Settling In

After months of buying game time cards for SWTOR, Scooter and I finally just subbed directly just after Christmas. (Yes, I know it's been over two weeks.) Despite its flaws, I enjoy story mode at least, and they've made it very easy to play the game for that. Amazing how if BioWare hadn't been so hidebound about which companions did what, they could have made stronger stories in the first place.

So the commitment is real. We'll be getting the HK rewards, and unless something catastrophic happens, playing as HK-55 come August.

One "downside"—if you can call it that—of having my lovely bride as a gaming partner is that I have become less social in games. Back when I first joined the World of Warcraft community, I was recruited by a RL friend, who then introduced me to his guild. I had an instant circle of friends. Sort of. You see, because of work changes, he ended up not playing at the same times as me, and then less and less altogether. I haven't even heard from him in years. Eventually, because my ties to that guild were tenuous at best, I ended up leaving the group and finding another, thanks to a friend I had met online. I've never stayed with a guild in a game for super long, though the ones based on external friendships, like fellow bloggers I have met through Twitter, etc., have lasted longer.

Having a ready partner for gaming means that I don't need to be sociable in order to accomplish my goals. At least not sociable with anyone but Scooter. We both fall into our natural introversion and just play the games our way. It helps that I got off the gear treadmill of raiding a long time ago. If it were otherwise, I am sure we'd be involved.

But I do miss the social factor. We had a pretty good thing going in TSW for a while, both with the Knights of Mercy and Beyond the Veil. We joined a SWTOR guild a couple months ago that I thought Belghast was involved with, but Scooter and I are almost always the only ones on. Which gives me guild wanderlust.

Ultimately, I am lazy. My lack of rock hard abs and dearth of recent posts on this blog are evidence enough of that. Would the benefits of a guild outweigh the energy costs? With increasingly elaborate setups (and interludes) for quests, both voice and even typed chat are a distraction I can do without. Scooter is an excellent gaming partner, and we tear through content—or not—at our own pace. But I still kinda miss having that external social element in my gaming.

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Link Rollup: Standing in the Stupid

Lots of good stuff floating around the blogosphere today, I may just make this a true web log post and just briefly comment on links.

Stubborn and Psychochild are both trying to figure out how to increase the social factor in MMOs. Stubborn discusses how a good guild can make a great MMORPG, while a poor guilding experience might just ruin it for an individual player. Psychochild focuses more on the grouping experience, and how a "pip" system might help folks find each other again, even through a random LFG tool. I am a player who has (1) sworn off PUGs after the toxicity of WoW LFG and (2) managed to become part of a meta-guild of game bloggers that fulfills my social gaming needs. I totally agree that social ties will increase player retention rates, and I think fewer, stronger bonds is the way to go. Devs tend to approach MMO players as if they were a homogenous group even as they cater to widely varying playstyles in an effort to appeal to different types of players. I've touched on the idea that MMOs are like cities far more than they are like small towns before. I feel devs should focus on the players' monkeysphere (while avoiding factionalism) instead of trying to make us all be friends.

Meanwhile, Zubon is talking about the danger of thinking that, because a game (or even a specific scenario) caters to your own playstyle, you are in some way a superior player. He even touches on the long tails of the RNG gods, and they can skew the individual player experience severely, even while maintaining the appearance of even-handedness in the aggregate. I have fallen victim to the playstyle aspect in various games, and seen it happen to others. The Secret World seems to have a particular knack for reminding me that I'm not so hot, simply by changing up which mobs are resistant to what ability procs. Luckily (or frustratingly), the ability system is designed to be flexible enough that I can (and must) adapt. So just remember, (like in real life) if you have a buddy seemingly incapable of accomplishing a task you skated through, it may have nothing to with your respective skill, and everything to do with how well (or poorly) the task matches up to the stats (talents) and tools you have been given.

And lastly, my new phrase of the day from my buddy Belghast: "Standing in the Stupid." Of course, we've all stood in the fire or the filth or the poison. The Stupid encompasses them all, and is a perfect generic term. It has the added bonus of integrating well with another old friend's favorite retort. When someone cannot seem to get out of the fire/filth/poison, I can just say, "You, sir, are stuck on Stupid."

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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.

Virtual Worlds, Real Friendships

I happen to be listening to "Forever Young" by Alphaville as I write this. It makes me nostalgic for my teen years where the last song of seemingly every dance was this anthem of youth. It reminds me of the great friends I had in high school, having fun, hanging out, talking about love and life.

But I've grown older, and my high school buddies are not as close as they once were. Work associates, even my fellow soldiers when I was in the Army, are just not quite the same. I am lucky that I have managed to marry my best friend. But where do I find the sort of friendships I had in high school?

Online? Perhaps. One of the topics of the Newbie Blogger Initiative Talkback Challenge was "Guilds: What for?" I have been part of several different guilds over my MMO "career." I don't envy guild leaders. They say it's like herding cats, and I have never aspired to be in a leadership position in a guild. While pretty much every guild I've been part of did some progression group activity (raiding), I never joined any for the express purpose of tackling group content. From my first guild in WoW—that I can't even remember the name of now—to Mercy Gaming, House Stalwart, and Beyond the Veil, I am part of guilds because of friendships. To me, that's what guilds are for.

I may not be as close to all the members as I was to my buddies in high school. Heck! I've met less than a handful of online friends in person. But I know a little about them and their lives. I share their joys and sorrows, if only through the strands of copper and fiber-optics between us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of my closest online friends are fellow bloggers. We can't help but share a little bit more of ourselves than we might intend for a gaming blog. We learn about each other, as we learn a bit about ourselves, typed out in black and white.

I'm not sure how long I've been aware of Big Mikey Ocho of Casual Aggro. He was one of the NBI Class of 2012, but it feels like I've known him longer. What do I know about him? In addition to MMO and Tabletop gaming, he's an avid frisbee golfer. He loves Jimmy Buffet. He's involved in the Special Olympics and other charities, as well as local politics; and I admire him for that. He's one of my favorite bloggers and guildmates. He grew up in southern New Jersey, close to Philadelphia, PA. He also grew up near Rowan University. And one day recently, while passing the school, Ocho decided he would pick up a T-shirt for an online buddy who uses a pseudonym.

Thank you, Ocho. I will wear it proudly.

What Raiding Was—and Isn't—for Me

I fear that I have come across as belittling end-game raiding in several recent posts. I don't. I know it requires a lot of individual skill and team coordination. But what end-game raiding is not, is something I enjoy doing.

I was involved in "casual" raiding guilds for at least a year, total, between TBC and WotLK. Those people provided a form of friendship as I went through some tough times in my life. WoW was my escape hatch, my pressure valve. I raided because that's what my online friends were doing. But we were all there for different reasons. Eventually, I had to take a break from raiding because business put me in time zones incompatible with our raid times, not to mention the interesting things to see and do in the places I visited.

When I first stepped out into Coldridge Valley in the summer of 2006, I was almost awestruck at the incredible world Blizzard created. The novelty and sense of adventure I experienced through Vanilla and two expansions was wonderful.

Raiding is not that for me. I eventually decided it was not how I wanted to spend my evenings. Repeating content over and over for weeks and months—regardless of how easy it became before we moved on to the next challenge—lost its appeal long before I came to the realization that my raid group didn't really need me. I was totally replaceable.

And that was OK, because I moved on to other things, other games. I haven't spent nearly as much time playing other games as I did playing World of Warcraft. Within a month or so after I quit raiding, I met my lovely bride, and things changed again.

I may be a bit of a gaming nomad now, but I am not alone in my wanderings.

Guild Drama

You do not form a team working towards a common goal, you are forced to group with others who are also competing for individual goals.
Samus in a comment on Sheep the Diamond

Samus brings up an interesting "fundamental" flaw in endgame raiding. He is referring to the way a group or guild must work together; but more often than not, individuals spend time without any reward for their efforts. DKP schemes are only a player band-aid for a faulty reward system design. Flaws in gear stats design can compound this, for instance when I was locked out of a loot roll in Ice Crown Citadel as a healer because the item had increased "hit," but there were no items that had a stat exclusively for healers. Occasions like that caused me eventually to forsake raiding altogether in every game I've played since. And it's a factor in my hesitance to run Nightmares in TSW, despite that they're smaller affairs.

I just finished reading Stubborn's post "A Resolution" about an ongoing situation in his now-former guild that probably didn't end when he quit the guild on Monday. In fact, it spilled out onto his blog repeatedly. The short version is that a small group of more hardcore/elitist members of the guild were conducting raids that, because of lockouts, ended up interfering with scheduled guild runs. Officers in the guild (apparently the GM is absent) did not handle the issue to Stubborn's satisfaction.

One of the clique of self-styled elites commented on an older post, "Our guild is like a big family. There is dysfunction at times. . ." Laughably, the commenter also took issue with Stubborn "airing out our dirty laundry" on his blog. Frankly, any time someone starts talking about "family" and "dysfunction" in a guild, it's probably time to go. But I refer you, Dear Reader, to my statement at the top of the right hand column. A bloggers blog what they want, and sometimes results are only obtained in the public eye and the light of day, rather than back rooms and closed fora. Now the dirty laundry has spread even further. If I still played WoW, I would be very interested in the name and location of this guild, so I could avoid it.

I've been part of guilds that had a certain elite group that pushed to do things that excluded others, but their numbers were usually insufficient to fully break off. A progression-oriented clique in a larger casual guild is a cancer that will only lead to trouble. Not that being progression-oriented is wrong, but they should find a guild that fits their needs rather than ruin it for everyone else. I think that progression guilds don't attract this sort of drama (though there's other drama) because casual players are rarely part of progression guilds, but progression players are often part of casual guilds.

If you want to raid, find a guild that’s serious about raiding to the level that you want. Anything else is just asking for drama.
Gazimof, commenting on Stubborn's post

Stubborn lasted longer in that guild than I would have, I think. He also has advice for guild leaders seeking to prevent this sort shenanagins.