Guild Leadership Archives - Page 50 of 108

A Proper Paladin

September 27, 2014 by Belghast

Capitalism Ho!

This morning I am getting around a bit later than normal. I am not sure why exactly I slept in so late. I got up to go to the restroom at 6 am, and then next thing I know my wife is getting up at 8:30 telling me that her tummy is grumbling. I apparently took from 8:30 until 9 to actually raise myself from the stupor. I showered and got dressed and wandered out like usual to find some breakfast. When I got to the QuikTrip just down the street from my house it was absolutely packed with people. When I exited the car I immediately realized why. Across the street is the high school and I was confronted with a barrage of the sound of that can only come from a dozen marching bands warming and tuning.

Since there were band parents and potential competitors wandering in and out of the store, I half expected that everything would be picked over. However it seems like they were prepared and pretty much everything you could want was in stock. I ended up getting my traditional Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Roll, and for my wife a chocolate long john. For the moment life is good as I have consumed my breakfast and am now writing for you lovely readers. It was around this point that I remembered that my friend Kodra and fellow host of AggroChat was planning a stream this morning. If you catch this post early enough you should totally tune into his Hitbox stream and watch him attempt to date birds. We have been joking for a few weeks that he needed to play this game… and the subsection title comes from a comment he just made over the stream when he was offered to get a job.

All Grown Up

Yesterday I was feeling absolutely like crap. I woke up and it felt like someone had filled my head with concrete over the night, and took after my throat with some sandpaper. I struggled around yesterday morning trying to get psyched for work, and it just wasn’t working. I texted one of my co-workers to make sure he was in the office, and that things were going smoothly. After reporting back in that all was well I decided to just stay home. I stayed remoted into work most of the day, working on this and that but took breaks to work on leveling my paladin. Considering I technically took a sick day, I didn’t feel bad at all about doing this. They were essentially getting free work from me as it was, and I was mostly just dealing with little issues as they came up, and responding to email.

After doing my daily low level dungeon roulette and getting Haukke yet again… I decided to pull everything in the zone and skip nothing. The boost of XP managed to take me through the rest of 48 and halfway through 49. I didn’t really feel like tanking another low level dungeon considering my precious bonus was gone, so instead I went out to Mor Dhona and worked on some leves. It is almost as though they had intended folks to do just this because all but one of the Leves spawn in exactly the same corner of the zone. So I could run to the vendor get four quests, complete all four and just say no to the free teleport between them. It took a couple of rounds of this to get close, but what actually dinged me was completely the “do 5 different types of leves” challenge log entry. Those things are worth a truly prodigious amount of experience.

The awesome thing about having so much Syrcus tower and Weathered gear, is that all of it is dual class for both Warriors and Paladins. This means the second I dinged 50, and bought 3 pieces of ilevel 90 gear from the hunt master… I was sitting at I think ilevel 89. My weapon and shield being the only thing dragging down my overall score. The problem is I had glamoured most of the hideous looking Syrcus tower gear to look like the default warrior set, and class specific glamours won’t show up when you equip it as another class. Instead I opted to go for a mix of the chain tunic I loved so much, and some of the heavy allagan bits I had managed to connect. For the paladin I keep the golden crown, and for warrior I use the bunny samurai hat. So far I am digging the look.

A Proper Paladin

Yesterday afternoon and into the night, my mission was to push through the Relic Reborn quest line and become a proper Curtana wielding paladin. One of the unintended consequences of the Nexus relic system, is that folks tend to be ONLY farming whatever happens to be the dungeon or trial that gives bonus light. Players have figured out there is the equivalent of the “Hot Zone” that Everquest and Everquest II used to have. Where if you run that one thing, you get a significantly boosted amount of nexus light. The result is that it took absolutely forever to get most of my primals done. I think at this point folks are still busy farming nexus light, and not working on alts… which I think is what keeps the group steps for the relic moving along quickly. You would figure as a tank I would get damned near instant queues… but unfortunately that was not the case.

I spent large blocks of time dancing in various places. Here I am dancing for two NPCs in Uldah… both of which seem thoroughly unimpressed by my skills. I think a rundown of the waits looked a little something like this… Chimera took around 45 minutes to finally pop and when it did I was the most seasoned tank so ended up tanking it. Hydra on the other hand took only about 25 minutes… and the other tank a Cat Girl in a Bikini wielding a huge axe rushed in and tanked it. For Ifrit it was more like a 15 minute wait, and oddly enough once again a Cat Girl in a Bikini tanked it, but from what I can tell it was a different one. Finally we come around to Garuda and it was almost instant pop. It turns out that I lucked out and hit a spot where Garuda was the Hot Zone… and as such it was the fastest Garuda run I have ever experienced. Folks were ignoring all of the mechanics and pretty much just burning her.

That just left Titan, and after another fifteen minute run I was volunteered to be the primary tank. This is fine because really as far as fights go Titan is one of the easiest fights to tank. For the most part you just stand in one spot occasionally shifting slightly to either be next to the red line or to avoid a bomb. Like every titan I have seemed to be in ever… it took a couple of wipes and echo stacks before we finally pushed through. On the time we won we were down to a single Scholar healer and a few dps and me. This seems to honestly be easier than trying to keep alive eight people on this fight. Sure it was a pain in the ass and took a really long time, but you reach a point where the healing and movement is manageable and you just keep repeating the same loop. With that I had my Curtana and shield. Moments later I had upgraded it to Zenith level and finally felt like a real paladin tank. This makes level 50 job number four and my fourth Relic Zenith.

#FFXIV #Paladin

Neon Ninjas and Knights

September 26, 2014 by Belghast

Its A Voxel World

Yesterday something pretty awesome happened… Trove Beta launched and overall everything went pretty smoothly. I have been a fan of the game since I got into the very first Alpha wave. You can check out my first video from November of last year and see just how much the game has changed. This is one of those titles that has changed at an almost staggering pace. I would pop my head in about once a month… only to find that the framework of the game was in a massively different place than when I last left it. I have to say during the Alpha this became a bit of an impediment to me playing it. I would want to just pop in and do something interesting and essentially have to relearn how to do anything at all. That said my friend Rae showed interest in the game early this week, and oddly enough we happened to both log in together on the very last night of Closed Alpha.

We had such a good time running around and smashing things, that we decided last night when the Beta launched to skip playing Final Fantasy XIV at least for a bit and dive straight into leveling up in Trove. The above mounts we found during the final hours of closed alpha, and they are essentially rainbow piñatas that shoot rainbows and confetti out of their butts as you ride along. Basically it is my goal to manage to get this mount again during beta. Nothing says Trove quite like leaving a trail of sprinkles everywhere you go. Unfortunately the mount comes from their version of a lootbox. I have no clue what the drop rate is for one of the piñata mounts but I know I purchased 10 of them last night and Rae purchased 5 with the points we were given going into the beta… and all we managed to get were a few crafting recipes.

Neon Ninjas and Knights

One of the brand new things for Beta was the introduction of the Neon Knight class. For most of the night this is what Rae ran around as while I played my Knight. The class is a bit of a stealthy melee in that your right mouse click causes you to drop a decoy and shift into stealth. From there you can throw shuriken at your target for a fairly devastating effect. The purple rings around you seem to be some sort of a charging up mechanic that indicates when you are ready to throw shuriken. Other than that if you attack from stealth you do a significant amount more damage. I personally found the class a little frustrating, since I like to rush headlong into combat and bash all the things in the face. For someone who wants more tactical game play however this might be the ideal option.

Fortunately or unfortunately I feel like the most “Bel” class in existence is still the Knight, which is essentially your default. For starters it is a melee class with pretty high survival in up close confrontations. The secondary attack is this impressive weapon slam that can knock back enemies and deal a cone of damage. The first ability you get is a charge and god knows I love charge attacks, but this one also doubles as a movement ability and a way to dash across gaps to get to places more easily. Finally the last attack is this shield that you can put up that causes you to take no damage for a period of time. The last one is on a long cooldown, but it serves nicely as an “oh shit” button for doing some of the harder content.

Content Density

One of the coolest things about late Alpha and now Beta is just how diverse and dense the content is. Early on in the game each biome section would have a single objective be it a castle or a tower or something of the sort. This time around you would be hard pressed to go for very long before discovering something that has a boss or a challenge or something of the sort. Granted by the time I came back later in the night, the world was getting more than a bit picked over… so I am hoping that the world reset happens pretty frequently. In any case we were able to roll around the map going to areas that had not been touched and doing the challenges we encountered along the way. The above shot is from this insane rainbow dungeon in the clouds that you get to by climbing up through the hollowed out tree pictured in the back. Each biome has its own challenges with is own mob types which make the gameplay feel fairly fresh.

Essentially the challenges that I have encountered break down into a few themes. The first involves triggering an event. These tend to say that there is something dangerous inside in the upper right hand corner of the screen. When you trigger the event you have to survive a few waves of enemies, and if you do so a chest appears. The negative is that both you and the mobs you are fighting have to stay inside a blue ring that spawns when the event starts. We had issues when fighting mobs up in the air, that they would fall off the edges. The positive is you can retry the event over and over by simply moving out of the ring and waiting for it to reset. The part that makes these challenging is that generally the area with the totem that triggers the event is covered in spikes or surrounded by these pillars that shoot fireballs in a Castlevania fashion. So while the half dozen mobs really isn’t a huge problem… keeping them from knocking you back into environment obstacles totally is.

Something Minecraft Doesn’t Give Me

At it’s core the gameplay of Trove is similar enough to Minecraft that you cannot talk about it without at least mentioning that game. You could call Trove Minecraft with more meaningful combat and MMO style loot, but the game itself feels richer than that might denote. One of the aspects of the game that I like the most is the existence of my Cornerstone. This is basically a plot of land that I control and can build permanent structures upon… but that also moves with me around the world. I can walk up to any plot that is presently unclaimed and the game will rebuild my cornerstone before my eyes. So I can have crafting machines travel around with me, and each time I do this it resets my spawn point. This gives me some permanence that I crave in an otherwise very flexible world. This however does not make for a great community, as folks are constantly picking up their home like a hermit crab and moving it with them.

What is more interesting is the fact that players can create clubs, which in essence give you guild like functionality. I’ve created a Club for the Alliance of Awesome, and as such we have a “Club World”. This is a fully instanced biome where we can control everything in it. This means you can build super intricate guild houses and give other players the ability to teleport into them. This is the more permanent structure from the looks of it, and gives folks a way to link up and meet in user created worlds. While ours does not really do much of anything at the moment, I have plunked down a few machines and will likely keep adding to it as we go along. You are given only the smallest of islands to start building on, but it looks like more or less you can freely build out over the ocean for quite some ways. There are a number of websites giving away beta keys right now, so I highly suggest you track one down and give this game a shot.

Cancelling Titan

September 24, 2014 by Belghast

Bragtoberfest 2014

bragtoberfest_spooky

This month Izlain and J3w3l of Couch Podtatoes are running an event for the gaming community. The idea is to have an entire month of remembering the good things about gaming. The last few months have been frustrating to be a gamer, and the word gamer itself has been drug through the mud a bit by some misguided individuals with other agendas… and their willing or not so willing peons. The idea is to get back to the roots of gaming… and just play awesome games for the fun of it. I was brought into the equation to help out with some logo work, and I did a couple of them that you might see used during the event. For a better description you can check out what Izlain posted on his blog Me Vs Myself and I.

We all know that the last few weeks have been a frustrating time to be a fan of video games. There are sections of the Internet and our society as a whole that don’t necessarily see things the way we do, and a huge push back against women, other minority groups, and the industry have stigmatized the word “gamer.” I want to take it back. I want us to remember why we started gaming in the first place. I want you to enjoy being a gamer, and to brag about your accomplishments in games, be it a high score shattered, a nice piece of loot earned, or your name at the top of a leaderboard. That bragging can take place however you see fit, be it via your blog, on a podcast, in a video, whatever you want. Let’s just get back to our roots as gamers.

Bragtoberfest aims to make it fun to be a gamer again. We all game, and most of us also either blog, stream, vlog or podcast about games as well. Why not combine the two into a month-long event?

If you are interested you should definitely check out the Bragtoberfest 2014 nook as that Is where the contest will be running out of. There are four major events that Izlain and J3w3l are running, as well as a slew of prizes to be had. More importantly this is an embracing of the good that is left in gaming, and the enjoyment each of us have that first time we boot up a new game. Also to get some buzz going, don’t forget to mention #Bragtoberfest when you post about the events.

Goodbye Alpha

Monday night on a whim I hooked my good friend Rae up with a key for the Trove Alpha, since she had shown some interest in the game. So we spent the evening wandering around the game, and I wish to god I had been streaming it… because the running commentary of her and I “discovering” things had to be hilarious. Trove is one of those games that I really enjoyed early on, but have simply not played of late. Each time I do manage to boot it up the game has changed so massively since the last time that I almost felt overwhelmed to even begin to play it. If nothing else the game has shown players just how in a constant state of flux most game development is. Trove has broken some of the rules and for the most part uses Reddit entirely for its user forums, as well as communicating copious amounts of information back with the community about what it has done and intends to do.

As much fun as we had, Monday night was a little bittersweet. It was only after logging out that night and checking into the Reddit yesterday that I realized that it was in fact the end of Alpha events that we were seeing. So many awesome things were going on, mostly that people were throwing down these pinatas full of loot on the ground for us to combat. We both managed to get amazing Pinata mounts… that leave a trail of rainbows and sprinkles as you move around. Sadly all of this went away that night as the servers went down. We will not be able to play again until Thursday when the beta officially begins… and I have to say right now I am feeming to play again. In the past I had pretty much played by myself, but to be running around with someone else was an absolute blast.

Right now we have tentative plans to wander around Thursday night leveling. I plan on working on Knight since that tends to be my favorite, and at this point I am not sure if Rae will be a Gunslinger or a Faerie Trickster. At least a small part of me is hoping that the new Neon Ninja class will be ready at the start of beta. I have to say the game is so much more solid than at any point I have ever played it in the past. The biggest improvement is just how content dense the various biomes now are. Once upon a time there would be a single element in the biome that was worth finding and clearing, but we stumble across all sorts of points of interest, each with their own bosses and treasure chests to be found. Right now I have an Alliance of Awesome guild running, so if you are playing or plan on playing let me know and we can get you invited.

Cancelling Titan

Yesterday during an interview with Mike Morhaime the website Polygon broke the news that apparently the mystery project Titan has officially been cancelled. For those who are completely unfamiliar with the name Titan and the mystery surrounding it, you can check out this excellent post from Massively running down the short history of a game that doesn’t exist. For me I guess it feels weird to know now that Blizzard does not have a new MMO up its sleeve, and makes me wonder if they are completely abandoning the MMO genre in general in favor of games that are frankly easier to manufacture content for. Right now Hearthstone is by all reports doing amazingly well, and they have managed to find a mix of value in their micro transaction model so that it does not feel abusive to the players. Similarly with the ramping up of Heroes of the Storm, we have them formally throwing their hat into the MOBA arena which at least for the games that have done it right, is also a cash cow. The amount of effort that it takes to develop a new hero for example is so significantly less than it does an entire MMO expansion.

Statistic: Number of World of Warcraft subscribers from 1st quarter 2005 to 2nd quarter 2014 (in millions) | Statista

Find more statistics at StatistaI feel like one of the things that most players do not understand is that World of Warcraft is following a very bell shaped decline. Each time a new expansion is released there is a momentary bump, but the last one of these only raised the subscribers enough to cover the exodus at the tail end of the previous expansion before steadily declining again. I am not trying to claim doom and gloom about World of Warcraft, but it feels like fact that the game has long since entered its golden years. The positive is that both Everquest and Everquest 2 have enjoyed significant followings and stability long after the buzz died down. In both cases they continue to churn out expansions happily, and for the small but extremely devoted fan base they are great places to be. As such I more than expect that the same will be true for World of Warcraft. I expect the game will likely taper off and flatten the curve a bit around 2 to 3 million players. Looking at the number alone however, we can see that the game is at a level of subscribers that it has not been at since the sometime between the opening of AQ40 and the launch of Naxxramas in vanilla.

So I guess my question is this… does this really mean that Blizzard as a company is moving away from the MMO model that they popularized? Do they have another skunkworks project up there sleeves that they can surprise the player base with at a later date? I realize talk about the decline of World of Warcraft makes a lot of fans nervous. I am trying to do so with the least amount of hyperbole available, and in a way that is an non-incendiary as I can. The truth is right now World of Warcraft still brings in a very significant amount of money. As it ages however, that revenue stream keeps diminishing. The question is, can they make enough money from micro transactions to replace the stability of the subscription dollar? Will they be able to muster the same amount of fandom without an MMO to stir up the hysteria to eleven? What does the future of Blizzard look like, and is it as dominant a force as it has been to date?

#ProjectTitan #Trove #Bragtoberfest

Familiarity in Proximity

September 23, 2014 by Belghast

Mega Servers Continued

A few days ago I made a post on about launch issues and game servers, and the problems and solutions that come from various server scenarios. In my post I presented some discussion about the various styles of servers and the weaknesses that each have. Mega Servers are an awesome technology but there are problems with it, namely that it reduces the casual proximity of players. In my post Doone made a comment, and while I normally would have simply posted it as a reply… I am thinking that maybe I need more space to go into my thoughts. For sake of not having to make you jump through a bunch of hoops I am going to repose his comment here.

Im not sure why anyone thinks Megaservers make it difficult to build community? Do you mean that it’s too many people to build intimate connections? Because if thats the case, then we’re just talking about social tools, not megaserver tech. Players just need a reason to interact and that doesnt change because of megaservers.

AA’s current situation is embarrassing. Theres not any good excuses for their current situation. This isn’t the first MMO launch, not even the first MMO with land and other features that complicate server flexibility. Theyre simply unprepared for deliberate reasons. There’s just no way they didn’t know what they needed for a smooth launch.

It’s worse that people who shelled out hundreds of dollars to support development are reporting not getting that 4 day advantage they were promised. That’s a serious charge.

Should AA have gone Megaserver? I don’t see how this wasn’t mandatory given the kind of features it has. You need a vast server community that’s STABLE. And you can’t have that when your system is as inflexible as the one they’ve adopted. I think they’re sinking their own ship right now. — Doone

While I agree with the bulk of what he said, I thought I should maybe clarify my points about mega servers. At first glance they look like a magic bullet for the problem. At the very least I thought they were a magic bullet for launch day woes, however they have their own problems that do not always show up early on.

Informal Community

There is a certain kind of community that happens spontaneously by just being around the same players each and every day. For example the above picture is that of one of the late game hubs in Final Fantasy XIV Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona. Upon arriving at the Aetheryte crystal I am immediately seeing some familiar places that tend to frequent it. You can see a name marked in orange as someone I have already friended. However more than that I recognize if not the names, but the guild tags of many of the players surrounding me. There is a sense of familiarity in seeing the same players day in and out, and when one of them is in need you are more likely to step in and help out. This is the way friendships in MMOs used to be formed through shared activity, not just shared guild tag.

In Final Fantasy XIV it has instanced housing wards, where you purchase a house and in theory become neighbors with lots of other players. Our house is across the street from a Market Board which is the way that you access the auction house economy. Over the course of weeks of being in close proximity with several other players, we have struck up a bit of a friendship. One of which is the name in orange in the above Mor Dhona photo. There is lots of spontaneous interaction that happens just by being around other players and gaining that sense of common goals. This picture is when we just spontaneously put on our brand new Dragon Warrior inspired Blue Slime King hats and started dancing together. But the interaction has spread much further than that, and I’ve helped these players out in the world beyond our neighborhood, as well as had my heart warm each time I happened to see one of them out in the wild.

A Server of Strangers

I’ve played many games so far that have some form of a blended server environment. World of Warcraft for the last several years has blended the leveling zones for the entire battlegroup to make each server feel more populated. The most recent poster child for Mega Servers however was the Elder Scrolls Online. Before launch they made several promises about creating a situation that grouped like minded players together into virtual servers, while still all being part of a much larger farm. While we had one of the smoothest launches since they could easily scale up the hardware temporarily, and reduce it later as needed… there are a lot of problems that came from not being with a fixed set of players. Admittedly some of the issues are due to the poor decisions made with the user interface.

In the above image, can you easily tell where my group mates are? Can you tell the names of players surrounding me? In both cases the answer is a huge nope, and this poor design choice of obfuscating information about other players only served to make the mega server concept feel that more alienating. Everyone that was not you became another nameless faceless person taking up room and competing for your resources. While this is the extreme, I’ve had the same thing happen in World of Warcraft when I encountered players from other servers. It was like that they were somehow less important to me, since they didn’t share the same server lineage. I knew that I would likely never see them again, so why even bother trying to be friendly?

Familiarity in Proximity

In a traditional server structure there is familiarity in your actions. You end up noticing players that do the same things as you do. It might be farming a specific location on the map because you like the look of it, or crafting at a specific machine. In hub based MMOs like World of Warcraft, you spend inordinate amounts of time milling around whatever your faction end game city tends to be. I would spend hours running circles around Dalaran while dealing with raid and guild business over text. While doing this I used to favor certain areas of the town and vendors, and I started taking note of who else seemed to like milling around these same places. Over time I would start up conversations and get used to seeing the same people. If they were gone, I would wonder what they were up to and hope that they were okay. Over the years there are so many contacts that I have made… that ultimately turned into later guild members that I made only because I noticed they were in the same place as me and decided to strike up a conversation.

The problem with the mega server is that it destroys this kind of familiarity through proximity. I feel like Elder Scrolls Online was the absolute worst case of this, because not only did it rob you of being around the same people all the time… it also took their names and guild tags from you. One of the important aspects of a guild is it becomes far easier to recognize than individual player names. Over time you start to associate a certain kind of behavior with a certain guild tag, and then when you see one of those people leading an event you have an informed decision as to whether or not this is going to be a good thing. As a guild leader, my people were amazing and the absolute best advertising I could ever have created. I would get random messages from players who ended up running a dungeon with one of my people, and they wanted to take time to compliment me as guild leader on how nice they were. It is this kind of interaction with others that I hope to preserve with whatever ends up being the next server model.

The Happy Medium

As I said in my first post, I think there is a happy medium somewhere. I think the ultimate version of mega servers, allows you to checkmark certain characteristics that you favor and then creates essentially a virtual server populated with the same players every time. Similarly I think there are ways for games to maybe more easily identify players that you have interacted with in the past. The biggest problem with Elder Scrolls Online is that every player felt anonymous. Even my own guild members, I struggled to locate them in a mob. This should never be the case, you should always be able to pick your friends and guild members out of the biggest sea of names and faces. Similarly I think it is important to be able to identify players, because it allows you to form those connections in your mind that if I saw this player in my crafting hub and they are out here doing the same action… I am invested in maybe going that next step and inviting them to a group. I want us to keep the best aspects of the traditional server structure, and find new ways to scale them as we go forward.

I want to leave with an excellent post from Sig of Crucible Gaming called “How WoW Ruined MMO Gaming”. While the title is hyperbole, there are some really good thoughts contained within, and it seems like Sig mourns the interconnectivity of the previous era of gaming. Once upon a time we needed players, and as such generally treated them better. As games have removed the need for having other players we have eroded that base of civility. While in many cases I think that World of Warcraft has poisoned the well in doing away with some things that were absolutely normal previously, I don’t think we are in an unredeemable state. Final Fantasy XIV has proven to me that there can exist a game that is both social and modern at the same time… and that has a thriving and cohesive community. I think the ultimate trick will be finding ways to take what they have done there and scale it to other games.