I am pleased to report that I am below 220, just barely at 119.8! For some, five pounds in two months may not seem like a lot but I am very pleased with this progress. If I can continue to get this level of result through March and April and start May at 115 I will be in a really good position to make strong progress through the spring, summer and fall months. I plan to add daily walks at work. The distance around our office park takes about 10 minutes to circle at a brisk walk which allows me to fit it into my 15 minute breaks. I'd also like to add biking to and from work to the routine. I only live a few miles from the office and there is a great set of trails that lead right to our complex. I think these additional efforts added over the course of the next few months will dramatically improve my results and lead to success in my goal to be below 200 by the release of Wildstar.
Speaking of Wildstar, I'm sure that's what anyone reading this is more interested in.
March is a big month for me, I will be heading to Boston in 3 weeks to attend PAX East. I really look forward to meeting members of the development team that are out on the floor, and I will have a list of questions that I am still building as I read through the blog entries and learn more about the game. My goal is to be fully caught up by the time I leave for PAX. Which I am on pace to do without issue.
The entry I am looking at today is concerning Combat Telegraphs. These are the red lines and circles you see when combat is going on. Here is the video from Jeremy Gaffney
This is a very interesting feature, and it has the gaming community at large concerned. When I hear this feature of Wildstar brought up by Streamers, Youtubers and Game Journalists they seem to think it is a simplification, a way of making the game easy or not hard core. I disagree with this sentiment from the information I've seen so far. In a previous post it was clarified that they have ways of tuning the telegraphs to adjust their difficulty, and that's where the importance is.
If you are in the top 10% of gamers or even the top 25% hell top 50% in terms of skill what you need to understand is that everyone else needs to play this game too. If those other 50-90% of players were not present then you could not have a game to play because the world would be empty and more importantly the studio would run out of money. Having a telegraph system as they have displayed is actually a way that can allow them to make the game harder and more engaging for everyone. The truth is that if you are in the top echelons of play, you don't need these telegraphs to tell you to move, you can react to things like shadows and monster facing and memory of abilities and patterns. But since the average player is not at that level the punishment of failing to react to these things has to be muted, because these players get frustrated when they don't understand what they did wrong. But with the giant red geometry on the ground if that ability one shots them, well, they know what they did wrong and should be capable of blaming themselves for the error and not some random fluke. It will allow them to learn and develop as a player.
As a whole, in addition to allowing the game to feature harder encounters it stands to reason that the population's skill will be elevated at large by these telegraphs.
I do hope there is a way to toggle them off and on though. Perhaps for a challenge, but primarily because I know people like to make videos and disrupting the beautiful environments and flashy effects with these red shaders would be a shame.
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