There Goes the Neighborhood – Massively Shutdown

First reaction on hearing the rumor / news? Damn, some passionate folks are out of a job.

If there’s one thing Massively did right, it’s making their news and article writers very recognizable people with their own opinions and personalities, especially since a number of them also have their own personal blogs in our part of MMO blogosphere town.

Second reaction? Well, crud.

If there’s another thing Massively did right, it’s be a really comprehensive summary list of MMO news and things of interest happening in the MMO world.

Lately, I’ve almost never clicked through to read an article – mostly because specific MMO news these days ain’t that exciting to me, and for one other reason I’ll get to below –  but it’s always been good for skimming through headlines on an RSS feed and getting a feel of what different MMOs out there (including many one will have never heard of otherwise) are doing.

But I can also empathize with a currently very unpopular opinion and post whom some others are reading as being a jerk dancing on someone’s grave, in that there’s one thing I’ll be glad about seeing Massively go.

The quality of the culture and the comments around the articles started going down the toilet a year or two ago, and has pretty much hit rock bottom these days.

-That- actively repels me from a click through because I don’t want to scroll down and end up seeing another flame war, replete with Massively trolls going at each other and anyone not yet savvy enough to recognize them.

A long time ago, when Massively first started, things were very different.

Comments were Rock, Paper, Shotgun-quality or higher, a bunch of bloggers were all hanging out there, and I had a really good time and run as a commenter there, which imo, got my name out there and recognized before I decided it was time to carve out my own lil place on the internet.

I’m really not sure what happened down the road, maybe it was just a side effect of too much popularity, maybe AOL was remunerating based on click-throughs, hits and comments and it was more profitable to let a combative , troll culture rage unchecked and get more people responding that way, maybe the comment system AOL made them use just sucked with moderating tools (I vividly remember a total inability to edit comments for a long time, fer instance) but something happened…

And it just made the bottom of the articles a really unpleasant place to be for me, especially when they somehow managed to attract a Positivity Troll whose name I recognized from the City of Heroes forums.

Every now and then, I would try to get back into the community swing of things with an odd comment or two, usually during the Daily Grind articles which I was quite fond of for coming up with thought-provoking questions and seeking reader opinion and input, and generally end up repeled by something or other.

The absolute straw on the camel’s back for me was when I tried to add a little humor with one comment, in my usual sardonic style, and guess what, my comment got deleted, presumably being read by the editor as a troll, while a whole lot of other trolls were running rampant.

LOL.

Well, I guess I don’t fit as part of the Massively community any more then. Cheers, see you, I’ll be hermiting over here on my corner of the internet, where people who don’t like me or my opinions can decide to stop reading me – no offense taken – and where people who do can stick around.

And that was basically how I took myself out of the Massively commenting community and stopped contributing to clicks and pageviews for the most part.

An inhospitable, controversy-fond social environment / culture had formed and no one was actively community managing or cleaning it up to any visible degree of success.

Do I really want to see Massively go?

Nah.

As I said, I’m sorry for the writerly guys and gals who are now out of a job. I hope they can move on to other better things and get a good income stream going again quickly.

I’m sorry for the loss of a news-aggregating site who covered MMOs primarily and did a good job at providing a specific kind of news service.

But, in this ever-changing world, the only constant is change and even institutions and businesses fade, restructure, shut down, grow or be born again. It’s just the natural cycle of things.

And sometimes, if the work environment has suddenly become toxic or intolerable in some way, it can be better in the long term to clear the decks and move on to other things, or give the place a graceful end.

There will still be plenty of folks content with the old way of how it’s always been, and not seeing a problem, of course. “It was doing fine!” They argue. *stares at SWG, stares at City of Heroes*

Somewhere, behind the scene, a bunch of suits were looking at the numbers. Sorry, but business is almost always about the numbers.

Sure, if you care about it, go ahead and appeal, petition, cling onto hope. If there’s enough of you (those numbers again), you can even change minds sometimes. So that’s good.

But if that doesn’t work out, then we may as well gracefully accept that things change, and then move on to better things – even if we have to MAKE them or the opportunities ourselves.

I hope to see another MMO news aggregator eventually step up into Massively’s place, grabbing hold of its strengths and the niche it was serving, but hopefully rehashing none of its mistakes – eg. having AOL as its boss, allowing a cesspool of a comment community to form and linger, etc.

RIP Massively.

I guess it’s really a new decade for MMOs now.

GW2: Oh Happy Day

T’was a very fruitful weekend for me in Guild Wars 2.

The last carapace chest finally deigned to drop for me during a Vinewrath on Sunday.

I’ve pretty much lost count of how many I’ve done prior to this. You know those lucky bastards that get 3 carapace chests in like, 4 Vinewraths? I’m their polar opposite. Someone’s got to draw the short end of the RNG stick, I guess.

While banging my head on the wall of innumerable Vinewraths, I ended up with about 6000 crests in total across weeks of Silverwastes, minus a thousand or so for one of the Ascended accessories that needed to be bought for the collection, and not including the ton of Mordrem parts I haven’t got around to exchanging for crests taking up room in my bags.

It worked out quite nicely, as I decided to be lazy and buy my last carapace headgear instead of running a third character through the storyline.

Minus another 1000 for the last Ascended accessory that needed to be bought, and I had 4000 left over to pick up all the buyable Mordrem tonics and minis.

Turns out both the Mordrem husk and troll tonics are pretty good for screenshots, as you can scroll directly into first person view with them. The husk camera is set a little higher than the troll’s. I think I prefer the troll overall, but I’m sure there will be times I might find the husk one handy.

The most delightful thing for me about finishing the Luminescent collection is the title. I’m madly in love with it ever since I saw it, and ever since playing its namesake in the Personal Story. Happily wearing it now.

I’m really not sure what to do with the Ascended armor chest that was its final reward. I already own a Zojja’s chestpiece that was a lucky drop from a Wurm kill. If I continue decking that warrior out, each piece only increments by such a minute amount I feel almost sorry selecting a wear location other than the chest.

Or I could pick another Zojja’s breastplate and give it to my guardian main… except that would make all the colors not match and feel a little weird. It’s not like he -needs- Ascended, since he doesn’t WvW or do fractals.

Or maybe one of my many other alts could use it? What stats? Who? *brain shuts down at this point and I just throw it in the bank to think about later*

And the last four Ambrite weapons that were still pending three weeks ago?

Yep, finally managed to pull enough fossilized insects after some weekly patient attendance at DTOP’s regular Fri/Sat ‘one hour after reset’ runs. (Or Sat/Sun morning for me.)

I almost didn’t think I’d get it done this week.

I lucked into an insect during Saturday’s two hours, and then promptly failed miserably to get one on Sunday, despite opening some two dozen chests over the two hours.

I bought my final sets of keys (about 12 of them all told) and logged out, intending to catch another sandstorm some other time and just run around opening chests, and never got back to it on Sunday.

I also start on about 14% of the Maguuma Wastes PvP reward track. Eventually, I’ll get the last fossilized insect that way, worse case scenario.

Monday morning, I wake pretty early before work, intending to get a blog post about the Luminescent collection done, and see that the clock says :57 minutes. Hmm, there’s three minutes left of a sandstorm! What if…

So I log on (thank you SSD for quick load times) and run around like a mad charr with CTRL held down, hoping to spy at least one chest before the sandstorm’s up.

I see one! It’s on a cliff! I grab the blue crystal and fail the jump several times, cursing under my breath, watching the sandstorm time tick down.

I get up there at last! I open it!

No insect.

Some random recipe that actually overloads me.

Baaaaaah. Much deflated, I look around for another chest. There’s under a minute of time left.

Encumbered, kinda half blind while walking around and scanning through my open bags settling on something to throw away to make room, I toss out some grey junk, and then another piece of grey junk to make one extra slot… just in case.

There’s another chest! Under half a minute left!

I run over and with 15 seconds on the clock, I throw it open and BAM, a golden fossilized insect slides into that slot I just opened up, while 8 bits of sand overload me.

THERE IS AN RNG GOD.

I fling 16 copper more of grey junk out my inventory to let the equally worthless sand slide in, then cradling the last insect, dash over to Divinity’s Reach to pull out the other three I’d been hoarding in the bank.

One quick waypoint to trade all the insects into the appropriate form, another waypoint back, and the celebratory crafting began.

Blog post? Err… Nevermind, I’ll write it in the night.

—

Besides those little bouts of satisfaction, I also got in a bit of leveling time during double xp weekend.

There was a spot of time the servers were being rather dodgy and the Silverwastes map was pretty much unplayable, so being neatly stymied in my attempt to get the last carapace chest, or do anything (like kill Tequatl or Wurm) that required a stable connection without dc’ing, I decided to power level my charr mesmer instead.

Boy, was that a little insane.

I’d never eaten so many boosters in my life.

Usually I settle for an experience booster and a killstreak booster at most, and food and a wrench consumable.

Since double xp was going on, I threw on a celebration booster from the log-in rewards too, for another 100% xp. I made some candy corn cake that gave 15% xp rather than the usual 10%.

I’m still too cheap to waste 5 experience boosters for a single improved experience booster, so I held off on that, and just nommed my usual stuff. Plus a speed booster, because what the heck, I was starting to accumulate too many of those.

Then I ran off to find yellow untouched mobs and hit one.

That 64xp mob? Coughed out some 500+ xp in bonus experience, and steadily rising from the killstreak booster.

Man, did that experience bar jump.

I calculated that 3 moas would move the bar by one tenth of the total experience bar. So 30 fully xp laden mobs equated to one level.

In one hour I jumped around 7-8 levels, and that was while wasting time chatting to a friend.

Said friend wanted to come along in the next hour, so that was what we did, scoring another 8 levels.

Level 25 to 33 to 41. Craaazy.

What eventually screwed up the streak was a whole spate of maps that we were in crashing and restarting, resetting all that sweet sweet bonus xp back to essentially zero (or the same amount as the mob’s usual xp.) Fields of Ruin? Crashed. Lornar’s Pass? Crashed. Harathi Hinterlands? Crashed.

WELL. That’s pretty much all the maps that are good for that level range. (Yes, we could downlevel, but you don’t get the maximum amount of potential xp that way, you get a lil less. And we were already spoiled from the crazy numbers we were scoring with each mob.)

So we ended up taking a break and it turned out that was all the time I could spare during the weekend for leveling because I got distracted by the Vinewrath once the servers stabilized.

Oh well, plenty of time to level at leisure now that my crazy collection obsession is sated, and I can slowly make a little progress on my Great Screenshot Project. (No mention of mass carnage and destruction for the expansion, so I guess I don’t have to hurry on this. Phew.)

I’m kinda looking forward to seeing what the whole horde of newbies who grabbed GW2 during the $10 weekend sale are making of the game.

The only thing that frightens me is the quality of mapchat in the low level zones. Prior to the newbie influx, they’ve tended to make my brain rot from the inanity and barrens-chat worthy phrases (I figure that many of the people still leveling lowbies during this time are not…hmm, shall we say very devoted GW2 players or veterans – vets are likely to have so many tomes of knowledge they have to use up or are perfectly fine crafting or EoTMing their way to 80 – and thus carry a bit of their usual MMO culture with them back into this game.)

I’m not sure I want to find out if it’s got worse or better or stayed the same.

I -am- having quite a bit of fun with the influx of newbie posts on Reddit though. I’m a little too hermit-y to consider helping random people in-game, but y’know, give me a soapbox and a comment space to write in and I can’t resist giving my twenty cents of advice.

Guess we all do our part to try and live up to that “fun, welcoming, inclusive community” moniker.

GW2: Heart of Thorns – First Reactions…

I NEED A REVENANT.

MAYBE TWO.

OR FIVE.

Heavy armor class, powered by GW1 nostalgia, echoes of the ritualist and dervish? YES PLZ. GIVE NAO.

—

Also fairly hyped about gliding. I liked doing that in Aion.

Less sure about masteries – it’ll probably end up being a bit of a lateral progression grind, but you know, we all need goals to chase and I’ll take horizontal progression that is ACCOUNT bound than character-bound vertical progression any day.

Besides, anything that gives necromancers greatswords, engineers hammers, and more besides (like druidic staff rangers) can’t be that bad.

Shield mesmers, too.

Also, precursor scavenger hunt / collection will be in this system, which means I might one day actually be able to make a Legendary that doesn’t come from a cheap and unwanted precursor.

So shiny, this jungle. Feels almost like Guild Wars: Utopia with its planned meso-american influences is echoing from its pores.

The Heart of Maguuma area and content sounds good – looks very vertical with three main parts canopy, middle and depths, looks to have a ton of secret stuff and lore inside (hylek civilizations, Mursaat? as allies?!) and will contain more challenging fights and bosses and *ahem* group content, presumably meaning raids of some type or other to sate the ravening hordes.

(As long as they stick to the original design philosophy of stressing inclusion and cooperation, I guess I won’t freak out about it.)

No crazy gear increases, no level cap increase, no stupid slavish following of a vertical progression system that doesn’t fit GW2, all good reassurances that the Anet designers still have their eyes on their nontraditional prize.

Some people are excited about guild halls. I guess I’m okay. I figure that between the three guilds I belong to: a megaguild, a friends-and-family small/medium guild and a lone bank guild, I should be able to experience whatever the system holds.

The new PvP mode Stronghold sounds kinda interesting. Sounds a bit MOBA-like, imo, what with traveling with NPCs to go attack a guild lord. Apparently it may have some resemblances with older GW1 PVP modes? I wouldn’t know, I was never a PvPer in GW1.

Maybe it’ll have some people excited, especially with the potential to make guild teams and compete on a leaderboard. PvPers seem to like that sort of thing.

Also a new WvW map. Looks pretty. I’ll wait till I see it in action though. See if folks manage to adapt to it or no.

Also a new stress on defending and holding objectives. Yak’s Benders are happy, I dunno about the rest of the WvW regulars. I think it makes a certain amount of sense, but my days of spending hours in WvW fighting for server pride are pretty much over, especially with so much new PvE stuff to distract me, so I’m probably not the target audience. I kinda just hop in and hop out from time to time, is about it.

—

And if you have no idea what the hell I’m blabbing on about, the Heart of Thorns website is over here, with trailers and all that.

Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be over here squeeing about the Revenant and wondering when the hell the release date is, because they conveniently neglected to do that just yet.

I know, let’s gather all the charr revenants that will be made and have Rytlock form us a new Legion: The Black Legion or the Legion of the Damned! (What, wrong game? Nuh uh.)

GW2: Point of No Return and the Vinewrath: Thoughts from a Jaded Vet

I wish I knew what to say about Point of No Return. (Yes, there will be spoilers beyond this point.)

Bhagpuss and the Mystical Mesmer have covered the episode a lot more aptly than I can, so I’ll point you over to their coverage of the episode.

Truth is, my main reaction is less about stunning revelation, but more of an “about time, can we get to something good now, please?”

Maybe I read too much Reddit, but I’ve been operating under the assumption/knowledge that sylvari were originally destined to be minions of Mordremoth for a long time now.

How much clearer did it need to be, especially with the holographic records of Scarlet nee Ceara taking a mindtwisting turn for the worse after “What Scarlet Saw” – a thorn root of Mordremoth winding up the Pale Tree attempting either to reclaim its champion or kill her for being wayward – and going completely batshit crazy attempting to reject both masters (and likely falling under the sway of Mordremoth the loonier she got, being that one of the Elder Dragon’s spheres is that of the Mind.)

Having already accepted the premise long ago, I found myself mostly more thrilled at seeing echoes of Guild Wars 1 back in my Living Story, walking in the footsteps of my ancient ancestors reliving the Ascension trials, fighting off one’s doppelganger, etc.

(How a charr has an Elonian human ancestor, I’m not sure, but let’s just handwave it like the Hall of Monuments, eh? I inherited dat fiery dragon sword dead to rights and no one had better dispute that!)

The rest of the story was pretty ho-hum, just moving the plot along, nothing much to see here… Oh, I guess there was one tragedy.

Victim of a dolyak hit-and-run.

Seriously, please check where your minis show up. Doesn’t this undergo testing? Maybe “emotional impact” is not one of the criteria on the checklist.

I have to give kudos for relatively bug-free this patch, anyway.

The fights themselves are decent.

I note with an amused smile that they again try to place stress on other concepts besides DPS all the things as quickly as possible.

For example, it is possible to kite or control mobs out of the circle representing the Throne of Pellentia, and if you do it early, you won’t get waves and waves of ever-so-annoying ghost mobs plus siege wurms, and instead merely need to play run-around-the-mulberry-bush-er-pillar with an Arcanist Echo.

This assumes, of course, that one is sturdy enough to deal with getting sniped at by a mob, plus able to control one’s rabid tendency to autoattack anything red.

(A total failure to organize in a pickup group, I might add, which I joined for the 8 minutes time achievement. The group sported two rangers and a mesmer, who were exceedingly on-the-ball with knockback skills, shoving all mobs out in under a couple seconds… who then absolutely failed to maintain this state of affairs by promptly killing them with autoattacks, causing new mobs to spawn in the circle. *sighs*)

The Shadow of the Dragon fight was moderately fun, with the added concept of ‘teaching how to recognize and coordinate with skills from allies’ along with the standard pattern recognition of mechanics.

If the GW2 forums are anything to go by, it seems the devs still have quite a lot of work ahead of them in training a certain subset of the population how to cope with fights like this.

I suspect most of them that are frustrated have simply missed a crucial concept that would aid in solving the fight.

• Have a problem with smothering shadows? Solution: Pick up the divine fire by walking into it, and then land any bit of damage on the shadow. Shadow explodes, divine fire buff expires, need new divine fire buff to light flame.

• Have a problem with getting interrupted by the dragon while lighting the flame? Solution: Look out for Braham’s sanctuary, which will apply stability, and light that spot. It will not protect against the upward rising dragon’s mouth, which will still launch upwards through stability, but it’ll stop getting interrupted by the dragon’s groping paw.

• Have a problem with the plants? The plants are triggered by the tripvine in between them. Either go around them, or run through them in the direct center. Sometimes, it is easier to clean up the arena by just running through all four pairs of plants and making them explode, then one has more room to work with.

• Have a problem with the shadowy tendrils? Beyond targeting the same vine as Marjory’s minions, which will help nom on them, ranged attacks are a lot less frustrating to land over trying to position melee attacks while trying to avoid vine knockback plus rocks. (Not that it can’t be done, I got my warrior through it with pure melee, cos lazy to swap weapons, but it’s a lot less annoying, imo.)

It happens. I remember misjudging the size of the explosion in one Living Story fight, which produced great perplexity in how exactly one was supposed to kite the exceedingly-slow moving mob to each prepped node in the time limit for the achievement… and some whining within partychat with friends… wherein it turned out that all one really had to do was AoE all the prepped nodes and voila, mob ded through massive explodey.

Bah. Sometimes you just overthink things, and sometimes the cues for the mechanics aren’t as clear as would be ideal. Happens.

Just as apparently nearly everyone was mistaken in propagating the “No AoE” notion at the Copper Husk, something I personally didn’t subscribe to either. I always thought that kiting the offshoots and poison away and exploding them away from the husk made a lot more sense, but required way too much organization and effort to achieve, so my personal solution was pretty much always to avoid the hell that was Copper and let the players there bicker and squabble and fail or succeed as they pleased. The difference between partial and total success just wasn’t worth getting upset over.

Getting back to the Shadow of the Dragon, I liked the inclusion of the challenge mote at the end, which made trying for achievements a lot less painful by only having to go through the lengthy dialogues once.

I got a decent amount of replay value with the achievements, especially since it took me a while to realize that diving straight for the divine fire in second phase often meant diving headlong into the path of the exploding rock column.

Took me a couple tries and a fair measure of repeating “patience” “patience” “LOOK around carefully and check the situation before you leap” to myself before I finally avoided all the rocks successfully.

The plant thing was also somewhat fun, because it changed up my priorities. ‘Spode all the plants first. Every time. Shadow going for a divine fire wall? Sorry, I’ll eat the setback, gotta make all the plants go boom first.

And finally, I guess the big unveil were the two cutscenes at the end of this Living Story.

For the purposes of building hype for their big PAX South announcement, I guess they succeeded. I’m mostly antsy for the announcement because the cutscenes mostly don’t indicate anything beyond “Pact tries to attack Mordremoth. Pact fails miserably. Something’s definitely up with the Sylvari. Soon(TM).”

Ok. Great. Future stuff.

That’s all very well, but what do I do -now-?

Grind, apparently.

Kill more Mordrem like my hero Rytlock with a fiery sword.

Like a good little player, I am obediently working on the Luminescent collection for lack of anything better to do – and also, because I really want that “Light in the Darkness” title for vanity’s sake, which is always a good motivator.

Thankfully, I hoarded a decent amount of each Mordrem part bag in the prior weeks (around 5-7 of each) and opening them got me most of the eyes and kidneys required.

Camping at the last two that I needed over the weekend -eventually- got me the parts I needed, though I managed to build 3 whole Thrasher bladders before getting an eye (yeesh.)

All I’m missing now is one more carapace chest box, one more headgear box that I could either buy or run another character through the Living Story, and one more Ascended thingummy that will need to be bought.

Mostly the chest box.

The Vinewrath has been a decent enough world boss, set at a level that most players appear to be able to manage (with the few below average exceptions getting pasted on the ground each fight.)

There are only a few crucial mechanics for people to remember, which makes it easier to communicate as well:

1. The Beekeeper / troll creates bees. Running into the center of the rings and out, will call aggro of some bees onto you. Lead these to the honeycomb to build it up.

Take cover behind the honeycomb when the troll runs in front of the Vinewrath.

Most people will already have positioned themselves there, which is all very well, but does sometimes attract troll adds to the area as well. Best to kill the troll adds if possible, so that insect swarms don’t stack and cause runaway damage.

If no one built the honeycomb, then well, it’s your fault for blindly autoattacking away and assuming someone else will do it!

2. The thrasher is fought like a normal thrasher, with plenty of reflects for its spinning-poison projectiles running along the floor phase. Keep distance if reflects are not up, so as to give yourself the best distance to strafe left and right to avoid the poison projectiles.

Pustules pop up and explode after some time if not killed. Destroying the pustule before that releases some spore clouds which give friendly player buffs (turning them pink.) The thrasher can also pick up this buff, so watch out.

When the thrasher runs in front of the Vinewrath, run towards it as well and take cover in the white cone in front of it. Feel free to keep attacking the thrasher in the meantime.

If you die in this fight, it’s absolutely your fault for not getting into the white cone yourself.

3. Dark Wing the terragriff, generally has standard terragriff-y attacks with some extra leap/pounce things. There are flowers that also spawn and need to be attacked/destroyed in order for them to open.

When Dark Wing runs in front of the Vinewrath, hop onto an opened flower for safety.

To be really sophisticated, make sure your opened flower is near the front so that you can keep attacking Dark Wing with ranged attacks. If you lack an opened flower nearby, it’s totally your fault for failing to ensure that one is opened before blindly autoattacking the terragriff!

The NPC escort of the carriers put a considerable amount of stress on control and support abilities as well.

Stealthing the carrier constantly can eventually put it out of combat, allowing it to regenerate up to full health.

There is also the standard water field elementalist and blasting to heal up the carrier as well.

I’ve been getting a considerable amount of mileage out of Healing Breeze (yes, it’s a guardian heal!) that can top up the carrier’s health ever so slightly, and Tome of Courage – the spamming of which can top up a decent amount of health, and if you’re in the right position to land a full heal with number 5, it can pump up a good half or more of the total carrier’s health bar.

In full zerker, too! I briefly considered switching to celestial or clerics, but decided that the healing was already sufficient in zerker, given the weak healing coefficients, and the inconvenience of switching gear to fight/kill things after supporting later.

PSA: If you’re doing nothing for the carrier, do not stand on it and suck up heals/support meant for it.

Nothing pisses off someone trying to save the carrier as dumb ass players in perfectly good condition being prioritized for ally support skills merely because the skills prioritize nearby players first.

The good news is that most of the time, the dumb ass players are either too scared of the oncoming Mordrem and are thus plinking from really really far away, or totally distracted by the clump of Mordrem elsewhere and have failed to notice the carrier trundling off away from them.

This provides gaps of opportunity for an enterprising guardian to be the only one near the carrier and sufficient time to charge up Tome of Courage 5 so that it’ll go off as the carrier is walking by.

There is generally enough time to swap back to a more functional heal for the boss fight, even if one’s elite is on cooldown.

As for control, it’s a knockback / interrupt / fearing players’ dream as there is plenty of opportunity to shunt oncoming Mordrem into the walls and away from a carrier’s plodding path.

(There is also plenty of opportunity for observers to groan at poor control skills… like knocking back a chasing Mordrem further ahead and into the path of the carrier that is desperately trying to get away from it.)

Generally and thankfully though, the fight is fairly resilient to the vagaries of a PUG matchup. If a lane fails (I’ve no idea how, frankly, but it does – presumably folks failed to distribute themselves equally), another lane can take over the champion that it was supposed to face and progress the fight from there.

Given the locked-in tunings, it’s actually quite easy to distribute oneselves fairly equally. Those at the amber troll boss before should go south and face the beekeeper, allowing for one more troll part with an extra extractor.

Those at blue and platinum’s thrasher should go mid and face the Vinewrath’s thrasher, for a chance at an extra thrasher part.

And those at indigo and gold/silver terragriffs should go face the Dark Wing for an extra terragriff part, with the husk people splitting themselves up among the three lanes.

(All these well laid plans go right out the window if a lane fails, of course, but meh, I guess people will learn in time. More often than not, the previous fort bosses are succeeding, so it’s just a matter of time before folks become comfortable with this fight too, I suspect.)

I can feel myself dropping quite easily into fairly jaded veteran mode already – so aggravating to see dead people lying around scaling up mobs, I always waypoint and run back and often get back faster than the dead people that are still chilling on the ground – so to combat the temptation to be snide out loud, I mostly just shrug, tell myself people will learn eventually (or not, preferably without me there) and look out for organized instances to join, and gamble with PUG instances  when I feel like gambling.

Fortunately, one more chest box has already dropped for me, so I just need to stick it out for one more lucky run. I figure there should be enough organized instances for long enough for that to happen. *crosses fingers and prays to RNGesus*

I did, however, encounter a nice newbie during today’s Vinewrath.

I got a whisper out of the blue from someone who just asked me, “So what are we supposed to do in this fight, what are we doing here?” during a Vinewrath lane defence.

I glanced through all my friends and follower lists, and nope, did not know this person before this. He was at least clever enough to send a random tell to someone to ask, even if he was too nervous to openly ask over say or map chat.

In 4 tells, I summarized the fight for him. Paraphrased: “For now, we’re defending the carrier to the vine wall.”

“If all goes well, we will face the Dark Wing terragriff. Fight like a normal terragriff, it charges and all that.”

“When it runs to the front of the Vinewrath, hop onto an open flower.”

“Flowers will spawn before that, and need to be opened by destroying them before that.”

Guess what. He didn’t die.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him make it to a flower for the first go. Fail to make it to a flower for the second time, taking a hit that took off 7/8s of his hp. Then the terragriff died.

Hooray. I trust learning has taken place.

In the meantime, I’ll just be over here, puttering about, doing my usual things, grinding for one more box (I was right about dem boot boxes by the way, got 6 by now, good thing I didn’t fall for the temptation of buying them!), contemplating maybe gearing some alts in sinister and testing new builds, and waiting for the PAX South announcement.

Please, oh please, let there be news of a way to save/load builds… I’ll trade a good many things for that.

On Difficulty and Performance in Games

I have not played Team Fortress 2 in three months.

I have never played Team Fortress 2 on a regular basis, though I did, once upon a time, play an engineer in Team Fortress Classic daily for 4+ hours until I regularly topped PUG server leaderboards or at least came in second place.

Would you not laugh at me if I were to join a random TF2 server as an engineer and expect/demand the same performance result right off the bat?

—

I played Batman: Arkham Asylum ages ago.

I was a fearsome terror that flapped in the night, chaining the sickest combos that stretched to the 20s and 30s, to the point that I was playing the challenge arenas and hitting most of the achievements and trying to improve my score little by little.

Years later, I picked up Batman: Arkham City…

…and my Batman SUCKED.

I couldn’t even chain 5 attacks. I was getting beat up by ordinary thugs on the street.

Obviously, this is the designers’ fault because they set the difficulty level too hard.

Couldn’t be me. I was a Batman GOD before this.

—

I have not played Skyrim in more than a year.

If I were to buy one of their DLC expansions and log back into my old character, who finished the game some time ago, what are the odds that I will be able to dive headfirst into the content without dying several times while I try to remember which button does what again, and how is my character set up to fight?

I guess this means this is a poor content addition and I should just give up now because I keep dying. It is too hard.

P.S. Full disclosure: It took me about halfway through Arkham City before I finally got the hang of the correct timing to press the appropriate buttons and remembered how to chain combos effectively and felt like Batman again.

I expect to do as badly for Arkham Knight this year.