Tales of the Aggronaut

Future Disappointment

October 21, 2015 by Belghast

Future Is Disappointing

I am home sick today fighting some sort of flu like chest crud, and as a result I am taking a bit longer than normal to knock out a blog post. It will soon be evident that today you will be unable to escape the fact that this is “back to the future day”, or at least the day that Marty McFly supposedly went forward in time to. While I have a heaping helping of nostalgia about Back to the Future in general, I have to say the future is always a bit of a disappointment. If you asked my thirteen year old self, what the future would be like… he probably would have bought into the fantasy of Back to the Future 2. At the very least I expected to have flying cars, and to have colonized the moon… but what happened instead was potentially stranger and more interesting. Futurism is almost always inherently wrong. We envision the future as delivered by the things we can dream about today. As new technologies evolve they shape that vision, and we are historically bad at guessing what trends will look like in five years… let alone ten… or in the case of this vision of the future twenty six years. Something odd happens when you place a goal on the horizon… people tend to start working towards that. So in a swell of nostalgia… we have actually seen hoverboards, self lacing shoes, and even the goofy pepsi bottle… because this movie TOLD us to make it.

This happens all the time and more often than not we don’t even notice. The bright colorful ubiquitous Verbatim 3.5″ floppy disks I am sure look like they do, because almost the exact same thing existed on Star Trek as a means of reading and writing data. Similarly the iPad looks an awful lot like the handheld LCARS tablet device carried on Star Trek the Next Generation. The internet as we know it… seems to have patterned itself off of the futurism of William Gibson. The reason why this happens is that technologists are generally geeks… and geeks love geek culture. Even if you don’t mean to… we are all subconsciously influenced by the things we love. The problem is… in the case of Back to the Future… none of the technologies that have showed up are really “true”. They are media stunts that have been created to prove that it “could” be done, but not necessarily something that is a widely accepted and adopted technology. The flying car for example, for the majority of my life has always been ten years away. The problem is that ten year mark never actually arrives… and my big concern is that we just are not investing enough in the future as a whole. Our space program is in shambles, and the corporate sector is constantly focusing on what brings them profits six months down the road instead of six years. It feels like we have stagnated, and most of what we are getting as far as innovations go are just constant iterations on the same ideas. This makes me concerned that the future will never actually arrive… or at least when it gets here it will be Shadowrun instead of Star Trek.

The Height Poll

If you follow me on twitter… or any other network that my twitter re-syndicates to… you may have noticed a poll that I sent out yesterday. Some people called it the strangest gaming poll they have seen… and I feel like maybe I need to supply some explanation. I am tall in real life… sitting around six foot four inches. This is tall enough that you realize that the world was not built for someone of your height. I am constantly banging my head on ceiling fans, the occasional low door frame, and have to be super careful when getting in and out of cars. As a result when I play games… especially MMORPGs I tend to play significantly shorter races. My first character in Everquest was a Dwarf, and I have had an affinity for little races including my current Lalafell in Final Fantasy XIV. In a conversation with another friend I found out that she was short… and had a similar experience… preferring to play taller races. So that got me thinking… which lead to the poll wondering if this is common place or if we are outliers. I thank everyone that voted in the poll, because it produced the image you see above. If anyone else wants to join in the question you can either click the link above or the image to launch into the strawpoll.

One thing I left off the poll is the folks who are medium height and prefer to also play medium height characters. I am assuming that a lot of those people voted “no real preference”, but in truth I was mostly interested in the relation between the extremes. It turns out that I am apparently not the normal, at least in terms of this question. Based on the poll it seems like the majority of players either have no real preference or prefer to stick with their same height regardless of the games they are playing. Only a few of each type preferred to play the opposite of whatever they are in real life. I guess that says a lot of things, and mostly that people tend to be happy with themselves. For me at least when I play a character in a game I tend to create a revised version of myself, where I fix the things that I dislike about myself… creating a “Ultimate Belghast”. I guess if I were being completely honest with myself… were I to “fix” my height I would not actually go “short” but instead trend towards medium. For a man it seems like six feet tall is about the sweet spot… the point at which the entire world seems to be built around that height. I’d never have to worry about leaning down in hotel showers so that the shower head can hit me… never have to worry about banging my head on things… and wouldn’t have to constantly search for “tall” sizes. Four inches doesn’t seem like much of a difference but in terms of functioning in the world it really is. Nonetheless I thought it was an interesting poll question and it was awesome that folks were willing to take it.

Gaming Muggles

October 20, 2015 by Belghast

Non-Gaming Spouse

@ModeratePeril I'd actually be interested in hearing about this and how you balance gaming with a non-gaming spouse.

— Jumpscare Jessica (@heyitsliore) October 19, 2015

Last night I kinda barged into an interesting conversation on twitter between some of my fellow TGENerates. This morning I thought I would write a bit about it, in a very non-standard blog post for me. While I don’t refer to her as a Gaming Muggle… I guess that would probably be a potential term for my own spouse. She doesn’t identify with the term gamer, even though she owned an Atari, a Nintendo, and currently plays more mobile games than I will likely ever play in my life. However because she tends to play spider solitaire or sudoku… she doesn’t consider it gaming. The truth is gaming left her when it went three dimensional, and what I mean by that is… she is capable of dealing with two dimensional planes and moving objects across them. However since her eyes never fused completely, she struggles with depth perception type tasks… especially in the virtual world where there are far less visual queues so to where an object is in relation to other objects. So I can remember her happily playing Tetris Attack in my college apartment, but once we moved to the Nintendo 64… that era was pretty much dead to her. My wife however is absolutely a geek, and we actually met due to our at the time shared IRC addiction. We were introduced by a man in Belgium, even though we grew up thirty minutes apart.

I will admit I have always been more than a little jealous of “gamer couples”, and seeing them in the various games I have played exploring these virtual worlds together. That said I know in the case of my wife and I we would probably just drive each other insane. We are both extremely good at the things we do… we just get to the same conclusion in vastly different ways. For example when we clean the house we tend to divide and conquer, each taking specific rooms. The reason being if we are trying to clean the same room at the same time we just end up getting in each others way. My fear is that in gaming the same would be true, with her taking one path, and me taking another… but ultimately ending up in the same location at the end. She has this inborn sense of direction that I have always coveted, because I have to navigate based on landmarks… and get completely lost when those landmarks are missing or have changed. I can enter a subdivision and within minutes have no clue which direction I am going anymore… and somehow she can magically tell me exactly what our heading is at any point during the trip. So I think she would honestly probably be far better at navigation than I would even in the virtual space.

Keeping Grounded

Over the years I have come to realize that having a non-gaming spouse is actually a big benefit for me personally. Everquest was essentially my first MMO, and it bit hold of me hard. Essentially the ability to explore a fantasy world was the sort of thing I had always craved, and giving me an always on persistent world to do it in… was absolute crack. The truth is that for most people that got really hooked on that game… it was in fact like a drug. There were more than a few people that I know that changed almost everything about their lives to adjust to doing things in Everquest. The ones who had it worse in a way were the ones with spouses also addicted to that game. I watched my friends alienate other friends, blow off jobs, and ultimately destroy relationships because of it. While playing I watched more than one marriage disintegrate, as some folks simply forgot to keep checking into the world. Bills may or may not have gotten paid, kids and animals may or may not have gotten fed. There was a bit of a dark underbelly to that game, and as a result it made me realize how lucky I am to have someone to forcibly pull me out of some of those mires.

To answer Liore’s question… how does one balance? Well having that person that isn’t doing the thing that you are doing… helps me at least realize that there is a world other than the games I happen to be playing. It isn’t exactly easy sometimes, especially considering that the reason why I game as much as I do is because my spouse is often busy with her own work. My wife is a rockstar teacher and because of that ends up spending upwards of eighty hours a week working on this or that item for her classroom. She takes it all super seriously, and because of that they have piled on so many extra duties. So there are a lot of times where I am busy with a game, and she is busy with lesson plans… and we are in completely different rooms conversing over instant messenger. It works… because we know we are in this together. The relationship is in the little things, and the fact that for the most part we “get” each other. I made the comment last night that “marriage is a strange thing… you never really know what is going to work… until it does” and that really is the case. I don’t know how or why it works… but it does and we have been together nineteen years… and married seventeen.

Complimentary Differences

I think the reason why we work is because on some levels we are completely and utterly different people. There are times it feels like the only thing we share in common, is our love for each other. I love Horror and Science Fiction movies… and she loves Home Improvement Television and Crime Dramas. She is very religious… and I am pretty deeply anti-religion in general. But the strange thing is… or differences make us stronger as a whole. We are unlike most couples in that from the moment we go together we were pretty much a team. Hell in college we pooled all of our resources into a joint bank account and pretty much supported each other, and I know married couples that have never had a joint bank account in their lives. This common sense of struggle together means that pretty much everything is tackled as a team. So if I don’t know how to do something, and she does… and then sometimes she doesn’t know how to do something, I do… we have a wider range of skills that make it easier to tackle things. I think the fundamental truth is that we have faith in each other, to do the things that we know we can’t ourselves.

What also makes it work is that for the most part we “get” and respect the things we choose to do. While I may not understand the concepts my wife is teaching… because Math has always been my weakest area… I get why she needs resources that her school cannot provide her, and never begrudge getting those items regardless of cost. Similarly my wife doesn’t necessarily understand why I love Star Wars or Lego.. or the countless game franchises I do… but she is constantly on the look out for things she knows I will like. The other day she found me an awesome R2-D2 skull cap that I plan on rocking this winter when it gets cold. She has also come home with Legos that she happens to find on sale somewhere, thinking I would like them. Similarly I am constantly searching for whatever things she is into, and have gone to silly lengths to track down whatever it is that she is hunting for. So while I might have a “muggle” wife… she certainly knows the important bits, and at the same time reminds me that there is a world just outside our door as well.

Legacy Lacking

October 19, 2015 by Belghast

Fine with Failure

I have come to accept the fact that there is no way in hell I am going to manage to finish all of the class story lines before tomorrow, when Knights of the Fallen Empire launches. I allowed myself to get massively distracted by Destiny, and for the most part I am okay with this. Last night I hit the start of Act 3 on my Sith Sorcerer and I should be able to wrap that up tonight if I am lucky. That leaves only the agent to play, and as a friend suggested last night… it might be interesting to see what leveling is like post KotFE. In truth while I am excited for this expansion, I am not just rushing headlong into the content. I still have yet to complete Shadows of Revan on any of my characters, and while my Jedi Guardian is sitting at 57… I have no real desire to rush through that. Honestly at this point I might ding the new level cap before I even set foot into the new chapters content. I want to play, but I am not feeling like I have to rush ahead, since really I am not trying to keep up with anyone. That normally is why I push so hard at the beginning of an expansion, is that I feel like I am obligated to grind my way to the top of the heap so I will be available for tanking as we level. That ended up in a small bit of burnout recently with Heavensward, so with SWTOR since I am now enjoying it again… I want to futz around a bit.

My biggest complaint about this game is shared with party based role-playing games in general. Nothing frustrates me more than anything, when the game forces me to take a specific character on a mission. This happened last night with Talos, and while I like the companion just fine… a healer and a dps/healer grouped together is not exactly the best mix in the world. I had to stop what I was doing in the middle of this mission, go back to the fleet, upgrade my mods and only then was I able to keep myself alive during a section where I am essentially soloing while Talos fiddles with something in a tomb. I tend to get really connected to a specific group of characters, and when the game forces me to mix that up I get frustrated. I am one of those people that plays Dragon Age with the same party every time, and never switches to use any of the others except begrudgingly when the game makes me do it. I like building a small tight knit team and then using everyone else for crew missions. The worst moment in Dragon Age was the bit where you have to split up and use all of your companions… only half of which had anything other than their starting gear. I had to load back in from a previous save and go out of my way to figure out how best to gear them all. It was pretty much the opposite of fun, and that is how I feel in SWTOR when I am forced to use a specific companion pairing for a specific mission.

The Distraction

The reason why I am mostly okay with not hitting my goal is because I have been having a silly amount of fun playing Destiny. Over the weekend I spent some more time working on my Hunter, which I hope to also get to 40 at some point soonish. After playing around a bit on the Warlock, I decided to use my boost to level 25 on the Hunter instead… because Blade Dancer seems like a really fun spec. I also just like the look and feel of the hunter better than the warlock, and it makes me a bit jealous that my Titan doesn’t have a knife to stab things with instead of just punch them. At this point I am level 30, and considering starting the Taken King content proper soonish if for no reason other than to unlock the Dreadnought for patrols. Ultimately I want to be able to get all of my characters up there in level so that I can share the benefit of having multiple near cap characters. A lot of the cooldowns can go faster if you can swap an item back and forth between your characters. The Agonarch runes can gain one charge per day per character, so if you bank the item you can pop on another character and gain another charge… ultimately getting special event access faster.

I am still very much in the slogging phase of the game, and I have been hovering around the 290 mark for over a week now. Ultimately my only way out is to start chain running Heroic Strikes, but I just have not been able to bring myself to do that. I am having fun with the game, and I am afraid pushing that hard is going to ultimately break it for me. When I start to resent the RNG, or resent the other players… I know my fun time with Destiny will be over. So I am sitting in this realm of finding enjoyment in the little moment to moment gameplay and trying to ignore the larger picture almost entirely. There is part of me that would love to see the raid… but a whole other part of me that doesn’t want to take that hit of heroine. I know what I am like when I start chasing raid drops… I approach them with a single minded determination and focus that ultimately leads to me being completely hollow as a result. I obsess over gearing… and grind myself into the ground destroying whatever enjoyment I had for the game in the process. I tried really hard not to do this with Heavensward, and in part it is why I have been taking this break and playing other games in the process. My hope is that by the time we end up going back to Final Fantasy XIV it will feel fresh and enjoyable again with the launch of the 3.1 patch. Similarly though I am trying to keep Destiny and SWTOR as enjoyable as I can for the time being… and it seems like not caring too much about reaching a particular destination is my way for doing that.

Week in Gaming 10/18/2015

October 18, 2015 by Belghast

One Track Mind

This week was quite literally… all about Destiny. We have a trio of myself, Damai, and Saldonas aka Carthuun that have been running around together quite a bit. Alternately I have been spending some time with Euron as well when we can manage to meet up, and both “actually” be on at the same time instead of afking for long periods of time and leaving our Playstation 4 on while connected to Destiny. Of note… if you do not exit out of Destiny before walking away, your PS4 will not fully go to sleep. I know I have frustrated many people on my friends list who tried to invite me to parties at all hours of the day… when I am not actually at my console. I have really been so into the PS4 this week that last night when we recorded the podcast, it was my first time on voice chat and really my PC since last Sunday. Anyways… on with the games!

Rift – Primal Urges

This week on a whim I decided to try and win one of the Wilds Packs being given away by Trion on their Twitter account. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time… and apparently choosing the right code to try. I opened the image that had six codes in it, and keyed it in quickly into my account and BAM… it gave me the Wilds Pack. I did not at first realize it but this was the big $100 pack of goodies, but the only negative so far is that it did not seem to give me ANY of the loyalty. Otherwise it would have pushed me from the Orange tier that I am currently on into the the Red. I put in a support ticket to ask, but my working theory is… that you get the loyalty for purchasing the pack, not for redeeming it. In any case I am more than happy to have a slew of free stuff including the new Primalist calling.

I have to say that mechanically it is really interesting. Instead of an energy or mana based mechanic, you have this push/pull mechanic that shifts your character between Fury and Cunning. Abilities that are scaled based on Fury push your bar closer to Cunning… and Cunning abilities push towards Fury. So you are constantly switching back and forth between the two stances and the gameplay feel reminds me quite a bit of the solar/lunar cycle of the old Boomkin. I say old Boomkin because I honestly have no clue if this push/pull thing is still in that class or not since I have not played one since Cataclysm. The calling itself is a leather wearing heavy weapon wielder, and so far I am digging it. As you can tell I shunned the tribal feel of the class and ended up making mine a steampunk dwarf. I’ve not really made it terribly far, but I have enjoyed the little bit I have played. I hope at some point soon I will devote a few days to getting really up close and personal with the calling.

Star Wars the Old Republic – Sith Happens

Last night during the podcast I returned to my Sith Inquisitor and am working on trying to finish it. I realize there is no way now that I will finish ALL of my classes before Tuesday, but I am at the end of Alderaan now and it seems like maybe if I can focus attention on it today I will be able to wrap this one up. I am still having a very love/hate relationship with the Sith Sorcerer. Namely I love that I can burn things down quickly with lightning, but hate how horrible of a healer I am if my companion ever seems to get into trouble. I switched from Khem Val to Treek and am enjoying that decision so far. Namely the big problem I run into is that my instinct is to burn harder as our health gets lower… and unlike my Scoundrel I cannot pull us out of quite the health deficit. So that means I really need to watch the companion health more closely and start healing sooner. As a result I end up dying quite a lot on this class, which just slows down the process. The storyline isn’t really “catching” me either… and I think largely the problem is I ended up choosing the finger-wiggler path instead of the melee path. Were I slashing things with my dual saber I would probably be enjoying this class significantly more. It does however give me a healing option Sith side… so I am just going to go with it for now and struggle through.

Destiny – Struggling for Exotics

I have reached the point in Destiny where those upgrades are no longer coming as quickly. I am now in the 290 light range and the engrams are being assholes to me. Right now the best source of gear seems to be doing Heroic Strikes, but our trio still struggles a bit with them. I realize that through running copious amounts of them that problem will solve itself. I also am frustrated by three of coins, which seem to be far less effective for me than others. It took me eight coins before I got my first exotic drop, and I am continuing to feed the beast and have not seen a second so far. I will say that the exotic that I did get was pretty sweet… Invective. I like shotguns, but my frustration has always been their relatively small ammo pool and clip size. Invective seems to take care of that for me, in that it regenerates ammunition at a fixed rate… which is actually pretty damned quick. I am finding it useful in strikes for when mobs get too close and personal.. and the fact that you can fire off the four rounds in full auto style… means you can absolutely shred a heroic minotaur for example. Then I shift back to my pulse rifle and by the time I need my shotgun again, the ammunition is back and ready to go. The only thing that could be better about it is if the chamber reloaded…. but that would probably be asking too much.

The funny thing is… I am in this place where I am really happy with my assortment of weapons. I just wish I had more high level blue fodder to feed to them to level them up. Right now I tend to mostly use… Hawksaw, Hung Jury, 1000 Yard Stare, Invective, and Sol Edge. I would love to have the exotic shards and fodder to power up my Hawkmoon… but I don’t have the steady income of exotics yet. I love that gun… but at 280 it is just too low right now to keep up with my other weapons. For the most part I am happy shifting back and forth between Hawksaw and Hung Jury… both of which are weapons that feel great and can precision shot pretty easily. The other big thing that happened this week is that I dug deep into the lore of Destiny, and if you ready yesterdays blog post you will see a bit write up about a series of videos. Last night I also ended up going on at length about this factor on AggroChat and probably bored the pants off of my co-hosts. What can I say… I am loving this universe and as I still continue to work my way through the missions I keep seeing more interesting parts of it. Destiny is one of those games that has grabbed hold of me and does not show signs of letting go. My hope is that I will be able to get it mostly out of my system by the time Fallout 4 launches…. because I want to spend some close and personal time with the wasteland.