Scanbot Sunday: Choices Part 2

Part one of this subject was originally posted on May 19th with a promise to return to the topic a week later. So I'm a little late, but let's talk about choice in Crafting and Housing and how it can drive the Wildstar Economy.

We've seen the housing plot. Your house is in the center and it is surrounded by a bunch of plugs in which you can socket structures. We've seen all sorts of buildings:  Tower Defense Games, Telegraph Training Grounds, Ferris Wheels, Banks, Crafting Stations, Gardens, Mines, Giant Statues, Dungeons on your housing plot! The point is that there are way more things to build then there is space to build things. I think this is a fantastic example of meaningful choice. As a player you have to choose which structures you want on your housing plot. For someone more interested in ascetics, the options are clearly there and the reason to rotate designs is obvious, new fun toys will show up and they'll want to give them a whirl, but what about for the serious min-max end game player? What options are there for them?

Weekend Without Wildstar - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Hey everyone! I probably should answer a couple of questions before starting.

First...weightless is hard. If there is a bandwagon that I was on, I have fallen off it. I pushed myself a little too far a few weeks ago and the snap back was pretty extreme. I've been away from the blog in general as a result, I didn't know what to say. For the past two weeks I've been saying "I'll post Wednesday!" This sounds an awful lot like, "I'll start working out Monday!" So, here I am today saying no more waiting, let's get writing today.

Wednesday Weigh In - Home Sweet...Mother of [REDACTED]!

I'll start off with the bad news, weighed in at 221 this morning -- Side note, I feel like I have at least a pound of water sloshing around in my inner ear.

Today I was able to enjoy a walk around the building during a 15 minute break, but unfortunately the overtime at the end of the day seemed to set the sun into its off position. I thought you summer days were supposed to be long! I'm not impressed! So I had to hit up the elliptical instead of taking a bike ride. I also pulled out the water mug at work today instead of getting a third can of soda. Hopefully I can work myself back down to 1 can a day, it is a major factor in my weight gain..though it is shaving precious ounces from that ever troublesome tooth enamel weight.

Enough about that! Wildstar Wednesday was all about housing this week. Scooter had tweeted out a few weeks ago that he was sneaking around to the Beta homes and getting screen captures of cool ones. Now we have an awesome gallery of examples of what the Beta folks have been up to. And based on this picture, the answer is "Living the good life."

I imagine the owner sits here while trolling General Chat.

You can see the whole gallery over at the Wildstar site.

Back in Business

Good afternoon. It's been a few weeks since my last update, and there is definitely a connection between keeping this blog up to date and sticking to my workout plans. I have went on one long walk and one short bike ride in the last 3 weeks. I also carried some stuff into storage if that counts.

There are a couple of popular sayings that come up when trying to focus on weight loss. The first is "Tomorrow is Today." It's so easy to say "I'll start tomorrow." because there is always a tomorrow. Falling off the wagon happens, don't keep putting off your new start date until tomorrow, or next weekend, or Monday. Start today. Do something, anything that you wouldn't have done that moves you towards your goal.

The second phrase is "11 days creates a rabbit." Which never made much sense to me...oh, sorry, I'm being told it creates a habit. I thought I was going to learn how to be a magician. Oh well.

So here's what I've got planned:

•  I'm going to update the tracker on the right to show the past 11 days. I am considering developing a point system so it's not just a did I or didn't I.
• I'm going to go back to daily updates. But I'm going to keep them short, closer to 250 words instead of the 1000 word monsters I used to ramble out.
• I've moved into a new stage of the MMO process, Anticipation. The learning phase is mostly done, so my content will reflect that and focus more on the waiting.
• Weigh ins will still come on Wednesday with the official Wildstar weekly update. For the record I was at 218 last week.
• My new exercise strategy will alternate between lower body and upper body. If it's nice out I will be Biking or swimming depending on the day. If it is not nice I will hit the elliptical or do the upper body exercises that I was never good at convincing myself to do.

Wildstar is still coming out this year last I heard, so durrnit I'm running out of time to lose these last 15 pounds! (...and also those other 3 pounds.)

Wednesday Weigh In - Game Jams

First let me call attention to the marvelous new post header that my good friend Joe Schmidt drew up for me. Getting free art is great! Getting amazingly talented free art is awesome! Onto other things, things less positive. I weighed in at 221 pounds today. All I had on were my glasses. I tried taking them off and all that really did was hide my shame in the blur of 20/1200 vision. I did get a walk in at work yesterday and a evening bike ride in on Monday, but I have really been letting the weather control me too much. I said last week I was going to overcome that, and then I didn't. So I have a goal for this week and it's the same as last week's. At least I don't have to update my rubber wristbands. For the record, I don't wear wristbands, because I am an adult. Please disregard my entire wardrobe of video game polo shirts that I wear to work in my professional office building.

 This week the Wildstar Team shared with us the sort of things they like to do on the weekend. Based on this post the answer is "go to work." Since this is an official blog post, and one assumes that senior management reads it, I don't know how much of that statement is true and how much is the entire team angling for a raise

What did we learn out of this update? Those housing dungeons that Gaffney was tossing about on the last interview circuit have a name now! They are called Expeditions.

Expeditions are scaled dungeons available via your housing plot. The scope of an Expedition is constrained, amounting to roughly 15 minutes of concentrated gameplay.  The story is on the minimal side, the content is devoid of exterior context, there are no quests and the playable space is relatively small.

For more information on how these Jams are different than the normal Monday through Friday 9 to 5 you can head over to the Wildstar Blog and read the whole entry.

When'sday Weigh In - Luminai

A co-worker asked me today if I was alright. I didn't know I looked unright, so I asked what she meant. She said I looked sad.

I guess she is right. I'm sure you've noticed that my posts have gotten, well...kind of lazy. I'm sorry about that. I certainly haven't lost my passion for Wildstar or for my weight loss goals, though I've certainly been slipping on the latter.

I'd like to be able to point to one thing or another as a reason, but I am unable, there seems to just be a convergence of things. For the last two weeks the weather here has been 100% butts. I have been working extra hours at work due to holiday preparation and holiday fall out. I also volunteered for a special project that I legally cannot say anything more about except that it is taking up more of my off hours than I expected it too. Extra stress, less hours to decompress, lack of sun, excess of moistness: it all just brings me down. So I have an extra pop, or a bag of Sour Patch Kids, or a giant burger from Fudrucker's. Now I weigh in this week at 219.2 pounds. I'm not proud of that, and I need to do something about it before it spirals out of control.

I am hoping to get some build up going this weekend and then, with any luck, the sun will come out next week and I can try this biking thing again, it was certainly effective, if I'm a little more careful and allow more time for travel I should be able to avoid injury.

How about those Luminai?

Human-Eldan hybrids? I did not see that one coming after the art director explained that no one knew what a Eldan looked like, but that does explain all of the dominion statues that the community had dug up with Eldan images on them. They were really Luminai statues.

I think it's kind of neat that these super humans lead the Dominion. It adds that layer of control and privileged that I thought was missing, it also explains why the Mechari and the Draken remain loyal.

If this kind of lore interests you, check out the full article on the Wildstar homepage.


I will do my best to find the time to get a real "The Nexus" and "Scanbot Sunday" produced this weekend. But I may have some other family obligations.

Wednesday Weigh In - Paths

I don't know which is more surprising today:

• After a week of failing to get a lick of productive exercise, I kept even at 217.8 pounds.
• Wildstar dropped a bombshell of Path information on their website early.
• The Press bombarded us with interviews and features all day today.

I have a ton of this information to dig though. I am hesitant to call the two videos posted by the team as the most important, they are certainly the most visible.

There is also a great deal of information on the different types of path "missions" that you'll encounter on a newly updated section of the Wildstar official web page. This includes details on the Scientist and Settler paths, which previously had only been spoken of in hushed whispers. You can read all of the details by following the link I've provided cleverly disguised as my favorite image of the day.

Before I post that link I did want to say a couple of things. It still feels like the Soldier and Explorer are the most fleshed out of the 4, but Settler will take some hands on to really understand and Scientist may just not be my thing, coloring my perspective. Also I was a little disappointed to see how "Crossing Paths" was represented in the Dev Speak video. I had imagined that it would be more like different paths interacting to create or unlock other extra content. Maybe we'll see something more at end game, that seems like a good place to really evolve the path interactions.

Frost keeps some odd company.

Scanbot Sunday - Choice

The short answer is: the weather did not hold up. It's not looking good for the start of the week either. I guess the April showers were pushed back. My leg does appear to be fully healed though, so I'll get some other activity underway for Monday and Tuesday.

I missed my "The Nexus" post this week. I wanted to cover audio pod casts, but I didn't have an opportunity to do my research on the subject. I'm going to get a couple weeks of all the casts I can find queued up for next week while I'm working and get that post up for next week. Sorry for the hiccup, just been pretty darn busy around here and haven't had the time.

Today I want to talk about choice in MMO's. It's a pretty important aspect of the game. It allows players to distinguish themselves and feel like they are more than just riding a rail. There are different types of choices: Permanent choices, temporary choices, and false choices.

Wednesday Weigh In - Beta Phase 2

This last week has been all kinds of hassle. Another busy week at work with some enforced OT, nice every once and awhile to have some enforced paycheck padding, but makes it hard to keep up on all these leisure activities. I am pretty sure I mentioned that I pulled a quad last week, so I've been off the sauce a bit. I think the most exercise I got this weekend was putting together my new giant cast iron bed frame. I included it in my tracking chart! Don't look at me like that, it was a lot of work. I managed to come up positive this week with a weigh in of 217.8. I got out for a walk around the complex today and everything feels fine, I'm planning to bike in tomorrow assuming the weather holds. One thing I am going to stop is the "down the stairs" thing I'd been doing. I don't know how much benefit it was providing, but I'm pretty sure that bounding downward was the cause of my injury.

Lets talk about 20 pages of patch notes! (Briefly)

Scanbot S..omeday - The Other 1%

I hope everyone had a great mother's day. I am late getting this post up, I've had this idea rattling in my brain for a week now, but every time I put pen to paper I come up with something unusable. I am going to try and give a synapses instead of a diatribe.

When you talk about the 1% in the MMO community everyone thinks of hard core raiders, the dedicated few who stormed the Necropolis of Naxxramas in classic World of Warcraft or concurred the Sunwell raid in the Burning Crusade expansion. Organized players who have both skill and commitment enough to switch crafting professions twice a week on three alts in order to ensure the best raid composition for every fight. These hard core players are certainly 1% of the whole inside any game's population, but they are not alone.

I am the 1% of players who enjoy the depth and breadth of what an MMO has to offer. I want to experience the world of Wildstar as an Exile and as a Dominion. I want to face my enemies toe to toe with my Techblade, ambush them with the power of my stealth suit, and I want to blast them with telekinetic swords or twin pistols. I want to explore, settle, soldier and science the world of Nexus.

I am the 1% of players who game for 2-4 hours a night and sometimes pull 20 hour shifts on a weekend, but prefers casual content. Sometimes, I want something truly punishing, but not on a set schedule.

You are most likely not part of my 1%, statistically speaking, but here is the good news. Based on what Jeremy Gaffney said about Wildstar's goals for elder game content development, they want to make something that appeals to your 1% too.

 Whew! That was way easier then trying to define a whole bunch of different examples of 1% player groups.

What's your 1%? What have you been missing recently? Is it a game feature that is missing from the game(s) you play, or is it a feeling that you want to recapture?

The Nexus - Officially Speaking

Good morning! I seem to be running a day behind this week on my updates, just the way it goes sometimes. The last couple of days have been uneventful for me, a result of the earlier part of my week. I managed to damage my left quad to some degree. I tried biking to work on Friday but the stinging pain while not unbearable did convince me to turn around to avoid exacerbating the injury. I'm taking a load off and avoiding straining my legs, which means no biking or elliptical and no stairs.

Interesting things burst out of the carbine camp this week, as well as a couple of notable other pieces of news.

• Jeremy Gaffney discusses the 1%
• Dev Speak #2 - Movement
• ZAM Interview with Chris Lynch and Hugh Shelton
• Press Event at Carbine
• Q&A on Week In Geek
• Jason Winter's article on Game Skinny

Wednesday Weigh In - Stress Test

I am a day behind on this update because I had difficulty formulating exactly what I had to say about the Wildstar Wednesday subject. When I decided to wait until Thursday I had no idea that Carbine was going to spring another Dev Speak video on us. I'll just add this to the pile of news items that I'll be covering on Friday.

I started biking to work this week, and it's been going pretty well. I gambled and lost yesterday (no I did not poop my pants) the weather did not hold up for the ride home and I ended up wet and dirty, the back of my Curse party Wildstar shift got the worst of it. The best side effect of this man powered commute has been it reduced my soda consumption by a serving per day. I'm wide awake when I get to work and I'm very thirsty for pure water. I did tear a muscle in my upper thigh though, I have today off so I will focus on upper body stuff and give my legs a rest. Once I get used to this extra expenditure of energy I will work back in the exercises I'd been doing for the last 4 months, I'm still getting in my walks at work, but I've been skipping the elliptical.

My weight yesterday, and I cherry picked the stuff out of this measurement. 218.1 pounds! Getting back on track!

My only pressing weight related concern at the moment is that all the weight loss seems to be occurring at or below my belt line. This impressive beast radiating from my belly button remains intact. I am worried I will end up with a freakish trucker body.


...no offense to any truckers who happen to read this blog, I'm sure you are quite lovely, I'm talking about those other truckers, the ones you don't like.

Wildstar Wednesday this week was a big announcement. Carbine will be holding a massive stress test on their beta server(s). They are going to invite way too many people in to play the beta for one or two days only in an upcoming weekend yet to be announced.

The purpose of this announcement was the let everyone know that it's not going to be a very fun experience for most people. There is no server queue yet, so lots of players will have trouble even connecting. If you do get connected you'll be in an overpopulated starting zone that is laggy and prone to crashing.

That sounds awful, why would you want to do that? The team needs to figure out where the servers break and why so that they can make improvements to the code or the hardware prior to that ambiguous 2013 launch date.

"Great, great, help the devs, that's all well and good...but what about me?" A fair question, if a little bit selfish. According to Craig Turner anyone who makes a good faith effort to log in and help with the stress test will be added to a priority list for future closed beta invites. See Internet? There is something in it for you.

I'm going to cut it off here for today, I just had my blood drawn and I'm a little woosy...speaking of cherry picking I just fasted for 12 hours and had a significant amount of life giving fluid removed from my body...maybe I weigh even less today!

Scanbot Sunday - Looking For Group

It has been a pretty great weekend. The streets were dry by 4pm on Saturday so I was able to head down to the bike shop and have the uncomfortable pieces of my bike replaced (pedals and grips.) I also picked up a key lock to replace the combination lock that will be wrapped around my seat pole for all time. (Or until I learn how to use a wrench.) Today was exceptionally nice. Took the new parts out for a spin to work and back. I Was a little worn out but I avoided taking a nap. I am going to do the bike transportation thing this week and see how it goes. It may be a couple of weeks before I am able to do that and have the energy to do much of anything else. Eventually, just like the other exercises, I will grow accustom to it and resume normal functions. Incidentally, I was a pound lighter when I got home. Something tells me that's not sustainable.

Alright, enough stalling, let's talk about group finders. I'll start with a spoiler, I think they are an essential tool in modern full featured MMO's. There, now if you disagree with that you'll be able to proceed through this piece with the appropriate amount of bile welling up. For those of you who do not know what a group finder is that will be the first thing I cover after the jump. Click the out of place black box to continue to the article.

The Nexus - Sup out there?

This has been a busy week for me. I was able to just narrowly avoid another winter event, we had snow but it was a light rain by the time I left work. Speaking of work, they are doing electrical systems work on our office tower this weekend so my whole department was doing mandatory overtime to get all of our time sensitive work 100% caught up before they killed power to the building for two days. I also had to juggle some great game releases this week.

Fortunately it's been a light week for Wildstar news.

Unfortunately this made it hard to make a post last night. as I stared blearily at the monitor knowing I had to get up at 7 to drive my girlfriend to work. I put it off until this morning and I'm glad I did. Despite a Firefox crash I've found some great items from across the web about Wildstar, a couple of which I just found today and a couple I'd forgotten happened this week. (My how time crawls while you are waiting for a release)

• Settler in Exile's piece on gold sinks.
• Carbine responses on Wildstar Central
• Shoddycast's Nexus Roundup
• EU Arkship post on Wildstar site
• Mission: Nexus episode 1
• Blind Quest: Wildstar Preview

Wednesday Weigh In - Month 4 Update (also Stormtalon's Lair)

I am four months into this experiment, so it's time again to look at everything and see how it's going. I should probably start with my weight as of this morning: 219.3 pounds.

This is significantly short of my goal of being at 215 by the start of May. I am less disappointed about this than you may expect. Certainly I've stumbled a bit over the last month. Even this week with mandatory overtime and oppressive gloom of a return snow storm has been a struggle for me to motivate. It was much easier to spend all evening playing Game Dev Tycoon on Monday and far too long in queue to play Neverwinter on Tuesday. But that's the thing, I'm a gamer. I always will be a gamer. I will do gamer things.

I could probably be getting more consistent early results if I scheduled my work outs for the morning before I went to work instead of in the evenings when I feel like it. Something more regimented has the disadvantage of being set aside from my normal routine, in the long run it will be far too easy to cast it off. If I can instead work positive activities and attitudes into my normal life I think the effects will be far longer lasting.

Here is a good example. I used to consume about 5 cans of pop every day, usually more on my days off. Pop is a huge source of extra calories in my diet. I could have cut it completely, I've done it before. Eventually I just started drinking it again, and right back up to 5 or 6 cans a day. This time around I reduced my consumption to 3 cans max daily. I drink one with each meal. This is still a bunch of calories that could stand to be out of my diet, but I've stuck with it for months, and I'm likely to continue. The only further adjustment I'd like to make is eliminating the can from dinner, so that I can get to sleep easier; a very common sense goal.

Assuming tonight's snow storm is just a joke that is a month late and it clears up by the weekend I'll be hitting the trails again to work up my stamina on my bike. and hopefully by May 13th I will feel comfortable biking to and from work daily. Adding this to the walk I take during my 15 minute break and my nightly 30 minute exercise creates a pretty reasonable routine that fits into my life. I think that's the trick for long term success, but I'd be interested to hear what you think about it.

Wildstar updated their page, as they do most Wednesdays. They treated us to some history to the Dungeon that was shown off to fans at Arkship EU. There are some nice pictures and a fair amount of background on enemy within this dungeon. It doesn't leave much to talk about, but it does whet the appetite. I would have liked to see a Dev walk though video of part of the instance, like Dallas Dickinson did for SWTOR. But we can't have everything. If you are interested in a taste of the story from this first Exiles dungeon, check out this link.

Boss 1?

Scanbot Sunday - Time To Level

Hope everyone is having a great weekend! The weather has been beautiful here. I did quite a bit of outside things yesterday, relatively. After spending my Saturday morning carrying tables from the barn loft to the garage at my parent's house I came home and got a 50 minute bike ride in to meet my cardio goals for the day. Today I hit the trail again and this time took it all the way to work, beastly hill and all. The top of the hill greeted me with this sign.

I don't know what it means, but it seems serious.

I'm pretty sure this was the sign I passed going the other direction.

Dem Photoshop Skills

There is another pound and a half of Sour Patch Kids on my desk from unknown sources...

Today's Wildstar related topic is leveling speed, the impact it has on the game and the impact the game has on it.

The Nexus - EU Arkship Mostly

Only in Minnesota does the weather go from "oy I wish I had a pair of gloves" to "why am I wearing pants?" in 24 hours. I may test the waters on biking to work over the weekend since snow exists only in huddled masses on the north side of tall buildings.

The artist I presented my concept logo to indicated he should have it finished over the weekend. I'm very excited to see how it turns out.

Today I will be looking at community and official information that has come out of the Arkship EU event that happened last weekend.

• Stormtalon's Lair Screenshots
• Wildstar Roleplay's Impressions
• Black Wolf and Mizpah on Wildstar Central
• Wildstar Life Interview with Lead Systems Designer Christopher Behrens
• ZAM interviews Jen Gordy
• Episode 2 of Late Night Dominion
• Wildstar Weekly on a new You Tube Channel
• Nexus Talk with Bog Otter 

Wednesday Weigh In - Crimson Isle

A couple of weeks ago, when the M30 patch notes were posted on the Wildstar page, Troy Hewitt explained how they try and measure excitement for their game. In my case you can literally measure it in the weight I have gained back.

Follow the read more to hear the details, and see what new feature Carbine revealed today!

Scanbot Sunday - Pre Release Communities

One of the great things that comes up because of the long development time of an MMORPG is the well established community that precedes release. The most passionate players make up this community and it interacts differently with the developer than the post release community does.

Last week I had considered writing about the way that Carbine engages the community through the Wildstar Uplink feeds on Twitter (#WSUplink) and the recent Design an Item Slot thread on Wildstar Central. My original feelings on this interaction was that it was a dangerous gambit, but the events of this week have entirely recolored my opinion. The way Carbine and its staff interact with their fans is well calculated and also amazingly "for real" and passionate. The "realness" of this outreach is what the community appreciates the most and they show it each day in the flurry of re-tweets and community events - there is a game night going on as I type that you can watch on Twitch just to chill out and play games or hang out in chat with other gamers who are excited about and waiting patiently (well kind of patiently) for the release of Wildstar.

The Nexus - Gaffney Is A Pretty Cool Dude

There is a lot of negative news that I could talk about this week, but that just isn't the focus of this blog.

I'll start with my activity, as I reported Wednesday I got to the gym, and also Friday. Thursday I failed to do my strength building exercises. Thanks to certain environmental effects I did not get to take my daily walks at work Thursday or Friday. Today I plan to do two sets of strength building exercises and tomorrow two sets on the elliptical. Sometime this weekend I will be drawing up a chart to check yay or nay for if I did what I planned. I should have that up no later than Wednesday's Weigh In.

This was a massive undertaking this week. There is so much going on in the Wildstar community right now. I've chosen to mostly focus on Jeremy Gaffney related news, because there was a lot of it. There were a couple of threads I wanted to check back on to see how they turned out.

• Open World PVP thread follow up
• Design an Item follow up
• Gaffney on Reddit
• Gaffney (and other Carbine staff) answer questions about patch note leaks
• Wildstar Weekly an EU video cast