Gaming Grievances

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The last few weeks have been a bit hard, and I have noticed I have been grumpier than usual. So I decided that I should probably channel that grump into something useful. In gaming there are a bunch of things that bug me, and that really limited to a specific game. Sure there are games that trigger these things, and I am likely going to use those as examples, but a lot of these complaints fall into larger groupings. This morning I am going to explore some of these things that I think the game world would be better off if “fixed”

Lack of Cross Saves

This one has been bothering me a lot lately, because I have been spending an awful lot of time playing Diablo 3 on the Nintendo Switch from bed. It bugs me to no end that my Switch account has no relation back to my Battle.Net account. However this isn’t limited to Diablo because when I was playing Minecraft Dungeons the same frustrations applied and in that case it made even less sense given that all platforms have to log in with the same Microsoft account. Right now Bungie is the shining beacon with Destiny 2 and allowing me to choose between playing a separate character on each platform or binding them all together into a single save. I want this functionality to exist across the board, because I don’t mind paying for multiple clients especially when I get to carry my same characters with me.

Lack of Cross Play

This is another big one for me, and is the beginning of what is going to be at theme. I hate artificial boundaries, and I want every game to offer cross platform play. Your gaming platform of choice should be that and I should be able to group together freely with my friends regardless if they are playing via Steam, Origin, the Epic Games Store or any of the consoles like PlayStation, Xbox or Switch. Games feel better when you have the ability to play with whoever you want to. The same goes for MMORPGs where we have made strides over the last decade but really there are still a large number of artificial boundaries… I am looking at you FFXIV and your data centers.

Regional Play Walls

Now we have one that is big for me and Blizzard products. I hate that my EU friends are walled off on an island that I can’t interact with unless I specifically switch over to a EU based Battle.net account. This should be fixed and this is a broken system. The internet is a giant melting pot and as a result has given me access to a ton of players that I probably never would have developed close ties to without it. However it is way more likely for me to want to hang out with friends from Ireland than those from Idaho. Truth be told I am not sure if I actually know anyone in Idaho, but that is not the point. Let me hang with my friends folks regardless of what Region we happen to play in. Sure I realize that it is going to be a less than optimal experience at times, but if I have friends that need to finish some achievement I should be able to pop over and help them out.

The Horrible Faction Wall

This is going to mostly be a World of Warcraft thing, but it goes true for any game that creates an artificial barrier that cleaves in half the player base. The Alliance and Horde wall needs to fall and we as player should be able to group freely with our friends on either side of the divide. Additionally the game as a whole should maybe adopt a better theme than constant racism and genocide, but that is a completely different discussion for a different day. One of the best things that Rift ever did was drop the barrier between the Guardian and Defiant players with their “Faction as Fiction” patch. This is desperately needed in World of Warcraft and maybe stop forcing the divisive Red vs Blue narrative while we are at it.

Physical Transmog Systems

Now lets switch over to a problem that is most represented by Final Fantasy XIV but goes for any game with a similar system. I hate having to keep track of physical items that I am only holding onto for cosmetic purposes. All this does is serve to bloat our banks as well as the amount of items that you are having to store for a specific character. Each one of those items has a full array of stats associated with it and is effectively a unique copy that is being stored, where you could simply give us a system that allows us to flag our account with a specific appearance storing significantly less data. It would be better even if this just happened automagically like it does in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft when we bind an item with an appearance that we didn’t already have. Please fix this Squeenix… and if you are building a similar game out there remember that cosmetics are super important to the overall enjoyment of a game.

Gender Locked Classes

This is a trope that is rife within a lot of the South Korean or Chinese MMORPGs, but it drives me up a wall. If you are going to add classes to your game, make sure that they can be played by either gender. Black Desert Online has effectively been walking this back by creating different versions for each gender, but having that line drawn in the sand is still horrible. Better yet I sorta wish that games didn’t have hard gender choices but instead a character creation system that allowed you to create your character in any way you saw fit and assign whatever attributes you wanted. That however is a battle for the future, and for now I just want games to stop releasing Male only or Female only content. This also is a problem with cosmetics in FFXIV, and it drove me nuts for years that as a Male character I couldn’t have bunny ears.

Lack of Beard Options

This is really a personal thing for me, and I am not sure how many players are impacted by it… but I cannot get into a character that doesn’t have reasonable beard options. This has been a big barrier for me and a lot of the Korean, Chinese or some Japanese MMORPGs because in many cases I have to deal with the meager offerings that are given to me. The best game of all time is probably Warhammer Online because it is the only one that offered wonderful ladybeards on the Dwarves, and you are darn tootin I took advantage of this on one of my characters. The reason why I play an Exo in Destiny 2 is because I could not create a Human with a beard, and for my Warlock and Hunter I just gave up and made female characters.

Lack of Account Wide Storage

I believe that you bank space should be plentiful, expandable and at least some of it should be account wide. This exists in some games but it absolutely should be a thing in more of them. I should be able to swap and materials freely between my characters, and better yet there should be a separate material storage available to them all. More games need to approach things from an account level giving players deep and meaningful reason to have multiple characters without creating the feeling that they are always on the wrong character at the wrong time.

Lack of Account Based Skills and Currencies

Once again adding to the whole discussion of feeling like you are on the wrong character at the wrong time… I wish any sort of currencies that are accrued for doing “things” were done so an an account wide level. So if your friends need you to be raiding on your main, but you really want to be gearing your alt… you could earn the currency on one character and spend it on another. In a similar note I wish things that are long grinds were attached at an account level as well. Tradeskills for example, I wish tradeskills were a thing that just existed and once unlocked and fully leveled could be used by any character on your account. There are plenty of ways to make this work from a lore perspective, but the convenience added of never not being on your gemcrafter or your enchanter would be phenomenal… or always being able to pick that herb or mine that node.

So now that I have aired my grievances with you… what are some of the things that drive you up a wall about games in general or that you would change? Drop me a note below, or feel free to wreck my opinions listed above.

Season 21 Complete

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Saturday afternoon I finished up Season 21 in Diablo 3 and I have to say… I am a bit listless now when it comes to what I should be doing with my time. I have plenty of other options, and I have been more or less falling back on playing Destiny 2, but it feels a little weird. During the course of a season I pour so much of my time and thought process into it that when it is over it feels a little strange. Games can be that way, and often times I find myself stalling finishing one just because I don’t want the experience to be over. There are a slew of games that I am one to two hours away from beating… and then just stopped playing rather than pushing across the finish line for one reason or another.

With Season 21 I had gotten into this familiar and comfortable pattern of farming bounties to get caches. I’ve written about this at length in other posts but the “easy” way to get the Avarice conquest is to save up enough caches and then open them all at once so that when you move you gather up over the 50 million gold needed. For me this represented 36 bounty caches that I managed to farm up, when I in theory only needed 31. However the amount of time that goes into the farming… always makes me want to over farm just to make sure I don’t screw things up somehow.

The most stressful moment is when I have to reach back into the bank to grab more caches knowing that if I move now it will be over and all of my farming will be for nothing. This is quickly followed by the frustration of having to clear out the mass if items that drop as a result. It takes so many trips do and from the pile of loot in order to clean everything up. This time around I spend most of the time cubing legendaries to finish out the last 20 or so that I needed for that final step in the seasonal journey. Unfortunately I didn’t get anything of note and am still at a single Primal Ancient for the season.

Why did I go through all of this effort? Well for the pet of course. This time it was some sort of a skink in a tube on top of a robotic crab body. The last time I did this seriously was for a Goblin that looked like Tyrael. Why do we do anything in games? For me at least it is more than likely for either a gear upgrade or cosmetic reasons. I could in theory do a bunch more things this season, but in reality once the final goal has been accomplished it feels like it is time to put this character to bed for a few months. I do at some point really need to clean up all of my alts in Diablo 3. There isn’t much of a reason to keep anything more than one of every class, so that might be another side project over the coming weeks.

There is of course my Switch character that I will continue working on. As of last night I hit level 66 and have started trying to pre-emptively knock out as much of the seasonal journey stuff as I can so that when I ding 70 I should have some packages of loot waiting on me. Since I did not do Crusader for the PC season, I decided that Thorns would be a highly playable build for console. So over the next few days I should be dinging 70 and will begin knocking out those seasonal journey accomplishments there. The only real challenge is that I don’t have much in the way of a peer group to knock out things like curses. I know Carth managed to solo it with a well leveled Boon of the Hoarder gem, so I might go after that route.

AggroChat #307 – Connection Based Madness

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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight Belghast completely botches the intro to the show and has to record a second one, and it is absolutely not like the rest of the crew let this slide calmly.  We start the show talking about Cross Code and how it is now available on consoles, and was quite possibly the best roleplaying game of 2018.  Bel dives into a discussion about how connection based matchmaking is destroying any joy that can be found in crucible. This leads into a whole discussion about the best sorts of matchmaking we have played under and also a long discussion about how peer to peer connections are problematic.  We talk about the concept of what if we could choose the length of a game before starting it.  This also leads to a discussion of how more games need clearly identified difficulty settings and allow players to understand the ramifications of that choice.  From there we dive into a discussion about how it is oftentimes hard to find information that is more or less considered to be common knowledge in a given community.

Topics Discussed

  • CrossCode on Consoles
  • Skill Based Matchmaking vs Connection Based Matchmaking
    • How to Ruin and Iron Banner
  • Peer to Peer Connections are Problematic
  • Variable Length Games
  • Why We Need to Stop Caring about how others play games
  • The challenge of finding gaming ancestral knowledge

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Curses, Thrill, and Bounty Farming

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Idling in Tristram on Seasonal Barbarian in Diablo 3 Season 21

Yesterday morning was a bit rough due to the hosting issues, and as a result I got my normal post out significantly later in the day. If you are on a cycle of only reading my blog in the morning then I would greatly appreciate you giving that mid day post a read as well, because I am curious about folks thoughts. In other business I still need about 11 bloggers to volunteer for Blaugust Promptapalooza so please check that post out as well if you are so inclined. Now that the business is out of the way I have been spending most of my time working on the Season 21 journey in Diablo 3. Here is a rundown of the progress made since I last wrote about it.

I tweaked my “No Set” build quite a bit, switching it from an earthquake based build to one that uses Hammer of the Ancients or “HOTA” in D3 parlance. I started with this build as a template and then tweaked it with the items that I actually had access to, namely I still have not gotten fart pants or illusionary boots. I also swapped the Esoteric Alteration gem for a Legacy of Dreams which makes the whole no-set thing significantly easier. I managed to do the 45 with plenty of time to spare and quite honestly Legacy of Dreams just made it a cake walk considering I went in with a 55 gem. The one gotcha is that I took this conquest to mean “no set bonuses active” but what it actually means is no set pieces at all equipped. I ran it once with a pair of ancient legendary set pants and didn’t get the conquest until I went back in and ran with a random legendary pants equipped.

The other conquest that I have knocked out is curses. The easiest way to make this one happen is to keep recreating your adventure mode game until you see the “Cursed Peat” bounty up in Act V Paths of the Drowned. This guarantees that the cursed chest is up, and that particular event spawns a ton of little boglings which help you add up the numbers needed. Two nights ago I was on fairly late and I saw it was up and tried to solo it… and I only hit 311, so just a bit shy of the 350 needed. Last night however Grace and I popped in and out of games until we found the right bounty and managed to beat the 350 needed by about 20. I wish we could have connected with Thalen, because I am certain he will need the conquest as well at some point this season.

That leaves me with only the very time consuming conquest left… Avarice. I’ve written about this before but effectively on T16 I am going to need to run 7 rounds of bounties or a total of 31 bounty caches. I realize I just linked to the post that has all of this information but for the sake of anyone with fresh eyes I am going to repost the cache related information here.

A T13 bounty cache contains 1,190,000 gold.
43 T13 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T14 bounty cache contains 1,440,000 gold.
35 T14 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T15 bounty cache contains 1,540,000 gold.
33 T15 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T16 bounty cache contains 1,640,000 gold.
31 T16 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

I could in theory do them on T13 and effectively knock the bounties out quicker… but I am not sure if the difference in speed would be worth two full more rounds of bounties. I always do more than the strict amount because I am constantly afraid of having to repeat the entire process again. So in theory were I doing T13 I would collect at least 45 chests (9 rounds), and on T16 I would collect at least 35 chests (7 rounds). I am limited in part due to my movement speed and less on the actual killing speed… so in theory there isn’t that big of a difference in the time it takes me to clear T13 as to T16.

Once I have finished my 3rd conquest I will have one last thing to finish, and I have been collecting a vault full of legendaries to knock it out. Essentially I have to use the cube to extract 40 powers, and doing all of these bounties are going to give me plenty of materials to be able to complete this easily. I will be swimming in them, and hopefully can use the excess to begin rerolling the various items I have equipped and hopefully get everything to ancient, and maybe a few to primal. The weirdest part about the season for me is that the roles have been reversed. I am the one carrying others and not the one being carried, which is kind fun for a change. If you need help knocking out any seasonal stuff let me know and I can hopefully arrange a time to assist.