landmark Archives - Page 2 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Disconnected Dragoon

March 18, 2015 by Belghast

Missing a Raid

Yesterday was one of those days when I felt like I was moving through molasses the entire day. In part it was the whole staying up late and babysitting servers bit, but also we had so much stuff going on during the day connected to the two outages. It turns out that after much research they were not actually related. I knew I was not exactly in “fighting shape” so I let my raid leader know that I would not be attending the WoW Raid that night. This is in part a good thing because they were apparently talking about having to do a paired down raid due to limited healers, and it is probably a good thing to rotate folks a bit. At this point I would never mind having to sit out for a night because I have so much other stuff going on that I could be doing. When I got home I took a nap and that helped quite a bit, or at least made me feel something vaguely human.

I asked my wife not to let me sleep more than an hour, since I generally struggle with the concept of napping. If I take a nap, it means I am not likely to get a good nights sleep. My body plays this game with me, where it only wants to get five to six hours of sleep a night. When I nap, it means I am going to have this massive bout of insomnia that night. Thankfully the short nap managed to do what it needed to do and I was still able to sleep fairly well as a result. I spent most of the night hanging out on the couch catching up on Better Call Saul. The irony of be getting into this series is the fact that I have never actually watched Breaking Bad. I mean I have watched the first episode, but since my wife showed some interest in the show I didn’t really want to start it on my own without her watching along. Otherwise there would come a point where I would have to start back from scratch and watch everything over again. I managed to catch up through episode seven, and that show is just becoming more interesting as it goes.

Disconnected Dragoon

When it came to actual gaming last night, I was a bit more distracted. I spent some time logged into Final Fantasy XIV because our Free Company is just insanely vibrant, but I really didn’t do all that much gaming. I ran a few roulettes, and managed to get yet another piece of 130 gear thanks to another carbontwine, but mostly I just spent a lot of time hanging out at the free company house when I got up from my nap. It really is surreal to see the number of people online… and at some point I need to catch up with my whole guild census project and record all the new people in our spreadsheet. One of the problems with FFXIV is that there is no good guild notes functionality so we are having to keep an external list of which character belongs to which personality. Its tedious but for whatever reason I struggle to relate in game names back to twitter and blogger names. I spend a lot of time thinking “I think that is this person” but never fully committing because my memory is extremely fallible. That is my deep dark secret, that in other games I remember everyone… because I can check the officer notes.

I am not sure how I really made it through the sequence of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and World of Darkness… but I am guessing at this point I can just do those on auto pilot. I am hoping I was not “that dragoon” in most of the instances, because I managed to get several commendations. Generally speaking if I go in, and manage not to die… I get commendations. I should have spent the night working on botany, but instead I mostly stood around a lot staring blankly at the screen. I feel like over the last several nights I have been particularly antisocial. Largely when I am watching something on Television I stay off voice chat, and go for large periods of time without reading free company chat either. I know at some point Arkenor asked for a group, but it was not until it had actually formed that I noticed. I have been a less than stellar “Bel” lately, and I am hoping tonight I will be feeling back to my normal self. I feel like I have missed a lot of what is going on, and I am hoping to remedy that.

Time to Landmark

It has been well over a year since I last played Landmark in any fashion. That game has evolved in such a way that if you are not playing constantly you fall behind in the number of changes. At this point I simply feel behind the curve and it has been a real barrier from me jumping back into the game. This morning I read something interesting however, that Landmark plans to have one more major character wipe before opening its doors to the public. My theory is that this might be precisely the ideal time to pop my head back in and see how the game has progressed. Right now this wipe is slotted for sometime around April 29th. So my hope is that I can pop in and experience all of the new content fresh and not be so entirely out of touch with it. Honestly the most enjoyment I had in the game was the process of “leveling up” which was completing a series of arbitrary goals to keep moving up through the different types of picks and tools you can create. Once I had access to everything the game quickly became stale for me.

For reference when I last played the game… the Caves system was not yet patched in. So this means I have that and all of the player combat to experience fresh. The problem is I am torn on the whole Daybreak thing. I am still rather pissed about the layoffs, but at the same time the folks who are still on staff there are struggling to make this whole thing work. My Landmark account is a sunk cost as I purchased it so long ago. I might as well get some use out of it, and see what this game has become in the months since I let my claim get repossessed. There was a point where I realized I was only logging in just long enough to mine copper to pay the upkeep on my claim. This is one of the things I don’t like about upkeep systems. If you are only playing the game to pay upkeep, are you really playing the game at all? I am actually looking forward to the character wipe now and hopefully I will be able to reignite the spark I once had for this game.

Doubling Down

February 12, 2015 by Belghast

Still Frustrated

Yesterday I broke my self appointed rules and made two posts because I felt the news warranted it. I said my peace but the problem is… I am still frustrated this morning. At the time of posting yesterdays blog piece I really only knew about a few of the people who were let go. As last night wound its way onwards, more names trickled out and at this point I am absolutely shocked by the scope. While I am not sure about the numbers, it feels like roughly half of the folks I was aware of over there were let go. Granted the actual numbers could be anywhere, but I am basing it simply on the faces that have shown up on twitter saying they were no longer Daybreak employees, versus the ones that have said they still are. In any case this will be a massive blow to Everquest, Everquest II, Everquest Landmark and whether or not we will ever actually get Everquest Next. For awhile on Aggrochat we have joked about Next being vaporware, and that we would only ever get Landmark… but now I am starting to really wonder if that is closer to the truth.

Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first footsteps into the MMO world. Similarly I am drawn to Everquest II in ways that I cannot quite understand, and while I go for large swaths of time without playing, I often return to it was the gaming equivalent of “comfort food”. It is this strange mix of a world that I am absolutely in love with, and a combat system that I hate beyond words. If I had to create a list of “favorite games that I am not playing” I would put Everquest II at the top of that list… so I guess I ultimately am part of the problem. I love this world but I am not inhabiting it on a nightly basis, and as such not giving it money to grow. I’ve bought into Landmark and H1Z1 but I am not really playing those either. I remember feeling the same way when City of Heroes closed its doors, that I had so many fond memories… but that I had also ultimately moved past that game as well. I guess we want the things we once loved and enjoyed to stay protected in a bubble forever, never to change… but when we move on are we not also ultimately to blame?

Doubling Down

Before the events of yesterday I had a topic kicking around in my head about the worlds that we play. I am not sure how the events of yesterday feed into the narrative, but I am going with it in any case. I feel as though the era of the “new mmorpg” is all but over. There will of course be new games that identify with the “mmo” ideals, but they won’t be quite the same as the worlds we have had had in the past. I feel like we are going to see a lot more games like Destiny, that is “mmo-lite” or another genre with mmo features. I feel like the worlds that were crafted during the golden age of massively multiplayer online role-playing game launches, are the worlds we will have to live with for better or worse. When Blizzard cancelled Project Titan, we can look at that in so many different ways. We could say that it was a sign that MMOs were dying, and that they no longer believed in the genre. We could however take that as a sign that they believed that the worlds we had already were worth saving.

So many of the games that we love are not broken toys, at least not yet. Each of them if given the devotion and the development resources could be transformed into a truly magical place. I am looking at the transformation of Final Fantasy XIV from 1.0 awkwardness to 2.0 and beyond splendor as proof that a game can change for the better. I’ve played each of the major MMOs for some length of time, and have experienced that each have exactly the same problem. How do they keep the player engaged on a daily basis, rather than in bursts of activity each time new content is released? I feel the problem is that games right now are mired in the construct of expansion releases, pooling up major features until they can sell another box of the game. This means the best features tend to either get bottled up for years time, or never actually make it into the game at all.

The episodic construct is a bit better, but you have to be careful that you are not adding “expiring” content into your game, making players feel rushed to somehow grind through it all before the next patch hits. The problem I had with the Living Story in Guild Wars 2 was that when I fell behind, I didn’t feel like there was a point to actually try and catch up… since I had missed so much already. The fact that the content was expiring made it feel less “real” to me… that they weren’t permanently improving the game, but instead running a series of limited time events. I feel like the shift needs to be moved away from both of these constructs and instead the focus placed on fleshing out the world. Do you know how frustrating it is to me in World of Warcraft that there are five portals below Wyrmrest Temple but only two of them go anywhere? Each world we play is littered with these forgotten expansion ideas, and all I really want is for a game world to quit teasing us and start living up to its full potential. Now is the time for these companies to double down on the content they have, fix the issues with their game systems… and try and make their games worth our copious time and devotion.

A Simple Night

Because of the news yesterday, and because of other events leading me to question myself and my connection to other people… I was not in the best of places emotionally last night when I got home. I have to say my mood was improved by hanging out with my extremely awesome free company in Final Fantasy XIV. For a few nights I had promised to help my friend Solaria work on knocking out some stuff, since she was fairly new to 50 and in doing so also spent a good deal of time running dungeons with Thalen and Asha. I have not had a night where we tore through multiple dungeons in a night, and I have to say it was good for the soul. Granted I felt a bit wobbly, since I have not really tanked much of anything other than our raids, and dungeon tanking ends up so drastically different. That said we managed to unlock a few dungeons for both Thalen and Solaria, and in the process get some Tomestones of Soldiery and Poetics.

I’ve missed logging in, getting pulled into a group and then spending the rest of the night tromping through dungeons. It is like connecting with my most basic instincts of trying to make sure everything in the dungeon hates me equally. I really enjoy the pace of Final Fantasy XIV, and its particular brand of tanking. The Warrior just “feels” right, and I am hoping I will be equally at home with the Dark Knight. If nothing else I will always have the Warrior to fall back on if the Dark Knight ends up not being the class I have wanted all along. I know Thalen has several more dungeons yet to unlock to qualify for high level roulette, so I am going to try and force myself to build groups more often. I get stuck in my own little world, and spend most of my time soloing… but I know when I do group content I feel so much better at the end of the night. While last night did not cure me completely… it did make me feel significantly better.

Maintenance Gaming

January 8, 2015 by Belghast

A Conundrum

A few days ago I posted a tweet saying that at this point I am far less bored with World of Warcraft than I have been during other expansions. There are a myriad of reasons behind this, not the least of which is that I actually like the leveling arc in Draenor. I am working my way through level 100 number three and I am not really bored with the content yet. Granted I don’t really seem to have the burning desire to get through it like I have in the past, I am more comfortable to take a “will get there when I get there” approach to my leveling. I feel like maybe this is a more sustainable thing than my normal “burn three characters to max and quit” mentality that I seem to have. Hopefully by the end of the weekend my hunter will be 100, and I will likely start pushing more seriously my Enhancement Shaman.

I think there are a few reasons why this is happening. Firstly I really do like the Garrison now that it is finished, especially on my warrior. It gives me a place of peace and sanity before I venture out into the chaos of the world. I can bank, transmog, and hopefully at some point auction without having to worry with mailbox dancers or folks standing on vendors with their corehound mount. It was when I ventured out of my of my garrison on Christmas to go pick up my presents that I realized I really didn’t miss the people from my “daily” chores. Someone had taken it upon themselves to coat all of the packages with a layer of savage feasts making it a pain in the ass to click the actual presents… and my immediate thought was “and this is why I don’t leave my garrison”. That is maybe the problem however… that no one actually leaves their garrison.

Maintenance Gaming

Initially I was surprised when the response to my original statement about not being bored with World of Warcraft was that so many of my friends absolutely were bored. The common thread went something like this “Right now I am only logging in to run Garrisons, so I am probably going to cancel”. I’ve reached this point many times myself when a game has a gimmick that wants you to log in every so often to trigger. With the launch of Nightmare Tides, Rift introduced the Minions system where you could send these mini-pets out on missions to go fetch things. There was a period of time I was logging in twice a day… when I got up in the morning and when I got home at night to swap out my minion missions. It wasn’t long before I realized that I was only logging in to flip these switching and faded away from that game again.

The exact same thing happened for me with the Dragon Coins mobile game, and to some extent Landmark in that I was only logging in to pay my upkeep on my claim. When you realize you are only fiddling with something out of a sense of obligation, it is almost always time to leave. I think the problem with what I am terming “Maintenance Gaming” is that it can very much slow down the burnout of a player by giving them things to fiddle with to distract them from burning through the objectives. The problem is it can also serve to reanimate an already dead corpse allowing players to keep logging in ONLY to do the maintenance activity and never actually playing the game. So the folks that are logging in “ONLY” to play the garrison, are essentially the walking dead and will eventually quit.

The Glue in Gaming

I feel like the glue that keeps gamers attached to a game is progression in one form or another. Right now I am actively raiding in Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft and progressing in both of them. I care deeply about both games because that is my anchor… the fact that I am raiding. When all the other minutiae bores me… there is a functional core there of the raid that draws me back in. For others it is the people you play with, but that can only go so far… because eventually you will have done everything you want to do with said people. PVP can act as an anchor for some folks, but then again you have to be building towards some long term goal to make the PVP seem like anything other than mindless grinding. While “maintenance gaming” is definitely now a trend… it isn’t enough of a thing to actually keep someone glued to a game it seems.

Minions in Rift were fun for a few weeks, and so was building aimlessly in Landmark… but when I realized I was only logging in to mine exactly enough copper to pay my upkeep… I was more than willing to let my claim get repossessed. I have a feeling that before long we are going to start folks reaching that point with ArcheAge where they are willing to let their claim disappear because they are tired of logging in only to pay the upkeep. The “glue” is a deeply personal thing, and is going to be slightly different for each player… but ultimately you have to find whatever it is that connects you to the game and makes you care about it. I think for me at least this is what has been missing… a sense of building towards something more important than what I happen to be doing this day. The longest stretches I have spent playing any game… are the ones where I have been raiding. So I feel like I need to raid to keep caring about the game world, and I need that game world to be interesting… to keep caring about raiding.

Play What You Love

August 17, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 18

This week on AggroChat I am joined by regular hosts Rae, Ashgar and Tam which means we are unfortunately without a Kodra this weekend. He is off enjoying the sights, sounds and gaming opportunities of GenCon. I swear one of these years I want to go to this, because it has been like the pinnacle of all gaming shows in my head since I was a youngin reading Dragon magazine. I realize that in reality it is a fair bit smaller than likely even PaxSouth that I will be going to in January, but there is just something extra epic about GenCon. In honor of this convention we talk at length about the latest rendition of Dungeons and Dragons… the fabled Fifth Edition and why you should be excited for it. Wizards of the Coast at this point pretty much knows that they made some serious mistakes with fourth edition, allowing for the meteoric rise of Pathfinder. In 5th Edition it feels like they are trying to pay for the sins of the past with awesome.

In addition to D&D 5th, it was a pretty significant week in gaming in that GamesCom, the Blizzard Warlords announcement and SOE Live were going as well as an event for EVE and SWTOR. I talk about the things that really stuck out to me from the GamesCom feed, including the PS4 Shareplay system and the controversy over Tomb Raider exclusivity. We talk about the World of Warcraft Warlords launch announcement and the subsequent trailer, and the general feeling of “blah” we seem to have towards it. Finally we talk about Everquest Next and that it does in fact seem to be a game they are actually working on and not just vaporware. Additionally we talk about the upcoming changes in Landmark, and how it is a step in the right direction but not enough to get Ashgar interested again. It is a pretty packed show so hopefully you will tune in.

Play What You Love

Since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV and the release of the 14 day trial program, I have had a number of friends give it a shot. A good number of them have gone ahead purchasing and subscribing to the game and this is awesome. However for a handful of players it just didn’t click for whatever reason and they sent me heartfelt apologies for not being able to get into the game. This is perfectly natural, not all games are for all people… and in the current gaming climate we are in there is more diversity than ever, so there really is no excuse to play something you don’t enjoy. So I feel like each of us owes it to ourselves to play whatever it is that we love, and never apologize for doing it. Life is too short to spend time playing something you just don’t enjoy for some reason.

Right now I am enjoying the hell out of Final Fantasy XIV, and I feel like this is a game I could settle down in. However if I reach a point where I am not enjoying it any longer, you can bet I will move on to whatever seems to “feel good” to play at the time. If you stick around and play a game you just aren’t enjoying it only really leads to you either getting completely burnt out, or extremely bitter about the fact that your friends are forcing you to play something you hate. If you allow yourself to glide along through a whole bunch of different fun experiences… I feel like we all end up happier as a result. So please if you try this game or any other and you really don’t enjoy it… go play something else. All you ever have to tell me is that it just “wasn’t for you” and I will completely understand.

Blaugust Prompts

I have been rather slack with a lot of the Blaugust related things, but the biggest of these is my original intent to collect a bunch of writing prompts. While the threat on the forum has a ton of these already I still need to add a bunch more. So today here goes a few related to this weeks podcast and this weekend post.

What game do you love that none of your friends seem to enjoy? Is there a game that you keep returning to but wish your friends were playing along with you?
For me GenCon is this fabled event, what is yours? What is the event that you would love to attend but have never had the opportunity to do so for whatever reason.
What makes a good community? What aspects of a game or social community do you enjoy, and what aspects detract from it?

I am extremely proud of all the bloggers who are participating daily in the Blaugust event. Thanks for making this a truly awesome month.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust