Tales of the Aggronaut

Death and Taxes

March 24, 2016 by Belghast

A Very Bad Day

Tuesday night I slept fairly horribly, and spent most of it tossing and turning and unable to regulate my body temperature between too hot and too cold. So yesterday I went into the day on a low point, with being extremely groggy and fumbling through activities. Unfortunately this also seems to be the sort of day when something horribly goes wrong. About 10 am yesterday morning we had a freak incident occur where a publish went wrong in the content management we use at work, that caused the entire xml cache to jettison itself and our main public facing website started throwing a “no nodes” error instead of serving content. I proceeded to spend the next five hours trying to fix the problem by republishing every single piece of content on the site… which is roughly 20,000 nodes worth. We got the bulk restored really quickly, and then spent the next three hours fighting with a handful of tricky node trees, that seemed to be super picky about the order in which things were published. By the time I exited work… all I really wanted was a drink… or four.

When I got home however we decided to get the monkey off our backs of our taxes. We itemize, and we also have them prepared… not that I think we can’t do our own taxes but I will happily throw money at someone for the piece of mind that come an audit we can point the finger at someone else’s legal team to sort it out for us. There is a level of stress that taxes invoke in me that is far higher than just about anything… so doing them on the day I was already having a shitty day was maybe not a great idea. Then again it wasn’t like the day could get much worse. The problem being that as we were flailing about the house trying to gather the last two or three bits of information before going… my wife and I were fussing with each other in a way that never really happens when money isn’t on the line. All of the stress and anxiety, is generally for naught as we get our taxes done… and generally get back a decent refund. The bigger stress last night was that I felt bad for missing the WoW raid… but thankfully it sounded like they had enough people to pull together without me. I hear they even managed to down Iskar which is a brand new boss for our group.

Today however seems like it is starting off much the same way as yesterday. I got to bed at a decent hour and it felt like I was getting good sleep… that is until about 2 am when I woke up thinking the alarm had gone off. For whatever reason it seems like we fell asleep with the television on, and that noise made me think the alarm was going off. In the middle of my trying to get ready, I noticed the smell of smoke. Like enough to make me start freaking out about if the house was on fire. So I started roaming the house to see if the smell that permeated got worse anywhere to indicate where it was coming from. I woke my wife when I decided to leave the house and go wandering outside to see if it was something from a nearby house. The smell was far worse outside, but once again it seemed to be diffuse without any real direction that it was coming from. I finally hopped in the car and drove the neighborhood, and when the smell was the same up the hill from us… I finally reached a point of solace that it was very much “not our house” and was able to attempt going back to sleep. This morning on the news we found out that apparently there is a massive grass fire burning north of us, but still about a thirty minute drive… so that has to be one hell of a fire to generate that thick of smoke as far away as we were.

Hilt Punch

Ultimately I ended up getting settled in after taxes and getting some food in me, roughly an hour after the start of the raid. I could have of course logged into World of Warcraft, and gotten pulled into the raid as a late comer. After the day I had however I was not exactly fit to be around other human beings, so instead I opted to chill out upstairs with the PS4 and some Destiny. One of the missions that has been eluding me for awhile has been the continuation of the quest that upgrades my legendary quality sword to exotic. There is a step early on where you need to get 50 “yellow bar” kills with the sword in PVE and 25 kills of players in the crucible. While I occasionally poke my head into the Crucible… I am not exactly a regular PVP player. That said last night I felt as combative as I was ever going to be… and my clan had suggested doing it on a week when Mayhem Clash was one of the highlighted modes. Supposedly “heavy ammo drops like candy” or so someone said and in truth… sure it is more common than other modes but not exactly easy either. There were so many times I picked up heavy ammo and instantly got gibbed by another player coming up right behind me before I could even get my sword out. So instead more often than not I simply punched players with the empty hilt of my sword, which counts as a sword kill nonetheless. Ironically in a lot of cases… the hilt without any ammo… still one shot players.

Spending an hour or two doing Clash had a few awesome side effects. Firstly I gained a fat stack of glimmer, more than enough to purchase the ship above from Petra in the Reef since I had recently reached rank 3 there. It also meant that after bashing my face against it for a bit… I managed to get all 25 of my kills… strangely enough the last six were gained in a single match, and single ammo pickup. I just got lucky and managed to time my jumps just right as to slash folks as they came at me in the air. This allowed me to knock out the next step pretty quickly, which was a special boss on the Dreadnaught. I remember when I read up on the quest folks talking about how challenging that encounter was and that how they really needed to use sword block effectively. In truth I would start out each foray by blocking an attack and then landing a succession of quick hits… but then would jump away and wait for my shields to recharge before repeating. Doing that it took roughly three engagements before I had that boss down. Now I am on a step that seems considerably more time consuming than any yet… where I need to collect special materials from the moon that supposedly occasionally drop from helium filament canisters and chests. At the same time I need to use my solar abilities, which is pretty easy given that I am rocking the Armamentarium for double the grenades and some item that allows me to pretty much do nonstop solar punches. Supposedly this means I need to kill 500 mobs with solar abilities and farm at minimum 100 helium fragment containers to get the drops. My goal is to finish that part so that the next Armsday I can pick up the final piece which is the Sunless Cell strike… and convince Squirrel and Jex to help me get through that. It feels good to get the crucible step out of the way… but I also know that next up is working on First Curse. That said I actually really enjoyed playing the Crucible and managed to get a couple of legendary engrams out of the process and a handful of exotics including a 310 Twilight Garrison.

Sometimes We Fail

March 23, 2016 by Belghast

The Rookie Raid

For a little bit now, one of the highlights of my week has been the Rookie Raid night with my clan in Destiny. I think mostly after playing the game for roughly two years… I was really wanting to raid, and getting to step foot in Kings Fall each week has been a blast. There are still a lot of things that I absolutely screw up, but I feel like I am getting better. I have always been one of those people that learns by doing, and it simply takes several repetitions before something actually gets cemented in my head. The highlight of the night was the fact that I actually made it through the ship jumping puzzle on the very first time… and it only took me two tries to get over to the wall and get into the chest nook just after the ships. This is serious progress because some of those jumps on past attempts took me dozens of tries to actually get. Similarly I seemed to make it through the piston wall without a ton of issues this week which also felt good. I ended up jumping to the final platform… and then got confused thinking I went the wrong direction. So I guess even I shocked myself that I had made it through with I think two deaths this week, instead of the literally dozens in previous outings.

I’ve had to develop the practice of sitting down with my character once I have reached the final platform of a jumping sequence. I wouldn’t go so far as the say that I am afraid of heights, because in real life I can look out over balconies or off the roofs of buildings without much issue. I can climb up on things without much issue either… well apart from the fact that I have zero dexterity. However for whatever reason in video games… I get disoriented and almost dizzy when dealing with jumping sequences. There are certain games that have triggered this feeling more than others, like Mirrors Edge. However there are other games that are just as parkoury for lack of a better word… like Dying Light that don’t seem to bother me at all. It has to be something about the perspective or some technical detail that does it… but whatever the case… Destiny absolutely triggers these feelings. So as stupid as it sounds, I feel like every time I don’t fuck up a jump… it is a pretty major victory for me. It takes so much mental stamina to get me through one of the jump sequences that when I finish… I am constantly afraid that I will do something stupid that leads to me plummeting back down below and having to do it all over again. So my little practice of sitting makes it seem like it is far less likely for me to somehow get bumped and fall.

Oryx Cheats

One of the cool things about this week is that I got to learn a few slightly different roles during the fights. Namely I moved from platform duty to Ogre duty, which is way more my style. When our group does Oryx we do it “challenge” style which involves making sure the Ogres do not move before they die, allowing all of the blight orbs to spawn in essentially the same place. This allows us to pop them all at the same time, and deal almost all of the damage to Oryx in a single turn. That is at least when things work out. As one of the Titans assigned to this duty, we run complimentary bubbles making sure Weapons and Blessing are both up and dropped in the same place. This allows us to take advantage of our Touch of Malice and keep from killing ourselves in the process. The goal is to dip back into the shield between ogres to replenish the shields and give us more life to spend while pummeling the adds. This works great… until we have to go into the fight without a super bar. We somehow managed to make it through that round but it was getting super dicey as far as the whole “not killing ourselves” part. It was during the Oryx fight however last night… that shit just got weird.

302 – Elulim’s Frenzy

304 – War Numen’s Fist

310 – Armamentarium

I had heard before of the bugs in the Kings Fall raid… but luckily in the previous two weeks we had never really encountered any. This week however they struck back with a vengeance, starting with several of us mysteriously dying to “misadventures”. Other times the platform sequence got messed up, or our runner was unable to grab the orb for some reason… having the platform disappear beneath them before the transfer actually happened. The scariest was when we saw an ogre appear in the default T state that models are generally modeled in… and then disappear quickly… coming up through the ground with the normal animation. Essentially there was something seriously wrong with the server, and even though we tried several different tricks to right the ship… we ultimately had to call it to time. The goal right now is to pop back in Monday night and see if we can wreck Oryx given that we have a check point right at the boss. Sometimes we fail… but even in failing I had a really good time. The loot on the other hand is starting to get more scarce, and I got some relatively low light level versions of things… but I did manage to pick up another much needed slot in the arms. I’ve posted a gallery of the various things, including the 310 Armamentarium chest that was waiting on me at the mailbox. I am not really sure where along the way that dropped but but it is much appreciated because I love having the extra grenades. However as long as I am running Defender, I kinda feel like the Saint-14 helm is a must have.

Space Goats and Paid Content

March 22, 2016 by Belghast

WoW Chronicles

Last Friday I managed to find a copy of the regularly back ordered… World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1. One of the huge problems World of Warcraft has had to date is that a lot of the lore just feels somewhat tacked on. I feel like much of the story was written during some late night unbridled “wouldn’t it be cool if” sessions, and there was a lot of hand waving going on from about Burning Crusade onward. What the chronicles project is trying to do is to set in stone a true canon about the world, and how all of the interlinking pieces actually fit together. I wholeheartedly support this notion… I just wish someone had the foresight to do it a decade ago, or at least when they decided to start really mixing things up with the first expansion. I am sure there has been a penciled together napkin sketch of what the world was intended to look like, that at least partially exists in the minds still of the people working at Blizzard. The problem is when something is not written down and set into print… it becomes too easy to erase a line here and graft on a new segment of lore there that really conflicts with something that came before.

What I am wondering is how much narrative cleanup are they committed to do to make this canon really a living document? While this project doesn’t exactly burn down what was in place before… it does invalidate a lot of things that happened and in other cases it simply explains things that already exist. For example… the book indicates that the Spirit Healers that we have used for years are essentially a rogue faction of Val’kyr. The book goes into depth about the relationship between the void lords, the titans, the old gods, and classifies things that lacked classification like the wild gods which now include the pantheon of August Celestials. What I really hope to see is some of these lore fixes making their way into the game in either the form of new quests, or old quest revisions. I will say that having some sort of concrete font of lore that they can keep going back to, makes me at least somewhat excited for the future of the game. Lore has always been one of the big problems I had with World of Warcraft, and how confused and messy…. and downright incomplete it always seemed. Hopefully we will start to see the fruits of this project with the coming expansion Legion… which even before this seemed like it was going to be a complete loregasm.

Paid Promotional Content

I am going to take the tail end of this mornings post to complain about something that has been bothering me. Granted I know it will do absolutely zero good since it is quite obvious the forces in question are not even reading my blog. For years I have gotten messages from various companies wanting to place paid content on my blog. There is a practice that is frighteningly common that gets called by a bunch of names… but essentially marketers want to pay established blogs to place pre-written and pre-approved articles which serve as a sort of advertising for a product. Essentially the practice makes me feel dirty inside that they are even targeting my blog… but most end up getting caught in the spam filter. Here lately several have made it through on my About page, and I have taken to responding to them directly. I realize I should just brush these off as the byproduct of having blogged for as long as I have, but it really sticks in my craw.

I get super excited about products, and games… and the other things that interest me in the world. I’m a geek and a lot of geekdom is geeking out about something. That said I want to make sure it is understood that when I get excited about something… it is because I am legitimately excited and that there is not some nefarious force behind the curtain pulling my strings. Sure I would love to make money on my blog, or at least love to reach a point where it is self sustaining… the problem is every option to monetize means I am giving up some of my control. For example if I were to install advertisements… I wouldn’t be able to curate WHICH advertisements I allowed onto the site, I would have to accept anything the ad network wanted to place there. So the notion of “supporting” products that I don’t necessarily believe in, really bothers me. As a result I have shunned pretty much all advertising, and while I freely accept alphas and betas to games… I only end up writing about the ones that really interest me. I have friends in the gaming industry, and it is awesome… but no one is paying me to like their product.

Basically what it all boils down to is that my opinion is not for sale. None of the folks that have been approaching me will actually read these lines, but I still feel like it is important to say it loud and publicly. Tales of the Aggronaut has been a work of love for going on seven years now, and while my opinions shift and change based on new data… they are still very much my opinions and not carefully scripted speaking points. That said I will always be open to reviewing products if someone wants me to do so. That said I will only write about the product when I feel like I have had enough time to see the entire picture, and when I have something interesting to say about it. I also will never guarantee a positive review. I am not really a ranty blogger, but I do talk about the points that disappoint me in games or products and that is likely to happen. If someone finds this in a search later on… hopefully they will actually read it before asking me to do something shifty like accepting payola for content. I am extremely luck in that I have a day job that can support my blogging shenanigans, and that I don’t need to somehow turn this into a profit center. I don’t begrudge those who are trying to monetize their content, but I can’t ever really condone shillery.

Light and Poms

March 21, 2016 by Belghast

Losing Light

This marks the second weekend of attempts to get a black spindle, and I am quickly reaching a point where I no longer want it. The first weekend was a tale of me largely spending the entire day either waiting to get a group or making attempts on it. For whatever reason Bungie seems to keep choosing Sunday as the day for Spindle runs… which is not exactly prime time for people playing the game. On top of that… Sunday is normally a day that I have stuff that needs to get done, and instead for two different weekends my world has focused around trying to get a Black Spindle. I reached a point yesterday where I wanted to reach through the internet and punch whoever it was that designed this mission. The individual parts aren’t all that bad… but combined together is just maddening. If you could simply respawn at a checkpoint before the 10 minute timer starts on the Ketch it wouldn’t be so bad. I would happily grind that until we finally got it… but instead it is the frustration of having to clear to a boss… then do the run across the temple… then unlock the various chambers… then FINALLY go up into the ketch and do the “real” mission. So you have 10-15 minutes of bullshit before you reach the point at which it is omg serious mode.

We tried several different methods of attempting to down the boss, the main one being that we jump to the middle and burn him down with swords. Towards the end we started trying to just whittle his ass down while keeping the adds under control, and honestly neither really worked well. Anytime we ducked outside of the entrance tunnel we would get wrecked, and almost one shot. I guess that is the biggest frustration is that the room has no place where you can really set up OTHER than the entrance tunnel and clean out the adds. The geometry of the room means that someone is always getting hung on something and stuck awkwardly out in the open… which means they are essentially dead. I am not sure what is up with the mission but it felt like we did significantly worse than the last time… and this time around I am 304 and decked out in raid weapons that deal extra damage to taken. I know I am the albatross around the neck of the group, but I am not exactly sure what I am doing wrong there. At this point I am not likely to spend another weekend of attempts on this stupid weapon… when I have two sniper rifles that I enjoy using already. Sure this is the best sniper in the game, but if it quite literally makes one of my party members slam their controller down against the desk breaking it… it is not worth the hassle or frustration.

Pom Pom Squad

The highlight of the weekend however for me was getting a Pom Pom Beanie on Friday evening while playing Division. Strangely enough this seems to be the chase item for most people because they are actually rather rare. I have given food and water to every single person that I meet along the street asking for it… and have a huge amount of clothing options… and have gotten exactly one pom pom beanie. Now these also can apparently appear on the appearance vendor that unlocks with the security tier, but I have yet to see any there. What is awesome about mine is the fact that it fits so perfectly with the colors that I already choose… black and green. Other than that last night I got a string of awesome weapon drops… and I finally abandoned my beloved LSW for a couple of ACR variants and eventually a P416… which all seem to feel the same when firing them. I also found an upgrade for my SRS marksman rifle but unfortunately the upgrade was only a green so it won’t last nearly as long. That seems to be my combo of weapons of choice… a fairly accurate assault rifle that fires well in single shot/bursts and a marksman rifle for headshots. This allows me to either spray and play, for random two mob encounters on the street… or get more strategic for larger groups.

I am consistently amazed at the wide variety of feelings this game can make me feel. There are moments when I feel stirrings of patriotism and sentimentality like when I come across a memorial like the one above, or improvised banners hanging out of windows that say slogans like “Can’t Keep NY Down”. Then other times the game gut punches you with feels when it comes to finding a phone message from before the infection, or as society was crumbling. Like last night I picked up a message from two parents that were coming into town to see their child because they missed them… and it feels all the more tense knowing that they had no clue what they were walking into. We had a lengthy AggroChat show talking about the morality of this game… and for whatever reason it stirs something completely different in me. I absolutely feel like the good guy, the one trying hard to bring some sort of order to a fallen city. Sure the only thing that separates me from the looters is the badge I am wearing… but I am also saving countless random people from executions or muggings as I roam the city streets. I might be more vigilante than righteous crusader, but I am okay with that. I think you miss some of the nuance of the game if you are constantly focused on this objective or the next, and aren’t really participating in the events that happen on the street. I cannot count the number of times I have rolled up on a group of Rikers with their guns drawn on a civilian, and even though it is a nameless faceless NPC… I saved them from certain death. Had I been a little slower on the trigger finger they would be dead on the ground, and those are the moments I feel heroic. Those are the moments when I don’t question what I am doing in this game.