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Week In Gaming 9/13/2015

September 13, 2015 by Belghast

Very Rough Week

As you could probably tell from some of the subtext of my posts this week… it was a pretty rough one for me emotionally. Work is still being stressful, but honestly that really had nothing to do with this one. For our country September 11th has some pretty tragic context, but for me it has completely different issues. Firstly September 11th was the birthday of my grandmother, and she would have been 90 this year. I miss her an awful lot, and there are days where it is just rough to think about her. Her birthday always brings back memories of her, which are honestly all good… but there is a bittersweet melancholy associated with it. She essentially raised me during the first years of my life, because she was my constant babysitter and companion. She is also the one member of my family that really seemed to appreciate my wife being a member of the family. If that were not enough to get me down in the dumps… this week also marks the anniversary of a pretty horrible period of my life. In September of 2012 I lost my Grandfather, and the day after the funeral… September 11th… a pretty horrific event happened at my work place. It quite literally with zero hyperbole ushered in the worst six months of my life. Someone screwed up, and screwed up badly… and I had to deal with the fallout and recovery. So each time this day comes I get a little gun shy. So this past Friday I was crawling in my skin as I waited for they day to end.

Demon Huntering

As far as gaming this week, I had a pretty cloistered time of it. I am still very much in my “hiding out” mentality, and I guess in part I think it was just me waiting for this week to pass me by, dreading Friday. I spent some time working on my Demon Hunter in Diablo 3 and I think when I last played I was about halfway through 69. At some point soon I hope to pop back in and finish leveling him to 70. I also spent some time farming away on Rifts, Greater Rifts and Bounties attempting to get blood shards… which I then disappointingly spent trying to get class set pieces. I have been stuck at 3 of 4 pieces of the set I am going after on my Barbarian for a few weeks now. I am not sure but Diablo might have worked its way out of my system for a bit. I finished off the seasonal stuff, but as of last night Grace on the podcast talked about additional seasonal rewards. I am just not sure if I will be willing to do any of the crazy things that are required to get them.

Star Wars the Old Republic

The big event of this week was that I apparently have fallen into a Star Wars the Old Republic shaped hole. I have played this game off and on since release, but this is really the first time I have felt I was actually back in the swing of things. I’ve played alts a lot in the past, but this is the first time I have actually continued the storyline on my Jedi Guardian main. As of last night I finished Makeb and am working through the precursor content leading up to Shadow of Revan. My plan is to finish the story content before the drop of Fallen Empire next month. Additionally I am taking advantage of the insane twelve times experience bonus. Last night during the podcast I started working on my Chiss Smuggler and I have to say… having access to Treek as a tanky companion makes that experience so much better. Seriously… I hate Corso Riggs so much… and was completely stalled out trying to play a smuggler because he annoyed me so much. Treek is simply a better tank.. in that she jumps AT the mobs instead of grappling them back to me. Who though a tank companion pulling back to the healer was a good idea? Anyways as soon as I wrap this post I intend to go downstairs and play some more Smuggler… that was how much I was into it last night. I may or may not have stayed up until 1:30 in the morning playing.

Final Fantasy XIV

I am very much in a lull right now with Final Fantasy XIV. I talked about this a bit on the podcast, but it is strange… that even while in this lull I still consider it my home base of operations. I figure when 3.1 lands which should be soonish… everyone will be invigorated once more and we will return to logging in every single night. In the mean time I am playing a lot of other games as not to force myself. I am still raiding on Monday and Wednesday nights, and this week we managed to get a few more people through Bismarck Extreme. I really want to defeat Ravana Extreme before the new content lands, but one of the big problems we are having is… that honestly it just feels like there isn’t much content for us to be doing. When we returned to Final Fantasy XIV July 2013 we had a years worth of content to explore since we had last played. While we managed to slowly whittle our way through all of it… it gave us tons of small goals to work towards. In Heavensward there really does not seem to be the much for us to work towards. We can clear Alexander Normal in our sleep, and are pretty successful with Bismarck Extreme. We are working on Ravana Extreme and I believe it is in our sights… but Savage Alexander just isn’t a realistic goal, namely because I can’t bring myself to do the gear grinding that it would require to really be viable there. I am well enough geared to do all of the content I feel like I could do… and I just don’t have the drive to push towards that bleeding edge. So instead I play other games and wait for another content drop.

AggroChat 74 – Force Binds Us

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

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And Also With You

September 12, 2015 by Belghast

Nar Shadda Living

Lately I have been on this Star Wars kick and like I said before… I absolutely blame the Force Awakens hype for putting me in this position. My good friend Tam mentioned something last night about playing SWTOR again… that absolutely rings true. We were both brought up in “good catholic families” so he mentioned something that is happening to me too. When we hear someone say “May the Force Be With You” it is absolutely instinctual to want to say “And Also With You”. Even worse… I have this irrational need to make the sign of the cross at the same time. The funny thing about playing this game again is that I guess I did not realize how often I have subscribed for a month or so in the past, that said I guess I am happy I did. I had access to Section X and the HK-47 quest line without having to pay to unlock it, because apparently I subbed at just the right time. When it came time to look into Strongholds it seems like I also have a five room Nar Shadda Sky Palace unlocked for free as well. The cool thing about that is that if I had to choose one of the housing options… it probably would have been Nar Shadda anyways because I have been in love with the concept of that city since I first encountered it in Dark Forces.

For the time being most of us are going through a bit of a lull in Final Fantasy XIV. Right now I am absolutely enjoying raiding and I really hope we down Ravana Extreme before the launch of the 3.1 patch… but past that I really don’t have much desire to log in. I could force myself to grind out the esoterics every week, but my fear is that if I start forcing it… I will also start resenting the game like I have World of Warcraft in the past. That was a cycle I would get into with WoW, where I would force myself to be there… “for the guild” or “for the raid” and then ultimately it would lead to my cancelling of my account once more. Final Fantasy XIV is my new home base of operations, and I am happy with it… I just don’t want to do anything to tarnish my enjoyment. There is never a point where Lalafell things or Final Fantasy XIV news does not give me warm fuzzies right now… but I also know me. I like playing lots of different games, and if I force myself to ONLY play FFXIV it will ruin the experience for me.

The Search for Parts

I have to say I am enjoying the HK-47 quest line. I spent most of last night working on it and gathering bits and pieces scattered around the galaxy. It seems like it provided just the right amount of friction, in that you had to go to the PVP area on Tatooine first and once that was out of the way, were able to explore the galaxy at your leisure finding the rest of the bits. The first part on Taris was the most annoying, because you had to get used to using the scanner to determine if you were close to a piece. All of the other pieces seem to have a clear path that you can search along, but in Taris it is hard to see the pattern of where the pieces will show up. Luckily there was a large group of people roaming around looking for it while I was there, and fortunately the quest is fairly pro-community. When someone finds a piece it stays there for about a minute allowing anyone in the vicinity to loot it. So when someone finally hit on being 10 meters away from the piece we quickly gathered together and found it. Essentially to get a piece to show up you have to be within 2 meters, which means a lot of staggerstep movement right around the 10 meter location.

From there I had to travel to the Jedi Temple and the Dark Temple. These steps require you to have an alt of appropriate level on the opposite faction, and the pieces you get in either can be mailed to any character on your account. Since I was doing this on my Jedi Guardian, the Jedi Temple was a pretty quick process. From there I mailed the scanner to my Sith Warrior and I proceeded with the same thing… but this time on the Dark Temple approach rather than the temple proper itself. After doing all of the locations… essentially my suggestion would be to stay on the path and keep moving forward a little bit until you hit on a piece. No piece that I found was very far off of the main path, so that at least seems to make life a little easier for you. By the time I was working on the final piece on Hoth I had gotten pretty decent at the whole searching process and it came the quickest of them all. Now I need to do both a normal mode dungeon and a hard mode dungeon, and I am hoping that Tam gets caught up so that we can grab Ammo and Sol and run them as a four player group. As far as plans go for today… I am going to return to leveling on Makeb and plan on binging the Star Wars movies… since I am clearly apparently going through a phase.

Section X

September 11, 2015 by Belghast

Life With a Teacher

It feels like I don’t have a whole lot worth talking about this morning. My evening was rather fragmented, in that I got home fairly early and then spent the next couple of hours trying to pass the time while waiting on my wife to get home. We had tentatively made plans to go out to dinner, and on a normal evening I would have fixed something and been engaged in a game by the time she got home. This school year has been rather rough for her, and she is spending silly amounts of time up at school grading and planning. It gets annoying at times because it is super hard to plan my life around her ever changing schedule, but I manage. There are certain aspects of being a teachers husband… that no one will ever really understand fully. We ended up going to a BBQ place near the Walmart Neighborhood Market, because my thought was after dinner we would walk over to the market really quick and pick up a few things. This seemed like a simple in and out trip, and we could get on our merry way homewards.

Fate stacked against us, and of all of the places to have “back to school clearance” I did not expect a Walmart Neighborhood market. For those who do not have these in their area, they are essentially a grocery store only Walmart, but have some minimal other items. As we were rounding the bend past frozen foods I saw that they had a kiosk of back to school stuff. I didn’t think anything about it, but next thing I knew we were sorting through all of the folders trying to pick out nine of each color from a mixed up bin of them. I cannot count the number of times I have had an experience similar to this one. There really wasn’t much space so my wife did most of the sifting through the folders but in the past I have had my hands knee deep in vats of assorted merchandise looking for that one item that matches the rest of the things we had pulled out. Part of being a teacher is trying to find all of the things you need for your classroom as cheaply as humanly possible, and while I am fairly used to it… it just surprises me sometimes when I am not expecting it. After all of the bin sorting… we got home a little later than I had expected.

Section X

When I finally got settled in for the night, I made a blanket cocoon on the couch and booted up Star Wars the Old Republic. I am now on this kick of trying to get through all of the story line that I have missed before the release of Fallen Empire. For this I am going to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Disney. You cannot go anywhere right now without being deluged in Force Awakens merchandise, and with it comes an upwelling of all of the other movies that I am really damned nostalgic about as well. I have these designs on making a Marathon of the movies this weekend while working on the SWTOR content. It has been a really long time since I have watched the prequels, so I am honestly hoping I can bury the hatchet that I hold towards them. The prequels broke me, and came damned close to breaking my love of Star Wars as a whole. So when I heard about Force Awakens I was mildly interested, but now I feel like I am full on in the thrall of overwhelming feels towards the franchise I grew up with. I even went so far as to order the Disney Infinity 3.0 Saga Edition… because it was on sale and two I had enough saved up discover credit to get it essentially for free.

I have to say playing this game again… and seeing fresh content in it… reminds me of why we were so damned addicted to it for a couple of month period after launch. The story content is really good, and even though Makeb does not actually feature any “class specific” content I am absolutely enjoying myself. I did however take a break from Makeb last night to start working on the Section X content. I guess I played long enough to get that area unlocked for free, and with it should give me access to my very own HK-47 droid. From what I hear it is a rather lengthy quest and involves collecting bits on several different characters, including a Sith. Mainly I was told that if I cared about story progression, that I should go ahead and do that now before getting too deep in the new content. As you can see from my previous pictures I went back to the Jedi Knight robes as seen on the box art. I have to say I dig the Holowardrobe because it is way cheaper to change your appearance using it than re-modding your gear. There are a few of us currently going through this Star Wars nostalgia attack, which makes me feel kinda sad each time I interact with the person who held down the fort while we have been gone. I know that I am just here doing some MMO tourism… and as soon as I am done with the story content I will be gone once more. Even though I have not been playing a lot of it… Final Fantasy XIV is still my home base of operations.

Breakup on Reentry

September 10, 2015 by Belghast

Returning Players

If you have followed me for any length of time you realize I play an awful lot of games. One of those traits also involves going back and re-exploring games that I have long consigned to the dust bin. One of the challenges with this lifestyle however is trying to figure out what the hell you were doing some six months ago when you last touched a game. This morning I want to talk about a problem that most games have. As content is released there is often times no real thought about the folks that will come back to the game several patches behind. While there is generally one game that I stay up to date with, and that game currently is Final Fantasy XIV… the others sit in various states of completion with no real easy route back to where I last left off. What ends up happening generally is that I start a brand new character, because it is simply easier to start fresh than try and sort out the options open to a formerly “level capped” character. As a programmer it seems like it would be easy to create some sort of new features tool that lead you to what has been recently added to the game. Various games have attempted this, and honestly Final Fantasy XIV has one of the better versions of this technology… but it could still use a lot of work.

World of Warcraft has these quest boards in main cities that are supposed to lead you to the starting quests of new areas. The problem being that you level so damned fast in that game that you always are well ahead of the quest completion curve. The worst offender however has to be The Secret World. In that game every single quest is essentially repeatable, so even if you are up to date… it can be a challenge to sort out what quests are new in a given region. The last quest content I completed was the “Last Train to Cairo” from Issue 6, and even then I think I missed most of Issue 5 because I didn’t quite know where to start to find it. Now we are sitting at Issue 12 and I know I have a ton of awesome content waiting on me. As each has been released I have popped in to spend some of the lifetime membership currency that I gain each month. The problem being… without significant research on my part I have no real idea where to start to even begin trying to sort these out. I spend most of my free time consuming MMO content… and if this bothers me… it has to be an impassible wall to more casually interested players.

Content Advisement

With the launch of Cataclysm, the World of Warcraft attempted to solve this problem by creating a series of billboards spread throughout the major cities that are designed to give you the start of a quest chain leading into new zones. The problem there is that you level too damned fast, and I constantly had a back log of these quests telling me to go to various zones that were less than optimal for my questing experience. While I applaud their efforts… I think all of these MMOs need to do a much better job at giving players advisement as to what they should be doing. What I envision is an optional box that says what zone you should be in based on your level and or gear, and provide a series of quest suggestions that you never completed. If there is a holiday going on, it should prioritize this and if you are at the level cap it should guide you to the next patch worth of content that you had not experienced. This would go a long way in making returning players feel welcome and relevant in the game experience. Considering I have done this dozens of times… I can tell you that returning to an MMO that you tucked neatly away into your past… is a completely overwhelming experience.

Firstly you have to sort out your bags, because I have not left a single MMO in a state where I did not have hundreds of items in my inventory with no memory of what was actually useful and what was simply dross that I picked up while killing things. Next you have to sort out your quest log, which also is never really left in a neat state. If you are the level cap you generally have a mixture of quests that you never completed and quests from whatever happens to be the current “daily” hub. Upon returning generally speaking neither of these is much use, but at the same time I find it just as hard to sort through my quest log as it was to sort through my bags. What I really want is some intelligence guiding my decisions. Present me with options of things that players in my level range are normally doing. Help me get back into your game, and set down roots again. It honestly shocks me that no game company seems to have thought this one through. There are a fixed number of new players out there, so many times established games are just trading their populations over time. Anything a game can do to make it more “sticky” for returning players has to ultimately help the bottom line.

Breakup on Reentry

Like I said Final Fantasy XIV does a decent job at this, but their own advisement window is greatly limited based on several factors. The biggest is that most of the items in the list are limited to the zone you are currently in. In the case of a returning player, they may or may not know what zone they should even be in. For years I have been trying to play Star Wars the Old Republic again. The problem being that I always end up playing on an alt character because it is simply too confusing to try and sort out what I should be doing on any of my three previously max level characters. My original instinct has always been to go to the space station hub for my faction. Problem there is that there were no sign of new quests. I have repeated this process dozens of times, until last night it finally dawned on me that I should maybe return to my starship. Sure enough waiting there for me was a quest chain starter leading me to Makeb. The problem being… that since it took me two years to finally find this quest it was anything but obvious, which tells me there is a problem with the way the systems are working.

What got me on this topic was yesterday some friends and I were listing off “must have” features for an MMO. Which got me thinking… that this is the one feature that no MMO really does a decent job of. Please someone out there… put some thought into the experience of returning players. The answer is not to ignore all of the content that came before. The answer is to help players go back and experience the things that they missed. As a result some sort of intelligent system is well worth the time it takes to build. All we are really talking is a handful of database queries based on a few parameters, and then returning the relevant items to a window. This would go so far into making returning players feel like they matter and are welcome in the game. I cannot count the number of games that I have reinstalled… only to leave after a single night of trying to sort out what it was that I was doing when I last played. In each case I “wanted” to play the game, but the game required more out of me than I was willing to give it. When this situation happens all I really needed was a breadcrumb to lead me to what I should be focusing on. On the positive side I did finally start the post release content in Star Wars the Old Republic, which is a thing I have been passively trying to do since the free to play conversion. I would really like to see where that story goes before the launch of Fallen Empire.