Heavy bois represent!

 Just Atlas Fishmo and I holding it down in Outpost Rush last night.  We both ended up back capping and at one point it was 2 vs what felt like the entire enemy team.  Atlas plays a heavy PvP tank build and I play a heavy "wheelchair mage" build.

GamesMadeMe: Game Manuals

 GamesMadeMe is a series of posts that cover gaming-related topics that have shaped who I am as a gamer today. With the release hype of Baldur's Gate 3 upon us (no, I am not playing it) it had me thinking about my journey into Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. Specifically the big, fat ringbound instruction manual.

A legendary artifact of gaming past!

 That is a good looking instruction manual!  When you picked up the box at the game store (a local mall GameStop for me at the time) there was some weight to it and you knew you were getting into something good.  Seeing the manual slide out of the game box was an awesome feeling and you knew what you were going to be doing for the next few hours while you waited for the multi-CD install process to finish.

 Even before Baldur's Gate 2 I have fond memories of sitting in the back of the family minivan reading through the manual of whatever latest video game I just bought.  I still remember buying Final Fantasy 8 and flipping through the manual.  I was so excited for that game and decades later that memory is stuck in my head.  Some of my favorites like FF8 and BG2 are still with me to this day.

 That experience is all but gone today and I can't remember the last video game I bought that came with any sort of game-related material.  I can still get a hit of the nostalgia with most board games and their manuals but it's more of a chore there as you really can't play the board game until you digest the rules book so it's always getting in the way of the fun.

 I have tried to bring some of this joy to my oldest son as well.  He found my Shadows of Amn instruction manual some time after he was reading by himself and he consumed the whole thing over the course of a couple days.  He didn't really want to play the game; was just fascinated there was a "book" with so much about a game in it.  We also bought him the collector's edition of the Zelda Breath of the Wild strategy guide and I've never seen a kid more fond of a book in my entire life.  He gets limited electronic time so he filled other time with reading and earmarking every last part of that book and coming up with elaborate plans for his one hour of electronic time the next day.  Man that makes a gaming dad smile ear to ear.

 Dang... need a tissue.  /sniff  Where does the time go anyways.  Game manuals made me the gamer I am today.

HowTo: Add a checkbox to Google sheets

 Dumb little thing I learned today while creating a checklist in Google Sheets; you can add a checkbox.  It is on the Insert menu.  Select the cell to add the box in, click Insert, and then select checkbox.  The data is stored as a boolean (true/false).

GamesMadeMe: Blogging About Games

 GamesMadeMe is a series of posts that cover gaming-related topics that have shaped who I am as a gamer today.  I've covered IDOCs in Ultima Online, THAC0 from D&D, and InQuest Gamer Magazine.  It feels like something obvious is missing though.  In the spirit of "Introduce Yourself Week" for Blaugust 2023 it only makes sense to close the gap on the obvious: blogging about games!

 In my "So it begins... again!" post yesterday I went back to where blogging started for me 18+ years ago, but I didn't actually talk about what inspired me to start.  First you have to understand where my gamer tag, heartlessgamer, originates from.  I am sure I've posted other recallings of this so bear with me if details have varied.

 My gamer tag comes from the game Kingdom Hearts and the "heartless" enemy featured in the game (little shadow dudes).  Playing Kingdom Hearts happened to coincide with some other key events that resulted in me needing to pick a new online handle.  Prior to these events I was using handles related to character names I had come up with for Star Wars role playing (Hehl Omni and Torno Shren).

 I was a frequent poster on the Vault network forums (think they are owned by IGN now) back in the day and for some reason the forums were changing and we all had to pick new names to go by.  I ended up going with "heartless_" because I was really digging Kingdom Hearts at that moment and time.  The underscore was required and then it was natural to just bridge that to "heartless_gamer".  Eventually that just became heartlessgamer after I nabbed the domain name.

 It is also those very forums that drove me to blogging.  I forget exactly what was transpiring at the time with the forums but there were forums shutting down and posts were going to be taken down forever.  It occurred to me: I don't have any control over this enormous amount of content I am creating on these forums... I should probably start a blog!  That'll show em!

 Eighteen years later and here we still are (I say we as though anyone actually comments on posts anymore).  There were several lean years in my blogging history as I became a father and realized there is more to life than punching the post button (and I needed spare time to play games of course; not worry about blog posts).

 The draught of blog posts ended in Sept 2022 when I said Let's do this - post a day! when I returned to daily blogging.  To be truthful while I had a gap in blogging I didn't slow down on finding platforms like Reddit to continue giving away my thoughts and ideas for free.  If you cant tell; I have deep desire to TALK ABOUT GAMES!

 Talking about games is directly tied to my enjoyment of games. My current jam is New World and I have tons of posts about the game here, on Reddit, in the old New World forums, in Discord, and other places.  Regardless of the scatter shot of places I put stuff I always come back to this blog.  Blogging is like breathing at this point and is as much a part of my gaming experience as anything else.

 In summary: I was writing a lot of posts about games on forums, the forums were going to go away, so I decided why not take control of my own thoughts and put them all on a blog. I have to talk about games. Blogging about games made me the gamer I am today!

 

New World: My hopes for territory control revamp!

 Having gone through the war cycle in New World recently (we won a war, got a territory, and then promptly lost that territory in a follow up war) it had me thinking a lot about the territory control and war system which is slated for a full revamp in Season 3 later this year.  Here are some hopes I have for the new system.

 The most important aspect for the new system is to get rid of the current PvP mission model to push a territory to war.  The mission objectives are static and so freaking boring.  There is also no real way to defend against a coordinated push. Also after the first wave of kills players are not worth any rewards for killing until their rewards timer resets so it gets tiring real fast as you can't ever stop players and you get no reward for stopping them.

 The dev team has hinted that the new system will be a timed event and focus on concentrating players into the open world zone that is being contested.  Control points/towers were mentioned. I am hopeful this means lots of open world PvP and long enough windows that players can get into the action without having to set a clock but not too long that players feel like they have to treat the game as a second life.

 One of the other things with the current territory influence mechanic is who gets the declare the war at the end of it.  While most often its just one company pushing a territory these days there are times when its more than one and the one that gets to declare and do the war is a toss up.  That is a lot of boring PvP mission grinding for nothing so I am never surprised when players don't want to do it. The root issue isn't that declaring the war is a toss up; the problem is there is only one war as the result of the action.  

 My hope with the new system is a tiered set of war brackets where every company should be able to declare war and get matched up (or not) with a defending company.  While one company owns the territory it should be a faction-wide event when it comes to the war.  If I'm a small company that contributed I should be able to get a war and fill out a roster against the opposing faction.

 My vision would be a set of tiers of company wars.  The top tier is for the faction control of the territory and governed by the winning company.  The lower tiered wars would be for a slice of the territory pie; basically wars would be for a stake of the prize.  I would even be open to the idea of a company in an enemy faction winning a stake in another factions territory; though at a reduced percent if their faction isn't the owning faction.

 Anyway they do it they need to make war more accessible to more players.  The only way to avoid the "war logger" (players that only log in for wars and often have several accounts to get around account restrictions) is to ensure the wars all happen at the same time so players have to pick where they are fighting for that war.  

 I'd love to see a war calendar where a new territory is going into war every three days and the opposite day is for territory control fights and invasions.  Then if you win a stake in a territory you can rest longer than a couple days before you are cycling back up for defense.  The current pace a territory can be pushed is exhausting.

 In summary: make pushing territory into conflict an event and ensure more players can get into wars while spreading out the rewards for territory control to more companies.  Thank you for attending my Ted talk.