Guild Leadership Archives - Page 104 of 108

Shaking the Toner

August 7, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy hopefully rested people. Last night was another toss and turn fest… because it seems as though our ceiling fan has broken, or at least is on its last leg. As a result I slept on top of the covers all last night, some of it relatively unsuccessfully. Here is hoping that I got enough sleep to prevent me from absolutely shutting down over the course of the day. Tonight is guild night so hopefully I have the steam to lead us on a wild adventure.

Guest Contributors

Some time ago a good friend of mine started posting the occasional article on my blog under the name of Ariad. However we did a pretty lousy job of messaging that the posts were coming from him and not me. As a result I feel there was some confusion as he and I do not always see eye to eye. We were talking yesterday and he is the Spock to my Captain Kirk. As a result I have created the banners above to denote when a guest contributor is making a post.

Additionally another friend had shown interest in making the occasional post. When I told him the Spock explanation above… he said that he was more like Khan. In the same way his opinions will also not 100% align with what I am saying, but I feel a breadth of different opinions is a good thing. I’ve known Sevok since the early days of Everquest 1 and have managed to keep up with him off and on through the various games I have played. I look forward to seeing the posts they come up with, I know Sev is currently working on a spin on my “A Tank Is” post from the other day about his favorite role… the pet class.

The Grand Experiment

It has been 103 days since I started what I dubbed the “Grand Experiment” and began posting something every single morning regardless if I want to or not. I have no real idea if the results have been a net positive, but I have been true to my cause and even when I was in a hotel room on vacation… I continued blogging each morning. Yesterday a friend of mine Talyn of the Pumping Irony blog asked me a little bit about my morning routine.

Essentially he stated something I have heard from myself many times before. That ultimately he felt like he just did not have that much time to post a blog post and as a result there are lapses between postings. This pretty much explains all of the lags in my posting pattern since I started the blog back in April of 2009. I would get into a pattern where I felt like I just did not have time to post, or that it came down to a choice between playing a game or posting. Every time the blog lost out to me just logging in and playing something instead.

The Routine

When I started down this path I figured I had a bit of time each morning as I drank my coffee and attempted to wake up. Previously I had been gaming a little bit to wake up, so I decided I would give that up and devote it to blogging. Since Talyn was curious about the timeframe it took me every morning I thought I would go through my average morning, in case anyone else out there was curious as well. My alarm goes off a 5:30 am and I get up and out of bed, making my way to the kitchen to fill the Keurig and turn it on. I stumble back down the hall and jump in the shower.

While I am in the shower I try to begin thinking about what I am going to post that morning and continue doing so as I get dressed. At roughly 6:00 am I go back to the kitchen… this time less of a stumble… to make a cup of coffee for myself and one for my wife as well. After delivering the cup of coffee to the bedside table I am usually upstairs and sitting at my keyboard by 6:10-6:15. Now begins the hard part. Some mornings I know exactly what I am going to write about… others I don’t have a clue in the world.

Shaking the Toner

If it is a writers block morning I try and flip through my RSS feed to see if anything arrived since I last read it that might start some thoughts percolating in my head. The opening paragraph is ultimately the same in most of my blog posts… this is less for you guys and more for me. This is my equivalent to the wind up before a pitch. Starting words coming out onto the page often times unjams the printer in my brain and causes the topics to come spilling out. Additionally the closing bit… is my way of turning off the faucet and allowing myself to transition from thinking about the blog to thinking about the work day ahead of me.

After lots of writing hackery and many trips to google image search and or launching a given game to collect screenshots… by about 6:30-6:45 I am wrapping up my post. I give it a once over, add any links I feel I might need, add categories to the post… and finally hit publish. I religiously use Microsoft Live Writer for my posts as it allows me to see visually how my post will look before I ever place it on the site. Additionally it does a lot of niceties like managing the image uploads, has in client cropping and resizing and lets me do my alignment trickery.

Finally once the post has been made I advertise it on both Twitter and Google+. Sure there are plugins that do this, and I could configure one and just make it happen automagically. However I like to tailor my post each morning towards the content platform I am advertising it on. This takes another 10-15 minutes depending on how many names I need to reference in the posts. I go downstairs, tell my wife that I love her and am heading out the door. At this point it is between 7:00 and 7:15… so after I jaunt over to QuikTrip for breakfast I get into the office between 7:30 and 7:45. From the moment I wake up to the moment I leave the house is roughly an hour and a half.

Constraints Help

Talyn’s initial comment was “Holy crap you’re fast!”, but in truth… it is the time constraint that helps me be speedy in the morning. When I do my weekend posts, they can take an hour and a half to two hours of just writing time. The difference is.. on the weekends I have all the time in the world, so I do not feel rushed to get in and get things done. However on the weekday mornings I know I have a finite amount of time that I can devote to each step. While I have an extremely flexible report time, I personally refuse to abuse this too much. I still end up as one of the first people into the office. Ultimately our core hours that we MUST be there are 9-3, and as salaried employees we can carve out our 40 on either side of that fixed point. I tend to work 7:30 to 4:30 most days, so I can blur that line a little bit and still be fine but I try never to absolutely violate it.

My Wife is Amazing

Yesterday while I was at work, my wife was out with some friends hitting a bunch of “junk stores” for lack of a better term. This was one of her last days of freedom before the start of the new school year and got roped into this adventure by another teacher friend. I was ramping up for a meeting and a got a text saying “are there any Lego sets you are looking for?”. My addiction to Lego has not really surfaced much on the blog yet, but I have always loved them. Of late I have been picking up sets whenever I found them cheapish. Apparently at one of the places they stopped they had a large number of sets that were marked down, and then had 20% discount applied on top of that.

An example… the Lego TIE Fighter is roughly $45 in the store, and they had it priced for $35… and then after the 20% discount the final price ended up a steal at $28. After many texts back and forth with pictures of different sets, I expected her to maybe come home with a TIE Fighter and something else… but instead she came home with this massive haul of sets. She spent roughly $100 and got all of the sets pictured above… 3 sets for my niece and nephew that are from the “easy to build” line… and a second Lord of the Rings Gandalf Arrives set for a friend.

It is not that my wife bought me Legos… it is that she saw them and immediately thought that I would want them. Granted this is a two way streets… I cannot count the number of times I have picked up some random item for her classroom that I happened to stumble upon while shopping without her. I just thought it was amazingly awesome that while out with friends, doing something completely out of the ordinary that she thought about me. I guess this is why we have been a successful pair for over 15 years. While I did not marry a gamer, I married an awesome nerd that “understands” my geek nature.

Wrapping Up

I need to get this wrapped up so I can get on the road. I hope this satiated any curiosities about my process that folks might have had. Additionally look for the first of the new round of guest posts to be happening in the next few days. These will be in addition to my morning posts. I don’t want to get out of the habit of writing each morning. For those in House Stalwart, be thinking about what you want to accomplish tonight. I am completely game for splitting into dungeon groups if we have a viable comp, running hunt rifts… or just doing random rifts and such to work on the guild quest. I hope you all have a great day today, and that you accomplish whatever you need to.

A Tank Is

August 6, 2013 by Belghast

When I typed out yesterdays post in my extremely groggy early morning state, I had no idea it would blow up as much as it did. It is probably one of the most interactive topics I have ever posted about on this blog. There are huge threads of comments on G+ and twitter as a result, and even here on my blog there were 10 comments. During all the exchanges yesterday, I had a suggestion from Brian “Psychochild” Green, that I expand on the topic of what exactly a tank is to me. I thought this was a pretty good idea, so here goes nothing.

A Tank Is

One of the things that came out from the last two days of discussions relating to the EQ Next class panel and the concept of removing tanking as a requirement from dungeons… is that we all have slightly different visions of what a tank is in our minds. As evidenced by so much of the discussion, for certain players a tank is just that character that has the taunt button. For me the definition goes so much further beyond the “taunt monkey”. Tank in my mind is made up of a bunch of different roles and personalities all wrapped together into a bigger package, and this is my attempt to explain each of these sub roles.

Tank As Juggernaut

A tank is in my mind a “meat shield”, an immovable wall that soaks up damage for the party. My vision of a tank is a massive heavily armored bulk that is an imposing force on the battlefield. My personal choice has always been to have as much stamina as humanly possible and as a result have a phenomenally large hit point pool and simply capable of laughing off most blows. But it is honestly completely up to the individual tank how they choose to full this role of being able to soak up a goodly amount of damage for the party saving the other members from certain death.

In various games I have seen various schemes for making this work, and I feel like going forward we should expand this role quite a bit. Traditionally you have mitigation or avoidance as the tools in this toolkit, but I am open to other methods such as a mage for example that is adept at shielding techniques or an agility based melee who is capable of moving so fast that they reduce the chance to hit. My personal preference will always be the big guy in the big armor that lumbers across the battle field like a moving rampart. However the game and to some extend player chooses to do it, this sub role is about being able to take abuse for the party.

Tank As Defender

Like I have said, Tanking for me feeds into my protective nature. I want to protect my friends and family and keep them safe. Another facet of tanking is the protector. Traditionally this has been to juggle targets to make sure that the big bad things stay off your healer and your dps, but I feel that the role is so much more than that. Ultimately the goal of the defender is to interrupt the flow of combat and impose itself in the middle of the process. This role has long been defined as the person with taunt, or the person with massive aggro generation… but quite honestly taunt is not the only tool or even the best tool in most situations.

Any ability that can reset the flow of an attack, can interrupt the flow of battle buying your healer or dps time to get out of harms way. In various games I have seen multiple ways of doing this, including slows, stuns, grip attacks, charge attacks, knockbacks, throws, and roots. All of them play a part in resetting an attack to cause the mob to change direction and focus even momentarily on the tank allowing the other party members to avoid taking the big damage. League of Legends is a prime example of a game that does not have taunt or aggro in the traditional sense. However they most definitely have tank characters. Each of them has some way of screwing up a players attack just long enough for someone else to either escape or swoop in for the kill.

Tank as General

Of all of the facets of tanking, this to me is by far the most important. A tank controls the battlefield, they make order out of chaos. The tank is the battlefield leader, controlling every aspect of combat from the pull, to the target priority order and even down to accessing the situation at hand and determining if it is time to recover after every confrontation. In the best dungeon and raid environments, the tank directs the flow of combat using the above abilities to keep other players out of harms way, and interrupt the attacks of the monsters in a pattern of their choosing.

So much of this role also is the ability to assess the risk at hand, device a strategy and execute it letting your team know what they should be doing in the situation. This encompasses not only knowing your own skills, but knowing the skills of all of the other players in the party and how best to leverage those for the ultimate win. This can always happen from “behind the lines”, but I have always felt that the flow of a grouping encounter works best when it is the “puller” directing traffic and preparing the party for what is coming. This facet of tanking really has little to do with the mechanics and more to do with the leadership of the player in the tank seat.

Tank as Mentor

Many times during combat things go horribly wrong, and since the tank is there in the heat of battle they can often times diagnose what is going wrong. In many ways the tank also acts as a battle mentor, and it is how they go about this that often times means the difference between success and failure. A tank that is willing to help the other team members with issues on the ground in a polite and not ego infused way, can rally together a defeated team into victory. A tank that passes the blame onto others always, will end up fostering a bitter environment that often ends in catastrophe for the party… or at least their repair bills.

A humble tank that shows a willingness to work with the other players to solve problems can do a good amount to set the morale of the group as a whole. Again this is a juggling act between being the forceful always right leader, and letting someone NOT directing the flow of combat become a backseat driver. A tank that is ready to assess what is going wrong, and provide constructive criticism in the form of “helpful tips” will go a lot further than one that sends down proclamations from on high. In many ways the tank is the cruise director for every outing, and unfortunately it ends up our responsibility to make sure the entire mission is flowing smoothly and that everyone is happy.

A Tank is… Complicated

Hopefully thought all of this you are beginning to see a picture that for me a Tank goes beyond simple threat and taunt mechanics. Quite honestly it is an extremely complicated role, and one that I do not take lightly. Ultimately all of this, and my protective leanings are why I do not really like tanking for pick up groups. I just don’t feel that protective towards people I do not know, and after years of bad experiences with the WoW Dungeon Finder… I simply cannot bring myself to queue as a tank for anyone but my friends and my guild.

Quite honestly I used to tank for pick up groups on a regular basis in the days before the dungeon finder. When you had to talk to players face to face in order for form a team, you were far less likely to be a complete dick to them over the course of a dungeon. Sure I encountered more than my share of haughty elitism, but that is something you can brush off much easier than outright disruptive and damaging behavior. I miss the days when in order to be successful you needed the personal skills to be able to assemble a team for your purpose. I met so many friends doing this, as contrasted with the “silent dungeons epidemic” where no one actually talks anymore.

I realize I am lamenting a bygone era… and the modern “push a button, get a group” is here to stay. However I will still build a team by hand if given the choice, and even now I prefer to draw on guild, social channels, and even random strangers in general chat over queuing up for a random dungeon. Or sadly… more often than not I just do not run a dungeon at all and resign myself to doing over world content. The dungeon finder system seems to have failed tanks like me, and the community or lack thereof that has sprung up around it. Or quite honestly… as Rowan alludes to.. the community might have just been something I had imagined all along.

Wrapping Up

Well it is the time I need to wrap this post up and get it advertised. I hope after reading it you get a much clearer picture of what exactly I mean when I say “Tank”. Last night I was completely out of sorts and didn’t really do much gameplay of any significance. I blame sleeping horribly the night before. Here is hoping that tonight I will be up to doing some funtime shenanigans again… and maybe even pull together a dungeon. I hope you all have a great day, and that everything goes smoothly.

Out to Pasture

August 5, 2013 by Belghast

I need to hustle this morning so the post may or may not be disjuncted. I had a generally lousy time sleeping last night as all sorts of odd noises kept waking me up. The end result is that I gave myself 15 more minutes to sleep at one point… and now I am probably more than 15 minutes behind schedule.

Out to Pasture

Yesterday my post about EQ next, its removal of role based combat, and my subsequent despair caused a pretty large comment storm divided up between my blog, Google+ and twitter. I have to say I had a vastly different gameplay experience than a large number of the posters. But that said it does seem like there are a massive amount of people disgruntled about tanking in general or even the concept of needing one. Rowan wrote a pretty great rebuttal with his post “Thanks, But no Tanks”.

I feel in many ways like I am being put out to pasture, like I am some relic of a bygone era. It reminds me of the same kind of feeling I had when Warriors in World of Warcraft went from the only viable tank, to by far the worst one. It’s like being told, “Thanks for tanking all of those years, but we really have no need for you any more”. I am sure that a lot of my healer friends will be feeling the same way. I remember going into GW2 with some of those folks, and ultimately they were extremely disenfranchised when they couldn’t find a healer to play.

Divide and Conquer

All of this is to say that I am not open to new ideas, but more that I am extremely disillusioned with the alternatives that we have seen before. Brian “Psychochild” Green who happens to be part of the Storybricks team, made a quick comment in my Google+ thread.

The holy trinity came about because of primitive MMO AI. Vastly improved AI means a new dynamic is needed. Wait before you despair.

And honestly I am completely fine with a new dynamic… but I want there to be a “Tanky” role in whatever it is. This can mean a lot of things but so long as there is room for strong defensive and protective gameplay, I will probably be okay. Taunt has always been a crutch, and a tool that the good tanks used only in situations where things were already out of control. I can live without the artificial construct of instant threat generation. Additionally I can live without the concept of the tank being the one person who gathers up all the mobs… in fact the “AOE it down” mentality while effective is extremely boring.

I want a role so that I focus on the biggest and hardest hitting mob, while the rest of my party burns down everything else. I want to engage and keep busy the big guys while my team either through the use of crowd control, or simply dps juggling takes out the rest of the group . I am completely fine with that kind of a paradigm. I just want a beneficial role to play, and this really has not been the case in any other game that tried to blur the lines of the trinity. A guardian in Neverwinter is about the most useless thing ever when it comes to grouping… I don’t want to be the sword and board guy that is dragging the entire team down.

Physical Mass

They could go down a completely different avenue and pattern the constructs off of pvp based tanking like Warhammer Online. I am again completely fine with this paradigm as well, as I really enjoyed tanking on my Ironbreaker. The different there and the construct that allowed this to function was that players had physical mass. You could not idly clip through other players or npcs… and as a result “Tanks” could create physical barriers to keep players from attacking the squishier targets.

This was an enjoyable mechanic and there was quite a bit of synergy between the support functionality I was supplying and the damage dealing my friends were doing. With the destructible and constructible world concept… I could definitely see a tank being an obstacle maker that slows down or impedes the enemy from getting to the party. So long as I play an important role in the party, and the addition of my abilities improves gameplay rather than drags them down… I will find a way to be happy with whatever defensive gameplay it provides.

DPS is Boring

Ultimately I play a tank most of the time because I like being able to take tons of abuse. I habitually level in every game as either a full tank or a custom tank hybrid build. It is the style of gameplay I always gravitate towards. The avatar I have in my head, always has a sword and shield and lots and lots of armor. My time constraints often times push me into a mode where I simply cannot be the lynchpin of the group, and cannot tank… so I fall back on dual wield dps generally. The problem is I find that style of gameplay boring.

DPS to me is avoiding stuff on the ground while trying to execute a “Simon Says” like pattern as quickly as possible to do the maximum amount of damage. Obviously from the comments in all the threads yesterday, this is a gameplay style that a lot of players enjoy. For me if I am not having to juggle targets, manage aggro, and protect other players I quickly get bored and zone out. My biggest hope is that whatever the new scheme ends up being with EQ Next that it gives me more to do than just run around idly and mash a few buttons blindly.

I realize that I am probably in the large minority of players that enjoy tanking, and do so even when NOT in a group situation. I know we are out there however, and that tanking to me is just something we do instinctually. I just hope was we move forward there is still a place for us to have a valuable team contribution without having to fall back on a gameplay style that just isn’t natural for us. I like grouping with my friends, and in many ways I took up tanking because I wanted to protect my friends… it ties into my deep protective instinct.

The problem is this same instinct just doesn’t really apply in the same way to strangers. The evidence of the lack of people who want to tank or heal that keeps being brought up are the long lines in the dungeon queues. I present an alternate explanation… those of us who tank or heal because of this protective instinct… simply do not want to tank for strangers. I love tanking for friends and guildies… but I have zero interest in ever queuing into a random because every experience I have ever had as a PUG tank was relatively bad. The tank in these groups is the focus of everyone’s ire, and until that changes you will always have able bodied tanks like myself unwilling to subject themselves to the crap storm… especially when we can form groups

relatively easily within our own guild.

Wrapping Up

I have rattled on enough for the day, and I probably will have opened up a few more cans of worms that will work themselves out during the day. I am open to new ideas, but every break from the trinity thus far has failed miserably in my eyes. Here is hoping that Storybricks will be the magic sauce that makes non-role-based gameplay enjoyable. I have a lot of hope about what Storybricks will do at least from a single player experience… but I just have yet to see any alternate scenario actually work as far as a grouping one. If they can deliver fun and non-chaotic group play I will be more than happy to hitch my banner to their wagon. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope nothing I have said offended anyone.

No Love For Tanks

August 4, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out in the verse… yeah I just got finished reading a post about Firefly… ignore me. This is another one of those “doing things under NDA that I can’t talk about” weekends… so as a result I usually am pretty scant in what I feel I CAN blog about. Thankfully SOE Live is still giving me news to react to so that is mostly what I will be doing. Additionally I seem to be down another couple of pounds as of this morning which would make 54 total since I started this latest foray of sensible living. I am fairly proud if I do say so myself.

No Love For Tanks

I have so much gratitude for Curse gaming for having the forethought to record all of the SOE Live sessions that Sony themselves did not have the foresight to live stream over twitch.tv. As a result of their work I bring you the Class Panel video 1 and 2… and my commentary on it. I watched this last night along with a few other friends and we pooled our comments over a shared chat channel. My rabid fanboyism from Friday quickly turned into quiet terror when they started unfolding their vision for the game as a whole. I have to say most of it sounded almost word for word like the pitch we heard leading up to the launch of Guild Wars 2.

To preface the part that scares me… they talk about a concept of “everyone taking care of themselves” and “No tanks or healers”. Which always seems to read to me as the pipe dream of every dps that has ever played a game and been bitter that they are not treated as seriously as the tank and healer characters. I am totally fine with not having a strict reliance on tanking or healing… but it scares me that they plan yet again to abolish these roles. My mind is filled with nothing but visions of the giant chaotic mess that grouping in Guild Wars 2 was.

Tanks LIKE Tanking

The component that designers bent on this path seem to completely miss… Tanks enjoy tanking and Healers enjoy healing. We do not feel like we are forced into those roles… those are the roles we assign ourselves happily and willingly. I LEVEL as a tank because I enjoy tanking mobs, it feeds off my protective nature and I know many tanks that feel exactly the same way. Additionally I have lots of friends who are extremely nurturing people, that will always gravitate towards playing whatever the feel to be the most supportive healing class because they want to in equal parts “nurture” their friends.

These are not some artificial roles that we have been forced into by bad game design… these are roles that fill our need to protect or nurture or support in a game. Not everyone wants to wildly mash buttons and destroy the targets as fast as they can. I feel as though there is a certain kind of game designer that just fundamentally does not get this drive. At one point in the video one of the designers describes the gameplay as “one person is forced to focus all the damage on them, another is forced to heal that person, then everyone else pretty much gets to do whatever they want and have fun”. It is almost as if the designer does not realize that tanking and healing ARE fun for the players that really like to do it.

I don’t view tanking as a sacrifice, I view it as feeding into my most primal nature and my inborn need to protect my friends. I would be willing to expect that all of the amazing healers who have supported me over the years did not feel forced into that role. Game design like this makes me think that these folks simply do not understand the amazingly symbiotic relationship between a tank and a healer, and how awesome it is when you get to a point that both players can predict the actions of the other. Maybe I am just lucky that I have had a long line of healers that I got to this point with… and I simply wish designers understood this better.

Granted there are definitely times where I don’t want to tank… and I am sure there are times where the healers don’t want to heal. That is completey cool and why we have modern gameplay that allows us to switch the roles around freely. However I do not feel that the problem is the roles themselves. Without roles combat feels like a chaotic mess, and simply something I do not enjoy. I was on board with Guild Wars 2, until the moment I did my first dungeon and saw that zergging a boss down from the resurrection point was a completely valid tactic. There is nothing fun about that kind of gameplay for me… and I am scared now that after seeing this amazing concept that we will end up with that sort of haphazard grouping.

A Solo Experience

Right now I feel as thought I will still enjoy playing Everquest Next, so much about the game seems completely amazing. I just fear that it might be a completely single player experience for me. If Landmark provides a random world with random storybricks encounters that I can explore freely… that might be seriously enough to keep me happy regardless of how the larger gameplay evolves. If EQ Next is nothing more than Minecraft evolved I will play the hell out of it and be exceedingly happy to do so. I just am not a huge fan of what sounds to be their design mantra of abolishing roles again… since that went so tragically wrong with Guild Wars 2.

I am extremely amped to get into the beta experience and build all sorts of nifty things in Landmark. I still go on massive Minecraft binges where I will do nothing but that game for a weekend and build entire cities… only to abandon the map and start from scratch again when the next creative urge hits. All I have ever really wanted is to have the Minecraft freedom with a better game wrapped around it. Having that kind of randomly generated and ever changing world, with awesome MMO controls mixed in would keep me happy for hundreds of hours of gameplay. I could not be happier if I logged into my email and saw a beta invite right now.

So I am very much still on board with the notion of EQ Next… but I just heard the first things that deeply concerned me. Here is hoping that this turns out to be more marketing spin than actual gameplay. I feel as though there are a lot of dps out there with chips on their shoulders against tanks and healers… and that every so often one of these design schemes that tries to undo the roles of teamplay comes along. Here is hoping they will dial it back before release. They did mention that they would support “defensive” gameplay, and depending on what that means I would be happy with the protector role in another fashion even if it is not gather up all the hate and soake the damage. I guess only time and subsequent releases will tell how this shakes out.

Wrapping Up

Well I have the lore panels to view, and that might be fodder for tomorrows posts. Additionally we need to pick up the house today and I want to get that done sooner than later so I can piddle around in Rift and the thing that must not be named. I hope you all have had a great weekend and are prepared for the work week ahead of us. Additionally I hope you have been as amped as I am to see all the yummy footage coming out of SOE Live, Quake Con and the Rift stream. I love Norrath, so no matter how frustrated I might be with a given direction they seem to be taking… I will always give the game a shot because of my love of the world.