Tales of the Aggronaut

Ship Happens

April 19, 2016 by Belghast

Meeting Folks

It feels like over the last several days we have gotten an entire years worth of rain… all at once. There is so much standing water in my front yard that I am beginning to think I actually do have a pond. The only positive of this is that once it has all soaked in everything should green up even more than before. The only negative about the rain today is that I am supposed to go out to lunch today, and the place we picked is within walking distance of my work. It would seem silly to drive for something that close, but I am hoping by the time lunch rolls around the rain has at least slowed to a sprinkle. The reason why I mention this happening at all is because who I am meeting for lunch are long time gamer friends Damai and Erry which is kinda cool. They are passing through town on their drive across the country, and in theory they should be getting to Tulsa around noonish. Now I got to meet Damai at Pax South, but this will be the first time meeting his sister Erry which is kinda cool. As far as where we are going, I picked a BBQ joint that I like because honestly… when it comes to Tulsa cuisine I always struggle to pick that one quintessential thing that everyone needs to try. Normally I would have suggested a sausage cheeseburger from Ron’s but that doesn’t always make great “travelling for long distances on the road” food given the copious amount of grease.

The funny thing about meeting folks that I have known for years online, is that no matter who it is I always get nervous. I always worry that I won’t live up to whatever impression of me that they might have in their head. Granted at this point I have met a bunch of folks that I have gamed with for years, and it has all essentially worked out fine once the initial awkwardness of translating that teamspeak voice to a physical body. That said it still stresses me out far more than it should. The positive about going out for a meal is that it gives an activity to focus on other than trying to fill all of the gaps with discussion. Hell even with people I have known for years, my vehicle of choice for hanging out is over a restaurant table. There is something primal about sharing a meal together, and there is also something comforting about it as well. All of this said I am not terribly stressed about this situation since as I said before I have at least met Damai in the flesh before. It should be really cool and I have blocked off a decent chunk of my schedule to allow for variance in when they actually get here. I should probably totally ask Rae to see if she wants to come too since she at least knows Damai.

Building a Fleet

Space-Age Mariner

Crypt Hammer

Gloriole Jump

Ripship Pardoner

Ketch Me If You Can

The strangest thing about the recent Destiny patch has been what seems to be a massive increase in the number of ship drops. All five of the above ships I’ve gotten since the patch last week. One came from the loot boxes, three from doing various activities, and one from opening treasure boxes. I am not sure if I just hit a lucky spot in the randomizer or if they changed the magic formula that indicates if drops happen. It feels like what they have actually done is made the chance of a ship drop disconnected from any other rewards, which in theory makes you roll on a much shallower loot table. In any case I am a huge fan of whatever these changes are because it is helping me build out my fleet. I am still chasing the taken ship from the loot boxes however, because I love that ship model and I have yet to get any of that variety. I do think that the Ripship Pardoner above is just about the quintessential “Titan” ship… big bulky and heavily armed. There are times however that I kinda wish that the ships actually “did” something, or that there was some sort of a ship to ship combat mini-game along the lines of SWTOR. Granted I never played the one is SWTOR but it was nice knowing it was out there.

Another aspect of this patch that I am loving is the fact that it once again rewards me for doing patrol missions. That seems to be just about the fastest way to level my Vanguard and Faction reputation. Every ding rewards you a package and those packages take your currently equipped loot into consideration meaning that more often than not I end up with an upgrade. Yesterday I pushed a faction across and wound up getting a 322 piece of armor that was immediately infused into my Iron Banner arms. I love that almost anything I can do right now has the chance of giving me an upgrade. I’ve also noticed that PVP seems to be dropping weapons more often, because last night pretty much every round I played had someone walking away with a legendary weapon. I ended up walking away myself with a Red Spectre with a less than amazing roll… but I am still going to try and make it work because I love the whole “Red Death” graphic. The biggest problem is the stability on the weapon, but I am willing to see if I can make it work. In any case right now I am just in love with all of the options I have and each one of them has a path that can get me upgrades.

Old School New School

April 18, 2016 by Belghast

Doomed

Firstly if you didn’t check it out I highly suggest you read yesterday’s blog post if for no reason other than the amazing custom artwork by my friend @Ammosart. As far as this weekend went, it was a bit of an odd one. I once again played a lot of Destiny, but this morning that is not one of the shooter experiences I am going to be talking about. I really hate it when game companies gang up on each other, because this weekend there were “special” beta tests going on for Overwatch, Battleborn and Doom. While at first they might not seem all that related, they are each chasing a multiplayer experience that they would really love you to care about. Battleborn is not even on the list of games I was interested in, thanks to a really bad alpha experience causing me to pitch it to the curb. Doom however… I really want to like and keep giving it ample attempts to sell me on its regressive notion of what first person shooter multiplayer should be. Now please note… I’ve had access to the alpha for quite awhile now thanks to a strange presell deal that they had for Wolfenstein The New Order. I have not really talked about it before now however due to the NDA it has been wrapped in, but with this weekends big beta event… that has been dropped.

Doom Multiplayer is a game that really hopes that you remember Quake 3 Arena fondly, and have been craving that sort of gameplay with marginally better graphics. The gameplay honestly gives flash backs to playing Rocket Arena… during a time when even then I thought the Quake Arena experience was far inferior to Unreal Tournament that I tended to play more often. If you miss the days of being shot across the map from someone you can’t even see as you spawn in… then this is going to be the game you have been hankering for. The big problem I had was in all of the matches that I have played… I never really found myself having fun. I mean I did okayish, but it very much felt like wandering around the same claustrophobic hallways that we used to in Quake. The worst sin however is the movement… it feels completely unrealistic and the same sort of stiff speedy running that those original Quake games had. What it is trying to be is fast paced run and gun action, but in an era when we can do that without sacrificing animation and design aesthetics. I’ve now played several different PC alpha tests, and installed it on the PS4 to give it a go there… and no matter what I keep coming up with the same impression. This is not a fun multiplayer experience.

Molten Core!

The general “unfun” nature of Doom was only drilled home thanks to also being in Overwatch this weekend. It feels like both games are trying really hard to deliver something similar, at least in the department of a faced paced shooter department. Also both games really want you to want to watch them as some sort of an e-sports extravaganza. However Doom is a world that traded the drab green and brown nothingness of Quake for various shades of orange and blood red… whereas Overwatch is almost more game world than it actually needs to support the combat. As you wander around the world there is a constant barrage of tiny details. Posters on the wall, images up on computer screens… advertisements for murloc themed restaurants. The world is vibrant and feels alive, and almost begs you to inhabit it, and what makes it even better is that every single character is just as vibrant and well designed. Playing Torbjorn feels unique and completely different from playing Pharah or Reaper or Reinhardt. The only negative here is that at times they almost feel too unique, in that the control scheme of one champion doesn’t begin to map up to playing another one. It is fairly normal for “league” style champion design to differ wildly, but at least in League you are always going to be using QWE, but for Overwatch champions there is essentially an array of hotkeys that get used… and not all champions use all hotkeys. The most confusing aspect of this is how some champions have a movement key and others don’t… and even among the ones that do they don’t always sync up to exactly the same key.

So what ended up having to happen is that I started to compartmentalize “this is how I play this champion” from “this is how I play overwatch”. The only unfortunate thing about this game is that you can see how much effort they put into building the world, and personally I get a little nostalgic about “what might have been”. Titan was supposed to be Overwatch the MMO, and I would have loved that. Even if they had given me a game along the lines of Destiny or Division I would have eaten it up completely. So as you are playing through the levels you see signs of what might have been. As far as the game play itself it centers around running multiplayer matches, to rank up… to unlock loot crates… to get sweet skins and other cosmetic stuff… that improve your game play experience for those champions that you really love. At its core this game is a really tight multiplayer team based shooter, and if that is not the experience you have been looking for… this probably isn’t the game for you. It plays like a modern version of Team Fortress 2 and feels tighter than that game ever did. Every aspect of the experience seems like it has been painstakingly planned and the awesome thing about it is that for once Blizzard is probably being more forthcoming with information than any other multiplayer game has been. For example they went into more detail about the netcode behind the game play than any company I have ever seen. The only unfortunate thing is that I am going to have to likely wait until May 3rd to get to play the game again, given that is when the pre-launch open beta period begins. The game lived up to all of my expectations, and I am amped to get to play it with friends.

Seven Years

April 17, 2016 by Belghast

Interesting Journey

It feels so immensely strange to be sitting down to write this post. As of this morning it marks the seventh year of Tales of the Aggronaut. I am not exactly sure why but seven years seems like a significantly more auspicious number than five or six or even eight. Culturally we place a strange importance on the number seven as either lucky or magical, and I have to admit that I fall for this same trap myself. As a web developer by trade, I started this blog with a purpose and had all of the trappings of a proper website. One of those is of course Google Analytics integration, and I spent some time this morning going over the numbers before sitting down to write this post. In the Seven years I have published 1260 posts, and they have been read a grand total of 235,304 times at the moment of pulling the stats. Over the course of this blogs lifespan I’ve had 110,359 unique readers from 182 countries, and roughly 40% of them are return readers. What I found shocking was that there are a little over 4000 of you out there that have read my blog more than 200 times. As far as my readers go it seems that the bulk from from the United States as one would expect, but the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Australia also make up large chunks and round out the top five countries with France coming in a not too distant sixth. The web developer in me was also curious to find out that the vast majority of my readers are using Google Chrome (go them!) with the next highest batch using Firefox (also good choice)… and then unfortunately a large block are still using Internet Explorer and I was shocked that it actually beat out Safari.

The thing is… these numbers are utterly meaningless because at the end of the day it still very much feels like I am a little kid pretending to make a newspaper or sitting in a cardboard box pretending to tell the news. Every day I get up and make my post, and mentally I feel like I am talking to myself. I have a hard time reconciling that there are people out there reading each and every day without fail. I know there are mentally, because when I am late getting a post up… folks will come out of the woodwork to check on me. However emotionally I cannot quite comprehend that I have people that are that interested in the boring things that I do each and every day. I am not a terribly interesting person, and most of my life is spent going to work, trying to be a good husband, juggling family and friends… and attempting to get in as much game time as humanly possible. The truth is I share a lot of my life with you my readers, and if I didn’t feel like I was talking to myself… I am not sure if I would have the courage to say some of the things I have said. I’ve shared my high points and my low points… and attempted to be honest with my struggles and frustrations. The result has been more support from my friends and readers than I ever thought possible. When am feeling down, you all reach out to me and lift me back up… and in truth you are a huge part of why I keep going each and every morning.

Evolution of the Aggronaut

I still look back on the early days of this blog and wonder what exactly caused me to start it in the first place. I guess in truth I was always a blogger, I just didn’t realize it. I was one of those folks that haunted game forums, and was prone to writing huge wall of text posts about this subject or that. As to what prompted me to make the switch from forum goer to blogger, that one is a bit harder to nail down. I know I was ultimately prompted to start thinking about it by WoW Insider and their focus on a single blog called The Wordy Warrior. Since I was a Warrior trying to lead a raid, I felt a certain kinship with this blogger and that lead me to start my own “warrior blog”. Aggronaut itself has gone through so many changes over the years. It was originally a Warrior Tanking blog, and then shifted to a general warrior blog… to a raid leadership blog… to a general World of Warcraft blog… to a Rift blog… until finally it was rebooted in its current form which is MY blog. For so long I kept trying to make it into something more than just an open discussion I was having with my readers about whatever happened to be on my mind. I was told that in order to be “successful” you had to find a niche and then exploit the shit out of that niche… and that never really did feel amazing. The end result after all of this back and forth is that Tales of the Aggronaut is a blog about me and whatever the hell I happen to be doing. If you are going to read me for long at all, you have to be interested in me as a person because I am not always going to be all that interesting.

The strangest thing to get used to over these years is that once you have made a post it often times develops a life of its own. There have been many times I have written something and then someone came along behind me and got some other meaning from my post that I never intended or even thought about. Sometimes this is good… and other times it just serves as fodder for someone else’s rant blog. The one harsh reality is that the posts that become popular, are never the ones you actually thought were worth reading. Looking back through my analytics… here are the top five posts in the seven years of Aggronaut. At least one of them completely makes me cringe these days.

Of those the only one I am actually proud of in any fashion is my GroupCraft series of posts. The Keyboard Turning one I am actually actively embarrassed by largely because I don’t even recognize the “me” that wrote that post because I guess I have mellowed out significantly since I first started this blog. However I feel like it would be dishonest to remove posts from the annals of time, so I leave them… even the ones that make me cringe. If nothing else this blog charts my evolution as a player and a decent human being. However I admit that a lot of that evolution didn’t really start until I began my mad mission of blogging every single day. In a few weeks it will mark the third anniversary of blogging every single day, and it is funny how I have gone from being one of the least prolific bloggers to being among the most. In the first four years of my blog I made 148 posts… in the last three years I made 1112 posts, so a huge difference.

Faces of Bel

Like I said in the start of this very long and probably self aggrandizing post… seven feels like a special number. For years I have joked that I really only play one character, and then try and recreate that character in every single game that I play. I’ve even posted pictures of my various characters to drill home that point. This got me thinking, and since I am really good friends with the amazing artist @Ammosart I decided I would try and commission her to create a special graphic to commemorate this occasion. The idea was to have an image that showed off several of the “Faces of Bel” and I have to say I was completely blown away when I saw the end result. She went above and beyond anything I could have hoped for, and now I will have to be tempted to have her create something for every anniversary… if I can afford that. I absolutely wanted this on a shirt, so at my suggestion she has throw it up on her t-shirt store. I wanted every last penny of the proceeds to go to her, so instead of me creating a “Tales of the Aggronaut” store this seemed like the better option. For I believe the first 72 hours it is only $14 and then after that they go up to the normal price of $20 and $22 for bigger sizes. Once I finish writing this post I plan on ordering one for myself because I am so floored at just how well this turned out. I am super thankful to have awesome friends like Ammo, that I can pester to do little side projects like this.

I feel like I need to wrap things up, because this post has gone on quite a bit longer than I thought it would. I am very thankful to have all of you out there reading my words, and without you I am not sure I would have the strength to get up every single morning and commit text to page before I have finished my cup of coffee. Through this blog and the awesome community of folks that I have met through the various social media accounts connected to it… I have forged a family that I will take with me for the rest of my life. It doesn’t matter if we have only interacted one time… you’ve left an impression on me and given me the will to keep going. Sure there are mornings where I question myself why the hell I keep doing this, but all of you out there that ping me over twitter or slack or countess other methods… give me that drive to keep moving forward. I realize this post has sounded a little bit like a farewell at times, and I haven’t meant it to. Seven is a magical and special number, but so is Thirteen… so as I top the hill of this goal I set my sights on the next one. Thank you for joining me in this journey, and hopefully we will have a lot more of them before I decide to call it quits. Also side note… please take some time to tell @Ammosart just how damned amazing this image is! I’ve had it for about a month now… and it has been pure hell to keep it under wraps because from the moment I got it I wanted to share it with the world!

Children are Strange

April 16, 2016 by Belghast

Unexpected Evening

Last night I had one of the strangest evenings I have had in a very long time. Firstly you have to understand that I sometimes take photos as a hobby. While I have not really mentioned this in the blog in a very long time, it is still one of those things that is at least somewhat in my life. My wife and I used to go off on these photo shoots on the weekends, and now that it is getting nicer we probably need to start doing it again. The problem with being into photography is that people seem to think that you might be interested in taking photos for them. You have to understand that the sort of photos I enjoy taking are landscapes, buildings that show “urban decay”, and interesting advertising signs. People photography has always bored me, and while I used to help my dad as an assistant while he did portrait photography… it is not exactly something that I feel I am very good at. However when asked by friends I will give it the good ole college try. Several years ago I photographed a wedding of some neighbors, and another time I did some family photos for them. Recently when they decided to adopt two kids there was talk of needing photos for the adoption ceremony. This always seemed like a far off destination, but a few weeks ago they got back the date and it was the first part of May meaning we needed to get something done quickly.

So as a result we settled on meeting up after work yesterday, hoping that maybe just maybe we would have some light to work with. All in all I think it went pretty well and over the course of about thirty to forty minutes I took close to 400 photos. Now granted some of those were rapid fire to account for blinks and eyes closed etc, but it was still a lot of posing and trying to keep two small children 2 and 4 from going into full blown meltdown. I am thankful to my wife especially who is not bored by portrait photography and actually somewhat enjoys it, who helped to figure out how to pose people and wrangle them. Afterwards we had planned on having a quiet dinner at IHOP because for whatever reason breakfast as dinner sounded amazing. However when we mentioned that we were going out to eat everyone seemed to want to tag along. This was fine, just unexpected and before we knew it we were dining with five adults, 2 kids and 1 kiddult… developmentally still a child but otherwise seems like an adult. The two soon to be adopted children, you could tell spent a good chunk of their lives just not receiving enough attention. Both are hungry for adult interaction, and at numerous points during the evening I ended up with one of them up on my knee answering a bevy of questions… or with them being completely enthralled and fascinated by my beard.

Solitude Required

The evening also thoroughly cemented in my mind how much we don’t want children. I mean the kids were awesome and I am more than happy to be an unofficial “uncle”, and this summer will be fun given that they already think our backyard is a “water park”. However given that we went to dinner around 7 pm and didn’t end up getting home until 9:30… I couldn’t handle the sheer amount of time it takes to do anything with a car load of children. The other aspect was the fact that at no point during the evening was there anything I could ever term as “peace and quiet”. I need my solitude and time to recharge my batteries without having to deal with any other human being… especially not one that is thoroughly dependent on me. This is why I have ferrets an cats… because in both cases they are completely happy entertaining themselves… but also equally happy to get attention. I know as a kid I used to think I wanted this huge family, because after growing up a single child I craved the big family life that always seemed so much more fulfilling. However I feel like I have a huge family… just pieced together out of my huge tapestry of friends. There are lots of opportunities for me to be an awesome uncle, official or otherwise… and that is more than enough child interaction for me. In other news the photos seem to have turned out well, and I need to sift through the stack and pull out the best ones to pass off today.