Tales of the Aggronaut

The City of Crows

April 28, 2014 by Belghast

The Second Year

This morning I am feeling more than a little groggy, but this isn’t unusual coming back into the working world of Mondays. Today I feel like I should be extolling you all with some great wisdom, considering this is the beginning of a second year of daily Tales of the Aggronaut posts. However I am pretty empty of anything that seems close at all to wisdom. So instead I am going to continue to ramble on like I always have and hope people are still willing to listen to it. Honestly at this point I am shocked and amazed that I still have a decent number of readers each day. I keep thinking that the novelty is going to wear off sooner or later. The biggest thing I do know is that I am helped in ways you won’t likely even understand by the fact that I do have readers to keep me honest.

I figure I will get the inevitable Monday morning plug of the Aggrochat podcast out of the way. I am honestly pretty damned proud of the fact that we have managed to record three episodes in a row in spite of some scheduling difficulties. In light of the fact that I am beginning my second year of daily posting, I am really hoping at this same time next year we can look forward to celebrating the anniversary of a year of weekly podcasts. I have a lot of fun recording these, but then again I also have a lot of fun recording my game stream whenever folks decide to join me in the mumble channel. One of the things I have always been about above all other things… is gaming with friends, and I guess a part of me is trying to capture that and bottle it in either podcast or game stream form. Though honestly the connections have been a little off lately as we’ve not run a dungeon together in weeks, so here is hoping this coming week we can all remedy that.

The City of Crows

In spite of not being able to really play much Friday night and having to program on an application most of Saturday, I seem to have made up sufficient ground most of Sunday. I started the day at 39 and working on the tail end of Alik’r and I finished the night dinging 42 and starting to make a dent in Bangkorai. Right now I am questing out of Evermore and something odd is going on here. The town is absolutely deluged in crows, and for those who have been through the Ebonheart Pact zone Crows Wood… I am beginning to wonder if it is for similar reasons. If that is the case I will be extremely happy, because I love all things relating to that Daedra. If not… it is at the very least a very cool and brooding locale, and thankfully a return to Breton architecture. There is a kind of beauty to the harsh Redguard landscapes… but their “cities” never really feel like proper cities to me.

If you are so inclined you can watch me faff about for awhile yesterday afternoon working on finishing a few quest chains in Alik’r. Unfortunately I cannot “100%” the zone, due to the fact of a few bugged areas that I will have to come back for. I am however happy enough to be moving on. The desert is gorgeous, but also very spartan… and I will be happy to be roaming around areas with grass and trees again. Bangkorai in general feels like a wrapping up of things. This could be in part because the finale of both the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild quests chains occur within the city of Evermore. I am rather happy with the conclusion of both to be honest, even though at least in the case of the fighters guild it took more than a few ziggzags to get there.

The Earth Forge

One of the awesome things about both quest chains is that they unlock locations that were previously unreachable. In the case of the Fighter’s guild you can then travel to the Earth Forge at any time, and I have to say… if they ever open up player housing… I am really hoping I have the option of getting a room here. The Earth Forge is pretty much my ideal location. It somehow blends a rocky pine filled mountain climate with the skeletal remains of a massive Dwemer machine. This pretty much combines two of the things I love the most in Elder Scrolls games in one place. If not I hope I can at least get a portal in my house to the Earth Forge, because I have a feeling I will be going out of my way to visit here regularly.

The Mage’s Guild quest line similarly opens up permanent access to the lost island of Eyevea that Shalidor once controlled. If you are into mages and such you should really like this place. In a similar fashion to the Freeport Enchanters guild in Everquest, you travel around the island through a series of portals. You can of course do it by foot, but the place is massive. From the architecture and the environmental details I would guess this area is technically in the Ebonheart Pact somewhere, specificially in Morrowind. The buildings are all mostly Dunmer architecture and the flora are mostly large mushrooms. The best part about both unlocks is that they now give you access to two new crafting stations per location, that each creates an extremely powerful set of gear. The only drawback is that each of them requires eight traits to be learned per item slot in order to craft them.

Grindless Crafting

Last night a discussion spawned in guild chat from one of our members talking about how much he disliked the way crafting worked in this game. First off I was shocked a bit, because I personally could not describe a better system. It is like everything I always wanted in a crafting system, and as I started digging into the reasons for why he didn’t like it, every point I brought up seemed to be something he enjoyed about it. Finally I got down to the root of the problem… he felt that leveling tradeskills was a painful undertaking. To some extent I agree, it feels like you are not making any progress, but then you learn that this is not the type of system you would ever “grind” your way through.

This is a negative side effect of the World of Warcrafts of the MMO world, in that it feels like you should grind your way through crafting to make sure you keep up. So far I have not really made it my missing to level crafting at all, but instead have simply played the game as I normally would. Multiple times a night I wayshrine back to a crafting hub, deconstruct any gear that I have gotten and go on about my business. As a result my Blacksmithing is level 28, and Clothing and Woodworking 24. Please note that the only thing I have ever crafted is sets of gear for myself and the occasional set of gear for a guildie. I’ve never crafted a single Clothing or Woodworking item at all, and those skills have both progressed nicely. This is the aspect of the game that I like almost more than anything else, crafting just happens as you play the game.

We’ve learned that the best way to level crafting is through deconstruction of gear. At low levels you don’t get very much of it to be truthful, but as you move through the game the amount of drops that you get increases wildly. Simply by playing the game and deconstructing everything you get, your tradeskills will more than keep up with where you need them to be. It is hard to get used to this concept, and that progression through the ranks of crafting is more about how you spend your skill points and less about raw tradeskill level. Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to address this today, just in case anyone else out there was trying to “grind” their way through crafting. If you are doing this, you are on a path of madness because crafting and deconstructing your own items is without a doubt the least efficient way to level. If you feel the need to “grind” at the very least find a crafting buddy. You get far more experience deconstructing gear that someone else has crafted, so if you both craft items and swap you will both end up better off.

#AggroChat #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Alik’r #Bangkorai

Grand Anniversary

April 27, 2014 by Belghast

No Free Lunch

Last night was Saturday night, and that means we recorded another episode of the Tales of the Aggronaut podcast… AggroChat! We had a few odd things going on last night. Firstly Rae was off travelling in world visiting her longtime friends Ahi and Bez. This means she was completely unavailable. Additionally Kodra was travelling, and connected in from crappy hotel wifi in San Francisco… leading him to be a little bit robotty. However we pushed through all of this and picked up a 4th player in the form of our good friend Tam. He had been talked about plenty of times on the podcast already, and it only seemed fitting to have him sub in. Super thankful for him to be willing to do it in a pinch. We talked about all manner of things including Hex Closed Beta, ArcheAge and the concept of selling entry into the beta process, and our ideal scenarios as far as character building and abilities in MMOs go.

We are going to have to find a way to stay more on topic, because each episode has increased every so slightly in length. The first one was right at an hour, the second an hour and fifteen minutes, and this one roughly an hour and thirty minutes. We could have formal topics that we push through, but I personally like the meandering format, because it means it is more like the natural conversations we already have. I wish I had kept rolling because moments after I cut the podcast off we had a pretty epic conversation about how Lucasfilm is disavowing the entire Expanded Universe concept… and while we will miss some things maybe it isn’t so much of a bad idea. There were some really odd fan service things about the Expanded Universe that don’t really hold up story wise.

Steampowered Sunday #11

When Elder Scrolls Online released on a Sunday, it pretty much put a severe halt to my blog series known as Steampowered Sunday where I take some time and play a game from my backlog of titles. Last night during the podcast we were talking about a game that Ashgar had been playing this week that fell firmly into the Bullet Hell genre. Kodra seemed to think this was madness, and having been a big fan of Ikaruga I totally understood the draw. There was a time period when I used to play lots of bullet hell shooters and pre-hell shooters. Gradius, Darius Twin, Raiden Trad… all games I remember fondly. I was never particularly good at them, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. I remember playing 1942 on the nintendo for hour upon hour trying to make my way through all the stages.

At some point I just stopped playing them. I think it was during the death of the dreamcast, but when I bought my PS2 I just simply stopped picking up the games anymore. While I have Gradius 5 on my PS2, I guess my tastes in games changed a bit. This honestly more than anything represents a period of time when I stopped playing consoles very much and started consuming games almost exclusively on the PC. Every now and then I would flirt with a new shooter like the ever amazing Jamestown, but I never really got heavily into it again. Last night in an attempt to cold boot this series again, Ashgar griefed me by gifting me a copy of a really rather awesome bullet hell shooter on steam. At face value Danmaku Unlimited 2 reminds me of a less technical cousin to Ikaruga. The soundtrack is in part what makes the gameplay, and helps you do what is needed to make it through the levels. The secret to a bullet hell is to zone out and focus only on the pattern and not so much about the rest of the noise on screen. Only a few things can actually hurt you, so you focus in on those things.

The hilarity of my play through is that after years of not playing these games my reflexes that had built up are completely gone. In addition I am playing this game roughly thirty minutes after waking up. So yeah I do pretty bad. Ashgar tried to make me feel better by saying that I did significantly better than he did the first time. Essentially the gameplay video is roughly seventeen minutes and the point at which I ran out of lives to keep going. I made it to about the mid point of stage four. All in all I think I did a pretty good job. The awesome thing about the game is it is really cheap. So for the price you cannot beat this kind of bullet hell goodness. I feel like there is a lot of customization in the way you set up the game. I went with pretty generic options and was playing on easy, so I think there is a lot more depth to be had there if I dig into it. Probably going to stream some more of me trying to play it later. In any case… I have successfully rebooted the Steampowered Sunday feature. Long live me playing through my steam backlog!

Grand Anniversary

Last but definitely not least… today is the one year anniversary of the Grand Experiment… my attempt to blog something each and every day. This means as of today I have made a post every single day for a year. That is a pretty significant feat and I am really damned proud of myself for sticking with it. At this point I figure I am going to try and make it another whole year without letting the beat drop. It hasn’t been the most easy thing to do, but I want to take a moment to thank my wife who has been extremely supportive in this adventure. There have been days where I might not have made it through the post without her just assuming that it was going to happen and giving me time and space to do so. Additionally I want to thank my friends who have supported me in this madness and my readers. There have been moments when I felt alone in my mission, and was surprised at how many of you have reached out your arms to help me along the way. Somehow I have gone from being the least regular of bloggers… to the most regular, and it is a pretty insane transition. I feel like I have grown a lot in the past year, and I thank you all for helping me with it.

The Limits of Caffeine

April 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleep is a Crutch

Yesterday was one of the roughest days I have experienced in a very long while, and is the type of day that causes me to go to bed early when everyone else is still up and gaming. It only takes one or two of those days where you have to struggle through with no sleep to keep you from ever wanting to do it again. In my case Thursday evening was totally out of my control, which makes it all the more frustrating. I had planned on going to bed around ten and everything was going to be perfect. Then my lungs decided to conspire against me. Either I could lay in bed and struggle to get my breath, or I could just get up and take a breathing treatment. The treatment hopped me up enough that it really took until midnight for me to calm back down enough to be able to sleep.

Our eldest ferret, Smokey has had one foot in the grave for some time… and the other belligerently ignoring that fact. It is to the point where we check on him when we get home each night just to make sure he is still alive. He doesn’t move around very well and pretty much does three things… sleep, poop and eat, not always in that order. As a result we’ve set up a cage for him in our bedroom in the floor so he could have some peace and quiet, and so the girls wouldn’t keep trying to play with him. For the most part we are just trying to keep him as comfortable as we can until he inevitably does die. His littermate passed on several years back, and at this point he is ten and really past the life expectancy of even the hardiest of ferrets.

When I laid down at midnight, moments later he decided that he needed to rearrange his bedding…. for multiple hours. After laying in bed listening to the constant scratching and shuffling about I got up and sat down on the floor opening the cage and trying to help him out. His mobility is very limited, so I thought by helping him arrange the blankets into a pouch, he would be happy. Wrong… I was so wrong. Everytime I would move something it seemed to start the entire process all over again. Finally about 3 am he either got things the way he wanted them or decided to give up for the night. We have to get up at 5:30 for work…. leaving us only a few hours of sleep. There are times I would have called in sick, because I knew I was not going to function but I knew at least that afternoon I would be the only person in the office for my department.

Turns out when another coworker called in for oversleeping…. who had been planning on being out that afternoon anyways… I literally was the only worker there all day long. Which means I got nothing accomplished as I dealt with ticket after ticket and an emergency request from the communications department. It is days like this that make me try my damnedest to keep a schedule. You only have to struggle through one of these to make you never want to do it again. To make matters worse…. we had to drive to Tahlequah that evening, the entire purpose of carpooling yesterday and my cheat blog post typed up the evening before. So I struggled through… and downed another 24 oz can of Monster as we headed out to our evening destination.

Chicken Fried Chicken

This was the highlight of my evening and likely going to be the highlight of my entire weekend. My wife and I both went to college at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah Oklahoma, and one of our favorite places to eat was Del Rancho. It is this odd throwback diner that has been in existence since the 50s. Their claim to fame are these insanely huge portions of chicken fried chicken and chicken fried steak. The fact that they served this up cheaply, and stayed open until 11 pm made it the favorite late night cram session destination of many of my friends. So of course… since we were going to be in town anyways this is where we were going to eat… damn the calories. Besides this place has been a destination for many epic conversations involving us in the past, so no reason why it should not today.

If you are a long time reader of my blog you might remember two years ago when we helped a student of my wife’s move to college. We were the thing he was lacking, stability. While his grand-mom… grandmother turned adoptive mother, is a very sweet lady, she lacked the logistical ability to see him off to college successfully. Over the course of his two years at college we have been the “parents” he has turned to, to help him out when he was in a moment of crisis. So last night as we picked him up from his dormitory he was a much changed man. More confident than I had seen him, and also considerably fitter. College had done the thing that it does to everyone… change them and in this case seemingly for the better. College is a place of “proto-adults”, folks in the tween time between being a teenager and a real card carrying adult. Before my eyes I was watching him become the person he would eventually be.

Essentially he is a young gay man having an existential crisis, and once again we applied stability and logic to his dilemma. After sorting through various relationship issues that he just needed someone to act as a sounding board on, we got to the root of the issues. His mother and sister were planning on moving across country to California. They were planning on doing this over the summer. He was trying to decide if he should go home for the summer and see them for as long as he could or not. But in reality what it seemed like he was needing was someone to give him permission not to. His family is a massive quagmire of drama, and my fear is that him going back would cause him to become mired in it again. His family has stolen from him, and tried to rope him into their schemes in the past. So we gave him the one thing he really needed… permission to do what was best for himself.

The Limits of Caffeine

It was while I was walking around Wal-mart as he and my wife picked up groceries, that my body began its crash cycle. The lights in the store felt dim and funky… and I found myself having trouble focusing my eyes on anything without staring at it for a long while. I had been here before… it what happens when I have pushed my luck entirely too far and the joyous effects of caffeination fail me. The problem is we were still over an hour away from home. I dropped him off at his dorm room and headed out of town to the convenience store formerly known as hilltop. I gathered up a cocktail of stuff in an effort to try and give me enough to push across to home. This consisted of a grape five hour energy, a monster zero ultra… and a bag of white chocolate drops for sugar content. I questioned if this would actually do it, but I knew that it needed to. My wife had been up just as long as I had, and while she was offering to take the wheel and drive home… she has even more issues with night driving than I do.

The problem is I had already abused myself pretty sufficiently to get to this point. Two hours of sleep had been extended by a cup of coffee in the morning, a monster on the drive in… another monster at work, a five hour energy about lunch, a few diet mountain dews during the day, another big monster after work, and another five hour energy on the turnpike to Tahlequah. Essentially I was learning the hard way… that there is a finite limit to just how long Caffeine can do its magic and keep you alert. The drive home was really weird and somewhat hazy. I went through moments of absolute clarity and alertness, to moments of feeling like I was swimming through fog and exhausted. The oddest thing is these cycles seemed to happen about every ten minutes. My wife did a valiant job of keeping me talking, even if it was just me responding “uh huh” and “yep”.

Thankfully we made it home safely, and went through the nightly ritual of dealing with the litter boxes and making sure all the children had food and were safe and happy. I finally got to crash around eleven, and I am not sure if I was conscious much past that. It was a day of zero gaming, and the beginning of a weekend where it is not sure if I will get in much gaming either. Several years back I wrote a testing software for my wife in ASP.NET, and we hosted it on a web server here at the house. When we switched providers and jumped from a 4 meg connection to a 98 meg connection… we lost the ability to host servers. So now I need to figure out a way to rewrite this over the weekend in PHP/Jquery so that I can host it on the same external host I use for this blog. All of this said… I plan on logging into ESO and relaxing a bit the moment I finish this blog post…. which seems like a really good thing to do right now.

Thumper Logic

April 25, 2014 by Belghast

Cheat Day

One of the rules of the “Grand Experiment” has been that I would sit down each morning and write a blog post. A lot of my friends in the blogosphere write their content at their leisure and stage the publishing at a date of their choosing. There is technically nothing wrong with this practice, but the entire idea behind the experiment, was to force myself to write every day. So as a result I have always considered it cheating to do what I am doing right now… writing a topic the night before I intend to post it. These lofty ideals are one thing, but every now and then real life throws me for a loop. Generally speaking on the weekend my posts end up being considerably later because sometimes I have to accommodate life in the process.

However our weekend plans have been altered quite a bit and as a result my wife and I are carpooling together tomorrow. This means that I won’t really have my traditional “drink coffee slowly and contemplate the universe” time in the morning… or at least I won’t be able to faff about as much as I normally do. So as a result I am admitting to my “blatant cheatery” up front and hoping you won’t mind terribly much that you are getting a slightly stale topic by the time I post it tomorrow morning. I could have lied to you, and posted this without you really knowing the difference… but I am always willing to admit my failings freely.

Thumper Logic

One of the things that I have not talked about much is that the Grand Experiment is far more for me than just writing every single day. It has also been an effort to surround myself with as many positive influences as I can, and limit the amount of negativity I have in my life. I am not just trying to bury my head in the sand. I assure you that I see just as many negative things on a daily basis as anyone, I am a pessimist by nature. However I had noticed that the more negativity I surrounded myself in, the more negative I became and as a result the more unhappy I was. You know how they say “fake it until you make it”, well it turns out it works pretty well for being happy as well. If you can’t be happy, adopt the trappings of being happy until I actually sinks in.

In addition to trying to limit my exposure to negativity… which means I pretty much stop reading game forums when they exit the alpha and beta phases… I have been trying really hard not to write many “rant” posts. In doing so I have realized just how unbalanced and ranty the world seems to have become. If you look at the popular review sources, it seems as though we absolutely love to hate video games. There are popular youtube personalities that I have never seen give a single game a positive review, however people line up to watch them. I am sure that the occasional video like this is funny, but after awhile it changes into something else. IT feels like these reviewers are trying to enact their revenge on an industry they believe has “wronged them” somehow.

People Want Different Things

Yes I am in fact breaking this image out again. It is perfectly okay for you to not like something, but just because you don’t like a thing does not mean it is immediately “bad”. I may not have enjoyed War and Peace… but that does not make it any less of a classic. Sure there are of course the occasional game that are horrible in an academic sense… I am looking at you Superman 64, but these are really rather rare. If a game comes out and at least one person enjoys it then I cannot really call it a “bad” game. There are games that are a financial failure, but that is a completely different line of discussion. Over the last few years it has become extremely “cool” to hate everything, and a lot of this was ushered in by the “hipster” movement. If you read the reviews of games, you would have the impression that the industry is doing horribly and making nothing but utter crap. However they seem to be making more money than ever, in part because very few people who consume these games actually pay attention to internet reviews.

At this point I am just too damned old to care much about looking cool on the internet. I feel no shame in gushing about the things I am really enjoying, and just glossing over the things I don’t so much enjoy. Over the weekend I appeared on the Game On podcast, and eventually the topic came around to Wildstar a game I really don’t like very much. I had a few options of where to go with my commentary. I could of course have spun up a mighty rant that would nuke the game into oblivion from orbit. Instead I chose to share my reservations, but also talk about a few of the things that I thought the game was doing right. It is your choice as a player, or a blogger, or a youtuber to either dwell on the good parts or the bad parts. Right now I am making the conscious choice to look for the good in both people and games, and so far I am much happier for doing it.

The Curse of the Fanboy

I hope it feels so good to be right.
There is nothing more exhilarating
than pointing out the shortcomings
of others, is there? – Randall

One of the worst curses you can give to another gamer is to call them a Fanboy, because it immediately belittles anything they may or may not have to say in response to your criticism. I guess my question is, why aren’t we all “Fanboys” over something. For the majority of us, gaming is our hobby, and even in those for whom it is a job… at one point or another it was also their hobby as well. We are all geeks here, cut from the same core fabric even if we claim to not acknowledge it. We all love games, more deeply than any of us would ever care to admit. At least at some basic level we all have to admit that games are absolutely magical. They can bring us to tears, make us laugh, and cause us to plunk down another $60 like a junkie in search of a fix. If we do all of these things, then why the hell SHOULDN’T we love it, and be more than happy to raise our hands high and yell “FUCK YES I’M A FANBOY”.

I love games, or I wouldn’t be spending each and every morning writing about them. Sure you get a fair dose of my personal shenanigans and that of my friends… but this is a gaming blog devoted to my love and obsession of video games. I am not trying to make games better than they are, because they seem to be just as good today at getting me to spend countless hours a night playing them than they were when I was a child. Sure I hold up certain games like Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Castlevania: Symophony of the Night on a pedestal, but my love of those games should not somehow tarnish something that doesn’t do the same thing as those games did.

What gets lost in the shuffle is the people behind the games that folks all too often want to tear down. No one goes into a game trying to build something that the players will hate. Each and every one of them has lost sleep at night trying to make the best possible game within the constraints they were given. Just as I started writing about games because I love them, they all aspired to be part of this industry that quite frankly has some pretty shitty conditions placed upon them. No child says that they want to grow up to work in an industry that is ultimately thankless and will more so make large segments of the fan base revile you. I am just waiting for it to be acceptable to like something again without someone else feeling the need to put you down for doing so.

Cast of the Aggrochat

I feel like I got a little preachy during the course of this post, but it is really how I feel. I am going to unabashedly love things, until I don’t then move on to other things that I love equally well. So far I feel like my mission of being more positive has paid off. I am surrounded by some pretty amazing friends, and I feel so thankful to have all of you supporting me on a daily basis. While I have a deep protective streak, which leads me to play all the tank classes that I end up playing… I feel no need anymore to protect you from what I deem a “bad game”. You might see me wax philosophical about how I don’t quite grasp a game, but that is coming from a place of wanting to learn what people see in it… and not from a place of hatred. I wanted to close things out on a really positive note by showing off something that I really love right now.

Rae has been hard at work over the last few weeks since we got the odd idea to start Aggrochat. She has been capturing the essence of our personas in Chibi form and I think she did a damned fine job. From the left we have Rae riding Ashgar the bear, with me in the middle, and the ever stylish Kodra on the far right. There are a few inside jokes in the peace but I figure it is universal enough for most to enjoy it. She does amazing work, and is the creator of the original Chibi Belghast that I have used for ages as avatars and in the masthead of this website. Over the coming weeks we will be branding our libsyn page into something more fitting a proper podcast.