Good Morning Folks. I had a really fun night with Ammo, Ash, Sita, and Sol running fractals and actually attempting to finish our tier 1 progression. The problem with that however is that I took exactly zero screenshots while we were doing things, so instead you get this generic placeholder that I took this morning while finishing off yesterday’s dailies. Our Thursday night shenanigans have been something that I very much look forward to each week. Occasionally they also extend out into Friday night nonsense, but not every single week. I got to test out my new headset which worked pretty well, save for the fact that it blocks out a lot of external sound… making my voice sound odd in my own head while I am talking. I went with a Corsair wireless headset, and the only reason why I had never used something like this previously… is I always tried to keep my headphones pretty open ear in case my wife needed to talk to me about something. If nothing else it beats the heck out of the lid mic on my laptop when I am downstairs.
Since I never shared a photo of me actually USING Eternity, here is that thing. I actually used it quite a bit last night because we tried the new Kinfall Fractal and the final boss is a bit of a damage sponge. I had to rapidly flip between my two weapons so that I could do sufficient breakbar damage to keep us alive. We got better after our first attempt, because we went into the fight completely blind. Mostly it is a melee fight because everyone has to stay stacked up in range of these two bubbles that protect you from environmental damage. Greatsword has two breakbar abilities, and Longbow one… and I needed all of them in order to burn through that bar as quickly as possible, especially in that final invulnerability phase. It was fun… but probably had about 50% more hitpoints than it needed for a Tier 1 Fractal. It wasn’t so much that the fight was complicated… it just got busy over time.
I’ve knocked out all of the weeklies already, but one of the aspects I love of them is there is always one that requires you to kill 100 enemies of a specific type. This often causes me to rack my brain trying to figure out where I could do this most efficiently, and this time around one of the types was Inquest. This immediately made me think of the Living World Season 4 zone Sandswept Isles, which is the last time we had any major involvement with fighting against the Inquest. There is an entire area of the zone that is pretty much nothing but Inquest mobs. While I was out there an event was firing up to defeat a boss named Zohaqan which is something that I had never participated in. The weeklies specifically often put me in these situations where I am getting exposure to content that I have never actually taken the time to do. When I was clearing Living World Season 4, I was burning through the content so that I could move on to Icebrood Saga. This is the thing about playing catch up in a game like this, is that you really do not spend as much time experiencing the content as you would when it is fresh and new. The Wizards Vault is this excellent way of forcing you to go back and focus on things like this.
The bite sized nature of the game makes me way more willing to just lean into content that is happening in whatever zone I happen to be in. That really is the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 so good. You start out with one goal in mind, but then are set down a path of doing a bunch of other interesting things… because you just so happen to be there at the right time for them to be firing off. Events fire off at a consistent enough schedule that you CAN seek out specific events, but you can also just pop into a zone and ride along with the current doing whatever the heck happens to be going on at that moment. I often operate in both modes while playing these games, and I am happy that this one supports a gameplay style where I don’t have to have a fixed purpose… but can still find purposeful things to do.
Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I will probably be diving into another book and playing some more Path of Exile since I am less than three pips away from level 100.
Good Morning folks. Yesterday was the beginning of the WvW Rush event in Guild Wars 2, but first I feel like you all need to stop an appreciate how amazing this Skeletor themed Charr is that I saw last night. I admit I was mostly not feeling like playing Guild Wars 2 yesterday, but I decided to pop in for a few minutes and see how much progress I could make in WvW after knocking out my dailies. I have been trying to farm down my dailies every single day and at least make some modicum of progress towards the weeklies so that I am not stuck doing all of them on Saturday and Sunday. Last night was a comedy of errors because I forgot to turn off my monitors upstairs before going downstairs to play from my laptop… which meant that I was playing at 1440p on a 1080p screen… so all of the text was super tiny. This also meant that when I got into World vs World I could not read a single thing that the commander was saying. Thankfully you can mostly just follow the tag and everything will be just fine.
I played for less than an hour and just happened to time it perfectly as the squad was making a push for Stonemist Castle. For anyone who does not understand how WvW works in Guild Wars 2… there are essentially 3 zones that surround a central zone called the Eternal Battleground. The three zones belong to each of the three factions and the Eternal Battleground is at least in theory this important objective that all three are fighting for. At the center of this zone is Stonemist Castle, and it is effectively the thing you capture for bragging rights and try and hold it for as long as possible. There was a 30 player queue for the Eternal Battegrounds, and I was able to knock out all of my daily quests while waiting to get in. I was not sure how the WvW Rush event worked… but when we captured Stonemist I was flooded with loot boxes and effectively had my Gift of Battle track completed two and a half times. Everything that is highlighted in my inventory came from that single capture event.
It also instantly completed the WvW Rush Champion achievement that also comes with its own reward track. Basically what I am saying is… if you need anything from World vs World, now is the time to farm it. You are going to need a Gift of Battle for every single Legendary you might want to craft, so in theory this is a good time to bank these up as they stack in your inventory. Awhile back I had purchased the starter kit for Sunrise, and pretty much only needed another Gift of Battle in order to craft it as I had a Gift of Exploration banked from the last time I did a world completion. I guess that also now means that I need to choose another character as tribute and start working on another world completion so I am ready for the next time I want to craft a legendary. This is the thing that I enjoy about Guild Wars 2 is that it gives me these broad overarching things to be working towards. So much of the endgame centers around legendary items that there is always something I can be doing to work towards my next one.
So essentially I jumped through a bunch of hoops this morning before sitting down to write this blog post. I did not have both gifts for the Gift of Fortune, but I did have one of the tokens that comes from the starter kit that allows me to choose one. So I popped open my handy GW2 Efficiency to see which one was cheaper for me to craft at that moment, and crafted a Gift of Might. This allowed me to consume the token for a Gift of Magic, but that left me short on Mystic Clovers meaning I had to use the crappy recipe to try and craft the last seven that I needed. I had already bought the weekly clovers that I could as well as the ones from the wizards vault. It cost quite the chunk of gold but I was able to complete Sunrise without much issue this morning adding sixth legendary to my armory.
Then because I had crafted Twilight already… the entire reason why I picked up the Sunrise starter kit was to be able to make Eternity. Essentially when you craft either of the great swords you get a memory that you can use in lieu of the weapon to craft Eternity, a sword that combines the visual effects of both weapons based on the day/night cycle. I could have sold the finished Eternity for roughly 3300 gold on the trading post… but alas cosmetics are the true end game and I wanted it for myself. Thankfully once you have gone this far down the rabbit hole… finishing the craft is pretty damned easy because it requires the Memory of Sunrise, Memory of Twilight, 5 piles of Crystalline Dust, and 10 Philosopher’s Stones. Now I own the fanciest of fancy greatswords… and as soon as I stop being lazy and swap all of the crap over from Twilight I will be wielding this on all of my characters that care about such things.
I am not sure how much I am going to be doing the WvW Rush event, but honestly I would like to grind my rank up as high as I can because that also seems to be greatly increased. I got eight ranks from that one Stonemist Castle capture in addition to all of the other rewards I got. At some point I would really like to make Warbringer the legendary WVW backpack but it requires Rank 350 to buy some of the components. I get that there are other options available that are probably easier… but I like the look of Warbringer.
Good Morning Folks. One of the hardest parts about the situation I am in… is watching the cats trying to deal with it in their own way. Gracie has been struggling and her way of dealing with it, has been being attached to me pretty much 24/7. This is not a bad thing and quite honestly, having this adorable fuzzbutt at my side has helped me a lot as well. However she always interacted with me and my wife in different ways… and now I am having to be both momma and daddy. Like she used to get up in my wife’s face constantly and want to headbutt her… and she is starting to do that with me. She has also started recently standing in empty rooms and meowing a lot… because I think on some level she thinks maybe she can summon her back out of the woodwork. Either that or she has momentarily lost sight of me, and is afraid I will go away too. I always holler down to her and then she comes and finds me… but its been really hard to see the toll that it is having specifically on Gracie.
I finally started Cold Iron Task by James J. Butcher after sitting on this book for what feels like forever. The last book that I read before this was Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle… and that was back in March. I am not sure what exactly happened. I think maybe that book took a lot out of me and I needed a break… and then that break turned into month after month with me never quite getting around to starting something new. It has been good to crawl back inside of a book, because it helps pry me out of my own head and dealing with my own issues. I’m a little over halfway through at this point and this third book in the Unorthodox Chronicles series is considerably better than the first two. Not that the first two were bad, but they spent a lot of time setting up the character of Grimsby and now he has arrived as a fully fledged character with his own cast of supporting characters. So much so that I think you could probably just skip the first two books without a ton of issue, because when something is brought up from a previous book they still keep explaining what it means.
Over in Path of Exile I am still chipping away at challenges and am roughly seven pips away from level 100. Until I ding I am largely playing it safe and also carrying with me an Omen of Amelioration to diminish the impact of random deaths. My current play pattern is that I run maps until I am full on Sulphite and then dive back into Delve to spend that down, and when I gather up eight or so of the quest heists I chain through those to clear out my inventory. I’ve run around 100-150 copies of Primordial Blocks and still have not found my hideout. I am currently on an off cycle building up more blocks maps and running Defiled Cathedral in the hopes of getting a Nameless Seer so I can shift the divination card pool from Cathedral over to Blocks. I have found tons of these… but never on a map that I actually wanted to swipe the div card pool from. I’ve also not really gotten any big ticket uniques from the Seer so I keep hoping that one of them will give me something really tasty.
Over in Guild Wars 2 I am back to doing our Thursday night shenanigans which also turned into a Friday night this past week. I have a whole new batch of weeklies to start chewing through as yesterday was the reset. I will probably spend some time tonight doing that. This is really the only MMORPG I can seem to get into these days, because everything else requires too much focus. So much of Guild Wars 2 has been pushed to muscle memory, so that I can just sort of turn my brain off and run content without thinking too much about it. That is a lot of the reason why I play so many ARPGs is it allows me to just sink into the keyboard and exist while dealing with my own stuff in my head. We have the WvW event starting today, so I might spend some time doing that so that I can grind out a few more Gifts of Battle and keep pushing my ranks up.
Because I am a glutton for punishment… I also rolled a brand new character in Guild Wars 1. I am going to do prophecies because quite honestly… that is the one that I want to see the story for the most. It is also probably the worst of the campaigns so I will need strength of mind to get through it. I went Ranger and I am probably going to go Elementalist just for the elemental weapon buffs, given that I do not want to go daggers… which pretty much negates the popular combo with Assassin. I did not make it terribly far, but I am trying to complete as much stuff as I can pre-sundering because the world feels so much shittier once everything is monochromatic. I’ve always tried to do Warrior combos, and honestly… I think this game might just feel better as ranged.
I am doing okay. I made a post effectively saying as much on Facebook with the hopes of reassuring people who are worried about me… but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Clearly people are not prepared for me to be raw and honest about life. That makes sense. Most people just want you to say “fine” when they ask how you are doing, because it lets them know that they checked in on you… but in truth they probably didn’t actually want a real answer because now it forces them to deal with you not being okay. In truth I am doing far better than I thought I would be.
Good Morning Folks. This weekend on the AggroChat podcast, Tam brought up a topic that sort of went in a bunch of different directions. The idea basically was a discussion around how he as a game designer, could build a communications system in an MMORPG that encouraged players to interact with each other. We know that forced voice chat does not work, and in the games that have open voice chat… the first thing I do is disable that option. We also know that pushing players of wildly different skill levels into the same content only leads to toxicity. We also know that across the board… MMORPGs are struggling. While Steam only represents a tiny slice of the FFXIV player base… it has seen a 78% drop in players since its all time peak in June of 2024. While again not representative of the totality of the player base… Steam does tend to allow for viewing trends and if it is happening there… it is usually also happening in the larger pool of stand alone client players.
I think one of the challenges of MMORPGs is that they are effectively being driven off a cliff by the most hardcore and as a result vocal player base. Here is a hard truth that we need to understand. If you use gaming forums, reddit, discord, or post about video games on social media… you are already among the most hardcore players in a given fandom. If you are regularly engaging in raid or other challenge content… you are further filtering your bias down to the needle point of the most serious of players, and they cannot survive with only your support. The challenge for developers is that as a whole, the feedback they have been getting is that the content needs to be harder in order to cater to the most dedicated players. However doing so… continues to push things out of bounds for the most casual players to a point where they feel like they can no longer justify that $15 per month in order to log in and do some busy work each day. When you lose casual players… you lose staff and money to make significant improvements to the game.
I think in part, Classic World of Warcraft has been so popular because it hearkens back to an earlier game design ethos. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are masterpieces of zone design, and in both case… the fights were not actually that challenging. You needed 20%-30% of the raid that had a clue what was going on… and the rest could more or less be populated with warm bodies that were pushing buttons, and also getting to experience content they might not be able to otherwise. I started out as one of those warm bodies, and then eventually over the course of years of raiding developed the skills necessary to lead and function at a high enough level of get recruited into more hardcore groups. The thing is though… the golden age for me were those first raids. We had fun. It was a party atmosphere with comms filled with bad jokes and even worse stories… as we all fail-boated our way through the content to eventually get shiny loot. When these games got super serious focus time… they just stopped being all that enjoyable.
If a game exists in this mode, where it is being driven by the most dedicated players… eventually it starts to shrink in size and with it comes downsizing of the studios. You can look back at all of the games that I used to play fairly seriously… and eventually dipped out of because of cost cutting and lower frequency of content. I played the heck out of Destiny 1 and 2, and got frustrated when they started vaulting content… in part because they did not have the resources to keep updating it. I played the heck out of Rift but eventually bailed because it could not consistently keep a player base interested in the game in order to do much of anything. Wildstar was amazing… but its raid content was way the hell too complicated for most players and the casual content while great… just did not have enough meat on its bones to keep people engaged. Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV were driven by decade long story arcs… and both began to flounder a bit when they lacked the story chops to keep people coming back for more.
In truth… I shifted my focus away from MMORPGs and began devoting the majority of my time to ARPGs where I could group up with friends if I wanted to… but the majority of my time was spent soloing. Other games have similarly become way more solo focused, like Elder Scrolls Online which churns through regularly story content updates… all of which can be completed in their entirety without the help of other players. We’ve lost this whole era where doing group content was a heck of a lot of fun, and I believe it is in large part because the players driving the narrative are the players craving challenge in their games. This also coincides with the birth of Streamer culture, and the focus on showing off how good you are at games in a public manner. If you are not doing something on the hardest of hardcore difficulty modes… then you are wasting your time… or at least that has become the prevailing public sentiment. However none of this takes into account the fun factor. Players who get their satisfaction by doing the sweatiest content ever… are a minority in the total player pie.
What you don’t hear publicly talked about is the number of players who bounce because they realize that none of the content is actually designed for them. The majority of folks don’t storm out the front door raging about how bad the game is. Instead they simply slip out a side door, cancel their subscription, uninstall the game… and then gravitate towards games that are giving them a better experience for their limited game time. There is a reason why Gacha games have seen this massive rise in popularity over the years, because they really hone in on the feeling of giving the players power… without actually increasing the difficulty terribly much. It is very easy to busily chase a bunch of objectives and feel like you are doing important things… regardless of whether or not the game is largely playing itself. They feel just connected enough so that you know you have friends who are also playing… but unfortunately there is no real meaningful multiplayer experiences.
I feel like for the most part Guild Wars 2 has done a pretty good job of catering content correctly, however there are still numerous cases where they drank the hardcore Kool-Aid and it shows. With the most recently expansion Janthir Wilds, they introduced a zone meta that is quite honestly… not capable of being completed without a large number of ringers in zone participating. As a result it is pretty rare that you actually find a group doing it, and succeeding at it. Similarly Dragon’s End to this day still fails more often than not. Contrast this with old classics like Tequatl, Octovine, or Chak Gerent that pretty much succeed damned near 100% of the time… and have full zones of players showing up every time they are run. The events that are being completed are just better designed, and it does not matter how much the “hardcores” turn their nose up at them… the participation proves it. People will come out of the woodwork for something that is chill, fun, and rewarding… and honestly does not ask that much of them.
Ultimately my theory is that MMORPGs have been struggling and shrinking… because they have been listening to the wrong voices. They lost sight of the inclusive content design that made their best zones great… and have leaned into chasing and ever shrinking piece of the player-base. World of Warcraft was a game changer. The number of people that I knew that had never really played another game seriously before that… was pretty freaking massive. However as the content kept getting more and more finely focused… the folks who did it for fun and did not have the time to devote to all of the prep work… quietly faded away. Essentially there are two paths to take… either you make it so that class design exists in a way that the difference between the most hardcore player and the most brain dead casual is about 10% efficiency… or you make the content designed in a way that you only need about 20% of the player base to be really paying attention to complete it. The best content tends to follow that second path. I am not saying do not put the double mythic extra plus hardcore content into your game… but make it for bragging rights only, and in no way connected to the flow of necessarily content.
Granted take everything I just said with a grain of salt. The fact that I have a gaming blog… already puts me on the narrow end of the “cares about games” spectrum. However I am very much a burnt out ex-raider who used to take this shit super seriously… until I realized that I would just be happier if I did not give a fuck about passing arbitrary skill checks in the games that I am playing. I mostly play ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch, where I only have to care about myself and my actions in order to complete them, and that reset on a regular enough basis that I can ignore a season/league if my devotion is elsewhere. That said… the whole conversation this weekend… did make me miss those glory days of raiding and a lot of the nonsense that used to happen on voice chat. To some extent I am getting some of this back with my small group shenanigans in Guild Wars 2, and I hope maybe we gather enough mass to be able to do some strikes at some point. I miss us progressing through Binding Coil in FFXIV and quite honestly… that was the last time when raiding with a large-ish group of people was super enjoyable for me. I had a blast learning the Arcadion with the release of Dawntrail, but that was pretty short lived.
Mostly I think we would be better of if games were designed to allow more casual players… to ride all the rides. I think the bar for entry for a lot of content has just gotten too high in order to keep the masses engaged anymore. That is the problem with the MMORPG design model… you need everyone bought in for them to succeed. We’ve spent the last decade filtering out who can reasonably play them… and they are going to keep shrinking unless that line of thinking changes. I say this as someone who has only one foot left in the genre… and could probably happily cancel the few subscriptions I have remaining without seriously impacting my enjoyment. If I am almost out the door… someone who is already well into the more serious end of the community… you’ve got problems.
