Rift Archives - Page 25 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Whim Republic

August 14, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks. In many ways last night was a far worse night than the previous… but for whatever reason I am feeling awake and rested this morning. I wish to god I understood sleep patterns, and why getting significantly less sleep ends up with me feeling better in the morning. Previously I had been used to 5 to 6 hours of sleep, but here lately consequence has ended up with me getting to bed a little bit earlier. More often than not… getting extra sleep just ends up making me feel horrible as a result.

Harvesting Moonshade

I spent a little bit of time when I first got home helping out a guild member orient herself to Ashora. However after assuring that she got all of the porticulum points… I logged back in Belgaroth and continued down my rabbit hole of leveling as a pure harvester. At the point at which I left off yesterday I had just finished up Freemarch and was entering into Stonefield. Stonefield actually went extremely quickly as I found that all of the rock golems gave extremely fast skill-ups. Additionally there were large fields of the mountain goat like creatures that I could gather up and AOE down.

Once I moved into Moonshade everything slowed down quite a bit again. Firstly I was finally catching up to where the character was at foraging wise… so this meant now having to manage leveling a third skill. I managed to push up rather quickly in harvesting on the various ram like creatures near the Defiant portal. The only problem is they petered out about 200 and the transition point to train the next tier is 225. I found the same essential problem killing boglings and skinning them out in front of the Dwarven Relcaimer camp. At roughly 200 everything slowed down.

Unfortunately the zone did not have any lower level golems or earth elementals… so I had to run around the zone randomly pushing up my mining from picking up Cobalt Lodes. I noticed that the Golems up near Hammerknell all required 170 mining, so that was ultimately my goal. After about 30 minutes of farming Cobalt I managed to push up to that point. The Golems all give skill-ups but they are fairly annoying since after killing each one it spawns three little phantoms. Additionally if you do not harvest the golem immediately it fades often times before you have killed the three phantoms. So it is this delicate juggling act of trying to mine the golem as the phantoms are spawning and before they have really begun attacking you.

This is the point at which I left off for the night. I figure tonight before we pull together the guild night festivities I will try and finish up pushing my trades to 225 so I can learn the next tier and move into the endgame zones. Hopefully I can find a ready source of mobs to mine, forage and butcher as that makes it go so much quicker than having to run around and try and find nodes to harvest. I would rather kill hundreds of mobs at one camp, than try and find 50 nodes spread out throughout a zone.

Whim Republic

Early in the evening one of my friends on mumble had been playing Star Wars the Old Republic and talking about it. After we got finished with our walk I decided to patch it up and pop in for a few to poke my head around. When I was last playing I had been alternating between leveling a Dark Side Sith Sorcerer and a Light Side Sith Juggernaut. I have to say I almost immediately regret my decision to log in when I was confronted with the warning screen letting me know that I was no longer a subscriber and should as a result feel horrible. They gave me a nice chart showing me all the ways I should feel horrible in the various basic features of the game that I would be losing by logging in.

I guess to some extent I had forgotten exactly how miserable an experience it is to try and play SWTOR as a free to play title. There I sat with my no-crew skills, my one hotbar, my inability to use various sundry features like displaying titles, my bank, the auction house. I had a stack of credits that had apparently built up from the last time I subscribed so I decided to start trying to make my character playable by unlocking various things. Essentially each one of these items can be unlocked permanently at an account level, but it would literally cost you multiple hundreds of dollars to get your account back to a state at which it would not feel absolutely horrible to play.

All the while I am going through this… I am marveling in the back of my head just how horrible an experience this is as compared to Rift. When I was trying to do my now dead in the water “How To Rift” series, I created a brand new account for the purpose of seeing what exactly the limitations were. Surprisingly enough logging in and playing on a free to play character pretty much felt exactly like logging in and playing on my main. There are a few limitations, but they are essentially unlocked through the loyalty system the moment you spend any money. You are gimped on the number of bag spaces, but as compared to SWTOR this seems like a truly minor thing.

Lack of Loyalty

I guess what feels so exploitative about SWTOR is the fact that I spent a good deal of money with that game. I bought the collectors edition package at launch, and subscribed for I think a total of 9 months. That is far longer than most players did, I feel as though I should get some of these features grandfathered in. I fully expect to be limited on total character slots, or the ability to play the newest content… but it feels like complete shit to log into my characters and have zero recognition for money spent when they were struggling along trying to make the subscription model work. What they are missing essentially is a loyalty system along the lines of what Rift has put in place.

When I logged into Rift after the free to play conversion… I was literally showered with loyalty rewards and the in game credits currency. I want to say I had roughly 100k credits and was at roughly 3/4 of the way through the purple tier of loyalty. I felt like they cared about me as a longtime subscriber, and they were more than happy to welcome me back and shower me with gifts. Granted I am STILL a subscriber, there has only been about a three month period since the release of the game that I did not subscribe. The experience all feels so much nicer however that they give me rewards I want to build towards, and make me want to spend money on the game because I want to support them.

On the other hand in SWTOR I feel like I am a cow being milked for whatever money they can get out of me. Everything about their system just feels cheap and insidious. Instead of adding new features to the game and pay-walling those… they seemed to have chosen arbitrary basic features to hide away from the unwashed masses of non-subscribers. So essentially without paying that monthly fee you get an extremely broken feeling gameplay experience. I know I have commented multiple times about how horrible their free to play model is, but I guess I forget just how bad it really is… until I experience it again each time.

The above video was compiled by Rift Scene and compares and contrasts the features of SWTOR, TERA and Rift. If you are not really familiar with the differences between the Rift and SWTOR free to play model it is well worth watching. I hope I will remember just how bad it is, the next time I get the urge to patch up the game and log in. There really is nothing there for me there unless I choose to subscribe, and I have no desire to do that since I know the next time I lapse I will be treated the same. The main difference for me is that I feel like EA Bioware really does not deserve any of my money. Trion on the other hand, gives both the outwards appearance that they care about me as a player, and as a result I feel like giving them all the support in the world.

Wrapping Up

Well time to get on the road. Todays post ended up far more ranty than I had intended it to. I am just still shocked at how bad the SWTOR free to play model is when it actually comes to playing it. On paper it looked horrible, but as a non-subscriber attempting to play the game it feels even worse. I hope you have a good day and you find absolutely nothing to rant about. I have a massive list of things I need to get done, so here is hoping I have the “oomph” to do them.

Wrong

August 13, 2013August 13, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks, and welcome to another episode of “Bel tries to think of something to write about in the morning”. Last night was kind of an odd night. We had to run a number of errands so it ended up with me getting home fairly late and missing most of the “nda” event. Afterwards I logged into Rift for a bit, but kept getting disconnected. I think it was jealous for cheating on it with another game. When it finally stabilized I did a bunch of silly things and finally it was time for our evening walk… and I was in bed by 10:30. Theoretically I should be recharged and ready for the day… but I feel all sorts of fuzzy mentally.

Silly Things

One of the things that I spent my massive amount of points on that I got from being a longtime subscriber to rift… was on the tradeskill extension unlocks for my main. As a result he has Mining, Butchering, Foraging, Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing and Artificer. Which to some extent has started me down the road to madness. Since I have pooled the majority of my tradeskills on one character, I have the overwhelming desire to rework all my other characters so that they are pure harvesters. Lately we have lacked a healer when I attempted to pull together dungeons and such with our 50+ crowd, so I thought I would bring my cleric Belgaroth out of retirement since he was already 50.

The problem is… this also began my descent into insanity as I noticed he had the odd combination of Weaponsmithing, Apothecary and Foraging. None of the tradeskills were terribly high, so I decided this was the opportune time to rebuild him as a master harvester. The only bad thing about this is that I spent all of last night roaming around Freemarch collecting ore and skinning wolves. When it came time for our walk last night I had just finished up on Freemarch and was headed into Stonefields. Since I have recently done this whole level all the tradeskills thing on Belghast when I picked up foraging… I am hoping it goes more quickly since I pretty well know the areas I need to be in for each type of material. I don’t really want to get too much further into the Storm Legion content without having his harvest abilities up to snuff.

Wrong

So two things happened yesterday… firstly I stumbled across the video above… and one of my posts got picked up by MMO Melting Pot a site that aggregates posts from the community normally relating to World of Warcraft. I like the site, and they do a decent job of promoting various blogs, but almost every trolling comment I have received has happened when they have featured one of my posts. Normally the trolls don’t really bother me but this one just stuck in my craw.

No, sorry the author of this post is flat out wrong.

So I have no problem with someone disagreeing with my opinion. It happens on a regular basis and people seem to be able to do it well. I have a problem with the fact that this poster said my opinion was wrong. It is impossible for an opinion to be wrong. It is not a fact based statement generally, but the way someone feels or believes, and as a result there is no right or wrong. It is in fact their opinion until they decide to change it. My blog while it has little factual nuggets at times, is pretty much my view on the world as I know it. While you can get grumpy or disagree with what I say, saying that said opinion is wrong just is not an option.

Now to the video above… I linked it into this segment because in some small way it is addressing as the video calls it the “nerd on nerd violence” aspect that is trolling. I disagree vehemently with folks all the time… prime example is the whole “tank” series of posts. All the while I was posting my good friend Rowan was posting the counter point on his blog. We don’t always see eye to eye and we disagree plenty… but at the end of the day I still love him like a brother… and I would never dream of calling his personal opinion “wrong”.

I’ve tried super hard myself to present a mostly positive outlook into our community, which in my case is the collection of gaming blogs out there. While the above video has nothing to do with that, I feel like it has a lot of threads of truth about our own community or ANY geek community in general. Geeks seem to like eating their own, because they do not measure up to some standard they have set in their heads. I have been guilty of this multiple times myself, and I try and take a step back and realize that we are a niche of a niche of a niche… and the quite frankly we need all the awesome people we can get. I have so much respect for the cosplayers out there, whereas I put my ideas on paper and hit a publish button from the comfort of my office… they wrap themselves in those thoughts and parade it for the world to see. I cannot imagine how much self confidence it takes to do that… and I have nothing but the utmost respect for ANYONE who even vaguely attempts to cosplay something.

Gearpunk Dice

My good friend Tesh is making another run at Kickstarter, and this time it seems to have gotten massive traction. The above dice are just a production sample from his blog but gives you a feel for what the gearpunk dice will ultimately look like. This campaign is for metal dice and he is offering essentially three designs… Tinker Dice, Gearpunk Dice and Fudge Dice. Essentially through a combination of the Gearpunk polyhedral dice, and the tinker dice you have what is like the ultimate gear punk dice collection for your gaming needs. I was a big fan when they were plastic, and I am an even bigger fan now that the metal seems to be going over like gangbusters.

[edit] Apparently I was extremely tired this morning… because I completely neglected including the Kickstarter link….

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tishtoshtesh/tinker-dice-steampunk-metal-dice

This one is easy now… the initial project requested $1000 and now they have received enough funding to do that almost ten times over. Essentially the dice are now a guarnteed thing, so make sure you do not miss out on this offering. They have been available through his shapeways site for some time, but this is a much better deal. I am extremely happy to see this campaign doing so well, and it could not be supporting a nicer gamer and blogger.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this thing up. Today is the first day back for my wife, and as a result it has thrown my morning into a complete state of disarray. I am not used to having to get ready with another human being roaming around the house. Additionally now pretty much begins hell for me until roughly mid September as the whole back to school ritual dominates my life. I am essentially bracing for it now, and expecting my time to be whittled away as we need to run this or that errand to prepare. I hope you all have a much better series of days ahead of you, and that the work week has been going well.

On Leadership

August 10, 2013 by Belghast

We have entered back to school shopping season and last night we ran around hunting for pants. A nasty side effect of our collective weight loss is the fact that my wife currently appears to have no pants that will fit to start the school season. This manifested itself yesterday when she was trying to get ready to meet some of her teacher friends for a presentation. Of course panic ensued, but she managed to figure something out and as a result last night we began the process of trying to rebuild the clothing archives.

On Leadership

Yesterday I was having a long talk with Sevok about his interest in maybe joining us in the House Stalwart Rift contingency. Sev has been a longtime friend of mine, lasting well over a decade at this point and been involved in many of the previous incarnations of House Stalwart. The problem is he really does not want to start up in Rift unless he brings his wife with him. She on the other hand has not been in a Stalwart guild yet, and is extremely gunshy of guilds in general, namely because we both have a shared moment in our history that likely changed both of us in different ways.

Over the course of the last few weeks I have talked quite a bit about how tanking brings out my protective nature, so I thought I might talk a bit today about what exactly lead me to guild leadership in the first place. In many ways it is this exact same protective nature manifested in trying to create a wonderful environment for my friends to play in. Honestly the roots have always been there, but as an introvert I am always loathe to step up unless I feel like some wrong has been committed. I have a strong sense of justice embedded in me and equality that honestly should not have been there based on my upbringing… but that is a tale for another day.

High School

I did not have the traditional “geek” upbringing of exclusion and ridicule at the hands of the popular masses. In fact I could have very easily been another one of the popular kids. I guess in many was from the outside it probably seemed I was one. I essentially had my geekiness grandfathered into the popular culture of my small home town. My parents friends ended up having what would essentially end up as our crop of “popular kids”, and as a result these were my play dates and birthday party goers all the way through elementary school. So as my geek tendencies manifested themselves for the most part they were just accepted as “me being me”.

My mother was a fairly overbearing sort that insisted that I be involved with everything. Essentially she was brought up in a poor household and had aspirational goals to be more than that and as a result ended up using me many times as the vessel of those aspirations. So as a result I was in 4H, an Eagle Scout, Team Captain of the Academic Bowl, FTA, Student Council, National Honor Society, and many more acronyms that I can barely remember. The result was frustrating for me, because I ended up in the local paper on a regular basis and everyone out in the community seemed to know my business. I want to say I was on 26 pages in my high school year book thanks to all the random organizations I was pushed into being a part of. I feel as thought my mother was trying to build herself a Kennedy… which I very much have no aspirations ever to be.

My Tribe

I could have very easily fallen in the kegger madness that was the life of a small town popular kid, but instead I took a very different path. My friends were essentially the geeky misfits of the town. The edgy art students, the math nerds, the show choir kids… all bound together to form a family of sorts. My mother was a home economics teacher, and as a result we used the small back room of her classroom as a private lunch room of sorts. In there would would plan D&D campaigns, play Wolfenstein on the 486 computer, and a lot of Chess and Pente. This room gave us a moment of sanity in a world that none of us really liked much.

The funny thing is… that as acknowledgement got around that these were my friend… these were my tribe of misfits… each of them started to get extended an invisible veil of protection. I was not a small guy, and at 6’4” the hooligans in high school seemed to fear me just by my seemingly powerful stature. Each of my friends reported getting picked on a lot less, or at least no longer in the form of physical confrontation. I had no clue when I started the little community that it would have the fringe benefits it ultimately did. To some extend it only caused me to expand the group and pull in other people. I feel like this is what started my “collecting people” tendencies that would serve me later.

Past Guilds

When I got addicted to Everquest, I went through a couple of extremely unsatisfying guild experiences. The first was an extremely exclusive group that dated back to a bygone era of gaming. They were friendly enough and active enough, but they were also an extremely closed door society. If you did not go through the initiation rituals to join their secret society… you were forever treated as an outsider regardless of how long and how many games you had played with them. I went through the little initiation, but really did not see the world change much after doing so. The problem is… as I got my friends into these games… they were forever destined to be outsiders… or not allowed in at all. After seeing this injustice play out a few times I decided not to follow them into any new games.

While in Everquest I moved servers to play with a group of locals to Tulsa. At first it was an extremely awesome having a group of locals that I could play with an socialize with. However the longer I played and the more closely I got to the inner core of the guild, I started to see the same problem with injustice. Essentially to be a member in good standing… you had to do whatever the guild leader wanted of you… and more often than not this was to do whatever would keep his wife happy. I saw members miss out on rare drops for their epic weapon quest that would instead go to alt number 307 for his wife. If she wanted this rep from this zone… the entire guild was expected to go there and farm forever until she got whatever she was wanting.

House Stalwart

If you were not in the inner circle, your opinion did not matter. When the wife had a falling out with a member, it was expected that the entire guild would shun them or else you would get kicked out on your ass as well. None of this sat well with me, but I was torn. My group of friends were still mostly in this guild, but I felt as though nothing about this situation was fair. Somehow I ended up as the sounding board for all the players who were sick of the leaders shit, and made some extremely deep ties within the “resistance” of sorts. As we moved on past Everquest and into other games I kept contact with the members of this undercurrent and in many cases they all ended up as members of Stalwart guilds eventually.

World of Warcraft was the next big thing on the horizon that I knew everyone would be playing. As a result I wanted to gather up as many friends under one banner as I possibly could. Prior to launch I started a brand new forum unconnected from any guild or game. Through it I organized all my friends from EQ, DAoC, Horizons and City of Heroes towards the goal of forming a new guild for World of Warcraft. Essentially I never wanted to end up in a situation like i was in the previous two guilds… either with abusive leadership or and elitist inner circle. After talking to some friends about it, I decided that the only way I could ever guarantee that, was to be the leader myself and keep it from happening.

So here we are roughly a decade later and there is still an active House Stalwart presence in several games. World of Warcraft damned near broke me for leading anything. As a result I took roughly a two year break from guild leadership, as I wandered around and joined up with lots of other pools of friends. I am extremely thankful to each person that sheltered me and invited me into their own organizations during this time. Sadly however in each new place I visited… there was something missing… and I would go back into my old ways trying to recruit everyone under a shared banner. I was missing my home, was missing my guild, and was ultimately missing the freedom to make an awesome home for everyone involved.

As a leader I have always tried to enable people to do awesome things and be awesome in the process. As a result I have always tried to keep things simple, only adopting the barest of rules that instill a sense of the larger community rather than a list of “thou shall not”. For the most part this has worked over the last decade. We have had a lot of amazing moments as friends and I have built more of an extended family for myself than a guild. These are all people that I talk to regularly outside of the game, when we travel I try and meet up with ones in the area… they are the family I chose for myself. Still to this day… I have an overwhelming desire to bring new people I meet that are also awesome into the fold.

Wrapping Up

I feel as though this post kind of developed a life of its own. I am not really sure what I intended to right. To some extent I was writing so that Sevok’s wife could see that our time spent in the horrible EQ guild had adverse effects on both of us. I just chose to take that bad experience and roll it into building a long standing family of friends and a much larger community. Hopefully this tale will be at least interesting to other people out there. I hope you all have a great weekend. I desperately need a haircut so that is the number one priority on our list. Also hoping to coax my wife into another trip to the place where she found all those Legos.

Evergreen Content

August 9, 2013 by Belghast

After some technical difficulties caused by the fact that my upstairs computer appeared to have come back in a half alive state after what I can only assume was a power blink caused by last nights storms… aren’t run-on sentences awesome? I am finally sitting down at the computer to write this mornings post. Additionally I am drinking the sweetest cup of coffee ever… because in my half awake state… I dumped the Splenda designated for my wife’s cup into mine. The end result is a cup of coffee with like six packets of sugar in it.

Evergreen Content

One of the things that has always frustrated me with MMO design is the fact that the higher up in level you are, essentially the fewer options you have for where to spend your in game time. What I mean is that usually games spend a good amount of time to provide alternate starter zone experiences, and then those usually funnel into shared zones for your faction before dumping you out into a ladder of zone progression towards the “end game”. Once you arrive at the end content you experience the same thing… everyone is pushed towards the same few content items.

When an expansion is released the same thing happens again but even more limiting. You are pushed out of the “old world” content and into a much smaller new world with the same very vertical progression path. Everything about the old content becomes completely disposable as it is immediately replaced by the shiny new things from the expansion areas. Not only is the new content separated by distance usually, but it gives players absolutely no incentive to ever return and revisit the older content. As a result each time an expansion is released the players are ultimately throwing more and more content in the dustbin.

A Better Way

Granted some games do a much better job at addressing this problem than others. In Rift when mentoring down you receive xp and rewards as though you were doing content at your level. The same is more or less true with Guild Wars 2 and its always mentored system of scaling the player down to the content level at all times. But in neither system do you really address the problem of lost dungeon and raid content. Ultimately you can get rewards similar to what you could earn at level, but you will never actually be able to progress your characters in the same way unless you are always doing the latest and greatest content.

With the advent of systems like StoryBricks that allow for smarter AI encounters, I keep wondering if this is now the time to have a much better system. Ideally this would work better in a system without hard level ranges, and more a “tiers of gear” approach like The Secret World has in place. What if a mob could perceive you as a greater threat based on your “tier” and ultimately fight “smarter”. This would make the old content scale to whatever level you happen to be at the time. The old encounters would be evergreen in that beating them at Tier 1 would be significantly easier than beating them at Tier 4.

Horizontal Progression

As a result you could continue to “pay out” the best tiers of gear, because all content would essentially scale up to meet the level of the players taking it on. In a mixed level group it would get far more tricky. You would have to do some sort of an average level for the encounter, but ultimately the base idea is that as you level your character you continue opening new doors to experience, rather than constantly closing permanently the doors behind you. I feel in part that this is so enticing as no amount of hard worked content provided by the designers would ever be considered “throw away” or “leveling” content again.

This of course is a massive pipe dream, and I am sure there are all measure of technically limitations to what I propose, but I have always wanted a world that scaled to me that I never outgrew. We can have this concept in single player games like Oblivion, I just think its time that we see a proper implementation in the MMO world. One added benefit is that being able to progress regardless of the content you are doing… incentivizes players to do the right thing socially… and assign their friends and guild members through that “old world” content.

Socially Beneficial

Being one of those players that regularly helps out the “young-ins”, it can be frustrating knowing that you will not actually progress your character while doing this thing that was “socially” the right thing to do. Games like Rift or EQ2 provide alternate advancement paths that make it much more enjoyable, since you know you are ultimately still making your character better in the process. However… would it not be that much cooler if you could provide a system that allowed for both the low tier player and the high tier player to receive the best type of rewards they could get… together in the same group?

It is always awesome watching a new player get their first really awesome item, because you grouped up with them to help them through a challenge. Would it not be equally exciting for them to watch you getting the same because you chose to help them? I have had a mantra for awhile… “anything that prevents me from playing with my friends is bad” and this is exactly the opposite of that. It makes sure that playing with my friends will always benefit me in the same ways it benefits them. Sure the content might be ultimately more difficult when you have 3 tier 1 players and 2 tier 4 and the end difficulty level is something in the middle… but as group you will be able to work through the challenges.

The Problem

As I sit here to write this post, it feels like it is coming out super esoteric… and as a result I am hoping to place it more firmly on the ground. In my office on the wall are lots and lots of maps, and many of them are from MMOs. There is one above my monitor that came from the Kunark expansion to the original Everquest for example. As I look at the glorious landmasses that are all these games… I am bit sad thinking that so many of those zones I will never have a valid reason to return to. They will never again be truly important to me, the same way they were when I was first leveling through them.

I would just like to see a design scheme that makes it always valid for us to return to the content we know and love and have conquered and find completely new challenges. This goes double for dungeon and raid content. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could zone into Blackwing Lair in WoW with a group of friends… and get an encounter tailored to fit YOUR level… and not a “roflstomp” soloable mess? The worst part about the “e-sport-ification” of raid content, is that we are constantly having to throw away fun experiences for whatever the newest tier happens to be. Sure you can always return to the older stuff, but it has been trivialized by the progression you have made since then.

I would just like to see something that fixes this. So that a zone stays epic regardless of when you tackle it, and that there will always be new and more exciting challenges and rewards to be found there. With the construct of scalable AI and encounters… I think that maybe finally this concept is ready to be explored. I have no desire to stay in the starter zone, grind boars, and become amazing like they did in the South Park spoof… but it would be awesome to be able to go back to that low level content and have a reason to be there.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap up and get on the road. I feel as though I have laid out a huge rambling mess. Hopefully this will make sense to someone. It has been a concept bouncing around in my head for awhile and all the talk of Storybricks and EQ Next and Scaling Mob intelligence has dislodged it enough that I wanted to try and put it down into words. I feel like I am fairly grossly unsuccessful at doing so. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope you can grasp the crux of what I was trying to say.