MMORPG Archives - Page 199 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Issues with Quick Join

October 26, 2016 by Belghast

The last several days I have spent a good chunk of my time idling on this riverbank out in the Western Plaguelands… while often roaming around a completely different Plaguelands over in Destiny. However that is not what I am going to talk about this morning, I simply needed a screenshot to post and grabbed this one. What I am going to talk about is the 7.1 patch in World of Warcraft, or at least a small part of it. I acknowledge ahead of time that this post is probably not going to make a lot of sense to many of you, because you have to really suffer with anxiety brain to get it. Yesterday as part of 7.1 a new feature called “Quick Join” was patched into the game. To quote the page announcing this feature on the World of Warcraft site…

So whether it’s your guildmate, your Battle.net friend, or your Real ID friend, you’ll be able to find each other and take part in a variety of game aspects without the need to ask the age old questions of– “What are you doing?” “Any room in your group?” “Can my other friend join?” You’ll just be able to see all of your friends, see what they’re up to, and ask to join with just a couple of clicks. It’s so easy, a drogbar can do it!

It is hard for me to adequately explain how much anxiety this causes me. In Diablo 3 there is a similar Quick Join feature that is designed to let you easily get into games with your friends. How it works in practice is that folks randomly join into your game usually without actually talking to you first. After the generally jarring experience this causes, I wound up going into the settings and flipping myself to private so that I would not show up in the Quick Join list. My fear with the World of Warcraft feature is that it would work like this, but I guess fortunately that is not the case. What it does instead is whenever you are queued for content, you show up in the Quick Join list allowing folks to request to join your queue. From there you have to accept or deny that request, so no ninja joining. Unfortunately it still makes me deal with the guilt of turning down friends, and the possible social ramifications. What I really wanted to see was a sort of “opt out” private mode built into the system, or maybe this would have been the perfect time to roll in the much requested “Appear Offline” or “Invisible” mode to Battle.net.

Anxiety Brain

I am generally a fairly gregarious person, and I try and go out of my way to welcome folks when playing the guild cruise director role. I am also known for driving a van full of candy… that gathers people up and convinces them to join whatever guild I happen to be a part of. This is absolutely one side of me and I love being that person whenever I can. That said there is another part of me that comes out when I am overly stressed or just simply worn out from having to “act normal” at work or day to day societal constraints. This part of me just needs to duck my head into my turtle shell and hide from the world… and these are the moments when Battle.net scares the shit out of me. I love having easy access to my friends, but sometimes I cannot handle appearing to follow basic social norms. There are times I need to fade into the background and pretend that the rest of the world exists. Essentially I need my alone time, and it is important for me to recharge my batteries so I have the strength to confront those times when I need to be around others. The thought that at any moment someone could ask to join me in whatever I happen to be doing… and that there is now a system to make that easier… is completely terrifying.

Yesterday a friend who I know was not getting this equated this to “you’d rather group with strangers?” and that is not entirely it either. There are times that I queue to be an anonymous blip in someone else’s radar so I don’t have to think… or be concerned about anyone other than myself. There are times where I simply need to complete an activity, and I am not necessarily up for the burden that comes from grouping with people I know. When I group with people I care about… I feel responsible for their safety, happiness and enjoyment. Maybe this is just the gut reaction from playing tanks all of these years, but I feel like when I am in group mode I need to be fully there for the folks who are with me. Essentially I have to psyche myself up to be able to take on this mantle of responsibility and do the things I need to do to make a group happen. Having that whole thing thrust upon me, is just jarring and abrupt… and how exactly do I explain to someone who I legitimately care for… why I am going to click that deny button?

Ultimately I am going to deny a lot of group invites that happen through this system, and I apologize ahead of time. Sometimes when you say “It’s not you, It’s me” it really means “nope it is absolutely you”. However this is not one of those cases because in all seriousness there are just times when I cannot handle being a responsible adult. In theory I could start deleting people from my Battle.net friends list until I only had the people who understood exactly what this means, but that is also a bad solution. I use that thing for grouping, and especially lately I have been pinging folks to try and find a fifth for mythics or keystones. My Battle.net list is largely there for cross realm grouping options, and I shouldn’t have to give that up just because I cannot handle the thought of getting randomly grouped with people when I am not prepared for it. Of note… this isn’t even an issue yet because all last night I didn’t see a single item show up on my quick join list. That unfortunately is not the way runaway anxiety works… instead I am stuck thinking through all of the possible things that COULD go wrong… before they actually have. There are so many times I get mired in the feedback loops of “what is the worst possible thing that could happen” and I am certain this is one of them. I just find it frustrating that after all these years of asking for an invisible mode we still don’t have it. I know all of this is “all in my head” but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less valid either.

Plus Anxiety

October 25, 2016 by Belghast

Me and this chest do not get along well. It is not so much that the chest itself offends, or the items that come from it… but instead the process of getting it to unlock. When I first heard about Mythic Plus dungeons… I thought it was pretty freaking great. It sounded a lot like the Greater Rift system in Diablo 3, and I was completely on board with it… until I actually set down to do one. I don’t handle timers well, namely they cause me so much more anxiety than they should. Literally if you put the easiest quest in the world on a timer… I will avoid doing it like the plague because it feels like every fiber of my being has to be concentrated on beating that timer. I mean I should have know this going into Mythic Plus content given that Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 cause the exact same sort of roller coaster of stress. To make matters worse… the first several keystones that we attempted we failed at miserably, which made me feel like the biggest failure of a tank in existence. This mental block against timers goes way back in my psyche, and it isn’t something I can entirely control. Once upon a time when I was a youngin… I went from being in the highest performing mathematics class to the lowest performing one… all because of a timer. There were these worksheets called mad minutes, where you were judged on how fast you were able to do math problems… not how correctly you worked them. The grading scale was skewed in a way that not making it to a problem was twice as bad as missing one. I’ve always been a fairly pensive person, and even though I push myself not to be… that is my nature and when you put me on the clock it puts me into panic mode.

All of this said… last night we ran two Mythic Plus dungeons and we were able to complete both of them before the keystone expired. So I guess I am managing the panic mode, well enough to push through a dungeon in time to get progress. Now I will probably NEVER go for the whole multiple chest bullshit, because I lack the drive to attempt to get multiple chests… when the loot in said chests is more than likely shit. On the positive last night I managed to pull a 5 item level higher version of the trinket I like, getting it at 845… which still seems really low to me given the effort. That however is a completely different rant for a different day because honestly I feel like every tier of mythic plus is 5 to 10 item levels too low for the effort spent in running it. What is the tale of today however is that apparently I am working through my anxiety with being on the timer. I still over prepare for this process and try and make sure there is nothing that could possibly interrupt my focus while running the dungeon. It was a huge boon last night when we got revenge on Halls of Valor… which is one of the early pluses that we attempted and failed at least twice. The entire goal of last night was simply to get the chest from our order hall unlocked that you can see above in the screenshot from Skyhold, however I will absolutely walk away with two victories that beat the timer… one of which was good enough to absorb a wipe on the final boss and still managed to pull out a win. Plus will likely always be a stress factor for me, because that timer… feels so insanely oppressive. I tried my best NOT to watch the timer, because it is one of those situations that so long as I didn’t think about it I was largely fine.

Seasonal Bits

October 21, 2016 by Belghast

Tonight begins the next season for Diablo 3, and I have to admit much like season 7 this one completely snuck up on me. Were it not for my friend Grace the beginning of the season would have passed me by completely. For the last several of these we have done a Friday night vigil as we attempt to grind our way up to 70 on a brand new set of seasonal characters. Once again I think I am going to go with a Demon Hunter, largely because they seemed super easy to push through the seasonal process and at least get high enough to collect the cosmetic goodies. I am just not super into Diablo 3 right now, the evidence being that it just got removed from my side bar. The challenge is that I can only have so many games that I actively care about at one time. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time playing World of Warcraft, and attempting to steal as much time as humanly possible to feed my love of Destiny. From there I am also juggling in some time for Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV… while at the same time trying to keep a foot in Rift for when the expansion lands there. This scattered approach at gaming has a lot to be desired at times, because it ends up leaving me feeling like no one game is getting the attention it deserves. Diablo 3 fell off the radar once I managed to get last seasons cosmetic items, and I had not even realized the season had closed until Grace talked about merging in her seasonal inventory. This in itself is one hell of a chore, but I find myself getting significantly more mercenary about this process as the seasons go along. Pretty much any legendary that is not ancient quality or part of the actively equipped set of gear… gets sharded.

The above screenshot is just because I wound up setting up a new outfit in Rift, and thought it was cool. I’ve loved the whole shade touched effect since the very first world event, and this time around for their “fall” event they are offering a shade touched skull that I could add to my wardrobe collection. I also picked up the scythe made of bone… because I kinda have a thing for scythes. The other interesting thing that I learned this morning is that apparently FRAPs does not handle DSR well. Dynamic Super Resolution is a thing that Nvidia cards can do, where they essentially run the game in 4k on a 1080p resolution. That is an oversimplification of what it ACTUALLY does but we are just going to go for that simplistic definition for the time being. I am going to need to go out hunting and see if I can find another all purpose screenshot program, because fraps apparently only takes a single 1080p panel of the larger image. This wound up with some rather comedic screenshots while trying to capture something for this mornings post. I finally wound up doing Alt+PrintScreen and pasting it into photoshop to get the results this morning… which also caused the FRAPs framerate counter to come along with it. DSR works great for a game like League of Legends or Diablo 3, but it does some weird stuff as a result. I guess I need to do some experimenting with the nvidia screenshot tool that comes with the new version of “Experience” and see if it works well enough to kick fraps to the curb. Thing is that is really all I use it for… dumping screenshots from every game into a single “gameshots” directory for me to sort through for the purpose of this here blog. In any case… the plan is to hang out in Diablo 3 tonight and do another grind ritual with the start of this brand new season. I always have a blast doing it, even when I am not exactly prepared for it.

Two More Fall

October 20, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a pretty great night. For the last several weeks since Emerald Nightmare released, Wednesday nights have been raid night. At this very moment we are just raiding one night a week, and at first that probably held us back a little. However given the last two weeks I think overall gearing was a bigger issue. Last week we went from only being able to take down Nythendra to adding Elerethe Renferal, Ursoc, and the Dragons of Nightmare to the list. Though admittedly both the Ursoc and Dragons kill felt like sheer dumb luck and bursty dps. This week however we largely added to the mix what felt like repeatable versions of those kills. Myself and Art the other tank finally sorted out something resembling a workable taunt rotation on Ursoc, and the fight went from being insanely spikey…. to pretty damned easy. Similarly with Dragons of Nightmare we just straight up did the fight like we knew what was happening this time… and it went down in a single attempt. Elerethe would have been a one shot were it not for both of us tanks getting knocked off the platform. That was not my proudest moment.

However I am in fact super proud that we managed to get things together for Il’gynoth and added our very first kill this week. Overall it felt like our dps increased between the two weeks, and with it a better sense of what needed to die when. Instead of leaving the Horror up for quite a while we had nice gaps to burn it in… and while we cut it a little close for comfort at around the 10 seconds until wipe mark, it was still a victory. From there we decided to take a stab at Cenarius and actually extended past our normal run time because we made decent progress on the fight. It still feels like there are a lot of levers we could and should tweak to make sure that fight is more repeatable, however we got the kill and hopefully will begin work on Xavius next week. I realize this is “just normal” as the chorus of the more serious raiders might say… but screw it I am happy with our progress. I feel like we are even probably going to start mixing in some heroics before too much longer. Especially with the release of Karazhan on the 25th and it adding some additional gearing options for folks. I am hoping to get a team going there pretty quickly, because I am more excited about that place than pretty much any content in any MMO. I loved the original Karazhan and good or bad, ran it quite literally every Sunday afternoon for what felt like two years to help gear folks and their alts, only to later be replaced by Zul’Aman runs. I think more than anything… most of us are simply going to be happy that before long we can complete the balance of power quest step and move on to the next batch of mythics.