Wildstar Archives - Page 7 of 16 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Wildstar Woes

July 26, 2014 by Belghast

Crack Dealer

So my reputation as a gaming crack dealer is intact, as I spent part of yesterday teaching another gamer to play Magic: The Gathering. I guess it is fitting that we taught him at a Math Conference, considering it was invented by a mathematician. In my defense this time, the attendee asked for someone to tutor him in the ways of planeswalking, and considering I was not actually attending sessions but instead just waiting around to be needed, I volunteered. We met yesterday morning at 9:30 in the third floor commons area and I brought my patented “box o’ decks”. @Jay2thaVee was a complete rookie to the concepts of magic and had not purchased any decks. Thankfully I had left a few of the various $14 starters I have picked up in their original states, as those are pretty much the easiest way to learn.

Unfortunately I take “devotion to black” seriously, and every single deck in my box save for one had black somehow mixed into it. He played a white/black nyx prebuilt, and I was playing a black/blue theros prebuilt. Basically for the first game I played with my hand on the table, so he could see what exactly I was doing and when I was doing it. Additionally every so often when he seemed to lack a play I would nudge him a little bit to explain how the cards in his hand might be useful. By the time we got around to the second match he was up and running and ready to kick ass… and in fact he did just that. The second match was excellent in that it showed just how quickly fate can change with the play of the right cards. We both had cards in play that helped us soak back up some health in each upkeep so for a long time we were in a bit of a stalemate as I could only do as little more damage than he could heal up each round.

Thanks to an artifact that gave all of my creatures lifelink I was able to soak up quite a bit of health during this long drawn out stalemate. At this point I was starting to get a creature advantage on him as well as a health advantage. Then with a single play he rocked my world. Granted I had to explain how good the card he held in his hand was, and why he should play it… but when he plunked down Banishing Light. Now I must have been extremely tired or something, but I completely misread the card yesterday when we were playing. It says banish “target” and for some reason I read that as “all” non-land permanents. So I played it as though it was a complete board wipe, which made the game more interesting. He began to make progress on chipping down my extremely high health pool which was like 32 or something similar at that point.

Then I get the big guns onto the board with my Abhorrent Overlord. So I once again start whittling down his health at the same time as he chips away mine. I do 6 health, he regens 2, and so on until we get to a point where he has 11 health and a serious creature advantage on me, and I have my single big guy as he eats everything else I can get on the board and 9 health. He manages to do 10 damage to me in one turn and it is pretty much over. However of all the ways to learn magic this is one of the better matches I have played. It shows just how tentative a lead can be at any point in the game. When we misplayed the banish card, it looked like the game was over… but had i not had several rounds of getting crap to play I could have maybe pushed back to get the victory. In any case I think he is hooked and going to buy a couple of decks for he and his son to play together. Sounds like awesome times.

Wildstar Woes

Last night I got a rather frank question from a friend of mine regarding Wildstar. Some time ago another friend had handed him one of the free trial codes that we got for preordering. He just now got around to trying it a month and a half after launch. While he enjoyed the game, it wasn’t like the most enjoyable thing he had ever played. His question was how many of the Stalwart crew were still playing, and if he should pick it up. He followed us into Elder Scrolls Online, and while he loves that game, he finds it extremely solemn to be playing by himself all the time. The big thing is that he didn’t want to jump into Wildstar and it to be the same experience for him. His question was, should he buy the game. Now I could have put the hard sell on him and lead him down a path that would have ultimately lead to disappointment… but I was honest with him.

For the most part in the circle of friends that he is part of… Wildstar has come and gone. There are a few of us who log in periodically but this game had probably the briefest of “glory days” of any title we have played to date. I only made it to 26 before slowing down and to the best of my knowledge none of us actually made it to the level cap. I enjoyed aspects of the game, namely the dungeons… but for whatever reason as much as I should love this game… the drive to play it was just missing. I am still piddling around, this time on the Exiles side on Evindra but running into the same lack of drive to log in. Everything about this game should be something that I really enjoy, and you could not ask for a better community team or company supporting it. But when I ask myself what I want to play in a given night, this game never seems to come up on its own. To be honest most of the time I was leveling my Chua Engineer it was the boom boxes that kept me logging in every night more than anything else.

So while I think there is a great game here, I had to be honest with him that he probably should give it a pass if he is only interested in playing with the Stalwart/Masks crew. I think one of the things that really hurt this title was the fact that we simply rolled on the wrong faction for the wrong server. Dominion side on Evindra is dead… like when I got to Whitevale I sat around for two hours waiting for someone else to wander by so I could take out one of the world mini-bosses and not so much as another adventurer came by at any point during that time. To be truthful it feels like wandering around Illium you might see a dozen other players at any given point, whereas on the Exiles side you are constantly bumping into people. The problem is with only 6 slots per server, it really negates the concept of playing both factions. Within a few days all of the people who were primarily Exile, had deleted their Dominion alts to free up space for more Exiles.

So once again we are stuck at the problem of having all of my time devoted into what has essentially become a non-starter character. So when confronted with the idea of re-rolling… I just can’t be bothered to put much effort towards it. Ultimately if my immediate circle of friends is not playing… then what exactly am I rushing around to get leveled to be able to do? I am sure I could roll with any number of the guilds on the exiles side, but I just am not sure if I have the social oomph left in me to start from scratch without being able to rely on the folks I hang out nightly with on voice chat. I feel like Wildstar might have run its course through the internet as well. I am seeing a lot of folks who claimed diehard loyalty to the game “taking a break”, which we all know is the beginning salvo in the “quitting the game” conversation. I am not ready to cancel my subscription yet, but I am just struggling to find reason to log in.

Dragooning It Up

Lately I have been back playing quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV. I feel like I parted with that game on really good terms and it has always been extremely charming. When not working on hunts I have been working on leveling the dragoon. If we can convince a repeat of the other night to happen, when we all logged in to run a dungeon, that place me playing a DPS character. Ashgar unfortunately only has two tanks to 50, and I have a Warrior and a Bard. That said I have never really felt deeply connected with the bard. It does amazing damage and is super useful, and mostly was easy to level through Fates. The class I would far rather play dps wise is the Dragoon, so lately I have been taking advantage of the Duty Roulette option and running some random dungeons. I have to say the groups I am getting randomly are actually extremely friendly and communicative. I feel like maybe this game has crossed the threshold of shedding all of the folks who were caustic and toxic… and now really has devoted fans left.

I guess the real challenge will be what this game feels like trying to tank it with random groups. At some point I will work up the nerve and tank a random as my Gladiator seeing as I would really love to get to Paladin conversion levels. There is still a lot to like in this game, and it is the only Asian inspired title that has managed to create a male character I actually enjoy playing. There are proper beards here, and you have options other than “pretty boy” as far as facial features go. We will see how long it take for me to get this game out of my system this time, but so far I am really enjoying myself. I feel like at some point I need to dig up a list of what all new content is available, as there have been three rather large patches since I last played the game regularly. FFXIV is pretty horrible about advertising what is new from the game interface itself, so I think there are probably some other ways to level that I am just missing.

#MagicTheGathering #FFXIV #Wildstar

For Science!

July 4, 2014 by Belghast

Rude Awakenings

At this point I have been up since right around 7 am, and have now walked almost 2.5 miles for the day. Why on earth have I done a thing like this. Over the summer months my wife has been getting up every morning and going for a walk, figuring that even if she is sedentary the rest of the day she has at least gotten a big chunk of steps in that can then be added to that evening by another walk. Last night she asked me if I wanted to go with her on the early morning walk, and I thought at the time it was a good idea. During the work week I am up at 5:30 in the morning, and get up and around pretty leisurely over the next hour or so. On the weekends I tend to allow myself to wake up naturally and then stumble to the QuikTrip and get breakfast.

This morning I was woken up by two things… first the weight of one of my cats not so gracefully deciding to plop down on my stomach, and moments later my wife petting my eyebrows. In the grand scheme of things I really don’t know what she was doing with them, but it sure as hell felt like they were being petted. I think she was bored of waiting for me to wake up and was trying to “annoy” me into coherence. So I stumbled out of bed, attempted to wet down the cowlicks in my hair and pulled on my walking shoes. I do a lot of complicated things in the morning, one of which is write a blog post, and almost every morning that is done well before 6:30. Apparently physical activity is not one of the things my body is willing to tolerate.

As I started down the path outside the house, it was immediately conscious of how hard it was to keep anything resembling a straight line. We were going extremely slow as compared to our normal pace, but it felt like my wife was racing on ahead of me and I was struggling to keep up. Nothing was really cooperating… not my thighs, shins, ankles… all of which screaming at me wanting to know what the fuck I was doing to myself. By the time we had made it most of the way through the first loop, my body was starting to wake up enough to keep moving forward on its own without me forcibly concentrating to move my legs one at a time. It wasn’t until we had finished the second loop that I was really ready to introduce speech into the equation. My wife kept saying things, and I would have to have her repeat them because I just couldn’t concentrate on both walking and listening at the same time. I feel awesome for getting up and walking a triple loop already, but damn did my body not want to play along with this notion. Here is hoping tomorrow will be easier.

For Science!

This title is extremely misleading, because in truth there is very little scientific about my poll. For starters the sample size is too small to really be meaningful, and the fact that I chose to distribute my poll through twitter and Google plus means the sample will naturally be skewed towards social gamers. All of that said… yesterday was the day that all of us day one Wildstar players got billed for our first month of playtime. In my case it was months of playtime because generally speaking I give every new game three months to hook me. From a standpoint of an Dominion player, I watched our guild turn into a ghost town over the last few weeks so I was curious to see just how many players were choosing to stay subscribed to the game. Additionally of the players who would be subbing… I was curious to know how many were doing it with a monthly fee and how many were trying to use the CREDD system.

I opted to use Strawpoll.me because I love the way it gives you instant results, and you can just simply watch the page as the responses roll in and it automagically refreshes itself. Firstly I want to thank all the helpers I had yesterday in spreading the poll. I got so many people willing to retweet this that it greatly improved the success of the results. If you look at the results above, we had at the time of writing this 238 total votes and of those 30% chose to subscribe to the game. Quite honestly this is about the conversion rate I was expecting just based on what I was seeing on the social networks. There were a lot of supposedly diehard wildstar fans that didn’t make the month. Of those that are subscribing 11 players are trying to pay through the use of CREDD, and I am assuming those folks were smart and bought several months in advance when they were still roughly a platinum per month. I have been watching the CREDD market over the last few days and it is slowly increasing, and at least on our server right now is roughly 4 plat per month.

We Are Not the Average Player

One of the things I think we as bloggers, podcasters and gaming pundits seem to miss however, is that we are in no way the average player. I think it is safe to say that the reach of this survey at least is firmly locked in what I keep calling the “internet zeitgeist”. This is a binge and purge cycle of latching onto a new thing and tossing aside the old one never to return to it. Wildstar was the new hotness for roughly a month, and now it appears that Divinity: Original Sin is the next hot thing. After that there will be something else that is a shiny bauble to draw away players attention. I am just as guilty of this as anyone, so I am not judging… just explaining that the way we play games does not represent how most people tend to play games. There will never likely be a game that stops our fickle ways, or at least we will never again have another multi-year long game like World of Warcraft.

I think the “average joe” I still enjoying Wildstar, and I think personally I just had the back luck of picking the wrong server/faction combination. As a result I have been flirting with rolling Exiles on Evindra, because the bulk of twitter seems to be playing that server/faction combination. I am still enjoying the game personally, but am just going through one of my down cycles right now. I will engage and be socially active for a very long time… but eventually I hit my threshold where I simply cannot take anymore human interaction. When this happens I duck my head into my shell and “turtle” for awhile, playing nothing but single player games.

Eventually I get to where I miss people again and venture back into society, but I figure I still have a few more weeks of turtling before I am ready to return to any sort of normal social interaction. I claim that I am an introvert, and folks have disputed that claim… but I think I just simply have built up more stamina for human interactions. That said there is always a point at which I just can’t handle any more, and this is one of those periods for me. So while I on one level I want to be playing Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online, when I actually log in and encounter other players my fight or flee instinct kicks in and I log right back out. So I realize I am adding to the feeling of the server being empty, but right now at this moment there is nothing I can do about that. I can only hope people will be around when this current funk fades.

#Wildstar

Three Hours Well Spent

July 2, 2014 by Belghast

Kidneys Safe, Vita Obtained

I have a running joke with my friend Rae, that each time I go off to meet someone to make a purchase from Craigslist that I am more than likely going to end up in a ditch somewhere missing a kidney. What can I say… I have a dark sense of humor. Regardless of this eventual fate, I am extremely cheap by nature, or more so I cannot stand paying more for something than I actually have to. As a result there are a handful of things I search Craigslist for a few times a week, one of them is the Playstation Vita. For a long while I have known that sooner or later I would get one, but seeing as I have a pretty lousy track record for playing handheld games… I most certainly did not want to pay much for it. Essentially handheld gaming is awesome if you travel a lot… whereas I actually actively avoid travel. If I am at home, I am more than likely going to be on my PC or one of my consoles rather than milling about on a handheld. That said I am still very much enthralled by handheld gaming, and the since I have a PS3 and a PS4… the Vita remote play functionality even as limited as it might be… seemed intriguing.

So the other day when I found a Vita that had been posted for a few days for $100 that came with two games… both of them something I would play, I honestly thought it was too good to be true. However over the course of a series of text messages I gleaned two things. Firstly that I suspected the person that was selling the unit was female, and that they did in fact seem legitimate. This is my own personal bias at work, but generally I consider women far more trustworthy than men, and potentially less likely to steal my kidney. I could not meet up that day so we scheduled a meeting for yesterday after work. Basically I did not want to mention it on the blog, because I really didn’t want to jinx it. There was a comedy of errors however when it came to actually meeting up. The person lived in a town roughly thirty minutes away from the southern most point of the Tulsa Metro. Since I prefer to meet at QuikTrip for safety sake, and that town did not have one… we decided to meet at one in Glenpool, thinking I had been there multiple times and it would be in the path she had to travel anyways.

Wrong QuikTrip

The only problem is that apparently Glenpool is big enough to actually have two QuikTrips… both of which are apparently across the street from a McDonalds. I must have looked insane walking around the QuikTrip parking lot looking for a pink and grey Chevy cruze. Like I was confused enough at one point that I even googled what a Chevy Cruze looked like on my phone, because I thought maybe I was not remembering which model was which. Once we realized we were at two separate locations she came to me because I had zero clue where she was. Everything checked out, the Vita is pretty awesome and only has a few scratches here and there on the case. It came with the vita unit, 4 gb memory card, charge cable, car charger, soft sided case, rubberized skin for the unit, Injustice Ultimate Edition game and The Walking Dead game. The owner had wiped it back to factory settings so all I had to do when I got home was set the unit up and I was streaming Resogun from my PS4 in a matter of moments.

The main reason why I knew sooner or later that I would get a Vita is that I have been a member of Playstation Plus for awhile. One of the awesome things about Playstation Plus is it is blanket subscription and does not care at all if you actually own the piece of hardware it is giving away games for. So since the moment I started subscribing I have been picking up every Vita game offered through the web storefront. As a result I now have a library of 35 good titles ready to download to my Vita. The only thing I need to pick up really is a bigger memory card, because quite frankly 4 gb will not hold much of anything. All in all this makes for another wildly successful Craigslist purchase. One of the things I am going to have to test out soon is the ability to play across the internet from my PS4 sitting at home. I’ve heard mixed reviews about it, but just the fact that something like that could possibly exist seems awesome. Also if you are on PSN and we are not already friends… look up “Belghast Sternblade”.

Three Hours Well Spent

I have seen the Realm Maintenance podcast a few times before, but never actually sat down to listen to it. I tend to listen to podcasts when I can during the day because it makes the work day go a little faster. Yesterday Godmother of Alternative Chat had linked this weeks episode, which is a special 100th episode that included her. The podcast was rather daunting, in that it was a 3 hour retrospective of a bunch of wow podcasters being interviewed and the results knitted together into a narrative. While it took me literally all of the day to get through it, listening in bursts here and there… I have to say it was three hours well spent. Listening to the collective pet peeves, advice and challenges of all of these extremely successful and popular podcasts was rather inspiring. I would not really put myself or the work we do with Aggrochat in the same league as any of these people, but it was awesome to hear that they had struggled with some of the same issues I had.

One of the most interesting takeaways from the whole show is that for the most part, all of the podcasters list radio and more often than not NPR as being an important influence. I guess to some extent that makes sense, because what is a podcast if not an online radio show. If I am in my car I am pretty much always listening to NPR, and I know personally I wanted to do a podcast out of a sense of awe of everything that radio can be. I’m a huge fan of This American Life and have even gone and seen Ira Glass in person, when he did a lecture here in town. One of the tougher questions the various guests were asked… was who their favorite podcast is. Most of them gave extremely diplomatic answers, but I have to say for me at least there are two podcasts that I pretty much drop everything I am doing to listen to when they are posted. The first of these is Alternative Chat, because Godmother somehow takes the production value of This American Life, and condenses it into a fifteen minute bite sized chunk. It is very easy to listen to because I know, no matter what else I have going on, that I will receive this fifteen minute vignette of awesome.

The other podcast that I listen to as soon as it is posted is that of the Battle Bards. There are two things that make this experience awesome. The first is the chemistry that has evolved between Sypster, MMOGC and Syl. Their tastes in music and games have this weird way of fluttering back and forth between complimenting each other and diverging at the same time. So on a specific topic you might get two of the three to agree, but I have never really seen all three agree on something at exactly the same moment. This chemistry aside, I love the focus of the podcast because I too am extremely passionate about video game music. While I might not know the whys and hows like they do… or even know the composers by name… when I am not listening to podcasts at work, I am listening to soundtracks. Video game music has always stirred my imagination in ways that nothing else quite can. It is this warm blanket of nostalgia that I wrap myself in regularly, and it is always awesome to listen to the Bards as they dissect various tracks that I know and love.

Overly Cerebral Morning

As is the case with so many mornings, I sat down to write with a vague idea of some of the things I might talk about. However as a whole this morning shaped up to be far more cerebral than normal. I wish I had pictures to at least accompany some of my giant walls of text, but alas you are going to have to settle for a really cool shot from Divinity II last night. When I got home from my adventure I piddled around with my vita for a bit, logged into Wildstar to claim another boom box and then after our walk settled into Divinity again for the rest of the night. I find it so odd that I have fallen so in love with a game that is over six years old at this point. Everything about the game still feels fresh and new to me, and I am loving exploring this world. All my of my friends are busy and enthralled with Divinity: Original Sin… but at this point I don’t even want to look at that game until I “finish” this one.

I have a feeling that “finishing” Divinity II is going to be a lot like “finishing” Skyrim. That there will always be something left unfinished and begging for me to wander around and finish at a later time. The only thing that makes me question this, is that already the game has made some significant changes that caused me to lose access to a number of quests. The world keeps getting stranger, and I am not really sure how I feel about the chief antagonist. He keeps showing up to taunt me, and then instead of actually attacking me… sends an army of fodder at me claiming it will “finish me off”. While I am sure I cannot take him down yet… I am level 30 and wondering how long this game actually runs. I am only in the second “area” so far, but not sure just how many more there are. I know of at least one more that is connected to the area I am in currently, but at this point I have put almost twenty hours into the game and feel no closer a finish than I did at the very beginning. I love when a game feels like it could go on forever like that.

Happy Strain Day

July 1, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Dargon!

Last night I had every intent of playing World of Warcraft, but that didn’t actually happen. One of my good friends decided to re-up WoW for a bit, and since we had not played in ages we made tentative plans to hang out on horde lowbies over on Scryers. July 3rd The Scryers is merging with Argent Dawn the server that I have 11 Alliance characters on, and this will give me 11 Horde characters as well. I’ve always had friends on both side of the fence, but had trouble choosing to roll a character over there and give up a potential character on the alliance side. The merger of the two servers solves all of this. However last night didn’t actually happen and while I logged in a few alts and loaded them up with the few heirlooms I had laying around, I didn’t actually play them much.

Instead I fired up Divinity II again and continued questing my way through their extremely interesting world. Apparently none of the screenshots that I took actually recorded, which is a problem I am noticing more and more with Dxtory. If it has been open for any period of time, it seems to forget how to work. So as a result I am pretty much going to have to start shutting it down and reopening it every night before I sit down to play. I thought I had recorded quite a few nifty things, but in reality it is probably best that they didn’t record given that they probably were spoilerific. A lot of interesting stuff happened last night and I am not entirely certain how I feel about some of the choices the game made me choose. When a game makes me feel like that, it is probably doing a good job.

Happy Strain Day

This morning the first “Ultra Drop” as they call it is now available for Wildstar. This big patch weighs in at well over 3 gig and includes two new max level zones, a slew of new housing options and various cosmetic customization. While I am nowhere near high enough level to appreciate any of this I am amped to see it happening. Basically I am always happy when a game releases content for free to its players that expands the footprint of the game. So many companies have promised a progressive patching schedule but to date very few of them have actually manages to keep up the promised pace. The holy grail seems to be a patch a month, but the problem is that real life gets in the way, and things often don’t work out quite like they intended. So far the only company that has come close to this sort of schedule is Guild Wars 2, with its bi-monthly story updates. The problem there is that it didn’t actually expand the game, and was just a sequence of self expiring quest content.

The funny thing is that apparently some of the player base considers this too soon. I was floored to read on twitter when a friend of mine lamented that she was not even close to finished with the current content, and was frustrated that she already felt “behind”. Me personally I want to be flooded with content, so I can pick and choose what I want to complete without feeling the need to actually play every little morsel that comes out. Now my tune will change completely if I find out that this is some sort of limited time or expiring content. For the longest time Rift had done an amazing job of pushing out little content patches, but over the last year they have put in a number of limited time events that have caused me to really want to stop playing entirely. We talked about this a few weeks back on Aggrochat, but when a company tries to force me to log in every day for a period of time… I ultimately get frustrated and just stop playing entirely.

Day One DLC

The early patch like this is really designed to give the player base confidence at the end of the 30 day trial period. It essentially is a way of stringing the player on and making them want to renew their subscription that should be expiring around the time the patch lands. The thing is… this is so commonplace now that it is literally meaningless. The patch landing at almost exactly the one month mark, is really the equivalent to a brand new game shipping with day one DLC on the CD. This is content that was in the works and ready to go at the time of launch, that was essentially held in reserve to land right at the one month mark and reinforce player loyalty. That is not to say that it is actually content that COULD have shipped in the game, generally speaking it is done but not stable or untested, and requires a month or so to incubate and get ready for prime time.

Even games as notoriously slow at patching as Star Wars the Old Republic, had their one month in patch that introduced a brand new dungeon “Kaon Under Siege”. The real test is going to be if we see a similar “Ultra Drop” timed for August 1st and September 1st as well. No company has really proven that they can continue to expand their game content on a month by month basis, thereby justifying the expense of a subscription fee. I would love to think that Wildstar is going to be the exception here, but when no one has actually managed to accomplish it once the subscriptions start slipping… I just don’t have much confidence. That is the unfortunate reality is that a number of players are already “done” with this game, as evidenced by a string of tweets saying as such. Will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out once all of these people flake off.

I’m Around Awhile

I personally am subbed for at least another six months, but I am hoping that this will be my new MMO for a long while. There are a number of players that are showing extreme commitment and subbing for an entire year at a time. Right now I want to be playing, I just can’t handle the large scale social interaction at the moment. Coming home and crawling into my own private single player world is just too comfortable at the moment. However within a few weeks I will get tired of being alone and will happily return to Wildstar. Here is hoping that there are still a large number of people playing it then. If not I might end up switching factions to Exile. I feel as though we probably picked the wrong side to play on Evindra since every person on my twitter feed seems to be playing Exile there, and since they are locked to only 6 character slots are not wanting to play Dominion as well.

I don’t feel like Wildstar is going to be a game that I stop playing just because my current circle of friends stops playing it. I played Rift for most of a year successfully by relying on the good graces of other circles of friends with their established guilds, and I figure I can do the same with Wildstar if it comes down to it. The sad truth is that unless the game is World of Warcraft, House Stalwart and the Alliance of Awesome so far don’t have the best track record of actually staying in any game for any period of time. I think this is mostly a multi-gaming thing, and I am just as guilty of it as anyone. Right now I want to play Elder Scrolls Online as well… but I just don’t end up logging in and doing it on a regular basis. So I feel bad for the folks that are over there and playing in relative silence. Once my current crush on Divinity 2 wears off a bit, I will likely return to ESO and try playing that since it is a much less frenetic game.

#Wildstar #DivinityII #Evindra #ElderScrollsOnline