Tales of the Aggronaut

Darkside of Eorzea

September 28, 2013 by Belghast

Ancestral Armor

This morning is a relatively horrendous day here in Oklahoma. It has been alternating between no rain and torrential downpours and with both the temperature has dropped quite a bit. Enough so that I had to go put on socks and find a fuzzy blanket to crawl under. This is to be expected since this is of course the first weekend of the Tulsa State Fair. Essentially every year during the fair, the temperature drops from shorts weather to jacket weather in the matter of an afternoon. This is just the way the rhythm of nature goes here in Oklahoma.

Additionally today is the very first Tulsa Mini-Maker Faire. Yesterday was another first for Oklahoma… we had our first web development conference that I attended. We had representatives from WordPress, GitHub, Etsy, Mozilla and a cool local javascript games company. I only managed to attend the first half of the conference because we had a minor catastrohy at work that I had to come back and fix. However what I DID attend was pretty awesome and it is extremely cool that Tulsa has become the “cool” city in Oklahoma or at least the one with the thriving art and technology scene.

When I got home that night I started the grind to 50 on my Warrior in FFXIV. I say grind… because literally after 49 I had no quests left to do to get me any experience. I will address that problem a bit later, but first check out the awesome picture above. Upon reaching 50 I was able to do a rather difficult quest and claim the chest piece to match the rest of the gear I got at 45. Honestly it feels like cruel and unusual punishment to have to walk around for five levels looking like a clown… but I guess it is to make you appreciate the chest piece all the more when you finally get it.

Darkside of Eorzea

As I said above… I had NO quests at all available from the beginning of 49 until I dinged 50. This meant one thing… FATE grinding. Essentially this is how you have to level all characters past your first. Leve quests reward almost insignificant experience and actually killing mobs to level is grossly inefficient after about level 10. So the end result is players roaming around in large parties tackling FATEs in one of a handful of zones. The 45-50 FATE grind is out in Northern Thanalan and while there are multiple FATEs that spawn out there… everyone is essentially waiting on a specific one to spawn.

The above image is taken by a friend of mine from a Dark Devices fate group. It is the biggest piece of fuckery I have seen in a video game in a long while. Essentially DD as it is known, should be a really cool four part FATE, but players have figured out that they can delay the first part and instead grind a literally endless stream of instant spawn cultists. The result is that players will form up in full parties and AOE the shit out of everything that is spawning, soaking up xp from the kills for 14 of the 15 minute fate timer. At roughly 1-2 minutes from failing the FATE, a group of players usually breaks away and kills the 8 or so named mobs needed to close out the event.

The problem with this whole scenario is that firstly… it is a hack… the developers I am sure never expected players to abuse the fate in this way. Secondly the problem is it favors only classes that have a strong spammable AOE. So essentially any melee class is screwed because they simply cannot keep up with their one AOE attack (if they even have that) due to the TP restrictions. The Black Mage of course is the king of the fate with their endless spammable Ice based attacks. The problem is… last night we had roughly 100 players in the same space trying to fight over the same mobs.

If you are in the right group it can be as much of half a level… pending you get the majority of the spawns and get gold on all four fates. If you are NOT in the right group… or not in a party at all… it becomes this massively frustrating experience. Each time they patch, I hope and pray they break this fate so it is no longer the grindy bullshit that it is today. I wanted to hit 50, so I joined a group and rode along for the experience using whatever AOE I could throw out with overpower and occasionally a steel cyclone. Quite frankly… I would not have hit 50 last night had I not managed to get into two good groups for this fate.

Asian Grindfest

For as much positive vibes as I have thrown the direction of this game over the last few weeks, and all the efforts they have made to westernize it… there is still a pretty egregious Asian grindfest lurking below the covers. You essentially have just barely enough quests available to you as a player to level a single class from 1 to 50. In truth there were numerous spots where I had to resort to FATE grinding because the quests just were not enough to push me to the next level where I could continue the main storyline. Additionally I have run more than my fair share of dungeons along the way… so I do not believe a player could quest their way from 1 to 50 without some sort of augmentation.

The problem lies that one of the best aspects of this game is the ability to play multiple classes on the same character. This means that if you spend all your quests on one class to level it… you will be left with nothing but FATEs and Leves to level your other characters. Getting from 1-15 is relatively easy, you can hit 10 within 30 minutes and it takes about an hour more to get 10-15. The 15-20 and each additional 5 levels after that, the speed slows down massively. The only way to combat this is to grind FATEs. After about 20 doing leves offers you a truly insignificant amount of experience, and since those are limited on the total number you can have… it is almost not worth doing them.

I fear that players will be dropping off like flies unless Square can provide some other questing opportunities. They could do this one of many ways. Firstly I would uncap the Leves… these are extremely fun and it seems silly to limit players to only doing a handful of these a day. Next they need to increase both the xp and monetary rewards from them… because after about 25 both are grossly insufficient. Lastly they simply need more quests… there are far too few of them out in the world, and the xp gained from simply killing mobs outright is laughable. The only reason why dark devices works like it works… is you start getting 150% multiplier from every single kill your group gets…. and you literally get thousands of kills during that time.

The game is extremely good in some aspects, but in other aspects the design is a confusing mess. It feels at times like the designers really did not know what they were doing. There is still the problem of how a level 50 player will earn money. I see tons of money sinks… but zero money fountains. They need to get the 2.1 patch out as soon as possible so that they can address some of the gaping holes in their games design. Ultimately whether or not they fix this… will determine how long I play the game.

Wrapping Up

I think I am going to wrap the post up here… this is the first truly negative post I have made about FFXIV since the days when I was not really sure if I was getting into it or not. There are some glaring problems, so hopefully they will address them in the same way they have addressed the infrastructure issues. I can tell the game was not really made for a western sensibility, so here is hoping they will understand that the west is the key to their continued succeed as we have the larger number of wallets ready to give them subscription bankroll. Hoping that the day clears up soon and we can go out and do something. Hopefully your weekend is going awesome and not being rained out like ours.

Early Access Zombies

September 27, 2013 by Belghast

Minor Renovations

Awhile back I decided to change out the Raptr widget I had embedded in my sidebar that showed the last few things I had played, to something more manual. I have always loved the feeling of the Steam library grid view, with its cool little preview images. So for my “Now Playing” section I strived to create something similar feeling. I think for the most part it works, but it is now a much more manual process as I have to create an image and then add it to my sidebar. I feel however that the results are worth it.

I had been wanting to do something different with my blogroll for a bit, but I was not really sure what I wanted to do. I am a very visual person, and even though I read most of the blogs in my RSS reader, I still think of them based on their visual appearance. The idea I came up with was making similar preview images for all of the blogs on my blogroll to give potential readers a flavor of the blog before even clicking through. I still have several more blogs to add to it, but I think the end result is really nice. Once again it is a much more manual process as I have to take time to create an image for each blog before I add them.

Blogrolls are one of those things that people tend to ignore in their own blogs, but for me it is a resource for someone to find other good voices. As a result I like to take care in trying to make sure my blogroll represents what I am actually reading. When pouring over this small change I did notice that a large number of the blogs on my roll were just not posting anymore. As a result I have pruned the list quite a bit, and will add to it as I notice people starting back up. Additionally I added a new section for “Gamecasts” since it is a mix of video casts and podcasts. I still need to add quite a few things to this list but it is a solid start.

Console Diablo

Recently I downloaded Diablo 3 again and gave it a spin trying to get back into the game. While I found elements of it enjoyable I also remembered all the things that frustrated me about it. I have come to the point where I just cannot stand the “click to move” mechanic. It just “feels wrong” for lack of a better term. I think in many ways this is the one thing holding me back from truly loving league of legends… I just can’t stand the control mechanics. When I heard Diablo 3 was coming to the consoles, I was initially not all that excited… but the other day I noticed that a PS3 demo existed. I figured what the heck, no better way to test and see if I like it.

It appears that all of my problems with the game stemmed in some way from the horrendous control scheme. With a controller, the game felt fresh and new and extremely enjoyable. Granted I only played a little bit the other night, and only had access to the Barbarian, but I had a blast. It made me remember just how much fun I used to have with Diablo in the first place. I am not sure if I am quite ready to shell over 60 bucks for the game on the console… but I can see myself picking it up sooner or later.

What I really want however if for them to patch in controller support for the PC version. This is the version that has the characters I want to play, and the friends I want to play with. I have a perfectly amazing XBOX 360 controller hooked to my PC that I use with more console friendly games. Essentially everything about the game was better with a controller. It is like they took so much more thought and planning into the user interface design as a whole. So please Blizzard… patch in controller support at least when you release the expansion. It makes everything about your game feel better.

Early Access Zombies

Back on September 20th Undead Labs released their extremely awesome open world zombie survival game… State of Decay as part of the Steam Early Access program. I picked it up shortly after but did not really have a chance to play it until last night. If you remember when this came out on the XBLA I raved about it for a long while, but really have not played it as much as I would like. One of the problems I have playing consoles is that it disconnects me from my group of friends. There is a large circle of us that hang out on mumble every night, and I have yet to find a really viable option for hanging out and chatting on mumble while playing the consoles in the loft.

Last night I happily fired up Mumble and then popped into the game. It feels as though the overall gameplay experience has tightened quite a bit. The Early Access candidate is in essence a beta test, and Undead Labs wants to make sure players know this while playing the PC release. Currently the client only has support for a controller, but they plan on eventually adding in mouse and keyboard support. Quite honestly I would rather they do this than half ass it like some of the other console ports like Force Unleashed.

The game is super responsive, and I can run it comfortably on maximum resolution making the client look so much nicer than the XBOX 360 one I was used to. I really hope they add in multiplayer co-op. This game just screams for it, because exploring this world with your friends would be so much more enjoyable than doing so with what are essentially scripted bots. I have no idea how long the game will be in this “beta” state on the PC, but everything about the title is at least as good as the XBLA client. So I would not hesitate suggesting the game to anyone. If you like zombies and you like fallout style open world exploration… this game is for you.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get up and around. I have a conference to attend today, and also need to make a trip to the cleaners… so I need to give myself as much wiggle room for finishing getting ready as I can. I hope you all have an excellent weekend. Ours looks like it is going to be super rainy. For those curious, my mom is recovering well and I am not sure if I mentioned this or not… but so is Lethbridge. Spoke with him last night and he is in a lot of pain after his surgery but doing okayish. He was in FFXIV for a bit last night playing the game one handed… which I guess is a good thing that a g600 can do.

Human Chop-Shop

September 26, 2013 by Belghast

Steam Machines

Now is the point at which Valve loses me. I am all about making Linux a viable gaming platform with AAA titles running in and out of it. That sounded awesome, because for what I use my home machine for… it seems silly to try and justify the cost of a windows operating system. All I have really wanted to awhile was an easy way to play windows games under Linux… and I know Wine has existed for years… but it is far too fiddly and unreliable for my tastes. Yesterday apparently they started making the second part of their big announcement… that there would in fact be “Steam Machines”.

As I said above, this is the point where I stop giving a shit. This does in fact seem like a battle for the living room… and currently as many others have suggested… gamers can totally play in our living rooms already. I guess I don’t really see there is a market for a PC platform for console gamers. Folks who prefer to play on consoles prefer to play on consoles… folks who prefer to play on PCs prefer to play on PCs. While there is cross over between the two, I have never once heard a console gamer say “man I really wish I had a consolized PC”, nor have I really heard that from a PC gamer either. I will have to see how the rest of the announcements shake out, but all I was interesting in was the operating system… not another hardware platform.

Human Chop-Shop

Yesterday was a truly bizarre day. I went to work like normal, but had plans to go to the Oklahoma Surgical Hospital over lunch to sit with my mother who was having outpatient surgery there. I am not sure what exactly I was expecting, but I guess I was expecting a traditional hospital. What I was presented with was more akin to a place that rents out booths for surgeons much like a hair dresser does. Granted I know nothing about their business model, but they did not seem to be outwardly affiliated with any of the hospital chains. They appeared to be some odd neutral party where people come to get operated on and then leave.

Essentially the entire place consisted of a huge waiting room where you wait with the person who will get operated on moments from now. Eventually they bring them back into what looks like an emergency room, with little curtain drawn stalls. At this point they get the patient into a hospital gown, hooked to an IV, and given a nifty little medical bracelet system. The above picture is the one my mom had on her… I asked the nurse what it would take to get a few more “bangles”. The purple one is apparently latex allergy… so I told mom we needed to work on that one for next time. She said that she had no desire to “collect them all”.

I had all intent of staying over my lunch break and then going back to work for my 1:30 staff meeting. That however did not quite work out, as Moms surgery kept getting pushed back and they did not take her for surgery until around 3:15. All the while she kept getting more and more nervous. I am thankful that I have a truly phenomenal boss, because all I had to do was text him to let him know I would not be in that afternoon and the reasoning why. My sticking around was an attempt to try and keep Mom as calm as possible, but I am not really sure how well it worked. She would be fine and then all the sudden her little hands would go to fidgeting and you could tell she wanted to run away screaming.

When they finally took her away I left and asked Dad to text me when he heard something. Apparently she was in recovery until around 5:30, so was pretty slow coming around fully from the anesthesia. I talked to her around 6:30 on her way home, she was doing okay and in decent spirits. I am guessing today she will hurt like hell. Essentially years ago she had an operation where they removed some cancerous spots from her nose and replaced the skin with a big graft. Over time they have realized the margins were not as clear as they thought… so they were coming back today to try and trim a bit more off the tip and get the rest of it before it grew any more. Her surgeon has been with her through numerous cancer surgeries and is likely the reason I still have a Mom… so we all expect the best.

Deforestation

Tuesday evening before bed we noticed that the thermostat in our house was way higher than it should be. Over the summer months we keep the temperature at a stable 74*, but Tuesday night it was sitting at 79* and the day had not really been that hot. During the summer months and those 100+ degree days, the thermostat has a bit of trouble keeping up.. but it rarely gets above 76* before cooling back down. Our big fear was that the unit had frozen up… as this had happened a handful of times throughout the years. Sure enough upon going outside I saw the all too familiar sheathe of ice encasing the pipes going from the outside unit to the unit upstairs.

We turned off the air completely last night, giving it time to thaw over night and during the day. So when the surgery took far longer than I had expected and I ended up taking a half day… I ran home to do battle with the AC unit. Our unit came with our house and at this point is over thirty years old. We have been told multiple times by the company we use to service the unit, that they simply do not make a unit as well built as the one we currently have… and that their advice is to literally run it until it ceases to run any longer. However as we enter into each summer season… we have fears in the back of our head that it will be the last for the unit.

There are several things that can cause a unit to freeze up like that, but the main two are being low on Freon or having the air intake blocked somehow. Essentially my plan was to hose off the unit outside to remove any grass clippings or left over cottonwood, and change the filter inside just to make sure it had a nice clean air intake system. We don’t really get outside much, we tend to scurry around like rats doing whatever needs to be done when it needs to be done. We hire a neighbor kid to do our lawn, so quite honestly it has been an entire season since I had been around on the side of our house where the AC unit is.

When I got around there… I was greeted with a crazy sight. Essentially all he rain we have gotten has caused the tree next to the AC unit to go into absolute miracle grow style overdrive. There were limbs everywhere… and essentially one entire side of the unit was blocked by growth. Additionally at some point birds had dropped some blackberries or something similar from the air… and two little bushes had started growing as well. So over the next hour and a half or so I proceeded to go to town with a cheap pair of clippers and took off all of the limbs blocking the unit while trying my best to keep from making the tree as a whole look scalped.

Additionally it had been a pain in the ass to get through the back gate for awhile, as the tree had grown a bunch of little offshoot branches that were hanging low. I trimmed all of these back a bit so that it is still sufficiently shaded, but now a 6’4” or taller adult can comfortably walk under them. While I was at it… I went into the backyard and did various other gardening tasks that had needed to be done. Somewhere we have picked up a patch of ivy along the side of our house… and while it is pretty to look at… it was causing a huge mess as it had grown in and around the tools in my tool rack. So I spent awhile untangling that mess and adding it to the green waste pile.

We are essentially horrible stewards of our lawn. I love the concept of having a lawn, but have no real desire to ever go out and experience it. The older I get the more light sensitive I have become… so as a result my perfect scenario is a dark room with nothing but the light of a monitor. Outdoors is pretty much the exact opposite of that. Long story short… after the deforestation and changing the filter for good measure… I was able to turn on the AC unit and it has been working like a champ. I feel horrible for not noticing the virtual kudzu that was the tree… but like I said… we don’t go out into our yard much.

Wrapping Up

Well it is once again that time… and I have wasted another bit of your morning and mine rambling on at length. I had a tidbit about Diablo 3 that I was going to try and weave in… but other things seemed more pressing. Someday I will have that subsection… I just know it. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope mine is super productive. I have a lot of things to get done before Friday. Our department is going out to a local dev conference, so that should be enjoyable. Just have to think of someplace good to go for lunch.

In Gaben We Trust

September 25, 2013 by Belghast

Steam OS

I feel like I am late to the party when it comes to talking about this announcement. Yesterday seemed to be the big day of it spreading out onto various blogs both professional and private. At this very moment… I am not really sure what to think about it. Admittedly I am a PC developer, I write code for Microsoft products, I play games that run under windows, and I have never found a reasonable replacement for Photoshop. All of those things mean I am pretty much chained to windows as a platform goes. The biggest of those however is the fact that it is a pain in the ass to get my games running under Wine in Linux.

While the Microsoft developer portion will likely never go away anytime soon, being able to reliably play all the games I want under Linux would make me likely kick windows to the curb as a home operating system, at least on my main gaming machine. The problem is… steam has literally thousands of games in its catalog… but only roughly 200 of them run on Linux. The vast majority of those are small indie titles, that are fun, but not the meat that the PC gamer is looking for. So the real challenge will be for Valve to get major developers to support their Steam OS on an even playing field with the consoles.

Good For Linux

Linux has always been an extreme niche community. The problem with Linux as a whole is the freedom of choice that is a positive for the serious user, is a massive negative to broad based adoption. Too much choice confuses the average consumer, and vendors don’t like not having a clear winner they can invest money in. Old fights like Gnome vs KDE and Ubuntu vs Redhat etc have always stunted the growth potential of what otherwise is an extremely mature operating system, more than ready for primetime.

While Linux has floundered at becoming a viable desktop operating system for the majority of America, I feel like a gaming machine is a niche it CAN conquer. Windows 8 licenses start at $100 and go up from there. I know no gamer that would not be willing to switch to a free operating system, and spend that hundred dollars elsewhere on games or gaming stuff. If I could get the games I want to play, running reliably and without fiddling under a Linux based operating system… I would kick windows to the curb without a second thought.

Ultimately I am going to have to find a replacement for Photoshop as it is… so that piece is no longer the hurdle it once was. With Adobe switching to a monthly subscription fee, that is just too much bullshit for me to deal with on a regular basis just to be able to comfortably make images. I am not making any money from Photoshop, and therefor I just cannot justify the cost. I have always had access to it through my work machine, so I have always kept my home version a few releases behind the curve. But with the licensing mess for the foreseeable future, it is making Gimp and namely GimpShop that much more appealing.

In Gaben We Trust

Basically steam has done this miraculous thing as far as I am concerned. They have gotten me to not only tolerate… but LOVE DRM. If I have a choice to buy something through steam, or through a secondary retailer like green man gaming that provides a steam code… I will always do it. I like having my entire games library organized in one spot, that is easy to download and play whenever I feel like it from each of my machines. Valve and Steam have absolutely won me over with dirt cheap pricing and truly epic sales. So while I mostly abuse their sales… when it does come time for a title to be released that I care enough about to pay full price… I will almost always gravitate to buying it through them.

Right now if ANYONE can bring enough gravitas behind Linux gaming… it would be Steam. They have the best chance to make this work, because they provide what every games company has to have to make a new operating system work… a prebuilt retail outlet. You can say whatever you want about Steam, but I feel like they are doing far more good for the gamers than they are doing harm. I know publishers really do not like dealing with them… Origin is the evidence of EA breaking out on their own to avoid the “Steam Cut”. However I really don’t see any of these splinter groups making enough of a dent to be worthy of jumping ship. Everyone universally hates Origin, as much as they seem to love Steam.

What This Means

If anyone can make Linux gaming viable, it will be Gaben, and as a result I am cautiously optimistic about this. A lot of the posts yesterday keyed in on the whole concept of bringing steam to the living room. For me that is not the significance here, and not really something I would want to do anyways. The majority of the reason why I don’t play consoles more than I do is because it is chained to a television, and not something I can do either on my gaming rig upstairs or my laptop. Sure there will be the occasional gamer that wants to hook up a steam box and play PC games like they used to play console games. That is totally cool and awesome that it might be a reality.

For me however this is about unshackling PC gaming from the “Windows Tax”. I would say probably 95% of what I use my PCs at home falls into one of two categories. Firstly there is gaming, and up until now that has been entirely a windows based activity. Secondly there is using web based technologies… these are 100% platform agnostic, and if Steam OS has Chrome I can pretty much do anything I would ever care to do here. I no longer use a traditional word processor and have converted to Google Drive for everything I do for myself. I use Live Writer to do my blog, but there are numerous really solid Linux packages that do the same thing. So if the gaming worked awesome on Linux… I would have nothing left chaining me to the windows operating system. As far as running visual studio, I could always Virtual Machine that… or just remote desktop into my work machine.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap things up and get on the road, but at this point we really don’t know many details other than the fact that something called Steam OS exists. There are supposedly three more big announcements waiting in the wings regarding this. Right now I am cautiously optimistic, but if this turns out to be nothing but a set top box… I will ultimately give zero fucks. I am hoping for a viable windows gaming replacement. Anyways…. I hope you all have a great day ahead of you. My mother is having surgery today, so hopefully that will go extremely well.