MMORPG Archives - Page 286 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Finally A Blue

January 1, 2015 by Belghast

Rededication

With the beginning of the year comes the less than amazing practice of the New Years resolution. Want to guarantee that something doesn’t happen… well make it a resolution and you will surely have failed it by the three month mark. At the very least that seems to be the way for me at least. I am exceptionally bad at sticking to goals because what seems so important right now seems far less important a few months down the road. What I am apparently good at is sticking to routines once I have developed one. In 2013 I lost a lot of weight, I would have normally said “a ton of weight” but it was really only 70 lbs. This year I got lax and did not really pay much attention to what I was eating, and for the most part hit a plateau for the year.

Towards the end of the year… thanks in part to the holidays I actually went up a bit. I am not going to beat myself up over it, because I knew as soon as the new year started I was going to rededicate myself to the routine. So while it follows the same basic idea as a resolution, for me at least it is different. I did this for over a year, and I apparently did it well enough that even after getting super lax… I managed to plateau rather than gain. I call that a success overall, but considering I am not anywhere near where I would like to be… I need the rigor once again. My body got a break over the last year, and once things warm up again I will start back in with the walking. For me however I really need the “eating” side under control more than the exercise side since that is what has yielding great results in the past. Sure I will feel hungry for a few days as my stomach adjusts, but the payoff in the end will be a great one I feel.

Finally A Blue

Being the old man that I am… I spent my evening in a rather sedate fashion. My wife and I hung out downstairs and watched a series of movies together, none of which were particularly new… but were new to us since we had not seen them. The first on the list was James Bond Quantum of Solace, which neither of us could remember if we had seen. Maybe we had or maybe we hadn’t, but in any case the movie itself was extremely forgettable… and it kinda felt like they were just phoning everything in about it. Skyfall that we watched afterwards however was excellent, probably the best Bond film I have seen in ages. It actually had storyline that I cared about, rather than a loose excuse for a bunch of fight sequences and car chases. The last movie in the list was the last Percy Jackson movie… the “Sea of Monsters”. While I did not really enjoy it as much as I did the first one, I thought it was pretty good nonetheless and provided a good natured romp through a magical world. Since my wife and I have not read any of the books we had nothing to compare it to.

While watching the films I was of course playing World of Warcraft, spending my night wallowing in nostalgia of playing my hunter Lodin. One of the dungeons that I have been running each week on every character that I think can survive running it… is the Eye of Eternity aka Malygos. I’ve been on a mount farming kick lately, since I am only a few away from the 150 mount achievement. Additionally I was pretty close to the Awake the Drakes achievement for getting a mount from each of the dragon flights. Last night I finally got the blue drake mount to drop, chipping one off both lists. Of course I need to keep running Malygos because I also need the Azure Drake out of there as well for the achievement. However this just leaves Malygos and Deathwing that I need to farm for drake mounts. Since I have two accounts… I really need to figure out how to create a save AT deathwing so that I don’t have to do Spine every week… because god that fight is frustrating.

Raiding on Holiday

Since I had been doing the posts leading up to the first of the year, I had not posted much of the information about my week. The raid groups I am part of in both FFXIV and World of Warcraft chose to go ahead and raid this week in spite of he holiday. Monday night of course was FFXIV and we actually had one more than we had room for in our raid. As such we focused on doing Turn 5 to get the person who could not make it the last time we killed it keyed for Turn 6. Even knowing how that fight goes, and knowing we can defeat it… it is still a rather tough fight and took us a few tries to get it down. The last time we downed the encounter for some reason my screen shot software was not working, so as a result I have gone back to the old reliable Fraps and have a kill shot finally. After that we started working on Titan Extreme again… a fight we have not seen in roughly two months. We made some progress but it was getting late and we decided to call it before the timer ran out. We did manage to make it through to the final and hardest phase, so here is hoping we can push through that this week.

In World of Warcraft we had a bit of a rough week in part because we were down both our fearless leader and a couple of our highest dps. However that said several of us, myself included greatly increased our dps between last thursday and this tuesday… and while it was not the cleanest raid I have ever been a part of… we struggled through and got the job done. We have six encounters defeated, and we managed to clear all of them with our reduced numbers. I call that a win because it will allow us to work on progression tonight. There were some issues that hopefully we can work through, but mostly I was pleased that apparently all of the tweaks from last week did their job. I was able to push respectable dps as a Gladiator, and I no longer feel like I am a detriment to the raid. This is a huge thing for me, because I was scared that gladiator simply was not a viable spec. It seems viable enough and I seem to do about the same damage as our rogues do, which I am perfectly fine with for the time being. Gladiator itemization is really odd, and it is hard to find “ideal” pieces. Thankfully however I did manage to get my BIS shield, when a raid member so graciously donated it to the cause. Hopefully you all have a great new years, and that you have luck accomplishing your own goals this year.

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.

Disappointment of the Year

December 29, 2014 by Belghast

Elder Scrolls Online

Since we are drawing close to the end of the year, I feel like it is probably time to start making sweeping posts to summarize my feelings about the year. The one today is a bit of a touchy one for me, but I feel like I still need to make it. Mostly I feel like by posting the “bad” one first it will be like ripping off a band aid and I can end the year on a more positive note. As such lets get on with the ripping and talk about my biggest disappointment of the year. For that dubious honor we have to give it to Elder Scrolls Online, and during the rest of this post I intend to explain myself a bit more. I feel like in part this is a case of extremely high expectations that were impossible to meet. When I first heard about this game, it was the end of an extremely long session of subterfuge where my friend who was in fact working on the game refused to give us any information about what he was actually working on. He kept us in the dark until the official announcement, but given we knew who he worked for… and the fact that it seemed like it was a fantasy based game he was working on… many of us had put two and two together and gotten four.

When the friends and family alpha started, I was lucky enough to be in that first wave. From tell of the community team I was among the top 1% of bug note reporters, and I never stopped doing it. I took it up like a mantle to try and help Zenimax create the best game possible. The problem is the direction of the game kept veering into a place I thought was going to be bad for the game. We gave copious amounts of feedback on the forum, most of which seemed to be unheeded. The early UI was a glorious thing, that felt just about perfect. It let me set up the game work the way I wanted it to, and could see all the players swarming around me. The problem is things took a turn towards deep minimalism that never quite worked. Even in alpha the game developed this “alone in a crowd” feel that never quite was remedied. By the time the game was launched I had been playing it for roughly a year at that point, and retread the early content more times than I can count through constant character resets.

What Went Wrong

I feel the games Achilles heel is that it became entirely too hard to group with your friends. For starters because of the super minimalistic user interface it was impossible to identify the people you knew when they were roaming around the world with you. You could of course form a group, but the group size was rather limited to only four players. I have way more than four friends that I wanted to be able to keep tabs on in the world around me. The Mega Server was a triumph of stability but it also destroyed the quaint familiarity that a server infrastructure has. On a traditional server when you go to the blacksmithing trainer… you see the same people there day in and day out. After awhile you end up striking up a conversation with someone sharing the forge… because after all you are doing the same thing over and over. This sort of interaction was completely absent. Every person in the world is a nameless faceless entity, and as such the only ties you really make are through public chat channels or the folks you brought into the game with you.

Functionally it became extremely difficult to group with people at all since there was a very tight range in which you could gain experience together. I believe it was something like a four level difference meant you were just running it and not going to get any benefit from it. This meant that unless you were leveling in a strict duo that was not going to play other than as a pair… it became nearly impossible to try and stay in sync with other players. We mentioned this numerous times during the testing process, that the game was badly in need of a mentoring system. It seemed since they had the tech to “bolster” players to 50 for the purpose of pvp content, that surely they could do the reverse and make it work for dungeons. So far the best game I have played that does this is FFXIV in that it auto lowers your level to that of the dungeon when you zone in. Content remains evergreen, and this game was definitely in need of something like this because it had really great group content… that was completely inaccessible because getting in that level sweet spot was difficult.

Alone in a Crowd

The biggest problem that we personally had was the fact that we had folks of all level ranges wanting to do content together. That meant that our only option at all was to go out into Cyrodil. The problem with this is that most of us wanted to play this game because of its amazing PVE storyline… but Cyrodil became the consolation prize that I simply got tired of opening. I am not a PVP player in my heart, and while there is plenty to do out there that does not involve PVP… it is not that engaging. The big problem is that we would bring 20+ people out into Cyrodil with on or maybe two of us actually being veteran rank players. When we encountered actual PVP… a single VR2 player could easily take down 20 folks faux leveled up to 50. The veteran levels just made too much of a disparity between survival of the level 50 folks and the non 50 folks making it sheer futility to do anything out in Cyrodil other than Skyshard farming…. and there really is a finite amount of that you can do.

The answer to the enigma of the game seemed to be to rush through the PVE content solo, because it was nearly impossible to try and actually do on level content with your friends. Then maybe just maybe at level 50 you could actually participate in content together again… but only then if you did all of the content for your faction and manages to “beat” the game allowing you to progress into the Veteran ranks. This was too long range of an outlook for most of the people we brought into the game. At launch House Stalwart had over 100 players of different play styles and differing amounts of play time. The one constant was that the majority of us were social gamers… knowing each other from existing guilds or social media. We wanted to group up and experience content together, and this was just something we could not do. Within a month our numbers had dwindled down to about 20… and by the time Wildstar launched the guild was almost completely empty.

What Went Right

This game is a pinnacle for me of quest content. The story is amazing and they managed to make it feel exactly like playing an Elder Scrolls Game for me. I felt like I was in the same settings that I have known and loved over the years. In testing I got to experience all of the starter zones, and each of them had a unique feel but at the same time felt like you were very much in Tamriel. There was a loving attention to detail that you just don’t see in most games. There are still several quests that I will remember and hold up against any quest content out there. I loved the “single player” experience of the game and I managed to get through all of the Daggerfall campaign and part of the way through the Aldmeri Dominion. All of it made me want to keep playing, and were it not for the launch of Wildstar I probably would have kept playing it. The problem was that I just didn’t feel like I had anyone to play with.. and it became increasingly harder to justify a subscription fee for what was in essence a single player game to me.

In spite of me declaring that Elder Scrolls Online was my biggest disappointment of the year… I still feel like I parted with this game on good terms. The disappointment comes from the fact that I had really hoped this game would be the new permanent home for me, when I have so desperately wanted a game that I would want to play for more than a few months at a time. I have longed for the next “WoW” not in terms of feature set, but in terms of gravity and ability to keep players stuck in its orbit. Elder Scrolls Online sadly was not that game, and likely never will be. That said I absolutely intend on playing it again when it comes out on the console and transferring my characters over to it. This game from the start felt like a game that would be better served with a controller, and I look forward to being able to play it remotely through my Vita on my PS4. I will always have love in my heart for this game… I just stopped wanting to play it. I felt like I beat the game, and will return again when there are new experiences to be had.

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.