Tales of the Aggronaut

Playing Together

July 12, 2016 by Belghast

This has already been an interesting morning so far, and it is only 6 am. I got up and did my normal routine of making coffee for my wife and I. I heard what sounded like rain so I took a peek outside like I often do, because the pool is an amazing indication of rain. All of those tiny droplets breaking the water show up far better than they do on land. As I stared out at the pool I noticed something moving around in it that I could not quite identify, so I took my cup of coffee outside to investigate. In the pool was this poor little field mouse that looked as though it had been swimming desperately trying to find a way out of the pool for awhile. I basically had two options… either help him now, or fish him out of the skimmer basket later once he eventually lost his battle with treading water indefinitely. I of course opted for the first, and started looking around the yard for something I could use as a ramp to help him get up and out of the water. I finally landed upon using a shovel and then began the battle of trying to convince him that I was actually trying to help. Once I finally got him up and out of the water he essentially collapsed on the shovel making it extremely easy to get him up and out of the water and over onto our deck. The little guy sat there for a bit before realizing that he should be afraid of humans, and eventually scurrying off in the general direction of the green belt behind our house. Sure he was what most people would consider a pest, but to me he was cute and fuzzy and in desperate need of assistance. I am absolutely a sucker for such things.

Last night also was a super interesting night. I had talked about events serving as a bit of a catalyst to get a large number of us back and engaged with Final Fantasy XIV. Part of that was “getting the band back together” as it were, and namely that meant reconstituting our raid team. So we spent last night working through some of the things many of us had sitting unfinished namely The Final Steps of Faith and Containment Bay S1T7. Before going into the fight Morehnai had warned us that the Nidhogg battle is little overtuned, and might be a bit difficult given that a bunch of us were sitting at exactly the 205 item level cap. He was really the only one of us that could be considered even the slightest bit over-geared with the rest between the bare minimum and just shy of 210. We also largely insisted on going into the fight completely blind, so this meant a handful of wipes as we started to learn the mechanics. The first wall was the add phase dps check, which we quickly sorted out and figured out ways to optimize our dps including me shifting to Deliverance stance for that big. Other than that it was largely working through the moving parts, avoiding damage that we didn’t need to take and ultimately more optimization before we ended up getting the sweet sweet kill. Sure normal mode Nidhogg is not exactly extreme raiding, but it felt like a good return to working together as a team.

After that we went through the Sephirot encounter, which was not surprisingly an awful lot easier. With that once again mostly being use learning what various things meant and how to avoid the damage. Sephirot being interesting in that there are a ton of non telegraphed attacks, namely the one where he turns to face a direction and then does a potentially platform wide attack. Other than that it was also learning the dance of his knock back attacks, and within a couple of attempts we had a dead member of the warring triad. Finally since we were short on time we popped back into Bismarck and killed us a sky whale earning Thalen a spiffy looking bow and the rest of us more Expanse Totems. Next week we are going to kill us a giant bug and hopefully clear the second half of Alex. Past that the sky is the limit, but it felt really good to be together and working as a team once more. Past that I wrapped up the rest of the story and it very much feels like we are saying goodbye to everything we have known over this expansion. I am seriously beginning to think that when Fan Fest happens in October that we will be getting the announcement of a new expansion, and not only that but that it will only be a few months away. The Deep Dungeon will serve as something for us to play with in the meantime and a vehicle which allows us to catch up all of those jobs that we never got around to leveling. In any case it feels like a really good time to be back in Final Fantasy XIV and back working together as a team.

Adorableness and Agitation

July 11, 2016 by Belghast

Mixed Weekend

This weekend was a bit of a mixed bag. One the positive side we decided to go visit the adorable kitten that is being taken care of by my Mother in Law. The little guy still seems to greatly favor me, and wandering around my beard… but this is a photo of him asleep behind my wife’s neck. To be truthful just a bit before this photo he was asleep behind my neck but she wanted kitten snuggles and swiped him. Unsurprisingly he settled right down and went back to sleep, having just finished a big meal a little beforehand. The kitten is almost heartbreakingly sweet, but is otherwise doing amazingly well. I also thought that maybe while I was in a new area and around a lake I would find all new sets of Pokemon, but for the most part on that front it was a complete bust. I found a handful of Pidgeys but that was honestly just about it. Which honestly I guess I am not terribly surprised given the cry on the Reddit about the need for better distribution of critters in deeply rural areas. Being around said kitten honestly was a bit of a mixed blessing, because on one level he is so adorable. On the other level it is a little bittersweet knowing that he will more than likely never come home to stay with us. The kitten is more more less already spoken for, and then there is the problem with his gender. After having a tom cat that had massive issues with spraying… we don’t ever want to live through that again. So for the last several years we have largely sworn off male cats. I just have no clue how to make sure a kitten never turns into a sprayer, because nothing we did to try and rehabilitate Mac ever seemed to make a difference.

As far as Pokemon Go is concerned, we recorded pretty much an entire podcast this weekend devoted to the game. However for whatever reason I didn’t really play much of it this weekend. During the podcast I burned an incense only to find out that I have a really hard time paying attention to that and podcasting at the same time. While I ended up getting a Psyduck after chasing it around my neighborhood for ages… I know for certain that I missed out on a handful of critters given that while the incense will draw them close, it doesn’t actually make them stay around for terribly long. I know for certain I missed out on a second Goldeen this way, and probably several others because I kept getting lost in talking and forgetting entirely that I had a timer ticking down. Friday night I did a little parking lot hopping, driving to different parking lots and walking around looking for anything interesting. Doing this I managed to catch a Snorlax, which apparently is super rare and I get why given how rough it was to actually capture. It started doing this thing that seemed like it was blowing the Pokeball to the side making everything curve out of the way. I wound up feeding it a berry, and getting some curve ball action going on to counteract it finally seeing that magical third twitch of the ball meaning I had successfully captured it.

The bulk of the weekend though, and yesterday especially I was just frustrated and filled with rage. I would love to be able to make sense of it but really there was no real reason for it. I just woke up Sunday morning with a horrible headache and everything seemed to anger me. I tried to isolate myself as much as possible because the moment I was actually around someone, like my poor wife I was snapping at them. The headache was intense, but not so much as to cause that sort of reaction. I struggled with finding something to really settle down and enjoy, that is until late Sunday afternoon I settled on finally watching through the tail end of the episodes of The Magicians. The uncomfortable sensation of wanting to play something, but nothing quite fitting the bill was maddening. I swear over the course of the day I booted up literally every game installed on my laptop only to log right back out a few minutes later frustrated. Probably the best thing I could have done was taken a nap… but given my less than friendly relationship with sleep that would have only lead to more problems. Basically for most of Sunday I was in essence a fussy baby, with my pacifier finally being mindlessly watching a television show. After I found something that actually seemed to keep my interest, I was then apparently able to log in and play something… and I finished the night by wrapping up my crystal grind for the new Relic weapon in Final Fantasy XIV. Now I am apparently in need of running a series of dungeons to “harden” the weapon or some such. Which makes me wonder if I can now do Snowcloak unsynced and solo it.

Pokemon By Night

July 8, 2016 by Belghast

No Seriously… Walking Simulator

I named yesterday’s blog post “Walking Simulator” half jokingly, but after two days of Pokemon after dark… it is really a truthful statement. You can look at my activity tracker and see very clearly the impact of the launch of Pokemon Go. While my wife thinks I am insane, I am however outside and getting exercise without really noticing it. Last night for example I walked quite literally for an hour without really realizing it. Sure I had broken a sweat because it was 94* outside, but thankfully there was a nice wind to greet me oddly enough in pretty much any direction. The best part about this is… I am not the only one doing it. This is the second night I have gone wandering, and Wednesday night I was really hoping I would not run into server issues. However for the most part starting around 8 pm the server seemed to be more or less stable, or enough so for me to risk trying to find some of the night spawning critters. Additionally bolstering that confidence, my friend Void had posted a link to a fledgling server status page for the Pokemon Go gateways. So with all bars reporting green I ventured out into the world.
I had barely made it into the neighborhood next to mine when I saw a couple walking along staring at a phone… and a few minutes later I saw the unmistakable action of throwing pokeballs at some critter. I smiled and held up my phone and they held up theirs as a sign of recognition, which caused a round of chuckles from all of us. It turns out they too were trying to take advantage of the shockingly good server connectivity and had just managed to catch a Pidgeot. Unfortunately the critter did not seem to still be around but a few minutes later I found my own rareish Pokemon in the form of a Weepinbell. I say rareish, largely because don’t know how common this or that Pokemon is… but the pre-evolved forms seem to be significantly rarer than the base forms. I found this list last night which attempts to list the pokemon caught in beta based on relative rarity. Which also made me super happy about one of my finds earlier in the day. For the last several weeks I have been going by after work each evening to water the flowers of a friend of ours while she is out of town. I had just pulled into the parking lot in front of her apartment and thought… I should probably check to see if there are any cool Pokemon around. Sitting right there almost literally in the parking space was a Tauros, a critter I had never actually caught in any of the games. It took a bunch of tries but sure enough a mixture of RNG and finger crossing got me that third little twitch that meant it was captured.

At this point I have seen twenty eight different pokemon, and captured twenty six of them. I missed a Butterfree on that first lunch outing, and then failed to catch the Fearow Wednesday night due to server issues. I say not bad at all for two days worth of effort and doing all of this legitimately… aka not using the cash shop items to “attract” Pokemon. Some things I have learned through hitting Pokestops apparently forty seven times based on the stats kept within the app. Pokeballs are plentiful… I now have over 140 of them so don’t fret too much about tossing several to catch a single Pokemon. Potions and Revives are also plentiful given that I have 54 and 36 respectively. Pokestops also seem to have the rare chance of giving you some cash shop type items given that I have received at least one incense off of a stop, and one of the 3 charge extra incubators that let you keep more than one egg going at once. Things I have learned from friends is that apparently you can bolster the defenses of a gym held by your team if you place Pokemon on it as well. Right now the gym in my town is held by the team I ultimately chose, Mystic aka Team Blue. So on my way out of town this morning I plan on stopping by just long enough to slap that hefty Weepinbell I got last night on the roster. I have no clue if I will lose said Pokemon or if it will return to me if fallen, or if I can heal it with potions etc. I do however know that if you hold a gym for your team you can earn pokecoins the cash shop currency as well as other in game items.

The other thing worth talking about this morning is that through a combination of friends and a super helpful Reddit post I finally have a handle on what the tracking system in the game means. When you click in the lower right corner of the screen you can see which Pokemon are near you. Each of them will show a number of tracks out beside them with the default seeming to be three. Number one thing I learned is that the list is sorted in order of distance from you, meaning the ones at the top of the list are closer than the ones at the bottom. Second thing I learned is that if you click on a Pokemon it begins to track that specific one. If while tracking your bar flashes, that means you are walking in the direction towards the Pokemon, and as you get closer the number of tracks will start decreasing. When you eventually get down to zero tracks it should spawn near you, and allow you to try and capture it. This would have been extremely helpful to know last night as I seemed to be wandering around trying to find one of two Psyduck in my neighborhood. I will say years of seeing silhouettes of Pokemon have greatly prepared all of us for knowing precisely what might be in our neighborhood based on the outline. Last night there also appeared a blip of a Tentacool for a bit, but I never found it either. Hopefully you too are getting out and walking and finding your own stash of critters. If you are curious what I have actually caught I am for the moment keeping a crappy spreadsheet until I figure out what I want to do properly.

Walking Simulator

July 7, 2016 by Belghast

Gotta Catch Em All

If I had any topic to talk about today, it was immediately erased from my mind as soon as I got my grubby hands on Pokemon Go. I was in fact one of those bastards that went through the relatively simple process of installing it to bypass the region lockouts. First off I want to address something that is frustrating me, is that for some reason people seem to think defeating region lockouts is “hacking”. Region lockouts are dumb, and at least on Android devices, any time you download anything you are already downloading the APK as that is how anything installs. The beauty of the android platform is there isn’t just one app store, in fact on my device I currently have Google Play, Amazon Underground, and APK Pure all installed and living happily together. These are especially handy when confronted with a device that for whatever reason is trying to block the actual Google Play store and instead keep redirecting you to their carrier run store. Anyways with that out of the way, I downloaded the APK and had it sitting on my device while I ran out to lunch yesterday. On my way out of the building I caught my first Pokemon which was one of the original three starters…. Go Team Squirtle! Then before I had even left my building I also happened to encounter a Staryu… things were getting off to a great start.

I had errands to run so I drove out to one of the nearby hubs of shopping that houses a ton of big box stores. I needed to pick up some cat
food and cat litter from Target, and also wanted to pop by Rackroom shoes to see if I could find any sandals that I did not hate this season. When I pulled into the parking lot of Target I opened up the app and noticed several Pokemon nearby where I parked. When you are anywhere, you see critters within the vicinity of you… and when you get close enough to one you can attempt to capture it. Sadly I have no screenshots of the capture process because it goes quickly. Essentially it is playing Skeeball, and for those who don’t have that cultural frame of reference… you are flicking the Pokeball with your finger and trying to hit essentially a target that represents the sweet spot for capturing each specific Pokemon. If you tap on the Pokemon you will see a set of rings with a green spot being the best possible place to land your hit in order to capture. You have a limited number of attempts before the Pokemon runs away and cannot be seen on your map. Of note all of this stuff tries to place your Pokemon in your surroundings using Augmented Reality via your phones camera. I however didn’t really want to see the real world and would far rather have a cartoony Pokemon world to be wandering around in and capturing critters.

So there I was wandering around a Target parking lot, I am sure looking like an idiot… but you know what I didn’t care. I was having fun and capturing all sorts of cool Pokemon. By the time I left that parking lot I had managed to gather up a whole bunch of new critters
including a really nice Eevee. Now each Pokemon you catch has a CP level… which doesn’t mean much to me as of yet because well I just started playing this yesterday. However from what I have been able to tell the higher the number the better, and this factors into what sort of stat package that they have. So my Eevee in question came out of the box as it were with 104 which is significantly higher than any other Pokemon I have seen yet. Ironically the hardest capture yet was my Magikarp, namely because it kept flipping around aimlessly anytime I tried to toss the Pokeball. Not only do you have to try and land the sweet spot, but most Pokemon will move around on you while trying to do this. Similarly I utterly failed at capturing a Butterfree because apparently it is a little stronger willed than others. I captured it three times… and all three times it broke out of the ball… eventually flying away never to be seen again.

The reason why I titled this post Walking Simulator, is because that is a genre name that folks have tacked onto games that are about walking around and exploring virtual worlds… but without any combat to speak of. Pokemon Go however is quite literally a game about walking. The world has all of these objectives out there in the form of PokeStops and Gyms that seem to appear based on the previous Ingress player portal locations according to Thalen who had apparently played that game way more than I ever did. So for me I have one right around the corner from my house in the form of a statue. So last night I convinced my wife to go for a walk… under the guise of exercise but she knew that really I just wanted to go out and capture Pokemon. Now we get into the larger problem of Pokemon Go right now… the servers and uptime. For most of the day yesterday things were crashing in spectacular ways, likely because Niantic was simply not ready for the crush of folks who like me decided to bypass the silly region lockouts. This immediately started a ban rumor floating around that anyone who downloaded the APK was going to get banned from the application. Yet in all of the threads I never saw anyone reporting anything other than normal intermittent service issues.

Pokemon Go is a deeply connected application. Not only do you need to stay in fairly constant communication with the Niantic servers over what I am guessing is some sort of a Web Service call… you also have to have unfettered connectivity to GPS satellites in order to keep your positioning true. This means two things… namely that gameplay can be unpredictable, and that your battery will weep in misery at the drain. When I went out to lunch I had about 85% on my battery… and after about an hour of running errands and capturing Pokemon I was sitting around 52% if I remember correctly. Ingress players are notorious for carrying a bunch of portable battery packs just to make sure that their gameplay is uninterrupted and truthfully that is probably going to be the standard operating procedure with Pokemon Go as well. So in the middle of my walk last night I encountered a Fearow in the grocery store parking lot. When I went to try and capture it however I threw the ball… and the screen locked up with the ubiquitous spinning Pokeball icon in the left corner of the screen working madly on trying to reacquire a signal. I finally had to shut down the application, and reboot my phone… to restore any semblance of connectivity… and even then when I got to the PokeStop outside of my Neighborhood I couldn’t actually retrieve anything from it. While the game has launched officially now… it is very much not without issues.

However what exists is extremely awesome. For me Pokemon was always a game about capturing interesting critters, and the combat and story always took a backseat. When I caught all of the available Pokemon in an area I stopped caring about it and simply wanted to move on to the next area so I could see fresh critters. For me… this game is likely going to be crack, but also going to be an excellent excuse to get out of the house and walk around my neighborhood. Where I work downtown there are a couple dozen different PokeStops within easy walking distance so more than likely I am going to start venturing out at lunch to go find them. What is disturbing is the level of saturation this app has already gotten. There are four or five different gyms located in downtown Tulsa, and by noon yesterday when I went out to run errands… each and every single one of them was already claimed by a player. Now these might be beta players or “Beaters” as the community has taken to calling them, but it might also be folks like me who grabbed the APK and just started playing. There are so many aspects of the game I can’t really talk about yet… because I have not experienced them. There is apparently a whole team mechanic that will happen at some point, but as I am sub level 5 that is not something I have encountered yet. I do plan on going Team Blue, and I believe that is where the rest of my friends are leaning as well. In any case… if you have ever loved Pokemon I suggest at least checking it out. I have this feeling that it will be something I obsess with for a few weeks… and then never touch again… much like the other Pokemon games I have played. However it does at least make walking and running errands a far more interesting experience.