Category Archives: Games

WoW – Rogue’s Up

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Before WoD launched, I had a bit of fun running old dungeons and raids to try and finish off some collections – pets and mounts.  I didn’t get lucky so much as simply following the odds.  Now that I have 2 characters at 100 (monk and druid) and a level 3 fishing hut (which took ~1000 fish to reach) I figured I’d try for them again.

In particular, Raiding with Leashes 1 & 2, which require kills in MC, BWL, AQ and SSC, Kara and TK.  I was running them pre-WoD with the monk, druid, rogue, hunter and shaman.  5 shots a week was decent enough, though my DK was sitting at 86 and a mage at 81.  Never really tried pushing those guys through.  I finished the 2nd set of combat pets last week and was lucky on an Anzu drop as well (horror stories on that one if you read the webs).  Still no A’lar but that will come in time.

Running them post-squish made some of the fights interesting at 90, SSC in particular.  No big deal really, 10 seconds or so a fight (Broodlord and Twins are a PITA mind you…) but now with decently geared 100s (ilvl 630+), I was 1-shotting them.  That was certainly different.  I figured, why not try to get another to 100 to make it all a bunch easier (and fatten the coffers a bit more while I’m at it)?

I want a farmer for quick and easy runs.  Hunter, DK, Mage and Shaman aren’t there so much compared to a Rogue’s stealth.  Doing Baron runs with the rogue, I was in and out in ~ 4 minutes.  Even my cat druid wasn’t able to meet those times.  Asmiroth, probably the oldest character on the entire server (I made him 5 minutes after the servers went live 10 years ago) was back in the fold!

Starting Off

After the monk and druid experiences, I knew what I was up against.  Less people to compete with but I was aware of the travel path and linkages, where to collect followers and so on.  I opted not to build a Lumber Mill this time, and rather focus my resources on something other than missions.  Collecting treasures on each map and killing rares, so far, has kept me fairly well topped up.  I’ll worry about missions later.

Shadowmoon went by in a flash.  I think the quest flow (and the zone layout) is the best of the entire expansion here.  There are minimal walls and tunnels, so movement works pretty well.  Gorgrond came after and I have to say, I really do not like this zone.  I headed south (as I took the lumber yard) to run through all the quests and followers (Tormorkk and Blook are south).  It’s a pain to move around this zone, but it’s over with.  Interestingly, I’m now 96 due to rested experience and those area-mission-quests that I decided to pay attention to – enough that I’ve unlocked Spires and Talador at the same time.

Hurdles

That said, the actual leveling process hasn’t been uneventful.  The start of Tanaan and SMV was harder than previous.  Even though my Rogue wears leather like my monk and druid, his ilvl was quite a bit lower.  I think I died more in the first hour than I did TOTAL with my druid.  I changed a few things, in particular glyphs, to make the process easier.  Recuperate continues after a kill, S&D auto-refreshes as well.  I also started to focus on stuns a bit more, like in the old days.  That made things easier.  Upgrades through SMV were enough to get me back on track for decent damage and Gorgrond went by with little fuss.

I really like the rogue.  The playstyle is very aggressive and it always feels like you’re doing something, rather than waiting for something to do.  Druid cats feel like molasses.  Monks feel like slow bears due to the way their Energy works.  Rogues have been close to GCD locked for years and it’s a lot of fun.  My main issue with them remains though.  They have very little self-healing (it’s a weak HoT that drastically reduces DPS) though a few survivability options to counter known damage.  To contrast, the monk self-heal is part of the DPS rotation and druids are pretty similar.  This makes soloing at level quite challenging.  The lack of additional roles is also a bugger.  I mean, I understand that it’s hard to heal with poisoned daggers but every other game has a rogue tank.

Every expansion my rogue gets leveled up and then parked.  I’m sure it’ll be the same thing here but when he does get off the bench, he’s quite fast at getting the job done.  Works for me.

Pandemic – Cooperative Strategy and Tactics

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So a bit more meat around Pandemic in this post.  Basics first.  Co-operative board game, run with cards, peons and disease cubes.  Players are randomly assigned a role that has particular features at the start of the game.  Each turn, players can move, attempt to cure a disease or run an action from their role.  They then pick up 2 more player cards, of which you can only have 7 in the hand at any time (more on this later).  Finally, they infect additional cities based on a separate set of cards.

Game ends with 1 of 4 conditions

  • All diseases cured – players win
  • No more disease cubes to distribute – players lose
  • No more player cards available – players lose
  • 8th outbreak – players lose

Games get more complex/challenging with more “bad” cards inserted into the decks, and with more players.

Roles

The core game has a few simple roles, such as Medic that can remove diseases in a city quickly, or a Quarantine Specialist that prevents further outbreaks.  Each has a particular strength and most are related directly to their location on the game board.  Others, like the Contingency Planner or the Operations Expert, allow for better card management, which is great for the late game.

The best role however is the Scientist.  They only need 4 cards to cure a disease (5 for everyone else) which has a very large impact when you can only have 7 cards in your hand.  Someone who can control the disease outbreaks and someone who can research faster make for a very different game.  This heavily favors 4 player games to get the “better” roles, where a 2 player game can be very challenging if you only get card-management roles.

Curing Diseases

As this is the goal of the game it’s also the simplest and most complex portion.  There are 4 groupings of 12 cities, associated by colors.  You need 5 cards of the same color and be on a research station (starts with 1, can add as you go) to cure a disease.  You only need 4 as a Scientist.  Since you’re limited to 7 cards, that means you can only focus on one color at a time and need to strategically discard.  If too many people discard the same color, you can really get into a bind where it’s impossible (or close) to cure a disease and automatically fail the game due to lack of player cards in the pile.

More to this, if you have multiple players your cards are more dispersed.  Maybe player 4 gets the card that player 2 needs.  In order to do an exchange, both need to be on the city named on the card at the same time (outside of a particular role).  That could be half way across the board, far away from a research station.  And when you exchange that card, the person who receives has to discard immediately to stay within the 7 card cap.

It’s really akin to actual crisis management, where you have to concentrate on key activities and let the smaller fires burn, hoping they don’t become large emergencies.

Epidemics

Randomly inserted into the player card deck are epidemics, which cause a proliferation of a disease in a given city.  If there’s too much disease, then it spreads – called an outbreak.  I’d say this is the case 80% of the time.  Once you place the disease cubes you then reshuffle the infection cards already discarded and put them back on top of the deck.  This compounds issues as you’ve already infected these cities and they get back to top of pile.  If you can remember what’s in the discard pile, you can attempt to prevent further outbreaks.

Easy games have 4 epidemics, hard ones have 6.  They drastically alter the board as if you run out of disease cubes or have too many outbreaks, you lose.  Sometimes things look peachy and one bad draw can have massive ripple effects.

Multiplayer Complexity

This is a fairly interesting point as complexity is often defined by variables needing to fit a static structure of defined limits.  A DPS check is you needing to do X DPS in Y minutes.  More often, you need to do W dance, control X add and use skill Z at the right time.  The more of those variables, the more complex the event.

Pandemic is structured in that it has 48 cities, 8 events, and X (4-6) epidemic cards in the Player pile.  Each player picks 2 per round, so you’re limited in potential total actions.  More players mean that the cards are more dispersed, making it more challenging to actually cure a disease.  With 2 players, it’s a 50% chance that you’ll get your card, only 25% chance in a 4 player game (actually chances are much different but this is napkin math for now).  So the more players you have, the more complex it becomes to win.  Conversely, it becomes easier to play.  More bodies means more people to control the outbreaks and infections.  There are the same amount of events as they are fixed per round but having 4 people on the board means you can control 100% more cities.

And the starting conditions are also based on player count.  With 7 roles in the starter game and only 2 players, you’re unlikely to see a Scientist.  But that’s ok, because the win condition complexity is lower.  With 4 players, odds are you’ll get at least 2 solid roles to assist with the win.  Though if you get a 4 player game without the Scientist or say, the Medic, then you’re in for a rather interesting time.

Strategy

Contrary to other games board, the initial set up is not a fixed point.  Sometimes you are dealt a really good hand, sometimes a really bad one.  You can’t build a deck either, so each card selection is pretty random.  Bad hands + random = worse hands.  This is often a problem with competitive board games, where one player gets a solid card advantage and unless there’s an error in play, or a miracle card is picked, they have the game on lock.  Co-operative is different as everyone wins or loses together, so it behooves the rest of the team to assist a weak hand.

Pandemic works because the element of randomness is offset by your group strategy and tactics.  4 people tackling an outbreak is much different than you alone, and the game turns meta very quickly.  Instead of considering your actions this turn, you need to think of the impact on the next few players and what you need for the next turn.

Quite a lot of fun and certainly recommended.

Boardgames Ahoy

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Somehow, I convinced my wife that a night in with boargames could be a date night.  Well, we did end up at a nice Italian restaurant beforehand (which was good) but the still, we ended up in a game shop and bought a board game.  Some progress!  Actually, one for the adults and another for the squirts.

Also, Star Wars – Imperial Assault is my next guilty purchase.  I love Descent 2 (which is an extension of the old Hero’s Quest game I played to death), so yeah…

Store

The Kessel Run is a store that I happened to notice while driving the other day in my neighborhood.  While I’m not sure how other cities run, Ottawa is a rather stiff town.  It’s Canada’s capital, so it has a lot of bureaucrats but it’s also the country’s IT capital.  Not vidya games, that’s Montreal.  Just plain IT.  Nortel was here before it went kaboom.  Let’s just say that those two character types don’t always see eye to eye, right?

So we’ve been somewhat starved when it comes to geeky outlets.  Hobby stores abound but not geek.  There’s Fandom II that’s been around for years and like 4 blocks from parliament but every other store has come and gone.  Games Workshop has had a dozen stores over the years, never one lasting more than a year.  There’s one other that opened recently, Monopolatte, which is a coffee shop / board game scene.  Busy as all hell, which I think relates to a shift back out of the virtual world into the social.

Kessel Run is sort of like that, minus the food.  Tons of board games, just astounding really.  Then a real kick on the XWing miniatures and Warmachine (similar to War40K).  My wife had been intrigued by what I found online, so we made a pit stop.  Sure enough, one of her old students is working there (the thing with teachers is that ever year they see ~200 new faces, so after a while…everyone knows you.)  Spent 30 minutes looking, then got the 2 games and went through the back room.  Which is a rather large gaming room, where about 10 tables were running an XWing game.  Neato.

The Magic Labyrith

First up was The Magic Labyrinth,a puzzle game for younger folk.  I firmly believe that kid’s games are awesome games for life.  Their simplicity is more about building skills than exercising them.  I still like playing Trouble and Connect 4.

The game is pretty neat.  There’s a board on top that you need to navigate your peon through, to get one of the items laid out.  The catch is that under the board you have a magnetized bearing that can hit the hidden walls beneath.  So you need to remember where those hidden walls are while the items up top move around the board.  More or less walls, depending on the challenge you want.

The wife and I played 3 games and it was a blast.  There’s just something about being next to the goal and hitting a wall on the last move to get you going.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a cooperative board game, which is not something you see that often.  If you’re working together, then these types of games tend to fall on the side of random more so that strategy but due to the mechanics, I think it works out pretty darn well.

Each players has a role (Medic, Scientist, etc…) that has some special feature in the game.  Either you can cure with less actions, move around freely and so on.  This part plays a major factor in the game.

The point is to cure 4 different types of diseases before you a) run out of cards, b) run out of infections or c) create too many epidemics.  You can only have 7 cards in your hand at any time, and you need 5 of the same color to cure a diseases at a research station.  There are a dozen cards of a given color in the deck, so discarding needs to be really thought out, especially if you’re multiple players.  Plus you can increase the difficulty by adding some bad cards to the deck, which really can mess with a game.

Moving around the board is also important as you need to keep the diseases in check to avoid an outbreak.  That part is pretty neat.  The curing aspect, combined with the roles mentioned above, mean that teamwork and communication is key to win.  I’ll write a more involved post later but suffice to say that the game plays pretty differently the more players you have due to the way the cards are distributed.

The good news is that even though we lost a couple matches we figured out what we could do to improve.  One match we clearly dominated and another was down to the wire.  So, random be random, but still fun.

Doctor Who, The Simpsons and MMOs

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I thought it was a good title but it actually stems from an Observation Deck post about the Simpsons.  The theory, and one that applies more so to Doctor Who, is that any show of long duration isn’t actually a single show but rather a multitude of shows using the same basic premise/characters.  And really, if you spend a minute to think about it, this applies to nearly every single movie in the past 10 years.  Sequels and reboots.  But those get a clean slate.  Serials (TV shows) do not.

Doctor Who has had “clean breaks” because you know the Doctor dies and is regenerated, they can put in a new actor and a new spin on the character.  Eccleston was brooding, Tennant was like a brother, Smith was a nutter and Capaldi is aggressive.  All sharing the same name, all in the same setting, and all without a break between them.  So you end up with people having a favorite Doctor, one they identify with.  “Eccleston was great!” I can hear someone say.  “Sit down, you’re drunk.  Rose ran the show and you know it” I reply.

Any show that hits the 5 year mark is likely to go through this shift.  Actors change, plots close and open, people grow older.  The Simpsons is different as it’s animated.  Actors have been pretty much the same since the start, none of the characters have grown old.  It’s never been off the air.  26 years now.  It’s still shifted somewhat, with changes in writing staff, which has had a rather drastic impact on the storylines.

MMOs, the Change and the Reboot

Very few MMOs ever get a reboot and succeed.  Very few sequels ever succeed either.  FF14 is really the poster child for this since it was both a sequel and needed a reboot.  Most MMOs just putter along for years and years, hoping to find the right combination of people and fun.

But they change over the years.  Each patch by definition changes something.  Players won’t ever consider something an expansion if there isn’t some new mechanic or thing to do.  And it can’t really be more of the same all the time because player tastes evolve, technology evolves and the market evolves.

I think most would agree that expansions are the obvious point to look for change in direction within a game.  UO had the Trammel split.  SWG has the NGE.  EQ had PoK.  DAoC had Atlantis.  SWTOR had the swap to F2P.  There are more examples in each game and more games than I could list…

WoW… well WoW is delimited by each expansion plus the advent of LFG, LFR and Flex Raids, which were all mid-expansion changes – all affecting the social aspect of the game.

I mean, let’s take a high level look at the WoW expansions and the mid-strikes between.

  • Vanilla – This was more or less a solo-friendly version of EQ2.  40 man raids.  8m peak players.
  • BC – An integrated vision with a tight focus on raiding and achievements (without actual achievements).  All the systems worked together.  Flying introduced but only at max level.  10 and 25 man raids (mostly the latter). Gain to 11m players.
  • WotLK – A split in many of the systems with the introduction of catch-up mechanics and heroic raids.  The best and worst raids were here: Uldar and Trials of the Crusader.  Flying at max level. Gain to 12m players.
  • LFG introduction – this was a few patches in to WotLK and had a few iterations.  Dramatically changes the social aspect of the game and forced a simplification of many mechanics.
  • Cataclysm – Gutting of the talent system, rebuild of the 1-60 experience/world, increase in overall difficulty, healing triage was introduced.  Flying from the start.  Most would see Cata as a major shift in direction for the game, where it tried to please the raiding and pro-difficulty crowd, when the market was heading another direction.  F2P MMOs were all over the place.  Also introduced Cross-Realm servers to address low pop zones.  Loss to 9m players.
  • LFR introduction – Firelands raid notoriously had less than 1% of the players complete heroic.  LFR put in so people can play the raids, see the story and Blizz’s dev time on raids isn’t wasted on 20 people.
  • MoP – Pet battles.  Daily quests everywhere.  Story that had zero links to any previous lore.  Farmville.  Many catch up mechanics and simplifications.  By this point, most systems had limited (if any) ties to other systems, meaning a player could do near every type of content without talking to another soul.   Merger of servers (connected realms).  Loss to 7m players.
  • Flex Raid introduction.  In my opinion, the biggest positive change to MMOs in 10 years.  Removed many of the limitations for group sizes and benching people, allowing social guilds to raid successfully.
  • WoD – Break of all ties to previous content/structure.  Sale of level 90 characters.  Garrisons which make most players self-sufficient and bypass most profession requirements.  The largest player boost since WotLK too.  Flex Raid for everyone!  No Flying.  Focus on world exploration and “dynamic” content.  As close to WoW 2.0 as we’ve seen so far.

Each person is likely to identify best with a given version of WoW.  You can read forums or other blogs and people will proclaim “BC was the best!”, “LFG killed WoW”, “AQ rules” (no one says this).  Rose colored glasses abound and few people, for any given form of media, will proclaim that today’s version is the best.  It takes time to digest what you have today and when it’s fresh, you really see the good and the bad.  When you look back on any memory, you tend to see the good in it rather than the bad.  If it was bad, you wouldn’t be thinking about it right?

Which I guess makes most of the 10 year anniversary MC runs look hilarious.  It’s pure chaos, with maybe a half dozen people running the whole show.  The difficulty is half of what it was once you’re in the zone and there’s no roster boss (actually finding 40 people to do it, getting them attuned and then having them travel to the instance).  It’s so different from what it was yet still people find it hard to get through.

Moving Forward

And honestly, in today’s market place of MMOs and games, you are at a great buffet of options and all sorts of price points and all sorts of mechanics.  If you can’t find something out there that pleases you, across hundreds of games, then maybe it’s not the market that’s the issue.  Maybe you’ve just graduated to grumpy ol’ bugger, sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, complaining about loud music the kids are playing these days.  We all know how much attention and credence those get.

Once people start to accept the fact that an MMO cannot be static and that a return to the past isn’t possible, maybe they’ll be ok with the fact that they are allowed to move on to another game.  Players tastes change with time.  Their schedules as well.  You finish school, get a job, then a career.  Maybe get married and have kids.  I read some of the guild invite spam and there’s always one that goes

Casual raiders wanted.  Schedule W-T-Su, 8-11.  Attendance is mandatory.

And I think to myself, I used to do that but I can’t anymore.  And when did that become casual?  I’ll try something else.  And I’ll have some fun.  ‘Cause that’s the reason we game in the first place, to have fun.

WoW – Gold is Worthless

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I mentioned in the previous post that the WoW Plex-like system just is a poor overall idea because gold is meaningless in WoD.  I want to expand on that a tad and in particular on garrisons.

Garrisons have an investment cost, measured in Garrison Resources, Gold and Time.  The time factor is rather small mind you, an hour per upgrade (minus the character level requirement for the overall garrison).  Garrison resources can be tight to start off, so everyone should use a lumber mill while leveling to stay ahead of the curve.  Gold is a different matter.  The buildings have a build cost (100-500g) and the schematics to build also have a cost (750-1500g).  All told you’re going to sink a fair chunk of change to upgrade all the buildings, say about 8000g.  Unless things have gone really poorly for you, that money should be available already, either from the 90 boost or regular play and leveling rewards.  Still, it’s possible to be set back I suppose, though only for a short period of time.

Within the garrison there are 2 main paths to take in order to turn a profit.

First is the follower missions.  For this, you’ll need a level 3 salvage yard (for big salvage crates), a level 2 bunker (for follower item rewards), a level 3 barrack (for 25 follower limit) and a level 3 inn (for gold rewarding quests).  A UI mod for follower missions is recommended as well, such as Master Plan. The big salvage crates can give about 50g per, the missions from 30-200g each, some missions give gear which sells for 50g and so on.  It takes a while to get rolling but I can make about 500g per day from missions.  And that’s excluding the gathering materials (herbs, ore, leather) that I get.

Second method is from daily quests from small buildings.  You get 3 small buildings in a level 3 garrison.  The profession buildings are all small and give a daily quest if you assign a follower at level 2.  These daily quests require you to make something that has a level 1 skill (if any skill required at all).  There are various levels of rewards mind you… the inscription one is lackluster and so is alchemy.  Jewelcrafting can give you 200g+ per day though.  And since professions in WoD are absolutely meaningless because of profession buildings, you can swap between them daily to collect some money.

To combine both methods, you set yourself up for option 1 (followers) and use the last 2 small buildings for daily quests.  So in about 5 minutes of work, per day, you can make 500-1000g without stepping out of the garrison.

There are more involved methods, certainly.  Gathering professions give a fair chunk of primals in the wild, which can be exchanged (50 of them) for Savage Blood.  The daily fishing gives 4-5 as well.  The level 3 Barn allows trapping of elites for ~15% chance at Savage Blood too.  Selling gathering materials doesn’t seem to turn much profit.  Creating items either as LFR drops i640 gear and follower missions can give you i655 without leaving home.  All this requires selling to other people, the previous methods never leave home.

So, in a game where absolute minimal play can get you 500-1000g per day, it makes you wonder what value 1 WoW dollar actually would have.  10K?  100k?  Most RMT sites sit around $15 for 20k. So let’s say a a WoW dollar would have to go for at least 30k/$15, otherwise RMT won’t get cut out.

And then once you had sold it, what you would actually DO with that gold.  You need a fraction of that for the garrison and then there are only 2 sinks in the game and both relate to the Auction House and vanity gear/pets/mounts.  Those that can be found by other players and those that the game dictates are available for purchase.  The former usually has prices around 10,000g while the latter can be near a million for heavily sought after items.  Odd group that latter one, with slightly different motivations.  The point is, WoW has next to no sinks for the masses.  WoD might have gotten rid of the daily quest money faucet from MoP, but they put in a variant that takes less time and effort and provides more money.

You can’t build a secondary market on top of a non-existent one.  WoW hands out gold by the bucket, the distribution of that gold depends on how many times you ask for more.

2015 Predictions

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New Year and all that jazz.  Still recovering from some illness and some self-inflicted pain over the holidays.  Back to work now though, hopefully things will sort themselves out.

Similar to last year, I’m looking at some resolutions and predictions for the coming year.

Blog Resolutions

  • Post more media in the blog. Pictures & video.  I think it would add more to the context.
  • Try out a diary format for a few posts. While I tend to focus on analysis, I think the recounting of adventures always fun to read.
  • More cross-posts. There are many, many bloggers out there.  I should do more to cross-post/link/comment.
  • End the year with 200 posts. That’s about 4 per week, which should be manageable.
  • Try more games! I won’t invest in a console, so I’m out about a dozen options per year.  But my tablet and Steam can keep me more than busy.

Personal Resolutions

  • Actively work on an exit-plan for current project at work.
  • Focus more on the family and what makes them happy.
  • Take time to breathe and time to sleep.
  • Read at least a dozen books.
  • Introduce my 4yr old and wife to tabletop/board games. My daughter received a Connect 4 and Trouble for Christmas and we played a fair amount.  She hates losing and wants to learn how to win. There are tons of games out there to try.

Predictions

Some of these are easy; some are way in left field.

  • SOE won’t launch a single product in 2015. Specifically, the order of eventual launch is Landmark, H1Z1 (cancelled before launch) and EQ Next.
  • EvE will increase their patch cadence a bit, to allow for more time between and draw out the ideas. Their subscription numbers will drop due to the stance on multi-boxing and bots.
  • Wildstar goes B2P by late spring. It either drops raiding as a focus or closes shop.
  • ESO will launch on consoles in the summer and go F2P at the same time. Still no auction house or viable crafting container.
  • WoW will drop back to 7m subscribers. Their PLEX-derivative won’t work due to the way the economy works (you don’t actually need gold to play WoW in WoD).
  • WoD end-game will be Burning Legion tie-in.
  • WoW patches will continue to take an eternity to go out, with no expansion news this year.
  • Heroes of the Storm will “launch” in the fall, even though Closed Beta is taking your money in about 2 weeks. Pricing will change once the gates open.
  • Overwatch won’t show in 2015.
  • SWTOR will have 3 content patches, with new raids and planets. GSF will be forgotten.
  • Steam and Riot will get hacked, which will likely change the way PC gamers identify with hackers. They’ve only targeted consoles so far.
  • 2015 will have a bunch of kickstarters finally launch. Pillars of Eternity, Star Citizen, Tides of Numenera and so on.
  • Microsoft will use the Minecraft source for a new game that’s used in schools. Makes a mint.
  • This is the year of the indie game standards. $15 dollar games will be held to similar standards as $60 games in terms of quality, less so content.
  • A new review system will be established detailing whether a game is playable at release or if you should wait for a kitchen sink patch.
  • Evolve, No Man’s Sky and Repopulation will do better than expected.
  • 20142015 will be the year of the RPG! (Witcher 3 for sure)

If I hit 50%, I’d be surprised but hey, that’s what this list is for right?

 

The year so far is off to a decent start.  Here’s hoping the same for all the readers.

2014 in Review

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Cause there’s only 1 day left, right?

Blog

Well, this year was the busiest year on the blog by a fairly large factor.  Writing more apparently helps!  I do have plans to keep that up in the new year after the holidays.  Similar to Wilhelm, WordPress’ updates are boggling to me.  The site worked fine at the start of the year and all these new interfaces have caused more problems than not. I guess it’s good for the layman but are there really that many new bloggers today?  Odd…

I’ve made some changes over the year to the blogroll, much cleaner now.  Once day I’ll get an RSS feed to work for it.  It’s been a good year for bloggers overall I should think, with a fair amount of cross-chat.  Gamergate helped that a bit, and the NotAllMen trip as well.  I mean, there’s nothing better than stupidity to get people writing after all.

I also added some new pages to the top of the site on theorycrafting, for those interested.  It’s the two fields of gaming I rather enjoy and I wanted to keep the interesting points up for those who are also curious.

Personal

Kids are bigger, so much bigger.  It’s a ton of fun to watch them grow as people and make their own way.  At 2 and 4, there’s an innocence that’s hard to find elsewhere and it’s refreshing.  Honestly, it’s the best part of my day.

Work is nearing a major milestone after too many delays.  The stress load from work is more than I am comfortable with.  Too few people to make decisions and it falls on 2-3 people, one of whom is me.  That said, it’s been great for career progression but hell on my psyche.  It’s not sustainable and I realize that.  See previous paragraph as to coping mechanism.  Crossroad of sorts.

Games

An interesting year for games…

Transistor – A rather amazing game in a small package.  You should do yourself the pleasure of playing.  Amazing soundtrack.   I’m putting this up there with Ico/Shadow of the Colossus as game art.

Elder Scrolls Online – Launched with no end game, lost a ton of people.  I can’t remember the last news package from the game which is both bad and good I guess.  I do know they got rid of their end game design for something sane.  One of the few MMOs that actively punished you for being social.  Had (really) good art and quests.  Just a multiplayer Elder Scrolls really and that’s not worth much more than box price to me.

Wildstar – had an endgame that no one wanted to play.  Seriously, there were 20(!) guilds running the 40 man raids at peak.  Do the math.  There have been updates and news about it, not all positive but at least something.  They are actively pushing lore, which isn’t what people play, so that’s odd.  I do expect it to go B2P as the components are there for it to work, similar to guild wars.  If they can figure out what they want people to do at max level that doesn’t have the word raid in it, then there’s some chance.  Combat mechanics were great, response time was fluid and art was cool.  The pieces themselves are great, it’s just the combined packages that was ugh.

WoW / WoD – Still subbed after 2 months but I think that’s at the tail end.  The most dumbed down version of the game yet, which would do well to attract people but nothing to retain them.  Hit 10+ million subs at launch, would be surprised if they retain 8 by the next quarter.  The zone quests are better than MoP…ugh…I’m trying to think of more positives here.  Garrisons can get you raid equipped?  I dunno… there’s just no reason to be social anymore.  See ESO… Also, waiting 14 months for content is a pretty big middle finger to their playerbase.  Math to me says they have 4-5 million people willing to play if there was something to do, so that’s what, $50 million they left on the table due to shitty release schedules?

SWTOR / SoR – A better expansion than the Makeb one, with a good retool of the skills and questing experience.  The dungeons and raids are good, there’s side quests and the art is still solid if you like the IP.  Strongholds are good housing and fit the F2P model well.  Conquests are a solid thing to do for guilds.  Was an overall good year after the crap of GSF that should die a slow death in a fire.  If BW can continue to release content like this, then it’s a good thing.  That said, they need to fix the rewards structure a bit.

FF14 – I decided not to subscribe here because I know the time investment and return is too high for me.  It’s the best bang for your buck mind you, with new zones, classes, dungeons, raids and plenty more on a frequent basis.  Where WoW has nothing for 14 months there were 5 (or 6?) content patches for FF14.

Dragon Age Inquisition You know, I like the game mechanics but after about 10 hours there’s too much MMO crap and not enough fighting.  I don’t want to collect herbs.  I want to fight bad guys.  There’s too much busy work and I feel like I’m orchestrating rather than actually doing.  When fights occur, they are against little peons half the time and not much fun.  The lack of healing removes most strategy as it’s just nuke as hard as you can or get an OP class to run it all.  It’s a decent enough game but I still prefer the original.

Shadow of Mordor – My pick for game of the year.  Two parts really shine.  First is the controls which pair the Batman and Assassin’s Creed series for fluid combat and parkour. Seriously, AC plays like garbage compared to this.  There’s no parry/attack here, it’s infinite moving combos.   Tons of fun.  Second, the nemesis system.  Consider this an innovation that should (will) be used for future games across the board.  Makes for tons of replay ability and personal investment.  The enemies you fight are unique to your game, which makes for so much more fun when you finally nail that one orc who’s been pestering you for hours and just won’t die.

Android Tablet – I’ve been looking for a solid game or two.  Room 2, 10000000, 1849, Darkness Reborn, Devious Dungeon, Hearthstone, Shadowrun Returns, Wayward Souls, SNES 9x are all actively used, whether Free of at cost.  Simpsons is still there too as a way to play a game without spending a cent.  Feedly and Chrome likely take up half of my time though….solid investment.  Oh, and a UE Boom is an amazeballs bluetooth speaker if you’re looking for one.

Overall

It’s been a good year.  Hoping that the same applies to all my readers.  Fingers crossed that 2015 is also a good run.

WoW – How Not To Run an Economy

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As you’re likely aware, I kinda have a thing for economies in games.  WoW was a decent example of how an economy worked due to sheer volume.  That’s about the only thing it ever had going for it.  The UI is atrocious and a disaster to read through.  It’s mandatory to have a mod to want to make a buck.  The market mechanics themselves are broken.  Crafting is useless except for max level gear and then only until patch X.1 (with the exception of Alchemy and flasks, which is a market with no bottom).  That glyphmas even occurred is proof enough for me that Blizzard just wings it.

Until WoD, every item had some nominal value even though it might take a while to sell.   Due to sheer volume, there was always a chance someone needed that ore from the level 10 zone, or that green item to level up with.

WoD took cooking’s and the gathering skill’s catch-up mechanic and well full blown stupid.  There’s zero need for any material outside of the WoD container.  People are limited in crafting items based on a daily cooldown, not on actual materials at hand.  Garrisons provide herbs and ore out the wazoo, saturating the market.  Ore in particular is an offender where a level 3 mine can give out ~150 ore and no one can use it.  Jewelcrafters used to be a prime market for ore, but that’s gone.  Today’s AH had 28(!) pages of one type of ore on sale.  20 pages of Frostweed too.

Market’s are simple beasts, it’s a supply and demand thing.  When the supply is 2-3x more than the actual demand, your market is more or less junk.  WoD hands out gear like candy.  A previous post mentioned that my monk is in near raid level gear without having even stepped into a dungeon (his healing gear is better than DPS).  There’s near zero need to actually craft or buy anything, especially with so many daily cooldowns prohibiting crafting.

Alchemy and cooking are always the outsiders here as they always have use to some people – and I think these two skills in particular speak volumes about how a market works.  Alchemy is a zero effort game.  You can collect more than enough herbs in your garrison to make flasks limited by your daily cooldown.  The market is, and has always been, run by idiots who continually undercut without understanding the value of what they are selling.  So it’s always a better sum to just sell the materials instead of actually crafting something.

Cooking is different.  You need meat and you need fish.  Both require effort as you need to leave the garrison to get it.  Sure, you can trap for the best feast but that still requires effort.  There’s also no daily cooldown on the skill, just craft away.  Combined, this means the skill has value, as it takes time to do it and you’re always short on materials.  You can make a decent profit since people don’t want to make their own food.

Themepark markets are notoriously poor examples as there’s no sink to the economy. If you don’t lose items, then you reach a point where there’s just nothing to buy.  You hoard your money and maybe get a rare item at some point.  Which will get replaced with the next patch.  For a themepark economy to make sense, things have to be consumed.  It doesn’t have to be gear, it could be an oil you put on gear that reduces damage by half (I mean delays future repairs).  Have every tradeskill have the ability to make one of those items and you just created a super sink.  Mats are used.  There’s no cooldown.  The market will settle close to the actual repair costs.

The way WoW’s market is running now, it’s just a competition to the floor with a massive saturation of material.

SWTOR – Odd Incentive

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Happy Holidays to start.  Hope everyone is having a good time.  My wife had been sneaking out for a month to work on a secret project and turns out she was doing some woodworking.  She made me a canoe oar from scratch, like the old voyageurs used.  Really friggin’ cool and amazing gift!

Over the holidays my play time is certainly down some, what with the family events.  That said, I have both my Sorc and Power Tech at 60 and wondering about what’s next.

SWTOR changed a bit in the last patch, where commendations were streamlined.  You swap ’em for gear and there are 3 types.  Basic, Elite and Ultimate.  How you get them is an interesting story.

Basic are what you get from leveling and daily quests.  There are 13 dailies on Rishi and Yavin combined, though you really only want to bother with Yavin’s 8 due to travel time.  You get 4 per quest.  Gear is worth 80, 100 or 120 per.  When I hit 60, I had about 950 in bank due to previous dailies/leveling.  Suffice it to say, I swapped into 186 gear pretty quick.  Then I started looking at going to 192 gear, which you can get from Elite commendations.  Here’s the rub though…

Hard Mode level 60 dungeons only award basic commendations.  Hard mode 55 dungeons give Elite.  The power curve between 55 and 60 is significant, such that 2 people can easily run a level 55 hardmode.  Sure, there’s the odd good drop at the end of a heroic but due to itemization and you already being at 186 in the dungeon, the odds are pretty low.  So dungeons are pretty much not worth anything right now.

Meaning all you have as group content is raids, which are on a weekly lockout.  I’m guessing this is a bug of sorts and a future patch will fix it.  In the meantime, I’ll be focusing on other activities.

Which for the most part means making credits.  I think I’ve made about 10 million since the expansion launched, across both the main players.  Artifice isn’t making much money, outside of farming due to the material costs of Midlithe.  Cybertech is raking in the money though.  That, plus finally maxing out companion faction (gifts) means I’ve flipped for a good profit.  It’s funny because I remember thinking that 1 million was a pipedream and here I am sitting pretty.  It’s a decent side diversion but I’m hoping for more.

WoW – An Experiment

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First off, I’ve been sick for what amounts to a month with a chest cold.  Turns out it was bronchitis and even with anti-biotics, things don’t seem to be improving much.  It’s worse when I talk and since my job is mostly talking, I’ve taken a few days off work.  Lungs are on fire after a coughing fit and woo, is that not fun. Hope this clears up before the holidays.

Leveling Without

Sort of stemming from Murf’s post, though predating it somewhat, I wanted to test the limits of the WoD garrison mechanics.  The requirements for this are a level 3 Barracks (for the 25 follower cap), level 3 Salvage Yard (for the large crates), a level 2 Dwarven Bunker (for follower items), and a level 2 Inn (for the headhunter for more followers).

Two particular tests mind you.  My Monk hit 100 the long way, capping off in Nagrand.  My Druid took the side road, hitting 100 in Spires but heavily supported through Character Experience missions.  100 is the bare minimum to do run the experiment, since you need a level 3 Garrison.

Ok, so that aside, here’s the details.

  • Ensure an even spread of skills across all followers
  • Have at least 1 follower with a scavenger trait (triples garrison resources)
  • Avoid any tradeskills (replace with the Headhunter in the Inn)
  • Avoid any bodyguards
    • Exception here is Leorajh.  Max him up so you can use the garrison table anywhere.
  • Load up the bunker on orders, to get follower gear
  • Run all level 100 missions.  They give a large crate.
  • Upgrade followers with your items, focusing on getting 3 to 615, then 3 to 630 and then 3 to 645.

After that is set up, then you need only run every mission that has player gear.  They stick around for a while, so only run them with your best followers.

Here’s the result on my monk after a few weeks.  If you see an Agility weapon, then it hasn’t updated to my healing spec.  I’m at ilvl632 right now and I’ve never stepped into a heroic dungeon or a raid.

My druid only hit 100 last night but here’s his workup so far.

So far, the only piece of gear I haven’t got from missions is rings and off-hand items.  Everything else can come from there.

It’s an interesting experiment to see how far a character can go.  I wouldn’t say it trivializes the rest of the content, given that you’d likely be better off just running dungeons.  It does however, remove the social aspect of the gearing treadmill which I’m not a super fan of for the genre.  We’ll see where this ends up.