Tales of the Aggronaut

Heroic Ogron

January 2, 2015 by Belghast

Bonding of House Noye

When the 2.45 patch went into Final Fantasy XIV they added a nifty new feature called the Eternal Bond ceremony. This allows players in game to get hitched in an instanced ceremony that they can invite all of their friends to. I’ve talked about my friends Ayla and Joren Noye before, and they’ve made several appearances in photos at least on this blog. So I was pumped when I received an in game mail message with a bunch if invites to their Eternal bonding ceremony. For some reason I had it stuck in my head that it was at 5 pm my time, but when I logged in about 4 pm to prepare for the festivities I noticed the invite said 7 pm instead. My heart sunk as I realized that it was going to conflict with my raid group in World of Warcraft. Since neither were on, I sent my apologies and the spare invites back to them just in case they needed to hand out more copies.

Thankfully Rae and Ashgar attended the ceremony from our free company, and Ash took lots of photos. I have to say Squeenix did a really good job with this ceremony design. I’ve seen similar “wedding” features built into other games but the look of this one is really magical. I feel horrible that I missed it, but at least I was able to see it thanks to all the awesome screenshots. I will have to give my apologies in person to Ayla and Joren… but I think they actually read this blog as well. So I am sorry that I missed the proceedings but it looked beautiful. You both are really awesome individuals and are part of what make FFXIV a fun place to be. Thanks for including me in the proceedings, just sucks that I could not attend.

Heroic Ogron

In general this week of raiding has been a rough one. All things considered we honestly probably should have just taken the week off. That said we did manage to make significant progress. While we struggled Tuesday night, we managed to get all of the bosses down that we had downed previously, opening up last night for trying something new all night long. Since our DPS has increased significantly we set our sights on the Twin Ogron encounter, which other than the RNG elements is apparently not that much more difficult than Kargath. RNG is specifically the problem… there were a few times where I took deaths to a horrible venn diagram of fire.. or the shield charge would go in the wrong direction. All of these are in part because we were missing key individuals that normally play specific roles in this fight… but we struggled through and managed.

After what felt like a dozen or so attempts we had that click moment when everything seemed to go perfectly. The biggest frustration with the fight is always the fire. While there are ways to mitigate the horribleness of the RNG by placing the bosses where we place them… this still doesn’t take care of things 100% of the time. The axes still go down in strange places, and the flames can pin players into a corner. The problem is on heroic… the fire is really really bad. There was one point where I ended up having to take a double stack… popped enraged regeneration, shield wall, and last stand and STILL ended up dying to the fire. I feel like this is going to be one of those fights that is never quite on “Farm” status, at least not on heroic. Too much can go wrong in too short a period of time… dealing way the hell too much damage. That said for a very rough week I am damned proud of the team for downing yet another heroic boss.

A Day of Huntering

Other than raiding the majority of my day was spent playing Lodin my hunter, and working my way through the quest content. This time around I had some very specific goals. When I leveled my Deathknight I jumped every two levels to the next zone. This time I am doing something similar, expect in two key zones… firstly I wanted to make sure I had gained enough faction in Talador to get to Revered with the Exarch. Now that I am moving into Spires of Arak, my goal there is also spend enough time to be able to hit Revered with the Arrakoa. This way I can go to Ashran and purchase two trinkets to bring my overall gearscore up a bit. This was something that I could not do on my Deathknight and ultimately I had to get trinkets from my Garrison to bring up my ilevel. Remember my entire goal here is to be able to hit 615 as soon as I can so that I can queue for LFR and start getting access to easy epics.

The only real problem with skipping content is that you are also skipping followers that you can use in your garrison. Lodin thankfully has quite a few, and it will be a bit before I build a barracks… so for the time being I can only have 20. Thankfully there are a couple of easy ones like Tormack and Blook that I can pick up along the way. So far I am really enjoying playing Lodin but it is very hard to stay focused. Every time I turn around I am killing beasts to farm leather… which I can ultimately do for hours. This is a very faffy character, so it is hard to stay on task and keep pushing the questlines forward. I guess that is in part why this character has appealed so much to me while playing around on break. Since my life very much right now is all about faffing around… it seems like the ideal pairing. My hope is over the next couple of days I will manage to push through to 100 and finish the character off. It will be nice to have access to a hunter since they are still doing so much damage.

Finally A Blue

January 1, 2015 by Belghast

Rededication

With the beginning of the year comes the less than amazing practice of the New Years resolution. Want to guarantee that something doesn’t happen… well make it a resolution and you will surely have failed it by the three month mark. At the very least that seems to be the way for me at least. I am exceptionally bad at sticking to goals because what seems so important right now seems far less important a few months down the road. What I am apparently good at is sticking to routines once I have developed one. In 2013 I lost a lot of weight, I would have normally said “a ton of weight” but it was really only 70 lbs. This year I got lax and did not really pay much attention to what I was eating, and for the most part hit a plateau for the year.

Towards the end of the year… thanks in part to the holidays I actually went up a bit. I am not going to beat myself up over it, because I knew as soon as the new year started I was going to rededicate myself to the routine. So while it follows the same basic idea as a resolution, for me at least it is different. I did this for over a year, and I apparently did it well enough that even after getting super lax… I managed to plateau rather than gain. I call that a success overall, but considering I am not anywhere near where I would like to be… I need the rigor once again. My body got a break over the last year, and once things warm up again I will start back in with the walking. For me however I really need the “eating” side under control more than the exercise side since that is what has yielding great results in the past. Sure I will feel hungry for a few days as my stomach adjusts, but the payoff in the end will be a great one I feel.

Finally A Blue

Being the old man that I am… I spent my evening in a rather sedate fashion. My wife and I hung out downstairs and watched a series of movies together, none of which were particularly new… but were new to us since we had not seen them. The first on the list was James Bond Quantum of Solace, which neither of us could remember if we had seen. Maybe we had or maybe we hadn’t, but in any case the movie itself was extremely forgettable… and it kinda felt like they were just phoning everything in about it. Skyfall that we watched afterwards however was excellent, probably the best Bond film I have seen in ages. It actually had storyline that I cared about, rather than a loose excuse for a bunch of fight sequences and car chases. The last movie in the list was the last Percy Jackson movie… the “Sea of Monsters”. While I did not really enjoy it as much as I did the first one, I thought it was pretty good nonetheless and provided a good natured romp through a magical world. Since my wife and I have not read any of the books we had nothing to compare it to.

While watching the films I was of course playing World of Warcraft, spending my night wallowing in nostalgia of playing my hunter Lodin. One of the dungeons that I have been running each week on every character that I think can survive running it… is the Eye of Eternity aka Malygos. I’ve been on a mount farming kick lately, since I am only a few away from the 150 mount achievement. Additionally I was pretty close to the Awake the Drakes achievement for getting a mount from each of the dragon flights. Last night I finally got the blue drake mount to drop, chipping one off both lists. Of course I need to keep running Malygos because I also need the Azure Drake out of there as well for the achievement. However this just leaves Malygos and Deathwing that I need to farm for drake mounts. Since I have two accounts… I really need to figure out how to create a save AT deathwing so that I don’t have to do Spine every week… because god that fight is frustrating.

Raiding on Holiday

Since I had been doing the posts leading up to the first of the year, I had not posted much of the information about my week. The raid groups I am part of in both FFXIV and World of Warcraft chose to go ahead and raid this week in spite of he holiday. Monday night of course was FFXIV and we actually had one more than we had room for in our raid. As such we focused on doing Turn 5 to get the person who could not make it the last time we killed it keyed for Turn 6. Even knowing how that fight goes, and knowing we can defeat it… it is still a rather tough fight and took us a few tries to get it down. The last time we downed the encounter for some reason my screen shot software was not working, so as a result I have gone back to the old reliable Fraps and have a kill shot finally. After that we started working on Titan Extreme again… a fight we have not seen in roughly two months. We made some progress but it was getting late and we decided to call it before the timer ran out. We did manage to make it through to the final and hardest phase, so here is hoping we can push through that this week.

In World of Warcraft we had a bit of a rough week in part because we were down both our fearless leader and a couple of our highest dps. However that said several of us, myself included greatly increased our dps between last thursday and this tuesday… and while it was not the cleanest raid I have ever been a part of… we struggled through and got the job done. We have six encounters defeated, and we managed to clear all of them with our reduced numbers. I call that a win because it will allow us to work on progression tonight. There were some issues that hopefully we can work through, but mostly I was pleased that apparently all of the tweaks from last week did their job. I was able to push respectable dps as a Gladiator, and I no longer feel like I am a detriment to the raid. This is a huge thing for me, because I was scared that gladiator simply was not a viable spec. It seems viable enough and I seem to do about the same damage as our rogues do, which I am perfectly fine with for the time being. Gladiator itemization is really odd, and it is hard to find “ideal” pieces. Thankfully however I did manage to get my BIS shield, when a raid member so graciously donated it to the cause. Hopefully you all have a great new years, and that you have luck accomplishing your own goals this year.

Wishes for the Next Year

December 31, 2014 by Belghast

Failed Futurism

Over the last few days I have made a few posts recounting some of the positives and negatives of the last year. Today I want to place my eyes forward towards the next year and what I hope it might bring. One of the problems with futurism is that generally speaking it is always going to be wrong. 2015 was the year that Marty McFly went forward to in Back to the Future 2, and that movie made a ton of guesses about what the future would look like, most of them being completely wrong. That said we are at least getting a form of a hoverboard next year, granted we will have to pave the streets in conductive metal for it to actually work properly however. The thing I find funny is how no work of futurism ever seems to get just how incrementally fashion evolves, because I doubt any of us are going to start wearing chokers made of bullets or a darth vader breastplate. Instead of futurism I am going to focus on my hopes for the year to come.

Gamers Stop Being Assholes

While yesterday I spent my post reveling in just how awesome my gaming community was over the past year, the larger community has not really been an awesome place to be. Our very small niche of a community has figured out more or less how to exist in a relative state of harmony. Outside the gated community however, things are pretty much in a constant state of martial law. My hope is that this year gamers can figure out that it is cool to have lots of people playing in their sandbox, that may or may not look the same or want the same thing as them. Diversity only serves to make things more interesting, because really as we learned during the 90s… just how many doom clones can we really stomach? At the very least I would love that gamers would stop endangering the lives of others with their misguided crusades. We are all here, we all play games… lets enjoy that fact and quit trying to claim this person or that person isn’t as much of a “real” gamer as you are.

More so than all of this… I would really love it if my natural instinct when confronted with having to play with a group of strangers is not to clench my sphincter and prepare for the worst. I would love to be able to approach grouping with random players the way that I used to before I started turning off every public channel in any game I was playing. There is a great post from Liore summing up a lot of these feelings of dread. Mostly I feel like a lot of gamers have forgotten why we started playing games in the first place… not for the competition, or not to be the best at something… but because we used to honestly have fun doing it. I have tried really hard to embrace this spirit of fun and positivity, but you can only be told “you fucking suck” so many times by a random stranger before you stop trying to interact with anyone that is not already connected to you. I’ve branched out and made a lot of friends, more than I can possibly list… but for the most part when I play a new game, I shut off all the public channels and hang out with people I already knew before going into it. This year… I would love this to change.

Settling Down for Awhile

For years I have been searching for something, a magical spark that seems to have been missing for me in MMO games. Over the last several years I have tried extremely hard to make this game or that game my new home. I tried to make Rift work, and tried to forcibly bring all of my friends along on that journey with me. I tried to do the same with Final Fantasy XIV, and Wildstar, and Star Wars the Old Republic, and The Elder Scrolls Online. In order for that spark to exist two things need to be there… firstly there needs to be tons of things for me to do, and an insane amount of goals and sub goals to keep my mind busy and engaged. Secondly there needs to be a solid and thriving community to keep me engaged socially. This past year I found that spark, but in two different places… both of which appeal to slightly different sides of me. As a result I am splitting time between raiding in Final Fantasy XIV on Mondays and World of Warcraft on Tuesdays and Thursdays… and occasionally Wednesday fun runs.

So far this mix works extremely well for me. There are things I like about both games, and I like the freedom of being able to flip back and forth between them at will. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time in Azeroth, but I think that is a counter reaction to the fact that I spent the last three months exclusively engaged in Eorzea. I feel no less connected to one when I am spending time in the other. I am playing both games and I am happy to be doing it. My hope for this year is that by the time we reach next December that I will still be playing both games happily. I am in amazing raid groups in both, and the content is keeping me engaged in ways that I feel like only one game would not be able to satisfy. I have a feeling that when new content is released in one, I will shift to mostly playing it… and versa vicea. My hope is that I have found a combination that works for me… and I can settle down for a long while here. I’ve gotten tired of the constant game jumping and want some stability for awhile.

Personal Projects

2014 saw me getting involved in a bunch of projects other than the Tales of the Aggronaut blog. I kept up my rigor of daily posts and in April I celebrated both my 5th anniversary as a blog, and my first year of daily posting. This coming April I will be able to celebrate a second year of daily posting and another year as a blog. My hope is throughout all of 2015 I will be able to keep up this daily posting thing. This past year also saw the launch of the AggroChat podcast along with my friends Rae, Ashgar, Kodra, Tamrielo and sometimes participants Dallian and Raven. Over the course of the first season we recorded 37 episodes of Aggrochat, and I think that is pretty damned solid. We made it over a lot of the awkward hurdles, especially considering I knew absolutely nothing about making a podcast before we started. Those first few episodes are mighty painful to listen to at this point, and I am sure after another year the entire first season will feel the same. We are anything but professional, but we have a large enough following that I feel like we must be doing something right.

This year also saw me start a fledgling experimental podcast called “Bel Folks Stuff”. So far three folks have been gracious enough to have a conversation about “stuff” with me, and I am thinking overall it works pretty well. The podcast has a much smaller footprint as a whole, but I am okay with that. In January I have another individual lined up for another conversation, and hopefully another in February. Basically this is just an excuse to have a conversation with friends and push the record button while doing so. Other than this there is another thing looming on the horizon that should be exciting for 2015, but I don’t really want to talk about it much until I am ready to announce it. Essentially my hope is that 2015 will be as awesome of a year for my side projects as this year has been. I could not do this without all the awesome people supporting me, and the constant help of my friends who always seem to be willing to follow me down whatever rabbit hole I fall into. Thanks to you all for taking this journey with me… I may not know what the next day will bring… but I know I will always have you along with me.

Satisfaction of the Year

December 30, 2014December 30, 2014 by Belghast

The Birth of a Community

I think this year more than any other we say what was previously an island of disconnected city states merge into a real community. Last January I posted a rather grumpy piece lamenting the lack of community, and throughout the year you all have strived to prove me wrong. I am not sure what exactly it was about this year in particular that seemed to draw everyone together, in part I think it was because this year was the year of multiple events, that I hope will repeat themselves this coming year. Since we have reached the end of a pretty epic year of community, I thought it was a good time to reflect back upon what we have achieved. There were individuals who say that blogging is dead, but I think wholeheartedly we have proved them wrong.

February – Birth of Alliance of Awesome

While not really an event in the truest sense, it was still a pretty significant event in the year for me. In February of this year some events happened that ended up in the forming of a much larger gaming community to be known as the Alliance of Awesome. With the launch of the Landmark alpha… we quickly realized that each of us needed to be in as many as seven different “guild” based server channels to be able to keep in contact with everyone playing the game… especially since friends lists simply did not exist at that point. It was proposed that we found a much larger community made up of all of different parts. This alliance of guilds would pool resources and eventually even a chat server. While at the end of the year I realize that maybe some of the ideas didn’t work as well as we had hoped… there are still more of us in almost daily contact than there are not.

The idea that there would always be a friendly Alliance of Awesome guild in whatever game we happened to be playing was something that has for the most part stayed true to the original intent. The only part that didn’t quite work was trying to create an actual Alliance of Awesome branded guild in Wildstar. I feel it is still best if we stay separate guilds, just ones collaborating in a larger sense. The biggest change in this direction was moving to using the same Teamspeak server graciously hosted for us by the ever amazing Saia. Some things have worked well, others not so much…. and other groups have faded away from the core. At the end of the day I think this was a really positive move for the community as a whole, and anyone that wants to participate is still more than welcome.

May – Newbie Blogger Initiative 2014

This may we saw a return of the seminal blogging event that at least to some extent started all of the momentum. Several years ago Sypster started this contest and last year I believe was the third year. Essentially it is a month for the elder bloggers in our community to encourage folks to start their own new blog and join our community proper. For this year the catalyst was Doone as has been for a coupe of years, but he was joined by an excellent cast of helpers in the forms of Izlain, J3w3l, ModeratePeril, and Joseph Skyrim. It was a bit hard for me to find numbers this morning when I was pulling together this post but based on my best guestimates and this list, it seems like we had 45 new bloggers join the fray during the month of May.

I did a quick run through of all of those blogs and as close as I can tell out of that initial group of 45, at least 30 are still active… and I judged activity by having any posts within November or December. That gives us right at 66% of the participating blogs still alive and kicking today. When you add to this that there are still a large percentage of blogs from past years up and running as well that graduate from being a newbie to a mentor… this really is one of the best events to grow our community each year. I am extremely proud to be a participant each year, and I am excited to see a new crop of bloggers arrive on my “Class of” blog roll.

August – Blaugust 2014

The idea behind Blaugust started on an absolute whim. I did not want to lose the momentum we build each year with the Newbie Blogger Initiative. While that event is going on, folks are posting hard and heavy… and then as it finished the posts start to taper off again. The idea was simple enough, get some of the most seasoned veterans in our community to take up the challenge of posting something new each and every day like I do. When I proposed this idea I thought maybe at most I would get five or six people that were willing to take up the banner. However this absolutely developed a life of its own, and before I knew it I had 52 people signed up to participate. I have to say I was completely overwhelmed with the support I got from the community on this one… and for the most part my entire August became about nothing but keeping track of Blaugust.

What I was even more impressed by was the level of participation. At the end of the month I had 50 that actually participated, and of those 28 actually had “won” the challenge and managed to post something each and every day. The biggest frustration with the whole event was that I had not really planned very well, and keeping track of who posted when became a very manual process. As a result this coming year I am going to have to engineer a different solution to make it less intensive on my part, and allow me to make the daily recap posts a bit easier. I never intended for this process to be something that “new” bloggers partook of, and as a result we saw a marked decrease in posts after it… since most folks needed a break after running that marathon.

October – Bragtoberfest 2014

bragtoberfest_spooky

Bragtoberfest was the brainchild of Izlain from Me vs Myself and I and the Couch Podtatoes podcast. During September there was the beginning of some pretty horrible stuff happening in the gaming community as a whole. Bragtoberfest was Izlain’s way of combating that by trying to get back to the roots of gaming… playing to have fun. The mission statement was simple: Bragtoberfest aims to make it fun to be a gamer again. We all game, and most of us also either blog, stream, vlog or podcast about games as well. Why not combine the two into a month-long event?

During the month of October there were several competitions bringing folks together for the purpose of competing in a game. These ranged from Strife to Team Fortress 2 and everything in between. Not being a super competitive gamer myself, I did not join in as much as I would have liked. That said I felt like I supported the mission by helping to provide a few logos here and there. Additionally many of us gave exposure to the event with recap threads and announcements on our own blogs. This morning as I was trying to pull together numbers for all of these things, I struggled to find firm numbers of participants. That said I know it was well over 20 bloggers who joined in during the month of October. Hopefully this one will happen again next year and like everything, we can grow upon it. The Bragtoberfest tag on Izlain’s blog seems to be the best summary of the event as a whole.

October – Alliance of Awesome Extra Life Marathon

One of the best things to come out of Alliance of Awesome this year… is the fact that we participated as a team in the Extra Life marathon. This all started with a random conversation between Zelibeli and myself about how we had always wanted to participate in the Extra Life 25 hour of gaming event. Both of us had not done so yet for the same reason… we questioned if we could actually manage to stream all 25 hours given our family lives. With the birth of AofA we kicked around the idea of having a Relay style stream, where each of us took a 2-3 hour block and then tagged off to another stream. This became a logistical problem since we were all using Twitch at the time, and you could not create a “team” unless you were at the partner level… and quite frankly none of us were popular enough to actually have that.

Thankfully along came Hitbox which offers the ability to create a team at the most basic membership… and we were off and running. We created an Extra Life team… and not having a clue what kind of participation we would get, I set a very sober goal of $200 as a team. We blew that goal completely out of the water, with a participation of 9 gamers… we managed to reach $1728 which to me is an absolutely staggering amount. My hope is this year we can be a bit more organized and maybe raise more by getting the awareness of what we are doing out there a bit more. Additionally my hope is to find someone who is a twitch partner that is willing to get an Alliance of Awesome twitch team created for us.. since that will open the door for folks to stream from the current generation of consoles as well.

December – Bloggy Xmas

Finally we had one last event that wrapped up last week with Christmas. My good friend Syl game to me with the idea of doing a sort of blogging advent calendar. It seems there is a local tradition in her area where folks in the villages decorate the windows of homes and stores to represent a day of the advent calendar. I started work on a logo, and she spruced it up by adding in the d-pad snowflakes and bam we had another event ready to run. I think she originally intended to have one blogger per day, but just like with Blaugust she was a bit overwhelmed by the folks wanting to participate. I tried to pull together some numbers this morning but it seems like for the 25 days of the event she had 45 participants, meaning most of the days had two different bloggers posting.

The overarching theme of the event was to write something about community, and I personally wrote a post about my need to keep growing my own communities by adopting awesome people. For the full effect of the event you have to check out the Bloggy Xmas website that gave us a really awesome advent calendar layout for the months post. My hope is that we will grow this to be an even bigger event next year. The community focus seems fitting since this was a year of so many awesome events bringing the community together, all the while existing in a climate where there was so much negative being caused by other gamers. I feel like our little community stood as a beacon for the fact that gamers could in fact get along, and not just get along but thrive. I want to thank all of you out in the community who participated in any of the events, or just kept your own personal blog active throughout the year. I feel we represent the best values our community has to offer, and I hope we can make next year even more amazing.