#Wildstar – 2 Weeks In

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By this point, I had a pretty good feeling for ESO but I waited til the end of the month. Will do the same here but wanted to post a quick update.

My Esper is 36. There are 2-3 people higher than me in the guild (Evindra-Exiles-Cats in Space) so I’ll venture to say I’m top of curve. It’s about the same rate as ESO and FF14, half as fast as TOR. I have spent an inordinate amount of time “goofing”. Exploring, crafting, little quests here and there, challenges. A fun dungeon runs, a few housing picnics (and a dungeon inside one!). There’s a ton to do and I am loving it all.

Catching some air. Massive air.

Catching some air. Massive air.

I was in Farside, subzone 3.1 I guess. It’s the mini zone attached to the large moon (with 1/3 gravity no less) and was just astounded by the little details. Small nooks are full of fun stuff. Hidden ghosts, passed out gambling NPCs, giant snails making out, hidden sets of stairs. And the lore is just jam packed with juicy bits.  Farside is also an odd one as it’s made up of smaller zones.  Compared to Whitevale (just before) you’re only in each zone a couple hours.  Mind you, each has their fun components.  The 2nd zone (the sand biome) has a spider-man like challenge.  You can fall from the highest point while doing it and I spent a solid 45 minutes getting through.  That I tried for 45 and didn’t just move on, speaks a lot I think.

Syp's lot is pretty neat!

Syp’s lot is pretty neat!

Are there bugs? Ya, a few. I’ve only ever had to drop 1 quest though. A rare /reloadui fixes the rest. One bug happened in the world quest line, at ~35.  That took a bit of magic but the quest itself was impressive, so I didn’t mind redoing a fair chunk.  I think I could count the bugs on my hand actually, which is so vastly different from ESO, that they are like night and eclipse.

World Quest - just amazing art

World Quest – just amazing art

Housing.  I will have to make an entire post on housing.  Neighbors are easy to find and some people have been ultra creative.  Ryven found one piece of loot, not even at max size, that takes up 25% of his lot.  I’m adding pieces here and there, though I think I’m going to go for an underwater vibe – given my squirg headgear.  I like farming on other people’s land too, since you share resources.  It is so much more than I expected and extremely seamless.

I spend a lot of time smelling the roses. And doing that with other people too. That alone should speak volumes to what Carbine has been able to do here. I am continually impressed, even as a jaded vet.  I think, at the very foundational level, things just work and work smoothly.  It’s more or less intuitive.  There’s very little bullcrap that you have to put up with in order to have fun, which is a great change from more recent games (as I like to remind everyone, FF14 is the exception to all my MMO complaints!).

Oh, and I love Lopp.

Won’t You Be My Neighbour

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I would be remiss to mention yesterday’s sad news of the passing of Christopher “River” Cavelle, who ran High Latency Life.  There’s a condolences page you can also view.  There are quite a few posts out there about the event as well, which is fairly indicative of the social fabric that seems to tie the blogging world together.  It’s a sad day indeed.

My wife, ever the astute, had noticed that that I was playing Wildstar with a smile on my face and with the odd interjection.  Normally, I don’t smile when I game unless I see something rather neat.  Then she asks about it, I show here and we move on.  It’s not often that I smile for long periods of time.  But for some reason, Wildstar does that and part and parcel is the guild structure.  I had a rather decent guild many a year ago in WoW, then a solid run through Rift.  But since then, ehhh.  They always had people I knew in the RL too.  Wildstar, not so much.  Instead it’s made up of other bloggers (Evindra – Exile – Cats in Space).

Wilhelm uses the term neighbours and Wildstar does the same with their housing system.  The analogy works, in that there is a giant neighbourhood of bloggers that we all interact with on a regular basis.  Some of them you see every day, others you see once a month, some you just pass through.  I live in an older suburb, with an established community.  If the houses were empty, it would not be the same area so even though I might never talk to the neighbor 5 blocks down, they make the area what it is.  The core difference, and this is really important, is that I can see these people.

I cannot see the other bloggers.  I can rarely even hear them.  But I can read what they write.  I know more about Murf than I do my wife’s aunt, who I’ve met a dozen times now.  Each and every one of them adds a little something to the internet.  The NBI does a great job of giving a platform to new members of the neighbourhood but I don’t know that it really reflects what they are getting into.  You just don’t know until you step in and read the words.  Until you share ideas with another.  Until you come to some realization that your original idea needs a bit of work.  That there are dozens of people out there already, waiting for more to come along.

I think one of the largest advantages that blogging has above other more recent platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Vine, etc…) is that the format allows for more of the person to show through.  Outside of a podcast/stream, you rarely get to spend more than 200 characters or 8 seconds with someone.  Since it’s longer, people have to put in a bit more effort into the message as well, so they come out more thoughtful.  They are also quite a bit more likely to respond to you.  And it’s often times much less confrontational.  Blogging, or rather long-form communication, acts as a giant virtual network for the community.  Each one of us has a house people can visit.  There’s plenty of stuff there to check out too and if you take the time, you can make a new friend.

Realizing My Own Limits

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There’s a widely known issue with introverts in that we don’t have much useful data about them. For some reason, they avoid attention! Go figure. So when I try to read up on social cues and tools, they often reflect a alpha/extrovert personality. This has been challenging as I’ve essentially had to learn the hard way.

Another known fact (if you read this blog regularly) is that I am an introvert. It’s funny enough when I tell this to co-workers or friends I’ve only met in the past 5 years. I certainly don’t come off like one. You can thank honed personal defenses for that one.

I like to watch people. Not in a creepy way but more like ants. Ok, that sounds creepy. When I was younger, I would spend hours at the local mall watching people interact. I’d guess what they did for a living, how many kids (if any), the car they drove, what they were up to. I did that by looking and what they wore, how they held themselves, their speech patterns and a few other things. Over the years, I got better and better at it. I guess it was my “people type” database. I was missing an important part though.

I could read people well enough but I lacked the social cues necessary for progress. I could start a conversation, but I lacked empathy, so emotional feedback would often break the people type mold. Many years in client service, dealing with all sorts of people helped that along. I developed some rudimentary tools. Lead in sentences. Easy exits.

I remember the first time my wife to be met one of my coworkers. Both were dumbfounded that they were talking about the same person. At work, I was an aggressive, no-nonsense, logical throughput machine. I had a goal and hell or high water, I got there. At home I was soft, responsive, willing to compromise. I was in effect two different people because of my social toolset. 

It’s a stretch to call it multiple personalities but at a really high level, that’s just about right. I had a few too, for different events. Over the past few years, I’ve instead found more common ground between them and for one main reason.

It’s damn exhausting.

Let’s pretend that I ask you to spend a month using the word superfluous, at least once an hour. You’d keep track, try to figure out where to use it. That takes energy compared to being yourself.

Being myself at home works. With friends too. At work, less so. So it’s a slight variant. Where I would originally end my week and crash for 10+ hours of sleep and barely get through the week, today I can get til about 2pm on Friday. Past that point, bareknuckles me comes out. It can be jarring but the key item is that I know about it.

So I schedule my week accordingly. Sessions I know will have conflict are early in the week. Items that simply require heads down work are end of week. I just simply ensure that I’m not in a position where I feel drained and ineffective. That’s a core problem with introverts, self judgment. 

So today I have a bunch of social tools, the ability to read people and talk to them, a decent enough personality balance and the knowledge of my personal limits. It took 20+ years of work to get here. One day, I’ll either find that book or write my own.

#Wildstar – Combat Comparison

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First off.  Ding 30!  Or rather, shabow, kabam, wazow! Guitar shred solo.  I know people find that part grating but you only see it 50 times during all your hours.  I can’t think of another interface you see less often. /meh

I’ve finally unlocked all my LAS slots.  Most of my skills.  I have some T4 skills too, which unlock additional effects on some attacks.  While 25 is the numeric middle point, I will say that 30 is the spiritual mid-point.  You have access to all types of content (except war plots and raids), have a solid understanding of your class, plenty of housing options, a lot of the tradeskills figured out and lots of combat experience.  Is good.

Of note, level 30 achieved after completing nearly every piece of content available to me.  Path, adventure, dungeon, main quest, side quest, challenge… you name it.  It’s wildly fun.  Housing rested experience is extremely useful – not only for the base 5%/10% buff but a night logged off there gives me about 30% of a level of rested.  DO EEET!

Wildstar vs the rest

Comparison posts are the best.  Especially since I like to work with allegories (social tick as well).  Truly, this post is coming from Shintar’s post on my Stormtalon video.

That video reminds me a lot of the boss fights I’ve been seeing in Neverwinter. How would you say the styles of those two games compare?

Excellent question!  To which I attempted to answer and realized it’s a bit more complex.  Wildstar is a combination of Guild Wars2 and Neverwinter.  The first game I couldn’t really get into (but others did!) and the latter which I invested heavily.  I’ll focus mainly on combat for this post.

For quick comparison, here’s a post to a NW boss fight.

Active Combat

Both games use a limited action bar, where you can only slot X amount of abilities at any given time.  GW2 limits this mostly to weapon types and traits (ugh) while Neverwinter really allows dynamic allocation.  You can slot pretty much any ability at any time, which is what Wildstar is about.  The hiccup here is that Wildstar uses a tried and true themepark stats model, so if you want to swap between DPS and Tank/Healer, you need a 2nd set of gear.  My Esper has, something like 12 bag slots of healing gear.  I’ll find a mod to help with that.

The action in combat is based on heavy movement.  GW2’s hilarious “roll everywhere” is partially present here but with a tank, there’s a bit more stability.  NW’s don’t stand in the fire and dance around is all over the place but the core difference is that the red stuff is not often in the shape of a circle.  Squares, rectangles, moving circles, shapes that grow or morph into other shapes.  You need to be paying attention.  Let’s just say you can’t multibox.

Where WS differs wildly from the former two is that it is global cooldown (GCD) locked.  GW2 & NW both rely heavily on cooldowns for abilities; you can’t just spam the most powerful attack.  WS instead allows you to use most any skill at any time but with a builder/finisher model.  The limit on skill usage is a GCD between skills (~1.5s), like other themeparks.  WoW’s model is only recently moving this way (think rogues, monks, paladins).

Role Focus

In many, many other games, the DPS are just dumb guns.  They stand and pew-pew, rarely move out of the way for anything and just focus damage everything they see.  I truly dislike this in WoW. GW2 has no roles, so let’s skip that.  NW has a tank/healer model but the tank does have issues keeping everything but the big-bad-guy on them.  Plus, all boss battles seem to follow the same model of summoning friends every ~30seconds.  DPS are required to take those down through skill lockdowns, which is generally fairly simple – especially with a Control Wizard.  DPS need to avoid damage but the healers have fairly simple tools to keep everyone up.  Bosses can rarely be interrupted, so it’s more about avoidance and lockdowns rather than timed attacks.

WS really has a focus on the trinity.  Tanks need to keep everyone on them as much as possible and usually have the skills to do so.  Healers are often left alone (in terms of threat) and can focus on keeping the tank alive.  They can heal DPS, if they are in range but their focus is always tank/healer.  DPS is a bit different here and more akin to NW or old-school WoW.  Focus fire, interrupts, stuns are really important.  Some bosses will wipe you if you don’t interrupt (and the need for multi-interrupts is another factor).  Traditionally CC doesn’t exist.  DPS also need to avoid all the red fire crap too, while doing the above.  If you look at the Stormtalon video, you can see that this isn’t super-obvious.  Movement from a DPS also means you’re often out of range of healing.  There’s a fair amount of pressure on the DPS and a rather higher skill level than almost any other game in recent memory (FF14 the exception).

Summary

My gut feeling is that the skill wall in WS is just holding the line on the skill wall issue.  Content (solo and group) is hard, requires a fair amount of attention from players and rewards smart play.  And that’s only the leveling content.  When’s the last time people died on a dungeon run in another MMO – again, FF14 aside?  I think that WS’ main benefit with this model is that if you train people, over the levels, to expect difficulty, you get better players at the end.

#Wildstar – Stormtalon Fight

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I ended up in the first dungeon yesterday, Stormtalon’s Lair.  It is a fair bit different than other games in that the trash packs are not easy.  CC options don’t really exist, outside of quick stuns/interrupts, so you need to juggle a fair amount.  Plus, there’s a fairly large gap between the trash and boss fights.

Trash is more or less static combat.  You move to avoid some attacks, just like single player combat.  2-3 enemies at a time.  It’s fun enough.

Bosses though, wow.  Everything is moving all the time.  The video below is the first dungeon end boss – Stormtalon.  The bosses before that are somewhat similar but this guy, just crazy.  Of interesting note, I am thinking people will need to circle strafe AND click buttons.  You don’t just move to avoid damage, you constantly move to avoid damage.  So that means attacking while moving.  I have a mouse with quite a few buttons, so there’s something beneficial there.

As an Esper, a static playstyle is challenging.  As you’ll see in the video.  I mess up a fair amount but it works out.  Dungeons take about an hour.  I died on the first attempt to the boss and died about 4 times total on the map.

#Wildstar – Shmorgasboard of options

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Let’s see if I can find the link.  I think it’s a fair assessment to compare GW2 to Wildstar in terms of content availability and options.  I know most people compare to WoW but really, from 1-max, the only thing you’re really doing is PvE leveling.  Crafting and dungeons are both, in my opinion, broken for people who level up. GW2 takes an approach of “do what you want”.

Wildstar gives you leveling through main quests, tasks, contests, open events, dungeons (hard!), and adventures (also hard!).  Crafting is actually relevant and multi-dependent on other streams.  In that I mean that if you were a leatherworker in other game, you would only need leather.  Here, you need leather and plants and cloth.  Grouping is also highly encouraged through not only guild “credits” which allow the guild to buy perks but also through renown, an additional currency to purchase customization options (housing, costumes, etc…).  And that’s not even talking about the Path quests (I took Scientist).

All that said it makes me feel like I have “dog with a puffy tail” syndrome.  I try to set myself goals when I play but darn if I don’t end up chasing rainbows all over the place.  An example.  I’ll be running a main quest in a part of the map.  I’ll likely find another quest from an item on the ground.  Or I’ll trigger a competition by finding an object, or killing some random enemy.  Or I’ll get a quest given to me over the communicator.  Or I’ll see my path icon which has me scan a bunch of stuff.  So what started out as a 1-2 quest initiative usually ends up as an actual dozen.

Off the beaten path

Off the beaten path

And that’s not even counting me looking at the map for additional harvesting nodes.  Oooh, a new node and I end up a bit further away from the core path and find more quests.  Then when I’m done all of that, I look at the map and see there’s a section I have not explored.  Or a point on the terrain that looks really cool.  I end up going there and 90% of the time, the cycle starts again.

The “neat” stuff is that crafting stations aren’t super common, so I don’t end up spending dozens of cycles making items.  Also, since item drops aren’t super common and I’m not actively farming materials, I can only make a few items at a time anyway.

Next up is running some adventures and dungeons.  They automatically set your level based on the event, so you can easily run stuff lower than your level (or above) if you want.  I’ve built a healer Esper, including AMPs but since play is based on damage, I need a 2nd set of gear in my bags.

Asmiroth.140602.223644

Back to the original GW2 comparison.  That game had the same effect, where you would more or less organically traverse the map finding new objectives.  The difference between the two is that GW2 had absolutely no story linking the stuff together (other than the personal story, 1 quest every 3-5 levels).  Wildstar takes a much more integrated story approach, at the hub, zone, map and entire faction perspective.  What I mean is that characters appear in multiple places, adding consistency.  WoW does this pretty well, especially after the Cataclysm patch.   It’s good, it makes you feel part of the story.

I am having a blast!

Theorycrafting – Guides

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I am a numbers guy and a freak around optimization.  I guess it borders on OCD.  It’s something I (luckily) get paid very well to do and my hobbies usually focus around that too.  Sure, the context of that is important but the action is doubly so.

In that vein, I’ve made quite a few posts on two particular topics over the years.  First, the concept of money and markets.  I’ve made a static page that’s accessible from the home page to collect all that data into a single place.  As I write more about the topic, I’ll update the page.

I’ve also written a fair chunk on character optimization.  While the static page is a bit more high level than the posts, it’s still a very good spot to get started on.  Again, as time progresses, I’ll add some updates to it.

In the meantime, take some time to read up and let me know what you think.

#Wildstar – Let’s Go

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Success!  By luck of events, this weekend gave me good fortune to get a fair amount of time into the game.  And it would appear, that by and large, there were next to no server starts woes.  ESO was a good high bar and Wildstar is right on pace.  It does put other games into stark contrast when you think about it (Watch_Dogs, D3, SimCity, etc..).  In the age of the interwebs, you’d hope they’d get this part down and Carbine did a fine job.

So, with my name all nice and reserved, I made my Exile Human Esper Asmiroth on Evindra.  What a mouthful.  I decided to take a trip to Algoroc as a starting zone, which has a more wild west meet sci-fi vibe.  Rocky canyons, cliffs to climb and a secret robot base.

One fun quest was out in the middle of nowhere, with no breadcrumbs to get there.  Here’s a video.

I just hit 15 and got my house too, so the next little while I think is going to focus on my customization.  Until that time, here are some screencaps.

Rocket Man

Rocket Man

That's a big gun

That’s a big gun

Big bad robot

Big bad robot

#WildStar – Getting Started

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So WildStar is up on Saturday.  I won’t be able to actually play on Saturday, what with being a parent and it being the weekend and all but that’s another topic.  Maybe I can find time to create a character.  Bah, best not to get the hopes up.

That said, I do know the following.  I’ll be on Evindra.  Twitter world seems to have picked that one and being an RP server, experience has taught me that’s my kind of crowd.

I’ll be rolling an Esper too.  My beta time really pushed me down that path for some reason.  I like healing, so I was stuck with Spellslinger and Medic as other options.  The former isn’t bad, it’s just has an odd Spellsurge mechanic that I’m not too fond of.  Medic is too melee for my tastes.  Nearly 10 years of playing a rogue in WoW has taught me to avoid melee.  Oh, and the Esper is seemingly the most borked of all classes and massively under-represented. I like me some underdogs!

Race and faction are a slight bugger though.  Twitter is running Exile, though I know the Alliance of Awesome (not sure if this is on Evindra though) is running Dominion.  I don’t like the Aurin personally and when you don’t like a race and have to stare at it for a few hundred hours – meh.  And I’ve never been a fan of the humanoid races either.  I did play Chua in the beta and I’ll be honest, playing as a Mogwai is a lot of fun.  I guess we’ll see where that ends up.

Random Thought – Multi-lingualism

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A thing I’ve realized lately is that I am constantly in a state of translation and interpretation.  My job deals mostly with integrating business and tech solutions so I need to speak both languages.  Then I need to brief VPs on the matter, yet another language altogether.  So while I am fluent in English and French, I think I actually know a dozen languages.  For example.

“But Captain, the warp coils in the dilithium chamber need to be realigned with the phase inducers manually with a tricorder inside a Jeffrey’s tube.”  That makes no sense outside of the context of Star Trek (and probably even less in that context).

“Ahhh, Jeez. He banged the blower.”  You need to be a gearhead to decode it.

“But the API doesn’t allow routing to the kernel, we need another low level hook.”  Real technobabble.

“Alignment of key strategies to the governance framework is required for sustainability”.  Executive speak.  I am, oddly and sadly, very proficient at this.

“Ok, so the DPS need to throw a pile DOTs and debuffs, while the tank keeps aggro and the healer just HOT.”  It’s like herding cats that one.

“Oh, did you see that dipsy-dangle toe-drag, what a beaut!” Got to love hockey.

 

I think this is one of those life skills that people develop over time and through experience.  I look back just 10 years and I’ve certainly more than doubled my vocabulary and context set.  As an introvert, I always had issues finding the right words for the right time for the right people.  Tons, and I means thousands of hours here, of listening to people talk, reading notes and watching videos (TED talks are awesome) have seriously expanded my abilities.  Today, I actually feel comfortable talking to nearly anyone about any given topic.  Young, old, a specialist or a generalist.

The downside to this however is that I use visual cues to help guide a talk.  Face to face, no problem.  I can read a person or a crowd and adjust as necessary.  Over the phone is tough.  I really need to pay attention and I can get flustered.  Written messages are the worst and I’ve resigned myself to a simple rule.  Don’t include the words “My, myself or I” in anything I write for work.  Personal stuff, no problem – but at work, I use “Us, We and It” instead.  It forces me to remove all emotion from the message and makes the issue a group issue rather than just me saying something.  Try writing something like that, it’s far from intuitive.

I know this is more of a random thought than anything else but as I grow older (and hopefully wiser) and look back some, I’m honestly impressed by the progress and motivated to achieve more.  Not obsessed mind you, just fascinated that when I was younger I thought I knew a lot.  When in reality, I have a better appreciate today for what I don’t know.  It’s actually quite liberating.