Contagion and Chill

Sofa Time

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It’s been a shockingly busy week for me, and most of it was completely unexpected.  Monday through Wednesday I had my boss out, which means I get to not only be myself…  but also him for all purposes.  Which means my “general and administrative” time goes through the roof while attending meetings, and juggling things from the other managers in our department that need resources for this or that.  On the gaming front I was equally busy, with Monday and Tuesday largely being either prep time for the raid or actually raiding.  Then Wednesday night we had the World of Warcraft raid, and while it didn’t actually make I was ended up getting pulled into tank some Mythic Dungeons for Valor.  So when I got home last night, that was the first night of the week when I didn’t already have something planned.  After doing a round of exercises in our newly reclaimed home gym in the garage…  I plunked down on the sofa and spent the rest of the evening playing The Division.  A whole bunch of stuff happened that has greatly improved my outlook on the coming levels.

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Firstly I did in fact move on towards the higher level areas, and there I started getting either upgrades for just green drops like crazy.  The other big change is that I have started vendoring most of the stuff I get because I am simply not getting enough blueprints fast enough to be able to keep myself outfitted in crafted gear, namely not the weapons.  Because of this influx of cash I managed to pick up a nice new marksman rifle, and a brand new LSW that have greatly improved my ability to kill things.  The biggest splurge of the night was a purple chest piece I found on one of the vendors that has over 250 armor.  At the end of last night I was just shy of level 17 and have been cleaning up on the higher level stuff.  I unlocked a security tree perk that allows me to see all of the intel that I missed along the way once I complete all of the side missions for an area.  As such tonight I will likely be poking around and picking these up for quick and easy experience boosts, and start cleaning out the low level zones again.  I had been concerned about how roaming the low level areas meant I was only going up against lower level mobs… but then I quickly did the math and realized that the bulk of my experience is coming from quests and objectives… and grinding mobs is next to meaningless.  I kinda miss the days when grinding lots and lots of mobs was a viable means of leveling…  since that is ultimately my instinct anyways.

Focusing In

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Right now I think my best path is to try my best to push through to level thirty.  I want to run around and spend time in the Dark Zone, but I feel like that is largely useless until I get somewhere near the cap since the items dropping won’t be staying with me all that long.  I also noticed that before I upgraded to the 15+ DZ area the mobs were dropping level 11ish gear which really wasn’t that useful.  Now that I have moved up to the next tier, everything is way over my level and simply not doable without a group.  The fact that you get zero leveling experience while in the Dark Zone really makes me want to avoid it at least until I have capped out my character.  So as we go through the weekend I plan on slowly prodding along and picking up as many levels as I can.  Now that I am almost 17… 30 seems significantly closer and given that I went from 15 to 17 in essentially a single night.  Tonight I plan on picking up the rest of the intel that I missed, and then focusing on going back to higher zone questing.  I’ve completely most of Central Park, and then will move on the higher tier zones after that.  The side missions and encounters all seem to go pretty quickly, it is the missions that are ultimately the ones that I end up having to rez multiple times while doing.

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The game is honestly much more difficult than I expected it to be, especially as a largely solo player.  The gear really matters, and when I got the two new weapons I am using… I saw a massive increase in how successful I was in completing encounters.  The thing I struggle with right now is how much I like to snipe and how hard it is to remain in cover when there are a bunch of mobs gunning for me.  I’ve never tried the turret but I am contemplating using that as a way to draw fire away from me so I can get off a round of head shots to whittle down the opponents quickly.  In truth there are simply a lot of time with the Rikers folks that I have better luck just bobbing and weaving in and out of cover while firing my light machine gun.  Really it is the other snipers that are the bane of my existence, and the folks who fire off a heavy machine gun.  Though the last is largely due to my impatience and not wanting to always wait for them to need to reload.  I am still very much enjoying the game, I just wish I had more time to play it.  I hope this weekend I will have some more time to just hang out and chill out on Sunday and can maybe get into some grouping time with friends also playing.

 

 

Of Immersion

That Word

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One of the things that I have come to realize over the last few days is that apparently immersion in a video game is not really that important to me.  What I mean by that is that sense of “losing yourself in a game” and for lack of better verbiage start thinking like your character.  This is one of those things that role players do amazingly well, and something that I have honestly always struggled with.  So what ends up happening when I play a pen and paper game for example… is that I ultimately always play a version of myself.  The same is true for MMOs that I create this “super me” where I change my features to match what I guess internally I consider the idealized version of myself.  I created the above imagine some time ago to illustrate that point, that essentially I keep creating the same character over and over… and the games that refuse to allow me to create that character…  I quickly lose interest in.  The reason why this has reared its head once more is the fact that I keep reading Division reviews that say the same thing.  There are a host of critics that find it jarring that they are having to fight people in essentially heavily armored hoodies.  There are so many that state that it “breaks their immersion” to fight something that takes so many bullets to make it fall over, even though they are not terribly well armored.  This is not the first time something like this has come up, and each time it makes me question… am I ever really immersed in a game?

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The thing is… I geek out about the lore and world-building that happens behind the scenes of the worlds that I am inhabiting.  I use the world inhabit because there are times I feel like I am wandering around through a realistic looking setting.  I remember the sheer awe I felt the first time I left Kaladim in Everquest and turned around to see just how massive the entrance really was.  I am a screenshot junkie and I am constantly snapping photos of the various vistas in the games I am playing.  I get thoroughly impressed when I am wandering a game like The Division that makes me feel like I am actually wandering Manhattan.  The thing is… there is never a point for me where I don’t realize I am playing a video game.  I’ve yet to really experience that transcendent moment that some folks talk about, where they blend into the story and get swept away as though it were really happening.  I mean a game can tug on my emotions, and make me feel all sorts of things…  but it is always a game, and I am always me experiencing it not some other character.  I got to thinking about the reason why this might be… and I finally landed on a possible answer.  When I am playing games… there is never a moment when I am not also doing something else.  If I am downstairs, the television is almost always on in the background, or I am carrying on a conversation with my wife at the same time.  If I am upstairs I am monitoring slack, discord or instant messenger conversations on my second monitor (or at least making an attempt at doing so) and while playing PS4 I am constantly waking my PC up when the screen goes to sleep so I can do the same.  Even back in the day when I would play a Nintendo or Super Nintendo game in my childhood bedroom… I would be listening to music or trying to jot down notes about where I found this or that.  I guess I have always been a habitual multi-tasker with one foot always in the next activity, or the one after that…  and because my mind is always thinking about other things and other possibilities it is very hard to get all that engaged in the one I am currently doing.  So when I play a game… I want a really awesome world with really fun game mechanics…  but a lot of the sticking points that seem to bother other people just simply don’t even register until I read it from someone else’s perspective.

Going Dark

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A good chunk of last night was spent doing Mythic Dungeons in World of Warcraft.  The normal Wednesday night raid group did not meet this week because we were down four or five people.  When I got home I popped into Discord and ultimately wound up logging in and tanking a couple of Mythic dungeons, something that for whatever reason I had never actually done.  Of note…  unless it is late in the evening there is never a time when I am going to turn tanking for a full guild group.  Now if we are having to pug people…  you are likely going to see me check out completely, but I really do enjoy tanking for friends and friends of friends.  After a couple of runs however I had my fill and ultimately logged from WoW for the evening.  I popped into The Division and did a cleaners mission that was super stressful and wound up with me rezzing at the check point a number of times.  The problem I have been having is that I am starting to feel severely under geared for my level, so after having watched so many dark zone videos where the loot seems to drop like candy, I decided to make my way over there even though I have heard so many times that “solo dark zone” is a bad idea.  Within a few minutes of wandering around, I was absolutely slaughtered by a rogue agent…  but the thing is it didn’t really bother me that much because I had yet to actually pick up anything decent.  Instead I opted to simply hunt right around the nearest Extraction point, where I noticed there were lots of people who seemed completely happy not to shoot me in the back.

I wandered around for a little bit and in that time managed to successfully extract a couple of loads of stuff.  A few of the items were blue upgrades… but the bulk was simply just stuff that I could sell and push me closer to my goal of a nice weapon available on the main base weapons vendor.  I had quite a bit of fun, and I can absolutely see how exploring this super dangerous area would be amazing with friends.  My schedule has been pretty damned wonky over the last few weeks so I am kinda hoping that I can connect with some of my other friends playing this game over the weekend and do some dark zone fun.  I realize that I am in an awkward level not being 30 yet, but I still think it could be a lot of fun to wander around out there and see what we can take down.  Last night I finally dinged 15, which again makes me so far behind the pack it isn’t even funny level wise.  Lately I had been pushing my way around the lower zones trying to finish them, when in truth I probably should just skip ahead to the 15ish areas and do whatever is available out there.  I poked my head into Flatiron and immediately started seeing greens that were massive upgrades over what I happened to be wearing, so I am guessing that is precisely what I should be doing.  The problem is… I have spent so much time wandering aimlessly that I have out leveled the areas I still have some quests in.  I figure I can always go at a later date and mop those up after I have hit the cap.

 

 

Savior of New York

Mostly Done

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Yesterday we continued on out in the garage and did a much more prodding and tedious detail pass.  This meant sitting down and sorting through old boxes that we had not seen in nearly a decade.  Among the treasures I uncovered was my Gameboy SP as well as pretty much all of my Gameboy Advance cartridges.  I literally had no clue where that was, and the last time I remembered having it was in a car that we traded off long ago.  I had feared that I simply forgot to remove it from under the drivers seat…  because for a long while it was my “waiting on my wife to finish at school” from a time when we regularly drove in together.  Apparently we did in fact pull it out of the car, and it sat in this trash bag filled with lots of other stuff we hurriedly pulled from that car before we traded it off.  This is apparently a tradition of ours because not only did we find a bag for when we traded off the Pontiac Grand Am…  but also a bag from when we traded off like two other vehicles as well.  I also found entire boxes of stuff that I apparently packed up when leaving previous jobs and never bothered to go through.  These boxes were full of countless pay stubs and health plan documents…  so a good chunk of my yesterday was sitting down listening to podcasts and shredding all the documents.

One of the gems of the day was the above image…  a box of essentially all of our ancient cell phones.  These pretty much represented our pre-smartphone era and those Nokia 5160s were our very first phones that we used for ages.  We also found a bunch of extra face plates…  since you could swap them out so easily.  The positive about these ancient phones is the fact that we didn’t even really have texting plans on any of them, so there isn’t really data worth harvesting so we can dispose of them pretty easily.  My friend Squirrel suggested that he would love to have them, for target practice.  Unfortunately by the time he posted that I had already disposed of the entire box.  Probably my favorite of that era was the weird white LG flip phone, largely because it had a clock visible on its face without actually opening it.  Another interesting find was my “art box” which is a big wooden box that was crammed with all of my watercolor and pen and ink stuff from college.  Another strange thing was the truly insane number of World of Warcraft trading game cards that I found stuffed pretty much everywhere.  For awhile it was habit to pick up a pack anytime I needed to go to the store… and apparently they just sat around everywhere.  At some point I will sift through them all and gather up all of the leftover in game codes to give away to readers or something.  They are mostly the “toy” variety, like Path of Cenarus or Illidan or maybe some Pet Biscuits.  Still the sort of thing is fun to have if you don’t otherwise have access to them.  The strangest thing about the weekend… is I think because we were so tired anyways from the cleaning, I can’t say that losing an hour has really had much effect on me.

Don’t Panic

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I spent essentially the rest of the weekend playing The Division.  At this point I have logged about thirty four hours since launch, and am sitting just a little past level fourteen.  The game still feels very fresh, and it is funny how much my play style has changed as I have moved into the game.  Early on I thought I would be super tanky and focus on things that let me survive in an open firefight, but in truth the longer I play the more sniper I become.  Right now I am running around with a Covert SRS for sniping purposes and generally dealing lots of damage quickly to targets that are far away from me, and then when they get into closer range I swap to a Police M4 which can whittle down enemies with focused bursts.  This works amazingly well against pretty much every enemy type but snipers.  Those guys… are pretty much the bane of my existence because they are trying to play the same game I am, and generally the computer is better at it.  So I spend a lot of my time trying to get out of line of sight from the snipers while mopping everything else up…  and then play this game of chicken popping in and out of cover and trying to quick scope them before popping back down like a prairie dog.  The worst snipers so far are the Rikers because they just seem more brutal in every possible way.  That said it might simply be that they are the highest level enemies I can encounter currently.

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On the podcast Saturday night we got into this long discussion about the morality of The Division, and how it made the other AggroChat folks feel uneasy.  I can’t say that I am experiencing this at all, because like always I am writing my own narrative of my character as I go… and the fact that this is a silent protagonist game really helps that for me.  So as i move around the city, I am the big damned hero cleaning up the city and saving people.  I am absolutely the good guys in my tale, but then again as they said Saturday so are the Cleaners, who absolutely think they are doing what is right for the city.  I guess for me I just love how rich this setting is… all of the little details like the graffiti that I am showcasing in the photos for today’s post is just amazing.  I think the key difference is… that I never really fully immerse myself into a game setting.  It is always a game that I am playing, and always a story where I am the hero.  Even if I am not supposed to be… I am building a narrative compatible with my notion that in spite of whatever actions I am taking, I am doing it for some greater good.  In the Division I absolutely rush to save hostages, or citizens being held up by looters, because it makes me feel like the hero I am trying to be.  When you do a random encounter on the street you are given bonuses for various things… and when I see that survivor bonus it always makes me happy.  I also spend a lot of my time going through abandoned buildings so I can make sure I always have whatever item citizens ask for when I come across one in need.  I am the one making the city a better place, and I am comfortable with that stance.  I guess that might be why I like the post apocalyptic genre so much, is because the world is in such a screwed up state… that there are so many ways for me to help fix it.  Even if fixing means simply hunting down the biggest baddest warlord… and putting a bullet in his skull.

 

Sleeper Awakens

Real World Rifts

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Yesterday I took the day off to manage getting a dumpster delivered.  This was one of those odd situations where they would not really give us a time of day for it to be delivered, but instead wanted to call on their way.  As a result I felt like I was pretty much in a holding pattern until that event happened, largely because we wanted it dropped off in the yard… not in the drive way.  So I treated yesterday like a normal work day, except instead of shuffling off to work after posting a blog post…  I booted up and played The Division for a bit.  I had been months since I attempted to stream anything, and I was also kicking the tires of the new OBS Studio…  which seems to obfuscate a bunch of the settings.  So the first few minutes of the stream were apparently a slide show narrated by my voice.  After that I fiddled with some settings until I finally landed on a combination of levers that seemed to produce a nice watchable streaming experience.  The thing about The Division is that I feel like I am constantly doing something… even if it is not the thing I intended.  One of the aspects of Rift that I loved was the fact that the world was constantly spawning rifts and invasions that I had to deal with.  It felt new and fresh…  up until the point that it didn’t anymore.  The happenings in The Division are varied enough that I hope they remain fresh, but I worry that there will be a time where I start avoiding the little things going on around me… just so I can complete the thing I am actually trying to focus on.

The other potential issue due to the dynamic interactions is that most of the time I feel like I am not actually making any progress.  I might set off in search of this or that… and get distracted by six things that happen along the way.  For example last night I was trying to do one of those missing agent location quests, where you pick up on their trail and follow them to what unfortunately usually ends up being a log book.  While on the final step of one of those chains… I also got the shout over the radio that looters were attacking a supply drop.  Instead of going over and defending I tried so hard to keep following the trail of clues.  All the while I was actually feeling like a horrible person for not helping those NPCs.  The game makes me feel the weight of my decisions in a way that most games don’t, and I think it is because this game bridges the uncanny valley gap so damned well.  The world I am wandering around feels so real to me…  that I could step out of the screen and into the real Manhattan and not really notice the difference.  It also makes me wonder how amazing a game like City of Heroes would have been… if it were rendered with this level of detail.  Right now I am feeling so completely behind in everything I am doing, but I am currently knocking on the door of level 10, whereas lots of other folks are hitting the level cap.  I am not really going to worry about grinding my way up, because really…  I don’t want to burn out on this title.

Completing Quests

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The strange thing about yesterday was that I had the entire day to play The Division, but instead I largely focused on working on stuff in Destiny.  I have been a slacker when it comes to completing any of the end game content, especially if it requires tedium.  For example one of the big goals is collecting Calcified Fragments, and they are hidden damned near everywhere on the Dreadnaught.  Most of them can be obtained “in the open” while doing patrol missions, but a handful of them are only exposed during strikes or story missions.  Even others involve doing events like Skyburners Deployment Code or Wormsinger Rune.  The other night while doing the Kings Fall raid, the nice folks made sure that I got all of my fragments from there, which took a big obstacle out of the way.  There is a long drawn out quest called “Hunger Pangs” that involves doing a bunch of silly stuff for Eris Morn.  Several of the steps are gated by the number of Calcified Fragments you happen to have collected at that point.  To do the final part of the quest you have to have found 45 of the 50 total fragments that currently exist in the game.  So yesterday during the day I managed to solo most of the quest line, including a rather tough version of the Undying Mind strike.  I was however stuck on the final quest, which is a pretty insane version of the Phobos quest that starts the Taken King.  Thankfully Squirrel and Jex helped me out last night, and I now have a shiny new Touch of Malice which will come in handy during the raid.

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Since they were looking for something else to do… I coerced them into also helping me out with my Sleeper Stimulant quest.  I had been on the final stage of this quest since I believe last October, but didn’t have a ready group of people to talk into helping me with it… and had zero luck pugging it.  The quest requires you to run a Nightfall level version of the Saber strike, which is somewhat insane to survive given that you get bombarded by Fallen ships at the start.  I had always heard that if you could simply manage to make it through the first sequence… that the rest of the strike was really not that bad.  I agree at least in part, that is until you reach the final boss.  That encounter was absolutely insane…  but we managed to take it down pretty easily.  Then feeling our Wheaties turned around and attempted the exact same strike as the weekly Nightfall.  The combination of Match Game and Fresh Troops made it so much worse.  Towards the end we were ping ponging around the room trying to stay alive long enough to resurrect the next fire team member, usually only ending up getting wrecked ourselves in the process.  Through a bit of dumb luck and perseverance we managed to pull out the victory on our third attempt at the final encounter.  After that I was needing to log, because in truth I only really intended to do the Malice event but ended up staying upstairs on the PlayStation for like three hours.  Was a pretty great night and I feel better having knocked a couple of big goals off of my list in the game.