Tales of the Aggronaut

MOBA Crash

November 5, 2014 by Belghast

Falling Down

Yesterday we had an interesting bit of news released as the first big MOBA, or multiplayer online battle arena if you are not familiar with the term, announced that they would be closing their doors. Dawngate was the product offering by Electronic Arts and entered closed testing in May 2013 but quickly fell from the buzz cycle. Quite honestly when I saw this announcement I had quite literally forgotten there was a game called Dawngate. Some of the complaints about the game was that it felt like a rather lifeless clone of League of Legends. Many of the Champions or “Shapers” as they called them seemed to have one to one relationships to league of legends champions. However the game did try to fix some of the things that were broken with the existing Summoner’s Rift map type, adding in more interesting gameplay elements.

The problem is that no one that I knew was actually playing it. There were a handful of people who got into the beta process last June and then I never heard anything again about the game. For whatever reason they lost at producing enough forward hype for their game to drown out the other MOBAs or at least fight for a place at the table. The game looked very pretty, but I just don’t think they did enough to excite players. My only hope is that Riot will take some of the ideas that Dawngate had and try and incorporate some game modes that are similar to that into League of Legends. I am not the biggest fan of MOBAs in general, but I have played enough of them to know some good ideas when I see them. The fact that Dawngate had this mechanic where taking down each tower was essentially the equivalent to like 1/3rd of an inhibitor seemed like a cool idea. Instead in League you reach a point where taking down additional towers is a waste of time… and I don’t think you would ever reach that point in Dawngate.

MOBA Crash

One of the interesting things about the games industry is how much it repeats itself. When someone has a successful idea, it seems that the “investors” all get involved to dog pile on that genre and try and crack out as many look alike games as they can. That is not to say that each of the new games does not have merit, nor is it to say that they are not good games. The problem is there is a certain point at which the market has reached saturation and can support no new offshoots. Unfortunately I think we have reached that point already with the MOBA genre. Dawngate was really the first major game in the genre to call it quits, and Turbine the developer of Infinite Crisis does not look terribly strong right now after a round of layoffs in October. I feel like we are just about to enter the same area we have been with MMOs for some time now… where there is no “easy money” left in the market.

Right now you have the juggernauts of League of Legends and DOTA2. To a lesser extent Heroes of Newerth still has a bit of a following, but their latest product offering of Strife seems to be struggling to gain traction. Smite on the other hand… seems to have found a niche in the fact that it is a WASD controlled MOBA and for folks like me that hate click to move… it offers a new way to play this game genre. Heroes of the Storm on the other hand has done what Blizzard does best… polish a game to a mirror shine and lower the barrier of entry. As such HoTS is a much easier entry point into the MOBA genre for non-MOBA players. Personally of all of the titles it is my favorite in part because it leverages characters that I already know and love and just extends that nostalgia into another genre. Apart from these few games though I think pretty much every other MOBA is suspect, fragile and vulnerable to be the next announced cancellation.

The Cycle Repeats

I think my first experience with this cycle of trying to cash in on the next hotness was the massive amount of vaguely playable games that came out after the release of Doom during the early 90s. For every Dark Forces there were a few Depth Dwellers or Nerves of Steel that were barely playable. Then Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans came on the scene… which itself borrowed heavily from the mechanics of Dune 2. But immediately following was an equally confusing cavalcade of RTS genre games finally ending up with only a handful of series surviving. We are seeing this same thing playing out currently with the string of “Minecraft clones” fighting for your dollar. Essentially if a game comes out that is popular enough you can bet that somewhere in a back office someone is willing to pour money into something vaguely similar in an attempt to rush their version of the trend to market. Eventually someone comes along with a box full of straight pins and the bubble popping begins.

The thing is that I don’t really even think this is a bad thing, other than for the folks who get caught up in the round of layoffs that almost always follows. It is possible for a game to move the genre forward even if it doesn’t end up a success itself. Warhammer Online for example had quite possibly the best quest objective visualization system I had played with, and many other games came through after its launch and offered a similar system for their own product. The next release of World of Warcraft offered a version of quest visualization that looked almost exactly like this one. So even though Warhammer Online turned out to be a failure, it imparted on the genre a few features that have stuck around. As such I feel like if we are starting to head towards a MOBA crash, the ones that failed to find a niche will still have an impact on the games that ultimate end up dominating the market. There will always be a market for MOBAs, just like there was always a market for Adventure games, FPS, RTS, Survival Horror, MMO, Sandbox Building or whatever the next big fad becomes in gaming.

Fuzzy Blankets

This month I am talking about something each morning that I am thankful for. This morning as I am wrapped tightly in a fleece blanket while typing this… I am reminded just how thankful I am for our array of very warm and very fuzzy blankets. Oklahoma is an interesting place, in part because we go through this seesaw act with our weather towards the end of Fall. Until a week ago it was pretty reliably 70*-80* days and I was mostly wearing shorts on the weekend. Then a cold snap hit is and it has gotten down to the 30s. The problem is I fully expect that we will be back in the 70s within a weeks time. During this back and forth I am always reluctant to turn on my heating, just because I know it isn’t “really” winter yet. As such we spend a month bundled up in blankets and honestly due to the weight loss I find myself more cold natured than I used to be. So this year like so many years I am thankful that fuzzy blankets exist to keep us warm, when our weather is still deeply confused.

A New Lance

November 4, 2014 by Belghast

Curiosity Abated

I ended up getting into a conversation yesterday based on my post regarding the longevity I have played Final Fantasy XIV. Like I said yesterday I have been back in Eorzea since July so this will be going on four months… which for me in my recent MMO history is a really long time to be playing any one thing. I have officially played Final Fantasy XIV longer in this one stretch than I did both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar combined if you just count time spent playing the production clients. This got me thinking and my friend as well… what my longest played games might be. So this morning I turned to Raptr, which I have always just left running in the background quietly logging time spent in whatever game I happened to be playing. When you do this you end up with some unexpected results.

For the purpose of this chart I ignored anything with less than 100 hours played, which it turns out is a surprising number of MMOs including Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2 and a few others. The fact that almost 40% of my time spent playing MMOs has been in World of Warcraft was not a huge shocker, considering I played that game for roughly 7 years without taking much of a pause. The fact that Rift weighs in at number two is also not a huge shock, considering I have played it off and on since release. What did surprise me is that I fully expected Everquest 2 to be in third place, as it is one of those titles I keep cycling back to periodically. I guess the thing is that I don’t end up playing it for terribly long before the combat system ends up frustrating me and I move in. In the year it has been out Final Fantasy XIV has shot to the number three spot in total time spent in an MMO with 536 hours. If nothing else I feel like that is pretty telling of just how much I am enjoying this game.

The last revelation is that I found it interesting that I spent roughly the same amount of time in Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars the Old Republic and Wildstar. Wildstar was the lowest of the 100 hour plus club weighing in at only 122 hours. Elder Scrolls Online was the highest with 163 hours, but were we able to include the year I spent testing that game I would have probably overtaken Everquest 2 at least. With Star Wars the Old Republic I could have sworn I spent more than 127 hours playing the game, so it really makes Wildstar and SWTOR almost exactly the same… which is strange considering that I never got a character to maximum level in Wildstar, but managed to level three in SWTOR. I guess the content grind really was that much faster in SWTOR than I realized. In any case it is interesting to look at the data and see where your time has been spent. Raptr by no means is an exact science, but I have it running on both my desktop and my laptop so in theory the data should be relatively complete.

A New Lance

For some time now I have focused on my Warrior job in Final Fantasy XIV as my main. I figured it was the one that I needed to be geared the most since I was going to end up tanking for my free company when we raided. However since launch I have also really liked playing a Dragoon, and for the purpose of Duty Roulette I almost always queue as DPS. Ages ago I got all of my jobs that I have at 50 to ilevel 90 so that they would be viable doing pretty much anything I cared to dip my toe into. However before we started contemplating raiding, I picked up a handful of pieces out of Syrcus Tower on my Dragoon placing him slightly ahead of the pack. Since the unlocking of loot in Syrcus I have been spending most of my time there trying to get him gear. Right now I still figure that most of my soldiery needs to go to finishing getting the warrior to ilevel 110 or better, however at 108 I am still leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of my guildies.

Factoring that in I figured I could splurge a little on my own wants for awhile. When playing any class my focus has generally been on getting a new weapon. It always feels like the most significant improvement, because it is that object that is most visually noticeable when you swap out a single slot. As a result it has annoyed me for some time that I still had my Gae Bolg Zenith weapon on my Dragoon. I could after all start the Atma grind, and the Animus book grind… but really in the grand scheme of things I do not have the money to get through the Novus step… so while I want to finish these for the sake of finishing them, it is not exactly a pathway to a better weapon for me. With the uncapping of Syrcus Tower it means that we have ready access to Unidentified Allagan Tomestones, the precursor step for getting the Weathered(100) and eventually Unweathered(110) weapons. So while I started out running ST over the last few days to pick up level 100 gear for my Dragoon I have ended up essentially grinding out one of the weapons.

ffxiv 2014-11-03 22-25-12-711 Last night I finished my grind to 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery and as you can see in the above screenshot I am the proud wielder of a shiny new Liberator lance. Unfortunately this happened like moments before bedtime for me, and I never really got to try it out. So tonight my plan is to run a quick Syrcus or Labyrinth to see how good it feels to have bumped up 20 levels in weapon ilevel. When I got my 110 axe on my Warrior, it was a massive and immediately noticeable difference, and I am hoping it will feel the same on my Dragoon. After dumping this 1300 “bookrocks” on a weapon, I will now return to gathering them up for the purpose of finishing out my set of Soldiery gear. That means I will need a ton of Sands of Time however to get those pieces up to 110 ilevel, which means I will still be running a truly silly amount of Syrcus Tower. In the grand scheme of things though I enjoy running it. I never see it as a grind, because it still feels very epic to me. I feel about ST the way I feel about various WoW raids that I used to solo for fun. It feels like I am doing something epic and important, even though it is content that is very much “on farm”.

This morning I am going to get by with just a two section blog post. Each of those sections took awhile to write so I figure it all shakes out in the end. This morning for my Month of Thankfulness post I figured I would talk about something fairly unlikely. Yesterday at work I had my annual performance review, and even though I am in many ways the pocket expert on so many systems we have… it is still a process that I find stressful. I think most sane and rational people have these moments where they feel like they are a giant fraud, and these seem to hit me just before I go into my yearly performance review. Yesterday was the same as every year, lots of anxiety for no reason. Once again I had a fairly glowing review, but I am kinda just beating around the bush here.

What I am thankful for is my boss. When I started out in my current position my little sub group got passed around like a hot potato. At one point I had been under six different managers, four directors and three CIOs… and had only been with the company for two years. Then my current boss took the position. I have to say when he took over I was suspicious, because I had never seen him in a managerial light, however he has done an amazing job. I really respect the focus he has placed on making our environment not only productive, but a very fun place to be. Each of us has our own “kitch” and for the most part he supports it all. It is the first time since my very first job… that I felt like I had a work family. This is also the first group I have ever willfully attended the Christmas Party for… and we do all sorts of outside activities like most recently going to the RiffTrax showings. So this today I am thankful for the effect he has had on improving how I think about my job, and the fact that for the most part I look forward to going into work each day and seeing my team mates. Sure each of the members of our team is a self starter, but it is his focus on morale that has made the entire thing work.

Slow and Steady

November 3, 2014 by Belghast

Longevity

There was a point yesterday when I realized something that somewhat shocked me. I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV for longer than the combined time my guild was active in both The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. There has been a trend over the last few years where when we move into something new we last around two months and then move on again. Elder Scrolls lasted roughly two months, and Wildstar in truth less than a month before folks petered out. For Final Fantasy XIV I have been going strong since July so this will be going on four months. In truth this is the longest I have played any game in awhile without pause. I am not sure if Rift counts since I tend to always be playing that game off and on, and the period of large amounts of activity last year only lasted a few months at most before it was back to me and a skeletal crew logging in periodically. Another thing I have noticed is that I tend to turn the lights off when I finally go, meaning that I am one of the last people to leave.

In Elder Scrolls Online this was maybe a bit different, since Sig and PK were both active considerably longer after I stopped logging in on a regular basis. I however only recently actually went through the process of cancelling my account there. Wildstar on the other hand I was all too willing to cancel my account, but sadly by the time I did the entire guild was completely toast. I guess I wonder what has made us grazers of MMOs rather than large scale consumers. For awhile I thought it was just the ramifications of coming from a multi-year game like World of Warcraft, and being unfettered and experiencing some kind of options overload. I still feel like there are so many good games out that to be played, and just not enough time to really experience them. I wish I could realistically play FFXIV, Rift, EQ2, LoTRO, TSW and Landmark all at the same time. The problem is when I rampantly multigame like that I get absolutely nothing accomplished in any of them.

Slow and Steady

Right now I am enjoying making slow and steady progress in all of my endeavors in Final Fantasy XIV. Last night I managed to hit 108 ilevel on my main job which is the warrior, and in part that is because of the 2.4 patch. There is a big of a paradox going on after the Dreams of Ice patch. Unlocking the loot in Syrcus Tower means that it has gotten significantly easier to farm the ilvl 100 gear drops and the Sands and Oils of Time needed to upgrade level 100 soldiery gear to level 110. The problem is that it feels like it is significantly slower to grind out Tomestones of Soldiery than it was to get Tomestones of Mythology. So as a result I am sitting on several unused Sands of Time and a couple of unused Unitentified Allagan Tomestones because I lack the Soldiery “bookrocks” to purchase either a weapon or another slot of gear to use the sands on. At this point I am closing in on the 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery needed to purchase a level 100 weapon, which I will then turn into a 110 weapon with one of the sands, finally giving my Dragoon something decent to poke things with. Before this patch I never would have spent soldiery on an alternate job, so it makes me happy to finally start progressing my Dragoon again.

The other side effect of the patch is that it seems to have become significantly harder to gear your very first character. Previously you could hop on the “hunt train” and farm up enough Allied Seals to purchase a full set of ilevel 90 gear within a few hours. For 270 Allied seals you could purchase an entire set of gear for a new job, which in the grand scheme of things even if you didn’t do the insane hunt process was only about a week of doing the daily hunt quests. This was a huge benefit to getting new players into the game quickly. This has slowed down considerably because all of the level 90 gear is gone from the hunt vendor and replaced with the level 100 Soldiery equivalents. Unfortunately this also means that the items themselves have gone up massively in price. The pieces can be purchased for 660, 400, and 300 for the various slots adding up to a grand total of 4020 allied seals for an entire set of gear. Right now this just seems absolutely insane to me. I feel like a later patch is probably going to reduce this price but that for the time being they are trying to make it easier to get soldiery gear… but not so easy that we can cap out over night and run out of things to progress.

Active Free Company

Another awesome thing about the 2.4 patch is that it has seemed to revitalize our server as a whole. Cactuar has sprung to life as so many players I think had taken breaks before the launch of this latest patch and all of its goodness. Granted a flurry of the activity has been leveling rogues, but that seems to be slowly tapering off. Similarly there has been a resurgence of activity in our guild as folks have joined up to start working on characters on our server, or returned from their own pre-patch absences. At several points yesterday we had around a dozen players online, and that still is not including some of our more active members that were curiously missing from the fray this weekend. I know Rae was off doing work related stuff, and Kodra was sick most of the weekend… and Ashgar busy packing for his move. With all of those things factored in it seems even more impressive that we were able to field the numbers that we did. I ran several of the new dungeons with groups of friends, and have yet to actually make my way into the expert duty roulette without a premade group.

Granted I am fully expecting that the upcoming launch of Warlords of Draenor will pull a few players away here and there, but I think the majority of our group is well insulated against the effects of WoW at this point. I am generally the one who returns, and right now as it stands I have no plans of playing at launch. In fact were it not for the level 90 boost that we got from preordering so far ahead of time… I doubt I would have even purchased the expansion this time around. I kinda wish I could claw back that purchase to be honest, but I guess that is the problem with preordering going roughly a year before the release date. That seems so long ago at this point, especially considering the short periods of waiting for new content I am getting used to in Final Fantasy XIV. This game is rolling out a new major patch each quarter, and a minor content patch on a semi-monthly schedule and I hate to say it… but you get spoiled. I don’t think I could return to a game with a year between content patches again after this.

Fuzzy Children

As I said yesterday this month I am trying to come up with something each morning that I am thankful for, turning it entire an entire month of “Thanksgiving”. This morning I am thankful for my “Fuzzy Children”, aka my pets. My wife and I have no intent of ever having human children, so our babies are as close as we will get to having kids. Presently we have three cats, one kitten, and two ferrets and they are all awesome. Each of them have their own personalities, and each of them their own routines that I would not change even if I could. Animals have a way of enriching your life for just existing, and while I might complain about this or that I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I wouldn’t know what to do without one animal at my feet and another on my lap… and another wandering around my office knocking stuff over. I am thankful for my fuzzy warm bundles of happy, and the joy they bring.

NaNoWriMo Supporter

November 2, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 28

Last night we once again rallied the troops and recorded another episode of AggroChat. This week Kodra was saddled with the dual burdens of illness and family… and as such could not attend. However we had Ashgar, Rae and Tam. The number one thing on all of our minds was experiencing the 2.4 patch content in Final Fantasy XIV which landed last Monday/Tuesday. During that time Tam has pushed up a rogue from level 1 to 50 and is now gearing it for raiding purposes. I have mostly spent my time running Syrcus Tower trying to get bits to gear out my warrior and dragoon. All of us have been slowly working our way through the brand new dungeon content. Yesterday shortly before the show Ash, Tam and myself finished the last of the three new hardmodes and I have to say I am really damned impressed.

Even more impressive is where the main storyline seems to be going. This is one of the aspects I find the coolest about FFXIV is that the story just keeps evolving and not in an artificial way. The problem with Star Wars the Old Republic is that when you reached 50… especially as a Jedi Knight or Jedi Counselor you had solved the galaxies greatest threat. There was nowhere to go but down from there. In FFXIV when you finish the main story, it is just the beginning and everything about the game tells you… you didn’t solve shit. You took out one pawn in a far greater game. So every three months or so when we get a major patch, I am always amped to see where exactly the story is going to go. Right now I am only a couple of hours into the new story content, and already they have thrown out some allusions to past Final Fantasy games that have me spooked as to where we might be going with this.

NaNoWriMo Supporter

At this point hopefully all of this years participants have at least broken ground on their new novel. Throughout the month of October I mulled around the notion of doing NaNoWriMo 2014, but in the end I have decided not to. Last year if you recall I essentially live blogged my novel and used each days writing as the next days posting on my blog. In the intervening year I have done absolutely nothing with it. I’ve not even cracked the original drive document to even begin editing it. This more than anything else tells me I am not quite ready to undergo the challenge again. Last year I won, and by winning I mean I actually finished my 50,000+ words by the end of the month. The problem is I have a chrysalis for a novel and not really something worth publishing. I need to put at least as much effort as I did writing it into editing it. At least once a week I think about digging into it and ripping things to shreds as I sort bits out that I slammed together in a rush. It just seems so damned daunting to unravel what I was only able to pull together through sheer will.

The other reason why I have decided to skip NaNoWriMo this year is that it took a hell of a lot out of me. My world for the month of November revolved around making sure I got my words done for the day. In the end nothing else mattered, and I pretty much abandoned everything else that I enjoyed. It was during the month of November that I faded away from FFXIV in the first place, because the game required too much effort from me to keep playing it while pouring out 1500 to 2000 words a day. Additionally my blog suffered because I could not keep up my daily blogging AND write that many words a day… was just not something I could juggle. This was the point that I got back into World of Warcraft, because WoW was a game I could play entirely on auto pilot. Nothing about the game made me think, and I could live in this blissful muscle memory zone where I got enjoyment without having to acknowledge the world going on around me. NaNoWriMo was all consuming, and while I think it is something that everyone should complete at least once… I have done that. I completed the competition last year, and wrote a novel… something that I can check off my bucket list. I don’t feel the need for a repeat performance… at least not quite yet.

What I plan on doing is being a cheerleader for the folks who ARE planning on doing the struggle this year. The folks that need inspiration or support as they struggle to keep up with the waterfall of words that NaNoWriMo is. Be it a word of encouragement or a swift kick in the ass when I see they haven’t done their words for the day… I will try and be there. So while I am not a participant I am very much a supporter of the process. Having actually gotten my novel finished on time last year I might even be able to provide a source of advice. I would never have finished last year were it not for the other people struggled through the process with me. They were a source of inspiration and I am hoping some of them will be taking up the challenge this year as well. It is an awesome thing, and hopefully I can play match maker between groups of friends entering the fray together.

I realize this is the second of November and not the first, but we are going to temporarily ignore that fact as I introduce a new thing that I am going to do all this month. In truth it was not until yesterdays post that I was made aware that this was a thing. My wife usually skims my posts each day to see if I have written anything about “us” in the blog, and after doing this yesterday she turned to me and said “you should have done a month of thankfulness post”. So yeah… I kind of wish I had thought about that before making my post yesterday. So this morning I pulled together a logo and am setting forth on this adventure. I’ve always liked Thanksgiving the best of all of the holidays because it isn’t about commercialization or how much you can spend to show your love… it is just about a simple thanks for the awesome things in your life. I am not going to make this out to be a big thing like Blaugust was, but I think it would be awesome if it spread a little bit around our community.

My Wife

I figured I would start off my series of posts with a post about my wife. Not only did she give me this idea but she is pretty much a constant source of support in my life. More important than that she keeps me grounded. I get absolutely engrossed in the things I am into, be it my blog, the podcast, streaming or whatever the latest video game I am obsessing over. She has a way of pulling me outside of all of this and focusing me on the real world outside of my computer and consoles. There are a lot of couples that game together, and I have always thought this would be a cool thing… but I also know it would never actually fly for me. If I had a gamer spouse the bills would never get paid, the chores would never get done… and I would ultimately end up losing my job. My wife helps me keep one foot firmly planted in reality, and keep from slipping down that slippery slope.

More than this we compliment each other nicely. She is all of the things I am not. She is a creature of logic and I am a creature of passion, and together we make this awesome pair. I can’t necessarily say that we are opposites, because we have just enough in common to make it work, but we definitely complement each other. The other strange thing is that we rarely actually fight. I mean we bicker back and forth, but there is rarely any spat that isn’t resolved by bed time. We are in fact an old married couple, and have been able to complete each others sentences for years. There are so many times we will just say a word or two before the other person agrees… because after almost two decades we know exactly what the other is thinking. Without having a place of love and stability, I wouldn’t have the courage each day to put myself out here in front of you all. For all of this and more I am very thankful for my wife.