Tales of the Aggronaut

MMO Ecosystems

December 4, 2015 by Belghast

What is a Game

Yesterday I got involved in a long winded discussion about the effects a major guild dying, has on a game… the game in question of course was World of Warcraft. There were a couple of different points of view floating around, and they largely centered around what the definition of the game meant to each person. Some folks chose to take the literal view and focus on the mechanics of the game itself, and argue that the loss of a big guild does nothing to change the way the game functionally plays. I however choose to view the game like an ecosystem, where quite honestly the actual game mechanics become one of the least important parts of shaping daily interaction. When a game launches, it ceases to be all about the pushing of buttons and the getting of loot. Much like a workplace has little to do with the rules and regulations that you set up ahead of time… but instead the interactions between the employees and the general sense of morale. If you have a great cohesive environment created by the players, you can overcome a lot of the technical shortcomings a game may have.

When a game is server based, like World of Warcraft, the game for most players is narrowed to a very specific niche… namely the things that occur on that individual server. Sure you can re-roll anywhere, but once someone has set down roots in my experience they are highly unlikely to move. I have 11 characters on Argent Dawn for example, and the vast majority of those characters are over level 90. So when I contemplate changing servers… the will to do this is pretty non-existent. My experiences with the game have largely been shaped by those individuals I have had interactions with on that server. With the switch of focus from group based activities to largely solo interaction… this might have changed, but I find it hard to believe that any given player is not in at least some way influenced by the forces at play on their home server. A large chunk of that environment is the large guilds that populate its ecosystem. So when one of those guilds leaves… it is felt not only in the social channels, but also in the economy and the general activity of the server. Crafters need time pressed raiders to buy their potions and “raid mats”, and casual players benefit from having those raiders regularly participating in group activities.

The Ecosystem

I’m going to break out and talk about a non-Warcraft example of the importance of a guild. In Wildstar on the Entity server, there is a guild I am part of called the Black Dagger Society. While I happen to be a member and might be a little bit biased, I think they represent one of those guilds that is for lack of a better term “too big to fail” when it comes to the health of that server. I would be willing to bet that there is not a single Exile player that does not benefit from them being on the server, and to some extent I would be willing to bet that even the Dominion players feel their presence as well. The big event that they organize is ThaydFest which is a weekend player run festival that serves as a focus point of getting players interacting with each other. The scope of this thing is massive, and you simply cannot exist on the server that week without feeling its pull. Similarly the BDS are the sort of guild that is constantly interacting with the world and the players that are not in there guild. I’ve rode along as they rolled into a zone… and started asking anyone there to join them in the taking down of this world boss or that. I’ve also watched their members be the first to respond when someone publicly asks for help. They embody the spirit of what an amazing community focused guild is like.

So if something were to happen to the Black Dagger Society, the effects would ripple to the core of the Entity server. There are a lot of things that would simply stop happening because I’ve not seen a similarly community focused force stepping up to offer the same level of interaction. Carbine as a company would do well to do whatever they can to nurture the fact that a guild like this exists, and they have done some community spotlight pieces on ThaydFest in an attempt to help them out. But when it comes to World of Warcraft, I have lived through the effect of guilds just like the BDS dying on a server, and watched the community as a whole contract. Cataclysm was the great changing of the guard on Argent Dawn, and when I came back at the end of it… all of the rich social network that I had when I left… had shriveled up and died. When one big guild leaves… it has a trickle down effect touching the satellite guilds that also interact with them. So to the players… that played on Argent Dawn, and stayed there during this transition… the game was absolutely traumatically changed for them. I know this… because I’ve talked to many of my friends that probably at least a little bit feel betrayed because I left them.

The Important Parts

Essentially this discussion is one about definitions, and how narrow your focus is. The trap that we can all too easily fall into is assuming that every player plays the game the same way as we do… and even more so… gets the same enjoyment and stimuli out of the game as we do. For a socially motivated player… the “game” is all about the interactions they have with other players. For a challenge focused player… the “game” is all about taking on new experiences and defeating them one by one. For an exploration motivated player… the “game” is all about seeing and experiencing new things. So while functionally the “Game” with a big G didn’t change… because the mechanics didn’t actually change when a group of players left the game… the environment and the atmosphere absolutely does. The problem is for me at least that a server is a snap shot in time. I will never be able to get back the Late Night Raiders from Vanilla Warcraft, even though I still keep in contact with dozens of them on a regular basis. I might be able to play a game with two or three of those people at a time… but I will never be able to set up another situation where the hundred plus people that circled that raid will still exist in the same setting.

The “Game” for me is this sequence of vignettes in time, of certain players and certain situations… that either positively or negatively influenced my experience. When they are gone… there is a void that is irreplaceable. So while you can still find Pixi peddling her “extra special pixipacks”, there will never be a Duranub Raiding Company, or a No Such Raid… or any of the countless other groups that I have interacted with and loved over the years. There was a time when on my server every single raid leader communicated with every other raid leader, and that infrastructure is just gone now. What is left is a sequence of walled gardens that no longer try and reach out to the other walled gardens and set up communication lines. As a result the server seems so much smaller than it used to, and while I love hanging out with the people there still… the experience is tarnished by the former grandeur that I remember. Did any one one of those players make the difference? Probably not, but it was the cumulative effect of losing a large group of players at the same time. There will always be a wistful nostalgia for the way those days felt, even though there was also a bunch of bullshit that went along with it.

Care and Feeding

Some companies do a great job of nurturing the community environment. Wildstar and Carbine for example seem to really be trying to focus on the players and their communities in trying to make that game a great place to inhabit. The challenge with Warcraft is that the game is just so insanely huge at this point, that it is really difficult to highlight every part of the community that is working. I do think that Blizzard does a bunch of things that actively harm communities, without really thinking about it. When you look at the “Game” with a large G… they have been regularly applying the sledge hammer to it every couple of years as they roll out a grand new scheme that is going to “improve the game”. The first of these fall-outs for me at least was when they shifted the focus from 40 player raiding to 25 player raiding. This created the “guildpocalypse” as I refer to it… and my own raid… the Late Night Raiders was one of the casualties that never successfully transitioned to a smaller raid size. Similarly the events that caused me to leave Warcraft the first time, were brought on by the shift in Cataclysm to greatly incentivizing guild based raiding. Prior to that our raid was a thriving ecosystem made up of House Stalwart and a bunch of smaller and more personal satellite guilds that together created one vibrant non-guild raiding landscape.

The focus on guild based raiding however meant that if we continued to raid in this fashion… that ultimately some of the guilds would see zero benefit from defeating this boss and unlocking this achievement. Instead we attempted to squeeze all of these guilds into House Stalwart and we went from being a guild of 600 characters to a guild of around 1000 characters over night… and this change was just too much for me personally to adjust to. There is a huge difference in raiding with someone two nights a week, to having to interact with them constantly in your guild. Blizzard is constantly fiddling with the dials… introducing Valor, taking it away… and introducing it again in a different way. I cannot count the number of times classes have changed so much that they end up causing players to abandon what was previously their main. I’ve done this myself numerous times because of a change in the game making the experience no longer enjoyable. Each of these decisions also has a social cost associated with it, that it often feels like is not being taken into account. Essentially the point of this post, and the eight paragraphs that it is ending up being… is that a game is more than just its mechanics, especially when you are dealing with a hugely social game like an MMO. For me the most important parts of this game, or any other for that matter… are the ones that have no direct relationship to the game itself, but instead are a side effect of the ecosystem that builds up around it. My game is always largely influenced by the people I happen to be playing it with.

A Gladiator in Hellfire

December 3, 2015 by Belghast

Change of Plans

Are you an alliance dps or healer looking to get raid exp/gear for #FriendshipMoose runs? Tonight 5-8 PST N HFC we can teach you fights!

— Jed (@jedsblog) December 2, 2015

Yesterday when I got up in the morning, I had every plan of coming home after work, hoping that what I was making in the crock pot was actually edible, and then sitting down to an evening of Fallout 4. I do after all need to finish up the main story line, so that we can properly talk about it for Saturday’s podcast where we in theory review it. Then I saw the above tweet come across my timeline. Now I have known Jed for ages, but never really had much of a chance to hang out with him in game. I can’t be for certain, but I believe our connection dates back to the Blog Azeroth community, and the subsequent IRC channel associated with it. While he hasn’t really blogged all that often in recent years, I still think of him… mostly as one of the many bloggers making up my twitter feed. Now we zoom ahead to the above twitter message, and it scrolling across my screen. Friendship Moose is this awesome thing that was started more or less on accident from what I understand by Thomicks. The idea was to have a community for running Heroic Hellfire Citadel for the purpose of getting people the moose mount prior to the launch of Legion.

Now I am not technically on any of the lists, but my hope was that if I got one of my characters geared I could maybe just maybe work my way into a raid at some point. I like the concept of getting that mount, but I am not going to be super disappointed if it doesn’t happen. Nonetheless when I saw someone that I kinda sorta know, doing an open call on Twitter for folks to join in on an Alliance side cross realm raid for the purpose of getting in training… yeah I was down with doing that. Also traditionally Wednesday nights are an excellent time for me to do anything raid related, since until 8 or 9 at night I am pretty much at home alone until my wife gets out of church. So I signed up, made some flasks and armor potions… and was ready to go. I was idling outside of HFC when the invites came through… at which point I was straight up ganked by some hordies while waiting. I guess it turns out that the folks leading the raid… are on a PVP server, so that was a bit of weird sequence of events since I am pretty much a dedicated carebear who has always played on not even PVE servers… but Roleplaying Servers.

More Fun Raiding

There was a period of time when as one of the leaders of NSR and eventually Duranub… I used to farm my alts out to other peoples raids to help them when they were running short a person. One of my great pleasures was seeing how the dynamics of these different raid groups worked, and what their cultural norms were. I am not completely certain if this was a regular group of people, or a group thrown together specifically for the purpose of Moose practice, but whatever the case it was an enjoyable group to hang out with for the evening. Since I have been mostly playing my MooCowAdin, it was a bit of an adjustment to get back into playing the very APM based Gladiator spec. The Retadin feels like it has some breathing room in your attack sequence to chill a bit, whereas as a Gladiator it feels like there is always some button I desperately need to be pushing. As much as I dislike the fact that I know the Gladiator spec is going away during Legion… I can absolutely understand why. It is a quirky spec, with quirky gearing requirements… and that requires spastic button mashing to really make work well. While we were actively raiding last, I made the conscious choice to uninstall recount because watching the meters actually made me play worse. So I have no clue how I did, but last night Jed said he was going to upload the logs at some point today.

We made it roughly as far as we managed to make it in the Facepull raid horde side on Sunday. We had a bunch of issues with Kilrogg, and that fight is significantly more technical than I realized. During the Facepull run I pretty much just killed adds constantly, stayed out of the poo… and made sure the poo didn’t drop in the raid. Past that I had no deeper understand of the mechanics, and this time around I actually got to play one of the technical roles of the fight. Namely there is a phase where three players have to run into these portals and get transported into another realm… where they attempt to deal as much damage as possible to wave after wave of adds. When they come out they have a large dps buff, and can make stuff dead faster. I ended up in the third wave of folks going into the portals, and this is something that I absolutely took for granted that folks must have just been handling on Sunday night. After several tries we defeated Kilrogg, and man when we did it was satisfying. We hit essentially the same stumbling block that we did Sunday as well… with the Gorefiend encounter, but I am thankful I am getting quite a bit more work in on learning that fight. The problem with the last fight of the evening always seems to be the same… whatever you raid before you stop, is the point that people are starting to lose focus, and over the course of the evening we had also lost a handful of people. The problem with raid scaling is trying to keep that appropriate mix of healers and dps… and just like Facepull it felt like we were short one healer from making it feel stable.

Transmog as Endgame

All in all I had a pretty great night, and the timing of the raid was just about perfect for me. It started around 7pm CST and ended around 10pm CST… which is just about the ideal parameters for me. If a raid goes much longer than that, I am honestly going to start fading horribly. It sounds like this is a weekly thing, so I am probably going to offer my services more often… that is if Jed will have me. Overall I had a pretty shitty night as far as loot went… I spent a lot of tokens and don’t have much to show for it. The thing I am in most desperate need of is a new weapon… but unfortunately while we did Heroic Blackrock bosses, I never got any of them to drop me an upgrade so I am sitting on using Taner’s Terrible Skinner the 670 version. It is my hope at some point this weekend to pop into LFR and focus on trying to get one of those bosses to drop me a weapon and shield upgrade, since both are severely lacking at this point. I did manage to pick up Warforged Shell-Resistant Stompers and a decent ring… that doesn’t actually sim out to being better than the slightly lower ilvl prismatic slotted ring I was already using.

So babysteps forward in catching up my gear level I guess… I am still largely sitting at 680 with the ability to jump up to 685 if I really needed to. However because of the quirks of Gladiator… and how important the Blackrock Foundry four piece set bonus is for that spec… I will likely be running several ilevels lower than I could be at all points. This is the point where I actually wish we had managed to raid Heroic Blackrock a bit more… so that maybe I could have gotten slightly higher ilevel versions of the set gear. This is the problem with set loot… because if you happen to get one of the few amazing bonuses… you simply cannot upgrade out of it without taking a significant hit somewhere. I remember that was the problem with Hunter Tier 2 loot back in the day… that eight piece bonus was so phenomenally good… that even though we were getting Tier 2.5 gear… there was no way we could actually take it and make it viable. I know my friend Thalen would argue with that point, because he wore a lot of 2.5 back in the day… but it certainly felt like it at the time. In any case… I just hope I was still acceptable dps, because I had a fun time last night. No matter how much I try and push raiding out of my system… it remains there clinging desperately… just waiting on me to come back to it.

Since I just rambled on for two paragraphs without talking about what I set out to talk about… after the raid I popped into 25 man Heroic Icecrown to clear it. Now that I am writing this… I am realizing that apparently I left after Sindragosa so at some point I will have to actually go finish up and do the Lich King. I guess in my head… I got the item I was hoping to get so it was a successful run for me. For awhile now I have been collecting the bits of the Red/Fel Green set of Deathknight look alike armor out of there for my warrior. When mixed with the similarly colored set of armor from Sunwell, it crafts a transmog that I am pretty happy running around in. I guess this is my nod to all of the fel themed stuff in the tail end of this expansion… and the next one. Transmogging after all is the TRUE end game of World of Warcraft. So I ended the night on a really high note by completing an outfit.

Always a Sale

December 2, 2015 by Belghast

Psychology of Clearance

For as long as I can remember, I have always been a bargain hunter. Few things feel better than finding that rare item on sale for as much as 50 to 75% off of its original price. I know without a doubt that I got this instinct from my Mother, because when I was growing up I can remember my Grandmother joking that she thought I would end up being a “Blue Light Special”. For those who are either not old enough, or not from the right region… K-Mart used to have a literal blue light attached to a cart that they would drive around the store, and for thirty minutes a specific item in the store would be at a significant discount. I remember my mother would always go to check out whatever these items were, sometimes whether or not we actually needed them. So to say that allure of finding a deal is ingrained in my very fiber is a very true statement. Thankfully my wife is much the same… so she gets it… and in truth we simply don’t like spending more money than we need to on anything. She however is always willing to carry it further than I am… and there comes a point where I am sick of dealing with something and am willing to spend any amount of money to be “done” with it.

One of our favorite activities during the parts of the year when stores are changing out seasonal merchandise is to go clearance hunting. We live in Wal-mart country, and are roughly two hours away from the central office. This means at any time there are around thirty or forty Wal-mart stores within easy driving distance. The trick of Wal-mart is the odd quirk that every store is essentially self governed to a certain bit, and this extends to what they choose to put on clearance. So one store might have an item for full price, but a store ten minutes away might have it for 75% off depending on a whole bunch of factors. My Lego habit has been fed by the fact that I can pretty regularly find whatever sets I want on deep discount… so that $200 set becomes $60… or the $30 set becomes $10. So the question always becomes… is this item good enough of a deal, and there have been times I have passed something up only to kick myself later. For example when driving home from Pax South last year, I found Star Wars Lego AT-TE for $40, but ended up passing because it felt like we had already spent a silly amount of money that weekend. I’ve kicked myself since because that was originally like a $150 set, and really freaking awesome.

The Steam Sale

So these instincts of bargain hunting and regret of the deals I have missed, carried with me into the digital world. As a result the Steam sale has been one of those forces of nature that I never can seem to resist. When I see that $60 game that I have always wanted to play… selling for only $5… it is really hard not to go ahead and pick it up and tuck it away for the day when I really get the desire to play it. The problem being… I like quite literally everyone else I know is doing this, and as a result we have hundreds of games as a steam backlog that we “really need to play”. Compound this with the fact that new games are constantly being released, it comes into a situation where there are just games that we own that we are quite likely never going to play. Over the last year I have tried really hard to resist the lure of the Steam Sale, but usually I end up picking up at least one “deal” that looks too good to pass up. Even though on some level the number of games that I have that I have not even installed… is a massive stress point for me.

This past weekend for Thanksgiving there was predictably yet another Steam sale going on, with its own rock bottom prices on games. I hit the site a few times to see what was being sold, and oddly enough had zero desire to purchase anything. At this point we have done a bunch of renovations on the house, so there is definitely the desire to “spend no more money” going on, but I don’t think it was that. There were also plenty of games that looked interesting to me, so I don’t think it was simply the fact of not having anything I wanted. I think maybe it is just the fact that I have finally come to the realization that there is no limited quantity here, that I am racing to snap up before they sell out. In a physical store… they have a limited number of items on the shelf, and when those items are gone… especially when clearance is concerned… they are not getting any more. When you are selling a digital key to a digital game… there is absolutely no rarity going on there. They can sell keys a virtually unlimited number of times… and be able to keep ratcheting that price downwards towards infinity, each time catching a new batch of purchasers. A physical copy of Pokemon or Final Fantasy ends up gaining value, but a digital copy only serves to get cheaper.

Always on Sale

I think another thing that is finally sinking in… is that I can purchase a game at any point and don’t need to have it waiting in the wings for me to play. I have insanely fast internet right now, in fact I ran a test this morning for the purpose of this article and you can see it over on the right hand side there. There is not a game that is available on steam that I cannot literally download in less than thirty minutes. So it is not like I need to preload things to really be able to have fun… I can wait for the whim to strike me, purchase it in any of the many always on market places and be playing the game less than a half an hour later. This is vastly different from the chunk of my life where I literally had to drive an hour away to be able to find any of the games I wanted to play. There is a part of me that still attributed a value to having something on hand, rather than having to go out and acquire it…. since I still remember having to go from store to store looking for one of the last remaining copies of a new game. Now I purposefully shun physical copies of things for the simplicity of knowing I can pre-order moments before the release of a game and still get the full benefit.

The other side effect is that there is quite literally always a sale going on somewhere. Between Steam, Origin, GOG, Greenman Gaming, Amazon, Humble Bundle… and countless other minor retailers there is quite literally always a sale going on for any game I could ever want to play. The only time this is not necessarily the case is for any game I might want to play on the Playstation 4. There I am very much still at the whim of a single game store, since once again I am not a huge fan of buying physical copies of games for the console. I greatly prefer the fact that thanks to my 2 Terabyte harddrive upgrade in it, I can have most everything I might want to play “on tap” and waiting on me to boot. All of these things honestly make the individual digital games worth less to me than they used to… and this is maybe going to be a problem that the industry will have to deal with. There was a time when I was willing to “snap up” a game for $20, and that degraded to $15… and then to $10… and now quite literally a AAA title has to be $5 or less for it to trigger that “buy now” instinct. I feel like I am simply becoming desensitized to the effect of the “Big Sale!” and now it seems simply easier to pay the price something is currently selling for rather than trying to stock pile it for later. This entire topic came up, because this recent steam sale seems to be the one that a good chunk of my friends also passed up. Has the magic of the Steam sale finally lost its magnetism? I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts about this, because for me at least over the course of this last year…. the only “deals” that I have really snapped up are those coming from Humble Bundle or the PSN store.

Tauren Flight Form

December 1, 2015 by Belghast

Rose-colored Lenses

Last night was the night when I finally realized that playing Horde was not some magical and happy place free from assholes. Over the last several days it has been pretty great, and I have casually bumped into people that I have slantwise known on the server. I was beginning to think that the Horde were simply more mature players than the Alliance folks that I had been so used to dealing with. That apparently is not the case… I simply had a really lucky streak. I have to say the Facepull guild has been amazing, and it is actually drawing me out of my own little world that I seem to get stuck in so many times. Last night Laughingly that everyone calls “Gigs” convinced me to join her and Martoxis in a Supreme Lord Kazzak raid. Now me and Kazzak have a long history, namely from the days when people would pull him to Stormwind and he would ultimately need to be despawned by a GM because it got too powerful. So I guess in a way I knew what I was getting myself in for, but Gigs promised this version was no big deal. She even went so far as to give us a Mammoth ride to the location, and everything seemed pretty awesome for a bit.

Then we started summoning people… and I was simply doing my part and clicking the portals to get people here faster. At some point during this rush a mage perfectly summoned a portal to Hillsbrad Foothills… aka where Dalaran USED to be. A handful of us mistakenly clicked it… including myself and Gigs… and we quickly fell to our deaths. At which point someone pulls the boss, locking us out of the loot. So while I was raging inside… I attempted calmly rez and get my way back to Tanaan Jungle. I honestly didn’t even think of that being a thing that someone would do… but I guess now I know to be cautious. It feels like however fate rewarded me for my frustrations, because on the next attempt I managed to get a drop both from the boss and from the token… which gave me not one but two different 705 trinkets: Chipped Soul Prism and Mark of Supreme Doom. Well worth a fall to my death… that honestly I should have survived with a bubble, but I was simply too shocked to react in time.

Last Call LFR

On the Alliance side of the house, there has been a long standing rule… that you do not under any circumstances do Looking For Raid content any night other than Tuesday and MAYBE Wednesday at the latest. The closer you get to Monday the worse the groups get, and you only ever set foot in an LFR dungeon on a Monday night if you have a significant death wish. Once again I thought maybe the rules of the universe simply didn’t function the same on the Horde side, because I did several LFR runs on Saturday and Sunday and had a pretty good time of it. The groups were calm and reasoned, and we simply wrecked stuff and got loot as a result. So even thought I had the shitty experience with the asshole mage in Kazzak, I decided to brave the unwashed masses and venture forth into Monday LFR. My first sign that something was wrong, should have been that the DPS queue was roughly an hour. I however had stuff I wanted to do out in Tanaan Jungle so I queued up and before I knew it… it was popping. At first things seemed to go more or less pretty well. We downed the first boss with ease… then when we got to the second boss… it took two attempts. Finally the third boss took three attempts… so things seemed to be going downhill. However with the miracle of determination we were able to get through it.

Then I queued for Archimonde… aka the Black Gate. Firstly I have to say how awesome I think it is that you are essentially fighting the demons that besieged Mount Hyjal. I’ve been running quite a bit of Mount Hyjal attempting to get that really awesome two handed sword for my paladin. The end game of World of Warcraft or any game… is really collecting outfits for transmogging. Needless to say… Archimonde did not go well. I was assured by my guildies that this fight was a little overtuned even for LFR, and that most groups struggle with it. However after our fourth wipe, we lost literally half of the raid and I found myself exiting as well. So in my first week of really being “back” I managed to raid Normal Hellfire Citadel through Gorefiend, all of Blackrock Foundry LFR, and all but Archimonde in the Hellfire Citadel LFR. The only thing that I wish I had managed to squeeze in there was Highmaul LFR, simply because I am in desperate need of Abrogator Stones. Playing catch up on the legendary ring quest is going to be a massive pain in the butt, because I remember just how many weeks it took me actively raiding Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry to get all the necessary bits to complete that thing.

A Reason for Facebook

Another interesting side note is that it seems Facepull hangs out pretty much exclusively on Facebook. This is the one social media network I have actively shunned over the years, namely because of some bad first experiences with it. I technically have a Facebook account because it is connected to this blog, and I namely use it to syndicate my posts to the Tales of the Aggronaut page. What is going to be interesting is this may give me a reason to actually use it on a regular basis, seeing as they seem to use it in place of the traditional guild forum. The other funny side note is that apparently yesterday they found my blog posts thanks to Nubzy linking it to said facebook group. So hey folks if you are reading this! Apparently Obi was a bit grumpy that I didn’t mention him in my blog post, so I am going out of my way to remedy that today. I’ve known Nubzy and Obi since I believe Vanilla, or at the very least since early Burning Crusade. They have followed me into many games and I have always considered them both to be part of my extended family. I am just happy to finally make good on my threat of playing something on their side of the fence. I still say however that World of Warcraft would be a better game if they just tore the fence down, letting battle.net friends play together regardless of what faction they happened to enjoy the most. That said I really am starting to enjoy being a bull.