Star Wars: The Old Republic Archives - Page 10 of 16

Section X

September 11, 2015 by Belghast

Life With a Teacher

It feels like I don’t have a whole lot worth talking about this morning. My evening was rather fragmented, in that I got home fairly early and then spent the next couple of hours trying to pass the time while waiting on my wife to get home. We had tentatively made plans to go out to dinner, and on a normal evening I would have fixed something and been engaged in a game by the time she got home. This school year has been rather rough for her, and she is spending silly amounts of time up at school grading and planning. It gets annoying at times because it is super hard to plan my life around her ever changing schedule, but I manage. There are certain aspects of being a teachers husband… that no one will ever really understand fully. We ended up going to a BBQ place near the Walmart Neighborhood Market, because my thought was after dinner we would walk over to the market really quick and pick up a few things. This seemed like a simple in and out trip, and we could get on our merry way homewards.

Fate stacked against us, and of all of the places to have “back to school clearance” I did not expect a Walmart Neighborhood market. For those who do not have these in their area, they are essentially a grocery store only Walmart, but have some minimal other items. As we were rounding the bend past frozen foods I saw that they had a kiosk of back to school stuff. I didn’t think anything about it, but next thing I knew we were sorting through all of the folders trying to pick out nine of each color from a mixed up bin of them. I cannot count the number of times I have had an experience similar to this one. There really wasn’t much space so my wife did most of the sifting through the folders but in the past I have had my hands knee deep in vats of assorted merchandise looking for that one item that matches the rest of the things we had pulled out. Part of being a teacher is trying to find all of the things you need for your classroom as cheaply as humanly possible, and while I am fairly used to it… it just surprises me sometimes when I am not expecting it. After all of the bin sorting… we got home a little later than I had expected.

Section X

When I finally got settled in for the night, I made a blanket cocoon on the couch and booted up Star Wars the Old Republic. I am now on this kick of trying to get through all of the story line that I have missed before the release of Fallen Empire. For this I am going to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Disney. You cannot go anywhere right now without being deluged in Force Awakens merchandise, and with it comes an upwelling of all of the other movies that I am really damned nostalgic about as well. I have these designs on making a Marathon of the movies this weekend while working on the SWTOR content. It has been a really long time since I have watched the prequels, so I am honestly hoping I can bury the hatchet that I hold towards them. The prequels broke me, and came damned close to breaking my love of Star Wars as a whole. So when I heard about Force Awakens I was mildly interested, but now I feel like I am full on in the thrall of overwhelming feels towards the franchise I grew up with. I even went so far as to order the Disney Infinity 3.0 Saga Edition… because it was on sale and two I had enough saved up discover credit to get it essentially for free.

I have to say playing this game again… and seeing fresh content in it… reminds me of why we were so damned addicted to it for a couple of month period after launch. The story content is really good, and even though Makeb does not actually feature any “class specific” content I am absolutely enjoying myself. I did however take a break from Makeb last night to start working on the Section X content. I guess I played long enough to get that area unlocked for free, and with it should give me access to my very own HK-47 droid. From what I hear it is a rather lengthy quest and involves collecting bits on several different characters, including a Sith. Mainly I was told that if I cared about story progression, that I should go ahead and do that now before getting too deep in the new content. As you can see from my previous pictures I went back to the Jedi Knight robes as seen on the box art. I have to say I dig the Holowardrobe because it is way cheaper to change your appearance using it than re-modding your gear. There are a few of us currently going through this Star Wars nostalgia attack, which makes me feel kinda sad each time I interact with the person who held down the fort while we have been gone. I know that I am just here doing some MMO tourism… and as soon as I am done with the story content I will be gone once more. Even though I have not been playing a lot of it… Final Fantasy XIV is still my home base of operations.

Breakup on Reentry

September 10, 2015 by Belghast

Returning Players

If you have followed me for any length of time you realize I play an awful lot of games. One of those traits also involves going back and re-exploring games that I have long consigned to the dust bin. One of the challenges with this lifestyle however is trying to figure out what the hell you were doing some six months ago when you last touched a game. This morning I want to talk about a problem that most games have. As content is released there is often times no real thought about the folks that will come back to the game several patches behind. While there is generally one game that I stay up to date with, and that game currently is Final Fantasy XIV… the others sit in various states of completion with no real easy route back to where I last left off. What ends up happening generally is that I start a brand new character, because it is simply easier to start fresh than try and sort out the options open to a formerly “level capped” character. As a programmer it seems like it would be easy to create some sort of new features tool that lead you to what has been recently added to the game. Various games have attempted this, and honestly Final Fantasy XIV has one of the better versions of this technology… but it could still use a lot of work.

World of Warcraft has these quest boards in main cities that are supposed to lead you to the starting quests of new areas. The problem being that you level so damned fast in that game that you always are well ahead of the quest completion curve. The worst offender however has to be The Secret World. In that game every single quest is essentially repeatable, so even if you are up to date… it can be a challenge to sort out what quests are new in a given region. The last quest content I completed was the “Last Train to Cairo” from Issue 6, and even then I think I missed most of Issue 5 because I didn’t quite know where to start to find it. Now we are sitting at Issue 12 and I know I have a ton of awesome content waiting on me. As each has been released I have popped in to spend some of the lifetime membership currency that I gain each month. The problem being… without significant research on my part I have no real idea where to start to even begin trying to sort these out. I spend most of my free time consuming MMO content… and if this bothers me… it has to be an impassible wall to more casually interested players.

Content Advisement

With the launch of Cataclysm, the World of Warcraft attempted to solve this problem by creating a series of billboards spread throughout the major cities that are designed to give you the start of a quest chain leading into new zones. The problem there is that you level too damned fast, and I constantly had a back log of these quests telling me to go to various zones that were less than optimal for my questing experience. While I applaud their efforts… I think all of these MMOs need to do a much better job at giving players advisement as to what they should be doing. What I envision is an optional box that says what zone you should be in based on your level and or gear, and provide a series of quest suggestions that you never completed. If there is a holiday going on, it should prioritize this and if you are at the level cap it should guide you to the next patch worth of content that you had not experienced. This would go a long way in making returning players feel welcome and relevant in the game experience. Considering I have done this dozens of times… I can tell you that returning to an MMO that you tucked neatly away into your past… is a completely overwhelming experience.

Firstly you have to sort out your bags, because I have not left a single MMO in a state where I did not have hundreds of items in my inventory with no memory of what was actually useful and what was simply dross that I picked up while killing things. Next you have to sort out your quest log, which also is never really left in a neat state. If you are the level cap you generally have a mixture of quests that you never completed and quests from whatever happens to be the current “daily” hub. Upon returning generally speaking neither of these is much use, but at the same time I find it just as hard to sort through my quest log as it was to sort through my bags. What I really want is some intelligence guiding my decisions. Present me with options of things that players in my level range are normally doing. Help me get back into your game, and set down roots again. It honestly shocks me that no game company seems to have thought this one through. There are a fixed number of new players out there, so many times established games are just trading their populations over time. Anything a game can do to make it more “sticky” for returning players has to ultimately help the bottom line.

Breakup on Reentry

Like I said Final Fantasy XIV does a decent job at this, but their own advisement window is greatly limited based on several factors. The biggest is that most of the items in the list are limited to the zone you are currently in. In the case of a returning player, they may or may not know what zone they should even be in. For years I have been trying to play Star Wars the Old Republic again. The problem being that I always end up playing on an alt character because it is simply too confusing to try and sort out what I should be doing on any of my three previously max level characters. My original instinct has always been to go to the space station hub for my faction. Problem there is that there were no sign of new quests. I have repeated this process dozens of times, until last night it finally dawned on me that I should maybe return to my starship. Sure enough waiting there for me was a quest chain starter leading me to Makeb. The problem being… that since it took me two years to finally find this quest it was anything but obvious, which tells me there is a problem with the way the systems are working.

What got me on this topic was yesterday some friends and I were listing off “must have” features for an MMO. Which got me thinking… that this is the one feature that no MMO really does a decent job of. Please someone out there… put some thought into the experience of returning players. The answer is not to ignore all of the content that came before. The answer is to help players go back and experience the things that they missed. As a result some sort of intelligent system is well worth the time it takes to build. All we are really talking is a handful of database queries based on a few parameters, and then returning the relevant items to a window. This would go so far into making returning players feel like they matter and are welcome in the game. I cannot count the number of games that I have reinstalled… only to leave after a single night of trying to sort out what it was that I was doing when I last played. In each case I “wanted” to play the game, but the game required more out of me than I was willing to give it. When this situation happens all I really needed was a breadcrumb to lead me to what I should be focusing on. On the positive side I did finally start the post release content in Star Wars the Old Republic, which is a thing I have been passively trying to do since the free to play conversion. I would really like to see where that story goes before the launch of Fallen Empire.

Games I’m Not Playing

July 17, 2015 by Belghast

Too Many Games

Right now I am suffering from a problem, in that there are just too many games that I want to be playing and simply not enough time in any combination of lifetimes to actually play them. Last night I downloaded and installed Skyforge, and gave it a quick spin this morning… and as interesting as it seems I just don’t know when exactly I am going to fit it in. For the first time in years I have been relatively monogamistic in my gaming, and with the dropping of World of Warcraft I pretty much have all of my focus on Final Fantasy XIV. Last night I ran dungeons with the guild and after doing my hunts managed to push my Dragoon to 56. As a result the desire to get that job to 60 is real, because I desperately want to be able to fill more than one roll when it comes to grouping.

By the same token I really would like to give some time to Skyforge so that I can give it a shot for free, before plunking down any money on it. I watched a bit of the MMO Show stream the other day as Jabberant played the game and I have to admit it peaked my interests. Playing this morning it feels like a better version of Neverwinter, because the janky control scheme of that game was always a major detractor. So now I get to juggle competing desires and figure out how to spend my weekend. So this morning I thought I would write about the games that I am wanting to play but just can’t seem to find adequate time to devote to them.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I have this strong desire to go back and experience the storyline that I have not yet. Essentially I have not really played my main in this game, a Jedi Guardian… since launch. Each time I go back I always end up playing alts because I am finding it really hard to get back into the swing of playing a level 50 character. I know there have been numerous expansions since launch, each with their own storyline content… and I am struggling to get back into the swing of doing it. Instead I mostly spend time playing my Light Side Sith Warrior, who has been stuck in the hell hole of Balmorra for at least two years. So one of my gaming regrets is that I have not figured out how to make progress on my main and see the Makeb and beyond storyline. Additionally I have this nasty habit of paying for a month, and then playing one day and never returning to it. I’ve gone through this sequence at least a half dozen times since we left this game. The draw of Final Fantasy XIV is always too strong to keep me playing there for long.

Wildstar

On my second attempt at playing this game I reached a point where I really was enjoying what I was doing. In fact there was a stretch prior to the launch of Heavensward where I was playing this one more than just about any other game. I have an awesome group of friends in this game and I love the Black Dagger Society guild that I am in. I had a blast roaming around the zones and taking down world bosses with them on a few occasions. For whatever reason however I am just not logging in right now. Once again the draw of Final Fantasy XIV is too strong, and maybe I just love our guild there too much. This is on the list of games I absolutely want to keep returning to, but I doubt I will until a bit more of the shiny has warn off from Heavensward. Right now I am in this push to reach a point where I have multiple useful jobs to help people with, and I think until I get there I won’t be happy playing much else.

The Secret World

I am woefully behind in my Secret World content, because the last update I think I played was the whole “Last Train to Cairo” sequence. I know there have been multiple updates since then but I am just not logging in and playing them. There are problems I have with this game that preclude me from really digging into the end game content. However I have loved all of the story mission content that I have played and I keep meaning to poke my head in and do them. I’m a life time subscriber, and I should have tons of goodies waiting on me… but generally speaking what happens is I log in and buy a nifty new outfit… then log right back out. Of all of my gaming regrets this is one of the strongest because I really would like to find a way to play this game in addition to whatever game I am “maining”.

ArcheAge

Just prior to the launch of Heavensward there were several of us on the AggroChat cast that had a brief love affair with this game. I want to find a way to return to playing this game on a regular basis because I don’t feel like I have consumed all of the good that I can get from it. This is the game that I was told once I reached level 30 I would be in forced pvp areas. While we are playing on Tahyang the supposed roleplaying server, I am 38 and have yet to encounter even another enemy player. There is a lot of great PVE content in this game, and we found the dungeons to be among some of the rougher we had experienced since say Dark Age of Camelot. I’ve logged in a few times since the launch of Heavensward, but never for terribly long because I keep feeling like I really should be in FFXIV gearing or helping other people gear. I still have things I want to do here, so I need to figure out a way to play it as well.

Skyforge

I talked about this as the start of the blog post, but I really do want to spend some time getting to know this game. At face value it didn’t seem like it was going to be anything I would be interested in. However after playing a brief few minutes this morning I think I might dig it. It is action combat that still feels like an MMO. Honestly I put Neverwinter in that same category, however there the combat just felt forced and janky. The proof will be in the pudding as to how the Paladin feels once I progress it a bit further. I admit the whole “switch roles at any time” thing is a huge draw for me, after getting used to that in Final Fantasy XIV. I doubt this would ever be a primary MMO for me, but it might be a fun weekend diversion. Ultimately I keep looking for a solid secondary game to have the duality that I did with Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I have yet to find the game that seems like the perfect match, but who knows this might be it.

Elder Scrolls Online

The game that I least understand why I am not playing it… is The Elder Scrolls Online. Everything about this game should be squarely in my wheelhouse considering the number of hours that I have spent playing games in the Elder Scrolls universe. I have access to it both on PC and on PS4, and I had this idea that the console client would somehow revitalize my interest in the game. The problem is… it hasn’t at all. I feel like the problem I have with this game is that even though I have people moving around me… I feel like I am ultimately alone. The other players are just a backdrop in part because I never see their names. I think in part I am experiencing Beta regret, because after testing this game for a year there are previous incarnations of the game UI that I just enjoyed more. If I could go back and play THOSE incarnations… I would probably be enjoying myself still. When names over the top of mobs went away… the world felt like it shrunk for me, and the game became more or less a single player experience. I still would love to find a way to make this game that at one point I was so devoted to still feel enjoyable, but I just have not found it.

Merry Sith-ness

May 30, 2015 by Belghast

Last Man on Hulu

Last night I had one of those nights where I was just restless without good reason for being so. Every activity I considered doing simultaneously sounded awesome and horrible at the same time. So while I finished my push to 21 in each of my Final Fantasy XIV crafting professions, I didn’t really accomplished much of use the rest of the evening. I spent a good chunk of my crafting time test driving Hulu and watching the tv show Last Man on Earth. My assessment of both is rather mixed. Firstly having never experienced Hulu my very first impression was precisely “what the fuck is with all these advertisements”. I finally found a blurb on the Hulu website explaining why they have ads which comes down to a bullshit answer of needing to reduce the cost of the subscription. How about this, how about you charge an “extra-premium” tier subscription that turns off all of that crap and just lets me watch the shows.

Right now my likelihood of actually staying subscribed to Hulu past the free trial is pretty non-existent for this reason. To make matters worse it is like watching Cable “On Demand” where they play essentially the same four commercials over and over. At this point I seriously want to burn down the honey bunches of oats factory that is shown on the Post cereal commercial that they kept playing over and over and over. After having that drilled into my brain all night long while watching an already sub par television show has made me want to vehemently avoid anything products by Post while roaming around the super market. I feel like that is counter intuitive to their original mission with the advertisement in the first place. As far as Last Man on Earth… the first episode was humorous, but then once Kristin Schaal showed up it progressively went down hill. Which is sad because normally speaking I adore Kristin Schaal, I still find this skit one of the most hilarious things on the planet. The problem with both Netflix and Hulu is the shows just keep playing without manual intervention… so I think I ultimately watched one too many episodes before finally deciding I had enough of it and stopped it.

Merry Sith-ness

Around 10 pm last night I opted to try and go to sleep, thinking maybe my malaise was simply caused by being tired. The problem being the moment my head hit the pillow it is like a flip got switched in my brain and I was instantly in “super awake” mode. I tossed and turned trying to figure out a way to get comfortable, and chatted with my wife until she fell asleep. After an hour of struggling to find sleep I opted to simply get up. Thinking that if I could go do something my brain would eventually shut the hell up and let me go to sleep. I’ve suffered from bouts of insomnia my entire life, and sometimes the worst thing I can do is try and force myself to sleep. Otherwise I will have sat there in bed for three hours and ultimately just end up frustrated that I didn’t get up and do something with that time. I am not entirely certain why I ended up launching Star Wars the Old Republic other than I have really not played much of it, and they have an insane xp bonus event going on.

I would really like to play the continuation of the main storyline on my Jedi Guardian, but the hard truth there is that I have been gone from the game so long that I quite literally have no clue where to start on it. Instead I opted to log into my Sith Juggernaut that is knee deep in Balmorra hell. In theory I could do just the class quests and be off the planet, but I feel a deep need to finish all of the things especially since this is the highest Sith character I have mustered to date. I am not sure if it was surprising or not but I actually enjoyed myself, but the unfortunately thing is that I managed to stay up until 2 am before sleep finally claimed me. This is going to make for a long evening with our podcast since I was back up again at 8 am. Hopefully I will be able to sneak a nap in today, but I have a feeling that since it will be nice outside my wife will want to get out of the house. We have been suffering through absolutely insane torrential rain. I heard an estimate that over the last week we have gotten as much rain as we normally get in an entire year.

Beautifying AggroChat

One of my failings is that I have done a pretty piss poor job of advertising the fact that AggroChat.com exists and is populated full of good stuff to read. Ultimately if you are reading Tales of the Aggronaut you are going to be extremely familiar with some of the content, but not all of it. Essentially AggroChat.com was a vehicle that I came up with as a way to pull together all of the content created by the hosts of the AggroChat Podcast. Additionally this site serves as a way to connect to each of the authors and a better vehicle for receiving both the AggroChat and Bel Folks Stuff episodes. We have had some grand plans to eventually expand this site to include people who do not already have blogs of their own. For the time being however it gives you a one stop shop for the following content…

The takeaway is that through this one site you end up with a ton of content delivered on a regular basis. I personally blog every single day, and Tam blogs five times a week at least. I keep hoping to add more news commentary content and game reviews but we have not quite gotten there yet. I plan on in the near future creating a special section of the AggroChat Game Club games where you can pull in some quick commentary from each of the folks that played it, as well as a link to the show where we discuss it. Essentially we are going to keep expanding it, so I should do a far better job of promoting it. So check the site out, and I would be open to any comments and suggestions. I’ve tried to set the site up in a way that allows you to drill down into specific content by one of our Authors quickly and efficiently. As of last week I even went back through every episode of AggroChat and indexed which hosts are on which shows so that they show up in our Author category links. While there is already a lot of great content here, watch the site because I am hoping it gets ever cooler.