MMORPG

Pokemon Go Frustrations

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Bad Polling

A few days ago I did yet another one of my super-non-scientific polls about Pokemon Go.  I got far fewer results than I had hoped but in the end got 38 total votes… and you can see the results here.  Ultimately I was curious to see just how well Pokemon Go is doing among my twitter timeline a little over a month after the initial release.  I knew my usage of the app had morphed a bit, and I was curious to see if everyone else had as well.  The slight unfair comparison here however is that with the staggered launch, some folks like most of South America just literally got access to the application.  As always I tried to create a bunch of categories that summed up what I thought of as the possible endpoints… but ultimately missed a few.  The results look something like this.

  • Actively “Catching Them All” Every Day – 11 Votes (29%)
  • Only Playing When You Go Someplace New – 5 Votes (13%)
  • Playing Rarely if you Remember – 10 Votes (26%)
  • Still Installed but not Active – 6 Votes (16%)
  • Uninstalled:  May Check Later – 2 Votes (5%)
  • Uninstalled: Got It Out of System – 1 Vote (3%)
  • Never Tried It: Not For Me – 3 Votes (8%)
  • Never Tried It: Still Interested – 0 Votes (0%)

Now I have no baseline here, because I should have taken a poll like this shortly after the launch, but it feels like that rarely playing number is probably higher than it would have been early on.   For me personally I am in this awkward place of still playing, but not nearly with the same gusto that I once did.  The attraction of Pokemon in the first place is the collection of new and interesting “mon”.  So when I play the actual game I spend most of my time capturing critters either to keep in my own collection or to wonder trade them off just to see what I might get in return.  The first few days of playing Pokemon Go felt like this, with me constantly finding something new and interesting around every corner.  However at this point I have caught 85 of the 150 Pokemon available in Pokemon Go and of that list…  Ditto, Mew, Mewtoo, Zapdos, Articuno, and Moltres are largely just myths at the moment.  That means I have roughly 60% of the 144 that are reasonably available right now.  Even then you have to discount the fact that Mr Mime, Khangaskhan and Farfetch’d are not available to me in the United States, which drops the total of available Pokemon down to 141.  Then you factor in the fact that I am in a Grass Type dominated area and pretty much every Rock and Fire type Pokemon is rare as shit here… and can pretty much only be summoned with a Lure or Incense my total reasonable list of available Pokemon shrinks further.

I Choose You Venonat #257!

What this means in practice is that I end up going weeks without seeing anything new.  Since finding new things is my core reward cycle in Pokemon, it really drags down my desire to keep playing.  There also seems to be a huge gulf that you fall off into after level 20.  I am just shy of dinging 21, but it has taken roughly a month of casual capturing to get me through the level.  I wish the app kept general stats of how many of each Pokemon you have caught because I am absolutely certain that if you added up the number of Pidgey and Zubat caught… they would together be around one thousand… with Zubat making up the lions share of those.  That is the core problem I am having is that I would say at least 60% of the Pokemon that I see on a daily basis… I cannot really muster the care to even try and catch.  This means I still get vaguely excited when I see my hundredth Venonat or Doduo because they aren’t yet another Rattata.  Even then I have caught enough of each to evolve four into Venomoth and three into Dodrio.  The other big challenge that I am having is the extreme heat going on right now, which severely limits the amount of time I am willing to go out hunting for critters.  The heat index the last few weeks has been hovering in the 110s, and that really is not conducive to going out and catching them all.  So instead I am mostly limited to checking my phone quickly when I pull into a parking lot, or on my way walking into work.

There is also still the problem that a lot of the world is a complete and total wasteland with nothing interesting in it.  We talked about this a bit on the podcast, but the game only seems to reward you for going to places literally everyone else is going.  So that means once a hot spot is found, then that becomes the prime real estate that EVERYONE goes to… which only cause the problem to snowball.  There is an open air mall here, and a handful of parks… that are sheer madness over lunch with people hanging out in the cars idling with the AC on near the pokestops that have lures running on them.  The game favors high cellular activity so much, that most of the rest of my area is completely devoid of anything of interest apart from random basepop trashmon.   The other main issue with this is that the game fails to capture the exploration aspect of the original source material.  In Pokemon I knew that going out into new areas, meant that I would be getting a new mix of the available critters.  So simply going over a zone, meant that while I might have 40% of the Pokemon be something I recognize, there would be 60% that were new and interesting.  That simply does not relate to the real world version with Go, because no matter any amount of reasonable movement around my area provides me a significantly different assortment of “mon”.  I can and have traveled an hour in roughly every direction from my home base… and still see exactly the same mix.  This tells me that their “regions” are just too large and generic, and there are not that many valuable sub region feature sets identified.  Oklahoma is a grassy wasteland to Niantic, so for the most part we get exactly the same assortment regardless if we are hanging out at a lake, or in the rocky canyon maze of Chandler Park.

High Pop Zones

I feel like at some level they decided that the games works well in San Francisco and New York… so it must work great everywhere else.  The problem there is the bulk of this country has nothing in common with San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, etc.  Most of the country is not a high population center, but instead a tapestry of smaller cities and wide swaths of countryside.  In those places the experience is miserable.  I have it far better than so many of my friends, but still it is maddening to roam around and see three things on the new “sightings” radar, and none of them are actually interesting.  There are so many reports that Pokemon Go usage is declining… and I can absolutely see it.  The game is extremely fun for the first few weeks, but once the new wears off… if you are not one of those players motivated to go out and capture gyms…  then there really is a constantly shrinking pool of interesting game play.  Right now as it stands they need to seriously adjust the reward systems in this game, and tweak it so that if you happen to go someplace that literally no one has ever gone before…  you should be rewarded with something awesome at the end of that journey.  The game itself is about getting out, exploring and more than anything moving.  Right now I feel like it does an extremely poor job of incentivizing me to leave my house, because if in my walk I only encounter two Pokemon it feels like a waste of my time when I could simply be chilling out and playing some other game.  They need to find a way to reward players for going to big social hubs, but also find ways to make it rewarding for players to get off the beaten path.  As always I am curious to hear your own thoughts.  I didn’t include any screenshots because I always hate trying to integrate in cellular format vertical screenshots into a blog that tends to favor landscape mode.

 

We Are Prepared

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Unplanned Plans

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Last night did not go as I actually thought it would.  Yesterday was the patch that allowed folks like me who purchased the digital pre-order of Legion to roll Demon Hunters.  Firstly I want to take a step back and acknowledge just how damned brilliant this idea is.  Sure there were demon hunters everywhere yesterday, but the total number running through the intro quests felt reasonable.  I realize they have gotten much better at instancing since the days of the Death Knight and Wrath of the Lich King… but still it seems rather smart to forcibly split up the population into waves.  There are still lots of folks who prefer to do physical copies of games, especially one with a long tradition of having awesome physical copies.  I guess the hope is that by letting some folks into the content early, that will mean that there won’t be quite the launch day crush on this single zone.  Now stepping forward again, I had planned on playing a completely different Demon Hunter last night…  as I continued working on my seasonal character in Diablo 3.  This was largely due to the fact that I fully expected the servers to be burning down around me, and the game to be essentially in an unplayable state with Demon Hunters, Broken Shore and the Legion Zone Invasions all starting last night.  I got home relatively early, and while waiting on pizza to arrive I thought I would pop in and at least create a character. For whatever reason when I boosted the Mage I just picked a name from the stable of names I have used in other games.  Even though it made zero sense… I named said mage Belglaive… a name that would later be ideal for my Demon Hunter.  As a result I also did a little renaming yesterday to shift my Mage to be Belglacial since I highly favor frost spec…  which freed up the name for my demonic Night Elf.  The other name in the running of course was the one I used on the beta server “Belblight”.

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What happened in reality is that both myself and Grace spent the rest of the night playing World of Warcraft and participating in the zone invasions.  I casually quested my way through the Demon Hunter starter content while eating dinner and then after getting dumped into Stormwind I was given the quest to do a Legion event.  For those who have not done them yet, it seems like Blizzard has learned a lot from the past events.  The ones that stick out in my mind the most is the Undead Invasion event that happened just ahead of the launch of the original Naxxramas and the release of Wrath of the Lich King.  In those events items spawned in a handful of zones, and it was a mad dash for players to scramble over to the area to get enough completion on it to be able to qualify for loot.  I ground these hard enough to get a set of gear for pretty much all of the armor types…  sadly the leather set is stranded forever on another battle.net account but I still regularly wear the plate set that largely looks like a blue and brown judgement recolor.  The problem with the event however was the fact that you were in constant competition with other players for spawns, and that it also caused you to camp zones until you got everything you needed.  I spent so many hours out in Azshara…  the good version not the one the version the Goblins later wrecked.

Maybe Space Goats Weren’t Unreasonable

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What happens in the Legion Invasion event however is that at any given time there will be two “hot zones” in the world where invasions are happening.  When I started playing last night those were Tanaris around Gadgetzan and Northern Barrens around The Crossroads.  The part that I did not quite catch onto however is that each character can complete both of the active zones, and does not need to wait for the event to “start”.  What happens instead is the moment you cross the zone boundary, you are stuck in an instanced version that is currently in phase one of the event.  It seems as though all you really need to do is to be in zone as each of the phases shifts, and I am uncertain how much actual participation you need to do.  There have been many times I was still flying to my destination when the event transitioned into Phase 2 and I have still managed to get full credit every time.  Upon completing Phase Two you receive a Small Legion Chest and upon completing the Final Phase you receive a Large Legion Chest.  From each of these a handful of things can drop, but the bulk are item level 700 weapons and armor, as well as some of the currency of the event Nethershards.  It also seems like any time you take one of the “bosses” of the event that spawn and are marked with a Skull, you receive somewhere between 5 and 10 Nethershards per kill.  In theory if you are wanting to maximize your earning, you would probably want to roll around as a team and focus entirely on killing the skulls as soon as they spawn.  The only problem there is that they have mechanics… one of which was an version of old school Kazzak that essentially becomes invulnerable when he kills ten players.  All of these Shards can be turned in for goodies including a Pet, full appearance sets, and individual weapons at the Captive Wyrmtongue <Reluctant ‘Quartermaster’>  that can be found in Stormwind, Orgrimmar and occasionally out in the field as well.  I know for example he spawns in Tanaris near Gadgetzan during that invasion.

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Now quite possibly the coolest part of this event is that it appears to be level agnostic.  To test this theory Grace grabbed her level sixty mage and brought it over to Tanaris where she was able to complete the event, with every mob appearing to her as though it were around her level range.  When she opened the chests instead of rewarding item level 700 gear, it gave her gear appropriate for her level.  That means players who are not even at the current level cap are going to be able to participate in this invasion, unlike the pre-launch events in the past.  The best part is that it seemed to “just work” and if this is an example of how well their new tech works to auto level players to the content…  I am pretty impressed.  I know all of the zones in Legion function in this manner, and that you can start in pretty much any place while leveling through and complete the content in your own order.  It is my ultimate hope that maybe just maybe this tech eventually trickles down to the older zones.  Now the possible negative here is that I still love being able to solo raid content…  so the hope is that maybe they can come up with some version of the “unsynched” style of play that we can do in Final Fantasy XIV.  In any case it was a fun night of swapping alts and then flying across great stretches of the contents trying to reach where the legion invasions were happening.  The two “hot zones” swap out every four hours, and largely right now I am looking at them as a good way of playing catch up on the gear for my characters.  Only one of my characters is in the 700s item level wise, so pretty much everything I pick up from this event is an upgrade.  Right now I am largely focused on getting the Warlock and the Demon Hunter geared out… because I have this feeling that they are rapidly going to become my alts of choice.

Long Time Coming

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Bug Squish

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At the launch of Heavensward we absolutely wrecked us a Sky Whale, but struggled a bit with Ravana.  It was a combination of insane amounts of incoming damage, mixed with the fact that we consistently failed at Final Liberation.  As we all faded away and off into other games, the one big regret many of us had was that we never actually managed to take down a bug.  Last night we finally set that record straight, and defeated Ravana.  In true fashion for our group however, the kill was a complete mess.  In fact I managed to get knocked off right before we finished the fight, because some random roofer was knocking on my door.  In Oklahoma our version of ambulance chasers are fly by night roofers looking to repair “hail damage”, and this guy had an equally questionable name to go with it.  So in my somewhat distracted state I was just a bit too close to one of the attacks that knocks you off the edge.  Ashgar somehow managed to survive alone until we finally pushed him over the edge at the last possible moment.  There is a final final liberation… and we probably killed him as the bar passed the O and was creeping up on the N…  aka seriously the last moment before we all died a horrible death for our hubris.  Of course like is usually the case no axe was dropped… but instead we did manage to pick up a pretty spiffy looking book that reminds me of a strange armored butterfly.

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After downing a bug, we set our sights on Final Coil since a few of our modern assemblage were not with us when we managed to take this down the first time.  We started off with Turn 10… and honestly had to relearn fights as we went.  So much of this happened so long ago… that we maybe partially remembered a mechanic here or there but had largely forgotten the bulk of them.  We outgeared a good deal of the mechanics, but in truth what this really meant is that we could simply chain resurrect players when they died instead of dealing with the proper mechanics.  Ashgar and I attempted to think on our feet and deal with this as best we remembered them…  the primary example of this being the giant metal clad hydra that serves as the boss of Turn 11 who happens to have an attack that will straight up oneshot the current tank if it is not taunted off.  Traditionally we have a firm cut off time of 10pm CST but we went over a little bit.  Tam called our final attempt on Bahamut for the evening, and that happened to be the attempt we pushed across the finish line and got the win.  I am so happy to have been able to come back and take on these fights for the folks who had never seen them.  While I want to keep progressing into content that I have not seen, it is always good to go back and do the stuff we have, just to remember how far we have come.

Legion Lock

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In other news I managed to push across the finish line in a completely different sort of fight.  For whatever reason I have had a fire lit under me to level a bunch of my stragglers up to level 100.  I pushed the Rogue from 92 to 100, Druid from 95 to 100… and then started on my Warlock that happened to be sitting at level 75.  As of last night I managed to nudge him across the line to 100 and even got in a quick LFR before the FFXIV raid.  I was honestly shocked to find out that you could queue for Highmaul LFR at item level 615, and I absolutely did just this.  I am not sure why I am enjoying my warlock so much.  It is just a style of game play that I have never really spent much time doing… and this represents the first “finger wiggler” I have ever legitimately leveled to the current cap.  I’ve had a Priest and Mage temporarily at “cap” but in both of those cases it was a boosted character so it really does not count.  I think part of it as well is that I really want a proper character to start farming transmog items for all of my cloth wearers.  I also want a tailor that I don’t mind grinding cloth on, because the Shadow Priest is absolutely not that character.  Now with the launch of Demon Hunters tonight, I fully expect to be attempting to do that madness…  however in the meantime I am really looking forward to exploring the world with my army of demon buddies.

Starfall Prophecy

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Expansion Teaser

For a little bit now there have been rumors about the impending announcement of Rift 4.0, namely due to some data-mined zone names floating around.  Nightmare Tide and I had a bit of a rocky start and it was only recently that I managed to level through the content and hit the level cap.  Originally I thought that this expansion might be based on the Plane of Fire, given a few of the leaked zone names.  However it seems like this expansion ties directly into the last raid of Nightmare Tides the Comet of Ahnket.  Based on the teaser information on the Starfall Prophecy promotion page, it seems as though the Comet Ahnket has been picking up bits and pieces of the planes as it hurdles towards Telara, and as a result this inhabitable world has been created that we now need to go to in order to find a way to stop it.  This combined with some of the artwork shown on the site makes it seem like this expansion will be an amalgam of elements, or at least Life and Fire.

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I have to say some of the new assets that are seen on the site are really damned cool.  Prime example is that I have zero clue what sort of machine this thing is, other than it seems to be themed with a similar face to the Comet of Ahnket content.  It looks amazing and I will be more than happy to fight it, and I am hoping that this is some sort of zone event boss.  Mostly it seems like this expansion is going to be a huge world with lots and places to explore.  I think one of my big issues with Nightmare Tide is that in the grand scheme of things… the color palette was extremely difficult to get used to.  It isn’t nature to see a landscape of violent purples and oranges everywhere, and trying to read that as something to roam around in.  While places like Goboro Reef eventually grew on me with time, it was a long adjustment period.  This on the other hand seems more familiar, like the same sort of zone treatment we saw in Storm Legion, but this time instead for a much more fire influenced setting rather than death.  Between now and launch however I either need to actually find a group to do Comet of Ahnket raid, or watch a play-through so I can soak up some of the information about what is happening there.  One of the things I love about Rift raids is that they are so full of story, that plays out around you as you move through it.  Unfortunately there is not a “Chronicle of Ahnket” or Intrepid Adventure for it… so that means I will actually have to try and find a pick up group to see the story-line.

New Features

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On the promotion website it lists a whole slew of stuff under the title of “Claim the Power of Ahnket”, and some of them are pretty interesting sounding.

  • Increased Level Cap: 70
  • Legendary Powers
  • New Zones
  • New Dungeons
  • New Raid
  • Planar Assault Adventures
  • Fortress Sieges
  • Looking For Raid
  • Individual Reward System
  • Active Upgrades
  • Eternal Item Rarity
  • Planar Fragments

 

These all sound interesting, but we don’t really have a ton of information to go on yet.  It is my hope that between now and the expansion release, they start showing off various features of the expansion during the Friday streams.  Unfortunately I have other plans today, and the time shift means that it is happening while I will be in the middle of a family dinner.  However I am fully expecting this weeks stream to be epic, showcasing a lot of new features but in limited detail.  Of the above list the two that stand out the most are “Looking For Raid” and “Individual Reward System”.  Now these have caused drama in games that implemented them, but I have to say after having lived with them for awhile…  I’ve become a fan.  There was a time when I was strictly against the whole content of LFR, and probably said some things against it.  That was also a version of me that had a dedicated raid team, and access to the best gear said raiding could provide.  The current version of me however just wants to experience the content and play all of these various games that I want to play.  For example in Rift I don’t really have a large group of friends who happen to be playing the game, or at the very least not in the density that I have elsewhere.  As a result it is extremely hard for me to figure out how to get anything started, and I would absolutely lean on LFR like a crutch the same way I do currently on the Intrepid Adventure system.  Because of this.. the Individual Reward system only makes sense, that way you are not trying to roll against other players but are instead getting your own personalized loot.

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The other things on that list that really interest me are Planar Assault Adventures and Fortress Sieges.  The Planar Assault Adventures sounds like absolutely something that would be down my alley, and I am hoping these are somewhat like chronicles in that they can be completed solo or with a group either one.  I mean I know nothing about it other than the name, but they give me ideas about leading a strike team of NPCs into various planar tears to complete objectives and get back out.  Hopefully the reality is even half as cool as my imagined version  sounds.  Fortress Sieges on the other hand seem like they might be able to go one of two ways.  If they are a PVE siege of a fortified position held by Planar forces, essentially a Planar Stronghold taken to the next level… then they sound completely amazing.  The other direction I could see something named like that going is some sort of open world pvp objective, and that is the point where they would lose me.  I have enjoyed world objective pvp in the past, but generally speaking when a game does this… it almost always degrades into deathmatching and ganking rather than focusing on objectives.  Essentially right now I know next to nothing other than a bunch of names, but regardless I am extremely excited about the prospects of what this expansion might bring.  As you can see from the above image.. I have already proudly put in my pre-order and am now riding around on my very awesome drake mount.