OwnedCore Report #29

[Kenneth]

We're back with our 29th Report. This week is gonna be juicy. We have a great article by Veritable where he discusses his BFA experience on Beta and raises some questions, some news from around the globe, and a list of 5 games coming this month that are worth getting excited for! I have to ask, are you guys/gals returning for BFA? Why or why not? It seems like everybody is on the fence but maybe that's just me.

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Battle for Entertainment - WoW's Battle To Keep You Engaged by Veritable

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I have been putting a lot of time into the aspects of the Battle for Azeroth beta, and let me tell you something. It doesn't feel like the World of Warcraft of a new expansion, it has a feeling of being that point late in the expansion where they add catch-up mechanics to entice new players to come back and play again.

To start, I didn't want to copy my character over. I wanted to see what it might be like as a brand new character coming into the game. It is like buying the Expansion on a new account and using the 110 boost to get into the game. To be fair, I re-created my character from live servers, including all of the skills that I had on my warlock, and went to town testing out how it plays. It started off as a simple experience of leveling, and then it grew into something akin to how do I keep playing this game now...

I knew going in that when I hit max level I was going to have a gear grind. That's normal. But I never experienced an actual grind. Normally, you would have to run dungeons like a mad man and go hard on heroics before you could do an LFR (taking from Legion experience). But here is how I think the expansion is failing and where it is succeeding. I will let you decide if it is a good move or not, and please leave your comments below.

It took me 1 Day and 5 Hours of play time to hit level 120. That was with reading a bunch of quest text for the story-lines because I figured it would be a good idea to at least have some semblance of what is going on this expansion as far as lore is concerned. Just like in Legion you were forced to do specific dungeons in the zones to finish the story arcs, but since there is only 3 real zones there are only 3 dugeons that I had to do while completing two of the zones. Freehold, Shrine of the Storm and Tol Dagor. I never really "needed" to do these however, and I found myself skipping up the item levels outside of dungeons and mythics using the new Rare system that you unlock during the Campaign quests.

When you get into Stromgarde and have a weekly quest to complete it, then you have unlocked the zone itself. In Stromgarde there is a vendor just off the docks that gives you the quest, has a table to queue up for the event in front of him, but after you finish the quest the first time... well there's a nice portal that takes you to the zone. So last night I was rather surprised and here is why.

After leveling and doing 2 heroics I had an item level of 307 (305 equipped) and I was trying to find out ways of getting more gear. Some magical person told me to go to Highlands and get the gear there. I had no idea what they were talking about so I asked and here is how the conversation went:

"What do you mean Highlands? Stromgarde?"
"Yes. On my warlock I could solo most of the mobs and you get iLevel 355 Gear off of every single mob kill. I geared up exclusively super fast."
"Okay, thanks I will look into it."

So here I am looking at my gear level after doing a couple heroics which give 325+ gear, the mythic versions give 340+ gear. And this super easy to access content gives 355 gear. Which would you prefer?

I did the Stromgarde obviously. If it is as easy and they said, then I would rather (as a DPS) not wait in an hour queue to do a dungeon, just to 'possibly' get a piece of gear.

Now Stromgarde is a pvp zone, but because of the new pvp system you 'see' the pvp flagged enemies, but only if you target them and attack them do you get flagged. So as a PvE player with Warmode turned off I went to town. It is essentially then a factionless zone where you can all work together to destroy Rare mobs.

What kinds of Rares? There are two different types of Rares in the zone. There are some that are around 130k-230k hp, and then there are the ones over 1 million HP. The bigger ones take a group to get down and only one of them has a mechanic that I "think" I figured out but no one else did, but I won't get into that here. The other ones were easy enough to solo. Some hit super hard so they took a little longer, but yes every single one dropped a 355 piece of gear.

I started at 11:40pm and finished at 12:14pm. I had gotten a full set apart from rings and trinkets of 355 Gear for both specs in under and hours worth of work. An example of what I am talking about is the two weapons. There is a staff and a wand/off-hand set that have different stats. The rest of the gear I really didn't care what stats it was, but was glad that the majority of it was Crit based with some other stat like haste or versatility or mastery on it. I also had a bunch of other purples that I couldn't use or had duplicates of so I disenchanted them.

So after that, I thought ... lets go see what these Mythics are like. So I found a group doing a +2 Freehold Mythic and we cleared it under the timer. I got a 340 pair of gloves, and they were useless to me since mine were 355 already and had better stats. I kept them for the off-set since I didn't have a spare, but it came to me thinking...

This is exactly how the token pieces worked in Legion half-way through. When you would by the piece and use it to get a certain iLevel and potential titanforged/warforged upgrade. But this is every day and over 20 mobs per day with a guaranteed piece of gear.

So my concern is how easy it is compared to other expansions to gear up. This sort of thing is normally used as a catch-up mechanic, and if the system stays in as it is. Essentially within a week of launch, it will be constant Mythic farming around 30 hours of playing the game. How is it that Blizzard can do content like this, with Uldir not really confirmed as far as opening date yet, and keep the players logged in, subscribed, and playing the game on a daily basis?

I honestly don't see it happening, and boredom will set in extremely fast if a player doesn't try to get into other areas of the game like PvP or Open World PvP with the Warmode system. To me personally, it was kind of a let down, as if they don't change anything then it's going to be a very short expansion for me as far as play time is concerned. I won't be able to stay engaged in the game by farming dungeons to get gear to do heroics, and then farming heroics to get gear to do mythics until LFR comes out to get my set bonus'. I just don't see it being a key motivator to stay logged in for more than a week after launch. Unless something drastic changed between now and Launch in the next month.

Knowing this, do you have any concerns or thoughts on the matter?

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5 Games Coming out in July 2018

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Jurassic World Evolution

This came out on July 3rd so it is already out but it still is July release date and probably one of the best of the month. I personally watched Sodapoppin give this game a whirl and it actually looked like a ton of fun. In this game you manage a dinosaur zoo essentially. You are building your own Jurassic Park. To top it all off it is already on Steam's top 12 best selling games on Steam in 2018.


Red Faction Guerrilla Remastered

The 2009 Classic is back and remastered. Red Faction Guerrilla has been remastered and like Jurassic World Evolution, has already come out on July 3rd for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. In this version of the game all the updates are purely visual but if anybody remembers the old version it has one of the most destructible environments ever. So add that to a new and upgraded visual world and you got yourself a lot of fun just like you had in 2009.


Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr

Try saying the title to this game 3 times fast. This game was announced back in 2015 and made by NeocoreGames who are also responsible for the King Arthur RPG games. This game captures the grim, dark, bloody, and gory universe setting of Warhammer 40k. If you're a Warhammer 40k fan I think this is worth giving a shot. This game came out on July 5th.


Earthfall

Earthfall is coming to us on PS4, PC, and Xbox One on the 13th of July. The thing that makes this game look juicy is that it reminds me a lot of Left 4 Dead. This co-op shooter has you fight off an alien invasion using all types of cool tools such as instant walls, heavy weapons, and more. It will feature ten missions across two campaigns with many environments. If you can't wait for BLOPS 4 Zombies than this might fill that niche for you until than.


Octopath Traveler

This Switch Exclusive is coming out on the 13th of July. It is a turn-based RPG developed by the popular Square Enix. At first glance this looks like a Final Fantasy type game with a twist but people have been saying it is more SaGa than anything. At first glance this game looks beautiful with a great sound track and what seems to be a smooth combat system. If I had a Switch this would be on my must buys if I wasn't already still playing Skyrim or the many other Switch games.

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Gaming News from Around the Globe

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Guild Wars 2 Fired 2 Employees over Twitter Beef

A writer for Guild Wars 2, Jessica Price, was fired a couple days ago. It started with a Twitter thread on the hardships of making a personality for a MMORPG Player Character. In response to all of this a Youtuber known as Deroir responded. His point was that even though he appreciated her thread he disagreed with her assessment of the situation and felt the problem could have been fixed with more dialogue options in game. Price took this response very personally and lashed out saying things like "Today in being a female game dev: 'Allow me -- a person who does not work with you -- explain to you how to do your job." She also added that she had been in the field for a decade and didn't need any of this explained to her. Referring to the dialogue comment Deroir made.

After this Twitter encounter blew up GW2 fans defended Deroir for just kindly recommending an option to the developer. The subreddit for GW2 exploded with threads and a lot of them were basically asking for Price's head. The community actually directed their anger toward a second writer, Peter Fries, who was sticking up for Price on Twitter with these now deleted tweets. At the end of the day both Price and Fries were fired by ArenaNet.

Recently two of our employees failed to uphold our standards of communicating with players

The President of ArenaNet also said:

Their attacks on the community were unacceptable. As a result, they?re no longer with the company.

This firing brought huge backlash to ArenaNet mostly by what people are calling the SJW community. Price later said:

I warned people in my interview that I was loud about these issues on social media and had no intention of shutting up

What do you guys think about all of this? Was Price in the right for lashing out at the fan who was putting in his advice on how to fix the issue she brought up in a public space or do you Price was right and that this had some sort of gender narrative behind the fans words?



CS:GO's Newest Panorama Update is on the Live game

The UI everybody has been waiting for since its announcement over 2 years ago is finally here. CS:GO has brought the Panorama UI to live servers after being on Beta servers for just a little over a week. This new UI still has its bugs and Valve wants people to share the bugs they find and right now it is totally opt-in. How do you get Panorama UI? Right click CS:GO in your library and go to the launch options. There type in -panorama. It's that simple. This new UI brings a ton of things that games like Dota 2, who have had this UI for years, have.

You can now:

• See more stats such as ADR (Average damage per round)

• Warm up in a community lobby while in queue for competitive

• See the map your queue chose for you before you accept it

• Enabled watching demo's from a specific round

• And a lot more.

This new UI gives CS:GO a clean new look and despite the bugs is worth enabling just to give that 2018 feel to your old friend.


Fortnite is giving us IRL clues on the theme of Season 5's Battle Pass

Ever since the rocket went off and put time crack in the sky things in the Fortnite Universe have been changing daily. In the game the time portal shows up at different areas of the maps and than they are gone the next. Places like the Motel, Tomato Town, and even Noms in Retail Row are all victims of this time portal. People assume this is Epic teasing that these landmarks will be removed and updated with whatever comes through the giant portal in the sky in Season 5. On top of that a Viking-esque anchor showed up on a mountain. Is the past really coming to the present? Viking theme possibly? Well Epic is giving us even more clues...in the real world.

A couple days ago a real life-sized version of the Durr Burger mascot appeared on the desert of Paldale, California. Photographer Sela Shiloni, who doesn't even play Fortnite, came across the burger. Once he posted what he found on twitter people were putting their tin foil hats on. There was a retro-style police car also located in the area which fits with the cop cars in Fortnite + they just added a 1920's skin pack of Detectives once the rocket put that time crack in the sky. Eventually DooM clan headed out to see the mascot for themselves and livestreamed it. Once arrived a person near the burger handed them a card which ended up happening to other people who went as well. The card included a phone number and read "Agent #3678". A Reddit thread including a ton of the findings can be seen here.



There is now a ton of speculation on coordinates, the agent code, something about Iowa, and more. Season 5 comes out on July 12th so maybe only time will tell.

[jaczar]

Price has always been a little bitchy to begin with, you dont speak out as a member of a company like she did. You still have to think about your job and clearly after being there for a decade she didn't have a clue about customer service. Got what she deserved, don't mix your personal life with your work life and you wont have these issues. I know she wouldnt have talked like that on the official gw2 twitter account so...

[Kenneth]

Price has always been a little bitchy to begin with, you dont speak out as a member of a company like she did. You still have to think about your job and clearly after being there for a decade she didn't have a clue about customer service. Got what she deserved, don't mix your personal life with your work life and you wont have these issues. I know she wouldnt have talked like that on the official gw2 twitter account so...

yea, im not deep in the GW2 community but when I saw people covering this it felt like her reputation was always this kind of tone. It's a shame jobs had to be lost but when I read that dudes advice with the dialogue it just felt like a genuine suggestion and the rage she got from that is mind boggling

[jaczar]

from the way they were both interacting it seemed as if they were both hanging out drinking as he stated and let their attitudes get the best of them. sucks to lose a job but you dont do something like that when you represent a company.