The Beginner Hall

Impending Naptime

Last night was a really rough night, in that I had a pretty major bout of insomina.  I started trying to go to bed around 11:30 and ultimately failed.  I suppose I could have sat in bed playing some Pokemon but instead I got up, took some Melatonin and waited for it to actually kick in.  Problem is by 2 am it still had not really happened.  During that entire time I bounced around the internet reading various bits of stuff.  Mostly I was purposefully trying to stay out of any game for fear of it making it even worse…  as a few nights I got I totally inadvertedly got drawn into Super Time Force for an hour.  I remember as a kid my mother used to always say “be careful not to get your days and nights mixed up”, well with two days left to go until I have to report back to work… it feels like I have done precisely that.  Granted I have been trying to go to bed at a reasonable hour most nights, and get up on at least my normal weekend hours.  That said I have a feeling that Monday morning is going to be pure hell.

None of this would really matter were it not for the fact that tonight we start recording the new season of AggroChat, which means I will be up super late.  Generally speaking after we record the episode I edit it and post it all that night.  The nights where I do not do all of this and push off some of it until the morning just feel crappy.  That entire Sunday I feel like I am somehow “off” because I can’t really begin my day proper until I have edited and uploaded the AggroChat episode.  In any case…  I have a feeling there will be a mid day nap in my future.  Here is hoping that it doesn’t make the entire process worse, because generally if I take a nap…  It means I don’t sleep right that night.  I have this strange relationship with sleep, where my body seems not to want to partake of it.  Generally speaking I get by on four to six hours of sleep, and then get a wee bit more on the weekends.  My only hope is tonight to maybe take the melatonin before we start the podcast, so that maybe just maybe it will kick in about the time I finish edits.

The Beginner Hall

Last night Stargrace pinged me over twitter to get an invite into our Final Fantasy XIV free company.  I was busy farming Dragon Soul so I in turn pinged Ashgar who managed to get her invited.  This morning she posted an interesting article about how no game actually does a very good job welcoming players back to the game.  This is absolutely true, and pretty much any time I return to an MMO I end up having to start a new level 1 character so I can see how the game plays now, as opposed to how it played however long ago it was when I last played.  Games with a ton of content make this an even more difficult proposal because how can you soak up dozens of patches worth of content quickly enough to know what you need to do to play the game optimally at that moment.  What I find funny is that Final Fantasy XIV does not do a better job of this… when every single Final Fantasy game I have ever played has a construct designed almost entirely to do this.  The Beginner’s Hall has appeared in almost all of the games and generally is in whatever the first major town you encounter.  It is completely skippable, and I almost always do so… but it does a great job of telling the player what they should be doing through a sequence of short in game conversations.

I feel like MMOs need this as well, and similarly it could be disguised as a real institution in the game world.  In Stormwind it could easily be called a “War College” and feature individuals to explain what the current trends in how your class performs, what features have been added into the game in the last several patches, and some background information about what the current major story arc happens to be.  All of which could be contextual based on where you were quest and level wise, and give a player someplace in the game world to keep returning to in order to get a “briefing” on what is happening in the world.  It could explain important things like, how does one find the portals to the new content…  or what the requirements for raiding are and how to improve your gear score enough to be able to meet said requirements.  There are few things more staggering than returning to a game months if not years after you last played it.  Everytime I go back to Everquest II for example… I cannot play my main, until I have spent some time working on a character with less going on.  Having a construct in game designed to ease a returning player back in, might just make the returning process a bit more enjoyable.

Transmog Addict

One of the interesting things about playing Lodin my hunter is that I have not really played him on a regular basis since Vanilla.  This means I last played him in a world before Transmogrification, and while I have a full set of Giantstalker, and my Dragon Hand Cannon for nostalgia reasons… his banks are not as loaded as the rest of my characters with interesting options.  As such it has been my new mission to correct this problem.  I learned long ago that if my characters look awesome… they feel awesome to play.  As such I am one of those players that is constantly swapping up what my appearance looks like gear wise.  While I like how Lodin looks just fine currently…. there are so many interesting ranged weapons that have appeared since he was last an active character.  I must get my hands on them so that I can swap them out at will.  There are two weapons from the Black Temple that I have set my sights on… the Rifle of the Stoic Guardian and the Black Bow of the Betrayer.

Yesterday I was lamenting over twitter what keeps me from streaming very much… that little voice in my head that tells me no one is actually watching.  Streaming is an odd thing to me… because in truth I really don’t watch may streamers unless on the rare occasion one of my friends happens to be streaming.  For me it is about sharing my life with the people who read my blog and follow my social feeds.  Its me saying “this is what I am doing, and I am letting you into my life as I am doing it”.  In a way it turns a solitary thing like farming raid content…  into a more social one.  One of my goals for the year is to stream more often, and originally my intent was going to be to stream my raids.  The problem there is that we have a few raid members with very sensitive jobs who did not want their commentary broadcast to the world.  Since that is out the window… I am thinking about streaming some of my farming of old content.  I have so much nostalgia about the older raids, and I do it in part because it is one of the more enjoyable ways for me to get transmoggy bits…and walk out with a little pocket money in the process.