May 2015 - Page 4 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

NBI Talkback 3 – What Made You A Gamer?

May 19, 2015 by Belghast

Early Beginnings

I had an extremely strange couple of days, so instead of talking about that I thought I would tackle the third talkback challenge. For this one my good friend Jaedia posted a prompt on the Newbie Blogger Initiative website asking “What Made You A Gamer?”. This is one of those topics that I have thought long about for years, and I am not really sure what the answer is. I am not sure if there is any one thing that makes someone a gamer. I think you are either born with the natural proclivities in that direction or you are not. My earliest memories of gaming are pretty clear however. My parents had a Sears and Roebuck version of the Atari Tele-Games console system… aka Pong. I remember being completely enamored with being able to move the bar on screen to intercept the square bouncing around the screen. I don’t necessarily remember playing this all that often because well… it was my parents toy and not mine, but I remember the desire being real.

A few years later thought my parents purchased an Atari 2600, and that is the system I remember being “mine”. My mom was a teacher and I guess one of her students was selling theirs used. This is important because it sets up a long tradition of me buying console systems second hand that I continue today with my Craigslist finds. The console came with the base system, several well worn controllers and a dozen or so games for the big price of $50… which actually was quite a bit of money back then. I was enthralled by the games and while they really had no story to tell on their own, it didn’t stop me from making up stories. Even the most generic game could be a vehicle for me to tell tales of valor and bravery. I remember for whatever reason that Sea Quest was one of my favorite games at the time, which was this simple game about going down in a sub marine to save divers. In my head I was this crack submarine pilot fighting off sharks to rescue my troops.

Discovering Role-playing Games

At this point we are going to take a bit of a detour, because I was happily an Atari kid for years making up stories to fill in the gaps that the games were not providing for me. Then an event happened that literally changed my trajectory permanently. As I have said before I grew up the child of a teacher, and that means a bunch of things. Not the least of which is that you end up spending a lot of time up at school waiting for your teacher parent to “wrap things up”. I knew all of the janitorial staff by name and they were a kind of family that I hung out with as they did their things, and I waited on my mother. At the end of the school year there was a tradition, the great locker cleanout. On the last day of school, anything that was left in the student lockers at 4 pm was going to get dumped in the ground and thrown out, to clear the lockers to be cleaned for the next school year. I learned my scavenging instincts at a young age, and this was pretty much a magical time for me as I wandered around through the piles of debris picking up gems.

Most of the treasures I found were in the realm of nifty “stationary” items like binders or notebooks, but I remember during second grade I stumbled upon a book that quite literally changed my life from that point onwards. That seems like a fairly bold statement but finding a dusty well worn copy of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook was like opening a whole other world to me. To say I was obsessed with this was a bit of an understatement. I poured over the pages of the tome soaking in everything I could from it. While I didn’t understand anything about the game itself, it provided for me a structure of types of heroes, types of weapons, types of magic that imprinted upon me. I loved the artwork and the next year at school it dominated the recess games I played with my friends. We were a band of warriors, and the fact that the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon started around this same time only served to fuel the fire. The only problem being that we lived in the bible belt, and “Dungeons and Dragons” was an evil thing. So instead I got wrapped up in the Marvel Super Heroes game also by TSR. For some reason my friends parents could stomach them playing a game based on comic book heroes, so long as we never referred to or referenced it as being “like” D&D. We had to go so far as to hide the dice needed to play it, so as a result I became the game master because my parents were cool with all of this.

The Nintendo Christmas

The next major event in my game development came with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Up until this point I had been doing everything I could to squeeze the joy out of a combination of the Atari and my scattered pen and paper role playing games. Then my cousins came to town with their Super Mario Bros and completely destroyed my world. Everything about the NES was just better. There were stories being told through the games, and with characters that you could actually recognize as characters. I grew up in a pretty small town and the arcade was a less than savory place. So my exposure to Arcade games to that point was pretty much limited to the occasional lobby of a department store. While I craved playing them, and begged my parents for a quarter anytime we were near one… it was not something I really got to do all that often. When the NES came on the scene I was completely blown away by the graphical fidelity and my entire existence became about getting one. This was the Christmas that the Nintendo was universally sold out around the country.

I had to be the most annoying kid because I kept tabs on which stores had them, which stores were rumored to have them… and which stores were sold out. I kept my parents up to date on my findings, in hopes that they would rush out and get one. So as Christmas rushed towards us and there was no Nintendo shaped box under the tree… I was completely devastated. Then Christmas morning happened… and I had put on a good face and was prepared to swallow down the disappointment. There under the tree was sitting a gleaming Control Deck box just like the one above. This was probably the most joy I had experienced to that moment, and if my parents had a video camera it probably would have looked a lot like the N64 kids. This was the single best and worst Christmas I had ever experienced. About two hours after getting my Nintendo… we lost power due to an Ice Storm that was raging… and we did not get power back for three days. So while I had the object of my desire… I had no power with which to actually enjoy it. The rest is pretty much history, games like Final Fantasy were able to merge my love of RPGs and my love of games, and now I spent most of my time playing MMOs. I still think however that people either are inherently game lovers or they are not, and there isn’t really much that can “make” a gamer.

Madness Intensifies

May 18, 2015 by Belghast

No Getting Used to It

By the time yesterday afternoon rolled around I had well passed my stress quota. If I were a pinball machine the tilt sensors were going off. The previous week had been one of the more stressful experiences in part because I don’t really handle change as well as I could. That said my workplace right now is in a constant state of flux as we are going through a fairly massively floor rebuild. We have folks tearing down one cube only to take the pieces that were used to make it, and use it to build up a brand new cube. The positive is that I now have a pretty sweet set up with a more private cube that has an entrance hall of sorts, but getting to that process involved moving out of my office before going to lunch one day… and moving back in a few hours later. When you combine the fact that we had to cram all of the mothers day festivities into this weekend, we had car troubles, and had at least one partially sleepless night due to dodging tornados by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around I had just checked out.

So as I was sitting there on my sofa mindlessly crafting away last night it was pure dumb luck that I happened to look down and notice that the tell I had just received was from an actual person and not another gold spammer. It turns out that I happened to be sitting there crafting in the Alchemists guild in Ul’dah next to someone who was apparently an avid reader of my blog. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this a few times now, and each time it is this mixture of pride, awkwardness and confusion. I have somehow lulled myself into this state where I feel like I don’t actually have any readers, so when I write my post each morning I can be just as open as I want to… because I am ultimately just talking to myself. So when I am confronted with the fact that this is absolutely not the case I never know quite what to do. I snapped a photo with my reader and told him that he would have to be less of a stranger in the comment thread, also threw out a friend invite and said to holler if they needed anything. My friends joke about me being “THE Belghast” but man… that is not a thing I will ever get used to. I’m just a guy who does a few different things and tries to squeeze as much enjoyment out of the games I happen to be playing as I can. The big point of pride however came when my reader said that I was for the most part the reason why they were playing Final Fantasy XIV right now, so if my joy can be infectious then maybe I guess it is okay.

Madness Intensifies

The only real concentrated playtime that I had this weekend were either during the podcast on Saturday evening or starting about 4pm on Sunday afternoon until I went to bed. During that time I focused on getting all of those tradeskills that I managed to get to level 5/6ish the other day up to 11. At the point of going to sleep last night I had managed to get all of them up there except for Culinarian, which I will hopefully take care of tonight. I will say that so far I definitely agree with the notion of this being the ideal way to level tradeskills, but man… it also means that my entire life right now is pushing tradeskills. There is no way in hell I am going to cap my poetics especially since they have now doubled the cap to 900 per week. The positive however is that I am actually finding myself really enjoying the black hole known as crafting. I like the fact that I am for the most part relatively self sufficient. This was always the big reason why I pushed crafting up in other games is that when I wanted something for an alt… I didn’t want to have to pester someone else to make it for me.

It is going to be so amazingly nice to be able to repair my gear while we are in instances, or knock out random glamour prisms as my whims suit me. Right now I am taking no small amount of pride in the fact that I have been crafting all of my upgrades WHILE working on crafting. The cool thing is that each time I hit a plateau I can have a fire sale of everything that I used to get to that point. So when I finally bring Culinarian up to level 11 I will be shedding all the early level crafting gear that I have laying around. The other nice thing about doing it this way is that I have been able to select the cash reward item from each of my crafting quests. The negative is… that I am struggling to remember which quests I have actually completed. I am pretty sure there are one or two of the level ten quests that I still need to go back and do. I am really enjoying the chill nature of crafting, and I am liking that it gives me plenty of time to watch some Orphan Black. I managed to watch through the first seasons and just started the second season last night before stopping to watch Game of Thrones. I doubt I will make it to cap before Heavensward but I am hoping to at least get close.

Forced Engagement

The biggest problem with crafting right now is that it is feeding my instincts to check out mentally. When I am stressed I tend to disengage from the world, and while I am so focused on crafting my way through the levels… it is all too easy to simply not watch free company chat or anything else for that matter. One of the things I am going to have to work on this next week is trying to find a happy medium between my super engaging “lets run all the things” side and my “lets just nest and craft” side. I am hoping that now that my group at work is done with the moves that I can start to chill back out once again. The fact that every single day my world was changing significantly made me want to cling to something calm and relaxing in my game world. Tonight will be a return to my raid schedule so that should help significantly. There is still some stress in the real world around a potential car purchase that might be happening, but hopefully the big stressers are past me.

Mostly I want to apologize to anyone who was looking to run anything this weekend. I managed to run a Sunken Temple of Qarn with Liore, but past that I pretty much ran nothing at all. I had all these grand hopes of doing some pony farming, but that fell through when we tried to cram a visit with my folks in Friday night. Saturday was pretty much an entire lost day other than rushing home to podcast under the threat of severe weather. Hopefully as the week goes on I can do more fun stuff with the Free Company because I could use the activity to get my mind off other things. As we talked about on the podcast Saturday night, I really hope we down turn nine tonight… but in the grand scheme of things I think we are still a few weeks away. We are just now consistently getting to the dive bomb phase, now we just have to figure out what to do with the dive bombs. On our best attempt I think we got to around 35% which isn’t too shabby. I hope you all have a great week, and please if you are an avid reader of the blog… don’t hesitate to ping me in game sometime and say hi.

Half Sleeping

May 17, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 57 – Preparing for Heavensward

Tonight we have Belghast, Ashgar, Tamrielo, Kodra and Thalen and once again we felt like we didn’t have much to talk about. However once we dug in a little bit I noticed a trend. Each of us was busy working on this item or that in relationship to Final Fantasy XIV each with our own goals that we have been trying to finish before the expansion. Ashgar just finished his Nexus weapon after the length grind, and talks about how it compared up against other grinds he has completed. Kodra talks about working on Turn 9 with two different raid groups and how he hopes we can get through it within the coming weeks. I talk about my own quest which involves me descending into the dark madness that is crafting and slowly stair stepping each and every crafting class five levels at a time.

In addition to this there is some more Shadowrun talk as we each continue our play throughs. Kodra goes into yet another dark place by playing some Demon Souls and talks about those experiences. He and Tam spent a good deal of time this week watching the first season of Sword Art Online and we get into a discussion about that as well. I talk about my experiences working on the Blackhand encounter in World of Warcraft, and we talk a bit about the lackluster numbers released by NCSoft regarding Wildstar sales. Yet another night of varied topics here on AggroChat.

Automotive Struggles

It is now officially “weather season” here in Oklahoma and over the last few weeks we have been deluged in rain storms. In fact we skipped Mother’s Day last weekend due to the fact that there was rampant flooding in the area of the state that our Mothers live in. This meant this weekend we had to make up for that fact and venture out to see all three mothers. Friday night we met my folks for dinner and chatted with them for a good while, and then Saturday we ventured to the northern part of the state to see my wife’s mothers. The only problem with this notion is that there was the constant fear of bad weather hanging over the day. The national weather service had used the term “life threatening” and “super cell” in relation to the storm that was supposed to be arriving that night. To make matters more tense we opted to drive my wife’s Pontiac Torrent because it is more comfortable on long trips. That said it has also been having some issues lately.

There is a point between second and third gear where it “chugs” for lack of a better term, or as my wife calls it “hiccups” while trying to change gears. This seems to hit most often on inclines but over time it has gotten worse. While driving north on the turnpike it happened again around 75 mph and this time had a corresponding check engine light. I pulled over to the side of the turnpike and shut down completely, and upon powering back on everything seemed happy. We were just outside of town, so we popped off and went to the local GMC dealer. While the service department was not open, the shop foreman just happened to be working on his mothers car and was able to at least hook up the Torrent to the computer and tell us what was happening. Turns out that the engine was misfiring and after some research there is a factory recall that we were never notified about. He promised that our vehicle would not strand us, but instead it would just get horrible gas mileage until we got it taken care of. Nonetheless with impending weather issues it made the rest of the day feel far more tense than it normally would have.

Half Sleeping

The national weather service originally predicted that a huge batch of Tornados would be hitting the Oklahoma City area around 3pm CST. The storm however stalled out over the state and by the time we started up the podcast last night it still had not fully hit us. The problem with a late night storm is that it pretty much destroys any semblance of sleep. Today I am completely dragging ass because we did not get the “All Clear” until about 4:30 in the morning. This means it was yet another night of sleeping with the television blaring the weather so that if something went horribly wrong over night we would hopefully hear it. Sleeping while half paying attention to the television means you don’t actually get much rest. I have a feeling I will be taking a nap at some point because right now I am struggling to get through my morning blogging routine, let alone do anything more productive. The good news is that for the most part we made it through the storm unscathed. The bad news is, that not every suburb in the Tulsa area can say the same thing.

The Broken Arrow area seems to have gotten hit the hardest from last night. Earlier on the news they showed footage of what like the remains of a trailer part strewn along the country roads. At that point the reporter was uncertain where exactly the debris was coming from, but there was a lot of it. My hope is that everyone made it out alive. It is always surreal to talk about Tornados because they are equal parts commonplace and revered here in Oklahoma. Everyone knows someone who has been effected by one in the past, but at the same time… when you spend every spring dealing with the warnings it also seems “commonplace”. For years I used to wonder how the folks on the west coast dealt with Earthquakes, but since we also have those… I am guessing it is much the same. When you are used to a natural disaster, it just becomes a bit less scary. Right now it seems like most of the issues happening today are just massive flooding. After years of drought, I had almost forgotten what “real” rain was like. At this point all of the rivers are well over flood stage, but fortunately I don’t live in an area that actually floods. Expect normal gaming blog posts to resume this week I hope, but today… was all about the weather.

The Podcasting Bug – Part 3

May 16, 2015May 16, 2015 by Belghast

Putting it Someplace

Today is the final post in my series highlighting some of the decisions that you need to think about when starting a podcast. In the first post I talked a bit about various formats, casting options and some of the design aspects. In the second post I dove straight into recording your podcast and editing it. In this mornings post I plan on handling the least exciting part of the equation… hosting it somewhere that other people can listen. If you wanna be a rock superstar and live large… well you are going to have to dump those shows somewhere reliable and fast. There are so many options here that it will make your head spin but I am going to try and do what I have done to this point and just talk about a few of the potential paths.

Dedicated Podcast Hosts

When I ventured down this road I noticed that pretty much all of the podcasts I listened to had one thing in common… they all seemed to be hosted by a service company called “Libsyn” so for ease of use that is who I chose to use for AggroChat. These companies are dedicated to a upload and forget it business model automating a lot of the process to make it easier to integrate with services like iTunes and Stitcher radio. One of the things you are going to realize quickly is that you have no real idea just how much space you need. For example the basic Libsyn account is $5 a month for 50 megs of monthly storage. What that means is that you can upload roughly 30 minutes of new audio each month before incurring additional overage fees. For a weekly show I knew without a doubt that this was not going to be enough.

When I set up the AggroChat account initially I went with the $15 a month 250 meg of monthly growth account, thinking that surely this was going to enough. The problem there is that there were a few weeks where I quite literally had to wait until after the monthly reset before uploading that next episode. Finally I have settled on the $20 a month account for 400 mb of storage. This gives me some breathing room, and allows our podcasts to fluctuate in length naturally without being extremely concerned about running out of space. Ultimately what you are going to have to figure out is what works for you. If you figure 50 meg per 30 minutes of podcast that means you can record at a decent bitrate and hopefully have a bit of wiggle room when it comes to your monthly allowance of space.

LibSyn

LIbSyn honestly seems to be the gold standard for podcast hosting. The problem is it is rather pricy as compared to say a normal blog web hosting account. In part this is because they work slightly different. For starters LibSyn has no concept of maximum monthly transfer. They are only concerned about how much file growth you are generating each month. Additionally they host your back log and archive indefinitely, which is extremely nice. We’ve recorded 56 episodes and all of them are available to listen to on demand, which means they are hosting roughly five gig of audio for us. The other big thing they provide is really good statistics and analytics about who is listening. I would highly suggest if you consider them at the very least going with the $15 a month 250 mb plan.

PodBean

In every market there is a “Bargain Provider” and just like that statement usually means… you ultimately get what you pay for. When you compare I am paying $20 a month for 400 mb worth of monthly growth through Libsyn, it seems like an absolute steal that you can get an $8 a month unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage account through PodBean. The problem is that they have a fairly abysmal reputation for reliability. The Better Business Bureau has them listed as an “F”rating, so you are more than likely taking at least some risk. However if you really cannot afford a better option this is there. I would love to hear thoughts if any folks out there are actively using this service and liking it. Most of the complaints I have heard centered around customer service. Considering the price I looked at it seriously for “Bel Folks Stuff”.

SoundCloud

The service I am the least familiar with to be honest is SoundCloud but from what I can tell a lot of folks are having good luck with it. In part the way its pricing is structured allows you to ease into using it, and as such get your feet wet before committing to a monthly fee. The free account allows you to upload 3 hours of audio. Now this is not per month, but this is 3 hours of audio period. For $6 a month you can get a total of 6 hours, and then upgrade to unlimited to $15 a month. When you compare the raw hosting power to my Libsyn account this seems like the clear winner, but for me personally LIbsyn still comes out ahead in the number of things it just takes care of for me. SoundCloud offers basic RSS support but from what I am tell it is not quite as optimized. Still this is a really solid option especially if you are considering hosting multiple podcasts off the same account.

Self Hosting Audio

You can at least in theory host your podcast off a traditional blogging account. The problem being is that when your web host sees the usage of folks constantly downloading MP3s from your site, chances are that they are going to hit you with some sort of bandwidth overage fee. Because of this what might be a perfectly reasonable and awesome place to host your blog, might be exactly the wrong sort of place to host a podcast. Libsyn is not terribly flexible when it comes to adding new podcasts without adding additional subscription fees. So when I started kicking around the notion of “Bel Folks Stuff” I opted to try and host this myself. For some time I had a cheap unlimited storage and bandwidth hosting account that I used for some development on the side. As a result I opted to simply host my MP3 files there, and link to them directly from WordPress.

The problem with this is once again you get what you pay for. While my unlimited host is cheap… and unmetered it is also sluggish at times. As a result I am telling you about a method that I am contemplating abandoning or at the very least tweaking how I do it. The host I am using is Arvixe which offers a $4 a month unlimited transfer and unlimited storage account. Overall it works well enough for my purposes but I have noticed that roughly once a week I have at least one minor outage in service. These outages are usually less than five minutes according to my wordpress uptime monitors, but they still happen. Now this could be for any reason including legitimate maintenance… or simply because they have over sold their resources. In whatever case it is something you should be wary of when looking at any “unlimited” account. There is almost always a small measure of “snake oil” in those sales pitches.

BluBrry Powerpress

The heart of this process relies upon a WordPress Plugin called BluBrry Powerpress. In its free form this plug-in takes care of the functionality that Libsyn does with its iTunes optimized RSS feed. In its paid subscription version it also adds in the robust analytics and statistics. For “Bel Folks Stuff” I chose to simply use the freebie version. I manually upload the MP3s to my web host, and then once activated I can link to the media in a traditional wordpress post. The end result feeds out as a podcastable rss feed, and visually embeds a player on the page. This works pretty flawlessly, and were I using a different host I would even maybe think this is the preferable way of dealing with a podcast because it gives me the maximum control. The nice thing about this plugin is that when I chose to create my own custom AggroChat.com wordpress site, I can still use it to cleanly embed media from libsyn into posts.

Advertising The Show

Now that you have your hosting set aside and hopefully your website created to embed your work, now it is time to talk a little bit about getting your show out there. This is something I honestly do a pretty poor job of myself. I just happened to stumble into an affiliate network through the close ties I made thanks to the Newbie Blogger Initiative. The Gaming and Entertainment Network was essentially formed out of NBI in a way, and were it not for that happening my shows would likely still be unaffiliated. I do a pretty horrible job at the business side of blogging and podcasting, so hopefully someone will come along after writing this guide and tell you all how to actually recuperate your costs. That is something I have yet to master, because this hobby is absolutely a money sink. Regardless though you are going to want some listeners and I am going to talk about a few of the avenues I use.

Twitter

Twitter is an absolute no brainer. Make an account for your show, and syndicate every new show over twitter. You can get as complicated here as you want or be as generic as you like as well. Ultimately in a perfect world you want to hashtag in some of the topics you spoke about during the show. I have yet to really master the art of this without making the advertisement sound anything other than smarmy. We publish on Sundays, so I tweet out the link early that morning. Then on Monday I tend to re-tweet it again for anyone who missed the first posting and is looking for something to listen to at work.

iTunes

I do not use iTunes at all, but man it seems like every other person on the planet does. There is apparently a meta game to getting your podcast placed in iTunes perfectly and there are all manner of guides to timing the launch just right. Truth be told mine is only up there because my friend Jaedia asked me to put it there. The act of getting it up there is relatively simple and Apple provides a list of specifications that the podcast needs to follow in order to qualify. From there you simply have to wait the requisite three or four days before it shows up in the index. I think for me it happened in about two but depending on backlog of podcasts it has been known to take as long as a week. Like with anything you can get higher placement if you convince your friends to go into iTunes and vote it up. I was shocked to find out that apparently our podcast has a five star rating.

Stitcher

The other big player in podcasting directories seems to be Stitcher Radio. Just like iTunes they have a series of requirements for getting a podcast listed, but have a handy dandy FAQ outlining them. Essentially it reads your RSS feed and re-syndicates it on their network. The only problem with this is that it seems to absolutely butcher my podcast. It sounds like a garbled mess running off their servers, whereas iTunes seems to leave everything as is. Just like with iTunes someone asked me to list my podcast there because they liked using the stitcher mobile client to listen to podcasts so I did just that. Really uncertain if I am actually getting any traffic from this but it can’t really hurt.

Go Make a Podcast!

So over the course of these three guides I have done my best to share the small amount of knowledge I have about how podcasting functions. The thing is I am still very much learning as I go because I don’t feel like this is the sort of the thing you can actually “master”. You might be sitting back and thinking…. god that is a lot of information to take in. The positive is that I knew absolutely NONE Of these things before I dove head first into recording our first episode of AggroChat. So my hope is that I can give someone who is on the edge and considering jumping into this world a bit of a head start. These are the things I wish I knew beforehand, and I have talked about some of the choices I might have made. Ultimately podcasts are extremely unique beasts, so yours can be whatever you want it to be. Again if you have any direct questions I am more than happy to answer them, but my hope is that maybe just maybe someone is going to read this mess and get the courage to start.