July 2015 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Blaugust Games of Week – Week 1

July 31, 2015 by Belghast

Pre-emptive Thank You

Yesterday I freaked a lot of people out by calling it the Blaugust Eve. As I have explained on twitter, I was accounting for my amazing time travelling Aussie and Kiwi friends for whom… right now IS the start of Blaugust. For the rest of us at the time of posting this we have a little more wiggle room before the festivities kick off. I have to say last year was an insane ride for me, as much as it was for the contestants. The intent was to run everything through the Blaugust Nook but that didn’t exactly happen, and it quite literally made my life hell. I ended up spending a couple of hours a day trying to sort out who posted what when and in what time zone they were posting from… and then the people who posted after midnight in their own time zone… only served to add to the complication. There were numerous times I tried to track down people on twitter or IM to ask if they meant X post to be on Y day or not.

This year it seems like most everyone has registered on the Nook which is going to help, but what is going to be even more important is advertising your daily posts there with the day number you are intending it to be. On your side that is a small amount of work, but on my side that is saving me literally hours of scouring… and is hopefully going to allow me to actually read blogs during the course of the event. As soon as things start I have to flip into book keeper mode, and while I might be “reading” posts I was not necessarily enjoying them last year because of all of the technical foibles. So I am thanking you ahead of time for complying with the list of rules, because it is going to make my life not horrible over the next thirty one days. I’ve been a fan of Anook for awhile, so much so apparently that yesterday someone thought I worked for them. I just think they do a great job of giving me guild forum like functionality but also giving the ability to interact with other gamers. I am amped this year about them sponsoring the Community Award, and we will ultimately sort out the specifics of that as the event goes on.

Games of the Week – Week 1

Yesterday we launched the writing prompts forum, and I thought it was pretty amazing that Void spent a good chunk of the day yesterday populating it with a bunch of ideas. I plan on adding a new writing prompt to this post every day during the course of this event, but I wanted to go a little bit further. Nothing makes more interesting posts than exploring a new game, or revisiting one that you have been fond of in the past. As such I plan on highlighting three free to play games a week, with an attempt to mix up the styles a bit. My hope is that if you are lacking inspiration, you can download and install one of these games and find plenty of things to write about. Lets get on with the games!

Dirty Bomb – Nexon/Splash Damage

This is a game I played a bit in beta but have not really played much after it officially launched, and I am actually looking forward to playing it some more. I have long been a huge fan of games by Splash Damage, and I spent many an hour playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Hell I even joined a competitive clan while playing it, but never really did much more than scrimmage other teams. Splash Damage creates a shooter quite unlike anyone else makes, and they tend to focus on these complex objectives that require multiple classes of players to complete them. I always focused on the “Engineer” archetype because it made the game play more enjoyable for me as it gave me a higher purpose. I am not big into “death matching” but I loved rushing headlong into a firefight trying to stay alive long enough to build a bridge or repair a tank. This game is the logical extension of Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Quake Wars Enemy Territory and even to some extent the critical failure Brink. I think I am one of the few people out there that wholeheartedly enjoyed Brink, and lately I have been feeling the itch to play some FPS action… and Dirty Bomb seems like it is going to fit that bill perfectly.

Download From Steam – Download From Nexon

Everquest II – Daybreak Games

I will always hold a special place in my heart for Norrath, the setting of the Everquest universe. When World of Warcraft launched I was torn because part of me wanted to be playing Everquest II. Instead I went where the bulk of my friends went, but continued to periodically visit the setting of EQ2 throughout the years. It has some of the best world building I have seen in any game, and the scope of the zones just feel so massive compared to almost anything else on the market. They innovated in so many ways, and had so many rich systems like one of the best Mentoring systems out there for the time. As the years have ticked by the game has felt more and more like a dated relic, however there is a simple nostalgic charm to it that I still find appealing. They seem to be banking on taking this nostalgia to market, as they have opened a time locked progression server allowing players to go back and experience the world as it was during the early days. This is making me seriously consider re-rolling and starting fresh on this new server, but I have had so many other competing goals that I just have not done it yet. My goal is this week to roll a character and check it out, but unfortunately that means I am going to have to buy a new character slot on my already loaded account. If you are looking for a world loaded with inspiration… this is a good place to start.

Download From Steam – Download from Daybreak

Marvel Heroes 2015 – Gazillion

Another game that I really enjoy but find myself not playing a lot of right now is Marvel Heroes. This game provides Diablo II style game play, with a rich class based system in the form of all of the different heroes that you can play. One of the coolest features of this game is the way that the you pick your first hero to level. The game allows you to play a long list of champions to level 10, and then you get to unlock one of them and take it all the way to level 60. This gives you plenty of time to get a feel for how they each play and their different abilities. I personally tend to be a Captain America player, but there are heroes that fit just about any imagined play style. The other thing that I really appreciate is the way that for the most part, the game gives me a pathway to unlock the things that I might want without hiding it behind an overly painful grind. Champions are purchased with Eternity Splinters which drop fairly frequently while doing content in the world. One of the complaints I have seen from friends is that the game play is extremely easy, and this is absolutely the case while you are playing on normal mode. However after defeating the main storyline you can ratchet up the difficulty much in the same way as you can in Diablo 3. This is absolutely a really fun game and the freemium nature is not egregious in any fashion, so if you want some old school Diablo game play with MOBA inspired style character design… you might check this one out.

Download From Steam – Download From Gazillion

Daily Prompt

Since I more or less posted a series of games that I have some connection to, or would like to have a better connection with. The writing prompt for the day is somewhat connected to that.

What game that you are not playing, do you still have a deeply nostalgic connection to and why?

Let us hear what game you keep returning to even if you aren’t really actively playing it… or likely will never play it with quite the same fervor. For me personally that game is absolutely Everquest II, and I still hold a torch for it even though at this moment I have not really played it over the course of the last two years.

Twas Night Before Blaugust

July 31, 2015July 30, 2015 by Belghast

It’s Almost Time

I know I have said this many times… but I have to say it again. I am completely overwhelmed by the amount of support I have gotten for the path of madness known as Blaugust. As of this morning when I compiled the list I will be posting shortly… we had 47 people signed up on the Blaugust Nook. I absolutely suggest that you get out there and mingle with your fellow Blaugustians, because you are all embarking upon a mission together that will be challenging for many of you. There is a shared spirit of struggle that binds us all, in our mission of creating thirty one days of content. These events that we hold serve to galvanize our community, and create cohesion where it may or may not already exist. More than anything however… this event is about tricking each and every one of you into realizing that you can in fact write content on a schedule. Inspiration is a fickle muse… but I am here to tell you that you don’t need her anyways!

The Blaugustians

Without anymore rambling on my part… I introduce to you the challengers in the second running of the Blaugust games… may the content ever be in your favor.

This is a pretty damned impressive group of blogs if I do say so myself. During this years Blaugust I will be taking special note for the folks who also competed last year and will be coming up with some special recognition for repeat winners and survivors. Remember it is not too late to join in the madness, and you can sign up on the Blaugust Nook thread at any point during the month and play catch up. Lets make this the best Blaugust yet!

A First Prompt

What are you hoping to get out of Blaugust this year?

To make things a little easier on the Blaugustians I will be providing a writing prompt each day during the month of August in my morning posts. These are of course completely optional, but if you find yourself stuck you can go to the writing prompt thread and hopefully find some ideas. I highly suggest that we make the writing prompts a collaborative experience, and if you think of something good even if you are not going to use it yourself… post it to the thread to help your fellow challengers. I look forward to seeing all of the awesome stuff you fine folks create tomorrow. I mentioned this yesterday but I also plan on suggesting some games of the week, in case you are struggling to find purpose. Nothing creates content like your first time experiencing a new game, or even returning to a game you had forgotten about. That said I don’t really want to roll these out today, but will instead include them in tomorrows post.

Anook Community Award

July 29, 2015 by Belghast

Prepping for Blaugust

At this point we are getting super close to the launch of Blaugust, and the sign ups keep coming on the Nook. There is still time to sign up and be ready for the start of this exciting month. Also remember there is zero penalty this year for starting late and catching up. Last year my friend Tamrielo did something absolutely insane and wrote 31 really well formed posts in a 48 hour period. While I would never suggest anyone do something like that, it is absolutely possible to start a week late and make up the missed progress. Similarly I know folks will be attending Gamescom or Pax Prime during this month, so it is absolutely a good idea to stage the content ahead of time. For the WordPress users out there I highly suggest you check out their pretty excellent mobile app (iOS, Android) that gives you access to your blog on the go, and does a decent job of letting you compose a post on the go.

I tend to be a very pro WordPress person, but blogger is perfectly acceptible as well and while I have never used it there seems to be a mobile blogger client also (iOS, Android). The primary reason why I tend to suggest WordPress is just that there is a path between WordPress.com free hosted service, and moving to a WordPress.org installation on your own custom hosting. There are a number of guides out there to help this process along. What I like so much about this is the fact that it lets someone get their feet wet and decide if this blogging thing is for them… before plunking down the money it takes to rent space on a web host and purchase a domain. There are lots of people that never make the jump between COM to ORG, but it is nice that there is always that option if you want to do something with your blog that is not supported through the official channels. There are also guides for going from Blogger to WordPress, but they tend to be far less straight forward.

Anook Community Award

Last night something really cool happened, namely that Lonrem the tirelessly working community manager of Anook.com posted an excellent “best practices” document on the Blaugust Nook. If the document were not enough in helping people get the most out of their Anook experience… he also slipped a tidbit of information in down at the bottom. For a few weeks now we had been talking about Anook wanting to sponsor some sort of award. It was finally decided that the best way to have an Anook reward is to have the users of the website vote on their favorite posts. Here are the basics of this award posted straight from his document.

I’ll also announce here that Anook is going to support Blaugust with a special prize! I’m going to tally up the Hearts that each blog post gets for each blogger (Blaugger?) and award the top blog with a game code. I’m going to see if I can round up other prizes from some of our friends and partners as well, no promises there! This does give a bit of an incentive to post regularly, start on the first of August, but also to share the link to your blog on Anook! If you’ve got any questions, let me know!

This is really awesome to have our first “real” sponsor… because my pocket didn’t really count. Last year when I started this, I decided to host the challenge off of Anook because it is a network that I love. Lonrem singlehandedly won me over with his devotion, and the features basically keep me from ever having to build yet another custom SMF forum for anything. So I fly the Anook banner on my stream and mention it on every AggroChat just because I love the site. I am humbled that the site is returning some of that love and helping us get this challenge started in a bigger and better way this year. I’ve had an idea through this contest of creating a games of the week where I suggest a handful of free to play games that folks play, and then write about their experience to help get those creative juices flowing. While I might have been dreading the loss of my free time that Blaugust means… I am absolutely getting pumped about how much more “real” this whole thing feels for 2015.

Surprise Alex

It is not uncommon for me to log in to Final Fantasy XIV in the evening and hear the all too familiar chime of a group invite before the game has completely loaded. My guildies are used to ninjaing me into tanking all manner of things, and I assumed that it was yet another case of “daily expert”. So I accepted the invite without thinking much about it, and found myself shocked when I saw the Alexander loading screen. To make matters worse the ninja alex was turn 2, which is quite possibly the most frustrating thing for a tank to take on without having a second tank in there that they trust. The problem being that pugs like to stack all of the mobs together, which makes it impossible for the tanks to effectively hold aggro on them. What happens instead is that both tanks burn through all of their resources and the mobs spend the entire fight bouncing back and forth between them. This would be fine and good if it were safe for a single tank to take them on… problem being that in the later phases you have to try and carefully split the damage to even it out. All of the mobs on one tank is pretty much a certain wipe.

The positive of getting pulled into Alex like this however is that it took away my normal reluctance to such things, and as of last night I now have three of my four pieces of loot for the week. All that is left is Turn 1, and quite honestly it is the least stressful for me to pug. The tanks have clearly defined roles and for the most part they go fairly smoothly now that most people are pretty well geared. At this point for that final item I want either a chain which would instantly give me a belt, or a pedal… which would also instantly give me an item because I have a second one in my inventory. I have to say the way gearing works in Alex is a little maddening, but I feel that honestly it is their way of trying to delay people reaching level 190 geared. With Esoterics in place, I can’t really see going for say the Alexander chest piece since it takes getting a lucky roll four weeks in a row on Turn 4. My first Esoterics item of course will be the 200 weapon, because for a tank that is the single most useful upgrade. After that I will probably assess my weakest pieces and go after what I need the most… which is more than likely going to be my chest piece. Of course in the mean time Square could do what they seem to always do… and change up the game by taking away loot restrictions. That said I still think it is a little early in the patch for that to actually happen, and more than likely won’t be until 3.1.

Muscle Memory

July 28, 2015 by Belghast

Unexpected Happenings

There is a specific moment in my time playing Final Fantasy XIV where I realized that the Cactuar community was something special. It was the night that we purchased our Free Company house, and all of these neighbors showed up to welcome us to the neighborhood. Many of those folks welcoming us were from the Howling Moon free company, and over the months of playing I got used to seeing all of these people hanging out at the Marketboard right in front of our house. Among them the pair that I got closest with was Ayla and Joren Noye. There were many nights like this one where we did silly things to pass the time between queues. Then several months ago they disappeared, as did most of the people I had become close with from that Free Company. I asked around in the guild but no one seemed to know what happened. It is always hard when friends disappear that you are close with… but not yet close enough to exchange all of those personal details.

With Heavenward they were back as I had hoped, but started playing a little later than most. I guess over those months they had some personal stuff to deal with, but I was amped to have them back wandering around in our neighborhood. Since then at least once a night we exchanged random happy emotes and a flurry of /say conversation as we fiddled with our retainers. When I got the hint that maybe things were not as wonderful in their guild as they once were, I did the thing that I always do… offered them a home. I didn’t really expect them to take me up on the offer, but last night as I was starting my daily hunts… I got a tell out of the blue from Joren. He told me that things just weren’t the same, and if it was still okay he would like to take my offer. Needless to say I was absolutely thrilled and delayed a guild dungeon run until they were ready for the invites. I cannot put into words just how excited I am to have them on board, we may even have to reconvene the council of squishy hats to celebrate.

Muscle Memory

This morning I happened to randomly click through to a re-tweeted blog post from DragonChasers about SkyForge. On it was a comment from the blogger Jeromai that struck a bit of a chord with me, because I am absolutely the sort of person that would frustrate him.

You know what’s really frustrating to me? People who can do it (whatever it is), but cannot describe or break down or teach exactly -how- they are doing it, beyond “I dunno, I just do it” or “here, just watch a video of me doing it,” or worse, “lol, it wuz easy, I don’t know how come you can’t do it.”

To me, folks who really know what they’re doing can also break down and explain roughly what they’re doing or the tactics they’re using or what they’re keeping track of, even if execution by someone else requires a lot of personal practice.

Sometimes people say that they don’t really know how to explain it, because they don’t want to explain it. For me personally I quite literally cannot explain how I do half of the things I do. Essentially I try and commit as much of the things that I do to muscle memory as I can, so that I can do them… without thinking about them. So when I tank an instance… I do so many little things that I can’t really break apart the things that I am doing automatically… from the things that I am doing intentionally. I’ve always been a player that played mostly on instinct and reflex rather than mindful reflection on strategy. I think this all comes from why I play games. Ultimately they are a means of relaxation for me, and many times I find myself zoning out into the sublime motion of playing the game without really having to think about it. This has strengths and weaknesses, and the big problem that I run into particularly is when I have to unlearn my reflexes and replace them with something else.

For example on the Titan Extreme fight in Final Fantasy XIV there is a place where I absolutely have to ignore every instinct I have built up and stop myself from running back into the boss after an attack. I struggled with that for our first attempts, because I had to commit an exception to the rule to muscle memory knowing that there would be a follow up attack that would kill me if I ran right back in. The other big weakness is there are so many things that I do on a daily basis that I cannot tell you step by step what I am doing unless I happen to be sitting at the keyboard and doing them. At work I am awesome at fixing problems and troubleshooting things… but I am horrible at trying to walk someone else through the process of doing all of these things. The positive is… once something has been committed to reflex it stays with you forever. I fired up F-Zero the other day for likely the first time in two decades… and I still knew every corner and place to use my booster on the tracks and easily got first place. Same goes for an MMO, I can sit down in front of a game that I have not played in years… and if I set the hot bars up the same way as i had them before I can return to playing the game like no time has passed.

The Final Stretch

My big accomplishment for the night is finally pushing across the line and dinging 59. I was able to replace the lance that I absolutely hated with this pretty cool one from the Ancient Library dungeon. This is the point where I realize that I have apparently not run the library as much as I thought I had. When it came to the level 57 gear, I had most of a set… and apparently do for just about every possible class I would care to level. The 59 gear however from Library, I have only a small smattering of pieces and next to nothing when it came to lancer gear. Thankfully I had squirreled away a set of High Quality 58 gear from the quests… since at that point I technically had better gear on my Warrior from running dungeons. That should more than get me through to 60 before really needing anything else gear wise. When I hit 60 I have waiting on me a 180 weapon, and a bunch of 170 and 160 pieces that should make up pretty much a full set.

My hope is that I will be able to leap frog to 170 the Alexander requirement pretty quickly. The thing I need to sort out in the meantime is how to do a better job of maintaining the Blood of the Dragon buff. The problem that I keep running into is that I will get thrown into a situation where I cannot safely get back to the boss in time to hit either a Fang and Claw proc or Wheeling Thrust. So my buff drops… and I have to wait whatever is left of the minute long recast time to throw the buff up again. I assume that once I hit 60, if there is a situation where I know Blood of the Dragon is about to fall… this is when I mix in a Gierskogul to spend the buff on an attack rather than let it fade completely. Remember the whole muscle memory thing from above? I had a previous rotation committed to that swap space… and now have to revise it. Given some time at 60 I will relearn what I need to do, because honestly I am not looking for the insanity of the optimal dragoon rotation… but instead looking for something that is “passable”. I don’t care if I beat our top dps… but I just want to make sure I am not the bottom of the pack either. I feel like I just don’t have enough of a competitive nature to ever be a truly successful dps player.