Posts Written On July 2015

8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 1 (Why our server was better than yours)

by on ·MMOs, Mylex, SWTOR

Introduction:
Interested in the player involvement which SWTOR has always seemed to need to get ranked PvP off it’s feet I decided to ask Mylex to write us something about his own experiences on the subject. In the days of ranked 8v8 (despite heavy imbalance between classes and a shrinking PvP population on the server) Mylex and a few others made the competitive PvP scene a dynamic experience. This was done through tireless networking and forum activity. Here’s what happened!
-Noctua

8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 1 – Why our server was better than yours!

Okay, maybe not. But it was good and we went from virtually zero activity to 5-10 teams in the queue each day, which was unusual for the PVP servers and unheard of on the other PVE servers. It was also a great time to play on The Red Eclipse, but it was a long road to get that point.

And this is the story…

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GD’s first theme week!

by on ·Noctua, SWTOR

I’m excited to announce GD’s first theme week which will start day after tomorrow on Monday the 13th. We will be focusing on SWTOR, specifically Ranked PvP previous to patch 2.0. Below is what you can expect to see this coming week.

Monday 13th: 8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 1 (Why our server was better than yours) by Mylex
We are starting the week off by welcoming Mylex to the GD family with his first guest post. Interested in the player involvement needed to get ranked PvP in SWTOR off it’s feet I asked Mylex to share his experiences of ranked back in the days of 8v8.

Tuesday 14th: 8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 2 by Mylex
The end of Mylex story as well as some advice to anyone looking to try to make competitive PvP happen.

Thursday 16th: “Rules of conduct” and Ranked by Noctua
January 26th, 2013 members from RC, TWATS and ND held a meeting agreeing upon a list of rules that would improve the state of PvP which was suffering from heavy imbalance between classes. Yesterday I brought Mylex and Anthis to the GD TS and asked them questions about this occurrence. In this post we will go over what happened at the time as well as encourage a discussion about rules and agreements for ranked PvP in games like SWTOR.

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Can video games improve your resume?

by on ·Gamer Culture, Murf, Theories

In the past, I wrote about a tech startup called Knack on my blog which used video games as a means to test job readiness and streamline the hiring process. Like comic books long ago, video games are at an odd place. The industry makes billions, spans the globe, and continues to grow. More and more colleges are adding video game-related majors. Video games have even boomed as watchable entertainment, either through Twitch and YouTube or by having them broadcast on cable television as sporting events. Despite this, the perceived value of playing a video game remains in question, even when the skills a gamer might learn from doing so could easily transfer into real world success.

During my tenure in World of Warcraft, I raided on a schedule with my guild. As I was promoted up the ranks into a leadership role, raiding in WoW took on many attributes similar to a management position at a company, despite being something I did for fun and entertainment. I often handled training, I helped maintain and exemplify our community culture and behavior policies, and I sometimes had to discipline people. Raiding also required project management skills, both in the raids themselves or leading up to them.

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LEILANI AMOREY

by on ·Miscellaneous, Noctua

I would really like to give a shout out to this artist I recently found!

Leilani Amorey is an artist and illustrator, living in the South of England. On Lei’s website she describes herself like this:
“I works hard and try not to take myself too seriously. I am also a hobbit, a blogger, a Tolkien fan, and a LOTRO player. Professionally I am an Online Community Manager and Illustrator , and I have spent the last 10 years working in gaming communities, making art, baking muffins, reading and collecting Tolkien’s books, and gaming (mainly in LOTRO and Landmark).”

If you like me have a weakness for water colours and all things Middle Earth then you should really have a look at the pictures below.

Anduin River

 

Dawn Down The Hill

“Once upon a time there lived a hobbit…just please, remember, what you read here is not the whole story. My life might look sometime like it’s all fairy tales and lovely ‘hobbity’  things, but fairy tales never work without trials, some sadness and a few tears every now and then. Despite that however, I’d rather prefer to show the bright side of things. So this is ‘me’ , a hobbit with the passion for drawing and painting the world of Middle-earth…and a fairy tale or two. – Lei”

The Hill - Hobbiton Across the Water

Here are some pictures from Lei’s “The Hobbit Project” which she is currently working on:

IMG_4876

IMG_5019 IMG_5021IMG_5020

You can find Leilani Amorey on twitter here. Also follow this link to go to the website to check out Leilani’s blog and other work!

collage

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Vizp

by on ·Pyxis

The raid that day was canceled, on very short notice. Quite rare. Somebody had an aunt’s birthday, something like that, announced that on the raid sheet in the morning and then others spontaneously decided they had better things to do as well. Vizp didn’t know this, he was on time, – ten minutes early – , and exploded when he found out that nothing was going to happen.

He completely exploded.

People were trying to sooth him. You know, an aunt’s birthday. Things happen.
‘Wtf, canceled,’ he started. ‘Do you even know what I canceled to be here? My girlfriend is in the hospital getting chemo. And I am here. For fucking nothing.’

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Social anxiety and WoW – Interview with Mipsy

by on ·Gamer Culture, Interviews, Noctua, Psychology

I was always quite skeptical to the concept of so called “tweets” which rarely seemed to hold much meaning in their 140 characters. If you’ve read my blog posts you know that expressing deep meaning with just a few words was never an art I mastered. For the sake of the blog however I reluctantly resigned to my fate as a “twitter user”. I have now found that sometimes interesting things do surface, even on twitter. About two weeks ago something caught my attention.

Jun 21
Randomly reading an MMO Champ thread about raiding, just found out there’s an EU WoW guild specifically for people w/ social anxiety.

I instantly knew that I needed to get myself an interview with someone from this guild. It was too interesting to pass up. So I wrote the GM who was friendly and very helpful.

_________________________________________

Guild: Paranoid – GM: Mipsy
Server: Emerald Dream EU
Main faction: Alliance
Game: World of Warcraft

_________________________________________

On Paranoid’s website the following description is given of the guild:
“Paranoid is a guild for the socially awkward, the shy, the people who’d like to raid, but get a headache just thinking about all the things they could screw up. The people who type a message to someone who’s LFM in trade, then backspace, then type, backspace, type, stare at what they’ve written, backspace again and go quest on their own. And if they do press enter, they’re relieved if they get the reply: ‘Sorry, full.’

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+ Defense stats

by on ·Pyxis

Guild drama. It is bound to happen. It will happen. Expected or unexpected, in ever changing appearances. It can be entertaining, tiring, frustrating or hurtful. If you are there to witness it, that is.

My luck: drama happened, and I was not around. I picked up traces from different sides; a Death Knight (in the non op days) from the progression team, a good player, had been replaced. Due to his work, he couldn’t play certain months, but he had always kept his place. This time he came back and got kicked. A complete surprise.

Some said he got replaced because the other person was better. (Hard to believe.) Some said it was because he had offended the raid leader. And some speculated it was because he was better than the raid leader.

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Does gaming impact my dreams?

by on ·Noctua, Psychology

Last night I had a dream I did not enjoy. In it I was having a conversation with a particularly irrational person who insisted on things that were so illogical that I simply thought to myself: “This is impossible, I’m just going to wake up now because there’s no point to this conversation”. So I did. When awake I realised that by telling myself to wake up I must have been aware of my dreaming state. A lucid dream in other words. How long had I been aware of the fact that I was dreaming I wondered. The whole night? I kept thinking about the subject of lucid dreaming as I stared up at the ceiling unable to fall back asleep. Eventually I got up. Some late-night (or rather early-morning) browsing of the Internet showed me that “hardcore” gamers  (characterized in part by regular playing sessions of more than 2 hours, several times a week) are more prone to lucid dreaming than the average person. Could this be true? It’s a captivating thought indeed.

Psychologist Jayne Gackenbach and her colleagues found many effects that gaming seem to have on our dreams in their research.

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