MMORPG

Serial Entertainment

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Altism Required

WoWScrnShot_122614_092957 Yesterday I made  statement on twitter about how much I appreciated how good the overall pacing of Warlords of Draenor has been.  This is especially evident as I quite literally played my 7th character through the Tanaan Jungle sequence, and I am still not bored with it.  The pacing of the content has these moments where you are “called to action” and moments allowing you to chill out and faff about for awhile.  Granted the entire system is riddled with moments of faff, but I enjoyed the fact that these were built in when following the main story arc as well.  Most of my friends agreed with me, but one in particular chimed in stating that they had run out of things to do in the expansion. It seems they don’t play alts, and don’t consider playing alts to be “content”.  I can totally get where they are coming from, because if I only played a single character I would be bored as hell already.  I feel however that alting is the only way an MMO becomes playable past that originally one to three month burst.

We as a whole are content locusts.  We swoop in and gorge ourselves on the content and then get frustrated when the companies cannot churn out enough content to satiate our voracious appetites.  I’ve heard reports that the folks building SWTOR truly believed they had six months worth of content ready for the players at launch… and it took me exactly two weeks to have played through all it on my first character, and I felt like I kept a rather sedate pace.  The sad truth of MMO gaming is that no company will ever be able to churn out content fast enough for the most dedicated of players.  Guild Wars 2 has come the closest with their living story campaign, but all of that was essentially disposable content that evaporated when the next chunk went in.  I feel like Alting and ease of alting is really the only salvation for keeping players in a game for more than a few months.

Serial Entertainment

WoWScrnShot_122514_195851 I feel like the issue with MMO content is that we tend to view things in terms of an expansion rather than a constant gradual progression.  The expansion cycle for the most part needs to be abolished, and instead steal something that tell tale games does exceptionally well.  I feel like episodic gaming might hold the key to salvation for the MMO genre.  What players really want is something new and exciting to do every month, and major progression of the main story every few months.  Right now there is exactly on game giving us this, and that is Final Fantasy XIV.  More or less since launch it has released a major patch every three months and a minor patch every month.  This has not been an exact thing but it has worked out to be roughly those intervals.  Essentially there is always something major looming on the horizon for players to “please look forward to”.  Then in the meantime there are little quality of life things going on so that it feels like you are still moving forward even if you are not quite to the next major mile marker.

The thing is… even in Final Fantasy XIV Alting is a big part of the game play.  They however disguise this fact with the job system.  The problem with Alting in most games is that when you are playing your alts you have essentially been forced to abandon all progress made on your main character.  I feel like Blizzard realized this was a problem early on, and started making various things account wide like mounts and pets.  The problem is their model simply was not designed for everything to be handled at an account based level.  Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand was designed from the ground up to be a single character game.  With that one character you can learn every single job out there and every profession as well.  This gives that one character infinite replayability.  Want to be a healer… then switch to your healer job, need to tank…  switch to your tank job.

Same Problem Exists

ffxiv 2014-12-22 21-15-57-96 Where the job system breaks down however is similarly… there just is not enough quest content to go around.  You have enough quests to get one, maybe two jobs to 50 before you have exhausted all that is available to you.  They are constantly putting in new storyline for the level 50 characters to play through, but there is nothing new available for players to level new jobs with.  There are of course job related quests every 5 levels… but the time between is spent grinding in one way or another. Essentially to level jobs once you have finished with your quests you are left with either chain running dungeons, grinding fates or grinding levequests.  All of which are tolerable, but none of which are actually all that enjoyable.  So we are back to the classic MMO conundrum of needing more quest content than is available, the problem specifically being here that we need low to mid level quests.

So while I feel like treating an MMO as though it were a television show is a good idea… the problem is that you not only need to expand the top end content… you also need to keep adding stuff for players to do in the middle.  Alts are not a perfect solution, but they are the solution that seems to work for me in order to keep me engaged with a game.  Ultimately there is a point where I feel like I have leveled everything that I care to level…  but that buys me more time in the game than I would were I simply sticking to a single character.  I always have these grand sweeping ideas like that I want to level “one of everything” but I never quite make that goal.  Ultimately there are some things that I just don’t enjoy…  as evidenced by my string of casters never actually making it to the level cap.  I don’t consider alting “content” persay, but it is a patch that keeps me engaged in the world and I am willing to employ it as a way of staving off boredom.

Lodin Lives

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Tradition to Skip

As completely charming as Christmas Eve ended up being…  yesterday ended up being very strange.  Granted the entire day wasn’t that odd, given that we got up super early to drive an hour to open presents with our great niece and nephew.  When trying to determine what we would get them for Christmas, my wife and I talked about our favorite parts of Christmas morning.  In both cases we remembered being super excited about what all had been crammed into our stockings.  I remember pulling out one magical thing after another that Santa had left for me.  So instead of a big gift, we opted to make them custom stockings jammed full of little treasures.  The funny thing is that the item that seemed the biggest hit was this little wall clinger octopus that we both remembered from our childhood.  You threw it up on a slick surface and it wriggled down slowly.  My nephew spent the better part of the morning throwing it up on the sliding glass door and watching as it jiggled its way down the door.

So I have to say that part of the morning was absolutely adorable, but from there we took a detour into strange land.  We went to Christmas lunch with a branch of the family that we don’t spend a ton of time with.  In part this was a good excuse to see the brand new child of our niece, and deliver our baby gift to them.  When we first accepted the invitation we had no really planned on doing the early morning thing, so we thought it might be the only time we would see my wife’s mother.  Honestly “our” family was kooky but just fine, it was when a bunch of people that must have been neighbors showed up that things cranked up to 11 on the strangeometer.  This large bear of a woman came in and upon seeing the baby asked the following question verbatim… “you feeding that baby titty milk?”.  My wife and I turned to look at each other… surely we did not actually hear what we thought we heard, but sure enough yup that is precisely what she said.

Moments later another woman came crawling in on the floor.   At first I had zero clue why this woman was butt scooting across the floor, but a bit later we found out that she had a wheel chair, but she just didn’t like to use it.  Thankfully at this point we had eaten, and we figured it was safe to slowly make our escape.  The new additions to the group all seemed exceedingly sauced, and reeked of booze.  I still don’t have a firm understanding in my head of who exactly they were, but in any case they made our normally insane family look normal for a moment or two.  So while this year has been a year of creating new traditions… I am not sure if that is one we will keep.  I really enjoyed the early morning with the kids, because Christmas needs kids to rekindle the magic each year, but I think we will skip the lunch.

Rejiggered Gladiator

WoWScrnShot_122614_093152 Overall I have been pretty disappointed with my raid performance as a Gladiator, so over the last few days I have set about to tweak some things.  The largest change is that I am giving up on the Heavy Repercussions talent.  In order to make that talent work, you absolutely have to get 2 Shield Slams in during a Shield Charge buff.  I found it frustrating to try and cram them in, and often times fate conspired against me to only actually get one in.  In many ways it reminded me of just how unforgiving the Unholy Deathknight rotation was back during the Icecrown days, and if you missed the timing your dps went to shit.  Now I am moving to what seems to be the more reliable and more common Unyielding Strikes talent, and as such I have to rejigger my priorities a bit.  Additionally I fiddled with my glyphs and talents a bit after looking at some warriors that were parsing well in Highmaul.

Noxxic has been a bit wonky in the past with some of their guides, but based on the high parses I have seen they seem to match up pretty closely.  I seemed to be taking a lot of the “wrong” talents, the biggest of which was I was previously taking Bladestorm which seems to have limited use in raiding, but instead should have been taking Bloodbath which is a 1 minute cooldown damage cooldown, something that protection is sorely missing.  Even though I have already run LFR, I am more than likely going to run the first part today so I can see what my damage looks like against The Butcher fight.  My hope is that all of the tweaks I made will give me a more stable damage curve, and keep me from lagging behind the way I have been in overall raid damage.

Lodin Lives

WoWScrnShot_122614_095054 Those who have been reading my blog awhile will know the tale of Lodin the Hunter, the character that I never actually intended to be my raiding main back in Vanilla.  Well with the recent round of hunter changes I have once again become interested in playing him, and quite honestly have been really enjoying it.  Last night I entered Draenor on Lodin and for the first time since Burning Crusade he is actually caught up and doing relevant content.  I never actually managed to level him to 70 back then, and during Pandaria managed to catch him up from 68 to 85, then finally with the launch of Draenor pushed him up to 90.  I used my spare engineering bits to knock him out a pretty sweet epic rifle that I am looking forward to him being able to use when he dings 91.  I’ve been spending quite a bit of time over this break hanging out on my laptop, and the hunter play style fits that perfectly.

Last night before the melatonin finally kicked in I managed to make it roughly halfway through the introduction sequence in Tanaan Jungle, and as soon as I finish writing this blog post and do my “Wizard Chores” as my guildies call the Garrison dailies… I am going to start working on him again.  I seriously would not mind him being my 3rd 100 of the expansion.  It feels fitting considering I am back playing Belghast, that I also dust off Lodin.  Since this is by nature a nostalgia ridden expansion, it only seems right to wallow in said nostalgia with some of my oldest characters.  I look forward to LFR with the Lone Wolf talent, but in the mean time I want to catch more awesome pets because lord knows Draenor has some awesome looking ones.  I am shocked an amazed that I am still having as much fun playing Warlords as I am, so hopefully it continues to last.

Highmaul Attempts

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Brilliant Ideas

Last night my wife and I thought we had a great idea.  I was in Highmaul raiding until 10pm my time, and we thought after that we would pop out to Wal-mart to pick up the ingredients for all of the recipes we were going to fix today.  Normally speaking we avoid Wal-mart like the plague, but there were a few things we needed in addition to the normal grocery store fare.  Any store at this time of the year is sheer madness, but we thought surely by 10 pm the crowds would have lessened.  It seems like everyone had this same idea because Wal-mart was completely insane.  The entire time in the store there was this persistent “crowd” noise of hundreds of people chattering.  This was only perforated to the sounds of a wailing child… that went on for a good five minutes without stop.

The biggest frustration was the general state of disrepair the store was in.  We attempted to gather up the ingredients we needed but kept running into obstacles.  When I went to get crushed pineapple for example there were two women there fighting over the last few cans.  After listening to one of the workers it sounded like they were stocking the shelves and stuff was flying off before they could finish stocking.  The biggest problem was that nothing really made any sense as to where it would be located.  The two women fighting over the crushed pineapple… apparently missed the warzone that was the palette of various fruit fillings out in the main isle.  I had scrounged up four small cans hoping it would be enough…  when I stared down and saw an entire case of the big cans just sitting there out in the main isle.

Peaceful Oasis

Normally speaking the checkouts are the worst part of a trip to Wal-mart, but after having to navigate that obstacle course that was the store…  this time the check out line actually seemed rather peaceful.  We had quite literally just made a break for it, only having gathered up about half of the things on our shopping list.  The strangest thing about last night was the fact that so many people seemed to just be wandering around aimlessly in the store, without a basket or a purpose.  There was this pack of one adult and four teenage boys that didn’t seem to have any real mission other than always moving slowly in whatever isle we needed to go down.  My wife had to stifle several curses, so it was most definitely time to exit the building regardless of the results.  Reasors our local grocery store chain was also open 24/7 so we figured whatever we were missing we could hopefully get there.

Whereas Wal-mart looked like a chaotic post apocalyptic wasteland..  Reasors was a pinnacle of calm and order.  Every shelf was well stocked, there were no random cases of food blocking the isles, and the workers all seemed to have the grace of angels.  We should have come here first and completely ignored Wal-mart because they had quite literally everything we needed in large supply and with no land grabs in the canned fruit isle.  I have a feeling that as we go through the day today, we will need to make a trip out to get this or that thing we forgot… and in that case I am most definitely going to Reasors.  The biggest frustration last night seemed to be the death of common courtesy.  In Wal-mart there were a number of times where we would wait on someone to pass, or let them turn out of an isle into the main lanes.  Never once did anyone even acknowledge the fact that we existed…  let alone say “thank you”.  Sure we were just as stressed as anyone there, but we took the time to thank the people who showed us where something was or let us pass with our carts.

Highmaul Attempts

Wow-64 2014-12-23 20-32-06-92 Last night was the only raid night we will have this week, with the holiday and such.  With that in mind we were hoping to at the very least clear all of the content we have been able to kill so far, and we managed to accomplish that.  In a single night we did Heroic Kargath, and then started in on Normal moe clearing Kargath, Butcher, Brackenspore, Tectus, and Twin Ogron.  We managed to clear all of this with plenty of time to put in a half dozen or so attempts on Ko’ragh.  The only fight we failed to oneshot was Tectus which still seems like a completely chaotic mess.  We are trying really hard to organize said chaos, but it feels like there is something we are either missing or that has not quite clicked yet on how best to move the melee group and the ranged group.  There were still several points where the melee could not engage the bosses because there was too much death swirling around on the ground.  We however pushed through and had a really good attempt allowing us to move on.

Ko’ragh on the other hand still feels confusing as hell.  We are starting to grasp the concepts, but have yet to quite figure out the best way to deal with the adds.  Last night we tried leaving the melee on the boss until the adds were gathered up on the tanks, but this seemed to be too much incoming damage for a single tank to manage.  I have a feeling that next week we will return to the melee wrecking the adds one by one as they come in.  In any case we keep getting further each time we work on it, so I have a feeling given a normal two night raid cycle we would have likely beaten him.  My biggest concern is that I feel like Gladiator dps is lagging behind what it should be.  The problem is I really don’t like the feel of fury this expansion, and I have a feeling that Arms is just as untenable as Gladiator seems to be.  Thankfully I have been leveling and gearing my Deathknight so if I have to switch characters to be viable for raiding… that is option as I am enjoying frost dps still.  Gladiator adds a lot of functionality that is nice to have, just fearing that there will be a point where it simply is not enough to make up for the lower dps.1

Ranged State of Mind

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Schedule Conflicts

The strangest thing about being on a lengthy break is just how contorted your schedule ends up getting.  In part I guess I need the normal weekly rhythm to make me feel like the world is right.  Last night for example we had a raid in Final Fantasy XIV, but since I did not go to work that day I almost completely forgot that it was a thing.  Similarly I am going to struggle to remember that I have a raid tonight in World of Warcraft because of the same exact problem.  There is a primus song that gives us the wisdom “Weekends don’t mean quite so much when you’re unemployed, cept for the fact you get to hang out with your workin friends”.  The same can essentially be said for week days too when you are on vacation, as everything feels like some extremely extended weekend.

This morning for example we almost completely forgot about setting the trash out to the curb.  In fact were it not for my wife reminding me we probably would have been screwed.  For some reason I ended up sleeping in until almost 9:30 this morning, which is why this post is getting out the door so late.  I feel there needs to be a term for this, since we have “Jet Lag” for when you cross multiple time zones…  we need “Holiday Lag” or something similar for when your days no longer have the same meaning that they used to.  I am not really complaining mind you, since I am not at work and getting to lounge comfortably in my fuzzy pants at 11 am.  Things could be considerably worse, but man it is strange to get used to.

One More Bard

ffxiv 2014-12-22 21-16-02-55 I had to share this photo today.  Once again it is me and the amazing Ayla and Joren Noye, dancing around in our holiday best.  I have actually glamoured my bard gear to look like last years holiday set since it kinda reminds me of Link from the original Legend of Zelda when you have the red armor right before you take on death mountain.  I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel that goofy things like this happen in our housing neighborhood.  What is even more awesome is that Ayla and Joren are going to go through the new Eternal Bonding ceremony on New Years day, and I was invited…  as well as anyone from the free company.  It should be awesome to see and I think we get a pet for participating.  At some point I need to make my way into game and work out what I am going to wear for an outfit.  I do have the tuxedo somewhere, but I kinda want to create my own custom spin on it.  Wondering what the Tuxedo jacket looks like with the Soldiery Kilt.

We lacked the numbers last night to do anything of major significance… so instead we decided to run a Syrcus Tower as a FC.  I wanted to run as my bard since that is the character that needs gear… and since there are always more bards in a full party I wanted to be able to roll need.  This however gave us the three bards in our party once we randomed in a couple of players.  We kinda wrecked the damage on everything, and our group was always the first to finish whatever adds we had spawned on us.  This was true even on Zande when the non-FC bard managed to get locked out of the final fight.  Our comets were still the first to go down in every round, and we ended up helping the others dps theirs down as well.  Sadly no bard gear dropped, but it was a fun and fast run without any of the normal bullshit that happens in Syrcus.

Ranged State of Mind

Wow-64 2014-12-23 11-07-14-87 In truth I have been playing my Bard quite a bit, and the nostalgia of Warlords of Draenor has even lead me to break back out Lodin my Hunter in World of Warcraft.  There is a strange sense of nostalgia playing him, because in truth I have not taken playing him seriously since vanilla.  I’ve talked about it before but Lodin was the raid main I never intended to play, and as such as soon as I got to Burning Crusade he was quickly abandoned.  Since I have brought back Belghast my Warrior out of retirement… it feels like it is also fitting to dust off Lodin.  Right now he is 89 and sitting in Townlong Steppes, so my hope is to finish leveling him to 90… equip the set of Timeless Isle gear I have waiting on him to make the first little bit of Draenor easier… and then work on leveling him to 100 next.  My enjoyment of him as a whole improved exponentially when I got Arcturis the spirit beast bear my last time playing him.  I’ve always liked running around with a dwarf and a bear… and Arcturis is really an amazing creature.

I think part of what excites me about playing a Hunter again is the introduction of the Lone Wolf talent.  I have always hated having a pet while dungeoning or raiding.  They always seem to do exactly the thing I don’t want them to do at the moment.  As such I’ve always personally found that raiding with something that you don’t have direct control over a liability.  That said I love having a tanky pet while leveling and farming, because at that point it is like having a two player party…  just one that you are controlling both halves of.  The Lone Wolf talent seems to be the best of both worlds… it lets me dungeon and raid as a pure marksman without the need to fiddle with pet mechanics, but also wander around the world as an amazingly efficient team.  Much the same was as Gladiator made me way more interested in Warriors…  Lone Wolf does the same for me and hunters.  Now I just want to get leveled up so I can see if it is as enjoyable as I think it will be.