World of Warcraft – Page 88

Flowers for Garou

May 16, 2016 by Belghast

More Flora

It feels really strange to follow up yesterdays post. Those were a bunch of things that I felt like I needed to get out there, and to be honest about the doubt that I had been struggling with. As it stands right now I am for certain taking a break over Memorial Day weekend rather than either pre-writing posts or arranging for guest posts. I am also contemplating starting to make weekends optional. Sunday is really the day that becomes madness for me because I am also scurrying around that morning trying to wrap up the various stuff required for posting an episode of aggrochat. As far as this weekend, it was honestly one without a ton of gaming. Instead I spent a large amount of time hanging out in the backyard. Scope creep is a term we use in development when a project has gone beyond its boundaries in the number of features the user is requesting. Our backyard has long since entered scope creep territory and that’s okay. The original goal was just to make it more livable, and this has involved a whole sequence of smaller steps leading up to where we are today. Once again I took a panorama of the progress, and you can see the larger version here.

We have now kept the original batch of flowers alive and actually thriving for two weeks now… so of course we doubled down on the proposition. We spent a bit of Saturday afternoon tracking down more of the shepherds hooks so that we could have matching ones to the ones we had picked up at ALDI a few weeks back. The other night while walking with a friend, my wife saw a hanging basket at a near by pop up nursery that she really liked. We also happened to have a coupon from that same pop-up that if we spent $20 we could get a free hanging basket, so the end result is us adopting the purple, yellow and white hanging baskets and adding them to my “flower babies” as I have taken to calling them. The only big things left are to wait on the grass to finish filling in where the weed treatments left barren patches… and so far it has started. Then there is of course the idea kicking around about replacing the table we have with something that sits a little lower to the ground and that we could use our pseudo-Adirondack chairs with. Then I am contemplating getting another of the umbrellas we found on sale to go in a post on the far deck side of the pool to add a little shade there from within the pool. Like I said…. scope creep abounds.

The most interesting piece of scope creep over the last week however is the fact that we have entered the realm of bird stewardship. I’ve not been able to take a great shot of them but we have soooo many birds. In the panoramic shot you can see on the right side that I have a feeder hanging in among the tree that is really an overgrown hedge. I’ve begun feeding fairly regularly, a first a blend from the Audubon soceity and later a bulk blend we got from Sam’s that fairly closely matched the nutritional mix of the first one. Sunday morning while watering the flowers I filled the feeder up to roughly the halfway mark because it was ultimately what was left in the 40 pound bag after dumping the rest into a tightly sealed container. This was at roughly 9 am… by the time we were out in the yard after my wife got home from church around 11 am… the feeder was completely empty again. There have been times I have counted a dozen tiny sparrows feeding at the same time, with a bunch of cardinals, bluejays, and various sundry other birds that I cannot yet identify roaming around. We have a couple that look like doves of some sort, and another couple that look like pidgeons. Basically the entire time we have lived here I have wanted birds to hang out in the backyard and in the evenings I have been able to watch the baby sparrows hop and play around on the deck. Unfortunately they are all pretty skittish at the moment, except for the Robins… they seem more than happy to roam within close distance of us looking for worms. In any case… this is the non-gaming activity that is taking up a good chunk of my time. On the weekends and evenings we tend to eat outdoors hanging out in our rockers watching the flora and fauna. Yup… I am officially old, but not minding a minute of it.

Surprising Whim

Most of my weekend gaming was spent in Diablo 3, doing various things… and largely without purpose. I managed to get my stash tab on Friday, and from this point on everything else is gravy in Season 6. For awhile now even before the season, Diablo was the game I played when I didn’t know what else to play… and I spent a huge chunk of the weekend not knowing what else to play. Normally Destiny would fill this niche but I didn’t really want to hang out upstairs when the couch was so damned comfy. During the weekend I found out that my good friends Chestnut and Chaide from Wildstar have decided to re-up World of Warcraft, and the glory that is our collective community managed to recruit them to hang out on Argent Dawn Alliance with us. I ended up logging in to do some invites last night and wound up sticking around and playing my Druid. There was a part of me that thought… wouldn’t it be glorious if I could somehow ride into Legion with a full army of level 100 characters. The actual leveling game of World of Warcraft is something that I have enjoyed greatly… it is just the Garrison busywork that ends up getting me down and making me no longer want to play.

So the idea is simple… if I can focus heavily on leveling and or gearing my characters I might be able to get back into the game for a bit. While watching my Sunday night shows, I managed to push from 91 to 93 and make a big dent in Shadowmoon Valley. Normally speaking I take this abbreviated path around Draenor, jumping each time a new zone opens up to me. This time around however I think I am going to just focus on the questing, because that is the thing that seems to be able to hold my focus even when the rush to end game doesn’t. I mean with this character I am not pushing to get anywhere, and Hellfire Citadel feels stifling at the moment so I am in no rush to get back there with LFR. As it stands I have my Druid, Priest, Rogue, Mage, Warlock and Monk to level… and I am sure that this current burst of interest in World of Warcraft won’t probably sustain my way through all of them, but I might be able to at least springboard this into a renewed interest in MMOs as a whole. The absolute hardest for me is going to be the Mage because… really I could care less about finger wigglers and the least is always the pure finger wigglers. I can pretend the Discipline Priest is a cloth tank, and I can focus on the awesome demon pets on the Warlock. However with that mage… all I am left with is the fact that I am slinging spells which never really feels amazing. Anyways who knows how long I will be around for, but I enjoyed myself last night.

AggroChat #107 – Objectifying Corgis

May 21, 2019May 15, 2016 by AggroChat

Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Inky discuss a truly dizzying number of topics the largest bit focused on Stellaris

This week we welcome back our sometimes host Inky… and I apparently get her confused with one of the other Pacman ghosts. The title of this episode doesn’t really relate to the discussion other than it was a hilarious line that slipped out there somewhere along the way. This week folks played a lot of Stellaris in both single and multiplayer configurations. We delve into this game and its relation to other 4X games, and why this one clicks for some better than the normal fare. We take a whirlwind trip through Fallout 4 and The Sims, before discussing Twitch Streaming. I talk for a bit about my revised experiences with the new Doom reboot, and why I consider it far better than my early multiplayer experiences. Grace talks about her return to Final Fantasy XIV and how much she loves healing butts. This kicks off a conversation about MMOs and Raiding and winds up with Inky and I pining for Hellgate London again. Finally we wrap things up with a discussion about Uncharted and the whole “cinematic game” trend of the 2000s.

Topics Discussed

Adorable Birbs
Stellaris
Fallout 4
Master of Orion
Crusader Kings
The Sims 4
Stardew Valley
Animal Crossing
Twitch and Streaming
Doom
Final Fantasy XIV
Destiny
World of Warcraft
Raiding
Hellgate London
Uncharted

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Bag Bloat

May 7, 2016 by Belghast

Overflowing

Last night I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about MMORPGs and she mentioned that she had logged into a game recently and had a visceral reaction. Upon logging in she saw what a state of disarray her bags were, and when she tried to go to the bank to simply just stuff it all in there… was confronted with the same thing going on there. She ultimately just logged out and went on to play something else. This exact sequence has happened to me time and time again and is the biggest obstacle for me playing certain games. A big game on that list is Rift. Right now every single corner of my bank is full, and most of my bags as well. Every so often I have the desire to play the game, but when I log in and see a few hours worth of sorting ahead of me to get my bags into a state where I can feel comfortable playing… I just log back out frustrated. In my case the bags are full of non-critical items like dimension stuff and crafting materials… but it isn’t stuff I am willing to part with either. So instead of playing the game like I originally wanted, I just lament how I don’t have a good solution to fix the problem.

I am in a similar place right now with World of Warcraft. My bags, bank, and void storage are completely full with cosmetic gear for transmogrification. I know that with Legion they are putting in a system that will allow me to save the graphic and not have to keep the item. However in the mean time I am stuck juggling all of this loot with no real end in sight. Sure I could get marginally larger bags, but that would only buy me a few slots worth of reprieve rather than being a permanent solution. So with World of Warcraft, I honestly doubt I will be seriously playing that game until the pre-legion patch launches… that hopefully gives us the transmog solution. This is a situation I am very familiar with because I have struggled with it for years in Everquest II, but in that case it is simply because the inventory maintenance systems they have are pretty horrible and I can’t remember what half of the items I have looted actually do. I wish games would have tool tips that clearly identified what an item is used for, because in the past I have accidentally sold that one important item that I could never get back to complete a quest, and I am in constant paralysis when it comes to potentially doing the same thing again.

Bulk Storage

Since Rift is the king of adding in new and interesting systems to solve problems. I would like to humbly suggest two more be added to the pile. Basically for me personally I need bulk storage for Dimension items and Crafting materials. So what I propose is an account wide bulk storage system. For the dimensions some sort of toolbox that you can dump items into and then place them directly from a panel that collects and shows you how many of each item you have. In order to remove items from the economy and not allow players to just horde items that they might later sell, I would suggest that adding a dimension item binds it to you so that it can only be used in dimensions attached to your account. There would probably need to be a limit to the number of a single item you are storing, but in theory it just goes into the void and then is summoned inside of your dimension via the toolbox panel. This solves a bunch of problems other than storage, namely that the toolbox interface would allow you to see just what you had to place, and even more so what you were lacking so you could go off and acquire those items in particular. Wildstar has a system very similar to this, and it works amazingly well. Having something in place similar would allow me at least to tame my bag bloat.

From the crafting side of the equation I suggest a similar system. When you dump your crafting materials into bulk storage they again go into the void and are only extracted through crafting. Once again this keeps players from stockpiling materials that could then be used to flood the market at a later date. Putting them into bulk storage would essentially remove them from the economy. Once again it would be best to have this system be account wide, so that you could farm materials on any of your characters and share them for the purpose of crafting. I would absolutely love something like this because I obsessively harvest nodes… but often times have nothing I really need to do with them. I simply stockpile them for that moment I will eventually need them. If I were smart I would simply sell them on the open market, knowing that I could buy them once more if I actually needed them for a project. Instead I dump them in my bank and they take up space. What I envision for an interface is a pretty minimal on, with just each of the crafting materials listed out by category… and a number beside each indicating how many you have in bulk storage. Guild Wars 2 has a similar system that works amazingly well, and seeing something like that in Rift would make my day. Basically having these two systems, combined with the “appearance saving” systems that Rift and Wildstar already have… and World of Warcraft is about to get… would fix almost all of my bag woes.

Blizzard: WoW and Overwatch

April 23, 2016 by Belghast

Puppy Love

This is admittedly going to be a bit of a bummer of a post, but I feel like I want to get it out of me and onto paper. I started this discussion yesterday on twitter but the 140 character limit of that medium kept me from really expressing any sense of nuance. What happened is as the day wound down I ended up watching a really great video from Curse talking about the road to Overwatch, and the first video was talking about the failure of Titan. It really is a great video because while Blizzard refuses to really talk about what happened with Titan, they do a pretty good job of trying to interpret and read between the lines, and managed to get an awful lot of candid commentary from the Overwatch team. However while watching this video I was struck by something. As you watch folks like Metzen and Kaplan talk about Overwatch you see this unbridled love and excitement in the way they express everything. You can tell just how much they are enjoying this game and how excited about the future of Overwatch they feel. This is just something I have not really seen from Blizzard in years in pretty much ANY game. Sure there are standouts like Terran Gregory that are amazing, and every time he talks you can tell he quite literally is living his dream each and every day. However the bulk of the World of Warcraft folks at Blizzard tend to come across with almost a sense of resentment that they are working on that product.

To go even further if you watch some of the Blizzcon Q/A sessions, there is almost a sense of condescension towards the players from the folks up on stage. It goes beyond the “we know better” thing that every IT professional is guilty of doing. It seems at times that they simply are not having fun with World of Warcraft anymore, and when you watch the same folks like Chris Metzen talking about Overwatch it is just such a stark difference. On some level I absolutely get it. There are things that I wrote a decade ago that I am still forced to maintain… and every single time I open them all I can see are the mistakes I made in the past. After a point I began to resent that code, and it is almost painful every single time I have to work in it. I am figuring that in many ways the folks who work on World of Warcraft, and have for a very long time… feel that same way about that game. They see this Weasley House of a game that is knitted together out of several different generations development, and just want to start over. I think this attitude is evidenced in the vast number of game system uproots that have happened during the course of its lifespan. Instead of just fixing the problems of the past, they nuke from orbit things like the talent system and try and rebuild something completely different on the rubble of the past system.

Nostalgia Not Hope

Now when I started down this path yesterday, a friend of mine brought up the Looking For Group documentary. The problem is I see something completely different there when folks talk about the origins of World of Warcraft than I do in the current Overwatch videos. I see a nostalgia for the way things used to be. I see a reminiscing of folks who remember the good times the game had and how excited they used to be about everything relating to the game. Ultimately I see a lot of living off of the whiffs of former glory, and what I see missing is the unbridled hope about what could be and is just over the horizon. In Overwatch the sky is the limit and everything is magical still, because they have yet to actually ship the product. In World of Warcraft, every single turn is dictated by a past decision and often times colored by past mistakes. As a player I want to know that the best days of the franchise are still ahead of me, and not something to be remembered fondly from the past. The development team has not made me feel that way since Wrath of the Lich King, and I realize that is entirely my fault as well. What the game needs now however is exuberance to turn back the tide of negativity and get the ship moving in the right direction, and I see that sort of positive spirit working through the Overwatch team and wish I could somehow bottle it and force feed it to the folks working on Warcraft.

It just makes me wonder if at this point the current team working on World of Warcraft is too tired of the game to really take it to the places it needs to go. The funny thing is… there is a team at Blizzard that is doing precisely the sort of job that the WoW team should be doing. Diablo 3 feels like the property that is largely ignored and was even left out of the “things going on at blizzard” video from Blizzcon 2015. However they are doing this amazing job of slowly and quietly improving the way Diablo 3 feels to play it. The whole seasonal concept has revolutionized the way I play the game and has created this moment that happens every few months where me and my friends get extremely excited to be playing the game again. We need that sort of an approach at World of Warcraft, rather than the slash and burn experience that keeps happening with every expansion. We need someone to take an approach that is constantly refining and moving the franchise forward rather than trying to re-invent itself and often floundering. SOE was the master of this methodoloy, and each Everquest and Everquest II expansion felt like it was pushing the boundaries of what the old tech could do, and the team seemed genuinely excited to be doing each new batch of content. Ultimately the truth is… how are we the players supposed to be excited about a product when the folks creating it seem to be going through the motions. I want Blizzard to love World of Warcraft the way that they seem to love Overwatch right now, and I wish I knew how to make that happen.