Blog Archives
Never the Straw You Want
I may be done with Hearthstone for good. At the very least, it has been more than a month since I last logged in. While my participation has ebbed and flowed over the last twelve (12!) years I have played, this time feels a bit different. I just… have no specific desire to log in again. The impetus is gone.
And I’m pretty sure it’s because of the Event quest changes.
When we talk about the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” we refer to a number of isolated causes that, over time, accumulate to the point of sudden failure. But what is often not addressed, is how… lame the very last one can be. I didn’t stop playing because of some Blizzard controversy (remember Hong Kong?), or reintroducing mechanics that the devs hate and whom consequently made bad on purpose, or leveraging terrible AI artwork in promotional material, or making sets intentionally weak as a power level reset while still charging full price, or introducing $158 pet gacha mechanics, or any of the multitude of other reasons. Hell, I didn’t even quit over the first disastrous quest overhaul.
Nah, the last straw for me was Blizzard getting too cute with the Event quests.
For context, Event Quests are an extra layer of Weekly/Daily quests that grant Event XP that moves you along a reward track. These Events last 4-5 weeks or so, and the rewards are usually free packs, hero portraits, and occasionally free epic/Legendary cards. Blizzard has actually stepped up the number of Events lately – or at least it felt that way – so in many respects, I should have been feeling grateful for the extra stuff. Instead, I felt worse.
Thing is, I used to be able to complete quests, including Event quests, while doing Battlegrounds. This was helpful for those time periods in which Standard was feeling boring, or perhaps I didn’t have all the Legendaries needed for a competitive deck, or just enjoyed Battlegrounds more at that time. These new quests have the “Traditional Modes” limiter, which means Standard or Wild only.
Also, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’m something of an optimizer. If you tell me I need to either play 2000 minions OR 500 Day of Rebirth deathrattle minions in Ranked Standard, I’m going to try the latter. And it’s going to feel horrible, not the least because any deck filled with those specific kind of minions is going to lose, on account of them being non-competitive. So here I am, trashing my Rank by losing constantly with cards I barely get to play – as games don’t last long when you play bad cards – and I still have to play like 500 of them, all because some fucking black-hat psychologist thought it would maximize engagement. Fuck every bit of that.
“Just ignore the quest and play normally.” Hearthstone isn’t the only game I play, and I sometimes go days without playing at all. Without focusing specifically on completing the quest, including the specific game modes it requires, completion won’t actually happen naturally. “Events aren’t required for anything, just enjoy whatever rewards you can get at your level of engagement.” Missing rewards, which now sometimes includes Legendary cards in the final steps, feels worse than not having Events happening at all. It would be one thing if it were a hidden achievement, or unlocked just a new skin or whatever, but it’s a rather in-your-face tracking mechanism that pops up after every game.
It’s a straw. Individually immaterial. Completely harmless to anyone who still enjoys playing Hearthstone on a baseline level. I 100% recognize that, by all measures, I would have likely drifted further and further away from the game independent of any changes to Event quests or otherwise.
However… it’s the last fucking straw. Perhaps not the one I deserve, but the one I have right now.
The Littlest Things
In the midst of a bout of gaming ennui, I find myself coming back time and again to PlanetSide 2. The game has some serious structural issues – to say that it’s still in Beta is somewhat less of a joke these days – and there is every indication that a sustainable population might not be there for too much longer. I created characters of each faction back when you were unable to have multiple factions on the same server, but a series of server merges have resulted in all three being on the same one (out of two) NA server.
In fact, going by that website, Ps2 has gone from 28 servers worldwide down to… 5. My routine when booting up the game is to filter the four continent maps by Ally Activity, and only choose to play if one continent has more than three hexes with at least 24+ friendly player activity. It is… not guaranteed, even during EST prime time.
So why am I still playing at all? It’s a good question, and the only real explanation is this: the Phoenix Launcher.
My “main” character was initially a member of the Vanu faction, which is based around laser/plasma weapons. Each faction has access to “empire-specific” weapons that have no real analog amongst the others. Technically all non-NS weapons are unique, but the difference between the LMG that has more ammo vs the less-ammo-but-higher-damage vs the middling one without bullet drop is not all that great. The empire-specific weapons are a whole other ballgame though.
The difference between the empire-specific rocket launchers is perhaps the greatest in the game. The Vanu have a charge-up laser launcher that has basically zero travel time. The TR have a lock-on rocket launcher that fires five rockets in a row. And the NC? The Phoenix Launcher, which fires a camera-guided and steerable rocket.
I have “quit” PlanetSide 2 several times already, for a number of reasons. But lately I keep coming back for the Phoenix Launcher because it is about the most fun I have had in a FPS… at least in a while. Which is bizarre because only the Heavy Assault class can use the weapon, and it is not as though I spend all my time playing just that class. It’s like the mere possibility of my being able to steer a rocket up over cover and around the cliff the enemy tank is hiding behind is enough to get the juices flowing. I’ll repair the base turrets as an Engineer and play Medic to forward a base assault just to set up the opportunity later to ride some rockets around.
In the abstract, I clearly enjoy the base gameplay too. And that’s true. But without the Phoenix Launcher, that would not have been enough for me to justify my continued play.
I cannot quite decide if that is sad, or precisely the way things should be.
Unsubscribing, Take Two
I may have reached the end of my second run of WoW.
As was the case last time, there was no clear death knell, no final straw, no slap in the proverbial face. Forensic evidence would probably suggest that my decline in activity can be traced back to the 5.2 announcement. At that point, I stopped bothering with LFR, knowing that I could endure the same long queues for 20+ better ilevel gear in a few weeks. I was also pretty much geared in all 483s anyway, much to the chagrin of my less fortunate guild survivors.
5.2 reinvigorated several things for me, including reaching some of the reputation milestones on alts that I would have dismissed out of hand as ridiculous previously. There were some underlying truths about myself I started to realize however:
- A healthy variety of dailies is 100% meaningless. Blizzard seems to think that 15 dailies out of a pool of 90 is somehow more palatable than the same 15 over and over. But… dailies are dailies. Unless a certain daily quest is particularly odious, such as having to kill a hard elite solo (the Pyrestar Demolisher), all daily quests blur together into a gray slurry of virtual obligation.
- Between the lack of interesting Black Market Auction House wares (which has admittedly improved in 5.2) and the BoP-crafting material economy, it is difficult to maintain interest in even lucrative AH shenanigans. As I continued canceling and re-listing cut gems and other goods day in and day out, I asked myself what exactly I imagine myself doing with this almost 400k gold. Buy something… but buy what? The lack of 476+ BoE weapons particularly was annoying. Yes, I could run LFR a bunch of times or even Honor farm, but all this gold was supposed to save me time, at least theoretically. If time = money, then money = time, does it not?
- I continued playing long after I no longer experienced any fun because of the possibility that things might change in the future. Which is quite a bizarre feat of circular reasoning, if you think about it. I have 76 pieces of Imperial Silk, for example, because if I suddenly developed a resurgence in interest, my future self would have more fun with all these accumulated mats (which you cannot really get any other way). It reminded me of how I behaved in my Middle School history course: the teacher handed out a week’s worth of worksheets on Monday, and I always completed them that very evening so I could slack off the rest of the week.
- The Legendary quest backfired big time, at least for me. By the time 5.2 came out, I had 2 Sigils of Power and 14 Sigils of Wisdom. With an average ilevel of 491, I was faced with the prospect of slogging through half a dozen or more DPS queues for the starter LFR raids, getting 476 vendor trash… if I was lucky! And then what? 6000 Valor? The questline might not have been “required” for anything I was doing, but it certainly felt more in-your-face “you are falling behind” than I ever felt before about, say, a raid-only reputation or heroic valor gear, by the very virtue of its accessibility.
- Once I got over the initial trepidation of skipping a day’s worth of cooldowns and AH re-listings, it actually became more difficult to convince myself to log back on at all. I had already “lost a day” that I would never get back. So… why bother? I skipped logging in one Saturday, and suddenly half the week is gone with nary a fuck given.
As with the last time I unsubscribed, I do not begrudge Blizzard and crew anything in particular. Well, maybe for the shit-hole of a no-pop server that they continue to allow to exist, to the detriment of all the lost souls trapped in Auchindoun-US’s hellish purgatory. But beyond that, most everything else I see as an improvement over prior design. Heroic scenarios sound like a great feature, and would have been custom-made for the 2-3 of my friends that actually managed to log on these past few weeks. Similarly, I am/was looking forward to being able to choose which spec to gear up in LFR, regardless of current role.
But… well. I could quite literally be playing any one of a hundred other videogames right now; games already purchased and with no subscription fee. More than the money though, I am looking forward to having the mental space back. It’s… liberating, in a way that cannot be described to someone whom has not had that same sort of mental real estate spoken for and suddenly vacated.
In An Age 