Guild Leadership Archives - Page 32 of 108

Art of Quietly Leaving

January 10, 2015 by Belghast

My Happy Place

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

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

Art of Quietly Leaving

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

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

Put Joy in Enjoyment

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

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

Does Threat Make Sense?

January 9, 2015 by Belghast

Threat Mechanics

Yesterday on twitter I got pulled into a conversation about threat mechanics and whether or not the concept is intuitive to players. The whole thing started with a comment by my friend Ashgar about the Guardian ability Riot Blade in Final Fantasy XIV. You get this ability at level 12, before you really grasp how your class mechanics work. So many Guardians make the mistake of thinking it is an upgrade to their Savage Blade ability because it technically has higher potency and as such deals more damage. The problem is… Savage Blade deals silly amounts to threat generation or enmity in FFXIV terms, and Riot Blade does not deal any at all. As a result brand new Gladiators start doing the Riot Blade combo to regenerate their mana, and at that point stop holding threat on the encounters… and similarly stop doing their job which is to tank.

The root of our discussion was that we wished that Final Fantasy XIV had chosen to give Riot Blade to players later in the game. The big problem is that by the time you are able to run your first dungeons around level 16, Riot Blade is still the newest thing players have in their toolbox. But this is also why healing for a new Gladiator becomes one of the most frustrating experiences ever. Final Fantasy XIV has a really interesting threat meter mechanic in the form of a series of gems that change color based on how much threat you have on a given mob. We jokingly refer to this as “playing Bejeweled” and you know that it is going to be a rough run when after casting your first heal… everything turns orange to you, aggros you, and you start “heal tanking”. Some Gladiators listen, and you can get them to adapt their ways… namely pull with shield throw, flash twice, and savage blade combo until dead. Other Gladiators refuse to listen and start trying to blame other players.

Does Threat Make Sense?

It was round or about this point that another friend of mine chimed into the conversation to drag us off in a completely different direction. My friend Talarian asked if we thought “threat” in general was a concept that players understood. His concept was that dealing damage and healing made obvious sense to a player, since both of those things existed in real life. But the concept of a tank, or the concept of threat generation abilities don’t have real world equivalents. To some extent I agree that threat generation is a bit more nebulous than damage or healing, but I totally think “threat” exists in the real world. As we go through our daily routines the “monkey brain” deep inside of us is constant assessing the world around us. Whether we want to or not, there is a calculation constantly ticking “is this a threat to me”? It doesn’t matter if you are walking down a dark alley or if you are trying to navigate the corporate hierarchy… we are constantly assessing threat to our well being or our interests.

I see the role of threat generation as being a master of influencing others to view you as being the primary threat. As such it has always made sense to me, be it storming into a room and like a action hero taunting the enemy “Hey Asshole! Why don’t you pick on someone your own size!” or simply taking aggressive actions to make someone take notice of what you are doing… the concept of forcing someone to deal with you makes sense to me. I think it is human nature to attack the most dangerous target first. We like getting the most struggle out of the way, so that we can focus on the targets of less threat later. While the wizard in the back of the room might be the real threat… that heavily armored guy that is coming straight for your with a big damned weapon drawn… is not exactly someone you can ignore and “feels” at the time to be the more immediate threat. Maybe that is precisely it, managing a sense of immediate harm and forcing encounters to deal with you because of your actions.

We Naturally Recognize Threat

One of the prime examples that I can give as to why “threat generation” works against players is when you are fighting a boss. When you do a lot of Looking For Raid in World of Warcraft, you notice there are certain tendencies in players. The first major tendency is to dog pile on whatever the biggest toughest looking mob there is. It does not matter if you said in raid chat to attack the mage first, or painted a skull over its head… there are still going to be a significant number of players attacking the big guy with the sword and shield. It is human nature to want to take down the big guy, and we tend to get tunnel vision and focus entirely on that mission if we are not careful. There are so many times that there is a side mechanic going on that is the REAL threat to the players… but especially as you get close to victory folks start ignoring the important things mashing their buttons harder trying to kill that big thing they were attacking. That big boss… has essentially effectively taunted the players into attacking him because of his imposing nature and perceived threat.

Sure games have created this artificial construct of abilities dealing X amount of threat per strike, but still at its core threat is a thing that players inherently understand whether or not they realize it. Some games have made some interesting choices around threat, by turning it into a target lock where mobs can taunt the players too… and you cannot target anything else for the requisite 6 seconds. Other games have chosen to make taunt work in PVP encounters by debuffing the damage you deal to anyone OTHER than the tank by a massive amount. Still others have relied on creating the role of tanking other players through careful use of stuns, slows, and pull effects to act as a physical obstacle that the players have to deal with in order to get to their target. All of which are tanking, and all of which are essentially “threat generation”. Sure some games have this as a mechanical number that needs to get bigger, but it exists in every game regardless of the mechanic or not. We might not know to call it threat, but I feel like by nature we understand that some things are of more danger to us than others. As such I don’t feel like threat has ever been a foreign concept to players.

Maintenance Gaming

January 8, 2015 by Belghast

A Conundrum

A few days ago I posted a tweet saying that at this point I am far less bored with World of Warcraft than I have been during other expansions. There are a myriad of reasons behind this, not the least of which is that I actually like the leveling arc in Draenor. I am working my way through level 100 number three and I am not really bored with the content yet. Granted I don’t really seem to have the burning desire to get through it like I have in the past, I am more comfortable to take a “will get there when I get there” approach to my leveling. I feel like maybe this is a more sustainable thing than my normal “burn three characters to max and quit” mentality that I seem to have. Hopefully by the end of the weekend my hunter will be 100, and I will likely start pushing more seriously my Enhancement Shaman.

I think there are a few reasons why this is happening. Firstly I really do like the Garrison now that it is finished, especially on my warrior. It gives me a place of peace and sanity before I venture out into the chaos of the world. I can bank, transmog, and hopefully at some point auction without having to worry with mailbox dancers or folks standing on vendors with their corehound mount. It was when I ventured out of my of my garrison on Christmas to go pick up my presents that I realized I really didn’t miss the people from my “daily” chores. Someone had taken it upon themselves to coat all of the packages with a layer of savage feasts making it a pain in the ass to click the actual presents… and my immediate thought was “and this is why I don’t leave my garrison”. That is maybe the problem however… that no one actually leaves their garrison.

Maintenance Gaming

Initially I was surprised when the response to my original statement about not being bored with World of Warcraft was that so many of my friends absolutely were bored. The common thread went something like this “Right now I am only logging in to run Garrisons, so I am probably going to cancel”. I’ve reached this point many times myself when a game has a gimmick that wants you to log in every so often to trigger. With the launch of Nightmare Tides, Rift introduced the Minions system where you could send these mini-pets out on missions to go fetch things. There was a period of time I was logging in twice a day… when I got up in the morning and when I got home at night to swap out my minion missions. It wasn’t long before I realized that I was only logging in to flip these switching and faded away from that game again.

The exact same thing happened for me with the Dragon Coins mobile game, and to some extent Landmark in that I was only logging in to pay my upkeep on my claim. When you realize you are only fiddling with something out of a sense of obligation, it is almost always time to leave. I think the problem with what I am terming “Maintenance Gaming” is that it can very much slow down the burnout of a player by giving them things to fiddle with to distract them from burning through the objectives. The problem is it can also serve to reanimate an already dead corpse allowing players to keep logging in ONLY to do the maintenance activity and never actually playing the game. So the folks that are logging in “ONLY” to play the garrison, are essentially the walking dead and will eventually quit.

The Glue in Gaming

I feel like the glue that keeps gamers attached to a game is progression in one form or another. Right now I am actively raiding in Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft and progressing in both of them. I care deeply about both games because that is my anchor… the fact that I am raiding. When all the other minutiae bores me… there is a functional core there of the raid that draws me back in. For others it is the people you play with, but that can only go so far… because eventually you will have done everything you want to do with said people. PVP can act as an anchor for some folks, but then again you have to be building towards some long term goal to make the PVP seem like anything other than mindless grinding. While “maintenance gaming” is definitely now a trend… it isn’t enough of a thing to actually keep someone glued to a game it seems.

Minions in Rift were fun for a few weeks, and so was building aimlessly in Landmark… but when I realized I was only logging in to mine exactly enough copper to pay my upkeep… I was more than willing to let my claim get repossessed. I have a feeling that before long we are going to start folks reaching that point with ArcheAge where they are willing to let their claim disappear because they are tired of logging in only to pay the upkeep. The “glue” is a deeply personal thing, and is going to be slightly different for each player… but ultimately you have to find whatever it is that connects you to the game and makes you care about it. I think for me at least this is what has been missing… a sense of building towards something more important than what I happen to be doing this day. The longest stretches I have spent playing any game… are the ones where I have been raiding. So I feel like I need to raid to keep caring about the game world, and I need that game world to be interesting… to keep caring about raiding.

Versatility Sucks

January 7, 2015 by Belghast

Ko’ragh Down!

With the holidays and the revolving door of people, it feels like this week is the first “real” week of tries we have been able to put on Ko’ragh. This time we went into it with a lot of proper research and managed to carve out a strategy. This involved a lot of things, not the least of which was me glyphing Mocking Banner so that it functions as a misdirect and our rogue and hunter standing by to do the same. Essentially Mocking Banner was available every other add phase it worked out, and it seemed to do miracle work of absolutely gluing the adds to our tank letting us burn them down faster. The off phases when it was on cooldown went nice and smooth as our rogue and hunter worked together to pick the adds up. We had a Deathknight available last night, but we wanted to sort out a method that did not rely on her since she is not an “every week” person in our raid and sometimes has scheduling conflicts.

It was amazing how different this set of attempts felt from the very start. The first handful of tries we had made on him before felt like this chaotic mess. This time around everything felt smooth and focused and while it took us a couple of attempts to work through the various issues… we straight wrecked the boss in a method that felt extremely repeatable. Additionally the entire raid as a whole felt better… even Tectus which is generally the most chaotic mess ever for us felt nice and smooth. I am really damned proud of the progress we have made as a raid. We have never been “cutting edge progression” but it feels nice to be doing well within the current tier with us sitting at 6/7 Normal and 2/7 Heroic. Thursday night the goal is to get in and get us a few heroic kills, and maybe test the waters to see where we are on the DPS check that is Butcher. Then hopefully we get some good solid attempts on Imperator Mar’gok.

Versatility Sucks

Yesterday twitter was a hotbed of long running conversations for me and various groups of people. One of these conversations was with my friend Talarian about stat distribution on the items in Draenor. As a Gladiator I have been focused on two things above all else… Bonus Armor and Crit because both of these feed the goofy chain reaction that is the gladiator warrior. In general Gladiators get 1.5 times the Attack Power from Bonus Armor per point of itemization than we do from Strength. This makes it our number one stat for literally anything… because per point we are getting one and a half times the benefit. The prime example of this is when you look at the Draenic Strength Potion and the Draenic Armor Potion. When I pop a strength potion I get 1000 attack power during the course of its buff, when I pop the armor potion which feels counter intuitive… I gain 1500 attack power. So yesterday I was complaining about getting items with the “wrong stats”.

Talarian chimed in with a well written post where he mathed things out and came up with the conclusion that relative ilevel is far more important than having an item with the “perfect” stat combination. While I agree with this in theory… it is nonetheless frustrating when you have to trade in an item with the perfect stat package with a “bigger” item with a rather shitty one. I feel like Blizzard goes through these phases where they want to make “stats interesting” but I feel like their game design simply does not support this. Raid encounters are in essence more about “throughput” than making “interesting choices”. So long as they keep making “DPS Check” encounters, that is literally the only thing we are going to care about, and we want whatever stat package gives us the most performance. In these scenarios stats like Versatility lose out, because would you rather have the stat that passively and opaquely “makes things better” or would you rather have that stat that cascades a chain reaction of your abilities making your class “feel” better.

Right now Versatility feels like a failed experiment, because it is this phantom stat that “makes everything better”. If we look at the definition on the wiki: Versatility is pretty simple: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%. It’s a straightforward, obvious upgrade to your primary role’s performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. The healing increase it provides does work on self-heals, such as Recuperate, for example. All of this sounds amazing… but the problem is it is also boring. When I stack crit it directly effects my chances of abilities interacting with each other, since a Crit X gives me a free Y and a Crit Y gives me a free Z… essentially my class FEELS better to play. When I stack Versatility the benefits are largely transparent and feel something akin to “Mastery 2.0” but somehow more boring.

Thank You for Blogging

While I am in this mode of reacting to conversations from twitter… I have to single one out that happened with the Godmother of Faff herself… AlternativeChat. This comment itself is buried in part of a larger conversation about the effect of when we refer to someone on our blogs. But it underlines a problem all bloggers have. None of us think what we are doing is as meaningful and important as others seem to. I am singling out AlternativeChat here because she has been a good friend for some time, and been every so gracious to follow me down a number of whims. All of this said and all history aside… when I wanted to have her on my Bel Folks Stuff podcast, I was quite literally afraid that she was going to say no. I feel like the tiniest of ants compared to her when it comes to my impact on the blogosphere and my reach within our shared community. Thankfully she graciously accepted and out of it came a really wonderful conversational podcast.

What I find hard to fathom is that I am sure there are people in the community that look at me the same way as I looked at AlternativeChat. I feel like I do nothing important, I just do my thing but it is the act of me doing my thing that is the important thing. There was a further discussion yesterday about numbers and statistics and all of that sort of thing. In truth at the end of the day I would feel just as happy if I had 50 readers as if I had 500 readers. All that really matters is that there is someone out there listening and reading and caring enough about me to keep doing it on a regular basis. This is not a business for me, this is an act of love and caring… and all I am looking for is people to share that with. So if you are out there blogging, I want to thank you deeply for doing whatever it is you do. At the end of the day you can’t read a person daily without caring about the individual on the other side of the screen. As far as the readers… I want to thank you all the most because you make doing this crazy thing each morning worthwhile because I know I am not alone.