Grand Experiment Archives - Page 19 of 200

Merry Sith-ness

May 30, 2015 by Belghast

Last Man on Hulu

Last night I had one of those nights where I was just restless without good reason for being so. Every activity I considered doing simultaneously sounded awesome and horrible at the same time. So while I finished my push to 21 in each of my Final Fantasy XIV crafting professions, I didn’t really accomplished much of use the rest of the evening. I spent a good chunk of my crafting time test driving Hulu and watching the tv show Last Man on Earth. My assessment of both is rather mixed. Firstly having never experienced Hulu my very first impression was precisely “what the fuck is with all these advertisements”. I finally found a blurb on the Hulu website explaining why they have ads which comes down to a bullshit answer of needing to reduce the cost of the subscription. How about this, how about you charge an “extra-premium” tier subscription that turns off all of that crap and just lets me watch the shows.

Right now my likelihood of actually staying subscribed to Hulu past the free trial is pretty non-existent for this reason. To make matters worse it is like watching Cable “On Demand” where they play essentially the same four commercials over and over. At this point I seriously want to burn down the honey bunches of oats factory that is shown on the Post cereal commercial that they kept playing over and over and over. After having that drilled into my brain all night long while watching an already sub par television show has made me want to vehemently avoid anything products by Post while roaming around the super market. I feel like that is counter intuitive to their original mission with the advertisement in the first place. As far as Last Man on Earth… the first episode was humorous, but then once Kristin Schaal showed up it progressively went down hill. Which is sad because normally speaking I adore Kristin Schaal, I still find this skit one of the most hilarious things on the planet. The problem with both Netflix and Hulu is the shows just keep playing without manual intervention… so I think I ultimately watched one too many episodes before finally deciding I had enough of it and stopped it.

Merry Sith-ness

Around 10 pm last night I opted to try and go to sleep, thinking maybe my malaise was simply caused by being tired. The problem being the moment my head hit the pillow it is like a flip got switched in my brain and I was instantly in “super awake” mode. I tossed and turned trying to figure out a way to get comfortable, and chatted with my wife until she fell asleep. After an hour of struggling to find sleep I opted to simply get up. Thinking that if I could go do something my brain would eventually shut the hell up and let me go to sleep. I’ve suffered from bouts of insomnia my entire life, and sometimes the worst thing I can do is try and force myself to sleep. Otherwise I will have sat there in bed for three hours and ultimately just end up frustrated that I didn’t get up and do something with that time. I am not entirely certain why I ended up launching Star Wars the Old Republic other than I have really not played much of it, and they have an insane xp bonus event going on.

I would really like to play the continuation of the main storyline on my Jedi Guardian, but the hard truth there is that I have been gone from the game so long that I quite literally have no clue where to start on it. Instead I opted to log into my Sith Juggernaut that is knee deep in Balmorra hell. In theory I could do just the class quests and be off the planet, but I feel a deep need to finish all of the things especially since this is the highest Sith character I have mustered to date. I am not sure if it was surprising or not but I actually enjoyed myself, but the unfortunately thing is that I managed to stay up until 2 am before sleep finally claimed me. This is going to make for a long evening with our podcast since I was back up again at 8 am. Hopefully I will be able to sneak a nap in today, but I have a feeling that since it will be nice outside my wife will want to get out of the house. We have been suffering through absolutely insane torrential rain. I heard an estimate that over the last week we have gotten as much rain as we normally get in an entire year.

Beautifying AggroChat

One of my failings is that I have done a pretty piss poor job of advertising the fact that AggroChat.com exists and is populated full of good stuff to read. Ultimately if you are reading Tales of the Aggronaut you are going to be extremely familiar with some of the content, but not all of it. Essentially AggroChat.com was a vehicle that I came up with as a way to pull together all of the content created by the hosts of the AggroChat Podcast. Additionally this site serves as a way to connect to each of the authors and a better vehicle for receiving both the AggroChat and Bel Folks Stuff episodes. We have had some grand plans to eventually expand this site to include people who do not already have blogs of their own. For the time being however it gives you a one stop shop for the following content…

The takeaway is that through this one site you end up with a ton of content delivered on a regular basis. I personally blog every single day, and Tam blogs five times a week at least. I keep hoping to add more news commentary content and game reviews but we have not quite gotten there yet. I plan on in the near future creating a special section of the AggroChat Game Club games where you can pull in some quick commentary from each of the folks that played it, as well as a link to the show where we discuss it. Essentially we are going to keep expanding it, so I should do a far better job of promoting it. So check the site out, and I would be open to any comments and suggestions. I’ve tried to set the site up in a way that allows you to drill down into specific content by one of our Authors quickly and efficiently. As of last week I even went back through every episode of AggroChat and indexed which hosts are on which shows so that they show up in our Author category links. While there is already a lot of great content here, watch the site because I am hoping it gets ever cooler.

Waiting for Headstart

May 28, 2015 by Belghast

Death or Double Space

This morning I am struggling to find purpose when it comes to sitting down and writing a blog post. I know as I struggle through this something will magically happen and words will appear on the page. For the Newbie Blogger Initiative folks out there, this sort of thing happens often. Last night for example I didn’t do much of anything that would inspire a story. I guess in truth that isn’t entirely true since I did record a Bel Folks Stuff podcast with Jaedia, but that is still being edited and hopefully will be released on Friday. After we finished that however I attempted to hang out on the sofa and craft, but before long found myself nodding off at the keyboard. I actually chose to do the responsible adult thing and head on to bed around 9 pm. As I said nothing terribly exciting to talk about.

I will say one of the more humorous things that came out in the twenty minutes or so before we actually started recording was that I am old. Jaedia was talking about editing my posts and that I double space after every line. This is an artifact of my age and something that is so deeply ingrained in me that I cannot stop doing it. Our editor over on MMO Games apparently thinks it is “adorable” that I double space, so I have transcended that line of being cute for my outdated ways. Ultimately I could write a search and replace to remove them… which would be simple enough but for whatever reason I find posts that double space after the end of each sentence easier to read. Throughout my entire educational career this was the “correct” way to do anything, and I have the style manuals to back me up on this one. The whole single space thing has come into vogue in the meantime. I feel like the “oxford comma” folks on this one that I am willing to die on this hill as I continue to double space.

Waiting for Headstart

For awhile now I knew that I would essentially be done with World of Warcraft on or around June 19th when the Heavensward head start happens. Admittedly I took a similar break from Final Fantasy XIV around the launch of Warlords of Draenor, or at the very least dialed back my Final Fantasy time to only a few times a week. So this is one of those things that I always knew would happen, but I realized yesterday that I should probably tell my raid leader that he essentially only has me for two weeks. I guess he knew it was coming and was extremely cool about it, but I still felt the need to actually put it in words. I was not however able to tell some of my other friends yesterday so my hope is to do that tonight when we work on Blackhand. I would love to be able to defeat Blackhand before I go. This would give me some nice closure for this phase of the expansion.

I think ultimately everyone involved with the guild knows that sooner or later I will run away again. I don’t exactly have a history of much longevity with World of Warcraft since the Cataclysm expansion. I will show up for a brief period of time, get bored and wander off again… only to be drawn back later due to some inexplicable urge to play. Right now I have just reached that place where there is nothing that I care to do in World of Warcraft. I’ve been there so many times, and it is not actually a lack of things to do. There are TONS of things that I could be doing, farming pets, farming mounts, clearing old world content, or working on achievements. The problem being that none of these things are actually driving me to log in. There are times I think this funk is essentially the side effect of me raiding multiple nights a week, and has very little to do with Warcraft itself. I think I reach a point where I simply need a break, so I wander off for a bit and do other things only to return later in a much more casual fashion.

Not Quite Done

Right now my plan is to dial back my World of Warcraft raiding time to zero as I work on leveling in Heavensward. I am still torn as to whether I will end up playing a Warrior or a Dark Knight. I am pretty damned attached to Warrior as far as classes go, but the whole leap+aoe opener thing that Dark Knights are supposedly going to have makes me super excited. I loved that aspect of the Jedi Guardian in Star Wars the Old Republic. Ultimately I will likely have both to 60 and geared up, but there is going to be some serious nostalgia drawing me back to Warrior. I have loved everything about the way that job feels, and I have to say my Malignant Mogaxe is reason enough to play one. I am honestly just pumped to wander around the new zones. Last week during the Live Letter watching Yoshi P play in the zones reminded me so much of the way Kunark felt. Granted it is much higher fidelity than the original Kunark, but I am talking more about the scale of the zones. Everything feels big and expansive and I am hoping that because of this the hard edges and zone walls will be more disguised.

In the past when I have withdrawn from World of Warcraft I have made a big deal about it. I have almost always done one of those “quitting” posts, but this time around I don’t feel the need to do that. In fact I have no plans on actually cancelling my account. I still plan on piddling around in the game, just on a much more casual level. Hell for all I know after my month or so long sabbatical I might be right back raiding the 6.2 content like normal. I do admit that I am super interested in the Hellfire Citadel raid that is just about to come out. I liked all the “fel” stuff from Burning Crusade, so if Tanaan Jungle is going to be an entire zone of that I might really enjoy it. I am just going to allow myself time to back away from the game as a whole so I can experience Heavensward to its fullest without the sense of bitterness towards Warcraft for pulling me away two nights a week. I really think this is for the best because if I force myself to raid WHILE playing Heavensward that is the surest way to get me to actually quit the raid entirely.

NBI Talkback Four – Deadly Gamer Sins

May 27, 2015 by Belghast

As part of my continued attempt to complete the writing prompts as part of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, this morning I am tackling Talkback Challenge Four. This one is a bit different than most because it is actually a series of questions about the “Seven Deadly Gaming Sins”. This concept is courtesy of Joseph Skyrim who has outlined the series of questions as a way of getting to know our gaming habits better. I have not done terribly many questionnaire type posts so this might be a little interesting.

Lust – Do you enjoy games more if they have scantily clad and “interestingly proportioned” avatars? Do you like playing as one of these avatars? Why or why not?

Nope! I am being honestly with this one because quite honestly there is this awkward uncanny valley thing going on when it comes to nudity in games. It always feels extremely cringe worthy in part because developers have yet to figure out a way to do mature content without it either being soft core pornography or incapable of also showing human emotion at the same time. As far as playing Avatars, that isn’t my shtick either. Pretty much all of the characters I willfully play are like the ultimate version of myself, or more so how I wish I might be. As a result I am always going to go with the heavily armored character, with badass armor plates everywhere. While the subligar in Final Fantasy XIV is humorous, I am not the type of person to walk around in one.

Gluttony – Do you have a game backlog of unfinished games but still buy new games regardless? Why or why not?

I have a truly massive backlog of games that are unfinished, and I am mostly okay with this. When I buy a game I don’t necessarily view it as “just” buying a game. I also view it as me supporting the development of that game with my dollars. Maybe that is a strange concept, but there are a lot of games that I am happy that exist whether or not I ever get around to playing them. Additionally I am a sucker for a good sale, and sometimes I pick games up in the hopes that I will actually get around to playing them because they were pennies on the dollar of the original price. When I pay full price for a game I always play it, pretty much immediately. The bargain basement games however, sit in the stack waiting for me to find the time and the drive to dig into them. I really need to resurrect the Steampowered Sunday concept again and start digging through my backlog.

Greed – Do you enjoy hand outs in a game? Have you ever opted to NOT do an action / in game activity because the rewards were lacking? Why or why not?

Oh absolutely on this one, as far as opting out of not doing something because there was no reward in it. I am most guilty of this in World of Warcraft, because when I reach a point where I can no longer receive upgrades on a given character… I lose all desire to keep doing the content. This is more than just a loot issue however because there are games where the content itself is the reward. Some games are only valuable to me so long as there is a carrot being dangled in front of me. For example I generally love running dungeons, but the hassle of running heroics in World of Warcraft is not worth the non-existant rewards that can be gained from doing it. On the other hand in Final Fantasy XIV I am almost always down for running a dungeon (except Aurum Vale because fuck Aurum Vale) and there is quite literally nothing of use that I can get from most of them. The experience is worth my time even when the rewards are not.

Sloth – Do you ever leech or AFK in a party? Do you discourage others from attempting things that you feel are difficult? Have you ever seen someone that needed help, but decided not to help them? Why or why not?

I’ve never leeched experience or AFK’d in a party other than you know… to go do something important in the real world for a brief period of time. There are times though that I do get pessimistic when I don’t feel like we can defeat a given content. I tend to play MMOs and there is a hard fact that sometimes there are simply gear checks that a group is not ready for. So while I see myself as being a pragmatic voice of reason… there are some who could see me as discouraging the group. As far as seeing someone in need of help… if someone is struggling with content I will almost always try and lend a hand in a game setting. I am one of those people who runs over and helps attack random monsters, because it is in my nature to do so. As far as dungeons and raids and such, it all depends on what my overarching mission for the night is or how much time I might have.

Wrath – Ever get angry at other players and yell (or TYPE IN CAPS) at them? Have you ever been so angry to stalk a person around in game and / or in the forums? Why or why not?

The me that existed around Lich King absolutely did this thing. In fact I have a lengthy post about the “Bunny Incident” if someone is interested in reading about it. The current me… I try really hard to be overwhelmingly positive. Mostly I went through a bad spot mentally for awhile… and then I took the advice of “fake it until you make it” and quite literally it did help. Over time I became a much happier person and additionally more balanced. There are some people though that seem to hate me and I do find myself obsessing about them a bit. Trying to figure out exactly what I might have done to them to make them so upset with me. I have this overwhelming need to be liked that no matter what I try I cannot quite shake. I am working on it, but it is like the polar opposite of Wrath.

Envy – Ever felt jealous of players who seem to be able to complete content you can’t? Do you ever suspect they are hacking or otherwise cheating? Why or why not?

For the most part no on this one. I don’t really see myself as some pinnacle of gaming skill. I am just a guy that enjoys piddling around in video games. I am not a terribly competitive person, and as such when I get bested in skill I just move on knowing that the player was better than me. I do take pride in things like tanking, but I think that is slightly different. As far as Envy goes… I don’t ever get jealous of content that people are able to complete. There are times I do get frustrated when players are at a level that I know they did not earn themselves, but are bragging about it. Anyone that worked their way up through the content on their own merit and through the blood sweat and tears that comes from weeks of wiping… those folks earned every last drop and I would never be jealous of anyone who put in the effort I did not.

Pride – Are you one of those people that demands grouping with other “elite” players? Do you kick players out of your team who you feel are under-performing? Why or why not?

Nope! I love my “scrubs” and “casuals” for the most part. Now on the raiding side I do tend to demand that players put in some effort. That said I am more than willing to teach someone the ropes, and explain fights. This has been one of the great things for me when it comes to the Final Fantasy XIV community. Overall folks have been more than willing to stop and take the time to explain the encounters when someone says they are brand new to it. As far as raiding goes you ultimately have to do what is best for the team. If you have a player that is simply not performing, and even though you have spent time working with them… simply cannot compete at the level the rest of the team is.

Under those circumstances then yes, absolutely I would trim that player from the raid and replace them with someone that was able to “keep up”. That is the thing about raiding is that essentially it is a “team sport”. On many fights you are only as good as your weakest link, and even though it might suck to do it… you have to do what is needed for the raid group to progress. That does not make the person a bad player or a bad person… and outside of the raid environment I would not think any less of them. I like to keep a line of separation between “Guild” and “Raid” for this reason. The guild is a social structure and the raid is a working group designed to complete a task. Folks have to be understanding that while everyone can be in the guild, not everyone is ready to put out the effort needed to be in the raid. I don’t necessarily see this as a “pride” thing but more a “taking the needs of the team” into account.

Flight is a Double Edged Sword

May 26, 2015 by Belghast

Skipping Content

Over the last few weeks a topic has sprung back up that I thought was long put to bed. I guess the lack of flight in World of Warcraft for the Warlords of Draenor expansion is still a divisive topic. I’ve said before that I support their decision to keep flight out of the expansion. My current malaise with Warcraft has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I can fly. So this morning I thought I would talk for a bit about the inclusion of flight in games and the strange ramifications it has on game play. Ultimately when you include flight players skip your content as simple as that. I can say this coming from a perspective of someone who has played several games with and without flight. Ultimately the first game I played with flight was City of Heroes, and it was both the most powerful “travel power” and also the most frustrating. Sure you could soar above the battlefield and move around relatively unscathed, but you did so at often times half the speed of any other travel power. The players that could fly however were able to terrain hack content, and often times find ways to level with absolutely impunity, but they did so giving up the ability to move about “quickly”.

When World of Warcraft first introduced flight it felt very similar. While you were technically going at 150% speed it felt like you were moving more slowly because in the air you lost your point of reference for how fast you were going. Additionally the flight masters still moved significantly faster than you were able to go. Even with the introduction of artisan flying at 280% flight speed you were still slightly slower than a flight master which I believe is roughly 300% speed. The problem is in both cases it changed the way I played the game. While I struggled to make the money to fly in Burning Crusade, by the time Wrath of the Lich King rolled around I had enough cash to spare to be able to outfit all of my alts with even Cold Weather Flying giving me the ability to fly while leveling. I found myself using the same sort of terrain hacking tricks that players did in City of Heroes. Instead of fighting my way to the entrance of something I simply swooped down from above and quickly poked into entrance tunnels to avoid fighting any adds. If I needed to kill a single quest mob, I would zoom straight into the hut they were located in with surgical precision avoiding the experience of clearing my way through a camp.

Flight is a Double Edged Sword

While you might be fine with this style of play it does not change the fact that you are ultimately playing the game in a way that was not intended by the developers. Someone spent a serious amount of time and resources designing the layout of the content you just leapt over the top of with your trust flying mount. Sure there are ways for developers to put counter measures in place that block you from terrain hacking the content using a flying mount, but that just adds to the problem. Instead of making new areas of the game they would be reworking areas to make sure that you cannot skip the important bits. This also destroys the ability to add content along the way like side quests and collectibles because if you are skipping directly to the end you will never actually see it. By having flight you are really handcuffing the tools that the content providers have to add to the mix, and changing the way they have to approach the content. The end result is likely a far less vibrant world.

If it were just Worlds of Warcraft I would think that maybe they simply integrated flight in a bad way. The problem being that I went through the same experience with Everquest II. Once I got the ability to fly I stopped experiencing content “as intended”. I started flying up to exactly the spot on my mini-map I needed to be at in order to complete the quests as quick as humanly possible. I pulled myself out of the game experience and essentially was robbed of the living and breathing world around me. With flight questing becomes about clearing dots off of your map as quickly as possible without spending any time really engaged in the content itself. I think in many ways this was why I enjoyed the questing experience of Warlords of Draenor so much more than I did the previous expansions. It actually forced me to spend time getting to know the layout of the zones, rather than zipping over the top of them. It is better to see the crags and crevices of the world… than a monstrosity of super pixilated trees that never quite mesh correctly.

Heavensward and Flight

As I look forwards at Heavensward I have to admit I am more than a little concerned that we are seeing the introduction of flying into Final Fantasy XIV. Firstly I hope they stand firm on the statement that there will be no flight in the original areas of the game. Secondly I hope they have thought through all of the ramifications that come with introducing a system that lets you skip over content. There has been a lot of talk about having to explore a region and learn how to harness the winds in that area before being able to fly there, and I am hoping this is actually a fairly drawn out process. This would mean that the player would need to have spent a significant amount of time in a given region before learning how to fly there. At one point Yoshi P in an earlier statement said something to the effect of having to completely explore an area before being able to learn flight. In both cases this sounds like maybe they understand the danger that integrating this system really is to a game. The problem is that flight is a Pandora’s box that cannot be easily shut after it has been opened.

Blizzard has learned this lesson and is trying to hold shut that lid with all their might. Other games like Rift have been carefully guarding their own box to make sure that no one opens it. It is with great reservation that I watch as Square Enix prepares to open their own box and see what happens. I say reservation, because this is the same development group that has managed to outthink its player base on a regular basis. They have essentially social engineered a community into treating each other with a modicum of civil decency rather than a race to the bottom to see who can behave the most horrifically. I have hope that they will be able to solve the problems that no company has to date with flight. I have hope that they will figure out a way to keep it from cheapening their content experiences. My hope is that they will make it so we are not completely alone in the sky. This is an expansion about doing battle with dragons… and dragons notoriously can fly. Maybe we will have to avoid encounters in the air just like we try and avoid encounters on the land as we traverse the world. We have roughly twenty four days before we find out, but I still stand by my stance that I am fine playing games without flying. I am even fine when a game decides that flight was a mistake and claws it back out of our grips.