MMORPG Archives - Page 395 of 408 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Wrong Answer to Right Question

January 4, 2014 by Belghast

Morning Sucks

I have consumed my tasty oatmeal and my first cup of coffee for the morning, and I feel no more prepared to confront the day than when I started. For the last two days we have been setting a self imposed 7 am alarm in the hopes of trying to retrain our bodies to get up at a decent hour and hopefully go to sleep at a decent hour. While the 2-3 am slumber time has turned into a bit after midnight, getting up in the morning still seems no easier. I keep wondering if rather than Monday morning sucking… I have just allowed the last three days of vacation to suck equally. The adult inside of me realizes that this is all for the best, but the inner 13 year old wants to rage against the machine and go back to bed.

I had a pretty active day yesterday, which I assumed would make it easier to sleep. Instead it just seemed to make every inch of my body ache. We continued our junking madness this time discovering an entire downtown area filled with nothing but antique malls. That is a bit of an over exaggeration as there were a few businesses in there that were not, but basically it was three blocks of antiques. I am probably going to save the trove of pictures for tomorrow as I have an actual thing to talk about today. We did however crawl the entirety of the antiques district and found some potential options, and I got lots of random photos of interesting stuff to pad an entire themed blog post.

Disker Redux

I wanted to take a few minutes out of my planned schedule to update my readers on the whole Disker trojan issue from yesterday. Apparently it has been confirmed that the Trojan is being spread by a fake version of the curse client. How are people getting the fake version? More than likely this is yet another case of Google poisoning, with an illegitimate link getting higher ranking over the legitimate one. Basically as always if you actually know the address of the website you are trying to reach, you might want to go ahead and type the fully qualified URL in your address bar instead of relying on Google to get you there. This has happened in the past with sites like Facebook suddenly redirecting users to a completely different place or at best an article ABOUT Facebook.

When I see one of my family members using a Google search as their address bar, firstly I die a little inside, but secondly I try my best to correct the behavior. Each time you enter a phrase into Google you should take the few moments to verify that the URL it is sending you to is in fact a legitimate looking one. If you go to a site frequently… create a bookmark rather than relying on Google search as a bookmarking system for you. Criminals rely on the users laziness to carry off these nefarious schemes, and a little bit of diligence on your part goes a long ways to keeping you and your accounts safe. If a domain name doesn’t look right, don’t use it. At the very least do some research before using it.

Wrong Answer to Right Question

Now for the topic I had actually wanted to talk about this morning, and the reason why you are not getting a massive flood of junking photos. This is a bit of a spinoff topic as it started for me on the AlternativeChat blog. She herself was reporting on a Morning Topic from WoWInsider asking just how much players would be willing to pay for a boost to level 90. Surprisingly the most chosen answer is “Nothing, I wouldn’t want this option to exist.”. For the sake of transparency I myself also chose this option. In part I am not sure I want to live in a world of warcraft where nothing before level 90 actually mattered any more. Right or wrong the decision to allow boosts to 90 that can be purchased off the store is essentially telling the player base just this. Nothing that happened in the past decade actually matters.

Don’t get me wrong… I will happily accept the free level 90 that is reported to come with the expansion. As you can see from the image above I already have 6 90s, and several that are in close range of getting there as well. However if you look all the way at the bottom you see Belglaive my mage (which may or may not get re-rolled before I actually take the character seriously). The mage is pretty much the exact opposite of the type of character I like to play. I enjoy Sturdy and Melee, and the mage is neither. The only reason why I have a priest of significant level is because I accepted a scroll of resurrection and chose to boost that character to 80 in the process. Similarly the only way I am likely to get a mage to the level cap is with the free boost that comes with Warlords of Draenor.

That aside I think “boosting” is the wrong answer to the right question. The right question to ask is how can I get friends playing together faster. Blizzard seems to be choosing the option of being able to jumpstart the character to 90 so they are within 10 levels of their friends. This however is a pandora’s box of issues waiting to be opened. Firstly you are throwing a player into a character at the end of their life and expecting them to play catch up on learning the abilities. Despite the problems with pacing and out-leveling content, one of the great things Cataclysm gave us was a slow and steady introduction to the key character abilities as you leveled from 1 to 60 and beyond. By the time a character reached 60, the old world cap they had been spoon fed new abilities so that they could assimilate them at their leisure into their own hand crafted rotations.

Throwing a player at a level 90 character is essentially telling them that they should go to Noxxic or Icy-Veins and copy down the rotations that are listed there. While I greatly appreciate that each site exists, because I don’t care about the math behind my character… it does not really create fun and engaging gameplay. It seems so much more engaging and a better introducing to the game world to learn those same abilities slowly over time. Additionally I hate the idea that nothing I have done for the last 10 years of playing WoW has mattered. There are so many amazing places out in the world that this new crop of players will never likely see, and unique encounters they will never experience.

The Right Answer

By allowing for the boosting of characters to 90 you are basically robbing them of experiencing the World of Warcraft. Instead the game feels too much like an “end game is the only thing that matters” experience, which having played DAoC for years felt like a really hollow thing. I talked about my commentary being a “good natured rant” yesterday, and that really is my intent. For once I have no doubt at all that Blizzard has their heart in the right place. They asked the right question, how can we make it easier for new players to play with their friends. That is absolutely the question they should be asking, because despite the rough edges it is the community of players assembled, and more importantly the friends playing the game that make World of Warcraft worth playing.

I just think they are taking the easy way out in essence by boosting players over the leveling hump. The better choice, the choice that works well in every game I have played with the feature… is to add a rich mentoring system. This allows for mentor players to drop down to the younger players levels and experience the content the way it was meant to be experienced. There is no glory in facerolling a dungeon for a friend, just so they can get some quest completed. As a tank I have done this so many times, because I can pretty easily solo old content. During the Christmas break I took a friend into Blackrock Caverns so she could get the Christmas hat. While I was happy to do it for her, the experience was not exciting at all for either of us because I simply pulled everything as fast as I could and watched it evaporate around me.

If I could have dropped my level to hers, and gathered up a few more guild members to run that dungeon like it was meant to be run, I would have done so in a heartbeat. I love soloing old content, so I am not saying that there is anything at all wrong with that. However everyone should be able to experience the older dungeons the way we all did when we were at level. All players should be able to experience the severe trauma that comes with someone clicking too many candles in Blackfathon Deep, or trying to get the Postmaster to spawn in Strathholme. Mentoring provides two things, firstly it lets new players get in and experience some content with their friends characters. Secondly it lets the grizzled veteran experience those old glories through new eyes by seeing the content again with their friends.

There have been many times in the past that I thought they were primed to introduce a mentor system. When they made spell levels scale to the character rather than basing them on ranks… I felt this was the key step needed to catapult us towards a rich mentoring system. However for whatever reason one has not materialized and again with the talk of Warlords of Draenor I have seen no mention of this system. This is the correct way to let players experience content with their friends, without completely invalidating everything that came before level 90. I am not as opposed to having a single character boost to 90, but if this becomes a “priced to own” service that ramifications will likely be just as negative for the community as the dungeon finder has been.

Bronze Rhino

January 2, 2014 by Belghast

A Light Dusting

I have been struggling to try and get my sleep pattern under control. Last night I had all intent to go to sleep early. However when I got laid down around 10 pm I just could not keep my eyes closed. It is like the act of laying down gave me a second wind. Additionally while I didn’t have breathing difficulties sitting up, the moment I stretched out in bed my lungs started bothering me. Had I gotten up and taken a breathing treatment right then I probably would have been fine and gotten to bed at a decent hour. Instead I piddled around talking with my wife and finally coming to that same decision about midnight.

All the while we were laying in bed we kept making comments about the moon being really right. When I got up to go upstairs I noticed that the entire world was blanketed in a thin veneer of snow. I find it completely insane that our icestorm from a few weeks back could coat everything in ice, but not cover the roads… whereas this tiny snow managed to stick. I guess the temperature has been low enough to bring the radiant ground temperature down just enough. It did however serve to make the world nice and bright last night. While taking my breathing treatment I got to piddling around online… and wound up falling asleep at the keyboard. When I woke up it was 2 am and I once again troddled off to bed later than I had intended.

Bronze Rhino

Earlier in the week we had talked about going to Muskogee, but I am not sure if that will still happen with the over night snow and the obvious cold and windy climate. Tuesday we went out junking for a bit again, or more so we went to pay my wife’s car tag and happened to hit a couple of places in the same town. One of the stores we had been to before long ago when we used to go junking for fun. I didn’t remember it being the claustrophobic place that it apparently is today however. I have no clue how anyone would find anything in it. It has what appears to be booths, but each and every one is crammed with so much completely random stuff that I was afraid I would cause an avalanche.

The gem of the day however was a bin of Barbie dolls that looked like a scene from Law and Order SVU. My wife has made me promise not to post the picture of it, but all I will say is I felt bad for the Ken doll. Obviously someone was very curious about what was under Ken’s pants. The other thing I snapped was this large bronzed rhino… because seriously who doesn’t need a giant bronze rhino for their house? I am having trouble pulling together the situation that would have led someone to actually purchase this for their home. Even more so, I struggle with the logic that would have lead someone to purchase this for resale. I remember the junk store being run by a nice old woman, and this time it was by a much younger man. I am wondering if maybe the woman has passed and left him the store… and he simply no longer cares about it the way she once did.

Like I said before I had talked about going to Muskogee today. If you remember way back that is where I found all the great deals on LEGO sets, and they also have a large number of these antique malls along Highway 69. No I am not making up the name of that highway, we have to be adults here… no snickering allowed. Additionally my wife has found some good deals at the various shops in town so if we don’t go today I think at some point before next Monday we will end up going there. I find it hard to believe that my long vacation is almost over. I guess that is why I am most concerned about trying to fix my sleep patterns, because I know next Monday is going to be a massive pain.

No Love For Rogue

Yesterday I did my big years retrospective post, but another thing I would have written about had I not done that was that on New Years Eve I managed to ding 90 on my rogue. Within a few minutes of dinging I had equipped a whole slew of Timeless Isle gear. The funny thing is… each and every character I have gotten to 90 has been short a single item from completing a full set of gear. On my shaman he was missing shoulders, and on the rogue he was missing boots. However upon reaching the isle and doing the various onetime and weekly chests I quickly got a set. I am still missing a trinket, but hopefully I will get one from LFR. I managed to boost my gear score high enough to be able to do throne of thunder, so off and on throughout the day yesterday that is exactly what I did.

For some reason this game hates giving me weapons. So I managed to get four pieces of gear to drop, two of which were set pieces, and the other two were the exact same pieces as the set. So functionally all I gained was a two piece bonus. I did however manage to get enough motes on my paladin to craft one of the 463 weapons. I have bumped that up to 471 so it is at least “almost epic”. I feel bad in LFR because quite frankly until I get better weapons I will not really be of much use. Rogue is so weapon dependant, and quite honestly all of the classes I play tend to be. There is very little you can do to be of use with a complete crap weapon. I still feel this is a massive shortcoming with pandaria… it is extremely difficult to get weapons if you do not like PVP.

2013 Retrospective

January 1, 2014 by Belghast

Grand Experiment in Review

2012 was an extremely horrible year for me and at least professionally I would rank it as quite possibly the worst year I have ever had. I would put it as worse than the year I was out of work for six months after the dotcom crash. On September 11th 2012 my company suffered what they thought was a network attack, that only later the security guy pulled his head out of his ass and realized it was a regularly scheduled security scan… that he himself authorized. The results of this was a massive overreaction that caused me and my team to spend the rest of the year and a good chunk of the beginning of this year rebuilding damned near everything that touched the web. Why did we have to do this? Because they quite literally pulled the servers out of the racks and sent them to the FBI, leaving us next to nothing to work off of.

So next to that year, this year has seemed like an absolute dream. However it has been more than that for me. 2013 has been a year of personal growth and exploring new things. In April when I finally pulled my head above water after the “faux” security incident, I really wanted to make a break back into blogging. I fell off of the planet shortly after the security event and simply could not bring myself to write about anything. Coming back I devised what I called a “grand experiment”, namely to blog each and every day even if I didn’t think I had much to write about. At this point there are 237 posts categorized as “The Grand Experiment”, and without fail I have blogged every day even when it was a struggle to do so.

Has the experiment worked? Well functionally yes I have managed to blog every day, but more importantly has it provided an interesting stream of content? Quite honestly I don’t know. Most of the time I feel like I am a little kid writing to a make believe audience. When I talk to someone who mentions something I have written… I am always shocked. I feel like no one actually reads my stuff, that I am mostly just writing it for my own benefit. People seem to enjoy what I write, and I have a regular stream of readers… but I will never have the type of audience that the bigger bloggers have. I am just too rough around the edges for that sort of thing. For the most part I am happy with the results of a year of blogging and my long-term goal is to make it at least one full year of posts without pause. That of course will be up April 26th of 2014, which seems like it is far in the future right now. However I don’t see myself losing steam at any point soon.

A Healthier Me

Another big change in my life over the course of 2013 is that I am considerably lighter. In March my wife and I began to shift the way we relate to food. I say it in terms like that because really we have completely changed our relationship to food as a whole. To say we went on a diet doesn’t really encompass the level of change. Diets are about the short term, but we wanted to make permanent and long-term changes in the way we ate. Namely we focused on trying to find a new and sustainable way to live. At this point I am 70 lbs smaller and have hit a bit of a plateau over the last month. However the fact that I survived both Thanksgiving and Christmas without breaking that plateau makes me happy enough.

My wife on the other hand continues to lose at a steady pace and is now down roughly 60 lbs. At some point I need to get super serious again, as I have become lax of late. However the current weight seems to be a place I can comfortable stay without any real intervention. I have reached my goal and it is time for me in this new year to refocus myself and set a new one. I will never be a small man, I come from a long line of really big people. I am however happy enough being able to say I am a “smaller” man. The thing I was not expecting to be honest were the health benefits. As a whole I am far healthier than I was a year ago, and the primary benefit is that my Asthma that I have struggled with my entire life… and have even been hospitalized for… is really a mere nuisance these days. I can go months on a single inhailer, and that is not a thing I have ever been able to do in my life.

Professional Growth

In the last year I have grown more into the role of the manager of my group. I have learned to delegate more, which is something I have always struggled with in my life. I was good at accepting assignments, but never very good at passing them on to my troops, instead trying to take them all on myself. My team is pretty amazing and I would be lost without them. I guess in some small way I have learned to have more faith in them, and trust that they will do as much diligence with an assignment as I would have. As a result I have shifted more into the architect role for my group and part-time project manager and full-time traffic cop. Making sure all of the assignments are going to the right places and all seeing at least some progress.

We usually have 50-60 active projects for a team of three people. So it involves lots of juggling. Various forces in my company want me to move up into a permanent management position. However I simply do not want to distances myself from the “real work” enough to take them. Additionally right now I am responsible for three extremely highly functional people, and I don’t think I could cope with being put over less functional people that I would some how have to whip into shape. I am not really great with confrontations, and as a result I think I would flounder. Either that or it would be similar to me as a raid leader, and I would turn into a real asshole. For the time being I think I am happy with where I am and what I am doing.

I Wrote A Novel

One of the things I have always wanted to do in my life was to write a novel. I made several false attempts at various times over the years but never could seem to push myself to do it. This November I joined the NaNoWriMo event, and over the course of the month knocked out my first novel. I have no idea if it is actually any good, because honestly I have not even read it since finishing it up. I plan in the new year to tear it asunder as I edit it, and fix any issues. However regardless if it completely sucks, I have accomplished a goal. I managed to write a novel, and that is a thing most people can’t say about themselves. I didn’t do it to get famous, or be published, I did it mostly just to prove to myself that I could.

The weird thing about it is, November seems like a lifetime ago. The whole concept of writing 1500 words per night was just absolutely draining. My entire life revolved around that novel for those thirty days, which is honestly longer than I have stuck with anything like that in my life. More than anything I feel like it was a venue of personal growth. I did a thing I never thought I could, and I did so in a methodical way in which it felt like success was assured from the moment I started. Sure I faltered a few times along the way, and there were a few days I didn’t write a blessed thing. However I kept moving forward towards the eventual 50,000 word count goal and I achieved it. I think more than anything I am proud of this accomplishment from 2013.

A Year of Gaming

This is a gaming blog afterall, so during 2013 I played a lot of games. I played way more games than I can ever manage to remember, but I will try and run down a few of the big ones. The list of major titles is as follows.

Oddly enough I am beginning this new year not entirely differently than I began the last year. January 2013 I was still involved in the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and it was not until April that I really began to distance myself from that game entirely. World of Warcraft and I have this love/hate relationship. I get frustrated with it so much, because it seems that they always seem to take the most short sighted solutions to problems, and there are so many games that there that do various things it does…. so much better. However as a total package I feel like the game is unbeatable. It offers the most good things in one package. The realization for me however after my 2+ years of absence from being serious about the game is that it is not about the game at all. World of Warcraft is about the people playing it, and I had missed the ragtag group of people known as House Stalwart immensely.

The game I probably played the most often during the year however was Rift. I want to love rift so badly, the promise of the game is really great. The problem is it just lacks something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It is a technically superior game in every aspect, but it is like it lacks a cohesive narrative that makes me care about the world every single day. The dragons were a thing I thought I could get behind. But now that we have systematically killed each of them off, I cannot say in a single sentence what the world of Rift is. I think that might be the problem, there is no one clear narrative to the game. You cannot say “this game is” and have even half of the people agree on it. I still play it occasionally and there is still an incarnation of House Stalwart there that Psynister and Fynralyl are keeping alive. I thank them so much for being there, but I just can’t seem to care about the game right now. I am sure at some point I will again.

Final Fantasy was another major force for the year. This was a game I never intended to like because really I feel like me and Japanese RPGs had a messy divorce quite some time ago. I had a group of friends actively wanting to play it, so against my better judgment I went along for the ride. What I found however was a really well crafted narrative and dungeon experience. If I could have kept experiencing new bits of immersive content, I would have likely stuck around. However once you reached the end of the game, it was exactly that… the end. All paths lead to massive amount of grinding, and for whatever reason… while I can stomach grinding all day long in World of Warcraft… I could not stomach the particular FFXIV brand of grinding. Namely I blame this on the overall lack of meaninful drops in the game. If I have a chance of getting something cool while killing mobes, no matter how remote the chance… it feels exciting to me each time I open a loot window. There was nothing that could drop from mobs in the world that I would ever care about. Additionally gearing up to get to a point where we could raid, was just not a bridge I was willing to cross.

Games for 2014

There has been a game I have been in super secret closed door testing since February. I cannot name the game by name, but I have to say I am still extremely excited about it even after most of a year testing it. I have watched the game grow from something that felt polished to something that really is amazingly rich and polished. I don’t think I will quit WoW this time for another game, because I have set down some pretty solid roots there again. However I know I will also be playing this game, at the very least two to three nights a week. It is probably the least wow-like game I have played in a long while, and because of that I feel like there is room in my heart for both games to have a unique space.

Past that I am really not certain what 2014 will hold. I know that I am not really interested enough to purchase a PS4 or an XBox One, so I think I will be exiting the console mainstream once again. I am mostly a PC gamer to be honest, and since my gameloft has been taken over by my wife I am okay with not having access to the consoles. More than anything I am looking forward to the various stores beginning to liquidate their stocks of PS3 and XBox 360 games, so I can pick up the titles I always wanted to play but didn’t have the desire to pay for. Additionally there are still a lot of things on the DS/3DS that I want to play, and I am looking forward to picking up the newest Zelda game. I am sure there will be a number of surprises along the way, games that catch my fancy enough to deserve lots of blog posts.

I hope that 2014 will be as positive force in my life as 2013 has been. Additionally I hope each and every one of you out there can say the same. My friend @AlternativeChat has declared 2014 the “Year of Faff”, and I am down with this notion. I think we all need to learn how to faff about in the game worlds we are in, because stopping and smelling the roses is the only real way I know to break the cycle of burnout. I have tried my best to embrace this concept, and hope to continue to do so in the year to come. More than anything, I feel like I am sick of jumping games every three months, and I get the sense that the gaming world as a whole is somewhat sick of that as well. I hope we can each embrace our own faff, whatever that might mean.

Enter the Shado-pan

December 30, 2013 by Belghast

Who Needs Sleep?

It is amazing just how quickly your sleep schedule can be thrown off balance when you are on vacation. Generally speaking I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and tend to go to sleep around 11:30 to midnight at the worse. Since being on break for the last week I have managed to shift that to getting up around 10 am in the morning and having to take Nyquil to be able to have a hope of getting to sleep at 3 am. Sleep has never been something that came easy for me, and in High School I even took a series of sleep studies to try and figure out the source of my frequent bouts of insomnia. There would be days I just didn’t sleep at all, and as a result it became progressively harder to function.

The problem is because of my weight the doctor wasn’t actually looking for insomnia but instead he was dead certain he would find out that I really have sleep apnea. Clearly he didn’t listen to me at all, because I told him I simply could not sleep at times. So I got hooked up to all these machines, with electrodes super glued into my head… put in an unfamiliar room and told to sleep normally. Apparently I had to sleep six hours for the test to be valid… I don’t think I slept at all. As a result I have never attempted too investigate what is actually wrong with my brain that keeps it form shutting down at all.

I am jealous of my wife, because she can take two naps in the same day and still manage to get a full nights sleep. Me on the other hand if I doze off for 30 minutes during the day I am screwed and will not be able to get to sleep at all during the night. I have another week before I go back to work, so during this time I am going to work on trying to train my body back into a normal schedule. This morning I woke up at 9 am, so it is happening gradually. I just know 5 am next Monday morning is going to be pure hell if I don’t act now and try and do something proactive to fix this.

Enter the Shado-pan

Yesterday morning shortly after blogging I did my recent scan of the auction house and found another one of the extremely amazing Fist of Fate weapons. These things really are ideal for leveling a combat rogue or enhancement shaman, as they quite literally cannot be beat before 90. Since I had a pair of claws… I decided I had to go get my favorite claw graphic ever. During Zulgurub era the coolest you could think as a melee was the matched set of claws. One dropped from the tiger boss, and the other from the panther boss, and to my knowledge I have only known one person who actually wielded the set during the time they were viable weapons. Vexa looked amazing with both of them, and even more amazing when the weapons would proc and she would turn into this awesome were-tiger.

During Burning Crusade they introduced a set of rare vendor purchased claws that had the same graphic. So immediately after equipping the second Fist, I made the trek out to Dealer Jayden at Stormspire in Netherstorm and purchase the Nexus-Claw. In the above shot you can see me wielding the set and looking otherwise badass. Sadly the lookalikes don’t proc, especially when transmogged… but that would be a nice change for the future. If you transmog something it would be awesome if it also transmogged the proc graphics. Who doesn’t want to be a badass looking werepanther? Honestly the trinket that I am loving is the one my paladin has that turns me into a random troll tribe. I feel like I am one of the few people out there who is not sick of troll instances. I have a special love for Zul’gurub, Zul’Aman and was supremely disappointed that we never had a Frost Troll raid in Wrath of the Lich King.

Yesterday I had another one of those days where I simply did not want to leave the house (much to the chagrin of my wife who is getting more than a little bit stir-crazy). As a result I worked my way through my normal leveling path, taking off and going to Kun Lai as soon as I could, and then again transitioning to Townlong. I am currently 89 and working on the totem of rage quest series in the second Shado-pan hub. My hope is this evening to finish leveling to 90, but we may or may not have a flex raid. I have a feeling we are going out into the world today, as my wife wants to hit some stores. My hope is that Monday things will not be terribly busy as most folks will have had to go back to work today. I still have another week off, so plenty of time to faff about and finish leveling the rogue.