Grand Experiment Archives - Page 47 of 200

Save Ferris

January 29, 2015 by Belghast

Is It Actually War?

This morning Alternative Chat has a post that is extremely relevant to my interests. In it she questions why Ashran is failing, and has devolved into both Horde and Alliance avoiding each other in an effort to get objectives completely more efficiently. She goes on to question if we are fatigued of the red versus blue faction pride that blizzard keeps trying to make happen. I think in a large part many players are, in part because to quote the Fallout franchise “War Never Changes”. We have been in this constant state of war against the horde for the last ten years, with no victories… just more meaningless battles. In this scenario the choice of horde or alliance feels just about as meaningful as choosing RED or BLU in Team Fortress 2. Sure in World of Warcraft we have natural alignment to certain races… I happen to be pretty partial to Dwarves, Worgen and Humans for example. However I would be willing to bed that every player has at least one race in their faction that they cannot stand… I am looking at you Night Elves.

During the recent 10 years 10 questions podcast, Alt featured my response to wrap up the show about why we chose the faction we ultimately ended up aligning to. My response was rather nuanced but essentially it sums up that I wish I didn’t have to choose. The funny thing is that for years I thought I just had a natural aversion to PVP, and that it was driving my distaste for factional combat. However that cannot be the case because during Pax South the game I ended up ultimately raving about was Gigantic… a game where the only thing to do IS PVP combat. I think the problem lies with this false sense of faction pride. I don’t care about what happens to my faction so long as it doesn’t actually inconvenience me. When it does inconvenience me I go do something else, because I am not playing an MMO for the PVP. I neither love nor hate the Horde, because they are essentially an island that exists far beyond the realm that I have access to. If I had access to playing with horde characters, in horde zones without walling myself off from my existing alliance friends… then maybe just maybe I would start to care.

Save Ferris

One of the problems with blogging the way that I do, each morning… super early in said morning… is that I am often a day behind in my content. As such yesterday seemed to be the day to post about this next topic… so I am of course posting a day late. There has been a rumor circulating that AOL has decided to shut down the Joystiq operation and its related sites. While I am not sure if I have ever actually been to Joystiq proper… I do absolutely read both WoW Insider and Massively on a daily basis. In fact I would not likely have the type of audience that I do today were it not for WoW Insider picking up and featuring my Groupcraft post years ago. That after all has been one of the great things about the site, they have always been willing to take content created by the community and show it off to the world. It always felt like a proud parent pinning your paper to the refrigerator door every single time they did it. They always felt like they cared about what the community of players were up to, and over the years they featured a few special moments from my guild.

The problem with many other gaming news sites is they often times ONLY report the news. What I liked about the Joystiq sites is that they focused quite often on how the news effected the players. So if it is fate that these sites will fade from memory, my hope is that other sites will help to pick up that torch of a more personal slant on the stories. Anyone can take a press release, reword it and hit publish but it takes thoughtful contemplation to report about how said press release effects the community. As always I am concerned about the human toll of events, and over the years I have gotten to know quite a number of the writers at both WoW Insider and Massively. I hope that there will be an eleventh hour salvation for the sites, but if there isn’t I salute the work those stalwart individuals have done to date. Not that anything I say has any weight when it comes to corporate politics, but I sincerely hope AOL rethinks their decision, or at the very least has the common sense to sell the network to someone else.

Other Stuff about Things

This morning is a bit of a strange morning, in part because there are things I would normally say that I can’t necessarily talk about. What I can talk about however is that as of yesterday I am officially a member of the MMO Games writing staff, as they have published my first article from my experiences at Pax. I plan on writing several more pieces that will also hopefully be published relating my experiences there. I will admit I would not be writing for the site were it not for the constant wearing down by friends that also write for said site. This is a strange decision for me, in part because I know I can never actually do this as a full time gig, and secondly because I already do the daily blogging thing, two podcasts and a plethora of other side projects. That said my hope is to focus more on long form human interest style writing, namely the same sorts of things that I was always a fan at for Massively and WoW Insider. I still have no clue what kind of frequency I will actually post at. I know I have another article waiting somewhere in the editorial queue, so hopefully that will see the light of day soon.

In other news it feels really damned good to be through a raid tier in World of Warcraft while it is still relevant content. This is not a feat I have actually done since Icecrown Citadel in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Granted for now it is just normal mode but as of last Thursday while I was travelling to Pax my raid group hit 7 of 7 in Normal, and this week we repeated that and picked up an extra heroic kill taking us to 3 of 7. Now that we are past Butcher I have a feeling that the other heroic fights are going to come a bit easier. Butcher was a giant mental obstacle that we felt we couldn’t pass… so we never really tried it. Granted Damai was watching the logs to check our relative damage output to see when we were “ready” but it still felt like we didn’t believe in ourselves enough to take it down. This week however we crossed that hurdle with far less difficulty than I expected. As such tonight when we go back in I am hoping we can take down a Tectus and a Brakenspore. I had an interesting exchange with my friend Eliyon last night, and he commented just how closely my raids progression has been to his groups. Makes us think that the raid as a whole was tuned just about right.

Raid Got Good

January 28, 2015 by Belghast

Media Personality

I got into a conversation with some of my friends the other day, and during the course of it they referred to me as a “media personality”. Then to justify this they asked the guild… who agreed with them that I was most definitely one. I am not sure exactly why but this made me more frustrated than it probably should have considering that they probably did mean it as some sort of a compliment. I guess for me… when you say those words together it doesn’t exactly evoke a positive image. So many self proclaimed personalities are these vapid and self serving entities that only think of promoting whatever it is that they are doing… and ultimately makes them money. I realize self promotion is a key part of this whole process, but it is one that I have always done half heartedly. I am this guy that does a thing, and if that thing doesn’t interest you… then I don’t exactly feel compelled to try and beat down your door.

I guess the huge benefit I have is that I don’t have to make a living from what I am doing. This is and likely always will be a hobby for me. My writing and podcasting is something that I do largely for my own personal enjoyment. If I were trying to support myself and my family from what I happen to be doing, then more than likely I would feel differently. I realized long ago that there was no real way I could support myself through writing. I look to my friends that attempt to do it, and they generally are writing for multiple venues and churning out articles left and right to keep their heads above water. That is not exactly the life I would want to have for myself. This way I get to “play” at being a serious writer, without having to deal with any of the consequences. All of this said… I still do not in any fashion feel like a “media personality”.

Raid Got Good

Last night was my first raid back after Pax South, and I was to some extent dreading it a bit. Getting back into the “swing of things” has been a bit of a struggle. Since coming back I have felt generally disconnected from my game worlds, and feared my performance would be frustratingly bad. All things considered I seemed to do just fine, and once the raid started rolling I felt right at home. Apparently I need to go to Pax more often because in my absence the raid got really damned good. When I left we were struggling with Imperator Mar’gok but making some progress. That Thursday night I left, the raid downed him without me… but with some very specific circumstances that revolved around a much smaller raid size. Last night… it felt like we were old pros because through the course of the evening we one-shotted 7 of 7 bosses in Normal all before we took our first break.

After the break we started working on Hard Mode and repeated a Kargath kill before moving on and attempting Butcher. That fight had been our roadblock and in the past when we had attempted it we lacked the oomph to get over the hurdle. Last night we one shot killed him for the first time, beating the enrage in what felt like a largely repeatable fashion. One of the things I have noticed is that when our raid downs a boss, it gives us a significant confidence boost and suddenly repeat performances feel much smoother. So I feel like after clearing the Butcher hurdle we will likely be able to take down a few more heroic encounters Thursday. For a full sweep of all of the content we have downed before, we moved on to the Twin Ogrons Heroic and got them down in a single attempt as well. Like I said… clearly I need to go away more often, because when I do it seems like the raid gets phenomenally good.

Selfiegate

One of the controversies that has been brewing since they first announced the 6.1 patch, is the integration with twitter. For some reason there are many players that view this as a bad thing. I for one absolutely loved the fact that I could integrate twitter with Rift, and used it constantly. The only bad thing about that integration was the fact that it liked to tweet for you if you didn’t first turn that off. It also provided an awesome feature that allowed you to take a screenshot with the UI hidden by default. This has been something I have wanted in every game I have ever played, because when you are trying to capture the action… it just feels odd to try and fumble to flip the UI off, then take a picture… and then flip it back on before you actually die. Anything that makes doing something I am already going to do easier… is a net positive for me. At the end of the day it is an optional feature, and as such no one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to hook up your account to twitter.

This week more gasoline was added to the fire when a certain follower mission was found on the PTR. The Field Photography mission rewards the player with a S.E.L.F.I.E. Camera allowing you to take as you might expect… those ubiquitous selfie style pictures. Then a later mission called Lens Some Hands allows you to upgrade your camera, adding Instagram style filters to it. For some reason this has erupted a controversy of people up in arms that selfies are being added to the game. To which I want to add.. chill the fuck out. I personally think its a cute feature to be added, and fits with all of the other random toys we have access to that do goofy things. As a programmer, I recognize that more than likely this was some programmers pet project. We all have a stack of “wouldn’t it be cool” things that we fiddle with when we have downtime. Ultimately this one turned out to be good enough that they ended up integrating it into the game. Once again… if you don’t want to use it… then don’t. No one is forcing you to take duck face pictures of your character, but for those who do want to… let them. I feel like sometimes we lose sight of the fact that this is a supposed to be something we are doing for fun… and if taking selfies makes you happy then screw anyone who tries to harsh that happy.

Mandervilles and Midgardsormr

January 27, 2015 by Belghast

The Morning Back

This morning is my first morning back to work, and I am surprisingly cheery about it. At the very least I had a pretty easy time waking up. I’m trying to type my morning post with a very attention craving cat sitting on my arm. The cats are still not entirely used to us being back. I can tell they missed us because they are pretty much smothering us 24/7. Now I know our house sitter played with them… because we got text messages talking about how sweet and adorable they were. I guess there is no substitute for mom and dad being home. Kenzie the kitten still acts confused any time she realizes we are not in sight. Off and on during the day yesterday she would come tearing through the house meowing trying to find me… then upon doing so snuggle up tight. I guess it feels good to be needed.

Gw2 2015-01-26 16-11-37-88 I seem to have skipped the convention plague, or at least I don’t really feel much different than I normally do. The biggest thing I am experiencing is a sort of jet lag feeling. Like my brain is still on convention time and I am not quite used to being back and communicating with other human beings “normally” just yet. As such I spent most of my yesterday chilling out on the sofa, and piddling around in Guild Wars 2. Yup that is right, I downloaded it, patched it up, and spent my day mucking about in it. I enjoyed myself I guess… but I am still in the same phase I always seemed to be with that game… trying to sort out what everyone finds so damned appealing about it. I admit the video and the crowd were enough oomph to get me to give it another try.

During Pax they kept touting their community as the “friendliest” and I feel like that is a bit of a misnomer. Sure when you die people seem to rush out of the woodwork to resurrect you… but in doing so they NEVER SAY A WORD. I feel like GW2 is the friendliest… because it is also the most silent. I wandered about yesterday interacting with several other human beings and not a single one said anything to me, even when I thanked them for helping me out. So I guess they are the friendliest because no one is being an outward asshole? I still say for my money Final Fantasy XIV is a far more enjoyable community, even the gold spammers are polite. All of that said I did begrudgingly enjoy myself, so I might be poking my head in now and again and slowly working my way towards the level cap. Right now I am 53 so there is still a long ways to go until 80.

Mandervilles and Midgardsormr

Last night our normal raid night in Final Fantasy XIV but with several people out that did not quite happen. I spent most of the night hanging out in free company chat talking to various people and working my way through the latest of the Hildebrand quest lines. It was once again completely insane, but as I ran through it I noticed… this quest seemed to make call backs to every single Hildebrand quest line we had experienced to date. It was almost as though the Hildebrand storyline were a television series and the final episode reintroduces all of the themes from behind, wrapping them up in a neat bow. My working theory is that this is the last we will see of Hildebrand before the expansion. For that matter even the main story line feels like it is acting as the precursor to the upcoming expansion, easing us into the world that will be once Heavensward launches. I am absolutely fine with this notion, and eating every moment of it while it lasts.

ffxiv 2015-01-26 21-30-03-90

After a period of time we realized that we had a full group of people on teamspeak to do some of the new dungeons. As with any patch this one introduced three new dungeons, two of which are hard mode versions of existing dungeons… and the third something completely new that fits the current storyline. Since the new dungeon Keeper of the Lake will prevent moving forward in the main story, we opted to do that one. For starters… this dungeon has some of the more difficult boss encounters we have seen to date. In fact I would say this is the first dungeon that we did not really feel overpowered for. The gear that it drops is ilevel 100, but I would hazard a guess that maybe it was designed for players to mostly be in ilevel 120. We however are all in the 110 range so it was a real challenge. One of the cool asides about the dungeon were that a lot of the mobs we encountered were named after ships from the classic Shmup Einhander. A few were references to other shooters like the mobs called the “Silver Hawks”.

We had to do what we have done on so many first runnings of new dungeons… limit break our way through every encounter. The first encounter took two attempts and the final encounter took a lot of luck and two attempts to figure out what we needed to do. It is easily the most difficult of the dungeons to date. Ashgar had run Amdapor Keep Hard and said that this new series had a running theme. Relatively easy trash encounters, that were not likely to kill the party… and really difficult bosses. I honestly prefer dungeons to be this way. Hard trash makes the dungeons frustrating, but when you arrive at a boss everyone naturally focuses on the encounter at hand. Similarly to the Manderville quest line… this dungeon seems to be ramping us up for the end of the expansion, and I believe that these are the last set of dungeons we will see before the spring 2015 launch of Heavensward. I hope to be able to run the other two soon, so that I can start doing hard mode roulette once more. They were worth quite a few poetics, so it should finally be reasonable to gear up in full 120 gear.

Highlights of Pax South

January 26, 2015 by Belghast

The Day After

This mornings post is coming out super late because… I slept in. After feeling like I had worked the last few days, I was super thankful to have taken Monday off. The positive is that since I had gotten up every morning at 5:30 it should not be too hard to shift back into work mode tomorrow. To the left is a photo I took yesterday when we were gassing up at the altar of excess… the New Braunfels Buc-ee’s. We decided since it was a short distance from San Antonio that we would stop there for breakfast and gas up for the trip. So here you have a very sleepy Bel who had not slept terribly well the night before. When I came back to my hotel room I was kind of riding an adrenaline high from day two. This meant that nothing that I did seemed to be able to calm my mind down enough to sleep. Normally this is the point when I get up and play some game, but our hotel internet connection was fairly slow, and I did not really want to go through the process of having to verify to WoW or FFXIV that I was connecting from a foreign IP… also I had already packed up all of my gear in preparation for getting up early the next morning.

Because all the pre-packing we managed to get on the road about 6:30 am and drove through to Waco before taking our first stop (other than Buc-ee’s) which bought us quite a bit of time. One of the things I want to ask my Texan friends… what the fuck is with the lean beef sausage? I thought maybe the BBQ joint in Austin was an aberration, but upon stopping at Buc-ee’s I got two Kolaches and both were this super lean, super dense beef sausage. Firstly sausage should be pork, but even that aside it should be a FATTY meat… because otherwise it is just like eating this dry meat log. That said compared to my beloved QuikTrip I was not terribly impressed with either my or my wife’s breakfast choices. They got a massive strike from my wife in that they did not have any donuts… they had EVERYTHING you could imagine, but no donuts. Anyways lackluster breakfast and fairly insane prices aside… we had a pretty chill trip back. I think in part it was the desire to get home that kept me going. So we stopped in Waco, Allen, Durant to hit a Gas Station, Atoka to hit an old school non-supercenter style Wal-mart and then pushed straight through to home. So we were on the road from 6:30 am until somewhere between 4:30 and 5 pm. Considerably better time than the trip out.

Highlights of Pax South

I have to say hands down the best thing to come out of Pax South was getting to meet my long time friend, guildie, and podcasting compatriot Ashgar in person. There are always those awkward moments when you see someone in the flesh that you already know their vocal mannerisms as your mind adjusts to seeing a body attached to them… but that faded extremely quickly. I snapped a photo of him dominating a cool indie game, and I believe it was snapped without him really knowing I took it… but considering he didn’t seem to mind the picture from yesterday going ahead and posting it anyways. For the last several years this man has been one of my closest friends, and I cannot wrap up the magic that was meeting him in person and realizing that yup he is in fact exactly like how I expected him to be in the flesh. I am of course sad that we only got to hang out that one day… but it was a pretty awesome day.

While I didn’t stop and take pictures of many of them… I have to say seeing all the people dressed up as things they loved was another huge plus of the experience. The entire convention has this entire vibe of “everything is awesome”. The past year has been a rough spot for gamers as a whole, and I was pleasantly surprised that I did not witness any creepy or reprehensible behavior. I did witness a socially awkward kid addressing a woman dressed as Teemo as “hot teemo” but a random guy from the crowd stepped up to say “man you are being a little creepy” and the socially awkward kid apologized and walked away. The thing that made me the happiest were the pairs of fathers and daughters roaming around the convention… when you could tell the daughter was the one who was really excited to be there. Pax South gave me a lot of hope for the future, and I am sure there were bad things that came out of the con, like there are anywhere… but it did not at least seem to be super prevalent. The photo to the side was so spectacular that I stopped and asked the guy if he minded me taking it. For those who are not familiar… this is a spot on “Old Gregg” from The Mighty Boosh. To make things even better… he pretty much nailed the Old Gregg voice and mannerisms as well. Was kinda bummed that he did not offer me warm baileys from a shoe.

Another moment that was absolute magic was sitting in the crowd waiting for the Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns announcement. I am not even a fan of Guild Wars 2 really… and I even felt pumped to see what was going on. They had left these inflatable “thunder sticks” with the Guild Wars 2 logo on them.. and folks were using them to great benefit. The noise was deafening so I attempted to take a video to give folks an example. Moments before Jennifer Hale took the stage the crowd had started a slower rhythmic thump which was awesome. I’ve seen a number of expansion announcements before but it is difficult to grasp the hype of the moment while watching a twitch stream from the comfort of your home. I was roughly six to eight rows back in the dead center of the auditorium and the excitement was just infectious. I have no clue if I will play Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns at launch, but having Jennifer Hale come out to work up the crowd was an awesome choice. She as always is a badass. Even if I don’t play the game, I am happy I got to participate in its announcement.

Belle of the Ball

I have to break this photo out again, because it makes me so happy to have a picture of Rae, Ash and Me playing Gigantic. This game was really my own personal “best in show”, in part because it was not something I expected to like at all. They really did an outstanding job both in the staging of the product, their booth, and building buzz around the convention. They also had what looked to be a pretty awesome party Saturday night. I swung by for a bit to say hi, but knowing I had a long drive ahead of me I simply did not stay for long. That party honestly was the only time during the entire weekend that crowds got to me… but that was in part due to the fact that it was quite literally standing room only. Finding enough free space to move around between the various areas of the room was a bit of a challenge and folks had spilled out onto the nearby balcony as well. Everyone I dealt with from Motiga the company behind Gigantic was simply awesome and welcoming. It was so many things that made them my pick of the show, for starters it is a game I had no real interest in but only sat down to play it due to my personal connection to Lonrem who was helping them out that weekend. The booth downstairs was impressive, and really dominated the floor which is saying something considering both Twitch and Intel had some pretty intense booths as well. On top of that… the lines to play this game were insane. At one point Saturday the line almost wrapped around twice. I’ve never been one to watch other people play games… I don’t watch a lot of twitch unless the caster is a friend of mine. While my circle of friends are big into watching the LCS play in League… I get bored within a few minutes of a match starting. However at various points during the weekend I found myself hanging out upstairs in the scrimmage room just watching the various teams playing. I found myself drawn to this game in ways I can’t quite grasp.

Largely I think this is in part because the game is visually exciting to watch. There is constant action and the characters are animated beautifully. Every attack you perform feels important, because there is weight to the animations that make them feel epic. Another huge thing for me was just how “at home” I felt with the controls. During the first match I picked up the controls of The Margrave within a few seconds and landed the first kill of the game. It felt and controlled exactly like I thought that character should. In my second game I wanted to try a champion, only to find it was already taken… so picked Roland on a whim. I don’t normally like ranged characters, but I felt Roland’s mid to short range game play compelling with the hookshot escape mechanism to get away when things went bad. So there I was playing a ranged character and loving it, in spite of it going against everything I traditionally like in games. I have a feeling I could probably pick up ANY character and find something I liked about it. The skill sets just seem to have a lot of depth to them, and the various specializations give players way to tweak them and make them their own. I am really looking forward to seeing more of this game as it moves forward towards the planned late 2015 release.