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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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2024, 2025, friday, mmo, rpg, tuesday, may, august, thursday, february, podcasts, blogroll, links, in, past, is, and, who, just, finding, that, there, the, of, 13, january, 21, wednesday, june, 24, 2023, pages, reference, youtube, channels, blog, archive, blogs, mothballs, pc, contributors, labels, what, valuable, decides, it, playing, with, my, dolls, again, aha, moment, people, mushy, middle, time, offiicial, reason, then, return, happy, hour, are, you, really, part, uh, actually,
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s entire officer corps too and there s also that crazy dunmer from eso those loading screens show the actual armor worn not the outfit she actually has on that s one thing that retail wow does better at least but i guess that this wouldn t be a post about mmo toons if it didn t include the instigator of this post wow hey lady long time no see or even longer really okay that wasn t the actual version of wow i was talking about but this one i occasionally go to the loading screen just to see how long it s been since i last logged into retail if i see gear update listed on all of these toons i know it s been some months and likely at least one major minor patch in the interim those are four of my most played toons on retail the original azshandra isn t there but given how things progressed in classic wow it just didn t feel quite right therefore i tweaked the composition a bit there that s better the gear and levels to be honest are all wrong from my perspective but i m not planning on doing anything about that at least now the names are correct on that warband there are other toons i have from mmos i no longer play such as age of conan rift or neverwinter that would require me to install the games again to simply take a screenshot of the loading screen and then there are games that no longer exist such as wildstar archeage or tera i do miss wildstar but not the other two even though i really have no desire to play some games or specific toons it s nice to pull them up on screen every once in a while just to enjoy how they looked and the memories they recalled again i m surprised that age of conan is still hanging on after all these years eta corrected grammar eta and corrected some more grammar sheesh posted by redbeard at 10 01 am 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels elder scrolls online guild wars 2 lotro memes mmos old toons retail star trek online swtor toons wow wow classic tuesday january 21 2025 finding that aha moment sometimes it takes looking at a game through fresh eyes to appreciate what we ve got i m not sure how this appeared on my youtube feed but this relatively short video is worth a watch back in 2009 i think my aha moment was questing through the ghostlands on quintalan my paladin and finally building up to deathholme i happened upon another player struggling through that place and we teamed up to finish off dark khan drathir neither of us had played before so it took us a try or two but we figured it out and defeated the traitor coming back from that part of the zone forever changed the game for me because i finally began to understand the story and what had happened there for vanilla classic in 2019 being the first time i d ever played the original version of wow it was a different moment it was exploring my way through wetlands to the arathi highlands to hillsbrad foothills up north i went and i found myself quite by accident in the western plaguelands i had experiences with doing this before but while i was stealthed and kept to the mountains i found i was able to sneak all the way up to the entrance to scholomance i had absolutely no business being where i was as a l28 rogue but sneaking there and into other places just whetted my appetite for more in lotro i know where my aha moment was reaching evendim and looking up at night and discovering the pleiades in the sky swtor was a bit different i think it was when i arrived on my smuggler at coruscant and there was a custom cutscene of me slicing a terminal to get into the spaceport unnoticed it wasn t much but it was a helluva touch given that i was trying to get my starship back what about you what was your aha moment in an mmorpg posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 5 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels lotro mmos musings swtor videos wow wow classic friday august 9 2024 finding people in that mushy middle okay i m going to say something that ought to be patently obvious visible activity by other players in an mmo is critical to an mmo s success it s a no brainer but you d be surprised at the number of games that struggle with that simple notion hello anybody here i remember when i first started playing wow there were people running to and fro in eversong forest not that many mind you but enough to get the feeling that there were others inhabiting the world then i was taken escorted to orgrimmar and holy crap was it crowded but as i leveled outside of a few critical places that were busy such as hillsbrad or stranglethorn the number of other players i encountered dwindled until i barely saw another soul in outland or large sections of northrend at the same time i began to see dalaran more and more as the location of people i encountered and put on my friends list it wasn t until i reached where dalaran floated above the crystalsong forest in northrend that i truly understood just how many people played wow on my server and more importantly where they all were after that revelatory moment i began to keep a closer eye on how mmos handled the multiplayer aspect of their games it s a rather common problem that over an mmo s lifetime people will gather at watering holes where the current content is located the problem is that is not where the new players are so to a new player it certainly seems like nobody or nearly nobody is playing the game if you don t want people around that s fine i ll be honest in that i kind of prefer the isolation to an extent however if you want to do any form of group content well good luck with that it s just that you need people out there and visible in the world to give you the impression that the game is viable by all indicators wow classic era doesn t have a large population the server selection screen identifies the east coast cluster as having a low population and if you look at the raiding population it s not exactly overwhelming however if you enter the two capital cities in classic era you re going to find a decently sized group of people just hanging around even at 1 am server time given that you periodically return to a class trainer to train you re always returning to a major city while leveling additionally the leveling process itself funnels you into the capital cities early on acquainting you with the fact that this is where people go no matter their level the impression it leaves on a new player is that the game is active even at the beginning lord of the rings online does something similar in that your intro zone and first leveling zone for clarification purposes they are distinct zones based on your race may be active but they all funnel you toward bree bree becomes a major hub within lotro itself that is always active no matter the expansion while the leveling zones have fewer and fewer players in them bree is always omnipresent as a watering hole sure the central location of whatever the current expansion is gets the lions share of players at max level bree is probably one of every player s top three hangout locations bree shows a new player that yes people do play the game and some of them are even at max level out there lotro may not have the activity of even wow classic era but it is active in its own way when you get to retail wow however a lot of the systems put in place back in the classic game are no longer present or no longer needed blizzard quickly discovered that people at max level congregated at a central location in the current expac zones abandoning other areas shattrath city and dalaran was where the people went and the major cities became ghost towns history repeated itself in both tbc and wrath classic only more so as there were very few new players out leveling in the world blizzard s solution was to put the focus back on the capital cities in cataclysm but it didn t exactly work as intended automated systems declining subscriptions and server transfers all meant that while some servers had active players where blizzard wanted them others did not and to make matters worse servers marked new players were frequently those with the lowest population in the wow ecosystem instead of server merges mists of pandaria introduced connected realms clustering servers with low population together so that the world would feel like an active world blizzard abandoned the idea of returning max level players to the capital cities where low level players could see them and as time went on more systems were created to get people to max level as quickly as possible if you were new and wanted to feel like part of a living world you had to skip over all of the old content to get to the new stuff when j1mmy put out this video there was a particular sentence that resonated with my experience in many mmos since 2009 but sure enough the second i hit 60 right on cue my pager s going off and i m getting contacted from people in stormwind begging me and pleading me to return and start the dragon chronicles and so i went back to stormwind i got to the dragon place i think i leveled up like once or twice and then i logged out cause i realized that through that entire experience of leveling through battle for azeroth to dragonflight i had yet to talk to a single other human even once it s kind of ironic in that for many mmos the most active you see players out in the world are in the starter areas and the main hubs in a current expansion the starter areas are where new players inevitably begin play and the hubs at the current expansion are where all of the max level toons go but it s once you leave that starter area where things get mushy and if you don t see anybody around the promise of seeing other people at endgame can seem like so much vaporware to combat that emptiness you need good gameplay good systems and a story that remains valid throughout the leveling experience and all three demand one thing that a lot of game companies don t want to utilize a development team s time it costs too much time and money to make sure the mid game is taken care of despite it being a critical part of keeping a player playing your game it costs far less money and is more profitable to simply put new items in the cash shop rather than plan for the long term and more than a little intimidating ironically enough as soon as i arrived i was accosted by someone looking for guild signatures having someone come up to me out of the blue kind of froze me in my tracks i have since gotten over my fright of that sort of behavior but it did take quite a while to do so and the overall lack of players available to perform group content at level is one of the reasons why automatic group finders are a thing unless you pay to skip those areas blaugust2024 posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2024 lotro mmos videos wow wednesday june 5 2024 time past i was eating dinner out with my oldest last night and talk turned to mmos we d discussed lotro for a bit she mentioned that our house was out of storage and about several of the changes made to legendary weapons because of the changes you didn t have to swap out your weapon every so often you could keep that same weapon as long as you wanted i still have my original weapon i mused i doubt i ll ever get rid of it we covered some of the other changes made to the game over the years as she d continued to play lotro actively long after it became a niche event for me then we discussed another mmo we d played a lot in the past i miss swtor i said but that bug keeps me from playing it the companion bug she asked yeah that one i have that bug too and it drives me crazy it s the only game i see where a companion just simply does not keep up with me over time i typically last as far as alderaan until i can t stand it any more that s a shame she replied because i loved the story in alderaan i used to think it was a problem with the radeon graphics cards i added but when we bought my current pc it runs on an nvidia card that s far more advanced than anything we had in 2012 and it still does it i wondered if it had something to do with server congestion there was more server traffic back then so i have no idea what the problem is i have seen it on two separate installations of the game and now three if you re seeing it too it s not like bioware hasn t made games with companions before or after so i don t know what the issue is with this one single game of theirs after a brief pause my oldest added that if there were classic swtor servers ever created she knows several people who would jump at the chance to play those again like your brother yeah he disliked how easy the game became i miss the difficulty i said taking another bite of my salad the consular end boss in particular was originally really tough until they nerfed it and even after it was nerfed it was a hard fight remember the final zone in the tatooine story she asked you kept going through this long maze until you got to the end and now it s you take an elevator and you re there yeah or remember accidentally touching something out in the field and discovering that was a world boss spawn point or when you d be assembling a group to take on a world boss and someone from the other faction would run up and cause the wb to spawn grabbing it for the other faction i remember that or those heroic 4 zones out in the field they re all 2 heroics now i haven t set foot in a flashpoint since they changed the design so that you didn t need a healer or a tank i confessed and you have those self administered healing points scattered around the instances but boy did i love the original flashpoints they had yeah you know you re getting old when your daughter starts reminiscing about how things were back in the day i suppose posted by redbeard at 1 13 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels family lotro swtor thursday february 8 2024 there s the offiicial reason and then there s nothing like stirring the pot i suppose one of my side comments in the discussion surrounding my last post alluded to me not playing swtor very much was because of the broken companion pathing whenever i play it i ve switched pcs replaced cpus and graphics cards and manufacturers and i even have the game installed on an nvme ssd drive a far cry from the slowpoke 5400 rpm mechanical drive it was once on but all to no avail my old sith inquisitor is still somewhere in chapter 10 of the kotfe expansion here i started at this entrance area in nar shadda right after you disembark from your ship and i ran toward the taxi literally all i did no attacking no shenanigans no nothing okay so senya is now just out of view if you look closely at the map you can see that she moved about half speed from the screenshot just above this one and now having arrived at the taxi i can swing the camera around and watch her go oh shit i m coming imagine if i were in a fight and she were dil...
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