Author Archives: Asmiroth

Fun With Alts

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First weekend after a long week’s worth of work and my eldest changing schools.  It rained ALL weekend, which actually was pretty good all told.  In the run up, I had 3 games of hockey, the last on Saturday which the wife and kids came to see.  It was a nice day out but nothing too hectic (aside from the aches on Sunday).  It’s a much different pace compared to the spring and it’s one that I’m thankful for.  I guess I’m being more conscious now of my actions than I was previously.  Reading up on the art of mindfulness.

I am not a religious person by any means, though I’ve been more akin to the concepts of karma and zen for a while.  I much prefer the eastern styles than the western & middle eastern guilt/punishment based approach (I’m being very generic here.) Something for another post as my thoughts mature on the subject.

Player vs Character

In recent years, games have learned to focus more on the player than the character.  Gone are the old D&D days of a character being completely segregated from another character being played by the same person.  More and more things are shared across – achievements, pets, costumes, skills.  FF14 takes this to the extreme, where a change of weapon changes you classes but more are taking some sort of middle ground.

D3 uses a shared stash across all players.  I find it rather limiting truth be told, since the amount of options per character are substantial and you have 10 characters per account.  Gone are the days of Tetris in Diablo2 but I’m still juggling tons of items.  One thing I do like is how legendary gems work.  If it’s in the stash, it can’t drop.  Easier to focus farm specific gems that way.

Making an Alt

Further on this point, I need to farm a few materials from time to time.  I’ve made a set of gear for my monk to do this but it’s a few minutes time to set up each session and remember to not muck up for the next GR run.  My brother asked about powerleveling and it dawned on me that the only real limit to an alt is their level, not their gear (if you’re the same class).

The Gem of Ease makes easy work of this as well, giving about 1750xp per kill and allowing you to equip a level 70 item on a level 1 player.  So both of us ranked up the gem, found a legendary with a gem slot , and got a few more items to help out.

  • Cubed Leoric’s Crown (for max bonus)
  • Helm with a socket and max level Ruby (41%x2)
  • Cain’s set (the level 23 version). 2 or 3 pieces, depending if you have the RRoG or not (30%)
  • Hellfire Ring and Amulet (both equipable at level 1) (45%)

Sitting at ~160% experience, we hit up a T6 new game with both alts.  Searching for a Curse Chest event is key, as they continually spawn new enemies at the appropriate level.  One event and we both were around 47.

Then we started dying in a single hit and had to drop the difficulty.  A few more cursed events to get into the high 50s and Halls of Agony 3 is the way to go.  While we tried with the alts, it was obvious that a few runs with high level characters would be best.  I think it was 3 runs to go from 60-70.  All told, around an hour total, compared to 6 hours or so doing it the first time.  Which is even less than when the game came out.

I’d actually be curious if it’s possible to do with a GR…

Anyhoot, we now both have alts.  His alt is better than his main it seems.  Mine is just a lightning jet for farming Death’s Breath.  A few minor tweaks through additional play and I was able to clear a T4 rift in about 2 minutes, collecting about 50 DB in the process.   I need some better rolls to move up the chain, which funnily enough means I need more DBs!

To go full circle, I used my high level character to make the material needed for an alt to get to max level in about an hour.  I have to say, this is a nice bonus to players as the leveling portion of the game is really the most boring once you’ve gone through it.

Be Careful Where You Aim

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In a meeting recently with a client that needed some help with a complex issue.  It was a long drive to meet them but it was something they insisted on.  So we arrive, do the introductions and get into the meat of the issue.  Clearly they are nervous and on our side, not quite sure if we have the solution that fits.

Except this one person, who insists on being hostile and dismissive.  I don’t mind being corrected when I make a mistake but I dislike arguing facts tempered with prejudice.  I can also only take it for so long.  So after about 15 minutes, I reminded this person that our group had traveled a long distance under good faith to help them with their problem.  That we could just as easily pick up our items and go back to the office and they’d be no better off (or worse, they’d have to explain why nothing came of it).  That small interjection was enough to get them back at the table trying to find a solution.

There’s an old adage of “don’t pee in the wind” that I think is fitting here.  Asking for help, then complaining the entire time doesn’t really make people want to help you.

Bad Rolls

The RNG gods are not with me lately.  Well, at least not in a sense that helps me out much.  I had a bit less than an hour yesterday in D3 and wanted to see if I could collect a few more Death’s Breaths, to help with my main build.  The farming build I’m using is based on a few unique pieces, and does decent work in T3.  I am however, still missing an In-Geom.

There is something fun about putting a bunch of enemies close together and having the screen go boom. While my U6/EP build does that in amazing fashion, this farming build just seems to fill the screen up with lights and explosions, all the while running a hundred miles an hour.

I ended up finding a goblin convention in three separate rift runs.  Those are the events where you find 10-15 goblins having a smoke break and you get to play pinatas with them.  Sadly, all that work and all I really got from it was Blood Shards to gamble with.  And no results from those shards.  Still… it’s like Christmas when you see that happen.  Nothing else matters.  Sparklies!

Fingers crossed for the next run!

Diablo 3 Has Come a Long Way

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Way back when, in 2012, D3 launched to some fanfare.  The core gameplay (combat, movement, art) was good but the underlying mechanics needed a lot of work.  The auction house in particular highlighted the issues with the core mechanics.

It’s a simple fact that people, en masse, will take the shortest route to their goals, often without regards for that path’s difficulty.  If it takes 30 minutes of farming, or 2 days of questing, I’m going to farm, even if my eyes bleed.  Blizz learned this rather quickly with WoW, which was why it was so strange to see the same types of errors at launch.  So, while the “max level game” was balanced around a set of specific numbers for player statistics, players needed to find gear to meet those requirements.

Problem 1.  Gear drops were completely randomized, with massive scales.  You could get a bow with intelligence, or a legendary dagger that was worse than what you were using 10 levels beforehand.  There’s a rule in gambling, where you have to let the player think he can win.  Streaks make them put more money on the table.  Because D3 had such massive swings of RNG, you ended up looking for less than a fraction of a percent of all gear.

Problem 2.  Scaling of content was inverted and had plateaus.  Typically, you have a scale that increased as you move farther into difficult content, requiring progressively more and more gear to get to the next rank (i.e. torment).  Not so at first, where just getting to the starting line was a massive effort, and the climb from that point was rather small.

As both problems were number problems, people started doing math.  If 1 person farming gets 1 decent item every day, then 1000 people farming get 1000.  The Auction House circumvented all farming, and with a little luck, you could go up exponentially in power in a few hours of scanning the AH.  The downside was that if you did that, then you were at max gear and didn’t really have a reason to keep playing – gear was the only goal.  You could either farm it through eye-bleeding runs of Act 3 (cause screw Act 2 &4, and Act 1 dropped lower quality items), or farm the AH.  That was about it.

D3 Today

Different story today.  Gear itself is still a goal, but it’s not the only one.  Seasons are here, ladders, sets that provide very different build options, transmog and achievements.

The original problem of gear drops has been mostly solved through “smart drops”.  About 80% of what you find is gear specifically designed for your class with stats you can use.  The stat ranges themselves are much more narrow.  Legendary items impact playstyle with interesting effects.  Legendary items can also roll as “ancient”, providing a ~10-20% boost in power.  You can craft meaningful gear, farm rings and amulets through uberbosses, run bounties for crafting materials/unqiues (of which most have interesting rewards), or run rifts for an increased chance at legendaries and sets.  Kunai’s Cube and Kadala even let you gamble specific materials for a chance at something better.  There are MANY paths to increasing your power now.

The second problem of scaling is also fixed, where there are many levels of difficulty and moving through the first few is rather quick.  A few crafted items and drops and you can move up 2-3 levels in a shot.  A few hours later of decent drops, or gambled set and you are in the mid-game.  A week or 2 later, you’re in the later difficulties.

Session So Far

Given I am running an S4 monk, and I want to run a U6 build, I have a particular gear plan in mind.  I needed specific items to complete that set.  When I hit level 70, my path was as follows:

  • Craft a set of rare equipment
  • Increase difficulty slightly
  • Run regular rifts & gamble with Kadala for Uliana’s set until I have 6 pieces (including duplicates)
  • Use Kunai’s Cube to transform duplicate Uliana items to the ones I need
  • Continue to gamble on belts and bracers for specific items
  • Collect rare Fist Weapons and upgrade to legendary, hoping to get 2 specific items
  • Complete basic set, and continue to gamble/upgrade for Kunai Cube support items
  • Re-roll some stats for improved power
  • Collect/upgrade legendary gems to rank 25

That part took a few hours, enough to get Paragon level 200 or so.

Sessions Now

Given that I have the basic set required for this playstyle (and 4 bank stashes of stuff) I can now do Torment 8 at a good level of comfort.  To continue to move up, I now need to optimize and collect some final pieces of gear.

  • Craft a better Hellfire Amulet
  • Upgrade set items to Ancient (mainly through Kadala Gambling)
  • Find a better Restraint/Focus combo
  • Upgrade legendary items to ancient through Kunai Cube
  • Re-roll stats as appropriate
  • Farm Death’s Breath with second gear set to help with Kunai’s Cube work (current gear set for that)

That list seems simple, I know.  Each step in the previous section was minutes long, or a few hours.  I didn’t care about the numbers as much as the item itself.  Now, I need better numbers.  Example:  Uliana’s Pants.  They are the most common drop and I’ve had ~20 or so thusfar.  Only 1 was ancient mind you, but it has decent stats.  So that means that each individual step in this list is likely to be measured in days.

It’s a long tail but every session I make some progress.  And that progress is what keeps people coming back.

Healthy Gaming

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Last night was a rather tiring night.  Or rather, I think it was the day’s work in the body.  Both my eldest and I were pretty exhausted, so the errands we needed to run were somewhat interesting.

One of them included getting some fish for our new tank.  I had some fish when I was younger, and I find the sight/sound of an aquarium rather peaceful.  It also teaches kids some level of responsibility, without having to worry about massive cost overruns.  So, cats and dogs, out of the picture.  My youngest ended up picking some Show Guppies.  They are surprisingly small to start but they sure do look neat.

After setting them up in the tank, my wife realized that the filter wasn’t working properly.  The fish were shaking, and scared.  That is a weird thing to see in such a small thing.  So I spent 30 minutes figuring out what was wrong, and it turns out there was a bit of sand in the impeller.  Fixed that and the fish were super happy, swimming all over the place.  We’ll wait a few weeks, maybe a month, then see if we can pick up some more.

Interesting side note here.  I use google for nearly everything, and I’m slowly teaching my wife how to use it as well.  I had asked her to find instructions to remove the impeller and though she was looking, she really didn’t have any luck.  About 5 minutes on my search and I found it.  It’s an interesting notion that while google is a powerful tool, there still is a significant learning curve to really make the most out of it.

Healthy Gaming

August is a good month and a bad month.  I am Canadian, and there’s a law here where you have to drink beer during the summer.  It’s a little known law, but the fine is having to drink beer.  The month of August therefore has a lot of beer and that doesn’t really jive well with belt sizes.

While I do have a workout plan, some nights it’s quite hard to get going or finding the time, especially after a long day and you just want to relax.  I’ve had an exercise bike for nearly 15 years now, and I’ve thought for some time about converting it to allow some PC gaming.  Console gaming I’ve done on the bike for a long time, but a mouse and keyboard can get tricky.

I did a bit of research and had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted.  A table like structure, where I could put either a laptop or keyboard, slightly larger on the right for a mouse.  There are a surprising number of options out there, depending on your set up.  I rummaged through my supplies at home and found a tread and riser (the step and backplate from stairs) from a previous reno that I could use.  Only to hook it on the bike, which has handles at an odd angle, and make it removable.   I found some bicycle tire hooks that did the job – they look like big J hooks, that you can screw in.

Long story short, I was able to put it all together in about 10 minutes.  I played some D3 for a while, finding the right spot for good reception for my wireless keyboard and mouse.  You don’t even realize you’re exercising, which is really the best part.  And it’s set up in such a way that my wife can use it easily too, so win-win.

Diablo 3

Patch 2.3 brought in Kunai’s Cube, which is a sort of gambling machine that requires various components to work, depending on what you want to get out of it.  The main ingredient is Death’s Breath though, and you need 10-25 per pull.  These things only drop from rare and above monsters, only 1 at a time, and at varying percentages based on difficulty.  I’d get maybe 10 per rift run or so.  Suffice to say, it’s the new bottleneck.

Luckily, I have a lot of odd pieces of gear on me and I could create a setup on my monk that uses the Sage’s Set, which increased the Death’s Breath drops by 1.  A bit more tinkering is required, but I should be able to do T4 without any big hiccups, which should provide me with 25-50 drops per run.

Kunai’s Cube is certainly a neat mechanic, and the ability to passively slot legendary affixes is really opening up gameplay to some interesting combinations.  I’d say it’s more than doubled the amount of gearing options available, and should make GR runs hit the 90s before the season is up.  That would be something.

Back to Work

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After 6 weeks of vacation, I’m back at work.  That 6 weeks was required, pretty much out of gas on the project I’d been working on for 4 years.  While July was more or less a write off, August was a lot of fun.  It’s a dichotomy really, given that I really like games and I also really like the outdoors and it’s nigh impossible to do both adequately.  And being a Canadian, we only have a few weeks of summer a year, so the latter passion won out.

The family spent most of the month out of the house.  Either at zoos, museums, parks or cottages.  My eldest really caught on to fishing this year and caught a nice walleye on her first “solo cast”.  That was quite an accomplishment and given the results, I’m sure she’s going to be bitten on that for a long time.  My youngest found an interesting passion in collecting rocks everywhere we went. In the middle of a conversation she’d just stop, see a rock and pick it up.  Impressive.  My wife is enamoured with camping fires, so we had quite a few of those.  And I got my time out on the boat.

This last long weekend was the men’s family fishing tourney, so 15 of us trekked for about 6 hours to a lodge and had a blast.  It was way too hot and the fish wouldn’t bite but it was still a good cap to the summer.

Summer Gaming

The odd times I was at home, I was able to get a few gaming sessions in.  FF14, Diablo 3 and some Assassin’s Creed 4 were on deck.

FF14 saw me hit level 60 and in a short amount of time had enough gear at max level to call it complete.  I do not have the time for organized raids, or at least a block of time that I can dedicate to it.  So max level dungeons and gear runs is enough.  I managed to level up my Dark Knight to about 40 though, and that was neat enough.  You lose appreciation for tanking in a game with a 2.5s GCD pretty quickly until you play that role.  I haven’t logged on in a month mind you and with Wildstar going F2P in a few weeks…I’m thinking of swapping back.  We’ll see.

Assassin’s Creed 4 was solely installed for the pirate ship combat.  I rushed through the rest of the game, made it to about ¾ of the quests done and then moved out to conquer the seas.  This playthrough was rather easy compared to my previous one.  I remember getting destroyed quite easily by some naval forts in the past but this run was like butter.  Maybe I just took them on too early in the past.  AC4 has a pretty crappy story but it does have some decent mechanics and the OCD in my liked the collection of all things.  I still despise the “follow target” or the “eavesdrop target” missions.  In a game where you can take on an entire army in melee combat, failing because you took a wrong turn seems asinine.  Deus Ex does this part much better.

Diablo 3

Let’s pretend for a second you haven’t ever played Diablo 3.  Now is a good time to start.  I have harped at length against the original launch of the game, even got a refund in the first few days because of the constant disconnects.  The RMAH (and AH) were incredibly poorly thought out and had an even worse implementation.  Blizzard was smart enough to fire the game director Jay Wilson, and bring in some quality members to wright that ship.  There were a lot of changes in store but the real turning point was the Reaper of Souls (RoS) really turned it up to 11.  AH was gone, complete rebalance of all classes and stats, smart loot (wizards would get next to no strength drops), a new class, seasons (ladders), bounties and rifts for added gameplay.

Patch 2.3 launched a couple weeks back and season 4 started last week.  There are massive quality of life improvements to the game and they’ve now added another form of gambling with the old D2 cube.  My monk is level 70 and missing 2 final pieces for her complete set.  Even without those pieces, I can manage some T6 content.  My brother is running a barbarian and when we end up in a duo, it’s just explosions everywhere.

I like the pick up and play style of game.  Without the realm of trials (massive quality of life improvement getting rid of that) the process of rifting is much smoother.  I can also drop out of a game without any real concerns.

Now to see if I can convert my exercise bike to hold a keyboard/mouse.  Getting some exercise after a month of beer would be a good thing.

Skyforge

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I’ve been out of commish for a bit.  Off work til the start of the fall.  Just way too much work and a rather nasty case of burnout.  Ugh.  So most of the past few weeks has been about resting up.  It’s an odd thing, something a little wonky with the body.

In that time, I’ve filled the time with other things.  I’ve started painting some miniatures from my various board games, starting with Star Wars Imperial Assault.  I forgot how much time each one would take… around 30-60m per from start to finish.  That’s a fair chunk of time but well worth it.

I’ve also popped some time in FF14, hitting 60 with my White Mage.  I’ll write about that a bit later.  I also decided to try out Skyforge, which is in open beta but if you can read through that lie, it’s launched since it’s taking your money.

Business Model

Free to play, though I’m a bit confused as to the model.  Progress is based on getting crystals to move across a character progression track.  If you subscribe, you get 50% more crystals/credits while playing, which is a rather big boost.  The kicker is that there’s a weekly cap on the amount you can get, so you’re really only buying time to get to that cap.  And the cap doesn’t scale with your “level”, so it’s much harder to get at the start of the game than later on.  Otherwise, you can get an alternate currency for small upgrades, nothing too big.  It’s possible to play the entire game for free though, as I’ve yet to see anything that would be completely locked out to non-paying players.

Combat

It’s more or less Neverwinter but with crappy auto-attacks and more classes.  Movement and positioning is rather important.  It’s smooth but there are certainly bugs.  I’ve died from single shots more than a few times.

Interestingly there are 3 roles, tank, DPS and support.  DPS is what you’d expect, though a little low on stuns for my tastes.  Support gives out shields and there are no heals.  I cannot understand any group-based game that doesn’t have heals or stuns.  Tanks are the same, using temporary shields and taking a beating.  They are HP sponges, not tanks.  In solo based game play, it works ok.  In the 3 man content, you can get by since the damage is manageable.  In 5 man play, there are some serious balance issues.  Tanks have it easy, DPS really are the weak point since support can’t ever top anyone off.  And because the game is more or less a free-for-all up until group play, most DPS are pretty bad at what they do.

Avoidance is a really important part of the game, with really big hits coming from big enemies, bosses with 1 shots too.  There are tells to show it’s coming but with a ton of particle effects, sometimes it can be hard to track.  Plus the bugs, where tells won’t show.  I miss telegraphs.

So if you ignore 5 man content, it’s pretty good.  But the entire end game is 5 man content (and eventually larger group content).  Ehh.

Progression

There are 2 ways to progress – the Atlas and through Prestige.  The Atlas is a node-based progression map, one per class and another shared across all classes.  You unlock nodes with colored crystals, which you get from completing content.  Think FFX’s progression model.  The scaling is a little odd, where you have nodes with +7 and others with +75. Moving across the class-based Atlas unlocks more skills and talents, allowing some customization.  I will say that of the 2 classes I’ve played, the actual skill unlocks are poorly balanced.  Talents aren’t too bad though.  Moving across the atlas enough to unlock another class is about 2 weeks worth of work.  You can try out classes in a simulator but actually taking 2 weeks, or even a month, to play the class that you want seems odd.

Prestige is gearscore, plain and simple.  All content is gated by Prestige.  You can also unlock Prestige counts through the Atlas. Just like gearscore, stat balance is not taken into account.  It has less issue at lower score levels but at higher ones… wooo it’s a big deal.  As a tank, I went up ~5% of Prestige while I also upped my Health by 20%.  It made a world of difference in gameplay.  Low end game play is around the 3K mark, with mid-game coming in around 5K or so, once you unlock group content.

Further to this, since Prestige gates all content, it also acts as a level.  This puts a barrier between players while leveling.  Scaling is coming, which is good.

MMO or Not

It’s a lobby game with extremely limited chat and group functions. There’s a guild system, called Pantheon.  There are more than 4 people in the shared zones but group zones are limited in size.  The main town has everyone standing under a giant globe.  I like Neverwinter’s model of distinct zones, which brings some life to the world.  Even Marvel Heroes has more MMO to it.

Art/Style

This is high marks.  The game looks great and is only 10 gigs.  There’s enemy variety, colors, good music and the locales are neat enough.  The sci-fi fantasy setting really works here, with a bit of a tech/wizardry setting too.  Bosses are fun to watch and the screen is often filled with effects.

Overall

This is a launch and I have found dozens if not hundreds of bugs.  Most are innocuous, but there are plenty game crashing bugs and combat bugs that just kill you outright.  There are also some rather significant balance issues that need to be worked out.  The Kinetic and Witch/Warlock classes are miles beyond the others in terms of DPS output.  Classes on their own lack diversity in skills and balance.

It looks pretty and plays smooth but  it’s a solid 2-3 months out from being ready for the prime time.  It fits the drop-in/drop-out market, which isn’t one I’m a big fan of.  There’s a semblance of breadth but no depth.

Life is More Than a Box of Chocolates

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I had mentioned a few months ago that I was going through a rough patch at work. I had stopped blogging and gaming for a while.  Things were pretty bleak for a solid bit, then things started to get better.  I am taking the month of August off, and planning to spend it with my family.  They are the ones who got me through that mess and the reason I get up in the morning.

I met my wife to be at a stag & doe.  It seemed like everyone there knew that we were supposed to meet there.  I was nervous and anxious but she still stuck with me.  Even our dates were a mess for me,  I was simply out to lunch that I was meeting such an amazing woman.  A bit more than a year later, we moved in together, then a year later we got married.   Up until then, that was the best thing that could have happened to me.

A little while on, we had our first daughter.  I had never been so proud of what we made.  A bit later, another daughter.  I can picture both days like it was yesterday.

For all the ups and downs, my only stable factor was my family.  I love my dad to death, but it’s not one of those open emotional relationships.  My brothers and sisters aren’t as close as we should be and I don’t talk to my mother.  I’ve always been out to the side, but that changes when I met my wife and had kids.  I love coming home to giant hugs and smiles.

These past few weeks have been exhausting.  I am having a hard time juggling everything and its put a strain on all sorts of things.  I thought I could scrape by the next few weeks, to end out the month and re-ground myself.  I don’t know if I can make it though.

We all went to a pool party yesterday.  Seeing my kids with nothing but smiles and getting to spend a lot of time with them was great.  It really brought to home why I work, and what I’m missing by not being around as much as I’d like.

My wife and kids are out of the house for a bit and I don’t like the empty nest feeling.  Never have.  I need the noise and bustle.  I need the laughs and the hugs.  Life has thrown me so many curveballs that I thought I could handle them all and keep moving forward.  The silence here is deafening.  I hope their trip is a short one, I need their hugs.

FF14 – Clown Suit

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Oh, how quickly we forget how games love to throw you under the bus when you had super cool looking armor, then make you dress like a clown…  Do all devs have this desire?
ff14 clown suit

I’ve completed the first few starter quests in Ishguard, enough to be on the quest that will give me a flying mount.  A few particular notes about this so far.

The FATES are “broken”.  In every ARR zone, FATES are run everywhere.  It’s rare you see more than 3 up at any given time.  N. Thanalan is on farm mode right now.  HS zones, every fate is up, all the time.  I found one that was a single target boss-like enemy.  We started pretty much when the clock started and ended up being 4 people trying to take it down by the end.  We failed the timer and I was on full-time healing duty.  The HP scaling doesn’t work (SE admitted this), their damage is significantly higher than ARR and the experience/time spent is less than half of previous content.  I’m guessing this wasn’t so much an issue when people were doing MSQ to get to 60 but now that people are trying to level alts, then it’s really a quite glaring issue.

The quests are better, in terms of pace and quality. I like house Fortemps.  Ishguard has a whole Game of Houses (which I claim GRR Martin has heavily borrowed for GoT) jive to it, which is a fair bit better than the lack of flavor in the previous 3 capital cities (Ul’dah was so-so).  The duties (contained personal quest zones) are larger too, instead of just battle arenas.  It’s cool.

The art/music is quite impressive.  I’ve always been happy with the FF series for both, but this expansion improved a lot.  Well, the clown suits aside. The enemies look better, the zones are amazing, Ishguard is massive… it all works well.  Plus, everyone has buckles.  Ain’t FF without a bajillion buckles.

The combat is more or less identical, if not a fair amount more difficult.  I am in decent enough gear, able to solo large chunks of ARR content.  HS basic enemies seem to be twice as tough.  I’m not really looking forward to my first dungeon.

Picking up the new classes isn’t terribly involved but playing them with what they give you is.  I have no alternate jobs and only a few spare pieces of strength gear.  When I picked up the Dark Knight class, it gave me a weapon, a chest and pants.  I needed to find pieces to fill in the rest.  And as with any expansion gouging is present – the gear for level 30 tanks is about 30x the price of gear for level 25 tanks.  So for the price of one level 30 hat, I was able to fill out my entire slot set.  I played as a DK for the first combat quest, to unlock Darkside.  I failed it a few times since I played it as a DPS until I realized it was designed to be played as a tank.  Once I did that, it was a cakewalk.  (Side note, I usually play a caster, so the GCD isn’t that big a deal.  It is when you play melee, very weird pace change.)

I like the content presented thusfar.  I think in general, it’s an improvement of what came before.   FATES need some number tweaking, there are some balance/bugs that need to be sorted out. As a whole?  This is certainly one of the smoother/slicker expansions I’ve gone through.

Alts and the Way Forward

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Alts.  The primary purpose of an alt is to provide a different experience due to the limitations of the primary character.   This is extremely applicable to class-based and level-based games, as the experience of a level 10 monk is much different than a level 40 wizard.  Skill-based games are a little different, depending on how they apply their cap.  Ultima Online for example, only allowed you to max out a subset of skills, while EvE allows to you max everything, if you play for 10 years.  People still end up specializing in skill-based games.  There are other reasons to play an alt, but these are really the most common ones.

The kink in this thought is the concept of an avatar, or a player representative rather than a character representative.  In 99% of games this is your game account, where you gain access through the character selection screen.  FF14 is the clear outlier, where a single character can complete all the content – alts are used for either cosmetic reasons (race/sex) or to play on a separate server.  All the game share a similar vein, where content is gated.  The warrior in WoW is generally separate from the Cleric – aside from pets, mounts and achievements.  FF14’s levels keep content separated, but quest progress is shared across the various jobs.  I’ll pick 5 games here to see where the similarities and differences lie.

WoW

After reading a bit more on the 6.2 dev Q+A for WoW had my thinking wheels going for a spin.  First though, I certainly can appreciate the candor in the responses.  Aside from the raiding progress, it’s fairly clear that the entire expansion had some serious core issues that were not addressed until 6.2.  (That certainly begs the question as to what they actually did for the 20 months between SoO and 6.2).  The second thing I noticed is how alts are mentioned as being the sort of evidence of many of these issues.  Rep grinding, garrisons, dungeons, professions and gold making are all linked in some form to alts.

Most telling is that using alts solely to farm gold (essentially just a 5 minute log on/off, and a weekly craft) is pretty clear that there are core issues with the content.  It means that the content available is of such poor quality that no one bothers to do it again, and that it has no relevance to the playerbase.

Rep grinding only being available from killing enemies is clearly a bad move.  It takes a long time to get through that and it’s eye-bleedingly boring.  6.2 addresses that.  So did the MoP rep commendations.

Garrisons were designed to be self-contained, in that you could level a character to 100 without stepping outside your gates (I did something quite like this with my Rogue).  Aside from companions and unlocking expansions to the garrison, there was no need to leave.  You could fully level and gear a player through the missions.  And supplement your main character with tons of gold from those missions.  I was making 500g per day in 5 minutes, with weekly spikes due to cooldowns.

Dungeons provided zero incentive to run outside of the story progress.  All the gear was supplanted by LFR or garrisons.

Professions were gated behind daily/weekly cooldowns, and could be done entirely in the garrison.  You’d complete as much in 1 minute as you would in an hour.

Wildstar

While there are more links between the characters in Wildstar (pets, mounts, linked housing) there’s still an issue with alt progression.  Unlocking raiding is still gated on a character basis, rather than a player basis.  Reputation grinds are there, locked behind daily quests that do not get faster with alts and gate items needed to do top end activities.  I do hear tell that both of the items are being changed for the F2P conversion though, so there’s some light at the end of that tunnel.

Crafting has cross-dependencies, more than most games, but still not terribly relevant once you get to veteran dungeons.

Ultima Online

Ok, I’ll admit I’m stretching back in time here as I haven’t been active in 10 years.  I did play (very) actively for a long time though, and made a habit of selling 7x GMs on ebay.  A typical account would have a miner/armorer/weaponsmith, a mage hunter, a tank, a treasure hunter and a house crafter.  Each filled a particular niche of the game, and each had dependencies on the others.  Due to the quick ramp up time of each skill, it was a relative simple matter to swap between characters at any given time.  And since there were no levels or content gates, a brand new character had access to the exact same content as 7x GM.  Their ability to excel at that content differed mind you, with is something EvE has in common here.

Rift

Rift is an outlier as it’s the mid-way point between distinct classes and distinct characters.  There are only 4 classes in the game, and each class can play each role (tank, heal, DPS, support) to relatively similar degrees.  It is certainly a different experience skill-wise to play a Rogue versus a Mage, but they still fill the same role, which is not the case in most other games. Most other games let you play 2 roles (DPS+other) for all the characters.  Crafting is different though, as you’re limited in which skills you can pick up.  There are few cross-dependencies though, so there’s little boosting of a primary character.  Planar attunement is even shared across all characters, which is a great incentive to play others characters.

FF14

This game shakes up the status quo and yet, maintains portions of it.  Content is gates through 2 mechanisms, level and progress through the main quest.  You only have to do the latter once and then it’s available for any other job on your character, assuming you have the job level to do it.  So my 51 White Mage has unlocked (most) everything before Heavensward, but my level 30 Dragon Knight can only access content available for characters 30 and below.

In an interesting twist, there’s a benefit to leveling multiple jobs through cross-class skills.  If my WM where to level a Black Mage to 26, he’d gain access to a skill that makes anything instant cast (like resurrection).  Crafting is similar, where there are clear benefits to raising everything to at least 15 to gain access to a host of skills that improve quality and future progress.  In fact, most crafting skills have a dependency on others, so either you have a really diverse guild, or you need to step up with your own materials.

Does an alt provide a benefit to the primary character?  Certainly.  But nearly all the content consumed by that alt is relevant to the player more so than the character.  All the jobs benefit more than the single one being pushed through.  And that’s a rather significant design shift compared to the rest of the market.

If you do have a “true” alt, in that I mean a separate character, then you’re in the same bucket as other MMOs.  It’s like you were a different person altogether, which is highly discouraged.

Sharing Alts

I would hazard to say that the shift away from distinct alts to shared alts is going to get more pronounced as games mature and come to market.  Or at least the game play would move away from a specific character and move to the actual player.  While level-based games will always provide some sort of gate to content, the majority of the game should be open to all alts once unlocked on a single character.  Having to “prove” yourself again and again makes little sense, outside of arbitrary padding to game content.

Impulse Buys + FF Update

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It was my birthday last week.  One year older, though in truth the date itself never means much to me in that fashion.  It’s nice to see family mind you, but it’s not like I move the hand on some death clock.

It’s also an interesting fact that as you get older, it gets a ton harder for people to figure out what to get you as a gift.  I would say that time and a solid experience are the best things, at least in the grand scheme of things.  I don’t need another mug, but a day off? That’s sweet.  A night out?  Great too.

Of course, there’s always cash.

Impulse Buys

I’d been thinking about getting a couple items for a while, and with the birthday cash, I picked up my tablet and made the buys.

First, a top end coffee maker from Bonavita.  I had tried coffee from a friend’s place who had this machine and it was by far the best home brew I’d ever had.  I had bought a Tassmio single brewer a while back, and even though that was good, it was costly and wasteful.  I’m not a coffee snob, I’ll have a cup of freeze dried at 5am to help wake up but I also like to have a great cup from time to time.  Plus, I wanted something that can serve more people too, as my 10 year old $20 machine was horrible.

Second, in the winter I had seen Star Wars: Imperial Assault in a local game store.  Miniatures + board games + cooperative play?  And add Star Wars?  Hell yes.  Apparently it’s a slight upgrade and skin job on Descent, which I already own and is pretty darn good.  Looking forward to setting it up and playing a few rounds with the little ones.  Oh, and some paint jobs on the miniatures will be fun too.  Did I mention STAR WARS?  Just checking.

I guess that’s not really impulse, since I put some thought about it for a while.  Truth be told, I usually spend a LOT of time researching something before biting the bullet.  This one was pretty quick.

Even more quick was the delivery (that is such a poorly written sentence).  It took 3 business days to get to my door, direct from Amazon.  I do not understand how brick and mortar stores work anymore.

ARR is Complete!

First, the quests in 2.55 are just face painting.  It’s like the entire patch was just cinematics, and a LOT of cinematics.  The last 2 quests, I’m sure that was 45 minutes of in-game cutscenes total before I was able to set foot in Ishguard.

There were certainly highlights in those scenes but in traditional FF fare, there turncoats, smug bad guys, dead bad guys, an escape by the heroes and potatoes just standing around.  Of all those things, the potatoes are the most irksome.  (Side note, FF14 doesn’t have blood or death on-screen.  Which makes it hard to cut a guy in two, but they did it.)

But what’s a potato have to do with anything you ask?  Ok, you probably didn’t ask that but here goes.  A potato is a character who provides next to no value in a given scene, outside of frustrating/confusing the audience as to why they are even there in the first place.  It’s like a combination of a Red Herring and Chekov’s Gun.  It’s just a lot of SMH – but hey, that’s what FF does best right?

I made it off to Ishguard and tried unlocking the 3 jobs.  I started the 2 quests for Machinist and Astrologian but they require me to visit the old lands for some stupid reason that makes no sense in the context of lore.  They hate the other side of that gate, why would they send me there?  Dark Knight I unlocked though, even if it wasn’t terribly obvious how to get it started.  Neat intro to the line too.  I’ll have to spend some time on the market as all my lower level gear is meant for magic-users.

I think that’s about 2 weeks of playing, to get from 43 to Heavensward.  If I’d hazard a guess, it would be 2 weeks or so to get to 43 in the first place, maybe a bit more depending on your love of cutscenes and the duty-finder timer.  All mandatory content for anyone buying HS today without an existing character.  I can certainly see that as off-putting.