Tales of the Aggronaut

Super Grape Stomper

June 11, 2014 by Belghast

Silent Observers

So far the issue of Wildstar Attunements has been a fairly polarizing one in the community as a whole. So when I posted my write-up yesterday about why I didn’t think they were a horrible thing… I expected it also to be polarizing. If you look at my statistics for the day, that single post got more unique viewers than anything else by a large margin. However surprisingly even though it got forwarded quite a bit, I really didn’t end up with much commentary. I expected someone out there to tell me how wrong I am, but that surprisingly didn’t happen. I had a friend send me a private message about it however, thanking me for keeping my post “fair” and not adding to the vitriol.

So is it because I approached the post from a calm place talking about my own experiences with bad attunement systems that folks didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to tell me how horrible I was? I am not so deluded to think that the majority of folks actually agreed with me. One of the things I see sometimes in the blogosphere is when one blogger posts about another, telling them just how wrong they are. I’ve done a few of these during my early days of blogging, but it really is not the type of thing I am interested in any more. There is more than enough negativity out there, that I really don’t need to add my own. I really hope that I can be a positive voice and talk about the good in things more than dwell upon the bad. Ultimately I appreciate every voice, even the ones I don’t agree with.

Super Grape Stomper

One of my favorite things in Wildstar is one that has surprised me. I normally have this odd relationship with mini-games in MMOs, and generally try to avoid them. However when I put the Moonshiners Cabin in my skyplot, I found the “This Aint No Bathtub Hooch” challenge to be insanely fun. Most of the housing challenges can be completed every 30 minutes, and often times I will stomp grapes to make moonshine four for five times a night. In part it is the rewards, or at least my attempt to collect all of them. The high end reward is the purple quality bed I wrote about the other day, which is cool but I already have one. The common rewards are either a neon beer sign or 150 reknown, and the rewards I am currently going after is the dye chest. It contains within it one of five random dyes, and I believe I only have three of the five currently. As a result I complete this quest over and over trying to get the last ones.

As a side effect I have a truly silly number of beer signs, and I am basically covering the side of my ship in them. I am not sure if they are tradeable, but if you need beer signs… I am your man. The funny thing about it is there is zero market for them, because the Moonshiners Cabin is pretty much constructable by anyone who chooses to plunk down the gold it takes to build it. The question is… will I still care about it once I have collected all of the dyes available. It is a fairly easy and fun way to farm reknown, but I am just not sure if it is worth paying the weekly upkeep. That is the dirty secret that no one really talks about in the housing system. These cool things we can place, have to be repaired weekly to keep functioning. So far all of the ones I have placed have had a 1 gold repair cost, which at this point is still a fairly significant amount of money. So I have a feeling many of my things… including the crystal jumping puzzle will go away at the end of this week. My mission however is to find the upgrade to my mining plot, because that is one of those things I have found massively useful.

Return to Cyrodil

As much as I have loved my time spent in Wildstar, I do feel bad that I have been horribly neglecting Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar is the new shiny, and as a result is getting my attention as I have a strong desire to level and get all the shiny baubles that come with it. However this really doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of Elder Scrolls Online, because the games literally could not be any more different. Things is I enjoy both immensely and hope to continue playing them both for some time. As a result I am really looking forward to tonight. For some time we have had these semi-regular “Faff about in Cyrodil” nights, and after taking last week off I am ready to get back into the swing of things. The event should give me the focus to sit down and really enjoy Elder Scrolls for an evening. I am not sure exactly what we will do yet, but I had a ton of fun at that Nord town we stumbled across with the Dark Anchor, so if nothing else I would love to head back out there.

Playing Wildstar and Elder Scrolls at the same time is an odd contrast. The one failing of ESO, is that it is extremely hard to group with other players. I really hope this is something they address in future updates because the game is in desperate need of better social systems to allow players to do content other than Cyrodil together. Ultimately we do it… only because that is what we CAN do as a large group. Without a mentoring system, we are pretty much limited to PVP content because it allows multiple levels to blend together and get bolstered up to level 50. I am mostly a soloist when it comes to questing, but the various folks who have tried to quest as a pair have found it extremely difficult to stay in sync while leveling. It has mostly worked for the folks that are always on at the same time, but for those who are not… if the partner gets even the slightest bit ahead it becomes extremely difficult for the other player to catch up.

After seeing how cleanly a game can manage disparate levels grouping together, my hope is that Elder Scrolls adds in some functionality for this. The game is awesome, but other than PVP it is a largely single player experience. That said the game does have some of the most enjoyable dungeons I have experienced, but I wish they had taken a queue from Final Fantasy XIV and simply scaled players down to the dungeons level. After seeing this work in Wildstar I am shifting to the opinion that this is the way all dungeons should work. A dungeon should have a fixed level and it scales the player to that level for the purpose of the content. Sure give the players rewards for their own level… but scaling down blows away some of the problem with “out leveling” content, and makes it easier to help guildies out when the content has “grayed out” for you.

Elder Scrolls Online

As stated above I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online and if you are Daggerfall Covenant I invite you to join in the fun regardless if you are in the guild or not. The plan is we will meet up at Northern High Rock Gate in Cyrodil around 8:30 CST. The guild is aligned to Wabbajack, and if we can manage to get people through the queue, it would be awesome to actually do this event on that campaign. The fallback to this point has been Volendrung, and I hope to be online early to try and assess the feasibility of Wabbajack for the evening. From there we will pick an objective for the night and wander off into the Cyrodil countryside in search of mayhem. If you are not a member of the guild, just add @Belghast and we can get you into the fray.

#Wildstar #ElderScrollsOnline

Wildstar Attunements

June 10, 2014 by Belghast

Bon Voyage

Finally home and sitting on the sofa and starting to tackle the blog post of the day. I ended up taking the day off from work to make sure I was able to do whatever my wife needed me to do this morning. She however has been successfully ferried to the airport, and while I got turned around leaving the airport I got to flex my knowledge of the backroads of North Tulsa to get back home. I am going to have to master highway 11 this summer during the Twitter Math Camp, where I am serving as a shuttle driver. However for the time being I am nice and safe and home.

When I got here it was really nice out, so I opted to go for a little walk rather than having to do all of it this evening. The thing this highlighted however is that I apparently need to try and find some earbuds with a longer cord. If I moved my head too quickly they ripped out of my ears and went flailing to the ground. If I am going to make it through the nightly ritual of walking I am going to have to do it to music. So after while I guess I will make a trip out to target or best buy and see what I can find. Once upon a time I had a set of head phones that had little behind the ear clips, so I am thinking I need to find a pair of those.

Wildstar Attunements

For some time now an infographic has been circulating around the internet outlining the “12 step process” for raid attunement in Wildstar. I admit when I first saw it, I was extremely hesitant because it is quite the ordeal… however the longer I have “lived with it” the more I think it might be just want the doctor ordered. I talked about my feeling regarding attunements and skill checks this weekend on the AggroChat podcast, but this mornings post is completely devoted to two excellent posts I read yesterday from Liore and Syl about the subject. I am not going to preface or summarize the posts, because you really need to just read their own words on the subject. Instead I am going to go off in my own rambly direction to talk about skill gates and attunements in general. If you are curious about the 12 step image… it is spanning the right side of the page… for dramatic effect.

Evil Attunements

Once upon a time in another life I was a somewhat successful raid leader in World of Warcraft. I lead a few raids during the 40 man era, but got really serious about doing it during the Burning Crusade 25 man era with the non-guild based raid groups of NSR and Duranub Raiding Company. I know the pain that attunements can be all too tragically as a raid leader. In order to get fresh blood into your raid, it meant either you spent time running old content and gearing those players up… or you resorted to stealing members away from fledgling raids that were maybe not as highly progressed as your own.

The problem with the World of Warcraft attunement system, was that it required an entire raid to complete. This was a constant drag on the raid system, and meant lots of players would have to join one raid just to get keyed to be able to join a bigger one. This system invoked so much animosity, just like it did back in Everquest where the system really saw the first light of day. During the Planes of Power expansion, getting keyed for various planes became a power vacuum that only a few elite guilds allowed anyone to have. Considering the raid designers for World of Warcraft were themselves the leaders of these elite raids… it was not surprising that the keying system ended up something very similar.

The Gatekeeper

The problem is that the attunements also served as a way to gate the content, and provide a level of gearing that you must be able to get past in order to proceed. To some extent they have tried to do this with item levels, but that in itself is also inefficient. Just because a player has a really high gear score, it tells you nothing about their ability. I’ve known more than a few players who have reached high gear score out of persistence, and still perform horribly in a raid environment. For ages these games have needed an objective measure for just how prepared a player is for the encounters contained within a raid. Nothing feels worse than having to be that raid leader, and tell a player that they simply do not perform well enough for the raid to carry them along.

One of the best mechanisms I have seen in a game to gate based on player skill… is the not terribly creatively named “Gatekeeper” encounter in The Secret World. In fact I have gushed about the need for this encounter on more than one occasion, but the latest is in the “WoW Needs a Gatekeeper” post. This encountered required you to complete a specific test designed to exemplify your ability to heal, tank or dps nightmare level content. Your reward for completing it, was literally the ability to get to the nightmare level gates in the game. As a DPS player at the time, I have to say that the test fully prepared me for the rigors that would be Nightmare difficulty content, and I am sure eventually raid level content.

What was so great about the encounter was that it was entirely personal. No one could carry you through it, or even assist you. You had to come to a solution to the puzzle of how to complete all of the necessary tasks to progress forward. This type of skill gate draws a clear line in the sand between the players that are ready and the players that are not, and takes a lot of the stress off the raid leader. I don’t like elitism, but raiding was never one of those things designed for the masses. It is designed to be an extremely rigorous skill based activity, much like high level PVP. The harsh reality is that not everyone should be able to raid. That is not to say that I don’t think there should be valuable high end content for everyone to complete. But I don’t necessarily think that raiding should be something that every player has the expectation of being able to do.

Why Wildstar Isn’t Evil

One of the coolest things about the Gatekeeper encounter is it gives players a shared struggle that they had to get through to be able to progress to the next level. My friends and I still to this day talk about what a colossal pain in the ass the dps version was. It took me 25 tries and I think it took my friend Warenwolf around 30… because we were both too damned stubborn to respec to the “optimal” path to complete it. We beat the damned thing on our own terms, and now carry it as a badge of honor. This is what raiding used to be, not about elitism, but about defeating something really hard together as a group and carrying with it a sense of pride in that accomplishment. I honesty feel like Wildstar is trying to return to that era when you felt like you earned every inch of space in each dungeon or raid you completed. I for one am fine with this change, even if it means I will likely never be able to raid again. I just hope that they put in content to keep me entertained in my casualness.

The main reason why I feel like the Wildstar attunement process is just is the fact that for the most part it is a personal journey. Steps 1-5 are entirely soloable, or at the very least zone events that will likely have other players completing them without the need for a premade group. Step 6 requires a group but should be able to be completed through pugging if you need to. To be honest every single achievement listed in the attunement, is either solo or something you can accomplish with either a freeform group inside of the zone, or puggable through the dungeon finder system. Sure you can get your guild to help you out significantly on several of the steps, but the length of the quest chain means that not many guilds will be dragging players through it. This means the onus of the entire event is on the player, and not on a guild or a raid to “catch them up”. So while it is not a one stop shop like the Gatekeeper, I feel it creates a sufficient skill gate to make sure that the players are prepared for raiding in Wildstar will likely mean.

I feel like Wildstar is a game with so much casual but challenging content, that there is always going to be something for the players that cannot raid to do. While World of Warcraft has made so many steps to make raiding an inclusive thing… it feels like it lost the epic quality that it used to have along the way. Some of my best moments in gaming came from Vanilla and BC era raiding, because when we FINALLY downed a boss… it felt like we had done something spectacular. When I got that tier set… it felt like it was a long fought struggle… and not something I gained by simply “putting in enough time” or “grinding enough currency”. I feel like raiding could definitely use an infusion of hardcore again, even like I said earlier… if that means I won’t be able to participate.

#Wildstar #Attunements

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Inappropriate Bed Time

June 9, 2014 by Belghast

Lazy Sunday

Yesterday we pretty much had the textbook definition of a “Lazy Sunday”. After getting almost 13,000 steps on Saturday, I only managed to hit 3,500 yesterday. We had rain to deal with off and on all day, and pretty much opted to stay indoors and vegetate. I think given how hard we have pushed we both could use a day off. Also my wife has been out of school for a week but never really gotten a single day to just recuperate. To make matters worse Tuesday she is flying out for the first of many conferences she will attend this summer. As such it also begins the part of the summer that I hate the most… trying to get used to being alone and then simultaneously get used to being not alone.

I am probably odd that it takes time for me to ease into any change in my environment. I have always been someone who could adapt to rapid and momentary interruptions extremely well. I remain calm under pressure, and get hyper focused on fixing whatever issue is at hand. Ironically I am extremely horrible at dealing with sustained change. When my world is thrown upside down but not immediately righted… I am not a happy camper. I have these little rituals, like this morning blogging thing… that when I do not get to observe them… nothing else is really right the rest of the day. So you can imagine how much turmoil the summer brings me since I tend to have a wife one week and then she is gone the next… and this lasts for at least the month of June but often times some of other months as well.

Easily it takes me a good three days to adjust to any change, sometimes longer. So if she is gone a week 3 days of that will be with me in personal turmoil as I adjust to her being gone. Then when she comes back there will be another three days of me adjusting to the fact that it is no longer just me and the cats in the house. I feel like I deal with all of this fairly well considering, but there are generally some severe low points while she is not around. Thankfully this year she will be travelling back on my Birthday, because in past years she has been gone for it… making it all that more of a depressing occasion. The week days are pretty easy thankfully because the routine of work keeps me pretty busy, and then at night I end up gaming the night away. The weekends on the other hand are pretty rough to be all by myself in the house. Hopefully this year will be a bit easier since I will still need to maintain the routine of walking every night.

Inappropriate Bed Time

Among my friends I have developed a reputation for having unnaturally good luck when it comes to drops and getting the random number generator to perform for me. One of the nifty things that I added to my house is the Moonshiners Cabin. Once every thirty minutes you can play a mini-game to brew a batch of moonshine. So far this is one of my favorite housing mini-games because really… it takes zero skill, just the ability to do a few tasks quickly. If you complete the game you get to roll for 150 reknown, a Neon Beer sign pictured above, one of 5 random dye colors, or the penultimate reward a purple quality “Granok Four Poster Bed”. The bed is also pictured above, but given my odd lighting in the house I am not sure if you can really see it in all its glory. It is a rather large bed decorated with so many odd things. Let me run them down really quickly… a pair of steer horns, a target riddled with bullet holes, a pink heart pillow, a camo pillow, a tiger striped pillow, stage lighting, a camera pointing at the headboard, an LCD monitor showing the beds headboard, and a clothes line with a bra and a pair of tube socks.

I am pretty sure the owner before me was rigging the bed to film porn, but I am not 100% sure. Maybe they were just part of some elaborate sleep study. In any fashion it totally fits the motif of my house which is “Intergalactic Airstream Trailer”. Essentially I want to be that crazy Chua in a teardrop trailer lost somewhere deep in the woods. Right now I am sharing my house with my pet carrots, and I intend to add as many adorable plushies as I happen to find to the house just to crank up the uneasiness factor. I am decorating the house as a “Chua Unhinged”…. which in reality is pretty much every chua everywhere. I was too cheap to buy a proper divider, so I am just using a forest of Elden Holograms to provide a visual divider between the living room and the bedroom. In the bedroom you have the creepy bed, a Chua regeneration chamber, a Chua mechanical arm… that holds a really huge missile. All things that any proper marginally insane Chua would need on a daily basis.

The thing that still has me over the moon about the Wildstar housing system is that so much of it is “functional”. I love Rift and EQ2 for having super detailed cosmetic housing systems… and to be honest in both cases the systems are generally more detailed in what you can do with them. The trump card that Wildstar plays is that they have given you a reason other than for bragging rights to have a cool home. So many of the things that you place in your home can be interacted with and used. For example this is a shot of my friend Tam’s house and he has a crafting table, that works just as well as the crafting tables in any of the cities. Since we are neighbors I can pop over and use it at any time, as well as mine his ore for him… with him getting the lions share of the reward from doing so. They have managed to create housing that not only is interesting and functional… but that also still has deep social ties.

Thirty Minutes Too Late

Throughout most of the weekend my friends and I had been missing each other online for the purpose of running the first Adventure. We often had four within the right level range but not quite five. I am prone to fits of walking away from the screen without warning, and at one point last night I did just this to cook dinner. When I got back in they were about halfway through running the adventure without me. This is no biggy, because I am sure I will get in on another run… but the worst part is I think I am the only one of us who is actually building fully tanky. I feel sorry for Rae because she got drafted into tanking as a Stalker with no tanking gear and no experience using any of the tanking abilities for her class. I stole the above photo from Scopique… and I am assuming at some point today he will have a rundown on his blog.

It sounded like they had a fairly rough time, but everyone soldiered through… no pun intended. I am curious if the engineer tricks will make it easier or not. One of the things I am really digging is that the engineer has a lot of active mitigation. There is this death and decay like mechanic that I drop called Unsteady Miasma. Firstly it deals AOE damage to the group in a 5 meter circle, but the important thing is it gives up to five mobs a debuff called blunder. When that procs it causes their chance to be deflected to increase by 28% at the current tier. As a result this causes me to deflect a not insignificant number of their attacks once you factor in my own deflection bonuses. This is the sort of thing that you want to keep up all of the time, and when I started doing so I noticed my ability to solo 3 man bosses increased massively.

At this point I figure I am about halfway through Auroria, and roughly halfway to level 21. My intermediate goal for the weekend was to hit 20, and I did so just barely. One of the cool things about adventures is that if you are over the suggested level it mentors the party down. This means at least to some extent the content stays evergreen. I am doing a really poor job of following the quest chains, and as a result I have stuff scattered all over the map that is incomplete. Deredune was pretty straight forward, but I was subjected to more than a few “whats over here” moments… and when I got to Auroria the gloves came off completely. I have followed so many wild goose chases in search of ore or an explorer quest item. I feel like I am doing a really poor job of progressing considering I am already starting to lag behind some of the guild members. That said… as busy as I was last week I didn’t really feel like I got to play much.

Wildstar Adventures

Tonight is going to be a busy night to say the least. We will have to do the traditional mad dash around the house to gather up items and pack my wife for her trip. So I am really not sure how much time I will really get to play. However if I do manage to get a solid block of time before or after my walk… I want to run the first Adventure. So this is my goal, I just have no clue at all if I will accomplish it.

#Wildstar #Housing

Band Back Together

June 9, 2014June 8, 2014 by Belghast

Lackluster Milestone

This past week I have been pushing hard to meet a personal goal. Inside FitBit on your profile page they have this little progress bar with a weekly goal of 70,000 steps. So I have been pushing all week to try and hit 10,000 per day to make sure I could reach this goal. I thought lights and buzzers would go off when I hit it, or at the very least I would earn a badge for it. Problem is that we recorded the AggroChat podcast last night, and immediately afterwards we went for our evening walk. When I got back in my mind was on the podcast that I needed to edit and I spent until well after midnight doing just that. So by the time I actually came back to the website and checked my progress… the bar was back at 0. I never got to see the bar full, because I really wanted to take a screenshot of it. Unfortunately however they have no mechanism to go back and see how you did the previous week… seems like a massive design flaw.

Right now my 7 day average is over 11,000 steps and my total for last week is 79,818. I have to just be at peace knowing that I did in fact accomplish the goal… even though there is nothing showing that I did. The problem with the fitbit is it is also a double edged sword. When things aren’t being tracked I just as quickly stop caring about the overall progress as I started. I try my best to charge my band at work when I am not going to be walking around for a bit. However at one point Friday I got up to go to the bathroom… and started to take the “long route” that involves basically walking the entire floor… but stopped the moment I realized I didn’t have my band on. If it was not getting recorded… it was immediately not worth the effort. I know this is a jacked up way of looking at things, but anyone who has done one of these always on pedometers likely experiences the same thing. I am somewhat disgusted with myself because this is only steps away from “food only being good if you took a picture of it”, but alas the positive effects of the fitbit far outweigh the negatives.

Band Back Together

Last night was a fairly monumental occasion because for the first time in a month we had our regular cast of hosts for the show. Rae has officially decided that she no longer hates us… even though she swears that she never actually did. She has started employing the wonders of her phone and setting an alarm for recording time. This week we talk about all sorts of interesting things. Kodra is going to be out next week at Origins game fair in Columbus Ohio. This con has a pretty proud tradition of competitive gaming and he is going there to participate in the regional for the My Little Pony card game. We’ve talked about this TCG before, but Kodra gives us a nice long rundown of the two decks he is considering taking to the competition and the strong points of each.

We talk for a bit about the World of Warcraft Alpha launch and more specifically its timing. Finding it really interesting that for the most part it has no NDA. I am wondering if this is going to be the case for all new Blizzard games considering Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm do not have NDAs associated with them either. Finally we get around to talking about the real big event of the week… all of us dipping our toes into Wildstar. It was a really great show, and it was awesome to finally have the regular cast all in one place again. Kodra introduced a new feature at the tail end of the show, where he, Rae and Ashgar talk about the League of Legends LCS games… and I sit in the background confused with nothing at all to add to the conversation. That said I am going to try and watch a few games to see if I can get into it now that I am regularly playing league again on Thursday nights.

Shards Online

For the next several hours you can download and play the trial of Shards Online. One of my good friends is on the community team for this game, so I have been promising for a bit that I would check it out. At face value the game seems like the spiritual successor for Ultima Online. Functionally playing it, it feels a lot like playing Neverwinter Nights mixed with a MOBA. You essentially have the standard left click to attack auto abilities and then special abilities aligned to QWER. Functionally it is a unity based game, so that means it should run well on multiple platforms. The current client is pretty poorly optimized and on my laptop that has dual Nvidia 660 GTX video cards… I was only seeing around 30 frames per second. However given time that should change as they optimize the settings.

The gameplay is really intuitive and straight forward, and for the most part I felt like I could take a number of mobs in the test shards. The shards that are available are all significantly smaller than the final size, and designed simply to give a player a feeling for the gameplay. The real promise to me is that players will be able to have a certain measure of control over their own game worlds. In the days after I left Everquest, every so often I would dabble in the emulator server community. I had insane amounts of fun redesigning zones and on one of my forays I completely reworked the way that the entire butcher-block to crush bone sequence worked evening out the rough spots in the leveling curve and re-itemizing the entire thing. I worked on bringing the Dark Elf influence to a higher effort with camps of actual Dark Elves scattered around the closer you got to crush bone.

So for me the promise of shards is that you can legally run your own server, and configure a community the way you want it. That said I am not sure if this is a game for me. I really do not like a click to move environment, and the graphics while charming feel like a throwback to an earlier era. I simply do not have the nostalgia about Ultima Online that many players do. I played a very small bit of it before finding Everquest and getting into that game. So my “good old days” are not Ultima but instead a mixture of EQ, DAoC and Vanilla World of Warcraft. As a result I feel like I am missing a piece of the charm that is this game. For someone who pines for a return to the days of Ultima Online… I feel like this is your opportunity to get into a world and help shape it. For me, it is just a really interesting novelty.

Shards is a game where you start out extremely weak and then build up your character over a number of painstaking levels. As a result my desire to zerg rush camps and play action hero style caused me to see this screen a lot. Not sure if there was really a death penalty other than having to wait for the release timer to tick down, but I died often enough to realize this is not my style of game in that aspect either. I think it is going to be interesting and I hope we see a massive surge in funding thanks to the preview weekend. I think the lackluster funding is mostly a side effect of kickstarter fatigue and the lack of kickstarter MMO projects that have actually released. In a way however I also feel like Shards is a game for an earlier era, and is not really the type of game to appeal broadly to currently MMO gamers. If you however want a trip down Ultima Online memory lane… this game is for you, and I hope you give it a try.