Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle

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Last night was all about Monster Hunter World as I had made plans ahead of time to run around with Grace and do the various events.  First out of the gate we worked on the Wiggler quest that grants this truly questionable helm.  It truly is the stuff of nightmares and honestly would have been a pain in the butt had we not realized that you could register multiple wiggler catches at once.  We quickly fell into a pattern of sneaking up on the wigglers and getting one in our sights… then coordinating over voice a 3, 2, 1, GO! to capture both at the same time.  Sure it took three shots at the quest to get all of the tickets needed to craft this monstrosity but here we go…  I have a goofy helm that I wasted some zenny on crafting and will likely never actually use.

From there we spent some time doing the “The Proving” quest that involves killing a fairly beefy high rank Anjanath.  We ran into all sorts of problems with PSN connectivity which made it significantly more challenging than normal.  Throughout the night I kept getting disconnected from the quest with a “Left Quest” message.  At first Ash suggested that Grace was just going off and leaving us… but I think it was more than that considering Ash and Mor both got punted out of the mission after having successfully joined with no ability to get back in.  We struggled through two kills and called the process done for the moment moving on to other things.

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Grace is in that awkward in-between step where she is officially a High Rank player… but still is using a significant amount of low rank gear.  Considering her next quest is the Pink Rathian, that is probably something she needs to fix and as a result we farmed Zorah Magdaros a bit for parts.  I am still to this day wearing the Zorah gloves for the hidden element ability, and honestly its an easy farm considering the event mostly just finishes itself.  Now when I was farming this I SOS Rouletted my way into full groups that allowed us to quickly complete the event which for those who need Zorah bits is a completely viable option.  The biggest challenge I ran into… and why I kept running it was that Zorah is super stingy with gems which are unfortunately needed for the gauntlets.

As far as starter High Rank gear goes… I am way more in favor of the Alpha Bone set because it has a lot of good stuff as well as 10 fire, 10 dragon and I believe 10 lightning resistance.  All total to craft the full Bone Armor set you need…  12 Quality Bone, 10 Monster Bone +, 2 Warped Bone, 3 Monster Bone L, 3 Boulder Bone, 3 Coral Bone, and 3 Ancient Bone.  Basically you need to kill a few big monsters and run amok harvesting bone piles in most of the zones to get it.  The end result gives you a set with Health Boost, 3x Attack Boost, 3x Entomologist, Slugger, Horn Maestro, and Master Fisher.  Not all of those are winners…  but Entomologist can be super useful if you are farming bug parts.  All of that said I still think its a great starter set for High Rank shenanigans.

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The highlight of the evening however was getting a Tailrider Safari with Grace’s Neutrino and PizzaMaid’s Aria.  Normally I just send Tailriders out from my room back in Asteria, but for this combination I made the trek to the Research Base so I could get the cutscene.  I am also realizing that I need to trade cards with Pizza and Grace because neither of them are actually using these outfits anymore.  The PS4 always has a bit of a delay when you attempt to take a screenshot so I am super happy that I was able to catch a decent one of this party going out to fight.

Tonight however I am thinking about kicking back and streaming some Final Fantasy XV on the PC… all depending on how well today goes.  I will be in training and in theory will have homework tonight because I am going through one of those cram session courses.  As a result my brain may be too broken to do anything interesting.

Go Team Moogle’s Pom!

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I want to lead off this mornings post with a little bit of exciting news.  So over the last few weeks you have no doubt noticed the Twitch madness I have been involved in.  That is probably a tale for a different day, but I am trying to stream significantly more often than I used to.  I even have a lot of proper streaming infrastructure set up now including MrAggroBot my fearless chat bot who is getting an adorable avatar that the amazing AmmostArt is currently working on.  I have no clue what is going on but I think partially it is due to the fact that I have a super supportive community of folks from various sources that occasionally pop their heads in and say hi.  One of the main reasons why I don’t play a ton of single player titles is that they end up feeling like solitary experiences.  Sure when I am in super turtle mode that works, but most of the time I want to share my nonsense with someone out there.  In the MMORPG world… that is my guild and when I stream a single player game…  twitch chat starts to feel a bit like guildchat.

For awhile now I have been a member of the Moogle’s Pom Tavern Discord, largely because it already had a significant number of my friends collected in one place.  I knew it was home, much in the same way as the AggroChat slack because I found myself saying good morning to everyone there each day.  Now I mostly knew of the Moogle’s Pom Tavern because of their official/unofficial stream team.  Official in the sense that it is a fixed thing and invite only, but unofficial as I believe none of the members are Partners and cannot actually create an official team in the eyes of Twitch.  With my increase in streaming focus and frequency, I am pleased to announce that I have been invited to the team and now have a banner on my twitch profile talking about it.  I am super happy about this revelation because it truly is an amazing group of people and that I am exceedingly happy to be part of.

For those unfamiliar, a lot of the names are ones you have already seen me talk about or host on Twitch…  but here goes a full listing (alphabetized because it would have bugged me otherwise).

I highly suggest you check out all of these fine folks and give them a follow.  I’ve got them all in my Auto-Hosting rotation so chances are you might see them if you are checking my twitch page with any frequency.  The above image is of course not connected to this at all… but since we don’t have an official banner image for the team I decided to find a “Moogle” image to use instead.  If you are so inclined you can also check out the Moogle’s Pom Tavern wordpress which should in theory be getting bios for the last few of us shortly (because we need to write them).  However the page is current except for me and Visse who were the last few adds to the team.

All of this said I will probably continue to use the BelStreamTime discord when it comes to me going live and chatting with folks because it feels really weird to muscle my way in and take over a discord I am not intimately responsible for.  Also it gives me a nice place to integration with twitch and carry over roles and permissions as well as my emoticon.  Speaking of which I really need to set up the next few ranks worth of emoticons even though currently I am the only one who could use them.  That is another thing that happened over the weekend that seems a bit hard to take.  For awhile now the AggroChat crew has been parking their Amazon Prime subsciptions on me because they knew it made me feel super awkward about it… and it is apparently fun to pick on the Bel.  Sunday however during my stream I had a long time friend throw a legitimate subscription and some bits my way and I have this weird mix of “I am incredibly grateful” and “no don’t do that! I am not worth your money!”.

I am still not entirely sure how I feel about this whole subscription thing.  I feel happy that my friends want to support me, but I also feel super awkward taking any of their money.  I could reconcile them giving me a prime sub… because it was a thing they got for free that wasn’t being used anyways.  Now that I am getting some actual subs I just want to push the money back into their pockets and tell them “no no no you don’t understand, you are throwing your money away!”.  I am weird at accepting recognition in any form…  like when it happens at work I want nothing more than to crawl under my desk and hide until no one notices me.  The problem there is that now I am a manager over three teams… and I can’t exactly do that anymore.  I think maybe my recent foray into Twitch mirrors the transformation I have had to make in the real world, where I am publicly “on” more than I used to be.

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.