Month: August 2016

My Legion Launch Preparations

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I haven’t made any. Jazz Hands.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve done what I felt like doing instead of making sure every character is prepared for Legion. That means I collected the invasion transmog and used invasions to level alts I’ll probably never play, instead of gearing up the characters who will be first out of the gate in the expansion. Heck, I still haven’t truly chosen a main for Legion yet. Mage is in the lead but I may still cave at the last second and play something that can heal. Who knows?! My alts are in disarray, I haven’t kept up with any gold making activities and I have remained relatively spoiler-free about the leveling content for the expansion. It may look like peak laziness but is in fact a carefully calculated gamble. I’m hoping that by going into the expansion completely unprepared and with no concrete plans, I might just be able to slow down, enjoy the leveling process, and avoid burnout. I don’t have any plans for raiding outside of LFR, but I do have at least 2 groups of folks making noises about mythic+ dungeons and that’s good enough for me. It is so much easier to wrangle 5 people on a regular basis than 10 or 20. Plus, the new Karazhan is set up for 5 people, and that’s the only must-see content I’ve seen announced so far!

I also haven’t done any IRL preparations for the launch of the expansion. No days taken off work, no meals prepped ahead of time, and no plans to stay up late. The last time I did a full-out MMO all night launch party was for WildStar. There’s no way I can muster that kind of enthusiasm for a new WoW expansion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see everything new, but I’m not in such a hurry to get leveled that I need to stay up all hours and waste precious leave time. It doesn’t help that this is the first week of classes, so there’s not much chance of me getting away for a few weeks anyway. But this weekend is a holiday in the States, and I am sure I’ll be getting a ton of WoW playing done then!

The sense I’ve been getting from my social circles is that people are becoming less likely to go through the full launch night nonsense as time goes on. Lots of folks are already making backup plans for the next few days in case of the ubiquitous server issues or DDoS attacks. Are any of you planning an all-nighter for Legion? or are you planning to face those demons only after a good night’s rest?


My Legion Launch Preparations

The Horizon

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A few days ago I saw this tweet from Grimsley, and meant to say something about it…  the other posts happened between.  I had not exactly put it into words but I have been noticing the same thing.  Initially I thought it was simply me that was no longer excited about these new games, but then I noticed that not that many folks in my otherwise MMO-Centric twitter feed seems to be getting excited either.  Sure there was an up-welling of folks playing Black Desert Online a few months back, but it felt like a splash in the pan compared to when folks shifted to Rift, Wildstar, or a plethora of other games to come up on the MMO front over the last decade.  Recently I ended up picking up Riders of Icarus because I had friends playing it…  but after a weekend of playing have not touched it since.  I had a very similar experience with Skyforge, where I played it for a week and some change, and then once again I was simply done with it and back to other titles.  There seemed to be this period of time where there was constantly the next big thing on the horizon… but that era appears to be dead and gone at least when it comes to AAA MMO titles.  Every now there are flareups, like with the launch of The Division.  However it feels like the era of the western published MMO is also good and dead, which might be part of the reason we stopped looking forward to these “next big things”.

South Korea is going through a bit of a renaissance still, as evidenced by the number of new MMOs coming out from there… that are often times localized for the North American market.  The big problem there is that I have found that I don’t really get into these games nearly as much as I did to their western fantasy counter parts.  Sure I played ArcheAge but the story of that game was largely nonsense, and I kept playing just because it gave me a huge world to explore full of lots of super intricate systems.  Blade and Soul I had a similar experience, where no matter how good the localization team did at making awesome relevant jokes…  I just didn’t find myself caring one little bit about the Hongmoon School.  In both cases a story is being told, that fundamentally feels like it was not intended for me to be playing it.  I am not saying that is a bad thing necessarily, because not every game has to be for every player.  The only problem is this is an added depth of “gunshy” that I have when I see an otherwise cool looking game that comes from the Korean market.  Another big part of the bounce factor for me is the inclusion of player versus player as the eventual end game.  That is not something I am likely to ever enjoy, especially not in an open world setting…  and as I entered that area of the world in ArcheAge it felt like the world around me got significantly less intricate because our time was supposed to be spent fighting other players.  Of note I am currently subscribed to ArcheAge so that game clearly left its mark on me, and caused me to dig in rather than bounce off, but I feel like it might be the outlier rather than the rule.

What I am finding however is that instead of looking forward to a new game coming to ride in on a white horse and save me from other MMOs…  I am looking to games that I have loved in the past and the content that they are creating.  I have always been one of those players to go back and revisit old games, and currently I have accounts active in Rift, ArcheAge, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV.  Additionally I poke my head in every now and then in Wildstar, and Everquest II to see how those games are going.  Essentially instead of following new games, I find myself following patch notes to see which game has something so interesting that I have to leap back into it for awhile.  Star Wars the Old Republic for example completely changed the way that game works, and at some point in the near future once other games die down a bit, I have a feeling I will be falling headfirst into the new content.  Similarly there is a lot of awesome stuff going on in Elder Scrolls Online, and at some point I want to return there and gobble up all the new fruit hanging on that tree.  I find that I am very much still a “content locust” except in this case I find myself returning to games I have already explored, rather than continually venturing forth into brand new worlds to stake my claim there.  There is this rich wealth of games that have survived, and sometimes even thrived… and I just seem to place my focus there instead of looking to the horizon.  A prime example is that as of tomorrow the next few months of my life will be dominated by the World of Warcraft Legion expansion… and then in October at Fanfest I fully expect the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion to be announced so we can begin looking forward to that as well.  There are still objects on the Horizon, they are just linked to other objects that are already familiar.

What I’m Playing: August 28, 2016

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This week has been very strange due to my recent medical “stuff”. I had a bunch of down time, but wasn’t able to actually sit at a computer to play games. As a result my gaming activity for the week ended up being very different from what I had planned.

World of Warcraft: I had grand plans for WoW this week. With the Legion invasion event still going I was hoping to get at least one more character to 100. Since Tuesday I have barely touched the game sadly, so I think the event is effectively over for me. It was fun overall, and I got a lot of leveling done. Still, I’ll be glad for Legion’s launch this week and the copious amounts of new things to do. If this event is a good indication of how the expansion will feel, count me as excited.

Diablo 3: This is where I spent most of my computer time, which was still pretty small. I’ve been working toward upgrading my legendary gems to 65 for the conquest, and also slowly augmenting some of my ancient legendaries so I can tackle higher greater rifts. Rifting has been perfect since each one won’t last any longer than 15 minutes and I can get up from my desk afterward to take a break. It’s been just enough that it makes me want to grab the stash tab this season, but with Legion coming on Tuesday I doubt I’ll stay dedicated enough to finish the job.

Mobile Games: I don’t usually play a huge amount of mobile games but they got a lot more appealing to me this week. I still play Pokemon Go every day, but lately it consists of logging in, catching any pokemon nearby, and logging back out. Instead I’ve been relying on 3 old favorites to pass the time: Tiny Tower, Puzzle and Dragons, and Alphabear. They seem to have the right combination of mindless tapping and cute puzzles to keep me distracted, and I can rotate between the three as resources or my attention span become limiting. It’s not exactly a high caliber of gaming but it has been great to keep me occupied this week.

That’s pretty much it for me this week. Next week is going to be all about the Legion, assuming I can actually sit at a computer long enough to enjoy it. I hope your week was more productive than mine!


What I’m Playing: August 28, 2016

Belghula Rising

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Belghula Rising

This week marks the last week of the Legion Invasion event, and with it goes the insane leveling elevator that many of us have ridden over and over.  At this point I have every slot on Argent Dawn Alliance filled with level 100 characters, and over the last bit of this week I have been pushing Belghula my female Orc Warlock on The Scryers.  Scryers is a linked realm with Argent Dawn and when that occurred I made the choice to roll a complete set of Hordies over there, so that I could hang out and play with friends I had other the other side of the server.  The Argent Dawn community has always been an odd one, and for a period of time we had a thriving official… and later unofficial server forum.  I still somewhat wish I had not killed the domain behind that forum, but at that time I thought I didn’t really want to be playing World of Warcraft anymore.  In any case I have a large community of horde friends that I love dearly, but never got to play with.  When I purchased Legion I ended up using my boost to create a level 100 Tauren Paladin and I even got to raid over there for a period of time…  until Sundays didn’t really work that well for me.  Now I am pushing up a second 100 to have a more balanced set of characters to play.  Something happened and I decided that I don’t mind casters… and even really like the Warlock so that ultimately is the one I have decided to push.

Last night during the podcast I managed to get her to level 95, so it should be relatively trivial to finish off and ding 100 today.  Similarly I have an Orc Deathknight waiting in the wings as well in the 60s… but I am not completely sure if I am going to push it hard or not.  I would like to at a minimum get it to 80 because the Cataclysm/Panda/Warlords grind seems much faster than getting a single character through Wrath of the Lich King.  I’ve talked about this in the past, but content design has changed a lot since Wrath and quest stacking was a much harder proposal back then than it is now.  By quest stacking I mean gathering up a bunch of quests related to a specific area and then burning through them all at once.  As far as the Cataclysm/Panda/Warlords grind… I feel like I have that one down to an artform jumping zones each time my adventure guide lights up telling me there is a new zone to jump to.  The most interesting thing about the whole experience however has been seeing how folks have broken the event over their knee and abused the hell out of the system.  The other day I talked a bit about the idea of resetting the event, but ultimately decided that it just made it a boring grind.  Some folks however have apparently taken this process to the extreme.

Last night I was sitting in the Crossroads minding my own business and working on the event, when someone broadcast a message across general talking about an Exp Grinding party.  They had auto invite scripts set up so that if someone typed 1 in chat it would throw out a raid invite.  The level of organization was impressive, even to the level of asking those of us who happened to have two seated mounts to use those and give rides to the players who were on foot or on slow land mounts.  From there we took a very specific route, killing what I feel was probably the optimal path through the mobs.  There were several times were we paused for a second to wait for the next mob in the sequence to spawn in… or when she went off to pull one that was within range to burn them down at the same time.  I cannot state how impressive this level of organization and cooperation from players actually ended up being.  She shouted the next target to general so that anyone else NOT in our raid could also reap the benefit.  The real coordination however was that when we finished phase three she told everyone to log out, and disbanded the party.  The idea being that when everyone logged back in they would potentially be in the same Stage 1 event.  I went ahead and finished out this event and moved to the next zone instead, but I have to marvel at how well that worked.  In truth I don’t want to really abuse this event, because doing it legitimately provides more than enough experience and loot for my tastes.  That said I guess this method probably works much faster and provides and endless supply of experience in one of the easier zones that the event is taking place.