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Enter the Warlords

June 13, 2014 by Belghast

Home Warden

As I talked about at the beginning of the week, my wife the teacher has started her whirlwind summer tour of the country and she ping pongs between various mathematics related conferences. As a result I am holding down the fort here at home, and at the same time having to take care of our neighbors pets. In the past there has always been this mad dash the few days before my wife gets home to pick up and house and make sure everything is in proper working order. However this time around I have been doing a much better job of picking things up as they happen. Here is hoping there will be no 11th hour cleaning fest… which admittedly is mostly just picking up trash around the house that I have allowed to stack up when I reverted to full on bachelor mode.

The hardest thing about being home alone has been maintaining my walking regiment. I am letting it split a bit, in that I am not walking a “three loop” around the neighborhood each night, but instead I am simply adding additional steps into my day so I don’t really have to. Admittedly I should be pushing myself harder and doing the loops anyway, but without my walking buddy I have lost a good chunk of the reason why I walked past 10,000 steps in the first place. So for now I am getting to 10,000 and then calling it good… even going so far as to walking loops around the living room one night to get the last couple of hundred steps in. All in all I am pretty proud that I have survived thus far and not really let any balls hit the ground. This weekend however… who knows how well that is going to work since it will be hard to fight the desire to be sedentary.

Enter the Warlords

Several days ago I apparently got into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program. Based on the time that passed between the launch of it and me getting in, I am guessing I was in the second wave of invites overall. With all the excitement of my wife getting ready to go on her trip, I had stopped checking my inbox for such things… and it ended up getting filed away under “promotions”. So I did not actually get in and attempt to play it until the night before last. Since for some time I had settled on Blood Deathknight as my “favorite” wow class, I opted to create one of those. Right now the only content available is the Horde content that centers around a campaign to build your Garrison in Frostfire Ridge. As a result of this I created an Orc Deathknight given that generally this is my favorite Horde Race when I actually play that faction.

Wednesday night was our regularly schedule “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and as such I got over to actually booting up World of Warcraft pretty late in the evening. So I was tired and probably a bit confused… so when they landed me in Frostfire Ridge with a toolbar full of abilities that made no sense… I had a very much “wtf is this shit” moment. I knew going into the Alpha that they had removed Blood Boil and merged it with Pestilence. I did not however know that they also removed Rune Strike and Heart Strike… and even Blood Strike. So I could not for the life of me that night figure out how to set up a Deathknight Rotation. After consulting the Sage Qelric, I managed to reason out a rotation once you filled in the missing bit of the information. They are apparently expecting us to use Pestilence as our Blood Rune consumer now.

Getting Into Things

Once I figured out the rotation and remembered how I normally set up the rest of my bar, things started to fall into place. Its funny how many abilities I didn’t even remember using but where just muscle memory for playing a Deathknight. Each time I used one of these… I had to track it down and put it on my bar in the “correct” place. This would have likely been less jarring if I had essentially not been playing much wow for the last five months. I made another attempt to play last night before our League of Legends night, and found it still pretty lousy feeling. However afterwards I finally started to get back into the swing of things. I still keep wanting to do things that wildstar allows me to do, and I keep trying to sprint… but overall I have managed to get through the first few quests and ding 91.

I have an Inn and a Barracks in my Garrison and my very first follower that I can send away on missions. So far I am digging the way Garrisons are just integrated into the storyline. At first I was concerned that they might be this big mini-game that was entirely skippable. However they have managed to integrate it into the storyline of building a base in this foreign land. I managed to find an ogre merchant that I could bribe to come trade with me at my Garrison. I am wondering if he will eventually show up there and become a merchant that I can buy and sell from. For the time being as far as I know that has not actually happened. I will probably play some more tonight and stream some of it. The Deathknight rotation still seems off somehow… like there is way too much downtime waiting on my runes to recycle. I guess it gives me plenty of time to weave in Soul Reaper and Death Siphon… which I am finding I like considerably more than Death Pact.

Warlords of Draenor

For at least some of tonight I will likely be playing some Warlords of Draenor. Since I am one of the few people in Alpha Currently… I feel like I need to do my job as a tester and… test content. When I say few… that is a bit of a misnomer because it seems like everyone and their brother are in the friends and family alpha. Blizzard has without a doubt the biggest family I have ever seen. If you are also in Warlords Alpha, you should totally throw me a Battletag invite (Belghast#1752). If you do so however please tell me how the hell I know you. It would be nice to have some friendly faces on the alpha server until they hook it up to the “real” battle.net accounts. Going to also start joining an “AofA” server channel if any of the other Alliance of Awesome community members happen to be playing.

#WoW #WorldOfWarcraft #WarlordsofDraenor

Remembering River

June 12, 2014 by Belghast

High Latency Rememberance

I am at a bit of a loss of words on how exactly to start this post. Yesterday was a very sad day for the gaming blogosphere. It was early afternoon when we got the news through a post on his blog, and the sorrow reverberated through the community like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Christopher Cavelle, the man we know better as River the author of the “A High Latency Life” blog passed away due to complications from an emergency surgery. It seemed like we had all just talked to him the other day, and it seemed absolutely impossible that this man was now dead. He had recently gotten into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program for World of Warcraft, and the last discussion I had personally was with him regarding his excitement. So it seems completely impossible that he is now gone.

River was like this elemental force of mischief. He had a way of showing up at exactly the right time and adding exactly the right quip to any conversation that involved him. While often bawdy, he carried with it a genuineness that made everyone love him, even if they were on the opposite side of a discussion from him. The way he crafted his blog was a thing of beauty and something I can only aspire to be able to do. He could take a rant and wrap it in an easy to swallow coating of humor that made you forget why you might be mad about his point of view by the end of the reading. It will always be his sense of humor that I remember the most, because he had this unique often self deprecating style that just worked. Even when he was being aggro, there was this loveable curmudgeon characteristic to it that made you smile.

A Small Tribute

The other characteristic that his blog was most known for was the fact that he almost always included a scantily clad woman to go along with his post. Unfortunately this was also the reason why I generally kept his blog out of my feed reader due to the often “not quite safe for work” nature. My boss has always had a habit of just swinging by my desk the moment I decide to take a break and read some of my RSS feed, and the last thing I needed was a picture of a woman doing questionable things to an ice cream cone sitting there. This however became one of those hallmarks that the community joked about, and yesterday when the news broke Syp suggested that today we all post a “scantily clad woman” in honor of @TheeRiver. So today I am following that suggestion and posting some really awesome Vi cosplay, since she is not only amazingly hot… but a brutal force to be reckoned with.

One of my regrets going forward will be that I never really got to know River on a personal level. He was genuinely one of the nicest people on twitter, and was quite literally one of the first people to ever befriend me. But I feel like I only really knew him on a surface level. There were many times where it felt like we were friends mostly through the other friends we happened to have in common. For me at least, I tend to get extremely close to someone when we share a guild or have struggled through something together, and that just never seemed to work out right. You can measure the weight of a person by the impact they have on their community, and this man left so many people changed in his wake. Recently he had gone through his own change when he decided to take an impromptu poll on the topic of gender and gaming. HIs post “Yes All Women” was his post about having his eyes opened that, yes the problem was really that prolific. I had hoped that we would get to hang out and play together in the Warlords alpha, and finally get to know him more closely, but unfortunately he was taken from us before that happened.

Our Community

There have been so many times that I have tackled with whether or not we actually have a community here in the gaming blogosphere or instead just a series of island states with temporary alliances. I’ve reversed my view significantly since that rather cynical post, but you cannot look at something like this without realizing that we really are a community in every sense of the word. Yesterday Syp once again said something rather cogent, that “Times like this, I wish there was a real world hangout for all us bloggers to get together and hug.” And it is true… I wish I could give all of the people in this community that are hurting from this loss a big damned bear hug. That is one thing that @Ardua and I have in common… we are huggers, and there are times when nothing else will quite do as much as a big heart felt hug. So while I am at still at a loss of words and bewildered by just how sudden this happened… my role in this is to be there for the people who did know River on a more personal level and are broken in side over his loss.

In a way Twitter and the blogosphere is his ephemeral thing… that was just expect to always be there even when we cannot be. The show must always go on, and our absence does not somehow stop the proceedings. As a result I find that we tend to take for granted that every member of this community will always be in exactly the same place as they will always be. I feel like this is an opportunity to reach out and let the people we deeply care about in this community know it. There are so many people that make every single day a better place for me. It has been popular lately in the media to talk about how the internet is pushing society apart. I submit to them that for introverts like myself, the internet opens up a new world full of people we would likely have never met otherwise, and as a result we are enriched by these experiences. There are people in my life that I love dearly, and would do anything in my power to help… and will likely never actually meet face to face. Just because distance and circumstances separate us… it does not make us any less of a community and in many cases a family.

River you will be missed.

Super Grape Stomper

June 11, 2014 by Belghast

Silent Observers

So far the issue of Wildstar Attunements has been a fairly polarizing one in the community as a whole. So when I posted my write-up yesterday about why I didn’t think they were a horrible thing… I expected it also to be polarizing. If you look at my statistics for the day, that single post got more unique viewers than anything else by a large margin. However surprisingly even though it got forwarded quite a bit, I really didn’t end up with much commentary. I expected someone out there to tell me how wrong I am, but that surprisingly didn’t happen. I had a friend send me a private message about it however, thanking me for keeping my post “fair” and not adding to the vitriol.

So is it because I approached the post from a calm place talking about my own experiences with bad attunement systems that folks didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to tell me how horrible I was? I am not so deluded to think that the majority of folks actually agreed with me. One of the things I see sometimes in the blogosphere is when one blogger posts about another, telling them just how wrong they are. I’ve done a few of these during my early days of blogging, but it really is not the type of thing I am interested in any more. There is more than enough negativity out there, that I really don’t need to add my own. I really hope that I can be a positive voice and talk about the good in things more than dwell upon the bad. Ultimately I appreciate every voice, even the ones I don’t agree with.

Super Grape Stomper

One of my favorite things in Wildstar is one that has surprised me. I normally have this odd relationship with mini-games in MMOs, and generally try to avoid them. However when I put the Moonshiners Cabin in my skyplot, I found the “This Aint No Bathtub Hooch” challenge to be insanely fun. Most of the housing challenges can be completed every 30 minutes, and often times I will stomp grapes to make moonshine four for five times a night. In part it is the rewards, or at least my attempt to collect all of them. The high end reward is the purple quality bed I wrote about the other day, which is cool but I already have one. The common rewards are either a neon beer sign or 150 reknown, and the rewards I am currently going after is the dye chest. It contains within it one of five random dyes, and I believe I only have three of the five currently. As a result I complete this quest over and over trying to get the last ones.

As a side effect I have a truly silly number of beer signs, and I am basically covering the side of my ship in them. I am not sure if they are tradeable, but if you need beer signs… I am your man. The funny thing about it is there is zero market for them, because the Moonshiners Cabin is pretty much constructable by anyone who chooses to plunk down the gold it takes to build it. The question is… will I still care about it once I have collected all of the dyes available. It is a fairly easy and fun way to farm reknown, but I am just not sure if it is worth paying the weekly upkeep. That is the dirty secret that no one really talks about in the housing system. These cool things we can place, have to be repaired weekly to keep functioning. So far all of the ones I have placed have had a 1 gold repair cost, which at this point is still a fairly significant amount of money. So I have a feeling many of my things… including the crystal jumping puzzle will go away at the end of this week. My mission however is to find the upgrade to my mining plot, because that is one of those things I have found massively useful.

Return to Cyrodil

As much as I have loved my time spent in Wildstar, I do feel bad that I have been horribly neglecting Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar is the new shiny, and as a result is getting my attention as I have a strong desire to level and get all the shiny baubles that come with it. However this really doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of Elder Scrolls Online, because the games literally could not be any more different. Things is I enjoy both immensely and hope to continue playing them both for some time. As a result I am really looking forward to tonight. For some time we have had these semi-regular “Faff about in Cyrodil” nights, and after taking last week off I am ready to get back into the swing of things. The event should give me the focus to sit down and really enjoy Elder Scrolls for an evening. I am not sure exactly what we will do yet, but I had a ton of fun at that Nord town we stumbled across with the Dark Anchor, so if nothing else I would love to head back out there.

Playing Wildstar and Elder Scrolls at the same time is an odd contrast. The one failing of ESO, is that it is extremely hard to group with other players. I really hope this is something they address in future updates because the game is in desperate need of better social systems to allow players to do content other than Cyrodil together. Ultimately we do it… only because that is what we CAN do as a large group. Without a mentoring system, we are pretty much limited to PVP content because it allows multiple levels to blend together and get bolstered up to level 50. I am mostly a soloist when it comes to questing, but the various folks who have tried to quest as a pair have found it extremely difficult to stay in sync while leveling. It has mostly worked for the folks that are always on at the same time, but for those who are not… if the partner gets even the slightest bit ahead it becomes extremely difficult for the other player to catch up.

After seeing how cleanly a game can manage disparate levels grouping together, my hope is that Elder Scrolls adds in some functionality for this. The game is awesome, but other than PVP it is a largely single player experience. That said the game does have some of the most enjoyable dungeons I have experienced, but I wish they had taken a queue from Final Fantasy XIV and simply scaled players down to the dungeons level. After seeing this work in Wildstar I am shifting to the opinion that this is the way all dungeons should work. A dungeon should have a fixed level and it scales the player to that level for the purpose of the content. Sure give the players rewards for their own level… but scaling down blows away some of the problem with “out leveling” content, and makes it easier to help guildies out when the content has “grayed out” for you.

Elder Scrolls Online

As stated above I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online and if you are Daggerfall Covenant I invite you to join in the fun regardless if you are in the guild or not. The plan is we will meet up at Northern High Rock Gate in Cyrodil around 8:30 CST. The guild is aligned to Wabbajack, and if we can manage to get people through the queue, it would be awesome to actually do this event on that campaign. The fallback to this point has been Volendrung, and I hope to be online early to try and assess the feasibility of Wabbajack for the evening. From there we will pick an objective for the night and wander off into the Cyrodil countryside in search of mayhem. If you are not a member of the guild, just add @Belghast and we can get you into the fray.

#Wildstar #ElderScrollsOnline

Wildstar Attunements

June 10, 2014 by Belghast

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

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