Tales of the Aggronaut

Glitchy Oryx

March 29, 2016 by Belghast

Rookie Revenge

Last night was one of those nights that went in a completely different direction than I was expecting. If you remember last Tuesday we had a combination of one of the smoothest runs for me personally in Kings Fall with the jumping bullshit. That then quickly became one of the glitchiest runs once we hit Oryx, and though we put up the valiant fight we simply ran out of time for attempts. We had agreed to meet up last night, given that it was the night before reset… and give taking down Oryx another go. We had a checkpoint already saved sitting at that encounter, so in theory it should not have taken terribly long. That was at least my line of thought going into the night. However we ran into a myriad of issues, but in part that is why this “Rookie Raid” exists is to get folks through the fights and teach them the things they need to succeed. I absolutely resemble that remark given that this week was just my third time into the Kings Fall raid at all. There is still so much about the raid and the various encounters that I simply don’t know… but I am trying to assimilate information as fast as I can.

One of the things that threw off the rhythm of the raid early on was that Wet had to rush to the hospital with his mom. Jex filled in admirably, and instead of snuggling with Wet in the middle I got to snuggle with his Titan while doing bubble duty. For leadership we had an alternating mix of Jex and Squirrel depending on the situation, and they both did a great job stepping up to the plate and helping folks through the Oryx fight. That said there is something almost talismanic about Wets presence, and when that is gone it is noticeable. It is almost like we need his snarky commentary as a good luck charm to get us through the encounters. We tried our best to fill in with talk of “MacGuffins” and “Tummy Wumzles” but it just didn’t quite feel the same. So Wet if you are out there reading this you were definitely missed.

The Haul

On the positive side though it took us an hour and a half worth of constant attempts we managed to get down Oryx. This was made even sweeter when we all realized that this was Warman’s first Oryx kill after apparently having gone to various Kings Fall raids for the last year on an almost weekly basis. That right there is why the Rookie Raid exists, to get folks access to this sort of content and I am super thankful to be part of it. I had wanted to raid myself for ages but never really had the opportunity, and then Squirrel, Wet, Jex and the rest of the Axioma Clan stepped in and bam… I am now doing awesome stuff in Destiny. I am also falling off things quite a bit because I can’t jump for shit. My biggest need right now is simply raw light levels, which I am working on a little bit at a time through exotic farming. Unfortunately I seem to mostly get the same slots… that don’t really need leveling up, however I figure during this weekends Iron Banner I should get a few more exotics.

War Numen’s Crown – 304

War Numen’s Chest – 305

Smite of Merain – 304

As has been my habit of late, now the haul for the night. I was sitting at 25 moldering shards so apparently the “bonus loot” business is in full effect now. The portion that I did not realize however is that it seems like the moldering shards are consumed upon getting said bonus loot? I ended up getting three drops from Oryx plus additional shards, but it takes my total shards to 7 so it means that I guess I got two off the boss. Anyways the awesome thing about last night is that I have a full “set” of armor from the raid and can now look like a Hive Knight. I also picked up a second Smite of Merain which will just serve as either a spare copy for an alt… or infusion fodder to try and get my Mida Multitool up in level. What I am looking forward to this weekend however is the return of Iron Banner which supposedly also has a decent chance of dropping me some upgrades. It seems like the clan as a whole is planning on running stuff with it, and hopefully even though I suck at PVP in general I can get in on some action. It would really be awesome to be able to hit rank 5 so I can start getting the good drops.

Scattered Gaming

March 28, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was an odd one. After a string of relatively nice weekends, we ended up getting one that was either cold and windy… or cold and rainy, both of which drove my instinct to stay inside and hibernate. The only problem is… with all this play time I largely squandered it and spent more time staring without purpose at games… than actually playing them. It feels like I am starting to go through another one of my “funks” because nothing seemed to fit “just right” as far as games go. I flitted between lots of different titles, playing them for a bit before shifting to something else… often times ending right back up in the game I started in. For a good chunk of the weekend I had the desire to play Destiny… but wanted to instead be hanging out downstairs which only left me the unofficial remote play app as a solution. Then there were games that I felt like I needed to make progress in like Division where I am still not at the level cap. Friday was largely devoted to Undertale, and I think after forcing myself to play that game… it maybe soured the rest of my weekend. So this morning I thought I would run down some of the progress I made in various games.

Undertale

I wrote about this at length but after hanging up my controller as it were… I opted to instead watch several of the different endings. I still feel fine in my decision to just abandon this game in an undefeated state. I guess I don’t have a primal urge to finish games, and more often than not I get to the ending and just don’t finish. I reach this point where I have gotten out of the game what I wanted, and I don’t see the point in expending that effort to push it across the finish line. In the case of Undertale the thing that was driving me forward was to understand the story, and now between the podcast and the various youtube ending videos… I feel like I do. Once that carrot was gone, the game play itself doesn’t make me want to ever touch this game again. On the podcast folks talked about ways to lower the impact of the mechanics, like the Temmie armor… but that isn’t even really an interesting option to me.

Destiny

I really did not do much in Destiny other than a little bit of Crucible. I am constantly amazed at how much I actually enjoy player versus player content in this game, when traditionally that is just not my thing. I think a lot of it is that in this game it feels like there is zero negative impact on the rest of the game. It is just another option I have to play, and gives me the same sort of PVE rewards that I expect to receive elsewhere. Other than specialty modes like Trials of Osiris it feels like I am rewarded equally for just doing whatever I happen to want to do at the time. I started down the path of the crucible simply as a way to get more Legendary marks, and then recently when I was grinding out sword kills I came to realize… I was actually legitimately enjoying myself. What is great about the crucible is that I get the central game play loop that I enjoy of shooting awesome weapons and charging around… without zero downtime. It seems like it is easier to get Three of Coins to proc on Crucible than it is while doing strikes… or it might simply be that Crucible itself is just about the perfect amount of time per coin use. While I have not actually gotten any of the really cool PVP drops… I do get a fair amount of strange coins, motes and random pieces of armor that end up getting deconstructed. Tonight I will hopefully be finishing up the rest of the Kings Fall raid that we had to abandon on Oryx last Tuesday, and beforehand it is my goal to hang out upstairs and run some more Crucible.

The Division

This weekend I managed to push Division a little harder than the rest of the games and caught up with my friend Tamrielo at least. At the start of the weekend I was sitting at roughly level 20, and as of this morning I am just about a third into 22. While I absolutely could play this and only give it partial attention at lower levels, as I have gotten into the twenties this is not really the case. As a result this weekend I managed to die probably more than I actually managed to accomplish anything. There are two missions that I know I attempted at least a half dozen times before finally giving it my full attention and pushing through. My standard operating procedure while hanging out with my wife downstairs is that I essentially have one eye on the game and one eye on whatever we happen to be watching… not literally but you know what I mean. The problem with this is that in doing so I am not exactly paying attention to the best possible tactical spot that I could be in while shooting incoming mobs. The addition of snipers really changed how the game works, and now that I have guys that rush me with shotguns as well.. I am having to be way more careful about how I take on content. That said I feel like I made some decent progress, but most of it was in short bursts of me playing for thirty minutes to an hour… and then logging out and doing something else. Thankfully much like Destiny… short batches of play time feel just as rewarding to me as multiple hour long sessions.

World of Warcraft

The other major happening of the weekend was me poking around on my Forsaken Hunter in World of Warcraft. Recently Blizzard added an achievement that you could unlock by leveling a character in WoW to 20, aka the free mode level cap. For doing this you end up getting Lady Liadrin as an alternate Paladin hero in Hearthstone. Not that I really play Hearthstone… and even more so… not that I really like playing Paladins in Hearthstone… I have this drive to get the achievement and unlock the extra shiny bits. The negative of this achievement is that it only counts if you have recently leveled to twenty after the launch of the achievement, that means my army of level 100s are doing me zero good for this goal. As a result I opted to level something on The Scryers Horde side since that is where the bulk of my lower leveled characters are these days. I largely played during the podcast on Saturday night, and as a result managed to get to I believe 18 before giving it up for the night. The goal is to spend some time this week pushing it over the line, so that I at least can feel like I got this out of the way. I honestly think this whole promotion is a brilliant idea to try and cross pollinate some of the players actively playing Hearthstone and get them to try World of Warcraft. I know Hearthstone is a major nostalgia bomb for me… but I wonder if it is the same for a player who has ONLY played Hearthstone, now being able to see where those cards they love are actually from.

100th Episode Mishap

March 27, 2016 by Belghast

Things Happened

This morning I am blogging a bit out of sequence, because things happened. Normally speaking on Sunday mornings I go through a little ritual. Traditionally I manage to get what I think of as my first pass edit done on Saturday night, so that Aggrochat mostly resembles its final form by the time I go to bed. I get up in the morning and mash it all together and do the final pass, before posting it all over the place. Last night however… when I listened to the show my heart fell in my chest as I noticed that it was significantly screwed up. All it took was for me to see the waveform to realize that something just wasn’t right, and I thought it was pretty much going to be an entire loss. This morning however I screwed with the audio until I reached a point where… it is still very much screwed up but it is salvageable. Essentially for whatever reason on the new Teamspeak setup my recording is completely jacked an sounds like trying to watch Cinemax in the 80s when you didn’t have it added to your subscription. Admit it guys… we all tried to sneak a peak at stuff we shouldn’t be seeing through the constant mechanical hum. The original pass this morning sounded pretty much exactly like that with me being shifted to a higher pitch than normal… dubbing it Chipmunk Bel.

After a few hours of trying various things I managed to isolate a lot of the hum, and now instead it just sounds like I am in the witness protection program and disguising my voice with a really horrible modulator. I think the show might be salvageable, and I am getting a push by our fans on witter to go ahead and post what exists. The thing that shocks me is just how little I have freaked out over this. The worse case scenario was that we lost a show… and in the the grand scheme of things it is pretty much a miracle that this… show 100 is the first time we have really had major issue. Sure there have been times we have gotten disconnected in the middle of recording and that I have had to knit together a show out of two pieces. However overall we have had really good luck, so much so that we never even thought about having more than one person try and do a recording at the same time. In the future however I think we are going to have a bot hanging out doing nothing but recording the channel with the hopes that it catches everything in one nice constant volume stream.

Stuff Went Wrong

Additionally on the positive side everyone OTHER than me last night sounded amazing. So the new set up seems to be great…. once I can sort out what the hell went wrong with my side of things. That is what is so screwy is that while talking everyone else said I sounded great too, however when it came to actually recording my own voice it went horribly wrong. If nothing else doing the bot recording thing should take care of that problem, but I still think there is some setting somewhere that is wrong… given that teamspeak saves audio settings on a server by server basis and even at times a channel by channel basis. The plan is to do a bunch of testing between today and next weekend and will hopefully sort out which magical setting unscrews my voice. In the meantime however I am pretty damned proud of how much I managed to minimize the effect. Granted things are still screwed up… but they are in a much less screwed up state than they were this morning. One of these days I really need to take some lessons in audio engineering because it would help if I had a damned clue what I was doing.

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Done with Undertale

March 26, 2016 by Belghast

Making My Own Finish

Last night I finished Undertale… and what I mean by that is that I reached a point where I am just finished caring about the game. I have so many conflicted feelings about this title. On one hand I really do enjoy the story that is being told, and I made my best attempt to go pacifist. The problem I have however is that there is a whole lot about the “game” that I simply hate. For me it feels like I am very much playing two vastly different games. One of which is this awesome console RPG where I wander around and talk to interesting people and do the occasional puzzle. Then there is a completely different game that is the often times bullet hell shooter that is the combat system. The combat system is the game that I hate, and the loner I had to play it the more I loathed its existence. The strange part about it is that I love JRPGs and I love Bullet Hell shooters… they are awesome separate genres but there is something about the hybridization of this game that offends my sensibilities.

When I play a bullet hell shooter, it feels like there is nothing on the line. Sure I might lose a ship or I might have to start back at the beginning of the game, but there is nothing that I deeply care about on the game. When it comes to an RPG… adding that bullet hell aspect feels too punishing for me. If I fucked and forgot to save, a single screw-up might cost me hours of retracing my steps to try and reach the point where I have to try that fight all over again. In a bullet hell title you often get some avenue for rapid trial and error as you figure things out on the fly. I am very much a learn by doing person, and no amount of prep work ahead of time is going to get me through a fight until I reach my own internal click moment where I grok the mechanics at a purely muscle memory level.

Un-fun Experience

If I somehow could have turned off the combat system and wound up with a game where I just walk around and talk to interesting people I would unabashedly sing this games praises. Tonight we are recording the AggroChat Game Club show where we talk about Undertale and right now I feel like I am probably going to be the lone voice that did not really enjoy this game. From the moment I first encountered the combat system I felt like I was “taking my medicine” and forcing myself through an experience that I simply was not enjoying. So in many ways it felt like doing homework, and I found myself trying to rush through as fast as I could so I had something to talk about. I don’t want to give too many spoilers in my blog post, and will likely save those for the podcast. However I managed to get to the bullet hell-iest of all bullet hell glitch endings, which apparently means that I did not make enough friends along the way? I did a bunch of research and watched several of the other ending options on YouTube and I have to say… the ending I was heading for feels like a massive slap in the face.

I realize it is a central conceit in a lot of Japanese games that you get a shitty ending the first time… and that is supposed to drive you to play the game again to get a better ending. I’ve always kinda thought this practice was bullshit, and instead of lighting a fire under me to get the better ending… I just tend to chuck that game in the dustbin as a thoroughly disappointing experience. The primary problem with me and this game is that I don’t enjoy the central game mechanics… which are avoid stuff on screen as a a replacement for standard menu driven RPG combat. I can absolutely play a game indefinitely that has a shitty story, but has mechanics that I really enjoy. This is why I mesh so well with skinner box and grindy games… because I am enjoying that core loop enough to keep playing for the promise of something cool in the future. That said I have never been able to struggle through a sub par mechanical experience just because I know there is a good story there somewhere. When I reach a point when I think I would much rather watch a YouTube video of someone else playing… then it is time for me to hang up my controller and cut my losses.