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BlizzCon was as amazing this year as it has ever been. From the Sombra announcement to Weird Al closing out the show, there was more than enough to do this year. What I wanted to do with this post is roundup the six game franchises and give some commentary on their current state, going from best to worst.

Overwatch

Everyone was expecting the release of the new champion Sombra, and sometimes when you're expecting something you really don't get too hype for it. Sombra's reveal was definitely NOT one of those times, because the hype was real. They started the opening ceremony with a retrospective video of Overwatch's release. I thought it was pretty fake, with a ridiculously setup war room, some equally ridiculous lines, and in general a lot of small things that tipped off "this was not real". Sure enough, the video started glitching out, and eventually blacked out entirely before playing the reveal video. Everyone loved it, and it was as amazing as I had hoped it to be.

Overwatch has taken off in popularity since its release, and the main reason is that it makes a genre that was previously associated with hardcore gamers accessible to casual gamers, while at the same time making sure not to lose the hardcore crowd. The Overwatch World Cup was played at BlizzCon, complete with their own mini-stadium built inside of one of the halls. Overwatch is turning into a juggernaut that is continuing to gain momentum with things like arcade mode, new maps, and new game modes. They are constantly tweaking their matchmaking algorithms, improving their server technology to make the game smoother, and listening to fan feedback.

World of Warcraft

While Overwatch has all the hype, World of Warcraft is an established brand that has endured for over 10 years. However, their last expansion, Warlords of Draenor, hmm... sucked. No really, it was awful. They lost a ton of players, released very little content, and seemed to have no plan for the future.

Legion, on the other hand, has been an amazing expansion, with the new artifact weapons, a world quest system to replace the daily quests, other systems inspired by Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm, and a ton of content. So, it was pretty telling when on the first day, Ion Hazzikostas took the main stage and spent an hour talking about what was coming to future patches, and did so by himself. He went over the next two patches, 7.1.5 and 7.2, the raid content we'd see in it, and even gave a teaser for a 7.3 patch. This expansion is simply blowing the last one out of the water - not that it would be too hard to do so - and it's clear there isn't going to be any kind of content drought for the foreseeable future. Right now, WoW is pressing all the right buttons, and backing up their words with new content. If you've been wondering whether to get back into WoW after the failure of Warlords of Draenor, the answer is clearly yes.

Heroes of the Storm

Heroes is an oddity in the Blizzard world. It draws upon all of their franchises to take on giants such as League of Legends and DotA2. And to be fair, it does a good job. Again, it's another case of bringing a genre of gaming that is more associated with the hardcore gamers to casual gamers. They announced adding Varian Wrynn and Ragnaros to the game at BlizzCon, and continue to add more variety to the way you can play the game.

What I find odd, though, is that unlike a first person shooter, having all these different ways to play Heroes of the Storm just doesn't appeal to me as much as it could. It lacks player progression, and compared to Overwatch is significantly more difficult to pick up the cosmetics. Not to mention that with as many heroes as there are in the game, the learning curve is really huge when it comes to trying to figure out what each hero does, and how to successfully play against them. Having multi-class heroes like Varian is only going to make the curve grow. On the flip side, there is a plethora of things to do in Heroes of the Storm, so if you enjoy the game you're going to continually have more to do.

Hearthstone

Hearthstone is a fun, lighthearted game that tries not to take itself too seriously. However, I personally find that the game tends to move too fast, with multiple expansions per year and a constantly changing meta game. The speed of the meta changing is not a new complaint, but with the new expansion announced at this BlizzCon, that speed doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon.

To me, Hearthstone is an incredible time sink if you choose to play it. Not only do you have to stay current on the meta, but you spend time analyzing your cards and assemble decks with hopes that you will put together something that will be useful. Not to mention the investment - either time or money - required to get the cards you need to be competitive. Hearthstone can be amazing fun, but to remain competitive you really have to be ready to make the commitment.

Starcraft

Starcraft II is definitely waning in terms of new things happening. Sure, the modding scene is pretty active, but there were no announcements related to Starcraft II, if you don't count the DeepMind announcement. They have completed the story with the 3 chapters of the game but do occasionally add new mission packs to the game which are fairly popular. However, this won't sustain the game forever, and unless they're thinking about moving along to the next chapter in the Starcraft series, there isn't going to be much to talk about when it comes to Starcraft any time soon. At least their e-sports scene is thriving.

Diablo

Where there is little to talk about for Starcraft, there is much to talk about with Diablo, and it's not very good. Diablo III has become a stale game, with the meta being exactly the same for the past 4 seasons. While they are adding some nice feel good elements such as the annual Diablo I event or the Necromancer, it really isn't clear what they have planned to allow the game to remain relevant. Challenge Rifts were a good thought, but even that will become stale after some time.

Diablo III almost seems like the red-headed stepchild of Blizzard. They have no e-sports scene, the content that gets added to the game tends to pale in comparison to other games, the meta has become stale, and they're even losing some of their top players to boredom. Are they doing enough to keep fans of the game playing it?

On the flip side, this sure feels awfully familiar. It's a long content drought, like those we'd get at the end of an expansion for World of Warcraft. Blizzard isn't dumb, they know when a game they've made is losing its appeal, and they tend to do something about it. They already did it with Reaper of Souls. Perhaps the next expansion or game is just around the corner?

Labels: BlizzCon, Diablo III, Gaming, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, Starcraft II, World of Warcraft

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Whirlwind Week
Posted: 3:01:00 PM 0 comments

A roundup of what's been a Janna whirlwind of a week!

Schedule

I've come to realize that, even after ending Six Minutes To Release's raiding run, I still only have one night a week to myself. That night is tonight. Every other night, I've got something going on:

Monday - Mastering and editing of the Six Gaming Podcast
Tuesday & Thursday - World of Warcraft raiding with remaining Six Minutes To Release members
Friday - Wife night :)
Saturday - Six Gaming Podcast live stream
Sunday - Ron's Bronze Plays League of Legends gaming on Twitch

It's a pretty busy schedule, but I look forward to a lot of these things throughout the week as well. Things feel pretty balanced right now. I still long for 40 hours days, though.

Descent: Underground

This past week, though, things got a bit crazy, because I found out that one of my favorite games of all time is being rebooted.

Descent's fast-paced, six-degrees-of-freedom combat made addicts of us all! Descent's frenetic and pulse-pounding action were light-years ahead of its 1995 release date. Like us, many of you still share war stories of your epic network battles. You remember your heroic shots, your death-defying maneuvers, and matches ending with a narrow escape as the tunnel collapsed behind you.

Sadly, as consoles took over and PC games were pushed aside by publishers, great games like Descent were left to languish in obscurity. A whole generation of gamers grew up without Descent's heart-pounding, non-stop action, robbed of the true 6DoF space adventure that is their birthright!

The Drought Ends TODAY!

This is a quote from the Kickstarter for Descendent Studios' Descent: Underground. This is a brand new Descent title, setup as a prequel to the original Descent series.

On one hand, I can't contain my excitement. I backed this project early and big once I learned of the direction that former CIG developer Eric "Wingman" Peterson was taking it. To have another Descent game being made from a set of dedicated developers who are listening to the community to make the game the best Descent game ever made is like a dream come true.

On the other hand, the Descent community has had its share of disappointments.

The official Descent 4 game was cancelled. Numerous projects have been started to try to mimic the Descent experience. Many of them have been cancelled, and those that did make it to production had no community support and were simply not Descenty enough for the community to back. And others who have tried to bring Descent back have been issued cease & desist legal documents by Interplay.

So why now? More importantly, why Descendent Studios, a team that never found the Descent community until after they launched their Kickstarter? While I have faith in their ability to deliver on their project, my faith with Interplay is not there. I really have to question Interplay's motives. Do they plan on this being some kind of cash grab? Are they thinking of screwing over Descendent much the same way PTMC's Dravis screwed over the Material Defender at the start of Descent II? That would be ironic.

Six Gaming Podcast

So the podcast happened this past week, with Episode 5 and its highlights now available on YouTube.

I'll be blunt, it's not our best showing. News seemed to be disjointed, the hosts were distracted with Twitch chat trolls, and the Round Table section was rather, well, bland. Hopefully next week, we'll be a little more exciting. SGP always seems to be better with more hosts.

Ron's Bronze Plays

This week I played with Colzaratha's smurf. It didn't seem to help a whole lot.

The first game, he played Ahri while I played Morgana. He did not have a good game. Every lane lost, and we slowly bled out. The second game was much of the same. I was again on Morgana against a Graves/Annie combo in the bottom lane that our ADC fed substantially.

We got our first win in game 3 when I played Janna. I had some strong Janna play this weekend, and got some crucial knockups to force the win. I tried to make it two straight on Janna, but despite more strong play, the rest of the team didn't have it in them.

In the final game, Colz and I switched roles, with me going mid Lux and him on Morgana. I went off for a 12/2/21 carry, and Colz and I ended in style. Result of the 5 games was an increase in 11 LP to Bronze IV and 88 LP.

Website Update

Last night, I was able to finalize the data I'm putting in the game box on the website. My article about the sorry state of gaming APIs really came to mind. While the Blizzard API has come a long way and the League of Legends API is pretty good, the Steam API still sucks (it's still missing an achievement feed), and an official XBox API isn't even a thing yet.

Really. It's 2015 people. Let my data go! Let my data be free!

Anyway, I still have to code out detailed pages for my WoW feed, get profile pages for my Diablo 3 characters, display detailed history of my ranked play in League of Legends, and at least show off the games I am playing on Steam, even if getting the achievements I have for them is rather archaic.

But honestly, this is the home stretch. After that is the life section, which really is just going to require me to set featured pages.

After that, I have a lot of content to update, which includes transferring my music collection to SoundCloud, updating all the tags on my Blogger and Tumblr sites, and recreate many of the pages from the existing site on the new one. That's not really a lot of stuff. Hopefully coding can be completed this weekend, and I can start on the content next week. I'm still committed to finishing by the end of the month.

Labels: Blogger, Coding, Descent: Underground, Diablo III, Gaming, League of Legends, Music, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, SoundCloud, Steam, Tumblr, Twitch, World of Warcraft, XBox

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Year In Review: 2014
Posted: 3:37:00 AM 0 comments

In many ways, 2014 was a big year for me. There were a lot of big changes made right at the beginning of the year, with some exciting plans starting to form up.

Where to begin?

Music

I will always remember the end of 2013 as being a kind of inspirational epiphany for me. In the span of 4 short months I wrote 4 songs complete beginning to end, managed to record 2 of them as stripped down versions, and penned the final lyrics of a few more that had been floating around.

The only major song that has come out of 2014 is a dance-ish piece I call "Bullseye", which is designed to be more about the music than about the lyrics. Even the lyrics that are sung focus more on the melody, making strong use of some of my unique vocal inflections. There is only a single verse and chorus, but the usage of such are designed to give the song added texture, not added meaning.

The main problem here is that a grand total of zero songs were released in 2014. After having such a strong finish to 2013, I expected things to carry over into the new year. Looking back, much of the music that came out of 2013 was due to having a lot of extra time on my hands while in San Francisco. I was able to put notes to Reason because I had little else to do, and with commute times being upwards of an hour some days, it was not uncommon for me to do some writing in my head, and then later pen it down into lyrics or Reason. I haven't had nearly the luxury this year since I've not been in San Francisco at all, and opportunities to write have been few and far in between. I've got this awesome guitar I want to play around with, and just haven't had the inspiration to do anything with it.

I've always toyed with the idea of setting aside just one night and dedicate myself to nothing but my music, but right now I take care of Six Minutes To Release five nights a week, spend Fridays with Kathy, and do the Six Gaming Podcast on Saturdays. Music has been playing second fiddle to pretty much everything else these days. I don't like it, but I know that I will never lose the drive for my music. It will come back some day.

Coding

After leaving Sift in February, I took a month off and then joined HCC Insurance Holdings as a .NET programmer. So far, I've been doing a lot of VB.Net in WinForms, but this last month has seen me start to work on an ASP.NET project again. It's in C# with a Bootstrap framework, and communicates with a lot of different moving parts within the company, so it'll be an exciting project to start 2015 with.

Personally, well, I'm always full of coding projects. My big project this past year has been the remake of roncli.com. This project is designed to stretch my understanding of the node.js stack, as I'm taking advantage of projects such as Bootstrap, Rendr, and Express, and have been working with APIs from Twitter, Google Blogger, and Tumblr, with many more in the works.

roncli.com as a domain turns 15 years old this February. The current design is its second, but is one that it has had for most of its lifespan. I've grown to absolutely HATE it. I've tried a number of times to remake it but nothing ever stuck... until now. Currently, I'm nearly done with integrating the blog into the site. It is going to be a pretty big hub of all things roncli, so I don't expect it to be complete any time soon, but I have made steady progress on it since May with no signs of slowing down. The fact that I'm learning the innards of these node.js projects is arguably more valuable than the site itself.

Gaming

2014 brought about a gaming renaissance of sorts. Sure, I'm still playing World of Warcraft, but I've expanded my horizons into games such as Diablo III, League of Legends, and countless other indie games that have been slowly filling up my Steam library. I've not exactly shaken off the "hardcore casual mobile gamer" title, either, as I still am very much into gaming on my iPhone.

What brought this on was the fact that while I was with Sift, I really did not have any time to myself. Gaming became a luxury to me, something that I couldn't spend a lot of time on. Once I left Sift and realized that evenings do exist, I had a lot of free time. I began streaming to Twitch regularly, and this past July took the reins of the Six Gaming Podcast while cohost Jacob "Showsan" Showalter is deployed in the military.

Between all this and the increase in popularity of streamers and professional gamers, gaming itself has taken on a new meaning for me, and is something I feel I could take advantage of given the right environment. After I am done with roncli.com, I want to build something gamer-centric around the whole "Six Gaming" concept we've got going on, so I don't expect much to change when it comes to my gaming, at least in the early part of this next year.

Life

This year I celebrated my 5 year anniversary of marriage to my lovely wife, Kathy. The fact that I've survived this long without her trying to cash in on the life insurance policy speaks volumes. And the fact that she has supported me through so many things, both good and bad, really makes me blessed.

Leaving Sift was a hard decision. I felt I held on a lot longer than I should have. In some ways, I did. Perhaps I could have made a more positive impact by leaving sooner. Or maybe I didn't hold on long enough, as it seems as though some of the things that caused me to leave have passed. Whatever, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm not going to dwell on the could-haves. I did what I did.

And what I did was start a new job. It's quite a switch going from the rushed startup environment to the slow-paced, meticulously-planned environment of a publicly traded company. At the same time, however, many of the habits I learned while at the startup I've been able to apply to the new job, and the transition couldn't have gone better.

But there is still that bit of emptiness, that missing sense of adventure.

I only managed to take 3 trips this year. The first was our 5 year anniversary trip on a cruise around southeast Alaska in June. Then came BlizzCon in Anaheim in November. Finally, I just returned from Christmas break in Buffalo, where the temperature averaged a balmy 45 degrees, much warmer than usual.

I'm hoping to get back to the Bay Area soon. I made a lot of connections out there, some friendly, some professional, and some both! I am still very much fascinated with how differently things work out there. It was very exciting to be a part of the culture, and I look forward to my next visit out there, whenever that may be.

A Look Ahead

It's hard to predict what's going to happen in the next year, but I'm going to state my goals here. No, they're not New Year's resolutions, but rather things I want to get done and say that I've accomplished.

Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper"
Finish the updated roncli.com site
Grow Six Gaming into a bigger and more general gaming community
Get back to the Bay Area at least once

Some strong goals. Now, to work on fulfilling them!

Labels: Alaska, BlizzCon, Buffalo, Bullseye, Coding, Diablo III, Gaming, HCC, iPhone, League of Legends, Life, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, Steam, World of Warcraft, Year in Review

Monday, April 07, 2014

All Good Things and Such
Posted: 10:18:00 AM 0 comments

It's been a long time since I've written anything of substance here, so let this post serve as a catch up to what's been going on.

Since April of 2012, I have had the pleasure of working on the iOS application known as Sift. The company developing Sift is a San Francisco Bay Area startup, of which I am a founder. Needless to say, I put in many hours of work into the product.

Sift was more than a job to me. It was an opportunity to do something big, and perhaps make a profound impact in the way people shop online. It's still in its infancy, but the product that we put out there is pretty awesome.

However, I decided to step away from the company in February after three months of consideration. It was a very difficult decision for me, as I truly believed in the product and the company. I was a remote worker in a high-impact position, and I found that it wasn't easy maintaining the visibility required of such a position in a remote location while still being able to get done the stuff that needed to get done. This became especially true as the company grew, both with more internal employees and having to work with multiple contractors outside of the company (and the country), which would have me going as early as 8 am and as late as 2 am. Combine that with the demanding travel schedule - I spent only 8 of the final 18 weeks of 2013 at home - and it's not hard for most people to see how stress levels were through the roof.

Extreme stress levels aren't something I'm particularly fond of, which led to my decision to move on. I did spend a good deal of time with the company, accomplishing and learning plenty along the way. I learned much about the open source world, and found that I very much enjoyed working with Node JS. I met a lot of awesome people as well, and I can only wish for their further success as Sift continues to grow.

While leaving was certainly not a decision I came to lightly, I'm quite happy that I was able to leave my second startup on my own terms after being able to accomplish so much for them. My first startup, Trax in Space, ended in financial disaster, and I wasn't ready to step away when it all fell apart. This time, I look back fondly on the experience, knowing that I was a major contributor, and that the company is still growing upon the foundation that I helped to build.

So what's next for me? Well, back to the Monday through Friday, 8-hour a day grind, resharpening and honing my .NET skills while bringing my schedule back to a sense of normalcy that I have found was very much missed. What else?

Music. I'm slowly getting back into my music, and as always have several songs floating around. I want to get myself a new electric guitar next, as my last one bit the dust some years ago. In the meantime, I post things I'm working on to my creative blog as I work on them.

Coding. I'm in the process of upgrading all of my .NET projects to 2013, will be updating LibWowAPI, and plan on slowly transitioning my websites over to Windows Azure. I plan on learning Rendr and incorporating it into my personal website, roncli.com, as a way of learning and showing off my node.js skill. And I am wanting to figure out Xamarain so that I may be able to write mobile games.

Gaming. And of course, I spent a ton of time between jobs gaming. I'm big time into Diablo 3 these days, have gotten into streaming my gaming experiences, and am a regular host on the Six Gaming Podcast where we talk all about gaming.

Seems like I'm getting back to my roots these days. That could be a sign of some wonderful times to come.

Labels: Azure, Coding, Diablo III, Editorials, Gaming, LibWowAPI, Life, Node, Rendr, roncli.com, Sift, Six Gaming Podcast, Stress, Tumblr, Twitch, Xamarian