Tales of the Aggronaut

Liebster Award Questionnaire

March 6, 2015 by Belghast

The Liebster

The Liebster award is this strange thing that circulates through the blogosphere every so often. The idea is that you answer some stuff about yourself and then nominate some other people you know to answer a set of your questions. It’s a cute “get to know you” process that I ultimately I have enjoyed reading in the past from other blogs. This morning the ever awesome Mystical Mesmer blog included me in their nomination form, and as such I will be taking their quiz. The problem is.. I have to fess up and say that I was nominated before and somehow missed it. I tend to read blogs in bursts, rather than daily… so there are times it will take me days to catch up. During one of these lulls the ever awesome Zuulzilla nominated me, and I did not find out until a truly embarrassing amount of time had passed. As such I never actually got around to filling her form out. This morning I am going to do something a little bit odd… I am going to try and answer both posts.

Zuulzilla Questions

1. Who, what, and/or where does your blogging inspiration come from?

Honestly I have no clue where the words that I type on a daily basis come from. My blog is very much a stream of thought of whatever happens to be important enough to me to trickle up each morning. I am thankful that I seem to be able to write a blog post on queue, but I am also constantly afraid that at some point the spigot will shut off.

2. What do you/did you want to be when you grow up?

When I was a small child… I wanted to be an Astronaut Doctor Fireman… a job that was apparently an amalgam of all three. During Middle School I wanted to be a Scientist of some sort… and then High School it was a Commercial Artist. I ultimately ended up becoming a programmer because I fell involve with the World Wide Web and HTML in 1993.

3. What advice do you have for someone just starting out in blogging?

Don’t box yourself into a corner when you set up your blog. Blogging about a specific game is awesome, until you stop playing that game. While it might be harder to get traction, I highly suggest you just do your own thing and over time an audience will find you.

4. What are some things on your bucket list?

I would absolutely love to visit Europe. For the most part I have not travelled terribly far from my home here in Oklahoma. I grew up an hour from where I live, and have spent most of my life in a two hour radius. While travel stresses me out, I would like to do more of it.

5. What clique were you in in high school?

To some extent I was grandfathered into the “cool kids” group, but didn’t end up hanging out with them much. Over time I built my own group of misfits, that my association with them… somewhat extended a bit of a bubble of protection over them. So essentially I made my own Clique.

6. You are exiled to an island and can take three items. What do you choose?

I guess I am going to go utilitarian here… a really good shovel, a really strong machete style knife, and a solar powered kindle loaded full of books? That exists right?

7. If you could go back 5 years and share one piece of advice with yourself, what would you say?

Work really hard on not caring quite so much what others think about you, and focusing on just doing your own thing. Also I would hopefully embark upon my “positivity crusade” earlier.

8. Who’s your favorite Superhero?

I am bad at picking favorites… but I would have to say the super hero that I will always gravitate towards is Batman. I love that he is just an extremely trained and well equipped normal human being, rather than someone with super powers. I like that idea.

9. Favorite place to visit?

Used book stores… namely Half Priced Books chain. I love the smell of a book store, especially one that trades in older books. There is just something calming about it. While I don’t read as much as I would like… I love being surrounded by books.

10. Dinosaurs or Dragons? Why?

Dragon, because Dinosaurs are just bit lizards… whereas Dragons tend to be giant fire breathing and flying lizards. It would be hard to beat that combination.

Mystical Mesmer Questions

1. What are the three major elements of your ideal video game?

Melee Combat, RPG Style Gear Acquisition, and Sandbox Exploration. That essentially is the appeal of a Skyrim type game for me. Give me a world where I can beat things up, get shiny new things, and wander around aimlessly finding interesting tidbits along the way.

2. Big city, suburb, or countryside?

Generally speaking I am a suburbanite. I grew up in the relative countryside, in a very tiny town. As soon as I could I ran off to the “big city”. However my version of big city is considerably smaller than say a New York or a San Francisco. I am pretty comfortable in my suburban existence, and would hate to give up all the convenience of having the ability to get practically anything I could need within a mile of the house.

3. What’s the origin of your blogging name?

It all started with the fact that my intention was to do a tanking blog, since that is the thing I tend to do most in video games. I wanted to be clever, so I mashed together the word “Aggronaut” to represent someone how voyages through “Aggro”… aka a Tank. The domain name was available, and I snapped it up. The “Tales of the” part just came natural since I would be spinning tall tales about my adventures.

4. Aeris lives and you’re hired to retell Final Fantasy 7. What role does she play?

I feel like I was the one person who never really liked Aeris in the first place. I liked Tifa or Yuffie so much more in 7. I would have happily never used her at all, but she was a pretty great heal bot… so I guess had she survived she would STILL be a heal bot? I pretty much beat the game using Cloud, Cid and Vincent… so yeah.

5. What’s your favorite biome?

So here comes some strangeness… I hate the winter and I hate snow and ice in the real world. That said I am always drawn towards snowy mountain biomes in games. If given a choice those tend to be my ideal settings, so for example even though I am human in GW2, I always end up going to the Norn capital of Hoelbrak and was always a fan of Ironforge in World of Warcraft.

6. Write a haiku love poem to this morning’s breakfast.

crunchy crackers nutty and sweet
slowly sipping delicious coffee, caffeinating my brain
cup always emptied too soon

7. What’s your preferred device for reading blogs?

I tend to use Feedly because it allows me to shift between reading blogs on my phone and reading blogs in a browser window keeping track of what I have read between the two. For podcasts I just started using Pocket Casts which does something similar.

8. If you were to start up a video game company, what would you name it?

I think “Confused Monkey” is a name that would adequately describe me and my style.

9. Which of the Seven Dwarves would you be and why?

I would probably say Grumpy or Dopey… my friends would probably say Doc. I tend to generally be the ring leader of things even when I am not technically the leader.

10. What form of exercise do you find to be the most effective?

I tend to prefer walking. I am looking forward to it warming up so we can start walking daily again.

11. How long is a piece of string?

Always about an inch shorter than you actually need it to be.

My Questions

Admittedly this is the hardest part about doing this… is coming up with your own set of questions. I stole a few here and there, and came up with my own along the way as well.

What are the three major elements of your ideal video game?
What’s the origin of your blogging name?
What is your favorite biome?
What is your favorite genre of movie?
How did you get started blogging?
What is your fondest childhood memory?
What is your favorite in game “mount” and why?
Do you collect “mini pets” in game, and if so do you have a favorite?
Cats, Dogs or Something else?
Describe your relationship with your automobile.
What role of the holy trinity of tank/dps/healer fits your personality most?

My Victims

I’ve seen several versions of this questionnaire over time, and all of them seem to have different rules for how and why you should nominate someone. Since the last version didn’t actually come with any of that information attached I am just going to free form this. My idea is picking folks who are not necessarily in the same social circles… so that hopefully this spreads further!

Simcha at Simcha’s Many Lives
Murf at Murf Versus
Braxwolf at Gaming Conversations
Sagacyte at Digital Adventures of Sagacyte
Cuppy at Cuppyville

Thanks for reading and I still feel like I have to apologize to Zuu for taking forever to actually do this, and thanks to Mystical for nominating me again and giving me the push to do it.

Multigaming

March 5, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Maxis

I technically entered the PC gaming world significantly later than many of my peers. My family did not get a PC Compatible until 1992 when we took home a 386×16 from Sears and Roebuck with a colossal two full megs of ram. The very first game that I purchased for it was a copy of Sim City. There was just something about the idea of building my own town that appealed to me. Everything about the game was a bit cludgy including the black text on red note card that served as copy protection… but quite honestly I did not care. I was getting to build a world on screen and my enjoyment soared once I learned that I could put in a cheat and simply build freely without rules. That right there was the great possibility for Sim City, that you could color outside the lines and create some really interesting stuff in the process.

Yesterday the news broke that Electronic Arts has shuttered the Maxis Emeryville studio that was the birthplace of the various Sim franchise games that we all loved. I will admit that the last version of Sim City was the only version that I did not purchase at release. Quite honestly I still have not purchased it, because it felt too icky. Initially I set back watching as friends got frustrated with the online only functionality, and ultimately had my nose turned up at the Sims-like piecemeal DLC bonanza that started. What made Sim City so great was that it was this toolbox for us to design our own cities of the future… but when you start attaching real world price tags to those cities, it just feels wrong. Electronic Arts clearly knows what they are doing, as they still manage to turn a profit in spite of all the various heinous activities they have done in the past. I just find it deeply saddening that yet another “classic” studio has in essence been destroyed by them. They now get to party with the other dead studios like Origin Systems, Westwood, Bullfrog… and I feel like I am missing a few names from the list.

Capping Poetics

Right now I am on a bit of a mission in Final Fantasy XIV. With the current access to both Carboncoat and Carbontwine through the weekly quest, I have been trying to do everything I can to get my poetics gear quickly. I freely admit I was doing fairly good at making sure I hit the poetics cap every single week, until the launch of Warlords of Draenor. After that I fell off the deep end and only really returned to playing Final Fantasy XIV on a nightly basis after the 2.5 patch. As such my poetics gear is woefully behind where it should be had I been as diligent as I could have been. Thankfully this just means that I am essentially in the same boat as the rest of our free company. So now I am trying to at the very least get in a single expert roulette each day. Last night I spent my night running several different kinds of roulettes to try and make up for lost time seeing as I didn’t actually get any on Tuesday.

One would think that doing the highest level repeatable content in the game would mean that I would run into some assholes. I know Kodra ran into a single elitist player from the Death and Taxes guild the other night, but in truth most of my interactions have been largely positive. In Keeper of the Lake that run went as smoothly as I could have possibly imagined, with players actively conversing and talking about what needs to be done. Then I got Snowcloak and the moment we zoned in, a player said that it was their first time there. As such I took up the role of giving them the information that they need to be able to complete the fights successfully. We had a single wipe from the tank over pulling, but no one got grumpy and we just kept pushing forward. It is nights like last night that make me realize what a rare community Final Fantasy XIV really has.

Multigaming

The other day we came to the realization that our Free Company has been back playing Final Fantasy XIV for around seven months. I think I already commented on this being some what of a record for us, with quite honestly our group rarely sticking in one place for more than a couple of months at a time. We are very rarely one month players, but by the same token when a new game comes out we rarely make it past the three month marker. In truth Final Fantasy XIV represents one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of playing any game ever for me. I played World of Warcraft for about seven years without pause, Everquest for 3, and Dark Age of Camelot for 2. As such Final Fantasy XIV sits as fourth place already in this hierarchy of longevity. I think the reason why it is working so well this time is the fact that I am still playing other games at the same time, and because of this Final Fantasy XIV feels like a constantly fresh experience.

For years I have been enthralled by the schedule that Sypster keeps with his gaming, because he is the only person that I know who has quite literally a specific game that he plays on a given day of the week. The other day I realized that maybe this is precisely why this current volley of gaming has been so successful. I have a very distinct schedule, I just didn’t realize it until I started thinking about my various in game commitments. On Tuesday and Thursday for example I am raiding in World of Warcraft, so as such I tend to devote those days entirely to that game regardless of what else I might be playing. Monday and recently Saturday before we record our podcast we have been raiding in Final Fantasy XIV so those days naturally become something that I log in and devote my entire energy to that game. Everything else is pretty variable, but I tend to mix in at least a little Guild Wars 2 daily so I can get the login bonuses, and lately quite a bit of Sky Saga. So ultimately my schedule seems to have enough structure to keep me focused, but enough freedom to know that I am only a few days away from having a more freeform night of gaming. It seems to work for me, and I am hoping that means I have finally stabilized in my gaming habits… as quite honestly I had gotten tired of jumping from game to game every two to three months.

Check Yourself

March 4, 2015 by Belghast

Master Shake

A few days ago I talked about our purchase of the Nutribullet blender, and starting down the path to madness that is mixing various combinations of things. Since that moment I have worked towards building the perfect “breakfast shake” that combines giving me enough nutrients to last until lunch, and the consumption of my morning coffee into one activity. I’ve ventured down several paths until eventually finding the one that seems to make me happy. Since various readers expressed an interest in my recipe when I finally landed on the one that I like… I thought I would actually snap some photos as I made this mornings shake to show the whole thing off. I went back and forth with the ingredients but finally landed on a combination that I like.

The Ingredient List

Cottage Cheese – 4 tbsp
Banana – 1 whole sliced can be frozen
PB2 Powder – 2 tbsp
Coffee – 12 oz cold made to taste night before
Cinnamon Brown Sugar Belvita – 1 pkg ( 4 crackers )
Honey – 1 tsp

Now to talk a little bit about the various things I finally included in the finished “shake”. First off we have the base of Cottage Cheese because it is low fat and relatively high in protein as well as calcium. When thoroughly blended it has an almost cream cheese characteristic which is great. Most of my recipes include a banana because it adds a good amount of bulk to the mix, and it is chock full of all sorts of stuff including tons of potassium. If you add it in frozen you get a much thicker mixture. Belvita biscuits were one of the last additions to this concoction, and in truth they are mostly in there for the fiber… and to give the shake staying power so I am not hungry until lunch. I think in theory any “biscuit” would probably work as well for those without Belvita.

I experimented with adding peanut butter and nutella, but all of those mixes frustrated me. Instead I started using a peanut butter powder which adds the flavoring of peanut without the oil and such. The most important thing is the coffee obviously, and I make this every night as part of my “shutting down the house” ritual. I tried various things, but ultimately I found it works best if I fix the coffee like I would normally drink it. Finally I add a teaspoon of honey just to add a bit more sweetness and balance things out. The end result is pretty great and is this mix of a bunch of great breakfast flavors. It still very much has a coffee drink taste, but also is extremely filling. All of the ingredients pretty much get disintegrated in the process leaving only this thick milkshake consistency. If you give this a shot, let me know what you think.

Check Yourself

A few weeks back our raid leader had outlawed “toys” in the raid, namely after a few incidents with the appearance swapping item… and a poorly placed sandbox tiger during the Oregorger encounter. One of the toys that I feel like leaders all across the game will be outlawing is the S.E.L.F.I.E. camera. That said I decided to hop up on a box and take a picture of our raid waiting for the last few people to zone in. So while I practiced safe screenshotting… apparently others have not been quite so cautious. In fact the very popular WarcraftLogs.com website that our own raid uses for log parsing has added special support to make sure raid leaders are certain who cast that selfie and when. So while cute I do hope all of my readers exercise appropriate caution, when attempting to sneak one in. I of course was being super obvious, since hopping up on a box before the raid.

After we got started last night we had quite a great evening. We cleared the five bosses that we have defeated before, and put some attempts in on Heroic Gruul. Oregorger felt surprisingly manageable after spending so much time bashing our head against it. I think more than anything it was a mental block for our raid, and now that we have cleared it I feel like we can probably finish clearing up the rest of the wings in short order. We saved the progression bosses for Thursday which tends to be our more serious night. I feel like I really should at least do the LFR version of these fights between now and then to understand the layout of each of the rooms. The most frustrating part about LFR right now is the fact that there are zero upgrades for me, and since you can only gain the legendary currency once per boss per week… there isn’t much incentive there either.

Gladiator Changes

One of the things that has kept me engaged this expansion is just how much I love the Gladiator spec. It is essentially that thing I have always wanted to do in a game… dps with a sword and shield. Everything about the spec seems ideally suited for my personal sentiments. That said I knew it was a bit of an odd duck specialization wise, and I have had to seek out specific gear with specific stats to make it work well. Up until 6.1 everything seemed awesome, and I felt very competitive, sitting in the top five on almost every fight. Last week I was rather sick, but this week… I finally noticed how much less damage I seemed to be doing relative to what I could push before the patch. Now on AOE fights… I am still insane with the amount of AOE bleed and cleave goodness at my disposal. However on largely single target fights it seems like I have lost a few thousand dps.

My theory is that before the patch I was attempting to shed all of the haste I could from gear and buffing my crit in its place. Post patch… we now apparently want to shoot for 700 haste. So I have a feeling that I will need to rifle through my bank and re-itemize myself. Thankfully I don’t think I have gotten rid of any items unless they were stat for stat increases. I am hoping that after some tweaks I can make this work, because honestly a huge chunk of my enjoyment of raiding right now… comes from being able to gladiator. I hate the way fury feels, and honestly always have. Arms is traditionally an under performing spec, but if I can get my hands on a Blackrock era 2 hander I might give that a shot. In any case I will need to spend some time sifting through the changes and adjusting, because I am not quite ready to give up on the dream of sword and board dps.

Gold Token Currencies

March 3, 2015 by Belghast

Obligatory WoW Selfie

With the launch of patch 6.1 I have to admit I was mildly frustrated that I had not managed to get the selfie camera to appear on my main character. Instead it showed up in the garrison list of my hunter, so it took me a few days to notice. Even then the default form of the camera is not a toy yet until you receive the follow up garrison mission to upgrade it. Now that I finally have it sitting in my toy box… I guess I have to do the obligatory picture. Now I have seen so many of these now that I decided not to tweet it, but nonetheless I think its cute and charming. I am surprised by just how little control over facial expressions you have, so I guess to get the picture you want to take would involve an extreme amount of patience. This makes the folks who have posted essentially little story vignettes using the camera all the more impressive.

I know that Blizzard has caught hell from a certain brand of player over this patch not having any “tangible” content. I for one am plenty happy with the results, namely because we got the content that goes with this patch ahead of time. Traditionally Blackrock Foundry would have been delayed until a patch rather than put in ahead of time and unlocked at a specific time. Do we really want to fault Blizzard for being proactive? While it might be stupid, little features like the selfie cam, twitter integration, heirloom system and color blind system breathe life in the game for a lot of players. While the raiders and pvpers tend to be very vocal groups, they don’t represent the “average” player. I would imagine that the average player runs LFR and is happy to be doing so, and things like the garrison and heirloom systems really add to their enjoyment. What I see is a blizzard that is trying really hard not to fuck up the gains they got with Warlords, and a very jaded community that is almost happy to see them fail. The rabble over this patch is precisely why we can’t get nice things.

Gold Token Currencies

Some time ago Blizzard teased the introduction of a monthly subscription token currency that can be purchased and sold to other players for in game gold. At the time I dubbed this “BLEX” since it seemed to be based on the Eve Online Plex concept. Some time has passed and I think many of us had simply forgotten about this until yesterday when an official blog post appeared talking about the “WoW Token”. Firstly I disapprove of the boring name, and I also disapprove of it being wow specific… but both of those are beside the point. It seems like we are now going to be getting the chance to purchase a subscription token and then sell that token on the open market. Unfortunately many of us are questioning just how open said market will be given that the FAQ states that systems will be setting the price of the currency not the players. That honestly concerns me a bit, because it makes me think that Blizzard will be trying to manipulate both sides of this equation.

I’ve played several other game that had something similar to the WoW Token, and in all cases played the game at the moment they introduced it. Generally speaking for the first month it is a buyers market, with a bunch of players trying to play “catch up” and purchase in game currency for real world money. Then things shift a bit, and the value of the currency goes up significantly, as the ready supply of folks jumping on the RMT bandwagon slow to a trickle. Ultimately the amount of a token needs to match the value proposal given by third party gold sellers. Based on some quick googling it looks like $15 gets you around 20k to 30k gold. So in order to stem the tide of third party gold selling Blizzard has to make sure that the token currency is worth at least that much, essentially that it is easier to use official systems than to risk the danger of unofficial ones.

The positive effect is if this works, the gold selling and gold hacking are in essence going to be a thing of the past. In the games that have had these token systems, there is still gold selling but nowhere near the levels that existed before hand. Essentially having a legitimate system drives the price down so much that it is simply not profitable for anyone to bother with. Unfortunately from the standpoint of players hoping to play for free… this is more than likely going to be out of reach. The price of a monthly token seems to rise with inflation, meaning that as it becomes easier to get money in game… it also starts costing you more of it to purchase your token. I feel like only the most dedicated of players with the most free time, or the best auction house schemes will ever be able to actually play World of Warcraft for free. In any case… I still think this is largely a positive move.

Final Boss Music

Last night I experienced a bit of a baptism by fire, as it seems that my raid group in Final Fantasy XIV skipped turn 8 and went straight into turn 9 the week I was out sick. The awesome thing is that it seems like they made serious progress that first night of attempts, and last night in spite of me having to play catch up and seeming to stand in the wrong place at the wrong time… we made forward momentum. This is the epic boss fight at the end of the second coil of bahamut, and just like turn 5, this one seems to be a guild killer. I know groups who have been working on learning this one for over six months. Knowing this I have to admit I went into the fight with a bit of a mental block about just how difficult it might be. Turns out just like everything else in Final Fantasy XIV… it is a rather predictable pattern that just requires lots of precision and execution.

Most of the wipes were absolutely due to me doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. However as the night drug on I started to grasp the dance and we all got considerably more precise at doing it. We actually managed to make it to the final phase which is no small accomplishment. Unfortunately unlike turn 5, the final phase here really does seem to be the hardest. That said we do seem to finally have a firm grasp on the “meteor” and “golem” phases and we were pretty much executing those flawlessly. Now we just need to get back in there and start working on that final phase. I am hoping within four nights of attempts we will have killed us a turn nine and be able to official move on to “current” content. I love my Final Fantasy XIV raid group and Free Company, for keeping me engaged for roughly seven months now… which admittedly is somewhat of a record.