July 2013 - Page 2 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Blizzard Edition

July 27, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in internet land… I am struggling horribly to get up and around today. I gathered up breakfast but did so while wearing a skullcap to hide my disheveled and unkempt hair. This is feeling one of those screw the world days… it is nice out but I don’t really want to go out and experience it. I am perfectly happy sitting on my comfy couch with my laptop and chilling out. The week had an odd amount of stress for nothing major actually occurring, and last night I had a temporary relapse of the panic attacks. Jury is still out on whether or not I will be drug out into the world to experience today kicking and screaming or not.

Blizzard Free?

The big semi-shocking news of yesterday is that Actiblizz managed to bail itself out of ownership by Vivendi and now is a relatively free agent. Granted for me so long as Activision is tacked on front of Blizzard it will never actually be a “free” company, but I feel that ship has sailed and the two companies will forever be joined at the hip. There have been a lot of news reporting that Blizzard is now the largest “indie” company… but I feel like these same outlets have zero clue what that term even means anymore.

Do I think it is good overall for Actiblizz to control its own fate? Sure… I feel that Vivendi was directly responsible for pushing out games before in an “unprepared” state in order to recuperate some of its money. Additionally there were several stories floating around just prior to this announcement talking about how Vivendi was planning in raiding its cash cow to try and repair its own bottom line. In essence this move fixes both problems… Blizzard is free from pillage, and Vivendi got a shot of money in the process.

The Footnote

Almost as a footnote the press release also casually announced that the subscriber base of World of Warcraft had fallen once again to 7.7 million. After watching the two stories play out in my RSS feed yesterday, there was a significant delay as individuals got over the shock of the first and began to Grok the second. Basically this was no real shock to me, because somewhere… and I am seemingly unable to find the source I saw a quote after their last big drop… that they were fully expecting to be at 6 million by the end of the year. Another 600,000 subscribers seems like they are on course for that possiblity.

This is more “Bel talking out of his ass” time, because I don’t really have references to back myself up… but essentially what I have heard thus far is that Blizzard is losing China. These losses are essentially the fallout of that problem. What happened in China then? Essentially there are so many WoW clones in the Chinese Market, that simply market and hit the culture touchstones better. Even more… WoW is no longer an aspirational game in the way it was. It used to be a brand that Chinese consumers wanted to identify, even Coke drew upon it to sell soda. From everything I have heard… this has changed and WoW is simply “not cool anymore”.

A Change in Model

I have said it multiple times… and I will continue to say it until November when I may or may not have to eat crow… but I believe this year at Blizzcon we will see the announcement of some form of a free to play model. They have already publically confirmed that a cash shop is on the way, and usually going hand in hand with that is a switch to one of the many now viable free to play options. My only hope is that they choose to follow the lead of Rift and giving players a Carrot, instead of following SWTOR and bashing players down with a stick.

Do I think going to Free to Play would help? Honestly I am not sure. I would likely poke my head in every now and then pending the model is not egregious. I figure there are lots of people with a mild interest in the game that would return every now and then and maybe spend a little money there. What I do think however is that there are probably still enough extremely devoted fans that the model would still be profitable for them. At this point I feel the subscription model is just no longer viable.

As I said yesterday a huge chunk of why I will not be playing Final Fantasy XIV is because I just don’t feel it is worth a monthly fee. Right now we have only a handful of holdouts still charging a monthly access fee, and the vast majority shifting to pay as you go or pay for perks schemes. I feel that regardless of when it happens, sooner or later World of Warcraft will convert and do so in a big way. Given their flair for showmanship and ability to spin something that would normally play as bad, into a positive for the Blizzcon audience… I feel that all the signs are right for them announcing the shift.

Vanilla Servers

Yesterday there was an interesting post by Syp over on Bio Break, asking if we would play on a Vanilla server if Blizzard created one. Essentially the post was spurred by comments that Drysc apparently made back in 2008 that hey had been seriously considering the model. Since that time however… Everquest has made a killing by creating Retro servers that allow players to experience the game through the eyes of history. Essentially SOE has proven that the model is completely viable, and viable enough that at last count I believe there were three different “retro” servers.

The most interesting part about Syp’s post however is the large batch of comments that occur afterwards. It seems like the majority of the posters essentially said “take my money now”. A few of us however were more “sounds awesome, but not for me”. I definitely fell into the second camp. I like the concept of a Vanilla server, but I feel as if it is probably best leave our happy memories in the rose tinted past. When I think about just how much WoW progressed as it went through its expansions… what would exist as a Vanilla server would feel like a primitive shell of what exists today. So while you would lose heinous inventions like the dungeon finder… you would also end up losing quality of life changes such as the ability to trade BOP loot in dungeons and even the “Need / Greed” loot system.

Ultimately while I am still interested in the advancement of that game… as evidenced to the fact that I devoted an entire blog post this morning to little blips about Blizzard in general… I just think I am done with the World of Warcraft as a game. I might return every now and then to check in on it… but I am not returning for the game itself… I am returning for the few people that are still there and rabid about it. I feel as if I have just moved past the limits of that game, and want more. In my “MMO Must Haves” series of posts, I rattled out all the features that I wanted in a game… and expectantly WoW has very few of them. On the converse Rift has damned near every one of them… so it is no shock that I am playing that these days.

I think eventually Vanilla servers will come to fruition, because there will come a time when Blizzard is trying to wring out every last drop of cash from an aging brand. I do not however think we will see it until they change their business model. There will likely be some access fee that you add to your account that allows you to roll characters on the closed Vanilla servers. I think the same kind of people that find the Everquest Retro servers alluring will also find the old world WoW servers that way also. I will admit… I would be more tempted if they started releasing servers for each era. Wrath of the Lich King was my favorite time in the game, and after we killed Arthas… everything felt tarnished.

Wrapping Up

I have a feeling that my wife is going to want to go out and explore the world… and as much as I do not want this at all… I figure I will end up being a good guy and aggressing to it. As a result I really should get up and around and get ready for the day. It is a lovely day outside at least, and the temperature is an unseasonable 80*. I just have zero interest in the outside world and would prefer to sit at home on my sofa. I hope you all have great weekends, and that you get accomplished anything you need to.

Goodbye Chocobo

July 26, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was a fairly good night. It was cool outside so we decided to go for our evening walk pretty early. After we got done with our loop of the neighborhood I decided it taking a dip in the pool sounded absolutely awesome. So after cooling down in the pool, I finally settled in for some serious Rift time, and luckily by then the servers had mostly stabilized. There was apparently an issue with the backhaul for the Trion datacenter that was generating a ton of lag for certain players.

Goodbye Chocobo

Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn releases on August 27th, and a good number of my friends are extremely pumped about this. As a result I got a bit caught up in the hype myself and had preordered the game through Amazon. I got into the beta and enjoyed myself and even wrote a relatively positive review. The problem for me is that once the nostalgia wore off, I was essentially left playing a game that was very much rooted in the wow era traditions and really didn’t push the bar forward much. With each successive beta test I found myself with less and less desire to actually log in and play it.

Don’t get me wrong… there is nothing wrong with the game, nor is it a bad game. In fact it is a really good game, and if you are deeply rooted in the Final Fantasy Mythos and/or really like the JRPG style of artwork and graphics… it is likely going to be an amazing game for you. That said.. I normally do not like the JRPG art and character style… and while I have a good chunk of nostalgia towards the Final Fantasy franchise… all of that comes from the 2D era of the game. I feel as though that nostalgic buzz has worked its way through my system.

Additionally right now I am really trying to set down some semi-permanent roots in Rift. The House Stalwart guild is hopping every night and people are friendly and happy and engaging. I don’t want to go off and play anything else, even on a lark and take a chance of jinxing this awesome thing we have going. I also lack the desire to really play Final Fantasy XIV. It was a game I was definitely going to play because I had several friends who were really excited about it. However my fear was that it would be another TERA for me, I play it one week and then cancel my account never to play it again.

For all of these reasons… yesterday I went into my Amazon account and cancelled my preorder. The biggest detractor for me, and the point that made me go ahead and pull the trigger… is the subscription fee. It is funny how things have shifted for me… and I have gone from being a player who didn’t want to play a game without a subscription option… to being one who really criticizes any game that ONLY has a subscription model. Ultimately the game was just not fun enough for me to be willing to pay a monthly fee to play. If it was buy the box, I would have gone ahead and picked it up and piddle around in it whenever I felt like. However knowing that I only had 30 days of playtime to decide if I liked the game enough to pay a monthly fee for it… was a massive hindrance.

I hope the game does well, and it finds its niche after all the work they have put into it. It really is an enjoyable experience, but for me just not compelling enough to pay for. I feel like I want the game to succeed, because at this point ANY MMO failure is a negative thing and causes the number of companies willing to fund a AAA MMO to shrink. Based on the number of people that are truly hyped about the game, I figure it will be a modest success which will hopefully be enough to keep the ball moving forward.

Night of the Hunt

Yesterday I ended up writing a piece in response to a blog post, and did not really go over what happened Wednesday night for the guild. For awhile now we have been trying to make Monday and Wednesday nights a time when we pull something together. The Monday side of the equation has been faltering, however most every Wednesday night we at least do something as a group. Monday has long been The Secret World night amongst a large group of my friends… and I am thinking we might simply need to start doing that as well. Wednesday night however we usually have a critical mass of players, and this past one I had huge plans.

In the Storm Legion concept there is something called a Hunt Rift that you can purchase from the Torvan Hunters. Essentially you are helping the Torvan Hunters capture dangerous planar beings. You open the special lures at any planar tear, and it starts a little multiple stage event that works somewhat different than a normal rift. During the first stage you help the hunter build the machine to trap the being, then you defend it against an onslaught of planar mobs trying to stop your efforts. Finally after defending the machine for several phases the mini-boss is summoned and you defeat them. The reward is lots of Torvan Hunters rep, a chest full of goodies, and being able to check off one hunt from the achievement that eventually unlocks Great Hunts.

The lures are roughly 5000 planarite each, and I decided I would purchase the first dozen that make up tier 1 of the torvan hunts. The plan was simple… we would grab whatever available level 50+ characters we had… grab the few 40+ players we had and teleport them to storm legion content via a rally banner… and wreck the hunts. This was an awesome theory… but was thwarted by the fact that apparently the Rally Scroll has limits on being able to teleport too low a character to the Storm Legion content zones.

We opened a single rift and closed it, but I made the call that it would just be more enjoyable if we could do something we ALL could participate in. It is never fun to be sitting on the bench when you perceive that other players are off doing amazing things. I searched my brain for an idea… and finally landed on the fact that myself and Tibuant had a decent stock of old world elite lures laying around. These were challenging encounters designed for 10 players at level 50, and our original Rift guild had many Elite Rift nights. As a result I had half a dozen lures still taking up bank space, and Tib had another couple himself.

We spent the rest of the night bouncing back and forth between the yellow elite tears in Iron Pine Peaks and Stillmoor opening the encounters. While most of the gear has long since been replaced with better Storm Legion greens, our youngins were able to pick up a few pieces of epic quality gear that might hold them for a little bit once they start into the new content. Honestly however that was just gravy, the real fun was just running around as a group and doing something out of the ordinary together. I am glad I made the choice to pick something we all could do, rather than excluding a batch of players due to level.

There will be other guild nights and other times we can finish the tier one hunt rifts. Each of the lower level players we toon along got one or more dings over the course of the night. So we slowly but surely moved them forward towards being able to participate in bigger and grander things. I am not saying there will not be nights that we run things higher level that some of our crew may not be able to participate in. But my hope is to be able to include the largest batch of players in the process. I am just enjoying running around together doing whatever the hell we end up doing.

Wrapping Up

I normally do three segments, but these two segments seem extra long to me. Additionally the time is getting late and I need to be getting on to work. This morning I need to run laundry by the cleaners and that always takes up a bit of time. Last night we had a lot of fun closing Rifts for the guild quest and hopefully we can finish off the second “close 100 rifts” quest tonight. We dinged level 5 yesterday but are a long ways from level 6. I hope you all have a great Friday and that it is the start of an awesome weekend. Tonight we will be picking up a printer from some folks on craigslist, and hopefully I will get on before too late.

Abolish Faction Walls

July 25, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out there. I joked yesterday about opening a real life air rift, but in reality I guess it felt a bit like that. We managed to get through the storm relatively unscathed, but not everyone did. Yesterday the report was that roughly 100,000 customers were without power, and in on the drive in there were numerous intersections that were reduced to four way stops. The neighbor across the street lost the entire fence on the front part of his yard, and the shopping center my favorite game store is in was pretty much demolished by the winds. It is so odd to have tornadic style damage without the Tornado.

Race and Class Restrictions

Yesterday Rowan posted a thought provoking pieces on whether or not there should be class and race restrictions in games. Namely this was spawned by Wildstar, but the question carries over to every game. Why does it make sense that fanatical characters should be limited by some sort of pseudo real world logic? In an example he gives… why CAN’T a robot do magic… isn’t that just imposing some kind of logic on fantasy gaming that doesn’t really exist? Is it not just as fantastical that humans can perform magic?

Ultimately I am against class and race restrictions… but even more so I am against faction based restrictions. My general theory is… that in every situation… ideology never breaks down solely along racial boundaries. There will always be people that play across the lines and are branded as either Sell-swords at the best, or Traitors at the worst by their own faction. One of the worst experiences you can have is when a new game comes out… and you are super pumped about one specific race… only to find out that every single friend you have wants to play the OTHER faction.

My mantra has been anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad. Faction based race restrictions get in the way of you playing what you want to play… and also playing with your friends that might have different tastes. I will go one step further and say that Factions in general… are generally bad, but more so games that try and set up an artificial “red versus blue” faction wall. That essentially feels like imposing artificial limitations on your players just to solve poor design problems. If have to rely on polarized faction based combat to keep your game moving, you made some bad decisions somewhere along the process.

Abolish Faction Walls

Some of the most liberating gaming experiences I have had come from games with much more flexible factional boundaries. The Everquest series probably takes the cake for its ability to give the player malleable faction alignments. Essentially you start out as either aligned as an Evil race or a Good race… and that sets up certain default racial relations that you have with other factions in the world. Given the time and the inclination… you can perform tasks that will alter these boundaries through lots and lots of player faction work.

Iksar for example started off hated by everything and could do business nowhere but the neutral Nexus and Cabilis their home city. However I had a friend who through lots of work managed to become maximum reputation with the Halflings… and he was treated as a favored guest in their territory. I myself took my Half Elf ranger which is natively a good aligned race… and managed to get him the same reputation with the Evil Erudite city of Paineel. This experience of letting the player dictate their alliances through their interactions with the world is the best possible scenario I have seen. Sadly… no one since has adopted this model.

In Everquest 2 you had something similar… defacto good vs evil racial set up… but over the course of the game you could decide to betray your home faction and begin gaining rep with the other. While this was not as rich and robust as the Everquest system… it was still a far better choice than the archaic “red versus blue” mentality. Additionally no where in the Everquest realm are you ever limited in who you can group with, communicate with, and trade with. All players can interact regardless of their personal choices.

Faction as Fiction

Singlehandedly one of the best choices Trion has ever made with Rift is to release the fabled “Faction as Fiction” patch abolishing strict faction walls in that game. While not as open as a game like Everquest that was designed NOT to have firm factions, it was a great way to “hack” that functionality into an existing game. Essentially in one pass they allowed Guardian and Defiant characters to group and guild freely, and set up a new neutral three faction based PVP system called Conquest. Players essentially act as mercenaries for three different political factions and wage proxy battles for them.

I feel like this decision point more than anything has allowed House Stalwart to grow so much recently. Many of the players that we were pulling in, tried it shortly after the release of Rift, but felt limited by the race and faction based choices. We were a Defiant guild, but many players just feel more comfortable with the kinder, gentler, greener… Guardian starter experience. Being able to tell them that “faction no longer matters” has almost become a rallying call as I get new folks invested in the game again.

I cannot help but think that games like World of Warcraft and Wildstar would not be far better served if they threw off the mantle of “red versus blue” and embraced letting players choose their own alignments. While we have extremely rabid Horde and Alliance players… I was one of those players that had friends on both sides of the pond. When Stalwart originally launched with the release of WoW, we had an Alliance Guild on Argent Dawn and a Horde Guild on Silverhand. The intent was to play in both places, so that we could stay together… but over time the majority greatly favored Alliance… leaving a skeleton crew manning the Horde bulwarks.

So instead of having like Fifty players all happy and acting together… we had 35 happy alliance players, and 15 unhappy horde players that felt abandoned. Any design choice that forces potentially pits players against their friends… is ultimately a bad one for the sake of building long lasting communities. Had we been able to BE an Alliance guild, but also had a number of “Horde” race sell-swords… I feel as though this would not have been a problem. The players didn’t care about the faction… they cared about the available races to play… and ultimately went to the side that they could play what they wanted to.

Looking Forward

One of the biggest detractors for me in everything I have heard about Elder Scrolls Online is the fact that once again there will be three distinct and insular faction groups. While choosing which faction to align to was easy for me… since I always play a Nord, Argonian or a Dunmer… it will not be quite so easy for my friends. I have a few friends that prefer Altmer for example… and I tend to go out of my way to kill them when playing Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls is a setting where there have NEVER been absolute race based factional boundaries. There are always Nords that are willing to sell their blade to the highest bidder, as well as Altmer that throw off their heritage and adventure freely in the world.

My biggest hope is that there will be a way for my friends to be in Ebonheart Pact where I plan on building the House Stalwart guild… but be able to play whatever they want to play. This will ultimately determine whether or not a Stalwart guild succeeds in this game. I realize that this is probably just a pipe dream, because everything that we have seen to this point seems to enforce the strict racial boundaries. But I guess I can hope… I realize factional boundaries are easy for companies to enforce, that they greatly simplify many aspects of the game. However this does not stop me from feeling like they are bad for the players.

ESO is still a long ways off, so I have the smallest glimmer of hope that they might rethink the firm racial limits, however Wildstar feels as though it is right around the corner and has set up the same tired walls. We are going through the same problems with that game as we have every other faction based title. Granted I am only really mildly interested in the game… but various Stalwarts are EXTREMELY interested. The problem is… each of us seems to natively align ideologically with one faction or the other… and currently it the sentiments seem to split down the middle. All of this is generally because we prefer to play one type of race over another. They could really serve to take a book from Trion and make guilds transcend factional boundaries.

While we are on pipedreams… one of the biggest flaws in The Secret World is the fact that Cabals are faction locked. This game is so liberating in certain fashions… you can group with any player on any faction or shard. However the fact that their guild system is limited based on a specific faction really throws a monkey wrench in this whole openness scenario. It has essentially forced guilds to manage three separate factional units… and then try and communicate between them using server channels. Everything would have been far simpler had they just said that cabals were free floating. I really hope this is a decision they revisit in the near future.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again… I have wasted another perfectly good morning rambling on. I had intended to talk about all the awesomeness that we did last night as a guild, but that yarn can wait for another day. On a related note however.. I totally suggest you check out Fynralyl’s blog post about her entry into the guild and reentry into Rift in general. Warms my heart to see that folks are enjoying themselves in an environment I have pulled together. Any questions I had as to whether or not forming a House Stalwart in Rift was a good idea… have long since gone out the window. I hope you guys have a great day, and that the weekend comes quickly.

Guild Crafter

July 24, 2013 by Belghast

This is one of those mornings when the content is just not flowing freely from my brain to my fingers and eventually onto the digital page. Last night was completely set to be another good night of sleep. I left Rift about 9:30 and we went on our walk shortly after. Then while we were out walking we noticed a massive storm system coming towards us. Ultimately while I tried to get to sleep the sheer severity of the storm kept me up. This combined with the fact that I happened to check my email during this time… and there was an issue with one of the websites I manage… kept me up until roughly 1 am.

Air Rift

Last night was one of those odd flukes that sometimes happens in Oklahoma that produces tornadic style damage… without actually forming a Tornado. When we were out walking we kept seeing the sky light up in the distance with massive amounts of cloud to cloud lightning. It looked extremely eerie, and it was a struggle to keep focused on walking and not watch the electrical ballet in the sky. My wife checked her phone while we were out on the loop we walk, and it looked like we had about 30 minutes or so before any of it hit us. I attempted to go to sleep and then it hit all at once.

Instead of starting slowly we got hit with this wall of wind that started shaking our backyard gate and causing a tree to start thumping up against the house every now and then. I put back on shorts and went out to investigate and it was just really odd out. It didn’t feel like a normal wind storm… everything was blowing every which way but I didn’t feel like I was walking against the wind at any point. I came back in because quite honestly it felt a little dangerous to be standing outside. I figured we would have to deal with whatever happened anyways in the morning.

Currently the sun is still not up, and as a result I have no clue the extent of any damage that might have occurred during the night. Looking out through the kitchen window and front door, it didn’t look like there was much debris in the front or back of the house. After the wind came hurricane gale force rain for a bit… then as quickly as it had happened it just passed over us. I went around the house to see if anything was leaking, figured that was as good a sign as any that we still had a roof. Once I finish up this blog post it should be light enough for me to go out in investigate.

Guild Crafter

In Star Wars the Old Republic… we had an awesome guild member named Shyris. She was the consummate guild crafter, and if you did not ask her for upgrades… she would hunt you down and force them on you. I on the other hand have never really been that much of a serious crafter. In every MMO I have maxed out whatever profession I chose to do… but never really used it much other than to craft one or two items at the highest level for my character. Something has changed deep down inside me… and I now take more than a certain amount of pleasure outfitting my friends in gear.

When Rift went free to play, I got a large amount of free store currency due to the longevity of which I subscribed. I used most of this windfall to outfit Belghast my main with as much awesome stuff as I could. Since Everquest 1, I have always been drawn to Smithing… having done a small bit of it myself in real life. If given a choice, I always end up going for Armorsmithing in fact, so since release Bel has been one and had the two supporting crafts of Butchering and Mining. With the ability to add extra tradeskills I have added on Foraging to complete the harvesting trio, and then added Weaponsmithing and now recently Artificer.

When you factor in Belgrave my rogue who is a max level Outfitter, I can essentially make all armor and weapons and I am slowly grinding my way through the Storm Legion levels of Artificer so I will be able to make the rest of the equipment slots. I find something extremely satisfying about hooking up a character with a bunch of upgrades. As a result I have spent a lot more time recently harvesting materials so that I can consume them making goodies for the guild. I’ve been trying to make regular trips out to my cloth farm, and depositing the proceeds in the form of 24 slot bags in the guild bank.

Ironhide Rollout!

I have yet to develop quite the forceful posture that Shyris had in SWTOR, but I still want to see stuff get used. Additionally I have developed a new obsession… guild harvest quests. Over the last two years, I have existed in guilds that were essentially already maximum level, or damned near close to it. As a result I have never really put much focus on completing guild quests. If there was a fun one up like closing rifts or killing planar creatures I would spend a bit of time helping out on it. However it was never the focus that it has become recently.

When I found out there was a daily way for me to contribute guild xp and help us level faster… I have been traipsing around Ember Isle and Iron Pine Peaks harvesting all manner of lower level goods just to turn in for experience in the manufactorum in Meridian. The bane of my existence and that of pretty much anyone doing this quest seems to be Ironhide. It is supposedly a 5% chance when skinning level 50ish mobs in the world. The problem is… this is very much dictated by your luck with the random number generator. You only need 10 Ironhide per turn in… however you will likely gather up about 200 normal leather in the time it takes you to get those.

Personally I have found a nice little area of Ember Isle skinning crocodiles that seems to produce Ironhide fairly well. Additionally Ember Isle has tons of Orichalcum nodes… which is another component to the turn in… and I will take any excuse to run around this zone because it is STILL really amazing. Then I tend to pop over to Iron Pine Peaks… because I absolutely love that zone and finish gathering up the foraging that I did not get on Ember Isle. For whatever reason Basilisk Stem does not grow on Ember, even though pretty much everything else does. The end result is roughly 150 guild xp per turn in… and I can do four per day. While this may not seem like much, it is a little bit that I can do personally to help push us forward.

Wrapping Up

It was a pretty chill night overall other than the wind storm. I am just about to go out and look around our house for damage. I hope that things are okay, and we still have a fence and a roof. Since I was up crazy late doing work.. I feel zero obligation to get into work bright and early this morning. That said I will still beat most of my office into work. I hope you all have a great day, and that hopefully everything is safe and sound when I survey the damage.