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Warlock Banana

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Last night did not go exactly as expected, but I am pretty pleased with the results anyways.  Last night was a good night, and it started from the moment I got home and got a bunch of things accomplished while waiting on the rice cooker.  After a furious round of chores, my wife and I sat down to eat and then I was off to play some PS4.  With my leg in its current mauled state it hurts to sit on the couch given that in order to use my laptop I need to use the recliner.  This ends up putting pressure on the four wounds and while I can take it for a few minutes… it doesn’t exactly make for comfortable gaming.  As a result I am largely upstairs right now, and other than being isolated from my wife it does give me access to my gaming consoles and my legit gaming desktop. The original goal for last night was going to involve running around and doing stuff  with some friends in Destiny, but while waiting for that to happen I decided to start doing Iron Banner on my Warlock.  I had not actually touched the Banner on either the Warlock or the Hunter during Year 3, and as a result I had the Lady Efrideet quests to complete which also reward some gear.  I managed to exit the week long even with my Titan main at 393, Warlock caught up to 391 and my Hunter lagging a bit out of disuse at 389.

I’ve tried a whole slew of weapons and honestly nothing makes me nearly as happy as my Year 2 Iron Banner Auto Rifle… the Haakon’s Hatchet.  So for the most part playing on my Warlock meant swapping this over via Destiny Item Manager.  For those who are not using this I highly suggest installing the chrome plugin, because it greatly improves the utility of being able to swap gear while playing the game.  Essentially I swapped my Auto Rifle and my Gjallarhorn over and was off to the races.  There is a part of me that is sad that this Auto Rifle just simply doesn’t exist any more.  I wish there was something you could do, like a weekly bounty for Lord Saladin that rewarded the year two weapons… just a random draw at the huge vat of available options.  Range Finder is one of those perks on a weapon that I feel like gets overlooked a lot, but given the normal crap range on this weapon… with that perk it allows me to melt targets an entire map away it seems.  Counter Balance and Perfect Balance on the same weapon always makes it feel great and I think a huge part of why I keep favoring this weapon… is that I have used it so much that I can predict exactly how it is going to behave in pretty much every situation.

Throughout the course of the evening I managed to go from Rank 0 to Rank 5 and complete all four of the bounties on my Warlock along with the three one time Lady Efrideet quests.  That meant I saw an awful lot of gear as a result.  Most of it was largely “more of the same” but I am picking out a few items to talk about.  Firstly I am not a huge fan of Sidearms, but I am trying to learn how to use them.  They play this interesting role of operating somewhere just outside of shotgun range but largely something you swap to when you empty your primary.  Normally speaking I would just infuse this into a weapon I am more familiar with but for the moment I am holding onto it largely because I think the perk package looks interesting.  With Hand Loaded and Range Finder… this means my side arm is going to have a massive operating range, and with Quickdraw I will be able to swap to it extremely quickly.  Combine this with the already insane Stability and Rate of Fire on the weapon… and it might be useful if I can learn to use it well.

One of the strange things about Iron Banner is that your drops seem to be extremely character dependent.  For example this time around the drops that were available were Class Items, Helms, Artifacts, Ghost Shells, Scout Rifles, and Fusion Rifles.  On my Titan I got Fusion Rifles almost exclusively, save for a single Distant Star Scout Rifle drop.  On my Warlock…  the Scout Rifles were raining down upon me.  I still think that more than likely I am going to be using the vendor roll which includes Full Auto… giving me a crazy high power auto rifle hybrid thing.  However I did manage to get a few other interesting rolls, including the one above that I thought were worth talking about.  Firstly to spec this out I would end up taking Braced Frame… which I really don’t like doing because it reduces the magazine size.  For the second pick I would ultimately take High Caliber Rounds to give some stagger and a bit more impact, and lastly would probably go for Firefly…  just because right now I don’t have a decent scout rifle with that on it.  For the un-initiated Firefly makes it so that when you kill a with a headshot… it causes it to explode dealing damage to all other mobs around it.  Firefly does a really great job at helping with wave clear and it is just fun to watch all of these things explode.  All in all it was a pretty great week in the Banana, and I am hoping the next time it comes around I can maybe push my army of characters up to 400ish.

Four Years of Thought

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This is going to be a bit of an odd video this morning, and largely one without any screenshots.  There has been a side project that I have been working on for some reason.  Like I am not purposefully being vague, but more that I am not entirely certain why I started down this path or what exactly has kept me going.  In theory it is going to lead to some sort of a year end post, but I am still working out the details there.  The important part is that this side project has caused me to go back through every post between 2013 and 2016… aka the period where my blog has actually been prolific.  For reference… there are a little shy of 1500 posts on this blog, and all but about a hundred of those have occurred during the window above.  It is really when I started doing the daily posting thing, that my blog became of any actual relevance…  and even then I have backed off that significantly with only doing week day posts.  The strange thing about this process is that you can learn an awful lot about yourself when you sift through roughly four years worth of posts… or in truth 45 months.  It was bizarre seeing how I have changed and how my thoughts have evolved during that period.  I’ve always prided myself in being someone in a constant state of flux… picking up new ideas, evaluating them and then either keeping my old one… or jettisoning it in favor of the new information.  This is extremely evident when you look at that first year versus what I am currently writing.

The weirdest take away that I was not expecting…  is that I am simply not interacting with other bloggers as much as I used to be.  At face value that seems odd because I am actually talking to other bloggers on a daily basis be it through social media, a private chat network like slack/discord or now the brand new Imzy forum.  What I mean instead is that there is not quite the blog to blog exchange of ideas that there once was.  While going through my posts I noticed that so often there was another blog post that would ultimately spawn me to talk about the same issue, or a tweet that kicked off an idea.  That just isn’t happening nearly as much as it once did, and I think that is a multi fold issue.  Firstly I am much more sluggish in reading blog posts than I used to be, thanks to trying to write a blog post column…  and as a result ballooning my RSS feed to include over six hundred gaming blogs.  However the other thing going on is that it feels like as a broad community we are simply not creating the same gaming think pieces that we once did.  We are no longer dragging out mechanics and tropes and investigating what works or does not work about them.  That is not to say that some people are not doing this…  but it feels like less of the community is and as a result the constant flow of ideas is not really there.

The other thing that I noticed is how much of a chilling effect Gamer Gate had on our community as a whole.  There are a whole lot of folks who simply left the game blogging community during that time and have never really returned.  Some of my most constant collaborators from the past…  simply don’t blog about games anymore.  Even more however seemed to greatly reduce their regular posting around that time.  It is as though we all got afraid to talk to one another, at least in a public venue like our blogs.  Now that same discourse is happening, but it is playing out through walled gardens like slack and discord, and not out there in the open for anyone to spawn an additional topic off of.  I know that personally I am significantly more guarded for fear of a wave of horribleness washing over my blog and sweeping me out to sea. The fear of this wave however has eroded more of the community than the wave probably could have itself.  The new normal after these events seems to be that we largely have kept our thoughts to ourselves, or shifted our attention to other communities to talk about.  Movies and Media for example seems to be a popular offshoot from our community for example.

I am not really presenting any remedy here, but just mourning the way the community felt… and how it influenced my blog.  I’ve always been a bit of an island here on the Aggronaut, but in the past I would take in ideas from outside myself…  sift through them and present them in my own way, and I just find myself not doing that nearly as much as I once did.  I think there is a general feeling that something is missing however, because of the rapid effect that a random twitter storm ended up spawning the Imzy forum.  I think there is a general sense that something changed, without a real understanding of how to get back to normal afterwards.  I might just be talking out of my ass here, but I have definitely felt it and for the last year and some change I have largely felt “off balance”.  It is only recently that the clouds have felt like they have tangibly parted for me… and that I can once again see any glimmer of the sun.  The past year and a half has been a time when we are constantly barraged with a shit storm of forces well beyond our control, and I honestly felt battered by it to the point of not being able to think much past the current week.  Things are not better, in fact things seem to be getting worse… but in many ways it feels like I maybe have my “sea legs” and have figured out how to return to some sense of stability.  I am attempting to stream again… and I am contemplating trying to reboot “Bel Folks Stuff”.

Literally everything in this post might just be a “from my perspective” sort of thing.  Maybe it is just me who has been in an odd place, and have detached from the community.  My entire life I have alternated between periods of engagement and periods of retraction when things got too chaotic.  I tend to think of these as “turtling” when I pull my head back up inside of my shell.  The past year has felt like one long turtle period, where I was constantly in hiding from whatever perceived thing was chasing me.  All of that said… it still feels like our community has also retracted during that same period.  Folks are largely doing their own thing now and I think in a large part it has been our way of forward momentum.  I guess I am ready to poke my head back out and return to what used to be “normal”.  I am wondering if others are feeling the same thing.  I am not happy with myself, and have not been for a very long time… but that too can change.  I realize this is a bit of an odd morning post, but it largely has some things that I have been mulling over and wanted to throw out there.  Reading four years of your own writing can make you extremely introspective… and in truth I wouldn’t suggest doing it.  That said I still think the project I am currently working on is going to be interesting at least.

Working Weekend

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Well this morning is not getting off to a glorious start.  File this under the category of more issues with web hosting.  I seem to be unable to upload any new files to any of my blogs.  Some sort of permission issue, and unfortunately not one that I can remedy myself with the level of access that I have.  We had an issue over the weekend where my sites got peppered with a bunch of bad files that were being used to send spam mail.  As a result I think the web host maybe locked things down a little too tight.  I spent the bulk of my Saturday morning going directory by directory and deleting this fishy files that had gotten uploaded through some exploit somewhere along the line.  However in the meantime I can’t upload any new images… which kinda derails the whole process of blogging for me.  Instead of writing a proper post I have spent the last forty five minutes trying to resolve the issue on my own with zero luck.

As far as gaming this weekend I was all over the place.  I played some Rift and made it to level 67 in the Gedlo Badlands, and also partook of the weekend mount sale to pick up a couple of the previously lockbox only mounts including the back warmech thing.  Early in the week I had set my goals on leveling the Deathknight in World of Warcraft to 110.  Then I found out that the frost hidden appearance that drops from this weeks world boss… also requires Artifact Knowledge 4, which was not something I could hope to finish during the timeframe.  That said I still have been having an awful lot of fun on the Deathknight and even casually playing without a serious push… I managed to get him to just shy of 108.  In Destiny I worked on getting all three of my characters through the various weekly quests available from Shiro in the Iron Temple.  I now have all three classes at 385 or above with my Titan being the highest at 387.  Other than that I started Dishonored 2 and am struggling to get into it.  I am not sure what it is about the setting but it is far less interesting to me than Dunwall.  I am not terribly far in so I am going to continue giving it a shot until hopefully it clicks.

Other than all of this… my weekend was perforated by a lot of things happening at work that I ultimately had to log in and deal with.  A prime example is that I had been trying to finish a dungeon needed by my Deathknight when I had to drop the dungeon finder group… and hop on a conference call for an hour to try and sort out what was happening.  The problem with being salary…  and not having an official on-call rotation is that it means you are always on call.  We sorted it out but it was a something looming over my head because you are never quite certain when you are really “out” for the day.  I thought I put things to bed at 11 am… and I kept getting pulled back in until around 7 pm my time.  Something similar happened on Saturday as well, and I had to stop what I was doing and drive back to the house just to get in for thirty minutes to fix something.  As a result it felt like this really strange pseudo working weekend, and with us skipping the recording of AggroChat something felt off the entire time.  It is funny now our rituals ground us… and now badly I needed mine to make the weekend feel normal.  Raiding Karazhan I guess however helped to serve as a great cap to the weekend, seeing as we once again had a pretty smooth clear.

 

Confessions of an Aging Gamer

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I had some thing happen to me this morning while playing Rift that has happened countless times.  I got a message to the effect of “Hai Belghast!” from someone that I noticed is in fact on my friends list.  However for the life of me I have no clue who it is based on the name.  Not wanting to seem like a heartless bastard I play along, until finally some nugget of a conversation triggers in my head and explains to me that yes… I do in fact know the person and who they are.  Essentially my brains filing system works really weirdly when it is concerned with other people.  I meticulously file away bits of information like personal details… hell sometimes even emotions or songs that I attribute to that person…  my brain building this complex network of only vaguely connected information that I equate to as this person.  However often times when it comes to a name… that information is filed as unimportant and is often jettisoned into the sands of time.  Now there are some folks that use the same name in every single game… and for them I have a bit more rote memorization of those names…  and even better if they happen to recycle the same fragment of a name over and over like I do with “Bel”.  However the problem is after a couple of decades of playing MMOs… I have had so many names associated to so many different people crammed in my skull that it all sort of blends together.

If you think of it like this…

  • Everquest – probably had a pool of about 500 player names that I had to memorize and associate with one another on both Veeshan and Xegony the servers I played on.
  • Dark Age of Camelot – this was a relatively small guild, and we were part of a relatively small alliance so probably 200 names or so.
  • Horizons – I got active in the larger community here so probably around 300 names that I had to sort out and try and remember.
  • City of Heroes – all told probably about 300 names as well but there was a lot of carry over from EQ, DAoC and Horizons.
  • World of Warcraft – Recently we hit the 1000 character cap in the guild… and considering longevity and activity in the community as a whole both horde and alliance side in multiple guilds 2000 names or so total.
  • Rift – Been in several guilds on several servers…  so probably around 300 names to remember.
  • Guild Wars 2 – Not as active here but in four guilds so probably around 200 names to remember.
  • Elder Scrolls Online – We had 150 players at launch… and this was a strange once since we interacted with account names not characters.
  • Final Fantasy XIV – last I checked we were at around 300 characters in the guild, and if you factor in random community folks and other linkshells that probably goes up to around 500 character names.

So not factoring other games in…  we are already up to around 5000 character names that are swimming around in my head looking for associations with some bundle of information about them.  Then there are a plethora of other games, twitter, raptr, steam and other means of contact that I have with names associated there is quite literally no way I could possibly keep up with it all.  I am trying to fake it like a pro but sometimes I fail miserably.  The problem is I want to remember, I want to know exactly who someone is just looking at a name but I simply can’t every time.  What is extra frustrating about it is… that the information is up there somewhere because I rarely if ever forget.  I just have the worlds worst filing system because I associate things with bits of information that make horrible indexes.  I mean how can you search by a feeling…  when you are only inputting a name?  Anyways so firstly I want to apologize if you are ever happy to see me logging in and I am super distant at first.  What I am honestly doing is trying to get more information from you to connect the puzzles pieces until it all comes snapping into focus.  Imagine yourself in a library where there are tons of books but no filing system… and the ones that you used last are of course the easiest to get to.  However the ones that haven’t been touched for months or years… they are going to take awhile to uncover but are eventually reachable.

I am not sure how much of this really is aging, and how much is the fact that I have way more information in my brain today that I had a decade or two ago.  I grew up in a small town where I only ever knew a couple hundred people total in my life.  Now I interact with literally thousands of people on a monthly basis, and in doing so…  I am desperately trying to care deeply about each and every one of them.  The empathy section of my brain is sort of permanently working on overdrive trying to grasp and hold as many people as I can in my monkeysphere while at the same time trying to lose as little information on the ones that just happen to slip out.  I realize this is a bit of an odd topic, and it is once again coming late in the day as I sit down at the keyboard for the first time for any extended length of time.  I guess I am proving that I can in fact write both in the early morning and in the evening.  In any case know that I really do care, I just sometimes need more time to boot up my search engine than others when it comes to retrieving any meaningful information from a name.  The image is of course not connected to this topic at all… I just wanted to somehow blunt the wall of text with a cool mount.