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...