Grand Experiment Archives - Page 51 of 200

Ignorance Was Bliss

January 13, 2015 by Belghast

Tale of Two Raids

Last night I spent the evening in Final Fantasy XIV with my raid of friends working our way through figuring out Turn 1 of the Second Coil of Bahamut… that is universally known as “Turn 6”. I know its confusing, but the “Coil of Bahamut” all three parts are treated as though they were one big raid, in spite of the fact that they do occur in three different locations. One of the interesting things about our Monday night group is that we specifically try and do as little research as possible before going into the fights. A lot of the joy we have found has come from figuring out the mechanics on the fly and last night was no different. Granted last night specifically it probably cost us a kill, since we had the boss down to the 10% territory and simply ran out of time for more tries because we spent so much time trying to figure out how to even do the fight.

On the other hand you have the raid group that I am part of that meets tonight in World of Warcraft. There we attempt to do all research humanly possibly, watching video of the fight from multiple angles and reading as much information about the fight as we can to be prepared for anything. I can’t really say which way is better, since they are so vastly different. I feel like maybe way number one works better in the long run, because so many times I feel like there is a lot of conflicting information when you attempt to “research everything ever”. While it might take a lot of otherwise meaningless wipes, we in the first method we seem to ONLY learn the way that works for us. Whereas in the second method we seem to have to discard a ton of information before we can find the path that actually works for our group.

Ignorance Was Bliss

This has the side effect of playing into a theme that has been running in my head for some time, that maybe “more information” isn’t always “better”. As gamers we have started demanding almost absolute transparency from the developers of the games we play. We want to know the moment something is being planned, and how it is going to be implemented… and for the love of god how it ultimately will effect all of the work we have done to that point. We get so caught up in the minutiae of the games we play, and sites like MMO Champion are all too happy to data mine all the tid bits of information even before the companies can tell us. It is human nature to love feeling like we have insider information, but if everyone knows… is any of it really insider information? The problem is I think we get lost in a sea of data points and miss the fact that the entirety is far more beautiful than the assemblage of parts.

I love Hotdogs and Bologna, but my continued love of both is dependant upon me not getting hung up on the fact that in both cases they are essentially a congealed slurry of all of the meat parts that have been deemed “unprofitable” for sale in other forms. Sometimes it is absolutely better to not know how the things you love are made, and as a result I feel like knowing all of this information sets us up for a great pitfall. There is a gulf between what we as players THINK happens behind the scenes at a game company and what actually does happen. Just like oil prices can crash if someone murmurs about rumored political problems in an oil rich reason… our enjoyment of the game can also come crashing down if we hear rumors about “problems at a studio”.

Trying to Find Magic

I have been fortunate or unfortunate… depending on your point of view to have had many friends that work for different game studios. As a result I get to see a completely different side of the industry that most players can see the effect off, but not really understand the way things actually work. The above picture if of Belgrod Sternblade in Elder Scrolls Online, a character based on my long line of “Bel”something characters in the games I play. It is awesome to have a namesake in a game, but I am not sure if it was worth the price I paid by being inside the circle of knowledge regarding ESO before it launched. By the time the game released I had been playing the game in one form or another for over a year at that point. We as players have the tendency to latch onto the way things used to be, rather than the current state and I was absolutely guilty of that. From a polish and functional standpoint the game improved leaps and bounds from the moment I started playing… to the moment it launched.

The problem is I could not let go of the fact that I liked the user interface so much better several revisions before the version that actually launched. Similarly there are players that cannot let go of the fact that we never got the “Path of the Titans” alternate progression path in Cataclysm, or the Dance Studio in Wrath of the Lich King. When a developer gives us too much information, especially when features are in a state of flux and “not quite ready for primetime” they are only setting up for player disappointment later when for whatever reason that feature is not nearly as shiny as the “oversold” version. The fact that I played Elder Scrolls Online through so many revisions absolutely damaged my overall enjoyment of the game when it launched. So much of the content felt “old” by then, when in reality the game had only been out a few weeks.

Box Art Decisions

As a child I can remember purchasing games on a regular basis without any prior knowledge other than the fact that it “existed”. Admittedly the box art and the images on the back of the box played a massive role in my choosing habits. This caused me to miss some really awesome games… I am looking at you Mega Man with the worlds worst box art. However there were other games that I picked up because they had awesome artwork… but had some really rough edges that I came to love, only because I was forced to sit there and “enjoy” the $50 that I had just spent. As such games like Lagoon that admittedly have a ton of problems… are ones I think upon fondly because I stuck with the game long enough to work past the rough spots. Sure there was the fact that I had sunk my money into a game that was maybe not as awesome as I thought it would be… but I feel like I also had more of a willingness to put up with the rough spots of a game to try and find the good in it.

I feel like we are bombarded on a daily basis with reason why we “shouldn’t” like this or that, and I myself do it constantly. I started down a diatribe on twitter yesterday about how much I disliked our Capitol cities in Ashran, and how they feel so much worse than any expansion city to date. At no point did I mean that the fact that Ashran has shitty cities is adversely effecting my game. To be truthful I simply don’t go there apart from picking up “roll tokens” once a week, and then maybe if my hearthstone is down. Otherwise I spend my time in my Garrison, or using the Shrine in Pandaria as my transportation nexus. The fact that Blizzard has not given me sufficient reason to care about the new “main” city doesn’t stop me from enjoying other aspects of the game. That said I enjoyed blowing off steam about a small thing that was bothering me. The problem is… my voice just added to the chorus of negativity surrounding a game that has been out several months at this point. I feel bad because ultimately I am still having a fun time in part because I am trying not to get hung up on the small details and keep looking for the larger beauty.

Priestcraft

January 12, 2015 by Belghast

Podcasting Weekend

This weekend was a little bit crazy in that I recorded podcasts both Saturday and Sunday. In theory had things not fallen through I would have actually recorded a third one Friday. Podcasting is one of those things that is both soothing and stressful at the same time. I like having conversations and hitting the record button, but the follow up that results in editing what I just recorded… that can be the stressful part. I feel like Podcasting is very much a labor of love, that you either get or you don’t get. I would be curious to find out how many avid podcasters are also avid listeners of talk radio in one form of another. I personally have my car tuned to NPR pretty much 24/7 and donate each year during their big fund drive. I see the shows that I record as a bit of a logical extension of that.

The strange thing about once you start podcasting… is that it seems like you could end up recording on someone’s show every single day if you really wanted to. I’ve had to turn down several “gigs” because I felt like I was just spreading myself too thin. In fact this is one of the things that I talked about last night when recording the Bel Folks Stuff podcast with Petter Mårtensson. Ultimately I would love to be able to say yes to every single offer I got to co-host or guest host a new thing. I am in love with the idea that I am in essence making radio on subjects that are important to me. For the time being I am going to stick with weekly AggroChat, monthly Bel Folks Stuff and then guesting as the opportunities present themselves. I don’t think I have the energy or bandwidth to ever try and add a third permanent or semi permanent show to the lineup.

Priestcraft

My primary goal for this week was to be able to push my hunter Lodin to 100 and run LFR before the reset. This was achieved Friday and I was able to knock out the LFR Saturday morning to some pretty phenomenal success as I wrote about in yesterdays blog post. After completing that mission my goals shifted to a new target. There are two classes that I never though I would have at high levels.. the first of which is the Mage and as such I used my Warlords free 90 to get one. The second class however is the Priest, and when I came back to World of Warcraft at the tail end of Cataclysm… I had been gone long enough to qualify for a free level 80. This character I decided to make my tailor, and during Pandaria I managed to get it to 85 where it pretty much sat as a tradeskill alt parked in the Dwarven quarter of Stormwind. With the garrison system, currently the only craft that I do no have access to is tailoring, so I set my mind to fixing that.

As a result Saturday and Sunday I spent my time in game, apart from that doing my “Wizard Chores” working on my priest. I started off leveling as Discipline, because the last time I played the game this felt like the “survival” option for leveling. Things died relatively quickly and I didn’t spend all of my time healing myself back up after every fight. Shadow for whatever reason had never actually worked for me. Upon coming back however I found leveling as Discipline to be pure pain. I managed to get from 85 to 87 before I finally said screw it and decided to give Shadow a try again. Whatever changes and tweaks they have made, seem to have greatly improved shadows survival and I managed to knock out 87 through 88 in no time. So before I went to sleep last night, I had dinged 100 and equipped the set of Timeless Isle items that I had sitting in my bank. It is shocking just how many of these tokens I still have laying around, more than enough for all of my alts.

Pandaria Frustrations

The recent leveling excursions on both Lodin my hunter and Belglorian my priest have made me realize just how much I did not enjoy Pandaria as far as expansions go. Mind you it is not worth $60 to me to be able to skip it, but I am definitely finding myself taking the shortest possible path to get there. Right now my leveling process goes a little something like this. I try and milk as much leveling time out of Jade Forrest as I can get, because overall I like that zone about the best of anything to offer in Pandaria. My ultimate goal is to get to 87 through whatever means possible, and in theory most of the time I can hit that well before I leave Jade Forrest, worst case I have to do the quests leading up to Halfhill with Chen and LiLi to get there. Upon dinging 87 I ignore whatever quest line I happen to be on and make a beeline for the Path of a Hundred Steps, and take the quests there that lead you into Kun Lai Summit.

From this point on I am only in a zone as long as is required to unlock the quest that takes me to the next zone. So in Kun Lai I complete Binan village, Westwind Rest, Shado-Pan Fallback… which then gives me access to Winter’s Blossom granted me the quest chain that starts Townlong Steppes. In Townlong I don’t have an exact path really, I am essentially just waiting for the flight path to the Serpent Spine to open up as that grants access to the quest chain leading to the Dreadwastes. Generally speaking this means I will need to complete Gao-Ran Battlefront and Rensai’s Watchpost quests in Townlong before moving into the Dreadwastes. The goal of this path is to keep moving every time you can go into an area with quests for higher level mobs. Higher level quests mean better gear, better experience and a shorter amount of time in that zone before moving on. You have to essentially throw out all ideas of being a completionist with this method.

Granted this is something I only do to steamroll up alts to the level cap. When I am working on my main or characters in general that I deeply care about… I end up doing everything and prodding my way through zones. At this point however I have leveled so many characters through Pandaria that I just want to rip the bandaid off as fast as possible and move on to quest content that I am not bored with yet. In theory I will have to do Pandaria two more times on my alliance characters, and an unknown number of times on Horde characters if I actually get around to leveling some. I am not sure what it was about Pandaria that made me dislike it, but I have similar feelings about the Cataclysm. Draenor on the other hand has been awesome. I can choose to be a completionist and move my way through the content more methodically, or I can jump every two levels to a new zone to maximize my experience gain. There is no need to try and complete X number of hubs to unlock the hubs in the new zone. I feel like Cataclysm and Pandaria were both failed experiments in “quest gating” content, and my hope is that Draenor will become the new norm for future expansions of being less particular about completing certain quests before moving on.

The Luckiest Hunter

January 11, 2015 by Belghast

On Nightmares

Last night my wife and I apparently had fitful dreams. This morning she got up first and I had somewhat woken up by the time she returned to bed. She said she had nightmares, and at first I said I did to, but the more I thought about it… the more I questioned if I had a nightmare at all. What constitutes a Nightmare? Is it that you are dreaming about otherwise scary situations… or is it really about a loss of control. If it is the later then I most definitely did not have a nightmare, and quite honestly rarely have nightmares. This morning dreamt about a cult that had been abducting young girls, and when I attempted to get the police involved they didn’t believe me. So in true action movie fashion I took it upon myself to go track down their lair and try and rescue them.

Turned out the lair was in an abandoned cave system, maybe a mine. I worked my way through the various guards until I was in this big room and could see two people talking. The first of which I recognized as the actor Jason Alexander from Seinfeld fame. The other was like gargantuan man I somehow knew was known as the “ugly man” from a circus sideshow. He stood about eight foot tall and was covered in these disfiguring growths. Jason was yelling at him, to make sure no one got past him, and if they did there would be consequences. The big man was cowering… well at least as much as you can cower when you are eight foot tall. So I waited until Jason had left the room before stepping out into the shadows. I simply asked him his name.. too which he replied “no one ever asks my name… It’s Bob”.

I essentially reasoned with the gentle giant that what was going to happen was probably really bad and that Jason needed to be stopped. He agreed, and I snuck into the other room… originally planning on whacking him on the head with a baseball bat to disable him. But it turned out that it did not work as planned because he had some sort of metal plate in his head. Jason went to pick up a double barrel shotgun and while loading it I escaped to the earlier room… where Bob handed me what looked like an elephant gun. I drew a target on Jason and fired… taking him down… and saving the day. Sure there were tense moments… but during the dream there was never a situation where I felt out of control. So I guess the question is… was that even a nightmare? If you are wondering “Why Jason Alexander?” well best as I can tell is due to this super creepy episode of Criminal Minds where he plays this mastermind character… which is where the above image comes from.

AggroChat #39 – Pokemon, RNG and Roguevania

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat actually getting an earlier start than normal. Problem being that we were down two people. Rae had apparently fallen asleep on the couch and was not around, and Tam after moving three timezones apparently forgot how they work. We might have to sort out a better time to record in the coming weeks since there is now a three hour difference between various members of our cast. Something that I think is only going to get worse when another individual that seems likely to move out to Seatle does so. Last night it felt like one of those episodes where we didn’t have much to talk about going into it, but as the night went on we managed to gather up enough words and phrases to build a show out of it.

We covered a lot of topics from Steam being an excellent source for games that would have never likely seen the light of day, like the Japanese indie game scene, to discussing the raid fight style in FFXIV and contrasting it against World of Warcraft raiding. It always feels like we don’t talk about a lot of individual games but as I edited the podcast I kept a list jotting down the titles. Over the course of the evening we talked about Final Fantasy XIV, Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby, Rogue Legacy, Valdis Story, ittle Dew, World of Warcraft, Aquasphere and Adventure of Link and probably a handful mixed inbetween. It ended up being a good show, albeit a significantly shorter one considering we only had three people to discuss with rather than our normal five. This is the first show in a long time we have actually managed to constrain to roughly an hour.

The Luckiest Hunter

During each game and each expansion… there is one of my characters that seems to be lucky. Granted according to Tam each and every one of my characters is lucky, but I think that has more to do with his phenomenal bad luck more than my good luck. For Pandaria my lucky character seemed to be my druid. Everytime I set foot in any LFR or Raid… he seemed to get drops. This expansion it is looking to be Lodin, my hunter because yesterday in LFR I managed to get five drops with no roll tokens used… meaning I got a drop out of all but two of the bosses. I walked away with helm, bracers, gloves, boot, and a ring. When you add to the three crafted pieces I already had… I am sitting at roughly 627. I have yet to do any dungeons, so at some point I will finish the epic ring quest and get that which should help the ilevel significantly. I have once again completely skipped the heroic gearing step.

Mostly I have been doing this to prove a point. Heroics right now are not worth doing other than for achievements and the occasional Inn Quest. The daily heroic is worth a small bit of gold… the most you can possibly get is 200g and 50 Garrison resources. I can get both of those easier by simply running high level garrison missions, or using the various buildings in my garrison. In the past there was a clear reason to be running heroic content, in that you needed to run them to cap Valor that you then spent on upgrades. That system seems to be completely absent in Draenor, and as such there simply isn’t the same impetus to keep running heroics over and over. In fact as I have proven on two different characters you can pretty much skip them entirely and go straight into LFR and get your gear that way. I hope in 6.1 they give us further reason to want to run heroics, because right now the risk vs reward equation is completely broken.

Art of Quietly Leaving

January 10, 2015 by Belghast

My Happy Place

Events over the last few days have made me realize how happy my world generally is. I’ve managed to curate and carve up social media into being a place where mostly I find friendly faces staring back at me. That does not mean that we always agree or always get along swimmingly, but as I said yesterday it is a place that causes me much more joy than it does frustration. What has lead me to this realization is watching a small bit of strife happening… but as an echo. That is to say I am not actually seeing it in my own thread, but instead hinted at in the comments and tweets of the friends who do frequent mine.

First off… it sucks when someone or something is making you unhappy. That said I would like to remind everyone this morning that social media exists for our own personal enjoyment. Just because someone wants to interact with you, doesn’t mean you have an obligation to interact back especially if that person is trying to bait you into a larger fight. While I wish the block button was a more powerful tool, with its continued use folks eventually get the message that you are not going to play in their games. I’ve seen the adverse effect of a lot of “Sea-Lioning” and sooner or later said folks get tired of creating puppet twitter accounts only to be blocked. I hate when I have to block someone, but ultimately my social bubble is about my happiness and not your enjoyment, and I feel if more people understood that the “twitters” would be a happier place.

Art of Quietly Leaving

A good chunk of the most recent strife that I have seen in echo.. is that a number of high profile individuals are leaving World of Warcraft, and in theory trying to burn down the house on their way out. The “I don’t enjoy this, so I will make sure no one else does” instinct runs deep in human beings, and god knows I have been guilty of this so many times. It is something you have to struggle with. This blog has been devoted to so many posts that have a shared theme that could be summed up as “WoW Failed Me”. Over the last year and a half since I started the daily blogging challenge thing… I have worked on trying to make myself into a much more positive human being. Part of this has involved letting go of the emotion out of my choices, and trying to present a much more amiable view of the world. Sure games have frustrated me, and I have been disappointed so many times… but I try my best to post my critique in a far less ranty manner than I might have the desire to.

Burning down the house on the way out, only serves to cause chaos and strife in your community… and makes sure that it is going to be much harder to eat crow later when you return. I have said I was done with World of Warcraft so many times at this point. I seriously could not count the number of times but the most recent was mere weeks before I started playing Warlords of Draenor (though at this moment I am struggling to find the reference). The heart wants what it wants, and you never know when it is going to drag you kicking and screaming in a direction you have no intent of going. I was doing perfectly fine until I watched the damned Blizzard World of Warcraft anniversary documentary. I was assaulted with a sneak attack of feels and wound up saying “I would play only to see molten core” and that wound up turning into “I guess I am back now” before I realized it. Even for the first few weeks of playing Warlords I was adamant that I “was not back” to the point of refusing to take back the crown to the guild I started back in 2004.

Put Joy in Enjoyment

The problem with World of Warcraft is for many of us it is like a relationship in itself. It is the bad breakup or the ex that betrayed us. We are bitter and confused as to why things changed and are left asking ourselves “was it me?”. Please take the advise of someone who has quit and restarted various MMO games more times than I can count. Yes it very much is you. Sure the game is in a constant state of flux, but so are we. The situation that leads us to play changes over time. Years ago I started guild and raid leadership because I really felt like I had no control over my own life. I was in a pretty horrible job, with the most petty boss I have ever experienced. I felt like I had no control over my own fate, and as such built my own realm where I was the one in control. I had an awesome guild and it was everything that my job was not. When I left that job and found a happier one, all of the reasons why I needed to be the leader melted away, leaving me only with the stress and burden of being the one everyone looked up to.

My situation had changed, and as a result the way I related to the game had changed. Chances are if you are leaving Draenor for this or that reason… your situation has changed as well. These sort of things happen without us realizing it, and in ways that surprise us. I’ve changed the way I approach these games, and while I still love the community aspect and I love raiding as part of a team. I am also willing to walk away when something isn’t as enjoyable as it once was to me. There is no reason to keep playing a game you are not enjoying. The best revenge of the “game that wronged you” is going off and finding one that does bring you happiness. Yes everything I am saying sounds suspiciously like relationship advise… but in truth it is because for some of us this game has been a ten year long relationship. Whatever you do… don’t break everything you can on your way out the door. Be the adult in this relationship and leave quietly and on good terms, because as evidenced by my revolving door of video games.. you never know when you are going to want to come back.