June 2014 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Next Gen Achieved

June 14, 2014 by Belghast

Aversion to Sports

It started yesterday with a random dumbass quip that I am known to occasionally spout towards the end of the day. Watching the internet be enthralled about the World Cup is a really surreal experience when you are living in the United States and soccer never actually makes the sports page other than during the World Cup. I figured surely someone would give me shit about my statement, but I expected them to hone in on the World Cup portion. Instead my friend Liore latched onto the root of the comment… asking why exactly I found the appeal of sports bizarre. I rattled off a half truth and said that I just was not born with what I call the “spectator gene”. I love league of legends for example, but no matter how many times I have tried to watch the LCS I find it completely boring. All it does it make me want to boot up League and play it, instead of getting completely caught up in the matches like my friends do.

My aversion to sports however goes far more deeply than that. When you grow up in a small town in Oklahoma or Texas… your entire school life revolves around the sports team. I grew up in a town of 2000, with a graduating class of 60… and even though we had a horrible football team… the entire damned town revolved around it. Growing up a big kid I was stalked from middle school on by coached that wanted to make me part of their “lineup”. I played little league ball and gave an attempt to play football… but I just didn’t enjoy it. Additionally I have never bought into the bullshit drill instructor act that all coaches perform. While that might motivate some people, all it does is make me want to flip them the bird… because I had so many other options for spending my time. It completely baffled them that anyone would not want to play football.

On top of that over the years sports have come to represent what was wrong with a small town. You might have duct taped together supplies in the science classroom, and classes meeting in portable huts instead of actual buildings… but by god if the field house needs renovated that is going to happen, and there is nothing that will ever stand in the way of our losing football team from getting shiny new equipment every year. The focus on football means other things slide and the school as a whole graduated a ton of barely functional adults. In my graduating class of 60, I would say 2/3rds of the kids who went to college flunked out their first year and are now working menial jobs in the same town. Then we get to the problem of the coaches themselves… who always seemed to be History or Mathematics teachers. My Geometry teacher was the head football coach, and would spend exactly five minutes writing something on the board… and then spend the rest of the hour as we worked on our homework assignment with the football players huddled around his desk talking about plays for the “big game”. The history teacher, while a nice guy was equally incompetent. He once told us that “Old Iron Sides” was named that because it was made of Iron not Wood. So how can I respect sports when I grew up in this situation.

I realize that huge swaths of the population love sports, and love cheering for their team. I try my damnedest to just ignore it, because I really don’t want to be a buzzkill. Every now and then one of these quips slips out, and as I said while I really do not have the spectator gene… there is a lot more driving that attitude. I played little league ball, but for whatever reason the indoctrination never really took. Which is humorous because I used to work in a baseball card and later comic shop. I even collected cards… but then it was more about the artwork on the card or the value of a specific rookie… and not about me actually caring about the game itself. I will say though that to this day Baseball is the only game I will really willingly watch. There is something untainted about that sport, because at our high school they never got any attention either. They had to play in old uniforms and on a crappy field… because the football and basketball programs drained the system dry. So in a way I felt almost a sense of kinship with them, since they too were damaged by the system.

Next Gen Achieved

I have for the most part avoided the “next generation” of consoles, and as all the hype surrounded them leading up to the launch I didn’t think much about any of them. Then something happened… and I saw the 2013 E3 presser from Sony. During the current generation of consoles I started out an XBox 360 fan… but over time I gravitated towards the Sony Playstation 3 when I picked up one used from a friend. The primary reason behind this shift in allegiance was the phenominal deal that is the Playstation Plus membership. For what is roughly $50 it gave me access to a massive game library of I think a dozen different playstation 3 titles at a time. So not only was the service cheaper than Xbox Gold but worth way more value in that it actually just gave me a curated collection of games every month for me to download. One of my good friends Ashgarshowed me a nifty trick that allowed me to log into the website and “purchase” the free games to add them to my account each month. After watching the E3 press conference last year, I knew sooner or later I would be getting a Playstation 4, but I was mostly waiting for the price to come down. Nonetheless this meant every single month I would add the new PS4 game to my account knowing that sooner or later I would get one and have a game library ready to play.

Awhile back on the AggroChat podcast, my friend Tam introduced me a rule he uses for the purchase of new console systems. He waits to buy a new console until it has at least five games, either currently released or releasing within the next six months that he wants to play. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was an excellent and logical way to decide when to jump into a new console. For me right now the list of games I am excited about looks something like this.

Infamous: Second Son
Assassins Creed 4: Black Flag
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Last of Us: Remastered
Destiny
Kingdom Hearts III
Final Fantasy XV
The Order: 1886
Guilty Gear Xrd
Bloodborne

While many of those are not Playstation 4 exclusives… I am devoted to the playstation family of consoles thanks to the warm fuzzies I have about playstation plus as a whole. In the time I have been subbed to the service I have gotten 151 games, and have a library of six PS4 titles waiting on me. Granted most of these are not exactly AAA titles yet, but one of them at least is something I have amped to play since the moment I saw game play from it. Microsoft on the other hand… really has nothing to offer me. As far as Microsoft Console exclusives… the only two that I am interested in that are not also coming to the PC are Killer Instinct and Sunset Overdrive. Neither of which are going to be games I play enough to make that console worth my time. Then again… there is just a lot I don’t like about the target of the XBox One. I was watching an excellent rundown video about the two consoles yesterday, and the guy admits that while he used the Kinect and TV integration features for the first month… he hasn’t used them at all since.

Getting the Goods

When it comes to buying hardware especially… I am a cheap bastard. I rarely if ever buy game systems new… in fact the only game system I did buy new was the 3DS, and only because I had pretty much exhausted all options. So when I started kicking around the notion of maybe picking up a PS4… I hit craigslist like normal. I did a search of the site and noticed that someone had a PS4 incorrectly posted in the barter section for way less than normal. They were wanting $280 and it came with two sports titles. Since I have zero use for those… I opted to try and talk the guy into a price without them. I honestly expected nothing to come of it, so when it texted me back a day later saying he would do $250 without the games… I was absolutely pumped. I joked during the day yesterday that I hope I didn’t get killed meeting a stranger on craigslist… which apparently disturbed Rae considerably. It was a little odd because generally I am not alone when I meet people from craigslist, but my rule has always been that we meet at one of the many QuikTrips in Tulsa… since they are ALWAYS busy 24/7.

The guy was running late… as in he was an hour late at the time he finally arrived. For awhile I was thinking that it was going to fall through like so many other “good deals” from Craigslist have. However he arrived with a PS4 in hand, with the original box and everything that came with it. It seemed that once again I was benefiting from the flighty nature of teenagers. He bought the PS4 and games with High School graduation money… and then decided he needed that money to move into an apartment. It is funny the stuff that folks you meet from craigslist will tell you, like when we bought my chromebook we found out that the guy grew up in the same town as my wife… and that they knew some of each others family. I think maybe this stuff only actually works out this well here in Oklahoma… where people are generally well meaning and rather polite about everything. But once again I am more than happy to take advantage of a good deal when I can find it. I took the machine home, booted it up and everything works awesome. It feels as though the dual shock four hasn’t really even been broken in. The guy had not even registered an account on the playstation network, so after a wipe of the system it is now set up with all the plus games.

So far I am mostly playing Resogun and Infamous Second Son. I would like to find a cheap copy of Killzone Shadowfall because it looks pretty cool. I am also kicking myself that I did not sign up for the Destiny Alpha. At that point I had no clue I would actually be getting a PS4, so of course hindsight is 20/20. Here is hoping I can figure out a way to get an alpha key and play it as well. So far I am loving the system, and super happy with the purchase. It is actually good timing considering my allergies are going completely haywire and right now I can barely breath. Seems like the perfect time to hibernate with a console and play some games. I might even try streaming to twitch later, just to see how well the service works.

#PS4

Enter the Warlords

June 13, 2014 by Belghast

Home Warden

As I talked about at the beginning of the week, my wife the teacher has started her whirlwind summer tour of the country and she ping pongs between various mathematics related conferences. As a result I am holding down the fort here at home, and at the same time having to take care of our neighbors pets. In the past there has always been this mad dash the few days before my wife gets home to pick up and house and make sure everything is in proper working order. However this time around I have been doing a much better job of picking things up as they happen. Here is hoping there will be no 11th hour cleaning fest… which admittedly is mostly just picking up trash around the house that I have allowed to stack up when I reverted to full on bachelor mode.

The hardest thing about being home alone has been maintaining my walking regiment. I am letting it split a bit, in that I am not walking a “three loop” around the neighborhood each night, but instead I am simply adding additional steps into my day so I don’t really have to. Admittedly I should be pushing myself harder and doing the loops anyway, but without my walking buddy I have lost a good chunk of the reason why I walked past 10,000 steps in the first place. So for now I am getting to 10,000 and then calling it good… even going so far as to walking loops around the living room one night to get the last couple of hundred steps in. All in all I am pretty proud that I have survived thus far and not really let any balls hit the ground. This weekend however… who knows how well that is going to work since it will be hard to fight the desire to be sedentary.

Enter the Warlords

Several days ago I apparently got into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program. Based on the time that passed between the launch of it and me getting in, I am guessing I was in the second wave of invites overall. With all the excitement of my wife getting ready to go on her trip, I had stopped checking my inbox for such things… and it ended up getting filed away under “promotions”. So I did not actually get in and attempt to play it until the night before last. Since for some time I had settled on Blood Deathknight as my “favorite” wow class, I opted to create one of those. Right now the only content available is the Horde content that centers around a campaign to build your Garrison in Frostfire Ridge. As a result of this I created an Orc Deathknight given that generally this is my favorite Horde Race when I actually play that faction.

Wednesday night was our regularly schedule “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and as such I got over to actually booting up World of Warcraft pretty late in the evening. So I was tired and probably a bit confused… so when they landed me in Frostfire Ridge with a toolbar full of abilities that made no sense… I had a very much “wtf is this shit” moment. I knew going into the Alpha that they had removed Blood Boil and merged it with Pestilence. I did not however know that they also removed Rune Strike and Heart Strike… and even Blood Strike. So I could not for the life of me that night figure out how to set up a Deathknight Rotation. After consulting the Sage Qelric, I managed to reason out a rotation once you filled in the missing bit of the information. They are apparently expecting us to use Pestilence as our Blood Rune consumer now.

Getting Into Things

Once I figured out the rotation and remembered how I normally set up the rest of my bar, things started to fall into place. Its funny how many abilities I didn’t even remember using but where just muscle memory for playing a Deathknight. Each time I used one of these… I had to track it down and put it on my bar in the “correct” place. This would have likely been less jarring if I had essentially not been playing much wow for the last five months. I made another attempt to play last night before our League of Legends night, and found it still pretty lousy feeling. However afterwards I finally started to get back into the swing of things. I still keep wanting to do things that wildstar allows me to do, and I keep trying to sprint… but overall I have managed to get through the first few quests and ding 91.

I have an Inn and a Barracks in my Garrison and my very first follower that I can send away on missions. So far I am digging the way Garrisons are just integrated into the storyline. At first I was concerned that they might be this big mini-game that was entirely skippable. However they have managed to integrate it into the storyline of building a base in this foreign land. I managed to find an ogre merchant that I could bribe to come trade with me at my Garrison. I am wondering if he will eventually show up there and become a merchant that I can buy and sell from. For the time being as far as I know that has not actually happened. I will probably play some more tonight and stream some of it. The Deathknight rotation still seems off somehow… like there is way too much downtime waiting on my runes to recycle. I guess it gives me plenty of time to weave in Soul Reaper and Death Siphon… which I am finding I like considerably more than Death Pact.

Warlords of Draenor

For at least some of tonight I will likely be playing some Warlords of Draenor. Since I am one of the few people in Alpha Currently… I feel like I need to do my job as a tester and… test content. When I say few… that is a bit of a misnomer because it seems like everyone and their brother are in the friends and family alpha. Blizzard has without a doubt the biggest family I have ever seen. If you are also in Warlords Alpha, you should totally throw me a Battletag invite (Belghast#1752). If you do so however please tell me how the hell I know you. It would be nice to have some friendly faces on the alpha server until they hook it up to the “real” battle.net accounts. Going to also start joining an “AofA” server channel if any of the other Alliance of Awesome community members happen to be playing.

#WoW #WorldOfWarcraft #WarlordsofDraenor

Remembering River

June 12, 2014 by Belghast

High Latency Rememberance

I am at a bit of a loss of words on how exactly to start this post. Yesterday was a very sad day for the gaming blogosphere. It was early afternoon when we got the news through a post on his blog, and the sorrow reverberated through the community like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Christopher Cavelle, the man we know better as River the author of the “A High Latency Life” blog passed away due to complications from an emergency surgery. It seemed like we had all just talked to him the other day, and it seemed absolutely impossible that this man was now dead. He had recently gotten into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program for World of Warcraft, and the last discussion I had personally was with him regarding his excitement. So it seems completely impossible that he is now gone.

River was like this elemental force of mischief. He had a way of showing up at exactly the right time and adding exactly the right quip to any conversation that involved him. While often bawdy, he carried with it a genuineness that made everyone love him, even if they were on the opposite side of a discussion from him. The way he crafted his blog was a thing of beauty and something I can only aspire to be able to do. He could take a rant and wrap it in an easy to swallow coating of humor that made you forget why you might be mad about his point of view by the end of the reading. It will always be his sense of humor that I remember the most, because he had this unique often self deprecating style that just worked. Even when he was being aggro, there was this loveable curmudgeon characteristic to it that made you smile.

A Small Tribute

The other characteristic that his blog was most known for was the fact that he almost always included a scantily clad woman to go along with his post. Unfortunately this was also the reason why I generally kept his blog out of my feed reader due to the often “not quite safe for work” nature. My boss has always had a habit of just swinging by my desk the moment I decide to take a break and read some of my RSS feed, and the last thing I needed was a picture of a woman doing questionable things to an ice cream cone sitting there. This however became one of those hallmarks that the community joked about, and yesterday when the news broke Syp suggested that today we all post a “scantily clad woman” in honor of @TheeRiver. So today I am following that suggestion and posting some really awesome Vi cosplay, since she is not only amazingly hot… but a brutal force to be reckoned with.

One of my regrets going forward will be that I never really got to know River on a personal level. He was genuinely one of the nicest people on twitter, and was quite literally one of the first people to ever befriend me. But I feel like I only really knew him on a surface level. There were many times where it felt like we were friends mostly through the other friends we happened to have in common. For me at least, I tend to get extremely close to someone when we share a guild or have struggled through something together, and that just never seemed to work out right. You can measure the weight of a person by the impact they have on their community, and this man left so many people changed in his wake. Recently he had gone through his own change when he decided to take an impromptu poll on the topic of gender and gaming. HIs post “Yes All Women” was his post about having his eyes opened that, yes the problem was really that prolific. I had hoped that we would get to hang out and play together in the Warlords alpha, and finally get to know him more closely, but unfortunately he was taken from us before that happened.

Our Community

There have been so many times that I have tackled with whether or not we actually have a community here in the gaming blogosphere or instead just a series of island states with temporary alliances. I’ve reversed my view significantly since that rather cynical post, but you cannot look at something like this without realizing that we really are a community in every sense of the word. Yesterday Syp once again said something rather cogent, that “Times like this, I wish there was a real world hangout for all us bloggers to get together and hug.” And it is true… I wish I could give all of the people in this community that are hurting from this loss a big damned bear hug. That is one thing that @Ardua and I have in common… we are huggers, and there are times when nothing else will quite do as much as a big heart felt hug. So while I am at still at a loss of words and bewildered by just how sudden this happened… my role in this is to be there for the people who did know River on a more personal level and are broken in side over his loss.

In a way Twitter and the blogosphere is his ephemeral thing… that was just expect to always be there even when we cannot be. The show must always go on, and our absence does not somehow stop the proceedings. As a result I find that we tend to take for granted that every member of this community will always be in exactly the same place as they will always be. I feel like this is an opportunity to reach out and let the people we deeply care about in this community know it. There are so many people that make every single day a better place for me. It has been popular lately in the media to talk about how the internet is pushing society apart. I submit to them that for introverts like myself, the internet opens up a new world full of people we would likely have never met otherwise, and as a result we are enriched by these experiences. There are people in my life that I love dearly, and would do anything in my power to help… and will likely never actually meet face to face. Just because distance and circumstances separate us… it does not make us any less of a community and in many cases a family.

River you will be missed.

Super Grape Stomper

June 11, 2014 by Belghast

Silent Observers

So far the issue of Wildstar Attunements has been a fairly polarizing one in the community as a whole. So when I posted my write-up yesterday about why I didn’t think they were a horrible thing… I expected it also to be polarizing. If you look at my statistics for the day, that single post got more unique viewers than anything else by a large margin. However surprisingly even though it got forwarded quite a bit, I really didn’t end up with much commentary. I expected someone out there to tell me how wrong I am, but that surprisingly didn’t happen. I had a friend send me a private message about it however, thanking me for keeping my post “fair” and not adding to the vitriol.

So is it because I approached the post from a calm place talking about my own experiences with bad attunement systems that folks didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to tell me how horrible I was? I am not so deluded to think that the majority of folks actually agreed with me. One of the things I see sometimes in the blogosphere is when one blogger posts about another, telling them just how wrong they are. I’ve done a few of these during my early days of blogging, but it really is not the type of thing I am interested in any more. There is more than enough negativity out there, that I really don’t need to add my own. I really hope that I can be a positive voice and talk about the good in things more than dwell upon the bad. Ultimately I appreciate every voice, even the ones I don’t agree with.

Super Grape Stomper

One of my favorite things in Wildstar is one that has surprised me. I normally have this odd relationship with mini-games in MMOs, and generally try to avoid them. However when I put the Moonshiners Cabin in my skyplot, I found the “This Aint No Bathtub Hooch” challenge to be insanely fun. Most of the housing challenges can be completed every 30 minutes, and often times I will stomp grapes to make moonshine four for five times a night. In part it is the rewards, or at least my attempt to collect all of them. The high end reward is the purple quality bed I wrote about the other day, which is cool but I already have one. The common rewards are either a neon beer sign or 150 reknown, and the rewards I am currently going after is the dye chest. It contains within it one of five random dyes, and I believe I only have three of the five currently. As a result I complete this quest over and over trying to get the last ones.

As a side effect I have a truly silly number of beer signs, and I am basically covering the side of my ship in them. I am not sure if they are tradeable, but if you need beer signs… I am your man. The funny thing about it is there is zero market for them, because the Moonshiners Cabin is pretty much constructable by anyone who chooses to plunk down the gold it takes to build it. The question is… will I still care about it once I have collected all of the dyes available. It is a fairly easy and fun way to farm reknown, but I am just not sure if it is worth paying the weekly upkeep. That is the dirty secret that no one really talks about in the housing system. These cool things we can place, have to be repaired weekly to keep functioning. So far all of the ones I have placed have had a 1 gold repair cost, which at this point is still a fairly significant amount of money. So I have a feeling many of my things… including the crystal jumping puzzle will go away at the end of this week. My mission however is to find the upgrade to my mining plot, because that is one of those things I have found massively useful.

Return to Cyrodil

As much as I have loved my time spent in Wildstar, I do feel bad that I have been horribly neglecting Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar is the new shiny, and as a result is getting my attention as I have a strong desire to level and get all the shiny baubles that come with it. However this really doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of Elder Scrolls Online, because the games literally could not be any more different. Things is I enjoy both immensely and hope to continue playing them both for some time. As a result I am really looking forward to tonight. For some time we have had these semi-regular “Faff about in Cyrodil” nights, and after taking last week off I am ready to get back into the swing of things. The event should give me the focus to sit down and really enjoy Elder Scrolls for an evening. I am not sure exactly what we will do yet, but I had a ton of fun at that Nord town we stumbled across with the Dark Anchor, so if nothing else I would love to head back out there.

Playing Wildstar and Elder Scrolls at the same time is an odd contrast. The one failing of ESO, is that it is extremely hard to group with other players. I really hope this is something they address in future updates because the game is in desperate need of better social systems to allow players to do content other than Cyrodil together. Ultimately we do it… only because that is what we CAN do as a large group. Without a mentoring system, we are pretty much limited to PVP content because it allows multiple levels to blend together and get bolstered up to level 50. I am mostly a soloist when it comes to questing, but the various folks who have tried to quest as a pair have found it extremely difficult to stay in sync while leveling. It has mostly worked for the folks that are always on at the same time, but for those who are not… if the partner gets even the slightest bit ahead it becomes extremely difficult for the other player to catch up.

After seeing how cleanly a game can manage disparate levels grouping together, my hope is that Elder Scrolls adds in some functionality for this. The game is awesome, but other than PVP it is a largely single player experience. That said the game does have some of the most enjoyable dungeons I have experienced, but I wish they had taken a queue from Final Fantasy XIV and simply scaled players down to the dungeons level. After seeing this work in Wildstar I am shifting to the opinion that this is the way all dungeons should work. A dungeon should have a fixed level and it scales the player to that level for the purpose of the content. Sure give the players rewards for their own level… but scaling down blows away some of the problem with “out leveling” content, and makes it easier to help guildies out when the content has “grayed out” for you.

Elder Scrolls Online

As stated above I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online and if you are Daggerfall Covenant I invite you to join in the fun regardless if you are in the guild or not. The plan is we will meet up at Northern High Rock Gate in Cyrodil around 8:30 CST. The guild is aligned to Wabbajack, and if we can manage to get people through the queue, it would be awesome to actually do this event on that campaign. The fallback to this point has been Volendrung, and I hope to be online early to try and assess the feasibility of Wabbajack for the evening. From there we will pick an objective for the night and wander off into the Cyrodil countryside in search of mayhem. If you are not a member of the guild, just add @Belghast and we can get you into the fray.

#Wildstar #ElderScrollsOnline