World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 31 of 139

Leadership and MMORPGs

August 6, 2019 by Belghast

This week is in theory “Topic Brainstorming Week”, and at least some part of this is being aware of when you are being gifted a topic. If you simply pay attention to your surroundings, there are topics everywhere. There was a time in this blogs history where I mined topics heavily from game forums and twitter. While reading either there would come moments when I would feel more passionate about a topic than was really possible to put in a post or a tweet. These moments were screaming for me to sit down and write a blog post. The biggest challenge of course is keeping track of those ideas because they often hit at moments when you are not able to sit down at a keyboard and start hacking away at those thoughts.

Yesterday I had one of those moments hit while I was wrapping up for the day. Thankfully I dusted off my grossly outdated Trello and cobbled together enough notes to get me through writing something this morning. Trello is an exceptional tool and Beyond Tannhauser Gate featured an excellent rundown of some of its features yesterday. We personally use it every week to keep track of our Show Notes for AggroChat in part because it allows us to bump topics easily by simply moving the card to the next show. Yesterday I made a few notes in the Aggronaut board along with the links in order to feed into this mornings post.

Yesterday a series of tweets came through that both had very similar themes. In theory if I had to guess Bazgrim saw the first tweet and then created a variant that was less game specific. Regardless they both cover the same ground, which is ways that MMORPG games and the types of interaction had a positive effect on their lives. I took long enough to retweet with a few comments from the first, but I also felt like I had a lot more to say on the subject. As such I jotted something down quickly into Trello and here we are this morning talking about it. For reference the original tweet was from Warcraft Memes and can be found here. Now I am going to hit on some of the points as they relate to me.

Helped with your depression or mental illness / Coping with Loneliness

While I have never been diagnosed, I have struggled my entire life. My mom dealt with periods of depression and suicidal thoughts, and I have struggled with these same dark thoughts at many times during my life. MMORPGs at least in part give me a different world to join and help me to get unstuck in my own thoughts. I can focus on those “wizard chores” as my friend Grace calls them, and forget for at least a moment that I feel like i am completely unraveling as a human being.

There are times when I just can’t simply cope with human interaction, and as such I probably don’t really use MMORPGs to cope with loneliness in the same manner as most people would. However there are times when I am deep in one of my “turtle mode” phases, where simply being reminded that there are other human beings out there as they scurry around me in a major city hub helps. MMORPGs allow me to be alone without really being alone, and they also give me an impetus to reach out to other human beings at times because there are many tasks that cannot be completed without doing so.

Been a place you found lasting friendships / Finding real friends

My first real MMORPG was Everquest and I started playing that in 2001. Over the eighteen years between I have flitted from game to game, and during that process picked up a number of friends in each of them that I still have regular contact with to this day. The whole “Bel’s Party Van” thing came about because of my habit of gathering up people in my wake and trying to drag them along with me to the next thing on the horizon. The truth is I have met an awful lot of my really close friends through blogging as well. For sake of this topic I am just going to run through the list of people that I record the AggroChat podcast with on a weekly basis.

Ammo – We both played World of Warcraft on the same server and met at some point along the way through that. Additionally since that point we have played dozens of other games together and she has been responsible for 99.9% of the Artwork you see on this blog.
Ashgar – We met through another AggroChat member during Cataclysm, when a bunch of people that I had played with in Vanilla came back to Argent Dawn and I gathered them up in my guild. Has become one of my closest friends and we have hung out in person several times at Pax South.
Grace – We met initially through blogging, but I absolutely drafted her into joining the Final Fantasy XIV guild in 2013. Since then we have realized that we suffer from a lot of the same issues, and it is super important to have people in your life who understand that sometimes you cannot handle human interaction, but also want to be able to do stuff.
Kodra – We raided together in Vanilla World of Warcraft, and have been in a lot of different guilds together over the years. We weren’t super close back then but through years of constant interaction have forged a friendship based on shared experience and amicably disagreeing on various topics.
Tamrielo – Was one of the leaders of our Vanilla Raid and also someone that I talked to on a fairly regular basis. In the years between gaming together in WoW, I got adopted into what was then an AOL Instant Messenger chat group and ultimate was the prototype for what would eventually become AggroChat. There are times when it feels like Tam and I are the same person put through vastly different experiences.
Thalen – My dwarven brother. Thalen raided with a different group in World of Warcraft, but this comes from an era when all of the raid groups were friendly with each other. He regularly attended our alt night events, and through many years of that we developed a friendship. He also has been drug along on many of my adventures and I am thankful that he too is someone I have gotten to hang out with in person.

Basically I have a long line of people that I have interacted with and then adopted, and most of these come from MMORPGs. I grew up in a very small town and never quite felt like I really belonged to any sort of engagement that was available to me. However through the internet and especially through online gaming I have found my people in droves. Understanding just how special this is has also lead me to my “collector” behavior where I try and gather folks up and drag them along with me. There are a lot of you that are probably reading this that have been adopted, and probably more that will be adopted at some point in the future. It is a thing I do.

Improved your communication skills and teamwork / leadership

I suppose I have always come across as way more of a reasonable adult than I actually am at any given point. This is in part why I found myself straight out of college in my very first job being thrust into a supervisory role. I was the lead web developer for a fortune 500 company, and was given a team of three people to work under me. Life was fine and dandy up until the point my Boss decided that I needed to punish one of my employees for taking too long of lunch breaks. I was forced to write them up for something I didn’t believe in… and it chafed super hard. From that point forward I purposefully avoided allowing myself to be pushed into a leadership role in the workplace.

When World of Warcraft was shaping up to be the next big thing, I knew I wanted a really good place to hang my hat. I also knew that I had come from a fairly unfortunate situation in Everquest, where the guild leader and his wife more or less dictated what was being done on a nightly basis. The only way that I was certain not to fall into this situation was to start a guild and lead it myself. I gathered up as many friends as I had at the time from a long line of games and sorta pointed them in a single direction. That lead to the founding of House Stalwart a guild that is still alive and kicking in spite of me no longer leading it.

Each time I joined a raid I got thrust into positions of responsibility. I had a former raid leader impart upon me the wisdom that when someone is willing to step up and talk through problems in a raid, that ultimately they are going to be viewed as one of the leaders. So after having two raids blow up on me, I had a friend come to me asking me to take a chance on him. Myself, Dageransus, Elnore and Thalen all founded the Duranub Raiding Company and it thrived up until the point that World of Warcraft placed their hand on the scale creating perks for Raiding Guilds and pretty much dooming the non-Guild alliance.

In all of these situations I was forced to negotiate with other players in order to get the result we needed. This meant dealing with all manner of interpersonal disputes and even breaking out bargaining tactics to make sure that the raid was able to function every single week with 25 capable and smiling faces. We poured over statistics trying to figure out how we could cultivate talent, and minimize the impact of the folks that weren’t really pulling their weight. All of these things happened without having any real power over any of the individuals we were trying to influence. There was nothing at all keeping a player from simply logging out of the game and walking away permanently.

I am not exactly sure when it clicked that I was essentially doing the thing which I had avoided like the plague for most of my career. I was leading people and even having to deal with punishments and reconciliation. A transition started to happen, where I kept being pushed into taking on more responsibility at work, and with it I kept backpedaling away from responsibility in game. These days I am the manager over three different groups of development resources totally sixteen different individuals that I am responsible for. I also regularly get called in to serve on various projects which come with their own management responsibilities.

None of these are things I would have ever felt comfortable doing, had I not years of experience doing the same basic thing in MMORPGs. The problem is… I can’t list 18 years of guild leadership on a resume without getting a bunch of funny looks. The boomer generation isn’t aware of it being equivalent experience. When my friends are going to places like Amazon, Google or Microsoft… they are awake to the realization that leading people is leading people. There will come a time when those hours spent convincing the Mage to give it one more try, will absolutely be resume worthy.

The weird thing is… I have an underground of MMORPG gamers at work. There are a bunch of us that talk about these experiences, and I seemingly have a way of being able to tell when someone plays. When you have been called to lead a group of strangers, it is amazing how much easier it is to lead people you actually know. I have a vested interest in watching these mmo gamers coming up through the ranks, and serving as that mentor that gets what they are choosing to do in their free time. We just lost one recently that was a Mythic raider, and I hope to keep tabs on their career and maybe recruit them back at some point in the future.

The very long story short… MMORPGs made a positive impact upon my life and gave me the confidence to go on and do bigger things in my own career. I feel like they are more of a positive influence on most of the individuals that I know as opposed to being a hindrance. There are so many life skills that get taught one skill point at a time when having to navigate your way through a bunch of other human beings. Once you make your own click moment and understand that what you are doing is the same thing as leadership in any other form, it will start to effect the decisions you make when the game is logged out as well.

A Time Long Gone

March 20, 2019 by Belghast

Last night was largely spent roaming around the ruins of Washington and unlocking things. Seeing as I apparently did things out of the natural flow of the game… I have just now unlocked clans and will have to sort out which one I should join as it appears like there isn’t really a coalescence of my friends in one place other than the clan that Scopique and Traellan are in. Normally speaking I would be joining whatever extension of the AggroChat/Greysky Armada/House Stalwart community that would be erected in a brand new game. The challenge here however is that I know there won’t be one. That group of individuals bounced faster off the first one than I did, and as such I know there is no glorious renewal of interest in the game and with it a flourishing of guild activity. Division 2 is a game that I largely go into knowing that I won’t have the social structures I am used to with the familiar comfortable integrations with other players that I tend to take for granted. I will be blazing a new trail and carving out a new home for myself… and the challenge there is of course which group of friends do I choose.

I already have an invite waiting on me from TBC or The Bloody Clans… a group that dates back to EGA Battletech but I spent most of my time with during Everquest and City of Heroes and have not really spent much time with since. I know TQMB has a presence or Tequila Mockingbird, which was my original Destiny clan and one that I still associate with when I actually play the game on a serious level. There are lots of other pools of friends that vary in level of seriousness about the game, all of which gives me a maze of choices to navigate. This reminds me of a statement that my friend Neph said the other day and while I don’t remember the exact phrasing it was something to the effect of the following. “I can’t wait until everyone is playing the same game again.” While I agree with that desire… especially in a scenario like Division where those of us who are playing the same game are not even under the same banner.

The problem is my statement back to her was that it is likely never going to happen again. I think the era of everyone playing one game is past us… at least for the age bracket most of us are in and for the type of demographic gaming wise that we represent. The era of the big budget AAA MMORPG is long gone, and there just isn’t something exciting enough on the horizon to unite the tribes of gamers together underneath one mutually agreeable digital habitat. If I am being honest with myself the last game that did this was World of Warcraft… and I am not talking modern WoW but instead the series run from Vanilla through the end of Wrath of the Lich King. In my experience that was the heyday of the “It” game that everyone was at the very least dabbling in. It was the era where you could walk up to pretty much any gamer of any stripe and they would be able to tell you what server and faction they were playing. My friend tells a story about an awkward interaction at a birthday party when he goes through a sequence of emotions… first of excitement to find out another one of the dads plays Warcraft… and then disappointment when he finds out they are playing on the opposite faction.

The “It” game for this generation is Fortnite… and before that it was League of Legends… and before that it was Minecraft… all of which more or less left the demographic that most of us are members behind. Even during the heyday of MMORPGs we struggled to ever get everyone to commit to playing a new game. I remember the first big foray was into Warhammer Online, and even then we only managed to muster about fifteen players to try it out of a roster of almost a hundred. The inertia of World of Warcraft was too strong to break most players out of its field of influence. We tried similar jaunts for Champions Online and the one that finally took me away from the game completely for awhile was Rift. The last big successful departure was Star Wars the Old Republic, and even then that only lasted for a few months. With the release of Elder Scrolls Online I drew heavily on social media attempting to pull everyone into the same guild… only to watch it fizzle out after another three months.

Essentially I feel like there will probably never be another game that unites the banners, and that is in part because we as gamers have fragmented and quite honestly are no longer willing to deal with the things we once were. I remember with the launch of World of Warcraft being stuck looting a Kobold in Elwynn Forest for a good 15-20 minutes and simply hard crashing the client and going on with my life. Which is in part why I found it so funny to hear people call the launch of Anthem disastrous, because compared to that it was smooth sailing. We just aren’t willing to deal with the inconveniences that we once were in order to play with gamers online, because that is no longer a novel and unique experience. Everquest was in part popular because it gave us the ability to have lots of our friends together in the same world, whereas before we were limited to somewhere between 4 and 16 players connected to a dedicated server that someone had to run in order to play games together. Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online before that gave us massive persistent worlds for us to explore… and at some point along the line we stopped caring so much about that novelty.

Now almost every game you play has some sort of massively online functionality that pushes other players into your game time. In Assassin’s Creed when another player dies in game it spawns a quest for you to go avenge their death by killing whatever NPCs took them out. This is a functionally single player experience, but it still has hooks into the larger game world to make you feel like you are experiencing things together with your friends… with friends being the loosest definition of that term in this case. The novelty of being online with other people just isn’t the draw that it once was, and as a result we instead are focused on the story or the gameplay or other elements that instead mean we are effectively looking for different things in our gaming experiences.

I’m a grinder… and while I enjoy the story… I am ultimately in a game for the loot and a sense of progression. So I can play games with the scantest of story so long as the moment to moment game-play feels good. Tam on the other hand cannot get behind a game that does not have a story or a game world that he cares about. This ultimately was the line in the sand that kept us both from enjoying Destiny 1/2 because he could not get behind that world or the digging required to find out any of the story. Ash on the other hand is deeply into systems and tends to love games with lots of customization and ability to tweak builds… so something like a Warframe with its systems within systems within systems really resonates with him. Every so often there will be a single game that caters to all of these core desires… but it happens very rarely. While I just outlines motivations for three members of our group… you can imagine what that matrix begins to look like when you expand that to ten people or a hundred people.

Ultimately we want a higher level of fidelity in our games now. We were willing to give something up for the novelty of hanging out online with our friends, but seeing as we are almost constantly connected through Slack, Discord, Twitter, Facebook and countless other little ways… that connectivity no longer is as valuable as it once was. Shit I remember a time when my friend and I used to dial into each others computers and talk over a terminal app just because it was interesting and novel, and now I can message tens of thousands of people in my larger orbit within seconds… and we just consider that the bare minimum for internet connectivity these days. No one builds massive worlds these days where lots and lots of players are connected at the same time… instead everything seems to have shifted away to smaller match based systems with cities serving as lobbies. I personally like the Destiny/Division/Anthem/Monster Hunter style of game play that lets me drop in and out without feeling bad about letting my friends down.

I know this summer we will once again coalesce upon Final Fantasy XIV for the release of the Shadow Bringers expansion. However I know that by the three month mark it too will have dwindled down to only the most die-hard and dedicated of player still playing it. I’ve largely made my peace with the fact that there will likely never again be another World of Warcraft, at least not in that genre. That same magnetism however keeps happening in other genres, so maybe someday down the time fifteen years from now… there will be a re-invigoration of the MMORPG genre. However I think more than anything… we mourn a moment in time where the stars aligned more than we actually mourn a specific game during its period of greatness. Games at the end of the day come down to the people you play them with… and as such I am still stymied by picking who to play Division with.

Fun Police: Portal Division

March 5, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I am taking a break from my normal Anthem love fest to complain about another game. This time it is World of Warcraft something that I have not played since the beginning of November, but am still subscribed to it because I guess my theory is that the urge might hit me again at some point? As such since I am a paying customer I do feel like I’ve earned the right to complain about things from time to time. Now I am one full patch behind and there is a new patch on the PTR that information has been trickling out about on the various data leak sites. I personally found out about this through a conversation between my friends Dom and Gloria, which lead me down the rabbit hole last night of trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

It seems as though the Blizzard Fun Police have struck once more and removed a bunch of portals from Stormwind/Orgrimmar, and cleaned things up a bit in the form of a new “portal room”. I am going to use the Alliance as an example since I have spent more time in my life playing in that area than in the equivalent Cleft of Shadow area in Org. Both the Mages Tower and Cleft of Shadows became the dumping ground for portals that were still useful but not necessarily associated with the current expansion. The newly renovated area now contains the following portals.

The Exodar
Shattrath
Dalaran (Northrend version)
The Jade Forest
Stormshield in Ashran
Azsuna
Boralus

What is missing from this portal area are…

Caverns of Time
Ironforge
Blasted Lands
Pandaria Shrines

If I am reading this correctly on the Wowhead article it also seems as though the axe is being taken to a bunch of the other portal options that had still managed to survive to this point. The other areas that have had a pass by the Fun Police are…

Dalaran (Legion)

IronForge/Thunder Bluff
Darnassus/Undercity
Caverns of Time
Dalaran Crater
Karazhan
The Exodar/Silvermoon City
Shattrath
Wyrmrest Temple
Vale of the Eternal Blossoms

Shrine of the Seven Stars/Two Moons

Shattrath
Dalaran (Northrend)

Dalaran (Northrend)

Caverns of Time

Essentially this is going to leave us with no way of getting to the Caverns of Time quickly… and practically no ways of getting to certain areas of the world quickly. I keep using the words Fun Police on purpose because so much of the decision making that goes into World of Warcraft always feels that way to me as a player. They announce some system that seems awesome at first… but the closer we get to the release of that system there is always some aspect of it that sucks. For example… I remember being super amped about the release of the item appearance collection system to feel Transmogs… but then also being super disappointed when I found out that you could not collect items unless you were on the right class when an item dropped. Similarly the Transmog system itself is just a significantly worse version of the cosmetic systems that other games have had for years that didn’t have weird restrictions placed upon them.

This effects me personally because I still had a good deal of my alts bound at the Shrine of the Seven Stars because it gave me quick access to move around the world and hit the content that I wanted to spend my time doing. It also made farming older raid content for transmog drops simple… given that I HAD to do that now on multiple characters to collect various gear sets for them. What makes all of these feel worse is the grossly out of touch commentary that came along with it from Community Manager Bornakk. The initial response is as follows.

I understand that changes can throw people off a bit at first, but I also think they help keep the world of Azeroth feeling alive. When there are fewer portals, does the world feel a bit bigger to you? Do you like that? How difficult is it to get to the locations you mentioned without a direct portal (talking to everybody who isn’t a mage here 😉 ) ?

The thing is… no it doesn’t make the world feel bigger, it makes the world feel more tedious to move around. There was a time when I had to spend 30 minutes or real time crossing the Ocean of Tears in Everquest. This was not something I considered valuable, and it could be longer than that if you happened to roll up on the docks at exactly the wrong time. This was passive time sitting there either waiting on a boat… or passively riding a boat… and god forbid you alt tabbed to do something else and got engaged in it… and missed either getting on the boat or getting off of it. This did not make Everquest seem like a bigger game… it just made it seem like a game that relished wasting my time. Removing portals from World of Warcraft that were already in place and widely utilized… just tells me that this game does not respect my time as the player. The horrible response was followed up with a possibly even worse one.

I wasn’t being sarcastic. Apologies to you and others who felt I was dismissing them in any way.

For how I personally play and enjoy games, I like when I feel like I need to travel for a few minutes to get somewhere. For me, it is more rewarding when I complete the task that way and I wouldn’t want to be able to get everywhere instantly but there is a good medium to find (but continuing to pile up various teleporting items feels strange). Traveling over large areas reminds me of how vast the world is and I often reminisce while flying on a flight path or a mount. Sometimes I have even just used the port to Timeless Isle and taken the flight path to Shrine (instead of going straight there) as I can enjoy the view and relax.

That being said, I know I can be a bit strange and I’m often not bothered by things that bother others – that’s why I ask a lot of questions. I want to understand the different play styles and opinions of others so I can better discuss them both with you and internally. Getting to the fundamental impact is important for me as the solution sometimes requires a different approach. Hopefully I can avoid the feeling that I’m just talking at you and want to be talking with you. Cheers!

I am glad that Bornakk enjoys having their time wasted. However I feel like that maybe shouldn’t be the scale by which we judge content? I realize we all have hot button issues that don’t bother others… for example I have talked at length about how much I hate item management… and then Bhagpuss will come along and talk about how organizing his inventory is his happy time. While that discussion can be esoteric, and I have addons to help me clean my bags… limiting access to the world by removing portals feels significantly less esoteric. Gloria also brought up the point that I immediately thought of last night… in that Final Fantasy XIV is a game that feels massive in scale, but it is also a game that has instant travel to any number of Aether crystals that are scattered conveniently around the world. The vastness is not harmed by the fact that I don’t have to start in Gridania and travel by Chocobo to all of the destinations in the shroud. The scale of the world still seems extremely impressive as I am popping my way into conveniently located hubs that allow me to play the game in the manner that I want when I want to play it.

Now I realize this is not the first time that Blizzard has come along and axed a bunch of portals. I raged against the action the last times it happened, and I am no less annoyed today than I was back then. I think it is a dumb call… but I continued playing the game because there were other aspects that I really did like in spite of the frustrating decisions that kept being made. I’ve talked to my friend Grace at length about this… that while I keep one foot back in the community to keep tabs on what is going on… I seem to only see the bad in the actions that they are taking right now. Battle for Azeroth was an expansion that went completely in the opposite direction that I would have wanted it to go coming down from the high point that was Legion. Legion pretty much dethroned Wrath of the Lich King as my favorite expansion that Blizzard has ever done… and in many ways it is because of the focus on class fantasy and giving us a bunch of interesting and unique content tailored towards that specific fantasy.

Battle for Azeroth… other than the cool troll and loa storyline… has been a pretty hollow experience that I keep finding plenty of excuses not to return to. Limiting my access to the one thing that did seem appealing… which was farming transmog gear in older areas of the world… really doesn’t help that desire to return. However as a player, watching the game go down a path I have no interested in going… I am mournful of the version of World of Warcraft that I did love. I would love to see a complete change in attitude within the WoW team and a focus on the fun rather than frustrations. However much like the fact that at 42 years old I am pretty set in my ways… a game that is 14 years old is fairly doomed to keep traveling on the same heading. As such I think this is another title that I can add to the list like Dark Age of Camelot and the original Everquest… that I remember fondly… but have no desire at all to return to.

Packed Weekend

November 5, 2018 by Belghast

I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.

Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.

I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.

I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.

Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.

Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.

As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.