Guild Leadership Archives - Page 86 of 108

Me and My Tentacle

February 1, 2014 by Belghast

I Hate the NDA

I know you are thinking, “of course you hate them, you are a blogger” and to some extent yes that is the source of my frustration. However more than that I feel like in the internet age they are defeatist. We are in an age when people are actively ready to hand you their cash to participate in a pretty buggy experience. Look at how popular the Steam Early access process has been to date, and just how many people are actively playing games that are not close to being launched yet. I started playing Minecraft during really early beta and it was roughly two years before the game “officially” launched… all the while there was so much enjoyment to be had in the process of the alpha. Each step of the way it was the constant stream of videos that got people pumped to be playing it.

At any given time I am in a number of alpha and beta testing processes for video games. It has been a thing that I have done for years, and it seems like the more you test the more you get to test. In the case of two of those I am amped and ready to be gushing about those games and posting cool info about them. The problem is both of those are under pretty strict NDA processes. They moment they lift however I will be off to the races with information in hand ready to post. What the NDA seems to cause right now is an era of disinformation. Folks who you assume are in testing can make comments like “I wouldn’t get your hopes up” here and there… without actually touching their NDA guidelines and cause a negative buzz for the game before it even launches.

The Open Model

The negative seems to stick with us more than the positive, and it seems like everyone knows someone who knows someone who doesn’t like this game or that game and is more than willing to give you their laundry list of reasons in private. This I guess is why Trove has been so unbelievably refreshing. The official forums are Reddit, and from day one we have been able to post whatever the hell we wanted about the game. They know it is alpha, but they also are super transparent about the information. Yesterday they released the Gunslinger class seen above, and sure it is buggy but it is damned cool seeing the first additional class in the game come to fruition.

Thing is… we’ve known this was coming for some time. They have talked about it in the live streams, on reddit… posted various tidbits of information. So the community that has sprung up around this game was ready and waiting with open arms to see this new class and the new batch of player created weapons that would spring out of it. What this open model does is general some serious evangelism for your game, which is a good thing. People what to play games that other people are having fun playing. The above video is the entire reason why I started playing Minecraft.

Were it not for the X’s Adventures in Minecraft series of videos, I probably never would have gotten onto the Minecraft bandwagon at least not until EVERYONE was playing it. There was something so simple about the game play I saw and infectious but only because the person doing the lets play videos was so open and engaging about what he was doing. Games can really benefit from this simple grass roots support, and I feel like this is going to play a larger and larger role in getting folks into new games over time. I am sure we are also entering the era of the video casting shill… and we have seen a certain measure of that in the media recently with the payola scandal going on within the xbox one videocasters. All of this said… I just feel like right now the NDA does more harm than good. When a new game comes out, people crave information about it… and if the game company themselves won’t provide it, this is a great niche for the evangelists to fill.

Me and My Tentacle

I admit it… I just wanted a reason to name this post something goofy. Over in WoW I have spent a lot of time soloing old content for fun and profit. Namely I have been seeking the pets and mounts that drop in older content. I believe i spoke about my surprise that I could actually solo the Twin Emperors finally in AQ40 which had been the only road block from regularly soloing this instance. When I took down C’Thun I got one of those items I had always wanted to get back when we were raiding. The Vanquished Tentacle of C’Thun is a trinket that on use summons a Tentacle of C’Thun to come fight by your side for 30 seconds. Even back in the day this was mostly a novelty item… since it was stationary and as a result really not that useful unless you were fighting a mob that stood completely still. However how freakin cool is it to summon a tentacle on demand?

Another bit of madness I have engaged upon recently is trying to work my way through the Argent Tournament. Look I know you are all saying… why did you not do that in Wrath? Well I am bad at doing daily quest grinds… I always have a million other things I would rather be doing than dailies. So I piddled at them from time to time… but mostly I just hated the jousting mechanic. Now however it seems like that mechanic can be cheesed by the fact that I am a well geared level 90. Luckily I think I only have Gnomeregan and Darnasas left before I can get the tabard, which it is cool to have a port to Northrend. However this is something I am doing mostly for the large number of pets and mounts you can get. Not sure how super seriously I will take this, I doubt it will become a daily ritual like the Netherwing grind did. Right now I have a lot of different games that I ant to be playing, but this is my next faction “goal”.

Free To Play Budget

January 30, 2014 by Belghast

The Arrival

Well yesterday was the day that The Elder Scrolls online officially announced its pricing and opened up the preorders. This honestly has been a day I have waiting for anxiously for some time. I realize that lately there has been a lot of hostility towards the Elder Scrolls because it is trying to be a traditional subscription model game in a market gone completely gaga over the “free” in free to play. I personally do not mind paying for a box and then later paying a subscription fee for a game, especially not this one. Unfortunately my NDA is firmly in place so there is not a whole lot more I can say about the reasons why I am so into this game. I am anxious for it to fall so I can properly gush over it. Honestly at this point I am shocked that it is still in place, considering the April launch date. Hopefully the coming weeks will see that change.

I love the preorder launch trailer above, because it takes place seconds after the original cinematic launch trailer. Whereas the first trailer focused on the player versus player conflicts being set up in the world, this one is more focused on the other conflict. You know the one where a giant Daedric Prince is trying to take over Tamriel. Since I am not PVP centric, this is the conflict I am most interested in and the cinematic like always does not miss a detail of showing this tension. If you have not already seen the original cinematic… you should really watch it first to get the full effect. I would love to see them release one that edits the two together into one seamless sequence.

The Pricing

The above image is the shot across the bow that started the madness. It seems that ahead of time Amazon staged the image and it got leaked. From that point it was off to the races with speculation and complaint about the benefits or lack thereof. Honestly when I look for a Collector’s Edition all I care about is access to in-game goodies, a soundtrack and the traditional head start weekend. As far as in game stuff, I generally expect some form of an in game boost item that becomes meaningless by about level 10, and some sort of an in-game mount… since having a mount becomes so insanely important in these games. So by those criteria this CE is lacking the soundtrack, but instead making up with an additional playable race… The Imperial. More than likely Belghast will be an Imperial, because that is fitting his character.

The real benefit however is not even mentioned here in the image that started it all. Apparently if you preorder before launch you get an additional set of bonuses called the “Explorers Pack”, that will allow you to create a character of any race in any faction. That right there is pretty huge. Imagine if you could have an Alliance Tauren, or a Horde Dwarf? I would have totally done that many times in my time playing various faction centric games. So far only Rift has really allowed me to create faction bending characters, and even then it is only through the use of race swaps. You also get an additional pet, but next to the rest of that pack it seems meaningless. All of this comes for the relatively reasonable prices of $50 for digital, $60 for physical, $70 for digital CE, and $100 for physical CE with the statue and book and all the miscellany that you see above.

Yesterday we were absolutely shocked at how reasonable the box was to be truthful. Based on recent examples a collectors edition I was honestly expecting this to be another one of those $150 Star Wars: The Old Republic style boxed sets. So while I find it pretty reasonable… there are a lot of folks who are chafing under the pricing. To be truthful were I outside of the United States I would too. For starters it seems like Zenimax simply changed the currency symbol rather than setting a realistic price point. That means for all my British friends, these prices end up being $80, $96, $112, and $160 respectively. Eighty bucks is a bit too much to ask someone to pay for a brand new non-super happy magical edition of a game. Granted by the time I post this, those prices will likely change as I just did them based on a quick google of converting dollars to pounds… but still they are more than a little out of whack. The end result is a lot of my euro friends simply saying “nope”, and quite honestly if I had to pay those prices… even as much as I love the game I might also be in that boat.

Free to Play Budget

Remember the other day me talking about how our perspective matters. This is yet another case of this happening. Had the free to play explosion not degraded what we are willing to pay for an MMO… then this is another launch that would have gone off without a question as to the price to value. At this point however so many MMOs are either outright free, or some sort of a “buy the box” model. Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and World of Warcraft remain the last bastions of the “pay for the software and pay for the game” era. So we can quickly rush to bashing them for this decision… but the problem is they were built for a era that may or may not be over. These games were started in a time when the reality was that players would happily plunk down their $60 for the client software and just as happily plunk down $15 a month for the maintenance fee. I mean this model works in the IT world, since damned near every big money software package comes chained to a maintenance agreement.

What has changed is that players now have an option. Similar to the open source movement, folks can now say “Nope” and opt to avoid playing the new and shiny games and instead retrench in games like Rift that have a much lower barrier of entry. As much as I want to play Elder Scrolls, I can’t necessarily say that they are wrong. I am pretty intimately connected to the success of this title, so I was going to play it long before they announced the pricing. I knew from the moment it was announced that I would be leading a branch of House Stalwart in this game, and having a lot of fun along the way. For me buying Elder Scrolls Online was a foregone conclusion, but I can completely see especially with the really poor currency conversion skills… why folks would opt not to buy into this franchise. Granted this games success really doesn’t lay within the MMO community… frankly I don’t think they “need” us. This game will be a test of whether or not the console player has an appetite for a large scale multiplayer version of a game they have bought tens of millions of copies already.

Sneaky McSneakybits

January 29, 2014 by Belghast

Persistent Stuff

It has been quite a while since I last talked about Trove on my blog. For a bit I had been recording regular segments of me exploring the world, then after roughly six of them I just stopped. Namely this coincides with me getting super into World of Warcraft raiding for a bit. I however have continued to explore the game each time they add a new build. At this point it is hard to remember exactly what the state of the game was when I last talked about it. Currently we have fully persistent cornerstones, and you can see mine on the right-hand side of the image above. It is still very much a work in progress, but essentially I was trying to maximize the space available and still look like something I could pick out at a distance as “mine”.

Currently there are four levels above ground and two below ground, the first of which below has my workbench and block transmuter thingy. One of the cool things that they added in within the last few patches is the ability for your crafting inventory to survive between server resets. This means I finally have a real reason to mass harvest materials for use later, since I am not constantly losing everything each time a patch goes in. My biggest wish however is that we could craft some weapons to replace the starter crap. Each time the server resets I rush around trying to get decent enough weapons to leave the first tier zones. In this present patch it feels like maybe they nerfed the drop rates a bit, as I slaughter a few dozen ladybugs and bees this morning and have gotten nothing at all but cubits… the crafting currency.

Another cool thing they are doing is replacing the in game weapon drops with ones created by players. When you get an item, it now says who the weapon was created by. It was pretty cool the other night when I got a nifty rapier drop and noticed it was created by a friend of mine CaptainCursor. Since the community is relatively small at present, this adds a whole new level to the game since you are constantly running into things created by names you recognize. You can check out the latest patch notes over on the Trove reddit.

Sneaky McSneakybits

Yeah I have no clue why I named this subsection and the blog post this… brain does things sometimes. Last night my most important mission was to finish leveling my rogue to 60, and consume all of the various loot boxes I had gathered up along the way. At some point they made it so that you are guaranteed a lockbox of some sort from your weekly patron gift. Since my warrior Belghast is already fairly well geared, or at least well enough to begin raiding… I figured I would stockpile them to give my rogue a quick gear boost upon dinging. Turns out it worked pretty well at doing just that. Between the lockboxes and about 50 plat in select purchases I was able to get well past the 300 hit requirement for expert dungeons. I did not however get to run one as we spent a good chunk of the evening out and about last night.

In theory the queue should go pretty fast since I am equally comfortable Barding it up as support or going dps as either my Marksman spec or my Nightblade primary dps one. Going back and playing rift has made me realize just how much I love the Rift Rogue and truly dislike playing a WoW Rogue. While I got Gloam to 90, and I am extremely happy I did so that I could do the living steel transmutes I needed to craft my Sky Golem… I really don’t think he is going to get much play. Quite simply put… Belgarou my feral druid is a better rogue than my rogue is… or is at least a more interesting one. I have just come to realize I don’t really like the way rogues in wow play. Not sure what it is about the play style but it just isn’t for me anymore, especially now that I feel other classes like Retribution Paladin do the rogue combo point thing better.

Ultimately my key frustration with WoW rogues is that combo points are built in the target instead of a buff that stacks on the rogue itself. Warhammer Online got this right initially with the Witchhunter class, which was by all purposes a “better” rogue. I realize at this point the combo points on target thing is tradition, but it simply does not work that well. While saying the Rift rogue is better, is a bit disingenuous since it is essentially a wow rogue, hunter, druid, and a few other classes that don’t exist in wow rolled into one. I think the main reason why it “works” better is that the combo point mechanism is on the rogue, not the mob. This adds a bunch of interesting gameplay elements like building your combo points on the boss, and then using your combo dump to execute weaker encounters. It is just at this point that the WoW rogue seems so much less interesting than the other “Rogue like” combo point classes.

Onyxia Mount Patrol

After the time in Trove and Rift, I settled in for a little bit of Tuesday raid reset madness over in World of Warcraft. For better or worse, there are several raids that I solo each week on multiple characters for an attempt at the various pets, tansmoggy bits, and every elusive mounts. The start of each week tends to be me making the trek out to Dustwallow Marsh to beat up on Onyxia. First off I have to bitch a little bit, because post Cataclysm they have made it a royal pain in the ass to get to Onyxia for Alliance players. The fastest route I have figured out is fly straight south out of Stormwind, hop the boat at Booty Bay, and then fly to Dustwallow from there. All of that involves flying across several zones and hoping that you happen to arrive at Booty Bay just in time to land on the boat.

Of course like normal she didn’t drop me a mount, or anything else of interest for that matter but at this point I can easily solo her as Retribution Paladin and Frost Deathknight, so I do this little interchange twice a week. I need to cycle through some of my other characters and see if I can build a spec for them that can bring her out of the air in phase two. I might be able to gather up enough timeless isle gear to make a passable Boomkin spec on my druid, and I think in theory I could probably do it on as Enhancement Shaman. I do not think however that my Rogue or Warrior will be of much use in my quest for her mount. I need to check with my friend Rylacus and see if he has any master tips for dropping her out of the air. The one time I tried to do the fight as a Blood DK it literally took 30 minutes for my diseases/icy touch/deathcoil to do enough damage to get her back on the ground.

The highlight of the evening in WoW however was me flying over to Ahn’Qiraj on a whim. Turns out that I now have enough physical damage to solo the Twin Emperors fight. This had long been a stumbling block for me when it came to soloing AQ40. The other big hurdle was viscidious, however since I dual wield frost… I simply switched my razorice enchanted one-hander to my main hand and that seemed to do the trick for shattering him. Past that howling blast was more than enough frost damage to freeze the big blob. I am still missing two pets from this place, so I can see adding it to the weekly faff farming rotation. I did not really have time to do my BWL run on my paladin, I am still missing a few pieces of judgement… so I am sure over the next few days I will be getting that in. Since the eggs are a pain in the ass on anyone other than my Deathknight, I generally grab a random person from the guild who needs transmoggy bits before venturing into the dungeon. My hope is to find a time when Scarybooster can be online, and drag his butt through with them.

Kickstarting Regrets

January 28, 2014 by Belghast

Patron Buffs

Last night I just was not feeling the raid thing. Monday nights are traditionally the open flex night in House Stalwart, but that night has always been an optional evening since it is not really attached to any specific raid group. As such I decided to mill around over in Rift and work on my rogue. Earlier in the day I had complained about how slow the 56-60 game was. To be truthful Storm Legion as a whole is much more sluggish and prodding than the old world content, and by the time you reach 56 it slows down again. Thankfully @gamer_lady came to the rescue by reminding me that there are patron buffs.

I think I began the night around halfway into 58 and wound up ending the night 15% away from 60. The buffs make a massive difference in the speed at which you level, especially with quest turn-ins. I hit a sequence in Argent Domain with tons of quest turn-ins and saw my xp just skyrocket. Tonight if I get back into Rift I will likely finish off the push to 60, and hopefully be able to open all the various lockboxes I have saved up for his ding. Additionally I am pretty close to finishing off runecrafting, so here is hoping the greens I currently have in my bags are enough to carry me over that finish line. I think runecrafting was the last of the trade skills that I had no maxed out, or at least I vaguely remember finishing off artificer the last time I played seriously.

Kickstarting Regrets

The theme that I keep seeing repeated out on kickstarter is that designers are using it as a way to work through their past regrets. Each time a game fails to grab market share there are a myriad of reasons why it happens. However in the case of recent kickstarter campaigns it feels like each designer has their own internal reason why they feel a project failed. In the case of Camelot Unchained, it seems like Mark Jacobs feels that Warhammer online failed because it simply was not pvp enough. So as a result Unchained is being designed to be this love letter to PVP in all its glory. I am sure there is a niche that wants to do nothing but pvp, but in my experience the only aspect of Warhammer I really liked at all…. was the PVE content. So I wish Jacobs luck on his journey because he is building a game I simply am not interested in.

Similarly in the past weeks Brad McQuaid started his kickstarter for Pantheon: The Fallen. The pitch so far seems eerily familiar to the one I can remember hearing for Vanguard. Hardcore game with mandatory group centric game play, and some really complex systems to add depth to the world. It seems like McQuaid’s regret is that Vanguard was not hardcore enough, and definitely in the post Sigil games era it became much more casual and solo friendly. The thing is… the Vanguard he proposed really failed to get serious market approval, and SOE watered it down to try and find a market for it. I realize this might be “too soon” since SOE just announced they were cutting Vanguard from their lineup… and honestly that depresses me quite a bit… but it is very obvious that McQuaid has a very different reason in his head for why that game didn’t meet expectations.

Wish Them Well

This is not to say that I don’t think both Pantheon and Camelot Unchained will not be modest successes. In both cases they are feeding to a relatively underserved sub-demographic of gamers. The problem is… that really is a niche within a niche within a niche and I feel has some pretty slim market potential. As romantic as I feel the vision of Pantheon is, I know personally I simply cannot play that sort of a game. I need a game where I can find a group quickly and one that I can also have meaningful solo game play and progression. Gone are the days when I could sit for five hours in the plane of hate camping an epic mob with friends.

My blocks of time are more in half hours and hours at a time these days, and at any given time I might need to be pulled away from the screen. As a result I have to play games that do not penalize me for this. So while I am nostalgic for the days of sitting outside Karnor’s Castle and forming groups… I also remember the hours upon hours I sat around doing absolutely nothing because I did not have said group. Granted this is me projecting a lot of my own thoughts on these games, and very little information is really available about them. However the pitch just does not sound like something I can really participate in.

Ultimately I hope all of these new MMOs succeed, and even though games like Wildstar are strictly in the “not for me” column… we need more MMO success than failure if we hope to keep our favorite genre alive. Additionally there needs to be a great adjustment for what exactly “success” means. If 100,000 players keeps the game running and turns a minor profit… then man that sounds like success to me. World of Warcraft skewed our reality, and just with my opinions of the community… it is time for a reset. No game has been as successful as WoW has been, so it is clearly an outlier and not the mold by which all games need to measure up. Until that sort of baseline adjustment happens… all new games will end up being judged as failures.