Guild Leadership Archives - Page 12 of 108

Disappointment Comes From Love

May 7, 2015 by Belghast

The Room

This is the point where I admit that I had never actually made it all the way through “The Room” before last night. I’ve sat down several times to watch it, but it was just too bad and too awkward for me to struggle through it. I feel like this is the sort of movie that is just more fun with a large group of people. So when I saw that Rifftrax would be doing it, I thought it would be a blast. I’m getting to be a regular at this whole Rifftrax live thing, and by live I mean sitting in a theater as the show is live simulcast from where they are actually at in Nashville. So far I have seen Godzilla, Anaconda, and a strange 1950s Santa Claus movie from Mexico. This season they have dubbed the “Crappening” with The Room, Sharknado 2, Miami Connection and Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny.

As far as The Room itself… they commented last night that it was a movie made by a man who had never actually seen a movie… or another human being. This film is just so out there, and the funny thing about it is that I still don’t think Tommy Wiseau realizes quite how bad this movie is. I mean at this point it has brought a relative state of infamy to all of the actors, but that isn’t exactly the same thing as fame. So as insane as the movie is, you can imagine that it gets cranked up a notch when the Rifftrax folks are lampooning it. The only problem with going to this movie with co-workers… and being named Mark… is that from now on I am going to be hearing a lot of “Oh Hai Mark” as I walk around the office. To which I will of course have to respond… “Oh Hai Doggy”. It was a great evening though and I look forward to the next one.

Subscription Drop

Yesterday the Quarter 1 earnings call happened at Blizzard/Activision and it should shock exactly no one that the World of Warcraft subscription numbers are once again down. With the launch of Warlords of Draenor the subscription numbers spiked at around 10 million players and has now dropped once more to the 7 million range. Each expansion gives the subscribers a spike and then things taper off from there, so this was going to happen no matter what. I will admit that I did not expect the bleed to happen quite so quickly. That said given my own feelings about the current state of the game, and the general rumblings within the community I guess it should not really surprise me. I agree with something that Alternative Chat said yesterday on twitter, that what we are seeing is a lot of people who came back and played the game for the month that came with their boxed copy, decided that they did not really like what they saw and left again all without actually subscribing.

If nothing else this seemed to be the trend within my own guild. Folks would come back and were extremely active until they got their first character to level 100, and then tapered off their playtime ultimately leaving again shortly after that point. My own time with this expansion is not all that different, and were it not for the fact that I am still raiding I would have left a long time ago. I leveled three characters to 100, and got the rest of my army of alts to “garrison” level. I spent the first month logging every single character in religiously and doing their garrison chores, and now I cannot be bothered to do them on more than just my main. The first character ran a lot of heroics, and now subsequent 100s jump straight to the LFR queue for gearing. During the launch we had 30 to 40 people on each and every night and it was insanely active. Now when I log in nightly to run my garrison stuff there are at most three other people on during non-raid times. While my guild is not exactly a bellwether for the game, it does at least show that something is fundamentally wrong.

Disappointment Comes From Love

.@eljeppy it is impossible to be disappointed if you don't love something 🙂

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) May 6, 2015

Yesterday I made a comment on twitter and this morning it still seems very true. This time around the folks that are complaining about Warlords are not necessarily the people who simply want to watch Blizzard burn down around them. This group are players that still love the franchise but are disappointed at what it has become. Ultimately you cannot be truly disappointed in something, unless you really do love it. I mean if you hate something, then it is impossible to be disappointed because it simply doesn’t matter that much to you. The problem is I am not exactly sure how this ship can be righted. Blizzard seems to be committed to the path it is on, because the 6.2 patch is largely just “more of the same”. The problem being that I see nothing in that patch that is going to keep people glued to the game for another quarter. The naval missions seem interesting, but at this point folks are just sick of the lost potential that is the Garrison.

Wow-64 2015-05-05 22-04-20-51 What we need now is an expansion announcement to bolster hope in the faithful, the problem there is I am seriously doubtful that we will see an announcement until Blizzcon. November is two quarters away, and I am just wondering if whatever does get announced is going to be too little and too late to keep from another subscription drop. Lots of people are talking about an expansion tying into the movie, but that movie is still a full year away. The 16 month lag in content between Pandaria and Warlords is still very fresh in everyone’s minds and quite frankly Blizzard does not have the luxury of waiting that long. They need a new world for us to start daydreaming about now, rather than waiting for a movie that may or may not be successful. The positive is that Blizzard is still doing remarkably well in spite of World of Warcraft. Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Starcraft II, and Diablo 3 all seem to be doing awesome. So maybe they just don’t care as much about their MMO as they once did? If nothing else these months leading up to Blizzcon 2015 are going to likely forever shape the face of Warcraft.

On User Interfaces

April 24, 2015 by Belghast

User Interface

Last night while running dungeons I got into a lengthy discussion with my friend Damai about the user interface layout in Final Fantasy XIV. As such I thought it might be useful to talk about my chosen layout this morning. One of the awesome things about this game is how adaptable the stock interface is to whatever you want from it. One of the big features that is poorly documented is that every single element can be scaled up or down. Some of these windows that are targetable can be scaled at any time, the rest can only be scaled in user interface edit mode. To Scale a window target it and hit Control and Home. This toggles through a series of available sizes from tiny to massive. As you can see in my interface I have lots of different hotbars, some of which are scaled as small as I can get them, and others a more standard size.

My layout is pretty straight forward. I tend to set up all user interfaces the same if given the option so that my main block of hotbars is stacked in the center of my screen, with my own health information and targets health information is directly above them so that I only have to look down a slightly from the center of my screen to see it. This is extremely important when you are dealing with encounters that transition at a certain percentage or something similar. I snapped this photo between pulls, but what is missing on the left side of my hotbars is the available targets window showing current emnity gems. On the right side of my hotbars is my party list which I have placed as such to make healing easier. I am right handed, so I tend to set my heal bars on the right side of the screen to make the movement more natural. All the other bits are largely extraneous like the lower lefthand bar includes all of my class icons allowing me to switch between classes faster. Pretty much every game I play has a set up similar to this, but in the FFXIV user interface I feel like this is my ultimate version of that design.

Messy Interface

Tuesday night I snapped a picture of my raiding interface in World of Warcraft from comparrison and I have to say… it is getting to the point where I struggle to play with this mess. At some point soon I need to trash everything and start from scratch trying to build something less intensive. I feel like one of the triumphs of Final Fantasy XIV is that it gives me a much more slim line interface but also manages to communicate to me all of the information contained within my World of Warcraft interface… but just in a much more compact fashion. Hell I would hazard that if I were playing World of Warcraft with the interface I have in FFXIV I would be enjoying it significantly more. This is the point when Tamrielo would chime in with some commentary about the conversations we have had in the past on user interfaces. I like a very specific design and when a game doesn’t support that layout I get frustrated quickly. So many of my complaints about Elder Scrolls Online were the fact that its interface would not support the layout I was looking for.

Once upon a time I had an interface that I was extremely happy with in World of Warcraft. On the left side of my hotbars is where I kept recount for damage and threat meters. On the right side I kept grid, an extremely combat view of the party and raid frames. The problem is grid died several expansions ago and no mod has come along to present the raid frames in quite so perfect a fashion for me. Grid gave me exactly the right amount of information, and as a tank I loved it because it would put a little red dot on any frame that was currently drawing aggro. I could at a glance tell if I had the majority of the mobs. There are other raid frames that work somewhat similar, but all of which are geared towards healers. Grid could be made to work for anyone who simply needed to see at a glance how the raid was doing. I feel at this point I need to just start from scratch, and build back only the features I actually want and need. All of the prepackaged user interfaces end up frustrating me because I don’t have full control over them. So as such for me to be happy, I am going to have to simply delete my interface folder one weekend and start over.

Interfaces are Important

This might seem like an odd thing to some, but when it comes to my enjoyment of a game I would say that the user interface ranks near the top of “most important things” to me. There are many games that I think I would enjoy, if they just had a better interface or better control scheme. Ultimately what this means however is my ability to manipulate things in such a fashion as to bring them in line with what is familiar for me. I’ve included three different games with three different interfaces, but as you can see there are some basic elements that I set up in each of them. While I am not literally cloning the exact same layout in each game, I am still bringing them closer into line with what I expect to be the case. I expect targets to appear on either side of my character and for the hot bars to be stacked in some fashion below my character. I am extremely combat focused so I want all of the important things that I need to see to be close to the center of my screen.

The things I tend to push off to the margins of the screen are the things that I am not dealing with often like Quest trackers, and hotbars for buttons that I don’t want to have to go digging to find, but that I also don’t need often. I am a creature of habit and I end up ultimately remapping things to work similar between games. If I am playing a class with some sort of a builder effect, then I will always put the “dump” ability for that effect on the 7 key. In Rift for example this is my single target finisher, on my Warrior in FFXIV this is Inner Beast. I will always place my interrupt hotkey on the 0 key that way my brain is wired to hit that key without thinking when I see something I need to interrupt. Similarly if I have an engagement ability that pushes me into combat, I will always place that ability on either 4 or 5 depending on the game… which can get confusing at times. Taunt regardless of the game however is always going to be sitting on 6, and if I am playing a stealth class… I recycle that key for my stealth ability. Because I play so many games, I have to create some sense of standardization between them. I guess in my mind I am just playing versions of the same game, and that ultimately is how I can switch back and forth between games without missing a beat. This is also why the interface is so important to me.

Wrong About Wildstar

April 23, 2015 by Belghast

More Initiates

For as frustrated as yesterdays post was, today’s is all the more hopeful. Lately on Wednesday nights I have been assisting a fledgling second static group in our free company out. While it still struggles to get a full eight people, we are making some progress. As more people level to the cap, more people will be available to join in the raiding fun and hopefully this will smooth the process out significantly. For the last few weeks we have been working on Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, aka the first major hurdle and the gateway to the second coil. Last week we made decent progress but were still struggling to get through the dive bomb phase. That phase seems to be the biggest frustration with the fight, and once you figure out the timing the rest goes smoothly. While I barded it up last week, this week I tanked it because that was the role that was needed. Since my health was significantly higher than Damai we swapped roles and I took the Twintania role and he adjusted quickly to dealing with the adds.

Now our first group of the night was less than successful because we ended up having to pug in half of the players. The positive was that we noticed that the people screwing up were not our own people. As the evening went on more people got in game and we were able to fill out the rest of the slots with some other seasoned veterans. From here I think it took four attempts before we downed the 5th turn and keyed a whole new group of players for the second coil. This is awesome for a bunch of reasons… because firstly it means that second team is progressing nicely apart from issues getting people online at the right time. Secondly however it also means we can start drawing on the pool of players available for Monday night turn 9 attempts as well. I know Grace is itching to see t9, so hopefully this will smooth out some of our own attendance irregularities. It is almost summer after all and with summer comes folks going off and doing summer things.

Wrong about Wildstar

This morning I am questioning if I have been wrong about Wildstar thus far in feeling that the game was just not for me. Granted we gave it a good shot and played this game at launch but it felt like something was off. Now coming back and playing it again I am really enjoying myself, but there are a large number of details that are significantly different that I think are effecting my enjoyment. When the initial video was released talking about the Exiles and Dominion, I naturally felt an immediate affinity with the Exiles… the problem being most of my friends had that same immediate attraction to the Dominion. I struggled with this choice until I found the Chua and for the most part enjoyed my time playing an Engineer. The problem being… I just did not enjoy that style of tanking. What I should have played was a Warrior, like I did every time I actually enjoyed myself during the beta. So this time around I am playing a Human Warrior and enjoying smashing faces and jumping around like mad. The Exile side has this whole “Firefly” vibe that works for me, whereas the Dominion feel more like playing the Empire from Star Wars. Both are interesting but at this point in my life… I feel more kinship with the rebels.

The other thing that is helping significantly is due to the whole promotion I have a hover board starting at level 1, which makes roaming around the zones so much more enjoyable. Additionally thanks to the promotion I have some spending money from selling extra items on the open market. Knowing my character is set for awhile on upgrades and spending money makes all the difference in the world. Finally the pace I am playing with makes a huge difference. Wildstar is the sort of game where piddling around feels more enjoyable than focused leveling. I am stopping to smell the roses, and boulders, and landmines… well you get the idea. Additionally I went the Soldier path, meaning I get to smash more things in the face and while I enjoyed Explorer… smashing things in the face is just more my style. At launch I had this overwhelming feeling of a need to keep up with everyone else, so that I would be viable for dungeon running. This time since I am playing all by myself for the most part… I am taking my time and poking through the content at my own speed. All of which adds up to a completely different experience for me. All of this proves that the circumstances you go into a game greatly colors your end experience. So far I am enjoying playing this game as a secondary “cooling down” from the action type game.

Wrong about Marvel Heroes

Another game that I have recently picked up that I am more than willing to admit I was wrong about is Marvel Heroes. I have avoided this game like the plague because of a whole slew of reasons. Firstly at its core it is a Diablo clone and while there is nothing wrong with that… click to move and attack games and I generally do not get along that well. Thanks to League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm I have learned to tolerate them… but my preferred means of control will always be WASD. Secondly everything surrounding this game gave the impression that it was a free to play money grab of the worst type. I played a tiny bit of this game in beta and was not terribly excited about any of the heroes I was able to play, so I filed this away in the “not for me” bin as well. The thing is over time I have continued to watch people I know and love and respect playing this game as seriously as they have played any traditional MMO. When I see something like this I start to wonder, what are they seeing it in that I am not. I’ve had these same feelings surrounding games that I just did not previously understand like Guild Wars 2, and after finally hitting my stride in that game I figured I might as well give Heroes a shot too.

Sunday I ended up playing this game for awhile, and wound up playing it for I think five hours without really meaning to. I feel like the piece of the equation that I was missing to really enjoy it, comes from the fact that I did not even realize I was in need of that Super Hero MMO fix. I happily played City of Heroes for about six months before moving on to World of Warcraft. When Champions Online launched I was extremely excited about that game… until the first patch wound up killing the combination of abilities I wanted to play with. With the launch of DC Universe Online that was yet another game I really enjoyed, but struggled to get traction in for reason I still don’t know to this day. Marvel Super Heroes seems to be just a bout the right amount of depth for me to consume as far as super hero content goes, and the ability to swap between heroes freely helps significantly. Right now I am focusing on Captain America but by the same token I have gotten rather fond of Gambit and Deadpool. All of which I really want to play more of, and ultimately this seems like the perfect sort of game to play downstairs on my laptop while watching television and movies. In fact I am hoping to do just that this weekend, and see what mischief I can get into with my shield bashing self.

Bad Medicine

April 22, 2015April 22, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Nights Sleep

Monday night I did not sleep well at all. I was up late futzing and waiting on a print job for my wife, that ultimately ended up printing the wrong thing. As a result neither of us got to bed until after midnight. After that I don’t think either of us really got solid sleep, and next thing we knew it the alarm was going off at 5:30. As a result I spent most of yesterday sleep walking through it. There are just some hazes that not even caffeine can clear, and this is only compounded by the fact that my allergies are still killing me. Even the smallest task seemed like a struggle, and last nights raid was pure hell to suffer through… in part because of my present state of mind. I realistically should have just bowed out and headed to bed, but that didn’t happen.

I did however managed to get to sleep around 10:30 and last night was probably the most luminously glorious night of sleep I have had in a long time. Granted I woke up before the alarm by about twenty minutes… but I did the correct thing and just got on up instead of trying to struggle for those last few minutes of sleep. The end result is I feel more human than I have in a long time. Who knew I needed this sleep thing after all? Now if only I didn’t have to go to work I could actually enjoy my day. Today in particular is going to be a strange one as I have to go to lunch with a vendor. Working lunches make me grumpy, especially since during this one we will be grilling the vendor for information. At least maybe I get a free meal out of the deal.

Rough Raiding

Last night I was not in the right frame of mind for raiding. That is the simple fact but the end results of the night didn’t really help either. As a whole the night felt like we were beating our heads against a wall. We had fourteen people, two healers and opted to run Blackrock Foundry Heroic. I am not the raid leader so I am sure there was a reason, but it felt like we were just setting ourselves up for failure. We managed to eek out a victory on Hans and Franz with that configuration. Then we lost one healer and gained a different healer, and someone healing in their off set. We pushed forward and managed to down Beastlord Darmac in this fashion, before heading on to do some attempts on Flambender Ka’graz. There we made some swaps to the layout that seem like they might have worked, but it required a lot more work adjusting on the tanking side, so overall it was a wash and we wiped horribly.

This stagnation and continued throwing ourselves against heroic when it seems like on some level we are just not ready for it is completely destroying any desire I have to log in. I am not sure what is going wrong honestly. I am not sure if our tanks are undergeared, or if our healers are undergeared… or if the dps are just taking too much “could be avoided” damage making the healers heal someone other than the tanks. All I know is that we are having to battle rez tanks constantly, and as a matter of course which makes all of our attempts sloppier than they should be. Our Tuesday WoW raid is generally bad at adjusting to the conditions on the ground which is maddening to me, because this is precisely the strength of the Monday night Final Fantasy XIV raid. If things don’t go according to plan we seem to lose our shit completely, and end up flailing wildly… or standing in shit and dying. So I am not sure if we just have a massive case of tunnel vision or if there is some gearing problem at hand. I know for me personally I am still wearing 640 pants because nothing better will drop.

Bad Medicine

The problem is right now I am right back in that old familiar place. I dread logging into World of Warcraft Tuesday and Thursday to get a raid invite. I’ve reached that point where I am just frustrated with the whole raiding in wow experience. I have been here so many times before, and I am not quite sure how to fix it. I feel committed to “take my medicine” and log in for the sake of my friends, but I question… are any of us actually having any fun right now? Monday was one of the funniest nights of raiding I have ever experienced, and we spent it wiping like nubs to turn 9 after having taken a month off of it. So it obviously is not progression that ultimately dictates how I feel about a raid… it is the attitude of the raiders and the atmosphere of the raid. We spent Monday laughing and joking, and at the same time we made some serious progress. That is when I love to raid, when it feels like we are pulling together as a team even if we are wiping horribly.

The Tuesday/Thursday night raids just feel broken. They have about as much mirth as the waiting room of a battered women’s shelter. I log in and join the raid and I feel worse, because there is an unspoken tension going on. No one talks anymore, because key players in the raid are easily distracted by chatter. What is frustrating is, this is not the raid I joined. This is not the raid I saw at the end of Siege of Orgrimmar, or even during High Maul. That raid was excited about the prospects of this expansion, and enjoyed their evenings spent together. This raid just feels stressed and burnt out… and I have no clue how to rehabilitate it. I wish I did know honestly, because I miss that raid that existed before we set foot into Blackrock Foundry. That is a raid I enjoyed spending two nights a week with. This one… I just end up zoning out and waiting for the night to be over.