wildstar – Page 5

What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

August 7, 2016 by Grace

Hooray, I made it through the first week of Blaugust! WoW has definitely been my main focus, but some other games have still been on my radar too.

World of Warcraft: This is where I spent most of my time this week. I got my legendary mace on my forsaken priest, but otherwise have mostly been playing alliance side. It makes me frustrated and sad, because I just plain like the horde races and story better, but at this point absolutely all of my friends are playing alliance so there’s no escaping it. Once again I find myself really wishing WoW would just add cross faction play already, even if it were tied to battlenet friends or something. I already have prepared myself for the inevitable point in Legion where I get sick of being alliance and go back to level my horde mains all alone. I guess it is a good thing I like alting.

LFR gets a (mostly deserved) bad rap, but sometimes you luck out and it’s nothing but Gamon and rainbows as far as the eye can see.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a little LFR on my druid and wandering around on my baby spacegoat mage and enjoying it. I’ve been using the baby mage as a chance to really see the low-level alliance quests, and to knock out some of the individual zone loremaster achieves that I never did. I got the overall loremaster achievement and title back before Cataclysm, so there’s a lot of quests I’ve never seen before. See yesterday’s post from Felwood for just one example.

FFXIV: I want to be playing this more, but WoW is really taking up too much of my time and attention for me to bother. Over the past week I’ve logged in for raid and pretty much nothing else at all. Don’t get me wrong, raid time was amazing and probably more fun than all of the time I played WoW put together, but we only raid 2 hours a week. I had been hoping that raiding on a schedule again would reignite my drive to log in more and upgrade my gear and such but it didn’t work out that way.

WildStar: I’m going to come clean and admit I hadn’t logged in to WildStar in a couple months. That just felt wrong, so when WoW got hit by a DDoS attack a few evenings this week I logged back in to WildStar. I didn’t do anything new and exciting, just a couple of expeditions. It still felt amazing and comfortable, like nothing had changed. I will be trying to spend at least one night a week poking around in this game again, because it remains my favorite MMO of all time.

Diablo 3: Season 7 started on Friday! The response to this season seems to be very low compared to all of the previous ones, but I’ve still been playing and having a great time. On Friday I got to play with some friends that I haven’t hung out with in way too long, and had a blast leveling together. This season was the first time in a while that I didn’t get to 70 on the first night, but that was all on me because I decided to get some sleep instead. I hit 70 and completed the first 5 chapters of the season journey yesterday, which included the cosmetic rewards and the full free class set of gear (after chapter 4). Since that was my entire goal for this season, I don’t know if I will stay invested or not, especially with the pre-Legion WoW event coming on Tuesday. A lot of the goals for the stash tab this time around feel easier, but also grindier, and I’m guessing I’m not going to bother when there are new shiny things to distract me in other games.

AggroChat #103 – Reboot Done Right

May 21, 2019April 17, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen celebrate two years of AggroChat and discuss more games!

This past week marked the second anniversary of the AggroChat podcast. For two years we have been coming together every week to discuss whatever we happened to be playing. So this is a great time to thank you our listeners for putting up with our rambling. We still very much feel like we don’t know what we are doing, but keep doing it anyway. This week we discuss the Overwatch Beta weekend that finally some of us managed to get into. Belghast contrasts his experiences in Overwatch with the Doom multiplayer weekend as well. Grace talks about the Wildstar Faction changes and how they are essentially the worst of both worlds. Ash and Bel talk about the Ratchet and Clank reboot, and how this is the way that all reboots should work. Kodra has continued to dig further into the world of Dark Souls and has some thoughts about it as it relates to learning Raid Boss encounters. We all get sidetracked on a discussion about good movie ports, and how we probably need to have an entire show about good Star Wars video games versus bad ones. Finally we wrap things up more or less with a lengthy discussion about how important it is to like the way your character looks in a game.

Show Topics

Overwatch Beta Weekend
Doom Multiplayer
Wildstar Cross Faction Letdown
Ratchet and Clank Reboot
Good Movie Ports
Dark Souls
Importance of Looking Good in Games

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Chipping a tiny hole in the faction wall

April 13, 2016 by Grace

The first dev connect for WildStar has ended and the results are in. Here’s what Pappy has to say about the changes coming for factions in WildStar:

We will be dropping the Content Finder faction barrier.

We will be allowing players of both factions to communicate openly with each other. There will no longer be a faction filter in chat.

The faction barrier for open world grouping, housing, social systems, and guilds (which includes Arena teams and Warparties) will stay in place for now.

Well that’s very disappointing. Depending on where you sit on the faction issue, you can find reason for complaint here, or reason for hope. My opinion is that I would have liked to see the faction wall go completely out the window. I want to be able to play with my friends on either faction without having to reroll a new character, and I want to be able to inhabit social spaces with them without restrictions. Unfortunately these changes do none of that. Let’s see what we are getting out of this.

1: Dropping the content finder faction barrier. I understand this choice. Queues can be long, and this will help shorten them. I do think it will feel incredibly weird to be randomly dropped into a group with the other faction but know that there’s no way to reconnect socially with those folks once the run is over (see point #3 below). It may feel a bit jarring to end up in a mixed group if you are a strong advocate of the faction wall, and it is almost made worse by the fact that there’s no lore or social context at all for this. Basically the only place in the game where mixed groups can happen is in a random group setting.

2: Removal of faction filter from chat. This is such a non-issue for me I don’t even know what to say about it. There’s been chat mods and even workarounds in the built-in systems that have allowed cross faction chat since launch. The people who really wanted this already have it, and the people really don’t want it are going to be annoyed at having it forced on them when they’ve chosen to avoid it up to now. It should make coordinating world boss groups easier at least since everyone will be able to understand each other.

3: No changes to open world grouping and social systems. Well shit. This is what I really was hoping for, and now it feels like xmas is canceled. I wanted changes that would let me play with my friends no matter what faction. I was hoping to be able to check out the other faction’s housing, or to convince my dommie friends to join my awesome guild. The housing thing especially frustrates me since it seems like it would be straightforward to add an “Exiles only” toggle to the housing settings to appease folks who don’t want dommies stepping on their lawns or in their private RP areas. Housing is such a bastion of community and creativity which absolutely does not follow strict faction, lore, or even genre restrictions, so it makes me sad to see it stay closed off.

I have spoken with some faction purist folks who are upset about these changes because they wanted the walls to stay in place as-is. I almost feel like this result is bad for both of us. For them, they can be randomly placed into groups with the opposite faction with no context and no way to avoid it. For me, the only faction crossover is happening in a place that I don’t spend any time, since I usually run group content with friends not random pugs. I really think opening up the social systems would have been much more preferable. Those who want to play with their friends or meet new ones while questing or grouping in the world could do so, while the faction purists could choose to keep their guilds and personal social spaces to one faction only. There would be no forced grouping with the other faction. I believe enough in the lore team of WildStar to give us interesting reasons why this could work, and I believe enough in the player base that they could continue to create social spaces and events that make them happy.

I hope that this is not the final word on this issue. These dev connects are an interesting way to gather feedback, but I hope there continues to be a dialog even after the decisions are made. One of WildStar’s greatest strengths is the way the devs interact with the players, long may this continue.

P.S. Don’t forget to check in on the new dev connect, they’re asking for feedback on race/class combos!

AggroChat #101 – Unicorns and Predictability

May 21, 2019April 3, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo talk about stuff and are not chipmunks!

This week we seem to have worked out the technical difficulties we had last week, and I regret to inform you that Chipmunk Belghast has left the building. Episodes 99 and 100 both had their issues and I believe those are finally behind us. Tonight we talk about both the esoteric and the tangible and lead off with a discussion about Randomized Loot versus Predictable loot… and apparently Belghast really enjoys chasing unicorns. From there we dive into a conversation about the insane grind at was getting the extra bank tab in Diablo 3 Season 5. We press forward into a discussion about Belghast aparently deciding he really likes good PVP and Grace talking about the divisiveness of the latest Wildstar world event. Kodra restarts Dark Souls and with Tam they contrast it with Bloodbourne. We talk about the latest craze that seems to be Nintendo discovering there is an internet and mobile gaming with Miitomo. Finally we talk about Adeptcon and the new Infinity Rule Book, and the Shadows Over Innistrad Magic the Gathering Expansion.

All the Topics!