It’s never over

* stumbles in, mumbles something to the Newbie Blogger Initiative newbies about never worrying about taking a break, just hop back in and keep going and everything will be fine *

Did you miss me? I’ve been working my butt off doing SCIENCE and traveling across multiple time zones to tell people about it. I’m exhausted but happy, and I’m finally home and playing games again. Since it is the end of the month I thought I’d just take a quick stock of what I’ve been playing and what my plans are for July.

Chroma Squad

This was the Aggrochat game of the month, and I had to rush to play as much as I could after getting back from my trip. It is a funny little tactical RPG with some tycoon elements, all about being the Power Rangers cast of a super sentai show. I never liked the Power Rangers much as a kid, but this game is funny and endearing. I only got through one “season” before we recorded the podcast, so I’m hoping to finish the game in July without the time crunch. I don’t think I will love it as much as some of the other Aggrochat folks, but I’m definitely enjoying it.

Diablo 3

The season is winding down and so is my enthusiasm. I had been toying with the idea of fully completing the season journey this time around but I’ve lost all my motivation at this point. I’ll be content with my stash tab this time around, and look forward to season 7 instead. I’m really hoping that with Overwatch out and Legion almost ready, that Bliz will start making some more noise about this franchise this fall.

Stellaris

I was spending hours engrossed in this game right before my trip. I have yet to hop back in at all since I got home. I know they just released a pretty nice patch, but I will want to make a new game to see everything and starting from scratch is not appealing right now. Except for the part where I would really like to try a multiplayer game, and if I can make that happen this game will probably move up my priority list.

Destiny

Through encouragement, curiosity, and outright bribery from Belghast, I’ve gotten sucked into playing Destiny lately. It has been many many years since I’ve played much in the way of first person shooters, and I was pretty awful at it for a few days. Lately I’m feeling more comfortable with a controller in my hand though, and have been greatly enjoying the game. I’m not thrilled about doing pvp or dungeons strikes much, mostly because I know I’m still pretty terrible and don’t want to have people rage at me. Every day I’m getting a little better and a little braver though. It helps that I have voice chat turned off so I don’t have to hear if people are yelling at me.

FFXIV

Speaking of people raging. My last post had lots of super positive things to say about FFXIV. Almost immediately after that I healed a random dungeon with some tank who heaped abuse on me, and any enthusiasm I had for the game went straight out the window. It is funny how fast one bad experience can sour an entire game. I’m sure there’s folks out there who will say I should not let it get to me, grow a thicker skin or stay out of MMOs but frankly, F*** that. I used to be the kind of person who would just let trolling or abuse roll off me or even turn around and criticize back but at this stage in my life I’d really like to enjoy my hobby without having to tolerate or participate in the toxicity that sometimes comes with it. I think it makes me extra angry because FFXIV is a game that is notable for having a far better community than almost any other MMO I’ve played. I’ve still had some fun doing old content for mounts with friends or seeing some of the new story and dungeons, again with friends. I haven’t seen any more abusive people and things have been mostly enjoyable. My sub expires in just a few days though, and I don’t think I can justify renewing for maybe one night a week of fun.

WoW

WoW is in a weird place for me right now. I am subbed basically because I can do so without paying any real money, and use the time to prepare for Legion when I might actually want to play the game. I’ve been logging in almost exclusively to do my wizard chores on 9-15 alts (depending on how much I care about my secondary servers on any given day) and collect free gold, with a tiny bit of old raid farming for transmog/mounts on the side. WoW isn’t a game to me right now, it is a holding pattern, it is a chore. I am simultaneously trying to squeeze every ounce out of the free gold machine while gleefully anticipating the day when I never have to look at my garrison again. It is a matter of giving up any enjoyment I might get out of the game now, in favor of putting myself in a better position to enjoy the game when the expansion comes. To those who say I am playing the game wrong, and should be enjoying myself right now I say: No. This system is available and I will participate in it so that I can get rewards I’m looking forward to down the road. It is no different in any way from the grueling torture of the Insane achievement, months of agonizing repetitive tasks, more “fun” activities given up in favor of a longer term goal. This is a method of play long supported by Bliz, the systems have changed but the underlying carrots and horrible horrible sticks are still there.

July

I don’t have a list of small, specific goals for July like many other bloggers do. I want to get better at Destiny, finish Chroma Squad, see more of the Arcterra content in Wildstar, and make as much gold in WoW as possible before they nerf garrisons. These seem reasonable, and vague enough that I will probably meet them and get to feel good about myself for it!


It’s never over

Overdue Rant

Internal Struggle

This morning I have stalled in sitting down to write my post, because I have a bit of a dilemma.  I try really hard to keep my blog overwhelmingly positive, with try being the opportune word there.  Over the last several years I have tried to limit the amount of negativity that I allow into my life.  That said every so often I encounter something that really pisses me off for a whole bunch of reasons.  Yesterday I encountered one of those things, and this morning I have been struggling with trying to find anything else that I would rather talk about in my morning blog post.  For the most part Legion has been an undiscovered territory for me, every now and then I see the echoes of drama happening in the World of Warcraft community but I have not dug further.  However yesterday some friends of mine were talking about the ramifications of the crafting system changes, and in a conversation I was not even directly participating in… they linked the above video.  Over twitter there have been like I said echoes of frustration about the changes, but not a whole bunch of details.  Now I guess in a way I can see the frustrations, namely centering around a new high demand resource called Blood of Sargeras that is going to be bind on pickup.  This feels short sighted honestly, but this isn’t really something that pissed me off.  Instead what frustrated me was the tone of the video and some of the phrasing of the answers.

One of the things I have mentioned before is a general feeling of condescension towards players that I receive when some Warcraft devs talk to the public.  Alex Afrasiabi has been really bad about this especially during Blizzcon, and apparently Paul Kubit has learned to represent the product from this same school of thought.  There are several moments during this video where the statement that is delivered feels like the equivalent of “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that”.  This came across big time in a discussion from this video that I am going to paraphrase about dual crafters being at a disadvantage in gaining Blood of Sargeras.  Which essentially gets answered as “we don’t feel crafters are disadvantaged” then a few moments later “we gave gatherers an advantage”.  If you give one class of player an advantage that a different class of player cannot get… that is pretty much the textbook definition of a disadvantage.  Other questions were not even really answered and just “Noped” out of existence, and the truth being I thought the collected questions that Josh Allen was reading off were pretty good ones.  The worst of these being the lack of any reason that might possibly matter about why they didn’t just make Blood of Sargeras bind on account, stating that they don’t want players to feel like they have to have an army of alts.  Which feels counter intuitive to how their game actually feels to play, given that after a point… if you want to stay invested you are going to ultimately roll up an army of alts.

There is a certain amount of paternalism that seems to be happening with the game design in World of Warcraft, that has honestly kept happening since around the launch of Cataclysm.  There is this general feeling I keep getting that “father knows best” and that we really shouldn’t want these things.  While the game keeps changing, I don’t really see any incarnation really being better than the last…  just that it is different and attempting to patch the holes in the previous design without fully understanding it.  It does not feel like we are building towards anything anymore, given that when a new system is introduced we know deep down inside that come next expansion  the devs will be backing away from it as quickly as possible.  So things like the Artifact weapons are awesome…  but so was the Garrison when it was first introduced, or the Half Hill Farm… or countless other things that were ushered it to create a new era of greatness in Warcraft only to be demolished two years later when the next “greatest thing” is released.  The myopic vision of the game hurts it, and makes it feel like nothing that came before the beginning of this expansion actually mattered.  That was not the way thing felt up through Wrath of the Lich King.  Back then it felt like we were building towards something, that we were unlocking new and interesting ideas with each content patch.  Now the entire experience feels shallow and lacking any meaningful depth that extends past the current patch cycle.

When all of this is the case or at least feels like it… the last thing you want to be told repeatedly by Blizzard staff is that you shouldn’t want more.  I realize that it is impossible to appease all of the fans, but to present folks that seem to have an adversarial tone about their obvious darlings… is not really a great option either.  I could do a super-cut of condescending answers to heart felt questions from the fans, knit together from videos like this one and countless Blizzcon panels.  All that would really do is to serve to make me even more sad.  Ultimately that is the problem I am having is that I want to get excited about Legion, but the more I hear about it the more I end up getting disappointed.  It is a foregone conclusion that I will play it however.  I always end up playing World of Warcraft expansions, but about a month and a half in the shiny seems to wear off and I remember the game I am playing.  I would stop trying, save for the fact that I still have a lot of friends that I care about… that are really enjoying this game in ways that I seem to be unable to.  This is precisely the sort of post I have tried to NOT make, but this morning…  I just couldn’t stop it from coming out of my hands on the keyboard.  I apologize now for all of the folks who are wrapped up the in thrall of Legion news.  I don’t want to rain on your enjoyment, and more so I am honestly jealous that you feel that way.  I wish I could bottle it and prescribe drinking whatever that is on a daily basis, because I would like to enjoy the game and play with my friends.  However this video and its tone… just sort of broke something inside of me that caused this rant to spill forth.  Tomorrow I will be positive and happy, and talking about the things that excite me once more…  but today I had to get a bunch of stuff that had built up off my chest.

Regularly Playing: June Edition

Back in May I decided to make a monthly ritual of “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” widget on the sidebar to more closely represent the games I quite literally was playing on regular rotation.  Given that it is that time again… here is the list of things for June.  I added a few new games into the mix and also removed a few more… even if one is really only temporary.  Doing the thing where I write a blurb about what I happened to be doing in each of them.

Rift

Regularly Playing: June Edition

In a weird bit of nostalgia, I decided to come back to Rift and give it another push.  There has never really been a period of time when I have not actually at least dabbled in this game, but so many times I failed to gain traction.  This time around I somehow managed to push from 61 to 65 and have started on  this mad mission to raise all of my tradeskills.  Now having almost accomplished that I will be pushing into the Planetouched Wilds and giving it a real amount of effort.  On top of this I am focused heavily on my crafting dailies, which often times means I need to venture out into the world in search of Sarleaf and Thalasite.  With the shift of WoW to the Garrison for most of your farming needs… I had forgotten just how much I really did love going off and ore farming.  There is just something relaxing about wandering around a zone with a purpose, looking for the next ore pop and trying to get to it before anyone else notices.  It is this weird game within a game that actually seems to work well for me.  I spent many an hour flying circles around Icecrown or Sholazar Basin in Wrath… and now am loving doing the same thing for Gelboro Reef.  Largely I am focused on that zone since, firstly I know it pretty well… and secondly the mobs are low enough level that I can go afk as needed and make it back to the keyboard before something actually kills me.  I am certain that I could be farming ore while wandering around the Planetouched Wilds, but the mobs out there are truly brutal.  Whatever the reason… I am deeply invested in Rift and its community once more and loving it.

Destiny: The Taken King

Regularly Playing: June Edition

While I have slowed down considerably in this game, there are still regularly sessions of it… namely because I have been trying to get fellow AggroChat member and good friend  of mine Grace settled in game.  Monday night we managed to get her to level 40, and pushed through the Taken King quest content… which means that there is an entirely new world waiting for her of endgame stuff.  With Iron Banner going on this weekend, I highly expect that the two of us will be working on that or at least attempting to show her the ropes of the event.  We also have several more steps in the recruit a friend process, but as we get her gear level up there it should get easier to do cooler stuff.  Other than that other games have taken priority over the last few weeks, namely with my return to active duty in FFXIV and running stuff in Rift.  Hopefully the Iron Banner will be a good event to get me back into focus and moving forward in Destiny once more.  I feel pretty disconnected, and I miss the Thursday night Challenge of Elders stuff horribly, I just had a few crazy weeks with the St Louis trip, and Kansas City trip… and a bunch of other random occurrences that knocked me out of my schedule.  Hopefully I can start to rebuild said schedule and get moving forward once more.

ArcheAge

Regularly Playing: June Edition

In a similar fashion to Rift, I have suddenly become involved and attached to the ArcheAge community as well.  Right now I am largely focused on leveling, but at some point I plan on doing all the tradeskilly things in this game as well.  Last year the AggroChat crew made a serious push into this game, and while we faded into the background… I still found it extremely enjoyable.  Additionally like I said yesterday, many of the early toxic aspects of the community as a whole seem to be gone.  Right now I am trying to get back in tune with the game and try and remember how the hell to do half of the things.  On the positive as I grind away at questing I seem to keep getting really nice drops for weapons and armor…  however I remember that most of the best stuff I had was crafted.  I just happened to time my return to coincide with some welcome back campaign, and I keep accruing rewards into my inventory that at some point I will figure out how to use.  Mostly I would like to hit the level cap before worrying too much with them, but I believe some of them are xp bonuses that I might as well use now.  If you are actively playing I am Belglaive on the Tahyang server, but I am not sure what all it requires to actually friend someone in game.  I am not sure if cross server friends lists are a thing there like they are in Rift.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

Regularly Playing: June Edition

I spent most of the month deeply frustrated with this game, namely because I was sitting at what felt like an artificial gear cap and being prevented from progressing in the story.  Since then however I managed to get a Void Ark run with some friends and got over whatever anxiety I happened to have about tanking it.  As a result I am now sitting at 205 gear score, and bumping up against the Nidhogg trial in the story.  It is my hope that at some point this week I can get a few friends together and run this and hopefully complete the 3.3 patch story.  I am still enjoying the game, but I lack the drive to play it… that I have in say Rift or ArcheAge right now.  For at least the foreseeable future my activity in game is probably going to be limited to our Tuesday night activities, or the occasional expert or other event that I organize with friends.  I love playing this game… but right now I only seem to love playing it with a group of friends logged in at the same time.  It is still an amazing game, but it has shifted into the sort of role that World of Warcraft has been in the past… that game that I only played when there was an organized activity.

World of Warcraft

Regularly Playing: June Edition

This one admittedly is barely making the list, and keeping its space on my sidebar.  Right now I am occasionally logging in to run Garrisons and get my free gold, but not doing much more other than that.  There has been talk of myself, grace and a few others doing random old world content for transmoggy bits and honestly…  that right now is about all I am interesting in World of Warcraft as a whole.  I feel like I am in a “desperately waiting for the Legion pre-patch” mode.  Largely because I am tired of not having any bank space, and removing any of my outfits is simply not an option.  I am not joking when I say that right now the only important thing to me in this game… is looking cool with my collection of old raid gear littering my bank vault.  If the new transmog system were actually patched in… I would more than likely go through a flurry of activity as I once again do awesome old world content for cool threads.  However I quite literally have hit a point where I maybe have 15 bag slots total between inventory, bank and void storage…. so I simply cannot play Belghast anymore without risking removing something.  So instead… I run the occasional garrison mission as I alternate through my army of alts… and then log out once again.

Things Removed From List

Overwatch

Zero clue why on this one… but the game released and I just have had no desire to really play it.  I am amped about just how excited everyone else seems to be about this game, but honestly it feels like I am more interested in talking about the world and the characters… than actually playing it.  If the player versus bots game were more compelling I would likely play it more often, but right now it feels like to enjoy it I need a group of friend to play it.  Ironically I have a huge group of friends playing it… but I think I am going through a “quiet time” phase where I just want to piddle around on my own in games rather than do a lot of organized play.  The few nights I rode along with people… I lasted 3 to 4 games before feeling the need to run and hide again.  I am certain at some point I will once again get the Overwatch bug, but the truth is I am just not that into competitive games.

Diablo 3

Removing this one again temporarily because well…. the season is over.  I have accomplished everything I could ever hope to accomplish, and now is the quiet time until the next patch.  This will be returning once again as another season starts and we all go through the crazy happy madness that is a season launch.  For a bit I was still farming for pets and such, but with the addition of several games this got removed from the docket.  I still very much love this game and look forward to adding it back to the list, but for the moment we are in the off season and the game for me at least is dormant.

 

Revisiting Old Ideas

ArcheAge Resurgence

Revisiting Old Ideas

I have been on quite the Trion Worlds games kick lately after coming back to Rift, and that has how officially spilled over into ArcheAge as well.  ArcheAge and I have a bit of a torrid past, or at least it was not a game that I really latched onto from the moment I first played it.  In fact in those early Alpha and eventual Beta days… the game had a less than stellar community.  That however has changed with time and a significant amount of effort by Trion staff, and the community that exists today is pretty great.  I blame Kiwi entirely for me starting to poke my head back into the game, and right now I am largely focused on leveling.  Right now I am playing a Firran Bloodreaver on Tahyang server, however as soon as the 3.0 patch lands I will largely be restarting as a Dwarf which will place me on the Nuia faction instead of Haranya.  Because of the lag between the South Korean and American versions of this game, we have known that Dwarves and Warborn would be something that would more than likely eventually cross between versions…  so I have been patiently waiting.  Of the starter races the Firrans were by far my favorite…  but if you put Dwarves in the game there is zero contest.  So I will have to bid a farewell to the crazy oriental steampunk land that I have grown up in on my cat, and get used to a more european fantasy setting once again.  Not necessarily a bad thing, just different.

I believe the level cap is somewhere in the 50s, so I still have a good ways to go since I am sitting at only 36 and that leveling in general does not go terribly quickly in this game.  It seems like my return was well timed, given that they gave me some sort of a welcome back package.  It included a quest that opens every 24 hours for various rewards, and a bunch of tokens that can be spent on Mirage Island, but I have not ventured back out there to see what all I can purchase with them.  At this point I am sorta waiting until I hit the level cap before being too tempted by the shiny baubles.  The game has so many little systems and currencies and things that can be done… but I feel like I would need to do a bunch of research to even begin to start taking advantage of half of it.  That is why in the meantime I am largely focusing on the leveling game, because combat is something that I understand… and honestly enjoy quite a lot after settling on the Bloodreaver class that is a mixture of Battlerage, Occultism and Auramancy.  One of the big concerns I can remember having about this game is the fairly open PVP system, but for the last several zones I have been in “High Tension” zones and really have remained largely uninterrupted in my pursuit of leveling.  The ArcheAge community staff deserves some pretty major Kudos for turning the course around in this game, and fostering what appears to be a real sense of community in its players.  Looking forward to delving further into it the longer I stick around.

Working on Something

Revisiting Old Ideas

Last night was largely devoted to helping a friend of mine get to level 40 in Destiny and through the Taken King storyline missions.  However after I logged out of that game I poked my head back into Rift.  I worry that maybe folks reading this blog are getting tired of me talking about the game, but then again I am certain they also felt that way about Destiny, The Division and Diablo 3…  or any of the other games I have latched onto and obsessed over.  The weird thing about Rift is how much it has felt like “coming home”.  What you have to understand is that there has never been a period of time where I did not log into Rift, but for a good chunk of it I was honestly confused by the options.  What I mean by that is there are just so many different things that you can do in this game, and I felt like I was missing any real sense of bearing.  I would log into the game… see my insanely full bags, see the fact that I was nowhere near the level cap and struggle to sort out exactly what I wanted to do with myself.  Then like a sad little puppy I would log right back out feeling confused and frustrated because I had the desire to play… but somehow lacked the force to break the inertia of standing around in the Tempest Bay Canals district.  Granted right now… I still spend a good deal of my time in that location…  however current it is out of a sense of feeling like I belong there, and not out of a sense of being trapped there.  I go out into the world and explore all manner of new stuff, but I wind up returning back to my home base in the crafting area.

Revisiting Old Ideas

A little over five years ago when Rift launched I did a series of posts called “Why You Should Be Playing Rift”.   The purpose of these posts was extremely misguided, and was my way of rebelling against “the man” at that time… aka trying to convert the folks still playing World of Warcraft to being Rift players.  It worked for some, and others it just caused them to delete my blog from their blog roll, and un-follow me over on social media.  The other day I started thinking about these posts and what I was trying to do with them, and decided that it might be interesting to revisit that concept.  However instead of writing them in spite, as a way of trying to show the world what they were missing…  the idea this time is for me to tell you all what I see in the game.  Rift is like that friend in high school that you have maybe drifted apart from…  but when you get back together it is like no time has passed.  Except in this case your friend has quietly evolved and developed a bunch of cool new things they know how to do.  Rift has remained trucking along in the background, seemingly ignored by a lot of the MMORPG players as a phase they maybe went through at some point.  It is a game that seems to keep figuring out new quality of life tweaks to make the game more enjoyable.  However it is also a game with a bunch of scary looking monetization methods that I think frighten too many players, and keep them from spending more time and getting to know the game the way I do.  So while I am adopting the same sort of name that I had the first time… as a sort of revisiting effort, the purpose is completely different this time.  My goal is to show you my readers why I feel the way I feel about various aspects of this game.  I am still working on the first part, but hopefully soon it will make its way to the front page and kick off the sequence properly.  More than anything I guess I wanted to warn my long time readers, that you are going to likely be reading a lot more of Rift and ArcheAge content in the near future.