Super Grape Stomper

Silent Observers

So far the issue of Wildstar Attunements has been a fairly polarizing one in the community as a whole.  So when I posted my write-up yesterday about why I didn’t think they were a horrible thing… I expected it also to be polarizing.  If you look at my statistics for the day, that single post got more unique viewers than anything else by a large margin.  However surprisingly even though it got forwarded quite a bit, I really didn’t end up with much commentary.  I expected someone out there to tell me how wrong I am, but that surprisingly didn’t happen.  I had a friend send me a private message about it however, thanking me for keeping my post “fair” and not adding to the vitriol.

So is it because I approached the post from a calm place talking about my own experiences with bad attunement systems that folks didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to tell me how horrible I was?  I am not so deluded to think that the majority of folks actually agreed with me.  One of the things I see sometimes in the blogosphere is when one blogger posts about another, telling them just how wrong they are.  I’ve done a few of these during my early days of blogging, but it really is not the type of thing I am interested in any more.  There is more than enough negativity out there, that I really don’t need to add my own.  I really hope that I can be a positive voice and talk about the good in things more than dwell upon the bad.  Ultimately I appreciate every voice, even the ones I don’t agree with.

Super Grape Stomper

WildStar64 2014-06-11 06-13-44-239 One of my favorite things in Wildstar is one that has surprised me.  I normally have this odd relationship with mini-games in MMOs, and generally try to avoid them.  However when I put the Moonshiners Cabin in my skyplot, I found the “This Aint No Bathtub Hooch” challenge to be insanely fun.  Most of the housing challenges can be completed every 30 minutes, and often times I will stomp grapes to make moonshine four for five times a night.  In part it is the rewards, or at least my attempt to collect all of them.  The high end reward is the purple quality bed I wrote about the other day, which is cool but I already have one.  The common rewards are either a neon beer sign or 150 reknown, and the rewards I am currently going after is the dye chest.  It contains within it one of five random dyes, and I believe I only have three of the five currently.  As a result I complete this quest over and over trying to get the last ones.

WildStar64 2014-06-11 06-15-09-102 As a side effect I have a truly silly number of beer signs, and I am basically covering the side of my ship in them.  I am not sure if they are tradeable, but if you need beer signs… I am your man.  The funny thing about it is there is zero market for them, because the Moonshiners Cabin is pretty much constructable by anyone who chooses to plunk down the gold it takes to build it.  The question is… will I still care about it once I have collected all of the dyes available.  It is a fairly easy and fun way to farm reknown, but I am just not sure if it is worth paying the weekly upkeep.  That is the dirty secret that no one really talks about in the housing system.  These cool things we can place, have to be repaired weekly to keep functioning.  So far all of the ones I have placed have had a 1 gold repair cost, which at this point is still a fairly significant amount of money.  So I have a feeling many of my things… including the crystal jumping puzzle will go away at the end of this week.  My mission however is to find the upgrade to my mining plot, because that is one of those things I have found massively useful.

Return to Cyrodil

eso 2014-05-14 22-15-30-478

As much as I have loved my time spent in Wildstar, I do feel bad that I have been horribly neglecting Elder Scrolls Online.  Wildstar is the new shiny, and as a result is getting my attention as I have a strong desire to level and get all the shiny baubles that come with it.  However this really doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of Elder Scrolls Online, because the games literally could not be any more different.  Things is I enjoy both immensely and hope to continue playing them both for some time.  As a result I am really looking forward to tonight.  For some time we have had these semi-regular “Faff about in Cyrodil” nights, and after taking last week off I am ready to get back into the swing of things.  The event should give me the focus to sit down and really enjoy Elder Scrolls for an evening.  I am not sure exactly what we will do yet, but I had a ton of fun at that Nord town we stumbled across with the Dark Anchor, so if nothing else I would love to head back out there.

Playing Wildstar and Elder Scrolls at the same time is an odd contrast.  The one failing of ESO, is that it is extremely hard to group with other players.  I really hope this is something they address in future updates because the game is in desperate need of better social systems to allow players to do content other than Cyrodil together.  Ultimately we do it…  only because that is what we CAN do as a large group.  Without a mentoring system, we are pretty much limited to PVP content because it allows multiple levels to blend together and get bolstered up to level 50.  I am mostly a soloist when it comes to questing, but the various folks who have tried to quest as a pair have found it extremely difficult to stay in sync while leveling.  It has mostly worked for the folks that are always on at the same time, but for those who are not…  if the partner gets even the slightest bit ahead it becomes extremely difficult for the other player to catch up.

After seeing how cleanly a game can manage disparate levels grouping together, my hope is that Elder Scrolls adds in some functionality for this.  The game is awesome, but other than PVP it is a largely single player experience.  That said the game does have some of the most enjoyable dungeons I have experienced, but I wish they had taken a queue from Final Fantasy XIV and simply scaled players down to the dungeons level.  After seeing this work in Wildstar I am shifting to the opinion that this is the way all dungeons should work.  A dungeon should have a fixed level and it scales the player to that level for the purpose of the content.  Sure give the players rewards for their own level…  but scaling down blows away some of the problem with “out leveling” content, and makes it easier to help guildies out when the content has “grayed out” for you.

Elder Scrolls Online

As stated above I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online and if you are Daggerfall Covenant I invite you to join in the fun regardless if you are in the guild or not.  The plan is we will meet up at Northern High Rock Gate in Cyrodil around 8:30 CST.  The guild is aligned to Wabbajack, and if we can manage to get people through the queue, it would be awesome to actually do this event on that campaign.  The fallback to this point has been Volendrung, and I hope to be online early to try and assess the feasibility of Wabbajack for the evening.  From there we will pick an objective for the night and wander off into the Cyrodil countryside in search of mayhem.  If you are not a member of the guild, just add @Belghast and we can get you into the fray.

#Wildstar #ElderScrollsOnline

Wildstar Attunements

Bon Voyage

Finally home and sitting on the sofa and starting to tackle the blog post of the day.  I ended up taking the day off from work to make sure I was able to do whatever my wife needed me to do this morning.  She however has been successfully ferried to the airport, and while I got turned around leaving the airport I got to flex my knowledge of the backroads of North Tulsa to get back home.  I am going to have to master highway 11 this summer during the Twitter Math Camp, where I am serving as a shuttle driver.  However for the time being I am nice and safe and home.

When I got here it was really nice out, so I opted to go for a little walk rather than having to do all of it this evening.  The thing this highlighted however is that I apparently need to try and find some earbuds with a longer cord.  If I moved my head too quickly they ripped out of my ears and went flailing to the ground.  If I am going to make it through the nightly ritual of walking I am going to have to do it to music.  So after while I guess I will make a trip out to target or best buy and see what I can find.  Once upon a time I had a set of head phones that had little behind the ear clips, so I am thinking I need to find a pair of those.

Wildstar Attunements

For some time now an infographic has been circulating around the internet outlining the “12 step process” for raid attunement in Wildstar.  I admit when I first saw it, I was extremely hesitant because it is quite the ordeal… however the longer I have “lived with it” the more I think it might be just want the doctor ordered.  I talked about my feeling regarding attunements and skill checks this weekend on the AggroChat podcast, but this mornings post is completely devoted to two excellent posts I read yesterday from Liore and Syl about the subject.  I am not going to preface or summarize the posts, because you really need to just read their own words on the subject.  Instead I am going to go off in my own rambly direction to talk about skill gates and attunements in general.  If you are curious about the 12 step image… it is spanning the right side of the page… for dramatic effect.

Evil Attunements

Once upon a time in another life I was a somewhat successful raid leader in World of Warcraft.  I lead a few raids during the 40 man era, but got really serious about doing it during the Burning Crusade 25 man era with the non-guild based raid groups of NSR and Duranub Raiding Company.  I know the pain that attunements can be all too tragically as a raid leader.  In order to get fresh blood into your raid, it meant either you spent time running old content and gearing those players up… or you resorted to stealing members away from fledgling raids that were maybe not as highly progressed as your own.

The problem with the World of Warcraft attunement system, was that it required an entire raid to complete.  This was a constant drag on the raid system, and meant lots of players would have to join one raid just to get keyed to be able to join a bigger one.  This system invoked so much animosity, just like it did back in Everquest where the system really saw the first light of day.  During the Planes of Power expansion, getting keyed for various planes became a power vacuum that only a few elite guilds allowed anyone to have.  Considering the raid designers for World of Warcraft were themselves the leaders of these elite raids… it was not surprising that the keying system ended up something very similar.

The Gatekeeper

The problem is that the attunements also served as a way to gate the content, and provide a level of gearing that you must be able to get past in order to proceed.  To some extent they have tried to do this with item levels, but that in itself is also inefficient.  Just because a player has a really high gear score, it tells you nothing about their ability.  I’ve known more than a few players who have reached high gear score out of persistence, and still perform horribly in a raid environment.  For ages these games have needed an objective measure for just how prepared a player is for the encounters contained within a raid.  Nothing feels worse than having to be that raid leader, and tell a player that they simply do not perform well enough for the raid to carry them along.

One of the best mechanisms I have seen in a game to gate based on player skill… is the not terribly creatively named “Gatekeeper” encounter in The Secret World.  In fact I have gushed about the need for this encounter on more than one occasion, but the latest is in the “WoW Needs a Gatekeeper” post.  This encountered required you to complete a specific test designed to exemplify your ability to heal, tank or dps nightmare level content.  Your reward for completing it, was literally the ability to get to the nightmare level gates in the game.  As a DPS player at the time, I have to say that the test fully prepared me for the rigors that would be Nightmare difficulty content, and I am sure eventually raid level content.

What was so great about the encounter was that it was entirely personal.  No one could carry you through it, or even assist you.  You had to come to a solution to the puzzle of how to complete all of the necessary tasks to progress forward.  This type of skill gate draws a clear line in the sand between the players that are ready and the players that are not, and takes a lot of the stress off the raid leader.  I don’t like elitism, but raiding was never one of those things designed for the masses.  It is designed to be an extremely rigorous skill based activity, much like high level PVP.  The harsh reality is that not everyone should be able to raid.  That is not to say that I don’t think there should be valuable high end content for everyone to complete.  But I don’t necessarily think that raiding should be something that every  player has the expectation of being able to do.

Why Wildstar Isn’t Evil

One of the coolest things about the Gatekeeper encounter is it gives players a shared struggle that they had to get through to be able to progress to the next level.  My friends and I still to this day talk about what a colossal pain in the ass the dps version was.  It took me 25 tries and I think it took my friend Warenwolf around 30… because we were both too damned stubborn to respec to the “optimal” path to complete it.  We beat the damned thing on our own terms, and now carry it as a badge of honor.  This is what raiding used to be, not about elitism, but about defeating something really hard together as a group and carrying with it a sense of pride in that accomplishment.  I honesty feel like Wildstar is trying to return to that era when you felt like you earned every inch of space in each dungeon or raid you completed.  I for one am fine with this change, even if it means I will likely never be able to raid again.  I just hope that they put in content to keep me entertained in my casualness.

The main reason why I feel like the Wildstar attunement process is just is the fact that for the most part it is a personal journey.  Steps 1-5 are entirely soloable, or at the very least zone events that will likely have other players completing them without the need for a premade group.  Step 6 requires a group but should be able to be completed through pugging if you need to.  To be honest every single achievement listed in the attunement, is either solo or something you can accomplish with either a freeform group inside of the zone, or puggable through the dungeon finder system.  Sure you can get your guild to help you out significantly on several of the steps, but the length of the quest chain means that not many guilds will be dragging players through it.  This means the onus of the entire event is on the player, and not on a guild or a raid to “catch them up”.  So while it is not a one stop shop like the Gatekeeper, I feel it creates a sufficient skill gate to make sure that the players are prepared for raiding in Wildstar will likely mean.

I feel like Wildstar is a game with so much casual but challenging content, that there is always going to be something for the players that cannot raid to do.  While World of Warcraft has made so many steps to make raiding an inclusive thing…  it feels like it lost the epic quality that it used to have along the way.  Some of my best moments in gaming came from Vanilla and BC era raiding, because when we FINALLY downed a boss… it felt like we had done something spectacular.  When I got that tier set…  it felt like it was a long fought struggle… and not something I gained by simply “putting in enough time” or “grinding enough currency”.  I feel like raiding could definitely use an infusion of hardcore again, even like I said earlier… if that means I won’t be able to participate.

#Wildstar #Attunements

Inappropriate Bed Time

Lazy Sunday

Yesterday we pretty much had the textbook definition of a “Lazy Sunday”.  After getting almost 13,000 steps on Saturday, I only managed to hit 3,500 yesterday.  We had rain to deal with off and on all day, and pretty much opted to stay indoors and vegetate.  I think given how hard we have pushed we both could use a day off.  Also my wife has been out of school for a week but never really gotten a single day to just recuperate.  To make matters worse Tuesday she is flying out for the first of many conferences she will attend this summer.  As such it also begins the part of the summer that I hate the most…  trying to get used to being alone and then simultaneously get used to being not alone.

I am probably odd that it takes time for me to ease into any change in my environment.  I have always been someone who could adapt to rapid and momentary interruptions extremely well.  I remain calm under pressure, and get hyper focused on fixing whatever issue is at hand.  Ironically I am extremely horrible at dealing with sustained change.  When my world is thrown upside down but not immediately righted… I am not a happy camper.  I have these little rituals, like this morning blogging thing… that when I do not get to observe them… nothing else is really right the rest of the day.  So you can imagine how much turmoil the summer brings me since I tend to have a wife one week and then she is gone the next…  and this lasts for at least the month of June but often times some of other months as well.

Easily it takes me a good three days to adjust to any change, sometimes longer.  So if she is gone a week 3 days of that will be with me in personal turmoil as I adjust to her being gone.  Then when she comes back there will be another three days of me adjusting to the fact that it is no longer just me and the cats in the house.  I feel like I deal with all of this fairly well considering, but there are generally some severe low points while she is not around.  Thankfully this year she will be travelling back on my Birthday, because in past years she has been gone for it…  making it all that more of a depressing occasion.  The week days are pretty easy thankfully because the routine of work keeps me pretty busy, and then at night I end up gaming the night away.  The weekends on the other hand are pretty rough to be all by myself in the house.  Hopefully this year will be a bit easier since I will still need to maintain the routine of walking every night.

Inappropriate Bed Time

WildStar64 2014-06-09 06-07-43-280 Among my friends I have developed a reputation for having unnaturally good luck when it comes to drops and getting the random number generator to perform for me.  One of the nifty things that I added to my house is the Moonshiners Cabin.  Once every thirty minutes you can play a mini-game to brew a batch of moonshine.  So far this is one of my favorite housing mini-games because really… it takes zero skill, just the ability to do a few tasks quickly.  If you complete the game you get to roll for 150 reknown, a Neon Beer sign pictured above, one of 5 random dye colors, or the penultimate reward a purple quality “Granok Four Poster Bed”.  The bed is also pictured above, but given my odd lighting in the house I am not sure if you can really see it in all its glory.  It is a rather large bed decorated with so many odd things.  Let me run them down really quickly…  a pair of steer horns, a target riddled with bullet holes,  a pink heart pillow, a camo pillow, a tiger striped pillow, stage lighting, a camera pointing at the headboard, an LCD monitor showing the beds headboard, and a clothes line with a bra and a pair of tube socks.

WildStar64 2014-06-08 20-38-11-427 I am pretty sure the owner before me was rigging the bed to film porn, but I am not 100% sure.  Maybe they were just part of some elaborate sleep study.  In any fashion it totally fits the motif of my house which is “Intergalactic Airstream Trailer”.  Essentially I want to be that crazy Chua in a teardrop trailer lost somewhere deep in the woods.  Right now I am sharing my house with my pet carrots, and I intend to add as many adorable plushies as I happen to find to the house just to crank up the uneasiness factor.  I am decorating the house as a “Chua Unhinged”…. which in reality is pretty much every chua everywhere.  I was too cheap to buy a proper divider, so I am just using a forest of Elden Holograms to provide a visual divider between the living room and the bedroom.  In the bedroom you have the creepy bed, a Chua regeneration chamber, a Chua mechanical arm… that holds a really huge missile.  All things that any proper marginally insane Chua would need on a daily basis.

WildStar64 2014-06-09 06-44-43-639 The thing that still has me over the moon about the Wildstar housing system is that so much of it is “functional”.  I love Rift and EQ2 for having super detailed cosmetic housing systems… and to be honest in both cases the systems are generally more detailed in what you can do with them.  The trump card that Wildstar plays is that they have given you a reason other than for bragging rights to have a cool home.  So many of the things that you place in your home can be interacted with and used.  For example this is a shot of my friend Tam’s house and he has a crafting table, that works just as well as the crafting tables in any of the cities.  Since we are neighbors I can pop over and use it at any time, as well as mine his ore for him…  with him getting the lions share of the reward from doing so.  They have managed to create housing that not only is interesting and functional… but that also still has deep social ties.

Thirty Minutes Too Late

WildstarAdventure_Scopique Throughout most of the weekend my friends and I had been missing each other online for the purpose of running the first Adventure.  We often had four within the right level range but not quite five.  I am prone to fits of walking away from the screen without warning, and at one point last night I did just this to cook dinner.  When I got back in they were about halfway through running the adventure without me.  This is no biggy, because I am sure I will get in on another run… but the worst part is I think I am the only one of us who is actually building fully tanky.  I feel sorry for Rae because she got drafted into tanking as a Stalker with no tanking gear and no experience using any of the tanking abilities for her class.  I stole the above photo from Scopique… and I am assuming at some point today he will have a rundown on his blog.

It sounded like they had a fairly rough time, but everyone soldiered through…  no pun intended.  I am curious if the engineer tricks will make it easier or not.  One of the things I am really digging is that the engineer has a lot of active mitigation.  There is this death and decay like mechanic that I drop called Unsteady Miasma.  Firstly it deals AOE damage to the group in a 5 meter circle, but the important thing is it gives up to five mobs a debuff called blunder.  When that procs it causes their chance to be deflected to increase by 28% at the current tier.  As a result this causes me to deflect a not insignificant number of their attacks once you factor in my own deflection bonuses.  This is the sort of thing that you want to keep up all of the time, and when I started doing so I noticed my ability to solo 3 man bosses increased massively.

WildStar64 2014-06-08 14-50-43-346 At this point I figure I am about halfway through Auroria, and roughly halfway to level 21.  My intermediate goal for the weekend was to hit 20, and I did so just barely.  One of the cool things about adventures is that if you are over the suggested level it mentors the party down.  This means at least to some extent the content stays evergreen.  I am doing a really poor job of following the quest chains, and as a result I have stuff scattered all over the map that is incomplete.  Deredune was pretty straight forward, but I was subjected to more than a few “whats over here” moments… and when I got to Auroria the gloves came off completely.  I have followed so many wild goose chases in search of ore or an explorer quest item.  I feel like I am doing a really poor job of progressing considering I am already starting to lag behind some of the guild members.  That said…  as busy as I was last week I didn’t really feel like I got to play much.

Wildstar Adventures

Tonight is going to be a busy night to say the least.  We will have to do the traditional mad dash around the house to gather up items and pack my wife for her trip.  So I am really not sure how much time I will really get to play.  However if I do manage to get a solid block of time before or after my walk… I want to run the first Adventure.  So this is my goal, I just have no clue at all if I will accomplish it.

#Wildstar #Housing

Alliance of Awesome

Multigaming Community

allianceofawesome On January 31st a few interesting things happened.  Firstly Sony Online Entertainment released the alpha for Everquest Next Landmark…  now just known as Landmark.  More importantly this set a chain of events into motion.  For some time there has been a group of loosely affiliated guilds and gaming  communities tugging on essentially the same pool of players.  So we might end up getting this mix of players for a specific title and then having a similar mix of players for another title down the road from this huge twitter/g+ gaming community pool.  With Landmark this reached a bit of a head and someone was brave enough to stand up and say it was silly.  In the opening days of Landmark, since there were no guilds (and still arent for that matter) each of these communities opted to start a chat channel.  The problem is this left some people joining as many as six different channels at a time.

Scarybooster proposed a simple idea, that we all agree to use one common chat channel, and with that the Alliance of Awesome was born.  It started simple in scope, but from there Zelibeli and I kinda ran with it and over the last four months we’ve built a rather large loosely connected gaming alliance.  Currently we have five different groups in the AofA community: House Stalwart, Multiplaying.net, Combat Wombat, Mercy Gaming, and Dark Religion.  Lately I have been talks with Liore about maybe having the already awesome Machiavelli’s Cats community join the fold as well.  I have to say so far that over the last four months things have indeed been awesome.  For the most part everyone has seemed to get along swimmingly and I’ve watched this group of disconnected pieces merge into a community in every sense of the word.

A Simple Idea

One of the big problems with being habitual multigamers is the fact that guilds are often transistory and it is hard to constantly muster a new batch of people to play whatever game is coming down the pipe.  Additionally since not every game will end up being ideal for everyone, this means you have massive amounts of fragmentation as folks leave a given game for something new.  The idea was that each individual guild would take responsibility for the reigns of the games that they were most into, and then that way as gamers we would have access to a good and familiar guild regardless of the game we choose to play.  Over the coming months I would like to see this formalized into a sort of Rosetta stone for who has which guilds where and just how active each of them are.

The problem is that since we each have our own guild identities, it felt odd to constantly ask players to register an account on a new forum for each group.  As a result we tried a few different things to have a shared neutral ground between the communities.  The first of these efforts was the Alliance of Awesome reddit… and while it worked well enough, it caused as much frustration as it solved.  Then I stumbled onto Anook and it seemed almost perfectly suited for us.  It offered public and private forums, an events calendar and was more gamer social network than private site allowing folks to link everything up to the games they are streaming into the shared hub… or in the verbiage of that network a “nook”.  This also lets the bloggers in our midst share our posts easily on the nooks blog, and so far that seems to also be working well.

A Unified Approach

Over the last few months we have been melding significantly.  Elder Scrolls Online launch for example was the first real “Alliance of Awesome” foray, and while we still kept to the branding of House Stalwart… it was very much a shared occasion.  With the launch of Wildstar, we had no real forerunner guild wise that looked to be taking up the reigns.  Instead we opted to drop any specific guild branding and simply go with the “Alliance of Awesome” for our guild name.  Honestly I have to say it feels very natural and I can see eventually we may drop the individual guild monikers and just do things from that standpoint.

The biggest problem I forsee moving forward is the fact that right now we are still very much utilizing two completely separate voice servers.  A good chunk of the House Stalwart guild is still very happily playing World of Warcraft and doesn’t really care about any other game on the market.  The rest of us are pretty nomadic, but we still are far more used to and comfortable with mumble as a communication platform.  Multiplaying, Dark Religion, and Mercy Gaming have all standardized on a Teamspeak 3 server run for free by the ever amazing Saia.  So I would really like to make a move to trying to use that as well and simply dropping the mumble.  That said this feels like a landmine because I have no clue how to convince the WoW-only contingency to abandon mumble and make the shift over to Teamspeak 3.  Also I hate to abandon Mumble myself until they have done this, because while I am not playing World of Warcraft on a nightly basis I still hold the guildmaster position and get called on to resolve issues.  I want to make sure I am reachable by folks even when I am not in the same game.

Shared Ethics

The other rough spot is that we need to come up with a shared set of rules and codes of conduct.  For years House Stalwart has followed a simple “three tenets” approach, and relied on guild leader and officer judgment to fill in the gaps.  Zeli tends to favor spelling things out, and considering the large volume of people she has dealt with not completely organically connected… I can totally see why this would be a good thing.  After years of trying to “keep things simple” but then having to deal with explaining nuance… I am starting to favor Zeli’s approach to be honest.  I hate writing rules, and as such that’s why I came up with the somewhat ambiguous three that we use.  I figured that using common sense folks would realize what they meant… problem is not everyone “common” is the same.  The further away from the same core of friends you get, the more confusing the interpretation becomes.

Going forward I think we are going to have to just agree upon a shared set of rules, and I think so far the batch Zeli came up with for the Alliance of Awesome guild seems like a great place to begin.  The biggest thing I hope out of this is that we are a living community.  That we will continue to grow as we adopt other awesome people from twitter, anook, g+, or that we happen to stumble across in game.  Also I hope that we do in fact get the Machiavelli’s Cats community to join the fold, and keep finding other like minded groups to rally to the cause.  I would really like Alliance of Awesome to not only have an ostentatious name, but also have awesome actions to back it up.  I want us to be part of the solution in the games we play, and not part of the problem.  I would love to see us better each of the gaming communities we are in.

Giving Back

File:Child's Play Logo updated.pngOne of the things that Zeli and I have been talking about lately is that we would really like to enter Alliance of Awesome in this years Child’s Play marathon.  Far as I can tell this will take place on October 25th, and the idea is to have 25 hours of live streaming for charity.  I have wanted to participate in this for years, but I thought it would be more interesting if we signed up a whole bunch of streamers from the Alliance of Awesome community and have one shared channel for the purpose of the event.  We have quite a number of people who stream already, and it would be awesome to give each of us like a 4-5 hour block of time to play whatever the hell we want to.

Also lately we have been holding a lot of events in various games.  Right now Wednesday nights are “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and those are pretty much only to anyone in the Alliance of Awesome community.  Additionally we have been holding a Thursday night “League Beginner Night” to let folks ease into the League of Legends game.  So far both events have been a blast and I would love to see them grow beyond the small number of people that we have.  I am sure we will be doing something similar for Wildstar, especially with the focus on grouping in that game.  I can only see the community as a whole getting better.  So here comes the thing I am sure you have all been waiting for.  If you are not already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… head over to the website and join our nook.  We don’t have any real requirements for membership other than wanting to be around a bunch of awesome people, and striving to be the “white hats” in gaming.  If you have a large community, track down myself or Zelibeli and we can see if the entire group would be a good fit for us as well.  Growing up as an only child, I always wanted to be surrounded by friends… and on the internet I try my damnedest to surround myself with as many awesome people as I can.  So far I think things are going pretty well.