Guild Wars 2 Archives - Page 23 of 42 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Chonky Battlecat Friend

August 31, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a mixed-topic post, and we are starting off with my chonky boi above. If you are an existing Guild Wars 2 player or have been considering starting it with Steam… then maybe you should log in and collect the item that is being given away currently. Essentially mount skins are almost always microtransactions found on the gem store. There are essentially three varieties: a specific skin on sale for a limited time, a scroll that gives you a random skin from several available on that scroll, and a scroll that allows you to select a mount of your choice. The last one tends to be the most expensive and I believe is somewhere in the neighborhood of $16-20.

What you are getting as part of the 10-year anniversary is a scroll that essentially lets you select a mount skin from many different pools of skins. This includes skins that are part of other bundle packs, as well as some that I have only ever seen sold individually. It was a hard choice for me but I have wanted a Warclaw skin for a while, and those seem to have a much slower rotation than other options. While the base warclaw probably looks more Battlecat-like, you can’t dye the actual tiger portion. So instead I went with this chonky unmasked sabertooth tiger and then dyed him up to look like a proper Battlecat. Sure I will stick out like a sore thumb on the WvW battlefield but it will make me happy doing so.

I spent most of last night swapping map runs with Ace in Path of Exile and I have to say… grouping is the biggest problem I have with that game. Everything about the process feels bad. Firstly you have the contra code problem, and for those who did not experience this, here comes an explanation. Back in the day you could input the Konami code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start) and it would give you 30 lives or if you were in two-player mode, you got 30 lives per player. However, when one player ran out of their allotted lives, it started bleeding lives from the other player so collectively you had a pool of 60 lives. When you open a map in Path of Exile it spawns six portals, each portal can only transport a single player… so the more players you have the fewer chances you have of getting through a map. It feels really freaking bad to be the person who dies on a map and has to consume another portal, and there is no mechanic for resurrecting a player.

On top of this, there is the constant frustration of loot. Unlike Diablo 3 or many modern ARPGs, Path of Exile has a single shared loot pool and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which items it flags for which players. We’ve watched a lockbox open and every single item is flagged for one player. We’ve seen the same item flagged to be lootable by BOTH players… even though we were running with “permanent allocation” turned on in the group settings. Then there are weird things like trying to pick up an item and not having inventory space seems to count it was looting it… then dropping it on the ground flagging that item as free for all looting. It just feels bad that you are constantly on the verge of ninja looting something because it is never really clear what belongs to you. There are other problems like “fog of war” exploration not being shared… that all lead to Path of Exile just being a game that feels bad to play with friends.

Contrast that with Diablo 3 which has always felt amazing to play with friends. It is super easy to drag someone along with you and the catch-up mechanics serve to quickly lower the gap in power. I mean the game also has its own problems, I love the ability to just trade any item to friends in Path of Exile whether or not they happened to be there at the time it dropped. I feel like I keep finding myself in a situation of really enjoying Path of Exile, but it is nowhere near the group dynamic replacement game that I was hoping it would be. Diablo 3 sadly still sits at the top of that heap and has yet to be dethroned, even though I keep desperately looking for a replacement. After needing a break from the frenzy of running maps together last night, I swapped over to D3 when I went downstairs and finished out the haedrig’s gift portion of my seasonal journey.

For anyone who has never really done the “proper” season start routine, the above video from Raxx outlines the process. Essentially you complete a challenge rift and then attempt to use the materials that you get through that process… to get some items that will give you a bit of a boost while leveling. This season I stuck out big time. I did my challenge rift on Sunday and then failed to hit anything useful. I stuck out completely on gambling and got zero legendaries, and then my upgraded weapon didn’t land on anything useful either. Still, I managed to level fast enough over the course of two days and then began my season’s journey properly. By the time I dinged 70 I had completed all of the achievements required to get my four-piece set.

At this point, I had only four set pieces and nothing else useful. I had managed to pull a set of Nemesis Bracers which I immediately threw on my Templar. I’ve been trained to feel like I need specific gear items and have used them as a crutch, so instead of going after some of the missing achievements directly, I did a round of bounties, as I would need the jewelry patterns contained in the bags in order to complete one of the achievements. My hope was that through this process I would ultimately get some gear… and I poured all of my deaths breath that I got into upgrading mighty weapons in the hope of getting an Ambo’s Pride. However I finished my round of bounties and was in no better state than I started, and I was shocked at just how easy it was for me to complete a level 20 Greater Rift.

Basically, I had this moment where I realized… that I am much better at Diablo III than I used to be. I mean that is to be expected considering just how many hours I have played this game over the last several years, but it never really sunk in until last night. Early on when I did the seasonal grind, I would have floundered on a 4 piece set trying to get my 6-piece, but instead I made the best of what I had available to me and cobbled together a custom load out of abilities that would accentuate my strengths. Essentially I used Leap and Whirlwind to gather up packs of mobs and then Rend to do the killing, and managed to finish the Rift with eight minutes to spare. I hope maybe one day I can have this same moment with Path of Exile because I still feel completely overwhelmed most of the time I am playing it.

I am hoping beyond hope that either Diablo 4 or Path of Exile 2 ends up being the best of both worlds. What I want is a game with some of the nuance and complexity of Path of Exile, but the fun drop-in non-punitive gameplay of Diablo III. After the debacle that has been the Lake of Kalandra league, I am starting to lose hope that we are going to find that from Grinding Gear Games. I think there are some aspects of “the vision” that are directly at odds with what I consider to be the optimal grouping experience. Maybe the Microsoft buyout of Blizzard will go through… cause some significant changes in the structure of that company and once again make me feel okay about supporting their games. I am hoping that Diablo IV ends up being a great game, in spite of the conditions it was developed under. Even though they have come out with public statements to the contrary… the experience we all had with Diablo Immortal still gives me some significant concerns about what we will get.

Guild Wars 2 Steam Launch

August 17, 2022 by Belghast

Yesterday we finally got a release date for something that has been in the works for a while. Guild Wars 2 is launching on Steam on August 23rd, and this announcement has been met with quite a bit of frustration on my social timelines. Guild Wars 2 being available through Steam is a universally good thing, because it lowers the barrier to entry into this game. The frustrations however lay with the fact that if you are already a Guild Wars 2 player with an existing account, you cannot link it in any way to steam. This means that those of us who have been around for a while are going to miss out on the convenience of being able to launch the game through what has effectively become the PC Gaming storefront.

We can gnash our teeth about this decision, but I think ultimately it comes down to financial reasons. If I understand correctly there is certain verbiage in the steam agreement that indicates the 30% cut of sales, is taken for all members playing on the steam platform regardless of where the purchases are made. So even if you went directly to the Arena.Net website and purchased gems… because you are a Steam player 30% of that money will go back to Valve. For a game that has persevered by its bootstraps like Guild Wars 2, immediately losing 30% of funding from a significant chunk of its player base would be brutal. I would have absolutely been open to rebuying the base game and all of its expansions if it meant that I could launch it from my platform of choice, but alas that is not a thing that can happen.

So you might ask yourself, why even bother with a steam release when existing players can’t make use of it? In the short time since the announcement yesterday, there are already over 25,000 players who have wish-listed Guild wars 2. I am not an industry flack so I am not entirely certain what that equates to for a potential conversion rate, but it is nonetheless still impressive to me for a 10-year-old game. The other piece that comes into play is that Guild Wars 2 will now be listed in the Free To Play section of Steam allowing anyone who wants to dip their toes into the game to try it out quickly, with minimal friction. It is a lot easier to convince someone to try a game when all they have to do is click the play button in a client that they already have than to track down the website, set up a unique account, and download an individual launcher.

We also have some data supporting the spikes in sales that come with launching a game on Steam thanks to Satisfactory. Satisfactory originally launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive, a platform with a sweetheart deal for game exclusivity and a significantly lower cut of the profits. It took roughly three months to reach the 500,000 sales mark on the Epic Game store and at the end of their year-long exclusivity period, the game had reached over 900,000 sales. Within the first two weeks of being on Steam the game sold almost 400,000 units and since then has gone on to sell well over 3 million copies. Essentially releasing a game on Steam puts it in front of a larger magnitude of eyeballs than it does on other platforms. So while it would be awful to lose 30% of all of the existing sales… that equation becomes completely different when it could garner millions of new players.

The Steam launch of course coincides with the 10th Anniversary of Guild Wars 2. For those of us who already play the game, while we are not getting the benefit of being able to use the Steam launcher… there are a number of goodies for us as well. There is a “Decade” armor set that can be obtained and starting today there are I believe a series of daily free items on the Black Lion store. I checked this morning and was able to purchase a single Black Lion Key for free, so you might keep an eye on things as the next few weeks roll out. It was also hinted in the update blog that there will be a free mount skin available at some point during the sequence of freebies. Finally on August 23rd at UTC-7 Twitch Drops will be enabled which can net you Transmutation Charges, boosters, a mini, a Glowing Purple Mask, and your choice of a classic Guild Wars 2 character outfit.

Many Games and Little Focus

July 8, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I find myself in a weird position right now where I am picking at the bones of several games but not terribly engaged with most of them. There was a time when I used to create these “regularly playing” posts, and in theory that is what today’s post is going to largely be. However, I just don’t really feel like reviving that format. If I was going to say I had a primary game at the moment it would be Path of Exile. I am very much in a bit of a honeymoon phase with that game… or as “honeymoon” as you can be with a game that is actively trying to make interactions with its systems difficult. I am not in my 60s on the Explosive Arrow Champion build and I have a few baby alts that are doing different things that I am poking around with as well. We have several folks from the AggroChat podcast playing right now and as a result, we have a “Greysky Armada” guild up and running. Not that I actually understand half of what there is to do with a guild… but we have a Guild Hideout and at least some Guild Stash storage.

Since Outriders Worldslayer just released, I am spending some time playing around in that game. I enjoy the mechanical systems but am a bit frustrated with how limited the expansion actually was. Essentially at its core, it adds one new activity to the game… the Trial of Tarya Gratar. If for whatever reason you don’t want to engage with the time commitment of that event, then you are stuck doing the same familiar grinds that have been in place since the release of the game. However, with the game being way more generous about dropping legendaries, I am actually trying to build a proper gear set focused around the Seismic Commander set. At the moment I am wearing mostly the “purple legendaries” gear until I can get a decent roll on all slots of the actual gear set.

I am still logging in pretty regularly to Guild Wars 2, but I am not really doing much of anything. At a minimum, I farm resources in the three guild halls that I can farm each day, and gather what home instance nodes I have. Most days I try and figure out a quick path to getting 3 dailies done and get my 2 gold. However lately I have not even been doing that. Essentially I need to pick a goal and then focus on that because while I have a wealth of things that I could be doing… I am pretty directionless in actually doing any of them. I could focus on my Skyscale or knocking out the karka hunting achievement which would give me some way of disposing of excess ascended materials. The problem is that I fail miserably at actually sitting down and focusing on any of them.

I am in a similar “maintenance mode” with New World, where I am logging in most days and harvesting enough materials to get 3 of the Hidden Stashes which turn into diamond gypsum, and one of the proficiency caches that gives me emerald gypsum. I then take these out to Shattered Mountain where my inn is bound, craft some gear for expertise boosts and then log out for the day. Doing this has allowed me to take all of my armor slots, sword, shield, and warhammer to 600 expertise. Right now I am working on pushing up greataxe and hatchet. At some point when the major patch drops that take away dungeon keys I will probably start running some of these again through the new group finder tool. The devs made a joke about calling them tuning orbs and expeditions… but I am sorry… that is obtuse and weird. They are dungeons and they are keys and “ya done fucked up” by not naming them the industry standards.

I am even in a worse state with Final Fantasy XIV right now. Basically, I am logging in every 4 days… either to go house shopping among the ever-dwindling number of housing plots… or to collect my money from the lottery system because I lost yet again. None of these interactions make me happy. I am very sad about the state of housing in Final Fantasy XIV. The lottery while it helped in some ways by keeping me from having to set up an auto clicker in order to succeed… but I also feel pretty hopeless still about my prospects of acquiring a house. Now that there are additional catch-up mechanics, I really should dive back into the systems and catch a character up. However, there is a mental barrier between me and this game at the moment. If I win a house I will once again have the desire to spend time in this world, but so long as I am homeless I am lacking that traction.

My return to Diablo III was a whirlwind romance. While it was not my fastest season in the world, now that I have finished up with those achievements and gotten the rewards… I have very little desire to keep playing. I had started a Hardcore Seasonal character, simply because I had never actually played in that game mode. I have to admit what knocked the wind out of my sails was when I realized it worked vastly different than I was expecting. I assumed that when I took a death, the hardcore seasonal would turn into a softcore seasonal. I mean this is how it works in Path of Exile and my brief jaunt into Hardcore Minecraft… but my assumptions were wrong. Instead, your character is just gone, and I cannot stomach the idea of wasting time on a character that poofs. This combined with the fact that I just got into Path of Exile has more or less stopped this project dead in its tracks.

Lastly, we have Diablo Immortal. This one is mostly just a footnote because I have uninstalled this game from all of my devices and not looked back after my “fruitless grinding” post. There were a lot of things I liked about this game and the way some of the systems interacted. I specifically loved the way that legendary items worked, and how you could extract the “legendaryness” and apply it to other items. It appears that Diablo 4 is going to do something similar to this, so it makes me very excited for what that game might end up feeling like in the end. However, the monetization of Immortal is going to give me a great pause for what the future of Blizzard games looks like. I have to admit though I had some fun while it lasted, and if they at some point in the future come to their damned senses and make this a more reasonable option… I might return. Considering most of the reputable sources have stopped covering the game aside from the occasional dunk on it… I will be interested to see what the revenue stream looks like on this going forward. I am also curious to see what lasting impact this will have on the Diablo player base… since this essentially nuked the goodwill from orbit.

Exonerating the Dungeon Finder

June 29, 2022 by Belghast

With the upcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, there has been quite a bit of talk in the Twitterverse and greater blogging community about this expansion. I have no plans to go back and try out the classic experiment because across the board I think it has failed. World of Warcraft Classic was quite a bit of fun… until we all remembered the work commitment that game required for doing anything serious at the endgame. I think I personally petered out somewhere in the mid-50s and I ultimately lasted longer than a good number of my friends. Those who remained however represented some of the more toxic players, and I’ve heard stories from folks who played like Namaslays about the sexual harassment represented in that community.

For years I have idolized the Wrath of the Lich King expansion as the last truly good time in World of Warcraft, and similarly, I have placed the transition squarely on the shoulders of the Dungeon Finder tool. It was late in the Wrath patch cycle that we were first introduced to this tool, and rapidly folks stopped forming groups on their own and instead relied on random chances to throw them together with other players. As someone who used to cultivate a wide network of social channels and friends lists so I could rapidly pull together groups from a huge pool of hundreds of “known good” players, this was an earthquake that shattered the infrastructure that I had built. However, as I look back on this era, I am pretty certain that I have been wrong about the Dungeon Finder all of these years.

I think the larger truth is that “online social interaction in a video game” no longer held the novelty that it once did. I very much remember my early days in Everquest were spent being amazed that I could be online with that many other players at once. We went into these games carrying with us the lineage of MUDs and IRC chat rooms… that were by nature deeply social enterprises. So the fact that we could play a game and do it while chatting with friends, was a groundbreaking scenario. World of Warcraft was probably the first MMORPG I played that was legitimately by its own merits a “Good Game”. What I mean by that is a game that was capable of enthralling someone who had no interest in “Online Worlds” and only really cared about the mechanical moment-to-moment gameplay. I think those of us who came to these games for the social interaction that they provided… eventually “aged out” of it. It isn’t so much that we lack the desire, it is just that real-world responsibilities eventually replaced the ability to maintain in-game responsibilities.

Since then I have played a lot of different MMORPGs at a good number of different levels of seriousness. It is really Final Fantasy XIV that proved to me that the dungeon finder tool could be a seriously good thing. The key difference here is that Yoshi P and crew wanted to create a structure that rewarded the player for good play or at least good behavior. The subtle pressure of wanting to win a commendation has been enough to curb most of the worst behavior for years. That is not to say that a good deal of toxicity has not crept into this game as well, but most of that can be seen at the highest levels of play and not necessarily in the “duty roulette”. It did plant the idea in my head though that with the correct social structure and systems that reward fair play, you might be able to rehabilitate even the worst of environments.

I’ve also played a good number of games since then that have had no grouping functionality built into them at all. While I can go through the social labor of trying to find groups, it is so much harder for me to be willing to put myself out there when I am grouping with strangers. There has been a long series of games lately where I have been the last one playing or one of the last few playing. This means I am spending almost all of my time soloing, and do not have a ready-made pocket healer to go with my tanky nature. If I could somehow transplant the Final Fantasy XIV Duty Finder and its social structure into New World for example… I would do so in a heartbeat. I know with the removal of dungeon keys, they are putting in some manner of group finding tool, but I believe it is a manual process and not an auto-matching system. Regardless having even that minimal infrastructure is an improvement over spamming trade chat.

Guild Wars 2 has a lot of grouping options for certain segments of the game, but thus far has done little to help me ease into other areas. For example, if we are talking about Open World or WVW content, I can simply click on the commander tag on the map and join the group (pending the group is open, which most are). If it is some daily objective like bounties in a specific region, there are also often manual group finder groups active for folks trying to accomplish that. Similarly, big reoccurring meta events have group finder groups allowing you to drop into RIBA in Silverwastes at will. However, up until this point they have not been a terribly viable way of finding a Dungeon, Strike, or Raid group because those communities tend not to use them. Arena Net knows this and is trying to implement some changes to make them more random player friendly… but still it is not “push button get group” easy.

I think the thing that the Dungeon Finder tool did do, was limit the importance of a server community and the social structures that are entangled with that notion. At the time… I mourned this greatly, but modern me is generally in favor of just completely abolishing the concept of a server and opening up grouping freely across the entire game. One of the greatest faults that I can find in both Diablo Immortal and New World is the deeply limiting server infrastructure that almost guarantees that over time server merges will be consistently required. At the end of the day, the ethic that I care the most about in an Online Game is the ability to play with my friends, regardless of what region they might be playing in. Sure it might be a pain in the butt to organize a play session, but having any sort of basic social infrastructure greatly improves my experience in the long run. Given that it is deeply difficult to keep players engaged for more than a few months at a time, the ability to hop around between different pools of active friends is key to the long-term success of a game.

Essentially for the last decade and some change, I have branded the Dungeon Finder as the great killer of games when in truth that was a flawed perception. I’ve realized that Wrath of the Lich King is a specific moment in time for me that could never be replicated. While some of that experience was wrapped up in the social infrastructure that I had built, probably more of it was associated with the deep depression that I was in at the time. I was clinging to World of Warcraft and the friends I had made in it as a lifeline to keep me from fading away. It is weird to me that I hold the game in such nostalgia when I was playing it through quite possibly the darkest period in my life. I can’t go back to the way I felt at that time, and I honestly would never want to knowing how close I came to ending it all. Instead of realizing it was me that was changing, I placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the biggest innovation to be brought into the game that I loved.

The hard truth is, I would love to see the Dungeon Finder or something similar to it in more games. Even with the toxic community of players that it brings along with it… having access to run dungeons and harder content is far better than having to expend the emotional energy to make it happen without one. My more modern mindset is that all of the barriers that keep people from doing content, easily with friends should be leveled. Constructs like the Trust system in Final Fantasy XIV are great, but could be even better if they were more flexible and allowed you to build a group of what you had available, and then use NPCs to fill out the rest of the party. There were so many times I wish we had systems like SWTOR where you could run content with two people and two companions. No game has really nailed these systems, but I now have to fully admit that we are far better off with them than without them.