wildstar Archives - Page 11 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Crystal Madness

June 6, 2014 by Belghast

Permanent Exhaustion

Back in March my wife and I each purchased a fitbit, and since then it has rewired quite a few things in our daily routine. Over the first few month we mostly focused on changing the way we walked, and picking up steps in places we could during our normal routine. So instead of taking the elevator in the parking garage, I started walking the stairs… and have now changed that up to walking the ramps down for maximum steps. In many ways the fitbit changes exercise into a game, and with it comes a whole slew of “achievements” being tracked by the fitbit dashboard. While what it does is rather stupid… it is just an always on pedometer, the fact that it is there and constantly reminding me that I need to be walking is where the real benefit comes in.

Over the last month we have been walking on a nightly basis, and within the last week and a half this has morphed not only into walking to augment our total steps… but to trying every night to “ding”. My wife is not a gamer really, but she has picked up my MMO analogy when it comes to the fitbit. For us dinging is getting to our target steps of 10,000 per night, and this is fitting since the little band goes nuts when you reach your target goal. While trying to hit 10,000 is cool… my new goal is trying to hit 70,000 weekly steps and getting the achievement associated with it. Why do I care? Well it has been looming there for months… and it was a thing I never thought I would actually be able to hit.

More than anything this whole experience has been a lesson in proving me wrong. I’m fat, and I will likely always be fat. At 6’4” I carry my 350 lbs more better than some… but I am still very much a fat man, and I am mostly okay with that. More than anything I want to be a more “fit” fat and have more stamina and endurance… and I have already come so damned far already. Granted right now I am somewhat living in a state of permanent exhaustion as I try and do this exercise thing each night and also do my evening gaming. Right now we are walking a little over 2 miles per night, and doing what we call our “triple loop” where we weave a course through our neighborhood and the next one over. The course is designed so it never takes us past our house, that way we are not tempted to call it and stop. Right now I need to have walked between 6500 and 7000 steps to be able to hit 10-11k during my evening walk. With it being a rainy and otherwise sedentary weekend… we might have to start walking a “quint loop”, but by god I will hit my 70,000 steps this week.

Crystal Madness

I had all intents of streaming last night, but for whatever reason it never quite happened. I spent a good deal of the evening running down the last few things I needed to do to complete Deredune, and what I was doing… while enjoyable for me seemed like it would be extremely boring to watch. As the evening wore on, more people joined me in the channel… and I simply never alt tabbed to fire up OBS. Wildstar is latching onto me with a vengence, and in ways I am surprised. You can go through my pre-launch posts… and I struggled hard to figure out a way to get into this game. I wanted so bad to like it, because at face value it seemed like a game I would love… or at the very least the me from five years ago would have loved. Overall it intrigued me enough to play it at launch, especially since I would be bringing with me a chunk of the Alliance of Awesome community.

Now that I have spent a good deal of time playing it… I am completely enthralled. The thing is I am not sure exactly why. Guild Wars 2 is one of those games that I have tried to dissect just why I don’t enjoy it, and no matter what I try and do there… the game felt largely pointless. Wildstar feels like it took so many of the good elements of GW2 but presented them in a way that I actually care about them. Problem is I am not sure if I can explain why. For starters there is something psychologically enjoyable about challenges. You can be wandering around and loot an item… and then all the sudden you on the clock and every fiber of your being is poured into completely whatever this task happens to be. Sure you can ignore them, and start them manually from the challenges section of your quest log… however there is something special about just stumbling onto one naturally.

The game has a depth that I have not seen since Everquest 2, and that really shocked me. There are layers within layers within layers of nuance going on here. Right now it seems to have every feature that I ever wanted in a game. While it doesn’t have a “chronomage” style self mentoring system, you can apparently drop your level down to your party members at any time. In fact so many of the things in the game seem to be there to help you group with your friends. The only real thing that the game fails at is in still continuing to divide players into red and blue teams. That said I can for the most part deal with this, since they have account based friends and I can at the very least talk to my friends on the other side of the faction wall. I have reached a point where I am pretty sure already that this is my new “WoW”, and had I not already purchased Warlords of Draenor… I would seriously consider skipping this expansion.

The picture above is pretty cool because it is from my skyplot. One of the nifty things is that while you are out in the world, you are constantly collecting things for your house. A special kind of item that you can find is a “PreFab Kit” and these allow you to build new sections of your skyplot. While wandering around I managed to find a green quality one that essentially added a crazy jumping puzzle to my house. So the fact that it is a jumping puzzle in itself is cool… but it basically added a daily quest to my house. If you can make it to the top of the puzzle in 1 minute 10 seconds you can get a prize, which is similar to the prizes you normally get from challenges. I’ve managed to pick up a handful of housing items from doing this, including a really cool spiral tree. If you are on Evindra/Dominion let me know and I will neighbor you so you can have access to do the puzzle.

League Beginner Night

I feel like maybe this week the title of our weekly League of Legends night might be a bit of a misnomer. We had several folks, but not quite enough to do two matches at the same time. So as a result we alternated swapping folks in and doing 5 man vs Bots games to let folks get adjusted to new champions. Oakstout joins us this week and it turns out that while he signed up for a beginner night… he owns a whole slew of champions and has like 130 wins under his belt or something like that. So I would hardly call him a beginner, in fact I am far more beginnerly than he was. That said it was still an awesomely fun time and we hung out and joked while playing the game. I played a total of three games, the first of which I tried out the champion Gangplank that was free this week. I have to say I dig him quite a bit, and if he goes on sale again soonish I might pick him up.

The second round I played Aatrox, which I still absolutely love for his pure survival. During this battle Oak was playing one of my all time favorite champions WuKong… but the combination meant we got to bully our lane severely. Our double jumps meant we could engage quickly and shred the enemy bots quickly before returning to farming or taking down turrets. I have decided though that I really need to pick up the Justicar Skin since I don’t really care much for Aatrox’s default appearance. Finally I closed out the night by playing a game as Woad King Darius… which we have all agreed is the “most belghast skin ever”. It was a great time, and if you are looking to ease your way into League of Legends, then I highly suggest you participate next week. At some point I figure we will even start to play real people.

#Wildstar #LeagueOfLegends #LoL

Ramble About Content

June 5, 2014 by Belghast

Story Content

I was having a discussion yesterday with some friends about whether or not the MMO player actually wants carefully crafted story driven content. When you look at the lackluster support that Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World have gotten overall, you could easily come to this conclusion… since each of them are deeply story driven and carefully constructed experiences. I think we are maybe seeing something else at work. If you look at a game like World of Warcraft, some of its deep story arcs have long been heralded as some of players favorite content. However the vast majority of the content is nothing like this, and I think it is simply a case of not everything has to be “art”.

It is in essence the filler content, that is just good enough to keep you from throwing up your hands in frustration, that make you appreciate that gem in the rough of a quest. Games like ESO, SWTOR and TSW attempted to infuse deep story and meaning into almost everything you do, therefore shifting story driven content to the status of a commodity. I suggest that games need busy work, to make you appreciate the transcendent content when it is placed in front of you. The “kill ten rats” quests are there to cleanse the palates so to speak, so that when a deeply engaging story arc is put in front of you… you actually take notice and don’t resign it to more content to grind through.

Epic Crafted Content

When I think about epic custom crafted experiences I think of the Mass Effect series. I have gushed on this game so much, and watched friends play it over and over. As much as I enjoyed the entire trip through the series… it is not the type of game that I would want to play every night. That ultimately is the problem with MMOs, you are asking players to come in and inhabit your space… hopefully making it a nightly traditional to log in and play with their friends. As much as I might like a Mass Effect or a Transistor… I wouldn’t want to play these games on a nightly basis. I want a space that is much more malleable, and doesn’t require so much of myself to play it. Essentially one friends assessment that MMO content “needs to be exactly good enough to be passable” is really not too far off the mark.

One thing that the busy work tasks excel at is helping drive your own personal narrative forward. The players who inhabit an MMO and really live there on a night by night basis, whether they realize it or not, are crafting a custom narrative about their character based on their own actions. Each time you kill some baddies, save a villager, or deliver a package to some far away mountain… these actions are complementary to whatever narrative you have in your head about your own character. When you ask a player to participate in something longer, more story driven… the end results are predetermined and may or may not be complimentary with this personal narrative. When you have a few of these long epics scattered throughout the game, they are welcome interludes. However when everything you do is based on some narrative that you don’t necessarily fully control… it can be jarring.

Grouped Content

While I would not want to play Mass Effect every single night, I still want to play it often… so there sets up the paradox. Right now I find myself compartmentalizing games as either “fun to play with other people” and “fun to play by myself”. Elder Scrolls Online is very much fun to play by myself, with brief flurries of playing with friends when it comes to dungeon and pvp content. This is part the game and part me. Firstly I hate questing as a group, and it has been something I have tried to avoid like the plague since the early days of World of Warcraft. I’ve always found the experience to be generally frustrating since someone is always a step behind or a step ahead of where you happen to be. Trying to keep people in sync is madness… but Wildstar and its focus on leveling the guild through grouped content is trying to change this.

They’ve given me a hook, a reason to group up that so many other games haven’t. I greatly prefer to experience “content” by myself and then group up to do “group content” whenever I can. But the fact that the only real way to level your guild is through players grouping up together and doing content, makes the entire concept of group questing much more friendly. They’ve given me a shiny bauble for my troubles, and also given me tools to make the entire grouping experience more meaningful in the way the various “paths” interact with one another. So this construct is making me re-evaluate the way I think about content in general, and start looking for ways to group up to accomplish things rather than solo everything.

In part my reluctance to group comes from my Everquest roots where your ONLY option was to group for everything. When MMOs gave me the option to be self sufficient, I took it and ran with it and have simply never looked back. So in a game like Elder Scrolls Online, I greatly prefer to be wandering around by myself. I go AFK frequently, often have to take my headset off to respond to my wife, and am generally not always super engaged with what I am doing. In short I feel like I am a liability for grouping, and in those cases I try and solo the entire night. The problem is this becomes a pattern with me, and I simply NEVER group unless it is content that I can’t do by myself. I find it interesting that Wildstar is somewhat successfully making me re-evaluate that point, and seeing that grouping is something that is beneficial to me, the guild, and the players I am grouped with.

Room For Both

Another thing I have learned about myself is that I seem to always need a “WoW”. I am talking about this in super generic terms because the game has shifted at various times… but I always seem to be playing one. Traditionally this has been me shifting back and forth between playing World of Warcraft and Rift… while at the same time playing a game like The Secret World or Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar seems to be my new “WoW” game in this equation, and it speaks to my desire to play that type of themepark/themebox type experience. The thing is there is always going to be room for an Elder Scrolls Online as well. I find myself right now wanting to pair down to just those two games, even though I have a ton of other games that I somewhat want to play. It is like I have various itches that need scratching on a regular basis, and no one game ever quite covers them all. However between a combination of those two games it might get close to covering all the bases.

The more I play Wildstar and enjoy it because it is new and shiny and exciting… the more I want to spend my weekend delving into Elder Scrolls Online and exploring Auridon and more of the Veteran level Aldmeri content. I functionally need both experiences, because so far I have not been able to get both from the same game. However after seeing the lackluster reception that Elder Scrolls has received versus the glowing recommendation of players for Wildstar, it is pretty clear that most players just want a better “WoW”. There is no shame in this, because to some extent that has been what I have been looking for as well. I want to visit these worlds with rich story, but I want to “live” on a nightly basis in one that is more of a “choose your own adventure” novel. Wildstar inundates me with choices of things to do… and there is a never ending list of achievements and things to explore, giving me a constant stream of adventures to be had.

League Beginner Night

I realize this mornings post has been an odd rambling one… without much of a firm point. I blame a clear lack of sleep on my part, and a measure of exhaustion on another. Hopefully there is something worth reading up there in that big mess. Tonight is the Alliance of Awesome League Beginner night again, and if you are a member of the AofA community I highly suggest you check it out. The start time is 9pm CST, but if we have a critical mass of players on mumble beforehand we might start a little early. Last week we had enough time to play a 3v3 Twisted Treeline and a 5v4+bot Summoners Rift. We had a ton of fun in the process.

If you have never played League of Legends before, and have been interested in getting into it… now is the ideal time to try it out. Last week we had several first timers, and to make things easier we broke apart into separate mumble channels to help tutor the new folks in what they should build and where they should be focusing their efforts. This in part involved me barking orders to Maric quite a bit, but he seems to have survived just fine and is signed up for this week again. I am still very much a newbie myself, but as a whole it is a really fun time to be had and presents a wild divergence from the types of games I normally play. I wish we had enough people in Heroes of the Storm to be able to have a similar night for that game.

Uniblade Get

June 4, 2014 by Belghast

Scrounging for Copper

The above picture pretty much accurately represents the last several times I have played Landmark. Generally speaking it is on a Tuesday evening when I realize that my claim upkeep will be running out shortly. So I log in and make a mad dash around the area surrounding my claim to scrounge up enough copper to pay the upkeep for another week. Generally speaking I only spend just enough time in game to gather the 4800 copper I believe that is required to unlock another 8 days of upkeep. It really wasn’t until last night that this process started to grate on my nerves, and I began to question what exactly I am trying to protect. In theory I could get my claim repossessed and be free of this burden… but as of yet I have not wanted to give up my “prime real estate” next to the spires.

I guess the thing is I haven’t been super into the game since the end of Alpha and the wipe that lead into Closed Beta. My previous claim I was extremely happy with, this one I am not sure quite what to do with it. It is this hulking monstrosity that I have zero desire to decorate further. I have reached a point where Landmark just isn’t that fun for me right now, or more so there just isn’t enough “game” there yet. What they have is this great rules driven building game, but after a point building stuff becomes stale. I look at all the harvest time I would have to sink in to be able to build the things that I would want to build… and I simply am unwilling to devote the time. I feel like maybe once combat goes in, that the game might be more tangible for me, that it might feel like there is a purpose to what I am doing. It was amazing just how strong of an incentive “protecting against monster attacks” was to spur on my building sprees in Minecraft. For the time being however I am seriously considering harvesting up all of the stone and other resources used on my claim and just letting it get repossessed this week. That way I could mark one game off my list until it becomes interesting again.

No More Loot Boxes

Another decision I have made is to drop my Rift patron status. I’ve subscribed to this game for pretty much all of the time it has been out on the market save for about three months. There is so much that I still like about Rift, but at the same time I just have no drive to play it. I have a ritual of logging in every Wednesday to collect the weekly patron gift, opening it… seeing if I get any cool armor and then logging right back out. Since I have geared both my Warrior and my Rogue in this fashion… and I have faltered at leveling my Cleric, I just can’t justify keeping up the patron status for a game I really have not played much at all in the last year. I have 90 days left of patron status, so I might in that time change my mind, but presently I just don’t have enough people to play the game with to make it worth my while.

One of the things that worked out differently than I had hoped with Patron status is the way that loyalty and cash shop currency accrued. That first year when I picked up a year long subscription, I had a massive amount of loyalty and a ton of cash shop currency to blow through as part of the free to play conversion. I made the mistake of assuming that the same thing would happen when I picked up this past years patron status. One of the things I expect out of a free to play “subscription” plan is a month allotment of cash shop currency. Since this isn’t a thing in Rift, I really don’t see much benefit in keeping up the Patron status. Additionally I expected another huge boost to my loyalty level from subbing for another year, and that didn’t happen either. For the time being I will simply play the game like a free to play player does until they give me reason to subscribe again.

Uniblade Get

The last several days in Wildstar have been about one thing and one thing only… trying to get to level 15 and trying to accumulate enough currency to buy a mount when I ding. As a result I have completely ignored the crafting system and sold everything I could possibly sell in an attempt to buy my precious mount. Was it worth the effort? Well the jury is still out on that one, but I do like the looks of my Uniblade. I figured this was the obvious choice for a Chua Engineer, especially since the “Hamster Ball” mount just did not feel dignified. Right now the mount feels a little lackluster since it is only a 15% boost. However it is cool that you can still sprint on a mount and that feels awesome as your engine revs up and such when you do it. The physics of the Uniblade are a little weird, and I have to say I would have honestly rather had the Exiles Grinder mount instead… but all in all I am happy. One bug I encountered is that apparently in order to buy the mount you have to have enough currency to cover the undiscounted price. This means instead of the 1 gold 15 silver price listed you actually have to have something like 1 gold 65 silver to be able to cover the full price… even though it will still only charge you the 1 gold 15 silver.

Now that I have obtained my goal, I am going to be far more interested in random grouping. I kind of wanted to meet up with people last night and group, but I was so focused on grinding out my level and trying to get as many saleable items as possible. This meant doing much lower content than I should have been doing, since it rewards less experience but I was more likely to accumulate a lot of saleable items in the process. One of the interesting things about Wildstar is that unlike World of Warcraft, you only seem to gain guild experience while grouped with other guildies. This means that in order to unlock all of the perks like the guild bank, we are going to have to group together and go do content. Now that I have level 15 I am really looking forward to trying the first dungeon… and I am imagining that it rewards a ton of guild experience. My next goal is to find a decent weapon, as I am still using some random drop green. My hope is that whatever dungeon quests exist I will maybe get a blue weapon from them. I also need to do some research into which tanking abilities I need to do a dungeon.

Wildstar Groupage

Since we are taking the night off from Elder Scrolls Online my goal tonight is to get some Wildstar grouping going. The goal is to resume the Cyrodil nights next Wednesday, and I hope to play quite a bit over the weekend as well. I still want to see so much in Elder Scrolls, but face it… this is launch week for a new game, and for the most part folks are going to be playing it. Tonight I want to focus on getting a group going with some Alliance of Awesome guildies and trying to gain lots of guild currency. Zero clue what we will actually be doing, but here is hoping we can find another world boss like we did the other night. If we have enough people it would be awesome to pop our heads into a dungeon.

#Landmark #Rift #Wildstar

Rocket House

June 3, 2014 by Belghast

Beard Reset

Last night I went after work to get my hair cut, as I was in pretty dire need of one. While I was there I did something rather drastic, I hit the reset button on my beard. Usually during the winter I grow my beard out to combat the cold, and then during the summer I trim it back up… sometimes even trimming it down to a Vandyke. This time I opted to keep it a full beard but just bring it down to something more manageable. Over the last several weeks as the heat has risen, our evening walks had become more and more frustrating. Sunday night I had reached a sort of critical mass as I got so freaking hot during the walk that I took a dip in the pool the moment I got back to the house. While I may mourn the loss of my big bushy beard… I realize that it was only about six months of growth and by the time winter rolls around again it will be back with a vengeance. One of the good and bad things is that I grow beard hair extremely quickly.

Rocket House

The highlight of last nights play time was finally unlocking the ability to have a house. I have long been a sucker for housing in any game that happens to have it, and the Wildstar model seemed extremely intriguing in beta… but I never actually managed to get a character high enough to unlock it. Apparently you can get your housing quest completed at level 14, and after running around all night myself, Tam and Ashgar all went off to Illium to do just that. I’ve not really spent much effort and more importantly money on the house yet, but I am sure it will become quite the gold sink for me. At this moment I have the Rocket Ship house that came with preordering the game, as well I managed to pick up a few decor items in my travels and mostly have just wanted a place to stash all of it.

One of the more interesting things that I have managed to pick up is a Meteor Crater kit. I added it to my plot but I am not really sure if I will keep it. Honestly I have no clue what I will be doing with my place at all to be honest. Right now it is mostly a dumping ground of various decor items I pick up in my travels. The cool thing is that already I have access to several rather nice buffs, including a 5% quest and monster xp one that I will likely start using while playing. At this point my goal in life is to get 2+ more gold I need for a mount at level 15. At the end of the night I was roughly 1/3 of the way into 14, so I don’t really have a ton more time to accumulate it. My theory is that I will go find some mobs that drop good stuff and blow them to smithereens.

I wish I had done a better job of documenting our travels last night, because we ended up doing several really cool things. Firstly the three of us did the level 13ish ship mission where we investigated the asteroids and what was killing the miners. I had managed to do this in beta and it was one of those points that made me re-evaluate how I felt about the game. The mission is extremely cool, and really shows off what the game can be. While wandering around Ellevar we managed to stumble across a world boss that was unlocked by the explorer path. Both Tam and I are explorers so ran around this circle unlocking the six locks on the cage. What spawned as a result was this massive void walker looking thing that was extremely difficult. I have a whole new respect for their encounter design after seeing this guy.

I have no clue what this guy was even called, because the shit hit the fan almost immediately after starting it. For starters he dealt massive damage to me as the tank, and kept dropping this crazy latticework of laser beams on the ground that I would have to dodge out of quickly. It seemed as though he was also leaving a green mist on the ground. The main problem was that none of us were really prepared for a dungeon style encounter, as no one was really set up to be the primary healer… and I honestly was not really configured to be the primary tank. I had to self rez about halfway through the fight but we managed to hold on long enough to take the guy out. As the fight continued he split into two, that became four, that finally became eight individual mobs. All I know is the overall experience was insane… and makes me want to find more of these unlockable bosses.

Growing On Me

I have to say the game is inexplicably growing on me. We were talking last night, and really Wildstar is like Guild Wars 2… but with a purpose. The big problem I had with GW2 was that nothing I did felt like it actually mattered. I wandered through the zones completing mini objectives, but nothing really felt that important. Wildstar feels like taking the Guild Wars 2 “so many things to do” model and wrapping it around a solid questing model with interesting storyline. The entire world feels so feature rich that it was absolutely overwhelming during beta after coming from the much more sedate and Spartan Elder Scrolls Online. I feel completely inundated with things to do, and little side missions to complete, especially when you factor in all of my explorer path content.

The content density is crazy, but as I am starting to get accustomed to it… I am enjoying it more and more. The overall game feels like a love song for Vanilla and Burning Crusade era World of Warcraft, but updated and modernized and packed with an insane number of features and baubles and widgets. As much as I don’t think there really is such a thing as a “WoW Killer”, this game probably has as close of a shot as any. There have been so many players that have lamented the changes that World of Warcraft has made over the last several years, and this is a game almost entirely for them. After fighting the summoned world boss last night… I am actually looking forward to seeing what their dungeon and raid content looks like. I don’t think I will ever again be a serious raider, but this game might make it happen more than anything I’ve experienced to date.

Not Leaving Elder Scrolls

While I have spent a lot of time talking about Wildstar lately, because it is shiny and new and I am finally starting to see what other folks have seen… this does not mean that Elder Scrolls Online has been tarnished at all for me. The two games are so drastically different that they don’t even occupy the same space for me. I am slowly working my way through the Auridon content, and I even logged in last night for a few minutes. I have a feeling since today is the official launch day for Wildstar, that it will likely be completely unplayable… and as a result I may just take the more relaxing route and play some Elder Scrolls. On twitter there has been a lot of talk about leaving Elder Scrolls, and this is definitely not me. In fact I am probably bumping my subscription up from 3 months at a time to 6 months at a time. I tend to play all the games at the same time… but there is a point where I could see myself maybe setting down to just Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and Landmark (if the landmark combat ends up being great). As it stands now however I am not abandoning anything for the time being.

#Wildstar #WorldBoss #Housing #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO