grouping Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Flame Broiled Defeat

February 1, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I met my first real defeat in Monster Hunter World and completely failed a quest. That quest was me attempting to beat Anjanath in the Ancient Forest, which admittedly I am super happy I did the tracking work I already did for this mob in spite of what everyone has told me. I managed to find it super fast and now we get into the part of the show where I talk about my horrible ideas. I have thought this thing was serious business since the first moment I saw it… and as a result I went ahead and threw up a flare to see if anyone wanted to join me. Within moments I had a full party of people tasking on this monster and in the grand scheme I thought it was going pretty well… then I started noticing other players fainting. It was around or about this point that I remembered that you get four faints per party… not per person. So when I finally fainted myself… it happened to be the fourth one our party had gotten and the quest immediately failed out. In theory I should have just tried this on my own because I was managing to land some significant hits in on the big guy but I guess the truth is I just sorta like running with party tactics going on. I have been joining other folks quests and enjoying trying to learn how to play off of the strengths and weaknesses of the other weapons. Mostly I am wanting to learn how not to trip up other players with the Longsword which has been a problem that other people have reported with the weapon. As far as I could tell this was not actually happening because I tend to favor surgical strikes rather than just flailing away with R2 sweeping attacks. My goal for tonight is to seek revenge and down a flame breathing dinosaur.

My enjoyment of this series is way more focused on playing with my Palico than probably any other element. So much so that the first thing I do whenever I drop down on a map is find where the free roaming tailrider Palicos are and go get one. I love the sequence of events that happens when your Palico meets one out in the wild. They get together and then high five and cheer… and moments later you have a new friend following you around and helping you. This is literally the best part of monster hunter and the most purest joy I feel in the game. Last night I found a Palico wearing the Horizon Zero Dawn Watcher suit and I just about lost my mind. It too had the Pukei-Pukei bow equipped so it was an interesting combination of two mostly ranged characters helping me out. My weapon development is sort of stalled out at the moment because I am not exactly sure what I need to get the next ranks as I have been using the Bone Shotel III for a few nights now. I can in theory make an elemental version… but its base attack is slightly lower so for the moment I am sticking with what I have.

I will close out this mornings post with a video of one of the varied Monster Hunter World cooking sequences. I just cannot explain how happy the Palicos and the Felyne chefs make me. I find myself getting a meal cooked even when I am just going to go wandering around in the wastes doing nonsense for an hour completing bounties. There are a lot of people who lament the change in the cooking song, but I never knew the previous one so its not like I am missing anything particular. What I love is the completely over the top cooking sequence… which admittedly was also one of the things I loved about Final Fantasy XV so maybe I just like digitally rendered food? I’ve tried to play Generations again but find it particularly hard to control the game with my existing 3DS XL… which is still way too small for my tastes. As I have talked about in the past… I have large hands and a lot of controllers just feel awkward in them. I play PS4 with the Hori FPS Plus which itself is a way larger controller than the default PS4. It really makes me wish that Generations existed for the Switch because I think I could get into the game there knowing I had the option of playing docked if I want to… which admittedly I play switch docked 90% of the time. Side note… I consider the default Xbox One controller a little small as well and similarly have found an aftermarket alternative that I love in the form of the no longer made Power A Fusion Pro. Thankfully I have managed to pick up a couple of those… one for PC and one for Xbox One off Ebay for way cheaper than that Amazon listing.

Beyond the Light

October 10, 2017 by Belghast

For the last few weeks I have been making contact with a lot of players in preparation for the launch of Destiny 2 on the PC platform. One of the patterns that I have noticed is that while there will be a ton of us playing, there are a significant number of different clans in the works. Even among my own guild-mates it has been decided to go with a Greysky Armada clan rather than joining another, so I will end up splitting time between that on the PC and Tequila Mockingbird on the PS4. Basically the common theme that I kept seeing was that we were going to be a pretty fragmented bunch going forward. Ages ago I created the Beyond the Light discord, and then never really did anything with it. The theory behind it was to have a clan agnostic place for folks to come together and get help doing stuff in Destiny. Since the early marketing material for Destiny 2 talked about us losing our connection with the light… it seemed like a really fitting name. The idea is to create a sort of hub for our little corner of the gaming verse, and facilitate cross clan activities. The channel names themselves are pretty general purpose and I decided to follow a pattern of the various weapon foundries for voice channels. The idea being that anyone can use any channel for any purpose that is needed at the moment.

The reason why I chose a discord rather than a slack or even a new Blizzard Social area… is the fact that Destiny 2 PC based voice chat is horrible. I am not sure how many of you actually tried using this during the PC beta, but it was horrific. Currently we only have about fourteen members, but I figure the discord will grow as we get closer and closer to the PC launch. There are break out channels for the various classes and we’ve already gotten into some discussions on Warlocks and Titans thus far. I’ve largely treated the PS4 launch as a sort of extended paid beta process for the eventual PC launch, and I have attempted to gather up as much information as I could along the way. If nothing else it should be a good place to find people to go do heroic public quests with and maybe even eventually pick up raids. There are already Destiny themed discords out there, but honestly they felt huge and impersonal… or in the case of the one associated with the reddit… fairly toxic at times. I wanted to create a happy place to hang and enjoy this game with all of the people who may or may not share the same banner as me. Effectively everyone is welcome pending they behave themselves. There isn’t a lot of formal structure right now but I figure that will come with time.

The other big news of the week is that Iron Banner is back and its reset day! Like every other activity this one is going to be based on a token system, and I have to say I really like this. There are a lot of complaints from players who like seeing weapons drop, and technically they still do in modes like the Crucible. However I would far rather have a predictable path to get rewards that I can work my way towards than to rely entirely on luck. The other aspect of this that I absolutely love is the fact that tokens go into the shared account inventory, meaning you can grind out the rewards on one character and then swap over to another character to consume them. I personally plan on holding all of my Iron Banner tokens until I have completed the powerful rewards milestones for the week so that I can potentially get items at a higher light level than where I am currently standing. Right now I see a handful of weapons that look really interesting, including an Iron Banner themed version of my beloved Origin Story. Additionally I think the gear set this time is amazing for Titans at least, so I hope to gather up most of a set there as well. This evening my goal is to eat some Tikka Masala that I have going in the crock pot… and play a bunch of Iron Banner. Side note you should be able to double dip the Call to Arms weekly milestone while doing Iron Banner so if you have not unlocked that… I highly suggest you do Lord Shaxx’s two early crucible milestones so you can start working towards yet another luminous engram.

Toasty on MMORPGs

May 5, 2016 by Belghast

The Decline

One of the more interesting trends that I have picked up on, has to do with my own blog. It feels like the more I talk about Destiny, the lower my reader numbers dip. I guess it makes sense, as I started this blog out with World of Warcraft and moved towards other MMORPGs as well. Destiny has a slightly different audience and not necessarily the sort of one that really reads blogs. The Destiny community is largely contained within a combination of Reddit, Twitch and YouTube. I don’t have a lot to say about this, but I just found it interesting. On one hand I hate that I am alienating a bunch of readers, and on the other hand in order for me to keep doing this daily blogging thing… I have to be writing about what is interesting me. At this very moment that is Destiny and Diablo, and nothing much in the traditional MMO camp. Now I have logged into a bunch of MMOs in the last few months, but none of them really seemed to hold my attention past that initial login. Each time there was something that would ultimately cause me to log out. It might be that my bags were a mess, or that I couldn’t remember what I was last doing. Ultimately I found a ready excuse and used it to “nope” the hell out of the game. The problem however I think is somewhere in me.

Right now I am finding myself enjoying games that shower me in loot, and games that allow me to have engaging solo experiences. Granted I have been spending a lot of time mooching off of folks as they run high end content in Diablo 3, but when I log into that game I can go off and do something by myself that feels like I am moving towards some goal. In Destiny no matter what I do I can always be working on getting that next faction package, or even spending time in the crucible hoping for that next 335 item. These two games specifically play extremely well by myself or with friends, and that is just something that I can’t say for MMORPGs right now. In most cases the only real way to get good gear is through raiding, and that takes a time commitment I am just not willing to do right now. There is no path for me to piddle my way to victory, and at the moment I don’t want to commit to much more than that. Raiding in Destiny has felt far more “à la carte” and I think the small six player raid size helps that. It seems easy to pull together a raid group, and even easier to pull together a three player team. For example we spent last night doing Challenge of Elders and it honestly felt just as engaging and rewarding as doing an MMORPG raid group.

Burnt Out Genre

For awhile now I have kept thinking that sooner or later I will get over this funk. That I will get that drive to go off and play an MMORPG. For example I really want to have the desire to play Final Fantasy XIV and to “get the band back together”. However there is just some wall keeping me from getting back into it and enjoying it. I’ve patched up the client a few times, but I know when I do log in… someone is going to do the “Bels Back!” thing and I will feel guilty when I log out a few minutes later because I and confused as to what to do. It is not a time issue, because I still have the same amount of time I ever did… it seems to be an attention span issue. Diablo 3 and Destiny both reward me for spending ANY time with them… and there is always an explosion of shiny colored loot just waiting on me around the corner. The grind of an MMO is a much more slow burn, with large gaps of time between those moments of excitement. For years I played MMORPGs as a way to hang out with friends, but thanks to tools like Slack, Discord, and Band… I can take my group of friends with me wherever I happen to go. I no longer need to rely on the MMO as a chat client, and when that happened I guess the games lost a part of their hold on me.

I guess it hit me last night when technically I was scheduled to be raiding in World of Warcraft, and I didn’t even remember that it was a thing I was supposed to be doing. The leader said over chat that I was just burnt out on WoW, which is a bit true… but its more than that. I feel like I am burnt out on MMOs in general. I’ve been rabidly playing this one genre since 2000, and I feel like maybe I just need other types of games in my life. The parts of the MMO that I really liked, which were the acquisition of new stuff and the feeling of constantly evolving your persistent character… those things have been exported to pretty much every single genre out there. I guess I realized this was happening when nothing that was coming out, that actually excited me… was an MMO. There are plenty of things to be excited for out there, and I think Black Desert is one of those games that I would have loved… were I not over-saturated on MMORPGs. I am not really sure if I have a point this morning. It sucks that I am driving away readers, but I just don’t think I can write with the same love and excitement that I used to about MMORPGs right now. I keep hoping at some point I will climb out of this hole, and be able to log into Final Fantasy XIV and be excited again for story and world building, However in the meantime… you are probably going to see a lot more talk of Diablo 3 and Destiny because that is where my attention and excitement has landed.

Working as a Group

June 21, 2014 by Belghast

Different Expectations

Lately there has been some discontent in the guild, and it has made me painfully aware that different people are looking for vastly different things. There is no right or wrong answer here, but simply a case of wildly different expectations of what they have come to expect out of a guild and MMO relationship. I am not speaking for the guild or anyone in it in making this post, but I thought it might be useful for me to outline how I personally view a guild. Like I said just because I see something this way doesn’t mean there are not a wide variety of other opinions on what is proper and good in guild etiquette. However I’ve learned the fastest way to resolve any rough spots is to simply outline what you are expecting out of an arrangement.

Each of us comes to MMO gaming and guilds from a different set of past experiences. While some of these overlap many times they do not, and that is where the misunderstandings stem from. Massively Multiplayer games are not this monolithic experience, regardless of how we might think of them as such. For me I come from a raider background, and even though I am mostly “casual” these days it still colors everything about my gaming experience. Some players approach a guild from a PVP standpoint and then get frustrated when not everyone embraces the aspect of the game they enjoy the most. Similarly role-players could feel left out in the cold when the guild as whole does not share their interest for deep personal character development. While we might all think we play exactly the same game… that is almost never the case.

Working as a Group

I love doing big epic things with my guildies like raids or dungeons or even some pvp encounters. The problem is… that while I love grouping up for these few cases… I don’t ever want to quest with another person. I did Star Wars the Old Republic as a dedicated Duo… and found the experience to be both rewarding on one hand, but deeply claustrophobic on another. I’ve always found the group leveling experience, and especially the group questing experience to be extremely chafing. Someone is always a quest ahead of the group and someone is always one or two quests behind. There is a constant awkward struggle to try and keep this many armed abomination moving forward efficiently. As a result my preference will always be to quest alone, and have my personal time.

That is not to say I am not willing to group up at a moments notice… but I want there to be a “purpose”. If you need help killing this or that objective, or if there is an over world dungeon that you just can’t quite survive by yourself… those are awesome times to group. That said I like there to be a fixed duration of the grouping and a fixed goal in mind. I am a truly horrible group mate, because I will wander off on my own constantly. I’ve spent so much of my gaming time with other people depending on me for this or that, and when I level it is my time where I get to not give a shit about the needs or wants of others. When we are in a dungeon and I am tanking however… I am all about the needs of the group and the goal of getting us through the dungeon successfully.

The Reality Check

For most of my gaming experience I figured most players felt like I did, and preferred to quest alone. However over the last few weeks I’ve come to the realization that there is a specific group of player that wants to literally be grouped up 24/7 and working together towards everything. I think this is both noble and cool to have a leveling buddy like that… but I want no part of it at all. What is cool is that there are enough of these folks that they should be able to form their own little “band of brothers” and conquer the world together, but they lack the spark to do just that. I guess in part I didn’t even realize players wanted this since the ability to solo at all for me at least feels like a hard fought battle. In the early generations of MMO games, grouping was required to do anything at all, and it often meant a multiple hour long commitment.

I cut my teeth playing Everquest, and as a Dwarven Cleric… trying to solo anything was an act of futility and my nights were often dictated by whoever happened to be tanking for the group. I felt helpless and completely out of control, being forced to depend on someone else for my fun. It was a feeling I did not like one bit. So when I entered more modern games, I would pick whatever archetype could solo well and be relatively self sufficient. Thankfully these were almost always tanks, since they mostly had the survival ability to take whatever the game threw at them. So I decided that I actually liked being able to solo on one hand, and being the cornerstone of a group on the other. The further into management I have gotten in my real life, the more I have craved my “solo” time in MMOs, where I can just do whatever the hell I want to do without having to worry about the needs and wants of the many.

Role of a Guild

So I am sure at this point you are asking yourself… why do I focus so much on the importance of guild and community. Well honestly the guild gives a foundation and friendly faces that I see on a daily basis. It gives me the sense that even though I am off on my own doing whatever I want to do… that I am working together with others towards a common goal of progressing the guild. It is both friendly chat group and a constant source of inspiration and support when you need it. Additionally it gives you access to a lot of really great people when it does come time to group up and do something meaningful in an MMO. The guild shines when it comes time to run an Ship quest, Adventure, Dungeon or PVP match. The other night we had a grand night of doing pvp and it was extremely fun… even though I traditionally shy away from player versus player gameplay.

I’ve always seen my role as a community organizer to be that of laying the ground work and collecting the awesome people all in one place, so that they too can take fate into their own hands and do cool stuff together if they choose to. There lies the problem however, is that so many players want to sit back and have a “Cruise Director” plan events for them to attend. I on the other hand counter that it is the responsibility of each player to take responsibility for their own fun. If you want to do something, do it and convince people to come along with you. I’ve posted a few times about what I term the art of Groupcraft, but I will link it here again. One of the most empowering things you can do for yourself is to learn how to be confident in the assembly of a team that will work.

There are absolutely more successful ways of pulling together a group and making something happen when you want it to. Essentially in my experience you have to talk to people directly to get them to actually notice that you are trying to do a thing. This is much easier on voice chat, since you get the immediate feedback, however I did this same thing for years without the advent of voice chat. The critical knowledge however is what exactly you need to be successful. If you are a tank, then you need to find a healer and a few dps. In order to find the healer, you have to know what classes CAN heal and who in the guild falls within those search parameters. Basically for me a good guild is a friendly group of people that you like chatting with, but also a way to ease the finding of people to do something with. A hand crafted guild group will always be more enjoyable than a PUG, and usually more successful.

Just My Point of View

WildStar64 2014-06-20 22-30-01-908 Please note, like I said before this is just my point of view on the subject and what I am looking for out of a guild and the people in it. This is not some maxim that I will not cross, because lord knows I am liable to turn around this afternoon and end up grouped with someone for a long period of time and enjoy myself. These are just my tendencies and I thought it might be useful to open a dialog about what folks are expecting, by outlining what I am actually expecting. The Alliance of Awesome has been an interesting experiment because it is this big glorious amalgam of a bunch of different communities with their own rich traditions. House Stalwart had a shared guild culture that had been built up over the course of a decade, and it was pretty much expected that everyone in the guild felt the same way.

Going forward into this new experiment, we can no longer afford to expect that. Each of us comes from potentially different backgrounds with some shared and some disparate experiences. We have to come up with a brand new cultural norm as a result. I don’t feel this is the time for anyone to throw their hands up and walk away in a huff because they did not get whatever it was they were looking for. Instead it is time for folks to talk clearly about what exactly they are expecting out of this larger relationship. I think we are on the precipice of having something truly amazing, that we can all benefit from. We just need to take the time not to nurture it as it grows. I would not have poured so much effort into it so far, if I didn’t think it could be great for everyone involved.