No Cap On Whining

And furthermore, why are new players stuck at the same lower cap?

And why can't I create a new character to play with friends who want to try it out?

And why do you have to do ridiculous shenanigans like this to maximize your prestige gains? http://www.reddit.com/r/Skyforge/comments/3c9wxs/how_to_maximise_your_prestige_gain_within_the/

And

And

And

And

They See Me Cappin', They Leavin'

I really think Skyforge is shooting itself in the foot by giving players a reason to stop playing every week as soon as they hit the weekly caps after a few days.  Cap reset Tuesday night and I was coming up on the Spark of Insight cap by Thursday night without premium.

"Work on orders" is not a proper answer to this.  Orders have two paths of progression: upgrading temples & chapels and raising adepts.  The former has two components: temple/chapel level and quality.  Temple and chapel levels have the most impact on both your prestige level and your character's stats but it is capped by the currency cap because holy texts are tied to currency.

So once you're at cap you're not going anywhere in terms of upgrading temples and chapels.

Temple and chapel quality require both credits (limited by cap, obviously)--and quite a lot of credits--and components received from missions available every other day.  So okay, there's a reason to log in every other day as long as you want to keep playing.  If you're not saving some credits in reserve, any progress on quality ends with the currency caps too.

Then there's raising adepts and ranking up your order, neither of which have an appreciable impact on your prestige or character.  In fact, the only direct relation they have that I'm aware of is that higher ranks allow for higher temple levels, except that just by sending adepts on missions regularly I've extremely outpaced the speed of my temple development.  The only way this would be a hindrance to progression is if someone never bothered with missions until they hit temple level caps.  Elsewise, order rank only seems to affect max level of adepts, level of daily adepts available to recruit, difficulty of missions, and number of adept slots.

You could, very very very easily, never "work on orders" and not lose out on much just by maintaining them for a few minutes every couple days and/or regularly on the few days of the week you're logged in full time.

So let's talk about the reason behind the caps.  Apparently according to devs (or so I'm told), it's meant to slow player progression into the endgame to give them more time to work on content.  It's a novel idea which I was okay with until the second week now where I kind of just wish I could explore the game unhindered.  If I really think about it, I'd rather reach the cap quickly and have nothing to do and then concern myself with minute character development than hitting caps in a few days.  I can FEEL it draining my enthusiasm for this game and that's very disturbing and frustrating that a game seems like it's okay with that.  My interest in it survives pretty conveniently right now that there isn't something else that wants my full-time attention.

I want to see where the story goes, I want to see where the gameplay goes, I want to see what the endgame is like, and I'd rather the thing between me and all of those not be that my numbers refuse to go up after a certain point.

I'd rather hit an empty endgame in a few weeks than hit an empty game 4/7 days of the week for months.

Dungeoneering

DF and HT guides forthcoming.  I've done DF twice and both times I got into groups that were stuck at the area with the trash that you have to sneak by (effectively at the end of the instance) and the one HT I had collapsed mysteriously AFTER the first boss was killed.

Mare Sacro Monastary Dungeon Guide

Mare Sacro Monastary (MSM) is the first "Group" Adventure, ie 5-man dungeon, you'll gain access to as you progress in prestige in Skyforge.

Like most areas you gain access to for the first time, Skyforge seems alright with dumping you right into an Impossible rating version of the dungeon--don't do this if it's your first time and be sure to manually drop it down to a lower-star difficulty to get your feet wet.  Group Adventures in this game are no joke and will wreck unorganized random groups, so you want to take the challenge at a reasonable pace your first couple times.

Entrance

Going in, the first several pulls are primarily groups of swarm mobs.  They're not difficult to handle but CAN do damage quickly so be prepared to pop shields.  Also, beware as you cross each bridge, as 1-2 kelps will jump up along most of them.

1st Gate

This pull can be pretty serious and is where most unprepared groups are going to hit a wall.  The swarm mobs need to go down ASAP but targets after that are a bit of a crapshoot.

Icy Abyss Kelps hit hard and will pursue the tank in melee range.  On occasion, it will pull in all nearby players and then create a bubble around itself which will burst, damaging players nearby after a short delay.  Everyone pulled in needs to get away from it quickly.

Roaring Waves Naiads are simple ranged enemies.  They can be kind of LOS'd behind the planters visible in the above screenshot, but they may path right up onto them.

I would recommend the tank grab all mobs and kite the Icy Abyss Kelp.  I would also recommend killing it first before the Naiads to simplify the encounter but any order is mostly fine.

Labyrinth

The next area has this kind of grid-y layout with groups of enemies at each corner of the yellow triangle, single kelps scattered throughout, and 3 patrolling Icy Abyss Krakens.  2 of the Krakens patroll each of the vertical lanes and one patrols east-west across the middle-top lane.

Make sure, before pulling any groups and while fighting, that you are aware of where the Krakens are so that you don't pull them also.  When and if you can pull them safely, they only take a minute or two to take down.  I usually grab the horizontal one and then one of the vertical ones to have a clear path.

Incidentally, the Krakens actually do eventually respawn if you spend too much time in the area.

I usually pull this west group first and, as you can see, from the west corner (as opposed to a lot of groups that like to pull them towards the gate).  This gives you a LOT more options for LOSing them for the pull and breathing room to kite.

Icy Abyss Naiads are rough and can shut down groups if you're not careful.  Their big ability to watch out for is when they have a bubble forming above them; they will launch projectiles that will deal damage and trap the hit player in a bubble--which can be chained to deadly results (often if multiple players are standing near each other).

If your group is having trouble with the Icy Abyss Naiads I strongly recommend simply targeting it first.

I like to pull the east group from the opposite side.  This group is relatively easy.

For this last group I clear out all the spare kelps on the side of the map that's convenient depending on which vertical Kraken was cleared out.  This pull is the same as the one before the 1st Gate, sans swarm-types.  Like previous pulls there's plenty of room for kiting.

Gauntlet => Cetus

This section has another 3 groups of mobs along with an extra quirk: starting from the second turn (the path leading directly to Cetus), groups of kelps continually spawn from Cetus and march down that hall.  If you pull smart, this is only really an issue for the last pull.  Be aware that any kelps that spawn and reach the end of the hall will just sit there if not pulled and then slowly die, so you can wait for waves to despawn before moving forward.

The first pull is pretty easy, just one Foamy Tides Ong and some kelps.  The thing to watch out for with Foamy Tide Ong is for when they start to spin around; they will start to do huge damage in melee range.

Second pull is an ong with 2 support kelps.  I strongly recommend pulling these back around the corner to where the first group was to avoid having to deal with the spawning kelps.

Third pull is a bit trickier unless you pull them far back around the corner, then it's just mostly dealing with Icy Abyss Naiad shenanigans while you take down the ongs.

Before moving on to Cetus, I recommend waiting for a wave of kelps to pass and then blitz straight for the boss, picking up kelps along the way, instead of stopping to fight them, because if you do you will start to get bogged down by rapidly spawning waves as you approach.

Cetus himself is pretty benign, the real trouble is with the intermittently spawning kelps, which can do real damage if they're not managed.

A lot of my troubles tanking this fight have been solved by simply kiting full time and picking up adds as they spawn.  It makes the fight very safe for everyone.

Leida the Conquerer

I recommend clearing out all the kelps in the courtyard leading up to Leida just to minimize the risk of extra accidental pulls during the boss.

Leida is a pretty simple fight.  The first, most immediate thing to watch for is geysers that will spawn beneath players and then erupt, dealing large damage if they're not avoided.  Second, at 15x and 7x HP, Leida will create a shield and spawn two Naiads.  The shield reduces damage to the boss and deals damage to anyone standing inside it; to break it, both Naiads need to be killed.

The two Naiads spawn at opposite sides to the left and right, which can make them tricky to pick up.  Often, one may wander into Leida's shield, in which case they need to be pulled out (with either abilities or manually--can retreat a bit into the courtyard).  If you can get threat on both quickly, you can cause them to cluster up by moving into the recess on the right/west that you can see in the background of the above screenshot.

Elsewise she's pretty easy to shred down, putting an end to MSM.

Skyforgin' and Tankin'

Been playing a lot of Skyforge the past week.  It's fun enough to fill my current MMO void while I'm still taking jaunts into Heroes of the Storm and Trove (since the Steam release I've had two separate groups of gaming buddies get into it).

Skyforge is a Russian MMO, and like a lot of foreign MMOs there is an awful lot that is either not explained very well period or not explained very well probably due to poor translations.  And like a lot of second- or third-string MMOs the external resources for the game are really poor when they exist at all, so I'd like to do what I did with this blog way way back when I started it circa Guild Wars 2 and try to collect information and strategies until someone else picks up the torch with a bit more organization and competence.

I can begin by talking a little bit about tanking so far, since that what I have modest experience with in MMOs and have been doing mostly in Skyforge.  I've only had access to Paladin so far.  Threat is very easy to get and hold and you have plenty of tools to get it and hold it and get it back if you need to.  As I get into the 4k+ prestige range though I'm starting to notice a lot of enemies--especially normal trash mobs--in normal+ level Adventures are tuned to completely squash you if you're not on the ball.  And this isn't entirely in terms of fight mechanics; a modest size group of Swarm-type mobs can and will wreck your shit if you aren't popping regular shields and your group isn't fast enough with the damage.

It gets worse in Group Adventures where you start having to treat every trash pull like you're approaching a boss.  Which is frustrating because the bosses, by contrast, are pretty well tuned for group play--for the most part.  Not having regular healing can really make things frustrating.  Maybe I'm doing things wrong or maybe I keep getting stuck with incompetent supports (I haven't played support enough to understand how viable or essential their role is, but I really should) but I switch off to DPS every so often to try to see how other tanks are behaving and I see the same kinds of issues.

One thing I've noticed that has helped, and have noticed other tanks catching on to, is that kiting enemies seems to be one of the safest ways to do things.  For example, pretty much all issues I had handling the pre-boss mini-boss of Mare Sacro Monestary were resolved by getting threat on the boss, picking up adds whenever they spawned, and running in a big ring around the outside of the room while the group blasted everything.  The gauntlet portion of the last boss of Daren Facility seems to virtually require a similar strategy.  Threat is not difficult to manage so you don't need to be constantly poking enemies, and enemy pathing is kind of strange; enemies don't seem to want to pass through each other and, when swarming, will gather around you in a circle--which is frustrating on many levels but can be abused to limit the number of enemies attacking you at once.  Also, ranged enemies seem to react very poorly to being LOS'd and may often sit there just staring at you from around the corner instead of attacking anyone.

This game very very desperately needs some way to mark targets; choosing which targets to kill first is a huge problem in this game.  Good and bad parties in this game can be distinguished by something as simple as whether or not everyone has the same sense in picking targets.

Anyways, that's all for now.  I'm going to do a writeup on MSM as soon as I've run it again to get accompanying screenshots.

Never Have I Ever

I've been playing Neverwinter the last 4-5 days ever since I hit some serious gaming withdrawal waiting on building a new desktop and discovered it (barely) runs on my shitty old laptop.  But this morning I had a very strange experience this morning where all the tiny nitpick things formed a perfect storm of FUCK THIS to where I might just stop while I'm ahead.

Neverwinter is a very nice game in terms of it's conventional MMO-ness and game mechanics; it's sort of halfway between the Guild Wars 2 fuck-the-trinity thing and...I guess Tera is the most relevant example of the other half--itself halfway between traditional MMO and aren't-we-cool-we-don't-have-tab-targetting actioney gameplay.  The class structure is fine if extremely extremely stereotypical.

It's also a Cryptic game.  A post-Star Trek Online Cryptic game, which very much harps on the spirit of a lot of the conventions and features of that game but dialed up to 11 on the tedious scale.  The game is constantly CONSTANTLY beating you over the head trying to get you to buy zen.  If you want to do ANYTHING cool you gotta have zen to buy shit.  It kind of seems (at least so far) that you either need to shell out or commit to the ridiculous grind of cobbling together astral diamonds (ie dilithium) to exchange.  I didn't bother with it in STO but it seems like it's even worse in Neverwinter.

Crafting resembles the crew stuff from STO and has a nice little web app for managing it without having to log in, and the companion minigame is really cool but you need to shell out zen (or already have a bunch of gold) to get more companions.

I mentioned it ran on my laptop, but it does so if everything is set to minimum and the "resolution scaling" also turned all the way down, which seems to just aggressively blur everything.  Which is fine; playing it on a tiny screen all blurry is uncomfortable but not unmanageable.  But the performance like this is pretty inconsistent.  In outside zones where there's not a lot around it runs fine, but in town it drops frames pretty hard...most of the time.  Sometimes it just works fine for some reason.  Similar problem with the dungeons: sometimes I can run 'em just fine, sometimes it runs so poor as to be nearly unplayable.

So this morning I was running the second dungeon for the second time (after I did it once I discovered I had a daily to do it, so I went to do it again) and the second dungeon is long and really really boring.

And my performance was shitting itself.

And I realized I was fed up with all the zen shenanigans.

And I realized I was sick of trying to play it as a blurry mess.

And I realized I had to listen to podcasts to make the boring questlines go by the night before.

And I realized I wasn't into it enough to look forward to leveling up another 40 times.

And...

So it's weird; I've "aggressively" stopped playing games before but never one I was, for the most part, otherwise enjoying.  I might have to come back to it sometime later but fuck all this zen bullshit.

My Thoughts on #GamerGate Over the Last Few Days

A few nights ago I was reading a very interesting Twitlonger written by @silverwolfcc (http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sdjrse) and I got about a third through it when I had something of an epiphany.  I had kind of an uncharacteristic moment of emotional pride in the gamer demographic that I’d never had before, over the sheer depth and breadth of the #GamerGate constituency.

It’s hard for me to describe without giving a lot of background, so if you’re in a rush suffice it to say that I’ve always hated the term “gamer” until then, but I’ve never been so proud to share a hobby with you amazing dudes and dudettes as I have been the last few days following GamerGate on Twitter.

I’ve always fancied myself an “old guard” nerd.  I’ve written before how the idea of “nerddom” being an expanding culture is anathema because it is, at its core, a holy haven of escapism.  That is to say, there could be said to be two factions: “orthodox nerds” who gravitated to traditionally nerdy subjects and media because that was the only way we could really understand the world around us; the people who were ostracized and marginalized, who argue about plot minutiae in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation because it’s legitimately important to us that that world be as tangible as possible.

In the past I refused to identify as a “gamer” because I thought the term ought to be reserved for the nerd orthodoxy in gaming, so I sort of viewed the label as derisively misappropriated.  But more on that later.

Then there’s the “pop nerds”; the ones who I would say are in it because it’s cool or trendy.  If I was writing about this in more detail I’d have a lot more disparaging things to say about this latter camp, but this post is about how I arrived at my olive branch so I’ll drop a relevant block quote here instead:

“The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: ‘Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Tolerance Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?’

“Bodhidharma answers: ‘None at all’.

“The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why not.

“Bodhidharma asks: ‘Well, what do you think of gay people?’

“The Emperor answers: ‘What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!’

“And Bodhidharma answers: ‘Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!’”

--http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
--http://poetrychina.net/Story_of_Zen/zenstory3a.htm

I’ve always been quietly of the opinion that the media favored by the nerd orthodoxy should remain in their control as a sort of petulant impractical exclusivity—or at the very least they ought to be what drives those media with the latter camp being subject only to the tastes of the former (I will comment that, as of writing this, it’s an old opinion and strikes me now as admittedly un-capitalist).  In practice I have never actually lived this philosophy as a real orthodoxy, partly because it’s impractical (pop nerds are absolutely ubiquitous) but mostly because I generally prefer that people like me and demanding people GTFO because they’re not enough of a “true nerd” is a straight shortcut to the opposite.  While I don’t fancy them on a conceptual level, I’ve never bothered to discriminate between people I meet in games that might fall into the latter camp, I might only pass benign silent judgment.  After all, a quiet accusation that an individual is “not a true nerd” is really nothing more than an appeasement of one’s own ego anyways.

But here’s where I’m going with this: my idea of the “nerd orthodoxy” excluded women as a rule.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love women (married to one) and I love female nerds (married to one) and I’ve played with many many many women in games over the years.  When I say “excluded women as a rule” it goes unsaid that I believe there are plenty of exceptions to that rule.

Here’s what I mean.  My wife is rather introverted (she’s warm and personable and not antisocial but she prefers small company if any) and to her life is perfect with a bowl full of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and a browser overflowing with tabs to FanFiction.net on her laptop.  To me, even before I met her, that’s what the quintessential female nerd looks like.  There’s millions of women out there like this, and I knew that well before GamerGate.

But there’s still more women and girls (and men etc.) who don’t really meet that description who nonetheless enjoy video games, so while I would get along with most people who play games just fine I maintained a sort of smug detachment from many of them.  I really think GamerGate has dispelled a lot of that.

I followed GamerGate from the start as an ancillary supporter.  I’ve virtually never in my life used gaming media for anything, so it’s not really all that important to me (granted my father is a journalist and I value truth, so in that respect I’m very much on board with a movement that seeks enhanced journalistic ethics).  My stake in the race was very much as an antifeminist and inasmuch as the anti-movement has damaged 4chan; while I’m concerned about SJW shit creeping into games I’m not very convinced that there won’t always be games for the core demographics.  I started using Twitter somewhat regularly to follow GamerGate once it moved there very early on.  It wasn’t until the last several days that I used it actively, and I only really started doing so out of boredom (my gaming desktop is borked so I don’t have a lot of gaming options at the moment).  But what I found in doing so was remarkable.

People of all flavors were out in support of #GamerGate against SJW encroachment in droves.  Without #notyourshield I don’t think it would be quite the same.  The racial makeup of GamerGate supporters is no surprise to me; I’ve been to Evo and am well aware that anyone who says gaming is a white hobby is fucking delusional.  What caught me off guard the most is the women, just the sheer unending volume of them.  Most of us know they exist for the most part, and most of us understand that gaming is a hobby heavily inhabited by men and that, while this is true, it’s hardly an exclusive hobby, but I had previously had no real appreciation for the sheer actual number of women who have the same passion for games and don’t want to see them ground into the dirt by the ideologically narrowminded.

Somewhere while reading @silverwolfcc’s Twitlonger it hit me.  GamerGate feels very much like a sort of orthodox nerd’s crusade against invaders, but it’s really not just the orthodox nerds in this battle.  There’s common ground with those who don’t fit my arbitrary labels too; there’s bigger fish to fry.  Using “gamer” as a common identity strikes me as a poetic way to come together.

And it’s more beyond that.  Before I’d listened to the conversation between @Sargon_of_Akkad and @TYFCapitalists on YouTube (A Conversation with The Fine Young Capitalists) I was very universally antifeminist.  I really had not been open to the idea that there were rationalist feminists (muh 1^st/2^nd wave was never really enough to convince me; there were suffragette terrorists back then too) until I heard @TYFCapitalists describe their experiences, methods, and the issues they were working on.  I’m much more convinced now that the insanity that marks 3^rd wave feminism is really a result of its Marxist underpinnings.

Here’s the difference between us and the SJWs: they see a society forever in its infancy and they see themselves as its all-knowing parents with all the petulant authoritarianism that only an insecure parent can muster—an I-know-what’s-best, don’t-question-me attitude.  They think gamers as a culture are children because they’re still stuck in that mindset that we’re either children playing with toys or reclusive nerds perpetually in middle school.  They don’t understand that we’re truly a culture of adults, and adults don’t need to be—and don’t like to be—talked down to.  They don’t understand that adults can disagree on deep, fundamental issues and still get along and have fun together at the end of the day.  They think we’re children who need to be protected from people with “bad opinions”; they don’t understand that even if someone is a legit sexist/racist/whatever, if that person is still a good person otherwise—a good player—we can find some common ground.  We can understand that those transgressions are character flaws that can be subverted and overcome—a rational racist can be taught why an irrational disdain for people of a given race is not useful.  We’re wise enough to give pause to the sort of truly childish thoughts that would cause someone to condemn someone else wholesale only for having a “bad” opinion.  The same sort of zeal that drives SJWs to condemn everyone who doesn’t agree with them is the same irrationality that allows someone to be racist irrationally for no real reason to the extent that they cannot be convinced out of their petty biases.

And that’s why we’re always going to win over cultural Marxism.  The situation is really quite the opposite of how it appears, for it is really them who are the angsty teenagers who break down the instant the world doesn’t conform to their expectations.  They’re up against adults, who enjoy challenging themselves, who are able to build meaningful communities and relationships, who are able to put aside small differences and get work done, who like to win but aren’t afraid to lose.  That’s how I define “gamer”.  Gamers are far from dead.