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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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e to start and you re over two months from the end then that s absolutely terrible game design and the devs should have locked character creation when it was effectively too late if it s not too late to start and you re over two months from the end then the community is actively sabotaging itself yes i considered the trolls but i also look at the players who only consider engaging in something if it s not too late to do something as a problem in itself it s never too late to try something out but if you won t do it if you can t get a certain specific item or title then there s a wee bit of a problem here having raised three kids i know better than to give in when one of them threw a temper tantrum and people who throw temper tantrums because they didn t get the thing they wanted or those who would take their ball and go home if they didn t win don t amuse me still it s extreme fomo set in motion by the design team if the only way to achieve certain things is to login practically every day that s part of the reason why wow s player base melted down in bfa and shadowlands pressuring a player whether by peer pressure or in game pressure to login and do certain activities every day if you don t play with a circle of friends you re kind of screwed if there s one constant in the positive commentary i ve seen from bloggers and online forums about seasons it s that it s great to play seasonal content with your friends it certainly appears that when someone complains about seasons in any forum based environment reddit discord game company forums the solution most often presented is go find a guild or a circle of friends and play with them so basically what people are saying is that the way to fix problems in the seasonal format whether exacerbating already extant ones or creating new ones is to avoid the problem entirely go find some friends and do the content with them do you not have phones friends possibly apocryphal i find that answer extremely disingenuous for two reasons it doesn t actually address the problems and if you play at a different pace or style than your friends you ll create fractures in your group of friends and you ll be unconsciously pressured into operating at the speed of play that your friends are operating at in my years of playing mmos every guild i ever joined imploded or changed to where i or my style of play was no longer welcome i honestly envy people who have no qualms about jumping to another guild at the drop of a hat or joining a bunch of guilds because i simply can t when i commit to a guild i commit to playing with people who i at least consider acquaintances for me it is not a lightly held commitment and i don t leave a guild without some serious consideration likewise i ve experienced the gradual fissures in my own current friends group because most of them pushed far ahead really fast in the current anniversary servers while i deliberately chose to not get swept up in the euphoria of progression raiding in vanilla wow again sure their rewards were great including one of them landing an atiesh but i was adamant in pushing at my own pace for my own sanity i was talked to by them about how they just want to go do stuff with me and that they d be happy to boost me i basically said thanks but no thanks and that was that i very rarely directly interacted with them in game save for general chatting and i ended up having to go the pug route whenever i wanted to run instances or do group content i was fine with that but i did miss running content with them in the end i guess you could say that they were all more hardcore than i was looping back to seasonal content if you operate at your own pace or you simply don t know people and aren t inclined to randomly join one of the many guilds who try to chat you up with whispers you re left with random pugs and we all have our horror stories about toxic pugs in mmos all the more so when the limited nature of seasonal content means that puggers want to go harder and faster than what they explicitly state add to that in retail wow at least the very real potential that if you screw up in a mythic plus run by a lack of understanding lack of skill the person whose key it was loses their key let s just say that people can get cranky about that which adds to the toxicity of doing pug runs hence the evergreen play with your friends suggestion that bypasses the toxicity problems without actually addressing them to me this is akin to an ostrich sticking their head in the sand and pretending everything s fine too few people use the full meme from kc green and the verge the short term nature of seasons means the long term is rendered less important we ve all had our posts or commentary about why does the story in x suck now or maybe why isn t company y putting out new story for their game well game companies aren t made of money despite what it certainly seemed in blizzard s case 17 years ago so if they re pumping out things to do in seasonal content guess what typically gets the shaft the overarching story game being focused on the short term so much means that resources aren t being allocated to the long term and that poses a problem for the overall success of the game this is not exactly a new phenomenon since it certainly seems that most publicly traded companies or those owned by private equity firms operate on a quarter to quarter basis i ve personally seen my own company or one of its predecessors basically use financial funny business like temporary pay cuts for one month to make the quarterly bottom line look better so i m quite familiar with how such a short term focus causes long term problems people notice a decline in quality employees get frustrated with the lack of pay or working conditions and leave or management lays off all of the people with institutional knowledge in favor of cheap labor who make the same mistakes that were done years ago so yeah such a focus on short term seasons whether there s an overarching road map or not means the overall plot can get lost playing single player instanced content in an mmo is a band aid on a community problem oh yes i figured i d address the other suggestion i m sure people will promote at least from a wow perspective if you can t do group content go solo stuff in delves that s always reworked for each season after all that s what it s there for isn t it yes and actually that s the problem delves are an admission by blizzard that it s cheaper to devote money toward creating a single player instanced experience in wow than it is to clean up the toxicity in the wow community let me put it this way every company has to devote resources in such a way that provides the most short term profit not long term because a company that s publicly listed on a stock market or owned by a private equity firm has to show maximal quarterly profits cleaning up an in game community takes a firm commitment from a game company and the community itself and more importantly it takes money frequently more money than a game company wants to spend for an intangible benefit of having a good community and let s also be blunt losing the bad actors in a toxic community also means that the game company is losing those players money so to a lot of game companies creating a single player experience to circumvent the toxic community in the pugging scene is the way to go it only costs some developer time as opposed to a lot more money invested in admins and enforcement and voila you get a workaround for those left out of group content to do instanced content of their own never mind that it is the gaming equivalent of pay no attention to that man behind the curtain here s a shiny new thing that you can play with from choice of games and the pythons of course it s not a matter of whether it s fun or not that it exists annoys me it also feels like it s a game company patting you on the head telling you to go play and leave the other content to the big boys and girls that single player instanced content is popular is kind of an understatement and yes i m quite aware of the green eggs and ham nature of my dislike but i do know that the nature of my dislike is grinch y enough that i would never even admit to liking it if i did try it and like it i could probably delve deeper rimshot and provide more reasons why i dislike seasons and seasonal content but i think that i ve beaten this topic enough and like i said above i don t expect people to agree with me on this because they have different experiences and they do have a tight knit group of friends guildies that play at the same pace as them so many of the potential pitfalls with the seasonal format don t manifest with them and that s fine with me i m glad they re having fun but for me i dislike it when not everybody is having fun when people don t find the seasonal format to be an enriching experience it doesn t matter if it s in wow swtor eso or any of the other mmos out there i don t consider a marker of success to be whether merely enough people are having fun but whether those that aren t can find their place at the table as well maybe game companies can only do so much as the community s own behavior has its own part to play but game companies can create the conditions that a better in game community can arise or they too can focus on the short term and worry about the long term ramifications next season always next season or ham radios i guess it s a sign that this is everywhere and not just in gaming communities seriously do a short youtube search and it ll pop up and blood pressure it happens to me all the time this is my understanding as i ve never played retail since mists so it might have changed my watching the crowds at the major cities and goldshire don t count as playing imho except for the executives because of course that s the case it would also require me to engage more in the retail wow story and that is simply not happening posted by redbeard at 3 21 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels elder scrolls online memes musings retail swtor wow wow classic wow classic anniversary wednesday august 13 2025 accidental swtor i was just reading some articles first thing in the morning before work when i stumbled across something odd from a slate article about chili s restaurants of all things i did a double take and said to myself i can t possibly be reading that right just what are the odds that a brand name for tablets found at a chain restaurant are named the same as a planet in swtor it was then that my brain caught up with me and i realized that i was thinking of ziost not ziosk from swtorista ztill it z not everyday you zee zo many z wordz in a name you know blaugust2025 posted by redbeard at 8 24 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2025 swtor wednesday may 28 2025 yes i do actually like playing them while you might think that my grumpy old man tm posts about world of warcraft and other mmos indicate i m not having fun these days i disagree i may not be having as much fun as i had while i was initially playing wow back in 2009 2010 but to me it is comfortable i can laugh at mmos now and not consider it srs bznss but i can also enjoy myself while recognize it s limitations this is something that simply doesn t happen in wow since wrath maybe from know your meme and justin parks yes there are things that annoy me i m opinionated enough that i ll always find something to annoy me but finding and complaining about annoyances doesn t mean i think that a game is irredeemable old blanchy notwithstanding one thing i have noticed the longer i ve played video games in general is that i m at my happiest when i m playing my favorite parts of video games for classic wow it s in the leveling process and just hanging around various parts of azeroth sure i also like running 5 person instances and a good match of alterac valley but that s in smaller doses rather than repeat runs for a deeper goal for example last weekend was alterac valley weekend so i got onto the classic era servers and ran alterac valley a handful of times but that was it i didn t have a need to do that more than just those half a dozen or so runs so once i got that out of my system i was fine on not doing any others all weekend or in retail instead of grumping about old blanchy s demise i decided to go exploring along the well trod path from stormwind to theramore the path is pretty traditional if you decide to not take a flight path straight to menethil harbor tram ride from stormwind to ironforge run from ironforge east through dun morogh take the pass either north or south from dun morogh to loch modan head north from loch modan into the pass down toward the wetlands run north and then east along the main road through the wetlands to menethil harbor take a ship from the harbor to theramore obviously i chose running along the scenic route because it was an option it gave me a chance to explore at a slow pace and enjoy the sights as i knew them in the pre cataclysm times okay that quest hub is new for cataclysm i didn t see a soul along the way but that was fine to be fair this is the fewest number of people on a ship to theramore that i ve seen in quite a while what was even better was at the end do i know you you look familiar my lone toon that has reached max level in 2014 used to be able to fly through a theramore that was devoid of npcs and everybody else because she never participated in the destruction of theramore event it is nice to see that a brand new toon doesn t have a completely empty theramore but rather a theramore that s as it was in cataclysm and largely what it was like from the tbc era there s also a measure of comfort when visiting areas i have fond memories of i ve been married for over 30 years and i simply can t comprehend why all these women would accept hanging around and sharing darmas like that maybe it s transactional by nature but the vanilla swtor planets particularly the low level ones bring back most of my nostalgia for the game the same goes for vvardenfell and eso i think the screencap is off a bit as it looked much more vibrant on the screen i ve also been known to roam the halls of spacedock i frequently get lost in this place what a fine example of starfleet training i am or just chill in town whether it be darkshire or stormwind i consider all of these lack of activities to be playing the game even though i might not have a specific plan at the moment you don t have to have a specific plan to play mmos so why not lean into it if that s what you feel like doing besides it keeps me from complaining about whatever people are hyped up about these days so that s a good thing even among my favorite bands i read an article yesterday out of bbc music that had a list of what the author believed were the top prog rock albums released in 1975 among them he put rush s caress of steel ...
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