My wife plays ball hockey, I play ice hockey.  She plays in a rec league, I play in men’s competitive and one group for pickup.  She’s adamant that the nicest man on the planet turns into an ape once you put a hockey stick in their hands.  I am not one to disagree.

The concept of competiveness for me is deeply associated with scope.  Rec/pickup is meant to just have fun and socialize.  At the end of the game, you’re going to see the opponents and have a beer with them.  It doesn’t make sense to take a whack at their knees.  Sometimes the blood boils, I get it, but it still strikes me as odd.  I know personally I tend to laugh the entire game, though there are certainly bouts of open frustration when you hit a string of bad luck.

Competitive though, that’s a different ball game.  You don’t usually have a beer with the opponents, so there’s certainly some bad blood that brews between both sides, usually just a couple players though.  The expectations are different as well.  It’s not so much about winning, because you can’t win them all.  It is however about trying.

I play on 3 teams, one of which has a much lower skill average than the others.  Well, to a degree I suppose.  The team itself is in a division of equally skilled players, so at the end it often turns into a meetup of mistakes.  Players who put effort, regardless of their skill set, build some level of confidence and improve – those that coast are really just spectators in the game.  That part really grinds my gears something fierce.

Skill is an interesting topic, if I can take a small tangent.  I remember a study where chess masters were presented a board for a few seconds and then it was hidden.  They then were able to replicate the board, piece for piece, without fail.  They did this because these were boards of actual games, where strategies were applied.  They tried again with boards that were setup by kids who didn’t know any of the rules, and few of the masters were able to copy the boards.  The lack of skill/understanding removed all patterns from the game.   Sports are a lot like this.  There is a certain pattern to a well-played game, and you can see this in most professional sports.  No look passes are a great example.  People just know where to be.  When you remove skill from that equation…the patterns go away.  It makes for rough going sometimes.

Greater Rifts

Following a bit on the theme of patterns, at higher GR levels, there are specific movement & skill patterns that need to be applied.  You can just go Rambo at the lower levels and bulldoze your way through but on the higher tiers, you’re going to suck floor.

The WD has an interesting pattern in GRs compared to Monks.  Depending on the gear set, you have more or less control of what’s going on.  Getting large packs together is harder, as your movement skills are a fair bit limited.  Using mimics (Grin Reaper) further complicates this, as they randomly cast their spells.  I understand the basic elements but the complex movements are still a learning process.  When to use the Wall, when and where to use Bears, when to use Haunt.  It’s all a neat little dance.  When it works out, you feel rewarded.  When it doesn’t, you feel cheated or pretty dumb.

The Monk on the other hand…you just flit around the screen massing up big piles of enemies.  You snapshot a decent EP, then learn to spread it in the group.  There’s more circling involved, a lot of quick jabs to keep the buffs up, but the actual skill use is simple.  Press SSS and things blow up.  I mean it sounds simple, and on paper it is, but in practice you need to get the timing down.

I like the challenge greater rifts apply here.  There’s more granular control on the difficulty than simply jumping up Torment levels and a much higher skill cap.  I think GR82 is the current record for group play, which would put it somewhere near uh, T 15 I guess?  I know that at GR60 a regular enemy has over triple the health of a guardian in a TX rift.  So finding the pattern of the class you’re playing is as important, if not more than the actual stats on your gear.  It’s a neat balancing act.

Wildstar

Still a huge queue, though I was able to log into my housing plot for 5 minutes before bed.  UI is the same as before, with a small (very small) item shop button.  Need to play through some more, fingers crossed it works tonight!

It was a good weekend.  It was a damn busy weekend.  Saturday was filled with guests for my daughter’s birthday, Sunday was for the stragglers and appointments.

I like to bake.  I have yet to successfully make any fondant for a cake, and I tried something new on Friday.  If you’ve ever made Rice Krispy squares, you know the melted marshmallow gunk step.  Well, my fondant turned into just that in my hands and I was displeased.  A quick run to the store got a box of it, pre-made, put some color in it and ended up with a pretty neat turtle-cake.  More time would have made a slightly different cake but I’m still quite happy.  And so was my daughter – which is the entire point of it all.

I have to say that both of my daughters were awesome this weekend.  It’s hard to have 20 people in your house for what seems forever, but they were really great.  And the birthday girl kept thanking folks for coming to her party.  Time sure does fly.

Weekend Buffs

This weekend was double bounty weekend in D3.  What with the previous portion of this post, I didn’t get much in.  But given that the bounties are the only way to get the crafting materials to re-roll legendary items, they were quite popular.

Interestingly, Blizz had to disable a few bounty quests due to bugs, some of which I didn’t realize were issues – in particular the Desserts quest in Act 1 spider-town.  In the few runs I had, things were pretty smooth.  Getting 4 caches per quest filled up my inventory something fierce, but who complains when it’s all legendaries?  Hah!

The weekend does highlight my previous point about the quality of the bounties, and the differences between acts.  Clearing level 2 of anything is a pain, and the act V versions of this are really quite painful.  You can really see the design differences in the act V zones compared to the rest of the game.  Ironically, these zones were designed when they knew bounties were going to be present, so it certainly begs the question as to what they were thinking when they got to that point of dev time.  Maybe the train had left the station by that point?

The zones themselves look pretty friggin’ cool, and the layouts have more options.  It’s that size part that’s the kicker in bounties… where you end up running one way for 2 minutes, only to realize you made a wrong turn at the start.

Ah well, now I have a lot of mats to gamble with.  Let’s see what them dice roll.

Busy, busy, busy.  Seems like each day is 2 hours short.  So that means each day feels like playing catch up.  And the next few days are going to be a little rough, at least according to the schedule we have.  I don’t think there’s a break until Monday.  Le /sigh.

Le D3

Not much going on here, or at least not much of note.  My luck here is beyond abhorrent.  I’ve tried bounties, I’ve tried rifts, I’ve tried greater rifts, I’ve tried Greed, I’ve tried the cube and bloodshards (well over 5000 of them since my last upgrade).  Not a single upgrade – and it’s not like I’m sitting on a gold mine of gear either!  I could upgrade more than ¾ of what I have on me, with even a mediocre “ancient” drop.

Greed’s domain is interesting.  You are guaranteed to encounter 2 random goblins before the boss, then 5-8 regular treasure goblins while on the boss.  The first 2 can be any type, though the 2 that are the most fun are the Fate Peddler (for bloodshards) and the Gelatinous Goblin (jellos), who ends up splitting into 6 mini treasure goblins.  My brother and I had a run last night with 2 of the jellos and I didn’t get a single legendary on a TX run.  I don’t even want to do the math on that.

The joke in all this is that my brother’s monk is only a few days old and we’re near par in terms of output.  He was in a full U6 build in a single session through gambling and cubing.  Then last night he had an ancient helm drop and gave me his trash.  Hah!

I think I need to do more sacrifices to RNGsus.  Or roll another character in Season 4.  That carrot on the stick is starting to smell rotten.

We’re into the 3^rd week of back to school.  The summer months had both daughters spending nearly all their time together, which is great from a relationship perspective.  The downside is that my eldest has a bit of a hen-like attitude, wanting to take care of her little sister.  Some of that is good but too much and it’s smothering.  Now that both kids are split between school and the babysitter, it’s given both the ability to stretch their proverbial legs.

And for the youngest, this has caused a rather significant change in attitude.  Previous, she was rather shy but now it’s like we have a new extrovert in the house, a little clown at times.  It’s great!  While we were aware that the eldest was likely headed towards the “gifted” program in school, we weren’t quite sure where the youngest would head into.  Even though it’s a few weeks, they have had such a massive increase in cognitive abilities, we may end up with both in that stream.

I rather enjoy challenges and to see my kids follow suit, without pushing them, is pretty neat.  It’s fun to see them learn a new skill and relate it to a previous one.  It’s important for us to keep them on their own separate tracks, given the age difference, to avoid any competition.

Whimsyshire

I decided to try something a bit different in D3, farming the rare transmogs found in Whimsyshire.  To get access to this zone, you need the Staff of Herding.  Given that seasonal characters start from scratch, I needed to farm the staff once again.

Way back when, it was an absurd amount of farming to get the staff material.  I think I ended up killing Izual for the plans for nearly a week before I got the drop.  Last night I got it in 2 kills.   Following the guide above some portions of the farming are much better in the adventure mode, while other are in campaign.

Further complicating things is that the adventure mode was removed as a requirement for season 4, so none of my characters had made any progress on that front.  I would hazard to say that it took longer to get to campaign act 2 than it did to farm every other drop for the staff, combined.  And this was on my farming monk, the one that just flies through the map.

So with the staff in hand, I took a dip into rainbow land.

Each run is about 3-4 minutes with the farming monk.  Given that only a few named enemies actually have a chance to drop the Spectrum, and that only piñatas can drop the Hamburger, running through is pretty quick.  It takes nearly as long to log out, in, and teleport into the zone as it does to clear it, which says something about efficiency I suppose.

I didn’t get much luck mind you.  Drop rates are apparently separate from difficulty, so I was still able to chop down whatever was around me quick enough.  An extra 300 or so DBs won’t hurt.  I received one legendary, from a piñata no less, from all of that.  Which makes me think that drop rates are artificially dropped in that zone.  Not sure if the next session will focus on this but it’s a good break from the regular TX rift runs.

Star Wars and I have this thing.  They make shit products and I buy them.  Ok, ok, maybe not always but most of the time.

The arcade flight simulator of Star Wars was pretty good.  The SNES (super series) was nice.  Force Unleashed 1 and Star Wars Battlefront were respectable enough.  KOTOR was amazeballs, and the Lego series too.  SWG was ok for a while and I have a love/hate relationship with TOR.  Let’s just round it up to a dozen good/decent games.  Out of all these.

On the tablet front, there have been a few games here and there.  The “best” one for me was Star Wars Assault Team.  It was a card-based battle of sorts, with character upgrades and whathaveyou.  It was horribly balanced at the tail end but it looked neat and my kids liked to play it.  (side note, it got pulled from the store last fall with no warning – including Tiny Death Star)

Since then we’ve had Star Wars Commander, a clash of clans garbage heap of nightmares and now we have Star Wars Uprising, a clone of the diablo clones.  It’s somewhat ironic that I’m playing D3 now.  It’s less ironic that this type of action game is the one type I seem to enjoy most on tablets.  There are a metric ton of action/loot games out there, of various levels of quality.  And they all use a very similar business model.

• Have an energy system. Use it to gate players farming too much.
• Have a complex skill system
• Have a loot system, with item grades. Apply a significant penalty to finding top end gear.
• Upgrading these items requires material that needs to be farmed/crafted. “evolving” the gear takes rare items.

That’s about it for this type of game.  Sure, you’ll have others that will throw in boss fights, active skills, group combat, customization and maybe a story!  Dungeon Hunter might be one of the more recognizable ones in this category.

So what does Uprising do to stand out?

For one, the loading times are about triple of any other game I’ve played and without the graphics to justify it.  It uses a gating mechanic for level difficulty, where your gear score must be this high to enter.  The problem is that it’s next to impossible to move up to the next gear level without gear drops.  And the items you need to drop are at the next level.  (this is the exact same problem Diablo3 had at launch).  You need gear to move forward but you can only get that gear after having moved forward.  There are 2 options for this.  A single daily quest that had a random chance to have a second random chance to award an upgrade.  Or use the cash-bound currency to gamble on item upgrades.

But hey, at least the combat is good right?  No, not really.  The skill system give the illusion of choice but anyone who isn’t taking the ranged-spread attack is going to be taking a dirt nap.  And people move so SLOW, with no combat feedback.

It is far from the worst game I’ve played in this genre.  And it has Star Wars on the label.  It’s just boring.  Some performance tuning is definitely required.  And a rather significant balance push.  Sort of gives the impression of a beta, which further adds to my disappointment.  Just seems like wasted opportunity.

I’m reading a book on meditation currently, Wherever You Go, There You Are – by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  I talked about my alignment with the eastern philosophies, in particular Buddhism, and this book certainly explores that concept in depth.  It comes with tapes to help meditate and exercises every few pages to get you in the correct mindset.  There are also quite a few passages from other “zen-like” authors, so there’s some tranquility if you will, in the pages.

I do find that it takes wild swings of the pendulum mind you.  There are sections that deal with nirvana, or simply emptiness and yet others than focus more on being mindful of your surroundings.  The latter seem to be much more approachable than the former, at least given the culture in the west.  It’s not that I think it isn’t a noble goal, just that in 2015, I think we may have moved beyond that now.  Being mindful, living in the present – and I mean truly living in the present – that’s something I’ve been trying to do for a long time.

As is clear, I’m very analytical, which in turn has me looking forward a lot, living in the future.  Instead of appreciating the moment, I’m often thinking about what’s next.  It’s a sort of hunger inside of me that I’m not quite sure how to handle.  So I have to make a conscious effort to be present.  This is less difficult with my kids, and slightly more challenging with my wife.  It’s a significant challenge in the workplace, given the type of job I do.

More of the Farm

It might sound odd, but I’m still learning more about how to play a monk, even after it being my primary character since 2012.  There are certain patterns in play that really make a difference in achieving success with less fuss.  The U6/EP build I’m using is different on TX than on all other levels, due to my damage output.  Everywhere else, I just mash a button and things explode.  (Aside – I have a great dislike for Belial.  I spent 2 nights trying to clear that guy when the game came out.  Now it’s 1 hit in T8. Boom.)  On TX, I need to group them up a lot more, so that the damage spreads across a group.  It’s quite a visceral feeling when the screen just blows up mind you, then you have 40+ enemies down at the same time.

While TX is dandy for legendaries, with still yet no luck on any upgrades, I am taking a different approach to upgrading through bounties.  I mentioned in another post how I have a dislike for Act 5 bounties and any bounty that asks you to clear level 2.  When those two are combined…and you end up chasing tiny rats in a corner… it is not pleasant.

After quite a few runs, I’ve noticed where my monk shines and where other classes are much more appropriate.  Any zone that requires movement around things is a monk’s forte.  Acts 1 & 3 are full of such places, with stairs and pits and so on.   Dashing around is fairly easy as monk, and I guess as a Wizard as well.  The big open zones are better suited for other classes, where they can move in a straight line through things fairly easily.  This means that the “clear level 2” bounties are near always better suited for those classes.  Monks are also tremendously good at boss fights.  1-2 hits and they go down.

So the final run I made last night, I focused solely on the ones where a monk excels in terms of speed.  In our group of 4, I ended up clearing 11 of the bounties (where the average is 6).  It isn’t that I should do more or less, it’s that I should do the ones I’m good at, which in turn helps the entire team complete all the bounties that much faster.

Though, I’m always looking for the Belial bounty.  That guy still owes me.