December 2015 – Page 7

Many Demons

December 16, 2015 by Belghast

Allergy to Advertising

Yesterday in my travels I listened to a piece on NPR talking about the habits of TV binge watchers and advertising. Apparently a study has found that binge watchers are far less susceptible to advertisements than your average viewer. They went into some reasons behind this… but I think as a whole we have just learned how to ignore advertising. William Gibson is the oracle of our age, because he consistently predicts a thing being a thing… before it actually happens. I remember in the book Pattern Recognition he introduced us to a person who is so allergic to branding and advertising that they would get the branding ground off the buttons in their jeans. I feel like I am nowhere near this, but instead I am in this realm where advertising just really doesn’t work that well for me. When I see the same ad over and over… especially if it feels like they are targeting me for some reason… I find myself less and less likely to use whatever product that is. There was a time when I actually like several post cereals for example… but after watching commercials for honey bunches of oats between shows on Hulu I have nothing but a negative reaction when I see anything with the Post brand on it.

As far as advertising in general, I’ve gotten adept at ignoring it. If I am going to be serious about a website I tend to snap it into my RSS reader, which also tends to trim most of the advertisements. From a side effect it also cuts down on the exposure to Malware, since a large number of attacks on end user machines come in through infected ad providers. While I might trust the hell out of a website, I don’t trust the advertising services that are well known cesspools of Malvertisements. With Television however…. there is very rarely a time where I will be watching a show without also doing something else at the same time. So I might be playing an MMO or fiddling around with this or that project… which means when an ad comes on the screen it gives me liberty to look down at my device. I am vaguely listening, but only well enough to be able to identify when the ad has finished and the television show has started again. Mostly I really don’t enjoy being advertised to. I am not bought into the fantasy that they are trying to create that is supposed to tell me that my life will be better with this product. Instead I prefer to just do my own research when I find that I need something. There is never a moment when I purchase something, that I have not already googled it, youtubed it, and tried to find multiple seemingly trustworthy sources of information on how said product works. That said… I realize I am probably a huge aberration, but I would have to think its an aberration that is growing more and more common.

OrcLock Instead

Last night most of the evening was spent going to RiffTrax where I saw Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny…. which is every bit as horrific as you might have imagined. Well the movie was horrific… the riffing over top of the movie was absolutely glorious. I would say this batch of shorts and the final movie… was quite possibly the best RiffTrax I have seen. They are doing a rebroadcast of Starship Troopers early into January so I think we are going to rally the troops and go see it as well, since it was one of the ones they did before we started making this a regular outing. When I got home however I spent some time piddling around and on a whim decided to roll a Female Orc Warlock rather than flipping over and playing my Dwarflock like I had talked about. Essentially I am enjoying my time Horde side quite a bit, and I am feeling the need to develop a stable of characters. I also really really need access to an enchanter and a potion maker, and there is no better way to do that than to make my own. So in theory Belghula… because I am running out of ideas for Belg names… is more than likely going to be a Tailor / Enchanter… since having access to crafted gear is always a useful thing.

This is I guess going to be an experiment in just how long I manage to stick with a female character. This is a thing I don’t do terribly well, and mostly its because… I tend to keep creating versions of myself when I make characters. At some point I need to do a supercut of my characters, but you will see there is a very specific pattern to them. They all have beards of some sort… and if there is a game that doesn’t allow beards… then honestly I don’t tend to stick around terribly long in it. After that I tend to have long hair drawn back into a ponytail… or if nothing else just long hair in general, and said hair is generally black or as dark of a brown as I can get it. Essentially that character ends up being the idealized version of how I guess I wish I looked… or at least my ultimate version of myself. Maybe I just really like the whole Adrian Paul Highlander thing… because my Secret World character looks quite a bit like he did in the Highlander Television series. In any case… I never seem to be able to fully immerse myself in a female character, because it pulls me out of the whole “this is me in game form” aspect. That said, when it comes to horde in particular… I think the female characters look badass and less sexualized than the alliance versions. I also like the female Orcs, Trolls and Undead far more than I like the Male counter parts. As a result I am going to give this a try, and hopefully it works… because seriously this Orclock looks awesome already.

Devilian Finally

While I played quite a bit of Devilian in the various phases of alpha/beta/whatever… I had yet to actually install the game proper since its launch. So last night when I got home… while I was dinking around on the Orclock I had it installing in the background. I crashed pretty hard around 10pm but I managed to get in this morning and get a character created. As a result I created Belghast the Berserker on Ravan… because if you give me a server name that even vaguely sounds like Revan… I am going to play on it. I am looking forward to seeing what the game is like after the handful of polish passes the late betas gave it. If nothing else it should at least partially scratch my Diabloesc itch for awhile. I have significant issues still with the fact that the classes are gender locked, but this is not really a Trion Worlds thing. That is one of the frustrating things about playing a game that has been localized like this… is that you end up knowing that most of the things that might frustrated you… the company you actually have access to, can’t do a damned thing about it. So as a result I am going to enjoy what is there, and try really hard not to worry about the stuff that isn’t.

I joined a Discord server yesterday being run by Zoltariel and having a bunch of the Trion folks on it as well. So I started chatting like I normally do, to which point I was treated to a length rant about how essentially anyone playing a Berserker is a “casual” and that how no one would ever invite them to a group. I am paraphrasing because this was a rant that took place over the course of twenty or so lines, but the gist was that Berserkers and melee in general had problems dealing with late game mechanics. The thing is… I enjoy melee. If you give me the option between a bunch of characters, I will always without a doubt play a melee… and problem even further play a tank. Since Devilian is the sort of game that doesn’t have a tank… then I am likely to play as much of a high survival melee as I can because I like being able to live through stupid things. Melee is what makes me happy, and even if it is absolutely empirically worse than every other class in a game…. I am still going to play it because it is the player fantasy that I enjoy. So I killed the chat channel when I quoted Tommy Lee Jones from the Fugitive after Harrison Ford just gave an impassioned plea about how he did not in fact kill his wife… “I Don’t Care”. Not everyone plays a game to win… some of us play them to have fun doing the playing.

The Best Games of All Time (Part 1: Criteria)

December 15, 2015December 15, 2015 by Tamrielo

I’ve been following the internet explosion over at GameFAQs with some amusement. Essentially, Undertale is beating out some highly beloved classics in a “for funsies” series of polls for “best game ever”. I think Undertale is a great game, and does a lot of things that require you to be conversant in some fairly diverse and long-held gaming tropes, but I doubt it’s up there for “best game ever”, for a few reasons. It’s nice to see it get recognition, though.

It’s gotten me thinking about what I would pick for the Best Games Ever, though. I use the plural because picking a single one is a laughably meaningless prospect, but there are some that are absolutely brilliant and deserve continued recognition. I’ve worked on coming up with some criteria to narrow the list down, see what you think:

1.) The game must be at least five years old.

This isn’t a slight on newer games, simply a nod to the fact that a game needs to be able to stand the test of time. I use five years because that’s on the long end of the development cycle for games, so games released more than five years ago aren’t going to be able to get by on the quality of their graphics or technology alone. It also ensures that the game has had time to fade into obscurity; if it hasn’t, that’s a good sign.

2.) The game must contain original concepts for its time.

This is a nod to the need for games to continue to evolve. The very best games aren’t just masterpieces in their own right, they push the medium forward into new spaces. The “for its time” clause is there because some games may use those same concepts later, and may build on them, but aren’t necessarily moving the medium forward.

3.) The game must display a near-perfect refinement of its mechanics.

Some games are brilliant but buggy. Some games are very good at a number of things, but excel at none of them. Something worthy of being called ones of the “best games ever” can’t be either– they need to showcase the best of a given genre, be polished and complete, and would benefit little to not at all from any changes made.

4.) The game must have had at least two of the following: at least one re-release on a new platform, have given rise to a remake, have created its own media web of spinoffs/sequels/etc.

This is a nod to games that are enduring, financially successful, and significant or beloved enough that new development offers enough further sales to justify the cost. Re-releasing on the same platform doesn’t count– no “Greatest Hits” reprint releases here (though many of the games probably would have that, too). Whether there’s a remake, a series of sequels, or other media, this addresses both the enduring appeal of the game as well as its footprint on the medium as a whole.

5.) The game must be good at more than one thing.

Maybe it’s got great combat and platforming. Maybe it’s got great voice acting and multiplayer. Maybe it’s got fantastic art and music. Maybe it’s excellent at teaching you how to play it and endlessly replayable. Maybe it’s a lot of these things. Some games are really, really good at a single one of these; these games don’t make the cut. A game need not be multiple games in one and good at all of them, but it needs to be more than a one-note experience.

6.) The game has to be fun or otherwise significant, even now.

Super hard one, and very difficult to determine. It’s a question of whether or not a game has truly stood the test of time, or if it’s a nostalgic hit but doesn’t *really* stand up. It’s the least objective of the list, but I think it’s important. It’s hard for me to claim a game is one of the best of all time if I couldn’t see myself sitting down and playing it or having a drawn out conversation about it in context of more recent games. I don’t necessarily think every one of the “best games of all time” need be a game I could sit down and play again, but they also shouldn’t be games that I can’t compare favorably with games I’ve played recently.

This is the list I’m going to work with, and mull over a ton of games this week. Let me know if there’s some important criteria I missed; I’ll consider adding it to the list.

Setting Priorities

December 15, 2015 by Belghast

Return of the Deathknight

I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion. As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much. Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome… but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great. I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however… that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of. That said… everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers. I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class. I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it. The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree… I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times… Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome. With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again. The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way. So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops. I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion. I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out. However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison. There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back. My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger… a dual wielding melee ranger. So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class. I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee… I lost interest in it as my main. Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main. However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons… the class just wasn’t for me. Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me. But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared. In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion. Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops. It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan. Right now however… he is sub 640… which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon. He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison. It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock. I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player. I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets. Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me. I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them. If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk… which I have admittedly struggled with. In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.

What is “Fair”?

December 15, 2015 by Tamrielo

I recently had a writing prompt that sparked some thought, as any good writing prompt does. It asked “under what circumstances is it fair for a company to institute layoffs?”

I’ve been hit by layoffs. I’ve had friends hit by layoffs. They’re the relentless specter of the games industry, and everyone has heard innumerable nightmare layoff stories and has probably experienced a few of their own. I know I have some, and I’ve only seen a few. It doesn’t take a lot to make a layoff feel like a nightmare.

The prompt asked about “fairness”. I don’t even know what “fairness” is in that sort of case. What is “fair”, when someone is losing their job? What is “fair” when an executive has to choose between decisions that they know will cause people to hate them? What is “fair” when that selection of poor choices isn’t even the fault of the person making them? What is “fair” for people who suddenly have to worry about their next paycheck?

I don’t think it’s possible to be “fair” to all of those groups of people. I’ve spoken before about the gap I see between workers in a company’s trenches and executive management– as more than one friend of mine calls them: the “suits”. For many people I know, “suits” are heartless, care only about money, don’t care about people, and are only looking so save their own skins or squeeze as much out as possible heedless of the toll it takes. They aren’t people who go home and live with the knowledge that they hold people’s very livelihoods in their hands, that their entire lives are a selection of decisions that they will be hated for, regardless of their reasoning. It’s easy, one imagines, to “live with” all of that when there’s a big paycheck coming.

I talk to a lot of people in executive management lately. They all have nightmare layoff stories too, but they’re different kinds of stories. They aren’t jump-scares, the sudden reveal of a terrible outcome– they’re creeping horrors, the slow realization that something awful is going to happen and there’s no good way to stop it. Every executive manager I speak to wants the same superpower: to see the future.

It makes me think of MMO class balance debates– the raging of players against “uncaring, incompetent” devs who don’t understand how the changes they are or aren’t making are terrible and “unfair”. Devs work crunch hours– should they get rewarded for the toll this takes on them or punished for allowing a situation to arise that necessitates crunch? Whose fault is crunch? Is there fault? Is exacting justice on the person or people at fault “fair”?

This is the kind of thing dominating my thoughts lately. How can I build a bridge between “suits” and the people on the front lines? There are decades of mistrust built up and those walls aren’t easy to break down. More than anything, finding ways to bridge that gap has been my motivation for leaving games to go into management.

As for what is “fair”, after I figure out how to answer the question of what that word even means, I find myself staring at a second question: “fair to whom?”