Gracie has thoughts – Page 17

Chipping a tiny hole in the faction wall

April 13, 2016 by Grace

The first dev connect for WildStar has ended and the results are in. Here’s what Pappy has to say about the changes coming for factions in WildStar:

We will be dropping the Content Finder faction barrier.

We will be allowing players of both factions to communicate openly with each other. There will no longer be a faction filter in chat.

The faction barrier for open world grouping, housing, social systems, and guilds (which includes Arena teams and Warparties) will stay in place for now.

Well that’s very disappointing. Depending on where you sit on the faction issue, you can find reason for complaint here, or reason for hope. My opinion is that I would have liked to see the faction wall go completely out the window. I want to be able to play with my friends on either faction without having to reroll a new character, and I want to be able to inhabit social spaces with them without restrictions. Unfortunately these changes do none of that. Let’s see what we are getting out of this.

1: Dropping the content finder faction barrier. I understand this choice. Queues can be long, and this will help shorten them. I do think it will feel incredibly weird to be randomly dropped into a group with the other faction but know that there’s no way to reconnect socially with those folks once the run is over (see point #3 below). It may feel a bit jarring to end up in a mixed group if you are a strong advocate of the faction wall, and it is almost made worse by the fact that there’s no lore or social context at all for this. Basically the only place in the game where mixed groups can happen is in a random group setting.

2: Removal of faction filter from chat. This is such a non-issue for me I don’t even know what to say about it. There’s been chat mods and even workarounds in the built-in systems that have allowed cross faction chat since launch. The people who really wanted this already have it, and the people really don’t want it are going to be annoyed at having it forced on them when they’ve chosen to avoid it up to now. It should make coordinating world boss groups easier at least since everyone will be able to understand each other.

3: No changes to open world grouping and social systems. Well shit. This is what I really was hoping for, and now it feels like xmas is canceled. I wanted changes that would let me play with my friends no matter what faction. I was hoping to be able to check out the other faction’s housing, or to convince my dommie friends to join my awesome guild. The housing thing especially frustrates me since it seems like it would be straightforward to add an “Exiles only” toggle to the housing settings to appease folks who don’t want dommies stepping on their lawns or in their private RP areas. Housing is such a bastion of community and creativity which absolutely does not follow strict faction, lore, or even genre restrictions, so it makes me sad to see it stay closed off.

I have spoken with some faction purist folks who are upset about these changes because they wanted the walls to stay in place as-is. I almost feel like this result is bad for both of us. For them, they can be randomly placed into groups with the opposite faction with no context and no way to avoid it. For me, the only faction crossover is happening in a place that I don’t spend any time, since I usually run group content with friends not random pugs. I really think opening up the social systems would have been much more preferable. Those who want to play with their friends or meet new ones while questing or grouping in the world could do so, while the faction purists could choose to keep their guilds and personal social spaces to one faction only. There would be no forced grouping with the other faction. I believe enough in the lore team of WildStar to give us interesting reasons why this could work, and I believe enough in the player base that they could continue to create social spaces and events that make them happy.

I hope that this is not the final word on this issue. These dev connects are an interesting way to gather feedback, but I hope there continues to be a dialog even after the decisions are made. One of WildStar’s greatest strengths is the way the devs interact with the players, long may this continue.

P.S. Don’t forget to check in on the new dev connect, they’re asking for feedback on race/class combos!

Past and Future of World of Warcraft

April 12, 2016 by Grace

There’s been a bit of fuss recently with the closure of a “vanilla” WoW server, and it has me thinking about the pull between nostalgia and progress. Now, for the record, I believe that Blizzard is 100% within their rights to force the closure of any 3rd party WoW server of any flavor. It is their IP, it is their game, they’re right to protect it. However, I’m also in the camp that would absolutely love to see them launch a legacy server or three. Full disclosure: I’ve played briefly on a vanilla server a few years back, during WoW’s Cataclysm expansion. I had never even played WoW during vanilla, I didn’t get sucked in until the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. The vanilla server still called to me because I wanted to see for myself what things were like back then, and because it conveniently erased all of the changes that were making me outright hate the game in its current state. It was a very different game at a very different pace, and I could have happily kept playing it indefinitely if the nagging understanding that I was walking in a moral gray area at best hadn’t driven me back to the straight and narrow. The fact that my chosen vanilla server has long since been closed down tells me I did the right thing by stopping.

I hold out hope that Blizzard might one day launch legacy servers the same way I still hold out hope that they’ll institute an invisible mode for battle.net. They obviously think both those things are not in their best interests or they’d have implemented them by now, but a girl can dream. Ironically, I think that having legacy servers might actually let people enjoy the current offerings more. There have been almost too many quality of life changes to the game to count, and running around questing on foot until level 40 with no heirlooms or dungeon finder might put some things in perspective. I also think that during the flatly awful lulls in content it would be nice to be able to travel back to a simpler time and be a tourist still in WoW, still giving Blizzard money but experiencing something a little different for a few months instead of quitting the game completely.

Looking forward towards Legion I don’t see a lot to excite me, and I do see a few things that turn me off. I feel like I am drifting farther away from WoW’s target demographic, and maybe that’s ok but it still makes me feel a little sad. I also look at the game itself and it is showing its age more and more. The older zones look pretty awful and that’s fine on a nostalgia server but a harder sell for an actively updating game. Each expansion works a little magic and brings a partial facelift but even the newest zones don’t hold a candle to the graphics of more modern MMOs in my opinion. After all this contemplation I find myself strangely yearning for the change that relegates all of WoW to “legacy” status, a fresh clean 2.0 with modern sensibilities and graphics. Maybe if that happens Blizz will finally open a vanilla WoW server.

They’ll Have to Kick Me Out

March 14, 2016 by Grace

By now most folks have heard about the bad news. In a classic “bury bad news on a Friday afternoon” move, NCSoft laid off as many as 70 of Carbine’s staff last week, and canceled WildStar’s China release completely. Other folks have already laid out most of my thoughts on the matter (see Gamer Girl Confessions and Notes from Nexus for example), I can’t help but ramble about this a little here too. Don’t worry, I got most of the swearing out of my system on Friday night.

I saw the world end once and I survived. I’ll always stay until they kick me out.

I’ve said before that Nexus is my home and while a lot has changed since I wrote that post the one constant is that I haven’t stopped playing WildStar. I’ve gone through phases of playing other games more, sure, but I’ve had an active subscription since launch and I intend to keep it that way. Right now I’m all paid up through the end of this year. After the news on Friday though, I’m just hoping that the game is still here that long. The layoffs are heartbreaking, but for the health of the game the cancellation of the China launch is the most worrying to me. It screams that NCSoft don’t have any faith in the game, and worse, it completely removes the potential for revenue from that new market. It also has the secondary effect of destabilizing the current player base, both by causing some folks to abandon ship, and demoralizing those of us who remain. Combine that with NCSoft’s record of shutting down under-performing MMOs and the outlook is grim.

I’m looking forward to hearing from Pappy as promised next week, hopefully sooner than later. He absolutely needs to help calm the players’ nerves and I don’t envy him having to do that at a time when I’m sure the remaining Carbine staff are incredibly stressed. It is vital that he convince us though, because if people believe the game is truly heading for maintenance mode or worse they will stop spending money and make all the prophecies of doom true.

Everything feels like panic and chaos. And candy-coated rowsdowers.

I still support WildStar and Carbine’s awesome staff. Nowhere else have I seen such a lovely, committed group of devs who happily engage with the community on a daily basis. I want to support them with my wallet too, but as a broke student I’ve got to be careful about my finances. Convince me that the game is still moving forward with short- and long-term plans. Reassure me that the game I love will still be here this time next year. There are so many mysteries on Nexus that I want to solve and new places I want to explore and I’ll happily pony up some more money for fancy hats or new dyes if it helps keep the doors open. But first I need to see clear goals and not hollow PR-speak. We’re all looking to you, Pappy, I’m with you til the end!

Change is Good I Hate Change

March 7, 2016 by Grace

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you might remember me praising the (still in Steam Early Access) game Subnautica a few times. Well, I’m back again today to praise it some more, and also offer some thoughts on game updates, and game changes more generally.

First let’s get some formalities out of the way. From the beginning I thought that Subnautica was a beautiful and immersive game, and over the past few updates it has only gotten moreso. They recently did a pass on the game that effectively just made everything prettier, from improving some models and animations to updating the lighting effects. I want to spend so much time exploring this world because it is so beautiful.

I did eventually craft an aquarium and grow some critters and plants!

Now it is time to move on to some meatier changes. The most recent update promised the ability to craft planters and large aquaria for growing your own terrestrial and aquatic plants, and for growing sea creatures from eggs. Cool! Unfortunately, this also required starting a new game again. This highlighted some changes since the last time I restarted that, while I think make the game better, made getting up to speed again much slower. There was a tiny bit more of an introduction sequence than I remembered, which was very nice. Once I hopped in the water and started working toward making a new sea base so I could start my new garden I discovered that many of the items I could craft immediately before now required blueprints, and the system for gaining those blueprints was different. Now you need to craft a scanning device to carry with you so you can scan fragments that you find until you scan enough to learn the full blueprint. You can’t add any sort of power supply to your base until you learn the blueprint for one. This really slows the pace of building, since it means you have to constantly run back to your escape pod to use the fabricator for much longer than before.

I think I’m so conflicted on this big change because I’ve been playing so long now and it is quite disruptive to my usual path of progress. It didn’t feel great to have to spend a while searching around for a blueprint for something I had from the outset before, especially when I just wanted to check out some of the cool new additions. Perils of early access I guess, but there’s also parallels to many other games. Leveling for the first time in a MMO I almost always want to take my time and explore. After that, I’m often just looking for the most direct route to get caught up to where I want to be. Having to re-earn something I already worked hard for feels incredibly unfun, whether a cosmetic item, reputation grind, attunement, or other unlocks. It is why big disruptive changes in a game feel bad sometimes, even when they’re adding great new content. The changes to old-world WoW in the Cataclysm expansion come to mind here. They added a bunch of new quests! There was so much to re-explore and see! But it disrupted my known alt leveling path, took away something I was so very familiar with (ah nostalgia!) and replaced it with new stories that I sort of wanted to pay attention to but mostly just wanted to get through quickly on my way to the level cap. To this day I feel like I never gave that content a fair shake because I was always in a hurry to rush through it, even when it was brand new.

This is a very different feeling from a simple addition of new content that picks up where you left off. New DLC for the most part, or new patch or expansion content in MMOs that adds max-level activities or increases the level cap doesn’t invoke so much resentment in me. Hopping into an existing game file or on to an endgame-ready character and working toward newly-added goals is satisfying because it feels like progress, not retreading old ground in a slightly different way.

I’m not sure exactly what all this means for me and Subnautica going forward. I absolutely love the game and will continue to highly recommend it. They are still adding monthly updates though, so maybe I need to space out my play time a bit and let a few pile up before returning and starting over from scratch again. Hopefully that will allow more cool new additions to outweigh my grumpy resistance to change.