March 2016 – Page 8

They’ll Have to Kick Me Out

March 14, 2016 by Grace

By now most folks have heard about the bad news. In a classic “bury bad news on a Friday afternoon” move, NCSoft laid off as many as 70 of Carbine’s staff last week, and canceled WildStar’s China release completely. Other folks have already laid out most of my thoughts on the matter (see Gamer Girl Confessions and Notes from Nexus for example), I can’t help but ramble about this a little here too. Don’t worry, I got most of the swearing out of my system on Friday night.

I saw the world end once and I survived. I’ll always stay until they kick me out.

I’ve said before that Nexus is my home and while a lot has changed since I wrote that post the one constant is that I haven’t stopped playing WildStar. I’ve gone through phases of playing other games more, sure, but I’ve had an active subscription since launch and I intend to keep it that way. Right now I’m all paid up through the end of this year. After the news on Friday though, I’m just hoping that the game is still here that long. The layoffs are heartbreaking, but for the health of the game the cancellation of the China launch is the most worrying to me. It screams that NCSoft don’t have any faith in the game, and worse, it completely removes the potential for revenue from that new market. It also has the secondary effect of destabilizing the current player base, both by causing some folks to abandon ship, and demoralizing those of us who remain. Combine that with NCSoft’s record of shutting down under-performing MMOs and the outlook is grim.

I’m looking forward to hearing from Pappy as promised next week, hopefully sooner than later. He absolutely needs to help calm the players’ nerves and I don’t envy him having to do that at a time when I’m sure the remaining Carbine staff are incredibly stressed. It is vital that he convince us though, because if people believe the game is truly heading for maintenance mode or worse they will stop spending money and make all the prophecies of doom true.

Everything feels like panic and chaos. And candy-coated rowsdowers.

I still support WildStar and Carbine’s awesome staff. Nowhere else have I seen such a lovely, committed group of devs who happily engage with the community on a daily basis. I want to support them with my wallet too, but as a broke student I’ve got to be careful about my finances. Convince me that the game is still moving forward with short- and long-term plans. Reassure me that the game I love will still be here this time next year. There are so many mysteries on Nexus that I want to solve and new places I want to explore and I’ll happily pony up some more money for fancy hats or new dyes if it helps keep the doors open. But first I need to see clear goals and not hollow PR-speak. We’re all looking to you, Pappy, I’m with you til the end!

Someday Arrived

March 13, 2016 by Belghast

Ameristralia

Yesterday was somewhat of an insane day, for so many different reasons. Firstly we had to get up and around rapidly because we had a 10 am wedding to attend, and all the while every bit of technology of my website seemed to be rebelling against me. I struggled to upload any images because apparently their were going through a FTP attack that was busying things out. I managed to limp by and get a post up in spite of the problems. The wedding itself was located out in the middle of nowhere, but that in itself is not what makes it an interesting occasion. One of my wife’s friends met a man from Australia through their social channels, and over the last few years they have been travelling to the two countries to meet family and such. Finally getting married here in America where they intend to live. What is just so flabbergasting about this whole thing… is just how many members of his family attended. I lost count but there were somewhere between sixteen and twenty folks from Australia at the wedding… and all I could think about was just how expensive those plane tickets must have been. Just doing some quick googling it looks like roughly $1300 per flight… which means… well for lack of a better phase this family really loves him.

The wedding was charming, and the bride was beautiful and all that… however the focus of at least my entertainment was this adorable free range kid. Her mom and dad were family of the groom that were acting as photographers for the event. I am guessing that the kid wanted to emulate mom and dad so they gave her a small digital camera… which she then proceeded to go around and take photos of everyone. It was adorable to see her walk up beside my pew, pause for a second and snap a photo before moving on… all without saying a word. She obviously was not having any of the service and wanted to roam around while the wedding was actually going on. I’ve always disliked weddings, I think mostly because for a period of time in my past I worked them with my father. My dad was a portrait and wedding photographer on the side… and I was his assistant and ended up operating the long angle photos set up in a balcony or whatever was available. It is always awkward attending weddings where you don’t really know anyone… and yesterday was absolutely one of those situations. I ended up getting a very strange hug from the grandmother of the bride, thanking us for attending. Thankfully it was over in about an hours time, and we ducked out shortly after the reception started.

So Much Sore

If the yearly bullshit ritual of daylight savings time were not today… I am sore in places I don’t even remember working yesterday. A few months ago we set the goal of tackling our garage over spring break, and to facilitate this we got a dumpster. You have to understand… we don’t use our garage and it has largely been a catch all over the last several years. Anytime we simply wanted something out of our sight… we threw it in the garage thinking “someday” we would take it to the dump, or donate it to goodwill or whatever. Apparently that someday is finally here and on Thursday night when we started… the overwhelming nature of the amount of crap out there was real. I somewhat wish I had taken a before picture but the above image is after a few nights and a half day worth of cleaning. Yesterday was the day we got the bulk of the big things out of there… either into the dumpster or in the two trips I made to Goodwill. About five years ago we had this strange summer when the spider population quadrupled… and apparently their base of operations was our garage. This made it even less appealing to go out there and try and reclaim the space because quite literally you were likely to walk into bits of cobweb spun from wall to wall. We however tried our best to ignore the eight legged infestation that was everywhere… and pushed forward only lamenting later the number of bites we are certain to have gotten… and the constant unshakable feeling that something is crawling on us.

The first photo may not look that impressive, but imagine every single corner of that place packed so that you could not move anywhere without crawling over something first. We had two benches, a dresser, a ferret cage, a hamster cage, and a truly silly number of electronics boxes that I felt for some reason I needed to keep in case something went wrong. On top of that we still had the remnants of the last time we attempted to clean the garage with several boxes, that were neatly sorted and full of obviously important things to us at one point. Then there were the number of things that were inexplicably in the garage and brand new still in package… like an Iced Tea pot, Smoothie Blender, and a tower fan… all neither of us remember having but were probably given to us at one point or another. It had quite literally been a decade since we last actively used our garage and it was like delving into a time capsule. As I said the brute force stuff is mostly taken care of, and at one point we had to make a trip to Big Lots to go purchase the cheapest vacuum we could find… because we decided we would rather not have the good house vacuum full of spiders and for some strange reason dead earthworms. Today we can at least sit down with boxes of stuff and try and sort things out. I think the first mission however is to look at some shelving for one of the walls so that we can neatly stow things out of the way rather than just have boxes laying around everywhere. Needless to say…. Yesterday and Today will both be gaming lite days.

AggroChat #98 – Sociopath or Savior?

May 21, 2019March 13, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen talk about a lot of games, and get into a moral debate about the world of The Division.

This evening we had a pretty strange show as far as subjects go. It feels like we can never just talk about how much we like this or that game without delving into deeper subjects. First up we talk Stardew Valley and how it has seemed to take the internet by a storm… or at least most of our social circles. Next up we talk The Division and instead of getting into a discussion about what we liked about it…. we ended up getting into a discussion about the morality of dispatching extrajudicial executions. Eventually we do however get into a thread about the things we really enjoy about the game. We also talk a bit about the bad news of the week relating to the cancellation of Everquest Next and the severe layoffs at Carbine for Wildstar. This spawns a discussion about MMOs in general and their viability for the future. Finally we talk about the new Flamestrike event going on in Infinity allowing players to participate in a larger campaign through the internet.

Topics Discussed:

Stardew Valley
The Division
Wildstar News
Everquest Next
Infinity Flamestrike

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Bad News Day

March 12, 2016 by Belghast

Goodbye Everquest Next

Yesterday the MMORPG industry received a couple of really bad bits of news. Firstly Daybreak Games has officially announced that Everquest Next is no more, and that they would be rushing Landmark into “launched” status this spring. Firstly it really should not come as any surprise that this is happening because in truth we have not had any substantive news about “Next” since SOE Live 2014. So when Storybricks parted company in February 2015 and SOE was sold to the holding company that renamed it to Daybreak… I fully expected we would never see anything further from Next. Storybricks was going to be the guts of this new approach at how to create an MMO and allow it o almost center around procedural interactions with he various factions and NPCs in the game. With that core gone… I could not reason how the game would function, and deliver even half of the lofty promises it had made. The other huge concern was the fact that Daybreak now seemed like a company desperately trying to survive under the yolk of evil overlords. When a company known for grooming technology for sale purchases a game company… it seems like creative freedom and the broad daydreaming that got SOE where it is today would be the firs thing to go.

The concerns I have is that it feels like Landmark is getting foisted upon us, in an unfinished state. It had been a couple of years since I last played the game and I popped in last night to see just how different it is. In truth it still feels like the prototype game that it has always felt like. I roamed around and collected items and then logged back out because I wasn’t really drawn to stay. The thing I love about Landmark is the community, and I am just hoping that through all of this transition they can manage to keep that intact. The problem I have with Landmark is that it is a fun sandbox that lets you build really interesting structures…. but I still wouldn’t really call it a game but instead more of a toybox. Sure you have the trappings of combat now, but while wandering around in the zone the game dumped me in…. there was actually nothing to fight. Maybe I need to dig down to find that, but the only thing I actually encountered that was potentially damaging were some exploding shrooms. I am hoping that in the few months left before the official launch that they can somehow pull together some of the ideas from Next and make Landmark a proper game experience.

Wildstar Falters

The other concerning news from yesterday is that roughly sixty employees were laid off in a “restructuring” within Carbine. This has honestly been a topic among some of my friends for awhile now, but we were dreading some form of action to be taken. Wildstar has not been performing amazingly well… in fact they are performing far worse right now than with City of Heroes was shut down by NC Soft. As a company goes they are notoriously brutal when it comes to closing titles that they deem are not operating as well as they expected. Wildstar is a significantly better game today than it was at launch, and the Free to Play conversion was more than just a payment model change, but an entire reworking and re-tuning of some of the game concepts. The game felt fresh and new and was exciting… for a period of time. The problem is, that Wildstar is just not my game. I have good friends who love it above all others, and for them it hurts a lot to see the company struggling. Every now and then there is just a game that does not for whatever reason “click”, and that was this game for me. On paper it sounds and looks like everything I could have wanted in a game, and I still think it has one of the best implementations of player housing I have ever seen. Unfortunately I just don’t ever have the desire to play it, and always seemed to prioritize playing something else over it.

The scariest statement about the whole press release is this line. “These cuts are directly tied to WildStar’s evolution from a product in development to a live title“. That right there seems to be signalling the end of active development on Wildstar and shifting the title into maintenance mode. An MMORPG cannot thrive without fresh dose of new content, and while you can do things like add new quests and script events without a lot of active development…. you can’t do things like roll out new zones and raids. Admittedly the game is getting fresh content with the release of Arcterra, and hopefully this will not effect that. The other worrying statement is that apparently there were statements floating around that the employees were told to expect more layoffs in the future. So much happens when layoffs are announced, and there is an internet dog piling of bad blood towards a game. I have nothing but love for Wildstar and its community and I want it to weather this storm and somehow bounce back stronger. I am clinging to hope because I know a lot of people who really need this game to succeed and thrive. All of that said… the cynic an realist in me still keeps saying that this is not going to end well.