MMORPG Archives - Page 318 of 408 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Raid Got Good

January 28, 2015 by Belghast

Media Personality

I got into a conversation with some of my friends the other day, and during the course of it they referred to me as a “media personality”. Then to justify this they asked the guild… who agreed with them that I was most definitely one. I am not sure exactly why but this made me more frustrated than it probably should have considering that they probably did mean it as some sort of a compliment. I guess for me… when you say those words together it doesn’t exactly evoke a positive image. So many self proclaimed personalities are these vapid and self serving entities that only think of promoting whatever it is that they are doing… and ultimately makes them money. I realize self promotion is a key part of this whole process, but it is one that I have always done half heartedly. I am this guy that does a thing, and if that thing doesn’t interest you… then I don’t exactly feel compelled to try and beat down your door.

I guess the huge benefit I have is that I don’t have to make a living from what I am doing. This is and likely always will be a hobby for me. My writing and podcasting is something that I do largely for my own personal enjoyment. If I were trying to support myself and my family from what I happen to be doing, then more than likely I would feel differently. I realized long ago that there was no real way I could support myself through writing. I look to my friends that attempt to do it, and they generally are writing for multiple venues and churning out articles left and right to keep their heads above water. That is not exactly the life I would want to have for myself. This way I get to “play” at being a serious writer, without having to deal with any of the consequences. All of this said… I still do not in any fashion feel like a “media personality”.

Raid Got Good

Last night was my first raid back after Pax South, and I was to some extent dreading it a bit. Getting back into the “swing of things” has been a bit of a struggle. Since coming back I have felt generally disconnected from my game worlds, and feared my performance would be frustratingly bad. All things considered I seemed to do just fine, and once the raid started rolling I felt right at home. Apparently I need to go to Pax more often because in my absence the raid got really damned good. When I left we were struggling with Imperator Mar’gok but making some progress. That Thursday night I left, the raid downed him without me… but with some very specific circumstances that revolved around a much smaller raid size. Last night… it felt like we were old pros because through the course of the evening we one-shotted 7 of 7 bosses in Normal all before we took our first break.

After the break we started working on Hard Mode and repeated a Kargath kill before moving on and attempting Butcher. That fight had been our roadblock and in the past when we had attempted it we lacked the oomph to get over the hurdle. Last night we one shot killed him for the first time, beating the enrage in what felt like a largely repeatable fashion. One of the things I have noticed is that when our raid downs a boss, it gives us a significant confidence boost and suddenly repeat performances feel much smoother. So I feel like after clearing the Butcher hurdle we will likely be able to take down a few more heroic encounters Thursday. For a full sweep of all of the content we have downed before, we moved on to the Twin Ogrons Heroic and got them down in a single attempt as well. Like I said… clearly I need to go away more often, because when I do it seems like the raid gets phenomenally good.

Selfiegate

One of the controversies that has been brewing since they first announced the 6.1 patch, is the integration with twitter. For some reason there are many players that view this as a bad thing. I for one absolutely loved the fact that I could integrate twitter with Rift, and used it constantly. The only bad thing about that integration was the fact that it liked to tweet for you if you didn’t first turn that off. It also provided an awesome feature that allowed you to take a screenshot with the UI hidden by default. This has been something I have wanted in every game I have ever played, because when you are trying to capture the action… it just feels odd to try and fumble to flip the UI off, then take a picture… and then flip it back on before you actually die. Anything that makes doing something I am already going to do easier… is a net positive for me. At the end of the day it is an optional feature, and as such no one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to hook up your account to twitter.

This week more gasoline was added to the fire when a certain follower mission was found on the PTR. The Field Photography mission rewards the player with a S.E.L.F.I.E. Camera allowing you to take as you might expect… those ubiquitous selfie style pictures. Then a later mission called Lens Some Hands allows you to upgrade your camera, adding Instagram style filters to it. For some reason this has erupted a controversy of people up in arms that selfies are being added to the game. To which I want to add.. chill the fuck out. I personally think its a cute feature to be added, and fits with all of the other random toys we have access to that do goofy things. As a programmer, I recognize that more than likely this was some programmers pet project. We all have a stack of “wouldn’t it be cool” things that we fiddle with when we have downtime. Ultimately this one turned out to be good enough that they ended up integrating it into the game. Once again… if you don’t want to use it… then don’t. No one is forcing you to take duck face pictures of your character, but for those who do want to… let them. I feel like sometimes we lose sight of the fact that this is a supposed to be something we are doing for fun… and if taking selfies makes you happy then screw anyone who tries to harsh that happy.

Mandervilles and Midgardsormr

January 27, 2015 by Belghast

The Morning Back

This morning is my first morning back to work, and I am surprisingly cheery about it. At the very least I had a pretty easy time waking up. I’m trying to type my morning post with a very attention craving cat sitting on my arm. The cats are still not entirely used to us being back. I can tell they missed us because they are pretty much smothering us 24/7. Now I know our house sitter played with them… because we got text messages talking about how sweet and adorable they were. I guess there is no substitute for mom and dad being home. Kenzie the kitten still acts confused any time she realizes we are not in sight. Off and on during the day yesterday she would come tearing through the house meowing trying to find me… then upon doing so snuggle up tight. I guess it feels good to be needed.

Gw2 2015-01-26 16-11-37-88 I seem to have skipped the convention plague, or at least I don’t really feel much different than I normally do. The biggest thing I am experiencing is a sort of jet lag feeling. Like my brain is still on convention time and I am not quite used to being back and communicating with other human beings “normally” just yet. As such I spent most of my yesterday chilling out on the sofa, and piddling around in Guild Wars 2. Yup that is right, I downloaded it, patched it up, and spent my day mucking about in it. I enjoyed myself I guess… but I am still in the same phase I always seemed to be with that game… trying to sort out what everyone finds so damned appealing about it. I admit the video and the crowd were enough oomph to get me to give it another try.

During Pax they kept touting their community as the “friendliest” and I feel like that is a bit of a misnomer. Sure when you die people seem to rush out of the woodwork to resurrect you… but in doing so they NEVER SAY A WORD. I feel like GW2 is the friendliest… because it is also the most silent. I wandered about yesterday interacting with several other human beings and not a single one said anything to me, even when I thanked them for helping me out. So I guess they are the friendliest because no one is being an outward asshole? I still say for my money Final Fantasy XIV is a far more enjoyable community, even the gold spammers are polite. All of that said I did begrudgingly enjoy myself, so I might be poking my head in now and again and slowly working my way towards the level cap. Right now I am 53 so there is still a long ways to go until 80.

Mandervilles and Midgardsormr

Last night our normal raid night in Final Fantasy XIV but with several people out that did not quite happen. I spent most of the night hanging out in free company chat talking to various people and working my way through the latest of the Hildebrand quest lines. It was once again completely insane, but as I ran through it I noticed… this quest seemed to make call backs to every single Hildebrand quest line we had experienced to date. It was almost as though the Hildebrand storyline were a television series and the final episode reintroduces all of the themes from behind, wrapping them up in a neat bow. My working theory is that this is the last we will see of Hildebrand before the expansion. For that matter even the main story line feels like it is acting as the precursor to the upcoming expansion, easing us into the world that will be once Heavensward launches. I am absolutely fine with this notion, and eating every moment of it while it lasts.

ffxiv 2015-01-26 21-30-03-90

After a period of time we realized that we had a full group of people on teamspeak to do some of the new dungeons. As with any patch this one introduced three new dungeons, two of which are hard mode versions of existing dungeons… and the third something completely new that fits the current storyline. Since the new dungeon Keeper of the Lake will prevent moving forward in the main story, we opted to do that one. For starters… this dungeon has some of the more difficult boss encounters we have seen to date. In fact I would say this is the first dungeon that we did not really feel overpowered for. The gear that it drops is ilevel 100, but I would hazard a guess that maybe it was designed for players to mostly be in ilevel 120. We however are all in the 110 range so it was a real challenge. One of the cool asides about the dungeon were that a lot of the mobs we encountered were named after ships from the classic Shmup Einhander. A few were references to other shooters like the mobs called the “Silver Hawks”.

We had to do what we have done on so many first runnings of new dungeons… limit break our way through every encounter. The first encounter took two attempts and the final encounter took a lot of luck and two attempts to figure out what we needed to do. It is easily the most difficult of the dungeons to date. Ashgar had run Amdapor Keep Hard and said that this new series had a running theme. Relatively easy trash encounters, that were not likely to kill the party… and really difficult bosses. I honestly prefer dungeons to be this way. Hard trash makes the dungeons frustrating, but when you arrive at a boss everyone naturally focuses on the encounter at hand. Similarly to the Manderville quest line… this dungeon seems to be ramping us up for the end of the expansion, and I believe that these are the last set of dungeons we will see before the spring 2015 launch of Heavensward. I hope to be able to run the other two soon, so that I can start doing hard mode roulette once more. They were worth quite a few poetics, so it should finally be reasonable to gear up in full 120 gear.

Reaping What We Sow

January 22, 2015January 21, 2015 by Belghast

Pax Packing

Tonight is my last night at home before heading towards PAX. As such our world pretty much revolves around packing up the things that need packing and cleaning the house some more to make it nice for the house sitter. I think at this point I have everything that I am going to need to both enjoy and “work” pax. This is going to be an odd experience for me, because in theory I am the eyes and ears of MMOGames.com during the course of this trip. In addition to that I am going to try my best not to let my streak of daily postings slip either. As such I am writing this and planning on posting it in the morning… which while cheating is something I have accepted in the past. In truth most of my posts during this trip will be along these lines as I intend to write up what I saw during that day from my hotel room.

The oddest experience for me is that I am going to have some actual media appointments, as in sit on the couch and talk to devs about their games. I have a ton of questions, but at the same time I am feeling extremely self conscious. Its like I am expecting them to immediately realize that I am not really a professional writer, and get kicked off the couch or something. Sure I blog each and every day, and that has been one hell of a marathon, but for whatever reason this suddenly seems that much more real. I would love to be doing stuff like this for a living, but I learned long ago that writing simply does not pay enough to even come close to offsetting the salary of a programmer. So instead I will just pretend to be a “legitimate writer”, and simply be thankful that someone is letting me indulge that fantasy.

Buy To Play

For the several quarters it has seemed to me that Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar were like two kids sitting waiting on the bottom of a pool. Each of them trying to hold their breath as long as humanly possible before admitting defeat and swimming to the surface. Today Elder Scrolls Online swam to the surface and admitted defeat, announcing that they would be abandoning the subscription model in favor of a new “buy to play” strategy with an optional premium subscription. That said I absolutely expect Wildstar to swim to the surface themselves rather quickly confident that they won this game of chicken… but no less battered for the challenge. This was the year that the subscription model gave its last hurrah, and ultimately proved that the buying public simply was not willing to pay on a month my month basis.

I say this but it is not entirely true, given that World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Final Fantasy XIV are each doing better than they have in years. The subscription model is still very much alive and kicking, but unfortunately the folks willing to pay a monthly fee… seem to already be committed leaving only the game hoppers and nomads shifting from title to title. Awhile back I wrote an article calling Elder Scrolls Online my disappointment of the year… and in many ways it still very much is. That said I hate to see them having to shift payment models like this. I still like the idea of a subscription, but a game has to earn the right to see my monthly payment. Final Fantasy XIV does this by providing a constant stream of new content. World of Warcraft earns my dollar by simply being the first breakout hit to claim the market share and thus addict swarms of my friends who refuse to leave it. Elder Scrolls Online just lacked the glue to keep me playing, and after my initial six months worth of subscription time I let my account go dormant expecting to play again when it hit the consoles.

Reaping What We Sow

Don't like pay to win air drops, or overpriced early access schemes? We got games we deserve for not being willing to pay subscriptoins.

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) January 21, 2015

Today I made a tweet, and as luck would have it my fingers got faster than my brain… and it of course has a typo. That said I pretty much stand by the statement… once corrected for spelling of course. Game Companies are after all companies. Developers, Designers, Artists and Writers all have to get paid for their work, and at the end of the day no one can afford to work for free. Hell I couldn’t do half of the stuff I did with my blog, podcasts and the sort without a really nice paying job to back me up and fund my hobbies. At the end of the day these companies have to make money, so they can turn around and invest in those resources that support their games., and that’s not even taking into account the serious costs associated with keeping up a server farm. Sure single servers are relatively simple and cheap to operate… but when you are talking an online game you are literally talking about thousands of servers working together to maintain the structure that we demand be not only up 24/7 but also be relatively lag free.

So if we complain about blatant money grabs like the air drop scandal in H1Z1, or the constant limited edition loot box bonanzas in Star Wars the Old Republic and Rift. We have to realize that all of it is entirely our faults. The subscription model was nice and honestly and for the most part was a contract between the players and a company. We pay them to keep rolling out new content, and keep the lights on… and we would get to play their games. However at some point during the line that contract was broken, and we the players started wanting more for free. I have gotten so tired of seeing comments like “I like the game, but I will play it when it goes free to play”. If you like the game, and want to play it… you should be willing to support it. I’ve subscribed to games for months after I stopped playing them, just because I believed in the mission of the company or the game. If we don’t help the companies… they are going to keep taking progressively more desperate measures to try and stay afloat and keep making salary.

Players Are Now Investors

I will be the first to admit that steam early access or paid alpha and beta programs are frustrating riddled with problems. Ultimately I feel like that extra transparency bogs down the process and ultimately produces a confused product designed by committee. The problem is… we are quickly becoming the investors in the games we are playing. Why are we now investors you might ask yourself? Essentially the repeat failure of AAA MMOs means that a lot of the institutional funding is simply not available. Would you want to fund an MMO after the state of Rhode Island was stuck holding a multi-million dollar bill for the failure of Copernicus? Kickstarter has been an interesting catalyst for games development. It has placed a power in our hands that we have never had before… and it is not entirely a good thing. As investors… we feel entitled to have our say in the way the process works.

I honestly miss the days when I could look at the games industry like it was some magical engine of creation. When I could view it as being something that simply turned out the games I wanted to play without any real consequences attached to it. The problem is… I know the consequences in the faces of friends that have been effected by the closure of studios, and the “cutbacks” in staffing as subscriptions faltered. How do you build a family when you aren’t sure where you will be living in six months? Maybe I shouldn’t care about the human costs behind these things, but unfortunately that isn’t really a luxury I have. I write my blog and I make my quips, but at the end of the day I have nothing but the utmost respect for the folks that make the games I care about. I can be petulant just as much as the next person, but sometimes I lose sight on the truth behind it all. They make the games that we are supposed to have fun playing… and in doing so it is up to us the players to uphold our end of that bargain. I am not addressing the people that didn’t enjoy a game, because that is the way it works…. I am talking about the folks that loved a game… but were unwilling to subscribe.

Proud to be Ul’dahn

January 21, 2015 by Belghast

Progress on Imperator

This morning I am struggling in a big way at getting anything started on my blog post. As I run out of time to actually write I decided to just dig straight in. Last night was our normal raid group time, and we cleared everything up to Imperator, and took some attempts on him. I joked before the start of the raid that since I would not be there Thursday due to Pax, that they would totally defeat him while I was gone. After last night I seriously think that is probably going to happen. Essentially I feel like we have one last hurdle to get through which is the second intermission when three adds spawn. We had one really amazing attempt where no one died at all until 15% or so… when the adds spawned and we got excited and sloppy and caused a bunch of bombs to blow up. To the best of my knowledge no one died to the mark of chaos bullshittery, so all that is really left is getting through that one bit and we have a boss downed.

My general theory is that pending they have full attendance (minus me of course) that they will totally kill Imperator Mar’gok Thursday while I am driving. I would love to be able to pop in for a bit but I am not sure I will even be in my hotel room before the raid ends. We are stopping off in Austin to eat dinner with a friend of my wife. I am a mix of excited and nervous about the whole PAX thing. One of my goals today is to start on lists of things to pack so that I don’t forget anything. I ran out yesterday to Target and picked up a few supplies that I had intended to bring like Beef Jerky and Cliff Bars. Tonight will be devoted to a whirlwind round of cleaning just to make sure things are as nice as we can get for our neighbors to come down and maintain our animals.

Proud to be Ul’dahn

The other big happening yesterday is that Final Fantasy XIV was back online after an extended downtime for the 2.5 patch. My general theory was that I would get into game and get caught up on the new content that just released. However it turns out that I did not actually finish off the story content from the last patch. I guess I ended up never turning in after the big boss battle so I spent most of my time before the raid last night working through the tail end of the 2.4 patch content. The odd thing about Final Fantasy XIV is the way it makes you care about the characters you interact with, and even the characters that are largely in the background of your conflicts. There is not a single Scion that I don’t like, and while there are some that I am more fond of… like Y’shtola and the ever adorable pair of Papalymo and Yda, there is not a single one that I dislike. This is an odd thing for me considering I am only a few hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition and already dislike Vivienne.

More important than that… I like the leaders of the various city states. While my character is technically Limsa Lominsan, as that was the city state that I started my citizenship in… I draw the strongest connection to Ul’dah. Now I am going to try and tread lightly to keep from delivering any spoilers, but I am a huge fan of Nanamo ul Namo and the leader of the Immortal Flames Raubahn. I’ve long though they were interesting characters, but the tail end of the 2.4 patch content has made me proud of both in different ways. There were moments I honestly wondered if I would tear up with pride while going through the quest content. If nothing else finishing that storyline has made me proud of be an adopted Ul’dahn and proud to be an Immortal Flame. That is the magic of FFXIV, to be able to create factions that you care deeply about… without the feeling of needing to somehow be “against” another faction in the process. I wish more games could manage to do that one.

Subligars for Everyone

Another quest series I seemingly did not wrap up was the 2.4 Hildebrand quest chain. While trying to work through the first few steps of the new main story quest, I stumbled across a turn in for Hildebrand and just ran with it. I have to say this is one of the more ludicrous conclusions of a Hildebrand quest in the series. I am not really sure how much I can go into it, other than once again Godbert saves the day. I was able to snap a questionable screenshot. I will let you try and decode what is actually happening here. Once again it was humorous, and a series of extremely well staged in engine cinematics. The only thing that bums me is that more than likely I will not get a chance to play any of the additional content from the patch until after I get back from PAX. Right now it is looking like tonight will be a packing night, and then during the actual convention when I get back to my hotel room I will be furiously working on blog posts. The closer this gets, the more I realize this is going to be a working convention.

Right now the plan is that Friday I will be roaming around the booth space, trying to talk to as many people as I can. I currently have a media appointment around noonish, but other than that my day is going to be devoted to playing demos and talking to the folks behind it. Saturday there are a few panels I intend to go to, and that will be the day that Ashgar arrives. So more than likely we will hang out a bunch since we have never actually met. In between all of these happenings I am going to try and meet as many folks from the twitter/blogosphere as possible. I plan on taking lots of photos with my cell phone, and jotting down lots of notes either the old fashioned way on a notebook or with my chromebook. Battery life is a concern so probably going to use the chromebook sparingly throughout the day. I kinda wish I had the forsight to arrange a spare battery. I did pick up one of those extra cell phone power packs yesterday so I should be good from the random twitter aspect. Similarly I am sure my 3DS will survive the day because they seem to have insane battery life. Tonight I will most likely prep the post for tomorrow morning… because we plan on getting up early and getting on the road. So much to do!