Short Format Experiments

Oh look, a post!

Such a crazy, elusive, rare sighting it has become.

The good news is, I kinda miss blogging and want to get back into the swing of things.

The bad news is, I don’t think I actually have the time for it, given the immense spread of projects I have on my plate lately.

This is not a To Do list.

This is merely a list of Routine Things I’d Like to Get Done Every Night But am Most Liable to Forget if Not Written Down.

There are plenty of other individual project-related things (eg. scan books, work on a Minecraft goal), non-routine things (eg. explore new patch content from GW2, or actually blog) and really-obvious-routine things (eg. shower and eat dinner) that fight for attention.

Still, it’s a three-day-in experiment into trying to cope with the rather ridiculous propensity of ALL games these days to over-utilize dailies of some kind or another.

Obviously, if I’m not actively playing the game, I don’t give a hoot. (Sorry, Dragonvale, Trove, Cooking Fever, Marvel Heroes, other games I am not interested in and thus have entirely erased any offhand memory as to the existence of daily log-ins, quests, challenges, to-dos.)

But GW2 alone, at the level I want to play at, in order to progress on certain arbitrarily self-chosen goals, is enough to require a bloody reference list.

—

Anyhow, the other piece of good news, such that it is, is that reading about the impending (chill) Blaugust has got me thinking about attempting another kind of experiment into scheduling and habit-setting and juggling routines.

While not actually officially participating in Blaugust (because that implies a level of commitment I don’t have the confidence for -right now-) it occurs to me that I have, once upon a time, wanted to experiment with shorter format posts.

It is quite unthinkable -currently- to find the time daily to write said short format posts.

It is, however, -potentially- possible that I might be able to find time on a weekend to write a -couple- of short format posts.

Which then get scheduled out and posted daily the following week.

In theory.

Maybe.

I might try.

Worth giving a shot, at any rate.

—

And in a complete non-sequitur, I would like to state for the record that I had an epic City of Heroes moment, a vibe that sent nostalgic superhero chills running down my spine, recalling Eden trials and Hamidon raids, in the latest map to hit GW2.

Some fifty to a hundred heroes in flight. Check.

Gaudy colors and costumes. Check.

Gliding -together-, towards a map-wide boss fight. Check.

That moment of shared experience, attention and focus funneled in one direction. Priceless.

The current zerg size somewhat obscures the potential right now, I think, overpowering the encounter via brute force, but in time, as the crowd dissipates somewhat, there might be something pretty cool here.

P.S. My non-spoilery first impression thoughts on the story bits of the first episode of Living Story Season 3 can be found in a quick comment on Bhagpuss’ well-covered non-spoilery patch summary.

GW2: I Think… Downscaling is Borked

I’m just a little bit upset.

I am mildly disturbed to the point of not being able to go to bed at 11.50pm on a Friday night and decided to stay up until 1.30am doing a quick experiment, collecting more data and then writing this blog post.

It started out well enough at around 9pm when I settled down to fill in the blanks on my spreadsheet to observe how downscaling on a level 80 had changed from then to now.

That, then, was merely an exercise in being a little obsessive for the explorer fun of it, because really, what else have I got to do besides run around the new Lion’s Arch, shooting karka hatchlings, and then going back to my usual routines?

I finished filling in the blanks from my screenshots and data and settled in to take a look at how my level 80 warrior had changed from before.

Now, this had been a banner warrior going deep into Tactics to pick up quick breathing at the expense of the more meta precision traitline, so it was not a surprise to see that I had gained a little Power, lost a bunch of Vitality, and gained quite a ton more Precision as a result of losing stats on traitlines and gaining stats on zerker gear.

Nothing shocking. Nothing upsetting. All kinda expected, and it’ll be interesting to see how my other more meta-faithful warrior alt changed too.

However, since this was the warrior I was using to collect downscaling stats on, I looked at that next.

After chasing up various mathematical alleys, I decided that trying to figure out any exact downscaling formulae was going to be tough, especially when I forgot to check or record down any -base stats- at those levels.

So it was pretty much just going to be very crude direct number comparison instead.

I gained a bit damage-wise with the new 80, since I no longer had to give up any stats on traitlines for the utilities I wanted. My crit chance went up by 10%, and crit damage by 8% or so.

This somewhat affected downscaling at lvl 70, as toughness and precision at the new 70 was still more or less better than my old not-so-dps-optimal 70. However, Power took a hit even here, dropping below the previous state.

By lvl 60, the Power stat does reveal that it’s been a little chopped off at the knees, 1391 as compared to the 1546 of before. The other stats are ehh… around the same-ish to slightly worse.

By lvl 50, everything’s taken a hit in effectiveness as compared with pre-patch, and it doesn’t get -any- better as you go lower and lower.

Power’s dropped precipitously and alarmingly, and let us not even speak of critical chance. It is near non-existent.

Now, one may argue that this makes sense. We want to bring the downscaled lvl 80 to lowbie equivalency, right? And lowbies don’t get multiple fancy stats on their gear, like precision and ferocity. Nevermind that builds that rely on high critical chance get a little shafted, it’s for a good cause, you know?

So I decided to check the stats on my lowbies to see if the level 80 had been made equivalent.

And what I saw really freaked me out.

I had a bunch of spare lowbies masquerading as storages, a thief, an engineer, a guardian, the works. Most of them are exactly level 20, thanks to the Experience Scroll veterans get, so I settled on that level to compare.

Many of them had 360-420ish Power, as compared with the new downscaled 80’s 225 Power.

HANG ON, THAT CAN’T BE RIGHT.

Ok, I know I am guilty of twinking out my lowbies hard. I put on even level 20 gear on them. I stack on minor runes of +10 power for 60 total power, give them a sigil of bloodlust (which got nerfed, thanks), I make shiny +Power jewellery for them. So maybe it’s just my twinking making shit unbalanced, right?

(It’s at this point where I realize I can’t go to sleep until I resolve this niggling issue…)

… so lying in bed, I come up with the fairest test I can think of. (That I can perform, given the resource limits that I have.)

Maybe the classes differ, so I am going to take the spare character slot I have, create a new warrior, use up one of my many Experience Scrolls to zap it to level 20, and I am going to buy gear like a noob off the TP, and then check not only just Power stats, but do a quick dps experiment.

This is a near nekkid new level 20. Still in the tutorial gear with nearly no Power on any of it, one hero’s band (+2 Power), and one iron ring (~11 Power iirc) that was a level up reward. She has 178 Power as compared with the downscaled level 80 at 225 Power, 8% crit chance as compared with 21.33% crit chance, 151% crit damage versus 174.7% crit damage. Okaaay.

I go to the TP. I am simulating a newbie, more or less, so here’s what I do. I buy my level 20 armor, all six slots. I pick the one with Power, obviously. I buy weapons the same way.

I -don’t- buy any trinkets or jewellery whatsoever, because they are too expensive anyway, so I have lost a bunch of potential Power stats there already.

I -don’t- put any minor runes or sigils on my gear, because I am a newbie, remember? I don’t understand any of this stuff. I just wear the default thing. It is the same stuff that can drop (which is why it is 2-3 silver as compared with the cutthroat crafted version.)

Do note that my ‘normal’ newbie has 266 Power. The downscaled level 80 has 225 Power.

Ok, she has a crit chance of 8% and crit damage of 151%. He has a crit chance of 21.33% and 174.7% crit damage.

Does that actually make a difference?

In lieu of calculating damage done (because I haven’t looked at those formulas yet), I do a test.

I go to the Wendon waypoint at Brisban Wildlands. The level 80 downscales to 20 in that area. My level 20 is an exact level 20. There are level 19 Jungle Boar there.

I get the exact same utilities, Balanced Stance, For Great Justice, Banner of Strength, minus an elite, because it so happens that I get enough Hero Points by leveling to 20 to unlock those. I have no traitlines on the lowbie, because those unlock at lvl 21. Do the extra traitlines on my level 80 give him an edge, necessitating his stats dropping to under a lowbie’s?

I kill a bunch of boar with the level 20.

Yes, the words are very small, so let me summarize:

• Cyclone Axe (~80 damage)
• Chop (~165-170 damage, critting for 210-250)
• Double Chop (~149-163 damage, critting for 229-259)
• Triple Chop (~145-149 damage on the first two strikes, 324-334 on the last strike, critting for 469-540 damage on the last strike.)
• Boar hits me for 70-77 damage each direct attack, more or less, and healing signet pulses away for 32 healing.

I swap over to the level 80 and do the same thing.

• Cyclone Axe (~64-69 damage, critting for 98-119)
• Chop (~112-145 damage, critting for 171-245)
• Double Chop (~104-129 damage, critting for 168-257)
• Triple Chop (~104-129 on the first two strikes, 235-286 on the last strike, critting for 188-233 on the first two strikes, and didn’t manage to crit on the last strike during my test)
• Boar hits me for 82-89 damage each direct attack, and healing signet still pulses away for 32 healing.

The boar’s bleeds was a constant 32 in both cases (makes sense, since armor doesn’t affect conditions), and the level 80 had a trait that had a chance of applying a bleed on a critical (which did 28-40 damage.)

I dunno… but it SURE SEEMS TO ME like the level 20 is doing more damage than my downscaled level 80. I kill the same boars in less hits on the lowbie than it takes the level 80 to finish off his.

It’s an untwinked lowbie, even!

Guess what happens if I put on the minor runes (each giving +10 Power for a total of 60 power) and the minor sigil of bloodlust (which I didn’t even bother to max out.) I did not even put on any trinkets, so this can go even higher.

Cyclone Axe 97, Chop 170-214, Double Chop 198-214, Triple Chop 192-226 & 412-485 (not a crit.)

I think someone has really gotten carried away with the downscaling if my level 80 is not even equivalent to a level 20 in a level 20 area!

I will leave others to debate if this is a good thing – maybe level 80s should face a sort of ‘hard mode’ as compared with new lowbies? (Never mind that optimizers would probably just try to make lowbie alts if those are the most optimal?)

Maybe this will make the self-styled “elitist” (but not truly elitist) level 80s in dungeons welcome lowbie noobs more when they are statistically better than downscaled 80s, nevermind that they lack knowledge of the mechanics and experienced 80s tend to know what is going on?

Me, I still can’t get over the knee-jerk emotional outrage of being unequivalent in this manner just quite yet. It is just TOO WEIRD. It doesn’t make any logical sense. (Laying it all out in the blog post -is- helping though. I can probably go to sleep after this.)

I do hope and suspect there will be adjustments to the scaling as time goes on, and hopefully in a better direction, but eesh, that’s a very steep downscale curve to get used to, as compared to before, and I have no more words for this beyond “….”

GW2: Sinister Necromancer Nights in the Silverwastes

I’ll fess up.

The first thing that ran through my mind when I heard the news wasn’t “OMG, gotta grind Silverwastes for a HoT beta invite!”

It was more like, “YES! Moar champion chests! Good excuse to revisit the Silverwastes since everyone will be piling back in!”

Like Bhagpuss, I don’t feel really fired up over whether I get into this beta or not – a somewhat strange state of affairs, considering that Path of Exile over yonder is also in closed beta for their Awakening expansion and GW2’s over here prepping for HoT, but I suspect there’s an air of inevitability to it.

I -know- without question that I am -obviously- going to be shelling out for the Heart of Thorns expansion, so -eventually- it is going to get played either way.

Ditto Path of Exile’s expansion, it’s going to be a free update and I’m not a super pro PoE player that can offer valuable feedback or bug reporting, so it’s not going to hurt me to experience it when it’s ready… when it’s done.

—

However, the announcement was a good excuse for me to break out of my habitual GW2 rut and give a little thought and effort towards one of the many “should do someday” ideas on my GW2 endgame list.

Namely, test out sinister gear.

I -could- just bring my tried and trusty zerk guardian with the sword and scepter pewpew into the Silverwastes, but the minor issue with that, besides being boring since I farmed Silverwastes for months with that playstyle, is that his inventory bags runneth over. It’s a struggle to free up 5-10 slots because of all the fun tonics, extra gear, Ascended materials that don’t fit in the bank anymore, leftover seasonal rewards, and a bunch of soulbound consumables that I bought with the pure intentions of practising Arah dungeon solos (and of course, never got around to it.)

The solution thus becomes: bring an alt.

Sifting through the characters that I’d been intending to test sinister gear on, the ranger is still underleveled, the thief’s playstyle I still can’t really wrap my head around (plus it’s kinda dangerous to melee Mordrem on a squishy you’re not used to playing) and my gaze naturally falls on the necromancer.

Here’s a number of birds slain with one stone. He’s a sylvari necro, and we want to play at least one sylvari through HoT because their story is apparently going to diverge some from the other races. Getting him Mordrem-ready and me used to the playstyle would help that goal.

Mordrem are best fought at range. Necros have comparatively decent range attacks beyond their one stabby stabby melee dagger.

The idea of being able to switch between condi, which would melt Mordrem husks, and power/precision, which should enable the more fun zerk necro options like death shroud life blasts, lichform autoattacking, and wells, is extremely appealing.

In theory, anyway.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take that long to put together a set of experimental sinister gear.

I’d already been hoarding the Ascended trinkets from the Living Story in my bank, so it was just a matter of filtering “Ascended” and pulling out the stuff with the right stats. (The back I leave as zerker, since I had a zerker backpiece anyway.)

 

I’d been charging up charged quartz for over a month and racked up some 40 of them before I stopped. Exotic sinister gear was just a matter of getting my Tailor logged on, buying a ton of Gossamer thread and clicking a couple buttons to craft the armor pieces.

Runes were a bit more of an issue.

The one sinister necro build available for reference is DnT’s Brazil’s. He uses Runes of the Aristocracy, which gives condition damage and additional might duration. It makes sense for that build because it’s meant for soloing dungeons, with a major trait synergy of signets giving might. It can actually produce 25 stacks of might on its own, which is pretty sick.

In this case, I’m envisioning more of an open world flexible build – I want swiftness, I want to be able to throw wells and play with lichform and deathshroud because FUN, and I want to be able to kill things from range using either power or condi as I please.

After scanning a Trading Post’s worth of Superior Runes and eliminating super-expensive runes for reasons of poverty, I end up settling for the super-cheap Superior Rune of the Adventurer – condition damage + some power (that sorta fits the whole sinister theme there) + a bit of extra endurance on using a heal skill, which can’t hurt, given a necromancer’s lack of vigor for dodges.

Weapon-wise, I knew I definitely wanted and needed scepter/dagger to be one of them. That is the quintessential necro weapon set for inflicting bleeds.

Dagger/ I eliminated, since I didn’t feel brave enough to go up and stab Mordrem in melee range.

I brooded over staff for a while, then decided to drop it in favor of an axe. Necro staff has always struck me as more of an AoE control-ish sort of weapon, if I was going to autoattack with staff, I may as well drop into death shroud and spam 1, eh? Envisioning Silverwastes, there didn’t seem to be too many opportunities for AoE spam over systematically taking down one Mordrem at a time.

Necro axe on the other hand is a very nice mid range weapon, that can key in on whatever you target, regardless of whatever else in between you and it. It’s a power-based weapon, with a nice damage life-force sucking channeled attack on button 2.

This was the initial experimental build.

6 in Spite went without saying, who wouldn’t want +300 Power and +30% condition duration? I wasn’t going to run signets, so the next best seemed to be VI Reaper’s Might for some might while pewpewing in death shroud. I’m using an axe, so VIII Axe Training for the damage increase and reduced recharge. XII Close to Death because 20% extra damage once a mob drops past 50% health? Yum.

6 in Curses for +300 condition damage (whee) and +300 precision (yay.) II Hemophilia for increased bleed duration (yep, this is our main damage once we go into condi mode), VI Focused Rituals because I want to play with ground-targeted wells, dangit, and the new trait specialization stuff ain’t here yet. XI Lingering Curse to boost conditions dealt with scepter, which oh so happens to be our condi inflictor weapon.

2 points left and I found myself not quite sure of the best place to put these. I gave them a try in Soul Reaping at first, for additional Ferocity, and I figured if I was going to be pewpewing with death shroud, I may as well let Life Blast pierce with VI Unyielding Blast.

Taking the build for a spin in the Silverwastes, it wasn’t half bad.

(In fact, given how the copper husk beelined for me after it had dropped to 1/3 health, and kept thumping me into kingdom come despite sitting on the ridge, I have to surmise that the build might have been dealing a substantial amount of damage. Or maybe it was the extra toughness on my weapons helping to attract aggro.)

I left my weapons as rabid scepter/dagger since I was using Tequatl Ascended weapons and used an exotic zerker axe/warhorn that I also already had.

I had a pretty large number of options for dealing damage – condi scepter/dagger, power axe, power deathshroud, power wells for AoE, and power lichform.

The only thing that got a bit annoying was terragriffs knocking me over (I suspect I’m too used to letting guardian aegis block the initial charge attack) despite rolling what seemed a pretty decent distance away, and needing to stunbreak with spectral walk…

…and I didn’t feel quite as sturdy as my old rabid build. Somehow, I kept finishing up my fights with about half to one third health remaining, and maybe half of deathshroud life force left. Also, I had a tendency to keep falling over during the Vinewrath corridor fights if I missed seeing something that might run me over.

So… enter the revised build to be stress tested further tomorrow.

I’ve not really used Signet of Vamprism very much, but it seems interesting with this build. Left on passive, it heals me a bit when I get hit by anything, so small attacks should sting less. If I take a large hit that dents my health bar, I can activate it for a heal, and mark a mob for life siphoning (which apparently scales with power – and sinister gear has power!)

I found that I wasn’t really utilizing the pierce feature of life blast much, so I swapped 2 points over to Blood Magic instead, with a little extra vitality and healing power. V Vampiric Precision is another experiment, since sinister gear has decent enough crit ability and I’m using either scepter or axe, both autoattacks that are fairly fast, hopefully producing a decent enough trickle of small heals that keep me more topped up than the previous build.

Just running around the regular Silverwastes events, it feels a little more resilient than the first build, which is promising.

P.S. I am not claiming that this is the end-all and be-all of builds out there.

I’m just sharing my design thoughts on how I personally go about making and testing experimental builds that fulfill a certain goal I have in mind (in this case: kill Mordrem, switch flexibly between power and condi, don’t die.)

I generally let other people do the min-max number calculations and settle for a more fuzzy in-game measure of ‘feels good to play, kills comparably fast or faster than other people around me, doesn’t squish and keep dying.’

The Newbie Quitting Point: A MUD Experiment

Dear Readers,

As you may or may not know, MUDs are often considered the early precursors of our modern day MMOs and exist in a distinctly more diverse variety than the branch (diku) that inspired and spawned the graphical games we play today.

There is also the common perception that MUDs are either dying fossils that few people play today, or very niche games with even tinier communities still clinging on like barnacles – an image which presumably might contribute to that decline in popularity.

A number of people just shrug and say “Oh, nobody plays a text game anymore,” which appears to be used as a handy excuse to do nothing about this state of affairs.

This is in interesting contrast to another genre of text games, the text adventures and choose-your-own-path and interactive fiction corner of the web, whose community, niche though it might be, really tries to promote the hell out of their favourite interactive medium with hobbyist websites and community competitions and active academic research and addressing usability issues with newer and different coding/programming languages and parsers and clients to enable the writing and playing of said genre across different platforms.

A friend of mine and I got into a little debate and discussion the other day about MUDs and their perceived decline.

He’s curious as to whether this is really the case or no, and is driven by this curiosity to do a little research about it.

a) Does the decline exist?

and b) if it does exist, why?

As for myself, I’m rather convinced that most MUDs are very much in decline (with perhaps a very few commercial exceptions really making an effort to market themselves and reach out to new audiences, on new platforms.)

We brainstormed up several possible contributing factors:

• Is it the fact that most MUDs are pure text, with little to no graphics, making them immediately unappealing or inaccessible?

• Could it be the control scheme? Typing out commands and navigating in cardinal directions is very much a DOS-like holdover.

• Is it simply the lack of advertising and marketing, meaning that many people may not even have heard about many MUDs out there, or know how to access them, or what features they may offer over graphical MMOs?

• Maybe it’s the archaic look of many MUD websites, which look like they were made during 1997 in the Geocities’ heyday?

• Perhaps it’s problems with the client? These days, Windows doesn’t even come with Telnet. So scratch one mode of access. It’s usually a downloadable client – which may make some people pause – or a web browser client, which may have its own host of issues?

• Or maybe there are so many small, hobbyist MUDs out there that the population of people who are willing to play a text-based game are all distributed among them and spread out too thinly? That they all feel they owe allegiance to only their one particular MUD and view the rest as competitors, thus presenting a disunited community face to the world?

It may very well be all of them are valid and contribute to the overall problem (though it’ll be interesting to know what the percentages are and what primarily turns many people away.)

While we don’t have access to all MUDs, and thus can’t do an overarching survey, our prior history with one MUD did give us a little insider access to an immortal/developer source, whose game logs and metrics register that on the average, 1-2 new players try this specific MUD out -every- day (a game that tends to lack heavy advertising or promotion, and yet new players do stumble across it), but just as quickly, around level 2-3, they quit, never to log back in again.

Since newbie retention is one end of the funnel that determines whether a game faces growth or decline in population (the other end is veterans dropping off from attrition,) this subject is what we’ve narrowed down to exploring for now.

My particular interest is in how similar or dissimilar this might turn out to be from factors affecting newbie retention in MMOs – we see developers scrambling to provide more guided experiences, as in GW2’s latest New Player Experience, which caused a certain hue and outcry among its veterans, or as Bashiok remarked regarding WoW’s barriers to entry, “Well *I* consider the biggest barrier being it’s a 3D WASD game with a moveable camera,” suggesting the control scheme might be an aspect to consider as well.

Problem is, neither of us are exactly newbies to MUDs, especially not -this- MUD in particular, even if we did stop playing it for a long time.

What we really need are fresh perspectives and new eyes to take a quick gander around and simulate a newbie (even better if you have zero MUD experience) and then share with us the point at which you might quit.

http://www.realmsofdespair.com/play-now

My assumption is that you’ll only spend 5-30 minutes of your time at the most.

Log in, look around and explore, and at the point where you feel that you might close the client and never return, come back here and post a comment as to where that point was, and why it irked you to the point that you might quit.

No obligations. Wherever the stopping point was for you, is what we want to hear about.

You needn’t even have to make it into the game. It could be “I looked at the website and it was butt ugly, so I stopped” or “I couldn’t find one bit of useful info about wtf the game was, or how to even start playing” or whatever gut response made you give up.

Could be “the client didn’t run” or “I couldn’t get a name I wanted” or “there was too much reading I had to do” or “I got lost and didn’t know where I was” or “I didn’t even know how to navigate or move around” or “it was too overwhelming I didn’t have a clear objective as to what to do” or “I wandered somewhere and died” or “I met someone and they scared me away” or “I never even saw anyone to talk to and got bored” or “levelling up was too slow” or whatever it was for you that prompted a quit response.

Maybe you didn’t get such a response and would be perfectly okay playing the game, and/or it was simply lack of time and too many other games on the plate competing for your attention – we’d like to hear about that too.

If you can’t spare even 5 minutes of your time to play a text-based MUD, I would also like to beg one favour from you:

To leave a comment here stating why it did not seem worth your time to even try a MUD out for 5 minutes – whatever it was that ran through your mind, be it “eesh, text games, I don’t play games without graphics” or “I’m already playing X game, I don’t have time to start another” or “I don’t want to download a new client” or “this is just a sneaky way to promote and advertise this MUD and I’m not falling for it!” (full disclosure: I quit this MUD in 2004 and have zero interest in its health or lack thereof, my friend may be a little more fond of it and I’m mostly doing him a favor with this outreach to my supremely limited blog audience) or whatever it was that prevented you from even clicking on the link and cranking the client up.

This isn’t an official academic social research project of any kind, it’s mostly to sate our curiosity and get a small sample from the group of MMO players that also happen to read gaming-related blogs.

The more responses we get, the more we’ll be able to get a grasp on some of the possible issues, so your help and your time is very much appreciated!