AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 93 of 108

The Beginner Hall

January 3, 2015 by Belghast

Impending Naptime

Last night was a really rough night, in that I had a pretty major bout of insomina. I started trying to go to bed around 11:30 and ultimately failed. I suppose I could have sat in bed playing some Pokemon but instead I got up, took some Melatonin and waited for it to actually kick in. Problem is by 2 am it still had not really happened. During that entire time I bounced around the internet reading various bits of stuff. Mostly I was purposefully trying to stay out of any game for fear of it making it even worse… as a few nights I got I totally inadvertedly got drawn into Super Time Force for an hour. I remember as a kid my mother used to always say “be careful not to get your days and nights mixed up”, well with two days left to go until I have to report back to work… it feels like I have done precisely that. Granted I have been trying to go to bed at a reasonable hour most nights, and get up on at least my normal weekend hours. That said I have a feeling that Monday morning is going to be pure hell.

None of this would really matter were it not for the fact that tonight we start recording the new season of AggroChat, which means I will be up super late. Generally speaking after we record the episode I edit it and post it all that night. The nights where I do not do all of this and push off some of it until the morning just feel crappy. That entire Sunday I feel like I am somehow “off” because I can’t really begin my day proper until I have edited and uploaded the AggroChat episode. In any case… I have a feeling there will be a mid day nap in my future. Here is hoping that it doesn’t make the entire process worse, because generally if I take a nap… It means I don’t sleep right that night. I have this strange relationship with sleep, where my body seems not to want to partake of it. Generally speaking I get by on four to six hours of sleep, and then get a wee bit more on the weekends. My only hope is tonight to maybe take the melatonin before we start the podcast, so that maybe just maybe it will kick in about the time I finish edits.

The Beginner Hall

Last night Stargrace pinged me over twitter to get an invite into our Final Fantasy XIV free company. I was busy farming Dragon Soul so I in turn pinged Ashgar who managed to get her invited. This morning she posted an interesting article about how no game actually does a very good job welcoming players back to the game. This is absolutely true, and pretty much any time I return to an MMO I end up having to start a new level 1 character so I can see how the game plays now, as opposed to how it played however long ago it was when I last played. Games with a ton of content make this an even more difficult proposal because how can you soak up dozens of patches worth of content quickly enough to know what you need to do to play the game optimally at that moment. What I find funny is that Final Fantasy XIV does not do a better job of this… when every single Final Fantasy game I have ever played has a construct designed almost entirely to do this. The Beginner’s Hall has appeared in almost all of the games and generally is in whatever the first major town you encounter. It is completely skippable, and I almost always do so… but it does a great job of telling the player what they should be doing through a sequence of short in game conversations.

I feel like MMOs need this as well, and similarly it could be disguised as a real institution in the game world. In Stormwind it could easily be called a “War College” and feature individuals to explain what the current trends in how your class performs, what features have been added into the game in the last several patches, and some background information about what the current major story arc happens to be. All of which could be contextual based on where you were quest and level wise, and give a player someplace in the game world to keep returning to in order to get a “briefing” on what is happening in the world. It could explain important things like, how does one find the portals to the new content… or what the requirements for raiding are and how to improve your gear score enough to be able to meet said requirements. There are few things more staggering than returning to a game months if not years after you last played it. Everytime I go back to Everquest II for example… I cannot play my main, until I have spent some time working on a character with less going on. Having a construct in game designed to ease a returning player back in, might just make the returning process a bit more enjoyable.

Transmog Addict

One of the interesting things about playing Lodin my hunter is that I have not really played him on a regular basis since Vanilla. This means I last played him in a world before Transmogrification, and while I have a full set of Giantstalker, and my Dragon Hand Cannon for nostalgia reasons… his banks are not as loaded as the rest of my characters with interesting options. As such it has been my new mission to correct this problem. I learned long ago that if my characters look awesome… they feel awesome to play. As such I am one of those players that is constantly swapping up what my appearance looks like gear wise. While I like how Lodin looks just fine currently…. there are so many interesting ranged weapons that have appeared since he was last an active character. I must get my hands on them so that I can swap them out at will. There are two weapons from the Black Temple that I have set my sights on… the Rifle of the Stoic Guardian and the Black Bow of the Betrayer.

Yesterday I was lamenting over twitter what keeps me from streaming very much… that little voice in my head that tells me no one is actually watching. Streaming is an odd thing to me… because in truth I really don’t watch may streamers unless on the rare occasion one of my friends happens to be streaming. For me it is about sharing my life with the people who read my blog and follow my social feeds. Its me saying “this is what I am doing, and I am letting you into my life as I am doing it”. In a way it turns a solitary thing like farming raid content… into a more social one. One of my goals for the year is to stream more often, and originally my intent was going to be to stream my raids. The problem there is that we have a few raid members with very sensitive jobs who did not want their commentary broadcast to the world. Since that is out the window… I am thinking about streaming some of my farming of old content. I have so much nostalgia about the older raids, and I do it in part because it is one of the more enjoyable ways for me to get transmoggy bits…and walk out with a little pocket money in the process.

Wishes for the Next Year

December 31, 2014 by Belghast

Failed Futurism

Over the last few days I have made a few posts recounting some of the positives and negatives of the last year. Today I want to place my eyes forward towards the next year and what I hope it might bring. One of the problems with futurism is that generally speaking it is always going to be wrong. 2015 was the year that Marty McFly went forward to in Back to the Future 2, and that movie made a ton of guesses about what the future would look like, most of them being completely wrong. That said we are at least getting a form of a hoverboard next year, granted we will have to pave the streets in conductive metal for it to actually work properly however. The thing I find funny is how no work of futurism ever seems to get just how incrementally fashion evolves, because I doubt any of us are going to start wearing chokers made of bullets or a darth vader breastplate. Instead of futurism I am going to focus on my hopes for the year to come.

Gamers Stop Being Assholes

While yesterday I spent my post reveling in just how awesome my gaming community was over the past year, the larger community has not really been an awesome place to be. Our very small niche of a community has figured out more or less how to exist in a relative state of harmony. Outside the gated community however, things are pretty much in a constant state of martial law. My hope is that this year gamers can figure out that it is cool to have lots of people playing in their sandbox, that may or may not look the same or want the same thing as them. Diversity only serves to make things more interesting, because really as we learned during the 90s… just how many doom clones can we really stomach? At the very least I would love that gamers would stop endangering the lives of others with their misguided crusades. We are all here, we all play games… lets enjoy that fact and quit trying to claim this person or that person isn’t as much of a “real” gamer as you are.

More so than all of this… I would really love it if my natural instinct when confronted with having to play with a group of strangers is not to clench my sphincter and prepare for the worst. I would love to be able to approach grouping with random players the way that I used to before I started turning off every public channel in any game I was playing. There is a great post from Liore summing up a lot of these feelings of dread. Mostly I feel like a lot of gamers have forgotten why we started playing games in the first place… not for the competition, or not to be the best at something… but because we used to honestly have fun doing it. I have tried really hard to embrace this spirit of fun and positivity, but you can only be told “you fucking suck” so many times by a random stranger before you stop trying to interact with anyone that is not already connected to you. I’ve branched out and made a lot of friends, more than I can possibly list… but for the most part when I play a new game, I shut off all the public channels and hang out with people I already knew before going into it. This year… I would love this to change.

Settling Down for Awhile

For years I have been searching for something, a magical spark that seems to have been missing for me in MMO games. Over the last several years I have tried extremely hard to make this game or that game my new home. I tried to make Rift work, and tried to forcibly bring all of my friends along on that journey with me. I tried to do the same with Final Fantasy XIV, and Wildstar, and Star Wars the Old Republic, and The Elder Scrolls Online. In order for that spark to exist two things need to be there… firstly there needs to be tons of things for me to do, and an insane amount of goals and sub goals to keep my mind busy and engaged. Secondly there needs to be a solid and thriving community to keep me engaged socially. This past year I found that spark, but in two different places… both of which appeal to slightly different sides of me. As a result I am splitting time between raiding in Final Fantasy XIV on Mondays and World of Warcraft on Tuesdays and Thursdays… and occasionally Wednesday fun runs.

So far this mix works extremely well for me. There are things I like about both games, and I like the freedom of being able to flip back and forth between them at will. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time in Azeroth, but I think that is a counter reaction to the fact that I spent the last three months exclusively engaged in Eorzea. I feel no less connected to one when I am spending time in the other. I am playing both games and I am happy to be doing it. My hope for this year is that by the time we reach next December that I will still be playing both games happily. I am in amazing raid groups in both, and the content is keeping me engaged in ways that I feel like only one game would not be able to satisfy. I have a feeling that when new content is released in one, I will shift to mostly playing it… and versa vicea. My hope is that I have found a combination that works for me… and I can settle down for a long while here. I’ve gotten tired of the constant game jumping and want some stability for awhile.

Personal Projects

2014 saw me getting involved in a bunch of projects other than the Tales of the Aggronaut blog. I kept up my rigor of daily posts and in April I celebrated both my 5th anniversary as a blog, and my first year of daily posting. This coming April I will be able to celebrate a second year of daily posting and another year as a blog. My hope is throughout all of 2015 I will be able to keep up this daily posting thing. This past year also saw the launch of the AggroChat podcast along with my friends Rae, Ashgar, Kodra, Tamrielo and sometimes participants Dallian and Raven. Over the course of the first season we recorded 37 episodes of Aggrochat, and I think that is pretty damned solid. We made it over a lot of the awkward hurdles, especially considering I knew absolutely nothing about making a podcast before we started. Those first few episodes are mighty painful to listen to at this point, and I am sure after another year the entire first season will feel the same. We are anything but professional, but we have a large enough following that I feel like we must be doing something right.

This year also saw me start a fledgling experimental podcast called “Bel Folks Stuff”. So far three folks have been gracious enough to have a conversation about “stuff” with me, and I am thinking overall it works pretty well. The podcast has a much smaller footprint as a whole, but I am okay with that. In January I have another individual lined up for another conversation, and hopefully another in February. Basically this is just an excuse to have a conversation with friends and push the record button while doing so. Other than this there is another thing looming on the horizon that should be exciting for 2015, but I don’t really want to talk about it much until I am ready to announce it. Essentially my hope is that 2015 will be as awesome of a year for my side projects as this year has been. I could not do this without all the awesome people supporting me, and the constant help of my friends who always seem to be willing to follow me down whatever rabbit hole I fall into. Thanks to you all for taking this journey with me… I may not know what the next day will bring… but I know I will always have you along with me.

Satisfaction of the Year

December 30, 2014December 30, 2014 by Belghast

The Birth of a Community

I think this year more than any other we say what was previously an island of disconnected city states merge into a real community. Last January I posted a rather grumpy piece lamenting the lack of community, and throughout the year you all have strived to prove me wrong. I am not sure what exactly it was about this year in particular that seemed to draw everyone together, in part I think it was because this year was the year of multiple events, that I hope will repeat themselves this coming year. Since we have reached the end of a pretty epic year of community, I thought it was a good time to reflect back upon what we have achieved. There were individuals who say that blogging is dead, but I think wholeheartedly we have proved them wrong.

February – Birth of Alliance of Awesome

While not really an event in the truest sense, it was still a pretty significant event in the year for me. In February of this year some events happened that ended up in the forming of a much larger gaming community to be known as the Alliance of Awesome. With the launch of the Landmark alpha… we quickly realized that each of us needed to be in as many as seven different “guild” based server channels to be able to keep in contact with everyone playing the game… especially since friends lists simply did not exist at that point. It was proposed that we found a much larger community made up of all of different parts. This alliance of guilds would pool resources and eventually even a chat server. While at the end of the year I realize that maybe some of the ideas didn’t work as well as we had hoped… there are still more of us in almost daily contact than there are not.

The idea that there would always be a friendly Alliance of Awesome guild in whatever game we happened to be playing was something that has for the most part stayed true to the original intent. The only part that didn’t quite work was trying to create an actual Alliance of Awesome branded guild in Wildstar. I feel it is still best if we stay separate guilds, just ones collaborating in a larger sense. The biggest change in this direction was moving to using the same Teamspeak server graciously hosted for us by the ever amazing Saia. Some things have worked well, others not so much…. and other groups have faded away from the core. At the end of the day I think this was a really positive move for the community as a whole, and anyone that wants to participate is still more than welcome.

May – Newbie Blogger Initiative 2014

This may we saw a return of the seminal blogging event that at least to some extent started all of the momentum. Several years ago Sypster started this contest and last year I believe was the third year. Essentially it is a month for the elder bloggers in our community to encourage folks to start their own new blog and join our community proper. For this year the catalyst was Doone as has been for a coupe of years, but he was joined by an excellent cast of helpers in the forms of Izlain, J3w3l, ModeratePeril, and Joseph Skyrim. It was a bit hard for me to find numbers this morning when I was pulling together this post but based on my best guestimates and this list, it seems like we had 45 new bloggers join the fray during the month of May.

I did a quick run through of all of those blogs and as close as I can tell out of that initial group of 45, at least 30 are still active… and I judged activity by having any posts within November or December. That gives us right at 66% of the participating blogs still alive and kicking today. When you add to this that there are still a large percentage of blogs from past years up and running as well that graduate from being a newbie to a mentor… this really is one of the best events to grow our community each year. I am extremely proud to be a participant each year, and I am excited to see a new crop of bloggers arrive on my “Class of” blog roll.

August – Blaugust 2014

The idea behind Blaugust started on an absolute whim. I did not want to lose the momentum we build each year with the Newbie Blogger Initiative. While that event is going on, folks are posting hard and heavy… and then as it finished the posts start to taper off again. The idea was simple enough, get some of the most seasoned veterans in our community to take up the challenge of posting something new each and every day like I do. When I proposed this idea I thought maybe at most I would get five or six people that were willing to take up the banner. However this absolutely developed a life of its own, and before I knew it I had 52 people signed up to participate. I have to say I was completely overwhelmed with the support I got from the community on this one… and for the most part my entire August became about nothing but keeping track of Blaugust.

What I was even more impressed by was the level of participation. At the end of the month I had 50 that actually participated, and of those 28 actually had “won” the challenge and managed to post something each and every day. The biggest frustration with the whole event was that I had not really planned very well, and keeping track of who posted when became a very manual process. As a result this coming year I am going to have to engineer a different solution to make it less intensive on my part, and allow me to make the daily recap posts a bit easier. I never intended for this process to be something that “new” bloggers partook of, and as a result we saw a marked decrease in posts after it… since most folks needed a break after running that marathon.

October – Bragtoberfest 2014

bragtoberfest_spooky

Bragtoberfest was the brainchild of Izlain from Me vs Myself and I and the Couch Podtatoes podcast. During September there was the beginning of some pretty horrible stuff happening in the gaming community as a whole. Bragtoberfest was Izlain’s way of combating that by trying to get back to the roots of gaming… playing to have fun. The mission statement was simple: Bragtoberfest aims to make it fun to be a gamer again. We all game, and most of us also either blog, stream, vlog or podcast about games as well. Why not combine the two into a month-long event?

During the month of October there were several competitions bringing folks together for the purpose of competing in a game. These ranged from Strife to Team Fortress 2 and everything in between. Not being a super competitive gamer myself, I did not join in as much as I would have liked. That said I felt like I supported the mission by helping to provide a few logos here and there. Additionally many of us gave exposure to the event with recap threads and announcements on our own blogs. This morning as I was trying to pull together numbers for all of these things, I struggled to find firm numbers of participants. That said I know it was well over 20 bloggers who joined in during the month of October. Hopefully this one will happen again next year and like everything, we can grow upon it. The Bragtoberfest tag on Izlain’s blog seems to be the best summary of the event as a whole.

October – Alliance of Awesome Extra Life Marathon

One of the best things to come out of Alliance of Awesome this year… is the fact that we participated as a team in the Extra Life marathon. This all started with a random conversation between Zelibeli and myself about how we had always wanted to participate in the Extra Life 25 hour of gaming event. Both of us had not done so yet for the same reason… we questioned if we could actually manage to stream all 25 hours given our family lives. With the birth of AofA we kicked around the idea of having a Relay style stream, where each of us took a 2-3 hour block and then tagged off to another stream. This became a logistical problem since we were all using Twitch at the time, and you could not create a “team” unless you were at the partner level… and quite frankly none of us were popular enough to actually have that.

Thankfully along came Hitbox which offers the ability to create a team at the most basic membership… and we were off and running. We created an Extra Life team… and not having a clue what kind of participation we would get, I set a very sober goal of $200 as a team. We blew that goal completely out of the water, with a participation of 9 gamers… we managed to reach $1728 which to me is an absolutely staggering amount. My hope is this year we can be a bit more organized and maybe raise more by getting the awareness of what we are doing out there a bit more. Additionally my hope is to find someone who is a twitch partner that is willing to get an Alliance of Awesome twitch team created for us.. since that will open the door for folks to stream from the current generation of consoles as well.

December – Bloggy Xmas

Finally we had one last event that wrapped up last week with Christmas. My good friend Syl game to me with the idea of doing a sort of blogging advent calendar. It seems there is a local tradition in her area where folks in the villages decorate the windows of homes and stores to represent a day of the advent calendar. I started work on a logo, and she spruced it up by adding in the d-pad snowflakes and bam we had another event ready to run. I think she originally intended to have one blogger per day, but just like with Blaugust she was a bit overwhelmed by the folks wanting to participate. I tried to pull together some numbers this morning but it seems like for the 25 days of the event she had 45 participants, meaning most of the days had two different bloggers posting.

The overarching theme of the event was to write something about community, and I personally wrote a post about my need to keep growing my own communities by adopting awesome people. For the full effect of the event you have to check out the Bloggy Xmas website that gave us a really awesome advent calendar layout for the months post. My hope is that we will grow this to be an even bigger event next year. The community focus seems fitting since this was a year of so many awesome events bringing the community together, all the while existing in a climate where there was so much negative being caused by other gamers. I feel like our little community stood as a beacon for the fact that gamers could in fact get along, and not just get along but thrive. I want to thank all of you out in the community who participated in any of the events, or just kept your own personal blog active throughout the year. I feel we represent the best values our community has to offer, and I hope we can make next year even more amazing.

Old Friends

December 28, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #37 – Games of the Year: Part Two

Last night I uploaded the second half of our Games of the Year broadcast, finishing out our pseudo countdown with the game that four of us voted for. However while that might have been the game of the year through consensus, it just did not feel quite right to declare an official game of the year for a podcast with so many disparate voices. As a result each of us gave our own game of the year, and you will have to listen through the podcast to see what my pick wound up being. I have to say we had an interesting round of discussions about this one and I hope we end up doing this as a yearly thing. With the end of the year closes what I am calling “Season 1” of the podcast. I only started classifying things by season because there was a place for that in the ID tag within Audacity, and I figured what the hell… might as well.

With the new year will bring a new season, and at this point I am not quite sure what it will look like. Right now we have a cast made of of myself, Ashgar, Kodra, Rae, Raven and Tamrielo but I sincerely doubt that most shows will have all six of us. That seems like a rather large group to podcast with, but hopefully we can muster four to five of us on any given night. The biggest regret for season one is that we had Tam has a pretty constant part of the show but we never actually updated the logo to include his chibi… even though he has had one for quite awhile. Ultimately I figure we should get Rae to draw up a Raven chibi as well just to have it at the ready. I would love to revamp our homepage a bit to have bios about each of the podcasters. I would also love to bring back in Dallian on occasion, who filled in quite regularly as this podcast was getting off the ground but we have not had to tag in for awhile. Hopefully you enjoy this second part of our Games of the Year show.

Old Friends

Yesterday I had an excellent surprise when I saw what character a good friend of mine was playing. She has favored the horde for some time, and when her guild over on another server went belly up I sponsored hr membership to the guild horde side that I have my alts in the Bloodmoon Chosen. While it sucked to have her over on the other side of the faction wall, it made me happy that she at least had a good home. Yesterday however on a whim it seems she decided to play her hunter AIlah. The above picture is of me and Ailah waiting for the Naxxramas 1.0 raid to start one night, to my left is Saracell another good friend, and hanging out in the background I realized was Vexa. The Late Night Raiders Hunters were an especially close knit family, and there is not a single one of them that I still do not talk to regularly. Ailah however was one of the founding members of House Stalwart, and for the most part my right hand woman back then when it came to guild organizational things.

Like happens so many times she became the mommy of two awesome boys, and lost a good chunk of her disposable play time. I always enjoy seeing her on when she has the time to play, especially now that she seems to be interested in her hunter again. Thankfully I had been playing Lodin my hunter, so that I could give some basic knowledge about how hunters work these days. It seemed like she had not actually been touched since vanilla because she was wearing all of the same gear we raided in… for the most part everything you see in this picture. I hooked her up with a crafted set of gear that will hopefully ease her transition into Northrend, and some quick advise with at least how I have my bars, talents and glyphs set up. Thankfully huntering is super easy so I am sure she has picked it up quickly. I have to say it was an awesome surprise to see an old friend show up like that, and hopefully she will be around more often. I doubt she will ever have time for raiding and such, but will be nice to run the occasional dungeon together.

Bad At Casters

I have traditionally been horrible at playing casters, that said the warlock feels familiar enough hat this point that it would likely be my caster of choice. While I knew I would never end up leveling a mage, so I used my free boost to 90… the Warlock on the other hand I actually enjoy leveling. He has been sitting at level 75 for quite some time however, so when Ailah started working on the Northrend content I grabbed him to hang out with her for a bit, since he was the only character in the level range. It took me a bit to get used to the controls again, because warlocking feels nothing like huntering, and that is the pet class I have been playing most recently. The only problem with leveling these days is that you really don’t need to use any of your abilities, since things die so quickly. I still have yet to figure out how the whole demonic transformation business works and how best to trigger it. I know it is a thing I can do every so often, but the mechanics behind it are still pretty opaque since things die so insanely quickly.

At some point I really want to finish leveling my Warlock to at least 90. I feel like it might be a caster I would actually enjoy playing, since the Mage is most definitely not that. My biggest problem with the mage is how weak it feels. I hate playing classes that cannot take a hit, so this is why I tend to play Discipline priest over shadow… because the shielding ability gives that class some serious survival. Similarly I like Demonology Warlock because the pet is nice and sturdy and can keep me alive through almost anything. When I say I hate “finger wigglers”, I guess you can more correctly narrow it down to me simply hating the “glass cannon” archetype. I favor survival over damage any day, which might be why I almost always level in tank mode regardless of the class. That is one thing I would love to see them add to the warlock, a caster tank mode since they get called on to tank things already in certain circumstances.