The Six Sided Ring of Fire

Mount and Blade: Warband... again... and again... and again... This time with 100% more reddit

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sat, 30 May 2015 13:55:00 -0700

So I tried to get back into Mount and Blade for about the millionth time, but this time I figured I'd ask a few of the questions to the subreddit /r/mountandblade to see if they had any idea what I was doing wrong or some advice on how to proceed. I made THIS post to ask some questions and got some very well thought out and detailed explanations... which is exactly what I expected from a community focused on such a detailed and well thought out game.

My biggest problems with Mount and Blade outside of technical "how to land shots" type stuff in no particular order:

Once I build an army I can't feed/pay them because I'm broke
When I lose a fight I spend the next hour going 1v100 and being taken prisoner over and over again.
When I try to rebuild an army I'm ambushed over and over and over before I can even get any troops trained

Those problems were all given solutions which I have been trying out in my most recent campaign staring Coward McRunsaway. Turns out you can buy businesses in cities and they will make money for you passively. That's a strong start. As soon as I had 2500 denars I purchased a brewery in a city and it makes me a little under 200 denars a week. I've been trying to save up for other businesses, but it's been very difficult. Prisoners take time to offload and without a high prisoner management skill you're stuck spending a ton of time to make very little money. The more time I waste running around looking for a ransom broker the more food my army eats. I have been bumping up my prisoner management, but I don't use blunt weapons, so I've been kinda handicapping myself a bit. I'm looking for a good 1hb weapon now. Also, I got lucky and was asked to be a mercenary for the Rhodoks very early and have been a mercenary a long long time paying for about half of everything I need. I break even some weeks and lose a lot on others depending on how many troops I have and what I've done that week, but it's a very different experience than being in the negatives until everyone deserts.

I also found out the very simple "trick" of just right clicking a friendly lord with a huge army and pressing "accompany." That means if there's a fight, it's going to be with my army and his army. So, when I've found myself with dwindling numbers of good troops I just linger with a big, well equipped army and play backup. Before this campaign I never had a lot of success finding specific lords I needed to find. This time I decided I'd just do everything I can to find who I needed to find. Turns out, when there is a war going on a lot of the lords stick together. That means if you find a lord with a big army moving towards the enemy there's a great chance you'll find the rest of the lords in the field. The only trouble I'm still having is finding the first lord when I'm summoned to fight in a war. I've only failed that quest once so far, but it's frustrating because I started looking where they said he was right away and couldn't find him. I need better tracking skill... but I spent all those points on a follower I ended up dismissing and now I'm back to not being able to see useful tracks.

Another very lucky situation of my current game is that we took over a lot of Swadian land, so I can train Swadian Knights. I kept hearing how strong they are, but I couldn't believe it when I saw it. I only have 5, but they account for half the kills on the battlefield and don't suffer when they are dismounted either. I also added in some Mamlukes from some Sarranid villages we have control over. That frees me up to make all my Rhodok soldiers into sharpshooters and make the most of my people's strengths. I still struggle vs horse archers, but having both Sarranid and Swadian calvary means at least someone can keep up with them. The Mamlukes have the added benefit of using blunt weapons, so more prisoners!

Basically, I've been "successful" enough to keep playing. I've never had a game go longer than 100 days without having a million horrific problems so this game being almost 300 days and not really that bad is a great start!

Thanks again to /r/mountandblade for giving me the boost I needed to actually keep on truckin in Mount and Blade: Warband!

Warlords of Draenor Recruitment Journal #2

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 01:03:00 -0800

What did I call the last one? Who cares. Anyways, picked up a few new guys this week. One is a 93 warrior with a 100 pvp geared monk main who's not in the guild yet. The second one is a friend of the couple who joined last week. The last one is a mage I met out in the world while farming barn mats. We had so much fun blowing up mobs and running down alliance that I had to ask him to join. He agreed.

So, I'd say the best way I've found to meet new guild mates is to be social in the world. Duh? Not really. People don't even think to invite someone who's standing right next to them doing the same thing to a group... which benefits everyone involved. Be social, mention you're looking for new members, be nice to people, and don't be afraid to take the lead in the situation. Simple. The only "hard" part is finding yourself in places where you will run into similarly minded people

The next step is going to be the step that makes every salesman's career... the referrals. I'm not exactly sure how we've only received one referral member since this big recruitment drive of mine. It's either that most people we've found are loners or they are waiting to see results before trying to sell the guild to their friends. Either situation is fair. I always mention that we are not in a position to create content for the casual member and that recruitment and excitement levels are going to determine which direction the guild ultimately takes. I just need to see if I can find a way to get the whole guild invested in bringing in new players. They don't have to be like me posting all over the internet and chatting up everyone they run into. I'd just like people to have their eyes open for people who'd fit in and not be afraid to say something. This is the area I'm going to focus on going forward. I'm going to have to sit down with a couple of the old guard and see if I can shake them up a bit as well. I don't think it's asking for much to be on the lookout for good players, but I also don't want to pressure people to the point where they feel something's wrong or it's too much work.

All in all, this week was a success. We picked up 3 new active members who have been contributing to the guild since they joined. Goal is one per week. I can see in the future it's going to be important to find a healer main or ten if we're going to get into more organized content on either the pvp or pve side of things. As it stands now we have one healer who's playing his 90 boost on our server infrequently and 4ish people with alt healers (myself included). That's okay if people don't mind playing their alts, but I know I'd like to take my warrior or death knight out way more frequently than my healer at this point. Same seems to go for everyone else who has a healing alt. We even have a monk who runs windwalker/brewmaster and doesn't seem to have plans of gearing mist walker. it's all okay, but in order to have everyone playing what they want to play we need to find more healer mains who WANT TO play their healer primarily. With how low our numbers have been and how steadily they have been improving with our open door policy I don't want to change anything quite yet, but something will have to be done if we break 100 characters in the guild and not one healer main who's active and contributing. The only thing we can hope for is that having to pull from the general public for healers to run content should mean we are meeting way more healers than anything else and have the best chance of winning them over. I guess we'll see.

Anyways, you can always catch me online at http://twitch.tv/t6srof or on twitter @T6SROF. The recruitment saga will continue...

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor - Reviving an Old Guild

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 18:55:00 -0800

If you've been stopping by the stream you've probably noticed that the new expantion to World of Warcraft has sucked me in. I'm in love with the game right now and having a really great time. That being said, our guild, has been all but dead for months. I started hearing the few guys who would log in from time to time start talking about all of us joining a bigger better guild and it all felt hopeless.

I decided I was going to do something about it and I have been trying every which way to find the right people for our guild ever since. I would say my drive to start boosting our numbers started at about Christmas time and since then we've picked up about 10 new players. Of those 10, 2 are friends from Twitch who used their free 90 boost to get characters on our server (Boulderfist). 4 of them are married couples who came to the game in pairs. One couple was the tank/healer of a dungeon I was in. The other I met via a recruitment post on /r/wowguilds. The other 4 are people we met in the world who were guildless who I convinced to give us a shot. There have been a few members added through trade and one rogue who was griefing alliance in Spires of Arak who needed to join us, but there has been no one good way to get new players.

I'm posting this because I'm actually very curious to see how this works out and want to start documenting a kind of... recruitment journal... so I can start to go back and review my notes as the guild grows... or doesn't.

The hardest part of recruiting right now is that we don't have any finite goals. Most people recruiting are looking for something functional. They want melee DPS who can raid Monday and Wednesday from 18:00 to 23:00 server time in ilvl 650+. That's easy. People who see that and fit the bill who are not happy with their guild situation will notice. The only difficulty is getting your message in front of those people. When your only goal is to find fun people to play with and eventually do rated battlegrounds and some minor raiding... what the hell do you say to get the right people to notice? I mean, you can go and say just that, but there's a big difference between a guild that has 500 members who don't know each other and just casually do stuff together when they can and a group of 20 players who all know each other well and have fun spending time together even though both of those groups are pulling from the same pool of players.

I'm stumped, but not frustrated. If I can pick up one good player who wants to be a part of the guild every week then that's great. I just need to keep working at it and keep trying. I just don't know where is the best place to look.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Warchief fight

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Wed, 8 Oct 2014 17:46:00 -0700

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Impressions

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Wed, 8 Oct 2014 17:18:00 -0700

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a hack and slash assassination type game along the lines of Assassin's Creed and the new Batman franchise. I haven't played through an AC game since I labeled the first one "The best boring game I ever played" and dismissed the Batman games as completely overrated. I'm not really all that interested in the Lord of the Rings movies and haven't read the books since they were assigned reading in high school. So, why buy it? 100% of the reason I decided to give this a try is their new (and about to get used by every other game under the sun) nemesis system.

More after the jump

The Nemesis System

The captains of Sauron's Army

In Shadow of Mordor you play a "ranger" named Talion who has been brought back from the dead and has to share his body with a wraith who wears a crown but has no idea who he is. That wraith gives you special sight [read: eagle vision if you're familiar with Assassin's Creed.] You get a roster of captains of Sauron's army that you have to dispatch in order to weaken Sauron himself. This is all pretty standard. The 15 or so captains are available to check out from the pause menu and all start out as silhouettes. Once you run into one you'll learn what he looks like, where he hangs around, and his name. If you interrogate a "worm" or a captain you can find out their strengths and weaknesses.

That's all standard stuff up to now. This is where things begin to get interesting. These captains are all procedurally generated, live their own lives independent of Talion, and react to your presence in a way that I've never seen before. They fight among themselves for power, have their own individual motivation, form and break alliances, and do all sorts of cool stuff even if you just sit there staring at scenery.

As it turns out, every orc you see huddling around a fire or driving slaves around the countryside sees himself as captain material and is just waiting for the right situation to move up. If you look at the picture above you'll see there are 4 tiers of dudes on the screen from top to bottom. The top tier are Warchiefs and then they go down in rank as you go down the screen. If there is an opening at the bottom rung and a random orc kills you... there's a good chance he's going to use that fact to slide right in there. Also, just because he started out life as a slave driver doesn't mean he's not going to end up a badass captain... as I found out the hard way.

I was fighting way too many orcs just screwing around when one caught me with my pants down and killed me. He must have added that to his resume and ended up filling an open slot in the captains' hierarchy. I figured it wasn't a big deal. In fact, I was excited to be able to get my revenge. Well, fast forward a few short minutes and he's killed 3 other captains and made himself the heir apparent to the next warchief slot. Not only that but he's brought his power level from 1 to 17! Along the way he became immune to pretty much everything and made himself a certified badass. He went from "who cares" to "OMG he needs to go" extremely quickly. I actually stopped everything I was working on to try to single him out and it STILL took me a few tries to kill him.

Because he killed me more than anyone else and was starting to become my own personal problem he became my "Nemesis." From what I can tell, it's just a title, but it becomes my driving purpose in life to take him out once he gets that title.

So far, the only complaint I have is that dropping off ledges is rough. I've been playing with a xbox 360 controller and it's been smooth sailing... unless I'm trying to drop off a ledge. Holding B will normally do the trick if you want to go straight to the bottom and holding down on the movement stick will drop one ledge at a time, but I find myself unable to drop when I REALLY need to from time to time. That's frustrating but ultimately okay. The other thing that normally drives me crazy but makes perfect sense here are the QTEs. Quick Time Events are typically when I uninstall, but they actually work. How else are you supposed to fight a hundred orcs in a circle if you never get a prompt that someone is attacking you? If you took out the QTEs then you'd have to simplify the combat experience... which is the far worse option in my humble opinion.

I can't say enough good things about the game at this point and I'm happy to finally see some tangible innovation that goes beyond the look or the scope of the game. What I figured would be a quick single player experienced turned into a fully alive world with a real sandbox feel. Skipping this game would be a bad idea. But then again, you'll see traces of this game's DNA all over the gaming world once other developers get their hands on this nemesis system. Nemesis is to RPG as Perks are to shooters. Remember when Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out and then every other shooter had to have perks and progression? I'm calling it now that this is where we're going with the nemesis system.

NOTE:

So far I've played 10 hours and have not seen all that much of the "end game" skills/runes. I cannot use the "Brand" ability yet which gives you the ability to flip a captain to your side. I cannot speak to that portion of the game yet.

Goodbye Diablo 3 Auction House aka How to screw up player motivation

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 01:13:00 -0800

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/diablo%C2%AE-iii-auction-house-update-9-17-2013

There's the announcement everyone thought would never come. My friends who are new-ish to Diablo 3 have said things like "people must be abusing the system" or "too many bot accounts making money off the Real Money Auction House." The truth is in the announcement and I've been saying it all along.

it ultimately undermines Diablo's core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot.

The auction house is a cancer. It creeps into your head every time you restart your game without finding anything of consequence. It's there every time your freshly found legendary rolls lousy stats. It's there every time you simply can't get something done the way you want to do it.

The basic dungeon crawler goes: Kill stuff, get new things from the stuff you killed, use these new things to kill even more stuff, repeat.

When you break that chain with a non core gameplay related means of upgrading your stuff it messes with your motivation. My first thought is "what isn't dropping to make room for these other means of acquiring loot?" That's quickly followed up with "I bet I'm not finding anything because of the auction house." Eventually I get to the point where I am unsure I can ever upgrade any of my stuff my killing monsters (core gameplay) so I go to the auction house. If I can't upgrade there either then why play the game at all? The world is full of junk and I can't afford the stuff in the auction house. What's the use?

Then I'll kill some boss mob somewhere and he'll drop nothing (hi, Butcher... you ass) and I'll sit back and go "I bet he isn't dropping anything because they have to balance the drops vs the auction house."

Even if it's not true... it's in my head. I am all messed up and the core gameplay is unclear. Am I supposed to be killing stuff or following Randy Pitchford on twitter? Should I be spamming zombie bears or should I be refreshing the auction house? It sounds like I'm exaggerating to make it sound worse, but I'm being 100% serious when I say there were many days in Diablo 3 where I'd just log in to screw with the auction house because I didn't believe it was possible to find any upgrades. Then, after a couple sessions like that I'd stop playing for a while because it would sink in that I can't do any better for myself by playing... that's why I'm in the auction house all night... what do I think I'm going to do when I get that upgrade off the auction house?

Borderlands 2 and SHiFT codes

This is a very similar problem to Diablo 3's auction house. This is a way that's not only there, but encouraged, to replace killing things in the loot chain. If you're unfamiliar, you can follow people like Gearbox Software's Randy Pitchford on twitter and he'll occasionally post what are known as SHiFT codes. These codes give you keys. These keys unlock a chest (in the center of town near the most used portal in the game) that drops gear.

So what is core gameplay in Borderlands 2? You load a game, kill a boss, end the game, load it back up, kill the boss again. Why? Because unlike Diablo 3, legendary items (that are pretty damn awesome) only drop from specific bosses and random loot midgets. It's hard to get the items that are recommended for high level play and even harder to get them with the proper affixes that make them truly powerful. The fact that there's a box in the middle of Sanctuary where you can spend currency you earned by being on Facebook or Twitter and upgrade your stuff is such a punch in the guts that it makes me feel like this is going to be my last Gearbox software game for a long time.

That stupid chest right by the main teleporter and New-U station stares me in the face every time I log in and mocks me with the potential stuff that DOES NOT DROP because they want twitter followers and social media interaction so they had to build a non-shoot-assholes-in-the-face method to upgrade gear into their game. Now, I've never used a key on that box, but I can't imagine that it will be full of junk. They want that social media hotness!

THIS POST WAS WRITTEN DOWN THE NIGHT THEY ANNOUNCED THE D3 AUCTION HOUSE WAS CLOSING. EVERYTHING BELOW THIS CAPLOCK'D TEXT IS NEW

So, it's been a few months and life goes on in the Diablo 3 world. I still haven't logged back into Borderlands 2 but that might be because I've been enjoying so many other games so much recently. Or, it could be because I've never even hit max level and have no interest in the "farming style" of the game yet they keep selling level cap increases... I don't know. I do have a negative feeling in my gut about Borderlands 2... but that might be because I'm the kind of player who is bothered by the "meta game" instead of just playing the actual game. This only comes with games I absolutely love. I really like Defiance... but I don't play it enough to care about any of the currencies or what I can get with shabloobie bucks or whatever the hell they are. But, in Guild Wars 2 I'm bothered by the fact that bag space is held behind a pay wall so much that it makes me dislike the game. Planetside 2 is one of my favorite games of the last decade yet I haven't logged into the game at all in months because I started to see the "core gameplay" as something I wasn't digging. I enjoy the tactical land grab but the best way to play as defined by the motivator (xp/certs) is to dig in at one base and play team death match all night.

In the end, game developers and publishers need to sit down and realize how they are motivating players. If people are moving away from PLAYING the game because there are better paths to in game rewards then there's something wrong. The only exception to this is Defiance because its content is in tune with a TV show and the two play off each other. They want you to play the game AND watch the show... and I'm somewhat okay with this because it's handled properly. I'll go into that another time... EVERYONE ELSE... stop with the out of game solutions to in game motivation.

Oh, and I think Diablo 3 could have kept the auction house seeing as they also announced seasonal ladders with Reaper of Souls. I'm seriously tapping my fingers for that expantion to launch... but anyways... I need to go kill some stuff and loot some things... so follow me on twitter @T6SROF (c wut i did thar?)

The best game of Oregon Trail you'll ever play... aka The Banner Saga

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:55:00 -0800

I finished my first play through of The Banner Saga late last night. The more I think about how I want to approach this post the more I just want to talk about the story. Not because it's good (it is) but because it's most of what you'll take away from the experience. This isn't one of those art piece "interactive stories" that have been popping up much more often in recent years. It's a strategy game. It's also not just a strategy game because the story is dynamic based on the decisions you make... making it something more along the lines of a choose your own adventure story. The setting of the game is a journey. The destination changes from time to time, but it's basically Oregon Trail. You start at one end with an army, some "clansmen" and supplies and head out to where you've got to be enjoying one strange adventure after another on the way.

The reason I am having trouble putting my thoughts on paper about The Banner Saga is because I feel like this game COULD have been more enjoyable if the developers had a bigger budget. Once you get through the first half hour of the game you've seen all the animations you'll see. The people you chat with will have a twitchy eye or tap on their shields, but they are just a looping 5 second animation on the screen as you read all the dialogue yourself. I make this complaint only out of love. The voice acting that IS in the game is stellar. The combination of the 70s retro cartoon graphics and the voice actors they used really is something special. The only problem is you don't hear them much outside of the first half hour of this 10 hour play through. I also have to back peddle even MORE because I believe the story is so good it stands up on its own without NEEDING voice actors or animations. In fact, I'd probably skip most of the dialogue if it was being spoken instead of displayed in text.

Basically, I loved the little cut scene in the beginning and I wanted a lot more of that.

The combat is fun and mostly straight forward but it did take me a little time to figure out exactly what's going on. You move your fighters around on what amounts to a chess board and take turns trying to whittle down each others armor and strength. Each fighter has its own special ability and passive ability along with their own distribution of stats. It's boiled down to the most basic and it really does feel good to have a plan come together.

The traveling and all the little side stories throughout your journey are what really take this game to the next level. Do you trust the guys who just so happen to be going in your direction and invite them to come along? Or, do you kill them where they stand because you can't be too cautious? Maybe you just keep going about your business and see what happens? In the end, this game does moral decision making right. This isn't the Bioshock style of "Press A to snap this little girl's neck or Press B to save her." Sometimes it's the difference between glancing or saying nothing that changes everything. The story is so well woven that I honestly couldn't tell you why I ended up where I did. All I know is it makes me want to start all over again and see what else is out there.

With that being said... let's go over some quick pros and cons and wrap this up:

Pros:

Story.
Art Style
Easy to pick up yet difficult to master turn based combat
Moral decision making done right
No "Quick save" making every decision count

Cons:

Animations and voice acting taper off too early
Holy WTF loose ends when I finished my play through without any hint to there being a way to find out.
Only one profile can be played. You can either resume or restart (sorry PC sharers)
No "Quick save" making every decision count

Conclusion:

If you enjoyed Oregon Trail or you like turn based "chess like" strategy games... OR you just love a good, well written story you need to get on steam right now and pick yourself up a copy of The Banner Saga. It's an amazing experience that you should not miss.

UPDATED: Match Making Kills Communities? Yes and no... MMORPG edition

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Mon, 2 Sep 2013 19:22:00 -0700

When I talked about match making killing communities I felt very strongly that removing the match making tool would improve the way people interact. I still do to a degree, but there's a much better way to look at the situation that I had not thought of until I read a bunch of related and absolutely unrelated arguments about this or that and realized that the tool is never the problem. You may be realizing why I attached the photo of this handsome gentlemen to this post. His shirt is a joke, but it's a decent way to put a bow on the argument that tools aren't intrinsically good or evil... it's the use of the tools. Now, don't get all real world on me here, this is leading to more game talk... this isn't the blog for gun control discussion.

Anyways, The tool that matches us up with compatible teammates/opponents isn't evil. It doesn't kill communities on its own, but it does allow for social interaction to become redundant if the game isn't designed properly. What this means is that the match maker should help those with limited time or social contacts but should be a supplement to the game, not the game.

How many times have you heard people talk about League of Legends or DOTA2 and say "I don't like the community. I only play with friends."? THAT'S THE IDEA! You are supposed to be making friends through the solo queue and eventually have a group of people you enjoy spending time with to play games with when you're online! People have become so reliant on match finders and queues that they have no idea what they are supposed to do when they end up in a game with people. It's like putting two people in a room together and they both take out their phones and start checking facebook instead of talking to one another.

So, let's look at MMOs and how they've changed thanks to the Dungeon Finders. EverQuest is a great example of a game where you were on your own to build groups. If you were known as a good tank and a good person you'd get groups with other people who respected your abilities/personality. Great, right? Well, as a good tank with a decent personality and long friends list I'd still end up sitting around in the /lfg lists trying to form/be invited to a group. This would sometimes go on for hours. I distinctly remember trying to find groups for 3+ hours only to end up having the group break up 10 minutes after reaching our destination. Sucks.... a lot.

Two days ago I updated my Rift client for the first time in probably a year. All of my skill trees were reset due to changes that were made since I last was on so I had to rebuild my healer tree. I threw a ton of points into the Warden tree and queued up for a dungeon. A minute or two later I was dropped in with 4 other guys and we were off. I didn't even have time to buff myself before we were fighting the first wave of enemies. I was getting decent xp and was moving quickly from place to place as the rest of the group was at the new level cap while I was still at the old one (60 and 50 respectively). Nobody was taking damage so my heals were pointless. I had all my skill bars messed up but it didn't matter because gear and xp were flying.

IT FELT AWFUL.

The idea behind dungeon finders is to allow for people with limited time or friends the ability to do group based activities and get good group xp/gear. It came from developers who wanted nothing more than to pack the game world with fun. They wanted to remove the frustration of sitting in town spamming "/ooc 50 warrior LFG" for hours and replace it with a rewarding experience on a small time budget. While they were at it, they also removed the frustrating time sinks like retrieving your corpse after a death, getting buffs from other players, and all sorts of other things people were always complaining about. Great, right? Well...

Time for another movie character! This time, it's The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded. In case you don't remember, he talks about previous iterations of The Matrix where they gave everyone a perfect world and they rejected it. The simulation failed because people didn't get the suffering and hardships they expected from the world and couldn't live in absolute happiness all the time.

See where I'm going with this? People look back fondly on their time in games pre-match making. They tell stories of corpse runs and long dangerous journeys that ended up a failure. They laugh about the time they lost a level and ended up having to play naked for a day while they got back to the required level of their gear. BUT... they won't go back to it because people are wired to do what is the most fun and avoid suffering.

This has to do with community?

Yes. Be patient.

Min/Maxing

So, this guy spends his whole time online breaking down exactly what the maximum amount of xp per hour is possible and it turns out that it's running dungeons back to back to back with a strong group. He fires up his twitch stream and shows off how him and his friends can make 100x the reward that you can by doing dungeon after dungeon. You then log in and do the same thing to a similar result. Eventually, everyone is aware that doing dungeons is the absolute best way to get xp and want to do nothing but the best for themselves while they are online. Great. Now we all know exactly how not to "waste" time while we're grinding. People start requesting more and more of this "optimal" content and the company delivers. When you get online you press a button and are dropped into a queue. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, you'll just be dropped right in on the action...

With a group of strangers. If things go well you may ask if they'd like to restart the dungeon, but for the most part you'll be re-queuing because it's easier than talking to people. Your character is still just standing in town waiting for the next group to pop.

Meanwhile, there is this whole world around you that you learned to avoid via min/maxers figuring out what's best...

But... what if the min/maxers found that your time was better spent out in the wild farming mobs in a high level zone rather than doing dungeons? That would make it so you'd have to form a group, travel to a spot, interact with other people, and work together for an extended period of time. That sounds a whole lot like social interaction doesn't it? Isn't that how you make friends? Get to know people? Build a reputation? Yes!

So, are the dungeon finders the problem or is the open world the problem?

The dungeon finder is a tool and by definition cannot be "evil" on its own. This particular tool's use is destructive only because it's the best option in the game across multiple titles. Tera? WoW? Rift? Yeah... do dungeons if you want to make the most of your time. Zones are no longer built for groups. They are soloable experiences for people who don't feel like grouping with others. With how little people get to know each other in match made groups there are more and more people who would rather just solo because "the community is bad" which puts more and more pressure on the devs to make the world easier and more solo friendly. This pushes more group oriented people into dungeons which give a distorted view of communities. So, over time, this cycle leads to people who could be the best of friends not even saying hello to one another because there's no reason to. Add in that these match made groups are pulled from multiple servers and everything that is being thrown at you is another valid reason to never interact with anyone EVER.

Dungeon finders have their place, but they are out of balance right now. They also don't typically give you the options you'd need in order to make the most of the situation. Let's say I'm a tank and I have a healer friend and a dps friend but we would like to meet someone who plays a strong crowd control role. We should be able to go into a dungeon finder looking for a crowd control player from OUR OWN SERVER so we can basically have "try outs" for a new friend. I've never seen the option to only draw from your home server.

Dungeon finders could also be adjusted to help with general LFG stuff as well. Why can't I say what I'm doing and where and have the game find the missing piece to my group? It would be really nice to be able to use the dungeon finder like that as well. "Warrior, Cleric, and Monk farming RSS looking for DPS/CC" into the finder and in pops a shaman and rogue! I'd even be okay with allowing group members to teleport to the group leader or the zone line to make it easier to meet up.

Why is the open world so important? Because that's where you set up shop and hang out for an hour or two getting to know people instead of plowing scripted content over and over where everyone knows exactly what's going to happen. I made way more friends chain pulling in Wall of Slaughter as a bard than I ever did healing dungeons in Tera. The open world gives you a chance to put a spotlight on your personal skill and show what you bring to the table. Are you the type of healer who never goes OOM? Are you a tank who never loses aggro? Are you so fast with your crowd control that we never have to deal with more than one mob at a time? Can you pull fast enough to always have a mob at camp? Are you DPSing so hard that mobs are melting without ever pulling aggro off the tank? These are all things you never really get a feel for in dungeons... and even if you do, those guys will be replaced with new ones when you queue back up anyways.

You also get a feel for who likes what you like as well. If I meet people who are grouping together in my favorite zone and it's their favorite zone as well then we have something in common and can learn to make the most of our time there. If you like to plow around a zone and find a group that also likes to plow instead of pull then that's great! It's just a way more social environment than static dungeon encounters.

I hear more and more complaints about "communities" and lack of social interaction than anything else these days. People want to get to know one another and form new groups of friends. What's more common is for old groups of friends to migrate from game to game without adding anyone new into the mix. Is that what Massively Multiplayer is all about anymore?

The bottom line is the more games get streamlined the less we need one another. This can be fixed by adjusting the rewards available from different activities. These are just games. The worlds can be completely changed if the motivation is there. It's time we start pushing for compelling open world experiences that reward us better than taking part in disposable groups.

Average +1: What we expect from our friends

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Thu, 6 Jun 2013 22:24:00 -0700

When you are grouped up with random people to play a game you get a certain level of quality. When you invite someone to a game, you expect that quality +1. This higher set of expectations can create a really frustrating situation for everyone involved... but there's good news! It can be avoided!

Check your mic

This should be pretty self explanatory, but there are some steps you need to go through to not be a pain in the ass.

Identify an easy to use echo service (TeamSpeak has it in the settings pannel and Skype has an echo call contact on your contacts list)
Wear your headset or place your mic how it will be when you're gaming. Don't set it perfectly... as if that's how it will end up... put it where it will actually end up when you're playing.
Talk LOUDLY into the echo service. Now, talk really quietly as if you're trying to speak without waking people up in the same room. Set your outbound volume to not blow out people's ears when you're excited while still letting us hear you clearly when you're calm.
UNDERSTAND THIS: Your nose and mouth both breath. Air comes in and out both of those places. Headsets have a tendency to stroll up near the ol' sniffer and make you sound like a gross mouth breather. Stand alone mics tend to be super sensitive to air. If you breath into your mic we're all going to be sour. Nothing is worse than a mouth breather in voice coms.

IN ORDER TO AVOID SOUNDING LIKE A MOUTH BREATHER WHEN YOU HAVE ALL YOUR CHROMOSOMES... blow air like a dumbass all around while echo testing. If you can snort out your nose and puff air out your mouth without it being picked up then it won't pick up you breathing normally.

If someone says your mic is FUBAR... IT IS! Don't go "Who? Me?" because at the moment it got so bad that someone said something, the last they want to hear back is "How could this be?" Even if you've gone through all these steps, don't hesitate to fix it even when it ain't broke.

Know your audience

Some people want to be entertained both on mic and in game with silliness and jocularity. Other people want to be a srs bsns all the time. Most people are in the middle and have norms and expectations that they will make clear if you give them the opportunity. Most people (even Jay) don't want to be a tremendous douche to you, so if you're not living up to the cultural norms of the group you're playing with, they will drop hints... TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY. "Hey, is your mic on?" Probably means "Feel free to talk more." "We get it" probably means "Talk less." And there are plenty of places for hints and suggestions throughout your time online. We all enjoy a good personality when it's warranted, but sometimes we all need to either tone it down or bring it up to match our audience.

If you're new to the group, spell out what you bring to the table

If we're playing team games of StarCraft 2 together, let me know what you're planning to do so we can work together. If you can only 6 pool as Zerg, lay that out before I go Nexus First. If you can't play a certain way or have philosophical or skill based limitations, SAY SO. AKA, let me in on what is in your head because my skills at reading minds aren't up to par.

If we're playing League of Legends and we're trying to figure out who is going to play what role and there's only one role you can play, get that out front so we know how to pick around you. It's not a big deal if we know, but if you can only go jungle and someone else has already picked a jungler, don't just quietly go mid with a free week champ that you've never played before... SAY SOMETHING.

Don't expect everyone else to read your mind

The difference between random teammates and pre-made teammates is that we are allegedly working together which should give us an edge. If you take away that advantage by treating the group like strangers then why not just kick you out of the group and find someone who gives us that "strategy edge?" Working together on the fly with various different people is an art and it's not easy. It makes it no easier if you keep the plan to yourself.

Do what you do best

If your best race in StarCraft is Zerg... play Zerg first! If your best champ is Ezreal... play him first! Don't expect people to know you're typically better "but". Nobody wants "buts" when they are inviting you to a game. You need to establish that you are average +1 before you start trying out riskier strategies. If you are not going to be better than the average then why would you be invited? This doesn't only mean skill. This means effort, communication, personality, etc. If you're not that great, the least you can do is try your best to work with your team. Sometimes that's more important than anything else. Just be that average +1 somehow and you'll be a welcomed member of the group.

Take advice. Give advice. Ask for advice.

Part of working together is lifting each other up. If someone is hinting at something you could be doing to help the team, take that advice and be open minded. Online gaming is not the most open minded place when it comes to things like "I have a better idea how to do what you're trying to do." It's hard to give advice un-prompted. If you're having a particularly hard game, ask if anyone has any ideas. If they give you BS like "play better" then maybe you're not in the right group of people... but challenge that. "I'm being serious, I'm having real trouble laning vs Teemo, is there something I can do to win this lane?" Most jerks have only one jerk bullet in their jerk chamber and use it as a defense mechanism just in case your question was meant to bait them into a trap. If you can shake off the jerk bullet and get real advice then you're in a better place in the game or at least within the group.

If you see something that could be improved, let them know, but understand that they may not take it well if you don't phrase it properly... or if they don't know you well enough. This can be tricky and every situation is different, but when you find a group you like and have proven you're average +1 you can build good relationships by navigating the "I know you're frustrated but try THIS..." scenarios.

When someone offers advice... even if it's a between the lines type hint, follow it if you can. Effort is appreciated and being an open minded teammate is awesome. If someone hints that the bottom lane could use more ganks, try to gank bottom lane. Acknowledge that you have received the information and tell them what you're going to do to fix it.

CONCLUSION

If your mic works properly, you are communicating with your group, your team work is outstanding and you do what you do best then you'll be a welcomed member of the team. I'm not just talking about playing with me and my friends... this is for everyone you meet online. I dare you to find someone who doesn't care that you're always huffing and puffing into your mic. Everyone hates that even if it's just a little bit.

When you DON'T live up to the Average +1 standard it's more frustrating than having a lousy random person on the team because the expectations are higher. On top of that, you're sticking around. Now, we all have to learn how to work around whatever it is you're doing poorly. Is it that your mic is garbage and we've been trying to tell you all night to do something about it? Is it that you keep trying outlandish stuff and we're losing close games together (making it hard to not blame you)? Are you not keeping up with the culture of the group? Are you giving non stop play by play when everyone wants voice coms clear for important information? Are you being silent when people are asking what's up?

The average +1 standard isn't much to live up to. There are so many ways you can be more fun to have around than a random, but it's up to you to make sure you have the right mind set and equipment to get the job done. So, fix that mic, get your game face on, and let's go kick some ass.

Climbing The Ladder in League of Legends [SPOILERS: Don't]

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Wed, 5 Jun 2013 01:18:00 -0700

League of Legends makes me think more than most games I play. Not that StarCraft, Dark Souls, Mount and Blade, or Guild Wars 2 are simple games. It's the social aspect of League of Legends that makes me really sit back and think deeply on what is going on. Today it hit me when I was reading my 10,000th "I'm trying to climb the ladder" post that I need to talk about why these ladders exist and why you think they exist.

Match making is there to give everyone fun and challenging games. They don't want to put the best player in the world vs the worst player in the world. That's not the most satisfying match up for either of them. The good player isn't tested and the weak player has no chance.

We always want to know where we stand. That's something that's almost 100% universal. This means if there's a scoring system that ranks people so they are matched with similar players those people are going to want to see the score. When two people who compete in the same game each have ratings they are going to want to compare ratings to see who's better.

Just look at StarCraft 2. When people see that I play StarCraft 2 what's the first question they ask me? "What league are you in?" They want to know who they are talking to before they say another word so they don't look silly by saying something stupid to a Grand Master or ask advice of a Bronze League player. It's just human nature.

So, we want to play against people who will challenge us while also not being unbeatable. We also want to know where we (and everyone else) stand. To this end, games like StarCraft and League of Legends group brackets of skill ratings together and call them "leagues." These leagues are a way for you to quickly and easily tell where people stand, are percentage based in case of ratings inflation, and are simple to remember. Great right? That means you get what you wanted.

Wrong.

The first problem that's especially important to keep in mind with League of Legends is that every variable introduced in the match makes your own personal rating less meaningful. To start with, it's not 1v1. The other 9 players are all variables... so are the 100+ champions, the endless variety of item builds, and even connectivity plays a part. If a chess player can get a rating within 5% of what his actual skill level is... you'd be lucky if it's within 25% on League of Legends.

This should NOT be discouraging, it's just part of the way this works and until there's a better way to rank people, this is the best you're going to get... and it's pretty damn good if you ask me. I've played about 1,300 normal games of 5v5 on summoner's rift. I'm something like 10 games below .500. How much closer to a 50% chance of victory could I ever expect in a game with so many variables?

So, let's say I go into ranked games from now on. I get put into Bronze V (the lowest league) and I'm .500 win/loss there. Am in in "elo hell?" Should I be disappointed? Should I blame other people for my bad place in the ladder? No.

Here's why.

Match making is there to give everyone fun and challenging games.

Ranking up into the Challenger Tier isn't the same as saving the princess in Mario Bros. It isn't a required milestone to say you've had the full experience. There's no beating the game. To that end, there is no reason you should feel defeated if you are not in one of the top leagues. By definition, half of the players are below average. That doesn't mean ~~they~~ we can't have great, exciting, fun games. In fact, I'd say you have more "freedom" to have fun in lower leagues where some experimentation and risk taking would either A. go unnoticed or B. be encouraged.

I see ranking up as a punishment. It's the match making system saying "Hey, you are winning too much and we need you to lose more to get back to 50/50 win loss." If it was up to me, I'd put way less weight on wins and way more weight on losses. I'd rather slowly move upwards slowly and win more games against people I'm better than instead of instantly being matched with better players if I win 2 or 3 in a row. If I win 5 of 6 GREAT! It just doesn't happen often. If me and 3 friends queue up together we will win the first game or two of the night and then go on a losing streak only to rebound and win a few later on. Why? Because we get matched with better players for a while and then get knocked back down. My skill doesn't rapidly change... why should my match making rank? I enjoy being competitive in every match, but I'd be okay with being the above average sized fish for a while longer.

I just wish more people would realize that their rank isn't a punishment and that ranking up isn't the goal. Haven't you ever heard an interview with a coach where they go, "Coach, your team looks like you can win it all" and he replies "we are just going to focus on the next game. We need to win one game at a time."? If your goal is to play well in this game and win than that's all you have to do. You can't win 100 games in a row in this game. You can only win one. In fact, you can't even do that. All you can do is play your role well and win your battles. The better you get at doing that (both winning your battles and recognizing that you can't make other players win theirs) the more games you will win and the better your rank will be. If you can forgive a bad play from someone else or recognize a really good play from the enemy you'll be level headed and have a much better shot at victory.

Screw it... I'm in elo hell and can't win cause this troll triss is 0-3...

See, isn't it so much easier to just be a blame game playing, no responsibility having, no self evaluating, piece of garbage?

http://twitch.tv/t6srof

6 Reasons People are Dicks on League of Legends

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Tue, 28 May 2013 22:19:00 -0700

"Make sure you give me credit. I want credit. Say 'This post wouldn't have been possible without my wife. Literally.'" -Megan (my wife)

I had to put that there because I've been trying to write this post for almost a month and haven't figured out how to structure it. I talked it through with my editor wife and she was like "list all the reasons with explanations." It's not my normal format, but this makes way more sense. Thank you, Megan! I love you!

Anonymity and an Audience

Any time you add those two A's together you end up with people losing their minds. This isn't specific to League of Legends, but it has to be mentioned. It's even worse when you add goals and responsibility for results into the mix. Nobody plays to lose. Nobody is planning on dying. Being mean to strangers because they aren't winning is a really good way to come across as a dick. You had a bad player. Now you have a bad player who's embarrassed at BEST and actively throwing the game at worst. Sure, you're not going to get a delicious knuckle sandwich for calling that dude names, but his inability to strangle you via CAT5 cable is not a good reason to treat him like an animal.

Poor Self Evaluation (I would be in X league if Y league wasn't full of trolls)

There are well over 100 champs, 10 players per game, and 10 roles that need to be filled by this random group of 10. I am bad at math, but if you think about how many different combinations of teams there can be it should start to become clear how different each game can be. Because of that blur of variables it's difficult to have an objective way to evaluate your own play. Because it's so difficult, people tend to focus on the easy thing... kills to deaths. Okay, you've killed the other mid lane champ 3 times in the first 3 minutes... great... now how are you using that advantage to secure the game? Did you gank the top or bottom lane to help them secure the tower? Did you focus the right target in a team fight to reduce their threat or did you blow up their 0-10-0 support because it would pad your numbers? As the 0-10 support champion I can tell you nothing is more dangerous than a player with a decent score. I win more games by running away from team fights while they scramble to get that fat kill score than I do supporting. This one "objective" stat doesn't tell the story, yet you'll hear endless tales of the 30-1-0 champ losing a game because of everyone else. Ever think that with those numbers you should have been able to turn the tide of all three lanes? No? Well it's time to get back to that mirror and start looking into it. If you can't, and you're going to blame your teams, then you're just a dick.

Free to Play = No Barriers to Entry

Low barriers to entry mean that people have far less to lose. There's nothing stopping someone from signing up with a different email unless they are the one person in the developed world who doesn't know of a free email host. Someone who's angry, has nothing to lose, and doesn't fear any repercussions is going to take the anonymity and audience factor and run with it. These are the 0-1-0 leavers at low level who just can't be bothered to deal with it. Oh, so you're telling me I shouldn't have died so early? Bye!

Because the game is free, it's also available world wide. People with 1k pings living in sod huts speaking languages that involve clicks and pops are probably not going to have a firm grasp on what is and is not rude in their 2nd language. I know from a million years of Spanish classes that I can barely ask where the bathroom is... I can't imagine having to explain in Spanish that someone made a mistake that could have been avoided without coming across as rude. Add in that curse words are the first words you learn in a new language and you end up with a powder keg of angry people with very few non violent means of verbal resolution.

Pro streams set unrealistic expectations (aka Poor Teammate Evaluation)

With the easy access to professional players' games via TwitchTV it's very easy to start to expect the players in your games to play the same way. Just because Pro01 can jungle Shen doesn't mean that SomeDude01 can do the same. These streamers are so good that they make the game look easy. The stream also doesn't have a way to let you know what they are looking at, where they are focused, what they are thinking, how they are judging the game, etc also known as all the finer points. All it does it show you mechanics done right. If you are too blind to see the difference between your play and pro play then you're also too blind to see that the guys in your games aren't going to play like pros. If you expect WCG level play out of a guy who plays 3 games a week it's YOU who looks silly.

Also, most pros play a role exclusively. If you are a top lane player you play top lane. You know how every champ you could pick would behave against most other champs that could be picked for top lane. You practice everything all the time that could possibly affect your game. The people who surround these pros who are streaming typically are one to two role people who have a laser-like focus on what they are doing. These guys all know each other too, so they are picking to their personal strengths and weaknesses. It's not just a random group of 5 guys who have never played together ever playing together for the first time. Their games are as different to our games as they could possibly be. Expecting your support Blitzcrank to land grabs like DoubleLift is insanity. Being a dick to your Blitzcrank because he doesn't land them like DoubleLift is just you being a dick. You wouldn't expect the receiver for your flag football team to run patterns like Randy Moss... why should your Blitz play like a pro? And again, you had a "bad" Blitz. Now you have a "bad" Blitz that's angry. You've gained nothing.

League of Legends is just a dumbed down DotA

If you truly believe this you aren't paying attention. DotA is its own game with its own strengths and weaknesses. If this statement was true then someone who has played DotA long enough to get most of the mechanics down would steamroll their way through the ladder on League of Legends. It just doesn't work that way. It's like saying that being good at Counter Strike makes you great at Call of Duty. It's just not the case. Apples vs Oranges. The problem with this mentality is that it hurts your ability to take what's going on seriously because you don't believe that it's possible for people to screw up something this easy. Not respecting the difficulty of League of Legends means you also fall into the "Poor Self Evaluation" category.

League of Legends grew faster than Riot Games could handle giving rise to the "go ahead and report me, they won't do anything" generation of players

This has been "remedied" with the Tribunal giving players the ability to help sort through all the reports, but the damage was done. People who have been playing since Pre-Tribunal have seen what it means to have no accountability for your actions. It set the bar low for behavior and kept it there. Once a culture has been established it's near impossible to change. The fact that people are used to berating each other and being berated has created this hair thin barrier between calmly playing and vein pulsing rage that can be triggered by anything. "Hey, I think you should help out bottom lane instead." is just as able to freak someone out as "you suck and I hope you die" because everyone is on the defensive ALL the time.

If you put it all together, not knowing if you're doing well or not, having no idea what to expect of your teammates, knowing that a single mistake will lead to you being bad mouthed by at least one other player who knows there's nothing you can do but take it, and you get this tense, bullshit situation where nobody feels comfortable to ask questions, get help, give advice, or talk strategy with one another.

I had this conversation with a player who was from Asia... and I know this because most of his text was little white blocks unless he switched to English letters:

Him: OMG quinn ur cs

Me: It's my first time playing Quinn. Sorry. I'm trying.

Him: ur lvl30 though...

Me: Okay, I'm a bad player and first time Quinn... is that enough for you to give advice or leave me alone?

Him: ur bad.

Me: Yes. I just said that. What do you want me to do?

and here it comes... the actual advice after wading through that sea of bile and wasting all that time typing.

Him: Just stay bottom and keep last hitting. Don't worry about team fights until you have your IE.

Me: You got it.

How hard would it have been for it to go like this:

Him: Quinn, you really need more CS. Don't team fight until you have your IE. You're way behind.

Me: You're right. I'll stay bottom and just keep farming until I have my IE built.

End scene.

Both have the same result, but only because I'm aware of how the community behaves and I don't let that kind of stuff get to me [okay, that's not true, I was mad... but I wanted to win so I wanted advice]. If I wasn't trying really hard to play the nice guy I would have just told him to take it deep and we would have spent the rest of the round fighting back and forth until one of us or both of us threw the round.

Can you see why it's important to be nice to each other? Knowledge is viral. Teach one guy something new and he'll teach it to 4 others who teach it to 4 others and eventually someone in that chain will do the right thing for you in the future without you even knowing it. Behavior is viral as well. Treat your team like human beings and they may not do the same, but at least you will prove that there is at least one decent human being playing League of Legends. All it takes is a little hope to move the average.

Guild Wars at Max Level

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sun, 12 May 2013 21:02:00 -0700

I have been at max level on my warrior for a couple weeks and have been trying to settle in and get involved in more things before I formed an opinion. I'm still "settling in" and haven't really found all that much to be super excited about. I saved all my karma from level 1 and bought myself 3 pieces of exotic gear from an event. That's just about the best I'll ever see in those 3 slots. I have my eye on a helmet that costs 20 gold... so I'm saving towards that. I found a great sword with max stats already, but I don't have "best in slot" weapons of other types. I'll be hunting for this piece or that piece for a while, but I can see a road that leads to the best stuff in the game and it's not very far from where I am.

So... what do you work towards?

The answer that I've been getting from people is to get different gear sets with different stats to use at different times. Basically, build a pvp set, a tanky set, a burst dps set, a condition damage set, etc. That's one road. Another is to work on legendary weapons which take a lot of gold and time. They don't have better stats than the stuff I have already (but ArenaNet is working on changing that) so there's no reason to rush to get a legendary unless you just want it for looks.

Then there's WvWvW. This is a game mode similar to Planetside 2 where you are fighting for control of structures and areas around the map. In theory, this is a great place to enjoy all the hard work you've put in on your character, but I haven't found it to be as much fun as I had hoped. So far, I've only been on a few times where I could put in more than a half hour before going back to clearing maps. It's very dependent on having "commanders" on the map who can herd people together and make use of the the population. Commanders are marked with an icon on the map for everyone in a large radius. This allows for people like me who come straggling into the fight to have an idea of where the fight actualy is.

So, now we're at the fight, but what can I do as a melee class without any decent escapes or deception skills? Well... I can sit back and shoot my bow at people... or run in and get obliterated. Those are my only options thus far in WvWvW. When you start seeing fights with over a hundred people on each side there is simply no quarter for someone at the point of contact. There are endless red circles everywhere that all mean damage, but will also confuse, disable, and DoT you to pieces. I can pick off a straggler here and there, but the fighting is for the ranged classes. I'm still not good enough at PvP to know how to take down another class 1v1 and in WvWvW... also, you use your regular PvE gear, so it's almost impossible to know if you'll be evenly matched 1v1. On top of THAT, there's the fact that fighting vs a great sword wielding warrior could be the easiest possible fight. I haven't quite figured out hammers and don't like giving away the few hits I get from bows, so it's bow/great sword for me... right to the grave unless my side has a numbers advantage.

So, I feel helpless in WvWvW. Firstly, because I don't know what I'm doing well enough to direct groups of people to things we could actually accomplish (like I would in Planetside 2). Secondly, because my class is ill equiped for this type of combat. That means I'm at the mercy of the commanders who are on at the time 100%. If people aren't motivated and working towards goals then I'm back out in PvE.

Next, there's sPvP. This mode is hilarous because it puts you at max level with PvP specific gear, so even if you are level 1 you are on exactly even footing with everyone else. If this was what you wanted to do in Guild Wars 2 then there's no reason to ever level at all. I find it fun, but it feels somewhat... odd? Why level at all if this is "end game?" I find that I enjoy sPvP more as a ranger than a warrior, so I've been taking my mid 20s ranger in place of my max level warrior.

sPvP is actually a lot of fun, but it's hard to consider it the "end game" of Guild Wars 2. It's more of a "side game" seeing as you progress independently from your PvE play. Still worth doing... but if it doesn't matter if you've ever played your champion... how could it be "end game"?

World dragons are fun, but they aren't raid bosses. They are fun experiences with decent loot, but they are no substitute for a true raid. I don't know that I'd ever be able to raid like I used to on EverQuest again, but the lack of a similar experience here leaves level 80 life feeling a bit more empty. Then again, I don't really know how raiding works without tank/healer/dps. I would imagine it could be quite fun if ArenaNet figured it out, but I'm not sure raiding is what they want us to do.

The Six Sided Ring of Fire (the guild) has not qualified for any guild events/challenges yet, but we're working towards it (slowly... our low numbers mean we earn influence slowly). These should be fun for us to do together very soon, but I have no experience with them yet, so I can't really speak to their quality. I know I'm really looking forard to leveling up the guild (as it's the first guild I've ever created), but I don't know how far we'll be able to go until our numbers go up.

So... what do are you to do at level 80?

There is a message here. It's just hard to see because everything you've done up to playing Guild Wars has left a haze of personal experience covering your eyes. You are supposed to enjoy the game play for what it is. That's it. ArenaNet has given you a game that's fun to play early with very little "grind" to to keep you occupied. There are fun events to take part in all over the world... in just about every corner of every map there's something challenging to do. Even the level adjustment based on zone should have lit this bulb over my head. ArenaNet wants you to see everything, do everything, miss a lot, go back to see it again, see new things when you pass from zone to zone, play with your friends, and enjoy your time in game. It's not about the gear, the grind, or any of the other time sinks that other games have put in. You are here to enjoy how you interact with the world regardless of gear, level, etc.

It's so simple it's crazy... just play to have fun. No subscription fee, no real benefit to grinding out hours and hours on one character... just a well designed game that's fun and easy to play with your friends.

Podcast S01E05: Recent Events (IdrA is out of EG, Penny Arcade has a kickstarter, Diablo 3 gold exploit)

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sun, 12 May 2013 02:25:00 -0700

Podcast: Guild Wars 2

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:50:00 -0700

Guild Wars 2: First Impressions aka Questing Done Right

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 06:16:00 -0700

I laid out my complaints with the quest hub system to a few of my MMO friends and they kept mentioning that I should try Guild Wars 2. I did... and I love it so far. It answers just about all of my concerns with modern questing just about how I laid it out in my post about quest hubs.

I'm going to make this real quick and come back with a better post at another time...

EverQuest is pure exploration. Nothing is spelled out for you at all. Careful attention to clues and a knack for questing is required to do anything beyond find stuff and kill it. Even when you do complete quests, they are not a substitute for the grind in most cases. See a mob? Better "consider" it and see if it's something you should attempt to kill.

Tera is the complete opposite to EverQuest. Tera gives you a series of quests that take you by the hand and bring you into a beautiful world of adventure. Diverting from the guided tour of Tera's world is typically the worst way to progress. The grind is simply completing quests that lead you to other quests that lead you to other quests. Anything else is a waste of time. If the mob you see in front of you doesn't have a "!" next to its name, then you probably haven't found the right quest hub. There is no "consider" system... the game flat out gives you the mob's level.

Rift is similar to Tera in that it has quest hubs with things to accomplish out in the world, but Rift adds another layer with "rifts" and world events. These are things that can happen at any time and reward you for taking part with other players of appropriate level. Rifts are beautiful and can be a lot of challenge and fun. Then add in the world events where hundreds of players all band together to move around the world completing "raid" type objectives and it's a pretty awesome time. The only problem with this system is you had to be part of a raid group in order to receive the rewards. I don't remember the specifics, but I remember trying to get in on raids for world events pretty often. This game has a consider system that's similar to EverQuest.

Guild Wars 2 is not a completely different animal, but it does things in such a slick way that it was hard for me to keep playing without coming back to talk about it here. Guild Wars 2 has a quest line that brings you from place to place like Tera or Rift, but where Guild Wars 2 really shines is that you'll NEVER make it from place to place without some dynamic event making itself available to you. Not only that, but the first quest I ever did was a series of riddles. It wasn't the biggest deal, but it felt fresh. Then, while I was moving to find the next "point of interest" on the map I got a notification that a new event was nearby. "Oooh... what's this?" I had to kill stampeding minotaurs. A circle appeared on my mini map where they could be found and I went after them. When I got there someone else was killing them to, so I just watched. That person laughed at me when I asked if I could join the quest because EVERYONE WHO HELPS KILL A MOB GETS CREDIT. That means when a big group boss is hanging around I can just wait for other people to engage and jump right in! No need to fight over camps or spawns... it feels like we're all in this together. Kill stealing is a thing of the past.

After a half hour or so I was so lost in a series of dynamic events that I didn't know which way was up... but I sure as hell was happy. No more quest log cluttering up half my map when I'm across the world from the target... the game is super slick about the UI. It makes a ton of sense and leaves you to just go out and explore the world.

Oh, and if you have a new friend join and you want to quest with them... you can... because the game automatically "de-levels" you to the zone you're in... so the days of "uh... I didn't get xp from that mob... you are too high for me to group with you" are OVER. The game also knows that at level 10 you've got more skills and gear than a level 5, so when you go back to a 1 - 5 zone it will drop you to 3 instead of 5... which makes sense. I don't know exactly how that works, but it is AWESOME that I can play with whoever I want even if I end up having more time to play than they do.

I play on Yak's Bend which was listed as "Very High" population and it shows. There are people EVERYWHERE... and I've had more interactions with people in one day of Guild Wars 2 than I have had total in Tera. I can't say that this game is perfect for me or that I'll enjoy it beyond leveling and some PvP (WvWvW or whatever), but right now... I'm just super excited to log back in... it's great!

Look out for Guild Wars 2 on stream... and a much better post about Guild Wars 2 soon!

Let's talk about Quest Hubs in MMOs

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Tue, 9 Apr 2013 21:40:00 -0700

There has to be a happy medium between XP camps and quest hubs. Going from EverQuest to Tera involved some serious culture shock and I'm not sure it's 100% necessary for that to be the case. I'm not a professional game designer or lore writer, so I'm not pretending I can do the job better than the pros, but I have a few ideas that I believe would improve on the quest hub system.

I've never heard anyone say they prefer quest hubs and turn ins to going out and killing mobs, but then again, it could be the circles I run in. I am just getting real tired of having to spend half my time in game riding around from NPC to NPC vs actually using my abilities.

I'd prefer to explore for the perfect camp for my level, kill a bunch of stuff with friends and then stop when the xp dwindles. In games like EverQuest that could be weeks. Then again, the XP came way more slowly in older games and zones would have very wide level ranges.

The alternative that has been presented in recent games is Quest Hubs. These are groups of NPCs that offer quests that give you gear, gold, and XP. These lead you from hub to hub and eventually from zone to zone while rewarding you for completing tasks. This is the way you are expected to level in Tera from 0 to 20.

So, why isn't there a hybrid of the two?

The most basic change that could be put in place would be to have the quest come AFTER you find the drop. This would be like picking up gnoll fangs and seeing they are NODROP LORE items and googling where they get turned in... only take out the googling part and have a quest pop when you pick up an item/kill a specific mob/go someplace special/etc. I'd even go so far as to give you a "quest bag" that quest items would go into and a skill similar to identify that would give you an idea of what to do with it. Identify "a gnoll fang" and it says "You've heard rumors that Captain Tillian rewards young adventurers well for trophies such as these. Go see him in Qeynos above the arena once you have collected enough to catch his attention. 1/4 fangs. Trivial at level 10" At 4 fangs, "I bet Captain Tillian will be quite pleased with this haul." At 5, your quest would update to 5/4. At 8 it would say 8/4, etc. You could stay in the cave killing gnolls as long as you wanted to and get all the rewards at the end. At least that way you'd be exploring for just the right place to kill mobs and when you found it there'd be rewards for you to clean up once you were tired of grinding mobs to death. It would also add incentive to killing random stuff you find in your travels. "I wonder what that named mob drops? Think he might start a cool quest?" As it stands in Tera, if I see a mob in a new zone that isn't marked as being part of a quest I avoid it because I know killing it will be a part of a quest later.

Another thing that could be done would be to condense the quests down to a minimal amount. Instead of having 2 quests where one tells you to kill rats in the sewers and another that tells you to kill ghosts in the sewers... have one quest that's kill rats and ghosts in the sewers.  There's no value added by clicking on 10 NPCs instead of 1 NPC. You could add more text to one conversation if the lore is the issue. I feel like making rats and ghosts their own quests is just stretching the time required instead of making it a great experience. A single NPC with kill quests for a zone could work on its own. Picture this being something like a hunt master in a forest telling you all the types of hides that he'd like help gathering and giving you a massive list of all the mobs in the forest. Then you could actually get some exploration in and get to know the area a little bit instead of spending half your time on a horse running from dot to dot.

I would even be okay with there being category linked NPCs in every major city that would give out "quests" similar to bounty boards. See the sheriff for information on wanted criminals. See the hunt master for animal targets. See the necromancer for undead... etc etc etc. That way you could get to know the people in town and then forget about town all together until you're ready to go back because you're done for the night, you're ready to move on, etc.

This could be tied more closely to the lore and positioned in a way that made more sense than just a random mob class quest hub. Picture a town that has a bandit problem and they are at the point of full blown war. General Whatever says, "The bandits have become bold. They have begun setting up camps in the open in plain view of the city walls! They need to be taught a lesson. If you are right for the job, then start driving them back!" Then that quest giver would be interested in anything you could do to push back bandits. You'd have a quest like "The Bandit War" and it would have goals like burn encampments, kill bandits, take out bandit officers, etc. This sounds like common sense, but with how many times you typically have to go back and forth between target and quest hub in modern MMOs it's easy to forget what the hell you're even trying to do lore wise. It would be much easier to follow if the entire war was a quest and you just worked your way through with lore messages popping after quest stages are completed.

Now, both of these ideas are centered on how you gain XP in game right? WRONG! These ideas are ways to prevent the situation we're in now where you press "share quest" and it says "lol no." There are simply too many quests and too many quest hubs with too little memorable lore or locations to be able to even communicate exactly what you're working on to anyone else. I've been on Skype with Palmer as we both walked into the same quest hub at the same time and we still can't sync up quests. We've been trying to share quests for 20 levels and can't figure out the best way to do it. There's absolutely no way that a random dude in zone and I would ever be in a position to quest together. That's a shame. The idea of "Massively Multiplayer" to me is that there is a pool of people out there that you will encounter in your travels and share adventures with. It's so hard to "share adventures" because everyone is so out of sync with how many tiny little steps there are to every single zone.

What I'm proposing here is that we make quests longer, more involved, and way lower in number with wider level ranges and progressive rewards. Let's picture that Bandit War again. So, I'm out and about putting bandit encampments to the torch right outside town because it's one of the first parts of the quest and appropriate risk/reward for my level and gear. I'm a Priest so I would be a valuable member of a group or duo with my heals and buffs. A slayer who's 5 levels higher than I am sees me and says "Hey, Baromen. Are you working on the Bandit War?" "Yes, I am." "Would you like to help me kill officers at their headquarters? I could really use a healer." "Yes, I would." We group up. Even though he's 5 levels higher than I am and working on a much later part of the quest I'm able to join him and be of use while getting rewards of my own done. The quest section that we are working on gives a reward of 100,000 XP and a new weapon for level 40 characters the first time you finish it.  After that you get a gold and xp reward for turning in additional "completions." We are having a great time and are very successful killing these officers at the HQ so we decide we'll finish it more than once. As we're doing this a Lancer (tank)  asks to join. He's also working on the quest but could use help with the sentries at the entrance. We agree and go back and help him. I complete another part of the quest and now the 3 of us adventure together.

As we're killing officers I pick up an officer's sword. That sword goes into my "lore bag" or whatever it's called and I get a prompt that I probably should take a closer look at it. This is the start of a new quest! I can share that quest with my group easily and now I have to collect 3 officer swords to gain gold from the blacksmith who'd like to study how they are forged. Great!

If you're concerned about exploiting or boosting via this method there should be a way a professional writer could write their way out of that problem. Try to turn in a level 20 quest at level 1 and the NPC could laugh at you. "This gnoll fang must be a fake or you a thief because those gnolls would tear a rookie like you apart! Don't waste my time with your trickery." The completion and reward would stay in your quest log until you hit a level where the NPC would "believe" you. Then you could turn them in for the xp/reward. Maybe not the perfect solution, but it at least proves you could throw up barriers to exploitation without taking the fun out of grouping.
There's no reason why we can't have quests that last a whole zone and don't require so much travel between NPCs. That would mean that someone you see in zone could be added to your party and regardless of what you're working on the two of you could work together to achieve the same goal. It's time to take the best of what's out there and make a game that feels like an MMO to the old timers without alienating the new consumers. Are there any games that even seem to care about the social aspect of quest hubs? Nope. Here's to hoping that there are devs out there who see this problem like I do.

PODCAST: S01E03 What's Worth Playing April 2013

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sun, 7 Apr 2013 20:40:00 -0700

In this episode we talk about some games you may have missed and why you should give them a second look.

Civilization Revolution: A Lesson for EA and Maxis

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Fri, 5 Apr 2013 19:26:00 -0700

I do not own SimCity 2013 (5, whatever... I still don't know how they are distinguishing this iteration from the others). I have watched streams of the game, YouTube videos, read reviews, and been unable to avoid discussions about SimCity on Reddit for weeks. A thought keeps popping up in my mind about this whole thing and I am tired of not spelling it out. This game would have been loved if it was marketed properly.

Civilization 4 was as deep and complex a turn based game as you could find back when it was released and has been loved and admired ever since. There are whole communities of people who still play the game just because it's great! I purchased it about a year ago because I wanted something turn based I could run on my laptop when I'm out of town and couldn't pay 100% attention to the screen at all times. It has never let me down. I have played a ton of Civ4 and have never been very good at it. I am simply overwhelmed by all there is to learn and do even though it gives you all the time in the world to make your decisions. I love it, but I know I'll never master it. It's everything you could want out of a turn based strategy game if you really want to get deep into the strategy part.

Civilization Revolutions was launched as a primarily console title that was INTENTIONALLY more accessible. The graphics were made more bright and goofy. The tech tree was dismantled and simplified. The whole experience was dialed back to make it much easier to get into than the previous 4 Civ games. If you were looking for the next Civ4 they TOLD YOU that revolutions wasn't it... but here's the important part...

THEY WERE WORKING ON CIV 5 WHICH WOULD BE THE SEQUEL TO CIV 4.

Civ Rev was an offshoot of the Civ world. It was a console game based off a PC juggernaut. It was Duplo to 4's Lego. But... Civ Rev was well received. I don't remember anyone spitting bile at Sid Meier about this new dumbed down causal game for consoles while the core market was on the PC.

If Civ Rev was sold as Civilization 5 I can only imagine the pitchforks and torches. It would have been everything wrong with the modern casualization of hardcore games. It's a CONSOLE game based on a PC exclusive! These are things that send the internet into a frothing white hot rage... but it didn't happen.

See where I'm going with this?

If SimCity 2013 was SimCity Online and cost $40 instead of $60 that would have been a start. If EA assured us that Maxis was working on SimCity 5 that would quench the thirst of everyone who loved super deep city simulation but that SimCity Online would be a fun social experience meant to be played online with your friends until SimCity 5 was launched then THIS "FUMBLED" LAUNCH WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED.

21 to 31 in Tera: Dungeons

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Thu, 4 Apr 2013 22:27:00 -0700

I'm still out of touch with what makes an MMO an MMO. Tera still feels Massively Multiplayer like Call of Duty is Massively Multiplayer. All the content that involves other people is reached the same way you'd play a game of Call of Duty. You say "I'd like to run a dungeon" and the game pops you into a dungeon. Replace that with "I'd like to play a round of team deathmatch" and you get where I'm coming from. The difference here is that instead of going through and selecting perks for your classes between dungeons you're moving around the world doing quests with other players around you.

"Around you" was chosen as the way to word that on purpose. There have been many times I've been doing a quest where I'm tasked with killing a bunch of monsters. When I get there, there's someone else killing those monsters. I can stand right next to that person and also kill those monsters until I've finished the quest, but we'll never interact. I've even taken it to the next level and tossed out heals to people I've seen doing the same quest I'm doing and the most I'll get out of them is "ty." Never a group invite, never a questing buddy... just "ty." The only exception to this was when Palmer and I were killing a BAM (Bad Ass Monster) someone ran up and started spamming "inv me!" We did, but after he got his kill he wandered off and didn't take part in the next BAM. He didn't take that opportunity to get to know us, run along and kill a bunch of BAMs for experience and loot, or queue for a dungeon. He got his BAM he couldn't get on his own and then wandered off. The best part was that he was the same level we were and it would have been a great group to kill a whole pile of BAMs... but he wouldn't even respond when I sent him messages. Odd.

So, there are people all around you doing things. I'm hoping they'll buy my stuff when I make things via alchemy, but other than that, they are only really there when you queue for a dungeon. Which I did... A LOT from 21 to 31.

Dungeons General

Bastion of Lok was my (and everyone else's) first experience in dungeons. Up until this point playing a Priest was no different from playing any other class. The only tangible difference was that I was able to heal myself... but I almost never had to. The time in between fights was plenty of "out of combat" time to not even need a heal. Then I ran my first dungeon. It was an eye opener because it actually forced me to learn my class specific spells (heals) and how to manage my mana. Those are two things I never even looked at prior to the first dungeon. I ended up changing all my skill bindings after just one run and having a very different outlook on being a Priest in Tera. It was a lot of fun! I realized this is the core competancy of Tera. The world is basically a holding pen for people waiting to run dungeons. There are no raids and I am not high enough level to experience a Nexus, so this is where the game shines for me.

So, you have a dungeon finder. If you listened to our last podcast you'd know my feelings on match making in games... if not, here we go again. I feel like dungeon finders make you worse at your role. Combine that with an open world that gives plentiful experience without any need for your class specific abilities and you have a player base that has no idea how to fill their roles. I actually tried to be ready to be a healer and just couldn't find the motivation to experiment. Even if I wanted to I'd need to have someone to experiment on and with how isolated people are... even when in close proximity to one another... it was impossible. So, I went into dungeon number one as the group's healer with no idea how my heal spells worked, how my mana would hold up, etc. As it turns out, having a general knowledge of how healing works in groups was enough to muddle through. Like I said above, I completely overhauled my skill binds afterwards and had a much better experience afterwards, but I actually cared about my performance and play a role that could get anyone killed at any time, so I can't really afk my way through my life in Tera.

The skill levels of the players I'm being grouped with is all over the map. I've had lancers (tanks) take zero damage the whole run and never lose aggro. Then the next lancer will be at half health with mobs running all over the place. I've had sorcerers get blown up 4 to 6 times in a single run and other sorcerers never take a hit. I feel that as a healer I'm in the unique position to focus on who's taking damage when and how much. I really can't tell which dps-ers are doing better or worse, but I do know that a living dps who's taking part in the fight is better than one who gets liquified in a single shot due to poor positioning.

Due to the dungeon finder I haven't been able to make any decent connections with anyone who has done a good job because so far I haven't met anyone from my server who stood out. The two tanks I really enjoyed running with were both from the role play server and like I said, I have no idea how to gauge DPS performance as there are no numbers for other players' DPS. No parse = no opinion beyond life/death and time I spend paying attention to their health bars. Combine this with the overall lack of motivation to do well and the result is an uncomfortable dungeon run with very little trust in anyone the whole time. I am constantly keeping an eye on dps-ers because they have a tendency to just sort of daydream instead of killing stuff.

Derping was alive and well way before you could be dropped into an instance with strangers from every server, but the way Tera works there's no way to tell who's good and bad when it comes to dps unless you judge them on everything but dps. That means they can just sit back and auto attack if they'd like to and I'll never know. . Tanks are easier to judge because they need to manage aggro... which seems to be the bottom of most tanks' priorities list once the fight starts. If a mob or 5 peel off and try to kill me it's on me to train them back on the tank and hope the AE portion of his attacks clip them.

I know how this is going to sound but...

BACK IN MY DAY, TANKS WERE ALL ABOUT THE AGGRO. If a mob peeled off to beat on anyone else it didn't matter what you were doing... YOU GOT AGGRO BACK... AND STAY OFF MY LAWN.

Healing beyond tab targeting

I was really curious how healing would work seeing as I can't target anyone for heals. This leaves AE healing, targeted AE healing, and reticle lock on healing. It's all pretty straight forward, but the violent camera swings it takes to lock on multiple players with the reticle can be tiresome. I use 3 heals primarily. One is a low cool down lock on heal that takes 3 actions to fire: activation, lock on, fire. The lock on is accomplished by moving your reticle over the person you want to heal. I can currently heal up to 3 people at once with this ability for around 3,000hp per heal. It has something like a 3 second cool down. The other two are both fixed distance AE heals. One heals for about 500hp a second in a small circle with a center point 10 meters in front of me. The other heals for 5,000hp immediately in a circle that starts at my feet and goes forward. It's an easy system to get a hold of and it makes for some interesting decisions from time to time. It's a very mobile and active skill set that doesn't allow me to just sit in the back and heal from a distance. The other major role I have is cleansing de-buffs. When a de-buff is applied the player's health bar goes from blue to purple (and there's a colorblind mode, so don't worry about that, colorblind guys). The only way I have to cleanse people is a large AE cleanse that requires me to be pretty close to the targets in order to hit them effectively.

In between these heals I have two mana return spells that I need to cycle depending on how the group is performing.

It's a very active lifestyle as a healer. I can even throw in a tiny bit of dps from time to time if the group is strong enough to not need constant healing. Pretty cool if you ask me.

How does it compare with other MMO healers in dungeons?

EverQuest is pure tab target while sitting on a mount in the back of the group healing. No other role outside of healing. No DPS at all. You get aggro? You die. The tank has to be aware of your position at all times just in case because without you, the group is history. 100% the opposite of Tera's healing experience.

Rift has tab targeting, but keeps you active by having a ton of different healing spells that need to be cycled. While I have 4 or so heals in Tera... I had something like 20 in Rift. I did find myself sitting in the back in Rift, but only between fights. I'd say Rift's Cleric is more of a traditional healer (when using Ward/Sent healing in particular). You can still contribute a little to the damage, but for the most part you'll have your hands full with the healing the whole time. I found myself staying mostly stationary so I could be found if I pulled aggro.

So...

Anyways, the dungeons have been fun. So fun, that I've decided to stick with Tera a while. I understand why they hold back the core game play for a while, but I was ready to give up from boredom. I picked a healer but never healed. By that measure, I might as well pick any other class (er... there are only 3... tank/heal/dps). I am guessing that the devs were afraid of creating a game that didn't feel like it had an open world or they would have had a dungeon available at level 1. As it plays now, I was on the verge of un-installing before I found the content this whole game is designed around. The content in the dungeons is nothing special. The boss fights are pretty simple with very few new abilities or problems. Not a lot of scripting. I enjoy them because I get to play my role and not feel like a gimpy hero from a single player game. If the dungeons were more complex and interesting it would help, but I'm not ready to say they all stink because I've only done the first two available and am not ready to write off the rest of them... however many there are. I just hope there's more depth to the encounters and a slightly higher learning curve instead of more hit points and damage... we'll see.

Anyways, I'm having a lot of fun with a game I hated at first. I'm glad Jay was so annoying about trying it, and if you are looking to kill some time, it's a fun experience for zero dollars.

LVL21 Priest LFG: A Brief intro to Tera

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 23:14:00 -0700

I rolled a priest in Tera the other night after a few months of being badgered by Jay to do so. After EverQuest, EVE, Rift, and Project 1999 I felt there was nothing to lose by trying another MMO. Especially if it's free.

So, I will give my short version of my experience:

I'm out of touch with MMOs.

Here's the longer version:

I am blown away by how streamlined this game is. I am moving from quest hub to quest hub along with everyone else who's around my level quickly and easily. I had no idea how to play the game when I downloaded it yet I'm already a third of the way through the levels. There is a radar and minimap on the screen that makes finding quest givers and targets as easy as it could be. The only way it would be any easier to find what I'm trying to do would be if I could just press one button and have it autopilot me over to the goal. My lousy sense of direction is legendary... yet I'm having no trouble at all finding my way around.

The "action based combat" is cool. I've been thinking about MMOs beyond 'tab targeting' for a long time and it's fun to see how it works out in the wild. The combat feels like it could be sped up a lot and still be easy to play, but I understand why it is the way it is. I'd like to see a MMO with the high energy pace of a Diablo III, but this is a step in the right direction regardless.

The gear feels limiting. You only have chest armor, gloves, boots, rings, necklace, earrings, and your weapon. I don't understand why they wouldn't have more slots. Would pants break the game? How about an off hand slot? Obviously, these are design choices that I'm sure were well thought out, but it feels like Duplo vs Lego right now.

All the chat channels are filled to the brim with garbage.

I play on a PvP server (Mount Terranis) and have only had 2 PvP experiences. First, a guy one shotted me while I was going back to town. There is no death penalty at all, so it was pretty much a poor man's gate. I went scouring over the logs to see what I lost... turns out I lost nothing at all. I was actually glad I got blasted because it put me right where I wanted to go. The second time was a slayer jumped me while I was questing and I won. I fought back from behind and learned my way in a long duration slug fest that ended when someone passing by saw me about to land the killing blow and decided they'd like to finish him off without saying anything and then ride off.

So, let me explain how PvP works on a PvP server. You can do a quick quest to be marked "Outlaw." That quest turns your name red. You can always undo the "Outlaw" status at any time. While you're an outlaw you can attack anyone and be attacked by anyone. You're also not welcome in many places, but I don't have a clear understanding of where you are and aren't allowed as I've seen red names in Lumber Town, so who knows? You also get some sort of buff that makes you tougher as an outlaw and that's probably because of what I saw in my second PvP experience. You fight one guy it could end up being 10 guys.

Shockingly, people still get their jimmies russled by PvP even without a death penalty. You have nothing to lose by being killed, so what's the big deal? I can't figure it out, but there are mad people in area chat all the time, so I guess it has some effect on people. I don't get it.

The form of PvP I am not involved in is GvG (guild vs guild). You can declare war on other guilds and fight them anywhere... including towns. This feels like the EVE Online model of hisec pvp, but our guild is pretty much a group of guys from the stream that are learning the game... no need to get our faces punched off in town.

The game is absolutely beautiful. That's pretty much all that needs to be said about that.

There's no reason to group between 1 and 21 from what I've seen. Even named mobs that con red can be easily solo'd at this point. I don't plan on grouping at all in the world. I hear that dungeons are worth doing, so I'll give them a try, but I wouldn't have to if I didn't want to. Is that okay? I don't think there's another option. Gone are the days of needing other players to get things done. Going straight from Project 1999 to Tera has made that difference very pronounced.

Is it worth playing? Yes. The price is right, the visuals are cool, and the action based combat is fun. Is this the compelling experience I've been looking for? I doubt it. It's just a fun way to pass some time. I don't expect my time invested in Tera to ever outpace time invested in other RPGs MMO or not. MMOs aren't built to be lasting experiences anymore.

PODCAST S01E02: Match Making killed the community

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 21:37:00 -0700

In this episode we explore how games have moved away from player hosted games, towards an easier to use automated match making system, and what that has done to online communities.

Direct Link to the MP3: HERE

Level 16 Enchanter LFG: Project 1999 Impressions

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:00:00 -0700

It's been about a month since I started messing with EverQuest Project 1999 and I've got a much better feel for what I've gotten myself into than I had when I originally posted about the game. At that point I was going off of mostly speculation based on what I had seen at that point. Today, I'd like to talk about what I've actually seen and done and give you an idea of what makes this game different.

How's the population?

This is probably the most frequently asked question when someone sees me playing Project1999 on stream. The simple, factual answer is between 600 and 1200 players depending on the time of day. I have no idea how that compares to the live server or EverQuest in its day. One thing that has been pretty clear is that there are people everywhere. From level 1 to 16 I've seen people moving around Qeynos, Black Burrow, and Western Karana. I've been in some full groups of strangers. I've been in zones that were too busy to be of use to me. I've also went to "hotzones" like Black Burrow and seen nobody in the zone. The server isn't crowded by any means, but there are lots of people enjoying the game at any given time. Just this morning I was shocked to see 8 people in Western Karana. That's more than I'd ever seen in the zone on live.

The important thing to point out when talking about population is that the only population you care about is the population that can help you do the things you want to do. What difference would it make to me personally if there were 10,000 players online and I was the only level 1 player around Ak'Anon? That's the situation on the live server from my personal experience. Leveling is so fast on live that you'll never get to know anyone. If I have a night off and play for 6 hours I'll blow by anyone who wasn't online to the point that they won't be able to group with me anymore. In Project 1999 the XP is slow. I've been farming bandits in Western Karana for weeks and have run into a lot of the same people day to day. It's nice to have a farming spot that lasts a few weeks because you're getting to know the area. For me, West Karana offers a good source of experience from the mobs and a great repeatable quest for both experience and platinum from the stuff they drop. I know my way around from the camp, to town, to the turn in NPC, and back and it's comfortable to keep doing what I'm doing.

I guess the best way to put it is I'm comfortable doing what I'm doing with the people who are around my level in the zones that I frequent. That's a good population if you ask me.

Understanding an old school mentality

MMOs used to be all about the journey. The games were meant to be enjoyed from the day you roll your character all the way through max level. The raid content that was available was basically a bonus. It was a way to reward you for spending all that time killing "a grass snake"s by giving you a chance to best huge monsters and make use of all the skills and gear you've earned. It wasn't an understanding that you were required to hit max level before you could enjoy a game until quite recently. I had no knowledge or interest in raiding end game stuff until I had been playing EverQuest for many years. Now, people routinely talk about "how long until max level" and "end game" is brought up in the first reviews of the game! This mentality has trivialized the time spent in game before max level. Companies are no longer building in a compelling experience from 1 to max. They are simply cranking out raid encounters and forgetting about everything else.

In the interest of keeping people engaged in the gameplay, modern games typically make you feel powerful early. You never get the feeling of being a tiny speck in the universe because they are afraid of losing subs. In contrast, my level 1 barbarian warrior almost stayed level 1 because the Vengeful Soloist (high level monster) was hanging around the entrance to the newbie hunting grounds and kept coming out of left field and murdering me. He wanders around, so even if you can't see him, you know he's out there somewhere waiting to put you in the ground if you stop paying attention. By the end of the night I had been killed by that stupid skeleton 6 times. It honestly feels like he's there to keep you from feeling like you have anything figured out. He's not far from the guards, but he's just as fast as you are, so you'll be limping to the city guards at low health praying that they save you many times regardless of how careful you are.

The other thing that I find very different with EverQuest is how quests are given out. You have to actually find an NPC that needs something done. I typically start with the guild master at my starting city and then walk around and hail every NPC in town trying to find something to do. When you say the right stuff they might point you in the right direction, but it's way more likely they'll just give you a hint. Then, when you're progressing through the quest there's a good chance that you'll run into monsters that you have no chance in killing... because the quests aren't given by level. You very rarely even know what the reward is going to be when you start... or if the task at hand is the only task or a piece of a large chain. Contrast that with the modern quest window that tells you where to go, what has to be done, and what the reward is before you even accept the quest. It is just a completely different feeling. It's exciting to hail someone and see what they have to say. You could end up with a bit of experience and gold for the things you were already doing or be sent on some epic quest that could last for months. You have no idea and things are never segregated by level, so it's a crap shoot what you're getting into. It's so much more rewarding... even when you spend a whole day collecting ice goblin necklaces to end up with a lantern.

In fact, getting that silly lantern after spending all that time collecting necklaces made it better. I got a lot of xp killing ice goblins, I had a goal to achieve, and when it was all over I got myself a light source. Would I have preferred a nice piece of armor or a weapon? Yes. But, the game doesn't work like that. It's never easy and there are no short cuts to get where you want to go.

When it feels like there is a short cut, there's often a down side. There is a repeatable quest in Black Burrow where you collect gnoll fangs and turn them in to a Captain Tillian in Qeynos for xp. You get a TON of experience for turning them in, but you lose faction standing with the "corrupt Qeynos guards." When you start turning them in it's almost impossible to tell which guards are which. Most guards were "indifferent" to me when I got to town. After turning in a bunch of fangs I noticed a guard "glowered at me dubiously" which meant I was not very well regarded. At that point I stopped turning fangs in. Meanwhile, a couple of my friends from the stream who wanted to catch up quickly kept turning in fangs for the "free" xp. Now, the corrupt guards are "Kill on Sight" to them. That means there are guards in town that will attack them the second they see them every time they want to go to Qeynos. These guards "path" around town, so both of these guys have a few deaths a piece thanks to their "free" xp and easy shortcut to leveling.

Can you imagine a new game having a mechanic like that? Want to level quick? Do this... but we'll make this town a death trap. I'm sure they'd be afraid people would just uninstall.

Death

I've also re-acquired my fear of dying in EverQuest. If it takes me 10 minutes to get to the place I want to hunt monsters then that's 10 minutes I'm going to lose if I die. I've found that I lose about an hour's worth of xp every time I die and Resurrections are laughably hard to find. I've only seen one cleric since I started playing other than the one I rolled and you don't get a rez spell until way later in the game. Your corpse goes away if you loot everything off of it, so you'd have to leave an item on the corpse you want rezzed and hope to find someone to rez you... not worth it at this point. That means it's not worth pushing yourself to the absolute limit because death is such a drastic penalty. On live I was typically fighting mobs that conned red meaning they are at least 3 levels higher than I am. On Project 1999 I prefer to fight light blues because they are the lowest level I can get xp from killing (with this odd exception of some greens giving xp that I don't understand). I end up getting more xp and having more fun because I'm not out of mana or dead while fighting light blues.

What type of maniac would prefer a high death penalty in an MMO? It seems like it would be a bad design choice. When you take a closer look at what a huge death penalty does to a game you start to realize why it was there in the first place. It makes every life valuable. If dying does nothing to your character and you're right back in the action, why fear death? Why play safe? Why learn encounters or practice things? Why would you have to know your character? Your skills? Your abilities? When the game keeps you safe on its own then things become way less meaningful.

This doesn't even take into account corpse runs. I forgot how I used to keep a full set of plate armor and weapons in the bank for my warrior just for when he'd die. I remembered when I died and didn't have any way of protecting myself on my way back to my corpse. Luckily, I wasn't far from home when I was put down. If that had been in the bottom of some crypt in the middle of nowhere I would have needed to have a backup set of gear just to get my real gear back.

Experience Gain

The "grind" has been fun. I make plenty of progress when I'm online and have been smoothly moving from level to level. It's slow enough that I get a real good feel of where I am and what I'm doing but it's not so slow that I'll be bored of what I'm doing before the next option becomes available. I would like to try new places from time to time, but I have been having a lot of new friends joining the game and basing out of one place that's easy to get to has been very useful. If I was on my own I'd of probably moved from Qeynos to Freeport, but as it stands, West Karana is fine and Qeynos is feeling like home. Sure, it's been a month and I'm only level 16, but I wouldn't want it any other way. I'm feeling like this is the best pacing in any MMO I've played. The world is complex and moving any faster would trivialize content before I even had a grip on where I'm at. I really like it.

Other Hurdles to Jump

At level 16 I finally got Breeze and Quickness (mana regen and weapon attack speed buffs) which means I have at least one version of every spell class I'm going to get. Prior to hitting 16 I felt incomplete. I'm glad I'm there, but a month to get here was a lot. I wouldn't want to get xp faster, I'd like to see these spells unlocked just a touch earlier.

Spells, spell reagents, and spell research that aren't available in either Qeynos or Halas simply don't exist. I'm not about to make a trek to a new city just to buy tiny daggers so I can summon an illusion pet. I'm also not about to go halfway across the world to buy the updated illusions or research spells. I'm going to have to end up dumping all my skill points into research so I can try to avoid failing the spell combines because the components are hard to come by. One of the "torn pages" I need I only have 1 of, so if that fails I may find myself killing level 15 humanoid mobs for days for no experience just to find that specific half page again. This must be less of a problem for porting classes, but for me, I just don't see the value in grabbing any non-essential spell from far away when I can do just fine without it. There have been two exceptions to this. Breeze is from The Overthere... and SUPERHUBBBRO got it for me. The other is my AE mez which I have to research. Once I have 5 or 10 of each the left and right side of the pages I need to research it I'll make the trip and try it out.

I forgot all about the fact that you can't just group with anyone. I know that's not a new concept, but you can only group with people in your level range. At level 10 you can group up to 16 (I believe) and the formula goes your level + ((your level/2) + 1). That isn't so forgiving early on. Not a huge deal when you're looking for group members, but when you're trying to group with friends you'd wish it was just a higher xp penalty vs no xp at all for the lowbie.

"I have no use for this" was added way after this era. If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about... when you gave a quest item to an NPC who didn't need it on live the NPC would hand it back and say "I have no use for this." On Project 1999 they simply consume the item with no recourse. Even killing the NPC won't get your item back... so it's gone. I made the mistake of handing my tattered note to the wrong NPC 3 out of 4 times meaning I have 3 characters who are completely nude for the start of their existence. In fact, none of those 3 have chest armor due to that piece being "covered" by the tattered note gear and not well represented as dropped equipment in newbie zones.

Will I keep playing?

Yes. I'm actually pretty happy with Project 1999 right now. I'm enjoying the pace of the world and the quality of the people I'm running into. The guys from the stream who have joined me online have been a lot of fun as well. I hope we all keep at it.

The only disappointing thing about playing Project 1999 on stream is that it's not very popular with viewers. I do intend to continue playing the game on stream, but I will try and mix other games in there from time to time.

That being said, Tera is another game that I've had my eye on for a while and while I normally can tune out his BS, Jay has been persistent about me getting involved... so I probably will in the coming week or two.

Tropico 4 has been a blast too. Just a silly sim game that's fun to play. I will have a review of that game soon.

My Podcasting Experience

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:23:00 -0700

"The Six Sided Ring of Fire Presents..." is the podcast that Jay and I have been "working on" for years. The both of us wanted to do a podcast and have been talking about it for as long as I can remember, but taking the first step was hard. It's way easier to plan than it is to actually start the recorder and blab away. Once we did we learned that we need a ton of work and have a long road ahead of us if we want to make this awesome. I've included the first attempt below. If you want to listen to it, it's here:

The original plan was to do a video podcast and have the both of us in game doing something that we'd talk about. If we were talking about MOBAs, we'd play a MOBA. If we were talking about RPGs, we'd play RPGs... etc etc etc This caused its own set of problems that became abundantly clear after sitting down and working on the first episode.

1. I can't focus on two things at once. I was mind wiped by shiny things on screen many times while trying to record this episode.
2. Video podcasts are huge files. This restricts the places it can go and reduces the interest level from people involved. It was explained to me that most people just wanted mp3 files so they could listen while doing something else.
3. We needed a better, smaller topic. Our first podcast, linked above, is about Free to Play games. That's such a huge topic that we ended up just skimming a whole bunch of information instead of driving home a focused point. The comment I received most often about the first podcast was that "It was like a more focused stream chat." When I brought that feedback to Jay his response was "Is that what we're aiming for?" No. It's not. We need a more focused topic so we can get deeper. Broad topics are simply too shallow.
4. Hardware needs to be tested every single time. I had set up my gear in a new way and because of that I came out way louder than Jay even though we had tested the day before. It took a good amount of time to learn how to normalize the audio and I still sound odd in the recording. It's very important to test extensively before trying to record.

So, we recorded episode 2: How to be a better game consumer last night and it was much better:

We took on a much smaller topic, prepped ourselves much better, and kept an eye on the clock to avoid going too long. The goal was an hour and it ran 1:10. I think the intro needs work. I had no idea how to intro the show and when I did it came off awkward. Once we got started it became a solid presentation. That lasted until about the 50 minute mark when I felt like we started repeating ourselves and circling the same topics. If I had noticed it earlier I would have tried to wrap it up. The goal for the next podcast will be to have a stronger intro and ending to give it a better feel, but the rest of it is actually very solid. We took aim at a topic and hit it the entire time. We made actual points that were backed up with data. We had examples of everything we wanted to cover and it came across very strong. Obviously, we can do much better, but from episode zero to one we've come a long way.

I'd love to hear what you guys think. Leave a comment below, get me on twitter (twitter.com/t6srof), send me an email (t6srof@gmail.com), or just stop on by the stream and say hi (twitch.tv/t6srof).

Podcast S01E01: How to be a better game consumer

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:18:00 -0700

In this episode Jay and Isaac talk about the way games are released and how to avoid being duped and encouraging bad business. Topics include pre-release hype, NDAs, DLC, season passes, and pre-order bonuses.

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm First Impression

T6SROF@GMAIL.COM (Unknown) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 05:54:00 -0700

Time played: 5 hours
Mode played: Campaign (Normal)
Story point: finished primal planet

This post is basically a stream of consciousness as I think about what I liked and didn't from last night's HOTS time. Not a lot of structure and I'm not really looking to polish it up, but I figured I could throw this out there and you may find it interesting.

I'm already seeing a bit of what was making people nervous about HOTS from the get go. The harvesters no longer needing to be split, the count of workers, etc. Those things are considered ways to raise the skill floor and encourage people to focus on more "fun" mechanics like fighting. I'm cautiously optimistic about this one. I think taking away some of the mechanics to drive the game to the fun parts is helpful. Why? Because I will never be on stage at MLG playing StarCraft... or anything for that matter, so it just does not concern me what happens at the pro level. Those guys have ZERO problems splitting workers or saturating bases, so what difference does it make?

Don't answer that.

The look of the game is... different. It's all basically the same thing, but something feels off. The art direction has a different... flavor to it. I guess anything that makes me feel uncomfortable about the art design could 100% be attributed to Wings of Liberty's art direction being focused on the high tech human military style of the Terran and HOTS on the living nightmare that is the Zerg. The only problem with that assumption is that there are a ton of pastels and what appear to be chalk artwork during loading sequences. That makes me feel like they are almost going from slimy gross monsters to something along the lines of flowers. Sure, these flowers will still kill you, but the colors are just throwing me off.

The speech bubbles and extensive use of zoomed in game engine cut scenes is odd and feels somewhat out of place. I'll probably have to go through the WoL campaign again to see if I'm remembering this incorrectly.

The missions have been interesting. Blizzard did a good job taking what makes Zerg interesting and expanding on it. I was never a big fan of the hero soldier type missions from WoL and these are only slightly more tolerable. I'm really hoping for a lot of big battle type missions going forward. I'm still in the "here's a new unit" phase... so we'll see.

I find myself way more interested than I thought I'd be in the story. No spoilers, but Kerrigan gets herself into quite a pickle with the decisions she's made. Spoilers: The fact that she gets news from the goofy news team from WoL is insane if you ask me... but I guess she could play it off as she was the Queen of Blades while they were off lying to everyone... but anyways... Spoilers off. The guys in the chat and I have new favorite characters and things have been fun, story wise. The writing feels a little inconsistent. Some characters and dialogue sequences are fantastic while others are flat. Still shows moments of amazing greatness, but others are like "seriously?"

This campaign seems to have the underlying theme of evolution. There are some amazing abilities you can add to your swarm that I didn't see coming. Also, the ability to move your research points around as you see fit whenever you are out of a mission is fantastic. I never really understood what I was doing with WoL's skill point system and figured it wasn't worth messing around with. Just picked what was obviously useful and forgot about the rest. In HOTS I'm swapping them in and out in order to see what combinations are the most fun/usefull.

A cut scene crashed on me and I couldn't see it again without restarting the mission. That was disappointing to say the least. I expect Blizzard IPs to be polished to a fine sheen... not crashing in a cut scene. The other thing I find... troubling... is that every loading screen has a "streaming content 23mb/30mb" type counter on the bottom right. I downloaded the game to 100% before starting to play. I don't like the idea that I can't play offline. I know you could play the campaign of WoL offline, but I haven't tried HOTS as I just played some campaign in one sitting.

Final thoughts:

Fun so far, but just doesn't feel right yet. I don't know if this will go away or not, but I will sure as anything finish this campaign. Will this lead me back online to ladder like I used to? Probably not. I'm having too much fun with Dark Souls et al. Am I glad I bought it? Sure... I'm just not super excited about getting knuckle deep in StarCraft II at this point. Only time will tell.