Tales of the Aggronaut

Grinding Gear into Plasteel

October 3, 2014 by Belghast

Ready for a Freeze

The last few weeks my allergies have been killing me, and this is not usually the case for fall here in Oklahoma. It feels like the seasons are getting horribly confused, and ragweed that normally hits its worst during July has been still active in August and October. As such my lungs have decided to betray me under the onslaught, and yesterday afternoon I ended up going home from work. I took a few breathing treatments and got some sleep and this morning I feel marginally better, but still on the scale of “lousy”. Right now I am just read for the first hard freeze to happen and kill off most of the allergens. Sadly that doesn’t look like it is going to happen any time soon. The temperature is dipping down today to the 60s, but otherwise we are still having 70 to 80 degree days.

The constant drainage and coughing just makes me want to stay inside and hibernate. Thankfully right now I have a ton of good games to play. With the impending release of Dragon Age: Inquisition several of my friends are replaying Dragon Age: Origin since like many Bioware games there is reportedly going to be a save game import feature. I know my experience playing through all three Mass Effect games in a row produced a ton more quest options than when I played Mass Effect 3 without importing. So it has me wanting to try going back through the past games as well. My upcoming gaming schedule may be devoted to Dragon Age: Origins for a bit, but I still plan on poking my head into FFXIV, Trove and Destiny on a nearly nightly basis to see what is going on.

Grinding Gear into Plasteel

Thanks to the miracle of the Queens Bounty event I’ve managed to shoot up to 24 light through upgrading the two purple pieces of gear that I managed to get. Through running various other things I have managed to pick up a handful of nice weapons and other light bearing blues. Right now I am running around with a level 20 scout rifle, that while it doesn’t deliver as much punch as the hand cannon, it still has a bit of impact and can carry like 250 rounds with me. It makes it extremely good for whittling down enemies at range with extreme accuracy. I would still love to find a level 20 blue or purple hand cannon, but so far my only purple ingram has produced crafting materials instead of a weapon. Upgrading gear right now seems to be my sole source of getting more light, as I have yet to find any items that can directly replace anything I am currently wearing.

Last night my play time entirely revolved around trying to find more green armor to grind down into Plasteel, and finding Relic Iron… which so far is the hardest of the materials to spot. I’ve gotten rather good at picking out the chunks of brown against the red brown landscape of Mars, and had a fair bit of luck finding chests that had quite a large quantity of it. The problem honestly as you can see from the screenshot is that I just cannot seem to get enough plasteel. I could in theory buy ingrams from the Cryptarch and grind those down… but that seems defeatist. Instead I am mostly spending my time doing patrol missions on Mars since they give me reputation and have a fair chance of dropping greens. I have now entered the grind phase of the game, and while I am still very much enjoying myself I can see how this might wear on folks with a lower tolerance to grind.

Tron and Infinium Ore

With the release of Beta and the addition of the Neon Ninja, they added in a biome to go with that theme. While this morning I was only able to find a very small one… this is what folks have dubbed the “Tron” biome. In fact when you are in the biome a musical theme plays that reminds me quite a bit of some of the Tron Legacy soundtrack. There are rivers of neon blue water, and instead of grass and brushes you have chips and resistors. It feels like you are in a datascape and the various robots have similar tron coloring. Each biome has a version of the skeleton, and in this biome they look like the Red MCP guards from the original Tron movie. I hope that eventually I can build a table that allows me to spit out stuff themed like this biome, because I will completely switch my entire cornerstone to look like it.

This little innocuous looking block is Infinium Ore, and it has become the bane of my existence. After a certain point in the crafting system… every single recipe requires this. The problem is that as you go up in level this doesn’t seem to get any more common. You can find Shapestone and Formicite Ore until your heart is content, but Infinium still is a very rare occasional, and any given vein maybe gives you twenty if you are extremely lucky. Most of my playtime has been wandering around looking for these ore spawns. The problem with Trove is I simply don’t understand how the game works yet. In Minecraft the spawns were based on a certain logic, and once you mastered that you could be plopped down almost anywhere and be able to find the resources you need. In Trove it feels more like you have to be lucky. I feel like I need to spend some time scouring the Reddit looking for tips and strategies for finding this ore node. I won’t be able to do any of the really cool things without large quantities of it.

#DragonAge #Trove #Destiny

Not For Rent

October 2, 2014 by Belghast

Allergic to Advertising

One of the things you might notice about my website is that it is completely devoid of any form of advertisements. Granted you could consider my blogroll a form of an advertisement, but those are hand made with love for blogs I care about. I’ve always shied away from using banner ads or even something as relatively unobtrusive as Google adwords. The problem I have with them in general is that while I can carefully curate the links I post or the banners I create… I can’t do the same with the advertisements that might show on my website. This blog is essentially about me, and as such it is about the things I support and care about. If a questionable ad played on the side of my website beside my content, especially something like those heinous Evony ads… I would feel just as responsible for it as if I were the one that created it.

Additionally my website is my hobby, and if I were to start trying to monetize it… I almost feel like it would somehow cheapen the experience for me. Getting up every morning and writing to you is a labor of love, and I often times pour my soul into whatever thing I happen to be writing about. If all of that was just part of a cash transaction… I can’t see as how I would be able to keep doing it. I have a weird association with money, and I have been in some extremely high performing environments that paid massive bonuses at the end of the year. I’ve learned that extra money doesn’t really motivate me to produce, but instead the intrinsic benefits of feeling like I am making even a small incremental effect on the world… that is the stuff that keeps me going. So I took a massive pay cut for my principles to work where I work, and similarly I am willing to turn down profit in an attempt to keep my blog “pure”.

Not For Rent

All of this is why I am almost offended when I get a certain kind of email. At least once a month, sometimes more than that I get emails from various marketing companies wanting to co-opt my blog and my readers for whatever their product happens to be. Frustratingly they don’t ever mention who they happen to be working for. Maybe that might make a difference, but more than likely not because the whole exchange makes me feel dirty. Here is an example of the type of letter you get, I’ve edited out the identifying bits because really I wish the company or the person writing it no harm. They are after all just doing a job they were paid to do.

We are interested in sending over a quality and relevant article to your site, as a contribution. Is this something you might consider? If yes, please email me back and I’ll be happy to send over the article for your review asap. Note that the copy will include a few references to our client. We’ll also pay you $100 per post through PayPal, for your time and effort.

Generally speaking I don’t even bother to respond to these, but for whatever reason this time I decided to be magnanimous and write back. While I am not at all interested in “paid editorial” as they called it, I would be willing to give a fair and unbiased review of a given product, but that there would be no strings attached that I would give the product a favorable review. I didn’t honestly figure they would be interested in this, but I figured what the heck. I like doing product reviews, I find them enjoyable and wouldn’t mind doing more of them. Generally I write about things I am already sold on and using, as a way of sharing with my readers the nifty things I happen to find. For example I am using a $20 back lit keyboard I stumbled upon and really liking, so at some point I will likely write about it.

I rather promptly received back a response stating that “our clients only accept in-house content at this time”. Meaning that they don’t actually want product reviews… they want a puppet to spread the word of their product offerings. While I very loudly support the products I support, things like Anook for example… I do so because I believe in the product and I use it myself. I have no interest in being a “shill” and having my blog perverted into something that it was never intended to be. This is my blog and my personal venture, and while I might let my friends post the occasional guest post… I refuse to give this thing that I have created over to a corporation to use as it pleases.

What I Am Open To

All of this said, like I told the marketer… I am not opposed to talking about various products on my blog. In fact to some extent I do this already with my semi-regular Steampowered Sunday series where I take a game from my steam library and play it for a bit, then talk about what I just played. Initially the plan was to slowly whittle down the number of games that I have not played in my Steam collection, but then my friends started hijacking this process and sending me games specifically for the purpose of playing them. Granted these are not companies, these are people I talk to on a daily basis. That said I am not opposed to companies handing me games and asking me to write about them. The catch there is they have to be willing to accept what I write about the game, and I give no promises of a favorable review.

I don’t tend to be a very “ranty” writer most of the time, and generally speaking I can find some positive in even the worst gaming experience. However just because someone gave me access to a game doesn’t necessarily mean I feel obligated to push it forward. I was lucky enough to get into the early phases of the ArcheAge alpha… and quite frankly I did not like everything that I saw. I talked about it a few times and said more than my share of negative things about it. I thought it was a great game with a horrible community, and if there were a PVE/Co-Op server environment I could play it on I would totally be doing so. Even though I have friends at Trion, I didn’t necessarily feel obligated to spin their game in a positive direction. I absolutely love Trove, so I am more than happy to gush about that game, and I am still a fan of Rift even though I am not playing it any longer. But just because I have a relationship with this company didn’t make me feel like I had to support every single thing that came out of its doors.

Basically if you are a small company with an interesting product, I am more than willing to talk to you. I don’t mind the idea of doing a product review so feel free to contact me on twitter. What I am not interested in at all is being paid to give your product a glowing review. Hell I am not interested in being paid to write anything at all to be honest. I am perfectly happy living in this Hobby sphere and to be honest… getting paid to write would simply complicate my life in ways I don’t really want to deal with. I am always interested in helping folks out, and if you have something cool that I believe in then I am going to tell the world about it. This mornings post is a bit of an odd one, and I doubt that my writing this will stop any of the marketing emails that I get. I just felt like I wanted to say something about this practice, and draw some sort of a line in the sand that says very clearly “not interested”.

Months Behind but Loving It

October 1, 2014 by Belghast

Happy Bragtoberfest!

During the month of October Izlain and J3w3l of Couch Podtatoes are running a special event they are calling Bragtoberfest. The idea is to share the fun you are having gaming with your friends. You can check out all of the details on Izlain’s blog Me Vs Myself and I. I thought it was fitting that on this fight October morning, that I do in fact have a handful of gaming achievements to “brag” about as it were. The event however is not just for crowing about your gaming achievements, but instead sharing that magical feeling we all have while playing a game we are really into. Over the past months there has been quite a bit of negativity either coming from or leveled against gamers. Bragtoberfest is an opportunity to embrace the good and present a positive viewpoint of gamers having fun being gamers.

Months Behind but Loving It

Back in July a large number of us that played Final Fantasy XIV at launch, returned to the game to give it another shot. I was the first to come back thanks to a free weekend, and enjoyed it so much that I ended up roping a lot more of my friends to join me. We played for roughly three months after launch and then for various reasons all wandered off into the next big game. As such we never really made much progression at the time. As a guild we had managed to take down Hard Mode Ifrit while working on the relic weapon chain, but that was literally as far as we had managed to get. So coming back we have had this whirlwind of catching up, and experiencing content that is almost a year old at this point, but still very new at the same time. Over the last several weeks on Tuesdays we have been pulling together an eight man raid team and working our way through Binding Coil of Bahamut. At this point we have defeated the first four turns and had originally planned on focusing on turn five last night.

However last night we had one of the members missing, and were subbing in a player that was relatively new to the Final Fantasy XIV end game. As such we opted to set our sights on a different target, the first of the Extreme modes… Garuda. Most of us had managed to get attuned for this fight and had been for quite some time, however there is just something about the Garuda fight that is terrifying. For starters it has one of the most awesome and at the same time creepy introductions. The normal mode Garuda fight kicked our ass so many times while trying to get folks through it around level 43 when you encounter it in the game. All of this gave me pause when I thought about the difficulty of doing the fight on Extreme mode.

One of the most interesting things about the Final Fantasy XIV endgame is that you have a fixed amount of time to make attempts. For Garuda and most instances you have exactly 90 minutes to defeat the encounter before the game punts you from the instance and you have to start over from scratch. For the most part we all went into this fight last night without functional experience of how it works and learned on the fly as we went. Each attempt we made adjustments to the strategy, shifting the targets between myself and Ashgar until we figured out an ideal mix of who needed to tank what where. There are three phases to the fight, and the last two phases rotate back and forth between them until you defeat her. Once we had managed to get through a single rotation of phase three we pretty much had the fight in our sights. At that point we had roughly nine minutes to defeat the encounter as a whole. We pushed through and managed to get it just in time, and as such finished a quest we all had sitting in our logs for some time allowing us to now move on to Extreme Mode Titan.

Flaming Axe of Doom

While bragging about cool stuff, I managed to finish gathering my 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery and am now the proud owner of the awesome flaming axe Conquerer. While I would love to be wielding a Bravura Novus instead, that quite honestly is still a good long ways off. I am still slowly working my way through the 9 Animus books, and then after that I have to do the Novus grind… which involves collecting a bunch of Alexandrite and binding 75 pieces of Materia to my weapon. This step is not only time consuming but also extremely expensive. As such I have been stockpiling money and Materia as I go to hopefully be able to complete this step. As far as the current Animus grind, I am 2 books into it and still have 7 more to go. My good friend Cylladora however is down to two books left, so I am pumped to see her progressing so quickly.

All of this made me decide a few weeks back to go ahead and gather up the Soldiery “bookrocks” and get the slightly easier to get level 110 weapon. The process for that is somewhat contorted as well but involves winning an Unidentified Allagan Tomestone from Syrcus tower or Second Coil of Bahamut. You then take this and 10 Rowena’s Tokens and trade for a Weathered Conquerer which in its own right is a really nice level 100 weapon. Each of the Tokens is sold for 130 Tomestones of Soldiery in Mor Dhona for a grand total of 1300. You then take your Weathered weapon to Drake in Hyristmill and trade both it and a Sands of Time to him to receive the level 110 “unweathered” version.

This is all possible thanks to the fact that in patch 2.38 they started allowing Sands of Time to drop in Syrcus tower. Since you can only win a single item per week in Syrcus, that means that I gave up on usable gear for the last two weeks to gather up the UAT and the Sands. Similarly I had to make sure I capped my Tomestones of Soldier each week to make sure I could get to 1300 in time, since you can only early 450 a week. I am damned happy to have a level 110 weapon, which is almost best in slot. You can technically get ilevel 115 weapons now either through the Second Coil raid or through the completion of the Nexus step of the Relic weapon chain. My goal is still to complete the Relic weapon, because I love the feel of the quest chain and the look of the eventual weapon. However for the time being I can feel happy knowing that I am going to be able to generate plenty of threat with a weapon at least as good as anyone in our little raid group.

The Queens Bounty

Monday night I pushed through to level 20 and started working on the Queen’s bounties in anticipation of trying to get gear from the event before it goes away at the end of this week. Last night after the raid I talked a couple of friends into helping me out with making this happen. The only problem is that as a fresh 20, I could not actually RUN the Queens Bounty Strike. Thanks to Kodra and Shiana we pushed through a couple of strike missions and after a few lucky drops and some upgrades… I managed to get to 21 light which allowed me to queue for the Queens Bounty content. So it was myself, a 24 and a 27 queueing for the content, and the game decided to give us all 24 mobs. As such I finally begin to understand the rage that some of my friends have felt while grouping with higher level players than themselves. Quite simply I could not actually land decent attacks on anything. I was aiming straight for the head and making content, but just simply not making a dent in it with my level 18 blue hand cannon.

My friends assured me that this was not anything I was necessarily doing wrong but instead just a simple component of the mobs being a few light levels higher than me. As such I tried my best to limp along through the content but spent a lot of time hugging the ground. At the end of the mission I managed to get the chest piece drop, but at that point it was already well past time for bed. My hope is to go back tonight and try for the helmet and maybe the sniper rifle. I still have four more tokens left to go and I just picked up a few more easily bounties this morning. Level disparity problems aside I am still digging the way this game feels. While I am not sure I would ever complete the raid, I am definitely going to shoot for gearing up in full purple gear. The biggest thing is I wish to god I could get a purple weapon drop. That would at least make me feel less useless. At the end of the night I was sitting at 22 just a single upgrade away from 23, so I am pretty damned happy with the results in any case.

#FFXIV #Garuda #Destiny

Electronic Gaming Monthly

September 30, 2014 by Belghast

Tied to Screens

At least once a week I see a report in the news talking about how we have become too tied to our screens and we have lost social interaction. While I agree that as a culture we are pretty damned addicted to technology, this view point that not interacting face to face is aberrant or strange seems to be a pretty extrovert centric. For the introverts the era of instant non-face to face communication allows us to leave far richer lives than if we were left up to our natural curmudgeon tendencies. I am not one of those people that goes out seeking face to face interactions, and while I can handle it in short doses… it completely drains me and causes me to retreat inside my shell. Whereas digital interaction, doesn’t really cause much stress at all as I can interact when I feel like it, but withdraw just as easily as closing down a chat window.

Dealing with people simply causes a lot of anxiety for me. We have various friends that we will go out with semi-regularly… but even then I struggle. When we make the initial plans it sounds like a great idea, then as it creeps ever closer to the time of the event… I start looking for ways out of it. It goes from something extremely fun, to something I am dreading. Then finally when I force myself to go through with it I have a good time in spite of myself, but this whole rollercoaster I put myself on is something I would rather simply avoid entirely. It takes a lot out of me to go through it each time. So when I see someone complaining that we are losing social interaction, I feel they simply are not taking me into account. Sure there are fewer people for the extroverts to get their warm fuzzies from, but for us extroverts it means we are forced into a lot less awkward interaction as a result. I feel like thanks to the internet I live a far richer and involved life than I ever would have on my own.

Electronic Gaming Monthly

While on an oddly introspective tear this morning, I thought I would talk a bit about a little back and forth I had yesterday about something I miss. In my travels I stumbled onto the Podcast A Life Well Wasted again… which tragically only ever released seven episodes. It is this great This American Life for Video Games feel, and I would love to have more of it. I re-listened to the first episode talking about the death of EGM magazine and was struck with waves of nostalgia for that time in video gaming. Electronic Gaming Monthly at the time was this inch think omnibus devoted to all things video gaming covering arcade, consoles, hand held and even on rare occasion PC gaming. I read the magazine pretty religiously from roughly 1990 to around 1996. It and White Dwarf were the magazines that I waited each month to arrive, and before I actually subscribed I would anxiously watch the news stand at my local grocery store for the next copy.

Back then a lot of my fervor for the magazine centered around them giving me the dirt on the next arcade fighting game. I remember it was the first magazine to post full moves lists for Street Fighter 2, and I memorized them like some arcane text. The arcades were this crazy place where people speculated about potential moves, and by the time Mortal Kombat 2 arrived there were all these unofficial moves sheets floating around the arcades with half of the attacks speculative or complete and total bullshit. EGM was the voice of authority, only publishing things that they had verified as working. At the same time they had this irreverent review style that appealed to me greatly at the time. Gaming was still very much an insider thing, and an excluded subculture… so it just felt awesome to have a magazine talking about the things I actually cared about.

I really don’t know why I stopped reading the magazine, other than maybe the internet got better at reporting the news I cared about… or simply that I got busy and poor in college and could not long shell out the then $7.00 price tag for a magazine each month. Before this episode I was acutely aware that Electronic Gaming Monthly no longer existed, but I never really knew when exactly it happened. In fact the last time I went to a news stand I didn’t see any magazines devoted to video games, so I am guessing that is entirely a bygone era. Once upon a time I used to think that working for EGM would have been the coolest job in the world. There were times I day dreamed about becoming a “video game journalist”. I guess in some way with my blog I have been, or I am at least as legitimate as that term ever really was. I do miss an era when the magazines did not feel beholden to the manufacturers to make sure they got at least a 6 out of 10 score. The aspect of the scoring system that I appreciated the most was that you usually got three different reviewers points of view, instead of just one.

Quite honestly I think a lot of what made that time in gaming history so magical is the actual lack of information we had about anything. Right now we know everything about the games that are being made before they even exist. Hell we obsessed over Titan and all we really knew about it was a name, but still folks managed to dig up little nuggets of information about it. EGM worked, because we were starved for information on our hobby. They were one of the few sources of this information, and while they might only give us 100 words on a single game… that was far more than we were getting anywhere else. The wild speculation, the misinformation, the rampant rumors all got laid low by a single issue of this magazine giving fertile ground for the next crop to spring up until it arrived to quell them again. I miss that era… and I think in a way that’s why the 16-bit games are so important to me… because they are wrapped up in that shroud of mystique. I miss Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Beginning the Real Grind

Last night I accomplished one of the goals I had set out to do Sunday and finally pushed through to level 20 in Destiny. At this point I feel like the real leveling curve begins as I start searching for gear with +light on it. Right now I have managed to find a blue chest piece with 5 light, so I am barely if at all moving in the right direction. Similarly I started working on the Queens Bounty and managed to knock one of them out for killing Fallen Ultras. I am roughly halfway through the 200 headshots one, so hoping I can grind that out in the next couple of days. I am really not sure how many of these I can complete before I actually get to take my swing at the loot piñata. I could really use an upgraded hand cannon as the level 18 green one I have been using feels not quite so epic any longer. I have to say I am really digging Mars so far. I find the Cabal extremely satisfying to kill, like even the relatively weak Legionaires.

At some point around level 18 I got sent to the shipwright again, and she let me pick a new design. I have to say I am digging this one a lot more than I did the collectors edition version. The paint job is okayish, but I am really loving the design of this ship. This is the first design I would have likely picked on my own. I absolutely hate the style of the first ship, and the collectors edition ship still has enough elements that it annoys me. This however is finally a good looking star ship. I think mostly I extremely dislike asymmetrical designs, so as a kid I loved the X-Wing and A-Wing… but the B-Wing and Millennium Falcon frustrated me. I could forgive the Millennium Falcon however since it was essentially cobbled together out of a bunch of other ships… but that B-Wing… man no mercy for that. In any case I am still digging destiny, and it is beginning to remind me more and more of Phantasy Star Online. That was really my first venture into online gaming, so there is a large bit of nostalgia there as well.

#Destiny