Geekdom Archives - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Conflicted Feels

December 18, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend we ended up recording a full on spoilers Last Jedi show because it seemed to be a reasonable thing to do. Functionally all of the AggroChat crew had already seen the movie and were ready to start talking about it. In this discussion however I seemed to be the odd man out in the way I feel about the movie. In truth I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it on Thursday night when I saw it, and as I saw it Saturday with my wife I started to get more critical of it. When we walked out of the theater my wife was similarly not sure how she felt about the movie, and then as we were walking to the car said she was a little disappointed. The problem is that seed grows over time and there are certain things in the movie that really bother me. It has a film with a lot of really awesome moments, knitted together by a bunch of other stuff that I am not really sure how to think about it. Essentially I am at a place where I feel like this is the weakest of the modern Star Wars movies and I place it firmly behind Empire Strikes Back, Force Awakens, Rogue One and A New Hope. There are individual moments however that could easily elevate the movie above all of those… were the rest of the film that strong as well. I remember thinking Thursday night… that the movie seemed really long but I mostly chocked that up to being after midnight when we got out of the theater. When we watched it as a matinee on Saturday morning however… it felt somehow longer. My biggest frustration is that the movie really answers none of the questions I had in a satisfying manner, but I won’t go further than that. If you want to hear the whole spoilery conversation check out the podcast episode because I elaborate on a lot of things there… and end up being the single person who seems to feel this way out of the crew. I want so bad to love this movie… but I am just struggling with it much the same way as I did the prequels. I was born and bred with Star Wars in my veins… seeing the first movie as a toddler in the theater… but I am struggling hard to maintain that hype and love.

While sitting around questioning how I felt about the direction of the Star Wars franchise… I spent a significant amount of time playing World of Warcraft. The irony here is that Warcraft is another franchise I often have deep problems with but keep returning because there is a nostalgic core there that I still love. Belghast the Female Orc Warrior on Scryers dinged 110 last weekend and since then I have been focusing on gearing up. This largely has meant a lot of running world quests and more specifically unlocking a good deal of the content on Argus. In the last week and some change I have managed to raise my item level to 896 which means that I can run the LFR version of Antorus. In addition to this I have mostly just been focusing on slowly raising my level by knocking out the world quests that give me things that are useful. Additionally I am trying to burn through all of the Argus quests that I come across in the hopes of gathering enough of <insert newest currency name here> to be able to purchase 910 items. Luckily the world quest drops seem to be scaling quite a bit as I ratchet my level up there and as a result I am creeping closer and closer to 900. The biggest challenge right now is the fact that I have yet to see any Legendary items in spite of doing a bunch of stuff that could in theory get me one. Either they have greatly nerfed the drop rate… or I am just super unlucky. In truth what I need to focus on is finishing my Order Hall campaign, because the fact that I have not done so is starting to hold me back in a bunch of ways. I think tonight pending I feel like doing group content… I will sit down and force my way through it because I know there are still a bunch of missions that I need to run. Essentially I need to finish Valsharah and do some dungeons before I can get to the next set of order hall quests.

In Porg We Trust

December 15, 2017 by Belghast

This morning I do not have a whole lot to say because yesterday I got home at midnight. I had a work dinner thing and then afterwards several of us went to see Star Wars The Last Jedi. It is still way in the “too soon” territory for really talking about this movie at length. I was weirdly not super hyped about this movie before its release. Like I always knew it was on the horizon and that I would eventually go to see it over the Christmas break, but I wasn’t clamoring to see it the way I had been the previous movies. More than anything I think I just lucked into seeing it on opening night… which is confusing because technically tonight is the opening night but Thursday is now the universal pre-opening night? I am more into world building than I am into individual stories, and unfortunately after the movie I feel just as clueless about a lot of things as I did going into it. That said it was a fun experience and I look forward to watching it again. In theory I will be taking my wife to a matinee tomorrow morning, since she could not attend last night. We also did not have the most ideal seats given that we were on the front row staring up at the movie, so there is some aspect of scaling and grandeur that I likely lost. The big takeaway from the movie is that the porgs are in fact every bit as adorable as they seem in the pre-launch hype. I feel like there isn’t enough love for the crystalline fox things, because they were pretty great as well. As far as characters go… all of our favorites from Force Awakens improved over the course of the movie… and I am completely in love with Rose. I thought for certain we were going in for a Empire Strikes back sort of movie… but in truth it ended in a very different manner making me extremely interested in where we are going for episode nine. All in all I had a great time and will likely see it multiple times while it is still in the theaters.

Bizarre Obsession

July 17, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend we recorded somewhat of a mega show of AggroChat. We originally sat down thinking we might not have a complete show… and then recorded for two hours and wound up dropping a few topics to try and manage the show length. There were a whole slew of topics but one of which is one that I did not expect to blow up to the level at which it did. Kodra has been talking magic for a year or so in his adventures in doing drafts through Magic Online for each of the expansion releases that have happened. Lately however I have found myself obsessing about the game even though I have not regularly played it since the tempest cycle. Magic the Gathering will always have this nostalgic characteristic for me because I have had a lot of really good times playing it. The problem is… once I entered the adult world I stopped having a regular stream people to play with. I’ve never really gotten involved with a local shop doing the Friday night magic thing, because in truth people just don’t play Magic the Gathering the way I want to play it. The prevalence of NetDecking and combo magic turned things into a weird cold war… where you either needed to be playing whatever the new hotness needed to be… or at least come up with a way to counteract that new hotness. When I last stopped playing… the format of choice was called “Type II” and I believe this translates to the “Standard” in the current naming of formats. So when I left during the Tempest cycle it was all about the combo to beat… and either scrambling to get the cards… or scrambling to get something to beat it.

The style of Magic the Gathering I enjoyed was back when you never quite knew what you might be encountering in a players deck. Maybe it just took my area while to get super competitive, but in early tournament play I only ever once encountered the “power nine” but instead came up against a lot of seemingly fun to play themed decks. For me a lot of my decks centered around some card that I wanted to play with… and then blunting the negative effects of that card. So say I wanted to play with the Lord of the Pitt, I would run some token creatures that I could just keep churning out to feed to it rather than pay the 7 life upkeep. If I wanted to play with Leviathan I would run Icy Manipulator and Twiddle to keep from having to pay the two island tax to untap it each round, then figure out some way to retrieve islands from the graveyard every so often. It was fun trying to figure out a way to counteract what was not good about the cards and then figure out how to make them work well enough to be playable. Some of the most fun I ever had was in college the magic store I used to hang out in had a deep common bin… and we would end up building these $5 decks out of the archives and then pit them against each other. I guess the modern equivalent to this would be pauper, but even then… that format takes itself way more seriously than I wish I could when it comes to MTG. I’ve been trying to sort out a way to play the game how I want to play it… but also find some people to play with.

The biggest problem right now is availability of people. There are enough folks who have played MTG at one point in their lives to maybe create a lunch time group at work. The problem there I am not not sure what sort of format would work best. I am leaning towards something janky along the lines of Pauper Commander… without the commanders. Where you functionally construct a deck of common cards without the ability to repeat any cards. I would functionally need to probably fund a lot of the commons given that there are simply not enough in any one set to make up a deck of entirely common cards. I think a format like that however might bring back the random weirdness that I miss from playing Magic. There were moments where you would sit down and encounter something you never expected to see… and it would be interesting to figure out how to adjust to that and find a way to either defeat it or work around it. In truth I love common cards, because they tend to be the unappreciated workhorses of magic. It always bugs me a bit when people just dismiss them and toss them aside like garbage… when you cannot really make ANY deck without relying on a whole slew of them to serve as the glue between those higher dollar cards. I have no clue how this will end but thusfar it has simply been a case of be re-familiarizing myself with Magic the Gathering and trying to figure out if this is really something I want to jump back into.

Lost in Maguuma

February 9, 2015 by Belghast

Wanderlust

Yesterday was a bit of a busy day for many reasons. Firstly getting home super late Saturday night, and then recording AggroChat extremely late, meant that more or less I just straight up crashed instead of editing the recording. This meant first thing yesterday morning I had to edit the podcast and post it. After that I of course still had a blog to write, and needed to spend some time working on another article as well. Throughout all of this there were two problems. Firstly I had a splitting headache the likes of which I have not seen in almost a year. Secondly it was absolutely gorgeous outside, with the temperatures rising up to roughly 80* F yesterday. So my wife and I hemmed and hawed as to whether or not we would actually go do anything. Finally around 3pm yesterday afternoon we decided to get outside and go wandering about.

I’ve talked about the fact that any town of a decent size around me has a Wal-mart. It has always been this way, because quite honestly I live in the Wal-mart heartland, with Bentonville the home office only about two hours away. The first first Wal-mart supercenter in existence is about 30 minutes away in the town of Wagoner for example. Big Wal-mart stores are boring, utilitarian and predictable… but going to smaller less shopped stores often provides this strange melange of products that they still have on the shelf. Each store has a certain amount of discretion as to what they can clearance, so this means that shopping multiple stores might yield completely different results. As such a few times of the year it is prime territory for hunting down clearance Legos.

We set forth on an adventure that took us through three very small locations, and while my wife found more interesting stuff than I did, at the second store… a store I had good luck with last year… I managed to pick up a couple of really cool Star Wars sets at a deep discount. First up I found the Lego AT-AP walker which was originally $60 for the much more reasonable price of $30. Then at a considerably worse deal I picked up the originally $25 General Grievous Wheel Bike set for $19… which admittedly I only jumped at because the General Grievous figure is just so badass looking. This season honestly has been pretty slim pickings, largely because Wal-mart has started doing this annoying thing. They will throw something on clearance… and change the sticker color to red… but have the item marked at its normal price. Essentially I look up each Lego set and if the savings is not 50% off I generally don’t jump at it. This has netted me some pretty cool finds like the SWTOR Sith Fury for $60 but in order to find them… you have to be diligent, and for me the fun is more about the hunt than the finding.

Lost In Maguuma

One of the other things of note that happened yesterday while watching the return of Walking Dead is that I managed to hit level 60 on my Warrior in Guild Wars 2. I am still knee deep in the Maguuma jungle region and right now I find myself shifting between Sparkfly Fens and Bloodtide Coast, largely be cause the Fens simply got too “big” for me as I kept wandering into level 62 areas and having to deal with constant glancing blows. This leaves me 20 levels to go before I hit the Guild Wars 2 endgame, whatever that might be. One of the things that has always bothered me about this game is that I never managed to max a character out. Eighty levels is a rather daunting task, especially when you don’t find yourself really enjoying the game play. That said I am generally known for having multiple max level characters in any game I play, so it felt like a weak spot in my armor that I could not stomach the grind in this one game.

Maguuma region is a bit of a slog, which has me concerned for the Heart of Thorns expansion. I really do not like Jungle or Swamp regions in video games. I was having a blast so long as I stuck to the snowy peaks of the Norn regions, but once I wandered into the swampy zombie filled wasteland… the fun factor of the game went down significantly. Here is hoping that I can stomach it just enough to graduate into the higher zones. All of the guides I have read say that I should really be doing dungeons to level… but I am admittedly scared of them. The shitty dungeon experience was what ended up killing the game for me the first time. Right now I am enjoying the soloing over world gameplay style, and I am afraid if I go into the dungeons again… and they end up still being the chaotic and exploitative mess that they were originally… that it will enrage me enough to halt my journey.

The Real Game

One of the biggest frustrations for me when it comes to online games is when a massive shift in the way the game feels happens. Most games have this highly tailored starter experience to ease players into the game, and then something happens as though the really polished section of the game flew away. Sometimes this transition is gradual, and other times it is quite literally like having the bottom dropped out from under you. I’ve not written much about Albion Online because to some extent I fell off that rather steep cliff. The first two tiers of content felt really fun and natural as I wandered around the world collecting resources to be able to craft nifty things. Then I reached tier 3… and the fun drained away quickly. The game up until that point had been around gathering materials and lugging them back to town so that you could use the crafting machines and fashion them into whatever you might like. When you hit Tier 3, the crafting machines start charging you a fee to use them. This is the equivalent of having to pay every time you need to use the anvil in a World of Warcraft town.

The problem with this is that there really aren’t that many gold fountains that I have seen so far, but the machine problem ends up to be a rather massive gold sink. Granted at this point I don’t even know if there is such a thing as gold in the game… because I have only managed to gather up a few silver to my name. Admittedly this is their pricing scheme… to get players to purchase gold, to ease the process of playing the game. According to the pricing listed on the founders pack information, it looks like $20 would get you 4500 gold, and $50 would get you 12,000 gold. Not that either of these is an absolutely insane price for what seems to be the purchasing power that gets you, but I have essentially stopped playing because I quickly realized this game was unsustainable without either grinding bandits for days… or plunking down some cold hard cash for a game that was only mildly enjoyable in the first place. This is a bit of a shame, because really Albion does have some really interesting ideas at work. I might piddle with it off and on still to see just how deep the money chasm is, but if nothing else for the time being it has most definitely halted my forward momentum.