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

Fighting Nostalgia

October 11, 2013 by Belghast

Familiar Itch

Over the last few days I have been feeling immensely nostalgic about World of Warcraft. This tends to happen to me as we near Blizzcon time, and I start to see twitter a buzz with people excited to be attending the convention. Some of my tweeps have even resorted to Blizzcon countdown clocks, and yesterday they finally reached the 20 somethings in days left til the conference. With this wave of nostalgia comes the all too familiar desire to re-up my account and play some of it. It would not have been the first time I did so on a whim, and is more than likely not going to be the last.

However I am wise to this trickery, or at least have a contingency plan in place. I have come to the realization that I like the idea of playing WoW a lot more than actually playing it. As a result I keep a trial account at the ready for when of these urges strikes, and last night I patched up my client once more. I figure if I make it through playing the trial account with the desire to play more WoW… then it is probably time to re-up. I figure this is a decent litmus test to see whether or not the desire to play is real before I spent $15.

Fighting Nostalgia

As a result I rolled a brand new Worgen Warrior on my trial account and proceeded to play. Immediately the buzz of the nostalgia started to wane. I had honestly forgotten just how spammy playing a low level warrior was, and by example EVERY World of Warcraft melee character. The unpredictable nature of rage and to a lesser extent energy left me with a decision. I either spent the entire time fighting watching my bars to optimize cooldowns… or I could just spam whatever basic attack I wanted to ALWAYS go off. Being a relatively impatient player… I always chose the spam route.

After a few minutes of spamming Heroic Strike… I remembered just how much my fingers used to ache after a dungeon run, always banging on the key I wanted to fire next because I could not be bothered to actually watch my bars. Basically my master plan of fighting the wave of nostalgia worked, all too well. I made it to about level 5 on my baby Worgen, to the point at which the forsaken show up… at which point I was supremely bored and logged out of the game. Having a taste of the gameplay reminded me that it really was not as fun as my mind had built it up to be.

Project Phoenix

Sometimes a game is much more enjoyable to remember fondly, than to actually play it. Right now there is a kickstarter going on called Project Phoenix. The goal of it is to essentially recreate the magic that was City of Heroes/City of Villains. I had so much fun playing these games, and regularly descend into bouts of nostalgia swapping with another friend of mine on mumble. The problem is… I think CoH is another game that is much more enjoyable to talk about fondly than to actually play it. I remember so much about the game, but every time I tried playing it again during its later free to play years the whole experience just felt lacking.

I wish this project the best of luck, but super hero games for me seem like they were a phase of a bygone era. I have tried Champions Online and DC Universe Online and in both cases… I was carried into them on the nostalgia of City of Heroes but found both gaming experiences somehow unable to live up to my memories and as a result my expectations. I think World of Warcraft and City of Heroes are both games for me like the original Everquest… extremely enjoyable to sit around and talk about the “good old days” but not really fun for me to play any longer.

Thing is… I think that is perfectly okay. I think nostalgia works that way, it makes us romanticize things that would now be trivial. For example I can remember being amazed at just how huge the sandbox that my father made for me was, and how I spent hours playing in it with my Tonka trucks. However were I to evaluate it from adult eyes, I would likely find it tiny and boring… and be ready to stop in a few minutes. Often times things we remember so fondly end up tarnished if we go back and re-experience them. This has been the case for Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft and a long list of other games that I have moved on past… but tried to rekindle that flame.

Bun’Jitsu

October 10, 2013 by Belghast

Hexxen

As you can see from the above image I am almost 80% finished downloading the Hex: Shards of Fate Alpha client. Starting late yesterday Alpha invites began trickling out as the servers came up. They of course are starting off with the highest supporters and working their way down the list, only allowing small bits in at a time to keep from cratering the servers. As a result I figure it will take a few days for them to reach us plebeians that only supported enough to get INTO the alpha in the first place.

However at one point yesterday they stated that it would likely take a few weeks to get down to the “slacker backers” aka folks who supported the project after the kickstarter finished. If that is the case it should be a matter of days not a matter of weeks, which is good. I know there were a large number for $250 backers and that is the tier that is starting invites now. The majority of my friend are all like me and in the $60 mere-human range.

Bun’Jitsu

I have to say I am really looking forward to getting some playtime with this. Everything about it feels like a different take on Magic: The Gathering for the online age. I am already pretty fond of the Shin’Hare… which happen to be a combination of Wild (green) and Blood (black). That was the deck combo I always relied on in MTG so here is hoping it will be equally effective in Hex. Besides any race that has a card called Bun’jitsu has to be amazing right? I just love the concept of these crazy twisted anthropomorphic bunny rabbits.

They released a PDF with all of the initial cards in it yesterday to backers and almost immediately someone took that and broke it out into an amazing deck builder site, so you should totally check that out. Additionally on Reddit there is a Hex Alpha FAQ thread that is worth checking out as it has a number of useful links… including the downloader for the alpha client. Like usual we have a pretty decent sized community that will be playing this off and on so I expect it to join the ranks of League of Legends as one of our regular non-MMO games. If you are part of this madness as well let me know! I am always looking for more people to hang out with while playing various titles.

Pugs Over Easy

October 9, 2013 by Belghast

Pugs Over Easy

If you have read my blog for very long at all, you will know that I am extremely gun shy about grouping with strangers. Namely in my time tanking I have had some pretty horrible experiences both as a tank and believe it or not healer in the various games I have played. Prior to World of Warcraft, I did this all the time… but with the advent of the dungeon finder everything seemed to go downhill. Today’s post is not really a reflection of any real or imagined events that have happened to myself recently, but instead spurred on by finding the most perfect analogy that wraps up my feelings about pugs.

My friends have all been following the release of Jinx the new champion for League of Legends extremely closely. Midday yesterday they linked me this thread on the forums posted by someone called Dread Pirate Arbuthnot. The intent was to explain what ranked play is like, but for me it rang true of the vast majority of my pugging experiences. As a DPS you can fade quietly and anonymously into the background and just do your job… but as a tank or healer… you always end up to blame for whatever failings the group has. On with the copypasta!

Look I can describe ranked play in a really simple analogy

So you want to eat a cake, right, but you only have eggs. So you have to find four other people who have milk, sugar, a blender, and chocolate. But you show up, and the blender guy throws his blender to the ground and screams EGGS OR I FEED, and then the other three people start yelling at you to give up your eggs. Then you have to piece together the broken blender, and it’s not really working properly, but you found some tape so it’s working. Except the beaters are kind of wibbly wobbly now, so it isn’t mixing the batter very well. The other four players start to scream at you for not blending the cake well enough, since that’s your job, and then the milk guy has to go leave for 15 minutes because his mom just made dinner.

Are you understanding this so far? Ok good

So any ways once milk guy is back you have the cake, and its time to put it in the oven. The problem is that there are professional baking teams who just played a world baking tournament, so everyone wants to bake a cake like theirs. Even though your cake is chocolate, they want to cover it with icing meant for a vanilla cake, because that’s what the Asian cake bakers do. You try to insist that your cake would be much better with chocolate icing, but they tell you to commit suicide. Finally, your shitty cake monstrosity comes out of the oven and it isn’t even edible because of the whole process, and apparently cakes need more ingredients than just eggs and milk and chocolate.

Then you go into the post cake lobby and everyone unanimously agrees its your fault

Then you immediately hit the ‘bake again’ button and pray that this time you can just ADD THE GOD DAMN EGGS

This seems to happen regardless of how many guild members you bring into a pug. Last week at some point I got drafted into trying to get one of our healers and her dps hubby through the Cutters Cry instance in FFXIV. I knew I should tank it, but I could really use gear on my Bard at the time… so at the nudging that it would be okay I stayed in as a dps class and we attempted to pug a tank. I knew this would be a decision I regretted.

Tolerance for Frustration

We proceeded to go through the instance with the tank only ever trying to hold aggro on a single target in each pull. Additionally it felt like he was going out of his way to stand in every bad thing he could. We limped along and did not manage to finish the dungeon before the timer ran out… and at the end… the tank was raging against us for somehow holding him back. We kept our cool and didn’t respond in kind… but this just bookends every experience I have had in pugging. When I saw the above post, it explained the feeling so well.

Granted there is a lot of league of legends specific stuff buried in there…. but the thrust of it is true. Doing a successful dungeon run with random people involves a crazy juggling act and if any one person doesn’t bring their specific ingredient it falls to hell quickly. Without a doubt the person that gets the blame is almost always the tank or the healer. In the case of the single target tank, I am pretty sure he all his rage was directed at our healer… who could not keep him healed because the adds kept killing her. While I and her husband did as much kiting as we could to keep her alive… and we made it as far as we did because of this… there was only so much you could do when the tank only wanted to tank a single mob at a time.

I guess after years of really good guild groups I have found my tolerance for frustration extremely lowered. On a regular basis I have one of my less patient friends asking me to queue for various things with him… and my answer is always the same. I will only do it if we have a full guild group. Ultimately I would rather wait weeks to make that happen, than to step foot into and tank another PUG group. Granted I am exceedingly lucky in that I generally DO have a large guild group that I can rely on. As a result I try my best to help the other members of the guild with whatever dungeon they happen to be needing at the time. It just works better when you have a non-judgmental group of friends doing something, than a bunch of strangers.

NBI Poetry Slam

October 8, 2013 by Belghast

Internet Dragons

Last night my group wanted revenge for the previous two attempts at Amdapor Keep. During the day we plotted our path and strategized what we would change, and when our fearless healer made it online, we went into the dungeon once more. It has been a long time since a dungeon had gotten the better of any of us. That is one of the odd things about Final Fantasy XIV is that you have a fixed amount of time to finish any dungeon. For Amdapor Keep we had 120 minutes, and quite frankly we used every single minute of that in past attempts to try and reason through the fight.

On my first run through the dungeon, the group I was with had mastered the first boss encounter, and in the subsequent two runs we had one shot it without much issue. This meant on attempt two we spent nearly an hour and a half working on the Demon Wall encounter. For anyone that has played a Final Fantasy game, they will immediately realize the encounter, as it is one of the more legendary ones that seems to appear in most games. Essentially you have a fixed amount of time to destroy the wall before it destroys you. In the MMO version, it essentially reaches a point where there is just too much damaging going out to be healed through.

However the little tweaks we employed in the strategy worked well enough that on our first attempt, I managed to get knocked off the side and the group still recovered without a tank to finish taking down the wall. This brought us forth to new batch of trash… that basically included a version of the boss from Haukke Manor mixed in multiple times within the packs. I don’t think we actually wiped on any of this trash, but it was some of the more annoying trash I had encountered to date. Finally we were up against the final boss of the dungeon… that is some form of a black dragon.

It took us 30 minutes of tries but we managed to formulate a workable strategy, and then it clicked in place once we learned the secret to avoiding massive amounts of damage. With 30 minutes to go we managed to make it through the encounter, this time without losing a player and finish off the boss. Amdapor Keep is doubly awesome in that it rewards both the currency we need and some fairly nice gear as well. Over the course of the dungeon our dragoon got a pair of boots, bard a chest piece and I believe legs, scholar healer neck, ring and pants… and alas me the tank nothing but the satisfaction of killing the encounter. I hope to go back in now that we can hopefully farm the dungeon for goodies.

NBI Poetry Slam

Yesterday one of my good blogger friends Syl posted a call to arms of sort. Her idea is that we “shake the bonds of srs blogging bzns” and join the ranks of many other bloggers who have written poetry over the subject of games, gaming and MMOs. If this concept were not fertile enough, she also pinged me over Twitter to let me know that she was expecting an entry from me. So I realize I am not getting out of this at all. Warning… just like my blog, my poetry is “different”.

I spent a lot of time writing poetry in the past, and even participated in more than a few poetry slams at various coffee houses during my high school and college days. I tend to draw inspiration from beat poets… but my own brand of poetry is a bit “odd”. She was expecting a poem about my current MMO crush… Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn… but I chose to draw inspiration elsewhere.

The Tank

born of stone
embraced by fire
Juggernaut standing
with stalwart purpose
and sharpened will

moving slow
into dank crypt
long axe slung
across broad tense
rampart shoulders

leading cautiously
this weary band
of wizened adventure
moving closer
to the maelstrom

with pealing cry
and furious motion
swings bold axe
cleaving flesh
commanding attention

this is my domain
my steely sphere
of present influence
and none shall pass
my constant vigil

Hopefully that will appease the Syl god and she will not sent me furious messages over twitter of disappointment. I think it is a pretty cool idea and I look forward to reading what other people come up with. NBI started out with a simple purpose of trying to help out new bloggers, but it has taken on a weird blogging festival atmosphere for the various sponsors. Its almost like a holiday that lets us mingle together with a shared purpose, and I feel like this poetry slam idea really adds to that purpose. Syl will be collecting all the entries on her own blog, so it will be interesting to read them all together in one place.