AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 98 of 108

Of Animus Books

September 14, 2014 by Belghast

Destiny of Poppy

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat. This week we were joined once again by Tam and the regular cast of AggroChat… Asghar, Rae and Kodra. I went into the night thinking we would end up gushing about Destiny quite a bit, but in truth it turns out we all have a some very valid complaints about the game. We do in fact talk about the good points, but also we talk about the weaknesses of the story. Moreso we talk about the fact that there really isn’t much of a story at all.

Apparently this week some craziness happened in League of Legends with the team Unicorns of Love. It seems as though they broke one of the taboos of the game and played Poppy in competitive play More so than that they seemed to dominate a match with her. We talk about the ramifications of this and get into an offshoot discussion about what happens when something is toxic for a game. When a game changes the class or mechanic that you love, what do you as the player do? I know a good part of why I wont be playing Warlords of Draenor, at least not at launch is the fact that Blood Deathknights “feel wrong” in ways I cannot quite quantify.

Of Tidal Bardings

Since the last three days have been spent working on my Easing Into Eorzea guide series, I have not really posted much that was actually about me or my endeavors. In fact this morning it feels more than a little weird to not be working on the next segment of that guide. I guess in part I wanted to get some of the most basic information out there especially since I have a good number of friends either just starting the game or considering starting it. One of the problems with Final Fantasy and just how content dense it is, is that it has so many different systems that it just expects you to know how to use. I remember when we first started playing, it took me weeks to figure out what everything did and even to this day I am still finding systems that I knew nothing about. So my goal was to try and flatten this learning curve by discussing things from the perspective of a player who is used to playing traditional western MMOs.

However this does not mean that I stopped doing things while writing these guides. One of the most exciting things from the past week is that I managed to get Tidal Barding. The entire reason why I was going for Turquoise color with my chocobo, was that it would match the Leviathan bardings perfectly as seen in the picture above. Leviathan has been my favorite summon since Final Fantasy IV and as a result I knew when I saw this that I would have to get it for my chocobo. The problem is that it involves getting a rare drop from Extreme Mode Leviathan, when I have not done any of the Extreme primals leading up to that. The other issue is that it is a three star armorcrafting pattern, meaning it takes an extremely well geared crafter.

This is the point at which my good friend and awesome cosplayer Spiral Sun rides in to the rescue. It turns out her Free Company leader could make the barding, so I shopped around on the market and managed to piece together all the bits needed. All told I think I spent around 150,000 gil to gather up the bits, which is a significant discount over what the completed barding had been going for on the market boards. Last night I checked it was still floating around the 500,000 mark. So thanks to Spiral I am now sporting my spiffy barding, and with the Turquoise color it works almost perfectly. The barding and bird kinda meld together perfectly and it feels like I am in fact riding around on a tiny Leviathan.

Of Animus Books

The other thing I have been working on in Final Fantasy XIV is my Animus Weapon. Late last Sunday I managed to wrap up my Atma grind and I was able to convert my Bravura Zenith into a Bravura Atma. The problem is the Atma step is basically a “half step”. While the weapon is in fact ilevel 100 instead of ilevel 90… the stats of it remain the same. You power up the Atma weapon by completing a series of books, each one giving your weapon a stat boost. To complete the weapon you have to do this 9 times. Each book costs 1500 tomestones of mythology and requires you to kill 100 mobs (10 each of 10 types), run 3 specific dungeons, complete 3 specific fates, and complete 3 specific guild and company leves. Throughout the day yesterday I knocked out all of the steps for my current book other than the three dungeons.

So today at some point I plan on running the three dungeons which are… Tam-Tara Deepcroft Normal, Stone Vigil Normal and Lost City of Amdapor. I figure I will ask in guild to see if anyone needs these dungeons before running them, because I would far rather complete them with a guild group. After turning in the book I will get +2 strength to my current Atma weapon and it will put me one step closer to the finished Animus. Then it begins the process all over again of grinding up 1500 tomestones of mythology for the next book. My guild thinks I am mostly insane for this, but at least Cylladora and Warenwolf are doing it with me as well. I believe Cav is maybe on the same step also. Essentially the fastest way to get the mythstones is to grind hunts, and as of yesterday Waren is now in the most popular of the hunt groups, so hopefully that will help things out a bit.

Dark Portal Closes

September 7, 2014 by Belghast

Larva and Whales

Last night we recorded our 21st episode of AggroChat, and it was a pretty enjoyable time. I was joined by the original cast of Ashgar, Rae and Kodra. This issue was more defined by what we didn’t want to talk about than what we actually wanted to talk about. A few of us wanted to avoid the gamersgate debacle at all costs, and overall I think we did a fine job of doing just that. The result was a very organic discussion that started with talking about what we had been playing, and ended with us delving into various items. Who needs show notes right?

I named the episode larva and whales because Kodra has been playing this super complicated puzzle game called English Country Tune. So far I have yet to figure out why exactly it is called English Country Tune, because it seems to be mostly about moving blocks around… some of which are called Larva for no apparent reason, and others are called Whales for similar lack of reasons. When I was listening to the recording, the whole discussion just seemed ridiculous.. and I figured that had to be our title. Later on we got into a discussion of the Wildstar server mergers and how our opinions might have changed a bit on the mega server concept after getting into Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV.

Dark Portal Closes

It is a rather dramatic subheading for what in truth is not a terribly dramatic act. Yesterday morning while writing my blog post, I ended up talking myself into cancelling my World of Warcraft account. In a way I guess it was writing about the Nightmare Tide expansion in Rift, that made me realize just how not interested I am in anything to do with Warlords of Draenor. There have been a few times over the years when I have cancelled World of Warcraft, and in almost all of them it was the result of some negative reaction to the game. It wasn’t providing me this or that, or I was frustrated with these changes… or more often than not the lack of changes. This time around I feel completely apathetic about the future of this game. I have friends that work on it, and lots of blogger and gamer friends who are still devoted to it, so I hope it does extremely well and provides them a fun environment to run around in. I think it still provides lots of good things for the faithful, but at this point I have just lost the desire to be in Azeroth.

I think the biggest evidence of my need to just close things down is the fact that I have not played the game since April or maybe even earlier than that. I have kept my account active for one reason and one reason alone… I was wearing the Guild master title in the guild I started back in 2004. The only times I would actually log in, were to throw out an invite to someone who was wanting to check out the game. It felt frustrating to have a game I was not playing at all slowly bleeding money out of my accounts each month. Similarly I have come to the realization of just how much the game has changed, not in the content or the client… but in the community. Playing on the Cactuar server in Final Fantasy XIV has made me realize what I missed about Argent Dawn. The experience in Final Fantasy is much like it was in the early days of that server. Coming back each time seemed to remind me just how many people that I once cared about were no longer playing the game.

Similarly I came to the realization that I no longer need World of Warcraft as a $15 a month chat client. The folks that really matter to me I have contact with through social media, instant message, email or even the battle.net client. So I no longer have to rely on World of Warcraft to help glue together bits and pieces of my world. I realize the surest way to return to WoW is to claim you are never returning to WoW. I can’t make such a claim, but it does feel like it is over now. I am leaving not because I am mad at the game, or that I am disappointed by the game… I am leaving because I feel no desire to play the game. After months of having access to the Warlords of Draenor alpha, I find that I have maybe played the game a grand total of six hours. I hope it will be a rousing success, and they already have my money… but I won’t be crossing through the dark portal. At the end of November, my Dark Portal is closing and likely for good.

Fun with Malboros

If you ask a Final Fantasy fan what their most dreaded encounter is, I would imagine that Malboros rank pretty high up the list, more than likely directly below Tonberries. The constant fear of not being able to move out of the “bad breath” attack makes fighting them super frustrating. The Final Fantasy XIV version is every bit as terrifying as the worst versions in any of the console games, and in their infinite wisdom the developers of 14 decided to create a dungeon almost entirely devoted to them. Last night I got to tank Aurum Vale for my good friend Thalen who is slowly creeping up on 50. This dungeon is needed as part of the promotion system for your grand company, and it unlocks access to the highest rank stuff, so as a result we end up periodically running it for the up and comers.

I actually thought the dungeon was nowhere near as bad as I remembered it. It might be that we all greatly outgear the dungeon, but in truth that shouldn’t factor too heavily since Aurum Vale is the last of the dungeons that mentors you down. For the level 50 players this means a frustrating experience of losing all of the stuff you got when you dinged 50, as the dungeon mentors you down to level 49 exactly. The biggest frustration with this is the fact that I lose Infuriate the ability that gives me a 5 stack of rage on demand. It is basically my steel cyclone on demand button, as that is one of the best ways to get threat on all of the things quickly. In spite of these frustrations I had a really good time. I have to say I actually enjoy tanking the lower level instances for guildies as they need them.

#FFXIV #WoW #AggroChat

Chocobo Madness

August 31, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 20

Last night we recorded our 20th episode of aggrochat. Quite honestly it doesn’t feel like it has been long enough for us to rack up 20 weekly episodes. Rae was off traveling to visit some friends for the Labor Day weekend, so that left us with myself, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam. We started the show by bidding a fond farewell to Blaugust since today is the final day of the month long blogging initiative. Some pretty awesome content has come out of it, and as of last night we still had 29 people who had posted something each and every day of the month. That is pretty impressive when you consider just how much content was churned out as a result. Not everyone has posted daily on the Blaugust nook… myself included but still we have over 700 posts there during the month. In total I believe we had 52 different participants that in some way joined in the fun, so I a wholeheartedly applaud everyone on the job well done.

After that we started a discussion about trash mobs, or more so why exactly we refer to non-boss encounters as trash. It hasn’t always been the case there was a point at which we just referred to everything as encounters, and in part I think that is because over the years the care and thought that went into non-boss encounters was lacking. We reminisce about some of our favorite non-boss encounters and talk at length about how we feel that encounters in general can be improved. I really enjoyed the discussion last night, so hopefully you all will as well.

Chocobo Madness

With the 2.35 patch Final Fantasy XIV introduced ways to dye your Chocobo unlike quite any other dye system I have encountered. Generally speaking in other games, you buy a dye or you pick a color from a selector and you end up with your color relatively simply. It might be cost prohibitive to get the color you want, but there is very little guess work. Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand introduced a system that is sheer madness. First you have to purchase seeds for various fruits that can be found on vendors. The seed is then grown in your garden and over the course of two days ripens. You can shorten this time by doing various things and the yield can be increased based on the type of soil that you use and the fertilizer. Where the madness goes into play is that these seeds increase or lighten various color sliders starting from the base yellow.

When the system was originally patched in, the forums were of course a buzz with trying to figure out the formulas for each of the colors people might want. After lots of trial and error it has pretty much been agreed upon that the two types of fruit… the fruit that darkens a color and lightens a color are essentially on two different color mixing systems. The darken fruits are on RGB and the lighten fruits have the side effect of increasing CMY. This makes trying to mix a specific color absolute insanity. The end result are several different guides for mixing colors and others that list supposed recipes for specific combinations. The problem with all of this is that it doesn’t seem to be an exact science and there is a large random element to just how much a given fruit effects the end plumage.

The Results of Madness

ffxiv 2014-08-30 10-34-22-578

So entering into this I knew I was fairly insane. My ultimate hope was to arrive at turquoise so I fed my chocobo 15 Doman Plums and 10 Mamook Pears as a start. Doman Plums being the fruit that lowers the red value and at the same time raises the Cyan value, and Mamook Pears being the fruit that raises the Green value. The problem with this system is that you have to stable your bird and wait essentially six hours to see what the final result was. The new color is revealed to you as part of a cut scene. So before I went to bed Friday night and hoped I had made a good combination of fruits. Saturday morning I got up fairly early and was excited to log in to see exactly what the end result was. It turns out that I was pretty close and ended up with Celeste Green (R:144,G:184,B:180) which is really close to the shade of Turquoise I was actually after.

So now I have the hard decision of do I leave well enough alone for the time being, because I am actually rather fond of the color. Or do I go for broke and try and push Celeste Green to the next step which would be Turquoise the shade I was actually after. The problem is I have no clue if I just feed doman plums in the hopes of getting there, or do I need to feed O’Ghomoro Berries and Mamook Pears in the hopes of darkening both blue and green at the same time instead. For the time being, and since fruit is so insanely expensive right now I think I am going to leave things alone and just be happy I got close to the color I wanted. Now my attention turns to trying to get the Tidal Barding to go with the new color… but that is a whole different rabbit hole for another day.

#FFXIV #Chocobo #Dyes

Adventures with Sound

August 25, 2014August 25, 2014 by Belghast

The Crab Boss

Over the last several years every computer I have owned has had one thing in common. The onboard sound card has been made by Realtek, and with each of them I have experienced various quirks. Sometimes the mic output is too low, sometimes there is mechanical noise that I can never seem to filter out. In all cases I have been annoyed to no end with dealing with them, but for the most parts too lazy to really change. In part this is because I remember days when the only real option for a sound card was a Creative Soundblaster, and I’ve had my own series of issues with them. Additionally I remember add-on soundcards rivaling at least a low end graphics card in overall expense to pick one up.

About six months ago my on board sound card decided to go flaky. I made a mistake to decide to update my Realtek drivers when I was doing the same for my LAN drivers. After installing the reference drivers I lost all use of the soundcard. No sequence of uninstalling and reinstalling various community drivers, the reference drivers from realtek, or the ones posted on the MSI support page seemed to restore full functionality. In the past I have used a USB headset before with decent success so I shopped around to find one that I found comfortable. The end result was picking up the Logitech g430 headset, that comes in a rather fetching blue and black color palette. The install was easy enough, but early on I noticed a few quirks with it, in that I had to plug it into one of the two USB 3.0 ports on my machine. Once I figured out that this was what was happening, I resolved the issue and soldiered on.

Adventures With Sound

For the most part these headphones were excellent and the Logitech drivers provided some really nice 7.1 surround sound emulation. As far as communication went I seemed to be understood well, and transmitting both clearly and with plenty of volume. It was during this time that we birthed the ideas of our podcast, and it was with this headset that I have been recording all of the episodes. As I listened back to the recording however I noticed something that bothered me. All of the other guests came through with much more full sound than my own voice. My voice sounded very flat and tinny and no matter how much I fiddled with the settings did it seem to actually improve it.

After some research I found that this was pretty much a universal complaint with this particular headset and namely the usb soundcard that accompanies it. It seems like it does a great job of output, but a pretty poor job of input, only allowing for 16 bit audio. The result is the “flat” sound that I had noticed and that frustrated me. The suggestion universally was to hook the headset to onboard audio for the microphone, and the usb for the 7.1 surround output. This seemed like a hack at best, but no amount of fiddling with the drivers and settings managed to fix the problems I noticed. This eventually lead me to start looking for other options, and as always that ended up with me searching Amazon.

Xonar Ping

For years I have had an unnatural love for all things Asus. As a result I have owned a number of products and when I buy something I always tend to start with seeing what their product offering is. A search of Amazon lead to what I expected, there to be a lot of Soundblaster options, but mixed in among them was a Asus Xonar sound card that had relatively good reviews. The best part was it was cheap, currently $26.99. I ordered one with my Amazon Prime membership, and it arrived on my doorstep Sunday morning. I was shocked to find that something actually delivered on a Sunday, and it was not like I actually paid for overnight or anything of the sort. Within a few minutes I had popped it in my case, and booted back up. I grabbed the latest drivers from the Asus website and popped into a game… and the sound was amazing. It was every bit as good as the Logitech software was capable of and then some.

Then I hopped on Teamspeak to hang out with my friends and test it there. Immediately upon speaking I got “Is there a Helicopter in the background?”. I recorded some test audio and sure enough there was a very noticeable mechanical disturbance in the background of my audio that seemed to get worse the longer I talked. My heart sunk, and immediately I had flash backs of all of the fiddling I had done with both the Realtek and Logitech sound drivers to see if I could get something better than what I was. I could get the sound to go away momentarily, but it always returned regardless of the settings. Once again I took to the internet and found people complaining of this, and leaning towards that I would need to RMA the card and get a new one.

New Drivers New Hope

There in the middle of the stack I found a glimmer of hope. There was a thread by a poster saying that he had all of the issues I was having, and ditching the Asus drivers fixed his problems. I guess the Xonar drivers are notoriously bad, and that there is another group that has released a Unified Driver for the Xonar family. I downloaded the drivers hoping that this would maybe fix my issues as well. It took a series of reboots to uninstall the current driver and install this new unified driver. I booted into a game and it sounded amazing just as before, and this time upon firing up Teamspeak, I was greeted with “the helicopter is gone!”. This is the part of technology that I like the least, the wide variance in which drivers work best for which cards.

I realize that it has become tedious for companies to release a specific driver for a specific revision of a product, but I feel like the age of the universal driver for a “Family” of products has been riddled with this sort of issue. Right now for example I am currently self locking myself to a specific version of the GeForce drivers, as I had all sorts of hell when I tried to update to the latest version. In any case, I have recorded a few audio samples and am extremely pleased with the results, so here is hoping with future episodes of AggroChat there will be far less disparity between our voices as there was in previous episodes. Hopefully the tinny flat audio is a thing of the past.