February 2015 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Lost in Maguuma

February 9, 2015 by Belghast

Wanderlust

Yesterday was a bit of a busy day for many reasons. Firstly getting home super late Saturday night, and then recording AggroChat extremely late, meant that more or less I just straight up crashed instead of editing the recording. This meant first thing yesterday morning I had to edit the podcast and post it. After that I of course still had a blog to write, and needed to spend some time working on another article as well. Throughout all of this there were two problems. Firstly I had a splitting headache the likes of which I have not seen in almost a year. Secondly it was absolutely gorgeous outside, with the temperatures rising up to roughly 80* F yesterday. So my wife and I hemmed and hawed as to whether or not we would actually go do anything. Finally around 3pm yesterday afternoon we decided to get outside and go wandering about.

I’ve talked about the fact that any town of a decent size around me has a Wal-mart. It has always been this way, because quite honestly I live in the Wal-mart heartland, with Bentonville the home office only about two hours away. The first first Wal-mart supercenter in existence is about 30 minutes away in the town of Wagoner for example. Big Wal-mart stores are boring, utilitarian and predictable… but going to smaller less shopped stores often provides this strange melange of products that they still have on the shelf. Each store has a certain amount of discretion as to what they can clearance, so this means that shopping multiple stores might yield completely different results. As such a few times of the year it is prime territory for hunting down clearance Legos.

We set forth on an adventure that took us through three very small locations, and while my wife found more interesting stuff than I did, at the second store… a store I had good luck with last year… I managed to pick up a couple of really cool Star Wars sets at a deep discount. First up I found the Lego AT-AP walker which was originally $60 for the much more reasonable price of $30. Then at a considerably worse deal I picked up the originally $25 General Grievous Wheel Bike set for $19… which admittedly I only jumped at because the General Grievous figure is just so badass looking. This season honestly has been pretty slim pickings, largely because Wal-mart has started doing this annoying thing. They will throw something on clearance… and change the sticker color to red… but have the item marked at its normal price. Essentially I look up each Lego set and if the savings is not 50% off I generally don’t jump at it. This has netted me some pretty cool finds like the SWTOR Sith Fury for $60 but in order to find them… you have to be diligent, and for me the fun is more about the hunt than the finding.

Lost In Maguuma

One of the other things of note that happened yesterday while watching the return of Walking Dead is that I managed to hit level 60 on my Warrior in Guild Wars 2. I am still knee deep in the Maguuma jungle region and right now I find myself shifting between Sparkfly Fens and Bloodtide Coast, largely be cause the Fens simply got too “big” for me as I kept wandering into level 62 areas and having to deal with constant glancing blows. This leaves me 20 levels to go before I hit the Guild Wars 2 endgame, whatever that might be. One of the things that has always bothered me about this game is that I never managed to max a character out. Eighty levels is a rather daunting task, especially when you don’t find yourself really enjoying the game play. That said I am generally known for having multiple max level characters in any game I play, so it felt like a weak spot in my armor that I could not stomach the grind in this one game.

Maguuma region is a bit of a slog, which has me concerned for the Heart of Thorns expansion. I really do not like Jungle or Swamp regions in video games. I was having a blast so long as I stuck to the snowy peaks of the Norn regions, but once I wandered into the swampy zombie filled wasteland… the fun factor of the game went down significantly. Here is hoping that I can stomach it just enough to graduate into the higher zones. All of the guides I have read say that I should really be doing dungeons to level… but I am admittedly scared of them. The shitty dungeon experience was what ended up killing the game for me the first time. Right now I am enjoying the soloing over world gameplay style, and I am afraid if I go into the dungeons again… and they end up still being the chaotic and exploitative mess that they were originally… that it will enrage me enough to halt my journey.

The Real Game

One of the biggest frustrations for me when it comes to online games is when a massive shift in the way the game feels happens. Most games have this highly tailored starter experience to ease players into the game, and then something happens as though the really polished section of the game flew away. Sometimes this transition is gradual, and other times it is quite literally like having the bottom dropped out from under you. I’ve not written much about Albion Online because to some extent I fell off that rather steep cliff. The first two tiers of content felt really fun and natural as I wandered around the world collecting resources to be able to craft nifty things. Then I reached tier 3… and the fun drained away quickly. The game up until that point had been around gathering materials and lugging them back to town so that you could use the crafting machines and fashion them into whatever you might like. When you hit Tier 3, the crafting machines start charging you a fee to use them. This is the equivalent of having to pay every time you need to use the anvil in a World of Warcraft town.

The problem with this is that there really aren’t that many gold fountains that I have seen so far, but the machine problem ends up to be a rather massive gold sink. Granted at this point I don’t even know if there is such a thing as gold in the game… because I have only managed to gather up a few silver to my name. Admittedly this is their pricing scheme… to get players to purchase gold, to ease the process of playing the game. According to the pricing listed on the founders pack information, it looks like $20 would get you 4500 gold, and $50 would get you 12,000 gold. Not that either of these is an absolutely insane price for what seems to be the purchasing power that gets you, but I have essentially stopped playing because I quickly realized this game was unsustainable without either grinding bandits for days… or plunking down some cold hard cash for a game that was only mildly enjoyable in the first place. This is a bit of a shame, because really Albion does have some really interesting ideas at work. I might piddle with it off and on still to see just how deep the money chasm is, but if nothing else for the time being it has most definitely halted my forward momentum.

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

February 8, 2015 by Belghast

Banquets and No Caffeine

This has been a strange week for me, for several reasons but not the least of which has been my mission to try and stop energy drinks cold turkey. I have been less functional than I normally am, but I am hoping that at some point I will crest and things will start to get more normal. This morning seems to be the worst of it, or what I am hoping is the worst of it. When I went out for my normal early morning breakfast run, I was so damned tempted to buy a monster. Fortunately I stuck to my guns and just picked up a Dr Pepper instead. I think what has made the last two days so awful is that for one reason or another I have not been fixing coffee in the morning as per my usual routine. As such this morning I woke up with the worst splitting headache I have had in years, which I can only attribute to not having nearly enough caffeine in my system to sustain me.

Yesterday itself was a bit of an odd one as well. The bulk of the day was spent piddling around online and doing laundry other than my brief period of time recording Battle Bards. The highlight of the day was pretty much hanging out and talking with Syl and Jae for several hours. The low point was the fact that in the evening I had to go to an employee banquet. In the grand scheme of things it is not that big of a deal, and this was I think the fourth or fifth one I have gone to. The problem is… they are largely long drawn out awards shows with the exact same meal from year to year. The positive of this however is the fact that there is really great cheesecake. The negative is, most of the food tastes like it has been sitting out for hours. This years frustration is that they never came around with coffee after dinner, so I am not sure exactly what was up with the wait staff this year. They acted disorganized, when in the past they have always been a picture of lightning precision.

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

The problem with having a banquet to go to meant that we would be getting home way later than normal. I gave my aggrochat crew a heads up, but Kodra sadly was just too sick to stay on and record. As a result we recorded the show with a very sleepy me, Ashgar, Rae and Tam. Granted Tam was probably not all that sleepy considering it wasn’t all that late for his newly pacific time zone self. For me we didn’t get started recording until 10 pm… and that meant 11 pm for Ashgar who got progressively less communicative as the show went on. Moments before we were about to hit record… Tam completely blew my mind. I’ve embedded the video above… the man in the videos hobby apparently is to make actual food… with doll sized utensils and then record it for YouTube. I had no real words for what I was seeing. As you are watching it… remember that he is putting this much effort into what is essentially a single spoon full of food.

When we finally recovered from that… we had a relatively normal show talking about Final Fantasy XIV and our defeat of Turn 6 and work on Turn 7 of Binding Coil of Bahamut. I break the pattern and discuss my experiences in Blackrock Foundry last week, and start a discussion about randomness in encounters and why it is both a good and frustrating thing. From there we delve into Tam’s faffing about in Elite: Dangerous. This reprises a conversation we have had before about his ultimate concept for a space game, where we all exist on the same ship, but can play vastly different roles. We decided in this grand space adventure he would be Wash, I would be Mal, and Rae of course would be Kaylee. I would love to have a game where pilot Tam could drop me off on a planet to explore while providing cover fire… then help me evac with all of loot I found, taking it to a near black market and unloading our spoils. Towards the end of the show we get into a discussion of the North American League Championship Series and how watching it has changed for Rae, Tam and Ashgar now that they also have a Fantasy League going on. It was a fun hour of conversation, albeit a very sleepy one.

I’ve Been Doing It Wrong

One of the more interesting tidbits that came out of last nights podcast is that apparently I have been playing Arcanist wrong all of this time. More so than that I have apparently been playing damage over time classes wrong in every game I have tried playing them. There have been few things I have hated more than playing a DoT heavy class, because the gameplay always felt slow and boring. What I had been doing all of these years was something relatively simple… I would send my pet to the target, apply my dots, and then use whatever weak nuke I happened to have to burn it down. I commented last night that I would rather level another Conjurer than play Arcanist. To which Tam was absolutely shocked… and he started to explain how he leveled where he ran around willy nilly and dotted everything in site up, letting Carbie fight to hold aggro while chain pulling everything. I tried this, in the middle of the podcast and damned if it did not work miraculously.

Truth is I simply do not think like a “finger wiggler” as I have always called them. I want to clash face to face with the mobs and burn them down one by one while holding aggro on everything else. That is my comfort zone, what I am used to, and the gameplay I always seem to return to. Arcanist and other dot classes apparently need to be played in a style that I had never thought about. Simply dotting up everything in sight and waiting for the dots to kill them while attacking other things. As Tam said, it is apparently easier to kill ten things at once than one thing… now knowing this I managed to get from 18 to 20 Arcanist with extreme ease in the amount of time it took to finish the podcast. This is just such a foreign concept to me, that it is taking awhile for me to grasp. So far it is working… maybe I will in fact have a Summoner/Scholar, the class that I never thought I would end up getting to max level.

A Calling Card

February 7, 2015 by Belghast

Out of Order

This morning is an odd one for me, in part because there is a natural order to my weekends. Generally speaking I get up, get dressed, go find some food… bring it up and spent the next period of time working on my daily blog post. This morning however things are a bit off, because my mother in law will be coming around noon, and in the week since coming back from Pax South our house has gotten a bit disordered. So as a result I gobbled my breakfast and set forth to clean on the house. Generally speaking I do the grunt cleaning, picking things up, straightening, throwing out trash… and my wife comes back through with more surgical precision considering she sees dirt that I don’t. Together we can get our house in manageable order in under an hour generally speaking.

The other awesome and scary thing that is happening this morning is that I will be sitting in on the recording of an episode of battle bards. I’ve been a long time supporter of the show, having listened to I believe every episode. I too am a huge fan of game music, and tend to spend most of my days listening to soundtracks looping in the background. So I am pleased to be able to share some of my favorite tracks along a theme… that I am not going to give away. As a result of this I ended up spending my normal writing time while eating… going back over my notes about the various tracks we will be reviewing. I admit now that it is the actual day we are recording I am a bit nervous. Normally when I guest on a podcast it is no big deal… because I am being myself. This time it feels like we have a higher purpose, and while I have some formal musical training… that feels like a lifetime ago. So hopefully I don’t make a complete ass of myself.

A Calling Card

Over the last few weeks I have been working on a little side project. I originally started thinking about it while at Pax South and it just took a bit to finally pull the technical bits together. I’ve owned the domain Belghast.com for some time but I never did much with it. The idea was always to create a site that somewhat combined all of the different things that I do. At this point I am all over social media, have two podcasts, a daily blog, a youtube channel, and hitbox stream… in addition to the stuff I am starting to do for MMOGames.com. When I was having to pull together the information to hand off to the community folks at each of the game companies during pax… I realized just how spread out everything is. It would be so much more simple if I could just say… go to Belghast.com and that will link you to all of the projects that I do. So I guess in the idea is part calling card, and part resume.

The hard part was figuring out how to do what I wanted to do. In the end I found a plug-in that would allow me to syndicate posts from damned near anything with an RSS feed. Honestly the plug-in is a bit scary, and likely designed for some really nefarious site cloning purposes. It was however the only thing I could find to do exactly what I wanted it to do. Thankfully all the functionality I need is in the free version, because the paid version is like $15 a month. Essentially I am just excerpting my posts on Aggronaut, AggroChat, Bel Folks Stuff and MMOGames but the plug-in was designed to copy the entire post, images and all. I still plan on writing and podcasting in all the same places… just plan on having the other site to connect all the dots. I like the banner, because it finally gives me a reason to use the “real life” chibi that Rae did for me. Not completely sold on the theme, but for now it works. I might do something more custom later.

At Peace with GW2

I’ve had a very checkered past with the Guild Wars franchise. I was not a huge fan of the original, largely because I had no ability to jump… and Ruined Ascalon was so damned ugly. Then you zoom forward and the manifesto trailer was released… and everything it said I thought I wanted. When I managed to get into the Alpha program through a friend, I was more excited for any Alpha I had been to that point. When I actually got my hands on it… I had this overwhelming “I don’t get it” feeling. In fact there was a three hundred page thread on the forums essentially saying the same thing. I felt that all criticism of the game approach was being ignored, and as a result it was the only Alpha program I have ever resigned from. Then we scan forward to launch, and everyone I know is excited about the game. I obviously lost access to the test servers, but did manage to get into the open beta phase. I got in and the game was not as bad as I had remembered it, and I had lots of friends playing it with me… so I ended up buying the game. A few weeks in however I was hit by the same sense of pointlessness, like nothing I was doing in the world mattered. The final nail in the coffin was how bad the dungeon running experience felt, when that was the majority of what I spent time with friends doing.

I had not really followed the game from that point on, other than to use it as my whipping boy for what happens when grouping is done badly. Then we move forward to Pax South. I had been asked to sit in on the panel to see what they had to say, so I dutifully did so. Maybe it was the excitement of the crowd, or the well crafted sales pitch… but when I got back to Texas I reinstalled the game and I have been poking around. I can’t say that the game has changed drastically, but I think maybe I have in the intervening years. At this point I am 59 on my Warrior, and have been running around aimlessly completing the objectives on the map. I have to say I am really enjoying myself. It is a vastly different experience than any of the games I am playing, a much more disposable experience… but that is okay. There is some serious depth to this game, but it isn’t the same sort of depth that you see in a traditional MMO. I find myself actually looking forward to the Heart of Thorns expansion. This game has become my cooling down experience after raid nights. I pop it open, running around for a bit and finish a few objectives… feeling like i have accomplished something without spending a lot of time. That seems to be where this game excels, giving you bite sized moment to moment experiences that feel like they are building to something larger. I have to say… and I realize how much crow I have to eat… but I am enjoying myself in ways I never expected to.

AggroChat Game Club

February 6, 2015 by Belghast

Failure to Random

Last night was our second night of raiding in Blackrock Foundry, and our second night of attempts on Oregorger. This boss has become the pinnacle of everything I love and hate about Blizzard raid encounter design. The thing I love is the fact that it is a really inventive fight that lets us play pacman as we gobble up crates of ore throughout the arena before Oregorger can get to them. What I hate about it is the fact that there are some serious RNG elements to the fight. After our first night of attempts the raid lead and others poured over the logs, and did some serious research finally finding a video showing how the process worked. In theory Oregorger will always choose to go a direction where there a boxes So the theory goes that if you clear boxes in a certain order he will favor a specific path over others. The problem in practice is even then… there is still a large amount of RNG into the encounter as to which specific direction he will turn and charge.

You can watch the video we stumbled onto purporting to have the solution. The problem is no matter how many times we watched the video, no closely we aspired to follow the golden path… something went wrong. It is moments like this that I get frustrated since really I have no clue what is going wrong. If we can ever figure out the magic behind the box phase we will down this fight because we are now doing the first phase flawlessly, or what appears to be flawlessly. Largely this has always been one of the problems with World of Warcraft raid design. They tend to view “random” as a positive thing, and to some extent I get it… but don’t make these random occurrences raid wipes. The Oregorger encounter is long enough as it is… to have a single mechanic take out half of your raid. I guess I find myself preferring the Final Fantasy XIV raid design ethic of extremely difficult… but follows a predictable pattern. That way when you fail you know it is because you didn’t do something… not because the random element decided to screw you over this try.

Hans and Franz

When we took our break half way through the raid, we opted to switch gears and shift to the Hans and Franz encounter. The mob names are Hans’gar and Franzok, and I find it absolutely hilarious that they a reference a skit that came out when I was in elementary school… and large swaths of our raid was not even alive when it was a “thing”. But I am told apparently there is a State Farm commercial bringing the characters back… so I guess it makes sense. The encounter is in a room filled with conveyor belts with thin strips between them that don’t move. At the start of the fight the belts are off, but when it enters the environmental damage phase they turn on making it harder to avoid the obstacles. The first phase is avoiding the “pop tarts” as they have become referred to by the raid… which are these molten metal slabs that come into the room. The second phase of the environmental damage is avoiding the metal stampers, that come down from the ceiling in a certain pattern. There seemed to be four turns of a specific pattern before the encounter picked a new pattern. Granted it could potentially pick the same pattern twice in a row for eight turns.

There was also a tank swap mechanic happening, but as DPS I never quite grasped what was actually occurring. There was a point in the fight where a specific tank in the rotation needed to have an external damage cooldown cast on him while being slammed to the ground. The rest of the fight was simply avoiding damage that could be avoided, and pouring damage into the boss during the few times when they were standing still. This meant that you wanted to make sure you blew your dps cooldowns and took your second potion during one of the windows where you could stand on the non-moving sections and pour damage in. Everything about this fight is like a better designed Oregorger, and what I mean by that is… there is still a fun quirky mechanic, there is still an element of randomness… but the randomness is predictable and something you can adjust for quickly. I will admit on the first pull seeing everything play out felt like madness, but it was simply to adjust after that to match the pattern in play. As a result we downed Hans and Frans last night and I managed to pick up two more drops… one of which again I won’t be using.

AggroChat Game Club

I figure at this point… the statute of limitations on the podcast we announced our first AggroChat Game Club title. As a result I am going to talk about it today for anyone who happens to read my blog… but not listen to our podcast. One of the ideas we kicked around for awhile was to have a single title that all of us played during the course of a month. Then during the last show of that month we dive into the game completely with no concern about spoilers. The idea is for us to talk everything about that game, what we liked, what we didn’t like and how we felt about the major plot points. During Episode 41, we deliberated about a long list of games and finally decided to go with a consensus title for the very first one. As such we chose Citizens of Earth by Atlus, and over the course of this month all five of the AggroChat members are going to be playing it. To make things even more interesting… this is a title that is available on Steam, 3DS and Vita and in actuality we have folks playing each of these versions.

What I want from you… is to play along with us! I thought it would be fun if we also collected some of the best comments sent into us by listeners to the podcast that are also playing. So pick up the game on whatever platform you choose, play the game, and then send in your comments. We will try and pick out several of the comments we receive about the game and mention them while recording our podcast. The show in which we are recording is February 28th, so please try and have the comments to us by the 26th to make sure we have time to read them. Each of us are already knee deep in the game, and I look forward to this little experiment. For those wondering… all of the titles mentioned during AggroChat #41 that did not receive a “hard veto”, are still technically in play. We are sorting out how this club will work from this point on, but more than likely we will be round robin picking future titles from that same list. Hopefully you will join in the fun, and don’t forget to let us know what you think.

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