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These posts are always really weird to sit down and write, because how exactly do you summarize something you have done this long.  Back in 2009 when the blog formally started I was helping to lead a raid in World of Warcraft as a Warrior Tank…  and quite possibly in the worst job I have ever been in.  I didn’t feel needed or respected at work, and this blog… and all of my guild/raid-leaderly duties were essentially my way of dealing with the maelstrom of chaos happening in the workplace.  As my work condition has improved my game environment has also changed… and it seems like the more responsibility that I take on in my work and home environments….  the less I actually want in my gaming ones.  Liore and I used to joke about starting and old folks home for old raid leaders, but there are times that it feels like I am absolutely a candidate.  These days I feel like I almost actively avoid the concept of raiding in the first place.

I realize this is probably an odd start to an anniversary post, but after going back and crawling through the last year of blog posts…  I am realizing that this is the first year when I did not have some form of active raid going on.  Sure we attempted to get something started in Final Fantasy XIV around the Stormblood launch…  and in Destiny 2 but neither of those really stuck that well and developed into a proper regular raid night.  Instead I have largely opted for solo play on a broader scale this year than I have in the past.  June saw the advent of the Robosquid Armada…  something we are loosely continuing with our Mythical Nonsense nights…  but that represents probably the most serious content that I attempted in this past year.  I am not sure if this is sign that I have changed in what I am wanting out of games… or if this was just a situation where no one actually wanted wear that raid leader hat permanently.

In the past year I also experienced a work transition, but it was one of those things that I largely just eased into.  For years I have been the unofficial leader of the development team at work, starting with a sort of “team lead” title that didn’t actually exist but very much was the role of assigning projects and figuring out our workload.  Around the beginning of this past year I was given the formal title of Supervisor…  and then last December my actual manager retired creating a vacancy that I moved into.  Now I managed not only the development team, but also data analysis and gis…  giving me fifteen other lives to watch after on a daily basis.  In many ways it sort of feels like going back to raid leadership…  but this time in the real world where I am sorta tanking for these people by dealing with the nonsense and meetings that are required to get forward movement.  Guild and Raid Leadership is not exactly one of those things that I would put on a resume…  but I will say that the experience does completely equate.

On the home front we are still in the same location we have been since 1999 and we experienced no major upheavals in the occupancy of our home.  We still have three cats:  Allie, Kenzie and Mollie and one ferret:  Shiloh.  There was a period of a few weeks when we thought a dog had adopted us… but luckily we found its home because we are just not really dog people.  Mollie is still skittish as hell, but has reached a point where she is my buddy instead of running from me whenever I entered the room.  She more or less was found as a kitten and grew up in a dog shelter for the first part of her life and wound up scarred from the experience.  Now she sorta follows me through the house as I do things…  letting me know she wants attention at various points along the route.  Kenzie is just as crazy as ever and is currently sleeping on the desk beside me.  Allie is still doing okay… but she is definitely entering the autumn years of her life and we are just trying to make her as comfortable as we can for as long as we can.  Shiloh is a sweetheart and gets lots of attention anytime she is awake…  but ferrets sleep an awful lot of the time which means I tend to give her lots of loving before work, when I get home from work, and before I go to bed…  because that seems to fit her sleep schedule.

The other day Tobold wrote a post talking about the decline of his own blog, and while I am not trying to do the same… it is noticeable the slow and steady bleed of readers.  I think this is far less a case of people simply getting tired of my nonsense and more a case that tastes are changing.  Personally I don’t have near the time I used to for keeping up with blog reading.  There used to be a morning routine that I had without fail… and now I never know who is going to ambush me on the way to my desk with some hot button issue that needs immediate attention.  Looking my analytics, it appears like my readership dropped by about eight percent…  which sounds bad but between the 15/16 year and the 16/17 year I lost sixty four percent of my readers.  It maybe seems weird to be happy that the bleed has at least been partially bandaged but the truth is…  what keeps me doing this on a daily basis is so much more than simple need to see the numbers go up.  I have talked about this before… but I think blogging for me is a form of therapy.

I feel like the “death of blogging” as it has been touted so many times is just a shift in tastes.  Folks are turning to YouTube for their gaming information whereas they used to bond with a forum or gaming blog in the past.  This sucks for those of us who prefer to read their information rather than have to watch a five minute video to get thirty seconds of information.  I first started encountering this myself when I would start playing a newer game… and find it completely impossible to find any sort of a blogging community that I should be reading.  When I started playing Destiny heavily… I found I had to trade blogging voices like Syp, Rowan, Liore, Syl and Grace for Youtubers like Mesa Sean, My Name is Byf, Holtzmann and Arekkz.  As the gaming tastes have shifted so have the communities and maybe you can find a Reddit for a game like Destiny 2, The Division or Monster Hunter World…  but you aren’t actually likely to find a proper blog for them.  The truth is the era of YouTube might also be coming to a close as a lot of folks are preferring to just interact directly with the personalities they are entangling themselves with direction over Twitch.

The trend seems to be moving towards more and more access to the person making the content, and while I dabble in streaming and have been adopted by the very amazing Moogle’s Pom stream team…  it is still very much an ill fitting glove for me.  Blogging is about opening yourself up to the world with a comfortable distance from the reader.  Sure I sit down each morning and write my thoughts for you…  but I am not having to interact with you directly as you read them.  Comments exist and so does pinging me over twitter…  but there is a layer of separation between what I am doing and what you are doing that makes the experience feel more cozy to me.  When I have encountered a reader before in a game or something like that… I never quite know what to do, how to interact with them.  The same is true on streams…  interacting real-time with people is fine so long as those people already exist in my monkey-sphere of people I am prepared to interact with.  When someone new enters the room I never know how quite to do things…  that they might also find entertaining.

As far as gaming goes this past year… I did a quick run through of what I seemed to be playing the most for each of the months since the last Anniversary…

• April 2017 – Star Wars the Old Republic
• May 2017 – World of Warcraft
• June 2017 – Final Fantasy XIV
• July 2017 – Final Fantasy XIV
• August 2017 – Guild Wars 2
• September 2017 – Destiny 2 (PS4)
• October 2017 – Destiny 2 (PC)
• November 2017 – Destiny 2 (PC)
• December 2017 – World of Warcraft
• January 2018 – World of Warcraft
• February 2018 – Monster Hunter World
• March 2018 – Monster Hunter World
• April 2018 – Project Gorgon

Not shockingly I tend to be extremely MMO-Centric in my gaming habits.  I tend to have some primary game that is my central focus at any given time and then a bunch of other games that I am also sorta playing.  Weirdly enough I spend so much more time playing an MMO solo… than I ever do actually playing solo story games.  I think the core reason behind that is two fold…  firstly I don’t like when games end.  I find the ending of the game to be the most sad time because it is over.  MMOs never end…  so I can never need to worry about running out of ways to interact with that world.  Secondly I find single player story driven games to be a very lonely experience.  Even if I am not interacting with other people… I like knowing they are out there and changing my gameplay in sublte and interesting ways.  Just seeing chat scroll by in the background makes me feel like I am part of something bigger than the tiny window into the world I have carved out for myself.  In theory streaming single player games can provide a similarly multiplayer experience…  but I never know how to handle that.  I don’t like reading out all of the text outload…  and it feels weird to pause what I am doing to read text as it scrolls by on screen while there are other people “in the room”.

I realize this is a bit of an odd anniversary post but it is what happened to come out of my mind this morning as I sat down to type it up.  One thing that I completely have not addressed is the amazing artwork that I have above at the top of this post.  That is of course by the very awesome AmmosArt who is more or less the official unofficial artist of all of my en-devours.  Since I am a member of the Moogle’s Pom community,  I wanted a few streamer moogles to use for decoration elements… and having seen her moogles before I knew it would work out swimmingly.  I have not actually used them in the method that I was intending yet…  but regardless they are amazing and I thought I would use this opportunity to share them with the world.  It’s time for me to wrap this up and head to work, but I wanted to close with one last thing.  Rather you are a regular who reads my post religiously, or a random drive by…  thanks for nine years of this interesting experiment.  I do this each day…  because in some way I am having an open dialog with each of you and the fact that you are out there somewhere is very important to that formula.

Sometimes I get something stuck in my head and I cannot dislodge it no matter how hard I try.  You as my readers occasionally are forced to indulge in whatever this nonsense is…  so that by hopefully sharing it I can move on with my life.  This mornings post is one of those cases.  Yesterday I talked about Radical Heights and how it would have been much more interesting were it to change the Battle Royale genre in some way rather than just attempt to hit all of the high points.  This is when I went down a path leading to… Smash TV would be interesting to reboot as a Battle Royale game.  What I mean by this actually is the concept of Smash TV which was a room based dungeon crawl with randomly spawning nonsense, big bullet sponge monsters and showers of cash and prizes.  After finishing yesterdays post this idea clung onto the brain and I started piecing together what something like this would look like.

As a result you have the above nonsense which is my attempt at sketching out what the setup of the game would look like.  In this configuration 48 players spawn into the game in little rooms off of a grid of battle chambers.  There are four color based cohorts of players that are ultimately fighting to arrive at the purple central region.  The sequence of play looks a little something like this….

1. Exit Starting Room
2. Make your Way to the Key Room
3. Collect Key
4. Make your Way to the Mini Boss Chamber for your Color
5. Defeat Mini Boss
6. Make your Way to the Final Boss Chamber
7. Defeat Final Boss
8. Profit

Key Room and Grouping

The Key is a shared resource in that the first person who unlocks the Mini Boss Chamber unlocks it for their entire cohort.  Where things get weird is that each cohort has the option of either grouping together or competing against each other.  When a new player enters a room where an existing player is already at both are giving 5 seconds of invulnerability and are prompted to make a choice “Friend or Enemy”.  If both players choose friend they are dynamically grouped together and from that point the victory condition is shared.  If one player chooses Enemy both are flagged as targets to each other when the invulnerability shield drops and now they are officially competing.  This continues as players move through their own cohort with the option to set a match default of either a sort of Carebear mode or Ganker mode.  Important note… there is no way to group up after this flagging period so it is a fast decision that sets the fate of the rest of the match.

Battle Chambers

Now we move on to the battle chambers themselves…  each of them spawns a semi-randomized encounter.  It could be a spawner full of small easy to kill, but also easy to overwhelm you trash mobs.  It could spawn in a single champion and with a couple of minions that requires some measure of tactics to take out.  It could also be an agility room where you have to avoid a pattern of damage for a certain amount of time before the doors open again.  Regardless of what type of room it is… it enters a lock down within 10 seconds of the first player arriving there and then prevents any new players from entering or exiting.  After defeating the encounter you have 30 seconds to clear out before the room resets and signals that it has “reloaded” and will begin the cycle of a 10 second lockout and encounter spawn.  As you move away from the starter rooms towards the key room the encounters increase in difficulty, and similarly as you move towards the final boss room in the central area.

Mini  Bosses

The Mini Boss rooms are some sort of large bullet sponge juggernaut that requires you to hit some sort of a weak area to deal damage to it, all the while avoiding its attacks.  I linked in an image of one of the Smash TV Bosses for reference but I wouldn’t necessarily say that these juggernauts look anything like this.  Basically the idea is to have an encounter hard enough that it rewards players choosing to group up together to try and take it down.  Similarly it needs to be largely avoiding a pattern so with enough skill and execution prowess you could solo the encounter if someone is feeling super murdery and decides to go it alone.  That is a constant tug of war… incentivizing both solo and group play in different ways.  After the mini boss room has been cleared the way to the central area opens for everyone in that cohort… with one caveat.  There can only be one group alive…  it is a dual condition of both boss down and only one active group…  before moving into the central zone.

Boss Rush or Buffs

Once you enter the central purple area you have two main choices to make.  Do you rush the boss and try and get it down before the other teams…  or do you go collect one of the buffs scattered in the four corner rooms of this area.  Each individual buff can be collected only once so there is a high likelihood that two teams may be going after the same buff given that there is no clear buff for each cohort to collect.  You can only collect one buff and it is an aura applied to your entire team from that point forward.  It scales based on the number of players you currently still have in the game…  so the fewer players you have it attempts to give you a buffer to compete against larger teams by making each player a little more bullet-spongey.  So if you clear your cohort with only five players alive… then chances are you are going to want to go for a buff.  If you instead have all sixteen players alive and well… then you are probably going to want to rush the central chamber and attempt to take down the boss.

Essentially there are two possible win conditions…  either every other player is eliminated or your cohort has taken down the Final Boss.  The only way the elimination condition can be triggered is if you are playing in solo play…  literally you have to be the last player standing and if you are grouped you are not the last player standing.

The Drops

So you are immediately thinking now…  sure there is one central path that you need to take to cross the least number of rooms possible to get to each objective and that is obviously the golden path.  Well that gets complicated in the fact that every time you take down a battle chamber you are getting loot and that loot is ultimately what is going to make you strong.  Each player enters the arena with a single six shot sidearm with unlimited reserve, giving them a fairly low damage but always available option.  As you traverse the map you start picking up weapon drops and buffs that make you stronger as you zero in on the objectives.  Since the rooms get harder as you go… there may be some benefit in farming a few of those early rooms to get kitted out before trying the harder encounters.  Loot starts as instanced to a specific player, but if for some reason they discard an item it becomes essentially free for all… showing up for all players regardless of cohort.  Here is a quick rundown of the sorts of things I thought would be drops.

• Weapons – very obviously different types of weapons that have different damage to rate of fire mixtures.  There are no ammo drops but picking up the same weapon twice will refresh its ammunition back to full.  Players can carry three weapons at once and have to discard a weapon if they choose to pick something new up.
• Auras – these items when picked up apply a short term buff to the entire cohort.  You can have three auras at a time and attempting to pick up a fourth aura item will simply fail and leave the drop on the ground.
• Consumables – these are items that can be held in reserve and used on demand.  Each player can hold three of these and they range from granting auras to med packs to providing some additional effect to your weapon.
• Cold Hard Cash – Since this is a game show when you kill anything it erupts in a shower of cash upon death, and this serves as both a scoring mechanism and a spendable resource.  Occasionally when a room clears a vending machine will appear allowing you to spend a bit of your cash to buy some of the things you could get as drops.  Each machine has six items for sale…  three weapons and three consumables… which are randomly pulled from the total number of those available in the game.  At the end of the game any cash you have still in your inventory gets converted to a sort of savings bond currency that can then be spent outside of game….  but there is a pretty hefty tax at the conversion.
• Favor Chests – if you do particularly well in a specific encounter there is a chance of the viewers watching you fight… providing a favor chest showing how much they appreciate your prowess.  These are by nature fairly rare but directly reward some of the cosmetic nonsense that you can collect like outfits and weapon skins.

Changing the Genre

Ultimately this is all I was talking about with Radical Heights… is that they could have taken that Battle Royale formula and changed it significantly.  This concept of “Smash Royale” still feels like Smash TV, but is also still very much a Battle Royale genre game in that the playing field slowly funnels players towards a central showdown.  This one however throws in a heavy PVE encounter focus in that killing things rewards loot… which then makes you stronger as you make your way to the final boss showdown.  Once opened that Final Boss chamber remains open with no lockdown period…  so as you start the fight you could have the other cohorts showing up in the middle of it sniping you as you attempt to finish off the boss and collect the loot.  I also feel like maybe I have not given enough concrete reasons why you might want to go that final boss encounter solo…  ultimately it is greed.  The final boss might drop 2 items per player in a maximum sized cohort and this is a fixed point….  so the final boss will always drop 32 items in this scenario.

That means if you go into that final encounter with fewer players…  then each individual player serves to benefit significantly more from the win condition.  It becomes a balancing act…  how many players do you really need in your group in order to be effective in the final encounter.  Only one group can emerge from the cohort area… but while in that area you could for example form 8 individual 2 player teams…  or 3 4 player teams.  Ultimately you as a player need to determine what your best course is when it comes to the Friend/Enemy decisions and how many additional players you need to make the final push.  There is no betrayal, but also no second chances…  from the moment you make that first binary decision you are locked into a specific path.  This is my idea for a Battle Royale game…  and I think it would ultimately play extremely well given that there are a bunch of points where a meta could develop.

I think to add pressure… there would be global callouts when an event has happened…  for example Red Mini Boss Down would tell every other cohort how much progress that they had made, or if Green picks up the buff.  I think even something like a “Blue Team Finalized” might be interesting because it could be one of two things…  either all of blue team decided to band together or one group managed to eliminate all of the other players in their cohort.  Since monetization is so damned important in a game like this right now…  I think the best option is a mix of limited time direct purchase cosmetics along with the ability to purchase directly the savings bond currency allowing players to buy anything currently “not on sale”.  The savings bond currency also serves as something that players can gradually save up over a large number of matches and be able to purchase the same “cash shop” cosmetics through copious amounts of grinding in game.

Those are my thoughts on how to tweak the genre and make it more interesting while also wallowing heavily in nostalgia in the process.  If you have actually made it this far down in the post… I thank you.  Mostly I just needed to get this out of my head and onto paper.