Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning Folks! We start off the show with some random talk about Rick Astley and the history of Rickrolling. From there Bel talks about getting a Commander tag and going for the obvious best choice… that Catmander. Kodra talks about beating Axiom Verge and his struggles with M.A.S.S. Builder not quite being detailed enough. From there we talk about the launch of the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch and the struggles of instant 8X growth. We talk a bit about the challenge of a game launch and scaling servers without overbooking capacity. Then we finish out with some discussion from Tam about the Star Citizen 3.18 patch and its own server capacity issues.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Last Epoch Multiplayer patch 0.9 and it was most certainly interesting. Shocking to no one that has ever experienced an MMO launch… there were problems. I attempted to create a character around noon when the servers first went online and encountered a litany of errors and gave up. Last night around 4 pm when I was attempting to log in, I kept encountering the above situation where it would try and load the character and then fail out with an error of “[LE-61] Failed to Matchmake” but have to hit some sort of time out before it returned me to the character select screen to try again. Around 5:30 my time, things had calmed down enough that I was actually able to log into the game as was my good friend Ace. From there we experienced a pretty hilarious night of weird bugs until I reached a point where I could no longer interact with NPCs… and we had to call it a night.
The above video is one that I snagged from this post on Reddit and uploaded to YouTube so that I could embed it. Unfortunately, it was uploaded directly to Reddit so please know I am not attempting to take credit for it. I absolutely encountered this same bug several times yesterday, and in truth, it seemed to be happening quite a bit for various skills. For example, if I used Lunge without a target, it would lock me in the movement animation while seemingly it waited for the command to time out. When I got shield charge, I was able to charge through walls and skip sections of the map…. because I am guessing my client, Ace’s client, and the server all had a disagreement on where exactly I was heading and where I successfully managed to go. The funniest thing though was when I would shield charge… and it would go super slow for a few seconds and then rapidly warp me to the final destination of the ability. When things got really bad towards the end of my session I started rubberbanding back to near Ace’s location because it was as though the server lost track of me.
Please note this is not me complaining, this is me regaling you with the experience we had last night. Ace and I were on discord laughing the entire time like we were drunk with joy. The folks I feel bad about though are the team over at Eleventh Hour Games. I am certain they did not get any sleep last night… most specifically MoxJet aka Judd (Mox) on Discord. He was in the chat when I disappeared last night and was back up this morning around 6 am, still answering questions… still being chill, responsive, and helpful. I remember when we were attempting to log in yesterday I was watching the chat for any signs of updates, and the chat was thrown into slow mode allowing one new message from each user every 5 minutes. Even then being throttled like it was… it was scrolling by faster than I could read it. I mean all multiplayer launches are at least somewhat traumatic, but I feel for the late nights the team is going to have over the coming days.
Last Epoch is legitimately overwhelmed by new players at the moment. If you look at the steam charts, as of writing this post Last Epoch is sitting in the 8th spot for top-selling games in the US and 12th Globally. Notice that Steam indicates that it is new to the list, which I believe means it has not appeared before on the top 100 list at all. This game went from a very niche title to being thrust into the mainstream literally overnight. I bought into the game in 2018 when it was a wildly different experience, and over time it has shifted from something I honestly did not enjoy much to being a legitimate contender for the Diablo/Path Of Exile throne. This is absolutely benefitting from the hype surrounding Path of Exile having a phenomenal Sanctum league, and Diablo IV waiting in the wings… but not quite ready for launch. It is probably even widely benefitted from Diablo II getting a remastered edition that has had its own traction among classic ARPG players. So while this is awesome for the future of Eleventh Hour Games as a company… it is going to be a bit of a rocky ride in the interim for that team.
For the moment since I spent so much time playing Necromancer in testing, I decided to try out a Sentinel build. This looked to be the sort of Righteous Fire gameplay I enjoy where you are nigh unkillable and just AOE everything around you to death. You can see the .85 build here on Last Epoch Tools, which I am adapting to fit .9, and for the most part, there are not significant enough differences to really cause challenges. I also plan on playing around with a Ritualist and Acolyte like I did in testing and Rogue is just stupid fun and arrives at a point of power way earlier than the other classes. I ran a bunch of things up on the test realm and I plan on doing the same over the coming weeks in online play. The game keeps your offline and online characters separate similar to how Wolcen did, so you have to make a choice of playing with friends or not ever playing with friends. I wish we could have at least played characters offline and then shifted to online play, but I get why they wanted to keep online play somewhat sacred.
Sadly I have no screenshots of me playing with Ace last night because quite honestly we were laughing too hard for me to think to take screenshots. We managed to run a few characters up to around level 17, and I plan on more or less holding my Sentinel where it is currently and resuming play together tonight. At first, we thought maybe there was some catch-up experience going on, but I think they just buffed the XP rates across the board whether or not you were grouped. The main thing we noticed is it felt like we were getting way more “Blue” and “Yellow” monsters than we would in a non-multiplayer map. The chat message indicates that the monster’s health is buffed but I think the changes maybe go deeper than that. It felt good to play with friends and did not feel like we were just stomping things without any challenge. I even died last night because I just did not get out of the bad fast enough. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I am hoping the servers calm down or stabilize as the team adds more resources.
I did not get anything that was necessarily set defining, and I probably traded more good items to Ace than I kept because I ended up getting a lot of +minion items on a build that does not care in the least about that. I did get Snowblind which is a somewhat universally good leveling item. Sadly I am not really going into elemental attacks at all, but maybe I will find some +cold weapons to make this do some work for me. I am also using Avarice Gloves which have synergy with elemental attacks. If I can lean in that direction a bit, those items should help me out a little bit. I had fun though and that is ultimately the real judge of a game launch. I think the Eleventh Hour Games team has a great product on their hands, and hopefully, they have the capital required to ramp up enough to stem the bleeding. They definitely have some work ahead of them because the testing did not hammer the servers anywhere near what happened last night. However, I think they are in a good place to move forward because it was at least playable.
Did you play Last Epoch last night? What were your experiences? Drop me a line below.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was a pretty glorious day at least so far as I knocked out a bunch of things in Guild Wars 2. Sometimes I just stand around admiring the majesty of our Guild Hall from the rainbow bridge. There is this dumb side project I created which is using a bunch of the super adventure box clouds… to create a way up onto the rooftops… then Thalen branched off of this with the rainbow bridge. I heartily approve of this particular brand of nonsense… and honestly, I think Thalen and I may have been the only two people to have placed anything in our guild hall ever. I know I have Tequatl backbones for days if we want to build a pillow fort out of them. I have nothing better to do with those drops so I always deposit anything from world bosses in the decorations bank.
I know I talked about the noodle cart yesterday, but I thought I would bring it up again. I picked one up after experiencing it from a random player in Rata Sum, and last night while waiting on Tequatl I opted to throw mine out there. Notice how the player beside me has two players in their cart and I have two players in my cart, and a third player has also thrown theirs out beside me. Before the start of Tequatl, their noodle cart was full of people as well. I love objects that create casual social interaction like this. Often times folks chat away while sitting on the cart and these are so much better than the “Box of Fun” or the “Bobblehead Laboratory”. I would love to see them create more multi-person chairs like this that have a purpose behind them. It would probably even be cooler if eating the noodles actually gave you something like the birthday cake food buff.
So first accomplishment of the night is that I finally managed to catch the meta event in Seitung and collected that piece of the turtle saddle. I mean I had done this event several times before, but never when I was actively on the correct step on the achievement chain. I managed to catch someone doing a train and caught Echovald Wilds and Kaineng City as well. Not that I needed the other two, but it was a source of some pretty good loot. I have to admit that I have contemplated buying a commander tag many times. When there is one on the map, folks seem to automagically coalesce behind it. The problem is they also expect the commander to have a clue about what is going on, which I do not entirely yet. It does however seem to be a huge boon for actually doing any sort of activity though, so as I delve into making groups I feel like I probably need one.
Shortly after resetting, I decided to check the group finder tool and happened onto someone in Strike Training forming a group for Kaineng Overlook. I was legitimately working up the nerve to do the same thing, so I very happily joined their team. This was the last piece that I needed for the turtle mount, and within ten minutes we had filled our party of ten and shockingly had a pretty reasonable group balance. What is even more shocking is the fact that eight out of the ten of us had never been there before, and we somehow managed to one-shot the encounter without much in the way of training. What helped me specifically is that the markers and warnings used in the fight seem to be pretty standard from what I have seen in other games. There is a mechanic where it puts numbers over the top of your head, and we all spread out to the edges because this was something I had seen several times in Final Fantasy XIV as the boss attacks each of us in that order.
Just like that, I was able to go back to Arborstone and turn in my quest and get my very own turtle friend. In the grand scheme of things, this was a much easier quest chain than I needed for the Skyscale, but it did require actual group activity rather than largely being a solo activity. This means the only mount that I do not have currently is the Gryphon. I’ve started on it, but I guess will actually start devoting some real effort to getting it finished. When we were doing Kaineng City Blackout, the Commander was using the Gryphon and there was no way that I could keep up with them over Skyscale so I absolutely understand the specific use case for that mount. In truth, there is a pretty solid use case for every mount, and since the new meta in Gyala Delve requires a Siege Turtle at times… I figured I would get mine so that I could at least fill that role if none were available.
After getting my Siege Turtle I turned my eyes to my next objective of the night which was to finish out the Battle for Lion’s Arch and more specifically the Breachmaker portion of that quest. I boarded and defeated Scarlet and after a bit of back and forth finished Living World Season 1. I will say that already Living World Season 2 feels so much better than I remember it because I understand the events that led up to that point. I get why Kas is so guarded about letting Jory do anything because she almost died during the battle on top of the Breachmaker. I get why Taimi is so weird about Scarlet and seemingly obsessed with her, and I get why Braham and Rox are being a wet blanket about it. There is also the fact that I care about these characters way more than I did when I was first dipping my toes into this content having not seen much of the Living World Season 1. This is going to help massively for anyone starting out the game now without the wealth of years of experience and understanding of the lore.
I still do not love Dry Top, but apart from the quests I at least have Skyscale to move around it rapidly. I remember unlocking the zone the very first time and having to use the dumb Zepherite crystals. I get annoyed at having to continue to use them for mobility during the story quests, but those at least are limited in scope. I get that someone at ANet put a lot of work into creating those baubles and wanted to show the technology off… but it doesn’t make me like them anymore. I am going to try and burn through Living World Season 2 since I have seen it before so that I can start Heart of Thorns properly soon. My goal is still to play through all of the stories on the Ranger, but I have been cheating a bit when I see a group open in one of the Living World maps and using “Teleport to Friend” to get access to the zone without doing the story.
All told it was a great night and a great place to put Guild Wars 2 to bed for a bit. I know starting tonight I will be spending a lot of time playing the new Last Epoch Multiplayer patch, so it might be a bit before I check back into Tyria. I love my turtle so much and have started working on unlocking its masteries. It still floors me how much I love this game today after spending so much time frankly not understanding why anyone else did. There is part of me that wishes I could teleport back to the version of me that was in the alpha program all those years ago… and make him understand what was special about the game so that I could have experienced everything as the content rolled out. Then again if I could do that… I would probably be just as jaded as the folks who seem to dislike Gyala Delve so maybe it is better that I approached with relatively fresh eyes over the last few years.
Good Morning Friends! You ever have one of those nights where you spent the entire evening playing a single game… but also feel like you made no real progress in it? That was my night and I am not entirely certain what I have to show for it. I know I was playing from at least 6 pm CST onwards because I caught the early Tequatl at server reset, but I have no clue how to account for the rest of my evening. I know I teleported into a few zones to help with bounties for folks who posted a plea in the “Looking for Group” tool and added a few people to my friends list through doing that. I did not however get over my fear of posting my own groups and actually doing the strike that I needed to do. I think at some point I gave up on the notion of either miracle-ing my way into an existing group posting for what I needed or getting the fortitude to do it myself and moved on with other activities.
That meant going back to Lion’s Arch for what I knew would be the final conflict and Scarlet Briar sacking it. I say this without concern about spoilers because… it is sort of a known secret at this point. Even though many of us never experienced the Living World Season 1 content, we have been confronted that the Lion’s Arch or the Claw Island missions are not the same ones that we see today, and ultimately probably went to the wiki to find out why. I am an old enough player to remember both versions of the city fondly, and while there are folks who wish we could go back to old Lion’s Arch… I have to say I greatly prefer what is colloquially referred to as “Disney Lion’s Arch” because it makes a more usable hub city. Destruction of your main city is still one of the most daring moves I have ever seen a game make, and I am not entirely certain it was a good call for the longevity of the title. It created some bitterness in the players who were fond of it before and a lot of dissonance for the players that came later.
Essentially there are two copies of Lion’s Arch that you experience in the story. The first is as the attack has fallen upon the city and toxins are building up around you, while you attempt to rescue as many as you can. There is a miasma meter that ticks up over time, and you do whatever you can to save whoever you can in the process. I only made it so far as rescuing Evon Gnashblade and I think 30 citizens before the gunk claimed me and ended the mission. I am not sure if you can legitimately do all of the objectives that you have presented in front of you in the time you have available. What does not help this process is the fact that all of the enemies appear to be infinitely respawning. I learned this the hard way pretty quickly when I was carefully clearing everything before starting an escort, only to have it immediately respawn on top of me.
The second instance that you encounter is “retaking” Lion’s Arch after regrouping with the refugees in Gendarran Fields. The new map is essentially one big meta as you fight enough skirmishes in a region to get the boss to show up, and upon defeating the boss you take back control of that sector. For the purpose of my quest, I needed to do enough events to fill a bar similar to earlier steps in the Living World Season 1 content. I stuck around and helped out in trying to retake the city, and we failed miserably at fighting one of three legendary bosses that have a Red/Green/Blue resistance scheme. The one we were fighting was Blue and vulnerable to Red or Green… but I could not seem to get my team to go over to the green puddle and get the corresponding buff so we could actually finish the fight. We got close, however, for only having a half dozen or so people fighting it. We failed the instance though but did get more than far enough to finish my quest.
The Breachmaker is Scarlet Briar’s giant flying airship drill and you see it during the cutscenes upon zoning in during the attack on Lion’s Arch the first time. I got far enough in the quest chain that my next step is a story mission which is likely an attack on that Breachmaker itself. Last night when I got there I did not really have enough time to get engaged in anything that would potentially take that amount of time. The problem with Guild Wars 2 story sections is they are not really a predictable length and as a result, I need to make sure I have an hour or more before diving into them. A lot of them take considerably less time, but every so often there is one that will take a few hours to get through. Unlike FFXIV, this game is not exactly good about warning you.
Other than the Lion’s Arch nonsense, I encountered this contraption yesterday… and Arena.Net got another 600 gems out of me. This is the Noodle Cart Chair, and unlike most other chairs… up to 2 other players can join you and there is a button to press to eat noodles. This was me and another player sitting on the chair together in Rata Sum, and every time I have thrown mine out I’ve ended up with someone joining me. This is maybe one of the coolest cosmetic microtransactions I have seen because it adds something social to the experience. I mean I love noodles anyways, but this is just delightful and the animation of watching the jadetech making noodles, washing bowls, etc is just magical.
Another thing that I did yesterday was to spend some time fishing because I have been waiting around in Seitung lately hoping to catch someone doing that meta event. That is one of the two steps I have remaining for the turtle mount. So when I am not procrastinating about starting a strike group, I am idling in the zone hoping we end up with enough critical mass to complete the boss. It did give me a chance to play with another microtransaction that I picked up a while back. I love the octopus fishing pole and the way its tentacles move subtly as you idle between casting. Fishing in Guild Wars 2 is not necessarily the best system I have experienced, but it is far from the worst. Would that all games could have a fishing system as good as New World. It is enjoyable enough and I should really get more used to throwing my pole out while waiting around for Tequatl to spawn.
Tonight my plan is to try and knock out the last steps of the Lion’s Arch quest chain, and then move on to Living World Season 2. I will probably also try to keep tabs on both Strike groups and Seitung meta in order to hopefully catch one of those. I need to look up the event table for that zone so I know how often it fires. Tomorrow, however… will be all about the drop of the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch.
