#Blaugust Day 7: Endings

All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows when to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death. - Sandman #6 - Neil Gaiman

I've been thinking about endings recently. About how much we dread and resist them, but how joyous and cathartic they can be when they finally come. At least they can when handled well. A bad ending can retroactively taint everything that came before and turn something you enjoyed into something to be forgotten or even actively railed against. The way something ends is the last impression it makes, and often becomes the most powerful.

So much of what separates a good ending from a bad one is timing; leaving before the welcome is overstayed. It's more complex than that of course; even a well-timed end can fall flat if badly handled, but dragging things out too long seems to be the surest way to ensure a bad end.

Also, not bringing a friend

MMOs by their nature are not good at ending. They're created with the intent of continuing on as long as possible. When they do end, it's often after a decline in studio support that leads to a sort of stumbling half-life leading up to the end. Is it any wonder that so many players, when they do finally cut ties with a game, seem to be filled with hatred for the game they presumably once enjoyed? When the end did come for them, it had taken too long and was no longer satisfying.

It falls to the players to ensure a good end in these situations, by accepting when the time has come. Don't fall into the trap of forcing yourself to keep going when a game is no longer entertaining. Be willing to accept when the time to move on has come. That way, at least the memories can still be pleasant. And you might even decide to return at a later date. After all, the other thing about endings is that the best ones always leave you wanting more.

#Blaugust Day 6: Magic Duels: Tromple Not Included

I've been somewhat interested in the new free-to-play online Magic: The Gathering game, Magic Duels, since I heard that a) it had come out and b) it wasn't blatantly horrible or absurdly monetized. Wizards of the Coast hasn't had the best track record with online versions of Magic, or really with anything online ever.  Still waiting on those digital tools for D&D 5th Edition guys!

I decided to check it out a couple weeks ago when I first heard it was out, but discovered it wasn't out on PC, just iOS. I am not one of the chosen of the Cult of Jobs, so I moved on and kept an ear out for the PC release. Last week I learned that it had been released on Steam.  I ended up downloading it while we were recording the most recent Aggrochat, and opened it up Sunday. Sadly, horrible connection issues meant it kept crashing in the middle of games or losing connection entirely. Since playing offline would mean not earning any currency for my games, I gave it a miss and played Marvel Heroes instead.

Yesterday, I decided to try again. Apparently the connection issues have been even worse the past few days with servers being entirely down for large swaths of time. By the evening however, things were working smoothly and I was able to play through the first bit of story and get access to my initial cards for duels.

Once the connection issues were out of the way, the game worked very well. Menu items are highlighted to direct you to where you should go next to learn your way around, and the first story campaign introduces the basic concepts, spell types, and abilities as you go along. I had seen someone claim (I don't recall where now) that the concept of the stack wasn't included in this game, and that there were no instants.  I'm happy to report that that is not the case; I have to assume that they just didn't play far enough in for instants to be introduced. Most of the decks I tried out in AI duels were green / something and the pleasure of turning a 2/1 weenie into a 7/6 trampler is alive and well.

Admittedly, I was gilding the lily a bit when I did it

Currency seems fairly reasonable to earn; it takes 150 coins to buy a 6 card booster, and you get 5, 10, or 15 from an AI duel depending on difficulty level or 20 from a player duel. There are also quests given each day; each of yesterday's involved winning 2 or 4 duels with particular deck colors and was worth 40 coins. Sadly you don't earn any coins from playing friends, but win-trading is a thing, so I'm not surprised.

In the end, I was impressed.  Magic Duels is a solid online version of Magic (assuming the servers don't fall over again) that you can play for free.  If you decide to check it out, feel free to friend me on Steam so we can duel!

#Blaugust Day 5: Under the Weather

Today's post may be a bit scattered; I'm not feeling too hot which is making concentrating on writing a bit difficult. I went in for a checkup Monday since it's been a good 15 years or so since I saw a doctor and got a tetanus booster shot while I was there. I had forgotten how much those can hurt. I've been pretty achy since then; hopefully it won't last too much longer.

No, not that Lockjaw

Being under the weather meant I didn't really feel like anything group-based or terribly complicated yesterday, so after a bit of a nap after work I jumped into Marvel Heroes for a while. I've reached level 45 with Magneto and have begun Chapter 8 of 9, which ends with the assault on Doom's Castle. Chapter 7 is the first I've finished without reaching the top of it's recommended level range, so I may have to head to Midtown to pick up a few levels before facing Doom. Without the synergy bonus I've got effectively doubling my experience gain I imagine I would have needed to spend a fair bit of time there or in Industry City even to reach this point.

Hopefully by tonight I'll be feeling more sociable. We shall see.

#Blaugust Day 4: Making Connections

My primary reason for blogging is to express my thoughts and get some of what I think about into a more finished form and in front of an audience.  In addition to that though, there's also a desire to better connect with a community that I'm a part of but don't always interact with.  I'm an introvert by nature so I have a tendency to lurk at the edges.  Blogging is one step towards counteracting this but I also want to be better about commenting on the blogs of others.

Liore's post about the importance of comments is what really got me thinking about this.  I rarely comment on blogs. To a great degree this is because I second guess myself and end up deciding that what I was going to say is silly or obvious.  I've often written a comment then deleted it and moved on rather than hit the submit button.  But even the least comment says 'I read this and thought it interesting enough to remark on', which is a nice thing to see in response to something you wrote.

I've decided to make a deliberate effort to comment on multiple blogs each day of Blaugust, and hopefully get in the habit of doing so more in the future.  I have to imagine that with something like 80 blogs participating at least a few will inspire a remark from me each day.  At the same time I'm going to try to make a point of engaging with those who comment on my blog.  It seems only right to let those who went to the trouble of responding to my thoughts know that I value their input.

Blaugust Day 3: Master of Magnetism!

Marvel Heroes is another game whose developers seem to be very good at learning from their mistakes. Most recently they did away with multiple story mode difficulties. Where previously you had to run through the entire story 3 times to get all the available rewards on a particular character (most importantly power points) a single run through the story now takes you from level 1 to 60. Previously you would expect to be around level 25 the first time you fight Doctor Doom. Now you'll be nearly at the level cap when you reach Doom.

I decided to test this out by pulling out one of the characters I have unlocked but a level 1 and seeing how the leveling felt in this new system. I considered a couple of options, but ultimately decided on Magneto.

Those are some impressive guns for a 90 year old.

I played through the first 4 chapters of 9, and had hit level 33 by the time I defeated the Kingpin. Based on a little time spent in Midtown Manhattan, that seems to still be a quicker way to level, but Story mode is definitely a more viable leveling option than before.

I did notice that villains in events had a lot less health than before, resulting in super-villains often being defeated almost instantly when they appeared. On one hand, it's nice that I can complete those events by myself without it being a multi-minute slog now. I think maybe they need to be adjusted back up a little though, as it's pretty much not worth trying to get to one unless you were near it when it spawned.

As far as Magneto's gameplay, I had a lot of fun floating around hurling metal shards at people and listening to Magneto's haughty comments whenever other heroes ran by. Magneto uses 'debris' as a secondary resource for his attacks which recovers slowly over time or faster through wrecking up the place. I tend to destroy anything around in any case just for fun, so that works out well for me. I also really like the white costume they chose as his default, though if his costume from his time as Headmaster of the Xavier School ever gets added to the game, I'll be picking that up immediately.

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

One of the things that continually impresses me about Final Fantasy XIV is that the developers are very good at learning from their mistakes. Sometimes systems don't work quite how they were intended to at first, but improvements get made and the game develops over time. One good example of this is cutscenes.

The storyline in FFXIV includes a lot of cutscenes throughout, many of which can be fairly long. All well and good, but at first those cutscenes would often be in the middle of dungeons. If not everyone in the dungeon wants to watch the cutscene, then you end up with some members of a group either having to wait for the others to finish, or running on ahead and starting fights without the person who was watching the cutscene. The very worst offenders were the final two 8 person trials in the initial story, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium. It is entirely possible for a player to watch the cutscene triggered before a boss in one of those trials and find that by the time the cutscene is over the rest of the group has already defeated the boss and moved on without them.

In the content that was added in later patches however, mid-dungeon cutscenes are noticably rare. When they do exist they are usually very short. Cutscenes at the beginning of dungeons are usually quite short as well, with the long ones almost always placed at the end of dungeons where watching them won't hold the rest of your group up. The lesson was learned and adjustments were made to avoid repeating the mistake.

I've been working on my crafting jobs recently, and I've noticed the same sort of thing there, where choices appear to have been made to address weaknesses in the crafting system or to fix elements that don't have the expected effect.

Crafting in FFXIV is a mini-game that involves using various abilities to fill a progress bar while also trying to increase a quality bar as much as possible to improve your chance of producing a high quality verison of the item you're making. For final products a high quality item is noticeably better than the normal version, having higher stats across the board. You have a limited number of actions to do this with as well as a limited amount of crafting points to spend on your abilities. To complicate things even further, your craft has a material condition which can vary over the course of the craft, adding an element of randomness to the process.

In theory, one needs to pay attention to material condition and react differently depending on the current condition since it heavily affects the amount of quality added by abilities. In practice, at most points in the process changing which ability you use would result in wasting the effects of previously used abilities or using too many crafting points and running out too soon. Thus, condition ends up just being something you don't pay much attention to that occasionally greatly helps you or screws you over.

In Heavensward, all the crafting jobs get a new ability at level 53, Precise Touch, which increases item quality. This ability is identical to the very first quality increase ability you receive, Basic Touch, with two differences. Precise Touch can only be used when material condition is Good or Excellent, and it adds a level of Inner Quiet to your Stack. Inner Quiet is a status you can stack that increases the effectiveness of all you quality increase abilities.

That's useful in and of itself, of course, but more importantly that stack can then be spent to fuel the ability Byregot's Blessing, which increases quality by an amount dependent on the size of the Inner Quiet stack.

What this means is that any time you would normally use Basic Touch, it is better to use Precise Touch if possible. Now you need to pay attention to material condition so you can use the better ability. It's not a huge change, but a small step to slightly more complex crafting. Of course, whether you think that's a good thing or not will depend on whether you view it as interesting complexity or not. I'm still not entirely sure on that point, but it's at least an attempt.

Blaugust Returns, Day 1

I originally started this blog on the first day of Blaugust last year, so I suppose it's somewhat fitting that I return to it on the first day of Blaugust.  I'm not really certain why, but I just haven't felt much inspiration to write in recent months.  Time for a fresh start though, and to see if I can keep things going this time around.  We shall see.

What are you hoping to get out of Blaugust this year?

 Belghast posted that question as a writing prompt for the first day of Blaugust, and it seems like a good question for me to answer.  What am I hoping to get out of this?  I'm certainly not it for the phat stacks of blog cash.  I have a day job that works just fine for me; this will only ever be a hobby.  I think I mostly want to blog as a way to think about my ideas and get them out into a more concrete form.

That's why I blog (when I do), but why Blaugust in particular?  I've found that I tend to work best with concrete goals.  That's one of the reasons that I'm a big fan of in-game achievements; they provide me suggested goals to work towards which give me sufficient structure that I'm not just flailing around wondering what to do.  Blaugust serves a similar purpose, setting a goal of one blog per day for a month.  I've done it once, but this time I'd also like to try and use that month to come up with some ongoing structure to keep me going.  One of my friends had a few suggestions for ongoing features I could write each of which could run for a year or more if done on a weekly basis.  I may try to do one or more of those and see how that goes.

In any case, Blaugust has come and the challenge has begun.  Let's do this.