Lazyimperial

@sweep said:

These developers are both white men, ie from a group that's never been subjected to the kind of casual offhand harassment that women/LGBT+/non cis people have to deal with on a daily basis, but it's painfully ignorant of them to assume that others might not have the same painless experience as they themselves did on their internal test server;

I agree with Artifact looks questionable and that the developers seem out of touch with human nature, but your implication (well, overt assertion) that they're out of touch because they're white (presumably straight) men is pretty biased, prejudiced, and lame. The internet picks on any difference, regardless of race. I'm a white straight male. I've been harassed because of the sound of my voice (I have a speech impediment and a decade of training in my teens has made it sound like a faux-British accent. Best I could do, really), because of stereotypes regarding what my political views and beliefs apparently must be, because of my ancestors and what they must have done in the past (they didn't, but thanks Internet), because of my crooked nose when/if video gets involved (I look traditionally German-Jewish, have a Jewish sounding name, and I work in accounting & finance. It's... an adventure sometimes, Sweep), and for anything else the Internet can think of. My "group," as you've so uncharitably lumped every straight male of European ancestry into, is subjected to casual offhand harassment frequently too. We aren't super-privileged ogres that live on giant ivory towers, heaping abuse down on those below while receiving none ourselves.

Now if you want to say white straight men aren't subjected to daily harassment at as high a frequency as women and the LGBT+ community, fine. But never with regards to harassment in general? Never? That's an interesting absolute. I guess I must have just been imagining all the trash talk directed at me and my fellow "group" members as some kind of fantasy victim complex, eh? :-/

I'm going to throw out a non-racial theory here: developers of all races and creeds tend to err on the side of optimism when it comes to their player communities. They build systems that make perfect sense to their mind's eye and work great within their developer-circle and pretty well with QA teams and professional testers too... but often forget what effects zero real consequences and relative-anonymity have on the behavior of the general populace. "Rubber meets road" kind of stuff. This is why Ultima Online worked great on test servers with full pvp and pick-pocketing active... but proved terrible when the game went live and no one trusted each other enough to even stand near each other at the bank (because someone could pick-pocket you, throw it in their bank before the guard killed them as punishment, and giggle at taking your stuff). This is why Sea of Pirates worked very well on test servers and with QA peeps, but was brutal upon release since people would camp towns and murder anyone trying to turn in a quest for booty. What developers envision their communities' average player behavior to be is seldom the reality. This is a "developers have relatively painless experiences that seem to provide evidence supporting their optimism but really don't" moment, not an "oblivious white dudes just don't understand others" one.

For example, I think Todd Howard is a bit naive to think that Fallout 76 won't have problems with harassment and griefing. Not naive because he's a white straight man and therefore apparently lacks any understanding of true harassment or abuse, mind you, but rather because he's picturing Fallout 76 with Bethesda employees and hired QA peeps playing it. Upon release though, it'll be a multiplayer game open to the general populace and the real life consequence for someone following you around and mucking up every encounter and activity you do will be relatively nothing. It'll happen, and teleporting away will only do so much good if every other person is behaving just as badly (also, what is so fun about having to ditch everything you're doing and teleporting half the map away in order to avoid being treated like garbage?). They'll have to eventually correct. Valve will have to eventually correct. "Hope springs eternal until 1337gam3r discovers how to lead trains of deathclaws to your player-base" and all that jazz.

But yeah... I appreciate your blog. Not the disheartening bias, but I had never heard of Artifact before this thread. I'll have to look it up.

Hm... I can only think of two off-hand.

1. Giving the player convenience of life upgrades late-game that should have been in the default starting kit. The most egregious example of this that I have experienced was in Mass Effect: Andromeda. The sub-par open world vehicle in that game (I think it was called "The Mako" or something) had two settings for its tires and suspension: one for flat surfaces that went just fast enough to leave you only significantly bored, and one for inclines and bumpy terrain that was EXCRUCIATINGLY slow on even the slightest slope, slowing to a 5 to 10 kilometer per hour crawl and trudging like it had all the horsepower of a child's tricycle. It was exasperatingly dull, and the bland open-world planets with zero ambient music and almost no environmental sounds outside of my tires crunching stones didn't help. Then my squad-mates would talk, and I'd long for my character's death.

However, a merchant on one of the later planets sold me a relatively cheap Mako upgrade that inexplicably boosted the off-road setting's speed and horsepower to such an extent that it was faster than the flat surface setting. Hills? Mountains? Physics? The Mako cares not. It was like driving the Humvee equivalent of a Skyrim horse. I remember shouting innumerable expletives at the screen in a blind, seething rage. All the hours of pure tedium and dullness that could have been avoided if this setting had just been the default setting. I had no idea this upgrade was even in the game, so I had done every scrap of side content before this later planet... grumbling and glowering in my slug-mobile. What a piece of trash.

2. Games with characters that break character (that aren't Deadpool). For example, Jacob Frye in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate rips on almost everyone. He can't resist a below-the-belt joke or snarky comment, and he churns them out like he's afraid that they're going out of style. No one is safe from his witticisms and vulgarities.... except one person in the whole game. Victorian England was not progressive with regards to women in business, and as a result some women would dress and present as men in order to bypass this socioeconomic taboo. A merchant you interact with repeatedly is one such entrepreneur, albeit clearly new to the concept. Her outfit is skin-tight and form fitting, accentuating her feminine frame. Her long hair is done up in a bun and visible beneath her Bowler Hat, and she makes no effort to throw her voice whatsoever. Outside of the male pseudonym, it's amazingly apparent that Mr. Merchant is actually Ms. Merchant in disguise... but Jacob says nothing, ever. The most irreverent man in all of England, who pokes at every single thing he can in regards to every single person in his life, drops every ounce of snark around Mr. Merchant and becomes a stoic, boring, completely different person until Mr. Merchant leaves the room... at which point he torments his sister about her Crow's Feet and mocks a street urchin for having less meat on him than a picked-over rib.

I get why Ubisoft did this (The Internet would have eaten them alive), and it's such a small thing... but jeez did the out-of-character moments irk me.

Edit Addition: oh, and I'd like to give an honorable mention to Gears of War 4, where the three new characters on your squad break character every other scene by swapping their characterizations. Each one of them is intermittently "a stoic warrior," "an impish fiend," and "an exasperated techie genius saddled by a stoic stick in the mud and an imp." They all make Baird seem like a Shakespearian character.

I love this franchise and regret that it has languished for so long. If they want to re-release each game with updated controls and higher-resolution graphics for $20.00 each, I'll happily buy each game for such said price. Like KingBonesaw, I'm happy to see Capcom doing something with this IP again.

@inevpatoria: Aw, I'm sorry you had that experience.

I am curious which dungeon you entered. Public Dungeons are marked on the map / compass with a cave entrance icon while group dungeons are marked as rectangular arches with a plus symbol next to them to indicate that a group is required. I think the intro Undaunted Quest directs you towards Spiderclutch and, yeah, if you didn't know that the plus symbol indicated group content then neither the quest journal entry (which uses the plus symbol as an indicator) nor the map icon itself would help you out. Doing that solo would be quite a slog.

Then again, it could have very well been a public dungeon. As a level 5, Bad Man's Hallow was a bad time by myself. I had no AOEs, horrible equipment, and no passive skills buffing me up. It was an... interesting experience. I ended up finding someone who was melting the enemies and followed him for a while. Ah, to be young and almost completely bereft of useful combat abilities.

Edit Addition: Oh, since you mentioned running across other players from time to time and teaming up with them, I imagine it was a public dungeon. If it was an instanced, group dungeon... then it would have just been you the whole time. But yeah, I sympathize. My high elf sorcerer visited the public dungeon in Grahtwood before I had unlocked Pulsar or Liquid Lightning (two AOE magic attacks), and oh gods... those groups of tigers and dryads were horrible. :-D Now I sometimes go back there for revenge.

I think ESO works great as a solo experience. As others have mentioned, they've made a mountain of adjustments and improvements over the past couple years. I personally play almost everything solo except for world bosses (which you can do as tank builds) and group dungeons (which I access via the group finder). Alas, there is no group finder for raids... so I've never seen any of them. I kind of regret that, but I just don't have the time for a raid guild. Oh well.

Oh, and there is some grinding in ESO, but it's more like Guild Wars 2 than World of Warcraft. Specifically, there is very little gear grind. Once your character hits level 50, you'll kick into ESO's equivalent of "paragon points" from Diablo 3. Each "champion level" gives you a point to spend on a passive bonus, and once you hit CP 160 (which takes like two weeks tops) you've hit the end of the gear level increases. All world drops, dungeon drops, and so on will then be CP 160. This also means that if you liked a particular world set for your build, you can go back and pick it up at the CP 160 max quality level via farming dolmens (giant daedric gates) or delve bosses (or just buy it from a guild auction house). I personally use a 5 piece set from the first full zone of the Ebonheart Pact that gives me 391 extra spell damage to flame spells on a guy that only does flame damage... so it's a nice end-game set from what used to be a level 1 to 10 zone. Level scaling has its perks, haha.

I've had my 5 pieces of Sun, my 5 pieces of self-crafted Julianos armor that adds a lot of spell critical chance, and my monster set items for 9 months now. It's... it's frankly great to not have to worry about replacing all my optimized gear with a whole new set of gear every new expansion just to hit the baseline I was at pre-expansion. I farmed mats and got my crafting skills up to build the Julianos set, farmed and used auction houses to finish the Sun set, and then ran veteran dungeons to procure my two monster pieces (which are best-in-slot helm and shoulder items). It was, effectively, a one-time gear grind. Also, if I leave for six months... I'm not completely outdated and ruined. That's a huge perk in of itself after my experiences with WoW, where a month off would effectively make me a pariah for all guild activities.

In place of WoW's endless gear grind loop and numerous reputation grinds, you have cosmetic grinds. Dungeons, daily quests, and so on have chances to drop "motif pages" that give you access to new appearances for your gear. Since this is the main end-game grind, drop rates can be really low sometimes. It's all optional, though... so if you don't really care about looking like a giant plate-mail Minotaur, you don't have to bother.

Oh, and I think inevpatoria is referring to public dungeons. ESO has 30+ traditional 4 person group dungeons that only have your party in them (they're instanced) along with 22 or so "public dungeons" in which many players can wander around simultaneously. At low levels, public dungeons can be a bit daunting. You'll regularly face groups of six to seven baddies, the respawn timers can be quick for such said baddies, and the bosses can be pretty tough. As you gain levels and advance though, public dungeons become entirely solo-able. With enough CP levels to significantly reduce incoming damage and boost outgoing damage, a few set bonuses tied to your particular combat leanings, and a couple decent AOEs, you'll have no worries. Until then, though... yeah, you'll probably wind up looking for the lunatic blazing a trail of death through the dungeon and latch onto his/her coattails. I did that, and I occasionally get someone following me now that I'm CP 748 and decked out for war.

I'd give it a try if you have the time. I personally came back to WoW for the new Battle for Azeroth expansion, goofed around for a week, and then went back to ESO. The grinding in WoW is incredibly pervasive, and I forgot how slow, cumbersome, and proc-dependent the combat could be. I also forgot the infuriating nightmare of killing XX number of giant, meaty creatures to collect Y number of meats for a quest. How can each 500 pound mutant have ZERO MEAT?! How can these wolves all have mouths FULL OF TEETH, but only 1 out of 4 has even a single tooth for my quest when I loot them? Gah. Between the grindy repetitive quests, the grindy repetitive reputations, and the grindy repetitive means to incrementally improve gear level to reach the baseline I was at pre-BFA... I'm kind of feeling burned out already. I've taken to logging in every couple days to finish up a quest chain here or there and do 4 world quests for a faction rep I want. Trying to forestall total burnout until after I've earned the BFA Pathfinder, Part One achievement. Hehe

Best: Modern gaming has become what I day-dreamed about as a kid. Well, kind of. I remember playing those 16 bit and 32 bit games back in the day and thinking, "man... imagine if this pyramid was 3d and looked like real life and you could ride around it on a camel!" Five year old me would have looked at Assassin's Creed: Origins and stared in awe. Now, I didn't dream about loot boxes, "micro" transactions that can often accumulate to hundreds of dollars in short order, timed events, and the other myriad quirks of modern gaming... but still, this era has been good to me.

Worst: The politics. All the miserable, ignorant politics. I'm not blind; people aren't any worse now than they were in the past. There were always extremists on the left and the right that would happily freak out over any perceived slight or grievance. There was always bias in every news outlet and I doubt a truly neutral, centrist journalist has ever existed in the history of mankind. It was just easier to ignore back in the day because the internet was still in its nascent phases. Now, it's the same rubbish as in yesteryear but on big, digital soap-boxes. Everywhere you turn, someone is offended by something and using some social media outlet or journalistic bully pulpit to loudly proclaim how offended they are and spout dehumanizing language to assail the reputations and moral credibility of any cretin who dares disagree with him/her/whatever. Turn aside from such said madness and you'll find an equal but opposite lunatic on yet another podium prattling off the polar opposite opinion, replete with equivalent dehumanizing language regarding their opponents. It's... well, exhausting. I have neither the time nor the energy to hate so many people and things with such fervor. These movements and counter-movements and counter-counter-movements ask too much of me.

It's gotten to the point where I've started disengaging from the gaming community and the hobby's websites. I've unsubscribed from every gaming news website, including this one. I've ditched every gaming news forum, save this one... which I frequent every now and then when I want to talk to someone about this hobby that I've had for the past 28 years. Even then, I'm centrist and middle-of-the-road on almost every issue, and the over-arching opinion here (and elsewhere) seems to be that anything that isn't left or right is actually no opinion at all. I hold my tongue most of the time, which makes coming here every other week for socializing about games kind of... ironically pointless?

Frankly I wish this industry, and this world in general, had more Vinny's. Not to creep Vinny out, but I think about him when I see uproars from the left and right about Cyperpunk 2077, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Doom: Eternal, and so forth. I'm sure Vinny has a political bend, but he's such a gentleman about it. It's not a bully pulpit for him, and he articulates his thoughts with such grace. His awkwardness during every hottest mess debate demonstrates the empathy that I wish more people had towards each other. Missing out on him and Dan may be the one regret I have about canceling my subscription here.

Oh well.

@squidc00kie:

Oh, it's all good on my end. I'm sorry that the kid went through that. :-P

Also, you're a far kinder soul than me. I didn't even bother to try and get the guy to take care of his kid. It became immediately apparent that the child was at the bottom of his life's totem pole, and I left him and his wife to it. I just dropped the matter completely, quit the game, and moved on.

@squidc00kie: I'm glad you two are having a positive experience.

As a gentle warning, please do yourselves a favor and just keep an eye on how you prioritize the game. World of Warcraft is a skinner box designed to hook you, and I've seen some bad things. The worst was 20 months ago (November 2016, I think) when I was running a raid with the guild I was in. Out of nowhere came the sound of a child in anguish. Apparently the guild leader's son had burned his hand on the stove for the first time and had no idea what to do. The kid sounded completely terrified and freaked out.

I assumed the guild leader would call the raid and help his whimpering child, but no. He told the kid to talk to his mother because the raid was about to make another attempt on some plant-tentacle thing. To my amazement, I heard the kid's crying fade silent... and then grow louder as he went to his mom, who was the guild leader's wife and one of our healers. She had even less patience than the father, and told the kid to run his hand under some cold water at the sink because the guild was about to crush a boss and move on to Cenarius.

Neglectful lunatics, the both of them. Was the skinner box really more important than their own freaking child? to them, yes. Clearly yes, and no one in the guild even cared. If anything, they were annoyed that the kid was delaying their chance to get a pair of new shoulder-pads with slightly higher numbers on them. I was so horrified that I quit World of Warcraft for almost two years, and while I have come back to see this expansion... I'm keeping the game itself at an arm's length in terms of my commitment to it. I'll probably stick around for a month to see the new raid on "looking for raid" difficulty and get the PVE content done, and then I'll leave until the next update a half year later. I've also refused to join a new guild, because I have no desire to engage in that again. Ever.

But yeah, I'm glad you are having a great time together. Just... be careful, fellow duders. WoW can take a heavy toll if you don't keep an eye on its influence.

Oh wow, I'm sorry to hear that the 60 to 80 experience is apparently now such a slog. I've leveled a few alts through that before the stat squish and it always went by really fast. Too fast, in the case of Northrend. I'd hit Borean Tundra and be level 80 before I was halfway done with the zone.

Truth be told, these stat squishes feel kind of necessary to keep the numbers and computing power needed from getting too absurd. I remember that Garrosh had to heal himself to full health about four or so times during his boss fight in the Siege of Ogrimmar because the game couldn't handle the amount of max health he was apparently supposed to have. They ended up setting him at the max health cap for the game and then just letting him heal to full over and over until he technically had the amount of health they deemed appropriate for the encounter. :-P

Necessary or not, though... I think the stat squishes remind me of why I like the Guild Wars / Elder Scrolls Online MMO design philosophy more. If you'll pardon me extremely paraphrasing commentary from the ESO team, "we're not going to raise the gear level above CP 160 because what's the point? The game is balanced around CP 160. If we raise the cap to CP 170, the game will be balanced around CP 170 and players will have to grind an entire new set of armor to hit... the baseline they are currently at. Then they'll get there and we'll up the cap to CP 180 in an endless loop of grinding and tedium. The numbers will get bigger and bigger, but the end result will be the same level of performance from your character. Nothing changes but an extra 0 on everything."

I know it's not for everyone, but I prefer grinding for cosmetics and armor motifs over grinding to hit a baseline that is ever-shifting away from me. I've binged on World of Warcraft the past week and a half (finished the Insurrection, Broken Shore, and Argus questlines, did all of the raid bosses in LFR save the sewer scorpion in Nighthold, saw the dungeons I had missed, got the arcanist manasaber and fox mounts, earned my flying ability in the Broken Shores, did the War of Thorns content, and just reached level 114 with 6/8ths of Drustvar finished). It's been fun, and I remember now why I have such affection for Blizzard's team that handles this game. They're a fun, silly bunch that know how to have a good time with absurdist fantasy fluff.

But, the stat squish serves as a constant reminder to me that level 120 will open up the endless, futile gear grind once more. Numbers will bloat higher and higher, and I'll get left further and further behind since I don't have the time to perma-binge on this. Eventually I'll be a LFR scrub again, mocked and belittled by a caustic player-base because I haven't ditched my wife, college, and my other hobbies to "git gud" by running mythic dungeons and heroic raids every day for hours on end. I'll be a second class citizen for the next two years until the next catch-up "War of Thorns" equivalent event and stat squish. *sigh* Then again, I've always been a second class citizen in World of Warcraft. Probably why I play in two to three month intervals and then quit for six to nine months like clockwork. It's a 14 year long cycle by this point.

Rambling off-topic, though. I'm sorry that you're getting stuck in the doldrums this patch. I hope the new leveling process speed doesn't leave you too ruffled, my friend.

I care, but I still watch sports anyway because otherwise I'd have no idea what the guys were talking about around the proverbial "water cooler."

Incidentally, my brain initially read this thread's title as "Do you care about performance enhancing drugs in e-sports," and I got way too excited imagining roid rage Overwatch matches and/or a dozen incredibly twitchy people fidgeting manically in front of their screens because of too much speed. That'd be a sad but incredibly droll sight to behold... so my answer would still be the same. :-P