January 2019 - Page 6 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

As promised yesterday, today we return at least for a bit to proper gaming news… or more so the news of the gaming I have been up to over the break. I’ve been spending a significant amount of time playing Destiny 2 which is not terribly shocking. That said I did manage to hit 650 light, the current cap for the rest of the current season and even have managed to push up my standard loadout of Breakneck, Ikelos Shotgun and Thunderlord to that level as well. Now begins the slow process of bringing the other things I care about up to that level as well.

I also managed to get my Hunter to 50 and have finished the Warmind content now and am slowly chewing my way through Forsaken. I’ve swapped over 650 weapons and am using them to slowly push up her light level which I have managed to get to 625 in a day of trying to do this. I will probably be spending a good deal more time working on her than the Titan seeing as I hit my initial goal of hitting the light cap during the break. At some point I will probably also start working on pushing up the Warlock, but seeing as that is my least favorite class to play… it always ends up lagging behind significantly.

The core problem I am having with Destiny 2 is a pretty good one to be having. There is more content to do each week than I have time to really do it in. At launch time I could push through all of the powerful gear options in a single night, and could easily run out of things that I felt were “worth doing”… and as a result spent a good deal of time working on alts to spread out that list of things to do enough to get me through the week. With the current state of the game there is no way I have enough time to do all of the things that could create progress so instead I just focus on the things I feel like doing in a given night. I am leaving so much progression on the table in a given week that I am having to learn to be okay with it.

Lastly I have been tooling around with a weird Dark-Soulsian game called Ashen that is currently only available on Xbox One and the Epic Games store. Once you get over the fact that all of the characters are faceless poppets, the game does a much better job of making you care about the world that you are exploring in the fact that you are essentially recovering after an apocalypse. As you roam around you meet new people that you can help and in turn they join the village that you are building. They start to offer you whatever it is that they can do from forging weapons to letting you futz with your stat layout.

There are times the game reminds me of Breath of the Wild as well… albeit with way more hardcore combat. It is very easy to die in this game as pretty much everything in the world hates you. This can get a little frustrating because in my rush to attack before they can attack me… I have accidentally killed a few NPCs. I am enjoying myself quite a bit, but I am not really playing it anywhere near as much as some of the other games I have on my plate. I still thought it was worth mentioning in case anyone else was interested. They have managed to create a game that is very much in the Dark Souls genre… that is also very hopeful and not quite so soul crushing. I linked to the original trailer above.

I’ve started this post a half dozen times this morning only to keep backspacing it away. So as a result I am just going to go with it as not to waste anymore time. I am not used to blogging while sitting downstairs, and I think that might be harshing some of my mojo. Either than or the fact that I am effectively writing the first blog post of 2019, a new year… and don’t want to mess things up. Regardless this morning I thought I would write a bit about some of my thoughts for the coming year. I am not generally one to do resolutions, so I am going to participate in the practice without actually calling them that. So here goes some of the things I hope for the next year.

Figure out Discord

I know this sounds like a silly topic, but I am being completely serious. No I am not meaning figure it out in a technical sense, but instead figure out how it fits in my life. Right now I am legitimately in fifty different discord servers, and have probably since its launch left about that many as well. Hell there are a half dozen that I set up myself for various reasons. This fragmentation means that I end up using none of them on a regular basis. While I use Slack and Microsoft Teams for work purposes… and that gave me a fixed reason to use the social Slacks I am in… I don’t have a similar need for Discord other than when I am wanting to use voice chat for some reason. As such we have a bunch of general purpose discords that serve as a ready voice chat option when we need one.

All of that said there are awesome people and interesting conversations going on there, and I would like during this new year to figure out how to become part of that. I’ve been pleased to see the Blaugust discord is still active, and I love hanging out with the Moogle’s Pom crew when I remember it is a place that exists. Unfortunately I think discord has way too much noise to really make it a constant destination. Too many people are scattered among too many different servers to have it feel like a cohesive experience. I think the other challenge is everyone is struggling to figure out how exactly to use it. Every single alpha that I am in wants to use it as their primary means of communication and as a replacement for the traditional forum experience. The UI doesn’t exactly help to identify what are things I actually should be reading, and what is just so much more spam.

It would be nice if there was a way to group servers into folders… so you could have a half dozen ones that you regularly use and then the rest neatly hidden behind a wall. This is a problem that I want to solve this year but I am not even sure where to start apart from simply leaving every server I am in and adding them back more judiciously.

Get Over Anxiety Tanking

I am not sure where it came from but lately I have been super anxious about getting back into tanking again. This is a big part of why I have been largely bouncing from Final Fantasy XIV is that I cannot seem to get over the hurdle of just tanking for randoms. That is what I need to do so I can get the currency I need to upgrade my gear to be able to run the dungeons to be able to finish the main story line. Yes I realize that was one hell of a run on sentence but I absolutely did that on purpose. Everything in that game seems to be gated by something, and the answer to all of it is just to tank queue as a Warrior and be done with it.

That said I keep logging in, playing the cactpot and then logging right back out. I think a lot of why I have not returned to World of Warcraft in earnest with the recent patch is that I have a similar wall that has built up against the responsibility of tanking. I want to figure out a way past this so I can get on with my life and start to enjoy MMORPGs again.

Organize My Vault

Another huge problem I am having with Final Fantasy XIV is that I am avoiding my inventory. I have six retainers full of shit and I cannot begin to figure out how to sort it all. I know there is a good deal of it that I can stick in the glamour chest and be done with it, but I am so paralyzed by the mountain of items that it is effecting my willingness to go do anything that might add more to it. I am similarly having an issue with Destiny 2 where I am running out of vault room. I need to go through and get rid of everything that I can buy back again through the collections… but right now I am willfully avoiding touching anything. I am struggling with an irrational fear that I might remove the wrong thing and with no undo system and no buyback vendor… I could accidentally get rid of something I can’t get back.

Quite honestly so many of the things I am dealing with are anxiety based… anxiety over interacting with people, anxiety over responsibility, and anxiety over possible loss. If I could figure out a way to solve that core problem a lot of these would disappear.

Figure Out Streaming

Another one of these anxiety triggered things is the fact that I would like to stream more… but always struggle to push that “go live” button. I think one of the big problems is that a lot of what I do on a nightly basis does not exactly make for “must see television”. I don’t play the type of games that lend themselves to streaming, because in a narrative experience… the fact that I am streaming seems to get in the way. Additionally does anyone actually want to see me grind public events in Destiny 2 for an entire night? I would love to come to terms with this and figure out a way to work it into my life.

Figure Out Social Media

As it stands I follow way the fuck too many people on Social Media and I have been paralyzed to start trying to tackle this problem. On Twitter I follow just shy of 1200 people and that is way too many to make it usable. Similarly I have allowed my Mastodon profile to balloon up to 226…. which means I am setting myself up for the same sort of problem there in the future. Again like so many of these I need to take the hard step and just start slashing those follow numbers, because it is completely unsustainable the way it is now. There is no way in hell that I can actually interact with that many people. Twitter vacillates between being extremely enjoyable and being a wall of noise that I cannot seem to push past. I need to figure out how to reduce the noise.

I have not done this thing because I have not been willing to risk upsetting some people in the process. I need to get over that and rip the band aid off.

Minimize

A lot of this has been about gaming or social media… but this one is more personal. I have reached a point where I am larger than I have been at any point in my life. I will never be a small person, but I need to be less big. So this year I need to get back on the wagon and reduce my calorie intake while also increasing my exercise output. I’ve done this numerous times in the past and I need to do it again. The problem is something will happen in my life that causes me to stop giving a fuck about it… and then this happens. Caring about my weight is not my default state, it is something I have to work at caring about. So this year I need to devote serious effort into fixing this before it gets worse.

Tomorrow I will return to games blogging, since the last few posts have been more on the personal and serious side… but I wanted to get them out of me as they appear to have needed to be written.

Seasonal Light Cap Get

Hopes for the New Year