Guild Leadership Archives - Page 25 of 108

Doubling Down

February 12, 2015 by Belghast

Still Frustrated

Yesterday I broke my self appointed rules and made two posts because I felt the news warranted it. I said my peace but the problem is… I am still frustrated this morning. At the time of posting yesterdays blog piece I really only knew about a few of the people who were let go. As last night wound its way onwards, more names trickled out and at this point I am absolutely shocked by the scope. While I am not sure about the numbers, it feels like roughly half of the folks I was aware of over there were let go. Granted the actual numbers could be anywhere, but I am basing it simply on the faces that have shown up on twitter saying they were no longer Daybreak employees, versus the ones that have said they still are. In any case this will be a massive blow to Everquest, Everquest II, Everquest Landmark and whether or not we will ever actually get Everquest Next. For awhile on Aggrochat we have joked about Next being vaporware, and that we would only ever get Landmark… but now I am starting to really wonder if that is closer to the truth.

Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first footsteps into the MMO world. Similarly I am drawn to Everquest II in ways that I cannot quite understand, and while I go for large swaths of time without playing, I often return to it was the gaming equivalent of “comfort food”. It is this strange mix of a world that I am absolutely in love with, and a combat system that I hate beyond words. If I had to create a list of “favorite games that I am not playing” I would put Everquest II at the top of that list… so I guess I ultimately am part of the problem. I love this world but I am not inhabiting it on a nightly basis, and as such not giving it money to grow. I’ve bought into Landmark and H1Z1 but I am not really playing those either. I remember feeling the same way when City of Heroes closed its doors, that I had so many fond memories… but that I had also ultimately moved past that game as well. I guess we want the things we once loved and enjoyed to stay protected in a bubble forever, never to change… but when we move on are we not also ultimately to blame?

Doubling Down

Before the events of yesterday I had a topic kicking around in my head about the worlds that we play. I am not sure how the events of yesterday feed into the narrative, but I am going with it in any case. I feel as though the era of the “new mmorpg” is all but over. There will of course be new games that identify with the “mmo” ideals, but they won’t be quite the same as the worlds we have had had in the past. I feel like we are going to see a lot more games like Destiny, that is “mmo-lite” or another genre with mmo features. I feel like the worlds that were crafted during the golden age of massively multiplayer online role-playing game launches, are the worlds we will have to live with for better or worse. When Blizzard cancelled Project Titan, we can look at that in so many different ways. We could say that it was a sign that MMOs were dying, and that they no longer believed in the genre. We could however take that as a sign that they believed that the worlds we had already were worth saving.

So many of the games that we love are not broken toys, at least not yet. Each of them if given the devotion and the development resources could be transformed into a truly magical place. I am looking at the transformation of Final Fantasy XIV from 1.0 awkwardness to 2.0 and beyond splendor as proof that a game can change for the better. I’ve played each of the major MMOs for some length of time, and have experienced that each have exactly the same problem. How do they keep the player engaged on a daily basis, rather than in bursts of activity each time new content is released? I feel the problem is that games right now are mired in the construct of expansion releases, pooling up major features until they can sell another box of the game. This means the best features tend to either get bottled up for years time, or never actually make it into the game at all.

The episodic construct is a bit better, but you have to be careful that you are not adding “expiring” content into your game, making players feel rushed to somehow grind through it all before the next patch hits. The problem I had with the Living Story in Guild Wars 2 was that when I fell behind, I didn’t feel like there was a point to actually try and catch up… since I had missed so much already. The fact that the content was expiring made it feel less “real” to me… that they weren’t permanently improving the game, but instead running a series of limited time events. I feel like the shift needs to be moved away from both of these constructs and instead the focus placed on fleshing out the world. Do you know how frustrating it is to me in World of Warcraft that there are five portals below Wyrmrest Temple but only two of them go anywhere? Each world we play is littered with these forgotten expansion ideas, and all I really want is for a game world to quit teasing us and start living up to its full potential. Now is the time for these companies to double down on the content they have, fix the issues with their game systems… and try and make their games worth our copious time and devotion.

A Simple Night

Because of the news yesterday, and because of other events leading me to question myself and my connection to other people… I was not in the best of places emotionally last night when I got home. I have to say my mood was improved by hanging out with my extremely awesome free company in Final Fantasy XIV. For a few nights I had promised to help my friend Solaria work on knocking out some stuff, since she was fairly new to 50 and in doing so also spent a good deal of time running dungeons with Thalen and Asha. I have not had a night where we tore through multiple dungeons in a night, and I have to say it was good for the soul. Granted I felt a bit wobbly, since I have not really tanked much of anything other than our raids, and dungeon tanking ends up so drastically different. That said we managed to unlock a few dungeons for both Thalen and Solaria, and in the process get some Tomestones of Soldiery and Poetics.

I’ve missed logging in, getting pulled into a group and then spending the rest of the night tromping through dungeons. It is like connecting with my most basic instincts of trying to make sure everything in the dungeon hates me equally. I really enjoy the pace of Final Fantasy XIV, and its particular brand of tanking. The Warrior just “feels” right, and I am hoping I will be equally at home with the Dark Knight. If nothing else I will always have the Warrior to fall back on if the Dark Knight ends up not being the class I have wanted all along. I know Thalen has several more dungeons yet to unlock to qualify for high level roulette, so I am going to try and force myself to build groups more often. I get stuck in my own little world, and spend most of my time soloing… but I know when I do group content I feel so much better at the end of the night. While last night did not cure me completely… it did make me feel significantly better.

Rough Raid Night

February 11, 2015 by Belghast

An Innocent Start

Most strange happenings on the internet begin with a rather innocuous start. I was discussing handwriting with @tsundereikemen and I decided to create a hand written note to show off my rather messy all caps writing. Then I happened to go directly into a meeting for roughly an hour. When I got out.. my twitter feed had completely blown up with people returning my greeting in their own hand written style. Yesterday I joked about Sigtric coining the hashtag “BelEffect” so he was immediate to point out that it was happening again. Of course I had to share this sudden madness with the world, because folks had no idea what I was talking about. I lost a few followers in my flurry of re-tweets, but screw it this was worth it. The “happening” was enough happiness to buffer any frustrations for the rest of the day.

The awesome thing is… I posted a second note some time later to adequately explain my feelings about the whole event… and it started up again adding several more notes to the mix. This silly thing is the reason why my twitter feed is so damned great. You guys can somehow manage to take a boring work day and turn it into a magical experience by tweeting a bunch of hand written notes. I always love seeing someone’s handwriting no matter how unkempt it might be… because embedded in those strokes and swooshes are a persons personality. So thank you all for participating in this little experiment… it was neither original nor that unique, but it was most definitely not something I expected to start yesterday. If you want to check out all of the images, I will be attempting to insert a gallery below.

Rough Raid Night

Not all raid nights can be amazing… in fact every now and then you can have a down right shitty one. Last night was one of these nights, and that is just something that is going to happen now and then. It seems like half of the world is sick with something right now, and last night it claimed two of our primary healers. This put us going into the night at a pretty big handicap, one that we never quite made up for. Ithato is freaking awesome for stepping in and trying to hold things together, and he fought valiantly. The problem is it just wasn’t quite enough. He was not quite as geared as the healers we lost, and had not been raiding with us all this time… so was having to learn the boss strategies on the fly. On top of these, the raid itself was just not quite what it should have been. I feel like the evidence was the fact that Teamspeak was deathly silent, which is not a usual thing. When we are doing well we are chatty and happy and picking on Rylacus, but last night… no one was talking at all.

We started off trying Gruul but after a half dozen wipes realized we didn’t quite have what it took last night to down it. From there we moved back to Highmaul Heroic, and managed to down Kargath and Butcher before hitting a similar wall on Brakenspore. We finally called the night, hoping to regroup on Thursday and see what we can do. If the gods bless us, we will have back the two healers that were absent and hopefully be back in fighting form. If not… it isn’t the end of the world if we can’t quite progress for a week. We are not exactly the most cutting edge and serious of group, and I think every now and then it is a good thing for us to be reminded of that. The health and well being of our players is worth more than our forward momentum, and I am thankful we have a raid leader that sees that… instead of angrily grinding us into the ground. I love my raid, even when we “wipe like nubs”.

Hunting Pearls

Since the raid was a wash, I opted to log into Final Fantasy XIV and work on my weekly Crystal Tower quest. With this last patch and the entrance of the World of Darkness casual raid, they introduced a quest to do all three dungeons and collect pearls and turn them back in at a quest giver in Mor Dhona. Since I had a bit of time I queued up for Labyrinth of the Ancients and was pleasantly surprised at just how smoothly it went. Normally there are wipes around every corner, but I guess at this point folks are trying to complete the quest, and as such are far over geared for the place. I lost every roll on any of the cosmetic gear, but was in and out of the raid quickly enough for me to contemplate running Syrcus Tower as well. Unfortunately it did not go quite as smoothly as Labyrinth, and we suffered some pretty massive wipe fests. That said folks silently struggled through and we managed to clear it still within thirty minutes of starting.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your take… I had completely World of Darkness collecting its pearl on Monday night, but not running the other other two. As a result I was able to turn in the quest and get my Carboncoat. This allows you to “un-weather” any of the Poetics accessories turning them into ilvl 130 items. Unfortunately I am not sure how to get Carbontwine the item needed to do the same for the Ironworks armor pieces, other than the extremely grindy method of turning in 6 Unstained Mark Logs. I think I will likely wait for 2.55 since it is more than likely that they will let World of Darkness start dropping both Carboncoat and Carbontwine just like Syrcus Tower drops Oil of Time and Sands of Time. It is unlikely that we will be raiding anything bleeding edge enough for me to need to be level 130 geared. In any case my running around in Final Fantasy XIV while chatting with the Free Company made the evening seem a tad bit less dismal, which I guess is what ultimately mattered. Hopefully we will regroup on Thursday and kick some ass to make up for the rather crummy Tuesday.

Melusine Down

February 10, 2015 by Belghast

I’m an Adjective?

There are just some days that it hits me how surreal my life can be. I seem to be having one of those days. I talked a bit about being called a “Cult Leader” last night, but apparently somewhere along the line I have become an adjective as well? If I would say I am most known for anything it would be that I blog each and every morning regardless if I have anything of any real gravity to talk about. If you follow Jaedia and Simcha you would have found out that this is apparently now termed the “Bel Method” because both of them have been dabbling with it of late. I didn’t even know I had a method to be honest… I just do this thing that involves blogging before I am actually awake. I am pretty sure people were rambling aimlessly long before I showed up, and will continue to do it long after I am gone. Though I do admit I got a great chuckle when I read that I have transcended humanity and now have become a “thing”.

@fynralyl that's the server the #BelEffect is happening on anyway. @belghast

— Sig (@Sigtric) February 7, 2015

Which makes it all the more humorous when the other day, I was mentioned in a conversation I was not really even participating in yet. My good friend Fynralyl mentioned on twitter that she was downloading Final Fantasy XIV, and before I even had a chance another friend… who is not even playing the game chimed in with our server information. To make it even more humorous Sigtric said the above quote, that the “#BelEffect” was going on. I am now an effect? I mean I realize my penchant for gathering people up and trying to get them all in the same place is rather notorious… but has it really become an effect to be monitored? Like I said before… it is really surreal to be referred to in adjective form. I am attempting to take it all in stride, as a sign of affection… but it is supremely strange. Now I am oddly cautious to see what other characteristic I have becomes a “thing”, is my traditional “Hey Folks” greeting now going to become canonized as well?

Melusine Down

Last night was of course our regularly scheduled raid night in Final Fantasy XIV. We unfortunately are starting to have a good problem happen… that quite often on Monday nights we have more than enough people to do our eight man. As a result since Paragon missed the last one, Cav offered to sit out and with that we zoned into Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. This was our second week of attempts on this encounter, and last week we managed to figure out most of the bits so it was just down to refinement and polish. We were teaching Paragon the fight from scratch, but he was a pretty quick study and before long we were back to where we left off last week. This fight is largely about managing adds, either in the form of the Renauds that need to be frozen with cursed voice or the Lamias that need to be burned down as soon as possible to lower overall raid damage. On top of all of these things… there is just a phenomenal amount of damage going out. There were so many times I was praying for my next cooldown so that I could survive just a little bit longer.

The turning point in our fight was honestly when we wiped because all of the Renaud that were frozen woke up at the same time. Prior to that the attempt was extremely smooth, and then we watched as the giants ran around wiping the raid. From that point on we started trying to manage just how many of them we had up at a once, and I started trying to do a better job of centering myself with the wall of them. These two tweaks lead to me getting frozen significantly less, and the wall of adds being more manageable as a whole. It was I believe one attempt after we started this strategy that we managed to get her down, and clear Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. Once again Ashgar remembered to tell folks to pose before we opened the chests, and I am super glad that he did… because this really is the best kill shot yet. I remembered to be centered in the photo rather than on one of the edges. We went into Turn 8 shortly after and only stayed long enough to get an idea of how the room works. Hopefully we can all watch some videos this week and make a good solid attempt next.

I Hate Oregorger

Yesterday I stumbled onto a blog post over on AskMrRobot showing how wipes on Oregorger compare to the raids average ilevel. I know we are still fairly low ilevel wise as a raid, I personally am only around 660 because we jumped straight from 7/7 normal and 5/7 heroic to doing normal mode Blackrock Foundry. I am wondering if that is the answer to dealing with the bullshit randomness of his hunger phase is to simply out gear it. Last Thursday when we were doing attempts on Oregorger we were following the exact pattern that everyone agrees upon is the best way to beat the fight. In fact multiple times during the night we stopped, rewatched videos to double check that we were not doing anything wrong… and still we kept dying to the damage of the phase. Either we were not fast enough on killing the crates, or simply lacked the gear to soak the damage. In any case the charge above would seem to agree that maybe Oregorger is simply a “gearing” thing. Had we entered Blackrock wearing full heroic gear… maybe it just would not have even been an issue.

In any case my hope is that by some sheer miracle of luck that we can down him because I want so bad to have this fight on farm status. I feel like both Gruul and the Hans’gar/Franzor encounter are likely on farm status after last week. I am wondering if there is something else that is low hanging fruit we can pick up while waiting on our gear level to raise before wrecking Oregorger. From what I understand the other boss we can try is Beastlord Darmac since Blackrock Foundry employs a “wing” strategy to its layout. Whatever we end up doing, I am looking forward to getting in tonight and smashing more Iron Horde faces. While much of the shiny of this expansion has faded for me, I am finding that the raiding is keeping me engaged and interested. While I may only be logging in to fiddle with my Garrison on nights other than the raid… I am still very much enjoying each and every boss fight.

Lost in Maguuma

February 9, 2015 by Belghast

Wanderlust

Yesterday was a bit of a busy day for many reasons. Firstly getting home super late Saturday night, and then recording AggroChat extremely late, meant that more or less I just straight up crashed instead of editing the recording. This meant first thing yesterday morning I had to edit the podcast and post it. After that I of course still had a blog to write, and needed to spend some time working on another article as well. Throughout all of this there were two problems. Firstly I had a splitting headache the likes of which I have not seen in almost a year. Secondly it was absolutely gorgeous outside, with the temperatures rising up to roughly 80* F yesterday. So my wife and I hemmed and hawed as to whether or not we would actually go do anything. Finally around 3pm yesterday afternoon we decided to get outside and go wandering about.

I’ve talked about the fact that any town of a decent size around me has a Wal-mart. It has always been this way, because quite honestly I live in the Wal-mart heartland, with Bentonville the home office only about two hours away. The first first Wal-mart supercenter in existence is about 30 minutes away in the town of Wagoner for example. Big Wal-mart stores are boring, utilitarian and predictable… but going to smaller less shopped stores often provides this strange melange of products that they still have on the shelf. Each store has a certain amount of discretion as to what they can clearance, so this means that shopping multiple stores might yield completely different results. As such a few times of the year it is prime territory for hunting down clearance Legos.

We set forth on an adventure that took us through three very small locations, and while my wife found more interesting stuff than I did, at the second store… a store I had good luck with last year… I managed to pick up a couple of really cool Star Wars sets at a deep discount. First up I found the Lego AT-AP walker which was originally $60 for the much more reasonable price of $30. Then at a considerably worse deal I picked up the originally $25 General Grievous Wheel Bike set for $19… which admittedly I only jumped at because the General Grievous figure is just so badass looking. This season honestly has been pretty slim pickings, largely because Wal-mart has started doing this annoying thing. They will throw something on clearance… and change the sticker color to red… but have the item marked at its normal price. Essentially I look up each Lego set and if the savings is not 50% off I generally don’t jump at it. This has netted me some pretty cool finds like the SWTOR Sith Fury for $60 but in order to find them… you have to be diligent, and for me the fun is more about the hunt than the finding.

Lost In Maguuma

One of the other things of note that happened yesterday while watching the return of Walking Dead is that I managed to hit level 60 on my Warrior in Guild Wars 2. I am still knee deep in the Maguuma jungle region and right now I find myself shifting between Sparkfly Fens and Bloodtide Coast, largely be cause the Fens simply got too “big” for me as I kept wandering into level 62 areas and having to deal with constant glancing blows. This leaves me 20 levels to go before I hit the Guild Wars 2 endgame, whatever that might be. One of the things that has always bothered me about this game is that I never managed to max a character out. Eighty levels is a rather daunting task, especially when you don’t find yourself really enjoying the game play. That said I am generally known for having multiple max level characters in any game I play, so it felt like a weak spot in my armor that I could not stomach the grind in this one game.

Maguuma region is a bit of a slog, which has me concerned for the Heart of Thorns expansion. I really do not like Jungle or Swamp regions in video games. I was having a blast so long as I stuck to the snowy peaks of the Norn regions, but once I wandered into the swampy zombie filled wasteland… the fun factor of the game went down significantly. Here is hoping that I can stomach it just enough to graduate into the higher zones. All of the guides I have read say that I should really be doing dungeons to level… but I am admittedly scared of them. The shitty dungeon experience was what ended up killing the game for me the first time. Right now I am enjoying the soloing over world gameplay style, and I am afraid if I go into the dungeons again… and they end up still being the chaotic and exploitative mess that they were originally… that it will enrage me enough to halt my journey.

The Real Game

One of the biggest frustrations for me when it comes to online games is when a massive shift in the way the game feels happens. Most games have this highly tailored starter experience to ease players into the game, and then something happens as though the really polished section of the game flew away. Sometimes this transition is gradual, and other times it is quite literally like having the bottom dropped out from under you. I’ve not written much about Albion Online because to some extent I fell off that rather steep cliff. The first two tiers of content felt really fun and natural as I wandered around the world collecting resources to be able to craft nifty things. Then I reached tier 3… and the fun drained away quickly. The game up until that point had been around gathering materials and lugging them back to town so that you could use the crafting machines and fashion them into whatever you might like. When you hit Tier 3, the crafting machines start charging you a fee to use them. This is the equivalent of having to pay every time you need to use the anvil in a World of Warcraft town.

The problem with this is that there really aren’t that many gold fountains that I have seen so far, but the machine problem ends up to be a rather massive gold sink. Granted at this point I don’t even know if there is such a thing as gold in the game… because I have only managed to gather up a few silver to my name. Admittedly this is their pricing scheme… to get players to purchase gold, to ease the process of playing the game. According to the pricing listed on the founders pack information, it looks like $20 would get you 4500 gold, and $50 would get you 12,000 gold. Not that either of these is an absolutely insane price for what seems to be the purchasing power that gets you, but I have essentially stopped playing because I quickly realized this game was unsustainable without either grinding bandits for days… or plunking down some cold hard cash for a game that was only mildly enjoyable in the first place. This is a bit of a shame, because really Albion does have some really interesting ideas at work. I might piddle with it off and on still to see just how deep the money chasm is, but if nothing else for the time being it has most definitely halted my forward momentum.