Goodbye Elrar

Good morning folks.  I am getting up and around rather slowly this morning as I still fell rather like shit.  I have scarfed down my traditional QuikTrip Sausage Roll breakfast, and imbibed enough caffeine to be cognizant.  Now I should really pretend to be brilliant and write up a post that people will love… or at least not hate.  Like most mornings I feel like this is an insanely daunting task.  We have a rather busy day of family gatherings and such…  so I feel as though this morning there is added pressure to be expedient.

Goodbye Elrar

elrar_pbr Roughly halfway through the day I had a moment to check my RSS feed and I stumbled across this article on Rift Scene.  At first I thought I had misread the title… because for the last two years… Elrar has been the public face of Rift in general.  But it turns out that in fact it was true… and that he was in fact “laid off”.  I am not sure the reasoning behind this but I do know that most every player will miss him.  As a big guy as well, I immediately identified with him, and after years of watching him on live streams I got used to his voice and antics.  It feels kinda sad to know that the recent stream where he showed off the amazing hedge maze… was to be his last with us.

There isn’t much official word out there, and Trion really has not posted an official statement other than one from Dahanese across the dev tracker.  I can only assume that this is more of the whole “changing direction” topic that Scott Hartsman mentioned when he took over as CEO.  When he said “We’re going to rapidly be laying the groundwork for a new strategy for Trion” I don’t think any of us realized just how rapidly he would be geting to work.  In the eight days since the announcement he has closed two offices and now sacked the public face of Rift.

Elrar went over on the MMO-Champions forums and posted this note…

Hey all,
I won’t be long – but wanted to say it has been the utmost pleasure getting to spend each day with all of you who make up the RIFT Community. You will be missed & I will fondly remember the time we had together.

Not sure what my future holds at this point, but I’m excited for the possibilities – gaming or beyond! I hold no ill will towards Trion or the folks still working hard to succeed today. The RIFT development team is full of kick-ass individuals who very much share the same passion for the game that I shared with you.
While I’ve never really used it, I’m going to try out managing my own Twitter account to better stay in touch with those who want to:
www.twitter.com/GiantApproved
I’m also musing a Twitch channel, at least with my new-found free time, if I start anything up it would be at www.twitch.tv/elrar
Thanks again everyone & my best wishes to you all

I wish him the best of luck to him in his future ventures.  I have loved having him as our community manager in Rift, and hopefully he will find another community to nurture in the future.  Ultimately that is what a community manager does more than anything.  I have so much respect for the community folks out there… my decade as a guild leader has made me realize just how difficult a job it is to always be on… and always be extolling the virtues of the company line.  A CM has to buy into their product 200% and always be ready to present a positive spin on even the darkest of commentary.  It would be so hard to meet a standard “fuck you all” thread with a smile and happily turn it around into a positive.

Ultimately I think the community team learns how to feed off the positive experiences to shield themselves from the negative ones.  Combine that with the fact that every action they do is always under a microscope of scrutiny and you have a recipe for endless torment.  However the community staff seems to feed off of it… draw power and inspiration and find a way to keep going the next day.  Even in games where I have not liked or agreed with their community staff… I have had the utmost of respect for what they do as a whole.  In the best cases I have become friends or at least friendly with the community team…  and in cases like Elrar or Morteia I will miss them terribly.

Now to do my own amount of spinning… as much as I will miss Elrar…  I really hate all the crap that has been shoveled in the direction of Dahanese over the last 24 hours.  No one ever wishes to replace someone else, especially someone beloved by the community.  This is not her fault and as a result the community really should refrain from giving her grief over the events.  I am sure she is going to do the best job possible for us as players, and as sad as I am about the events… I welcome her with open arms in her new role.  She will most certainly work her ass off to support the community and be a new face for us all to come to love.

Mining Madness

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Last night I was pretty drained so I spent most of the evening running around trying to work all three harvest abilities up to 300 so I could officially start Storm Legion content. I feel as though this whole plan of mine might be madness… but I don’t really want to get too far into Cape Jule without the ability to harvest all the resources I find.  I am wanting to level up my cleric so I can have a nice pre-3.0 healing resource to help the guild with dungeons and the sort.  One of the things I have learned since the last time I leveled multiple harvest professions… is that regardless how much slower the skill-ups seem… that I am far better off finding camps of mobs that can be harvested rather than running around aimlessly looking for pops.

As a result I spent a good chunk of my time out in Shimmersand in the highest level area.  I have been farming the above camp of crystaine and iron golems trying to hit 300.  I managed to get butchering up to 300 while killing drakes in the same basic area.  My real challenge is going to be finding an area of boglings or similarly forageable critters to kill to finish topping off foraging.  Of the top of my head I really cannot think of any… but I figured I would try Stillmoor.  I vaguely remember camps of life creatures… which are often times forageable.  If any of my readers have a suggestion of where to go from 250-300 foraging… I would greatly appreciate it.  Worse case scenario I will run around aimlessly and pick herbs in Iron Pine Peaks.

Another Shot

ffxiv_commentary

Awhile back I posted that I had cancelled my preorder for Final Fantasy XIV, and my commentary about the game in general.  However apparently I still have access to this last beta phase.  With a good number of my friends super excited about the game…  I thought I would go ahead and download it last night.  I figured giving it another shot is never a bad thing.  Fortunately or unfortunately… my commentary above from earlier in the day still applies.  The game is rather charming in many ways… but at the end of the day it is just not different enough for me to really be able to get past the “wow with chocobos” aspect.

Firstly… and this will be a huge killer for so many people… it has without a doubt the worst intro sequence I have ever had to sit through in an MMO.  You are essentially surrendering thirty minutes of your life as you play through a completely unimportant sequence of events I assume intended to introduce you to characters that will for some reason be important later.  The probably is… there is no Escape key to allow you to skip it… and after you have seen one of these sequences you pretty much never need to sit through it again.  However on each and every character you are forced to slog through the annoying cutscene.

Once you get into the game… unless you know otherwise… you are treated to a series of banal quests as you run errands around town.  I made the mistake of doing these the first time I sat down to play the game.  Now I at least know that I can pretty much just go to my guild master, do that quest and go out into the world killing things with great zeal.  The gameplay is enjoyable and the world is gorgeous…  but it all feels like an poor fitting shoe.  There is so much familiar but at the same time… so foreign.  There are symbols and glyphs all over the place, that I feel like I am supposed to natively understand what they mean.  Additionally things are called by weird names… and it almost feels like something was lost in the translation from Japanese to English.

That is pretty much the problem I have regularly with the title.  It feels as though another culture set out to create World of Warcraft.  So it is WoW but with a completely different set of cultural norms.  So this is what adds to the whole familiar but odd at the same time feeling that I just cannot shake.  I used to be a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series… but my affection for it stopped almost exactly at Final Fantasy VI.  So there is a certain amount of nostalgia here… but at the same time it feels like it draws more heavily from the later games.  So while I am casting spells I might recognize…  the world itself does not feel familiar apart from a smattering of familiar critters.

I figure I will continue to play it off and on throughout the weekend with large sessions of Rift in-between… but I still feel confident in my feeling that this is a pass game for me.  Like I said before… if this was a “buy the box” title, I would have gladly snapped it up and played it off and on when friends wanted to.  However that said, there is no way I can see justifying a monthly subscription fee to play it.  I know my friends who are extremely into the Final Fantasy setting will love the title.  It is charming and does a good job of bringing the FF setting into the WoW Genre.  But for someone who doesn’t really care about Final Fantasy… it comes off as just another WoW Clone… albeit a well done one.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to get on with the morning.  In addition to the family gathering this afternoon, my wife apparently has a compiled list of things that she needs to run errand wise.  So I need to finish this up and get on with the day.  I hope you all have a great weekend, and hopefully I will see some of you either in Rift or in FFXIV.  My current character name over there is “Belghast Sternblade” but anyone who has played with me long could have guessed that one.