Posts Written By Noctua

SWTOR PvP: What to expect from 4.0

This blog post will briefly discuss the current state of PvP in the game Star Wars: The Old Republic, as well as delve a bit deeper into the expectations the players have for the future. PvP in SWTOR has been struggling for a long period of time and I have watched the playerbase grow increasingly frustrated. Considering the amount of time this has been going on I was curious to know how much faith there is still left in the community for an improvement, especially with the upcoming expansion and its promise of an influx of players. In order learn more about this I’ve interviewed four players (Igor, Zherio, Snave and Mosh) and asked them about their thoughts and feelings about the current state of the game as well as their expectations for the future.

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Games that blur the boundaries of work and play

Video games are often framed as sites of play and entertainment. Their transformation into work platforms and the staggering amount of work that is being done in these games often go unnoticed. Users spend on average 20 hours a week in online games, and many of them describe their game play as obligation, tedium, and more like a second job than entertainment.

So begins Nick Yee’s study “The Labor of Fun“, an article about the work like duties that come along MMORPGs. Today I wanted to give a quick shout out to this study which I think you might find interesting if you are an MMO player like me.

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Plato’s virtual cave

As gamers we are used to switching between alternate realities by immersing ourselves into the games we play. In my article “Does gaming impact my dreams?” I discussed this subject further while musing over the reasons why gamers more often experience lucid dreaming than their peers. I ended the article by saying:

When we then enter the world of dreaming, do we [as gamers] then recognize the signs of fiction and fantasy more easily than others? It is indeed an intriguing idea and the philosophical implications of this is fascinating to me. But more on that another time.

Well, my friends, it’s “another time”. It’s about to get deep!

When I hit the play button and enter a new game I am very much aware

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The story of finding your guild

In an effort to encourage you all to tell GD the brief story of how you found your main guild I here present to you my own story! This blog post was inspired by a reader commenting on my blog post “Social Identity and Guilds in MMORPGs“. After reading the comment I thought it would be interesting to read your stories so even though I’m really cagey when it comes to writing about myself I will try to start this off!

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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Review of: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

What is it? A first-person mystery adventure
Play it on: PC and PS4
Reviewed On: PC
Price on steam: £15/ $20
Release date: Out Now
Developer: The Astronauts
Link: Official site

If you’ve already played through the game continue to my in depth story analysis to discuss theories!

“This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand” is the first thing we see after hitting play. It’s a message from the developers, a disclaimer. The statement is definitely true. There is no user interface, no maps or tools to help you along the way. We are only given a very basic introduction to the story as the game starts. We are then expected to discover how things work and what we’re supposed to do on our own. There is no tutorial segment explaining sprint or crouch. There aren’t quest arrows. We now have, to on our own piece together the events leading up to the vanishing of Ethan Carter in order to solve the mystery of the boy’s disappearance and several other gruesome murders.

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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: Analysis – SPOILERS

IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE GAME THEN
INSTEAD OF READING THIS ANALYSIS JUST GO TO THE REVIEW I MADE:
THE VANISHING OF ETHAN CARTER REVIEW

 

Trust me, unless you’ve actually played through it completely then the below theories won’t just be spoilers, it will be boring since you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about!

The-Vanishing-of-Ethan-Carter-scenery

 

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Liebster Love

The Liebster love has come to GD, thanks Pixelkaffe! To make this a little easier (and less tedious for the readers out there) I and Mylex will do our answers in the same post! In reality it’s just Mylex being too lazy to make his own post and tag his own victims but whatever.

11 random facts about Noctua:
1. My favourite number is 125 and it changes every year on my birthday (in accordance to a schedule I made when I was 7).
2. People say I think too much. How can someone think too much?? I can see how one could think too little.
3. Money and fame Honesty and transparency are the qualities I value most in people I meet.
4. I name my computers. This one is called Ivy.
5. My wildest and deepest desire as a child was to have a secret room that no one but me knew existed. In the absence of such a room (and since my mum could not be pursueded to hire the workers needed to design such a room for me) I once put a little lamp and a chair in a tiny closet where I would read books for hours while people where looking for me.
6. I’m extremely sensitive to bright colours that don’t match… It’s an unwelcomed legacy from my mother who taught me about complementary colour schemes from a very young age.
7. I’m often openly hypocritical. Take this situation for an example; I love asking other people questions but I am easily unnerved by answering them myself. I’m very cagey by nature and even writing these 11 facts about myself is proving a very long and uncomfortable process!

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Gaming Controversy – The effects of gaming

Ever since I came across the blog Gaming Conversations I have wanted to do a collaboration with Braxwolf. After writing “Between men and women…” I realised from the comments that followed how interesting an open discussion about controversial topics can be. So here we go. I have chosen the gaming controversy resulting from discussions of the topic censorship and gaming. Does the content in video games change the behavior and attitudes of a player? Does that mean we should censor certain content? In this blog post I will present some different points of view and leave the subject open for discussion.

In today’s age gaming has become a medium of storytelling which provides their audiences with an interactive power not other forms of narrative can offer. This can help us more easily immerse and open ourselves to feel empathy for the characters who’s story we are experiencing. It’s a beautiful way for the art of storytelling to develop. But what are the downsides of this? Just like any medium of storytelling we are affected by it’s content.

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Voices, voices, voices…

I don’t know about you guys but I am an avid reader of body language, an ability I’ve wasted much time attempting to perfect. I say wasted, because in the world of gaming it certainly feels sort of useless. That said I find it very useful IRL. It is such a crucial part of how I figure a person out that I feel quite crippled trying to understand people online. In this environment the tools we have to figure a person out are very limited. This makes me wonder if we as gamers tend to read even more into a persons voice than others in order to compensate for the lack of other things. So tonight when I couldn’t sleep I decided to look for some research on how a voice impact how we see a person.

Fun facts about voices:
According to research into leadership it is clear that people are more willing to follow or trust someone in charge (male or female) if they have a deeper, darker, more masculine voice.

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Leadership part 2 – Interview with Dakaru

So this week Rav and I will be doing another twin piece post on in-game leadership. For my second article on the subject I decided to get in touch with Dakaru, GM of Nostrum Dolus and team leader of the ND ranked team. Him and his team were, to be blunt, hated by many, but their combined level of skill was unmatched on the server they played. It is surely one of the reasons they generated so much hate. Dakaru has since moved on from SWTOR and is currently playing Evolve where he is again finding himself in a leading position.

To give a bit of background, Dakaru started out as an officer in Nostrum Dolus back when it was mainly a PvE guild. He was most interested in PvP himself which led to Dakaru being given a leadership role in ranked when that came into the game. Eventually the GM and Co-GM quit the game and Dakaru took over leadership of the guild. As he did so many of the PvE players in ND were quitting and Dakaru ended up slowly turning ND into a more PvP oriented guild. The ranked team he collected was a slow progression according to Dakaru. “I got as many good players as I could find together, and kept shuffling around over and over”, he tells me. By the time of the transfer to Nightmare Lands the game had lost a lot of players and so had Nostrum Dolus. They ended up merging their ranked team with another team who had lost a lot of people as well.

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