Tales of the Aggronaut

Extra Life Results

October 26, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #28 – Server Nightmares and Spycraft

Last night we recorded another episode of the AggroChat podcast, which is something that was a bit up in the air a few weeks back. Because of all of the excitement going on with Extra Life streams and Team Alliance of Awesome… I had wondered at one point if we should just skip the week. Thankfully we had plenty of stuff to talk about and the normal cast of characters were all in attendance. Last night we were joined by Ashgar, Kodra, Rae and Tam as we discuss all sorts of stuff going on. It was a weird lead up for me, since I was out and about all day long, and didn’t really have much time to catch up on the news until right before we started recording.

We talked about the latest round of FFXIV announcements coming out of the London Fanfest. Unfortunately the announcement that we got in Vegas of the Job information coming in London… was a bit of a tease. We also talk about what we are looking forward to Tuesday when the 2.4 patch lands. I talk about my experiences with Rift Nightmare Tide launch and the fairly catastrophic server rollback that caused me to loose essentially one entire days worth of playtime and a bunch of other stuff that came with that. Tam and Kodra talk about their experiences playing Civilization Beyond Earth as a co-operative team. Finally Rae fills us in on some of the craziness that is happening in the post season League. It seems like there is a ton of “horse trading” going on as players are swapping teams left and right.

Extra Life Results

I have to say I am really damned proud of Team Alliance of Awesome. We opted to do the 25 hour marathon relay style where each of us would pass the baton to the next leg of the stream. I personally chose to take the 11pm EST to 3am EST slot thinking I could just stay up after we record the podcast and push through it. I did however take a nap in preparation but I have to thank all of the folks that showed up during the middle of the night to cheer me on. You guys kept me awake and responsive. During that last hour after Pazz logged out of voice chat I got more than a tiny bit quiet. All told we had 9 total participants and as you can see from the image on the right side we raised $1728 for the Extra Life charity. So I want to thank everyone that participated by taking a leg of the stream, and everyone who tuned in to cheer us on. It was an awesome experience and I am hoping next year we can maybe even make it bigger somehow. I know as we neared go time folks came out of the woodwork wanting to participate but we had already assigned all of the slots.

One of the things that I thought was awesome was just how varied the group was in what all they streamed. Sure there were a few games that got duplicated but there was a ton of variety from Single Player to MMOs to even Classic Console games. There seemed to be a little bit for everyone. I know Ashgar even managed to completely beat the Kirby game he was playing during his stream, which is pretty awesome. I originally planned on playing The Secret World, Trove, FFXIV and Destiny… but I ended up mixing that up a bit. I started off rolling a brand new Illuminati character in The Secret World, but having not played in awhile I did not make it terribly far into the game before I hit the hour threshold where I had intended to swap games. After that I popped into FFXIV and threw myself at the Mercy of the Duty Roulette, healing an Ifrit and a Tam-Tara Deep Croft run. After another hour had passed I flipped over to Rift and spent the rest of the night working my way through Goboro Reef in the Nightmare Tide content. After two hours of play I managed to finally get back to roughly the same place I was before the server rollback the other day.

The folks I am immensely proud of though are the individuals who took it upon themselves to do the entire 25 hour stream. For me I found four hours late at night a challenge, but I know Braxwolf, Stargrace and Liore all took it upon themselves to do the entire stream. So seriously raise your hands and give all the folks that managed to complete the full 25 hour marathon a huge round of applause. This is an awesome cause and it was great to actually be part of it this year. Like I said before I am hoping to maybe do a better job of assigning slots and getting as many folks participating as we can next year around. For the most part I believe the covered all 25 hours of the marathon, and some streams ran a bit long but it was awesome to have multiple folks streaming at the same time. I really like the team construct in Hitbox, and I just wish Twitch would extend that functionality to mere mortals instead of having it walled up behind being a partner. I will never have the kind of numbers needed to become a partner in any site… but it is awesome to still be able to have a team of friends streaming. You can watch my entire 4 1/2 hours of streaming in the embedded video above.

Valdis Story

This morning I am cheating a bit with my Steampowered Sunday game, in part because I started playing this last week. I have gotten in the habit of picking up almost every Humble Bundle package that comes out, because I know sooner or later I will want to play one of the games in it. Ashgar actually tipped me off to this game, because of the horribly long name I mostly ignored it when I noticed it in the bundle. However he thought I would definitely be interested in it as it is a Metroidvania of a sort. More so than a Metroidvania, it is very much a game in the feel of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night… and if you have been around my blog for very long you will recognize that as most likely my favorite game. I own copies on the PSP, Vita, PS3 and even still have my original Playstation disc around here even though I don’t actually have a functional PSX any longer.

You have a series of characters to choose but initially your only options are Wyatt a emo haired youth with a big sword (see cloud) or Reina a female monk that is labeled for “advanced” players. I of course went for the guy with the big sword… because slashing things with a big sword is fun. At some point I plan on going back through and trying out Reina, especially since during Wyatts play through of the game you encounter her early on… and she seems like a badass. The storyline of the game is a little odd. You are in a world where heaven and hell have both come to the material plain to duke it out for the surface. As one of the last remaining humans you seem to have the ability to use the attacks of either side. There is a lot of this that I don’t quite understand yet, but the devils are reddish hue and the angels tend to have blue color palettes.

The story doesn’t really matter much to me to be honest. Why I am playing this game is that mechanically it is really fun. You wander about and collect new abilities that open up new areas to explore just like the traditional Metroidvania style. For example one of the first abilities you get is a wall jump, allowing you to explore new areas and reach places that you haven’t been before. Today during my stream I managed to find a new ability that allowed me to erect a pillar of ice, allowing me to jump on it to reach areas I couldn’t before. If you are used to Metroidvanias none of this will seem out of the ordinary. There is a basic crafting system that allows you to upgrade your gear in towns, and that aspect actually reminds me a bit of Simon’s Quest the second Castlevania game.

This is the sort of game that you either really like Metroidvania games or you dislike them. You can check out my entire stream from this morning above. I play the area between two towns and end up fighting two bosses… both of which I barely made it through. The boss fights are fairly tough in part because often times the environment conspires against you. The first boss I made it through I literally have no clue quite how I did it. In part I feel like I just lucked into that one. The second boss was difficult because the floor was icy, and the wind would blow you to the side making it super hard to stay on the platforms and time the jumps to avoid the ice beams. In any case it is worth a look. The game is pretty much $15 wherever you go for it and available DRM free through the developer or on Steam. Good game, and I play on playing it some more… I just wish I had it on the Vita to be honest. This seems like the perfect type of game to play before falling asleep.

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