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Through Wolfy's Eyes

~ One gamer's view of the forest and the trees

Through Wolfy's Eyes

Author Archives: wolfyseyes

When Home Games Become Fortresses

07 Saturday Aug 2021

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

community, ffxiv, final fantasy xiv, gatekeeping, MMO, mmo communities, mmo community, mmo games, mmorpg, mmorpgs, mmos, white knight, white knighting, xiv

I’m going to have to thank MOP’s editor in chief and my awesome boss Bree for this prompted post. We were talking in the work chat about how sad and dangerous it was when people wrap their entire identity around a single MMO or single game, and that got me thinking a lot about the topic.

If you’ve been even near gaming discourse on any platform or website, you pretty much know the type. They’re often referred to as “white knights” and usually charge headlong into keyboard battle to defend the honor of their favorite game and, by extension, their home. And while I can certainly appreciate the desire to battle back against misinformation or misconception, or even the need to argue online (in good faith, ideally), there’s also a point where it becomes clear that a home game — a place meant to escape to in comfort — turns into a fortress that must be protected against all comers.

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A Shortlist of Long-Term Gaming Goals

06 Friday Aug 2021

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

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dauntless, elite, elite dangerous, elite dangerous odyssey, ffxiv, final fantasy xiv, gaming, gaming goal, gaming goals, goal, MMO, mmorpg, mmorpgs, multiplayer, multiplayer gaming, xiv

Yep, I’m pretty much ripping off other bloggers’ post ideas for today’s posting. In my defense, I don’t make this a regular feature on my blog, so I think that gives me a free pass. Also, like, it’s Blaugust 2021, y’all. Sometimes post ideas are hard to drudge up.

Whining notwithstanding, I actually am beginning to find that putting down some long-reaching gaming goals is pretty helpful for keeping motivated in multiplayer and MMO titles. So with that in mind, I felt that I should share a few of the things I’m reaching for in my favorite titles.

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Writing Project Spitball Bonanza: Ultimate Hyper Championship Arcade Edition

05 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by wolfyseyes in Nerdy Things

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book, books, novel writing, writer, writing, writing books

Pardon the stupid title. I’m feeling kind of free-flowing with today’s post.

If you follow my Twitter feed, I’m sorry. Also, you perhaps have been exposed to some general malaise about the need to have two jobs, particularly since the second job is a soul-crushing but necessary for survival in capitalist America hellscape that is casino customer service (again, I’m sorry). Now that I’ve been writing professionally for a little bit, I’m starting to get it in my head that I’m capable of doing more writing. Self-published writing.

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The 40 Year-Old Content Creation Virgin

04 Wednesday Aug 2021

Posted by wolfyseyes in Human Things

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

age, content creation, content creator, creative, creativity, gaming, holy shit i'm doing this, online gaming, random thoughts, stream, streaming, twitch, twitch stream

As I write this blog post I’m at the cusp of another livestream for Massively Overpowered. I promise that’s not a plug for the channel or for my stream (though perhaps it should be), but it’s basically a marker in the sand of where I’m at right now in my professional career as a writer for the site.

Let me provide a little context: MJ, the site’s primary livestreamer, suffered a pretty spectacular lightning strike at her house. Mercifully everyone is fine, but she’s been mostly knocked out of streaming, which she used to do every day. By comparison, I did streams for the site barely once a month, if that much, mostly because I wasn’t confident in a lot of things about my ability to be a streamer or a content creator. However, since the weather incident, I’ve done my part to keep the MOP Twitch channel alive by doing weekly streams every Sunday and Wednesday. And I’m having a lot of fun dong it.

All this despite the fact that I’m 40 years old. Which, at least in the grander scheme of Twitch things, is ancient.

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Early Access Games That Aren’t Trash

03 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by wolfyseyes in Nerdy Things

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Tags

craftopia, early access, fps, hardspace shipbreaker, multiplayer, online gaming, online multiplayer, sandbox, steam early access, survival sandbox

With all of the itchy, uncomfortable, and downright exploitative ways game dev studios are trying to monetize their game, it’s easy to pass off anything other than “gold product” as nothing more than a scam. And for the most part, you’re right. Even I can admit that crowdfunding a game is a whole lot riskier and possibly more scam-adjacent than not, when previously I had foolishly hoped that it would open up a lot more doors and ideas.

One of the most recent and proliferous forms of “alternative” game monetization schemes is the early access launch, which asks folks to buy an incomplete game, provide feedback, and watch it evolve into a fully-launched product. It’s, at the brass tacks level (and grossly oversimplified), spending money to be a tester instead of letting professionals do that and get paid for it. However, as vile as that sounds, there are a few games that I’ve come across that actually are worth the buy-in cost in my opinion, and so I wanted to take a moment to highlight them with today’s post.

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Finding Fun Despite the Doldrums

02 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

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actiblizz, activision-blizzard, blizzard, community, ffxiv, final fantasy, final fantasy xiv, mmo community, mmorpg community, square enix, warcraft, world of warcraft, WoW

Honestly, I was kind of hoping to avoid any topic related to the hellscape that is Activision-Blizzard’s treatment of its employees. Mostly because far smarter and better people have written about the matter than I have and I don’t have anything of worth to really say on the subject without just standing on the shoulders of those giants. However, a recent event today spurred this post. Specifically, a tweet from someone I follow which read that, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t really get invested into Final Fantasy XIV and decided to return to WoW.

This is in spite of some best efforts and some found delight by this person, I should point out. I’ll not go into detail but this player really did try to dig in. Of course, this attempt was spurred on by the aforementioned issues, and I suspect that this particular WoW player wrestled mightily with their long-standing love of the game and the unveiled misery many of its developers have had to suffer through — something that I’ve written about before on this blog. And despite my feelings about Blizzard and its games, I get it.

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Latent Friendship is Magic

01 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

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Tags

community, ffxiv, ffxiv community, final fantasy, final fantasy 14, final fantasy xiv, friendship, MMO, mmo community, mmorpg, roleplay, roleplayer, roleplaying, xiv

Recently I’ve gotten back into Final Fantasy XIV a lot more than I had previously. This wasn’t kicked off by recent awful events, by the way, and it wasn’t necessarily spurred on by the larger Endwalker expansion reveals (though that did have a small part to play in things). Mostly, my return was fueled by friends. Friends that I sometimes play with and people that I’m not necessarily friends with.

Allow me to explain

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The Thrival Sandbox or How I Learned to Love the Grind

11 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

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Tags

elite dangerous, MMO, mmos, multiplayer, multiplayer gaming, no man's sky, sandbox, sandbox mmo, survival, survival sandbox, survival sandbox mmo

I’ve made no attempts to hide my distaste for survival sandbox MMOs and games. They’re one of the laziest forms of game design and I still hold to that opinion for the most part. That said, I have slowly begun to find a few exceptions to the rule that have endeared me to at least a couple of aspects to the sub-genre and, perhaps in some small way, helped me to build a bit of empathy and appreciation for those who love these kinds of games.

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These Four Years Gone

08 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by wolfyseyes in Uncategorized

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These sorts of things tend to be relegated to Twitter threads. But Twitter (rightfully) doesn’t have an edit button and I have fat-ass thumbs. Also, I like to proofread a bit (believe it or not), so I want to take these thoughts here on one sheet of digital paper instead of the digital Post-It Notes of that platform.

Also, I appreciate that politics are an exhausting topic for many, so those who want to skip it can without being bombarded by posts on their feed. But for those who didn’t skip — for those who clicked the link — I feel like I can finally collect my thoughts on this past election.

As a means of dating this post, yesterday marked the defeat of Donald Trump as President of the United States by Joe Biden, the end of a long four years of grief, confusion, worry, stress, and out-and-out fear. And these feelings are coming from a straight-passing white dude; I can’t even begin to get close to the experiences of Black people, of people of color, of transgendered people, of women. But we, collectively, breathed a sigh of relief and held parties in the streets of the cities around this country while the world looked on and very likely wiped its collective brow.

Now that the dancing and partying is over, though, I can reflect on what has happened, and express what I want to see happen the next four years at least. And it starts with discussing the oft-raised point of working together with Trump supporters.

First off, it is absolutely feasible — the possibility of foolish hope that I have — that people finally got over the grift of Trump and voted with their conscience. For those people, some mending of bridges can and should happen.

But the onus is ultimately on them to reconcile. Not us.

These are folks who were angry that a Black guy tried to fix things for eight years and admittedly didn’t always do a graceful job of it. These are people who saw someone mocking the other, expressing and validating their hatred, and cheered. They rallied behind a man whose whole platform was to stop the Black guy’s moves and make liberals sad. And they would gleefully ignore the obviously fascist plays to see it done, ignoring the fact that what happens to the few often can bleed into the rest.

These are people who wanted horrible things done to people of color. Who wanted to see gay rights revoked. To uplift white supremacy. To erase transgender care from the record. This is hate, which is not a “toe-MAY-toe/toe-MAH-toe” difference of opinion. And while hate can be reversed through exposure and experience, that change comes by the efforts from those who foster hate, not their targets. The onus is on them to reconcile, to change, to forgive, to apologize. It is not the responsibility of the abused to coddle the abuser.

And some of that cannot be reversed no matter what.

So, to that point, I demand of this administration cleansing fire. I want to see the expulsion of hatred, of dangerous rhetoric, of literal denigration of American democratic institutions. In his speech last night, Biden said that it was time to lead with empathy and to heal “the soul of America,” but there are some things where healing means cauterizing, and Trump’s honest-to-goodness fascist Nazi maneuvering and those who helped that along must be out. We had a World War over this.

I demand of Democrats to stop being so fucking toothless. I’m not saying that they need to never work with Republicans — that’s not how this works — but I also don’t want mealy-mouthed, hand-on-the-clavicle operatic shock when things don’t happen or things can’t be changed. Act. Decisively. For fuck’s sake, act.

And, of course, I want to see all the things that were talked about on Biden’s platform — control of COVID, uplifting the actual middle class and the economy instead of conflating the stock market as fiscal progress, reversal of climate change, and a return to sane international relations.

I also recognize one guy and four years is not enough. Trump is not the source, but a symptom of the wider disease, an illness int his country that minorities have been made to suffer and have tried to tell us about and fight against for centuries. He is the manifestation of those who don’t want societal progress for all. And they carried Biden to the White House on the idea that he would work to correct that. And he had better.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that many changes won’t come in this term. But I can at least hope. A foolish hope.

The Silent Support of Awful, Awful People

17 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by wolfyseyes in Human Things

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

games, games industry, gaming, gaming community, hogwarts legacy, industry, red dead redemption 2, social, society

Take Two Interactive’s boss bragged about working his devs to the bone in order for Red Dead Redemption 2 to make it to market. Ubisoft has been demonstrably shown to keep miserably sexist and racist people in its upper management. J.K. Rowling has pulled off her mask to unveil a transphobic goblin beneath.

In spite of all this, I absolutely bought RDR2 day one, am interested in Riders Republic, and am at least curious about Hogwarts Legacy. All of which come with the extraordinarily complex baggage that feeling this way means I stand alongside vile humans and their even more vile opinions and behaviors.

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