July 2016 - Page 5 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Walking Simulator

July 7, 2016 by Belghast

Gotta Catch Em All

If I had any topic to talk about today, it was immediately erased from my mind as soon as I got my grubby hands on Pokemon Go. I was in fact one of those bastards that went through the relatively simple process of installing it to bypass the region lockouts. First off I want to address something that is frustrating me, is that for some reason people seem to think defeating region lockouts is “hacking”. Region lockouts are dumb, and at least on Android devices, any time you download anything you are already downloading the APK as that is how anything installs. The beauty of the android platform is there isn’t just one app store, in fact on my device I currently have Google Play, Amazon Underground, and APK Pure all installed and living happily together. These are especially handy when confronted with a device that for whatever reason is trying to block the actual Google Play store and instead keep redirecting you to their carrier run store. Anyways with that out of the way, I downloaded the APK and had it sitting on my device while I ran out to lunch yesterday. On my way out of the building I caught my first Pokemon which was one of the original three starters…. Go Team Squirtle! Then before I had even left my building I also happened to encounter a Staryu… things were getting off to a great start.

I had errands to run so I drove out to one of the nearby hubs of shopping that houses a ton of big box stores. I needed to pick up some cat
food and cat litter from Target, and also wanted to pop by Rackroom shoes to see if I could find any sandals that I did not hate this season. When I pulled into the parking lot of Target I opened up the app and noticed several Pokemon nearby where I parked. When you are anywhere, you see critters within the vicinity of you… and when you get close enough to one you can attempt to capture it. Sadly I have no screenshots of the capture process because it goes quickly. Essentially it is playing Skeeball, and for those who don’t have that cultural frame of reference… you are flicking the Pokeball with your finger and trying to hit essentially a target that represents the sweet spot for capturing each specific Pokemon. If you tap on the Pokemon you will see a set of rings with a green spot being the best possible place to land your hit in order to capture. You have a limited number of attempts before the Pokemon runs away and cannot be seen on your map. Of note all of this stuff tries to place your Pokemon in your surroundings using Augmented Reality via your phones camera. I however didn’t really want to see the real world and would far rather have a cartoony Pokemon world to be wandering around in and capturing critters.

So there I was wandering around a Target parking lot, I am sure looking like an idiot… but you know what I didn’t care. I was having fun and capturing all sorts of cool Pokemon. By the time I left that parking lot I had managed to gather up a whole bunch of new critters
including a really nice Eevee. Now each Pokemon you catch has a CP level… which doesn’t mean much to me as of yet because well I just started playing this yesterday. However from what I have been able to tell the higher the number the better, and this factors into what sort of stat package that they have. So my Eevee in question came out of the box as it were with 104 which is significantly higher than any other Pokemon I have seen yet. Ironically the hardest capture yet was my Magikarp, namely because it kept flipping around aimlessly anytime I tried to toss the Pokeball. Not only do you have to try and land the sweet spot, but most Pokemon will move around on you while trying to do this. Similarly I utterly failed at capturing a Butterfree because apparently it is a little stronger willed than others. I captured it three times… and all three times it broke out of the ball… eventually flying away never to be seen again.

The reason why I titled this post Walking Simulator, is because that is a genre name that folks have tacked onto games that are about walking around and exploring virtual worlds… but without any combat to speak of. Pokemon Go however is quite literally a game about walking. The world has all of these objectives out there in the form of PokeStops and Gyms that seem to appear based on the previous Ingress player portal locations according to Thalen who had apparently played that game way more than I ever did. So for me I have one right around the corner from my house in the form of a statue. So last night I convinced my wife to go for a walk… under the guise of exercise but she knew that really I just wanted to go out and capture Pokemon. Now we get into the larger problem of Pokemon Go right now… the servers and uptime. For most of the day yesterday things were crashing in spectacular ways, likely because Niantic was simply not ready for the crush of folks who like me decided to bypass the silly region lockouts. This immediately started a ban rumor floating around that anyone who downloaded the APK was going to get banned from the application. Yet in all of the threads I never saw anyone reporting anything other than normal intermittent service issues.

Pokemon Go is a deeply connected application. Not only do you need to stay in fairly constant communication with the Niantic servers over what I am guessing is some sort of a Web Service call… you also have to have unfettered connectivity to GPS satellites in order to keep your positioning true. This means two things… namely that gameplay can be unpredictable, and that your battery will weep in misery at the drain. When I went out to lunch I had about 85% on my battery… and after about an hour of running errands and capturing Pokemon I was sitting around 52% if I remember correctly. Ingress players are notorious for carrying a bunch of portable battery packs just to make sure that their gameplay is uninterrupted and truthfully that is probably going to be the standard operating procedure with Pokemon Go as well. So in the middle of my walk last night I encountered a Fearow in the grocery store parking lot. When I went to try and capture it however I threw the ball… and the screen locked up with the ubiquitous spinning Pokeball icon in the left corner of the screen working madly on trying to reacquire a signal. I finally had to shut down the application, and reboot my phone… to restore any semblance of connectivity… and even then when I got to the PokeStop outside of my Neighborhood I couldn’t actually retrieve anything from it. While the game has launched officially now… it is very much not without issues.

However what exists is extremely awesome. For me Pokemon was always a game about capturing interesting critters, and the combat and story always took a backseat. When I caught all of the available Pokemon in an area I stopped caring about it and simply wanted to move on to the next area so I could see fresh critters. For me… this game is likely going to be crack, but also going to be an excellent excuse to get out of the house and walk around my neighborhood. Where I work downtown there are a couple dozen different PokeStops within easy walking distance so more than likely I am going to start venturing out at lunch to go find them. What is disturbing is the level of saturation this app has already gotten. There are four or five different gyms located in downtown Tulsa, and by noon yesterday when I went out to run errands… each and every single one of them was already claimed by a player. Now these might be beta players or “Beaters” as the community has taken to calling them, but it might also be folks like me who grabbed the APK and just started playing. There are so many aspects of the game I can’t really talk about yet… because I have not experienced them. There is apparently a whole team mechanic that will happen at some point, but as I am sub level 5 that is not something I have encountered yet. I do plan on going Team Blue, and I believe that is where the rest of my friends are leaning as well. In any case… if you have ever loved Pokemon I suggest at least checking it out. I have this feeling that it will be something I obsess with for a few weeks… and then never touch again… much like the other Pokemon games I have played. However it does at least make walking and running errands a far more interesting experience.

New Beginnings

July 6, 2016 by Belghast

Turning A Bad Situation

Yesterday was an extremely odd day, where a good deal of it I spent sifting through horrible IRS interface documentation, and then the rest googling phrases in said documentation to try and find better documentation. That alone had me at the literal end of my wits… which we all know are of limited supply in the first place. Then something happened… something that could have been extremely bad. I had an interaction with with a player that I really do not like, that I finally had to distance myself from to keep from losing my shit. Several years ago I wrote about the infamous “Bunny Incident” and I felt like I was nearing the threshold of unfocused profanities flying freely. So I stepped away and went to lunch, then when I finally came back to a device I found out that apparently I was not the only one who had been feeling that way. So what could have been a horrible incident… actually turned into something completely different. I know I am vague-booking here a bit, but I don’t really want to drill too far into the who and what because that isn’t terribly important in the truth because I am focused on what happened afterwards. For awhile now I have been back playing MMOs after what felt like a several month long break from them, but I have been back largely playing by myself. I have been enjoying my time in Rift and ArcheAge, but enjoying things as a solo venture is just different from playing with a large group of people who seem to be equally happy to be playing with you.

So this negative event has seemingly acted as a bit of a catalyst, in a measure that I wasn’t sure was possible. What happened last night is that a large number of us logged into Final Fantasy XIV and spent almost the entire damned evening running content together. It was truly glorious, and was originally focused around the concept of getting people caught up in the storyline but eventually filtered into so many different areas. So from the moment I got home from work, until about 10 pm I spent that entire time hanging out with friends and tanking various things that people needed. I lost track along the way what all we ended up running but I was literally down for anything anyone needed. I helped people get caught up in 3.2 story content, 3.3 story content, the Void Ark, Alexander four… basically a bunch of stuff that folks didn’t want to do solo but were more than willing to tackle with friends. The end result was this amazing blur of laughter and the best aspects of what can happen when you are playing with your friends. Instead of letting one negative event pull us down, we have seemingly galvanized that one interaction into something that I hope will last past the one night.

In talking with my friends throughout the night it seems like we were all waiting for the same thing. For the bulk of our original group to return to playing the game. When you have spent a year and a half struggling together… playing without those folks seems like a hollow proposition. I am thankful for the folks who have kept the home fires burning in the Greysky Armada during this extended absence, because it means we have a free company to come home to. The bulk of yesterdays strife is rooted in a simple miscommunication, like so many conflicts seem to be. Namely there were ground rules set that were never communicated to those of us who had been returning, around what was expected. So when the person in question gave some rather ham-fisted edicts and unfortunately we took them in the worst possible way. I am not really ready to bury the hatchet completely here, and for the time being I really want nothing to do with that person. However what happened as a result has reinvigorated my feelings about Final Fantasy XIV as a whole. I am certain to keep playing Rift, ArcheAge and Destiny… but for a bit I am focused on trying to help my friends get back engaged in the game. Last night really felt like we were getting the band back together, and it was seemingly noticed by the social structure of Cactuar. Tam and I were both welcomed back with open arms by a bunch of folks that we used to interact with on a nightly basis. Just like returning to Rift has felt very much like returning home… coming back last night and playing Final Fantasy XIV with my friends was also very much returning home. There is a level of joy in gaming that I felt last night that I have not felt in so many months… and it was intoxicating.

Kittens and Gaming

July 5, 2016 by Belghast

Tiny Babby

It was a good weekend, if not a very rainy one as a whole. This made for an extremely humid evening last night for fireworks and festivities. Our plans largely backfired because in the past we have been able to see the fireworks from the comfort of our back yard. This time around however they apparently switched locations, and the bulk of the fireworks were hidden behind a stand of trees. All of that aside however the highlight of my weekend was the little guy that I am feeding above. Now to clear up some confusion… we did not adopt him but did however drive like an hour and some change to go up and see him. My Mother-In-Law found this little guy abandoned, but I am a bit fuzzy on the details. All I know is zero sign of mother and probably about a week old when she found him. She has been nursing him with a bottle as pictured, and at this point we think he is somewhere between two and three weeks old. Completely sweetheart who seemed to really like my beard. He would curl up under it and start kneading the underside of my chin. My wife took lots of pictures of me feeding him… as to why it ended up with me feeding him that is anyones guess. He seemed to take the bottle better from me, and growing up we had barn kitties… who sometimes were not that keen on being a proper momma. So I remember occasionally having to nurse a litter by hand so I guess that muscle memory just kicked in. We have no plans to adopt this little guy because he seems to be in just fine hands already. Though I will admit… it was hard not to try and take him home with us.

Forty Five

I spent a good deal of my weekend playing ArcheAge and as of last night I am level forty five. This means that for the last two zones I have been leveling exclusively in the mixed faction regions that are more or less open PVP. This was a huge point of anxiety around launch that ultimately I could not hit the level cap without venturing out into zones where folks could gank me. As it turns out… everyone seems to have something better to do with their time. I’ve spent many an hour out in the mixed zones and while I have seen a ton of “red” players not a single one has bothered me. Granted that might be simply because I am higher level than they were, or it might also be that they are focused on more important things. So essentially I have leveled the same as I did before, and enjoyed questing… with just the slightest awareness in the back of my head that I am not entirely safe. Largely I just shifted to a point of view where if I am going to go afk… I go find a Nui shrine to do so near because of the peace aura surrounding them. As far as leveling goes… I am slightly ahead of the curve more than likely thanks to the Patron buffs. I am largely ignoring crafting and spending a meager pittance of labor points on opening lootbags and gear, which has kept me outfitted and is a shocking amount of experience. I tend to let the bags collect while I am working on a quest hub, and then before moving to the next open them all and stash the crafting materials in the warehouse before moving on. I had honestly wondered if I would hit a wall when I moved into the open pvp zones, but so far the game is just as fun as it was beforehand and I am moving along smoothly.

Taming Familiars

Another game that I have been poking around in is Riders of Icarus after talking about it over the week with the AggroChat crew. The character on the right is my Beserker, and the character on the left is Tamrielo’s rogue of some sort. It is shocking how when left to our own devices… we end up creating pretty similar looking characters. In both cases we even purposefully decided to go with a hairstyle that is unlike what we normally choose… yet we still seemed to have chosen the exact same alternate appearance. The game as a whole is doing some interesting things, with the central feature that makes it special being that you can go around taming mounts and combat pets. Unfortunately unlike ArcheAge you cannot have both a mount and a combat pet at the same time… or at least I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. There are certain aspects of the game that remind me of a whole slew of other games, but more than anything they seem to be focused on the player fantasy of mounted combat… namely mounted aerial combat with a crossbow or lance. This so far is the least enjoyable part of the game for me, because well… so far I suck horribly fighting in the air because it feels like I lose all situational awareness and often back into another mob while dancing around the one I am currently fighting.

Last night I managed to get to some sort of a proper dungeon and was pleased to see that you could complete it in a solo fashion, or with a full group. The feel of the zone is extremely similar to Ragefire Chasm in World of Warcraft, but nonetheless fun and interesting. I am wondering if on higher difficulties you have more than the single boss at the end of the cavern which is the golem pictured above. I’ve played this game quite a bit and I am still not sure if I like it or not. I think I might need to play the Guardian tank class a bit to see if that is maybe more my speed, because generally speaking I enjoy playing dps… but my heart is never really in it. The game can be set up to run in a traditional action bar combat method or through left/right mouse button action combat style. What I find personally works best is a bit of a hybrid between the two… namely setting the game into Action Mode but also using hotbar combat. The biggest challenge for me right now is the fact that all of my attacks are fairly slow… and animation locked so dodging and avoiding attacks becomes a challenge. I am enjoying the game enough to keep playing, but just not sure if it is different enough from the other games I am playing to keep my attention for the long haul. If you are out there playing Riders of Icarus feel free to throw Belghast a friend invite.

Crafting Away

As for Rift I am stuck in a bit of a holding pattern for the moment. Each night I focus largely on completing all of the daily crafting quests for the various purple, blue and green currencies. However I guess I have reached a point where I should probably venture into the world for real. Over the weekend I managed to cap both the purple and blue currencies, and even though I spent them down a bit… that tells me that maybe I have focused too intently on this one aspect of the game. I’ve been making almost nightly trips out into Goboro Reef… that I found out from Captain Cursor I have been calling by the wrong name all of this time. The zone was one that I did not really like a first, but for Karthite and Sarleaf farming I find it extremely relaxing. At some point I need to just break the pattern and focus on pushing my way further into the Planetouched Wilds. Either that or start up with the running of experts again, because I am still far from ideally geared. However I am not sure if Experts or Intrepid Adventures are the better option at the moment. I am really looking forward to the change to the Warlord soul that is up on the PTS, because I have always enjoyed playing it… at least significantly more so than the Paragon soul that I am currently using. I always liked the rhythm of landing Piercing Thrust after a combo point dump attack. It feels good to see a single attack deal that sort of damage, and supposedly the PTS changes restore the soul to general viability, which I am absolutely looking forward to.

Uncoordinated Ramble

July 1, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I made what seems to have been a fairly controversial post, but also one that seems to be misconstrued to be more than it really was. The key complaint of the post was the method in which Blizzard occasionally conveys information to the fans through a dose of condescension. That isn’t good for the brand and isn’t good for the game as a whole. The rest of the points that I used as examples… well they were just me pointing out ways I felt the person delivering the message was doing so in a less than friendly manner. Yesterday I had a bunch of valuable conversation with different folks on both the main point and the sub points, and also some not so valuable discussion. I feel like any discussion line that follows something along the lines of “you don’t have to play the game” isn’t really valuable. Sure there are folks who just want to throw stones, burn the crops and salt the earth after they have left. I am not one of those people… I genuinely care about this game because it is like an old friend. However it is a friend that keeps going through really strange phases that are maybe not so good for their health. Ultimately I am just the sort of person who has to say something eventually, and when I do… I can more or less move on knowing that I said my peace.

Every year at work when it comes time for the performance review… there is always a question that boils down to following orders. My boss always feels the need to make a point about how I will “eventually” follow orders, but that I have to explain my point of view first. There have been a number of times throughout my career where I have had to implement bad solutions that I knew would eventually bite us in the ass six months to a year later. I don’t do this cheerfully, and not without first explaining all of the reasons why this is a bad idea. However if after making my case… it is still decided that we have to do whatever this thing is… I do so to the best of my ability knowing that I made my point known. When I leave the work world I am this same person… I have to speak my peace in order to move on. So when I see a game making decisions that I don’t agree with… well I stand up and say something and do so in my own private vehicle for communicating that. This is my blog ultimately, and if you are coming here you are going to keep getting me talking about whatever happens to be important on my mind. I enjoy your visit, and I appreciate feedback… but at the end of the day this is my blog filled with my opinions and that isn’t really something you can judge “right” or “wrong”.

Ultimately the truth is I am not deluded enough to believe for even a second that anything I say here is going to change anything outside of the confines of the limited things I have control of. I can make my point, and inscribe it on the pages of this virtual tome. However that doesn’t mean my point is actually going to influence anyone as a result. You have to understand most mornings when I sit down to start writing… I largely forget that I actually have readers. That is not to say that I don’t value each and every reader… it is just that I end up sitting here talking to myself. Often times the points I make, are a way of me dealing with the thoughts and feelings that I am having at the time. It is a way of me processing the complex melange of reactions that I have boiling up inside of me, and there is something about putting it down onto paper that seems to bring forth the truest version of whatever it was that I was thinking. Ultimately we can disagree on whatever it is that I am talking about, and that is going to be okay. We don’t have to agree to exist within the same space, and often times it is better if we don’t. The internet and its ease of creating echo chambers is actually a really horrible thing, and so long as a view point isn’t one that I consider toxic… I welcome it into my mind to swirl around with the thoughts that are already there. My thoughts on any matter are a constantly evolving and shifting mess.

When it comes to World of Warcraft, I do question if I am compatible with the view the developers have for this game. There was an interesting side note yesterday in a conversation with Nyn about social consequences of game changes. I brought on a sequence of ramifications related to not having various aspects of the game be “bind on account” or at least collected at an account level. Namely talking about the number of times I have wanted to play this or that alt, but my friends really needed me to be playing my main. When that happens you are left with a choice… do you do the socially beneficial thing and play the character that is needed to help out your friends, or do you be selfish and spend your night working on the character you really want to be progressing. The more things that are pushed to an account basis, the more these problems just go away. If I can be running around on my main and collecting stuff that benefits my army of alts… then that reinforces me playing the character that is needed at any given moment. I think in the grand scheme of things this would also go a long way towards getting tanks and healers queuing for content… because they know that ultimately there is some benefit that can trickle down to my other classes. To which she raised the point… that these aren’t really game mechanic problems but instead social problems.

I guess my stance is that the two are irrevocably connected. Every game change has social ramifications, and every social change effects the way players view game mechanics. Largely I judge World of Warcraft against the actions that other companies are taking in other MMOs. Some of them do a phenomenal job of social engineering the player base to make shifts in behavior that ultimately benefit the health of the game. A prime example is the way that Final Fantasy XIV keeps coming up with reasons that end game characters, want to be running lower level content by making end game rewards hinge upon the collection of items from lower level content. This reinforces the cycle of constantly having a fresh supply of high level and geared players queuing for content, and the introduction of a first time bonus mechanic makes it so that high level players actually get excited knowing that their rewards from running the content are going to be multiplied by the presence of a new player. This is absolutely bribery, but it is bribery that works extremely well… and shows a high level of understanding for the psychology of players. So ultimately I think the more things that can be pushed back to the account level, the more willing players will be to bring what is needed instead of what they want to keep moving forward.

This also spawned a discussion about the design philosophy of “bring the player not the class” which in truth… doesn’t really work that well. Sure it works great in cases of Paladins and Druids… that can field a dps, tank and healer but ultimately breaks down when it comes to pretty much any other class. Now I will agree that any tank is swappable for any other tank, and for the most part healers are also equally interchangeable. However when it comes to DPS, it doesn’t feel quite so much the case with so many fights punishing players for bringing too much ranged dps or too much melee dps. If anything I think more things bound at the account level helps to get closer to the “bring the player” aspect of that equation because it rewards alting in a manner that isn’t really the case yet. Alts are the thing that keep players engaged with the game during those slow spots where progression has either topped out, or is going much slower than expected. Bolstering the reasons for players to roll that army of alts is I think a huge part of keeping players active and subscribed to the game. There are still some sore spots with things that have gone to account based, like the upcoming transmog changes not really working 100% cross character… but it was a step in the right direction. Similarly account wide mounts, pets and achievements were extremely awesome and have increased the value of each of those things for me at least. However it feels like we just haven’t gone far enough yet. There are so many things like currencies and factions… that just don’t seem to make sense at a character by character basis when it would be significantly more rewarding to have those things on any character you happen to be playing. Anyways…. this ramble has gone on long enough and gotten way out of control. Additionally I am out of time this morning and needing to head to work. Thanks for reading if you actually made it to this point.