MMO Archives - Page 395 of 430 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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

Crypt of Revenge

April 15, 2014 by Belghast

Cold Snap

The above photo is from this past Sunday evening, taken right before a massive line of storms blew in. During the day on Sunday it was around 80* outside and Monday morning it was 35 out. Over the night last night it dipped back down into freezing temperatures. One of the problems with living in Oklahoma is the constant and ever changing weather patterns. At this point I just wish it would realize we are in spring and not winter. When I went out to lunch yesterday… it was snowing. Not the occasional snowflake drifting down from above, but enough that I had to use my windshield wipers on a pretty high setting. It was of course melting the moment it touched anything, but it was more than enough to be annoying.

Down the road from Tulsa in Porter they are extremely concerned about this years Peach harvest. They had been talking on the news about planning on using helicopters to push warmer air down into the fields to keep the crops safe. That didn’t seem terribly cost effective but I am sure it would at the very least be interesting to watch. We actually had to turn on the heat again last night, and even this morning in my office that is normally the warmest part of the house it is really freaking chilly. Can it be spring yet please?

Crypt of Revenge

When I last stepped foot in the Crypt of Hearts I was level 26, and since then I have dinged 30 and upgraded a good chunk of my gear. Similarly the healer that was also 26 is now 31 and during the day yesterday we plotted our revenge on the dungeon. While it was enjoyable to get our asses handed to us the first time, this time around we wanted to wreck the place for taking our candy. I have to say the levels and the gear helped massively. In fact there were several moments last night where I ignored proper elder scrolls dungeon etiquette and just charged into the packs pulling everything at once. For the most part we could mitigate the combat with the fact that we had a 37 and 38 dps with us. The fights all still required us to pay attention to what was going on, and the mechanics were still very punishing, but they were not impassible.

The boss encounter above was probably the most brutal thing we had experienced to date. Even with the slightly overpowered damage it took us a few tries to get through it. Essentially the skeletal juggernaut alternated between two attacks, the first being a linear charge across the room, and the second being quite possibly the largest AOE attack I have seen to date. You have to avoid both successfully or you end up getting wrecked. The area of effect is so large that you have to be running in the right direction AND then dodge out to clear it. This means you have to save plenty of stamina in reserve to always have a dodge available. The damage you take seemed to lessen depending on how close to the edge you managed to get before the attack fired off. While punishing, it was still a really cool encounter to experience.

City of Ash

After defeating the Crypt we decided to continue our journey into the City of Ash. This dungeon represents and entirely new kind of dungeon crawl from the other ones we had experienced in Elder Scrolls Online. The back story for the dungeon is that you are trying to save a Bosmer city that is being assaulted by the forces of Mehunes Dagon. For those not familiar with the name, he was the big baddie that you were fighting during the course of Elder Scrolls VI: Oblivion. His plane of oblivion is one of fire and demons… and not surprisingly you end up fighting a lot of flame based Dremora inside the City of Ash. What makes the encounters interesting is when you reach the city and start the quest proper… you are given the choice of a healer npc or an archer npc to guide you.

We took the healer, because we assumed that any game that would offer you a healer… means you are just about to start taking massive amounts of damage. We were for the most part right as the encounters mostly pulled themselves for large chunks of the dungeon. I am not entirely certain if the mobs were actually linked, or if the healer bot was instead pulling for us. In either way the crawl through the burning “Ewok Village” was fast paced and frenetic. Bosmer architecture is really interesting, as they seem to be able to convince the trees to grow in shapes that support their city. Considering how seriously they take the Green Pact the inhabitants had to be freaking out when the first started around them.

This is probably going to go down as one of my favorite dungeons, in part because the zone looked amazing… but more importantly because there was a giant burning oblivion gate at the very end. Oblivion is probably the Elder Scrolls game that I have spent the most hours playing, and gave us the amazing Shivering Isles campaign. You could drop an oblivion gate in an otherwise boring dungeon and I would still have to go there just to defeat it. Fortunately the City of Ash is not a boring dungeon, and had some of the more interesting boss fights I had experienced to date. The games dungeons honestly just keep getting better. Each of them has a very unique feel and vastly unique mechanics. What I find amazing is how nothing really feels “recycled”. The bosses do what you would expect them to do based on how they are and what their environment is.

Arx Corinium

So during the course of the night, we had started in a skeletal crypt, moved to a burning bosmer city… and finished it in the Black Marsh. At each tier so far the different dungeon environments have been extremely varied which is a good thing. At this point in the evening I was starting to get a bit drowsy so might recount of the tales might be a bit spotty at best. The main mission here at Arx Corinium is to help a Nereid save her sisters from the Naga that control the dungeon. What this means to the players is that you are going to have to fight a ton of things at the same time. One of the more interesting things is that there are also huge Lurchers lumbering about the dungeon. These are not connected to the Naga packs and seem to be non-social. It gives them the feeling of a Big Daddy from the original Bioshock. Throughout the night we tried our best to either pull them before or after the rest of the pull. At one point one of them just wandered up from somewhere unseen, so they seem to have pretty long paths.

There are many of these “leap of faith” moments where you have to jump off cliffs and waterfalls hoping that you survive the drop. While we managed to survive each, there definitely seems to be a high chance that you might bounce enough on the rocks to kill yourself. There were fights in the dungeon that reminded me more than a little bit of Polaris from The Secret World… and not really in a good way. I am sure that over time we would be able to adapt to the encounters, but there were a few fights that we only made it through because Shiana is 38… and really good at kiting. On at least two of the encounters he was the last person standing and managed to drag us over the finish line. I felt bad for Waren and Shiana… because they were essentially just along for the ride and the repair bill. In Elder Scrolls Online you need to be within five levels of the encounters you are fighting or you no longer get loot. That said Tam and I managed to walk away with a lot of nice things and I think it was a great night overall for all of us.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #CryptofHearts #CityofAsh #ArxCorinium

Life in Castlevania

April 14, 2014 by Belghast

Keep Progress

Last night I popped into Landmark for a bit and continued work on Belgarde Keep. At this point I have burned through around 1 million stone and still have so much more to do. One of my friends chastised me for building with stone. He said that I could do this much more easily with dirt and then come back over and paint in the stone texture. For whatever reason that just feels like cheating. Right now I can carve out bits of detail as I so choose and I still have stone underneath. With dirt I feel like I would be playing a constant game of trying to keep the facade looking right. The irony of my structure is that in a game with a pretty prolific smooth tool… I go out of my way to try and keep from anything getting smoothed. I don’t like the way it mushes up the textures to be honest.

I was feeling pretty good about my progress until I saw this picture… it looks like maybe my structure is a voxel off somewhere when it comes to what is currently the upper tier. So that means I will likely have to rip it out and start over from scratch placing stuff up there. However for the time being I think I will leave it as is until I get the “oomph” to go on another massive stone farming mission. The section I am standing on in this above photo… I am thinking about removing large chunks of it and making it a low balcony. Giving it more of a ramparts feel to it. Right now I am pretty pleased with how things are going, I just need to pull myself away from Elder Scrolls Online more often to do more work on it.

Life in Castlevania

I spent most of yesterday faffing about in Rivenspire, and as was my expectation from yesterday… it is very much Castlevania. Stuff is going horribly wrong in zone, and it is mostly due to the fact that we have free roaming vampires everywhere. There are few things I like more than slaughtering malformed vampires, but apparently one of them is killing Trolls. I remember in Skyrim the first time I was attacked by an Ice Troll. It felt completely epic seeing this lumbering shape charging at me through the blowing snow. That feeling apparently never gets old because I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday avoiding finishing a quest just so I could kill loads more trolls. Fire is traditionally the weakness, and I am not sure if that is still the case… but I as a Dragon Knight I applied loads of it just in case.

Rivenspire in the way it is laid out seems to be designed to keep me moving around in circles. There are so many things I still have to do in the zone to be able to move on… and I have already dinged 30. I am afraid I will be at least 35 before I manage to gather up the presence of mind to focus on the task at hand. This game for whatever reason is almost my kryptonite. There are so many shinnies and rabbit trails that I cannot keep from following. One minute I will be on task riding towards an objective, then a dark tear will open up from the sky and dump things down onto me… then I spend the next forty minutes on a mindless rampage across the country side only to realize I am back where I started and no closer to my objective. Thing is… I might get frustrated over my constant state of distraction, but I am enjoying each and every minute of it.

Faffing About Bleakrock

In an attempt to let people catch up a bit I decided to run around on my little Bosmer Nightblade in the Ebonheart Pact. Nothing terribly exciting but I thought I would stream my adventures. I had not streamed in awhile, and I end up joined by my friend Pazz. Over the course of an hour I make my way through the Bleakrock quests. If you’ve already played through Bleakrock there is nothing terribly exciting to see here, other than me roaming around aimlessly with a big sword. I really like the Bosmer for some reason, they feel more “feral”. In a way I am purposefully rolling things that would not be seen natively in an area. I plan on making an Argonian when I roll a character in the Aldmeri Dominion. You can listen to Pazz and I rattle on for awhile, and since he apparently does not understand how to make a push to talk key you get to listen to his inane water bottle noises that sound rather “questionable”.

You Apparently Like Us?

I am absolutely floored over the support we have gotten so far on the podcast. Embedding it again because it seems like the thing to do. Honestly I expected to post the podcast and then maybe have a dozen listeners that took pity on us enough to download it. Instead I have gotten some pretty positive comments. I know that it is currently pretty low quality, but that is something we can improve on over time. I had a friend ask me what bitrate we encoded at… and I literally had no answer. I just saved it out without really paying attention what I chose. I also want to fiddle a bit with the actual recording next time around. The positive is that I do believe there will be a next time. We all had fun doing it, and even if no one else was listening I think we would still continue recording.

I had a few people offer to be guests, and another few people offer to have us on their podcasts for some cross pollination. I think for the short term we need to lock down exactly what it is that we are doing before changing the mix significantly. I think it would be fun to record a show where we completely open things up similar to my podcasts, but then again that might be a little odd fighting to stay on task with people constantly popping in and out. For the time being what we did works, so I expect to keep tweaking that a little bit to improve the quality. I’ve already worked on a new version of the intro, and hopefully by next week Rae will have our awesome Chibis finished. This is starting to feel like a “real” thing… and while that is odd, it is also pretty damned cool.

#Landmark #ElderScrollsOnline #AggroChat #RIvenspire #Bleakrock

A Wild Podcast Appears!

April 13, 2014 by Belghast

The Birth of AggroChat

This mornings blog post is going to be heavily related to what we did yesterday. Firstly… I have long thought that some of the conversations we had on the House Stalwart mumble sounded pretty damned close to many of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. While I did not think we would ever be as polished as Alternative Chat, or as awesomely thematically focused as the Battle Bards… I thought our people had something interesting to add to the mix. This is happening super fast to be honest, but that is probably a good thing. I was afraid that this would end up being yet another idea we had, that we never quite capitalized on.

We first talked about doing this on April 9th, and here it is the 13th and we have our first show up. I am sure at this point it is somewhat awkward of a recording but we will get better. Additionally at some point I will lean how the hell to use audacity and make a better sounding introduction. We have a super ghetto libsyn page up right now, and that will also be changing hopefully over the coming weeks. Rae is working on some really awesome chibi versions of the co-hosts and she would likely kill me if I posted the pencil versions before she has time to pretty them up. If you guys did not know it was Rae that drew the original Belghast chibi that adorns this blog, so the new ones are truly awesome. Since libsyn needed a 1400×1400 square image I threw together a truly obnoxious placeholder image.

A Wild Podcast Appears!

As I alluded to above… last night at 8pm EST we did our very first recording. It was a little awkward starting out, but as the night went on things felt more natural. There was a point at the end where I finally looked at the clock and noticed we had been rambling on for an hour and decided to cut things off. In truth we hang out on mumble damned near every night, so I knew that once we got over the hump of doing this “for real” things would begin to flow again. We covered a pretty wide gamut of topics from ESO Craglorn Adventure Zone, to Heroes of the Storm, to My Little Pony Card game and many many stops in-between. I will leave it up to you guys to determine if it is a worthy pursuit. I am pretty happy with the way things turned out, for it being our very first podcast… and none of us really know what the hell we are doing. Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the end result.

Right now we are very much in a “finding our format” mode. Functionally we have been keeping things really simple. We all share access to a google doc that is a running show topics of sorts. In this first episode we barely scratched the surface of all the things we ended up brainstorming. Mostly I would like to see us keep things pretty lose, but we might start doing a section for news after the what we are playing bit. While the “what everyone is playing” thing is pretty generic, it seems to work really well to break the ice and get things rolling. I’ve seen numerous podcasts and video casts do that one… so I felt not shame in blatantly stealing it.

Rivenspire is Serious Business

Yesterday morning pretty early I finished up the content in Stormhaven and moved up into the Rivenspire area. The transition between Glenumbra and Stormhaven was pretty extreme, but there seems to be an equally steep divide between Stormhaven and Rivenspire. Single pulls are pretty much a thing of the past, and it is very unlikely that I now find smaller than a three pull when I am running around. As a result of this and a result of the fact that I have a really awesome onehander right now… I am back to mostly playing as sword and shield instead of two hander. I am still really enjoying the content, and if you played through SWTOR at all… Rivenspire feels a lot like Alderaan.

You have these competing families vying for control of the land, with one of them having gone completely off the deep end. Additionally there is a very “Castlevania” feel to the zone, which tells me as I get deeper in I will like the content even more. Few things make me happier than slaying Werewolves and Vampires…. and the zone also has a pretty heavy contingent of Daedra to boot. In fact one of the public dungeons I ventured into thinking I could solo it… and ended up getting bailed out by my friend Warenwolf. It easily had to have a dozen different bosses in it including the ones associated with the quest chain. It is truly insane the amount of loot you get in a group public dungeon like that. We both had to resort to “mail banking” where we mail the items to a friend and they return it back to us later.

Tag Team Farming

While recording the podcast last night, Rae and I spend most of it faffing about in Landmark. The thing that has had me high center in my building project is a complete and total lack of stone. My structure is almost entirely made of stone and it took over 200,000 to get to the point at which it is today. Last night I went out into the desert and dug down, as underneath sand is generally a solid bed of stone as far as you can possibly dig. Before I knew it Rae had joined me and we were carving out a massive swath of stone beneath the ground. While recording we managed to harvest up over 300,000 and as a result I went back and added in floors/ceilings to my stone superstructure. This makes me happy as I was getting tired of seeing the grass growing up in the middle of my keep. From here I am not quite sure where I am going next but I have a few ideas.

If you are in game you should totally swing by Liberation/Levee and check out Rae’s adjoining claims. They are located on a hill southeast of the spire, and the low settings I have to run the game on for my laptop to not completely die… are not doing it justice. She has this really awesome garden area, and then down the hill she has a guest house. Her main house is carved out of the hillside and a subterranean area. If you are in need of a crafting hub she also has pretty much all of the machines. She has another super secret project, but I won’t be showing it since i think she is going to try and enter it in the “Landmark’s Landmarks” contest. Here is hoping she does well because it is looking really cool.