And Then There Were Two

I got an invitation a few months back to join Azrael and Adarel in an ongoing chat on Discord. More recently, the folks from Multiplaying and the MMOShow invited me to their Slack, another collaboration service. Honestly, other than dipping my toes in, I haven't logged into either in quite some time.

Discord. Slack. Raptr. Anook. The field of social media for gamers seems to be exploding. Add in VOIP clients like Ventrilo and Teamspeak, and company-specific chat services like Battle.net, and we've never been more connected as gamers. It's a little overwhelming, actually. I have easy access to Twitter and some other, more generalized, social media sites at my office. But even G+ was unreachable for at least a year after it launched, and I still am not as fully engaged there as I am on Twitter.

Needless to say, to even get to some of these "Facebooks for Gamers" that are blocked on the office network, I need to use my phone, something that is not exactly convenient to read, depending on the site, and what else I am doing during the day. And then, when I get on my computer at home, I don't generally get on any social media, but log into whatever game I want to play. Which, right now, is usually the fully voiced SWTOR.

Several years ago, when I started playing World of Warcraft, the quests were issued in text form. It was not difficult to participate in voice chat, because there weren't really voices in the game other than "atmosphere." It did become a bit of a distraction during the raids I participated in, where we used Vent to coordinate our efforts but which included audio cues for some major boss abilities—and again simple ambiance or story notes. To this day, I don't really know what the floating bone dude was doing in the bottom of Ice Crown Citadel. The last time I participated regularly in VOIP during actual gameplay was on Secret Mondays playing with the Knights of Mercy. It was sort of a "last straw" because we were never quite in sync on the cutscenes, and folks would talk over them.

Back in my WoW days, I regularly participated in the text guild chat while traveling by taxi to various locations. Mutiny (of Uldum) was a large and friendly guild, and there were several people online most nights. I was part of several guilds up through TSW and even the WildStar launch. But more and more, I find I don't really need the social interaction of a large guild; and certainly, voice chat is taxing when I am both listening to in-game dialogue and holding a private conversation with Scooter.

Scooter and I play as a pair most of the time. Since we're usually in the same room, we have no need for headsets or VOIP. The games we choose to play aren't very difficult even for soloists, so we have no problem as a duo. In the meantime, despite being aware of others supposedly in our guild in SWTOR (the remnant of Mercy Gaming), we rarely see anyone else online. That may change with the upcoming expansion, but will it really matter? Guilds in MMOs once filled a need for companionship in my bachelorhood, a need that is now satisfied by Scooter.

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Bad Romance

As is my habit while commuting to work, I was thinking this morning about MMOs, and SWTOR in particular. Consider yourself warned: SPOILERS abound below if you have not been through the Warrior story. However, given that it's been almost four years since launch, I make no apologies for spoilers of the original class stories.

A few days ago, I finally finished the companion conversation series with Malavai Quinn on my female Sith Warrior. Not long after picking up Lt. Pierce on Taris, I decided he was a much better match for the lusty, action-oriented Morrenia than the proper, priggish Quinn, and tried to romance him. Doing research, I got mixed information as to whether that was even possible. The official site says no, but a few wikis say yes.
I convinced Scooter (on her Sorceror, Glember) to run with Talos Drellig (her healer) so I could have Pierce out as our Tank. His conversation preferences were a natural fit with how I wanted Morrenia's personality and character to develop, and I also lavished him with gifts to maximum affection. (I did hit max with Vette first, though only coincidentally.) Unfortunately, the most romance Morrenia ever got with Pierce was a single tryst. There is never a declaration of undying love or marriage or anything.

Meanwhile, Quinn, the old stick-in-the-mud, apparently tries to pull rank and run the Fury strictly by the book. This irritates both Vette and Pierce, and I essentially told them both to ignore him—that the ship was mine, not his—getting bonus points from both. And then, Quinn goes from prig to prick (never go full prick), betraying Morrenia at the behest of Darth Baras. I'd been romancing him (in case Pierce did not work out), but this made me just hate him.

My heart just wasn't in the romance after that. I attempted to continue on; but, in a sense, I was just leading him on in order to increase his affection. When it came right down to it, I snubbed Quinn, costing me 116 affection. But I got the achievement for completing the conversation series (which comes with stat buffs) and I was able to make it up to him through a hefty gift.

I really wish they'd made Pierce actually romanceable. As far as I know, while three classes have two potential romances for the male character (Warrior, Agent, and Smuggler), none have more than one for the female version. Partly because of the romance angle, SWTOR is the first MMORPG in which I have more male characters than females—some created specifically to romance the female companions. The later expansions introduced two more companions to romance. And included same-sex romance, to boot. So I guess they've covered all their bases?

While I still find Corso to be the most annoying companion (although I dismissed Skadge—the last Bounty Hunter companion—immediately; he's too much of a brute), I don't dislike him the way I do Quinn. I know I am not alone in wishing I could have killed Quinn on the spot, or even once the crisis was over. After all, in the movies and other fiction, Sith Lords have killed people for far less egregious transgressions. There have been those on the forums who've made cogent arguments for why the Sith Warrior would keep Quinn around, and also why BioWare removed the possibility of killing companions. But the meta-game reason (that he is the Warrior's healer) will be obviated by the upcoming KotFE expansion, when all companions will be able to serve any trinity role. All that's left is for the Warrior to finally say:

"Hey, Quinn, remember that time you totally betrayed me? He's yours, Pierce. Do with him what you will."

"With pleasure, M'Lord." *crunch*

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Back to Commentary Logins

After over a month of allowing anonymous comments, I am back to requiring some sort of sign-in. I am sorry for any inconvenience or discouragement of genuine commenters, but I can't remember a single anonymous post that wasn't spam. I may be mistaken. There are a variety of ways you can log in, so I doubt you would have to sign up for anything new at this point:

• Google
• LiveJournal
• WordPress
• TypePad
• AIM
• OpenID

I'm sorry if this causes any inconvenience, but dealing with spam has been an inconvenience to me with no benefit.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

The Adventures of ScooRow: Our Week in Gaming

Things are humming along on the 12x Train. I am cruising through the first chapter on both my smuggler, "Albarossa," and my solo trooper, "Eyes'on." Scooter and I just completed the second chapter on our Agent/Bounty Hunter pair. Interestingly, there are elements of the story I don't remember—or flat out missed—from our first run-through when mine was the Agent, and hers, the Hunter. Spoilery examples below:

Team "Silverleaf" has become the most wanted group in the galaxy, as Republic attempts to apprehend him for the "murder" of Kellian Jarro have resulted only in more bloodshed for the Republic. I've skittered back and forth across the Light/Dark boundary throughout the story. Silverleaf is a more powerful version of me, I suppose: easygoing and doing the right thing most of the time, until someone threatens me or mine. For instance, I let the padawan go at the end of Chapter 1, but then put a blaster bolt in her when she tried to arrest me on Quesh. The same thing happened on Nar Shaddaa when a Republic squad ambushed and slaughtered my peers at a penthouse party, and ended up full of holes themselves.

I've come to greatly enjoy the interplay among the Hunter's crew. They are on their own much more than the other characters I have played, who are always reporting back to someone. Things even got a little tense between Torian "Death Before Dishonor" Cadera and Gault "Credits Before Anything" Rennow. I may have mentioned before that I thought the Great Hunt extended into at least the second chapter, and didn't remember much of anything after that. I'm glad, though, because it makes the story more interesting than it would have been if we were simply reviewing it.

Imperial Agent Ginie "Cipher Nine" Sunfleur, in the meantime, has shaken off the Imperial conditioning that was commandeered by Ardun Kothe of the SIS in order to control her. War with the Republic is imminent, as the Minister of Intelligence assigns Ginie to investigate the shadowy Star Cabal. One thing that pissed me off about the Agent story when I went through two years ago was that the brainwashing was not part of my backstory. Last night, however, during Scooter's play-through, I realized from the dialogue that it had happened after the Agent defied and killed the rogue Darth Jadus, not prior to the Prologue assignment on Hutta. It was still annoying. But it also lasted for months on our first run. With 12x, we did Chapter 2 in just a few sessions.

I don't think I'll have time to get through the original storylines on my Republic characters before 12x ends just prior to the new expansion. My concern now is deciding which characters Scooter and I should take through the 50-60 content from "Rise of the Hutt Cartel" and "Shadows of Revan." I hope we can do it on at least one set that we can then take into "Knights of the Fallen Empire," since I know that at least some of the characters in the new content are folks we'll have "met" already.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Not a Minute Gaming

Much like the protagonist of Fight Club, Scooter and I are somewhat obsessed with IKEA. There is a store reasonably close to where we live, and we have not yet bought a major piece of furniture together that I have not spent a good chunk of the day assembling while following the Swedish company's wordless Lego-style instructions.

In case you have never been to an IKEA, the place is practically a destination unto itself. The showroom path snakes back and forth in a big-box building, much like a Disneyland ride except without the cool clam-shell cars. We spent about five hours there on Saturday, looking through the showroom, and then another good hour or two on Sunday, because we had (foolishly, in retrospect) driven down there in my Juke instead of Scooter's Jeep, and didn't have enough room for the larger boxes we wanted.

For years, we have been eying the Crescendo of Light, one of a series of very large prints available at IKEA. How large, you ask, Dear Reader? The picture is 78¾ x 55 inches (200 x 140 cm). Thanks to a sale, it now dominates our master bedroom.

Scooter has been wanting to update and unify the style of our living room and we started the project by replacing three different shelving units and curio cabinets with the Kallax 4 x 4 cubby unit. It's just shy of five feet per side and (shhh!) we put casters on it, as seen on the shorter unit below, so Scooter could roll it around. Good thing, too, because after I had it built and in position, Scooter decided she didn't like it in the place she had intended, and move it to the other side of the room. We also bought a few boxes and baskets perfectly sized to fit the roughly 1ft³ cubby holes for some hidden storage and extra decorative interest.

The last major piece we got was the Kallax 2 x 4 cubby unit, which we turned horizontal and placed behind the couch to hold our DVD/BluRay collection. This was also supposed to have casters, but I miscalculated how many we would need, and now we have to go back sometime this week.

As happens with any furniture rearranging, the living room feels fresh and new, with walls exposed that had been behind stuff and lights in a different place, casting new shadows. And of course, the bedroom feels wonderfully tranquil with that huge tree on the wall. Hmm, I think we need some leafy green bed linen. . .

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

How Rewarding: Currency vs. Items

This has been sitting in my drafts since at least 2013. Apparently, things were hot and heavy regarding the economics of Guild Wars 2's auction system, known as the Black Lion Trading Company. After a quick check on Twitter, confirming things haven't changed, I decided to post this, largely unedited:

Currencies as reward are interesting, many people who argue for barter systems fail to realize that currency is an emergent property of economics, not an artificial invention of government. Even when there is no formal money, people develop currencies for exchange purposes (e.g., cigarettes in prison). Because if all you have to offer are eggs that I don't need and all I have are carpentry skills which you don't need, we can earn currency and spend it as we see fit. This is one reason I am not fond of special currencies in MMOs that have no exchange rate between them.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The GW2 AH is a buyers’ market, it "works as designed" in a game devoid of scarcity, especially when Gold can be converted to Gems, which is ANet’s income. Only those people who expect to play the market and make a profit think it’s broken. ArenaNet wants you out there adventuring, not watching lists. Having said that, vendor+1c is silly. Since the AH takes a cut, if you sell at vendor+1, you may as well just vendor the item. But no one says you have to sell your stuff at that price. Those that want it “right now” will pay.

What does all that mean for GW2 crafting? Yet another game where crafting is barely an afterthought. At least you can level up a little while doing it. TSW has the only crafting I’ve ever gotten into, because I don’t have make a bajillion copper pants to skill up. However, it’s still a “mats market” (materials being more expensive than finished items) like WoW always was. And the Elite and Nightmare Tier Gear is not generally craftable.

However, I dislike the randomness of dungeon drops, and the unreliability of the loot system in WoW and several other games. You might quite simply never obtained certain "must-have" items through RNG. Perhaps you might get something through the AH, but that leads to the original issue of having the in-game cash to purchase it. Many players dislike the more prosaic token systems Blizzard once instituted, but least they were more in line with the sense of steady progress you get through leveling your character. I think people's tunes might change if XP were as random as loot. "Ohp, sorry! You got no XP for the last ten bears you killed. Better luck on this next one."

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Slacktember Strikes Again

Well shoot! Momentum is a horrible thing. I have a couple post seedlings that I need to develop before sending out into the wild. But my couple-days break (along with busy work stuff) has turned into a tenday, which is not good. Well, technically, I did write a well-researched and lengthy rant regarding some real world politics on Sunday. But since it didn't exactly fit here, I put it on Facebook, where far fewer people actually saw it. My mild-mannered alter ego is not nearly as famous as Rowan Blaze, the Rambling Ranter. So this post is really more to get me back into the swing of writing than anything else.

I started yet another alt in SWTOR to play while Scooter is doing other things. I really should just finish another storyline. But I had a spark of an idea for a new Trooper, so back to the creation screen I went. He turned out pretty cool, I think. Unfortunately, you'll just have to imagine it. Because even though I've taken a bunch of pictures, I've been too lazy to prepare them for the blog. But that can be the seedling for another character post.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Blaugust the 32nd: Did Blaugust Drive My Traffic?

Bwahahah! you thought, we were DONE, did you?

Way back on Blaugust the 10th, Ysharros asked the blogger's eternal question: Is this going to raise my pagehits? (I'm paraphrasing.) Someone, I can't figured out who, mentioned Syl had talked about sharing our stats, so that people don't feel like they're alone. [Syl clarified in the comments below.] As was pointed out, we're really all just small fish. So, I got 15,963 pagehits in August—several which I am sure were actual readers. As a contrast, I have a work friend who just started a blog about current events and biblical prophecy, and he's already getting 4k hits a day.

In case you're curious, my highest month ever is that first huge peak from September 2013, almost 17k and largely stemming from this post I did in late August of that year, in which I discussed barriers to entry and other economic concepts as they related to MMO revenue models. Digressing further, it's interesting what I got right and what I didn't in that post. As predicted (and I wasn't alone in this), The Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar were not the second coming of the subscription model—though it seems that Final Fantasy XIV may be. On the other hand, I was pretty sure I would never play or SWTOR ever again. And yet here I stand, having paid six more months of membership dues. And counting.

The second peak is May, just a few months ago, where I got about 16.6k as I was coming off of Developer Appreciation Week and got a bit of a boost (I think) from the Newbie Blogger Initiative. Don't feel bad if you're just starting out. You may note the cute little initial peak from July 2010 (the first month Google actually started counting, despite the graph beginning with May). In July 2010, after blogging for about 6 months, I got 997 pagehits, and in August I got only half that.

Following the Ancient Gaming Noob's lead (who I am sure gets waaaaay more hits than I), let's look at page referrals.

• Google tops the list, plus Google France and Germany, so lots of searching people are finding my stuff. (It just occurred to me, that may also include people coming from G+.)
• My own url is second, so a lot of people are just coming straight here, that's cool.
• Twitter's own shortener, t.co, is next, so that's a good place publicize my stuff.
• Feedly is, of course, a common RSS/Atom client, but it's nice to see that show up in my stats.
• Anook, social media for gamers and home of Blaugust, rounds out the the top five, perhaps the best indication that Blaugust as an organized event had an impact this past month (as opposed to the simple uptick in my posting).

Rounding out the top ten are Blessing of Kings (Rohan) and Inventory Full (Bhagpuss), so a special thanks to both of them and whoever is reading them in Canada and Germany. But note something interesting: all these sites account for only 887 of the almost 16k hits I got this month. Considering the lowest two sources on the list are only 27 apiece, that's a very long tail.

My graph is pretty jagged, even though there's a steady trend upward over the long term (about five years on the graph). While there are outliers, the biggest indicator of how many hits I get in a given month is how many times I post that month, sometimes adjusted for posting a lot at the end of the previous month. There's no real magic to it, to be honest. I don't know if I obsess about my stats more or less than the average blogger, or really where I stand in relative popularity. Going back partly to my post yesterday, I fall somewhere between extrovert and introvert. Popularity is nice, but my self worth doesn't depend on it. And I am happy with the few gamers and bloggers I surround myself with in my little corner of internet.

And with that, I put Blaugust 2015 to bed on this blog.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.