Tales of the Aggronaut

Deforestation

March 16, 2016 by Belghast

So Much Change

So one of the things you will pick up on if you have read my blog for terribly long, is that I don’t exactly handle change well. I can do pretty well with juggling new information or new ideas… but when it comes to fundamental changes in my home or work lives it stresses me the hell out. Basically I need a place of stability somewhere, and right now that is very much not home. There has been this sequence of changes that are all positive, but all worrisome for me personally. The worst of it was during the renovation work on the house, namely the fact that it drug on as long as it did and that there were constantly other people inhabiting my space. Last night however… it reached a new point when I got home from work. We’ve never done much of anything with our backyard, and this year we are trying to change that. We set up the patio off the new door to our bedroom, changed out the deck boxes, got a bunch of new chairs… and even a wind chime (something I have always wanted) all in the name of making the backyard space more usable. I don’t have a great “before” picture of my back yard, but I will be using one from this winter as a point of reference. You see the trees that we have around our back deck? Those are apparently not trees at all, but are intended to be a hedge. The hedge in the photo is supposed to be about a foot and a half or so tall in front of the other hedge that is now a tree. As a result of this we talked to a friend who does landscaping with the hope that he could sort things out for us and get things back under control.

The problem is I was not exactly prepared for the reality of what that meant. There is what looks like the limbs of an entire forest dotting the backyard, and this panoramic shot was taken before they were actually finished. They have since taken out the bulk of the second tree and cut it back hoping that it will start greening up again in a more manageable fashion. Neither my wife or I were really prepared for the fact that we went from having lots of green blocking the view of the green belt behind our house and the neighborhood across the way… to having almost zero. I have faith that things will grow back and the end result will be much better… but man does it look like shit right now. I guess this is what happens when plants are allowed to grow unchecked for twenty years. At some point I guess I need to learn how to trim things like I probably should have been all this time. I grew up in a house without any real landscaping so I guess I just assume that things needed to be left alone and allowed to do whatever they hell they wanted to. This just adds one more stresser to the pile that seems to be growing. On a positive note that garage is awesome again, and I have been going out each night to work out in our gym… that we have not really had access to for a decade it feels. I even went out quickly for a bit after the raid last night to work out some of the excess post raid energy, which was kinda awesome.

War Priest Challenge

Last night was also my second time attending the Axioma Clan Rookie Raid night. I have to admit I have been looking forward to this since going to the last one on the previous Tuesday. While I have been enjoying The Division, there will always be a special place in my heart for Destiny and I have been logging in and playing for a bit pretty much every day. I have to admit part of this has been easy access on my laptop while downstairs using Twisted’s Remote Play app. The only problem that I have so far is the fact that there is no way to really chat over PSN party chat, which means that while I can do random strikes with strangers… I can’t really group up with friends reliably. Otherwise the connectivity is good enough that I could in theory use it all of the time. Now I doubt I would want to trust it for something like the Kings Fall raid when timing is extremely tight on things like the jumping puzzles. Speaking of that I failed considerably less this week… at least on the ships. On the annoying bit where the giant penis shaped pistons push you off of the wall… I think I actually did worse but I am choking that up to the fact that I am normally in bed by the time we got to that area. The raid itself started an hour and a half later than the previous week, which was a bit of a thing… given that I get up at 5:30 each morning, and my friend Squirrel had to get up at 4.

Defiance of Yasmin – 310

Midha’s Reckoning – 308

Kingslayer Shell – 300

War Numen’s Boots – 303

War Numen’s Mark – 305

Sootpearl – 310

Regardless I had a great time last night, and I felt like more of a useful member of the team. I still failed quite a bit at various things… like for example on the Daughters fight I ended up getting torn, which meant I had to do the jumping puzzle. The only problem there being that I had never done the jumping puzzle before. I sadly failed and wiped the raid, but I feel like I could probably do better next time. Of all of the dumbass things that I did the cake is the fact that apparently in the two years I have been playing this game… I never realized that a Titan could cancel their jump by pressing x in midair allowing you to pretty much drop straight down at will. All of this time I have been doing jumping puzzles by trying to time just the perfect amount of momentum to carry me over a gap and still be able to land safely on the other side. Once I was told this… and actually Grokked what people were saying… the jumping puzzles seemed way easier. Once again the loot gods were favorable, because I managed to pick up a bunch more items… the highlight of which is probably a 310 raid sniper rifle. I also managed to pick up a 308 fusion rifle, but given that I have Telesto… and I don’t really even like fusion rifles I will probably eat it to power up another sniper rifle. A couple of the other items will likely get fed to my hunter or warlock to help them get their light up. Now that I can hit 304 light, I need to apparently farm all of the strikes in the hopes of getting Exotics that should have a fairly decent chance of dropping at 310, that I can then turn around and use to power up my other gear.

Fixing Everquest 2

March 15, 2016 by Belghast

Tale of Two Games

Last week we had the somewhat bittersweet news that Everquest Next was officially being cancelled. For those who were utterly confused about what Landmark, Next and the rest of the EQ games actually are… here is a quick rundown. Everquest of course is the granddaddy of the big hit MMOs. Then mere days before the launch of World of Warcraft…. Everquest II came out as an attempt at rebooting the world. Everything in that setting happened after a huge calamity that saw Luclin the moon shattering and sending shards to earth. The world was changed, the land fractured, and in many ways it allowed for a much larger scale game world than the original. Everquest Next was the concept for what was ultimately going to be the third Everquest MMO… so in truth you can just think of it as Everquest III. Landmark on the other hand is ultimately the tool that they were using to build the world of Everquest Next. After playing around with it the folks decided that this was actually a really fun thing to play with in itself, in the Minecraft style. Landmark was really never a fully fleshed out game, but more of a sandbox toy that players could fiddle with. Since its launch they have made it more “game-like” but it still is missing a lot of the core features folks expect in an MMO.

Now in the above paragraph I mentioned a key fact… that Everquest II launched on November 8th of 2004… and then was completely overshadowed by the launch of World of Warcraft on November 24th of that same year. The two games took significantly different paths, and produced really different results. Everquest II was this rich tapestry of cultures and game systems that provided a really deep game play experience that worked on so many levels. World of Warcraft was a much more streamlined experience that asked less of the player, but ultimately became easier to pick up and play without an excessive amount of research. We all know how the tales goes… that WoW becomes the juggernaut of MMO gaming and EQ2 becomes this sheltered garden with an excellent community and lots of great content… but always treated as a second tier experience. Right now Everquest II feels extremely dated, like an artifact of a different era whereas World of Warcraft feels somewhat evergreen. The major difference there is that each time WoW releases an expansion they do significant systems overhauls that cause some sweeping changes to not only the fidelity of the game client itself, but also the back end systems. Everquest II on the other hand has been this “Weasley House” of MMOs with content constantly being tacked on top of the older foundation. The new content feels like modern content, but you experience a sort of whiplash as you shift between the different layers of the content and see just how drastic and inequitable the improvements have been.

Renovation Is Due

The above image has been floating around for a few weeks now and represents some work that the Everquest II team is doing to update the orc model. It seems that the newest expansion content that they are working on heavily focus on orcs, and as a result they are just updating the base model to bring them up to modern standards. Seeing this however made me realize just how bad the old models look. I mean it has always been one of those things in the back of my mind, but when you see what the team is capable of producing today… placed against something that has existed since 2004 it is staggering. Now that Everquest Next is no longer a thing… I would love to see them pour some of those resources into producing a graphical upgrade to Everquest II. The big problem with the game are just how dated the models and the animations look, and going back there is always an adjustment period and largely just hand waving off a bunch of details that get under my skin because the content itself is so amazingly rich. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and it is the sort of thing that could be rolled in over time. If you remember the original Everquest went through the same problems and with the release of Luclin they released new and updated character models. Unfortunately in the case of EQ2… we need a lot more than just characters. I would love to see this great game get a second life, because for so many of my friends that I have tried to get to play this game… the ugliness of the assets was a barrier they simply could not get past.

Now fixing the graphics isn’t going to fix the game entirely… but it would go a long way into making it feel more playable. Next up however we really need to talk about the user interface, that has always felt a bit cludgy. I’ve not played the game in the last decade without first installing some sort of third party addon user interface. For years I played with Fetish Nightfall, and within the last six years or so I switched over to being a Drums UI guy. With these UI extensions the game becomes rather good, but the whole process of acquiring a UI and keeping it updated… feels needlessly arcane in a manner I have not experience in any other game save for maybe Dark Age of Camelot where they had no official support for addons. So the entire User Interface could use a bit of a facelift. Finally we have to talk about the way combat works in this game. I feel like this is the step that would actually cause rioting in the streets by diehard Everquest II fans… but I also feel like it is the point that is the most needed. The game really really needs to simplify combat in a way that does not require me to use 30+ abilities in a combat rotation. The above picture is of my Shadowknight, and at least 30 of this abilities are ones that I pretty much used in every single round of combat. It was even worse on my Dirge and I had these super complex patterns memorized… that even today I can sit down at the keyboard and automatically cycle through them.

The problem is… it doesn’t really feel fun. I feel like I am playing some sort of a musical instrument instead of actually experience reactive combat in a video game. Now I am not saying water it down to the level that single hotbar games have done… or simplify it to the point of an action MMO. I just would love to be able to have one primary hotbar of abilities that get used every round… and then a bunch of optional abilities that throw in for flavor or when special conditions are met. The cooldown of EQ2 abilities is so long that you need something… anything… to fill in the gaps so you quite often are simply mashing the next button that is off cool down. Please understand that I am a huge fan of Everquest II… but every time I leave it is the cludgy combat system that eventually drives me away. For several months I can overlook it and just blend back into the rich and vast game world… but I always reach this point where I need to play combat that simply “works better”. I think maybe this is a ship that has already sailed, and after doing several combat passes early in the game… I am not sure if they have the intestinal fortitude to attempt another. All of this aid… simply making the game look better would go a long way into making this a more attractive experience to new players, but in doing this post I am talking about all of the things that I wish were different. Combat will always be a huge part of that.

Savior of New York

March 14, 2016 by Belghast

Mostly Done

Yesterday we continued on out in the garage and did a much more prodding and tedious detail pass. This meant sitting down and sorting through old boxes that we had not seen in nearly a decade. Among the treasures I uncovered was my Gameboy SP as well as pretty much all of my Gameboy Advance cartridges. I literally had no clue where that was, and the last time I remembered having it was in a car that we traded off long ago. I had feared that I simply forgot to remove it from under the drivers seat… because for a long while it was my “waiting on my wife to finish at school” from a time when we regularly drove in together. Apparently we did in fact pull it out of the car, and it sat in this trash bag filled with lots of other stuff we hurriedly pulled from that car before we traded it off. This is apparently a tradition of ours because not only did we find a bag for when we traded off the Pontiac Grand Am… but also a bag from when we traded off like two other vehicles as well. I also found entire boxes of stuff that I apparently packed up when leaving previous jobs and never bothered to go through. These boxes were full of countless pay stubs and health plan documents… so a good chunk of my yesterday was sitting down listening to podcasts and shredding all the documents.

One of the gems of the day was the above image… a box of essentially all of our ancient cell phones. These pretty much represented our pre-smartphone era and those Nokia 5160s were our very first phones that we used for ages. We also found a bunch of extra face plates… since you could swap them out so easily. The positive about these ancient phones is the fact that we didn’t even really have texting plans on any of them, so there isn’t really data worth harvesting so we can dispose of them pretty easily. My friend Squirrel suggested that he would love to have them, for target practice. Unfortunately by the time he posted that I had already disposed of the entire box. Probably my favorite of that era was the weird white LG flip phone, largely because it had a clock visible on its face without actually opening it. Another interesting find was my “art box” which is a big wooden box that was crammed with all of my watercolor and pen and ink stuff from college. Another strange thing was the truly insane number of World of Warcraft trading game cards that I found stuffed pretty much everywhere. For awhile it was habit to pick up a pack anytime I needed to go to the store… and apparently they just sat around everywhere. At some point I will sift through them all and gather up all of the leftover in game codes to give away to readers or something. They are mostly the “toy” variety, like Path of Cenarus or Illidan or maybe some Pet Biscuits. Still the sort of thing is fun to have if you don’t otherwise have access to them. The strangest thing about the weekend… is I think because we were so tired anyways from the cleaning, I can’t say that losing an hour has really had much effect on me.

Don’t Panic

I spent essentially the rest of the weekend playing The Division. At this point I have logged about thirty four hours since launch, and am sitting just a little past level fourteen. The game still feels very fresh, and it is funny how much my play style has changed as I have moved into the game. Early on I thought I would be super tanky and focus on things that let me survive in an open firefight, but in truth the longer I play the more sniper I become. Right now I am running around with a Covert SRS for sniping purposes and generally dealing lots of damage quickly to targets that are far away from me, and then when they get into closer range I swap to a Police M4 which can whittle down enemies with focused bursts. This works amazingly well against pretty much every enemy type but snipers. Those guys… are pretty much the bane of my existence because they are trying to play the same game I am, and generally the computer is better at it. So I spend a lot of my time trying to get out of line of sight from the snipers while mopping everything else up… and then play this game of chicken popping in and out of cover and trying to quick scope them before popping back down like a prairie dog. The worst snipers so far are the Rikers because they just seem more brutal in every possible way. That said it might simply be that they are the highest level enemies I can encounter currently.

On the podcast Saturday night we got into this long discussion about the morality of The Division, and how it made the other AggroChat folks feel uneasy. I can’t say that I am experiencing this at all, because like always I am writing my own narrative of my character as I go… and the fact that this is a silent protagonist game really helps that for me. So as i move around the city, I am the big damned hero cleaning up the city and saving people. I am absolutely the good guys in my tale, but then again as they said Saturday so are the Cleaners, who absolutely think they are doing what is right for the city. I guess for me I just love how rich this setting is… all of the little details like the graffiti that I am showcasing in the photos for today’s post is just amazing. I think the key difference is… that I never really fully immerse myself into a game setting. It is always a game that I am playing, and always a story where I am the hero. Even if I am not supposed to be… I am building a narrative compatible with my notion that in spite of whatever actions I am taking, I am doing it for some greater good. In the Division I absolutely rush to save hostages, or citizens being held up by looters, because it makes me feel like the hero I am trying to be. When you do a random encounter on the street you are given bonuses for various things… and when I see that survivor bonus it always makes me happy. I also spend a lot of my time going through abandoned buildings so I can make sure I always have whatever item citizens ask for when I come across one in need. I am the one making the city a better place, and I am comfortable with that stance. I guess that might be why I like the post apocalyptic genre so much, is because the world is in such a screwed up state… that there are so many ways for me to help fix it. Even if fixing means simply hunting down the biggest baddest warlord… and putting a bullet in his skull.

Someday Arrived

March 13, 2016 by Belghast

Ameristralia

Yesterday was somewhat of an insane day, for so many different reasons. Firstly we had to get up and around rapidly because we had a 10 am wedding to attend, and all the while every bit of technology of my website seemed to be rebelling against me. I struggled to upload any images because apparently their were going through a FTP attack that was busying things out. I managed to limp by and get a post up in spite of the problems. The wedding itself was located out in the middle of nowhere, but that in itself is not what makes it an interesting occasion. One of my wife’s friends met a man from Australia through their social channels, and over the last few years they have been travelling to the two countries to meet family and such. Finally getting married here in America where they intend to live. What is just so flabbergasting about this whole thing… is just how many members of his family attended. I lost count but there were somewhere between sixteen and twenty folks from Australia at the wedding… and all I could think about was just how expensive those plane tickets must have been. Just doing some quick googling it looks like roughly $1300 per flight… which means… well for lack of a better phase this family really loves him.

The wedding was charming, and the bride was beautiful and all that… however the focus of at least my entertainment was this adorable free range kid. Her mom and dad were family of the groom that were acting as photographers for the event. I am guessing that the kid wanted to emulate mom and dad so they gave her a small digital camera… which she then proceeded to go around and take photos of everyone. It was adorable to see her walk up beside my pew, pause for a second and snap a photo before moving on… all without saying a word. She obviously was not having any of the service and wanted to roam around while the wedding was actually going on. I’ve always disliked weddings, I think mostly because for a period of time in my past I worked them with my father. My dad was a portrait and wedding photographer on the side… and I was his assistant and ended up operating the long angle photos set up in a balcony or whatever was available. It is always awkward attending weddings where you don’t really know anyone… and yesterday was absolutely one of those situations. I ended up getting a very strange hug from the grandmother of the bride, thanking us for attending. Thankfully it was over in about an hours time, and we ducked out shortly after the reception started.

So Much Sore

If the yearly bullshit ritual of daylight savings time were not today… I am sore in places I don’t even remember working yesterday. A few months ago we set the goal of tackling our garage over spring break, and to facilitate this we got a dumpster. You have to understand… we don’t use our garage and it has largely been a catch all over the last several years. Anytime we simply wanted something out of our sight… we threw it in the garage thinking “someday” we would take it to the dump, or donate it to goodwill or whatever. Apparently that someday is finally here and on Thursday night when we started… the overwhelming nature of the amount of crap out there was real. I somewhat wish I had taken a before picture but the above image is after a few nights and a half day worth of cleaning. Yesterday was the day we got the bulk of the big things out of there… either into the dumpster or in the two trips I made to Goodwill. About five years ago we had this strange summer when the spider population quadrupled… and apparently their base of operations was our garage. This made it even less appealing to go out there and try and reclaim the space because quite literally you were likely to walk into bits of cobweb spun from wall to wall. We however tried our best to ignore the eight legged infestation that was everywhere… and pushed forward only lamenting later the number of bites we are certain to have gotten… and the constant unshakable feeling that something is crawling on us.

The first photo may not look that impressive, but imagine every single corner of that place packed so that you could not move anywhere without crawling over something first. We had two benches, a dresser, a ferret cage, a hamster cage, and a truly silly number of electronics boxes that I felt for some reason I needed to keep in case something went wrong. On top of that we still had the remnants of the last time we attempted to clean the garage with several boxes, that were neatly sorted and full of obviously important things to us at one point. Then there were the number of things that were inexplicably in the garage and brand new still in package… like an Iced Tea pot, Smoothie Blender, and a tower fan… all neither of us remember having but were probably given to us at one point or another. It had quite literally been a decade since we last actively used our garage and it was like delving into a time capsule. As I said the brute force stuff is mostly taken care of, and at one point we had to make a trip to Big Lots to go purchase the cheapest vacuum we could find… because we decided we would rather not have the good house vacuum full of spiders and for some strange reason dead earthworms. Today we can at least sit down with boxes of stuff and try and sort things out. I think the first mission however is to look at some shelving for one of the walls so that we can neatly stow things out of the way rather than just have boxes laying around everywhere. Needless to say…. Yesterday and Today will both be gaming lite days.