Where’s Rhalinur

Definitely absent but not completely afk. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been busy playing Tera and clearly I’ve been posting about it. A couple of nights ago I had gotten the itch to do something different so I got back into D3, leveled my witch doctor and recently defeated the skeleton king. This was a nice divergence from my focus on Tera. Tonight I’m tempted to jump back into D3 but this is my final weekend of playing Tera for a couple of weeks. This coming Monday my family and I will start our trip to Europe for a 2-week vacation in Italy. We’re very excited and preparing for that trip has had me busy. On top of that I’m taking care of our youngest son who is out of school for the summer. Anyhow, when we return in early July my goal is to not just jump back into games that I love but to continue posting on Aggrolicious. This is a long term project and I intend to be here for the long haul.

Tera and DPS meters

This is a polarizing feature that some players would like to be a part of Tera sometime in the near future. There are many arguments to be made on why it should or shouldn’t be a feature of the game. Of those arguments there are sufficient pros and cons as to why this should happen. On one hand having DPS meters will help the player identify that they are not doing enough to help the party/raid; on the other that same feature can be abused to where, due to low dps, a party/raid a member can be booted from the group or not allowed to join in the first place. There are more arguments why dps meters should be available to which I won’t get into here. Instead I’ll share my thoughts on having it.

Let me be clear that when dps meters are used correctly that they help the player identify where they are in the effectiveness of their gear/spec/skill rotation. However, let me also say that I’m against dps meters when they become a measuring stick to arbitrarily rank a player on how they perform to which that limitation inhibits their ability to become part of a group who can help them improve. To me the advent of dps meters was one of many reasons why my love for WoW started to wain over time. Too often I saw the negative aspects of dps meters being misused and the greater internet fuckwad theory in full effect.

Ultimately dps meters and gear score was a big factor of what ruined WoW for me. In the beginning it was a game that I loved to play and had incredible fun in. Where it was difficult to get into upper echelon guilds that were the best at end game raids they were not concerned with dps output or what gear you had but whether you were a good fit for the guild, that you showed up to raids on time and knew the boss fights. When the top guilds recruited new members they usually had an established web site with an application form, and you would be interviewed by an officer who would determine if you had the qualities that they were looking for. Guild invites were not random or given after a public channel recruitment post hooked an observer. Getting into a top level guild was a big deal.

So, in closing I’ll just say that I for one am hesitant in adding a dps meter to Tera but that doesn’t mean that I’m absolutely against it. Should EME include a dps meter my preference would be that the individual player sees only their dps output and no one else’s. Furthermore EME has been doing a bang-up job of providing dungeon guides to the community. As part of their guides they should include what dps output is recommended from the players to be a helpful contributor. Although this is not a perfect solution I think that it’s not a bad compromise to start with. Should other better ideas exist I would be open to suggestion.

Tera project continues and patch 17.29.03 released

While its been a week since I’ve last posted anything that doesn’t mean that I’m done with this blogging endeavor. Instead I’ve found my summer to be filled with a lot of business that I wasn’t expected. What I had hoped for was the free time to play Tera and be level 60 by now. Instead I’m now level 42 and still truly enjoying Tera.

What has kept me busy is having the summer off from work and spending that free time with my youngest son, who also has the summer off. While our oldest son is busy trying to establish his independence from us my wife is busy with an intense work project that she has to have completed prior to our Italy vacation later this month. To me that family time is much more important especially spending time with my youngest son, which is far more rewarding. That being said, let me share in brief some thoughts on Tera.

Path 17.29.03 was recently released. Let me summarize my thoughts on what has changed.

• Character transfer level requirement has been changed from 5 to level 10 with a 24-hour cool down is in place; also the amount of gold allowed to transfer was lowered from 100,000 to 30,000.
  • I am not entirely sure why this would be implemented but I’m guessing that some players may have found some way to exploit the game with the previous less stringent transfer rules. Does it have to do with the recent Vanarch election process? I don’t know for certain and some brief google searches didn’t find a sufficient reason why this was included.
• Changed daily quest reset time from 7 p.m. PDT to 8 a.m. PDT
  • This makes sense to change dailies reset at a more convenient time other than peak player hours
• Reduced the number of players needed to create a new zone channel
  • Since I’ve never created a new zone channel I’m not sure what the necessity of this change was but can guess that it just makes custom chat channels easier to generate
• Saved the best for last: Changed the timer that one can post messages to the Looking for Group channel to one message per minute
• • I can see what they’re doing here. In the patch notes they included the snarky comment “Seriously, it’s not Barrens chat, people.”. For those who were not in vanilla WoW days this was a reference to the amount of chat that went on in the Barrens that if Obi Wan Kenobi had anything to say about Barrens chat it would be, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy”.
  • It was a lot of fun to be a lurker and watch the LFG posts that the players in Tera posted. Occasionally I’d chip in what I felt were helpful messages but would for the most part stay away. Now that there’s a 1 minute timer on the LFG channel it has changed the chat, but not much. What EME should to is up that timer to 2 minutes on all channels but include a global or out of character channel without that restriction so that the players who enjoy that social aspect of the game can chat there, and those who don’t want to participate can stay out of them.