elder scrolls online Archives - Page 10 of 27

Alliance of Awesome

June 7, 2014 by Belghast

Multigaming Community

On January 31st a few interesting things happened. Firstly Sony Online Entertainment released the alpha for Everquest Next Landmark… now just known as Landmark. More importantly this set a chain of events into motion. For some time there has been a group of loosely affiliated guilds and gaming communities tugging on essentially the same pool of players. So we might end up getting this mix of players for a specific title and then having a similar mix of players for another title down the road from this huge twitter/g+ gaming community pool. With Landmark this reached a bit of a head and someone was brave enough to stand up and say it was silly. In the opening days of Landmark, since there were no guilds (and still arent for that matter) each of these communities opted to start a chat channel. The problem is this left some people joining as many as six different channels at a time.

Scarybooster proposed a simple idea, that we all agree to use one common chat channel, and with that the Alliance of Awesome was born. It started simple in scope, but from there Zelibeli and I kinda ran with it and over the last four months we’ve built a rather large loosely connected gaming alliance. Currently we have five different groups in the AofA community: House Stalwart, Multiplaying.net, Combat Wombat, Mercy Gaming, and Dark Religion. Lately I have been talks with Liore about maybe having the already awesome Machiavelli’s Cats community join the fold as well. I have to say so far that over the last four months things have indeed been awesome. For the most part everyone has seemed to get along swimmingly and I’ve watched this group of disconnected pieces merge into a community in every sense of the word.

A Simple Idea

One of the big problems with being habitual multigamers is the fact that guilds are often transistory and it is hard to constantly muster a new batch of people to play whatever game is coming down the pipe. Additionally since not every game will end up being ideal for everyone, this means you have massive amounts of fragmentation as folks leave a given game for something new. The idea was that each individual guild would take responsibility for the reigns of the games that they were most into, and then that way as gamers we would have access to a good and familiar guild regardless of the game we choose to play. Over the coming months I would like to see this formalized into a sort of Rosetta stone for who has which guilds where and just how active each of them are.

The problem is that since we each have our own guild identities, it felt odd to constantly ask players to register an account on a new forum for each group. As a result we tried a few different things to have a shared neutral ground between the communities. The first of these efforts was the Alliance of Awesome reddit… and while it worked well enough, it caused as much frustration as it solved. Then I stumbled onto Anook and it seemed almost perfectly suited for us. It offered public and private forums, an events calendar and was more gamer social network than private site allowing folks to link everything up to the games they are streaming into the shared hub… or in the verbiage of that network a “nook”. This also lets the bloggers in our midst share our posts easily on the nooks blog, and so far that seems to also be working well.

A Unified Approach

Over the last few months we have been melding significantly. Elder Scrolls Online launch for example was the first real “Alliance of Awesome” foray, and while we still kept to the branding of House Stalwart… it was very much a shared occasion. With the launch of Wildstar, we had no real forerunner guild wise that looked to be taking up the reigns. Instead we opted to drop any specific guild branding and simply go with the “Alliance of Awesome” for our guild name. Honestly I have to say it feels very natural and I can see eventually we may drop the individual guild monikers and just do things from that standpoint.

The biggest problem I forsee moving forward is the fact that right now we are still very much utilizing two completely separate voice servers. A good chunk of the House Stalwart guild is still very happily playing World of Warcraft and doesn’t really care about any other game on the market. The rest of us are pretty nomadic, but we still are far more used to and comfortable with mumble as a communication platform. Multiplaying, Dark Religion, and Mercy Gaming have all standardized on a Teamspeak 3 server run for free by the ever amazing Saia. So I would really like to make a move to trying to use that as well and simply dropping the mumble. That said this feels like a landmine because I have no clue how to convince the WoW-only contingency to abandon mumble and make the shift over to Teamspeak 3. Also I hate to abandon Mumble myself until they have done this, because while I am not playing World of Warcraft on a nightly basis I still hold the guildmaster position and get called on to resolve issues. I want to make sure I am reachable by folks even when I am not in the same game.

Shared Ethics

The other rough spot is that we need to come up with a shared set of rules and codes of conduct. For years House Stalwart has followed a simple “three tenets” approach, and relied on guild leader and officer judgment to fill in the gaps. Zeli tends to favor spelling things out, and considering the large volume of people she has dealt with not completely organically connected… I can totally see why this would be a good thing. After years of trying to “keep things simple” but then having to deal with explaining nuance… I am starting to favor Zeli’s approach to be honest. I hate writing rules, and as such that’s why I came up with the somewhat ambiguous three that we use. I figured that using common sense folks would realize what they meant… problem is not everyone “common” is the same. The further away from the same core of friends you get, the more confusing the interpretation becomes.

Going forward I think we are going to have to just agree upon a shared set of rules, and I think so far the batch Zeli came up with for the Alliance of Awesome guild seems like a great place to begin. The biggest thing I hope out of this is that we are a living community. That we will continue to grow as we adopt other awesome people from twitter, anook, g+, or that we happen to stumble across in game. Also I hope that we do in fact get the Machiavelli’s Cats community to join the fold, and keep finding other like minded groups to rally to the cause. I would really like Alliance of Awesome to not only have an ostentatious name, but also have awesome actions to back it up. I want us to be part of the solution in the games we play, and not part of the problem. I would love to see us better each of the gaming communities we are in.

Giving Back

File:Child's Play Logo updated.png One of the things that Zeli and I have been talking about lately is that we would really like to enter Alliance of Awesome in this years Child’s Play marathon. Far as I can tell this will take place on October 25th, and the idea is to have 25 hours of live streaming for charity. I have wanted to participate in this for years, but I thought it would be more interesting if we signed up a whole bunch of streamers from the Alliance of Awesome community and have one shared channel for the purpose of the event. We have quite a number of people who stream already, and it would be awesome to give each of us like a 4-5 hour block of time to play whatever the hell we want to.

Also lately we have been holding a lot of events in various games. Right now Wednesday nights are “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and those are pretty much only to anyone in the Alliance of Awesome community. Additionally we have been holding a Thursday night “League Beginner Night” to let folks ease into the League of Legends game. So far both events have been a blast and I would love to see them grow beyond the small number of people that we have. I am sure we will be doing something similar for Wildstar, especially with the focus on grouping in that game. I can only see the community as a whole getting better. So here comes the thing I am sure you have all been waiting for. If you are not already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… head over to the website and join our nook. We don’t have any real requirements for membership other than wanting to be around a bunch of awesome people, and striving to be the “white hats” in gaming. If you have a large community, track down myself or Zelibeli and we can see if the entire group would be a good fit for us as well. Growing up as an only child, I always wanted to be surrounded by friends… and on the internet I try my damnedest to surround myself with as many awesome people as I can. So far I think things are going pretty well.

Ramble About Content

June 5, 2014 by Belghast

Story Content

I was having a discussion yesterday with some friends about whether or not the MMO player actually wants carefully crafted story driven content. When you look at the lackluster support that Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World have gotten overall, you could easily come to this conclusion… since each of them are deeply story driven and carefully constructed experiences. I think we are maybe seeing something else at work. If you look at a game like World of Warcraft, some of its deep story arcs have long been heralded as some of players favorite content. However the vast majority of the content is nothing like this, and I think it is simply a case of not everything has to be “art”.

It is in essence the filler content, that is just good enough to keep you from throwing up your hands in frustration, that make you appreciate that gem in the rough of a quest. Games like ESO, SWTOR and TSW attempted to infuse deep story and meaning into almost everything you do, therefore shifting story driven content to the status of a commodity. I suggest that games need busy work, to make you appreciate the transcendent content when it is placed in front of you. The “kill ten rats” quests are there to cleanse the palates so to speak, so that when a deeply engaging story arc is put in front of you… you actually take notice and don’t resign it to more content to grind through.

Epic Crafted Content

When I think about epic custom crafted experiences I think of the Mass Effect series. I have gushed on this game so much, and watched friends play it over and over. As much as I enjoyed the entire trip through the series… it is not the type of game that I would want to play every night. That ultimately is the problem with MMOs, you are asking players to come in and inhabit your space… hopefully making it a nightly traditional to log in and play with their friends. As much as I might like a Mass Effect or a Transistor… I wouldn’t want to play these games on a nightly basis. I want a space that is much more malleable, and doesn’t require so much of myself to play it. Essentially one friends assessment that MMO content “needs to be exactly good enough to be passable” is really not too far off the mark.

One thing that the busy work tasks excel at is helping drive your own personal narrative forward. The players who inhabit an MMO and really live there on a night by night basis, whether they realize it or not, are crafting a custom narrative about their character based on their own actions. Each time you kill some baddies, save a villager, or deliver a package to some far away mountain… these actions are complementary to whatever narrative you have in your head about your own character. When you ask a player to participate in something longer, more story driven… the end results are predetermined and may or may not be complimentary with this personal narrative. When you have a few of these long epics scattered throughout the game, they are welcome interludes. However when everything you do is based on some narrative that you don’t necessarily fully control… it can be jarring.

Grouped Content

While I would not want to play Mass Effect every single night, I still want to play it often… so there sets up the paradox. Right now I find myself compartmentalizing games as either “fun to play with other people” and “fun to play by myself”. Elder Scrolls Online is very much fun to play by myself, with brief flurries of playing with friends when it comes to dungeon and pvp content. This is part the game and part me. Firstly I hate questing as a group, and it has been something I have tried to avoid like the plague since the early days of World of Warcraft. I’ve always found the experience to be generally frustrating since someone is always a step behind or a step ahead of where you happen to be. Trying to keep people in sync is madness… but Wildstar and its focus on leveling the guild through grouped content is trying to change this.

They’ve given me a hook, a reason to group up that so many other games haven’t. I greatly prefer to experience “content” by myself and then group up to do “group content” whenever I can. But the fact that the only real way to level your guild is through players grouping up together and doing content, makes the entire concept of group questing much more friendly. They’ve given me a shiny bauble for my troubles, and also given me tools to make the entire grouping experience more meaningful in the way the various “paths” interact with one another. So this construct is making me re-evaluate the way I think about content in general, and start looking for ways to group up to accomplish things rather than solo everything.

In part my reluctance to group comes from my Everquest roots where your ONLY option was to group for everything. When MMOs gave me the option to be self sufficient, I took it and ran with it and have simply never looked back. So in a game like Elder Scrolls Online, I greatly prefer to be wandering around by myself. I go AFK frequently, often have to take my headset off to respond to my wife, and am generally not always super engaged with what I am doing. In short I feel like I am a liability for grouping, and in those cases I try and solo the entire night. The problem is this becomes a pattern with me, and I simply NEVER group unless it is content that I can’t do by myself. I find it interesting that Wildstar is somewhat successfully making me re-evaluate that point, and seeing that grouping is something that is beneficial to me, the guild, and the players I am grouped with.

Room For Both

Another thing I have learned about myself is that I seem to always need a “WoW”. I am talking about this in super generic terms because the game has shifted at various times… but I always seem to be playing one. Traditionally this has been me shifting back and forth between playing World of Warcraft and Rift… while at the same time playing a game like The Secret World or Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar seems to be my new “WoW” game in this equation, and it speaks to my desire to play that type of themepark/themebox type experience. The thing is there is always going to be room for an Elder Scrolls Online as well. I find myself right now wanting to pair down to just those two games, even though I have a ton of other games that I somewhat want to play. It is like I have various itches that need scratching on a regular basis, and no one game ever quite covers them all. However between a combination of those two games it might get close to covering all the bases.

The more I play Wildstar and enjoy it because it is new and shiny and exciting… the more I want to spend my weekend delving into Elder Scrolls Online and exploring Auridon and more of the Veteran level Aldmeri content. I functionally need both experiences, because so far I have not been able to get both from the same game. However after seeing the lackluster reception that Elder Scrolls has received versus the glowing recommendation of players for Wildstar, it is pretty clear that most players just want a better “WoW”. There is no shame in this, because to some extent that has been what I have been looking for as well. I want to visit these worlds with rich story, but I want to “live” on a nightly basis in one that is more of a “choose your own adventure” novel. Wildstar inundates me with choices of things to do… and there is a never ending list of achievements and things to explore, giving me a constant stream of adventures to be had.

League Beginner Night

I realize this mornings post has been an odd rambling one… without much of a firm point. I blame a clear lack of sleep on my part, and a measure of exhaustion on another. Hopefully there is something worth reading up there in that big mess. Tonight is the Alliance of Awesome League Beginner night again, and if you are a member of the AofA community I highly suggest you check it out. The start time is 9pm CST, but if we have a critical mass of players on mumble beforehand we might start a little early. Last week we had enough time to play a 3v3 Twisted Treeline and a 5v4+bot Summoners Rift. We had a ton of fun in the process.

If you have never played League of Legends before, and have been interested in getting into it… now is the ideal time to try it out. Last week we had several first timers, and to make things easier we broke apart into separate mumble channels to help tutor the new folks in what they should build and where they should be focusing their efforts. This in part involved me barking orders to Maric quite a bit, but he seems to have survived just fine and is signed up for this week again. I am still very much a newbie myself, but as a whole it is a really fun time to be had and presents a wild divergence from the types of games I normally play. I wish we had enough people in Heroes of the Storm to be able to have a similar night for that game.

Rocket House

June 3, 2014 by Belghast

Beard Reset

Last night I went after work to get my hair cut, as I was in pretty dire need of one. While I was there I did something rather drastic, I hit the reset button on my beard. Usually during the winter I grow my beard out to combat the cold, and then during the summer I trim it back up… sometimes even trimming it down to a Vandyke. This time I opted to keep it a full beard but just bring it down to something more manageable. Over the last several weeks as the heat has risen, our evening walks had become more and more frustrating. Sunday night I had reached a sort of critical mass as I got so freaking hot during the walk that I took a dip in the pool the moment I got back to the house. While I may mourn the loss of my big bushy beard… I realize that it was only about six months of growth and by the time winter rolls around again it will be back with a vengeance. One of the good and bad things is that I grow beard hair extremely quickly.

Rocket House

The highlight of last nights play time was finally unlocking the ability to have a house. I have long been a sucker for housing in any game that happens to have it, and the Wildstar model seemed extremely intriguing in beta… but I never actually managed to get a character high enough to unlock it. Apparently you can get your housing quest completed at level 14, and after running around all night myself, Tam and Ashgar all went off to Illium to do just that. I’ve not really spent much effort and more importantly money on the house yet, but I am sure it will become quite the gold sink for me. At this moment I have the Rocket Ship house that came with preordering the game, as well I managed to pick up a few decor items in my travels and mostly have just wanted a place to stash all of it.

One of the more interesting things that I have managed to pick up is a Meteor Crater kit. I added it to my plot but I am not really sure if I will keep it. Honestly I have no clue what I will be doing with my place at all to be honest. Right now it is mostly a dumping ground of various decor items I pick up in my travels. The cool thing is that already I have access to several rather nice buffs, including a 5% quest and monster xp one that I will likely start using while playing. At this point my goal in life is to get 2+ more gold I need for a mount at level 15. At the end of the night I was roughly 1/3 of the way into 14, so I don’t really have a ton more time to accumulate it. My theory is that I will go find some mobs that drop good stuff and blow them to smithereens.

I wish I had done a better job of documenting our travels last night, because we ended up doing several really cool things. Firstly the three of us did the level 13ish ship mission where we investigated the asteroids and what was killing the miners. I had managed to do this in beta and it was one of those points that made me re-evaluate how I felt about the game. The mission is extremely cool, and really shows off what the game can be. While wandering around Ellevar we managed to stumble across a world boss that was unlocked by the explorer path. Both Tam and I are explorers so ran around this circle unlocking the six locks on the cage. What spawned as a result was this massive void walker looking thing that was extremely difficult. I have a whole new respect for their encounter design after seeing this guy.

I have no clue what this guy was even called, because the shit hit the fan almost immediately after starting it. For starters he dealt massive damage to me as the tank, and kept dropping this crazy latticework of laser beams on the ground that I would have to dodge out of quickly. It seemed as though he was also leaving a green mist on the ground. The main problem was that none of us were really prepared for a dungeon style encounter, as no one was really set up to be the primary healer… and I honestly was not really configured to be the primary tank. I had to self rez about halfway through the fight but we managed to hold on long enough to take the guy out. As the fight continued he split into two, that became four, that finally became eight individual mobs. All I know is the overall experience was insane… and makes me want to find more of these unlockable bosses.

Growing On Me

I have to say the game is inexplicably growing on me. We were talking last night, and really Wildstar is like Guild Wars 2… but with a purpose. The big problem I had with GW2 was that nothing I did felt like it actually mattered. I wandered through the zones completing mini objectives, but nothing really felt that important. Wildstar feels like taking the Guild Wars 2 “so many things to do” model and wrapping it around a solid questing model with interesting storyline. The entire world feels so feature rich that it was absolutely overwhelming during beta after coming from the much more sedate and Spartan Elder Scrolls Online. I feel completely inundated with things to do, and little side missions to complete, especially when you factor in all of my explorer path content.

The content density is crazy, but as I am starting to get accustomed to it… I am enjoying it more and more. The overall game feels like a love song for Vanilla and Burning Crusade era World of Warcraft, but updated and modernized and packed with an insane number of features and baubles and widgets. As much as I don’t think there really is such a thing as a “WoW Killer”, this game probably has as close of a shot as any. There have been so many players that have lamented the changes that World of Warcraft has made over the last several years, and this is a game almost entirely for them. After fighting the summoned world boss last night… I am actually looking forward to seeing what their dungeon and raid content looks like. I don’t think I will ever again be a serious raider, but this game might make it happen more than anything I’ve experienced to date.

Not Leaving Elder Scrolls

While I have spent a lot of time talking about Wildstar lately, because it is shiny and new and I am finally starting to see what other folks have seen… this does not mean that Elder Scrolls Online has been tarnished at all for me. The two games are so drastically different that they don’t even occupy the same space for me. I am slowly working my way through the Auridon content, and I even logged in last night for a few minutes. I have a feeling since today is the official launch day for Wildstar, that it will likely be completely unplayable… and as a result I may just take the more relaxing route and play some Elder Scrolls. On twitter there has been a lot of talk about leaving Elder Scrolls, and this is definitely not me. In fact I am probably bumping my subscription up from 3 months at a time to 6 months at a time. I tend to play all the games at the same time… but there is a point where I could see myself maybe setting down to just Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and Landmark (if the landmark combat ends up being great). As it stands now however I am not abandoning anything for the time being.

#Wildstar #WorldBoss #Housing #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO

Coconut Hunt

June 2, 2014 by Belghast

Insanity Continues

This morning we woke up a little bit before our alarm normally goes off, and instead of getting up and starting the morning process… I opted to simply lay there in bed waiting for it to go off. When I got up moments later to turn off my 25 year old alarm clock, I heard a loud boom and saw a flash of lights out the window. Upon further investigation there was a fire truck pulling into our neighborhood. The rain had been coming down for awhile, so I found some shoes and wandered out to see what the commotion was. There across the street from our house, the neighbors jeep wrangler was on fire with flames shooting high out of the engine compartment. At this point I am trying to figure out what exactly happened in my head, because far as I know Jeeps just don’t spontaneously combust.

I would have tried to snap a photo but I figured that would be extremely crass… and also with the rain coming down I didn’t want to endanger my phone. So many things about this weekend have been absolutely bizarre. There was a point yesterday that while driving around we stopped at an intersection. Normally in Tulsa we have a lot of panhandlers that work intersections, but I was not prepared for what I saw when I looked to my left. There standing on the corner was a man in a Leatherface mask from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a suit with a cup out taking money. I am not sure if his shtick was working but he definitely seemed to be freaking lots of motorists out in the process. I am wondering what exactly was up with this weekend, because so many strange and unusual things happened. Is there some weird alignment of the magnetic forces going on or something… because at this point I am almost expecting a plane engine to come crashing through my roof or something.

Coconut Hunt

Over Mother’s Day weekend we happened to pop into a Walgreens for something on our way out of town and my wife found these Margaritaville drink packets in Pina Colada flavor. Since my wife’s mother loves Pina Colada we picked some up, and it turns out they are pretty amazing. They taste as close as you can get to the actual thing without having the alcohol in them. A few days passed and we went right back to the same store and they had none of them. At which point we checked the other stores in our suburb and were only able to find a few boxes. These went far quicker than I had expected, and that lead to our mission from yesterday. It turns out that by our estimation roughly 20% of all Walgreens seem to have gotten this product in. We went out yesterday running from store to store hunting for the illusive product. All told we managed to gather up 16 packages of them.

That means we are okay for 96 bottles of water before we have to go on another hunt. I feel somewhat like I am in a zombie movie foraging for supplies. I would think this was absolutely insane, but I might have to start doing the same thing. I have a similar obsession with this Cherry Pomegranate drink mix that seems to have gone out of production. The grocery store around the corner from me used to stock it, and now Dollar General seems to get it in as a seasonal item. So I figure at some point soon I will be making my own trip from store to store looking for it. In both cases we have been unable to find it online to just buy in bulk. I guess in the case of the Pina Colada that is not entirely true. You can get it online for $2.35 a box… whereas in the store it is $1 a box. For the time being I figure we will continue foraging, but what concerns us is that my wife’s sister stopped at every Walgreens from South Carolina to Oklahoma and only found 8 boxes.

Laugh it up Fur Ball

I did not expect to like Wildstar very much based on my frustrating experiences in Beta, but what can I say… it has grown on me. I am finally starting to feel like I grasp the interface and especially the mapping system. I would still like to see the ability to set a waypoint similar to other games and have a little thing blink on the side of the mini-map for which direction to go. I still don’t really care for the giant temporary arrow thing… but I am getting used to using it. My army of bots delights me constantly, as does my chosen character. I feel like I tried to make as close to the traditional “Belghast” appearance as I could with a fuzzy rat thing. It is the animations and movement that makes me happy. I streamed for a bit yesterday, and you can see me constantly bouncing and double jumping around.

I have to admit… double jump is a big part of my enjoyment. It is my firm belief that every game is better with double jump. I guess this is helped by the fact that I chose the Explorer path, which is essentially the “I like jumping puzzles” path. Thankfully you get path abilities like “Safe Fall” that have already come in extremely handy as I bound off the edge of things. The other thing I am loving is the fact that I seem to be able to solo a lot of the group content with my robot armada. Sure it takes a lot of concentration, and careful use of cooldowns and stuns… but I’ve managed to solo almost all of the 2+ boss type encounters. Bascially I need to come up with a verbiage to describe them… because right now I am calling them “Angry Skulls” and “Angry Skulls with Horns”.

As much as I might not want to… I really do enjoy the over the top nature of this game. There is absolutely nothing subtle about any of it… and I feel like starting in Crimson Isle and then moving to Deredune has made all the difference in the world for me. I rolled a new Chua Spellslinger and I plan on taking it the Levithan Bay to Ellevar route to see if it is somehow better now that I grasp the game concepts a little bit better. It might simply be that I have gotten used to the visual bombardment that is Wildstar. Compared to Elder Scrolls Online it still feels like trying to make sense of the Las Vegas Strip… but I am finding it enjoyable nonetheless. I can see why people are so fanatical about this game already, because it is very much like a “better” World of Warcraft. I remember being just as fanatical with Rift proposed being the same kind of thing. Basically the real challenge is going to be getting players to stick around for more than 1-3 months, but that seems to be the same struggle everyone is dealing with. For the time being I am switching back and forth between this and ESO, and trying to mix in as many other titles as I can in the process.

#Wildstar