April 2018 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Blurry Cats

April 30, 2018 by Belghast

I’m somewhat all over the place this morning and struggling to get started, so in the meantime here is a picture of a confused cat. This is Kenzie, she is my real life palico and “helps” me do lots of things… including fetching me rubber bands and string that I didn’t even know I needed. She then wants me to throw the string or rubber band so she can find it again and prove how good of a Palico helper she is. She is trying to show how much better the real version is than the in Monster Hunter World version. She also largely looks like this every time I take a photo because it is like she has never seen my phone before.

I guess this is an upgrade from the ferret who won’t stop wiggling and then yawns… so that every photo looks like she is about to bite me. Example in the photo above… I promise she did not just bite me after the photo was taken. In fact the most aggressive thing she ever does is lick my hand and she is a lovable wiggly fluffball. I wrote on twitter the other day that I am consistently jealous of people who can take good photos of their pets. Ours seem to exist in two states… asleep or shapeless blur. By the moment I get my phone out, unlock it with my thumbprint and open the camera app… the moment of adorableness that was just happening is always over. What you end up seeing are the hollow after moments of what was a really cute photo ruined by the fact that my pets do not understand photography.

They are however great at sleeping on me or around me. Like right this very moment Kenzie is laying on my headphones because apparently that is a comfortable thing to do… just sort of drape your body over an awkwardly shaped object. Basically she likes being near me at all times when possible and meows incessantly the moment I lock her out of the bathroom to take a shower. Similarly when I record a podcast on Saturday nights she gets really confused that she cannot also be in the room… and if you have ever tuned into one of my streams you have probably hear her talking to me or me talking to her. The thing is… I have several blankets on my desk for the cats to lay on… but more often than not she is just going to lay on a controller or something else that cannot possibly feel comfortable.

Since this has apparently turned into a post where I just sit here talking about pets. This is Allie, she is our old lady and mostly just wants to lay on things. The majority of the time she is either laying on the blanket I keep on my recliner end of the sectional or draped over top of me while I am sitting there using my laptop. She is awesome in that she has figured out how to lay in such a way as to not obstruct my keyboard and mouse movement. The only problem is when she is doing this thing I basically cannot type with my right hand. When I am using a controller she has figured out how to basically cradle herself up against my beard as not to obstruct the use of said controller. She is a great girl but is starting to show the signs of age and ultimately we are just going to love on her as long as we have her. Once again… the moment I took this shot she moved slightly causing it to be a little out of focus.

Then we have Mollie our youngest and most blurry cat. I took like six shots in rapid succession and this is the least blurry of them all. She had a rough start of her life and as far as I can tell she was found as a kitten in a parking lot and taken directly to a primarily dog animal shelter. So she lived there for like the first six months of her life having to content with the constant barking of puppers. When we first got her she was insanely skittish and over time has improved… but she also isn’t quite there yet. For whatever reasons she seemed scared of me at first, but I largely chock this up to the fact that the lady running the shelter was about the same height and build as my wife and she maybe thought she looked “safe”. Over time she has become my little shadow as I move around the house, hopping up on things and wanting attention. However she bolts the moment she hears a loud and strange sound or sees Kenzie. There are times though when kenzie is sleeping on the blanket on my wife’s end of the sofa… and Mollie will sneak in and snuggle with me and those are the best times ever.

Since this morphed into a pets post… I figured I should also show off a picture of Shiloh when she is sleeping and adorably curled up in her toy box. Ferrets love toys and she will drag them around the cage and shove them into the toybox or under blankets, though she rarely falls sleep in here. I am guessing she was playing and got tuckered out. Ferrets are sorta like windup toys in that they have all sorts of motion and action until they run out of charge… and then basically conk out wherever they happen to be at that moment. As a result you will find your ferrets sleeping in all sorts of weird positions because they ran out of energy at exactly that moment. There have been times I have woken up in the morning and Shiloh will be conked out halfway between the litter box and one of the beds… because apparently she woke up just long enough to go potty and then ran out of steam again. She has always been a sleepier girl than any of our other ferrets have been and when she is sleepy… she is REALLY sleepy. Then again when she is active she is really active and wants to be picked up and subsequently tries to climb up my shirt. The funniest thing is that she also plays with the cats… especially Mollie and she will wait at the side of the cage when she is near by. Mollie also tries to pull on her blankets when she wants Shiloh to wake up and play… so inevitably there will be a tuft of fleece blanket sticking out through the cage in the morning.

So those are my pets… I did not exactly intend on the post to take this trajectory but it is what happened. I hope you have a great day and a great start of the week.

MTG Arena Economy

April 27, 2018April 27, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I spent a tiny bit of time in Magic the Gathering Arena because they unleashed the new Dominaria expansion. The funny thing is the digital version of Magic got Dominaria long before I actually got the box that I ordered. If you currently have access to Arena just the act of logging in gets you three packs, and once again remember these packs have 1 rare/mythic, 2 uncommon and 5 commons… and or a combination of wildcards. Wildcards as always can be traded in for any card you are missing of that rarity and they do not appear to be set dependent. This means that more or less you seem to be able to bank them and then turn in a bunch of them any time you want to build a deck.

The other thing that went in yesterday was the ability to spend money and buy the intermediary currency of Arena… Gems. There are two currencies in the game… Gold that you earn by completing quests and such and Gems that you plunk down hard earned cash. The prices range from $4.99 for the first pack of 750 gems making it roughly 150 gems per dollar all the way to 20,000 gems for $99.99 making that 200 gems per dollar spent. The thing that concerns me the most at this point is the fact that MTG Arena is a beta and I have yet to actually find any place that talks about whether or not there will be a wipe before launch… and if there is one if money spent will be refunded. This is the biggest hurdle for me personally against spending any money at all… because I would really like assurances that I would at least keep the value of that purchase even if I don’t keep the cards.

Now we get into the prime thing you can buy with your gems… packs of cards. At the 45 and 90 pack range you get what was the Dominaria buy the box promo card… making me think that they consider 45 packs to be the equivalent of a 36 pack Magic the Gathering Booster Box. I did some nonsense via spreadsheet before I actually noticed that there is a post on the forums with pretty much all of the economy elements outlined. As it stands the only scaling is on gem purchases… where the more money you spend the more gems you wind up getting per dollar. At the high end of buying 750 gem packs that places the price per pack at $1.33 and if you are buying on the low end at 20,000 gems the price per pack drops down to $1. That means 45 packs would be $59.88 buying 600 gems at a time and $45.00 buying 20,000 gems at a time… similarly the gigantic 90 pack bundle comes out to $119.76 and $89.99 respectively.

For an economy reference… Hearthstone buying in the smallest package ends up being $1.49 per pack and in the largest package $1.16 per pack… for 3 fewer cards each pack. The biggest problem with each and every gem pack is they do not exactly sync up with the dollar amounts meaning you are going to have a remainder of gems that are not really usable for the purpose of buying packs. Contrasted again with Hearthstone there is no intermediary currency so you always know what you are getting per dollar spent regardless of some nonsense exchange rate. My friend Toadchild also did some math and figured out that the most efficient way to purchase cards if you wanted the maximum number of packs for your gems… would be 1-45 card pack, 2-15 card packs and 4-6 card packs giving you a total of 99 packs for 19,800 gems. This still gives you an annoying remainder of 200 gems though in the process. If you are curious about the full range of nonsense here is the google sheet I was working things out in.

Other than just the ability to purchase cards for cash… they implemented the beginnings of a draft mode. Quick Draft however is not the pod drafting you were expecting however and instead something significantly different. Effectively when the event is going on you can enter the draft at will and be placed up against some AI that drafts with you. This apparently gives you the ability to leave the screen and return to your matches later any time while the event is active. The buy in is going to be 5000 gold or 750 gems… aka the $4.99 pack and rewards you a blend of cards and gems in prizes. Essentially you keep anything you draft into your collection and have the possibility to win additional prizes if you get to 7 wins before you get to 3 losses. Draft packs have the same distribution as tabletop giving you 1 rare/mythic, 3 uncommon and 10 commons making it a more familiar format for those who have drafted before. The prize support breakout looks a little something like this…

0 Wins: 50 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
1 Win: 100 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
2 Wins: 200 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
3 Wins: 300 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
4 Wins: 450 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
5 Wins: 650 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
6 Wins: 850 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
7 Wins: 950 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted

The boosters are all listed as a “Chance for Extra Boosters” but there really isn’t any particular information surrounding that… maybe if you go 7 and 0 you get 3… or 7 and 2 you only get 1. This isn’t really clarified that I saw.

The other thing that went in is Quick Constructed which is effectively a tournament in a box allowing you to hop in and play in a competitive structure with prize support. The buy in here is 500 gold or 95 gems and has significantly more meager rewards primarily allowing you to gamble your gold for the chance at winning your 7 and getting it doubled in the process with a few randomized cards in the process. This would feel better were it not for the fact that they completely removed random card rewards at the end of winning a match, meaning this is now your way for getting that sort of thing. I actually loved the whole get a random card after you win thing… because it sorta felt like an Ante card even though that concept is an element of a bygone era. For those interested the prize support structure looks a little something like this…

0 Wins: 100 gold and 3 individual Uncommon cards
1 Win: 200 gold and 3 individual Uncommon cards
2 Wins: 300 gold and 3 individual Uncommon cards
3 Wins: 400 gold and 3 individual Uncommon cards
4 Wins: 500 gold, 2 individual Uncommon cards, and 1 individual Rare card
5 Wins: 600 gold, 2 individual Uncommon cards, and 1 individual Rare card
6 Wins: 800 gold, 1 individual Uncommon card, and 2 individual Rare cards
7 Wins: 1,000 gold, 1 individual Uncommon card, and 2 individual Rare cards

In a worst case scenario you spent 500 gold and got back 100 and 3 common cards. In the best case scenario you spent 500 gold… doubled it and got back 2 rares and 1 common. Unlike draft this is not an AI mode and you are playing against players. They suggest that this is game mode primarily for players who have already completed their daily quests and are looking for a way to get more goodies.

All in all I am mostly happy with the economy of the game so far. It seems rather reasonable especially if you contrast it with paper magic. For your dollar you are getting way more value out of Magic the Gathering Arena both in the sheer number of rares and uncommon you get per dollar and the fact that wildcards exist. Wildcards and stockpiling them seems to be a really good way to prepare for the oncoming release of a new expansion. As it stands right now… I could sit on my stash of mythic and rare wildcards and then the moment the next expansion releases buy everything outright that i need to make a deck work. Cracking packs is always going to be fun for me personally, but for players who would rather just buy what they need… cracking packs becomes a way to get those much needed tokens to finish their custom “brew”. The only concern I have is that since this mode seems so much more equitable to the player… what will it ultimately do to the physical hobby?

[UPDATE]

Any gems purchased with real money during the Closed Beta will be given back to your account after a final wipe at the end of the Closed Beta.

— Wizards of the Coast (@Wizards_Help) April 27, 2018

I got a response back from Wizard of the Coast support and the plan is to return the spent gems to your account when it goes live.

The Pilot and The Meat Suit

April 26, 2018 by Belghast

It has been a weird few weeks for me. One of the problems I have had over the years is that people tend to value me way more than they should. This means that I often get pulled in to consult on things that I have absolutely nothing to do with. When you factor in the shift to management… this seems to have only gotten worse. Sure I have an above average ability to troubleshoot software related problems and my borderline nefarious past makes me decent at working through potential system flaws. I’ve always sorta been a jack of all trades and master of none, and it turns out as I have gotten further in my career that is actually a really handy survival skill. It helps me understand how the pieces fit together and how the different roles click into place to make a whirring machine function.

The biggest problem there is I find it mentally exhausting to attempt to solve the problems of others, because I sorta have to pour myself into the situation and ask a bunch of “what would I do” type questions. As a result last night I completely missed the Mythical Nonsense night. I had a dinner that was made up of Jalapeno Chicken, Corn Dodgers and Potato Wedges (Charlie’s Chicken is so good)… and largely crashed out on the sofa until a short time later when my wife was ready for bed… and I followed her extremely willingly to a comatose wonderland. I stayed there until roughly 5:10 this morning when my body decided that I needed to be up… which is about 20 minutes before the alarm goes off. So I sat there quietly petting the cats on the edge of the bed until the cacophony of beeping happened.

As you might be able to tell by now this is not exactly my normal post, because I really don’t have a lot of gaming information to talk about. Instead you are getting something else that may or may not be weird and awkward. For as long as I have remembered I have had this sort of feeling inside that I wasn’t real. I am not exactly sure how to put it other than that, that I am not actually part of my own life. When I get tired or stressed I find myself sorta going on auto pilot and then watching my life happen as though I were watching a movie. I am detached and somewhere else just casually browsing what my meat puppet of a body is doing without me actually being resident in it.

The closest thing I can explain it as is though the me that everyone else interacts with is not actually really me. Instead it is like the real me is someone piloting this flesh mech around and occasionally gets bored of doing so… and instead retreats to just letting the AI take over. Every so often things will shift back into focus and I will with startling realization notice that I am in fact real and I am in fact effected by whatever is going on. This is always jarring when it happens no matter how many times I experience the shift in perspective. It’s like something has tethered me back to my meat suit and forced me to actually interact with the world in first person again instead of the blissfully detached third person I was enjoying.

Now you could just say that I was letting my mind wander, but it has always felt more than that. Its like for a bit the “me” inside of me took a break and wandered off because it got bored with whatever happened to be going on. It is really frustrating when this happens during a conversation because then I sorta have to try really hard to catch up and “grok” whatever the hell was just being said because I know at some point someone is going to expect an answer that makes sense. It is weird feeling like a spectator in your own life. Like I said before… this was going to be an odd post from the start but it was the thing that was presently on my mind.

Monster Hunter and Destiny

April 25, 2018 by Belghast

While I am not quite ready to throw out a complete post about it… I am swirling around in my head the notion of rebooting Blaugust this year. If I did so it would be a slightly different affair and I am sorting out in my head exactly what that might entail. There was a period of time when we had a bunch of events happening at the same time… Developer Appreciation Week, Newbie Blogger Initiative and Blaugust. None of which really exist today in their current form and have not properly for a few years. So in remixing Blaugust I would be also attempting to fill some of the niches that the others provided as well by laying out a series of themed weeks. The rough idea is it would start with the last full week in July as a sort of “Prep Week” where the remaining elder bloggers would sorta throw out “how to get started” posts from an inspirational, logistical or technical manner. It is still an idea that is incubating however so I will do some sort of a larger post once it has solidified completely in my head.

The other general thought that has been going around in my head is that Monster Hunter World has become my new Destiny: The Taken King. That sounds counter intuitive I know since Destiny 2 is a much closer simulacrum to the original game than Monster Hunter World given that they are two completely different genres. However what I am talking about is more the way I engage with the game rather than the way the game actually plays. Destiny 1… especially during the Taken King era was this game I was completely obsessed with and wanted to know every tiny bit of lore I could find for it. It was this giant box of content that allowed me to engage with it in whatever method I chose to, and also always gave me one more goal to complete once I had finished the previous one. It was this title that I could just log in and play any given night without needing to bring into it a predetermined purpose because there were so many layered purposes available that I could easily latch onto one of them and proceed happily for an evening.

I had a small group of friends playing it, that allowed me to do bigger activities if I so choose like the various raids I completed with Axioma and later Tequila Mockingbird. That said most of my time playing the game was just me roaming around and doing stuff that suited whatever mood I happened to be in. There was always one more obstacle to overcome and one more piece of loot that I was chasing and never quite obtaining. It was a perfect storm of hooks for me personally and kept me entertained right up until the point when my head was filled with daydreams of Destiny 2 and what might be. I realize I can still log in at any point I want and play the game again… but it almost feels tarnished due to the greatly diminished community surrounding it.

Destiny 2 for reasons I cannot fully explain does not contain the same hooks for me that the original did. I tried very hard to stay focused on it, and for some time I have blamed my eventual malaise towards the game on the fact that I tried to play it twice. What I mean by that is that I played the game hard and heavy when it released on Playstation 4 and then immediately turned around and went through the same manic leveling process on the PC one month later. Effectively I ran up six characters to high gear levels back to back, and I had managed to hit 305 the then cap on PS4 before swapping over to PC and grinding up to that point again. That is a lot to ask of any game to sustain interested during that sort of nonsense and I largely explained my fading away from the title as simple burnout.

The problem is there was so much more that I have yet to completely unpack. The moment to moment game play in Destiny 2 feels amazing… but there is a problem with its feedback loop. What was missing was my drive to keep doing more of it once I had obtained whatever shiny baubles I wanted to obtain weapon wise. What was missing was some larger overarching pull that kept me going off and doing individual tasks that ultimately felt like they were adding up to some big payoff. In part the problem is a lot of those items that I used to grind for… now exist as Eververse cash shop exclusives. The other problem is that when they have put in longer grinds like the weapons of osiris… they feel extremely hollow because they are so horribly repetitive and involve you doing the same limited number of activities over and over. I realize they are still trying to fix this broken loop and some of the upcoming changes might help it… but I feel like their over reliance on timed mechanics is going to be a bridge I just cannot cross given now much anxiety they inflict.

On the flip side you have the game Monster Hunter World that I honestly did not expect to get into, given my lousy track record with the handheld versions. However I am engaging with it much the way as I engaged with Destiny during the Taken King era. I find myself looking up lore for the monsters if they have existed in the series before, and if not speculations about their origins and such that are floating around on Reddit. I find myself researching bits and parts for armor and what interesting builds surround them that exploit their specific attributes. I find myself able to log into the game any given night and just find something to do because I have this massive laundry list of things I want to go acquire. I can always use more elder dragon parts…. but similarly can use the gemstones that are rare drops off of almost any creature you can hunt. I became completely ecstatic last night when I got a double gem drop off Zorah Magdaros… that I cannot fully explain why I was bothering to do in the first place.

This is the feedback loop that used to drive me while playing Destiny 1 and it is the feedback loop that keeps me doing nonsense. I have an addiction to SOS Roulette which isn’t even really a thing… just something I made up in my head to relate it to the various roulette’s in Final Fantasy XIV. I like dropping into the middle of an assortment of random events happening that people need help on and trying to push the scenario to a win condition by my interaction with it. Sure there are times we fail miserably like Monday night… but then there are nights like Last night where we somehow managed to win every single boss fight I attempted including Val Hazaak and Nergigante. There will likely NEVER be a time when I cannot use at least one or two things off the elder dragons.

What makes Monster Hunter World so sticky is that eat time I get the parts to craft a new piece of gear, it ends up opening a whole bunch of possibilities to solve other problems… and often times leads me down a path of wanting something else to try some new build out. The way the gear sets interact in interesting ways means I am constantly searching for another piece of gear to complete a specific stat packages that I have decided in my head that I need. This was the same sort of nonsense that happened for me in Destiny 1 where I was constantly seeking out a slightly better stat package that interacted more perfect with the gear I had. I had a vault full of items that I didn’t want to shard because they were useful under certain circumstances and led me to want to keep them. I am having this same problem in Monster Hunter World where I am afraid I will legitimately hit the 1000 item hard cap on equipment.

Effectively what I have realized is that Monster Hunter World is my new Destiny, and hopefully I have explained a bit this morning what that actually means. It is that game that I can pick up and play without any real reason… and find a constant stream of activities that I want to be doing… that also feel like they are working towards some larger objective. Capcom is doing an excellent job of keeping a constantly flow of events and activities happening almost every week to keep us engaged and wanting to do new an interesting things. Kulve Taroth is phenomenal and might go down as some of my favorite content in any game… but the fact that they sprung it on us completely unannounced makes it all the more exciting. While I have had friends who have bounced off of this game… I still maintain an active enough community to be able to do things together if need be. The only problem is that right now I seem to be a couple of hours off what would be prime monster hunting time… given that I tend to wind down around 9:30 my time and that is when folks are getting online.

Ultimately while this might seem counter-intuitive… if you loved the original Destiny but largely have bounced off Destiny 2… you might give Monster Hunter World a try.