MMORPG – Page 266

The Kerfuffle

December 30, 2015 by Belghast

Getting Out

For the last few days we have more or less been stuck in the house. We had quite literally three and a half days of nonstop rain, that then turned into ice, sleet and snow. Yesterday however we were getting to the point of being stir crazy. It is funny how much different you feel about your home when you feel like you can’t or at least shouldn’t leave it. I can happily stay home for days on end without leaving… but the moment I feel like I am trapped there… I start to go stir crazy. So as a result my wife and I had decided that yesterday we would get out regardless of how cold it was. Admittedly cold for me is sub freezing… not necessarily the negative temperatures that the rest of my readers might consider cold. We essentially had one task that needed to get done, and a bunch of other things that we sorted out somewhere in the middle. My wife’s tribal tag was due, so we had to trek out to the small town that has a Cherokee nation tag office, and what I thought was going to take fifteen minutes ended up taking close to an hour because they were short workers due to the holiday break. After that we grabbed a friend and went out looking for post holiday clearance bargains…. and the strange hair stuff my wife uses that no one seems to stock.

At the first place we stopped we managed to find both the hair gunk, as well as clearance Legos. At some point I had picked up The Phantom ship from Star Wars Rebels for cheap…. I want to say something in the range of $8-10. Then I had seen The Ghost a handful of times marked down but always passed it up for this reason or that. I had been kicking myself for not snapping it up when I saw the stores start to close it out, but apparently the target we went to somehow managed to still have one after the Christmas rush. Better yet it was marked down by like $40 making it the best deal I had seen on it yet. What I am really curious about is whether or not The Phantom will dock with The Ghost like it does in the television show. Some googling makes it seem like that is the case, so I am really hoping. My big problem with my Legos is finding a place to display them after I build them up. This is one of the big solutions I need to figure out for my office. I thought about some sort of shelving on the walls, but finding a way to make it somehow immune to cats jumping up there and knocking everything around is always going to be a problem. When we went out to eat yesterday I snapped a photo of what was a broken “legal age of drinking” sign in the bar area. Apparently we are super hardcore here in Oklahoma as we seem to allow newborns to drink.

The Kerfuffle

Something is going on in the WoW twitter community, and to be honest I am not entirely sure what is up. I’ve tried to piece things together as best as I can, but the root seems to be that two different groups are fighting… and it somehow is over the #warcraftpositivity hashtag. What has been so damned odd on the outside looking in is just how many people who are apparently not even involved in the initial kerfuffle are getting pulled into the fray. I had things I was going to say, but honestly I am not even sure if it matters. It just really sucks to be on the outskirts and watching two different groups of friends fighting over something that was supposed to be a good thing in the first place. Essentially while the Internet is a huge place… when you are mostly hanging out in a small corner of it there are going to be times when you keep running into people that for whatever reason you do not get along with. At this point you can do one of two things… you can make a big deal of it and get upset or you can just accept that these people still exist in the world and there is nothing you can do about it. Your friends can still be your good and true friends… and still like this other person. Sure it is awkward as hell to be part of a sequence of messages that include this other person… that might have you blocked and as a result you are only seeing part of the conversation… but at the end of the day no matter how much you huff and puff there isn’t much you can really do about it.

All of these things tend to start with a difference of opinion, and then it gets inflated to the point where it is a verbal war. Well meaning people get in the middle of issues that don’t actually involve them, and as a result it becomes a “thing” that seems to leaving everyone scratching their heads as to what exactly happened. I was not even really on social media that much over the holidays, yet I still seem to have gotten wrapped up in it as I got some random un-follows from folks loosely connected to the mess. I’ve used twitter since 2009 and in that time I have found less than a half dozen folks that were not bots getting auto-blocked from reporting spam… that I actually found vile enough to block. There are some folks and hashtags that I have muted in Tweetdeck but that is an entirely different story. Basically it takes a lot to get me to block someone, and I try my damnedest to never act based purely on third or fourth hand knowledge. I am not big on the shunning of people for a reason that are not deeply personal to me… and even then while I will never forgive some people, I can still functional and interact with them in a generally friendly manner. I hold some serious grudges against a few individuals based on my interactions with them in WoW, but I also knew that at some point because of mutual friends I would have to keep interacting with them.

WoW Community

The problem is… that due to events like this happening with a frighteningly regular frequency, the WoW Community has developed this reputation of being like a middle school lunch room. At times this is absolutely a fair assessment, but it is also a shallow one. The players who are online and interacting on a regular basis do not represent the bulk of Warcraft players. Most people just want to log in every night, and decompress while killing internet dragons… and don’t really reach out much past their own guild or immediate circle of real life friends. I’ve heard the WoW Community referred to as Toxic, and this is also I think unfair. Sure this particular community has some problems, but those problems are only really noticed…. because it is so insanely huge still. When you are part of the largest MMO community, even single problem is going to be magnified through sheer numbers. Sure there are more assholes in WoW, because there are far more players there to interact with… and the folks that hang out in trade chat and heckle other players… seem more noticeable when you have a hundred on a server… instead of just having two or three in other games. The same goes for the twitter presence, because the wow community as a whole out numbers pretty much every other MMO gaming community I am part of combined.

What gets lost in the noise is all of the positive things that are happening behind the scenes. There are people who are doing a lot of good and putting a lot of actual positivity out in the world. Just because a handful of miscreants takes offense to that, and decides to derail something…. doesn’t mean that it was a bad thing in the first place. The truth is… were it not for the fact that I was on twitter and interacting with a handful of the folks connected to the events… I probably wouldn’t have even known something was going on. Both House Stalwart the guild I founded back in 2004, and Facepull the horde side guild I am finally getting to do awesome things with… are both doing amazingly well and thanks to the holiday break have more smiling faces active and happy to be in game than I have seen in a long time. That is what matters in Warcraft, not the bickering or the name calling that seems to be happening somewhere in the ether above the actual game. I think those of us who are watching things seemingly burn down around us… need to remember that in a couple of weeks time no one will remember what the hell actually happened. Things will keep moving forward the way they have always moved forward, and people will still keep being awesome all around the community. So my hope is that if folks still cannot get along after all of this… that they just quietly disagree in their own corner of the twitterverse, so that the rest of us can continue having a happy place to rest our heads.

A Matched Set

December 29, 2015 by Belghast

Holiday Goals

A Matched Set — 270 After Sifting Through Bank

There are a lot of folks that have goals going into the holiday season, for me… these tend to involve some gaming feat that would normally take a silly amount of time to do. One Christmas break I played through Mass Effect 3, and then started over from scratch and played from 1 to 3 again trying to control the outcome. The Christmas break that SWTOR was released I leveled as part of a duo from level 1 to 50. Other years my mission has been to level a character from start to finish in World of Warcraft, and I made a decent dent in that with pushing the druid from 1 to 40 so I could use that Yeti mount. This year one of the things on my list has been to finish leveling my Warlock who before this week was sitting at level 30 from the last time I got the urge to level. I am not exactly sure why but I have wanted to have a matched set of level capped characters in Destiny for awhile now. I think largely it is because when I am farming exotics, I hate the concept of items going to waste… and I pretty regularly got exotics for Warlocks in spite of not having one. So sitting in my bank I had 3 exotic helms and 1 exotic chest that were warlock only, as well as a few legendary warlock only items as well.

Throughout the course of yesterday afternoon, while the ice was falling outside… I was sitting upstairs in the warmth of my office plugging away at my warlock. Originally I started doing the House of Wolves content, since I tend to like it better than the Dark Below. However I quickly noticed that I was leveling way faster while simply working my way through the back log of bounties I had accumulated. As a result I spent most of my afternoon meticulously narrowing down the number of bounties I had until finally I was a sliver away from 40. I hopped down to Mars and completed a few missions and dinged. After sifting through my bank and spending a few legendary marks, I managed to push my overall light level up to 270 which is not too shabby for a fresh 40. The only negative is… some of my exotics are really specific to sub class and the only one I have made ANY movement in thusfar is Voidwalker. I really like jumping up into the air and throwing down three bombs at people… but at some point I need to push up sunsinger because for group activity that seems to be the best option. Self resurrection is slightly overpowered, but I figure it is something you save in reserve for when it looks like your group is going to wipe. However it should do well to feed Tlaloc whenever I get one.

Matched Set

It feels nice to have a matched set, and the funniest thing is…. every single one of my characters is an Exo. Mostly I had issues with not liking the other races character creation options. The humans were out because they lacked a beard…. because seriously… I cannot ever bring myself to play a human that doesn’t have a decent beard. The Awoken were out because well… space elves…. and I have a pretty deep hatred of most things elven. I am fine if other people want to play them… but they are very much not my thing. The best elves ever… were both from the Elder Scrolls setting… because Cannibal Wood Elves and Nasty Vile Dark Elves… are the only ones I can embrace fully. That left me with one race left to play… and since Destiny ultimately reminds me of playing Phantasy Star Online… and Exo is about as close as I can get to my Cast it was the clear winner. The awesome thing is though that each of my classes has a very fitting look and feel for their class, even though they are all technically just big robots.

I’ve not dwelled on it too much, but I really think that Phantasy Star Online being my first MMO… has greatly shaped how I feel about Destiny. The games have a very similar feel, with a lobby system of sorts being the tower… which equates pretty similar to the tower like area you ran around in PSO. Then you go out on missions that involve you going to planets and often times retracing the same areas over and over with slightly different features and creatures dependent upon your mission. I played the hell out of that game, up until the point when I got hooked on Everquest. The funny thing about it is, that as melee heavy as I was in other games… in PSO I always played a Cast Ranger. So the fact that I really enjoy Destiny doesn’t seem that shocking. It feels very much like the spiritual successor, minus the anime skin. At some point I really want to get into the raid in Destiny, but similarly to WoW…. I mostly just want to do it for the gear. Downing new content is cool and all, but the force that always drives me forward in these types of games… is the acquisition of new and cool things. When you take loot out of the equation, like in Final Fantasy XIV it is a serious hit to my enjoyment. Most of my dungeon running in FFXIV was in an attempt to complete cosmetic sets, and ultimately was still gear driven… just gear as an appearance not necessarily as function.

Next Mission

At this point I really need to buckle down and finish Fallout 4 main storyline, because this coming weekend we need to record the review show. I am not sure what exactly has happened but I have simply not been playing Fallout much over the last few weeks. I think we can blame most of it, on my re-entry into World of Warcraft and my desire to play “catch up”. Then this week has been a bit of a resurgence in Destiny, this combined with the only machine I have that plays Fallout 4 well enough is my upstairs computer. Over the course of our movie and television marathons I have largely been downstairs on the sofa in my comfy blanket cocoon. This has meant that Fallout sadly has been abandoned for the moment. I tried last night to play it some over steam in home streaming, and once I sorted out the many technically difficulties, I finally got it up and running. The only problem there was that the video stream would artifact out anytime I encountered much action, making it questionable if it is really worth playing it on my desktop… or if I would simply be better playing it on my laptop with greatly reduced graphical fidelity. My laptop will run it after all, but with a somewhat potato quality. In any case… I need to pick up where I left off and make some forward movement.

Winter and Yeti

December 28, 2015 by Belghast

Winter Arrives at Casa Belghast

So something I am realizing yet again is how badly I need a schedule to function. During the work week, I am on super tight time constraints. I get up at 5:30, make coffee, pack my wife’s lunch, and then am usually upstairs sitting at my keyboard by just a little after 6. Then I bang out a blog post, feed the animals… play with the ferrets because they are begging to be picked up… and then am out the door at around 7 am. On the weekends however…. and on this holiday break… I am completely all over the place with my blogging. When I know there is no real time constraints… I feel free to screw around in the morning. I’ve been reading twitter and blogs for the last two hours… and finally it is getting to the point where it is kinda embarrassing that it is 11:30 and I have yet to produce a blog post. While I complain about stress, I am also apparently one of those people who thinks most clearly when the shit is hitting the fan… or at least I am bumping up against a deadline. It is like my creativity flows more freely when I know there is something riding on the line. I know that at pretty much I can start writing and come up with a post… and because of that… it means when there is no deadline I keep putting it off. I am the king of procrastination… and among the list of things that need to do today is book my hotel room for Pax South… which is only a few weeks away.

As you can see in the above image, Winter has finally arrived in Casa del Belghast. For most of the Christmas break so far it has been windy as hell, but still pretty warm. On Saturday, it started raining, but between the showers… it was still nice and warm outside. The thermostat started to turn down yesterday, and overnight the constant rain turned to ice, and eventually as of this morning snow. The Monday morning commute was apparently hell, based on conversations with the folks holding down the fort. This is one of those moments when I am damned happy that I still have essentially another week to go before I have to worry about it, and by then I am hoping that we have returned to the balmy conditions we have been in recently. I am perfectly fine with not having a “real winter” here in Oklahoma, because our normal Ice Storms suck. If we got fluffy and happy snow like the rest of the world seems to, I would be perfectly fine with winter. Instead we get ice… and lots of it… that usually starts out as sleet and then eventually becomes glaze ice that freezes to anything it hits… high means power lines. Why the hell we have above ground powerlines still boggles me… because the ice can snap the aerials like very brittle twigs. Thankfully from what it seems, this is going to be our major day of ice and snow… and then it will warm back up shortly after.

Mission Yeti: Accomplished

I told Lodur last night, that he would have to hold down the fort without me… because I am officially out of the Team 360 No Mount business. I’ve talked over the last few days of my Christmas gift that required a little work. A really good friend of mine read my commentary about the struggle to get the holiday Yeti mount, and when she managed to get two of them… pinged me that she had a gift for me. The gotcha of course was that it was on a server that I have zero characters, so I rolled a level 1 druid and have been leveling like crazy over the last few days. It took me roughly two days of marathoning Star Wars movies to go from 1 to 40 and last night I wrapped it up getting the final two thirds of a level in Feralas. I stopped what I was doing as soon as I dinged and made my way to Orgrimmar to learn Journeyman Riding, and of course learn the mount. From there I fiddled around and got to an interesting vantage point to take a few screenshots. I am super happy to have the mount, but also really enjoyed the “Catte Durid” leveling process. The only problem is… that this character is now stranded on a server that I am not sure if I will play much on.

I talked a bit about the general toxic environment I encountered while leveling the character, which does not give me warm fuzzies about staying there. That said this is the only server that my friend really has characters on. The frustrating part is that to move a character it is $25 each, which seems like a lot of money when you are looking at an army of alts. Considering that at this point moving a character is a scripted process, and requires zero manual intervention… the game as a whole would be a happier place if they just adopted the Rift system of server transfers. In that game you can move one character per week for free, pending that character is in good standing and above the level of 15. That means over time you can move servers with your characters, and sure you have to wait a week per… but it lets you get out of bad situations without being taxed into oblivion for doing it. There are many times that players end up getting stuck on a server that they literally do not know anyone playing the game anymore. So it seems like insult to the injury of losing their friends…. to ask them to cough up another $25 per character to move off of the bad environment. Sure you can always group with Battle.net but there is something you miss by not having access to the friendly green spam of guild chat… and all the while I was leveling this druid… I felt the pangs of not having access to my friends. At some point I will likely delete the druid I have on The Scryers and move this character to that server, but in the meantime it will serve as a sort of hiding out alt… which is largely why I have not mentioned the server name yet.

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015

December 27, 2015 by Belghast

Holiday Lagged

There are some mornings when trying to think is a struggle… this is one of those mornings. Last night I suffered from a pretty bad bout of insomnia, and instead of just sitting in bed and hoping for sleep to find me… I got up and played PS4. At which point I realized it was 2:30 in the morning and I really needed to try and sort out how to sleep. The day as a whole today is rainy and nasty and the antithesis of just how delightful the holiday was here in Oklahoma. On Christmas day I was running around in a short sleeved shirt, and were it not for the wind I wouldn’t have needed my hoodie. We were warned however that just after the holiday the temperature would drop, and from the sounds of it the panhandle of the state is now getting lots of ice. Thusfar it has been only rain…. but so much of it that sitting upstairs in my office it actually drowned out the sound of all of the various machines whirring away. I finally got up around 8:30 and attempted to start the day, but the problem being… that I have largely just been staring at the screen unable to get a post started. Then suddenly I remembered…. it’s Sunday… the day I have a crutch to fall back on in the form of the week in review posts. So I am hobbling along on this crutch for all that is sacred in the world… otherwise I have no clue what I would write about.

Return of Destiny

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015 — MIDA In Action

I guess Bungie got the message that it sucks when Xur does not have a weapon option during the Friday festivities. The last four or five weeks he has brought some new weapon each time…. and this week was no different with the newly Year-2-ized version of the MIDA Multitool. During this month he has also brought the Monte Carlo, Hardlight, and Telesto. The only problem here is Friday I have to make a decision… do I care enough about getting this weapon to grind out the 23 strange coins needed to purchase it. The Monte Carlo was a no brainer, because I have heard so many good things about this gun… that I just had to play with one myself. Telesto was similarly a no brainer, because I have gotten two of these to drop… so had no need for it. MIDA and Hardlight however I was left with the decision if it was really worth the needed grinding to pick it up. With the Hardlight I decided… that I already have a lot of Auto Rifles that I really like… between my love of the Zarinaea-D, Zhalo Supercell, Monte Carlo and the newly improved Fabian Strategy… I had no real use for a new Auto Rifle to add to the mix. For the MIDA however I crowd sourced my opinion and got messages back from Sig and Squirrel both saying to pick it up… that it was both amazing in PVE and PVP. So far I am liking it, but I am having to get used to using a Scout Rifle again. I have largely just been using Auto and Pulse Rifles for awhile now, so it is taking some adjusting. The truth is… for the most part there are very few weapons that I don’t like in Destiny.

Last night while dealing with Insomnia I decided to cast aside the Hunter and Titan briefly and instead focus on the Warlock who still need to hit the level cap of 40. I realize I could be leveling through doing the Taken King content, but instead I just ended up clearing out my bounty log. I am finally reaching the point where my Stranger’s Rifle is beginning to show its age, as I finally got some weapon drops that are technically higher than it is. The problem is… I am so damned used to using the Stranger’s Rifle… and the whole fully automatic pulse rifle thing is so overpowered… that I am probably going to keep at it until I hit 40, or at least until I get a purple weapon to replace it with. In the meantime I am left with the decision… do I grind my way to 40 like I am doing in a super chill and enjoyable way… or do I actually start with the quests. On my Hunter I largely waited to do quests until I was at the level cap, so I could revel in the sweet sweet engram drops that seem to happen like candy during missions. I still have all of the House of Wolves and Dark Beyond quests as well… and those in theory won’t be nearly as beneficial gear wise. So I might just start on doing those and see how close to 40 I can get.

Another thing I did this week was get my Ace of Spades exotic on the hunter. I am currently on the First Curse of the step of the Gunsmith quest on my Titan… and I have to say I am simply not looking forward to doing all of the bullshit you have to do to get it. The only problem with Ace of Spades is just how crap hand cannons seem to be right now. I am not sure which I dislike more… the absolute potato range of them… or just how small the magazine and ammunition pool is in general with them. I run out of ammunition while using a hand cannon faster than almost anything else… and I never seem to get enough normal ammo drops to be able to use these in strikes. So instead every now and then I break them out while doing bounties when things don’t matter quite so much. The positive of Ace of Spades however is that it just look bad ass. So in theory it might get some use, but not really likely given all of the other exotics that I have and legendaries that are also equally well stated.

World of Warcraft

The other day I posted about my mission that level a Cat Druid to 40 all so that I could leave the 360NoMount club… and add the Christmas Yeti mount to my collection. It has been two days and I am now getting close to the goal. As of last night when I finally reached the point where I thought it was probably time to attempt going to sleep… I was roughly 2/3rds of a level from 40 and was just now starting Feralas. It has been a fun ride pushing up a new Cow Druid, and went a lot faster than I might had expected. I took a slightly different route than I did with my Warlock and the end result feels like I got a lot more straight forward Kill Ten type quests which I can burn through insanely quickly. The other thing that helped is the fact that my druid is a skinner… and I was constantly jumping random leather bearing animals along the way to level that. Back the in the day all of the leveling guides used to tell you to always be engaged in killing something… like if there was a mob on your way to your objective to always kill it no matter what. Having done that on the Druid and not so much on the Warlock… I have to say that yes in fact that is the superior way to level especially with all of the experience boosted heirlooms that I am wearing. The question is… now that I have almost achieved my goal… do I hit 40 and quit… or do I keep pushing up the druid. I am not a big fan of the server cluster I am on, and the people seem to be insanely rude compared to Argent Dawn so at some point I may transfer the druid over once I finish it. I realize I can cross realm group… but man… some of the stuff I have encountered here I have never run into on AD. That is saying a lot given that I used to always think of Argent Dawn as a pretty horrific place.

The other activity that I spent time this week doing was leveling my Warlock. Basically playing her was my reward for completing my holiday dailies… and in part the only reason why I made so much progress on the druid so quickly, is that I completely started ignoring that holiday dailies existed. At some point I need to go through all of my characters and loot the presents in Orgrimmar and Ironforge before they poof, but I think once I get to 40 on the druid I am going to switch back to playing the Warlock. It is funny how isolating it can be playing on a different server even though you have access to BNet and your friends list. Facepull is just friendly and somewhat active green spam and I love having it around. It is my hope that at some point soon we will get the rumored battlenet channels, which will hopefully let us have guild like chat spanning across multiple games. If there was an addon that existed that gave me access to slack while playing World of Warcraft… I would be in a perfect place.