Ninja Grouping

Content Void

This morning I am completely struggling to find purpose in writing.  I suppose I could try and counter point Scree’s post about my post yesterday.  But honestly I don’t really feel the need, as he didn’t really shoot down any of the points I had made, but instead provided his own points for why he won’t be playing ESO and moreover why he feels like it never should have been made.  They are some pretty drastic points, but they are his points and he has every right to his own opinion.  Additionally each and every one of you have the undeniable right not to buy Elder Scrolls Online and not to love it.  But again yesterdays post was spawned out of what I felt were some factual inaccuracies about a few points.  However after reading his post this morning it also feels a lot like “I really hate this game, and here is why you should too.”

I feel like that is the problem with the community right now.  We have so much hatred but very little genuine love for anything anymore.  Where is that child like sense of wonder that we can roam around and exist in fully fleshed out 3D worlds?  If gaming doesn’t give you that, then really what is the point of playing?  There are still moments in each and every game I play where I am wrapped up in awe of some moment that just happened that I was not expecting.  It might be something cool over the horizon or it might be some interesting turn of a phrase.  I play these games and I write about them because I love them…  not because I hate them.  Even when something frustrates me to the point of spawning a rant, like I have done so many times about World of Warcraft… it comes from a place of disappointment for not being as good as it could be.

I love the games industry for all of its flaws, and I love all the ways it manages to keep me enthralled and entertained and waiting for the next thing to happen.  From the moment I first got a controller in my hand this has been my story, and my “thing”.  While sometimes it is pen and paper or miniatures or even card games… I am in love with games at the root of my being.  So when I see someone take a crap on something and exclaim that it doesn’t deserve to exist… it depresses me that we have come to a point where that is an accepted stance.  All ideas even if you do not like them, deserve their moment in the sun.  Yeah I realize this top of today’s post is the equivalent of me responding with a “Carebear Stare” to a rather targeted attack… but fuck it, that’s how I roll.

Ninja Grouping

Last night I really did not do a lot of gaming, which is in part why I am bereft of content this morning to talk about.  Over the last few days I have felt pretty crappy, so I am taking the initiative to try and improve things a bit.  Namely I am going to try going cold turkey on energy drinks… because while they help wake my sleepy butt up…  they also tend to cause me to crash pretty damned hard later.  I had gotten to the point where I was starting to drink four or so a day… and that is a bit too much.  So last night I went to bed around 8:30 and crashed after a few minutes of playing bravely default.  Thankfully I was able to sleep all night long, but partially that was nyquil assisted.  The last two nights I have woken up at 4:30 am and 3:30 am… so I was running on a serious sleep deficit.

What little I did play last night was Diablo 3.  One of the aspects of the game that I absolutely adore is just how easy and seamless it is to group up with your friends.  While the above image is old… because I didn’t think to take any new ones…  my friend Rae ninja grouped with me while I was working on the beginning of Act 3.  We did about five levels in a really short period of time and had I stuck around any longer I would have suggested popping out and bumping up the difficulty to expert.  Hard really is the new normal, and none of us play the game on anything lower than that now even solo.  When you add in additional people, it feels like the scaling just isn’t quite enough to compensate for the new gear fountain so we end up bumping the difficulty up a ways.

Rae managed to pull a couple of legendaries during our time grouping, but after getting three in a row last night I think the loot gods were frowning on me.  For the most part I got no upgrades, but I am wearing a really nice green suit of crafted gear, so it might be a long while before I upgrade out of Aughild’s Victory.  At the close of the night I was just a stones throw away from 50, which means I should be able to push through to 60 on my next big play session.  I am really surprised at just how much crusader specific gear I have been getting.  I even managed to get a crusader only legendary flail the other night.  My only worry is that the Reaper of Souls launch is pretty much happening at the same time the head start for Elder Scrolls is, so I am not sure how much time I will really devote to leveling a crusader until I have hit a lull in ESO.

Plea for Larger Battle.net Friend List

For the love of god… can we please get a significantly larger friends list for battle.net?  At this point I am actively or at least semi-actively playing three different blizzard titles.  I have friends scattered between them all, some of them playing multiples, some of them playing only one.  I am the guild leader of a wow guild with over 900 characters, and have a big twitter/social media community that I want to be able to play with and communicate with while in game.  The current size of I believe 200… is just too damned small.  It has become a weekly thing to try and prune out people that I have not played with in awhile to be able to accept friend invites from new people.  I hate doing this… this goes against every instinct in me to “delete” people that I care about.

At this point we have had multiple upgrades to the battle.net infrastructure… so can we please get a significant increase in the number of people we add?  Bumping it up to 1000 seems like a safe place to be, even 500 would be significantly better than where we are currently.  I am sure someone is going to post and ask me if I really need that many people…  yes… yes I do.  Sure I might not talk to each and every person every day, but I am constantly pinging someone I have not talked to for awhile and we end up spending the evening catching up.  Gaming for me is a social thing, and anything that helps me in that mission is a good idea.  One of my favorite features of Rift is the fact that I can take my entire twitter feed with me.  So please Battle.net do something to help out the people for whom 200 is just too small.