Tales of the Aggronaut

An Evening With Alternative Chat

December 5, 2014 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff Episode 3

This morning sees the release of the third episode of my experimental side podcast, Bel Folks Stuff. For those who have not followed this development, as the title graphic says I have conversations with interesting people about the stuff they are into. So far I’ve had such conversations with Gypsy Syl and Rowan Blaze and his wife Scooters. Both of those were really awesome conversations and I suggest you go back and listen to them at your convenience. This morning however I am releasing an episode that I have been looking forward to with another good friend the Godmother of Faff behind Alternative Chat. As a strict devotee of the Faff lifestyle, or at the very least an aspirant to the lifestyle… I always appreciate her bringing the term to public consciousness. The funny thing is… we really didn’t even talk about this during the podcast. I believe in letting the conversation go where the conversation goes and we filled up an hour of time chatting away about various bits, and probably could have filled up another hour doing the same.

Of note for this episode I also wanted to make sure that the podcast was available on both iTunes and Stitcher radio to help those folks out who prefer to listen to podcasts through those avenues. I admit I was nervous with this episode because Alt herself has such an amazing production quality for her own podcasts. I felt like there was no way I could live up to that standard. That said I feel like this episode is really solid, and that maybe just maybe I am starting to get a hang of what exactly this thing is going to be all about. I don’t really sit down with a fixed number of questions or anything of the sort, but instead just try and keep the conversation flowing as best I can. With Alt the conversation flowed naturally even though later in the cast she admitted to having notes of her own. I still feel like we maybe got more than a few moments of genuine spontaneity there nonetheless. Speaking of spontaneity, I am always trying to evolve as a person and as such would love to hear your comments on how this side project is working.

Rifftrax and Raiding

With the shit storm that happened Tuesday with the Argent Dawn server, we didn’t actually get to start raiding as a group until last night. Unfortunately I had other plans, and had to miss the raid. Some of my co-workers and I have started this tradition of sorts of going to the RiffTrax live shows whenever they happen. Granted they are not truly “live” for us as in performed in theater. Nonetheless each time I go I think to myself “I have never laughed this hard ever” and then the next one trumps it. This go around they were riffing on a show they did during the 5th season of MST3K, a strange version of Santa Claus that involves Santa, Merlin, and some Christmas Devils… you know the standard fare. It turns out that apparently the film originally hailed from Mexico where maybe it made more sense? The final product is this insane dubbed over feature with so many absolutely absurd moments that they had pretty much endless ammunition to make fun of it. If you are really curious you can check out the MST3K version that someone has dumped on youtube, but apparently it was edited down heavily… and they had all new jokes to make at the movies expense.

As far as the raid goes they apparently had a pretty great night of their own right. It seems as thought they managed to two shot Kargath, and then down The Butcher a well. The sounds like they made some good progress on Tectus as well, so they are hoping to easily down that next Tuesday and progress to the next boss. We apparently ran the raid on personal loot and the RNG gods were good to a lot of players. I know Rylacus walked away with three pieces of gear, which means he can officially no longer complain about “never getting drops” for the remainder of this expansion. Admittedly he has always had pretty shitty luck with getting drops he actually needs, but the moment a rare assed mount drops… his dice immediately improve. I can’t really complain because I too have a collection of rare mount drops, but most of those were diligently farmed… and the only one I actually won when it was relevant was the Fiery Warhorse Reins.

Less Communicative

Last night after my post yesterday, I had a friend check in on me to make sure I was doing okay. It made me realize that I am doing a pretty bad job of reaching out to say “hey” to people lately. This friend has been logged into WoW at the same time as me for many nights, but I have been stuck in my own little world quite a bit. Right now I have a batch of things that needs to be wrapped up at work before going on my holiday vacation after the 19th. Then there is the daily blogging, and the two podcasts that I am keeping going… one of which records weekly. After that it seems like I always have some OTHER side project to work on, like my upcoming post for Syl’s Bloggy Xmas. Someone started a conversation the other day with “I know you are busy but” and I thought… am I busy? It seems like I very much am, and as a result when I get busy I tend to encapsulate myself in a little bubble or just shift into “speak if spoken to” mode.

Mostly this morning I wanted to take a moment to say that essentially “its me not you”. I feel like I am failing miserably at keeping in contact with people during this holiday season. I promise I still care, and I promise I am still interested in what’s going on in your worlds… but at this point I feel painfully behind in everything. I’ve always taken the Stanley Spadowski “Drink from the Firehose” approach to information intake. The problem is I seem to be falling further and further behind as my blog reader consistently has hundreds upon hundreds of posts to read. Between that and trying to juggle playing World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and entertain semi-focused raiding in both of them… my attention circuits are maxed out. I promise I am still out here and still caring… I am just not taking it upon myself to engage directly nearly as much as I previously did. All of that said… if you need help with something I will do my best to assist in any way I can. Hopefully after the holiday break things will calm down a bit and I can reach a point of equilibrium.

Honeymoon Over

December 4, 2014 by Belghast

Old Familiar Beast

It feels very much like the honeymoon is now over as far as my return to World of Warcraft. Each time I have come back there has been something that ultimately drove me back away. When I came back before the launch of Pandaria, it was the “failed state” feel of the guild and how the once shared guild ethics seemed to have vanished. When I left last April, it was in part due to the fact that two factions of the guild quite literally hated each other, and it caused this giant rift right down the middle. Last night it felt like a brand new yet very familiar Maelstrom was opening, and I essentially supported it. One of the ideological things I have fought for years was the creation of a “Raider” rank in the guild, that granted special access to the guild banks. I hate the concept of a rank that can in any way be used to say that “this person” is better than “that person”. The problem is as a former raid leader myself I can see that it is entirely logistically needed.

Last night I helped to set one of these ranks up, and immediately after doing it I started to question my sanity. This only served to be reinforced later as a new acquisition to the guild started asking questions about how to get into the raid. This is going to be something that comes up over and over, especially now that there is a very noticeable raid rank. The problem is don’t have any good answers to give them. There is no path to follow to get into raiding, because House Stalwart is not a raid guild. Maybe it is moot at this point but I keep saying that over and over. I never wanted it to become “just another raid guild” because it used to be more than just a group of folks who mutually benefited from one another. It used to be this awesome extended family, and while pockets of that still exist… it feels like that era is just gone.

Honeymoon Over

All of this was compounded by the fact that at the very same time there was an incident that happened over voice chat, about someone potentially being muted that reminded me all too clearly of why I have left in the past. I have always despised the concept of the haves and have nots. I’ve always been someone who cared more about attitude and personality than skill, but by the same token this is what has held me back in my own raiding endeavors. If you want to be successful you do have to erect some barriers saying you have to be this tall to ride this ride. I just can’t bring myself to be the person to do that. I’ve never been able to decide that this group of friends is more important to our success than this group of friends. I just want everyone to get along and treat each other with some basic human dignity, but that always seems to be impossible. So last night underscored for me with a big bold line that if House Stalwart is going to be successful moving forward, I need to make sure I never permanently take back the crown. If I do I will started trying to make the guild a much more egalitarian place again, and tie a boat anchor around what was successful last expansion.

That said things are not as dire as I might make them out to be. The same raiders that need to be super serious to break the raid, are the ones that were grabbing anyone and their brother trying to make sure they got heirloom weapons for leveling. So while the bar has to be set pretty high to make sure things are successful, I have a feeling that once the current tier of raid content gets on farm status… those same barriers will start to break down as we have folks that can carry the others to victory. I just know that the guild was more successful than it has probably ever been during Pandaria as far as raid content clearing, and I need to stay out of the way of whatever mojo is required to return us to that status. I know that is going to involve a lot of things that fundamentally make me uncomfortable as a human being. I do however have faith that the raid core knows what it is doing, but I also feel like our fearless raid leader is stressed beyond boundaries. We have some fundamental problems… like too many melee and tanks… and far too few ranged and healers… but I feel like that will all be sorted as things move forward.

Sit Down, Shut Up, Enjoy the Ride

If I am going to stay in World of Warcraft for this expansion I am going to have to make some fundamental changes in who I am as a player. Right now I feel too much responsibility for the happiness of others in the House Stalwart World of Warcraft guild. It has been my baby for years, and I have nurtured it as such during all of that time… constantly trying to keep an influx of new and awesome people flowing through its doors. The thing is… before the launch of Warlords of Draenor I freely gave up the crown, as I have done multiple times since Cataclysm. I need to realize this means I am no longer in charge, and also by the same token no longer responsible for whatever happens in guild. Last night Rylacus passed the crown to me, but also gave me a speech that he really thinks it is best if I give it right back. Ry doesn’t care a bout the power, he just wants to keep me in game and happy as long as he can, because he knows each time I start taking responsibility for the happenings of all of these people… I burn out and run away screaming into the night. I need to also allow myself to be absolved of the guilt that comes from giving up that crown.

There is a thing I do really well, and that thing is acting as the guild cheerleader and chief recruiter. I am always going to be trying to find awesome and interesting people to draft into my family, because ultimately that is precisely what a guild is to me… a big extended and sometimes contorted family. It is joked that I have a white panel van full of candy, and drive around abducting people into our guilds… and more or less that is precisely what I do. I have always done it for World of Warcraft, and I currently do it for Final Fantasy XIV… for a guild there that I have NEVER been the leader of. I feel like I never much cared about actually directing the people once I got them, my focus has always been on the acquisition of more of them… hoping that the rest would sort itself out in the meantime. The problem is… just because I am friends with two people… doesn’t mean that they will be friends. Basically at this point if I am going to be happy in World of Warcraft, I need to be the friendly voice in guild chat and let other people worry about the minutiae. I hope that House Stalwart can remain mostly the same place it has been since launch, but I expect we are going to go through some rough times until folks realize fully… that this is not a raid guild, and raid membership is not guaranteed.

Tower Diving Time

December 3, 2014 by Belghast

Server Go Boom

Last night was the launch of Highmaul in World of Warcraft, or at least it should have been. For the majority of the night we tried in vain to log into Argent Dawn. While a handful of us made it to the character select screen, even fewer of us made it in game. Those in game however could not actually play the game, as the world was just fundamentally broken… mobs un-lootable or not spawning at all. All of the problems seemed to be related to the Chicago data center, where the Ruin battle group that Argent Dawn is attached to is located. Lately there has been a lot of talk of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks going on against the various MMO providers, but this is a nebulous concept that most people struggle to really understand. Thankfully there is a site like IPViking that can visualize this traffic in a way that it makes sense. Watching their attack map is like watching missile launches in some war game simulation… both terrifying and mesmerizing at the same time. The above image sadly is not from last night, but just one they have as an example on their website.

During the launch of Warlords of Draenor, there were very clear attacks against Blizzard. Last night however I did not actually see attacks targeting blizzard, but instead attack after attack targeting the St Louis area. I could only assume that the attacks are associated in some way to the things surrounding Ferguson in the St Louis metro area. This however speaks to the way the internet actually works, instead of the way that we all assume it works. The hard facts are there are a limited number of pathways across the United States, and if an attack is blocking traffic from reaching the Chicago data center, it is effectively also blocking anyone from reaching those servers. I ran a traceroute last night and from Tulsa area my packets went to Dallas before going over to the AT&T network somewhere in the vicinity of Wichita before the packets just died. I can only assume that the packets kept getting lose in the maelstrom of attacks between me and the Chicago data center.

Tower Diving Time

After a point I gave up on trying to get into anything within World of Warcraft, and wandered between a couple of games. My original intent was to do some Syrcus Tower on my Bard job, but when I got into Final Fantasy XIV the dps queue for Syrcus was reporting 30 minutes… which is significantly longer than I have ever actually seen it. So I abandoned that notion and instead decided to play some Heroes of the Storm. My good friend Rae finally managed to get her invite from Blizzard and apparently spent the better part of last night playing it as well. I had a strong feeling that she would like the game, based on her seeming love of League of Legends. For me it is a much stronger game because I like its focus on the team win, and not so much on individual performance. That said Rae was still constantly checking the meters during the matches, which I can only hope will be something that fades over time as those League tendencies potentially fall away.

I had really not played it much since the game reset that happened awhile back, wiping out our progress. As such I had completed the tutorial but was still sitting at level 1, having not actually played any real matches to level up with. Thanks to the +50% xp friend bonus, I managed to level up last night to five, and unlock many of the features of the game. I’ve noticed that they have front loaded a lot of the stuff so that you get the interesting items sooner. At level 5 it feels like I have all of the tools needed to really play the character how I would want to. I am a huge fan of Muradin and in all the times playing the game, that has been the character that most fits what I want to play. That said I am also rather fond of Raynor and Tyrael… and if I am going to play a support you can’t beat Uther. I think the main reason why I like Muradin is his Avatar ability that causes him to grow in size and become extremely sturdy, allowing me to tower dive obstacles if I really need to, or survive team fights. With passive health regeneration he has some serious sustain, and most of the time I never actually needed to return to base.

Bloggy XMAS Countdown

I feel bad that I did not advertise this sooner, but there is an event that I am going to be part of that is happening in the blogosphere. The awesome Syl of MMO Gypsy had this idea of creating a virtual advent calendar of sorts within the blogging community. Apparently in her country it is custom to decorate the various shops and houses around town to represent a day of the advent. As such she has created this truly awesome Advent Calendar of gaming blogs. I am currently scheduled to be one of the posters for 12/9 and I will begin prepping for that soon. The problem is I am still not quite sure what I am going to talk about. I have a few ideas, but we will just have to see how that sorts out. In the meantime this is day three of the postings and I highly suggest you go back to the first and read your way forward. I thank Syl for coming up with the idea and making it happen, and once again there has been this massive outpouring of support which is truly awesome.

Inky and the Sneeze

December 2, 2014 by Belghast

Made in the Shade

Last night was a night entirely devoted to Final Fantasy XIV as Monday nights are the raid night for the Greysky Armada the free company we are all a part of. As such I forwent logging into World of Warcraft at all and just milled around aimlessly in game until time for raid. I say aimlessly but there were a lot of things that actually happened, not the least of which was convincing @CurlyWench to hang out with us on Teamspeak. I asked if she needed anything run, and next thing we are pulling together a group to run Haukke Manor… with me healing it. Honestly Haukke is one of the easier ones to heal, apart from that final boss fight. She was tanking, and uncertain of her abilities, and fortunately or unfortunately she ended up in a group with two tanks who were more than happy to share secrets. The run went extremely smoothly, and I managed not to let us die.

When we got out of the dungeon run, one of our guildies Cylladora was up to some Shenanigans. She said over Free Company chat that anyone that came and sat in our pool with her would get a present. So over the course of a few minutes our pool was full of people reclining wearing spiffy new sunglasses that she had made us all. It was an extremely awesome gesture, and managed to create a moment when we were all inhabiting the same place at the same time, and talking through /say instead of tells or free company chat. One of the things that Final Fantasy XIV has mastered is creating situations where players need to interact with one another. The housing district we are part of is extremely vibrant, and I cannot go to the market board down from our house without receiving at least one or two /cheers and /hugs.

This has admittedly been a bit of a stark contrast from World of Warcraft lately, and it has been something weird to get accustomed to. The Garrison system is awesome, but it has done an extremely good job of isolating players and keeping them from mingling. We might all be sharing the same actual space but we are each phased into our own instance of it. As such we really have no need for Ashran or Stormwind or any other player hub, but instead spend the majority of our time hanging out in our private town. Admittedly I am mostly fine with this, because there is a lot of negativity in my Warcraft server community that I really don’t feel like exposing myself to on a constant basis. That said it is nice to see the same people every time you go to the bank, or hit a mailbox… and instead we just see our collection of scripted bots. Final Fantasy on the other hand has somehow mastered the ability to bring people together… and ultimately keep them together.

Inky and the Sneeze

The 2.4 Final Fantasy XIV Patch introduced the continuation of the Hildebrand storyline. For those who are not familiar with this name, he is a bumbling investigator and international man of mystery that solves mysteries by quite literally falling into the correct answer through pure accident generally speaking. This is essentially how Final Fantasy XIV introduces pure absurd concepts from previous games, and brings them into this world without completely breaking cohesion. The Final Fantasy series has several completely silly bosses, and one of the more memorable ones from Final Fantasy VI is Ultros. While I love Ultros, he might be a bit dated for modern sensibilities… since he is essentially a walking tentacle hentai joke. This time once again he is paired with his “buddy for life” Typhon. Some of you might remember the pair working the Coliseum in Final Fantasy VI, and this time around they are working at the Coliseum in Uldah.

The quest line leading up to Dragons Neck is absolutely insane, and as such the fight itself is equally insane. Basically the crux of the fight is trying to stay in the arena. Various fights will knock you out of the ring, at which point so long as there is ANYONE else in the ring you can run right back in. However there are some absolutely horrible attacks that can knock everyone out of the ring if not interrupted. I won’t go much further into the strategy other than that, as not to spoil the fight for people. We managed to get the fight down in spite of ourselves and it dropped the Wind-Up Ultros mini pet… which means we are likely to start doing this as the warm up for Binding Coil each week until all of us get this awesome pet. It was at times a frustrating fight, but also a really enjoyable break from the standard raiding faire.

Twintania Final Phase

The main show last night was us returning to Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut to work on Twintania. This fight is the great killer of many raids in Final Fantasy XIV and holds the key to unlocking the Second Coil of Bahamut. I know many people who have struggled at this fight for ages never quite able to push across the finish line. In our first night of trials we barely made it to phase two of the fight, or more so we barely made progress into phase two. Last night we polished the first two phases, phase three, and made significant progress on phase four which is really the last major phase of the fight. The final phase is simply “don’t stand in fire” which is a lesson we have long ago mastered. There is a thirteen minute hard enrage, but I don’t foresee us getting even vaguely close to that. In fact we were doing extremely well on the final attempt… and had we not run out of time on the duty timer… we might have downed her last night.

The end result however is that all of us are hungry to get back in there next week and wreck this fight, allowing us to move on to the Second Coil of bahamut. Twintania is one of those fights that you really have to experience rather than be taught through videos. Quite honestly I find most fights I need to experience to really learn. I am not one of those people that can watch a series of videos and grasp the key concepts needed to get through a fight. I can however read a written description of the abilities and piece together how things work. The problem that we keep running into is that no one wants to write out a full length description of the fight, or go into any sort of explanation as to WHY things work. The videos are keen on saying “just do this” or “just do that” without explaining why they are doing it.

This became super clear with phase three of the fight when Twintania dive bombs the party. All of the guides told us to meet in one place, this little depression and then run to the center of the room. We tried this over and over before finally guessing at what was actually happening. It turns out this is straight up a geometry exploit that they are trying to do. In truth the fight should be exactly like Onyxia during the deep breath phase, where Twintania dive-bombs in a straight line towards the location where the marked player was standing when the symbol appeared over their head. The geometry hack is dependant upon everyone in the party standing in this little depression in the map, which means Twintainia actually dive-bombs a much lower plane than the rest of the ground. So all we have to do is run to higher ground and the attack will miss us entirely.

This is totally a hack, but apparently one that Square Enix has yet to patch… likely because they thought it was a clever way of handling the encounter. The problem is not a single video explained how this mechanic worked, or why doing this one thing negated the attack. Once we grasped upon exactly what was going on, we got it down in moments and immediately started progressing into the final real phase of the fight. Maybe I am old, or more so I know I am old… but maybe it is starting to have consequences. I find Youtube as a generally horrible way to learn information, and in all cases I would rather have an explanation of how something works written out in long form… rather than someone’s video of them doing whatever it is that they are wanting to convey. Maybe I am just stuck on the paradigm of video as entertainment means… instead of video as learning technique. In any case… we managed to figure things out as a group and hopefully next week will have officially cleared the first coil of bahamut.