Tales of the Aggronaut

Everybirdie Knows!

August 22, 2015 by Belghast

The Hunter Gatherer

This morning I am getting a bit of a late start because the weather is dreary out and everything seems to distract me. I’ve had to contend with the kitten knocking all manner of things onto the ground from the cabinets, and the other two cats intent upon pinning my arms down so that I can’t effectively type. As a result I am getting a later than usual start on composing my morning blog post. This mornings post is going to be inspired by the sheer madness that Grace has bestowed upon me. What I am saying.. is everything is her fault. For those who have been following me over the last few days, you will know that the August AggroChat Game of the month is the bizarre bird dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend. I had been avoiding playing it so that I could stream my first moments, and finally the stars aligned for me having enough time to devote my attention to doing just that. Since this is a largely text based game, I figured I would act out the dialog as best I could. I set a time for 6pm last night, and I had an awesome audience of friends joining in the fun. I only actually made it through one play through however because by the end of all of that talking… my throat was killing me.

What can I say about Hatoful Boyfriend that has not already been said. The game is completely insane. You play the role of a “Hunter-Gatherer” human girl, having to fit into bird society and attending Saint Pidgeonations a prestigious school…. for you know… Birds. If that premise itself was not insane enough… in order to make progress in the game you have to develop a relationship with one of a cast of different birds. From what I understand if you have failed to gain the attention of at least one suitor by a certain point… the game just ends. From start to finish it takes about an hour to play, and last nights play through ended up running about a hour and twelve minutes in total. The game while short… has a lot of replay-ability as apparently there are secret endings that you can only unlock through repeated plays of the game. Having done this or that ending unlocks new options, and at this point I have completed the game three times and unlocked a total of three different endings as well as a bonus romance of sorts.

Birb Boyfriend

While absolutely none of this sounds like a game I would be interested in… there is something quirky and infectious about the game that makes you want to keep playing to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. One of the nice features of the game is that there is a fast forward of sorts that lets you skip through some of the often long sequences of dialog that require no player action. In truth you are only really making a few choices per game session, and watching the events of those decisions play out before you. In many ways some aspects of it remind me of Persona 4 Golden, which is a game I need to return to playing at some point. I keep hearing there is an actual “bad” ending, but I have yet to find it. In many ways playing this game feels like the first time I watched the movie Brazil, with even stranger and more surreal experiences the longer I kept playing. In fact this morning I actually got up and started playing again, so maybe I am not hooked on the insanity?

If nothing else it is going to make for a very interesting AggroChat in a few weeks when we record that episode. I feel like so far maybe Grace has done the best job of picking a game title that generates conversation. I feel like There Came an Echo probably would have as well if I did not suffer so many technical problems that kept me from finishing the game. Thalen also has an interesting game picked for us, so I think the next few months are going to be a blast as far as the Game Club goes. I had a lot of fun recording the play through of this game, and it was so damned bizarre trying to act out the different birds. I stumbled pretty massively on some of the names and had to rely on some assistance from Ashgar a few times. However I made it through and now at least have some fodder to talk about for the show. I am not sure how many more endings I will try and unlock before we record but I still have some time. The gameplay goes fast enough, and in many ways it is like a train wreck… you just can’t help but keep watching it. As someone who went into “Birb Boyfriend” as deeply skeptical, I highly suggest everyone pick this title up and give it a chance. It is just too damned strange not to experience it for yourself. If you want to watch my play through if you missed the live stream I embedded the video below.

Remote Play Working

August 21, 2015 by Belghast

Remote Play Continued

I am not exactly sure why but I have been obsessing over the whole concept of using my laptop downstairs as a remote thin client for my gaming machine upstairs. My grand hope has always been to be able to devote time and resources to the gaming machine, and just use any laptop in the house to play games remotely. After last night I think maybe I have it working as intended. For the last several days I have been struggling with Splashtop Personal, and in spite of lots of folks reporting good results with it… I never could get anything even vaguely close to playable. Namely the biggest problem was mouse lag, and when you are playing games that require mouse movement… this is a huge problem. I spent time crawling the forums, looking for answers and after trying a series of supposed registry hack fixes… the best I could ever seem to get out of Splashtop was something in the neighborhood of 25 fps which a more common stable 20 fps. Yesterday I installed a brand new AC1200 wireless card in my laptop, so that should literally rule out ANY connectivity issues. I was seeing 650 Mbps stable wireless and did not see any significant improvement in performance as a result. Now on the other hand… web surfing and downloading anything is now absolutely amazing… so I don’t regret the $20 spent on the new usb 3.0 wireless dongle.

Now I said I thought I had solved it… but as to this point have talked nothing about the failures. What finally worked is Steam In Home Streaming… with some hackery. Steam Streaming has worked fine for steam games, but not every game that I want to play is on steam. The biggest elephant in the room is games on Origin, but I think I found a workaround for this one. If you add Dragon Age Inquisition to Steam and attempt to launch it directly, it will fail every single time. However the workaround seems to be that you add the Origin launcher to steam and then remotely launch it… and while that window is up you can launch the game you want to play. The caveat is that you have to completely exit Origin after every game play session or it won’t actually work. As a result Splashtop Personal is coming in handy anyway as a way of making sure I do not have Origin running before heading into game. The same thing seems to work with the Battle.net launcher, and the Final Fantasy XIV launcher. Having steam open those gives you access to the application that you are actually wanting to play over the remote session. As far as performance goes, there was some strangeness with audio that I ultimately solved by setting both the client and “server” machine to 2 channel 16 bit 48000 hz audio. After that I was able to play Dragon Age Inquisition remotely with the exact same frame rate I was seeing sitting at my machine upstairs. I am guessing the new wireless made all the difference in the world because I could feel zero lag input, and it made for a pretty amazing experience. As a final thought if you want to play a steam game that does not have a launcher of its own… I have heard having steam open notepad.exe works the same.

The Heavensward Episode

I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the upcoming episode of AggroChat that we will be recording Saturday night and releasing Sunday morning. After all of us had completed the 2.55 content, we recorded a full spoiler episode where we hashed out out ideas about what just happened and where the game would be heading. This week we plan on doing the same thing for the 3.0 story content to date as a preparation for whenever we receive 3.1. We had put off the show in an attempt to get as many people through the 3.0 story as possible, but at this point we figure the statute of limitations is officially up for these spoilers. I am mainly writing today because we are taking input from the community. There are several ways you can send us your ideas either through the aggrochat email or the aggrochat twitter account. Of if you feel more comfortable you can leave your thoughts below. Our goal is to talk through our own ideas and the ideas that we receive on air Saturday.

There is a lot of stuff that happened between 2.55 and 3.0 and some of it had some pretty major ramifications for the games story. I’ve been extremely careful not to spoil too many details even with the screenshots that I use. That said there are things I just need to talk about. There are characters that we lost along the way, and new characters that we gained… and it is going to be good to finally be able to openly talk about all of this. The final cinematic for 3.0 sets up a brand new villain that we will likely be facing, and I have so many ideas on what that one is going to mean. Also there are less spoiler theories as well like this being the expansion of multiple element primals. If you think of Ravana, he is very clearly a mixture of Fire and Earth. Bismarck similarly is a mixture of wind and water. Would that make the next primal a mixture of Lightning and Ice? I cannot think of any existing summons from other Final Fantasy games that really fits that theme, so I am guessing they would be crafting a brand new one just for FFXIV. That only covers three primals however and I fully expect that each patch will have its own new one. So are we going to start seeing new elements, or are they going to tie directly into the new primary enemy that I mentioned above. Essentially… we have stuff to talk about and would love to have your input.

Of Bird Boyfriends

The AggroChat game club game show is also quickly sneaking up on us, and I think of all of the hosts I am the only one who has yet to touch this months title. Grace picked Hatoful Boyfriend as the game of the month title, and I have to say at first I had a small bit of trepidation about this title. If you remember Kodra has gushed about this title numerous times and even streamed a bunch of his gameplay. I watched some of it… and it seemed like pure madness. At the core this is just not a me game, largely because there is not death and destruction. That said I am actually starting to look forward to finally giving this a try, because it DOES seem like pure madness. I could use a bit of surreal insanity in my life, and some of the possible endings sound so damned bizarre that I have to see them for myself. I’ve been largely putting off starting however because I thought it might be funny to stream my first moments in the game. As such I have been trying to find a time when my streaming would not be too much of a nuisance for my wife who is going through the normal “back to school” frustrations. It seems like tonight however might be an excellent time and right now I am planning on starting my stream at roughly 6 pm CST for anyone who wants to see me attempt to date some “birbs”. I plan on playing on voice activation so you can get all of my subtle responses and not just the ones that I want coming through over push to talk. I am not sure exactly what will happen, but I have a mixture of excitement and dread at the same time.

KingsIsle Blaugust Prizes

August 20, 2015 by Belghast

KingsIsle is Awesome

Some of you may know KingsIsle games as the creator of the wildly popular Wizard 101, Pirate 101 and the upcoming mobile monster destruction game Rise and Destroy. For those who do not they occupy a unique niche in the MMO industry. They create these awesomely rich cartoon worlds populated with tons of content, and all of aimed at being appropriate for pretty much all ages to play. I’ve not spent a ton of time playing these games but on a whim one weekend some of the AggroChat folks spent it rolling brand new characters in Wizard 101 and wandering around together. The game just exudes charm and I had enough fun that weekend that I decided to spend a little money on the game even though I really didn’t intend to keep playing it regularly. I’ve always heard they have an amazing community, and that KingsIsle in general does a lot to try and foster this. However I was pleasantly shocked when I was contacted by a representative from KingsIsle yesterday and handed some prizes for our Blaugust event. They handed me several codes for special bundles in both Wizard 101 and Pirate 101, each bundle having a retail price of between $29 and $39 bucks. That is absolutely awesome, and I actually spent a bit more time playing my Wizard 101 character yesterday. For those curious, I dug up the release videos for each of the trailers. I have yet to decide how I will reward these but it is awesome to have more options in the prize pool. If you interact with any of the KingsIsle employees, seriously give them a huge thank you!

Grand Tourney Gauntlet Bundle for Wizard 101

HooDoo Bundle for Pirate 101

Exhaustion Hits

Last night is traditionally the raid night for my second static group in Final Fantasy XIV. However we were missing a significant number of the key players, namely our second healer and tank. For a bit we considered other options, and were on the verge of just running an expert for the day and calling it good. Problem being as I sat there at the keyboard waiting for things to happen I kept dozing off while leaning forward, literally waking up when my head banged my boom microphone. So instead of doing Final Fantasy XIV shenanigans I retired to the couch to peacefully doze in and out of consciousness while waiting on my wife to get home. I didn’t really want to go to bed for real yet, because once I conk out I am often times dead to the world… and I wanted to make sure she made it home safely and didn’t have car trouble or anything out of the ordinary like that. Before the attempt at raiding, and a small bit afterwards I continued playing some Diablo 3. The game worked mostly because I had no one relying on me, and quite frankly I was playing on normal level which means I can doze off for a second here and there and suffer zero consequences from it. After I beat the normal storyline and unlock the content I will end up dialing up the difficulty as I attempt to level to 70 before the 23rd.

This is really a stupid mission I have set out on… largely because I really need to be in Final Fantasy XIV instead capping esoterics for the week. The interesting thing about Season play in Diablo 3 though is it feels like they have ratcheted up the drop rates of everything. While my profile has not updated to show it yet… at level 13 my crusader already has three legendary drops… including Genzaniku the awesome axe that summons a spirit to fight for you. When I entered into this seasonal thing I fully expected to lose my character at the end of the season… because I didn’t actually do any research before saying “sure” and clicking on the seasonal button. I guess however everything you earn in season just rolls over into your normal characters at the end of a season which is pretty frickin cool. So even if I don’t make any real progress in season 3, I will absolutely be starting a fresh season 4 character to play as well. I guess in the coming days I will be popping into Final Fantasy XIV to get in an expert or two and then popping into Diablo 3 because it makes an excellent way to wind down for the evening. I mostly enjoy soloing over there, but I am always looking for people to chat with while I am doing it. I finally got around to adding my friend Byx last night to battle.net and I know there are tons of other people that I should as well. I am finding that I am really enjoying the crusader, but in truth all of the classes I have played so far have been enjoyable in one way or another. I just find it so bizarre that at this point, World of Warcraft is probably my least favorite Blizzard game.

Loyalty Systems

August 19, 2015 by Belghast

Another Bonus Post

It is bizarre that once again I have something that I absolutely have to write about “right now” instead of waiting for a morning post. This makes two bonus posts in a week… so it has to go down as some sort of red letter day or something. The problem being I am just about to write out a post that is going to make a lot of people upset, or at least I think it likely will. That said I feel like I have to be the bad guy here and take the other side of the discussion. What is it exactly that is worth making a bonus post about you ask? Well today Wildstar announced the scheme for their new “loyalty system” and the rewards that come with it. Going further than just dangling shiny objects in front of our faces, they also made a fair attempt to explain how exactly the monetization and loyalty accruals would go. On initial viewing I didn’t think much about it, but it was not long before the twittersphere was buzzing with frustration.

If you examine the system more closely you see that the deck is stacked in favor of players who pay physical money, over players who are paying with their time. This is most noticeable when you take the issue of C.R.E.D.D. the token currency the game has had for awhile that provides players with an alternate form of paying for their subscripting by trading in game platinum for a months token. The C.R.E.D.D. tokens cost players $20 and then can be sold on an in game brokerage for a variable amount of Platinum that fluctuates with the demand on monthly tokens. This allowed some of those early players to get in on the ground floor and snap up several months worth of game time on the cheap, and then has continued to allow folks to play largely for free at the cost of time spent in game farming currency.

Currency Exchange

When it comes to loyalty the equation is very much not equal. The player spending the $20 for the token earns 4000 cosmic points, in addition to whatever platnium they get out of the transaction. The player redeeming the C.R.E.D.D. for a month’s worth of premium game time only gets 1000 cosmic points out of the deal. The initial complaint that I keep hearing is that the C.R.E.D.D. player is paying $5 more per month than the subscription player who is getting their play time for $15 a month instead of $20. At first glance this logic makes a sort of sense, but it isn’t quite that simple. In some game systems you are actually selling your subscription token to another player who then sets the price point. In Wildstar however there is no actual transaction between two players, and a such it becomes hard to really equate the two. What is ultimately happening is this…

Player 1 purchases a C.R.E.D.D. and indicates that they want to sell it.
The Broker NPC gives that player an amount of platnium based on the current exchange rate for that token.
Player 2 indicates that they want to purchase game time for platnium.
The Broker NPC gives them a C.R.E.D.D. token in exchange for an amount of platnium equal to whatever the current exchange rate is.

At no point did the player actually pay $20 for a month’s subscription time, but instead bought in game currency. The second player spent a fixed amount of in game currency to gain a month of subscription time in lieu of spending any real world money. The key benefit of buying C.R.E.D.D. will always be gaining a month of subscription time, or in the new scheme a month of premium access. The loyalty being gained is just a nice added effect, and a thank you from Wildstar for keeping the system running.

The Restaurant Analogy

The deck will always be heavily stacked in favor of the person who is paying physical money to a free to play game. The “free” players have a lot to offer to games, largely because they make a game feel alive and active. In an MMO this is especially important when it comes to filling out dungeon finder queues, and providing items for the economy. However the hard facts are that without folks actually plunking down cash and buying into the game, the games would not and could not exist. I don’t know any figures for the MMO market, but the mobile game market has something like an abysmal 2% “conversion rate” or the amount of players who actually make an in game purchase. Even if we are exceptionally generious and think that MMO players are more likely to spend money… you are probably still looking at something like 10% of the players spending money. Think back to every game launch and the copious tweets, forum posts and blogs that essentially say the same thing each time… “I like the game, but not enough to pay for it.”

In High School I had a good friend from a broken home that was one of four children living off of a super meager single income. My friendly simply could not do a lot of the things that I could do, so often times I would subsidize a dinner here or a movie ticket there… because I valued his time and companionship and knew there was no way in hell he would ever get to do these things unless I did. I never felt used in the equation, or taken advantage of, because having him along made my experience more enjoyable. However if you think about going to a restaurant with someone who is picking up the tab for the entire table. They are doing it as a way of appreciating your company, or because having you along makes the dining experience more enjoyable. However shift for a moment and think about the Restaurant.

While no restaurant owner wants anyone to have a bad time, and they want everyone to get good service… or in this case the awesome game filled with interesting things to do. At the end of the day the person who matters the most to the restaurant owner and their employees is that person picking up the check. That person is going to reap the lion’s share of the special service, and if they tip well are also likely going to get remembered and treated especially nice from that moment on. That check and those tips go directly towards supporting the restaurant and its employees. It makes sense that the person who pays the bill is the one that gets remembered and gets special treatment. So in the case of an MMO the loyalty systems will always be stacked in a way as to reward the person who is willing to keep funneling more money into the system that keeps the lights on, the community staff paid, the servers running, and more content being created.

It Feels Shitty

At this point you are probably saying, “But Bel, that isn’t really fair and feels really shitty” and I agree with you. It does feel shitty. It feels shitty when your time spent in a game and your loyalty to that product is worth less than someone who is spending a lot of money on it. The problem is I can’t really fix that, and I am not necessarily saying it is an amazing system, but just the way these things work. The term “loyalty” always gets bandied about but I think it is a horrible term to use. This is essentially a patronage or donation system, where the folks that are willing to pay are supporting the rest of the folks who are enjoying the system. There is a quote that I have heard hundreds of times, that today I finally looked up the source of. It was apparently originally attributed to the user Blue_Bettle on a MetaFilter article called User-Drive Discontent.

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

As much as I dislike the cynicism of that statement, I cannot argue with the fact that it is absolutely true. When we use Google, we are making a financial transaction. They are providing us search results and we are selling them our rights to aggregate the data in those search results and present advertisements based on it. Similarly when you purchase game time with C.R.E.D.D. you are essentially providing a product that Carbine turns around and sells to other players for cold hard cash. It is very much the modern equivalent of “sharecropping” where the company owns the game, and you pay with your time spent… and get free rent as a result and a small small share of the rewards. Loyalty systems will always be anything but, so long as the equation does not balance.