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The Grand Experiment

April 26, 2013 by Belghast

Over the years I’ve developed a certain false assumption about blogging. For whatever reason I have felt that in order to sit down and write anything… I had to have something exciting or somehow epic to write about. This combined with the fact that I have picked up a plethora of design and managerial responsibilities at work, has lead to these massive lapses in content. There have been multiple times lately that I have wanted to blog, but felt I had nothing really to blog about.

So instead of doing a massive “what happened to Bel” post, explaining all the shit I have gone through since September 11th of last year… I am just forging forward into unexplored territory. Usually I have a bit of free time in the mornings as I drink my cup of coffee, or as I try and wind down at the end of gaming each night. My experiment is just to sit down and write about what I did the previous day… even if I find it immensely normal and unexciting.

Cute and Potentially Disturbing

As soon as I got home last night, I sat down and reserved the new Raptr reward pet for Rift. I am really digging the rewards system, in that so far I have gotten some pretty nifty things through it. Last promotion they offered the Dwarven Smithy Goggles that I had been coveting ever since they gave them out as a reward at PAX. This time around they were offering a really bizarre in game pet that looks exactly like the Raptr mascot. Pictured above, I am not 100% sure if it is really adorable, or really disturbing looking. In game it almost looks like the various balloons that are available during the anniversary event. In addition I am wearing the Stone Spaulders that are another promotion this time around.

I’ve used Raptr for years without much expectation for reward. I just liked the fact that it was a really solid multi-protocol IM client that seemed not to tax the various games I was playing. When they started giving me rewards for the games I played… that was just icing on the cake. Yesterday I had used the /tweetpic functionality in game to post this shot on twitter… and I got a response from a live Raptr employee, which was a really nice touch.

The rewards presently available that you should check out…

The Monkey King

A few weeks back my friends managed to get me playing a game I had never played before, and thought I never would. Over the course of the last few weeks I have been joining them almost nightly for 5 player games of League of Legends. I had been absent from the game for a few nights, mostly because my internet connection has really gone to shit. But I was coaxed back into the fold last night.

Once again my internet was being shitty, and I was warping all over the maps… but I still enjoyed myself. I’ve developed a particular affinity for Wukong, the Monkey King. I really like leaping in an doing massing amounts of damage only to throw up a decoy and escape away into the shadows. I am not particularly good at any champions so far, but I am mostly passible with Wukong, Garen, Darius, Shen, Alistair and Volibear.

There is a definite pattern with the champions I end up liking. One of my friends… the one who got me hooked on the game has successfully created a roadmap of all of the champions he feels I will be happy with. So far, one by one he has been right, with the exception of Blitzcrank. After a warm-up map against bots, a 6th friend logged in and we decided to do 3v3 twisted treeline.

I had never done this map before last night, and while enjoyable… it really feels super claustrophobic. The other bad thing I noticed about it is that if one side gets underfed… it just snowballs as running around the map catching up on minion kills doesn’t really feel like a possible thing. Even with the frustration, playing with friends is always fun… and it cracked me up as certain players definitely disliked killing their friends.

Classic “Home” Tour

Finally the constant lag, and ending up in the wrong place… fighting the wrong thing in League of Legends got under my skin enough to cause me to call it a night. One of the big things I do lately… is follow whatever whim happens to hit me. While I cannot really explain it fully, I had a whim last weekend to play one of my oldest characters. Lodin is the Dwarf Hunter that I spent all of classic World of Warcraft raiding with, and had neatly put to bed with the release of Burning Crusade and my transition to tanking fulltime. I had made various attempts to level him in the past, but really never got any traction.

Over the course of the weekend I managed to push him from 75 to 85 and actually enjoyed myself. One of the realizations I have come to is that World of Warcraft is the fast food of MMO gaming. It is bright, and happy and very enjoyable… so long as you don’t think too much about what you are consuming. It is the second part I always fail at. I end up thinking about how half assed so many of their implementations are. The transmogrification system for example is hands down the worst version of cosmetic items, in ANY game.

Since World of Warcraft is so much more of a casual experience than League of Legends, I figured I could tolerate the shit internet a bit better there. While I have been super nomadic since leaving the game, the guild I founded back in 2004 is still extremely active. I had intended to go out to Jade Forrest and continue my push to 90, but logged into the statement coming across guild chat “It’s Bel’s Fault”. I assured the guild member that I am certain it was in fact my fault, but inquired exactly what was my fault this time.

Turns out they decided on a whim to run old raids to show a friend that was relatively new in the game. Not that they actually needed my help, but a trip down memory lane is something I am almost always down for. We proceeded to clear Karazhan, Magtheridon, Gruuls Lair, and ended the night taking down Kaelthas in Tempest Keep. All of it was stupidly easy, and posed no representation of what it was like to do those instances when they were real… but it was still fun seeing it all again.

A Wild Blog Post Appeared

It is now 6:48 am, and I have run out of coffee. I started writing at roughly 6:00 am, so it appears that the experiment worked. I did in fact have enough time to prattle on about what happened last night. I did nothing terribly interesting, but I did manage to piece together a narrative of the events. Right now most of my gaming nights look just as spastic as this one. I’ve been ping ponging back and forth between whatever games end up suiting my fancy.

Right now I don’t really intend to set down permanent roots until Elder Scrolls Online releases. I’m currently plotting my return to guild leadership with that game. In essence I miss the camaraderie of House Stalwart, and while I can’t be 100% happy returning to World of Warcraft and assuming the hat there… I feel like ESO is the game we all want to play. In effect I feel like I want to “get the band back together”. I’ve tried this before in the past, but in all of those cases I tried my damnedest NOT to be the guild leader. I wonder if those guild excursions failed, because I was not putting the same effort into making sure things were happening.

I could ramble on about this past for hours I am sure, but right now I know that pretty much everything for me until the release of Elder Scrolls Online is going to be “appetizers”. If folks are interested, I have been using Tamriel Foundry as a way of planning for the Elder Scrolls House Stalwart instance. I really loved the pre-launch guild building tools that were provided by SWTOR, and this gives a very similar feeling. As always it is like pulling teeth to get any of the Stalwarts to actually sign up for anything, but we have 8 signed up… and even more in the recently launched Google Plus community.

Makes me feel all fuzzy inside thinking about the potential of the game and guild. As far as the blog goes, I will try my best to keep this experiment up. It seemed to work, and I had enough time to write a really long post. I will attempt to keep writing even if I don’t particularly find it interesting myself. If you have made it this far in the post… thanks for reading.

Bring On The Storm Legion

June 1, 2012 by Belghast

It is the beginning of a new month, and with it closes the #NBIMMO fun. As a result Syp has posted a poll for the NBI Awards on Bio Break. You can cast your vote in categories like “Promising Star, Game Specific” and “Most Interesting Angle”. The categories have narrowed down the field with five blogs competing for each award. I am not really sure how long the voting is set to run, but get over there are show all these new blogs some love.

Entering the Storm

There had been some rumors circulating about this, but yesterday Trion dropped a 100 megaton bombshell on the community announcing their upcoming feature rich expansion: Rift: Storm Legion. The announcement of a new expansion is never that huge of a surprise. We have come to expect them roughly a year after release. However this is one of the most ambitious and feature packed expansions that I have seen in recent memory. Some of the features include:

Two huge new continents, reportedly more than tripling the size of the existing game world.
Dual-faction island city of Tempest Bay.
Four new souls, one for each of the callings
Level cap raised to 60
Ability to “Instant Adventure” your way from 1-60 if you choose.
Greater variety of onslaughts, rifts, and events.
Seven new dungeons zones.
Three new raid zones.
A new single player Chronicle.
Massive colossus battles that supposedly effect the world in ways we have not yet seen.
Personal dimensions: Guild and Player Housing.
New “Cape” inventory slot.
New Grandmaster tier of crafting.
New puzzles, artifacts, collectables, achievements, mounts, pets, titles and more.

The Past Year

A little less than a year ago, I made on post on this blog titled “It’s Not You, It’s Me”, where basically I admitted to cancelling rift and outlining some of my reasons for doing so. There are multiple reasons, some of which I have come to realize really were about me, and my lack of wanting to commit to doing any form of organized gameplay. I can’t hold any game responsible for that, because honestly it has been an evolution I have gone through, from very serious raider, to very serious casual player. Since then I have played a ton of EQ2, LoTRO, gotten bored with SWTOR, and been dabbling in Guild Wars 2 and Secret World betas.

The primary problems I had with Rift, was the lack of “fluff” the world had. Nothing in Telara seemed to exist, just for the fun of it. All things seemed to be tied to some purpose, or needed by the single questing patch per faction. I enjoyed the game, but just ran out of things I felt worthy of doing. There were plenty of collections and achievements that I could have gone after, and I had many factions I could be running dailies with, but when I ran out of quest storyline, I just ran out of things I was interested in. Rift events were a blast, but after a point they also became old.

Trion Listened

I can’t say that Trion listened to me, I don’t have the ego to even imagine that, but what I can say is that my entire guild seemed to go through the same gradual leaving that I did. We went from having 50 active players, to 10, to 5, to none. So while they may not have listened to me, I can tell they heard the community as a whole that wandered off, because in the last year they have been insanely busy. I stopped actively playing the game sometime last June. Here is a list of some of the major content achievements as taken from this amazing “welcome home” thread, for folks coming back to the game.

PVP Rifts.
Cross Server Looking For Group.
3 “Sliver” 10 Man Raids.
Chronicles Solo/Duo Instances Added.
Planar Attunement Post 50 Advancement System.
Master-Mode Dungeons.
Support for player made Add-ons.
Ember Isle – New questing zone for level 50 characters.
Instant Adventures – LFG open world adventures.
Cross-Faction Auction House.
Rift Mobile App.
In-Game Character Weddings.
6th Role Slot.
Crafting from bank.
Mercenary System to balance the sides in PVP Matches.
New Fishing and Survival Trade-skills.
New “Seal” crafted Inventory Slot.
Nameplates for mobs and players.
Streaming Client.
Guild Finder system.
Leaderboards.

Expansion before the expansion

So in one year they have added an entire expansions worth of content already. I’ve always respected the folks at Trion, and thought given time, they would turn the product into a really amazing place to be. I subscribed for roughly a years time, even though I only played the game roughly 4 months. I had faith in the team, and figured my subscription was a “donation to the cause” of sorts. Seems like that “donation” has been repaid in massive amounts of hard work. Even before the expansion proper launches, 1.9 is waiting in the wings and seems to fill up any of the remaining gaps in the game.

The two big things for me that are coming in 1.9 are Conquest Mode, and Mentoring. Conquest promises to take us back to DAoC style 3 faction PVP. I have long held the opinion that what is wrong with PVPin general, is the fact that games focus on the Red Vs Blue mentality. I can remember in DAoC, the factions to some extent self balanced. If one team was a bit stronger, the other two would temporarily gang up to even out the odds. I think the Conquest mode will be a shot of adrenalin to a languid PVP culture.

If you’ve read my blog at all, you have heard me go on and on about mentoring and how great it is. Literally this is the one feature that I think every game needs. Being socially focused, it gets frustrating when new friends start and you can’t really help with out without absolutely steamrolling content for them. This is really no fun for anyone, for you laying waste without consequences is boring. For your friends, they end up just following you around aimlessly never actually learning how to play their classes. When you can mentor down to your friends, and run the content for real, you get to relive the experience and do so with your buddies.

A Pat on the Back

It is so easy to focus on the negative things in the game industry. Trust me there are plenty, and I have been a bitter ass for a very long time when it comes to the flaws in games. That said, I feel that it is all the more important that we point out what is going right in the industry. With the expansion, Trion will have added in every single one of the “must have” features I could even muster. On top of that, it triples the size of its game world, and with that comes a flood of new content for players to experience. Essentially they have answered the challenge posed by all of us who unsubscribed, and have done so in really heroic fashion.

I still very much love Norrath, and am having a blast still in Everquest II, but I almost feel like I need to resub to Rift just to applaud them for their efforts. At this point I have been gone long enough that essentially I will need to completely re-roll to remember how the hell anything works. That said I think I will be doing just that, and taking a tour of all the changes first hand.

I had already decided that I would not really be playing Guild Wars 2 or Secret World anymore until the launch. I played enough of the games to realize I liked it, so I don’t want to wear off that new game smell. So between the ever present EQ2, Rift, Diablo 3, and piddling around with SWGEmu… I think I will have plenty to do for the foreseeable future. It needs to be said: Great job Trion.

NBIMMO: Resources and Final Thoughts

May 31, 2012 by Belghast

#NBIMMO

Well apparently it is that time, the end of the Newbie Blogger Initiative month. I think overall it has been a great success for the community. Syp has a nice wrap up post, and a list of all the blogs and articles over on his site Bio Break, so rather than copypasta, I will just send you guys there. Huge thanks to Syp for pulling this all together, and it cannot be sheer consequence that this all culminates on his birthday. So in addition to the thanks, sending a bit Happy Birthday your way.

The Cutting Room Floor

I’ve had a stack of posts kicking around in my skull for the better part of a month, but my schedule has been insane so none of them actually made their way to paper. However since this is still technically within the month, I wanted to throw together a post I had been meaning to for a few weeks. Essentially without really meaning to, I have come at my posts from the stance of helping bloggers through some of the more technical aspects of hosting your own blog.

In the process there have been several items I wanted to talk about, resources I wanted to share, that have just been left on the cutting room floor. Pieces of debris that never quite made it into a fully realized topic form. So as a warning, today’s topic is going to be a bit more freeform than normal for me.

Gaming Tooltips

One of the coolest inventions of the post-wow world is the tooltip script. Essentially multiple websites now allow you to easily add a script snippet to your blog template, and then when you link to a given website it shows a nice mouse over popup of the items description. These really add a nice level of detail to your posts, your readers can see exactly what an ability does when you talk about it, without you needing to devote time to actually explaining it. If you want to talk about a nice piece of loot, you get instant access to the stats without needing to come up with some arcane formatting for it.

The first website I can ever remember doing this was Allakhazam, but over time more and more websites have adopted the practice. Originally it was pretty contorted to get this information into your website, but now most of these sites offer a simple one line script include. It is likely that whatever game you play, has someone offering a similar service, but below are some of the more common ones by game.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Torhead

Torhead offers for SWTOR the same level of support we are used to from WoWhead. Updated constantly, should have pretty much any tooltip you would want to link to. To include them in your site, just add this snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

   1: <script src="http://tor.zamimg.com/tooltips.js "></script>

The links that are produced look a little something like this: Jolee Bindo’s Lightsaber

DarthHater DB

DarthHater really hit the ground running, and early on claimed a huge share of the item database traffic. Does not seem to be nearly as complete as Torhead, but still definitely a viable option. To include the links in your site, just add the snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

   1: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://db.darthhater.com/js/extooltips.js"></script>

The links that are produced look a little something like this: Jolee bindo’s Lightsaber

KnoTOR

KnoTOR honestly seems to be abandoned, or at least they update extremely slowly. I am including them however because they really had the nicest looking links available when it was being developed on actively. To include the links in your site, just add the snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

   1: <script src="http://i4.knocdn.com/assets/tooltips.js "></script>

The links that are produced look a little something like this: Jolee Bindo’s Lightsaber

World of Warcraft

WoWhead

Really as far as wow item databases go, the only one of any real significance at this point is WoWhead. They came from out of nowhere and have continued to kick ass expansion after expansion. To include the links in your site, just add the snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

   1: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js"></script>

The links that are produced look a little something like this: Shadowmourne

Multi-Game Support

ZAM

The Allakhazam network has been around in one form or another since the opening days of the original Everquest. They support pretty much every game that comes out. The side effect of supporting everything however is that they may not support a specific game as good as another content specific provider. However they are an add once, use many juggernaut for tooltips. To include the links in your site, just add the snippet somewhere in the header of your template.

Supported Games

Everquest
Everquest II
Final Fantasy XI
Final Fantasy XIV
Lord of the Rings Online
Rift
Warhammer Online
World of Warcraft
Star Wars: The Old Republic

   1: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://zam.zamimg.com/j/tooltips.js "></script>

Some example links: Sedition, Sword of the Bloodmoon, The Soul Reaper, Panzer Shield

Experimental

I wanted to include this one, despite the fact it is somewhat more experimental. Ask Mr. Robot was an amazing resource for World of Warcraft gear planning. They seem to have shifted focus over to Star Wars: The Old Republic, and with it they have a really cool item database in the works. The integration process is not yet as simple as the others, but they have a blog post on integrating it with wordpress. I personally have not gone through the trouble myself, but including this out there in case someone else wants to.

Those Amazing Fonts

Sooner or later you want going to want to do some work with interesting fonts, either to label images, or create logos for various post series. The problem is the fonts included in windows are boring as hell. Something a good number of users do not realize is that fonts are licensed, and the various font foundries have teams of rabid lawyers crawling the web looking for violators.

The safest option is to simply stick to using nothing but freeware or open source fonts. The big problem is, that if you type “Free Fonts” into Google you get a complete mess of sites that are sometimes a bit questionable at worst, and at best full of low quality fonts. There are a few websites I have used for years, that have consistently high quality fonts.

Blambot

http://www.blambot.com

If you read comics at all, be they digital or print, chances are you have run into Blambot fonts and never knew it. Personally I think they are the best font shop out there. They sell their fonts for a pretty reasonable price, but even better they offer a good number of their more recognizable faces completely free. All of the fonts in the above image are from Blambot, as are the fonts I use in the Tales of the Aggronaut logo.

DaFont

http://www.dafont.com/en

While Blambot represents one amazing font studio, DaFont is essentially a massive search engine for awesome free fonts. There are many websites out there that serve a similar purpose, but what sets DaFont ahead of the competition is the fact that it breaks fonts down into stylistic categories. If you are looking for a fantasy font or a Sci-fi font, within moments you can instantly jump into long lists of similar styled fonts. You are given a preview of the font in the main list, and can jump into a complete display of the entire alphabet for each. They have a huge selection of open source versions of familiar type faces, so there should be something to fit any of your design needs.

Smashing Magazine

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

I did warn you ahead of time, that this post was going to be pretty free form. I am including this resource here because they do occasionally link awesome fonts. More than anything this is just a great web design resource. I have it in my RSS Reader and they cover everything from WordPress Tips, to Free Graphic resources, to of course great open source fonts. If you are running a website in any form you need to watch this page periodically.

Software Resources

Gimp

http://gimp.org

Personally I am a Photoshop user, started using it somewhere around version 2.5 (circa 1994). While it can do amazing things, it has an equally astonishing price tag associated with it. It quickly becomes hard to justify the cost, if you are not using it professionally. Luckily for the rest of the world, there is a great image manipulation software that is open source.

Gimp can do pretty much anything you will ever need to do from photo retouching, to painting, to really nice logo work. It has a pretty rabid community supporting it, and there are plugins out there to do any manner of effects. The biggest problem for me, is that coming from Photoshop, it has a very different user interface. With the 2.9 release (not yet available for windows) supposedly it brings things more in line with the “Photoshop” standards. However luckily for the Photoshop natives out there, there is a custom fork of the gimp project called Gimpshop. Essentially it sets up the shortcuts and windows into a much more Photoshop like arrangement.

Inkscape

http://inkscape.org

If you are more familiar with vector graphics like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, I have you covered too. I am actually just starting to use this a bit myself. I have been looking for a more simplistic vector program, and so far while I am still learning this one, it feels very robust. I never actually learned Illustrator very well, and was a longtime Corel Draw user. So far the controls and tools feel clean and familiar. You have the ability to export your graphics as either an SVG directly for use on the web, or rasterizing it as one of many image formats. Would have come in extremely handy back when I was trying to diagram WoW Raid strategies.

Windows Live Writer

http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows-live/essentials-other-programs

I cannot express how much I love this software. Writer used to be a stand alone project, but is now included as part of the Windows Live Essentials package. While Windows Movie Maker is pretty awesome, the only part of this package I really use is Writer itself. Essentially it acts as a WYSIWYG editor for your blog. When you configure your blog with the software, it logs into your website and downloads all the CSS information for your theme.

If you look at the image above, that is side by side screenshots of my Secret World impressions post. On the left is the site as I composed it in Live Writer, on the right is the site in Chrome. This completely frees you from wondering what a given post will look and feel like when you publish. The real money feature is the image manipulation. You can resize the images freely, set the alignment, word wrap, margins, borders all without any manual manipulation.

Basically for me it frees me up to just write, without having to worry if it is going to look right or not. Over the years I have noticed a good number of other bloggers using it. People seem to either love it or hate it. It supports a wide number of common blogging platforms. I use it for example on my custom hosted WordPress, but I have also connected to a blogger and had equally good results.

Final Thoughts

While personally I have not participated in the NBIMMO as much as I would have liked this month, it has spawned an amazing number of quality blogs in the process. Often times lately, my schedule has dictated that either I get to play the games, or write about them. I more often than not choose to play, and as a result I go for weeks without posts. Luckily however a good number of these new blogs have been extremely prolific.

I still think this was an amazing idea, and I hope as we officially exit NBIMMO month, the community sprit will continue. While there are tons of us out there, we are at the end of the day a pretty small community. I never would have started up my blog in the first place were it not for the great support of other game bloggers. So I hope as time goes on, each of us can continue to offer support when others need it.

NBIMMO: Be Open Minded (…Unlike Me)

May 3, 2012 by Belghast

The Newbie Blogger Initiative has been rolling the last few days with some pretty amazing posts in the process. From the sponsor side there have been all sorts of posts on how to get started, how to choose your topics, and how to mine information and keep up with various bloggers. Out of all the advice we have been giving have started to pour several new and fledgling bloggers. I’ve been amazingly impressed by the turnout, and Syp deserves some kind of a medal for starting this boulder rolling.

Some of the blogs to come out of NBIMMO already

There are a good number more bloggers participating in the program, but I specifically picked the ones that had no posts prior to the launch of NBIMMO. If I missed anyone in the process apologies.

Belghast’s Are Bitter

Today’s post is very much related to NBIMMO, but not as directly as the previous two days. The first day I gave some pretty general tips, and yesterday a specific tutorial for using Reader to power your blogroll. Today we are getting into much more esoteric territory. This is very much a life lesson I am having to force feed myself.

I will be the first to admit that quite often I am a dumbass and one hundred and ten percent wrong about many things. But often times I tend to take a pretty pessimistic view towards the online games and the gaming industry in general. After several cases of being let down in the past, I often times walk into games expecting the worst. Today’s lesson at hand then, is to try your best to keep an open mind towards new experiences.

Enter TERA

When I first saw TERA, I saw the skimpy clothing, and the truly ridiculously over sized weaponry I can remember thinking to myself: “Oh god, not another useless low-rent eastern grind fest”. it has all the earmarks of that trope. Final Fantasy art style… check. Buxom women wearing next to nothing… check. Unrealistic fantasy weapons in an inexplicably steam punk setting… check. This game was not at all on my radar, I had completely written it off.

A funny thing happened. People started talking about it being a blast. Talking about how fun and revolutionary the combat system was. Even more shocking, these people were all folks that I deeply valued their opinion. At first I thought there was some new internet madness spreading around, I mean can’t they see this looks like yet another game in the long line of Lineage clones? In a fit of what I thought was my own madness I decided to go ahead and pick up a copy.

Bel Admits He Was Wrong

Funny thing is, they were right. This game really is a blast, and the combat really is revolutionary. The game is definitely the equivalent of gaming junkfood. It has some amazing gameplay, gorgeous visuals, and every time you see one of the scantily clad females run past you feel bad about yourself for enjoying the game. But the game is like this magical slot machine, that you mash buttons furiously until you can set up a series of chain attacks… then win prizes.

I am not sure if at this point I could actually see myself subscribing to the game, but if I had not allowed myself the possibility that the opinions of other players could be right, I would have missed out on all the fun I have been having in it. I’ve gotten to a point where I have been so jaded, that I have a real hard time looking past the few negative things to see all the good.

Remember Guild Wars 2

Thing is this is the second such game I had written off, but that turned out to be really enjoyable. Based on bad experiences in previous testing, I had written off Guild Wars 2 as a game full on hype, but weak on enjoyment. I decided almost begrudgingly to get in on the beta test weekend. Last weekend I wrote up what I thought was a pretty positive review of the game, talking about all the things I enjoyed about it. I listed a few weak points, but as the commenters pointed out, they aren’t all “bad” things.

Since the close of the beta weekend, I have been anxious for the next one. I’ve gone from feeling the game was a marketing sham, to being hopeful that it will see a summer release and not wait for the holiday season. Once again I have had to alter my opinion. Had I stayed closed minded about the game, I would have missed out on one of the more enjoyable weekends I have had in recent memory.

Basically, I Am Wrong Often

I’ve gone through many such cycles recently. Twelve year long wait, I was frustrated that Diablo 3 was nothing revolutionary. After playing it for a bit, it actually grew on me. I had quite a bit of fun reliving some of the fun times I had playing Diablo 2, and now am looking forward to being able to play the game with friends. I had some big time expectations, expecting a game that would walk on water, and ultimately set myself up for a disappointment as I watched the feature set shrink.

I am trying very hard not to be as pessimistic and bitter as I have been in the past. I am trying hard to keep an open mind as I look forward to games. Since I have been wrong so often, it is making me adjust my outlook on lots of different games. While I had originally written it off, Mists of Pandaria may just be one of the best things to happen to WoW in a long time. I had made fun of the pet battle system, but after seeing some footage of it in action, I have to admit it looks pretty great. I can’t really see myself returning to the game, but honestly at this point who knows.

I bemoaned the fact that The Secret World was a Funcom game. I was determined that just because I didn’t like Anarchy Online or Age of Conan, that ultimately this new game would end up being something I wouldn’t like either. But that is ultimately unfair, because the studio that built the previous two games, isn’t exactly the same as the one currently building TSW. So as I hear more details about the gameplay, classless advancement, and the awesome Lovecraftian settings I have to say I am getting excited.

Learn From My Mistakes

Ultimately my advice to you, is to do the things I have failed miserably at. Keep an open mind, try to stay positive, and don’t let yourself get disappointed enough that it destroys your motivation. The last of these is something I have struggled with more than any. Every major lapse in content that Tales of the Aggronaut has suffered, has been due to the fact that I got the wind knocked out of my sails, due to some game.

I’ve been bitter and angry, like I was with my perceived downfall of the game I loved so much, World of Warcraft. I’ve been disappointed by a game that turned out to be something I didn’t actually want to play. I’ve had disappointments in raids, disappointments in patches, and disappointments in accomplishments. Each time I have allowed myself to get knocked down, and developed a nasty case of not knowing what to say. I think the trait of a truly great blogger, is that they just keep writing, regardless of what they are feeling. This is why I will never actually be great.

But with my current trend of keeping on the positive side, I realize that while great posts will come and go, and with them your spikes in readership. The important thing to me however, is the community you build with other gamers. This initiative has given me a good deal of hope that we are in fact still a fairly cohesive community, and as such willing to help each other out. While I am still a grumpy old man, NBIMMO has given me hope for the future. I really look forward to the coming games, and coming posts.