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No Internet Blues

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Vault of Glass

I am on vacation the next two days, so as a result you are getting a post a bit later than normal.  I had every intent of getting up like normal, but the world was rainy…and the bed was warm, and the room nice and dark so I just kept sleeping.  I got up long enough to make my wife some coffee and then went right back to bed, and while I thought I wasn’t really asleep I apparently missed her departure.  I largely survived the moms day festivities and other than getting choked up due to some backwater yokel burning wet leaves…  thing went pretty smoothly.  So much so that I thought we would be back home at a decent hour last night.  My Destiny clan does a Sunday night Retro raid trip through Vault of Glass, and I am in desperate need of an Aetheon kill so that I can finish my No Time To Explain exotic pulse rifle quest.  Generally speaking Sunday is television night in our household, but given that te rest of the day was kinda messed up I decided to take a pass and instead signed up for the raid.  It was going to be awesome to finally have that quest out of my log.

When we got home from an extended dinner/conversation with my parents, I went upstairs and sat down at my computer.  I brought up a single website…  the one that allows me to sign up for a clan event.  When I then turned around and hit the Bungie website to transfer some items I got a no internet connection error in Chrome.  Sure enough I was setting the caution light symbol on my ethernet, and it was around this point that I noticed the cable modem disconnected.  I fiddled a few times to try and get it reconnected, and then hollered down at my wife to check the cable.  Sure enough the television part of the equation was out too.  The biggest frustration is that there was an error messaging showing up on the television with a phone number, but when we called that number and waded their their annoying menu of options, we finally received an answering message stating that the office was closed.  At this point it is 8:30, and the raid starts at 9 pm…  so a mild bit of panic is setting in but there isn’t much I can actually do about it.

Life Without Internet

Thankfully our mobile phones were working because my wife managed to find a different tech support number, and we called that.  Once again we had to wade through a frustrating sequence of message prompts.  We finally get to someone and sure enough there is a major outage in our area, one that is not planned to be resolved until 10:06 so an hour after the start of the raid.  I manage to fiddle with the mobile app for the clan and de-register from the event, and sit there resigned to my fate.  The problem with our modern connected society is that most of the things that I like to do… simply don’t function without internet.  Thankfully I had managed to log into the PS4 before the internet went out and it seemed that Ratchet and Clank didn’t care about having connectivity.  I ended up playing that for a bit until at some point  looked to the side and the blue lights were back on our cable modem.  My Wife verified that in fact we did have cable television back as well, and things seemed pretty peachy.  It seems like they managed to fix the issue by 9:30 instead of 10 something whcih was awesome, but unfortunately the Vault of Glass raid didn’t actually make.

Instead we ended up watching the rebroadcast of Fear the Walking Dead, and then going to bed a it later than we normally do.  Losing internet is this strange roller coaster of emotions which I guess in some way troubles me that this one thing is that important.  We found out that apparently there was a lightning strike that took out a connection point for both the power and cable, and that a large swath of my town was out of power.  I remember the thought going through my head of “Whats the use in having power if we don’t have internet” which when I thought it kinda jarred me.  I guess it was a weird conclusion to what was ultimately a really strange weekend.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad strange, just way busier than we are used to.  On a positive note my “flower children” seem to still be happy and we have failed to kill them off in the week we have had them.  They require way more water than I had originally thought which has me watering both morning and evening to keep them looking healthy.  The “Sunpatiens” especially seem to need a thorough soaking both times to make them nice and happy, which was not something I was expecting.  I had always been told that over watering was just as bad as not watering at all.  However it seems like whatever we ended up with combined with Oklahoma temperatures really need that water.  Hopefully tomorrow I will be back to normal gaming style posts, but this is all I really had for today.

Back After A Break (Or: When The Game Stops Being Fun)

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It’s been a while since I posted last, mostly because there hasn’t been a lot I really feel like saying. It turns out it helps me to take a break from posting every so often to clear my head. I hadn’t really considered this previously, because my breaks from this have coincided with fairly major life events, so it’s seemed reasonable to just stop posting for a while. This time, it was more burnout than anything.

Back After A Break (Or: When The Game Stops Being Fun)

While not posting, especially when I’ve had an unbroken string of posts for a while, there’s this weight of obligation, this feeling like I need to post something, need to write something, just to fill up space. It’s the same sense of feeling obligated to log into an MMO every day, just to “check in”. I hadn’t really connected the two before now.

Something I see a lot, and have talked to a lot of people about over the years, is burnout. It’s a huge issue in game development, and it’s a constant cycle in MMO raiding, two spheres where I’ve spent a lot of time. There’s a pervasive sense that you need to keep going, keep doing the Fun Thing, because if it’s not a Fun Thing, why did you spend so much time in it? It’s often compared to the business semi-equivalent, the concept of sunk costs, but I feel like it’s a poor comparison. Just because I’m not having fun with something *now* doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun *before*. We change, situations change, and it’s not (always) the game’s fault.

I haven’t logged into FFXIV in months now. I haven’t stopped liking that game; it’s still one of my favorite games, I just don’t feel like playing it right now. The most fun I have, the most invested I get in that game, is when there’s a nice big backlog of content to go through and get a bunch of story all at once. Getting the story in drips and drabs just gets me to lose the thread, especially when they come months apart. I’m excited about the next big thing they’re putting together, their procedurally-generated dungeon, and I’ll wait to play until that’s out and I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on.

Starting to post here again is kind of the same thing. I feel like I have things to say and comments to make, and I’ve played enough games in the interim to have more food for thought.

Mothers Day Prep

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Searching for Thing

Yesterday was a strange day, in that we got up and ate breakfast like normal… but upon finishing my wife went off to work.  She spent the entire day either working in her room or later proctoring a mock AP exam.  This meant that I was largely left to fend for myself, which is admittedly a happy place for me.  I grew up an only child, and instead of going places I didn’t want to I often begged to stay home alone.  So even today I am pretty happy just chilling by myself for long periods of time.  Yesterday however there was a mission, and that was to acquire a Mothers Day gift for my mother in law.  Now early in the season we had figured out what we were going to get her, but did not honestly have a great place to store it.  So yesterday after eating breakfast and showering I got out and cleaned my vehicle so that I could set down the seats and haul said item.

The only gotcha was that when I got to the store, the huge stack of said item that was there several times during this season…  somehow vanished.  I spent awhile poking around in the store and looking for the item, and even harassed several employees that lead me through a sequence of departments I had already checked.  So I sent the obligatory “We Might be Screwed” text to my wife and as it was getting to be lunch time I figured I would get some take out and call various stores to see if anyone had some.  I am purposefully being vague here, because while I know that my mother in law doesn’t read my blog… it still feels weird to talk about a gift I have yet to deliver.  My brilliant wife suggested that I go onto the stores website to see if it shows any in stock near by, which is great because I hate making phone calls.  The funny thing is…  the store in question shows that they have 20 available and in stock at my local store.  Aka the store I just went to that told me they didn’t even know what I was looking for.

Inventory Black Hole

On a whim I figured it was worth a shot… the worst thing that would happen is that they would have to refund the purchase.  So I added two of the item I was looking for into my shopping cart on the website…  somehow expecting at any moment for the site to come to its senses and realize that the store didn’t have the product.  I added in my credit card information and hit purchase, verifying that it was in fact available for pick up that day before finalizing the order.  I got a confirmation email saying that the store would call me when the item was ready for pickup.  Then I began waiting…  and in my boredom, anxiety and frustration I noticed that Audacity was open in the background.  Maybe this is a bad thing for me to have open in the background because I apparently recorded this.  Firstly I am horribly sorry for the thing you are about to listen to…  but it made me giggle so I decided to share it.

Sure enough about an hour and a half later I get the phone call from the store telling me that they have two ready for pick up, and asking when I will be there.  I hop in the my vehicle and head straight there, where they have two of said item loaded on a flat bed trailer thingy ready to go.  I have to show my ID and sign a piece of paperwork and almost too good to be true I am walking out to the parking lot with said items.  Funny story…  while moving the items on the cart began to jostle and next thing I notice they are sliding off the back end of the cart.  This is the point at which I learn about physics and how if you have an item that naturally moves on its own… you apparently should orient it in such a way as to NOT cause that movement to happen.  Thankfully nothing was damaged and I got them loaded into the back of my vehicle, and even had a nice person who really wanted my flatbed cart so I didn’t have to push that back up to the store.

 

Crusadering

Mothers Day Prep

What was left of the day I spent playing Diablo 3 and pushing my way towards some of the conquest achievements.  I was happy that I didn’t have to end up running all over hells have acre yesterday trying to find the thing on short notice.  I still feel like having my Mothers gift drop shipped more than a week ahead of time was the way to go, but that doesn’t always work out.  Yesterday was honestly oddly stressful because the moment my wife got home from work, we had to get right back on the road and head to dinner.  We do this once a month dinner thing with her siblings, and because reasons… it somehow got shifted from Friday night to Saturday night.  Which meant we had to watch the clock and make sure we were out of the restaurant in time for us to drive the roughly hour home so I could be here for the podcast.

Today we are doing something similar, with the moment my wife gets out of church we are heading to her mothers to deliver the gift, and then that afternoon seeing my mother.  I am actually super glad that I have both Monday and Tuesday off because otherwise this would have been a crazy weekend.  This is also probably one of the strangest posts I have made in awhile, because it is like 99% real life and 1% gaming.  Hopefully you all will take it in stride because it is what happened to come out once my fingers started moving this morning.

 

Toasty on MMORPGs

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The Decline

One of the more interesting trends that I have picked up on, has to do with my own blog.  It feels like the more I talk about Destiny, the lower my reader numbers dip.  I guess it makes sense, as I started this blog out with World of Warcraft and moved towards other MMORPGs as well.  Destiny has a slightly different audience and not necessarily the sort of one that really reads blogs.  The Destiny community is largely contained within a combination of Reddit, Twitch and YouTube.  I don’t have a lot to say about this, but I just found it interesting.  On one hand I hate that I am alienating a bunch of readers, and on the other hand in order for me to keep doing this daily blogging thing… I have to be writing about what is interesting me.  At this very moment that is Destiny and Diablo, and nothing much in the traditional MMO camp.  Now I have logged into a bunch of MMOs in the last few months, but none of them really seemed to hold my attention past that initial login.  Each time there was something that would ultimately cause me to log out.  It might be that my bags were a mess, or that I couldn’t remember what I was last doing.  Ultimately I found a ready excuse and used it to “nope” the hell out of the game.  The problem however I think is somewhere in me.

Right now I am finding myself enjoying games that shower me in loot, and games that allow me to have engaging solo experiences.  Granted I have been spending a lot of time mooching off of folks as they run high end content in Diablo 3, but when I log into that game I can go off and do something by myself that feels like I am moving towards some goal.  In Destiny no matter what I do I can always be working on getting that next faction package, or even spending time in the crucible hoping for that next 335 item.  These two games specifically play extremely well by myself or with friends, and that is just something that I can’t say for MMORPGs right now.  In most cases the only real way to get good gear is through raiding, and that takes a time commitment I am just not willing to do right now.  There is no path for me to piddle my way to victory, and at the moment I don’t want to commit to much more than that.  Raiding in Destiny has felt far more “à la carte” and I think the small six player raid size helps that.  It seems easy to pull together a raid group, and even easier to pull together a three player team.  For example we spent last night doing Challenge of Elders and it honestly felt just as engaging and rewarding as doing an MMORPG raid group.

Burnt Out Genre

For awhile now I have kept thinking that sooner or later I will get over this funk.  That I will get that drive to go off and play an MMORPG.  For example I really want to have the desire to play Final Fantasy XIV and to “get the band back together”.  However there is just some wall keeping me from getting back into it and enjoying it.  I’ve patched up the client a few times, but I know when I do log in… someone is going to do the “Bels Back!” thing and I will feel guilty when I log out a few minutes later because I and confused as to what to do.  It is not a time issue, because I still have the same amount of time I ever did… it seems to be an attention span issue.  Diablo 3 and Destiny both reward me for spending ANY time with them…  and there is always an explosion of shiny colored loot just waiting on me around the corner.  The grind of an MMO is a much more slow burn, with large gaps of time between those moments of excitement.  For years I played MMORPGs as a way to hang out with friends, but thanks to tools like Slack, Discord, and Band… I can take my group of friends with me wherever I happen to go.  I no longer need to rely on the MMO as a chat client, and when that happened I guess the games lost a part of their hold on me.

I guess it hit me last night when technically I was scheduled to be raiding in World of Warcraft, and I didn’t even remember that it was a thing I was supposed to be doing.  The leader said over chat that I was just burnt out on WoW, which is a bit true…  but its more than that.  I feel like I am burnt out on MMOs in general.  I’ve been rabidly playing this one genre since 2000, and I feel like maybe I just need other types of games in my life.  The parts of the MMO that I really liked, which were the acquisition of new stuff and the feeling of constantly evolving your persistent character…  those things have been exported to pretty much every single genre out there.  I guess I realized this was happening when nothing that was coming out, that actually excited me… was an MMO.  There are plenty of things to be excited for out there, and I think Black Desert is one of those games that I would have loved…  were I not over-saturated on MMORPGs.  I am not really sure if I have a point this morning.  It sucks that I am driving away readers, but I just don’t think I can write with the same love and excitement that I used to about MMORPGs right now.  I keep hoping at some point I will climb out of this hole, and be able to log into Final Fantasy XIV and be excited again for story and world building,  However in the meantime… you are probably going to see a lot more talk of Diablo 3 and Destiny because that is where my attention and excitement has landed.