Pros & Cons of Playing An MMO With Your Significant Other

Virka and I have had tons of fun playing Wildstar.  Playing together is a great experience. Someone I work with asked about what it's like to game with her and this list and this just kinda formed in my head...

Top 10 Pros & Cons Of
Playing An MMO With
Your Significant Other

*Please excuse any vague, confusing or biased pronouns. This was written based on our experience but we think the ideas expressed are possibly universal for any and all gaming couples.

Pros	Cons
1.  You work well as a team and you always have someone to help you kill the tough baddies.	1. It’s easy to overlook guild chat and miss out on other social opportunities because you attention is focused on the person sitting at the desk next to you.
2. You can brag about your spouse’s game prowess to your friends and guildies.  Gamers are sexy chic nowadays… or at least that’s what we’ve been telling ourselves.	2. The logs show that your special someone did twice as much healing as you did on that heroic boss encounter.  It doesn’t show that you had extra responsibilities and besides, everyone knows disc is OP!
3. You have someone to watch your back in PvP.	3. It sucks that she’s better at PvP than you are…
4. It is easy to discuss strategies quickly and negotiate different tactics against difficult objectives.	4. They’ll have no problem reminding you that you were supposed to be healing them just then.
5. You have someone who kinda has to lend you gold to buy that mount.	5. You kinda have to lend them gold to buy that mount they want.
6. You can offer each other constructive criticism and help each other become better players.	6. Your significant other often sounds mighty arrogant when they are telling what you are doing wrong.  They obviously think you are stupid and you are not going to take this one lying down!
7. You have someone to do those silly holiday events with.	7. You have to do all those silly holiday events no matter how lame they are.
8. You are probably going to get some the night you down that big raid boss that’s been wiping you for weeks.	8. You probably aren’t getting any the night you spend wiping to that tough raid boss… she/he most likely has a headache.
9. Someone is always around that you can discuss the upcoming patch with, all the new features, and the great new add-on you are excited about.	9. You spend so much time talking about and playing the game that dishes are piling up in the kitchen and the house is a wreck.  Also, it’s your turn to scoop the kitty litter.
10. It’s great to have a hobby you both enjoy.  You are more likely to enjoy more facets of the game as you explore it together.	10. Your spouse sometimes embarrasses you in front of your guild by showing them silly videos from your college days like this one where you are the girl in the polka dot dress: Watch the Demonessa trailer: http://youtu.be/n0N4yen5ilg.

And remember that no matter how well you and your special someone game together, it can sometimes feel like this.  If you haven’t seen this video, you must watch it now!

It's Not About The Nail was written and directed by Jason Headley.  

It stars Monica Barbaro and Jason Headley.

MMO Boot Camp

We could not be more excited or more ready for the big head start! I've been encouraged by the high quality of all Wildstar-centric blogs popping up.  Also, I've had a good time joining the world of Twitter (yeah, really late to the party) and interacting with some cool folks.  Luckily, we have found a guild that seems like it will be a really good fit for us. 

On top of that, I have instituted MMO Boot Camp. As excited as I am to play Wildstar, the idea of sitting on my ass all weekend is not so appealing... A while back Virika got her old mac set up with Windows through the use of Boot Camp in order to play SWTOR. It's not a great machine but it works. Since she upgraded it's been sitting on a shelf near our treadmill for playing vids and music while running.  Eventually, I built a desk for it and MMO Boot Camp was born. I found that I could still play decently well while going around 2.5-3 mph on the treadmill. I often ran instances and leveled in SWTOR while burning calories. I could even raid in WoW on non-progression nights. Diablo was fun too. 

Last weekend, I got Wildstar running on the Mac at a decent FPS, albeit at low graphic settings. I'm excited to try it out. It will be tougher I think, simply because Wildstar is a harder game than any of the other games I've played while on the move. It requires much more movement and coordination than WoW or SWTOR ever did. 

Also, we took Gracie's advice from Moonshine Mansion and got well stocked on provisions. A successful trip to Trader Joe's provided plenty of healthy vittles and decent wine. Tomorrow, we will get our chores done and get a good night's sleep. This weekend is going to be amazing! All that is left is to decide what class my first toon will be...

Virika’s Tradeskills Secrets

This is our intro to crafting in Wildstar.  I would really love to hear feedback on this post and any corrections or suggestions!

Every MMO has it’s own version of crafting, in Wildstar it is called Tradeskills and they are quite unique!  I found the progression of leveling my crafting skills less obvious than other MMOs and I think I can share a few secrets I found along the way.  I hope you will find this guide will give you the confidence to wisely use your precious mats for the most benefit.

Overview

There are 2 types of crafting, Tradeskills that you pick and Hobbies that everyone can do:

Gathering:

• Farming (Hobby)
• Mining
• Relic Hunter
• Salvaging (Hobby)
• Survivalist

Crafting (production):

• Architect
• Armorer (heavy armor)
• Cooking (Hobby)
• Outfitter (medium armor)
• Runemaking
• Tailor (light armor)
• Technologist (potions, etc)
• Weaponsmith

Here is a graph showing the relationship between the gathering skills and which crafting skills supply components:

	Farming	Mining	Relic Hunter	Salvaging	Survivalist
Architect	X	X	X	X	X
Armorer		X		X
Cooking	X				X
Outfitter			X	X	X
Runemaking				X
Tailor	X		X	X
Technologist	X	X	X
Weaponsmith		X	X	X

We have found that you can learn 2 gathering skills instead of one crafting and one gathering. So far the draw back is that you will have to obtain and hold 2 gathering tools for faster collection.
Hopefully this information can help you decide which Tradeskills you will pick when you get to level 10, I think they all have the potential for profit and to be useful but that has yet to be proven.  I recommend looking at Chief Sarcan's post for a more detailed explanation of each Tradeskill.

Tradeskills interface:

Press K to open the Tradeskills interface; there are 3 tabs available at the top:

• Schematics – where you can see all of the patterns, including locked patterns, with the name, components and how to unlock if applicable.
• Tech Tree – this shows you the path to learn the patterns for each skill as well as displays your XP towards each level, there is drop-down box at the top center.
• Talents – another tree that shows the Talents (bonuses) for each Tradeskill that you can earn.

Leveling your Tradeskills and Hobbies:

Gathering:

• Hobbies have only one level, you can always farm any item that is ready to be picked and salvage any item in your inventory!
• Tradeskills have level 1-5, gather nodes in lower level zones for level 1 to earn XP to increase level, higher level zones will have higher level nodes.
• Salvaging also has only one level.  To salvage you can either click on the 2 arrow/recycle button in the bottom of your bag to review the salvageable items in your bag or drag the item to the button.  Note- there is a slight delay as the salvage button lights up and then you click it, I assume this is to help you to avoid salvaging the wrong item. Salvaging destroys the item and returns items used for Tradeskills (that might have gone into the crafting of the item) and grey items of very little value.  I found the power cores to be particularly useful, however sometimes the items that you recover from salvaging might NOT be as valuable as vendoring or selling the item on auction house.  Keep this in mind!

Crafting (production):

• Cooking (Hobby) has only one level but earn Stars in the Tech Tree to earn Talent points.  It seems impossible to make the higher level items unless you have talent points.
• Runemaking has one level.
• Tradeskills have 5 levels (Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Artisan, Expert), craft items and complete branches in the Tech Tree to increase level.

Talents:

In the Tech Tree you will see that completing some branches reward not only a new pattern but also a Star with a 1 as shown below:

The Star is 1 Talent point which is spent in the Talent tab to earn bonuses for the Tradeskill – in Beta they seem to be automatically spent, although the interface infers that they might be selected.  These will be useful so you should try to earn them!

Crafting Vouchers:  Complete dailies to earn crafting Vouchers – these can be spent on crafting bags of random crafting components (although I do not recommend it) but at Expert level you will need spend Vouchers to buy rare patterns, crafting those rare patterns can unlock even better patterns (also requiring the voucher-bought pattern), so I suggest you save them up!

Expert Research:   I have not gotten mats for this yet so I do not know much about it, but I assume it has to do with raiding.

Practical advice:

• Pre-max level crafted items are nice but probably not essential, so I would not break your bank or your mount fund in order to level your Tradeskills!  Questing with found, quest and challenge reward gear seemed sufficient, so crafted gear was not required.
• Collect the items you can use for your Tradeskills as you quest by salvaging unwanted soulbound items and collecting nodes.  Luckily in Wildstar you have a massive Tradeskills bag so you will not have to worry too much about bags space!
• When you are ready to start crafting, begin by getting the zone crafting dailies and work your way through the Tech Tree to learn those patterns – this way you will level your Tradeskill while getting crafting Vouchers, a Talent point (one point for completing 3 dailies in each zone) and zone rep.  You can use the cheapest mats and items with the least upgrades for quest turn in.
• Craft items that are upgrades for your current gear.
• After completing the above, craft items to complete branches in the Tech Tree that will yield a Talent point.
• Once you get to Expert you will be able to use crafting Vouchers to make upgraded gear. 
• Be ready for some fun surprises! I would love to hear or see what you find!
  

A Couple of Thorns

   I have one nagging worry about Wildstar. There was something slightly off. As I mentioned before we hit level 50 just before the last beta weekend came to a close. While Virika and I both enjoyed leveling, I kept thinking about what will make Wildstar a great and successful game. So what makes a great MMO? I've been thinking a lot about this and here is the list I came up with:

1. The experience of leveling and exploring the game world must be fun and feel rewarding.
2. End game must be filled with enough content that is challenging and rewarding enough to keep the players interested.
3. The game must be fun to replay. Leveling an alt character must be a unique experience that is just as fun as the experience a player had with their main.

   Obviously, there are certainly other factors behind successful games, like player base, community and several other factors. For now, I want to focus on the three above. 

   To the first item, Wildstar definitely has a great leveling experience. Nexus is a richly designed game world with lots of nooks and crannies to explore. The lore is fantastic and players log out wanting to experience more. At least to me, Wildstar has enough comedy to keep the player laughing and doesn't take itself too seriously. On the flip side, the conflict between the two factions is believable and the player feels heroic taking part in the struggle. A great sense of adventure dominated every zone I played through and I don't think it could have been much better.  

   As far as end game, I don't know yet. In terms of adventures and instances, Wildstar delivered heaps on the way up. Hopefully this upcoming beta weekend I can try out the level 50 veteran instances and cut my teeth on some serious PvP. Hopefully, I'll get the chance to experience the raiding situation before launch, but we'll see about that.  I am optimistic that Wildstar will deliver a fairly decent endgame with the launch.

   Replay. Alt characters... about this I am nervous. Although the leveling process was great, the zones were very linear.  I did the missions on the ship. I had a choice of two starting areas which were pretty good. I got to the main city and went to the next zone appropriate to my level. When I finished that one up or got to a point where the xp rewards were trivial I moved onto the next zone.  So on and so forth. There weren't options. My fear is that playing another character of the same faction will be an arduous chore on the way up to the end game. Everyone will be doing the same quests they did the first time through. That's just grind and not very fun.

   As I see it, there are two things a player can do to keep it interesting.  The first is make a toon on the other faction. While most long time players will want to do this anyway just for the experience, many will want their alt character to help support their main. Also, players want to keep playing with their friends. The other thing a player can do is choose a different path. This will provide some different content along the way. I don't know that it's enough though.

   Overall, Paths are a great idea. If you haven't seen it yet, check out this post by Tobold. He discusses some of the appeal of the paths system and why it works for players. Personally, I had fun doing the soldier missions and all that but I couldn't help but feel a little let down. I feel Carbine missed an opportunity with paths. Each path could have been a lead in to another unique story line. The objectives and rewards could have been a lot more thrilling. Some of those soldiers holdouts were difficult but most of them weren't. Throughout the game, doing path missions felt a lot like doing chores. Especially, the settler I played. There was way too much stuff to collect and it seemed never ending. The rewards for settler seemed a little better but at the end of the day I'm not good at doing chores at home and I don't really want to do them in the game. If a player could raise their character level by doing path missions, they could at least change up the leveling grind a bit.

   

   Obviously, I am still really excited about Wildstar. However, the linear questing model, I think is a serious flaw. It probably won't break the game but I hope that the designers think about this in the future.

So This Is How The Other Half Lives

  
   Hope you all had fun playing during the Beta weekend.  An old WoW buddy of mine from Canada preordered the game with us. After showing him the Wildstar website earlier in the week, he was immediately sold on the spellslinger class. He wasn't sure about which faction, but he leaned towards Exiles because, "they're the good guys and the Dominion seems like a bunch of d*@ks." Virika and I had wanted to revisit the Exiles anyhow, so we made a bunch of Aurin toons.     

Home Sweet Home

  I felt we should all play something different from one another, so V played stalker, and I made another Esper. It probably would have been more exciting if I did something else, but at least I had some idea of what I was doing. The Aurin are the tree hugging hippies of the future who don't have a problem getting scrappy when the bad guys show up. We had fun hacking, slashing, and slinging spells across the Celestial Forest.  We beat up the baddies, rubbed elbows with royalty (the Aurin queen is our buddy) and we even got to Thayd. After that, Virika and I began to set up our plots of land before retiring for the night. My Aurin house lacks the swagger of my dominion pad but I was happy to get it before the weekend ended.

   Part of me was hoping that I wouldn't enjoy playing the Aurin or the Exiles so I would know which faction to play as my main when launch day hits. While the Dominion are the obvious bad guys who come across as likable as sour milk, they are funny as hell. I very much enjoyed the dark humor of the Dominion characters and quests.  Right off the bat, the Dominion player experiments with different methods of killing off traitors and it's hilarious.  I'm not a psychopath or anything, but it's like comic book villain stuff and it cracks me up.  And I hate to say it, but the Dominion have the cooler looking races.  Big Bear Butt made an awesome space chinchilla.  A couple of hours into the game, I was sure we'd be flying a Dominion banner in our front yard...

   The Exiles... they are just so epic. They are the good guys struggling to survive with an evil empire stacking all the odds against them. They are the underdogs of the galaxy and they don't stand a chance. But, let me tell you, the Exiles player is gonna have a hell of lot fun giving those Dominion bastards a run for their money. When players quest for the Exiles, they feel heroic. They are protecting the innocent and killing the bad guys. While questing for the Dominion, the player feels like a bit of a pawn. They don't really care about the player. As long as the player continues to perform tasks and accomplish the missions assigned, the Dominion won't vaporize him or her yet. Also, the Exiles have the Mordesh or as I like to call them, the coolest race in the game with the best back story.

   I'm sure both sides will be fun to play. Each side has their merits. Which will you choose?

Humble Beginnings

     After many years of leveling, PvPing, and raiding in Azeroth, World of Warcraft began to feel a bit stale.  Our once strong hard core guild had been gradually disintegrating.  In the final days, we were a maybe once a week casual raid guild.  Mostly people just got older and their schedules got more complicated.  We had some good times and the core group had been playing together for almost four years.  When Art of Vengeance (our last 10 man incarnation) fell apart, my heart wasn't in WoW anymore.  I began as a DPS, had a stint as tank and had settled into healing for most of my raiding/pvp activities.  Ironically, despite all the silly panda stuff, I felt the game was at it's best when MoP came out.  The new zones had an amazing aesthetic that for me, really supported the mystic and ancient setting.   The game-play itself was certainly better than it had ever been.  Rotations and talents were interesting and combat was extremely fun.  The MoP raids, I thought were some of the best in the game (but nothing beats Ulduar IMHO).

     For a while, I had also dabbled in SWToR.  Mostly because like every kid born in the 70's, I love Star Wars.  I played a couple of classes and I got Sith Sorcerer, Bounty Hunter Powertech, and Jedi Shadow to 50.  My wife is an avid MMO player as well and her first toon was an Imperial Agent.  That story line really kept my interest.  It seemed less juvenile than anything my characters had going on.  Lots of intruique, double agent stuff, conspiracy and a kick ass ending. Some of the other story lines were cool (some were just awful), loved the space missions even though they could feel repetitive.  In the end, just wasn't as much fun as WoW.

     We tried Secret World for about a week.  Felt like a waste of time.  I always wondered if we gave it more of a chance, maybe we would have found some things to enjoy in the game.

     And now... Wildstar.  I haven't felt this excited about a video game in a long time.  My wife and I got into the winter beta in early January and it's been quite a fun ride.  The first thing you become aware of when you log into Wildstar, is that the game has a huge personality, for lack of a better word.  This didn't surprise me.  All the videos on the game website were hilarious.  At it's core, there is a serious story line guiding your adventures on the planet Nexus but you're going to have plenty of laughs along the way.  One of my favorite parts was the narrator who berates you with snarky comments when you die, pumps you up and congratulates you when you level up, and gives you some exciting background when you get to a new area.  The game play is very active.  The player has to hop around and do quite a bit of aiming.  The instances are fun and definitely challenging. The boss mechanics kept me on my toes and kicked my ass until I got the hang of them. The players we met were all very helpful and that just added to games positive atmosphere.  I decided to try my hand at blogging as we begin our adventure in Wildstar when it releases on June 3.  If you didn't already know, pre-order you get in three days early.   I plan on putting together some detailed posts about various aspects of the game my wife and I experienced in beta and keep it going once the game goes live.

 For now, here are some pics form the various characters we've started:

My Esper looks like a badass shredding on her hoverboard.

Thanks for reading. 

-Gubjub