Happier Without Meters

Deliberate Exclusion

ffxiv 2015-05-02 20-24-37-37 One of the puzzles I have been trying to sort out the entire time I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV is why exactly the community as a whole seems to be friendlier to other players.  I’ve talked about the various literal “social engineering” missions that the development staff have made in order to spin things that would normally be a negative as a positive.  When I see the new player bonus in a dungeon I actually get excited rather than frustration over having to potentially teach someone new mechanics.  Quite honestly I am wondering if it is something far more simple than anything, a line in the sand that the folks running the game drew long ago and have since reinforced numerous times.  In Final Fantasy XIV running a DPS log parser is not only unsupported by the game, but it is actually an actionable offense.  This has had an interesting chilling effect on some of the elitism that you normally see in communities.

Since simply mentioning parsed logs in private free company chat can end up with a GM knocking down your door…  it changes the way folks interact with the data gained from log parsers.  That is to say people are still parsing the logs, but the first rule of “FFXIV-APP” is there is no “FFXIV-APP”.  This means that no one gets called out in the middle of a pug for having “weak dps” and no one is standing around in “trade chat” linking their latest boss kill.  The players that do parse, do so quietly and in secret and I believe in the end this makes the “meters” less of a competition and more of a personal diagnostic tool.  It seems that once you take this competition out of a community it has some pretty wide reaching trickle down effects.  I’ve always thought of dps meters as a distraction, and back during Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, we had rules against mentioning them or linking them in raid chat.  I largely just found the automated spam annoying, but it also seemed to cause players to focus on things that were less important than the mechanics of a fight.

Accidental Experiment

Wow-64 2015-05-05 21-51-46-49

The problem is that meters are a double edged sword.  Eons ago while the earth was still cooling I needed a add-on called Omen in World of Warcraft to let me know how I was doing on threat.  Later on these features got rolled into Recount, and Skada and the rest of the meters.  As a result I simply got used to running the meters all of the time, but after a point they were no longer needed.  Tank threat became a non-issue with the introduction of Vengeance to help mitigate the lower damage that tanking characters generally had.  Once introduced into my life I started feeling like I needed meters all the time to let me know how things were going.  I became addicted to the metrics and numbers associated with raiding, and as such spent a good deal of my time staring at bars and percentages rather than actually playing the game.  Some weeks back I talked about being frustrated with the current state of my mods, and actually went so far as to start installing several of the addons that I had been using.

One of the addons that ended up getting pulled was Recount, because I had this plan of switching over the Skada.  The funny thing is that I got interrupted during the middle of what I happened to be doing, and while Recount absolutely got installed…  I never went so far as to install another meter.  The first time I noticed was during a raid a few weeks back, but since I was so used to NOT having meters in Final Fantasy XIV it didn’t bother me terribly much.  This combined with the fact that I knew someone in the raid was going to parse our logs anyways caused me to simply ignore the fact that they were not there any more.  The end result was that I felt generally happier about my night of raiding.  I spent more time in the moment of the game play rather than focusing on how I was doing versus this player or that in the meters.  I decided to just go with this and run without meters for awhile to see if it improved my overall outlook on the raid.

Happier Without Meters

ParsedMeters The funny thing is that I actually think it did.  World of Warcraft stopped being a competition for me and more of an experience.  Sure the fights are still nowhere near as engaging or enjoyable for me as the ones in Final Fantasy XIV but I am spending more time “in” the fight and less time worried about other non-important things.  The funny thing about this is that apparently it had other effects on my game play as well.  The constant concern about how I happened to be doing may have been actually holding me back from actually doing well.  I figured I was still firmly in the middle of the pack dps wise, until after the Flamebender Ka’graz fight one of our mages said something that made me curious.  He said something to the effect of “I can’t  believe I was beat by a protection warrior”.  To which point I confessed that I had installed my meters some time ago, and had no clue how I was actually doing anymore.  To which my raid leader responded “Well, Bel, You Did Well” and linked me the url of the live parse.

There are a lot of mitigating factors behind my performance and I know this.  For starters I recently got the four piece set bonus and for gladiators it essentially increases everything useful to us by 20%.  More than that I think the absence of meters caused me to stop worrying about every button press and rely more on what I knew I should be doing when I should be doing it… instead of trying to second guess myself all of the time.  In essence I stopped caring about my performance and just started playing the damned game, and while it most definitely improved my levels of happiness it also seems to have actually improved how I was performing.  I am just not a hyper competitive person about most things, and accidentally eliminating that stimulus from my game experience seems to be a net positive for me.  I know that there are always going to be meters tracking my performance but I also feel like so long as they are not in my face all of the time I can try and ignore them.  Now I am not suggesting that you uninstall your meters, and that it is some new path to happiness.  However for me it seems to have given me a new lease on a game I was starting to hate playing.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Happier Without Meters

The light at the end of the tunnel

Last night we spent a third of the raid time killing Ifrit which took us about 4 tries to get past all the pitfalls, and then the rest of the time was back into turn 9.

Turn 9 has taken a weird progression.  Every individual phase is this giant monumental task and when you finally get past it you hope “can we now just kill this stupid boss?”  We took about a month before we finally got the boss into phase 4, and the hope was very much “can we now just kill this stupid boss?”

Phase 4 is by far the most demanding thing I’ve ever been asked to do in a raid.  I have the job of marking dive bombs, which means in addition to doing an incredibly intricate dance around the arena to deal with boss mechanics, I am also expected to place the ground markers for dive bombs.  Dive bombs can take 3 different configurations and based on which one it is in, I have to mark different areas.

This is what we should do
This is the chart I keep on my second monitor so I can direct the raid to the safe spots

 

Last night we had one attempt where I had marked both locations in enough time and we had enough people up.  All we needed to do was get past dive bombs and everything was rinse and repeat.

We did not get past dive bombs, but what I did glimpse was the possibility of us beating this fight.  I saw the light at the end of this tunnel.

What we actually do
A diagram representing how our raid actually handles divebombs

We’ve been working on Turn 9 for almost three months now, and the fact that we are still playing this game and don’t hate each other is a testament to both the game, our leader, and our group’s resilience.

On Wednesday I get to dive right back in with a pretty green group, so I look forward to learning the fight all over again.

Wish me luck!

On Giant Steps

It’s not exactly a secret that the most recent Trial in Final Fantasy 14, Steps of Faith, isn’t exactly popular. I think it would be a lie to say that this is because it requires coordination or punishes mistakes harshly, because there are actually a lot of trials (even ones required for the story) that do this, like Shiva or Ultros. Today’s patch, 2.57, brings some changes, mostly by reducing the damage that a lot of the hazards do and reducing the health of most enemies (including the main enemy, Vishap), which should make it a bit easier to finish the trial before you fail. What it doesn’t change is why I dislike the trial in the first place:

Even if you know you’ve failed, there’s no way to start over until all of the events “finish”.

Vishap Wins

Super Meat Boy Philosophy

If you’re not familiar with the platformer Super Meat Boy, it’s a game that’s filled with spikes and saws and missiles and other things that will kill you, and asks you to get to the goal as fast as possible without dying. You die in one hit, so it’s a pretty hard game. The thing that makes it playable at all is that there’s maybe two seconds between dying and restarting a level. (I mentioned this in the Darkest Dungeon podcast). As a result failure isn’t that big of a deal, because before you even have time to think about it you’re starting again.

Steps of Faith is not like that. It’s the only trial that doesn’t end if your entire group is dead, it has its own unique failure condition when the dragon makes it all the way to the end of the bridge. In addition, if you miss certain things (like the giant harpoons), your chances of victory are very low, and you still have to let the entire sequence play out. This results in the time it takes for a successful run to be comparable to the duration of the duty finder lockout for leaving (30 minutes), so people frequently leave when they get it via roulette. (I haven’t seen a case this bad since Oculus, which WoW eventually started bribing players into doing.)

meat boy

Looking Forward

I don’t know if the nerfs are going to help this, but that’s really just a matter of magnitude. They may have reduced Vishap’s health to the point where you can beat on him the whole time and still win. I personally think the only required change would have been allowing the fight to reset if all party members were dead (or some other way to reset the fight). It’s a new day, and we have people in the Free Company approaching this fight again, so I suppose we’ll see in the future.

Vishap Loses



Source: Ashs Adventures
On Giant Steps

Tam Suggests: Kentucky Route Zero

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the best games I’ve played recently have been recommended to me by other people. I know my tastes, and I’m pretty proactive about finding games I know I’ll like, and as a result I tend not to listen to the games people suggest for me. A few things slip by, usually stuff that isn’t in my usual wheelhouse, and I usually get them from other people or the occasional errant thing I read on the web.

I’d like to add a feature where I suggest games I’ve played that I think are worth looking into for one reason or another. These will be “Tam Suggests” games, and I’ll be following up with another feature called “Tam Tries” which will be more of a standard review, done my way.

I’ll lead these off with a disclaimer: The game I suggest here are worth playing. This doesn’t necessarily make them good, and I don’t necessarily think everyone will like them. I’ll talk about why I think they’re worth playing, but don’t expect a lot of hard criteria-checking. In a review, I’ll be looking at the game holistically. For the Suggests series, I’m going to be focused on a small number of reasons that, despite its flaws, the game is worth your time.

Let’s start with one that’s been lodged in my brain for a few years now. Here we go.

2015-05-11_23-08-02

Kentucky Route Zero is a weird game. Aggressively, intensely weird. So weird it’s able to drive the casual observer far away.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of the best examples of art in videogames I’ve ever seen.

The premise is very, very simple. You are a deliveryman, driving through Kentucky and trying to get to your last stop of the night, and you’re fairly far away. On your way, you find yourself taking a supernatural shortcut, a mysterious route called Route Zero, or just “the Zero” by those in the know.

It’s played like an old-style point-and-click adventure game, and you move around solving puzzles and exploring, seeing the sights and pushing ever onwards towards your goal. You meet interesting people who’re going the same way you are, and sometimes make friends. The whole thing is done in an almost impressionistic art style, shadow play and simple shapes hinting at what’s there, rather than showing you outright. Here’s the trailer, see for yourself:

Things get weird pretty fast. Then they get really weird, even faster. I have a pretty high threshold for strange, so it didn’t really faze me, but I’ve spoken to people who’ve tried the game and couldn’t handle how strange it gets. I don’t think it’s nonsensical, it’s just a little bit sideways, and the logic of Route Zero is more Through The Looking-Glass than you might expect, complete with weird, non-Euclidean geometries.

It’s worth playing for the art alone, but the sound design deserves a mention (in fact, its sound design has won awards). It flits between the dreamlike and the ominous, but keeps the running theme of “it’s late and it’s lonely out here on the road” going strong. I’ve commented before that there’s no alone like 5am, and KRZ captures that feeling very well.

It’s got great visuals and music, though that’s not why I think it’s worth playing. It’s worth playing because it does some very creative things with game narratives that only games can do. A lot of games, even very beloved ones, imitate movies for their storytelling; one-sided projections of the story to the audience. Kentucky Route Zero appears to do that until the first time you talk with an NPC. It shows you what to prepare for by introducing your dog.

KRZ

It’s a simple, apparently meaningless choice. When you pick a name for the dog, a short blurb about the dog’s personality follows, and for the rest of the game, that’s the dog’s name and personality. Later, it comes up again, only you already know the dog’s name and whether or not the dog is friendly towards other people you meet is no longer your choice.

It’s a really simple concept as shown here, but it slowly gets deeper. When talking to NPCs, I can pick which conversation options tell which parts of the story I want to tell. It gets more complicated when I’m getting to choose what both sides of the conversation are saying, or even what multiple people in my slowly growing party have to say and when. Who interrupts whom, and who’s quiet while the others talk?

Eventually people will ask about your motivations, and this can lead into entire varied asides and different sorts of paths and conversations based on what you choose to say. At one point, I was helping set up a TV for someone, and at a certain point I could reminisce in a couple different ways about my parents and how they felt about TVs, or I could brusquely say “I know how to set up a TV”. I chose the latter, favoring action and displays of competence, and I was able to set up the TV without help. Later, a similar conversation came up and I opted to comment about my background as a mechanic and fix what needed fixing, rather than talking about it. The min-maxer in me enjoyed being able to just be good at whatever I wanted to say I was good at.

Some time later, two of the characters talked about how standoffish and aloof I’d been as Conway, and that control over the conversation came up again. I could have them argue, or mutually decide they didn’t like Conway, or show compassion.

As the game unfolds, you see more and more of the surrounding story– the colour gets filled in, if you will, but which colours you see vary based on your choices. It tells a very complex, winding story, but does so in a way that lets you explore it– not just the physical space, but the relationships with the characters.

It’s not for everyone, and it takes some excruciatingly weird turns, but the way in which it’s presented is really interesting, and I find myself looking forward to new chapters so that I can see where the story goes –where I can take it– next. It’s an experience I can’t really have outside games, and it shows off what the medium is capable of.

It may not be your cup of tea, but I think it’s worth a look.



Source: Digital Initiative
Tam Suggests: Kentucky Route Zero