Blaugust Day 1: And I’m Cutting Corners Already

Back from business trip, got home at 6pm, completely bushed.

Had a bath, then collapsed into bed, not really sure if it was going to be a nap or if I was going to sleep like the dead until the next morning.

Woke at 9pm.

Just in time to catch the very last sequence of TTS guild missions for the week, albeit with some preliminary cursing and swearing as my internet has been dropping out intermittently lately.

(I need to figure out the cause eventually, possibly something to do with the Killer NIC software/drivers or ethernet adapters not playing nicely together, or router issues, or is it my ISP, but thankfully, I installed a motherboard with -two- ethernet connections, one Intel, one Killer NIC, and I’ve experienced this problem before.

Then, what solved it was yanking out the Ethernet cable from the Intel adapter and sticking it into the Killer NIC one, which suddenly and completely stabilized the connection for months.

Now that it’s doing the same damn thing again, it’s time to do the opposite, yank it out of the Killer NIC one and stick it back into the Intel one, which *touches wood* seems to have resolved the issue. Weird.)

Finished guild missions. Open Reddit and blogs to find out there’s a massive explosion of GW2 news to catch up on, and a massive explosion of blog posts to read since Blaugust is here.

Went down the GW2 news rabbit trail a while: Sweet, the first beta weekend is actually set during my country’s super-long national day holiday celebration for turning 50 years of age (SG50). First time ever that real life and game stuff has coincided so nicely, since you get used to waking up at 3-5am for special game events when you’re living on the other side of the planet as the game developers’ work day.

There’s a massively long post about fractals that I haven’t had time to fully digest yet, and a whole bunch of Reddit reactions to it.

GW2 seems to be revving up to do some kind of big announcement at Gamescom 2015 too… possibly the anticipated “challenging group content.”

(Every time I say or type the phrase, it comes with this little bit of impending dread trickling down the back of my spine.)

As for Blaugust, well, I kinda want to join it so that my faithful readers have a whole lot of nice things to read for the month of August, to make up for my dead silence of July. I kinda want to get back into the blog posting habit. I kinda want to enjoy the whole social atmosphere of bloggers getting together and cheering each other on.

I haven’t had dinner yet.

I go out to the kitchen, reheat some leftovers, scan through the whole flood of Blaugust-related posts, and kinda groan about the whole “gotta sign up for Anook” thing, the “please update your posts here and there to make everyone’s lives easier,” the “hey, do use Twitter to announce your stuff” (I HATE TWITTER) and all the attendant administrative stuff that completely rips out the joy of writing and posting a nice simple blog post about what’s on your mind and what you’ve been doing and what you want to share.

Whatever happened to the good old days of “Yo, just put me on an RSS reader and check out what I’ve been up to, when you have the time?” All these ‘push’ technologies. *twitch*

I finish dinner.

It’s 11.30pm.

I kinda want to have an official Blaugust Day 1 post up by the 1st of August (local time). WordPress is a harsh mistress. She -knows- what time you post.

So you know what? Here, I’ll steal my Reddit post about raids and the anticipation of probable raids in GW2, clean it up a tide, and post it as food for thought:

I’m against raids that are similar to how other MMOs do raids, with design choices that promote exclusion, elitism and guild drama.

That means things like:

• a repeating gear treadmill/hamster wheel for more and more stats on your gear to improve your performance so that you can kill bigger and badder bosses;
• an RNG loot system where either people get jealous of other people getting stuff they also want or feel they’re never progressing or worse, are backsliding because everyone else is getting more powerful;
• where people feel encouraged to jump guilds because they got lucky with drops and the rest are ‘too slow’ for them;
• where others feel they can or should or have no choice but to kick their own fellow guildies out from participating in raids because their performance is not up to snuff, rather than helping them learn and getting better, and so on.

I probably wouldn’t mind guild-based instances in GW2 if: 

• you get challenging PvE content (including getting to fight really big monsters) as a guild group;
• where you can earn individual tokens or progress on an individual reward track per raid you attend so that you’re not at the whims of RNG;
• where the guild as a whole has a different progression track to unlock bigger and badder monsters (preferably with some nifty guild hall rewards like trophies to show how far the group has gotten);
• where raids can flexibly scale to the number of guildies you bring, rather than force a leader to bench someone because oops, only 15 people or whatever;
• and most importantly where the stats playing field is, more or less, level between someone who had to tend to real life for a couple of months and someone who raids fanatically daily (or however frequently the raids occur) so that the former people do not get left behind, left out and otherwise excluded from learning the raid at any time. (See existing guild missions and triple trouble as good examples, anyone can be new even now, and still join in, learn how to do it and contribute equally.)

I may elaborate on it further later on. Feel free to jump on the topic or comment as you like.

As for the Anook thing, and other administrative details, you know what… I’ll deal with it tomorrow.

(Which is in about 2 minutes’ time.)

P.S. No, I still draw the line at Twitter.