Gaming

Gaming post

Corrupted Azoth Tree

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Good Morning Friends! It was a wild weekend between the Muskrat and Twitter and the fact that my Mastodon 4.0 instance that I love… is unsustainably popular. On Friday afternoon Stux the admin of Mstdn.social closed the doors when we crossed the 100,000-user threshold. He had been advised by his host that they could not reasonably scale up that instance any further. Unfortunately he did not also close down the ability for users to send out invites to their friends… and as I have talked about before when it comes to MMORPG servers… it is extremely important to be in the same place as your friends. The end result is that another 11,000 invites went out before finally shutting down that loophole.

So unfortunately things are sluggish as hell and the timeline on the server has been running roughly an hour behind real-time as an army of worker processes churn furiously through messages. Stux also manages Mastodon.Coffee which is his attempt at creating an English language only server, and due to the overloading of Mstdn spawned a brand new server called Masto.Ai. I’ve been sitting here this morning trying to decide if I do the right thing for the community to lessen the load and migrate over… or if I just deal with it until enough people get frustrated to drop the total number of active messages. I had hoped the next time I migrated would be to something I was running for myself. I recently picked up Aggro.Chat for such a potential project but don’t have any of the pieces in place yet. It feels like running your own instance is the Fediverse equivalent of Homeownership.

Apart from social media nonsense, I’ve been spending as much of my time as possible doing super chill things in New World. Saturday morning was a delightful time as I chilled out talking on the Fediverse while running my favorite Iron routes. I am not entirely certain why I go off on tangents but suddenly I decided to catch my Engineering up to Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing. Essentially for leveling purposes, I am opting to only use a single high-tier material at a time. Most patterns have a required item… so for example, if you are making a Starmetal sword, you MUST include Starmetal into that pattern, but the other types of materials are variable and you can even use the lowest tier available. This means since I am leveling up Engineering on Wyrdwood at the moment, I am going to use nothing but the lowest-tier leather, cloth, and metal. That also means that I still need to run those lower-tier routes that I find so relaxing.

At this point, both Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing are over 150, which means I can make high-end Orichalcum items but lack the skill to really reliably hit anything of significant item level. Engineering is rapidly catching up and one more push should take me up to 150. Logging is so tedious, but right now my jam tends to be throwing on a YouTube video and grinding away peacefully. I’m using a few specific banks as swap space for current projects, and everything else… is crammed wherever I have room. At some point, I need to set up a system as I have over on Valhalla where specific banks are for specific items. Maybe I should log in there and scribble down a list of what went where so I can copy the methodology to Themiscyra. I’ve legitimately not logged into Valhalla at all since the re-roll, nor have I really had the desire to do so.

I’ve also been out exploring a lot and with that have come some interesting drops. Firstly it appears that every single named mob still has a chance of dropping pretty much any legendary crafting item. So far I’ve gotten pieces for a bow, blunderbuss, and void gauntlet, and unfortunately none of the items that I really care about deeply. Thankfully for Sword, Greatsword, and Shield I picked up the Item Level 600 patterns from the Halloween event. One thing that I really enjoy is how noticeable it is now when you get a named item drop. They all have a bright outline on the item as shown above and have a glowing effect. Essentially when you see an item like this, they will always drop with the same stats and can in theory be farmed from that specific boss.

There are a bunch of really weird places in the world. We all know there is the giant Azoth tree in Brightwood that is guarded by the Angry Earth folks. There is a grove full of not-quite Azoth trees down in Edengrove, which are also guarded by Angry Earth. However in Mourningdale, there is this weird glowing tree that has been corrupted with a bunch of miners working around it, and I am wondering if it also used to be one of the giant Azoth trees like from Brightwood. It makes me wonder what that area of Mourningdale might have looked like before it was corrupted. Would it have also been something more akin to Edengrove?

Speaking of Edengrove, there are a few places where it is just breathtaking to view the various monuments that dot the valley. I’ve not gotten as into the lore of New World as I have other games, but my working theory is that Edengrove and more particularly the Garden of Genesis is the heart of what remains of the original civilization that claimed Aeternum it’s home. The Angry Earth is all that remains and now guards once-sacred areas against the intruders that have come to the shores over generations. New World has clear indications of areas that were settled by different civilizations, but Edengrove has always seemed like it is much older and features a glimpse at maybe what the entire island looked like once before the attempts at colonization.

I’m continuing to largely play in cycles of either going out into the world and gathering resources or sitting down and grinding through crafting levels. This seems to be a really good pattern for me, but soon now that Ace and Vern have hit level 60… it will be time to go out exploring some of the more dangerous areas. I’ve quested through most of Ebonscale Reach and am working on clearing out Edengrove… which would lead me to start on Reekwater next. The money fountain has dried up a bit, only because the quests themselves take much longer to complete and there are far fewer of them. I still have that strong desire however to make the yellow quest markers disappear from my world map.

I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What are you playing currently? Drop me a line below.

Flourishing Communites

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No Longer Mainstream

This morning I am struggling more than a bit to find a topic to write about.  I keep coming back to a conversation last night on teamspeak regarding our identification or lack thereof with the term “gamer”.  One of my friends talked about how he has slowly distanced himself from the title because it no longer really offered anything in way of meaning for him.  It no longer really clearly identified his interests.  I guess to some extent I am no longer a mainstream gamer either if you really think about it.  When there is a big show like E3 It is evident that I no longer care about the games that seem to get the most press like the Call of Duty or Battlefield franchises.  Granted there was a time where I was happy to throw money at both of these, but that time has passed.

Instead I tend to focus on the games that give me the most freedom to inhabit the worlds.  The narrative game play experience is still fun on occasion but the games I tend to play every night offer some way for me to inhabit them.  The top franchises seem to be mostly about fighting against other players, whereas I want to cooperate and collaborate with them in creating social environments.  The thing that keeps me tied to Final Fantasy XIV right now is just how vibrant and alive the community is, and how easy it has been to find the social strata I have craved.  It is something that has just been lacking from other games I have played in the last few years, and I am not really sure why exactly it is lacking.

Flourishing Communities

I wish I knew why that sense of community flourishes in some games but not others.  I think in part it is due to isolation from the more negative forces of the internet.  The games that have had some of the best environments, have also been games that I felt where under appreciated.  In Everquest II the Antonia Bayle server community is amazing, and has a thriving role-playing and community event presence.  Similarly in Lord of the Rings Online the Landroval community is equally amazing, and offers everything from casual concerts at the Prancing Pony to intricate community events.  In both cases these are games that are not pulling in the big attention and I think the end result causes a much more tight knit and insular community.  Similarly Final Fantasy XIV has been somewhat isolated from the mainstream and developed a community that flourishes around a love of the game.

So I guess my pondering is, do these communities thrive because the mainstream gamer has shunned them?  I’ve literally seen some of my more mainstream friends turn their noses up visibly when I have mentioned I was playing Everquest 2, or Lord of the Rings Online…  and I am sure the same would be the case with Final Fantasy XIV.  In the case Final Fantasy XIV there is still a lot of bad blood out there surrounding the failure that was 1.0.  In the case of the others, I think it is mostly because they were “not WoW”.  I am beginning to be of the opinion that playing a second or third tier MMO is the best experience, pending you find a server that still has a thriving and active population.  The people that have stuck around there, do so for various reasons… but it often means that the community is well established and stable… and with a little effort welcoming to new comers.

Gamer Lacks Meaning

Now to drift back to the original discussion from last night about whether or not gamer is a meaningful term.  There was a time where that term meant something, a shared experience that became immediately relatable.   Now gaming in general has become so fragmented that just because someone self identifies as a gamer, doesn’t meant at all that you have any shared experiences.  I ran into this Wednesday at the funeral with my cousins.  There were four of us nephews… of us at one time or another have self identified as gamers.  However as we started to talk about them two of them immediately started talking about their latest call of duty exploits, and another pair of us started talking role playing games.  So when the term gaming was summoned it meant two vastly different things.  I still find myself unwilling to fully abandon the title of Gamer, even though most of the images that currently evokes no longer really represent me.

Maybe I have shifted my focus in the way my friend Tam has shifted to “Game Designer”.  Maybe the fact that I am now a “Game Blogger” better denotes my interest in gaming and my point of view on it all.  Even “MMO Gamer” probably does a far better job of representing my interests than “Gamer” does.  I think some of the discussion is about whether or not labels are important at all, and I think they are mostly.  Labels, especially one ones someone self identifies with are a kind of social shorthand.  It is like a sketch of the person that they want the world to see them as, and is meaningful in trying to align interests but not much more than that.  Once you get to know someone you learn their hopes, fears and aspirations… the labels stop being meaningful at all.  Prior to that however they act as a way to grease the wheels of interaction.  The problem with this however is that gamer is coming to represent something I do not support and do not want to be part of.  I would love to think that I could reform the title and bring it back to something just, pure and true…  but I think we have long crossed the point of no return and are now seeing the last death throes of “Gamer”.

Change is Scary

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Gatekeeping a Hobby

Yesterday was one of those strange days where a lot of people were talking about the same ideas.  I was not privy to the original source that sparked the discussion, but several of my friends over twitter were talking about the definition of a “real gamer”.  It seems that someone was spouting off in their lack of knowledge that tablet and mobile gamers were in some way lesser gamers than the those on the console or PC.  This once again gets back to the definition of what exactly a gamer is.  Over on the Moderate Peril blog he questioned exactly why we need a label at all.  In other hobbies, you don’t see the attempt to exclude people the way that we do within gaming.

I am very much one of those people that wants to assemble as many awesome people from as many different points of view around me as I can.  As a result I am always open to new interpretations of what exactly gaming is.  While I am not a huge fan of mobile and tablet gaming, just because the types of games I enjoy playing do not translate well without physical controls… that doesn’t mean there are not actual gamers there as well.  If you boot up bejeweled while waiting on a bus, you are just as much of a gamer as someone who camps a rare spawn for 20 hours.  There have been times in the past that I found mobile gaming to be lacking, but at this point there are tons of really detailed games that you simply cannot get on any other platform.

After seeing Hearthstone on a tablet for example, I feel like any other platform is somehow lesser because of just how cleanly it works there.  After playing Carcassonne on my phone, it felt so natural and perfect to be playing a turn based board game that way.  The big area that I am seeing taking over the mobile markets is the various kinds of simulation games.  While it started out with things like Tiny Tower, it has involved into extremely detailed and lengthy games.  Similarly I can see a lot of role-playing games flourishing on the mobile markets.  All of these things are real games, played by real gamers.  Shouldn’t we be including everyone in our big happy family instead of trying to exclude them?

Change is Scary

The cynic in me wants to think that the exclusion comes from a form of gaming Hipsterism.  The realist in me however sees that it is pure and simple fear.  Change is a scary thing, and we get rooted in our own inertia of the way we think things ought to be.  This is the gaming equivalent of “I walked to school uphill both directions and I liked it”.  In order to stay a vibrant and interesting market it needs to adapt to trends.  While I deeply love the Fallout series for example, I don’t expect every game to be the Fallout series.  Additionally while I have certain things that I like to play, it is perfectly okay that things exist that I don’t want to play.  Guild Wars 2 has become somewhat of a whipping boy for me over the years as a way of explaining what I don’t want to play.  That said I love that it exists because it makes a large number of my friends excited and happy to be playing it.

Expecting everything to be custom tailored for you is the surest way to end up angry in the end.  It is like walking into a store and complaining that a red shirt isn’t blue enough for you.  If you don’t want to wear a red shirt, don’t buy a red shirt and then expect it to change into the color you want it to be.  If you are like me and don’t like sports games…  simply ignore the fact that the sports games exist and move on with your life.  If you want to spend your nights playing nothing but Japanese Role-Playing games then do that with your free time, but realize that there is still a lot of room for games in even that niche that you may not like.  As the video states… it is perfectly okay to not like things, but don’t be a dick about the things you don’t like.  There should always be room in our community for folks that don’t look, think, act or experience things in the same way as we do.

Harder Isn’t Better

Similar to all of the above, there was a second topic floating around that Liore specifically wrote about.  I guess the old argument had resurfaced that you aren’t a “real gamer” unless you are always playing everything on the hardest settings.  For starters I don’t even know what a “real gamer” is, because if you are playing games of any sort you are a gamer.  There is no sign that says you must be this tall to ride this ride.  Now granted it is perfectly okay for there to be skill checks in order to unlock certain things.  These give us challenge and something to push for.  That said when a person accomplishes said skill check, it does not immediately make them a better person than someone who didn’t.  I find it completely valid that some content be gated behind these skill check mechanics, but the sort of elitism and classism that surrounds them needs to die in a fire.

Similarly playing something on hard mode does not immediately make you a better person.  I personally mostly play games on medium to easy mode depending on what exactly I want from an experience.  More often than not I am playing a specific game because I want to experience the story, and while I enjoy the moment to moment game play I am not there because I want the rush of excitement from being able to twitch my controls at exactly the right moment over and over enough times to unlock a special achievement.  I just want to see the story through the point of view of the experiences of my character.  In these cases I absolutely play on easy mode, and I personally love it when a game is like Wolfenstein New Order and allows me to drop the difficulty on the fly in the middle of a game session if I encounter a roadblock.

“Twitch moments” are absolutely the number one thing that kills my gaming experience.  When I encounter a moment that is significantly harder than the rest of the game play surrounding it, that is often a roadblock that keeps me from completing the game.  In an MMO or a Role-Playing game I can wander about and level up or get significantly better gear to mitigate the difficulty.  In most single player games however I simply have to have faster reflexes.  While I realize I can train myself to have faster reflexes, years of not playing twitch games have caused me to dull significantly.  The problem is… most games are not worthy the time commitment it would take to improve.  I don’t generally find achievement getting fun, nor do I find repeating the same mission over and over until I finally grasp it.  One of two things happens, either I lower the difficulty and beat it… or I simply stop playing the game likely to never return to it.

So I ask you the question, am I no longer a gamer because I do this?  No and I feel like you would tend to agree or you wouldn’t be wasting your time reading my blog on a regular basis.  I am a gamer because I game, not because I live up to some artificial bar set by someone being elitist and exclusionary.  Gaming is about having fun, and if in the course of whatever you choose to do you are enjoying yourself… then mission accomplished.  While gaming is about the journey and not necessarily about the destination… anything that stalls you out along the path is a bad thing.  This is why I love mechanics like the Echo system in Final Fantasy XIV and the system that World of Warcraft has.  Where over a series of wipes you are slowly buffed until you can defeat the content, because it maintains bragging rights for the folks who don’t need the buff… but still allows things to be fully accessible by anyone else.  At the end of the day I am an easy mode gamer…  deal with it.

The Illusion of Choice

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Before this past week, I had not really followed the news about the Mists of Pandaria expansion apart from a mention here or there in my RSS reader.  So now that I am leaving the wow-free zone that I have created for myself, I am trying to catch up on all the tidbits of progress.  I admit, when I first got wind of the expansion I was just as bitter and cynical as the rest of the “kung-fu panda and pokemon” complainers.  I am not sure if it is the long leave, or the news I am reading itself but I am looking forward to it.

Never a Real Choice

One of the big complaints that did manage to invade upon my fortress of wow-less solitude, was the “dumbing down” of the talent trees.  When I first heard the news, like a good chunk of my friends, I was full of rage over them needlessly simplifying a process that already worked “just fine”.  I bemoaned switching to a system that gave up choice in favor of “hand holding”.  My talent trees should be tall and full of many widgets to click on, the way they always were!

I have come to the realization that despite the “illusion of choice” and multiple options, in each tree there was really only one viable path.  There are roughly 68 DeathKnights in my guild, and apart from  no more than a 5 talent difference, each us has almost the exact same blood tanking build.  For each class, and each tree, there has always been one spec agreed upon by the community to be head and shoulders above the rest.  So while it always felt like we had tons of options, in reality if we wanted to play on any serious level, we were going to go with the agreed upon path.

The thing is, this has been the case in every game I have played that has some sort of a talent system.  Rift added a bit more depth to the system, but the same winning combos were there as well.  This was so much the case that between my times playing it, they have added this nifty system that tutors you through speccing into one of these agreed upon paths.  This was a breath of fresh air, since with 9 potential talent trees to juggle per class, plotting a course became extremely arcane.

Freedom to Fail

The point of view I have eventually come around to is one that I would have argued until I was blue in the face a few years back.  In the end, all having a talent tree does is really give a player a chance to screw their character up to the point of being unplayable.  I had a friend, who shall go unnamed that decided to try and build a “Jack of all Trades” hunter in vanilla WoW.  Instead of focusing on one tree and then some secondary talents, he spread his points out evenly trying to pick up the best all all the early talents.

The end result was a character that had no glaring weaknesses, but no real bonuses either.  He could solo just fine, but when it came to running dungeons he lacked the raw damage output needed to support a team effort.  Believe it or not, I have seen many people make this mistake over the years.  The freedom of picking talents, also gives you the freedom to make characters that simply don’t work.  Ultimately the designers have intended us from the start to try and reach those top tier talents. As such when a winning hybrid spec exists it usually gets “fixed” to restore the balance.

Less is More

So in returning to what outraged myself and others, at face value the Deathknight talents are going from 41 points to only 6 points.  Initially like everyone else I thought to myself, my god they are watering these classes down.  Last night I copied my Deathknight out to pandaland and quickly found out that my assumptions were completely wrong.  In truth the new system is going to give us far more personalization while still remaining viable.

Just like with Cataclysm, when you first open an empty talent tree you are asked to choose a specialization.  Previously this just gave you whatever the signature ability was for your class.  Keeping with the Deathknight analogy, choosing Blood gave me Heart Strike, Veteran of the Third War, Blood Rites, and Vengence.  However my talents gave me all the other abilities that made tanking as blood viable, namely all those handy “oh shit” cooldowns.

What it took me a long while to understand, is that in Mists of Pandaria, when you choose a specialization you are essentially receiving with one single click that previous “optimal spec”.  Instead of getting those signature abilities from before, I receive 17 active and passive abilities that made up the golden path everyone chose.  What this really does, that has never existed to this point is set a clear baseline of abilities that one can expect every possible spec to have.  This completely takes the guess work of whether or not a player has some critical ability out of the mix.

Fluffy Goodness

Basically the talent points are now a series of decisions that occur at level 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, and 90.  Each of these decisions changes the flavor of your abilities, or adds new functionality to your class.  When I switched my Deathknight from Human to Worgen, the thing I really missed was the Every Man for Himself racial.  Previously in Wrath it was not terribly difficult to build a viable tanking spec that included the ability Lichborne.  However in Cataclysm, you had to give up some high threat talents and utility to get it.

With the MoP talents at each level you are basically making a choice and in essence sacrificing other abilities.  Most of the tiers, for the classes I have seen all are similar abilities with a similar theme.  In the case of Lichborne, I can take it as my level 30 pick, but I am giving up on having Anti-Magic Zone and the brand new Purgatory ability.  None of the choices really take away from my viability, but each shapes the flavor of my character.

So while at face value it looks like you have less freedom, in reality I personally feel like I have more than ever.  I cannot count the number of times I have respecced just to change one or two points.  That was the only real control I had, and in general I have had less than 5 points that could realistically be juggled.  This time I am getting to make 6 choices, each of which has some pretty significant ramifications.  I can be a tank with Bladestorm, or a Deathknight with AOE Deathgrip (Gorefiend’s Grasp), or Combat Rogue with Shadowstep.  I get to make these fun choices knowing that I am not trading my viability for flavor.

Ode to the Trinity

I have to say I am honestly shocked after writing this all out, that I am really looking forward to the expansion.  I made as many catty comments about it as the next person, but the more I read about the changes the more I like.  The funny thing is, I know I am contradicting things I have said I wanted in the past.  I have seen enough of the “post-trinity” games that I know that I don’t really enjoy them.  At the end of the day, I really like having clearly defined roles.

The main problem I have had with abolishing the “trinity” is that without them I feel like I have no purpose.  While this is great for soloing, grouping in games like Guild Wars 2 has been sheer and total chaos.  The classes that generally get hurt the most are the melee, and those are the only thing I have ever been interested in playing.  I cannot be happy unless I am sinking a weapon in monster flesh.  Playing a “finger wiggler” just lacks the visceral quality that I crave.

So when I would try and take on a difficult/elite/etc encounter with group members, this little scenario would play out.  I would run in and begin to attack, sword and board in hand.  Sooner or later I would pull aggro, and begin trying to back out.  Ultimately I would fail at shedding aggro and die while trying to heal myself.  The fighting to stand up would fail as well, since we are fighting a big monster and not easily killed by throwing stones at it.  At this point I rez, and try and run back into the action which may or may not be all the way across the current map.

Even in games that have blurred the lines a bit, without going into battle knowing your role it feels like every bad pvp experience I have had.  “Lets all run in and throw ourselves at the enemy, I am sure they will fall to one of our flailing bodies.”  I like knowing who is the tank, who will be providing dps, and who will save all our asses by healing us when we do something phenomenally stupid.  A well balanced party was the key to pen and paper RPGs and honestly it still makes sense for MMO grouping.

Solo Friendly

I think the nugget at the center of every “post-trinity” argument however is pretty simple.  Everyone wants to be viable in both a group and while soloing.  SWTOR tried to solve this by giving everyone companions that essentially turned you into an instant somewhat balanced group.  WoW has added in a lot more self heals, and other ways to save yourself when things are going wrong.  Ultimately, everyone wants to be able to play the way they want to play and still be viable doing so.  For me that is usually tanking, which I guess places me firmly as a pillar of the trinity. 

This post has rambled on a lot longer than I had originally intended.  I guess in hindsight I should have broken it into multiple posts, but at least in my mind all of these things are connected. I am still pretty shocked that I am looking forward to roaming around Pandaland.  What I have seen of the areas, I have enjoyed.  I will go on at length another time, as to why I feel Cataclysm failed whereas Wrath and Burning Crusade did not.  Suffice to say, I feel Pandaria will be a return to the world building experience of the first two expansions.  I am looking forward to exploring this new and beautiful world.