Guild Leadership Archives - Page 2 of 108

FATE Grinding Go!

July 25, 2015 by Belghast

Home Improvement is Scary

A good chunk of our week has revolved around planning for some renovations around the house, and I have to say the whole process kind of wigs me out. I have been acting pretty calm and collected because I know it also stresses my wife out… but I feel like I am wading out into an ocean that I know very little about. The long and short of it is that we live in a house with wood siding, which is not exactly ideal for the climate extremes of Oklahoma. Additionally our climate seems to really be a positive environment for termites… and when we moved in we knew the house had some issues. Then a little over a year after moving in… we had our first swarm. We have been on a termite plan since and it has been nearly a decade of having zero activity, but we know there is some underlying damage in the siding, but other than cosmetic issues we had not really had any problems.

That is of course until recently when we during a particularly hurricane like horizontal rain… we had a very small leak in our kitchen ceiling. After having the roofers out, they thought it was coming in along the garbage edge of siding and up over the flashing. This is the point at which we first noticed… just how bad our siding really was. Throughout the course of the week we had numerous contractors out who gave estimates… and we think we have maybe decided on a company and a product. Right now we are looking at replacing all of the wood siding with fiber cement, which is this crazy stuff that feels like ceramic tile, but looks like wood. But this means some major money, which has us also sorting out financing options. Being an adult is an extremely frustrating thing. We think we have a plan figured out… but even though I know this is something that really needs to be done… it is a massive decision. I know things will work out in the end, but this whole process is exceptionally stressful for the moment.

CPUCores

I was asked by someone on my steam friends list last night, if this program worked since I had been running it. I actually just started testing it last night, even though I purchased it long before it showed up on steam. I do not remember how much I paid when I bought it, but I want to say it was somewhere around the $10 mark. It promised to improve your FPS by improving your CPU utilization, and this is something I had been frustrated by in the past. The machines I use are quad core or six core… and it always felt like very little of my CPU time was actually being used. At the time I figured what the hell, purchased it… and then got busy messing with other things. When they went on steam the developer was nice enough to send me out a Steam key as well, and yesterday I actually started testing it. Is this digital snake oil? Well honestly… all I can really offer is a heartfelt shrug.

I did some testing this morning with World of Warcraft which is one of the most poorly optimized games that I have played when it comes to utilizing multiple cores. Hell lets me honest, the game itself is horribly optimized in general… but my theory was that this game seems to be extremely CPU limited, so in theory if CPU Core optimization would help any game it should help this one. The above graph is taken from task manager and shows that for the most part all of the cores are running at around the same amount of load and an overall 36% utilization of my CPU. In World of Warcraft itself I was standing in my Garrison and setting roughly 30 frames per second. The latest release of CPU Cores features a “CPU Cores It” button allowing you to scan your current process list and apply the change to an application that is running. If you look at the graph below you see that with CPUCores turned on, it is now pegging two of my six cores and as a whole the CPU utilization is now 64%. In game I was still standing in my Garrison but saw a jump from 30 fps to 40 fps… which is not really earth shattering but still not too shabby and is in line with what a lot of the reports seemed to indicate.

The confusing thing is however… that it seems like CPUCores is only really using two of my six cores. There are some settings in there to manually override what cores it is actually using to run things, so I figure I will continue to fiddle with it and see what I can get from it. I didn’t actually record any of my measurements last night, but I saw a bigger jump when using my laptop. I actually started to see comparable performance to my desktop which was kinda massive. The general advice in the community is that this is designed for medium end systems to get some additional performance out of them, and that if you already have an extremely high performance system… it is likely not going to do anything for you. Normally speaking I run Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward on my laptop around 30-40 fps… but last night with CPUCores running I was seeing 60-70 fps which is a big jump. Laptops are notoriously bad at CPU utilization because they are designed to safe energy whenever they can. I feel like maybe that is the magic bullet here for using this application, because honestly the results on my gaming desktop do not warrant the purchase. I largely bought the app because I was curious if it worked, and for the most part it does seem to do something… because a 10 fps increase is still a 10 fps increase no matter how you chop it. My hope is that over time it will continue to work better and it seems like they are just now starting to try and optimize for AMD processors. As always… your mileage may vary and I probably would not have paid the current $20 price tag on steam.

FATE Grinding Go!

So it appears that with 3.0.5 the changes to FATE experience have been noticed by the community. As I looked at Duty finder it actually scrolled for the first time in a long while, with multiple FATE parties happening in different zones. I decided to join the train in Dravinian Hinterlands and it seemed like the time spent was worth my time. I had dinged 58 earlier in the day while running a dungeon with guildies, and after a bit of FATE grinding I managed to get to around the halfway mark to 59. It is my hope that today I can run some more dungeons and FATEs and make a serious push for 59. The community seems to have been reinvigorated by the patch, and it is shocking just how good Square Enix is at timing their content. In the days leading up to this recent patch it felt like there was a slowing down as people finished their Law grind. Instead now everyone is actively buzzing again as they are trying to get as much Esoterics as they can, so that within three weeks they can get those tasty tasty level 200 weapons.

When I decided that I needed a break from FATE grinding, I opted to pop over into SkyForge and work on finishing unlocking all of the costumes. After having played the tutorial as every class currently in the game… I have to say they all feel very unique. You have everything from the mad bomber feel of the Alchemist, to the skill shots of the Archer, to the insane melee flurry that is the Slayer. The problem is… the three classes that you get to choose from at the start are without a doubt the most generic feeling of all of the classes that I played. This is rather unfortunate because while I feel it gives people a desire to unlock that class that they really want to play, it makes the initial grind feel meaningless and pointless since you ultimately have to play the lesser of the starter evils to get there. I feel like this game could benefit from the Marvel Heroes approach to classes, allowing you to play a little of each of them and then after the tutorial choose the one you wanted to unlock. I feel like eventually they will let us outright purchase these classes, but I have found that option sorely missing from the cash shop. I would absolutely pay to unlock the Berserker for example or the Slayer… but since I missed out on the founders packs I have no real way to do that.

Begrudging Enjoyment

July 23, 2015 by Belghast

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.

Love Our Guild

July 20, 2015 by Belghast

Unlocking Dungeons

This weekend was a little bit split as far as gaming goes. I spent about four hours in SkyForge and the rest of it wandering around in Final Fantasy XIV. I had a bunch of side projects that I never really got off the ground. One of the things about being a tank is that you are constantly getting called on to do tanky things. Last night for example, I had all intentions of simply wandering around the new zones doing hunt mobs, but I ended up getting drafted to tank both Neverreap and Fractal Continuum for a friend who just dinged 60. Since this would allow him to unlock the content, and be yet another possibility for a daily expert roulette, as well as providing three of us in the dungeon run some tasty tasty first time bonus, I did not mind giving up my relaxing evening of hunting to help out.

Both runs went fairly smoothly other than Warenwolf falling off the side of the final boss in Neverreap. Luckily we had the stamina to go ahead and finish that boss without him. Fractal Continuum went extremely smoothly other than some annoyances with bomb placement on the final boss. Luckily the loot gods seemed to be at least a little favorable and Waren walked with a bow and some other items helping him inch towards that all too critical level 170 mark for Alexander. It is my hope that in this last week we will have increased our item level enough to be able to put a good attempt in on Bismarck Extreme tonight. I found out that apparently the dps constraint is that you be able to break the spine in a single attempt without also blowing every cooldown. Wednesday we were able to break the spine, but it was a “just barely” situation and we absolutely had to abuse every cool down available to get there.

Love Our Guild

Last night I had a moment when I was overcome with warm fuzzies. Folks were doing what they always do and filling my screen with green happy spam, and somehow it came around to the discussion of the free company. I am not sure if I remember who started it but someone made the comment that they were happy that I had recruited them into the guild, because if not for that they probably would not be playing. Then in a burst of activity a bunch of people chimed in with pretty much the same thing. So I wanted to talk a bit this morning about how much all of my guildies mean to me. There are so many days where I have had a rough patch, that I can log into our free company and within moments of seeing the cheery conversation I am in a much better mood. Having a happy guild family is ultimately what helps me keep returning to one game over another, and ultimately is what keeps me engaged in Final Fantasy XIV.

Sure the game is awesome, but having this big group who is willing to drop what they are doing to help someone else out, makes the experience so much better. Yesterday during the evening I worked through a backlog of dungeon runs that I had recorded, and came across a video that didn’t turn out quite as intended. Since the launch of Heavensward the guild crafters as lead by Solaria have been working away on making us an Airship. When it came time to launch it for the first time a good chunk of us gathered in the workshop basement of the guild hall. In part we hoped a cut scene would happen, and as a result I had OBS rolling away in the background recording the event. While the event did not turn out as I had expected, looking back on the footage it makes me exceptionally happy to see so many of my guild members roaming around in one place. I love the housing district for the constant flow of guild members popping in and out as they go off to other adventures, and this moment was probably the largest meeting of sorts we have had. It made me realize that we need to do something like this more often.

More SkyForge

The SkyForge open beta finishes up this Wednesday and in the mean time I plan on playing for a little bit each night. I have to admit while there are still problems with the game for me, it is growing on me in ways I can’t quite fathom. During yesterdays run I finally figured out something that had been bugging me. I said in my videos and in my blog posts that it seemed like the combo system was largely ineffectual, and for the most part this is true. However I noticed on my character to the right of the health bar was a charge counter of sorts marked with a lightning bolt. This is directly above the dodge counter that shows how many times in a row you can dodge, and how long before the counter regenerates when they are all spent. This lightning bolt number tied to the special combo attacks, and if I use a combo while I have a charge available it does significantly more damage. However any additional combos while that charge is regenerating end up being largely useless.

Knowing this is a thing, made combat feel more purposeful. Essentially I had one special move to use every 30 seconds or so, because that seemed to be roughly how long it took to regenerate a charge. When that ability was not available however I could happily wail away on the target then set up for the next special attack. This little bit of information seemed to dynamically change the way combat felt. Additionally doing the more open world zones, seemed much more enjoyable to me given that if I started wailing away on a boss, chances are someone would come along behind me to help me finish it. Running around with a group of other players also made me realize just how little damage the paladin does comparatively. In all honesty… I might end up playing quite a bit more of this game because it feels like I am starting to grasp the reason why it does the things it does. It is not the sort of game I would ever play as a primary mmo, but I have been enjoying playing it in these short bursts, where I complete a single objective and then log back out for awhile.

Chasing a PVE MOBA

July 16, 2015 by Belghast

A Meaningless Term

Yesterday I witnessed a conversation unfold that I have had a dozen times myself with various folks. A friend of mine made the idle comment that they would really like to see a “PVE MOBA”, to which someone else predictably replied that you cannot have a “MOBA” without PVP. The problem is that there is absolutely no clear definition of what exactly a “MOBA” is. Additionally each player seems to refer to a slightly different set of mechanics when someone says “MOBA-like”. So for some people it is all about the match based pvp action, and others it is all about the interesting class design. If you simply dissect the term “MOBA” you get Multiplayer Online Battle Arena… which in itself is another absolutely meaningless term. Multiplayer Online is clear enough but the Battle Arena part is complete nonsense. What are you battling and what sort of arena are you battling in?

For me personally the key elements of what make a MOBA intriguing have nothing to do with player versus player combat. I like the different characters and their unique sets of abilities, and the way they interact with other characters and their abilities. In fact I would be happy spending my time in lane killing creeps because I honestly enjoy doing that way more than engaging with other players. When I play League of Legends I will almost always play against bots, and have long thought that it would make an interesting game to make it purely co-operative against interesting challenges. The problem is if you say this.. you get the reaction above that it cannot be done… because MOBAs are PVP games dammit! But what I am presenting is that folks are assigning a specific mindset to a term that is absolutely meaningless on its own merit. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can describe so many games and is likely why the term gets blurred so much to describe games that are absolutely nothing like the original Defense of the Ancients roots.

Keep the Interesting Bits

For me the interesting bits about what we generally refer to as a MOBA are the Character design that I have talked about before, and ultimately the payment model. I like this concept of purchasing individual champions, and having a rotation of free champions to play to consistently keep testing the waters and trying to branch out. The key part as well for me is the way that MOBA titles grow over time. If you look at the evolution of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, in both cases they are constantly releasing new content to satiate the appetites of players. I think this has been key to the success, that every few weeks there is something new being introduced to the game to shake up players expectations. League for example has over 120 different unique champions that they are doing a decent job of keeping balanced against each other, and Heroes is adding at least one champion a month it seems to catch up. So I feel like the big success of this genre has been constant incremental evolution of the product.

This variety helps deal with the “special snowflake” syndrome that happens in MMO design. Often times there is a demographic of players that wants to play a specific class in a manner that was not intended to be played. Granted this happens to some extent in build system MMOs like league, but it is always clear that this is not necessarily a “supported” play style. The champion system instead lets companies roll out lots of hyper focused characters that play to very specific niches. So in this case what would be a “special snowflake” like the “melee hunter” would simply just be another champion they could build to fill that desire. So instead the focus becomes on mastery of a specific set of abilities unique to that champion, rather than a much larger set of abilities as seen in most “talent tree” systems. I feel like this is crucial in allowing someone to adapt to a brand new champion quickly, but at the same time feeling confident enough to branch out into things they have yet to try before. There are game play modes like ARAM (All Random All Mid) that encourage this branching out because it forces players to play with a random champion.

Chasing a PVE MOBA

So the quandary I am in is that I love the League of Legends lore and champion design, but don’t love the game itself. I have long thought that it would be awesome to have a PVE centric version of League of Legends where you play the same champions with the same abilities in a Diablo like setting. Instead of fighting in Summoner’s Rift against five other players in a battle to destroy the opposing teams nexus, it would be a co-operative experience as five players venture into a procedurally generated dungeon with a treasure at the end. The idea is that each map would be harder than the previous until you reach a boss battle for the final treasure in the dungeon. You could even keep the build mechanic in the form of at the beginning of each map level you could have the same merchant that exists just outside of your teams Nexus in the Rift. After venturing a certain way into each map level he could travel to the next level, making it so that players could only buy new items at the beginning of each map.

For the hyper competitive players, you could still keep all manner of stats from number of monsters killed, their average difficulty rating, how fast it takes your team to clear a map, and of course how many times you have died during a specific encounter. Personally I would go with a counter strike approach where each player gets a single life per map, making it progressively harder the more players that you have lost. I would introduce the ability to purchase resurrection potions, but again that is an opportunity cost… since you have limited item inventory slots and limited gold to keep purchasing items with. Similarly I would introduce a “lives” mechanic in the number of times your team can retry during a specific dungeon crawl sequence. This would encourage the team to stick together and work on group tactics rather than going off on their own and risking getting overwhelmed. The thing is… I would absolutely pay to play a game like that, and would probably rope my friends into playing it to. The key impediment however is that folks seem to keep thinking that “MOBA” style mechanics cannot also apply to PVE game design. Someone make this game happen… I am looking at you Riot.