February 2017 - Page 4 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Be The Battery

February 10, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterdays post was a little more bleak than they usually are, and the bizarro thing is… I think writing it helped a lot. It helped putting the frustrations and dread into a single post and sending it out into the world. Its almost as if typing the words lessened the hold the malaise had on me. Then again the activities of last night helped quite a bit as well. However I will get to that shortly. First off I want to show off my home in Elder Scrolls Online. I went back and forth on a few different homes before finally settling on Mournoth Keep in the Halcyon Lake area of Bangkorai. I remember being extremely fond of the main campaign in Bangkorai so that fit for me as well as the fact that since I chose Daggerfall Covenant as my original faction… I wanted something to call home in the same area. In truth I have not done much with it since getting it, largely because I have not had much luck in getting pattern or furniture drops. I am being told that looting furniture seems to be the best way to do that. In theory I could resort to stealing, or instead just fine one of the many towns controlled by enemies and run amok looting there. I have a feeling through with the focus on housing there is going to be a lot of competition for lootables.

Now on to the events of last night and how they seem to have turned around my spirit. For awhile now Squirrel, Jex and myself have had an informal Thursday night thing where we go off and do small group content in Destiny together. Originally this was the night when we took on the Challenge of Elders, but more recently we have been running all three of our characters through the weekly nightfall. I have yet to get an icebreaker, so I largely think they are humoring me until I actually get one. Whatever the case it is a lot of fun, but due to the bizarre schedule since coming back from PAX it had been a few weeks since we last did one of these nights. In truth I had not actually played Destiny since probably January 19th now that I am thinking about it. I was extremely rusty, and by the sheer number of times that they had to rez me it showed… but regardless I think we all had a lot of fun. This week the Nightfall is Dust Palace which is something that has been in the rotation since year one… and that everyone has memorized at this point. As a result we were able to run through three characters worth of Nightfalls in way less than an hours time. During the Nightfall runs they asked me where I was on progress on the quest line to unlock the Outbreak Prime weapon, which requires you to group together in a fire team with a Titan, Warlock and Hunter to make forward momentum.

The truth is I had not really made it terribly far other than picking up the occasional progress from our Thursday night runs when the stars happened to be aligned and we wound up choosing to play different classes on a given run. Like they often do… they set out to change that and we ran a sequence of Archon’s Forge to finish out the step I happened to be on since those apparently count as “public events”. It was around this point that we realized that we did not have three characters with the devices needed to do the decoding step of the quest chain. There is a phase that needs to be completed in a social area where a titan, warlock and hunter input a sequence on this item that drops from the quest chain. If all three sequences are correct you can click through and get to the next step. After a little shuffling we realized that Jex’s warlock had already completed the quest, and Squirrel’s hunter was on the step I had just completed. So we continued on to catch Squirrel up in the process and ran a sequence of three heroic strikes, and then three public events to get us all on the same stage of the quest. After that back to the social area to complete the matrix and move on to the next step.

It felt like the night was still relatively young, so instead of hanging it up for the evening we pushed on into the next quest which involved collecting a bunch of SIVA tech by killing splicers. This also required us to run the Sepiks Perfected strike, which we knocked out in short order by simply doing the 320 light version. From there it was back into Archon’s Forge to complete three events, and farm up the rest of our SIVA Tech fragments. All of which went extremely quickly and before we had finished the three events, we had gotten 100% of our fragments. Watching those things scroll by 2 at a time on the right side of the screen was madness as we tore apart the forge event. Finally it was another trip back to a social space, this time to solve a four by five matrix. It took a half dozen attempts but we finally got the right numbers on all three of us, allowing us to move to the final step. Now both Squirrel on his hunter and myself on my Titan are on the step that requires us to simply kill any three bosses in the Wrath of the Machine raid. Then I will have my very own Outbreak Prime pulse rifle, and can do silly damage to SIVA targets with my nanites. All it all it was exactly the sort of concentrated fun that I needed to pull me out of my funk, and even though I am staring down the barrel of what will almost certainly be an extremely stressful day… I suddenly found a new packet of spoons with which to confront it.

Groundhogs Day

February 9, 2017 by Belghast

Fair warning this is going to be a largely real world post. There might accidentally be some gaming content but I can’t guarantee it at the start of this post. I am still struggling to kick whatever junk I wound up with at Pax South, and the problem is it has been going on long enough that I am starting to fall into deep turtle mode. For those not familiar with my personal verbiage, turtle mode is largely when I pull my head into my shell and forget the world exists. The more stressed I am, the more likely I am to get stuck in my shell. What frustrates me the most is that I don’t exactly want to be in this mode. I had all of these plans to start streaming again, launch a second podcast… and when I stuck my head out I saw my shadow and went running back inside to hide. I realize the title of this post was likely to confuse some folks because well… the actual ground hogs day was in fact this month. So there you go I tied up the reference in the first paragraph. The prolonged illness part is a huge chunk of it, but so is the fact that work right now is sort of madness. I am dealing with four different fires that sprung up over the last week, all of which are critical and all of which require immediate attention and have firm deadlines associated with them. As a result when I get home I just sort of crash and crash hard. Yesterday I talked about going to bed by 8, and last night I was asleep in my chair by 7:30-8ish and had moved to the bed by 9ish. For some that might not seem strange but I am generally a barely able to fall asleep at midnight sort of person. My body doesn’t seem to function at all if I get more than six hours of sleep in a given night.

Needless to say when I go into this mode it also makes me a flake. Last night was for example the guild raid in WoW, and I simply could not do it. I went back and forth on this point for awhile last night before simply surrendering to the fact that I would not be able to function even a minimal level as a tank, let alone the sort of tank they need for progression night. I could not even be responsible for myself, let alone for an entire raid worth of people. Knowing that is frustrating, because the will is in there… but it is like the machine that is me cannot figure out how to sort its controls enough to actually function. I hate that it seems like I have good weeks, where I am normal and functional… followed by several weeks of complete disarray and malfunction. Part of it goes back to the whole “spoons” theory, in that right now I seem to have a super limited amount of spoons and my workplace is taking every last one of them to keep moving forward and existing. Maybe things will calm down to the point once again where deadlines and critical issues are not looming so oppressively, but I feel horrible that I cannot seem to juggle both this world and the actual world that earns me a paycheck. Of course I am going to spend my spoons on the side of the equation that keeps me in my home and my family safe and happy, but I swear I used to do a better job at keeping all of the plates spinning and in the air.

You my reader ultimately suffers in the balance as you have to deal with yet another “Malfunctioning Bel” post. I ultimately write about my experiences good or bad, and when I am not actually experiencing anything interesting to talk about, I struggle to find things to post. In theory I could simply skip a day, but part of me just wants to be brutally honest with my readers. Tonight I am going to try and do the Thursday night Destiny thing again, which is as close to pure fun without any huge feelings of responsibility. Jex and Squirrel have been carrying my worthless ass in that game for years now, and even when I fail they keep picking me right back up. I had a talk last night with my wife, and she mentioned it is really like we are living in an alternate dimension, where all of the normal rules have been flipped upside down. I guess in truth that is adding to the problems as well… it feels like everywhere I turn there is sheer and utter madness, and I need some stability in my life. I’ve always been pretty good at compartmentalizing… and so long as I have one area of my life that seems to be functioning normally I can shrug off a whole lot of chaos in the process. The problem is… I don’t really feel like I have that place right now. My home life has been chaotic due to the whole needing to give up Luna for the good of her and our two elder cats. My work is in a constant state of chaos, and has been for six months or so. The gaming world is a self made chaos as I feel like I am pulled in a whole lot of different directions with different pools of friends playing different games. Now the world as a whole is madness as each day I am treated to a new carnival of horrors thrust upon society by an administration that feels like is some cruel joke. There is no safe place to stand in the maelstrom right now, and because of that… I keep retreating inside hoping that someday when I poke my head out again the storm will have passed and we can feel some glimmer of happiness once more.

Brief Goldrush

February 8, 2017February 8, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was kind of a shit day. I got to work around 7 am, ran around like a chicken with my head cut off and didn’t get home until after 6:30 pm. To make matters worse I wound up skipping breakfast with the idea of just grabbing something from the cafeteria in the basement… but apparently they changed hands and are no longer open at a reasonable hour for breakfast eating. When I got home I ate some left overs and planned on largely chilling out on the sofa with my laptop, however within minutes I was falling asleep at the keyboard. Instead of opting to consume caffeine to forcibly prop my eyelids open like I do so many nights… I simply went with it and crashed hard. I know I woke up a few times, one of which I vaguely remember going to the kitchen to get a drink… but for the most part I was completely dead to the world not really becoming aware of my surroundings until about five minutes before the alarm was set to go off this morning. Bel is still a very sick Bel, and while I am taking some stuff whatever respiratory hell that I picked up at PAX South seems to be lingering. Unfortunately work is absolutely madness right now and we are pushing towards a hard deadline… one that honestly made me think if going to PAX was a good idea at all in the first place. So I am suffering through it, and largely just collapsing into my desk chair and trying to think clear thoughts… that is until yesterday when a firestorm erupted not even vaguely related to said deadline. All of the sudden I am back in the same meetings I attended six months ago… and being told to develop the same solution I suggested six months ago but was largely told wasn’t needed. Suffice to say… it was a miserable day to be a Bel.

As a result I don’t have much that is exciting to talk about other than the fact that something strange happened. We had essentially a virtual run on the banks in the form of the WoW Token going from 60,000 gold to 115,000 gold and back down to around 66,000 gold all within a 36 hour period. So what caused this? Well quite simply the law of supply and demand, but more importantly the release of the ability to fund “Battle.net Balance” from consuming a WoW token instead of simply trading it in for subscription time. If you will indulge me in a quick side bar here… didn’t Blizzard say that as far as branding goes “Battle.net” was going away? I find it bizarre that they are rolling out a new feature with this same branding instead of simply calling it “Blizzard Balance” or something super generic like that. Essentially all of those folks with pent up desires for products on the Blizzard store, suddenly had the ability to cash in their bankroll and buy those things pushing the demand for tokens way higher than the demand for actual gold. In truth this should have been foreseen given that there will always be a constant need for things on the store that previously cost cash, but there is a constantly dwindling number of aspirational gold needs in the game. Sure you could really drop a silly amount of money and buy outright that 2 million gold spider mount… but at the end of the day it does nothing but sit there as a supposed status symbol. Whereas in the past with the Tundra Mammoth and Yak… those greatly improved game-play especially when it came to leveling alts. However I won’t lie that the thought of being able to sell a token and purchase the Alliance motorcycle did cross my mind as something I might be willing to do.

What I want to talk about more than anything else is the absolute windfall that this means for Blizzard. When you purchase a token for $20 it can be then traded for goods valuing $15… be it in the form of a monthly subscription or now in $15 of Battle.net balance that can then be spent on anything from physical merchandise to the digital services they provide. Every time a token changes hands Blizzard makes $5 off the top, regardless of what it is spent on. My theory is that a lot of the tokens over the last two days were spent purchasing digital services… like character moves or renames… things that folks had been wanting to do for a long period of time but just been unwilling to cough up hard currency to make it happen. If that is the case then every single one of these token purchases also essentially amounted to pure profit. I have been a long time critic of the prices that Blizzard charges for character moves or renames… when essentially they are charging for access to what is now a completely automated and scripted interaction. Once upon a time there was a labor cost associated with these services, because someone manually kicked off a SQL script to make it happen… however that has not been the case for over a decade and the price never actually went down. If folks spent their tokens on digital game purchases, or in game items for Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm or Overwatch… then again that is mostly pure profit. The only time there are serious physical expenses factoring in is if someone purchase tangible items on the store like a Murloc plush or an Overwatch hoodie. Even then… they are still making a decent profit on that item or they would not be selling it. Basically the Token system allows Blizzard to double dip and make a profit on the front end and the back end of every purchase… and at the same time ensures that the folks that are grinding out the gold are actively playing their properties.

In truth I think we can expect one of these “runs on the bank” each time something new is released from Blizzard. A new champion in Heroes of the Storm… bam the token price inflates as folks scurry to purchase it. The Diablo 3 expansion pack that adds Necromancers releases… same thing… a rush to sell off some gold to purchase the thing that folks want. I think of this much like the lottery system, in that once the reward gets to a certain point… it brings people out of the woodwork that would never normally buy tickets. Personally that price point is somewhere around 300 million dollars for a lottery, because that prompts me to start buying the occasional one off ticket here and there on the vague chance that I will actually win. For WoW players that price point seems to be 100,000 gold for the US economy and 200,000 gold for the EU economy. The bizarre part of this is that I don’t think the balance feature is even available on the EU realms yet, and it absolutely had no effect on China, Taiwan, or South Korea yet… but in truth those three markets are madness anyways. Regardless… the fact that players can now cash in their gold for tangible goods… that they could then in theory sell on secondary markets like Ebay tells me that we are going to change the dynamic considerably. You have just essentially let players start turning game time in to real dollars, which is a strange paradigm and one that is not entirely dissimilar to the traditional third party gold markets. Granted this is going to be a SUPER lossy process, but one that will exist nonetheless. One that more than likely only the most sage of gold making wizards will ever figure out how to tap. Things are going to be really strange from this point out.

[Edit] I just heard from my friend Nyn that you cannot apparently use Battle.net balance to fund physical items… so that at least negates some of my commentary. However that does mean that tokens going to Battle.net balance are essentially going to be largely pure profit for Blizzard.

Think of the Children

February 7, 2017 by Belghast

For the majority of last week I talked about games that I had played at PAX South, and in truth there are still a handful more than I want to discuss. I think that is the real triumph of this years show, that I walked away with so many things that I found interesting enough to write entire posts about. Granted in my super meandering way I end up talking about a lot of things other than the game during each of them. Today is not going to change that. In 2016 the most memorable game at PAX South for me was a game called Ultimate Chicken Horse. In fact this was the sort of experience that I kept dragging people back by the booth to check out for themselves. I don’t have a ton of opportunities to do the whole couch co-op party game thing, and it seems that when I actually do get that opportunity I want to take advantage. I even wrote a couple of different posts about my thoughts talking about just how fresh and interesting the experience was. Now I did not expect to find another game like this, but it seems like it found me.

Ultimately I think I happened to stare a little too long at a booth as I was passing by, and within moments was engaged by someone talking about a game called “Think of the Children”. Admittedly we had not shifted into “lets play all the games” mode yet, and this game was a good part of that mental shift for me at least. The idea apparently came out of a recent game jam and was being groomed into a full game. The concept was simple enough… that you are parents and have to try and take care of a bunch of children. The challenge comes in when you find out that the children are essentially lemmings. They have no survival instinct and instead of simply slowly marching towards the edge of the a cliff… they are going to actively go find danger. The kids might decide it is super awesome to go try and pet a jellyfish… and get stung to death, or mess with a bird… and get pecked to death. Essentially these little buggers are constantly trying to kill themselves and you as the parents are trying desperately to corral or distract them long enough to make it through the timer without losing any of your charges.

This turns out to be exceedingly difficult, and just as you seem to have one group of kids under control… another group goes off and does something truly horrible. Essentially you have a few tools for managing the children… you can either pick them up and move them away from danger… or shout at them which effects every child in range for a super short period of time… before they go right back to doing whatever horrible thing they were planning on doing. You can also temporarily distract children by setting up tables, or deploying a pinata. I found myself largely throwing children away from harm while Rae who was playing with me attempted to set up the distractions. Regardless I was an extremely bad parent and my first time out of the gate I got an F-… and on attempt two I upgraded that to a D. Let me just tell you that was the proudest I had ever been of getting a D in my life.

Sure the game is morbid as hell, given that inevitably some of your children are going to die horrible and stupid deaths. However the gameplay was so fast paced and frenetic that we spent most of our time yelling unintelligible sentence fragments at each other while desperately trying to keep yet another child from going and playing in traffic. I mean there is a clear reason why I am not a parent of anything but animals… because in truth animals have way more survival instinct than proto-humans. Where the game shines is when you are sitting there playing co-op with one of your friends, and if I had an opportunity to do this often I would absolutely suggest this game in your rotation of what I term “party games”. One of the cool things that happens at PAX in general is that you wind up striking conversations with random people while waiting in lines. Each and every time this happened to me it ultimately got down to talking about our favorite games of the show, and this is the game that I kept sending people out into the world to find. It was tucked into a quiet row and was ultimately rather unassuming, but man was it a great experience to play. Even though I don’t have a lot of opportunity for couch co-op I am still going to pick this up for no reason other than to support what is ultimately a really cool game idea. If you find yourself interested in this madness you can check out the official website, or do what I did and just add it to my wishlist on Steam.