Bright Engrams Revisited

Bright Engrams Revisited

Over the last few nights I have been super engaged with the start of the new Destiny 2 season.  One of the things I dig so much about it is how I can focus in on a different activity each night and vary up what I am doing…  but still enjoy whatever it is that I am doing.  I am not so much into the Crucible so I have not touched that this week yet, but one night I focused on the Planetary Flashpoint, another I really focused on Gambit, and last night for example I mostly focused on completing stuff in the Dreaming City including a bunch of Blind Well.  At some point I am sure I will at least do 3 strikes and 3 heroic story missions to get the powerful engrams included.  The only complaint I have to be honest is the fact that I keep getting Helmets instead of pieces of 600 gear that I actually still need for a given slot.

Bright Engrams Revisited

One of the things that came up in my little social community was some comments about loot boxes and how a friend of mine did not like the Destiny 2 implementation.  On one level yeah… it is less than optimal, but after living with it for awhile and having them tweak the formula… I no longer feel it is anywhere near as heinous as some of the loot box schemes I have seen.  What changed is there are a bunch of tweaks that were made, not the least of which is the fact that once you have earned an item you can always go into your collections tab.  This is any weapons that are static rolls, so basically anything pre-forsaken…  any ghosts, sparrows, ships, shaders, etc so essentially anything has less need for permanence which is making me way more liberal at scrapping things.  As a result I almost always have a decent balance of Dust… which you can see in the above picture is like 6044.  This morning I opened one of the Bright Engrams and got a skin for one of the Titan exotics, 3 shaders, and a bounty note.  The skin could be scrapped but I have not collected it yet so that was not going to happen, the shaders scrap at around 10 dust per… and the bounty note is turned in for Tess Everis specific bounties that reward glimmer and dust.

Essentially I feel like the game is giving us a bunch of options to get cash shop goods without spending any real world money.  There is always the problem that everything coming from a Bright Engram is super random…  but that is mitigated by the fact that each week during a given season Tess is offering a bunch of items for direct purchase.  Last week they had a ton of the exotic items but this week it looks like they are mostly selling legendary stuff…  2 emotes, 2 sparrows, 2 ships, 1 ghost shell, one armor piece and a couple of the exotic weapon skins.  Basically this helps to mitigate the randomness of the engrams and allows you to just straight out buy the item you were wanting.  Unfortunately this also means you need to be logging in each week to check out and see if Tess is selling that one thing you really wanted.

Bright Engrams Revisited

In a night of casual play I tend to get one or two engrams as the bar feels like it fills way faster than it used to.  You can see in the above shot that I am pretty damned close to getting one, and that happened to be the one I opened this morning and screenshot its contents.  One night this week I got 3, and last weekend there was a really heavy play day that I got four of them in a single day.  Essentially I am saying that they are way more generous with said loot baubles, at least compared to how it felt when the game initially launched.  This isn’t a “Belghast Luck” thing because experience game is experience gain for everyone, and sure maybe the fact that the first engram I opened this season gave me the sweet ghost rider sparrow…  is luck.  Anyways I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the cash shop in Destiny 2 and how it has gone from really horrible… to completely manageable.  Having a cash shop in a game is always going to incur some problems, but the tweaks they have made since launch have turned this one into a completely manageable situation.  The biggest change for me personally was when I realized I could re-buy shaders… which has made me way more cool with scrapping them knowing that if I really want a specific color I can buy it again.

Wildstar Thoughts

Wildstar Thoughts

I am having one of those mornings when I am not entirely certain I have thoughts that are worth sharing.  However because of the ritual that I have built up for myself I am going to share something anyway.  I consistently have a chorus of “no one wants to hear about that” running through my head as I write most of my posts.  I think that is in part why I struggle so hard when someone says something nice to me about my blog or any of the other things I do.  I feel like I really have no clue what I am doing and even more so why anyone would care about it.  I am super appreciative that people do seem to care, but I feel like one of these days everyone is going to pull back the curtain and realize what a boring person I am.  Worse I have an unshakable fear that I am a fraud and that some terribly clever person is going to write a lengthy essay on medium pointing out this fact and cause you all to hate me.  Medium feels like it is a site entirely about writing lengthy essays about exposing harsh truths about the things we love.

Wildstar Thoughts

Sometimes I start writing and things just veer wildly off course, and I have a feeling that is precisely what is happening this morning.  Yesterday afternoon at 2pm pst Wildstar went dark as a game and I have some weird feelings about it.  This was not an important game to me personally, in fact I struggled to figure out why everyone liked it so much.  That said I realize that it was a very important game for an awful lot of the people who I care about in my life.  This is in part why I kept trying to unlock the puzzle about what made it feel good to play.  Probably the happiest I was with the game was when I was playing my Chua Engineer and even then…  largely because of the adorable bot army that I drug along with me.  The core problem there is… that the vast majority of the friends I had playing the game on the regular were Exiles not Dominion.  Sure this eventually changed so that you could cross faction until your heart was content… but I think by then it was too far past that golden time in which a game really has to hook me on its charm.

Wildstar Thoughts

There was something about the game that caused me to struggle with it.  There was a certain sensory overload that I felt each time I played, with too many things going on with the UI and the telegraphs that just left my eyes feeling immensely tired after playing it for a short period of time.  I realize this is weird given that I have always been one of those people who prefers to have a massive number of UI elements on screen in World of Warcraft, but the combination of this and the action combat proved to be more than I could handle most of the time.  I am regretful that I never managed to make it to the level cap or really experience any of the endgame content.  I had multiple characters largely fall off the face of the leveling curve in Whitevale…  and I am not entirely certain what specifically about that zone caused me to lose all forward momentum.

Wildstar Thoughts

All of that said I have to tell you that Wildstar had quite possibly the best housing system I have seen in a game, namely the way you could set up your little pocket dimension to be whatever you wanted it to be…  along with interesting minigames to play.  It also had an excellent cosmetic gear and dye pot system that I hope going forward more games pay attention to.  It was a game that gave its players so many nice systems, and I think that is in part why it had a generally thriving social structure.  There are a good number of people that I met through the game that have become fixtures of my Twitter feed in a daily basis, and I am thankful that I got to meet all of them.  Said feed was completely breaking my heart as I watched so many emotional posts scrolling by in the last hours of the game before they finally shut things down.  I think what probably makes this worse… is the fact that Wildstar lasted far longer than anyone actually expected it would given NC Soft’s track record of shuttering still relatively popular franchises.

Wildstar Thoughts

At this point however I am not entirely certain which is worse.  Watching a game get shuttered, or having a game purchased by a company that you are almost certain is going to do bad things to the game.  I watched Hellgate London be bastardized by Hanbitsoft and then get regurgitated back onto Steam in a form that is at times barely recognizable to the original.  Recently Trion Worlds was purchased by a company that has games in its stable with literally temporary inventory bags that expire after seven days.  So I have nothing but the worst fears about how Rift is going to change under their stewardship.  So I am not sure if it is worse to see a game completely close its doors, or to watch it flop around in a zombie state for awhile muddying your memories of it.  As I have said before when this sort of thing happens…  these MMO games that we love are fleeting.  Grab on with both hands and enjoy them while you still can, because eventually…  they are likely going to shut their doors either replaced by something shiny and new or because the players disappeared over time.  In the case of Wildstar we can only hope that a Server Emulator is far enough along to be able to create a fan run server like the thriving Star Wars Galaxies community or the Age of Reckoning Warhammer Online community.

 

 

The last cupcake

freebothat Today is the last day for my most beloved MMO, Wildstar. I’ll be there tonight when the servers go down. It’s the least I can do, to stay in that amazing world until the last possible second. Wildstar’s demise wasn’t really a shock to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less sad. I spent last night wandering around the world, checking in on all of my characters, and watching the players chat with each other for possibly the last time. I was reminded that Wildstar has more character than any other MMO I can think of, and certainly more than my next 2 most-played MMOs put together.
pregame

Thayd was party central right up until death rained down upon us

I still remember the beta for this game, and how much fun we had as those servers shut down in preparation for launch. The shutdown tonight will be a bittersweet echo of that  event. I met a bunch of amazing folks while playing, and made a lot of fantastic memories. This blog wouldn’t even exist if I hadn’t gotten so excited and wanted to share my love of Wildstar with the world. Some of my favorite MMO memories are of building my housing in this game, or participating in its huge, complicated, telegraph-tastic raids. Did you ever play Wildstar? What are some of your favorite memories? Will you be there tonight when it goes dark?

The last cupcake

The last cupcake

Today is the last day for my most beloved MMO, Wildstar. I’ll be there tonight when the servers go down. It’s the least I can do, to stay in that amazing world until the last possible second.

Wildstar’s demise wasn’t really a shock to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less sad. I spent last night wandering around the world, checking in on all of my characters, and watching the players chat with each other for possibly the last time. I was reminded that Wildstar has more character than any other MMO I can think of, and certainly more than my next 2 most-played MMOs put together.

The last cupcake

Thayd was party central right up until death rained down upon us

I still remember the beta for this game, and how much fun we had as those servers shut down in preparation for launch. The shutdown tonight will be a bittersweet echo of that  event. I met a bunch of amazing folks while playing, and made a lot of fantastic memories. This blog wouldn’t even exist if I hadn’t gotten so excited and wanted to share my love of Wildstar with the world. Some of my favorite MMO memories are of building my housing in this game, or participating in its huge, complicated, telegraph-tastic raids.

Did you ever play Wildstar? What are some of your favorite memories? Will you be there tonight when it goes dark?