Games Archives - Page 373 of 690 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Fail Drafting with Bel

May 7, 2018 by Belghast

The first I learned this weekend are that the Quick Draft format in Magic the Gathering Arena is extremely enjoyable. The second thing I learned this weekend… is that I am pretty horrifically bad at drafting a set I didn’t spend much time playing at all. The third thing I learned is that even if you suck at drafting… it is still a pretty reasonable way to pick up cards for doing other interesting things with. If I am doing my math correctly… I walked away with 45 cards that I picked out during the draft and at least 8 cards that I got from the pack that I won just from participating in the draft. Especially if you are trying to work towards something in particular this seems like a very efficient spending of your gems. Ultimately you are getting over 1200 gems worth of cards for 750 gems if you want to think of it in those terms when you are talking about total number of cards gained through the process.

Granted by drafting you are not putting any points towards your next vault opening and there is no chance of getting wildcards other than through any of the 8 card normal packs you win in the process. I drafted a grand total of three times this weekend and failed miserably in all of them with the best I managed to do ending up with a 3 and 3 before finally washing out. There was one where I did not manage to win a single match but even then I walked away with a handful of gems and all of the cards that I managed to draft in the process. The event however sadly ends in roughly three hours as of the time of making this post. I am hoping that they might do this as a weekly thing and offer up a new set each week for drafting. Surely they have enough information on Ixalan to make this work, or it would be a truly great way to introduce Kaladesh as they have already stated they are going to soon.

Ultimately Arena scratches the Magic itch for me especially if I can ever get reasonable at formats like Draft and be able to craft decent decks. A large part of the issue I have is that I am not really playing a lot of magic, and have been more of a collector for the last several years than someone who actually sits down and plays on a regular basis. I am trying to stoke a bit of a Magic culture at work, but it is really difficult for me to find a time or a place to sit down and play. Sure there are shops I could go to Friday Night Magic at… but I don’t even have a deck that I would feel really comfortable playing in such a location because it feels like I have been out of the game so long. There was a time where I could look at a card and immediately think of all of the possible combos for it… and that time has passed. Largely I need to build back up that muscle memory and the only viable way for me to do it… is by playing lots and lots of Arena. On the positive side… each time I sit down to play it I seem to get completely engrossed in the game and completely lose track of how many matches I have ended up playing.

Watch Fail Drafting Hour of Devastation with Belghast! from Belghast on www.twitch.tv

If you are curious and want to see me fail-drafting you can check out the VOD over on Twitch as I streamed most of it. I accidentally cut off towards the end… but I had honestly forgot I was streaming at that point so you are not getting much in the way of commentary as the progression continued on. Chestnut hung out with me for a bit but that was really the only person I had in the stream and even then I think she was mostly afk cleaning house as she said. When I don’t have people interacting with me I sometimes forget I am actually streaming and you end up with me falling back into silence. Anyways… if you want to see what the format is all about you can at least watch how the draft part works at the beginning. I need to sort out why none of the music I had playing was coming through on the stream. If you want to see someone significantly better at drafting… you should also check out Kodra who was my inspiration to stream the draft (because he did it earlier in the day).

Watch Magic the Gathering: ARENA from Kodra22 on www.twitch.tv

Rudderless

May 4, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was largely spent cleaning up quests that I have had in my log for a long while over in Monster Hunter World. Since the Kulve event is over… I feel like I don’t have as much of a pressing goal as I previously did. I could of course just farm things like Nergigante for parts that I need to make awesome weapons, but the Kulve event sorta robbed me of a bit of the drive there. Apart from the bow… I have a reasonable weapon option of every type right now. Sure there are things I want to make but the need isn’t there in the same way that it once was given that I have a box full of decent options. At this point I am hunter rank 70 and the meter is climbing extremely slowly on doing normal stuff. In theory I should be engaging in a bunch of tempered fights but I really don’t like soloing in Monster Hunter World that much, and I also didn’t much feel like SOS Roulette last night… so was stuck just wandering around and knocking out things that have been sitting in my log for awhile.

Monster Hunter World has more or less become my MMO of choice right now, and as a result it is making every other MMO feel really weird to play. I’ve largely been checked out of Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, and the Battle for Azeroth changes are making me not that keen on World of Warcraft. I have the desire to play Elder Scrolls Online… but I find myself lacking the focus since that is a game that requires all of my attention. I realize this is an odd thing to say given that Monster Hunter World is way more reactionary than ESO is… but I also have to play MHW upstairs and with Elder Scrolls I can chill out downstairs with the laptop while watching television. I find my mind wandering or paying too close attention to something that is on television and end up in a horrible spot in Tamriel. The other game that is sorta calling my name at this very moment is Star Wars the Old Republic because I really would love to play through the rest of the content I have missed. I have not done any of Knights of the Eternal Throne, in fact the first quest of that expansion is sitting waiting there on my Jedi Knight for me to pick up and start playing.

Lately I have been trying to ease my way back into Destiny 2 given that the new expansion lands on Tuesday. The moment to moment PVE gameplay is still every bit as fun as it ever was… but my current problem with this game is actually a silly one. I have been out of inventory space for a very long time and the pain of having to juggle items between characters or dismantle things immediately upon getting them wears me out. When I have an MMO and my bags are a mess or I am lacking enough bag space in general… I find myself extremely demotivated to play it. This is in part what is going wrong with Project Gorgon at this very moment… I have next to no bag space and as a result I am constantly having to play the inventory management game which is the exact opposite of fun. The expansion is adding another 100 slots and supposedly some of the kiosks we used to have back in Destiny 1 so we will see how this improves my opinion of the game by not having to care quite so closely about what was in each inventory slot. In theory I would love to push my Warlock and Hunter through Curse of Osiris… because that is a sign of just how hard I stalled out on this game. The expansion landed and I only managed to get one character through before legitimately giving up and moving on to other things.

I’m in a really weird space with gaming in general right now and it seems like I spend more time getting ready to play a game… than actually sitting down and playing a game. There is an intangible wanderlust that has effected me and I am not sure what the cure is. It is almost as though I am too stressed on a daily basis to actually sit down and enjoy the things I am supposed to enjoy. I’ve been through these periods in the past and sadly it has also cut off any desire I had to stream or be engaged with other people in any way. It has been a rough several weeks and I have a feeling that at some point it has to let up… and the clouds will part once more and I will feel like a human being. Apologies to anyone who is attempting to interact with me right now because I am sure the experience is lacking.

Red and Gold

May 1, 2018 by Belghast

One of my favorite aspects of Monster Hunter World has been the constant revolving door of limited time events. It seems like at some point we will run out of brand new ones, and that they will begin cycling through the past happenings… but for right now it seems like every time I turn around there is something brand new and shiny to interact with. Starting on April 27th we got the Code Red event which involves fighting four “red” monsters in the standard arena, one after another. So you have to work your way through Anjanath, Odogoron, Rathalos and then finally the Elder Dragon Teostra. Doing this gives you a special currency that looks like a monster gem called a Red Orb. Collecting seven of these and a slew of parts from all of the monsters included in the quest allows you to craft a set of rank 8 gear patterned off of Dante from Devil May Cry.

What makes this set really interesting is unlike past offerings… this is not a complete suit but instead individual pieces allowing for some interesting Mixed Build options. For the unindoctrinated… armor pieces have specific stats on them and by mixing and matching them you can often times come up with really interesting builds that benefit specific weapons. The boots for example have two levels of weakness exploit which I can see very easily mixing into other sets to achieve the desired affinity boost while hitting weak areas. The other special thing about this event is the fact that we get a brand new Charge Blade that is themed after Devil May Cry as well and starts out Rank 8 without any need to do a follow on upgrade quest. Instead of a sword and shield… it is a short sword with a run that serves as the shield… that then turns into a giant two handed sword giving it a very unique appearance and feel while using. A good chunk of my last week and some change has been spent collecting bits for this set and weapon… and last night I finally managed to craft the final piece when Teostra dropped that last piece of webbing.

The other big thing I have been participating in is the Kulve Taroth “raid” quest that drops materials to create a really awesome set of armor that you can see me wearing in the above image. Other than that it is also a chance for a lot of really interesting semi-random weapon drops. During the course of the runs that I have participated in I have managed to get a purple or better weapon for every slot other than bow… which seem to be extremely stingy for some reason. I had enough blue weapons that when I sold them all last night I jumped from 10,000 zenny to just shy of 300,000 zenny. The keepers have been 9 orange rank 8 weapons and 23 purple rank 7 weapons. Like I have talked about before the real benefit of this quest is it gives you a stable of usable weapons that allows you to branch out a bit. Like I have a decent Hunting Horn now… why not try it out and learn to use it?

Among the weapon drops I have gotten one of the more interesting ones is this Rank 8 longsword with 330 paralysis on it. If a monster is at all susceptible to this status effect… it seems to proc quite often. I was clearing out some of my quests last night and took out a Lavasioth and during the short time it took me to lower it to skull territory and trap it… I managed to proc paralysis four times. While these weapons won’t likely ever outdo a truly tuned weapon… because they are spending some item budget on defense… I like them as well rounded general use options that I didn’t have to spend a lot of materials to create. The Kulve Taroth quest goes away May 5th and the Dante quest goes away on May 10th. I am curious to see what replaces each of them which I guess we will start to see late in the evening on Wednesday? The content release schedule is odd and ends up with some things releasing Wednesday night and others releasing Thursday night. I want to get some more farming in of Kulve tonight for more attempts at shiny gold weapons, but in the grand scheme of things I am pretty happy with the progress I managed to make.

MTG Arena Economy

April 27, 2018April 27, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I spent a tiny bit of time in Magic the Gathering Arena because they unleashed the new Dominaria expansion. The funny thing is the digital version of Magic got Dominaria long before I actually got the box that I ordered. If you currently have access to Arena just the act of logging in gets you three packs, and once again remember these packs have 1 rare/mythic, 2 uncommon and 5 commons… and or a combination of wildcards. Wildcards as always can be traded in for any card you are missing of that rarity and they do not appear to be set dependent. This means that more or less you seem to be able to bank them and then turn in a bunch of them any time you want to build a deck.

The other thing that went in yesterday was the ability to spend money and buy the intermediary currency of Arena… Gems. There are two currencies in the game… Gold that you earn by completing quests and such and Gems that you plunk down hard earned cash. The prices range from $4.99 for the first pack of 750 gems making it roughly 150 gems per dollar all the way to 20,000 gems for $99.99 making that 200 gems per dollar spent. The thing that concerns me the most at this point is the fact that MTG Arena is a beta and I have yet to actually find any place that talks about whether or not there will be a wipe before launch… and if there is one if money spent will be refunded. This is the biggest hurdle for me personally against spending any money at all… because I would really like assurances that I would at least keep the value of that purchase even if I don’t keep the cards.

Now we get into the prime thing you can buy with your gems… packs of cards. At the 45 and 90 pack range you get what was the Dominaria buy the box promo card… making me think that they consider 45 packs to be the equivalent of a 36 pack Magic the Gathering Booster Box. I did some nonsense via spreadsheet before I actually noticed that there is a post on the forums with pretty much all of the economy elements outlined. As it stands the only scaling is on gem purchases… where the more money you spend the more gems you wind up getting per dollar. At the high end of buying 750 gem packs that places the price per pack at $1.33 and if you are buying on the low end at 20,000 gems the price per pack drops down to $1. That means 45 packs would be $59.88 buying 600 gems at a time and $45.00 buying 20,000 gems at a time… similarly the gigantic 90 pack bundle comes out to $119.76 and $89.99 respectively.

For an economy reference… Hearthstone buying in the smallest package ends up being $1.49 per pack and in the largest package $1.16 per pack… for 3 fewer cards each pack. The biggest problem with each and every gem pack is they do not exactly sync up with the dollar amounts meaning you are going to have a remainder of gems that are not really usable for the purpose of buying packs. Contrasted again with Hearthstone there is no intermediary currency so you always know what you are getting per dollar spent regardless of some nonsense exchange rate. My friend Toadchild also did some math and figured out that the most efficient way to purchase cards if you wanted the maximum number of packs for your gems… would be 1-45 card pack, 2-15 card packs and 4-6 card packs giving you a total of 99 packs for 19,800 gems. This still gives you an annoying remainder of 200 gems though in the process. If you are curious about the full range of nonsense here is the google sheet I was working things out in.

Other than just the ability to purchase cards for cash… they implemented the beginnings of a draft mode. Quick Draft however is not the pod drafting you were expecting however and instead something significantly different. Effectively when the event is going on you can enter the draft at will and be placed up against some AI that drafts with you. This apparently gives you the ability to leave the screen and return to your matches later any time while the event is active. The buy in is going to be 5000 gold or 750 gems… aka the $4.99 pack and rewards you a blend of cards and gems in prizes. Essentially you keep anything you draft into your collection and have the possibility to win additional prizes if you get to 7 wins before you get to 3 losses. Draft packs have the same distribution as tabletop giving you 1 rare/mythic, 3 uncommon and 10 commons making it a more familiar format for those who have drafted before. The prize support breakout looks a little something like this…

0 Wins: 50 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
1 Win: 100 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
2 Wins: 200 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
3 Wins: 300 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
4 Wins: 450 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
5 Wins: 650 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
6 Wins: 850 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted
7 Wins: 950 gems, 1 to 3 eight-card boosters, and all the cards you drafted

The boosters are all listed as a “Chance for Extra Boosters” but there really isn’t any particular information surrounding that… maybe if you go 7 and 0 you get 3… or 7 and 2 you only get 1. This isn’t really clarified that I saw.

The other thing that went in is Quick Constructed which is effectively a tournament in a box allowing you to hop in and play in a competitive structure with prize support. The buy in here is 500 gold or 95 gems and has significantly more meager rewards primarily allowing you to gamble your gold for the chance at winning your 7 and getting it doubled in the process with a few randomized cards in the process. This would feel better were it not for the fact that they completely removed random card rewards at the end of winning a match, meaning this is now your way for getting that sort of thing. I actually loved the whole get a random card after you win thing… because it sorta felt like an Ante card even though that concept is an element of a bygone era. For those interested the prize support structure looks a little something like this…

0 Wins: 100 gold and 3 individual Uncommon cards
1 Win: 200 gold and 3 individual Uncommon cards
2 Wins: 300 gold and 3 individual Uncommon cards
3 Wins: 400 gold and 3 individual Uncommon cards
4 Wins: 500 gold, 2 individual Uncommon cards, and 1 individual Rare card
5 Wins: 600 gold, 2 individual Uncommon cards, and 1 individual Rare card
6 Wins: 800 gold, 1 individual Uncommon card, and 2 individual Rare cards
7 Wins: 1,000 gold, 1 individual Uncommon card, and 2 individual Rare cards

In a worst case scenario you spent 500 gold and got back 100 and 3 common cards. In the best case scenario you spent 500 gold… doubled it and got back 2 rares and 1 common. Unlike draft this is not an AI mode and you are playing against players. They suggest that this is game mode primarily for players who have already completed their daily quests and are looking for a way to get more goodies.

All in all I am mostly happy with the economy of the game so far. It seems rather reasonable especially if you contrast it with paper magic. For your dollar you are getting way more value out of Magic the Gathering Arena both in the sheer number of rares and uncommon you get per dollar and the fact that wildcards exist. Wildcards and stockpiling them seems to be a really good way to prepare for the oncoming release of a new expansion. As it stands right now… I could sit on my stash of mythic and rare wildcards and then the moment the next expansion releases buy everything outright that i need to make a deck work. Cracking packs is always going to be fun for me personally, but for players who would rather just buy what they need… cracking packs becomes a way to get those much needed tokens to finish their custom “brew”. The only concern I have is that since this mode seems so much more equitable to the player… what will it ultimately do to the physical hobby?

[UPDATE]

Any gems purchased with real money during the Closed Beta will be given back to your account after a final wipe at the end of the Closed Beta.

— Wizards of the Coast (@Wizards_Help) April 27, 2018

I got a response back from Wizard of the Coast support and the plan is to return the spent gems to your account when it goes live.