World of Warcraft – Page 59

Box of Spoons

February 17, 2017 by Belghast

I feel like I was given a box full of spoons. One of my friends said that awhile back and I had no clue what it meant at the time… but after some research… yeah I totally get it. I have been largely functioning on adrenaline and fear for the last several weeks as I had this big looming deadline swinging dangerously over my head. Yesterday however was the day… and we launched… and despite having a flurry of activity and a pretty active bug tracker we largely survived. We had a happy hour yesterday where our boss picked up the tab, and I cannot fully express how awesome it was that he did that… and even more so that I work with a group of people that I enjoy working with enough to go to happy hour. This site had a heavy toll on both myself and Rae who has been the mastermind of its design. By the time we sat down at the pub… I felt like I had several weeks worth of tired crashing down upon my shoulders. Last night I flailed about a bit trying to play various games… and even succeeding in doing a few delves in Elder Scrolls Online. However before long I was back to staring blankly at my laptop and decided it was time for sleep. I slept better than I have slept in a long time… with my periods of waking up being replaced by dreams where I thought I woke up and did things. Apparently Kenzie was going nuts and it woke my wife up… but I seemingly was blissfully unaware.

We still have a hefty list of things to sort out, and bugs to fix… however they all seem so much less significant than the overarching goal of launching. The chief content provider remarked that launching a website was like giving birth, and given that she has a teenage daughter I am going to take her word for it. It is definitely like something, given that yesterday was the culmination of a few years worth of planning and a years worth of furious development and re-development and then ultimately trying to hop up and down on the trunk until the various components fit enough to close the lid. You always start out with these lofty pristine goals, and then as you start managing towards a date you have to sacrifice some of that naivety and start trying to focus on what actually works or will work well enough for the time being. I hate managing to a date… because it feels like you are doing development wrong, especially when you are doing something that you have never actually done before. I mean I have launched plenty of sites… but we essentially threw away most of our comfortable tools this time and launched out into a brand new direction that if we managed to pull it off was going to be amazing. What is also the hard part is this is the first time I was the one actually managing the timeline and making sure things were getting done. I would have been so screwed if like I said before… I didn’t have a really amazing group of people to work with.

The images you are seeing are not from my random screenshot tool, but I would forgive you if you thought that given that up until this point in today’s post I have not actually talked about gaming. Instead these are sort of post cards from the gaming that I did while in this state. I have been playing quite a bit of Elder Scrolls Online, because of the segmented nature of its questing allows me to get in… turn a single symbol on my map from black to white… and feel like I have accomplished something. I am still slowly pushing my way through Malabal Tor, but if I get a full day of questing this weekend I might be able to get through it. Last weekend during the AggroChat podcast I started working on my Warlock in World of Warcraft, and was shocked that it pretty much took the entire podcast to get through the intro scenario, artifact weapon, and class order hall quests. I really should have done what so many of my guildies did and chain ran all of my characters up to the point where they choose the first zone in Legion. In that intro scenario there were two of us… which made it take significantly longer than it was intended. As a result they maybe need to scale that back given that we are reaching a point where no one is running it. Finally at some point over the last week I participated in all four turns of the third section of Alexander and man… is that a thing. I greatly enjoyed the fights so much more than I did the middle section of Alexander, because Voltron sorta broke me. The final boss was sufficiently epic, and both 9 and 12 required a bunch of attempts to finally push through it. I rolled lucky and managed to get two helm tokens and two of the four needed pants tokens… so I guess I will be wanting to run more of this? It was a lot of fun, but was sort of dulled by the stupored state of being in constant stress mode. I am looking forward to feeling like I can actually enjoy the world once more.

Brief Goldrush

February 8, 2017 by Belghast

Brief Goldrush — Screen Grab from WoWToken.info

Yesterday was kind of a shit day. I got to work around 7 am, ran around like a chicken with my head cut off and didn’t get home until after 6:30 pm. To make matters worse I wound up skipping breakfast with the idea of just grabbing something from the cafeteria in the basement… but apparently they changed hands and are no longer open at a reasonable hour for breakfast eating. When I got home I ate some left overs and planned on largely chilling out on the sofa with my laptop, however within minutes I was falling asleep at the keyboard. Instead of opting to consume caffeine to forcibly prop my eyelids open like I do so many nights… I simply went with it and crashed hard. I know I woke up a few times, one of which I vaguely remember going to the kitchen to get a drink… but for the most part I was completely dead to the world not really becoming aware of my surroundings until about five minutes before the alarm was set to go off this morning. Bel is still a very sick Bel, and while I am taking some stuff whatever respiratory hell that I picked up at PAX South seems to be lingering. Unfortunately work is absolutely madness right now and we are pushing towards a hard deadline… one that honestly made me think if going to PAX was a good idea at all in the first place. So I am suffering through it, and largely just collapsing into my desk chair and trying to think clear thoughts… that is until yesterday when a firestorm erupted not even vaguely related to said deadline. All of the sudden I am back in the same meetings I attended six months ago… and being told to develop the same solution I suggested six months ago but was largely told wasn’t needed. Suffice to say… it was a miserable day to be a Bel.

As a result I don’t have much that is exciting to talk about other than the fact that something strange happened. We had essentially a virtual run on the banks in the form of the WoW Token going from 60,000 gold to 115,000 gold and back down to around 66,000 gold all within a 36 hour period. So what caused this? Well quite simply the law of supply and demand, but more importantly the release of the ability to fund “Battle.net Balance” from consuming a WoW token instead of simply trading it in for subscription time. If you will indulge me in a quick side bar here… didn’t Blizzard say that as far as branding goes “Battle.net” was going away? I find it bizarre that they are rolling out a new feature with this same branding instead of simply calling it “Blizzard Balance” or something super generic like that. Essentially all of those folks with pent up desires for products on the Blizzard store, suddenly had the ability to cash in their bankroll and buy those things pushing the demand for tokens way higher than the demand for actual gold. In truth this should have been foreseen given that there will always be a constant need for things on the store that previously cost cash, but there is a constantly dwindling number of aspirational gold needs in the game. Sure you could really drop a silly amount of money and buy outright that 2 million gold spider mount… but at the end of the day it does nothing but sit there as a supposed status symbol. Whereas in the past with the Tundra Mammoth and Yak… those greatly improved game-play especially when it came to leveling alts. However I won’t lie that the thought of being able to sell a token and purchase the Alliance motorcycle did cross my mind as something I might be willing to do.

What I want to talk about more than anything else is the absolute windfall that this means for Blizzard. When you purchase a token for $20 it can be then traded for goods valuing $15… be it in the form of a monthly subscription or now in $15 of Battle.net balance that can then be spent on anything from physical merchandise to the digital services they provide. Every time a token changes hands Blizzard makes $5 off the top, regardless of what it is spent on. My theory is that a lot of the tokens over the last two days were spent purchasing digital services… like character moves or renames… things that folks had been wanting to do for a long period of time but just been unwilling to cough up hard currency to make it happen. If that is the case then every single one of these token purchases also essentially amounted to pure profit. I have been a long time critic of the prices that Blizzard charges for character moves or renames… when essentially they are charging for access to what is now a completely automated and scripted interaction. Once upon a time there was a labor cost associated with these services, because someone manually kicked off a SQL script to make it happen… however that has not been the case for over a decade and the price never actually went down. If folks spent their tokens on digital game purchases, or in game items for Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm or Overwatch… then again that is mostly pure profit. The only time there are serious physical expenses factoring in is if someone purchase tangible items on the store like a Murloc plush or an Overwatch hoodie. Even then… they are still making a decent profit on that item or they would not be selling it. Basically the Token system allows Blizzard to double dip and make a profit on the front end and the back end of every purchase… and at the same time ensures that the folks that are grinding out the gold are actively playing their properties.

In truth I think we can expect one of these “runs on the bank” each time something new is released from Blizzard. A new champion in Heroes of the Storm… bam the token price inflates as folks scurry to purchase it. The Diablo 3 expansion pack that adds Necromancers releases… same thing… a rush to sell off some gold to purchase the thing that folks want. I think of this much like the lottery system, in that once the reward gets to a certain point… it brings people out of the woodwork that would never normally buy tickets. Personally that price point is somewhere around 300 million dollars for a lottery, because that prompts me to start buying the occasional one off ticket here and there on the vague chance that I will actually win. For WoW players that price point seems to be 100,000 gold for the US economy and 200,000 gold for the EU economy. The bizarre part of this is that I don’t think the balance feature is even available on the EU realms yet, and it absolutely had no effect on China, Taiwan, or South Korea yet… but in truth those three markets are madness anyways. Regardless… the fact that players can now cash in their gold for tangible goods… that they could then in theory sell on secondary markets like Ebay tells me that we are going to change the dynamic considerably. You have just essentially let players start turning game time in to real dollars, which is a strange paradigm and one that is not entirely dissimilar to the traditional third party gold markets. Granted this is going to be a SUPER lossy process, but one that will exist nonetheless. One that more than likely only the most sage of gold making wizards will ever figure out how to tap. Things are going to be really strange from this point out.

Derpest Dungeon

January 24, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not exactly go as intended, but it was a pretty great night nonetheless. Originally I had hopes of getting a Mythic+ group together so that I could use my +5 Maw of Souls keystone. That said I didn’t really exert a whole lot of effort in finding it either, and when I finally got settled in for the night after a bunch of idling there were only a handful of us on. Instead I opted to work on my time walking dungeons in the hopes that I might get more of that tasty tasty Essence of Aman’Thul from the weekly quest. When we got a group together it consisted of Rylacus and his son Tinoke who both still needed 2 dungeons… myself who needed 4 and then Bled and Phy just because they are awesome and love me enough to do a bunch of time walking dungeons. In truth I had completely pug tanked one of the dungeons so I could have suffered through it if I had to, but I enjoy tanking for my friends way more than I enjoy tanking for strangers. In any case we got to chit chat back and forth on Discord while doing the dungeons and that made the four go much faster. I had hoped by the time we finished there might be more people around, so we could pull together that Mythic+ but alas that was not the case. In truth I am guessing it was a good thing since a crisis arose while we were doing the Time Walking heroics.

I hate printers, probably more than any piece of equipment ever. They never seem to work as intended and always require an inordinate amount of fiddling. One of the things you have to know is that many nights my wife can print as much as an entire ream of paper for her class. When I am upstairs I am also at least in part the warden of the printer, and get yelled up at to fix issues when they arrise. Now earlier in the evening she was printing perfectly fine… and then all of the sudden things stopped spooling entirely. I tried my best to correctly diagnose the problem, but none of the rampant googling actually provided anything that was useful. Of note… we have a massive workgroup printer that weighs about 200 lbs and is precariously connected to a machine that acts as a print server via parallel to usb cable. It works 99% of the time but is just brittle enough to make me constantly uncertain of what might be causing the problem. We tried a sequence of rebooting the laptop and rebooting the “server” to no luck. She was able to hit file shares on the “server” without issue, but any time she tried to access the printer it said that it did not exist. However I could print to that printer from any other computer on the network so the connection was still there and active. Finally in my destination I started fiddling with home group settings, and changed her share settings because I was literally trying everything I could reasonably think of. Instantly it was like something refreshed her machines permissions and she could suddenly see the printer and life was once again good. Once again… let me express my undying hatred for printers.

Apparently Tam had been trying to get a hold of me while deep in printer diagnosis hell. Over the weekend I made a vague attempt to catch up on the Final Fantasy XIV content, but hit a both literal and figurative wall… in the form of the Baelsar’s Wall instance. I was not about to pug tank it… and it turns out apparently I couldn’t anyways because my item level is too low. I am currently sitting at 220 but apparently need 230 to get there. When I finally got patched up and logged in, Ash was needing to go to bed which left us with Tam and Kodra and seeing as I had not actually run any of the second half of the derpest dungeon, we opted to form a group for that. I have to say… while I have struggled in the past to get in and have fun… the deepest dungeon really hit the spot. The deepest dungeon serves the purpose of being quite possibly the easiest way to get weapon upgrades, with a mini game system that I have talked about in the past that involves collecting “gear” and leveling both your weapon and armor to 30. When you have collected 30 you can turn that in for a very solid 235 weapon which would be a sizable upgrade for me. Now when I entered last night I was sitting at the point where I stopped playing last time… which was somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 weapon and 14 armor. By the end of the night if I remember correctly I was sitting at 30 weapon and 28 armor… so pretty close to being able to collect my first weapon. It seems like the 51-100 floors move your item levels considerably faster… either that or we simply got lucky. To be honest, I had more fun in FFXIV last night than I have in a long time… and the above screenshot is there to simply serve as a reminder to just how insane Cactuar is as a server.

Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.