Raiding Drama

Eleven Sads out of Ten

Ori 2015-03-12 11-52-32-79 Yesterday I ended up running home over lunch to fiddle with a server here at the house that was no longer responding.  While here I decided to boot up Ori and the Blind Forest and play for a bit while I scarfed down my lunch.  I had been prepared slightly for this intro by my friends and by watching the video from e3.  In truth I still was not quite prepared.  If you do not cry through this intro, or at least get really damned close to crying…  you likely have no soul.  We have joked a bit on the podcast that the video game industry seems to only really know how to do rage fueled revenge and soul crushing depressing sad as far as an available emotional range.  This game is most definitely in the crushing sads territory, and I would give it eleven sads out of ten as the title goes.  Quite honestly the best comparison I have is the introduction to the Disney film Up.  It manages to be so touching and adorable… and at the same time so unfortunately depressing.

The positive is however that once the game proper starts and you manage to get through the introduction… the tone does get quite a bit more hopeful.  The game itself is this wonderfully animation quality experience.  At its core the game is very much a metroidvania, and it is quite clear early on which obstacles you can pass and which you cannot.  Additionally the game has some interesting combat in that you have a light spark that follows you around and ends up flinging fireball like things that lock onto your target.  So this is vastly different from the traditional mechanism of slashing things with a weapon or firing directly at your enemies.  The game right now is $20 on steam, and as little as I have played of it… I am already hooked.  If you like beautiful games with excellent narration… of the metroidvania genre…  I highly suggest you check it out.  I will more than likely be streaming some of this over the weekend and playing a good deal more of it.

Raiding Drama

Wow-64 2015-03-05 21-06-19-69 We had a bit of an incident happen last night, and I have to say it was primly surreal to experience it.  Over the years I have been the guild leader of most of the guilds I have been part of, and even when I was not… I still was treated as such by most of the membership.  However for the past year in both World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV..  I am not leading anything.  I have taken up the role of cruise director and recruitment…  but have not been doing any of the heavy lifting that comes with the crown.  Apparently over the last several months I have finally gotten used to that role.  One of our problems over the course of this expansion has been a lack of critical lack of available healers.  For the most part we have struggled through, but are starting to get to content where we need the intended balance of dps, tanks and healing.  As such our raid leader opted to bench a few people of our dps to try and get our ratios more in line with what they should be.  Unfortunately it seems that at least one of our players took offense to this.

During the middle of the raid one of the players chain logged in all of his characters and de-guilded them one after another.  I have to give him credit for saying a rather nice farewell message when he got to the last one…  but all of this felt a bit over dramatic.  Normally I would have been tracking that player down, and trying to talk them off the ledge.  Last night however… I was content to watch the events play out in front of me, as I realized…  this was no longer my problem.  World of Warcraft is a game that comes with more than its fair share of drama, especially when it comes to raiding.  However I am not the guild leader any longer, nor am I responsible for raid leading at all… and I can simply sit back and watch the events unfold in front of me without feeling any guilt in the situation.  I have to say that was a pretty awesome feeling when I finally realized that I was fine with someone else dealing with things.  It sucks when anyone leave the guild, but I have to accept  that people are going to ultimately do whatever the hell they want to do.  I have a feeling the person in question will cool off and come back, but if he doesn’t it is not really that big of a deal anyways.

Thogar Down

Wow-64 2015-03-12 20-26-53-85 On the positive side of things, pairing the raid down to a more reasonable ratio of healers to dps…  did manage to improve our performance.  Before last night we had really only spent a single night of attempts on Operator Thogar in Blackrock Foundry.  For those unfamiliar this is the “train” fight and it takes place on a series of four tracks.  During the fight a dance happens of moving back and forth between the different lanes to avoid the oncoming trains that buzz through.  If the player is hit by a train it seems to reduce their health by a specific percentage, leaving the player on the edge of death…  but not quite oneshotting them.  Previously our big issue was that in two places during the fight… the entire raid needs to split into two groups.  The problem here is there is a fairly hefty tank swap mechanic so that the tanks need to time this swap in such a way so that the fresh tank is taunting Thogar as they are moving to the new position.  The margin here is super slim, and both sides have to burn through their adds extremely quickly so that we can join back up and let the then free second tank taunt back the boss before the damage gets to great.

Last night we managed to do all these things right, and very quickly got to the second one of these swaps.  Within another try or so we managed to push through the fight and down Thogar.  One of the things that made last night extremely difficult was the fact that we essentially had no battle rez.  Our druid healer was out for the night, as was our Deathknight DPS… meaning our only option was to have the bear tank stance dance and someone get a rez off before dying to the boss.  Needless to say we largely did this without a rez, and I have to say I am pretty damned proud of how fast the progress happened.  We spent the rest of the night working on the Heart of the Mountain event, and I feel like we need to sift through the logs and see exactly what was going wrong there.  It is one of those events where there are dozens of mechanics happening at the same time… and while we could consistently push into phase two without issue… we struggled to get elementalists down.  I have a feeling that we are going to have to split into teams and each focus on a finite number of mechanics.  Drama aside it felt like a really good night of raiding.

Wildstar Attunements

Bon Voyage

Finally home and sitting on the sofa and starting to tackle the blog post of the day.  I ended up taking the day off from work to make sure I was able to do whatever my wife needed me to do this morning.  She however has been successfully ferried to the airport, and while I got turned around leaving the airport I got to flex my knowledge of the backroads of North Tulsa to get back home.  I am going to have to master highway 11 this summer during the Twitter Math Camp, where I am serving as a shuttle driver.  However for the time being I am nice and safe and home.

When I got here it was really nice out, so I opted to go for a little walk rather than having to do all of it this evening.  The thing this highlighted however is that I apparently need to try and find some earbuds with a longer cord.  If I moved my head too quickly they ripped out of my ears and went flailing to the ground.  If I am going to make it through the nightly ritual of walking I am going to have to do it to music.  So after while I guess I will make a trip out to target or best buy and see what I can find.  Once upon a time I had a set of head phones that had little behind the ear clips, so I am thinking I need to find a pair of those.

Wildstar Attunements

For some time now an infographic has been circulating around the internet outlining the “12 step process” for raid attunement in Wildstar.  I admit when I first saw it, I was extremely hesitant because it is quite the ordeal… however the longer I have “lived with it” the more I think it might be just want the doctor ordered.  I talked about my feeling regarding attunements and skill checks this weekend on the AggroChat podcast, but this mornings post is completely devoted to two excellent posts I read yesterday from Liore and Syl about the subject.  I am not going to preface or summarize the posts, because you really need to just read their own words on the subject.  Instead I am going to go off in my own rambly direction to talk about skill gates and attunements in general.  If you are curious about the 12 step image… it is spanning the right side of the page… for dramatic effect.

Evil Attunements

Once upon a time in another life I was a somewhat successful raid leader in World of Warcraft.  I lead a few raids during the 40 man era, but got really serious about doing it during the Burning Crusade 25 man era with the non-guild based raid groups of NSR and Duranub Raiding Company.  I know the pain that attunements can be all too tragically as a raid leader.  In order to get fresh blood into your raid, it meant either you spent time running old content and gearing those players up… or you resorted to stealing members away from fledgling raids that were maybe not as highly progressed as your own.

The problem with the World of Warcraft attunement system, was that it required an entire raid to complete.  This was a constant drag on the raid system, and meant lots of players would have to join one raid just to get keyed to be able to join a bigger one.  This system invoked so much animosity, just like it did back in Everquest where the system really saw the first light of day.  During the Planes of Power expansion, getting keyed for various planes became a power vacuum that only a few elite guilds allowed anyone to have.  Considering the raid designers for World of Warcraft were themselves the leaders of these elite raids… it was not surprising that the keying system ended up something very similar.

The Gatekeeper

The problem is that the attunements also served as a way to gate the content, and provide a level of gearing that you must be able to get past in order to proceed.  To some extent they have tried to do this with item levels, but that in itself is also inefficient.  Just because a player has a really high gear score, it tells you nothing about their ability.  I’ve known more than a few players who have reached high gear score out of persistence, and still perform horribly in a raid environment.  For ages these games have needed an objective measure for just how prepared a player is for the encounters contained within a raid.  Nothing feels worse than having to be that raid leader, and tell a player that they simply do not perform well enough for the raid to carry them along.

One of the best mechanisms I have seen in a game to gate based on player skill… is the not terribly creatively named “Gatekeeper” encounter in The Secret World.  In fact I have gushed about the need for this encounter on more than one occasion, but the latest is in the “WoW Needs a Gatekeeper” post.  This encountered required you to complete a specific test designed to exemplify your ability to heal, tank or dps nightmare level content.  Your reward for completing it, was literally the ability to get to the nightmare level gates in the game.  As a DPS player at the time, I have to say that the test fully prepared me for the rigors that would be Nightmare difficulty content, and I am sure eventually raid level content.

What was so great about the encounter was that it was entirely personal.  No one could carry you through it, or even assist you.  You had to come to a solution to the puzzle of how to complete all of the necessary tasks to progress forward.  This type of skill gate draws a clear line in the sand between the players that are ready and the players that are not, and takes a lot of the stress off the raid leader.  I don’t like elitism, but raiding was never one of those things designed for the masses.  It is designed to be an extremely rigorous skill based activity, much like high level PVP.  The harsh reality is that not everyone should be able to raid.  That is not to say that I don’t think there should be valuable high end content for everyone to complete.  But I don’t necessarily think that raiding should be something that every  player has the expectation of being able to do.

Why Wildstar Isn’t Evil

One of the coolest things about the Gatekeeper encounter is it gives players a shared struggle that they had to get through to be able to progress to the next level.  My friends and I still to this day talk about what a colossal pain in the ass the dps version was.  It took me 25 tries and I think it took my friend Warenwolf around 30… because we were both too damned stubborn to respec to the “optimal” path to complete it.  We beat the damned thing on our own terms, and now carry it as a badge of honor.  This is what raiding used to be, not about elitism, but about defeating something really hard together as a group and carrying with it a sense of pride in that accomplishment.  I honesty feel like Wildstar is trying to return to that era when you felt like you earned every inch of space in each dungeon or raid you completed.  I for one am fine with this change, even if it means I will likely never be able to raid again.  I just hope that they put in content to keep me entertained in my casualness.

The main reason why I feel like the Wildstar attunement process is just is the fact that for the most part it is a personal journey.  Steps 1-5 are entirely soloable, or at the very least zone events that will likely have other players completing them without the need for a premade group.  Step 6 requires a group but should be able to be completed through pugging if you need to.  To be honest every single achievement listed in the attunement, is either solo or something you can accomplish with either a freeform group inside of the zone, or puggable through the dungeon finder system.  Sure you can get your guild to help you out significantly on several of the steps, but the length of the quest chain means that not many guilds will be dragging players through it.  This means the onus of the entire event is on the player, and not on a guild or a raid to “catch them up”.  So while it is not a one stop shop like the Gatekeeper, I feel it creates a sufficient skill gate to make sure that the players are prepared for raiding in Wildstar will likely mean.

I feel like Wildstar is a game with so much casual but challenging content, that there is always going to be something for the players that cannot raid to do.  While World of Warcraft has made so many steps to make raiding an inclusive thing…  it feels like it lost the epic quality that it used to have along the way.  Some of my best moments in gaming came from Vanilla and BC era raiding, because when we FINALLY downed a boss… it felt like we had done something spectacular.  When I got that tier set…  it felt like it was a long fought struggle… and not something I gained by simply “putting in enough time” or “grinding enough currency”.  I feel like raiding could definitely use an infusion of hardcore again, even like I said earlier… if that means I won’t be able to participate.

#Wildstar #Attunements