Tales of the Aggronaut

Breaking Routine

October 17, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely when it came to Sunday morning. Generally speaking I have the process of finishing up an AggroChat episode down to a fairly regimented process. Saturday night before I crash I try to do what I call the initial edit, which is most of the actual edit work. Then Sunday morning I write the small bit of copy, and upload and syndicate the podcast to the various sources where it gets put. However this week was the first week doing all of this on the new machine… and I was not prepared. For starters we recorded a really long show mostly about the Final Fantasy XIV 3.4 main story quest. We did not unfortunately ONLY talk about that, and that meant we had almost three hours of recorded audio to process… and didn’t actually finish things up until around midnight my time. Instead of staying up further, I decided to crash and deal with it in the morning. Then Sunday it was a carnival of errors, as the version of audacity on my new machine was apparently slightly newer than the version I had been using which means a lot of the filters had different options… or at least were arranged in different ways. Additionally there was the process of trying to find all of my source files off of the old machine, which is thankfully still accessible over the network.

The worst part of it however was the changes to the Truncate Silence filter…. which is a crutch we lean on heavily for AggroChat. We are fairly pensive folk, and as a result there are a lot of lengthy pauses in conversation. With truncate silence that 3 hours of audio becomes 2 hours… but on my first attempt it maybe clipped a little more than actual silence. For whatever reason it was clipping the hell out of anytime Kodra talked, giving his speech a record skipping characteristic. However this is not something I realized until I was just about to upload the files to our host. Thankfully I caught it in time and was able to redo that portion, lowering the granularity of the filter. This mean’t what is normally a couple hour process… ate up I think four hours in total. Admittedly I was piddling around in Guild Wars 2 during much of it, so there were probably moments when I didn’t notice a filter had finished here or there. The positive however is that every filter applied went massively faster than on the previous AMD FX-6300 based processor. That was really my hope with the new i7 based system, is that it would be able to chew through rendering tasks far more successfully. As with any system there is going to be an adjustment and moving in period, and I am hoping that now that I have finished a single podcast on this machine additional ones will be much quicker.

As far as the weekend itself went, I was all over the place. I played a significant amount of Destiny, completing a bunch of bounties and discovering the Archon’s Forge… or more so how easy it was to get a pick up group. Much the same way as the court of Oryx, you seem to be able to just show up and folks will either be doing it… or quickly swarm when they think anyone else is. I also played a lot of World of Warcraft, completely a few mythic dungeons as well as successfully completing my first Mythic+ keystone. I’m looking forward to seeing that upgraded loot in the weekly order hall chest. In addition to that I completed the five time-walking dungeons on both Belghast and Exeter, and on the later I used it as a way to gear him up. I am now sitting over the 825 cap needed to get into LFR so my hope is tonight I will be able to run the two parts available and potentially get more upgrades that way. Generally speaking on Belghast the 835 rewards are not super enticing, but I still ran it this week for the purpose of getting some rune stones. I also need to do a bunch of fishing, as I now have the pattern to turn the 300 versatility food that I spent a chunk of the weekend crafting… into a 375 version. I am only using this stuff for raiding and mythic+ attempts, as I keep a bank full of Faronar Fizz for other stuff.

The biggest take away from the weekend is that I am actually finding myself legitimately enjoying Guild Wars 2. Recently it had been a game that I was dipping my toes into for the sake of my friends that were also playing it. However before the podcast we ran several of the story mode dungeons and they were pretty enjoyable. Enough so that when I sat down to decide which game I would play during the podcast, I decided to go ahead and stay with Guild Wars 2. That means that I spent the next three hours roaming aimlessly completing little objectives here and there, and mostly finding my way to the next story mode dungeon. The post 80/ Heart of Thorns mastery leveling is pretty slow. In all of that time I only managed to get about half of a mastery level… and then I ended up wasting a bunch of experience because I didn’t notice I needed to click through and train it. I am pretty not sure what my purpose in game is, but I am still fairly dead set on the warrior… and more importantly hammer warrior. That makes me the make shift tank for the group, and I have been using rifle lately as my dps weapon because it allows me to have something that I can hit things with at range. At some point I want to pick back up where I left off in attempting to level armor smithing, but right now my craft window looks somewhat like madness to me. All in all I feel like I have come to terms with the game in accepting what it is… and more importantly what it is not.

Plenty of Tinfoil

October 14, 2016 by Belghast

Lately it has felt like there has been a bit of a mass exodus of folks leaving Blizzard or at least the World of Warcraft team. The highest profile of these of course was the departure of Chris Metzen, but yesterday another fairly high profile name joined the group. Tom Chilton posted a note on the forums stating that he would be leaving the World of Warcraft team to join an as yet unnamed project. This leaves Watcher… aka Ion Hazzikostas in charge of the team. This of course is simply two folks leaving a game… but in between there have been a number of lower profile departures as well. The rumor mill of course starts churning and contemplating what might be going on at Blizzard to spawn these events, and honestly I think something more benign is at work here. For some of these folks… they have literally been working on the exact same project for over a decade. Imagine if you, in whatever your line of work… had to work on exactly the same thing every single day. Granted at Blizzard there is a lot of room to branch out and work on other teams as new games come down the pipeline, but I have long felt that WoW was essentially the product that no one seemed super excited to work on.

I feel like it is time once again to dredge up “The List”. Years ago there was a supposed leaked list of expansions, that in theory covered the entire planned arc of the World of Warcraft franchise. Of note… this list was floating around the interwebs before the launch of Burning Crusade, and I remember seeing it roughly the same time as the original Naxxramas patch was released. I myself wrote about it prior to the announcement of Cataclysm, trying to draw upon it for wisdom as to what the path forward might be. Cataclysm honestly threw a giant monkey wrench in the proceedings, and from that point onward it stops being terribly accurate, but for both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King it was down right prophetic. What I think we can draw from it now however is that the “Legion Set” was always something that was planned to wrap up the cycle of World of Warcraft. I believe that from day one, it was the intent of the original WoW team to bring us back into conflict with The Burning Legion, and it was simply a matter of figuring out what path we would take to get there. For the sake of having this list in a more modern post I am reprinting it below.

Draenor Set

Azuremyst Isle – 1 to 10
Bloodmyrk Isle – 10 to 20

Eversong Forest – 1 to 10
Quel’thalas – 10 to 20
Hellfire Peninsula – 58 to 62
Zangarmarsh – 60 to 64
Terokkar Forest – 61 to 65
The Deadlands – 63 to 67
Nagrand – 64 to 68
Blade’s Edge Mountains – 66 to 70
Netherstorm – 67 to 70
Shadowmoon Valley – 69 to 70

Northrend Set

Borean Tundra – 67 to 70
Howling Fjord – 67 to 70
Dragonblight – 69 to 72
Grizzly Hills – 70 to 73
Crystalsong Forest – 72 to 75
Zul’drak – 73 to 76
Sholazar Basin – 75 to 79
Storm Peaks – 76 to 80
Icecrown Glacier – 78 to 80

Maelstrom Set

Gilneas – 77 to 80
Grim Batol – 78 to 81
Kul Tiras – 79 to 82
Kezan – 81 to 86
Tel Abim – 83 to 85
Zandalar – 84 to 87
Plunder Isle – 86 to 88
The Broken Isles – 87 to 90
The Maelstrom – 89 to 90

Plane Set

Pandaria – 1 to 10
Hiji – 10 to 20

Wolfenhold – 1 to 10
Xorothian Plains – 10 to 20

The Green Lands – 88 to 91
The Dying Paradise – 91 to 94
The Emerald Nightmare – 94 to 97
The Eye of Ysera – 97 to 100

Deephome – 88 to 91
Skywall – 91 to 94
The Abyssal Maw – 94 to 97
The Firelands – 97 to 100

Legion Set

K’aresh – 96 to 99
Argus Meadowlands – 97 to 100
Mac’Aree – 99 to 100
Maw of Oblivion – 100+
The Burning Citadel – 100+++

So at least in part… I think some of the recent leaves from Blizzard or the WoW team… are because the job if finished. Now please do not mistake me saying that I feel like World of Warcraft is done… but what I am saying is that the original story arc has reached its conclusion. There were a lot of changes and reworks as time went on.. and we ended up fighting the Legion at level 110 rather than 100, but we got there nonetheless. I think for some of these folks who have been working on the product for over a decade now, there is a sense of closure. They can make a break and walk away feeling like they accomplished whatever job it was that they set out to do in the first place. I imagine were I in their shoes, it probably would feel like a great time for me to go do something else now. Among the AggroChat crew there has been a lot of discussion about the way Legion feels… and more than anything else that it feels like the first truly “fresh” content that we have seen in a really long time. There is something going on in the game, and a stark difference between the feel of the awesome intra-zone stories and the bigger factional story that feels forced in there. I think what we are seeing is the evidence of two different teams at work, with different visions and goals for the game.

So while we might be losing the old guard, it definitely feels like there is some fresh new talent coming in to infuse something exciting into the franchise. I’ve said this several times but it bears repeating. This is the first time since the launch of Catalysm that I have hope for the future of the Warcraft franchise. What I mean by that is that this is the first time in all of those years that I feel like maybe just maybe the best days of this franchise are not something we will remember fondly from the past, but instead something that is on the road that lay ahead. Almost two months into Legion I am still completely smitten by it, and that seems like a really good thing. By this point in both Pandaria and Warlords at least I was losing significant amounts of steam. Here I am still more than happy to run almost anything someone points me in the direction of. I am absolutely enjoying raiding and happy to be sitting at 4/7 Emerald Nightmare now with our super casual raid. I am interested to see what comes next, and what news might filtered out of BlizzCon about where the future will take us. More than anything I hope that the awesome Class Halls can be a bridge to get us to finally bury the hatchet and take a step away from the vision of the red versus blue game play and storytelling. I want the next decade to be one I get to share with my horde and alliance friends both.

Three Bosses Down

October 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was an interesting night raid wise. It seems like we reached some critical mass of gear to make the content largely doable. Either that or we simply spent too much time fighting with the harder encounters first. We’ve been able to down the first boss of Emerald Nightmare since our very first hastily thrown together raid on that Friday of the first week it was open. However for the last several weeks we have had a slightly shifting raid composition as folks filtered in and out of the group, including several different tank and healer teams. Last night however felt like things have started to solidify, and it really feels like a fairly solid team. The biggest problem that has been facing us was the shifting from boss to boss trying to find the next one that worked for us. On our first outing we gave Spiderbird a shot, and decided that maybe that fight had too many moving parts. Then for whatever reason… we collectively decided that Il’gynoth was the next best target. After a few weeks of wiping to the eyeball, we decided to shift focus back to Spiderbird at the tail end of last weeks raid and then were shocked we managed to get it easily to the 30% range before shit fell apart. So this week we came back and focused on this boss and after about four or five attempts we managed to push it across with a victory that felt pretty solid. Sure we were down several people at the point of the kill, but we had enough that after a little bit it felt certain we would get it. Granted we were about 45 seconds away from the enrage timer due to the missing dps.

From there we moved on to working on the Ursoc encounter because it seemed largely to be a tank, healer and coordination check. On I believe our second attempt we managed to get the victory after a bunch of shifting bits around to figure out how to handle the charges more effectively. As a tank however I have to say Ursoc is a bit of a heart attack. I was constantly praying that I would have enough rage to hit my next reactive ability to help curb the insane damage that was coming in. The constant tank swaps were a little strange to get used to as well, but Art and I managed to largely figure it out, and with it… another new boss kill. From here we moved to Dragons… and on our second attempt hilarity ensued. Several of us were down… and we THOUGHT we were wiping…. so Kylana started going into the whole spiel about how we could improve on the fight. However the remaining living tank and the dps and heals that were still up just kept on pushing forward. Apparently we were a lot closer to victory than we realized, because in the middle of this speech about the things we need to tighten up… we saw the Dragons of Nightmare killed message pop across our screens. It reminded me so much of the time we killed Sindragosa… with everyone dead. Thalen had fired the last shot and then gotten frozen… and the boss was dead but we all had to rez up and run back to be able to loot the body. Because of this fact I didn’t get a screenshot of that kill, as I was running back at the time. We put in some tries on the Eyeball but ultimately called it since it was getting close to our normal stopping time. However I will absolutely take three new boss kills in one night.

Steam Game Crashes

October 12, 2016 by Belghast

When I get to working on something I can be completely oblivious to the world around me. Last night was one of those times. I got a message from Tam asking if I needed Xephatol one of the new dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV, to which I replied that I had not touched the content yet. I was in the middle of digging into an issue that had been bugging me since building this system over the weekend. Certain games just would not load regardless of how many supposed “fixes” I attempted… namely the whole compatibility mode and run as administrator nonsense that you seem to need to do with Windows 10. He hinted that it might be good to test out Final Fantasy XIV… which is the point where I got super oblivious. Namely that I said I had tested all of the MMOs and they seem to be working… but that I was largely having trouble with Fallout 4 and No Man’s Sky. It did not dawn on me at the time that he was not so subtly hinting that I should come run the dungeon with them… and it even included an obligatory smiley after his statement. So finally it dawned on me what he was trying to get at and I ultimately logged in, and got caught up to the dungeon. It was a good time, and this really is a dungeon of bad ideas. These silly birbs cannot fly… but want to at all costs. More importantly than that however was the fact that it unstuck the logjam my content was in, and the post dungeon revelations were quite interesting. I largely want to finish the story content so that we can talk about it on Saturday during the podcast because it is sounding like we are going to get a really interesting expansion announcement this week as a result.

As to the more pressing matters… the issues I had been having were maddening. The key problem with windows gaming on a new machine… is that you never quite know if what you are experiencing is just strangeness with the game… or if it is the result of some bad combination of drivers. However as a result I updated almost every sort of driver I could think of to make sure that was not it. Like I hinted at before… I tried several versions of compatibility mode, and running as administrator. I tried launching from steam, nvidia experience, and directly from the executable to see if there were any different behaviors exhibited. In all cases what would happen in Fallout 4 was that it would show the “Please Stand By” screen… and would hear about 5 seconds of static and sound… then the spinning blue “not responding” wheel would pop up and Fallout 4 would either crash… or just sit in this zombie state indefinitely leading me to ultimately close it with task manager. Since the weekend I have spent a good chunk of every evening trying different things and scouring the web looking at people who supposedly had eureka moments. Each time I would feel hopeful only to have it dashed almost immediately as the next great fix didn’t do anything for my current situation. So this is the mental quagmire I happened to be in last night when Tam was trying to reach through it… the repetitive pattern of trial and research only leading to miles of defeat.

After doing the dungeon run… I had a bit of my own eureeka moment. One of the posts had mentioned that usb devices being connected could be causing crashes like this on startup. Now when I built the computer I did so seperate from my main gaming rig. Then Sunday afternoon I unhooked literally everything that was in the back of the previous machine and plugged it into this one. That means with it came all of the devices I had been using on the previous setup. While crawling through the config file for Fallout 4 I noticed a setting that I like flipping to disable controllers, because it is one of those games where it is going to try and use a controller if one is hooked to your system. I flipped that setting and bam the game launched. Now previously I had the Windows PS4 Remote Play application installed, and I largely used it as a way to extract screenshots easily from my Playstation 4 for the purpose of these blog posts, rather than ferrying them across on a thumb drive. As a result when I last used my machine I had my Dual Shock 4 controller hooked to the PC. On a whim I disconnected the DS4 from the usb cable, and then suddenly No Man’s Sky would load as well. It seems as though something was timing out when these games were trying to identify controllers connected to my system, and then getting really confused with the DS4 that doesn’t have actual drivers that work successfully most of the time. So it seems as though this has largely cleared up the issues I was having, which makes me pretty happy given that I spent from 5:30 until 7:30 last night trying random combinations of things to get Fallout 4 working… when in reality I didn’t even care about playing the game. I was stuck in a loop of needing desperately to solve the problem, so that I knew everything was functional.