World of Warcraft Archives - Page 84 of 108

Finally Turquoise

September 6, 2014 by Belghast

A Stronger Message

Yesterday various things happened, and it left me feeling like I needed to present a slightly stronger message about my feelings regarding issues. I still stand by my statement earlier in the week that everyone simply needs to be excellent to one another, and that would go a long ways in fixing issues. Since then some things have happened and I feel like I need to make a blanket statement about a few things. First off I support equality and diversity in gaming and in pretty much everything else in life. I tend to think of myself as a Humanist, and I would like to think that I give everyone out there an equal shake. I believe human beings are infinitely wonderful things, and that we should treat each other with respect.

Similarly I like that gaming is slowly becoming a more inclusive place. I am almost 40 years old at this point, and I’ve watched gaming come in and out of acceptance several times and I figure with the influx of mobile devices, it isn’t much more different than every family owning an Atari 2600 or a Nintendo Entertainment System. Gaming has no less meaning today than it did when those events happened. So I feel like there is room in gaming for anyone who cares to pick up a game and play it. As such I totally support all sorts of games, even the games that folks have been calling “non-games” like Gone Home an Depression Quest. I come from an era when games didn’t have graphics, so I don’t see something like Depression Quest being all that different from a text based adventure game like Zork, and without it… and MUDs you all would not have the games that you likely love today.

Finally I feel like this most recent controversy is a deeply confused situation. I feel like there are most definitely people who in earnest believe that this is a fight about journalistic integrity. The problem is there is so much *ism being thrown into the discussion by folks supposedly supporting the cause that any sane and cogent discussion gets pushed out. So far the best run down of the entire issue is in this topic, where someone interviewed a bunch of members of the movement trying to find a thread of commonality. I highly suggest you give it a read, because I found it informative and coming out of it I have a better understanding of the intent. The problem is based on a huge informational dump that came out today… the noble members of this movement apparently were in fact being played by the very same folks they claimed not to support. It seems as though the woman for whom their outrage started this entire thing, really was a Social Justice Rogue… and I use that term with ultimate respect in what she managed to pull off.

#IStandWithGanondorf

Finally Turquoise

Now that I got my statement out of the way, and feel that I have underlined and bolded my views on the situation. On to really important things like the fact that I finally… after spending like 60k buying fruit and then growing my own batch and using almost all of it… managed to get to Turquoise. I have to say it is absolutely glorious to behold, and now I just need to either farm Leviathan for a barb and collect all the mats to get the Tidal Barding crafted… or hope the market prices go down to a place where I can afford to buy it. It does make me exceedingly happy to scamper about on the mount while grinding FATEs for my atma bits. At this point I have three more zones left: Middle La Noscea, East Shroud, and North Shroud.

The method that finally managed to get me there was in fact the spreadsheet. The problem is the method is not infallible. I think this is in part due to the fact that you get slightly randomized bits of color per fruit fed. So instead of hitting Turquoise green on the first try I hit Apple Green. I used the sheet to figure out the colors I needed to add to that to get to Turquoise and then BAM! I finally worked. Generally speaking there will be a 2-4 fruit spread where the sheet will “guess” that you will arrive at the color you want. Initially I was feeding the bare minimum to hit the color, but it seems safer to overfeed a fruit to hit more in the middle of that range. If you don’t play FFXIV and the chocobo dyeing game… this all sounds like madness… and more often than not it is. I hit my goal color and am supremely happy for the time being.

Nightmare Tides

I have not really played much rift for the better part of a year now, but once again it is expansion time and I find myself eyeing the game. Storm Legion more or less was a bust for me. It featured a couple of extremely interesting early zones, and a whole slew of extremely grindy later zones. I realize this is odd to hear me complaining about grinding when I am so happily grinding away for an Atma weapon. The problem with Storm Legion however is it felt much like the Veteran ranks in Elder Scrolls Online feel… grinding without purpose and progress. It took an immense amount of time to push through the levels from around 56 to 60, and while I have made it through on two characters… I have lacked the drive to do it again on either my Cleric or my Mage. This expansion however drops the 10 level grind to a 5 level one, and I am hoping that it becomes more manageable. I know I will likely be playing this, as I am far more interested in it than I am say Warlords of Draenor.

I don’t really plan on having a big rallying cry to get folks into the game. Quite honestly I would prefer if everyone stuck in Final Fantasy XIV and playing it happily. I want to stay playing FFXIV regardless of away missions out into Destiny or even Rift. I am of the opinion that had I not worn myself out doing NaNoWriMo I likely would not have left Final Fantasy XIV in the first place, and never ventured back into World of Warcraft. That might just be my brain revising the facts of the time, but it seems reasonable. I remember very much being unable to get into the game after a night of writing hard and fast to hit the goals. Anyways in any case… I would prefer Final Fantasy XIV to be my base of operations, and not Rift. That is not to say however that I am not intrigued by the content. I still have a whole bundle of good feelings about the game and the company behind it. I guess time will tell if I plunk down the money to play it, but I feel like October 8th the announced release date will be here before we know it. Also I feel like it is pretty damned brave to be releasing against the Warlords juggernaut.

#Rift #FFXIV

Change is Scary

August 19, 2014 by Belghast

Gatekeeping a Hobby

Yesterday was one of those strange days where a lot of people were talking about the same ideas. I was not privy to the original source that sparked the discussion, but several of my friends over twitter were talking about the definition of a “real gamer”. It seems that someone was spouting off in their lack of knowledge that tablet and mobile gamers were in some way lesser gamers than the those on the console or PC. This once again gets back to the definition of what exactly a gamer is. Over on the Moderate Peril blog he questioned exactly why we need a label at all. In other hobbies, you don’t see the attempt to exclude people the way that we do within gaming.

I am very much one of those people that wants to assemble as many awesome people from as many different points of view around me as I can. As a result I am always open to new interpretations of what exactly gaming is. While I am not a huge fan of mobile and tablet gaming, just because the types of games I enjoy playing do not translate well without physical controls… that doesn’t mean there are not actual gamers there as well. If you boot up bejeweled while waiting on a bus, you are just as much of a gamer as someone who camps a rare spawn for 20 hours. There have been times in the past that I found mobile gaming to be lacking, but at this point there are tons of really detailed games that you simply cannot get on any other platform.

After seeing Hearthstone on a tablet for example, I feel like any other platform is somehow lesser because of just how cleanly it works there. After playing Carcassonne on my phone, it felt so natural and perfect to be playing a turn based board game that way. The big area that I am seeing taking over the mobile markets is the various kinds of simulation games. While it started out with things like Tiny Tower, it has involved into extremely detailed and lengthy games. Similarly I can see a lot of role-playing games flourishing on the mobile markets. All of these things are real games, played by real gamers. Shouldn’t we be including everyone in our big happy family instead of trying to exclude them?

Change is Scary

The cynic in me wants to think that the exclusion comes from a form of gaming Hipsterism. The realist in me however sees that it is pure and simple fear. Change is a scary thing, and we get rooted in our own inertia of the way we think things ought to be. This is the gaming equivalent of “I walked to school uphill both directions and I liked it”. In order to stay a vibrant and interesting market it needs to adapt to trends. While I deeply love the Fallout series for example, I don’t expect every game to be the Fallout series. Additionally while I have certain things that I like to play, it is perfectly okay that things exist that I don’t want to play. Guild Wars 2 has become somewhat of a whipping boy for me over the years as a way of explaining what I don’t want to play. That said I love that it exists because it makes a large number of my friends excited and happy to be playing it.

Expecting everything to be custom tailored for you is the surest way to end up angry in the end. It is like walking into a store and complaining that a red shirt isn’t blue enough for you. If you don’t want to wear a red shirt, don’t buy a red shirt and then expect it to change into the color you want it to be. If you are like me and don’t like sports games… simply ignore the fact that the sports games exist and move on with your life. If you want to spend your nights playing nothing but Japanese Role-Playing games then do that with your free time, but realize that there is still a lot of room for games in even that niche that you may not like. As the video states… it is perfectly okay to not like things, but don’t be a dick about the things you don’t like. There should always be room in our community for folks that don’t look, think, act or experience things in the same way as we do.

Harder Isn’t Better

Similar to all of the above, there was a second topic floating around that Liore specifically wrote about. I guess the old argument had resurfaced that you aren’t a “real gamer” unless you are always playing everything on the hardest settings. For starters I don’t even know what a “real gamer” is, because if you are playing games of any sort you are a gamer. There is no sign that says you must be this tall to ride this ride. Now granted it is perfectly okay for there to be skill checks in order to unlock certain things. These give us challenge and something to push for. That said when a person accomplishes said skill check, it does not immediately make them a better person than someone who didn’t. I find it completely valid that some content be gated behind these skill check mechanics, but the sort of elitism and classism that surrounds them needs to die in a fire.

Similarly playing something on hard mode does not immediately make you a better person. I personally mostly play games on medium to easy mode depending on what exactly I want from an experience. More often than not I am playing a specific game because I want to experience the story, and while I enjoy the moment to moment game play I am not there because I want the rush of excitement from being able to twitch my controls at exactly the right moment over and over enough times to unlock a special achievement. I just want to see the story through the point of view of the experiences of my character. In these cases I absolutely play on easy mode, and I personally love it when a game is like Wolfenstein New Order and allows me to drop the difficulty on the fly in the middle of a game session if I encounter a roadblock.

“Twitch moments” are absolutely the number one thing that kills my gaming experience. When I encounter a moment that is significantly harder than the rest of the game play surrounding it, that is often a roadblock that keeps me from completing the game. In an MMO or a Role-Playing game I can wander about and level up or get significantly better gear to mitigate the difficulty. In most single player games however I simply have to have faster reflexes. While I realize I can train myself to have faster reflexes, years of not playing twitch games have caused me to dull significantly. The problem is… most games are not worthy the time commitment it would take to improve. I don’t generally find achievement getting fun, nor do I find repeating the same mission over and over until I finally grasp it. One of two things happens, either I lower the difficulty and beat it… or I simply stop playing the game likely to never return to it.

So I ask you the question, am I no longer a gamer because I do this? No and I feel like you would tend to agree or you wouldn’t be wasting your time reading my blog on a regular basis. I am a gamer because I game, not because I live up to some artificial bar set by someone being elitist and exclusionary. Gaming is about having fun, and if in the course of whatever you choose to do you are enjoying yourself… then mission accomplished. While gaming is about the journey and not necessarily about the destination… anything that stalls you out along the path is a bad thing. This is why I love mechanics like the Echo system in Final Fantasy XIV and the system that World of Warcraft has. Where over a series of wipes you are slowly buffed until you can defeat the content, because it maintains bragging rights for the folks who don’t need the buff… but still allows things to be fully accessible by anyone else. At the end of the day I am an easy mode gamer… deal with it.

Play What You Love

August 17, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 18

This week on AggroChat I am joined by regular hosts Rae, Ashgar and Tam which means we are unfortunately without a Kodra this weekend. He is off enjoying the sights, sounds and gaming opportunities of GenCon. I swear one of these years I want to go to this, because it has been like the pinnacle of all gaming shows in my head since I was a youngin reading Dragon magazine. I realize that in reality it is a fair bit smaller than likely even PaxSouth that I will be going to in January, but there is just something extra epic about GenCon. In honor of this convention we talk at length about the latest rendition of Dungeons and Dragons… the fabled Fifth Edition and why you should be excited for it. Wizards of the Coast at this point pretty much knows that they made some serious mistakes with fourth edition, allowing for the meteoric rise of Pathfinder. In 5th Edition it feels like they are trying to pay for the sins of the past with awesome.

In addition to D&D 5th, it was a pretty significant week in gaming in that GamesCom, the Blizzard Warlords announcement and SOE Live were going as well as an event for EVE and SWTOR. I talk about the things that really stuck out to me from the GamesCom feed, including the PS4 Shareplay system and the controversy over Tomb Raider exclusivity. We talk about the World of Warcraft Warlords launch announcement and the subsequent trailer, and the general feeling of “blah” we seem to have towards it. Finally we talk about Everquest Next and that it does in fact seem to be a game they are actually working on and not just vaporware. Additionally we talk about the upcoming changes in Landmark, and how it is a step in the right direction but not enough to get Ashgar interested again. It is a pretty packed show so hopefully you will tune in.

Play What You Love

Since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV and the release of the 14 day trial program, I have had a number of friends give it a shot. A good number of them have gone ahead purchasing and subscribing to the game and this is awesome. However for a handful of players it just didn’t click for whatever reason and they sent me heartfelt apologies for not being able to get into the game. This is perfectly natural, not all games are for all people… and in the current gaming climate we are in there is more diversity than ever, so there really is no excuse to play something you don’t enjoy. So I feel like each of us owes it to ourselves to play whatever it is that we love, and never apologize for doing it. Life is too short to spend time playing something you just don’t enjoy for some reason.

Right now I am enjoying the hell out of Final Fantasy XIV, and I feel like this is a game I could settle down in. However if I reach a point where I am not enjoying it any longer, you can bet I will move on to whatever seems to “feel good” to play at the time. If you stick around and play a game you just aren’t enjoying it only really leads to you either getting completely burnt out, or extremely bitter about the fact that your friends are forcing you to play something you hate. If you allow yourself to glide along through a whole bunch of different fun experiences… I feel like we all end up happier as a result. So please if you try this game or any other and you really don’t enjoy it… go play something else. All you ever have to tell me is that it just “wasn’t for you” and I will completely understand.

Blaugust Prompts

I have been rather slack with a lot of the Blaugust related things, but the biggest of these is my original intent to collect a bunch of writing prompts. While the threat on the forum has a ton of these already I still need to add a bunch more. So today here goes a few related to this weeks podcast and this weekend post.

What game do you love that none of your friends seem to enjoy? Is there a game that you keep returning to but wish your friends were playing along with you?
For me GenCon is this fabled event, what is yours? What is the event that you would love to attend but have never had the opportunity to do so for whatever reason.
What makes a good community? What aspects of a game or social community do you enjoy, and what aspects detract from it?

I am extremely proud of all the bloggers who are participating daily in the Blaugust event. Thanks for making this a truly awesome month.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust

We Have The Date

August 15, 2014 by Belghast

That’s a Lot of Fish

Last night I did something a bit different than my normal fare and actually hung out with several of my coworkers. While I hang out with Rae at least in the virtual sense almost every night, this was a bit different. For my boss’s birthday his brother took him to a thing called Rifftrax put on by the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000. They do the same basic thing, but they do it live and stream it to theaters all over the country. Since he had such a great time he decided it would make an excellent group activity. So last night we met for dinner and then continued on to the nearby theater to watch the Matthew Broderick version of Godzilla ripped apart by the MST3K guys.

First off this is a much bigger deal than any of us realized, as we spent probably a bit too long at the restaurant and had maybe 20 minutes before the start of the film. By the time we all got to the theater and inside the place was absolutely packed. Apparently if you want to get seats together you have to arrive well ahead of time, and it almost has a tail gating mentality. Instead we all split up mostly into groups of two to find a place to sit. So this ended up with me being down on the front row leaning back in my seat and trying to watch the movie. Thankfully we didn’t really CARE about the movie… but instead the commentary. Afterwards they said that it was a bit hard to hear the dub over as you got further back in the theater so I guess the awkward angle was worth it.

This is totally something I would do again, and it has been a long while since I have laughed this hard. I guess I had completely put large sections of the Broderick film out of my memory. I mean I remember it being bad at the time, but I didn’t remember it being THIS bad. If you have the chance to see Rifftrax in a nearby theater I suggest you take up that opportunity. They do this apparently as a semi regular thing here, so I will have to follow the schedule and see what is next. It seems like the next showing is November 4th where they do that campy classic Anaconda. I will have to see what is going on but I would really like to maybe try and go.

We Have the Date

Yesterday was the big announcement for the Warlords of Draenor release date and now we know exactly when to expect it to land. Some time ago Godmother ran a contest to see who could guess the date, and I apparently came the closest along with River. I remember at the time River saying something to the effect that I looked lonely on the spreadsheet so he decided my guess was as good as any. Now that said I did have some logic behind my guess, I was not just randomly picking numbers. My general theory was that we would not see a World of Warcraft expansion until after Blizzcon. So knowing the Blizzcon dates I figured they would want to take advantage of the Blizzcon-Bump but get product out there before Thanksgiving and the holiday madness begins. I apparently was right but Blizzard threw everyone for a loop by making the release a Thursday. I don’t think anyone was expecting that.

Once again the good folks at Blizzard have managed to craft together a really awesome cinematic. Were I a horde player I would probably be cheering the awesome orc action. Instead it just seems like another really awesomely animated feature explaining the premise of the expansion. The events play out a little different than I would have thought. All along I thought that Garrosh would actually stop Grommash from drinking the blood, but it seems like good ole Grom was already making that decision. Garrosh however just gave him the backup he needed to defeat Mannorath. I feel like the events of this expansion will serve to set up for the long fabled Burning Legion expansion, since we obviously screw with the way things were supposed to work out. I figure you can’t kill a demon like Mannorath without having some pretty negative repercussions.

Overwhelming Meh

Like I said, were I a horde player I would likely be heralding in yet another overwhelmingly horde focused expansion. Thing is I am not, and I have never cared a single bit about any of the horde lore. It was just that faction filled with monstrous humanoids and a handful of people that I cared enough about to roll alts to be able to play with. Nothing about the horde is really my thing, apart from the whole “everything has spikes” aspect. I expected yesterdays event and subsequent trailer to pump me up and prepare me for what was inevitable, my temporary return to World of Warcraft. The thing is it seems to have had the opposite effect. I am even less interested in the expansion than I was going into the day, and I can’t really put my finger on the why.

I have been in Alpha/Beta for some time now, and all in total I have played somewhere between six and eight hours. During that time I have just felt like I was forcing myself to play the game. I felt obligated to test the content since friends had gotten me into it. Nothing I was doing however really did it for me, and even with the existence of some interesting ideas like the Garrisons, it all felt rehashed. The Burning Crusade was one of the most exciting expansions for me, and it was the era of so many cool things for me as a raider. I expected to be wrapped up in this whirlwind of nostalgia upon returning to it… albeit in a pre-destruction state. While Draenor is gorgeous and I can see the underpinnings of the areas I used to love… it all just feels really old at this point.

This expansion is going to be amazing for those players that are currently enthralled with the game. There are going to be a handful of other players that maybe quit wow but didn’t really play other games in the meantime… that will return and fall back in love again. However I fear for those of us who have gone nomadic and played every game that has come down the pipe… the overall game is just starting to feel its age. The systems don’t quite work as well as other games on the market, it isn’t the culmination of the best ideas any longer. Instead it is a combination of what they could get to work within the existing framework of the game. It will definitely breathe new life into the game a whole and introduce a bunch of new doodads for the players to get involved with, but so far it has all felt very hollow to me. As much as I want to be excited, I am wondering if I have actually truly outgrown the game. I had more fun doing Godmother’s survey than I have had actually playing the game in a very long time… so that tells me I was pretty much living off nostalgia to this point, and maybe that font has been exhausted.