Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I haven't been keeping up with WoW news so much in recent months. The investment-to-payoff ratio of following development news several months in advance just isn't worth it to me most of the time. Someone mentioned the recent developer blog post(s) on raiding last night, though, so I thought I'd take a peek. I do love seeing behind-the-scenes rationale for changes to a game like WoW, so it's neat to me. I've long said Blizzard is not stupid, but reading through posts like this does make it clear how tricky some elements in such a huge game can be. Hindsight is 20/20, they say. It's really easy to overcompensate or create new issues in the attempts to fix old ones. Each adjustment in the difficulty, size, or lockout mechanics for raids was well-intentioned and meant a an improvement. Some succeeded, others failed, and almost all uncovered or created new issues entirely. Blizzard certainly isn't the only company, and WoW not the only game, to suffer from th

So, I've mentioned lately thinking about what to do with Jezra, one of my more active-in-recent-memory MUCK characters. Plus, someone keeps encouraging me to talk about characters, so... some specifics, I guess... I said recently: "... she seems to have hit a pretty static point that's not real inspiring either. Relationship drama has died down as she found a niche with Orion and Tash that (so far, at least) seems to be working fairly well. Business is fine and dandy. I find myself thinking 'something' needs to happen to shake things up a bit. Life without conflict is realistically nice, but narratively kinda boring. ;)" Also, the character itself doesn't have a lot of excitement built in, which seems to be a frequent character creation flaw on my part. She's fairly well adjusted and perhaps disturbingly smart. I envisioned her as sort of like the movie portrayal of Tony Stark in creative brilliance, but she doesn't have the ego. That has a lot

It's not new, per se, but I recently had a discussion with a couple other players - definitely some "old school vs. new school" sentiments going on. I don't want to call the situation "hopeless," but I'm also not idealistic enough to think setting up a forum, encouraging people to use the board system, or updating the Wiki (all of which have been done at one time or another) will be a simple and solid fix. So much existing lore resides entirely in a couple people's heads, meaning any effort to gather it all requires a non-trivial effort on their part - effort that cannot simply be put in by anyone who has the time and desire. So there's sort of an atmosphere that discourages any major roleplay, which isn't particularly healthy for a roleplay-based MUCK. Anyway, I include the conversation I had here for those few who might read it. I hope it might make the point without being offensive - certainly none of it was intended as a personal att

Let's see... After some discussion, I may be doing ARIN GW2 stuff on Saturday nights rather than Sunday - not a huge deal, especially given that it's usually just been running around and dealing with dailies anyway. Considering how empty Saturday evenings have been in the absence of WoW, though, it seems to work out fine. And it still leaves the earlier AW guild missions in the game for Sunday, though that's more late afternoon these days. I'm always a little amazed when something I initially disregard on TV ends up grabbing me at some point. Avatar did that when I noticed the story arcs going beyond the moral-of-the-week episodes. Venture Brothers seemed like an old adventure cartoon, but deconstructed some of those tropes and spun out it's own impressive mythos. Adventure Time seemed overly childish, but caught my attention when I saw the rather tragic story behind the Ice King. Most recently, Rick and Morty seemed like a throw-away show until I noticed some

I recently picked up a couple more things to read, though I'm not maintaining the pace I did last year, getting side tracked by other material. Balanced on the Blade's Edge was a quick read. The setting/concept sounded interesting, and there are some neat elements there - an age of airships founded on the remains of forgotten magic, a remote prison/mine recovering the precious fuel, a sword-bound mage out of time... It could be a really awesome fantasy story, but doesn't really attain that level. The higher focus on instant attraction between the main characters ends up making it feel a bit more like a romance novel. But it's not terrible either, all-in-all an okay read. I also found myself look into All Your Need is Kill . I think I'd heard of it before, but I'm sure it came to my recent attention due to being the source material for the upcoming movie, Edge of Tomorrow. I might once have been a Tom Cruise fan, but not so much these days. The movie itself

So I'm closing the book on Dark Souls. I expect to start playing the sequel going into this weekend, as the PC version is available Friday. I didn't actually beat the game - with two DLC bosses and the final primary boss left. Alas, I went back to try to take a whack at them and the Windows for Gaming Live setup was acting up again, not letting me sign in to get into the game cleanly (no sign-in means no save function). As I didn't think I could one-shot them all, I just sort of said "heck with it" and watched videos for the light and dark endings. In the end, that outside-game system was the worst part of the experience. The game itself was... well... perhaps the best, most enjoyable 100+ hour exercise in ultimate futility I have ever experienced. It's odd to say it that way, but it's true. The game was good. It was fun. As I said before, it was an experience not unlike when I played the first Diablo. There's a sense of exploration, and definitely

Strange. I dreamed I was Ichigo Kurosaki in some alternate take on his awakening as a "soul reaper." Different sword. Several characters who didn't appear until later hanging around a totally different school. No Rukia, though. Something happened and "I" got stuck in spirit form for a while, unable to interact with most people, though I ran into a mysterious woman who gave some pointers on the whole spirit situation, all the while thinking in an out-of-character sense that she was actually my mom. Heh. And the last I remember I was rushing round trying to find the right classroom to be in, back in human form. I'm not even sure when the last time I caught an episode of Bleach was...

Collecting some thoughts, I suppose. Youngest daughter of Kyn'Elwynn and Amber, Sarine is not even a year old in "present" FFa time. I have, however, conceptualized and played some ahead. Borrowing shamelessly from the Blades of Namara in the Fallen Blade series , I decided early on that Sarine would be brought up to be Mika's "Talon." The Blades are/were an order of assassins serving the goddess of justice, existing to serve as balance against high-level corruption. When an evil, abusive noble or ruler arises who'd beyond the reach of the law, Namara points one of her followers after him... In the context of Furryfaire, it strikes me that the Horsemen serve a similar function, but 1) they have to be "hired" and 2) they adhere to a very specific set of guidelines for what makes a worthy target. Sometimes, it's useful to have someone who can act a little bit outside a framework like that, and it makes a certain amount of sense to me f

Because, why not? Nice weather, free time, and a desire to do something other than sit around and be bored - all plenty of reasons to get out and start walking. And now that I have a smart phone, I was even able to collect some data on the trip to the top of the ridge and back. Out the door and back to the door: 2 hours and six minutes Distance walked: 5.41 miles (2.6 mph average speed) Vertical change each way: 1,163 feet

A little burned out on Dark Souls, and with the sequel a week away from PC release, I recently picked up FTL: Faster Than Light . I'd heard about it, and it was cheap, so I figured I'd give it a try. What I got was a reasonably entertaining game that's not every intensive and gives examples of what I consider both good and bad difficulty. The "good" difficulty is in learning how things work. There are several different sorts of ship systems to experiment with, and there's fun to be found in picking up something new and finding out it works far better than you thought it did. Mixing and matching to figure out what works well is a good thing. The "bad" difficulty comes in two main forms here. One is the random element - often events come up with a decision and there's a chance of a good outcome and a chance of a bad outcome. Arguably, risk assessment is a learned skill in this game, but you can have a play-through ruined, even near the end, by

Years of World of Warcraft taught me to expect a certain amount of chaos after any major patch. When systems change, something tends to break and will need fixing. Sometimes there are simple issues with numbers that need to be retweaked for balance, other times it's something more serious. Whatever the specifics, I've learned to try to sit back and wait for the dust to settle before getting too worked up about changes. Arenanet has avoided a lot of that with their (mostly) biweekly patches. Of course, content adjustments seem less prone to major mishaps than system adjustments. There have been some issues here and there, with requirements, rewards, and scaling of events being tuned over the course of several days. I haven't seen anything too serious, though. Yesterday, they put out what I would consider their first major system/mechanic-related patch for Guild Wars 2. And yeah, some things broke. I personally saw daily/monthly achievements reset a couple times over and

Quickie MMO notes: GW2 is pretty "stable." I may log on to do dailies, and that's about it. Sunday, I put in a couple hours, give or take, for guild missions, then another hour or so doing other guild stuff, which... usually just boils down to dailies at present, unless a story event comes up. "Big" patch tomorrow, but it's mechanical stuff rather than story stuff. News comes of the World of Darkness MMO that was in development has been cancelled. I am not surprised. Doing WoD justice in an MMO is a tall order, and CCP never struck me as possessing the skill and resources to pull it off. Otherwise, I've been pondering just how much one should apply reason and "realism" in an RPG. I've said before that I find internal consistency more important to a fantasy story/movie/RPG than realism . "Realism" falls by the wayside once you start talking about magic or FTL travel or whatnot. But if you have a world with floating rocks, t

Years ago... sheesh, over a decade now, I think... an online friend shared this D&D-system world he used in some campaigns, Rym. He put up a web site with a lot of information, though there are still a lot of gaps, too. He also tied this in with Furryfaire MUCK. That had ups and downs, and there are still compatibility issues that we sort of skirt around, but I've always liked the magic/tech "vibe" of the setting even if I've interpreted it differently than others. One of the races of this world is the hoomiku. Now, when it comes to roleplaying them, there really isn't all that much information set out by their creator. There's a race page with some basics and D&D 3E-ish stat modifiers, there is a glimpse at their technology on the weapons page , and then there are some scattered references in images and map sites such as Haizat and Southwind Cove . When you put it all together, you get a picture, but it's a bit sketchy in places. To date, I

Good, solid action movie. The characters work. Really, I had fun and there's little to be critical of. Perhaps my only complaint is that the heroes go off in search of answers to what's going on and the evil plot basically gets info-dumped on them (and the audience). Sorta clunky, but it didn't really take me out of the experience.

So, the Warlords of Draenor alpha has begun. That still doesn't make me think it'll be released before October, and it still doesn't decide whether I'm going to take up regular play again. It also heralds the release of early patch 6.0 notes . There's a lot of info there, and it's early enough we can expect a lot of details to change. Shifting gears on professions leaves me with probably the biggest feeling of "Um... what?" I know all the details have to be worked out, and tweaks will be done, and all that, but it's one little thing that bugs me. Paladin Avenging Wrath is now only available to Retribution Paladins. The phrase that comes to mind is "clipped wings." I approve of simplifying the huge number of abilities in the game, but I don't want to lose such an iconic effect/ability just because I'm in Protection spec. *sniffle*

Solid dystopian science fiction. I watched through this anime series, and I think it's worthwhile, all told. In some ways, it's slow to get moving, but the second half of the series really gets rolling. It manages several reveals pretty well along the way. And the ending feels decent and appropriate - which told me even before I looked that this was produced as a TV series before any manga or novels. It also floats some pretty heavy questions of ethics. The series pitches the idea of a mega-city-ish Japan with a few massive leaps in technology: extensive use of holograms, wide-spread surveillance with heavy aptitude testing and instant profiling in the Sibyl System, lots of drones and automation in all sorts of areas, and of course the Dominator firearms. Dominators are pretty potent with their real-time threat assessment and modes ranging from knocking someone out to putting large holes through drones, but their limits become apparent too. They're used in law enforcement

Okay, I've seen some cute things popping up online over the course of the day, sure. I might even go so far as to call a few of them funny . But the highest scorer so far on the amusement/laughter scale for me might actually fall flat on people who have never played WoW. 'tis the listed 6.0 patch notes .

As a friend got her ascended staff crafted on Sunday, I got to thinking about armor again and the value of this top-tier gear. Rings, trinkets, amulets - little side pieces that can be acquired with laurels (among other methods) seem to go through a decent bump from exotic to ascended levels. The same is true of the back piece that was introduced, with some stat bonuses going up by around 30% (more or less in some cases) from exotic to ascended levels. The points get watered down with everything else, but it's a notably per-piece percentage benefit. Weapons and armor, on the other hand, are a bit more iffy. Going from exotic to ascended/legendary there on any particular piece is right around a 5% difference, plus an infusion slot that's worth about another 5 points in one stat. My initial thought for weapons was "Five percent more damage? Sure, sign me up!" But it isn't even that much. Though the stats and base damage go up by that amount, an ascended-level