Guild Leadership Archives - Page 18 of 108

Disconnected Dragoon

March 18, 2015 by Belghast

Missing a Raid

Yesterday was one of those days when I felt like I was moving through molasses the entire day. In part it was the whole staying up late and babysitting servers bit, but also we had so much stuff going on during the day connected to the two outages. It turns out that after much research they were not actually related. I knew I was not exactly in “fighting shape” so I let my raid leader know that I would not be attending the WoW Raid that night. This is in part a good thing because they were apparently talking about having to do a paired down raid due to limited healers, and it is probably a good thing to rotate folks a bit. At this point I would never mind having to sit out for a night because I have so much other stuff going on that I could be doing. When I got home I took a nap and that helped quite a bit, or at least made me feel something vaguely human.

I asked my wife not to let me sleep more than an hour, since I generally struggle with the concept of napping. If I take a nap, it means I am not likely to get a good nights sleep. My body plays this game with me, where it only wants to get five to six hours of sleep a night. When I nap, it means I am going to have this massive bout of insomnia that night. Thankfully the short nap managed to do what it needed to do and I was still able to sleep fairly well as a result. I spent most of the night hanging out on the couch catching up on Better Call Saul. The irony of be getting into this series is the fact that I have never actually watched Breaking Bad. I mean I have watched the first episode, but since my wife showed some interest in the show I didn’t really want to start it on my own without her watching along. Otherwise there would come a point where I would have to start back from scratch and watch everything over again. I managed to catch up through episode seven, and that show is just becoming more interesting as it goes.

Disconnected Dragoon

When it came to actual gaming last night, I was a bit more distracted. I spent some time logged into Final Fantasy XIV because our Free Company is just insanely vibrant, but I really didn’t do all that much gaming. I ran a few roulettes, and managed to get yet another piece of 130 gear thanks to another carbontwine, but mostly I just spent a lot of time hanging out at the free company house when I got up from my nap. It really is surreal to see the number of people online… and at some point I need to catch up with my whole guild census project and record all the new people in our spreadsheet. One of the problems with FFXIV is that there is no good guild notes functionality so we are having to keep an external list of which character belongs to which personality. Its tedious but for whatever reason I struggle to relate in game names back to twitter and blogger names. I spend a lot of time thinking “I think that is this person” but never fully committing because my memory is extremely fallible. That is my deep dark secret, that in other games I remember everyone… because I can check the officer notes.

I am not sure how I really made it through the sequence of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and World of Darkness… but I am guessing at this point I can just do those on auto pilot. I am hoping I was not “that dragoon” in most of the instances, because I managed to get several commendations. Generally speaking if I go in, and manage not to die… I get commendations. I should have spent the night working on botany, but instead I mostly stood around a lot staring blankly at the screen. I feel like over the last several nights I have been particularly antisocial. Largely when I am watching something on Television I stay off voice chat, and go for large periods of time without reading free company chat either. I know at some point Arkenor asked for a group, but it was not until it had actually formed that I noticed. I have been a less than stellar “Bel” lately, and I am hoping tonight I will be feeling back to my normal self. I feel like I have missed a lot of what is going on, and I am hoping to remedy that.

Time to Landmark

It has been well over a year since I last played Landmark in any fashion. That game has evolved in such a way that if you are not playing constantly you fall behind in the number of changes. At this point I simply feel behind the curve and it has been a real barrier from me jumping back into the game. This morning I read something interesting however, that Landmark plans to have one more major character wipe before opening its doors to the public. My theory is that this might be precisely the ideal time to pop my head back in and see how the game has progressed. Right now this wipe is slotted for sometime around April 29th. So my hope is that I can pop in and experience all of the new content fresh and not be so entirely out of touch with it. Honestly the most enjoyment I had in the game was the process of “leveling up” which was completing a series of arbitrary goals to keep moving up through the different types of picks and tools you can create. Once I had access to everything the game quickly became stale for me.

For reference when I last played the game… the Caves system was not yet patched in. So this means I have that and all of the player combat to experience fresh. The problem is I am torn on the whole Daybreak thing. I am still rather pissed about the layoffs, but at the same time the folks who are still on staff there are struggling to make this whole thing work. My Landmark account is a sunk cost as I purchased it so long ago. I might as well get some use out of it, and see what this game has become in the months since I let my claim get repossessed. There was a point where I realized I was only logging in just long enough to mine copper to pay the upkeep on my claim. This is one of the things I don’t like about upkeep systems. If you are only playing the game to pay upkeep, are you really playing the game at all? I am actually looking forward to the character wipe now and hopefully I will be able to reignite the spark I once had for this game.

Guar Wrangler

March 17, 2015 by Belghast

Horrible Night

Last night was supposed to be our guild attempt on Turn 9 again in Final Fantasy XIV. I logged in ready to go, and then all hell broke loose. We had two servers go down at work, and I spent my night working with a coworker trying to bring them back online. While all this was happening, the guild rightfully filled my spot and the show went on without me. It sounds like maybe they got through another phase but I was not paying that close of attention to what was going on in Teamspeak. I spent most of the night watching those servers, trying to make sure that they were not going to go down again. I got a 9:30 pm call from my boss which freaked me out, because my mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that something had happened again. Turns out he was just returning my call from earlier in the evening that apparently he missed.

The problem is as stressful as my actual evening went… it apparently spilled over into my dreams. In my dream I was interviewing Robert Downey Jr. and he was extremely agitated. He was pacing around the room, and I kept trying to the bottom of why. Suddenly he got mad with me and transformed into the Ironman suit from his briefcase. He fired a shot at me, and I responded by turning into the X-O Manowar suit. We battled back and forth in this conference room. One of his repulsor beams blew a hole in the wall and outside I could see the Ultramarines fighting some sort of giant Kaiju. Finally they defeated it and stormed into the building to assist me. Moments from capturing Robert Downey Jr. turned Ironman… I apparently woke up. It was a strange night.

Capping Poetics

While semi-afk and working on servers I happened to notice movement in my game screen. It turns out the entire guild was swarmed around me trying to lure me back from wherever I happened to be. Unfortunately it didn’t work and it took another thirty minutes or so before things were finally restored. Since I missed the boat for raid time… and quite honestly I didn’t feel like I should get involved in something that serious I opted to run hardmodes for poetics. I went into the night sitting around 200 poetics of the 450 cap. Through a series of hard modes, trials and a random expert with guildies when the raid was over I managed to get within a single point of capping. This meant I was within a single trial of cap, so I stayed up and did just that… managing to get the most frustrating Ifrit Hard mode I have ever experienced. The tank failed to have shield oath up, which meant that the white mage quite literally tanked Ifrit for most of the kill.

If nothing else capping poetics was a bit of a silver lining to an otherwise shitty night. Right now I am very much in this mode of trying to cap every week so I can finish gearing out my main the Warrior. As far as pieces to purchase, I need a couple of pieces of jewelry, the belt and the chest piece… and then a bunch of weeks to past to get the necessary carboncoat and carbontwine to upgrade them to 130. In any case there is still a lot of upgrades ahead of me, and my hope is to get to as much 130 gear as I can before the release of the 2.55 patch which is supposedly March 31st. That seems really damned soon considering we just recently had the Golden Saucer patch, but I guess they are wanting to give players time with that patch to finish things up before June 19th and the Heavensward headstart. I guess now that I think about that, it is only giving players a month with 2.55 which makes sense as something that they would want to do.

Guar Wrangler

After the night that I had I should have just gone straight to bed. The problem is I was still very much still “worked up” over the events. I likely could not have slept if I had tried, so throughout the night I had been patching up Elder Scrolls Online, and decided to pop my head in. It turns out that they flipped the switch for Tamriel Unlimited a bit early, and folks were able to log in and play last night. Overall the transition seemed smooth enough, and all of my pets and such got sucked into the new collections system. Similarly I was granted 4500 crowns to spend on the in game shop, and with that I picked up the stealth armor pack that had this very cool covenant armor set, and the guar that I am riding on. I also picked up the Wildhelm dog pet, because he looked adorable.

As far as the game itself, I had been popping my head in Tamriel once or twice a week for awhile now. After the change I didn’t really detect anything to strange other than the fact that I now had a champion point to spend, and had to respec my character completely. That was the hardest part, trying to decide and remember what I had before. I feel like I probably ended up with a similar build to before… but I can’t be too certain. I am still heavily sword and shield dragon knight, and that seems effective. I wandered around and managed to take out a world mini-boss at some ghost pirate camp without much issue, so I am happy with the results. I look forward to getting more time to explore the Aldmeri Dominion now that the champion system feels like I am actually making forward momentum again. Now I just have to live with the consequences of having limited sleep.

Cleansing Lunari

March 15, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #48 – Ori and the Sad Sads

Last night we embarked upon another journey through that weekly tradition we call the AggroChat podcast. Things are a little different sounding this week because I finally got a proper microphone. Positive is I can have my fan on me while we record without it picking that up… however it seems to pick up my mouse clicks like insanely bad. Last night we dedicated the show to the ultimate Pi day, and Kodra was celebrating with a bunch of tiny pies. The first game we talked about in depth is Ori and the Blind Forest which is so many sads out of sad. The game is a gloriously animated and beautifully done…. but has the saddest intro I have ever experienced in any game. We talk about how the hopeful tone of the rest of the game, doesn’t really fit with the intro sequence. From Ori we move into the pitfalls of the Final Fantasy XIV crafting system, and why all of us are trying to become Omni crafters for the sake of our free company Airship. This makes Tam exceptionally sad because all he really wants to be is a good goldsmith.

I talk about my guilds progress in Blackrock Foundry and some of the drama that happened as a result of us needing to pair down our dps in order to conquer the content. Most of the guilds I know have been struggling with keeping enough healers this expansion, and because we are habitually short that limits the number of dps we can realistically bring on fights. Since we are getting into harder content we had to bench a few people, and one of them took offense enough to rather dramatically guild quit during the middle of the raid. Tam went into a interesting discussion about the new Infinity rules and how they will change the way gameplay happens, by shifting focus away from combat to instead be focused on objective completion. Finally I talk at length about my experiences playing the Steam beta of Moonrise… but I will go into that in more detail below.

AggroChat Dot Com

A few weeks ago I had a bit of a brain storm… or at least a slight drizzle. The revolved around the idea of trying to apply to get press passes for the AggroChat folks to Pax Prime. It made me realize that between all of us that do this podcast on a weekly basis there is quite a lot of content that we are producing on a regular basis. I write Tales of the Aggronaut daily, Tam writes Digital Initiative, Ashgar writes Ash’s Adventures, Kodra the Keen Gamer, and Rae does Little Rae of Sun. What if we pulled all of this content together in one place, and then augmented it with some of our other friends that maybe don’t want to take the time to maintain a full blog of their own, but have the occasional post in them. The end result is AggroChat.com and while it is not finished and still very much a work in progress, I feel like it is “done enough” to start talking about it. Right now the big daunting task that is ahead of me this morning is pulling together all of the content from AggroChat into the site. This means manually creating entries for all 48 of our episodes so far, but it is well worth it to make sure everything works correctly.

There are a few outstanding issues, like why exactly Ash’s preview images are broken. Other than that I think things have come together rather nicely. I still need to do a “real” logo for the site pulling together the awesome Chibi versions of ourselves that Rae created, and I still need to get bio information from all of our bloggers for the individual author pages. However I am pretty pleased with how things are shaping up. The color scheme was intentionally obnoxious in some what of an honorific of Kodra… who we honestly thought was color blind for the first several years of gaming with him. He puts together some pretty outrageous color schemes, and I figured because of this our website needed to be equally insane. Let us know what you think of the site so far. Hopefully more bloggers will be coming on board the site within the next few days as I sort things out. My hope is that this will push all of us to create more interesting content.

Cleansing Lunari

One of the games I talked about a little bit in my day one PAX South wrap up post was Moonrise by Undead Labs. I had a lot of fun playing the game and being shown the ropes by Richard Foge, even though he kicked my ass in PVP numerous times. So as exciting as this game was, because it reminded me so much of Jade Cocoon… it really fell in the realm of “not the key demographic”. I am not really much of a mobile gamer, while I own tablets and numerous handheld systems… I don’t game on them very often. In fact right now I think the only mobile game I have installed on my phone is Final Fantasy Dimensions. As one of the few people on the planet that do not have an iPad the game fell in that category of “really excited to see it” but probably not for me. All of this was until the other night when I happened to click through to a twitch stream posted by the Undead Labs account. It turns out the game is coming to Steam Early Access soon, and this immediately changed my perspective on it. To make things even cooler I managed to score a closed beta key, and have been playing quite a bit of the game since.

I have a more proper preview post in the moderation queue on MMOGames.com, which should be releasing Monday or Tuesday, but I wanted to take a few minutes this morning to talk about this game and why you should be excited about it. First off the game is a really enjoyable art style that reminds me so much of Free Realms. I have always liked that sort of “realistic cartoony” feel to games where I can create something funky without it feeling like I am no longer actually connected to reality. The game centers around the event called the Moonrise which normally happens for only a few days, causing normally peaceful “Solari” to turn into ravening corrupted “Lunari”. The problem is this Moonrise has been lasting far longer than normal and seems to only be growing in strength. You play the role of a game keeper like Warden, and your job is to go around the countryside cleansing the Lunari of their sickness by engaging them in battle.

Immediately the game has some characteristics that feel very Pokemon like in that you are sending your pets out to do battle with other creatures. Where this whole equation gets turned on its head is the fact that it is happening in real time, and you are battling with up to two Solari at a time… out of a stable of six that you have “at the ready”. So if this were not frenetic enough, you also have the ability to do battle yourself, with your warden earning various abilities as you level up. When it comes to Warden vs Warden combat, you have two win conditions. Either you can knock out all of the enemy Solari… or you can instead use abilities that focus the enemy Warden directly. When I fought Foge at Pax South I seemed to do just fine at whittling down his Solari, but he would do a better job at focusing me directly and knocking me out as a Warden. The game itself is extremely enjoyable with a combination of lobby areas with open hunting zones and dungeons to explore and treasures to find. When this goes to open access I highly suggest you check it out, and I am sure over the next few weeks I will be posting more about it.

The Tower Guardan

March 14, 2015 by Belghast

There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia. I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.

Ignorance is Bliss

I’ve told bits and pieces of my time in Dark Age of Camleot in the past, but today I thought I would delve further into what was ultimately the second MMO I played. I remember being in the beta process and thinking that the game seemed so much more advanced than Everquest that I had been used to. However I did not really play the game seriously until the launch of Gaheris the co-operative server. Most people think fondly upon Dark Age of Camelot of the realm versus realm combat, for me however it was all of the interesting PVE things that I did with my friends. At that time we had an extremely small and close knit guild called the Whispers of Legend. In fact the only real remnant of that guild is a posting on Zam’s for an item I submitted under our guild name. One of the best things about Gaheris was that we could literally play any class in the game together, and explore any realm freely.

Our motley group consisted of a Dwarf Warrior as the main tank, me on my Celt Champion as dps and off tank, a Lurikeen Enchanter providing dps and crowd control and a Celt Bard being dual boxed by our warrior providing all of the healing and song twisting. Much later on I picked up a second account and ran my very own bard, but much of the content that we experienced we did as a trio, with my friend Shadoes playing both the role of main tank and main healer. This game was also the very first appearance of me using the name Belghast, so even if I could never actually return to playing it… it will always hold a special place in my heart. There were so many times we ventured someplace we should not have been only to end up trying to fight our way back to our tombstones, more than anything to prove to ourselves that we could do it. It was a different time in online gaming, when more often than not we were playing with people we were able to lay our physical hands on in the real world. On average the three of us would get home from work, and log directly into Dark Age of Camelot for that nights adventure.

The Tower Guardian

The adventure that most stands out in my mind was our finding of the Tower Guardian. When the Shrouded Isles expansion hit we spent a good deal of our time wandering around its wilderness looking for interesting things. With that expansion a number of named encounters were introduced and spread through out the world. So it became our mission to try and find all of them… and farm them for every last bit of loot. In fact the item that I talked about submitting… I am pretty sure came from one of these such trips. One night while wandering the Dales of Devwy we stumbled upon this giant clockwork golem looking creature that towered over even the trees. I think at the time it conned purple to our group, but we decided to give it a shot anyways considering the area around it was difficult but easily huntable. While it took several attempts we managed to down it and got some really nice loot. So we proceeded to farm it, each time getting better at the process until we had it down to a science.

A few days later we happened to be in a local game shop, that had several folks that played Dark Age of Camelot far more seriously than we did. We were talking about our fun farming the golem, and the shop keeper had a somewhat stunned look on his face. I turns out that apparently this encounter was designed for a raid to take it down, and while it took upwards of thirty minutes for us to actually defeat it… we managed to do it with four characters, two of which were being played by the same person. While games have evolved to have hard requirements on what you need to bring to be successful, I have never forgot the lessons that we learned playing this game. That while you might not have the optimal grouping, you can sometimes persevere through sheer force of will. There have been many times I’ve tried to do things in an unorthodox way, but no game has rewarded it quite as much as Dark Age of Camelot did.

Sometimes We Failed

I won’t lie and say that things always worked out in our favor. In fact I have quite a number of screenshots like one above, with us dead in fairly horrible places. However we always seemed to manage to pick ourselves back up and keep trying long after others had given up. This trip down memory lane would not be complete without a photo of Shard our Dwarven Warrior main tank. The thing I find so odd about this game is that our experiences and our memories are so vastly different from most players that wax nostalgic about it. This was not a pvp game for me, but instead a game that let me explore freely every corner of three vastly different and exception realms. This was the game that really cemented in my mind how poor of a design decision that hard faction walls really were. Dark Age of Camelot went from being a lackluster experience, to one of the most memorable with the simple addition of the co-operative play server.

Do you have any memorable stories of games that you and your friends maybe played in a less than suggested style? I would be curious to hear some of your stories of times you entered something vastly unprepared but managed to pull out a victory nonetheless. One of my fondest memories from World of Warcraft for example was the time we took nothing but hunters into Upper Blackrock Spire and timed our aimed shots on the same target, just watching it explode before our eyes. It was like we were a walking firing squad, slowly mowing down our targets or burning it down while one of us kited the pack. Sometimes unconventional play can be extremely rewarding. For years I’ve found myself getting caught up in trying to do things the right way for the sake of speed and efficiency. Sometimes however you just have to break the rules and play games in a manner no one in their right mind ever planned. I freely admit that I still wish there wa such a thing as a melee hunter.