MMORPG – Page 254

Deep Roads

February 29, 2016 by Belghast

It’s Over

At this point I don’t know for certain if my character is weeping tears of frustration or joy. Which ever the case I am just really happy that as of today and by the time I get home from work… the Love is in the Air event will be finished. I felt so damned conflicted this year when it came to this event, largely because I don’t even know why I was participating. I really really do not enjoy World of Warcraft holiday events, because they somehow manage to make something that should feel fun an exciting… into an obligation. Then on top of that… I don’t even like the Love Rocket mount. However because it is the rarest mount in the game, and I do not already have one… I feel somehow obligated to try for it every year. I wish I could understand why I do it… and to the extent of pushing aside other games that I would enjoy more just so I can haplessly farm for a chase mount. Sure it only takes a few minutes to do an attempt at the mount… but I felt obligated to run six different level 100 characters through it. Which by the time you check your garrison and shipyard on each, and queue for a dungeon… you are talking about roughly an hour of your night gone… chasing a mount I didn’t even really care that much about.

We talked at length about this phenomena over the weekend on the podcast, and largely why this works… and why it also frustrates us. Tam suggested that it was because it feels like the game is not respecting our time… and that is absolutely part of it. I think for me personally a good deal of my frustration is that this madness is actually working. This game knows my triggers so well, and it feels as though I have no control in the process. There is a certain measure of excitement in the chase, and were this something I could normally farm on my own… it would fall into the same category as my attempts to get rare mounts from raid bosses. However the fact that it is only available for a limited time… triggers the “fear of missing out” that if we don’t become mindless drones we might miss that one opportunity to get something cool. Even when in this case the something cool is not something we actually wanted in the first place. It is just frustrating to see a company working so effectively against my nature and getting me to follow along in their scheme each year in trying for “the thing”. Now granted I know without a doubt that come Halloween I will once again be chasing like mad in trying to get the Headless Horseman mount. At least I can rest comfortable in the knowledge that it “could be worse”. I mean it could be something as heinous as the Rift cash box chase mounts

Dwarf in the Deep Roads

I don’t have a whole lot to say here, because I didn’t get terribly far into it… however I did manage to start a quest chain leading me into the Deep Roads. The Deep Roads are my happy place in the Dragon Age universe because if it were really possible…. I would absolutely live completely underground. If you venture into any of my Minecraft settlements, you will see a pretty simple structure above ground… that leads to a massive snaking catacombs underneath. I just feel safe underground, and I have loved being down in every cave I have been able to. I still think having a structure that was mostly buried in a mountain would be my ultimate situation. I wonder if some of my reaction of safety to being underground… comes from the fact that I live in a state where the wind comes sweeping down the plains…. and takes out an entire city every now and then. In any case… we also got into a lengthy discussion about the Deep Roads on the podcast…. and I was shocked to find out that pretty much everyone other than me… unanimously hated them. They just seem like a badass concept… here are these roads and warrens deep underground that you have to fight the Dark Spawn which natively live down there. That pretty much sounds amazing… constantly having a fresh flow of Dark Spawn to fight. Then again…. I might not be normal when it comes to combat in video games. The Deep Roads are like the most metal part of Dragon Age, and I am hoping together to get time to venture forth again down there.

Iron Banner

February 27, 2016 by Belghast

Modem Death Cry

Last night was a bit of a strange night in that I once again flipped between games like mad. I started off in doing my daily love rocket frustration grind… and once again I have nothing to show for it. Then I popped into Dragon Age Inquisition for a bit, but I am having a hard time remembering just what the hell I was doing when I last played. So I wandered around a bit aimlessly and almost accidentally completed a quest. Finally at the end of the session I realized that I apparently have one of those major quests waiting in the queue where I go off to seal some breach somewhere… and have apparently been just avoiding completing it each time I have played lately. Once again I logged out sufficiently avoiding it, but at some point over the weekend I really need to finish it so that hopefully I can get back on stable ground once more with this game. Throughout all of this my wife and I were trying to catch up on iZombie because at this point we are about five episodes behind. It was around this point when the hulu stream stopped and I started having some issues staying connected to the network. I get upstairs and once again my modem is insanely hot, and my internet connection that normally tests out around 200 Mbps is testing 5 Mbps. I unplugged everything and did the “throw it in the fridge for a few minutes to cool it down” trick once more.

When I finally got everything back up and running… I decided to just hang out upstairs and play some Destiny. So I set forth on a sequence of events that wound up keeping me awake until midnight. Destiny is still that game that I can just play happily without much forethought. Since I had not done so in awhile I opted to do a heroic, and I have to say… it was pretty miserable. For whatever reason I almost always get the restorative mind when it comes to heroics…. which is essentially the destiny equivalent of the Oculus. No one that I know of likes it… because for starters it is a huge mission and involves the damned “move the orb” mechanic to keep pushing forward. Additionally there is a segment with a bunch of Vex Cyclops that are just annoying to deal with. Finally you have this horrible segment at the end, where you have to keep running the ball while trying to avoid the beam of death from the restorative mind… and at the same time avoiding waves of goblins and hobgoblins that spawn in. This is pretty easy to deal with in normal, but in heroic the stupid beam of death is quite literally that. I made it though and ended up with a few purples…. that wound up being disenchant fodder. I continued running 36 strikes from that point on until I finally got an Exotic to drop… which is ironically Truth, the weapon Xur is selling this week… but in a much better 290 version.

Player Versus

It is round about here that my night starts to get a little strange. I don’t hate the crucible but it is one of those activities that I never actually participate in. Similarly I have never done Iron Banner or Trials of Osiris… and I completely missed doing any of the Crimson Doubles. Essentially I am a no show for the player versus player activities, and I have no clue why… but on a whim last night I decided to start doing Iron Banner. Firstly I absolutely expected to be horrible, since Iron Banner is in theory worse for new players than Crucible. In the Crucible all players are scaled down gear wise to a happy medium allowing all players of all levels and gearings to be viable and on somewhat even ground. Iron Banner on the other hand does not scale the players down… and my lackluster 298 ass is nothing compared to the 330 folks that are running around in the zone. The funny thing is however that I seemed to do mostly okay. Sure there were occasions where I just got wrecked from out of nowhere, but there were lots of other occasions where I gunned down my target and even so much managed to get a three streak of kills before finally getting wrecked in return.

I think what makes this feel more enjoyable than a lot of the player versus player combat I have experiences is that it quite literally feels like there is no negative. You play a match, you shoot some people, and at the end of it there is a chance of loot. There are no repair bills, there are no lasting consequences… and even when you die you pretty much instantly respawn. This feels more like the old school Doom deathmatch gameplay that I originally cut my teeth on. Maybe I have shunned PVP all of this time without good reason. Sure I rarely broke 1.0 KDR but as the night went on I got significantly better. I even managed to pull a legendary from the place, and am pretty close to ranking up with the Iron Banner. I have to say I am shocked at just how much I enjoyed myself, and in truth I really need to do more crucible as a result. All of this kinda makes me look forward to the Dark Zone in The Division, because hopefully I can get a team together and we can roll around as a group exploring. Maybe I am not as carebear as I always thought I was.

Rockets and Striders

February 25, 2016 by Belghast

Love Rocket Is A Lie

Last night I did little productive. I think I am still dealing with the after effects of not sleeping terribly well on Monday night, because I ended up going to bed insanely early. I did however get Witcher 3 installed on the new laptop, and it runs amazingly well. The strange thing is…. it almost runs better on the laptop on a mobile video card than it does upstairs on my desktop and a full fledged gtx 960. That has been the oddest revelation is just how little difference there has been in performance, and in some cases it seems to perform better. I am guessing that might be due to the difference of the laptop being a 4th gen i7 and my desktop being an FX-6300…. which if that is the case I guess I will be paying the Intel tax on all future systems. The bulk of my actual game time was switching between my six level 100 characters in World of Warcraft and trying to get the “Love Rocket” mount to drop. Now granted I have done this for several years at this point without luck, and quite honestly I am not sure why. Now the Headless Horseman mount is badass… and I can absolutely see why I chase that every single year I am actively playing during the Halloween event. I would absolutely use the hell out of a flying spectral horse, because it looks amazing.

The Love Rocket on the other hand…. I am largely just chasing because it exists and I don’t have it yet. Now I have had the Blue and Red rockets from the card game for years, and never end up using either of them…. largely because I don’t like the slight wobble while flying. So I cannot see how having a giant pink rocket is going to make that effect any better. That said… the thrill is in the hunt and even though I have gotten like a dozen pets… I am still going after the mount every single day. The best and worst part of the entire experience is when you go to click your Heart-Shaped Box… because for a moment you get a surge of hope… only to have it dashed quickly when you find nothing interesting inside. I think the worst part of the event are the Love Tokens, because seriously…. could they have just not made these BOA? There are some really cool things you can purchase with them like heirloom upgrades but by running the dungeon each day during the even you won’t get anywhere near enough to do something with them. Sure there are a bunch of quests that you can also do… but they are freaking annoying. I have my magenta drake from doing the holiday events, and I made a little promise to myself never to touch them again… well apart from the dungeon encounters.

Water Strider

The other big frustration for the player base right now seems to be the fact that the Water Strider is changing functionality in the latest Legion Alpha build notes. Original its restrictions were simply limited to “non-battleground areas” but it seems like they are greatly reducing its usefulness by limiting it to only Draenor and Pandaria. I absolutely get the frustration that players are feeling over this, because Blizzard honestly makes a bunch of bizarre calls. What I don’t get is why this seems to be the breaking point for some folks, and other even more confusing changes weren’t. What I have to somehow believe is that this is an additive effect of all of the fiddling that Legion seems to be doing… and that for some they are choosing to draw a line in the sand here. To those players… I promise that I understand your frustration. I am losing an entire spec… Gladiator will not exist in Legion and I have gone through the whole “seven stages of grief” thing over that. Being able to be a viable dps with a sword and a shield has always been my ultimate “player fantasy”. There is just something awesome about smashing mobs in the face with my shield, and a huge part of what kept me glued to Warlords as long as I was… was the ability to live out those dreams. The side effect of that however is that it was a horribly fiddly spec, that was difficult to itemize for…. and because of that I can absolutely understand why it is going the way of the Dodo.

To the players who are frustrated over this mount… I hear you… I really do. There have been many times in the past of this blog where I have railed on Blizzard for their failures. On March 25th of 2011 I wrote an article chronicling all of the things I saw as failures in the game in my “Is WoW the WoW-Killer?” post. I read through it yesterday… and it was a lot less ranty than I originally thought it was. The thing is… I’ve learned that it is absolutely okay to play other games. In fact I would say it is pretty damned healthy to shift back and forth between games on a regular basis. That sort of distance has allowed me to see the parts of the game that really are being done well, and learn to ignore some of the things that just out and out piss me off. Sure it means that I often disappear from World of Warcraft, and venture into other lands for awhile… but that distance allows me to blow off the steam and remember when I come back why I liked the game in the first place. I am not meaning this to be trite or offensive…. but if the Water Strider is your line in the sand… then really it might be time for you to go explore other games as well. I am not saying “leave” the game… just go play something else for a bit. The World of Warcraft is a great game, but during these long content doldrums it can also be an extremely frustrating game to be a fan of. Right now I am actively playing WoW, FFXIV, Destiny, ESO…. and planning on picking up The Division when it comes out… and hoping to return and play some more SWTOR at some point as well. Playing all of those games has in truth allowed me to more greatly appreciate the quirks and things that each of them do the best…. and to some extent ignore the faults. The only true statement is that there is no WoW Killer coming…. but instead a bunch of interesting games to explore that have their own rich communities.

Bunny Samurai Returns

February 24, 2016 by Belghast

Half Undressed

I am back on the wagon as far as cutting out caffeine during the evening. During my post PAX illness without really intending to, I quit drinking pop. Any time I attempted to it hurt my already ungodly sore throat so I switched to mostly drinking water, juice or fake koolaid. As a result my intake of Caffeine seriously plummeted, causing a few side effects. Firstly my operating range… was greatly stunted, and by that I mean that I am able to stay awake until 10 pm max instead of my normal Midnight to 1 am sleep times. Additionally I noticed that I actually slept better and fell asleep easier… so after all of these years of thinking caffeine had little to no effect on me… I am guessing I was completely wrong. Monday night I was being lazy and ended up drinking Mountain Dew, instead of making something else to drink and when I finally tried to go to bed around 11 pm I found it significantly harder to actually get to sleep. As a result last night I opted to drink mostly water, and once again returned to being able to fall asleep easily. This however has some strange side effects… like my body is still used to getting 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night, and for some reason when I go to bed at 9 pm I end up waking up again sometime around midnight.

So last night I ended up waking up around 11:30 pm and my body apparently thought I had slept a full night. The television was blaring because it seems that I crashed hard and forgot to turn it off. In my brain I am guessing that I equated the television to the alarm clock, and I started going through the routine of grabbing underwear and taking off my night clothes and heading for the bathroom to take a shower…. only to realize that it was not in fact 5:30 am part of the way through that process. It is one of those moments when I was glad my wife was still completely conked out… because I am sure I looked like an idiot… half undressed, holding my underwear stumbling for the door. The point at which I realized was when I went to turn off the alarm clock only for it to finally dawn on me that it was the television. Now I am not saying I am giving up caffeine completely… because I just finished a tasty cup of coffee. I am however trying really hard to not drink anything with caffeine once I get home from work, and I have absolutely cut energy drinks out of my life completely. I am still very much going through the phase where every time I pass a cooler in a store that is loaded with them… I get that desire to purchase one. The positive however is that for the most part I don’t “need” one, and other than yesterday after not sleeping terribly well the night before… I haven’t had any real moments during the day where I was fighting drowsiness.

New Machine Thing

For the next few days I will likely be installing games on the new laptop, playing them once or twice and then moving on to installing another game. This seems to be my tradition when it comes to getting a new machine, because ultimately I am wanting to see how much better everything seems to perform. Last night the first game on the menu was Dragon Age Inquistion, which I finished installing Monday night. It ran beautifully and using the Geforce Experience settings it picked reasonably high settings, or at least high enough to NOT have playdough hair. After that I played some Fallout 4 and once again… it ran beautifully on reasonably high settings. The thing I am noticing is that there seems not to be nearly the gap in performance between the gtx 960m and the gtx 960 as there has been in previous generations. For the most part I am able to run things in the same sort of fashion I have come to expect on my desktop machine upstairs… which honestly makes me even happier. I was fully expecting the 960m to perform something akin to the 760/860 which had always been the case before… where a mobile card was roughly a full generation behind the desktop equivalent. Maybe Nvidia realized that this felt shitty and was also deeply confusing to the customers? The next game on tap will be to install the Witcher 3, which was another in the long list of games that my laptop simply would not play. At some point I will settle down and actually begin to play some of these games… rather than just launch them to see how pretty they look.

Towards the end of the night however I did manage to settle into a single game… that is at least until sleep claimed me. Yesterday was the release of the 3.2 patch in Final Fantasy XIV and I have honestly been fairly scarce in the game since well before the launch of 3.1. I always said at some point I would get drawn back in, and I guess last night in installing the client that started to happen. I am not sure yet if I will stick around for a long period of time… or if this will simply be another one of my “content locust” passes where I gobble up all of the new stuff and move on to something else. I do however want to see the new story content in 3.2 before someone online spoils any of the key plot points, which considering that is already happening to folks… I need to move fast. Last night I didn’t get much more accomplished than the first few steps of the continuation of the main story quest. I did however see several other quests that I am guessing are the new Hildebrand and new dungeon starter, that I will at some point have to pick up. The thing is… there hasn’t been a moment where I didn’t care about this game… I just wanted to play other things instead. I have a feeling that it will be up to the MSQ to determine if I really want to stick around after finishing the content. It seems like they also made some significant changes to the game, that I will have to sort through and determine how they effect me. One of my guildies last night told me to respec out of Strength because apparently Vitality is now literally the only stat that applies for tanking, so thankfully I had enough company marks to do that. This makes me wonder just how deep the rabbit hole of changes actually goes.