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Three of Coins Problem

May 17, 2016 by Belghast

The Ultra Knight

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Last night while making yet another trip to the Dreadnaught just to kill the Ultra Knight, I started thinking about what a glorious debacle the situation of exotic drop rates are in Destiny. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game… and they have made so many great strides over the last year into truly making it an amazing place to be. The problem is… they are seemingly inches away from landing on the target but nonetheless not quite there. The problem currently centers around making doing content feel rewarding. I completely blame the recent Iron Banner for giving me more hope than I probably should have had. During that weekend I had a single activity that I wanted to be doing, as often as I could… and that was queuing for more Iron Banner. During the weekend I managed to make it to Rank 5 on all three of my characters, and the primary motivation was the acquisition of loot. Sitting in queue and playing a match felt like quite literally the best use of my time because I knew that every four or five matches I would be rewarded with some shiny bauble that either would replace my current item in that slot or serve as infusion fodder.

Once that weekend ended however it feels like I simply don’t have an activity like that that is equally rewarding. There is of course Challenge of Elders, but the Challenge requires you to gather together a fireteam to really have a chance at completing it. We have absolutely made a date on Thursday nights to try and get our various characters through CoE but the problem is… what do I do with the rest of my time in game. I am largely a soloist, and it feels like I don’t have a similarly valuable activity that feels like I am spending my time wisely. So as a result that activity ends up being heading to the Dreadnaught every 10-15 minutes to kill the Ultra Knight, so that I can consume yet another Three of Coins buff… and every fifth kill or so get an Exotic Engram, which may or may not decode to 335 light and help me push the goal forward. In fact there are so many times that I will be playing another game like Diablo or last night World of Warcraft… where I take a break every 15 minutes or so and log into my PS4 via the Remote Play app with the sole purpose of rushing to the Ultra Knight and attempting to get that exotic engram.

Lies of Xur

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The problem is that this isn’t really an enjoyable feedback loop and feels like a hacked workaround to solve core problems in the actual gameplay. In theory that default thing I could be doing with my time should be either the Crucible or Vanguard play lists. Those are activities that need players doing them to keep the game thriving. However instead of getting interesting things while doing these activities, it feels like they solely serve the purpose of being a vehicle for me to spend Three of Coins buffs. Then there is the problem of strikes like Dust Palace and Omnigul not actually removing the buff and triggering the potential of an exotic drop. Then there is also the problem of Xur, where he is supposed to be this trader that sometimes brings us amazing things. However for most of us, Friday is simply the occasional that finally allows us to restock our Three of Coins and nothing he has to offer is actually interesting. This is because it feels like if you are doing any activity in this game, and you don’t have the Three of Coins buff active, you are playing the game completely wrong.

There is a lot of talk about Bungie summoning the Diablo developers to talk about the lessons they learned with the “Loot 2.0” patch. One of the key lessons seems to have been lost in translation. Diablo currently has a Three of Coins like effect when it comes to Legendary drops, but the difference is… it is always active. In theory if you are actively playing the game you should be seeing a Legendary drop at least every 10-15 minutes with the chance going up significantly based on the difficulty of the activity you are tackling. This means that doing literally anything from killing a level 1 mob to killing a boss has a chance of summoning a Legendary drop. This is how things should ultimately work inside of Destiny, because going out into the world and doing activities should feel like the most rewarding activity. You remember every time you get a drop from a boss, but no one remembers that one time the Cryptarch happened to give them something interesting. It feels like Destiny needs to reconsider the way loot works in the game, and make it so that Strikes, Crucible, Nightfall, Prison of Elders, and Raids are the default thing that players want to go and do, rather than simply finding any vehicle for flipping that Ultra kill switch. I also think there should be that random snowballs chance in hell of quite literally ANY mob out in the world dropping a super rare Exotic Engram, or even one of the good Legendaries at a decent light level. Bungie needs to drive players into the feedback loop of doing group activities, because the activities are fun but also the best possible way for them to get rewards.

Flowers for Garou

May 16, 2016 by Belghast

More Flora

It feels really strange to follow up yesterdays post. Those were a bunch of things that I felt like I needed to get out there, and to be honest about the doubt that I had been struggling with. As it stands right now I am for certain taking a break over Memorial Day weekend rather than either pre-writing posts or arranging for guest posts. I am also contemplating starting to make weekends optional. Sunday is really the day that becomes madness for me because I am also scurrying around that morning trying to wrap up the various stuff required for posting an episode of aggrochat. As far as this weekend, it was honestly one without a ton of gaming. Instead I spent a large amount of time hanging out in the backyard. Scope creep is a term we use in development when a project has gone beyond its boundaries in the number of features the user is requesting. Our backyard has long since entered scope creep territory and that’s okay. The original goal was just to make it more livable, and this has involved a whole sequence of smaller steps leading up to where we are today. Once again I took a panorama of the progress, and you can see the larger version here.

We have now kept the original batch of flowers alive and actually thriving for two weeks now… so of course we doubled down on the proposition. We spent a bit of Saturday afternoon tracking down more of the shepherds hooks so that we could have matching ones to the ones we had picked up at ALDI a few weeks back. The other night while walking with a friend, my wife saw a hanging basket at a near by pop up nursery that she really liked. We also happened to have a coupon from that same pop-up that if we spent $20 we could get a free hanging basket, so the end result is us adopting the purple, yellow and white hanging baskets and adding them to my “flower babies” as I have taken to calling them. The only big things left are to wait on the grass to finish filling in where the weed treatments left barren patches… and so far it has started. Then there is of course the idea kicking around about replacing the table we have with something that sits a little lower to the ground and that we could use our pseudo-Adirondack chairs with. Then I am contemplating getting another of the umbrellas we found on sale to go in a post on the far deck side of the pool to add a little shade there from within the pool. Like I said…. scope creep abounds.

The most interesting piece of scope creep over the last week however is the fact that we have entered the realm of bird stewardship. I’ve not been able to take a great shot of them but we have soooo many birds. In the panoramic shot you can see on the right side that I have a feeder hanging in among the tree that is really an overgrown hedge. I’ve begun feeding fairly regularly, a first a blend from the Audubon soceity and later a bulk blend we got from Sam’s that fairly closely matched the nutritional mix of the first one. Sunday morning while watering the flowers I filled the feeder up to roughly the halfway mark because it was ultimately what was left in the 40 pound bag after dumping the rest into a tightly sealed container. This was at roughly 9 am… by the time we were out in the yard after my wife got home from church around 11 am… the feeder was completely empty again. There have been times I have counted a dozen tiny sparrows feeding at the same time, with a bunch of cardinals, bluejays, and various sundry other birds that I cannot yet identify roaming around. We have a couple that look like doves of some sort, and another couple that look like pidgeons. Basically the entire time we have lived here I have wanted birds to hang out in the backyard and in the evenings I have been able to watch the baby sparrows hop and play around on the deck. Unfortunately they are all pretty skittish at the moment, except for the Robins… they seem more than happy to roam within close distance of us looking for worms. In any case… this is the non-gaming activity that is taking up a good chunk of my time. On the weekends and evenings we tend to eat outdoors hanging out in our rockers watching the flora and fauna. Yup… I am officially old, but not minding a minute of it.

Surprising Whim

Most of my weekend gaming was spent in Diablo 3, doing various things… and largely without purpose. I managed to get my stash tab on Friday, and from this point on everything else is gravy in Season 6. For awhile now even before the season, Diablo was the game I played when I didn’t know what else to play… and I spent a huge chunk of the weekend not knowing what else to play. Normally Destiny would fill this niche but I didn’t really want to hang out upstairs when the couch was so damned comfy. During the weekend I found out that my good friends Chestnut and Chaide from Wildstar have decided to re-up World of Warcraft, and the glory that is our collective community managed to recruit them to hang out on Argent Dawn Alliance with us. I ended up logging in to do some invites last night and wound up sticking around and playing my Druid. There was a part of me that thought… wouldn’t it be glorious if I could somehow ride into Legion with a full army of level 100 characters. The actual leveling game of World of Warcraft is something that I have enjoyed greatly… it is just the Garrison busywork that ends up getting me down and making me no longer want to play.

So the idea is simple… if I can focus heavily on leveling and or gearing my characters I might be able to get back into the game for a bit. While watching my Sunday night shows, I managed to push from 91 to 93 and make a big dent in Shadowmoon Valley. Normally speaking I take this abbreviated path around Draenor, jumping each time a new zone opens up to me. This time around however I think I am going to just focus on the questing, because that is the thing that seems to be able to hold my focus even when the rush to end game doesn’t. I mean with this character I am not pushing to get anywhere, and Hellfire Citadel feels stifling at the moment so I am in no rush to get back there with LFR. As it stands I have my Druid, Priest, Rogue, Mage, Warlock and Monk to level… and I am sure that this current burst of interest in World of Warcraft won’t probably sustain my way through all of them, but I might be able to at least springboard this into a renewed interest in MMOs as a whole. The absolute hardest for me is going to be the Mage because… really I could care less about finger wigglers and the least is always the pure finger wigglers. I can pretend the Discipline Priest is a cloth tank, and I can focus on the awesome demon pets on the Warlock. However with that mage… all I am left with is the fact that I am slinging spells which never really feels amazing. Anyways who knows how long I will be around for, but I enjoyed myself last night.

E1M1

May 14, 2016 by Belghast

Doomed

Awhile back I wrote about my feelings regarding the Doom multiplayer tests on both the PC and PS4. It felt so much like they had missed the mark, and it seemed very much like someone trying to recreate the experience of the original Doom… without realizing that certain parts of that experience were due to a limit in the ability of the technology at the time. The experience just was not fun, and that is the most scathing indictment you can honestly give any game. So as a result I had for the most part decided to ignore that there was ever a Doom 4… or in this case a weird reboot. Then yesterday I started seeing the first impressions of the single player campaign come in, and they were positive enough that I thought I would take a look for myself. Even though at this point I have only really played an hour and a half of the game, I am glad I wound up grabbing it. The impressions I had of the multiplayer were correct, in that this is an attempt to boil the game down to its original roots. While this doesn’t really work for a multiplayer experience, it does work really well for single player. The game functions in a way that you don’t really see games function in recent years, in that the game is not open world. It is a series of closed loop levels that are designed to be approached as a single map. The first one is quite literally E1M1 as the title of this blog post suggests, borrowing the same naming as the original Doom. They are a closed puzzle that needs to be solved and involves opening a familiar series of Blue, Yellow and Red key card areas to progress through.

The combat itself is also really interested and reminds me of the way these games used to play, where you would have a truly frenetic amount of enemies spawn in on you and have to deal with them rapidly. However once you dealt with that room you were granted time to roam around the area freely before moving ahead and engaging the next set. In many ways it reminds me of the way that the Painkiller games felt, where each room is this challenge to survive and then you restock your ammunition and health in an attempt to prepare for the next such room. What helps make this manageable is the games “Glory Kill” system. When mob is near death it will glow slightly and stagger around letting you know that you can sweep in and with the F key engage a sequence where you do an almost Mortal Kombat like fatality. Sometimes you rip the head off of the monster, other times you rip the arm off and beat it with it. Other than just being a carnal ballet, they serve the purpose of giving you life or ammunition back allowing you to keep up the killing streak a little longer. I found it very needed for getting through some of the later rooms. Often times the mobs will spawn in with such number that you have to keep running around the room to avoid getting wrecked. The imps are also more frustrating than they have ever been with their ability to hang off the edge of things and gun you down with their fireballs.

Nothing Will Save You

Unlike the original Doom, there is no “save game” that you can rely on. Instead there are a sequence of Checkpoints that unlock as you go through the level. When you die you either fall back to the last check point or restart the level in its entirety. These checkpoints generally coincide with the various lulls in the action that I talked about. The only frustrating thing is that they sometimes encompass several rooms worth of encounters. I ultimately stopped last night playing because I died and rolled back to a check point a few rooms back… and simply didn’t have the strength to deal with the shit storm I had just waded though to get there. Even on normal difficulty that game is really tough at times, and you find yourself having to keep glory killing just to maintain your health long enough to push through to the next room. Ammunition also feels like a constant problem with both the 20 round shotgun and the 50 round or so Heavy Machinegun. Similarly the Chainsaw this time around relies upon gas tanks that you find scattered throughout the levels. What was surprising is just how fast you get into the action, similar to the original doom you are planted in a room with mobs that you have to chew your way through with only a pistol. The secret areas that can be found feel every bit as meaningful as they used to in Doom, with them often granting access to a weapon before you would find it in the normal flow of the game.

One of the more interesting aspects of the gameplay is the weapon modification system. Each gun has an Unreal Tournament style alternate fire system but these are unlocked by finding weapon kiosks scattered through the levels. Each mod package changes the way your right mouse button interacts, and once you have unlocked multiple modes you can change between them with your R key. For example with the shotgun its two alternate fire modes allow you to choose from what is ultimately a grenade launcher and a three round burst that can both be accessed by holding the right button for a charged shot. I personally tend to favor the grenade launcher because it allows me to bounce a grenade between several different mobs taking out the entire pack. However for boss fights or tougher enemies I could see how the three round burst would be extremely beneficial. The problem there however is that when you only have 20 rounds in the weapon, chewing those up 3 rounds at a time means you empty the gun quickly. The big takeaway is that the game is very much a 90s shooter, with 90s shooter sensibilities… remastered for the 1080p and beyond world. Some of these work amazingly well in single player, but not in multiplayer. However I might change my tune once I see how the snap map system works. In any case I am definitely enjoying the single player campaign, and it has just enough story and intrigue to keep the game moving forward…. but not so much that you get bogged down in character development. This is in no way the rich narrative environment that Doom 3 was for me at least, but it has enough atmosphere to keep my interested. If you want a good shooter, give it a shot… but if you are looking for a deep storyline… this is not the game for you.

Endless Rockets

May 10, 2016 by Belghast

Action Movies

This so far has been one of the stranger breaks from work I have experienced. Yesterday I was a complete waste of space in all possible versions of that term. I think I was just overly drained from the weekend and spent most of the day starting things but not quite getting into them. I played some Rift, patched up Final Fantasy XIV but never actually logged in, played an awful lot of Diablo 3 in very short spurts and occasionally connected to Destiny over remote play to attempt to get exotics from the Ultra Knight on the Dreadnought. For much of the day though I aimlessly drifted along with whatever happened to be on television. Namely for whatever reason yesterday was apparently classic action movie day or something, because I caught all of Die Hard and Rambo: First Blood Part II, as well as bits and pieces of others. The funny thing about action movies is with time they usually seem worse than you remember them… this was absolutely the case with Rambo. There were so many things in that movie that just seemed silly, from the fact that the helicopter he was piloting at one point seemed to have an endless supply of rockets, to the fact that he fired a ton of bullets and never seemed to stop and change the magazine… nor did it actually seem to have any place in his outfit to store extra magazines.

Diehard on the other hand, for the most part holds up just as well as I remember it. In fact in many ways, I appreciate the movie more these days. The only part I ever really had trouble reconciling was how he ended up without shoes. I mean I get the point… he was taking the advice to de-stress, but before I went off to be a hero I would have put my shoes on rapidly. Also the concept of undressing in a strange bathroom is not really something I would ever be comfortable with. However once the movie starts proper that movie makes a strange amount of sense. It comes off as more a heist film than a traditional action movie, and we are getting to watch both the heist and the guerrilla resistance to it. The movie has so many tropes that play out to make it work… from the cokehead hotshot, to the incompetent police chief… to the equally incompetent federal agents. I am sorry but Bruce Willis is still a bad ass even when I see him in a modern movie, but he seems to have lost a lot of his early “moonlighting” charm that gets displayed in the original Die Hard. Sure he makes snarky comments, but I feel like Die Hard really was more a reprisal of the Addison character in a different setting. The other big takeaway from watching both movies back to back is just how many visuals have been stolen from these films.

Crusaders are Slow

Last night was also a mixed bag in that we had been warned for the last several days that a major weather event was coming. Most certainly it was because it absolutely wreaked havoc on Wynnewood area, but for the most part in the Tulsa area we got nothing but spotty rain. That did not stop us however from going into storm mode where we both hung out downstairs watching the constant scroll of weather reports and storm chasers across our screen. As a result I didn’t do the normal Destiny thing because it didn’t really feel safe to be upstairs and oblivious to what was happening. Instead I played quite a bit more Diablo 3, and eventually took to helping my friend Thalen level. Later we were joined by Grace and the pace of leveling increased greatly. As my crusader I can take a lot of damage, but I just dish it out ever so slowly. The unfortunately part about my seasonal journey is that I am now to the point where I need to do some sort of a conquest to move on to the next step, and none of them look really doable for a crusader. I mean the “easiest” and most grindy one is to level three gems to 65, and at this point I am working on that every so slowly. I have all three of my normal gems to over 45 and am ever so slowly working my way to 65.

However to get that bank tab I am going to need another conquest somewhere. We made a quick attempt at the kill 350 in a cursed chest and came up very short with our group getting 292 which normally would feel awesome… but still very short of the goal. I have a couple of friends playing Demon Hunters and in theory they can solo it, so I might pester them for assistance. The chest in question that supposedly is the easiest to do is one that spawns in the Paths of the Drowned in Act V, and spawns a ton of bogglings. The problem being for me to kill things as a crusader I need to get them super close to me… and trying to wrangle all of the mobs is the big challenge. I really either need an disintegration wizard or a rapid fire demon hunter that can wreck things as fast as they spawn to get through it. The only problem here is that I am definitely behind the curve when it comes to this season and both demon hunters already have their extra bank tab and are now playing significantly less. My fear is that this is going to be the equivalent of the Black Spindle in Destiny… aka that thing I try a bunch of times but can never seem to do. As far as today goes… I am not sure what is on the radar. I know I need to adult like mad, and do the laundry. I am also hoping to sneak off to go see Civil War, largely because I know some of my co-workers will be wanting to talk about it upon my return. As far as gaming goes, that is entirely up in the air and more than likely I will just end up playing a lot more Diablo 3.