January 2015 - Tales of the Aggronaut

In Mourning

January 31, 2015 by Belghast

So It Happened

A couple of days ago I talked about the present rumor that AOL would be shutting down all of its enthusiast press websites… as far as we are concerned that was Joystiq, Massively and WoW Insider. Yesterday I first saw that it was officially in reading Brianna Royce’s touching announcement on Massively. I have to saw that as well written as it was… it was breaking my heart to be reading it. At this point I am not really sure how much of meaning I have to say about it. It just flat sucks, and seems to follow the model that everything AOL lays its hands on goes to shit. The most frustrating part is that it seems so senseless considering that from what I could tell all of the publications were doing swimmingly, in spite of draconic and ham-handed budget cuts. I feel bad because I really did not follow Joystiq at all, but I did however read Massively and WoW Insider on a near daily basis.

While I didn’t always agree with every article, I felt like the site needed to exist. There is a blogger that I am not even going to dignify by naming, that seems to be dancing on their grave with their “I Hope Massively Shuts Down” post. I am done with that site and anything associated with it, and I think it was the last straw for a lot of people who had long only half heartedly followed it. In fact I am officially done with rant blogs in any fashion. But all of this is side tracking me from the purpose of today’s post. I feel strongly that all of these writers will find homes either in community work or on another gaming website. Today I compiled the list of twitter accounts for the writers that had them, for Massively and WoW Insider. I figure this is the best way to follow people and see what they end up doing over the coming months. February third will be the final day of all of the Joystiq connected sites.

Massively Cast

WoW Insider Cast

Pax South Panel Rundown

I had happy things to talk about in Final Fantasy XIV… but quite honestly after writing the first part of today’s post I am really not amped up and prepared to write them. Instead I am going to close out today’s post with something I have been working on over the last few weeks. One of the cool things about the age we live in is that sooner or later most things end up on Youtube. For those that did not have the benefit of travelling to San Antonio for the inaugural Pax South show… or if you are like me and missed a bunch of the panels because you were doing other things… I thought I would compile a list of everything that I could find online. I did not record any of these and as such I do not take any responsibility for the quality… but this is the best of what I could find.

Game Panels

Conversation Panels

I am still missing a LOT of panels, but as I find them I will try and update the list to include them. One of the big problems that I saw was that Gearbox and Bioware were pretty much doing their own things… and NONE of their panels were listed on the official Pax South registry, making it really hard to catch them. I am really hoping I can find recordings of some of the ones by Bioware, but for those I don’t even know the name of said presentations to go off of. If you know of any obvious ones that I am missing, I would appreciate a comment below to let me know. In any case, I hope you have an awesome weekend and that you go out and do awesome things… to help us forget that our gaming ecosystem is suffering a loss.

Fairwell to Highmaul

January 30, 2015 by Belghast

Isometric Sorta Minecraft

About a week ago a friend of mine hooked me up with access to the Albion Online alpha. I was immediately a fan of the art style, but concerned that it would end up feeling like a throwback to something like Ultima Online. I do not have the fond nostalgia towards that game that so many players did, largely because I did not give it a shot until after I had already played a ton of Everquest. So the other night when I got in, I noticed I was naked and the movement was click based… but other than that I popped right back out expecting to explore it at a later date. Last night after the raid I wanted to play something, but did not want to get too deeply involved. Seeing the icon on my desktop I decided to fire it up and give it a shot. When I was quite literally falling asleep at the keyboard at 11:30 I realized the mistake I had made… because this is absolutely one of those “just one more thing” games.

First off this is a game without classes in any fashion. You gain mastery over whatever you happen to be doing. As such I have focused on leveling my crafting and working on leveling my sword and board skills. So you start out rather simply by gathering rocks and chopping down trees so that you can build a skinning knife. There are “suggestions” of what you should do when that appear in the lower center of the screen but these can honestly be largely ignored if you like. I would however suggest you follow the first few until you grasp how exactly the game works. At the end of the night I had upgraded all of my crafting gear and adventure gear to tier 2, and was preparing to venture out to try and find the tier 3 areas. The real interesting thing for me is going to be that it appears to be available on PC, Mac and Linux… but also iOS and Android making it extremely cross platform. If this thing runs on my Samsung Galaxy S5 phone… I am in real trouble.

Fairwell to Highmaul

Last night we ventured forth into Highmaul Heroic and after clearing the roadblock that was Butcher on Tuesday attempted to down some new bosses. First up was Brackenspore and while we struggled a bit towards the end with the fungal creep and lost one of our flamethrower masters… we managed to push him across the line and kill him all in one shot. We had made attempts on Brackenspore heroic previously, but had not really put any serious time into it. From there we moved on to Tectus and while things did get a little dicey at times… we managed to oneshot him as well without any previous attempts on the heroic version. This set our sights on Ko’ragh, and we fought valiantly, however were ultimately bested. I believe our best attempt got him down to something like 22% but each time there would be a transition at a bad time and folks would die as the healers struggled to keep both tanks up. I figure given some more time to work on him we could easily get him down. As my friend Kadomi just reminded me… this content is still the current tier meaning we might want to kill Imperator to get the achievement.

However for the time being our princess is in another castle, as Blackrock Foundry releases next Tuesday and we plan on setting our sights there for the time being. Highmaul has been a really fun raid for us, and I am proud to have gotten 7/7 normal and 5/7 heroic before the launch of the next raid. This is kinda huge for me, and as I said in and earlier post… I had not been up to date with relevant content since Icecrown. I especially appreciate the way that folks have pulled things together in the last few weeks. I joked that folks got good while I was away at Pax South, but it really did feel like that. When I left we were still struggling a bit here or there, but when I came back… everyone seemed to have laser focus and precision. I really am looking forward to Tuesday and sitting my feet down in a brand new instance… one that drops actual tier set gear!

Marketing Is Strange

When I first heard about Dying Light it was through watching a gameplay video from some conference… I spent a bit of time this morning trying to locate said video but was unable to do so quickly. Essentially the video touted the multiplayer co-op survival horror sandbox nature of this game, and in doing so sold it to me completely wrong. While it looked gorgeous, and while I have yet to tire of worlds full of post apocalyptic zombies. I have however completely tired of the hardcore survival sandbox genre. In a sea of hundreds of those games… it feels like a horrible way to market a game right now, but I am guessing the folks thought it might be wise to try and ride the coat tails of Day Z or something of the sort. The early description that I saw of the game, and was reinforced by almost every trailer pointing out the sandbox nature… excited me about as much as you saying “brand new moba”… which is to say, not at all.

What I am hearing after the launch of the game however is that it is essentially Dead Island, but better in every possible way. I loved Dead Island for its strange campy free roaming RPG feel. While I never played the second game that came out of that series, I logged quite a bit of time playing the first and would gladly step back into that world. The problem being that the storyline behind Dying Light was mostly obfuscated until I stopped caring about it. Had I seen the above trailer first… I would have been interested. I feel like this is one of those games that is going to be judged wrong by folks like me writing it off… when it sounds like it is absolutely a game for those who enjoy open ended RPGs. While I have missed the initial purchase rush, I will probably pick it up when it gets the first price break on steam. Had they done a better job marketing the game to more than one demographic… I would have likely been a day one purchaser.

Save Ferris

January 29, 2015 by Belghast

Is It Actually War?

This morning Alternative Chat has a post that is extremely relevant to my interests. In it she questions why Ashran is failing, and has devolved into both Horde and Alliance avoiding each other in an effort to get objectives completely more efficiently. She goes on to question if we are fatigued of the red versus blue faction pride that blizzard keeps trying to make happen. I think in a large part many players are, in part because to quote the Fallout franchise “War Never Changes”. We have been in this constant state of war against the horde for the last ten years, with no victories… just more meaningless battles. In this scenario the choice of horde or alliance feels just about as meaningful as choosing RED or BLU in Team Fortress 2. Sure in World of Warcraft we have natural alignment to certain races… I happen to be pretty partial to Dwarves, Worgen and Humans for example. However I would be willing to bed that every player has at least one race in their faction that they cannot stand… I am looking at you Night Elves.

During the recent 10 years 10 questions podcast, Alt featured my response to wrap up the show about why we chose the faction we ultimately ended up aligning to. My response was rather nuanced but essentially it sums up that I wish I didn’t have to choose. The funny thing is that for years I thought I just had a natural aversion to PVP, and that it was driving my distaste for factional combat. However that cannot be the case because during Pax South the game I ended up ultimately raving about was Gigantic… a game where the only thing to do IS PVP combat. I think the problem lies with this false sense of faction pride. I don’t care about what happens to my faction so long as it doesn’t actually inconvenience me. When it does inconvenience me I go do something else, because I am not playing an MMO for the PVP. I neither love nor hate the Horde, because they are essentially an island that exists far beyond the realm that I have access to. If I had access to playing with horde characters, in horde zones without walling myself off from my existing alliance friends… then maybe just maybe I would start to care.

Save Ferris

One of the problems with blogging the way that I do, each morning… super early in said morning… is that I am often a day behind in my content. As such yesterday seemed to be the day to post about this next topic… so I am of course posting a day late. There has been a rumor circulating that AOL has decided to shut down the Joystiq operation and its related sites. While I am not sure if I have ever actually been to Joystiq proper… I do absolutely read both WoW Insider and Massively on a daily basis. In fact I would not likely have the type of audience that I do today were it not for WoW Insider picking up and featuring my Groupcraft post years ago. That after all has been one of the great things about the site, they have always been willing to take content created by the community and show it off to the world. It always felt like a proud parent pinning your paper to the refrigerator door every single time they did it. They always felt like they cared about what the community of players were up to, and over the years they featured a few special moments from my guild.

The problem with many other gaming news sites is they often times ONLY report the news. What I liked about the Joystiq sites is that they focused quite often on how the news effected the players. So if it is fate that these sites will fade from memory, my hope is that other sites will help to pick up that torch of a more personal slant on the stories. Anyone can take a press release, reword it and hit publish but it takes thoughtful contemplation to report about how said press release effects the community. As always I am concerned about the human toll of events, and over the years I have gotten to know quite a number of the writers at both WoW Insider and Massively. I hope that there will be an eleventh hour salvation for the sites, but if there isn’t I salute the work those stalwart individuals have done to date. Not that anything I say has any weight when it comes to corporate politics, but I sincerely hope AOL rethinks their decision, or at the very least has the common sense to sell the network to someone else.

Other Stuff about Things

This morning is a bit of a strange morning, in part because there are things I would normally say that I can’t necessarily talk about. What I can talk about however is that as of yesterday I am officially a member of the MMO Games writing staff, as they have published my first article from my experiences at Pax. I plan on writing several more pieces that will also hopefully be published relating my experiences there. I will admit I would not be writing for the site were it not for the constant wearing down by friends that also write for said site. This is a strange decision for me, in part because I know I can never actually do this as a full time gig, and secondly because I already do the daily blogging thing, two podcasts and a plethora of other side projects. That said my hope is to focus more on long form human interest style writing, namely the same sorts of things that I was always a fan at for Massively and WoW Insider. I still have no clue what kind of frequency I will actually post at. I know I have another article waiting somewhere in the editorial queue, so hopefully that will see the light of day soon.

In other news it feels really damned good to be through a raid tier in World of Warcraft while it is still relevant content. This is not a feat I have actually done since Icecrown Citadel in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Granted for now it is just normal mode but as of last Thursday while I was travelling to Pax my raid group hit 7 of 7 in Normal, and this week we repeated that and picked up an extra heroic kill taking us to 3 of 7. Now that we are past Butcher I have a feeling that the other heroic fights are going to come a bit easier. Butcher was a giant mental obstacle that we felt we couldn’t pass… so we never really tried it. Granted Damai was watching the logs to check our relative damage output to see when we were “ready” but it still felt like we didn’t believe in ourselves enough to take it down. This week however we crossed that hurdle with far less difficulty than I expected. As such tonight when we go back in I am hoping we can take down a Tectus and a Brakenspore. I had an interesting exchange with my friend Eliyon last night, and he commented just how closely my raids progression has been to his groups. Makes us think that the raid as a whole was tuned just about right.

Raid Got Good

January 28, 2015 by Belghast

Media Personality

I got into a conversation with some of my friends the other day, and during the course of it they referred to me as a “media personality”. Then to justify this they asked the guild… who agreed with them that I was most definitely one. I am not sure exactly why but this made me more frustrated than it probably should have considering that they probably did mean it as some sort of a compliment. I guess for me… when you say those words together it doesn’t exactly evoke a positive image. So many self proclaimed personalities are these vapid and self serving entities that only think of promoting whatever it is that they are doing… and ultimately makes them money. I realize self promotion is a key part of this whole process, but it is one that I have always done half heartedly. I am this guy that does a thing, and if that thing doesn’t interest you… then I don’t exactly feel compelled to try and beat down your door.

I guess the huge benefit I have is that I don’t have to make a living from what I am doing. This is and likely always will be a hobby for me. My writing and podcasting is something that I do largely for my own personal enjoyment. If I were trying to support myself and my family from what I happen to be doing, then more than likely I would feel differently. I realized long ago that there was no real way I could support myself through writing. I look to my friends that attempt to do it, and they generally are writing for multiple venues and churning out articles left and right to keep their heads above water. That is not exactly the life I would want to have for myself. This way I get to “play” at being a serious writer, without having to deal with any of the consequences. All of this said… I still do not in any fashion feel like a “media personality”.

Raid Got Good

Last night was my first raid back after Pax South, and I was to some extent dreading it a bit. Getting back into the “swing of things” has been a bit of a struggle. Since coming back I have felt generally disconnected from my game worlds, and feared my performance would be frustratingly bad. All things considered I seemed to do just fine, and once the raid started rolling I felt right at home. Apparently I need to go to Pax more often because in my absence the raid got really damned good. When I left we were struggling with Imperator Mar’gok but making some progress. That Thursday night I left, the raid downed him without me… but with some very specific circumstances that revolved around a much smaller raid size. Last night… it felt like we were old pros because through the course of the evening we one-shotted 7 of 7 bosses in Normal all before we took our first break.

After the break we started working on Hard Mode and repeated a Kargath kill before moving on and attempting Butcher. That fight had been our roadblock and in the past when we had attempted it we lacked the oomph to get over the hurdle. Last night we one shot killed him for the first time, beating the enrage in what felt like a largely repeatable fashion. One of the things I have noticed is that when our raid downs a boss, it gives us a significant confidence boost and suddenly repeat performances feel much smoother. So I feel like after clearing the Butcher hurdle we will likely be able to take down a few more heroic encounters Thursday. For a full sweep of all of the content we have downed before, we moved on to the Twin Ogrons Heroic and got them down in a single attempt as well. Like I said… clearly I need to go away more often, because when I do it seems like the raid gets phenomenally good.

Selfiegate

One of the controversies that has been brewing since they first announced the 6.1 patch, is the integration with twitter. For some reason there are many players that view this as a bad thing. I for one absolutely loved the fact that I could integrate twitter with Rift, and used it constantly. The only bad thing about that integration was the fact that it liked to tweet for you if you didn’t first turn that off. It also provided an awesome feature that allowed you to take a screenshot with the UI hidden by default. This has been something I have wanted in every game I have ever played, because when you are trying to capture the action… it just feels odd to try and fumble to flip the UI off, then take a picture… and then flip it back on before you actually die. Anything that makes doing something I am already going to do easier… is a net positive for me. At the end of the day it is an optional feature, and as such no one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to hook up your account to twitter.

This week more gasoline was added to the fire when a certain follower mission was found on the PTR. The Field Photography mission rewards the player with a S.E.L.F.I.E. Camera allowing you to take as you might expect… those ubiquitous selfie style pictures. Then a later mission called Lens Some Hands allows you to upgrade your camera, adding Instagram style filters to it. For some reason this has erupted a controversy of people up in arms that selfies are being added to the game. To which I want to add.. chill the fuck out. I personally think its a cute feature to be added, and fits with all of the other random toys we have access to that do goofy things. As a programmer, I recognize that more than likely this was some programmers pet project. We all have a stack of “wouldn’t it be cool” things that we fiddle with when we have downtime. Ultimately this one turned out to be good enough that they ended up integrating it into the game. Once again… if you don’t want to use it… then don’t. No one is forcing you to take duck face pictures of your character, but for those who do want to… let them. I feel like sometimes we lose sight of the fact that this is a supposed to be something we are doing for fun… and if taking selfies makes you happy then screw anyone who tries to harsh that happy.