The Nexus Blues

The other day, Lewis Burnell published an article on Ten Ton Hammer entitled I Miss Wildstar.

It's been 9 months since Wildstar shut down, and Lewis makes the argument that the MMO should have been allowed to live, particularly when he believes that the game was --in his opinion-- "one or two patches away from greatness."

I can't disagree with the need for a couple of patches to fix some persistent gameplay issues in Wildstar, but I'm not convinced that Wildstar would have survived even then.

Sure, Wildstar did a lot of things right, such as the storyline and even the overall gameplay. People who played around with the in-game housing loved it*, and the cartoony graphics evoked a classic WoW-esque feel that more "realistic" graphics designs in other MMOs don't.

But Wildstar had... issues.

The game released at the tail end of the big MMO boom, when the massive herd of MMO players would try a new release out, invoke the WoW mantra "the game begins at max level", and proceed to rush through the leveling content only to find the end game content locked behind some truly Old School raid attunement. This led to the bizarre combination of "there's nothing to do" and "it's too hard" from different parts of the player base.

Wildstar also promised updates at a pace that proved too good to be true, which meant that people who were promised an everflowing font of "stuff to do" never saw that happen.

Therefore many of those same players, who played Wildstar in the Summer of 2014, were more than happy to put aside their dalliance with Wildstar and return to WoW when Warlords of Draenor was released in November.

The "return to WoW after trying something out" was pretty much a theme of the MMO era up through Legion's release, but was most telling in the reactions to the original releases of Age of Conan, SWTOR, ESO, and of course, Wildstar.** All of those had issues in addition to a fickle initial player base, but only Wildstar lingered far too long in the strict subscription model before switching to F2P in an attempt to save the game.

Finally, Wildstar had the misfortune of being run by Carbine, which if the comment in the Kotaku article I linked to above is true, was very poorly run. When you piss off your parent company, that's one thing, but when you piss off NCSoft as your parent company, you're kind of screwed.

To answer Lewis Burnell's article, I miss Wildstar too. And yes, I think it could have hung in there longer, fixed several issues, and had a much longer run than it did. Hell, Age of Conan is still going on and I have absolutely NO idea how they're managing that, given how few people I ever see when I'm logged in. But I also realize that Wildstar's demise didn't have as much to do with Wildstar itself as the MMO market circa 2014 and how Carbine Studios was run.

I realize that Wildstar as an MMO is probably dead, but I don't necessarily think it's the end of the intellectual property. But we'll see, I suppose.




*I never took advantage of it, so I'll never know.

**Rift was an odd duck out, because the people who populated the original Rift release were those who didn't like the direction Blizz went with WoW in the removal of skill trees and whatnot, so Rift went on their merry way for quite a while with a devoted fan base.

It's Been a Month Coming....

I post about loot boxes and gamer burnout and crunch, and I get views but no commentary.

I post about LOTRO's potential successor, and the comments come out of the woodwork.*

So, what'll happen when I mention about some of the updates coming out tomorrow in SWTOR?

Such as quality of life improvements to F2P and Preferred players, such as an increased credit cap, an extra quickbar, and free Medical Probe/Quick Travel?

Oh sure, SWTOR fans have been discussing this for almost a month, but still these changes will make the F2P and Preferred lifestyle more bearable. Now about that bank space thing....

I kid, I kid. But on FB you'd think that people were jumping off of tall buildings because they couldn't remove their helmet without paying a few Cartel Coins for the privilege. But I do have to admit that it is better than the "This game sucks!" and "We want KOTOR 3!" and "What, this pile of trash is still around?" that I see in frequent comments about the game.

Trolls just gotta troll, I guess.




*Relatively speaking. It's a pretty quiet place, here.

There's Enough Room For Only One of Us

Well, the big news of the last day or so in the MMO world was that Amazon Studios is now developing the "new" LOTR MMO. Of course, that's the same MMO that Athlon Studios was creating, and now the "based on the literary world of JRR Tolkien" MMO is being developed by the same people that are bringing you the new Middle-earth streaming series. The latter is presumably set in the Second Age, so that makes me think that the "marching orders" for the new MMO are to be set in the Second Age as well.

After all, between Sauron and his minions (and depending on when in the Second Age, Black Numenorians) and the Free Peoples of Middle-earth, there's plenty of space there for a two faction MMO set in the Second Age. Or even the First Age, for that matter.

But this news doesn't necessarily bode well for LOTRO. When Athlon was running things, I kind of shrugged and figured that LOTRO wasn't necessarily in danger. But now, with Amazon's financial might, LOTRO could be in trouble.

And this comes right when there's an optional 64-bit LOTRO client out there, which warmed my heart to no end.

Hey Bioware, how about a 64-bit client for SWTOR? If LOTRO can do it, surely you can....

A Nice Way to Check out Azeroth

I suppose you know they're out there, but I was shopping over at Target the other day and verified that yes, Blizz still has 60 Day Wow Subscription cards for sale at Target.*

And yes, they're $30. However, if you're like me and has a spouse who works at Target, you can get a 10% discount. I believe Best Buy has a nice discount too, but I don't know what that translates into with the 60 Day WoW card.

Still, 10% off a $30 60 Day card translates into $13.50/30 days, a better deal than a 3 month subscription price ($14) but not as good as the 6 month price ($13).

Of course, that does come with the catch that you have to either work at Target yourself or have a family member who does. But hey, I know how I can keep my costs down and still peruse WoW Classic without any excessive breaking of the bank.




*Alas that Target didn't really work out in Canada, as apparently they tried to keep things similar to whatever company they bought out rather than basically transport the Target experience to Canada itself. After all, based on traffic across the US/Canada border that's what people wanted, and I'm still scratching my head why Target's management thought otherwise.

Just One More Time....

When I wrote my last post, I honestly didn't know that Jim Sterling would create his latest Jimquisition taking on gambling mechanics. And that it'd be released today.

And that I'd be so pissed at the game design that Torulf Jernstrom talked about inside the video.

Oh, I knew on an intellectual level that it existed, because a lot of it is "modern marketing" amped up to an extreme level, but the brazenness of the major dev houses is really galling. And here I am, falling for that trap, because I'm thinking "yeah, I have to login to ESO so that I can get the daily reward" in much the same manner that a long time ago I discovered I was on an addictive precipice in smoking the occasional cigar.

This is not good.

On the flip side of it, now that I recognize what is going on, I can adjust my habits as much as I can to walk myself back from the ledge.

But for those who have fallen off the precipice, there's no going back.

They can't stop.

And the video game industry is happy to oblige, because they can make a ton of money off of these people.

If nothing else, the overall amorality of the video game industry toward this situation will be their downfall. Here, I was thinking that self righteous moralists shifting blame from everything from teen suicides to mass shootings onto the video game industry might have an impact, but the reality is dawning on me that the video game industry is setting themselves up for a fall by this behavior.

It's not too late for the major dev houses to walk all of this crap back and get rid of gambling mechanics in their games, but that window is shrinking. I'd imagine that the EU is going to crack down on them in the next year or two, and that potential player base is large enough that the dev houses can't ignore them.

Or they could try, but if there's one thing that the investors in today's market want, it's a maximum amount of money. And if the EU says jump, the investors will push the dev houses into finally saying "How high?"

How About a Nice Game of Chess?

A lot of MMOs these days give rewards for logging in, and if you log in enough times in a month you're likely treated to a little perk. ESO does this with daily rewards that (especially at low level) come in handy for potions, and they have three special perks per month. Typically at the 21st or so day of logging in per month, you might get a pet, an outfit, or maybe even some downloadable content.

Other MMOs, such as Age of Conan, TERA, and Rift, all do this as well, and WoW and other MMOs do this with daily quests.*

However, I do wonder about the nature of "push button, get reward" rewards that encourage daily logins.

It's one thing to throw a bone to regular players, and I do get that, but when I'm in the middle of doing whatever around the house and I think "Gee, I have to go login now because I want to make sure I pick up the daily rewards" and then before I know it I've stopped folding laundry and am halfway to the PC, yeah that does become somewhat worrying.

***

In its own way, the "push button get reward" reminds me of when I played the Age of Empires mobile game, which would give you a small reward with daily logins, but would then encourage you to spend money to get those rewards faster (the classic P2W environment). While not all MMOs go the P2W route with daily logins, a lot of them do "encourage" a player to peruse the cash shop to see what you'd get if you accumulated rewards faster (i.e. "paid for them") by making the reward accumulation just slow enough to drive you batty at times. And in mobile games, making the reward accumulation key to being able to survive an enemy onslaught, well, that just sucks.

And yes, just like when playing against a guild group in Warsong Gulch, when you try to simply use the free option and not purchase extras, it can feel pretty hopeless at times.

So "free" doesn't really mean "free" if you actually want a shot at winning, so even in winning you "lose" something (money).

Or, as Joshua put it in Wargames, "A strange game. The only way to win is not to play."




*I remember logging in daily during Wrath to get that daily 5-man run complete so I could get my badges and slowly accumulate at first a T9 set and then a T10 set of gear. For a non-raider, that was the best I could get.

Perusing the Landscape

I've been poking my nose into a few of the MMOs that I've tried and not really done much of anything with, such as Rift and TERA, and found that the environments are somewhat stable.

Well, kinda.

For example, the last several times I logged into Rift I was practically the only person around. Just about any sign of life would be better than what I found at the time. After it was pointed out to me that it was likely that a particular server might be more active when I was logging in, I made an effort to try various times and days of the week. Still, I saw hardly any activity.

The past few weeks, however, I've seen an uptick in the activity in Rift on both factions to the point where I can be reasonably certain that if, say, I needed an assist on taking care of a Tear, there would be someone in the vicinity to help out. I would definitely not call Rift as having a healthy population, but it's better than the "dead" it certainly seemed to be several months ago.

***

TERA is in a better situation than Rift, but that's not exactly saying much. Unlike Rift, TERA is still being actively developed by Bluehole --they recently released a new race/class combo, for instance-- but TERA still has that "shameless"* look that a lot of Korean MMOs have. For better or worse, that look tends to attract some people and repel others.

The look aside, TERA had finished server merges and gotten down to two servers: one PvE and one PvP. From my end, I think the server merges where absolutely the best thing to do for TERA, because there's a viable population in both. What I can say is that there seem to be more people active in TERA at any given time than Rift, but I'm not sure if the population is at the level that is good for the long term health of the game. Let's put it this way: if TERA were owned by NCSoft, I'd be a bit nervous about NCSoft shuttering the game.

***

Which brings me to ArcheAge.

I've been seeing YouTube videos for a couple of years about how "ArcheAge is dead" and "when will they kill ArcheAge?", but ArcheAge is still here.

I do have to wonder how much longer, however.

I have two toons in ArcheAge --one of the quirks of the game is that you get EXACTLY two toons total across all servers, unless you subscribe-- and with one parked in a mid level/upper level capital and another in the intro/low level zones, I simply don't see the population there. In Rift, at least, you do see people creating new toons in the intro and low level zones, but ArcheAge feels dead. Perhaps the decision to allow only two toons total has something to do with that, because if you want to experiment on different servers with race/faction/class combos before subscribing you have to be in a constant state of deleting toons. And lets face it; not everybody is so keen about constantly zapping toons because of that artificial limitation.

But the thing is, ArcheAge seemed a bit healthier in the intro and low level zones before the server merges** than after.

Even though the population is likely higher than Rift, at least Rift is in maintenance mode while the devs for ArcheAge are still trying to put new content together. And there are other, glaring problems that are more obvious to an English speaker than to a Korean speaker, because the English port is, well, a bit inconsistent. You have NPCs speaking to you when you walk around, and at first I thought the reason why I couldn't understand them was because I was an Elf and they were Human. It turns out that they were speaking in Korean, and the devs for ArcheAge never bothered to provide English voice acting for these NPCs. I wouldn't necessarily mind, but having to constantly check out the text box to make sure I'm not missing anything does get really annoying after a while.***

Okay, I doubt the English port is a deal breaker for most people, but the overall lack of toons to work with in the free portion of the game is. And I'll be honest, outside of the lack of toons and the English port, there's not that much that sets ArcheAge apart from its other Korean MMO competitors (Black Desert Online, TERA, etc.)**** And when you've got such a low population as ArcheAge seems to have, that's a problem.

***

Anyway, this wasn't by any means an in depth analysis of the state of those games. These are just overall impressions of hopping back in after having been away for a while, and just seeing what's around.

One MMO that I really ought to get back into playing is Neverwinter, because despite the overall generic nature of the Forgotten Realms I do look on that D&D setting a bit like comfort food. Now, if someone had created an MMO based on the D&D world of Krynn, I'd be up for that. I still have my copies of the original Dragonlance Chronicles around, and if you gave me a chance to hang around with Tanis and company....



*As Rohan put it, which is likely the best way to put the toon and clothing choices.

**They took place a year or two ago, right when I was testing the game out.

***I'm used to "make sure you pay attention to everything because you might need it later" mode you get when playing RPGs for as long as I have. Besides, if you're an Elf and you're in Elven territory, you ought to be able to understand everything said (presumably in Elven). Wandering into Human territory is a different thing, and I'd not expect to understand the language. But having a foreign language everywhere just breaks immersion for me.

****All the P2W debacle aside, you could argue that was a problem with Rift. While I found the story intriguing and the fact that Rift deliberately kept the talent trees around, if you're looking for a new game to play Rift would have a hard time standing out from the crowd. Other fantasy MMOs had better known properties (Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, D&D, Conan, Elder Scrolls) which give it an initial leg up on Rift, and that becomes hard to overcome.

Some Friday Humor

I came across this on Facebook today, and laughed:

So in honor of some of the Vanilla WoW memes (and experiences), I came up with the following:

It was hard to limit my options to these.

As you might have imagined, distilling all of people trying out Vanilla WoW having only experienced BC and later down to 25 Bingo options was hard. I suppose I could make more sheets, but this one will do for starters.

Maybe I shouldn't have taken a bite of that Apple

I spent the latter part of last week at mini-Red #2's university orientation*, and while it was wonderful to look around and enjoy the university atmosphere, I couldn't completely shake work from the back of my mind.

Wrong time of year, perhaps, but there were vistas
like this across campus.

You see, work often means being beset by business terms ("business-speak"), discussions about how to do more with less, and the steady advance of business analytics.

The concept of business analytics isn't exactly new, given that methods of separating customers from their money have been around for millenia. However, computers and electronics have grown to the point where the "Big Data" of business analytics is now a huge business. The "targeted advertising" in the past has yielded to analytics driven methods of optimizing sales.**

Even getting away to a university in a small town hasn't allowed me to escape all of this stuff.

***

And what, you may be asking, does this have to do with a gaming blog?

Everything, actually.

Why do you think live services, lootboxes, and other in-game purchases are so big (and yet so reviled) with game dev houses right now? Because they do a great job of utilizing analytics to target the gamers who will pay for such things.

There are companies who market toward dev houses to help them maximize their profit. And if you said "Well, of course there are," watching their sales pitch is less about watching a meeting in a dev company and more about watching something that'd have been at home in a traditional corporate boardroom.

Here's a snippet of one, from Jim Sterling's The Jimquisition from back in 2017:

Sorry about adding the 50 second preamble, but I thought it was better to get a sense of the overall situation rather than simply dropping it into a post as-is. And although I do take issue with Jim Sterling at times, this entire episode of The Jimquisition does cover a lot of items that I used to see regularly as a salesperson at Radio Shack back in the early 90s.***

***

I guess you could say that --as a player of MMOs-- I ought to be inoculated to this sort of monetization, but there are times when it does bother me a lot. Like when I'm walking through a small college town, enjoying the scene, and see something that makes me think "You know, if [pick a storefront, any storefront] knew their customer base better, they could really do well here in town."

It's like being a musician, and not being able to turn your analytical brain off and simply enjoy the music any more, only far far worse.

And I really am concerned that monetization schemes in the gaming industry will become not only more invasive with time, but paradoxically harder to detect. And also I fear that game companies --particularly the major corporate dev houses-- have lost sight of the reason why games truly exist: for fun.




*Although he and I had been at his university twice to visit, my wife hadn't. Therefore, both of us tagged along with him for orientation. The drawback to those extra days off from work is that there was an absolute pile of work to get done when I got back. Yay me.

**BINGO!!! I WON BUZZWORD BINGO!!!!

***Sorry, but the term back then was "Salesmaker", not salesperson. Radio Shack loved their own lingo to no end. And boy, could I tell you stories about life at "Rat Shack".

A Quick Check-In

Yes, I still exist.

No, the blog isn't fading.

Yes, I do have a couple of posts in process, but nothing that's finished and ready to post.

But no, none of those posts are things that I'm particularly proud of, so they may never see the light of day.

Yes, I've been sucked into watching the FIFA Women's World Cup, and yes, I've been enjoying the matches so far*, but yes, it does cut into my gaming time.

And finally, yes, I've been watching E3 with a great deal of interest, and more than a bit of a jaundiced eye after the disastrous releases of Fallout 76 and Anthem (not to mention the Blizzard layoffs and other things happening in the gaming industry). But AMD... That is interesting. VERY interesting.

Anyway, I'll try to check back in next week (if not sooner).




*Except the US' nuking of Thailand. Not the score itself, because the only way the US could have stopped scoring is to simply kick the ball around the midfield for about 45 minutes, but the goal celebrations that went on after the US shot past a 6-0 score. Some people seem to think that this celebration backlash was because "women aren't allowed to show emotion", but in my case, I just felt bad for Thailand who were so clearly overmatched that I could have been playing out there for them and nobody would have noticed.

A Little Bit of Music for a Friday

If your first exposure to an MMO soundtrack was WoW's Blood Elf starting zone, you likely remember the cello piece The Sindorei:

That piece of music set a theme of melancholy against a backdrop of beautiful Eversong Woods, highlighting the aftermath of the events of Warcraft III.

Well, the cello is back in the intro music to the new ESO expac, Elsweyr, but used in a very different manner:

The Jeremy Soule theme is given a grim reading by the cello, which launches the rest of the piece with minor chords and a discordant sound more reminiscent of Knut Avenstroup Haugen's Age of Conan's soundtrack than anything we've typically heard from Elder Scrolls Online. It gives a feeling of foreboding, forcing you to look over your shoulder, rather than being a heroic upbeat piece like Summerset's Main Theme was.

Given that the dragons' return to Nirn is a major plot point in the expac, the worry and grim overtones are perfect for being concerned whether a dragon is going to drop on your head when you least expect it.

I'm looking to the release of the full soundtrack just to hear what else is in store for us.

Culturally Speaking

ESO's Elsweyr expac finally dropped, and I celebrated by hanging around Vvardenfell and doing some crafting and questing.

What, you thought I'd do something else for a change?

No way, man. I'm not getting in the middle of the mad rush over to Elsweyr. And apparently I'm not the only one, given the crowd over in Vivec City. As Shintar put it, ESO does a good job of spreading people out, but I also think that it's now baked into the game's DNA.

The reason why I'm bringing up the "baked in" part is because I had a conversation with the oldest mini-Red today. She's home for (part of*) the Summer from her university, and she's spent the past two weeks catching up with friends and getting in some MMO playing.

This evening, while I was working on dinner, she and I were talking about MMO culture. She said that in LOTRO today, the main discussion in World Chat centered around a new player who had recently left WoW and decided to try out LOTRO instead. The new player simply could not stop praising LOTRO's in-game culture, talking about how nice everybody is, when back in WoW the culture was so toxic. Given that LOTRO has their own culture issues with a few notable malcontents --on the Gladden server at least-- I was kind of surprised by the story. "Had WoW gotten that bad?" I wondered.

I'd also been reading in chat on ESO about an influx of WoW refugees finding that ESO is a more pleasant gaming social experience than the present atmosphere in WoW, and I knew of posts on Reddit (of all places) mentioning that SWTOR is a more pleasant gaming experience than WoW.

This kind of begs the question whether the WoW experience is now more toxic than it was when I left.

***

The only way to really find out what WoW is truly like is to resub and then login to an old toon. However, I wasn't planning on doing that until right before (or right after) WoW Classic comes out, so it'll be only then that I'll find out exactly what Trade Chat has devolved into.

That being said, I realize that it has been about 5 years since I last subscribed to WoW, so my remembrance of WoW's Trade Chat has faded somewhat. Since then, Blizzard's fortunes have waxed and waned, and WoW itself has bled both subscribers and devs. You know things have changed when Elitist Jerks has faded into nothingness as people from EJ have been hired on by Blizzard itself.**

My great fear is that WoW now has a toxic culture baked into the game in as much the same way that League and some other MOBAs now are more well known for a toxic culture than being incredibly popular worldwide. It's also entirely possible that the type of person who is attracted to WoW's dictum that "the game begins at endgame" is more likely to engage in toxic behavior than those who don't subscribe to that belief. Other MMOs, such as LOTRO or ESO or SWTOR, have more of an "enjoy the journey" attitude toward their MMO design, and aren't defined by toxic culture.

But this is all a "who came first -- the chicken or the egg" sort of speculation, because people could have left for other MMOs because of the toxic culture in WoW, or WoW became toxic as people left.

***

I don't believe that a game's culture is set in stone. Blizzard can change WoW's culture, but it requires Blizzard to invest in more aggressive policing of Trade Chat, Zone Chat, and other areas where poor behavior has been allowed to fester.

Reputation, however, is much harder to change than the culture itself. Once a game acquires a bad reputation, combating that will take a lot of effort above and beyond the effort needed to fix the cultural issues. And it takes the one thing that WoW likely doesn't have in abundance any more: time. Blizzard is on the hot seat to "turn things around", and a corporate quick fix won't correct a poor reputation because quick fixes are designed to make things look good on the quarterly balance sheet, not address any underlying long term problems.

Poor Bobby Kotick. The two things that are required to fix problems in WoW --time and money-- are things that he doesn't want to use. He'd much rather cut costs and demand people do more with less than actually fix the long term problems.




*She'll be spending a few weeks back at her university during the Summer as a camp counselor/chaperone for a Summer Music Program, and then spending another week away at a double reed camp. Then she'll move in early because of Band Camp, which is a boon to us because we'll be taking her brother up to his first semester at a university during the time she'd ordinarily need to go back.

**Courtesy of Reddit, here's the thread Why did Elitist Jerks die out? There's also the additional nail in the coffin as EJ was bought out by Ten Ton Hammer and the latter tried to monetize the site. I could have told them that EJ was --more than anything else-- a labor of love, and trying to make people pay for that will inevitably backfire.

Farmer Red Out Farming

It's been a long time since I farmed mats.

How long? Well, I used to support the ICC-10 runs that our Horde guild had by farming mats in Icecrown Glacier as a relaxing activity in between 5-man runs.*

Sure, I farmed ore and cloth a bit in Cataclysm and Mists, but without the need to support a guild's raids my farming activities were reduced to a (very) small sidelight of my in-game WoW activity. I was happy to level my crafting up to max and that was pretty much it.**

The past several weeks, however, I've been hanging around Vivec City in ESO, leveling the various crafts that I have by completing dailies. I've done some questing --and I had completed the ESO Morrowind expac already on my first toon, so I know what's coming-- but when I venture out in the wild I've been keeping out an eye more for mats instead of actually working on the various storylines. Truth be told, Vivec City is pretty much ideal to use as a base for farming and crafting, because all of the crafting stations are close to the delivery crates, there's a bank located in the center of the crafting area, and all three are close to a wayshrine so you can hop over to a specific locale and go mat farming.

Many of the mercantile oriented guilds have already figured this out, because the distance between the wayshrine and the crafting area is filled with various guild merchants.

***

If you're like me and used to the more traditional MMO expacs where everybody abandons the previous expac's hub(s), seeing Vivec City as both relevant and active is quite a sight. When Cataclysm dropped, I parked Neve at Dalaran and conducted a robust business opening ports for players. After a month, however, Dalaran had turned into a ghost town in the same way that Shattrath was largely abandoned when Wrath dropped.

The reasons for this happening can be boiled down to two simple design decisions: the zone resources and hub vendors were limited to their affiliated expac's mats and rewards, and the ability to transport to different locales is by "realistic" transportation. For example, if you want to mine Fel Iron, you go to Hellfire Peninsula. If you want Copper, you go to an intro or low level zone in WoW's Old World. That doesn't change, so if you want to mine the latest mats you have to go to the latest zones. If you want the latest vendor gear, you go to the current expac's hub(s).

And transportation to and from those hubs can take a lot of time too. At least WoW has flying mounts for waypoints, because with LOTRO you're frequently stuck with riding hubs, and in SWTOR the speeders from the travel hubs tend to follow the roads and/or buildings.

ESO utilized a different set of design decisions.

The first major design decision was to utilize phasing to change the "leveling" materials to coincide with your toon's Crafting level. If the highest level blacksmith mat you can utilize is Orichalum, you find Orichalum nodes throughout the ESO game world. If it's Ebony, you find Ebony. And this remains the same no matter where you're located, whether it's Coldharbour, Vvardenfell, Stonelands, or Kenarthi's Roost. This makes gathering mats a lot easier to handle, and frees a player from having to restrict themselves to the latest expac's zones.

The leads right into the second design decision, which answers the question "if I can go anywhere to find my leveling mats, how do I easily get to where I want to go?" In this case, ESO adopted the GW2 method of wayshrines for easy point to point transfer. You pay for transfer to a wayshrine out in the wild, but there's no cooldown, either. And wayshrine to wayshrine transportation is free.

Finally, as part of the the rewards for completing a crafting daily, you have a shot at getting a map directing you to a rich deposit of mats in a specific zone. The map isn't so detailed as to take out all sense of adventure, but it does give you a pretty decent sense of where the rich deposit is. Once again, not completely handheld, just making it easy enough to quickly handle your farming activity.

***

While the ESO method does make farming for mats quick and fairly painless, that doesn't necessarily mean it's superior to the more traditional "grind it out" method. The former works great for the casual farmer --of which I am one-- who doesn't want to spend 1/2 hour a day farming mats to perform dailies. The latter is better for a more realistic world, where mats are found in specific regions. If you've got the time, the latter is better. I, however, don't have that time that I used to, so the former is better for me while I play ESO.

Still, I'm sure that when WoW Classic drops I'll become reacquainted with farming again while trying to build up any sort of gold pile.





*I learned the hard way to land your mount first and then enter into a 5-man. Only the most ridiculous of "GO-GO-GO" players wouldn't wait for that.

**That's the completionist in me talking.

ATTENTION ALL PLANETS OF THE SOLAR FEDERATION

...We have assumed control...

...We have assumed control...

...We have assumed control...

--Rush, 2112

Everybody got that?

Okay, I now know when I can resub to WoW.

Ignoring the Obvious

In my years of MMO gaming, I don't think I've ever spent more than a couple of weeks in a PTS server.

And if you throw out those MMOs that hadn't even been released yet when I visited the PTS --Rift and Wildstar-- then my result is a big fat zero.

The primary reason for this is because I don't want to spoil the story on an expansion. Unlike some people, who check out PTSs to help out the debugging process, or guilds who want a leg up on upcoming raids or content, I'm perfectly happy remaining ignorant as to future content.*

Well, getting onto the ESO PTS was an exercise in avoidance.

***

Sure, I kind of expected the PTS to be just like the regular environment, but with the additional zones, but still I was surprised to find my toon in Vvardenfell, where she left off. So, if I wanted to see the new zone, I had to go find my way there.

"If I have to go to Cyrodiil to get there..." I began.

Then I remembered how Summerset and Vvardenfell worked out: you take a boat to get there. Sure enough, there was transportation awaiting me once I reached an embarkation point, and I happily took the easy way there.

I made a point of avoiding the questlines around, which was no small feat given all the interesting scenes and quest givers out there.

And cats.

Lots and lots of cats.

Good thing this is in-game, because otherwise I'd be sneezing my head off about 5 minutes after arriving in Elsweyr.

I kind of split from the city hub and ran out into the wilderness, keeping an eye open for a delve to go check out. I found a couple and jumped right in, believing that I could go check out these delves without giving away too much story.

A great idea, but I got the feeling that I was being given a piece of the story anyway, especially in the first delve I found, where I kept hearing ethereal voices telling me how I was going to die and live here with the denizens of the delve (which was a crypt, naturally). A nice atmospheric touch, but still it left be thinking that had I picked up a quest or two the voice would make more sense.

But hey, if you want to be a murder hobo in ESO, nothing is stopping you.

***

What surprised me the most was the in-zone conversation. It had nothing to do with the expac at all, but rather more mundane stuff. Like the NHL hockey playoffs. Or which ESO race is the best. (For boinking, someone added, and that conversation took a weirdly R-rated turn real fast. I felt like I was listening to people describing Hentai in public, which made the conversation that much worse.)

At one point, someone rather pointedly asked in chat "What are all of you doing here in the PTS, anyway?"

"Hey, we all got Beta Keys, so we're here," one person replied.

"Yeah, but you could be having this conversation in the main servers."

"No we couldn't, we're here."

I sighed and shook my head, and did my best to ignore the conversation from that point onward.

***

So, if you're actually looking for a "what does it look like?" from me for Elsweyr, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I can say that I didn't see any obvious bugs, like hands sticking through walls, or toons looking like they're inside out (see Assassin's Creed games for examples). My whole point was to at least see what the zone looks like, and I can say there are a lot of cats. And cat people. And talking cats. And more... well, you get the idea.

Now, if in-game chat can stop talking about which is hotter, Amalexia or Ayrenn (or Emeric vs Jorunn which was the parallel debate), I'd be grateful.



*It makes for a great excuse as to avoiding game forums, aside from avoiding drama. I have teenage kids, I have a job, and those two items alone provide me more than all the drama I want. I don't need any more drama in my life. That's a big part of why I don't want to sign up for Twitter, and have been trying to step back from Facebook: the outrage machine is more than I can stand. That doesn't mean I avoid keeping up with current events, but modern social media seems designed to generate outrage to keep people engaged, and I don't need that. At all.


EtA: As Shintar pointed out, it's not PTO, but PTS. I've corrected that in the post.

An Early Easter Present

Well well well....

Guess what popped into my INBOX this afternoon:

And right after my post on I Sheep Things as well.

For the record:

No, I did not request a beta key.

Really, I didn't request one.

Honest!

And since I'm playing my way through from Vanilla ESO through Summerset, I certainly wasn't expecting to get to Elsweyr any time soon.

My guess is that they pulled my account out of a hat for a random key giveaway, because specifically targeting me would be an epic fail on their belief of the reach of this blog.

If anything, I was debating about taking a few extra dollars and purchasing some of the DLCs --or at least comparing the cost of purchasing DLCs versus an ESO Plus membership-- rather than jumping into Elsweyr. After all, it'd be nice to get a bit more backstory on some of the places in the DLC*.

However, I think I can swing this. I can stick to some of the non-story specific places, such as Delves and whatnot, without actually playing through the story and spoiling the expac for me. But for the record (and in a non-spoilery fashion), I'd dearly love to allow my character interactions to punch Tharn right in the face, in much the same way the Smuggler in SWTOR gets an opportunity to slug Guss Tuno in the kisser.

*I also would like to know how Cyrodilic Collections fared in Murkmire.

Mr. Stark, I Don't Feel So Good....

I was perusing some of the old Blogs in Mothballs this evening and discovered that I Sheep Things has finally vanished into the ether.

For the longest time, I Sheep Things was the domain of Rhii, although she was only one half of the blogging team. I remember her constant updates throughout WoW's Wrath heyday, and her can-do attitude was infectious. But I also recall her despair when, as Cataclysm approached, that her guild leaders decided to abandon their guild and go and hitch a ride on another guild's ICC runs to finally take down Arthas before the expac ended. She felt they were so close to beating Arthas that the guild leaders' behavior was a betrayal of the highest order.

I could only feel for her, because I wasn't a raider, but she always felt like that enthusiastic kid sister I never had and I wished I could have done something to help her out.

Not too long after that, real life began to intrude on her gaming and blogging, and she soon dropped out of sight to leave a gigantic hole in the WoW blogging community.

Aurdon, the sole remaining member of I Sheep Things, rarely posted, and compared to Rhii's manic output was practically non-existent. However, he decided to revamp the blog a bit and focus instead on non-MMO games, because he'd stopped playing MMOs a while ago. But I guess that he decided to eventually give up the domain for I Sheep Things, and now that piece of MMO Blogging history has gone to join Righteous Orbs and other blogs of that era.

***

At times like this, I get a bit pensive and wonder why we keep PC running when other bloggers have come and gone.

To be honest, I don't have a driving need to write my thoughts about gaming down, and at the same time I can't really give it up. We don't have a large following; in fact, our likely largest following was when I wrote the old Two Sides to a Coin posts back in 2011 that was promoted by WoW Insider (now Blizzard Watch) as one of their blog posts they liked. And as you may have guessed, I'm not enamored of some of the things that drive the current crop of Influencers in social media.*

I guess you could say that I just like blogging. It fills some hole in my psyche that I can't explain, and I feel kind of bad when I don't get a chance to pound out a blog entry at least once a week.

But I do also miss all of those who were here before PC, and those who welcomed our little blog with open arms into the wider WoW blogger community.






*Come on; someone on the far end of the 40s isn't exactly Influencer material. When your wife gets invitations to join AARP in the mail, you know that your life is about to change.

No Words....

Better Than I Hoped For

I've been behind on my writing (work plus the final round of mini-Red #2's college visits plus taxes), so here's a little tidbit to throw out there:

A New Expac, Onslaught, is coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic

Yep.

That actually gives me some hope for the long term health of the game, because I was afraid EA would shut down BioWare after Anthem. But maybe EA and BioWare will figure a few things out, like letting BioWare people with experience running online MMO-esque games work on the content of Anthem for a change.

This is the New Normal

As usual Jason Schreier does a fantastic job of digging in and examining what went wrong with Anthem in a piece on Kotaku.

TL;DR: these sort of disasters are starting to demonstrate somewhat similar underpinnings:

• Insistence on software engines not built for --or robust enough-- to handle the development process. This can be also known as the Frostbite Curse. EA's insistence on using Frostbite for all games --as a cost saving measure, among other things-- basically loses all cost savings as the difficulty in working with the engine adds time to the development process. Additionally, BioWare keeps "reinventing the wheel" with Frostbite in every large project, and never seems to settle on a "good enough" interface with the engine. The same problems that plagued Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda plagued Anthem. Admittedly some of those problems wouldn't have been able to be avoided unless BioWare gave Frostbite the middle finger, but others were definitely avoidable.
  
• Not having a rock solid design. I'd call this the Destiny problem, as Destiny's disastrous rollout was due in no small measure to the constantly shifting aspects of basic game and story design. In Anthem's case, after the original concept went out the window, nobody could seem to decide on a story and game design; nobody seemed to know who or what Anthem really was. It was only when there was less than a year remaining until release that Anthem's design began to crystallize, but that was far far too late in the process.
  
• Belief that since things had worked out in the past, it was always going to work out in the end. Crunch, that period of development when you're working insane hours trying to get the product out the door in reasonable shape, happens with all software houses. Some software houses, such as Naughty Dog, are legendary for having brutal crunch periods. BioWare is no stranger to crunch, but the crunch of Dragon Age: Inquisition was particularly bad, and the result of a DA:I that won awards in the game industry gave BioWare's management the idea that if they just crunched hard enough the old "BioWare Magic" would work wonders and they'd get a great product in the end.
  
  I've been in software houses that believed that sort of thing, and I'm here to tell you that crunch like that does no favors to either management or the devs. The devs get burned out, and management buys into the false belief that they can keep doing this indefinitely. Apparently, the crunch for Anthem was so bad there were fairly large numbers of people who had the equivalent of a nervous breakdown and had to simply stop showing up to work for months at a time. A lot of experienced developers and senior staff quit. And maybe, just maybe, BioWare finally learned that you can't push devs too hard or bad things happen.
  
• Infighting between development staff. The Edmonton and the Austin BioWare studios were often at odds on Anthem development. Edmonton called the shots, and although Austin had a lot of experience in similar games with all of their work on SWTOR, all of their suggestions were repeatedly shot down. You'd think that when the MMO devs are telling Edmonton that "hey, we've been down this road and here's how to fix it", Edmonton would listen. But that was frequently not the case.
  
  Again, I have experience here, and it's never fun when you end up feeling like Cassandra right before that wooden horse is brought behind Troy's walls.
  
• Interference from the Big Dog. People kind of expect this at EA owned companies, right? Only that pretty much all major development houses are doing the same thing now, from Activision Blizzard to EA to Bethesda. The decision to use Frostbite is due to the EA bigwig who is VP over the division that makes Frostbite. The decision to not budge from the March 2019 release date is because of the end of the fiscal year for EA, not because BioWare or EA thought the game was ready for release. If anything EA should have let Anthem slide into June, giving the devs and extra three months to fix bugs and add material to the game, but EA wanted the release on its balance sheet for the last fiscal year, and they got what they wanted. The entire "games as a service" model --and EA's particular disdain for single player games that you play once and you're finished-- have also had their impact on Anthem.
  
  But what is likely one of the worst parts of the EA interference was the time when FIFA was migrating to Frostbite, and because FIFA makes EA a metric ton of money to the tune of a couple of orders of magnitude of cash from BioWare's releases, EA sucked away all the Frostbite experts into helping FIFA get out the door, right when Anthem really could have used them the most.

I could go on, but you've got the idea. After Fallout 76 and Anthem, and the associated Bungie divorce, the major development houses aren't exactly in the good graces of gamers. But here's the thing: if gamers think that they have a say in how the dev houses are run, unfortunately they don't. The major dev houses make a lot of money on games that the hardcore gamer likely turns their nose up at: the annual Madden or FIFA releases, the latest Call of Duty iteration, or the tons of mobile games. The big dev houses don't cater to the hardcore gamer, but rather the investor first and then the type of gamer that Gevlon would call the "morons and slackers". Sure, it doesn't have to be this way, but it's only when the investors start to get antsy will things change with the major dev houses.

And frequently, those changes are not for the better.

An Epic Game Needs an Epic Soundtrack

As surrounded by music and musicians as I am in this household, it's not exactly a surprise that I find interesting articles on the intersection of music and gaming.

(And if you're interested in MMOs and music, check out Battle Bards in the sidebar.)

Anyhoo, I came across this article about Sarah Schachner, the composer of the music for Anthem, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and other games/movies:

Music For Saving The World: Sarah Schachner And The Soundtrack Of Video Games

What I found the most interesting about the article was when she discussed how she was contacted by NASA to compose music for the spacecraft Cassini, as it was nearing the end of its 20 year life. The article is bridged by her involvement in Cassini, and in between it covers the wide range of topics, from "where do you get your ideas" to "female composers in video games" to her own personal trajectory.

It's really worth the read.

Oh Hai, Sneak Button. How've You Been?

I've been working through ESO's Craglorn the past week or so on an off-and-on basis, and if I thought that the "vanilla" part of ESO emphasized the solo play versus group play (it does), Craglorn is very much a group play oriented zone.

The original implementation of Craglorn, prior to the One Tamriel patch, was just about entirely group oriented. Even the puzzles had to be performed in a group context, otherwise you couldn't progress in the main questline. The post One Tamriel version of Craglorn still retains much group content (including a lot of group Delves, designed for a group of four people), but a significant part of the main questline is not solo play.

What do I think of the revamped zone so far? Interesting.

In its own way, the lore surrounding Craglorn and the Celestials has me a bit more confused than before. I'd kind of figured out the Daedra vs. Aedra and the Mer vs. Men aspects of Nirn, but the Celestials are pretty much outside of all of that. In the realm of neat and ordered*, Celestials are the monkey wrench thrown into the machine.

The non-spoiler version of the zone is that there's a Celestial for each month of the year. Think "Zodiac" instead of "Celestial", and you've got the idea. If you were given to understand that those Celestials you find throughout differing ruins (mostly Ayleid), and are utilized in a lot of puzzles, were just metaphors for the different months of the year, then I was right there with you. But apparently the Celestials are more than months of the year and constellations in the sky. And three of them are missing.

::cue dramatic music::

Your job is to find out what happened and to fix it.

But hey, if you played through the main vanilla questline, you know that this sounds like not a big deal after you dealt with [redacted], right? At least I thought so, too, but given all the group content in the zone I get the feeling that my toon is a wee bit more underpowered than I thought.

It's still taking me some time to adjust to Craglorn, as I'd become used to the ebb and flow of the zones in Vanilla ESO, but I'm fine with that so far. Reintroducing myself to constantly sneaking around isn't a bad thing at all, particularly if it means that you don't get one shot by a gigantic mob of trash screaming for your blood.





*And given the differing "pantheons" of the species in Tamriel, that's likely stretching things a bit.