Goodbye Mixer

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I guess the big news this morning is that Mixer is officially over and that Microsoft has sold the service and all of the accounts to Facebook Gaming. Mixer represented and alternative to Twitch.tv for those who sought it, and seemed to have fairly reasonable terms of service. I personally liked it because of the ability to have a conversation with someone sitting in chat in near real time as there was a very minuscule delay between my stream and what they saw. Because of this it is also why I tended to prefer to watch show streams on Mixer when possible, but alas as July 22nd the streaming service will be shuttered with everything transferring over to Facebook.

The real tragedy is that it seems like the partners were not told anything, and just woke up yesterday morning to the news like the rest of us. The big name acts that they specifically brought onto the platform were consulted, but it seems as though everyone else was in the dark. Facebook Gaming does not have a good reputation with gamers, and I would dare to say that a lot of folks try and avoid any interaction with facebook if possible. I saw comments from a few friends yesterday that had been streaming on Mixer as their primary platform stating that they would rather just not stream at all than to follow over to Facebook. I personally went through the process of decoupling all of my accounts from Mixer yesterday, but did not go so far as the delete my account in its entirety.

It seems like Gothycakes is one of the few named talent acquisitions that Mixer did that is planning on letting it ride and going onto Facebook gaming. The challenge is that most of the folks that left Twitch to go to Mixer in the first place experienced a massive decline in their viewership, Ninja included. It is really hard to get people to switch platforms, let alone to move over to one that a lot of folks associate with their parents more than their own interests. The Electronic Sports League or ESL signed an exclusive deal for streaming match content on Facebook, and according to reports experienced an 85% loss in viewership. That does not bode terribly well for folks asking their fans to follow them in this buyout to an already struggling platform.

What I think is more concerning however is this closes the door on what was the only real viable alternative to Twitch. Yes of course there is YouTube Gaming, but that service has had its own fraught history and in May of 2019 completely shut down the apps associated with the gaming service burying the content once again in mainstream YouTube. As a viewer watching content on YouTube live is not exactly a great experience and feels extremely minimal when it comes to fan interaction. Live Streaming gets mixed in with the accursed YouTube premiere program making it extremely hard to tell which of the people you follow are actually live and which are simply feeding you recorded content through an awkward delivery mechanism.

Once upon a time I used to stream on Hitbox, but that has apparently become Smashcast. Hitbox already had some shady moments as a service, and Smashcast seems to have doubled down on this ethic. There are of course other smaller platforms that one could stream to. If you already have an established community on Discord for example, you might simply be better just streaming through its options. What is ultimately going to happen however, is that the vast majority of streamers that were on Mixer are likely going to try and get their fans to transition back to team purple. Twitch is the massive juggernaut in streaming, and it is going too be progressively harder to compete with them. Which unfortunately means that content creators have also lost most of the leverage they might have had when it comes to negotiating with them.

I’ve been kicking around the notion of streaming again, and I had honestly contemplated Mixer because the community there has always seemed to be a big more positive than that of Twitch. However as a Twitch affiliate, there was already a strong reason just to stay with that platform since I already had inroads, not to mention that I never got organic viewership through any platform other than big purple. I feel bad for the folks who had their livelihood mixed up with Microsoft and the Mixer platform. I don’t think Facebook is going to be a favorable environment for games streaming at any point in the near future, but I guess I could be wrong. This is a significant move in an attempt to buy them some market share, and it will at the very least probably add a non-zero amount of value to the platform.

If someone has been out there waiting in the wings looking to launch a streaming platform… I guess now would be the ideal timing to do so and provide these folks who are effectively being de-platformed an alternative. I doubt that is going too happen however, and since YouTube doesn’t really seem to care much about its game streamers the lions share will come back to Twitch. What are your thoughts about this news? Do you intend to follow streamers over to Facebook gaming? Drop me a line in the comments below.

Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition

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I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal.

It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 – PC

Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.

Diablo III – PC and Switch

Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.

To the New and Returning

Guild Wars 2 – PC

So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.

Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC

I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.

Torchlight III – PC

I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.

World of Warcraft – Retail – PC

World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.

To Those Departing

Animal Crossing: New Horizon – Switch

Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.

Atom RPG – PC

You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.

Wolcen – PC

I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.

Summary

During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing.

AggroChat #304 – Darkness and Dragons

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Featuring:  Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start off with a discussion about Destiny and unintentionally the storyline a bit as Darkness has finally arrived.  Bel talks about the degenerate gameplay of the AFK Forge and how it more or less brought the game to a halt.  We also talk about the gear sunset as Bungie tries to do MTG Standard but for Destiny.  From there we talk about Guild Wars 2 and how Tam thinks it is the best mount system.  Bel and Grace disagree, but we continue from there about some general discussion about the game and more specifically the Dragon mount grind.  Lastly we wrap up with a quick discussion of the EA Play 2020 event, Star Wars Squadrons, Cross Play for All Platforms and that EA is probably still evil in spite of them really wanting us not to think that.

Topics Discussed

  • Destiny 2
    • The Darkness is Here
    • Degenerate AFK Forge
    • Weapon Sunset
      • MTG Standard for Destiny
  • Guild Wars 2
    • Ideas about Flight
      • Tam’s Soliloquy of Love
      • Bel and Grace’s disagreement
    • The Dragon Mount Grind
    • General Guild Wars 2 Discussion
  • EA Play 2020
    • Sweet Star Wars Game
    • Cross Play For All
    • Probably Still Evil

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

One Last Ride

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With the AFK Forge Farm broken, the planetary activities appear to be back on the menu. I spent a good amount of time last night on Io rolling from one event to another with no fear of having enough folks to actually be able to defeat the heroic boss at the end. This is what Destiny feels like when it is good, an effortless series of events that ignite off the conclusion of the last. The unfortunate thing however is that it never quite stays this way. For now everyone has renewed vigor for something other than AFKing for hours and getting free engrams, and as a result I am riding it for all that it is worth.

One of the things that is making everything feel so damned good is a new auto rifle that appears to be in the rotation. I have no clue where it originally came from, but I played an excessive amount of gambit and never seemed to find one. I love this thing so much and for the first time in years that I have had anything that felt close to my beloved Haakon’s Hatchet from Destiny 1. I am very happy that I will in theory be able to carry this weapon forward for a few seasons. You can tell this fact by the little yellow number that shows 1360 power, meaning that this thing can be capped for a few more seasons before it becomes defunct.

What does not bring me joy is the stark realization that so many of my favorite weapons are going to be gone after this current season. Notice on my perfect roll of Bad Omens that it shows 1060 power, which is the current seasonal cap meaning that after this go round this weapon will no longer be able to grow. Bad Omens however is currently dropping from Umbral Engrams, so I am hoping that through all of this I can maybe get another one of these to drop that extends the life for a few more seasons. With cluster bombs and tracking this is pretty much as close to feeling like the Gjallarhorn as has ever exited in Destiny 2.

Nothing will ever likely replace the easymode farming that was the AFK Forge, but simply going out and playing the game seems to yield a fair number of engrams on its own. I played for a few hours last night and managed to walk away with six umbral engrams, a powerful engram, several random legendary drops and an exotic drop which seems like a pretty reasonable haul for playing some Crucible and Gambit. Right now I am mostly focusing down the various things that can reward powerful or pinnacle gear, as well as working on the various bounties associated with the season to stockpile on currency. I am not sure why I am back playing, but I am… and I think it is at least in part a desire for one last ride with my favorite gear before it starts to go away.