With the upcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, there has been quite a bit of talk in the Twitterverse and greater blogging community about this expansion. I have no plans to go back and try out the classic experiment because across the board I think it has failed. World of Warcraft Classic was quite a bit of fun… until we all remembered the work commitment that game required for doing anything serious at the endgame. I think I personally petered out somewhere in the mid-50s and I ultimately lasted longer than a good number of my friends. Those who remained however represented some of the more toxic players, and I’ve heard stories from folks who played like Namaslays about the sexual harassment represented in that community.
For years I have idolized the Wrath of the Lich King expansion as the last truly good time in World of Warcraft, and similarly, I have placed the transition squarely on the shoulders of the Dungeon Finder tool. It was late in the Wrath patch cycle that we were first introduced to this tool, and rapidly folks stopped forming groups on their own and instead relied on random chances to throw them together with other players. As someone who used to cultivate a wide network of social channels and friends lists so I could rapidly pull together groups from a huge pool of hundreds of “known good” players, this was an earthquake that shattered the infrastructure that I had built. However, as I look back on this era, I am pretty certain that I have been wrong about the Dungeon Finder all of these years.
I think the larger truth is that “online social interaction in a video game” no longer held the novelty that it once did. I very much remember my early days in Everquest were spent being amazed that I could be online with that many other players at once. We went into these games carrying with us the lineage of MUDs and IRC chat rooms… that were by nature deeply social enterprises. So the fact that we could play a game and do it while chatting with friends, was a groundbreaking scenario. World of Warcraft was probably the first MMORPG I played that was legitimately by its own merits a “Good Game”. What I mean by that is a game that was capable of enthralling someone who had no interest in “Online Worlds” and only really cared about the mechanical moment-to-moment gameplay. I think those of us who came to these games for the social interaction that they provided… eventually “aged out” of it. It isn’t so much that we lack the desire, it is just that real-world responsibilities eventually replaced the ability to maintain in-game responsibilities.
Since then I have played a lot of different MMORPGs at a good number of different levels of seriousness. It is really Final Fantasy XIV that proved to me that the dungeon finder tool could be a seriously good thing. The key difference here is that Yoshi P and crew wanted to create a structure that rewarded the player for good play or at least good behavior. The subtle pressure of wanting to win a commendation has been enough to curb most of the worst behavior for years. That is not to say that a good deal of toxicity has not crept into this game as well, but most of that can be seen at the highest levels of play and not necessarily in the “duty roulette”. It did plant the idea in my head though that with the correct social structure and systems that reward fair play, you might be able to rehabilitate even the worst of environments.
I’ve also played a good number of games since then that have had no grouping functionality built into them at all. While I can go through the social labor of trying to find groups, it is so much harder for me to be willing to put myself out there when I am grouping with strangers. There has been a long series of games lately where I have been the last one playing or one of the last few playing. This means I am spending almost all of my time soloing, and do not have a ready-made pocket healer to go with my tanky nature. If I could somehow transplant the Final Fantasy XIV Duty Finder and its social structure into New World for example… I would do so in a heartbeat. I know with the removal of dungeon keys, they are putting in some manner of group finding tool, but I believe it is a manual process and not an auto-matching system. Regardless having even that minimal infrastructure is an improvement over spamming trade chat.
Guild Wars 2 has a lot of grouping options for certain segments of the game, but thus far has done little to help me ease into other areas. For example, if we are talking about Open World or WVW content, I can simply click on the commander tag on the map and join the group (pending the group is open, which most are). If it is some daily objective like bounties in a specific region, there are also often manual group finder groups active for folks trying to accomplish that. Similarly, big reoccurring meta events have group finder groups allowing you to drop into RIBA in Silverwastes at will. However, up until this point they have not been a terribly viable way of finding a Dungeon, Strike, or Raid group because those communities tend not to use them. Arena Net knows this and is trying to implement some changes to make them more random player friendly… but still it is not “push button get group” easy.
I think the thing that the Dungeon Finder tool did do, was limit the importance of a server community and the social structures that are entangled with that notion. At the time… I mourned this greatly, but modern me is generally in favor of just completely abolishing the concept of a server and opening up grouping freely across the entire game. One of the greatest faults that I can find in both Diablo Immortal and New World is the deeply limiting server infrastructure that almost guarantees that over time server merges will be consistently required. At the end of the day, the ethic that I care the most about in an Online Game is the ability to play with my friends, regardless of what region they might be playing in. Sure it might be a pain in the butt to organize a play session, but having any sort of basic social infrastructure greatly improves my experience in the long run. Given that it is deeply difficult to keep players engaged for more than a few months at a time, the ability to hop around between different pools of active friends is key to the long-term success of a game.
Essentially for the last decade and some change, I have branded the Dungeon Finder as the great killer of games when in truth that was a flawed perception. I’ve realized that Wrath of the Lich King is a specific moment in time for me that could never be replicated. While some of that experience was wrapped up in the social infrastructure that I had built, probably more of it was associated with the deep depression that I was in at the time. I was clinging to World of Warcraft and the friends I had made in it as a lifeline to keep me from fading away. It is weird to me that I hold the game in such nostalgia when I was playing it through quite possibly the darkest period in my life. I can’t go back to the way I felt at that time, and I honestly would never want to knowing how close I came to ending it all. Instead of realizing it was me that was changing, I placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the biggest innovation to be brought into the game that I loved.
The hard truth is, I would love to see the Dungeon Finder or something similar to it in more games. Even with the toxic community of players that it brings along with it… having access to run dungeons and harder content is far better than having to expend the emotional energy to make it happen without one. My more modern mindset is that all of the barriers that keep people from doing content, easily with friends should be leveled. Constructs like the Trust system in Final Fantasy XIV are great, but could be even better if they were more flexible and allowed you to build a group of what you had available, and then use NPCs to fill out the rest of the party. There were so many times I wish we had systems like SWTOR where you could run content with two people and two companions. No game has really nailed these systems, but I now have to fully admit that we are far better off with them than without them.
The post Exonerating the Dungeon Finder appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This probably comes as a bit of a surprise given that I posted on the 24th about being torn up about the disappearance of the barn kitten that we were going to adopt. I am still kinda torn up about that to be honest, and none of the three kittens have shown up. My wife did in fact immediately return to bombarding me with kittens, but that is probably a good thing in the long run. Our local animal welfare shelter is full to the point of overflowing, and as a result, had waived all adoption fees. After work on Friday, I agreed that we should probably go out there and at least take a look because saving an animal from a Shelter is always a good thing. My adorable Josie butt came from this same Animal Welfare, so we had good luck before… what is to say we would not have good luck again.
We were not there for very long before Miss Gracie stole my heart. This is a picture of her that I snapped as we were on our way up to the front office to adopt her. She was the runt of a litter of kittens that had come into the shelter the same day we came by to look. One of the four was already adopted, but I have a serious bone to pick with whoever decided to name this group. You had Porkchop, Potato Salad, Fruit Salad, and Carrot Cake… so I am guessing either someone was planning for a picnic or they were just hungry. Miss Gracie was originally referred to as Fruit Salad… and there is no way we are actually going to keep calling her that. The funny thing is that my wife landed on the name Gracie, but in my headcanon, we named her after my good friend Grace. Both are “smol” and fiesty, so it works.
Right now she is sequestered in my wife’s office, as we usually do with a new cat for at least a few days before introducing them to the rest of the family. It was hilarious last night, that as we lay in bed… we could hear her running laps around the office and randomly pouncing on things. For being as tiny as she is… she certainly SOUNDS like a much bigger cat. The sheet on her cage at the shelter said that she was 4 months old, but when we got the official paperwork… it was more like 2 months. She is maybe the smallest cat that we have ever adopted… save for MAYBE Kenzie who did not go through a shelter system. She has very much not been weaned for very long… or was force weaned because of the loss of a mommy. Every time we love her she goes through the familiar behavior of trying to find a nipple. We went through this with Kenzie as well, and even years later she liked to go through a nursing behavior with a blanket for comfort.
Over the weekend we had a bit of a scramble for setting up the office for her. We technically adopted her on Friday, but could not pick her up until last night because she still needed to be spayed. Essentially we have plenty of toys around the house and even have them in a little toybox downstairs. However, we wanted to start Gracie out with some fresh toys of her own. Right now the clear winner is this little scratcher/playmat thing that we got for $4 at big lots. She loves pouncing on the little plastic rods with the doodads attached to them. We also got these adorable little fuzzy sloth toys that she likes throwing up and catching. Essentially they are about the size of your standard “mouse” toy, but much cuter. She has not really taken to the crinkle ball made out of like wadded-up iridescent mylar ribbon. I figure coming from the spartan confines of a shelter cage… she is maybe a little overstimulated.
Admittedly this post is largely just a vehicle for me to share a bunch of photos of Miss Gracie. Please love her as much as I already do. I hope she bonds with at least one of our two other cats, and the transition to the larger home environment goes smoothly.
The post Welcome Home Gracie appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I thought I would give a bit of an update on my Diablo Immortal madness. I am not even sure why I am continuing to go down this path other than to serve as an example of what not to do for others. I am still a “free” player and have managed to get up to Paragon level 40 and am still getting bonus XP as the Server Paragon I believe is 50 currently. I however have hit a bit of a wall, in that I am not getting anywhere near the number of materials that I need to keep upgrading my gear. Additionally, I have noticed that once I hit Paragon 30, I have stopped getting near the number of legendary drops that I once did as well. I am not sure if this is a “dry spell” or something inherently built into the game, but I am struggling a bit to get the gear and more importantly combat level needed to progress in the game.
Because I am over Paragon 30, I should in theory be accessing the Hell 2 difficulty for greater rewards. However, that is not happening because I do not have the gear to actually complete this. Everything in this game boils down to your combat rating and your resonance and combined these determine how effective you are in combat. Combat rating can be increased through upgrading your gear, acquiring better actual items, or equipping/upgrading better legendary gems. The whales were farming Hell 2 long before they managed to reach Paragon 30 because the gems that they had equipped pushed their combat rating well beyond that which was required to do the content. Weirdly enough I can actually function fairly well within a Hell 2 zone, but eventually, get overwhelmed. This is because the game has decided to penalize me for not being at 1220 Combat Rating and is causing me to take 61% more damage and deal 38% less damage.
Since I am unwilling to spend any money on Legendary Crests and the $25 gamble to get 5 Star gems… my only real recourse is to either find better Legendaries/Set Pieces or to continue upgrading my gear. As a solo player, I am not running around constantly in a group of four players, and the game numbers have dropped off enough that it is actually a bit of a challenge to fill a party. That means my best option is to go out into the world and grind for gear. This is cumbersome and tedious, and also involves competing for resources against every other free-to-play player who has come to the same conclusion. In order to take all six legendary slots from Rank 7 to Rank 8, I am going to need the following.
24 – Glowing Shards – Gained from salvaging Legendaries
660 – Enchanted Dust – Gained from salvaging a Yellow or bought for 10 scraps each.
3,600 – Scrap Materials – Gained through salvaging White (1 per) or Blues (3 per).
132,000 – Gold – Gained through many sources
Since getting yellow drops are completely unpredictable, the source of most of the Enchanted Dust that I have gained in the game has come from converting 10 Scrap Material into a single one. So if you flatten the materials required you are essentially looking at 10,200 Scrap and then salvaging 24 Legendary items.
Sitting down this morning before writing this post I decided to run an experiment. I completed a round of four bounties, not because the bounties themselves really are that fruitful in materials, but instead because it gave me a fixed purpose to go out into the world and kill a lot of things in a structured manner. The full round of bounties took me roughly 15 minutes. During the course of that run, I happened upon a random world event and a treasure goblin both of which will have increased the total count of items gained. Every time you open a world event chest until you hit the daily cap… you are rewarded with 4 enchanted dust and 2 blues. After you hit the cap you stop getting the enchanted dust and only get blues, so these are not a viable long-term means of grinding out enchanted dust really. On my 15 Minute run, I got the following:
So flattening this for the sake of easier calculations, in 15 minutes I gained the equivalent of 133 Scrap Materials worth of items. So I know from playing this game that it is not realistic to take that 15-minute swath as representative of what I can expect to gain every single outing. There will be times when it is much more fruitful and there will be times when I walk away with a considerable amount less. However once again for the sake of making the math more simple while understanding that my sample size is bad… if we took for granted that I gained 133 Scrap every 15 minutes, it would take me a little over 19 hours to grind out the 10,200 scraps I need to upgrade my six legendary slots to the next rank.
I’ve also approached trying to do whatever I could to get some Hell 2 gear dropping from the activities that I could complete. If you manage to do a Level 30 Challenge Rift, it unlocks the ability to get Hell 2 drops from Challenge Rifts, Elder Rifts, Cycle of Strife, Vendors, Bounty Rewards, and the Horadric Tome. However, as I said before I have seen a massive drop in the total number of Legendaries that I have gained. Prior to Paragon 30, I seemed to have about a 50/50 chance of getting a Legendary when I ground out 10 Monster Essences and turned them in for a Horadric Tome page. Since dinging Paragon 30 I have yet to see a single Legendary drop in this manner just as an example. Similarly while out in the field I seem to be getting far fewer Legendaries off the Orange skull mobs that are designated as having a higher Legendary drop chance. Basically, I feel like there is very little that I can do to move forward that does not require a ludicrous amount of time spent.
That said, why don’t we close out this post with something a bit more enjoyable. I really do like the build that I am running and out of all possible legendary items in the game, there are only a few left that I might be interested in. I do really enjoy the Essence Transfer system because it allows me to essentially keep to the same build while occasionally swapping out items when something with a higher combat rating drops. My build looks a little something like this:
Primary Attack
Punish
Largely using it because it gives me an additional block rate for surviving massive pulls
Secondary Skills
Draw and Quarter
My main strategy is to use the holy steed that you summon to gather up large packs of mobs in order to burn them down with my AOE skills. My shoulders increase the duration of the steed by 30%, my pants cause it to catch everything on fire, and finally, my chest causes the steed to call down bombardment on packs around me.
Holy Banner
My helmet converts the banner into Holy Beacon which zaps everything within range with Holy Light damage which is excellent for big pack clear.
Consecration
My shield causes the consecration to slow enemies by 30%, just as a way of keeping them in the bad a bit longer to help whittle them down.
Falling Sword
My weapon converts how the falling sword works so that it is a charged line attack that grows the longer I charge it. Essentially this is the sweeper that I use to mop up anything that did not get killed by my Consecration and Holy Beacon.
Essentially the way that I play is to run around on my horse, gather up three or four packs worth of mobs, lead them back to a central location, drop holy beacon, drop consecrate, and then start hitting punish to try and keep up my block. Once I am down to only a few stragglers I angle my Empowered Sword so that it cleaves through the entire pack and finishes them off. Very fun gameplay and very fitting for the Crusader class.
I wish the game had some measure of tracking how long I have played because I figure that number is going to be large. I’ve managed to finish the free track of the Battle Pass and now every time I gain a new level I essentially get some gold and 150 Scrap Materials. I have to admit there is part of me that wants to pay for the battle pass now that I have unlocked it fully, and would be gaining all benefits. Traditionally this is how I approach a battle pass system. If I can manage to grind out the free track, then I “reward” myself by paying for the full access track. However, with Diablo Immortal I am deeply conflicted because I do think that even as a purely PVE-only player… I am being negatively impacted by the existence of all of the paywalls. If I was spending money I would have better Legendary Gems and would not be staring down the barrel of a 20-hour grind… to MAYBE be able to get access to Hell 2 and start getting the gear my paragon level would denote. Buying the battle pass would do almost nothing to help me out, because in the entirety of the track… it only includes two Legendary Crests.
I think ultimately that is the conundrum of Diablo Immortal. It is a game that I have really enjoyed quite a bit, but the monetization will forever taint that experience. Knowing that my experience is suffering in large part because entire systems in the game are effectively locked off from me… feels awful. I think very soon I am going to reach a point where I just put this game to bed for now. Mobile games ultimately soften their requirements over time, this is the nature of the beast. They launch in a state that is deeply prohibitive of the free-to-play players in order to extract the maximum amount of cash from the whales.
At some point in the near future, I expect there will be concessions and probably an apology letter, and the game will change drastically… while also introducing a brand new top-end money grind. I genuinely do like this game, I just think that maybe it is best to wait for Diablo 4 and forget this one exists for a while. In the meantime, I have Diablo 3 and am starting to finally grok Path of Exile. Diablo Immortal could have been a great game, and might still be at some point in the future. For now, however, the monetization path it has taken has ruined that experience. No one can dismiss the fact that I have put effort into understanding this game and trying to keep moving forward. There is a path forward, as Demone Kim outlines in the above video… but just not one I am willing to take.
The post Fruitless Grinding appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Sometimes in life, a sequence of events takes place… and you don’t really have the mental pathways prepared to process it. I am struggling with one of those right now and as a result, I am in a bit of a funk. The above picture is of a cat that is not ours… but the one on the left was going to be. We lost my baby Kenzie in December of last year, and it has taken me a long time to process that as well. Recently my wife has been on this kick of bombarding me with kittens and claiming that we need one. On one hand, I agree that Kittens are adorable and I love them all… and on the other hand I have been slowly trying to bring Mollie our exceptionally skittish cat out of her shell. The latter has made me extremely hesitant to do anything to upset the delicate balance, especially given that the death of Kenzie threw her into a bit of a tailspin.
I had finally come to terms with the idea of getting a cat, and one of our friends about an hour away had a litter of adorable babies. My wife drove up to visit them and the cat on the left pretty much adopted her. I would show you some much cuter pictures… but they also include my wife and she would probably kill me for publicly posting them. Essentially it was decided that we would end up with this baby and started going through the planning phase for a new kitten. We were effectively waiting until she was good and weaned, and had set a date for this last Wednesday. I had taken the afternoon off and we were going to go pick the kitten up and then take her back to our veterinarian where she would get tests and such to make sure she did not have anything communicable that could harm our existing babies.
We did not go to get a cat on Wednesday, because on that morning three of the kittens… were just missing. These babies were indoor/outdoor animals or as we generally refer to them in rural America “barn cats”. The problem with outdoor animals is sometimes things happen to them. I remember as a kid having plenty of barn cats that would occasionally disappear never to be heard from again. We don’t know what happened to them… we know that the kitten we were about to adopt is gone. At this point a few days later, we have to assume the worst. I am struggling with this a lot. I had gotten attached to the idea of us getting this kitten… that granted I had never actually met myself. I had been flooded with pictures of the said kitten… but never actually met her.
Now I find myself in the position of my wife starting up the kitten bombardment.. and talking about how we need to go to a local shelter that is at levels of overflow that might trigger euthanasia. I however find myself still mourning a cat that I never actually knew. It is like I don’t really have the emotional hardware to process this one. My wife is largely fine because she went into this with the logical realization that outdoor cats can and do disappear. I, on the other hand, am far too soft-hearted for this and while I can shrug off the loss of a human… animals are precious babies that need to be loved and protected. I know that I will probably concede to being drafted into this mission of kitten hunting this weekend, but for now, I am exceptionally melancholy about that prospect.
The post Ineffective Emotional Hardware appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
