May 2013 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Double Shower Day

May 12, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I am barely capable of movement. Essentially we worked our little butts off yesterday but I will go into more detail below. Also I am groggy as shit, since I am having to get up way earlier than normal on a weekend morning so that we can get up and around and try and intercept my mother when she goes to breakfast after church with her friends. I am not a huge fan of holidays in general, but since mothers place the utmost of importance upon this day I try my best not to disappoint.

The Trash Pile Grow-eth

Over the week we had decided that the project we were going to tackle was getting the gaming loft back in order. Essentially for the last several years it has been unusable space. We had robbed the entertainment center of its television when we started RVing. When we got Sugar Gliders, the cage needed a relatively dark location, and the loft is habitually so. In addition all this clutter made its way out there, so without comfortable seating options, and a viable tv it just stopped getting used for anything at all.

The problem with cleaning the loft is that we needed to clear a path through the backyard to start a trash pile. We had an entire year of leaf litter and random debris that had accumulated back there, so my wife decided that we needed to start the day by clearing a path. The scope was relatively small at first but we went well beyond the intended stopping spot.

Red Tipped Laurel

With the help of my brother in law we got the hedges and trees pruned back. Previously the hedges had overgrown to the point where you could not walk along the backside of the pool at all. Now the pathway is mostly clear, or at the very least passable. When the pool guys hooked up the cover to winterize it, they were not able to hook up one of the tethers because it was underneath the hedge. In our normal fashion, it just took us ages to actually get around to seeking someone with the equipment to trim them.

The other huge surprise is that our trees have flourished. Not sure why but this year is the first year I have noticed just how big they have gotten. When we moved it they were half that height and there was a clear delineation between each of the individual trees in each cluster. All this time we had thought they were just sickly, since every few leaves was a reddish brown color. According to my brother in law who is a borderline arborist, these are red tipped laurels, and that color mutation is on purpose. Apparently the trees are excessively healthy.

Winter Debris

The main thrust of the backyard outing was to clear away all the leaf litter, and assorted debris that had collected over the winter. Honestly I wish I had taken a before shot, because the backyard was a mangled mess of junk everywhere. We had gathered leaves at a previous time, but neglected to collect the bags… and over the winter they had disentigrated. So those were an extra pain to clear. In addition all the furnature, and pool toys were strewn around the yard. The majority of pool toys are not even ours, but one of our good friends keeps bringing them over and leaving them.

That is actually the story of our yard as well. There were so many things just left in the back yard that we didn’t even recognize. There was a stereo that had been left out over the winter, and now had little bugs crawling in and out of the back. There were what felt like a couple dozen cups in various shapes and sizes that once contained a drink. All of this basically is the assorted debris accumulated by the kid that does our lawn. He is extremely forgetful, and just leaves things laying around constantly. We used to get home and find his bike just sitting in our yard for no apparent reason.

Enter Junkman

This would be disturbing to most, but we’ve seen him grow up and are used to it. We are as close to these neighbors as humanly possible, and they have listed us in the past as emergency contacts. Nonetheless this added up to a bunch of junk that we had no idea what to do with. We had looked into getting a dumpster rental, we have done that in the past when we knew ahead of time there was going to be an excessive amount of crap we would be throwing in it. However that is always a pain, and you feel that your time is ticking down since you only get it for a short period of time, and when one is in your front lawn… all sorts of random things seem to show up in it over night.

I had looked into the Bagster, which is a portable dumpster that you pick up at home depot, and then just call Waste Management to pick up when you were done. However while reading the reviews on Amazon, someone mentioned something they do instead. Basically they pile the stuff up in their yard and then call a junk and debris company to come get it. After a quick google I found the Junkman service, and that idea stuck. Basically you pile your crap up, and then they come load it up for you charging you based on volume. The cool thing about their service is that they will clean the area to the ground, and try to recycle everything they possibly can from your stuff. Seems like a win in all possible directions.

To the Loft!

We did not shower in the morning, since we knew we would get filthy working out in the yard. So both of us went in, showered, put on relatively clean clothes and went and got some lunch. My wife ended up taking a cat nap, and I ended up getting sucked into a couple of relatively quick bots matches in League of Legends. When we got started again we tackled moving the stuff out of the loft that we had intended to… namely these three weird doctors office seating chairs we had picked up ages ago. We thought the little unit was interesting, but they never really were comfortable, especially for long gaming sessions.

In addition the chairs were massive cat hair magnets. We corralled the cats into the bedroom, and carried them out one at a time, adding them to the junk pile. In addition we took out to my Jeep an old HP LaserJet 4 printer that was sitting up there, waiting to be donated to good will. We had an old male cat that was given to marking everything, regardless of what we did to try and stop him. So initially we had thought the entertainment center would be in extremely bad shape.

Turns out for whatever reason he had barely touched it. This combined with the fact that it was extremely well made, which means extremely heavy… we modified our plans and decided to just use the existing center. We cleaned it off completely, and changed the orientation, to make hooking the cable up easier. The loft is extremely screwy to be honest. You have a power outlet on the side behind the loveseat, and it would be near impossible to run cable over there, since that is the side that backs up to our rock chimney.

Loveseat Juggling

The last major chore was trying to figure out a way to get the loveseat up our very narrow stairwell, and into the loft. This involved so much odd maneuvering, and brute force that I am certain it is the cause of the majority of our aches this morning. It is amazing how something so relatively small looking can be such a pain in the butt to maneuver. There were several times we managed to get hung up and stuck on walls, banisters, railings etc. The final push to where it rests today essentially involved me pulling and lifting with all my might, while my wife got under the other end and lifted it almost straight up in the air.

To be a gentleman, I had tried to grab the end of the loveseat where Mac had sprayed… and even though we had cleaned several times it was still absolutely permeated with the stuff. As a result once we managed to get the loveseat upstairs and everything arranged… I took my second shower of the day. I was absolutely filthy from the dusk and cleaning up fermented cat urine. At this point the sunburn from working out in the yard, combined with the soreness in places I am not sure I even had… left me in a rather catatonic state. However it was all worth it, when I was able to hang out in the loft and play PlS3 last night in comfort.

Happy Mothers Day

I am needing to wrap up and get on the road. Going to meet up with my mother after she gets out of church and meet her at the local watering hole for breakfast. In addition after that, I need to see my grandmother, then travel an thirty minutes and see my wife’s step mother, and ultimately another thirty minutes to see her mother. It is going to be an extremely hassled day, and as sore as I am right now I am completely not looking forward to it. However it is Mothers Day, so what are you going to do. I hope you all survive the madness as well, and for the mothers out there… I hope you have the happiest of Mothers Days.

Almost Elite

May 11, 2013 by Belghast

This morning has already started off to be super amazing… and I am trying to say that with as much sarcasm as I can muster. In my gathering of breakfast, I had to go to three QuikTrips to find 2 jalepeno sausage rolls. On top of that I had another wonderful night of NDA restricted activities, so there is not a whole lot that I can really talk about today. However in keeping with my promise to myself I am going to make something happen anyways.

Almost Elite

I did manage to play a little Rift over lunch yesterday afternoon. Essentially there are three of us at work that bring our lunch, and laptops and go find a quiet conference room in which to relax and play games over the noon hour. I think it’s a pretty awesome plan, and it gives us all that mental break we need during the day. Since our work wifi is laggy as shit, I try my best to do something pretty relaxing. Traditionally this is some EQ2, but since I have most recently reignited the fires of Telara… it was some Rift.

While I am loathe to do them for long, I have been focused on getting as many daily quests as I can both of the adventuring and crafting variety. They are good money, and also give me the sweet sweet infinity stones that I crave. Yesterday it feels like I made real progress, as between crafting three new items and obtaining another infinity stone item I have replaced all of my greens and pre-60 blues.

Essentially by swapping out two items with infinity stone items, I will be able to get my hit rating up to the suggested 300 for doing elite dungeons. I am really looking forward to doing some random elites. As much as I dislike pugs, that reaction seems to be reserved for when I am tanking. If I am playing a DPS, like I am right now… I seem to be able to just blend into the background and watch the events of the pug unfold around me in a completely stress free fashion.

I guess when I am dpsing, I no longer feel responsible for the success or failure of the instance. I am hoping over the next week I can get in enough adventure dailies to be able to start running the instances. Our little four man team I believe is getting close to being elite dungeon ready as well. The more gear I can get before that point, the easier it will be for us to break into elites as a team.

Double Fine Bundle

Every so often Humble bundle comes out with an unbelievably good deal. This time around it is all of the double fine games in one neat and price what you want package. Essentially they are offering Psychonauts, Costume Quest, Stacking, Brutal Legend and contributor access to Broken Age their kickstarter game. The kickstarter game requires a $35 dollar donation to unlock, and brutal legend $8 but for 10 bucks you can easily walk away with four really good story driven games. Definitely worth checking out if you are so inclined.

Backyard Blues

Over the week we managed to get really good deals on two televisions. One is now hooked up in the bedroom and the other is awaiting us to finish setting back up my game loft. As a result we will be focusing on that today… since tomorrow will be entangled with mothers day madness. We are starting out in the backyard first to clear a space to start piling up the old furniture. Since my wife is now pacing back and forth, I need to cut this short for the day. I hope you all have a great morning and afternoon and if so inclined an awesome Mothers Day.

Player Taxonomy

May 10, 2013 by Belghast

This is the sixteenth post in my experimental “post every morning” scheme, and it represents the first true roadblock. Up to this point, I had been posting about whatever was happening in my life, and namely whatever games I played the previous night. The problem I have right now is that while I have plenty of awesome things to talk about from last night, I can’t speak a word about any of it. I may or may not be under a pretty sizeable NDA. So as a result I will be trying to find interesting things to talk about otherwise.

Player Taxonomy

I was having a discussion the other day with a good friend and we got into the whole dividing players into groups concept. We often times have this notion that players are either hardcore or casual, and depending on which side of the divide you are on that other term becomes a slur against what you don’t enjoy. He presented an interesting take on the divide, in that players are made up of multiple parts of different drives. He broke things into 3 drives, but I have since expanded it into 4.

Casual – These players tend to play games on a very peripheral level. They may play multiple titles, but not really get heavily involved in any one game. They do not perform large amounts of research, even if it is a game they play very often.
Core – These players tend to get extremely invested in one or more games. They may play multiple titles, but are more likely to dig into the theory and gameplay of one specific game. They are likely to do large amounts of research on technique and related information.
Social – These players tend to be focused on the social aspect of gaming. They are in games because their friends are playing them. Their gaming experience revolves around interaction with their friends, and if enough of a critical mass of their community leaves the game they are likely to do so as well.
Solo – These players tend to prefer to do things alone, and while they may associate with communities they do so mostly for the benefits that being a member provides. They will participate in group activities if there is a large benefit to doing so, but afterwards they often wander back off to doing solo content.

Essentially the theory is that we are all made up of these building blocks. For example I tend to be Social-Core by nature in online games, but I will have large periods of being Solo-Core depending on if I am playing a game with a preformed community or not. I crave the social connection of a community in an online game, however in the absence of it I tend to withdraw and not reach out to strangers. I have tried to be Casual about games in the past but it rarely works, as I almost always end up digging deep into the minutia, figuring out mob spawn patterns, what the best drops are, and which areas I should be hunting.

There is a line of thinking that says that labels in gaming are a bad thing. I agree to some extent, because the old social versus hardcore debate only really tells part of the story. However the truth is that different kinds of players are motivated by different forces. We need some kind of judgment free taxonomy to help understand what kind of a player someone is, and what they are looking for out of the online gaming experience. I cannot claim the above is a new idea, as I got it from a conversation with a friend… and he cannot claim his ideas are new either because this is something that has been kicking around in the marketing side of the industry for several years.

I feel these building blocks do a pretty good job of modeling opposing forces, namely social tendencies versus solo tendencies, and casual tendencies versus core tendencies. All that said I feel it is totally viable for someone to be social-casual-core striking a balance between really digging into a game and playing them on a superficial level. The thing I have noticed over the years, is that most of the players that claim to be casual… myself included really dig deep into whatever game they happen to be playing. They just may play lots and lots of games at the same time or serially. I think it is an interesting discussion at least, and as a guild leader I have always tried to understand the drives of the people that I am trying to mold towards a specific goal.

Journey to Coldharbour

With all my personal posts and game log type posting, I have not had a chance to really mention this. At the beginning of the month Zenimax released this video about Coldharbour the domain of Molag Bal. I have to say right off the bat the footage from the video looks amazing. I think it is awesome just how vastly different Coldhabour looks and feels from Deadlands the Oblivion plane belonging to Mehunes Dagon we experienced in Elder Scrolls VI: Oblivion. It seems like the Dark Anchors that are mentioned are going to be similar to the Mehunes Oblivion gates.

I really look forward to seeing how all of this will really work in game play. It seems like the anchors drop down from the sky, so I am wondering if they will be “Rift like” events that occur around the map, or static spawns. The Elder Scrolls games have always had a certain measure of dynamic content, so it would be cool if the Anchors were this games answer to “Rifts”. There really isn’t enough in the video to really make a call one way or another, but it is a super cool concept. Every time they release one of these videos, I just want to play ANY Elder Scrolls game I can get my hands on. Why hullo there Skyrim!

Wildstar: Devspeak Movement

So I am still on the fence about whether or not I care about Wildstar. Firstly I have not had a great track record with me trying to get deeply involved in any Science Fiction based MMO. They are awesome for awhile, but they seem to lack the stickiness with me that fantasy MMOs have had. Secondly no matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to view this as anything other than a much higher resolution World of Warcraft. There is a moment in this video that I immediately thought the guy was falling into Area 52 out in Netherstorm. All of that said, the game does look much nicer in every department than WoW.

Range of motion in a video game is a huge thing. If the combat animations feel clunky, the combat itself will feel clunky… as goes with the jumps, rolls, running animations etc. This is a beautifully animated game, and the video really showcases that. The big take away I always have from one of these videos however is just how amazing their Marketing and Communities are at engaging the public. They do a phenomenal picture of painting a picture of the game and setting up an attitude that makes you want to play it. I feel like this is going to be one of those titles that I will need to play before I can decide if I am going to look into it very seriously.

Aatrox, The Darkin Blade

Another nifty tidbit of information from yesterday, is that Riot games announced their next champion for League of Legends. Basically it looks to be a badass AD melee character with life draining abilities. Similar to Mordekaiser he uses a health spending mechanic to cast abilities. You can click the picture, or this link to see a full breakdown of his abilities. At first glance he kind of feels like a fusion of Mordekaiser and Zac, so will be interesting to see how he plays.

Initially I thought… hell yeah, badass demon dude with a molten sword and wings! But ultimately I am really not sure if this is a “Bel” character or not. So far I have not really enjoyed playing Mordekaiser, because his mechanic feels super “fiddly”. I don’t really like champions that are very “do this one thing, so you can do this other thing or you die” in their ability set up. I admit it, I am totally a barbarian and like simple gameplay… think Garen, Wukong and Darius. When I play a game, I am about as subtle as dropping a piano on someone. I feel like even though he looks awesome, and I like his abilities (other than the health spending mechanic) he will definitely be a “try before I buy” character.

Adventures in Legally Viable Posting

So I have managed to weave together a post this morning after all, and this makes me happy. I was afraid that my certain restrictions would dry up the well of rambling, but I have managed to grab a few things I thought was cool out of the air and cram them into a single posting. Not that my nightly rundown posts are all that exciting in the first place, but hopefully folks won’t mind these posts every now and then when I am bound not to talk about the previous night. I hope you guys have a great Friday, and that it is the gateway to a really amazing weekend. We are going to be super busy this weekend finishing up the game loft, so wish me luck!

Forever Downwards

May 9, 2013 by Belghast

It’s a rainy Thursday morning here in Oklahoma, and it took everything I had to pull myself away from the covers. The constant rhythm of the rain was absolutely intoxicating, and was calling me to stay in bed and sleep. Unfortunately with my boss still out, I am thrust into the role of his proxy and end up having to attend all the meetings he was supposed to attend. The biggest positive however is that since it is Thursday, there is only one more day in the week.

Rewarding Exploration

One of the things that the Elder Scrolls games have taught me is to explore every corner of the map. You never know where something extremely cool is hiding. I’ve always appreciated it when a game likewise rewards players for getting “off the path”. When Rift launched, it quickly became known for all the explorer moments that occurred on the tops of mountains, bottoms of the ocean and forgotten dungeons. There were a number of things that could only be found by straying from the path.

I can still remember the first time I stumbled onto a puzzle, or a cairn and remembering how cool that felt to have found something in the game on my own. It also reinforced the gameplay style of wandering all over the map looking for possible Easter eggs. From that point onwards I was traipsing across the tops of mountains, just because I could and just to see if there might be something to be gained from doing so. I have been glad to see that Storm Legion if anything has ramped this instinct up.

Forever Downwards

Yesterday I stumbled onto a hidden path and experienced one of the coolest of these “Explorer Moments”. I had been doing a few quests in what appeared to be a partially submerged Brevanic ruins. Leading off to the side of the entrance tunnel was a non-descript path that truncated in a flooded room. This just screamed to be explored, so I started swimming downwards into the abyss. The tunnel continued to wind downwards through bend after bend, with no sign of stopping.

I had been through what felt like a dozen of these turns when I reached the point of no return. My breath meter was at the halfway point, and I decided to push on ahead… because surely there had to be a reason for the tunnel to exist even if it was just an instance zone in. At roughly the 1/4 of my breath bar mark, I noticed the tunnel straightening out and a break in the water leading up into a chamber.

The Patient Sentinel

Upon breaking out of the water and entertaining the chamber, I was rewarded with an achievement: Deep Learning. Across the room waiting on me, was a holographic construct with a quest, and a lever that appeared to enable a teleport to the surface. The quest was actually part of a chain, and ultimately lead to some pretty cool storyline. To me however, the coolest piece of this whole experience is that now I apparently have permanent teleport access back down into the bowels of the Storm Legion base.

It is little moments like this that make games worth playing. This type of stuff is why the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are so much like crack for me. There is always something cool off on the horizon, that I know I can go over to and explore. Rift does a really good job of lacing the gameplay with little discoveries that you can only find if you deviate off the path.

ARAMination

Originally I had plans to run dungeons with the Alea Iacta Est folks, but as the night wore on my friend Plasmodia to to feeling woozy. Seems as though her supervisor had brought back some form of the “convention crud” and she was beginning to run a decent fever. We all agreed that she should be ushered off to bed, but with that we had lost our tank but more importantly our 4th member. I have not minded our instance runs where we pugged a single person in, but the more you add the more unpredictable the process becomes.

Throughout the week my friends have been diligently playing League of Legends matches every night, and I’ve felt bad for not joining them. In large part I had been coaxed into playing the game, so that I could be a stable fifth player for them. With my resurgence of Rift, I have been anything but that. I think part of the issue is that I just do not like the game nearly as much as they all seem to. I have fun, and it is enjoyable when I am playing with a full group of friends, but I am often times thinking about other games.

Not Competitive Enough

This shows badly in my game play, and my lack of improvement. I am not super competitive, and I just don’t seem to get the adrenaline rush they all do from killing other players. When we have scrimmaged against each other, I have enjoyed beating someone I know far more than I have enjoyed beating any of the random players. I have learned to assimilate a lot of the language and phrasing that has come with the game, but it rarely if ever is the thing I am looking to discuss as a group.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy the game and I enjoy playing with my friends when we play the game together. However I just find myself lacking caring about things like build order, and last hitting, and all the other trappings that come along with the game. I have watched a friend go from not knowing the game exists, to super hardcore about it, and all the while I am just struggling to understand why anyone would play the game if not for others.

The prime example of this difference really came up last night. We had managed to pull out a “back door” victory in the ARAM gameplay mode. What this means is a player hides in the bushes from the other team, and then when they are charging down the lane, sneaks back and takes out their nexus ending the match. It essentially catches the other team with their pants down, and steals a win. It is extremely cool when it happens for your side, and extremely defeating when you have it happen to you.

A Difference in Motivation

After this whole chain of events, while I thought it was cool… she was talking about how pumped she was and that she would not be able to sleep after that. I seem to lack that adrenaline rush entirely, because while it was nifty that we had won, and I was proud of her for her maneuvering… it was just another match to me. The problem is, because of this lack of adrenaline and craving for victory… I still make the same bad decisions and still fall for the same traps. Winning the map just doesn’t mean that much to me.

This is my problem in every game I have tried to do any player versus player gameplay. I just don’t care about the outcome as much as other players do. When there is not a direct correlation between money and loot on the line, winning over another player for sheer bragging rights doesn’t mean much of anything to me. Now on the other hand, I have always had the drive to push to kill that raid boss, or clear that raid instance… because I knew there was a chance at tangible goodies awaiting me.

While I try my best not to be, I am very loot driven. If you lay out three paths before me… one gives tokens, one gives nice gear, and the other lots of experience… I will always go for the one that gives the nice gear. One of the reasons why I have so much bloodlust in these games and literally kill everything walking, is I know that any single mob could have the chance of dropping something really cool. When you remove loot from the equation, you remove a ton of my motivation to achieve.

Since I am very focused on improving my character through gear… League of Legends feels like rerolling a new character, getting it to level 10, and then rerolling something else… over and over and over. You never reach that point that you can do amazing things, because you’ve built up your character in the process. I think the methodology of the game works and levels the playing field for all players. But the fact that I start over at square one in each match really drops my enjoyment whether or not I want it to.

Rambled Long Enough

Well I’ve rambled on at length about League of Legends, and how generally ill suited I am for the game. The tail end of this post feels like me thinking through things on paper. I enjoy League still when we have a voice server full of people playing together, but if given a choice I will always choose to play an MMO. I just feel extremely bad for abandoning my friends, when they really have needed a stable fifth person. Looking at my calendar, it looks like today is going to be super busy with my boss being out of the office. I hope all of you out there have great days that are far less stressful than mine looks to be.