Aggrochat Archives - Page 103 of 106 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Faffless Wednesday

August 7, 2015May 29, 2014 by Belghast

Banging Doors

Well it happened again last night, I was woken up by one of our cats banging on the closet door. The problem is after I finally got her crackhead self settled down and up into bed with us… I once again was completely wide awake. Problem is this time it was at 12:45 when it started, so there I lay in bed at 1 am completely unable to get back to sleep. So I sat there for a bit, finally deciding to get up and go upstairs and play something for awhile to hopefully tire myself back out again. The game of choice was Defiance, but I will go into that more later. I managed to get to a state where I thought I might sleep around 2 am, but the rest of the night was extremely fitful.

According to fitbit I was awake 9 times during the night. I have no clue what is going on with me that my body keeps thinking I am fully awake at any point I wake up. I have always struggled with sleep, and as a result cannot nap for fear of not being able to sleep that night. This whole waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep thing that has plagued me the last two nights is brand new however. Right now this morning I feel mostly normal, albeit a little sluggish… I just fear for what this will mean as the day wears on. Yesterday was rough since I had been up since 3:45, especially about 2 pm or so it became torture to try and do anything productive. I might have to start resorting to taking a sleep aid, but I hate how groggy they make me feel in the morning.

Faffless Wednesday

Last night for whatever reason we simply did not have a good turnout for our normal “faff about” in Elder Scrolls Online event. It could be that people were just busy, or it could be that the Wildstar servers were up for some reason yesterday and folks are anxious for the head start coming Friday. In any case there were just three of us that showed up with the purpose of doing the event, so we decided that it was really too few to do a dungeon, and too few to really do anything meaningful in Cyrodil. As a result we just kinda piddled around doing our own thing and chatting back and forth. PK and Delevax joined the rest of us on mumble and we hung out while playing. I have not really as much time to play Elder Scrolls Online that I would have liked.

Lately my weekends have been scattered with little landmines of not being able to play anything, and then last weekend the amazing single player games Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order got my devoted attention. At this point I think I am about two hours away from finishing Wolf, and transistor was a punch in the gut… but a very good one. I had been looking forward to Wednesday because I knew I would devote myself to playing nothing but Elder Scrolls Online, even if the “event” didn’t happen. I have to say I love the veteran content, and more importantly I love that mobs are once again difficult. There were always a couple of types of encounters that were painful for me… I am looking at you Harvesters… but for the most part I had reached a place where I could steam roll in entire packs of mobs. There were several late game public dungeons that I solo’d my way through, so my skill level with the game had reached a point where it was simply greater than the challenge.

Veteran content reset that equilibrium. I literally can get my ass kicked by a mudcrab if I happen upon a pack of three, and even in the case of two at a time I have to use Green Blood to heal myself while dealing with the second one. I like that the game instantly became a challenge again the moment I completed the storyline. The result is that while I do the Aldmeri Dominion content, the game feels fresh to me since I am having to relearn how to manage tough encounters. Last night I finished up Kenarthi’s Roost and moved on into Auridon. Since this is the content I have done the least, I am really enjoying winding my way through elfland. I’ve decided that I really like the Bosmer… I was talking last night with Euron that they remind me quite a bit of the Witch Elves from Warhammer Fantasy. As much as I want to dislike her, I have to admit that Queen Ayrenn is pretty awesome as well.

Figuring out Defiance

I wrote yesterday mornings blog post at about 4 am, and then proceeded to faff about in Defiance for the next hour until 5:30 when the alarm normally goes off. During that time I think I finally figured out how to enjoy the game. There was always something I liked about it, but the experience just felt lacking in some way. Like I didn’t quite grasp how the questing system worked or how the world exploration worked. The first change I made is that I started playing the game with the Xbox 360 controller. While it controls competently with the keyboard and mouse, everything feels like it just works better with the controller. I guess this is the side effect when you develop a game for consoles, but I am slowly getting used to playing an FPS with a controller. I find the lack of focused aiming to be far less of a detriment that I thought it would be.

Secondly I had a major epiphany while playing as I stumbled across and Arkfall. I started treating this game like it was Rift, in that so many times in Rift I just spend my time ping ponging from tear to tear closing the Rifts. Doing this so far has been worth a ton of experience and my Ego rank is slowly climbing. Additionally you seem to get some really good rewards for doing it, and I am starting to bump into other players as well which makes the experience overall more enjoyable. I always felt like the thing that was lacking was that I didn’t really have anyone to play the game with. I am hoping as this game transitions from “buy the box” to “free to play” that folks will start filtering back in. It might just be the recent time spent playing and FPS, but I am enjoying the game quite a bit. Therein lies the problem however… I simply have too damned many games to play.

League Beginner Night

Tonight I’m Playing League of Legends. Once upon a time in House Stalwart we did these league beginner nights, when we coaxed new players to League of Legends onto mumble and did some vs bots or custom 5v5 gameplay. The purpose was to ease folks into the game and let them soak up some of the knowledge of a few of our more veteran players. When the Alliance of Awesome folks started talking about League, I figured it was a good time to try and resurrect this concept. So tonight I will be playing some league and hanging out on mumble with folks while doing it. I am just hoping to get in some practice playing Braum, but if not I will probably default back to Wukong, Garen or Darius. I would actually love to play some Varus since I have yet to do so since picking up the PAX skin. If you are interest in joining up check out the Anook event, the goal is to start around 9 PM CST to make it doable for the West Coasters. There are technically only a couple of people signed up, but I know we will have a lot more just from word of mouth.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance #LeagueofLegends #LoL

Transistor Gushes

May 25, 2014 by Belghast

Good Bye Old Man

Yesterday was a rough day for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I had to bury my old man ferret Smokey. In 2009 we got a pair of brothers from a ferret rescue, and at that point they were several years old already. Bandit passed away several years ago from Insulinoma, and it was one of the hardest things I had been through. I feel like maybe him passing quickly was a godsend. For the last several months Smokey had been deteriorating of old age, and it was hard to watch him go through it. For the last couple of months we had kept him in a separate cage in our bedroom, where he could have easy access to food and water since he was not moving around very well at all. His hind legs simply did not obey him any longer and he had developed cataracts in both eyes.

Our goal was to try and keep him as comfortable as we could until he passed. The old man had some fight in him because there were several nights that we were certain he would not make it through til morning. When morning came it was still friendly and very much alive. When we got up yesterday morning we did our normal “check to see if he made it through the night”, and he seemed about as normal as he ever does. Raised his head, sniffed my hand and went back to sleep. While we were out running errands yesterday it seems like he passed in his sleep because he was curled up in the same little ball he always was.

I am thankful at least that it seems as though he went peaceful. He was a good boy and a friendly ferret, even though he never did bond as tightly to us as his brother did. The above photo is of him in much better days, snuggled up with one of our girls Shiloh in the hammock. Bandits passing was so sudden and jarring, but with Smokey we have had months to get used to the idea and just tried to make him as comfortable as we could. So while part of me is definitely sad that he is gone, another part of me is relieved that he no longer has to struggle.

The Big Clean

Pet funeral aside, yesterday was a good but very tiring day. If it tells you anything I managed to hit 10,000 steps on my fitbit before we actually went for our evening walk. As I said before the house needed cleaning badly, and I got up and around yesterday morning and picked most of it up. However there are still a few deep cleaning projects that need to happen. We needed to run to the bank, so we got out and about and did some shopping. The shirts I had been wearing were getting huge on me, and my wife would visibly sigh each time I wore one of them that now hung from my shoulders like a drape. JC Penny was running a door buster sale that we just happened to luck into without really meaning to. I picked up a bunch of new and better fitting shirts and this prompted me to remove a ton of older shirts from the closet.

Similarly both myself and my wife needed new bathing suits. I found a nice pair of trunks that are far more colorful than anything I have ever bought in the past, and she found a nice one-piece at Old Navy. All of the shopping inspired her to come home and tear apart the closet both figuratively and quite literally. The bedroom for several hours yesterday was a warzone, and among other projects we cleaned out the catch all corner that had jewelry, perfume and lotions on what used to be a typewriter desk. For some time I have been hauling around a cabinet to go into that corner that we picked up on craigslist, but simply lacked the time to do the necessary cleaning to make room for it. It fit in nicely, and honestly could have been a bit bigger.

Similarly she tore apart the bathroom that joins to our bedroom and set up one of those wire divider shelves underneath to segment what is normally just one big space. My biggest contribution was culling my wardrobe by literally half and folding it neatly for a garage sale. As mentioned yesterday in a few weeks we are getting pulled into a garage sale, and I am wondering exactly what else I will be selling. I have tons of compact discs in my office, that I simply never listen to anymore. The idea of listening to a CD just feels foreign, since I stream almost everything thanks to Google Music. I don’t feel the need to own music any longer, I just want access to said music when I want it. As a result I am probably going to get rid of my entire collection, but I seriously doubt any of the regular garage sale fare will want the type of stuff I listen to. Not a single CD could you really classify as “pop”.

Transistor Gushes

Finally last night we recorded our seventh episode of Aggrochat. Once again Rae was travelling, so since Dallian has been so gracious to be a kind of unofficial fifth member of the cast, he stepped in at literally ten minutes notice. I called the episode “Transistor Gushes” because quite literally… that game has hijacked the podcast. For those who don’t know we keep a running shared Google document for the show notes, and during the week we jot down ideas, and recycle ones that we didn’t get to from previous weeks. This week the only thing mentioned is Transistor written in 72 point font, with a much smaller blurb below it that says “things that are not Transistor”.

We successfully covered both, and we discussed Transistor, Wolfenstein: New Order, the Final Fantasy 5 draft, Watchdogs, Dark Souls II, Comics, and a few other things along the way. I feel like it was a really good podcast, and while most of the topics only actually engaged 2-3 of us at a time, the mix of which 3 people were talking was pretty evenly distributed. We plan on having a follow-up show in a few weeks to talk about the actual storyline and elements of Transistor, but for the time being we limited ourselves to just talking about the interesting game play elements. We will of course start giving a massive spoiler warning when we get into discussion of plot points. When talking about Wolf, I tried to limit myself to only discussing things that happen as part of the introduction to the game. Hopefully this works for people, but if not let us know in the comments… hell if it does work let us know… we love feedback.

FF5 Draft: White Mage Hell

May 18, 2014 by Belghast

Today I am swapping things up a bit with my Steampowered Sunday post. Originally the goal of this column was to force myself to play some games that were sitting in my steam backlog… which is huge. However over time this has mutated a bit into “bel plays a game and reviews it”. Today we are going to see some further mutation of this as I write about some madness that I allowed myself to get involved with along with my Aggrochat podcast co-hosts Kodra and Ashgar as well as occasional fill-in host Tam. For some time Ashgar has participated in the Four Job Fiesta charity event that now helps out the Child’s Play charity. The goal of this is to play through the epic game Final Fantasy 5 using a fixed set of jobs.

For those not familiar with Final Fantasy 5, it was a 16 bit era title that allowed you to choose what classes a fixed set of 4 characters would be by assigning them jobs. While in the job they gained abilities that could then carry over into other jobs. This became a min-maxers dream as you could make some extremely broken combinations. As a result for years players have done various wierd combinations of this game for fun, and the Four Job Fiesta capitalized on this and turned it into a grand charity event. For awhile Ash has wanted to do an internal draft of this game, where four of us get together and draft out a viable party made of of the different available jobs. As a result each player has to make some compromises to determine what they want to go after first.

To facilitate this Ash decided to set up a card deck game using the amazing Google hangout app Roll 20. He laid out the various sprites for the characters in rows representing the Wind Crystal, Water Crystal, Fire Crystal and Earth Crystal… adding the Freelancer as an optional job for the Earth Crystal given that specific one only has four options. So again for those not as deeply familiar with the title as it seems to be among our little circle of mumble users… the setup looks something like this.

The Job Options

Wind Crystal

Knight
Monk
Thief
Black Mage
White Mage
Blue Mage

Water Crystal

Red Mage
Time Mage
Summoner
Beserker
Mystic Knight
Mime

Fire Crystal

Beastmaster
Geomancer
Ninja
Ranger
Bard

Earth Crystal

Dragoon
Dancer
Samurai
Chemist
Freelancer

The Draft

The rules of the game that we are playing under is that each player must always have one of a given job, and from the moment you get your crystals… every character must have a job. There are alternate rulesets where you can play with freelancer until you get all four jobs available, but we are playing with the more pure ruleset. This as always means that some of the parties will have a much easier time than others. Whoever gets stuck with Thief and White Mage will be struggling, since both of them have issues early game, and whoever has the Black Mage will have a supremely easy time rolling over everything in their way. We opted to go with a draft order that minimized the advantage of being first, and the disadvantage of being last… that looks a little something like this.

ABCD | DCBA | BDAC | CADB

We decided to roll a 20 sided die in the Roll20 addon to get started and pick the order. Ashgar using his dice hacking abilities rolled an 18, Tam rolled an 8, Kodra rolled a 5… and I rolled a very lowly and painful 2. Meaning that in the above scenario Player A would be Ashgar, B would be Tam, C would be Kodra and I got stuck bringing up the rear with D. However due to the order of the draft I feel like maybe I had a slight advantage. Of course the Black Mage was gone by the time it got around to me, but I still had plenty of really good things to pick from, considering in this draft I got to make 2 picks back to back. When all was said and done our party compositions looked like this.

Belghast – White Mage, Mystic Knight, Ranger, Samurai

Ashgar – Blue Mage, Summoner, Beastmaster, Dancer

Kodra – Black Mage, Red Mage, Bard, Chemist

Tam – Thief, Time Mage, Ninja, Dragoon

This surprisingly left the Knight completely untouched, which is an extremely good early game starter. Not unsurprisingly no one picked the Berserker or Mime, or the Geomancer. However I think we were all somewhat shocked that no one at all picked up the Freelancer, which ultimately ends up being one of the best options since they can be super customized. I think overall each of us had a plan in the works, namely mine involved using Ranger to feed my Samurai. Ash seems to like Blue Mage and Beastmaster which are super fiddly combinations… but he is methodical enough to make them work amazingly. Kodra of course went for the power combo of Black Mage/Red Mage which will mean he has an extremely easy play through. Tam went with a super focused build of being able to feed the Ninja and Dragoon, but will have the roughest start of all of us… since you cannot get thieves a weapon in the first town.

Reality Setting In

It was really during the first “post job” boss encounter that the reality of my choices set in. I wanted to go for a very melee party, which meant I needed some extremely strong healing. There is no stronger healer in Final Fantasy 5 than the White Mage, so it seemed like a no brainer pick. However I did not really “grok” the reality of trying to play through with ONLY white mages up through the water crystal. Karlaboss aka the fight above is the moment it really set in what I had laid out in front of me, as I slowly dinked away at 650 hp… 10 damage at a time. Granted there was no way in hell he was going to kill me… but the entire process is just slow and tedious.

I made it through to the ship graveyard where finally I could start to grind away at the mobs. My white mage party is uniquely suited for combating the undead, since this flavor of FF allows for you to case cure on the undead which becomes an offensive spell. I made an early mistake in that I tried to podcast while playing this game, and wound up running out of mana and dying horribly. However I reloaded from an earlier save state after we finished the podcast and continued on the journey. I opted to grind my way to 10 on the undead hoping that would give me enough of a buffer to get through the next few fights before I finally get the water crystal and can make a party full of mystic knights. Granted I will still have to keep one player a white mage, but that should work just fine given I will still need some healing.

White Mage Hell

The boss at the end of the ship graveyard was a complete pushover. Generally speaking this is a pretty rough time for most parties considering she starts out living and turns undead a few rounds into the fight. The undead version has the nasty added issue of poisoning players each time she hits them. This quickly gets out of control for most parties, however with an army of white mages I just pushed forward nuking the hell out of her with cure. It took two rounds of this after she turned undead to finish her off. I calmly cured the poison and moved on. However as easy as this fight was, the next one turned out to be absolutely brutal.

As I climbed the north mountain to get to the wounded dragon Hiryuu, I started to question if I should have ground higher than ten in the ship graveyard. I simply could not do crap against the mobs on the mountain, other than simply out survive them. Additionally the flail that I picked up, and is now my saving grace… seems to miss quite a lot. Instead of fighting I opted to run away from almost all of the fights leading up to Magissa. I knew this encounter would take a truly insane amount of time. She has 650 hp and as you can see from the above shot I was only whittling away around 12 hp per attack. This was a sheer battle of willpower to keep moving forward at a snails pace.

When she summoned her pet Forza, I ignored him completely, realizing that there was no way at all I could keep up with fighting him and Magissa and the regeneration spell she casts on him. Instead I opted to cast protect on my entire party, and used one of my white mages to heal folks up while the others slowly dinked away at Magissa until she fell. Finally I turned my attention to Forza and focused all of the attacks on him. Even doing this the “right” way, it still took about thirty minutes to push my way through the encounter with my army of “horrible monks”. I was completely drained after that fight, and it was getting close to midnight so I stopped playing and streaming. At some point today I will pick up where I left off. You can watch the entire thing on my twitch stream, or you can check out the videos that I have uploaded to YouTube embedded below. Additionally Kodra is streaming his play through so check out his channel as well.

AggroChat Episode 6

This week we have myself, Kodra and Ashgar for Aggrochat. Rae was unavailable because honestly I feel like she was probably asleep. She spent the day hanging out at the local Renaissance Faire with her brother and our good friend Dallian that appears on last weeks Aggrochat. This week we had a bunch of things to talk about, or at least things that Kodra especially was excited to discuss. The first of these was the new champion in League of Legends… Braum. Next we talked about the Hex vs Wizards of the Coast lawsuit and what it means for the game and TCGs in general. We also get on this long drawn out discussion of Kickstarter Fatigue and what it means for the kickstarters that are still coming out, and whether or not that is still a viable means of funding a project. Like always we get lost on lots of rabbit trails between all of this points.

#AggroChat #FF5 #FinalFantasy5 #FourJobFiesta #SteamPoweredSunday

Rebooting Minecraft

May 16, 2014 by Belghast

Guild Meeting

I have an exciting evening planned that I have been looking forward to for a few weeks. One of my long time House Stalwart guild members is here in town, and tonight we plan on having a board game night. Dallian/Doctor Hannah appeared on Episode 5 of AggroChat, and we mentioned the upcoming visit there. He lives in the Little Rock area which makes him a neighbor of ours as far as the internet is concerned. I always think its cool when I get to meet someone in the flesh that I have gamed with for ages. I think the plan tonight is to play loads of Munchkin and eat pizza at Rae’s house. We’ve tried to invite several of the locals to meet up, so it should be really fun. I am contemplating bringing some magic starter decks, but that might be a little too involved. We’ve been talking with a co-worker about maybe trying to play some magic over lunch soon. Apparently his wife is super into the game and would probably even come up over lunch to play it.

I don’t really do this sort of thing that often. I guess the last guild member that I met up with was Lummox who happened to be about fifteen minutes away from where I happened to be staying in Albany. It is always interesting to see how someone is in real life verses their in game persona. For the most part, a lot of the people I have met have been fairly similar. I have to say the closest was probably Urcasio and Ravener, who were pretty much exactly the people I would have expected based on in game interactions. Since I generally find it easier to meet over food, Dal and I are meeting up before this evening for lunch. For years I have been talking about how amazing Ron’s Hamburgers are, and more importantly their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. So we are meeting up at my favorite location today around 11ish. I would love to somehow steal him to town like I managed to do with Rae. I feel like I am trying to build this little gamer community, one person at a time.

Rebooting Minecraft

Last week one of my new friends Missysmojo decided to try her hand at playing Minecraft. I joked with her that she would end up losing the next three months of her life. She opted to stream a little bit, and it got me thinking. It has been years since I have played Minecraft with any regularity. There have been a few times I patched up my client and connected to the guild server just to see what folks were doing, but I had felt like I had “beaten” Minecraft for some time. In this last year there have been significant changes in the game, and probably even more before that I really never noticed. So I thought I would start a brand new game and play completely legit. No mods, no helpful minimap… just the vanilla client and a texture pack (because yeah that is necessary). The above video is the results of that process last night. I am not really sure yet how often I will be streaming Minecraft, but I expect to continue where I left off each time.

For starters… I am really not used to the game any longer. I kept trying to “suck in” blocks and drops like you do in Trove. The low performance of the game frustrated me, because I am not used to it “chunking” and loading in parts of the game slowly freezing my client momentarily when it does. I am sure this is something I can tweak, because I probably just don’t have enough memory flowing to the default client. There used to be a tool called Magic Launcher that handled a lot of the memory allocation for me, so I might look into that. Another dumbass move is I totally thought I was on “survival” mode for the first little bit, running scared from potential monsters… only to find out that I actually was in peaceful mode on the client. Once I noticed that and changed it things started to get interesting.

For starters, it seems like the creeper spawn rate is insane. I maybe saw one or two zombies and skeletons the first night after flipping it to a normal mode, but I saw what felt like half a dozen creepers. I managed to trap four chickens inside my base and I dug a pit like I often do and have them down there for a constant source of eggs, feathers and meat. At some point I want to try and drag a couple of cows and pigs in there as well so I have all of my livestock needs handy. Most of the video involves me setting up “base” as I hollow out a mountain, search for coal and finally start digging down into the earth in search of steel. I encounter a cave with a skeleton spawner in it… and have a pretty epic battle trying to break the cave and torch it off. I had quite a bit of fun, or at least more fun with Minecraft than I have had in ages.

Bunny Doom

I love everything there is to love about the Shin’hare, and the fact that they exist makes Hex so much more enjoyable than Magic the Gathering ever could be. It’s an entire race of adorable evil samurai bunnies… you could slap that into ANY game and I would play it. As a kid one of my favorite comic book characters was Usagi Yojimbo… so everything about this deck feeds my enjoyment. Not to mention that my favorite deck combination in Magic the Gathering was Green and Black… and the Shin’hare are exactly that… Life and Blood aka Green and Black. In some ways it reminds me of playing my thalid deck circa Fallen Empires. I would constantly use that deck to feed my black “sacrifice or I feed” cards. While I am lacking some of the cards in Hex to make this work really well, the starter deck mixed with a few cards I got from my packs seems to be working okay.

Last night I got in and played a few hands against the AI, mostly because it was getting late and I didn’t want to deal with people. I am anxious for when trading comes into play, because of my group of friends I think I am really the only hardcore bunny player. I should be able to help some of them out with cards they are looking for and bolster my bunny army. My all time favorite card is still the Uzume, Grand Concubunny. Not only is the artwork adorable, but the card is insane when you get it out into play.

When I first read this card, I assumed it would start dropping the 0/1 battle hopper tokens that the other Shin’hare cards do on the table. While that would have been good enough, considering the normal concubunnies you have to expend resources and tap them to get this effect. The real effect however is so much better, in that it summons a random non-unique bunny card into play. This can be ANY card, even ones you don’t currently have in your deck. It is literally generating cards for you, but the problem is this makes the card and insane aggro magnet.

I need to formulate some ways to protect the card, because really it is too damned valuable to not have it on the board for more than a few turns. Hopefully soonish I can get together with my other friends currently in the closed beta and play some actual matches. I feel like Kodra is in a completely different league with me, and like to play a style of magic that I do not… but this will not stop me from attempting to beat him. He royally kicked my ass in hearthstone, but it didn’t stop me from coming back for more. These type of games for me are about the moment to moment play and not whether or not I win. In fact that can pretty much be said with any game I play, I am just not that competitive. It is about the journey not the win conditions.

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