Bunny Fail Tank Returns

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I’ve talked about this a bit in the past, but I have struggled with Final Fantasy XIV since finishing the Stormblood main story.  I am not exactly sure why, but after leveling my Warrior through the questing process…  and then grinding up a Samurai I bounced.  When I say I bounced… I bounced hard.  I just stopped logging in entirely and even didn’t care enough to log in for most of the major holiday events that have gone on.  At one point I made an attempt to get back into the game and pushed through the new MSQ content right up until I reached the Drowned City of Skalla.  I could not bring myself to tank that with a random group and I told myself… I would wait until I had friends around to run it with me.  That event never happened and I got distracted by a bunch of games in the meantime.

The problem with this is that it sort of set up an artificial barrier between me and the content.  It was as though I had some sort of a mental block preventing me at just throwing myself at content the way I used to be willing to.  I knew I needed something severe to get me off high center and back into caring about what was going on in Final Fantasy XIV.  There used to be a time when I willing to log in each night and run experts with completely random groups of players from the roulette system.  However I developed some sort of barrier against doing that… one that I think was slowly chipped away given how freely I am willing to do my “SOS Roulette” nonsense in Monster Hunter World.

Watch Sleep Deprived Bel tries to remember how to Fail Tank in FFXIV from Belghast on www.twitch.tv
As a result last night I used the presence of an audience as a bit of a kick in the butt to get me back into Final Fantasy XIV and doing dungeon content again.  I streamed for a little over two hours and in that time I believe I ran four dungeons and made some progress in the MSQ afterwards.  In truth were it not for the MSQ slowing the pace down significantly…  I might have streamed longer throwing myself at more dungeons for gear currency.  I managed to pick up a chestpiece with tokens and now feel like maybe I can do this thing and catch my gear levels up to something reasonable.  At the start of the night I was 313 item level and by the end I edged it up a bit to 315.  Skalla and the next set of patch dungeons all drop gear that is an incremental upgrade, as well as some tasty tasty currency.  Basically at this point I need to reach a state where I can start doing expert roulette again to play catch up.

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After taking a break from streaming and FFXIV I hopped over to Monster Hunter World for awhile and spent some time running nonsense with Grace.  I have been mostly running hammer when we are doing stuff, because it is a weapon that I like quite a bit… and one that I want to get better at using.  There are definitely times when I am fighting something that it feels like having something more than a longsword in my arsenal would help greatly.  We took down a Squirrel Blimp and I managed to unlock the third of my elder dragons while she ran around trying to find the Great Girros.  I was not in terribly long as I was already in a fairly sleep deprived state from the previous nights fragmented sleep schedule due to the launch.  All in all though it was a pretty great night and I want to thank everyone that stopped by to tune in and chat with me.  Also huge thanks to Solaria who actually joined my discord and hung out with me while I eased my way back into Final Fantasy XIV.  It’s fun lobbing comments at text messages scrolling across twitch chat, but it is even more fun when you have someone hanging out in chat to talk to over voice as well.

A Big Launch

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This morning I am feeling like the above screenshot.  I was using PSN the other night and this image came up…  which as a programmer tells me something went horribly wrong.  I am guessing these are the labels for each one of those messages and then the UI is supposed to replace that value with whatever happens to be your localization.  However the screen failed to render and presented me with this gem.  I am currently failing to render completely and glitching out while sitting here typing to you.

Last night was essentially the culmination of five months of madness, leading to the midnight launch of something we have all been working on.  I had this master plan for how I was going to handle needing to be up super late.  The goal was to come home… eat a big sleep inducing meal… and then go to sleep super early.  That super early however turned into about 7:30 after I spent some time in my office screwing around on the interwebs.  I did in fact get to sleep relatively early, and woke briefly as my wife got home from church and again when she went to bed. For the most part I got some reasonable sleep at least for what is essentially a nap.

I had set an alarm for 11:15 pm allowing me to get up and around and functional before the midnight go live…  however did not need it due to the phone call I received at 10:35.  Have you ever tried to be summoned forth from a glorious slumber… and then attempt to not only comprehend what someone is saying to you, but also supply the appropriate response?  It took a few times for the person to relate what was going on in a manner that my sleep addled brain understood.  From there it was off to the races as I needed to call in various folks that were actually responsible for doing the things that needed to be done in the project.

As is always the case with any go live… something is not working entirely as intended at the moment of the launch.  This is basically a rule and there will always be some amount of scrambling around last minute to fix whatever thing that is.  For most of this five month project I have largely acted as a conduit between my side of the house and the business side of the house.  The truth is the business doesn’t necessarily want you to do something… they just want you to handle it getting done.  As a result most of my time has been spent ferrying requests from one person to another person who can actually fulfill that request.

Last night was no difference and about 15 minutes from launch the issue that cropped up had been resolved and we were back to smoothly sailing towards go live.  The worst part about a launch is waiting for the first real data to start flowing through the system.  No amount of testing can ever simulate live input, even when you are yourself trying to follow the exacting procedures that the users will take.  Hell in this example we spent five weeks of two to three hour long hands on guided user acceptance tests… and  I still felt a certain amount of unease as we started seeing things roll in.

The truth is… things were working as we planned and by 1:30 in the morning I had decided it was probably safe to go to sleep.  I sent an email stating as much to the team and headed off to slumber.  There was of course a certain period of trying to get adjusted from firing on all cylinders to shutting down completely, but I fought through it and managed to fall into deep sleep again.  Unfortunately one team member did not see this however and called me about 3 am to tell me he too was leaving for the night.  So once again I had to force myself awake, but given the lower importance of the call I am not entirely certain I made it all the way there.

As a result this morning…  I have nothing much to talk about other than the experience of having one more big launch under my belt.  For those who have done this you will understand the roller coaster of nerves and anxiety that you go through as you start doing the software version of “did I lock the door?”.  In the end however things went mostly smoothly and I wound up getting way more sleep than I originally expected to.  That said it was a deeply fragmented sleep, and this morning I am still a bit glitchy as I sit down to post this.

Tonight however… I am planning on returning to the world of gaming and doing something interesting.  Right now the plan is to stream for a bit, but I have no clue at all what I am going to stream or when exactly I will get started.  Basically there are a few things on the table…

  • Defeat the Act 1 Boss in Dragon Quest Builders
  • SOS Roulette in Monster Hunter World
  • Re-learn how to tank doing Roulette in FFXIV

So in theory one of those things will happen tonight and during the day I will make some decision as to which.  If you’ve made it to the end of this post… I figure you are either a developer who has gone through this sequence many times over and continue reading out of a sense of camaraderie …  or you are super bored.  Regardless thanks for hanging out and reading my thought stream.

 

Frying Pans and Nora Braves

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Over the last few days I have had a hankering to play some State of Decay.  This was a game that I originally started playing on the Xbox 360, then picked up when it was eventually released on the PC.  When the Year One Survivor Edition came out I picked that up too…  as well as buying it for a friend that I thought would enjoy it.  Since I had not actually tried streaming from my Xbox One, I decided to pick the game up on that platform and give it a go.  Basically Undead Labs is an awesome developer and I have no problem supporting them by picking it up on multiple platforms.  We don’t officially have a release date for State of Decay 2…  but based on the trickle of activity I am hoping we get some more news soon.  My hope is the sequel takes everything that worked well about the first game, but adds in the ability to hang out and explore the zombie filled landscape with friends.

Watch Hanging out playing some State of Decay YOSE on Xbox One from Belghast on www.twitch.tv
So as a result last night I fired up the stream while testing out a few new screen elements and bashed some zombies.  If you are for any reason interested you can check out the Twitch VOD here (or click the embedded player above thanks to Jaedia), but it involved a lot of me stumbling around trying to figure out what to do and a few gloriously brutal deaths.  I also may or may not have run over the NPC that was following me around and bashing things with a frying pan.  The kinda cool thing last night is I had a bunch of folks that were completely different from what I would consider the normal crew of people who take pity on me and hang out while I stream.  It’s really bizarre for me to have someone pop in the channel that I don’t actually know.  It was a surprising amount of fun to just hang out and publicly fail at playing a video game.

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Right now I don’t have much in the way of stamina as far as “being on” goes.  I lasted a little bit over an hour before needing to go do something else with less of an audience for a bit.  I am not sure if it was just that I was tired dying in State of Decay and wanted to play something else for awhile, or if I was tired of interacting.  I need to sort out a proper way to swap games when I am just not feeling the one I am playing, because in truth I wound up logging into Monster Hunter World and farming content and it would have been nice to have a little company doing so.  I originally logged in with the goal of doing a little SOS Roulette, but noticed a note in the Login Bonus about the Aloy event going live.  For those who are curious, the quest is titled “The Proving” and shows up under events as a 6 Star High Rank mission that requires the player to be Hunter Rank 11, so you may need to do a little bit of progressing to get there.

There are two pieces to the set, a full suit of armor similar to the Ryu gear that literally transforms you into the Aloy character model.  Additionally there is a version of Aloy’s bow that can be upgraded to a Rarity 7 weapon with some elder dragon bits.  The gear can be upgraded a total of 10 times allowing it to remain fairly relevant for a long while.  If you want to craft the gear you are looking at collecting the following….

Aloy Armor

  • Nora Brave Trophy – 4 – Obtained from Event Quest
  • Anjanath Pelt+ – 14
  • Anjanath Nosebone+ – 6
  • Anjanath Gem – 1
  • 30,000 Zenny

Aloy’s Bow

  • Nora Brave Trophy – 2
  • Anjanath Fang+ – 3
  • Monster Keenbone – 5
  • Anjanath Plate – 1
  • 16,000 Zenny

Aloy’s War Bow – Upgrade to Rarity 7

  • Nora Brave Trophy – 3
  • Anjanath Scale+ – 7
  • Elder Dragon Bone – 3
  • Wyvern Gem – 1
  • 32,000 Zenny

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Now it should be noted that the only part of this that you absolutely have to collect during the event are the Nora Brave Trophies which drop at least one per mission… and there was one time I lucked out and got four in one shot.  The rest of the bits can be gained from either normal High Rank Anjanath hunts or in the case of the upgrade by taking down Elder Dragons to get those bones.  I ran the mission a total of five times last night and got everything I needed to craft both the base rarity 5 bow and the rarity 5 armor.  The cool thing about this is that it not only makes you look like Aloy… but you also MOVE like Aloy.  Not really sure how to describe it other than that, because it feels like you are playing Horizon Zero Dawn set in the Monster Hunter World setting.  I have no clue how long this event is going to run, but personally I knocked mine out doing good ole SOS Roulette.  That said more than willing to help folks get their parts if they need them.  Honestly I might farm it a bunch while it is available because it seems to be a really good way to get High Rank Anjanath parts.

 

Bathtubs and Nonsense

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I’ve been partaking in some serious nonsense of late, not the least of which has been Dragon Quest Builders… and streaming me playing Dragon Quest Builders.  I figured I would lead off with this screenshot because it is absolutely amazing.  My townsfolk decided to build me a bath tub…  which I immediately installed in my private master suite.  So the funny thing about Twitch in its most modern incarnation is…  it makes it silly easy to be an Affiliate.  From the moment you start streaming it starts ticking off little achievements, which in some bizarro world way made me want to get them.  One of them is called “Path to Affiliate” and it shows up as a little quest of sorts in the sidebar of the achievements page.  It includes…

  • Stream 8 hours in the last 30 days
  • Stream for 7 unique days in the last 30 days
  • Reach 3 average viewers in the last 30 days
  • Reach 50 followers

The last one was easy because I have had my account so damned long that I have more than 50 pity follows at this point if nothing else.  In theory once you qualify and get that achievement checkmark… you are done.  Lately I have been dabbling around with streaming, and one by one each of the boxes got checked… and now I am apparently an affiliate.  I am not entirely certain why I did this thing, but it happened.  Now I actually sorta want to try and come up with a proper schedule, which is super difficult because with my managerial duties my arrive home time is super variable, as is whether or not I feel like playing any games in “live” mode.

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This did force me to contemplate what would happen if someone actually subbed to me.  As a result I named them appropriately to attempt to encourage people that this is not a thing that they should actually do.  I keep expecting Twitch to lower some hammer on me for discouraging people from giving them money.  Basically I would feel super awkward to actually take any money from anyone.  This is mostly a thing I did for myself… and in part because it will allow me to create a spiffy twitch emojii if I so choose.  I am not even sure what else Affiliate includes otherwise, mostly it was just…  a thing I felt like doing because it was available.

Now however I find myself involved in all sorts of other nonsense as a result.  I talked yesterday a bit about StreamLabs OBS… or SLOBS as apparently people are calling it…  why people why.  I’ve also been dabbling with their custom Chatbot that is apparently what happened when they gobbled up Ankhbot.  As a result I now have the beginnings of a custom channel bot named MrAggroBot that will do some of the basic functionality you see in chat bots… and at least in theory also works on Discord.

Similarly I have set up a “BelStreamTime” Discord with the sole purpose of joining it while streaming, and as a result allowing anyone else who cares to hang out with me join as well.  I realize no one actually needs a new discord to join…  but I also did not want to dirty up any of the other discords I am part of with my streaming nonsense.  The highlight of the night had to be getting everything actually working so that the Chatbot joined my quickie Twitch test stream, accepted commands and also announced that I went live through the Discord.  It was more proof of concept than anything useful but I sorta felt like Doctor Frankenstein bringing life into the world…  if that life was complete and utter nonsense.

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As far as doing actual gaming stuff…  I grouped up with Grace and took down some low rank monsters.  I never really reached the point where I farmed Low Rank content the way I now do High Rank, and as a result I am missing a ton of parts to make lower level items required to make the higher level versions.  I’ve been working slowly on building a Tobi Kadachi Longsword for its lightning damage, and we wound up farming Tobi a bunch of times for parts.  From there we started doing more esoteric hunts, like an Anjanath and a Pukei Pukei with a 30 minute timer in which I tried to hammer.  I am not exactly completely effective as hammer, but it was a lot of fun.  Unfortunately I apparently completely phased out the fact that Tam was trying to invite me to a party and wound up heading to bed around 9:20.  It was a fun night, but also one where I did a bunch of silly things with minimal use to anyone.  So yeah… I am apparently a Twitch Affiliate now and am starting to build up the infrastructure needed to do “stuff and things” on that platform.