Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off the show with a discussion about the hidden episode of this season’s Game Changers over on Dropout TV. Bel regales the group with his adventures in the endgame of Destiny Rising and how it really is a better Destiny game than anything we have gotten in years. Grace instantly sells us on Star Birds just by telling us its from the folks behind Dorfromantik. More than that, it has the art style of Kurzgesagt so you adventure the galaxy with adorable birbs. There is currently an event going on in Guild Wars 2 where you can run random fractals with complete strangers, and it is delightful and stupidly rewarding. Bel talks a bit about Borderlands 4, and while it is probably the best Borderlands since the second game… it has some massive performance issues on PC. Kodra talks about the recent board game A Place for My Books, and most of the crew dives into further discussion about Silksong.
Good Morning Folks. Right now the Festival of the Four Winds is going on in Guild Wars 2, and with it comes the tradition of cashing in your troves of raw resources into loot boxes… and then being sad when you get nothing good from it. Zephyrite Supply Boxes can be purchased from several vendors on the docks of Labyrinthine Cliffs with pretty much every raw unprocessed resource in the game. Likely the most efficient option is globs of ectoplasm which net you 7 boxes each. People gamble on these because you can potentially get a super rare infusion worth around 10k gold. More than likely however you are going to get four jute scraps or something similarly useless. I cashed in pretty much everything I had, and did not walk away with anything other than stacks of festival tokens and quartz crystal. The tokens I spent on some of the homestead patterns, and the crystals I am going to keep in my inventory for daily conversions to charged crystals so that I don’t forget to do this.
Yesterday’s dailies included one of my least favorite options, which was to craft an item in the Mystic Forge. Generally speaking I do the Mystic Clover recipe, which is to combine 1 Obsidian Shard, 1 Mystic Coin, 1 Glob of Ectoplasm, and 6 Philosopher’s Stone in the mystic toilet with a roughly 33% chance of getting a clover. The cheapest option is to throw 4 random blue items into the toilet and get a random item back out with a 20% chance of upgrading its rarity. Unfortunately I noticed this long after I had already consumed all of my unidentified items and salvaged them. I could have run another event and just hit up the toilet afterwards… but I was mostly trying to knock things out so I could move on to some Path of Exile so I paid the tax for my hubris and made a clover.
Over in Path of Exile I have been leveling on my Toxic Rain character that I started last weekend. I think I have more or less gotten past the ugly duckling phase and while I am still exceptionally squishy… my damage output mostly makes up for this. I picked up a new Merc to run with it, namely the “Manyshots” variety that comes with related ice attacks to freeze things… giving me some more wiggle room while avoiding bad stuff. I have spent way the hell too much currency on this character because at this point I have probably dropped 70 Divines in total on gear. This is the problem with an alt is that you go through this phase where you have nicer gear than you should for a level and it feels bad for it to be so damned squishy as a result… when in reality you just need lots of levels before it starts to feel better. If you are curious this is where things are currently with this character.
Earlier in the league I was rotating between Primordial Blocks in my eternal search for the hideout, and Shipyard which is a nice big open layout map that happens to be attached to it. In case you do not know this… if you want to sustain maps SSF style, you set all of your favorite maps to the same map… and then exclusively run maps attached to that map in the atlas. There is a natural desire for maps when they drop, to be one of the maps attached to the map you are running. So by having a lot of favorite slots you can put your thumb on the scale and force the odds. It is not a 100% of the time thing, but it works well enough to produce a lot of the same map. When you switch the maps you are running, you flip all of your favorites to the other map you are running and essentially ping pong back between the two. I am running Shipyard at the moment because I had too many to store in my maps tab, and also they produce Blocks maps very quickly that I will run on my real character.
In other news… MyMiniFactory is running a summer sale right now and I am probably going to go shopping. I really do not love the current state of Games Workshop Dreadnoughts, so I am absolutely going to use a proxy for my budding Space Wolves army that I will be building. Namely I plan on picking up this Asgardian Dreadnought from Atlan Forge which I think will be a better stand-in for Bjorn the Felhanded than the current plastic dreadnought options. There are probably some other options that I will pick up like some of the base troops so that I can con my friend into printing some off for me to paint up as proxy Space Wolves until I figure out what recipe I am going to go with for painting that army. Once I figure out the scheme that I like I mostly want to follow that so that I have something very repeatable for doing the rest of the army. I’ve picked up some reasonable sable brushes, cheap synthetic brushes, and cheap drybrushes to get me started in this journey. In theory my painting box out in the garage might have all of my old brushes in it… but after sitting out there for thirty years they would likely need a lot of conditioning to get them functional again.
I’ve also contemplated picking up the Primal Hounds line from Greytide Studios because they seem to have a lot of really useful Space Wolf adjacent bits for modding things. At an absolute minimum I will probably pick up the base toppers, because I really dig these. All of this might actually get me to shift my opinion as to which flavor of 3D Printing I went into first… Resin seems like a massive mess but in theory I could convert my upstairs bathroom into a work room for this. It has a massive counter top that is largely being not used for anything currently. The thing that worries me though is ventilation, which in theory I could have in my wife’s office but that is going to take much longer before I could set up anything in there. In the Bathroom I at least have access to two sinks and running water and plenty of counter-space to set up a curing station. My friend has made the offer to print me stuff, but at some point that will be cumbersome for both of us.
Anyways. I think I am done writing for now. I mostly pushed myself to actually make a post today rather than waiting for tomorrow because of Blaugust and trying to get my post count up to a point where I don’t feel ashamed of it.
Good Morning folks. Yesterday was the beginning of the WvW Rush event in Guild Wars 2, but first I feel like you all need to stop an appreciate how amazing this Skeletor themed Charr is that I saw last night. I admit I was mostly not feeling like playing Guild Wars 2 yesterday, but I decided to pop in for a few minutes and see how much progress I could make in WvW after knocking out my dailies. I have been trying to farm down my dailies every single day and at least make some modicum of progress towards the weeklies so that I am not stuck doing all of them on Saturday and Sunday. Last night was a comedy of errors because I forgot to turn off my monitors upstairs before going downstairs to play from my laptop… which meant that I was playing at 1440p on a 1080p screen… so all of the text was super tiny. This also meant that when I got into World vs World I could not read a single thing that the commander was saying. Thankfully you can mostly just follow the tag and everything will be just fine.
I played for less than an hour and just happened to time it perfectly as the squad was making a push for Stonemist Castle. For anyone who does not understand how WvW works in Guild Wars 2… there are essentially 3 zones that surround a central zone called the Eternal Battleground. The three zones belong to each of the three factions and the Eternal Battleground is at least in theory this important objective that all three are fighting for. At the center of this zone is Stonemist Castle, and it is effectively the thing you capture for bragging rights and try and hold it for as long as possible. There was a 30 player queue for the Eternal Battegrounds, and I was able to knock out all of my daily quests while waiting to get in. I was not sure how the WvW Rush event worked… but when we captured Stonemist I was flooded with loot boxes and effectively had my Gift of Battle track completed two and a half times. Everything that is highlighted in my inventory came from that single capture event.
It also instantly completed the WvW Rush Champion achievement that also comes with its own reward track. Basically what I am saying is… if you need anything from World vs World, now is the time to farm it. You are going to need a Gift of Battle for every single Legendary you might want to craft, so in theory this is a good time to bank these up as they stack in your inventory. Awhile back I had purchased the starter kit for Sunrise, and pretty much only needed another Gift of Battle in order to craft it as I had a Gift of Exploration banked from the last time I did a world completion. I guess that also now means that I need to choose another character as tribute and start working on another world completion so I am ready for the next time I want to craft a legendary. This is the thing that I enjoy about Guild Wars 2 is that it gives me these broad overarching things to be working towards. So much of the endgame centers around legendary items that there is always something I can be doing to work towards my next one.
So essentially I jumped through a bunch of hoops this morning before sitting down to write this blog post. I did not have both gifts for the Gift of Fortune, but I did have one of the tokens that comes from the starter kit that allows me to choose one. So I popped open my handy GW2 Efficiency to see which one was cheaper for me to craft at that moment, and crafted a Gift of Might. This allowed me to consume the token for a Gift of Magic, but that left me short on Mystic Clovers meaning I had to use the crappy recipe to try and craft the last seven that I needed. I had already bought the weekly clovers that I could as well as the ones from the wizards vault. It cost quite the chunk of gold but I was able to complete Sunrise without much issue this morning adding sixth legendary to my armory.
Then because I had crafted Twilight already… the entire reason why I picked up the Sunrise starter kit was to be able to make Eternity. Essentially when you craft either of the great swords you get a memory that you can use in lieu of the weapon to craft Eternity, a sword that combines the visual effects of both weapons based on the day/night cycle. I could have sold the finished Eternity for roughly 3300 gold on the trading post… but alas cosmetics are the true end game and I wanted it for myself. Thankfully once you have gone this far down the rabbit hole… finishing the craft is pretty damned easy because it requires the Memory of Sunrise, Memory of Twilight, 5 piles of Crystalline Dust, and 10 Philosopher’s Stones. Now I own the fanciest of fancy greatswords… and as soon as I stop being lazy and swap all of the crap over from Twilight I will be wielding this on all of my characters that care about such things.
I am not sure how much I am going to be doing the WvW Rush event, but honestly I would like to grind my rank up as high as I can because that also seems to be greatly increased. I got eight ranks from that one Stonemist Castle capture in addition to all of the other rewards I got. At some point I would really like to make Warbringer the legendary WVW backpack but it requires Rank 350 to buy some of the components. I get that there are other options available that are probably easier… but I like the look of Warbringer.
Good Morning Folks. This weekend on the AggroChat podcast, Tam brought up a topic that sort of went in a bunch of different directions. The idea basically was a discussion around how he as a game designer, could build a communications system in an MMORPG that encouraged players to interact with each other. We know that forced voice chat does not work, and in the games that have open voice chat… the first thing I do is disable that option. We also know that pushing players of wildly different skill levels into the same content only leads to toxicity. We also know that across the board… MMORPGs are struggling. While Steam only represents a tiny slice of the FFXIV player base… it has seen a 78% drop in players since its all time peak in June of 2024. While again not representative of the totality of the player base… Steam does tend to allow for viewing trends and if it is happening there… it is usually also happening in the larger pool of stand alone client players.
I think one of the challenges of MMORPGs is that they are effectively being driven off a cliff by the most hardcore and as a result vocal player base. Here is a hard truth that we need to understand. If you use gaming forums, reddit, discord, or post about video games on social media… you are already among the most hardcore players in a given fandom. If you are regularly engaging in raid or other challenge content… you are further filtering your bias down to the needle point of the most serious of players, and they cannot survive with only your support. The challenge for developers is that as a whole, the feedback they have been getting is that the content needs to be harder in order to cater to the most dedicated players. However doing so… continues to push things out of bounds for the most casual players to a point where they feel like they can no longer justify that $15 per month in order to log in and do some busy work each day. When you lose casual players… you lose staff and money to make significant improvements to the game.
I think in part, Classic World of Warcraft has been so popular because it hearkens back to an earlier game design ethos. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are masterpieces of zone design, and in both case… the fights were not actually that challenging. You needed 20%-30% of the raid that had a clue what was going on… and the rest could more or less be populated with warm bodies that were pushing buttons, and also getting to experience content they might not be able to otherwise. I started out as one of those warm bodies, and then eventually over the course of years of raiding developed the skills necessary to lead and function at a high enough level of get recruited into more hardcore groups. The thing is though… the golden age for me were those first raids. We had fun. It was a party atmosphere with comms filled with bad jokes and even worse stories… as we all fail-boated our way through the content to eventually get shiny loot. When these games got super serious focus time… they just stopped being all that enjoyable.
If a game exists in this mode, where it is being driven by the most dedicated players… eventually it starts to shrink in size and with it comes downsizing of the studios. You can look back at all of the games that I used to play fairly seriously… and eventually dipped out of because of cost cutting and lower frequency of content. I played the heck out of Destiny 1 and 2, and got frustrated when they started vaulting content… in part because they did not have the resources to keep updating it. I played the heck out of Rift but eventually bailed because it could not consistently keep a player base interested in the game in order to do much of anything. Wildstar was amazing… but its raid content was way the hell too complicated for most players and the casual content while great… just did not have enough meat on its bones to keep people engaged. Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV were driven by decade long story arcs… and both began to flounder a bit when they lacked the story chops to keep people coming back for more.
In truth… I shifted my focus away from MMORPGs and began devoting the majority of my time to ARPGs where I could group up with friends if I wanted to… but the majority of my time was spent soloing. Other games have similarly become way more solo focused, like Elder Scrolls Online which churns through regularly story content updates… all of which can be completed in their entirety without the help of other players. We’ve lost this whole era where doing group content was a heck of a lot of fun, and I believe it is in large part because the players driving the narrative are the players craving challenge in their games. This also coincides with the birth of Streamer culture, and the focus on showing off how good you are at games in a public manner. If you are not doing something on the hardest of hardcore difficulty modes… then you are wasting your time… or at least that has become the prevailing public sentiment. However none of this takes into account the fun factor. Players who get their satisfaction by doing the sweatiest content ever… are a minority in the total player pie.
What you don’t hear publicly talked about is the number of players who bounce because they realize that none of the content is actually designed for them. The majority of folks don’t storm out the front door raging about how bad the game is. Instead they simply slip out a side door, cancel their subscription, uninstall the game… and then gravitate towards games that are giving them a better experience for their limited game time. There is a reason why Gacha games have seen this massive rise in popularity over the years, because they really hone in on the feeling of giving the players power… without actually increasing the difficulty terribly much. It is very easy to busily chase a bunch of objectives and feel like you are doing important things… regardless of whether or not the game is largely playing itself. They feel just connected enough so that you know you have friends who are also playing… but unfortunately there is no real meaningful multiplayer experiences.
I feel like for the most part Guild Wars 2 has done a pretty good job of catering content correctly, however there are still numerous cases where they drank the hardcore Kool-Aid and it shows. With the most recently expansion Janthir Wilds, they introduced a zone meta that is quite honestly… not capable of being completed without a large number of ringers in zone participating. As a result it is pretty rare that you actually find a group doing it, and succeeding at it. Similarly Dragon’s End to this day still fails more often than not. Contrast this with old classics like Tequatl, Octovine, or Chak Gerent that pretty much succeed damned near 100% of the time… and have full zones of players showing up every time they are run. The events that are being completed are just better designed, and it does not matter how much the “hardcores” turn their nose up at them… the participation proves it. People will come out of the woodwork for something that is chill, fun, and rewarding… and honestly does not ask that much of them.
Ultimately my theory is that MMORPGs have been struggling and shrinking… because they have been listening to the wrong voices. They lost sight of the inclusive content design that made their best zones great… and have leaned into chasing and ever shrinking piece of the player-base. World of Warcraft was a game changer. The number of people that I knew that had never really played another game seriously before that… was pretty freaking massive. However as the content kept getting more and more finely focused… the folks who did it for fun and did not have the time to devote to all of the prep work… quietly faded away. Essentially there are two paths to take… either you make it so that class design exists in a way that the difference between the most hardcore player and the most brain dead casual is about 10% efficiency… or you make the content designed in a way that you only need about 20% of the player base to be really paying attention to complete it. The best content tends to follow that second path. I am not saying do not put the double mythic extra plus hardcore content into your game… but make it for bragging rights only, and in no way connected to the flow of necessarily content.
Granted take everything I just said with a grain of salt. The fact that I have a gaming blog… already puts me on the narrow end of the “cares about games” spectrum. However I am very much a burnt out ex-raider who used to take this shit super seriously… until I realized that I would just be happier if I did not give a fuck about passing arbitrary skill checks in the games that I am playing. I mostly play ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch, where I only have to care about myself and my actions in order to complete them, and that reset on a regular enough basis that I can ignore a season/league if my devotion is elsewhere. That said… the whole conversation this weekend… did make me miss those glory days of raiding and a lot of the nonsense that used to happen on voice chat. To some extent I am getting some of this back with my small group shenanigans in Guild Wars 2, and I hope maybe we gather enough mass to be able to do some strikes at some point. I miss us progressing through Binding Coil in FFXIV and quite honestly… that was the last time when raiding with a large-ish group of people was super enjoyable for me. I had a blast learning the Arcadion with the release of Dawntrail, but that was pretty short lived.
Mostly I think we would be better of if games were designed to allow more casual players… to ride all the rides. I think the bar for entry for a lot of content has just gotten too high in order to keep the masses engaged anymore. That is the problem with the MMORPG design model… you need everyone bought in for them to succeed. We’ve spent the last decade filtering out who can reasonably play them… and they are going to keep shrinking unless that line of thinking changes. I say this as someone who has only one foot left in the genre… and could probably happily cancel the few subscriptions I have remaining without seriously impacting my enjoyment. If I am almost out the door… someone who is already well into the more serious end of the community… you’ve got problems.
