World of Warcraft

AggroChat #252 – Server Community Nostalgia

by

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we are down an Ammo and start off with a discussion about hosting providers and the process of moving the 77,000 files that make up AggroChat.com.  From there we talk about MMO Housing and the madness that is camping an opening in Final Fantasy XIV. Bel got into the WoW Classic Beta and talks about his experiences of relearning the game and plans to start a dungeon and raiding guild called Decades Behind once things go live.  Kodra talks about how Server Transfers started the process of destroying Server Communities which leads to some hopes of static servers in Classic. We talk for a bit about the PC RPG Pathfinder: Kingmaker and how it is close to the campaign. Finally Bel talks a bit about getting a new tablet and venturing forth into Tablet gaming.

Topics Discussed

  • Hosting Providers
    • AggroChat has Moved
  • MMO Housing
    • Instanced vs Physical
    • Woes of FFXIV
  • WoW Classic Beta
    • Relearning things we forgot
    • Decades Behind
    • BfA Damaged the Brand
    • Server Community Nostalgia
  • Pathfinder: Kingmaker
  • Tablet Gaming
    • Samsung Galaxy Tab S4

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

AggroChat #249 – The Star Wars Spirit

by

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat249

Last week we failed to announce the 5th anniversary of our show so we start off talking a bit about that.  From there Bel goes into a discussion about the BlizzCon Spirit and how he seemingly has caught the Star Wars version and returned to SWTOR after the Star Wars Celebration announcements.  We talk about the game quite a bit and then get into a discussion of Jedi Fallen Order which we missed from last week. From there we talk Magic the Gathering Arena and how Kodra is finally playing Standard.  We also talk about doing some direct Duels and the current Magnificent Momir format. Finally a discussion about Pagan Online that devolves into a discussion about upcoming ARPGs in general.

Topics Discussed:

  • The Blizzcon Spirit
  • The Star Wars Spirit
    • Star Wars the Old Republic
    • Fallen Empire
    • Eternal Throne
    • Overall Tweaks to the Game
    • Jedi Fallen Order
  • Magic the Gathering Arena
    • Standard Format
    • Direct Duels
    • Playing with Jank
    • Magnificent Momir
  • Pagan Online
    • Early Access
    • Potentially Eventually Free to Play
    • Wolcen
    • Last Epoch
    • Torchlight Frontiers
    • Grim Dawn

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A Time Long Gone

by

A Time Long Gone

Last night was largely spent roaming around the ruins of Washington and unlocking things.  Seeing as I apparently did things out of the natural flow of the game… I have just now unlocked clans and will have to sort out which one I should join as it appears like there isn’t really a coalescence of my friends in one place other than the clan that Scopique and Traellan are in.  Normally speaking I would be joining whatever extension of the AggroChat/Greysky Armada/House Stalwart community that would be erected in a brand new game.  The challenge here however is that I know there won’t be one.  That group of individuals bounced faster off the first one than I did, and as such I know there is no glorious renewal of interest in the game and with it a flourishing of guild activity.  Division 2 is a game that I largely go into knowing that I won’t have the social structures I am used to with the familiar comfortable integrations with other players that I tend to take for granted.  I will be blazing a new trail and carving out a new home for myself…  and the challenge there is of course which group of friends do I choose.

I already have an invite waiting on me from TBC or The Bloody Clans…  a group that dates back to EGA Battletech but I spent most of my time with during Everquest and City of Heroes and have not really spent much time with since.  I know TQMB has a presence or Tequila Mockingbird, which was my original Destiny clan and one that I still associate with when I actually play the game on a serious level.  There are lots of other pools of friends that vary in level of seriousness about the game, all of which gives me a maze of choices to navigate.  This reminds me of a statement that my friend Neph said the other day and while I don’t remember the exact phrasing it was something to the effect of the following.  “I can’t wait until everyone is playing the same game again.”  While I agree with that desire… especially in a scenario like Division where those of us who are playing the same game are not even under the same banner.

The problem is my statement back to her was that it is likely never going to happen again.  I think the era of everyone playing one game is past us… at least for the age bracket most of us are in and for the type of demographic gaming wise that we represent.  The era of the big budget AAA MMORPG is long gone, and there just isn’t something exciting enough on the horizon to unite the tribes of gamers together underneath one mutually agreeable digital habitat.  If I am being honest with myself the last game that did this was World of Warcraft… and I am not talking modern WoW but instead the series run from Vanilla through the end of Wrath of the Lich King.  In my experience that was the heyday of the “It” game that everyone was at the very least dabbling in.  It was the era where you could walk up to pretty much any gamer of any stripe and they would be able to tell you what server and faction they were playing.  My friend tells a story about an awkward interaction at a birthday party when he goes through a sequence of emotions… first of excitement to find out another one of the dads plays Warcraft…  and then disappointment when he finds out they are playing on the opposite faction.

The “It” game for this generation is  Fortnite… and before that it was League of Legends… and before that it was Minecraft…  all of which more or less left the demographic that most of us are members behind.  Even during the heyday of MMORPGs we struggled to ever get everyone to commit to playing a new game.  I remember the first big foray was into Warhammer Online, and even then we only managed to muster about fifteen players to try it out of a roster of almost a hundred.  The inertia of World of Warcraft was too strong to break most players out of its field of influence.  We tried similar jaunts for Champions Online and the one that finally took me away from the game completely for awhile was Rift.  The last big successful departure was Star Wars the Old Republic, and even then that only lasted for a few months.  With the release of Elder Scrolls Online I drew heavily on social media attempting to pull everyone into the same guild…  only to watch it fizzle out after another three months.

Essentially I feel like there will probably never be another game that unites the banners, and that is in part because we as gamers have fragmented and quite honestly are no longer willing to deal with the things we once were.  I remember with the launch of World of Warcraft being stuck looting a Kobold in Elwynn Forest for a good 15-20 minutes and simply hard crashing the client and going on with my life.  Which is in part why I found it so funny to hear people call the launch of Anthem disastrous, because compared to that it was smooth sailing.  We just aren’t willing to deal with the inconveniences that we once were in order to play with gamers online, because that is no longer a novel and unique experience.  Everquest was in part popular because it gave us the ability to have lots of our friends together in the same world, whereas before we were limited to somewhere between 4 and 16 players connected to a dedicated server that someone had to run in order to play games together.  Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online before that gave us massive persistent worlds for us to explore… and at some point along the line we stopped caring so much about that novelty.

Now almost every game you play has some sort of massively online functionality that pushes other players into your game time.  In Assassin’s Creed when another player dies in game it spawns a quest for you to go avenge their death by killing whatever NPCs took them out.  This is a functionally single player experience, but it still has hooks into the larger game world to make you feel like you are experiencing things together with your friends…  with friends being the loosest definition of that term in this case.  The novelty of being online with other people just isn’t the draw that it once was, and as a result we instead are focused on the story or the gameplay or other elements that instead mean we are effectively looking for different things in our gaming experiences.

I’m a grinder…  and while I enjoy the story…  I am ultimately in a game for the loot and a sense of progression.  So I can play games with the scantest of story so long as the moment to moment game-play feels good.  Tam on the other hand cannot get behind a game that does not have a story or a game world that he cares about.  This ultimately was the line in the sand that kept us both from enjoying Destiny 1/2 because he could not get behind that world or the digging required to find out any of the story.  Ash on the other hand is deeply into systems and tends to love games with lots of customization and ability to tweak builds… so something like a Warframe with its systems within systems within systems really resonates with him.  Every so often there will be a single game that caters to all of these core desires…  but it happens very rarely.  While I just outlines motivations for three members of our group…  you can imagine what that matrix begins to look like when you expand that to ten people or a hundred people.

Ultimately we want a higher level of fidelity in our games now.  We were willing to give something up for the novelty of hanging out online with our friends, but seeing as we are almost constantly connected through Slack, Discord, Twitter, Facebook and countless other little ways…  that connectivity no longer is as valuable as it once was.  Shit I remember a time when my friend and I used to dial into each others computers and talk over a terminal app just because it was interesting and novel, and now I can message tens of thousands of people in my larger orbit within seconds…  and we just consider that the bare minimum for internet connectivity these days.  No one builds massive worlds these days where lots and lots of players are connected at the same time… instead everything seems to have shifted away to smaller match based systems with cities serving as lobbies.  I personally like the Destiny/Division/Anthem/Monster Hunter style of game play that lets me drop in and out without feeling bad about letting my friends down.

I know this summer we will once again coalesce upon Final Fantasy XIV for the release of the Shadow Bringers expansion.  However I know that by the three month mark it too will have dwindled down to only the most die-hard and dedicated of player still playing it.  I’ve largely made my peace with the fact that there will likely never again be another World of Warcraft, at least not in that genre.  That same magnetism however keeps happening in other genres, so maybe someday down the time fifteen years from now… there will be a re-invigoration of the MMORPG genre.  However I think more than anything…  we mourn a moment in time where the stars aligned more than we actually mourn a specific game during its period of greatness.  Games at the end of the day come down to the people you play them with…  and as such I am still stymied by picking who to play Division with.

 

Fun Police: Portal Division

by

This morning I am taking a break from my normal Anthem love fest to complain about another game.  This time it is World of Warcraft something that I have not played since the beginning of November, but am still subscribed to it because I guess my theory is that the urge might hit me again at some point?  As such since I am a paying customer I do feel like I’ve earned the right to complain about things from time to time.  Now I am one full patch behind and there is a new patch on the PTR that information has been trickling out about on the various data leak sites.  I personally found out about this through a conversation between my friends Dom and Gloria, which lead me down the rabbit hole last night of trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

It seems as though the Blizzard Fun Police have struck once more and removed a bunch of portals from Stormwind/Orgrimmar, and cleaned things up a bit in the form of a new “portal room”.  I am going to use the Alliance as an example since I have spent more time in my life playing in that area than in the equivalent Cleft of Shadow area in Org.  Both the Mages Tower and Cleft of Shadows became the dumping ground for portals that were still useful but not necessarily associated with the current expansion.  The newly renovated area now contains the following portals.

  • The Exodar
  • Shattrath
  • Dalaran (Northrend version)
  • The Jade Forest
  • Stormshield in Ashran
  • Azsuna
  • Boralus

What is missing from this portal area are…

  • Caverns of Time
  • Ironforge
  • Blasted Lands
  • Pandaria Shrines

If I am reading this correctly on the Wowhead article it also seems as though the axe is being taken to a bunch of the other portal options that had still managed to survive to this point.  The other areas that have had a pass by the Fun Police are…

Dalaran (Legion)

  • IronForge/Thunder Bluff
  • Darnassus/Undercity
  • Caverns of Time
  • Dalaran Crater
  • Karazhan
  • The Exodar/Silvermoon City
  • Shattrath
  • Wyrmrest Temple
  • Vale of the Eternal Blossoms

Shrine of the Seven Stars/Two Moons

  • Shattrath
  • Dalaran (Northrend)

Dalaran (Northrend)

  • Caverns of Time

Essentially this is going to leave us with no way of getting to the Caverns of Time quickly… and practically no ways of getting to certain areas of the world quickly.  I keep using the words Fun Police on purpose because so much of the decision making that goes into World of Warcraft always feels that way to me as a player.  They announce some system that seems awesome at first… but the closer we get to the release of that system there is always some aspect of it that sucks.  For example… I remember being super amped about the release of the item appearance collection system to feel Transmogs…  but then also being super disappointed when I found out that you could not collect items unless you were on the right class when an item dropped.  Similarly the Transmog system itself is just a significantly worse version of the cosmetic systems that other games have had for years that didn’t have weird restrictions placed upon them.

This effects me personally because I still had a good deal of my alts bound at the Shrine of the Seven Stars because it gave me quick access to move around the world and hit the content that I wanted to spend my time doing.  It also made farming older raid content for transmog drops simple…  given that I HAD to do that now on multiple characters to collect various gear sets for them.  What makes all of these feel worse is the grossly out of touch commentary that came along with it from Community Manager Bornakk.  The initial response is as follows.

I understand that changes can throw people off a bit at first, but I also think they help keep the world of Azeroth feeling alive. When there are fewer portals, does the world feel a bit bigger to you? Do you like that? How difficult is it to get to the locations you mentioned without a direct portal (talking to everybody who isn’t a mage here Fun Police: Portal Division ) ?

The thing is… no it doesn’t make the world feel bigger, it makes the world feel more tedious to move around.  There was a time when I had to spend 30 minutes or real time crossing the Ocean of Tears in Everquest.  This was not something I considered valuable, and it could be longer than that if you happened to roll up on the docks at exactly the wrong time.  This was passive time sitting there either waiting on a boat… or passively riding a boat…  and god forbid you alt tabbed to do something else and got engaged in it… and missed either getting on the boat or getting off of it.  This did not make Everquest seem like a bigger game… it just made it seem like a game that relished wasting my time.  Removing portals from World of Warcraft that were already in place and widely utilized…  just tells me that this game does not respect my time as the player.  The horrible response was followed up with a possibly even worse one.

I wasn’t being sarcastic. Apologies to you and others who felt I was dismissing them in any way.

For how I personally play and enjoy games, I like when I feel like I need to travel for a few minutes to get somewhere. For me, it is more rewarding when I complete the task that way and I wouldn’t want to be able to get everywhere instantly but there is a good medium to find (but continuing to pile up various teleporting items feels strange). Traveling over large areas reminds me of how vast the world is and I often reminisce while flying on a flight path or a mount. Sometimes I have even just used the port to Timeless Isle and taken the flight path to Shrine (instead of going straight there) as I can enjoy the view and relax.

That being said, I know I can be a bit strange and I’m often not bothered by things that bother others – that’s why I ask a lot of questions. I want to understand the different play styles and opinions of others so I can better discuss them both with you and internally. Getting to the fundamental impact is important for me as the solution sometimes requires a different approach. Hopefully I can avoid the feeling that I’m just talking at you and want to be talking with you. Cheers!

I am glad that Bornakk enjoys having their time wasted.  However I feel like that maybe shouldn’t be the scale by which we judge content?  I realize we all have hot button issues that don’t bother others… for example I have talked at length about how much I hate item management…  and then Bhagpuss will come along and talk about how organizing his inventory is his happy time.  While that discussion can be esoteric, and I have addons to help me clean my bags…  limiting access to the world by removing portals feels significantly less esoteric.  Gloria also brought up the point that I immediately thought of last night… in that Final Fantasy XIV is a game that feels massive in scale, but it is also a game that has instant travel to any number of Aether crystals that are scattered conveniently around the world.  The vastness is not harmed by the fact that I don’t have to start in Gridania and travel by Chocobo to all of the destinations in the shroud.  The scale of the world still seems extremely impressive as I am popping my way into conveniently located hubs that allow me to play the game in the manner that I want when I want to play it.

Now I realize this is not the first time that Blizzard has come along and axed a bunch of portals.  I raged against the action the last times it happened, and I am no less annoyed today than I was back then.  I think it is a dumb call…  but I continued playing the game because there were other aspects that I really did like in spite of the frustrating decisions that kept being made.  I’ve talked to my friend Grace at length about this…  that while I keep one foot back in the community to keep tabs on what is going on…  I seem to only see the bad in the actions that they are taking right now.  Battle for Azeroth was an expansion that went completely in the opposite direction that I would have wanted it to go coming down from the high point that was Legion.   Legion pretty much dethroned Wrath of the Lich King as my favorite expansion that Blizzard has ever done… and in many ways it is because of the focus on class fantasy and giving us a bunch of interesting and unique content tailored towards that specific fantasy.

Battle for Azeroth… other than the cool troll and loa storyline…  has been a pretty hollow experience that I keep finding plenty of excuses not to return to.  Limiting my access to the one thing that did seem appealing…  which was farming transmog gear in older areas of the world…  really doesn’t help that desire to return.  However as a player, watching the game go down a path I have no interested in going…  I am mournful of the version of World of Warcraft that I did love.  I would love to see a complete change in attitude within the WoW team and a focus on the fun rather than frustrations.  However much like the fact that at 42 years old I am pretty set in my ways…  a game that is 14 years old is fairly doomed to keep traveling on the same heading.  As such I think this is another title that I can add to the list like Dark Age of Camelot and the original Everquest… that I remember fondly…  but have no desire at all to return to.