Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
This is the first show of our seventh year of AggroChat, because we are apparently bad at tracking time and said nothing about our anniversary last week. We start off with another “Bel was dumb” story as he ventured forth to battle the boxpocalpyse. From there we wind around a bit through a few topics and land on another exploration of levels in video games as a concept being a bad idea. We talk about a bunch of ways that games do this and how some have figured out meaningful horizontal progression. Next up we talk about the effective death of Kotaku with the departure of Jason Schreier and this leads to a larger discussion about the odd place that “video game journalism” finds itself in and the rigors of trying to fill content for the 24 hour news cycle. We go down the rabbit hole that is Star Wars Galaxies crafting system and contrast it against a few other approaches like that of the original Everquest II system. Finally some brief discussion as Tam finds Beat Saber and the shockingly good work out it ends up being.
Topics Discussed
Bel and the Boxpocalypse
We’ve outgrown the concept of levels
WoW’s leveling buff
Marking progression horizontally
The Death of Kotaku
The challenges of gaming content creation
The Brilliant Madness of Star Wars Galaxies crafting
Over the extended weekend I played an excessive amount of World of Warcraft. Namely I leveled my Tauren Hunter from 70 to 120… which sounds more impressive than it actually is. There were a lot of those levels that took me only a few minutes and in most cases I never managed to finish the starter zone of any expansion thanks to the bonus currently in place. I’ve been working on creating a stable of horde characters similar to those I have on the Alliance side after a decade and some change of playing there primarily. I now feel significantly more comfortable playing Horde than I do Alliance and as a result I am feeling the absence of that army of alts and have set it into my mind to fix that.
Last week I set forth to tame Arcturis the Spirit Bear and managed to get him on my first attempt. He was just sitting there waiting on me to tame him, and over the course of the weekend I realized something. I was essentially playing with the perfect avatar of Ashgar, who tends to personify with mystical shape changing bears. As a result I thought it would be fun to name my pet Ashgar, and weirdly the act of doing so made me care way more about never letting him die. Weirdly it also made it feel like he suddenly got better at AOE tanking. I know this is all in my head, but it did send me down a rabbit trail of wanting to name pets after my friends.
In my travels trying to find some of the other Spirit Animals, I happened across King Krush… which is probably as close to Godzilla as you get in World of Warcraft. It is an irradiated looking green devilsaur, and since this is also probably as close as you get to a proper Kaiju that is tameable… this personifies my friend Grace. Also I really just like the concept of a giant Devilsaur being named Grace. I just wish it had kept the size of when I originally tamed it, because that would be even more perfect given how tall her Roegadame towers over me in FFXIV.
This is a bit of cheating because I have had this own in my stable for quite a while. I tamed it because it reminded me of the Great Owl from Secret of Nymn. Pulling it back out of the stable made me think of how much I have always personified Thalen as the wise Owl of our group. He was our mastery of strategy back in the Duranub raiding days, and I’ve always considered him to be a source of sage advice. He also never really gets rattled and approaches most situations with a calm and rational head. So it seemed deeply fitting to name this great owl after him.
Kodra required a bit of research, because he is known for the garish color schemes of his characters. In fact he is the reason why we have the Purple/Pink and bright Green color scheme that we do for AggroChat. I set forth searching through pet models that were available on Petopia and landed upon this particular basilisk that is green with purplish pink highlights. So I flew over to Zul’drak and tamed one specifically for the honor of Kodra. The thing about basilisks is that they are tough as nails and make really good protectors… which are also traits that I would align with Kodra as well. Anyone who used to chat-roulette to have political conversations for fun, can take on just about anything in the world.
I will admit, Tam was really hard because there are so many aspects of him that I have gotten to know over the years. However in World of Warcraft terms I will always think about his rogue, and the one that got away. During the heyday of the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, Tam set forth to questing and farming his ass off chasing the goal of being the first person to actually open the gates on our server. I remember contributing a little bit to the cause and going out to Silithis a few times to farm with him, namely because I also needed bits for resist gear. He worked his ass off and the grind broke him, an broke his enjoyment of the game… especially since we ultimately were about five hours too late in pushing across the finish line. However in my eyes, he will always be the Scarab Lord and since he truly is good as gold to every single one of his friends… I had to track down a Golden Scarab Beetle and name it Tamrielo.
Ammo was a situation of trying to figure out which of the many options I would go with. If you know her even a little bit you know she is a tried and true cat person, so without a doubt I had to choose that family. Other things you should know about Ammo is that she is an amazing artist and responsible for most of the artwork associated with Aggronaut and AggroChat both. However there is also a certain low key shyness that she has anytime someone mentions how damned good she is. So in my search for the perfect cat I with with this gorgeous Indigo Purple mana saber… that also spends most of its time stealthed and trying to blend in quietly to the world. In my head at least this fit my good friend Ammo perfectly and hopefully you will all agree.
While I didn’t set forth on this mission for the purpose of doing something for the anniversary of AggroChat, that also sorta just happened along the way. Today marks the release of our very first show titled “Finding the Format” back in 2014. The show is super cringey to listen to these days, but as we near our 300th episode I find it staggering just how long we have kept this ball afloat. It is a thing that has sorta morphed and changed as we have. I am super thankful to have this awesome group of individuals to call my friends, and I also want to thank all of the people who have guested on the show over the years. Here is a quick rundown of the various folks who have joined us:
Dallian
Inky
Nephsys
PizzaMaid
Rae
Shiana
Vexa
Warenwolf
Weiward
Now Dallian and Rae get special shout outs since they were involved an awful lot in the early days of AggroChat. Dallian was sorta the pinch hitter for a long time and was that guest I kept snagging any time it looked like we were going to be short some folks. Waren, Shiana and Neph are semi regular extras because they may or may not be hanging out on the voice chat server we record on and it feels real bad to lock them out of the podcast channel. We have a big village of people that make up the extended AggroChat family, and I am thankful to have all of them in my life. Who would have thought that six years later we would still be doing this thing.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we are back, and we start off with an apology that logistics did not work out last week to get the band together. We start off with some discussion of the Stellaris group that has been playing as a weekly game night thing. From there Bel talks about his sojourn back into World of Warcraft Retail and his new practice of naming his Hunter pets after people. Ashgar talks about his recent experiences with Phantasy Star Online 2 and how both him and Tam bought a SADBox to play it. From there we dig into the meat of the show as we give a global spoiler warning that we are going to be talking about plot points in Final Fantasy VII. We tried to stay away from any specific plot points from the Remake, but the original is discussed an awful lot. Finally we wrap things up with some brief talk about the new PS5 Controller design and how we all generally like it.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Grace, Nephsys, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have special guest Nephsys who was hanging out with us on voice chat before the show and we didn’t want to lock her out in the cold when we all popped into the podcasting channel. This week was one of those weeks when we did not think we had much to talk about, but ultimately filled a show anyways. Up first is some discussion of Stellaris and the weekly pick up game that appears to be happening in lieu of in person board game night. There is much discussion about the vast changes that happened over the course of the games lifespan. From there we talk a bit about a love letter to Mega Man Battle Network that is called One Step from Eden. Then after that discussion Bel completely loses his place in the list of topics and goes off into an impromptu discussion of Animal Crossing thinking he needs to fill air time. Finally he sorts things out again and returns to some talk about Dragalia Lost and its recent updates before closing out the show.
