Blog Features

Heavensward Hype

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AggroChat 47 – Scrabble is for Olds

Last night is another case of us sitting down, saying we had nothing to talk about… and then ending up talking for an hour and a half about everything imaginable. We talked about Ashgar and the insanity he is currently going through working on his Relic Novus in Final Fantasy XIV. We talked my recent journey back into Bravely Default and how that game requires a certain measure of degenerate play to defeat encounters after a certain point. We talk about Tam’s brush with near death as he decides that no one should ever be bit by a Black Widow spider because it hurts like hell. I talk about my experiences in Blackrock Foundry and the World of Warcraft selfie toy filling up my twitter feed. I talk about hitting level 80 on my first character in Guild Wars 2… and how empty it feels since the last 15 levels or so were essentially given to me for logging in daily.

Our longest discussion however that spawned the quote that I am using for the title of this show was about board games and miniature gaming. We talk about “long” board games, those taking several hours to play out… and the frustration of having to devote that much time to a game you are essentially “behind the curve” in the entire time. We talk about games that require less time to get into and play, and that can be played for a number of times in a single evening. This also spawns a discussion into miniature gaming talking about the problems with Warmachine and Warhammer 40k contrasted with some of the strengths of Infinity. As always it is a long rambling discussion between a bunch of friends, and since you apparently like that as AggroChat listeners… then this should be a banner episode.

Heavensward Hype

ffxiv_lvl60_warrior Yesterday was a pretty huge day for Final Fantasy XIV in that Yoshi P was at Pax East giving a presentation on the upcoming expansion.  Thankfully it was live streamed to the internet, and you can check out the entire presentation from yesterday over on their twitch video on demand page.  Honestly at first I thought it was going to be a disappointing repeat of all of the information that had come out of the Tokyo Game Show back in December.  The show started with essentially revealing the same information about the Au Ra race and the three new classes that happened during that show.  However quickly it segwayed into showing us things like the amazing level 60 class sets.  The above image is that of the Warrior set, and while I still intend to play Dark Knight as my main…  I have to say I will be rapidly leveling Warrior as well.  Instead of breaking rocks with axes… they seem to have just skipped a step and made the axe itself out of a rock.

ffxiv_lvl60_dragoon Since this is essentially the expansion of the Dragoon…  you would expect the level 60 class armor to be amazing.  As the above image shows it was well worth the wait.  My biggest hope is that they don’t have the female “belly hole” problem that the earlier dragoon armor had.  I have to say though that I will continue poking things with a spear if for no reason other than the collect this gear.  As usual I was not quite so amped about the caster sets, but then again I never really am.  I have no clue what is going on with the Black Mage set , at least  the current set is something I would happily wear.  This set is a bit more “demon lady gaga” than anything else I can think of.  If you want to check out all of the new class armors you should hit up this youtube video that shows each set in action.  I am happy that maybe just maybe I will finally have a Bard set that I am not ashamed to wear.

Not a Spring Release

ffxiv_heavenswardrelease The biggest news to come out of yesterday is a firm and concrete release date for the first Final Fantasy XIV expansion… Heavensward.  Within the next few weeks they are apparently releasing a brand new benchmark application to allow us to test out the Direct X 11 changes, and play with all of the racial customization options on the Au Ra.  If this works like the previous benchmark it should allow us to export our saved characters and then import them into our actual game client.  On March 16th the pre-orders will open and like usual the physical collectors edition is going to have some sort of a big dragon statute pack in.  Apparently earlier they had announced that we would be getting a flying dragon mount as part of the collectors edition as well, which in truth are the type of rewards I care a bout.  All of this time we had heard “spring 2015” for the release date, but it turns out that the game will be launching on June 23rd with early access starting June 19th…  so not spring but summer.

It turns out that they apparently did have a May date in mind for the launch, and they tried to make it.  However as Yoshi P apologized they wanted to make sure they had a very polished product for launch.  I for one support pushing back by a few weeks to make sure we have a really polished game, because really…  the first expansion is a crucial time for any game.  I want to make sure they are able to keep this quiet momentum they seem to have going into the new content.  That said we also still have one full major patch waiting in the wings, and I am not sure there would have been enough time for us to really get to complete that content before the expansion anyways.  I feel like that is the prime difference here as there is with other expansions.  Most expansions land at the tail end of a six month or longer lull with no new content.  In the case of Warlords of Draenor it was at the end of a 16 month lull…  even with the impending expansion… they still have content releases planned up to the moment 3.0 launches.  So in the mean time I will be working on my crafting…  because it sounds like we are going to need a team of crafters to complete our free company airship.

The Bunny Incident

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I have a pretty bad habit of wanting to spawn a feature on my blog and then having it die after a few posts.  Anyone remember Steampowered Sundays for example?  That one I still want to get back to eventually, but with the whole editing and posting of aggrochat often times spilling over into Sunday morning I simply ran out of available time there.  All of this said the other day I was working on providing some information for Sypster on a feature he is working on.  It got me thinking how many tall tales from the mmoverse I have in me.  There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia.  I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper.  Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.

The Bunny Incident

Wrath of the Lich King was both an amazing and an extremely frustrating expansion for my raid.  We had some of our greatest moments, but also some of our most frustrating experiences.  All of which lead me to be a very grumpy person a good deal of the time.  Most of you know me as the generally positive person that I portray on my blog and through social media.  This is all an act, or at least it was when I first embarked upon the journey.  By nature I can be pretty cynical and pessimistic, and it is a sheer act of will that I fight this every day striving to find the silver lining in every cloud.  I spent a good deal of time “faking it until I made it” as it were, and for the most part it worked.  It helped to pull me out of one of the greatest funks in my life.  Today I am going to uncork the events of what lives in infamy within the guild has come to call “the bunny incident”.

When Wrath launched we hit it by storm and our twenty five man completely wrecked Naxxramas 2.0.  We thought we were awesome… but the problem was that the content was way easier than we were used to.  As such our raid got soft and too used to being able to walk into the zone and destroy everything around us.  So when Ulduar launched… it was like a harsh reality check.  Everything about the raid was infinitely harder, and required every single player to pay attention and perform to the best of their ability.  This was not helped by the fact that during this time we had a lot of politics in the decisions behind our raid composition.  We had a number of situations where we had one extremely highly performing raid member, tied to a piece of dead weight… that we were forced to drag along with us in order to get the high performing member.

The Bad Times

Additionally during Ulduar we went through a revolving door of tanks, making it a constant struggle to try and teach a third tank that was drastically undergeared how to survive the completely silly amount of damage that the encounters in Ulduar were heaping upon us.  None of this made for particularly happy times for me.  When the going got tough…  people started flaking out and simply not attending.  There were many nights that people would be available for the farmed content, but when it came to a progression night full of wipes we were barely able to scrape together twenty five people.  It seemed like every step forward, caused us to take a giant leap backwards.  We spent a lot of time during this period wiping to content we had already had on farm because we lacked the resources to really keep going.

We did what any raid would do… and went into overdrive trying to recruit solid people to bolster our waning numbers.  With this came a clash of cultures, because quite honestly we were a much more forgiving raid than most.  This caused some of our new recruits to not really take things as seriously as they should.  At times it felt like trying to teach a kindergarten classroom how to file their yearly tax returns…  but we mostly struggled through at the cost of my own sanity.  We had stabilized and were pushing forward, and one night we were making some very serious progress on Kologarn.  In fact I would say the mood in the raid was pretty jolly as folks were finally starting to get how they needed to move, and when we needed to break people out of the hands.  I felt pretty confident that we would be able to beat the boss that night.

The Event

I believe it was Thalen that had just finished delivering some advise to tweak things up a bit… and I in my normal antsy fashion was pacing back and forth asking if I could pull yet.  I tend to get super impatient before a pull, because I pump myself up for the fight and get the adrenaline coursing… and then have to do something with the nervous energy until go time.  I had just started running in when it happened.  On of our players decided it would be funny to use the the Blossoming Branch on me as I ran in, turning me into a bunny.  The problem is while in bunny form you can take no actions, and I could not click it off in time before Kologarn destroyed me, and subsequently wiped the raid.  Looking back upon it now…  it is kind of funny, but at the time I was not amused at all.

I don’t really know what I said exactly, in some way I almost blacked out during the event.  All I do know is that I apparently proceeded to curse and rant on voice chat for a good ten minutes about what just happened unleashing all of the pent up frustrations I had about the raid group, the lack of effort some individuals were putting into it, and wrapping it all up in a neat rage fueled bow.  I do remember saying that I would be going through the logs line by line after the raid to find out who it was that did it, and they would no longer be welcome in our raid from that point on.  I think I went on to say that I would go so far as to tell the other raid leaders about the incident, because at that time in our servers history… pretty much all of the raid leaders knew each other and talked regularly.  When you got blacklisted by one, you often times got blacklisted by all of them.

The Coming Down

While the guy who did it did not fess up during the heat of the moment…  he did come to me later and apologize.  He went so far as to mail every person in the raid some gold for the repair bill he caused.  He truly felt sorry for doing it, and we didn’t end up kicking him from the raid, or anything severe.  Basically this was the moment I realized that I needed to change something, because I was feeling entirely too much stress and frustration over a game.  I apparently scarred some of the raid members for life, and for the rest of that expansion it was like they were gunshy that “Angry Bel” would come out again.  It is still talked about in our guild, as a sort of cautionary tale…  like “Don’t make Bel mad, you won’t like him when he’s angry” sort of thing.  Its all in good fun now, but I know at the time I quite literally scared some of our members.

I tried really hard to take less of a direct role with some of the raid decisions.  This was the era when I realized that I could not be both the friendly happy guild master everyone knew.. and be the raid leader that everyone needed at the same time.  I think this was really the beginning of the end with me and World of Warcraft, but I ultimately did not leave until Cataclysm.  I kept changing things up trying to keep the game viable.  During Crusaders Coliseum for example I switched from Warrior main to Death Knight main, but regardless of what I did there was still a pool of bitterness there.  This has been the event I think of every time I consider leading a raid again.  Ultimately we have to know the limits, and know what will happen to us deep down inside when we push those limits too far.  Now I am happy to be the cruise director of the guilds I am part of, and the man with the recruitment van.  I strive on a daily basis to remain the “Happy Bel” folks have come to appreciate and keep the “angry wrathful god of vengeance” locked up deep inside.

Liebster Award Questionnaire

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The Liebster

The Liebster award is this strange thing that circulates through the blogosphere every so often.  The idea is that you answer some stuff about yourself and then nominate some other people you know to answer a set of your questions.  It’s a cute “get to know you” process that I ultimately I have enjoyed reading in the past from other blogs.  This morning the ever awesome Mystical Mesmer blog included me in their nomination form, and as such I will  be taking their quiz.  The problem is..  I have to fess up and say that I was nominated before and somehow missed it.  I tend to read blogs in bursts, rather than daily… so there are times it will take me days to catch up.  During one of these lulls the ever awesome Zuulzilla nominated me, and I did not find out until a truly embarrassing amount of time had passed.  As such I never actually got around to filling her form out.  This morning I am going to do something a little bit odd…  I am going to try and answer both posts.

Zuulzilla Questions

1. Who, what, and/or where does your blogging inspiration come from?

Honestly I have no clue where the words that I type on a daily basis come from.  My blog is very much a stream of thought of whatever happens to be important enough to me to trickle up each morning.  I am thankful that I seem to be able to write a blog post on queue, but I am also constantly afraid that at some point the spigot will shut off.

2. What do you/did you want to be when you grow up?

When I was a small child… I wanted to be an Astronaut Doctor Fireman…  a job that was apparently an amalgam of all three.  During Middle School I wanted to be a Scientist of some sort… and then High School it was a Commercial Artist.  I ultimately ended up becoming a programmer because I fell involve with the World Wide Web and HTML in 1993.

3. What advice do you have for someone just starting out in blogging?

Don’t box yourself into a corner when you set up your blog.  Blogging about a specific game is awesome, until you stop playing that game.  While it might be harder to get traction, I highly suggest you just do your own thing and over time an audience will find you.

4. What are some things on your bucket list?

I would absolutely love to visit Europe.  For the most part I have not travelled terribly far from my home here in Oklahoma.  I grew up an hour from where I live, and have spent most of my life in a two hour radius.  While travel stresses me out, I would like to do more of it.

5. What clique were you in in high school?

To some extent I was grandfathered into the “cool kids” group, but didn’t end up hanging out with them much.  Over time I built my own group of misfits, that my association with them… somewhat extended a bit of a bubble of protection over them.  So essentially I made my own Clique.

6. You are exiled to an island and can take three items. What do you choose?

I guess I am going to go utilitarian here…  a really good shovel, a really strong machete style knife, and a solar powered kindle loaded full  of books?  That exists right?

7. If you could go back 5 years and share one piece of advice with yourself, what would you say?

Work really hard on not caring quite so much what others think about you, and focusing on just doing your own thing.  Also I would hopefully embark upon my “positivity crusade” earlier.

8. Who’s your favorite Superhero?

I am bad at picking favorites…  but I would have to say the super hero that I will always gravitate towards is Batman.  I love that he is just an extremely trained and well equipped normal human being, rather than someone with super powers.   I like that idea.

9. Favorite place to visit?

Used book stores… namely Half Priced Books chain.  I love the smell of a book store, especially one that trades in older books.  There is just something calming about it.  While I don’t read as much as I would like… I love being surrounded by books.

10. Dinosaurs or Dragons? Why?

Dragon, because Dinosaurs are just bit lizards…  whereas Dragons tend to be giant fire breathing and flying lizards.  It would be hard to beat that combination.

Mystical Mesmer Questions

 

1. What are the three major elements of your ideal video game?

Melee Combat, RPG Style Gear Acquisition, and Sandbox Exploration.  That essentially is the appeal of a Skyrim type game for me.  Give me a world where I can beat things up, get shiny new things, and wander around aimlessly finding interesting tidbits along the way.

2. Big city, suburb, or countryside?

Generally speaking I am a suburbanite.  I grew up in the relative countryside, in a very tiny town.  As soon as I could I ran off to the “big city”.  However my version of big city is considerably smaller than say a New York or a San Francisco.  I am pretty comfortable in my suburban existence, and would hate to give up all the convenience of having the ability to get practically anything I could need within a mile of the house.

3. What’s the origin of your blogging name?

It all started with the fact that my intention was to do a tanking blog, since that is the thing I tend to do most in video games.  I wanted to be clever, so I mashed together the word “Aggronaut” to represent someone how voyages through “Aggro”… aka a Tank.  The domain name was available, and I snapped it up.  The “Tales of the” part just came natural since I would be spinning tall tales about my adventures.

4. Aeris lives and you’re hired to retell Final Fantasy 7. What role does she play?

I feel like I was the one person who never really liked Aeris in the first place.  I liked Tifa or Yuffie so much more in 7.  I would have happily never used her at all, but she was a pretty great heal bot… so I guess had she survived she would STILL be a heal bot?  I pretty much beat the game using Cloud, Cid and Vincent…  so yeah.

5. What’s your favorite biome?

So here comes some strangeness…  I hate the winter and I hate snow and ice in the real world.  That said I am always drawn towards snowy mountain biomes in games.  If given a choice those tend to be my ideal settings, so for example even though I am human in GW2, I always end up going to the Norn capital of Hoelbrak and was always a fan of Ironforge in World of Warcraft.

6. Write a haiku love poem to this morning’s breakfast.

crunchy crackers nutty and sweet
slowly sipping delicious coffee, caffeinating my brain
cup always emptied too soon

7. What’s your preferred device for reading blogs?

I tend to use Feedly because it allows me to shift between reading blogs on my phone and reading blogs in a browser window keeping track of what I have read between the two.  For podcasts I just started using Pocket Casts which does something similar.

8. If you were to start up a video game company, what would you name it?

I think “Confused Monkey” is a name that would adequately describe me and my style.

9. Which of the Seven Dwarves would you be and why?

I would probably say Grumpy or Dopey…  my friends would probably say Doc.  I tend to generally be the ring leader of things even when I am not technically the leader.

10. What form of exercise do you find to be the most effective?

I tend to prefer walking.  I am looking forward to it warming up so we can start walking daily again.

11. How long is a piece of string?

Always about an inch shorter than you actually need it to be.

 

My Questions

Admittedly this is the hardest part about doing this… is coming up with your own set of questions.  I stole a few here and there, and came up with my own along the way as well.

  1. What are the three major elements of your ideal video game?
  2. What’s the origin of your blogging name?
  3. What is your favorite biome?
  4. What is your favorite genre of movie?
  5. How did you get started blogging?
  6. What is your fondest childhood memory?
  7. What is your favorite in game “mount” and why?
  8. Do you collect “mini pets” in game, and if so do you have a favorite?
  9. Cats, Dogs or Something else?
  10. Describe your relationship with your automobile.
  11. What role of the holy trinity of tank/dps/healer fits your personality most?

My Victims

I’ve seen several versions of this questionnaire over time, and all of them seem to have different rules for how and why you should nominate someone.  Since the last version didn’t actually come with any of that information attached I am just going to free form this.  My idea is picking folks who are not necessarily in the same social circles… so that hopefully this spreads further!

  1. Simcha at Simcha’s Many Lives
  2. Murf at Murf Versus
  3. Braxwolf at Gaming Conversations
  4. Sagacyte at Digital Adventures of Sagacyte
  5. Cuppy at Cuppyville

Thanks for reading and I still feel like I have to apologize to Zuu for taking forever to actually do this, and thanks to Mystical for nominating me again and giving me the push to do it.

Multigaming

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Goodbye Maxis

simcitydos I technically entered the PC gaming world significantly later than many of my peers.  My family did not get a PC Compatible until 1992 when we took home a 386×16 from Sears and Roebuck with a colossal two full megs of ram.  The very first game that I purchased for it was a copy of Sim City.  There was just something about the idea of building my own town that appealed to me.  Everything about the game was a bit cludgy including the black text on red note card that served as copy protection… but quite honestly I did not care.  I was getting to build a world on screen and my enjoyment soared once I learned that I could put in a cheat and simply build freely without rules.  That right there was the great possibility for Sim City, that you could color outside the lines and create some really interesting stuff in the process.

Yesterday the news broke that Electronic Arts has shuttered the Maxis Emeryville studio that was the birthplace of the various Sim franchise games that we all loved.  I will admit that the last version of Sim City was the only version that I did not purchase at release.  Quite honestly I still have not purchased it, because it felt too icky.  Initially I set back watching as friends got frustrated with the online only functionality, and ultimately had my nose turned up at the Sims-like piecemeal DLC bonanza that started.  What made Sim City so great was that it was this toolbox for us to design our own cities of the future…  but when you start attaching real world price tags to those cities, it just feels wrong.  Electronic Arts clearly knows what they are doing, as they still manage to turn a profit in spite of all the various heinous activities they have done in the past.  I just find it deeply saddening that yet another “classic” studio has in essence been destroyed by them.  They now get to party with the other dead studios like Origin Systems, Westwood, Bullfrog… and I feel like I am missing a few names from the list.

Capping Poetics

ffxiv 2015-03-04 19-55-26-25 Right now I am on a bit of a mission in Final Fantasy XIV.  With the current access to both Carboncoat and Carbontwine through the weekly quest, I have been trying to do everything I can to get my poetics gear quickly.  I freely admit I was doing fairly good at making sure I hit the poetics cap every single week, until the launch of Warlords of Draenor.  After that I fell off the deep end and only really returned to playing Final Fantasy XIV on a nightly basis after the 2.5 patch.  As such my poetics gear is woefully behind where it should be had I been as diligent as I could have been.  Thankfully this just means that I am essentially in the same boat as the rest of our free company.  So now I am trying to at the very least get in a single expert roulette each day.  Last night I spent my night running several different kinds of roulettes to try and make up for lost time seeing as I didn’t actually get any on Tuesday.

One would think that doing the highest level repeatable content in the game would mean that I would run into some assholes.  I know Kodra ran into a single elitist player from the Death and Taxes guild the other night, but in truth most of my interactions have been largely positive.  In Keeper of the Lake that run went as smoothly as I could have possibly imagined, with players actively conversing and talking about what needs to be done.  Then I got Snowcloak and the moment we zoned in, a player said that it was their first time there.  As such I took up the role of giving them the information that they need to be able to complete the fights successfully.  We had a single wipe from the tank over pulling, but no one got grumpy and we just kept pushing forward.  It is nights like last night that make me realize what a rare community Final Fantasy XIV really has.

Multigaming

gw032 The other day we came to the realization that our Free Company has been back playing Final Fantasy XIV for around seven months.  I think I already commented on this being some what of a record for us, with quite honestly our group rarely sticking in one place for more than a couple of months at a time.  We are very rarely one month players, but by the same token when a new game comes out we rarely make it past the three month marker.  In truth Final Fantasy XIV represents one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of playing any game ever for me.  I played World of Warcraft for about seven years without pause, Everquest for 3, and Dark Age of Camelot for 2.  As such Final Fantasy XIV sits as fourth place already in this hierarchy of longevity.  I think the reason why it is working so well this time is the fact that I am still playing other games at the same time, and because of this Final Fantasy XIV feels like a constantly fresh experience.

For years I have been enthralled by the schedule that Sypster keeps with his gaming, because he is the only person that I know who has quite literally a specific game that he plays on a given day of the week.  The other day I realized that maybe this is precisely why this current volley of gaming has been so successful.  I have a very distinct schedule, I just didn’t realize it until I started thinking about my various in game commitments.  On Tuesday and Thursday for example I am raiding in World of Warcraft, so as such I tend to devote those days entirely to that game regardless of what else I might be playing.  Monday and recently Saturday before we record our podcast we have been raiding in Final Fantasy XIV so those days naturally become something that I log in and devote my entire energy to that game.  Everything else is pretty variable, but I tend to mix in at least a little Guild Wars 2 daily so I can get the login bonuses, and lately quite a bit of Sky Saga.  So ultimately my schedule seems to have enough structure to keep me focused, but enough freedom to know that I am only a few days away from having a more freeform night of gaming.  It seems to work for me, and I am hoping that means I have finally stabilized in my gaming habits… as quite honestly I had gotten tired of jumping from game to game every two to three months.