May 2014 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Nexus Destiny

May 31, 2014 by Belghast

Bel Against Nature

As I said yesterday morning, last night we had a big end of school cookout to attend and in spite of my antisocial tendencies I enjoyed myself quite a bit. However this morning I am paying for that enjoyment as my sinuses and lungs are full of crud from “extended exposure to nature”. The food however was amazing as was the company. This little guy showed up towards the end of the night, and we all ended up snapping photos of him. Firstly I had zero clue that Tree Frogs existed in Oklahoma, secondly if they did I didn’t realize they could be green. Most of the frogs you see around here are muddy brown or grey to mix into the surroundings. According to the biology teacher in the midst this guy is NOT native to Oklahoma, but we have no clue where he comes from.

The other thing I am wishing I had snapped a photo of were the kittens. One of them tried really hard to come home with us, and I totally would have been cool with that… if I didn’t think it would completely upset the existing balance with our three cats. These babies were the most chill and relaxed I have seen. One of them I carried around in the crook of my arm on her back like I would a ferret. She was all to happy to have my scratch her belly, and none of them really seemed to use their claws at all. The most entertaining thing was listening to the back and forth with the parents as the various kids tried really hard to adopt one for their own. One girl damned near outlined a PowerPoint presentation for exactly why she should have a cat. But alas her mother decided that she would rather have a crying daughter than a divorce.

I have a sneaking suspicion that in our household this will not be the end of the talk of the adorable kittens. Right now our eldest cat is extremely picky, and I am afraid bringing a little one into the mix would set her off. That said it is impossible to find more relaxed cats than these I think. I am such a softie when it comes to little furry things. The desire to adopt them all is why we had six cats at one point. Over the years we’ve had two bunnies, six different ferrets, two sugar gliders, a hamster, a guinea pig, and in total ten different cats to date. So I am sure there will be more cats in our future, in spite of me putting up a good defense… I always eventually give in. Right now I am happy with just cats and ferrets though, and I doubt I will branch out into other fuzzy children again.

Newbie Blogger Initiative

Today is the last day of the Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2014, and I feel like I should have probably done more. This year I have set in a different role, doing more personal tutelage of participants than big informational posts. Mostly this happened because as far as a advice goes I am not sure what I could say that has not already been articulated better. I don’t really know what I am doing, and I am still very much figuring it out on a daily basis. In a way I have been a Newbie this year as well in that this is our first year doing the podcast. Tonight will be our 8th episode, so I am pretty proud of how that has progressed so far. I am also very much a newbie at this whole streaming thing, even though this month I have cut down massively on the amount of time I have devoted to it. May is pure hell, but hopefully as we move into June things will chill out quite a bit.

About mid month I reworked my blogroll so I have all of the Class of 2014 blogs listed there. You should totally check them out because this crop is doing some pretty great things. What has been the most interesting for me personally is that a number of my long term friends have opted to start or recommit to blogs this month as well. I have each of them in my blogroll and I have been seeing some pretty great stuff come out of the “noobs”. We as a community need this event, to help replace the many people who just stop blogging each year for whatever reason. As someone who spends a lot of time doing this… I fully understand the desire to throw up your arms and stop. That said we need this transfusion of talent each year to help keep the gaming blogosphere a vibrant place.

Here is a rundown of my NBI topics this month.

The Ritual – my discussion of the writing routine
So You Want to Stream – primer on getting OBS working with Twitch.tv
Permission to Suck – My thoughts on getting started and posting regularly
Reaching Out – discussion of social networking and blogging
Class of 2014 – preliminary rundown of Class of 2014 early adopters
Not as Hard as it Seems – my getting started blog post

So I guess at the end of the month I didn’t do as poorly as I thought I did. Six posts devoted to NBI2014 is probably better than I did during the 2013 run. My only real regret is that I didn’t come up with anything brilliant for Syl’s Poetry Slam. I think maybe the topic of “Magic” threw me for a loop, because I have a very negative feeling towards “finger wigglers” as I call them. I am at home with swords and shields and shotguns… but I have always shied away from casters and wizards and spell slingers. I tried to come up with an epic about slaying an evil necromancer… but nothing really worked. So I wish I had come up with something, but I am sure she will have plenty of entries this year to choose from.

Nexus Destiny

Today is the beginning of the Headstart for Wildstar. I think the servers came up last night at Midnight PST, which would have made it 2 am for me. I have a deep seething hatred of all of these launch dates being centered around PST, but I not much you can do about it when a studio is from the west coast. I was so damned happy when the Elder Scrolls Online times were all based on East Coast. All of this gnashing of teeth aside, I got in this morning rather smoothly and created Belghast the Chua Engineer and Belgrave the Human Warrior. Both of which are on Evindra the PVE-RP server… which is where all the sane and rational people seem to be rolling characters. I say that jokingly, but almost all of my twitter list will apparently be on that one server, so even if folks are not all in the same guild it will be good to at least have them all centralized on the same server community.

This is the new Belghast… while I could not do anything vaguely close to my traditional “Bel” look as an angry bunny/rat/thing I feel like I captured the “feeling”. Something about playing as a Chua immediately made this game more enjoyable. I think mostly it is the animations, and the fact that in early games I always favored dwarves or small races in general. My original Everquest character was a Dwarf and my first WoW characters were all also Dwarves. So while this seems like a huge departure race wise for me… someone who mostly rolls humans, it is more a “getting back to my roots” of sorts. I am still up in the air about this game, but I am going to give it a fair shake. I did not intend to like Final Fantasy XIV at all, but ended up having a blast playing it. So I am hoping that Wildstar will be another similar case. I feel like this is precisely the game that I would have loved… about five years ago, but I’ve changed massively since then. Here is hoping there is a game inside of Wildstar that the current me will enjoy. In any case I plan on still playing quite a bit of Elder Scrolls as well.

#Wildstar #NBI2014

Too Many Games

May 30, 2014May 29, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Cheater

Once again I am doing what I consider cheating… which is writing up a post at night that I intend to post in the morning. Basically tomorrow is another one of those “ride in together” days, because directly after work we have a big end of school cookout thing to go to. So I simply won’t have much time to do my faff about verbally thing tomorrow morning. As such I am staging a post tonight, and doing the same thing everyone else… but for whatever reason I feel like I am somehow betraying the ritual by doing. Today’s topic I have been kicking around for awhile, so I figure this is as good of a time to spring it on my adoring readers… look I like to pretend I have adoring readers okay.

Too Many Games

Right now things have reached a sort of critical mass with me, and there are entirely too damned many games right now that I want to be playing. This could not have hit at a worse time considering how busy the tail end of school is combined with the fact that we have weddings and graduations and such to attend. Normally I feel like I can reasonably juggle three to four games at a time bouncing back and forth between them. The other day I posted saying that multi-gaming was even an awesome thing to do… considering it kept you from getting bogged down in the decisions a game company makes that you don’t necessarily agree with. However for me, I am spreading myself super thin with a ton of different activities that I want to be doing. So today I am going out outline each of the games that I am playing and lament the things I would love to have time to do in them.

Elder Scrolls Online

Right now I still consider Elder Scrolls Online my primary game. At roughly two months since headstart I am still very much loving this game. It has some problems, namely with difficulty of grouping, but as far as the game itself goes I dig it massively. I’m working my way through Auridon and slowly creeping up on Veteran Rank 2. I have so much that I still want to do in this game, but lately my schedule has limited my time in it. This is the type of game that I can only really play if I am fully focused on it, and this is doubly so with the veteran content. Shit can go wrong in a heartbeat if you are not doing all the right things, so it means on the nights I am not feeling all that… I end up playing something else.

Wildstar

This game is the new hotness it seems and it launches tomorrow, at least for the headstart folks. I mostly preordered this game in case I decided I was in love with it, and I wanted to make sure I secured the preorder bonuses. I really dig the pre-order house, and I did not care for anything in the Collectors Edition pack… so I went with the normal. I am still so up in the air about this game… there are things I like and things I don’t like. Right now I am simply not sure who is going to win out, however since everyone is playing it, and it scratches the same itch that World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic do… going to give it a good college try.

ArcheAge

Speaking of games I am conflicted about… welcome to ArcheAge. I find so much about this game intriguing and repulsive at the same time. It is this fusion of one of the most interesting games system wise and class wise… combined with one of the worst communities I have experienced. This game has invented new ways for you to grief your fellow players… and this is the sort of thing I have zero interest in. That alone would be enough to make me go running and screaming into the night… but the class system is so damned interesting to me. I love the concept of “Rift without Restrictions” and that is pretty much what the open class system seems like. It reminds me so much of the way the class system for Horizon worked… and that is a great thing.

Heroes of the Storm

I want so badly to be playing this game right now… but I also want so badly to not be playing this game with strangers. The MOBA thing is one of those things that I really only enjoy if I am queuing with people I know. That said supposedly the queue times are greatly improved with the new client. If you are in the HoTS alpha… please let me know! I need more people to queue with, and I feel horrible for being in this game when so many people want in… and not playing it much.

Defiance

The last few nights I have been playing this game again and really enjoying myself. The whole shift in how I approach it has really helped quite a bit. I would love to see more people playing it because I think it would be far more enjoyable to run around as a group. I still have yet to really scratch the surface of any of the story content, and feel like I should do that. Really enjoyed the first season of the television show, and would love to get caught up on the in game content before the next season starts.

Final Fantasy 5

At this point I am behind my friends in this game, and quite honestly I am struggling to get the oomph to play it. That said I feel like I should really finish this game as part of the FF5 draft thing we did. I feel like I would be a horrible person if I didn’t finish it. That said I also know I am going to get talked into doing the Four Job Fiesta in a month… so not sure if I will finish before then either.

Trove

There is something about this game that makes my inner child squeal with glee. Things are just so damned much fun, and the mob design is amazing. That said I have been out so long and so much is changing on what seems to be a near weekly basis that I feel hopelessly lost. At some point I need to resort to reading through all of the patch notes starting around the time I last played in the hopes of understanding how things have changed. The combat in this game is just enjoyable, I only wish I could play it with a controller. I guess in theory I could use one of the keypad mappers but I have been lazy.

Landmark

Oh Landmark… how I love you and am completely bored with you at the exact same time. Right now it is less a game and more a toybox for you to build in, with a ruleset wrapped around it. This was really fun while I had giant things to build… and while I was progressing through the ranks of collecting the next best mining pick. Now that I have topped out, and have fleshed out most of what I wanted to build… I log in pretty much only to mine copper and pay my upkeep. What I need to make me care about this game is the combat system. Here is hoping I will fall back in love with it when I can run around the world killing things.

Diablo 3

I still don’t have a character to 70, and I feel like I have somehow failed for not doing this. Basically this released way too close to the launch of Elder Scrolls Online… and I never gave the game the attention it deserves. At some point soon I really want to work on leveling my crusader, since I have technically beaten the game on my Monk. I am struggling with the desire to simply grind the last two levels to ding 70. I figure at some point I will have a renaissance of caring about d3… but it might be awhile before I cycle around to it again.

Rift

The new souls were released and I have yet to even check them out. I really would like to level my cleric to 60 before the 3.0 patch hits, but I have no clue how long that is. Right now I am logging in on a weekly basis to get my patron gifts and that is about it. I thought it would be really cool to do a streaming series where I try and remember how to tank, and do a public service of tanking elites. I’ve heard the queue times are absolutely insane, and I know personally I have waited over two hours without getting a DPS queue. I still love this game, but at the same time don’t really know what I want to do in it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

A few weeks back I was playing the hell out of SWTOR and enjoying myself. While I have let my subscription lapse again… I would love to pick back up on my Sith Juggernaut and see what happens after Balmorra. I have never actually made it off this planet imperial side, but I was really damned close to doing this when I was last playing. The real challenge will be if I can manage to play the game without subscribing… or will I re-up again only to cancel a few weeks later.

World of Warcraft

Finally there is good ole World of Warcraft. Once upon a time I had a grand idea of getting everyone to 90 before the expansion. I have failed miserably at keeping up with this ambition, but who knows if I will actually do this or not. Right now all I have left are the Priest, Monk and Warlock… all of which are over 60 at the least. The Warlock and Priest are both in Pandaria content, but at the very beginning. I might get a wild urge to play again and push these guys across the finish line. Either that or I might completely abandon this until the release of Warlords of Draenor. In any case the account is still active, because I pop in periodically to dink around with stuff for the guild.

Nothing at All!

Tonight I will be playing…. nothing more than likely. We have an end of school cookout and by the time we get done there… we will likely crash, or walk… or walk then crash. If anything I launch Wildstar and create my characters. Right now I am planning on having my Chua Engineer and an Exile Warrior of some sort… just not sure if that will be Human or Granok. In any case I have nothing exciting to report about my master plan for the evening other than hanging out in the real world and eating some good food.

Faffless Wednesday

August 7, 2015May 29, 2014 by Belghast

Banging Doors

Well it happened again last night, I was woken up by one of our cats banging on the closet door. The problem is after I finally got her crackhead self settled down and up into bed with us… I once again was completely wide awake. Problem is this time it was at 12:45 when it started, so there I lay in bed at 1 am completely unable to get back to sleep. So I sat there for a bit, finally deciding to get up and go upstairs and play something for awhile to hopefully tire myself back out again. The game of choice was Defiance, but I will go into that more later. I managed to get to a state where I thought I might sleep around 2 am, but the rest of the night was extremely fitful.

According to fitbit I was awake 9 times during the night. I have no clue what is going on with me that my body keeps thinking I am fully awake at any point I wake up. I have always struggled with sleep, and as a result cannot nap for fear of not being able to sleep that night. This whole waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep thing that has plagued me the last two nights is brand new however. Right now this morning I feel mostly normal, albeit a little sluggish… I just fear for what this will mean as the day wears on. Yesterday was rough since I had been up since 3:45, especially about 2 pm or so it became torture to try and do anything productive. I might have to start resorting to taking a sleep aid, but I hate how groggy they make me feel in the morning.

Faffless Wednesday

Last night for whatever reason we simply did not have a good turnout for our normal “faff about” in Elder Scrolls Online event. It could be that people were just busy, or it could be that the Wildstar servers were up for some reason yesterday and folks are anxious for the head start coming Friday. In any case there were just three of us that showed up with the purpose of doing the event, so we decided that it was really too few to do a dungeon, and too few to really do anything meaningful in Cyrodil. As a result we just kinda piddled around doing our own thing and chatting back and forth. PK and Delevax joined the rest of us on mumble and we hung out while playing. I have not really as much time to play Elder Scrolls Online that I would have liked.

Lately my weekends have been scattered with little landmines of not being able to play anything, and then last weekend the amazing single player games Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order got my devoted attention. At this point I think I am about two hours away from finishing Wolf, and transistor was a punch in the gut… but a very good one. I had been looking forward to Wednesday because I knew I would devote myself to playing nothing but Elder Scrolls Online, even if the “event” didn’t happen. I have to say I love the veteran content, and more importantly I love that mobs are once again difficult. There were always a couple of types of encounters that were painful for me… I am looking at you Harvesters… but for the most part I had reached a place where I could steam roll in entire packs of mobs. There were several late game public dungeons that I solo’d my way through, so my skill level with the game had reached a point where it was simply greater than the challenge.

Veteran content reset that equilibrium. I literally can get my ass kicked by a mudcrab if I happen upon a pack of three, and even in the case of two at a time I have to use Green Blood to heal myself while dealing with the second one. I like that the game instantly became a challenge again the moment I completed the storyline. The result is that while I do the Aldmeri Dominion content, the game feels fresh to me since I am having to relearn how to manage tough encounters. Last night I finished up Kenarthi’s Roost and moved on into Auridon. Since this is the content I have done the least, I am really enjoying winding my way through elfland. I’ve decided that I really like the Bosmer… I was talking last night with Euron that they remind me quite a bit of the Witch Elves from Warhammer Fantasy. As much as I want to dislike her, I have to admit that Queen Ayrenn is pretty awesome as well.

Figuring out Defiance

I wrote yesterday mornings blog post at about 4 am, and then proceeded to faff about in Defiance for the next hour until 5:30 when the alarm normally goes off. During that time I think I finally figured out how to enjoy the game. There was always something I liked about it, but the experience just felt lacking in some way. Like I didn’t quite grasp how the questing system worked or how the world exploration worked. The first change I made is that I started playing the game with the Xbox 360 controller. While it controls competently with the keyboard and mouse, everything feels like it just works better with the controller. I guess this is the side effect when you develop a game for consoles, but I am slowly getting used to playing an FPS with a controller. I find the lack of focused aiming to be far less of a detriment that I thought it would be.

Secondly I had a major epiphany while playing as I stumbled across and Arkfall. I started treating this game like it was Rift, in that so many times in Rift I just spend my time ping ponging from tear to tear closing the Rifts. Doing this so far has been worth a ton of experience and my Ego rank is slowly climbing. Additionally you seem to get some really good rewards for doing it, and I am starting to bump into other players as well which makes the experience overall more enjoyable. I always felt like the thing that was lacking was that I didn’t really have anyone to play the game with. I am hoping as this game transitions from “buy the box” to “free to play” that folks will start filtering back in. It might just be the recent time spent playing and FPS, but I am enjoying the game quite a bit. Therein lies the problem however… I simply have too damned many games to play.

League Beginner Night

Tonight I’m Playing League of Legends. Once upon a time in House Stalwart we did these league beginner nights, when we coaxed new players to League of Legends onto mumble and did some vs bots or custom 5v5 gameplay. The purpose was to ease folks into the game and let them soak up some of the knowledge of a few of our more veteran players. When the Alliance of Awesome folks started talking about League, I figured it was a good time to try and resurrect this concept. So tonight I will be playing some league and hanging out on mumble with folks while doing it. I am just hoping to get in some practice playing Braum, but if not I will probably default back to Wukong, Garen or Darius. I would actually love to play some Varus since I have yet to do so since picking up the PAX skin. If you are interest in joining up check out the Anook event, the goal is to start around 9 PM CST to make it doable for the West Coasters. There are technically only a couple of people signed up, but I know we will have a lot more just from word of mouth.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance #LeagueofLegends #LoL

Defiance

May 28, 2014 by Belghast

The Dream

It is now 4 am and my body has decided that I have slept enough for the night. I ended up going to bed very early, so I guess in a way it makes sense as I normally only get 5/6 hours of sleep a night. I had the most interesting dream, and since it is sort of game related I figure what the hell… might as well blog about it. In the dream I was summoned to Blizzard HQ, but I have no real idea why I was asked to be there. When I got there I was given a name badge and ushered into a room with a bunch of other people. There were computers and a big table and folks were spread around the room working on various things. It felt like a first day of work kind of scenario where people look to busy themselves until they are given real work to do.

Throughout next few hours people from various disciplines would come in and talk to us. At this point it started to feel like a job interview. I remember one of the guys was a quest designer and he started asking us questions about triggers and spawners, and it turned out that he was having a specific problem with a specific quest. He ended up digging out a mockup of the zone and explained the problem. I’ve had quite a bit of experience building zones in various emulator projects, and ended up redoing the entire Butcherblock > Greater Faydark > Crushbone sequence in one of my times playing with the Everquest emulator at home, so I figured what the hell. Turned out there was a place on the map that the player had to move through that was an nice tight bottleneck and a trigger could be placed there that everyone would pass over.

At this point I am getting excited because I feel useful, and maybe have a shot at whatever this interview process happens to be. But as the day goes on the reality sits in, that I am 37 and established in my career, with a wife who is very established in her career. No matter how cool it would be to work at a place like Blizzard, there is no way I could uproot all of that on the shot at following my boyhood dream of working in the games industry. Additionally there was the hard reality that I already make more than most of my friends in the industry, and where I am has a good pension system that I am already fully vested in. Basically my chance at that dream died a long long time ago, and any desire to do it is just sort of an aftershock. The weird thing is… I am realizing all of this while I am dreaming and while my dream self is at Blizzard HQ.

We end up breaking for lunch, at which point the more dream like qualities start to sit in. Like for some reason I managed to make it to Anaheim California… without my wallet. I guess this is the new version of arriving at school in your underwear maybe? It is around this point that I wake up, and am fully wide away with no hope of returning to sleep and attempting to continue where the dream left off. I never really found out why I was there and what exactly they were doing. The funny thing is, of all of the games companies my brain seemed to latch onto Blizzard. Don’t get me wrong I would love to work at a place like that, and everything I have heard about the environment is that it is a great place to be. But of all the games I have played, my relationship with World of Warcraft seems the most tumultuous. I guess the dream is just a sign that no matter how many times I try and pack the dream of working in the industry away… it keeps rising back to the surface.

Defiance

It was a really odd evening last night, and I was in that odd place where I was really too tired to play much of anything. It has been torrential raining here in Oklahoma over the last three days, and last night about 6 pm we noticed a potential break in the weather that would allow us to go out and get our walk in. As a result by the time we had finished at 6:30 I had hit 11,000 steps and was just absolutely exhausted. I crashed out on the couch which meant playing on my laptop, so continuing my Wolfenstein: New Order game was out of the question. I ping ponged around a bunch of different games, the first of which was Defiance. This is one of those games that I really want to like, but for whatever reason I seem to constantly spin my wheels in. I guess in part I don’t know what exactly I am supposed to be doing. I’ve literally been wandering around the Mount Tam zone since the game released, and there seems to be no real direction on how I get out of it.

As a result each time I do play, I end up wandering around and doing quests that I have probably completed a dozen other times. The moment to moment game play is fun, as it always has been… but I feel like I am missing some over arching narrative that I should be following. For ages folks have talked about how much they liked the story content, but the one I tried didn’t seem terribly soloable. I feel like this game would be so much better with other people playing it, yet each time I play it I am pretty much soloing because I literally know no one else that is regularly booting it up. At the very least I doubt anyone is as low level as I am still. I feel like there has to be some concept that I am just not catching. I think next time I play I am just going to move out of Mount Tam and see what else I can find. I have no clue what lies at the end of the zone, because I always end up logging out before I get there.

A New Idea

For a few days I have been thinking about starting a new feature. The idea is to close out each post with a quick section about what I intend to do that night. This is of course an intention, and lord knows what might occur between my post in the morning and that evening. However the intent is two fold, firstly since I play so damned many games it will help to give me focus on an objective. Secondly since I hang out with so many different people in those games, it gives folks warning about what I should be playing that evening.

Tonight I’m Playing Elder Scrolls Online. Tonight is the semi-weekly event over there that we have been trying to pull together lately. If you are interested in joining along in the fun, check out the Anook event. The intent is to go from 9pm CST until whenever folks start losing consciousness… which usually means around 11pm CST. Since we have done two weeks in Cyrodil, I was going to try and mix things up a bit. I am sure everyone has dungeons that they need run, so my goal is to try and pair people up in groups relative to their level range. If this doesn’t work, then we will fall back on another romp in Cyrodil. We are going to play it by ear which way we end up going. If you do intend to go please sign up on the event so I have an idea for what kind of numbers we are expecting. The last few weeks we’ve had around a dozen people interested.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance