Tales of the Aggronaut

The Future Is Now

October 18, 2014 by Belghast

Other Peoples Drama

Yesterday my wife and I went on an adventure to Northwest Arkansas. We have a deep sense of nostalgia about the Fayetteville area, because I guess it was one of the first towns we knew nothing about and wandered around together in. This is a thing we like to do, go to a new area without any real warning and see what all we can find. Combine this with the fact that my wife has a really awesome cousin in the area, and it is a location we try and get to as often as possible. For whatever reason however it had been a few years since we had managed to make the trek. I mean its not extremely far, but it still ends up being roughly a two hour journey from our home… so something we don’t exactly undertake lightly.

One of the coolest things about going up there is hanging out at our cousins place of business. She is a tattoo artist of some renown and the shop is always an interesting place. It gives us a window into lifestyles that are just somewhat hard to fathom. I guess I’ve always thought it was important to expose yourself to other ways of thinking, but there are times that I just sit back and cannot quite follow the logic that lead down some of the paths. I mean the family is awesome, but the shroud of drama that surrounds it is one part really bad luck and one part less than stellar decisions made in the midst of that bad luck. But what I love is just how valiantly they fight back against whatever circumstances they are thrown into. While constantly in struggle mode, you can feel the love and the life that they embrace.

The Future Is Now

Northwest Arkansas is known for a lot of things, but probably the biggest is that Bentonville is the headquarters of the Wal-mart corporation. As such you see some interesting machinations take root there that will likely filter out into the rest of the country. Yesterday while roaming around town we saw something interest, a Wal-Mart Pickup Grocery. In essence it looks like a non-descript warehouse building with a series of bright green drive in stalls similar to a drive in restaurant like Sonic. The idea apparently is that you order your groceries online, and then pull into the stall and punch in some code letting the folks inside know you are there. At which point they bring out your groceries and help you load them into your vehicle.

I have wanted exactly this same concept for years… and I am pumped to see that it even exists in a test market. For years I have wanted to be able to do my grocery shopping online and simply pull up to the store and load what I just bought. I really hate everything about grocery shopping, from the journey from cold to humid within each store, to the slow moving shoppers, to the desperate for small talk and validation cashiers. I mean I try my best to be pleasant through the average shopping trip, and keep from biting anyone’s head off… but it is a frustration that I would be more than happy to abandon. The prevalence of self checkout lanes greatly improved my shopping experience, and this is just the next step. The only thing that would improve it beyond this is maybe if robots delivered my groceries.

Playstation TV

Today I am wrapped up in my fuzzy little cocoon on the sofa, with cats napping beside me. After two days of heavy activity, I am ready to just be mostly comatose today. I got home late enough last night that I didn’t really get much chance to do anything. I did take a bit and hook up my Playstation TV and so far the results are mixed. I feel like I need to probably hard wire my ps4 into my network, so that only one of the two units is using wireless. Playing Destiny there was a noticeable lag to the gameplay. I mean it is probably no worse than when playing on the vita, but playing on a tiny screen with already awkward controls seems to make it less noticeable. I didn’t experience any of the graphical glitches that Pete Smith on G+. I am hoping if I hardwire my PS4 that it will help out the latency a bit.

I essentially need another HDMI hub downstairs as essentially I had to unplug my Chromecast to plug in the PSTV. The other thing that I guess I was not prepared for is that I would need another Vita memory card. So I have an HDMI hub and another memory stick on order that should arrive tomorrow. The base unit only has 1 gig of storage so there really was not much that I could even download to play on the unit. I will likely keep the chromecast hooked up until I get the rest of the bits to connect things up. Thankfully it recognized my Dual Shock 4 without any issue, and was able to play using that. The only problem I see there is that the PSTV doesn’t seem to take advantage of the touchpad at all, which makes some of the “Vita” interactions a bit awkward like the motion to “swipe away” a current application to close it is performed by holding down a button as the corner slowly peels away. I think once I get used to it, I will enjoy it more as it will extend the PS4 to yet another television.

Movies, Roulette and ArcheAge

October 17, 2014October 16, 2014 by Belghast

Little Projects

I am cheating a bit on this post, and writing it the night before I intend to post it. The plan is for us to go running around in Fayetteville tomorrow, and as such I really need not to take my normal leisurely “not having to rush to work” amount to time to write a post in the morning. Today was an insanely busy day. Right now I am taking a few days off work because it is Fall Break here in Oklahoma, and since my wife is a teacher she is out. One of the problems with living with a teacher is that you pretty much have to plan your time off around school breaks. For awhile we had planned on doing a little project, originally the intent was to rip up all of the carpet in the bedroom and paint the floor.

As time got closer to fall break we backed away from that notion, mostly because it would quite literally take all four days of this little break… and since my wife has had an insane semester so far… she really needs to take an actual break, and not a working one. Instead we opted to do a bunch of little things around the house today. Our house for starters was in massive need of a deep cleaning. Additionally we needed to gather up and take another load to Goodwill. The front closet was our key mission, and for quite some time it had been packed with coats and shoes we weren’t actually wearing any longer.

Instead we took what was useless space and turned it into something useable. Previously the closet was full with a bunch of coats that were too big for us since the weight loss. The floor was full of shoes that we longer wore, and the top was full of a bunch of board games that we had not touched since college. We kept the few things we were actually going to use from all of those categories and the end result left us a bunch of open space. We moved an 8×2 cube unit into the empty space, allowing us to store our SLR equipment on top of it, and use the other bins for scarves and such, and the lower two bins for storage of our current shoes. This left a spot on the right side that was perfect for our laptop cases, and just enough room to hang the handful of coats we decided to keep. One of the nice things is once we end up organizing something… it tends to stay organized so here is hoping that is the case with this as well.

Movies, Roulette and ArcheAge

When I finally crashed on the sofa after working on the house all day long, I logged into Final Fantasy XIV and ran my daily elite roulette with my good friend Cylladora. It went pretty smoothly and when it was finished we both logged out of FFXIV for a bit. I opted to poke my head into ArcheAge for a bit since right now it is pretty much a solo affair for me. A few days ago I applied for Greymoon the guild that everyone I know is playing the game is in… and was accepted, but I have zero clue how to actually go about getting an invite. None of the folks I know have been around since I got accepted, so I figure I will just wait until one of them is on to ask them. The guild requires folks to log into teamspeak, which seems a little odd to me. Granted I spend most of my time connected to TS, but it feels strange to require that folks just log in out of course rather than for them doing so with a purpose.

I am still slowly working my way through the content, and I am closing in on 22. I managed to get a pretty sweet katana to drop earlier which was a massive improvement over the blue sword I had been using for awhile. I took a handful of deaths because I really was not paying nearly as close of attention as I probably should have been. Lately I have been hanging out on the sofa and watching television while playing games, but tonight I opted for a movie. I had yet to see the Amazing Spiderman 2, so I decided to watch it. All in all I think it was a pretty good comic book movie. I’ve never been a massive fan of Spiderman, but I think all kids who read comic books at least know a bit of the storyline and a few of the major villains. It seemed like they did a good enough job at representing both the Green Goblin and Electro. It was good enough to pull my attention from the game a handful of times leading to deaths.

8 Bit Boy

A few days ago I watched the awesome Missy Mojo playing an interesting game on her stream. The game reminded me of a mishmash of a bunch of the late 8 bit Nintendo games as sort of a combination of McKids and Super Mario Brothers 3. 8-Bit Boy pays homage to so many different games and is an absolute steal at only $3.99. I have been playing it off and on, and while I don’t find it in the same league as the various frustration games like Super Meatboy, I find it plenty challenging. I’ve reached a point where the game has started to feel a bit like the special levels in Super Mario World. It isn’t the type of game I can play a lot of in one sitting, but I keep returning to it and whittling away at progress.

There is a certain generic character to the game, that would normally turn me off. The main character is just about as bland as you can get and at the same time looks somewhat like Mario, the character from Adventure Island, and even a little bit Alex Kidd. I think I would have rather the game actually built a strong character for you to play than something that ends up being his amalgam that never is as strong as any of them. The level design kinda feels super generic as well, borrowing elements from a ton of different games. So all of these things would normally turn me off, but I have to say the game play makes up for it in spades. It controls like pretty much the best version of all of the games it is trying to replicate. If you are into that sort of thing, you should totally check it out.

#ArcheAge #FFXIV #8BitBoy

Doomlords and Paladins

October 16, 2014 by Belghast

The Tobold Effect

Yesterday was a strange day because every now and then one of my posts develops a life of its own. I had gotten an email saying that I had a comment waiting in queue. I keep my blog set to moderate new comments because for whatever reason I get a truly phenomenal amount of spam. Every now and then one of them makes it through Akismet and ends up as a real comment. So instead of letting these just sit out there without noticing them, I have my wordpress set to moderate the first comment from a specific poster, and once I have approved them they can comment from that point on freely. So while in wordpress I happened to look at my Jetpack statistics page and saw something weird.

For a moment I thought the stats were completely borked or something, but upon closer inspection I was in fact having what looked to be a spike in readership. When looking through the referrers I saw a name there that I had not seen before. Apparently Tobold created a post with nothing but a link to my “Sandboxes and Sheep” post on ArcheAge, and then bam we were off to the races. While I might be occasionally getting lambasted in his comment stream, I guess there is no such thing as bad publicity? I mean I really did not write that post to be anything than me adding my counter point to the posts that were linked. I was not trying to condemn pvp, but just present an alternate viewpoint to “there are no consequences”.

In any case on an average day I have around 150 readers, and that day I saw that number up up to be like 750ish. Here is hoping that some of them might stick around for awhile, and if so welcome to the new folks who are reading me ramble. I post something new every day, and you get my unfiltered thoughts as on the average morning I start writing around 6 am and write hard and fast for thirty minutes to an hour and produce the post you see each day. I did not necessarily set out that day to write the post I ended up writing, but instead that is what happened to flow out when I put text to screen. The only thing I would add to the comment stream, I was an Alpha player of ArcheAge so while my current character is only level 20, I have more experience than that would denote.

Less Toxic Community

I freely admit that most of my opinion of ArcheAge as a whole comes from early testing of the game. I got into alpha testing back in May when a friend of mine hooked me up with an invite. Overall I think my first impressions were favorable, but as I played it was the community that ended up grinding me down. The griefing was prevalent, and most of it did not involve pvp combat at all to be truthful. I’ve talked about some of my experiences before, but ultimately I detached myself from the game because of the toxic community. With the games launch this was my number one detractor from giving it another shot, that and the fact that at 35 in Alpha I pretty much stalled out due to the constant pvp ganking while trying to quest. Both of which were sad because the game still has quite a bit to offer players of all stripes.

Coming back I have been pleasantly surprised I guess is the best way to put it. While the community is still fairly horrible when compared to say Final Fantasy XIV with their awesome pugging experience… it is at least as good as say World of Warcraft, which is to say it is pretty much the norm for a massively multiplayer game these days. While the public channels do sound a bit like /trade or barrens chat most of the time, they can be pretty easily ignored. I am not sure if simply the worst offenders have moved on to other games, or have at least moved on to bigger content and are no longer in the areas I am in… but in any case I have not actually experienced the non-pvp griefing like I did in alpha.

I think maybe in alpha folks were just like a child testing the limits of their parents will. So many of the things I think folks were doing just because they “could” do it. The fact that most of those early invites were youtubers and streamers probably amplified this toxic nature. There were a few awesome streamers like Kiwi, but also a lot of not so awesome ones whose streams consisted mostly of “watch me abuse these players”. If you went afk in alpha… you were more than likely going to get pushed out of town by a tractor and find yourself dead in the countryside. So it is all of these experiences that have so negatively colored my opinion of the game and left me not wanting to really give it a shot at launch.

Doomlords and Paladins

So I have watched this games progress and played the role of the grumpy curmudgeon as various friends decided to give it a shot. I was fairly happy to ignore it until I realized something. By some quirk almost all of the people I know and care about playing the game seemed to have ended up in the same location. Firstly I noticed that most of the players were on the Naima server, and while I figured a lot of folks would end up playing the “catgirl” faction… it turned out that almost all of them were on West the faction I actually preferred. To make matters worse, I realized that almost everyone happened to be in the same guild. This is the point at which I started to contemplate actually playing the game. What makes it stranger is that several of the groups of friends, don’t actually really know each other. So they all seemed to arrive there independently.

As such I have been trying to look at the game with somewhat fresh eyes, and give it a fair shake where I had not before. The game itself is really fun, but at this point I am not really sure why. I keep flipping back and forth between Paladin and Doomlord, because I am really not sure which one I prefer. Paladin seems to be considerably better for pure survival, but Doomlord has a lot of fun toys. Right now I have both a charge and a death grip attack, which makes me extremely happy. The healing capabilities of Paladin sadly are not terribly useful in combat. Like I can throw a heal over time on myself, but the amount of health it heals versus my hitpoint pool feels insignificant.

What I would love to find is a version of tank that plays like a Shadowknight or a Deathknight, where my attacks basically proc heals. Not sure if such a beast exists and is still at the same time “tanky”. The biggest surprise has been just how willing people are to group up for objectives. The main difference with this game is that there is the ability to send out a group invite to anyone in the vicinity. So many players do that by course before starting an encounter. The negative is that there is no passive tagging system, so the first player to hit anything owns the encounter. I realize this is an older game, but I find it hard to believe that any game would choose active tagging for mobs at this point.

Chief Concerns

My biggest concern for this game is the fact that Trion does not have any real control over it. They run the servers, and can fiddle with bits in their databases… but as far as the client and server code they do not have any access to that at all. They are essentially a third party reseller of this game to the western markets. There are a lot of things that players requested in Alpha that have come out as not being functionally possible, or XL Games was completely unwilling to consider them. There are features that are just requirements for a modern game like the ability to invert the mouse axis, that are missing. I know of at least one friend that simply cannot play the game because of this. At the end of the day, while I have warm fuzzies about Trion… I have to realize this is not their game.

If this changes I might have more hope, and I feel like they are doing their best to accommodate the play style of western gamers. I have listened to a few discussions on this however, and so many of the things that we are requesting… just don’t make sense to XL Games who is entirely focused on the Korean MMO mindset. What I would love to see is for the code to be forked in such a way as Trion had the ability to “improve” the game, but the problem there is that we then get cut off from the main trunk of the tree and it becomes extremely hard to obtain all of the expansion content. The Korean version is considerably further along than the Western version, in that there are even additional races like the Dwarves. It will be interesting to see how things shake out.

#ArcheAge

Pre-Warlords Patch Time

October 15, 2014 by Belghast

Tis the Season

I have to say I am more than a little bit scared that this crap I have had for the last few weeks is not just “allergies” as I had originally thought. The last couple of days whatever it is seems to have settled into my lungs, and it is getting a bit harder to actually breathe. I still would not think anything about it really, apart from the fact that my boss has been out the last few days for a fairly serious case of bronchitis. I guess in truth it isn’t so much the bronchitis that is serious but more so the fact that he has bronchitis… and only one lung. In any case something appears to be going around, and considering the close proximity in which we all work together… it is likely if one of us catches something we are all going to catch it.

The positive I guess is the fact that today is my Friday. Since my wife is off for fall break the next couple of days I decided to take them off as well. As of yet we don’t really have any solid plans other than a few projects around the house. In any case even if I feel like shit, at least I don’t have to go into work right? Thankfully most of the projects are just time intensive rather than labor intensive so I can totally muddle through them with junk in my lungs. If things get much worse I will either go to the doctor or go to urgent care and hopefully get a steroid course or something to clear it up. I would probably call in this morning, but since my boss has been out for the last two days… and I have been attending meetings in his place… we need to actually do a bit of an information dump before I am gone from the office as well.

Pre-Warlords Patch Time

Yesterday twitter was completely abuzz over the release of the 6.0.2 patch in World of Warcraft that brought in all of the major changes that are always the precursor to a major expansion. One of the biggest of these was the entrance of the brand new player models for all but the Worgen/Goblins. While I had played quite a bit in Alpha… I had not actually copied most of my characters over to see what they would end up looking like. I copied my main Belgrave, but since he is a Worgen it really didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. I made a handful of premades, but when I last did that they still had the whole “single face” issue going on so it was really hard to see just how they would match up the appearances. So when I logged in last night I have to say I was a little shocked at just how strange the transition looked. Above is an image of Belghast prior to the patch and Belghast after the patch.

Something was just off for some reason in the appearance. It didn’t feel like “my” character that I had spent so much time playing and tanking on. So like everyone the first thing I did was run to the barber shop and try and improve the appearance. After some tweaking I finally landed on a look that feels “closer” to how I felt Belghast looked in appearance. What is strange about this entire process is how much I realize that the characters no longer feel like they are “mine”. I am not sure how to articulate that, because it wasn’t until I saw what my characters looked like that I realized how much the face apparently DID matter to me. The differences aren’t that massive, but they just don’t feel like they belong to me any more. They were just these higher fidelity things that happened to have the name and all of the gear of my previous character.

The characters I feel that translated perfectly however were the Dwarves. This shot is of Lodin my original raiding main from vanilla and his after the patch translation. I have to say it is perfect, it captures everything I intended for the character and feels just about perfect. So the handful of characters I have that were dwarves feel the same to me as they did previously. The big problem I seem to be having is with the Humans and Draenei. For whatever reason they just seem to be off in ways that I can’t fully articulate. If I did ever come back, I have a feeling I would be race changing most of my characters to be dwarves, because so far that seems to be the clear winner in this upgrade to me at least. Granted that could just be my natural affinity to the subterranean folk in the first place. In any case my curiosity was sated and other than things feeling odd, I didn’t really have much emotion about the translation either way.

Lalafell Badass

The real fun of yesterday was the fact that Tuesdays are reset day in Final Fantasy XIV. This means I was able to pop back into Syrcus Tower to try for another piece of gear, or one of the tokens needed to upgrade an existing piece of gear to ilvl 110. In addition this was the week that I finally would have enough tomestones of soldiery to be able to purchase the chest piece. Granted I already had a level 100 chest, but there is just something about this chest that the moment I saw it… I knew I had to get it. I have this thing for plate mail skirts in games, that I likely will never fully understand. In world of Warcraft, my favorite set of gear will always be the Paladin Judgement set, and in FFXIV it seems to be right now the soldiery chest. The problem with it is that my bunny samurai helmet no longer really went with it. Thankfully last week I managed to get in on a Behemoth kill which netted me the really badass looking plate helm I am wearing in the above image.

Tuesday nights are traditionally our raid night, but over the last several weeks we have been struggling with getting enough people online at the same time. Last night we sat there with seven for quite a bit, and then two of our newer 50s that are considerably less geared came online. We opted to get their weekly elite hunt done, which would allow them to get just enough gear to be able to enter something interesting. As a way of breaking them into what raiding in FFXIV is like, we opted to do Hard Mode Ultima Weapon. It had been quite some time since we had downed it ourselves, so we were all a bit rusty, but we managed to work through the issues and the massive lag issues our newest charges were having… and defeated the boss. Hopefully over the next few days we can start knocking out the various hard modes for them so that they can do the Hard and Elite duty roulettes for gear and tokens. If nothing else going into Ultima allowed me to take this really badass screenshot. I love my new armor, and while I will miss the bunny samurai hat… the behemoth helmet just looks amazing.

#WoW #FinalFantasyXIV