I don't know guys, but unlike previous times when people said Hearthstone was "dying", there was still a huge amount of community involvement and discussion. Now however, the meta is stale, this subreddit has dropped off significantly in number of upvoted posts and comments, and other forums seem dead as well. Is this finally the beginning of the end so many Doomsayers (pun intended) have declared previously? I love this game, but I gotta say, this expansion has been the most disappointing and unfun expansion ever. Yes, even more than this same time last year before rotation. What do you guys think?
So maybe I should start with some backstory and disclaimers. I've been playing ESO for around 6 or 7 years now on PC NA. I obviously cant vouch for console so just be aware this is from my PC lens. I enjoy all sorts of content in ESO. Dungeons, gathering, housing, trading, crafting, Cyrodil, etc. I've at least dipped my feet into pretty much everything this game has to offer. I kinda float around from content to content as I feel and take breaks from doing stuff as I feel.
What I wanted to address is the completely unjustified negative light the PvE crowd constantly gets painted in. I mean the trials/dungeons crowd. I've noticed a common theme on this sub to imply the PvE crowd are toxic elitists that single you out and hurl insults if you haven't completed content as hard as them. This is the exact polar opposite of what I've experienced.
Like I said, I don't stick to doing one thing too long. I actually haven't cleared a trial in a year now. So in my ESO career I've ended up in 4 separate PvE trials guilds. I've never tried to join an 'elite' guild and to be quite frank, if a guild is advertising as super hardcore they have the right to be picky. I've always joined guilds that were 'new player friendly'. Every single one of them has been incredibly helpful and full of people willing to give up hours of their time to help me out. Go over my parses with a fine toothed comb. Explain mechanics. Give build advice. Any question I had someone had an answer.
Never once has a single person in these guilds insulted me because I haven't cleared XYZ content. Not a single time did someone trash me for a low dps parse. Never has someone gloated over top of me because they're so good and I'm just a trash noob. This just hasn't happened to me a single time ever in my ESO journey. I've never seen it happen to anyone else either. I don't mean to say this has never happened to anyone ever, just be aware these are a very small minority of cases that are not an accurate portrayal of the community as a whole.
I get pretty aggravated with these posts because the PvE crowd is genuinely the most helpful crowd filled with people who will bend over backwards to help others. Which makes sense when you think about it. They're the people dedicating their time to group success. When I see a post that unfairly paints them as toxic it really grinds my gears and it's not true. In my opinion these people are the incredibly toxic ones. It's not fair
... keep reading on reddit ➡Listen to the most recent Vicious Syndicate podcast here - https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/vs-data-reaper-podcast-episode-75/
As always, glad to do these summaries, but a summary won't be able to cover everything and can miss nuances, so I highly recommend listening to their podcast as well. There will be no podcast next week. Next VS Report will be up next week, but will likely be abbreviated for obvious reasons. A Wild VS Report will drop before the next round of balance changes, likely on January 23rd.
General - Podcast this week can be summed up as a 50 minute rant about the current state of the game of Roguestone. ZachO thinks this is one of the most lopsided metas he can remember. He thinks by next week, Face Hunter will be the only non Rogue deck with a positive winrate at top legend, which has never happened. We're in a 2 deck meta under a single class. Alterac had so much promise, but unfortunately will be known as the expansion that had solitaire beginnings that eventually led into Roguestone. The meta isn't as bad in the climb up to Legend right now, but it's getting there. ZachO says in the past 24 hours that Diamond ranks have Poison Rogue playrates somewhere around 8-10%, and Thief Rogue is around 16-17%. ZachO says he thinks Evolve Shaman was more broken across all of ladder than Poison Rogue currently is where it's mainly noticeable at higher ranks, and because it was more popular, it saw more complaints than Poison Rogue currently is seeing. You still care about what's happening at Top Legend even if the majority of the player base isn't, because people will watch streamers who are at those ranks queue into an endless amount of Rogues for the next 2 weeks, and people will stop watching because what's the point of watching that? It hurts streamers as well. Blizzard should just disable Cloak for the next 10 days until we get to the balance changes. There's no innovation right now in any sort of class, because what's the point? There's not even a way to build off meta decks whose sole purpose is to counter Poison Rogue. They're concerned that this will cause people to leave the game, and when people leave it's hard to come back. This is the first time Hat has told ZachO since the inception of the Data Reaper Podcast he doesn't want to do a podcast next week. If the game isn't bringing you joy with its current state, just step away and play something else until the balance patches happen. They re-emphasize that t
... keep reading on reddit ➡
DOOOOM! Darkness! Devastation! The demise of an entire people! Ser Pounce without his favorite snacky snack! If thoughts such as these trouble you, dear reader, pray, tread no further, for drearier things are yet to come.
Of course there will be a hefty dose of tinfoilium with any dreams interpretation, I'll be the first to admit it, and I can only claim these are my opinions, carefully considered opinions perhaps, but opinions nonetheless. but now that we've got all the warnings out of the way...
In Jon's final chapter of ADWD has a very eerie dream which keeps catching my imagination. Especially because the dreams of those with dragon blood often pierce the veil of the future (with R+L being highly probable at this point I am not going to go into that here but a wolf or a dragon dream really makes no difference does it?) I wanted to go in depth as if it were real and not just a throwaway dream and brainstorm what kind of dark path this takes us on, dispassionately reading the symbols without the refreshing taste of optimism.
=======================================
> That night he dreamt of wildlings howling from the woods, advancing to the moan of warhorns and the roll of drums. Boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM came the sound, a thousand hearts with a single beat. Some had spears and some had bows and some had axes. Others rode on chariots made of bones, drawn by teams of dogs as big as ponies. Giants lumbered amongst them, forty feet tall, with mauls the size of oak trees.
Already off to a beautifully dreary start. Something to note here is that the 'Boom DOOM boom' pattern directly mirrors the drumming that Theon hears in Winterfell coming from the nearby Wolfwood to herald the coming of Stannis' army. And the setting here as well is a place where the Wall (or perhaps some other wall) meets the woods...
But in this dreams its wildlings, not what we expect from Stannis, and also that its a 'thousand hearts with a single beat.' This and the next line imply that these may not just be normal wildlings but the armies of the Others instead - the diversity of their culture now washed away into single haunting purpose. So we are likely seeing the Others assembling an army of wilding wights, but from where? The destruction of Hardhome perhaps. Melisandre has a previous vision where she sees dead things shambling beneath a great grey cliff, where fires burn inside a hundred caves. The wind rises and the white mist comes sweeping in, impossibly cold
... keep reading on reddit ➡When people look into an issue like this, most, I think, are looking for something tangible that they can look and say “you know, I have noticed that”, or even to see other people who they would trust saying the same thing. For example, working class fishermen talking about how the tides come in further every year from when they started is something tangible that helped me, in my youth, understand what the issue was in a real way.
But people who clearly don’t understand climate change but use it to fear monger do as big a disservice to the issue as deniers. The people who just blame every natural disaster on climate change, even as climate scientists say they’re unrelated, are doing us a disservice, because if it’s something that people know is bullshit, they’ll be more likely to see you as lying. For example, saying that every hurricane is the result of climate change... people know that hurricanes existed before the last 30 years. You stating that hurricanes are caused by climate change, even as climate scientists say that climate change has little effect on frequency or intensity of hurricanes, makes you seem like both a liar and a hysterical one at that. Same with wildfires... don’t blame a wildfire on climate change until you know the facts, because a lot of these wind up being the result of arson (accidental or intentional).
If those of us who believe in anthropomorphic climate change would just stick to the facts and use tangible examples, I think we’d do a lot better on this issue. The extreme, hyperbolic doomsayers need to be addressed more often with facts just as much as the skeptics.
In short, don’t tell people there’s only 12 years left before certain doom and then be shocked when people don’t take you seriously.
Two warlocks Two hunters Two titans All having the power of the main character Vs Doomsayer with all his weaponry
I have been hearing some not so remarkable posts implying that the pandemic is not going to be over just because the kids are vaccinated, or at least something along those lines. One CNN analyst in particular said kids should wear masks for another 1-2 years even after the vaccinations! And I said, "What. The. Heck?!" This is the last part of the puzzle. The key to returning to normal life, and the media just wants to make it sound like it's eternal masking for us despite what Fauci and Walensky have said about it being temporary. Seriously, what's up with these people?
I guess they're just desperate for clicks, huh? Ah well. I still say the US is much closer to the end of this. Even Scott Gottlieb recently agreed despite a potentially (subdued) winter surge on the move.
I see a lot of posts that deny their ability to give us several planets with big map areas filled with interesting content, events and stories.
They have made a lot of great games with huge worlds filled with content, and it's hard to make such huge games without filler content, if they don't want them feel barren and release them in time, but they are getting better at it.
Let's look at their track record, in their main games. All these games are huge and open, so I'll factor that part.
Arena and Daggerfall:
- Colossal randomly generated world, towns, dungeons, quests, and everything, but dotted sparsely with hand crafted content, (in the game world and in the quests and stories).
- Those were great games, but some players did not like the absolute randomness, so for the next games, they went the other way around.
Morrowind:
- The hand crafted landscape was barren between really interesting settlements, dungeons, land marks and the hand placed clutter around, but with no random flora and clutter, so each area felt unique, but somehow barren.
- A lot of static and hand placed population and loot, but some of those entities could be fetched from random lists, so it seemed there was some random population and loot as well, but the percentage of the static ones were relatively high.
- Some really great hand crafted quests and stories with plot twists, rivalry and other intrigues, but the game had a lot of filler quests to fill the gaps, so that it would not feel too barren.
- No random events and radiant quests.
Oblivion:
- The game world and dungeons were semi-procedurally generated, filled with procedurally generated loot, trees, grass and other clutter. Then they altered them manually to add flavor and more life.
- Then they added some manually designed settlements, dungeons, landmarks and other stuff, but it seems that they lacked enough man-hour to be able to thoroughly overhaul the whole map area, so it had a lot of generic places.
- The same trend happened with population and loot, so it had a lot more generic population and loot that regretfully scaled with the player level. On the other hand they added radiant AI to give the population more life.
- There was less filler quests in this game, but still it could not be avoided.
- Added a few random events, like M'aiq the Liar, to add more life and variety to the world and its events, but this feature was at its infancy, and cou
Listen to the most recent Vicious Syndicate podcast here - https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/vs-data-reaper-podcast-episode-75/
As always, glad to do these summaries, but a summary won't be able to cover everything and can miss nuances, so I highly recommend listening to their podcast as well. There will be no podcast next week. Next VS Report will be up next week, but will likely be abbreviated for obvious reasons. A Wild VS Report will drop before the next round of balance changes, likely on January 23rd.
General - Podcast this week can be summed up as a 50 minute rant about the current state of the game of Roguestone. ZachO thinks this is one of the most lopsided metas he can remember. He thinks by next week, Face Hunter will be the only non Rogue deck with a positive winrate at top legend, which has never happened. We're in a 2 deck meta under a single class. Alterac had so much promise, but unfortunately will be known as the expansion that had solitaire beginnings that eventually led into Roguestone. The meta isn't as bad in the climb up to Legend right now, but it's getting there. ZachO says in the past 24 hours that Diamond ranks have Poison Rogue playrates somewhere around 8-10%, and Thief Rogue is around 16-17%. ZachO says he thinks Evolve Shaman was more broken across all of ladder than Poison Rogue currently is where it's mainly noticeable at higher ranks, and because it was more popular, it saw more complaints than Poison Rogue currently is seeing. You still care about what's happening at Top Legend even if the majority of the player base isn't, because people will watch streamers who are at those ranks queue into an endless amount of Rogues for the next 2 weeks, and people will stop watching because what's the point of watching that? It hurts streamers as well. Blizzard should just disable Cloak for the next 10 days until we get to the balance changes. There's no innovation right now in any sort of class, because what's the point? There's not even a way to build off meta decks whose sole purpose is to counter Poison Rogue. They're concerned that this will cause people to leave the game, and when people leave it's hard to come back. This is the first time Hat has told ZachO since the inception of the Data Reaper Podcast he doesn't want to do a podcast next week. If the game isn't bringing you joy with its current state, just step away and play something else until the balance patches happen. They re-emphasize that t
... keep reading on reddit ➡