Warlocks are Slow

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There are times when I make significantly bad decisions. This is potentially one of them. I’ve been back and enjoying Destiny 2, and of course my brain has decided that I should totally sabotage that progress with playing the game “optimally”. There is a correct way to deal with the seasonal light grind, and that is to grind up all three characters and focus on your least favorite two first before moving on to your main character. The theory being that any light gain in your weapons along the process will help to boost your “main” character further each week. My main is of course my Titan, and probably my least favorite character is my Hunter… so I have instead been focused on grinding all of the weekly objectives on my Warlock. Don’t get me wrong I do enjoy the Warlock quite a bit, but Titan and Warlock jumps are polar opposites. When I switch between the two I have to do a sort of mental remap of my reactions, during which I am performing horribly. I decided to use this period of time to get the two crucible objectives knocked out. Basically whenever I am having fun, I swear my brain purposefully goes out of the way to destroy that notion. Thankfully I was hanging out with my friend Grace on voice and more or less stopped caring about performance while we chatted away. At some point during the night I noticed that both my instincts and performance suddenly improved and I once again started taking down enemies. Since they apparently disabled skill based matchmaking… apparently I improved rather than just being de-ranked enough to no longer get put up against good players.
The impending weapon sunset is having interesting effects upon me. Firstly I am being way more brutal with deciding whether or not I want to keep a weapon. I have a bad problem with digital hoarding in games that allow me to do so, and my vault is filled with artifacts from the launch of the game. The fact that most of this is going to be useless in a few months makes me realize that I need to have a massive house cleaning and shard all the things. Essentially anything with a power cap of 1060 is going to stop being relevant when the next season changes. I believe everything in this screenshot minus the exotics is going to effectively become trash as soon as the seasonal reset happens.
This means that there are a lot of weapons that I really enjoyed using… that are just going to stop being useful. Take this Hero’s Burden, I got it from Iron Banner some seasons back and have used it a ton over the seasons whenever I didn’t want Riskrunner taking up an exotic slot. It is going to be sad to see it go, but I have a vault filled with tons of these things that just no longer have the value they once did. Sure I could keep it and run around completing bounties with it, but what is the point long term because I know that there is going to constantly be a refresh of new items to chase. Essentially I am going to have to start thinking of Destiny 2 in the same way that I think of seasonal content in Diablo 3… that it is entirely disposable.
What pains me however is to lose access to what has been one of my favorite auto rifles to date… what I consider to be the perfect roll of Steelfeather Repeater. At least in the case of this weapon it looks like I probably have one more season left in it after this one is over given it has a cap of 1260 rather than 1060. This seasonal reset could be really good, if Bungie plays it correctly. When Forsaken came out all gear in our vaults was magically upgraded to 750 light, and I think Bungie needs to do this each time a season changes. So when the next season releases we should all bump up to 1060 light, which was the previous cap so that everyone starts each season on a level playing field.
I admit that a significant amount of why I have not played my Hunter is because she is currently sitting at 857. The baseline starting point for this expansions content is 1000, and Bungie would love to sell me the ability to catch up to that point quickly. It is not however worth 2000 Silver to boost up to that point, but it also represents a non-zero amount of time to sit down and grind that level up. If I am having that feeling about a third string alt, then I imagine there are a lot of players who have not participated in months or years that are feeling the same way. I know my friend Warenwolf had not played since the gear boost to 750 and as a result had a lot of catching up to do before he became “viable”. Ultimately I would love to see them get into a cadence so that each time the game moves forward in level, your characters get mailed a set of gear that represents the minimum level required to start the next grind. Eight blues don’t really do anything to destabilize the game or the gear economy, but they go a long way to making players feel like catching up is within reach. This makes it significantly easier for those of us who are playing the game actively to successfully talk our friends into returning to give it one more try. As it stands now however… the progression of the game feels like a runaway train to anyone who has not been actively playing, which is bad for bringing folks back into the fold. The post Warlocks are Slow appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Venturing Forth into Pandemia

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Every so often I end up writing a real world post, and this is that morning. As a result I tend not to syndicate these terribly widely because it isn’t exactly the sort of thing for mass consumption. These are just me talking with you my long term readers about what happens to be going on in my life. To prime the pump here is a delightful picture of Kenzie and Josie… and it makes me realize that Josie certainly has grown significantly. Also it makes me realize how bad the giant hole that the cats have tore in the stairwell landing looks. The hole started its life as a worn spot in the carpet because they put down really cheap carpet when they flipped this house and we have not gotten our shit together to the point to decide what the hell to do about it. The cats however helped make that hole basically an exposed spot of bare plywood.
This is “four” a new addition to our outdoor cats that visit us from time to time. Four is pretty young and seems to largely be unbothered by our presence. While taking this photo my wife was a few yards away sitting on the patio off our bedroom. Four is completely chill and flopped on the concrete under the table and while he bolts for a moment when there is movement… seems to reset back to the default operation he was previously doing rather quickly. I love the existence of our outdoor cat family, but I have noticed that their presence has meant a lack of the usual bunnies and birds. I just want them to be friendly enough to visit us while we are out there.
Here is the point at which we pivot drastically from adorable cats… to Covid 19. March 20th was my last day in the office during what my friends and I have started to refer to as “The Before Times”. So I was fully remote for 13 weeks, but now have been feeling a certain amount of pressure to at least start showing up a few days a week in the office. It is not so much that I was given an ultimatum, but effectively if I did not start returning before the 30th of June, I would need to come up and clean out my office. I am not exactly sure WHY we need to clean out offices because after two days in the office it still feels like an absolute skeletal crew up there. I had a spare mask I was not using and decided that Giant Cthulhu Pop needed to do his part… or at least could hold it for me.
When I say that there is no one there… this image illustrates that point. This is on the floor of the parking garage with the tunnel that connects to our building In the before times… this would be wall to wall cars and I would not be able to find a spot to park. Even at 7 am in the morning when I normally roll into the parking garage, I would have had to have parked one floor away in either direction to find a space. The building itself is on mask protocols and social distancing, with things like elevators limited to only four people at a time. The thing is… I never rode in an elevator with more than just one other person. On a normal morning rush… there were lots of times I was in an elevator with ten people crammed in.
Ultimately I had planned on shifting to a few days a week in the office and the rest of the days remote as my normal schedule. The problem is… I kept waiting for things to get better but they just haven’t. The above image represents the general curve of infections that we have experienced in the county I live in. The blue diamonds represent phase 1, 2 and 3 of reopening the state and the green stars represent memorial day weekend, the beginning of the protests, and the trump rally. As of yesterday we had a single day high of 259 new cases identified in the county and of course… this was the week that I decided to poke my head out of my hidey hole and go back to work. I am more than a little terrified that I might have been exposed to something have have brought it home to my wife who has also been remote this entire time.
I didn’t exactly feel unsafe while in my office, because everyone there was equally mandated to be wearing masks anytime there was a chance of interaction. However that also means that most of us were unmasked at our desks sharing the same recirculating air. In some ways I am glad I left the house because I had developed a tangible fear of doing so. During the entirety of the thirteen week period, I had only been in two buildings with more than a few people at a time. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to schedule hands free grocery pick up, and only needed to go to I think three stores… all three of which had a minimal number of people in them. However the longer I went without venturing forth… the more insurmountable that task seemed to be. I now absolutely understand how someone finds themselves afraid to go out into the world.
I did do something silly while I was in the office, and took a photo of my sheet of cheapo Dollar Tree stickers. This is kinda dumb but one of the things I would do, when someone did something really cool is that I would slap a sticker on the opening of their cube. I kinda miss being able to do that, so I sorta want to try and turn these into icons that I can use in teams. It is silly but weirdly people really seemed to like getting “good job” thumbs up stickers, so I guess that is something that you never quite grow out of. I did have to alter my pattern of giving them out, because at first I was just sticking them on the top of the cube wall… until I realized that most of my employees couldn’t see up there.
The problem now is I am trying to decide what I should do. Do I continue going back into the office next week on Tuesday and Wednesday… or do I resign myself to just going up and cleaning out my office over the long holiday weekend? The reason why I am so concerned is illustrated in the above chart, which shows the raw data points that have not been smoothed into a curve. Our previous high was 143 on June 20th… and then 4 days later it spiked up to 259 on the 24th. The periodic dips that you see make up for the fact that there just isn’t much testing that occurs over the weekend. I live in a part of the country where masks are just not worn… the few stores I have been in my wife and I represented the sole mask wearers and got a lot of nasty looks as a result. This is why I generally feel like it isn’t very safe to leave my house, let alone return to anything resembling a normal daily cadence. Something has to change or things are just going to get out of control. I am not sure if that thing means a rolling back of the opening or something like mandating that masks be worn in public. Whatever the case something needs to change now because we are already past the point of making a significant difference any time soon. I fully expect that this is our lives for the next few years, and I wish I had the magical thinking that some of my coworkers do about the recovery bouncing back within a few months. Also… I would really prefer not to die, which is what escalates my fear given my multiple warning signs suggesting that if I did catch it… I would probably have a really bad time. I realize this is a bit of a downer post, but sometimes my blog is therapy and I needed to get some of these thoughts out of my head this morning. I did give you cats before I careened off the cliff though. The post Venturing Forth into Pandemia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Of Nickels and Dimes

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Yesterday I made a random comment, and it seemed to gather a bunch of traction with my twitter feed, as I spent the rest of the evening reading comments in general agreement. The beginning of this thought process like so many that I have, actually started the other day. I was talking with a friend of mine and they displayed disdain with having to pay to purchase a game. It seemed to be causing them a certain amount of friction, and it didn’t read as “I can’t afford to purchase this” but more a case of “I don’t feel like I should have to purchase this”. This has made me contemplate the nature of where we are currently in gaming and the prevalence of the “Free-To-Play” business model.
The idea of this model is that they get you in the door with a simple game download and install, and then get you later when you are needing to purchase things to be able to maintain a certain “quality of life” within the game. For example playing Elder Scrolls Online without the optional “ESO Plus” subscription is miserable, because that crafting bag that magically takes away your inventory woes is a massive bonus. Similarly I feel like if I am going to play Star Wars the Old Republic, I am going to be paying for a subscription because the “free player” limitations just feel overtly cruel.
At least in the case of those two games there is a monthly amount of money that I can pay easily to take these woes away. When I get frustrated is with the more South Korean MMO model of having a bunch of purchases that effectively add up to a month subscription, without giving you the convenience of actually paying a monthly subscription. Essentially each month you are going too want a Premium pass and the Mission Pass Gold in order to get the full experience. Combined this is roughly $15 and lasts 30 days, but for quality of life purchases you are also going to want the Material Storage pass… which is 300 star gems. These in theory come from playing the game naturally, but if you for some reason you have to purchase them out right which is a horrible idea… it is $15 for 360 star gems.
There is a large part of me that longs for the era of MMORPGs when you purchased the box, purchased the occasional expansion every few years… and then had a simple subscription amount that you could budget for. The problem there is that this limits the amount of money that a game can drain from your pocket book, and even the bastion of the subscription model has found a way to add additional purchases to try and entice you to spend more. World of Warcraft has 15 mounts, 15 pets, 2 toys, a slew of deluxe bundles, and a large number of services that you can only obtain through hard currency. I am not faulting them for finding additional ways to claw money into the coffers, but it can be a bit exhausting especially if you add in the gold token economy.
Guild Wars 2 has been lauded as this buy the box once purchase without need for subscriptions, but even this game feels like I need to spend a certain amount of money to play it in a manner that feels reasonable. Firstly for each character I would want a set of unlimited harvesting tools, because it is annoying as hell to constantly keep running back to a vendor to purchase new pick axes. Each one of these tools and there are three is roughly $12.50 because unless you can catch them on fire sale they are 1000 gems each. I also feel like a Copper Fed Salvage machine is a significant quality of life improvement at $10, and you need shared account storage to keep it in so all of your characters can use it and that is $8.75 per slot or $35 for 5 slots for a bit of a price break. Black Lion keys are a trap but the game does in fact love to throw you chests that you cannot lock without spending money.
I miss what was essentially the Warcraft Battle Chest era of gaming, where you bought the base game and then every so often an expansion came out that tacked on to the original game and gave you new content. Hell I miss the era when “DLC” meant that I got a bunch of new content for a game rather than what is effectively a bunch of cosmetic gear. I get that cosmetics are the true end game, because this is something that I have said all too many times… but it would be nice to get content drops as well. I never minded paying my own way, and I guess the other day I was balking in part while talking to that friend how we have arrived at a point where some folks don’t expect to need to. During the DLC expansion era of games, I remember having friends that complained about not getting the entire game with their original purchase. So there will always be some controversy that is brewing and micro-transactions are just the newest version of the same discussion that has been happening for decades I guess.
I think one of the big challenges is that we have this artificial price ceiling for games at $60 each, and I am not exactly sure when that was set. I remember when Phantasy Star 4 released it was selling for roughly $90, and above is an example of some of the pricing from the late Super Nintendo era. Take the example of Street Fighter Alpha 2, that game was released in 1996 so that $69.99 in adjusted for inflation would be $114.37. While I realize that games are cheaper to distribute digitally than they were to actually put chips into a cartridge, no matter how you slice it there is still a significant amount of money missing from that $60 price tag.
As much as it might frustrate me, it is this long tailed monetary wrangling that keeps the lights on, the staff paid and the servers running. There are few things more disheartening when a game that you love dies. Talk to all of my friends who pinned their hopes and dreams on Wildstar about how bad it feels that the game is gone, and that there is no viable emulator option to keep playing it. So yeah it frustrates the shit out of me, and I throw some serious shade anytime I see that a game I am interested in is launching as the “fee to pay” model, as Jim Sterling calls it. The alternative of a game closing down however feels really bad. I feel like we had it better when we were just paying a flat subscription fee rather than being constantly needled for another small purchase.
That however is coming from a position of privilege. I can reasonably afford to pay whatever it takes to be able to play a game. There are a lot of folks out there who simply can’t because once you subtract groceries and rent, there just isn’t much if anything left over for an entertainment budget. I firmly believe that those folks have the right to participate in the same type of “games as therapy” that I ultimately do on a nightly basis. So if the cost of that happening is me being needled, than I guess that is the cost that I have to pay. I don’t love it, but I can be okay with it… I just wish more games gave me that “bullshit tax” that was an amount I could pay to ablate all of my frustrations. So my fearless readers… what say you? What are your thoughts on this matter, because many of you responded last night on twitter. Now that I have laid bare the situation we find ourselves in, spill your soul in the comments below. The post Of Nickels and Dimes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Goodbye Mixer

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I guess the big news this morning is that Mixer is officially over and that Microsoft has sold the service and all of the accounts to Facebook Gaming. Mixer represented and alternative to Twitch.tv for those who sought it, and seemed to have fairly reasonable terms of service. I personally liked it because of the ability to have a conversation with someone sitting in chat in near real time as there was a very minuscule delay between my stream and what they saw. Because of this it is also why I tended to prefer to watch show streams on Mixer when possible, but alas as July 22nd the streaming service will be shuttered with everything transferring over to Facebook.
The real tragedy is that it seems like the partners were not told anything, and just woke up yesterday morning to the news like the rest of us. The big name acts that they specifically brought onto the platform were consulted, but it seems as though everyone else was in the dark. Facebook Gaming does not have a good reputation with gamers, and I would dare to say that a lot of folks try and avoid any interaction with facebook if possible. I saw comments from a few friends yesterday that had been streaming on Mixer as their primary platform stating that they would rather just not stream at all than to follow over to Facebook. I personally went through the process of decoupling all of my accounts from Mixer yesterday, but did not go so far as the delete my account in its entirety.
It seems like Gothycakes is one of the few named talent acquisitions that Mixer did that is planning on letting it ride and going onto Facebook gaming. The challenge is that most of the folks that left Twitch to go to Mixer in the first place experienced a massive decline in their viewership, Ninja included. It is really hard to get people to switch platforms, let alone to move over to one that a lot of folks associate with their parents more than their own interests. The Electronic Sports League or ESL signed an exclusive deal for streaming match content on Facebook, and according to reports experienced an 85% loss in viewership. That does not bode terribly well for folks asking their fans to follow them in this buyout to an already struggling platform.
What I think is more concerning however is this closes the door on what was the only real viable alternative to Twitch. Yes of course there is YouTube Gaming, but that service has had its own fraught history and in May of 2019 completely shut down the apps associated with the gaming service burying the content once again in mainstream YouTube. As a viewer watching content on YouTube live is not exactly a great experience and feels extremely minimal when it comes to fan interaction. Live Streaming gets mixed in with the accursed YouTube premiere program making it extremely hard to tell which of the people you follow are actually live and which are simply feeding you recorded content through an awkward delivery mechanism.
Once upon a time I used to stream on Hitbox, but that has apparently become Smashcast. Hitbox already had some shady moments as a service, and Smashcast seems to have doubled down on this ethic. There are of course other smaller platforms that one could stream to. If you already have an established community on Discord for example, you might simply be better just streaming through its options. What is ultimately going to happen however, is that the vast majority of streamers that were on Mixer are likely going to try and get their fans to transition back to team purple. Twitch is the massive juggernaut in streaming, and it is going too be progressively harder to compete with them. Which unfortunately means that content creators have also lost most of the leverage they might have had when it comes to negotiating with them. I’ve been kicking around the notion of streaming again, and I had honestly contemplated Mixer because the community there has always seemed to be a big more positive than that of Twitch. However as a Twitch affiliate, there was already a strong reason just to stay with that platform since I already had inroads, not to mention that I never got organic viewership through any platform other than big purple. I feel bad for the folks who had their livelihood mixed up with Microsoft and the Mixer platform. I don’t think Facebook is going to be a favorable environment for games streaming at any point in the near future, but I guess I could be wrong. This is a significant move in an attempt to buy them some market share, and it will at the very least probably add a non-zero amount of value to the platform. If someone has been out there waiting in the wings looking to launch a streaming platform… I guess now would be the ideal timing to do so and provide these folks who are effectively being de-platformed an alternative. I doubt that is going too happen however, and since YouTube doesn’t really seem to care much about its game streamers the lions share will come back to Twitch. What are your thoughts about this news? Do you intend to follow streamers over to Facebook gaming? Drop me a line in the comments below. The post Goodbye Mixer appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.