It is all about the time sink

The time sink game is all I’m playing at the moment. It has many levels and challenges.

I have three writing mini-projects going at once, a few games to try to play, and a family to look after. The three writing projects have deadlines which are looming so I really should be doing those with all my spare time, but I find them difficult to write them without spending large blocks of time. When I write I need a good 1-2 hours of time to get anything new written. I can review my own work in much smaller time blocks, but there is only so much review that can be done before it is called procrastination. New text needs thinking time.

A pc game however can be 30 minutes to 1 hour if I know what I’m doing (like WoW), or need a heap more (like 2-3 hours) if it is a game which is new to me like Elder Scrolls, EvE, Star Wars. I guess I could go play D3 too if I wanted some hack and slash fun, and D3 is the game I’ll fall back to when all else fails.

The writing is all based around pen and paper role-playing games (for a Deathwatch mini-module and a fan made Ars Magica supplement), and I’m enjoying the process of trying to create something for a critical audience. Writing for your own sake is easy, writing for an audience who will read, review, editorialise, and point out incongruity is much harder. That could be part of my hesitation too. The projects are not commercial things, so I’m not targeting a commercial level quality, but still thinking it has to be better than my typical notepad scrawl.

As far as computer games go, WoW is still interesting to me. I have some gripes which will come out below, but as I write this I’m really just mouthing off about an errant kid who I like, but pissed me off recently.

I think it is interesting that WoW Insider has announced cut-backs to their blog staff across all games, and wow is significantly affected. That would not happen if the revenue was flowing well, and that is telling about the users of these games, and the market in general. Even though the subscription rate is ok-ish the players themselves are not putting up with any kind of silly or boring content anymore. I think repetition will be the next thing that MMOs have to have less of to keep their audiences, and that will be a huge problem for almost all the theme park style games. Players want more content, more often, with no drop in quality or they go elsewhere. They might return when the new content drops, but almost all the players I speak to are not willing to wait. They go elsewhere. And they should too.

WoW and Guilds

Well there is a doozy here to tell. Many of our raiders either left for greener pastures, were removed for being painful, or left for life reasons. That then caused another round of departures, as others had to ponder leaving too. Then some of those greener pastures were not as good as advertised, so those people began looking around again. Because I’m fed up with being treated like a revolving door, and fed up with the whinging, a few were told they were not welcome back. I think most people would support a player making the “right” call for themselves, and forgive a lot of how that was communicated or made. We’re all human. I think a Guild has to also make the “right” choices too, and that means sometimes enough is enough.

This was not a great time for our guild, but also not unexpected at this stage in the game. The downtime between expansions is always crappy for guilds, with only the strongest ones staying focused. Add in some continued drama, a few people who think they are special snowflakes, and you’re left with very little to do. There is no lever by which a player can be controlled (such as an employment contract for compensation) so “managing” difficult people is next to impossible for any prolonged period.

That leaves us with a guild of social players and no “serious progression” raids happening. Frankly I’m glad that some of the pains-in-the-arse players are gone. I’m sad that we lost great people too, and even more so that it might lead to others leaving. At this point though it is not something to fight, but something to accept. I want players to be having fun, and that is far more important than rubbish about which guild you belong to, or she-said-he-said malarkey. I am glad it is “over”. I’m glad that the people who are staying will not have to wonder why such stupidity is tolerated. It is not tolerated anymore.

I can now login without having to think about somebody getting shitty about some illusory problem. Finally, no dramas from World of Warcraft. Yeehaw! I do not even understand why in hell some people require the input that they do; it is like they are not adults at all.

I’m even happy that the people who left are getting what they like from their game time. It is good to think that people can go somewhere and be happy, and it is very possible (and even a certainty in one case) that a problem only existed because of the people involved. Dissolve the problem relationship permanently, and the fun comes back. More power to them. I hope they’re all killing digital monsters, and looting wonderful pixels.

I’m really not having a go, just talking through what happened. I’m sure the choices were not perfect, nobody makes perfect choices all the time.

Bygones are bygones. – TyphoonAndrew.

An aside – Wow characters can only belong to a single guild at a time, and therefore changing guilds is also inevitable. Why can’t WoW have more than one formal method to organise players. Cal them battle units, corps, whatever, but allow a way that players can stay in a guild they like, but also advance and be managed in another set of organisations. It might help players who have dual loyalties. We can cross-server raid all sorts of junk, but cannot organise characters in the same way in-game. I think that is a functional gap.

ESO Beta

This weekend I was given a ticket into Elder Scrolls Online Beta (thanks T!) and it looks like a reasonable game. As my friend told me “think of it as a good single player story, not as an MMO” and its a great game. There was an NDA which I briefly skimmed while downloading the game so rather than say anything questionable, I’ll just say that it is similar enough that I knew what to do, but was a little different. Graphically it will challenge some computers. This is not a game which will run well on a low spec machine.

Where is the value?

If I were to think about value for money when playing time sinks I not subscribe to Wow, Eve, ESO, or any other subscription game. I’d get back into Star Wars, or something like it. It’s free and has plenty of content I’ve not played. Or many of the other games out there that are free to play. I do like the idea of not having a wow subscription for a while to save up for something else. Perhaps it is time to pause my membership for a few months.

I’ve also got a 7 day trial of EvE sitting waiting, but I cannot bring myself to login just yet. It looks fantastic, and honestly I’d be playing more just to look at the pretty space pictures than actually want to do space battles. I don’t think that alone is worth a subscription cost. In fact a video of beautiful space scenes rolling in the background would almost be as appealing.

That’s not weird. Is it? Happy killing, TyphoonAndrew

Penny Arcade perfection on WoW and the NSA

The Great Game by Penny Arcade is wonderfully perverse. They’re awesome.

Bloody typos.

Why I am still playing, and loving it

Written first for the WoW Hammer website, re-posting here some time later. Please forgive the fact it has not been reedited for the past weeks. It’s been busy.

 

I’ve also not been playing much since then, but always endeavour to do so. I might need a “am I still playing” post soon. Grumble.

The content in the recent patch is excellent, and it will very likely hold the player base in thrall until Blizzcon where my guess is we will see another announcement to keep the WoWers wowed.

Blog status like the Drowned God

“What is dead my never die”

It has been another fast and tiring few weeks around the TyphoonAndrew household, with far too much non-gaming malarkey. That does not mean that nothing news worth happened, but gosh darn it – I can’t give my usual degree of rant on the topics.

Here is a rapid fire round-up of some things that I thought to blog in detail about, but won’t get time to.

Should characters be scaled?

At best, make it an option. No way I want this as a forced change.

If you want it to be forced and no choice to stay high level then I can agree to disagree with you, and then also decide that you really must be a tad selfish. Games can be about fun options, and it should not totally destroy an existing fun to crate a new fun.

Blizzcon News and Gossip

Frankly I’m beyond caring about Blizzcon, particularly where getting the information asap from the showroom floor is concerned. Australians are far too far from the noise and splendorous hype for me to worry about being current.

The general buzz is about the DOTA style game they are ramping up, but I really hope we do get an expansion announcement and then details about it.

Without one it feels like the end of Mists just sort of ends with a whimper.

Blackthorne can be downloaded.

I have no idea what it is (was) or it if it is worth downloading.The screenies I fond make it look like a side scrolling action game. Cool for some casual kicks.

HearthStone, Impressions so far

A week ago I downloaded and started playing HearthStone. For a beta it is solid.There were no graphical glitches, error 37s, or other strange config things going on to hamper getting in straight away to play.

Overall – I’ve now been reminded why I hate “Draw a Card” based games and why I just stayed away from MtG when it was repeatedly offered at game stores and roleplaying tables. The degree of “random” in what powers can be used when is a key issue for how the game plays. That might be a cornerstone of this style of game and a known factor to many players, but for me it is farcical.

The darn game could be renamed “The Frustration of RNG”.

Knowing that a deck contains a few handy abilities to your current situation and not getting them for turn after turn is way too frustrating. Twelve or so games into the normal Practice modes where you try to unlock the other classes and I was almost screaming at the screen. I certainly thumped the table. I am also consistently frustrated by how often the NPCs is able to pull the “right” move. Kill a taunt empowered card and the NPC drops another straight down. For pity’s sake. The NPCs seem to always have the right card as follow-up. Screw this.

One battle my “Heroic” Mage drew no extra minion cards for 5x rounds – in a game based upon using minions and specials to win! In another game which came down to both heroes being on less that 5 HP at the last turn I’d never seen a Fireball card (4pts cost inflicting 6 damage). ON A MAGE!

I also noticed that there is a certain strategy in not just using cards because you can deploy them. The NPCs in Practice mode seem to hold cards early and then swamp the board later. The NPCs in the tutorial games are softer and seem to have worse luck with cards. I’d like to know if the NPCs are at the same “level” as my hero or am I being challenged by level 10 opponents while tooling around on a level 1-3.

That aside…

• Too many “click to proceed” things from the time you open the app to the time you are actually about to play. Animations are slow (on my laptop). I think that is by design in HearthStone as WoW plays fine on the same laptop and it cannot be using much in the way of a 3d engine.
• Overall I’d like it to “play quicker”. Show cards quicker, etc.
• The initial training fights have the odd “Grom Dar!”, “You will burn”, and other character based emotes and actions, and its funny now but after a few games I started wondering how old that will get.

After the training five or so fights, the player is tasked with defeating the other classes. Some classes seem already freaking cool, and others disadvantaged.

The Mage (starter) has a 2pt special power which delivers 1x damage, and it can be used every turn if you wish. By contrast the Hunter has a 2pt ability which inflicts 2x damage. Why? I note that the Mage can always ping 1pt, but the hunter can sometimes not, but that is a trivial limitation on a game where we usually have other uses for those points.

So far I’ve unlocked the Warrior, Shaman, and Priest so far, and find the Warlocks, Hunters, and Druids darn tough to beat. I’ve heard that Rogues are tough to content with, but both my matches have been down to the wire although I’ve lost both too.

The Warlock’s draw a card power is fantastic, and I am repeatedly fighting and getting trounced by the Warlock because I think that ability will suit how I like to play. Sure it might cost a few health, but a Card per 2pts is trivial if you have only a few cards left in your hand. The Druid being able to directly attack is great. It might only be useful periodically, but it seems hardy and appropriate to the class.

The Monk and Death Knight are not present as classes and I can forgive that given how much diversity there is already in the class mix.

Related articles

• Late-ish into the HearthStone beta (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)

I’d back a MOO2 clone in a heartbeat

BioBreak blog reminded me today how much I loved the PC game Master of Orion 2. By today’s games it is a contradiction to all the features that generate buzz:

• single player
• turn based
• fully offline
• no time limits
• still images, or sprite graphics

Why was it so good? Well for a start it supplied a backdrop for my mind to fill in the story.

Can the Trinity be damned?

Can the trinity of tank, heal, damage roles in online rpg games be removed? Really?

An old question, and perhaps one which is both too subjective for each game style in question, and also blisteringly obvious for MMOs. Blessing of Kings has a great post where the discussion thread is the perfect primer for the issues and the potential degrees of how effective the solutions will be. A darn good read.

To me it is all about degrees of effectiveness vs the suspension of disbelief. No solution I’ve ever read provided a summary for an MMORPG that has no role based system, without a set of quasi-magical powers to manipulate the monster’s behaviour. And that is not what might really happen.

If nine of my friends and I decided to attack a giant, I don’t think the giant would understand taunts enough to only swing at one person, or that two of us were good at recovering from wounds so might be better to kill early. The giant is going to kill easy targets, targets that hurt it a lot, and then the rest of us.

Similarly a grizzly bear will attack one of us until it can get a good meal, unless we keep poking it with spears in which case it will hurt the spear carrier and probably ignore any others just standing to the side waving their hands (healing, caster dps).

In MMORPGs I don’t think it can be totally removed. I don’t think I’d want it removed either. We have a method which is essentially in support of the fun, and while the mechanics of that illusion might be tweaked, the illusion is useful.

Thinking about the in-game store

It was going to happen. I don’t like at all what I’m reading. If you’re “pro” any side of these features then I’d warn you that I am not before you read on. I’m angry about this, and strong language follows.

Achievement Spam screenshots

If nothing else, getting achievements means I am doing something sort of productive in wow. Not majorly productive – like gearing, or getting a something really rare; but I am getting somewhere.

Just pruned the front page blog links

I’ve pruned dead, gone, missing, or content changed links and blogs from the my warcraft & pc gaming blog’s homepage (ya, this one you’re reading); and thought it might also serve as an invite to readers and subscribers to tell me about things that should be there. So many of the resources from 2007 through 2011 are gone.

So allowing that it is WoW or gaming related – what do you visit that’s worth linking, or should I link to you?

Maintenance is fun. TyphoonAndrew

Mine Is Another Man’s Treasure

I’ve been hunting and completed the “Is Another Man’s Treasure” achievement, and now have my shiny new title, the Relic Hunter. It was a short but fun journey which leads me to ponder some of the other achievements and special things I might be able to do during down time.

My gathering has not stopped though.

So far my main has now got about 22 of the 25 or so items which you can find to get the achievement, which only requires 20. I plan to get the others slowly over time.

My alts are still gathering these too. I have two Jade Infused Blades and two Jinyu Staves, and will be working on a few more Pandaren Mining Picks, and hopefully at least two of the caster neck items. Each find is nice in terms of silly feedback reward, and also 300k experience to a leveling character. Not to be sniffed at.

Insidious Guild – Ultimate Challenge (screenshot)

A little while ago the Insidious Guild on Nagrand got THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE (yes, has to be written in caps, its the ultimate). That means 250 Guild Challenges. Sheesh the boy and girls in Insidious are a busy bunch of achievement junkies players.

drool … Armored Bloodwing mount

What a nice evil looking Bat! The new store purchasable mount is god damned evil looking, and a pleasure to behold. Blizzard store link for those who can’t wait and have $25 they can spend without regard for charity or child support.

I want this mount.

Ref from MMO Champion: Armored Bloodwing – Items – World of Warcraft. Video after the break.

Have we lost Titan? End of days…

I both loathe and desire the Blizzard fan-base, as they make threads like this – where Titan is announced as delayed…(snarky-warning)

“only reason i got bizzcon tickets was to see titan info. guess its time to double the price and ebay em, really a shame”

You paid a huge amount of cash to attend the hopeful launch of a game which we know almost nothing about.

LucasArts Closed

Rhetoric surrounds the closure of LucasArts. I feel for the folks who have lost their jobs, and agree with the popularist cynical view that most of what made the company iconic originally has not been the daily activity for many years. That said the company did have some interesting different games in production for Star Wars and I was excited. 1313 was a new direction, and I was watching it. I was even a little excited despite feeling that the Star Wars MMO failed to deliver anything different or as good as WoW. It will be a shame if those games do not get picked up by other software development houses, and hopefully some of the staff too.

Of course the comments are a range of support and snide, the move is not totally unexpected given Disney has Star Wars now and can do as it wishes. This is a significant point in time to watch…will Disney provide vision for the franchise, or produce garbage?

IMHO Disney is a monolithic company operating in ways that only rarely connect with my daily life. I watch their films when I get around to them, and generally don’t buy merchandise or go to theme parks. They have purchased a powerful brand in Star Wars, with a very passionate support base. With that passion comes expectation and management of feedback, some fans are not forgiving.

I hope they have a new angle and create something in the spirit of the first Star Wars film. That would impress, and have a chance of providing a continuing fan-base well into the next decade.

Src: LucasArts Video Game Development Shutdown by Disney.

Hearthstone looks interesting

The new thing from Blizzard is a digital card game named Hearthstone. I think it is great to see effort by Blizzard to expand their breadth of game styles into new areas. These type of games do attract players with different needs and this is especially attractive as it is both free to play, and will run on many platforms including the iPad. This is a good strategy in my opinion for diverging their interests, which on the whole will help keep the company stronger (as long as it is a good game).

Be warned the promo video does not demonstrate the gameplay, for that check out the main website or the MMO Champion link below.

Time for Tokens to die

Years ago the wow community were rousing about the token system was ok, but fundamentally flawed. The mini-game we play after the boss dies is another treadmill-merry-go-round where gear drops which is useless. As a design principle wow’s reward for effort is based upon re-trying the kills each week until you get lucky. Today I’m bloody mad about this as its been far too long that we’ve been suffering this. Rant incoming.

In our guild forums I wrote this class tokens:

On the token (issue) I think we’re screwed for two reasons: we need to take what we can in terms of characters who are able to join and raid above their match on the token, and we can’t get people to switch characters just to suit the bloody token system each major content patch. It is a bullshit scenario to be in, but I can’t think of a solution that does not have the regular raiders re-rolling each patch.

The token system was an ok idea to allow a boss to drop loot which would not be fraught with drama, as only a few classes could use it. Less people = less drama right? Wrong.

We have in guild now is one character with a token to himself, and half the raid split on each of the other two. Ah shit, gear drama. And I don’t mean people being bitches about loot, I mean that we see Tokens getting cycled for gold/de as we’ve had too many of one type and miles from enough of others. The drama is that our progression is slowed due to shitty luck. A boss dies but the drop is totally pointless.

Also with 4-5 players on each 2 tokens it takes huge amounts of time to gear those 9 players. It is not just 9 kills job done, because we have alt sets, and subs who join from time to time to help with the roster, which makes the distribution ever worse.

Just bring more people to suit the tokens? The server populations are shrinking and this is a totally non-viable response.

Bring the player not the class? Nope. Bring a balance of classes for the tokens. Oh and the tokens change each major content patch. Arrrg.

Reroll? Good god, have you seen how unfriendly the alts are? Forget that as viable for everyone except those with huge amounts of time to play.

The outcome is our raid group just has to suck it up, and keep grinding.

Honestly I am so sick of the loot rewards or issues around loot getting in the way of actually having fun with my raid team in World of Warcraft.

Fark this, I’m soon going to play something else. If Blizzard need a reason why I’ve moved to month-on month payments now, and will shortly consider reading a book instead of logging in they can start with this. Fark it. Destroy it all.

(p.s. what about suggestions for alternatives? Nope, I’ve done that for years suggesting ways that progressive “coins” or currency could be acquired each kill. Do a search on Gear on the blog… they’ll be a few.)

WoW players raise $2.3 mil for Sandy Relief

Warcraft players raised $2.3 Million for Sandy relief through puchased of entirely option in-game widgets and toys. At last a feelgood aspect of MMO games, instead of a typical angry rant. 2.3m for any charity effort is bloody nice work, and not bad considering we’re a bunch of no-life basement dwellers; with violent tendencies.

Kind of makes you feel good. See we do have souls. Kek.

World of Warcraft Players Raise $2.3 Million for Sandy | Geekosystem.

Exalted with the Lorewakers

I didn’t want to be exalted with the Lorewalkers for the Red Disc, although that is a nice bonus. The real goal was the Archy tools to spin up the Archy nodes in Pandaria, and to teleport to a random active site. Such good function needs to be acquired.
I do like the fact I can fly around like the trash mobs in the Malygos fight though. Very cool.

Stats on Heroic Raiders

Any time I see stats for Raiding numbers I am interested and start comparing realms, guilds, factions, etc. Typically this ends in me confirming something which I felt was already half true in my mind, or gaining a deeper level of information about a known real impact. That said, anytime I see stats I also assume that somebody is lying about something. Human nature.

Today I saw a page for the PvE Raiding stats across all servers for characters which had killed at least 2/16 heroic bosses on 11 Dec. This means our server Nagrand-US ranks 189th on the list, with only 38 characters killing 2/16. That is across the 394,805 guilds and 25,581,509 characters in their database.

By comparison the high values were in the 500s and 600s characters on some realms having killed 2+ bosses, 147 realms with less than 10 characters, and 87 realms that have not killed any at all. The “high” servers have also got many guilds which have 14+ of 16 bosses in hard modes for Tier 14 raid content. These guys are awesome, and I’m jealous.

There are also 60 realms where there are greater than zero but less than 10 characters who have killed 2+ bosses. Considering the minimum raid size is 10 that means that transfers must be occurring with some regularity. How else do you get 5 characters on a realm who have killed 2+ bosses on heroic?

Some of my old servers (Feathermoon-US) is 0, Eonar-US has 30, and Sumamar and Earthen Ring have only 15. The average is roughly 47 characters per realm who have killed 2/16, but then the median is only 25 telling us that there is a skew in the distribution where the leader realms drop off drastically from the top, very quickly into the average, and a very long tail which has not.

Now our guild has not killed any Heroic modes as yet (soon), and while there are only 28k characters who have, I don’t feel too bad as we are gaining ground. Would I like to be? Of course.

(update) What does it mean?

Well not much in the broader sense, just that it was interesting in terms of a gauge for where raiders are in the content. Seeing 10,000+ players have run through heroics, but many realms have very little heroics implies to me that the “end” of T14 is a significant way off yet. I’ve read rumour of the next raid in 5.2 being an Ulduar style raid, and that is exciting. Timing wise I hope that it is a long way away so we get the opportunity to strike through the current stuff.

Happy killing.