Chasing a Wraith

The Dead Horse Discussion
On Friday, I wrote a post decrying the schadenfreude of some in the MMO community over the apparent difficulties WildStar and its dev team are having of late. Commenters were of the opinion that Carbine brought it upon themselves as a result of their arrogance and foolishly catering to what turned out to be a very niche group of "hardcore" raiders.

Then Belghast wrote on Saturday about the decline of MMOs in general (not exactly a new topic), highlighting the fact that—other than Everquest Next, which is probably years away—there is not really any AAA MMORPG on the horizon. We have WoW 6.0 coming up, but Blizzard has shuttered development on Titan, effectively "admitting that the MMO genre has no more room for new players."

The Elephant in the Room
Without a doubt, in the absence of WoW, the MMO landscape would look very different. And it would likely be much smaller. As it is, compared to genres/franchises like Call of Duty, MMOs are small potatoes. But up till now, big publishers like EA, NCSoft, and Activision were willing to throw big money at almost any studio with a good idea for getting a piece of the MMO pie. That seems to have changed; even though without WoW in the picture, almost every MMORPG that has been published could be considered a success.

But they're also relatively homogenous, and WoW is blamed for that. Much like Hollywood, a blockbuster in the video game industry begets clones as studios attempt to replicate that success. Everyone remember the Guitar Hero spinoffs and clones? Don't forget that WoW itself is a both a reply to and an attempt to capitalize on the success of (vanilla) EverQuest. But without WoW, there is no guarantee we would have SWTOR or Rift—or TSW or ESO for that matter. If we did, however, it's a safe bet that they would actually be of a different design than they are now and would be less like one another.

Virtual Nomads
And so we players flock from one MMO to another. Some would say we swarm like locusts. But perhaps like heroin, chasing that initial high is a futile endeavor. We're chasing whatever it was that felt amazing about being in a virtual world with other players from around the globe. I've played with folks from China and Australia, to Brits, Canadians, and Continentals. But the sense of wonder about online play—or the glitter of snow in Dun Morogh—is over for me. WoW isn't home anymore, but neither is any other game.

The Age of Arches?
Which brings me to ArcheAge, a game I had not intended to touch given the toxic PvP atmosphere it was rumored to embrace. However, while I was participating in the latest episode of Beyond the Veil last Thursday, Scooter was downloading the AA client. While she enjoys the games we now play, she is ever in search of something new. It was upon her suggestion that we briefly looked at EQ2 early this year.

Since it's free to play, I fired it up myself, and got in close to six hours of play yesterday, including a sizable amount of time customizing my character, a Nuia Vitalist I named Misteli (Finnish for mistletoe). Scooter had created a Nuia Archer already on the Enla server, naming her Kammi and playing to level 5. Together, we made it to level 9 and the village of Lacton before calling it a night.

Honestly, so far I like it. Not quite as frenetic as WildStar, at least at this level. No standing in/dodging out of "the stupid." And though I haven't gotten a great handle on it, I like the possibilities of the mix-and-match class/skills system, reminiscent of ESO. I picked Battlerage as my secondary set when the time came. I may have screwed it up; but right now, Misteli plays a bit like my cleric in Rift, both the tank and the healer for Scooter's DPS.

As far as movement and combat, if ESO had had this control scheme from the get-go, it would have been a no-brainer over WildStar. ArcheAge has very much what I consider an MMO-style rather than a reticle-aiming combat scheme; I had no trouble getting around, even on the rowboats (that were thankfully unobstructed by griefers when we crossed the bay).

Much like WildStar, I guess I will be taking ArcheAge one level/feature at a time. It's fun right now, but I don't know whether it will continue to be so as we get further into the game. And when the time comes, will I be willing to pay to "remove the suck"?

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QOTD: Schadenfreude

It's one thing to deeply oppose a game's design, but if you take delight in watching major MMOs flounder, you don't really deserve this genre at all.
~~Brianna Royce, Massively (emphasis in original) 

I have seen this phenomenon over and over. Someone who doesn't like a game gloats over bad news regarding said game. It goes beyond simple a "I told you so" and becomes a perverted schadenfreude.

I say this not as a current subscriber to WildStar, but as a human being: Wishing for and then gloating over someone's failures (whether real or perceived), is the worst sort of immaturity. Especially since most of the armchair game designers could never even hope to get their pet ideas off the ground, much less have any sort of commercial success.
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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

I remember one piece of advice I saw during one NBI or another was "Never apologize for a gap in blog activity."

Belghast sent me a DM on Twitter asking if everything was OK, because I really haven't posted much this month. He was worried that perhaps Blaugust had burned me out. Blaugust was great, and I posted every day, but my writing pattern/routine was really not sustainable for various reasons. I felt a need to break away from that routine at the beginning of Slacktember, which, when combined with an extended business trip, led to limited posting.

And not much has changed. I am still playing WildStar with no plans for any other game other than getting back into The Secret World, which I have severely neglected of late. I also dipped into DragonAge: Origins, but am having difficulty convincing the game client that I am entitled to the extras I have paid for.

Thus, I find myself somewhat behind in posts from last year, but a bit ahead of 2012, and even with only two posts, Slacktember 2014 is in my top 7 months (of 57) for pagehits.

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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.

Three Years, Plus One

To My Lovely Bride, as we begin a new year,

Four years ago, we met for the first time, and my life has been richer, fuller, ever since. Three years ago, we said, "I do," surrounded by family and with our friends on Twitter cheering us on. Today, our Spousal Leveling Contract finishes level 3, and we start level 4. We are so alike and yet so different. Your strengths make up for my weaknesses, but I can only hope to shore up any of yours. I am sure I can be exasperating at times.

I saw this the other day and saved it for this occasion. I hope I can be this romantic when I'm old and grey. I love you.

In some ways, it feels like I've known you forever. Like you're the other half of me that I was missing all those years before we met. In other ways, our time together seems to have flown by. Like we just met. So many changes in such a short time. It has been an adventure this far, and I hope to keep our quest log full for decades to come.

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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.

MegaStar

Hello, Dear Reader. It seems so long since we have been here. Blaugust came to an end and so did my posting. I only planned to take a one- or two-day break that coincided with Labor Day and a business flight on Tuesday. Instead, that break stretched out to the weekend, and now it's been a full week since I posted.

Luckily, I managed to avoid the bulk of what has come to be known as GamerGate, an appellation that surely shows how serious it is. Which is not very. Someday, maybe people will realize they should not feed the trolls. And yes, while I do not believe that both sides of the debate have equal merit, I do believe both sides have exhibited trollish behavior, from what I have seen.

Meanwhile, Carbine has created a minor -gate of their own with the announcement of a server restructuring that will leave us with only four WildStar megaservers, none of which are designated RP servers. This caused immediate consternation within the RP community, who had seen WildStar as a haven for RP activity. While I have all my characters on Evindra, a North American RP server, I almost always play alone or in partnership with my beloved bride, Scooter. I usually view RP servers as friendlier and more mature, but many folks are taking to the forum feedback thread to complain bitterly and even announce their /ragequit.

The RPers don't want to be thrown in with the general population, full of players the RPers are clearly superior to. Seriously, they whine about griefers before the problem has materialized. They may have a point, I don't know. But I don't think they really do either. What they were bringing up as examples of griefing behavior seems to be mostly oblivious people going about their business, rather than a malicious attempt to ruin anybody's fun. And of course, the devs are complete hacks (according to some RPers) who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, much less implement the "simple" fixes these armchair programmers come up with. But at this point, we just have to wait see how things shake out. I do hope that the opportunities for RP that these players crave do materialize, though it may take more effort on their part than simply picking a server.

In preparation for the megamerger, Carbine is offering free transfers to other realms. Though I didn't really see the point, this guy totally did. Then again, he transferred all of his characters at once rather than stagger them, which meant two days of down time. In the future, I hope he learns his lesson and keeps at least one character playable until the others are fully transferred.

One last thing the forum RPers were up in arms about is the implementation of second names coming with the megaservers. Apparently, people are so hidebound that they can't even imagine having a surname for their character, and are even willing to quit over it. I, on the other hand, love the idea, having had formal full names for my characters ever since STO (still one of the most RP friendly games I have seen, though some may disagree). Up till now in WildStar, I've basically mashed my character surnames into their given names (e.g, RowanBlaze, LyraSedgeweaver, etc.). Despite some initial confusion on the forums, the plan is that, after the megaserver implementation, everyone will have the opportunity (be forced) to change their name to include two words with a space between them.

As well as the allowance of at least one space in character names, I think the megaserver is something Carbine should have implemented from the beginning. And I am not alone in that opinion. If you're affected by all this and have not done so already, check out Kaelish's digest here. Along with the FAQ, you'll probably get all the info you need there, without developing an aneurysm.

Meanwhile, I started yet another character: Leonotis (Leonurus), pictured above. He's a Cassian Esper, and my first Explorer, as well. He's definitely a character, but I'll have more details in another 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.