February 2016 – Page 13

D3: The Benefits of Friends

February 1, 2016 by Grace

Time for an update on my D3 Season 5 progress. I feel like I’ve been flying though things this season.
1.   Hit level 70 on Friday night. Done!
2.   Complete the Seasonal Journey for the pet by the end of the weekend. Done!
3.   Reach solo greater rift 50. (My best last season was 45). At 46 now.
4.   Reach paragon level 400. (Last season I hit around 350). Done!
5.   Complete greater rift 30 with 2, 3, and 4 players. Done!
6.   Bonus goals: Reach level 70 on a hardcore wizard or complete at least one set dungeon on a witchdoctor. Still waiting on this one. I should really level a gem of ease I guess.

As you can see, I’m quite close to being finished with my goals, and we’re only a couple weeks into the season. How did this happen? I have been playing about the same amount I did last season. The big difference this time around is that I’ve spent a lot more time grouped up with friends. Even though grouping up can be a bit more stressful for me, the benefits are pretty obvious. The drops are better, everything goes much faster, and I can tackle higher difficulties than I could on my own.

This isn’t really new information. I’ve always known that grouping up in this game is way more lucrative. This is the first time I’ve had enough experience with it to really appreciate it though. As someone who still prefers playing solo it is a little overwhelming. And now we get to my next issue: the seasonal journey. Last season I got through the Champion rank, and last night I achieved this again for season 5. There are some parts that expressly have to be done solo, but I found that many of the goals were met easily during passive group play. I’m not sure whether to feel happy that I didn’t have to worry about them, or to feel robbed of any feeling of accomplishment. For now I think I’ll err on the side of being happy, because some of the upcoming goals are still going to be a real struggle for me.

You see I’ve decided to try to go for the extra stash tab you can unlock this season. It is locked up near the end of the season’s journey, behind things like “complete 2 conquests” and “solo greater rift level 60”, the kind of stuff I never even wanted to attempt in previous seasons. To be honest, I don’t really want to attempt it now. Trying to meet these goals feels way beyond my normal relaxed playstyle for D3. I’m afraid I might never be able to complete this, certainly not without help. I am nervous that I might not have a chance to knock out some goals that would be easier in a group before my friends lose interest in the game and move on. Mostly I feel resentful that something as desirable and useful as an extra stash tab is locked so high up the seasonal ladder.

I understand that a lot of people who play this game are more hardcore than me, but I always liked that in previous seasons the rewards for completing the higher levels of the journey were all cosmetic. You could push yourself as far as you wanted to but also feel comfortable stopping when you’ve had enough without feeling like you were missing out on something important. I’ve been playing Diablo 3 semi-regularly since it launched and have never even come close to achieving most of the things that are required to unlock the stash tab this season. Maybe that means I’m a terrible player and I’m ok with that because I’ve enjoyed the hell out of all the time I’ve spent with this game. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that pushing myself past my comfort zone to try to get some more room to throw my excess legendaries doesn’t end up souring this season for me. Hopefully I’ll still have good friends around for a while to help me along the way.

Advocacy

February 1, 2016 by Tamrielo

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year bridging the gap between two groups of people. I don’t have a good term for the first group– implementers, maybe. They describe themselves as the folks “in the trenches” actively making changes and additions to the project. Then there’s management– the producers, the leads, the people with direct reports, and increasingly, directors and executives.

The two groups tend to think of themselves as separate. I’ve noticed, at least in the games industry, that it’s much more pronounced on the implementer side than the management side. In games, the studio structure tends to mean that the management layers actually in the studio are often considered “in the trenches”, particularly since a lot of them do the same work as the implementers. Beyond that, though, you get what’s often termed “the publisher” or “corporate”. There tends to be a layer of distrust somewhere in there, on one side of which are the implementers and on the other side is “management”.

I remember a producer, once, who became a studio hero when she went to the publisher to fight for more time and resources for the team. I was relatively new to the industry, but I remember other people talking about how she was “one of the good ones” and similar positive associations with the implicit suggestion that she was the exception to the rule. I recently had a classmate, a senior manager, talk in glowing terms about one of his employees, someone who had taken some extra time to fill him in on the technical details of some project, and volunteered to join him in a meeting to explain them. He’d expressed that he often felt like his employees would exploit his lack of technical knowledge to get away with various things, and having someone take the time to explain and help out in a meeting was hugely valuable to him. Listening to him, I couldn’t shake the familiar sound of “this was one of the good ones” and that implication that the person was the exception.

At the same time, I’ve noticed something about the management sphere as I’ve entered it and spent more time there. Networking is hugely valuable, and almost ritualized. It’s rather more than just meeting people over drinks, although it’s often that also; there’s a structure to it that doesn’t exist in the meetings I’d often attend with game industry implementers. I’ve started to figure out what the difference is. It goes back to the examples above– the communication that is valuable and important. The old adage “talk is cheap” is misleading– it might be cheap, but it’s incredibly valuable. Having a producer go out and advocate for their team, or an employee advocate for their boss, is a hugely endearing thing. It bridges gaps, it forms bonds, and it galvanizes relationships.

I’m starting a new job this morning, and I have it through a series of people who have all advocated for me. A classmate who I got to know well put me in contact with a firm who, upon meeting and talking with me, advocated on my behalf for the company I’ll be working for. Rather than consigning endless resumes to the void and going through interminable interview sessions with very little give and take, I instead had a variety of conversations about what they were looking for, what I was looking for, and how we could meet in the middle, and had a verbal offer before leaving the one and only 90-minute interview I had. I benefited hugely from others advocating for me.

In games, it’s often said that it’s “all about who you know”, which is true– it’s much easier to get a job if you know someone at the studio you want to work for who will, as above, advocate for you. What I’ve noticed in the management sphere is that what that advocacy looks like is very different. The business world has an ingrained understanding of exchanges, and since so much of it is about communication, exchanges of social currency are often understood. Those networking meetings are effectively interviews without specific positions; you meet people with the goal of finding personalities and skills that fit with needs you can think of. When you find someone, you know who to talk to– often someone who you’ve got a relationship of some kind with. “I used to work for X, I know they’re looking to fill my old position, let me talk to a friend of mine there”.

I wondered, when I first started meeting people in the business sphere, why everyone was so enthusiastic about helping others find positions if they wanted them. When I’d see the conversations, I’d just assumed those people were close friends, and it wasn’t until I had people advocating for me that I realized what was going on. The advocacy helps both sides, and the advocate benefits twice. People are looking for opportunities to advocate for others. It mirrors what I’m used to in games, where everyone helps everyone else find jobs, because no one knows when it’ll be them looking for a job. For me, it was familiar, and comforting to know that the two groups were not that different; one just had words for what they were doing.

I think one of the most valuable things I’ve learned from my MBA program is this structure of advocacy and how to do it properly. I’ve started watching for open opportunities and developing a sense of fit– who might I recommend who would fit in this kind of position? Who I know is suddenly just as valuable as what I know, because once I’m no longer directly implementing, my job revolves around communication, and knowing lots of people is as important for a communication-focused job as technical skills are to an implementation-focused one.

One of the things I want to look into as I point my newfound business managment knowledge through the lens of the games industry is how to foster advocacy between groups that are usually separate and distrustful of one another. More than anything, that advocacy drives strong relationships, and fostering that kind of environment can only be good for communication and understanding.

Pax Deconstructed

February 1, 2016 by Belghast

Not Prepared

It turns out Illidan was right…. I was not prepared. This morning I thought I would break down some things I learned this weekend while at PAX South. Overall I had a fun time, but there were just some things that didn’t quite work out as planned. The first year it felt like I had a lot of my time planned as I had numerous media appointments to attend to. This year I was going for what ended up being the polar opposite, and that didn’t quite work out either. Over the course of the weekend I walked roughly 25 miles, and either I have the beginning of the PAX Pox… or my allergies are just going haywire now that I am back in Oklahoma. I am so insanely sore, and in truth I lacked the stamina for this conference. Before the first year I had been walking every single day, and for the most part I took it all in stride. This time around I am thirty pounds heavier and have not been walking at all… and it took its toll. Both Friday and Saturday I was up by 5:30-6 am and out at the convention by 8. Then after wandering around largely aimlessly trying to sort out what to do for several hours…. I ended up leaving around 4pm each day and going back to the hotel room and crashing. The first day this was largely due to a general lack of parking downtown, and having several of the major garages booked out by another corporate event. On Saturday however it was absolutely due to the fact that I was simply “PAXed Out” and too tired to keep going.

The other thing that did not phase me during year one, but absolutely did during year two were the crowds. There was this strange thing going on, where there were fewer big games at the convention…. but the crowds were so much bigger. A prime example of this is the fact that on Saturday we were trying to find a table in the gaming area to play board games. This area was over twice the size of it was during year two… but every single table was full with zero signs of anything opening up. Similarly every other room in the convention seemed packed… the Jam room… the Arcade room… the Intel PC Gaming room… all were just packed with people. While the first year did not bother me at all when it came to crowds…. this year definitely did. It makes me pretty certain that there is zero way I could handle the type of crowds that a PAX prime has. By the time I left at 4 pm, on top of the exhaustion…. I just needed some peace and quiet and a place to sit down and chill. I realize I could have probably gotten this in the AFK room…. but given that every other area was packed…. even the first aid station, I figured that would also be completely packed. I don’t want to give the impression that I did not enjoy myself, because I absolutely did… it was just a much harder convention for me than the first year. Year one was this super chill event, and it has just gotten considerably bigger.

The People

For me at least this con was absolutely about the people. The folks that were in attendance were… Ashgar, Thalen, Paragon, Rae, John her brother, Tick, Dallian, Damai, Rowan, Sctrz, Genda and his wife, Exale and Maovis. This at least was the number of people that I actually managed to meet up with at least for a period of time. The problem is that it is really damned hard to have a meaningful amount of time with fourteen different people, that may or may not be in the same place. I felt like I was constantly trying to meet up with different groups of people and failed miserably at spending much time with any of them. Then there were other folks that I meant to meet up with, but never actually saw. Early on I had every intent to try and meet Fynralyl and Psynister on the way down, or Beau and Leala… but I simply ran out of mental bandwidth to try and juggle everything. In theory I could have come up with ways to make it happen, but in trying to keep my schedule super flexible…. I spent a good deal of time simply doing nothing. So the truth is next year… a bunch of things need to change. While I hate having every moment of the day scheduled out, I feel like I am going to have to make some hard and fast appointments so that I can feel like I actually made the most of the weekend. I also plan on making some more media appointments because they did a great job in the first year of breaking up the day… and also giving me a quiet place away from the crowd to sit down and talk about games with the developers. To facilitate that however I am going to have to really get my shit in gear and get that Media pass.

Now that I am home… I just feel overloaded. On top of the sore throat and sore everything else…. I am just feeling like I need to hide out from the world for awhile. It is situations like this that make me realize that I am in fact introverted, regardless of how hard I try and be extroverted. The happiest moments of the weekend for me, were introducing people to Ultimate Chicken Horse, sitting in the board game area and playing Codenames, or just chilling out and collecting street passes with Dallian early in the morning. Had I been able to do more of that I probably would have been fine staying considerably longer, but there was one period where I walked non-stop for two and a half hours trying to sort out what the hell we were doing…. and after that, I was pretty much beat. Essentially I think the key for me to be able to function at this bigger PAX Prime is to have better planning, which is not exactly a strong suit of mine. I tend to do best when I roll with the punches, but there are far too many punches in this case to be able to roll with them. I will say it was amazing to get to hang with all of these people in person, but I just feel guilty that I didn’t get to spend all that much time with any one of them.

Next Year

All of this said… I am absolutely going next year. This is the only PAX that is really viable for me to attend. Also we have made it into and event that my wife actually looks forward to for completely different reasons. The big thing for me is going to be sorting out the parking thing. That first day… was a huge damper on the weekend, and it made me super paranoid about finding parking on Saturday. I think I am going to try out the bus system next year, that way I can get downtown without having to drive… which also makes me less paranoid about partaking of adult beverages. Next year I also need to take more photos… because in the entirety of the weekend I only took five or six. I think the biggest thing however is going to be scheduling actual lunch and dinner times with different groups of people so that I feel less like I abandoned folks. I got to spend the least amount of time with Rowan and Sctr and Genda and his wife, but in both cases I get to the Dallas area more often than I do San Antonio, so hopefully I will be able to meet up with them on another occasion soon. The biggest goal however is to be a much smaller person by the time PAX 2017 rolls around, because that thirty pounds and lack of regular walking made the biggest impact on my enjoyment. Once I made it back to the hotel each night, I was just dead to the world. I am so thankful that I ended up taking today off from work, because if I had to roll back in after travelling yesterday, and just the sheer exhaustion of the convention…. I am not entirely certain I would be able to function.