Coin Weight Is Bad

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Before I dig into this mornings topic I feel like I need to preface it a bit. I really want Pantheon Rise of the Fallen to succeed. The release of new Western MMORPGs that are not highly focused on becoming pvp kill boxes is an extreme rarity. The Everquestian and Warcraftian dynasties are barren. It is a fevered dream for me to someday tuck into a brand new game that doesn’t involve playing k-pop idols in heavy armor. What I actually want is something more akin to a World of Warcraft or a Lord of the Rings Online that takes advantage of all of the niceties of everything we have learned in the last twenty years of gaming. However what I am apparently getting instead is a love song to the pain filled days of Everquest.

That is not to say I didn’t know this going into following Pantheon. This is a game created by the late Brad McQuaid. I also feel like I should preface once again that I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I should have known with crystal clarity what I was in for. Brad has effectively developed the same game three times, each time trying to realize his original vision with a higher level of fidelity. You have the original Everquest that was severely limited by technological constraints. Next up was Vanguard that appeared to go through some severe development time constraints of needing to push forward to market in an incomplete state. Lastly you have Pantheon which seemed like a final attempt to make good on what he was seeing inside of his head but never quite capable of realizing in digital form.

I feel like another important statement is that both Everquest and Vanguard ultimately eased up on the harsh restrictions that were originally placed on the player on both games. Everquest made itself considerably more casual friendly with the introduction of graveyards that summon bodies, a massive teleportation network that allows players to move around more quickly and freely, and even the introduction of instanced content that was more casual friendly. In an effort to find an audience, Vanguard went through a lot of more casual player friendly changes as it struggled to stay afloat. I remember playing it launch and deeming it just not very fun, when I was used to World of Warcraft at the time. I went back considerably later towards the end of its life cycle and had a blast running around and exploring Telon.

Coin weight should matter, and we’ve decided to go that direction

Joppa – Pantheon Creative Director

However all of the above doesn’t exactly explain why I am writing about Pantheon this morning. Yesterday while casually browsing the interwebs I stumbled onto a blurb from MassivelyOp talking about the decision to add coin weight into the game. For those who were not from that era of gaming, back during the Everquest days, the coin you were carrying had weight to it and you regularly needed to dump coin in the bank to keep from being encumbered. For those poor monk players they were constantly fighting a losing battle trying to keep their total item carry down below a specific weight number in order to keep from being debuffed. It was a bad idea then and it is a bad idea now. By the time of Dark Age of Camleot, the immediate successor to Everquest, coin weight had been abandoned and effectively has been gone from the genre ever sense.

The fact that this community wants coin weight back in the game tells me that they have a deeply masochistic streak. I think more than anything it also sets a tone for the type of game that Pantheon is trying to be. If you have coin weight then you are likely probably also going to have full item loss on death and corpse recovery, and on top of that the ability to lose levels. Essentially it sets a tone for a game that I really don’t want to personally play, because I would never freely return to a game that put me in the sort of negative positions that Everquest did. I don’t want to get those real world calls on a Sunday afternoon begging me to log in and resurrect a corpse because they had lost their level and needed the experience back and it was just about to rot. I also have no nostalgia for twelve hour long runs in Fear, Hate or the Plane of Sky.

They’re looking for people with the time and dedication of college students but appealing to the nostalgia of middle-aged gamers who no longer have that kind of time.

Tipa – via Tweet

I think last night Tipa hit the nail on the head and phrased my thoughts in a much more concise manner. Pantheon is being built for an imaginary demographic, that has the tastes of a 40 something but the free time and real world constraints of a teenager. I also wonder if this is the video game equivalent of a midlife crisis… the desire to recapture the glory of our past adventures in a modern game without having the logic to understand that is a bygone era. We put up with a lot of these punishing design patterns, not because we loved them… but because there was no other game out there for us to be playing that offered the same kind of experience. The critical thing we have now that we lacked then is the freedom of choice and a wealth of options that we could be playing that asks significantly less of our time.

What I want is a game that feels like Everquest felt like, without actually making me re-live the trauma of the past. I also want that game to be delivered with all of the knowledge we have learned in the two decades worth of online gaming that have happened between now and then. I am somewhat saddened by the fact that Pantheon won’t be that game. However I am more saddened by the fact that Pantheon is effectively being built for an audience that I question actually existing. Sure there is a community of backers and folks like Cohh Carnage fueling this fire, but I have also experienced this all a number of times as games launched. Players will absolutely tell you with utter conviction that they want this thing today, and then post launch tell you how it didn’t end up feeling as good as they thought it would. Players ultimately don’t know what they want.

What I do however know for certain is that I don’t have the room in my life that demands total control of my play time, and the requirement to always be grouped with other players. Sure folks will tell you that you can solo just fine on certain classes… as someone who tried to solo level a Cleric in the original Everquest, I can tell you that really is no life at all. The truth is I didn’t really have the time to play Everquest the first time around. However I was so hungry for that type of experience that I was willing to risk marital strife in order to get that experience. I know more than one marriage that ended over that game and the time constraints placed upon its players. While “coin weight” really isn’t as big of a deal as I am probably making it out to be, for me it is emblematic of a “vision” that I want no part of. I feel like we have probably swung too far in the direction of player convenience to make interesting game decisions. However I feel like this reaction is way too far in the other direction.

Why I Became Horde

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This weekend an event happened that I thought I would talk about, however first I feel like I need to give some background. During the heyday of World of Warcraft I was a die-hard Alliance player. They were of course the faction that had Dwarves, which went an awfully long way for me. However because of the human faction hacks, the fear break, and weapon skill hacks I ultimately re-rolled at some point as a Human Warrior that became Belghast, the character that I ultimately became most known for. Argent Dawn during Vanilla was a magical place, that much like cheers was a server where everybody knew your name. This was in part due to the fact that it had a very active server forum, allowing different guilds and both factions to mingle freely.

As I moved my way into leading raids, I got indoctrinated into a bit of a club of other raid leaders who were in pretty regular communication. I’ve talked about this before but we had an incident where someone took BOE loot as need, left the raid and posted it on the auction house. I mentioned it to one other raid leader, and within fifteen minutes this player was on the do not invite list of all of the major raids in the game and on non-raiding probation for the guild based raid that he just joined. Twenty minutes he was in chat begging me to reverse all of it, when in truth the cat was out of the bag. No one wanted someone like that in their raid and all I did was mention it to one other leader in passing and it set the wheels in motion that really couldn’t be undone.

Argent Dawn was a server that was greatly impacted by a number of events over the years, most specifically the Alliance faction. Firstly the transition between 40 player raids to 25 player raids was extremely fraught, and similarly was the shift down to the existence of 10 player raids. Probably more than that however was the shift away from non-guild based raiding that came with Cataclysm. Blizzard started attaching things at the guild level, and Argent Dawn was a server with a still thriving ecosystem of raid groups that weren’t actually really associated with a specific guild. For years we were an overpopulated server being one of the first two Roleplaying flagged servers, and each time new servers opened up Argent Dawn was often times in the list of eligible targets for transferring characters off. On the Alliance side of the house this claimed entire guilds as they decided to make the jump to greener pastures.

For me personally, I checked out of World of Warcraft during Cataclysm, and it began a cycle. I would go through this pattern of returning at the end of one expansion, playing the pre-expansion content and then ultimately leaving again one or two patches into the new expansion. This is not exactly what you want in a guildmaster, and this ultimately lead me to hand off the reigns a few times… firstly to Elnore who was a serious raider and shifted the focus of the guild to raiding. Then to Rylacus who was more or less the Steward of Gondor, not really leading the guild but more keeping tabs on it while I was away. Finally the guild transitioned to Kylana, who like Elnore once again shifted the guild and the infrastructure to serve the purpose of raiding. There was a time where I was unfairly bitter about the changes in the guild as a whole, since I fought hard to keep Stalwart not just another raid guild. However I can see that they made the changes that were needed by the people who were still around and still playing the game while I was constantly gone.

The bigger problem however, is that I was never just active in House Stalwart. I was active in the community at large and while I was gone it changed in even more sweeping ways. Not only did my effective “home” feel a little foreign each time I returned to the game, but the server community as a whole felt like strangers. There was a time when I had the limit of server channels configured on my characters, and coming back they were all ghost towns. Gone was the council of guild and raid leaders, gone were the social channels of friend raid groups, gone were the few roleplaying groups that I was still friendly with, and replaced was a bunch of asshattery in raid chat by a completely new crop of people. I tried to make connections, but ultimately it didn’t feel like home.

For years I had been a semi-active member of the Bloodmoon Chosen guild on the horde side, which was made up of a bunch of people that I knew from the Argent Dawn server forums and the eventual Argent Dawn IRC channel. These were folks that I had communicated with daily for years, so it absolutely made sense that I park my little horde alts in their guild. It was during Warlords of Draenor I believe that some drama happened on that side of the fence, and while I am still not exactly sure what went down, all of my friends from BMC broke out and founded their own guild. Facepull felt like home because it was made up of so many people that I had known since Vanilla days, and I started leveling a Paladin that served as my horde main for a few expansions.

The funny thing about Argent Dawn Horde side is that it seemed not to be changed so severely by the rigors of time. While roaming around in both the Hubs and the over-world zones I was constantly bumping into familiar faces and having random conversations with folks that I actually knew form the onset of the server. This weekend one of these events happened, and it was ultimately what inspired me to write about my shift in allegiance. I was landing at the Great Seal just as a familiar name was about to take off, which caused me to send a message to her. Tenebres is someone I have known from the forums for decades, and I remember when she posted baby photos of her now 15 year old daughter in what I think was the IRC Server at the time? So what followed was us talking for a good 45 minutes catching up on how and what we have been doing.

The thing is… this isn’t a one time event because I am constantly bumping into people that I have known for years while roaming the world, because it seems like the Horde never had the great server splits that the Alliance side did. The Horde just feels like home right now. There has been massive turn over in the Alliance guild, and I dearly love some of the folks that still tie back to the era in which I was actively playing. However playing Horde reminds me of the social fabric that I loved about the server because while it is somewhat diminished, it still exists and there are still large groups of people that communicate on a regular basis. It is ultimately those social connections that root me to a game and to its server, and without them the entire process just feels hollow. Ultimately this is why I am spending my time of late playing catch up and leveling an army of alts, because that is the one thing that I miss the most from Alliance side, being self sufficient in all of the tradeskills.

AggroChat #297 – Easing the Learning Curve

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

Tonight we start off the show with a special announcement.  Cat Context was effectively the podcast that inspired Bel to go out and try and do the same thing with some of his friends.  After a three year absence, this week we get a brand new Cat Context episode that can be found hosted on Aggronaut.com.  Today Kodra is going to be playing some Hollow Knight randomizer since there are a bunch of new updates and he has been given an entire day for gaming.  From there we get into a topic that has been skipped a few times due to the potential length regarding easing into a learning curve and how Infinity is trying this with Code Zero.  Bel segues into a discussion about what happens when the servers go offline and a game goes dark and the concern that there will be an entire generation of games that are eternally lost.  Finally we wrap things up with some talk about the Mario Maker 2 Final Update and the interesting things that level builders are doing with it.

Topics Discussed:

  • Cat Context Podcast
  • Hollow Knight Randomizer Updates
  • Easing into the Learning Curve
    • Infinity Code Zero
    • Magic the Gathering
    • Warhammer 40k
    • Timeless Games
  • Lost Generation of Games
    • What happens when a game permanently goes offline
    • The age of private servers
  • Mario Maker 2 Final Update
    • Fun with World Maker
    • What makes a quintessential Mario game

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Cat Context Podcast #117 – Three Years Happened

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Featuring:  Arolaide, Ellyndrial, and Liore

The circular nature of life can be strange.  You are oftentimes presented with opportunities that you never quite expected.  The Thirteenth of April was the six year anniversary of AggroChat, and that is extremely germaine to today’s topic.  In 2014 I was listening to a podcast created and hosted by one of my good friends called Cat Context.  The shift to listening to it was extremely natural because at the time I was playing Rift as part of the Machiavelli’s Cat, so it felt like I was listening to an extension of guild chat.  It was effectively three friends, hanging out on voice chat and talking about a bunch of loose topics for roughly an hour.

The chemistry that this group of friends had was staggering, and it planted a seed in my head that I could in theory do the same thing with the large cast of characters that I hung out with on a nightly basis on Teamspeak.  Little did I know at the time that making a conversation seem effortless is way harder than it sounds, and I am still in awe of the great interactions that always happened on the Cat Context podcast.  Over the years I would get wistful and tweet at Liore or Aro about how much I miss the show.  Apparently this stuck in Liores head as earlier this week I got a DM announcing that they had gotten “the band back together” but lacked any place to actually host or advertise it.

So it is with great pleasure that I have the opportunity to announce Cat Context episode 117, or at least we think that is the appropriate number.  Three years ago life happened to all of these wonderful hosts and the show sorta dropped.  As a result we have a show that talks about at least in part what has happened over the last three years and more importantly what life is like now living in the time of pandemic.  I hope you are all as pleased to see a new episode of Cat Context and I would absolutely be willing to set up more permanent hosting for the trio if this thing starts happening more frequently.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download