Sandbox Archives - Page 19 of 30 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Alliance of Awesome

June 7, 2014 by Belghast

Multigaming Community

On January 31st a few interesting things happened. Firstly Sony Online Entertainment released the alpha for Everquest Next Landmark… now just known as Landmark. More importantly this set a chain of events into motion. For some time there has been a group of loosely affiliated guilds and gaming communities tugging on essentially the same pool of players. So we might end up getting this mix of players for a specific title and then having a similar mix of players for another title down the road from this huge twitter/g+ gaming community pool. With Landmark this reached a bit of a head and someone was brave enough to stand up and say it was silly. In the opening days of Landmark, since there were no guilds (and still arent for that matter) each of these communities opted to start a chat channel. The problem is this left some people joining as many as six different channels at a time.

Scarybooster proposed a simple idea, that we all agree to use one common chat channel, and with that the Alliance of Awesome was born. It started simple in scope, but from there Zelibeli and I kinda ran with it and over the last four months we’ve built a rather large loosely connected gaming alliance. Currently we have five different groups in the AofA community: House Stalwart, Multiplaying.net, Combat Wombat, Mercy Gaming, and Dark Religion. Lately I have been talks with Liore about maybe having the already awesome Machiavelli’s Cats community join the fold as well. I have to say so far that over the last four months things have indeed been awesome. For the most part everyone has seemed to get along swimmingly and I’ve watched this group of disconnected pieces merge into a community in every sense of the word.

A Simple Idea

One of the big problems with being habitual multigamers is the fact that guilds are often transistory and it is hard to constantly muster a new batch of people to play whatever game is coming down the pipe. Additionally since not every game will end up being ideal for everyone, this means you have massive amounts of fragmentation as folks leave a given game for something new. The idea was that each individual guild would take responsibility for the reigns of the games that they were most into, and then that way as gamers we would have access to a good and familiar guild regardless of the game we choose to play. Over the coming months I would like to see this formalized into a sort of Rosetta stone for who has which guilds where and just how active each of them are.

The problem is that since we each have our own guild identities, it felt odd to constantly ask players to register an account on a new forum for each group. As a result we tried a few different things to have a shared neutral ground between the communities. The first of these efforts was the Alliance of Awesome reddit… and while it worked well enough, it caused as much frustration as it solved. Then I stumbled onto Anook and it seemed almost perfectly suited for us. It offered public and private forums, an events calendar and was more gamer social network than private site allowing folks to link everything up to the games they are streaming into the shared hub… or in the verbiage of that network a “nook”. This also lets the bloggers in our midst share our posts easily on the nooks blog, and so far that seems to also be working well.

A Unified Approach

Over the last few months we have been melding significantly. Elder Scrolls Online launch for example was the first real “Alliance of Awesome” foray, and while we still kept to the branding of House Stalwart… it was very much a shared occasion. With the launch of Wildstar, we had no real forerunner guild wise that looked to be taking up the reigns. Instead we opted to drop any specific guild branding and simply go with the “Alliance of Awesome” for our guild name. Honestly I have to say it feels very natural and I can see eventually we may drop the individual guild monikers and just do things from that standpoint.

The biggest problem I forsee moving forward is the fact that right now we are still very much utilizing two completely separate voice servers. A good chunk of the House Stalwart guild is still very happily playing World of Warcraft and doesn’t really care about any other game on the market. The rest of us are pretty nomadic, but we still are far more used to and comfortable with mumble as a communication platform. Multiplaying, Dark Religion, and Mercy Gaming have all standardized on a Teamspeak 3 server run for free by the ever amazing Saia. So I would really like to make a move to trying to use that as well and simply dropping the mumble. That said this feels like a landmine because I have no clue how to convince the WoW-only contingency to abandon mumble and make the shift over to Teamspeak 3. Also I hate to abandon Mumble myself until they have done this, because while I am not playing World of Warcraft on a nightly basis I still hold the guildmaster position and get called on to resolve issues. I want to make sure I am reachable by folks even when I am not in the same game.

Shared Ethics

The other rough spot is that we need to come up with a shared set of rules and codes of conduct. For years House Stalwart has followed a simple “three tenets” approach, and relied on guild leader and officer judgment to fill in the gaps. Zeli tends to favor spelling things out, and considering the large volume of people she has dealt with not completely organically connected… I can totally see why this would be a good thing. After years of trying to “keep things simple” but then having to deal with explaining nuance… I am starting to favor Zeli’s approach to be honest. I hate writing rules, and as such that’s why I came up with the somewhat ambiguous three that we use. I figured that using common sense folks would realize what they meant… problem is not everyone “common” is the same. The further away from the same core of friends you get, the more confusing the interpretation becomes.

Going forward I think we are going to have to just agree upon a shared set of rules, and I think so far the batch Zeli came up with for the Alliance of Awesome guild seems like a great place to begin. The biggest thing I hope out of this is that we are a living community. That we will continue to grow as we adopt other awesome people from twitter, anook, g+, or that we happen to stumble across in game. Also I hope that we do in fact get the Machiavelli’s Cats community to join the fold, and keep finding other like minded groups to rally to the cause. I would really like Alliance of Awesome to not only have an ostentatious name, but also have awesome actions to back it up. I want us to be part of the solution in the games we play, and not part of the problem. I would love to see us better each of the gaming communities we are in.

Giving Back

File:Child's Play Logo updated.png One of the things that Zeli and I have been talking about lately is that we would really like to enter Alliance of Awesome in this years Child’s Play marathon. Far as I can tell this will take place on October 25th, and the idea is to have 25 hours of live streaming for charity. I have wanted to participate in this for years, but I thought it would be more interesting if we signed up a whole bunch of streamers from the Alliance of Awesome community and have one shared channel for the purpose of the event. We have quite a number of people who stream already, and it would be awesome to give each of us like a 4-5 hour block of time to play whatever the hell we want to.

Also lately we have been holding a lot of events in various games. Right now Wednesday nights are “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and those are pretty much only to anyone in the Alliance of Awesome community. Additionally we have been holding a Thursday night “League Beginner Night” to let folks ease into the League of Legends game. So far both events have been a blast and I would love to see them grow beyond the small number of people that we have. I am sure we will be doing something similar for Wildstar, especially with the focus on grouping in that game. I can only see the community as a whole getting better. So here comes the thing I am sure you have all been waiting for. If you are not already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… head over to the website and join our nook. We don’t have any real requirements for membership other than wanting to be around a bunch of awesome people, and striving to be the “white hats” in gaming. If you have a large community, track down myself or Zelibeli and we can see if the entire group would be a good fit for us as well. Growing up as an only child, I always wanted to be surrounded by friends… and on the internet I try my damnedest to surround myself with as many awesome people as I can. So far I think things are going pretty well.

Uniblade Get

June 4, 2014 by Belghast

Scrounging for Copper

The above picture pretty much accurately represents the last several times I have played Landmark. Generally speaking it is on a Tuesday evening when I realize that my claim upkeep will be running out shortly. So I log in and make a mad dash around the area surrounding my claim to scrounge up enough copper to pay the upkeep for another week. Generally speaking I only spend just enough time in game to gather the 4800 copper I believe that is required to unlock another 8 days of upkeep. It really wasn’t until last night that this process started to grate on my nerves, and I began to question what exactly I am trying to protect. In theory I could get my claim repossessed and be free of this burden… but as of yet I have not wanted to give up my “prime real estate” next to the spires.

I guess the thing is I haven’t been super into the game since the end of Alpha and the wipe that lead into Closed Beta. My previous claim I was extremely happy with, this one I am not sure quite what to do with it. It is this hulking monstrosity that I have zero desire to decorate further. I have reached a point where Landmark just isn’t that fun for me right now, or more so there just isn’t enough “game” there yet. What they have is this great rules driven building game, but after a point building stuff becomes stale. I look at all the harvest time I would have to sink in to be able to build the things that I would want to build… and I simply am unwilling to devote the time. I feel like maybe once combat goes in, that the game might be more tangible for me, that it might feel like there is a purpose to what I am doing. It was amazing just how strong of an incentive “protecting against monster attacks” was to spur on my building sprees in Minecraft. For the time being however I am seriously considering harvesting up all of the stone and other resources used on my claim and just letting it get repossessed this week. That way I could mark one game off my list until it becomes interesting again.

No More Loot Boxes

Another decision I have made is to drop my Rift patron status. I’ve subscribed to this game for pretty much all of the time it has been out on the market save for about three months. There is so much that I still like about Rift, but at the same time I just have no drive to play it. I have a ritual of logging in every Wednesday to collect the weekly patron gift, opening it… seeing if I get any cool armor and then logging right back out. Since I have geared both my Warrior and my Rogue in this fashion… and I have faltered at leveling my Cleric, I just can’t justify keeping up the patron status for a game I really have not played much at all in the last year. I have 90 days left of patron status, so I might in that time change my mind, but presently I just don’t have enough people to play the game with to make it worth my while.

One of the things that worked out differently than I had hoped with Patron status is the way that loyalty and cash shop currency accrued. That first year when I picked up a year long subscription, I had a massive amount of loyalty and a ton of cash shop currency to blow through as part of the free to play conversion. I made the mistake of assuming that the same thing would happen when I picked up this past years patron status. One of the things I expect out of a free to play “subscription” plan is a month allotment of cash shop currency. Since this isn’t a thing in Rift, I really don’t see much benefit in keeping up the Patron status. Additionally I expected another huge boost to my loyalty level from subbing for another year, and that didn’t happen either. For the time being I will simply play the game like a free to play player does until they give me reason to subscribe again.

Uniblade Get

The last several days in Wildstar have been about one thing and one thing only… trying to get to level 15 and trying to accumulate enough currency to buy a mount when I ding. As a result I have completely ignored the crafting system and sold everything I could possibly sell in an attempt to buy my precious mount. Was it worth the effort? Well the jury is still out on that one, but I do like the looks of my Uniblade. I figured this was the obvious choice for a Chua Engineer, especially since the “Hamster Ball” mount just did not feel dignified. Right now the mount feels a little lackluster since it is only a 15% boost. However it is cool that you can still sprint on a mount and that feels awesome as your engine revs up and such when you do it. The physics of the Uniblade are a little weird, and I have to say I would have honestly rather had the Exiles Grinder mount instead… but all in all I am happy. One bug I encountered is that apparently in order to buy the mount you have to have enough currency to cover the undiscounted price. This means instead of the 1 gold 15 silver price listed you actually have to have something like 1 gold 65 silver to be able to cover the full price… even though it will still only charge you the 1 gold 15 silver.

Now that I have obtained my goal, I am going to be far more interested in random grouping. I kind of wanted to meet up with people last night and group, but I was so focused on grinding out my level and trying to get as many saleable items as possible. This meant doing much lower content than I should have been doing, since it rewards less experience but I was more likely to accumulate a lot of saleable items in the process. One of the interesting things about Wildstar is that unlike World of Warcraft, you only seem to gain guild experience while grouped with other guildies. This means that in order to unlock all of the perks like the guild bank, we are going to have to group together and go do content. Now that I have level 15 I am really looking forward to trying the first dungeon… and I am imagining that it rewards a ton of guild experience. My next goal is to find a decent weapon, as I am still using some random drop green. My hope is that whatever dungeon quests exist I will maybe get a blue weapon from them. I also need to do some research into which tanking abilities I need to do a dungeon.

Wildstar Groupage

Since we are taking the night off from Elder Scrolls Online my goal tonight is to get some Wildstar grouping going. The goal is to resume the Cyrodil nights next Wednesday, and I hope to play quite a bit over the weekend as well. I still want to see so much in Elder Scrolls, but face it… this is launch week for a new game, and for the most part folks are going to be playing it. Tonight I want to focus on getting a group going with some Alliance of Awesome guildies and trying to gain lots of guild currency. Zero clue what we will actually be doing, but here is hoping we can find another world boss like we did the other night. If we have enough people it would be awesome to pop our heads into a dungeon.

#Landmark #Rift #Wildstar

Too Many Games

May 30, 2014May 29, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Cheater

Once again I am doing what I consider cheating… which is writing up a post at night that I intend to post in the morning. Basically tomorrow is another one of those “ride in together” days, because directly after work we have a big end of school cookout thing to go to. So I simply won’t have much time to do my faff about verbally thing tomorrow morning. As such I am staging a post tonight, and doing the same thing everyone else… but for whatever reason I feel like I am somehow betraying the ritual by doing. Today’s topic I have been kicking around for awhile, so I figure this is as good of a time to spring it on my adoring readers… look I like to pretend I have adoring readers okay.

Too Many Games

Right now things have reached a sort of critical mass with me, and there are entirely too damned many games right now that I want to be playing. This could not have hit at a worse time considering how busy the tail end of school is combined with the fact that we have weddings and graduations and such to attend. Normally I feel like I can reasonably juggle three to four games at a time bouncing back and forth between them. The other day I posted saying that multi-gaming was even an awesome thing to do… considering it kept you from getting bogged down in the decisions a game company makes that you don’t necessarily agree with. However for me, I am spreading myself super thin with a ton of different activities that I want to be doing. So today I am going out outline each of the games that I am playing and lament the things I would love to have time to do in them.

Elder Scrolls Online

Right now I still consider Elder Scrolls Online my primary game. At roughly two months since headstart I am still very much loving this game. It has some problems, namely with difficulty of grouping, but as far as the game itself goes I dig it massively. I’m working my way through Auridon and slowly creeping up on Veteran Rank 2. I have so much that I still want to do in this game, but lately my schedule has limited my time in it. This is the type of game that I can only really play if I am fully focused on it, and this is doubly so with the veteran content. Shit can go wrong in a heartbeat if you are not doing all the right things, so it means on the nights I am not feeling all that… I end up playing something else.

Wildstar

This game is the new hotness it seems and it launches tomorrow, at least for the headstart folks. I mostly preordered this game in case I decided I was in love with it, and I wanted to make sure I secured the preorder bonuses. I really dig the pre-order house, and I did not care for anything in the Collectors Edition pack… so I went with the normal. I am still so up in the air about this game… there are things I like and things I don’t like. Right now I am simply not sure who is going to win out, however since everyone is playing it, and it scratches the same itch that World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic do… going to give it a good college try.

ArcheAge

Speaking of games I am conflicted about… welcome to ArcheAge. I find so much about this game intriguing and repulsive at the same time. It is this fusion of one of the most interesting games system wise and class wise… combined with one of the worst communities I have experienced. This game has invented new ways for you to grief your fellow players… and this is the sort of thing I have zero interest in. That alone would be enough to make me go running and screaming into the night… but the class system is so damned interesting to me. I love the concept of “Rift without Restrictions” and that is pretty much what the open class system seems like. It reminds me so much of the way the class system for Horizon worked… and that is a great thing.

Heroes of the Storm

I want so badly to be playing this game right now… but I also want so badly to not be playing this game with strangers. The MOBA thing is one of those things that I really only enjoy if I am queuing with people I know. That said supposedly the queue times are greatly improved with the new client. If you are in the HoTS alpha… please let me know! I need more people to queue with, and I feel horrible for being in this game when so many people want in… and not playing it much.

Defiance

The last few nights I have been playing this game again and really enjoying myself. The whole shift in how I approach it has really helped quite a bit. I would love to see more people playing it because I think it would be far more enjoyable to run around as a group. I still have yet to really scratch the surface of any of the story content, and feel like I should do that. Really enjoyed the first season of the television show, and would love to get caught up on the in game content before the next season starts.

Final Fantasy 5

At this point I am behind my friends in this game, and quite honestly I am struggling to get the oomph to play it. That said I feel like I should really finish this game as part of the FF5 draft thing we did. I feel like I would be a horrible person if I didn’t finish it. That said I also know I am going to get talked into doing the Four Job Fiesta in a month… so not sure if I will finish before then either.

Trove

There is something about this game that makes my inner child squeal with glee. Things are just so damned much fun, and the mob design is amazing. That said I have been out so long and so much is changing on what seems to be a near weekly basis that I feel hopelessly lost. At some point I need to resort to reading through all of the patch notes starting around the time I last played in the hopes of understanding how things have changed. The combat in this game is just enjoyable, I only wish I could play it with a controller. I guess in theory I could use one of the keypad mappers but I have been lazy.

Landmark

Oh Landmark… how I love you and am completely bored with you at the exact same time. Right now it is less a game and more a toybox for you to build in, with a ruleset wrapped around it. This was really fun while I had giant things to build… and while I was progressing through the ranks of collecting the next best mining pick. Now that I have topped out, and have fleshed out most of what I wanted to build… I log in pretty much only to mine copper and pay my upkeep. What I need to make me care about this game is the combat system. Here is hoping I will fall back in love with it when I can run around the world killing things.

Diablo 3

I still don’t have a character to 70, and I feel like I have somehow failed for not doing this. Basically this released way too close to the launch of Elder Scrolls Online… and I never gave the game the attention it deserves. At some point soon I really want to work on leveling my crusader, since I have technically beaten the game on my Monk. I am struggling with the desire to simply grind the last two levels to ding 70. I figure at some point I will have a renaissance of caring about d3… but it might be awhile before I cycle around to it again.

Rift

The new souls were released and I have yet to even check them out. I really would like to level my cleric to 60 before the 3.0 patch hits, but I have no clue how long that is. Right now I am logging in on a weekly basis to get my patron gifts and that is about it. I thought it would be really cool to do a streaming series where I try and remember how to tank, and do a public service of tanking elites. I’ve heard the queue times are absolutely insane, and I know personally I have waited over two hours without getting a DPS queue. I still love this game, but at the same time don’t really know what I want to do in it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

A few weeks back I was playing the hell out of SWTOR and enjoying myself. While I have let my subscription lapse again… I would love to pick back up on my Sith Juggernaut and see what happens after Balmorra. I have never actually made it off this planet imperial side, but I was really damned close to doing this when I was last playing. The real challenge will be if I can manage to play the game without subscribing… or will I re-up again only to cancel a few weeks later.

World of Warcraft

Finally there is good ole World of Warcraft. Once upon a time I had a grand idea of getting everyone to 90 before the expansion. I have failed miserably at keeping up with this ambition, but who knows if I will actually do this or not. Right now all I have left are the Priest, Monk and Warlock… all of which are over 60 at the least. The Warlock and Priest are both in Pandaria content, but at the very beginning. I might get a wild urge to play again and push these guys across the finish line. Either that or I might completely abandon this until the release of Warlords of Draenor. In any case the account is still active, because I pop in periodically to dink around with stuff for the guild.

Nothing at All!

Tonight I will be playing…. nothing more than likely. We have an end of school cookout and by the time we get done there… we will likely crash, or walk… or walk then crash. If anything I launch Wildstar and create my characters. Right now I am planning on having my Chua Engineer and an Exile Warrior of some sort… just not sure if that will be Human or Granok. In any case I have nothing exciting to report about my master plan for the evening other than hanging out in the real world and eating some good food.

Rebooting Minecraft

May 16, 2014 by Belghast

Guild Meeting

I have an exciting evening planned that I have been looking forward to for a few weeks. One of my long time House Stalwart guild members is here in town, and tonight we plan on having a board game night. Dallian/Doctor Hannah appeared on Episode 5 of AggroChat, and we mentioned the upcoming visit there. He lives in the Little Rock area which makes him a neighbor of ours as far as the internet is concerned. I always think its cool when I get to meet someone in the flesh that I have gamed with for ages. I think the plan tonight is to play loads of Munchkin and eat pizza at Rae’s house. We’ve tried to invite several of the locals to meet up, so it should be really fun. I am contemplating bringing some magic starter decks, but that might be a little too involved. We’ve been talking with a co-worker about maybe trying to play some magic over lunch soon. Apparently his wife is super into the game and would probably even come up over lunch to play it.

I don’t really do this sort of thing that often. I guess the last guild member that I met up with was Lummox who happened to be about fifteen minutes away from where I happened to be staying in Albany. It is always interesting to see how someone is in real life verses their in game persona. For the most part, a lot of the people I have met have been fairly similar. I have to say the closest was probably Urcasio and Ravener, who were pretty much exactly the people I would have expected based on in game interactions. Since I generally find it easier to meet over food, Dal and I are meeting up before this evening for lunch. For years I have been talking about how amazing Ron’s Hamburgers are, and more importantly their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. So we are meeting up at my favorite location today around 11ish. I would love to somehow steal him to town like I managed to do with Rae. I feel like I am trying to build this little gamer community, one person at a time.

Rebooting Minecraft

Last week one of my new friends Missysmojo decided to try her hand at playing Minecraft. I joked with her that she would end up losing the next three months of her life. She opted to stream a little bit, and it got me thinking. It has been years since I have played Minecraft with any regularity. There have been a few times I patched up my client and connected to the guild server just to see what folks were doing, but I had felt like I had “beaten” Minecraft for some time. In this last year there have been significant changes in the game, and probably even more before that I really never noticed. So I thought I would start a brand new game and play completely legit. No mods, no helpful minimap… just the vanilla client and a texture pack (because yeah that is necessary). The above video is the results of that process last night. I am not really sure yet how often I will be streaming Minecraft, but I expect to continue where I left off each time.

For starters… I am really not used to the game any longer. I kept trying to “suck in” blocks and drops like you do in Trove. The low performance of the game frustrated me, because I am not used to it “chunking” and loading in parts of the game slowly freezing my client momentarily when it does. I am sure this is something I can tweak, because I probably just don’t have enough memory flowing to the default client. There used to be a tool called Magic Launcher that handled a lot of the memory allocation for me, so I might look into that. Another dumbass move is I totally thought I was on “survival” mode for the first little bit, running scared from potential monsters… only to find out that I actually was in peaceful mode on the client. Once I noticed that and changed it things started to get interesting.

For starters, it seems like the creeper spawn rate is insane. I maybe saw one or two zombies and skeletons the first night after flipping it to a normal mode, but I saw what felt like half a dozen creepers. I managed to trap four chickens inside my base and I dug a pit like I often do and have them down there for a constant source of eggs, feathers and meat. At some point I want to try and drag a couple of cows and pigs in there as well so I have all of my livestock needs handy. Most of the video involves me setting up “base” as I hollow out a mountain, search for coal and finally start digging down into the earth in search of steel. I encounter a cave with a skeleton spawner in it… and have a pretty epic battle trying to break the cave and torch it off. I had quite a bit of fun, or at least more fun with Minecraft than I have had in ages.

Bunny Doom

I love everything there is to love about the Shin’hare, and the fact that they exist makes Hex so much more enjoyable than Magic the Gathering ever could be. It’s an entire race of adorable evil samurai bunnies… you could slap that into ANY game and I would play it. As a kid one of my favorite comic book characters was Usagi Yojimbo… so everything about this deck feeds my enjoyment. Not to mention that my favorite deck combination in Magic the Gathering was Green and Black… and the Shin’hare are exactly that… Life and Blood aka Green and Black. In some ways it reminds me of playing my thalid deck circa Fallen Empires. I would constantly use that deck to feed my black “sacrifice or I feed” cards. While I am lacking some of the cards in Hex to make this work really well, the starter deck mixed with a few cards I got from my packs seems to be working okay.

Last night I got in and played a few hands against the AI, mostly because it was getting late and I didn’t want to deal with people. I am anxious for when trading comes into play, because of my group of friends I think I am really the only hardcore bunny player. I should be able to help some of them out with cards they are looking for and bolster my bunny army. My all time favorite card is still the Uzume, Grand Concubunny. Not only is the artwork adorable, but the card is insane when you get it out into play.

When I first read this card, I assumed it would start dropping the 0/1 battle hopper tokens that the other Shin’hare cards do on the table. While that would have been good enough, considering the normal concubunnies you have to expend resources and tap them to get this effect. The real effect however is so much better, in that it summons a random non-unique bunny card into play. This can be ANY card, even ones you don’t currently have in your deck. It is literally generating cards for you, but the problem is this makes the card and insane aggro magnet.

I need to formulate some ways to protect the card, because really it is too damned valuable to not have it on the board for more than a few turns. Hopefully soonish I can get together with my other friends currently in the closed beta and play some actual matches. I feel like Kodra is in a completely different league with me, and like to play a style of magic that I do not… but this will not stop me from attempting to beat him. He royally kicked my ass in hearthstone, but it didn’t stop me from coming back for more. These type of games for me are about the moment to moment play and not whether or not I win. In fact that can pretty much be said with any game I play, I am just not that competitive. It is about the journey not the win conditions.

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