Grand Experiment Archives - Page 23 of 200

Happier Without Meters

May 13, 2015 by Belghast

Deliberate Exclusion

One of the puzzles I have been trying to sort out the entire time I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV is why exactly the community as a whole seems to be friendlier to other players. I’ve talked about the various literal “social engineering” missions that the development staff have made in order to spin things that would normally be a negative as a positive. When I see the new player bonus in a dungeon I actually get excited rather than frustration over having to potentially teach someone new mechanics. Quite honestly I am wondering if it is something far more simple than anything, a line in the sand that the folks running the game drew long ago and have since reinforced numerous times. In Final Fantasy XIV running a DPS log parser is not only unsupported by the game, but it is actually an actionable offense. This has had an interesting chilling effect on some of the elitism that you normally see in communities.

Since simply mentioning parsed logs in private free company chat can end up with a GM knocking down your door… it changes the way folks interact with the data gained from log parsers. That is to say people are still parsing the logs, but the first rule of “FFXIV-APP” is there is no “FFXIV-APP”. This means that no one gets called out in the middle of a pug for having “weak dps” and no one is standing around in “trade chat” linking their latest boss kill. The players that do parse, do so quietly and in secret and I believe in the end this makes the “meters” less of a competition and more of a personal diagnostic tool. It seems that once you take this competition out of a community it has some pretty wide reaching trickle down effects. I’ve always thought of dps meters as a distraction, and back during Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, we had rules against mentioning them or linking them in raid chat. I largely just found the automated spam annoying, but it also seemed to cause players to focus on things that were less important than the mechanics of a fight.

Accidental Experiment

The problem is that meters are a double edged sword. Eons ago while the earth was still cooling I needed a add-on called Omen in World of Warcraft to let me know how I was doing on threat. Later on these features got rolled into Recount, and Skada and the rest of the meters. As a result I simply got used to running the meters all of the time, but after a point they were no longer needed. Tank threat became a non-issue with the introduction of Vengeance to help mitigate the lower damage that tanking characters generally had. Once introduced into my life I started feeling like I needed meters all the time to let me know how things were going. I became addicted to the metrics and numbers associated with raiding, and as such spent a good deal of my time staring at bars and percentages rather than actually playing the game. Some weeks back I talked about being frustrated with the current state of my mods, and actually went so far as to start installing several of the addons that I had been using.

One of the addons that ended up getting pulled was Recount, because I had this plan of switching over the Skada. The funny thing is that I got interrupted during the middle of what I happened to be doing, and while Recount absolutely got installed… I never went so far as to install another meter. The first time I noticed was during a raid a few weeks back, but since I was so used to NOT having meters in Final Fantasy XIV it didn’t bother me terribly much. This combined with the fact that I knew someone in the raid was going to parse our logs anyways caused me to simply ignore the fact that they were not there any more. The end result was that I felt generally happier about my night of raiding. I spent more time in the moment of the game play rather than focusing on how I was doing versus this player or that in the meters. I decided to just go with this and run without meters for awhile to see if it improved my overall outlook on the raid.

Happier Without Meters

The funny thing is that I actually think it did. World of Warcraft stopped being a competition for me and more of an experience. Sure the fights are still nowhere near as engaging or enjoyable for me as the ones in Final Fantasy XIV but I am spending more time “in” the fight and less time worried about other non-important things. The funny thing about this is that apparently it had other effects on my game play as well. The constant concern about how I happened to be doing may have been actually holding me back from actually doing well. I figured I was still firmly in the middle of the pack dps wise, until after the Flamebender Ka’graz fight one of our mages said something that made me curious. He said something to the effect of “I can’t believe I was beat by a protection warrior”. To which point I confessed that I had installed my meters some time ago, and had no clue how I was actually doing anymore. To which my raid leader responded “Well, Bel, You Did Well” and linked me the url of the live parse.

There are a lot of mitigating factors behind my performance and I know this. For starters I recently got the four piece set bonus and for gladiators it essentially increases everything useful to us by 20%. More than that I think the absence of meters caused me to stop worrying about every button press and rely more on what I knew I should be doing when I should be doing it… instead of trying to second guess myself all of the time. In essence I stopped caring about my performance and just started playing the damned game, and while it most definitely improved my levels of happiness it also seems to have actually improved how I was performing. I am just not a hyper competitive person about most things, and accidentally eliminating that stimulus from my game experience seems to be a net positive for me. I know that there are always going to be meters tracking my performance but I also feel like so long as they are not in my face all of the time I can try and ignore them. Now I am not suggesting that you uninstall your meters, and that it is some new path to happiness. However for me it seems to have given me a new lease on a game I was starting to hate playing.

Axe to Grind

May 12, 2015 by Belghast

Lung Infections Suck

I’ve been in a strange place the last few days, where I am still recovering from what has turned out to be an infection in my lungs. It has been allergies central around here and unsurprisingly my lungs have reacted negatively to it. I had been dragging along for awhile with what felt like a constant persistent dry cough. Last Friday I finally decided to go to the doctor when I coughed up a small bit of blood. Turns out my lungs were actually in far worse shape than I thought. Since then I have been on a pretty heavy dose of prednisone and am on the mend, but man… I have to say I am still drained as hell. I attempted to go to work like normal yesterday but ended up coming home about halfway through the day. Today I am making another attempt to go a full day, so I am hoping the strength stays with me. What is so strange about this one is just how drained I feel as a result of simply existing.

Why are my lungs betraying me you might ask? The above photo is not intentionally abstract but instead my my phones camera attempting to focus on what are ultimately hundreds of tiny particles of Cottonwood seed. This is what we jokingly refer to as summer snow, and with all the rain we have been getting the Cottonwoods have been blooming in overdrive blanketing the law with a mat of white fabric and making the air look like it is quite genuinely snowing. Thankfully I have a day or two of reprieve thanks to the recent round of storms, but I am sure as soon as things dry up again the bloom will begin a new. Normally this happens around my birthday in June but I guess all the moisture moved up the time table. In any case it sucks to live through and I am just hoping that I can limp through until it has finished. In the meantime I will continue to take this high dose pack of prednisone and antibiotics and pretend to be a normal human being.

Axe to Grind

For months now we have been slowly keying folks through the various primal fights in our Final Fantasy XIV free company. While a chunk of us have been sitting on the Ifrit step, the final of the original set of Extreme primals… it seemed like every time we set out to attempt it we were missing a seventh or eighth that also had it unlocked. So we would once again shift focus and do another round of Garuda or another round of Titan to get people caught up. Last night, finally after a new round of Titaneers we managed to get eight people on at the same time with the ability to do Ifrit. Now I realize I could have been pugging my way through the primal encounters, and with all of the mount farming parties this is a relatively straight forward prospect. There is just something rewarding about doing a fight that is new to you, with nothing but your free company surrounding you. It makes the kill that much sweeter and the experience that much more magical as you accomplished a new mission with friends. Once again we went into the fight without much research, but managed to pick up the basics extremely quickly.

It took us several attempts but by the end of our first night ever working on the boss we had downed an Ifrit and moved on to other things. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to get this quest out of my log. I know the big push for this at least from Ashgar’s side was to get the sweet axe I am pictured holding in the first picture. For those who have completed some of the later story, you will recognize this as the axe that Moenbryda wields. It is just one of many weapons you get as a reward for defeating the original trio of Primals, but I went with the axe because it is probably one of the more unique appearances in the game. Now I doubt if it will ever offset my usage of my Malignant Mogaxe, but it is still pretty awesome to have it as an option for when I decide to change up my outfit a bit. Glamouring/Transmogging/Wardrobes are one of the simple pleasures of a modern MMO. The ability to look like you want to look is what makes these games fun to play for me. Gone is the era of looking exactly like every other player in the game, and here to stay is the ability to craft your own appearances. After playing Everquest and being able to tell every single item a player was wearing based on its color and appearance… I have to say I am happy to be living in modern times.

Back to Nael

Yes I realize this is not a picture of Nael Van Darnus but I didn’t snap any pictures from our attempts on Turn 9 last night. Instead this is a picture of me rocking the Garuda bow because I finally feel like I have an outfit floofy enough to support it. This weekend I managed to finish getting my 120 set from World of Darkness which makes up a chunk of the outfit above. Since picking up the Garuda bow I have been looking for a reason to use it, and finally I think the gold and white in the Bogartyr coat works well enough with the gold and white on the bow. Now if anyone tells me that is really blue and black I will reach through the internet and punch them in their soul. A few weeks back we set down on a new mission, which involved alternating between working on coil and working on other things. Since then we have finished the original three primals, Leviathan Extreme and Odin and as a result feel like we are no longer beating our heads against the wall that is turn nine. Coming back to Nael tonight felt far more fresh than it has in a long time.

I was somewhat concerned that we would have lost progress, but in truth we picked up right where we left off and started making fast progress. Everything about the fight is smoother now and we have been making it into the final dance phase every single attempt. The awesome thing about this is that it feels like last night we were finally getting the pattern down. In fact the last few attempts we were making it to the dive bombs phase consistently. Now if we can just master where the dive bombs need to go… I have a feeling we will be clearing turn nine finally and moving on to the final coil. I love my static group, and I love the way folks just keep plugging away without getting frustrated. We have been on this boss for a very long time, and no one seems to have any diminished desire to KEEP doing the boss, or keep trying to succeed. In fact everyone seems to keep doing little things here or there to tweak their performance and make things work more smoothly. I love my free company, and I love the raid we have built around it… my hope is that we can keep trying to get more people into the mix and maybe with Heavensward expand to a third static because the two we have now are just awesome.

Back But Don’t Play

May 11, 2015 by Belghast

Supporting Kickstarter

This morning I am going to tackle the second talkback topic for the Newbie Blogger Initiative because it is actually one that has been on the hearts and minds of the AggroChat folks for the last few weeks. For the April AggroChat Game Club game I chose Darkest Dungeon, and since then the topic of playing “unfinished” games has been somewhat of a recent discussion among us in private. The fact that the game was unfinished caused numerous problems, not the least of which was the simple fact that we were never quite sure if this or that functionality was intended… or just unfinished. So I feel like I was not able to give it a really solid testing, because I don’t know what might change between now and when the studio deems the game “finished”. The prompt however for this talkback is pretty straight forward but my answer is going to be a bit more nuanced.

Early Access and Kickstarter – Do you support unfinished games?

So for the first part… yes I wholeheartedly support the backing of unfinished games. I’ve backed more than I can count at this point through either Kickstarter or company specific initiatives. I think Kickstarter is a pretty awesome thing, and it has caused a lot of things that I care about to see the light of day. I’ve backed both software and physical merchandise projects through it, and have been relatively happy with pretty much every project I have ended up chipping in on. Kickstarter does a lot of things, but the biggest one to me is that it allows me to vote with my dollar on what I think is going to be an idea worth making. I rarely back very far into a given product tree, and the end result is me usually getting a cut price copy of the game at launch. While many of these games offer a double platinum early access alpha program… that is not so much what I am interested at least not any more.

Tired of Alphas

Once upon a time I wanted to be playing every single game I could get my hands on. I reveled in the fact that I had alpha and beta tested most of the MMOs out there. For a period of time this was something that was achievable because at any given moment there were a very limited number of Alpha and Beta test programs available. Somewhere along the line I noticed that playing an Alpha seriously adversely effected my chances of staying with a game for very long after release. In essence I would burn myself out playing the Alpha, so that when launch happened the game felt very old and tired to me. The pinnacle of this problem happened for me with Elder Scrolls Online. I seriously cared about the release of this game, and I took my Alpha testing duties seriously. I was told at one point that I was in the top 1% of all bug reporters in the game, and every single time we played I spent most of my time reporting and re-reporting issues I saw.

The problem here is that I had been alpha and beta testing builds of this game for a good year before the game actually launched. So while I only managed to play about three months after the launch of the title, in truth that was around 17 months of me actually playing the game. Huge chunks of the content I had literally seen hundreds of times, and remembered each of the different incarnations. The additional problem is I had trouble letting go of the past. There were some changes made in that game that I considered “for the worse” and myself and many of the other early testers rather vehemently pined for the imagined “good ole days” of early alpha. Memory is always an incomplete state, and what we remembered was this or that feature that stood out in an ocean of an otherwise broken game. The final product was so much better than the one we were requesting they return to, but we got hung up on the minutiae of this or that feature that we missed. Basically I learned that Alpha testing ultimately ruined my enjoyment of the final product… and it only took me twenty some years to wake up to this fact.

Back But Don’t Play

Ultimately I have a very nuanced stance on Kickstarter. I am more than happy to donate money towards a cause that I believe in like the creation of a brand new Wasteland experience on the PC, or any of the other games I have backed that let me wallow in the nostalgia of my youth. Generally speaking I now back just far enough into it to give myself a cut rate copy of the game at launch. Then when I get said copy and any bonus trappings… it seats neatly in my Steam account until I am ready to play it. I might boot it up periodically to check on its progress, but ultimately I am not going to start the game for real until I see that note from the developer talking about how the game has launched. The problem is this also means I am phenomenally bad at tracking the progress of games on Kickstarter. I almost always have a message that needs to be responded to about this or that game but this is what works for me. It lets me feel like I am backing things that I believe in, but also gives me the piece of mind of not actually starting a game play session until the game is “finished”.

As far as other games that are in a permanent state of development like Minecraft… once again my feelings are a bit more nuanced. Paying to play an alpha does not really bother me, if the experience and the enjoyment itself is worth paying to play said alpha. I got into Minecraft for example during its pre-beta days when you could pick up a copy for well under $10. I have gotten easily $1000 worth of enjoyment out of that game. Similarly while I don’t play them nearly as often I have gotten more than enough happiness out of both Trove and Landmark to recuperate any costs I might have put into them. Ultimately backing an unfinished game, and playing said unfinished game is not an entirely bad idea… so long as you go into it with the thought process that you are playing something that isn’t quite done yet. Early Access games are in essence paid betas, and if you can live with that… awesome… if not wait for the release of the game. I personally have found that the games I played heavily in Alpha and Beta get more enjoyable over time, and going back a year after launch I end up really enjoying myself. So that is to say that the games I ruined through Alpha testing… are not in a permanent state of ruined as evidenced by my recent travels into Guild Wars 2, Wildstar, and Star Wars the Old Republic. Ultimately you have to figure out what works for you, and the amount or risk you are willing to take. If I feel like I am going to care about a game, I try my best not to burn out before launch.

Botany Mastered

May 10, 2015 by Belghast

A Very Cardgamey Show

It seems when I think we have nothing to talk about… we end up talking for two hours finally having to force ourselves to stop talking to close out the show. Last night was one of those night as I was joined by Tam, Kodra, Thalen and Ashgar. Sometimes a clear theme is presented and last night inadvertedly this happened. As we rambled through the various things we have been playing, it turns out that a lot of us had been playing card games in one form or another. We got this interesting peak into the secret underground gaming scene of Seatle that Kodra has now apparently gotten his ticket into. He recorded this weeks AggroChat on a quick jaunt away from this all day gaming event that was happening in a nearby hotel. The kind of event that isn’t advertised, and that you apparently have to know someone to get into. This is not starting to sound like fight club at all is it?

Other than that I shift things around a bit in the show and I actually go first. Usually by the time we get around to the games I have been playing my co-hosts are bordering on being asleep so I opted to talk about my stuff first. Which was a large course of Echo of Souls, and beating Wolfenstein The Old Blood which is an absolutely enjoyable but exceptionally short version of the original Wolfenstein game redone in New Order style. Machinegames has somehow created this magical mix of the glory days of the 90s era shooter mixed with the narrative power of modern gaming. Ashgar once again is going through his DS collection and playing things that he had not beaten before, this time jaunting down a time travelling avenue. Thalen extolled the joys of Hand of Fate, and Kodra rediscovered Heroes of Might and Magic 3. More than that however we talked a lot about card games and board games in general. Was a fun and chill show to record and hopefully that comes across in the production.

Botany Mastered

Last night while recording the podcast and editing it I spent my time in Final Fantasy XIV working on Botany. For some time I have been working on pushing up the two critical harvesting abilities Mining and Botany before actually starting the Disciple of the Hand push. I figured having the ability to go out into the world and gather things would be beneficial when making the push to level all the other things. The Disciple of the Land classes also gave me a bit of a buffer to psyche myself up for diving headlong into the pit of madness that is crafting. At this point begins the money grind and thankfully I am up to almost 2 million gil to help support this push. I guess the first order of business is to level all of the professions to 15 so that I can get the best cross class abilities to help with the rest of the grind. My original thought was to take everything to 15 in no particular order, and then start walking them up 5 levels at a time. So take everything to 20, everything to 25 etc. This also allows me to convert all of the crafting gear along the way hopefully keeping my vaults from overflowing.

Another thing that I really need to start doing is working on my beast tribe daily quests. One of the things that Ashgar talked about on the podcast was the interesting quest that comes at the end of maxing each of the factions. There is apparently a storyline that somehow joins up all of the rebellious beast tribe factions into a “Justice League” of sorts. I would really love to see this storyline before Heavensward launches, but at this point I have right around a month to accomplish all of this. I am not sure if I have given myself enough time, especially given that I keep dinking around in other games at the same time. I am starting to feel under the gun with wanting to accomplish so many things before I officially say goodbye to “A Realm Reborn”. So far FFXIV 2.0 has been an amazing ride and I am amped about what Heavensward and 3.0 has to offer. I guess tomorrow night the 2.57 patch will be going in, and I am wondering what exactly it will bring as well. I would be extremely happy if they uncapped Poetics gains… but I somehow doubt that will be the case.

Bad At Shadowrun

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time working on Shadowrun Dragonfall and I have decided that I need to just start over. I spent too much of my time on my main character too focused on a specific tree. I was planning on going all melee all of the time and quite frankly that is a poor choice to go with. I spent most of combat running around the room chasing down mobs that would move away from me and attack from ranged. Additionally I am going to have to throw out some of my instincts because I straight wiped my party trying to stay and fight against unwinnable odds. All of that said there are aspects of the game I am really enjoying, but right now I am just pretty horrible at actually doing it. I also need to learn to save far more often because this game will straight kill you at times with a smile. It is going to be an interesting show when we ultimately talk about this game but I am really wanting to make it further than I did with the previous games. I would love to beat this one because in many ways the gameplay reminds me of the Fallout series.

The thing is the game gives you one of every classes so I guess what you end up playing is just for flavor. I will probably go Street Samurai once again because that was always my favorite character to play in the actual Shadowrun campaigns I have been in. I didn’t really care that much for the little dwarf I rolled so I will probably go something more generic like a human this time around. All in all I was a fun several hours I spent yesterday, and as it is raining insanely outside… I plan on going downstairs and hanging out on the sofa all day while watching Netflix. Shadowrun is precisely the perfect kind of game for a day like today. So I will either be doing that or be working on tradeskills in final fantasy. In any case I have a gloriously lazy Sunday ahead of me. These are the types of days that gaming was made for. This massive lung infection has gotten me out of having to travel for Mother’s Day so right now we are planning on having a re-roll there next weekend when the world is not actively trying to kill us. Hopefully you have an awesome day too.