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Fun With Trains

February 27, 2015 by Belghast

Bel’s Blog Bonanza – February 27, 2015

For those not familiar with it, I write a bi-weekly column on MMOGames.com and they made the huge mistake of letting me name it myself. As such I gave it the completely bombastic title of “Bel’s Blog Bonanza” and every other week I give a run down to the best of my ability of the current hot topics circulating through the gaming blogosphere. This week I talk about the echo effects of the rather brutal interview of Peter Molyneux by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. This had many responses out in the community, and I picked a few of the ones I felt represented the various feelings the best. Additionally the Crowfall Kickstarter has been huge on the blogging front with an absolutely overwhelming number of posts contemplating what everything means thusfar.

This week has also been huge as far as game patches went with the two remaining subscription juggernauts of Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft both releasing a significant patch on Tuesday. From the Final Fantasy XIV side from we had a large number of posts talking about their experiences with the Manderville Golden Saucer and related items that came into the game this week. On the World of Warcraft front we had quite a few reactions to the various features that were put in with the first patch of the expansion. While the viewpoints of FFXIV 2.51 seemed overwhelmingly positive, the reactions from the World of Warcraft players were a little bit more mixed… which I assume is what you would expect from having a much more mature community. The honeymoon was over long ago and now folks are viewing the game through less than rose colored lenses. In any case check out the post and let me know what you think of the column.

Fun With Trains

Last night I finally started to feel like I was getting back into the swing of things. Yesterday as a whole I felt considerably better than I had since last Thursday. With it being a raid night, and we had cleared all of the encounters we had worked on during my medicated stupor on Tuesday… this meant that last night was entirely a learning night. Some people get depressed at the concept of constant wiping, but for me it feels cool because we are getting to try new things. Last night we set our sights on Operator Thogar, which for those who are unfamiliar with Blackrock is the “Train Boss”. His room is essentially a train depot with four different tracks. At various points during the fight a train will come barreling through the room and if you are on the wrong track at the wrong time… it will flat out one shot you. For me as a bit of an abomination as Gladiator DPS… it will take me down very close to death but not actually kill me.

As you move through the encounter some trains will simply buzz through, and others will stop and drop off adds. Among the types that drop adds there are ones filled with simply mindless trash mobs, and others filled with what we have termed “specialists”. It is these specialist trains that cause the problems and quite simply last night we were not getting them down fast enough… while at the same time dodging trains. It seemed like melee had the dance down pretty well, which is generally the case since melee is used to constantly moving. We just need our ranged and healers to get used to the rhythm of the fight to be able to time when they can cast and when they have to be moving. Basically we died constantly at this same point… where we have a pack of specialists and we did not get them down with enough time to move to the far edges of the room and split up. I feel like this is a critical juncture and once we nail that we will have the encounter.

Killing the Flamebender

Generally speaking if we do not make serious progress on our first few attempts, it is almost better to switch targets and let folks digest the mechanics for a week. When we come back the following week there is absolutely a marked improvement. Since this is the case with our raid, our leader called the halt on the Orc Trainmaster and we went back to working on Flamebender Ka’graz. If you remember we actually made some solid progress on her awhile back getting her down into the 30% range if I am remembering correct, so I knew going into the night that more than likely this was going to be a fight we could fine tune and get through. Once again this is a fight with a lot of moving parts. Players have to avoid lines of fire that get drawn on the floor as she targets a ranged dps and attacks them. This means the melee spend most of their time shifting around trying to keep from standing in these.

The crucial part of the fight seems to be dealing with the two lava wolf spawns. This was the point at which we spent the most effort improving last night. We shifted around trying several different combinations and finally landing on actively calling which target which group of players should be attacking. Like I said last time these work like Corehounds and if they are not brought down at the same time… they both re-ignite. The other big thing we tweaked was where the group collapsed, attempting to do so in the center of the room rather up within melee range of where the boss is tanked by default. I think the combination of both of these was what actually allowed us to get through that second flame puppy phase with essentially a full compliment of players. From there it was just repetition of the things we were already good at doing… and when the third dog phase happened we were able to ignore them and finish off the last 3% of the boss. As is rare for us we actually managed to get everyone to stand still long enough to take a kill shot.

Things Did For Loot

November 24, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #32 – Azeroth, Mordor and Beyond

Normally Sunday mornings I talk about the happenings from the night before when we record our weekly episode of AggroChat. However yesterday it just didn’t really fit the theme of the post, so I opted to push off advertising it on my blog until this morning. We recorded for roughly two hours, but thankfully after I edited it was condensed to only an hour and twenty minutes… which is far more reasonable. It is always strange when we go into a show with what we feel like is not a lot to talk about… and then a show happens and it ends up being a length one. I feel like some of those are the most natural because the conversation just went where it needed to go without our direction.

We talked about a dizzying range of games from Shadows of Mordor and Tam and Kodras views on the game. They both still say it is very much a “bel game” and at this point I am planning on picking it up hopefully when it goes on sale during the Steam Christmas Sale. It does look really interesting, and I like the seeming focus on mechanics rather than story. We once again delve into a discussion about 4X games namely Beyond Civilization, Civilization 5 and Endless Legend. Similarly there is a length discussion about our feelings surrounding Dragon Age Inquisition and Kodra has finally made some progress in Dragon Age Origins. Finally I talk at length about my experiences returning to World of Warcraft as I gush about finally having a strong female in World of Warcraft that is not also moments away from being turned into a raid boss. Seriously if you have not followed the Yrel character you should check her out.

Things Did For Loot

My focus this weekend entirely was getting geared up enough to be able to do Molten Core on Tuesday night with the guild. Since this is a 40 man looking for group experience… and various members of them guild have said it took upwards of three hours to complete… we are wanting to try and pull in as many people as possible Tuesday night so we can hopefully carry the random players to a rapid victory. The only problem is that in order to join in the fun, you have to have 615 ilevel. Unless you had some extreme luck with item upgrades in Nagrand, it is not exactly easy to hit that kind of level without a lot of dungeoning. Arria and several others kept telling me that I needed to PVP in order to get my ilevel up high enough to run Molten Core, but at first I rejected this notion entirely. However after a period of time without a guild group online that I thought we could make dungeoning work… I resorted to queuing for battlegrounds.

Over the course of the weekend I ran enough battlegrounds to be able to purchase a neckpiece and bracers at roughly 1250 honor each. I have to say… I actually enjoyed myself, and it shocks me just as much to be able to say those words. Remember I have gone on length diatribes about how faction based combat destroys a sense of community. The thing is… battlegrounds are not open world pvp and I did not enjoy Ashran the open world pvp zone at all. The strange thing is that I have quite literally not PVP’d in World of Warcraft since Burning Crusade other than once or twice here needed for some holiday achievement. Once upon a time I was part of an Arena team if you can believe that, with the sole purpose of gearing my paladin in some healing gear. It is strange how cyclical things are… in Burning Crusade PVP gear was extremely useful for PVE purposes… and now in Warlords the exact same thing has happened. I guess I don’t mind PVP so much when I know there is a loot piñata at the end of my efforts.

Heroic-palooza

Between the two pieces of PVP gear I was able to bump my ilevel up high enough to be able to do Molten Core. However yesterday I spent most of the day running Heroics with the guild. The strange thing is that I tagged along as dps. It feels so strange that sword and board gladiator is actually viable dps, and for most of the runs I was competitive with the person sitting in first place on the meters. The awesome thing about this is that the gear needed to tank and needed to Gladiator dps are essentially the game. Bonus Armor it turns out is just as much of a DPS boost for Gladiator as it is survival for Defensive. All of this makes me wonder if we will see a resurgence of viable specs to allow tanks to tank as Arms or Fury like they used to back in Vanilla WoW. In any case I ran Bloodmaul Slag Mines, Grimrail Depot, Auchindoun, The Everbloom and Skyreach and between them I managed to get several upgrades.

I feel like I need to take a moment to praise Blizzard for the changes to the way that personal loot works. I made a comment the other day on twitter when they removed personal loot as the default for pugs, that going back to need before green only really helped the trolls. It turns out that they just felt they needed to tweak personal loot a bit before returning it to the dungeons, which ultimately they hotfixed back in within a days time. The new version is extremely awesome, because no matter how bad your luck is early in the dungeon… the final boss will always drop an item for your spec. Mostly what makes the system great is there are no more instances of unusable loot. Granted what you get may not actually be an upgrade, but we did several runs with nothing but plate wearers… and no leather rotted in the dungeon.

Finally a Worthy Helm

Over the course of the weekend I went from 609 ilevel to a respectable 623 and I feel that I am fully ready for Molten Core tomorrow. I am not sure if I will be called on to tank or to dps, but in either scenario I feel comfortable thanks to the fact that Gladiator dps is esentially just tanking without the taunts. One of the things that I have tried to be religious about is doing my crafting and resource workorders in my Garrison. The primary one is the Gearspring Parts needed for engineering, or in truth every single tradeskill that makes things seems to have a limited resource that can be sped up significantly through the use of your Garrison. This expansion has returned to having an exceptionally useful helm gained through engineering, and this time it is upgradeable three steps to make it competitive with raid gear.

This morning I managed to collect the last of the 100 Gearspring Parts needed to craft it, and finally I have a helmet that is worth of displaying helm. Traditionally I run around sans helmet, because in truth World of Warcraft has pretty much nothing but ugly helms. These goggles however are fantastic, and I am proud to let my engineer flag fly high. Unfortunately I am going to have to figure out a way to get savage blood, which I am afraid that I do not have a source of it in that I did not build the barn. Since it is a tradeable resource my hope is that I will be able to obtain it through an alt. Honestly my biggest hope is that eventually they add it to the primal spirit vendor at a significant loss, so that I can use my stockpile of those. In any case I feel like I am fully ready for the rigors of raiding, but still have plenty of upgrades that I can get from heroics.

My Routine

There are mornings I have an idea immediately and others that I struggle to find purpose in my writing. There is something about being under pressure to write a post each morning that makes it work for me. I’ve long found that on the weekends I dawdle considerably more and struggle to get a post out. Whereas in the morning as I am drinking my morning coffee if I just start writing a post materializes before I really know fully what I am going to write about. As such for this mornings thankfulness post, I am thankful for my routine. I am thankful that I embarked upon this journey over a year ago, and thankful that I realized that the morning would actually be a viable time for me to write. Writing a post feels like I am starting the day having already accomplished something, which in turn I feel makes the day as a whole a better one. May each of you also find the routine that works for you.

Collaborate Not Compete

November 13, 2014 by Belghast

For Azeroth

Last night while I slept Warlords of Draenor launched in the United States. Once again the launch time was based on Pacific Standard Time meaning that it occurred at 2 in the morning for me. I actually got to see some play last night from Qelric, due to the fact that this time it actually launched ahead of time for our European friends. I think it is pretty awesome that finally it launched for them at the same time it was slotted to launch in other territories, it just meant that they technically got a head start. In part I think this decision was influenced by the fact that with this expansion they have completely removed the concept of world and server firsts. So while folks are hustling around like mad, presently there are nine people online in guild for example… there really isn’t much of a broader point to it.

I think removing the world and server firsts was a good step, but I think it is so ingrained into the Warcraft culture to rush headlong towards the finish line. My hope is that this will at least cause some of the players to slow down and enjoy the journey. That said I realize I will probably level quickly… because I always seem to level quickly. This is more of a necessity this time around since I am actively juggling two different games and trying to be available for grouping in both. Unfortunately I will not really get to experience Draenor until after work, though I have popped in this morning to at least take a screenshot of the trio standing outside the Dark Portal. I must admit that while I played in Alpha… nothing I did actually felt real. This time around I will be actually working on things like Garrisons permanently, so I think a lot of the stickiness of this expansion will have more effect.

Awesome Communities

The other day I made a connection that I had failed to grasp until then, when a friend from twitter pointed something out to me. For weeks I have been talking about just how amazing the community has been playing Final Fantasy XIV. It is the little things, like the fact that the other morning I zoned into North Shroud looking for the B Rank Phecda. It has been common place for me to /shout in zone asking if anyone has seen the spawn. I had a pretty quick response from a player who not only gave me the location, but also hung out at the spawn point to help me kill it… even though she didn’t need the kill. Then a good ten minutes later, another person sent me a tell asking if I still needed it, because they just ran past the big bear. This little Vignette plays out over and over… and I have added so many random strangers to my friends list through casual interaction like this. There is this global sense that we are all in things together that I cherish.

If I had to rattle off the four best server communities I have been part of it would have to be Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, Landroval in Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World (mega server), and Antonia Bayle in Everquest II. In each case there have been so many positive random encounters that make living in those worlds enjoyable. I’ve had completely random strangers run up to me in Bree on Landroval offering me crafted goods to help my leveling process. I’ve had folks offer me a group during the various Everquest II holiday events, that then turn into multiple hour long treks through the world. I’ve had random strangers stop me in the Secret World to tell me that they liked my outfit, and ask where I got various bits of it. These casual interactions remind me of the way servers used to feel back during the early days when the MMOs were a little less “massive”.

Collaborate Not Compete

It was around this time in our conversation that my friend pointed a thread of connection between all of these games that I had never really noticed myself. None of those games have real and meaningful faction rivalries. Sure in The Secret World and Everquest II you have certain alliances, but largely this work out to be personal choices. Being Templar versus being Illuminati is largely just a flavor choice, since from the moment you get out of London or New York you are grouping together and communicating freely. Games like Final Fantasy XIV and Lord of the Rings online don’t even have these artificial divisions. From the moment you start playing any of these games, you are instilled with this spirit that all of the players are ultimately battling something more sinister than they can imagine. So it makes perfect sense to lend another player a helping hand along the way, since you are not competing against each other in any meaningful way.

There might be a certain measure of self sorting going on when it comes to players of these games as well. Since none of the four really have a strong PVP aspect, that flavor of super competitive player is just not interested in playing them. That means you are left with a more collaborative “role-playing server crowd” type player. Ultimately this shared struggle, and spirit of cooperation has always been why I have self sorted myself onto Role-Playing servers, because in general this type of player is more prevalent there. Essentially what I am coming to realize is that the awesome communities that I have held out as paragons against normal online gaming horribleness… all exist for pretty similar reasons. They are all environments that teach the players to get along with each other, rather than compete.

Collaborative Environments

To tie into today’s post, I am thankful that games exist that teach players to work together rather than work against each other. So many games set up an artificial conflict between players, and try desperately to draw them into it. As I said in my “Sandboxes and Sheep” post, these artificial faction boundaries have no meaning to me personally. I have no real emotional ties to the Horde or the Alliance, other than the fact that I mostly chose Alliance because that is where the Dwarves were. However this decision did not immediately make me hate the horde, in fact I have 11 Alliance characters on Argent Dawn… and 11 Horde characters on The Scyers… the realm that is connected to Argent Dawn. Over years of playing on that server I made just as many friendships across the faction barrier as I did within my own pool of players. In fact one of my key problems with World of Warcraft has always been that it made us choose sides in a war that was largely meaningless to us.

All of this is the reason why I am thankful that there are games that have transcended faction. I was hugely impressed when Rift decided to abandon the artificial conflict with their “Faction as Fiction” patch removing the hard lines between Defiant and Guardian. I think as a whole that game has been greatly improved for doing so. More than that however I am thankful for the games that never put up those walls in the first place. Eorzea is this wonderful land where the races don’t always get along, but they are not openly warring either… because the writers have created a threat so great that in its face… squabbles seem petty. After talking this whole situation through, I feel like this sort of environment really does breed a player willing to help others freely. It is for that spirit, that I am thankful for. If you are actively making your community better, you are doing awesome work.

Familiarity in Proximity

September 23, 2014 by Belghast

Mega Servers Continued

A few days ago I made a post on about launch issues and game servers, and the problems and solutions that come from various server scenarios. In my post I presented some discussion about the various styles of servers and the weaknesses that each have. Mega Servers are an awesome technology but there are problems with it, namely that it reduces the casual proximity of players. In my post Doone made a comment, and while I normally would have simply posted it as a reply… I am thinking that maybe I need more space to go into my thoughts. For sake of not having to make you jump through a bunch of hoops I am going to repose his comment here.

Im not sure why anyone thinks Megaservers make it difficult to build community? Do you mean that it’s too many people to build intimate connections? Because if thats the case, then we’re just talking about social tools, not megaserver tech. Players just need a reason to interact and that doesnt change because of megaservers.

AA’s current situation is embarrassing. Theres not any good excuses for their current situation. This isn’t the first MMO launch, not even the first MMO with land and other features that complicate server flexibility. Theyre simply unprepared for deliberate reasons. There’s just no way they didn’t know what they needed for a smooth launch.

It’s worse that people who shelled out hundreds of dollars to support development are reporting not getting that 4 day advantage they were promised. That’s a serious charge.

Should AA have gone Megaserver? I don’t see how this wasn’t mandatory given the kind of features it has. You need a vast server community that’s STABLE. And you can’t have that when your system is as inflexible as the one they’ve adopted. I think they’re sinking their own ship right now. — Doone

While I agree with the bulk of what he said, I thought I should maybe clarify my points about mega servers. At first glance they look like a magic bullet for the problem. At the very least I thought they were a magic bullet for launch day woes, however they have their own problems that do not always show up early on.

Informal Community

There is a certain kind of community that happens spontaneously by just being around the same players each and every day. For example the above picture is that of one of the late game hubs in Final Fantasy XIV Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona. Upon arriving at the Aetheryte crystal I am immediately seeing some familiar places that tend to frequent it. You can see a name marked in orange as someone I have already friended. However more than that I recognize if not the names, but the guild tags of many of the players surrounding me. There is a sense of familiarity in seeing the same players day in and out, and when one of them is in need you are more likely to step in and help out. This is the way friendships in MMOs used to be formed through shared activity, not just shared guild tag.

In Final Fantasy XIV it has instanced housing wards, where you purchase a house and in theory become neighbors with lots of other players. Our house is across the street from a Market Board which is the way that you access the auction house economy. Over the course of weeks of being in close proximity with several other players, we have struck up a bit of a friendship. One of which is the name in orange in the above Mor Dhona photo. There is lots of spontaneous interaction that happens just by being around other players and gaining that sense of common goals. This picture is when we just spontaneously put on our brand new Dragon Warrior inspired Blue Slime King hats and started dancing together. But the interaction has spread much further than that, and I’ve helped these players out in the world beyond our neighborhood, as well as had my heart warm each time I happened to see one of them out in the wild.

A Server of Strangers

I’ve played many games so far that have some form of a blended server environment. World of Warcraft for the last several years has blended the leveling zones for the entire battlegroup to make each server feel more populated. The most recent poster child for Mega Servers however was the Elder Scrolls Online. Before launch they made several promises about creating a situation that grouped like minded players together into virtual servers, while still all being part of a much larger farm. While we had one of the smoothest launches since they could easily scale up the hardware temporarily, and reduce it later as needed… there are a lot of problems that came from not being with a fixed set of players. Admittedly some of the issues are due to the poor decisions made with the user interface.

In the above image, can you easily tell where my group mates are? Can you tell the names of players surrounding me? In both cases the answer is a huge nope, and this poor design choice of obfuscating information about other players only served to make the mega server concept feel that more alienating. Everyone that was not you became another nameless faceless person taking up room and competing for your resources. While this is the extreme, I’ve had the same thing happen in World of Warcraft when I encountered players from other servers. It was like that they were somehow less important to me, since they didn’t share the same server lineage. I knew that I would likely never see them again, so why even bother trying to be friendly?

Familiarity in Proximity

In a traditional server structure there is familiarity in your actions. You end up noticing players that do the same things as you do. It might be farming a specific location on the map because you like the look of it, or crafting at a specific machine. In hub based MMOs like World of Warcraft, you spend inordinate amounts of time milling around whatever your faction end game city tends to be. I would spend hours running circles around Dalaran while dealing with raid and guild business over text. While doing this I used to favor certain areas of the town and vendors, and I started taking note of who else seemed to like milling around these same places. Over time I would start up conversations and get used to seeing the same people. If they were gone, I would wonder what they were up to and hope that they were okay. Over the years there are so many contacts that I have made… that ultimately turned into later guild members that I made only because I noticed they were in the same place as me and decided to strike up a conversation.

The problem with the mega server is that it destroys this kind of familiarity through proximity. I feel like Elder Scrolls Online was the absolute worst case of this, because not only did it rob you of being around the same people all the time… it also took their names and guild tags from you. One of the important aspects of a guild is it becomes far easier to recognize than individual player names. Over time you start to associate a certain kind of behavior with a certain guild tag, and then when you see one of those people leading an event you have an informed decision as to whether or not this is going to be a good thing. As a guild leader, my people were amazing and the absolute best advertising I could ever have created. I would get random messages from players who ended up running a dungeon with one of my people, and they wanted to take time to compliment me as guild leader on how nice they were. It is this kind of interaction with others that I hope to preserve with whatever ends up being the next server model.

The Happy Medium

As I said in my first post, I think there is a happy medium somewhere. I think the ultimate version of mega servers, allows you to checkmark certain characteristics that you favor and then creates essentially a virtual server populated with the same players every time. Similarly I think there are ways for games to maybe more easily identify players that you have interacted with in the past. The biggest problem with Elder Scrolls Online is that every player felt anonymous. Even my own guild members, I struggled to locate them in a mob. This should never be the case, you should always be able to pick your friends and guild members out of the biggest sea of names and faces. Similarly I think it is important to be able to identify players, because it allows you to form those connections in your mind that if I saw this player in my crafting hub and they are out here doing the same action… I am invested in maybe going that next step and inviting them to a group. I want us to keep the best aspects of the traditional server structure, and find new ways to scale them as we go forward.

I want to leave with an excellent post from Sig of Crucible Gaming called “How WoW Ruined MMO Gaming”. While the title is hyperbole, there are some really good thoughts contained within, and it seems like Sig mourns the interconnectivity of the previous era of gaming. Once upon a time we needed players, and as such generally treated them better. As games have removed the need for having other players we have eroded that base of civility. While in many cases I think that World of Warcraft has poisoned the well in doing away with some things that were absolutely normal previously, I don’t think we are in an unredeemable state. Final Fantasy XIV has proven to me that there can exist a game that is both social and modern at the same time… and that has a thriving and cohesive community. I think the ultimate trick will be finding ways to take what they have done there and scale it to other games.