Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Corrupted Azoth Tree

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Good Morning Friends! It was a wild weekend between the Muskrat and Twitter and the fact that my Mastodon 4.0 instance that I love… is unsustainably popular. On Friday afternoon Stux the admin of Mstdn.social closed the doors when we crossed the 100,000-user threshold. He had been advised by his host that they could not reasonably scale up that instance any further. Unfortunately he did not also close down the ability for users to send out invites to their friends… and as I have talked about before when it comes to MMORPG servers… it is extremely important to be in the same place as your friends. The end result is that another 11,000 invites went out before finally shutting down that loophole.

So unfortunately things are sluggish as hell and the timeline on the server has been running roughly an hour behind real-time as an army of worker processes churn furiously through messages. Stux also manages Mastodon.Coffee which is his attempt at creating an English language only server, and due to the overloading of Mstdn spawned a brand new server called Masto.Ai. I’ve been sitting here this morning trying to decide if I do the right thing for the community to lessen the load and migrate over… or if I just deal with it until enough people get frustrated to drop the total number of active messages. I had hoped the next time I migrated would be to something I was running for myself. I recently picked up Aggro.Chat for such a potential project but don’t have any of the pieces in place yet. It feels like running your own instance is the Fediverse equivalent of Homeownership.

Apart from social media nonsense, I’ve been spending as much of my time as possible doing super chill things in New World. Saturday morning was a delightful time as I chilled out talking on the Fediverse while running my favorite Iron routes. I am not entirely certain why I go off on tangents but suddenly I decided to catch my Engineering up to Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing. Essentially for leveling purposes, I am opting to only use a single high-tier material at a time. Most patterns have a required item… so for example, if you are making a Starmetal sword, you MUST include Starmetal into that pattern, but the other types of materials are variable and you can even use the lowest tier available. This means since I am leveling up Engineering on Wyrdwood at the moment, I am going to use nothing but the lowest-tier leather, cloth, and metal. That also means that I still need to run those lower-tier routes that I find so relaxing.

At this point, both Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing are over 150, which means I can make high-end Orichalcum items but lack the skill to really reliably hit anything of significant item level. Engineering is rapidly catching up and one more push should take me up to 150. Logging is so tedious, but right now my jam tends to be throwing on a YouTube video and grinding away peacefully. I’m using a few specific banks as swap space for current projects, and everything else… is crammed wherever I have room. At some point, I need to set up a system as I have over on Valhalla where specific banks are for specific items. Maybe I should log in there and scribble down a list of what went where so I can copy the methodology to Themiscyra. I’ve legitimately not logged into Valhalla at all since the re-roll, nor have I really had the desire to do so.

I’ve also been out exploring a lot and with that have come some interesting drops. Firstly it appears that every single named mob still has a chance of dropping pretty much any legendary crafting item. So far I’ve gotten pieces for a bow, blunderbuss, and void gauntlet, and unfortunately none of the items that I really care about deeply. Thankfully for Sword, Greatsword, and Shield I picked up the Item Level 600 patterns from the Halloween event. One thing that I really enjoy is how noticeable it is now when you get a named item drop. They all have a bright outline on the item as shown above and have a glowing effect. Essentially when you see an item like this, they will always drop with the same stats and can in theory be farmed from that specific boss.

There are a bunch of really weird places in the world. We all know there is the giant Azoth tree in Brightwood that is guarded by the Angry Earth folks. There is a grove full of not-quite Azoth trees down in Edengrove, which are also guarded by Angry Earth. However in Mourningdale, there is this weird glowing tree that has been corrupted with a bunch of miners working around it, and I am wondering if it also used to be one of the giant Azoth trees like from Brightwood. It makes me wonder what that area of Mourningdale might have looked like before it was corrupted. Would it have also been something more akin to Edengrove?

Speaking of Edengrove, there are a few places where it is just breathtaking to view the various monuments that dot the valley. I’ve not gotten as into the lore of New World as I have other games, but my working theory is that Edengrove and more particularly the Garden of Genesis is the heart of what remains of the original civilization that claimed Aeternum it’s home. The Angry Earth is all that remains and now guards once-sacred areas against the intruders that have come to the shores over generations. New World has clear indications of areas that were settled by different civilizations, but Edengrove has always seemed like it is much older and features a glimpse at maybe what the entire island looked like once before the attempts at colonization.

I’m continuing to largely play in cycles of either going out into the world and gathering resources or sitting down and grinding through crafting levels. This seems to be a really good pattern for me, but soon now that Ace and Vern have hit level 60… it will be time to go out exploring some of the more dangerous areas. I’ve quested through most of Ebonscale Reach and am working on clearing out Edengrove… which would lead me to start on Reekwater next. The money fountain has dried up a bit, only because the quests themselves take much longer to complete and there are far fewer of them. I still have that strong desire however to make the yellow quest markers disappear from my world map.

I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What are you playing currently? Drop me a line below.

What You Know about New World is Wrong

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New World launched to great acclaim on September 28th of 2021, and then almost immediately took a massive nose dive into infamy. It suffered through economy-breaking gold duplication bugs, combat-breaking bugs that gave players nigh invulnerably, and a wide arrange of PVP siege bugs that caused territories to flip to whoever was cheating the hardest. It suffered from a horrible server design and a lack of a steady hand at the wheel that caused actions to land too little too late and made it nearly impossible to be able to play on the same server as your friends. The overcorrection caused them to suddenly spin up almost three hundred servers… most of which were rapidly empty and incapable of doing any form of group content. The game plummeted from a peak concurrency of just shy of one million players down to an all-time low of just under thirteen thousand players.

This is the New World that players think they know, as outlined in the “New World – Timeline of a Failure” YouTube video by Josh Strife Hayes. In fact, I presented my own string of blog posts lamenting the sorry state of affairs and what I would do to fix them. The game was in exceptionally rough shape and I even thought at several points it was largely unfixable. The thing is… I was wrong and most of the major points that I had have been addressed and vastly improved. However it was while watching a contorted “reactionception” video of Gaming Kinda reacting to ZeplaHQ who was reacting to Ginger Prime’s 5 reasons why he is choosing New World over FFXIV video… that I realized how wrong the community has it. The game that was actively being memed on by Zelpa’s chat just no longer exists.

This is how we land at the somewhat provocative title of this post. If you have been following the game closely, then sure you probably know the score. However, for most of you, I would imagine that you tuned out by this time last year and never looked back. New World however has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance and with it a resurgence of players coming back to the game. This is well earned because over the past year the team has put in the work and made significant changes to the way that the game functions. At the time of posting this, the game has experienced a 24-hour peak of 119,390 players, while also slowly pushing up their average player numbers. Nature is healing itself… or at least the game has been.

It is at this point that I am going to address some of my own complaints made in my 11/15 New World Concerns post. In that post, I made a series of accusations about the game, and most of them have been resolved in some way. So this morning I am going to go point by point and address them. If you would rather just see a list of the major changes, then I highly suggest this video from Demone Kim.

Point 1 – Bad Support Structure for New Players

This one was one of my less cogent points, but largely I felt like it was very difficult for new players to progress through the game. The main story was gated at several points behind dungeons that required you to find a group in order to run them. The scarcity of keys and lack of rewards for higher-level players made it very hard to find anyone willing to do said dungeons.

In New World now dungeons as a whole are far more rewarding to players. I ran through the very first dungeon the other day and was just handed a bag with 1000 gold in it for completing it. In addition to that, I got a number of rare crafting materials that can only be obtained from that dungeon, and weirdly enough even at the higher level I ran it… I found a significant upgrade. Dungeon keys have also been eliminated from the game for normal dungeons, so there is no “cost” real or otherwise to run that dungeon with your friends, and as a result, it seems like they are a bit easier to get going.

On top of that, the New World team has completely revamped the new player experience and not only added better quests and significantly more of them… but also alternate paths that you can take to avoid needing to do any of the dungeons. At any point the game would have normally asked you to do a dungeon, you can get an alternate version of that quest that is open-world and easily completed solo. Previously you were effectively required to do Town Board quests in order to get enough experience, and now… I was level 40 before I even chose my faction. The world gives you so much experience both from questing but also just gathering materials, that you are going to consistently be over level for any of the content allowing you to mostly steamroll it.

Point 2 – High-End Materials Are Worthless

New World suffered from this problem that players were farming the high-end materials at length because the only truly profitable items were extremely rare drops that required you to be wearing a set of luck armor in order to obtain them. The spectrum of resources was flipped on its head meaning all of the Tier 1 resources were extremely expensive and all of the Tier 5 resources were dirt cheap.

This was in part resolved by upending the crafting system and completely replacing it with something that made more sense. Previously the most efficient way to level a crafting profession was to craft 300,000 level 1 items. That is a bit of an exaggeration for impact purposes, but suffice it to say players ground through copious amounts of low-level resources to slowly tick their levels up. This drove up the value of Iron and down the value of Orichalcum, for example. Now the most efficient way to level is to always be crafting the best items that you can make. This gives purpose to all of the tiers of resources and lowers some of the pressure on that first tier. Additionally, they made almost all tiers of resources more plentiful, especially the last two tiers creating way more potential for farming Starmetal and Orichalcum for example, which the crafters now actually need.

Point 3 – Unobtainium Problem

Connected to the points above, the high-end materials were farmed not because people needed that much Orichalcum, but instead because they wanted to rare drops that could come from them. In order to combat this, you can now craft rare drops from a given tier of resource… by just pouring raw resources into them. Do you have a pattern that requires Fae Iron? Well, you can now just pour 50 Iron Ore into crafting a single Fae Iron. While it is a significant loss of resources it gives you a deterministic way of getting the resources you need rather than relying on luck alone. This changes the equation on a lot of materials and also serves to make the rare drops from nodes feel like a bonus rather than something you are grinding away for.

Point 4 – One Shot Group Quests

Previously there was an issue where like dungeon quests, there were a number of group quests scattered throughout the game that would require you to find a team in order to survive. The problem was that these areas could only be entered once, meaning that if you did not keep up to the same level quest-wise with your friends, you could find yourself locked out in the cold. Unfortunately, this is still a bit of a problem, in that you have to be on the quest in order to get into these areas. However, none of the bosses contained within these areas require a group and are now easily soloable even if you are using something like Healing Staff.

Point 5 – Item Watermarking

At launch, there was a system in the game called the “High Watermark” system that required you to get drops in order to push up your average drop range. This was an invisible system that mostly required people to keep track of their drops via spreadsheet… or simply keep the highest version of every slot in their inventory. This was sheer madness and honestly… the system still exists. It has been converted over to the Expertise system instead, which gives you a visible readout of where your item level is. Getting upgrades are guaranteed through running the end-game dungeons and there are also a number of ways to collect “gypsum” which can be converted into a guaranteed upgrade every day. These two combined have made the process of watermarking far less egregious and no longer require you to farm the same boss for sixty hours trying to farm incremental upgrades.

I still think the gear score system and watermarking are somewhat dumb processes, but it is more something that just happens on its own now instead of something you have to purposefully grind for.

Point 6 – Crafters Don’t Have Influence

This point was also a little contorted, but the problem being addressed was that crafters and PVE players in general had little control over the “health” of a given territory. This was made important for a lot of reasons that led players to essentially set up camp in a single town and then never leave it, making them entirely reliant upon whoever controls that territory. So a ton of small changes went into effect to chip away at this relationship, the first being that travel is now practically free with a maximum azoth cost of 20 and no longer takes into account your current weight. Next, they made it so you can access your storage in one town from any other town for free, making it way less important for you to focus all of your efforts on a single territory.

In order to lower the negative effects of territory changing hands, the team capped the taxes in a territory and also took a number of steps to make it so that every territory is viable instead of just Everfall and Windsward. When a company gets gold for holding a territory, it is a calculated amount based on how far progressed that territory is, making it beneficial for them to make sure all of the crafting machines are upgraded as far as they can be. Lastly, there is a change that is currently on the PTR that will make it so any “base” crafting items no longer require specific tiers of machines so you will be able to level freely regardless of how progressed a specific town is. You will still need higher tiers for specialty patterns, but since most of what you craft while leveling are base items… you can effectively do that anywhere now.

So while they implemented none of my ideas, the problems that needed addressing are more or less fixed now.

Point 7 – 2000 Player Limit / Fixed Servers

Technically this was the first point in my post, but I reordered them on purpose because I did not want to start on a downer. While most servers have been bumped up to 2500 players… this is very much not a solved problem. We even encountered this issue on our recent re-roll. Given that all of the above changes have been implemented over the last year, it tells me that the server infrastructure is a bit harder to tackle. We tried to make the best choices we could possibly make for choosing a place to re-roll on, and still ran into an issue where the server got locked out against new characters or transfers for a week.

This has now largely resolved itself, but it will always be a challenge guaranteeing that you can play on exactly the server that you want to play on. This is really the remaining Achilles heel of New World and something that I hope they can resolve in the near future. They are adding a cross-server queue for Outpost Rush, and it sounds like they are working on ways to do a cross-server group finder as well. So hopefully bit by bit they will start to chip away at this problem so that you can play with your friends regardless of what server you might end up on.

With this post what I am trying to get across is the concept that the game is not the same game that was openly memed into oblivion a year ago. I was one of the game’s harshest critics, and you can go back through my blog and read a number of posts where I was terribly disappointed and frustrated. However, I hung in there because there were certain aspects of the game that I enjoyed and just were not being replicated anywhere else. If you already own the game, you owe it to yourself to start a new character and see the game with fresh eyes. I am so happy I did precisely this because I am honestly having more fun now than I did even in the best of times at launch.

I am spending my time over on the Themiscyra server in US-East and playing a character named Belglaive. Character names are unique for the game as a whole, and as a result, Belghast is already over on Valhalla because I could not bring myself to delete my original character. if you happen to check it out ping me in-game.

Buzzer Beater

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Good Morning Friends. I am what I would prefer as a buzzer-beater. I get things done, but almost always end up doing them right before the deadline. I am the sort of employee that drives their managers insane when it comes to compliance items. If you tell me something is due on a specific date, I interpret it as being done at the close of business on that date and will hand it in without fail at the last minute. It is this way with seasonal events in video games, and last night I finally got around to checking out the Halloween event in New World. You technically can receive the quest at 35, but given how fast I got my ass handed to me by the roaming 60s I decided I would come back later. The problem is that “later” never really happened until last night.

When the fight begins properly you have a big boss called Baalphazu and a few types of smaller adds that spawn around it. The most common are these little pumpkins, which you can destroy and get a pumpkin bomb that you can throw at the boss. Essentially I think the plan is for those who are lower level to be picking up the pumpkin bombs and chucking them at the boss, which lowers its defenses and starts a burn phase. The larger challenge with that however is when it is doing a burn phase, it is also dealing massive AOE damage. The strategy seems to be to dogpile everyone on the boss and throw down enough healing circles to allow everyone to effectively shrug off the damage. When it worked it went well and 30-40 players showed up at the spawn point. When it did not go well, we struggled to burn down the boss until reinforcements arrived.

There were a number of rewards for the event that now makes me wish I had started this a bit earlier. There were three helmets, the one shown above, a pumpkin head, and a witches hat. There was also an armor set featuring a chest piece and helm that are designed to make you look like Baalphazu, as well as a “pumpkinling” that you could get for your home. The bigger reward is that after you had completed the event a few times you got enough faction with the vendor and could start buying item-level 600 weapon patterns. I ran enough of the event yesterday to pick up the cosmetics and greatsword, sword, and shield crafting patterns. Doing the event drops bags of loot that contained the lower-end versions of the weapon patterns, and I believe I managed to get one of those for all the other slots. All told it was a good event and I wish it was sticking around a bit longer, and that more level range variety could have easily participated.

Other than that I continue to quest my way through the game. Right now I have a few competing goals the first of which is to continue harvesting up all of my banks full of material so I can do another massive crafting session. The next is to gather up gold and territory standing so that I can purchase a Tier 4 house in either Brightwood or Mourningdale. Weirdly on my server… the guild that controls Brightwood seems to not care much about leveling up that territory so I am starting to lean heavily toward Mourningdale. Whatever the case I have to hit 30 faction in that territory in order to unlock that max-tier home. I think I am about to wrap up questing in Mourningdale, and not certain where the game will send me next. I would assume more than likely it would be Ebonscale Reach.

In other news… I lost yet another lottery in Final Fantasy XIV. I know a while back I said I was hopping off the lottery train, and I did for a few rounds… but alas I am back to doing the four-day wait. I do not understand why Square did not seize the opportunity with the Island Sanctuary to give us all an instanced housing plot. That seems like it would have been perfect to just have those hidden among the island somewhere and function essentially like a housing district for one. Right now on my server at least, it seems we are all vying for the same plot each week, so the likelihood of me ever winning one is pretty minimal.

If nothing else I guess it gets me logging into the game every week, though I almost always stay parked at the placard awaiting the sad trip back into the game when the results are posted.

Dragonflight Launch Schedule

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Good Morning Friends! I tweet-threaded some thoughts yesterday that I thought I would expand into a proper blog post. As we slide into the launch of the Dragonflight World of Warcraft expansion, I have to admit that I have some complicated thoughts about it. I immensely enjoyed my time spent in both Alpha and Beta testing. More specifically I thought the directed testing that took place prior to the start of Beta was extremely valuable because it set a clear focus for every play session. With those constraints, I set my focus on completing a single zone at a time and each week finished the task on at least one character. As a result at this point, I have largely seen all of the leveling content and enjoyed most of it.

Unfortunately without that direction and drive… when the game effectively turned over control to me, I struggled to find traction. Previously I was playing with a clear mission of testing the content and now that I was left to my own devices, I really didn’t have much forward momentum. I think on some level I just don’t find the World of Warcraft style of gameplay nearly as engaging as I once did. Over the last few years, my personal preferences have shifted more towards action combat and away from more strictly hotbar combat. I think this is also why my whole “level everything to 80” burnt me to a crisp in Final Fantasy XIV and why after finishing the main story there I have not really returned other than the stalk housing properties.

I think this is more a tale of shifts in my own tastes and less a tale of expansion quality. What I was able to experience and play through, makes me feel deeply like Dragonflight is going to go down as one of the better World of Warcraft expansions. I don’t think it will rank up there quite as high as say Legion, which now sits at the pinnacle for me, but I do think it is going to be better than a Shadowlands or Battle for Azeroth. The only thing that still concerns me is that the zones don’t feel anywhere near as intricate. Part of what I liked so much about Legion is that it took everything that Warlords of Draenor attempted and expanded upon them. I like zone events, treasures, and minibosses that all reward good stuff. Maybe there has been a micro objective pass that I have not fully experienced in-game, but last week when I was playing the world still felt very spartan.

I think there are a lot of interesting things happening with the expansion. While everything goes really hard on the whole Dragon thing, and you pretty much have to like Dragons to enjoy that deeply… there are enough fringe world-building things going on that make me wonder about the direction the entire game is going. I’ve never particularly cared about the Dragon Flights, and my interest in them cratered with Cataclysm, and how Alexstraza did not remember us from Wyrmrest temple when we were questing for her in Twilight Highlands. I feel like there are a lot of plot threads once thought resolved… are about to become unresolved again. What World of Warcraft has lacked is a clear story that carries forward from expansion to expansion and I hope this might be the beginning of that.

Mechanically I think the new talent trees are excellent. While they did not give me back my previous gladiator stance, left enough on the table for me to build a really fun protection warrior. I enjoyed Blood Deathknight and Protection Paladin as well, so it was going to be one of those expansions where I had trouble deciding upon a main. I probably would have landed back on the Warrior since it has such a special place in my heart. The bigger challenge would have been to determine if I was going to play the OG Belghast which is a Human, or the more modern Belghast which is an Orc. While I like the general community Horde side quite a bit better, I have to say I will probably always have strong Alliance leanings.

This time around there is this interesting staggered launch, where as of this past Tuesday the pre-patch landed featuring the new talent trees and a precursor questline. On the 15th, in a few weeks the new race/class will be playable. Then the 28th the official launch day happens with the gates opening on the Waking Shores. This all makes me realize that I will not be playing Dragonflight at launch, in spite of largely enjoying myself in testing. I know that with a World of Warcraft expansion there will be a certain measure of FOMO associated with it. My entire social timeline will likely erupt in nothing but Warcraft talk for a few weeks, and honestly, I look forward to seeing everyone geeking out on the game. I also know that it is highly unlikely that I will be joining them.

Even if we push past my complicated feelings about Blizzard, I am just not sure this is the game I want to be playing right now. I have a lot more games that I would rather be devoting my time towards, given that it is very unlikely that I would want to be raiding anyways. I have a long list of things that I would like to accomplish in Guild Wars 2, and I would like to give Final Fantasy XIV a chance to enspell once again with the post-Endwalker story. I am just not really connected to the World and story of Warcraft anymore, and while I have guild families that would accept me back… I also don’t really feel that longing to join them right now. I do know enough people who are wrapped up in the game though that I truly hope this is the good expansion that I think it is going to be for them.

In the short term, I am still deeply engaged with my New World reroll. It features that action-style combat that I seem to be favoring right now, and last night I dinged 60 and started working on gearing. I also ran through a dungeon with the guild which was extremely fun, and I am hoping as folks level we can do some of the interesting outdoor content that is focused on a single team. I think on some level I need to reach a place where it is okay for me to wave from the sidelines as the float goes by. There is a version of me that would absolutely be trying to claw my way up onto the float to keep the excitement rolling… but instead, it is probably way more healthy to set my own interests and my own pace.

So for now as we approach the Dragonflight launch, I will be waving at you all from the sidelines.