Yesterday I spoke for a bit about one of the reasons why I have not streamed that often. Namely that I have friends who would prefer not to be broadcast over my stream, which means when I DO stream… I have had to wall myself off from my social network of friends by dropping down to the “streaming” channel. As a result there is only so long I can seem to go without popping back upstairs because I simply get lonely down there all by myself. Over the last year or so I have tried to figure out a set up that would work, to let me stream freely without the fear of broadcasting my companions. The defacto tool is Virtual Audio Cables, but folks have talked about it being cumbersome and the more I looked into it… and they started talking about setting up batch files to do this or that… it honestly scared me away. Honestly even the website seems a bit cludgy… so I kept looking for other solutions.
In the mean time I made attempts to make this process work using both Voice Meter and Breakaway Audio. Neither tool admittedly was designed to do this, but I had found guides online that supposedly allowed it to work. Problem being after setting everything up… it never seemed to work for me and there was extremely limited documentation on what I could do to tweak my setup. Last night I finally decided to dig down into Virtual Audio Cables, and found the guide embedded above. For starters… this is the point at which I complain that YouTube is the worst means of disseminating information. What I needed in all of these cases was a good blog post with annotated screenshots… all I could actually find were a series of haphazard videos. That said the above video, when followed actually produced the results exactly like I wanted. Last night I was able to stream practically all night long, while hanging out with friends… and not broadcasting a single thing they said. Additionally I bound a separate push to to talk key just for the stream so that folks watching the stream are not getting “half” of the conversation. The videos below are the results of my evening of streaming.
Sohm Al with Neighbors
The picture does not exactly go with this story… but oh well it is my prerogative. Solaria’s fishing outfit looks amazing, and it makes me want to level fishing. It does however show you that the Greysky Armada spends a ton of time milling around our guild house in The Mists. One of the things I love about this game is that we are constantly interacting with our neighbors. Last night Damai and I were talking in /say and a neighbor joined in, saying that he needed a dps and a tank for Sohm Al the second dungeon in Heavensward. Damai was already spoken for, but I offered up my own services as a tank. We queued and got in quickly and the below embedded video is the results of that run. I did a few stupid things, one of which that wiped the party but we had a great time running dungeons with people who were essentially complete strangers until I last night. I think it is awesome that you can have these casual run in acquaintances.
During the early days of World of Warcraft had this rich tapestry of social connections that reached into many of the other raiding guilds on the server. When I needed someone for an activity our raid was running, I could reach out into these social channels and draw upon dozens of different people who were milling around looking for something to do. Cataclysm however pretty much destroyed this network, and I have never really been able to build an equivalent in any other MMO… that is until Final Fantasy XIV. The people here on Cactuar seem to crave interaction with folks outside of their insular guild units. I am in my maximum number of linkshells and while folks get lost in their own little world… especially while leveling in Heavensward… I have still been able to draw upon them to fill groups. As we move into more “maintenance” mode this is going to become more true. The only thing I wish was that there was a way to create more “formal” guild alliances. There are a handful of free companies that we hang out with regularly, and it would be nice to have a shared channel of communication that was not “opt in” like a linkshell.
Another Titan Extreme
Wednesday is normally the raid night of our second guild static. Since the raid leader was not around he left it up to Damai to organize something… and while we did not really have the appropriate numbers to work on Second Coil of Bahamut, there were still a large number of folks needing Extreme Primals to unlock more content. I was asked if I “felt like tanking Titan Extreme” to which I replied “there is never a sequence of events that exists… where I feel like tanking Titan Extreme… but I will if you need me”. Titan Extreme is just one of those fights that is maddening on so many levels and I would place it among the five hardest fights in all of the A Realm Reborn content. That said I make it out in my mind to be far worse than it actually is, and at this point I have the dance memorized. This fight is absolutely about repeating the same sequence of actions over and over until the boss falls down, and as I have commented in the past… this is the sort of fight we fail miserably at. We are amazing at fights where we have to think on our feet and adjust to change… but doing this on Titan extreme ultimately ends up screwing the entire raid when it comes to Weight of the Land damage.
What I found amazing is just how challenging this encounter still is even though many of us were being downscaled to 50, and our gear downscaled with us. A Realm Reborn content is absolutely going to remain relevant for new folks that have yet to experience it. This makes me more happy than just about anything else in Heavensward. We still have a bunch of people coming up through the ropes that have not seen any of the 2.0 raid content, and my hope is that we can have an old school night where we work on this as a guild and get people through it. This is what I wanted from World of Warcraft all along… a way to run old content and make it still relevant to current players. There were epic experiences like Blackwing Lair and Ulduar that are just diminished because we overgear the shit out of it, and there is no real way NOT to be overpowered… other than making some alts and level locking them at fixed points in time. Granted we tried to do this once with a raid of level 60 locked alts… but it still was not the same. Final Fantasy XIV however seems to have figured out how to make it work, and I am damned thankful. We eventually got the kill and I edited out just that part in the above video.
Last night I spent a good chunk of time playing with Forge.gg and in doing so I forgot the problem from before… that it ultimately broadcast all of the audio from teamspeak. However I did manage to pull a few nifty clips from one of the dungeon runs. The problem being I have no clue how exactly to embed them in a site. There are a bunch of features that I would love to see added to forge, namely the ability to easily get an embeddable snippet. Similarly I would love to see a feature like Twitch and Hitbox have to export the video to youtube. The big take away from last night is that I need to sort out how to extract teamspeak audio from my stream. This has been on my ToDo list for some time but I have yet to actually sit down and do anything about it. Which is somewhat unfortunate since I have several different tools installed right now that can essentially do the same thing. I started working through a tutorial for something called Breakaway Audio this morning, but have been running into issues… namely Teamspeak doesn’t seem to recognize the channel I set up for it.
Ultimately it would be awesome to solve this issue because I think I would end up streaming quite a bit more. The big thing for me is that I have to choose between being sociable with my friends on teamspeak… or streaming what I am doing. However if I solve this issue… in truth I am probably not going to mess with Forge that much, and simply just use Twitch. The always on functionality is cool… but I have to disable FRAPs to make it work which takes away my primary means for collecting screenshots from games. Generally speaking I disable whatever screenshot functionality exists in a game, and then use FRAPs to collect the screenshots in a generic “gameshots” folks, giving me a quick place to look for something I want each morning when I work on my blog post. To get Forge to work however I have to completely exit out of this software and it did not seem to work with DxTory either which has always been my fallback general screenshoting software. I still feel like maybe Forge isn’t a great fit for me, but I see a lot of people using it and enjoying it.
Hell Levels
Once upon a time in Everquest there was the concept of a “Hell Level” meaning that there were certain levels that were far more difficult to get than others. While back then these were literal mathematical break points where the experience needed was greater than the previous levels or the levels after. However this term has continued on into MMORPGs as a frustrating patch in the leveling curve. Right now it feels like 58 is a Hell Level because I very quickly hit another level wall, and really did not have much in the way of experience between it and the last one. So I am currently running around in the Dravianian Hinterlands doing quests, in an attempt to make up the difference. The problem being at this point I have yet to even reach the halfway point through level 58. I am pretty sure that the folks that are sixty in the guild have simply chain run dungeons.
I could do that, but in truth I would rather just wait until people in the guild actually need runs. Like last night I helped a guildie through The Vault, which is where all the forge.gg clips came from. There is just something more satisfying for me to be tanking for friends. I ultimately have this protective nature when it comes to my friends and family, and this makes tanking feel more “real” I guess for lack of a better word. The community in Final Fantasy XIV is awesome, and I have seen nothing bad to speak of with the influx of people for Heavensward. I absolutely could queue for dungeons and be just fine, because at this point I know the fights well enough to be able to explain them to anyone. The problem being when I am tanking for strangers, I feel like I have to put on the mask of “super tank” and be bigger and better in everything I do. I feel like I am on stage in a way, but with my friends I can just chill and I don’t stress quite so much when aggro twitches or I am slow to turn the mobs. I know no matter what I do in the dungeon they are still going to love me when the dungeon is finished.
Viva La Fake Friday
Today is my “Friday” for this week! This is because here in the United States most of us are getting off Friday for the Independence Day holiday. I opted to also take Thursday because we have things we are going to be doing over the break. For whatever reason my family growing up always did some project over the fourth, and recently I started talking about wanting to rearrange my office to be a better set up for gaming and streaming. My wife jumped on this and said we could do a lot of the little things we had been wanting to do over the extended break. This escalated quickly and now we are having a small dumpster delivered in our front yard on Friday. As a result I am going to be flipping a lot of my posting, meaning I will be writing posts each night and working on stuff around the house during the days. The first of these is likely to begin tonight, but to you the reader… it will appear just like any morning post.
I always feel the need to be honest with my readers about my schedule, because I guess to me staging content ahead of time… feels like it breaks the nature of my whole experiment. The original idea was that I would post something every morning without fail, and for the most part I have done this. Just sometimes the writing actually occurs the night before. I hope I survive the next few days because the whirlwind of change is about to suck me in. My hope is that when I exit on the other side I will have a much better space to do my PC gaming in, and if I can also sort out my audio issues… my hope is to also begin streaming a hell of a lot more. The next few days however might be a lot less talk of gaming… and a lot more talk of my failings at doing home improvement stuff.
Monday night is traditionally the raid night of our static group in the Greysky Armada Free Company. I had been wondering if we would actually raid since… well the expansion was released and we are all busy leveling. We were wondering just how a lot of things would work out, how our gear levels would scale appropriately and how effective we would be down leveled back to 50. It turns out I was pleasantly surprised on almost all counts and we stepped foot into turn nine once more making some of the most progress we have ever made. We actually managed to make it through a dive bomb phase unscathed, so at least now we know what that feels and looks like. The problem is shortly after doing so… we started our normal “death by simple mistakes” meaning we were all getting too tired to continue on.
I have hope however that maybe this weekend or next week we can step back in there and finally get a damned victory. Right now turn nine is our white whale… which is ironic in a game that literally has a giant flying white whale for a boss. This is one of those things that I just want deep down in my bones now, to move past this barrier and be able to say we have beaten it. I realize at this point it is outdated content… but that doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is taking down Nael and being able to move into the Final Coil of Bahamut. I am hoping that we will continue plugging forward and taking down this stuff even when it is no longer relevant. It makes me happy that the game continues to be challenging even though some of our members have long since reached the new level cap of 60. I however was on my dragoon last night which is still only level 51.
Blame Acti-Blizz
I was having a conversation yesterday with a good friend of mine, about the 6.2 patch and what has worked and what has not worked. During the course of this chat, he threw something out there as though it were just fact… that surprised me a little bit. This friend of mine is as diehard a World of Warcraft fan as they come, and both he and his son play on a daily basis. So to hear it from him really took me back to an earlier conversation he and I had back in 2008, to the announced merger of Activision and Blizzard. His comment was, that the current state of the game and the seeming lack of forward momentum… is entirely to blame on the merger with Activision. Back when this happened he said that his greatest fear was that it would change the way Blizzard interacts with its games and with its players. Last night he said that essentially all of his worst fears have been realized, and that the game we today is a direct result of this merger.
While we cannot say this with any certainty for me at least Blizzard has been on a downhill slide since the release of Wrath of the Lich King. That was the last “great” expansion for me personally, and represented the closing of an era when I was completely enraptured by the game. Granted lots of things have changed, and so many other games have hit the market… but it feels like Blizzard stopped being the revolutionary market leader… and started trailing behind in the days post Activision merger. My question is more did they simply shift focus… did they no longer care as much about the World of Warcraft community as they did their other product offerings? It feels like WoW is a game that has been left to largely fend for itself. There is a large amount of hype drummed up each time a new expansion releases, but then that quickly dies down and we are thrown right back into the cycle of doing just enough to keep hope alive in their player base that things will eventually get better. The problem is… this sense of hope is fading as players are staring down the barrel of potentially another Siege of Orgrimmar like lapse in content.
Following the Money
I think the problem is that quite literally World of Warcraft is no longer Blizzards most important asset. You can see that pretty clearly as you look at the attention paid to each of their product offerings. The favored children of Blizzard right now are Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm, and this is evident by how much attention they seem to be getting by the company. You have to think about the simple economics behind that decision. If you can create a game where people will gladly plunk down $4 for five virtual cards, and potentially do so multiple times a month… what is the pure money benefit of spending much effort on a game where the players are ONLY paying you $15 a month. Similarly with Heroes of the Storm you have a game where you can churn out multiple new heroes a month and sell them for the priced to own rate of $10 a piece roughly, not including the skins which are also often around the $10 price point. I saw a recent article stating that it would cost around $1000 to purchase everything that is currently available in the in game Heroes of the Storm store.
Don’t get me wrong… I don’t begrudge them either of these games because I play both of them. The problem is… if you can churn out a few champions a month, or a new hearthstone expansion… the potential investment of time to the money it makes the company is far greater than spending the year it takes to make a brand new World of Warcraft expansion. Even factoring in the box sales it is no wonder that the Warcraft team seems to be starved for resources when the rest of this company is thriving. So I guess I get back to my friends point… that the Activision merger shifted the focus of this company from making great games “whenever they were ready” to making games to maximize investor profits. I cannot be so naive as to believe that the Blizzard of old didn’t care about profits, but I think for a long period of time they were simply shocked and baffled by their own success. I’ve said for awhile that when you start to believe your own hype… you are setting yourself up for the fall. I think with the Activision merger… Blizzard saw their valuation and consumed their own hype completely. Ultimately as I watch the company change, I fear for the state of World of Warcraft, this game that in spite of all of my better sense… that I still care about.
This morning I am struggling a bit to find purpose as I sit down at the keyboard. As of last night I reached level 58 in Final Fantasy XIV on my Warrior and am not quite to the next level wall. Things are happening that are enriching the experience, but those same things are massive revelations and spoilers and I am concerned about giving too much away. As a result I am just not sure what to talk about. I could break out some more of my existential angst that I can presently only be a tank when someone in guild asks for groups. I could comment vaguely about how much I am enjoying the story, and how awesome it is going so far. Neither of which seem all that fulfilling however and as I sit here tickety tacking my keys my mind is a blank page when it comes to other things that I might talk about.
I had these grand ideas that I would stream some more this weekend, but since my wife spent most of her time downstairs… I was inclined to do the same. I don’t like streaming when I could be disturbing her, so instead I just kept playing. I really wish Forge did what I wanted it to do… namely that it would take real screenshots to a directory, instead of getting uploaded to the Forge website. The problem I have run into in the past is that I cannot run Fraps at the same time as Forge, and without Fraps I don’t have my stable source of screenshotting anything that crosses my screen. I tend to disable the in game screenshot keys and use fraps to dump all of my game screenshots into one standard directory to make pulling from it for blogging purposes easier. The other problem with forge is that the clip size was too limited to snapshot an entire boss fight. I also wish there was a way to back up my stream to youtube the same way I can with twitch. Nonetheless I might give it another shot soon.
Shoddy Shipyards
Yesterday I spent some time in World of Warcraft, for all the wrong reasons. The night before I had left my phone upstairs on the charger, and by the time I got situated on the sofa and realized that I didn’t have my phone… and as a result did not have access to my FFXIV authenticator I could not be bothered to get up. The Blizzard client on the other hand authenticates far less often, when connecting from the same machine over and over… and I was able to get in with just my account information. As a result I played for a bit, long enough to unlock Shipyards and the first and I think second camps in Tanaan Jungle. The renovations to my garrison however that resulted in the building of my shipyard however were not quite so successful as I noticed I now apparently have a break in my wall. It was one of those things that I caught out of the corner of my eye as I rode past, and now I cannot keep myself from seeing it every time I ride to the shipyards to check on progress.
The journey into the jungle is pretty much the same as the journey out of it. You complete objectives which moves the storyline further, and unlocks an additional base camp. I am not terribly far into it at this point so I am not sure how long this mission goes. It was around the time I got to the second camp that I needed to stretch my legs… and while I was up I grabbed my phone so I could play other things. I have to give Blizzard credit because they do this moving target as you go through a zone thing really well. There were several moments like this during the leveling process, where you help this or that base to progress the storyline, and those tended to be the best part of this expansion. If they had somehow managed to create an entire expansion around moving the ball forward and delivered new content on a monthly basis I think I would be significantly happier than I am currently. As it is right now patch 6.2 just feels like too little too late for me. Other than the break in my outer defenses, the craftsmanship of this patch seems to be on par with the rest of the content they have released, so at some point I want to finish to see how things progress.
More Mobile Gaming
One of my biggest complaints this expansion has been that Garrisons turned out the way they did. I was hoping for player housing, and what I got instead was a mobile game… that was not mobile at all. All of the mechanics that go into the garrison and the shipyard as well are the same sort of ploys that go into getting people to keep playing a mobile app. I have been playing the hell out of Fallout Shelter for example, and it is the exact same sort of gameplay as you find in the Garrison. You have abilities that you use and then timers that you are waiting out… so you can do additional things… all the while juggling limited resources and trying to find ways to replenish them. There is nothing really “wrong” with this sort of cooldown based gameplay, because it seems to work phenomenally well in getting us to keep pushing buttons on our phones. The problem here however is… we are not on our phones. In fact we are having to do this sort of upkeep based gameplay on a client that requires a PC to log in and check. The end result has been me logging into my characters in the morning and in the evening for most of this expansion to do nothing but swap missions.
I think more than anything… this has been what has grated on my nerves this expansion. These mechanics place me into the game on a regular interval… but I am not actually “playing” the game when I am in it. Instead I am juggling the upkeep of a mobile game, without an easy to use mobile interface. As I have moved forward into the Shipyards it feels like they are taking the whole follower mechanic to the next level with allowing players to customize the ships… which means you need to go locate the blueprints to make various upgrades, while also locating blueprints for various ships. It just feels like this would be a really enjoyable experience had they added it to the WoW Armory app as a mini-game that you could either interface with in game… or through an easy to navigate menu on your phone. Instead the result is giving us something that feels more cumbersome than daily quests ever did, and at the same time extracting us from the game world… and keeping us holed up in our garrison scheduling this next batch of missions for our dozen alts. This experience makes me question even further if Blizzard actually understands its player base at all… and what made their game great for all those years.
The picture does not exactly go with this story… but oh well it is my prerogative. Solaria’s fishing outfit looks amazing, and it makes me want to level fishing. It does however show you that the Greysky Armada spends a ton of time milling around our guild house in The Mists. One of the things I love about this game is that we are constantly interacting with our neighbors. Last night Damai and I were talking in /say and a neighbor joined in, saying that he needed a dps and a tank for Sohm Al the second dungeon in Heavensward. Damai was already spoken for, but I offered up my own services as a tank. We queued and got in quickly and the below embedded video is the results of that run. I did a few stupid things, one of which that wiped the party but we had a great time running dungeons with people who were essentially complete strangers until I last night. I think it is awesome that you can have these casual run in acquaintances.
