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Blizzard Does Not Need WoW

August 5, 2015August 5, 2015 by Belghast

The Elephant in the Room

I figure this morning I would cut with any sidebar discussions and get straight into the topic that was on everyones lips yesterday… the Blizzard Q2 Earnings call. If you remember during the Q1 2015 earnings call they announced a drop to 7.1 million subscribers after a peak of 10 million during the Warlords of Draenor launch bump. I think we all knew that the numbers would be down, at least incidentally based on our own experiences from the game. I have to say that I thought WoW token would be more of a game changer, and when they announced that World of Warcraft was down to 5.6 million subscribers I figured that the Token numbers would bolster this amount. However based on further information it appears that this number does include token subscribers as well. In truth this number likely does not fully account for the actual loss. Personally I would consider myself no longer playing World of Warcraft, but my account does not actually die until mid September. There are several folks in similar holding patterns in our guild waiting on their time to tick down as well.

As always MMO Champion has a spiffy graph charting the subscription numbers since the release of the game. To put things into proper perspective, the subscription numbers are exactly what the subscription numbers were in December of 2005 roughly a year after the initial launch of the game. This has lead some folks to point out that when you iron out the outliers like the Warlords of Draenor bump you end up with a standard curve that you might expect for a game of this longevity. There was a lot to be gleaned from the earnings call, but one of the major points I got out of it.. is that while they have already announced that the World of Warcraft expansion would be revealed Thursday at Gamescom, they left it off of the list of products planned for the rest of the year. That tells me that at the very best the expansion will be a Q1 2016 release. That means that there will be at a minimum of a six month lag between content patches, and at worst… honestly who knows what the worse case scenario could be. Hopefully this will not be anywhere near as long as the content drought after 5.4, but I am seriously hoping that they reconsider Hellfire being the final patch of the expansion.

Blizzard Does Not Need WoW

I feel like the takeaway from the earnings call is not that World of Warcraft has fallen by 1.5 million subscribers in a quarter. Anyone who was not expecting this was living in a rose colored world. Quite honestly I half expected it to be a bigger drop just based on my own experiences. The real take away for me however is that in spite of losing this many players Activision Blizzard had one of its strongest quarters yet. During the earnings call there were repeated mentions of “diversification of product offerings”, which tells me that Blizzard no longer considers themselves the “World of Warcraft” company. They see the writing on the way, that their juggernaut is winding down, and they have replaced its revenue by more agile games that are significantly easier to support. The hard truth is that Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are making them lots and lots of money. When Overwatch launches you can damn well bet that it is also going to make them equally large piles of money, further diluting the need for World of Warcraft.

There was a time when Warcraft was the prize bull, but that is simply no longer the case. If you think of it from a pure numbers perspective it makes sense. Hearthstone for example is a digital card game, and the bulk of the assets that are created for it are two dimensional images. Granted they are awesome looking but they do not require the amount of time it takes to create three dimensional textured models and even more so huge three dimensional worlds for players to explore. The type of content that goes into games like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm is just simply cheaper to produce than the amount of time that goes into building an entire world filled with hundreds of quest givers that have to be debugged and cross checked to make sure they are not breaking something else. To make matters worse… this expensive content is something we are extremely good at either avoiding or burning through as quickly as possible. The hunger for new content is never changing, there is never a point where we the players will ever be satiated. Adding a new playfield to Heroes of the Storm changes that game and its meta for months, and requires only a faction of the work that a single zone would take in a traditional MMO.

The Movie Tie In

The timing of all of this seems to coincide with the release of the Warcraft movie, but I question what exactly that means for the franchise. All of the details behind the movie so far seem to point at this being a “Warcraft” movie and not necessarily a “World of Warcraft” movie, meaning that it takes place in a time before the MMO is set. So does this mean that we will be doing more “timey wimey” stuff with the expansion, and we are somehow trapped in the timeline that we created by following Garrosh to Draenor? Are we going to play a role in trying to stop a new invasion of Azeroth by Guldan and the Burning Legion? The bigger question is… if all of this is going to happen are players going to stomach yet another storyline retcon? These are all questions that I really don’t have an answer for. I feel like if Blizzard has a shot in hell at rekindling the love of this game, they have to take us someplace new and unexplored, but do it in a way that feels epic like never before. I still mark Wrath of the Lich King as the best expansion to date, and it built upon the success of Vanilla and the Burning Crusade polishing both to a mirror sheen.

This is simply something that going back in time cannot provide for me. We’ve done the reboot of the world thing before with Cataclysm, and I found the whole process frustrating and annoying that places I once loved… simply no longer existed. I feel the only real option is for us to take the fight to the Legion, and have an expansion where we are the ones laying siege for once. What I want to see is an expansion where the Alliance and Horde finally put aside their difference, and with it the artificial barriers between players fall down. I want to see an expansion that places us squarely in the path of epic battles as we lay siege to the worlds that the Legion has conquered before, slowly working our way back to their base of operation and banishing their evil from the universe. That is the adventure that will bring players back, and anything less than that I think will ultimately feel hollow. We have run out of villains that we care about… and the whole “Dances with Orcs” feel of both Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor has been infuriating for anyone who really doesn’t care a damn about Orcs. Blizzard needs to prove to us that it can still create an opposition that is worth of the lineage of Arthas and Illidan, and I feel the only way they can do that is by having us take on the Burning Legion on their own territory.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Blizzard Does Not Need WoW

So Much Better With People

August 12, 2015August 5, 2015 by Belghast

The AMA Experiment

Yesterday my good friend Syl started a thread over on the Blaugust Nook with a very simple purpose. The idea was to generate writing prompts by asking the person above you in the thread a question. It seemed like an awesome idea, so I joined in the fun asking the first question, which then left me open to be asked a question. Wilhelm from The Ancient Gaming Noob chimed in after me and gave me a really excellent question, because it is honestly one I have thought about before but never actually written anything on. Without more rambling… here is the prompt.

For a lot of people, starting off in MMORPGs changed the way they viewed and interacted with video games. I often defer single player games in favor of online games now due to the fact that games with other people are… or at least seem… more interesting, even when I am playing them solo. Did starting off with MMORGPs change your relationship with video games?

Brief History of Belghast

So I feel like in order to answer this question appropriately we have to go a ways back into my history. I grew up in a small town, but more so than that… I grew up a significant distance outside of the city limits. This compounded with the fact that I had no siblings, meant that I really didn’t have anyone to play with. As a result I got extremely adept at entertaining myself, but when we hit middle school… the prime era of sleep overs, I pretty much took every opportunity to stay over at someone else’s house or have someone at mine. It was awesome to be able to play games with friends, but my reality was that I was mostly a single player gamer the majority of my time. As such I tended to favor mostly single player titles like role playing games, and zelda like adventure games. These would let me explore worlds by myself without the need of an additional player to bring the fun.

In college I did my fair share of LAN gaming, but the majority of my time was still spent playing single player titles like Fallout on the PC. My first real “MMO” experience was Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, and I ate that game up. Even though communication was not that big of a deal, I spent so much time exploring the worlds with other players. I even went so far as to get a PC keyboard adapter that I could hook up to my Dreamcast so I could make communication easier. During this time I was still playing a significant amount of single player games on the PC and devouring every single Japanese Roleplaying Game that was released on the PS1, PS2 or the Dreamcast. Then my “jumping into” Everquest happened, as I was asked to play a friends secondary character during a Vox raid… and from that point on I was pretty much hooked. Gradually I just stopped playing anything single player and instead devoted every single moment of gaming time to whatever my current MMO crush happened to be as I moved through EQ, DAoC, Horizon, and City of Heroes.

So Much Better With People

Something else happened during this time, that ultimately disconnected me from single player game experiences. Games became so much more cinematic, and quite honestly this was not a good thing as far as I was concerned. There were so many times I wanted to plunk down in front of a game, boot it up and just start playing. When I played my role playing games, I absolutely expected to have a serious time commitment. I did not however expect to have to wade through cut scene after cut scene just to play a platformer. So I became even more immersed in my big online worlds that let me wander aimlessly and find my own enjoyment. I also found myself favoring games that were extremely similar to the online worlds I was playing in. Games like the Elder Scrolls or the three dimensional Fallout games provided me that big open world I craved but allowed me to explore offline. The problem is there was always something missing. These are games that I have devoted hundreds of hours to playing, but there is always a point where I start thinking to myself… this world would be so much better with people.

Ultimately even if I am in “alone in a crowd” mode, I enjoy seeing people roaming around in the same world I am inhabiting. Maybe this is an artifact of my early desires to have someone to play with, or a side effect of being recruited into Everquest in the middle of a bustling and thriving guild. In any case I always end up missing the people when I am playing other games. So as a result there are lots of single player titles that I want to play through, to experience the story… but they ultimately sit in my steam library unfinished and in some cases not even started… because I would rather be online interacting with people that I care about. Fairly recently I have found that hanging out on Teamspeak while playing single player games helps a bit. It allows me to chat with people and feel like I am part of a larger community, while still indulging in single player worlds and experiences. Similarly streaming a single player game to twitch feels like I am in some way making it a multiplayer experience by sharing it with others. So to answer the original question… yes MMOs have changed the way I play single player games, by simply making me not satisfied with being in a world without other human beings to interact with.

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I Think I’m Learning Japanese (i really think so)

August 5, 2015 by Tamrielo

I spent about four hours today studying Japanese, and working on my process for teaching myself. A few people asked me what resources I was using, so I figured I’d talk a bit about those as well as how I’m structuring my study.

My first step was the free “level 1″ Rosetta Stone program, which I got for iOS. It lets you ‘sample’ various languages, in the form of a roughly two hour course, broken out into chunks. It’s a very high-immersion piece of software, using exclusively audio input/output, images, and kana (written Japanese) to teach. It doesn’t really hold your hand as far as explaining how to use it goes, so I had a number of missteps while I figured out what each type of exercise wanted me to actually do.

What I like about the Rosetta Stone software is that it teaches by showing rather than telling. It doesn’t explain how the grammatical structure works or what the words it uses mean, it leaves you to intuit what it’s saying through context. While this sounds very frustrating, it’s structured in such a way that you can pick up a lot of tangential lessons while doing the exercises it provides, and it mixes up the ways it demonstrates these. As an example, in one exercise it might have you match pictures with statements like “the boy drinks juice” or “the woman drinks water”. You’ll have learned “juice” and “water” prior to this exercise, and are basically now hearing them in sentences to get a sense of how they’re used. The last section of the exercise will then say “the man drinks tea”, introducing you to a word you haven’t seen before, but that you can guess at because the other options you have are “juice” and “water”, so the remaining new word must be “tea”.

What I don’t like about Rosetta Stone is that, first and foremost, it’s extremely expensive. The software costs hundreds of dollars, and while I think it’s a good piece of software to get an early handle on the language, it’s not going to work for everyone and the depth to which it can reach is relatively shallow. It’s essentially a very expensive way to get a solid handle on a very small piece of the language, though its focus on audio puts it decently ahead of most learning tools shy of a tutor or study group; the latter may not be easily available and the former is going to cost rather more than Rosetta Stone in the long run (though cover a lot more material).

I can neither afford a tutor nor Rosetta Stone, so once I’d completed the free trial lessons, I went looking elsewhere for material. The next tool I started using was another iOS app: iKana, which is essentially a set of flash cards for all of the Japanese syllabaries. As a minor aside, it’s important to note that Japanese doesn’t use an alphabet the way we understand it in English. Each symbol in Hiragana and Katakana corresponds to a particular syllabic sound, which is either a vowel (e) or a consonant-vowel combination (ke). Because each symbol has a single sound (unlike English, which has anywhere from two to five sounds for a given letter), there are a LOT more kana than letters in the alphabet.

My approach as a raw beginner was to tackle this bit of memorization first. It requires very little structure and it’s going to be the foundation of me being able to read or speak the language. I spent about a week doing nothing but studying Hiragana for an hour each night, using iKana’s flash cards, stroke order practice, and built-in memory tests. The app comes in a package with iKanji, which is a similar app for learning Kanji (Japanese symbols for words/concepts, rather than syllables), though I haven’t yet used it much. The overall cost of the pair of apps was ten dollars, and I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth out of just iKana, without even touching iKanji. The convenience of being able to practice anywhere I have my phone is great, and it’s become a nightly ritual for me.

What I *don’t* like about iKana is that its tests aren’t extremely robust. Speed recognition tests give you a syllable or a kana and have you match it with its pair, letting you select from four. This is fine and good early on, but it’s a lot easier to score highly on a multiple choice test than it would be for me to simply write all of the Hiragana on a piece of paper. Essentially, iKana can get me a leg up, but I’m going to need to spend some time with something else (read: a pencil and paper, honestly) to get the rest of the way. I can’t speak much about iKanji, because I’ve opened the app all of once thus far. I’ll get to it later.

With a pretty okay basis for Hiragana, I felt like I was ready to tackle a textbook. The last purchase I made was the Genki textbook and workbook, for about $70 on Amazon. It’s by far the most highly recommended Japanese learning tool, though it comes with the caveat that it doesn’t hold your hand when teaching you. The textbook moves quickly and comes with some audio CDs for both textbook and workbook. What I like about it is that it provides Japanese text without visible romaji (English alphabet letters) so that I’m forced to actually read Hiragana rather than reading romaji and glancing at the actual Japanese text.

What I don’t like about Genki is that it really wants to be taught by a teacher that’s got a lot of other study work paired with each lesson, and it’s structured for use in a classroom. There are a number of exercises that ask you to talk with classmates, for example. Obviously an entirely self-taught language is going to be nearly impossible, but still.

The structure I’m putting together for my study looks something like this:

Kana recognition, to the point where I can read kana by looking at it. I don’t need to be fast at this, I just need to be able to do it.
- This is basically to lay a foundation for everything else. If I can read or hear sounds, I can put them together and work out what I’m hearing, but until then I’m going to be floundering.
Basic grammar and phrases, enough to say some basic things and ask simple questions, and start to get a handle on constructing sentences of my own.
- This is to get a grasp of sentence structure and start to get a feel for how to both speak in and listen to the language. I’m less concerned with grammatical perfection here than I am the basics.
Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary, both in kana and in kanji.
- Sort of self-explanatory, and it’s honestly going to be a part of every step of the process, but here is where I’m going to start trying to express more complex thoughts, and I’m going to need the vocabulary to do so.
Advanced grammar and sentence structure; how to say complicated things.
- A lot of language learning programs will try to get you saying the complex English things you’re used to early on, which I find frustrating because I can’t break it down the way I do in English. When I tried to learn Spanish, I had a bad tendency to try to directly translate whatever I would have said in English straight to Spanish, and got frustrated because my (large) English vocabulary didn’t map neatly to my (small) Spanish one. It’s a trap I fell into previously and one I’m trying to avoid here. My hope is that I can afford a tutor by this point.
Eloquence, more vocabulary, specialized communications.
- I have no idea if I’m going to get here. I doubt I will unless I wind up spending some significant amount of time in Japan for whatever reason, or wind up with friends who’ll speak the language around and with me. If I can speak the language well enough to communicate for business purposes, that’ll be great, but that’s another thing I’m going to need specialized training in.

We’ll see how well this structure holds up to me actually trying to learn!

I Think I’m Learning Japanese (i really think so)

August 5, 2015August 5, 2015 by Tamrielo

The structure I’m putting together for my study looks something like this:

Kana recognition, to the point where I can read kana by looking at it. I don’t need to be fast at this, I just need to be able to do it.
- This is basically to lay a foundation for everything else. If I can read or hear sounds, I can put them together and work out what I’m hearing, but until then I’m going to be floundering.
Basic grammar and phrases, enough to say some basic things and ask simple questions, and start to get a handle on constructing sentences of my own.
- This is to get a grasp of sentence structure and start to get a feel for how to both speak in and listen to the language. I’m less concerned with grammatical perfection here than I am the basics.
Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary, both in kana and in kanji.
- Sort of self-explanatory, and it’s honestly going to be a part of every step of the process, but here is where I’m going to start trying to express more complex thoughts, and I’m going to need the vocabulary to do so.
Advanced grammar and sentence structure; how to say complicated things.
- A lot of language learning programs will try to get you saying the complex English things you’re used to early on, which I find frustrating because I can’t break it down the way I do in English. When I tried to learn Spanish, I had a bad tendency to try to directly translate whatever I would have said in English straight to Spanish, and got frustrated because my (large) English vocabulary didn’t map neatly to my (small) Spanish one. It’s a trap I fell into previously and one I’m trying to avoid here. My hope is that I can afford a tutor by this point.
Eloquence, more vocabulary, specialized communications.
- I have no idea if I’m going to get here. I doubt I will unless I wind up spending some significant amount of time in Japan for whatever reason, or wind up with friends who’ll speak the language around and with me. If I can speak the language well enough to communicate for business purposes, that’ll be great, but that’s another thing I’m going to need specialized training in.