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.

 

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.