April 2015 – Page 12

Race to the Bottom

May 26, 2015April 8, 2015 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff #6 – A Good Friday with Liore

I had these grand ideas about having two episodes during the month of March to make up for the fact that I missed a February episode. That never quite worked out. I had a handful of people that I had talked to but scheduling never quite worked out since I try really hard to squeeze these episodes in whenever my wife is otherwise busy. With the weekly schedule of AggroChat and the various guest spots I end up getting called on to do, it means she is having to bend her time around me quite often, that I try my best not to make this podcast also do that. As such I tend to schedule people on a whim, and I am super thankful that the amazing Liore was amicable about that sort of timing. I literally talked to her Thursday to see if she was available, and we recorded on the afternoon of Good Friday since we were both off work.

Liore and I have known each other for what feels like forever. She’s been in my guilds, I’ve been in her guilds… and for a period of time in Rift we raided together multiple times a week. During all of this time we have forged an unconventional friendship. It feels like we end up on opposite ends of so many discussions, but at the end of the day we do so with the greatest of respect for the other. During this podcast we talk about all sorts of things, but one thing in particular we highlight because we found it extremely humorous. Both of us have been getting commentary from the community about a supposedly rivalry between the two of us since we do similar columns now for gaming websites that are technically in competition with each other. I had a blast spending the afternoon talking with Liore, and had I allowed myself to do so I could have easily spent another full hour chatting away. I always love it when the conversation flows naturally.

Race to the Bottom

Yesterday we saw the release of the WoW Token out into the wild, and the demand for gold greatly outstripped the availability of people snatching up subscription time. At the beginning however it was skewing the other direction. The token started at a prematurely low 30,000g and I watched it yesterday raise up to 35,000g before taking a big dive into the territory that it is currently sitting. Someone thought ahead and created an excellent stock market like tracking system on https://wowtoken.info/ and you can see the bottom starting to drop out. Thing is… most players already have an active subscription for the moment. It was not until the end of the month when in other games with similar systems we started to see the demand finally climb again. My advice, just like Wildstar is to snatch up these cheap tokens now because once the system matures a bit you will be paying significantly more per month of subscription.

The reason why I feel like this is the largest benefit of a system like this is it removes the temptation of players to turn to less than legitimate sources of currency. When I wrote about this a month ago, my research at the time indicated that in the aftermarket this same $20 was buying players around 100,000 gold. This means the legitimate route now costs you roughly five times as much as the illegal market, which is still going to be a huge draw for some players. The WoW Token is a failure for Blizzard unless they can squash the third party gold sellers by starving them of their market. Right now the token is new… and a lot of people are trying it out. Given a month or two of sanity they will realize that it is greatly overpriced. I guess for me, I won’t be doing this token unless I can buy a couple and get a big ticket item like an expedition yak, one of those things I have always wanted but was much too far out of my price range. I have a feeling that this is going to be the case for your average customer. If by the end of the month we do not see a massive spike in the price of a single token… then I will be extremely surprised.

End of an Expansion

Now for the hardest part of my morning… how exactly do I talk about the wrapping up of the storyline in Final Fantasy XIV 2.55 without giving any spoilers. I chose a very careful screenshot out of the stack of them that I took because this one really doesn’t say much about what is going on. In the most spoiler free fashion I can, I am going to talk about my impressions of the events. I have to say Final Fantasy XIV knows how to end an expansion. This is hands down the most satisfying and at the same time most anxious ending to an expansion I have ever experienced. In games like World of Warcraft everything is generally resolved at the end, and all the loose bits tied up… because the intent is for that expansion to live on its own forever without actually continuing the storyline in the next expansion. In Final Fantasy XIV… every aspect of this closing means massive ramifications that will hopefully be resolved as we travel into Ishgard. Instead of wrapping up the lose ends neatly… for each one that is concluded two more ends stand open waiting to be explored.

The awesome thing is… this game has proven that it WILL actually explore them. How frustrating has it been in the past as games have hinted at things, that never saw fruition. After all there are still I believe three portals under Wyrmrest temple that go nowhere, that will likely NEVER go anywhere because the narrative has moved on past the original plans. I expect that each event that happens during the closing of “A Realm Reborn” is going to factor heavily into a future storyline chain. It was a pretty shocking and brutal conclusion, but it makes me damned happy that I am playing this game. I quite literally did not see this one coming, and I highly suggest you push hard so that you can see this content before the expansion. I pushed through in part because my friend Ashgar said that the trailer that was releasing this Friday supposedly spoils some parts of this impact. As the credits rolled they showed a number of scenes from the past block of content… and I have to say sometimes you lose sight on just how much we accomplished during “A Realm Reborn”. I am extremely excited to see what happens as we turn our eyes “Heavensward”.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Race to the Bottom

Defeating the Steps

May 26, 2015April 7, 2015 by Belghast

Family Calls

Over the weekend we had a crisis arise, but not one that directly effected our family. Early on Saturday around 2 am in the morning, my former brother-in-law while drunk wrapped himself around a tree. He was exceptionally lucky for many reasons. Firstly for hitting a tree he managed to get out of it with this life… but with several broken ribs and a collapsed lung. Secondly he managed to do all of this without injuring anyone else, and on private property… so there were no charges. Thirdly this means he did not get a DUI, and also means he is not in jeopardy of losing his job which in the contract has a morality clause. The problem is since death of my wife’s sister, a half dozen years ago… he has managed to systematically burn every bridge he had to rely on. My wife’s sister was a stabilizing force in his life, and without her he simply went out of control.

The thing is, given the age difference between my wife and her eldest sister this man was in many was as much a father to her as anyone else. He was this constant force in her life, which has made it impossible to completely write him off like so many have. So my wife got up at 3 am on Saturday and sat with him until 5 pm when someone finally relieved her. He never once thanked her for this or apologized for putting her through this… but nonetheless she feels obligated to be there. In a way I think she feels like her sister would want her to be there, trying to watch out for him. Last night she packed a bag, and went off to the hospital to stay the night, and took off work to spend the day there today. This morning I am a bit out of it because I never really sleep well when she is not at home. The cats kept me company, but I kept rolling over in bed being surprised that she was not there beside me. I have a feeling this is going to be a long day for both of us.

Defeating the Steps

With the 2.55 patch Final Fantasy XIV added the rest of the story line to set up the release of the expansion coming in June. With it came yet another Trial, the problem being that this trial is significantly different than the others. Instead of a big boss battle, you have an epic fight against a dragon on a bridge in which you with the help of your Ishgard allies use all sorts of machinations at your power to win the day. There are far more moving parts than your average story mode trial, and this means that players need to know their roles and perform them with split second precision at times. As such this has become the bane of the duty finder, causing players to simply not queue for trials roulette right now. I talked about this effect in other posts, since it has seemed to take a significant amount of time to fill trial duty parties. I myself queued three different times and each time the group failed… and then slowly disintegrated beyond our ability to stitch it back together.

Last night during our normal raid spot we took this encounter on, since we were down a few key people. I played the role of tank, which is a confusing mess of picking up adds and trying to drag them to the front of the bit dragon… so that the players with cannons can hit them. All of this time we are trying to avoid being stepped on and taking around 3000 hp worth of damage, often times being stunned at inopportune times. As the Dragon nears the cannons he explodes them causing AOE damage to anyone standing around them… and to the adds if they happen to be in range of them. At key points during the fight two players have to use these pillars to chain the dragon in place… and a third has to target and fire the Dragon Killer weapon. The timing here is super tight, if the dragon is not chained he will simply dodge the attack. In any case on our third attempt we managed to get all of the pieces in the right order and defeated the trial. Now I have waiting ahead of me what is supposedly the most important storyline in the game yet.

Moggle Mog Revisited

When we managed to down Moggle Mog extreme, there were a number of players missing from the group. As such last night we had four players who had not seen the encounter. We considered going and fighting Titan Extreme, but honestly none of us really relished the though of throwing ourselves against that. Moggle Mog and Titan are examples of two very different primal fights. In Titan it is all about repeating the same procedure over and over until you beat the boss, something we are apparently not great at. Moggle Mog on the other hand involves a lot of thinking on your feet and adjusting to the situation as it happens… a type of game play that we seem to excel at. With the new players that had not seen the fight it took us a handful of tries, but we managed to down him once more and got one of our newer players Grace a spiffy pink ribbon. I got the last one but unfortunately it doesn’t show up under my plate armor. I would absolutely wear it with pride however if it did show up.

Afterwards I started working through the post Steps of Faith content, but that was ultimately short lived. I was significantly more tired than I realized and before long I was logging for the night. I snapped this photo of me hanging out with Tataru, Minfilia’s right hand woman. Not sure why exactly, but early on in this game I latched onto her as one of my favorite characters. She is awesome and I feel deeply under appreciated in the Final Fantasy XIV scions storyline. There have been many times where she has saved the day, and gotten nothing more than a half heated acknowledgement by Minfilia. For all of these reasons I feel like Tataru and I are buds, and it was a cool moment in the story that allowed me to snap this photo. I would far rather be working for her, than the often clueless leader of the Scions. Tataru at least would know how and when to use a linkpearl, and I have actually seen her do things that were actually helpful… rather than just playing at the whole damsel in distress thing. Tataru for Scion President 2016!

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Defeating the Steps

Soft Skills

May 26, 2015April 7, 2015 by Tamrielo

I’ve been transitioning over the past six months from a game designer to a team lead/project manager. Specifically, the kind of person whose job it is to ensure that everyone working on their team has the resources and shielding they need to do excellent work, or, for the cynical, meddle and ruin everything.

There’s a similarity in both fields that I’ve found interesting. Most people don’t tend to believe that either game design or management are “skills”, in the classic sense of the term. There isn’t the same view as people take when talking about mathematics, or programming, or mechanical engineering– those things involve skills, and there’s a deference given to people who can have them. You’re unlikely to, as a non-programmer, suggest to a programmer that you could whip up a secure peer-to-peer networking solution if you felt like it.

As a game designer, however, it was interesting to me how often people would say one of three things to me:

1.) “Oh, I thought about making games for a living, but decided not to.”

2.) “Hey, I have this cool idea that you haven’t thought of, you should use it!”

3.) “Man, I played [game], those guys/you screwed up some obvious stuff! I can’t believe they were such idiots!”

These aren’t people intending to be disrespectful or crass; most of the time it’s an honest attempt to find common ground or strike up a conversation, but there’s a very real belief underlying the comments– the skills employed by a game designer aren’t “real”, at least in the sense that they’re skills that most people lack. There’s an underlying implication that anyone could be a game designer, just that the people who are doing it either got to it first or couldn’t find something better to do.

There’s a similar train of thought that I see applied to management– it’s very popular to hate on anyone with “manager” in their title, or just the concept of leadership and management in general. From within game development, there was a pervasive, strong distrust of anyone in any sort of leadership position beyond a team’s direct reports.

The distrust is so pervasive, in fact, that finding suitable images for “stupid boss” and similar made finding images for this post trivial, whereas finding suitable images talking about “soft skills” led to very little of use.

I think we distrust soft skills, and by extension the people who use them. The idea that being a good communicator is a skill bothers people at some fundamental level, and it leads to a certain disbelief when it comes to jobs that are more about soft skills than “hard” skills (programming, mathematics, etc). There’s a lot of research that’s been done on the topic, and it’s interesting how constrained to certain circles it is.

I’m fond of saying that people don’t have as much free will as they like to think they do, that conscious thought is consistently and radically affected by subconscious stimuli without our knowing. We are hardwired to be affected by our subconscious and rationalize our behaviors after the fact– you didn’t eat a whole bag of chips in one sitting because the combination of flavors is precisely tuned to drive your brain to crave more, you did it because those chips were delicious. That bit of rationalization says “sure, I made a questionable decision, but it was MY questionable decision, not influenced by someone who knows more than I do about how my brain works”.

I think this is why we distrust soft skills. It’s easier to accept that someone can do something you can’t, that involves a particular skill that you haven’t picked up, than it is to accept that someone can do the same thing you do, but better. In a sense, we’re less intimidated by people with skills we lack entirely than people who have the same skills we do but are better than we are at them. It’s player fantasy, applied to the real world.

If two very similar classes in an MMO have markedly different outputs, the game’s community rages– the game itself is broken, and for many players, the game is fundamentally unsatisfying unless the imbalance is reduced or removed. This has next to nothing to do with how much that difference in output affects their day to day play– the mere suggestion that someone else does the same thing they do, but better is enough to fuel anger. Sometimes this can be rationalized– some classes are “harder to play”, and this will mollify the playerbase. The “hard skill” of playing the class is justifiable, and more accepted.

I think the same thing is true of soft skills– the concept of a really excellent communicator (a marketer, almost by definition) is viewed with distrust and often outright venom by people who value “hard” skills. I’ve had friends tell me to my face that “business types” are poison and the worst people, even knowing that I’m pursuing a business degree.

I often suspect that I’m exempt from this label because I’m still developing my skills, I’m not a “real” businessperson and thus it’s easier to rationalize me away. I wonder how many friendly relationships are sabotaged simply over the divide between the concept of “soft skills” vs “hard skills”. I suspect it’s a very high number.

Source: Digital Initiative
Soft Skills

Loot and Mental Breaks

May 26, 2015April 6, 2015 by Belghast

Rainy Weekend

The problem with three day weekends… is that ultimately you find yourself in need of a fourth day. While I kept a pretty strict schedule, for whatever reason having three days off in a row tends to shift you out of work mode and into vacation mode. This morning getting up was absolute hell, and my wife is going through the same thing. I watched her start to get up only to face plant back on the bed… a move I likely would have tried had I not needed to get up and turn off the alarm. In the grand scheme of things I managed to get to bed fairly early last night, or at least early for me. To make matters worse I am supposed to be in this conference call most of the day… which for those indoctrinated means fighting desperately to keep from falling asleep and snoring as someone on a speaker phone drones on at length about something.

To make matters worse I am freaking freezing this morning. Not literally but we are going through one of those periods that we do here in Oklahoma where I am uncertain if we should have on the heater or the air conditioner. So since it is 55F outside I am upstairs with my zipper hoodie on trying to warm up. We were supposed to have this lovely Easter weekend, but in truth it was cloudy, windy and rained most of the day. We went out at one point to visit family in the hospital and it only managed to warm up to around 53F. The highlight of yesterday however was that getting out and about, and it being relatively lousy out meant that we were able to go to our favorite Desi restaurant and not have any semblance of a line. Their awesome Desi Rice ended up making both lunch and dinner for me yesterday. There are times I wish we had a place closer, but I think it would lose some of the specialness of having to make a pilgrimage to go eat there.

Guild Runs

One of the simple pleasures of the weekend came from running lots of content with my guild. I am amped that folks are getting into their 50s and needing content that will actually pay out in tomestones. This has been a point of internal conflict for me lately, is that I desperately want/need to cap poetics, but I also want to be there to help people when they need runs. With the influx of people into our guild I could easily spend every waking moment tanking this or that for one of our free company members. The problem is for the low level stuff it puts me no closer to my weekly cap goals. Now that the 130 weapon is within sight, I really really want to get one. This means that I am going to need to gather up 1300 poetics, which in turn means that I am going to need to cap several weeks in a row to reach that. So it frustrates me that while I enjoy running stuff for the lowbies, that I am spending time on content that won’t get me any closer to that goal.

Saturday and Sunday however, lots of people needed lots of upper level content which allowed me to feel useful and helpful, but at the same time keep inching towards the goal of hitting 450 poetics for the week. Over the course of the day we ran experts and hardmodes, each of them slowly incrementing that total so that by the time I slept I was only around 100 poetics away, which seems doable tonight between raiding, the daily expert, and potentially running the new trial. That honestly is my huge hope for tonight is that we will be able to run the Steps of Faith trial really quickly, because I have tried with two random groups only to have half of the group bail on me after a single failure. That trial is also gumming up the works right now of the trial roulette because the moment people random into it, they are abandoning party and taking the penalty. The result is that people seem to just be avoiding the trial queue, because we ran a few this weekend and they took forever to form.

Loot and Mental Breaks

I’ve spent what feels like a silly amount of time playing Darkest Dungeon this weekend, and I have to say I am still loving it. Essentially I have been playing through at least one adventure per day, which seems to be about the right amount for me in one sitting. After that I log into whatever game I am going to be playing for the night. At this point I have lost one entire party, a couple of singles and pushed three characters to the point of having a mental break. That said I am having a blast doing it and I finally defeated the Apprentice Necromancer, the first real objective in the game. Right now my ideal party would include a Bounty Hunter, a Highwayman, a Jester and an Occultist. No particular reason other than the group comp seems to work really well for me. As far as healers go I really really like the Occultist, because I guess I am really good at winning the roll that keeps him from bleeding my characters. I have seen as much as 16 points of health healed on a single turn by an occultist, whereas the plague doctor seems to only be able to dink heal single points.

The bounty hunter right now is my absolute favorite hero, but that might just be because he looks pretty much like every character I tend to play in games. I love the whole grappling hook thing, and the ability to use it as either a ranged weapon or to pull targets within his melee range. Highwayman just seems really strong with his range abilities, and if the target can bleed he has a nice attack there as well. Jester is really brutal, with two attacks that deal a lot of bleed damage. The biggest problem I have with them is that one of their best attacks is this jump dirk ability that also places them in the first slot in your party, potentially pushing the bounty hunter out of melee. So I try really hard not to actually use that ability unless I think I can finish someone off with it, because the person in the first party position tends to soak some of the worst attacks. So far I am going into dungeons with lots of food, bandages and torches and doing remarkably well. I am sure as I go further the game is going to get more punitive.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Loot and Mental Breaks