Grand Experiment Archives - Page 65 of 200

Sell Me on Warlords

November 16, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat 31 – Endless Legend of Draenor

Last night we recorded yet another episode of AggroChat, and I was joined by Ashgar, Kodra and Tam. Still no signs of Rae, but she has been absent in a lot of things lately. I think she is just going through one of those periods of seclusion, that I occasionally find myself in. I went into last night not thinking we had a whole lot to talk about, but once again we managed to ramble on for an entire show. This week Ashgar, Kodra and Tam have been spending some time playing Endless Legend a relatively new 4X game that spawned from a rather steam early access program. From what it sounds like it is a really interesting take on the traditional civilization game model. Throughout the discussion it reminded me in no small part to Age of Wonders but with more original fantasy race combinations.

Thanks to a sale on Steam Tam delved into the rather critically acclaimed Shadows of Mordor. When I originally saw the trailer I thought… “man this is a Tam game”. He loves all things stealthy, and by the same token I thought “man this is not a Bel game”. At least the second part of that statement might have been wrong. It sounds like there is plenty of carnage and mayhem, and a super interesting nemesis system to keep players busy. Essentially if I could manage to struggle through the stealthy bits, there is probably a really enjoyable game there waiting. One of the cooler ideas is that apparently your friends nemesis characters… will join your game and hunt you down too. So in theory you could unleash some living nightmares on your friends if you end up letting them level up too much.

Finally I delve into the topic of Warlords of Draenor and my return to the game. I still stand by my original statement that if you have no interest in World of Warcraft, this expansion will do little to change that. However if you are like me and still have at least a passing interesting in the game, or have a huge vault of nostalgia towards the Burning Crusade era… this is going to be like crack. Right now I am finding the game extremely interesting, and we ramble on talking about it at length. So while I thought we didn’t have a whole lot to talk about, it turned out as the night went on that we still managed to fill up a show full of verbal faffing.

Burning Crusade Nostalgia

One of the points we landed on last night that I find extremely interesting might also be the reason why I am enjoying this expansion, but I don’t feel like someone like Tam would. Ultimately I think it depends on how you felt about your experience in Burning Crusade as a whole. For me Burning Crusade was really the expansion where I came into my own as a player, and became “Belghast”. I started my WoW raiding life as a Hunter, but that was a class I had never actually intended on playing. Originally I wanted to play a tanky paladin, but the bait and switch when they replaced the strike system with the seal system… and the fact that at low levels paladins were frustratingly slow to level solo caused some problems. I had a death in the family shortly after the launch of the game, and when I came back most of my friends had shot far ahead of me, leaving me to have to solo almost entirely.

At that point the Hunter was the king of soloing all things, and as such I picked it up and caught up to my friends rather quickly. I can’t say I disliked playing Lodin my hunter, but it just wasn’t the class I had ever intended or imagined myself playing. Then one thing lead to another, and a good friend needed a hunter for his raid… and bam I ended up becoming a raiding hunter. I loved the Late Night Raiders group of hunters, and many of them I am still close with even today. However i never really excelled as a hunter, because my heart was not fully into it. I could do better than average damage, and had decent enough reflexes and was reliable as part of a rotation… but I had no passion for it, at least not the way the other hunters did. However as I started accepting gear from the raid, I felt bound by loyalty to keep playing that character as long as they needed me.

The Raid Crash

With the launch of Burning Crusade it was this great reset button, and I seized the opportunity with both hands. I half heartedly tried to level Lodin at first, but quickly found myself exclusively playing Belghast my protection warrior, and became a much needed tank as we all leveled up. The Burning Crusade could be thought of as the great raid killer, because all of the changes… all of the moving characters around and dropping the standard raid size from 40 to 25 man ultimately was the final blow to many raids on our server that had only been limping along for some time. Here is where the perspective comes in because while I was just an admittedly well liked member of the raid… Tam was one of the leaders of it. So while I viewed everything as this grand opportunity to do the things I had always wanted to be doing… his viewpoint had to be decidedly different. I know when my second raid “No Such Raid” fell apart around me it took a lot of our me personally. I had that raid dumped in my lap, and with the figurehead in its cult of personality gone… there was really no amount of duct tape to keep the ship afloat.

So while I personally view Burning Crusade as this expansion where I got to finally move into the role that I had been designed for… others might not have quite the hopefulness that I did. I remember when the expansion hit, there were a lot of raid members that were frustrated by the gear reset. In fact they were down right mad that all of this work that they went through and effort they put into getting just the right items… was to be immediately erased the moment they stepped foot into Hellfire Peninsula. Expansion are the great equalizers… they give players the opportunity to shift focus, and pick up something that they had always wanted to play but were never given the chance to. With the launch of Warlords of Draenor I am doing just that myself. I felt it was fitting for me to be setting aside my Deathknight and once again taking up the mantle of Protection Warrior.

Sell Me on Warlords

Last night during the course of the podcast, Tam uttered the words above.. “Sell Me on Warlords”. In truth I couldn’t nor would I really want to. Warlords of Draenor is more of the same, with a prettier coat of paint and some nifty casual friendly features like the Garrison. I feel this is an expansion that only those who still begrudgingly feel love for World of Warcraft in their hearts should ever try and play. The game has some serious shortcomings still as compared to more modern MMOs. It pisses me off on an almost nightly basis that it doesn’t have a mentoring system, nor does it have a content scaling system for dungeon runs. I greatly prefer that Final Fantasy XIV sizes down the players to fit the dungeon, so that there is never a case where you straight up roflstomp the content. This came up the other night when Zeli and Jabberant started characters and used their boost to 90 to create them on Argent Dawn. Jab asked if there was a way to go back and experience the old dungeon content… and sadly unless you mean by soloing with great ease… the answer is a resounding no.

So I can’t really sell Warlords as the next best thing since sliced bread. I still think that functionally Final Fantasy XIV is a better game. That said I am happy that I don’t really have to make the choice between them, In fact I have been extremely thankful to have FFXIV that I am still deeply connected to as Argent Dawn has burned down around me. What Warlords represents is a game with the charm and grace of any Blizzard title. The recent performance issues still do not degrade the fact that the game is extremely well crafted. At the end of the day it is an old game, with a fresh coat of paint… but it is a very enjoyable game still. The content itself I am finding more enjoyable, because they took the lessoned learned with the Timeless Isle and extended them out to the world as a whole. There is so much to see and find, and so many neat rare mobs to take out along the way. It is like they gave me carefully crafted crack just for me… because I love getting interesting loot and killing interesting things. If you hold a special place in your heart for Draenor… it might be a worthwhile time to return as well. At this point I still have not actually renewed my account… but signs are pointing to that I will be doing so.

Supporting Wife

One of the recent sagas in my life that has somehow managed to stay mostly out of my blog is the ongoing issues I have had with my laptop. I feel like at this point I deserve an honorific of “laptop killer” because I seem to be exceptionally hard on them. My Asus Republic of Gamers laptop lasted about two years, and I loved it dearly… until something went wonky with the motherboard and kept it from charging the battery. Then I got the SLI configuration Lenovo y500 laptop… and I too adored it. Ultimately I think it was pretty much my perfectly laptop, until a few weeks ago I went downstairs to boot it up… and it refused to go past the Lenovo splash screen. I realized unfortunately that it was out of warranty, so I ended up posting on the Lenovo support forums.. and as of yet have not received a response.

So over the last few weeks at my wife’s urging we have been watching craigslist to see if we could find something interesting. In the past when I have been without my laptop, I have been in a state of utter panic… however this time around I have tried extremely hard to be zen about it. We saw a few interesting things but either the poster wanted more than I was willing to pay for it, or after some exchanges of texts I found out that the video card would be too underpowered for my purposes. All of this while I did not realize that my wife had also been searching craigslist on a daily basis. Thursday night she happened across a post on the Oklahoma City craigslist, for someone selling a Lenovo y580 a model slightly newer than mine… for a ridiculously cheap price.

My wife did not even bat an eye at the thought of us making a trip to Oklahoma City, entirely for the purpose of getting me a laptop from some random seller on Craigslist. I am exceptionally lucky and thankful that I have a wife that is so supportive of all of the random otherwise meaningless activities I engage in on a daily basis. She knows all of this is important to me… and while she doesn’t always grasp the reason why… she constantly surprises me at just how much she is willing to do in support of my madness. So yesterday went took a two hour trek to Oklahoma City, looked over the laptop… and today it is sitting beside me downloading various things. Of course we made a trip through all of the Half Priced Books stores in the area, since we don’t have those in Tulsa… so it was not entirely about the laptop. Still I am extremely thankful to have a partner willing to jump through so many hoops for my happiness.

Amon’s Pants

November 15, 2014November 14, 2014 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff Episode 2

Since I was sick yesterday I decided to go ahead and wrap up the last bits of editing needed to push the latest episode of Bel Folks Stuff out the door. While editing I had this strange trip into the past, as I had recorded the podcast a few weeks ago. We talked about news… in speculative terms that have long since been resolved. So my important lesson is that I really should not sit in a show as long as I have with this series. The end result feels a little strange, like we are looking into the past and seeing what our thoughts were like on a subject a couple of weeks ago. In any case it was an enjoyable episode to record, and I am fairly proud of this side project as a whole. However it is causing me to rethink my plans to record the next episode now… that I wouldn’t actually release until mid December.

In this episode I am joined by the illustrious Rowan Blaze of the I Have Touched the Sky blog and a frequent guest on the Beyond the Veil podcast covering The Secret World. In an interesting change to the format of the first show… we also had a second guest with us… thought due to some technical constraint she was not extremely chatty. Scooter is Rowan’s awesome wife and constant companion both in game and out. Since one of the more interesting tidbits of his blog is the fact that he is almost always chronicling their adventures together rather than apart. He suggested we include her in the discussion, and I think it turned out to be a fairly brilliant idea. Once again there was not a really strict format, and as I said before… some of the information is a bit dated now… but in any case I think it was a good effort well worth your time.

Amon’s Pants

In the weeks after the release of the 2.4 patch, I have been spending most of my time in Syrcus Tower. On the average night I have been running it between 2 and 5 times an evening. At this point I can literally run the place in my sleep… and on more than a few of the runs I am pretty sure I dozed off at some point around Sylla and finally woke up when we were taking down Amon. I’ve been running the raid for several reasons… but primarily to complete the ilevel 100 dragoon set. I started off with extremely good luck, gathering up most of a set within the first few nights. This all had a side benefit of also gathering up quite a few Sands and Oils and enough Unidentified Allagan Tomestones to outfit an army of alts. I reached a point where all that was left were the pants, and that had been the state I was in for the last three weeks. I managed to see them drop a few times, but in all three of those occasions… there was another dragoon and the RNG gods decided to smite me.

Normally speaking Syrcus Tower goes extremely smoothly, as most of the server has reached a point where they are using it as a way to farm oils and sands… and the occasional piece of alternate job gear. In truth most of these runs are actually rather friendly, with folks willing to lend a hand to those just learning. This particular run however was the exact opposite of the spirit I normally experience. For a moment I thought that maybe I was in another game, because I saw the same sort of petty name calling and infighting that I had experienced so many times in the World of Warcraft Looking for Raid tool. It took us no less than four times to finally be able to beat Amon… and when we did there sitting in the loot window were my pants. This time however there were no other dragoons in my party to ruin my day. Never again do I have to run Syrcus Tower as a Dragoon… but that just means I will likely start running it as a bard and working on that set of gear. I might have an issue with grinding things.

Garrisons are Great

I reached a point last night with my Garrison where I finally decided it was a pretty amazing thing. Not that you can really clearly make out what I am doing in the above screenshot… but this is Belghast my Warrior Engineer Enchanter… mining ore. For years I have struggled with my decision to level both enchanting and engineering on the same character. The lack of mining has always been something I have struggled with… but there is a long story behind how I ended up in this predicament. Primarily Belghast started his life as an Enchanter/Tailor because that was a combination of trade skills that I was missing. Then I got serious about raiding… and hit a drought when our raid was clearing Tier 5 content in Burning Crusade. I could not for the life of me get a helm upgrade… and there sitting on the crafting table was the insanity of engineering goggles. At that point they were Tier 6 equivalent… so I made the decision to gather up all the resources and in a single afternoon I dropped tailoring and leveled engineering to the then cap.

While the mine respawn seems extremely long… it still gives me access to gather ore and slowly progress my engineering a little bit while I level. Additionally I am finding the follower missions to be extremely enjoyable. Last night I managed to reach rank two with my town hall, which allowed for a larger selection of plots. As such I now have placed an Engineering plot, Enchanting Plot, replaced the Barracks with a Dwarven Bunker, and kept the Inn with the hopes of upgrading it to rank 2 and recruiting random followers. Essentially on Belghast I am pretty much trying to go with all the “killing stuff in the world has interesting effects” buildings. Since well… I like charging around the map killing things. My hope is that with things like the Dwarven Bunker giving me an increased chance of getting Rares and Epics… I will actually get some stuff I can use. I feel like I have a much larger post entirely devoted to Warlords of Draenor in me, so I will save further information for tomorrows post. Needless to say I am enjoying myself.

That Dad is Okay

I really did not talk much about this next thing, but today I am thankful that my father made it through surgery fine and seems to be improving. For the last several months my father has had a rather scary condition that they originally thought was causing his eyeball to swell up in size. After much investigation, and a slew of specialists it was determined that what was actually happening was that his eye was being pressed forward… giving it the appearance of growth. As it got worse however, he lost his ability to do most things like drive… as ultimately he was always trying to manually reconcile the two images he was seeing at all times. He tried not to let on that it bothered him, but as the months drug on you could tell he was absolutely miserable.

Finally this week a specialist provided a plan of attack, and he went from having a consultation on Tuesday to having full blown surgery on Thursday. Thankfully everything went as planned and to the best of anyone’s knowledge there were no complications. I talked to dad over text this morning and his vision continues to improve. In fact I was shocked that moments after the surgery he was able to see normally again and read signs. It has been a scary time for my family, not knowing quite what was going to happen. As such I am so thankful that things turned out well. One of my biggest fears is the loss of my sight, and I know my father shares that fear. While he never wanted to let on just how frightened he was… I am sure he must have been. I am also thankful that once again we get to share our love of books.

Game Launches

November 14, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Chocobo

I have to start off this mornings post by showing off my pride and joy. Some time ago Final Fantasy XIV put in a player reward system for recruiting new players. Since then I have had a number of folks use codes to get themselves a +25% xp helm while leveling. It seems as though one of them has finally reached the 90 days of subscription time point because in my mailbox there was sitting a Draught Chocobo Whistle. This is a two player mount allowing any group member to hop up on the back of your Chocobo with you. What makes it even more awesome is the fact that it does not scale down for small races. This means unlike my real chocobo… this one towers over the landscape making me feel epic. In theory it can’t scale as it has to support the largest of the player models… the Roegadyn.

If my calculations are correct this wonder of nature is thanks to the very awesome Solaria Neferim aka @CatInGlasses. The only sad thing is that I could not bring myself to wait until she logged into use it. It would have been fitting if my first passenger was her. In any case I am super grateful to have this awesome mount, and while I have already thanked her multiple times… I figured I would also post about it here in my blog. There are a few times where this mount will come in extremely handy… as did my two player rocket in World of Warcraft. Supposedly when they put in the marriage system they are also adding in a mount from going through the “Eternal Bond” ceremony. I am hoping they allow same sex marriage… which I believe they have already said they would. Thalen and I are already talking about gaming the system… because we like free mounts.

Game Launches

Yesterday morning while I slept the second dark portal to Draenor opened, letting players spill into the unspoiled planet to begin the Warlords of Draenor expansion. So as I slept and while I worked folks ground away madly trying to level to 100. By the time I reached home last night two of my guildies had managed to push across the line and ding 100. One of course questions why exactly they rushed to hit the finish line, given that they just spent over a year waiting on new content… but that is beside the point. For the most part the servers were largely unstable last night which has lead to much raging on the forums. Maybe it is just that I have lived through so many of these at this point, that I just expect things to go poorly. Blizzard is claiming that a major Distributed Denial of Service Attack is going on against their servers. It may very well be, considering that they came out against GG rather vocally at Blizzcon… and those folks seem to really like resort to this sort of behavior. By the same token it seems that every game launch lately has claimed to have a DDoS, which is a handy excuse because it means it is out of the companies control.

Ultimately at this point while I understand the frustration of the players, and I feel like Blizzard should have been better prepared… most game launches are just not smooth at all. Trying to be prepared for a stampede of wildebeests hitting your server, knowing that in a few weeks time most of them will have disappeared… feels like sheer madness. I think companies have done the math and realized that it is simply better for them to weather the first few days, because the most demanding players aren’t likely to be sticking around in any case. The players who are in it for the long haul will sit there waiting out the issues and keep plugging away slowly. Ultimately the problems seem to be revolving around the new systems they introduced like the Garrisons… and given time patches will arrive and problems will be fixed. It has been years since there has been a significant problem in World of Warcraft that was not remedied within days if not hours. All of this said, given the debacle that was the Diablo III launch… you would think they would be better prepared for the onslaught.

Slowly Plugging Away

I had apparently quit messing around with the Warlords Alpha before they put in the Tanaan Jungle “fight for the dark portal” sequence. I have to say I am sufficiently impressed. The arrival through the Dark Portal feels like you storming into a new world, and establishing a foothold. When we first stepped through the Dark Portal into Outland… the war was already waging and we were but a pawn in the larger plan. This time we are a hero of the alliance and feel crucial to the war strategy. Some folks have a problem with this, but I have enjoyed the fact that my stature seems to keep improving from expansion to expansion. If you contrast the openings of Wrath where we were very much still a trooper, to the opening of Pandaria where we start as just another soldier and elevate towards a significant hero over the course of the first few zones. Warlords of Draenor feels like it is aware of that past and builds upon it.

The other thing that the introduction does extremely well is introduce you to the title characters of this expansion… the Warlords of Draenor. One by one you encounter the various characters from the wallpaper as you fight to gain purchase in this new realm. By the time you finally reach Shadowmoon Valley or if you are Horde Frostfire Ridge… there is a sense of urgency that you must prepare for the incoming Iron Horde invasion. The game does a good job of instilling the player with a sense of purpose and a reason why they are here in the first place. Unfortunately a lot of this was completely wrecked by the fact that the servers were barely playable last night. There was a point fairly early on where I got completely derailed by the fact that entire regions of the map were locked in a time frozen state. Moving forward into another region would suddenly allow time to catch up, all of which became extremely disconcerting… but I am sure over the coming days this will clear up.

Poetics Ho!

Instead of hanging out and waiting on the servers to improve, I logged figuring I would lessen the server load by at least one… and played some Final Fantasy XIV. I managed to pull together an Expert Roulette group with my friend Spiral Sun and Warenwolf healing. This and a couple of Syrcus Tower runs managed to push me to my goal of 825 tomestones of poetics, and the Ironworks Trousers of Fending. This takes Belghast Sternblade my character on Cactuar to ilevel 111 which makes me extremely happy. In addition to that I managed to pick up another Sands of Time and another Oil of Time, which will always come in handy. The only negative thing is that I still have yet to get the Dragoon pants from Amon. At this point it is more a point of pride than anything, because I have more than enough Tomestones of Soldiery to just buy that set of pants. For the time being I figured I would just save up until I hit 1300 and get another weapon… since the 110 weapon seems to be the most beneficial item you can really get.

I still need about 100 Poetics bookrocks to cap for the week, but a few more expert roulettes and I will be there without much issue. Right now my weekend is going to be a bit of an odd one. Tomorrow we are travelling to Oklahoma City to look at a laptop. A few weeks ago mine started having issues, and in spite of all of my trouble shooting… and posting on the Lenovo forums… I have yet to find an answer to resolve it. Unfortunately it is also about six months out of warranty. I did however like it so much that I am looking at a slightly newer model. The cool thing is that the second video card that is in my current laptop, will fit in nicely with this new model, as well as give me a swappable BluRay drive. In any case I am doubting I will get in much play time tomorrow other than what I happen to do during our normal podcast time.

Perspective and Experience

This morning I am thankful for the gift of perspective and past experiences. There have been more than a few rage-y posts that I have made over the years regarding the launch of new games and new expansions. The one that I remember the most recently is the 1017 debacle that was the launch of Final Fantasy XIV. After a point it becomes easier to resign yourself to the mantra “this too shall pass”. Companies always fix problems, server loads always lessen, and leveling is not a race. I think one of the smartest things that Blizzard could have done was remove the concept of a World and Server first for the purpose of leveling. It encourage players to engage in self destructive behavior, burning themselves out within hours of a new expansion releasing. My hope is that while there are obviously some players rushing headlong towards oblivion… that this will cause players to level at a more sedate pace.

While the server frustrates are real, and they seem epic at this point… I am thankful for the perspective that in the grand scheme of things… this can’t even be termed as a rough launch. With the recent launch of Rift’s Nightmare Tide expansion… I quite literally lost 24 hours of progress made on my characters and tradeskills when they suffered a catastrophic hardware failure that caused a rollback. With the launch of Final Fantasy XIV they were so wholly unprepared for its success that the game did not even include a queue system, and players were force to set up hardware macros to keep trying to log in… and as such unintentionally DDoSing the lobby servers. When World of Warcraft initially launched it was a good solid month before the game was really reliably playable. I remember waiting thirty minutes in the mines around Elwynn forest for loot from a kobold corpse to show up in my inventory.

Sure you might have a queue on your server, but it is nothing compared to the reported 20 hour login queues that players experienced during the recent launch of ArcheAge. Nor does it really compare to the fact that when the Landmark paid alpha rolled out… I rebuilt my claim four separate times before I actually managed to get one that stuck around for more than a day… as they kept having to wipe the voxel data due to bugs that caused corruption. Admittedly… that was an alpha, but one players paid to get into… and caused equal amounts of frustration. All of these things taken into account… I can’t even call this a bad launch yet. Granted over the coming days things are either going to improve… or they are going to get drastically worse. In either case I will re-evaluate, but for the time being I am thankful to have the presence of mind to just go play something else for awhile.

Collaborate Not Compete

November 13, 2014 by Belghast

For Azeroth

Last night while I slept Warlords of Draenor launched in the United States. Once again the launch time was based on Pacific Standard Time meaning that it occurred at 2 in the morning for me. I actually got to see some play last night from Qelric, due to the fact that this time it actually launched ahead of time for our European friends. I think it is pretty awesome that finally it launched for them at the same time it was slotted to launch in other territories, it just meant that they technically got a head start. In part I think this decision was influenced by the fact that with this expansion they have completely removed the concept of world and server firsts. So while folks are hustling around like mad, presently there are nine people online in guild for example… there really isn’t much of a broader point to it.

I think removing the world and server firsts was a good step, but I think it is so ingrained into the Warcraft culture to rush headlong towards the finish line. My hope is that this will at least cause some of the players to slow down and enjoy the journey. That said I realize I will probably level quickly… because I always seem to level quickly. This is more of a necessity this time around since I am actively juggling two different games and trying to be available for grouping in both. Unfortunately I will not really get to experience Draenor until after work, though I have popped in this morning to at least take a screenshot of the trio standing outside the Dark Portal. I must admit that while I played in Alpha… nothing I did actually felt real. This time around I will be actually working on things like Garrisons permanently, so I think a lot of the stickiness of this expansion will have more effect.

Awesome Communities

The other day I made a connection that I had failed to grasp until then, when a friend from twitter pointed something out to me. For weeks I have been talking about just how amazing the community has been playing Final Fantasy XIV. It is the little things, like the fact that the other morning I zoned into North Shroud looking for the B Rank Phecda. It has been common place for me to /shout in zone asking if anyone has seen the spawn. I had a pretty quick response from a player who not only gave me the location, but also hung out at the spawn point to help me kill it… even though she didn’t need the kill. Then a good ten minutes later, another person sent me a tell asking if I still needed it, because they just ran past the big bear. This little Vignette plays out over and over… and I have added so many random strangers to my friends list through casual interaction like this. There is this global sense that we are all in things together that I cherish.

If I had to rattle off the four best server communities I have been part of it would have to be Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, Landroval in Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World (mega server), and Antonia Bayle in Everquest II. In each case there have been so many positive random encounters that make living in those worlds enjoyable. I’ve had completely random strangers run up to me in Bree on Landroval offering me crafted goods to help my leveling process. I’ve had folks offer me a group during the various Everquest II holiday events, that then turn into multiple hour long treks through the world. I’ve had random strangers stop me in the Secret World to tell me that they liked my outfit, and ask where I got various bits of it. These casual interactions remind me of the way servers used to feel back during the early days when the MMOs were a little less “massive”.

Collaborate Not Compete

It was around this time in our conversation that my friend pointed a thread of connection between all of these games that I had never really noticed myself. None of those games have real and meaningful faction rivalries. Sure in The Secret World and Everquest II you have certain alliances, but largely this work out to be personal choices. Being Templar versus being Illuminati is largely just a flavor choice, since from the moment you get out of London or New York you are grouping together and communicating freely. Games like Final Fantasy XIV and Lord of the Rings online don’t even have these artificial divisions. From the moment you start playing any of these games, you are instilled with this spirit that all of the players are ultimately battling something more sinister than they can imagine. So it makes perfect sense to lend another player a helping hand along the way, since you are not competing against each other in any meaningful way.

There might be a certain measure of self sorting going on when it comes to players of these games as well. Since none of the four really have a strong PVP aspect, that flavor of super competitive player is just not interested in playing them. That means you are left with a more collaborative “role-playing server crowd” type player. Ultimately this shared struggle, and spirit of cooperation has always been why I have self sorted myself onto Role-Playing servers, because in general this type of player is more prevalent there. Essentially what I am coming to realize is that the awesome communities that I have held out as paragons against normal online gaming horribleness… all exist for pretty similar reasons. They are all environments that teach the players to get along with each other, rather than compete.

Collaborative Environments

To tie into today’s post, I am thankful that games exist that teach players to work together rather than work against each other. So many games set up an artificial conflict between players, and try desperately to draw them into it. As I said in my “Sandboxes and Sheep” post, these artificial faction boundaries have no meaning to me personally. I have no real emotional ties to the Horde or the Alliance, other than the fact that I mostly chose Alliance because that is where the Dwarves were. However this decision did not immediately make me hate the horde, in fact I have 11 Alliance characters on Argent Dawn… and 11 Horde characters on The Scyers… the realm that is connected to Argent Dawn. Over years of playing on that server I made just as many friendships across the faction barrier as I did within my own pool of players. In fact one of my key problems with World of Warcraft has always been that it made us choose sides in a war that was largely meaningless to us.

All of this is the reason why I am thankful that there are games that have transcended faction. I was hugely impressed when Rift decided to abandon the artificial conflict with their “Faction as Fiction” patch removing the hard lines between Defiant and Guardian. I think as a whole that game has been greatly improved for doing so. More than that however I am thankful for the games that never put up those walls in the first place. Eorzea is this wonderful land where the races don’t always get along, but they are not openly warring either… because the writers have created a threat so great that in its face… squabbles seem petty. After talking this whole situation through, I feel like this sort of environment really does breed a player willing to help others freely. It is for that spirit, that I am thankful for. If you are actively making your community better, you are doing awesome work.