Tales of the Aggronaut

Munchkin Mania

May 17, 2014 by Belghast

Too Old for This

Every now and then I will say something like “I am too old for that”, and I don’t really believe that is ever the case. It is just a shorthand for “I am old enough to release that it has consequences and am unwilling to deal with those.” When you get older, you realize that your actions have severe negative effects on your wellbeing at times, and attempt to avoid these at all costs. The funny thing is… staying up until midnight is not a huge deal, I do it all the time. However this usually means that I have had a gradual winding down throughout the evening and am at a super chill place when midnight actually comes. Last night I was out driving through town at 11pm, and it had a vastly different effect, and this morning I am paying for it.

While I greatly enjoyed my evening, I now feel groggy and useless this morning as I sit here attempting to assemble a post. It is a sort of post excitement hang-over of sorts, and as I think about it… it really feels like a mild version of an actual hangover. I am sure I could have slept in more, but my wife brought one of the ferrets in to “play” this morning, and when I looked at the time and felt the grumbling in my tummy I figured it was “good enough”. I can’t be grumpy with my wife for waking me, because in reality it was a good thing I was up at 8 am, will keep my schedule from being thrown off too much. Additionally I wake her up with the ferrets at pretty much any opportunity I get… so turn about is fair play.

Munchkin Mania

So what exactly doing that caused me to drive home last night through the rain at 11:30 at night? Well as I said yesterday a good friend of mine is in town for the weekend to attend the Muskogee Renfaire. As a result Rae decided we needed to have a game night, where we would play board games, eat pizza and generally have a good time. It had been ages since any of us sitting at the table had played munchkin, so we had to relearn the rules. Honestly it probably would have just been faster if we had called up the Munchkin episode of Tabletop on my chromebook and watched it to “grok” the rules a little faster. I am known for being all about the death, destruction and ultimately loot in the games I play, so Munchkin is one of those games that is ideally suited for my sensibilities… even before you factor in that the cards are hilarious.

Our mistake however was the fact that Rae owns both the base set and the Cleric and Ranger sets. We decided to just jumble everything together and play with some massive decks of cards. The problem with this is that in doing so it drags out the game immensely. I should have taken a picture of my hand, but at one point last night I had some dozen bonuses in play and I felt like a little kid playing dressup. I feel like somehow Rae stacked the deck or something, because she managed to win BOTH of the rounds of Munchkin that we played. She is a sneaky one, and kind comes out from nowhere. At one point I was set up to win, and I thought no one could do anything about it. However she was sitting all that time on a card that allows her to right the monster instead of me. Unfortunately my cards were in play, reducing the monster to something we could not buff enough to defeat her.

This is the fun of munchkin, there are no such things as permanent alliances. Essentially anyone that is level 9, just became everyone on the boards enemy. Dallian had the bad luck of drawing a lot of instant level up cards, meaning he became the focus of our aggression early in each game. Like I would manage to sneak in the level up cards every now and then to kinda keep people from noticing that I was gaining power. He on the other hand would lay down 3 in one turn, making folks realize “oh crap! he is winning!” at which point we all turned our guns to bear down on him. I kinda feel bad that this happened since he was the visitor to our fair city and all, but all is fair in love and loot.

Warming Coldharbor

At some point I need to get out and pick up the dry cleaning today, but other than that my key mission is to get through Coldharbor, or at the very least ding 50 trying. At this point I am really amped and ready to move on to the veteran level content. Aldmeri Dominion is the first stop on the veteran content for the Daggerfall Covenant, and this is the faction that I have played the least of. In fact I have not even got past Auridon, or even halfway through it on any character in beta. So I am really looking forward to exploring this area, and killing copious amounts of elves in the process. As my friend said, if you like killing elves… you get to do that more in Aldmeri than any other faction. Unfortunately I kinda wish I could align with the Maromer… angry snake worshipping pirate elves are so much cooler than the Aldmeri.

Other than this I know I want to play some more wildstar at some point. I would really like to see if my Chua Engineer remains fun as I start getting more abilities. Additionally I feel like I have been neglecting ArcheAge, so I will probably be playing some more of that. Basically today I want to vegetate and play lots of games. We have to go to a wedding tomorrow, so today is my one real shot at messing about happily in various games. Hopefully you too can have a relaxing weekend, and I am hoping that Dallian and Rae have a blast at the Renfaire. They really are not my thing, but from everything I have heard says that the one here at the Castle is one of the better ones in the country. One of the absolute best things I have ever heard of is one year when a guy went dressed as Spock, and he kept scanning people with his tri-corder and muttering “fascinating”.

Rebooting Minecraft

May 16, 2014 by Belghast

Guild Meeting

I have an exciting evening planned that I have been looking forward to for a few weeks. One of my long time House Stalwart guild members is here in town, and tonight we plan on having a board game night. Dallian/Doctor Hannah appeared on Episode 5 of AggroChat, and we mentioned the upcoming visit there. He lives in the Little Rock area which makes him a neighbor of ours as far as the internet is concerned. I always think its cool when I get to meet someone in the flesh that I have gamed with for ages. I think the plan tonight is to play loads of Munchkin and eat pizza at Rae’s house. We’ve tried to invite several of the locals to meet up, so it should be really fun. I am contemplating bringing some magic starter decks, but that might be a little too involved. We’ve been talking with a co-worker about maybe trying to play some magic over lunch soon. Apparently his wife is super into the game and would probably even come up over lunch to play it.

I don’t really do this sort of thing that often. I guess the last guild member that I met up with was Lummox who happened to be about fifteen minutes away from where I happened to be staying in Albany. It is always interesting to see how someone is in real life verses their in game persona. For the most part, a lot of the people I have met have been fairly similar. I have to say the closest was probably Urcasio and Ravener, who were pretty much exactly the people I would have expected based on in game interactions. Since I generally find it easier to meet over food, Dal and I are meeting up before this evening for lunch. For years I have been talking about how amazing Ron’s Hamburgers are, and more importantly their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. So we are meeting up at my favorite location today around 11ish. I would love to somehow steal him to town like I managed to do with Rae. I feel like I am trying to build this little gamer community, one person at a time.

Rebooting Minecraft

Last week one of my new friends Missysmojo decided to try her hand at playing Minecraft. I joked with her that she would end up losing the next three months of her life. She opted to stream a little bit, and it got me thinking. It has been years since I have played Minecraft with any regularity. There have been a few times I patched up my client and connected to the guild server just to see what folks were doing, but I had felt like I had “beaten” Minecraft for some time. In this last year there have been significant changes in the game, and probably even more before that I really never noticed. So I thought I would start a brand new game and play completely legit. No mods, no helpful minimap… just the vanilla client and a texture pack (because yeah that is necessary). The above video is the results of that process last night. I am not really sure yet how often I will be streaming Minecraft, but I expect to continue where I left off each time.

For starters… I am really not used to the game any longer. I kept trying to “suck in” blocks and drops like you do in Trove. The low performance of the game frustrated me, because I am not used to it “chunking” and loading in parts of the game slowly freezing my client momentarily when it does. I am sure this is something I can tweak, because I probably just don’t have enough memory flowing to the default client. There used to be a tool called Magic Launcher that handled a lot of the memory allocation for me, so I might look into that. Another dumbass move is I totally thought I was on “survival” mode for the first little bit, running scared from potential monsters… only to find out that I actually was in peaceful mode on the client. Once I noticed that and changed it things started to get interesting.

For starters, it seems like the creeper spawn rate is insane. I maybe saw one or two zombies and skeletons the first night after flipping it to a normal mode, but I saw what felt like half a dozen creepers. I managed to trap four chickens inside my base and I dug a pit like I often do and have them down there for a constant source of eggs, feathers and meat. At some point I want to try and drag a couple of cows and pigs in there as well so I have all of my livestock needs handy. Most of the video involves me setting up “base” as I hollow out a mountain, search for coal and finally start digging down into the earth in search of steel. I encounter a cave with a skeleton spawner in it… and have a pretty epic battle trying to break the cave and torch it off. I had quite a bit of fun, or at least more fun with Minecraft than I have had in ages.

Bunny Doom

I love everything there is to love about the Shin’hare, and the fact that they exist makes Hex so much more enjoyable than Magic the Gathering ever could be. It’s an entire race of adorable evil samurai bunnies… you could slap that into ANY game and I would play it. As a kid one of my favorite comic book characters was Usagi Yojimbo… so everything about this deck feeds my enjoyment. Not to mention that my favorite deck combination in Magic the Gathering was Green and Black… and the Shin’hare are exactly that… Life and Blood aka Green and Black. In some ways it reminds me of playing my thalid deck circa Fallen Empires. I would constantly use that deck to feed my black “sacrifice or I feed” cards. While I am lacking some of the cards in Hex to make this work really well, the starter deck mixed with a few cards I got from my packs seems to be working okay.

Last night I got in and played a few hands against the AI, mostly because it was getting late and I didn’t want to deal with people. I am anxious for when trading comes into play, because of my group of friends I think I am really the only hardcore bunny player. I should be able to help some of them out with cards they are looking for and bolster my bunny army. My all time favorite card is still the Uzume, Grand Concubunny. Not only is the artwork adorable, but the card is insane when you get it out into play.

When I first read this card, I assumed it would start dropping the 0/1 battle hopper tokens that the other Shin’hare cards do on the table. While that would have been good enough, considering the normal concubunnies you have to expend resources and tap them to get this effect. The real effect however is so much better, in that it summons a random non-unique bunny card into play. This can be ANY card, even ones you don’t currently have in your deck. It is literally generating cards for you, but the problem is this makes the card and insane aggro magnet.

I need to formulate some ways to protect the card, because really it is too damned valuable to not have it on the board for more than a few turns. Hopefully soonish I can get together with my other friends currently in the closed beta and play some actual matches. I feel like Kodra is in a completely different league with me, and like to play a style of magic that I do not… but this will not stop me from attempting to beat him. He royally kicked my ass in hearthstone, but it didn’t stop me from coming back for more. These type of games for me are about the moment to moment play and not whether or not I win. In fact that can pretty much be said with any game I play, I am just not that competitive. It is about the journey not the win conditions.

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Cyrodil Excursion

May 15, 2014 by Belghast

Turning a Corner

I am still not overwhelmed with excitement about Wildstar, but I am maybe starting to turn the corner on this game. Last night I opted to work on the warrior a bit more, and it turns out the area I was languishing around had no actual quests for me. One of the frustrations with the game is that the quest advisement on the minimap makes zero sense to me. I keep trying to figure it out, but end up just hopelessly lost as I keep opening my main map to find the objectives. I know there is some sort of a golden path system that you can turn on to get advisement but I find that whole process frustrating. All I really want is a blip on the edge of the minimap showing me where I should head to get to the next sequences of quests. Additionally I had mobs that I simply could not find. There was an NPC in town that no matter how many times I moved through an area, never seemed to be where the quest turn in location was marked on the map.

All of this said, in my flailing I happened to stumble upon an instance of sorts revolving around trying to save Outpost M-13. I was woefully underleveled for the content but found it extremely enjoyable anyway. I entered the instance at level 10 and all of the creatures I stumbled across were 13 to 14. You start the mission as a hired shiphand on a cargo freighter delivering crystals. You are boarded and it is your job to try and protect the freight. I did fairly well here until it came time to fight the actual boss, and then I struggled a bit… having to try two or three times to get past him. Finally we land on a planet, that is absolutely gorgeous. You roam around with a 1950s style spaceman helmet, exploring what appears to be an asteroid with minimal gravity. What is awesome here is that when you jump you get hangtime like you would expect in lower gravity. Finally you wind your way around to Outpost M-13.

The next sequence of events plays out like the movie Aliens as you explore the base and subsequent mine looking for either survivors or the cause of the catastrophe. Mostly if more content like this exists in Wildstar… I might be happy to play it. While I simply could not chew through the hive queen boss, and will likely have to return “at level” I had a blast doing it. If nothing else this sells me on their universe, because stuff like that is really fun. The game still feels rather awkward at times, and I still have my problems with the warrior overall, but at the end of the day I am a melee player. While running around as a Chua with a shotgun was fun, it just doesn’t feel like “me”. So while I am still having issues with their UI design a bit, I am hoping I can fix most of that with modifications. I need to do some searching to see if I can find a serviceable mini-map replacement.

Cyrodil Excursion

For roughly a week I had on the Anook Alliance of Awesome calendar an event called “Faffing About in Cyrodil”. The idea was to grab as many guildies as we could and head to Cyrodil looking for whatever we could do. When we pulled together and finally coalesced we had roughly a dozen players, and not the most balanced party… but we worked with it. At first we made a valiant attempt on Fort Glademist, that was currently being held by the Aldmeri Dominion. However we struggled to even take the Lumbermill. This was partially because we mostly just charged in aimlessly and spread ourselves too thin, but even more so that we were a group of bolstered to level 50 characters… and it was being guarded by actual veteran rank players. The problem with bolstering is that it levels you to 50… but the base stats for a 50 without the benefit of armor increases or anything of the sort. This means as a whole we represented a pack of level 50 paper dolls for someone to rip through.

After making a couple of attempts we got tired of the running back and decided to shift focus to what my original goal was… collecting skyshards and beating bosses. The cool thing about Cyrodil is that it is pretty much a normal questing zone in addition to being a zone full of PVP objectives. So we wandered around the zone, often times aimlessly, collecting the various skyshards along the way. At the end of the night I was up three skill points and had dinged 49, and various other folks in the party had dinged as well. The dungeons in Cyrodil are really good experience, not to mention insane amounts of loot. It is somewhat sad that instanced dungeons are rather pitiful experience if you are not completing the quest, however you can gather up a group of friends and roll through the Cyrodil dungeons for hours and almost level exclusively that way. The respawn is fast enough that we were constantly having to fight our way back out of the dungeons as stuff was popping only one or two packs behind what we had just killed.

I was streaming last night and captured almost the entire thing, and as always posted it up on my youtube channel. It seemed like folks were having a good time, even though we didn’t really have any success at the PVP aspect of cyrodil. It is my intent to do this more often, and I will likely be trying to schedule another one of these nights for next Wednesday. However I think I am going to try and start it a little earlier in the evening. As the night drug on, you could tell that most of us were barely holding in there. This is the negative side effect of being a guild almost entirely made up of 30 somethings… and mostly LATE 30 somethings and 40 somethings. Five thirty in the morning comes really early, so I personally try very hard to head towards bed by at least 11. For our east coast folks that had a lot of them staying up til midnight or so. Hopefully with time we will find a happy medium that works for both the east coast and west coast contingencies.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #WIldstar #Cyrodil

Farmer Belghast

May 14, 2014May 14, 2014 by Belghast

Server Overload

One of the key parts of the preorder process for Wildstar is the ability to reserve a player name and a guild name. Since I am still up in the air about this game I figured I would go ahead and do this. The process theoretically opened yesterday morning and could be completed by going to the name reservation page and logging in. The only problem here is that their servers crumpled under the crushing weight of folks hammering this single page. I tried off and on throughout the day with no luck, and as I moved into the evening I still was not getting to a working screen. Moments ago I finally connected in and completed the process reserving Belghast and House Stalwart just in case. Far as I know you aren’t required to use the guild name, but I figure if nothing else I will create an alt guild or something so that the name lives.

Last night I decided to try something different and logged into the little Chua engineer I had created at some point during the beta. I am not sure if it was the difference in starter zone or the difference in playing a ranged tank, but for whatever reason I found myself enjoying the game last night. I embraced the cute and deadly aspect of the game and ran around blasting everything with my shotgun. Considering I tend to shy away from playing ranged in any form, this was the first I had really played one in Wildstar. I am wondering if this is the Guild Wars 2 effect, and that melee is just unsatisfying in this game. Also with this character I opted to go with the Explorer path, which more than anything involves a lot of jumping puzzles. Normally I cannot stand these, however they felt manageable with access to double jump.

The game still feels very much like a trip to Six Flags, but the Crimson Isle area feels far less busy. Maybe I could enjoy the game more starting here rather than Leviathan Bay. Now I feel like I owe the game a play through long enough to see if I like the third area better. This has been the case with most games I have played, there are certain starter experiences that I simply do not like. I am looking at you Night Elf areas, whereas I can seem to do Dun Morogh happily over and over. There are things I like about playing the Warrior that I don’t get to do on the Engineer, however I just don’t really like Ellevar as far as zones go. I was mostly okay with the Leviathan Bay route until I got there. I am wondering if I can shift course and go to Deradune, without having to reroll.

Farmer Belghast

After getting to 6 in Wildstar I opted to log back into ArcheAge for a bit and see what trouble I could get into. Last night I finally reached a point in the quest chain where I started getting quests asking me to craft certain items that required vegetables. This meant that I needed to grow them, and also introduced me to the concept of a public farm. During an earlier quest I was given a scarecrow that apparently allows me to claim a plot of land for my own, however the area surrounding where I was working seemed to be all claimed. As a result I just opted to plant my veggies in the public plot and pray. See interesting thing about this game is that pretty much every aspect of it… allows for other players to grief you. Pretty much anyone can come along and harvest your crops from the public plot if you do not collect them within a certain period. Farming is a real world time sink, in that I planted the crops and it took thirty minutes actual time for them to grow. I of course went off throughout the world and completely forgot about them. Thankfully upon logging back in this morning they were still there waiting for me.

What ended up distracting me, was a series of quests in the next zone over that involved slaughtering tons of critters to collect parts for a suit of armor. It seems as though through this quest chain you will be able to collect a full set of blue quality gear for whatever armor class you choose. I of course am going plate, because really… there is never an answer that doesn’t end up with plate armor. In Elder Scrolls Online I’ve tried a few times to play something OTHER than a plate wearer, but always end up dropping it and dumping myself in full plate. I also managed to pick up a really amazing green quality sword that is letting me cut through the mobs like butter. I am still very much enjoying myself, but I am wishing I had a few more abilities. Right now I have shield charge, shield bash, 3 hit combo swing, AOE root/damage, self heal, and channeled drain life. It is a pretty robust kit, but I really want another attack to combo with the charge/bash/strike thing I have going on.

One of the things I really want to try and figure out is smithing. Right now it all seems to be dependant upon me going into some cave somewhere and grinding mobs while waiting on Iron Ore pops. In theory I am fine with this, but I keep thinking there has to be a more efficient way to get ore. However almost every cave I have been in, has one or two higher level players lurking about, so I am beginning to wonder if that is in fact the only real way. At some point I need to sort out why I could not stream the game and get that going again. Dxtory boggles me because it seems like for some people it works great, however for me it never seems to produce the sort of results I actually want. On a positive note it does seem to be a better generic screenshot program than Fraps, or at least cause far fewer issues. If nothing else I am using the hell out of it for that purpose, but I want to solidify how to record games full screen with it and actually get OBS to stream them to twitch.

Faffing in Cyrodil

I am a horrible person because last night, yet again I did not participate in the google hang out pen and paper game. Honestly I just wasn’t feeling up to dealing with people. I need to get to the doctor soonish, because I fear something is wrong. For about a month now, when I breath in deeply there is a sharp pain on the right side of my lung. It started as a dull ache, so I thought maybe it was a muscle pain or something of the sort, however over the last few days it has become more sharp. Last night when we did our walk, I struggled a bit to keep going and got pretty dizzy. I hate going to the doctor, because I spent a good chunk of my childhood sick and in the doctors office. It has made me try and avoid them like the plague as an adult, the only problem is… I have actual medical issues that I probably should be going for. Last night I had just reached my fill of human contact so I did my own thing, because I really couldn’t handle needing any additional interaction.

I also knew I would need to be sociable today as we have a guild event scheduled in Elder Scrolls Online. Right now we have a handful of people signed up for it, but I am hoping we will get a bunch more people who didn’t know about the Anook event. I am not sure exactly how well this is going to work, as Delevax said most nights our PVP Campaign is locked by that time in the evening. Worse case scenario we end up guesting on another campaign, since functionally there is really nothing we cannot do while guested. The primary goal is to grab skyshards, the secondary goal is to get into trouble whenever we can. If in the process we happen along some quest objectives, it would also be cool to complete those. I know I have an objective out there from the last time I was running around with Zeli and Jabb, but it was not feasible for us to go get it. I am sure it will be fairly rough, but I am hoping if we stick together as a group we will be able to compete with the various veteran rank players.