April 2019 - Page 3 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Ten Years of Tales

April 17, 2019 by Belghast

Ten years ago today I installed WordPress for the first time and decided to put digital pen to paper and roll out the mat of Tales of the Aggronaut. At that time I doubt I had a thought in my head about it lasting anywhere near this long, nor growing into what it has become. Tales of the Aggronaut was not my necessarily my first blog… and the previous incarnation is floating out there still in the ether never to be spoken of again. However this blog combined a bunch of things that I was already doing… namely writing big walls of text. I was one of those folks that would come into a game forum and write big posts talking about my feelings about this thing or that thing… or offering support and advice to those who were in need. I was a fairly active member at the time on the Argent Dawn server forums, and a lot of the people that I am still in contact from those days I met amongst a bunch of lines of text… and the eventual IRC server that spawned from it.

Ten years seems like a momentous number, but I just could not really think of anything I wanted to do to mark the occasion. At this point many days it is a struggle to get myself to log in and make a morning post, let alone come up with some grand promotional scheme. Instead we are going to have a quiet birthday… which is in truth how I prefer to celebrate my actual annuals these days as well. There are many blogs out there that are far longer in the tooth than this one, but I think well aged blogs is a bit of a rarity these days. I know my own blog roll is full of blogs that have gone into the sands of time… that I just cannot bring myself to delete. Blaugust has helped quite a bit, and I am planning on this year potentially outshining last year now that we have a fairly active Discord community surrounding it. I am thankful for my regulars… and I hate to say this because it sounds vain but… anytime I get a notification saying someone liked one of my posts it is a little burst to keep me going.

The other interesting thing about the passage of ten years is just how different my life has become in that time. When I started this blog I was a dedicated Guild and Raid leader making our way through the newly released Ulduar raid and struggling a bit at the jump up in difficulty between it and Neo-Naxxramas. I was also completely devoted to World of Warcraft and namely playing the Warrior class. I also had very definite opinions on raid tanking and various other aspects of the game… thinking myself to be some font of knowledge for the community. I had opinions and I was very willing to share them damn the consequences… because I was in my early thirties and thought I had figured an awful lot of things out.

Now we scan forward to today… and I am a leader of people with fifteen people under me as I transitioned from development to management. As a result I am not longer leading anything at all in my off time and doing really good to be a member of literally anything. While I still organize people around concepts and ideas… I have tried my best not to be the one actually holding the reins. While I used to raid on a near nightly basis… I can’t bring myself to even commit to raiding once a week for a few hours. Where I used to spend every night grouped up with other people and usually on voice chat… I can’t bring myself to communicate with other human beings regularly once I am officially off the clock. Where I used to think I had a clue what I was doing… I am now in my 40s and know that I know next to nothing about most topics and it seems like I am imposing myself when I share my opinions on things. While I am still very much an MMO player… I find myself playing them all effectively on solo mode or maybe with a very small group of people in tow.

Another thing that has changed significantly over the years is how much of myself I am willing to put into these posts. I’ve shared with you deaths in the family, times I am struggling with one thing or another, and things that have happened that brought me joy. I shifted my writing style from being disconnected from the readers… to trying to invite you all into my world for a few minutes each morning as I write. I can’t say that anything I write about is actually interesting, but it is at least grounded in the reality of where I am and what I am doing at a given moment. The truth is I would be far more popular if I would simply stick to a single topic and become an official site for a specific game. Those folks are the ones with the large readership, but me… I am more of an acquired taste. If you are not interested in me as a human being… then chances are you won’t be sticking around for very long.

All of that said… I am thankful for the people that I do have that regularly check in on my world… and it is shockingly a larger number than I ever expected it to be. In ten years almost 200,000 unique individuals have visited Tales of the Aggronaut… and while I am certain a good number of those unique users are bots because internet… it still means that I have introduced myself and my point of view to way more people than I ever expected I would. During that time I have made 2028 posts including this one… which would have been a larger number were it not for the fact that I barely made any posts during the first four years of this blog. Every day however a few hundred of you come and visit my world and I am thankful for the company. It makes me wish I had the fire to do more to actually push this blog and the disconnected community that supports it on a regular basis. In theory I should be pushing a discord or a reddit or some other venue… but instead I would just rather enjoy knowing the fact that I have a bunch of quiet users out there tagging along with me as I do things.

This isn’t exactly the triumphant post you make when you reach a milestone like this, but in truth I didn’t really want a bunch of fanfare. You out there… reading this blog… and an important part of it even though you may have never actually interacted with me directly. Even though I largely write like I am talking to myself, I do appreciate knowing there are people out there that care. As far as words of wisdom to leave this post on… I am not entirely certain I have any. I guess we will see if Tales of the Aggronaut makes another ten years… though at this point I cannot imagine what the world and my life will be like during that time. My blog is as much therapy as it is a purposeful act of creation, and I thank you all for taking the time to listen.

Grim Community

April 16, 2019 by Belghast

If you have been reading this blog over the last few days you will know that I have been delving into Grim Dawn. At this point I believe I am 43 and after some advice that I received checked the Veteran box. I am not entirely sure what this does apart from seemingly increase the rate of named mobs spawning, and as a result increase your chance for good loot in the process. More or less it reminds me of the difference between Normal and Hard in Diablo 3, where you can pretty much instantly bump up to Hard and just go on with your life without much stress. It appears the other difficulty ranks do not unlock until later… I am assuming either associated with you hitting level cap or you finishing the main story.

I have officially been playing long enough that I have started trying to venture out and see what sort of community surrounds this game. For a largely single player focused experience… I was not expecting much. The steam forums were not exactly a great resource, but then again they never. However exploring further it appears that there is a fairly active scene supporting this game, so I thought I would spend some time this morning going into some of the resources I have found. The at a glance takeaway seems to be that a lot of the same sort of folks that supported Diablo 2 and Diablo 3… are supporting this game.

GrimCalc

This is the very first Grim Dawn resource that I stumbled across, because several build guides were linking to specs designed using it. Ultimately it is at its core a spec generation tool that allows you to fiddle with your talent points and devotions… and then links to a bunch of other resources not necessarily hosted on the same site. I thought it was pretty great and exactly the sort of thing I had been looking for. Unfortunately when you dip down into the build compendium, instead of having something more programmatic and searchable it links you to a forum post with a bunch of popular builds.

https://grimcalc.com/

Grim Checklist

This was linked to off of GrimCalc and appears to be a site that maintains checklists that you can create for your various characters to make sure you have hit certain objectives. At this point I don’t really know enough about the game to understand this, and as such I have not spent much time exploring it but I thought it was worth noting.

http://grimchecklist.com/

Grim Tools

Then in my journeys I stumbled across Grim Tools which appears to be the WoWHead of Grim Dawn websites. Effectively it does everything that the previously two links do… but adds a bunch more functionality as well. It of course has a robust build calculator that you can see above that not only manages Talents and Devotions but also drills into possible item builds. On top of that it has a database for all of the Items, Monsters and Pets… their own version of the Checklist Functionality and a World Map.

This later functionality was ultimately what drew me to the site. I was searching to try and find a good map that shows all of the world and stumbled across this application instead. Now given the limited area that I have cleared I had already thought that Grim Dawn was a really big game. However based on this map it seems that I have not come close to seeing the full scope of it. What is weird also is that as I go up through new areas… it appears like the areas themselves are getting much bigger in scale. What I find really impressive about this game is that legitimately you can walk from one end to another and the zones actually connect and synchronize without having to do any hand waving teleportation magic. This is something that Diablo 3 completely fails at with each act representing a disconnected island from the whole.

https://www.grimtools.com/

Grim Dawn Forums

Another interesting throwback with this game is the fact that it has official forums… and they really are a hub of information about the game. So many modern games have all but completely abandoned this concept, pushing all of the moderation duty to fan managed Reddits and the like. However Grim Dawn has what appears to be a very thriving forum culture where folks congregate to talk about the finer points of gameplay. All in all it does not appear to be super flamey either.

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/

Grim Dawn Reddit

Normally I am super leery of anything that advertises specifically that it is “Not a Political Correct Reddit”. This usually means that a given reddit has very specific political leanings of its own. However with that caveat it does not appear to be a bad place to find information. Overall the threads I’ve read up to this point have been largely positive, and quite frankly I have not really seen much that made me cringe. That said I purposefully sorted it towards the bottom of the list because Reddit is not always going to be the most useful place in the world… and I have seen subs turn on a dime when something shifts in the game. Still worth knowing about, and I suggest that you use the “Old” reddit for this one given that they have done nothing to update it for the modern interface.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Grimdawn/

Are you a Grim Dawn player, and is there a major resource that I completely missed in this list? Let me know about it. I purposefully excluded Graceful Dusk because it wasn’t nearly as good of an interface as GrimTools and didn’t appear to be as updated. If you want to try custom versions of Grim Dawn, the game supports modding and this thread on the forums appears to be the best resource for grabbing those. Finally there is a Discord server community if you are so included for that sort of thing.

Heir to the Throne

April 15, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about three things. Firstly watching the string of new releases coming out of Star Wars Celebration including a Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker trailer, a trailer for the game that EA has a high likelihood of cancelling before it sees the light of day, and some leaked footage of the strangely press blackout Mandolorian Television Series sizzle reel and trailer. It was also a weekend about watching the first episode of the final season of Game of Thrones… and I had honestly forgotten how good that show was after watching so many recent seasons of Walking Dead when effectively nothing much happens. Lastly it was a weekend devoted to playing heaps of Grim Dawn. When I started this recent stint I was sitting at roughly level 15 but throughout the weekend I pushed through to level 38 on my Warder character.

The only negative is that I found out this morning that running in Windows Borderless mode causes you to get some really fucked up screenshots. The above image is an example of this where it appears to be capturing only the tiniest square of the upper left hand corner of the screen where I would assume the 0/0 coordinators are located. This means that pretty much all of the cool screenshots that I thought I was getting over the weekend wound up to be duds, and I had to scramble around this morning to take a handful of relevant shots for the purpose of this blog post.

The big problem with Grim Dawn is it never seems to give you a firm boundary between acts, so it is very hard to track exactly where you are in the progression of the main story. As far as I can tell I am firmly in the middle of Act 3 and have managed to get my way to another large town called Homestead which appears to have everything that Devil’s Crossing has except maybe the Illusionist. I am now questing for a group of Inquisitors called the Black Legion that is now sending me out into the wastes to kill stuff. I like the look of Homestead a lot, but it is somewhat of a pain to navigate given its multiple levels and the fact that this game sometimes has trouble with ramps. Ultimately you have to take any sort of a subtle ramp or rise very slowly or you just keep hopping right back of it.

The only real negative take away from the weekend is the fact that Multiplayer is not as easy as Diablo 3. Even then there doesn’t really appear to be any multiplayer activity to do like Adventure mode and it would simply be either me joining someone elses game in progress or them joining mine. The deal breaker however is the fact that both players theoretically have to own the same set of expansions in order for it to work. I slowly picked up expansion content for this game as it was released and ultimately went on sale… and as such I have everything available. So it would take someone paying the $24.99 for the base game, and then an additional $39.97 for all of the DLC content to catch up to the level my client is so we could play games together.

As a result this is largely going to be a single player game for me, but I still feel like this is the real heir to the Diablo 2 crown. It is a happy medium between Diablo 3 and Path of Exile and feels just about right to actually go out and experience. What is most interesting about it is how well the story line plays out and who it is way more intelligible than that of Diablo 3. It actually has actions that make a difference on the world because in most of the quests you are given multiple paths to reach resolution. I am currently paying for my actions because the town I am visiting is apparently missing one NPC because I chose to enact my vengeance during the events of Act 2. Of all of the various NPCs I have chosen to take the combat route…. I am wondering which other ones will wind up making me miss something as a result.

Still a great game, still very much worth picking up. However given that this is a single player experience you can probably bide your time and pick it up when it hits a sale point favorable to you.

Faking Sealed Magic

April 12, 2019 by Belghast

This morning you are going to get a tutorial how to do something that likely no one has actually ever asked for. One of the more poorly documented features of Magic the Gathering Arena is the ability to directly challenge your friends. This is also one of the more poorly supported given that there is no construct for keeping a friends list or seeing who is actually online and available for dueling. Regardless… there technically is the functionality of being able to switch over to Direct Challenge mode and input your username + random digits BattleTag style handle in and purposefully link up to another human being that you actually known. Recently Tam, Mor and Lyle have been dueling each other and having a good time building decks with the limited pool of cards that they had available to them. This largely meant that the three of them were relatively on even footing, and playing some really fun and really janky magic that mimics a sealed environment.

The challenge is that both Kodra and I have spent a lot more of our time and by reference money on MTG Arena, which also means that we have a much wider pool of cards available for building decks. This also means that in theory we can build way more efficient decks that are probably less fair than having to be forced to play with the cards available and not necessarily the cards you want to play with. It got me to thinking… Magic the Gathering is a community that has an amazing set of web based tools to simple Price Lists like MTG Goldfish or amazing search engines like Scryfall. I thought surely someone had already come to the point of wanting to fake out a sealed pool of cards… and if not I would potentially be trying to build one myself and at least needed to research the APIs that would be available to me.

What I found was MTGen a website that allows you to replicate a lot of the common sealed formats and generate lists of cards replicating the experience of opening packs… including as you can see above the various seeded boosters that occur in pre-release tournaments. The site more or less gives me what I was wanting minus a few problems. What I actually want is the ability to simply say I want X of this pack and X of this pack and X of this pack… but for sake of this experience I deemed it good enough. Now the challenge that we have in front of us, that I experienced last night is that the default sealed formats expect you to take the pool of cards and build a 40 card deck with them. When you are doing direct duels in MTG Arena it requires both players to have a 60 card deck meaning we are going to have to increase the total number of packs opened. So instead of 6 packs for a normal sealed deck you would in theory open 9 packs as Kodra suggested to me last night. Again if doing the pre-release format you would be adding 3 more packs… and thankfully the MTGen site supports this sort of functionality.

The only NEGATIVE however is that MTGen does not support Magic The Gathering Arena as an export format… and of course Wizards of the Coast had to be difficult and could not simply recycle Magic Online. This again lead me to find a work around. I figured MTGO would be the most common format for converting deck lists from that online tool to Arena. So I rolled with that and found that ultimately I just needed a list of cards minus the Sideboard heading. So when you copy the cards out from MTGen make sure to trip that first line.

Now we move on to another website… MTGArena.Pro and more importantly their Deck Converter tool. This allowed me to paste in that list of cards that I got from MTGen and it converted it to the more contorted MTGArena format. You can assign a deck name if you so choose, because the default in Arena will simple by “Imported Deck” if you do not. I personally left it alone given that I would not want to accidentally pick one of these “Jank in Progress” decks for playing proper magic with, and at least I would know if it was still named Imported Deck I should stay away. The site provides you a handy copy output button, which will place it on the clipboard stack… which is important because Magic the Gathering Arena works weird.

Lastly you go over to your Decks section of Magic the Gathering Arena and click Import… at which point it will automagically try and import anything you have put in the copy/paste buffer. This is not the behavior I expected… I would have instead expected to be presented a file dialog to go find a text file on my hard drive. I guess in theory they have gone this route to eventually make mobile support easier? I guess at this point all mobile devices pretty much have robust copy and paste functionality.

I realize I said lastly on the step before… but you are presented with a list of your cards that have been plugged into Arena. Now you can simply weed out the cards you don’t want to play and build your own janky sealed deck. There will of course be problems if you don’t actually own a copy of the card and as such will have to craft it using the proxies you have earned up to that point. This is also why you might want to draft a larger pool of packs if you happen to have a smaller pool of cards available. It also might steer you to certain colors, but while this is not a perfect solution it does at least allow you to manually replicate sealed environments and play directly against your friends in this manner without having to hope to get into the same draft or sealed event on Arena.