Tales of the Aggronaut

Heading for a Trap

September 16, 2015 by Belghast

Slightly Darker Side

One of the ways I have differed so far from my friends, is that I cannot seem to bring myself to do ONLY the class story line. As a result I am ridiculously over leveling the content, and last night I worked on finishing up Nar Shaddaa. I’ve been enamored with the concept of the vertical city since first experiencing it in Dark Forces. In SWTOR Nar Shaddaa is the darker and more disturbing cousin of Coruscant and provides a very similar leveling experience. You travel through hub sections of the city until you end up in Shadow Town and resolve the central conflict of the story and your class quest. As a Smuggler this setting feels extremely at home, and as you might expect I do in fact get into plenty of trouble with Bounty Hunters and Hutts. Generally speaking when I have played SWTOR in the past, I am extremely light side focused. In fact I generally have trouble not choosing the “blue” option on any quest dialog. As a Smuggler however… I am finding it a little easier to choose that “red” option.

I guess I am ultimately playing my version of Han Solo… the goodnatured lovable scoundrel. When lives of innocents are on the line, I always end up choosing the “right” option and get those light side points. However when I am in a situation where I serve to profit greatly by looking the other way… I find myself “playing the character” and finding it significantly easier to to take those dark side points… and console myself with a pile of credits. Similarly if I have been double crossed… or if someone is doing something truly heinous… I find it oh so satisfying to take that [Attack Them] option. Horrific Imperial Scientist gene splicing people? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! Try and talk my way out of a bounty hunter? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! My weakness seems to be damsels in distress however… because I know right now I am walking into a big trap but I am having to play it off like my character would. It will also likely end up giving me another opportunity for sweet sweet revenge… which I am sure I will be unable to resist taking dark side points for. Thankfully I have diplomacy as a Crew Skill… and even though it is likely at the end of a blaster… it helps to repair all those dark side points.

Cavalcade of Commendations

One of the good changes while not playing the game, is the fact that they standardized the planetary commendation system. Now when you complete anything you have the option of simply taking “basic commendations” instead of the planet specific ones, and at the same time they have increased the total number you get before fifty exponentially. This means that I am constantly swimming in a good supply of them, and I could probably constantly upgrade my moddable gear… but I am finding that I don’t really need to. Since I am using Treek as my tank and she came with a full set of mod gear, and I managed to piece together a workable set from the GTN and the pilot packs… it allows me to pretty much ignore every quest reward and just go for more commendations. Since I am quite overleveled I was 21 before leaving Coruscant, at which point I went to the fleet and kitted out both armor for myself and Treek in the best modifications I could find at the time. This rather easily carried me through until the end of Nar Shadda, at which point I dinged 30 and repeated the same process with level 29 gear. If I can continue this process of upgrading my gear “every other planet” I should be in really good shape to have a pile of commendations for other upgrades.

Last night I spent some of my pile of credits on making myself look cooler. At some point they added in dye slots to the gear, which allows you to “socket” a dye that comes in either single color or dual tone combinations. Most of the really cool combinations are exorbitantly expensive, but I found one I could live with that was black and grey for roughly 40,000 credits. Then I went searching for a really cool gun, and found this one that is originally a cartel item… that folks were selling fairly reasonably on the market. The gun you end up with at the end of the starter zone is functional but not that cool looking… so I was more than happy to cast aside “Flashy”. I dig the fact that it looks like the blaster rifles that some of the troopers have. It fits my shoot first, ask questions later style of playing the “Sawbones” healer. I have long said that “looking cool” makes your character feel cool, and I am pretty happy with my Chiss Smuggler. I am extremely happy that I re-rolled him ages ago as a Chiss instead of yet another human. I am starting to develop this “savior of the aliens” rep in my questing choices, which is kinda awesome since people keep pointing out the fact that I am another “alien scum”. Still having a surprising amount of fun playing through the Smuggler storyline that I ultimately missed at launch.

Universal Patronage

September 15, 2015September 15, 2015 by Belghast

Account Social Systems

One of the things I have been spoiled on by playing quite a few Blizzard games is the existence of Battle.net as a common backbone. When RealID was originally released, I have to admit it bothered me quite a bit. I don’t actually use my real name very much online, and it isn’t necessarily because I am trying to obfuscate who I am… but more that I come from an era in the internet when everyone was their “handle”. Someones handle is more distinct and meaningful for me… than telling me their real name and oddly enough I have a much easier time remembering it. For example… I know several dozen folks with the last name of Smith… but I only know one Scopique. As Blizz took a step back they created the Battle Tag system and since then I have been happily known as Belghast#1752 making it significantly easier to meet up with people regardless of what Blizzard game they happen to be playing. This has been the case with most modern game releases, that they have some underlying account based system that allows me to quickly meet up with my friends by giving them a single idea that relates to all of my characters.

The problem is… when this system is missing I really notice it. It has been a recent struggle while playing Star Wars the Old Republic and the various Trion Worlds games. Sure it is nice to have disconnected alts that you can go hide on… but I have been willing to give up this for the convenience of being easily available. The thing that I find confusing with both SWTOR and Trion is that in both cases they have an underlying system that they could rely on for communication purposes. For SWTOR you have Origin chat… which is pretty horrible, but could at least serve as some common connective tissue. In the same of Trion Worlds though you have a shared account structure that through the use of the Glyph client gives you access to all of the games on your account. All that really seems to be missing is a single “Glyph ID” and a chat infrastructure built around it. The best feature of Blizzard games right now is that you can take your friend list with you into any game you go. So while I am not playing World of Warcraft, I can still keep touch with my WoW playing friends while I am in Diablo or Heroes of the Storm. It would be so nice if I could do this same thing while playing Trove, Rift, ArcheAge or eventually Devilian. Please make this a thing Trion Worlds!

Universal Patronage

While I am asking things of Trion Worlds this morning… I thought I would go ahead and throw in another thing. One of the features of the old Sony Online Entertainment games that I really enjoyed was the concept of the “All Access Pass”. Where you could pay one premium account price and get subscription level access to all of their games. I think back in the day it was something like $25 per month for an All Access account, instead of the individual $15 a month for each game. I loved this concept because it allowed me to pop back and forth freely between their games when I was in the mood to actively play them. The problem there is that for SOE and now Daybreak games… they are all titles that I play in spurts. However since the launch of Rift there has never been a time when I was not at least sometimes playing this game. While I may not play it seriously most of the time, I still keep poking my head in it. Similarly I am really enjoying the current state of ArcheAge, and I love poking my head into Trove. With the addition of Devilian to their lineup… it seems that I am ending up with a situation much like that of SOE where there are lots of different games that I wouldn’t mind playing.

The problem being that I simply cannot justify Patron access to ALL of them. So I have to pick and choose which game I want to activate at a given time. However if there was some sort of universal patron account that allowed me to pay one fee and gain patron access to all of their games… I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat. In the long run I think it would be a net win, since I doubt there are many people out there who are actively maintaining multiple patron subscriptions. You get a little bit per month out of the folks who were already subbing, to give them access to your entire library of games. This also allows you to do cross promotions between them, allowing the achievements in one game to maybe grant you something nifty in another game. This is again one of the strengths of Blizzards stable of games is that they are all interconnected at least to some extent. I feel the same sort of loyalty towards Trion Worlds as others do towards Blizzard, and I just think it would be awesome for something of this sort to happen. I realize Trion is a weird case in the fact that ArcheAge and Devilian for example are not developed in house… but my hope is that there is enough control on the back end systems to be able to implement a sort of universal patronage account.

Gigantic Codes

I have been sitting on an email that I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with it. Gigantic is finally leaving its Alpha process and entering Closed Beta, and with it they are loosening the restrictions a bit and handing out friend codes to a lot of the folks who have been in the closed process for awhile now. There are some constraints on these however and I think it is important to mention that. Right now Gigantic is exclusive to Windows 10 and Xbox One, which I find mildly frustrating since it ran perfectly fine on Windows 8 up until this latest push. This however is a listed requirement, and since I have not been actively testing of late… I have to assume it is probably a legitimate requirement. If you are interested in checking the game out you have to hit the link below and redeem one of the codes I am posting. This is of course a first come first served sort of deal, but I figured the best option was to share them with my readers.

https://www.gogigantic.com/redeem

~~Key 1: 4GB2KE5-I5FBYD-G433KKI-KN723Q~~
~~Key 2: BSKA5FG-SOFHUL-CCVNKBD-WLBRHQ~~
~~Key 3: ZIBOYHQ-ZQVHHX-FC3JL5T-6CMMKQ~~
~~Key 4: 3ML4C2H-RXJD5N-DRCJX3T-I5PAVU~~

Good luck! Hope to see you in game in the near future!

[Edit] and those went WAY faster than I expected them to. Hopefully you all enjoy closed beta!

A Boy and his Ship

September 14, 2015 by Belghast

Healers Not Required

I have a distinctive grumpy this morning. For starters it is raining and storming… and I cannot pull the covers over my head and allow myself to be lulled back to sleep by the rhythmic noise. Secondly I was up far later than I expected last night. but that in itself wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. However roughly 45 minutes before the alarm was set to go off, our kitten using some of her newly discovered jumping abilities caused an avalanche to occur sending a ton of crap falling off of a high perch. Instead of just accepting my fate and getting on up, I did the futile thing and attempted to go back to sleep. So I am going through that sluggish phase when you have attempted to get sleep… but didn’t get enough of it. As such my mental processing is a bit sluggish, but the show must go on. Coffee is being consumed, and hopefully that will fix all the wrongs in the world… or at least lessen them. As to last night… I was up late in part due to a bout of insomnia and in part due to doing things with friends. I wrote the other day about my process of working through the HK-47 storyline, and over the weekend Tam managed to get caught up to the same place I was. As I was folding laundry last night, I got a text asking if I was around but I didn’t actually see it until I was headed upstairs to wait out my insomnia.

There are a whole lot of faffing about that you have to do, which involves going to planets and scanning for HK-47 parts. After that however you have two dungeons… the first one being a normal mode False Emperor and the second being a hard mode Maelstrom Prison. We managed to get four warm bodies, which included a tank and three dps… but unfortunately our only healing option had to go to bed early. Since all of us were between 56 and 57 in level we assumed we would be able to do the normal mode dungeon without much issue. While I managed to get a little low a few places, False Emperor went off without a hitch and we even managed to get a few cool cosmetic pieces. Still feeling brave we decided to go ahead and attempt Hard Mode Maelstrom Prison without a healer… and while I took a few deaths due to my own stupidity… we managed to make it through that dungeon as well. So in theory… we can likely run any of the older content without heals. The cool thing is that while we were running the place we managed to get housing items to drop… which makes the place far more interesting for repeated running. I think tonight I can run the last part of the HK-47 chain, which is a return to the Heroic 2 dungeon from the very first of it. I simply did not have the oomph to remain awake last night and push through it.

A Boy and his Ship

I spent most of yesterday chasing Skavak across Coruscant on my Chiss Scoundrel. I am having quite a bit of fun playing the smuggler right now, and it is really the only class that I did not spend a significant amount of time playing during release. Before leaving the game I had managed to get the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular and Trooper all to level cap, and had several failed starts and playing the smuggler. This time around I decided to go for the “sawbones” spec, which now does more than it previously did. The Scoundrel subclass was a confusing mess because I personally struggled trying to figure out what abilities I should be using. Previously you got this mix of melee focused and ranged abilities… and it seemed like a horrible idea to be a melee healer in this game. Instead they have taken out all but the crowd control melee abilities and give Sawbones a focus on ranged damage to mix in with their healing. This combined with switching to Treek as my tank over Corso Riggs has ended up making for a much more enjoyable experience. Towards evening I blasted out of the space port on Coruscant headed for the wasteland of Taris.

Now that I have dinged 21, I spent some of my hard earned commendations and kitted out both my armor and that of Treek in full level 21 modifications. I am pretty damned happy that I have orange sets of gear for both, and my theory is that I will upgrade at the end of each planet, hoping to soak up enough commendations while on the planet to be able to kit out my gear each time. The truth is with the experience bonus I am well ahead of the curve. Taris for example is originally intended for level 16-20 players… and I didn’t even make it onto the planet until 21. My hope is this is going to allow me to be able to complete some of the heroic four content, and get more commendations that way. In theory I think the heroics are daily quests, and I could keep going back to Coruscant to do those in order to soak up a few additional commendations. In any case I am really enjoying myself, and this has been a welcome diversion. My hope is that we can muster some grouping again over the next few days and explore some of the flashpoints that we never saw. While this is a long shot, it would be kinda cool to be able to see some of the operations as well. Tonight however… we are going to work on taking down Ravana Extreme.

Something New

Yesterday I decided to try something slightly new, and failed a little bit along the way. I had noticed that many podcasts actually uploaded their shows to YouTube, by simply throwing up a static image with the audio running behind it. I figured this couldn’t hurt, and for some people YouTube might be a more comfortable experience than having to set up podcast software. The first attempt however lacked any audio at all. I was using Adobe Premiere for the first time, and as a result ended up exporting in some strange format that was a combination of a video file and a waveform audio file as well. Windows seemed to know what to do with the file, and when I tested it… it appeared to play just fine. However upon uploading it… I got a really long still image with zero sound kinda defeating the purpose. The second export however made it just fine, and we now have our first YouTube show up. We’ve already gotten a few views so we will see how this compares to the podcast. It might also make an easier format for folks to comment on. Let me know what you think. I doubt we will ever do a video show like Cat Context and The MMO Show… but for the time being it gets our show in another medium.

Week In Gaming 9/13/2015

September 13, 2015 by Belghast

Very Rough Week

As you could probably tell from some of the subtext of my posts this week… it was a pretty rough one for me emotionally. Work is still being stressful, but honestly that really had nothing to do with this one. For our country September 11th has some pretty tragic context, but for me it has completely different issues. Firstly September 11th was the birthday of my grandmother, and she would have been 90 this year. I miss her an awful lot, and there are days where it is just rough to think about her. Her birthday always brings back memories of her, which are honestly all good… but there is a bittersweet melancholy associated with it. She essentially raised me during the first years of my life, because she was my constant babysitter and companion. She is also the one member of my family that really seemed to appreciate my wife being a member of the family. If that were not enough to get me down in the dumps… this week also marks the anniversary of a pretty horrible period of my life. In September of 2012 I lost my Grandfather, and the day after the funeral… September 11th… a pretty horrific event happened at my work place. It quite literally with zero hyperbole ushered in the worst six months of my life. Someone screwed up, and screwed up badly… and I had to deal with the fallout and recovery. So each time this day comes I get a little gun shy. So this past Friday I was crawling in my skin as I waited for they day to end.

Demon Huntering

As far as gaming this week, I had a pretty cloistered time of it. I am still very much in my “hiding out” mentality, and I guess in part I think it was just me waiting for this week to pass me by, dreading Friday. I spent some time working on my Demon Hunter in Diablo 3 and I think when I last played I was about halfway through 69. At some point soon I hope to pop back in and finish leveling him to 70. I also spent some time farming away on Rifts, Greater Rifts and Bounties attempting to get blood shards… which I then disappointingly spent trying to get class set pieces. I have been stuck at 3 of 4 pieces of the set I am going after on my Barbarian for a few weeks now. I am not sure but Diablo might have worked its way out of my system for a bit. I finished off the seasonal stuff, but as of last night Grace on the podcast talked about additional seasonal rewards. I am just not sure if I will be willing to do any of the crazy things that are required to get them.

Star Wars the Old Republic

The big event of this week was that I apparently have fallen into a Star Wars the Old Republic shaped hole. I have played this game off and on since release, but this is really the first time I have felt I was actually back in the swing of things. I’ve played alts a lot in the past, but this is the first time I have actually continued the storyline on my Jedi Guardian main. As of last night I finished Makeb and am working through the precursor content leading up to Shadow of Revan. My plan is to finish the story content before the drop of Fallen Empire next month. Additionally I am taking advantage of the insane twelve times experience bonus. Last night during the podcast I started working on my Chiss Smuggler and I have to say… having access to Treek as a tanky companion makes that experience so much better. Seriously… I hate Corso Riggs so much… and was completely stalled out trying to play a smuggler because he annoyed me so much. Treek is simply a better tank.. in that she jumps AT the mobs instead of grappling them back to me. Who though a tank companion pulling back to the healer was a good idea? Anyways as soon as I wrap this post I intend to go downstairs and play some more Smuggler… that was how much I was into it last night. I may or may not have stayed up until 1:30 in the morning playing.

Final Fantasy XIV

I am very much in a lull right now with Final Fantasy XIV. I talked about this a bit on the podcast, but it is strange… that even while in this lull I still consider it my home base of operations. I figure when 3.1 lands which should be soonish… everyone will be invigorated once more and we will return to logging in every single night. In the mean time I am playing a lot of other games as not to force myself. I am still raiding on Monday and Wednesday nights, and this week we managed to get a few more people through Bismarck Extreme. I really want to defeat Ravana Extreme before the new content lands, but one of the big problems we are having is… that honestly it just feels like there isn’t much content for us to be doing. When we returned to Final Fantasy XIV July 2013 we had a years worth of content to explore since we had last played. While we managed to slowly whittle our way through all of it… it gave us tons of small goals to work towards. In Heavensward there really does not seem to be the much for us to work towards. We can clear Alexander Normal in our sleep, and are pretty successful with Bismarck Extreme. We are working on Ravana Extreme and I believe it is in our sights… but Savage Alexander just isn’t a realistic goal, namely because I can’t bring myself to do the gear grinding that it would require to really be viable there. I am well enough geared to do all of the content I feel like I could do… and I just don’t have the drive to push towards that bleeding edge. So instead I play other games and wait for another content drop.

AggroChat 74 – Force Binds Us

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

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