MMORPG Social

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mmorpg-social

Over the last few days I have found myself playing around with Mastodon quite a bit more.  For those who remember I wrote a series of posts about Mastodon, talking about its potential as a twitter replacement.  The two posts of note are probably “Adventures in the Federiverse” where I largely botch the agreed upon “Fediverse” name, and a later one where I talk about the customs I wish I knew about going into it.  I still have a lot of hope about the concept, but I also found myself largely falling out of frequency in using it.  Nineties.Cafe had this great run of regular activity and then almost simultaneously we all sorta wandered off more than likely because we got busy.

This recent flurry of activity has in part been do to the very excellent Gazimoff aka Gareth Harmer and creating the MMORPG.social mastodon instance.  At first I thought this was something connected to MMORPG.com since well you know… he is one of the writers there.  After some digging however I guess the root is with the loss of Wildstar, the idea seems to be bourn out of trying to create a neutral non-game based MMORPG community that lets people continue to stay in touch.  This is something I can definitely get behind, plus the launch of a new instance is an awful lot like the launch of a new MMORPG itself… and everyone appears to be happy and busy and active.

The only negative is that I seem to be leaving ground strewn in my wake full of past instances.  For those who have not followed my madness I have ended up unintentionally being a bit of an instance jumper.  Thankfully Mastodon by default has a system that allows you to forward users from one profile to another… but they are effectively disconnected personas.  MMORPG.Social is my fourth experiment with the platform…  let me run through them all.

  • @Belghast@Mastodon.Cloud – my first attempt and I only started here because Mastodon.social the flagship was full
  • @Belghast@Elekk.xyz – I rapidly realized that this instance had way more of “my people” on it and jumped because of its game focused local.  I still sub to the Patreon to help support it.
  • @Belghast@Nineties.Cafe – I jumped yet again when my good friend Liore founded this instance to create a permanent niche in the mastodon network that we had a bit more control over.  The truth is I don’t plan on abandoning this but over the last several months it has become pretty inactive.
  • @Belghast@MMORPG.social – Finally I am here because I thought this was a really interesting experiment and thusfar has been a very charming local to hang out and talk MMORPGs with.  At the moment it seems to be very FFXIV focused, but folks have commented on some of my Destiny related posts as well.

Now can I say with certainty that I won’t jump again?  Nope not at all, but the cool thing about Mastodon and the ActivityPub based Fediverse is that you don’t have to care much about it.  You can export the people you follow from one instance and move them forward with you to the next.  You are by no means limited to communicating with your local pool of users, but can instead drink from the firehose and go out into the much larger global fediverse and interact with hundreds of other instances each with their own specific goals and purposes.

I think the biggest challenge that Mastodon has is we keep looking to it as a replacement for Twitter as a whole.  That is a lot of responsibility to be placing on a fledgling network, especially given that personally I have been actively using Twitter since April of 2009 and racked up in that time some almost 58,000 tweets.  My gut reaction when something happens is to still hop on Twitter and say something about it.  There is a lot of inertia there to overcome, and if you go into it expecting it to be the new thing that everyone is going to use…  it is more or less just setting it up for failure.  Instead I am largely angling for the stance of “This is something else fun to use” and setting myself for those expectations.  I know that I will never convert the critical mass of twitter folk to take up the banner of tooting…  but instead I am finding it interesting to branch out and meet some new and interesting people there instead.

I have goals of sorta tweaking each of the four profiles I have on Mastodon to be different things, because I still want to use Nineties.cafe, but probably as a more personal account, and MMORPG.social will become the account I use more to talk about gaming stuff.  I know several users who have done an excellent job of separating the streams, and each account gives me access to a totally different Local feed.  I just need to sort out a better Android client to use that has good multi-account support since Tusky as much as I like it… requires you to log out completely to log into another instance.

 

Forging Stuff

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A couple of weeks ago I talked about my general disappointment in The Black Armory and how it does not really have any content that players can participate in immediately.  That much is largely true but as far as disappointment it is waning.  Once I hit 620 light the Forge Ignition sequence went from nigh impossible to pretty much a guaranteed thing.  The actually event itself is honestly pretty great, I just wish it would have scaled in a similar fashion to the way that strikes appear to, giving players a brand new activity to do at a much wider variety of light levels.  Now at 630 light burning down the final boss feels much like burning down a Public Event Boss…  somewhat time consuming but largely trivial.  Granted I have yet to ignite any of the forges other than Volundr, but I am up to the point where I should be doing Gofanon tonight.  I could have in theory done it last night but I spent my evening trying to mop up any remaining powerful gear rewards that I had available.

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The Hammerhead is your first reward for taking down the boss and while I didn’t get an amazing roll…  I didn’t get a horrific one either.  I’ve since ignited the forge a few more times to get some of the blue weapon frames which apparently end up as one of a handful of weapons per type of activity being completed.  I did one that required doing three lost sectors on the Dreaming City and another that required taking down a couple high value targets in the Gambit and in both cases it rewarded a weapon from the pool from those activities.  I am working on one for collecting a bunch of materials, and as a result I am assuming it will be rewarding one of the planetary weapons as a result.  Now for some quick show and tell of some of the weapons I have picked up from the armory either as drops or as frames that I forged.

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This is the weapon that I forged from a blue frame that involved running three lost sectors in Dreaming City.  I have to say I love this weapon so much in both look and the way it feels to use it.  I’ve infused it up a bit and it has more or less become my new main hand canon to go to.

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The other weapon that I got from forging a blue frame is Bygones…  which weirdly enough is a weapon I had yet to get from any of my Gambit packages.  This one comes with kill clip and full auto and so far has been a blast to use because it honestly feels like you are firing a really slow rate of fire super accurate auto rifle.

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As far as random drops…  Bad News was never an amazing Hand Canon to start with, and this way cooler paint job version isn’t necessarily amazing either.  The roll I got has explosive rounds and range finder… which is okay-ish but the reload speed largely precludes me from using this very often.

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Baligant is also not an amazing shotgun in general but this version with Field Prep and Moving Target seems particularly bad…  I mean I guess you could slide to reload but not really my cup of tea.  I tend to ignore all shotguns that are not full auto.

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Lastly I finally wrapped up my Hand Cannon Headshots in Crucible… and then completed the rest of steps and unlocked my Ace of Spades.  Yes I realize this is like six months behind the curve but whatever…  it knocks another exotic quest off the list.  I still have several that I need to do including the Rat King which simply requires me to go find some other people with the Rat King and do activities.

Have you gotten anything cool or interesting from the Black Armory Forges?

Prison Break Problems

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First off I need to start this mornings blog post with a spoiler warning.  If you have not played through the first mission in the Destiny 2 Forsaken expansion, then there are going to be spoilers included.  Granted probably nothing more than was already spoiled with the Forsaken trailer, but I just felt like I needed to throw that out there.  This weekend I spent some time playing Destiny 2 and while working on the Heroic Story mission queue I noticed one of the missions was “Prison Break” the first mission in the Forsaken storyline, and something I had not played through in awhile.  I remembered really liking it a lot and opted to go replay it for powerful gear credit.

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It was around this point that I realized the core problem with Destiny 2 and its story.  It functionally operates in two modes…  pretending that you never played Destiny 1 and re-educating you in all of the basics of the universe, or assuming completely that you were a Destiny 1 lore hound and giving you a big ole deep dive with little room between the two.  The “Prison Break” episode plays out completely differently for players who were new to Destiny with the PC release and players who were veterans of the original game on the consoles.  This disconnect begins from the very moment that you are treated to a cinematic between Uldren Sov and Cayde-6.  This really hit me at the moment of the above screenshot…  the “How’s your sister?” line either is extremely powerful or makes no fucking sense depending on your perspective.

“Prison Break” is a mission that almost exclusively references things that happened in Destiny 1… and worse things that were never introduced up to this point in Destiny 2.  Sure if you went around scanning everything your ghost indicates you can scan you might have gotten snippets of information here or there but if you base things entirely upon what you see in the normal flow of Destiny 2 there are a bunch of problems.

  • The player has no clue who Uldren Sov is – we last saw him in the introduction to Taken King expansion for Destiny 1
  • The player has no clue who Mara Sov is… because again we last saw her in the introduction video to Taken King in the big Oryx space battle
  • The player really has no clue what the Reef is
  • The player has no clue that the Awoken were working with the Fallen and have no clue who Variks was/is
  • The player has no clue what exactly the Prison of Elders is
  • The player has no clue who Petra Venj is and why we already seemingly know her

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These are all things that make this mission extremely confusing if you view it through the lens of a “brand new to Destiny 2” player.  For veterans however this mission is a big romp as you roam through this place that you only managed to see a piece of before when doing trials for Variks.  This is a destination I think that we all wanted to see more of and I was completely staggered by the sheer scope of the place when I first played the mission.  For those who are not already familiar with it… it is just another busted ass location that is being blown up for some reason and that is largely hand waved away.  There is no time spent on explaining what it is other than a Prison, and no time spent explaining who Petra Venj is other than someone who can apparently levitate her knife.

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This is the core challenge of this expansion and why I think it had such split reactions.  For me it was an amazing romp through places I had been and quite honestly miss greatly from Destiny 1, and for others… it is just another string of locations that were never really explained.  The game does a really bad job of telling a cohesive narrative that does not require you to have watched every single Byf or Myelin lore video to understand.  I was one of those players that gobbled up every little bit of lore about the first game… and as a result I sounded like a madman half of the time when I talked about it trying to defend it to the rest of the AggroChat crew as being this deep masterpiece.  The game doesn’t just let players know these things, but instead requires them to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to be able to interact with the content.  The Book of Sorrows is really interesting science fiction horror reading…  that thankfully has been collected into an easy to read PDF or EPUB format…   but to get it initially you had to roam around the Dreadnaught in Destiny 1 collecting over 40 Calcified Fragments.

The problem with this style of storytelling is it sets up a dichotomy of players.   You have players like me who are willing to track down the story and chase it across various in game assets and other websites that help to summarize and condense the content into easily understandable chunks.  You also have what I feel is the majority of players who just straight up bounce off of the story when it never quite pays off on the deep secrets they have heard people talking about through its storyline.  If you were a lore hound, you immediately understood who the frozen hive were and why it was super exciting to see them.  You also understood a lot of things about Rasputin and at the very least knew who Ana Bray was enough to be interested in meeting her.  You also knew all sorts of things about Cayde-6 and his background and how someone becomes an Exo, and why Clovis Bray is the home of some really dangerous technologies.

 

As a new player… which is especially true for the PC crowd given that there was no option of playing Destiny 1 on that platform, you are simply treated to a list of names that have no real meaning.  These are proper names which is at least an upgrade from Destiny 1 which treated you to “the traveler”, “the speaker”, “the exo stranger”, and “the darkness” among others.  The names themselves however don’t have meaning attached to them if you didn’t dig for said meaning.  Sure for the right kind of player this sets up a delectable puzzle that they are going to go digging for to find the answers, but you can’t expect EVERY player to want to do the leg work required to make any sense of it all.  In the end I will defend the story that is being told as ground breaking, because the sum of all parts is amazing…  but the game does no favors in actually helping players find it.  It took me a long time to really see this point of view, but replaying through “Prison Break” was a bit of a wake up call to them simply not explaining why we should be caring about anything in this game.

Digital Fragmentation

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epicgamesstorefront

There has been a significant amount of consternation surrounding the recent activities of Epic Games…  which I still feel like I need to cram the Mega in there.  There are those that herald this as a new era in which Steam actually has proper competition.  There are others that signal this as the end times for PC Gaming because players will be fragmented across many platforms.  There are others still that are complaining largely because they don’t want to have to install the “Fortnite Client” to play their games.  For me however I am somewhat amused as I sit back and watch the events unfold  because it all has a sense of deja vu.

Epic is a company that had a game that was a big enough success… that they decided they were able to askew all of the traditional norms and funnel everyone through their own infrastructure.  If you removed the word “Epic” and replaced it with Valve the above statement would still be completely true.  Steam started out more or less as the digital distribution mechanism for Half-life 2, and a good number of us only got our steam accounts largely because of this.  Prior to Steam I had dabbled with a few services like Direct 2 Drive which was at the time a side project by IGN, in fact my original Mass Effect 2 copy was through it.  However round about 2008 I standardized on Steam as my platform of choice since it was clearing winning the early digital distribution battles.

Since around 2010 I made the decision to go entirely digital if possible, and that carried forward onto not only PC purchases but also with consoles as well…  which has lead me to swap out a few hard drives to upgrade them in the process.  The funny thing is… you accumulate a lot of digital games scattered across different platforms.  When I purchased a video card a few years back I got a copy of Witcher 3 for example…  but it was only redeemable on the GOG Galaxy client.  Each month as part of my Amazon Prime subscription, Twitch Prime gives me a slew of games…  that are only available through the Twitch client.

I just did some looking this morning and not counting single game clients…  I have the following Multi-Game Launchers installed on my system…

  • Battle.net
  • Bethesda.net
  • Epic Games Launcher
  • Glyph
  • GOG Galaxy
  • My.Com Game Center
  • Origin
  • Perfect World ARC
  • Steam
  • Twitch Client
  • Ubisoft UPlay
  • Wargaming.net Game Center
  • Windows Store

That is thirteen clients, not counting Discord who also seemingly wants to get in on the action but that I don’t have any games through.  So to the point of those being concerned about fragmentation…  what difference does one more store make giving that eleven of those clients I had installed prior to the launch of the Epic Games store.  This isn’t taking into account the three online stores that I also interact with on Microsoft Consoles, Sony Consoles and Nintendo Consoles.  The funny thing is…  I can think of a couple other clients that I no longer have installed that would have bumped that number up even higher.

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What makes it even more disturbing is the number of games that I am accumulating that I will probably never actually play.  Originally this was just the realm of Humble Bundle… when I purchased a bundle deal because of one title that I wanted… and got fifteen more that I didn’t.  However since then there are Xbox Live Gold and Playstation Plus which I largely just consider to be the upkeep costs of owning a Microsoft or Sony console…  but that also give away games each month that I feel obligated to log into their respective store fronts and claim just in the off chance that I might want to play them at some point.  On top of that Origin gives away games on the regular… which I am admittedly less connected to regularly grabbing because Origin is hands down the worst client.  But now Epic Games is determined to start giving us new games every few weeks, and Twitch Prime offers up a deluge of new titles each month.  Ultimately I need some way of keeping track what I have on what platforms and the only real options I have found are completely manual.

Basically what I am saying is… we have been fragmented for a very long time and while I respect the notion that folks don’t want to sully their systems with yet another launcher I am also not that sort of a purist.  Disk space is cheap and I like the concept of having a lot of games “on tap” and ready to play when the mood hits me, and as a result I have all of these damned launchers scattered throughout my system doing whatever launchers do.  It is an unfortunate reality, but it is a reality I long ago accepted as something that I am going to have to deal with.  The only two clients that I really take issue with are Origin and the Windows Store, but one of those I can’t uninstall because it came with the operating system… and the other I am resigned to use because I still care about Bioware games.

When it comes to making game purchases however that is a completely different situation, and as it stands now…  I am not opposed to the concept of buying games on the Epic Games store.  The interface currently is way better for finding games than that of Steam… but that is only because it has a handful of games on it at the moment.  Steam is a victim of its own success and its generally hands off approach that they have had in attempting to manage their platform.  As such potential gems are embedded in among of shovelware asset flips, making it extremely hard to find those things that you maybe have not heard of yet… but probably should give a shot.  I guess time will tell how Epic decides to combat that with their own store front.  For the moment however I don’t think some sort of a PC Gaming Apocalypse is upon us…  nor do I really care about having to install another client.  I think things are going to move forward much the way they always have …  and by the end of next year I will probably be forced to install a few more vestigial clients in order to keep playing the things I want to play.