Monday, October 13, 2014

Where Have All The Static Spawn's Gone? Long Time Passing!

I really miss leveling in MMOs, the way it used to be. Everyone a certain level goes to certain zones and either joins a party currently killing a static spawn or waits for space to open up, or they  start a new group for a different spawn.

Game-long friendships were formed this way. You’d see other folks running around the world 5 levels above you and think, “I knew that guy from Norther Desert of Ro and he was my same level! Wonder what he’s been killing to get so high so fast!” Maybe you’d send him a tell and he’d tell you where better killing is, or completely ignore you for the noob you were.

Maybe the group killing pygmy goblins in Lyonesse had a great leader from was *amazing* and helpful and you joined his guild and jumped games with him and other guildmates and you’ve been friends ever since.

Maybe you just sat there and did nothing while the party leader only invited his friends, and your only choices for leveling were killing this one static spawn or doing a dungeon and no one else you knew was on so you went and played solitaire and cursed stupid online communities.

Static spawns aren’t always awesome - but when did they go completely away? Now we go from exclamation point to exclamation point, or dungeon to dungeon, or public quest to public quest. No interacting, no real discussion. The only conversation being a call for a rez, or a shoutout if anyone has seen a mob.

I’d like to see some mixture of MMO leveling options for those who’d just like to get together with some friends and kill a few hours where you might actually have to explain stuff to people. Of course, judging by how WoW raid finder works, maybe this isn’t the best idea.

It’d be nice to have the option though!

Thursday, October 9, 2014

eSports Overload!

I used to watch every Starcraft 2 event I could possibly watch. Whether it was live or recorded, I’d watch just about everything, at least up until the final 4. If I didn’t care about anyone in the final 4, I’d tend to stop watching at that point, because there was other stuff to get to.

Then WCS hit, and I simply couldn’t watch everything. It was just too much content, considering I liked watching the talk shows and big events. It helps that WCS was horribly done in the North American scene and after I couldn’t watch a few days in a row I was so far behind there was no way to catch up. I stopped caring.

Geoff "iNcontroL" Robinson did a big rant just after WCS launched about how we’re diluting the SC2 scene with events, and how viewers would suffer for it. I thought he was right then….but even with the WCS changes it’s still been bad for SC2 stuff.

Now though, we’ve been watching a ton of Hearthstone, so our SC2 watching has dropped off a bit. We still catch the big tournaments (DreamHack, HomeStory Cup, Lonestar Clash, RedBull events), but there’s no more good talk shows to watch since Chanman left. At least, none that I’ve found that I enjoyed.

I watched a bit of TI because, well, it’s TI and who doesn’t want to watch something called a “newbie stream” when you’ve never played or watched DOTA2?! It was fun! For a bit. But the rest of my keeping up with eSports was through Chanman’s show, Unfiltered. When he stopped doing it, I stopped caring. I haven’t watched Live on 3 in a while though….I think I’ll put that on the watch list. But moving on to the point!

Now that we’re heading into Blizzcon finals for Hearthstone and SC2 in just a few weeks as well as DreamHack Open 2014, and some TakeTV tournaments - there’s even less time for watching stuff, considering it’s football season and my husband is determined to make me play Disc Golf on Saturdays.

Even without watching WCS (ugh!), King of the Hill tournies, random Twitch channels, or any esports shows, I find myself having to choose very carefully what content I have to watch. Let’s not be crazy, I still watch 8bits! But I haven’t even had time to watch Crumps2’s Twitch channel lately! It’s so sad!

I seem to be choosing events to watch based on casters, or favorite players - and when they’re out I tend to stop watching almost immediately.

I see now why folks on Reddit only seem to watch one game, as evidenced by the fact that every community seems *shocked* that some big event did something they’ve never seen before that another game has been doing for years.

There just isn’t enough time to take care of a household, watch everything I want, work, *and* play! Either way, the next 12 weeks will hold a lot of tournaments I’m looking forward too, along with the holiday season - so it’ll be a great time for some hot chocolate while I decorate the house and do laundry...and root for the Bronco’s!

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Kripp Saving eSports!

I want to take a few moments out to share how much I enjoyed this weekend’s World Cyber Arena (WCA), casted by Kripparian on his Twitch channel.

Let’s be honest, the event was a mess. Internet issues, horrendous scheduling, last second rule changes, missed flights for 1 competitor and 1 caster. If it could have gone wrong, it did. So why did I enjoy it so much?

The cast was *amazing*. Kripp did a really great job at explaining the issues, and I’ve never enjoyed a cast so much as the downtime discussions between Kripp and the players who switched in and out to co-commentate.

It really irks me when tournaments who experience issues and have their casters come on and say “hey, we’re having some technical issues, so we’ll start the games as soon as possible”, and then, nothing. Production throws up a “We’ll be right back” screen and then music plays for anywhere from five to 90 minutes.

Even less often, someone throws up funny “we’re still working on it” or time updates on a ticker on the screen. I appreciate those, but they’re not used often. I want to say DreamHack and RedBull do it. Does anyone else?

So why was this so different? From the moment the stream came up (a bit late) Kripp was honest about the issues, his control over them, what was being done to help alleviate it, and then pretty much ignored them and did his best to provide an outstanding cast of an event with what was clearly minimal support by the event organizers. There were some “yeah, I know it’s bad, I can’t help it” moments that just made my heart break for him! But he soldiered on in a great way with a much better attitude than I would have had!

I want to be really clear here, as event organizers, WCA clearly failed on many fronts. It doesn’t matter if the issues stemmed from inexperience, translation issues, internet issues, DDOS, scheduling…..what made this event fun was Kripp.

He was handling the stream and casting for North America and he did a really great job at taking what must have been a stressful and overwhelming experience and turning it into a cast that is unrivaled in pure fun, interesting discussions!

I feel there was some uncomfortable moments between That’sAdmirable and Kripp - but everyone else fit in nicely and traded informations, jokes, bad manner, and killed time in such an enjoyable way that I feel a ton of esports casts could learn from this experience.

We never get to hear this kind of back and forth in events which many consider to have “good production”. They always wrap things up, go to a commercial, and then come right back to a game. Seeing a different way of doing things makes me wish we did it more often.

There was a Starcraft 2 event a while back, one of the first RedBull events, where Day9 and Husky talked for almost 30 minutes regarding everything from the best food they ate in the city they were in and the current meta of the game and how they expected it to shift with the new planned updates. It was fantastic! Why do we not do this anymore?

Regardless of how the games turned out (GREAT death-Shammy player!) in China, I am 100% certain I will tune into the next Kripp hosted event…..and sadly, I am hoping Trump misses his flight again. Kripp did a great job on his own, and the players switching in and out in between their matches gave me a great insight into their views of the games and the event as a whole that I never would have gotten had Trump been there to co-cast.

Great job Kripp. Saving esports!