Unfortunately, I’ve been in quarantine since Monday since I got Covid over the weekend. I was extremely fatigued and sick Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and I felt too sick to do any work so I would be either sleeping or playing a few games of Valorant or Overwatch for the day. Funny enough, I did the best in my games when I was the most sick– dropping 30 kills two games in a row and winning almost all of my games. However, I played about 8 games of Valorant today (I know…) and I lost pretty much all of them. I deranked from Platinum to Gold and sometimes, you just need to know when to stop hitting “Play Again”.

Away from my gaming experiences, I’d also like to mention some stories over this quarantine period. First of all, the covid-19 virus is definitely still very real and a problem. I wear my mask everywhere I go and in every class, but somehow, I managed to get the virus and it has not been fun. I had the worst congestion I have ever had in my entire life, with my clogged nose actually making it difficult to swallow. Alongside my congestion, I had a dry cough and very dry throat which was painful during the day. Thankfully, these symptoms are mostly gone as I am writing this, but it was definitely difficult for the past few days.

My room at Eastview– don’t be deceived, I was given no pillows, no blankets, and the bed is as hard as brick. Having your own bathroom is nice, though.

This week, I definitely learned to be thankful that I am not usually stuck in a tiny box of a room inside Eastview. Since you are not allowed to leave the room, you need to rely on other people delivering items to you, even medicine. Eastview’s concierge for quarantine services do not have any medication on hand besides from two tablets of Tylenol, and they also changed their hours to leave earlier at 7pm– right before my symptoms always get worse. This means that after 7pm, no one is at the desk to pick up medication or food, and therefore, you are kind of fending for yourself from covid.

I assumed this was because it is the end of the year and they don’t find covid to be a big deal anymore after the mask restrictions were lifted, but honestly, that was probably the reason I had such a difficult time with this virus. I was given no medication, and when I called UHS Pharmacy for nasal spray for my EXTREMELY congested nose, I waited at my door for four hours hoping it would arrive, but I had to call again after those four hours and question them since they said it would arrive shortly over my phone call earlier. When I called UHS again, the lady told me my medication was packaged and still sitting on her desk and no one has come to pick it up. You couldn’t bother to check up on the girl with covid who was crying on the phone at 9am for medication?

After I called them (with an obvious attitude), they delivered my nasal spray in (no joke) five minutes. UHS is a 9 minute walk from my place in Eastview. After four hours of crying because of the blockage in my nose, I had my medication delivered after four hours since I had to call and remind them because they forgot to pick up my spray and deliver it to me.

Not to mention, they forgot to serve me dinner my first day there, and they also skipped me the second day. I had called them on the second day after dinner hours questioning if dinner was going to be served today, and they had no idea I was even staying at Eastview… they asked me if my room was correct and if I had checked in– yes to both. I was completely confused considering there are four people living in the rooms next to me… did they skip them too? Not sure.

Since I tested positive, my roommate has also been staying two floors below me, and she said that she has people call her twice a day to ask her how she is and if she needs anything. When I heard about this, I was a bit shocked considering I have gotten no calls like that. I was suffering with extreme symptoms and she has none, but I have to make sure to call people because they keep forgetting about me… They keep treating my roommate how they should treat everyone else, but I, the one ACTUALLY with covid, keeps getting forgotten about and never getting checked up on.

This was supposed to be a blog about my experience gaming during quarantine but I went on a bit of a rant and decided to talk about my other experience… lol. Anyway, I would not recommend staying at Eastview for quarantine if you test positive. They give you other options such as going home or getting a hotel, and I chose Eastview because my mom at home is severely immunocompromised and I thought a hotel would be too expensive. Honestly, if it means I would be able to step outside and breathe fresh air as well as not relying on other people getting medication for me (FOUR HOURS LATER) I would have paid for the hotel. Penn State, do better.

Hi! I haven’t been playing Valorant or Overwatch as much (definitely not because I’m close to deranking from Plat…), and I haven’t really been itching to do so. Instead, I was playing Sims 4 for a few days, and then now I started a new Minecraft server with my friends. This Minecraft server is MUCH different than regular vanilla Minecraft, we loaded a modpack called Feed the Beast Revelation with well over 200 mods!

From this picture, you can see on the right that there are 407 pages filled with new additions to the game, including large well-known mods such as EnderIO, Applied Energistics, Thaumcraft Botania, Thermal Expansion, Immersive Engineering, and Project Red. With anything from magic to engineering, this modpack has endless things to do and is a great activity to binge over the upcoming summer!

The most interesting additions to Minecraft through this modpack would definitely be the engineering aspects where you can generate grid power and create energy in order to fuel other machines that can create the most powerful items in the game. Through these materials, you could actually create nukes that will literally destroy an extremely large portion of the map (and probably crash your game, too).

Another thing I really enjoy about this modpack is that it tracks everywhere you’ve discovered and places it in a map. Also, you can see mobs on the map (red circles) and you can set waypoints to certain locations (magenta point labeled “base”).

Below, this is a machine that generates power from tree sap, and then transfers the energy through the red tubes to power machines in another room.

Here are the machines I’m referencing. They can make a wide variety of materials used for creating more complex items.

The biggest thing I’m looking forward to in this server is creating mining turtles where you can actually code them to gather certain materials or mine in a certain path. My boyfriend and I had made mining turtles in our last server, but this was when I was barely proficient at coding and I had to learn a new language called Lua, which I eventually gave up doing. Now, after programming all year, I definitely feel more confident in being able to create my own program for these turtles. I find it really interesting when you can code something outside of Minecraft and then when transferring it into the game, you can actually see it work.

As for now, my friends and I are only getting started on this server and I will probably put many hours into making my base look very pretty. 🙂

Recently, the biggest drama in the Valorant community has been surrounded by popular streamer JasonR, who often queues with pros and is well-known in the community for his skill. However, over the past month, he has been getting much backlash because there are clips of his stream in which he purposely dodges the game if he hears a woman talk on his team, claiming his PC crashes or his internet went out. Also, if the woman does not talk until the game has already started, he either mutes her or leaves the game altogether. There are also previous clips from years ago where he called all women on Twitch “hoes” and other words. Him and his wife also banned women from his Twitch chat if they found out they were women.

This drama got much bigger last week, when he got matched with his good friend Tarik in his Valorant game. Then, Jason started yelling at Tarik during the game and called him a bad friend because Tarik would not speak about the drama on his Twitch channel and rather avoided the topic completely. Tarik banned his name in his chat and only stated that he disagreed with Jason’s actions, not continuing any further.

After they lost the game, Tarik wanted an explanation of why Jason was so angry at him during the game, and over 35,000 viewers started watching their argument unfold during their streams. This argument was about an hour long, so I’ll summarize the jist of the argument.

Basically, Jason was upset that Tarik did not tell everyone that he was not this misogynistic, woman-hater that everyone was labeling him as. He thought that Tarik’s place as a good friend of his and someone who has met him and his wife and hung out with both of them, he would be able to convince people that Jason is not misogynistic.

Tarik stood his ground and reasoned as to why he should not defend Jason if he does not affect the obvious misogynistic behavior that he does on his stream all the time. Just because they’re friends, does not mean he always has to agree with Jason and defend him. Tarik’s main analogy he was trying to make Jason understand was — If you hung out with someone, and they were completely fine in person and a normal human being, but they go home on their stream and start acting racist, and there are many racist clips of him circling around, doesn’t that make him racist?

This was a perfect analogy to describe Jason’s behavior with women in his games, however, Jason completely missed the point every time he tried to bring it up, and the entire argument was a complete failure as nothing was done. Every time Jason spoke, I swear those lines could be studied as an example of gaslighting and manipulation. He kept repeating the point that Tarik had met him and his wife in person and they were not misogynistic, but he could not get through to his head that Tarik was saying that his actions on stream had heavily implied that he hates women and is uncomfortable being around them.

Also, perhaps the funniest part of the argument, where Jason was exclaiming frustration about how other big streamers reached out to him and told him he doesn’t deserve the hate, but he said Tarik was “being a girl about it” and didn’t say anything to him…lol.

Tarik ended his stream after this argument out of anger, so I went and watched Jason’s stream. Jason eventually deleted the video of the stream after it ended, so no one can take clips of what he said after the argument was over. Basically, I gathered that he was not apologetic for anything and he did not understand how anyone could imagine his actions to be misogynistic. Also, he said that his reason for dodging women was out of respect for his wife so she would not be uncomfortable with women in his games and his chat being weird.

Either way, this guy is a fool. If this is the case, this relationship is extremely toxic and he keeps blaming everything on his wife’s insecurities instead of taking accountability for making the women in his games uncomfortable. The day after the drama, he posted a TwitLonger in hopes to save his failing career, but the TwitLonger was not sincere at all and basically mentioned his wife again. He streamed the next days with the title “THEY LOVE TO HATE ME” and made a pro streamer ShahZam and his girlfriend, Joona, uncomfortable in their games by talking to ShahZam and saying “Oh, you’re with your girl?? Her dream has come true! Oh my God!”

Overall, many people hate JasonR even more after this argument with Tarik, and Tarik has gotten much support by not falling into Jason’s manipulation and standing his ground that he thinks Jason’s actions are wrong. I still see braindead comments and replies to tweets where they think that Jason doesn’t have to play with women if he doesn’t want to, and how all the women in his rank are boosted anyway.

I hated Jason the second I heard about the drama, and I watch Tarik much more now. I also loved scrolling on Twitter after the drama and every pro streamer was tweeting about it and posting memes and videos. I also remember when I was watching this argument live, tons of really popular Valorant streamers started typing in Twitch chat and in Tarik’s Valorant chat, people like Kyedae, Asuna, Pokimane, and many others.

pic.twitter.com/EHLqKP80Ta

— LG mada (@madafps) March 27, 2022

This type of thing also doesn’t happen that often, but I really like listening to drama so it was fun to digest. 🙂

Even though I haven’t ranked up from Plat 1 yet, I’m playing really well in my latest games in the past week! Yesterday, I was playing with my boyfriend and we won 13-1 where we were playing people who peaked at Plat 3, which is almost Diamond. I got the most kills on my team and it honestly felt like I was playing with Silver/Gold players…. they were so bad.

So, after that game, I feel pretty confident in my rank and I feel like I belong after struggling in lower ranks for so long. I feel like I can definitely make it to Diamond eventually, hopefully after grinding out more games this act or some time during the next act. My friend said he would buy me a cake if I reached Diamond so hopefully that’s pretty soon. 🙂

During that game where I did really well, my random teammates kept complimenting me and calling me crazy which felt really nice. I don’t usually top frag, but that game and the previous one I was doing the best on my team if you click on my profile from the link above.

My workload is lighter this semester, especially right now as I have finished all of my work, and I’m looking forward to playing today and the next week. I can’t really play over the weekend, but that’s okay. :p

Switching the topic from Valorant to Overwatch, my ranked dropped tremendously because of connection issues on PSU wifi >:( so I hope to get my Plat back on Overwatch as well. I need a few wins in a row to get it back, but I keep losing because the wifi lags me out of every game I play… so I guess I’ll have to wait until summer to get my Overwatch rank back. I could have gotten Diamond, as I was pretty close last season, but my rank has dropped so much because of the connection issues that it will take me a long time to get back to where I was.

Overall, I look to play more tonight and next week and I’ll update on if I rank up or down!

As promised, I’ll also be talking about my other favorite game in this blog, Overwatch! The Overwatch community has long complained about the lack of updates to the game, not adding more characters or lore. As a refresher, Overwatch is a 6v6 ability based game with three categories of heroes: Tank (Buff, high health heroes used to push the enemy team), DPS (Damage), and Support (Healers). However, Overwatch 2 will be a 5v5 with more gamemodes added.

The developers of Overwatch, Blizzard Entertainment, have stopped updating the game, saying they will work on an Overwatch 2. Overwatch is known for its amazing lore through their cinematics, and some of my friends believe they announced an Overwatch 2 because they were simply too lazy to continue updating the original Overwatch game and adding new heroes, maps, and gamemodes to the game.

Ever since Overwatch 2 was mentioned by the team in June 2019, many members of the community have decided that Overwatch 2 may have just disappeared into thin air due to the excruciatingly long wait for the game to be developed. Blizzard kept pushing the release date back every year. Furthermore, the lead game director for Overwatch, nicknamed the “Father of Overwatch”, Jeff Kaplan, had also left Blizzard entertainment. After this, the community really lost hope.

However, the new game director, Aaron Keller, made an update video on Overwatch 2! This was the most clear news the community has gotten in months, and in the video, Keller even states that the development team knows that they disappointed the Overwatch community by not properly communicating the development process as well as not updating the current Overwatch game.

They announced a closed alpha, beta, and a new hero called Sojourn. The closed alpha is limited to game developers and pro players, while any player can apply for the closed beta. He emphasized that their new plan for Overwatch 2 was to be as clear as possible in their updates as well as a promise to keep the game alive, as many complain that they killed Overwatch from the lack of updates.

Lastly, there have been small leaks here and there for Overwatch 2, as well as the loading screen and a change for the hero Doomfist. Apparentally, the Overwatch League Facebook page accidentally tweeted a picture of Doomfist with a Tank symbol next to his name, while before he was a DPS character.

Overwatch 2 the role of Doomfist was changed from DPS to Tank 🛡️

This was leaked through the official Overwatch League Facebook page.https://t.co/liEwoZnCR5 pic.twitter.com/K4ibNl4alC

— Naeri X 나에리 (@OverwatchNaeri) March 16, 2022

I hope to be accepted into the closed beta in April and have a chance to play the new gamemode for Overwatch 2!

Hi everyone! After a long and hard haul, I got my rank back to Platinum 1! I went on a winning streak of about 14 games straight, and I started at Gold 1 this rank and traveled all the way up to Plat 1.

Here is a screenshot from Valorant’s tracker.gg and it shows all of my stats for every game. K/D means Kill-Death ratio, HS% means head-shot percentage, and ADR means average damage per round. Some games I did a lot worse than others, in which you could see my HS% is very low as well as ADR. If my K/D is red, it means I had more deaths than kills and therefore my ratio would be considered negative.

I go negative many games but there are some where I have an outstanding performance and I also got match MVP twice. Even though I don’t get on the top of the leaderboard every game, I still am able to win games through my communication (if people aren’t being toxic to me) and ability use. I would also usually queue with either my boyfriend or his friend, and queuing with a friend makes it much easier to win because you know their play style and have better communication.

If anyone is looking to rank up, my best advice would be to find one or two other friends to queue up with and try to coordinate abilities together. For example, my boyfriend mains a character with stuns and flashes, while his friend mains someone who can dash in and be aggressive. If you pair their abilities together, you can stun the enemy team and then push them to guarantee easy eliminations.

I’m very happy I was able to rank up so much within the past week and I look forward to getting closer to Diamond within the next act or two. 🙂

Aside from actually playing the games Valorant, Overwatch, etc., I like to spend my time watching content creators for the games on Twitch and YouTube as well! I’m assuming everyone knows what YouTube is, but Twitch is a platform where people stream their live gameplay for an audience. Twitch also has a live chat with emotes that make watching more fun, enjoyable, and interactive.

When I get food or chill in the library before doing my work, I usually put on a stream in the background to watch for entertainment. Watching these streams will help you learn more about the game, and observing pro players will expose you to more areas and strategies about the game which will help you improve! My favorite streamers to watch are supertf (Overwatch), iiTzTimmy (Valorant, Apex Legends, + other games), TenZ (Valorant), and xQcOW (Variety). 

I watched a lot of supertf when I was starting to play Overwatch, and I literally went from the worst rank in the game (Bronze) to the average rank (Gold) in about a month and a half. Supertf is really entertaining to watch and he is also Overwatch’s best tank player, which made it very easy to gain game sense and quickly improve.

Also, I used to watch xQcOW a LOT, who is Twitch’s most popular livestreamer and he is mostly known for being pretty funny and entertaining. Watching him is good for exposing yourself to many games, as he usually plays a different game every day! All of these content creators also post their streams on YouTube if you don’t have the time to watch live, or you’d rather watch reruns.

Overall, if you would like to start getting into games or get better, watching these entertaining streamers on either Twitch or YouTube is a good start!

I mentioned this clip in my previous blog, and I’m going to explain the backstory! Also, the clip I included in last week’s blog was from an unranked game, however, this one was from a trio purposely throwing my competitive ranked game.

I was queuing into a competitive game with my best friend, Selin, and we are talking in voice chat normally for the first few rounds, and then, these two players start commenting on how annoying we are and calling us fat, ugly, and more insults. We were doing perfectly fine and winning the game until these two players started becoming more toxic and then their insults started to progress into more sexist comments.

While I was ready to mute them as I always do, Selin started messing with them by playing into their insults as you could tell from the clip. If they started calling her fat, instead of getting mad, she’d be like “YEAH, you’re right I’M FAT… keep going…” and then at some point they literally didn’t know what to say. She kept repeating it in such an obnoxious tone that the people who were being toxic to us just seemed shocked and couldn’t respond… LOL.

They kept continuing spitting insults every breath they took and it lasted throughout the entire game, but the most comedic part was that we were both on the top of the leaderboard.

(side note: my rank has gone up a bit after this game… this was right after the rank reset which lowered my rank an entire tier)

The ones who were the most mean to us were Jett and Raze, the two players with Japanese names. However, during the game the Omen (Garlic) was playing good cop for the entire game, defending us and telling the two off. This was only an act as when the game ended, the omen started yelling at us and calling us E-Girls and saying how he never liked us this entire time, which we thought was actually hilarious.

(definitely don’t watch this without headphones)

Selin was calling them out at the end where she was yelling and saying that they were bottom of the leaderboard and she just spewed the same insults back at them. Overall, games like these are not uncommon at all for us, and we just needed to gather the confidence to yell at them back. 🙂

Recently, almost half of my games have people start being extremely toxic the second I use my mic. The video clip above is an example of an unranked match, not even competitive play! This past week, I would queue into a game, talk how I normally do, and suddenly if I mess up ONE play, the entire lobby starts talking down on me even if they have done worse.

A little backstory for the clip above, I was solo-queuing an unrated match of Valorant because I was waiting for my boyfriend to get on so we could duo-queue competitive, but Valorant’s matchmaking system put me in a game with a 4-queue of men all in a Discord call together outside of the game.

Round 2, one of them yelled at me to watch a certain angle, I said no (an unrated match does not affect my rank, therefore I don’t care about winning), and then he said “Do what I say, you’re a woman” and I wish I was joking. The amount of people I have gotten like this in my games this past week has actually been more than ever before.

He was being toxic to me the whole game, and at certain rounds he would say “[Player name] wants to know if you [would do vulgar things]” as if they were all talking about me in their Discord call, which they definitely were. The same man also kept telling me to shut up every time I spoke. Also, similar to another situation I will definitely cover in my next passion blog, one of them was playing “good cop” and was buying me guns, complimenting me, and asking me to join their Discord.

I honestly was fooled and I thought that that person was solo-queued into our game, but when I went on Valorant’s tracker.gg website to see my match history, I saw that all of them were infact, queued together.

The clip is also from the very last round when the game was ending, and the entire team waited until then to talk trash at the end of the game which is the general pattern of the misogynistic guys I get in my game all of the time. I have a lot of content for future passion blogs just from this week, one of which I’ll cover next week where I was in a competitive game with my best friend, and since we were both together, we just messed with them the entire time.

They would call us fat and ugly, and my best friend would go along with it and make it known she was not offended, and they were literally stunned and didn’t know what to say, LOL. That’s a sneak peak for my topic next week. 🙂

Hi! Last semester, my passion blogs were mainly focused on Valorant, but this semester I want to expand my topic to just video games, therefore I can include more games in my posts. I’ll still write about Valorant, however, this week I want to talk about my favorite game, Overwatch!

Overwatch was first released in May 2016, and since then has been one of the most popular first-person shooter games on the market. The game is a 6v6 multiplayer team-based game, in which there are 32 heroes to choose from and play as. In competitive play, there are 3 assigned roles: Tank, DPS (Damage), and Support (Healers). The main job of the tanks is to push in and create space for the damage heroes to be able to eliminate the other team quicker, and the supports need to both heal the team and create poke damage to put the other team at a disadvantage.

This game is heavily team based, and each character has their own set of abilities and an ultimate, which can be comboed with other team members’ abilities in order to eliminate the other team. Each competitive game has a set objective, whether it is king of the hill, capture both points, or move the payload to a certain checkpoint.

For a more in-depth description of the objectives in competitive play, here’s an Overwatch Wiki link which could definitely explain it clearer than I can. King of the hill is a nick name for Control, capturing two points corresponds to Assault, and moving the payload is called Escort.

Playing this game for the first time, you will definitely suck. I started playing this game last year, and after about a year of playing, I ranked up from Bronze (the lowest rank in the game) to Platinum (the average rank for all players). Bronze rank would show up as 1500 SR and lower, meanwhile platinum is 2500SR to 2999SR. Each win constitutes of around 25 SR, and losing would subtract a similar amount from your overall rank.

This is my rank from last season, since I spent much of my Winter break playing this game with friends at home because the PSU wifi is so bad for this game that the connection makes it literally unplayable. I lost around 100 SR due to connectivity errors, as leaving one game loses you anywhere from 25 to 50 SR.

This game requires a lot of game sense that is acquired by playing a lot or watching pro players. I personally improved a lot by watching pro players on Twitch or YouTube, because they verbally say why they are doing certain things and it definitely helps a lot when you actually start playing the game yourself. The game requires a lot of team and personal strategies because there are infinite mistakes that beginners make which give the other team an advantage and overall cause a lose.

Also, it definitely takes a long time to learn every hero’s abilities and ultimates and exactly what they do. This is one of the biggest hurdles for playing this game, because people who don’t feel the dedication to start playing this game usually state that it’s because the gameplay seems like it has too much going on and they don’t want to learn every character. The video I attached is of a damage character called Genji, a ninja with shurikens with a large amount of damage if landed on an enemy player. He is definitely one of the most fun damage characters to play, as he can climb walls, get behind the enemy team easily, and has incredible mobility.

Overall, I hope you look into this game (if you haven’t already), and enjoy!