Don't Mind Red, He's Got a Headache

I finally started group content with the kids.

Since they only have one account that they share* between them, the best we could do alone was a 2-man instance.  Luckily for us, The Old Republic has a perfect introduction to an instance with The Esseles, a 2-person Flashpoint designed for L10-12.  No other players in the area, no competition to complete a Heroic 2+ first, and we've got plenty of time to finish without rushing.

The Esseles has the bonus of being one of the best of The Old Republic flashpoints for story, so I knew that'd keep them attracted as well.

So, I pulled out the Old Man, reacquainted myself with how to play a Scoundrel (aka "get up in people's grill and blast them from behind with a shotgun scattergun), and sauntered off to take a trip to Coruscant aboard the Esseles.

My oldest had the first run, and to be honest, that was the smoothest of the bunch.  I told her straight up to let me maneuver into position first, and then backblast to start the fight.  Typically I'd end up taking out a regular enemy, leaving Corso to round up the Strong and/or Elites for us to attack afterward.  While the fighting went well enough, I had to explain the TOR method of choosing who gets to speak in a cutscene**. There was also the little matter of me playing the Old Man as more a devil-may-care type than my original Gunslinger, so I got to see some wording out of him that I ordinarily wouldn't ever see out of Dalaak.***
I heard a "Daa-aad!!" from upstairs more than once, but I shrugged it off.

But there was one problem:  the Esseles crashes at the end on our desktop computer.  Ironically enough, not the laptop, so I was able to restart SWTOR and get back into the Flashpoint before it ended, but still it was quite annoying.

Next came my son, and he was just as wisecracking as I was, but he reserved it more for the group chat. He was a bit overeager at times, but luckily it wasn't too big of a problem.

But my youngest....

I told her at the beginning to let me lead.  I told her that during the flashpoint, too.  Several times, in fact.  She's ten, and I know she can read.  But she still kept running ahead, running the wrong way, running into a boss fight before we cleared out the trash, and in general acting more like someone half her age.

Finally, her behavior caught up with her.  She ran off the edge of a platform and disappeared into space.

I said a silent prayer of thanks that SWTOR flashpoints still let you do that, whereas you're hard pressed to do that in a WoW instance.

"Now," I said as she respawned, "Will you cut it out?"

"Oops," she replied.

"If you pull stuff like this in a regular instance, people will let you die to teach you a lesson.  It's called 'You yank it, you tank it,' and the real tank would get really pissed off at you for this.  Behave better, and let the person who has been here before do the leading."

After the lecture, she shaped up.  I'd rather she get the lesson from me than finding herself vote kicked or being the reason for a wipe.

She also learned that --as a Gunslinger-- her abilities are best when behind cover, whereas my Scoundrel is built to get in the baddies' faces.  She saw me at work and tried to imitate it, but I explained that her best abilities, like the Charged Bolts' bonuses and other assorted goodies she gets in her talent tree, are made for long distance.

By comparison, these runs ended better than the Hammer Station run I had the other day, where the Commando Healer didn't heal and the tank would rush in before I could CC a droid.  By the time the Healer began to get the hang of things, the tank decided we weren't going to live through the first boss**** and dropped group.  In spite of my encouragement, the Healer dropped too, and then after that so did the other DPS.  These people were too willing to throw in the towel rather than try the hard work of actually making it through an instance slowly, grinding out a victory.

Maybe they could have taken a few lessons from some kids.




*My rules.  I get to control the MMO accounts --LOTRO and TOR-- that way, and I also keep track of any activity within the toons.

**TOR has each person select an action and then a random (virtual) dice roll determines who gets to speak.

***I decided to have the Old Man play dumb with Beryl toward the end of the class questline on Taris. Kind of unusual for a guy who flirted with Grand Master Satele Shan in the closing cutscene to the Athiss Flashpoint, but I've decided that I want him to pursue a romance with one of the female companions later, so I want to minimize any repercussions later.  Sometimes it helps having done the Smuggler class story before.

****Nobody had the ability to pick up the canisters, so he decided he'd rather drop instead of actually, you know, TRYING.

Blizzard Announces More Info on "Connected Realms"

...which are sounding exactly like server merges.  They're just not saying that because, well, saying "World of Warcraft to Perform Server Merges" is a way of getting a LOT of negative press.

Patch 5.4 Feature Preview: Connected Realms

To be honest, it sounds more like what has been implemented for The Secret World and is being implemented for Age of Conan than anything else.

Still, they're server merges.  No way around it.  I've been perusing some online listings of active accounts on servers --I still wonder how they manage that-- and I've found that Ysera has dropped quite a bit over the past few years (down to something like 1/4 the size of Area 52), matching what I've noticed in game.  I do wonder how this is going to work long term, and whether a Horde-heavy realm will be matched up with an Alliance-heavy realm to balance things out.

But the merges have begun.  (Just don't call them that.)

Like the Corners of My Mind

I was doing a little cleanup on the blog tonight when I came across a couple of things I knew were coming but still were a punch in the gut:  the domains for The Pink Pigtail Inn and TankingTips.com were gone.*

Going through the list, Voss' Sword and Board and Cynwise's Posterous Field Notes have also vanished into the same ether that claimed Tam's Righteous Orbs and Lara's Root and Branch.  Still, the PPI especially was the great watering hole that not only had Larisa's posts, but also had the monster mess of a blogroll that people could use as a master reading list.  I know I used to use PPI to find new blogs to read, and I could trace a big spike in PC's readership to the week when Larisa added us to her blogroll.  Even up to a year after Larisa stopped posting at PPI, we'd see more people following a link from there to our blog than just about anywhere else.

Now, outside of Rades' huge blogroll, there's pretty much Hugh at the MMO Melting Pot keeping the blogroll flame alive.  WoW Insider doesn't bother with posting interesting blog links anymore, and truth be told I've not really ventured over to WI in quite a while.

Change is the only constant in the blogging world.  Keeping up a blogging schedule is not an easy task, and real life has a way of interfering with both blogging and game playing.  When we started PC almost four years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into.  If I did, I might not have committed to it.  Yet at the same time, I'd not have traded the experience for the world.  I've met fellow bloggers around the world whom I'm happy to call friend, and the schedule of writing a blog has pushed me (and my writing) in directions I didn't think I could go.**  the MMO blogosphere can be sniping and backbiting at times, but we all have the same interest at heart:  a love of the weird wonderful worlds that inhabit a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG.

This blog, while ostensibly about "all sorts of games", really began as a WoW blog.  And it remained that way for well over two years, with occasional forays into other MMOs.  However, as I've moved from one dominant MMO (WoW) to several MMOs, the blog's feel has changed to reflect that.  I suppose that going forward you can expect more change, but what it will entail I don't really know.

I'm not the gamer that some people are; I don't have the experience in electronic gaming that Spinks has, for example, or the endgame experience that many other MMO bloggers have.  While I realize his hiatus was for medical reasons I still miss Cynwise's PvP posts, because compared to the master I'm merely playing at PvP. There are others who write great fiction, like Rades or Akabeko (The Red Cow), and many others whose humor and wit bring cheer to an otherwise dreary morning reading work e-mail.  However, it is the thoughtful blog posts, the ones where people bare a little of their souls, that I cherish the most.  It's the equivalent of sitting out on a porch with a beer or two, shooting the bull, while the sun goes down and the fireflies dance in the yard.

But I hope that as the blogosphere changes, one thing remains constant:  the camaraderie of the bloggers themselves.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a beer that's getting warm.



*The Pink Pigtail Inn goes to another blog entirely now, and the domain for TankingTips.com has completely vanished.

**Now, if that will only translate into getting a novel written to completion....

The Stuff of Nightmares

Have you ever had the dream where you're trying to outrun something --a train, a car, or Usain Bolt-- but you feel like your feet are made of lead?  You're trying desperately to get around a corner before you get run over, and you can feel the rumble of the steam engine in your bones as that train gets closer....

Closer....

Closer....

And then you wake up, your heart pounding in your chest.

Yeah, I've had that dream a lot recently, and it involves Deepwind Gorge.

On the face of it, Deepwind Gorge is a lot like Arathi Basin and Battle of Gilneas, with the additional part of having to capture the other faction's gold.  The BG is more compact than either AB (by a lot) or BoG (marginally so), but the line of sight issues make it seem larger than it is.  But the biggest differences between the prior two and DG are the locations of the respawning points:  each faction's home base.

That alone changes the dynamics of the BG, because if you're assaulting a mine and you can kill off another faction's toon, that pretty much guarantees that toon will be gone for more than twice the normal amount of time it would take to run back from a localized spawning point.  We've all been in the situation where you're in AB assaulting the Gold Mine, and you kill off a toon just to see it make a reappearance from the GM spawning point 10 seconds later.  That won't happen in DG.

But what the respawn points also do is make Rogues' biggest advantage --stealth-- their biggest weakness.

No matter how fast a Rogue can run while stealthed, except for a few short bursts they can't move fast enough to get back to a base in peril.  You are trying to get back as quickly as you can, or to get anywhere as quickly as you can, and you feel like your feet are in mud.

There is an option, of course, which is to summon your mount and ride back, but for a class that's bringing up the bottom in terms of survivability in BGs, that's akin to jumping up and down and yelling "Free HKs!!" To ensure survivability you have to ride in a pack, and that isn't playing to a Rogue's strength either.

Rogues are at their best when they can strike when you least expect it.  They don't have the plate (or even the mail) of other melee classes, and they don't have either tanking or healing capabilities.  They also don't have a (seemingly) neverending font of mana, either.*

What all this means is that a Rogue's best bet while playing Deepwind Gorge is to either play close to your home base --defending the gold-- or spending time as part of a bigger effort.  Solo work is a risky business for a Rogue in general, and solo work in DG is potentially very nasty indeed.

Oh, and try not to have too many nightmares.



*I once hid in Icewing Bunker with another Rogue, watching a Mage spam Arcane Explosion and seeing the Mage's supply of mana creep downward like a snail.  "They need to nerf that," I whispered.  "There's absolutely no downside to spamming that for minutes at a time."

"Yeah," the other Rogue replied.  "That and a Lock's Hellfire and Rain of Fire.  When a Lock can dump Rain of Fire on the run...."

WoW Weddngs are Alive and Well

I've known people who play MMOs together who are married, and even some of those who met in game (WoW or some other MMO) and married before I met them.  But in-game weddings?  I've not known any myself.

However, Navimie of The Daily Frostwolf is a bit luckier than I, and last Wednesday attended an in-game wedding up in the Grizzly Hills.  Her adventures of getting there as an L1 alt are worth the read alone, but the picspam of the ceremony itself are really cool.

If my wife and I were to get married now, we'd not go for an MMO ceremony --she doesn't play-- but we most likely would have something like this at the reception hall:

Yes, that's a Settlers of Catan wedding cake.
(From forgoodnesscakes.net.)

Or maybe this:

Of course, I usually lose at Scrabble.
(From casasugar.com.)

Who Needs Coffee on a Friday?

I had pretty much written off this week's post because of work and the Summer blahs, but then Blizz drops this little nugget:

Activision Blizzard to be Bought from Vivendi

Looks like current CEO Bobby Kotick has decided to buy out Vivendi's share of the company, which means they'll be out from the massive conglomerate's thumb.  Not sure what that means as far as Blizzard's games, since it's far likely that the Activision bean counters would be more involved with decisions than Vivendi ever was, but it could mean that they'll look into monetizing WoW more.  (Read:  more cash shop stuff.)

However, the big stir has been in the MMO community that --according to Blizz estimates and the link above-- WoW is now down to 7.7 million subs.  As much as people would like to spin this, that can't be good.

World of Warcraft is now down 36% from it's peak number of subs in early Cataclysm.

It also highlights the driving force behind Blizz's push for a cash store in the game.

***

I also wanted to use this news to point out one item from the current patch.

I've taken to flying across Kalimdor and the Northern Barrens while I wait for a BG to proc, and let's just say that the Northern Barrens seem just as empty as before the patch dropped.  Wagons needing escorts are empty, just as the Grummies in Kun-lai Summit go unprotected.  Back in Wrath --and even in Cata with the Firelands-- you could find toons scampering about even when the content wasn't the most current.  Now, however, it's crickets.

A symptom of the overall problem, I suppose.

Various and Sundry in July

The summer doldrums are in full swing.

Outside, the heat has climbed into the oppressive levels, with the humidity to match.  Con season is in high gear, with SD Comic Con this week and less than a month until Gen Con, with PAX Prime at the end of August.

And right on cue, an update on the Pathfinder Online sandbox MMO surfaced:

Not a lot to find interesting; there's background and there's some buildings, but only a few seconds worth of actual figures.  The concept of a sandbox fantasy MMO is interesting, so I'm wondering about the details that weren't shown in the video clip.

***

Another thing I've wondered is whether the next gen consoles will push MMOs away from PCs and into the console format.  Blizzard could be getting some valuable development time in that regard with porting D3 to the XBox360 and PS3, but the major stumbling blocks are XBLive and PSN.  Without the cross platform connectivity, that seems to ensure that MMOs' major selling point (the massively multi part) will be balkanized.  However, I would never bet against Blizzard being able to figure something out in this regard.

***

Heard around MMOs:

In Age of Conan:

[In Eiglophian Mountains, a female toon wearing almost nothing runs by up the mountain path]

Female Toon (in Gen Chat):  Wooo!  I'm invisible!
Me:  Is this Order of the Stick or something?
Third Toon:  Is [toon name] naked again?
Me: Yeah, just ran right by me.  Because, you know, a frigid mountain climb goes better without clothing.


In World of Warcraft:

[In Alterac Valley]

Warrior:  We need a tank here by Drek!
Mage:  WTF, man.  You're marked AS a tank.
Warrior:  Oh.  Whoops.


In TOR:

[On Taris in Gen Chat]

First Toon:  Where is it?
Second Toon:  What?
First Toon:  That wonderful Tarisian beachfront property that the Black Sun sold me!  They said the view was breathtaking!
Second Toon:  Can I have what you're smoking?  I can sure use some.


EtA:  "is"..  "are"...   I are a writer, right?