I’m a plotter.

This is distinct from being a planner, someone who comes up with an executes a plan. No, I’m a plotter, someone who creates plans within plans, working out unlikely contingencies and thinking about how things might go wrong. It’s not simply enough for me to drive to the store to pick up some food, I need to think about the precise time to optimally make the trip, the routes I’ll take at that time, what other things I can do on the way and while there, and in what order those are best accomplished, and what I’ll do if there’s unexpected difficulties– there’s traffic on my route, they’re out of what I want, and so on.

D.W. Frydendall, “Plotting”

I’ve described the way I think to other people, and I’ve frequently heard the comment that it sounds “exhausting”. I wouldn’t know– I get agitated and stressed when I’m not thinking multiple steps ahead. When I take someone out to dinner, I’m thinking of what I’m going to wear, where we’re going to go, two backup places in case the place I chose is closed / busy / not to taste, I’ve probably looked at the menu and decided what I’m going to order before I go, put gas in my car, look for parking nearby… and if I don’t do one or some of these things, I’ll worry about them. I don’t get excited about things unless I’m watching all of the pieces fall into place, at which point it’s usually already happening and I’m feeling relief.

I’ve had friends call me a mastermind; it’s certainly what my Myers-Briggs profile uses, and it seems apt. I’m most comfortable when I’m making an effort to predict what’s going to come next. When I don’t adequately plan, I find that things don’t go well. If I plan to go out during the weekend, and I don’t have an explicit idea of where I’m going to go and with whom, I often find myself listlessly sipping a drink, bored and often regretting my choices. Even the places I frequent are places where I know ahead of time will have something for me to enjoy. I’ve found that if I don’t plan and make sure things are going to work out right, I’ll spend a lot of time sitting, bored. When I arrive somewhere, my first instinct is to look around to see who I might want to talk to and start thinking about how to approach them; if I don’t, I’ll wind up just sitting and wondering why I bothered. I’m very rarely surprised, partly because I’ve thought about things well in advance, and partly because if I haven’t, things tend not to happen.

As a result, I tend to only get excited when a plan is coming together nicely, when I think something unexpected and good might happen (exceedingly rare), or after I’ve gotten an unexpected, awesome surprise (also very rare). In recent memory, the latter two have only happened once (well, twice, at the same time), and it’s one of my most cherished memories of the past year. As a child, I got so good at guessing my birthday and Christmas presents that my mom simply stopped trying to surprise me, because I could deduce what she was going to get me. My dad has always been able to surprise me; he plays the game better than I do and is able to think further ahead than me, so he’s consistently been able to get me gifts I didn’t realize I wanted. It’s probably where I get it from; he also gets “pleased” that things are going well rather than “excited” that something is happening.

This blog is a conscious attempt for me to break out of my plotting habit. Except for the occasional series, I don’t think ahead to what I might write about before I’m sitting in front of the computer, and even when writing series, I have a vague idea but conscientiously avoid specifics until I’m actually writing. I do one draft and submit, doing only a cursory check for errors (more often editing them out later). It forces me to think on my feet, and write something without mulling over it beforehand.

In the past year, I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten better at spontaneity, especially when it comes to collecting my thoughts. I’m less worried about breaking from a plan or going off-script, and can adapt better than I was able to before posting regularly. Since moving to a five-day-a-week schedule, this has only gotten more noticeable. I’m forcing myself to think in the moment rather than having everything planned ahead, and it has simultaneously made me calmer about changing situations and more obsessive about making sure my plans are perfect and executed on point.

At this point, it’s undeniable that regular blogging has significantly changed my behavior, and I’m interested to see where else it goes. I still don’t get excited about things, and I still lean heavily towards planning than not, but it’s not at quite the same incorrigible level it used to be.

In FFXIV, the raid group I lead uses an unpopular strategy for part of Turn 9. Rather than an “everyone do this” strategy, requiring everyone in the group to move to a single point and then run around in sync, we use what has affectionately been called the “Benny Hill” strategy, which has everyone running around and more or less panicking through the phase.

I’ve been roundly criticized, both directly and indirectly, about pushing this strategy over the “standard” one. It’s been described as less efficient, more random, and unreliable, not to mention counter to what our players with experience in T9 are used to.

So, why do I insist upon it? Because I know my team. My raid group is contemptuously good at controlled chaos in fights. Put us in a situation where we just need to REACT and handle things as they come up and we absolutely dominate. By comparison, set up a situation in which we need to precisely execute a specific, detailed plan and we’re passable, but not amazing. The group has incredibly good instincts, and so as a result any strategy which focuses on general concepts versus specific solutions is far more successful for us.

It’s a pretty significant departure from how a lot of groups operate. Many raids go by a sort of stimulus/response strategy– “when X happens, do Y”. Very lengthy, detailed plans arise from this sort of thing– “when X happens, do Y if A is also happening, otherwise do Z if B is happening, and if neither A nor B is happening, do nothing”, which everyone needs to just internalize. It works very well for a group that’s focused on following orders and being told what to do. In large part, this was true of LNR– we divided fights up into specific stimuli that people needed to watch for and react specifically to and otherwise ignore. I knew a great many people in LNR who had no idea how certain fights worked, just what to do as their specific class at specific key points.

In FFXIV, the group is very different. Everyone is very active and very involved. Instead of describing stimulus/response strategy, I focus on what the boss is going to actually do, and leave the solutions up to individuals. The only time specific “do this” strategies come up is when we need a coordinated effort in a very specific way, but most of the time I can let the strategy adapt itself as people figure out what they need to do.

Tonight, we went into Shiva Extreme, a fight that a lot of groups break down into very specific, very detailed stimulus/response strategies. All of the guides I’ve read online talk about “when you see X, do Y”, but not what’s actually happening or what you’re avoiding. I find it frustrating, because there are often multiple ways to deal with a particular situation, and boiling it down into a single strategy that works for a single group doesn’t necessarily spread evenly across all groups (in fact, it rarely does). Instead, we quickly described the kinds of things the boss did, and some general concepts for dealing with them, and did extremely well as a result. Rather than proscribing specific behaviors, we described the situation and let people handle it as best they could. We certainly did things “wrong” in a number of ways, but we had a lot of success with the fight as a whole, and will probably beat it with little difficulty next week.

One particularly unsuccessful raid group I ran with focused exclusively on the “right” way to do boss fights, often to the detriment of the group, because deviating from the “correct strategy” was unthinkable, even when the group’s strengths clearly lied elsewhere. In one specific case, after multiple weeks of wipes to a particular chain of mechanics, I suggested we simply take the damage that we were trying to avoid, and have our healers heal through it. The suggestion received widespread derision, but since it was late and people were tired, we tried it anyway… and beat the boss handily on that attempt. The next week, we were… back to the “official” strategy, losing, even though we’d proven we could win a different way.

One of the most important things about raid leading, and I suspect leading teams in general, is paying attention to what your team is good at and can excel at and slightly altering your parameters to play to those strengths. Sometimes this leads to some really bizarre behavior, but however weird your approach might be, if your output is successful, it largely doesn’t matter. Every successful new paradigm started as a weird idea, and not every successful approach is going to be universally successful for everyone who tries it. Paying attention to what’s good about what you have to work with is an important part of a team’s success.

Square peg and a round hole. Metaphor for a misfit or nonconformist.

In a lot of cases, I’ve seen people use the phrase “square peg, round hole”. Most of the time, this is used as critique of the person or team or strategy– the “peg”, and suggests that maybe the peg should change to fit, or that a different peg entirely should be used. Sometimes, I think, it’s worth looking instead at the hole, and changing that.

I don’t play PvP-heavy MMOs anymore. I haven’t for over a decade now. I have, occasionally, participated in organized PvP battlegrounds, but it’s not a big part of what I spend my time doing, and a lot of people have, over the years, assumed that it was because I simply didn’t like PvP. My previous Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowbane posts wherein I talked about spending a lot of time not just PvPing, but as a straight-up player killer surprised some people, and I’ve had a few people since then ask why I never participated in battlegrounds and whatnot.

Straight answer: it’s because it feels artificial to me. PvP flags, organized battlegrounds, it’s more a sports team metaphor than a high-stakes danger metaphor. I’ve never been one for team sports, and organized PvP feels, to me, like a team sport with a slightly different interface. It’s occasionally entertaining, but it doesn’t really thrill me.

It’s probably worth telling a brief story about the first MMO I played, which wasn’t Everquest. I played Ultima Online, one of two games to break my spirit (Star Wars Galaxies was the other). I was excited about a game in which I could be a crafter, and make items for the really skilled heroes. I didn’t have a lot of faith in my own abilities in games at the time– I loved them, but I never considered myself very good. Rather than trying to play something good at combat, that might fight on the front lines (scary!) I decided I would instead be a blacksmith, and make swords for the real heroes.

It took a ton of work, but I eventually was able to save up for a small house with all of the supplies I needed to craft things. I made nice items and stored them in my house, and sold them to other adventurers (keeping the money, of course, in my house). It was a pretty good time, and I enjoyed the brief conversations I had with people, all of whom were much more powerful than I was. Rather than fighting, I’d spent a lot of time working on my sneaking skills, so I could go out and collect ore for blacksmithing without getting into any trouble. Sometimes, if I needed an item that could be pickpocketed from a mob, I did that, rather than fighting– I had effectively no combat skills, but I could make fancy items and I was sneaky.

At one point, I had a window shopper looking at my wares and house. He hung around a bit longer than most people, and while I thought it was strange, I didn’t really think about it. What I didn’t realize was that he’d pickpocketed me while pretending to chat, stealing my house key, going inside, using the key to open my chest of valuables, and claiming the deed within. He made his move while I was standing outside of my own home, and when the deed transferred, the house belonged to him, and he locked me out. It was a pretty effective scam, and I’d (foolishly) put all of my valuables in one easy-to-find place, so he had my stock of items, my gold, and my house, and laughed when I raged at him.

I was devastated, and angry. I’d worked hard for the house and money, and it seemed monumentally unfair that another player could just rob me of it all in a blink. I alternately whined and raged on forums, getting mild sympathy but mostly responses of “you didn’t use X to protect yourself? what were you thinking?” suggesting common knowledge that I’d somehow missed out on. Angry at the lack of help I was getting, I went after the guy who’d stolen everything from me, hunting him down at my own house and attacking him. In my angry frenzy of button pushing, I hit the pickpocket button, and for a brief moment, I saw his inventory window before he cut me down. It was surprisingly sparse, three teleport stones labelled “home” and some simple other things like potions and a spare weapon. I wondered why he would have three teleport stones that were all the same, and I returned, stealthily this time, stealing one from his pack. I was surprised at how easy it was– he’d spent time working on pickpocketing, but nothing on sneaking, so he never noticed me. As I left, I saw him looking around for the thief, because he must have looked in his inventory, and to hasten my getaway I hid and used his teleport stone without thinking.

I was dropped in a house, not unlike mine, but much more remote, in which there were simply piles of money and items, all stolen (I presumed). On a whim, I grabbed as much as I could quickly (after all, I had no qualms about stealing from a thief) and used my own teleport stone to leave, vanishing just as he got wise, used another teleport stone, and appeared in the same room. Not taking any chances, I deposited my loot in a secure bank and chuckled as he chased me down. In addition to a healthy pile of gold, I’d nabbed a handful of items I didn’t recognized, most of which I couldn’t use but grabbed anyway. It turned out these were incredibly valuable items, some of the best items in his vault, and without a care I sold them to other players. The thief would harass me as I did so, telling people who were buying that I was selling items I’d stolen from him, and every time I’d merely comment “You stole my house, turnabout is fair play!” and eventually simply “maybe you should’ve protected yourself better”, mimicking the jabs I’d gotten from other players on the forums.

I was soon flush with cash, and had plenty to buy a new house and set up my blacksmithing shop again, several times over. I set up shop again, but this time spent a huge amount of money buying and preparing elaborate traps, ensuring that anyone who tried the same trick on me wouldn’t have it so easy. After all, I expected a vengeful thief. It wasn’t long before it happened again. I’d become paranoid, and kept my inventory open, so even though I didn’t detect the thief, I saw when my house key vanished. I waited a few moments, then walked in. The same thief that had started this mess was lying dead on my floor, having been variously shot, stabbed, impaled, ignited, and otherwise maimed by my collection of traps. Considering it my just desserts, I looted his body and replaced the traps. He never bothered me again.

I could say that I stopped my PvP-related theft there, but it’d be a lie. I wound up doing to several other people what the original thief had done to me, and ultimately realized what I was doing, felt awful about it, and quit the game while sitting atop a huge pile of ill-gotten gold.

What stuck with me, though, was the sense of weight to my actions. Exerting influence on another player, whether that was making them a weapon, stealing from them, having a nice chat, or brutally murdering them in my deathtrap dungeon, was a choice I made. It wasn’t fighting nameless AI-controlled mobs that were mostly dumb and offered me little in the way of challenge or thought, or wandering around gathering from static nodes with only those same AI-mobs to stand in my way, it was an actual interaction with another person.

When I moved to EverQuest, the same sort of interactions with other players were there– I couldn’t do very much without a group, and so I spent a lot of time either seeking out people to play with or playing with (and getting to know) other players, who were doing the same things by necessity. It made our playtime horrendously inefficient in terms of getting to the highest level, and I often stood around doing nothing, because the penalty for going out on your own and failing was severe– a lengthy corpse run (that you had to do, or your body would disappear with all your items!) and often some severe experience loss. The stakes being high meant that I valued my time with other players.

As I’ve talked to people about Archeage, there’s a recurring comment that I hear: “I wish I could play that game without the PvP”. I’ve rolled this around in my head, because at first blush I’d agree. I (think I) want a game where I can better myself and build and have interesting, interlocking systems to explore without the fear of another player coming in and ruining my day. The more I think about it, though, the more I’m not convinced it’s true. I’m put in mind of Minecraft, especially its build-only mode, which some people love but I have no patience for. I can certainly build interesting things, but without anything to threaten my construction, I have little motivation to achieve. It’s the same thing that drives me to succeed in raids– taking something that looks impossible and gradually, over time, building and executing a strategy that overcomes it. Every new boss could be the one that breaks us, which makes every boss we defeat a rush. If we’re not challenged by a boss, there’s little joy in its defeat, only frustration if for whatever reason we fail at it.

In a game where other players might affect your experience, every victory has the weight of achievement. The threat of actual loss makes the world feel more organic and real, because you interact with it in an organic and real way. You don’t simply hop a teleport back to the local bank when your inventory is full, you think about what items you need to carry and you plan your excursions. You don’t throw yourself off a cliff to expedite travel back to a town, and you don’t treat other players like inanimate objects at best, direct opposition at worst. The next player you run across could be the one that saves you from a player-killer or the one who stabs you in the back. In most modern cases, the game doesn’t even let any of this happen to you until you’re fairly familiar with the game’s mechanics, so the bygone days of cheerfully slaughtering newbies are largely gone, outside of periodic exploits.

I don’t think that PvP is a “better” way of playing MMOs, but it certainly shifts my viewpoint. Even in my short time poking at Archeage, there’s a clear culture and players have actual reputations, something I haven’t seen in ages. I couldn’t tell you who the notable people on my FFXIV server are unless I know them personally, despite playing for a year now, but inside of a week I can rattle off a handful of names that cause a stir in Archeage. There’s weight to your decisions, and the game lets you make your own bed, but forces you to sleep in it.

It’s possible to have the same kind of stakes in PvE MMOs, but the concerns about “forced grouping” become very big in that kind of game, because the “Environment” half of PvE has to be extremely punishing and essentially require multiple players working together at all times.

I’ve said it before, but I look forward to the next technological advancement that gives us MMOs-as-sims instead of MMOs-as-games again. I’ve come to miss the uncertainty of a game world that doesn’t conform to formulas, and that I can’t be assured of succeeding in so long as I follow the dotted lines. It isn’t for everyone, but that uncertainty makes every victory that much sweeter for me. In a weird way, it makes me feel like I’ve earned my place in the world, as opposed to simply putting my time in to accomplish it. Sometimes I do just want a ‘safe’ game to delve into with some friends, but other times I’ve come to realize I miss the uncertain, dangerous ones, too.

I picked up Archeage (by which I mean, hit “install” on the Steam client) the other day because it came up in conversation. I’d picked it up originally when it launched in the US and quit within fifteen seconds when I realized the game lacked an inverted Y mouse setting. Couldn’t play it, wasn’t going to go to the effort of hacking in some kind of fix, done with the game. Easy.

I loaded it up recently, mostly to check to see if they’d added that feature. A Google search suggested they had, so I booted it up, patched, and hopped in. To my very great surprise, I’m having a surprising amount of fun with it, enough so that I want to put the brakes on playing until I have a chance to run around with Kodra and Thalen.

There’s a nasty catch-22 I’ve noticed in MMOs over the past few years. The bar for content and systemic density is so high right now, and people so invested in their existing MMOs (or not playing any at all), that there’s essentially no hope for a new MMO to compete at the same level as existing games when it’s released. On day one, before there’s been any chance for anyone to hit the servers, for kinks and bugs to be worked out, and so on, most MMOs are pretty rocky. Our standards for “acceptable” rockiness have changed over the years, but so has our expectation for a new entry into the genre as well as the skill of the teams creating them. Put simply, we no longer have MMOs that brick your motherboard on day one, but we’re also no longer willing to tolerate that sort of thing, nor would that sort of thing happen in a modern MMO team.

I say all of this to say that, like a good steak, an MMO isn’t quite finished the moment it leaves the pan. It cooks a little bit more after release, and it’s that little bit of extra that turns an okay game into an excellent one. A year after its release, Elder Scrolls Online is getting rave reviews– all of the changes, fixes, and additions in the game have brought people back, not to mention a shift to free-to-play which, far from the herald of doom the internet pundit crowd likes to crow about, is often a new lease on life for an MMO that has stabilized.

So, Archeage. I hopped in, and after confirming that yes, I can in fact turn on inverted Y and actually play the game, I started running around. A few things stood out to me very quickly:

— This game is built like FFXIV; I can master every class, I just can’t use them all at once.

— There’s a pseudo-deckbuilding component, like Rift, in which I combine various classes to form a custom build. Presumably some of these are better than others, but there’s a lot of potential room for experimentation, and it’s easy to move them around.

— The visuals are impressive and not overwrought, especially the animations.

— There is an absolutely insane level of content density, from random interactable activities to hidden quests to standard quests that I can overachieve in, to detailed story quests, to fully integrated climbing and boating systems… all of which I’m not only allowed to do, but the game encourages me to do very early on.

I like the idea of mastering every class, provided there’s some tangible benefit to me doing so. It’s something that’s stopped me from playing all of the classes up to max level in FFXIV– not just the time involved, but that I already have my favorite classes to play, which fit any role I might want to fill, and there’s very little I would get from leveling up another class. The only thing that gets me really excited about leveling a new class in FFXIV is if it has some really fun gameplay elements or suits a theme I like a lot. I leveled Ninja, and I’ll likely level Dark Knight as a replacement for my Paladin. In Archeage, my “build” is comprised of three classes, so there’s a lot of benefit to me having focused on a few and slowly increasing my repertoire to be more flexible and be able to create more builds. I’ll need to spend more time with it, but at least what I’ve seen is promising. At some point I’ll sit down and start theorycrafting good, functional builds, but I want a better handle on how the game feels before I do so. It feels a lot less contrived and unwieldy than Rift, which is a very good thing in my book. I loved the concept in that game, but not the execution.

The animations are really impressive, and I find them a lot of fun. I have never enjoyed warrior-style classes, because I feel bulky and inelegant, wielding a huge weapon with brute force and no finesse. I’m currently playing a warrior in Archeage, because the dual wielding style is graceful and feels powerful, even though the two-handed weapon animations feel brute-force-focused and smashy. At least as far as I’ve gotten, the game feels like it’s going to let me play the skillful swordsman type of character that I’ve always enjoyed but rarely gotten to play, substituting speed and finesse for brute force, and actually making it feel that way in the character animations. When I hit a mob with a warrior ability, I FEEL it, and that’s incredibly satisfying to me.

I’ve played through the first ten levels of the game thus far, and it’s striking to me how much there seems to be to do. There are entire systems that the game hasn’t introduced to me yet but that I can see portions of as I play. There’s a currency that accrues over time spent in game that I use to access my loot drops, which is a clever system for a variety of reasons but also ties in with crafting and gathering, as far as I can tell. The game is very open, and while I’ve spent a bunch of time simply following the main quests, every time I venture off the beaten path I find something at least somewhat interesting. The game seems tuned to give you key systems early on, then expand them as time goes on. I’ve raised my own horse and can ride around mounted now, but my horse has levels and can get attacked by enemies– I have a follower who benefits from watching me fight but is a potential liability. It’s an interesting trade-off that adds just a bit of interesting flow to gameplay.

Right now I’ve gone the path of the fast, agile swordsman, taking Warrior, Rogue, and a secondary skillset called Auramancy, which seems to be focused on resistances and shedding debuffs but importantly includes a Blink-style teleport spell, one of my favorite tools in any MMO. We’ll see if the content density continues to be compelling, but I get the impression the game hasn’t finished showing me what it’s got to offer.

It may be a bit before I continue updating, but I’ll continue talking about Archeage as long as I continue playing it. I’ve already made it past the point where a lot of people quit in disgust due to the initially toxic community, but a year on, things seem to have settled down. The odds that I’ll be able to ever have my own property seem slim, because space for that sort of thing seems to be in short supply, but we’ll see if that’s something I care about.

There’s a really common business concept that I’ve heard a lot of, mostly through my time making games. It’s often suggested that you should “take ownership” of your work, and that doing so gives you more investment and makes you care about it more.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/229464652/hand-painted-coffee-mug-this-is-my

It’s an effective strategy from a leadership perspective, but it’s not without cost. To truly allow someone to take ownership of something, they need to have the freedom to shape it in their own way. In a lot of endeavors, this is fine, but as nice as it is to have an invested employee building something for you, if you really do need it a specific way there’s a good chance you’ll be robbing them of ownership.

To look at it from a different angle: a big part of my attachment to the minis games I play is the personal touches I give my collection. Even beyond painting them, I do a lot of careful work in assembly, often significantly converting a model, to put my own personal touch on it. I can’t remember the last time I assembled a mini precisely how it appears on the box, and in some cases I’ve done some conversions so extensive that the mini in question is almost totally unrecognizable. I do my best to be careful about the minis being confusing on the table top, but the personal touch is important to me.

SAO’s Yui, work in progress

One of my recent projects is an extensive conversion of an ALEPH Steel Phalanx force to SAO characters. I’ve carefully constructed a playable list from the minis I have (and a couple of additions), and am converting the entire group to match the main cast of the show. Prior to this, I’ve never liked Steel Phalanx, it’s a faction made up of characters that don’t really resonate with me. By turning them from characters I couldn’t care less about to characters I’m interested in, I’ve been inspired to do a lot of work converting and painting the entire team, and I suspect I’ll have a lot of fun actually playing them, too.

The Infinity community (as represented on the forums) has been publicly supportive of this project (and others!), but I’ve gotten the occasional bit of criticism– why change the models that are sculpted the way they are for a particular reason, or why make your games more confusing with bizarre proxies or heavily altered pieces? It’s a similar type of criticism I’ve recieved from a recent Ariadna team I put together, which was based on my Shadowrun campaign and is about half-comprised of non-Ariadna minis that fit the Shadowrun characters but aren’t necessarily part of Ariadna as a faction– potentially confusing for someone, even if I’m very consistent about how I use them.

Volt Securities and Interdiction, my (commissioned) Ariadna force.

The reality is that without my own personal touch on these groups of minis, I wouldn’t own them, or they’d collect dust on a shelf. At any given time, I usually have a handful of minis that I haven’t assembled, sitting around in boxes because I picked them up from a tournament victory, as part of a sale, to round out another order, or just on a whim, and I haven’t made a personal connection with them that gives them value to me beyond game pieces. When I put my own spin on them, they have meaning for me even when I don’t like them. I often go as far as telling myself my own stories about them, determining fictional personalities and stories about the groups I put together, which inspires paint schemes, details, and even extends to list construction.

When I was growing up, I once complained to my dad that the essays I had to write in school were boring and meaningless. He suggested that I use the essay prompts as a way of springboarding into a topic I *was* interested in– his actual phrasing was more like “use the prompt just long enough to lead you into something you actually want to talk about, then talk about that”, which appealed to my teenage subversive side, but the end result was the same. My writing quality jumped immensely after that, partly because the satisfaction of “tricking” the teachers into letting me write about whatever I wanted gave me a smug sort of glee, but also because once I was writing about something I actually cared about, I put more effort in the work. On several assignments, I was told later that I didn’t exactly adhere to the prompt as such, but that it was a good enough essay that the teacher would let it slide. I took ownership of my writing and the improvements were noticeable, though the end result was often not what had originally been envisioned.

The same is true elsewhere as well. My writing, my minis, and my work all get a lot more care and effort put into them when I can take ownership and make them my own, but it also means they’re very likely to be significantly different from the standard set of expectations. As a team leader, I take care to be aware of this double-edged sword. I can give someone a lot of freedom to work out how they want to do things, but if I then come back and “make corrections” or otherwise deny then the freedom to add their personal touch, especially after the fact, I’m both sabotaging my own credibility and damaging the work of my team member. When I delegate a task out to someone on my team, it’s important that I support their efforts, even if they’re not what *I* would choose to do, so long as they’re effective. If I want something done my way, I had better be prepared to do it myself, or I can’t expect to draw upon the additional motivation and value that comes from someone “taking ownership”.

I’ve been playing a lot of mobile games lately, for a couple of reasons. The big one is that it’s a hugely underappreciated segment of games that’s increasingly the most relevant part of the industry, and the other is that I spend a lot of time away from my computer, and lightweight mobile games are increasingly my go-to.

At the recommendation of a few people, I picked up Knights of Pen and Paper, a turn-based RPG in which you play as a bunch of people sitting around a D&D game with a DM. It does the whole pixel art thing, trying to evoke a classic feel in its characters and monsters. It’s hearkening back to NES-era graphics and gives the vibe that it’s a DM running a game with some rough edges while itself being a polished, solid experience.

It takes a lot to pull off what they’re trying to do, and I think it works really well. The DM sprite narrates quests and adventures to me, and my party is made up of five other characters, all playing particular classes. I get to pick who’s playing, and different people have different special strengths for me to choose– I’ve got the pretty, popular girl who gets discounts at shops, I’ve got the studious, top-of-the-class girl who’s pretty good at everything, I’ve got a guy in a band, I’ve got the pizza guy who dropped in to play a game, and I’ve got an artist girl who’s lucky. Each of these characters is playing a particular class, which I also get to pick– I’ve got the choice of Paladin, Warrior, Cleric, Druid, Rogue, Wizard, and there are other classes I can unlock with quests.

The setup is entirely charming, and the writing is often really funny. I can have random encounters as I travel from place to place, and the DM always sounds vaguely surprised or disappointed when nothing awful happens to me. When I get into an encounter, various players make outraged comments or jokes about cheating. The writing is lighthearted and fun, but still moves things forward. It hits a sweet spot in between telling a coherent story and making nods to the kinds of ad-libbed nonsense that happens in real pen-and-paper games.

Gameplay is split into two pieces– quests and the overworld. In the overworld, I can choose to go shopping, travel around, take on a new quest, swap my party around, rest, etc, all by talking to the DM. When I take a quest, I have to travel to wherever the quest is located and then fight encounters there, which is where things get interesting. First off, I get to pick how challenging the encounter is. I can customize most quest battles to be as easy or hard as I want, selecting appropriate enemies and adding them to the encounter. More challenging encounters are more rewarding, and certain boss fights and random encounters have a set difficulty. Quests will often ask me to fight a certain number of enemies of a particular type, and I can fight them all at once or take them on more slowly, depending on how my health and mana are doing.

Recovering health and mana is done by resting, or through spells. My choice of classes determines what abilities I have to work with, and building a balanced party is important, but the means with which you go about it is entirely up to you– there are a lot of combinations that work, and if you have one that will be strong later but is weak to start, you can still make it work by lowering the difficulty of your encounters early on.

In combat, every character gets a turn, and you can see initiative order (determined semi-randomly, of course), so you can prepare in advance. Each character gets an action, which can be a basic attack or one of their special abilities, which cost mana. The effect is that I feel like I’m playing a D&D party, each person reacting to the situation at hand and lending their unique skills to the group.

After finishing Hero Emblems, I wanted another fun RPG-style game, and Knights of Pen and Paper absolutely fits the bill. It’s definitely worth your time, and I look forward to playing more of it and exploring what it’s got to offer. It’s got a lot of systems that I haven’t really talked about because I don’t know much about them, but suffice it to say you can equip your characters, you have a party inventory, and you can upgrade your gear and abilities as you level up and get more money, all of which change how you play. There’s a ton of optional content and (apparently) a lot of hidden unlocks, so exploring random quests is entirely worthwhile (and levels up your characters!).

I’m enjoying it a lot, hopefully you will too. There’s even a sequel!

A conversation I had yesterday really stuck in my mind. One of my raid team was talking about how he enjoyed the task of “marking”, because it made him feel useful, and let him be a raid hero for that section of the fight.

nct.org

A bit of an aside: “marking”, in general, means calling attention to a particular enemy or point on the ground that will be important for handling some upcoming mechanic. Sometimes you mark the next target, sometimes you mark a target that everyone needs to stay close to, sometimes you mark a point on the ground that someone (or everyone) needs to run to. This generally needs to happen while the rest of the fight is happening, so your attention is split– you need to be fast and accurate, and still be contributing in the usual way while doing so. It’s a difficult job, and generally your efforts aren’t noticed if the fight is going smoothly– it’s only if you miss the marks or forget to mark that things go downhill and people notice.

Our discussion went on to talk a bit more about how FFXIV does a good job at providing moments for players to be heroes in group content. A few things contribute to this. Really impressive spell effects, especially for big hits or potent cooldowns, call attention to someone’s efforts. This culminates in the Limit Break button, which charges up slowly for an entire group and can be used by a single person to execute a massive protective barrier, a powerful group heal, or, most commonly, a devastating, highly visible attack. It’s a single button, but you get to press it pretty rarely and it’s a ton of fun when you do.

FFXIV also doesn’t revel in killing you. Other MMOs I’ve played have boss encounters where a single hit from the boss will outright kill any single player who isn’t a tank. In FFXIV, this is very rarely the case. Non-tanks won’t necessarily survive very long against a boss’s direct attention, but there’s enough time to regain control of the situation. This means that, in a pinch, it’s possible for someone to stand in and take a bit of punishment to allow time for a tank to recover (or, in extreme cases, get Raised) and return to the fight. These sorts of clutch saves are thrilling, and are a lot more possible in FFXIV than in many other games.

It’s incredibly satisfying to have a heroic moment in a raid situation, and what really makes it work is the sense that it isn’t artificial. The game isn’t blatantly setting you up to look like a hero and get fanfare without you doing work, your act of heroism is a legitimate act borne of your skill and your presence of mind. It’s a satisfaction that’s hard to manufacture, and it’s gotten me thinking about how we’ve lost our way a bit when it comes to making players feel heroic.

There’s an adage in game design that drives a lot of design work: “Show, don’t tell.” It shows up in a variety of media, from writing to film to theatre, and the same concept holds in games. Put simply, having an NPC tell you about the dragon that attacked the city is much less interesting than actually seeing the dragon attacking the city. Turned around the other way, having an NPC tell you how awesome you are is a lot less satisfying than genuinely feeling awesome in your own right.

In World of Warcraft, I completed thousands of quests. To hear the NPCs tell it, I saved tens of thousands of lives and was responsible for the livelihoods of countless unseen people, all of whom (I was assured) owed me a great debt. You get numb to it pretty quickly, but what I do remember is learning how to solo elites, back in Vanilla. Elite mobs, at the dawn of WoW, were intended to require a group to fight, two or more people, and were generally pretty deadly. Being able to take on elite mobs on your own, especially ones that were at or above your current level, was a mark of accomplishment and pride. It meant that you could easily beat quests that other people struggled with, and you could traverse parts of the map that other people avoided. I would occasionally fight an elite that I knew other people couldn’t handle, and would occasionally see players stop, try to determine if I needed help, and be impressed when I’d win on my own.

In Everquest, I remember cowering at the edge of the Kithicor Forest, which was an idyllic green forest during the day and a haunted nightmare hellscape by night. If you were travelling through the area, you quickly learned to wait at the edges of the forest for dawn, because the monsters within would tear you to bits. Occasionally, you’d see a group of players head into the forest at night, armed and armored to the teeth, after some rare item or another, and when I eventually became one of those players and did it myself, it felt significant, because I not only knew how dangerous it was but also knew that I could handle it.

Artist: Mike Henderson

I’ve played games in which I’ve stopped world-ending plots over and over again, sometimes twice before dinner and again after a bite to eat. We’ve raised the stakes in our narratives to the point where they strain credibility; every quest is an earthshattering dilemma and without our intervention, all will be lost. It’s not simply that the presence of other players breaks the illusion, it’s that we just finished saving the world over the last rise. It feels manufactured and artificial.

The alternative is to save the really big stuff until it’s more appropriate, and fill the game up with smaller, more down-to-earth tasks. It’s how “kill ten rats” became a thing, and our collective design solution for the KTR problem was to make the rats into giant slavering werewolves, until there was a deadly threat lurking behind every corner and under every bush. In some cases, this is absolutely literal– there are zones that are simply full of deadly enemies packed so tightly you have little hope of navigating without bumping into one or ten. Why anyone would live in a place like that is beyond me, but there they are, and they really need you to go collect slavering werewolf meat so that the town can avoid starving to death.

I think we solved the wrong problem. It’s not that killing ten rats is an inherently boring quest, it’s that we’re limited in the verbs we can use to approach it. We have ten rats, we have our weapon, and we apply axe to (rat) face until there are zero rats, except there are never zero rats, because there are a bunch of other players all doing the same thing.

Imagine instead that you walk into a blacksmith’s shop to get your gear repaired, and the following dialogue shows up:

“I’d love to repair your gear, but I’ve got a bit of a problem. Rats are infesting my workshop, and the traps I ordered haven’t come in. I won’t be able to fix anything until I can do something about these rats.”

Now, going in there sword swinging is a choice. You can also go and see where the traps are, or possibly you’re good at crafting your own traps and can simply make some for the beleaguered blacksmith. Maybe you’re an accomplished beast tamer and can coax the rats out, pied piper-style, or you’re a ridiculously powerful mage and can set magic wards around the workshop to keep the rats away. Instead of the blacksmith setting you to a task, he’s set up a problem and you can come up with a solution. When you do, he’s appropriately thankful that you bothered to intervene (you didn’t have to!) and is happy to repair your gear (a sensible, meaningful reward). Furthermore, that’s a quest that is appropriate for anyone of any level– being more advanced simply means you have more interesting, more efficient options at your disposal.

Quests have become an exp treadmill– go here, click on this, return, go there, kill these things, return. Sometimes they’re a bit more involved than that, but the verbs are always very simple and are almost always entirely explicit. They HAVE to be, because that’s the main method of progression. The questing system in EQ is positively archaic compared to what we can do now, but quests in EQ felt meaningful because they weren’t the main thing you were doing to progress.

Why do you feel like a hero in FFXIV when you save your raid with a sudden moment of clarity and action? It’s because you’re doing something outside of the norm, something unique to that moment that you alone are in a position to do. You’ve broken out of the usual set of verbs and are doing something a little different, just for a moment, that makes all the difference.

We’ve become so afraid of our MMOs feeling grindy that we’ve filled them with quests and stories, and in our haste to distance ourselves from the days of mob camping and aimless wandering, we turned the stories themselves into a grind. When every story makes you a hero, and you’re told constantly what a hero you are, no matter how finely crafted the storytelling might be, it’ll ring hollow.

Took a break on Friday to clear my head after all of the MMO nostalgia and get caught up on a backlog of work.

We had our Game of the Month podcast on Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and I want to talk a little bit more about that game. I’ll rehash some of the stuff I talked about in the podcast, so I apologize in advance for any redundancy.

One of the tangents we (I) got on while talking about Shadowrun was how difficult it is to make a game centered around old nostalgia and make it good. I have a litmus test for this sort of thing, that Ash mentioned in the podcast. A game needs to be good on its own, absent any context outside of its series. The further along a series gets, the more impenetrable it becomes, generally speaking, which is why the third or fourth game in a given series is often a significant reboot. To wit: Grand Theft Auto 3, Bioshock: Infinite, Assassin’s Creed IV, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the new Thief, Fallout 3, Jedi Outcast AND Jedi Academy– just a short list of games as I scroll down my Steam Library that are the third or fourth game in their series and a significant reboot, sometimes changing the game’s genre entirely.

Shadowrun is a good game in its own right– you can enjoy it without having a decades-long background in the kinds of games it’s inspired by. It’s perhaps why I’ve had so much trouble getting into Pillars of Eternity. There are awkward parts of the gameplay and the user interface that are borne of the game trying very hard to stay close to its roots, without necessarily evaluating if those roots make for a modern-feeling, up-to-date game.

Games are experiences that are meant to evoke certain feelings; they create a particular scenario in which your brain lights up in a certain way. Unfortunately, the key there isn’t the game itself, but the way the brain lights up, and that changes over time, ESPECIALLY with new experiences. I can play Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, one of my favorite steampunk games, and it lights up my brain in much the same way it did when I played it more than a decade ago. It’s also a deeply flawed game, with a lot of break points and issues. I’ve played similar games since, and they don’t evoke the same feelings. I dearly loved JRPGs growing up, but now it takes a truly spectacular one that approaches the genre differently to get me engaged.

Even if we like the same sorts of games over time, our standards will rise as we get better and better games. The bar goes up, and fewer and fewer games will meet it as time goes on. If we’re not careful, we’ll find that no new games meet our criteria anymore, and nothing new will light our brains up the way the older games do.

Lone Wanderer tweaked wallpaper (FALLOUT 3) by SLiqster

It’s why I harp so much on trying games you don’t necessarily think you’ll like, in genres you don’t always play. I mentioned Fallout 3 as an example in the podcast– the old Fallout games with isometric turn-based RPGs, and lent a strong sense of wandering through a vast world on your own and having many options for dealing with whatever problems or opportunities came up. The new Fallout games are first-person shooters, but importantly they’re still pursuing that sense of wandering through a vast world. Our bar for that sort of experience has risen, and for the most part an isometric game makes you feel detached and makes the world feel constrained to what you can see on screen. In a first-person shooter, you can pull out binoculars or a scope and look out over a vast landscape, which contributes to that sense of detachment and tunnelvision when playing an isometric RPG when put in direct comparison.

As games get better, the kinds of things we can express in them as a medium get broader, and certain genres will lend themselves to certain types of games more readily. This will change over time, as genres mature and the gaming landscape changes. The point-and-click adventure game that gave you chills as a child (7th Guest anyone?) has become a first-person thriller (Call of Cthulu/Amnesia) and eventually morphed into an MMO (The Secret World), all focusing on a very similar set of experiences and lighting your brain up in similar ways, but coming at it from very different angles.

http://joshflores.net/

With a game that’s about nostalgia, about triggering those old feelings, it’s important to pay attention not just to what those games did, but how the medium has evolved in the meantime. Slavishly recreating an old game isn’t going to have the same impact as a brand new game that evokes those same feelings in a newer, tighter package. This can even transcend IP– Shadowrun Returns and Dragonfall have little to nothing in common with older Shadowrun games, but it expertly pulls in references to older Shadowrun content as well as evoking the feel of old Black Isle and similar games, all without becoming inaccessible to a player unfamiliar with any of those things.

Coming off of the MMO nostalgia train of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I haven’t felt like an MMO has captured the feeling of the old games. For me, it’s because a lot of those memories are inextricably tied to the joy of discovering a new technology– the Internet, and the idea that I could play games with real people in a huge world without the constraints of a team vs team match was thrilling. That same earthshaking, intoxicating excitement isn’t likely to happen again until another major technological breakthrough that not only changes the way I play my games, but also changes the way I live my life. That confluence of events is what gave those older MMOs the spark that seared into my brain, and is (I think) why the genre has stumbled once internet multiplayer became a core feature of every video game. Certain games are trying to mine that nostalgia for older MMOs, but they’re missing the key factor; recreating the games and their features, not recreating the experience.

I hope that in my lifetime I see another technological leap that makes me sit forward, jump into a game, meet a new person in that game, and have us both get excited because, holy shit, we live in the future and we can’t believe playing this game in this way is an actual thing we can do. That’s how I’ll get my MMO nostalgia, and that’s why I’m excited about the new Shadowrun– it’ll make me remember all of the good times I had with old isometric RPGs without also reminding me that they now feel old.

I talked a bit before about a different kind of MMO system, with only two roles: Frontline and Flanking. Actual abilities while in these roles would vary based on player choices, but the core concept revolves around the idea of a front-and-center player and up to two flanking players, who aren’t in the direct line of fire.

A structure like this would have a number of ramifications on encounter design and group content. I’ll split things up by working my way up in encounter size.

Solo Encounters

A player playing solo is going to still have a Frontline and a Flanking setup, and is mostly going to be using these to change up their tactics mid-combat. The enemy is going to be attacking them no matter which they’re using, so it’ll be more akin to stances than role-swapping. There’s a lot of possibility here for creative solo builds, though it’ll be instantly familiar to a lot of players because it’ll look like the games where you can weapon-swap easily, like Guild Wars 2, WoW’s stance-swapping, and similar.

Design of solo encounters isn’t going to change much, although the variance in how effective players are at fighting enemies on their own should even out a bit. What’s most likely is that players will build a particular ‘stance’ to be their primary, and then put utility and other functions on the secondary, to fill in gaps and reduce downtime.

Duo and Trio Encounters

Players playing in pairs will start to see the system take shape (yes, that sentence was fun to write). It’s at this point that the Switch mechanic will enter play, and in theory combo chains can start rolling, giving two players large benefits for playing together as soon as they have a duo. Mostly, it won’t require anyone to change their solo builds much, although some players may set up Switch combos and start to fall into preferred roles at this point.

With a third person added into the mix, we’ll start to see group dynamics form. There may be two players who switch frequently, and a third who spends most of their time flanking and supporting, or all three players may switch frequently. It’d be important to playtest various ways of Switching in a trio, whether a player calls a specific other player to Switch or if they simply call for a Switch and the first player to respond is the one who switches. Normally I’d be against that kind of imprecise design, but with a small number of players it can stay organized pretty easily.

‘Standard’ Groups (4-9 players)

At this size group, we’re looking at dungeons, the kind of everyday delves that you get into with a group, do some exploring, fight a few bosses, collect loot. For standard dungeons, I would tune them for 6 or so players, but allow players to enter with as few as 4 or as many as 9 players. Keep the rewards static, but split them among the party, so the fewer players you bring, the more rewarding the dungeon is for each individual.

In this sort of setup, you’re looking at 2-3 trios, and I think the trio would be the basic group unit of the game, because that’s where the Switch mechanic works best. As a result, encounters are going to need to think more about supporting multiple groups and splitting groups up, with fewer single large bosses and more “controlled chaos” fights. I generally think this will be fine, especially because it allows us to introduce tank-swapping mechanics (in which a boss will overwhelm a single tank, so two or more tanks take turns, usually a much more advanced skill) at a very early stage.

Groups will quickly learn to work together in both their trios and in the party as a whole, which makes the overall transition to larger-sized groups a lot smoother and more natural.

‘Large’ Groups (12-24 players)

This size of group fits solidly in the “raid” encounter size, and it’s here where the difficulty comes in, because these fights are going to need to scale to the player number for them to make any sense. One possibility here is to have a “vanguard” group that gets further bonuses based on the players’ choices and can Switch with other whole groups, a sort of second-tier advanced mechanic that sets one team as the ‘heroes’ of the encounter until swapping out for another group.

There’s a certain amount of appeal to this structure, just because it adds an extra layer of strategy to fights based around juggling Vanguard bonuses, but also because it creates a situation in which different groups can play to different strengths. A group with a very strong core group can focus skilled members in one group and have them be the Vanguard, whereas a group where skill is spread out a lot more might perform Vanguard Switches more often, spreading the punishment (and heroism!) around. A particularly skilled and coordinated group might set up a strong combo, in which they perform rotating Switches in their group to chain combos, while also Vanguard Switching to the next group for them to continue the chain, until everyone in the entire raid has participated.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have the Vanguard buff scale based on the number of group members, though I wouldn’t make that the only scaling mechanic for encounters.

Encounter Design

One of the things that would go away fairly quickly is the idea of the basic tank-and-spank fight, where one tank holds a boss in place while a healer keeps them alive and the rest of the party burns it down. When even a ‘basic’ group is likely to have two tanks, there’s going to need to be a lot more variety in encounter design.

I’d likely move away from single large bosses as the exclusive “major” encounters in a dungeon, and would quite likely change the way dungeons worked in general. With scaling in place, I’d consider freezing most resource regeneration, so players would need to be much more careful about how they played– being less wanton with their health and more careful about throwing around big spells. With that kind of design, every encounter becomes interesting, because it stops being about blowing everything to win, then recovering, then moving on– efficiency of combat becomes a significant factor. A dungeon might have a number of rest points, acting as checkpoints and letting players restore resources once per run, but keeping even minor encounters relevant.

It would also naturally make it valuable to bring more players into a dungeon, to swap in as resources dwindled. A smaller party might get more rewards, but would be much less likely to be able to complete the dungeon. It would also encourage Switching, particularly if Switching could be used to restore some resources. This would conflict with the idea of having resource regeneration be a core boost to slot, but could be used as a “switching restores more”. If Switch was only usable in combat, with the first party member to gain aggro being the default Frontline player, it would prevent spamming Switch out of combat to restore skills, but potentially open up interesting group dynamics wherein combat is prolonged as a resource faucet.

I left WoW in late spring of 2007, burned out from the stress of trying to hold together a fragmenting group. A lot of the raid had left to join other friends on other servers for the expansion, and others were taking the expansion slow. Some of the core group had pushed quickly to the new level cap and were raring to get raids in, causing tension. They wanted deadlines set for people to hit max level, something I staunchly opposed. When it became clear I wouldn’t push people faster than they wanted to go, most of the gung-ho raiders left.

What remained was disorganized and, in many cases, bitter from the infighting that had characterized the last few months of raids pre-expansion and the post-expansion disagreements. The heart and soul of the group was gone, so I did what I could to make sure people would land on their feet elsewhere and, burned out myself, moved on.

A few months later, I was pulled back into WoW by a new group of friends. I’d moved across the country for my job and while they’d all played WoW before, they’d never raided and in some cases had never reached max level. It seemed like a nice way to relax, and I missed the game, so I came back, fully expecting that I could avoid my old haunts. This was easier, because we rerolled on the opposite faction, so I had a lot of content I’d never seen and could leisurely play through.

Old habits die hard. Without even trying, I was experimenting and optimizing, and had a newly max-level character in appreciable gear in a couple of months. I’d passed by people who had 60-level head starts on me and gotten the attention of the leader of the guild I was in, who’d already heard stories about me and saw me as a way to get to see top-end raid content that he’d never seen before.

It’s worth noting at this point that the guild’s leader was, to put it politely, incompetent. Capricious and thoughtless, he would demand that the guild come together to do some activity or another, most of which he wanted to brand with his own ‘creative’ twist. It wasn’t enough simply to run a dungeon, we would run it without a tank, or without DPS, “for an element of fun”. Prior to my joining, these efforts were doomed to failure– because I was geared and familiar with playing the game at high levels, I could often push through these nonsense restrictions, which only fueled more.

It got bad enough that several of us created our own channel to get away from the guild leader, calling it “element of fun” as a jab at his scattered whims. It was through this back-channel communication line that we started having fun with the game again, free to talk and have fun without worrying about the constant reactions of the guild leader, who was insecure enough to feel threatened whenever anyone had an idea other than him. It was here that we started talking about raiding again, and where I started building a new team.

I’d had some friends who I’d left behind when I played WoW previously, particularly from college, who I’d kept in touch with but had never played with. I rolled a new character, different from my rogue, and offered to level up with them, and we could all be a group. None of them had formed any particular ties to where they were before, and so were happy to level up something new and different.

We also pulled in people from elsewhere on the server that we’d met, slowly forming a core. A few of my former LNR raiding buddies had left and missed having contact, so I pulled them in as well. We had a motley crew of players of vastly differing skill levels, but I had a good handle on how to run a group, and the 10 or so of us were a lot easier to manage than the 80 or so I’d been managing before.

The biggest issue I had was timidity. Most of these players had never played the game at a high tier before, so there was a tendency to wait, heal up to full, wait for full mana, ask three or four times if everyone was ready, and so on before a pull would happen. It was polite and thoughtful, which I appreciated, but it wasn’t conducive to exciting runs or holding everyone’s attention. A dungeon run that could be completed in 25 minutes could take more than an hour, and people who could only be on for 30-45 minutes were twitchy about committing to something that might take that long.

I gently encouraged faster pulling, but it didn’t take. I had flashbacks to old LNR days, when a hunter would pull mobs well before people were ready and we’d all come together once danger was imminent. I had a pack of throwing knives on my rogue, and could easily pull the next pack and force the tanks and healers to react lest we all die. Stealing a comment from our old raiding days, I’d throw a knife at some nearby idle enemies, declare “hlep!” as they attacked, and see how the group handled it.

As it turned out, the group figured it out pretty damn quick, and we went from slow progress to aggressive powerpulling in short order. Our tanks would start pulling on their own, just to stop me from creating chaos, and one of our healers started being able to heal through truly ridiculous situations largely, I think, from not realizing that he shouldn’t have been able to do so. I’d started with a group of timid, inexperienced players and quickly had a successful crew. We never raided in Burning Crusade, but by the time Wrath hit, we were a well-organized, high-functioning group, working our way through all of the content in Wrath from start to finish, very close to keeping pace with content releases.

This group has stuck with me for more than half a decade at this point, and while the precise makeup of the group has changed a bit over time, it’s been these folks that have jumped games with me for years. Even when we’re not playing the same games, we’re in communication and we’re talking about what we like and don’t like. It’s this group that fumbled our way through Karazhan once or twice and it’s this group that will be working at and taking down Turn 9 this weekend.

I could tell more MMO stories, but they’d all center around this group, so this is about the point at which I leave off on the game progression. Since they’re probably reading this: Thanks for sticking around, y’all. It’s been awesome, and I wouldn’t be looking forward to Heavensward (and every other game we play) anywhere near as much were it not for this crew.