July 2015 - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Begrudging Enjoyment

July 23, 2015 by Belghast

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.

A Small Patch

July 22, 2015 by Belghast

Blaugust Clarifications

Yesterday I had a handful of questions about Blaugust that I thought I should address this morning, just in case anyone else had it. Firstly it is absolutely okay to write content ahead of time and stage it to release over the course of the month. With both Pax Prime and Gamescom happening during the month of August, this is more than likely going to cut into some writers schedules. I know last year there were several folks doing great… and then they went to Gamescom and dropped off the face of the planet. Being able to cover schedule irregularities is a necessary coping skill to deal with keeping a schedule. While I personally prefer not to schedule posts ahead of time, quite literally everyone else does this. So for the purpose of Blaugust this still absolutely counts towards your thirty one posts.

Another question that I had is whether or not it is cool to tell a story in thirty one parts. This is also absolutely fine, and like I said yesterday this is a challenge about longevity and regularity… not necessarily what you are writing about. A prime example of this is during my NaNoWriMo run in 2013… I knew that I could not do it and blog at the same time. So instead I just posted my nightly words each day as my blog post. So over the course of the month I essentially broadcast the draft of my story to the world. In the case of the person who asked me yesterday, they wanted to write the back story of their primary game character over the course of the month. That seems completely valid, and at the same time something that would be extremely awesome. The constraints of this contest are about producing thirty one posts during the month, and so long as those posts mean the constraints of the challenge you are doing just fine.

A Small Patch

I have a good friend Rylacus who is going to be starting Final Fantasy XIV soon. Over the year plus I have been contiguously playing this game I have talked to him about the patching schedule. I mentioned that about once a quarter we get a big patch, and usually more than once a month we get little minor patches. The problem being that he had no real frame of reference as to what I meant by those two things. Yesterday 3.0.5 was released and this is absolutely what I would call a “small patch” by FFXIV standards. When I linked him the patch notes he was completely floored by the fact that we call that a minor patch. A lot of things happened yesterday, not the least of which is the introduction of the Esoterics tier of Tomestones. I keep thinking at some point they are going to run out of goofy names to call these, but they seem to have a limitless fount of them. This allows players to purchase item level 200 items, and returns us to the state of the weekly tomestone cap of 450. The weapons once again are priced just enough to force players to hit that cap three weeks in a row to get them.

Yesterday was also another significant moment for me and my Warrior as I finished upgrading all of my gear to level 180 (other than the Alexander ring that I should be getting tonight… ). This means I am essentially “done” gearing with Law and can now start diverting that to my Dragoon who is roughly halfway to level 58. I was reaching this point where running dungeons was not nearly as important for me as it had been in the past, and then bam… a small patch releases and once again I am infused with this desire to hit the dungeons every single day. This time around Expert Roulette is going to be my key focus, and we have learned in the past that through running a single roulette every day for several days in a row.. you can cap your tomestones without doing anything terribly insane. What I marvel at however is the timing of their content. Quite literally just as we started slowing down our dungeon running fervor… they launched yet another tier of gear giving us even more reason to get excited about running dungeons again. This game is absolutely phenomenal at figuring out the right mix of carrot and stick.

Final Coil

Another huge thing yesterday is that Savage Alexander opened and now the bleeding edge of Final Fantasy XIV raiders can throw themselves against that content. As of this morning it seems like only a handful of free companies have defeated the first turn, and only one or two have managed to defeat the second. So it seems like it will take folks a good deal of time to actually conquer this raid. For our guild however, we are still very much in the gearing process and have yet to be able to field a reliable “normal” Alexander run on a regular basis. What our Monday night group has been working on instead is finishing out the Final Coil of Bahamut. I realize we are quite literally “months behind” as the saying goes, but I am still very much enjoying myself. We managed to take down Turn 12 on Monday night and made what I feel is significant progress on Turn 13. Ultimately it will probably take us a few more weeks, which is good… because we still only have one geared tank for the Monday raid.

As a result… I ended up solo tanking turn 13… which is quite possibly the most hectic thing I have done in a long time. My world became entirely centered around making sure I had five stacks of wrath at the right moment… so I could hit Inner Beast plus another cooldown… in order to survive the tankbuster… which of note means that it literally does enough damage to decimate my 25,000 hit points. The worst timing however was on the pull when quite literally I was hitting my fifth ability and gaining my fifth stack of wrath… as the attack was casting that I needed Inner Beast for. Needless to say that night stressed me the hell out… but hopefully we can down him soon. I would love if the axe dropped, because it is super amazing looking. What I really hope however is that we can finish gearing and start work on Bismarck Extreme, Ravana Extreme and Alexander for gear.

The Revenge of Blaugust

July 21, 2015 by Belghast

What is Blaugust?

A few years ago I started down this path of madness that I have referred to as my Grand Experiment, where I started blogging every single day. It has been a grueling experience at times, but also something I would not trade for the world. I learned a lot of things about myself because when you are writing that many posts… something interesting happens. At some point in the process you break down the walls you are holding up between you and your readers and start being completely and often brutally honest with them. I sit down at the keyboard each morning and share a chunk of myself, and this bond I have developed with my readers is something pretty special. Last year I wanted to channel just a little bit of this with the rest of the blogosphere and started the Blaugust challenge. The idea is simple… during the month of August blog something every single day. If you succeed in thirty one days of posts… you are a Blaugust winner.

I had this idea that the only folks that would participate were seasoned bloggers. You know folks like me with years of blogging under their belts. The reality however is that a lot of new bloggers took up this banner as their own and produced some amazing stuff as a part of it. As such Blaugust has become this strange event that allows a lot of folks to essentially rededicate themselves to the craft of writing. After last year I was uncertain if I would be doing another one of these, but I was not so subtly urged by my readers that they were expecting it to happen once more. Last year we had 28 Challenge Winners that managed to make it through the month without missing a post, and another 21 Challenge Survivors that participated in the contest. I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of participation… but in the tradition of all internet things… lets make this year even bigger.

The Topic

First off let me get this out of the way. This contest is all about longevity and frequency and not necessarily about what you are writing. The idea is to get folks in the habit of regular posting, so that after a month of posting every single day… they can settle into a more reasonable schedule after August and do regular posts a few times a week. So as far as your blog goes… you can tell us whatever you feel like. These can be game posts, post about some other hobby you are really interested in, or just posts about your life. Somewhere along my path to madness I reached a point where I am essentially immune to writers block when it comes to Tales of the Aggronaut. I can sit down at the keyboard and start writing without any preparation and within a paragraph a theme starts to form and I am up and running with a new blog post. Inspiration is a fickle thing, and essentially I brute forced my way around it. The plan is to make you realize that you don’t need some magical muse to crank out interesting posts. Everything you say is already interesting so long as it is genuine and comes from your personality, and the rest is just simply taking notes.

The Guidelines

Last year… the month of August was a blur for me, and it was honestly hell for me to go through. When you had as many people blogging as we did, a good chunk of my morning was spent tabulating who blogged and who didn’t. Then when you factor in the international nature of this competition it was extremely hard to actually determine what day a given post was supposed to represent. As such this year I am going to be quite a bit more strict on the guidelines, because I would really like to exit the month of August with at least some bit of my sanity intact. I love you guys dearly… but I really need your help on this.

Write a new blog post of no less than ten sentences in length. This is essentially two large paragraphs and is a good solid minimum size. If you are doing a screenshot/photo blog just make sure your description explaining what the image is all about fits this constraint.
Include a link back to the 2015 Blaugust Initiative Page. My hope is that this will allow other people to join in the challenge and play catch up.
Advertise the post on the Blaugust Nook. When you join the nook I will be elevating everyone to “Blogger” access to do this. This is extremely key this year, because this is going to be how I log all posts, and if you do not do this you are not going to get proper credit.
Either in the title of your post or the first heading inside of your actual post.. please denote which day this post is for. Something like “Blaugust Day 21” just to make sure that I am giving everyone credit for the correct day, and this should help to stop the oddities of folks in vastly different time zones getting dumped into the wrong slot.
If you advertise the post on social media, please include the #Blaugust hashtag. Again we are trying to help spread the word and get folks to join in process… and at very least get folks reading the posts.
Over the course of the month, write 31 posts.
????
Profit!

The Vlogger Clause

Since this contest is far more about longevity and doing things on a schedule… I thought I would open it up to a slightly different audience this year. Blogging is awesome, and I love it dearly… but Vlogging is also awesome. Being willing to put yourself out there, and on camera… on a regular basis is quite the daunting task. As such I wanted to open this up to folks who are vlogging, and essentially allow them to count a daily vlog as a valid post for the month. As such I am going to throw some loose requirements around it.

Vlog must be at least five minutes in length.
Include a link back to the 2015 Blaugust Initiative Page in your videos “dooblidoo” and mention the Blaugust initiative at least once during the video.
Advertise the vlog post on the Blaugust Nook. When you join the nook I will be elevating everyone to “Blogger” access to do this. This is extremely key this year, because this is going to be how I log all posts, and if you do not do this you are not going to get proper credit.
Inside the “dooblidoo” mention what day you are posting for. Something like “Blaugust Day 21” just to make sure that I am giving everyone credit for the correct day, and this should help to stop the oddities of folks in vastly different time zones getting dumped into the wrong slot.
If you advertise the post on social media, please include the #Blaugust hashtag. Again we are trying to help spread the word and get folks to join in process… and at very least get folks reading the posts.
Over the course of the month, write 31 posts.
????
Profit!

Some Revisions

Last year I did some madness that I won’t be doing this year. Essentially the deck was stacked against anyone who was not ready to go on day one. Inevitably there were folks that started one or two days late, that got knocked out of the running for the big prize for not being there from day one. I didn’t really feel like this was fair, because ultimately they put the same amount of effort in during the course of the event, it was just that they had to play catch up a bit. As such I basically have three categories that I am going to be dividing people up into.

Challenge Winners – Anyone who makes thirty one blog posts during the month of August. I will be tallying the Results on September 2nd as to allow for all possible time zone strangeness.
Challenge Survivors – Anyone who makes at least fifteen blog posts during the month of August is going to be considered a “survivor”.
Challenge Participant – Anyone who did not quite make it to fifteen is still awesome in my book and deserves some recognition for showing up and joining in the fun.

The Rewards

As with last year I will be keeping track of these things in my big spreadsheet of blaugust, and at the end of the month on September 2nd I will be tabulating the results. From the contest winners I will be doing a drawing for several prize packages. I hope you enjoy games, and want to acquire more of them… because that is what we are going to do. Last year someone summed up the contest as “write awesome stuff and get games!”. Over the course of the years I have acquired a bunch of spare game download keys, so I will be dipping into this grab bag of awesome to get some prizes for folks. I will be using a secure dice roller to determine one Grand Prize winner and three additional prize winners from the pool of Contest winners.

Grand Prize!

I hope you follow me on Steam, because I will be picking a game off of your Steam Wishlist and purchasing it for you. Nice and simple. If there is something you have been craving like a special store mount or something of the sort from your favorite MMO, we can probably work that in instead.
Three Also-Awesomes

Additionally to a grand prize winner I will be picking three other individuals to get to choose something from the grab bag of awesome. May the odds ever be in your favor… because once again I will be relying on the dice roller to determine who gets first picking order from the grab bag.
All Participants

All participants are going to get sidebar badges to denote that they participated in Blaugust 2015 with special versions for the Survivors and Winners.

If there are any companies that would like to sweeten this pot, contact me because I would most certainly love to give everyone who participates in this contest something for doing this challenge.

The Sign-Up

In order to participate you need a few things. Firstly you need go over to the forums on the Blaugust nook and post your intention to participate in this handy forum thread I have created. This is going to help me prepare to start reading your posts during the month (if you are not already in my blog reader). Then as the month goes on post your new entries to the Blaugust Nook so that you get proper credit for them. The nook also serves as a jumping off place for the Blaugust community that builds up around this event. Share your struggles and your victories, and lean on each other for ideas. We are all in this together, and the hope is that at the end of the month each of us is stronger for the participation. As always if you have any questions feel free to pop me a line on any of the many avenues that I leave available for folks to contact me. Lets have an awesome August and a truly phenomenal Blaugust!

Love Our Guild

July 20, 2015 by Belghast

Unlocking Dungeons

This weekend was a little bit split as far as gaming goes. I spent about four hours in SkyForge and the rest of it wandering around in Final Fantasy XIV. I had a bunch of side projects that I never really got off the ground. One of the things about being a tank is that you are constantly getting called on to do tanky things. Last night for example, I had all intentions of simply wandering around the new zones doing hunt mobs, but I ended up getting drafted to tank both Neverreap and Fractal Continuum for a friend who just dinged 60. Since this would allow him to unlock the content, and be yet another possibility for a daily expert roulette, as well as providing three of us in the dungeon run some tasty tasty first time bonus, I did not mind giving up my relaxing evening of hunting to help out.

Both runs went fairly smoothly other than Warenwolf falling off the side of the final boss in Neverreap. Luckily we had the stamina to go ahead and finish that boss without him. Fractal Continuum went extremely smoothly other than some annoyances with bomb placement on the final boss. Luckily the loot gods seemed to be at least a little favorable and Waren walked with a bow and some other items helping him inch towards that all too critical level 170 mark for Alexander. It is my hope that in this last week we will have increased our item level enough to be able to put a good attempt in on Bismarck Extreme tonight. I found out that apparently the dps constraint is that you be able to break the spine in a single attempt without also blowing every cooldown. Wednesday we were able to break the spine, but it was a “just barely” situation and we absolutely had to abuse every cool down available to get there.

Love Our Guild

Last night I had a moment when I was overcome with warm fuzzies. Folks were doing what they always do and filling my screen with green happy spam, and somehow it came around to the discussion of the free company. I am not sure if I remember who started it but someone made the comment that they were happy that I had recruited them into the guild, because if not for that they probably would not be playing. Then in a burst of activity a bunch of people chimed in with pretty much the same thing. So I wanted to talk a bit this morning about how much all of my guildies mean to me. There are so many days where I have had a rough patch, that I can log into our free company and within moments of seeing the cheery conversation I am in a much better mood. Having a happy guild family is ultimately what helps me keep returning to one game over another, and ultimately is what keeps me engaged in Final Fantasy XIV.

Sure the game is awesome, but having this big group who is willing to drop what they are doing to help someone else out, makes the experience so much better. Yesterday during the evening I worked through a backlog of dungeon runs that I had recorded, and came across a video that didn’t turn out quite as intended. Since the launch of Heavensward the guild crafters as lead by Solaria have been working away on making us an Airship. When it came time to launch it for the first time a good chunk of us gathered in the workshop basement of the guild hall. In part we hoped a cut scene would happen, and as a result I had OBS rolling away in the background recording the event. While the event did not turn out as I had expected, looking back on the footage it makes me exceptionally happy to see so many of my guild members roaming around in one place. I love the housing district for the constant flow of guild members popping in and out as they go off to other adventures, and this moment was probably the largest meeting of sorts we have had. It made me realize that we need to do something like this more often.

More SkyForge

The SkyForge open beta finishes up this Wednesday and in the mean time I plan on playing for a little bit each night. I have to admit while there are still problems with the game for me, it is growing on me in ways I can’t quite fathom. During yesterdays run I finally figured out something that had been bugging me. I said in my videos and in my blog posts that it seemed like the combo system was largely ineffectual, and for the most part this is true. However I noticed on my character to the right of the health bar was a charge counter of sorts marked with a lightning bolt. This is directly above the dodge counter that shows how many times in a row you can dodge, and how long before the counter regenerates when they are all spent. This lightning bolt number tied to the special combo attacks, and if I use a combo while I have a charge available it does significantly more damage. However any additional combos while that charge is regenerating end up being largely useless.

Knowing this is a thing, made combat feel more purposeful. Essentially I had one special move to use every 30 seconds or so, because that seemed to be roughly how long it took to regenerate a charge. When that ability was not available however I could happily wail away on the target then set up for the next special attack. This little bit of information seemed to dynamically change the way combat felt. Additionally doing the more open world zones, seemed much more enjoyable to me given that if I started wailing away on a boss, chances are someone would come along behind me to help me finish it. Running around with a group of other players also made me realize just how little damage the paladin does comparatively. In all honesty… I might end up playing quite a bit more of this game because it feels like I am starting to grasp the reason why it does the things it does. It is not the sort of game I would ever play as a primary mmo, but I have been enjoying playing it in these short bursts, where I complete a single objective and then log back out for awhile.