Native Jovian

Yeah, it was a great time. I was completely dead after travelling all Thursday and then spending three days at Nerdapalooza, so I almost left early on Sunday. Glad I didn't; the last act was Powerglove, and they were fucking awesome.

So, I just got my copy of Y. There was an insert about getting a Torchic from Mystery Gift. I was already planning on starting with Fennekin, but now clearly I have to pick Charmander, too, so along with Torchic, I can have ALL THE FIRE TYPES. It's either that or get one water, one fire, and one grass type as my starters. Hm, Froakie, Bulbasaur, and Torchic? I could see it. That would get me six different types between them, by the time they all hit their final evolution, too. I think I like that better than ALL FIRE, ALL THE TIME.

Well, fuck. I just got home and went to buy tickets for this, and now it says they're unavailable. Edit -- I sent off some emails (and already got a reply!). Apparently they're still available, you just have to buy at the door. Whew.

I'm a big fan of Criken who does something between Let's Plays and highlight reels. He tends to pick multiplayer games and then spend a bunch of time playing them with his friends, and then posts the more entertaining/funny parts that result. Occasionally he does single player games, but still has his friends watching and commenting instead of actively participating. Either way, it's usually goddamn hilarious. I've also been watching Extra Credits since sephfire first started putting them up on YouTube and posting threads about them here at OCR. But that goes without saying, because everyone here knows how awesome EC is because they watch it religiously, right?

I'm not particularly interested in WWHD, personally. I loved the original Wind Waker, so I really have no problem with just popping that back in my Gamecube and playing it, rather than paying for the HD version, "improved" though it may be. The Mario stuff I'll probably check out sooner or later, but for one reason or another, I'm not really super excited about them. I'm sure they'll be fun if I pick them up, but they're not really a system-seller for me. As far as Monster Hunter... never gotten into that franchise, either, though I have seen some pretty of it, so I might check that out too.

Why the hell is their so much bitching about the Zelda franchise in general, and an upcoming 3DS Zelda game in particular, in the Wii U thread? Seriously though, I'm getting a Wii U when I get home next week. I'm definitely getting ZombiU, Wonderful 101, and Pikmin 3. I've never gotten into the series before, but I'm also told that Rayman Legends is really good, so I may pick that up. What else should I check out?

Looks like I will be able to make this -- I get home on Friday (at 5:30 AM, after a 15 hour flight from Hawaii), so even if I immediately crash for like 10 hours I'll still be ready for shit on Friday. I am le excite.

I don't know if I'll be in town on that weekend yet (I travel for a living and it tends to be on short notice), but if I'm home, I'm definitely going to check it out.

You are not the average consumer. A price advantage isn't going to move consoles by itself, true, but the fact that the Wii U is $100 cheaper than the PS4 and $200 cheaper than the Xbox One is going to make a lot of difference to people who are just buying "a new game player" rather than knowing specifically which console they're interested in.

Microsoft and Sony are already locked in a death struggle over the 15-35 male gamer demographic, Nintendo doesn't need to try to muscle into that territory. They need to keep doing what they've been doing with the Wii and the 3DS -- leveraging their system's unique mechanics, and their IPs, to offer something that you can't get on any other console. That basically means more first party titles -- Nintendo's always done well with first-party stuff, and it's games like Mario, Zelda, and Smash Bros that sell Nintendo consoles. We'll have to see how it does during the holiday season, given that it's the cheapest of the next-gens by $100. I still don't think that the Wii U has a solid system-seller, but it's slowly amassing a respectable library even without a single must-have title.

I was planning on buying a Wii U once the price dropped, but I've been travelling so often for work that I wouldn't have had any time to play it anyway. I'm headed out for two weeks on Monday, too, so no go there. Next time I'm home for a week or so I'll pick one up.

Two or three updates in a day, which has happened more than once, is a bit excessive, but it's not that big a deal. Certainly not something worth blocking the emails over.

Fuck yeah, that game was awesome. Crystal Bearers on Wii was pretty good too, though it wasn't really the same kind of game.

So it is. I love SFM stuff. Dat smooth animation, gets me every time.

I... know? I'm saying that I'm not convinced that paying $300 for a system that has three exclusives I care about is worth it. Yes, there will certainly be more eventually, but that's an argument for buying it later, when they come out, not now, when they haven't. I don't really care about HD Wind Waker. Wind Waker works just fine on my Gamecube right now, and I don't feel the need for an updated version.

I've been sort of waiting for a price drop to pick up a Wii U, but... I'm still not sure there are enough games to make it worth it. About the only things I'd be really interested in are ZombiU. Pikmin 3, and Wonderful 101. I'm sure that there will be more stuff that I'm definitely interested in eventually, but if I'm going to spend $300 on something, I want to be able to enjoy it now. I guess we'll see how I feel in a month.

I spent like ten minutes this evening trying to get into the server queue for Cactuar. Not spent ten minutes in the queue; spent ten minutes trying to get into the queue. I just got a "the server is full, go away" message. At this rate, between login being fucked for a few days, and then the instance servers being fucked for a day or so, and then the servers getting hammered so hard that I couldn't even get in line to wait to log in, it's probably for the best that I have other plans for the actual launch tomorrow. Also this. I'd much, much rather roll with 10 or 20 people I know than 1,100 people who just happen to be on the same website.

I'm on Cactuar as well, as Juren Jovian. We should probably make a linkshell or something.

You can now register your copy of FFXIV here if you preordered, in order to make sure you get into early access, but the servers are getting hammered pretty hard. It'll give you an error message when you try to redeem your code, but it may go through anyway. Have your Square Enix profile open in another tab (you'll be able to get to it from a drop-down menu in the top-right of the pre-order code redemption screen) and you can refresh it to see if you actually got registered. While I was doing that, I got messing with my Square Enix account for the hell of it. Best avatar, or best avatar? In other news, does anyone know what linking your XBL/PSN/Steam/Facebook account to your Square Enix account does?

There's nothing wrong with F2P if it's executed well. It allows for games that can't directly compete with WoW (which, still being the 800 pound gorilla of the genre, is most of them) to find a niche in the marketplace. Take Star Wars: The Old Republic, for example. I've been playing since pre-launch and I love the game, but it wasn't keeping enough subscribers to maintain the profit margin they wanted (they had said it needed about 500,000 subscribers to break even, and it had dropped from a high point of around 1.7 million to a low point of about 600,000), so they went to a hybrid model (where you could subscribe for automatic total access to everything, or play for free with some restrictions). This bumped active accounts up to over two million. Now, not all of those 1.5 million non-subscription accounts pay, and not all over those that do pay as much as a subscription fee, but some pay more than that (and some subscribers pay over and above their subscription). That's the glory of a real-money store. With a subscription model, the most money you can get from someone is the cost of the subscription. With a real-money store, there's no limit, because there will always be someone willing to pay extra for whatever's in the store. Of course, the subscription model has advantages too. It leaves a company more financially stable, because that money is paid up front whether the player actually plays the game or not, which lets the developer concentrate on more long-term goals than "we've got to bring more people into the store". A good F2P developer will do both, of course, but a subscription-only model allows them to focus their attention. That said, a F2P model, or a hybrid like SWTOR uses, can keep a game alive when it would have otherwise had to shut down (or allow a game to be made in the first place when it doesn't have the enormous amount of financial backing that games like SWTOR and FF14 do), so I don't see how that's a negative on the industry at all.

Yeah, I remember seeing him mention OCR when he did an AMA on Reddit. Pretty awesome stuff.

I don't think it's a criminal matter -- no one's going to get arrested over it, certainly -- but it could be a civil one if the retailer has a deal with the publisher that says "if you buy from us, you have to sell at the MSRP". If Gamestop is buying at the publisher rate, then turning around and calling new games "used" in order to get around contract agreements, then they could get in trouble with the publisher for that. Given that Xenoblade's publisher is Nintendo, that could be a big deal. Emphasis on "could". I don't know if it's actually the case.

We've tried doing two different servers before, and what usually ended up happening is that one would be full and the other would be dead, so there was sorta no point in having two servers anyway -- only one was ever being used at any given time. Generally speaking I'm fine with not playing customs. There are enough official maps, and enough variety between them, that you don't really need custom maps to keep things fresh. That said, customs can be fun as well, so I don't think that we should delete all the custom maps off the server entirely. I'd be okay with only allowing official maps by default, but if we did that I'd probably want to have a custom map night every once in a while, too. edit -- oh, and I do like the idea of extending the "recently played" count if we're just going to do official maps. Part of the problem with just officials is when we end up doing the same maps repeated over the course of the night. The recently played list should be long enough that you shouldn't see the same map twice in one session.

I don't really have a problem with them selling it at an inflated price -- if that's how much people are willing to pay for it, then more power to them. What bothers me is the fact that they're branding them as used to do so. If people are willing to pay $90 for a used game, then why wouldn't they be willing to pay $90 for a new game? There's either some sort of MSRP deal where they're not allowed to sell a new game for that much -- in which case shucking off the plastic wrap and selling it as "used" is actually kinda shady -- or else they don't think that people would be willing to pay that much for a new game (but are for a used one), which is stupid.

So the question is, how is the nominate-and-vote system failing? If people don't like a map, then why aren't they voting against it? If one or two people really detest a map that other people like enough to vote for, then why is that a problem (and how would going to a pure mapcycle fix it)? Personally, I'd be mostly okay with getting rid of nominate, but not RTV. Sometimes you just get sick of a map and RTV it to go to the next one. The problem with that is that you can get people who RTV as soon as the map starts and that can lead to several map changes in a row that depopulates the server -- but I've only ever actually seen that happen on a troll map (like Pacman or something).