Wildstar Attunements

Bon Voyage

Finally home and sitting on the sofa and starting to tackle the blog post of the day.  I ended up taking the day off from work to make sure I was able to do whatever my wife needed me to do this morning.  She however has been successfully ferried to the airport, and while I got turned around leaving the airport I got to flex my knowledge of the backroads of North Tulsa to get back home.  I am going to have to master highway 11 this summer during the Twitter Math Camp, where I am serving as a shuttle driver.  However for the time being I am nice and safe and home.

When I got here it was really nice out, so I opted to go for a little walk rather than having to do all of it this evening.  The thing this highlighted however is that I apparently need to try and find some earbuds with a longer cord.  If I moved my head too quickly they ripped out of my ears and went flailing to the ground.  If I am going to make it through the nightly ritual of walking I am going to have to do it to music.  So after while I guess I will make a trip out to target or best buy and see what I can find.  Once upon a time I had a set of head phones that had little behind the ear clips, so I am thinking I need to find a pair of those.

Wildstar Attunements

For some time now an infographic has been circulating around the internet outlining the “12 step process” for raid attunement in Wildstar.  I admit when I first saw it, I was extremely hesitant because it is quite the ordeal… however the longer I have “lived with it” the more I think it might be just want the doctor ordered.  I talked about my feeling regarding attunements and skill checks this weekend on the AggroChat podcast, but this mornings post is completely devoted to two excellent posts I read yesterday from Liore and Syl about the subject.  I am not going to preface or summarize the posts, because you really need to just read their own words on the subject.  Instead I am going to go off in my own rambly direction to talk about skill gates and attunements in general.  If you are curious about the 12 step image… it is spanning the right side of the page… for dramatic effect.

Evil Attunements

Once upon a time in another life I was a somewhat successful raid leader in World of Warcraft.  I lead a few raids during the 40 man era, but got really serious about doing it during the Burning Crusade 25 man era with the non-guild based raid groups of NSR and Duranub Raiding Company.  I know the pain that attunements can be all too tragically as a raid leader.  In order to get fresh blood into your raid, it meant either you spent time running old content and gearing those players up… or you resorted to stealing members away from fledgling raids that were maybe not as highly progressed as your own.

The problem with the World of Warcraft attunement system, was that it required an entire raid to complete.  This was a constant drag on the raid system, and meant lots of players would have to join one raid just to get keyed to be able to join a bigger one.  This system invoked so much animosity, just like it did back in Everquest where the system really saw the first light of day.  During the Planes of Power expansion, getting keyed for various planes became a power vacuum that only a few elite guilds allowed anyone to have.  Considering the raid designers for World of Warcraft were themselves the leaders of these elite raids… it was not surprising that the keying system ended up something very similar.

The Gatekeeper

The problem is that the attunements also served as a way to gate the content, and provide a level of gearing that you must be able to get past in order to proceed.  To some extent they have tried to do this with item levels, but that in itself is also inefficient.  Just because a player has a really high gear score, it tells you nothing about their ability.  I’ve known more than a few players who have reached high gear score out of persistence, and still perform horribly in a raid environment.  For ages these games have needed an objective measure for just how prepared a player is for the encounters contained within a raid.  Nothing feels worse than having to be that raid leader, and tell a player that they simply do not perform well enough for the raid to carry them along.

One of the best mechanisms I have seen in a game to gate based on player skill… is the not terribly creatively named “Gatekeeper” encounter in The Secret World.  In fact I have gushed about the need for this encounter on more than one occasion, but the latest is in the “WoW Needs a Gatekeeper” post.  This encountered required you to complete a specific test designed to exemplify your ability to heal, tank or dps nightmare level content.  Your reward for completing it, was literally the ability to get to the nightmare level gates in the game.  As a DPS player at the time, I have to say that the test fully prepared me for the rigors that would be Nightmare difficulty content, and I am sure eventually raid level content.

What was so great about the encounter was that it was entirely personal.  No one could carry you through it, or even assist you.  You had to come to a solution to the puzzle of how to complete all of the necessary tasks to progress forward.  This type of skill gate draws a clear line in the sand between the players that are ready and the players that are not, and takes a lot of the stress off the raid leader.  I don’t like elitism, but raiding was never one of those things designed for the masses.  It is designed to be an extremely rigorous skill based activity, much like high level PVP.  The harsh reality is that not everyone should be able to raid.  That is not to say that I don’t think there should be valuable high end content for everyone to complete.  But I don’t necessarily think that raiding should be something that every  player has the expectation of being able to do.

Why Wildstar Isn’t Evil

One of the coolest things about the Gatekeeper encounter is it gives players a shared struggle that they had to get through to be able to progress to the next level.  My friends and I still to this day talk about what a colossal pain in the ass the dps version was.  It took me 25 tries and I think it took my friend Warenwolf around 30… because we were both too damned stubborn to respec to the “optimal” path to complete it.  We beat the damned thing on our own terms, and now carry it as a badge of honor.  This is what raiding used to be, not about elitism, but about defeating something really hard together as a group and carrying with it a sense of pride in that accomplishment.  I honesty feel like Wildstar is trying to return to that era when you felt like you earned every inch of space in each dungeon or raid you completed.  I for one am fine with this change, even if it means I will likely never be able to raid again.  I just hope that they put in content to keep me entertained in my casualness.

The main reason why I feel like the Wildstar attunement process is just is the fact that for the most part it is a personal journey.  Steps 1-5 are entirely soloable, or at the very least zone events that will likely have other players completing them without the need for a premade group.  Step 6 requires a group but should be able to be completed through pugging if you need to.  To be honest every single achievement listed in the attunement, is either solo or something you can accomplish with either a freeform group inside of the zone, or puggable through the dungeon finder system.  Sure you can get your guild to help you out significantly on several of the steps, but the length of the quest chain means that not many guilds will be dragging players through it.  This means the onus of the entire event is on the player, and not on a guild or a raid to “catch them up”.  So while it is not a one stop shop like the Gatekeeper, I feel it creates a sufficient skill gate to make sure that the players are prepared for raiding in Wildstar will likely mean.

I feel like Wildstar is a game with so much casual but challenging content, that there is always going to be something for the players that cannot raid to do.  While World of Warcraft has made so many steps to make raiding an inclusive thing…  it feels like it lost the epic quality that it used to have along the way.  Some of my best moments in gaming came from Vanilla and BC era raiding, because when we FINALLY downed a boss… it felt like we had done something spectacular.  When I got that tier set…  it felt like it was a long fought struggle… and not something I gained by simply “putting in enough time” or “grinding enough currency”.  I feel like raiding could definitely use an infusion of hardcore again, even like I said earlier… if that means I won’t be able to participate.

#Wildstar #Attunements

Inappropriate Bed Time

Lazy Sunday

Yesterday we pretty much had the textbook definition of a “Lazy Sunday”.  After getting almost 13,000 steps on Saturday, I only managed to hit 3,500 yesterday.  We had rain to deal with off and on all day, and pretty much opted to stay indoors and vegetate.  I think given how hard we have pushed we both could use a day off.  Also my wife has been out of school for a week but never really gotten a single day to just recuperate.  To make matters worse Tuesday she is flying out for the first of many conferences she will attend this summer.  As such it also begins the part of the summer that I hate the most…  trying to get used to being alone and then simultaneously get used to being not alone.

I am probably odd that it takes time for me to ease into any change in my environment.  I have always been someone who could adapt to rapid and momentary interruptions extremely well.  I remain calm under pressure, and get hyper focused on fixing whatever issue is at hand.  Ironically I am extremely horrible at dealing with sustained change.  When my world is thrown upside down but not immediately righted… I am not a happy camper.  I have these little rituals, like this morning blogging thing… that when I do not get to observe them… nothing else is really right the rest of the day.  So you can imagine how much turmoil the summer brings me since I tend to have a wife one week and then she is gone the next…  and this lasts for at least the month of June but often times some of other months as well.

Easily it takes me a good three days to adjust to any change, sometimes longer.  So if she is gone a week 3 days of that will be with me in personal turmoil as I adjust to her being gone.  Then when she comes back there will be another three days of me adjusting to the fact that it is no longer just me and the cats in the house.  I feel like I deal with all of this fairly well considering, but there are generally some severe low points while she is not around.  Thankfully this year she will be travelling back on my Birthday, because in past years she has been gone for it…  making it all that more of a depressing occasion.  The week days are pretty easy thankfully because the routine of work keeps me pretty busy, and then at night I end up gaming the night away.  The weekends on the other hand are pretty rough to be all by myself in the house.  Hopefully this year will be a bit easier since I will still need to maintain the routine of walking every night.

Inappropriate Bed Time

WildStar64 2014-06-09 06-07-43-280 Among my friends I have developed a reputation for having unnaturally good luck when it comes to drops and getting the random number generator to perform for me.  One of the nifty things that I added to my house is the Moonshiners Cabin.  Once every thirty minutes you can play a mini-game to brew a batch of moonshine.  So far this is one of my favorite housing mini-games because really… it takes zero skill, just the ability to do a few tasks quickly.  If you complete the game you get to roll for 150 reknown, a Neon Beer sign pictured above, one of 5 random dye colors, or the penultimate reward a purple quality “Granok Four Poster Bed”.  The bed is also pictured above, but given my odd lighting in the house I am not sure if you can really see it in all its glory.  It is a rather large bed decorated with so many odd things.  Let me run them down really quickly…  a pair of steer horns, a target riddled with bullet holes,  a pink heart pillow, a camo pillow, a tiger striped pillow, stage lighting, a camera pointing at the headboard, an LCD monitor showing the beds headboard, and a clothes line with a bra and a pair of tube socks.

WildStar64 2014-06-08 20-38-11-427 I am pretty sure the owner before me was rigging the bed to film porn, but I am not 100% sure.  Maybe they were just part of some elaborate sleep study.  In any fashion it totally fits the motif of my house which is “Intergalactic Airstream Trailer”.  Essentially I want to be that crazy Chua in a teardrop trailer lost somewhere deep in the woods.  Right now I am sharing my house with my pet carrots, and I intend to add as many adorable plushies as I happen to find to the house just to crank up the uneasiness factor.  I am decorating the house as a “Chua Unhinged”…. which in reality is pretty much every chua everywhere.  I was too cheap to buy a proper divider, so I am just using a forest of Elden Holograms to provide a visual divider between the living room and the bedroom.  In the bedroom you have the creepy bed, a Chua regeneration chamber, a Chua mechanical arm… that holds a really huge missile.  All things that any proper marginally insane Chua would need on a daily basis.

WildStar64 2014-06-09 06-44-43-639 The thing that still has me over the moon about the Wildstar housing system is that so much of it is “functional”.  I love Rift and EQ2 for having super detailed cosmetic housing systems… and to be honest in both cases the systems are generally more detailed in what you can do with them.  The trump card that Wildstar plays is that they have given you a reason other than for bragging rights to have a cool home.  So many of the things that you place in your home can be interacted with and used.  For example this is a shot of my friend Tam’s house and he has a crafting table, that works just as well as the crafting tables in any of the cities.  Since we are neighbors I can pop over and use it at any time, as well as mine his ore for him…  with him getting the lions share of the reward from doing so.  They have managed to create housing that not only is interesting and functional… but that also still has deep social ties.

Thirty Minutes Too Late

WildstarAdventure_Scopique Throughout most of the weekend my friends and I had been missing each other online for the purpose of running the first Adventure.  We often had four within the right level range but not quite five.  I am prone to fits of walking away from the screen without warning, and at one point last night I did just this to cook dinner.  When I got back in they were about halfway through running the adventure without me.  This is no biggy, because I am sure I will get in on another run… but the worst part is I think I am the only one of us who is actually building fully tanky.  I feel sorry for Rae because she got drafted into tanking as a Stalker with no tanking gear and no experience using any of the tanking abilities for her class.  I stole the above photo from Scopique… and I am assuming at some point today he will have a rundown on his blog.

It sounded like they had a fairly rough time, but everyone soldiered through…  no pun intended.  I am curious if the engineer tricks will make it easier or not.  One of the things I am really digging is that the engineer has a lot of active mitigation.  There is this death and decay like mechanic that I drop called Unsteady Miasma.  Firstly it deals AOE damage to the group in a 5 meter circle, but the important thing is it gives up to five mobs a debuff called blunder.  When that procs it causes their chance to be deflected to increase by 28% at the current tier.  As a result this causes me to deflect a not insignificant number of their attacks once you factor in my own deflection bonuses.  This is the sort of thing that you want to keep up all of the time, and when I started doing so I noticed my ability to solo 3 man bosses increased massively.

WildStar64 2014-06-08 14-50-43-346 At this point I figure I am about halfway through Auroria, and roughly halfway to level 21.  My intermediate goal for the weekend was to hit 20, and I did so just barely.  One of the cool things about adventures is that if you are over the suggested level it mentors the party down.  This means at least to some extent the content stays evergreen.  I am doing a really poor job of following the quest chains, and as a result I have stuff scattered all over the map that is incomplete.  Deredune was pretty straight forward, but I was subjected to more than a few “whats over here” moments… and when I got to Auroria the gloves came off completely.  I have followed so many wild goose chases in search of ore or an explorer quest item.  I feel like I am doing a really poor job of progressing considering I am already starting to lag behind some of the guild members.  That said…  as busy as I was last week I didn’t really feel like I got to play much.

Wildstar Adventures

Tonight is going to be a busy night to say the least.  We will have to do the traditional mad dash around the house to gather up items and pack my wife for her trip.  So I am really not sure how much time I will really get to play.  However if I do manage to get a solid block of time before or after my walk… I want to run the first Adventure.  So this is my goal, I just have no clue at all if I will accomplish it.

#Wildstar #Housing

Band Back Together

Lackluster Milestone

This past week I have been pushing hard to meet a personal goal.  Inside FitBit on your profile page they have this little progress bar with a weekly goal of 70,000 steps.  So I have been pushing all week to try and hit 10,000 per day to make sure I could reach this goal.  I thought lights and buzzers would go off when I hit it, or at the very least I would earn a badge for it.  Problem is that we recorded the AggroChat podcast last night, and immediately afterwards we went for our evening walk.  When I got back in my mind was on the podcast that I needed to edit and I spent until well after midnight doing just that.  So by the time I actually came back to the website and checked my progress…  the bar was back at 0.  I never got to see the bar full, because I really wanted to take a screenshot of it.  Unfortunately however they have no mechanism to go back and see how you did the previous week…  seems like a massive design flaw.

Right now my 7 day average is over 11,000 steps and my total for last week is 79,818.  I have to just be at peace knowing that I did in fact accomplish the goal… even though there is nothing showing that I did.  The problem with the fitbit is it is also a double edged sword.  When things aren’t being tracked I just as quickly stop caring about the overall progress as I started.  I try my best to charge my band at work when I am not going to be walking around for a bit.  However at one point Friday I got up to go to the bathroom… and started to take the “long route” that involves basically walking the entire floor…  but stopped the moment I realized I didn’t have my band on.  If it was not getting recorded… it was immediately not worth the effort.  I know this is a jacked up way of looking at things, but anyone who has done one of these always on pedometers likely experiences the same thing.  I am somewhat disgusted with myself because this is only steps away from “food only being good if you took a picture of it”, but alas the positive effects of the fitbit far outweigh the negatives.

Band Back Together

Last night was a fairly monumental occasion because for the first time in a month we had our regular cast of hosts for the show.  Rae has officially decided that she no longer hates us…  even though she swears that she never actually did.  She has started employing the wonders of her phone and setting an alarm for recording time.  This week we talk about all sorts of interesting things.  Kodra is going to be out next week at Origins game fair in Columbus Ohio.  This con has a pretty proud tradition of competitive gaming and he is going there to participate in the regional for the My Little Pony card game.  We’ve talked about this TCG before, but Kodra gives us a nice long rundown of the two decks he is considering taking to the competition and the strong points of each.

We talk for a bit about the World of Warcraft Alpha launch and more specifically its timing.  Finding it really interesting that for the most part it has no NDA.  I am wondering if this is going to be the case for all new Blizzard games considering Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm do not have NDAs associated with them either.  Finally we get around to talking about the real big event of the week…  all of us dipping our toes into Wildstar.  It was a really great show, and it was awesome to finally have the regular cast all in one place again.  Kodra introduced a new feature at the tail end of the show, where he, Rae and Ashgar talk about the League of Legends LCS games… and I sit in the background confused with nothing at all to add to the conversation.  That said I am going to try and watch a few games to see if I can get into it now that I am regularly playing league again on Thursday nights.

Shards Online

ShardsPreAlpha 2014-06-08 11-08-52-018 For the next several hours you can download and play the trial of Shards Online.  One of my good friends is on the community team for this game, so I have been promising for a bit that I would check it out.  At face value the game seems like the spiritual successor for Ultima Online.  Functionally playing it, it feels a lot like playing Neverwinter Nights mixed with a MOBA.  You essentially have the standard left click to attack auto abilities and then special abilities aligned to QWER.  Functionally it is a unity based game, so that means it should run well on multiple platforms.  The current client is pretty poorly optimized and on my laptop that has dual Nvidia 660 GTX video cards… I was only seeing around 30 frames per second.  However given time that should change as they optimize the settings.

ShardsPreAlpha 2014-06-08 10-52-36-268 The gameplay is really intuitive and straight forward, and for the most part I felt like I could take a number of mobs in the test shards.  The shards that are available are all significantly smaller than the final size, and designed simply to give a player a feeling for the gameplay.  The real promise to me is that players will be able to have a certain measure of control over their own game worlds.  In the days after I left Everquest, every so often I would dabble in the emulator server community.  I had insane amounts of fun redesigning zones and on one of my forays I completely reworked the way that  the entire butcher-block to crush bone sequence worked evening out the rough spots in the leveling curve and re-itemizing the entire thing.  I worked on bringing the Dark Elf influence to a higher effort with camps of actual Dark Elves scattered around the closer you got to crush bone.

ShardsPreAlpha 2014-06-08 10-51-24-355 So for me the promise of shards is that you can legally run your own server, and configure a community the way you want it.  That said I am not sure if this is a game for me.  I really do not like a click to move environment, and the graphics while charming feel like a throwback to an earlier era.  I simply do not have the nostalgia about Ultima Online that many players do.  I played a very small bit of it before finding Everquest and getting into that game.  So my “good old days” are not Ultima but instead a mixture of EQ, DAoC and Vanilla World of Warcraft.  As a result I feel like I am missing a piece of the charm that is this game.  For someone who pines for a return to the days of Ultima Online… I feel like this is your opportunity to get into a world and help shape it.  For me, it is just a really interesting novelty.

ShardsPreAlpha 2014-06-08 10-54-27-452 Shards is a game where you start out extremely weak and then build up your character over a number of painstaking levels.  As a result my desire to zerg rush camps and play action hero style caused me to see this screen a lot.  Not sure if there was really a death penalty other than having to wait for the release timer to tick down, but I died often enough to realize this is not my style of game in that aspect either.  I think it is going to be interesting and I hope we see a massive surge in funding thanks to the preview weekend.  I think the lackluster funding is mostly a side effect of kickstarter fatigue and the lack of kickstarter MMO projects that have actually released.  In a way however I also feel like Shards is a game for an earlier era, and is not really the type of game to appeal broadly to currently MMO gamers.  If you however want a trip down Ultima Online memory lane… this game is for you, and I hope you give it a try.

Alliance of Awesome

Multigaming Community

allianceofawesome On January 31st a few interesting things happened.  Firstly Sony Online Entertainment released the alpha for Everquest Next Landmark…  now just known as Landmark.  More importantly this set a chain of events into motion.  For some time there has been a group of loosely affiliated guilds and gaming  communities tugging on essentially the same pool of players.  So we might end up getting this mix of players for a specific title and then having a similar mix of players for another title down the road from this huge twitter/g+ gaming community pool.  With Landmark this reached a bit of a head and someone was brave enough to stand up and say it was silly.  In the opening days of Landmark, since there were no guilds (and still arent for that matter) each of these communities opted to start a chat channel.  The problem is this left some people joining as many as six different channels at a time.

Scarybooster proposed a simple idea, that we all agree to use one common chat channel, and with that the Alliance of Awesome was born.  It started simple in scope, but from there Zelibeli and I kinda ran with it and over the last four months we’ve built a rather large loosely connected gaming alliance.  Currently we have five different groups in the AofA community: House Stalwart, Multiplaying.net, Combat Wombat, Mercy Gaming, and Dark Religion.  Lately I have been talks with Liore about maybe having the already awesome Machiavelli’s Cats community join the fold as well.  I have to say so far that over the last four months things have indeed been awesome.  For the most part everyone has seemed to get along swimmingly and I’ve watched this group of disconnected pieces merge into a community in every sense of the word.

A Simple Idea

One of the big problems with being habitual multigamers is the fact that guilds are often transistory and it is hard to constantly muster a new batch of people to play whatever game is coming down the pipe.  Additionally since not every game will end up being ideal for everyone, this means you have massive amounts of fragmentation as folks leave a given game for something new.  The idea was that each individual guild would take responsibility for the reigns of the games that they were most into, and then that way as gamers we would have access to a good and familiar guild regardless of the game we choose to play.  Over the coming months I would like to see this formalized into a sort of Rosetta stone for who has which guilds where and just how active each of them are.

The problem is that since we each have our own guild identities, it felt odd to constantly ask players to register an account on a new forum for each group.  As a result we tried a few different things to have a shared neutral ground between the communities.  The first of these efforts was the Alliance of Awesome reddit… and while it worked well enough, it caused as much frustration as it solved.  Then I stumbled onto Anook and it seemed almost perfectly suited for us.  It offered public and private forums, an events calendar and was more gamer social network than private site allowing folks to link everything up to the games they are streaming into the shared hub… or in the verbiage of that network a “nook”.  This also lets the bloggers in our midst share our posts easily on the nooks blog, and so far that seems to also be working well.

A Unified Approach

Over the last few months we have been melding significantly.  Elder Scrolls Online launch for example was the first real “Alliance of Awesome” foray, and while we still kept to the branding of House Stalwart… it was very much a shared occasion.  With the launch of Wildstar, we had no real forerunner guild wise that looked to be taking up the reigns.  Instead we opted to drop any specific guild branding and simply go with the “Alliance of Awesome” for our guild name.  Honestly I have to say it feels very natural and I can see eventually we may drop the individual guild monikers and just do things from that standpoint.

The biggest problem I forsee moving forward is the fact that right now we are still very much utilizing two completely separate voice servers.  A good chunk of the House Stalwart guild is still very happily playing World of Warcraft and doesn’t really care about any other game on the market.  The rest of us are pretty nomadic, but we still are far more used to and comfortable with mumble as a communication platform.  Multiplaying, Dark Religion, and Mercy Gaming have all standardized on a Teamspeak 3 server run for free by the ever amazing Saia.  So I would really like to make a move to trying to use that as well and simply dropping the mumble.  That said this feels like a landmine because I have no clue how to convince the WoW-only contingency to abandon mumble and make the shift over to Teamspeak 3.  Also I hate to abandon Mumble myself until they have done this, because while I am not playing World of Warcraft on a nightly basis I still hold the guildmaster position and get called on to resolve issues.  I want to make sure I am reachable by folks even when I am not in the same game.

Shared Ethics

The other rough spot is that we need to come up with a shared set of rules and codes of conduct.  For years House Stalwart has followed a simple “three tenets” approach, and relied on guild leader and officer judgment to fill in the gaps.  Zeli tends to favor spelling things out, and considering the large volume of people she has dealt with not completely organically connected… I can totally see why this would be a good thing.  After years of trying to “keep things simple” but then having to deal with explaining nuance… I am starting to favor Zeli’s approach to be honest.  I hate writing rules, and as such that’s why I came up with the somewhat ambiguous three that we use.  I figured that using common sense folks would realize what they meant… problem is not everyone “common” is the same.  The further away from the same core of friends you get, the more confusing the interpretation becomes.

Going forward I think we are going to have to just agree upon a shared set of rules, and I think so far the batch Zeli came up with for the Alliance of Awesome guild seems like a great place to begin.  The biggest thing I hope out of this is that we are a living community.  That we will continue to grow as we adopt other awesome people from twitter, anook, g+, or that we happen to stumble across in game.  Also I hope that we do in fact get the Machiavelli’s Cats community to join the fold, and keep finding other like minded groups to rally to the cause.  I would really like Alliance of Awesome to not only have an ostentatious name, but also have awesome actions to back it up.  I want us to be part of the solution in the games we play, and not part of the problem.  I would love to see us better each of the gaming communities we are in.

Giving Back

File:Child's Play Logo updated.pngOne of the things that Zeli and I have been talking about lately is that we would really like to enter Alliance of Awesome in this years Child’s Play marathon.  Far as I can tell this will take place on October 25th, and the idea is to have 25 hours of live streaming for charity.  I have wanted to participate in this for years, but I thought it would be more interesting if we signed up a whole bunch of streamers from the Alliance of Awesome community and have one shared channel for the purpose of the event.  We have quite a number of people who stream already, and it would be awesome to give each of us like a 4-5 hour block of time to play whatever the hell we want to.

Also lately we have been holding a lot of events in various games.  Right now Wednesday nights are “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and those are pretty much only to anyone in the Alliance of Awesome community.  Additionally we have been holding a Thursday night “League Beginner Night” to let folks ease into the League of Legends game.  So far both events have been a blast and I would love to see them grow beyond the small number of people that we have.  I am sure we will be doing something similar for Wildstar, especially with the focus on grouping in that game.  I can only see the community as a whole getting better.  So here comes the thing I am sure you have all been waiting for.  If you are not already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… head over to the website and join our nook.  We don’t have any real requirements for membership other than wanting to be around a bunch of awesome people, and striving to be the “white hats” in gaming.  If you have a large community, track down myself or Zelibeli and we can see if the entire group would be a good fit for us as well.  Growing up as an only child, I always wanted to be surrounded by friends… and on the internet I try my damnedest to surround myself with as many awesome people as I can.  So far I think things are going pretty well.