Uncategorized – Page 115

Fairies and Unicorns and Pokemons

July 7, 2016 by Grace

This week has seen a rather dramatic return to FFXIV for my primary social circle. This time last week a few people were poking around, and suddenly the last few days almost my entire old raid crew is back and active and running things together. It is funny how having people I like and care about to run things with increases my enjoyment by an order of magnitude. It has been months and months since I’ve done anything resembling raiding or progression in any game, and I can’t wait to finally dig into some of the new bosses in FFXIV that I haven’t seen yet. Unfortunately I know myself well enough to know that being too social and having people depending on me will eventually lead to me sealing myself back up into my introvert bubble, so I’ve been taking steps to prevent this. It is a weird position to be super happy my friends are around but also forcing myself to step out into other games or just away from the computer to make sure I am mentally equipped to handle the social times when they count.

One of the things I did last night to try to carve out some “alone” time was to download Riders of Icarus. This MMO just went into open beta yesterday, although since it will be free-to-play I’m not exactly sure if the difference between open beta and launch is very meaningful. In any case, I had a few friends who were trying it and wanted to see what the fuss was about. The game is definitely pretty, but I’m not even sure that is a point in favor of a MMO anymore. All of the recent MMOs I’ve seen have been pretty, and sadly most of them are pretty in the same vague quasi-real-but-still-fantasy way. There wasn’t anything in particular about the art style of Riders of Icarus that stood out for good or ill. The world seems quite cool, I am a definite fan of sky whales and dragons, and the concept of finding creatures to tame and ride out in the world is really enticing. That seems to be the high point though. The action combat system that other folks were happy with seems not to shine through very well on a mage-type character. Also, the interface and systems feel like they came from a much older game. Looting in particular just felt bad to me. When I kill a monster and take its stuff I want it to be exciting but also quick. I don’t want to have to mouseover and interact with 3 little bags on the ground. FFXIV’s “everything instantly goes into your bags” mechanic and WildStar’s loot explosions and loot vacuum have really spoiled me. In any case I only managed to play for an hour or two, so I intend to push a little further to see if anything sticks. As it stands now though, I don’t think this game will be for me.

The other game on my radar right now is Pokemon Go. Yes, the fever is definitely sweeping through my friends and my twitter feed. I managed to log in last night when it launched here and catch the squirtle in my house before being chased away by connection issues. It definitely took me a very sad amount of time to figure out exactly how to catch a pokemon, but I can eventually be taught. This morning I excitedly walked down to the local park where there was a pokestop, and collected a few items there. However when I got to work the reality of living and working in a pretty rural place set in. My workplace, where I usually take walks at lunchtime, doesn’t even show up on the map. In the game world, I spend my days in the middle of a giant field I guess. It is sadly devoid of pokemon or points of interest here, so to play this game I’d have to seriously change my behavior or else get lucky trying to find things when I go to the grocery store etc. I’m not sure that’s very appealing to me so I might have to sadly let this poke-craze pass me by. If anyone out there has a similar problem or has found a way around it please let me know!

Walking Simulator

July 7, 2016 by Belghast

Gotta Catch Em All

If I had any topic to talk about today, it was immediately erased from my mind as soon as I got my grubby hands on Pokemon Go. I was in fact one of those bastards that went through the relatively simple process of installing it to bypass the region lockouts. First off I want to address something that is frustrating me, is that for some reason people seem to think defeating region lockouts is “hacking”. Region lockouts are dumb, and at least on Android devices, any time you download anything you are already downloading the APK as that is how anything installs. The beauty of the android platform is there isn’t just one app store, in fact on my device I currently have Google Play, Amazon Underground, and APK Pure all installed and living happily together. These are especially handy when confronted with a device that for whatever reason is trying to block the actual Google Play store and instead keep redirecting you to their carrier run store. Anyways with that out of the way, I downloaded the APK and had it sitting on my device while I ran out to lunch yesterday. On my way out of the building I caught my first Pokemon which was one of the original three starters…. Go Team Squirtle! Then before I had even left my building I also happened to encounter a Staryu… things were getting off to a great start.

I had errands to run so I drove out to one of the nearby hubs of shopping that houses a ton of big box stores. I needed to pick up some cat
food and cat litter from Target, and also wanted to pop by Rackroom shoes to see if I could find any sandals that I did not hate this season. When I pulled into the parking lot of Target I opened up the app and noticed several Pokemon nearby where I parked. When you are anywhere, you see critters within the vicinity of you… and when you get close enough to one you can attempt to capture it. Sadly I have no screenshots of the capture process because it goes quickly. Essentially it is playing Skeeball, and for those who don’t have that cultural frame of reference… you are flicking the Pokeball with your finger and trying to hit essentially a target that represents the sweet spot for capturing each specific Pokemon. If you tap on the Pokemon you will see a set of rings with a green spot being the best possible place to land your hit in order to capture. You have a limited number of attempts before the Pokemon runs away and cannot be seen on your map. Of note all of this stuff tries to place your Pokemon in your surroundings using Augmented Reality via your phones camera. I however didn’t really want to see the real world and would far rather have a cartoony Pokemon world to be wandering around in and capturing critters.

So there I was wandering around a Target parking lot, I am sure looking like an idiot… but you know what I didn’t care. I was having fun and capturing all sorts of cool Pokemon. By the time I left that parking lot I had managed to gather up a whole bunch of new critters
including a really nice Eevee. Now each Pokemon you catch has a CP level… which doesn’t mean much to me as of yet because well I just started playing this yesterday. However from what I have been able to tell the higher the number the better, and this factors into what sort of stat package that they have. So my Eevee in question came out of the box as it were with 104 which is significantly higher than any other Pokemon I have seen yet. Ironically the hardest capture yet was my Magikarp, namely because it kept flipping around aimlessly anytime I tried to toss the Pokeball. Not only do you have to try and land the sweet spot, but most Pokemon will move around on you while trying to do this. Similarly I utterly failed at capturing a Butterfree because apparently it is a little stronger willed than others. I captured it three times… and all three times it broke out of the ball… eventually flying away never to be seen again.

The reason why I titled this post Walking Simulator, is because that is a genre name that folks have tacked onto games that are about walking around and exploring virtual worlds… but without any combat to speak of. Pokemon Go however is quite literally a game about walking. The world has all of these objectives out there in the form of PokeStops and Gyms that seem to appear based on the previous Ingress player portal locations according to Thalen who had apparently played that game way more than I ever did. So for me I have one right around the corner from my house in the form of a statue. So last night I convinced my wife to go for a walk… under the guise of exercise but she knew that really I just wanted to go out and capture Pokemon. Now we get into the larger problem of Pokemon Go right now… the servers and uptime. For most of the day yesterday things were crashing in spectacular ways, likely because Niantic was simply not ready for the crush of folks who like me decided to bypass the silly region lockouts. This immediately started a ban rumor floating around that anyone who downloaded the APK was going to get banned from the application. Yet in all of the threads I never saw anyone reporting anything other than normal intermittent service issues.

Pokemon Go is a deeply connected application. Not only do you need to stay in fairly constant communication with the Niantic servers over what I am guessing is some sort of a Web Service call… you also have to have unfettered connectivity to GPS satellites in order to keep your positioning true. This means two things… namely that gameplay can be unpredictable, and that your battery will weep in misery at the drain. When I went out to lunch I had about 85% on my battery… and after about an hour of running errands and capturing Pokemon I was sitting around 52% if I remember correctly. Ingress players are notorious for carrying a bunch of portable battery packs just to make sure that their gameplay is uninterrupted and truthfully that is probably going to be the standard operating procedure with Pokemon Go as well. So in the middle of my walk last night I encountered a Fearow in the grocery store parking lot. When I went to try and capture it however I threw the ball… and the screen locked up with the ubiquitous spinning Pokeball icon in the left corner of the screen working madly on trying to reacquire a signal. I finally had to shut down the application, and reboot my phone… to restore any semblance of connectivity… and even then when I got to the PokeStop outside of my Neighborhood I couldn’t actually retrieve anything from it. While the game has launched officially now… it is very much not without issues.

However what exists is extremely awesome. For me Pokemon was always a game about capturing interesting critters, and the combat and story always took a backseat. When I caught all of the available Pokemon in an area I stopped caring about it and simply wanted to move on to the next area so I could see fresh critters. For me… this game is likely going to be crack, but also going to be an excellent excuse to get out of the house and walk around my neighborhood. Where I work downtown there are a couple dozen different PokeStops within easy walking distance so more than likely I am going to start venturing out at lunch to go find them. What is disturbing is the level of saturation this app has already gotten. There are four or five different gyms located in downtown Tulsa, and by noon yesterday when I went out to run errands… each and every single one of them was already claimed by a player. Now these might be beta players or “Beaters” as the community has taken to calling them, but it might also be folks like me who grabbed the APK and just started playing. There are so many aspects of the game I can’t really talk about yet… because I have not experienced them. There is apparently a whole team mechanic that will happen at some point, but as I am sub level 5 that is not something I have encountered yet. I do plan on going Team Blue, and I believe that is where the rest of my friends are leaning as well. In any case… if you have ever loved Pokemon I suggest at least checking it out. I have this feeling that it will be something I obsess with for a few weeks… and then never touch again… much like the other Pokemon games I have played. However it does at least make walking and running errands a far more interesting experience.

Uncoordinated Ramble

July 1, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I made what seems to have been a fairly controversial post, but also one that seems to be misconstrued to be more than it really was. The key complaint of the post was the method in which Blizzard occasionally conveys information to the fans through a dose of condescension. That isn’t good for the brand and isn’t good for the game as a whole. The rest of the points that I used as examples… well they were just me pointing out ways I felt the person delivering the message was doing so in a less than friendly manner. Yesterday I had a bunch of valuable conversation with different folks on both the main point and the sub points, and also some not so valuable discussion. I feel like any discussion line that follows something along the lines of “you don’t have to play the game” isn’t really valuable. Sure there are folks who just want to throw stones, burn the crops and salt the earth after they have left. I am not one of those people… I genuinely care about this game because it is like an old friend. However it is a friend that keeps going through really strange phases that are maybe not so good for their health. Ultimately I am just the sort of person who has to say something eventually, and when I do… I can more or less move on knowing that I said my peace.

Every year at work when it comes time for the performance review… there is always a question that boils down to following orders. My boss always feels the need to make a point about how I will “eventually” follow orders, but that I have to explain my point of view first. There have been a number of times throughout my career where I have had to implement bad solutions that I knew would eventually bite us in the ass six months to a year later. I don’t do this cheerfully, and not without first explaining all of the reasons why this is a bad idea. However if after making my case… it is still decided that we have to do whatever this thing is… I do so to the best of my ability knowing that I made my point known. When I leave the work world I am this same person… I have to speak my peace in order to move on. So when I see a game making decisions that I don’t agree with… well I stand up and say something and do so in my own private vehicle for communicating that. This is my blog ultimately, and if you are coming here you are going to keep getting me talking about whatever happens to be important on my mind. I enjoy your visit, and I appreciate feedback… but at the end of the day this is my blog filled with my opinions and that isn’t really something you can judge “right” or “wrong”.

Ultimately the truth is I am not deluded enough to believe for even a second that anything I say here is going to change anything outside of the confines of the limited things I have control of. I can make my point, and inscribe it on the pages of this virtual tome. However that doesn’t mean my point is actually going to influence anyone as a result. You have to understand most mornings when I sit down to start writing… I largely forget that I actually have readers. That is not to say that I don’t value each and every reader… it is just that I end up sitting here talking to myself. Often times the points I make, are a way of me dealing with the thoughts and feelings that I am having at the time. It is a way of me processing the complex melange of reactions that I have boiling up inside of me, and there is something about putting it down onto paper that seems to bring forth the truest version of whatever it was that I was thinking. Ultimately we can disagree on whatever it is that I am talking about, and that is going to be okay. We don’t have to agree to exist within the same space, and often times it is better if we don’t. The internet and its ease of creating echo chambers is actually a really horrible thing, and so long as a view point isn’t one that I consider toxic… I welcome it into my mind to swirl around with the thoughts that are already there. My thoughts on any matter are a constantly evolving and shifting mess.

When it comes to World of Warcraft, I do question if I am compatible with the view the developers have for this game. There was an interesting side note yesterday in a conversation with Nyn about social consequences of game changes. I brought on a sequence of ramifications related to not having various aspects of the game be “bind on account” or at least collected at an account level. Namely talking about the number of times I have wanted to play this or that alt, but my friends really needed me to be playing my main. When that happens you are left with a choice… do you do the socially beneficial thing and play the character that is needed to help out your friends, or do you be selfish and spend your night working on the character you really want to be progressing. The more things that are pushed to an account basis, the more these problems just go away. If I can be running around on my main and collecting stuff that benefits my army of alts… then that reinforces me playing the character that is needed at any given moment. I think in the grand scheme of things this would also go a long way towards getting tanks and healers queuing for content… because they know that ultimately there is some benefit that can trickle down to my other classes. To which she raised the point… that these aren’t really game mechanic problems but instead social problems.

I guess my stance is that the two are irrevocably connected. Every game change has social ramifications, and every social change effects the way players view game mechanics. Largely I judge World of Warcraft against the actions that other companies are taking in other MMOs. Some of them do a phenomenal job of social engineering the player base to make shifts in behavior that ultimately benefit the health of the game. A prime example is the way that Final Fantasy XIV keeps coming up with reasons that end game characters, want to be running lower level content by making end game rewards hinge upon the collection of items from lower level content. This reinforces the cycle of constantly having a fresh supply of high level and geared players queuing for content, and the introduction of a first time bonus mechanic makes it so that high level players actually get excited knowing that their rewards from running the content are going to be multiplied by the presence of a new player. This is absolutely bribery, but it is bribery that works extremely well… and shows a high level of understanding for the psychology of players. So ultimately I think the more things that can be pushed back to the account level, the more willing players will be to bring what is needed instead of what they want to keep moving forward.

This also spawned a discussion about the design philosophy of “bring the player not the class” which in truth… doesn’t really work that well. Sure it works great in cases of Paladins and Druids… that can field a dps, tank and healer but ultimately breaks down when it comes to pretty much any other class. Now I will agree that any tank is swappable for any other tank, and for the most part healers are also equally interchangeable. However when it comes to DPS, it doesn’t feel quite so much the case with so many fights punishing players for bringing too much ranged dps or too much melee dps. If anything I think more things bound at the account level helps to get closer to the “bring the player” aspect of that equation because it rewards alting in a manner that isn’t really the case yet. Alts are the thing that keep players engaged with the game during those slow spots where progression has either topped out, or is going much slower than expected. Bolstering the reasons for players to roll that army of alts is I think a huge part of keeping players active and subscribed to the game. There are still some sore spots with things that have gone to account based, like the upcoming transmog changes not really working 100% cross character… but it was a step in the right direction. Similarly account wide mounts, pets and achievements were extremely awesome and have increased the value of each of those things for me at least. However it feels like we just haven’t gone far enough yet. There are so many things like currencies and factions… that just don’t seem to make sense at a character by character basis when it would be significantly more rewarding to have those things on any character you happen to be playing. Anyways…. this ramble has gone on long enough and gotten way out of control. Additionally I am out of time this morning and needing to head to work. Thanks for reading if you actually made it to this point.

It’s never over

June 30, 2016 by Grace

* stumbles in, mumbles something to the Newbie Blogger Initiative newbies about never worrying about taking a break, just hop back in and keep going and everything will be fine *

Did you miss me? I’ve been working my butt off doing SCIENCE and traveling across multiple time zones to tell people about it. I’m exhausted but happy, and I’m finally home and playing games again. Since it is the end of the month I thought I’d just take a quick stock of what I’ve been playing and what my plans are for July.

Chroma Squad

This was the Aggrochat game of the month, and I had to rush to play as much as I could after getting back from my trip. It is a funny little tactical RPG with some tycoon elements, all about being the ~~Power Rangers~~ cast of a super sentai show. I never liked the Power Rangers much as a kid, but this game is funny and endearing. I only got through one “season” before we recorded the podcast, so I’m hoping to finish the game in July without the time crunch. I don’t think I will love it as much as some of the other Aggrochat folks, but I’m definitely enjoying it.

Diablo 3

The season is winding down and so is my enthusiasm. I had been toying with the idea of fully completing the season journey this time around but I’ve lost all my motivation at this point. I’ll be content with my stash tab this time around, and look forward to season 7 instead. I’m really hoping that with Overwatch out and Legion almost ready, that Bliz will start making some more noise about this franchise this fall.

Stellaris

I was spending hours engrossed in this game right before my trip. I have yet to hop back in at all since I got home. I know they just released a pretty nice patch, but I will want to make a new game to see everything and starting from scratch is not appealing right now. Except for the part where I would really like to try a multiplayer game, and if I can make that happen this game will probably move up my priority list.

Destiny

Through encouragement, curiosity, and outright bribery from Belghast, I’ve gotten sucked into playing Destiny lately. It has been many many years since I’ve played much in the way of first person shooters, and I was pretty awful at it for a few days. Lately I’m feeling more comfortable with a controller in my hand though, and have been greatly enjoying the game. I’m not thrilled about doing pvp or ~~dungeons~~ strikes much, mostly because I know I’m still pretty terrible and don’t want to have people rage at me. Every day I’m getting a little better and a little braver though. It helps that I have voice chat turned off so I don’t have to hear if people are yelling at me.

FFXIV

Speaking of people raging. My last post had lots of super positive things to say about FFXIV. Almost immediately after that I healed a random dungeon with some tank who heaped abuse on me, and any enthusiasm I had for the game went straight out the window. It is funny how fast one bad experience can sour an entire game. I’m sure there’s folks out there who will say I should not let it get to me, grow a thicker skin or stay out of MMOs but frankly, F*** that. I used to be the kind of person who would just let trolling or abuse roll off me or even turn around and criticize back but at this stage in my life I’d really like to enjoy my hobby without having to tolerate or participate in the toxicity that sometimes comes with it. I think it makes me extra angry because FFXIV is a game that is notable for having a far better community than almost any other MMO I’ve played. I’ve still had some fun doing old content for mounts with friends or seeing some of the new story and dungeons, again with friends. I haven’t seen any more abusive people and things have been mostly enjoyable. My sub expires in just a few days though, and I don’t think I can justify renewing for maybe one night a week of fun.

WoW

WoW is in a weird place for me right now. I am subbed basically because I can do so without paying any real money, and use the time to prepare for Legion when I might actually want to play the game. I’ve been logging in almost exclusively to do my wizard chores on 9-15 alts (depending on how much I care about my secondary servers on any given day) and collect free gold, with a tiny bit of old raid farming for transmog/mounts on the side. WoW isn’t a game to me right now, it is a holding pattern, it is a chore. I am simultaneously trying to squeeze every ounce out of the free gold machine while gleefully anticipating the day when I never have to look at my garrison again. It is a matter of giving up any enjoyment I might get out of the game now, in favor of putting myself in a better position to enjoy the game when the expansion comes. To those who say I am playing the game wrong, and should be enjoying myself right now I say: No. This system is available and I will participate in it so that I can get rewards I’m looking forward to down the road. It is no different in any way from the grueling torture of the Insane achievement, months of agonizing repetitive tasks, more “fun” activities given up in favor of a longer term goal. This is a method of play long supported by Bliz, the systems have changed but the underlying carrots and horrible horrible sticks are still there.

July

I don’t have a list of small, specific goals for July like many other bloggers do. I want to get better at Destiny, finish Chroma Squad, see more of the Arcterra content in Wildstar, and make as much gold in WoW as possible before they nerf garrisons. These seem reasonable, and vague enough that I will probably meet them and get to feel good about myself for it!