July 2014 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Amazing Community

July 31, 2014July 31, 2014 by Belghast

Computer Meltdown

All that I really wanted to do when I got home was to log into my computer and play some Final Fantasy XIV. Unfortunately my computer seemed to conspire against me. Everything seemed happy when I first got home and I had just queued for duty roulette and begun working on a FATE when something odd happened. The screen froze and turned black, and then moments later I was rebooting. Now I am notorious for ignoring windows updates, and I know in Windows 8 there will reach a point where it simply will not let you ignore them. Sure enough upon reboot it was installing new software, so I thought that maybe all that had happened is that I reached that threshold.

So I went ahead and booted up my machine and logged into windows. Everything seemed just fine, nothing really seemed out of the ordinary until I booted into Final Fantasy XIV again and then boom… the same thing. I thought for a bit that maybe it was my video card driver update that I applied last night, so upon rebooting I proceeded to roll back that driver. Upon booting into the game again… this time a brown screen then a black screen and then everything powers off. The thing is that the video card never actually felt hot when I reached back and felt the air vent on it. My initial thought was that the video card was just toast, which is disturbing because it was only a few months old.

As a test I swapped out to an older card and sure enough the machine booted right up. Unfortunately however upon firing up a game I was back at the black screen cycle. It was then that I noticed something. I took the side panel off my case and watched it boot up, and the fan on the processor heatsink was not moving at all. So I am guessing at some point it died, and potentially for awhile it was working intermittently. Processor overheating would in theory cause all of the things that I was experiencing. Here is hoping that there has been no permanent damage to it. A heatsink/fan combo is a relatively cheap thing to replace, so I ordered a new potentially better one from Amazon and it should be here Friday. Until then I guess I will be gaming on the laptop exclusively.

Meet Kenzi

Now other than my computer having a meltdown and throwing me into stress mode, there was some awesome that managed to happen yesterday. We added a new child to our family, and unfortunately she moves so damned fast that this is the only picture I have managed to snap since bringing her home. Thankfully the folks we got her from gave us a far better picture of her. However as you can see she apparently loves the ferrets. She has kept returning to the playpen to play with them through the bars. They seem completely enthralled by her as well, and moments after snapping this albeit blurry photo of her and Shiloh she also woke up Bellatrix and they were both following her every move. Being a kitten however she is rarely in one place for too terribly long.

We thought for a bit about a name and tried multiple characters from Harry Potter as well as Firefly, before finally settling on Kenzi. She seems far more like that character than any other so far. She is fearless and daring, and a little bit shifty at times. Not to mention the whole dark hair thing works well also. Kenzi was my favorite character from Lost Girl and really the only reason why I enjoyed that show for as long as I did. So I feel like the name is fitting. Right now she is batting my fingers as I type this and trying to hop up on the keyboard. While I think it is absolutely adorable… I need to finish this post up so I can get on to work. Here is hoping the ferrets wake up and steal back her attention.

So after writing my blog post she decided to crawl up on my shoulder. I am officially in love, not that I wasn’t already. I have always wanted a shoulder cat to hang out with me while I game. Now she is curled up under the lapboard that my laptop is on grooming herself, but she spent a good long while on my shoulder. This is totally going to work out… we just have to somehow figure out a way to stop the nibbling. She seems to like to attack my beard and bite it right now. Which is adorable, but will eventually get to be frustrating and potentially painful.

Amazing Community

For the last week or so I have been spending most of my evenings playing Final Fantasy XIV on the Cactuar server. I have to say I am starting to fall in love with the sense of community there, and on the entire Aether data center as well. Thanks to my time in wow and just how toxic that environment can be… I have been extremely gunshy about branching out and playing with people I did not already know. I’ve always been willing to group with my guild and their friends, but I had zero interest in poking my head out into the larger world. Quite frankly when I had done this in the past, I dealt with so much abuse as a tank that I had no interest in ever attempting it again. The problem is this negative attitude towards pugging carried forward into every game from that point on. The moment someone wanted to do something, and we did not have the requisite number of people I would immediately remove myself from the equation. This means I’ve spent an awful lot of time sitting around in games waiting for the magical number of people to log in so we could go do something fun.

Coming back to Final Fantasy XIV however I did so without much of my support structure. For most of this past week I have been the only person online at night in my guild, and as a result I finally decided to brave the Duty Roulette. This essentially is a random dungeon system that picks from any dungeon available to you. The awesome thing however is that for leveling, you gain experience as though the mobs were your level not the level you have been scaled down to. I went into this with the plan to attempt to be more social, so I started talking to the group the moment the instances started. Funny thing is…. other people talked back, and in very positive ways. Instead of running the dungeon in silence we started to banter back and forth much like grouping used to feel like during my Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot days.

So what caused this magical environment to appear in the face of so many games with toxic grouping environments? I honestly think it is two fold. Firstly at this point the only people who are playing Final Fantasy XIV are the players who are in it for the long haul, the players who are devoted too the franchise and willing to weather whatever storms might arise. There is a sense of general camaraderie that I have not seen in many games, and I think it comes from a shared struggle. I expected the servers to feel dead with the initial drop off of players after launch, but in reality while there are fewer overall players, they are just more focused in specific areas. While you cannot go to any zone and run FATEs, the zones where you can… are extremely active.

The other part I think is a weird little system that Squaresoft put into the game. Similar to league of legends, at the end of each dungeon or guildhest you can “commend” a player for their actions. You only get one single commendation per dungeon run, so it forces you to think long and hard about who best deserved it. Now there are some pretty significant rewards for having racked up a large number of these. This I think causes players to want to seem friendly, and through the course of pretending to be… they end up actually being cordial. I expected that the commendations would be almost exclusively reserved for the tanks and the healers, but it turns out that apparently I have made some appreciated contributions as well. At this point I am sitting around 25 commendations, and there is rarely a duty or hest that I don’t walk out with at least one. So apparently my banter, combined with the fact that I try my damnedest to interrupt everything as a DPS… is appreciated and matters.

I feel like Final Fantasy XIV is this strange time capsule where players have returned to the kinds of values that I used to appreciate so much while playing the games that existed before World of Warcraft. While I have not poked my head out into the raid community yet, I find it really impressive that I am playing on a server that has actual community events. This game feels like a crazy throwback… and I am loving it so far. It seems like somehow we managed to actually pick the right server to be playing on all those months ago when we picked the server name simply out of our love of the cactuar. The server even keeps track of the spawn times of hunt mobs, keeping a google doc to record when one last spawned and was killed. Granted the other day when I looked it had gotten a bit out of date, but just the fact that the server cares enough to create something like that is pretty awesome. I think the next thing for me is to try and find some social linkshells and meld into the broader community more.

Writing Prompts

Tomorrow is the official beginning of the Blaugust initiative, and as promised I will not leave you hanging. I will be posting a series of writing prompts each day to help turn the wheels and get your creative juices flowing. Please note of course that you do not have to write about any of the prompts I post. I am just trying to provide inspiration if it happens to be lacking.

What was the first game that made you “feel” something. I am talking about the first game that invoked a real human emotional response be it fear, love, outrage… we’ve all had it happen and I am curious about your first time.
What is your favorite boss encounter in any game and why. What makes that encounter stand out in your mind and what can be learned from it.
If you were an NPC in a video game, what type of NPC would you be.

Gospel of Blaugust

July 30, 2014 by Belghast

What is Blaugust?

With the beginning of August rapidly approaching, I thought it would be a good time to do another general rundown post for the Blaugust Initiative. The idea is really simple, and honestly was inspired by my wife doing something similar in the math blogging community. This all springs out of something I decided to do 442 days ago that I called the Grand Experiment, where I got up every morning and made a post… even if I didn’t really want to. Through doing this I have learned a lot of things about myself, and as a result the community as a whole has learned a lot about me. I feel like at this point I have almost transcended writer block, in that I can sit down at the keyboard and start a stream of conscious flowing and at the same time make it somewhat relative to the purpose of my blog.

Thanks to cramming together of blog and august, Blaugust was born, and the idea is to take the challenge during the month of August to write a new post every day. More than anything this is about pushing you out of your comfort area and into undiscovered territory. When you have to produce posts without being able to rely heavily on multiple days of pre-writing it can be a scary thing. What happened for me is that I also began to allow more of my personal life to slip into my posts. As a reader, I am far more interesting in the people behind the screen than what they might happen to say. I’ve never been a big fan of building myself a personal echo chamber filled with only people who think like I do. As a result I am interested in whatever my friends and fellow bloggers have to say, and I think free writing like this really brings that point home.

The Topic

One of the questions to come out of the whole contorted process of this initiative being born, was if we had to write on a specific topic. Ultimately you can write about anything that happens to suit you on a given day. You can diverge from gaming in any fashion if you like, and your blog doesn’t even have to be gaming related in the first place. Liore gave a really excellent example early on of writing a gaming related Foodie blog, and this would be an amazing thing and should totally happen. The purpose is to get used to writing on a schedule and not so much dictating what you happen to be writing about. Inspiration can be an extremely fickle thing, and if you want for it there end up being some massive lapses in your posts. The plan here is to make you realize that you don’t really need the muse to crank out interesting posts. If you allow yourself to do it, your personality will inhabit the writing and inspiration will find you mid paragraph.

The Guidelines

Since I also decided to make this a proper contest and give away some prizes among those who manage to finish I realized that I really needed some basic guidelines. I am not trying to bog this initiative down in rules, but at the same time the only way to have a fair ending is to make sure that everyone has followed some really basic guidelines.

Write A New Blog Post of no less than 10 sentences in length. This is essentially two large paragraphs, and feels about right for the minimum size.
Include a link back to the Blaugust Initiative Page. My hope is as this starts others will join in the challenge and play catch up.
Advertise the post on the Blaugust Blog. You will be given “blogger” level permissions to do this. More than anything this simply serves as a central repository for all of the awesome posts. Some folks have mentioned that they want to write some deeply personal journal style posts on occasion, and with these just make sure I have access so I can credit you.
If you advertise the post on Twitter, please include #Blaugust hashtag. Again trying to help spread the word and get folks to join midmonth.
Over the course of the month, repeat this process 31 times.
????
Profit!

The Rewards

I will be keeping track of who has posted a post each day during the course of August. On September 1st I will be holding a drawing for several prize packages. I hope you like games, and want to acquire more of them… because that is what is going to happen here. As someone put it.. write awesome stuff and get games! Over the course of a few years of the various bundle series, I have accumulated a bunch of duplicate game download keys. I can think of no better way to give away some of these than to reward the hard work of participating in this grueling challenge.

Grand Prize!

I hope you follow me on Steam, because I will be picking a game off of your Steam Wishlist and purchasing it for you. In addition to this I wil be letting you pick a game from my Humble Bundle surplus list as well. For this prize specifically I will be looking for someone who has actually posted a post on each day individually, rather than someone who has posted 31 posts in the month, but not necessarily one a day. This prize should represent the truest form of the challenge.
Three Also-Awesomes

Additionally I will be picking three individuals at random from the total pool of contestants to win the “Also-Awesome” award. To qualify for this you have to have started your posting on August 1st, and have written a total of 31 posts over the course of the month. I will have each of these folks in order drawn pick two games a piece from my Humble Bundle surplus list. I am varying the requirements here a bit to allow someone to have missed a day here or there but still have posted “catch-up” posts to be in the running for something.
The Catch-Up Artist

– Anyone who joins the initiative late is going to be in the running for this prize. To quality you have to have joined after August 1st, but managed to catch up and still write a total of 31 posts in the month of August. You can procrastinate however long you like, but I am expecting 31 well formed posts to get this one. After the above prizes have been picked from my Humble Bundle surplus list, the winner of this prize gets the chance to name one of the games for themselves. I promise the surplus list is more than big enough to support a wide variety of choices from all of the winners.
All Participants

I will be crafting some sidebar badges and banners that can be affixed to your website showing that you won the Blaugust challenge. Additionally you will be able to bask in the warm afterglow of knowing you accomplished something really awesome. Depending on the number of participants I reserve the right to make up a bunch of other awards along the way.

The Sign-Up

I have honestly been staggered by the amount of interest I have received since concocting this loosely strewn together plan in the first place. For ease of maintenance I am asking that all participants sign up on the Blaugust nook. All you have to do is go there and click the join button, and of course have an Anook account… but everyone should at this point because it is an awesome site. Right now we have several members ready to go, but I am hoping this last push for people will help get us a few more. I really appreciate each and every one of the people who have shown interest in participating in the challenge. Through the course of the month I will be posting some prompts on a daily basis that you can use if you like to help you out with coming up with something to post about. The goal right now is to give you two to three a day at the bottom of my own blog posts for the month. I know I risk forgetting someone in the process, but here is the list of the folks that I know have mentioned interest in the process.

There is still plenty of time to add your name to the big long list of folks who have already mentioned they are interested in the process. Even if we get no more people, this is more than enough to make sure we have an awesome month. I thank you all for following me down this path to madness, and I hope we make it out the other side unscathed.

#Blaugust

Hitbox Frustrations

July 29, 2014 by Belghast

Back to Normal

This morning signals the return to my normal routine. Over the course of the math camp I have allowed myself to veer significantly from the path I normally take. This means a lot of things, including being far more sluggish about making my blog posts within a scheduled timeframe. Additionally my diet and walking regiment fell completely apart in the face of eating out so many times. That said it is time to buckle down and return the tray tables in their upright position and prepare for landing. It feels so weird to be going back to work today, and I am dreading being deluged by a weeks worth of stuff that set unsorted out.

I have only slightly followed my email while I was out, and dealt with a few fires… and postponed a few others for this week. I know I have an extremely full plate waiting on me, and hopefully my coworkers will be forgiving as it is going to take me a little bit to get back into the swing of things. Unfortunately based on everything I read in my inbox, I really need to hit the ground running today and knock out several things. I know of at least one project that needs to be out the door and ready to go by August 1st, and another that needs to follow closely on its heels. Then there is our project list, and juggling in a new person into the group. So it is going to be a stressful rest of the week to say the least.

Hitbox Frustrations

This morning I logged into Hitbox.tv and completed a ritual I have done for the last several days… so many times I have quite literally lost count. I logged into my account, went into my pre-recorded video and attempted to push the videos to youtube. Like always it gave me the popup message signifying that my videos should show up on youtube shortly. As has been the case each and every morning, I am quite certain they will not actually show up there. Right now I have half a dozen videos that I have recorded playing various games that are in essentially limbo. While there are lots of awesome things about the service… right now you cannot download videos you have recorded, upload them to youtube or even embed them directly from the hitbox service. Which basically means the videos are not accessible anywhere other than through the hitbox interface.

There are so many things I like about hitbox, but presently it is relentlessly buggy. The streaming portion they have down pat, and I would say it is one of the best experiences since you can actually chat somewhat realtime with people watching your stream. It is all of the little things that I have come to take for granted with Twitch that simply do not work at all. Previously there was a really awesome twitter integration so you could have an automated message go out to your twitter feed when you were actually live and ready to go. In the last few days since I had last streamed, this apparently broke as well. Right now it feels like we have been sold a lemon, and while I am sure they are trying as hard as they can to straighten things out… they seriously need some better public relations.

The official pronouncement from hitbox support is that things should be fixed either today or tomorrow. The problem is that “today” and “tomorrow” were three weeks ago. Instead of following up with a legitimate estimate for when things will be fixed… they just keep giving out the same “today” and “tomorrow” statements. Now as my friend Ashgar pointed out, I can in fact record local and upload to YouTube as a separate process… which is fine for anything I do in the future. I however tend to stream sequentially, in a way that someone could go back and watch the progress I made along the way. This means a number of videos are now essentially stuck in hitbox jail and there is no way that I can get them to another service. I took for granted that the estimates of when things would be fixed were actually true, so I kept recording expecting that someday I would be able to upload them to YouTube without issue.

Right now I am in a holding pattern and still using hitbox, because really the streaming functionality is excellent. I just wish everything else about the service were up to the standards set by twitch. I don’t really want to go back to twitch if I can help it, because having to live in a minimum of 30 seconds of lag, is frustrating to me and frustrating to anyone who might be viewing what I was doing. I feel like my viewers are significantly different than the normal viewers that streamers get. When I get someone in my channel it is a friend of mine, and I feel like I should interact in as timely a manner as I can, because we have connections beyond that of viewer and streamer. Hopefully tomorrow will come, and they will fix their crap and let us start moving files again. At the very least I would be happy with either the ability to download what I have already recorded or at the very least embed it directly into my blog.

Player Commendations

After dropping off our British friend at the airport, and one of our ferrets to the vet… we went home and pretty much vegetated. I had a rather glorious day playing some Final Fantasy XIV and even doing a little bit of streaming. For the most part the day was spent working on my Dragoon in an attempt to get him to level 45 and acquire the awesome dragon armor set that waits for me there. Right now my leveling method of choice is to run around a zone, this time Coerthas doing FATEs while waiting on the Duty Roulette to pop. For years I have been completely gunshy about doing random dungeons, thanks in part to just how horrible and toxic the community in World of Warcraft dungeon finder can be. That said I have to say that the community so far in Final Fantasy XIV has been an utter delight.

Sure I have run into a few players that are relatively horrible at playing their class or their chosen role, but I have yet to find a single player that I would consider rude or abusive. I can take playing with folks who struggle, but it was always the “internet tough guys” and general jerks that kept me away from the dungeon finder. The most interesting thing for me is that apparently I have made a positive impression on the groups I have been in. After I had left the first time, FFXIV introduced a system of positive reinforcement called “Player Commentations”. The idea is at the end of each dungeon run each player gets to commend a single player for their actions in the run. Generally speaking I assumed these would be limited to the tanks and healers, since they tend to run the show. That said I have managed to rack up ten of them so far through the course of my random dungeon runnings.

Granted I try to go out of my way to make the dungeon run smoother, interrupting all of the AOE effects that I can. In Stone Vigil last night I even managed to double interrupt a pack using Legsweep for one and Spineshatter Dive to interrupt a second one moments later. That said I expected this sort of thing to go unnoticed, or get attributed to the tank… since tanks also have stuns… but at least in PUGs seem to rarely use them. All of this said it feels like the community in FFXIV has reached a point where all of the negative forces have wandered off into other games, and what is left is a cohesive group of players who are bound together in their love of all things Final Fantasy. This might be a great oversimplification but so far I’ve greatly enjoyed all of the random dungeons and guildhest groups I have been a part of. People seem to be genuinely willing to talk through problems without resorting to name calling.

I closed off the night sitting at 43.5 and working on the final Dragoon hunt. Something awesome is that apparently when we were not looking they added in some extremely awesome rewards for completing the hunt logs. When you complete your class hunt log you get a ring that is honestly as good as Darklight if not slightly better. When you complete your grand company hunt log, you get a pet. You can collect your rewards by telling Jonathas in Old Gridania a “tale” of your deeds. I still think this is a pretty cool way of handling a epic turn in like this, that your character literally tells the NPC a story about how you succeeded in battle. This is going to give me the drive to finish up my Immortal Flames hunt log, so that I too can get a pet from it. So far I am really enjoying my time back in the game, and it is starting to stir the attention of some of my guildies. Here is hoping that at some point we can return to doing 8 man content. For now I will just settle with being able to do guild groups.

#Hitbox #FFXIV

We Survived Math Camp

July 28, 2014 by Belghast

British Vittles

I had said earlier in the week that the math conference I was working at not only represented teachers from almost every state, but also represented a handful of countries. Among those were a couple of Brits, one of which decided to bring a bunch of items for us to try. On the final day he set out a bunch of things that had not been consumed on a table for anyone to grab. I nabbed a box of Jaffa Cakes initially, since I had heard about them from various people but never tried them. This box represents the various things that were not taken, and since we were picking up the place to make it presentable they all came home with us. I’ve had a Cadbury bar before, so I have not broken into it yet, but I have managed to try both “cakes” and “biscuits”.

I am not sure what I was expecting when it came to Jaffa Cakes, but the reality was absolutely nothing like I was expecting. To put it into terms for the American palette when we think “sponge cake” we tend to think a Twinkie or one of the ubiquitous yellow cakes you buy to make strawberry shortcake. This version of sponge cake tastes more like a stale vanilla wafer that has been sitting out on a table for a week and soaking up moisture. The orange filling tasted a bit like a melted gummy bear, and the chocolate was more a kin to bakers chocolate. The end result was not unpleasant but just not what I had been expecting. I actually kinda like them, but I think that might be the fact that I am consuming something that I cannot otherwise get, so there is a bit of a forbidden fruit aspect to them.

On the other hand the Hobnobs or simply “biscuits” are rather good. Like it doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to wonder why they are popular. It is like a cross between an oatmeal cookie and a saltine cracker. More so almost like really good granola made into a cookie form. While I doubt I would go out of my way to eat a Jaffa Cake, I would totally be down with biscuits in the future. All of this time I honestly thought that British biscuits were just American cookies, but nope it is a completely different animal. We have things here called digestive biscuits, so I am honestly wondering if they are related to these kinds of biscuits. Now the cool thing is that if I ever get a hankering for either of these items… there is a British foods import shop in town that stocks all sorts of stuff like this. I likely would not have gone out of my way to try these things, but I am happy that I now know what they taste like.

We Survived Math Camp

I have to say it feels good to be able to say that we survived math camp. I feel like we need a t-shirt or something to commemorate the event. I honestly have a massive respect for the individuals who have hosted the event in the other locations, because the amount of prep work and little details that went into this undertaking was a bit staggering. On top of that the fact that my wife and I lived in a sort of split household during the course of the events, meant that neither of us slept really well. The first thing we did upon getting home yesterday was taking a nap. I was surprised at just how many people had arranged for trips to the airport of their own volition rather than needing to run multiple car loads this time around. I ran a single load on Saturday evening, and then another yesterday. I have one more to take this morning, but for the most part there was not the mass number of loads that we had as folks arrived.

While I feel like I really had little to do with it, it feels nice to see people talking about how much they enjoyed their time in our city. It is weird how after spending all this time prepping… I take comments about the school system with personal pride. I found myself using the royal we throughout the course of the week, like I was actually part of it or something. Granted I have done a lot of work for the school system over the years as my wife needed this or that, but I never really felt connected to it other than “that’s the place my wife works”. After essentially living for a week out of the building, and supporting those inhabiting it… I feel a deep connection to it all.

In other news… I tried Chicken and Waffles yet again… and yet again I don’t really see why the meal is heralded as so awesome. After the conference split up about 11 am all of the folks what did not need to immediately rush to the airport went out to eat. There I ordered chicken and waffles, since it was a place I had never eaten before. I’ve tried it three or four times now… and every time it is a rather bland chicken breast or chicken strips over a nice big thick waffle… with all of it drenched in syrup. It is charming but nothing earth shattering and overall I find the meal rather bland. I just feel like I am somehow missing some cultural touchstone. Like maybe I am supposed to be enthralled by the absurdity of putting chicken and waffles together. But considering growing up I made grilled cheese sandwiches with waffles… it doesn’t seem that odd to me.

Ding 40

When we finally got settled in for the night, I popped back into Final Fantasy XIV to work on my dragoon some more. Since the last time I played the game actively, it has made a number of really nice quality of life improvements. Namely the addition of the Duty Roulette system that allows you to get assigned to a random dungeon out of a large stack of potentials. The best part about this is that the experience gain inside the dungeon seems to scale to your level. That means you could get assigned to a level 15 like Halatali and still get the same experience you would running a much higher level dungeon like Cutters Cry. For the purpose of leveling this means you have extremely rapid queues, and while the gear that drops inside may not be usable, the experience gain stays consistent.

Another nifty thing that I learned last night is that apparently while we were gone, they added in some perks for having an account authenticator. In addition to having the three discounted teleport locations, you can now set a single free location if you have you account set up with the authenticator. Since my grand company of choice is the Flames, that made it an absolute no brainer for me to use Uldah as my freebie. This now allows me to move Coerthas to one of the discounted locations, since I no longer need it for Uldah. For better or worse Coerthas seems to be the best place for running FATEs, and I will likely be there until at least level 46 when Mor Dhona really starts in proper. In any case alternating between Duty Roulette and FATEs seems to be a rather enjoyable way to level, and if I get much play time today I will probably be able to push through to 45.

We have a number of errands to run today, and another math camp person to run to the airport. However once I get back from that my plan is to work on the level 40 Dragoon quest. Since the 35 quest so simplistic, I am expecting this one to be a major undertaking. The warrior quest chain had some definite gimme quests, but others that took all the skills I had learned to that point to be able to push through them. The cool thing is that it seems like we are starting to get a bit more activity in the game. A number of friends were talking about firing it back up last night, so it will be interesting to see how active it gets in the coming days. Cactuar is still an extremely populated server, as all weekend long it was barred from new character creation. However as of this morning it was open again. Hopefully the couple of new people can get in and create a character today.

#FFXIV