AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 96 of 110

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.

Twenty Legs

December 21, 2014 by Belghast

Double Feature

Last night was both amazing and horrible at the same time, for so many different reasons. Since it is holiday season our ability to record AggroChat is going to become increasingly strained. In fact last night both Rae and Tam were recording on location at their respective parents houses. For some time we had been kicking around the idea of having a “Game of the Year” podcast. The problem with this concept is it would require us all to actually agree on what we felt was our game of the year. While there is a lot of overlap in our tastes, there is also an extreme amount of divergence. The end result had us recording our “Games of the Year” podcast, in which each of us picked five games we felt were significant to us in the past year, and then we as a group talked about all of them.

The end result is that between last night and this morning I had over three hours worth of recorded audio to sift through. Thankfully we totally did this on purpose as it allows me to split this one episode into two still significant episodes worth of discussion. As such I have released part one today, and I will release part two next Sunday, giving everyone a much needed break from recording to go hang out with family and friends and not care about being home by 9pm on a Saturday night to strap into a chair and record a podcast. The other side effect of this whole thing is that I was up until 2 am last night, and then back up this morning at 8 am to finish editing. I quite literally just finished editing everything and uploading the first part when I sat down to write this post. It is going to be a really long day.

Shrine to Geeks

The reason why it is going to be a really long day, is that yesterday was ALSO a really long day. I got up fairly early, and as my wife was getting dressed and ready knocked out yesterdays rather frantic blog post. Then from that point until I literally sat down to record AggroChat last night, I was either driving or shopping. We took my mother in law with us to Joplin Mo, because one it is a really cool town and two it is not terribly far from where she lives. We had a whole bunch of things that we wanted to do, but one of them was to go to the Mall. It really is borderline suicidal to go to any Mall on the weekend before Christmas, and by the time I got out of there I was absolutely done with humanity for the day. One of the cool things about the Joplin Mall is that several years ago Vintage Stock went in and created this insane flagship store.

Now I have talked about Vintage Stock before, but it is really hard to grasp the scale of this place until you are actually in it. Imagine going to a Wal-mart, where everything in the store somehow pertained to geekdom. The amount of consoles, comics, rpgs, videos, puzzles, books, board games, and action figures is really hard to grasp. I tried to snap a picture to show you folks the scale of this place but it extends out on either side from the vantage point I took up. Hopefully at least you can get the idea. On a normal day it is absolute sensory overload… but yesterday with all the people packed in… it was a bit too much for me to handle. Thankfully we make it to Joplin fairly often so even though I did not really get to enjoy the bounty that is this store… there will always be another trip to explore it under more calm circumstances.

Twenty Legs

One of the regular themes of my blog is that we like to go to Flea Markets and junk stores. One of my favorite activities here is to take photos of the random strange things I happen to find. Sometimes you find an item that creates far more questions than you could ever possibly answer. For example the above photo is a box of 20 Furniture legs… for $5.95. While I am not really sure what the going rate for disembodied furniture is, that seems like not too bad of a deal. The problem is… why do they have a box of 20 furniture legs… and better yet who is going to come along and NEED a box of 20 furniture legs. I have a feeling these are the sort of thing that are extremely specific to the piece they came off of, so unless you happen to need exactly these legs for your furniture… you probably have no interesting in this box. Better question is why would someone purchase furniture without the legs in order to need said box of 20 legs.

There were a ton of strange and cool things to be found. For example I thought this Igloo style R2-D2 cooler was pretty awesome. The inside of it was roughly the same size as one of those large drink cooler that sports teams use to dump Gatorade on their unsuspecting coaches. While it was pretty great… it was not $75 worth of great. Had it been somewhere in the $20-$40 range I probably would have snapped it up, because seriously when the hell else am I going to find an awesome R2-D2 cooler. Then there is the just straight up bizarre collectables. The above photo is this group of mannequins dressed up in various outfits. For starters… I struggle to wrap my mind around why these were created in the first place. Secondly I also struggle to imagine who decided it was a good idea to purchase them. Thirdly… I find it even stranger that someone thought that selling them as another really good idea. I picture somewhere someone has a whole set of these disembodied figures in various bright outfits, because while I snapped a picture of four standing side by side, there were probably a dozen different ones in the booth. Since they appear to be missing legs… wondering if I can somehow reunite them with the furniture legs above.

Finally I always end up finding things that make me feel extremely old. I guess that ultimately is the sign of aging, when a good chunk of the things found in a flea market are things from your childhood. On the right we have the infamous Kraco Stereo Cassette Adaptor for your 8-Track tape player. This was awesome for vehicles that had an 8-track deck in an era that rapidly adopted the Cassette tape instead. I say infamous because it had a notorious reputation for completely eating tapes. I remember using this to survive a family trip to Colorado with my cousins, and as we went across country… it slowly mangled a Phil Collins tape until it was completely unrecognizable. Ultimately mangled or not… we considered the ability to actually play tapes in the massive conversion van worth the risk. I posted about this on twitter yesterday and it turns out a lot of other folks that follow me also had mixed memories of this device. In any case seeing it hanging there in relatively good packaged condition brought back a ton of memories.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

December 14, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 35

Last night we recorded our 35th episode of AggroChat, featuring myself, Ashgar, Tamrielo and Kodra. Last night the show became mostly about raids and raiding. I am not sure if this started with our progress in Final Fantasy XIV working on Turn 5 of Binding Coil of Bahamut or if this began with Tam talking about the new “It’s A Wipe” game from steam. It’s A Wipe is essentially a raid simulator in that you are the raid leader of a group of players trying to make it through progression content. Having lived this world… the more we talked about this game the more it seems like the creators of the game were raid leaders themselves at some point. When Tam got into the section talking about the descriptions of the various players and their traits… I could seriously associated names to each of the people he was talking about because we had those exact personalities in our own raids.

From there we wound our way through lots of digital card gaming with Kodra, as he talked about the new Hex and Hearthstone expansions. Tam talked about the sweeping changes to the Infinity miniatures game and the ramifications it is having on the various factions. Finally we delve into my relapse into raiding. This past week I raided Monday in Final Fantasy XIV, Tuesday doing Highmaul progression content in World of Warcraft, Wednesday a casual foray into LFR with the guild, and Thursday Highmaul progression again. All total that was four nights of raiding… and I was having an absolute blast. As Kodra pointed out, I am raiding as much as I ever did in Late Night Raiders… just doing it in a more piecemeal and casual fashion. I am really enjoying splitting time between Final Fantasty XIV and WoW and seeing how each game does raiding.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

A few hours before the raid my friend Kinral mentioned that he had an impending invasion in his garrison. I volunteered to do one as I had not gotten one done for the week. In theory you can do as many invasions as you like, but as far as I know you can only receive rewards from one a week. Additionally there is an achievement for having done all of the available factions, so I have been looking to spend my weekly garrison fight on a new faction. Kinral thankfully had the Shadowmoon Clan, which is the one you fight during your “trial” garrison invasion. We got all prepared to do this, teleported to his Garrison… but for some reason he could not accept the quest. So we ran out to the edge of the phasing and waiting as he logged in and out and fiddled with various bits to try and get the quest to show up. While doing this Odie and I did what any bored players do… start breaking out the Paper Zeppelins.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson… firstly that you can outrun the paper zeppelins. More importantly however that you can keep throwing more Zeppelins at the player and end up with an army of them following them. The above photo only shows four, but I did managed to get all five chasing him at one point. After some more figurations… we found out that Kinral had not upgraded his Garrison to the Tier 3 Town Hall… which is really strange because when I teleported to his Garrison… I saw the Tier 3 castle layout. He upgraded really quickly and we were able to do the invasion. We were roughly 50 away from getting gold, and none of us got anything tangible from our loot bags. So here is hoping that next week I can manage to get in on one of the gold invasions and get something cool from it. I mostly just want to get gold so I can prove to myself that I can do it.

The Final Stretch

While I am about to talk about Belgrave and my progress leveling… I had to share the above screenshot just because I thought it was pretty amazing. I spent a good deal of time yesterday while recording the podcast faffing about in Pandaria, either farming Dinosaur bones for the 9999 mount or trying to get Zandalari Warbringer kills. During one of the long stretches flying across the continent I noticed I flying against the moon and snapped a screenshot. I really really love the Grinning Reaper Ebola charity mount, and especially when it is flying… because it seems so improbable. Anyways onwards to Belgrave… last night I managed to hit 99 so I am in the final stretch towards 100. Unfortunately he is not having the best luck in the world. I keep completing these quests, and almost every time I am walking away with the default green reward instead of an upgraded version. While Cuppy chimed in yesterday telling me that it was in fact possible to hit 615 without the Dwarven Bunker… I think maybe she also had a significant amount of luck going into it too. I plan on completing Nagrand and seeing where I am at the end of it… but I have a feeling I am going to be significantly shy of 615.

I have to say when you are used to getting upgrades from quest rewards… you die a little inside each time you get a green. Similarly not a single on of the lootables scattered around the zone have become upgrades either. At some point I am going to make an attempt on the 620 sword on top of Oshugun. Here is hoping that ends up purple, because it if does I will be set for awhile. One of my big frustrations with Blizzards design through the years is their seeming inability to ever put a full set of gear in an area. Since Nagrand is a gearing up zone basically… would it not have been better for them to have enough treasures in the zone to make a full set of gear? Better yet… why is there not a blue set of Smithed gear that the player can wear while trying to gear up? I feel like gear in general has been a frustrating point this expansion, especially considering most heroic gear has a chance of dropping from any boss in any dungeon… making it feel extremely generic. I feel like Blizzard tried to do a lot of things with this expansion, but most of them are not working as intended.