Tales of the Aggronaut

Goodbye Granite Falls

July 18, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was night three of good sleep after taking a quick walk before bed. Additionally it has broken loose the log jam that was my weight loss plateau. As of this morning I was down another three pounds since starting the walking. The weird thing about the sleep however is that I am pretty much dead to the world. I didn’t dream, I don’t remember sleeping… I just went to bed and woke up with the alarm and everything between is a void. I seem to be getting rest because I am not absolutely dead tired in the morning… it is just an odd experience since I normally dream and remember the dreams.

Don’t Starve

Over the last few nights one of my friends has been playing the hell out of this game, so last night I decided to fire it up and give it a shot as well. It has been compared to turn of the century film version of Minecraft… but quite honestly I didn’t have that feeling at all. Essentially “Minecraft” to me means taking raw materials and building something permanent. So for me Terraria is a Minecraft game… but Cube World for example is not… regardless of how much it looks like it.

It took me awhile to adjust my expectations… what we have here instead of a building game is a survival game. Something I find far less interesting. Essentially you have to gather resources during the day, and survive the night all while not going crazy or starving. You gain sanity by standing near the fire each night, and as you get more insanity you start to see hallucinations everywhere. I’ve heard that eventually the hallucinations will attack you if it gets bad enough.

I can’t say I really enjoyed myself massively… but the gameplay instead fell into the mildly entertaining category. I think at my core I am a base builder… and the lack of the ability to build a permanent basecamp to go adventuring from really harmed my enjoyment of the game. I have seen screenshots that seem to suggest that later you are able to build fortifications to keep your camp safe. Additionally at least at low levels, it seems like you are almost penalized by trying to keep returning to a central base. Since in essence you can plunk down a fire anywhere you happen to be when night comes.

The other big problem I have with the game is a lack of permanence. The goal of the game is to “beat” each world by solving some puzzle that allows you to progress to the next one. So even if I could build some form of a base, I would be abandoning it every time I moved to the next tier in the game. Even in Minecraft when I decided to venture out and build a new base camp… I know that I always have the previous ones to return to if I so choose. Essentially it seems like the game has all the survival hassle of Minecraft, without the elements that make it fun for me… the wholesale world building.

The game is well designed, plays extremely smoothly and has a great retro look and feel that is immediately appealing. If you really like the survival aspect of Minecraft and similar games than this might be just the thing for you. I only managed to survive 3 nights on my first foray because I kept trying to engage in combat apparently too early. So that throws another money wrench in my enjoyment… to be happy in a game I need to be killing something regularly. My friend is having a blast with it, so it might very well be down your alley… however it goes in the “not really for me” bucket.

Goodbye Granite Falls

Between the laptop lunch fun and the beginning of last night I managed to wrap up the last of Stonefield with Baby Bel over Faeblight. The tail end of that zone is much more enjoyable than I remember. I am sure it was equally epic when I ran it originally… but there have been some tweaks that seem to make it flow better. Firstly I remember there being a gap where I was uncertain exactly where to go… so the transition up to the camp near the Phoenix Gate seems to be messaged better. Additionally the “rumble” with Guardian forces at the tail end of the zone… actually occurs in Stonefield now. Previously it sent you across the bridge into Scarwood Reach… where it was extremely easy to get into mobs way too high for your level.

So major Kudos for them for fixing the flow of this tail end content. Additionally the whole opening of the Phoenix gate felt far much more epic to me after having done the Rise of the Phoenix raid instance. I guess I am in less of a rush this time through the game… and as a result find myself enjoying the content much more. I still have problems with a few things… like Meridian and Sanctum still do not seem worthy of being capitol cities… but there is enough good always to make up for the few frustrating spots.

Has the Must Haves

Essentially when I was working on my MMO must haves list… I came to the realization when a friend asked me… that Rift is the only game on the market that has almost every single bullet point I listed. While I am looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online… it also seems like a vastly different kind of game… much like The Secret World is. So as a result… I feel like even after that game launches… Rift will still be my traditional MMO crush. I feel like I will always be playing rift at least some of the time.

There is just so much to like about the game, and so many different options for things to do. Especially now with the gem store… you can expand your character in ways you never could before. Recently for example I picked up Artifacing for Belghast over on Deepwood. This adds to his already existing crafts of Armorsmithing, Weaponcrafting and the three harvests of Butchering, Mining and Foraging. At this point it is just easier to add additionally tradeskills to that one character than to try and level up new harvesting abilities elsewhere. The one thing I really wish however is that we had cross shard mail between our own characters.

Better Mentoring

One of the sore points right now is that mentoring should be a bit easier than it is. I am not talking about lowering your own level… because that seriously could not be any easier. What I am looking for is the ability to invite any 4 friends to a group… click a button… and have it queue us for a random dungeon to meet our level range. Right now we essentially have to mentor manually to the lowest common denominator… sometimes it lets us queue for a dungeon… other times we have to remember where the hell the dungeon entrance is and run in manually.

One of the most powerful things about Rift is that it is functionally possible to group with your friends regardless of shard or level range. Trion really needs to put some effort into ironing these tools out to make it a much simpler proposal. I want to be able to group a bunch of people together and see a list essentially of things we can do… and then queue for something on that list without having to do much fiddling. When we have done this manually there is usually a lot of trial and error until we get everyone in the right zone at the right time at the right level. Streamlining this process would be a massive boon.

Wrapping Up

Well I have pissed away another morning rambling on about nothing much. Now has come the time for me to gather up my now empty coffee cup, run it to the kitchen and get on with the day. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope mine personally is far more uneventful. While I was on vacation, nothing much happened. But every day this week since I have been back… there has been a crisis. Yesterday for example McAfee decided out of the blue to mark an FTP Server Daemon as a “Potentially Unwanted Program” and in the process quarantined it… taking down a number of automated processes with it. I just want a nice calm day where I can actually remove items from my task list, instead of chasing down fires.

On Guild Leadership

July 17, 2013 by Belghast

Yesterday was a double post day… and quite honestly I just don’t have much ammo for this morning. I’ve been relatively busy at work and in the evenings I’ve had an odd schedule. Last night was the second night of going for a 15 minute or so walk before going to bed… and as suggested earlier in the week by Tententacles it seems to have mostly halted the panic attacks. Additionally it seems to unjammed my weight loss and is getting me off this plateau I have been on for several weeks.

Awesome Forum Sigs

Our very own Audrae is working on something spiffy for the Stalwarts. Essentially I’ve seen over the years nice clean guild signatures on various forums and always thought it would be cool to have something like that for the Stalwarts. I mentioned this yesterday in passing, and last night after work she knocked this out post haste. She has grand designs of building a php based signature generator but the first step looks amazing for a static one. This way we can have those really cool drool worthy signatures where ever we end up in the future.

Right now we are starting to develop a critical mass in Rift, but I am really torn as to the direction we should take. Currently we are living under the roof of the Outcast Misfits, and they have been gracious hosts. But the problem is… we still have an internal identity and our folks tend to mingle mostly with other Stalwarts. So in essence we have become a guild within a guild. There are times I really wish we were a guild of our own, so that I could get completely behind the concept of recruiting new people.

Additionally I have been playing a low level alt with long time Stalwart friends over in Silent Strike on Faeblight. I feel like that might be a halfway step between actually forming an official House Stalwart guild again in Rift. The only problem is… the relationship of Stalwart and Silent Strike dates from the pre-raiding era of our guild. Whereas the active members playing Rift are all from the raiding and post-raiding era. I still feel like as a whole it would be a better fit personality wise… but there isn’t the immediate name recognition there as there is for me.

It has been awesome logging into Silent Strike though in the evenings and seeing a bunch of “Hey Bel!” messages spamming across green chat. That was what Stalwart really was more than anything, a wonderful social place where everyone knew your name. Still I don’t want to move at all without talking to the assorted crew of folks… but this is likely going to have to be an email conversation since getting everyone online at the same time has proved to be troublesome. Hopefully I can reach some consensus as to what we want to do… and then move on it. I will admit… the part that has always bothered me about Deepwood is that it is not officially an RP server… not that it really means anything anymore.

On Guild Leadership

There was an interesting thread back and forth yesterday on Twitter about the death of guilds in WoW between myself, Linedan and Zellviren. In that conversation I made the above statement. It is honestly the truth… there was a massive amount of difference between leading a guild.. and trying to lead a raid. Guild Leadership is just a default instinct for me. My goal was always to create an environment that enables people to be awesome and do awesome things together. My philosophy was to try and make the officers and leader as hidden as possible… so that you felt the effects of having them… but they were never making any grand sweeping proclamations.

Additionally I tried to engage the quiet guild members, just to make sure they were getting what they needed. But when Stalwart changed from being a social guild that had a non-guild based raid attached to it… to raiding as a guild… something fundamentally shifted for me. Granted during some of the Wrath years, I was struggling with the mantle of raid leadership… but I had a team of others to hold me up when I was burnt out beyond going. Always in the past… I had the comfortable guild life to retreat to… and could say that there was a separation of church and state between House Stalwart and Duranub Raiding Company.

When Cataclysm robbed us of that buffer, it was the beginning of the end for me. No one really wanted to do the 25 man raids anymore after the expansion released… so as a result we organized into 5 different 10 mans. The problem is… not all 10s were created equal. It quickly devolved into a mix of the haves and have not’s… with the haves lording the kills over those who had not yet. Rather than cross pollination within the groups, so the more experienced helped out the less experienced… galvanized cliques were formed.

It was completely cool that people wanted to play with their friends all the time… but where I ran afoul with the system is that the people I wanted to play with… were not necessarily the team that the rest of my raid group did. I always struggle when a game puts up walls between me playing with ALL my friends. I hate having to choose if I play with this group or that… and the cataclysm lockout system just exacerbated this. Always in the past I could raid with the 25 man, and then break out into a smaller friends and family style 10 man to get the type of interaction I actually craved.

Being a raid leader essentially broke me. Now I am extremely gun-shy about committing to ANY organized activity… and I wish I could find a way past that. I miss all the more casual grouping activities, but each time I join a group with friends… I have this fight or flight instinct kick in telling me to run. I miss the days when I was just a guild leader… was the chaperone and cruise director for a group of friends. That is a role I am good at… a role that makes me happy.

As I look forward to games on the horizon… I am going to try my best to make a return to guild leadership in a proper fashion with Elder Scrolls Online. By the Stalwarts… I am looked at as a leader regardless if I am wearing the hat or not. So in every one of these non-wow games we have joined… where I have tried my best NOT to be the guild leader… I have ended up the leader of a guild within a guild anyways. Normally this works out fine for the most part… but in SWTOR this ended in pretty catastrophic fashion as we ended up splintering off from the guild we were hosted in. I really never want a debacle like that to happen again.

All of this… is why I think long and hard about moving our people into or out of a guild. Stalwart is more than a guild to me… it always has been. These people are my extended family, the family I chose. They have always been there for me when I needed them, and I will continue to try and be there for them. I’ve helped out Stalwarts fill out job applications, with interview questions… and even hired one as a co-worker. Additionally when I was out of work… this same group of people kept digging up job offers from other parts of the country. So all of this is something I feel passionate about protecting.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to take a nothing day… and spin off in a direction that created a big ole post. Still have no clue if it is one actually worth reading or not… but here it is nonetheless. I am sure I have a busy day ahead of me.. and it is pretty late right now so I need to be getting on the road. I hope you all have great days ahead of you, and that you do something awesome during its course. Here is hoping that tomorrow I can say it is night three without a panic attack!

Rift Puzzles and Cairns by Level

July 16, 2013 by Belghast

One of the coolest things that Rift has is hidden puzzles, cairns and static spawn treasure chests scattered throughout the world. Your instinct is to gather up the list and go after them as soon as you can… but since each of them gives you a physical reward… there is a bit of a trick to it. Essentially each puzzle or lootable in the world has a fixed level range… and in order to give you the best possible reward it is always a good idea to wait until exactly the maximum level.

Since I have a large number of friends just starting the game, I figured I would take a few moments to compile a list of puzzles, cairns and lootables by level range. This is in many ways a remix of the information found on KFGuides.com and I will be redirecting you there for the individual puzzle and cairn information. They have done a ton of work organizing this information I am just presenting it in a checklist form, similar to my bonus level ranges post from SWTOR.

Level 30 Rewards

Lake of Solace / Freemarch

The lake of solace is a really unique case. Not only does it have a puzzle deep within the lake, and a cairn, but it also has eight distinct lootables buried deep within the depths of the lake. Each one will give you a potion that is worth 8 minutes of underwater breathing. For location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, location for the cairn, and location for each of the 8 lootables please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Silverwood

Silverwood is the starter zone for the Guardians and offers both a puzzle and a cairn that can be found. Unfortunately there are no lootables that I know of. For location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and location for the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Level 35 Rewards

Stonefield

Stonefield is the second area for the Defiant and is connected to both Freemarch and Scarlet Gorge. It has a puzzle and three separate Cairn locations. For location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of all three cairns please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Gloamwood

Gloamwood is the second area for the Guardians and is connected to both Silverwood and Scarlet Gorge. It has a puzzle and a single cairn location. For location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Scarlet Gorge

Scarlet Gorge is the beginning of the mixed faction zones. It is connected to both Gloamwood and Stonefield and acts as a bridge between the two faction starter areas. It has a puzzle and a single cairn location. For location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Level 40 Rewards

Scarwood Reach

Scarwood Reach is a mixed faction zone and connects to both Scarlet Gorge and the high level zone Stillmoor. It has a puzzle and a single cairn location. For the location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Level 45 Rewards

Moonshade Highlands

Moonshade Highlands is a mixed faction zone and connects to Silverwood, Gloamwood, and the high level zone Iron Pine Peaks. It has a puzzle and a single cairn location. Please note, the puzzle requires two players to click in a pattern in order to complete the puzzle. I can be solo’d but is extremely difficult and requires perfect timing. I would highly suggest bringing a friend along for the trip. For the location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Droughtlands

Droughtlands is a mixed faction zone that connects to both Freemarch and the high level zone Shimmersand. It has a puzzle and a single cairn location. For the location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Level 50 Rewards

Iron Pine Peaks

Iron Pine Peaks is a high level zone and represents one of the three end game daily zones for the original game. It touches Stillmoor, Scarwood Reach, Scarlet Gorge, Gloamwood and Moonshade Highlands. It has a puzzle and a single cairn location. For the location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Shimmersand

Shimmersand is a high level zone and represents one of the three end game daily zones for the original game. It touches Droughtlands, Freemarch and Stonefield. It has a puzzle and a single cairn location. For the location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Stillmoor

Stillmoor is a high level zone and represents one of the three end game daily zones for the original game. It touches Iron Pine Peaks and Scarwood Reach and has a puzzle and single cairn location. For the location of the puzzle, tips for completing it, and the location of the cairn please check out the following guide at KFGuides.

Ember Isle

Ember Isle is a challenge zone that was released after the launch of the initial game. It featured level 52 or higher mobs and was designed for extremely well geared players. After the launch of Storm Legion they scaled back the mobs a bit to turn this into an alternate leveling zone. Unfortunately KFGuides seems to have stopped following the game as a result we have to rely on alternate sources for information. This zone has both a puzzle and a decent guide to locating it and completing it can be found here. Additionally if you prefer there are a number of youtube videos showing the process. I have not found a really good guide for how to get to the Cairn but you can find the location coordinates here. Additionally there are also a number of youtube videos showing the path.

Storm Legion Puzzles

In Storm Legion they seemed to shift the focus of these puzzles away from being an excellent source of gear, to being a way to collect various items for your dimension. I still love the concept of in game puzzles so I myself will be tracking these down and completing them. Previously I had only completed the original puzzles and did not even realize there was a puzzle on Ember Isle or that the tradition had continued into Storm Legion.

Essentially there are puzzles now in City Core, Kingsward, Moriban, Steppes of Infinity, Seratos, and Eastern Holdings. The Stylish Radish of Better Homes and Dimensions has an awesome guide that outlines all the things you have to do to complete the puzzles of Storm Legion. Many of them seem to have collection prerequisites, and essentially unlock new items for you to purchase on Omi the Mistress of Puzzles in Tempest Bay.

That’s All Folks

That is all I currently know about puzzles and other nifty things out in the world in Rift. Hopefully compiling this will help someone out there. Remember for the old world puzzles and cairns, wait until the level listed before completing them to assure the gear is the best possible you can get.

Crashing Castles

July 16, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… and this time I actually mean it. I am not sure what it was… the fact that I was completely exhausted by the end of the day, the hour or so I spent playing with friends… or the 15 minute walk I took before bedtime… but something helped. I went to bed around 9 pm and slept the entire night through without any panic attacks. Probably some of the best sleep I have gotten in awhile. So thank you all for the varied suggestions yesterday on the subject.

Crashing Castles

One of the best side effects of the steam sale, is it is a great opportunity to get your friends hooked on amazing games when they get priced on the cheap. I’ve been a huge fan of Castle Crashers for years, and used to play it with some friends on the Xbox 360. When it was released on steam… I picked it up immediately because seriously… it is worth buying on every platform you own. Right now it is going for the absolutely bargain basement price of $4 as part of the daily sale… and should be up there for at least another 24 hours.

As a result I got recruited last night when Ashgar picked up multiple copies of the game and gifted it to anyone who didn’t already have one. I have to say this was exactly the type of fun I had been needing. For me, Ash and Tam it was much like coming back home to our side scrolling fighting game roots… and we all adapted pretty quickly. Rae on the other hand, we could tell never really played that type of game… this compounded with the fact that she was playing with the keyboard… made the evening frustrating for her.

On that note… I highly suggest you pick this title up especially if you hail from the era of Final Fight and Double Dragon. But if you do so… I also highly suggest you have a gamepad to play it on. This was designed to play with an Xbox 360 controller… and I feel it plays best when I use that. It is completely playable on anything else however… but just remember all the tips and suggestions given in game… will be geared towards that specific controller. It won’t say press heavy attack… it will say press Y.. so if you are using something else there had to be a bit of translation in your head.

Just as a note to anyone on my steam friends list. I will almost never turn down an opportunity to play some castle crashers. There is something about this game that is so pure and fun that it just takes me back to the days of feeding quarters to gauntlet or teenage mutant ninja turtles and playing with three other friends. I really hope they create a sequel someday that is just as fun. The only game that I might like more than this as far as side scrolling beatemups… is Guardian Heroes… if it ever made its way to steam I would be immensely happy. Speaking of which… I need to get some people together to play the D&D Shadows of Mystaria steam port.

Granite Falls

Right now on my little warrior I am slowly making my way through the granite falls area. Stonefield has always been one of my favorite areas in the zone, in part because it was the area shown in the original cinematic trailer for the game. Additionally the town of Granite Falls is one of the prettiest in the game, and the falls themselves have always looked extremely epic. Sooner or later I will end up having to buy the Granite Falls dimension so I can have my very own copy.

I am up to my favorite quest chain as well, involving the crypt near town. Essentially giving me ANY quest chain involving undead and I will be happy. I started working on this over lunch, and got about halfway through the sequence of quests before I got drafted for castle crashers last night. My hope is that today I will push through the rest of Stonefield and move on to the Scarlet Gorge area. I feel like this is an area that just does not get enough credit in the game. I will have to play up another character when they have gone through with the redesign of the zone that is supposedly in the works.

Defying Reason

Also over lunch yesterday I decided on a whim to boot up Defiance for a little bit. I have an odd relationship with this game. I like it mostly… but I just can’t seem to take playing it for very long. I am happy to log in, kill a few rounds of mutants, maybe complete a quest… ride around in my dune buggy for a bit… and then log. I figure it would be much more enjoyable if I was playing regularly with a large group of people, but solo I seem to have a very short attention span.

I guess overall I just don’t like shooters as much as I once did… and the whole behind the back shooter thing works well but feels just awkward enough to give me a low tolerance for it. I really like the television show and the world, but so far I see little resemblance between the two other than having my very own “cat woman” telling me what to do. I just wish that the story had been set in the St. Louis area that we are vaguely familiar with in the television show… instead of out in California. Additionally since I am NOT from the California area and have never been… there just isn’t the same payoff as there is for other people. I didn’t realize that Mount Tam was an actual place… but I would have been able to pick up landmarks in Missouri.

Ultimately it is a good game… and it is pretty enjoyable… but I have the same patience with it that I have for Borderlands 2. I seem to be happiest when I play in spurts, unlike my friends that can literally play Borderlands 2 for hours and hours on end. Defiance definitely scratches a similar itch for me… and I finally found a weapon that I like. Essentially it is a heavy energy machine gun thing… reminds me of shooting a BAR in the WW2 area shooters. I can take down the baddies pretty successfully with it… but I cringe at the thought of eventually out leveling it. I have yet to find another weapon that I enjoy anywhere near as much as it.

I think this will continue to be one of those titles that I boot up every now and then… but never really dig too far below the surface. Additionally the game feels very “un-social”, and very much single player. I rarely if ever end up encountering other players when I play, and if I do they are usually buzzing around on their way to the next objective. I am sure this changes as you get higher in the content, but I am still in the starter area essentially. I could push through I am sure and get to the next area… but I figure why force myself when I seem to be enjoying little spurts of play here and there.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again… I need to wrap this up so I can get on with my morning and get into work. Today is trash day, so I need to make sure that is out by the curb. Additionally I really need to run some stuff by the cleaners. If I don’t get a start on these things I will end up extremely late for work. Right now I am essentially the boss, as mine is off on vacation… but it sets a bad example if I start slacking myself in the process. I hope you all have a great day… and here is hoping that today will be relatively panic free.