grouping Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Uniblade Get

June 4, 2014 by Belghast

Scrounging for Copper

The above picture pretty much accurately represents the last several times I have played Landmark. Generally speaking it is on a Tuesday evening when I realize that my claim upkeep will be running out shortly. So I log in and make a mad dash around the area surrounding my claim to scrounge up enough copper to pay the upkeep for another week. Generally speaking I only spend just enough time in game to gather the 4800 copper I believe that is required to unlock another 8 days of upkeep. It really wasn’t until last night that this process started to grate on my nerves, and I began to question what exactly I am trying to protect. In theory I could get my claim repossessed and be free of this burden… but as of yet I have not wanted to give up my “prime real estate” next to the spires.

I guess the thing is I haven’t been super into the game since the end of Alpha and the wipe that lead into Closed Beta. My previous claim I was extremely happy with, this one I am not sure quite what to do with it. It is this hulking monstrosity that I have zero desire to decorate further. I have reached a point where Landmark just isn’t that fun for me right now, or more so there just isn’t enough “game” there yet. What they have is this great rules driven building game, but after a point building stuff becomes stale. I look at all the harvest time I would have to sink in to be able to build the things that I would want to build… and I simply am unwilling to devote the time. I feel like maybe once combat goes in, that the game might be more tangible for me, that it might feel like there is a purpose to what I am doing. It was amazing just how strong of an incentive “protecting against monster attacks” was to spur on my building sprees in Minecraft. For the time being however I am seriously considering harvesting up all of the stone and other resources used on my claim and just letting it get repossessed this week. That way I could mark one game off my list until it becomes interesting again.

No More Loot Boxes

Another decision I have made is to drop my Rift patron status. I’ve subscribed to this game for pretty much all of the time it has been out on the market save for about three months. There is so much that I still like about Rift, but at the same time I just have no drive to play it. I have a ritual of logging in every Wednesday to collect the weekly patron gift, opening it… seeing if I get any cool armor and then logging right back out. Since I have geared both my Warrior and my Rogue in this fashion… and I have faltered at leveling my Cleric, I just can’t justify keeping up the patron status for a game I really have not played much at all in the last year. I have 90 days left of patron status, so I might in that time change my mind, but presently I just don’t have enough people to play the game with to make it worth my while.

One of the things that worked out differently than I had hoped with Patron status is the way that loyalty and cash shop currency accrued. That first year when I picked up a year long subscription, I had a massive amount of loyalty and a ton of cash shop currency to blow through as part of the free to play conversion. I made the mistake of assuming that the same thing would happen when I picked up this past years patron status. One of the things I expect out of a free to play “subscription” plan is a month allotment of cash shop currency. Since this isn’t a thing in Rift, I really don’t see much benefit in keeping up the Patron status. Additionally I expected another huge boost to my loyalty level from subbing for another year, and that didn’t happen either. For the time being I will simply play the game like a free to play player does until they give me reason to subscribe again.

Uniblade Get

The last several days in Wildstar have been about one thing and one thing only… trying to get to level 15 and trying to accumulate enough currency to buy a mount when I ding. As a result I have completely ignored the crafting system and sold everything I could possibly sell in an attempt to buy my precious mount. Was it worth the effort? Well the jury is still out on that one, but I do like the looks of my Uniblade. I figured this was the obvious choice for a Chua Engineer, especially since the “Hamster Ball” mount just did not feel dignified. Right now the mount feels a little lackluster since it is only a 15% boost. However it is cool that you can still sprint on a mount and that feels awesome as your engine revs up and such when you do it. The physics of the Uniblade are a little weird, and I have to say I would have honestly rather had the Exiles Grinder mount instead… but all in all I am happy. One bug I encountered is that apparently in order to buy the mount you have to have enough currency to cover the undiscounted price. This means instead of the 1 gold 15 silver price listed you actually have to have something like 1 gold 65 silver to be able to cover the full price… even though it will still only charge you the 1 gold 15 silver.

Now that I have obtained my goal, I am going to be far more interested in random grouping. I kind of wanted to meet up with people last night and group, but I was so focused on grinding out my level and trying to get as many saleable items as possible. This meant doing much lower content than I should have been doing, since it rewards less experience but I was more likely to accumulate a lot of saleable items in the process. One of the interesting things about Wildstar is that unlike World of Warcraft, you only seem to gain guild experience while grouped with other guildies. This means that in order to unlock all of the perks like the guild bank, we are going to have to group together and go do content. Now that I have level 15 I am really looking forward to trying the first dungeon… and I am imagining that it rewards a ton of guild experience. My next goal is to find a decent weapon, as I am still using some random drop green. My hope is that whatever dungeon quests exist I will maybe get a blue weapon from them. I also need to do some research into which tanking abilities I need to do a dungeon.

Wildstar Groupage

Since we are taking the night off from Elder Scrolls Online my goal tonight is to get some Wildstar grouping going. The goal is to resume the Cyrodil nights next Wednesday, and I hope to play quite a bit over the weekend as well. I still want to see so much in Elder Scrolls, but face it… this is launch week for a new game, and for the most part folks are going to be playing it. Tonight I want to focus on getting a group going with some Alliance of Awesome guildies and trying to gain lots of guild currency. Zero clue what we will actually be doing, but here is hoping we can find another world boss like we did the other night. If we have enough people it would be awesome to pop our heads into a dungeon.

#Landmark #Rift #Wildstar

Groupcraft Revisited

April 16, 2014 by Belghast

Dusting Off Skills

One of the very first features that got my blog noticed years ago was a series I called Groupcraft. In it I outlined the general theory I take when trying to make a group happen out of thin air. This was a process I had streamlined since when I first started trying to make groups happen back in Burning Crusade, and still continue to do this today. This advice predates the existence of the dungeon finder tools, and even in a world where you can push a button and get a group… I still find most of it extremely useful. Based on a discussion over on twitter yesterday, I feel like it might be time to dust off this topic and revisit it. The Elder Scrolls online has grouping tools, but once again I find that a custom built group is far more successful as the queue times seem to be pretty extreme for anyone who is not a tank or a healer.

Taking Responsibility

The very first step in the process is to take responsibility for your own happiness. You can sit around in guild chat hoping a group will happen upon you and whisk you away to a dream land of epic loot… or you can make one happen yourself. Massively Multiplayer games are the refuge of introverts, and since I believe it or not am one of them… this was a hard step for me to move past. In other games I have hung out hoping things would evolve into a group… and then wound up disappointed when I pissed my night away waiting for it to happen. In games like Everquest it was easier, simply going to a specific place in the world meant it was pretty easy for you to get into a group. However in the post wow world this is just not something that works.

Be Specific

It is simply unrealistic for you to expect that someone will form a group for you. As a result you need to be the catalyst that makes sure the groups happen, and it really isn’t as hard as you might think. Once you’ve decided you are going to step up to the plate and form a group… you need to know what you intend to do. This can be a pretty flexible mission of “run a dungeon”, but in doing so you need to know which one and what the requirements for that dungeon are. The first dungeon you are likely to run in the Daggerfall Covenant is Spindleclutch. It requires some kind of sturdy tank, some form of a healer, and then the rest of the party is pretty flexible. By healer and tank, there are many different things that can work but they need to be able to take some damage and heal some damage. Simply throwing a few points into healing staff is generally sufficient at least for the first tier of dungeons.

Surveying the Scene

Now that you know what you want to do you need to lock down some people. With the goal being Spindleclutch the sweet spot seems to be around level 14 with it technically being able to support people in the 12-18 range generally speaking. While I took this screenshot from my own guild this morning when nobody much was on, you would hopefully see some names lit up and available. What we are focusing on is the 12-17 section of the screen. For example in Stalwart we have an entire screen worth of people to choose from. If you can find at least four people on in the list then bam you likely have the makings of a group. If you can find two or more, then you can shift focus and go do a public dungeon since those tend to be design for two or more players and are loaded with all sorts of goodies similar to instanced dungeons.

Communication

This step is absolutely key to making your group work. So many people simply broadcast to guild a message similar to “anyone want to do something?”. These are NEVER successful, or moreso are only successful if the person on the other end is also trying to build a group. Saying “I need one more person for Spindleclutch” is a bit more successful, but that still requires that someone is watching guild chat and comfortable in their own abilities to speak up and sign up for your mission. What I find instead works so much better is to directly message players. So if I were to be building this hypothetical group I would start pinging folks in the sweet spot with something like this. “Hey noticed you were in the level range for Spindle Clutch, going to be pulling together a group. What roles can you fill?”.

At this point the player is going to do one of two things either say they cannot go, which is perfectly cool… or respond back with a list of roles they can provide. You are already one step closer to a group than you were a few minutes ago. I tend to just assume players want to run dungeons, and I skip the step of even asking if they want to go. It might seem presumptuous but over the years I have come to realize that most players are waiting for something interesting to happen. If you give them the opportunity, they more than likely will jump at the chance… unless they simply do not have the time to do “whatever” that night.

Lock Down the Required Roles

Now comes the trickiest part. We know that we need players between the levels of 12 to 18 with a sweet spot being around 14. We know that we need a tank of some sort and a healer of some sort. If you are yourself a tank or healer, it becomes a lot easier… as you need to only find the other half of the required roles. As a more dpsy player you need to find two people before you have a viable group. An instanced dungeon group cannot really happy before you’ve found both a tank and a healer, so those are the slots I tend to fill first. Once you have locked down both positions, you have a viable dungeon group and can fill the last slots. If you cannot find a tank or a healer remember you still have a perfectly viable public dungeon group. Public dungeons are pretty awesome, and every one I have gone too has been a loot bonanza quickly filling my inventory.

Start Up the Group

So at this point you’ve locked down the required roles, and identified a three other players who are ready to dungeon together. One of the nice things about Elder Scrolls Online is that all that really needs to happen now is for a single player to zone into the dungeon. At that point all of the other players can choose the “teleport to player” option which will pop them into the dungeon as well. Hopefully your custom group will go smoothly. However inevitably you will hit a snag, or a boss encounter you simply were not ready for. I believe in a blame free dungeon environment, where you assess what is going wrong and try and fix it however you can. Dungeons are hard, and they require complex skills. Try and be open to assistance and provide blameless advise for what might be going on in the dungeon. If you do all of these things, I think you are pretty much guaranteed an enjoyable night of dungeoning.

The fringe benefit of all of this is you begin to know more members of the guild, and what each player can bring to the table. The more you do this, the easier it becomes to pull together groups on the spur of the moment. You shift from feeling like you are forced to only solo, to being someone who has control over their own destiny. The truth of multiplayer games is that the players generally would like to group up and do big things. Not everyone has the time to do this all of the time, but folks come into this genre with at least the intent to do things larger than they can do on their own. You just have to be willing to take your fate into your own hands and start the ball rolling. Even today I get super self conscious at times when I step out into a new social environment that I did not bring with me a ton of familiar faces. But this basic framework for making groups happen has never failed me.

Better than Dungeon Tools

So I will throw out a final thought for the day before closing this up. I first outlined my process for making groups happen in an era when we did not really have the grouping tools that exist today. So this is the way you HAD to get groups, and relied heavily on social channels and guilds. Now that we have role based dungeon tools… quite simply we have gotten lazy. Building a group like this means you have to communicate with other players to make it happen. The one thing that makes “pugging” so generally terrible is that players simply do not communicate freely. How many times have you been in a pug and it is a silent train careening off the tracks? No one is talking, and no one is trying to discuss what is going wrong. The only time anything is said is when it is to curse out the tank or the healer for being “fail” at the game. By talking to the players to form the group you have already broken down that crucial barrier to success… communication.

Almost every game that has a “push a button, get a group” type tool also has other tools for you to try and build groups around. So I always try and fill my groups the “old fashioned” way, and then if we are a single person short go ahead and queue us all together for the dungeon filling that last slot. Even absolute assholes tend to behave better when they are out numbered in a guild group. I feel like the modern grouping tools are best used to augment building a group from scratch. Get as close as you possibly can to a full team, and then use the tool to fill the rest. You can always pop into a public dungeon while you wait in the queue. While I have mostly focused on Elder Scrolls Online, this general theory pretty much applies to every game I have played. The most critical step is really telling yourself that you can do this.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #GroupCraft #Dungeons

Matter of Perspective

December 8, 2013 by Belghast

Unexpected Route

Yesterday I set out with the mission of running the rest of my characters through LFR, but after some frustrations with a couple of bad tanks… I decided to retreat into the comfort of leveling. The problem is… leveling through Wrath content feels extremely slow. The way they lay quests out just is not conducive to burning through them. I began the day at 71 and after a few hours I had finally dinged 72, so I figured I would take a break and run a dungeon. Apparently somewhere along the way I had forgotten just how good Wrath era dungeon experience was. I quickly shifted from questing my way across north rend to chain running dungeons.

I am generally the most anti-pug person you could imagine, but for whatever reason as I said the other day… if I am dpsing I have the patience of a saint generally. What I found surprising however was just how painless the whole event was. We had one tank rage quit because we did not clear the optimal number of mobs, and someone aggro’d one pack too many. After calling us all noobs and leaving we got another tank within seconds and completely the dungeon without issues. We had another tank that did not know which way he was going in Gundrak and after going swimming with the angry fishes for an extended period of time several of the people afk’d out of the dungeon, and I joined them. Other than those two instances… I had 26 instances of success.

At times the group was chatty, other times they were utterly silent. In all cases however we succeeded without much effort. It feels like they have nerfed the dungeons to the point at which anyone can run them without much thought. As a rogue I pretty much spammed Fan of Knives as we pulled huge packs of mobs. I found it surprising how quickly I hit 80. Thanks to the handy dandy statistics inside of World of Warcraft I know I ran exactly 26 dungeons to get from 72 to 80, which was the better part of a day. However this is definitely the express elevator through wrath content, and I feel like I will do this with pretty much all of my alts that have yet to clear that hurdle. In fact I am considering today once I have gotten a bit of gear, to do the same with the 80-85 climb.

Matter of Perspective

Maybe my fear and loathing of pugs is unfounded? Maybe it really is a simple and efficient way to level? Maybe chain running LFR has just given me a perspective on what I should expect from others? In any case it was not nearly the traumatic experience I had expected. I figured I could stomach anything for a single group, however I found the experience rather refreshing. It may simply be that at this point everyone knows the wrath instances like the back of their hand, and can pretty much run them on autopilot. In any case I might have to revise my opinion of pick-up groups. That’s one of my good traits however is that none of my opinions are so intractable that they cannot be changed. After all I had sworn off World of Warcraft for years, and now find myself enjoying the hell out of it again. Just like everything in life, I feel that it is all a matter of perspective.

Rediscovering Dungeons

June 25, 2012 by Belghast

Here in Oklahoma it has been insanely hot and by Thursday it is supposed to be in temperatures over 107F. As a result, I have been actively trying to avoid leaving the comfort of air conditioning. This meant that this last weekend, I spent the vast majority of it logged into Argent Dawn in World of Warcraft. The game still has a pretty firm resurgent hold on me.

Am I Really Back?

Honestly at this point I am still not 100% sure if I am really back, but I have moved from seven days of free time to actually paying for the first month. I had planned on doing this anyway, just to make sure my friend got his mount, but I have to say I am already finding myself making plans for the future. Right now I have a stable of sub 85s, and I admit I am looking forward to leveling them.

I spent the largest portion of the weekend working on Exeter, my Paladin. This was actually my very first character in World of Warcraft, and I had grand ideals about playing it as a main. Due to not being able to keep up with my friends, and the failings of protection paladins early on in vanilla, this never quite panned out. But nonetheless the character has always had a special place for me.

When I last played the character over a year and a half ago, I had just started on Vashj’ir and decided to swap from Retribution as I played in Wrath, to full on protection. With some minimal ability swapping, I was able to pick up the character pretty quickly and continue on questing. I have to say the Cataclysm Tankadin is a blast to play. I have given paladins crap over the years, even on this blog, but the gameplay is extremely infectious.

Over the course of the weekend I finished Vashji’r, quested through Hyjal, mined my way across Deepholme and finally reached 85 while doing the first few quest chains of Uldum. I have no clue how many actual hours of play it took me, but with all the perks granted by a level 25 guild, it seemed like it just flew by. Instead of watching my xp bar I found myself just following along the quests, and before I knew it I had hit the cap.

While I have complained about “kill ten” quests before, I have come to realize that at the end of the day I really do prefer them. Having a traditional questing structure gives me a sense of purpose as I check things off my list. When I have played more open ended games, like Guild Wars 2, I have felt like everything I did lacked that same sense of purpose. As much as I had complained about the disconnected feeling of Cataclysm, the quest flow is pretty nice and has enough other kinds of quests to break the monotony of the kill tasks.

Grouping Should Be Fun

When I left WoW originally it changed my game play deeply. I went from being the center of each group as the main tank, to actively avoiding grouping all together. I had developed a phobia of being needed at all, since I had spent the previous seven years responsible for the happiness of so many others. I grouped when I absolutely had to, but the rest of the time I was off by myself and seemingly happy.

With the release of SWTOR, I gave grouping another try. However choosing to level as a dedicated duo, left me feeling chained to having to play whenever someone else was online. When it came time to run flashpoints, I just found them not as much fun as I remembered dungeons being. I think in part, I just didn’t like the design of the Star Wars hard modes. I don’t mind hard encounters, but I have always felt that they should be an endurance game, not twitch reflexes.

Many of the SWTOR hard mode flashpoints, just felt cheap and irrationally punishing. Colonel Daksh in Maelstrom Prison for example, goes into this phase where you have to avoid getting in line of sight of him. Essentially 2 or 3 times per fight, everyone in the group has to do an intricate dance avoiding being seen. If you are seen at all, it is essentially a one shot death. If you aren’t dpsing him fast enough, you also die from the incredibly short enrage timer. As we wiped over and over to one thing or another, the attempts just ceased to be enjoyable, and given time flashpoints were just something I completely avoided.

Remembering It Can Be

Thanks to the coaxing of my friend, coming back to WoW I have been grouping again. I eased into it by duoing some old raids, until I built back up my tanking ability to some extent. Once I got back into the swing of a heroic, including the “new to me” hour of twilight five mans, it felt like coming home. Unfortunately it seems like we can only muster full guild groups on Friday or Saturday nights. But those last few nights, have been some of the most enjoyable gameplay I have experienced in years.

Friday night we gathered up to work on various achievements, that each of us had outstanding. We knocked out a couple still remaining from the Icecrown five mans, and then moved on to the redesigned Zul’Gurub. ZG has always been one of my favorite places in Azeroth, and in vanilla I spent hour after hour there both tanking and healing it. When I heard they were removing the raid and making it a heroic, I was extremely disappointed. However, considering they went from a raid to a five man, they’ve done the zone justice. While none of the fights are exactly the same, they each feel very similar in nature and still have a very epic feeling to them.

In an hours time, we had knocked out every available Zul’Gurub achievement. While there really wasn’t much in the way of gear upgrades for anyone involved, we had a complete blast doing it. I am remembering the side of gaming I used to love so much, but the circumstance of having to be both guild and raid leader robbed me of. Running around with my friends taking down baddies, has re-awoken a piece of my inner child I thought was too jaded to ever feel this way again.

Well Rested Return

One of friends, mused that I just needed some time away from the game to get my perspective. I think that honestly might be the case. Too much frustration had built up, over too many things not directly related to gameplay. Coming back now, I have a new pair of rose colored lenses and my buffer of bullshit has been emptied out. I never thought it would be WoW I was returning to however. I really thought with my recent return to Rift, that it would be the one that held my attention. As much crap as we have all said about “pandas and pokemon”, I think the upcoming expansion will breathe some life back into the game. I just hope that my return, others will be willing to give it a fresh start as well.