May 2016 - Page 3 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Musical Steeds

May 18, 2016 by Belghast

Muscle Memory

The tale of our run in Final Fantasy XIV has been interesting, namely we played for roughly two years straight… and then after the launch of Heavensward that original group more or less faded away from the game. When we played the game at launch, I was towards the end of the pack when it came to leaving, and this time it seems like I was among the first. I had split priorities when it came to FFXIV and WoW raiding… and to be truthful I was burning out intensely in both. I last played regularly in December of 2015, and for whatever reason I’ve just not had much drive to dip my toes back in. As additional story content was released, I made a college try to come back and consume it. Unfortunately however I never actually made it all of the way through the 3.2 content. As a result I admit I had more than a little trepidation upon returning, because I wondered how much skill I would have lost. It turns out “muscle memory” is ungodly strong, and for the most part I was able to sit down and begin rotating through abilities and hitting hotkeys by reflex.

What also helped however was the content we were doing. Now our raid group met on Tuesday nights for two years, and it seems as though the current batch of Greysky folks have kept up that tradition. This time instead however it has been turned in to a pony farm night. Now back when we were doing the Extreme Primals legitimately, I had managed to get the whistle for the Leviathan pony, and counted myself damned lucky. In the meantime however it appears that Square has increased the drop rate, and getting those musical horses seems to be a pretty regular occurrence. What shocked me was just how quickly the boss fights came back, even in their currently abbreviated state. For example I instinctively followed the normal tank queues for Titan… even though I initially stood on the wrong slice of cheese. I was happy to know that I could in fact still apparently tank in this game, and I think I will feel significantly better actually doing some duty finder for gear currency.

A Good Night

It felt really great to be back, and equally great to be playing Lala-Bel again. There is just something about this character that makes me happy, and maybe some of the funk I have been in has been due to the fact that I haven’t been playing him lately. After the raid my friends Tzi, Rylacus and Nyte helped run me through The Antitower, the first of the 3.2 dungeons. I poked around a bit afterwards trying to figure out where all the other dungeon quests started, but sleep claimed me pretty quickly. I know I will be doing Destiny raid tonight, but the hope is to return to FFXIV in the coming days. I mean maybe the answer is to simply play all the things. Right now I am getting enjoyment out of WoW and FFXIV again… so maybe the idea is to simply ration them both. I know I have a lot of catching up to do in FFXIV so it serves as an excellent game to grind away while downstairs. When I left in December I was one of the better geared characters in the Free Company… and now I am probably one of the worst geared. I know this… because in running the Antitower I managed to pick up no less than two upgrades, which is generally a good sign that you are way behind the curve.

Garuda Pony

Nightmare Pony

I managed to get the Garuda pony which was an easy drop since everyone else in the raid had one, and was quite literally just farming it to get me one. Then I rolled on Nightmare that dropped from Titan, and managed to get the lucky roll. The only thing there is… I guess I didn’t fully realize that this was a rare drop from any of the first three primals… even thought Ashgar said as much. I didn’t quite grok it at the time, or I would have probably passed on the roll. We did not however see any of the ACTUAL pony that is supposed to come from Titan. We did however manage to get at least one person a Leviathan mount, and I believe one other mount… but I am drawing a blank. All in all it was a really fun night and I am going to try and juggle my schedule so I can start making this a weekly thing. Hopefully I didn’t do anything that pissed anyone off too terribly. I felt a little bad falling right back into my overbearing tank mode… but like I said I was largely relying on instincts to get through the evening and that comes with the tendency to pull. Ashgar however pulled for me a few times expecting that I would provoke it back from him, and I did like a good lalatank. It was kinda great getting to hang with Tzi and Rylacus again, even thought poor Tzi had no voice at all. Maybe I am over my mental block against MMOs, or maybe I just happened to choose the right nights to play again.

Three of Coins Problem

May 17, 2016 by Belghast

The Ultra Knight

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Last night while making yet another trip to the Dreadnaught just to kill the Ultra Knight, I started thinking about what a glorious debacle the situation of exotic drop rates are in Destiny. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game… and they have made so many great strides over the last year into truly making it an amazing place to be. The problem is… they are seemingly inches away from landing on the target but nonetheless not quite there. The problem currently centers around making doing content feel rewarding. I completely blame the recent Iron Banner for giving me more hope than I probably should have had. During that weekend I had a single activity that I wanted to be doing, as often as I could… and that was queuing for more Iron Banner. During the weekend I managed to make it to Rank 5 on all three of my characters, and the primary motivation was the acquisition of loot. Sitting in queue and playing a match felt like quite literally the best use of my time because I knew that every four or five matches I would be rewarded with some shiny bauble that either would replace my current item in that slot or serve as infusion fodder.

Once that weekend ended however it feels like I simply don’t have an activity like that that is equally rewarding. There is of course Challenge of Elders, but the Challenge requires you to gather together a fireteam to really have a chance at completing it. We have absolutely made a date on Thursday nights to try and get our various characters through CoE but the problem is… what do I do with the rest of my time in game. I am largely a soloist, and it feels like I don’t have a similarly valuable activity that feels like I am spending my time wisely. So as a result that activity ends up being heading to the Dreadnaught every 10-15 minutes to kill the Ultra Knight, so that I can consume yet another Three of Coins buff… and every fifth kill or so get an Exotic Engram, which may or may not decode to 335 light and help me push the goal forward. In fact there are so many times that I will be playing another game like Diablo or last night World of Warcraft… where I take a break every 15 minutes or so and log into my PS4 via the Remote Play app with the sole purpose of rushing to the Ultra Knight and attempting to get that exotic engram.

Lies of Xur

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The problem is that this isn’t really an enjoyable feedback loop and feels like a hacked workaround to solve core problems in the actual gameplay. In theory that default thing I could be doing with my time should be either the Crucible or Vanguard play lists. Those are activities that need players doing them to keep the game thriving. However instead of getting interesting things while doing these activities, it feels like they solely serve the purpose of being a vehicle for me to spend Three of Coins buffs. Then there is the problem of strikes like Dust Palace and Omnigul not actually removing the buff and triggering the potential of an exotic drop. Then there is also the problem of Xur, where he is supposed to be this trader that sometimes brings us amazing things. However for most of us, Friday is simply the occasional that finally allows us to restock our Three of Coins and nothing he has to offer is actually interesting. This is because it feels like if you are doing any activity in this game, and you don’t have the Three of Coins buff active, you are playing the game completely wrong.

There is a lot of talk about Bungie summoning the Diablo developers to talk about the lessons they learned with the “Loot 2.0” patch. One of the key lessons seems to have been lost in translation. Diablo currently has a Three of Coins like effect when it comes to Legendary drops, but the difference is… it is always active. In theory if you are actively playing the game you should be seeing a Legendary drop at least every 10-15 minutes with the chance going up significantly based on the difficulty of the activity you are tackling. This means that doing literally anything from killing a level 1 mob to killing a boss has a chance of summoning a Legendary drop. This is how things should ultimately work inside of Destiny, because going out into the world and doing activities should feel like the most rewarding activity. You remember every time you get a drop from a boss, but no one remembers that one time the Cryptarch happened to give them something interesting. It feels like Destiny needs to reconsider the way loot works in the game, and make it so that Strikes, Crucible, Nightfall, Prison of Elders, and Raids are the default thing that players want to go and do, rather than simply finding any vehicle for flipping that Ultra kill switch. I also think there should be that random snowballs chance in hell of quite literally ANY mob out in the world dropping a super rare Exotic Engram, or even one of the good Legendaries at a decent light level. Bungie needs to drive players into the feedback loop of doing group activities, because the activities are fun but also the best possible way for them to get rewards.

Flowers for Garou

May 16, 2016 by Belghast

More Flora

It feels really strange to follow up yesterdays post. Those were a bunch of things that I felt like I needed to get out there, and to be honest about the doubt that I had been struggling with. As it stands right now I am for certain taking a break over Memorial Day weekend rather than either pre-writing posts or arranging for guest posts. I am also contemplating starting to make weekends optional. Sunday is really the day that becomes madness for me because I am also scurrying around that morning trying to wrap up the various stuff required for posting an episode of aggrochat. As far as this weekend, it was honestly one without a ton of gaming. Instead I spent a large amount of time hanging out in the backyard. Scope creep is a term we use in development when a project has gone beyond its boundaries in the number of features the user is requesting. Our backyard has long since entered scope creep territory and that’s okay. The original goal was just to make it more livable, and this has involved a whole sequence of smaller steps leading up to where we are today. Once again I took a panorama of the progress, and you can see the larger version here.

We have now kept the original batch of flowers alive and actually thriving for two weeks now… so of course we doubled down on the proposition. We spent a bit of Saturday afternoon tracking down more of the shepherds hooks so that we could have matching ones to the ones we had picked up at ALDI a few weeks back. The other night while walking with a friend, my wife saw a hanging basket at a near by pop up nursery that she really liked. We also happened to have a coupon from that same pop-up that if we spent $20 we could get a free hanging basket, so the end result is us adopting the purple, yellow and white hanging baskets and adding them to my “flower babies” as I have taken to calling them. The only big things left are to wait on the grass to finish filling in where the weed treatments left barren patches… and so far it has started. Then there is of course the idea kicking around about replacing the table we have with something that sits a little lower to the ground and that we could use our pseudo-Adirondack chairs with. Then I am contemplating getting another of the umbrellas we found on sale to go in a post on the far deck side of the pool to add a little shade there from within the pool. Like I said…. scope creep abounds.

The most interesting piece of scope creep over the last week however is the fact that we have entered the realm of bird stewardship. I’ve not been able to take a great shot of them but we have soooo many birds. In the panoramic shot you can see on the right side that I have a feeder hanging in among the tree that is really an overgrown hedge. I’ve begun feeding fairly regularly, a first a blend from the Audubon soceity and later a bulk blend we got from Sam’s that fairly closely matched the nutritional mix of the first one. Sunday morning while watering the flowers I filled the feeder up to roughly the halfway mark because it was ultimately what was left in the 40 pound bag after dumping the rest into a tightly sealed container. This was at roughly 9 am… by the time we were out in the yard after my wife got home from church around 11 am… the feeder was completely empty again. There have been times I have counted a dozen tiny sparrows feeding at the same time, with a bunch of cardinals, bluejays, and various sundry other birds that I cannot yet identify roaming around. We have a couple that look like doves of some sort, and another couple that look like pidgeons. Basically the entire time we have lived here I have wanted birds to hang out in the backyard and in the evenings I have been able to watch the baby sparrows hop and play around on the deck. Unfortunately they are all pretty skittish at the moment, except for the Robins… they seem more than happy to roam within close distance of us looking for worms. In any case… this is the non-gaming activity that is taking up a good chunk of my time. On the weekends and evenings we tend to eat outdoors hanging out in our rockers watching the flora and fauna. Yup… I am officially old, but not minding a minute of it.

Surprising Whim

Most of my weekend gaming was spent in Diablo 3, doing various things… and largely without purpose. I managed to get my stash tab on Friday, and from this point on everything else is gravy in Season 6. For awhile now even before the season, Diablo was the game I played when I didn’t know what else to play… and I spent a huge chunk of the weekend not knowing what else to play. Normally Destiny would fill this niche but I didn’t really want to hang out upstairs when the couch was so damned comfy. During the weekend I found out that my good friends Chestnut and Chaide from Wildstar have decided to re-up World of Warcraft, and the glory that is our collective community managed to recruit them to hang out on Argent Dawn Alliance with us. I ended up logging in to do some invites last night and wound up sticking around and playing my Druid. There was a part of me that thought… wouldn’t it be glorious if I could somehow ride into Legion with a full army of level 100 characters. The actual leveling game of World of Warcraft is something that I have enjoyed greatly… it is just the Garrison busywork that ends up getting me down and making me no longer want to play.

So the idea is simple… if I can focus heavily on leveling and or gearing my characters I might be able to get back into the game for a bit. While watching my Sunday night shows, I managed to push from 91 to 93 and make a big dent in Shadowmoon Valley. Normally speaking I take this abbreviated path around Draenor, jumping each time a new zone opens up to me. This time around however I think I am going to just focus on the questing, because that is the thing that seems to be able to hold my focus even when the rush to end game doesn’t. I mean with this character I am not pushing to get anywhere, and Hellfire Citadel feels stifling at the moment so I am in no rush to get back there with LFR. As it stands I have my Druid, Priest, Rogue, Mage, Warlock and Monk to level… and I am sure that this current burst of interest in World of Warcraft won’t probably sustain my way through all of them, but I might be able to at least springboard this into a renewed interest in MMOs as a whole. The absolute hardest for me is going to be the Mage because… really I could care less about finger wigglers and the least is always the pure finger wigglers. I can pretend the Discipline Priest is a cloth tank, and I can focus on the awesome demon pets on the Warlock. However with that mage… all I am left with is the fact that I am slinging spells which never really feels amazing. Anyways who knows how long I will be around for, but I enjoyed myself last night.

Cycles

May 15, 2016 by Belghast

Something in the Water

Yesterday the very amazing Aywren posted a bit on her blog to serve as a bit of inspiration and support for bloggers out there, and a bit of it was directed at me. There is something going on and it is bigger than me or this blog, but seemingly effecting a lot of other bloggers out there. Its like this growing dissatisfaction with whatever we have been doing, and trying to find a way to tweak and change it to make our lives better. IronWeakness for example has been frustrated lately with the lack of attention to his family and faith, and as a result is quitting cold turkey. Liore has reached a point where she just doesn’t really want to write about games because of a lot of reasons… not the least of which is how toxic gaming has become. As far as me, I have written about my frustrating inability to get into MMOs lately. I guess the thing is… this feels different from your average lack of creativity. I can sit down at the keyboard and summon a post at will every single day and I have done so for the last three years. More than anything I have started to question why and if I actually want to do it.

In part I have felt this massive amount of pressure to keep moving the ball forward. It is like I have all of the plates spinning in the air and I am desperately trying to make sure that none of them stop and come crashing to the ground. The past year has not been amazingly well for me when it came to gaming, and more importantly writing about gaming. I made an attempt to do the whole writing for a paycheck thing when it came to MMOGames.com. The problem is… turning it into a job… no matter how sporadic and supplemental it was… drained all of the fun out of the experience for me. Similarly I used to love to write code on the weekends… until I became a programmer for a living… and now the last thing I want to see once I exit work is code of any form. This was only compounded by Blaugust which took a significant toll on me, and my ability to enjoy reading blog posts. During that month, the insane number of people we had signed up… meant that every morning I was getting up and religiously checking this long list of post and tabulating data in a spreadsheet. Nothing drains the fun out of anything like a spreadsheet.

Backing Away

So I have slowly backed away from MMOGames and the thought of taking any assignments there, thinking that distance would make the enjoyment come back. I also took a long break from reading blogs, because I thought with time the desire to read them would come back. In both cases things regenerated over time, but I feel like a part of me died in both cases that can never come back. Right now I just feel somehow out of phase with the world. There are days when I am mostly okay, and can hold normal conversations… but the rest of the time it feels like everything is washing over me in a manner that is just impossible to grasp. There are so many times I contemplate interacting, but it is so damned hard to take that first step. Most of the time I am this bundle of anxiety and awkwardness that I am trying desperately to make seem normal. The worst is that I have turtled for a very long time… and what I mean by that is that I have this tendency to tuck my head into my shell and just stop interacting other than when forced to do so. In part I think a lot of the games I have been playing like Diablo 3 or Destiny… I am doing so because I can play them in a completely solo way with brief intermissions of group activity.

I am not sure exactly when I stopped logging into voice chat on a nightly basis, but this has caused this wall of stress surrounding my interacting with the folks I podcast with each week. I still love them and feel the same way about them… but I struggle to interact with them outside of our weekly recording session. I can handle one or two people at a time… but the possibility of logging in to a whole room of people… no matter how familiar I am with them just makes me want to run screaming. Always in the past I have come out of one of these periods within a month or so… but this one feels like it has lasted the better part of this year and might have started last year. I know that I need to force myself to interact… but all I want to do is pull the covers over my head and forget the world exists. It is really hard to be any form of myself when I am like this… because I am known as being this gregarious sort that is kind and happy to see new people. There are just times when I can’t be that version of myself, and I am not sure how to knock myself free of this current slump.

Expectations

I guess I felt like I needed to be open about these struggles I am dealing with, because maybe it explains a bit why I am the way I am sometimes. All of this is in part why I have seriously contemplated just hanging up my spurs and stopping the blog for awhile. The truth is though… that I don’t really want to. I’ve built this dialog between you the readers and myself… and I enjoy it. I can rattle off a post and it is blissfully one sided. Sure folks comment, but I can deal with responding to those as I am ready. I don’t have to be prepared to have a bidirectional exchange immediately… I can sit down write what I feel like writing and then walk away feeling like I have gotten whatever it was out of my system. The only problem there is this giant looming pressure that I need to post something every day. I think the whole daily thing has been good for me as a whole, but now it just serves as this point of failure that is waiting to happen. I know at some point I will not write a post, and the streak will be over… and it honestly scares me a little bit. Part of me is wondering if I should just plan to have an outage and get it over with to remove a chunk of the pressure.

The truth is my readership on the weekend has always been limited, so I have been kicking around the notion of posting weekdays, but then making the weekends optional. I know coming up for Memorial Day weekend I will be out of town… so that might be the moment I just let the ball drop. My blog can survive without three days worth of posts, or at least I keep telling myself that. Part of me is afraid that if I stop the pattern, I will fall back into my old habits of being the least reliable blogger out there. I would love to be able to say that I would only blog when I have something really important to say… but then that barrier of what is important versus not important would throw me into paralysis. As it stands… I think at the end of this month I will be taking a break, and hoping that this lull with no gaming and no blogging will help to repair whatever schism has formed inside of me. I don’t really want to quit blogging, but I feel like I need to at least take a break, and a planned break is better than just getting up one day and being unable to do it anymore. So anyways… that has been what is going around in my head and I hope now that I got it all out on paper… it makes a little more sense.

Thanks as always for being there and reading.