Tales of the Aggronaut

Always a Sale

December 2, 2015 by Belghast

Psychology of Clearance

For as long as I can remember, I have always been a bargain hunter. Few things feel better than finding that rare item on sale for as much as 50 to 75% off of its original price. I know without a doubt that I got this instinct from my Mother, because when I was growing up I can remember my Grandmother joking that she thought I would end up being a “Blue Light Special”. For those who are either not old enough, or not from the right region… K-Mart used to have a literal blue light attached to a cart that they would drive around the store, and for thirty minutes a specific item in the store would be at a significant discount. I remember my mother would always go to check out whatever these items were, sometimes whether or not we actually needed them. So to say that allure of finding a deal is ingrained in my very fiber is a very true statement. Thankfully my wife is much the same… so she gets it… and in truth we simply don’t like spending more money than we need to on anything. She however is always willing to carry it further than I am… and there comes a point where I am sick of dealing with something and am willing to spend any amount of money to be “done” with it.

One of our favorite activities during the parts of the year when stores are changing out seasonal merchandise is to go clearance hunting. We live in Wal-mart country, and are roughly two hours away from the central office. This means at any time there are around thirty or forty Wal-mart stores within easy driving distance. The trick of Wal-mart is the odd quirk that every store is essentially self governed to a certain bit, and this extends to what they choose to put on clearance. So one store might have an item for full price, but a store ten minutes away might have it for 75% off depending on a whole bunch of factors. My Lego habit has been fed by the fact that I can pretty regularly find whatever sets I want on deep discount… so that $200 set becomes $60… or the $30 set becomes $10. So the question always becomes… is this item good enough of a deal, and there have been times I have passed something up only to kick myself later. For example when driving home from Pax South last year, I found Star Wars Lego AT-TE for $40, but ended up passing because it felt like we had already spent a silly amount of money that weekend. I’ve kicked myself since because that was originally like a $150 set, and really freaking awesome.

The Steam Sale

So these instincts of bargain hunting and regret of the deals I have missed, carried with me into the digital world. As a result the Steam sale has been one of those forces of nature that I never can seem to resist. When I see that $60 game that I have always wanted to play… selling for only $5… it is really hard not to go ahead and pick it up and tuck it away for the day when I really get the desire to play it. The problem being… I like quite literally everyone else I know is doing this, and as a result we have hundreds of games as a steam backlog that we “really need to play”. Compound this with the fact that new games are constantly being released, it comes into a situation where there are just games that we own that we are quite likely never going to play. Over the last year I have tried really hard to resist the lure of the Steam Sale, but usually I end up picking up at least one “deal” that looks too good to pass up. Even though on some level the number of games that I have that I have not even installed… is a massive stress point for me.

This past weekend for Thanksgiving there was predictably yet another Steam sale going on, with its own rock bottom prices on games. I hit the site a few times to see what was being sold, and oddly enough had zero desire to purchase anything. At this point we have done a bunch of renovations on the house, so there is definitely the desire to “spend no more money” going on, but I don’t think it was that. There were also plenty of games that looked interesting to me, so I don’t think it was simply the fact of not having anything I wanted. I think maybe it is just the fact that I have finally come to the realization that there is no limited quantity here, that I am racing to snap up before they sell out. In a physical store… they have a limited number of items on the shelf, and when those items are gone… especially when clearance is concerned… they are not getting any more. When you are selling a digital key to a digital game… there is absolutely no rarity going on there. They can sell keys a virtually unlimited number of times… and be able to keep ratcheting that price downwards towards infinity, each time catching a new batch of purchasers. A physical copy of Pokemon or Final Fantasy ends up gaining value, but a digital copy only serves to get cheaper.

Always on Sale

I think another thing that is finally sinking in… is that I can purchase a game at any point and don’t need to have it waiting in the wings for me to play. I have insanely fast internet right now, in fact I ran a test this morning for the purpose of this article and you can see it over on the right hand side there. There is not a game that is available on steam that I cannot literally download in less than thirty minutes. So it is not like I need to preload things to really be able to have fun… I can wait for the whim to strike me, purchase it in any of the many always on market places and be playing the game less than a half an hour later. This is vastly different from the chunk of my life where I literally had to drive an hour away to be able to find any of the games I wanted to play. There is a part of me that still attributed a value to having something on hand, rather than having to go out and acquire it…. since I still remember having to go from store to store looking for one of the last remaining copies of a new game. Now I purposefully shun physical copies of things for the simplicity of knowing I can pre-order moments before the release of a game and still get the full benefit.

The other side effect is that there is quite literally always a sale going on somewhere. Between Steam, Origin, GOG, Greenman Gaming, Amazon, Humble Bundle… and countless other minor retailers there is quite literally always a sale going on for any game I could ever want to play. The only time this is not necessarily the case is for any game I might want to play on the Playstation 4. There I am very much still at the whim of a single game store, since once again I am not a huge fan of buying physical copies of games for the console. I greatly prefer the fact that thanks to my 2 Terabyte harddrive upgrade in it, I can have most everything I might want to play “on tap” and waiting on me to boot. All of these things honestly make the individual digital games worth less to me than they used to… and this is maybe going to be a problem that the industry will have to deal with. There was a time when I was willing to “snap up” a game for $20, and that degraded to $15… and then to $10… and now quite literally a AAA title has to be $5 or less for it to trigger that “buy now” instinct. I feel like I am simply becoming desensitized to the effect of the “Big Sale!” and now it seems simply easier to pay the price something is currently selling for rather than trying to stock pile it for later. This entire topic came up, because this recent steam sale seems to be the one that a good chunk of my friends also passed up. Has the magic of the Steam sale finally lost its magnetism? I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts about this, because for me at least over the course of this last year…. the only “deals” that I have really snapped up are those coming from Humble Bundle or the PSN store.

Tauren Flight Form

December 1, 2015 by Belghast

Rose-colored Lenses

Last night was the night when I finally realized that playing Horde was not some magical and happy place free from assholes. Over the last several days it has been pretty great, and I have casually bumped into people that I have slantwise known on the server. I was beginning to think that the Horde were simply more mature players than the Alliance folks that I had been so used to dealing with. That apparently is not the case… I simply had a really lucky streak. I have to say the Facepull guild has been amazing, and it is actually drawing me out of my own little world that I seem to get stuck in so many times. Last night Laughingly that everyone calls “Gigs” convinced me to join her and Martoxis in a Supreme Lord Kazzak raid. Now me and Kazzak have a long history, namely from the days when people would pull him to Stormwind and he would ultimately need to be despawned by a GM because it got too powerful. So I guess in a way I knew what I was getting myself in for, but Gigs promised this version was no big deal. She even went so far as to give us a Mammoth ride to the location, and everything seemed pretty awesome for a bit.

Then we started summoning people… and I was simply doing my part and clicking the portals to get people here faster. At some point during this rush a mage perfectly summoned a portal to Hillsbrad Foothills… aka where Dalaran USED to be. A handful of us mistakenly clicked it… including myself and Gigs… and we quickly fell to our deaths. At which point someone pulls the boss, locking us out of the loot. So while I was raging inside… I attempted calmly rez and get my way back to Tanaan Jungle. I honestly didn’t even think of that being a thing that someone would do… but I guess now I know to be cautious. It feels like however fate rewarded me for my frustrations, because on the next attempt I managed to get a drop both from the boss and from the token… which gave me not one but two different 705 trinkets: Chipped Soul Prism and Mark of Supreme Doom. Well worth a fall to my death… that honestly I should have survived with a bubble, but I was simply too shocked to react in time.

Last Call LFR

On the Alliance side of the house, there has been a long standing rule… that you do not under any circumstances do Looking For Raid content any night other than Tuesday and MAYBE Wednesday at the latest. The closer you get to Monday the worse the groups get, and you only ever set foot in an LFR dungeon on a Monday night if you have a significant death wish. Once again I thought maybe the rules of the universe simply didn’t function the same on the Horde side, because I did several LFR runs on Saturday and Sunday and had a pretty good time of it. The groups were calm and reasoned, and we simply wrecked stuff and got loot as a result. So even thought I had the shitty experience with the asshole mage in Kazzak, I decided to brave the unwashed masses and venture forth into Monday LFR. My first sign that something was wrong, should have been that the DPS queue was roughly an hour. I however had stuff I wanted to do out in Tanaan Jungle so I queued up and before I knew it… it was popping. At first things seemed to go more or less pretty well. We downed the first boss with ease… then when we got to the second boss… it took two attempts. Finally the third boss took three attempts… so things seemed to be going downhill. However with the miracle of determination we were able to get through it.

Then I queued for Archimonde… aka the Black Gate. Firstly I have to say how awesome I think it is that you are essentially fighting the demons that besieged Mount Hyjal. I’ve been running quite a bit of Mount Hyjal attempting to get that really awesome two handed sword for my paladin. The end game of World of Warcraft or any game… is really collecting outfits for transmogging. Needless to say… Archimonde did not go well. I was assured by my guildies that this fight was a little overtuned even for LFR, and that most groups struggle with it. However after our fourth wipe, we lost literally half of the raid and I found myself exiting as well. So in my first week of really being “back” I managed to raid Normal Hellfire Citadel through Gorefiend, all of Blackrock Foundry LFR, and all but Archimonde in the Hellfire Citadel LFR. The only thing that I wish I had managed to squeeze in there was Highmaul LFR, simply because I am in desperate need of Abrogator Stones. Playing catch up on the legendary ring quest is going to be a massive pain in the butt, because I remember just how many weeks it took me actively raiding Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry to get all the necessary bits to complete that thing.

A Reason for Facebook

Another interesting side note is that it seems Facepull hangs out pretty much exclusively on Facebook. This is the one social media network I have actively shunned over the years, namely because of some bad first experiences with it. I technically have a Facebook account because it is connected to this blog, and I namely use it to syndicate my posts to the Tales of the Aggronaut page. What is going to be interesting is this may give me a reason to actually use it on a regular basis, seeing as they seem to use it in place of the traditional guild forum. The other funny side note is that apparently yesterday they found my blog posts thanks to Nubzy linking it to said facebook group. So hey folks if you are reading this! Apparently Obi was a bit grumpy that I didn’t mention him in my blog post, so I am going out of my way to remedy that today. I’ve known Nubzy and Obi since I believe Vanilla, or at the very least since early Burning Crusade. They have followed me into many games and I have always considered them both to be part of my extended family. I am just happy to finally make good on my threat of playing something on their side of the fence. I still say however that World of Warcraft would be a better game if they just tore the fence down, letting battle.net friends play together regardless of what faction they happened to enjoy the most. That said I really am starting to enjoy being a bull.

Hellfire and Horde

November 30, 2015 by Belghast

Adulting Sucks

This morning I am sitting here trying to eat my oatmeal and drink my coffee… and this Monday guy keeps pestering me and trying to make me adult. Really freaking annoying. This weekend was a tale of my wife and I avoiding adulting.. so much so that finally yesterday we had to get out and do things in the world. Essentially yesterday was the day of doing all of the things we put off the rest of the break. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t too bad, but the world was cold and rainy… and when I first set foot outside yesterday morning my first instinct was to rush back inside and swear off breakfast. Then my tummy kicked in and told me that it was hungry, and it was also sick of the options we had available in the house. So I ventured out and got breakfast, and realized that I could in fact survive outside of my house shaped bubble with its blanket cocoon. You can tell the hibernation instinct is strong… because we bought the fixings for a bunch of various crock pot meals… so we don’t have to leave the house at all once we make it in from work.

Unexpected Activity

A good chunk of my weekend was spent doing things to get gear for Belgrace my newly 100 Tauren Paladin. When you boost a character they end up giving you a full set of green 640 gear, which is a significant increase over the sort of gear you end up with by natively leveling. Also apart from having to get silver in the proving grounds… you are level appropriate for heroics and the first two LFR raids. I however had pretty crappy luck in Blackrock Foundry with getting upgrades, but I did have a fair amount of luck picking up Baleful drops in the Tanaan Jungle campaign area. So last night I was sitting at 656 with a decent purple weapon… that was sadly as good if not better than Belghast’s alliance side. I had settled down into my blanket cocoon on the sofa prepping to watch my Sunday evening television binge of Once Upon a Time > Walking Dead > Into the Badlands > Talking Dead when I got a random invite from my friend Nubzy.

I knew that they raided on Sunday nights, but I had no clue they planned on dragging me into Hellfire Citadel. I had told her that I was working on gearing and that I had managed to get to 656, but that did not necessarily mean I was expecting to raid. They were resetting the instance apparently and were grabbing a ton of other people into what was their largest raid group to date of around sixteen people. Brerhoof has always been awesome, and he set to making me some upgrades for my remaining 640 green slots. So before I had even really set foot into the dungeon Brer handed me Gauntlets, Pants and Boots that were significant upgrades. Then off the very first drop I managed to pick up Shell-Resistant Stompers and luckily I had not bound the boots yet so I equipped the drop and holding onto the BOEs for the time being. Either I will get an upgrade for them, or pass them on to the next guildie that needs them. The night as a whole saw me getting a bunch of really nice upgrades… in addition to the boots I picked up a Helm of Precognition, an Warlord’s Unseeing Eye for offspec… and most importantly a 690 weapon upgrade Fel-Burning Blade.

Old School Feels

While the gear upgrades were awesome… the real take away from the night was just how much fun I had. The horde guild is named Facepull, and that should tell you something about the attitude and demeanor. More than anything running with them… reminded me of the nights raiding with Duranub before Cataclysm. It was an old school kind of fun, and even when we did something stupid… no one really got pissy about it. We just kept pushing forward and making progress. For having a bit of a strange balance we did really well making it up to Gorefiend before hitting a bit of a wall. At that point we had a few members of the raid have to leave… one of which was a healer leaving us with a fairly unbalanced party. The big surprise of the evening is I guess I did not realize that Nubzy was now one of the tanks. I guess I knew her most as a Shadow Priest, so I guess in the back of my head I just assumed she was booming it up on her Druid. Right now the plan is to gear out my offspec for tanking, but if we continue to need healing… I might change those plans at some point.

Paladin is the only class I have really successfully healed on… but that was back during Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King. I know Paladin healing is far less whack-a-mole than it was… and for some people that is probably a good thing. For me that really has no healing instincts left anymore from my Everquest days… that is definitely a bad thing. The only sort of healer I am is really the “mash button faster for more heals” kind. Granted I did level as a healer in SWTOR on my Scoundrel, but good at healing companions is one thing… good at healing people is a completely different one. In Final Fantasy XIV I kinda fail at my Scholar and I am not exactly the sort of healer you really want on my White Mage either. In any case I had a lot of fun, and the Sunday evening thing is something I could potentially get used to. They don’t start until almost 8pm EST, which by that time I am always downstairs watching television anyways. I managed to dps just fine while watching my shows last night, so in theory this is a decent fit. I have to say I could get used to this raiding as a cow thing… and the group of people seemed pretty damned cool as well.

Week In Gaming 11/29/2015

November 29, 2015 by Belghast

Leak Testing

At this point it has been raining for roughly four days nonstop, and at the same time been hovering near freezing. This has seriously harmed any desire I had to go out into the world and do anything. As a result however we have a bunch of errands that we HAVE to do today, in order to return to being fully functional human beings in the real world. I also cannot believe tomorrow… we have to go exist in the real world again. This has been one of the most chill holiday weekends we have had in years, but then you realize… the reason why it is so chill. The last decade has had a horrible cost on our combined families, and quite honestly… we just don’t have the people we used to. We are doing good to get a single Thanksgiving or Christmas per side of the family, let alone the four or five that we used to have to hit when we first got married. My mom used to say to us, that we would miss these family get togethers when they were gone… and she was absolutely right. I miss the people… but I do not miss in any way the stress of feeling like we had to appease everyone.

The other thing that is awesome about this weekend… is it is essentially the first time in a month we have not had strange people banging on our house. Wednesday day the contractors did the final walkaround, and there are still a few things… but for the most part we are done. The dumpster has been removed from the driveway, and we can once again park our vehicles in our own damned driveway. The positive about four days of nonstop rain is I feel like it has thoroughly leak tested the house. All of the old leaks are gone, and thankfully thus far we have yet to find any “new” leaks. I like the bedroom with the door in it, because it ends up getting a lot darker during the day which makes taking naps all the more enjoyable. We still need to weatherstrip around the edge of the door, but we can already tell that the siding and insulation have made the house significantly more temperature stable. We set a temperature on the thermostat and the heater rarely kicks on to bring it up to temperature… whereas previously during the winter the heater would almost constantly run making my upstairs office unbearable. Which means maybe just maybe… my office will be comfortable during the winter months, because last night when I had it shut off completely while podcasting I didn’t really get hot at all.

World of Warcraft

This week for better or worse has been all about comfort gaming for me… and with that a return to the World of Warcraft. At this point last week I was mostly fighting the desire to log in… and failing ultimately playing my sub level 20 characters for free. This week I have dove head first into the timesink, and used my free boost to 100 to create a Tauren Paladin for the purpose of playing with my horde side friends. I’ve not really played much horde since the early days of Warcraft, and the only time I had a at level cap character was during Wrath of the Lich King when I was raiding a bit with Batteries Not Included… the raid group that would ultimately form the majority of Facepull the horde guild I am in now. I’ve always said at one point or another I would level another character so I could hang out with some of the excellent people on that side of the fence. Now after doing so for just a little bit I am kinda kicking myself for not doing it sooner. I’ve never bought into the Horde versus Alliance rhetoric… but it just feels like people are friendlier Horde side.

There have been three separate occasions where I have been out in Tanaan Jungle, and got overwhelmed… only to find another Horde healer dropping down from above and healing me. One of them I ended up thanking them and having a forty minute conversation about the various people we know from the early days of Argent Dawn. It always felt like the Horde at least on Argent Dawn was more closely connected than the Alliance side… and I always assumed in part it was due to the fact that they were massively outnumbered. With the grand merging of realms that feels less true, especially since we are in the same battle group as the Alea Iacta Est horde mega guild. That said it does feel like people are more willing to help out other players, especially when you are running around as a giant cow. There is a certain kinship that Tauren seem to have for their other “beefy brethren” as one of the folks that helped me out put it. I still love my Ally characters, but for once I feel like I have a horde character that feels good and natural to me. Maybe I see some race changes to Tauren in my future… because there is just something appealing to being an adorable lumbering bull.

EVE

As a side project I have been playing some EVE on the free trial. I was drafted as an EVE virgin, even though I played a bit during the alpha and beta tests eons ago. My experience so far has not been without issues… namely there is apparently a known bug that can happen during character creation. When you are creating your character, you have to have a piece of clothing selected for every slot… problem being as you can see on the right side bar there is no drop down for “Bottom”. I did not find this out until I had already spent a significant amount of time sculpting my face. I also thought it was a little odd that I only had one hairstyle, but I thought maybe that had something to do with the fact that I was a free account, and that when you purchased an account maybe it unlocked additional styles. However after not being able to move forward I did some digging and this is a bug that has been regularly reported since around 2011. Somewhat shocking that something like that has been allowed to stick around the game this long.

On attempt number two of creating a character… I made sure that every drop down had something in it before really starting the process. I ended up going in a completely different direction … namely my own take on Dave Lister from Red Dwarf. Though I am sure no one would really notice that unless I specifically pointed it out. I named my character “Bel Ghast” and set out into the world to see how the game had changed. Ironically the game works pretty much exactly like I remembered it, but the big thing I did not remember was just how slow the pace is. In many ways it reminds me of the original Everquest where every action has a certain amount of downtime in it. I immediately fell back into my old habits, which were to upgrade my ship… to carry more ore… to allow me to save up money to buy more interesting things. The problem being is I have hit the 5 hour wall that Tam has talked about… where you need to pour about ten more hours into the game before you can do anything interesting. There is a place where the prices for the things you want jump from being 10k isk, to 500k isk… to 2.5m isk. So now I am in this gulf where I am questioning my will to push through it. Additionally I am struggling finding new areas to “hunt” in like the Rogue Cloning Facility. I can oneshot pretty much every ship in that area, but feel like I need to find something bigger to test my weapons on, but not sure where to find it.