Tales of the Aggronaut

Sword Coast Chronicles

January 17, 2018 by Belghast

Do you know how hard it is for me to say Neverwinter… and not follow it up with Nights? Like that is hands down the hardest thing about playing the Cryptic made MMO… is just stopping with the first word. Like part of me feels like it would have simply felt better to call it Neverwinter Nights Online, but I am guessing that Bioware probably still has the licensing rights to “Neverwinter Nights”. Regardless of this personal struggle I find myself suddenly unable to stop playing this game. I am not really sure what is going on there but I am having a lot of fun and the content just seems to be flowing smoothly in a way it never did the few other times I tried to play it. Everquest II had this concept of the golden path where a sparkly line of particle effects would attempt to lead you from objective to objective. The problem is it never really worked right and was prone to completely abandon you if the effects clipped through the terrain, or simply route you in a truly bizarre manner. As a result I think when I first saw that Neverwinter had a similar construct… I largely tried to ignore it after all of the bad experience attempting to make it work in EQ2. The main difference is that here it actually works remarkably well, and while it might not be the most optimal path for questing purposes… it does end up giving you a nice path to follow that eventually ends in you getting all of the objectives you need to knock out those quests.

I had so many quests that were either partially completed or not even started scattered throughout a bunch of zones. I am guessing I mostly ran around and killed stuff without really focusing on completing anything. The problem with returning to a game after a significant amount of content has been added is you are never quite certain if something was in the game when you last played… or if you had just been completely oblivious to it. One of these for me is the introduction of the Sword Coast Chronicles tab which shows your general progress through the game, or at least what you should be working on content wise at a given level. The only problem with this is that I am progressing way faster level wise than the content would in theory suggest. I’ve been working on Neverdeath Cemetery still within the confines of Neverwinter proper. If I had to guess I am now entering the second half of the content in that zone and should begin to start ticking off some of the boxes needed for the completion rewards. So far the thing that is making this game stand out for me is just how interesting the locations are and how relatively densely packed they are with interesting vistas. The one gotcha here is that the zones are not really as open as they might seem at first glance but instead in truth are more corridors to move through in a similar fashion to the zone design in something like Destiny 2. So long as you treat the zone as a conduit to do the quests it feels really good… when you start trying to break out off the beaten path and just traverse the zone without a purpose however it begins to feel frustrating and confining.

Another thing I remember about this game is that it seemed really scarce with loot drops and at some point they went in completely the opposite direction. I am getting more than enough gear from just running about to stay constantly upgraded and in the short time I have played I have gotten three different mounts as world drops and two companions. There are entire subsections of this game that I have no clue what is even going on… like I vaguely remember there being some sort of web based component to this game. I keep getting crafters and such from quests but I have no clue how to access it. I attempted to do a little research yesterday but was constantly confronted with several year old information, so I am guessing the game just does not have much of a informational community presence. Reading back through my original reviews of the game… I seem to have thought it was an enjoyable experience each time I have attempted to play it. The problem is I never really stick to it for one reason or another. It already feels like I have gained way more traction in the game than any of my other efforts given that I logged in at level 16 Monday and now am just shy of level 30. There are still a lot of ways that I feel like I don’t really know what the hell is going on, but I am slowly getting acclimatized to the game and feeling like I at least know my way round a bit. The Dungeons I have run have been a mess… but the sort of mess where one person who is grossly overpowered just speed burns through the content and we sorta follow along haplessly looting shit. At some point I want to check out the user created content that I know at some point went into the game. I know my friend Tipa was super into that for awhile, so I am interested to see what playing that is like. All in all I am still having a lot of fun, and probably just as shocked as you are to be seeing more Neverwinter posts.

On The Mend

January 16, 2018 by Belghast

I am mostly among the living. Yesterday was a federal holiday here in the United States and with me being off work… it also mean’t that I largely treated it as part of the weekend for blogging purposes. I am still fighting the same crud that I had last week, but it feels like at some point on Monday I turned the corner. While I still have the vestiges of whatever bronchial mess has inflicted me, I am starting to feel better and less like an appendage of the couch and or bed depending upon the time table. it truly was a miserable weekend and while I attempted to game I was not terribly successful at anything until yesterday. I spent most of the break working on the Tauren Hunter who has now finished the Outland and is knee deep in Northrend just starting the Grizzly Hills area. My hope is that when I ding 74 the bear spirit beast will be up and I can collect it for my pet. Up until this point I am mostly running a Fel Corehound that I got from the Blasted Lands. I took the Beast Mastery talent that allows your pets to shadow step… so it is entertaining watching him leap up on targets rapidly. At this point however I can kill most mobs well before my beast even has time to interact with it… which is the life of running full heirlooms.

Sunday I indulged a really weird whim and decided to reinstall the Arc client and give Neverwinter a spin. I’m on the PR feed still from Perfect Worlds and they are constantly putting out press releases about content releases to this game. It got me wondering what the current state of matters is when I have literally not heard anyone talk about it in almost two years. It turns out the game is in pretty great shape as far as actually logging in and playing it. As far as doing its best to feel insidious from a loot box standpoint… it is also working on winning some awards. I don’t remember much about the game if I am being very serious, but you know that thing that we chastised Call of Duty WW2 for doing at the beginning of the year? Where if you get a drop the game announces to the rest of the world what you just got? That apparently happens in Neverwinter as most of my time spent in the central hub area was a constant stream of people getting loot drop rewards. In the very short time I played yesterday I got somewhere around 25 loot crate drops from random stuff while doing quests. Each one of these crates would require a key which runs roughly $1.25 each without any of the “buying in bulk” discounts applied. Through the quests I wound up getting three free keys to open three sample crates and if the ones that drop in the wild are at all similar to what they gave us as “examples” for why we should buy into this system… they were full of utter garbage. If you can however do what I started doing and just vendoring the damn crates for a few copper each time you saw one drop… and loot past the money grubbing nature of the game… the core feedback loop is actually rather enjoyable. I think when I logged in last night I was around 16 left over from my initial push around launch and I believe I logged out for the evening around 25/26ish. During all of that time I enjoyed the core game quite a bit so long as I completely ignored the multiple currency cash shop nonsense. If you can do the same then you too will probably enjoy yourself.

Last completely random thing I did last night… is patch up and log into Elder Scrolls Online. This game is in fact the same as I remember it and still rather enjoyable. The biggest problem I will have is trying to sort out exactly what I was doing when I was last playing. I am still being insanely stubborn and wanting to finish all of the original three story arcs before doing any of the newer content. As a result I believe I am somewhere in the middle of Malabal Tor during my Aldmerri Dominion play through. From there I will at some point venture forth into Ebonheart where maybe just maybe I can play long enough to see the character that was inspired by me and some of the folks we play with. I think the fact that I jumped around so much last night… but still managed to get a bunch of play in with each jump… is probably proof that I am on the mend. In truth a good chunk of this weekend was spend with me just staring blankly at things without really doing a lot of interaction. There were several times that I would start up a YouTube video that would then cycle through a whole bunch of things before I even realized I was still watching something. Now however I need to go warm up the car and prep myself to venture forth into the frozen tundra (for Oklahoma at least). Tonight will likely either be more Neverwinter or ESO because I had a lot of fun playing both.

Rough Night

January 12, 2018 by Belghast

I don’t have a whole lot to talk about this morning. I am still struggling with whatever illness I started fighting at the beginning of the week. As the morning went on yesterday my lungs started going to crap and last night I spent the majority of the evening chilling/unable to get warm. When it came to actually getting a nights rest I failed in that department as well. I went to bed around 9 pm ish and went straight to sleep… only to wake up around 12:30 and be unable to get back to sleep. I tossed and turned throughout the night while dealing with coughing spells all adding up to a very fragmented sleep cycle. On top of that the last few evenings I have been struggling with connection speeds to my network at home. I should in theory be seeing 300 Mbps and I’m only seeing something in the 10-15 Mbps range. After spending an hour with chat services they are sending someone out to check into things… and their only available slot was this afternoon. So at the very least… I only have to make it through half a day today as I took the afternoon off to go meet the cable troubleshooter. As a result… I just don’t have much to discuss this morning. I made it to just short of level 60 on my Tauren Hunter, and in theory I will pick that process up tonight and enter the Burning Crusade content. I am legitimately considering trying to eek out as much as I can from Blasted Lands to make the Burning Crusade journey a little shorter. As it stands right now the worst part of leveling is BC/Wrath era and I sorta want to get those over as soon as humanly possible. I am hoping that soon I will get back into the swing of things and be able to do normal posts rather than struggling with existence in the mornings.

Types of Players

January 11, 2018 by Belghast

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The photo of Belgrazer has absolutely nothing to do with this post… I just felt like I needed some image to break up what would otherwise be a wall of text post. Yesterday I made a post about the emotional labor it takes to be an organizer in a guild. Then Scop and I went back and forth with a series of comments. Firstly I don’t want it to come off like I was specifically making a post about him, or specifically directing my commentary at him. He got to be the guinea pig because he happened to be the person responding. The thing is… I do get his down in the weeds point of view as a member wanting other members to respond. It has just been in my personal experience that this doesn’t really happen unless someone is out there prodding folks into action. One of the weird offshoots of this conversation happened in the private slack that the AggroChat podcast crew discuss things on. Tamrielo a long time friend and similarly long in the tooth leader and organizer and I started talking about the various personalities we encountered. I made the flippant comment that if I was pressed to do so… I could create a list of pretty much every personality I had encountered through leading guilds and raids… and then walked away from the conversation to enter a meeting filled afternoon. When I got out of said meetings he had done just that. We went back and forth on a few of the points and there were a few cases I felt he had missed, but all in all he was pretty damned spot on. You can now find a revised list over on his blog that I feel is pretty close to whatever I would have cobbled together myself. I don’t want to copy large sections of his post, but I do want to share the general bullet point list of types of folks we encountered.

The Socialite
The Drill Sergeant
Chill AF
Things Explainer
The Ninja
Side Projects
The Collector
The Griefer
The Devotee
What’s Going On Lately
I Got Mine
You Need Yours
My Dude
The Hiker and The Backpack
I’m Here, Now What?
Ready To Go
The Downer
The Positivity Cannon
Silent But Competent
Respect My _____

The thing is… if I were pushed to do so I could probably rattle off names of players I have played with over the last two decades and tell you which of these traits they were focused on. Most people are to some extent a “multi-class” of a bunch of these traits. Similarly every single one of these has a positive version and a not so positive version. “The Griefer” for example… can be beneficial to a group by goading other people into reforming their habits or getting better at dealing with things at hand… or they can just be a merciless asshole that only exists to sow the seeds of drama. Similarly the “Things Explainer” walks a thin line between being overtly helpful when asked for assistance… and being a know-it-all that everyone wants to avoid catching the attention of. The term “emotional labor” is a weird one but very apt and is often times brought up in terms of dealing with the emotional maintenance needed to keep a team going. It is draining knowing that you need to treat each one of these people a specific way to get the results you actually want from them, and know that you are always walking a fine line between getting the positive version and the negative version.

The truth is over the years I have probably been at least part of each of these traits, and at this very moment in my life I have zero clue which one I actually embody anymore. In most games I am very much “What’s Going On Lately” aka the “Content Locust”… the person who swoops in and consumes the new content and then bounces pretty soon after that. I think I have almost always been at least heavily multi-classes into “The Socialite” and “Chill AF” which is an odd blend but I definitely go through phases where I embody one over the other. I am very much not a good “Things Explainer” because there are so many things I can do easily but could not necessarily tell you how to do them. I feel like all of the traits that specifically focused on “competence” are not necessarily for me either because I mostly am just winging it the entire time I play a game. I have “Collector” and “Side Projects” streaks but usually only after I have gobbled up all of the surface level content and am desperately trying to stay rooted in a game because my friends are playing it still. Ultimately what I am trying to get at is that each of us have multiples of these traits blended together into the player profile that we ultimately are. However your leaders… the people who are out there watching for these things probably already have you pegged. I am absolutely certain however that each person I talk to would probably slot me slightly different. Regardless I highly suggest checking out Tams post because it contains a lot of good description of each of these types.