Sky Pirates of Tyria

Good Morning Friends! I find myself being forcefully cheery this morning because I have no clue what is up with me… but Wednesdays are hard. I am not exactly certain what is going on with me, but I have the hardest time getting started and actually blogging on hump day. We are starting off this post with this image that I found hilarious because I never noticed that the statue of Balthazar had a bucket over its head with two eyes drawn on it. This is an expert rebellion right here, because when a god goes amok… you don’t just remove a perfectly good statue… you make it look silly. I guess those are some spoilers right there but minor ones. Suffice to say that I have noticed the Guild Wars 2 maps are all loaded with similar attention to detail, and it is pretty cool.
Yesterday dropped the second part of Living World Season 1, and I was super excited about this. So far this content has not aged nearly as well, because there is a whole mystery aspect to it… and knowing what I know having finished End of Dragons… there are certain characters that are named that give these events away completely. I get that this is revising history here… but were it me I would have had that character be operating under an Alias given that we have seen and heard a lot about them over the years. Otherwise, I was exceptionally happy to finally see the official introduction to Kas and Jory, characters that I initially did not like in Season 2… but have come to love greatly over the subsequent content.
I thought I would end up playing through all of this new content last night but ultimately stalled out. they did it again with this content drop where they added a “do events” section in Bloodtide Coast. However, it seems like maybe not ALL events count evenly because it seemed like I was getting more credit when doing the events connected to pirates. There are also now a number of event areas around the zone without really clear objectives on how to progress them. Instead of bashing my face against this last night I proceeded with my usual nightly routine of a little WvW and a little PVP and figured I would regroup today in trying to get past the “help some people out” time gate. I am not sure if this factored into the actual events or if this is just a way of padding out the content. Whatever the case I don’t love it given that there was been one of these seemingly disconnected sections in both Living World parts so far.
Earlier in the evening though I participated in my nightly reset Tequatl kill, and it was one of the weirdest groups I have experienced. The entire zone felt like a bowl of fruity pebbles because seemingly EVERYONE had a commander tag up. Specifically, look at my minimap and if my count is correct, there were eighteen tags of one form or another active last night. Granted a few of those were mentor tags which don’t really count, but the vast majority were bonafide commanders. I mean it was a good meta and maybe went more smoothly than I am used to, but I fear my one map starved the rest of the server of commanders for a time. There is a part of me that wants a commander tag, but another part of me that doesn’t really want to spend the 300 gold on it. Today I hope to sort out what I am supposed to do in those few situations that did not seem to have clear objectives. The story is great so far, and ultimately that is really what I am after when it comes to this content. It is weird having finished all of the other content in the game and then filling in key bits of information that would have been nice to know all those years ago. The post Sky Pirates of Tyria appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

The Unfixable Problem with New World

If you followed me at all last week, you would know that I have been back in New World poking my head through the changes that have been made since I last played. I even wrote about a number of extremely positive changes that have taken place, and how weird it is that the New World team is not making a bigger deal about it. It is around this point that I feel like I need to come clean. I fell in love with New World back during the late alphas after they had already shifted the game to be significantly more PVE-focused. When the game was released it broke my heart, because for the first few weeks what had evolved in the game was everything that I said I had wanted and reminded me so much of those early days of Everquest with the player-created “camps”. Then Patch 1.1 came along and destroyed that community and with it much of the underpinnings of what I loved about the game.
This shifted me from being passionate about the game and hoping for its success, to ultimately wanting to watch it burn down around me. I pretty regularly kept track of the downfall as charted by the steam concurrency numbers. Yesterday the above video was released and I SHOULD feel righteous about the send-up about this game, but I don’t. It is a well-crafted video and pretty much every point that is made in it is true. However, after poking my head back into the game there is a huge part of me that has hope that maybe just maybe this game can be saved. There is a game here that is good and enjoyable and a world that is extremely fun just to roam around in. So many people have lampooned the looting of boxes and the zergs, but I found all of that extremely fun. I still find it enjoyable to roam around and clean out a town while working on my weapon skills.
Please note this is not me being unrealistic about this game’s fate. The numbers are going in the wrong direction and eventually Amazon Corporate will decide that it is no longer worth the expense of keeping a game studio active and cut its losses. As the above video outlines… they did everything they could possibly do wrong… and weirdly still made an enjoyable game as a result. There are folks who are actively playing that are completely riding the waves of “copium” as evidenced by a conversation that I experienced last night. Folks were in global chat trying to tell people that 20,000 concurrent players were actually “good numbers” for an MMORPG. The thing is I am not even sure what could be done to turn this game around at this point short of a global relaunch as a different business model like free to play.
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Yesterday I was lamenting this on Twitter, and my friend Jae suggested that they get streamers engaged again. The truth is… I am not sure if this would work a second time. Amazon went into this game in a big way when it came to promoting it with the most popular streamers on its platform. Similarly, they did the same thing with Lost Ark and in both cases… players, in general, felt burned by the gameplay experiences. I am not sure there is enough goodwill left in the Twitch community for another round of 10+ hour stream drop chases, and even if people watch it… it does not mean necessarily that they are going to stick around. I farmed most of those drops on my second monitor with twitch running in the background and muted, and I figure the majority of players did the same thing. I think in order to come back from this, there needs to be a more grassroots approach in getting some exceptionally passionate folks to be promoting the game organically.
Coming back to New World I have noticed that almost all of the video creators that I followed at the launch of the game have moved on to other things. They often times follow the same trail of the “next new hot thing” because once a creator starts turning a profit… they can’t really afford to be devoting time towards a stale game. This creates an interesting opportunity for the next new creator to step in and really take control of this community in a big way. The only folks who appear to be really active in content creation are the “Economy” videos, and I think there is room for someone to step up and make a name for themselves. However, Amazon is going to need to foster this community rather than chasing the big-name Twitch stars who have already moved on from this game. Paying them to come back is going to feel exceptionally shallow considering many of them have already created their own version of “What’s Wrong with New World” videos to get those hate clicks.
I think the core flaw with New World that cannot be changed easily, is it was not designed to be an MMORPG. The largest servers in the game have a maximum active population of 2250 players, which is what lead to the massive queue times at launch and overwhelming fragmentation of the player base. Players want to play with their friends, not create new friends when they land in a game, and as a result, any amount of word-of-mouth pull is going to lead back to overpopulation. Any “community” that was built up along the way is long dead given that my server Valhalla, has been merged twice from the Minda I started out on to the Frislandia that consumed it. It is now just a game with a bunch of random strangers playing it mostly, and the folks who largely stuck around are the hunter killer type that chased the PVP highs. Even on Valhalla which used to be one of the highest pop servers in the game… Outpost Rush takes forever to fill the queue in part because the game is not rewarding enough to have non-pvp types queue for it.
I think the only way this game survives is to completely gut the way that the server infrastructure works and effectively start from scratch in designing it. If I were going to take a do-over here I would move to something more akin to the model that Guild Wars 2 uses with many instances of the same map active at any given time, and then have a large battlegroup of a sort where different factions vie for territory with other factions. When I walk into Brightwood, I would see who holds the phase of that territory for my battlegroup and the state of machines for my “server” but when I walk out of the town I would be in an instance that may or may not be blending me with players from other servers. I get that this is extremely complicated to pull off, but it is the only way I can see having the “game-changing” impact of the war system while still letting players play freely together regardless of where they landed.
We know the name has some rudimentary phasing technology already because it is displayed around the housing system. This house with the weirdly stacked furniture in the yard? That is being shown to me because it is the homeowner on my server with the highest accumulation of points. If I owned a house in this location, it would instead show me my home. My hope would be that they could expand upon this system to knit together a world made up of “virtual” instanced server communities that are built and disassembled on the fly. I get that this is a massive ground-up redesign of the way that the game works, but it is also the one thing that might just save the game. At its core, the game has a scaling problem because it was not designed to be an MMORPG, but instead was designed to be something more akin to a Rust or Ark with a fixed player base.
The reason why this problem is so key to the failure of the game is it is the thing that keeps players from recruiting their friends in a massive way. We went through this at launch with no one actually being able to land on the same server… and be able to play the game without massive queue times. The design of the infrastructure goes completely against everything that we know about how MMORPG populations are formed. I guess the alternate path that they could take is spinning up custom servers through something akin to the Fallout First program. There is absolutely a part of me that I would pay for a private server where I could hang out and play with my friends. The problem is… doing so would effectively destroy many of the aspects of this game that make it interesting. I think the Achilles heel of New World is likely an unfixable problem… unless Amazon is willing to pour a truly ridiculous amount of money into changing the way the server infrastructure works from the ground up.
With the core problem surrounding player counts and congestion in place… I think any amount of improvement and progress will be fleeting. I really do love this game and I am happy to play it, but also know that at some point it is going to be shuttered. I am not sure Amazon has the fortitude to stick this one out, because so far… their track record as a game studio and publisher is not phenomenal. The post The Unfixable Problem with New World appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

An End To Dragons

This weekend I got back on the main story quest for End of Dragons. I am not sure why I ultimately bail at times and have trouble following the main story thread, but it is definitely a thing. At least in the case of End of Dragons and Guild Wars 2, there are times when I know a major fight is about to happen which causes me to pause. I know from experience that no fight in Guild Wars 2 plays out quickly, and often times they last about two to three times longer than I feel like they should for a story mission. The end result is that I put off doing them, and return to my regularly scheduled nonsense. Then weeks if not months pass before returning to actually following that main story thread. I have this weird fear of being committed to doing something for an unknown period of time, that I cannot easily bail out of without forcing myself to do everything from the start. If you could restart story missions from the last checkpoint… this would probably alleviate my fears.
One cool thing that happened while questing my way across Echovald Wilds, is that I got to experience the zone meta event. Fighting this giant jade golem/mech thing was really fun and I liked the fact that the encounter moved to different locations. I greatly appreciate the new visualization mechanic of showing arrows in the direction that the entire party is supposed to go in. Older fights honestly could benefit from this, so it would be lovely if they shoehorned that into other encounters. I am specifically thinking of something like Tequatl with four points that need to be guarded, or Triple Trouble where there are three different worms in three different locations that need to be fought. Granted you can just do the tried and true “follow the mass of people” but I do appreciate having some indication of what to do.
As far as the final encounter of the expansion goes… it felt phenomenally epic but was also at times VERY busy. It was about as frenetic as I could possibly handle without just feeling overloaded by it. When it was over… I was thankful because honestly there was a little too much going on for me and I felt deeply overstimulated. Don’t get me wrong, it was cool as hell… but as someone who generally goes for maximalism, this was a bit much. It played out in a way that I more or less expected it to play out, which had a required amount of time associated with it and hoops to jump through… but it was a little overwhelming. I am honestly concerned about what this encounter looks like when you had in about sixty other players.
I guess I now need to join the vast numbers trying to get a turtle mount. I need to read up on the frequency of when the zone meta plays out and figure out a time that I can start doing it on a daily basis. I want my siege turtle because they are really cool looking, but also super handy for any sort of objective that requires breaking an obstacle. Then again I also need to buckle down and devote time and effort to finishing up my Skyscale and Griffon mounts as well, and sort out where to even begin my Rollerbeetle. I like that these long grinds exist, but I do find it hard to get excited over doing them. Now that I am done with the story and all caught up, however, I think it might actually give me the drive to start filling in the missing pieces.
As far as the story goes it was excellent. For me at least, each expansion has gotten better than the last… minus the bullshit with the dragon response missions. The problem with End of Dragons is that we are dumped off in a similar position to that of Final Fantasy XIV. In both cases, a decade-long journey has come to a close and for the most part, there is no obvious path forward. I will be interested to see where the Guild Wars 2 team goes from here now that the dragon magic crisis has been resolved. I have to admit there were moments in the epilogue that I teared up a little after reaching what was a pretty obvious point of conclusion for certain character arcs. I am very ready for the next expansion whenever it lands, and also deeply looking forward to the second part of Season 1 when it comes out in a few days.

To Dragon’s Watch!

The post An End To Dragons appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #389 – Always Pay Your Sheep

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we are down a Grace and a Kodra but carry on with the long list of topics left over from last week.  We start the show with a discussion of Trek to Yomi and how it is the video game form of a samurai movie.  Bel revisits New World and talks about all of the improvements, and how it is very unlikely to change anything population-wise.  Folks played Necromunda in person using the 2018 rules set and share their experiences.  Bel talks a bit about his rabbit hole from last week of looking at just how far off Kickstarter estimated delivery dates are for Video Games.  Finally, we talk some more about Star Citizen and the 3.17 patch, along with some long-time daydreaming about a world where Tam gets to ferry us around the galaxy going on delves through abandoned space hulks.

Topics Discussed

  • Trek to Yomi
  • New World Improvements
  • Necromunda
  • Kickstarter Nonsense Estimates
  • Star Citizen 3.17
  • Always Pay Your Sheep in PVP
The post AggroChat #389 – Always Pay Your Sheep appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.