MMORPG Archives - Page 210 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Petulence

August 4, 2016 by Belghast

World Go Boom

For the last several nights there has apparently been a shit storm happening on the Blizzard network, or more likely the networks they use as a backhaul. The frustrating thing about a DDoS attack is that at least on some level, if it is a large enough one there isn’t a whole lot you can do other than triage. Most successful attacks don’t actually target the servers of company, but instead the connections just upstream of the data center. If you can somehow manage to get that provider to start blocking the ip ranges that are attacking you… and most of the time they are not nice clean IP ranges, but instead random rootkit/malware infected bot machines… the attack often times moves upstream again making the effect inconvenience even more companies. The real problem in this whole situation is that bot networks are dirt cheap to use, because virus infections of all those folks who only use the internet for “the facebooks” are prevalent. The rumor has it that this particular bot attack is spawned by some of the players who were recently banned from Overwatch for hacks and cheats. Now as is shockingly commonly the way among spoiled internet brats, they are throwing a massive tantrum in the form of an attack directed at Blizzard and their customers.

Now for the most part the last couple of nights have been chill for me personally. It seemed as though initially so long as you were not running raid content and as a result switching server clusters… you really didn’t encounter much issue. I for example happily leveled my way through Pandaria, and it was not until about 8pm last night that I started to encounter issues. I have to admit it was a little nostalgic seeing the “World Server is Down” message, because it had been so long since that was a regular occurrence on the Argent Dawn server. Because we were the first Role-playing server sorted alphabetically in the list, we became the target of a lot of protests and down right petulance from players simply wanting to wreck our fun time. More often than not it was spawned by a similar set of spoiled internet brats, namely in the form of players on the PVP server Blackrock. Any time their server would go down they would come over and flood our server with level 1 Gnomes “protesting” and as a result bringing our server down as well. Those same players would likely be the type that are currently DDoSing the network, but back then that sort of attack was not really possible. I am sure there were plenty of otherwise good people who got swept up in the madness, just like what happened during the “warrior protests” that also targeted our server. However the bulk were likely simply lashing out at the “lol arpee” server because we made an easy target.

Storming Draenor

The servers however eventually recovered and as a result I was able to say goodbye to Pandaria and move on towards Draenor. I spent a silly amount of gold last night upgrading all of the caster heirlooms I have to level 100, so that I could use them on my Warlock, Mage and Priest… all of which have yet to push through to level 100. It seemed like gold well spent given that I would likely be playing all of them shortly. In the grand scheme of things, percentage wise it was not that big of a hit to the total amount of cash that I had laying around. Additionally questing through the Draenor content is going to make back a good chunk of it given that I will be selling my gear instead of wearing it. If I find myself desperate for money there are lots of characters that I have not touched tons of quest content on. In any case I picked up Grimoire of Supremacy that lets me swap my Felguard for a permanent Infernal which seems pretty awesome. I think running around with an infernal is the ultimate player fantasy for a lot of folks that end up going Demonology, and I remember how much fun it was when I helped my friends complete that quest in Felwood to get their first. The only negative is… that it seems to have removed my ability to summon these various demons as their short term “fire totem” like variety that was a decent dps boost. I have a feeling that while fun for running around, that I might eventually swap back to using one of the other talents. I managed to stay awake long enough to get through the Tanaan Jungle intro quest, and am now in the process of setting up my garrison. I am hoping that tonight I can make a serious dent in the leveling process, and maybe move into Gorgrond. Mostly I am making the big push, because I know that Friday night will begin another Diablo 3 season, and I will begin switching time with that game.

Rubber Band Thief

August 3, 2016 by Belghast

A Game of Fetch

This is Kenzie and she is a mess. I am not sure how else to describe her, because she is unlike any other cat we have shared a home with. She can be the biggest butt ever, and a bit of a bully to the other cats… but she can also be the sweetest and most adorable animal you have ever seen. She sort of vacillates between being an angel and a devil sometimes within the same moment. She likes to help with the laundry… and as you can see here sometimes crawl under the upturned laundry basket. She also gets super obsessive about certain things… for example I really like Red Velvet Muffins from QuikTrip… and apparently so does she. I can wrap up one of the muffin wrappers in several layers and she will go spelunking through the trash can in search of it. When she finally gets it… it is not like she eats it but more certainly rips it to shreds. Another similar obsession is twist ties and rubber bands. We go to the cleaners fairly often and for whatever reason they like to rubber band together sets of wire hangers. I am not sure exactly when it happened but Kenzie started stealing these rubber bands from the closet and running off with them. In fact our living room and bedroom are filled with little caches of rubber bands that she mysteriously “loses” and can then summon up at pretty much any moment when she wants one. I have a feeling if we ever moved out the couch there would be a sea of rubber bands and twist ties laying back there waiting to be rediscovered.

Over time this obsession started to morph and I am not completely sure when it started. Instead of just playing with the rubber band she started returning back to wherever we were at and dropping it next to us. When she first did this I decided to go ahead and toss it away again and see what she would do, and from there… a new game was born. We have a cat that plays fetch, in the truest sense of the word. She will bring us something… and want us to toss it… and then she brings it back and we do this over and over until she gets tired of it. When that happens one of two things will happen… either she will “lose it” and by lose I mean know exactly where it is at all times but decide to stop returning it. Either that or she will just lay down beside me ON the object and want attention. This second cessation of fetch generally means that she just wants a break and will resume fetch in a little bit when she starts nudging the object again. So as a result the highlight of my evening was more or less spending an hour and some change playing fetch with Kenzie, quite possibly the longest running game yet. It was extremely important because my wife was in the bedroom with the doors shut off attempting to bond with Luna, someone I have not really introduced you to yet. As a result I am trying to be elsewhere so that both Kenzie and Allie have a stable and friendly source of attention, and as a result while I tired of the fetch thing about thirty minutes into it… and while my reaction time slowed significantly as I tried to level my Warlock… I kept at it because I knew Kenzie needed someone constantly paying attention to her.

Pandaria Is Maddening

As far as the gaming I was doing while playing fetch … I continued to push my Dwarf Warlock up through the levels. At this point I am sitting at 88 and somewhere in the Townlong Steppes quest chain. I said that Pandaria was maddening and that is mostly because we are in this awkward transitional period of time… where you cannot actually purchase the flight book off the black market auction house. That means you can level an alt and have it fly happily from level 60 until 85… then have this awkward block of 85-90 where you cannot fly, and pick up once again in the 90-100 content. This is a prime example of one of my complaints with World of Warcraft content, in that often times they seem not to take into account the ramifications of changes. Removing the Black Market Auction House until legion… also probably unintentionally blocked players from being able to purchase the level 85 book for flying. The easy fix would have been to simply change the level you can purchase Pandaria Flight from the trainer in the Shrine to 85, and do away with the book. However instead I am stuck in this limbo as I try to level a new army of alts to the current level cap of 100. I realize that I could always purchase boosts to 100 and be done with it… but even though I am taking every shortcut possible, I still enjoy the act of leveling and questing. The mob density in Pandaria just makes that whole process a bit of a slog.

The one thing I am super thankful of however is that while each individual zone is a fairly linear process… they have added quests that unlock zones rather than having to quest your way through one to get to the next. That way when you ding a level you can check the Adventure Guide to get the quest to move on to the next area. This admittedly really speeds up the leveling process, and while I once had this ideal path through Pandaria that mostly still works… it is sped up by no longer needing to clear to a specific quest to unlock the next area. My next big decision however is what to do when I ding 90, and if I want to spend the gold to upgrade my caster heirlooms from 90 to 100. I am highly considering it given that I have two more cloth wearers that have yet to hit 100, so it is not like they won’t see a lot of use in the coming months. Essentially where I am standing on the whole leveling game is that I have my Priest, Mage and Monk that will be sub 100 now that I am zeroing in on getting that Warlock up there. At some point once I get some gear at level 100 I will probably take a lengthy break to finish farming up the remaining cloth that I need to push my tailoring up to a reasonable place for Legion. As to why I am suddenly motivated to play all of these alts… I guess in theory it is because I am constantly seeing new appearance items and creating a stable of appearance farmers for the various armor types. Prior to the Warlock I did not really have a cloth wearer that I enjoyed playing… and as a result don’t have much in the way of cloth appearance gear. After all… the true end game is looking awesome.

Revising Memory

July 29, 2016 by Belghast

Of Pedestals

Wow-64 2016-07-29 06-16-01-25

For quite a while I have held the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft on a bit of a pedestal. That was the last time I was truly and completely devoted to the game, and is the point where I for better or worse thought the game took a sharp detour. It was shortly after the launch of the next expansion Cataclysm that I began this on again off again tourism with the game. So this year when the talk of “Vanilla” servers came up, I thought to myself that I had no desire to ever return to the launch of the game… but Wrath of the Lich King most definitely. It felt like the right mix of progress and promise wrapped up into an extremely playable package with awesome lore events and truly phenomenal raids. Sure there was the shit storm that was the Crusaders Colosseum, but for the time being we are going to forget that was even a thing. Yes I realized that it served a key story arc, but as a raid goes it was thoroughly disappointing after Ulduar. I can also remember really enjoying the questing in Wrath of the Lich King and some of those zones are ones that I still count among my favorite in the game. That was until I recently returned while leveling my Warlock. In part the distinction was made clear after recently leveling both my Rogue and Druid to 100 in the Warlords of Draenor quest content, then dropping down to my level 75 Warlock and attempting to push him up into the Cataclysm zones.

The key problem I noticed was the fact that content rarely synchronized terribly well. In the later expansions, you are allowed to collect a whole series of quests for a specific area and then do a whole bunch of different things there before returning to the quest hub to move to the next area. That simply doesn’t work in practice in Wrath of the Lich King, and I found myself constantly reaching the same point at different times, with the absolute worst of it involving sending me back to the same Harpy filled ravine in Storm Peaks each time after something slightly different. If that was the exception and not the rule life would have been golden, but zone after zone I found myself staggered just enough in my questing to be annoying and greatly drag out the leveling process with a ton of movement from one edge of the zone to the next. This of course was exacerbated by the fact that my Warlock only has slow flight, which makes traversing the bigger areas extremely painful. That said I remember definitely having to do all of these zones before flight, which only would have made them that much worse. I tried doing my stair step approach to the content, and found that not entirely working as intended… namely because there is no hero’s call quest that leads into Icecrown. At 79 I finally decided to pop over and see if I could start the quests, and sure enough I was able to finish up there and ding within fairly short order. The quest sequence inside of Icecrown is probably the best I experienced in my abbreviated push through Northrend.

Evolutions Were Made

So regardless of what I have said about Wrath of the Lich King in the past, I have to admit that significant upgrades have been made to the way we level characters. I mean I knew that The Burning Crusade quests were frustrating and slow, but even then there seemed to be a lot more batching up of related tasks than I experienced during the several zones in Northrend. Ultimately my big complaint with the more recent expansions has not been the leveling content, in fact I think questing through Pandaria and Warlords to be some of the most fun I generally have on a character. Even Cataclysm from what I remember was pretty fun, with the only real problem there being that each zone is an entirely linear experience and if you lose the quest chain somewhere you are simply dead in the water. I am sure as I level with my demons through the Cata zones I will find the same frustrations there that I found with Wrath, just in different ways. The little bit I have played of Legion feels like they have once again made a leap forward in the way the flow of questing feels, and I am sure at some point I will be complaining about all of the past content when I level my next batch of alts. When you spend a good deal of your time playing alts, the way the quests fit together really matters, and in games like Final Fantasy XIV where I don’t have quests to level alternate jobs… I miss it greatly.

We tend to lock things in our mind, that are colored by feelings and emotions that were happening at the time. In many ways the Wrath era had some of the most turmoil in my life in dealing with a job that I hated, and a downward spiral of events brought on by deaths and other traumatic events. However I will always think fondly upon that time because of the stability that my guild and raid team provided me during that time. They were always there and always supportive even when I decided I wanted to stop leading anything. It is because of all of this that Wrath was this shining moment for me in a long list of World of Warcraft experiences. However that sequence of events is nothing I would ever want to relive, and it is impossible to try and piece that era back together. In many ways my fondness for Wrath of the Lich King is no different than a parent trying to relive their own high school sports glory days through forcing their kids to make the same decisions they did. I need to come to the realization that there is no going back, and we can only keep moving forward and adapting to the changes as they happen. I still completely reserve the right to disagree with the direction various games are being taken in, but ultimately my only choice is whether or not I play. I can’t claw back change, and somehow bring things back to a state that I remember so fondly. My recent trip through Northrend has made me realize that even if I could… I wouldn’t actually enjoy the results.

Peak Pokemon

July 28, 2016 by Belghast

Nothing but Zubats

AWildZubat

There are several news outlets reporting that Pokemon Go has reached its peak and is now starting to trend downwards. This is zero surprising to me, simply because it would be hard for any game to reach this level of viral saturation… and then somehow manage to sustain it. There are a lot of factors at play here, not the least of which is our apparent short attention span when it comes to internet fueled phenomena. That said I personally am still playing it quite regularly, but with a lot less of the reckless abandon. On my drive into work every morning there are still a couple of parking lots I pop by and check that have given me good finds in the past. However I am largely not doing the evening walking thing, because we have had a streak of 100 degree days with some silly humidity going on. Whenever I stop anywhere however I still habitually whip out the phone to check if there is anything interesting around. I’ve made several trips to local hot spots in a constant search of something new. The game however has a lot of problems standing in front of it, and I believe that they more than anything are what is standing in the way of player retention. The truth be told, I feel like we are at a point of being rolled out to every market that really makes a difference, and that was probably never the intention… or at least not this soon. However the social pressure of players wanting to play desperately, and being willing to find other ways to do so… meant that if they did not push to other territories that they were ultimately losing their shot at that income stream.

The biggest problem with this game is that the experience is not equitable. I count myself lucky that I work in a town of 500,000 and live in a metro area of roughly 1 million. That said other than a dozen “hot spots”, Tulsa seems to be a wasteland of Pidgey, Rattata, Weedle and oh so many Zubats. When you get out to the suburbs where I live, even those seem to be few and far between that when I go on a walk I am catching them more out of a sense of boredom than any desire to actually waste the pokeballs on them. Similarly I get excited when I see the next tier of “mostly trash” Pokemon in the form of the Doduo, Caterprie, Venonat, and Spearow because it breaks up the monotony of an ocean of Pidgey candy. I said that I count myself lucky, because as miserable as it is to go a week without seeing anything interesting… I am still sitting just shy of level 20 with 76 Pokemon caught and 77 seen. Thusfar “the one that got away” was a Dratini that I lost due to the once super common “pokeball lock up”, where the screen would freeze on catch and you had either caught the Pokemon or not, but had no real second chance because you would have to restart the app to get control again. The folks that are in really dire straights are those who are unlucky enough to live in rural areas. I know when I have traveled to various small towns here in Oklahoma I have seen nothing but the regular assortment of random trash Pokemon, even surrounding Pokestops.

Servers On Fire

Another huge problem up until this point is that the servers have been anything but reliable. Another way that I am extremely lucky is that I have a wife who is super understanding about my desire to go hunting invisible creatures. She has suggested multiple times that we take road trips to check out other areas and see if maybe I can get far enough out of our zone to find something new and interesting. The problem there is that until this week you never really could rely on the servers actually being up at any given moment. It is impossible to tell the difference between what is just the servers on fire from usage, and what is Niantic actually performing maintenance. The reason being that the company behind this game seems to think the best policy is zero communication with their customers about basic up time information. So the one time a few weeks back when we actually decided to take a road trip, the servers looked fine when we left our house. Then by the time we actually reached our destination I could not catch anything without getting a string of constant application lockups due to the servers not responding. I went to a park that I thought would be loaded with Pokemon, and ultimately it was… however after trying to catch four things and getting four pokeball lockups, I gave up and headed home frustrated.

Now when I say that the experience is not equitable, I think it is worth mentioning the experience that the faction of AggroChat is having up in Seattle. They seem to have a cavalcade of hot and cold running Pokemon all of the time. Tam apparently lives across from some park that is an absolute hot bed of activity in the evening, and while we have those here they are nowhere near my house, and would be horribly awkward to drive to at 9/10 pm at night. Here in Tulsa there is a reddit that keeps tabs on what folks have seen and caught… and I know in Seattle they seem to be regularly catching things that we have never seen. So ultimately I feel like they need to tweak the base population to be a little more fair, and a lot less based on cellular activity which was the case with Ingress. I am sure this game is a phenomenal experience in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Chicago… but significantly less for those of us stuck in smaller population centers. So if we have reached “Peak Pokemon”, I feel like a good chunk of it comes from the frustration of wanting to play… and when you finally can keep connected to the servers, the only thing you see are the same critters you see everywhere. My kingdom for a Vulpix or I would quite literally wet myself if I probably saw a Pikachu or a Charmander.

Still Playing

All of this said… I am still very much interested in this game. The part of Pokemon that I enjoy the most is roaming around and catching new things, and for the most part this app lets me do ONLY that. However at some point I am going to get bored with the assortment of common and slightly less common Pokemon that I can regularly find here. I caught a Machoke on Monday, and that had been the first new wild Pokemon I had seen in over two weeks. Most of the new finds I am getting, are through sheer brute force evolution of less common critters. For example I got an Arbok yesterday, by finally getting enough candy to evolve and Ekans. While in part I am happy to tick off another checkbox in the Pokedex… I would have far rather seen an Arbok in the wild, or a Seaking, or a Gloom… or the countless other evolutions I have finally gotten enough candy to do. I am admittedly jealous of the folks who live in active enough areas to see that sort of stuff in the wild, without actually resorting to making Pokemon Go into a lifestyle. Sure there are folks that have been hanging out at the handful of hot spots every single night here in Tulsa, and I am certain they have seen some pretty awesome stuff. However what I am looking for is a game that I can play in the times between going and doing other things, and for the most part this game fits that bill awesomely. I am just hoping that at some point they give me something more interesting to see than another Rattata. Right now my app is telling me that I have caught 660 Pokemon, and quite literally I figure at least 300 of those have been Zubats. Largely I am just hoping at some point the game changes in a way that makes me still have hope that I will find something interesting in the wild. That is a huge part of what has nerfed my nightly walks is knowing that a trip around the neighborhood is maybe going to get me a couple Pidgeys, a Rattata and if I am super lucky an Eevee. I am curious what your own experiences have been? Are you having much luck “catching them all”?