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Week In Gaming 12/5/2015

December 6, 2015 by Belghast

Sunday Madness

Today my posts and the AggroChat podcast are coming out a little late, because reasons. My wife has this thing at church this morning, and stuff was not going very much as planned. So instead of wrapping up the podcast when I got up, I went into the mode of attempting to support my wife as she flailed around the house trying to get everything ready. I don’t really do the religion thing, but it is important to my wife so I’ve always attempted to support her in whatever way she needs. Normally speaking I would have been further along in the podcast creation process by the time I slept last night, but instead I decided to have a knock down drag out fight with Amazon. There is an item that starting last Tuesday, has been updating daily to tell me it would be there by 8pm the next day. This has drug on for several days… and the FedEx tracking that I finally received shows that there is no way it is going to be here until sometime at the end of next week. Needless to say I was more than a little perturbed, and ended up trying to get to the bottom of it.

Where I feel bad however is that I know I took out some of my frustrations on the agents that were working the case. I realize why companies hide their chat functionality, but overall it is a horrible practice, that only leads customers to be pissed as hell by the time they FINALLY get a hold of a person to talk to about their issues. I know I probably came off as a mad man, but seriously… I’ve been an Amazon customer since around 2000, and been a prime member for I think as long as the program has existed. I keep that active so that I can have items here in two days… and there have been a lot of times in the past where they actually have it here next day. Since the swap to using the US Postal Service however, I have had several delayed orders… and this one just seems to be another in that line of problems. The worst part about it is.. that after spending over an hour last night trying to get someone to tell me where the ball was dropped… no one seemed to have any answers. I did however get two months of prime added to my account apparently to appease me, so I guess that makes up for some of the frustration. I have no doubt that the item will arrive and be just fine… but man this situation has been annoying. It is nothing nearly as bad as Tam and Amazon quite literally losing his shipment.

The Week of Warcraft

For the most part this was in fact the Week of Warcraft as I am attempting to play both characters on Argent Dawn Alliance side… and the joined The Scryers server Horde side. This means there are two different communities that I am trying to be an active part of, and as a result pretty much everything else I am doing has fallen by the wayside. Part of my Sunday ritual is to go downstairs and watch a sequence of television shows until ultimately it is time for bed. However during this sequence I got pulled into the Horde side guild raid with my friends in the awesomely named Facepull. Between some gear upgrades from drops and some crafted gear by the amazing Brerhoof it took me to around the 670 range. Now after some LFR this week I am sitting at 679 so a stones throw away from 680. I have two parts left to do of LFR and my hope is at some point before this evening I can actually get them knocked out and will hopefully see some more upgrades. My lowest piece on the Paladin is his necklace which is still the level 640 boosted green gear. In theory if I get lucky I could get a baleful item to drop while I am doing dailies… which I also need to do at some point. I have everything enchanted and gemmed… at least with cheap enchants and gems so my performance as a whole should be better tonight… that is if they still want me to come and pewpewpew things.

Then Wednesday night I was invited to raid with some twitter folk that I have known for ages. There I brought my Alliance Warrior Belghast, and similarly have made some jumps in gearing as the week went out. I started the week at 680 and have bumped it a little bit up to 684. This is still a long ways off from the 705-710 range that I need to be in order to really function in Heroic for the Friendship Moose fun, but whatever I am enjoying the process. In both cases I was mostly a fly on the wall as the raid went about their business, but I could see myself enjoying both situations greatly. It is my hope that in both scenarios are am invited back for future weeks, and in spite of my crummy gear I still managed to end up I think 3rd in total damage done for the raid. My burst dps is still on the weak range, but I am throwing out a lot of total damage which still is nice. Gladiator is such a fun spec that I am really going to hate losing once the expansion ships. I guess there is hope at a later date that they might revive the spec, but I seriously imagine it was just too hard to balance when it essentially took all of the same gear that tanks did… which means that my overall survival is among the highest of the dps classes. In any case I am having fun… and that is what really matters right?

Reaching Diamond City

The original plan for this week was to record our final Fallout 4 show last night, and because of that I felt this overwhelming need to have completed the storyline. This means that a good chunk of this week I was pushing hard to get through the main story, and I have to say… it was some of the most miserable I have been playing Fallout ever. My play style is very much a “forget the story exists” method, where I wander aimlessly and go explore whatever happens to suit my fancy. This means there is a lot of ADD induced gaming as I see what that building over there in the distance is, or go explore that wrecked vehicle there because it looks interesting. The result is that I spend a lot of time playing, but not a lot of time getting anywhere specific. With the severe content density that is the Commonwealth, it means I had at 70 hours not gotten anywhere vaguely close to Diamond City. I knew where it was, but I was busy wandering around the Cambridge area and exploring lots of little nooks and crannies.

Instead this week I forced myself to follow the storyline, and while it is really awesome… and there are lots of interesting characters… the entire process feels forced. I mean it IS forced, because I am trying hard to play in a style that is not natural to me. I talked about this for quite a bit on the podcast last night, but essentially most of the time I don’t like it when games end. In Mass Effect 2, I enjoyed every moment of the side missions… but it felt like all of my fun was being sucked down a drain the moment I started that sequence of events that lead to the end of the game. I want these worlds and settings.. and characters that I have created to essentially live on forever… and the sooner I “beat” a game… the sooner that fun for me is over. I think in part this is why I like the MMO so much, because my characters never have to go away… they just keep going on and changing and adapting as new content is released. So as it looks like we are pushing off the Fallout 4 show a bit… I am going to try and find a happy medium where I alternate between following story… and also spending some time following my heart.

Launch Hype Cycle

November 24, 2015 by Belghast

The Perfect Amount

One of the subjects I have thinking about quite a bit this week is the video game hype cycle… namely the time from when a video game is announced to the time you can have it in your grubby little hands. There are a lot of times that a game is announced with great fanfare and then when it actually releases two years later… the excitement has died down to a point where I rarely realize it has launched. This is especially true with games that have an early access system, because quite literally in my mind they have been “out” from the moment they started taking money for the game. I’ve come to a line of thinking that Fallout 4 pretty much represents the perfect amount of hype leading into a game launch. While all manner of information was leaked about this game for a few years… there was no official acknowledgement of the game, nor any media floating around about it until June 2015 at E3. At which point they announced that the game would be available in November of that same year. This gave the game a focused four months to hype it up and get people read for it.

The truth is that most of the hype was fan created. Bethesda themselves continued to release a slow trickle of information and trailers… large parts of which were simply recompiled from the demos given at E3. But this constant trickle served to keep the fires ignited long enough that by the time the game actually launched a few months later… folks were still very much at the peak of excitement, rushing out into the store and buying damned near anything even vaguely related to the game. As an example of this fever pitch I give to you exhibit A… the fact that the extremely limited edition Nuka Cola Quantum cases are going for over $1200 on Ebay. They announced a game with lots of new features, and then delivered it a short period of time later as promised. This sort of brevity is refreshing when it comes to video games, because we are simply used to it dragging on over the course of several years including extended alpha and beta phases which only serve to get the players bored with the title before they even lay their hands on it.

Beta is Not Beta

Another huge problem that plagues the industry is the fact that Beta testing really doesn’t mean what it says it means. What is ultimately spurring on this post is the launch of the World of Warcraft Legion Alpha yesterday to the press, streamers and a few fan sites. While Fallout 4 had this nice clean short cycle, Legion is already setting up to have a considerably longer one. We first got the official announcement of the rumored expansion at Gamescom in August, and post Blizzcon in early November we received our potential launch window of September 2016. Now that we have an alpha circulating, we will now have plenty of hype inducing articles and videos circulating… with ten months to go until the potential launch window. While this is awesome to stoke the fires, the flames will have died down significantly by the time the game actually releases. Right now I myself am riding this nostalgia buzz that has lead me to resubscribe to the game, but there is likely no way that the game can sustain my excitement until next year to keep the love going.

What I meant by the Beta not meaning what it used to, is the fact that we no longer have these cloistered NDA protected testing environments. So in essence Beta becomes this time to allow streamers and the press to hype up the game for Blizzard, rather than the period of deeply focused testing. Sure it is frustrating to be in something that is under NDA, and not be able to talk about it… but games need an incubation period before the world gets to see them. When I was testing Elder Scrolls Online I was quite literally in the closed testing process for a little bit over a year before the launch of that game. I tested the hell out of it, and myself and Ashgar apparently developed a reputation for our prolific bug noting. There were lots of things that I saw that would have freaked the hell out of the press and public if they saw them, but I simply calmly noted it and described as many details as I could and moved on. As the builds changed we saw many of those bugs disappear… and often times other ones arise that we continued to note. For me at least it was not about getting to play the game free or having something to fill my site with articles… but instead about trying extremely hard to make sure the best possible game launched.

A Challenge

So now is the point where I present a challenge to anyone with access to the World of Warcraft Legion alpha client. Test the hell out of that game and submit bug notes for anything that even seems vaguely out of place. I want each of you to be so prolific in your bug notes… that the developers behind the scenes know you by name and immediately start predicting what you might say. The Warlords of Draenor testing process was not taken seriously by the developers or by the players… and most of us just used it as a way of showcasing what was coming out from the game. What we ended up with was an expansion that did not quite feel right on so many levels, all of which were things that could have been addressed during the Alpha testing process. By the time a game makes it into Beta… it is essentially in a polish phase, where the content gets the spelling errors ironed out, and cosmetic blemishes are fixed. Alpha is the time when you can actually effect the way a game will play like at launch, and now that you have access to this client I expect each of you to do your job. After all testing is a job, not a perk… or something that elevates you above other players.

Quite literally if Legion is not the best expansion that World of Warcraft has ever seen… we are in a lot of trouble. You can have a single bad expansion and still turn around… namely I am looking at Dark Age of Camelot and the horrible Trials of Atlantis expansion here. They continued on to do a lot of really interesting things, but they absolutely had a misstep. I feel like Warlords was without a doubt Blizzard’s misstep when it comes to the Warcraft franchise, and Legion is their chance to redeem themselves. The problem being they need you the players to give honest and sometimes brutal feedback on what is working and what is not working. There is a huge difference between the live client and the alpha client… and the alpha forums are this magical place where people actually talk about the serious issues of the game without resorting to hyperbole. I expect each and every one of you that have access to this alpha to put that time to good use, and find every single bug in the game. Sure you only have access to the Demon Hunter starting experience, but I expect you to help make that starting experience the best “newbie zone” in the game. Now what are you doing reading my post… get to making bug notes people!

Week in Gaming 11/22/2015

November 22, 2015 by Belghast

Missing Breakers

During this segment I generally run down the gaming I have done during the previous week, however this week I am going to regale you with a story from last night. As I have talked about a bit on my blog we are currently going through some minor home renovations. We seem to be nearing the end however, and other than a few minor problems that they are working on… things seem to largely be done. During part of this process we had a big extension cord coming out through the garage door so they could do work on the front of the house, and as part of their wrapping things up they asked me to go inside and raise the garage door so they could unplug it. When I got out to the garage however… the door would not open, and around about this same time I noticed that our freezer was off. Thus began the mission to try and sort out what breaker was flipped.

The breakers are in a horrible location in our house, which is on the garage wall… but someone in their infinite wisdom decided to build a table and attach it to the wall in front of the breaker box. When I say table… I mean it is a 4 foot deep and 8 foot across shelving unit made out of full sheets of plywood. Sure it is sturdy as hell but it is super awkward and fiddling with the breakers means I have to essentially crawl up onto the table. The problem being… none of the breakers were flipped which began a hunt through the house because the contractors were convinced that this could not be the ONLY breaker box on the house. Please note that at this point we have lived in the house going on eighteen years…. we were absolutely certain this was the only breaker box. Finally after running around and flipping the damned house main in the back yard… someone noticed that the outlet in the garage that the opener was plugged into… had a ground fault switch. We flipped that and magically everything started working again. So yeah… that was a fun way to spend a good chunk of my night.

Final Fantasy XIV

This week finally saw my return to Final Fantasy XIV as it also announced the release of the 3.1 content. I talked about this a bit during the week, but it feels a little bittersweet. The content was really good, but also really really short. Usually we have some big boss fight as the pinnacle of the content patches, and this time around…. nothing. Sure there was a big fight but it wasn’t on the same level as a new Primal or an encounter like Gilgamesh. Also there is the fact that we still don’t have a new segment in the Hildebrand chain… or nothing to really replace the hole it has created in the content. I feel like they spent a lot of time on the Lords of Verminion minigame and as a result a bunch of other stuff slipped to the 3.15 patch later. I still have yet to do any of the dungeons, but hopefully I can get that going soonish.

The bulk of my final fantasy time consists of me logging in, and doing my Beast Tribe dailies for the new Vanu Vanu tribe along with some of the old world quests. What makes this pretty great is the fact that at the current level cap… all of the old world quests are super easy to do. So essentially my daily pecking order is… Vanu Vanu > Slyphs > Sahagin. Mostly I just want to be a tiny lalafell riding along on a giant goobue. Last night we also revived the tradition of doing stuff on Saturday nights as we ran bits of First and Second coil with the guild. I was not there for Turn 5 but I got pulled in on the second coil fun. We managed to get all the way up to turn 9, and put in a few attempts before Ashgar and I had to leave to prep for the podcast. My hope is we can get people in the habit of showing up on Saturday nights to do stuff like this and pony farming. That would go a long way towards revitalizing the Final Fantasy experience for me.

Destiny

I am continuing to play Destiny but a significantly reduced pace. Each Sunday afternoon we do a Star Wars pen and paper game, and right now Destiny seems to be my game of choice to play while doing that. It is something I can play on a machine that is not my main computer, and still be able to pay attention to what is going on in the roleplaying. Destiny is for the most part muscle reflexes at this point, so I am spending the time doing bounties and missions and such. I did however play quite a bit on Wednesday, or at least long enough to do my various weapon missions. I still very much love this game, but Fallout 4 has largely taken the place it held of the game I am spending most of my time playing. There are still a lot of things I want, but more than likely I am going to mostly do the Armsday/Xursday thing each week and then focus if there are objectives and goals that I really want to accomplish. There are a few interesting looking weapons this week that I am hoping turn out to be pretty awesome from the Gunsmith.

Fallout 4

I am still slowly wandering my way through the commonwealth. I am roughly sixty hours into the game and have yet to go to Diamond City. That said I have done a whole slew of side quests, but more often than not when I get one… I have already been to that location and cleared it out. When I went to help the Brotherhood of Steel for example… I had already completely cleared that location other than the areas that the Brotherhood ends up unlocking for you to go explore. As far as the Minutemen, I am tasked with taking back the castle, but the castle is a long ways off from where I am. Right now I am largely exploring the Cambridge area and delving into the ruined buildings that you find there. The hospital at Cambridge was one of the more interesting areas, so if you have not been there I highly suggest checking it out. There has been some crazy shit happening there… but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. At this point I am still largely using my crappy pipe gun, that has been upgraded as much as possible…. but that is largely because I have a truly silly amount of ammunition for it.

World of Warcraft

I am weak…. and nostalgia is strong. Over the last few weeks I knew deep down inside that I was fighting a losing battle. Finally yesterday I gave in and started playing my sub level 20 horde characters since I could do that for free. When Scryers and Argent Dawn merged, I ended up creating an entire accounts worth of Horde alts with the thought of playing with some of my Horde friends on the Argent Dawn server. I tried to create one of every race and class… and some of them I am probably going to simply re-roll. For my Warrior… I ended up going Blood Elf because I remember at launch Warrior was not an option for them. Also I have gotten kinda sick of playing Orcs, and my Deathknight is an Orc, and my Paladin is a Tauren. Maybe I am mellowing in my old age, but the whole “elf” thing is annoying me far less right now. Maybe it is the nostalgia of him wearing what is essentially a set of Wrath armor from Molten Core. In any case I am poking my head around World of Warcraft, and we will see how well that takes.

Be Nice to the People

November 20, 2015 by Belghast

Bad Luck

TotallyLegitOvarwotch — This looks totally legit right?

Traditionally I do this Friday thing where I talk about one of the many “MMOs Worth Playing” but honestly…. today I am just not feeling it. I am feeling more annoyed and frustrated about MMOs than I am feeling the love right now, and in this current mindset it is probably best that I simply don’t talk about a game. The purpose of the column is to highlight a game and talk about the things I love about it, in the hopes that it might nudge people into giving it a try. In order to really do that I have to be feeling happy and enjoying the world around me… and right now I am kinda grumpy. Granted I am grumpy over a stupid reason. Right now I feel like I am one of a handful of people who didn’t get into the Overwatch beta weekend. I am largely annoyed by this, because I am in fact one of the people who went ahead and pre-ordered the game knowing eventually that I would want to play it. You would think… that if you have a bit single weekend only stress test that you might want to include the people who are already signed up to spend money on your game.

Maybe that is screwed up in my logic, but it seems to me that they should have pulled from the pool of sign ups first for this one in particular. I am not saying that about the normal always on Beta process… that one is completely luck of the draw. This one however… when you are testing a game for a short period of time… it might be cool to thank the folks who have already pressed that button and said “Yes, I want your game”. Frustrations aside, I am hoping all of my friends who are going to be playing it this weekend will enjoy themselves and have lots of things to talk about. Honestly this test will give me a better feeling of how I am going to like the game, since a lot of the AggroChat folks seemed to have gotten in. This is the hardest part about Betas is standing on the outside watching your friends have fun… and then trying really damned hard to be happy for them… and not sad that you got left out.

People Behind The Thing

It's okay to be sad/frustrated/upset with a thing, but never okay to attack the human being who's job is to represent that thing

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) November 19, 2015

So even though I am frustrated, I am directing my frustrations at an entity… the game Overwatch and or the company Blizzard behind it. I realize that that company is made up of people, and it has to be super tiring to hear people raging at them constantly. I realize over the years I have said some pretty caustic and even pyroclastic things about video games and or the companies behind them. At no point however did I aim that criticism at the people themselves. I never joined the chorus of “I Hate Ghostcrawler” nor will I join any other personally targeted witch hunt in the future. I can dislike a thing… but still have the utmost respect for the people for whom it is their job. Much of this week has felt like I have been attempting to give lessons in how to treat people with simple human dignity… and yesterday continued that trend. These companies have people working there, that go to work every single day hoping to do something cool… and often times get met with this constant wall of negativity. It is no wonder when someone reads one too many “fuck you” posts targeted at them that occasionally community staff snaps. Ultimately how good of a job, and how much satisfaction in it… would you have if someone stood over your desk heckling you the entire day?

Now you can take the path of “they willfully accepted the job”, but that too is utter bullshit. They probably took the job for the same reason that any one of us who are gaming addicts would jump at the chance to do the same thing. The folks that work at games companies do so because they love games with every fiber of their being, so much so that they are willing to sacrifice basic things like stability, and normal working hours… for the chance of being part of something they at least once felt was awesome. So if this week I happen to be complaining about Overwatch… I know that behind the scenes there is a crew of people who are working insane hours right now, and trying their damnedest to please as many people as they can… while at the same time desperately fighting to roll out the best possible product that they can make. I’ve been lucky to know enough people that work at enough companies to know that all of these fine people are grinding themselves into the ground all in the hopes of making each of us happy. So the next time you level an attack at a thing… please make sure it is targeted at the thing… and not the voice of the person hanging out in front of it for whom it is their job to represent said thing. I most definitely don’t believe that games should be above criticism… but I do believe that we shouldn’t be targeting our bile at a human being.

Hoping For a Great Friday

My hope is that I can go into this Friday and not see anything else that makes me sad about humanity. For those of you in the Overwatch beta weekend… have a blast, take lots of screenshots, record lots of video… because I expect some really amazing content as a result. For those of us watching from the sidelines… there are dozens of other things we should be doing. I personally am now 55 hours into Fallout 4… and have yet to make it to Diamond City. I’m also in a strange place when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV where I am logging in each day to do Beast Tribe dailies, but not finding much drive to do anything else. I am in that strange place where I took a long enough break from the game to where I am completely out of touch with what I was doing before I left, but have not been away long enough to make me super nostalgic enough to dive back in with vigor. I am also still fighting the urge to play World of Warcraft, and I am scared that sooner or later I will be giving into it… if for no reason other than to get it out of my system again. I am in a place where I want into the Legion beta more than any other beta in a long while, mostly because I hope beyond hope that Deathknights are fun again. The fact that I had to switch back to my warrior during Warlords honestly was a bit of bummer, and I would love to be a Worgen DK once more. Anyways… that was a long “outro” but hopefully you have a great weekend, and stay safe and happy and warm.