Updates

This is probably the longest I've gone between posts. I really should just sit down and write, instead of thinking about writing.

Warcraft

We're clearing Antorus every week. I guess now we're just waiting for the next expansion. The officers are trying to get a taste of Mythic, but we just don't have the numbers.  Even our heroic runs usually only have around 18 people.

Rift Prime

I finally got Trion's website to work. The adblocker I run was interfering with their payment provider. I signed up for a package, and have been leveling a Guardian Warrior. Hopefully I will go into it in more detail in a future post. But by and large, pretty much everything I said when I first tried Rift still holds. 

Which does make sense, as it is a Prime server. But that also means that the reasons I stopped playing Rift before are going to cause me to stop playing Rift now.

Other

Otherwise I'm not really playing anything. I guess Bless Online is coming out shortly, maybe I will give that a whirl.

Ahead of the Curve: Argus the Unmaker!

Yes, my screenshot skills are very rusty. This is better than the shots where I have my back to the camera.

My guild downed Heroic Argus the Unmaker this weekend!  We spent an hour trying to get our fifth kill on Aggramar, so it wasn't looking very promising.  However, our first attempt was a heart-breaking 0% wipe, so we knew it was in our grasp.

The next couple of pulls were odd wipes, including one where Argus decided to walk away from the tanks, turn around, and Cone of Death them. Finally we got a good pull where everything went well, went into the last phase, got Titanforging early, and everyone stayed alive longer than normal.

Argus is an interesting fight in that the last phase completely resets the board. Everyone who's dead comes back to life with the rest of the group and you start again cleanly. In some ways it's kind of nice, because once you've mastered the first phases, you don't have to do them perfectly while learning the last phase. A death or two here or there is perfectly survivable, and you can save battle resses for the last phase.

Now we just have to fix our issues with Aggramar. I'm not sure what's going on. I think we made some small changes which is making the fight more fragile for us.

Still, that's Legion pretty much done and dusted for us. I doubt we will try Mythic, just due to avoiding the roster hassle.

Paystyles

Imagine that there are two MMO players: Sally and Lucy. Both of them regularly play the same four MMOs: Game A, B, C, and D. However, they don't play each game equally, but for different amounts of time. Sally and Lucy spend 50% of their time in A, 25% in B, 15% in C, and 10% in D.

Both players have the same entertainment budget of $60 per month.  However, how each spends that budget is different.  Sally prefers to spend $15 on each game. Lucy, on the other hand, spends all $60 on game A, and $0 in the other three games.

Game	Time Spent	Sally	Lucy
A	50%	$15	$60
B	25%	$15	$0
C	15%	$15	$0
D	10%	$15	$0

My contention is that Lucy is a more accurate model of how most gamers want to spend their money. She doesn't mind spending a significant amount of money on her hobby. However, there is a threshold which a game has to surpass to be considered worth spending money, and all the money goes to those games which surpass the threshold (usually only one game). Even though Lucy spends 50% of her time in other games, they don't get any money at all.

Of course, if next month Lucy spends most of her time in game B, she will spend the $60 in game B.

There is a minority of gamers who are like Sally, though. Who prefer subscriptions and spreading the spending around.

I think the reason lockboxes are so popular is that they more closely match how Lucy wants to pay for her games. I think the game companies would prefer Sally and subscriptions. Witness how many games attempt to start with subscriptions but have to convert to F2P and lockboxes. The game companies are stuck with a audience of Lucys.

The common refrain in the community lately is that lockboxes are evil and predatory. The vocal community, though, tends to be Sallys. Perhaps lockboxes are empowering for Lucy instead, allowing her to spend her money exactly as she would prefer, even if Sally thinks that way is illogical and foolish.

Updates

I haven't posted in a while, so here's an update on how things are going.

Rift Prime

There's a fair amount of hype and nostalgia going around for Rift Prime. I decided to give it a whirl and downloaded the Glyph launcher again.

Unfortunately Trion's website won't let me add my credit card as a payment method for some reason. It just stalls with no errors or response. So that's the end of that plan.

World of Warcraft

My guild has cleaned up our act on Coven, even one-shotting it a week ago. Unfortunately, this has also been accompanied by serious regression on Aggrammar in the last two weeks. We've been wiping much more than we did on our first two kills, making it very hard to actually get attempts in on Argus.

We did finally get a chance to make three or four serious attempts on Argus last raid. We even had a 1% wipe.  We just have to clean up that last phase and reliably get the Titanforging buff early.  Hopefully Coven and Aggrammar will go well next week, and give us enough time to down Argus.

I also got the Lightbringer title from Argus (the zone) last week. For some reason, I could not get the hang of the goblin glider, as this was the first time I've really used it. Normally I just bubble when I need to fall a long distance. I fell off the edges of Argus and died numerous times while trying to get the hidden treasures. I finally got them all, and got a nice title for my paladin.

A Neat Ranged Paladin Idea

I came across this Reddit post describing ideas for additional class specialisations. One was for a ranged paladin, and I thought it was particularly interesting.

Normally ranged paladin variants play up the idea of paladin as holy spellcaster, the "shockadin". In the past we've even had spells like Denounce which allowed Holy paladins to try this playstyle. And it worked reasonably well for questing, but was never raid-viable. In Legion, Blizzard moved Holy paladin dps back to a melee-style, which I've found quite fun for questing. (Still not raid-viable, though.)

In any case, this ranged paladin variant isn't a spellcaster, but instead uses a two-handed crossbow. It fuses elements of a "witchfinder", inquisitor, or Van Helsing-style vampire hunter into the paladin. Having the paladin focus on a weapon reinforces the martial aspect, and witchfinders reinforce the religious overtones of the class.

Though crossbows would be the signature weapon, I imagine these paladins could also use bows and guns. It would also be nice for ranged weapons to be used by a class other than hunters. Though Blizzard would have to add Strength to ranged weapons.

A witchfinder might be an interesting idea for a new non-caster ranged class well, maybe wearing leather instead of plate. However, I wonder what specialisation options it would have. A paladin variant would be simpler.

All in all, this was a neat paladin variant, and one I'd love to see in-game.

Heroic Aggramar Defeated!

Heroic Aggramar fell surprisingly quickly.

We spent over an hour trying to get our second kill on Heroic Coven. We finally got them down and reached Aggramar with about 50 minutes left in the raid. I think we resigned ourselves to going over the basic strategy and then pulling it a few times to see the fight.

Instead we killed Aggramar in five pulls.

I think that part of it was that we use a lot of assigned CC on Coven, so it was pretty easy to do the same thing on Aggramar. Then the rest of the fight is straightforward.

I think our guild's major weaknesses are movement and spacing. If a fight doesn't require precise movement and positioning, we're decent enough. I'm not really sure how we can get better at movement and spacing. From previous guilds, it's not something which is really discussed, but more something which is done naturally.

In particular, I sometimes think that many players have a "home" position in a given fight. That's where they stand, and where they return to after a given mechanic ends. I feel that there are several players in our raid who don't do this naturally. They don't go back to a standard position, instead moving to new positions, often based on the position of different mechanics, all the time. It's not like this is wrong, exactly, but it does make their movement unpredictable. This ends up hurting us in fights where predictable movement is more useful.

Allied Races

With 7.3.5, Blizzard released four allied races if you pre-order the next expansion, Battle For Azeroth. There are two races for the Alliance: Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei; and two races for the Horde: Nightborne, and Highmountain Tauren.

Each of these races played a part in the Legion storyline, and recruiting them is a very organic development in the story. Each race requires a certain amount of reputation and achievements, which you basically have if you've been playing Legion.

I'm really happy that Blizzard chose to make playable scenarios about recruiting each of these races. A long time ago, I complained about Theramore, wishing its destruction had happened in game, rather than in an associated novel. It's heartening to see Blizzard put important story events in game, and give the player a role to play in those events. It feels like the Blizzard of a couple expansions ago would have just made the Allied races available to play, and put the story of how they joined in a novel or story online, or a cutscene.

Perhaps this change was prompted by competition with FFXIV, which is all in on the storyline occurring in game. Regardless, it's a good change. Hopefully the same thing will happen with the scenarios for Battle for Azeroth, especially the triggers for the war. I hope players have their bloody hand prints all over the burning of Teldrassil or the attack on Undercity, or whatever other events happen.

In any case, I created a Void Elf shadow priest, and have been very slowly levelling her up. She's currently level 35. I really like the scaling changes made to levelling, as well as having zone completion tied to the story lines. I've been levelling in Kalimdor, as I have not seen most of the post-Cataclysm stories there. The new levelling is very enjoyable.

Heroic Coven of Shivarra Defeated!

Coven of Shivarra was bidding to become our fight with the most wipes so far in this expansion. We finally got it down this week, only a few wipes short of our Heroic Avatar count.

Heroic Coven is an interesting fight in that the individual mechanics are not very hard, but dealing with the combinations can be very difficult. Some mechanics push you to spread out, some mechanics push you to collapse, and there's some randomness as to which mechanics happen when which makes it hard to learn the fight. You may see a certain combo only a few times a night.

For us, our big change was how we handled the marching adds. We switched to a strategy where we tried to lock down all the marching adds. This delays running behind them as long as possible, and makes it a lot easier to find safe spots during darkness.

It took us a little bit of practice, including several attempts where we got fairly close. But something always happened in the last 20% and the attempt fell apart. The final kill was fairly smooth. Hopefully we will be able to repeat this next week.

This is the one fight this tier that has really tested my mana. I was running on fumes for much of the last bit of the fight.

The only other thing to note is that the Legendary Prydaz makes a large difference this fight. It's well worth bringing it out for this fight if you have it.

The Problem of One-Tricks

The current major cause of angst in Overwatch are "one-trick" players. These are players who play almost entirely with a single character and refuse to play other characters. The problem is that Overwatch is a game where you can swap characters to better match different situations.

Add to that the fact that some characters are seen as weak, or specialized, and a lot of people become unhappy when another player chooses a character that seems sub-optimal.

The other problem here is that generally, if you play a lot on one character, you become better at that one character than you are at the others. A Torbjorn main can rightfully feel that she plays best on Torbjorn, and would be worse on the character her teammates want her to play.

Of course, no one complains if you one-trick a character who is in demand and who people don't play. Mercy players or tank players come to mind.

Not to mention that if you play in regular team, each teammate often gravitates to the same roles. Dave is the support, Sally is the tank. From an outside point-of-view, this is one-tricking, but the big difference is that everyone on the team is comfortable with it.

So far, Blizzard's stance is that--as long as you try to win--playing one specific character is acceptable. But there are signs that resolve may be cracking. One-tricks are often reported by other players, and can get caught in the automated banning systems.

I wonder what a purely mechanical solution would look like. Imagine that, in competitive, any hero who's playtime this season is more than one standard deviation away from your average playtime per hero is locked out. So your hero pool would be limited at the start of a game, and you'd be forced to play on a wider variety of heroes.

It would make matchmaking more difficult, as you'd now have to account for available heroes when assembling a group. It wouldn't do to make a group where everyone is locked out of the healers (as unlikely as that is).

On the other hand, perhaps your rating in Competitive would be more representative of your ability in the game as a whole, and not just with one hero.

Overwatch League

You have to hand it to Blizzard. They went full-bore into eSports with the Overwatch League. Paid rosters, teams associated with cities, branding, professional sportscasting, even allowing fans to purchase team skins. They're really treating Overwatch League as a true professional sport.

The question, of course, is if this will work out. So far, it looks to be doing okay. I think they had 400,000 viewers for the first matches, and future matches seem to be about the 110,000 viewers mark. The real test is if they can attract significant advertisers and sponsors. That is what will make OWL profitable.

I've only seen part of one match: the last three games of the Los Angeles Gladiators versus the Philadelphia Fusion. LAG came back from being down 2 games, and won the last 3 games to win the match. It was reasonably interesting, more or less like watching regular sports on television. Blizzard integrating the stream into the Battle.net app was an excellent decision, as it made it very easy to check out.

The only issue I had with the actual broadcast is that it was sometimes hard to keep track when the camera switched to a different player. Adding a fast wipe or transition there would be really nice.

The structure of a match is pretty interesting. It's technically best-of-five games, but teams play at least 4 games. This gives it a similar feel to halves and quarters of a football or basketball game, with one possible period of overtime.

One thing I noticed is that OWL really validated Blizzard's decision to allow hero swapping in Overwatch. On the last game, LAG started with an unorthodox 3-damage lineup including a Widowmaker. They then switched to a 3-tank lineup when the Fusion reacted. It reminded me of matching lines in hockey. I was impressed by that, and am considering using my free currency on an LAG skin.

(Everyone gets some free OWL currency, enough for a skin for one character.)

I'm unlikely to really follow OWL, but it's definitely an intriguing experiment. I hope it proves successful for Blizzard. If you haven't seen a match, it's worth catching one just to see the league in action.

Patch 7.3.5 Tomorrow

Patch 7.3.5 comes out tomorrow. I've been really impressed with Blizzard's release discipline this expansion. Each patch has come out like clockwork 11 weeks apart.  Amazing job by the team, especially the project managers.

Now hopefully they can bring Battle for Azeroth in with the same discipline.

Patch notes for 7.3.5 can be found here.

From the notes, it looks like this patch is all about revamping the mechanics of the leveling game. Level scaling is being introduced everywhere, and there look to be lots of changes to improve that part of the game. I think it's about time. Out-leveling a zone while you're still questing in it is annoying.

The other part of the patch looks to continue to the story in Silithus. It will be interesting to see how the denouement of the Legion story plays out.

There's no mention of the Allied Races, so I imagine that they are saving them for BfA, or possibly as a pre-order unlock.

Finally, if you have authenticator, 4 extra bag slots! Blizzard CS even got in on the latest meme:

Perfect. [https://t.co/bbyyZ6Ny44]
🎨 /u/SymbolicHuman pic.twitter.com/PGqkzUSsTB

— BlizzardCS (@BlizzardCS) January 15, 2018

Heroic Kin'garoth and Varimathras Defeated

In this week's raid, we continued advancing, this time getting Heroic Kin'garoth and Varimathras down.

Kin'garoth

Here we made a couple of adjustments to our strategy. We aimed to kill an Annihilator robot first. We were having problems with having Ruiner targeting the people who were soaking the annihilation pools. The other change was to split the dps into 3 groups, and each group go after a different robot. The group going after Annihilator was weighted with more of the top dps players, to guarantee that robot died before the end.

It worked pretty well, as it minimized a lot of movement in that phase, and we got a kill a few attempts later.

Varimathras

This is kind of an easy fight, really only a challenge for the healers to keep everyone topped off before they have to run out of the group. It was really just a matter of getting everyone to recognize the two debuffs, and to stay in for Marked Prey, and run out for the Necrotic Embrace.

Coven of Shivarra

This is the fight we're working on. It's pretty crazy, with lots of abilities overlapping and coming in a random order. I think it will be our Avatar for this tier, as it hits a lot of our weaknesses with movement, positioning and dealing with multiple abilities simultaneously.

Loot-wise, I really need a helm, as I'm still using an i915 tier piece from Tomb of Sargeras. Other than that, everything is going well.

The Last Jedi

This post contains significant spoilers for The Last Jedi. Seriously, I don't think there's anything that I do not spoil.

When the DVDs for The Last Jedi come out, someone will immediately make an abridged version where pretty much every scene of Finn's is cut. And that version will be superior to the theater version.

Darth Jadus

I saw The Last Jedi tonight. I'll try to have a full post on it tomorrow.

But every time I see one of these movies, I wonder why we can't get a villain like Darth Jadus. Here's a clip from Chaper 1 of the Imperial Agent story of The Old Republic.

Now this is a Sith Lord. Truly scary, almost reasonable until you realize that he's insane, and powerful enough to make his insanity real.

Defensive Passive Talents in Path of Exile

A friend of mine sent me some advice on Path of Exile:

I played for years with terrible defenses and a lot of deaths. Always took offensive passives and built glass cannons that always hit a wall. The passive tree really needs to be more depth than breadth first, as you seek out life nodes in other starting areas, only taking some offensive passives along the way. I think the general rule is something like 400 life per act with capped resistances (preferably from gear, but temporarily from passives if necessary). Offensive power generally comes more from appropriate support gems in linked gear, with some relatively few on the passive tree. Game became way more fun when I built defensively on the passive tree, even though it seems weird bypassing so many offensive nodes related to your skills (at least early on). 

My favorite defensive base for a Ranger (Raider) is taking the life nodes and rushing Phase Acrobatics, Arrow Dancing, and then stretching across the bottom to the Marauder and up to the Scion Life nodes. “Cast When Damage Taken + Immortal Call” helps a lot too even if you lack endurance charges. At least one point of energy shield for stun avoidance, and a little bit of armour (diminishing returns) from armour-evasion hybrid gear. It’s very solid. Same idea for other classes, I’m sure. 

I do wish there were an easier way to respec, but fortunately it doesn’t take long to rush the first several acts (no need to full-clear zones or really focus too heavily on gear early on). Especially if you saved some leveling uniques/rares from your first run.

I ended up deleting my existing characters and starting again, this time focusing solely on defensives. I'm playing a Scion, so we'll see how that goes.

It is a little weird ignoring most of the tree. There are lots and lots of offensive talents, and they're often the interesting talents, the ones you "want" to take. However, it is very nice to take much less damage and survive more.

One of the interesting things about a defensive build is that it gives you a lot more options for play style. Offensive talents often "lock" you into a build. For example, taking talents which boost your Fire damage makes you dependent on Fire.  But if you only take defensive talents, your attacks depend solely on your gear and gems. You can switch styles and abilities freely.

In that respect, defensive builds are really good for new players, as they give a lot more room for experimentation during the game.

The current structure is a bit of trap for new players. I rather wonder if the skill tree in Path of Exile would benefit from a different structure. Perhaps something where the inner ring of talents are all defensives, while all offensives are in the outer ring. This would nudge new players into taking defensives early, while they are still learning the game.

Fishing Legendary!

I got the Fishing Legendary Artifact Weapon, the Underlight Angler, today!

Coriel with the Underlight Angler at the Fountain in Dalaran

It wasn't that hard to get. I got 20 Arcane Lures from Conjuror Margoss (in the pool near Dalaran) and then went from zone to zone, fishing in the pools until I got all the rare fish. It didn't really take that long.

After that you fish up a Pearl from a pool, and then eventually get a quick scenario from Nat Pagle. Kill some murlocs, fish in some pools, kill a giant murloc, and then the skeleton gets fashioned into a fishing pole. Now that I think about it, it's kind of creepy.

I also found a useful macro for fishing:

#showtooltip
/cast [nomod] Fishing
/equip [noequipped:Fishing Poles, mod] Underlight Angler;[spec:1, mod] The Silver Hand;[spec:2, mod] Truthguard;[spec:3, mod] Ashbringer;

Normally, it acts as the fishing cast. But if you hold down a modifier button like Shift or Alt, it switches weapons between your fishing pole and the correct weapon for your specialization (substitute different weapons for different classes, the spec order is as listed in the specialization window).

I have to say that this took a lot less time than I was expecting. Perhaps there's a lesson there.

Edit: Just realized I made a mistake. It's not a Legendary, it's an Artifact Weapon with a talent tree. You have to fish up rare fish to get Artifact Power.

Progress in Heroic Antorus

With the holidays over, my guild has returned to Heroic Antorus. We've moved Normal Antorus off to an optional or with alts weeknight. We did leave Normal Argus alive, and killed him first, so that all of our heroic raiders would get the Argus trinket upgrade item.

This week was a pretty good week. We got first kills on Heroic Antoran High Command, Essence of Eonar, Portal Keeper Hasabel, and Imonar the Soulhunter.

Antoran High Command

I rather like this fight. It's not so bad once people get the hang of the pods. The only thing is that a guild coming from Normal might have only one or two people who regularly do pods. And now you suddenly need six, so it's possible to have a learning curve. Especially for the first guy into the Engineer's pod who has to drop a shield device asap.

I'm the healer who gets to activate the shields, which I find very fun for some reason. Wait for the voice line, activate the device, shield comes up and protects everyone.

Essence of Eonar

We actually had more trouble with this fight than with Antoran High Command, mostly because we kept getting mixed up where to go. Once we get the activation sequence down, it should become a lot smoother.

This fight is kind of annoying as a healer because everyone is taking constant damage, but people are in and out of range and line-of-sight all the time.

Portal Keeper Hasabel

Not much to say about this fight. I was the healer who went up with the portals. The first two portals were pretty easy, but the third one was very confusing with all the debuffs. To be honest, I don't really understand why our kill attempt was so much smoother than the preceding wipes. We must have fixed some mistake, but I have no clue what the mistake was.

Imonar the Soulhunter

This fight was pretty amusing. After working out the P1 and P2 kinks, we made several good attempts.  But after phase 2, as we were roughly in the middle of the bridge, Imonar would suddenly appear and start attacking. In the confusion, we kept losing half the raid. We were wondering if we weren't going fast enough, or if tripping one of the traps caused him to come after us, or even if it was bugged.

We were leaning towards bugged, because on some of our earlier attempts with a lot of early deaths people could get across the bridge fine. After looking through logs, the cause was finally tracked down. Our feral druid was wearing a mythic+ Ember of Nullification, which has:

Equip: Taking magic damage has a chance to apply Choking Flames to the attacker, silencing them for 2 sec.

So taking incidental damage while crossing the bridge triggered the trinket, and it interrupted Imonar from very far away. On the early attempts, the druid had died, so the trinket didn't come into play. Once the trinket was removed, Imonar died in short order.

All in all, a pretty good week. Hopefully next week we can get everything down quickly and get some decent attempts in on Kin'garoth.

Fishing in Legion

For a secondary goal, I've decided to take up fishing in Legion. Today, I did the fisher friend in Suramar. I rather like the reputation mechanic used.

For those who don't know, there are several fishing NPCs scattered around the world. To gain reputation with them, you need to fish up a special item nearby and turn the items in. Every so often, you will get a special item which summons a boss. Killing the boss gives you about 25 of the reputation item.

So what happens is that there will be raid going. Everyone fishes peacefully until someone summons the boss. Then the raid kills the boss and everyone gets the reward. The infrequent combat breaks up the monotony of just fishing. For the most part you're doing your own thing, but you come together as a group. There's also a sense of camaraderie with all your fellow fishermen.

It's a simple mechanic, but I think it works quite well. It's also a perfect fit for the fishing profession.

WoW Videos: Eternal Legend

I was wandering around YouTube, and I ran across this old video. I'm posting it in anticipation of WoW Classic.

It certainly drips with that Vanilla WoW flavor. It's probably the lack of shoulder pads.

One thing about this video is that it really gives a sense of many different smaller stories happening. A modern WoW expansion is really focused on one major story line. Now, Blizzard does a pretty good job with that one story line, but I kind of miss the old way where each story was somewhat separate from the others. I suppose Pandaria was the last expansion like this, at least before the Garrosh story kicked into gear.

A Hard Time With Secondary Goals

I'm currently having a hard time choosing a secondary goal in WoW. There's many options, but I'm not really enthusiastic about them.

My main goal is raiding of course, but that's reserved for a couple of specific nights a week.

Possible goals:

• Finish the mage tower challenge. I've tried it about 4-5 times. I usually get up to the point where you have to heal the ghosts, and then I die there. I'm really not used to healing outside of the UI. I probably should practice and finish this though.

• Get the Retribution and Protection hidden artifact weapon appearances. Retribution in particular is supposed to be an interesting quest line.

• Get the artifact fishing rod. I have leveled fishing to 800, so I could continue on and get the Underlight Angler.

• Get the PvP Prestige rank 1, or whatever they call it. I only have about half the PvP talents unlocked.

• Continue working on one of my other max-level characters. I have a mage, warrior, demon hunter and shaman at 110, but I haven't really concentrated on any single one. Instead I desultorily play one or the other at random.

• Level a new character. I'm waiting for 7.3.5 and all the changes to leveling before trying leveling again. 

The thing is that I don't really value one of these options more than the others. So I try different options and random, and don't really make any real progress.

What goals are you working on in WoW (or any other game)?

Revisiting Gevlon's "4 fun ppl" Theory

A couple of years ago, Gevlon proposed a "4 fun ppl" theory of toxicity[1]:

Those we consider trolls are people with honest intention to positively socialize, but their extremely low social skills cause them to post hurtful or annoying things instead. 

I was recently reminded of this theory when Jeff Kaplan of the Overwatch team posted a "takedown" of a player complaining that he had been banned unfairly:

You have over 220 reports for harassment. Looking at your chat logs, these reports are verified. Here are some examples: 

now im dont give a [expletive]
they can [expletive] my [expletive]too
you deranged addicted nerd
and this community is ignorant and insane
im the reason for anything good
good morning you sad sad dumb generation
LONG WALK FOR A PILE OF [expletive] 

Plus you continually accuse other players of hacking -- we're seeing this in a significant percentage of your games played. The players you are accusing are not hacking, they are just performing at a high level. 

Also, you repeatedly spam lines such as:
TOrbrbrbrbBrbrbrBrBrBRBBRBRBRBRbRBRBRbRB 

Our community has made it clear to us that Toxicity is one of the top issues that needs to be addressed in this game. As a result, we're getting stricter and that means people are going to get suspended and banned for poor behavior. You've fallen into that category.

I'm not denying that this player is toxic. However, looking at the examples, it really feels like he's one of Gevlon's "4 fun ppl", rather than an intentional troll. Probably someone with poor impulse control, and who swears a lot in real life, rather than someone who intends to be toxic. Someone trying to socialize and be "fun", but failing at it.

(To be honest, even I find the idea of a Tobjorn player spamming "TOrbrbrbrbBrbrbrBrBrBRBBRBRBRBRbRBRBRbRB" kind of funny after the fact, though I don't doubt it was annoying in the match.)

As Gevlon noted, these are the types of players who really suffer from a lack of clear rules. "Don't be toxic" is not a clear rule. In my opinion, multiplayer games would be far better served by concrete rules like "no swearing" or "don't call out people for hacking".

You could even add a popup whenever someone swears or uses the work "hacks" in chat. Something like "Swearing is considered toxic and you may be suspended. Send Message or Cancel" and have Cancel selected as the default option. That way, the popups train people not to swear. And if they continue through the popup, that's evidence that they intend to be toxic.

[1] My previous posts on Gevlon's "4 fun ppl" theory:

• Gevlon's "4 fun ppl" Theory
• More on Gevlon's "4 fun ppl" Theory

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, everyone!

I'm still working my way through Path of Exile. I'm now in Act 5. Unfortunately, I don't think my character has enough defensives, so I'm dying a lot more. Given that the game doesn't really offer much in the way of respecs, this is beginning to cause my interest to drop. I really don't want to restart with a new character and redo everything.

In WoW, my guild is 2/11 Heroic Antorus. We pretty much only did Normal mode over the holidays though. We start Heroic in earnest this weekend.

Looking at last year, I didn't post a lot. Less than a post a week. I'm not sure if I have nothing new to say, if I'm getting tired of writing, or if I just fell out of the habit. Or maybe the MMO industry is just dying like normal.

At the beginning of the year, I changed to threaded comments on this blog. There's only one level of replies. I did this primarily so I could reply to each comment. But I'm not sure it really worked out. I'm leaning towards going back to a flat comment thread. If anyone has any opinions on this, let me know in the comments.

A Second Look at Path of Exile

On the recommendation of a friend, I'm taking a second look at Path of Exile.

I've gotten a lot further than last time. I'm currently in Act III with a Witch, but I'm thinking about starting over with a Scion. My Witch is currently a Lightning caster, but I kind of want to try a sword-and-board melee class instead.

I really like the story so far. It's told well, and the New Zealand flavor makes it a bit different than the norm.

The Path of Exile devs have spent the last few years steadily adding to the game. It makes it more complex, which can be daunting, but it also means there's more to dig into if you want to.

Speaking of complexity, so much loot drops in the game. Players can actually write "loot filters" in a quasi-scripting language to only show loot that you want to drop. I downloaded a loot filter that literally has a Github repository. While it seems like overkill, it does go a long way towards cleaning up the clutter on-screen.

The ironic part is that even if a lot of loot drops, you don't really replace what you're wearing all that often. D3 had the same issue at launch, but Blizzard went in the direction of having fewer but more relevant drops.

If you're looking for a ARPG, give Path of Exile a shot. You'll probably have to spend your first character just figuring out how everything works. But once you get a handle on the complexity, it's pretty neat.

World PvP in Battle for Azeroth

One of the most interesting elements in Battle of Azeroth is that Blizzard is doing away with PvP and PvE rulesets for different servers. Instead, any character on any server will be able to flag or unflag PvP in a major city. Then when they go out into the world, they will be (seamlessly) put into a cross-realm zone where everyone has the same PvP state.

This is a really interesting way to handle PvP. Limiting changing state to major cities encourages people to try out world PvP. If they decide it's not for them, it's fairly painless to switch back.

There are also lots of interesting things Blizzard can do with this system. For example, they could ensure that each PvP cross-realm zone is balanced between Horde and Alliance. It won't be like modern PvP servers where one faction outnumbers the other ten-fold.

Blizzard could also eliminate ganking entirely. Simply put the max level players into a different cross-realm zone than the lower level players. Absolutely unfair fights simply can't happen without the players forcing it through grouping shenanigans.

About the only major loss I can see is that PvP fights at raid entrances will probably go away. It would be very likely that a group intent on raiding will unflag before heading over to the instance.

All in all, I think Blizzard's plan for PvP is a good one, and it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.

Dropping FFXIV

I've decided to stop playing Final Fantasy XIV.

The first reason is that I've decide to try and get through the backlog of games I have to play. So I've decided to stick with one long-term game, WoW, and one short-term game which gets uninstalled after I finish it. Thus FFXIV is dropped and uninstalled.

The second reason is that I do not find the current meta much fun. I don't like running through the dungeon and mass pulls. I also played a paladin, which is a tank class. But the current meta is all about staying in DPS stance as much as possible and doing maximum DPS. I didn't find it as fun as actually tanking.

So I switched to playing a Red Mage, but my heart wasn't really in it. It's perfectly fine, I suppose, but spamming AoE was a little boring.

The main story quest and other single-player quests are still excellent. I may resub when the story patches are releaed. But the heart of FFXIV daily gameplay is regular dungeon runs and group content. And somewhere along the line, I lost the "fun" in that.

Battle for Azeroth Trailer

The next WoW expansion, Battle for Azeroth, was revealed at Blizzcon, and the cinematic trailer made its debut.

We make the standard observation that it is not as good as the Wrath trailer. But it's still quite good, and honestly, is a lot more understandable than the last couple of trailers. The graphics are excellent as always.

It's got some good moments for both factions. Sylvanas reminds everyone that she's the Banshee Queen and discovers Horde pride. Anduin, on the other hand, has a really cool helm, and realizes that healers win battlegrounds, thus putting him ahead of 80% of PvP players.

As for the theme of the expansion, way back in 2009 I wrote a post on The Nature of War, and I think it still holds up today. I don't think Blizzard can make this work without fully committing one side as the aggressor.

I do hope Blizzard doesn't make Jaina Proudmoore into the bad guy though, and butcher her character like they did to Fandral Staghelm. Her perspective is interesting, and I don't think it's wrong.

WoW Classic Announcement

I have to admit that I wasn't expecting Blizzard to actually make WoW Classic. It's basically a second game at this point, and I didn't think they'd be willing to go that far. But Blizzard is going to try, so we'll see how it works out.

I would like WoW Classic to be a success. If it is successful, maybe Blizzard will start nudging normal WoW back towards Classic, adding back some of the small decisions, inconveniences, and restrictions that have been smoothed away. Perhaps they will also dial back the focus on transient gameplay, bringing back an unapologetic focus on "extended" content.

Those are all changes which I think have weakened modern WoW, and I would be happy to see the pendulum swing back in the other direction. Of course, the opposite might happen. Blizzard might leave WoW Classic for people who like the rough edges, and make normal WoW even more smooth, in order to differentiate the two.

That being said, I think that a lot of people will try WoW Classic, run up against those changes, and start complaining. Are people really going to enjoy reagents, ammo, shards, dead zones, requiring exactly 40 people in a raid, top guilds poaching players from lower guilds, the hybrid tax, hybrids forced to heal, few viable specializations, very little loot, and all other sundry rough edges which have been smoothed away?

My prediction is that a massive number of players will sign up for WoW Classic, but they will all dwindle away in a year or two. The players remaining will be complaining that their guilds cannot maintain raids, and calling on Blizzard to smooth away the restrictions to attract more players.

I also think the mod community will make a determined effort to eliminate many inconveniences via mods. For example, I bet we see a Party Finder mod (with Gearscore!) quite quickly after WoW Classic is released.

Finally, I think the community will be surprised at how easy WoW Classic will be. I don't think WoW Classic will prove difficult for raiders used to modern mechanics and theorycrafting. Especially as everyone knows the strategies for all the old content.

Blizzcon Predictions

Blizzcon starts tomorrow. What do you think will be announced?

I predict:

• The next WoW expac is announced. It focuses on Kul Tiras and the nagas. The void will be in the background (perhaps for the expansion afterwards).

• No new classes, but playable Vrykul and Nightfallen.

• A completely new gear slot which uses the artifact mechanics. We go back to normal weapons.

• Overwatch announces a new support character. A male healer that heals like Ana or Mercy.

• Diablo announces a new Druid class for 2018, released much like the Necromancer.

Those are my wild guesses. Of course, by the time you read this, Blizzcon will probably be in full swing. What do you predict will be announced?

Final Thoughts on Nier: Automata

I beat Nier: Automata last week and I'm still exhilarated by the ending. What they did at the very end was nothing short of brilliant. A beautiful use of video game mechanics and conventions.

Overall, Nier: Automata was an excellent game. It played well and had an interesting story line. Combat was fun and fluid. The sequence before the final fight was beautiful. I liked a lot of the mechanics like skill chips and the auto-use chips. The game did quite well at reinforcing the idea that the main character was an android through game mechanics.

I strongly recommend Nier: Automata to everyone. One thing to note is that game says it has multiple endings, unlocked through multiple playthroughs. That isn't quite right, and it is a little confusing at first, but it's hard to explain without significant spoilers. Just keep playing, and you'll know when you've reached the true end.

Some thoughts on the "true end' are below the break. Lots of spoilers.

First Impressions of NieR: Automata

An awful lot of video game conventions just make sense when your character is a robot.

I picked up NieR: Automata a couple of weeks ago, and have been steadily working my way through it. So far, it has been a delightful game, with some very interesting design decisions.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic setting where alien robots invaded Earth and drove the surviving humans to the moon. You play a female android, named 2B, who is working for the humans. It's mostly a straightforward console action game. The story line is very Japanese, which is somewhat hard to explain. If you watch anime, you'll recognize a lot of tropes. However, at the same time, it is also very weird.

Speaking of console games, the mouse and keyboard keybinds are next to impossible to play with. It's clearly a game designed for a console controller. After trying the game with mouse and keyboard, I promptly went out and bought an Xbox 360 controller. Given that the last console I owned was the NES (regular, not Super), this has been an interesting learning experience.[1]

Though the trailer above is in English, I'm playing with the Japanese voices and English subtitles. The English voices aren't as good, in my opinion. The only downside is that sometimes there will be a conversation while fighting, and it can be hard to catch the subtitles in that situation.

I started the game on Normal difficulty, but couldn't beat the first level, so I dropped down to Easy. Easy is interesting because your character has "auto-chips" which automatically control your character. However, you can enable and disable specific chips to customize your game. For example, I use automatic ranged fire from your pod and automatic evading, but manual melee attacks and manual weapon switching.

This whole theme of your character being an android and mechanics reflecting that is quite well done. For example, saving is literally your character uploading her current memory at a terminal. If you die, your memory is loaded into a new body at the terminal. You can find your old body and pick up all your gear.

Similarly, your characters "skills" are slots in memory. It's really nice system, and I'd like to talk more about it in a future post.

I really like the camera work as well. The game often seamlessly switches into a side-scroller or overhead view for specific sequences. It's quite well done. Character control is also very well done, and the game just feels smooth and easy to handle.

All in all, I'm really enjoying NieR: Automata, and I recommend it. It doesn't do anything too revolutionary, but it is a highly polished and fun experience.

1. As an aside, how do you console gamers handle the Left/Right Button and Trigger? Do you use your forefinger for both, or do you use your forefinger for the Button and middle finger for the Trigger? Neither feels quite right to me.

Ahead of the Curve: Kil'jaeden

My guild defeated Heroic Kil'jaeden last night. Our first attempt of the night was a 9% wipe, and then we were all over the map for a bit. But we did have another 4% wipe a few attempts before we got the kill.

We did end up wiping more on Fallen Avatar, but I think that fight just hits all our weaknesses more.

For Kil'jaeden, the fight overall is pretty good. It has a lot of mechanics, though, and you have to wonder if all those mechanics were really necessary. Perhaps it would have been a better fight if the dark phase had been skipped, but the last phase lasted longer. We never really had trouble with the dark phase. We either died in the phase before or after.

Not much more to say about the fight. Healing it is pretty normal. Deaths come from doing mechanics improperly, and failing mechanics usually ends in a total wipe. We did have several attempts with tank deaths to Felclaws. But I think those were more due to the tanks letting active mitigation drop at the wrong time.

Oh well, our goal of beating the raid before the next one comes out has been met. I'm looking forward to a couple of weeks of regular farming. (Well, let's hope the second kill goes smoothly!)

Fallen Avatar of Sargeras Down!

Last night, my guild killed Fallen Avatar (Heroic), making us 8/9 for Tomb of Sargeras. Now we only have Kil'jaeden left. That's decent timing, and we should get him down before the next raid opens.

We actually had several close wipes on Fallen Avatar. 3% last week, and a 1% and 0% wipe this week. Sometimes my guild makes strategy over-complex. For example, here we were "sacrificing" people in the last phase to the Dark Marks, but that killed our DPS and we didn't have enough to push it over. For the kill attempt, we didn't try to sacrifice anyone, and just healed as much as possible.

The other problem, I think, is that we aren't very predictable in positioning. Like for Fallen Avatar Phase 1, I would imagine that people should try and stand in a given spot, and move in similar ways to the last attempt. But it seems like every attempt the movement of players is different from the last attempt, forcing everyone to adjust on the fly.

But then again, I've always liked assigned positioning and choreographed movement. The problem, of course, is that if you have to deviate a lot from the choreography, than you might as well not bother.

Still, I think that predictable player movement is an underrated element for normal/heroic raid groups. Mythic groups often move predictably naturally, and so rarely call it out as something to work on.

Still, a dead boss is a dead boss. On to Kil'jaeden!

Ready Player One

This post contains spoilers for Ready Player One.

Ready Player One is an interesting novel. It's been described as "Willy Wonka meets The Matrix". For a novel which focuses on our nerd/gaming subculture, I had a surprising number of philosophical issues with it.

It's set in a near future quasi-dystopia, where Earth is ruined. However a genius, Halliday, created a virtual reality system which everyone uses. When Halliday died, he leaves his fortune and control of the virtual world as a treasure hunt. Halliday was fixated on the 1980s, so all the clues revolve around popular United States culture from that time period.

It's essentially a Grail Quest story, as the hero, Wade Watts, faces successive trials in his quest for the treasure. The villain is the standard over-the-top evil corporation.

Part of my antipathy is that I don't have much respect for 1980s popular culture. It's decent enough, I suppose, but the idea of a generation committing it to memory is rather horrifying to me.

Ernest Cline is obviously liberal, and this has an odd habit of bleeding through in unexpected ways. For example, though most of the book is online using avatars, when the good guys meet up, it turns out they meet all the standard diversity checkmarks. Although it did amuse me that you could tell this written before 2015, as there are no transgender characters, the current cause du jour.  Especially as it would be really easy to fit one in, what with the difference between avatar and person.

The attitude towards government and corporations is weird. Corporations are so powerful that slavery or indentured servitude has come back. However, government is powerful enough that medical privacy laws are absolutely inviolate. Perhaps it was just the necessary positions needed for the plot, but I found it jarring.

The tech in the story is also odd. It often feels more like magic than anything else. It features avatar perma-death, which is unusual. Personally, I think Cline over-values cleverness and discounts brute force, which makes the tech feel a bit off to me. Simple brute force is very powerful when the computer is fast enough.

All this is pretty minor, and more amusing than anything else. The real problem, though, is that Cline misses the point of Grail Quest stories, and it ends up making Wade's quest feel arbitrary and hollow.

In a traditional Grail Quest, the hero's virtues are tested by the trials. Virtues like kindness, resolve, and courage. The quest in this book does not test any of those. Certainly Wade displays some of those characteristics during his adventure. Especially in the middle section, when he finally does something worthy of being a hero. But this feels kind of coincidental to the trials, and not required. If you look at Willy Wonka, for example, Charlie wins because he is a good kid, and resists the temptations of the trials.

Instead, the trials pretty much test Wade's knowledge of 1980s trivia and ability to play videogames. I was really hoping that the final trial would require Wade breaking with Halliday's obsessions, demonstrating independence of thought, the student surpassing the master. Instead it was yet another videogame.

Even the deus ex machina aren't quite right. There are two points in the story where Wade is saved or successful because of arbitrary objects in his possession. The first he just mentions that he bought it a few months ago when it comes time to use it, and the second he got because he decided to get the max score in a random video game he finds while searching for a clue. Now, Grail quests have deus ex machina objects, but they're sort of earned. For example, the hero will save a fox from a trap early in the story, but later when the hero is captured by bandits, the fox will reappear and chew through the ropes binding him. The hero's virtue leads to an unexpected payoff. But Wade demonstrates no virtue in getting these objects which save him.

Since the trials evolve entirely around trivia and videogame skill, it is very arbitrary as to how fast each side solves clues. There's no reason that the evil company takes so long to solve the last clue, while the heroes remember it from an old song almost instantly, other than the plot demands it.

Ultimately though, Ready Player One says that Wade Watts was worthy of being the Philosopher God-King of the virtual universe because he could recite Monty Python and the Holy Grail by heart, and play a perfect game of Pac-Man. You'll forgive me if I don't think that is enough.

Play Diary #8

World of Warcraft

Heroic Desolate Host and Heroic Mistress fell to us this week. It was kind of funny, because the raid leads were so sure that Heroic Mistress would be a pushover, but we kept wiping on her. It's just one of those fights that you can screw up in many small ways. But once you learn it and get used to it, it should be fairly straightforward.

I also finished my Demon Hunter's class mount. It was a pretty good quest line.

It's somewhat interesting that WoW made the same mistake that SWTOR did. By splitting up the content by class, there's lots to do for an alt, but for a single character the content looks sparse. If you compare 7.1 to 7.2, the 7.1 content (Suramar City insurrection) feels so much meatier, even though there's probably the same amount of content in Broken Isles, just spread among the different classes.

Final Fantasy XIV

I hit max level with my Red Mage. I've started doing roulettes and gearing up. So far the wait isn't too bad. All the groups have been wall-to-wall pulls. Red Mage AoE is a little boring, but whatever. Boss fights are still fun. It's kind of interesting to see all the mechanics I ignored when tanking.

I'm debating if I should start leveling another class, or just gear this one up fully. I doubt I'll do EX primals or Omega Savage, but I could go through Omega Normal. I've never actually finished the older 8-man raids, either.

High Skill Gameplay Versus Low Skill Gameplay

Another day, another forum/reddit post about the state of max level gameplay in FFXIV, this time focusing on healers. My current theory on why FFXIV is experiencing unhappiness is because the "high skill gameplay" does not match "low skill gameplay".

To see what I mean, let's look at WoW. In WoW a mythic healer plays much like a normal healer, only better. They both cast the same spells, but the mythic healer gets in more casts and triages better. The mythic healer probably makes better use of cooldowns. The normal healer's goal is to slowly refine her gameplay to match the mythic healer.

In contrast, in FFXIV, high skill gameplay and low skill gameplay is very different. If you're in a low skill group, you want to have the tank in tank stance and focus on threat moves. The healer heals more than she damages.

In contrast, high skill gameplay often has the tank in DPS stance, and using DPS stats. The healers are often dealing damage as well, with one estimate of a healer casting 3 damage spells for every healing spell.

I think a game has trouble when you're in the middle, when you're not sure if you should be using the low skill or high skill tactics.  You go low skill when the rest of the group is high skill, and they get upset for you wasting their time. You go high skill when the rest of the group is low skill, and you end up wiping.

In contrast, in WoW, how you should play is fairly straightforward. You tank, heal or dps to the best of your abilities. You don't need to significantly adjust how you play.

Another game which has issues with the low skill/high skill dichotomy is Overwatch. Certain heroes are much stronger and weaker at different levels of the game. Widowmaker and other snipers become a lot better when people can aim. Meanwhile, Torb and Bastion are much more potent against low skill players who have trouble dealing with them. But the "meta" is defined by the high skill players, and that can cause issues in low skill gameplay.

WoW Analyzer

I came across an excellent site for analyzing your performance: WoW Analyzer.

It's super easy to use and really slick.  You just link a Warcraft Logs parse, and it gives you a genuine breakdown of things you can improve upon.

For example, apparently I double Holy Shock a lot when Divine Purpose procs, causing me to waste Infusion of Light procs. I really should go Holy Shock - Flash of Light - Holy Shock. That was genuinely useful information, provided in an excellent format.

Suggestions for one of my Desolate Host wipes

Seriously, this site is an amazing example of web app design!

The only problem is that not all specs are supported. It's mainly healer specs right now. Hopefully it will be able to attract more contributors and support more specs.

Play Diary #7

Final Fantasy XIV

The latest seasonal event, Moonfire Faire, has started. It was short and sweet, and really just an excuse for everyone to congregate on a beach in swimwear.

I figured out how to hide my weapons so I could make a cosmetic gear set. I've been playing for years, and never realized the button next to Hide Hat hid your weapons! For some reason, I thought it was just sheath/unsheath weapons.

Otherwise, my Red Mage is up to level 67. The end is almost in sight. One interesting aspect of playing DPS is that commendations are treasured because they're rare. Especially if you manage to get multiple commendations in a single instance.

World of Warcraft

We got our second kill on H-Mistress, and then got our first kill on H-Sisters. Then we wiped a fair bit on H-Desolate Host. We don't have the transition to the last phase quite right yet.

Hopefully we will get it this week. However, I think the summer vacation bug will hit in August, and we'll be treading water until September. That's normal though, and hopefully we won't regress.

Pyre

Still chugging along. The difficulty is beginning to ramp up. I've won all my matches up to this point, but I think my first loss will come soon. Apparently the game continues on even if you lose a match, just like a regular sports game. It will be interesting to see how that is handled.

An Accidental Game of Competitive Lucioball

 Overwatch's latest event, the Summer Games, started today. I don't play Overwatch a lot, but I logged in today while eating dinner to open the free lootbox. (Sadly, I didn't get anything interesting.) After that, I started clicking around to see the new skins and other elements.

I accidentally clicked on Competitive Lucioball in the Arcade, and Overwatch managed to sign me for a match within seconds! Normally matchmaking takes up to a minute, so I'm not sure if Blizz has made major improvements with the matchmaker or if I was just lucky (unlucky?).

I hurriedly tried to figure out how to play Lucio, praying that I at least would not score any own goals. Luckily my teammates were able to carry me, and we actually won!

I'm kind of surprised Blizzard made a competitive version of Lucioball. It is kind of fun, and it is a level playing field. At the very least, no one can complain about your choice of character. Still, it's pretty unusual to get a competitive ladder for an event side-game which won't be around for very long.

Pyre: First Impressions

I've started Supergiant's latest game, Pyre. So far, it's really good.

It's sort of a text-based RPG combined with ritual battle system called the Rites. As you go through the story, you recruit different teammates and make simple choices that determines how you progress.

One interesting thing is that it's not fully voice-acted, but each character makes some sounds in a made-up language whenever they speak. It's a really neat way of adding a voice and tone, without having to actually record every line.

 The Rites system is a mix of sport and combat. It's a little bit like a fantasy variant of basketball. There are 3 players on a team, but only one player can be active at a time, though you can quickly switch from player to player. There is a an orb on the playfield, and the objective is to take the orb to the enemies pyre. Each player has an aura around them which they use for defense, or to cast at an enemy player. The player with the orb has no aura.

Characters have different characteristics. Some are slow, some are fast. Some have large auras, some score more points when they capture the orb.

The battlefield is also on the mental plane, so character's have stats like Hope. All in all, it's quite a neat system.

I'm not sure how far in I am, but the story is very good so far. All in all, I recommend Pyre.

Dungeon Meta in WoW versus FFXIV

In the comments to the previous post on FFXIV's dungeon meta, Shintar asks:

Sounds a lot like the way it's been in WoW for years (or at least it was still that way last time I played). Or do you think this is different?

First, I really don't remember exactly what WoW meta was when anymore, so I'm just going to compare FFXIV to the current meta.

In WoW, speed runs usually aim to skip trash, rather than engage. When you're skipping packs, you generally don't drag mobs along, because you don't want to accidentally engage. In FFXIV, trash is unskippable, for the most part.

WoW also has more trash than FFXIV. But the WoW trash generally has less health but hits harder. Also a WoW group has 3 dps instead of 2. Basically instead of a few large pulls, WoW tends toward many smaller pulls.

As well, packs in FFXIV have a lot of space between them, which I think makes the stop-and-start nature of gameplay more obvious. I think this lends itself to a good WoW group going through the dungeon at a steady pace. Not quite pulling multiple packs, but chaining from pack to pack quicker.

Another possibility is that WoW seems to be segregating the player base by ability this expansion. More geared and advanced players are funneled into more difficult content like Mythic+, while people generally only run the lower dungeons when they're undergeared, or just want an easy run.

FFXIV takes opposite tack, and often encourages better players to go back and play with newer players. A lot of the time this is good, but it does mean that "edge" tactics come to dominate, and start being applied in places they shouldn't be.

Now, that I think about it, this last possibility is probably the same as as older WoW expansions, when experienced players ran heroics for badges. That was a "go go go" meta as well. So ultimately, maybe encouraging veterans to play with new players is a bad idea.

Diablo 3 Seasonal Necromancer Complete

I finished Chapter IV of the Seasonal journey with my Necromancer in Diablo 3 today, and got the complete Rathma set for her. This is the point I stop in D3. I don't really care for farming perfect items and Greater Rifts. I really like Seasons because they give a directed path that you can follow, and several points where you can stop and still feel satisfied with what you've completed.

The Necromancer is an interesting class. It has three possible resources: essence, corpses, and health, which you can combine in different ways. For example, I use Devour to gain essence from corpses, and took a passive that generates health globes when corpses are used. I then use a Legendary that gives me Essence from consuming health globes. I got another Legendary which causes my golem to drop a corpse every second, further feeding that loop. Add a Siphon Blood rune which automatically pulls in all health globes when you attack. Finally, all that essence gets channeled into summoning Mage Skeletons.

Some ability runes also change some costs from Essence to a percentage of Health, which you then supplement with abilities to get health back. More than most characters, the Necromancer feels like it's designed for you to set up these Rube Goldberg-esque chains converting one resource into another, feeding your damage.

It was pretty enjoyable, and I think the D3 team did a good job in setting up several possible play styles.

I'm not sure what the future of Diablo 3 is like, but these packs which introduce a new class are an interesting way to go. For example, adding a Druid shape-shifting class would be great.

FFXIV's Unfortunate Dungeon Meta

I've complained a few times that I don't like the way the dungeon "meta" in FFXIV has turned out. Here's a good Reddit thread discussing the issue.

Basically, many players expect the tank to pull "wall-to-wall". Basically run through all the mobs from the start to a gate, where they are all then AoE'd down.  It's the most efficient method of clearing a dungeon, but it also requires the players in the group to be geared and on point. Essentially it's the most fragile method.

As an aside, I've noticed the North American players in almost all games will gravitate towards the most efficient and most fragile method, which require the highest level of personal performance. Even in WoW raids. Apparently, Japanese gamers don't do this, and tend towards more fool-proof strategies even if they take more work.

There's a lot of tanks and healers in that thread who are unhappy about the meta. Perhaps a backlash will develop, and it will become okay to pull single-packs at a time. But I doubt it. Doing that would add 5 to 10 minutes to the clear time, and that is clearly a deal-breaker to impatient players.

Personally, I've just given up on tanking, and am leveling a Red Mage damage dealer. This way it doesn't really matter to me. If the tank pulls "wall-to-wall", I'll use AoE. If she pulls a single pack at a time, then I'll use a regular rotation.

Richest Person in the World Inflection Point

This is a non-gaming post.

There are several libertarian-ish economists on the internet who argue against focusing on inequality. One common argument I've seen is that it is better to be a poor person (in America) in 2017, than to be the richest man a century or two ago. That poor people today have a better life than oil barons like J.D. Rockefeller. Thus rather than focus on relative inequality, we should pursue rising standards for everybody, even if it increases inequality.

As far as arguments go, it's not a bad one, especially if we focus on non-status, or more material elements. But that's not what I want to discuss today. Let's just take that argument as a given, and put ourselves in the same mindset as these economists.

So then we have the following sequence of logic:

1. The richest person in 1870 had a worse standard of living than a poor person in 2017.
2. The richest person in 2017 has a better standard of living than a poor person in 2017.
3. Therefore, in some year between 1870 and 2017, the richest person in the world had a standard of living roughly equal to a poor person in 2017.

What year do you think that was? What's the point in time where you would choose to be the richest man in the world rather than a poor person in 2017? What is the missing invention or innovation which makes all the difference?

I think the best candidate is 1955, when Jonas Salk invents the polio vaccine. I think that removes the last major scourge of childhood illnesses (which strike rich and poor alike). After that point, I think the richest person in the world can approximate most innovations that a poor person in 2017 has access to, or can live without those innovations. As awesome as computer games are, I don't think they make up for millions of dollars.

What's your candidate for this inflection point?

FFXIV: Stormblood

Last month, FFXIV released its latest expansion, Stormblood. Early access and the first week or so had several problems, with blocked instance servers and massive queues that kept people from progressing. But eventually everything calmed down.

The main story in Stormblood is about the attempt to liberate Ala Mhigo and Doma from the Garlean Empire. It's quite a good story with lots of interesting turns and new characters. The sidequests are particularly good this time around, particularly in the Azim Steppes, filling out the new cultures introduced.

The main villain, Zenos, is a little boring. He's the bored, overpowered type who's just looking for a challenge. He serves his purpose, but the two sub-villains, Yotsuyu and Fordola, are much more interesting characters.

On the whole, I think the Heavensward story was slightly better, but I'm a fan of high fantasy stories about knights and dragons. Stormblood is a bit more political war fantasy with two human sides fighting each other.

Stormblood also introduced some simple new quest types, including one where you play a merchant at a stall helping customers. It was an interesting and unusual quest.

The dungeons are pretty standard fare, though quite well done. There's even one boss fight which doesn't have any combat at all.

Stormblood also added swimming and underwater areas. Unlike other implementations, underwater areas are entirely non-combat. Personally, I like this implementation, as I find fighting underwater to be a huge hassle in most games, especially as melee.

Finally, Stormblood adds the Red Mage and Samurai classes. They're both interesting. Red Mage wields a rapier. She alternates between Black magic and White magic, then jumps into melee, executes a combo, and flips back out. It's very stylish. Samurai, meanwhile, is pretty much what you'd expect. It's an understated melee swordsman, executing combos and building up to a very powerful strike.

General mechanics-wise, there was some streamlining, mostly in how cross-class skills are handled. Each role now has a pool of common skills available to all classes in that role. You no longer need to level up a second class to unlock your job.  If you're looking for significant changes to FFXIV's mechanics, you'll be disappointed.

All in all, Stormblood is a great expansion for FFXIV. It doesn't do anything radical, but focuses on FFXIV's main strength, the story. It also adds two interesting new classes and some polish to other areas of the game.

Repeatable Stateful Solo Content

One of the more interesting experiments Blizzard is conducting in Legion are pieces of repeatable stateful solo content. Repeatable stateful content is interesting because previous runs impact future runs. The best examples are boardgames like Risk Legacy.

So far, Blizzard has included two such pieces of content: the Withered Training scenario in Suramar, and the Deaths of Chromie scenario.

In the Withered Training scenario, you start off with some Withered elves and explore a dungeon. You come across chests, and have to "spend" some of your Withered to retrieve them. However, these chests unlock new types of Withered in your next run. Chests can only be retrieved once, and then don't appear in future runs. So fully completing the Withered Training requires several plays. Each run you may go to a different area and collect the chests there.

In Deaths of Chromie, the limiting factor is time. But after you complete areas, you unlock shortcuts that allow you to make your next run faster. There's also reputation, making the scenario as you do more and more of it.

I think these are really interesting pieces of content. Repeatable content is always good, but the stateful part makes it more interesting. The hard part, I think, would be coming up with a reason the content is repeatable and stateful. The Withered scenario is an artificial training scenario, and Chromie involves time travel. Time loops like Groundhog Day are classic repeatable content.

Perhaps a large dungeon with many floors might work. You could do things like unlock shortcuts, or perhaps killing a boss gnoll causes all the gnolls to flee and be replaced by spiders.

I wonder if you could do something with repeatable stateful group content. The problem here is reconciling state. If someone who's done the scenario 100 times groups with someone who's done it 5 times, who's history is used? You could do like raids, I suppose, and simply default to the group leader.

In any case, these scenarios have been a neat part of Legion, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Blizzard expands on them in the next expansion.

Updates

Posting has been almost non-existent over the last couple of months. I'm not 100% sure why. I've been playing several games, I've have several ideas for posts. But I can't seem to bring myself to write anything. Oh well, maybe next month will go better.

I'm currently playing WoW, Diablo, and FFXIV. On deck are Pyre and Foxhole.

World of Warcraft

Just chugging along in Tomb of Sargeras. We're on Heroic Mistress Sassz'ine, and are having lots of trouble with her. We've beaten her once, but the fight just isn't clicking for us. I think we aren't doing Hydra Shot well, so when it's Hydra Shot + other mechanic, we fall to pieces and lose people. I really should look up some videos.

Diablo 3

I made a Necromancer for Season 11, who is currently level 68. For most of levelling I went with a Bone Armor + Death Nova build which waded into melee. For the last few levels, I've been trying a more caster-style build with Skeletal Mages + Blood Siphon.

Final Fantasy XIV

I got the expansion and finished the main story quest. It was quite good, and hopefully I will make a full post about it soon. I've grown disenchanted with tanking in FFXIV, though. I really don't like mass pulls, but if I don't do mass pulls, the DPS pulls for me and the run becomes a mess. So I've decided to level up a Red Mage, which is quite fun. Of course, as DPS, there are queues, so I'm leveling Miner alongside it.

Pyre

Pyre is the latest from Supergiant Games, who made Bastion and Transistor. I pretty much bought it sight unseen, on the strength of the previous two games. I have no real idea of what it is actually about.

Foxhole

Foxhole is an interesting game. It's in Early Access, but is fairly polished. It's kind of like a WWII Real-Time Strategy game, only you control a single soldier.

As well, there's a full economic chain to do anything. For example, scrap has to be mined, taken to refinery and converted into building materials, then taken to a factory to make bullets, and then the bullets have to be taken to the front line. When a soldier dies, they respawn with nothing, so everyone is reliant on logistics to get anywhere. You can build buildings and vehicles including tanks.

Games are quite long (multiple days), but it isn't totally persistent as there is an eventual winner. Then a new game starts.

In some ways it reminds of Eve Online, only there are defined teams. There also is no money involved, so the logistics chain is a bit different.

I haven't played very much, but I strongly recommend trying Foxhole if you're looking for something new and different.

Chromie's Companion Tank Mechanic

In the new Chromie scenario, you have the option to make your companion Chromie a tank or a healer. The tank mechanic is particularly neat, and should be stolen by every game which uses a companion.

As a tank, Chromie loses 2% of her health every second, until she hits 50% health. But when her health is above 50%, she gains a significant scaling damage bonus. At 100% health, she dishes out crazy damage.

As a healer, this mechanic is quite fun.  Normally in games with companions, you spend most of your time acting as a poor man's dps, occasionally throwing a heal on your companion. And it generally has to be this way. If normal mobs hit the companion hard enough to require significant healing, dps characters would not be able to cope.

But with Chromie, a healer can spend most of her time healing, and this is optimal gameplay for her, as the loss of the player's dps is more than made up for by the boosted companion dps.

If you're dps, you get a tank, but one which starts with half health, pushing you to kill things faster. Though I imagine dps players would still prefer to use a healing companion or another dps companion.

I think this mechanic would be an excellent match for a game like The Old Republic in particular, where companions are an essential part of solo gameplay.

Mass Effect: Andromeda Review

This post contains spoilers for Mass Effect: Andromeda.

A good ending forgives a lot of sins. Mass Effect: Andromeda has a solid ending. It also has a lot of sins.

I finally finished Andromeda last night. I think it might be easiest to review it in bullet-point form:

Good

• The ending of Andromeda is quite good. It feels like someone listed everything which was wrong with ME3's ending, and systematically went about writing the opposite. As a result, the ending is very fulfilling. All the allies you made appear and help, validating all your choices in the game. Though you still have your 2 squadmates, all your other squad members show up to help in the final fight. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the ending, and Andromeda goes out on a high note.

• Andromeda has one really good decision to make. On Kadara, there are two rival criminal organisations seeking control of the planet. You have to side with one of them. The two groups are very different, and it's not obvious which is the better choice. I've seen some interesting debates as to which choice is better. Additionally, Andromeda used the "quick-time event" to make the choice, forcing you to make the choice with time pressure. Ordinarily, I'm not a big fan of the quick time events, but here it worked perfectly.

• The combat is fun and works well. There are lots of different builds and play styles.

• If you like Krogan, there's lots of interactions with them. Drack, a squadmate, is pretty awesome. The krogan colony is pretty funny, and provides a much needed dose of humour. (Apparently, some krogans LARP, playing Krantt: the Ragening. There's also a new father support group, where they have sing-alongs and demolition explosion demonstrations.)

• The six companion loyalty missions are very well designed, and actually fairly interesting, with a wide variety of styles. 

Mixed

• The story and writing is decent. It's not particularly good, but it's not particularly bad either. In fact, in some ways it's unfortunate this is a Mass Effect game. If it had been an entirely new franchise, I would have said it was a promising start, and hopefully would get better in the sequel.

• The open world and driving around in the Nomad is reasonably fun.

Bad

• Your crew, aside from Drack, are not very interesting. Honestly, they're kind of annoying. After thinking about it for a bit, I've come to the conclusion that this is because they're teenagers. Oh, they're theoretically adults, with adult histories. But they act like teenagers in a television show. Everything is overly dramatic and histrionic. I wanted to space half of them by the end.

• The game has a set of quest objectives called Tasks, which are an utter waste of time, and really just serve as filler. Collect 10 rocks, etc. Some tasks have objectives which randomly appear in enemy camps. I strongly recommend that you simply ignore all the tasks you get, and just focus on the main quests.

• The software quality is not quite there. The animations and cutscenes have mostly been patched up to reasonable quality by now, but quests can still be fragile and buggy.

• The game lacks the "grace notes" of the original trilogy. Elements like the elcor, hanar, and volus, which weren't really part of the story, but enhanced the world.

• The new races introduced, the Angara and Kett, are uninteresting.

• The entire scanner mechanic is overused, and really slows the game down.

Conclusions

Looking at these notes, I don't think I've touched my main issue with the game. It feels like the new studio was given the Mass Effect franchise, and they felt like they had to do "more" to live up to the name. Add more open-world content and bring back driving a vehicle. Add a scanner. Add all these tasks. Add NPC strike teams. But in the end, they spread themselves too thin. Pretty much every element of the game, save maybe combat, is a step below the original trilogy.

In a lot of respects, I think they would have done better to cut all these extra features and focus on polishing the main story and animations. If the player does everything, tries to 100% the game, it's too long. It would be better as a shorter and more focused game.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is not a bad game. It's just not a great one. And Andromeda has the misfortune to be a sequel to a set of truly great games.

An Alternate Legendary Scheme

I'm generally happy with Legendaries this expansion. I only have 3, but they're good enough. I also don't play at a level where they really matter, so having or not having the Best-in-Slot ones isn't super important to me.

However, I think for a lot of people who are more hardcore, the Legendary system didn't really work. In particular, I don't think the concept of tailoring your build to match your Legendaries really took off.

Perhaps the problem was that the Legendaries weren't strong enough. For example, if you look at Diablo 3, set bonuses are pretty insane. If you're wearing a set which buffs an ability, that buff is on the order of a 1000% or more. I don't think such a system--where getting a Legendary forced you to build your character around it--would really fly in WoW.

I think a system that fits WoW better would be something with a little bit of randomness, but also add in control and effort.

I would suggest a scheme where the Legendary drop rate was about one per week, but the item level started at 800 or so. The player could use Obliterum to upgrade the Legendary to the item level cap.

This scheme would get the dedicated player all Legendaries reasonably quickly, but they would have to devote time or money into upgrading the Legendaries they want to use. Using Obliterum as the upgrade material would also help out crafters, giving them incentive and a market for their wares.

WoW Videos: Holding Out for a Healer

I've always liked Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero. This variant is quite well done. The video is by Kruithne. The main vocalist is Sharm, and the chorus is Letomi.

And the subject matter is certainly very appropriate. ;)

Success is the Hardest Thing to Argue Against

Lately, my guild has taken up a tactic which I find distasteful, but is leading to success. So far it's been used sparingly, but because it is successful, the leadership's aversion to the tactic is eroding. I fear we'll start resorting to it earlier and earlier in the next tier.

Basically, on a difficult boss, when we're fairly close to a first kill but are having trouble closing out that last 10%, the raid lead will start asking the lowest DPS people to step out. Because normal and heroic raids scale now, the average DPS of the raid increases while the mobs get weaker.  We got our first kills of Heroic Botanist and Heroic Gul'dan this way.

I don't approve of this tactic. To me, a raid team is a team, and you win or lose with that team as a whole. I'm perfectly fine with having minimum requirements to join the team, but once you're in, you're in.

If we didn't use this tactic, we would progress a little slower, true. Maybe we would have killed Botanist and Gul'dan a week later. But we have plenty of time.

I also think we're using this tactic as a shortcut instead of tightening up our strategy and positioning. We aren't a Mythic guild, and thus our basic handling of mechanics is not as good as it could be.

But it's really hard to argue with success. The raid leadership will point out that they only do this when it's "necessary", after we've already wiped for a couple days and no one objects in raid. But no one really want to be the person holding back the group, either. And it's hard to say that yes, we should spend one or two extra weeks wiping when we could be progressing and working on new bosses.

But because it's successful, we're reaching for it earlier and earlier. I think we wiped on Botanist twice as much as we wiped on Gul'dan. How much will our tolerance erode in Tomb of Sargeras? One night of wiping? As soon as we have a 20% wipe?

Your Name Review

There are minor spoilers for Your Name in the post, and there may be larger spoilers in the comments.

I saw Your Name (Kimi No Nawa) on the weekend. It's about a boy in Tokyo, Taki, and a girl in the countryside, Mitsuha, who start dreaming that they are the other person, even though they are complete strangers.

It was a popular movie in Japan, and is in a two-week run in some North American cinemas. There was a full theatre when I went to see it. Though I do live in Vancouver, which has a large East Asian population. Amusingly, I was the only non-white, non-East Asian person there.

The movie was quite good, with interesting and engaging characters. In particular, I thought it was "well-balanced". Some comedy, some drama, some romance, some moderate action, a touch of scifi/fantasy, a bit of Japanese religious mythology, and even an explosion.

One of the problems I have with modern western movies is that they seem to have lost that sense of balance, and often tend to extremes. An action move is 90% action with very little characterization. Romantic movies are intensely romantic. Indie movies tend to be very quirky and not very normal.

Your Name is also relatively short, clocking in at 1h 45m. Again, this is quite good, as it packs a lot in that short time frame.

Your Name is not a perfect movie, though the anime community hypes it up a lot. In particular, if plot holes bother you, there is one major plot hole, though it's not strictly a plot hole. On reflection, it's extremely unlikely the characters did not do or realize X. Kind of like characters not calling the police when they have a cellphone and in a situation which warrants it. But if you just let that go, or attribute it to the "magic dream" blinding them to it, it's more than good enough.

I recommend Your Name, especially if you can catch it in theatres. You may only have a week to do so, however.