Month: December 2015

A Gladiator in Hellfire

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Change of Plans

Yesterday when I got up in the morning, I had every plan of coming home after work, hoping that what I was making in the crock pot was actually edible, and then sitting down to an evening of Fallout 4.  I do after all need to finish up the main story line, so that we can properly talk about it for Saturday’s podcast where we in theory review it.  Then I saw the above tweet come across my timeline.  Now I have known Jed for ages, but never really had much of a chance to hang out with him in game.  I can’t be for certain, but I believe our connection dates back to the Blog Azeroth community, and the subsequent IRC channel associated with it.  While he hasn’t really blogged all that often in recent years, I still think of him… mostly as one of the many bloggers making up my twitter feed.  Now we zoom ahead to the above twitter message, and it scrolling across my screen.  Friendship Moose is this awesome thing that was started more or less on accident from what I understand by Thomicks.  The idea was to have a community for running Heroic Hellfire Citadel for the purpose of getting people the moose mount prior to the launch of Legion.

Now I am not technically on any of the lists, but my hope was that if I got one of my characters geared I could maybe just maybe work my way into a raid at some point.  I like the concept of getting that mount, but I am not going to be super disappointed if it doesn’t happen.  Nonetheless when I saw someone that I kinda sorta know, doing an open call on Twitter for folks to join in on an Alliance side cross realm raid for the purpose of getting in training…  yeah I was down with doing that.  Also traditionally Wednesday nights are an excellent time for me to do anything raid related, since until 8 or 9 at night I am pretty much at home alone until my wife gets out of church.  So I signed up, made some flasks and armor potions… and was ready to go.  I was idling outside of HFC when the invites came through…  at which point I was straight up ganked by some hordies while waiting.  I guess it turns out that the folks leading the raid… are on a PVP server, so that was a bit of weird sequence of events since I am pretty much a dedicated carebear who has always played on not even PVE servers… but Roleplaying Servers.

More Fun Raiding

A Gladiator in Hellfire

There was a period of time when as one of the leaders of NSR and eventually Duranub… I used to farm my alts out to other peoples raids to help them when they were running short a person.  One of my great pleasures was seeing how the dynamics of these different raid groups worked, and what their cultural norms were.  I am not completely certain if this was a regular group of people, or a group thrown together specifically for the purpose of Moose practice, but whatever the case it was an enjoyable group to hang out with for the evening.  Since I have been mostly playing my MooCowAdin, it was a bit of an adjustment to get back into playing the very APM based Gladiator spec.  The Retadin feels like it has some breathing room in your attack sequence to chill a bit, whereas as a Gladiator it feels like there is always some button I desperately need to be pushing.  As much as I dislike the fact that I know the Gladiator spec is going away during Legion… I can absolutely understand why.  It is a quirky spec, with quirky gearing requirements… and that requires spastic button mashing to really make work well.  While we were actively raiding last, I made the conscious choice to uninstall recount because watching the meters actually made me play worse.  So I have no clue how I did, but last night Jed said he was going to upload the logs at some point today.

A Gladiator in Hellfire

We made it roughly as far as we managed to make it in the Facepull raid horde side on Sunday.  We had a bunch of issues with Kilrogg, and that fight is significantly more technical than I realized.  During the Facepull run I pretty much just killed adds constantly, stayed out of the poo… and made sure the poo didn’t drop in the raid.  Past that I had no deeper understand of the mechanics, and this time around I actually got to play one of the technical roles of the fight.  Namely there is a phase where three players have to run into these portals and get transported into another realm… where they attempt to deal as much damage as possible to wave after wave of adds.  When they come out they have a large dps buff, and can make stuff dead faster.  I ended up in the third wave of folks going into the portals, and this is something that I absolutely took for granted that folks must have just been handling on Sunday night.  After several tries we defeated Kilrogg, and man when we did it was satisfying.  We hit essentially the same stumbling block that we did Sunday as well… with the Gorefiend encounter, but I am thankful I am getting quite a bit more work in on learning that fight.  The problem with the last fight of the evening always seems to be the same… whatever you raid before you stop, is the point that people are starting to lose focus, and over the course of the evening we had also lost a handful of people.  The problem with raid scaling is trying to keep that appropriate mix of healers and dps… and just like Facepull it felt like we were short one healer from making it feel stable.

Transmog as Endgame

A Gladiator in Hellfire

All in all I had a pretty great night, and the timing of the raid was just about perfect for me.  It started around 7pm CST and ended around 10pm CST… which is just about the ideal parameters for me.  If a raid goes much longer than that, I am honestly going to start fading horribly.  It sounds like this is a weekly thing, so I am probably going to offer my services more often… that is if Jed will have me.  Overall I had a pretty shitty night as far as loot went… I spent a lot of tokens and don’t have much to show for it.  The thing I am in most desperate need of is a new weapon… but unfortunately while we did Heroic Blackrock bosses, I never got any of them to drop me an upgrade so I am sitting on using Taner’s Terrible Skinner the 670 version.  It is my hope at some point this weekend to pop into LFR and focus on trying to get one of those bosses to drop me a weapon and shield upgrade, since both are severely lacking at this point.  I did manage to pick up Warforged Shell-Resistant Stompers and a decent ring… that doesn’t actually sim out to being better than the slightly lower ilvl prismatic slotted ring I was already using.

So babysteps forward in catching up my gear level I guess…  I am still largely sitting at 680 with the ability to jump up to 685 if I really needed to.  However because of the quirks of Gladiator… and how important the Blackrock Foundry four piece set bonus is for that spec…  I will likely be running several ilevels lower than I could be at all points.  This is the point where I actually wish we had managed to raid Heroic Blackrock a bit more…  so that maybe I could have gotten slightly higher ilevel versions of the set gear.  This is the problem with set loot… because if you happen to get one of the few amazing bonuses… you simply cannot upgrade out of it without taking a significant hit somewhere.  I remember that was the problem with Hunter Tier 2 loot back in the day…  that eight piece bonus was so phenomenally good… that even though we were getting Tier 2.5 gear… there was no way we could actually take it and make it viable.  I know my friend Thalen would argue with that point, because he wore a lot of 2.5 back in the day…  but it certainly felt like it at the time.  In any case…  I just hope I was still acceptable dps, because I had a fun time last night.  No matter how much I try and push raiding out of my system… it remains there clinging desperately… just waiting on me to come back to it.

Since I just rambled on for two paragraphs without talking about what I set out to talk about…  after the raid I popped into 25 man Heroic Icecrown to clear it.  Now that I am writing this… I am realizing that apparently I left after Sindragosa so at some point I will have to actually go finish up and do the Lich King.  I guess in my head… I got the item I was hoping to get so it was a successful run for me.  For awhile now I have been collecting the bits of the Red/Fel Green set of Deathknight look alike armor out of there for my warrior.  When mixed with the similarly colored set of armor from Sunwell, it crafts a transmog that I am pretty happy running around in.  I guess this is my nod to all of the fel themed stuff in the tail end of this expansion… and the next one.  Transmogging after all is the TRUE end game of World of Warcraft.  So I ended the night on a really high note by completing an outfit.

Genre Definition

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I recently came across a massive flowchart for anime recommendations. I’d copy it in this post, but it’s enormous. It sparked a conversation with Kodra about what genres things actually fit into, and got me thinking about what having a genre even means at this point.

Genre Definition

Kodra looked over the chart and found it odd that Kino’s Journey, a show we watched recently, was classified under “slice of life” and not “adventure”. It’s a show about a girl on a motorcycle traveling from country to country through a fictional (read: allegorical) world, learning about the lives of the locals and occasionally getting involved with local events (but mostly trying to remain a neutral observer).

Kodra’s take (though he can correct me if I’m misrepresenting it) was that the whole road trip, fraught with danger and sometimes open conflict, was an adventure, and that the show was therefore an adventure for showcasing adventurous things. I disagreed– my take was that it’s a show about seeing the everyday lives of various people through the lens of someone whose day-to-day is travel, rather than staying in one place. There’s no beginning or end to the story, no overriding goal to accomplish, no Big Bad to defeat, just a continuing story of a somewhat unusual everyday life.

That having been said, I also have to ask myself the question– would someone coming off of a string of more “standard” slice-of-life shows enjoy Kino’s Journey? Is that even a genre that makes sense? A lot of police procedurals and medical dramas fall quite neatly into the “slice of life” category, but is someone going to like Grey’s Anatomy or CSI just because they liked The Wire or The Big Bang Theory? On the other side, something like How I Met Your Mother is framed like an adventure, but is a lot closer to other slice-of-life shows than something like, say, LOST.

Genre Definition

The same thing applies to games as well. Dishonored is a stealth game, unless you don’t want to play it that way. Wolfenstein: The New Order is an action shooter, but you can play it like a stealth game if you want. Borderlands is a shooter but has a lot of MMO stylings and is, realistically, best when played with friends rather than solo. I don’t know where you even start to classify something like Gone Home or Cibele, outside of the wide arc of “interactive fiction”.

On Steam, games are less and less classified by genre and more classified with tags, which vary pretty widely. Dishonored has the following tags on steam: “Stealth”, “Steampunk”, “Action”, “First-Person”, “Assassin”, “Atmospheric”, “Singleplayer”, “Adventure”, “Story-Rich”, “Multiple Endings”, “Dark”, “Dystopian”, “Magic”, “FPS”, “RPG”, “Replay Value”, “Fantasy”, “Open-World”, “Shooter”, and “Sci-fi”, which are arranged by most popular tags by the community. Some of these tags are pretty redundant, but they paint a reasonable picture of what to expect, without trying to shove the game into a single genre.

We can look at Gone Home, one of those games that defies simple genre categorization. Steam has it tagged thusly: “Walking Simulator”, “Short”, “Indie”, “Exploration”, “Atmospheric”, “First-Person”, “Story-Rich”, “Female Protagonist”, “Adventure”, “Singleplayer”, “Great Soundtrack”, “Interactive Fiction”, “1990s”, “Mystery”, “Romance”, “Point & Click”, “Narration”, “Realistic”, “Relaxing”, “Simulation”. I’m not sure I would call Gone Home a simulation of much of anything, and the tag “walking simulator” seems a bit tongue-in-cheek to me, but the overall theme of the tags paints a good picture of the game.

Genre Definition

I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but it was definitely during my lifetime (I’m going to say late-90s/early-00s) that entertainment media started mixing genres more significantly than before. You can see it in the weird evolutions of niche, speciality TV stations– when MTV stopped just playing music and The Fantasy Channel blended with Sci-Fi (anyone remember The Fantasy Channel?), all the way up to now, where shows like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and Agents of SHIELD started appearing on be primetime channels, instead of being relegated to tiny budgets on niche networks.

It’s been a really neat thing to follow, but our classification of media hasn’t really kept up. We don’t have a lot of unifying language to talk about the media we like, and I suspect that’s why you get a lot of outrage about particular shows. Someone expects to watch Jessica Jones and get a similar experience to Daredevil (because they’re both comic book properties through the same network), and is surprised (sometimes unpleasantly) to find that they’re very different shows, and they feel like they’ve been misled.

Genre Definition

People got up in arms about Destiny because they felt like it should have has deeper MMO mechanics, or a larger focus on story, or have more intricately balanced multiplayer like Halo. There wasn’t the right language to classify the game properly, so it’s a lot easier to be disappointed. We as viewers and players have developed more specific, more rarefied tastes while the language used to describe our media has become less and less accurate, making it hard to figure out if we’ll enjoy something new.

It’s an interesting problem, and I’m not sure where the onus of solving it lies. Does it lie with critics and journalism? Can their major contribution to the state of the industry be developing and delivering a unified language for describing media? Does it lie with marketing? Should marketing be defining their games, with the most successful games dictating what language means for everyone else? Does it lie with players, and the new surge of community tagging and sorting?

Kodra and I have run into issues trying to sort through Crunchyroll and other platforms to find media we like– there’s so much and it’s so poorly described and categorized (if at all) that it’s hard to know what’s worthwhile, especially if it takes a few installments for something to really get going. Mostly we sort by looking for recommendations, though finding recommendations we trust is hard. At this point, of all the people we know, we’re probably some of the most versed and up-to-date on anime, making it easy for us to recommend things but much more difficult to find stuff ourselves.

Marketing Bullseye

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You may have noticed it has been a bit quiet here for the past few weeks. Between a lot of RL events and a general sense of wanderlust (mostly being dealt with int Fallout 4), I’ve been slacking on my WildStar time. Fortunately, they’ve managed to grab my attention back in a huge way.

Marketing Bullseye

What more could you ask for?

WildStar has just announced a new upcoming event: Space Chase! This one seems like it was custom made just for me. The short version is that it is an event where you can run shiphands expeditions to earn currency to buy cool housing rewards. Have I ever mentioned how much I love shiphands expeditions? Because I really really love them, even if I can’t stop calling them shiphands. Old habits. The best part is that the currency for the event can be earned by completing any level-appropriate expedition. That means everyone above level 6 (or 14, I guess, if you actually want to use the housing decor) can get in on the fun.

The rewards look pretty darn sweet, and include parts for building your own custom spaceships, NPC space cadet decor, and even housing music unlocks. Some of the coolest items appear to be from random in-game store boxes, which I’m not the biggest fan of. However it looks like they are sticking to their plan of having all store items be trade-able, so I’ll be stalking those music tracks on the auction house.

The Space Chase event runs from December 9 – December 18. The perfect timing to keep everyone busy until the Protostar winter holiday event begins. Who’s ready to chain-run expeditions with me?


Marketing Bullseye

Always a Sale

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Psychology of Clearance

For as long as I can remember, I have always been a bargain hunter.  Few things feel better than finding that rare item on sale for as much as 50 to 75% off of its original price.  I know without a doubt that I got this instinct from my Mother, because when I was growing up I can remember my Grandmother joking that she thought I would end up being a “Blue Light Special”.  For those who are either not old enough, or not from the right region…  K-Mart used to have a literal blue light attached to a cart that they would drive around the store, and for thirty minutes a specific item in the store would be at a significant discount.  I remember my mother would always go to check out whatever these items were, sometimes whether or not we actually needed them.  So to say that allure of finding a deal is ingrained in my very fiber is a very true statement.  Thankfully my wife is much the same… so she gets it…  and in truth we simply don’t like spending more money than we need to on anything.  She however is always willing to carry it further than I am…  and there comes a point where I am sick of dealing with something and am willing to spend any amount of money to be “done” with it.

One of our favorite activities during the parts of the year when stores are changing out seasonal merchandise is to go clearance hunting.  We live in Wal-mart country, and are roughly two hours away from the central office.  This means at any time there are around thirty or forty Wal-mart stores within easy driving distance.  The trick of Wal-mart is the odd quirk that every store is essentially self governed to a certain bit, and this extends to what they choose to put on clearance.  So one store might have an item for full price, but a store ten minutes away might have it for 75% off depending on a whole bunch of factors.  My Lego habit has been fed by the fact that I can pretty regularly find whatever sets I want on deep discount… so that $200 set becomes $60…  or the $30 set becomes $10.  So the question always becomes… is this item good enough of a deal, and there have been times I have passed something up only to kick myself later.  For example when driving home from Pax South last year, I found Star Wars Lego AT-TE for $40, but ended up passing because it felt like we had already spent a silly amount of money that weekend.  I’ve kicked myself since because that was originally like a $150 set, and really freaking awesome.

The Steam Sale

Always a Sale

So these instincts of bargain hunting and regret of the deals I have missed, carried with me into the digital world.  As a result the Steam sale has been one of those forces of nature that I never can seem to resist.  When I see that $60 game that I have always wanted to play… selling for only $5… it is really hard not to go ahead and pick it up and tuck it away for the day when I really get the desire to play it.  The problem being… I like quite literally everyone else I know is doing this, and as a result we have hundreds of games as a steam backlog that we “really need to play”.  Compound this with the fact that new games are constantly being released, it comes into a situation where there are just games that we own that we are quite likely never going to play.  Over the last year I have tried really hard to resist the lure of the Steam Sale, but usually I end up picking up at least one “deal” that looks too good to pass up.  Even though on some level the number of games that I have that I have not even installed…  is a massive stress point for me.

This past weekend for Thanksgiving there was predictably yet another Steam sale going on, with its own rock bottom prices on games.  I hit the site a few times to see what was being sold, and oddly enough had zero desire to purchase anything.  At this point we have done a bunch of renovations on the house, so there is definitely the desire to “spend no more money” going on, but I don’t think it was that.  There were also plenty of games that looked interesting to me, so I don’t think it was simply the fact of not having anything I wanted.  I think maybe it is just the fact that I have finally come to the realization that there is no limited quantity here, that I am racing to snap up before they sell out.  In a physical store… they have a limited number of items on the shelf, and when those items are gone… especially when clearance is concerned… they are not getting any more.  When you are selling a digital key to a digital game… there is absolutely no rarity going on there.  They can sell keys a virtually unlimited number of times… and be able to keep ratcheting that price downwards towards infinity, each time catching a new batch of purchasers.  A physical copy of Pokemon or Final Fantasy ends up gaining value, but a digital copy only serves to get cheaper.

Always on Sale

Always a Sale

I think another thing that is finally sinking in… is that I can purchase a game at any point and don’t need to have it waiting in the wings for me to play.  I have insanely fast internet right now, in fact I ran a test this morning for the purpose of this article and you can see it over on the right hand side there.  There is not a game that is available on steam that I cannot literally download in less than thirty minutes.  So it is not like I need to preload things to really be able to have fun… I can wait for the whim to strike me, purchase it in any of the many always on market places and be playing the game less than a half an hour later.  This is vastly different from the chunk of my life where I literally had to drive an hour away to be able to find any of the games I wanted to play.  There is a part of me that still attributed a value to having something on hand, rather than having to go out and acquire it…. since I still remember having to go from store to store looking for one of the last remaining copies of a new game.  Now I purposefully shun physical copies of things for the simplicity of knowing I can pre-order moments before the release of a game and still get the full benefit.

The other side effect is that there is quite literally always a sale going on somewhere.  Between Steam, Origin, GOG, Greenman Gaming, Amazon, Humble Bundle… and countless other minor retailers there is quite literally always a sale going on for any game I could ever want to play.  The only time this is not necessarily the case is for any game I might want to play on the Playstation 4.  There I am very much still at the whim of a single game store, since once again I am not a huge fan of buying physical copies of games for the console.  I greatly prefer the fact that thanks to my 2 Terabyte harddrive upgrade in it, I can have most everything I might want to play “on tap” and waiting on me to boot.  All of these things honestly make the individual digital games worth less to me than they used to… and this is maybe going to be a problem that the industry will have to deal with.  There was a time when I was willing to “snap up” a game for $20, and that degraded to $15… and then to $10… and now quite literally a AAA title has to be $5 or less for it to trigger that “buy now” instinct.  I feel like I am simply becoming desensitized to the effect of the “Big Sale!” and now it seems simply easier to pay the price something is currently selling for rather than trying to stock pile it for later.  This entire topic came up, because this recent steam sale seems to be the one that a good chunk of my friends also passed up.  Has the magic of the Steam sale finally lost its magnetism?  I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts about this, because for me at least over the course of this last year….  the only “deals” that I have really snapped up are those coming from Humble Bundle or the PSN store.