Farewell Wildstar

Day Two Rundown

We had an amazing turnout in day two, and while a couple of folks didn’t end up making a post we picked up several more in the process.  Additionally there were two blogs that I missed in the day one rundown.  I have to say I am still floored by the quality of content that folks are churning out.  I guess once you get the ball rolling in something it just develops a mind of its own.  I really need to figure out a better way of tracking the individual posts, as I have been up since 7 am and the last hour has spent simply pulling together this list of links.  However it is totally worth it because there look to be some pretty amazing posts there.  I plan on reading them immediately after posting my own morning post.

• House of Witches
• Blue Kae
• Lock and Bolt
• The Chindividual
• Murf Versus
• Disconcur
• XP Chronicles
• Star and Shadow
• Hello Cynical Badger
• Gaming Conjecture
• Alternative Chat
• Ashfang
• Me vs Myself and I
• JVT Workshop
• The Keen Gamer
• Chris Sanders
• Aggro Range
• Rambling Thoughts about WoW
• Irrelative Collection
• Missy’s Mojo
• Contains Moderate Peril
• The Mystical Mesmer
• Beyond Tannhauser Gate
• I Have Touched the Sky
• Scarybooster
• Simcha and Alts
• MMO Quests
• Bio Break
• Echoes from the Abyss
• Welsh Troll
• The Ancient Gaming Noob
• Herding Cats
• Looking for Playtime
• Little Rae of Sun
• Healing the Masses
• Power Word Remix
• Pleasant Gamer
• WoW Adventurer
• Wow in the Details
• Thalen Firebeard (day one)
• Thalen Firebeard (day two)
• Shadoe’s Miniature Adventures (day one)
• Shadoe’s Miniature Adventures (day two)

So there you go 41 day two posts, and two that I missed from day one.  We are having one hell of an initiative so far, and I highly suggest you check out all of the posts.  I have my super happy face on right now because It is going so smoothly thus far.

Farewell Wildstar

I finally did something yesterday that I knew was coming for awhile now.  I logged into the Wildstar account website and cancelled my subscription.  While I still have through October to play the game, I doubt I actually will.  At this point I have not played for two and a half weeks, and simply have no real drive to do so.  I did not actually make it to the level cap but stalled out at 26.  Why am I quitting you might ask?  Honestly I don’t really know.  Everything about Wildstar is something that I should like, but once the amusement of playing a Chua wore off I was left once again with the game I played in beta… that just didn’t quite do it for me.  I never really got into the game during the beta process and the highest I managed to get a character was to 10, but considering how much I had misjudged FFXIV in beta… I thought I owed it to myself to give the game a chance.

It does have a lot of nice things going for it, and the community and development teams do an awesome job of listening to the fans.  Wildstar however is kinda like a monster truck rally, when what I really want is a book club.  The game is awesome in an over the top 80s action movie kind of way, but after a point it just wears on you.  The wow-raider me would have loved this game, but I have changed considerably since I was raiding five nights a week.  I ultimately want something a little slower pace and a little bit more cerebral and less twitchy.  Who knows at some point I might fire it back up, but I kinda doubt it.  It was a fun experiment and I think overall it will do really well, but I think I wanted to like the game far more than I actually liked it.

I think what really started the downfall for me is as I watched our guild start to disintegrate around the time the free month ran out.  The aspect of the game I really liked was its group content, and that was really damned fun.  The problem is without active players, it became impossible to do the dungeons, and I was not quite ready to brave the dungeon finder.  Additionally we chose the wrong faction as a guild.  Not that I don’t love Dominion, but everyone I know from twitter and the blogosphere is playing on Evindra Exile side… which means we had no shot in hell of even getting their alts considering the 6 character per server limit.  Sure I could have started over and rolled Exile… and I did make a few alts… but quite frankly I just didn’t enjoy the game enough to start from scratch.  I wish all of you folks still playing the game luck, because it really is an interesting experience.

Not Final After All

Last night we got things back to normal and recorded Episode 16 of the AggroChat podcast.  Once again we had our entire cast of myself, Ashgar, Rae and Kodra.  On a whim we decided to pull in Tam as well since he was available.  I have to say it was one of the more chill shows we have recorded in awhile and everything seemed to flow pretty naturally.  I did absolutely no editing this time other than removing a few silences.  It sounds a little different however because I am recording from a different machine in a different location.  This weekend I had my main computer melt down and I have yet to get it back up and running.  As a result I recorded from my laptop, but we struggled through and I think the end product works just fine.

We talk about a bunch of things like Shovel Knight, Rogue Legacy, League of Legends, falling out of love with Wildstar… but more importantly our return to Final Fantasy XIV.  I guess for us it was not final after all.  I personally want to set down some more permanent roots in this game, and despite the cost prohibitive nature of guild housing… we are starting to price and talk about the location we want to buy in.  They made a ton of tweaks and in all cases it seems to have improved our enjoyment.  If you are thinking about giving it a spin check out the free 14 day trial.  We are on the Cactuar server in the Aether data center.  If you get in add Belghast Sternblade to your friends list and give me a shout.

Writing Prompts

I slacked off yesterday or more so I got caught up in the excitement for just how amazing day one was… and forgot to post any writing prompts.  Thankfully I had six already so it is not like you guys were at a loss for potential inspiration.  That said I do intent to keep throwing out the occasional batch of writing prompts and adding them to a list I have collected on the nook.

• What is your earliest gaming memory?  We all have to come to gaming from somewhere, what brought you into the fold?
• What is your favorite class?  Do you play a new type each game that comes out or is there always one type of class that you tend to favor?
• Do you follow a games lore?  There is often tons of lore both in game and out of game, do you follow it and even track down the tidbits that are not obvious.. or are you mostly oblivious to it?

#Blaugust #FFIXV #Wildstar