Tales of the Aggronaut

The Console Embargo Sucks

October 28, 2020 by Belghast

Unboxing culture is the actual worst. We’ve arrived at this point where watching someone open something is high dollar entertainment. I say that and as you can tell YouTube is giving away my secret that I did in fact watch the iJustine video because I personally found it entertaining and I worry about myself greatly because of that fact. Yesterday was the embargo date for the PS5… but not in any meaningful way. It was the day that those deemed worthy of receiving a press unit in the mail were able to actually open the box and show the contents to the world. Prior to this they were simply able to show off the box that they received and many did just that in reference to other Sony PlayStation boxes.

There is another embargo date on November 6th that actually allows them to talk about the unit, how it plays, the user interface and all of the other things that folks actually care about. What is making this so insufferable is the fact that we just went through something similar with the Microsoft Xbox Series X. When folks got their hands on units initially they were limited in what they could actually show… namely they could really only talk about application start up time improvements. I don’t believe we have actually seen third party footage of anything other than current generation games running on the Xbox hardware.

What multiplies the infuriation of this whole drawn out process is the fact that it is highly unlikely that the majority of folks wanting one will be able to purchase either an Xbox Series X or a Sony PlayStation 5. Unless they are just about to open the floodgates… the units are going to be in very high demand and as a result very short supply. In both cases there was discussion about multiple waves of preorders that as far as I am aware never actually materialized. I would expect there to be some sort of a restock around Thanksgiving/Black Friday and another possibly closer to Christmas but the stock is going to be tight more than likely until well into the new year.

The end result is simply that the TechTubers are being orchestrated by these massive corporations to whip folks into a frenzy… over something that realistically they can’t actually buy. Now please note… I don’t blame the reviewers because they have been given a golden ticket with an expiration date that allows them to draw a whole lot of eyeballs to their channel with something that the masses are interested in. Same is true for all of the Streamers that suddenly switched to Genshin Impact as they were trying to draw in the eyeballs as that game was booming. Who I blame is the console manufacturers because this entire generational rollout has been a mess of playing cat and mouse around releasing details.

All of the information that has been drip fed over the course of the last two quarters… should have come out in a single push around June pending there was actually an E3 this year. I think the last minute nature of everything has doomed this to be a rough launch. I say all that feeling relatively certain that I have a pre-order unit locked in. Even then however I am not 100% certain that I will be getting my shiny new toy in any semblance of the release date. Truth be told there is part of me expecting a refund any day now and a sorrowful message from the retailer telling me that they oversold the available quantity.

We are living in a time of great uncertainty because the world is just burning down around us. I know it is silly to be frustrated over a game console, but that is precisely where we are because for many of us the only thing holding us together are the distractions. I am not sure I would have made it through this year were it not for gaming and my ability to focus on it instead of the asshole in the oval office or the fact that no one seems to take the fact that we are living in the time of a pandemic seriously. If you have made it down this far, I thank you for indulging this rant piece. I am sure I will return to proper content tomorrow.

Genshin Marvelous Merchandise Event

October 27, 2020 by Belghast

This morning I didn’t have a ton to talk about so I thought I would talk a little about the current event happening in Genshin Impact. For the most part this is a give away of a lot of items disguised as a daily event. If you go over to the events tab you are going to see an entry for Marvelous Merchandise, and this is going to essentially tell you where the merchant is on any given today. This morning is the second day of the event on the American servers. I am guessing you have two options here… either roam the world aimlessly looking for the vendor or simply reveal the “hint” which just straight up tells you where to go.

So for today he was available in Springvale, and when you get close enough you will start to see the Slime Box icon that represents this vendor. Liben reminds me an awful lot of Don Kanonji from Bleach and this thing seems to be a trope I have seen in several other anime of having a weird sometimes slightly creepy dude that helps the protagonist. You and Paimon are very suspicious of what he is asking… essentially collecting random materials from the world and trading them in for a mystery box.

So far he has asked for some really basic stuff that I already had tons of laying around in my inventory. The first day he asked for the basic button mushrooms that can be found pretty much everywhere in the world and by this point I have a significant number of. On day two he asked for pinecones, which again can be found practically everywhere and I also had a large number collected. I am guessing this pattern is going to keep going as he asks for something basic that then allows us to cash in for goodies. The only day that is going to be a challenge is if he starts asking for things like meat, since I tend to cook my way through those as soon as I get them.

After you hand in your materials he is going to allow you to open up one of the seven elemental slime themed boxes. The first day I opened electro and you can see it still shows as unavailable on day two. Next I went for pyro and am slowly going to work my way across the boxes left to right. It appears that each day your box is not a fixed set of rewards and instead pulled from a random pool of options. Essentially you seem to get some number of primogems, some amount of mora and then maybe some extra items thrown in.

On the first day I pulled 30 Primogems and 40,000 Mora which is absolutely worth the few minutes it took to knock this event out. On day two from the Pryo box I pulled 4 purple experience books, 30 Primogems, and 20,000 Mora. Like I said earlier it appears based on some quick research that the box you choose doesn’t actually indicate the rewards that you are going to get and instead you just get rewards from a pool of available options. So far there appear to be four patterns that you can pull.

30 Primogems and Extra Mora aka 40,000
30 Primogems and 3 copies of 3 different green quality talent books
30 Primogems, 20,000 Mora, and an assortment of experience books
30 Primogems, 20,000 Mora, and an assortment of enhancement ore

I am seeing reports of some folks getting different numbers of items within each category, so for example one reported getting 8 Mystic Enhancement Ore and another person reported getting 6 Mystic and 6 Fine Enhancement Ore. I am not sure if world rank and level have anything to do with this calculation, but essentially those four patterns seem to be what is available.

Another aspect of the event is that by opening boxes each day you are going to end up getting a huge chunk of Battle Pass progress. However that isn’t much of a driving force as I have recently completed my Battle Pass and reaped all of the rewards from it. I find myself in a place where I have less of a focus each day because for the longest time I had been pushing for AR40 and completing BP50… both of which are goals that I have accomplished. Now I am more or less in a daily pattern of logging in, doing the bounties and then trying to farm something useful for character progression.

We are on the cusp of patch 1.1 and I am hoping that on November 11th when it drops we will have more activities to revitalize the gameplay. This currently event isn’t exactly ground breaking, but it is a good opportunity to get some free wishes, which I thoroughly approve of.

Mount Madness

October 26, 2020 by Belghast

I have lost my damned mind friends. A new day dawns and with it will be my eighth day of attempts on trying to get the headless horseman mount. This is something that I have been chasing yearly since it initially released in 2007 during The Burning Crusade expansion. I’ve been chasing it longer than the existence of this blog, which started in 2009. Why have I been chasing it you might ask when I already have the way cooler looking Fiery Warhorse’s Reins that dropped legitimately during a Kara raid? Simple… this one flies and that makes it significantly better. It is said to have somewhere around a 0.5% drop rate, which means in theory that you should be able to get it within around 200 runs. The challenge there however is that the event only lasts two weeks and there is no way you can farm it 200 times on a single character, essentially throwing that logic out the window.

Starting on the 18th I Headless Horseman on every character of level 20 or higher, leaving me making attempts on it 24 times for those first two resets. By the time reset three rolled around I had done some additional research learning that it can only drop from characters capable of earning the epic loot-filled pumpkin. You have to be level 45 in order to win this epic loot, or what would have been the equivalent of 110 prior to the level squish. This forced me to dial things back to 13 characters for a few days until I realized that I had another eligible character on Eonar that I more or less forgot about. Still for days three and four I ran 13 characters and starting on day five I added a 14th.

Now is where the madness starts to settle in to take a rest. I put my thinking cap on and remembered that prior to the launch of level I pushed every single class up to 100 or in the new level squish nomenclature level 40. Surely it wouldn’t take terribly long to push more characters up to 45, given that it is only 5 levels worth of content right? It turns out that no… it really doesn’t take a lot of time and as such I have pushed up my Alliance Demon Hunter and Hunter and now am working on my Warlock. So that has increased each daily run total by a single character for runs six and seven and in theory I should be able to finish off the warlock today increasing it once again for day eight.

Based on my napkin math, I have run Headless Horseman 119 times so far this season, not taking into account any of the runs that I will be making tonight. I’ve seen pretty much every drop multiple times but the mount and now I feel completely committed to see this nonsense through. I have a total of seven more days worth of attempts, counting today since at the time of writing the reset has not happened. Even if I somehow stop with the Warlock that puts me at 17 characters with their own attempt each day for the next seven days which will net me another 119 attempts. I’ve never had this many characters eligible in past years, so I hope beyond hope that I somehow manage to get this thing I have been chasing for thirteen years.

AggroChat #320 – Asymmetrical Difficulty

October 25, 2020 by Belghast

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Thalen

Tonight we are down several folks because of various reasons. Grace and Tam are both travelling and Ammo was off celebrating her birthday. As a result we go forward with one of the smaller casts we have had in awhile. Tonight we talk a bit about Genshin Impact and the recent Resin adjustments that have been announced. Bel talks about his experiences with the World of Warcraft Exile’s Reach new player starter island. This goes a bit into the awkward fit that it causes combined with the level squish that came in with the Shadowlands pre-patch. We then get into a discussion about games that support asymmetrical difficulty or what is generally referred to as a “handicapping system”. We talk about how this can maybe make it easier to play games with your young children that can’t quite manipulate the moves that well yet. Kodra and Thalen share their progress with Ring Fit and we delve into a discussion about the recent D&D 5th Edition games that have entered early access. Finally we talk a little bit about Spiritfarer and the charming life of being a friendly grim reaper.