wildstar Archives - Page 7 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

For Science!

July 4, 2014 by Belghast

Rude Awakenings

At this point I have been up since right around 7 am, and have now walked almost 2.5 miles for the day. Why on earth have I done a thing like this. Over the summer months my wife has been getting up every morning and going for a walk, figuring that even if she is sedentary the rest of the day she has at least gotten a big chunk of steps in that can then be added to that evening by another walk. Last night she asked me if I wanted to go with her on the early morning walk, and I thought at the time it was a good idea. During the work week I am up at 5:30 in the morning, and get up and around pretty leisurely over the next hour or so. On the weekends I tend to allow myself to wake up naturally and then stumble to the QuikTrip and get breakfast.

This morning I was woken up by two things… first the weight of one of my cats not so gracefully deciding to plop down on my stomach, and moments later my wife petting my eyebrows. In the grand scheme of things I really don’t know what she was doing with them, but it sure as hell felt like they were being petted. I think she was bored of waiting for me to wake up and was trying to “annoy” me into coherence. So I stumbled out of bed, attempted to wet down the cowlicks in my hair and pulled on my walking shoes. I do a lot of complicated things in the morning, one of which is write a blog post, and almost every morning that is done well before 6:30. Apparently physical activity is not one of the things my body is willing to tolerate.

As I started down the path outside the house, it was immediately conscious of how hard it was to keep anything resembling a straight line. We were going extremely slow as compared to our normal pace, but it felt like my wife was racing on ahead of me and I was struggling to keep up. Nothing was really cooperating… not my thighs, shins, ankles… all of which screaming at me wanting to know what the fuck I was doing to myself. By the time we had made it most of the way through the first loop, my body was starting to wake up enough to keep moving forward on its own without me forcibly concentrating to move my legs one at a time. It wasn’t until we had finished the second loop that I was really ready to introduce speech into the equation. My wife kept saying things, and I would have to have her repeat them because I just couldn’t concentrate on both walking and listening at the same time. I feel awesome for getting up and walking a triple loop already, but damn did my body not want to play along with this notion. Here is hoping tomorrow will be easier.

For Science!

This title is extremely misleading, because in truth there is very little scientific about my poll. For starters the sample size is too small to really be meaningful, and the fact that I chose to distribute my poll through twitter and Google plus means the sample will naturally be skewed towards social gamers. All of that said… yesterday was the day that all of us day one Wildstar players got billed for our first month of playtime. In my case it was months of playtime because generally speaking I give every new game three months to hook me. From a standpoint of an Dominion player, I watched our guild turn into a ghost town over the last few weeks so I was curious to see just how many players were choosing to stay subscribed to the game. Additionally of the players who would be subbing… I was curious to know how many were doing it with a monthly fee and how many were trying to use the CREDD system.

I opted to use Strawpoll.me because I love the way it gives you instant results, and you can just simply watch the page as the responses roll in and it automagically refreshes itself. Firstly I want to thank all the helpers I had yesterday in spreading the poll. I got so many people willing to retweet this that it greatly improved the success of the results. If you look at the results above, we had at the time of writing this 238 total votes and of those 30% chose to subscribe to the game. Quite honestly this is about the conversion rate I was expecting just based on what I was seeing on the social networks. There were a lot of supposedly diehard wildstar fans that didn’t make the month. Of those that are subscribing 11 players are trying to pay through the use of CREDD, and I am assuming those folks were smart and bought several months in advance when they were still roughly a platinum per month. I have been watching the CREDD market over the last few days and it is slowly increasing, and at least on our server right now is roughly 4 plat per month.

We Are Not the Average Player

One of the things I think we as bloggers, podcasters and gaming pundits seem to miss however, is that we are in no way the average player. I think it is safe to say that the reach of this survey at least is firmly locked in what I keep calling the “internet zeitgeist”. This is a binge and purge cycle of latching onto a new thing and tossing aside the old one never to return to it. Wildstar was the new hotness for roughly a month, and now it appears that Divinity: Original Sin is the next hot thing. After that there will be something else that is a shiny bauble to draw away players attention. I am just as guilty of this as anyone, so I am not judging… just explaining that the way we play games does not represent how most people tend to play games. There will never likely be a game that stops our fickle ways, or at least we will never again have another multi-year long game like World of Warcraft.

I think the “average joe” I still enjoying Wildstar, and I think personally I just had the back luck of picking the wrong server/faction combination. As a result I have been flirting with rolling Exiles on Evindra, because the bulk of twitter seems to be playing that server/faction combination. I am still enjoying the game personally, but am just going through one of my down cycles right now. I will engage and be socially active for a very long time… but eventually I hit my threshold where I simply cannot take anymore human interaction. When this happens I duck my head into my shell and “turtle” for awhile, playing nothing but single player games.

Eventually I get to where I miss people again and venture back into society, but I figure I still have a few more weeks of turtling before I am ready to return to any sort of normal social interaction. I claim that I am an introvert, and folks have disputed that claim… but I think I just simply have built up more stamina for human interactions. That said there is always a point at which I just can’t handle any more, and this is one of those periods for me. So while I on one level I want to be playing Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online, when I actually log in and encounter other players my fight or flee instinct kicks in and I log right back out. So I realize I am adding to the feeling of the server being empty, but right now at this moment there is nothing I can do about that. I can only hope people will be around when this current funk fades.

#Wildstar

Three Hours Well Spent

July 2, 2014 by Belghast

Kidneys Safe, Vita Obtained

I have a running joke with my friend Rae, that each time I go off to meet someone to make a purchase from Craigslist that I am more than likely going to end up in a ditch somewhere missing a kidney. What can I say… I have a dark sense of humor. Regardless of this eventual fate, I am extremely cheap by nature, or more so I cannot stand paying more for something than I actually have to. As a result there are a handful of things I search Craigslist for a few times a week, one of them is the Playstation Vita. For a long while I have known that sooner or later I would get one, but seeing as I have a pretty lousy track record for playing handheld games… I most certainly did not want to pay much for it. Essentially handheld gaming is awesome if you travel a lot… whereas I actually actively avoid travel. If I am at home, I am more than likely going to be on my PC or one of my consoles rather than milling about on a handheld. That said I am still very much enthralled by handheld gaming, and the since I have a PS3 and a PS4… the Vita remote play functionality even as limited as it might be… seemed intriguing.

So the other day when I found a Vita that had been posted for a few days for $100 that came with two games… both of them something I would play, I honestly thought it was too good to be true. However over the course of a series of text messages I gleaned two things. Firstly that I suspected the person that was selling the unit was female, and that they did in fact seem legitimate. This is my own personal bias at work, but generally I consider women far more trustworthy than men, and potentially less likely to steal my kidney. I could not meet up that day so we scheduled a meeting for yesterday after work. Basically I did not want to mention it on the blog, because I really didn’t want to jinx it. There was a comedy of errors however when it came to actually meeting up. The person lived in a town roughly thirty minutes away from the southern most point of the Tulsa Metro. Since I prefer to meet at QuikTrip for safety sake, and that town did not have one… we decided to meet at one in Glenpool, thinking I had been there multiple times and it would be in the path she had to travel anyways.

Wrong QuikTrip

The only problem is that apparently Glenpool is big enough to actually have two QuikTrips… both of which are apparently across the street from a McDonalds. I must have looked insane walking around the QuikTrip parking lot looking for a pink and grey Chevy cruze. Like I was confused enough at one point that I even googled what a Chevy Cruze looked like on my phone, because I thought maybe I was not remembering which model was which. Once we realized we were at two separate locations she came to me because I had zero clue where she was. Everything checked out, the Vita is pretty awesome and only has a few scratches here and there on the case. It came with the vita unit, 4 gb memory card, charge cable, car charger, soft sided case, rubberized skin for the unit, Injustice Ultimate Edition game and The Walking Dead game. The owner had wiped it back to factory settings so all I had to do when I got home was set the unit up and I was streaming Resogun from my PS4 in a matter of moments.

The main reason why I knew sooner or later that I would get a Vita is that I have been a member of Playstation Plus for awhile. One of the awesome things about Playstation Plus is it is blanket subscription and does not care at all if you actually own the piece of hardware it is giving away games for. So since the moment I started subscribing I have been picking up every Vita game offered through the web storefront. As a result I now have a library of 35 good titles ready to download to my Vita. The only thing I need to pick up really is a bigger memory card, because quite frankly 4 gb will not hold much of anything. All in all this makes for another wildly successful Craigslist purchase. One of the things I am going to have to test out soon is the ability to play across the internet from my PS4 sitting at home. I’ve heard mixed reviews about it, but just the fact that something like that could possibly exist seems awesome. Also if you are on PSN and we are not already friends… look up “Belghast Sternblade”.

Three Hours Well Spent

I have seen the Realm Maintenance podcast a few times before, but never actually sat down to listen to it. I tend to listen to podcasts when I can during the day because it makes the work day go a little faster. Yesterday Godmother of Alternative Chat had linked this weeks episode, which is a special 100th episode that included her. The podcast was rather daunting, in that it was a 3 hour retrospective of a bunch of wow podcasters being interviewed and the results knitted together into a narrative. While it took me literally all of the day to get through it, listening in bursts here and there… I have to say it was three hours well spent. Listening to the collective pet peeves, advice and challenges of all of these extremely successful and popular podcasts was rather inspiring. I would not really put myself or the work we do with Aggrochat in the same league as any of these people, but it was awesome to hear that they had struggled with some of the same issues I had.

One of the most interesting takeaways from the whole show is that for the most part, all of the podcasters list radio and more often than not NPR as being an important influence. I guess to some extent that makes sense, because what is a podcast if not an online radio show. If I am in my car I am pretty much always listening to NPR, and I know personally I wanted to do a podcast out of a sense of awe of everything that radio can be. I’m a huge fan of This American Life and have even gone and seen Ira Glass in person, when he did a lecture here in town. One of the tougher questions the various guests were asked… was who their favorite podcast is. Most of them gave extremely diplomatic answers, but I have to say for me at least there are two podcasts that I pretty much drop everything I am doing to listen to when they are posted. The first of these is Alternative Chat, because Godmother somehow takes the production value of This American Life, and condenses it into a fifteen minute bite sized chunk. It is very easy to listen to because I know, no matter what else I have going on, that I will receive this fifteen minute vignette of awesome.

The other podcast that I listen to as soon as it is posted is that of the Battle Bards. There are two things that make this experience awesome. The first is the chemistry that has evolved between Sypster, MMOGC and Syl. Their tastes in music and games have this weird way of fluttering back and forth between complimenting each other and diverging at the same time. So on a specific topic you might get two of the three to agree, but I have never really seen all three agree on something at exactly the same moment. This chemistry aside, I love the focus of the podcast because I too am extremely passionate about video game music. While I might not know the whys and hows like they do… or even know the composers by name… when I am not listening to podcasts at work, I am listening to soundtracks. Video game music has always stirred my imagination in ways that nothing else quite can. It is this warm blanket of nostalgia that I wrap myself in regularly, and it is always awesome to listen to the Bards as they dissect various tracks that I know and love.

Overly Cerebral Morning

As is the case with so many mornings, I sat down to write with a vague idea of some of the things I might talk about. However as a whole this morning shaped up to be far more cerebral than normal. I wish I had pictures to at least accompany some of my giant walls of text, but alas you are going to have to settle for a really cool shot from Divinity II last night. When I got home from my adventure I piddled around with my vita for a bit, logged into Wildstar to claim another boom box and then after our walk settled into Divinity again for the rest of the night. I find it so odd that I have fallen so in love with a game that is over six years old at this point. Everything about the game still feels fresh and new to me, and I am loving exploring this world. All my of my friends are busy and enthralled with Divinity: Original Sin… but at this point I don’t even want to look at that game until I “finish” this one.

I have a feeling that “finishing” Divinity II is going to be a lot like “finishing” Skyrim. That there will always be something left unfinished and begging for me to wander around and finish at a later time. The only thing that makes me question this, is that already the game has made some significant changes that caused me to lose access to a number of quests. The world keeps getting stranger, and I am not really sure how I feel about the chief antagonist. He keeps showing up to taunt me, and then instead of actually attacking me… sends an army of fodder at me claiming it will “finish me off”. While I am sure I cannot take him down yet… I am level 30 and wondering how long this game actually runs. I am only in the second “area” so far, but not sure just how many more there are. I know of at least one more that is connected to the area I am in currently, but at this point I have put almost twenty hours into the game and feel no closer a finish than I did at the very beginning. I love when a game feels like it could go on forever like that.

Happy Strain Day

July 1, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Dargon!

Last night I had every intent of playing World of Warcraft, but that didn’t actually happen. One of my good friends decided to re-up WoW for a bit, and since we had not played in ages we made tentative plans to hang out on horde lowbies over on Scryers. July 3rd The Scryers is merging with Argent Dawn the server that I have 11 Alliance characters on, and this will give me 11 Horde characters as well. I’ve always had friends on both side of the fence, but had trouble choosing to roll a character over there and give up a potential character on the alliance side. The merger of the two servers solves all of this. However last night didn’t actually happen and while I logged in a few alts and loaded them up with the few heirlooms I had laying around, I didn’t actually play them much.

Instead I fired up Divinity II again and continued questing my way through their extremely interesting world. Apparently none of the screenshots that I took actually recorded, which is a problem I am noticing more and more with Dxtory. If it has been open for any period of time, it seems to forget how to work. So as a result I am pretty much going to have to start shutting it down and reopening it every night before I sit down to play. I thought I had recorded quite a few nifty things, but in reality it is probably best that they didn’t record given that they probably were spoilerific. A lot of interesting stuff happened last night and I am not entirely certain how I feel about some of the choices the game made me choose. When a game makes me feel like that, it is probably doing a good job.

Happy Strain Day

This morning the first “Ultra Drop” as they call it is now available for Wildstar. This big patch weighs in at well over 3 gig and includes two new max level zones, a slew of new housing options and various cosmetic customization. While I am nowhere near high enough level to appreciate any of this I am amped to see it happening. Basically I am always happy when a game releases content for free to its players that expands the footprint of the game. So many companies have promised a progressive patching schedule but to date very few of them have actually manages to keep up the promised pace. The holy grail seems to be a patch a month, but the problem is that real life gets in the way, and things often don’t work out quite like they intended. So far the only company that has come close to this sort of schedule is Guild Wars 2, with its bi-monthly story updates. The problem there is that it didn’t actually expand the game, and was just a sequence of self expiring quest content.

The funny thing is that apparently some of the player base considers this too soon. I was floored to read on twitter when a friend of mine lamented that she was not even close to finished with the current content, and was frustrated that she already felt “behind”. Me personally I want to be flooded with content, so I can pick and choose what I want to complete without feeling the need to actually play every little morsel that comes out. Now my tune will change completely if I find out that this is some sort of limited time or expiring content. For the longest time Rift had done an amazing job of pushing out little content patches, but over the last year they have put in a number of limited time events that have caused me to really want to stop playing entirely. We talked about this a few weeks back on Aggrochat, but when a company tries to force me to log in every day for a period of time… I ultimately get frustrated and just stop playing entirely.

Day One DLC

The early patch like this is really designed to give the player base confidence at the end of the 30 day trial period. It essentially is a way of stringing the player on and making them want to renew their subscription that should be expiring around the time the patch lands. The thing is… this is so commonplace now that it is literally meaningless. The patch landing at almost exactly the one month mark, is really the equivalent to a brand new game shipping with day one DLC on the CD. This is content that was in the works and ready to go at the time of launch, that was essentially held in reserve to land right at the one month mark and reinforce player loyalty. That is not to say that it is actually content that COULD have shipped in the game, generally speaking it is done but not stable or untested, and requires a month or so to incubate and get ready for prime time.

Even games as notoriously slow at patching as Star Wars the Old Republic, had their one month in patch that introduced a brand new dungeon “Kaon Under Siege”. The real test is going to be if we see a similar “Ultra Drop” timed for August 1st and September 1st as well. No company has really proven that they can continue to expand their game content on a month by month basis, thereby justifying the expense of a subscription fee. I would love to think that Wildstar is going to be the exception here, but when no one has actually managed to accomplish it once the subscriptions start slipping… I just don’t have much confidence. That is the unfortunate reality is that a number of players are already “done” with this game, as evidenced by a string of tweets saying as such. Will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out once all of these people flake off.

I’m Around Awhile

I personally am subbed for at least another six months, but I am hoping that this will be my new MMO for a long while. There are a number of players that are showing extreme commitment and subbing for an entire year at a time. Right now I want to be playing, I just can’t handle the large scale social interaction at the moment. Coming home and crawling into my own private single player world is just too comfortable at the moment. However within a few weeks I will get tired of being alone and will happily return to Wildstar. Here is hoping that there are still a large number of people playing it then. If not I might end up switching factions to Exile. I feel as though we probably picked the wrong side to play on Evindra since every person on my twitter feed seems to be playing Exile there, and since they are locked to only 6 character slots are not wanting to play Dominion as well.

I don’t feel like Wildstar is going to be a game that I stop playing just because my current circle of friends stops playing it. I played Rift for most of a year successfully by relying on the good graces of other circles of friends with their established guilds, and I figure I can do the same with Wildstar if it comes down to it. The sad truth is that unless the game is World of Warcraft, House Stalwart and the Alliance of Awesome so far don’t have the best track record of actually staying in any game for any period of time. I think this is mostly a multi-gaming thing, and I am just as guilty of it as anyone. Right now I want to play Elder Scrolls Online as well… but I just don’t end up logging in and doing it on a regular basis. So I feel bad for the folks that are over there and playing in relative silence. Once my current crush on Divinity 2 wears off a bit, I will likely return to ESO and try playing that since it is a much less frenetic game.

#Wildstar #DivinityII #Evindra #ElderScrollsOnline

Stormtalon’s Lair

June 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleeping Soundly

When my wife travels I always have trouble sleeping. You get so damned used to having another person laying in bed beside you, that something just feels off. The cats try really hard to make up for the fact that there is another person missing from the bed, but it doesn’t quite work the same. When my wife is gone I end up with one cat pushed up against my face on my pillow… another one burrowed against me on the side my wife would normally be, and a third pretending the bed is lava by standing elevated on my legs. The end result feels like I am trapped in place for fear of upsetting some crazy version of kitty jenga.

Last night however I picked my wife up from her latest trip, which should be the last of the season. So when I hit the sack around 10:30 I conked out soundly and sleep that way for the majority of the night. Its funny how amazing a good nights sleep feels when you haven’t been getting them. I am still a bit groggy, but things feel like they just function better. I should try getting this sleep thing more often. By the time I finish this Monster Zero Ultra I should be feeling right as rain. However it will never cease to amaze me what an effect having my wife home can have on me and my overall happiness and well being.

Nipplegate

So yesterday blizzard released the images of the new Male Human model as part of the reworking coming with Warlords of Draenor. Overall I have to say they seem to have done a pretty good job of translating the original look to a more high fidelity version. It has been compared to Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as well as the “Human” Shrek from the second movie. I can definitely see the human shrek thing, but overall it doesn’t really bother me. Belghast is a human male warrior, and I can see being just fine with the look and feel of the new model once you slap some facial hair on it. The only thing I don’t get are the nipples. What the hell is going on with those… like I sincerely hope this is a texture mapping issue deforming them and not the intended final look. They remind me somewhat of a pair of pepperoni slices glued to the canned ham like pectoral muscles.

It makes me wonder if the Dwarven male had the same issue, but we just didn’t notice because there was always a beard covering them up. So I did some digging and the emotes manage to allow us to see the nipples on the Dwarven model. Maybe it is just that they are smaller scale but they look less like something pasted onto the chest. Yes I realize the irony here in pointing all of this out… because this is precisely the same sort of thing that women have had to go through every time a game releases a female model of anything. Hell Wildstar as much as I love it… I am convinced the animators have never actually seen a female form, because the proportions for the waists especially are anatomically impossible. Anyways… twitter is freaking out. Since I don’t tend to run around shirtless in an MMO, at the end of the day it doesn’t really effect me much.

Stormtalon’s Lair

At this point we had run Ruins of Kel Vorath a few times, but there is a completely different level 20 dungeon that we had yet to touch. So last night we managed to pull together a workable team and run Stormtalon’s Lair. After the mess that was the last time I tried to tank one of these things wearing something other than tank gear, I opted to craft a bunch of new gear and augment it with a few careful auction house purchases. The end result was that I had what felt like enough support power to do the job, and sure enough I had none of the threat issues that I had the last time. It seems like if you are in tank gear, you will do just fine controlling the mobs in an instance, which is somewhat of a cool thing. For awhile we had heard this dungeon was considerably harder than Kel Vorath, and by the difficulty we had with the first boss and some of the trash mobs I would have agreed with those people.

However once we got used to the trash, it felt far more manageable than that of Kel Vorath. While there were quite a few annoying things they did, there seemed to be far fewer of the “Random group wiping” type effects. The first boss honestly was probably the hardest boss in the instance for us. We managed to down the second boss in one try and the final boss I think took us two, and we finished it up with only three people standing. As far as a dungeon to run multiple times… I would honestly far rather do Stormtalon now that I am used to it. I don’t really want to give away any of the fight mechanics, because for us at least that is one of the most enjoyable things about going into a new MMO is hitting the fights completely cold and trying to figure out the mechanics on the fly.

That said we did encounter an optional boss that completely beat our spirit down. We made five or six attempts and never could quite land on the right strategy for dealing with it. During the encounter he summons some adds, and if I try and tank both the boss and the adds I get absolutely wrecked. I am wondering if this is going to be one of those situations where I have to kite the boss around while everyone burns the adds. The problem is… the adds don’t go down terribly easily, and he summons more waves rapidly. While we don’t have the answer yet, I look forward to going back in another night and trying to figure the encounter out. Right now I am loving the feeling of the boss mechanics in these dungeons, because whoever did their encounter design is really doing some interesting stuff.

For the longest time I have wished there was such a thing as 5 man raiding, and really the type of mechanics we are seeing are the level that normally accompany raid encounters. I would say that the 5 man normal dungeons here are at least as difficult as LFR is in WoW. I can see these encounters being an absolute nightmare to try and PUG your way through them. There are moments where the entire group has to pay attention and do something or they die in almost every boss fight I have come up against. While World of Warcraft tended to recycle boss mechanics from one expansion in the next expansions dungeon content… this is something wholly different. It is introducing a raid level of responsibility into encounters that I have not seen before. The existence of Interrupt armor is going to be the death of many a PUG group.

#WoW #Warcraft #Nipplegate #Wildstar #StormtalonsLair