Everquest Archives - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

On Leadership

August 10, 2013 by Belghast

We have entered back to school shopping season and last night we ran around hunting for pants. A nasty side effect of our collective weight loss is the fact that my wife currently appears to have no pants that will fit to start the school season. This manifested itself yesterday when she was trying to get ready to meet some of her teacher friends for a presentation. Of course panic ensued, but she managed to figure something out and as a result last night we began the process of trying to rebuild the clothing archives.

On Leadership

Yesterday I was having a long talk with Sevok about his interest in maybe joining us in the House Stalwart Rift contingency. Sev has been a longtime friend of mine, lasting well over a decade at this point and been involved in many of the previous incarnations of House Stalwart. The problem is he really does not want to start up in Rift unless he brings his wife with him. She on the other hand has not been in a Stalwart guild yet, and is extremely gunshy of guilds in general, namely because we both have a shared moment in our history that likely changed both of us in different ways.

Over the course of the last few weeks I have talked quite a bit about how tanking brings out my protective nature, so I thought I might talk a bit today about what exactly lead me to guild leadership in the first place. In many ways it is this exact same protective nature manifested in trying to create a wonderful environment for my friends to play in. Honestly the roots have always been there, but as an introvert I am always loathe to step up unless I feel like some wrong has been committed. I have a strong sense of justice embedded in me and equality that honestly should not have been there based on my upbringing… but that is a tale for another day.

High School

I did not have the traditional “geek” upbringing of exclusion and ridicule at the hands of the popular masses. In fact I could have very easily been another one of the popular kids. I guess in many was from the outside it probably seemed I was one. I essentially had my geekiness grandfathered into the popular culture of my small home town. My parents friends ended up having what would essentially end up as our crop of “popular kids”, and as a result these were my play dates and birthday party goers all the way through elementary school. So as my geek tendencies manifested themselves for the most part they were just accepted as “me being me”.

My mother was a fairly overbearing sort that insisted that I be involved with everything. Essentially she was brought up in a poor household and had aspirational goals to be more than that and as a result ended up using me many times as the vessel of those aspirations. So as a result I was in 4H, an Eagle Scout, Team Captain of the Academic Bowl, FTA, Student Council, National Honor Society, and many more acronyms that I can barely remember. The result was frustrating for me, because I ended up in the local paper on a regular basis and everyone out in the community seemed to know my business. I want to say I was on 26 pages in my high school year book thanks to all the random organizations I was pushed into being a part of. I feel as thought my mother was trying to build herself a Kennedy… which I very much have no aspirations ever to be.

My Tribe

I could have very easily fallen in the kegger madness that was the life of a small town popular kid, but instead I took a very different path. My friends were essentially the geeky misfits of the town. The edgy art students, the math nerds, the show choir kids… all bound together to form a family of sorts. My mother was a home economics teacher, and as a result we used the small back room of her classroom as a private lunch room of sorts. In there would would plan D&D campaigns, play Wolfenstein on the 486 computer, and a lot of Chess and Pente. This room gave us a moment of sanity in a world that none of us really liked much.

The funny thing is… that as acknowledgement got around that these were my friend… these were my tribe of misfits… each of them started to get extended an invisible veil of protection. I was not a small guy, and at 6’4” the hooligans in high school seemed to fear me just by my seemingly powerful stature. Each of my friends reported getting picked on a lot less, or at least no longer in the form of physical confrontation. I had no clue when I started the little community that it would have the fringe benefits it ultimately did. To some extend it only caused me to expand the group and pull in other people. I feel like this is what started my “collecting people” tendencies that would serve me later.

Past Guilds

When I got addicted to Everquest, I went through a couple of extremely unsatisfying guild experiences. The first was an extremely exclusive group that dated back to a bygone era of gaming. They were friendly enough and active enough, but they were also an extremely closed door society. If you did not go through the initiation rituals to join their secret society… you were forever treated as an outsider regardless of how long and how many games you had played with them. I went through the little initiation, but really did not see the world change much after doing so. The problem is… as I got my friends into these games… they were forever destined to be outsiders… or not allowed in at all. After seeing this injustice play out a few times I decided not to follow them into any new games.

While in Everquest I moved servers to play with a group of locals to Tulsa. At first it was an extremely awesome having a group of locals that I could play with an socialize with. However the longer I played and the more closely I got to the inner core of the guild, I started to see the same problem with injustice. Essentially to be a member in good standing… you had to do whatever the guild leader wanted of you… and more often than not this was to do whatever would keep his wife happy. I saw members miss out on rare drops for their epic weapon quest that would instead go to alt number 307 for his wife. If she wanted this rep from this zone… the entire guild was expected to go there and farm forever until she got whatever she was wanting.

House Stalwart

If you were not in the inner circle, your opinion did not matter. When the wife had a falling out with a member, it was expected that the entire guild would shun them or else you would get kicked out on your ass as well. None of this sat well with me, but I was torn. My group of friends were still mostly in this guild, but I felt as though nothing about this situation was fair. Somehow I ended up as the sounding board for all the players who were sick of the leaders shit, and made some extremely deep ties within the “resistance” of sorts. As we moved on past Everquest and into other games I kept contact with the members of this undercurrent and in many cases they all ended up as members of Stalwart guilds eventually.

World of Warcraft was the next big thing on the horizon that I knew everyone would be playing. As a result I wanted to gather up as many friends under one banner as I possibly could. Prior to launch I started a brand new forum unconnected from any guild or game. Through it I organized all my friends from EQ, DAoC, Horizons and City of Heroes towards the goal of forming a new guild for World of Warcraft. Essentially I never wanted to end up in a situation like i was in the previous two guilds… either with abusive leadership or and elitist inner circle. After talking to some friends about it, I decided that the only way I could ever guarantee that, was to be the leader myself and keep it from happening.

So here we are roughly a decade later and there is still an active House Stalwart presence in several games. World of Warcraft damned near broke me for leading anything. As a result I took roughly a two year break from guild leadership, as I wandered around and joined up with lots of other pools of friends. I am extremely thankful to each person that sheltered me and invited me into their own organizations during this time. Sadly however in each new place I visited… there was something missing… and I would go back into my old ways trying to recruit everyone under a shared banner. I was missing my home, was missing my guild, and was ultimately missing the freedom to make an awesome home for everyone involved.

As a leader I have always tried to enable people to do awesome things and be awesome in the process. As a result I have always tried to keep things simple, only adopting the barest of rules that instill a sense of the larger community rather than a list of “thou shall not”. For the most part this has worked over the last decade. We have had a lot of amazing moments as friends and I have built more of an extended family for myself than a guild. These are all people that I talk to regularly outside of the game, when we travel I try and meet up with ones in the area… they are the family I chose for myself. Still to this day… I have an overwhelming desire to bring new people I meet that are also awesome into the fold.

Wrapping Up

I feel as though this post kind of developed a life of its own. I am not really sure what I intended to right. To some extent I was writing so that Sevok’s wife could see that our time spent in the horrible EQ guild had adverse effects on both of us. I just chose to take that bad experience and roll it into building a long standing family of friends and a much larger community. Hopefully this tale will be at least interesting to other people out there. I hope you all have a great weekend. I desperately need a haircut so that is the number one priority on our list. Also hoping to coax my wife into another trip to the place where she found all those Legos.

Evergreen Content

August 9, 2013 by Belghast

After some technical difficulties caused by the fact that my upstairs computer appeared to have come back in a half alive state after what I can only assume was a power blink caused by last nights storms… aren’t run-on sentences awesome? I am finally sitting down at the computer to write this mornings post. Additionally I am drinking the sweetest cup of coffee ever… because in my half awake state… I dumped the Splenda designated for my wife’s cup into mine. The end result is a cup of coffee with like six packets of sugar in it.

Evergreen Content

One of the things that has always frustrated me with MMO design is the fact that the higher up in level you are, essentially the fewer options you have for where to spend your in game time. What I mean is that usually games spend a good amount of time to provide alternate starter zone experiences, and then those usually funnel into shared zones for your faction before dumping you out into a ladder of zone progression towards the “end game”. Once you arrive at the end content you experience the same thing… everyone is pushed towards the same few content items.

When an expansion is released the same thing happens again but even more limiting. You are pushed out of the “old world” content and into a much smaller new world with the same very vertical progression path. Everything about the old content becomes completely disposable as it is immediately replaced by the shiny new things from the expansion areas. Not only is the new content separated by distance usually, but it gives players absolutely no incentive to ever return and revisit the older content. As a result each time an expansion is released the players are ultimately throwing more and more content in the dustbin.

A Better Way

Granted some games do a much better job at addressing this problem than others. In Rift when mentoring down you receive xp and rewards as though you were doing content at your level. The same is more or less true with Guild Wars 2 and its always mentored system of scaling the player down to the content level at all times. But in neither system do you really address the problem of lost dungeon and raid content. Ultimately you can get rewards similar to what you could earn at level, but you will never actually be able to progress your characters in the same way unless you are always doing the latest and greatest content.

With the advent of systems like StoryBricks that allow for smarter AI encounters, I keep wondering if this is now the time to have a much better system. Ideally this would work better in a system without hard level ranges, and more a “tiers of gear” approach like The Secret World has in place. What if a mob could perceive you as a greater threat based on your “tier” and ultimately fight “smarter”. This would make the old content scale to whatever level you happen to be at the time. The old encounters would be evergreen in that beating them at Tier 1 would be significantly easier than beating them at Tier 4.

Horizontal Progression

As a result you could continue to “pay out” the best tiers of gear, because all content would essentially scale up to meet the level of the players taking it on. In a mixed level group it would get far more tricky. You would have to do some sort of an average level for the encounter, but ultimately the base idea is that as you level your character you continue opening new doors to experience, rather than constantly closing permanently the doors behind you. I feel in part that this is so enticing as no amount of hard worked content provided by the designers would ever be considered “throw away” or “leveling” content again.

This of course is a massive pipe dream, and I am sure there are all measure of technically limitations to what I propose, but I have always wanted a world that scaled to me that I never outgrew. We can have this concept in single player games like Oblivion, I just think its time that we see a proper implementation in the MMO world. One added benefit is that being able to progress regardless of the content you are doing… incentivizes players to do the right thing socially… and assign their friends and guild members through that “old world” content.

Socially Beneficial

Being one of those players that regularly helps out the “young-ins”, it can be frustrating knowing that you will not actually progress your character while doing this thing that was “socially” the right thing to do. Games like Rift or EQ2 provide alternate advancement paths that make it much more enjoyable, since you know you are ultimately still making your character better in the process. However… would it not be that much cooler if you could provide a system that allowed for both the low tier player and the high tier player to receive the best type of rewards they could get… together in the same group?

It is always awesome watching a new player get their first really awesome item, because you grouped up with them to help them through a challenge. Would it not be equally exciting for them to watch you getting the same because you chose to help them? I have had a mantra for awhile… “anything that prevents me from playing with my friends is bad” and this is exactly the opposite of that. It makes sure that playing with my friends will always benefit me in the same ways it benefits them. Sure the content might be ultimately more difficult when you have 3 tier 1 players and 2 tier 4 and the end difficulty level is something in the middle… but as group you will be able to work through the challenges.

The Problem

As I sit here to write this post, it feels like it is coming out super esoteric… and as a result I am hoping to place it more firmly on the ground. In my office on the wall are lots and lots of maps, and many of them are from MMOs. There is one above my monitor that came from the Kunark expansion to the original Everquest for example. As I look at the glorious landmasses that are all these games… I am bit sad thinking that so many of those zones I will never have a valid reason to return to. They will never again be truly important to me, the same way they were when I was first leveling through them.

I would just like to see a design scheme that makes it always valid for us to return to the content we know and love and have conquered and find completely new challenges. This goes double for dungeon and raid content. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could zone into Blackwing Lair in WoW with a group of friends… and get an encounter tailored to fit YOUR level… and not a “roflstomp” soloable mess? The worst part about the “e-sport-ification” of raid content, is that we are constantly having to throw away fun experiences for whatever the newest tier happens to be. Sure you can always return to the older stuff, but it has been trivialized by the progression you have made since then.

I would just like to see something that fixes this. So that a zone stays epic regardless of when you tackle it, and that there will always be new and more exciting challenges and rewards to be found there. With the construct of scalable AI and encounters… I think that maybe finally this concept is ready to be explored. I have no desire to stay in the starter zone, grind boars, and become amazing like they did in the South Park spoof… but it would be awesome to be able to go back to that low level content and have a reason to be there.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap up and get on the road. I feel as though I have laid out a huge rambling mess. Hopefully this will make sense to someone. It has been a concept bouncing around in my head for awhile and all the talk of Storybricks and EQ Next and Scaling Mob intelligence has dislodged it enough that I wanted to try and put it down into words. I feel like I am fairly grossly unsuccessful at doing so. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope you can grasp the crux of what I was trying to say.

Everquest Current

August 2, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning everyone, hopefully you got a bit more sleep than I did last night. I ended up with another minor round of panic attacks and as a result did not actually make it to bed until after 1 am. However I seem to be mostly functional. Thanks a ton for all the warm wishes I received yesterday through either the blog, twitter, google+ or in game. We didn’t do anything really insane… just went out to dinner and then came back and chilled out downstairs. I piddled around a bit in Rift and eventually made my way over to the SOE Live twitch stream.

What Happens in Vegas

Normally we think of what happens in Vegas… stays in Vegas… however at SOE apparently what happens gets live broadcast over Twitch.tv for free. Having been a long fan of the SOE franchises, namely Everquest 2 I figured I would tune in last night for a bit and see if there was anything interesting happening. I have been immensely curious to find out what is coming down the pipe with Everquest Next. I have so many fears about how the game will turn out… sandbox can mean so many things and not all of them good for the long time survival of a game. So I like many tuned in thinking I might see a teaser for EQNext before the official unveil at Noon PST today.

You could tell that pretty much the only thing the crowd wanted to hear about WAS EQ Next and when Smedley took the stage… he did a pretty thorough job of baiting and teasing the crowd. However he did bring out the very famous Jeremy Soule of Skyrim fame to showcase his work on the Everquest Next theme. Within moments of it happening in the live broadcast the above theme was available on Youtube. I have to say… I am more than a little disappointed. Granted this is “sketch” as they called it, an early synth only version of the theme… but quite honestly it feels a little generic for lack of the better word.

If you listen to the Everquest 1 and Everquest 2 themes… there is definitely a shared lineage there. I expected this theme to carry on in a new way with the original “Everquest Notes” much in the same way that Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim take the same skeletal core of “TES Notes” and make them their own. But what we have is something vastly different and really does not feel at all like “Everquest” music to me. It feels way too ethereal, and not bombastic enough to represent an over the top franchise like Everquest. Apparently however gauging opinion from twitter and Google+ I am in the minority of my opinion.

I listened to the track over and over trying to find some shared lineage back to the original themes… and I think maybe just maybe I figured out what Jeremy Soule was trying to do. In the original Everquest theme… there is an odd little segment that always felt a bit out of place… that starts at roughly 0:46 and continues to 1:06. The more I listen to the EQNext theme the more I think he chose this odd little section to expand into a larger theme. I guess my hope is that Soule was starting with this segment and fading his way into the “EQ Notes”, and that the part that did the unfinished fade down is where the theme would pick up and grow into something we recognize.

I have a lot of faith in Jeremy Soule, I have a 4 disc set of Skyrim music that I listen to at work on a pretty regular basis. I was just shocked at what I heard and how little it represented “Everquest” for me. It also makes me afraid that they are really distancing themselves from the past, and kinda abandoning the Everquest lineage that came before. I love Norrath and probably always will, and while I don’t think I could ever return to playing Everquest 1 I am still a huge fan of everything that Everquest 2 has become. I want Everquest Next to draw upon this pedigree and not just completely abandon it.

Everquest Current

So much emphasis has been placed on Everquest Next, but last night was really about showing off Everquest Current. Both Everquest and Everquest II are seemingly unstoppable juggernauts of content. In the video above they announce the 20th expansion for the original Everquest, Call of the Forsaken. It is completely staggering to think of any MMO in todays climate making its way through 20 separate expansion packs. That is really one of the things that the SOE model has done… is allow aging communities to survive and be nurtured by what seems like extremely dedicated product teams.

I don’t really play Everquest other than occasionally logging in to my station account and remembering just how primate the old days were, so the first half of this trip down “everquest current” was interesting but had no real meat on its bones for me. I started to get a little excited when the EQ2 portion came up. While I am knee deep in Rift and living it… I will always have a deep nostalgia over EQ2 and all that it represents. As a result I want it to be awesome, and I want to to successfully draw players. In the above video they announce the 10th expansion for EQ2, Tears of Veeshan.

I remember spending a lot of time farming the North Temple of Veeshan for rep and gear back in the original game… and to some extend I always knew that EQ2 would take us back there. Additionally they will be opening up High Hold Keep, a zone that I travelled through numerous times on my way to the Karanas but never actually leveled in the area surrounding it. Apparently in the storyline we have dug too deep below the keep… and uncovered a band of Goblins that have taken it over. As a result it looks like similar to Kaladim, it will be a former city turned dungeon as you “retake” the keep.

What I found extremely interesting in the talk of going to the “Nexus Core” supposedly an area that powered the Nexus on Luclin. I have always hoped that one of the expansions would take us back to moon and see what remains of it, so maybe this will open the door to that actually happening. I really loved Luclin, I guess in part because this was the first expansion I was actually a loyal player for the release. I started playing Everquest just shortly after the release of Velious, and there was something magical about experiencing my very first MMO expansion pack.

The big reveal it seems was the addition of a 26th character class The Channeler, which is apparently on the SOE Live floor. The shots they showed of the class looked pretty cool, but it also seemed extremely confused. It is a priest archetype, but has a giant mage like elemental construct but wears leather and wields a bow. It will be interesting to see what the class plays like, and whether it feels like a ranger turned pet class or not. The unique mechanic is that the construct is customizable with the ability to swap abilities and appearances to make it into whatever the player wants. Again it will have to be something I see in action to be able to make sense of it.

Finally at the TAIL end of the video Holly Longsdale teased what was coming for expansion eleven. Based on the images shown… I would guess that the Everquest 2 timeline will be discovering the lost continent of Taelosia as see in the Gates of Discord expansion to the original game. I could be wrong… namely because I was not actually playing EQ at that time, but based on some of the artwork I remember… these odd tribal lizardish men look to fit that theme. I am not sure but I believe Taelosia is the last major landmass that has not made an apperance at least in part in the broken world setting. It is good to see that they have a long range plan of where to take the game next. I still would love to get a trip back to the moon however.

Wrapping Up

I am looking forward to seeing the actual Everquest Next announcement today around noonish pst. Additionally from Quake Con there is supposed to be a live demo of Elder Scrolls Online at 1:30 EDT so that should be awesome as well. I will likely be listening to both in the background as I work on various things today. I really hope that both are as awesome as I have built them up to be in my head. I hope you all have a great Friday, and that it leads to a great weekend. Hopefully other than picking up around the house and doing a few chores mine is pretty relaxing. Tonight at 8pm CDT House Stalwart is hosting a League of Legends beginner night for anyone that wants to get their feet wet, so that should be enjoyable. It has been so long since I have played that I am really looking forward to doing it for a few hours.

Abolish Faction Walls

July 25, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out there. I joked yesterday about opening a real life air rift, but in reality I guess it felt a bit like that. We managed to get through the storm relatively unscathed, but not everyone did. Yesterday the report was that roughly 100,000 customers were without power, and in on the drive in there were numerous intersections that were reduced to four way stops. The neighbor across the street lost the entire fence on the front part of his yard, and the shopping center my favorite game store is in was pretty much demolished by the winds. It is so odd to have tornadic style damage without the Tornado.

Race and Class Restrictions

Yesterday Rowan posted a thought provoking pieces on whether or not there should be class and race restrictions in games. Namely this was spawned by Wildstar, but the question carries over to every game. Why does it make sense that fanatical characters should be limited by some sort of pseudo real world logic? In an example he gives… why CAN’T a robot do magic… isn’t that just imposing some kind of logic on fantasy gaming that doesn’t really exist? Is it not just as fantastical that humans can perform magic?

Ultimately I am against class and race restrictions… but even more so I am against faction based restrictions. My general theory is… that in every situation… ideology never breaks down solely along racial boundaries. There will always be people that play across the lines and are branded as either Sell-swords at the best, or Traitors at the worst by their own faction. One of the worst experiences you can have is when a new game comes out… and you are super pumped about one specific race… only to find out that every single friend you have wants to play the OTHER faction.

My mantra has been anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad. Faction based race restrictions get in the way of you playing what you want to play… and also playing with your friends that might have different tastes. I will go one step further and say that Factions in general… are generally bad, but more so games that try and set up an artificial “red versus blue” faction wall. That essentially feels like imposing artificial limitations on your players just to solve poor design problems. If have to rely on polarized faction based combat to keep your game moving, you made some bad decisions somewhere along the process.

Abolish Faction Walls

Some of the most liberating gaming experiences I have had come from games with much more flexible factional boundaries. The Everquest series probably takes the cake for its ability to give the player malleable faction alignments. Essentially you start out as either aligned as an Evil race or a Good race… and that sets up certain default racial relations that you have with other factions in the world. Given the time and the inclination… you can perform tasks that will alter these boundaries through lots and lots of player faction work.

Iksar for example started off hated by everything and could do business nowhere but the neutral Nexus and Cabilis their home city. However I had a friend who through lots of work managed to become maximum reputation with the Halflings… and he was treated as a favored guest in their territory. I myself took my Half Elf ranger which is natively a good aligned race… and managed to get him the same reputation with the Evil Erudite city of Paineel. This experience of letting the player dictate their alliances through their interactions with the world is the best possible scenario I have seen. Sadly… no one since has adopted this model.

In Everquest 2 you had something similar… defacto good vs evil racial set up… but over the course of the game you could decide to betray your home faction and begin gaining rep with the other. While this was not as rich and robust as the Everquest system… it was still a far better choice than the archaic “red versus blue” mentality. Additionally no where in the Everquest realm are you ever limited in who you can group with, communicate with, and trade with. All players can interact regardless of their personal choices.

Faction as Fiction

Singlehandedly one of the best choices Trion has ever made with Rift is to release the fabled “Faction as Fiction” patch abolishing strict faction walls in that game. While not as open as a game like Everquest that was designed NOT to have firm factions, it was a great way to “hack” that functionality into an existing game. Essentially in one pass they allowed Guardian and Defiant characters to group and guild freely, and set up a new neutral three faction based PVP system called Conquest. Players essentially act as mercenaries for three different political factions and wage proxy battles for them.

I feel like this decision point more than anything has allowed House Stalwart to grow so much recently. Many of the players that we were pulling in, tried it shortly after the release of Rift, but felt limited by the race and faction based choices. We were a Defiant guild, but many players just feel more comfortable with the kinder, gentler, greener… Guardian starter experience. Being able to tell them that “faction no longer matters” has almost become a rallying call as I get new folks invested in the game again.

I cannot help but think that games like World of Warcraft and Wildstar would not be far better served if they threw off the mantle of “red versus blue” and embraced letting players choose their own alignments. While we have extremely rabid Horde and Alliance players… I was one of those players that had friends on both sides of the pond. When Stalwart originally launched with the release of WoW, we had an Alliance Guild on Argent Dawn and a Horde Guild on Silverhand. The intent was to play in both places, so that we could stay together… but over time the majority greatly favored Alliance… leaving a skeleton crew manning the Horde bulwarks.

So instead of having like Fifty players all happy and acting together… we had 35 happy alliance players, and 15 unhappy horde players that felt abandoned. Any design choice that forces potentially pits players against their friends… is ultimately a bad one for the sake of building long lasting communities. Had we been able to BE an Alliance guild, but also had a number of “Horde” race sell-swords… I feel as though this would not have been a problem. The players didn’t care about the faction… they cared about the available races to play… and ultimately went to the side that they could play what they wanted to.

Looking Forward

One of the biggest detractors for me in everything I have heard about Elder Scrolls Online is the fact that once again there will be three distinct and insular faction groups. While choosing which faction to align to was easy for me… since I always play a Nord, Argonian or a Dunmer… it will not be quite so easy for my friends. I have a few friends that prefer Altmer for example… and I tend to go out of my way to kill them when playing Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls is a setting where there have NEVER been absolute race based factional boundaries. There are always Nords that are willing to sell their blade to the highest bidder, as well as Altmer that throw off their heritage and adventure freely in the world.

My biggest hope is that there will be a way for my friends to be in Ebonheart Pact where I plan on building the House Stalwart guild… but be able to play whatever they want to play. This will ultimately determine whether or not a Stalwart guild succeeds in this game. I realize that this is probably just a pipe dream, because everything that we have seen to this point seems to enforce the strict racial boundaries. But I guess I can hope… I realize factional boundaries are easy for companies to enforce, that they greatly simplify many aspects of the game. However this does not stop me from feeling like they are bad for the players.

ESO is still a long ways off, so I have the smallest glimmer of hope that they might rethink the firm racial limits, however Wildstar feels as though it is right around the corner and has set up the same tired walls. We are going through the same problems with that game as we have every other faction based title. Granted I am only really mildly interested in the game… but various Stalwarts are EXTREMELY interested. The problem is… each of us seems to natively align ideologically with one faction or the other… and currently it the sentiments seem to split down the middle. All of this is generally because we prefer to play one type of race over another. They could really serve to take a book from Trion and make guilds transcend factional boundaries.

While we are on pipedreams… one of the biggest flaws in The Secret World is the fact that Cabals are faction locked. This game is so liberating in certain fashions… you can group with any player on any faction or shard. However the fact that their guild system is limited based on a specific faction really throws a monkey wrench in this whole openness scenario. It has essentially forced guilds to manage three separate factional units… and then try and communicate between them using server channels. Everything would have been far simpler had they just said that cabals were free floating. I really hope this is a decision they revisit in the near future.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again… I have wasted another perfectly good morning rambling on. I had intended to talk about all the awesomeness that we did last night as a guild, but that yarn can wait for another day. On a related note however.. I totally suggest you check out Fynralyl’s blog post about her entry into the guild and reentry into Rift in general. Warms my heart to see that folks are enjoying themselves in an environment I have pulled together. Any questions I had as to whether or not forming a House Stalwart in Rift was a good idea… have long since gone out the window. I hope you guys have a great day, and that the weekend comes quickly.