December 2016 - Page 3 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Point of Mythic Plus

December 19, 2016 by Belghast

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Well this is a generally shit start to a day… but I guess the show must go on. I was just setting up to start blogging this morning and then suddenly I noticed an email in my inbox from paypal verifying that my $50 transaction from the Sony Playstation Network had succeeded. My not nearly caffeinated brain took a moment to realize… “Bel you haven’t bought anything from the PSN”. When I went over to check the email account that PSN is attached to… at 6:19 in the morning… literally while I was sitting upstairs drinking my coffee someone changed the email address on my PSN account. Currently the link from Sony that you use to report this… is throwing a 404 error so I am wondering if there are broader issues happening currently. I’ve since gone onto the Paypal website and put on a dispute on the transaction to attempt to claw it back, which was its own special version of hell. I’ve verified that neither my primary or my secondary email accounts have been compromised because I leave all of my gmail accounts running with the IP logging thing turned on… and I recognize every connection in the last several days. I hope this is not evidence of the sort of week I am going to have as a result.

The real point of this mornings post was going to be talking about how I was wrong about something. For awhile now I have had the attitude that there was not really much of a point to Mythic Plus dungeons. This is of course from the stance of someone who has access to raiding. The risk to reward equation seemed to be pretty crummy considering just how high of a mythic plus you needed to run in order to start seeing upgrades over raid gear. I am coming here this morning to admit that I was wrong about this stance… not the part about risk to reward but the point about there being no real point. Sunday night is Karazhan night generally, and instead of doing that this week my team decided to knock out the four mythics weekly quest to see if we could get any upgrades given that we have now killed enough Emerald Nightmare for it to be a heroic cache. While gear may not really be the point… they are insanely fun when you are running them with a solid team. Over the course of the night we ran three plus two mythics, a plus five and eventually a plus seven. The truth is… in our raid geared state none of them seemed that insane, and thankfully I had Kylana to keep directing me where I should be going and what I should actually be pulling.

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The other cool side effect of all of this madness is that they seem to be a really excellent source of chaos crystals, which given that I am not the raid enchanter due to the fact that the last one transferred off server… this is maybe going to be a good source of mats to help fuel raid enchants. When you can two and three chest the lower dungeons… it means you have lots of purples to grind down into tasty enchants. As a whole my Nightmare Cache ended up giving me a 5 item level upgrade with a gem socket… so that was well worth the time, and along the way I managed to pick up a ring that is situationally better than the one I had been using. The long and short of it however is that I had a lot of fun last night running dungeons with friends and it brought back some life into a game experience that was starting to wear a little thin. I now kinda want to see what my breaking point is when it comes to mythic plus madness… and I want to try a ten or higher just to see what happens. The best part of last night is the fact that we will all be seeing Mythic Seven chests in our Order Hall come Tuesday morning and in theory… the possibility of decent upgrades as a result. So if I can just sort out what happened with my PSN account… it is going to be a potentially great week.

Icecrown Challenge

December 16, 2016 by Belghast

The world is a truly bizarre place sometimes. There are a lot of folks that make up my twitter timeline that I know… but only in a slantwise way. I recognize them, and am even happy to see posts show up as my feed scrolls by, but I really don’t know much about them. ArcaneRatsel is one of those folks, and I largely followed her because she does amazing things for the Warcraft community as a whole. She was part of an expansion of my timeline as I attempted to follow more positive Warcraft folks. For example she did this crazy thing where she essentially created faction logos for anyone who was interested…. and as a result created a truly silly number of them. She is also involved in the Running of the Gnomes that supports Cleveland Clinic, Running of the Trolls that supports the Trevor Project, and now the Icecrown Challenge that supports the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. To say she is a “good egg” is a big understatement… but again this is largely someone I only knew existed in passing and occasionally but rarely ended up in the same conversation with. So yesterday all started with a really simple thing… she said she was passing through my state to visit family. It is not like Oklahoma is a popular destination spot, so generally when I see that I comment and welcome whoever it is to the state.

After a handful of back and forths… the conversation quickly moved to DMs… because in the oddest of coincidences apparently we grew up in the exact same town of 2500 people. There is a little less than a ten year difference between us in ages, so we are for all purposes of different generations. It is not like we should have had a lot of overlap… but we absolutely did. My Mother was a teacher at the High School for decades… and it turns out her Mom was as well. In fact her Mom was my Freshman English teacher, and for a period of time went to the same church as I did. Through either the church thing or the teacher thing… I know I wound up in their home multiple times throughout my “growing up” period, and as we found out last night my dad who was an armchair professional photographer took portrait photos at least once. If you were to do an “as the crow flies” we grew up less than a mile apart, in fact from my house you could look out over the pasture and see hers. Ultimately… the world is a really strange place sometimes and what seems like massive distances can be shortened in an instant. I mean after all my wife and I grew up thirty minutes apart, and were in turn introduced by a mutual friend in Belgium. It is also weird how someone who is a complete and total stranger can suddenly become of much more significance from a single thread of connection.

Now when I first saw the Icecrown Challenge I was thinking… “Bel you should do this thing, because you clear Icecrown weekly anyways”. Now that I have some connection to at least one of the folks responsible for running the event… it was simply something I couldn’t NOT do. So last night I set my stream up and streamed my adventure across Icecrown… with a lot of help from my audience. By help I mean absolutely throwing a monkey wrench in the proceedings. I was all set to try and clear as fast as possible, but things happened along the way. You can watch the entire stream as a Beam VOD, but suffice to say… I am not taking full responsibility for some of the madness. I’ve been interspersing some of the wing boss kill times throughout this post that I lifted from my recording. I am just going to lay them out here to see if you can find the problem…

Professor Putricide – 11:11
Blood Queen Lana’thel – 14:46
Sindragosa – 26:56

It took me 3 minutes and 35 seconds to clear from Putricide to the Blood Queen, and based on some probably wrong math…. 12 minutes and 10 seconds to get to Sindragosa. The majority of that time was spent on attempting to do the Dreamwalker fight. My viewers told me with the utmost confidence that I could absolutely heal the dragon to full with a single bandage, and I am sure that is absolutely the case…. but not on heroic where she is constantly taking damage over time. So I wasted a good ten minutes and a I think eight bandages trying to make this work… only to get instantly interrupted when I started challenging the heal. So essentially all of the time I had made up to this point was completely blown and I ultimately had to jump in a portal to reset the encounter. Now were I choosing to run it on my Paladin, life would have been dandy. I know that I can heal her to full with a few flash of lights and move on with my life. In fact that was a large chunk of the reason why I used to always run this place weekly as a paladin. However last night I had to simply move on with my Warrior.

After the huge ball of frustration that was Dreamwalker… I finally looted Arthas and paused my timer at 31 minutes and 49 seconds. As per are the rules of the Icecrown Challenge… I then turned around and donated $31.49 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Additionally as part of the rules of the contest… I challenged Mort, Ashgar, and Thalen to also take the contest and make their own donations. The donation drive runs for I believe a month and officially started 12/13. Right now they have roughly $400 in donations and I feel like we can get this higher. Even if you are not directly challenged, you can totally start your own branch of the tree like I did. I would love to see this trickle through all of the little offshoots of the community… because lets face it… running Icecrown is fun. While I might grouse a little bit about losing ten minutes… that “wasted” time just meant I donated a little bit more money towards a really good cause.

Social Structure and MMOs

December 15, 2016 by Belghast

I’ve talked off and on about Imzy, and how it is filling a niche for me at least that Google+ used to in that it allows for a sort of long winded discussion that twitter just simply doesn’t. Yesterday I read a post there that made me realize something I had been trying to sort out in my head for awhile. The vast majority of my gaming time is spent playing MMOs and I tend to have several that I am in various states of active in at the same time. However I rarely if ever gain any sort of permanent traction in them, and after a few weeks of play tend to fade away again until the whim hits me to fire it back up. I go through a cycle of curiosity that leads to excitement… that leads to confusion and disillusionment that ultimately ends with me leaving once more. I will pick up a game and for a few days to weeks it is going to be the most interesting thing in the world as I get adjusted to the systems and mechanics again. However I always reach this point where an overwhelming sense of “what now” hits me. When that happens I wind out going right back to whatever it is happens to be my core game… which if we are being honest with me is an alternation of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. I have been working on my games played during 2016… and decided to extend that out to all of the games that are easy to track thanks to my blog. There is a clear pattern of when I start getting super excited about WoW I shift away from FFXIV and versa vicea. There is of course some overlap, but you can see a back and forth pattern that emerges.

So the question is then…. what do these two games seem to have that so many others don’t. The answer was sitting there waiting for me to notice. I often talk about games having great communities… but generally speaking this is in broad terms and extremely non-specific. Most games have some excellent niches in them, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t really do much to add core enjoyment for me. I keep returning to World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV… because those are the games that I have established communities in. There was a time when I was willing to branch out and meet new people… plunk myself down in a brand new game and start growing an entirely different infrastructure. The community that I have right now… is in large part the result of me doing this over and over. Each new game I go into I meet a whole new cast of people… but at some point that began to change. As I gathered a larger and larger core of players… I stopped looking outside to the community nearly as much and instead looking to my guild. While I am still meeting a lot of new people… they are coming with the pedigree of knowing someone I already know and am familiar with… which of course speeds up the social footnotes that come from meeting anyone new.

Last night was a prime example of this happening, because we were raiding in World of Warcraft and had someone pop by and join…. that I had not personally played with in several years. My personal community in House Stalwart within World of Warcraft seems to have this ability to stay evergreen… and always have a certain chunk of the population that is active and always happy to be there. House Stalwart my guild has existed for twelve years… in spite of my actions. When I left WoW to start playing Rift I tried my best to burn down everything about the game… actively recruiting people away to play this new an exciting game. I did the same thing for Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online… and countless other games. However at its core… the guild still remains and not only that… but has remained viable for the purpose of doing interesting end game content the entire time. Similarly the Final Fantasy XIV guild… while considerably younger just seems to endure whatever boom and bust cycles we go through population wise, and in both cases…. I know that I can return at any point and will be welcomed back with open arms. In truth I think pretty much everyone who has touched either guild feels the same way… which is why folks are constantly showing up from out of the woodwork and reintegrating back into the core at least for a little while.

So the problem that exists with nearly every other game… is I just don’t have anything close to this infrastructure… nor do I really have the emotional or intellectual strength to try and forge it. There have been House Stalwart offshoots in damned near every MMO that has existed… or at least as a guild community we have chosen a specific server and faction to all roll on. However for most… these interludes serve as a vacation from the game they were already playing… and after a break most folks wind up going right back to the familiar. In a traditional MMO I need to have something that I am building towards, and that object on the horizon is usually doing interesting things with my friends. So while it is absolutely fun to pop in and play Rift or ArcheAge for a weekend… I find hard keeping motivated when I know I have no real facilities to do any of the big interesting things… other than pugging. I am spoiled to be honest, and so many years of not having to PUG has soured my experience as a whole. Any random person I encounter is somehow tarnished by the memory of all of the good times I have had with my guild throughout the years. After generations of MMOs… this has lead me to be rather insular in my gaming habits and tending to return to the folks I already know and respect rather than trying to create something new.

So now days I tend to operate in two modes. I have the games that I am active in and have deep social connections… and the games that I slink off to when I need to limit my social connectivity and turtle for awhile. I tend to gobble up whatever new content is available, and then happy drop that game by the wayside as I return to active duty again. Games like Star Wars the Old Republic, The Secret World and Elder Scrolls Online are great for this role, given that they all have deeply engaging stories that you can find yourself completely lost in… so much so that you forget that you are essentially alone in a crowd of strangers. There are a lot of games that I think I would enjoy… if I had a similar stable infrastructure. However at this point… to be honest… folks are pretty stratified in their gaming habits. I can no longer really make an impassioned argument as to why they should abandon X game that they know and love for Y game that is new and different. I know this boom and bust cycle all too well at this point… and while it is a hell of a fun ride, to some extent I am getting that fix elsewhere. For me personally… the Diablo 3 season mechanism perfectly emulates the feeling of “unwrapping” a brand new MMO and rushing with your friends to level as quickly as you can. This time however we all know it is perfectly fine to fade away once you have achieved your goals… because its a game we will all return to again and again as new seasons happen. I have been the cause of so much frustration and disappointment in my gaming career… that I guess in some part I would rather slink off alone… than get folks excited about yet another game that I am sure we will all abandon within three months time. However that same instinct… is what keeps any of these games from actually gaining traction. What I realized this week when reading the post on Imzy is just how desperately I need that social infrastructure for me to be able to enjoy a MMO.

Wipeout Simulator

December 14, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday was the release of the Destiny 2.5.0 patch which brought in a brand new holiday event called the Dawning. However lets not kid ourselves that the part of this patch that really matters is the fact that once you hit max rank… every green you pick up with simply automagically get converted into Weapon Parts or Armor Materials. I guess another important part is the fact that the SRL has returned… or the Sparrow Racing League for the uninitiated. I spent my entire day pumped for this event… and then I got home and had to wait an hour for my PlayStation to patch up. This is sincerely one of the more painful patches I have experienced as far as download times go. Generally speaking I am used to booting up my PS4 and having the patch install and being in game within a few minutes given that I leave my PS4 in that pseudo online mode to allow for patching. Unfortunately this patch appeared to be a two parter, with one piece installing almost immediately… and then following up after that was another 2 gig download. This is the point where I wish that invest in some better patching infrastructure because with my internet connection… I should not be having this issue.`Given that how much else is “peer to peer” in modern gaming… I would not be shocked if someone on a DSL like in Lexington, Kansas is slowing me down.

There is a truly silly amount of changes, including an entirely new strike scoring system that seems to work very similar to that of the Prison of Elders event. With it comes a whole new set of bounties that involve you completing various things in the strikes in order to complete them. Another massive change is that Skeleton Keys that are used to open chests containing strike specific loot… are supposedly dropping significantly more often. On top of this your first Nightfall of the week per character will include a guaranteed Skeleton Key drop. There are other nice quality of life changes, like supposedly Xur now sells Exotic Shards for Strange Coins rather than you having to break down an existing Exotic to get one. There are new quests from several of the tower vendors, including a Dawning Holiday themed one started with Eva Levante. Like with the Halloween event this year there are hidden items available like a green and black sparrow that can be obtained through collecting a dead ghost fragment on the Bannerfall map and then using that to open the chest hidden underneath the Future War Cult staircase back in the tower.

The highlight of the patch for me however is the introduction of SRL again, and all of the bounties and such that come with it. The sub highlight of this however is the fact that Sparrow Racing counts as a Crucible match…. and rewards drops that can scale all of the way up to 400 light. Of note… it seems like the Crucible reputation booster absolutely works on SRL and I was running them last night while doing some racing. Right now I am getting mostly gear that is going to serve as infusion fodder, but wearing it at the moment until I figure out what I plan on doing with it… because for now I am really only doing racing. The above rocket launcher for example is nothing I would ever use because it is missing either Tracking or the Grenades and Horseshoes perk. However for the purpose of infusing it into another item… I will absolutely take that 395 light level.

What makes this event so much better than a normal Iron Banner event for light levels… is the fact that complete sets of gear for all slots can drop from it. In addition to some blast from the past crucible weapons… there is a full set of “racing” gear that can drop. So far I have only managed to get the chest piece but it too dropped at 396 light… which was significantly higher than anything I had equipped. it is not exactly the sort of gear you would want to go out adventuring in… since its perks are exclusive for sparrow racing. However for the purpose of getting that light level up… I am absolutely going to wear it and hope to keep getting better drops. The weirdest thing about Sparrow racing is the way it makes me change my controller grip. Traditionally I grip my controller with my index fingers resting on the L2 and R2 triggers respectively, because in theory if I need to hit L1 and R1 it is not too painful to simply move my finger up briefly. However in the SRL you literally never want to take your finger off L2 ever…. or at least not unless you really plan on doing it purposefully to bank a corner at the right speed. While racing sparrows however L1 and R1 serve the purpose of shifting your sparrow slightly in that direction… think using collar buttons to bank turns in F-Zero. You can get the same effect by pressing in your thumb sticks for L3 and R3 but I find this pulls my steering off significantly. So when I am doing the SRL event I essentially move my hand up on the controller and use my middle fingers to hit L2 and R2 resting my index fingers then on L1 and R1. It takes some getting used to but for me personally it seems to just “work better”. I could never handle this as my standard grip, but for the short length of a racing match it works well enough.