Six Degrees of May 6th, 2016
I guess I haven’t really mentioned my plan in these six degrees posts since I started, but basically I wanted to explore what I could find out in the blogosphere. I figured what better way to travel then to start from my blog and venture forth…so I pick a site that I have on my blogroll and go from there. If the site is no longer around I pick another…once on the new site, I pick something from their blogroll or if they don’t have a list, I bounce back up a level and pick another. If the last post was over 6 months old, I add a 7th site to my list.
In any case, it’s started pretty well so far and it’s been fun…
This week I only looked at 6 sites since they were all pretty active recently…
Six Degrees of May 6, 2016
- Nomadic Gamers
- Healing the Masses
- Tyrannodorkus
- Queue Times
- Dina Farmer
- Her Geekery
Nomadic Gamers – [FFXIV][Rift] Capping Tomes and Re-Visiting Old Loves
pkudude99 over at Nomadic Gamers talks about experiences in Final Fantasy XIV trying real diligently to get the bomb chair mount from the Kobolds. He’s also started back up in Rift, but to his surprise, none of his UI looks familiar. He doesn’t say how long it’s been, but I can certainly sympathize – if I’m out of a game for a month or more, playing other stuff, things can easily get confusing. I’m sure if/when I go back into Rift, I’ll have to take some serious time refamiliarizing myself with things. That was always a fun game, and one of the few I leveled to max in. That was a while ago, but I loved the possibilities provided by the soul system. So many things to choose from, and of course I loved the melee Harbinger Mage. I’ll have to go back there sometime.
Healing the Masses – Black Desert Online: Issues with Awakenings
Jewel at Healing the Masses posts about awakened weapons in Black Desert Online. Apparently awakening is something that you can do once you reach level 56 or so and it provides a new set of skills for your character. The developers have been publishing videos about the awakened classes and not everyone is pleased with what awaits them. Jewel is concerned that the familiar tamer style of play is going to change with the introduction of awakened weapons. Why pigeon hole everyone into the same play style for their class, why not let them choose what type of character they want? I mean, I would be pretty upset if a character I was playing completely changed at max level – particularly if I didn’t know that was how they were gonna play when I created them. In my view, choice is a key feature of MMOs that often gets overlooked…provide equally powerful, balanced options and you will get diversity in end game play rather than cookie-cutter builds. As Jewel mentions…”Add the new weapons but keep the same skills and [k]eybinds as before.” I could not agree more.
Tyrannodorkus – How You Can Use Gaming to Explore Your Love For Writing
Over at his blog, Tyrannodorkus talks about the Newbie Blogger Initiative, getting news from Massively, and blogging in general. A couple weeks ago I asked about the NBI on Twitter and it seemed that 2016 was gonna be a pass for the event. It takes a lot of effort to coordinate something like the NBI and I think people just had other priorities this year. In any case, Tyrannodorkus looks at writing a blog and using gaming to motivate writing. As a fellow game lover and blogger, I can totally relate to using the games I play to drive different aspects of my writing. While I like to talk about comics, TV, movies, books, and other stuff, video gaming is by far my greatest muse. And some of that motivation took a hit when Massively was disbanded. Similar to Tyrannodorkus, I used to get a lot of news from them and now have switched to Massively OP and other sources – I guess having been burned, I’m now diversifying my news sources. His post is a great prompt for new and experienced bloggers and I applaud him for keeping the flame of the NBI going – anything to help current and future game bloggers is always welcome.
Queue Times – /Yell Ep. 12: Lots of Free Stuff
The folks at Queue Times put out a podcast called /Yell and they’re up to episode 12. I always like finding gaming podcasts and I’ll definitely add this one to my list of weekly listens. This is a pretty informative episode as it covers everything from Black Desert Online to Neverwinter to Ultima Online to Crowfall. They break the cast into 3 parts – MMO news, beta discussions, and the biggest fail of the week – this week that crown goes to Demon Hunter clothing in Legion. The hosts seem pretty knoweldgable and are easy to listen to, and they cover the type of things I’m interested in. If you get a chance, give them a listen and you’ll see how a well laid out and informative podcast they have. Only issue I found was that they are a bit confused about aphabetical order…I don’t think The Secret World falls between Blade and Soul and Final Fantasy XIV, but that’s where they covered it…it was kinda funny.
Dina Farmer – Herald: An interactive Period Drama
Dina talks about Herald an interesting game that looks at 19th century colonialism from a multiracial perspective. It looks pretty interesting and could be considered educational as well. There aren’t many games out there that celebrate diversity and actually treat characters as though they can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ regardless of what their race, socioeconomic level, or importance, but from what Dina mentions, this game can be one of those few. She appreciates the idea that the main character, Deven can develop into a ‘sympathetic protagonist’ or a ‘hardened man, uncaring about the racial disparity’. I think this sounds like an interesting game with concepts that should be embraced by more game developers – the creativity of games can be a great place where empathy and diversity are explored. While I like the idea and want to see more of it in gaming, not every game has to focus on these things though, just like we let players make choices for the characters in a game, it’s good to let people decide what types of games they want to play…given the choice, I’ll give this game a run. According to Dina, this game will be coming out later this year.
Her Geekery – Ruler of Books tag!
Ashlee over at Her Geekery looks at Ruler of Books tag which she learned about from blogs she reads. This tag was recently created to cover a group of 7 questions about books you’ve read and to tie bloggers, twitterers, vloggers and such together in a common topic. I find this kind of thing a great part of the online community. In her post as response to the Ruler of Books tag, Ashlee mentions quite a few authors that I really am into myself…Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman…all good writers that I’ve read many works from. She also answers one of the questions with Brienne of Tarth…what character’s face would you put on a coin… I think that’s a great suggestion. The character as portrayed in Game Of Thrones on HBO certainly seems like she could have been the face on a coin in n the past…definitely a classical appearance. I’m not gonna answer all the questions for myself right now, but this post has me thinking of how I would answer…perhaps in a future post I will play the game…maybe after I read a book that was actually written this year.
Roundup
This was a very diverse week…from podcasts to beta games, from books to blogging…and it was fun to read all these posts. Even though the Newbie Blogger Initiative is not happening this year, I hope potential bloggers and veterans alike take an opportunity to read what others have to say and to express their thoughts on gaming, geekdom and all things nerdy. Have a great week!
Morning Ramble 2.85