#objectively it is not nearly as good from a writing standpoint as my most recent work | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aion-rsa · 4 years ago

Text

World of Warcraft Shadowlands Review

https://ift.tt/37tIPkA

After the launch of World of Warcraft Classic, the perceived downfall of the Battle for Azeroth expansion, and a notable delay, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is finally here.

The release of a new WoW expansion comes with a level of anticipation, dread, and curiosity that we don’t typically see in expansions to other live service games. Chalk that up to both the extensive nature of WoW‘s content offerings and the fact that every expansion writes the opening pages to a new chapter in a legendary MMO that has revolutionized the genre (and gaming) for over 16 years.

That being the case, reviewing a new WoW expansion is also a somewhat unusual process. Each new WoW expansion features a campaign to work your way through along with a variety of endgame content that typically isn’t even available when the expansion launches. That’s why we’ve broken our review of Shadowlands down into looks at the expansion’s leveling and endgame in order to tell you whether it is worth losing your free time to.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands Leveling Review

By the end of World of Warcraft‘s last expansion, Battle for Azeroth, the usual fatigue that accompanies the final days of a WoW expansion was amplified by the belief that Blizzard was no longer in control of its 16-year-old MMORPG giant. There were some players who felt that Activision’s influence on Blizzard had corrupted the company’s spirit. Others who had just gotten a taste of World of Warcraft Classic bemoaned the loss of the social elements that had once defined the game. There was a general feeling that Blizzard was doing all it could to keep WoW afloat while longtime fans were impatiently waiting for the MMO to embark upon its next great adventure.

In many ways, Blizzard wants Shadowlands to be that great adventure. More importantly, the studio seems to want Shadowlands to be the expansion that helps reset WoW and wipes away some of the mistakes that the team has made in recent years. After hours of playing Shadowlands, it seems the expansion is on track to do just that, even as the ghosts of the past decisions threaten to drag the MMO back down into a void of complacency.

Shadowlands makes a good first impression. Shortly after starting the expansion’s primary questline, you’re thrown into The Maw, a kind of uber-Hell where the worst of the worst go when they die. The problem is that it seems every soul has been sent to The Maw recently, which has allowed the realm’s ruler, a Thanos-like creature known as The Jailer, to build an army of the damned. With help from the recently crowned Lich Queen, Sylvanas Windrunner, The Jailer plans to use this army to take over all the realms of the Shadowlands and Azeroth as well.

This setup is a simple, but effective way to not only introduce players to the lore of Shadowlands but to once again put all players under the thumb of a universal threat. You will miss out on many, many bits of lore by hopping into Shadowlands without knowing anything about the history of World of Warcraft mythology, but it’s easy enough to understand and enjoy the standalone plot that Shadowlands offers.

More importantly, the entire Shadowlands concept seems to have brought out the best of the game’s talented artists and designers. Each zone in Shadowlands essentially serves as a different version of the afterlife. This idea is beautifully demonstrated by Shadowlands’ starting zone, Bastion, which is a kind of an Elysian Fields version of the afterlife where angelic figures roam fields of wheat. It stands in stark contrast to the next zone, Maldraxxus, where necromancers train the souls of the damned as well as warriors who refused to stop fighting even in death.

It’s entirely possible to enjoy your time in World of Warcraft without diving into the story or lore, but it’s a testament to the design of Shadowlands‘ worlds that the lore is built into every corner of each new zone in such a way that you end up appreciating what the team has built even if you skip every line of dialogue en route to the endgame.

Yet, the biggest highlight in Shadowlands is the level squish. Blizzard’s decision to reduce the level cap from 120 to 60 not only helps the game feel much more approachable for new players (even if the leveling time is about the same) but also ensures that reaching a new level feels more significant. While vital talent points are only acquired every five levels from level 15 on, each new level typically rewards you with some kind of new skill or dungeon to explore.

While I leveled my first Shadowlands character (a Shadow Priest) to 50 during the expansion’s pre-patch period, the journey from 50-60 was made that much better by the Shadowlands‘ combination of largely exceptional world design and the fact that there was something new to explore with each new “ding.” Shadowlands offers a nearly universal leveling experience for first-time level 50-60 players, and the expansion’s campaign does a fairly good job of making that progression relatively painless. I especially enjoyed the way the game now clearly marks campaign quests and side quests, making it that much easier for players to reach 60 as fast as possible.

Release Date: Nov. 23, 2020 Platform: PC Developer: Blizzard Publisher: Blizzard Genre: MMORPG

That may sound like an odd bit of praise for those out of the loop or anyone who hasn’t played WoW since its early days, but the truth of the matter is that WoW just isn’t about the leveling experience anymore. Blizzard has done everything reasonably in its power to make the journey from 1-60 as efficient as possible. As someone who really got into WoW with the release of Classic, there’s a part of me that is always going to miss the idea that the journey to the level cap should be this epic adventure filled with leveling zones, dungeon runs, and a slow but steady mastery of your character’s abilities and equipment. I suspect there’s a happier middle-ground between modern WoW leveling and WoW Classic leveling, but if you accept that Shadowlands leveling is just meant to be a narrative-driven prelude to the endgame, then it’s a lot easier to appreciate the campaign the team has designed.

That being said, there are some aspects of Shadowland‘s leveling experience that simply do not work. Quests remain one of the game’s biggest issues. World of Warcraft quests have always been somewhat infamous for their simplicity (many of the WoW Classic quests really do boil down to “Collect X Item”), but Blizzard has tried to make the questing process more enjoyable in recent years by creating tighter questline narratives and ensuring you have to travel shorter distances between objectives.

All of that makes questing more efficient, but little of it makes questing more interesting. Most quests follow the same basic tropes and are easy enough to complete without any help from friends or other players. That last part is especially disappointing as the release of a new expansion should be the best time to embraces the benefits of an influx in players. Instead, I’m often left running around working through the same basic skill rotation to complete a similar series of quests by myself.

This is where dungeons should come in to help break up the monotony, but they’re kind of in a weird spot at the moment. I love the design of the Shadowlands dungeons I’ve queued into so far from both a thematic and gameplay standpoint, but they’re just not designed to be woven into the leveling experience quite in the same way that they were in the past. You don’t really “need” to run dungeons until you’re grinding for better gear in the late game. That approach removes a golden opportunity to capitalize on the “massively multiplayer” element of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Games

World Of Warcraft: 10 Things Shadowlands’ Tutorial Doesn’t Teach You

By Matthew Byrd

Games

World of Warcraft: How to Craft Legendary Gear in Shadowlands

By Matthew Byrd

Thankfully, the role-playing portion of the experience fares pretty well. I’ve already praised Shadowlands‘ story and world-building, but so far, I’m also happy with how Blizzard has balanced the various characters and races. Yes, some classes will offer a statistical advantage over others, but that’s unavoidable. What’s impressive is that you get the feeling you can truly play Shadowlands as any class/race/specialization combination you choose and not have to worry about being ousted by other players until you get into high-end raiding. Time (and the growth of Shadowlands‘ PvP scene) will reveal just how balanced Shadowlands really is, but what’s important right now is that most classes feel like they have some semblance of identity and are not so unbalanced that you need to prioritize anything but your role-playing preferences.

Battle for Azeroth‘s problem wasn’t necessarily its leveling experience (it actually featured a strong narrative and some great zones), but if we treat the journey to the level cap as a guided campaign, I generally feel that Shadowlands is a stronger expansion overall due to its level squish and better overall world building.

With the release of Shadowlands, Blizzard seems to have rescued WoW from some really rocky waters. Now, we just have to hope the team uses its considerable resources to do more than just stay adrift.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands Endgame Review

For quite some time now, the mainstream perception of WoW’s success has been tied to the idea of the game recapturing its “glory days.” While that idea absolutely applies to players’ personal definitions of the game’s golden era, it’s also based on the belief that WoW’s success will always be based on how close its subscriber count is to the game’s peak metrics.

Truth be told, I’m not sure WoW will ever recapture its peak subscriber numbers. Gaming, the internet, and entertainment culture at large have just changed too much since then. In lieu of that pursuit, Shadowlands focuses on something that recent WoW expansions have sometimes ignored: making the fans who already play the MMO the most as happy as possible.

The most obvious examples of the expansion’s success in that respect can be found in Shadowlands‘ endgame. WoW has been all about the endgame for quite some time now, but recent expansions (most notably, Battle for Azeroth) have botched the endgame somewhat by emphasizing fundamentally unenjoyable content grinds and resources designed to keep the carrot constantly out of reach rather than emphasize the thrill of the pursuit.

For the most part, Shadowlands avoids those mistakes. This expansion’s endgame content is much more focused on offering narrative-driven pursuits that feel far more dynamic than BfA’s Island Expeditions and the other ways that it required you to grind for gear and resources.

Any discussions of Shadowlands’ success in that respect has to start with the expansion’s covenant system. When you hit level 60 for the first time, you’ll be able to join one of four covenants. Not only did you get to know each covenant throughout the course of the expansion’s campaign (which adds some welcome weight to your decision) but each covenant offers you unique abilities based on your chosen class.

This is where Blizzard pulled off a minor miracle. It would have been easy for every covenant to offer a strictly best ability that all players immediately went for, but for the most part, most classes will have to choose between multiple viable abilities that are situationally valuable. Not only does this make character-building far more dynamic, but the viability of multiple covenants adds much-needed variety to the game’s sometimes muted role-playing atmosphere.

The benefits of covenants don’t stop after you’ve acquired your abilities, though. Each covenant offers an array of unique pursuits and expanded character building options that ensure the growth of your character doesn’t end when your talent points run out. It’s honestly reasonable to suggest that some players might choose their covenants based on the visual appeal of the gear they offer, which characters they want to hang out with the most, or the unique endgame mechanic each offers, and Shadowlands’ endgame happens to be dynamic enough to ensure those players won’t feel like they’ve been abandoned just because they sacrificed a few percentage points in specific categories.

Shadowlands’ Torghast dungeon is absolutely a big part of the reason why WoW’s endgame enjoyability is no longer as dependant on raids, dungeons, PvP, and other “hardcore” content that requires strict optimization at all times. We’ve talked about this dungeon extensively in the past, but it’s essentially WoW’s take on a roguelike. It offers a nearly infinite level of content that sees you climb the tower, acquire incredible new powers along the way, and fight your way through a series of randomized rooms and bosses.

Torghast offers a compelling reason to keep logging into WoW even if you largely consider yourself a solo player. The dungeon taps into the chaotic joy of the best roguelikes without being so random that it leaves you feeling like your success is entirely dependent on luck. It asks players to have a pretty firm grasp on their class but doesn’t leave you feeling like your mistakes are going to ruin the experience of your fellow players. Even better, Torghast runs reward you with one of the key resources needed to craft legendary gear. That means that some of the best gear in the game is no longer limited to those who want to endlessly run some of the most stressful high-end dungeons and raids.

We knew that Torghast was going to be a thrilling addition to the game, but one of the more pleasant surprises of the expansion so far has been the zone that Torghast is located in: The Maw.

Essentially a version of hell where the worst of the worst go, The Maw offers a somewhat unique endgame zone filled with dangerous bosses, challenging enemies, and a GTA-like wanted system that limits how much time you can safely spend in the area a day. It’s not quite the endless content farm it aspires to be, but it’s great to have an area of the game that always feels dangerous no matter how strong your character is.

Games

Best World of Warcraft Shadowlands Mounts and How to Unlock Them

By Matthew Byrd

Games

World of Warcraft: How to Unlock Torghast in Shadowlands

By Matthew Byrd

If there’s one potential shortcoming in Shadowlands’ endgame for more solo-minded players (or anyone else for that matter) it’s the Anima system. While the expansion’s new resource isn’t nearly as annoyingly necessary as BfA’s Azerite, unlocking some of the more impactful endgame perks will require you to grind for it. At the moment, the Anima grind is largely an excuse to keep up with the various world quests and other opportunities to add to your covenant’s reservoir.

The presence of resources such as this (and your reputation with various factions) is quickly entering “necessary evil” territory as Blizzard continues to rely on them as the best way to incentivize players to return and participate in the slow pursuit of progress. It’s an acceptable enough mechanic in that respect, but endlessly repeating the same basic world quests in the hunt for more Anima just isn’t the most satisfying way to spend your time.

Of course, you could always grind for Anima, gear, and other resources via Shadowlands’ party-based content. Yes, there’s an intimidation factor that comes with running Shadowlands’ more challenging group content, but so far as the design of that group content goes, this expansion hits its marks. Shadowlands’ dungeons are clever, distinctive, and pleasantly challenging.

Actually, the difficulty of the game’s recently released first raid (Castle Nathria) has even surprised some veteran players. The raid’s Mythic difficulty is appropriately daunting, but even completing it on Normal and Heroic difficulties requires quite a bit of coordination and personal responsibility.

There’s a general feeling that the difficulty bump we’ve seen so far in Shadowlands will be welcomed by the players who participate in that style of content the most. There’s a complicated argument to be had regarding whether or not it’s valuable for Blizzard to “tune” all of WoW’s content to appease hardcore players, but the emphasis on making inherently hardcore content more challenging seems to have paid off so far.

Shadowlands’ PvP system benefits from a similar philosophy. The return of PvP vendors means that competitive players will receive PvE viable rewards that include some truly incredible gear and items. While that may annoy those who aren’t interested in competitive content, this is another example of Blizzard seemingly conceding to the idea that it’s better to please the players who are already interested in this style of content rather than try to accommodate those who perhaps aren’t.

While I haven’t had the chance to play much PvP content in Shadowlands, I’ve heard good things from those who have spent quite a bit of time with it in terms of the current balance. For that matter, Shadowlands’ endgame class/spec balance seems to be in a fairly healthy place even if there’s always work to be done.

The bottom line is that Shadowlands offers more reasons to log-in each day and makes the daily WoW experience far more enjoyable than it has been in recent years. We’ve danced to this tune before, though, and we know that the real test will be how Shadowlands feels six months or a year for now.

Such as it is, though, Shadowlands’ endgame content offers such a massive improvement over BfA that you’re actually hearing longtime WoW players sound excited about playing the game again. That’s an accomplishment in and of itself, even if it sometimes feels like Blizzard is still working on what the ideal modern WoW experience really looks like.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post World of Warcraft Shadowlands Review appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/37nPNGz

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes

stillellensibley · 5 years ago

Text

Lucas Blalock talks with David Campany

LUCAS BLALOCK, MIRRORS WINDOWS TABLETOPS, MOREL BOOKS, 2013

David: Lucas, I’d like to dive in and ask you something about surfaces. It seems to me that photography became modern in the 1920s when it accepted its industrial smoothness. In doing so it made itself available to the expanding inventory of surfaces that proliferate in the modern world – plastics, metals, glass, new fabrics. In denying its own surface it became the supreme recorder of the surfaces of the world (I think of Edward Weston declaring: “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”) Meanwhile modernist painting largely gave up depiction to concentrate on its own surface. Since then of course things have got more complicated both in photography and painting, as artists move back and forth between the surface of their medium and the surfaces they depict. Does this ring true to you?

Lucas: It does, and it makes me think of the slippage, when describing photographs, between a description of the image content, and one of the physical object. This creates a sort of location problem when talking about photography. I am sympathetic to Weston’s insistence on ‘looking’ but my faith in the camera isn’t his. For me photography is more an act of drawing than one of index or transparency.

In my own work I think this question of surface has been most shaped thinking about collage, and at what point a photograph moves beyond its threshold into another form. I think another way of saying this might be that part of what is at stake in photography’s denial of its surface is a footing in homogeneity and naturalism. I am interested in making pictures that betray these qualities, making heterogeneous or stilted photographs, while at the same time using a consideration of the medium as a boundary.

David: To that end the title of your book is intriguing. Mirrors and Windows: photography since 1960 was of course the title of a MoMA show and book put together by John Szarkowski (in 1984). There Szarkowski seemed to wrong-foot his critics by including all manner of heterogeneous or ‘stilted’ photographs. Robert Cumming’s sculpture/performance photos. John Divola’s theatrical/forensic photos. You’ve added ‘Tabletops’. It makes me think that the tabletop is the classic location for the still-life (plucking and placing) and for collage (cutting and pasting). Then there’s ‘the desktop’ of the computer screen, the location of digital post-production.

Lucas: The title does refer to Szarkowski’s exhibition as well as the table proper in the ways you mentioned. Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane” (which comes from an essay about Rauschenberg’s collage techniques) was in the air. WINDOWS MIRRORS TABLETOPS is also the neon that emblazons a Silverlake glass shop which I drove by nearly everyday when I was living in California. I kept, rather absently, thinking about the Szarkowski and what this third term might be. Over the months it started to take on more and more possibilities.

David: What do you plan and what is improvised?

Lucas: Almost everything is improvised, though obviously I often set up the initial terms of that improvisation. For me, being in control of the details doesn’t seem to me to make very good pictures. I am reading Philip Guston’s collected writings and he quotes Paul Valery as saying that bad poetry “vanishes into meaning”. I think some analogue of this is true in photography. To be a bit more specific, when I am working I let the momentum carry my decision making. I set objects on the table but the pictures get made trying to figure out how to look at these things rather than composing them. Shooting in the studio is not so different for me from shooting something outside.

David: Guston had a knack for holding onto remarks that made sense. In an interview from 1960 he recalls something John Cage said to him:

“When you start working everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

One can’t leave while holding on to every last detail. It’s interesting that historically the street was regarded as the space in which control escaped the photographer while the studio was where it could be regained. That distinction has slowly vanished but what remains is the enigmatic ratio of art, chance and document.

Lucas: I don’t intend to make the claim that the kinds of contingencies at play in the studio are the same as Winogrand’s or Friedlander’s. I shoot with a large format camera and in the end I think that condition informs the pictures as much as where they are made.

David: Of course. There’s a widespread assumption still that the larger the camera format the less contingency there is. Winogrand the speculative hunter-gatherer embracing all chance on 35mm; the large format studio photographer banishing everything unintended (I notice Jeff Wall gets annoyed when people say there’s no chance in his work). Very often I feel the plate camera sitting there stoically on its tripod, is somehow asking to be entertained, daring you to surprise it.

Lucas: It just involves a different attitude. I like this thing Godard said about all films being documentaries because the camera was documenting the performance of the actors (Jeff Wall somewhat echoes this with his idea of the “phantom studio”). Maybe with the large camera it becomes a question of limit instead of encounter – or at least limited encounter or cumbersome encounter. I think about the 4×5 less as stoic than slow and clumsy – even though it can be used in very precise ways.

To return to something else you said, I think that the studio is a site of control. Maybe you could say that Winogrand’s project was about capturing momentary harmony in a situation of seemingly endless contingency; where the studio is more like a laboratory where contingency can be introduced and made variable. Art historian Svetlana Alpers’ book, The Vexations of Art: Velasquez and Others, deals with the way that the painter’s studio functioned as a site for looking out, or a place for rehearsing how we approach and picture the world. I think that this kind of consideration and picture making invites another set of contingencies, which for me have expanded into the processing capacities of the computer.

David: I think Godard was quite right. Even the modes, methods and materials of artifice are – or become – documents. It makes me wonder whether the criterion by which all art (but particularly photographic art) survives is primarily documentary. A documentary not just of what was before the camera, but of an attitude towards it. This might be as true of a still life photographer as a street photographer. I look at Winogrand’s pictures and I see documents of his world but also documents / examples of particular formal challenges – the stretching of compositional ‘harmony’ until it almost snaps, of becoming ‘stilted’ as you put it. Records of his own undoing, to paraphrase a Scritti Politti lyric. I have that feeling looking through this book too.

Lucas: I hope so, and this “becoming document” is really close to my own thinking about making photographs. One of the things I have thought a lot about in the last few years is what we as viewers bring to looking at photographs now – how Photoshop, digital, the internet, etc. have altered the terms of that looking.

I have put this idea out there before that early jazz audiences not only had familiarity with the standards, but, having come up in a culture where it was expected you could play an instrument or carry a tune, that the technical variations were also widely legible. If you played a tune in 5/4 your audience could hear it, and I think photography is in a similar cultural situation now. Not only do a broad range of people understand the camera, but also, increasingly, the tools of the picture’s digital processing. Imagining and attempting to re-articulate this ground, putting pressure on these expectations (especially your own), is a big part of what it means to make pictures.

David: Improvising with materials before the camera is a kind of photographic jazz people understand. That’s nice. But improvising with Photoshop seems to be a different matter. Photoshop hasn’t reached the ‘jazz phase’ for most people. They use it to standardize, to perfect. A kind of grooming of the image. You don’t take that path at all. You take the same attitude to Photoshop as you take to what you do in front of the camera. It’s experimental.

Lucas: It is. Grooming is a great way to describe its more conventional use! And though, from a practitioner’s standpoint, I totally agree that the software’s possibilities haven’t really been explored until recently, I think that apps like Instagram, celebrity-before-and-after-photos, the Iranian missile picture, and others have really primed us in the software’s potentialities, and it is this literacy I am (possibly optimistically) assuming.

To respond to another part of what you said, there is definitely a through line from how I begin a picture (with the camera) to the way that the digital file is handled. When I first started making pictures that had been fucked with it took me a long time to understand what constituted their limits. The computer is such a powerful tool and in the beginning it felt like there were too many possibilities to make these interventions feel specific or necessary. I found a way forward in Cezanne, Courbet, and Manet and also in Brecht’s writings on theater. This opened to thinking about bringing the offstage of photographic production onstage by parroted procedural corrections gone awry. I was interested in the way that I could make these technologies – designed to have a high degree of transparency (the studio, the camera, and Photoshop) – more opaque. An awareness of the computer’s invisible hand in its “grooming” capacity had already become part of what it meant to look at photographs, and using these tools in a more forward, evident way felt available. All of this was buttressed by seeing work by other young photographers, particularly Florian Maier-Aichen who was using the computer in really inventive ways.

DC: Beneath all this I do see a grounding in realism in your work. Maybe it’s to do with your lighting, which tends to be even, avoiding chiaroscuro or anything expressionistic. From this baseline you are able to foreground the handling of materials and the manipulation of surfaces. It’s a bit like close-up magic: one has to allude to transparency if one is then going to subvert it.

Lucas: Yes, absolutely! A lot of the choices are very direct. I am trying to make a picture “of” something – the thing or situation in front of the camera – and fulfilling this promise of photographs.

It is great that you brought this around to close-up magic. I have been really excited for years about this Adam Gopnik piece from a 2008 New Yorker about just that. I read it as I was just beginning to figure out this work and it really clarified something for me. I still give it to students and friends. It is called The Real Work.

David: It’s a wonderful essay. When I read it I imagined Gopnik thinking: “I know I can write in a way that could really convey something about close-up magic,” maybe because his sentences are so simple and perfect and thus a little mesmerizing. He describes the way one guy works as being “like a man handling cards rather than like a magician handling props.” Now, which of those are you, Lucas?

Lucas: The man with the cards I hope.

David: Because looking like a man handling cards makes for a better magician handling props?

Lucas: I answered that one sort of instinctively… but yes, because it makes for a better magician – or just one of a certain stripe. There is the transcendental strangeness of illusion that is beguiling, but then there is this other strangeness that is much closer at hand. In this latter kind there is a tension between the performance and the work of performing or the prop and its other life off the stage. For me this is where so much takes place.

David: This is a big book. You made the work and lots more over an eighteen-month period. You’ve been going pretty fast. Markets prefer artists to develop slowly and incrementally but photography does allow for rapid work. Huge artistic ground can be covered quickly. I guess most of your thinking is in the doing.

Lucas: It is really a book about just that. Having a studio practice has allowed for thinking in pictures, or by picturing, where problems get worked out through putting them in play. The book is a kind of primary text from that practice. It doesn’t have the distance of a monograph or a collection – it is more like a notebook. And this kind of accumulation has been very important within the work. I am always looping back to pick up underdeveloped ideas.

David: That’s refreshing to hear, and not so common these days. Perhaps there has been something in photo-art education that has tended to nudge young image-makers into pre-rationalization or post-rationalization, and slightly away from ‘thinking as making’.

Lucas: That is totally possible but I think it also rubs up against the desires of the market you mentioned. There is a lot of anxiety. I think ambition is a really complicated thing in this kind of atmosphere. It’s a shame it’s discouraged (even if just implicitly or internally). For some reason it is really easy to talk yourself out of making a picture… But for me this working method is totally indispensable.

David Campany and Lucas Blalock

Source

0 notes

preciousmetals0 · 5 years ago

Text

Glassnode Co-Founder Says On-Chain Data Can Spot Bitcoin’s Tops and Bottoms

Glassnode Co-Founder Says On-Chain Data Can Spot Bitcoin’s Tops and Bottoms:

Blockchains produce huge amounts of data and it seemed that only data scientists and blockchain research firms like Chainalysis and CipherTrace were making use of it. Recently, crypto investors like Willy Woo and Philip Swift have begun to incorporate on-chain data into their rigorous Bitcoin analyses and the results have been astounding.

Despite these efforts, on-chain data remains something of an enigma amongst crypto investors. To clear up the confusion, Cointelegraph decided to sit down with Rafael Schultze-Kraft, the co-founder of on-chain market intelligence platform Glassnode.

Cointelegraph: Let’s start with having you tell us a little about yourself and what you do.

Rafael Schultze-Kraft: I have an academic background in computational neuroscience, programming, machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analysis. Working for several startups in Berlin over the past six years, I’ve gained substantial industry experience applying data science and machine learning to a large variety of real-world problems using data from vastly different domains.

I founded glassnode with my partners and for me it represents the perfect fusion between my passion for data with blockchain and digital assets — probably the most exciting domain to be working on today.

While I am a co-founder and CTO, I make an effort to set time aside to conduct a fair share of data science and analysis as I find getting my hands dirty and engaging with data is the most exciting part of the job.

CT: What is Glassnode’s mission?

RSK: We are the go-to hub for all things on-chain and our purpose is to serve as the primary gateway to on-chain data. We provide advanced insights, market intelligence, tools, and data which are required for investors to freely make sense of all the data which is generated on blockchains.

Our datasets are extremely useful for investors looking for indicators and signals. Furthermore, researchers looking to observe and analyse adoption rates and long-term valuations will find on-chain analytics indispensable.

We seek to increase transparency on what various actors are doing in the field, and on-chain analysis allows one to keep an eye on how they are interacting within the network. One of the big problems we’ve seen in crypto is that exchanges report false volume and conduct wash trading within their order books.

Meanwhile, investors have an extremely limited view of what is really happening within most crypto and blockchain-oriented organizations. On-chain activity paints a completely different picture of what is truly happening and this data is extremely valuable to investors and researchers.

CT: In your opinion, why is it important for investors to study on-chain analytics?

RSK: I think that the most crucial aspect about on-chain is that it is something that has never existed before in finance: a public ledger, transparently unfolding all transactional and economic activity. It would be crazy as an investor not to carefully look at and study this data!

Many investors are using methods and data that they know well from the traditional finance markets and applying them to the digital assets space. Introducing the value of on-chain data in this space, contextualising, and making this data easily accessible and digestible, is a great part of what glassnode is about.

Furthermore, we must remember that there is not just ‘one blockchain,’ there are many different protocols and the interpretation of data across these systems is not a uniform process.

CT: Last week Placeholder partner Chris Burniske said:

“The narrative that ‘it’s just Tether’ driving Ethereum adoption is not based in fact. Tether accounts for 20% or less of Ethereum’s gas use. ETH‘s uses are heterogenous & robust; people are just now realizing how oversold it was.”

CT: Given that you posted a Glassnode chart showing otherwise, what is your take on whether or not Tether (USDT) is driving the demand within the ETH network?

Entities paying gas on Ethereum. Souce: Glassnode

RSK: In my opinion, it’s too early to say that Tether is driving Ethereum adoption. A close look at the chart does show that Tether is driving demand as of late, but it is too early to determine if this trend is sustainable. If you check the chart closely, you’ll notice that demand peaked and then goes down.

Furthermore, when we talk about adoption, I don’t think it is fair to discuss the phenomena purely from the standpoint of Tether activity. The graph also shows a very large portion of transactions related to complex smart contracts that interact with each other.

% of gas used in txs not sending ETH. Source: Glassnode

Number of Ethereum txs not used to send ETH. Source: Glassnode

Therefore, it’s too extreme to claim that Tether is driving adoption. What is clear is that currently Tether is driving demand within the Ethereum network as nearly 20% of all network fees were connected to Tether transferring USDT.

CT: So can we infer that we will see consistent, steady or even peak demand for Ethereum in the future?

RSK: It’s too early to say, the only thing we can objectively state is that there has been a huge increase in demand for Ethereum Gas. It went from 1% in June 2019 to more than 25% in a short period of time. Let’s observe how this evolves — Tether will not be the (sole) factor for Ethereum demand in the future.

CT: Does the surge of Tether transactions and growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector mean that increased demand and higher gas fees will lead to price stability and additional growth of Ether’s price?

RSK: Tether is a token that is pegged to the dollar so people can trade easier without going back into fiat. It’s clear that the token is heavily used and that its primary utility is for trading cryptocurrency. Therefore, I would say that it probably has some influence on price.

DeFi platforms are a completely different animal. These are complex, self-sustaining decentralised systems that provide a venue for the exchange of value, goods and services.

In theory and practice, they truly represent the ideal interaction one envisions Ethereum facilitating and as these platforms continue to grow it is entirely possible that the digital asset supporting these ecosystems will stabilize and potentially even increase in value.

CT: What would you say are the core concepts one needs to grasp in order to understand on-chain analytics?

RSK: I think people need to have a very basic understanding of core on-chain concepts such as transactions and addresses, and the differences between UTXO (unspent transaction output) and account-based systems like Ethereum.

From an investor’s perspective I would start by looking at core metrics such as transaction volume and number of active addresses, and then reading about and understanding the more advanced and established indicators metrics. In my opinion these are SOPR, realised capitalization, MVRV, HODL waves, coin days destroyed, and liveliness — to name a few.

CT: Is there a way to automate on-chain analysis for robo investment platforms or do investors just need to add these steps to their routine toolkit for conducting asset analysis?

RSK: Yes, on-chain data can absolutely be used for algorithmic trading. This data can be fed into automated systems along with any other data source traders use. And the added value in doing so, we believe, is immense. That is why we offer our on-chain metrics through a unified API, so anyone can easily integrate with their algorithmic trading platforms.

On the other hand, on-chain data has shown to be very useful for discretionary trading as well. On-chain indicators can be used to better understand economic behaviour in these networks, as well as analyse and predict market cycle tops and bottoms.

CT: What else do you want to tell me? Are there any additional hot topics, statements or opinions of importance that you think the world should know?

RSK: I want to emphasize that we (as in those interested in blockchain and cryptocurrency) are still early in this space and I think that every person that is investing in digital assets should begin to consider on-chain analysis as part of their analytical regime.

Analysis of data from blockchains is revolutionary. It is very different from the old world traditional style of asset investing.

This data is fundamentally important for crypto investors, yet the majority of investors do not understand the value it unlocks. It’s possible that investors unknowingly (subconsciously) write off the value of on-chain value as upon first glance it appears difficult to interpret due to the blockchain specific terminology and unconventional application of analytical methods.

Sometimes you just don’t realize how valuable something is until its demonstrated to you.

As I said earlier, many crypto investors are simply applying methods from the old world of investing (indicators and conventional trading ideology) to a totally new asset class which is behaviorally and technically different from traditional assets.

0 notes

goldira01 · 5 years ago

Link