Summertime, and the grindin’ is easy

School’s out for summer, and the weather is fine; long, hot days perfect for a picnic on the beach or chucking a ball around a park, kicking around a piece of ground in your home town, lazing on a sunny afternoon watching little fluffy clouds A time for holidays, getting away from it all, leaving technology behind.

Doesn’t that sound awful? Thankfully games companies are doing everything they can to keep us all beavering away in front of glowing screens devoting absurd amounts of time to earning digital tchotchkes. Steam kicked things off a bit early with its Summer Psychological Manipulation Sale, this year shoving everyone into a random coloured team in some sort of Five-Way Stanford Prison Buy Trading Cards And Make A Number Go Up Experiment; as Melmoth observed “Steam’s sale is now more of a game than the games it’s selling.”

Neverwinter is never (hah!) short of an event or two, recently celebrating an anniversary as well as indulging in assorted skirmishes, firework parties and suchlike. There’s usually a few cosmetics up for grabs, perhaps some themed consumables, often a green-quality companion, nothing too over-the-top but quite fun. This weekend is the Wonders of Gond, with a chance of earning a rather desirable purple-quality mount, though it does seem that an awful lot of grinding is required to refine an item to that point. I might’ve given it a bit of a go, if not for other games…

Over in the World of WarTankGaming, they’re also celebrating an anniversary, and handing out free tanks to all and sundry for the next week. TANKS very much, Wargaming! (Do you see what I did there?) A Tier II light tank might not be much, but hey, don’t look a gift tank in the barrel and all that, and there’s the garage slot if nothing else. There isn’t so much generosity in the skies in the EU, just some discounts in World of Warplanes (the US seem to be getting a free plane from the 8th), and the chance of a hanger slot if you complete a bunch o’ missions. A Tier VII Gloster Meteor seems more of a tempting reward, but just one of the tasks requires 250 wins at Tier IV or above, being in the top 10 XP earners for your team (presumably to avoid joining and immediately quitting/dying), no ta.

No, I think my grind of choice is going to be good old War Thunder, where there’s Summertime Madness!!!!! (I think they missed a trick not using five exclamation marks, a sure sign of madness.) Amongst assorted discounts and bonuses, the big draw is the chance to earn premium tanks or planes that normally have to purchased with real money. At this very moment you can earn a premium T-34-57 or Panzer IIIN by recording 90 kills using Russian or German tanks respectively, eminently achievable in a week if a bit of a slog. From August 4th – 10th there’s a Tier II premium aircraft for each country up for grabs, the mission details yet to be announced, but I’d hazard a wild guess it’ll involve shooting down a bunch o’ planes… Finally, from August 11th, the big stuff, Tier III and IV premiums including some very nice (and expensive) planes like the American Spitfire IX; I imagine these will have quite insane requirements like some of the more unusual rewards from last year’s Indian Summer event, but we’ll see.