Guild Wars 2 Beta: Either don't play a charr, or wait for the actual release

Incredibly beautiful world. Unfortunately, its beauty is matched by its lagginess and confusingness (lol is that even a word) and bugginess.

Especially for the charr personal story, things are so ridiculously easy up to the arena bit, the leadins of which are ridiculously easy... then the siege devourer appears. That + lagging at least 3-5 seconds on all my skills in there, not to mention moving, makes the fight impossible. Not sure what's happening there, I don't lag THAT badly anywhere else.

When I managed to finally beat it on a fluke, I couldn't figure out how on earth to get OUT of the arena, so in desperation I teleported out.

WHOOPS! Now I have to do the fight AGAIN, everything I did has been reset.

._.

Also keep getting errors when trying to log into my existing charr, and when trying to create new characters. I have no idea whether that's because we're only allowed one character in beta, since the error messages certainly don't say *that*. So I'm left trying to log in over and over, and then seeing errors over and over.

And the LAG! Not even just on skills, MOVING seems so slow compared to GW. Not to mention the zoom. WTB MOAR ZOOM PLZ. Zoom feels like I'm stuck in a closeup. >.<

Contrast this to how amazingly smooth the intro is for a newbie in Prophecies, and how you can zoom way back to get some proper perspective.

I'm probably not touching GW2 again until the actual release. The beta can go hang.

Unhappy nugget is unhappy.

Added:
So I went and tried a human necromancer after it stopped bugging out... Uh... okay the Charr setting is gorgeous. The human one is just blah, on top of all the other problems.

The human area actually left me convinced that GW is more beautiful than GW2. The charr area at least really impressed me in terms of looks.

...I feel like someone who got engaged to this gorgeous all-round wonderful (by general repute) girly, even though there were some niggling misgivings, and who decided to BE OPTIMISTIC. And then this morning I had me a little grope and... AAAA THERE ARE TEETH WHERE TEETH SHOULD NOT BEEEEE.

._. Here's to hoping launch day doesn't make me feel the same way.

Pan-fried miso-marinated steak with onions, salted fermented soybeans, and strawberries

DA TASTIES!!!!

Zomg this is absolutely lovely. Particularly because I have trouble getting steaks as rare as I like in most restaurants. They look at me and insist on hearing 'well-done' when I say, 'rare', which results in my having to start repeating, 'BLOOD, I want BLOOD.' The blood trick gets me rare steaks, but also very strange looks.

But nao, nao I can cook my OWN! Mooohahahaha.

Steaky Goodness Requires
Miso - enough to liberally coat and massage into your steak bits
Cooking wine - I use Chinese plum wine
Onions - enough to cover 2/3 of your pan after slicing
Salted fermented soybeans - roughly 1/6th of the amount of onions you use
Steak! Any sort, after the 24-hour miso marination it'll be juicy and tender
Strawberries - enough to arrange prettily around the plate
Ghee - dollops for frying

Side Dish
Sweet corncob - 1 per person
Ghee -  to taste
Salt - to taste

Marinade da Steak

  1. Slice steak into 1.5 inch thick bits
  2. Massage with miso till steak is coated and happy
  3. Plop in a soup dish
  4. Pour plum wine over the lot till the bottom of the dish is covered
  5. Cover dish with aluminium foil, toss in fridge
  6. Ignore for 24 hours

Make da Steak

  1. Dollop ghee into frying pan, use more than you think you'll need
  2. Wait till ghee does a kinda nice streaky thing when you tilt the pan
  3. Scrape miso off steak bits with spatula (if you have paper towels you can blot with those, I am too primitive a cook to have them)
  4. Plop in pan, steak bits should sizzle nicely but not attempt to kill you via oil splattering
  5. If steak attempts to murder you with oil splatters, turn heat down until it stops doing that XD
  6. Cook to the doneness you like
  7. Put on plate to let it rest

Make da Tasty Soybean Onions

  1. Mix sliced onions and soybeans into your leftover miso and plum wine marinade
  2. Pour the whole lot into the pan of tasty leftover cow-juice and ghee
  3. Cook until onions are nicely caramelised with just a hint of bite

Make da Silly Corn

  1. Violently yank corn leaves and silk off corn, cackling all the while
  2. Pour a mug of water into rice cooker
  3. Put (empty) bowl in rice cooker
  4. Balance corn on empty bowl
  5. Close, hit cook, ignore till it beeps

 

Serve da Tasties

  1. Move steak bits to new plate, so their juicies don't bleed all over and offend your eyes - and so kittehs can lick the resting plate
  2. Cover with tasty soybean onions
  3. Slice strawberries and arrange around steak bits
  4. Steal corn from rice cooker
  5. Dollop ghee on corn
  6. Sprinkle salt on corn


EAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT! YAY! EAT! EAT! EAT!

Particularly try eating strawberries with steak AND onion and soybeans all in one mouthful. O.O It is surprisingly wonderful - the strawberries sit on top of everything like a sweet fruity melody, and the rest is just amazingly umami.

RedAnt on how Clicktale doesn't quite tell the whole tale.

This Clicktale review is completely independent – we’ve used it on several projects where we wanted to better understand user interactions. We’ve had a chance to look at both the way it collects data and how it reports this information. We’ve also had the opportunity to compare the results against other other software tracking tools, as well as other approaches to the same task such as physical eye tracking. We started using Clicktale based on many of the positive reviews we’d read, but on further investigation many of these were paid reviews (via affiliate commission).

Clicktale is a software tool which allows you to track what users are doing on your website. It is used to analyse how people behave and what they do on particular pages. We’ve used it on several projects to try to gain a better understanding of how users were travelling through the site. More specifically, we were trying to get a better understanding of how they were using particular pages & forms, and what steps we could take to improve our conversion rate.

To summarise our experience, we were quite disappointed with the results. The Clicktale reports seem to illustrate certain behaviours and user problems, but after some investigation we realised these weren’t problems.

Users were in fact behaving differently to what this tool was describing.

We wasted a lot of time investigating issues that we couldn’t reproduce, and worrying about defects which weren’t there.

Our problem was that we realised that some of the Clicktale data was wrong… but the trouble was we didn’t know which bit.

Using Clicktale is not like looking over their shoulder. Clicktale records mouse position every second or so and keyboard strokes. Then, in a separate process, a Clicktale bot visits your site and takes a screenshot of that page. The actual playback is an animation of this screenshot and an image of a mouse cursor moving over the top of it. Similarly the heatmap uses this screenshot.

There are a few problems with this approach, but the primary one is that the screen that you’re seeing in the playback can be quite different to the one that your user just saw.

via redant.com.au

We've been using Clicktale too... This kinda explains some of our results. ._.

Weird: Rift is not even half as fun as Forsaken World.

Yes, a subs-based AAA fantasy MMO is not even half as fun (or IMO) even half as good as an asian F2P AAA fantasy MMO. (Not to say that I think there is anything wrong with F2P asian MMOs, just that the focus of their studios tends to be a little (ok a lot) different and the general perception of them seems to be bad.)

And this is despite these two being more or less polar opposites with where their studios and dev teams are coming from.

Rift just glows with love love love... in every aspect but its art direction, which is honestly, quite terrible.

Forsaken World just glows with love love love for profit... in every aspect, including its art direction, which is very strong.

Why do I think FW is better, and more fun?

FW has better combat mechanics.
The classes are better thought out, and combat flows more smoothly. Rift combat feels incredibly clunky and unwieldy for some reason. None of the souls I've played have really seemed to 'gel'. Be it from the press eleventy billion buttons builds that some mages have, to the press just two buttons builds that some ranged rogue builds are. FW classes, in contrast, have *flow*. Once you get into the groove, once you know what you are doing, they just *feel* right.

FW has better sound.
FW has great sound - with some classes showing it off better than others. If you have played a bard to a highish level in FW (60+), you'll KNOW the difference between how water/wind/light bards sound just by listening to them play (assuming proper play) - no need to even look at the screen. Contrast this with Rift, where everyone sounds the same. ._. Not just the players, even the mobs sound the same! As someone who usually turns off the music, but leaves the sound on, and who depends on the sound for cues on what to do next, the fact that everything in Rift sounds more or less the same is a big downer.

FW has better art direction.
FW is an attractive, vivid world. While there are some stylistic choices I may not personally like, (hrmm Stonemen), I cannot argue that they are beautiful in their own way. Whereas Rift is bland bland BLAND. And don't even get me started on mage gear. Good lord, I'm convinced Rift mages have the ugliest gear in the MMOverse, even when you discount rendering engines (of which Rift has a rather good one).

I would say those are the three main things that stand out for me. FW, while I played it, was an MMO where I looked forward to jumping into the game world. Rift is just kinda blaaaaah.

This makes me feel sad, because Trion so obviously loves its game and cares about its community. But that isn't enough to overcome the three points above. It's like eating a dish made with the finest ingredients and a great amount of love which has unfortunately, somehow turned out tasteless.

Needless to say, I won't be renewing Rift into month 3, though I wish Trion and the Rift community all the best.

...here's to hoping GW2 won't break my gameynugget heart.

WoW vs Rift: Cross-Server LFG/LFR isn't the only problem - Big Bear Butt Blogger » I Have Met the Asshat, and it is Dalra

Please note, there has been an update to be found at the bottom of this article on April 14th, 2012.

So, you know how I was amazed at how bad that LFR run in Dragon Soul was as a healer?

Yeah. Second round was even worse. I blame Red, I went in for more healer gear.

What we had tonight could have been a good run, except for one thing.

A single player held the fun of 24 other souls hostage… and that players name was Dalra.

Yes, that says Dalra of Icecrown US. 

Would you like to see a picture of Dalra, proud enhancement shaman, in action on the Spine of Deathwing?

Just in case that is difficult to make out, here, let me zoom out a bit.

There in the center you can see the raid group on the Hideous Amagamations in the center, up and down the line.

And there, up in the upper right hand corner, you can see Dalra, all on her own, killing a tentacle. As an Enhancement Shaman. All there, all alone, killing tentacles. Spawning adds. Lots and lots of adds.

You see that title she has? Destroyer’s End? Yep. Solid Enhancement Shaman DPS. Dual wielding, got 4 piece tier, yay.

Too bad she queued as a HEALER.

The whole Spine of Deathwing fight, Dalra did nothing except single-handedly destroy tentacles, spawning endless waves of Hideous Amalgamations and the bloods that follow.

And here is something I didn’t know. If all the tentacles are dead, a new tentacle spawns, so there is no chance of your ever accidentally killing every Hideous Amalgamation and being left with no way to nuclear blast the plates off to expose the tentacle.

I. Did. Not. Know. That.

But now I do, and I have Dalra to thank for that. So, thanks!

24 people in a raid trying their best to win and move on, and those 24 people are subject to the whims of one person, a person who has the achievement and the title of having completed it on normal, who knows what it is they are doing, and who chooses to try and screw everyone else intentionally.

For fun, I guess.

And there is nothing anyone can do about it. that is the point of this post. Once the boss is pulled, that’s it. The group has no control in any way over the outcome from that point on.

You’re done. Wipe it or push on, beat it despite them, and give them their ‘fair’ chance at loot.

Once that boss is pulled, that player is free to do whatever the hell they want for the rest of the fight.

I want to be clear on this.

The issue is not Dalra. Dalra is nothing.

Nothing unusual or special or even especially irritiating went on tonight. If Dalra logged off with warm fuzzies knowing they got a second Deathwing Axe and relic drops tonight (according to the Armory) by queueing as a healer for insta-queues, doing enhance DPS while the group was down a healer, and even intentionally screwing people by trying to wipe the run if what she wanted didn’t drop… well, most people didn’t even notice.

Apathy and expectations are so low at this point that nobody really cared. It was just faceless, nameless asshat number 45862. As the picture shows, the tone of comments weren’t outrage, just tired acceptance. “No joke, I’m tired of morons in LFR.” That’s not nerd rage, that’s apathy and acceptance that stupid is just stupid.

We went on with some other faceless clown in LFR, and finished the run. Most people, I imagine, don’t even realize that it was on purpose. They are probably so used to stupid people by now, that if anything, they just pegged Dalra as being another in a long chain of incredibly stupid players, and went on with their lives.

I know better, because after Monday night I went into Spine looking at all the tentacles to see if I could identify another asshat and get some screenshots for my own fun. AND I DID. I watched while healing my whack-a-mole frames, as Dalra didn’t even start on the normal group tentacle. Right from the start, they went to an untouched one, destroyed it very fast, went to the next, destroyed it, and so on until all four were dead. Then kept killing tentacles as they respawned. Then, when the first plate lifted, killed more tentacles. As fast as they could pop.

There was no mistake, no confusion. It was a dedicated attempt by Dalra to wipe a raid from the second it triggered Spine. And I caught it early, notified everyone, began asking for Dalra to stop right away. There was nothing anyone could do to stop her. Just watch, and do our best to heal and kill.

If anything, anyone in the guild Shining Star Crusaders should feel ashamed that Dalra is carrying your torch, representing you. I don’t know anything about Shining Star Crusaders, maybe it’s a guild on Icecrown famous for shenanigans and being trolling asshats. Maybe it’s just some dude in a basement that is so ineffectual in real life that they have to do stuff like this to feel some kind of connection with someone else. Some kind of desperate bid for attention, any kind of attention, to rise out of the meaningless morass that is their pathetic excuse for a life, something to try and prevent themselves from feeling so cold and alone in a world that hates them. And they’ve got a personal guild full of their alts. I don’t really care.

My take is as likely to be accurate as anyones, and mine at least is based on personal experience seeing one of their guild members at play when they didn’t know they were being watched somewhere that it might turn up in public later.

Update: Some folks in reading this thought it was an actual slam on the guild mentioned. I thought I had stressed in the post, fairly bluntly, that I was speculating wildly on the kind of guild that had Dalra as a member, while at the same time knowing nothing whatsoever about the truth of the guild. That I was speculating like this or ‘musing aloud’ to prove the point that Dalra was serving as my only window on the kind of guild SSC might be, because in LFR cross-server activities, I didn’t have any way of knowing anyone in that guild prior to seeing one memeber in LFR be an asshat, which is entirely UNLIKE the old style single-server runs where guilds could form lasting recognizable reputations. In point of fact, after this post went live and word about Dalra got out, SSC took immediate action, removed Dalra from their roster, and took further action to make it clear that kind of behavior was not representative of their guild in real life. Clearly, in real life the guild SSC is not actually a single kid in a basement. Some of the responses (on each side) also showed me pretty clearly that a lot of people fail at reading comprehension. At least, they do where imagined insults and direct attacks are concerned. End of update, I now return you to the original post.

Dalra is not important. This post isn’t really about Dalra.

I am simply USING Dalra as my little bitch to make a point about an extremely serious issue in live LFR.

via thebigbearbutt.com

Just over a month of Rift has convinced me that it *isn't* just random cross-server LFG that has made the WoW PUGging community so toxic. (Went back 1 month for Cataclysm, levelled AGAIN from 1-85, unsubbed and never want to go back blah de blah.)

I used to think that cross-server LFG which was 'after my time' (I first unsubbed for 2+ years at the end of TBC), was the main reason for the utterly horrible experience of the WoW community that confronted me on my short stint back for Cata. It was so bad I started trying psych experiments on my PUGs. =P Results, inconclusive due to sample size, but still kinda interesting, detailed here:
http://nugget.posterous.com/priming-consistency-cheating-and-being-a-jerk

Other folks are welcome to try it!

But the thing is, Rift has almost exactly the same mechanic and people are so damn POLITE! At the very *least* they are civil 95% of the time. On good runs, they are kind, considerate, and sometimes even funny and charming.

Even though they've more or less duplicated WoW's LFG system.

This in turn convinces me that the horror that is the WoW community (PUGwise) is a lot more to do with a) evolution of that community, and b) existing culture influencing the behaviour of new folks.

Or rather, of turds seeing other turds act like turds and thereby feeling happy in knowing that their turdiness is the acceptable norm.

From what I can see, there's no reason Rift PUGging shouldn't be the cesspit that WoW's is - but it just isn't.

Same with the arena-based PvP and general PvP culture in Guild Wars. Yes there is a certain degree of elitism, some might even say a lot of it. But I will say that as a scrub PvPer, Guild Wars PvPers are in general incredibly civil. GW was the first place I ever saw the opposing team thank their opponents for the match. See them say 'GG (Good Game / Good Going)' and not have it be sarcastic.

More studios need to see that the culture of their community matters, and address it throughout the life-cycle of their games.

Cataclysm was *beautiful*. Sylvanas never looked so hot. Blizzard obviously put so much love into it. And despite that, I'll never touch WoW again with a 10-foot pole now. I left TBC thinking I could go back someday and maybe, maybe like it, if I had a fresh start. Cata made me realise that for me, in WoW, there's nothing to go back to.