Tales of the Aggronaut

Double Agent

January 3, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve reached this sorta happy place with World of Warcraft where I find myself alternating back and forth between it and Destiny 2 for how I spend most of my evenings. Over the last month or so I had spent most of my pushing up my Orc Warrioress, and have now reached the point where I can no longer easily push her power level up by just doing World Quests. As a result this caused a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas break and lead me to pick another of my various horde characters to start working on. Having not actually pushed up a Demon Hunter… and Legion being the expansion all about Illidari… I figured it was high time to actually do this thing. I started out leveling as Havoc like I had before on the Alliance side but promptly swapped over to Vengeance when I started missing tank survival. It turns out that I really like Vengeance as a spec and you get to do a bunch of fun things… sadly at the cost of your charge around the map ability. The way shorter cooldown version of Heroic Leap in the form of Infernal Strike however makes up for the lack of the less predictable movement ability. If nothing else the build allows me to do most of the World Questing with impunity and at some point I will actually try some dungeon tanking.

For the moment however when it comes to LFR, Heroics or Timewalking… I have been swapping back to Havoc and just noobing it up. This is the point where I have to step back from some of the commentary I made while leveling the warrior. I was shocked and amazed at how chill the horde side of the house had been during my experiences… but once I donned the mantle of the demon hunter… and potentially as a side effect of the long holiday break… all of the asshats seemed to come out of the woodwork. Monday night I chain ran my five timewalking dungeons in a row… and all of the cool demeanor that I had originally attributed to the horde side melted away. It became a night of gripes and wipes as I limped through my five instances and then walked away praising some dark god that my sanity was still intact. I am still not entirely certain why my recent change in religion of sorts and swap to the horde, but I would have to think a lot of it has to do with simply wanting to hang out with my friends in Facepull. As a result it has been this super chill place to hang out and have occasional comments about the game and life in general. On a day by day basis I am feeling way less of a double agent and more leaning towards the Horde. For years I never could seem to get into characters on that side of the fence and the only reason why I had a max level character during Warlords was because I boosted, this time around however I have the same number of Alliance characters as I do Horde and I am already plotting the next thing to level. Side note… Blood Elf demon hunters look way cooler than the damned floppy eared Night Elf equivalent.

Resolutions

January 2, 2018 by Belghast

The last few days have sorta whirred past as we did not do much of anything. The cold temperatures and the desire to eat up some of the many things we have in our cabinets and freezer meant that we largely just stayed inside. This mean’t fuzzy blankets and pants and sheets and cats… while chilling out and playing lots and lots of World of Warcraft and Destiny 2. I mostly made it to midnight on New Years Eve but crashed shortly thereafter. In the grand scheme of things 2017 was not a bad calendar year for me personally… but for the world as a whole it had a rather soul draining visage. It is my hope that 2018 will bring forth new and interesting things for us… while neglecting from finding ways to crush our spirits. On a personal level I want 2018 to the unbridled goodness that seemed to be 2013-2015. What I mean by that is 2013 was a year in which I did a ton of interesting things… not the least of which was beginning the whole blog post a day madness. In 2014 I founded AggroChat podcast and with it a bunch of interesting discussions have been had. In 2015 I started going to Pax South and also writing some for MMOGames.com. Not saying I really want to return to writing for other people because I frankly don’t have the time on my hands for that… but just saying those three years were pretty great for various reasons. I am not normally the resolution making type, but I figured I would do it just this once.

Sort out my Blog Feed

One of the casualties of trying to write on someone elses dime was my blog reading habits. Prior to that I had been a rabid consumer of so many home grown gaming blogs, and while I never commented as often as I should have… I mercilessly lurked in the background. It was part of my daily routine to sift through the latest posts and they often times served as fertile ground to come up with something that I wanted to say in response. During the brief time where I attempted to write a column on the blogging community… I felt like I had to expand my horizons by a large bit and with it my blogroll ballooned up into the 600-700 blog range and became unmanageable. One of the side projects for this year is to sort all of this out and begin reading on a daily basis again.

Organize my Magic the Gathering Cards

Towards the tail end of 2017 I purchased a bunch of stuff from BCW card supplies with the intent of organizing my Magic the Gathering collection. This has yet to happen in part because the upstairs is sweltering at the moment due to the cold snap. That said I want to make sure this actually happens. I have been playing since 1994 and I have a mishmash of cards spanning through the decades as I picked up a pack here or there for nostalgia purposes. I want to organize all of these and get these sorted not only by set, but also by card color and rarity. I got dividers to denote sets and colors, but this is going to be a long process given just how damned many cards I have. I also have some hard cases for the cards that are more valuable and really should be better protected than a sleeve.

Sort out my Humble Bundle

I have a bad habit of snapping up Humble Bundles when they come out and often times not doing much with them. One of the goals for the new year is to sort this shit out… consume the keys for the games I do not currently have in steam and try and find homes for the games that are duplicates. I know there are gamers out there that would love to be playing these games… I just need to find them a new home. I did this once upon a time… and need to spend some time getting my lists up to date. In theory there might be giveaways or something… or me just going through steam and looking to see if certain games are owned by my friends. Whatever the case this is on the list.

Get Back on the Wagon

During 2013 and 2014 I lost a lot of weight and during 2015 it started sneaking its way back on. Now at this point I have gained back every last bit of it and probably then some. In truth I have never quite made it back up to my highest weight, but I am up there. Essentially I need to do something about it for quality of life reasons as much as anything else. I’m an aging fat man and I need to at least fix some of the things that I can. I know this involves doing regular exercise and also is going to involve monitoring what I am actually eating as well. I had a lot of luck with the Lose It app in the past and I will likely return to using it religiously again. Probably also going to go back to having oatmeal for breakfast… though I failed completely at that one this morning. Basically the reality is that I need to do something because I am tired of being as big as I am. I will never be a small person, nor do I really want to be… but I want to be a smaller person. I am not going to set parameters here because I am not even sure what the reality of it is going to look like yet, but I do want to make some changes because I am tired of feeling tired and sore all the time.

Games Played 2017 Edition

December 30, 2022December 29, 2017 by Belghast

Year End Review

One of the weird things that I do is that I attempt to keep track of the games I have played during a given calendar year. I started this madness I believe in 2015 and then have slowly been back populating that list based on a few methods. Essentially I am tracking things on a month by month basis and if I have written about a game or taken screenshots of a game… I log it as having been played during that month. The end result is this weird history of the games I have played over the course of a given calendar year. Seeing as this is the last “weekday” that I will be making a post until the beginning of 2018… I figured it was the perfect time to break out my post talking about the various things I played this year. Without further stalling… here is the data.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

During the course of the year I played a grand total of 41 different games, which is from 57 last year and 67 the year before that. Basically the key difference is that I mostly played MMOs which tend to hold my attention for larger periods of time than burning through a bunch of single player titles. Lets take a swath of the top ten titles and look at them a little closer.

World of Warcraft – 10 months
Destiny – 8 months
Diablo 3 – 7 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 months
Horizon Zero Dawn – 7 months
Destiny 2 – 6 months
Pokemon Go – 6 months
Fallout 4 – 5 months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 months
Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 4 months

At first glance the clear king is World of Warcraft with 10 months of play, but if you look back at past years this tends to be the one game that I am almost always at least playing a few days a month. However you notice that I largely took a complete break from the game in March and April and I feel like it is largely due to a few games coming out around the same time… Mass Effect Andromeda, Horizon Zero Dawn and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I feel like the true winner is Destiny and Destiny 2 because if you include those as one game… then I played them every month of the year with some overlap between of two months when I was technically playing both. Granted I am including the time I spent playing various betas of the game but still… I feel like this was the year of Destiny for me personally. I spent significantly less time playing Final Fantasy XIV as I played rabidly during the launch of Stormblood and sorta bounced off otherwise. Another anomaly this year is that Rift did not make the top 10, and similarly odd is how much of a return Pokemon Go has had…. but I largely chock this up to getting a new phone that handles it better. The weirdest part about this years top ten list is that it includes several single player titles: Fallout 4, Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. All three of these are games that I keep being able to return to and play again and again in short bursts.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

Multi-Year View

Now if we expand out even further… here is the list of everything I have played since 2012. Things get a little spottier the further you go back. Essentially I have back populated this last by going through all of my old blog posts and jotting down which games I talked about playing. Additionally I have scanned all of the screenshots that I happen to have and divided them up by the month the file was created as an attempt to create a somewhat accurate picture of what I had been playing. Generally speaking if I am playing a game I am taking screenshots because I always need images for my blog. I may or may not have almost 30,000 screenshots sitting on network attached storage… and a stack of every hard drive from every machine I have owned waiting for a day when I feel like going spelunking for more screenshots. I am not even sure why I started down this path but now that I am on it… it has become another obsession of mine. Basically from here on we are going to largely talk about the top fifteen games I have played since 2012.

World of Warcraft – 47 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 42 months
Rift – 37 months
Destiny – 27 months (including D2 31 months)
Elder Scrolls Online – 26 months
Diablo 3 – 23 months
ArcheAge – 13 months
Guild Wars 2 – 13 months
Wildstar – 13 months
Everquest II – 11 months
Fallout 4 – 10 months
Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 months
Trove – 9 months
Pokemon Go – 8 months
The Secret World – 8 months

First interesting pattern is that there is only one non-mmo on this list and that is Fallout 4. I am not entirely certain why I keep returning to that game but there are so many nights I will fire it up on the laptop while doing other things and just roam around. Once again Rift has fallen a bit in the rankings as this time last year it was tied with Final Fantasy XIV for the second place slot. Destiny slides up into number three eclipsing Elder Scrolls Online, especially if you include Destiny 2 playtime which I denoted in quotes. Guild Wars 2 and my resurgence into that game caused it to leapfrog Wildstar a bit, and then the tail end of the list is either new because I expanded things out to top 15 or in a similar position. There are some games on this list that are likely to eventually fall out of the ranking. I am not really playing Everquest II anymore in part because the management since the swap to Daybreak has just been pitiful. Its a torn community and just not the environment I remember loving. Trove may or may not see me returning to it, because I have a friend who is super into that game right now… but also playing on the PS4 and not PC which makes the return to play with him more unlikely. Additionally that game has changed so much since I last played it that I would almost need to start fresh to really get back into it. Similarly I am not sure how much more time I will be devoting to ArcheAge because I just don’t find the game nearly as compelling as I once did. As I leveled in the game it felt like the things I wanted to be doing narrowed rather than broadened given that I have no interest in PVP nonsense. I left shortly before they split the servers into veteran and new player experiences, and I am not even sure what the game looks like right now.

Looking Forward

As far as the calendar year of 2018… I am not really sure what I will be playing. It is a forgone conclusion that I will be playing World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. In spite of me not really liking the more PVP centric focus, I would be lying if I said I would not be playing it at launch. I predict that I will be playing some more SWTOR in the near future because the release of a Star Wars movie always brings out the nostalgia for all things Star Wars. On top of that with Disney pulling the license for Marvel Heroes… I want to make sure I experience the story content in SWTOR just in case they for some reason decide to do the same thing they did with SWG. I know at some point I will make a return to Final Fantasy XIV and more than likely when they patch in the next step of the Palace of the Dead. As far as new games go… there really isn’t much on the horizon that really interests me. I am not enthralled by Crowfall or Camelot Unchained, because they seem to be creating games that don’t really stoke my interests.

Brad McQuaid will likely bring us some sort of version of Pantheon: Rise and Repeat as I heard someone call it the other day (I believe Wilhelm but not 100% sure). I played Everquest, and Vanguard… and Pantheon seems like more of the same just yet another slightly higher fidelity version of the same game Brad has kept trying to create since the 90s. I don’t have near as much nostalgia as some do for the “you must have a group with you at all times and death must be frustrating and painful” genre. Ashes of Creation looks mildly interesting… but what I have seen of the community tells me it is going to be a game I am not going to enjoy much in the same way that I didn’t enjoy ArcheAge at launch. Monster Hunter World is definitely something I am looking forward to giving a shot, in spite of the fact that I am horrible at Monster Hunter games. Anthem also seems really interesting, but the gameplay footage we have seen reminded me a bit too much of the promises Division made but never quite delivered on. In truth in the 2018 calendar year… I expect to keep playing a lot of the same games I played during the past several years because those MMOs just keep getting better with age.

Radiolarian Paradox

December 28, 2017 by Belghast

The world is a really weird place and I sometimes have trouble reconciling just how random it is. Yesterday after legitimate decades of not being in contact… I had a friend I grew up with reach out via the email address on this blog. As the day went on we chatted and for the most part found out that we are still drift compatible. We fell out of contact for reasons that quite honestly I have probably talked about on this blog at some point without assigning names or faces to the situation. However I always sorta hoped at some point he would find his way back into my monkeysphere and that seems to have actually occurred. It is super weird to get back in touch with someone who hasn’t been around for the last two decades. Like for example he knows my wife, but at the time we were last in regular contact we were dating and not married. In that time I have shifted through many jobs and titles and positions… and had the birth of the blog and podcast and my attempts at writing for a gaming site and then determining that wasn’t really for me. So much life has happened for both of us and it is weird trying to slip back into a friendship from so many years ago. Regardless it was a really cool happening to close out 2017, a year that has been generally crummy in so many other ways.

Lately I have fallen into a pattern with my evenings where I spend a little time in World of Warcraft knocking out the daily emissary chest and doing any world quests that have interesting rewards. Then I usually end up swapping over to Destiny 2 and doing whatever package schematic is available that day to get more Dawning rewards for free. I’ve talked about it at length in another post, but the Dawning being a largely cash shop holiday has been immensely frustrating for me. This was an event that I was so into when it happened in Destiny 1 in part because it brought back the sparrow racing league and ushered in the beginning of strike scoring. As it stands now I cannot seem to bring myself to run strikes of any form because they largely feel pointless. The bane of my existence at the moment is the Advanced Paradox Amplifier needed to get several of the prophecy weapon unlocks. These come from Strikes, Heroic Adventures and Crucible matches… and come extremely sparingly at that. I have been mostly grinding them out by chaining the new mayhem mode crucible matches and unfortunately most of the time you wind up with a single Paradox Amplifier per match… that you then need to turn in ten of to get the advanced variety. Unfortunately both the Strikes and Heroic Adventures award with the same frequency meaning that you can either do two things that take a significant amount of time… or grind your face off in PVP. I feel like part of me is completely dead inside from all of the crucible I have done lately, because I really don’t enjoy it… but I want the items that I can potentially get from doing it.

What makes this so painful is that Radiolarian Cultures seem to drop like candy from every public event or chest you open. I can spend 30 minutes and roam around opening chests on a planet and get more than enough to do several weapons, and then I am stuck grinding for legitimately hours to get a single blue quality advanced Paradox Amplifier. Throwing another thing into the mix I apparently need Fossilized Hermaion Blossoms which drop in Nightfalls. I need two of these so does this mean I will have to complete two Nightfalls in order to get this step done, or does this simply mean that they drop two at a time? The prophecy weapon grinds are largely frustrating because there is no real casual activity on the Paradox side of the equation. Had they said… you could do strikes, crucible matches or lost sectors… that would have been something that I could piddle around on my own happily doing for hours. Instead strikes feel too long and unrewarding, crucible matches are mind numbing, and the heroic adventure mechanism is just generally unfun especially since they included another god forsaken timer. At this point I have completed Hand Cannon, Pulse Rifle, SMG, and Sword… and now seemingly am working on the Saint-14 shotgun. I need to chain run a bunch of strikes over the next few days so I can get the currency to purchase Curtain Call from Zavala before the weapons swap again next Wednesday. I am in this weird place with Destiny 2, where I keep playing because I love the moment to moment gunplay… but keep getting frustrated by the myopic design.