Tales of the Aggronaut

Working as a Group

June 21, 2014 by Belghast

Different Expectations

Lately there has been some discontent in the guild, and it has made me painfully aware that different people are looking for vastly different things. There is no right or wrong answer here, but simply a case of wildly different expectations of what they have come to expect out of a guild and MMO relationship. I am not speaking for the guild or anyone in it in making this post, but I thought it might be useful for me to outline how I personally view a guild. Like I said just because I see something this way doesn’t mean there are not a wide variety of other opinions on what is proper and good in guild etiquette. However I’ve learned the fastest way to resolve any rough spots is to simply outline what you are expecting out of an arrangement.

Each of us comes to MMO gaming and guilds from a different set of past experiences. While some of these overlap many times they do not, and that is where the misunderstandings stem from. Massively Multiplayer games are not this monolithic experience, regardless of how we might think of them as such. For me I come from a raider background, and even though I am mostly “casual” these days it still colors everything about my gaming experience. Some players approach a guild from a PVP standpoint and then get frustrated when not everyone embraces the aspect of the game they enjoy the most. Similarly role-players could feel left out in the cold when the guild as whole does not share their interest for deep personal character development. While we might all think we play exactly the same game… that is almost never the case.

Working as a Group

I love doing big epic things with my guildies like raids or dungeons or even some pvp encounters. The problem is… that while I love grouping up for these few cases… I don’t ever want to quest with another person. I did Star Wars the Old Republic as a dedicated Duo… and found the experience to be both rewarding on one hand, but deeply claustrophobic on another. I’ve always found the group leveling experience, and especially the group questing experience to be extremely chafing. Someone is always a quest ahead of the group and someone is always one or two quests behind. There is a constant awkward struggle to try and keep this many armed abomination moving forward efficiently. As a result my preference will always be to quest alone, and have my personal time.

That is not to say I am not willing to group up at a moments notice… but I want there to be a “purpose”. If you need help killing this or that objective, or if there is an over world dungeon that you just can’t quite survive by yourself… those are awesome times to group. That said I like there to be a fixed duration of the grouping and a fixed goal in mind. I am a truly horrible group mate, because I will wander off on my own constantly. I’ve spent so much of my gaming time with other people depending on me for this or that, and when I level it is my time where I get to not give a shit about the needs or wants of others. When we are in a dungeon and I am tanking however… I am all about the needs of the group and the goal of getting us through the dungeon successfully.

The Reality Check

For most of my gaming experience I figured most players felt like I did, and preferred to quest alone. However over the last few weeks I’ve come to the realization that there is a specific group of player that wants to literally be grouped up 24/7 and working together towards everything. I think this is both noble and cool to have a leveling buddy like that… but I want no part of it at all. What is cool is that there are enough of these folks that they should be able to form their own little “band of brothers” and conquer the world together, but they lack the spark to do just that. I guess in part I didn’t even realize players wanted this since the ability to solo at all for me at least feels like a hard fought battle. In the early generations of MMO games, grouping was required to do anything at all, and it often meant a multiple hour long commitment.

I cut my teeth playing Everquest, and as a Dwarven Cleric… trying to solo anything was an act of futility and my nights were often dictated by whoever happened to be tanking for the group. I felt helpless and completely out of control, being forced to depend on someone else for my fun. It was a feeling I did not like one bit. So when I entered more modern games, I would pick whatever archetype could solo well and be relatively self sufficient. Thankfully these were almost always tanks, since they mostly had the survival ability to take whatever the game threw at them. So I decided that I actually liked being able to solo on one hand, and being the cornerstone of a group on the other. The further into management I have gotten in my real life, the more I have craved my “solo” time in MMOs, where I can just do whatever the hell I want to do without having to worry about the needs and wants of the many.

Role of a Guild

So I am sure at this point you are asking yourself… why do I focus so much on the importance of guild and community. Well honestly the guild gives a foundation and friendly faces that I see on a daily basis. It gives me the sense that even though I am off on my own doing whatever I want to do… that I am working together with others towards a common goal of progressing the guild. It is both friendly chat group and a constant source of inspiration and support when you need it. Additionally it gives you access to a lot of really great people when it does come time to group up and do something meaningful in an MMO. The guild shines when it comes time to run an Ship quest, Adventure, Dungeon or PVP match. The other night we had a grand night of doing pvp and it was extremely fun… even though I traditionally shy away from player versus player gameplay.

I’ve always seen my role as a community organizer to be that of laying the ground work and collecting the awesome people all in one place, so that they too can take fate into their own hands and do cool stuff together if they choose to. There lies the problem however, is that so many players want to sit back and have a “Cruise Director” plan events for them to attend. I on the other hand counter that it is the responsibility of each player to take responsibility for their own fun. If you want to do something, do it and convince people to come along with you. I’ve posted a few times about what I term the art of Groupcraft, but I will link it here again. One of the most empowering things you can do for yourself is to learn how to be confident in the assembly of a team that will work.

There are absolutely more successful ways of pulling together a group and making something happen when you want it to. Essentially in my experience you have to talk to people directly to get them to actually notice that you are trying to do a thing. This is much easier on voice chat, since you get the immediate feedback, however I did this same thing for years without the advent of voice chat. The critical knowledge however is what exactly you need to be successful. If you are a tank, then you need to find a healer and a few dps. In order to find the healer, you have to know what classes CAN heal and who in the guild falls within those search parameters. Basically for me a good guild is a friendly group of people that you like chatting with, but also a way to ease the finding of people to do something with. A hand crafted guild group will always be more enjoyable than a PUG, and usually more successful.

Just My Point of View

WildStar64 2014-06-20 22-30-01-908 Please note, like I said before this is just my point of view on the subject and what I am looking for out of a guild and the people in it. This is not some maxim that I will not cross, because lord knows I am liable to turn around this afternoon and end up grouped with someone for a long period of time and enjoy myself. These are just my tendencies and I thought it might be useful to open a dialog about what folks are expecting, by outlining what I am actually expecting. The Alliance of Awesome has been an interesting experiment because it is this big glorious amalgam of a bunch of different communities with their own rich traditions. House Stalwart had a shared guild culture that had been built up over the course of a decade, and it was pretty much expected that everyone in the guild felt the same way.

Going forward into this new experiment, we can no longer afford to expect that. Each of us comes from potentially different backgrounds with some shared and some disparate experiences. We have to come up with a brand new cultural norm as a result. I don’t feel this is the time for anyone to throw their hands up and walk away in a huff because they did not get whatever it was they were looking for. Instead it is time for folks to talk clearly about what exactly they are expecting out of this larger relationship. I think we are on the precipice of having something truly amazing, that we can all benefit from. We just need to take the time not to nurture it as it grows. I would not have poured so much effort into it so far, if I didn’t think it could be great for everyone involved.

Rocket Powered Hoverboard

June 20, 2014 by Belghast

Baby’s First Diablo

It is no real secret that I love Lego, as I sit in an office full of sets waiting to be built and have an army of minifigures decorating my cube at work. So when I first heard that Funcom, the makers of my beloved Secret World were working on a brand new game revolving around the random minifigures bags that I already buy way too often… I figured I would be throwing money at the screen. A good friend of mine managed to get into the alpha and without saying much about it specifically she said it was extremely cute and charming. That about sums it up perfectly… oh and you might throw in adorable. I love the whole “toy store come to life” vibe that you get while playing the first level. You start off with one of three sets of minifigures, I ended up going for the roman soldier, because he is already one of the favorite minifigures I own.

I am not sure who exactly coined the phrase, but so far “Baby’s First Diablo” has stuck, and that is not to diminish anything about the game. It feels very much like a diablo style version of the various “Lego” franchise branded video games. You break up blocks to get resources and stars in this case instead of coins. Then you use special “builder” type minifigures to construct objectives. You can have three minifigures equipped at a time, and right now my team consists of the Roman Soldier that has a charge and a melee swing, the Fortune Teller who is one of those special builder types, and the Bee Girl that drops adorable honey bombs and attacks enemy legos with swarms of bee ranged attacks.

It seems like the game is going to use a model similar to league of legends in that you buy champions in the form of minifigures packs. The only gotcha is that I assume they will be just as random as the actual in store variety is. So if I had to guess you can probably end up with duplicates, but I have no clue at all how that will work. Will you be able to trade your dupes with other players, or will they have some sort of a deconstruction ability to turn them into resources… or are they just going to go with “smart random” in that you never have the chance of getting a minifigure you already have. In that case it would mean you would simply need to buy 16 packs of each type and would eventually get the full set. This is definitely going to be a game I watch as the open beta continues.

Rocket Powered Hoverboard

Just like Griff Tannen in Back to the Future… my hoverboard’s got power. Last night I dinged 25 and was finally able to claim both the preorder hoverboard and the deluxe edition hoverboard. Surprisingly I think I like the deluxe edition quite a bit better. Originally I upgraded to deluxe when I thought I would be sticking around for awhile, and I guess I am happy I did so. On the chua it seems so much cooler looking than the original human preview picture did. I guess the difference is that the preview shots didn’t really have actual in game lighting applied to them, so they made everything look that much more gold and gaudy. In game it looks pretty cool and as short and fat as my chua is… the regular hoverboard just looks too small for him.

So far moving out of Auroria has breathed new life into the game because I did not really understand at the time just how bored with that zone I was. It’s weird because I absolutely loved Deredune but couldn’t be bothered to care about Auoria at all. Now I am in something much more my style the traditional “snowy” zone. For whatever reason I seem to have an affinity for the snow zones in games be it Iron Pine Peaks or Winterspring… that usually ends up as my favorite leveling destination. Additionally I’ve installed a number of mods that make following the quest chains a bit easier so I expect that I will stay on track a little better rather than endlessly chasing rabbit trails. I am still firmly in the middle of the pack level wise, but there are several that are now into their 30s, so I keep feeling the need to “catch up”.

Battlefield Hardline

Game trailers are pretty much all lies, but even knowing that this one gave me hope that we might see an interesting shooter to play. You have to understand that my ideal shooter is one of the Enemy Territory series games, where you have real “objectives” that have to be completed in order to progress the map. Based on this footage and folks using the term objective based shooter… I had hopes that this might be a return to that gameplay style. So I applied for the beta and got accepted to play it on the Playstation 4. Within a few minutes of gameplay all of those hopes were dashed. This game is pretty much exactly like every single Battlefield or Call of Duty game… except this time you get to play cops and robbers. For some that will be a good thing, if you like Battlefield and Call of Duty… but for me it is a pretty damning indictment.

The objectives in Hardline are basically “capture the flag” by another name. Instead of creating a series of complicated objectives that the team has to work together to achieve, it simply creates temporary choke points where death-matching occurs. On top of this… the game just does not feel like a next generation shooter. Everything feels extremely low resolution as compared to say Destiny, in fact I wouldn’t even say those two games are anywhere near the same league as far as look and feel. Everything about this game feels like a “B Team” effort, and I think that is pretty much what players have come to expect out of “off year” titles in the big shooter franchises. Basically if you just want Battlefield 4 with a few changes, then you might enjoy it. If you were like me and hoping for something more… keep looking elsewhere. After all Destiny is just around the corner.

#LegoMinifigures #Wildstar #Hoverboard #BattlefieldHardline

Recording Console Games

June 19, 2014 by Belghast

Bombing Run

Yesterday was an interesting day, partially because I dinged another level and am now officially in my “late thirties”. Most of the morning was spent in preparation for my wife to fly in, and doing a last minute run through the house to “pick up” a bit. Honestly this year I somehow managed to pick up successfully as I went and didn’t really hit the point where I simply stopped caring that there was a pizza box on the kitchen counter. So it really only took a few minutes, and I streamed some Warlords of Draenor while waiting. For a reason that I did not know at the time… none of my voice over was coming through in the stream, but I will get to that later.

I picked up my wife around noon and we ran across town to my favorite Indian restaurant… where I proceeded to order something completely new in honor of the occasion. My standby has always been Chicken Tika Masala medium hot, and no matter how many times I consider ordering something else… I always end up back on that. The new dish was a sort of super spicy egg fried rice with chicken in it that they call Desi Rice. In any fashion it was pretty freaking good. Overall the day was pretty relaxing, and it served as the perfect break in the working week. It was awesome to have my wife back, even if it is only for a few days as she flies out to the second conference of the year Sunday.

What completely overwhelmed me yesterday was all the well wishes from my internet family. Both my twitter and g+ feeds were blowing up with well wishes all day yesterday, and upon logging into teamspeak that night I got another round. I feel completely bombarded, and I thank all of you for that feeling. It kinda feels like the whole Sally Fields “You like me, You really like me” moment. But amazing friends aside… I find it always interesting to see which bot wishes me a happy birthday first. This year and I believe many of the other years recently… the reward goes for the WoW Ace Forums… who wished me a happy birthday at 7 pm on the 17th, which I can only assume is on Australian time? In all seriousness… I am humbled by the amount of support I get from you all.

Recording Console Games

One of the coolest things about the PS4 is that it can stream live to twitch. It also happens to be one of the most disappointing, since the twitch streaming rate is locked to 480p which shocked me. I pretty much religiously stream in 1080p so it was frustrating the first time I cracked open one of my Destiny Alpha videos and saw how blurry the footage was. The other nuisance is that it seems to only record MY voice chat as part of the stream, and not that of the other people I happen to be partied with. The end result is this disjointed experience of listening to an often times hilarious one sided conversation. I figured there had to be a better way.

For some time I had looked at a capture card, but honestly that whole concept was foreign to me. After doing a ton of research I realized there was a huge problem there, with the way the streaming worked. The two consoles that I most wanted to stream from were the Sony Playstation 3 and Sony Playstation 4… both of which I absolutely love. The problem is that in both cases they use HDCP or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection aka a screwball system that tries to encrypt the video data from the source to the television. Apparently the Xbox One also struggles with this, and for some reason in all of these systems it is either on all of the time… or turned on the first time you play a movie and then stays on. Normally this would prevent you from recording gameplay footage, because the recording device is not “HDCP Compliant”.

The widely accepted workaround is to plug these consoles into the capture card using component cables. This however causes its own stream of problems as you take a digital signal… convert it to analog and then convert it back to digital. The end result is often blurry and color shifted and just not something I wanted to mess with. So after a lot of research I stumbled on the above video. Basically the idea is to use an HDMI splitter to get around the HDCP lockout without actually stripping the HDCP protection and making the device illegal for sale. All of this is voodoo to me to be honest, but I wanted to give it a shot. I managed to find an Elgato HD Capture device on Craigslist and got a ridiculously good deal on it, therefore enabling this entire thing to work. As of last night I had the set up going and it worked successfully, after a few attempts to work out the kinks. Sorry for the twitch advertisement spam on twitter.

Rube Goldberg of Streaming

This ladies and gentleman is my streaming setup. I decided to diagram it out in part because it made it actually make sense rather than the jumble of cables that I have running around my desktop. Right now I have both the PS3 and PS4 hooked up in this fashion and will ultimately move the Xbox 360 in here as well. For the setup I am proposing you need the following materials.

The Elgato comes with one HDMI cable and the necessary Micro to Full USB Cable. Like I said I got mine through a craigslist deal for $75 enabling this whole setup to work. So the only thing I was actually missing was the splitter. After doing a lot of research on the subject it seems like only a few splitters do what is needed. Thankfully the one I ordered and linked above is both tiny and works great. Ultimately I want to get some much shorter usb cables because right now… having all these 6 foot cables is a mess. Essentially you hook all of your game systems to the HDMI switch, and then hook the switch to an HDMI splitter, and then hook one of the two outbound ports to the Elgato. That then passes the signal to the television and your computer. You can download software from the Elgato website that does a decent job at capture, but I simply integrated all of this into my existing OBS setup.

Trial and Error

After a lot of trial and error I was able to produce a video of me playing Castle of Illusion on the PS3. I do a rather horrible job at playing the game, but that is entirely beside the point. Basically I could have died over and over and still would have been amused because the setup was working. The only problem is… I seemed to be unable to record any dialog from my microphone. I spent the better part of this video fiddling with my settings in OBS trying to make it function again. The video however looked great, and was streaming to twitch and exporting to youtube in glorious 1080p. The trouble with my headset started over the weekend when I decided to disconnect it from my machine and hook it to my ps4 for the purpose of grouping up in Destiny.

Being a USB headset, everything seemed to go wonky when I did this and everything from mumble, to teamspeak to obs treated the headset as though it had never been connected to the system, forcing me to remap everything. Then I remembered… I had hooked the headset previously directly into my machine, and was now trying to go through my powered hub. So I pulled the headset out, hooked it directly into the machine and bam… all of the sudden OBS started working again. This second video has dialog coming across and with the help of my good friend Ashgar, I managed to sort out the volume levels so that I could actually be heard over the game audio. So I feel like right now I have a repeatable solution for streaming HDMI connected consoles over twitch.

Now my specific setup is not a requirement… there are lots of different ways to do this. Some folks have had good luck installing a cheap capture card in their PC and streaming through that. The Elgato seemed like a more hands free solution to working out the finer points of video conversion. There however are a bunch of different devices on the market that do essentially the same thing. I wanted the Elgato simply because it did not require an additional power source and could draw power entirely from my PC over USB. Since the HDMI switch and splitter each have their own power supplies, this just cut down on the total number of cords needed. Right now the hole thing is a colossal mess, and at some point I want to hook it up with significantly shorter cables. For now however it works great and I am super happy to be able to do this.

Fires of Kel Vorath

June 18, 2014 by Belghast

The Vanishing

There are things that happened yesterday, that I feel like I want to talk about… but at the same time I probably shouldn’t. Suffice to say a good friend of mine pulled the ripcord yesterday and jettisoned out of the internet briefly. I kept trying to figure out if it was something I did or said, but it seems like there were just larger things happening that I will never fully understand. While it was happening though I was supremely confused and depressed to be watching it going on… and felt rather helpless to stop it. I have a bad habit of trying to internalize these things, and trying to figure out how exactly I had failed the person. Luckily for us at least, the person seems to be reversing course a bit… and since friends are friends I am ready to welcome them back with open arms regardless.

A few weeks ago I was moved to send out a blanket tweet and I honestly don’t even remember why at the moment. While I don’t remember what started it, the sentiment is very heart felt. Each and every one of you makes my life better in some way. We might grouse and bicker and have bad days, but at the end of the day I am better off because each of you exists out there and has touched me in some way. We use the word “community” a lot, but in many ways it doesn’t really sum it up. You guys are my family, and not the uncle that you never see and always thought was kind of weird… but the ones you wish you saw more often. As an adult, your friends are the family you choose to associate with. I don’t draw lines between real life and online… because the effect is real either way. So I just wanted to start my blog post this morning in trying to remind you all what you mean to me.

Fires of Kel Vorath

The better part of last night I spent trying to finish out the Auroria zone in Wildstar. The further into that zone you get, the more intense the questing becomes. The other night I ran the Ruins of Kel Vorath dungeon with some guildies, and last night I finally reached that area in zone. It is absolutely massive and everything seems to exist on this grand epic scale. The only thing I can really equate it to is doing the quests outside of Dire Maul in World of Warcraft, but imagine that Dire Maul was maybe four to five times bigger. Almost an hour of that time was spent doing a single zone event quest as I helped the dominion retake Kel Vorath. The rewards were minimal but the experience gain was phenominal. At the beginning of the night I was level 22 and now I am level 24 and about halfway into it.

I came into Wildstar expecting fun mechanics and a really enjoyable world to wander around in and explore. I had zero expectations of epic story so I am really pleasantly surprised to find it. I have no clue how much of the zone I have left. Right now I am hung up on a main story quest because I cannot for the life of me find the mob I am supposed to be killing. The indicator is on my map, and I have wandered around the entire area without finding any place that lets me go underground where the indicator seems to point me. Unfortunately the game is just new enough that there really are not many guides out there that I can even lean on as a crutch. So if I ever manage to find Kaarg the Divine… then I imagine I will be wrapping up the zone in rapid succession. I have the quest leading me out of Auroria to speak to someone at Palerock Post, so I think I am as “done” as it comes other than this one straggler.

PVPness

I don’t have any proper screenshots from last night, so instead here is a shot of me standing on this giant gun. Zelibeli decided to schedule a PVP night last night, and in an attempt to spur it on I showed up and participated. Several of my friends had a pen and paper game going on, so I knew attendance would be at least somewhat limited. I am supposed to be participating in the game, but for one reason or another I have not actually made it to a single meeting. So I figured it was just fine if I didn’t make this one either. We actually had five people ready to go for PVP, the only problem was that we were not complimentary levels. This might be an oversight on their part, but for whatever reason it does not seem like you can mentor down to the lowest player and queue together for PVP. Maybe this is their way of trying to prevent “smurfing”, but in any case it also meant that we all needed to swap to alts to make this work.

I grabbed my level eight warrior, because quite literally… that is the only character I have other than my engineer that has finished the “ship” starter area. First thing I have to say is that I suck horribly at pvp, and as a result I tend to actively avoid it. That said PVP in this game is much like PVP was in Warhammer Online… as in it is a phenominal way to level a character. I went into the night about halfway through level either, and exited the night almost level eleven. We ran maybe five matches, towards the end we were starting to get the swing of things. We were playing Walatiki Temple, which in many ways is like a remix of Warsong Gultch. Instead of being a pure capture the flag scenario, it is a “collect the things” one. In that you capture these Moodie Masks that spawn in the center of the zone and take them back to your base.

The catch is that you can also capture masks from your base. So in theory you have to guard the middle objective and your own base to be able to win it. We were doing a fair job of limiting the hemorrhaging towards the end of the night until someone started shooting off his mouth about how dumb we were for guarding the masks at home… causing the entire team to get distracted and fumble. People really are the worst part of PVP, and I wish in many ways there was NO chat in the battleground. If they simply had a smart ping system like league of legends has, I think most of the chat could simply disappear. The challenge we had last night is that ultimately we ended up against other premades, and quite simply we were not exactly “premade” quality.

In World of Warcraft, if you queued as a five man you got matched against other groups that queued as a five man. From the way that we got trounced I am guessing that the Exile players were a combination of two five man premades. They each worked flawlessly to whittle down our defenses and at the same time keep pushing forwards and taking masks. All of this said… I really was surprised just how much I enjoyed myself, and bolstered by just how little the rest of the AofA folks cared about winning. We were there to play the game and play it as well as we could while we could. With that sort of attitude I can totally see this becoming a regular thing. I like playing anything… and so long as folks keep a good attitude about it I can deal with losing all night long if we do. The big positive is that win or lose you still get a ton of experience and a satchel of goods, so I came out way ahead at the end of the night.

#Wildstar #WalatikiTemple #Auroria #FiresOfKelVorath