Tales of the Aggronaut

Catastrophic Rollback

October 25, 2014 by Belghast

Extra Life is Go!

This morning team alliance of awesome has been streaming for awhile by the time I write this post. This means the Extra Life marathon has been kicked off and the thunderbirds are go! So I highly suggest you tune into the Alliance of Awesome team and see how all is streaming. I personally won’t be coming on until significantly later in the day where I plan on playing a brand new Secret World character named “Belstream” on the Arcadia server. I’ve gone through the character creation already and am sitting at the very start of the New York zone. I went Illuminati this time, because with all of the “conspiracy” floating around in the gaming community it seemed rather fitting. The Secret World is one of those games that I love but don’t end up playing all that often. I am a lifetime subscriber, and I still consider that money well spent.

One of the interesting challenges today is trying to fit in the recording of a podcast around the various stream times. Kodra and Hiddenwings stream before our normal recording time, and I stream almost immediately following it. I will be going from 11pm EST to 3am EST, and then after me is I believe Scarybooster and then finally Cav will be finishing off the entire process. From what I understand both Stargrace and Braxwolf intend to do the entire 25 hours… so during a lot of the stream there will be multiple channels on Team AofA that you can be watching. When I last tuned in, Stargrace was streaming some Divinity Original Sin, so you should see a wide variety of titles today. I personally am mostly going to stream MMOs. I had originally planned on streaming some Destiny, but with my current frustration with the game that probably isn’t the best idea. Maybe going to substitute in some Rift Nightmare Tide if it is behaving.

Catastrophic Rollback

The last few days I have been sick, as I said in my blog my lungs pretty much betrayed me. As a result I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch poking around in Rift Nightmare Tide. Over the course of Thursday I watched one and a half seasons of American Horror Story, made it about half way through 60 and made some significant progress on several different tradeskills, finally crafting myself a nice set of blue weapons. Then something bad happened. When I was working on my blog post yesterday the Faeblight server was completely offline, and while I thought this was odd I just went on with my business of writing a normal blog post. Later in the day on twitter I heard that Laethys, Faeblight and Wolfsbane were all offline and that there had been something that happened to the hardware for that server cluster. When I got home the server was back online, and I logged into my character only to notice that I had lost an entire days worth of play time. My character was sitting back at 1% experience into 60… pretty much the point at which you normally zone into the zone.

A thread on the forums confirmed the issue, that there had indeed been a rollback. The goofy thing is it seems to be an uneven rollback. I have all of my Planar Attunement experience gained, as well as all of my Minion experience. My character however was completely rolled back, including the fact that I no longer had the spec or macros that I set the day before when I started to level the character. The biggest problem is… I spent a lot of platinum training various skills… and all of THAT seemed to be missing like I had in fact trained the skills but had nothing to show for it. As an IT professional I have had things like this happen to me too. A backup is only as good as the time you need to restore it… and it is often times impossible to tell if a backup is actually going to work correctly. Having been in the shoes of these folks before myself… I feel generally horrible for the stress that they are going through. Supposedly Faeblight is hit the worst and they are having to manually go back through logs to try and figure out what all was actually lost.

I can take this with a grain of salt, knowing that sooner or later Trion is going to make things right for me. They always have in the past, and I have a feeling they will during this time. I mean this is probably the most catastrophic rollback I have experienced since the ill fated launch of Horizons back in 2003. Unfortunately rollbacks were something that happened during those days, so we accepted it at face value and moved on. Rollbacks these days however are almost unheard of, and as a result the players on the forums are out for blood. There are some players who had power leveled themselves to 65 and maxed out several of their tradeskills… and all of that effort was completely lost. I am super thankful I have been playing the expansion extremely casually at this point. All of this said I am certain that Trion will make things right in the end, the biggest frustration for me was setting back up all of my hotbars and my new spec again.

ArcheAge Update

I have not been playing much of late, especially with all of the other games on my plate. However I felt like I needed to post an update. I have been pretty down on ArcheAge as a game from my pretty horrific experiences with the Alpha/Beta community. In part I think a lot of those early players were Streamers and did horrific things to other players to entertain their audiences. I can remember one incident where I had to cross a bay in a rowboat, and folks were lined up trying to capsize and subsequently drown us as all of the little newbies tried to cross the open water. Coming back and playing on the Naima server at launch… I have to say I have not experienced any of this non-combat griefing. I have gone afk in town numerous times, and have not found myself pushed out into a bunch of mobs and dead on the ground… this was something that happened constantly in alpha.

The game is still compelling, but I have yet to actually make it to the contested zone levels this time around. I am still in my early 20s, but I hope to make a push at some point to see just how the open pvp areas feel. If the early game is any indication, maybe the production player base is more reasonable than the barbaric alpha playerbase was. I can deal with danger, and I can deal with the possibility of death… what I could not deal with was the constant jackassery that I experienced in the alpha community. This is still not my primary game, especially with all of the exciting things happening in FFXIV this week, and the launch of Rift Nightmare Tide. However I still have a large number of friends playing the game, and it has been nice to pop my head in and talk to people I have not seen in years. Unfortunately the guild I was planning on joining imploded this week, and has been replaced by another one. So I will have to make the necessary inroads to get invites there. Also unfortunately it seems they might not be as casual friendly, which would be unfortunate… because for each of the serious players I know playing the game, they have a couple of not so serious friends that are also playing with them.

#ExtraLife #Rift #ArcheAge

Bel Folks Stuff Debut

October 24, 2014 by Belghast

An Evening With Syl

A few weeks back I talked about a new kind of podcast I was planning on doing. Where I grab one of the very interesting members of our community and chat with them a bit. Somewhat of an informal interview podcast. Thankfully everyone I have talked to about this idea thought it was cool and has been willing to volunteer for the process. Since my friend @Gypsy_Syl and I have notoriously struggled to find time to actually hang out together on voice chat, I figured it would be awesome to start this entire process with her. Thankfully she graciously accepted and last Sunday at noon my time which was 7 pm her time… we sat down to record a show. I am really pleased with how it turned out, and while I still feel like I am absolutely “winging it” I can see how this is going to work with other “Folks” as well.

Right now the plan is to do this as a semi-monthly show, because quite honestly with daily blogging and weekly podcasting with AggroChat, I don’t feel like I can really add much more to my schedule. Naming a thing is always the hardest part, after some time I landed on more of a statement of what the show was… than an actual name. “Bel Talks To Interesting Folks About Really Important Stuff That They Enjoy Doing”. This however was way too long to be the title of anything… so I just shortened it to “Bel Folks Stuff”. It’s quirky I know, but I figure the folks that will be listening won’t care much about the title… but will instead be tuning in to listen to someone from our community talking about stuff that they enjoy. So please tune in and enjoy “An Evening With Syl” the very first episode.

Gobbie-Boom

Last night I spent most of the night working on my Monk, trying to push him ever higher in level. I was happy the other night to graduate from Totorak to Haukke Manor as it is a considerably more enjoyable dungeon. My friend Ashgar likes to refer to Totorak as “The Thousand Yawns of Total-Nap”. For me, I don’t mind the dungeon that bad but it does definitely seem to drag on, especially in that section where you keep having to bust poison balloons and move through the green sludge. Last night however I got to move into one of my favorite dungeons… Brayflox’s Longstop. The reason why I like Brayflox is simple… it has some really awesome sets that come out of it. While tanking the place I had managed to gather up a full set of Cavalry, and while healing I had managed to gather up most of a full set of Battle Mage. However every time I ran the place, either Infantry did not drop… or someone else was with me that wanted it far more.

As you can see from the above picture, last night I managed to get the Infantry Chest to drop. So far I only have legs, hat and chest… but I figure I will be running a lot more Brayflox. One of the things that I didn’t really cover in my guide is that every night I always do at least one completely random dungeon run. This is worth a massive amount of xp even if you end up getting one of the primals… that normally rewards next to no experience. After that I tend to just queue for whatever the highest level dungeon I can run happens to be… especially if I am playing DPS. Nothing sucks worse than wading through a thirty minute dps queue, only to end up getting Ifrit. So I expect over the next few days to queue up for Brayflox, and then run FATEs while waiting on the roulette to pop. The only thing I wish is that you could queue with your chocobo out, because this greatly lowers my survival in FATEs to have to run without him.

Using My Boost

This morning Faeblight appears to be down, so I can’t actually log into the game and take any proper screenshots. As a result you get a shot of my menagerie of characters. This is fitting because in reality I was going to talk to the boost to level 60. As you can see I have a whole slew of characters that I could have used this on. Mostly I struggled with a choice between boosting Belgrenth my Dwarven Mage, or Belgaroth my Bahmi Cleric. Belgrenth is still stuck down in his 20s, but overall I enjoy questing on him because the launch content feels better to play than the Storm Legion content. Belgaroth however I had just started the Storm Legion slog with, and felt like I was making no real progress. So did I go for maximum number of free levels… or did I go for helping me skip the content I wanted to skip on an otherwise really enjoyable character.

As I am sure you can tell from my lead up… I ended up using it on the cleric because skipping Storm Legion sounded like an awesome deal. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a good use for the free boost to 375 crafting, so I ended up spending it on survival… something that I struggled to level on my other characters. If I had been thinking really I would have used it on fishing… because as time goes that one seems to take significantly longer to level. The other big news from yesterday is that I think I figured out a pretty decent leveling build for Belghast. All of the warrior builds I was using when I last played have seemed to have gotten nerfed significantly. Once upon a time I could farm things with impunity and keep myself at nearly full health. Those days were long gone as upon starting the Nightmare Tide content it was a struggle just to stay alive.

I landed upon a thread on the official forums by a guy named Inny proposing his leveling spec for 3.0. You can check out the full magelo build here but essentially it is a 42 Warlord, 34 Champion, 0 Liberator build. So far it seems to be working pretty well, and the combination of a few minor heals and the combination of Weapon Defense and No Permission to Die allow me to stay alive in most situations. No Permission to Die need some really specific timing to make it work, as it heals you to 50% if you receive a killing blow in the time that the buff is up. The biggest boost to my survival was crafting a new set of weapons. Thankfully it was pretty easy to gather up the materials to do that, but unfortunately I have pretty much burnt through all of my available platinum on tradeskills. Hopefully that will start to regenerate as I quest, so I can do the same for Armorsmithing as I did for weaponsmithing. All in all the content is enjoyable, or at least significantly less grindy feeling than the Storm Legion content was.

A Real Monk

October 23, 2014 by Belghast

Being Sickly Sucks

My life story is pretty simple, and can be pretty much summed up by my body repeatedly betraying me. I was born with a primary immune system issue, which is far from “boy in the bubble” territory, but mostly means I have a “lazy” immune system. Essentially all of my antibodies and defense mechanisms hang out saying “these guys aren’t so bad” until finally one of these foreign actors torches the place, and forces them to fight back and repel whatever bad things invaded my body. Throwing a sucker punch into the works I have some pretty severe asthma and allergies. More often than not what starts as allergies or an undefended against cold ends up triggering the asthma and locking me down.

Right now my lungs are betraying me and since yesterday afternoon have been struggling to breathe. I am doing the normal “take breathing treatments every few hours” thing, which is helping but just considerably slower than I would like it to. By the time I went to bed last night I was actually feeling almost human. Waking up this morning however my body seems to have rebelled against me once more. At this point I am uncertain if this is just a cold or something deeper, but in any case the initial treatment is the same, rest and medication. I am so ready for nanites to exist, I will gladly embrace our robot overlords if they bring with them the ability to fix my dumb malfunctioning body. Maybe I can have like cool cybernetic parts too… in the future I will totally be Adam Jensen.

Nightmare Tides

I was reminded yesterday by my friend RowanBlaze that it was the launch day for Nightmare Tides. I managed to get in for a bit but didn’t stick around terribly long for a number of reasons. The first was that the servers were really populated, like can’t engage a single mob without having a swarm of players on it with you. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means that the expansion as a whole seems to be pretty well received. The second was that after spending about thirty minutes doing “bag maintenance” and removing all of the old Storm Legion quests from my log, I honestly just felt drained. I was afterall not feeling amazing in the first place, and when you combine this with the fact that the once awesome build that Pkudude helped me find in the first place isn’t quite as awesome as it once was… I just lacked the oomph to go out onto the forums and find whatever it is that the latest leveling build happens to be.

The thing I did mess around with however is the new Minions system. So far I am a fan, other than I have no clue how to actually earn adventurine. The idea is that Minions are mini-pets with a purpose. My biggest disappoint is that not all mini-pets are minions… and not all minions are mini-pets. This aspect of the system is deeply confusing and they would have been far better serviced if they had simply done what Blizzard did and assign attributes to ALL existing mini-pets. That aside it is a fun little mini-game where you send your pet out on missions. The more missions you run the better xp it gains… and I would assume at some point you start to unlock more dangerous missions as a result. I got a nice jellyfish minion as part of my preorder (that also happens to double as an in game companion) but there are a number of basic mini-pets that you can pick up for 1 plat each. The other way you can obtain them is either by buying randomized packs… or by spending the Nightmare Tides zone currency on individual ones.

Admittedly I have been doing a pretty poor job of keeping track on the progress of this expansion. An awesome reader of mine hooked me up early on with beta access, and I spent quite a bit of time poking around the first zone. I did not however delve too deep into the systems because I wanted to spoil the experience as little as possible. Mostly I was trying to decide if I wanted to pre-order or not, and I enjoyed myself enough to throw some more money Trion’s way. Now I am trying to figure out all the things I happened to miss. If nothing else Minions are an interesting diversion to the leveling process as the user interface has made it super simple to hop in and out of the Minion screen, notifying you when your current missions is complete in the same place the dungeon finder tools show up. Since I am essentially done with Destiny for the time being, I might end up streaming some Nightmare Tides leveling this weekend during the Extra-Life marathon.

A Real Monk

The bulk of my evening I spent watching television and working on leveling my Pugilist in Final Fantasy XIV. I have this crazy goal of reaching 50 on all combat and crafting classes by the Spring 2015 release of Heavensward, and for some reason of late I have hung on working on the pugilist. I think in part because this is my last Disciple of War class to level… at least until next week when the Rogue/Ninja is released. For the longest time I just could not get into the pugilist, but lately I feel like I have finally gotten into the “rhythm” of playing it… or what everyone refers to as “the dance”. When I was working up my guide I declared Monk being less positional dependant than the Dragoon… and in a way this is absolutely true. Monk attacks will still land and qualify for the next step in a combo regardless of where you are in relation to the target. Dragoons on the other hand, the combo will not continue unless the attack was performed from the right position.

Saying that however leaves out the fact that a monk that is NOT doing positional attacks… is a monk that is completely ineffective and might as well just be auto attacking. There seems to be a massive damage output difference between keeping up all of your stacks and dancing around the target to just standing there and beating on it from one place. The thing I like the most about the monk so far is that the position attacks seem to be eaiser to land that for the dragoon. The Dragoon attacks have a lot of lead up time to the attack, and notoriously your tank is going to twitch the target at exactly the wrong moment… making it so that Heavy Thrust for example doesn’t land. With a monk this never seems to happen… or at the very least it is not as crippling of an event as you can still continue going to your next attack. If you miss a Heavy Thrust… you have to Heavy Thrust again… until finally one lands.

So I am happy to finally get what people like about playing the Monk. Last night I ran a really horrible Halatali for my daily roulette. If you are a Gladiator tank out there, please for the love of god do not use Riot Blade. We tried to explain to this tank three for four times exactly what he needed to do to hold aggro. However he almost willfully ignored us. At one point I actually voted to abandon the party after one of our dps bailed on us. Unfortunately the NEW dps didn’t understand why we were trying to abandon party and voted it down. After that I ran a few instances of Totorak and a few of Haukke after I graduated up into that dungeon. Finally near the end of the night I dinged 30 and was able to complete my monk quest. Now I am no longer a pugilist but a proper monk, and finally have some decent AOE capabilities. Actually looking forward to finishing leveling this job and getting it geared out.

#FFXIV #Rift #NightmareTides

Wish I Was Proud

October 22, 2014 by Belghast

Fatigued and Forlorn

My wife and I have very different online circles. She is super hardcore into mathematics, and I pretty much only following gaming folk. As such we don’t actually follow each other on twitter, since there really is very little overlap between our communities. The math conference that I helped out with over the summer has lead to a bit of overlap, but it is still super minimal. The other day she hollered into my office at me “What is your gamers gate shit doing in my feed?”. Sure enough the madness that has infected what used to be my happy place, had spread over into other communities. These were not folks choosing sides in the battle… they were folks shocked and dismayed at the death threats and hatred being directed towards women. Once again reinforcing a very negative stereotype against our community, one that I feel we have fought really hard to get past.

I’m 38 and have been a gamer my entire life. There are things that I have done through gaming that I am extremely proud of. I am proud of the days of trying to make 25 people that have no tangible connection to one another work as a well oiled machine… or at least an oiled enough one to take down a boss. I am proud of the community that I built from the ground up that over the course of its existence has housed literally thousands of “stalwart” gamers. I am proud of the blog that I have built, and my two podcasts (one of which has yet to see the light of day). I am proud of the events like Blaugust and the Newbie Blogger Initiative that I have been involved in. I am proud to know so many awesome people, some of which have actually transitioned into my day to day life… or that I have hired because of their awesome non-gaming abilities. All of these things took lots of effort to make happen and were all pretty cool things that I SHOULD feel proud of.

Wish I Was Proud

The problem is I can only feel proud of these within certain “safe” circles because the world as a whole still sees us as basement dwelling troglodytes. The problem is… as much time as we have spent trying to change this image with really awesome things like Extra-Life… Gamers Gate is proving them completely right. It is proving to the world that we are not quite ready to crawl out of the primordial ooze of our basements, not quite ready to exist in normal society yet. Chris Kluwe spun up a pretty incendiary rant yesterday about how the whole situation pisses him off, and I feel everything that he is saying… I just wish he had chosen to write the article without the same sort of aggressive language that I expect from the GG folks. Ultimately that article itself somewhat proves we are not quite ready to pull ourselves up out of the muck.

While I work for one of the coolest bosses in the world, I am still part of a society that seems gaming as an aberration. I live in flyover country, and here gaming is still viewed as something “kids do”. We were inching closer and closer to being able to get people to understand that going home and raiding with our friends is no different than going out to a bar with theirs. We had reached a point where just maybe folks were starting to understand that waiting in line for a video game release is no different than waiting in line for a midnight showing of the latest movie. Our culture was slowly grafting itself to the mainstream… and this was a good thing for those of us still dependent upon the mainstream for our livelihood. Every day that Gamers Gate exists, and makes the press about their impotent “movement” and the harassers that freely associate with it… is a day that chips away at the progress we have made towards being “normal”.

Tried to be Neutral

I honestly did not sit down this morning and intend to write this post. Sometimes you sit down at the keyboard and and your words develop a life of their own. I started out this GG madness trying to stay in the middle, and remain supportive to those who needed supporting, but unaligned to either Gamers Gate or the Anti-Gamers Gate camps. The events pretty much made this an impossibility as the assault on the already under represented sections of our community continued. The thing is… the longer this went on the more it pushed me into the Anti-GG camp. So much so that I have systematically pruned my social media of anyone supporting it. The problem is… there is just as much negativity going on against it as well. Over the last year and a half I have worked seriously to limit the amount of negative feedback I keep in my loop. Its not that I am trying to be a Pollyanna or anything… I just find it healthier to dwell upon the good things, and avoid the bad ones.

The problem is I don’t feel like I can avoid Gamers Gate, because it has become so attached to every part of this community that I love. It is like this disease that has spread, and I am uncertain how exactly to cut it from these limbs without sacrificing the things I care about in the process. Ultimately I just want it to go away, and I want the hatred and the fighting to stop. I want people to treat each other with basic human decency. Because really at the end of the day that should be a basic thing. Since the golden rule of “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself” is woven into every single religion and culture on our planet… you would think that it shouldn’t have to keep being explained. There is nothing that can be salvaged at this point from Gamers Gate. The media has spoken, and they have rightly chosen to focus on the real harm to actual lives that is being done with this “movement”. It is time for it to go away, or it might literally succeed in destroying the games we love.