Tales of the Aggronaut

Night Falls

February 11, 2015February 11, 2015 by Belghast

Unfortunate Bonus Round

This is going to be a bit of an oddity for me, I am breaking my normal one post per day rule. I feel like the gravity of the situation warrants it, because right now I am feeling so many different emotions at the same time. By now most of you will have heard the news that I believe first broke over on the newly erected Massively OP website. Today Daybreak Games, formerly Sony Online Entertainment has chosen to make some sweeping cuts to staff. Among the individuals caught in this madness were none other than Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson and and Linda “Brasse” Carlson. I cannot fathom a chain of consequences that would lead to this happening, but I will get into that later. For me and many others these two individuals along with Scott Hartsman before he left to join Trion… were the face of the Everquest franchise. They were the spirit of the game, and the lifeblood that kept the player base constantly engaged, because never once did you question their sincerity or devotion to making the game world awesome.

Last Tuesday when the news broke that SOE was to be no more, and they would be taking up the new name of Daybreak Game Studio I tried to keep things in stride. After all I had gotten used to Everquest transitioning from Verant to being called Sony Online Entertainment hadn’t I? When I found out they had been purchased by what seemed to be a cold and faceless financial holdings company, I tried to keep a positive tone in that it seemed that they were holding most of the companies rather than chopping them up into pieces. I held in the back of my mind the possibility that the future was in fact going to be positive, that maybe out from under Sony they could reach previously locked off markets like the Xbox One. After all this same company owned both Rhapsody and Fiverr, surely they knew what they were doing right?

Night Falls

Today it seems that my worst fears have been realized, and that things really can’t stay the same. As online gamers we get lost in the worlds created by the games that we love to play. Part of that world are the names and faces of the individuals who act as the conduit between our normal mundane lives, and the magical realms we spent our free time in. At least in a small part they act as civil servants to the virtual cities we inhabit. As we watch public presentations and read patch notes and press releases, it is amazing just how quickly we can rattle off the names of the key players that are relaying the information to us. Even though we may never know them, we develop an almost personal relationship as they take the stage to give us tidbits of information about the future state of “our” game.

The problem is… we get extremely close to these personalities, so that when one leaves either by their own hand, or by circumstances the shock waves reverberate through the community. Today a mighty shock wave happened, and I am still not quite sure how to talk about it with any intelligence. For many years, Brasse has been the public face of the Everquest community team, and Smokejumper the face of the future of that franchise. It was impossible to watch either of them and not see just how excited they were to be representing this game that they too loved. I find it exceptionally hard to try and imagine a future that does not involve them, and I have to say a lot of my faith that there will even be an Everquest going forward is more than a little tarnished.

The Survivors

This has been the month of senseless corporate action. First with AOL killing off their blogs, and now the selling of of Sony Online Entertainment. I am deeply concerned about the future of these games, in part because the gravitas of Sony… allowed for SOE to be a little “funky”. They devoted time to building a lot of unique and quirky features that we were not likely to see come out of any other company. Do you think that any other company would have given us something truly strange like SOEmote? Sure I never used it, but I thought the tech was extremely cool especially for the roleplaying community. The tools that I did love, like the robust housing system and the dungeon builder… likely would not have come to fruition in a company not quite so willing to chase rabbit trails.

All of this said… I think it is important to also think about the people who were left behind. They are reeling from the layoffs, and seeing their friends gone. Having been through more than one layoff, it completely changes the feel of the office. Every action becomes questioned, and every motive suspicious, making it almost impossible to focus on doing the excellent job that the “citizens” are expecting you to do. It is easy to say you are done with the Everquest franchise, because of these rather rash actions… but in truth you are just going to punish the people who are still there, still trying to create the game worlds you love. Hopefully we can all take a deep breath, grieve the loss, and try and figure out how to move on without being bitter. I really hope this next week gives us some really good news, because this month so far has turned out to be a fairly tragic one.

Rough Raid Night

February 11, 2015 by Belghast

An Innocent Start

Most strange happenings on the internet begin with a rather innocuous start. I was discussing handwriting with @tsundereikemen and I decided to create a hand written note to show off my rather messy all caps writing. Then I happened to go directly into a meeting for roughly an hour. When I got out.. my twitter feed had completely blown up with people returning my greeting in their own hand written style. Yesterday I joked about Sigtric coining the hashtag “BelEffect” so he was immediate to point out that it was happening again. Of course I had to share this sudden madness with the world, because folks had no idea what I was talking about. I lost a few followers in my flurry of re-tweets, but screw it this was worth it. The “happening” was enough happiness to buffer any frustrations for the rest of the day.

The awesome thing is… I posted a second note some time later to adequately explain my feelings about the whole event… and it started up again adding several more notes to the mix. This silly thing is the reason why my twitter feed is so damned great. You guys can somehow manage to take a boring work day and turn it into a magical experience by tweeting a bunch of hand written notes. I always love seeing someone’s handwriting no matter how unkempt it might be… because embedded in those strokes and swooshes are a persons personality. So thank you all for participating in this little experiment… it was neither original nor that unique, but it was most definitely not something I expected to start yesterday. If you want to check out all of the images, I will be attempting to insert a gallery below.

Rough Raid Night

Not all raid nights can be amazing… in fact every now and then you can have a down right shitty one. Last night was one of these nights, and that is just something that is going to happen now and then. It seems like half of the world is sick with something right now, and last night it claimed two of our primary healers. This put us going into the night at a pretty big handicap, one that we never quite made up for. Ithato is freaking awesome for stepping in and trying to hold things together, and he fought valiantly. The problem is it just wasn’t quite enough. He was not quite as geared as the healers we lost, and had not been raiding with us all this time… so was having to learn the boss strategies on the fly. On top of these, the raid itself was just not quite what it should have been. I feel like the evidence was the fact that Teamspeak was deathly silent, which is not a usual thing. When we are doing well we are chatty and happy and picking on Rylacus, but last night… no one was talking at all.

We started off trying Gruul but after a half dozen wipes realized we didn’t quite have what it took last night to down it. From there we moved back to Highmaul Heroic, and managed to down Kargath and Butcher before hitting a similar wall on Brakenspore. We finally called the night, hoping to regroup on Thursday and see what we can do. If the gods bless us, we will have back the two healers that were absent and hopefully be back in fighting form. If not… it isn’t the end of the world if we can’t quite progress for a week. We are not exactly the most cutting edge and serious of group, and I think every now and then it is a good thing for us to be reminded of that. The health and well being of our players is worth more than our forward momentum, and I am thankful we have a raid leader that sees that… instead of angrily grinding us into the ground. I love my raid, even when we “wipe like nubs”.

Hunting Pearls

Since the raid was a wash, I opted to log into Final Fantasy XIV and work on my weekly Crystal Tower quest. With this last patch and the entrance of the World of Darkness casual raid, they introduced a quest to do all three dungeons and collect pearls and turn them back in at a quest giver in Mor Dhona. Since I had a bit of time I queued up for Labyrinth of the Ancients and was pleasantly surprised at just how smoothly it went. Normally there are wipes around every corner, but I guess at this point folks are trying to complete the quest, and as such are far over geared for the place. I lost every roll on any of the cosmetic gear, but was in and out of the raid quickly enough for me to contemplate running Syrcus Tower as well. Unfortunately it did not go quite as smoothly as Labyrinth, and we suffered some pretty massive wipe fests. That said folks silently struggled through and we managed to clear it still within thirty minutes of starting.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your take… I had completely World of Darkness collecting its pearl on Monday night, but not running the other other two. As a result I was able to turn in the quest and get my Carboncoat. This allows you to “un-weather” any of the Poetics accessories turning them into ilvl 130 items. Unfortunately I am not sure how to get Carbontwine the item needed to do the same for the Ironworks armor pieces, other than the extremely grindy method of turning in 6 Unstained Mark Logs. I think I will likely wait for 2.55 since it is more than likely that they will let World of Darkness start dropping both Carboncoat and Carbontwine just like Syrcus Tower drops Oil of Time and Sands of Time. It is unlikely that we will be raiding anything bleeding edge enough for me to need to be level 130 geared. In any case my running around in Final Fantasy XIV while chatting with the Free Company made the evening seem a tad bit less dismal, which I guess is what ultimately mattered. Hopefully we will regroup on Thursday and kick some ass to make up for the rather crummy Tuesday.

Melusine Down

February 10, 2015 by Belghast

I’m an Adjective?

There are just some days that it hits me how surreal my life can be. I seem to be having one of those days. I talked a bit about being called a “Cult Leader” last night, but apparently somewhere along the line I have become an adjective as well? If I would say I am most known for anything it would be that I blog each and every morning regardless if I have anything of any real gravity to talk about. If you follow Jaedia and Simcha you would have found out that this is apparently now termed the “Bel Method” because both of them have been dabbling with it of late. I didn’t even know I had a method to be honest… I just do this thing that involves blogging before I am actually awake. I am pretty sure people were rambling aimlessly long before I showed up, and will continue to do it long after I am gone. Though I do admit I got a great chuckle when I read that I have transcended humanity and now have become a “thing”.

@fynralyl that's the server the #BelEffect is happening on anyway. @belghast

— Sig (@Sigtric) February 7, 2015

Which makes it all the more humorous when the other day, I was mentioned in a conversation I was not really even participating in yet. My good friend Fynralyl mentioned on twitter that she was downloading Final Fantasy XIV, and before I even had a chance another friend… who is not even playing the game chimed in with our server information. To make it even more humorous Sigtric said the above quote, that the “#BelEffect” was going on. I am now an effect? I mean I realize my penchant for gathering people up and trying to get them all in the same place is rather notorious… but has it really become an effect to be monitored? Like I said before… it is really surreal to be referred to in adjective form. I am attempting to take it all in stride, as a sign of affection… but it is supremely strange. Now I am oddly cautious to see what other characteristic I have becomes a “thing”, is my traditional “Hey Folks” greeting now going to become canonized as well?

Melusine Down

Last night was of course our regularly scheduled raid night in Final Fantasy XIV. We unfortunately are starting to have a good problem happen… that quite often on Monday nights we have more than enough people to do our eight man. As a result since Paragon missed the last one, Cav offered to sit out and with that we zoned into Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. This was our second week of attempts on this encounter, and last week we managed to figure out most of the bits so it was just down to refinement and polish. We were teaching Paragon the fight from scratch, but he was a pretty quick study and before long we were back to where we left off last week. This fight is largely about managing adds, either in the form of the Renauds that need to be frozen with cursed voice or the Lamias that need to be burned down as soon as possible to lower overall raid damage. On top of all of these things… there is just a phenomenal amount of damage going out. There were so many times I was praying for my next cooldown so that I could survive just a little bit longer.

The turning point in our fight was honestly when we wiped because all of the Renaud that were frozen woke up at the same time. Prior to that the attempt was extremely smooth, and then we watched as the giants ran around wiping the raid. From that point on we started trying to manage just how many of them we had up at a once, and I started trying to do a better job of centering myself with the wall of them. These two tweaks lead to me getting frozen significantly less, and the wall of adds being more manageable as a whole. It was I believe one attempt after we started this strategy that we managed to get her down, and clear Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. Once again Ashgar remembered to tell folks to pose before we opened the chests, and I am super glad that he did… because this really is the best kill shot yet. I remembered to be centered in the photo rather than on one of the edges. We went into Turn 8 shortly after and only stayed long enough to get an idea of how the room works. Hopefully we can all watch some videos this week and make a good solid attempt next.

I Hate Oregorger

Yesterday I stumbled onto a blog post over on AskMrRobot showing how wipes on Oregorger compare to the raids average ilevel. I know we are still fairly low ilevel wise as a raid, I personally am only around 660 because we jumped straight from 7/7 normal and 5/7 heroic to doing normal mode Blackrock Foundry. I am wondering if that is the answer to dealing with the bullshit randomness of his hunger phase is to simply out gear it. Last Thursday when we were doing attempts on Oregorger we were following the exact pattern that everyone agrees upon is the best way to beat the fight. In fact multiple times during the night we stopped, rewatched videos to double check that we were not doing anything wrong… and still we kept dying to the damage of the phase. Either we were not fast enough on killing the crates, or simply lacked the gear to soak the damage. In any case the charge above would seem to agree that maybe Oregorger is simply a “gearing” thing. Had we entered Blackrock wearing full heroic gear… maybe it just would not have even been an issue.

In any case my hope is that by some sheer miracle of luck that we can down him because I want so bad to have this fight on farm status. I feel like both Gruul and the Hans’gar/Franzor encounter are likely on farm status after last week. I am wondering if there is something else that is low hanging fruit we can pick up while waiting on our gear level to raise before wrecking Oregorger. From what I understand the other boss we can try is Beastlord Darmac since Blackrock Foundry employs a “wing” strategy to its layout. Whatever we end up doing, I am looking forward to getting in tonight and smashing more Iron Horde faces. While much of the shiny of this expansion has faded for me, I am finding that the raiding is keeping me engaged and interested. While I may only be logging in to fiddle with my Garrison on nights other than the raid… I am still very much enjoying each and every boss fight.

Lost in Maguuma

February 9, 2015 by Belghast

Wanderlust

Yesterday was a bit of a busy day for many reasons. Firstly getting home super late Saturday night, and then recording AggroChat extremely late, meant that more or less I just straight up crashed instead of editing the recording. This meant first thing yesterday morning I had to edit the podcast and post it. After that I of course still had a blog to write, and needed to spend some time working on another article as well. Throughout all of this there were two problems. Firstly I had a splitting headache the likes of which I have not seen in almost a year. Secondly it was absolutely gorgeous outside, with the temperatures rising up to roughly 80* F yesterday. So my wife and I hemmed and hawed as to whether or not we would actually go do anything. Finally around 3pm yesterday afternoon we decided to get outside and go wandering about.

I’ve talked about the fact that any town of a decent size around me has a Wal-mart. It has always been this way, because quite honestly I live in the Wal-mart heartland, with Bentonville the home office only about two hours away. The first first Wal-mart supercenter in existence is about 30 minutes away in the town of Wagoner for example. Big Wal-mart stores are boring, utilitarian and predictable… but going to smaller less shopped stores often provides this strange melange of products that they still have on the shelf. Each store has a certain amount of discretion as to what they can clearance, so this means that shopping multiple stores might yield completely different results. As such a few times of the year it is prime territory for hunting down clearance Legos.

We set forth on an adventure that took us through three very small locations, and while my wife found more interesting stuff than I did, at the second store… a store I had good luck with last year… I managed to pick up a couple of really cool Star Wars sets at a deep discount. First up I found the Lego AT-AP walker which was originally $60 for the much more reasonable price of $30. Then at a considerably worse deal I picked up the originally $25 General Grievous Wheel Bike set for $19… which admittedly I only jumped at because the General Grievous figure is just so badass looking. This season honestly has been pretty slim pickings, largely because Wal-mart has started doing this annoying thing. They will throw something on clearance… and change the sticker color to red… but have the item marked at its normal price. Essentially I look up each Lego set and if the savings is not 50% off I generally don’t jump at it. This has netted me some pretty cool finds like the SWTOR Sith Fury for $60 but in order to find them… you have to be diligent, and for me the fun is more about the hunt than the finding.

Lost In Maguuma

One of the other things of note that happened yesterday while watching the return of Walking Dead is that I managed to hit level 60 on my Warrior in Guild Wars 2. I am still knee deep in the Maguuma jungle region and right now I find myself shifting between Sparkfly Fens and Bloodtide Coast, largely be cause the Fens simply got too “big” for me as I kept wandering into level 62 areas and having to deal with constant glancing blows. This leaves me 20 levels to go before I hit the Guild Wars 2 endgame, whatever that might be. One of the things that has always bothered me about this game is that I never managed to max a character out. Eighty levels is a rather daunting task, especially when you don’t find yourself really enjoying the game play. That said I am generally known for having multiple max level characters in any game I play, so it felt like a weak spot in my armor that I could not stomach the grind in this one game.

Maguuma region is a bit of a slog, which has me concerned for the Heart of Thorns expansion. I really do not like Jungle or Swamp regions in video games. I was having a blast so long as I stuck to the snowy peaks of the Norn regions, but once I wandered into the swampy zombie filled wasteland… the fun factor of the game went down significantly. Here is hoping that I can stomach it just enough to graduate into the higher zones. All of the guides I have read say that I should really be doing dungeons to level… but I am admittedly scared of them. The shitty dungeon experience was what ended up killing the game for me the first time. Right now I am enjoying the soloing over world gameplay style, and I am afraid if I go into the dungeons again… and they end up still being the chaotic and exploitative mess that they were originally… that it will enrage me enough to halt my journey.

The Real Game

One of the biggest frustrations for me when it comes to online games is when a massive shift in the way the game feels happens. Most games have this highly tailored starter experience to ease players into the game, and then something happens as though the really polished section of the game flew away. Sometimes this transition is gradual, and other times it is quite literally like having the bottom dropped out from under you. I’ve not written much about Albion Online because to some extent I fell off that rather steep cliff. The first two tiers of content felt really fun and natural as I wandered around the world collecting resources to be able to craft nifty things. Then I reached tier 3… and the fun drained away quickly. The game up until that point had been around gathering materials and lugging them back to town so that you could use the crafting machines and fashion them into whatever you might like. When you hit Tier 3, the crafting machines start charging you a fee to use them. This is the equivalent of having to pay every time you need to use the anvil in a World of Warcraft town.

The problem with this is that there really aren’t that many gold fountains that I have seen so far, but the machine problem ends up to be a rather massive gold sink. Granted at this point I don’t even know if there is such a thing as gold in the game… because I have only managed to gather up a few silver to my name. Admittedly this is their pricing scheme… to get players to purchase gold, to ease the process of playing the game. According to the pricing listed on the founders pack information, it looks like $20 would get you 4500 gold, and $50 would get you 12,000 gold. Not that either of these is an absolutely insane price for what seems to be the purchasing power that gets you, but I have essentially stopped playing because I quickly realized this game was unsustainable without either grinding bandits for days… or plunking down some cold hard cash for a game that was only mildly enjoyable in the first place. This is a bit of a shame, because really Albion does have some really interesting ideas at work. I might piddle with it off and on still to see just how deep the money chasm is, but if nothing else for the time being it has most definitely halted my forward momentum.