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Digital or Physical

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Fun with Polls

A few days ago I posted a poll on my twitter feed asking a simple question about my followers gaming habits.  In the end 88 folks responded to the poll which is honestly more than I thought there would be… but far less than needed to really make it scientific and such.  Essentially I was thinking about how I have shifted from only purchasing games in physical retail stores… to almost never doing so.  In fact not counting the land-run for copies of Wildstar to redeem for bonus loot, the last game I likely purchased in a store was TERA back in January of 2011 (yes I had to look up the release date).  Even then the only reason why I purchased a physical copy was that it was not available through any of the online retailers I trusted, and I didn’t realize it was a game I would be interested in playing.  This was another case where I was following the great internet zeitgeist and getting in on the rush of yet another game…  that I would ultimately walk away from quickly.  This is also the last game other than the Wildstar land-run that I purchased from a GameStop… but that is an entirely different thing for a different day.

For Those Who Can’t See the Embedded Tweet

  • 65% – Mostly Digital
  • 16% – Mostly Physical
  • 19% – Fairly Equal Mix of Both

There are so many times that in my mind I think I represent the new normal, when in truth I am probably an outlier.  So with digital purchases I wanted to take the temperature of my gamer friends about the subject.  As it turns out I am in fact in the majority with 65% of you stating that you mostly purchase digital games.  Now the weirdity with twitter polls is that if you are using a third party client, you don’t actually see them.  As a result I had a large number of people comment directly but in those cases I am uncertain if they are also represented by a vote.  As a result I am only going to be looking at the poll numbers for percentages, but using the folks that responded to indicate trends.  Here are a few of the interesting trends that emerged.

Import Troubles

There were a few people that indicated that they purchase almost 100% digital other than when they are importing a game from another region.  This makes complete sense as the payment methods that are widely available in English speaking regions, are totally not the case in other regions.  Then there are problems for example with South Korean games where you have to have some sort of national id to be able to purchase the game in the first place.  I know from past experiences trying to play Phantasy Star Online that figuring out how to pay for a Japanese game can be maddening and there are entire guides out there that are the equivalent of showing a screenshot and showing where to click to get through the sequence of screens to make a payment.  Especially now that Amazon allows folks to order from the .JP website with non-Japanese payment methods, sometimes just buying that physical copy can skirt a whole slew of frustration.

Console VS PC Divide

Another group of folks commented that they are 100% digital on the PC, but almost exclusively purchase physical copies for their consoles.  This again makes sense, because digital purchases on consoles are often times more expensive than purchasing through a retailer that is offering a discount to get your business.  There is also the case that consoles have a finite amount of storage space.  I know personally I have gone through the trouble of upgrading the hard drive in my PS3, PS4, and Xbox 360 to keep from running into the wall where I am constantly having to uninstall one thing to be able to play the next.  However in this case I know I am very much not in the majority.  Even with my Wii U I have an external hard drive connected so I simply won’t have to worry about storage space.  Buying that physical copy for the most part lets you insert disc and play… even though there is a modern trend of having to wait for a lengthy install process before playing it.  Also having that physical copy allows you to trade it off after you are done with it… which is apparently a much wider practice than I would have thought.  I tend to hold onto a game forever even in a case when it was a bit of a bomb.

Physical Exclusives

Another case that came up several times is that I had a group of folks that indicated that they buy digital unless there is a physical collectors edition… and then they go with the cool boxed edition.  I think this is a combination of a bunch of things, not the least being that the physical collectors editions have statues and mock-ups of in game items that you can’t get in any other form.  Then there is also the cool factor of seeing a wall of games.  I used to have a dedicated gaming space and a huge bookcase full of games similar to the one you see behind Jasyla in most of her videos.  Then problem being after several decades you end up with so much clutter that something in me snapped and just started giving it all away.  I mean that said I have a closet packed to the brim with older console stuff, but I’ve only started holding onto the things that were particularly rare.  It can be amazingly cool however to gaze upon your collection of rare physical collectors editions of games, so I absolutely see the appeal.

Concerns about Long-term Play-ability

This one came up a few times and I was not honestly expecting it.  There is a concern that while the console might work for decades… the game companies and the digital delivery methods might be long gone.  As a result we would be unable to play digital games.  This one also makes quite a bit of sense as I have lived through both the downfall of game consoles…  as well as the downfall of digital stores.  While the Dreamcast went the way of the dodo, I can still freely play the games that I have on their goofy gigabit pseudo dvd system.  Similarly I can talk about the disappearance of the Games with Windows store that Microsoft ran…  however in that case I think they simply rolled those purchases over to the Xbox store.  There is a certain amount of liability for digital purchases, so long as the main game company is in business.  This is the reason why you still see PSP titles available through the PSN store… even though that platform has long been shuttered.  I guess my line of thought has long been that if Sony and Microsoft are gone… there are going to be wider problems with their consoles given the amount of connectivity that is interwoven.   I know when my internet went out a few weeks back, it was kinda hell to find a game on the PS4 that I could play without it needing to “dial home” for something.  All of that said… I absolutely get this concern because the only way I can play Hellgate London is because I held onto my physical copy.

Wrapping Up

I really appreciated the wide number of responses that I got from folks on this question.  Actually it turned out pretty cool, and I have considered doing something like this again in the future.  I liked seeing all of the different points of view in a question I had thought about quite a bit myself… but one that wasn’t necessarily a hot button topic.  The other big scenario that I purchase physical copies of games… are when I happen to find a deal that is too insanely good to pass up.  Even then I take that serial number… and input it into steam because the last thing that I want to do is remember where the hell my physical copy is.  I love being able to have a console or a gaming machine loaded full of options, and be able to keep them “on tap” as it were.  I guess for me that was always my dream of having some sort of a gaming system where I could simply hit play and select one of any of the games I owned.  There was a period of time where I had sixteen consoles hooked up in my loft, but the complicated system of “A/B” switches that were required to make that work is maddening.  I love that I can just flip on my PS4 or Wii U pick a game and go, and this is also a big reason why I have zero qualms about repurchasing a game on a newer system.  In the end we all have different habits and different norms, and I thought it was awesome just how free you all were with your thoughts.

Cycles

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Something in the Water

Yesterday the very amazing Aywren posted a bit on her blog to serve as a bit of inspiration and support for bloggers out there, and a bit of it was directed at me.  There is something going on and it is bigger than me or this blog, but seemingly effecting a lot of other bloggers out there.  Its like this growing dissatisfaction with whatever we have been doing, and trying to find a way to tweak and change it to make our lives better.  IronWeakness for example has been frustrated lately with the lack of attention to his family and faith, and as a result is quitting cold turkey.  Liore has reached a point where she just doesn’t really want to write about games because of a lot of reasons… not the least of which is how toxic gaming has become.  As far as me, I have written about my frustrating inability to get into MMOs lately.  I guess the thing is… this feels different from your average lack of creativity.  I can sit down at the keyboard and summon a post at will every single day and I have done so for the last three years.  More than anything I have started to question why and if I actually want to do it.

In part I have felt this massive amount of pressure to keep moving the ball forward.  It is like I have all of the plates spinning in the air and I am desperately trying to make sure that none of them stop and come crashing to the ground.  The past year has not been amazingly well for me when it came to gaming, and more importantly writing about gaming.  I made an attempt to do the whole writing for a paycheck thing when it came to MMOGames.com.  The problem is… turning it into a job… no matter how sporadic and supplemental it was… drained all of the fun out of the experience for me.  Similarly I used to love to write code on the weekends… until I became a programmer for a living…  and now the last thing I want to see once I exit work is code of any form.  This was only compounded by Blaugust which took a significant toll on me, and my ability to enjoy reading blog posts.  During that month, the insane number of people we had signed up… meant that every morning I was getting up and religiously checking this long list of post and tabulating data in a spreadsheet.  Nothing drains the fun out of anything like a spreadsheet.

Backing Away

So I have slowly backed away from MMOGames and the thought of taking any assignments there, thinking that distance would make the enjoyment come back.  I also took a long break from reading blogs, because I thought with time the desire to read them would come back.  In both cases things regenerated over time, but I feel like a part of me died in both cases that can never come back.  Right now I just feel somehow out of phase with the world.  There are days when I am mostly okay, and can hold normal conversations… but the rest of the time it feels like everything is washing over me in a manner that is just impossible to grasp.  There are so many times I contemplate interacting, but it is so damned hard to take that first step.  Most of the time I am this bundle of anxiety and awkwardness that I am trying desperately to make seem normal.  The worst is that I have turtled for a very long time… and what I mean by that is that I have this tendency to tuck my head into my shell and just stop interacting other than when forced to do so.  In part I think a lot of the games I have been playing like Diablo 3 or Destiny… I am doing so because I can play them in a completely solo way with brief intermissions of group activity.

I am not sure exactly when I stopped logging into voice chat on a nightly basis, but this has caused this wall of stress surrounding my interacting with the folks I podcast with each week.  I still love them and feel the same way about them… but I struggle to interact with them outside of our weekly recording session.  I can handle one or two people at a time… but the possibility of logging in to a whole room of people… no matter how familiar I am with them just makes me want to run screaming.  Always in the past I have come out of one of these periods within a month or so… but this one feels like it has lasted the better part of this year and might have started last year.  I know that I need to force myself to interact… but all I want to do is pull the covers over my head and forget the world exists.  It is really hard to be any form of myself when I am like this… because I am known as being this gregarious sort that is kind and happy to see new people.  There are just times when I can’t be that version of myself, and I am not sure how to knock myself free of this current slump.

Expectations

I guess I felt like I needed to be open about these struggles I am dealing with, because maybe it explains a bit why I am the way I am sometimes.  All of this is in part why I have seriously contemplated just hanging up my spurs and stopping the blog for awhile.  The truth is though… that I don’t really want to.  I’ve built this dialog between you the readers and myself… and I enjoy it.  I can rattle off a post and it is blissfully one sided.  Sure folks comment, but I can deal with responding to those as I am ready.  I don’t have to be prepared to have a bidirectional exchange immediately… I can sit down write what I feel like writing and then walk away feeling like I have gotten whatever it was out of my system.  The only problem there is this giant looming pressure that I need to post something every day.  I think the whole daily thing has been good for me as a whole, but now it just serves as this point of failure that is waiting to happen.  I know at some point I will not write a post, and the streak will be over… and it honestly scares me a little bit.  Part of me is wondering if I should just plan to have an outage and get it over with to remove a chunk of the pressure.

The truth is my readership on the weekend has always been limited, so I have been kicking around the notion of posting weekdays, but then making the weekends optional.  I know coming up for Memorial Day weekend I will be out of town… so that might be the moment I just let the ball drop.  My blog can survive without three days worth of posts, or at least I keep telling myself that.  Part of me is afraid that if I stop the pattern, I will fall back into my old habits of being the least reliable blogger out there.  I would love to be able to say that I would only blog when I have something really important to say… but then that barrier of what is important versus not important would throw me into paralysis.  As it stands… I think at the end of this month I will be taking a break, and hoping that this lull with no gaming and no blogging will help to repair whatever schism has formed inside of me.  I don’t really want to quit blogging, but I feel like I need to at least take a break, and a planned break is better than just getting up one day and being unable to do it anymore.  So anyways… that has been what is going around in my head and I hope now that I got it all out on paper… it makes a little more sense.

Thanks as always for being there and reading.

 

Stolen Will

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Challenging Elders

Stolen Will

Over the last few weeks my friends Squirrel, Jex and myself have started what is turning out to be a little bit of a tradition.  Generally by the time Thursday night rolls around we have done Challenge of Elders on our mains, and since there is traditionally nothing going on Thursday night on the Axioma raid calendar we’ve opted to make it a sort of “Alt Challenge” night.  In the first week we managed to get two sets of alts nearly complete with the challenge.  This week however I had not actually run Challenge on Tuesday as is usually the case, and as a result I ended up running my Titan main with Squirrel and Jex alts.  That said we did extremely well and managed to get the requisite 90,000 cumulative score in only two matches.  The one thing I am certain of however is that I am sick of the melee objectives.  Last week the Challenge was Melee Bonus damage with Super bonus score, and this week it was Bonus Damage from Airborne kills and Bonus Score from Melee.  So basically for the last two weeks of Challenge of Elders we have been running around and punching mobs until they are dead.  Essentially it is time for something else, and I could definitely go for a modifier like secondary kills or something like that, but also have an increased ammo drop rate.  I could also go for another precision kill week with small arms, because it would allow me to farm all of the exotic weapons that I wish I had farmed the first time around.

Stolen Will Stolen Will Stolen Will Stolen Will Stolen Will Stolen Will

After doing a round of Challenge of Elders, instead of starting another set of alts we opted to do the Nightfall which Bungie had the grace to give players something they had been wanting anyways.  For weeks since the launch of the April patch players have been figuring out ways to somehow farm the Taken variants of the Winter’s Run strike.  The reason is that this is the only place that will drop the Stolen Will “Taken” appearance shotgun.  Even folks in my own clan have sorted out all sorts of methods to try and dictate that you are getting this strike versus some other strike.  This is also what is causing the Heroic Strike playlist to be pure shit, given that very rarely is someone actually going to run a strike to completion that isn’t Winter’s Run.  By setting this up as the weekly Nightfall it is allowing all of the folks who are desperately farming for the shotgun to get it out of their system.  Sadly of the three of us… the one who seemed to want it the most was Jex…  however Squirrel and I both walked away with one.  Mine has usable stats so I am definitely keeping it… I think for Squirrel his is already infused into his 1000 Yard Stare.  As far as the loot haul for the evening… I got a 335 Lethe Noblesse that I have already infused into my Hakkon’s Hatchet because one… I don’t really like Scout Rifles and two…  the roll on the one I got was pretty crappy.  I ended up getting a 335 Cruirass of the Witness that is more than likely also going to serve as infusion fuel.  As far as the exciting bits… I picked up the 335 Stolen Will, 335 Exotic Lord of Wolves Shotgun, somewhere along the way a 335 Zhalo Supercell that will probably be infusion fodder…  and finally a modern light level version of the Helm of Saint-14 also at 335.  It was a really great night in both the hanging out and doing various stuff… and the walking away with lots of shiny baubles department.  At this point I just need a Titans Mark and a Titan Artifact to push me over the barrier and hit 335 light cap.

Agent Carter

Stolen Will

I just wanted to write a quick blurb about this to finish off this mornings post.  Yesterday afternoon it was officially announced that the ABC series Agent Carter had been cancelled and would not be brought back for Season 3.  This of course is causing a lot of frustration among the general geekdom community that I am plugged into.  I personally think it is a show because the bit of it I have watched… it was really good.  The problem with that statement however is the “bit of it I have watched”.  I am part of the problem.  This show is absolutely in my wheelhouse, but I am not watching it… because I am not watching Television.  I do however watch a lot of Television through streaming, and as a result I am completely not used to the concept of watching something on a specific schedule anymore.  As a result I am woefully behind in so many shows because I ultimately wait for them to show up on Hulu, Netflix or Amazon Prime.  I feel like Agent Carter is a victim of a disconnect between how Televisions really want us to watch, and how people are actually watching.  What I mean by that is that Agent Carter the only place I could find to stream Agent Carter was on Amazon… and by that I mean purchase each episode for $2.99 and that is not going to happen.  Hulu offered the show but in their ultra shitty 5 episode window, which means that if I for some reason get behind in a show… as was the case with this one… I can never actually catch up because those first episodes are gone to the sands of time.

So the truth is this is absolutely a show I would have watched, had they simply put it in the format I consume broadcast media.  The problem is much like was the case with the music industry…  Television is desperately clawing, kicking and screaming… trying to hold onto the power base that they built over the decades.  Shows like Agent Carter that resonate with the generation that has already moved past the “TV Guide” era are unfortunately going to be the casualty until they sort out how to make this function.  I feel some guilt here, because if folks like me were watching then maybe it would be getting that third season.  However I am just not willing to watch television on someone else’s schedule, and even the DVR concept seems foreign to me these days.  I don’t have the number of tuners to be able to record all of the shows I am vaguely interested in, and I certainly don’t have the hard drive space on said DVR to keep them until I am ready to watch them.  I am perfectly fine with watching commercials in my stream…  just let me stream it… and from the platforms we already use.  This is not permission for yet another proprietary video network that requires a login and a bunch of hoops to jump through.  Sit down and cut a deal with Hulu or Netflix… and get over this shit.  Unfortunately if networks don’t get with the program soon they are going to continue to watch their market share slip through their fingers as a generation finds other ways to entertain themselves.

 

 

 

Gracie’s Gaming Rollercoaster

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The last week has been full of highs and lows in my gaming world and I thought I’d share some here. I’ll get the disappointments out of the way early so I can get on to the happy stuff! The big one is of course I did not get into the Legion beta. A friend asked me why I even care since playing the beta means burning out on Legion faster. Long gone are the days where I wanted to play the beta so I could practice leveling and dungeons and make a run for server firsts. Instead, I’d like to see the beta to poke at the new systems, see how the classes have been changed, and just gawk at the new world at a time when WoW is getting really stale.

The other disappointment also comes from the Blizzard front. I got the chance to play Overwatch both during the stress test weekend and the open beta. I was excited, but it turns out that I really do not like competitive shooters and that’s all Overwatch is. Yes, it is polished, beautiful, with a really interesting cast of characters, but if you don’t like shooting squads of strangers with a group of friends or yet more strangers, then this game probably won’t change your mind. The world seems so interesting, though. I’ll add my voice to the chorus that would love to play a PvE shooter in this universe, where I could take time to explore it better.

Enough with the bad, let’s talk about the good stuff! I’ve been playing the Ratchet & Clank reboot game and loving it. It makes me want to dig out my old copy of the original and see all the similarities and differences. I love this series of games so much, and I think part of why I enjoy WildStar as much as I do is because the style and humor very frequently remind me of Ratchet & Clank. Sadly the movie isn’t playing in any of my local theaters, so it looks like I might have to wait for it on Netflix or make a special trip to civilization to see it before it disappears.

My D3 season 6 is moving along nicely. I still need to set aside the time to work on a set dungeon mastery so I can move forward with the journey, and I still haven’t seen any of the new pets or wings drop for me, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with my progress. We’ve reached the point in my circle of friends where the truly hardcore folks have already finished their goals and moved on so it is harder to get carried, but it also means I can set my own pace from here on out. My plan to be slightly more social has also been working well, and I’ve played with quite a few old friends in the past week that I don’t usually get much chance to hang out with anymore.

The big surprise of this week is that I went back to FFXIV for a bit and had the most amazing possible time. I’m not sure exactly when I stopped playing, but the last time I talked about FFXIV much on this blog was during last Blaugust when we were working on the Ravana EX fight. We never did murder that bug before I left, so I’m guessing I’ve been away 7 or 8 months. My triumphant return started out a bit rocky, since I logged in to the bane of MMO nomads everywhere: cluttered bags full of stuff I had no idea what to do with. Once that was taken care of I also had to rebuild my UI and all my macros, which took the better part of an evening.

After all the frustrations of those activities I took a break for a couple days and came back ready to heal butts. I threw myself into duty roulette for some old and some new content and got reminded that I really do still love healing in MMOs, or at least in this specific one. I danced the dances and healed the butts and even occasionally did some DPS too and had a surprisingly good time. My fancy top hat definitely helped improve my mood too. The icing on top was I got to tag along with my Free Company’s pony farm night and won 2 new pony mounts. It’s like the game is trying to bribe me to stick around, and it might just work!


Gracie’s Gaming Rollercoaster