house stalwart Archives - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Alliance of Awesome

June 7, 2014 by Belghast

Multigaming Community

On January 31st a few interesting things happened. Firstly Sony Online Entertainment released the alpha for Everquest Next Landmark… now just known as Landmark. More importantly this set a chain of events into motion. For some time there has been a group of loosely affiliated guilds and gaming communities tugging on essentially the same pool of players. So we might end up getting this mix of players for a specific title and then having a similar mix of players for another title down the road from this huge twitter/g+ gaming community pool. With Landmark this reached a bit of a head and someone was brave enough to stand up and say it was silly. In the opening days of Landmark, since there were no guilds (and still arent for that matter) each of these communities opted to start a chat channel. The problem is this left some people joining as many as six different channels at a time.

Scarybooster proposed a simple idea, that we all agree to use one common chat channel, and with that the Alliance of Awesome was born. It started simple in scope, but from there Zelibeli and I kinda ran with it and over the last four months we’ve built a rather large loosely connected gaming alliance. Currently we have five different groups in the AofA community: House Stalwart, Multiplaying.net, Combat Wombat, Mercy Gaming, and Dark Religion. Lately I have been talks with Liore about maybe having the already awesome Machiavelli’s Cats community join the fold as well. I have to say so far that over the last four months things have indeed been awesome. For the most part everyone has seemed to get along swimmingly and I’ve watched this group of disconnected pieces merge into a community in every sense of the word.

A Simple Idea

One of the big problems with being habitual multigamers is the fact that guilds are often transistory and it is hard to constantly muster a new batch of people to play whatever game is coming down the pipe. Additionally since not every game will end up being ideal for everyone, this means you have massive amounts of fragmentation as folks leave a given game for something new. The idea was that each individual guild would take responsibility for the reigns of the games that they were most into, and then that way as gamers we would have access to a good and familiar guild regardless of the game we choose to play. Over the coming months I would like to see this formalized into a sort of Rosetta stone for who has which guilds where and just how active each of them are.

The problem is that since we each have our own guild identities, it felt odd to constantly ask players to register an account on a new forum for each group. As a result we tried a few different things to have a shared neutral ground between the communities. The first of these efforts was the Alliance of Awesome reddit… and while it worked well enough, it caused as much frustration as it solved. Then I stumbled onto Anook and it seemed almost perfectly suited for us. It offered public and private forums, an events calendar and was more gamer social network than private site allowing folks to link everything up to the games they are streaming into the shared hub… or in the verbiage of that network a “nook”. This also lets the bloggers in our midst share our posts easily on the nooks blog, and so far that seems to also be working well.

A Unified Approach

Over the last few months we have been melding significantly. Elder Scrolls Online launch for example was the first real “Alliance of Awesome” foray, and while we still kept to the branding of House Stalwart… it was very much a shared occasion. With the launch of Wildstar, we had no real forerunner guild wise that looked to be taking up the reigns. Instead we opted to drop any specific guild branding and simply go with the “Alliance of Awesome” for our guild name. Honestly I have to say it feels very natural and I can see eventually we may drop the individual guild monikers and just do things from that standpoint.

The biggest problem I forsee moving forward is the fact that right now we are still very much utilizing two completely separate voice servers. A good chunk of the House Stalwart guild is still very happily playing World of Warcraft and doesn’t really care about any other game on the market. The rest of us are pretty nomadic, but we still are far more used to and comfortable with mumble as a communication platform. Multiplaying, Dark Religion, and Mercy Gaming have all standardized on a Teamspeak 3 server run for free by the ever amazing Saia. So I would really like to make a move to trying to use that as well and simply dropping the mumble. That said this feels like a landmine because I have no clue how to convince the WoW-only contingency to abandon mumble and make the shift over to Teamspeak 3. Also I hate to abandon Mumble myself until they have done this, because while I am not playing World of Warcraft on a nightly basis I still hold the guildmaster position and get called on to resolve issues. I want to make sure I am reachable by folks even when I am not in the same game.

Shared Ethics

The other rough spot is that we need to come up with a shared set of rules and codes of conduct. For years House Stalwart has followed a simple “three tenets” approach, and relied on guild leader and officer judgment to fill in the gaps. Zeli tends to favor spelling things out, and considering the large volume of people she has dealt with not completely organically connected… I can totally see why this would be a good thing. After years of trying to “keep things simple” but then having to deal with explaining nuance… I am starting to favor Zeli’s approach to be honest. I hate writing rules, and as such that’s why I came up with the somewhat ambiguous three that we use. I figured that using common sense folks would realize what they meant… problem is not everyone “common” is the same. The further away from the same core of friends you get, the more confusing the interpretation becomes.

Going forward I think we are going to have to just agree upon a shared set of rules, and I think so far the batch Zeli came up with for the Alliance of Awesome guild seems like a great place to begin. The biggest thing I hope out of this is that we are a living community. That we will continue to grow as we adopt other awesome people from twitter, anook, g+, or that we happen to stumble across in game. Also I hope that we do in fact get the Machiavelli’s Cats community to join the fold, and keep finding other like minded groups to rally to the cause. I would really like Alliance of Awesome to not only have an ostentatious name, but also have awesome actions to back it up. I want us to be part of the solution in the games we play, and not part of the problem. I would love to see us better each of the gaming communities we are in.

Giving Back

File:Child's Play Logo updated.png One of the things that Zeli and I have been talking about lately is that we would really like to enter Alliance of Awesome in this years Child’s Play marathon. Far as I can tell this will take place on October 25th, and the idea is to have 25 hours of live streaming for charity. I have wanted to participate in this for years, but I thought it would be more interesting if we signed up a whole bunch of streamers from the Alliance of Awesome community and have one shared channel for the purpose of the event. We have quite a number of people who stream already, and it would be awesome to give each of us like a 4-5 hour block of time to play whatever the hell we want to.

Also lately we have been holding a lot of events in various games. Right now Wednesday nights are “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and those are pretty much only to anyone in the Alliance of Awesome community. Additionally we have been holding a Thursday night “League Beginner Night” to let folks ease into the League of Legends game. So far both events have been a blast and I would love to see them grow beyond the small number of people that we have. I am sure we will be doing something similar for Wildstar, especially with the focus on grouping in that game. I can only see the community as a whole getting better. So here comes the thing I am sure you have all been waiting for. If you are not already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… head over to the website and join our nook. We don’t have any real requirements for membership other than wanting to be around a bunch of awesome people, and striving to be the “white hats” in gaming. If you have a large community, track down myself or Zelibeli and we can see if the entire group would be a good fit for us as well. Growing up as an only child, I always wanted to be surrounded by friends… and on the internet I try my damnedest to surround myself with as many awesome people as I can. So far I think things are going pretty well.

Rebooting Minecraft

May 16, 2014 by Belghast

Guild Meeting

I have an exciting evening planned that I have been looking forward to for a few weeks. One of my long time House Stalwart guild members is here in town, and tonight we plan on having a board game night. Dallian/Doctor Hannah appeared on Episode 5 of AggroChat, and we mentioned the upcoming visit there. He lives in the Little Rock area which makes him a neighbor of ours as far as the internet is concerned. I always think its cool when I get to meet someone in the flesh that I have gamed with for ages. I think the plan tonight is to play loads of Munchkin and eat pizza at Rae’s house. We’ve tried to invite several of the locals to meet up, so it should be really fun. I am contemplating bringing some magic starter decks, but that might be a little too involved. We’ve been talking with a co-worker about maybe trying to play some magic over lunch soon. Apparently his wife is super into the game and would probably even come up over lunch to play it.

I don’t really do this sort of thing that often. I guess the last guild member that I met up with was Lummox who happened to be about fifteen minutes away from where I happened to be staying in Albany. It is always interesting to see how someone is in real life verses their in game persona. For the most part, a lot of the people I have met have been fairly similar. I have to say the closest was probably Urcasio and Ravener, who were pretty much exactly the people I would have expected based on in game interactions. Since I generally find it easier to meet over food, Dal and I are meeting up before this evening for lunch. For years I have been talking about how amazing Ron’s Hamburgers are, and more importantly their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. So we are meeting up at my favorite location today around 11ish. I would love to somehow steal him to town like I managed to do with Rae. I feel like I am trying to build this little gamer community, one person at a time.

Rebooting Minecraft

Last week one of my new friends Missysmojo decided to try her hand at playing Minecraft. I joked with her that she would end up losing the next three months of her life. She opted to stream a little bit, and it got me thinking. It has been years since I have played Minecraft with any regularity. There have been a few times I patched up my client and connected to the guild server just to see what folks were doing, but I had felt like I had “beaten” Minecraft for some time. In this last year there have been significant changes in the game, and probably even more before that I really never noticed. So I thought I would start a brand new game and play completely legit. No mods, no helpful minimap… just the vanilla client and a texture pack (because yeah that is necessary). The above video is the results of that process last night. I am not really sure yet how often I will be streaming Minecraft, but I expect to continue where I left off each time.

For starters… I am really not used to the game any longer. I kept trying to “suck in” blocks and drops like you do in Trove. The low performance of the game frustrated me, because I am not used to it “chunking” and loading in parts of the game slowly freezing my client momentarily when it does. I am sure this is something I can tweak, because I probably just don’t have enough memory flowing to the default client. There used to be a tool called Magic Launcher that handled a lot of the memory allocation for me, so I might look into that. Another dumbass move is I totally thought I was on “survival” mode for the first little bit, running scared from potential monsters… only to find out that I actually was in peaceful mode on the client. Once I noticed that and changed it things started to get interesting.

For starters, it seems like the creeper spawn rate is insane. I maybe saw one or two zombies and skeletons the first night after flipping it to a normal mode, but I saw what felt like half a dozen creepers. I managed to trap four chickens inside my base and I dug a pit like I often do and have them down there for a constant source of eggs, feathers and meat. At some point I want to try and drag a couple of cows and pigs in there as well so I have all of my livestock needs handy. Most of the video involves me setting up “base” as I hollow out a mountain, search for coal and finally start digging down into the earth in search of steel. I encounter a cave with a skeleton spawner in it… and have a pretty epic battle trying to break the cave and torch it off. I had quite a bit of fun, or at least more fun with Minecraft than I have had in ages.

Bunny Doom

I love everything there is to love about the Shin’hare, and the fact that they exist makes Hex so much more enjoyable than Magic the Gathering ever could be. It’s an entire race of adorable evil samurai bunnies… you could slap that into ANY game and I would play it. As a kid one of my favorite comic book characters was Usagi Yojimbo… so everything about this deck feeds my enjoyment. Not to mention that my favorite deck combination in Magic the Gathering was Green and Black… and the Shin’hare are exactly that… Life and Blood aka Green and Black. In some ways it reminds me of playing my thalid deck circa Fallen Empires. I would constantly use that deck to feed my black “sacrifice or I feed” cards. While I am lacking some of the cards in Hex to make this work really well, the starter deck mixed with a few cards I got from my packs seems to be working okay.

Last night I got in and played a few hands against the AI, mostly because it was getting late and I didn’t want to deal with people. I am anxious for when trading comes into play, because of my group of friends I think I am really the only hardcore bunny player. I should be able to help some of them out with cards they are looking for and bolster my bunny army. My all time favorite card is still the Uzume, Grand Concubunny. Not only is the artwork adorable, but the card is insane when you get it out into play.

When I first read this card, I assumed it would start dropping the 0/1 battle hopper tokens that the other Shin’hare cards do on the table. While that would have been good enough, considering the normal concubunnies you have to expend resources and tap them to get this effect. The real effect however is so much better, in that it summons a random non-unique bunny card into play. This can be ANY card, even ones you don’t currently have in your deck. It is literally generating cards for you, but the problem is this makes the card and insane aggro magnet.

I need to formulate some ways to protect the card, because really it is too damned valuable to not have it on the board for more than a few turns. Hopefully soonish I can get together with my other friends currently in the closed beta and play some actual matches. I feel like Kodra is in a completely different league with me, and like to play a style of magic that I do not… but this will not stop me from attempting to beat him. He royally kicked my ass in hearthstone, but it didn’t stop me from coming back for more. These type of games for me are about the moment to moment play and not whether or not I win. In fact that can pretty much be said with any game I play, I am just not that competitive. It is about the journey not the win conditions.

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Too Themepark

May 13, 2014 by Belghast

Crazy Fox-Wolf-Thingy

I find myself enjoying ArcheAge far more than I had really expected to. I have not really even gotten to the “open world” aspect of the game, but I find the questing and combat systems really enjoyable. At some point I managed to pick up the animal to the side of me that is some sort of a fox-wolf-thingy. I am not sure if it was from a quest or if I looted it from a mob, but in any case I have a pet now. My friend Errn informed me that this is my battle pet, but I had reasoned that much by noticing that it was fighting for other players. Thing is… when I got it, it was already like level 30. This means the thing probably kicks more ass than I do to be honest. One of the weird things about the game is that you can either have a mount or a pet out, but not both.

As a result I tend to run around with my battle pet out, and then use the glider poorly to manage to get around quickly. I really have no clue what I am doing when it comes to the glider. No matter how I try and control the thing, it seems like I am just falling through the air gracefully. I’ve watched various streamers be able to control where they want it to go, and I am completely in awe of their skill. Right now the closest I can get is to hover over the area I want to go and then fold up the glider by hitting R, causing me to plummet through the air. Obviously this works grand if you are close to the ground, but not so much when you have leapt off of a huge cliff with it. In the later case, I end up cursing the screen as I seem to flail around in midair on the glider.

I feel bad that I have almost entirely ignored anything going on with any of the quests. Since all of the cinematic are in Korean still I just end up skipping thing, which has lead me to feel like the quest dialog itself is completely meaningless as well. So I have zero clue what is going on in the world other than I am helping a series of villages defend against all sorts of things, and I am perfectly fine with that. The more killing I get to do in the course of the leveling the better, and right now I am really enjoying the “Over Achieve” and “Hidden Quest” options gained by going on a murderous rampage. While I seem to be swapping out gear pretty frequently, it doesn’t really feel like I am progressing my character along that easily. I’ve yet to figure out the rhyme or reason behind getting skill points, but I could really use a lot more of them.

Too Themepark

Firstly I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression from this title. I love Themepark MMOs, for what they give me… a carefully curated trip through an interesting world. I find that I enjoy both Sandbox and Themepark MMOs equally, at least generally speaking. However there is just something about Wildstar that maybe takes it a step too far. While playing this game, I literally feel like I am at Six Flags with so many things fighting desperately for my attention. When I walk into an area that I just explored and hear the “Challenge!” sounder it reminds me too much of a midway barker trying to get my attention. I’ve compared the visuals of the game to the Vegas Strip before, but really it reminds me a lot more of an actual real world Themepark. Everything is bright and polished to a shine, with every single inch of space covered with something designed to get my eye to look there. The above screenshot is of one of the rare sparse moments, and when the game is like this… I actually enjoy it. However I had to wait for a few minutes to take this shot for various mobs and players to move out of the way.

I am basically in the same place I have been for a couple of months. I recorded the above video on March 13th and I have had zero forward momentum since then. I’ve gotten on each beta weekend so far to play for a bit, but just found the overall experience lacking. There is a lot about the game that I think I would like, but something just doesn’t sit right with me each time I sit down to play it. The last game I felt this conflicted about was Guild Wars 2, and the end result of that experience is a game that even though I have free access to play it… I never have any desire to do so. With Wildstar I put in my pre-order in part to lock in my goodies for if I ever decided that I DID want to play it. Each day I consider cancelling it, because I am just not “feeling” this title. It isn’t the setting or the races or the goofy character models, but something more deeply set into the game itself. The funny thing is, I have been back playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and enjoying the hell out of it… but Wildstar that is a very similar experience just feels really odd to me. Time will tell if I shun the internet zeitgeist and sit out of this one.

Blue Water Land

I am still working my way through Coldharbor in Elder Scrolls Online, and last night I hit 48. The quests out here feel more epic than the ones leading up to them, in part because everything in Coldharbor seems to be absolutely dripping in lore. One of my joys in any Elder Scrolls title has been killing the various Daedra, and here I have an entire zone full of almost nothing but them. What is interesting is finding all of the inhabitants of the zone that have been tricked into the service of Molag Bal in one fashion or another. Last night I had a really cool moment where I helped out some Argonians and their Hist tree, and another where I gained the trust of a feral pack of Bosmer. This section of the game feels very much like Mass Effect 3, where I am wandering around this zone building an army to fight the daedric prince.

I am trying to decide if I am going to hold out with my level 44 gear until I ding 50. I have a really good daedric shield that just dropped, as well as my prismatic weapon that I am unlikely to replace until I leave cold harbor. Wondering if I can limp along until 50 and then craft an entire set of nice gear then. As of the close of the night I managed to make it roughly halfway to 49, and I still have large swaths of Coldharbor that have been completely unexplored. Still very much loving the experience of the game, but I am definitely finding that I need breaks from playing it. The gameplay towards the end of the game gets really intense, and if I am not feeling 100% I end up taking a lot of un-needed deaths. As a result I have been perforating my long play sessions with trips into ArcheAge, SWTOR and now a little bit of Wildstar. So far I really seem to be enjoying this mix.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #ArcheAge #WildStar #Themepark

Thumper Logic

April 25, 2014 by Belghast

Cheat Day

One of the rules of the “Grand Experiment” has been that I would sit down each morning and write a blog post. A lot of my friends in the blogosphere write their content at their leisure and stage the publishing at a date of their choosing. There is technically nothing wrong with this practice, but the entire idea behind the experiment, was to force myself to write every day. So as a result I have always considered it cheating to do what I am doing right now… writing a topic the night before I intend to post it. These lofty ideals are one thing, but every now and then real life throws me for a loop. Generally speaking on the weekend my posts end up being considerably later because sometimes I have to accommodate life in the process.

However our weekend plans have been altered quite a bit and as a result my wife and I are carpooling together tomorrow. This means that I won’t really have my traditional “drink coffee slowly and contemplate the universe” time in the morning… or at least I won’t be able to faff about as much as I normally do. So as a result I am admitting to my “blatant cheatery” up front and hoping you won’t mind terribly much that you are getting a slightly stale topic by the time I post it tomorrow morning. I could have lied to you, and posted this without you really knowing the difference… but I am always willing to admit my failings freely.

Thumper Logic

One of the things that I have not talked about much is that the Grand Experiment is far more for me than just writing every single day. It has also been an effort to surround myself with as many positive influences as I can, and limit the amount of negativity I have in my life. I am not just trying to bury my head in the sand. I assure you that I see just as many negative things on a daily basis as anyone, I am a pessimist by nature. However I had noticed that the more negativity I surrounded myself in, the more negative I became and as a result the more unhappy I was. You know how they say “fake it until you make it”, well it turns out it works pretty well for being happy as well. If you can’t be happy, adopt the trappings of being happy until I actually sinks in.

In addition to trying to limit my exposure to negativity… which means I pretty much stop reading game forums when they exit the alpha and beta phases… I have been trying really hard not to write many “rant” posts. In doing so I have realized just how unbalanced and ranty the world seems to have become. If you look at the popular review sources, it seems as though we absolutely love to hate video games. There are popular youtube personalities that I have never seen give a single game a positive review, however people line up to watch them. I am sure that the occasional video like this is funny, but after awhile it changes into something else. IT feels like these reviewers are trying to enact their revenge on an industry they believe has “wronged them” somehow.

People Want Different Things

Yes I am in fact breaking this image out again. It is perfectly okay for you to not like something, but just because you don’t like a thing does not mean it is immediately “bad”. I may not have enjoyed War and Peace… but that does not make it any less of a classic. Sure there are of course the occasional game that are horrible in an academic sense… I am looking at you Superman 64, but these are really rather rare. If a game comes out and at least one person enjoys it then I cannot really call it a “bad” game. There are games that are a financial failure, but that is a completely different line of discussion. Over the last few years it has become extremely “cool” to hate everything, and a lot of this was ushered in by the “hipster” movement. If you read the reviews of games, you would have the impression that the industry is doing horribly and making nothing but utter crap. However they seem to be making more money than ever, in part because very few people who consume these games actually pay attention to internet reviews.

At this point I am just too damned old to care much about looking cool on the internet. I feel no shame in gushing about the things I am really enjoying, and just glossing over the things I don’t so much enjoy. Over the weekend I appeared on the Game On podcast, and eventually the topic came around to Wildstar a game I really don’t like very much. I had a few options of where to go with my commentary. I could of course have spun up a mighty rant that would nuke the game into oblivion from orbit. Instead I chose to share my reservations, but also talk about a few of the things that I thought the game was doing right. It is your choice as a player, or a blogger, or a youtuber to either dwell on the good parts or the bad parts. Right now I am making the conscious choice to look for the good in both people and games, and so far I am much happier for doing it.

The Curse of the Fanboy

I hope it feels so good to be right.
There is nothing more exhilarating
than pointing out the shortcomings
of others, is there? – Randall

One of the worst curses you can give to another gamer is to call them a Fanboy, because it immediately belittles anything they may or may not have to say in response to your criticism. I guess my question is, why aren’t we all “Fanboys” over something. For the majority of us, gaming is our hobby, and even in those for whom it is a job… at one point or another it was also their hobby as well. We are all geeks here, cut from the same core fabric even if we claim to not acknowledge it. We all love games, more deeply than any of us would ever care to admit. At least at some basic level we all have to admit that games are absolutely magical. They can bring us to tears, make us laugh, and cause us to plunk down another $60 like a junkie in search of a fix. If we do all of these things, then why the hell SHOULDN’T we love it, and be more than happy to raise our hands high and yell “FUCK YES I’M A FANBOY”.

I love games, or I wouldn’t be spending each and every morning writing about them. Sure you get a fair dose of my personal shenanigans and that of my friends… but this is a gaming blog devoted to my love and obsession of video games. I am not trying to make games better than they are, because they seem to be just as good today at getting me to spend countless hours a night playing them than they were when I was a child. Sure I hold up certain games like Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Castlevania: Symophony of the Night on a pedestal, but my love of those games should not somehow tarnish something that doesn’t do the same thing as those games did.

What gets lost in the shuffle is the people behind the games that folks all too often want to tear down. No one goes into a game trying to build something that the players will hate. Each and every one of them has lost sleep at night trying to make the best possible game within the constraints they were given. Just as I started writing about games because I love them, they all aspired to be part of this industry that quite frankly has some pretty shitty conditions placed upon them. No child says that they want to grow up to work in an industry that is ultimately thankless and will more so make large segments of the fan base revile you. I am just waiting for it to be acceptable to like something again without someone else feeling the need to put you down for doing so.

Cast of the Aggrochat

I feel like I got a little preachy during the course of this post, but it is really how I feel. I am going to unabashedly love things, until I don’t then move on to other things that I love equally well. So far I feel like my mission of being more positive has paid off. I am surrounded by some pretty amazing friends, and I feel so thankful to have all of you supporting me on a daily basis. While I have a deep protective streak, which leads me to play all the tank classes that I end up playing… I feel no need anymore to protect you from what I deem a “bad game”. You might see me wax philosophical about how I don’t quite grasp a game, but that is coming from a place of wanting to learn what people see in it… and not from a place of hatred. I wanted to close things out on a really positive note by showing off something that I really love right now.

Rae has been hard at work over the last few weeks since we got the odd idea to start Aggrochat. She has been capturing the essence of our personas in Chibi form and I think she did a damned fine job. From the left we have Rae riding Ashgar the bear, with me in the middle, and the ever stylish Kodra on the far right. There are a few inside jokes in the peace but I figure it is universal enough for most to enjoy it. She does amazing work, and is the creator of the original Chibi Belghast that I have used for ages as avatars and in the masthead of this website. Over the coming weeks we will be branding our libsyn page into something more fitting a proper podcast.