H1Z1 Early Access

Bel Folks Stuff #4 – An Evening with Petter

This month the Bel Folks Stuff podcast focuses on the amazing Petter Mårtensson.  Petter has been an extremely busy man, and has had a ton of side projects over the years.  In his normal fashion he even offered to guest on Aggrochat if we could ever work out the time zone issues.  Our listeners could know him from any number of places.  For several years he worked for the european gaming magazine GameReactor both as a writer and as an on-air anchor.  Similarly while dormant for several years, he is the man behind the Don’t Fear the Mutant blog.  On the podcasting front he has been extremely active in the CSICON network serving as a host on several different shows including Claims the Normal, Three MMOSketeers, Enochian Frequency and most recently Who’s Who.

In addition to all of this he was involved in creating the A Tale of Internet Spaceships documentary talking about the culture behind EVE online.  Now he is also writing a monthly Final Fantasy XIV column for MMOGames.  Like I said… he is an extremely busy man and I am thankful he took the time to sit down with me and have a length conversation…  mostly about non-gaming stuff.  I think the most interesting thing about the conversation was the delve into Futurism and the things we would love to see.  We also geeked out a bit about Doctor Who, which apparently is something that happens on every podcast now that he hosts the Who’s Who show.  Definitely was an interesting conversation, and I hope you all enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

Listen to the Show

H1Z1 Early Access

H1Z1 2015-01-15 22-48-18-17 Yesterday Sony Online Entertainment launched the H1Z1 early access.  This was originally supposed to go live on Steam around noon, but various delays pushed it back into the late afternoon.  When I got home from work it was available and I figured $20 but satiate my curiosity was a fair price.  However the game apparently is very much “not quite ready for primetime”.  The above screen is what greeted me when finally after my World of Warcraft raid I fired the game back up.  Early in the evening I was not able to get into the server select screen at all so I guess in a way it is progress?  I am sure this is another case of “underestimated demand” and I seriously cannot blame them.  Throwing a game up on Steam early access as your initial forray into alpha… is pretty damned daring.  Right now the game has roughly 2000 reviews, roughly half of those are positive and half are negative, so if only a small fraction of the population comments…  that means they sold a ton of early access copies.

I love the concept of a zombie survival game…  the problem is I don’t want to have to deal with the world pvp aspect of games like Rust and Dayz.  So when this game was announced I had zero interest, until it was confirmed that there would be PVE only server environments at launch.  Hell I didn’t even mind that the original icon in the server browser list was a teddy bear.  I am a carebear, and I am okay with this notion.  While it is immature to taunt the player base that has proved to make up the overwhelming majority of MMO players…  I can deal with it.  I am sure H1Z1 is going to be a mess for the near future, but hopefully at some point it will be playable and interesting and allow me to play a base building game in a walking dead style world.  If it gives me that… then I am largely going to be happy with it and will consider it $20 well spent.

Mar’gok Attempts

Wow-64 2015-01-15 20-12-37-89 Early in the week on Tuesday we had a really phenomenal night or raiding, meaning we cleared 6/7 on normal and 2/7 on heroic.  This freed up last night to work entirely on Imperator Mar’gok.  While we got a bit of a late start due to key players running a bit behind, we accomplished just that, an entire night of attempts.  Mar’gok is one of those fights with a lot of moving parts, and it is simply going to take a lot of repetition before we have our “click moment” when everything falls into place.  We however did make good strides in that direction.  Essentially there is one transition that is wrecking us… that we need to figure out how to do more smoothly.  Once we have that transition down I think we will down the boss.  All of that said we did manage to start getting him down into the 40% range each time, which tells me we are likely on the cusp of victory.

It feels really good to be doing current content in World of Warcraft.  During my time back in Pandaria I attempted to raid with a group that was in theory several content patches behind.  There is just something demoralizing about doing that, and especially since we never seemed to make any real forward momentum that would lead me to believe that at any time we were likely to get to current content.  When LFR served as my primary source of upgrades…  I had to ask myself why was I even bothering with the constant nights of wiping.  This expansion however has been a completely different experience.  I really want to kill Mar’gok but I have the utmost confidence that we will, and likely before the Blackrock Foundry raid opens.  I am just bummed that I won’t be around Thursday night next week… because more than likely after reviewing the logs we will make some tweaks and finish this raid.

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