Tales of the Aggronaut

Computer Blues

June 12, 2013 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have been having what I term as “bad mental health” days. I’ve been super stressed about various sundry things at work, and combine that with the fact that I just do not handle change well. Every time my wife goes away during the summer for a conference, I go through this massive adjustment period. So much of my life is intertwined with hers, that when she is gone… there is just a void. I try my best to manage this “funk” but now and then it gets the better of me. I am thankful that I have a lot of friends who are willing to cheer me up.

Computer Blues

It seems like over the last few days… my computers have been betraying me. I have been having issues with my gaming laptop, where it is intermittently losing its power connection. Fiddling with the cord brings back the connection for short periods of time, before going out. I initially thought… this is likely a power supply issue so I did what I always do and went on amazon… found a replacement and got it shipped through prime. I got the new power supply and it worked even worse.

After much research it seemed like the g73 model has had some issue with the power port getting lose itself. After watching a few videos… I decided this was not something I wanted to undertake myself. It involved pretty much a complete teardown of the laptop, de-soldering one port and soldering back in another. I am essentially a software guy… I build my own PCs but that is mostly just assembling a bunch of parts that were designed to go together. I have done soldering work before, but it was nothing I was ever extremely comfortable doing.

After digging around I found what appeared to be an extremely reputable guy here in my town that does this sort of thing. He owns a “Nerds: We Can Fix That” franchise and as such is primarily a mobile pc repair truck, so we agreed to meet so that I could have him look over my laptop. After doing various sundry tests his though process was that it really was a bad power supply. After looking around he showed me a spot in the power connector one where of the prongs was most definitely crushed. His suggestion was to find an original Asus power supply and try that.

After much digging I finally was able to get a real Asus power supply ordered… but unlike the speed I am used to with prime.. it wont be here until Thursday at the earliest. As a result I am without my laptop and my ability to hang out downstairs while playing games. I know I have blogged about this before… when I lost my Gateway FX laptop, but I never really appreciate how amazing that is… until I can’t do it. After a long day it is so nice to just chill out on the couch with my laptop and half play games and half watch stuff off the DVR. I am nervous however that this will not really be the issue, but I am willing to try it… and it is far less invasive than other possible solutions.

Another Betrayal

Last night I get home, and go upstairs to begin the evening ritual of playing something. I get on mumble to talk to my friends… and in the middle of booting something up my gaming desktop locks up hard. In fact at first I can’t seem to get it to boot… which I later find that it is simply booting exceedingly slowly. I go into diagnostic mode trying to figure out what exactly is wrong. Everything seems to be operating as expected… voltage looks good… hard drive tests fine… memory tests fine. So after much fiddling I am basically at square one as to what might have happened.

A lock up is common enough, but a lock up followed by not wanting to boot afterwards really floored me. I am not talking windows booting… I am talking slow bios posting. I am going to have to keep and eye on things, but last night switched from a gaming night… to a do maintenance on all the things night. I went ahead and patched everything that could possibly be patched, updated all the drivers that could be updated… and did some registry maintenance. Given my “bad mental health” state… having both machines down at the same time was a state I was almost unable to cope with.

I realize that these are all first world problems… and rather petty… but having both machines potentially down at the same time sucked. Luckily through all my fiddling whatever happened seems to be not happening now. When a problem mysteriously goes away… it bothers the hell out of me though. I am not sure what happened, have no log evidence of what caused the lockup/slow boot scenario and ultimately no evidence of what seems to have cleared it up. My desktop is three to four years old at this point, so it might simply be aging hardware issues.

Now that I think of it… it might be older than that… I got it when we we were still raiding Wrath of the Lich King content in World of Warcraft. It has been a trusty machine that has pretty much run anything I have thrown at it for several years. It might in fact be time to upgrade… but I would much rather do it on my own time than having a box just up and die on me. Here is hoping that I have at least temporarily staved off whatever occurred.

Killing Psychos

I finally was able to get my machine in a state I was happy with around 9:30 last night. At this point I got back onto mumble and decided to join some friends in Borderlands 2. It was me playing Axton, Ash playing Zero and Rae playing a super bloodlust infused Maya. Quite frankly the combination of Rae and I riding around in a vehicle together is probably a bad thing. Especially when it comes to doing quests that have non-standard objectives. There may or may not have been a few objectives we almost failed at… because we were both too busy shooting things to notice that was not the goal.

When the game first shipped for whatever reason I was not able to hook up with the crew playing it. As a result I have pretty much only played single player borderlands 2 content. Last night was an absolute blast, and having players to rez me… really helped when I tried to play “tank” and bull rush a bunch of mobs. I need to find some better weapons… because right now my assault rifle is a tap to fire model that seems to always need reloading at the wrong time. I picked up an amazing sub machinegun last night, but it seems to go through bullets like water… and I am always scavenging to find more.

The combo of Axton/Maya/Zero seemed extremely formidable… but I think if you put ANY combination of different classes together you would have had the same results. Looking forward to maybe getting back in tonight and finishing the quests we were doing. Honestly I don’t really care if we even do quests…. I was just in the mood to roam around and kill things to satiate my “computer troubles” induced bloodlust. Borderlands 2 is a really good game for that kind of mindless violence. It is like the Saturday morning cartoon of death.

Rift Update

The other big thing going on today is the fact that it is the launch of the Rift Free to Play conversion. It will be interesting seeing how this improves or damages the community. My hope is that by lowering the barrier of entry it will be easier to get folks to try the game. Additionally I am hoping for a path through the cash shop to pick up some dimension goodies… because quite frankly I have been way too poor thus far to really experience the dimension content properly. In any case it will definitely be a massive change to the game… and as such interesting to watch unfold.

Additionally… it is really hard to type with a cat trying to balance on your arm. I guess I should take that as a queue to wrap things up. I hope you all have a great day, and that you are in a better mental place than I have been. I think my body is betraying me as well. This morning I am additionally having a “bad lung day” in that my asthma and allergies have decided to make my life hell. Trying to decide if today will be a stay home and take breathing treatments all day occasion or not.

Sony: Best Troll Ever

June 11, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was a truly odd occurrence for me. I played a quick league of legends bots game with friends, and piddled around for a bit in Dragon’s Prophet managing to get level 20. All of this was essentially “busy work” as for my inner circle of friends, the main event of the evening was the Sony Entertainment Pre-E3 stream. After seeing it… there really is not much else I can talk this morning other than just how amazing the show was when contrasted with the Microsoft presentation earlier in the day.

Throwing the Xbone

Thankfully we have a lovely abridged version of the Xbox E3 conference that arrived on YouTube over night so I can link here for you all. Basically the Microsoft conference was a massive improvement over the reveal event and its obsession with television. They actually seemed like they might care about games… but then unfortunately they presented me with a bunch of titles I really don’t care about. All of their big reveals seemed extremely unexciting. While I am watching this I am desperately scanning the list for that one game that makes me want to own a console system.

Out of all of the games shown… the only title that stuck out for me… was Killer Instinct. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of a new Killer Instinct game is pretty massive, as the original one was probably hands down my favorite fighting game ever. I was like a kid in the candy store a few months back when I managed to successfully get the Killer Instinct emulator running and got to revisit the original arcade experience. The problem is I just don’t feel like this is enough of a reason for me to spend $500 on an ugly black box.

Coming away from the presentation I still got the feeling that Microsoft doesn’t really care about games that much anymore. I still feel like they intend this to be some convergence device that causes people to change the way they interact with television. That is fine, but I already have a Roku… and it cost me way less than $500. Most of their killer features just are not that killer for me. I could give a shit about sports, and I never really seriously watch live television. So combined with games I don’t really care about… and making a big deal out of games that have been on the PC for over two years… I just really do not feel like Microsoft’s vision is where I want to be.

The Next Generation

I saw a tweet last night that essentially wondered what it was like to be Sony yesterday, having an entire day to soak in the Microsoft E3 presentation… all the while knowing that you were just about to nuke them back into the stone age. It certainly must have been an amazing day for everyone involved with the PS4 in any way. For as awkward and confusing at times as the Microsoft conference was… the Sony PS4 event was that much polished and keyed to the demographic that matters to them… gamers. There was an obligatory section giving someone floor time from the Sony entertainment division, showing off the movies and music libraries… but every other component of the show was about their serious line up of games.

For as nonplussed as I was about the Microsoft Lineup… I saw game after game that I want to play right now. The Order was this amazing steam punk meets diesel punk meets Victorian monster hunter game. The demo that was shown was an in game engine rendered trailer, and that really doesn’t matter… because it looks far better than most fully CG trailers today. In fact that was a huge theme with the show as a hole. Almost everything took painstaking effort to mention that what you were seeing was in game or in engine rendered footage. The end result is almost movie quality animation and brilliant special effects, there was just an unbelievable amount of eye candy being shown.

The Bumps

This is not to say that the presentation did not have its share of hiccups last night. Ubisoft decided to go completely blind and do their demos as a person on stage actually playing the game. They demoed both Assassins Creed VI and Watchdogs this way… and in both cases… AC especially they had some freezes in gameplay. Watchdogs however that has been in development far longer… had a few moments of slowdown but no lockups. This is the risk of actually doing anything live, because anytime I have had to demo software… it never goes 100% smoothly. I know the feels the guys on stage were going through… so to some extent this softens the blow of the fact that they had lockups.

Additionally there were some pretty awkward presenters… but nothing nearly as awkward as the Microsoft “trash talk” examples… and the really bizarre rape analogy as the man and woman were playing Killer Instinct together. Seriously Microsoft… what made you think it was okay to say something like that? At first I was like man… this is awesome an actual woman on stage playing a game… that is not a super model. Then you reduce her to a whipping boy as some jackass trash talks her and tells her to lay down and it will be over soon? Xbox One: The Console of Choice for Date Rapists everywhere!

Sony: Best Troll Ever

Anyways… essentially none of the bumps in the road for Sony were anything nearly as egregious as what we have seen from Microsoft. The big takeaway for me from the Sony conference is the fact that the games look like they are going to be amazing. Sony took every possible opportunity to troll Microsoft and make them feel bad for their current choices. The above is a great video highlighting one of the biggest features announced last night. Essentially you will be able to trade games for the PS4 the same as you could for any console previously. No awkward restrictions… you can buy used games and swap titles with your friends the same as you have been up to this point.

This is a huge boon for Sony, as the lack of used game support was likely to completely rule me out of this generation of consoles. I hate Game Stop probably more than most people, and I refuse to give them any business at all… however I still buy most of my console titles second hand. Very rarely is there a title for the consoles that makes me want to go out into the store and spend $60 on it day one. Instead I love the scavenger hunt that is going to pawn shops, and more equitable secondhand game stores like Vintage Stock, Game Xchange and Half Price Books. So the ability for a modern console to still give me that hunting for a bargain experience… is a huge boon.

Additionally the PS4 does not require an internet connection to work… however admittedly a lot of the features they were showing off in games were connected features. The console though has been designed to work in a connection agnostic state, which is again is a huge boon for Sony. There is no creepy Kinect eye always watching you, and with the recent flood of security concerns… giving Microsoft a box in your house that was always passively watching what you did was more than a little dystopian for me. I think Sony embraces the concept that actual gamers really don’t care much about minority report gimmickry… they just want to play the damned games reliably.

The biggest troll of the evening however was announced towards the end of the evening. The PS4 looks like a better console in every possible way, and have far better developer support with new and interesting titles. Playstation Plus is still far superior to Microsoft’s crappy gold program.. even after the announcement of getting 2 old titles per month. All of this goodness… and Sony drops the bomb in that it is $100 less than the Xbox One. While still expensive… the $399 price tag, and all the games that I want to play on it… really make this a buy for me. I may not get it new at launch, but I will definitely be picking it up eventually. I almost felt at the end of the night… that Sony should just drop the mic after the announcement and walk away… because they schooled Microsoft in every conceivable way.

Best Thing About The Show

While I am experiencing a massive resurgence of console gaming right now and am really looking forward to the next generation of console games… I am still very much a PC gamer at heart, and namely an MMO Gamer. Last night Sony got a major coup in that they announced that Elder Scrolls Online was coming to the Playstation 4 and would be available Spring 2014. Almost immediately Bethesda started in with the damage control and released the trailer above… showing that it would be coming to PS4, Xbox One, PC and Mac all within that Spring 2014 time frame. Elder Scrolls Online is the game I am looking forward to the most of all the titles on the horizon… and we finally have a projected timeframe.

The new footage looks absolutely amazing, and it includes some really solid first person game play. I’ve never had a problem with the idea of third person… and when playing Skyrim I switch back and forth between first and third regularly depending upon the situation. Having first never really seemed like a must have… but this is a huge boon for the Elder Scrolls purist crowd. Additionally the first person graphic for that Dragon Knight chain attack thingy looked amazing. This only further cements my desire to play one… I want to be Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. I wonder if like WoW… I can find an add-on that says “Get Over Here!” every time I press the attack.

Wrapping Up

I really need to get on with my morning. Today is trash day, and I have to finish gathering it, as well as give my cat some medication… and get on the road. The broad takeaway for the night is that Sony absolutely obliterated Microsoft. There is next to nothing they can do to recover in my eyes from the brutal beating they received at the hands of the Playstation 4. I want to start stockpiling cash now… so that I can pick one up in December when the console launches. I hope you have an amazing day… and I hope I did not offend any stauch Microsoft fans out there.

Infertile Ground

June 10, 2013 by Belghast

On Thursday of last week Psychochild posted on his blog an interesting article, musing where did the MMO Bloggers go? My immediate thought process is that they have not really gone anywhere. There are lots of bloggers as evidenced by the fact that the Newbie Blogger Initiative brought droves of them out of the woodwork and a year after the fact roughly 35 were still actively blogging. I think it is more an issue that the online community changes drastically on a regular basis. Older bloggers have dropped off and newer ones come in to replace them.

The Lack of Community

I think one of the big problems at hand, and why it seems like the ecosystem is not nearly as fertile as it once was… is the fact that there is no one overarching community. There is no single home base that bloggers check into, especially when it comes to blogs that are not so game-centric. I started my journey into blogging thanks in part due to the massively supportive community that is Blog Azeroth. Granted of the original batch of active bloggers, there are only a handful remaining, but that ecosystem has remained fertile thanks to the constant tilling of the volunteer staff and the works of podcasts like the Twisted Nether Blogcast always bringing new and upcoming blogs to the forefront.

The problem is… I no longer play wow as my primary game… and once I shifted away from that I lost my warm cocoon. There are friendly people out there in the outer reaches of the blogosphere, but it is far less certain once you are no longer looking at a single game. We have no broad gaming blogging community, because quite frankly we rarely get any form of consensus on anything out here in the black. This frontier community is far less friendly to newcomers, and while I have been blogging off and on in spurts of activity since April of 2009 I still very much feel like an outsider in this community. Instead of the attitude of "lets be lifelong friends" it usually feels a bit more like "lets be independent states with temporary alliances".

Infertile Ground

There is definitely a community out here on the rim of society, but it feels like it is mostly limited to the first pioneers to reach the outer rim. So the same dozen or so blogs link to each other frequently, but seem very closed to newcomers on their territory. Sypster did an amazing step forward by trying to reach a hand out through the cold black space, with the Newbie Blogger Initiative. But for those bloggers that participated as mentors… I ask you… how many of those new bloggers do you follow on twitter or G+ or facebook or have on your blogroll and or RSS reader? Basically I feel that we have made some steps, but have done nothing really to create a fertile colony out in the game agnostic reaches of space.

If we want bloggers to set down roots we have to make them feel a part of something bigger. Blog Azeroth did an amazing job of this, and gave me the confidence I needed to venture out into the black once World of Warcraft was no longer giving me what I wanted. But once I got out here in the outer reaches, I was just not prepared for just how different the community was. Admittedly I have a bad habit of just assuming everyone I am friendly with, is an actual friend… but sadly out here in the black that hasn’t always been the case and minor conflagrations occasionally turn into full blown wars. All of that said… I feel that the MMO and Gaming bloggers themselves could do a much better job of trying to help others out.

Shining Beacons

There are several examples of people out there doing amazing jobs to bridge the gap and found communities. I have to give @Sypster massive amounts of credit for the Newbie Blogger Initiative program. For awhile it felt like we were really gelling into a nurturing environment thanks entirely to his efforts in bringing disparate communities together. Unfortunately as a community we seem to have dropped the ball in keeping that effort rolling. I wonder what we could do to bring things back up and running and jump start some life back in that effort.

Another person that I have to recognize is Rowan. He does the most amazing job of trying to retweet people and give them recognition. I have no clue why he has latched onto my blog posts, but he does a great job of rewording things to make entertaining and original retweets. As much as I sometimes disagree with the quotes they choose, MMO Melting pot in the past has done a pretty good job of rebroadcasting and aggregating various topics from within the community. Lately however even they have seemed to be slowing down.

As of this Friday I have started my own little plan of sorts. Each Friday I have decided to do 5 #FF tweets, each singling out a specific blogger or member of the gaming community. Instead of a generic blast of a bunch of names, I am trying to write some reason why you should follow each individual person, giving them their own 140 characters. I am not sure if it will work, or make any difference, but I felt like it was a good thing to try anyways. Additionally making something routine is a way for me to keep doing it… and I have been pretty horrifically bad at doing the #FF practice in the past.

By Will Alone

As Psychochild states blogging is a lot of work. There are so many times where you are throw up against a choice… of do I blog about games or do I actually play said games. My problem is that in the past I too often chose to play the games, and then at the end of the night I lacked the oomph to actually cobble together sentences to say the words I wanted to say. In April I started a new experiment, where basically I would force myself to write something every morning as I am drinking my coffee. It might not be the best post ever, but it would at least be constant movement forward. I have no clue if the experiment is working other than the fact that 46 days later I have not missed a day… and on some days I have done extra posts like this one.

I made a commitment to blog about something, and even if I don’t want to… or it is extremely inconvenient as it was this morning… I have kept up the vigil. There are definite days where I am brimming with ideas I want to talk about… then there are other days where I have to make a post happen by surfing through my blog roll until "talky words" appear in my mind. I might be posting pure crap, but I am posting something… and for me that is progress considering I have had some pretty epic lapses in content during these four years of blogging.

Where to go from here

If we want to do something to offset those leaving the blogging community… we have to nurture those just entering it. This is where we are really failing as a "community". We have made some amazing efforts for short periods of time… but we really need to come up with a solution for the marathon. Individual game blog communities are thriving, and that is awesome for that specific game… but we need to come up with a global community that supports all the games. My only thought is to maybe create a permanent forum similar to Blog Azeroth that acts as a central home for all gaming bloggers regardless of their chosen game. I have no problem building such a forum community… but I want to make sure it would even be used before going through the effort.

Would such a community get used? Is there a community that already exists that is acting in this manner? I am open to suggestions… but these are the problems as I see them. Thanks for reading.

The Rat Trap

June 10, 2013 by Belghast

By necessity this is going to be one of my shorter early morning posts. I am in process of drinking some coffee, and before much longer I will need to run my wife to the airport. I’m awake roughly 30 minutes ahead of when I normally wake up… but for whatever reason it feels like I am missing 3 or 4 hours of sleep. I always find it extremely hard to shut my brain off when I know I NEED to be sleeping… and last night was no exception to this rule.

The Prophecy

I am still finding myself very much inexplicably drawn to this game. The more I play it, the more nuanced the combat becomes… but at the same time everything about it is deceptively simple. It is essentially all the same clicks and key presses, but when you do them in timing with what other abilities produces entirely new results. This feels extremely liberating in that I can get all the same warrior like abilities that I enjoy in other games with a handful of key presses just varying my timing for different results. This guy feels like I have always wanted a warrior to feel… brutal and imposing but also controlling the battlefield.

My biggest problem so far is the fact that I seem to always receive the quest to do something… moments after I have done it. The game has these public quest areas that are very reminiscent of Warhammer Online. They involve killing a bunch of things, and then finally an insanely difficult boss spawns and taking it down rewards treasure and completion of the public quest. In every single instance of a public quest in game… I have completed it, and then shortly thereafter gotten a quest to kill the final guy in the public quest.

Some of these were extremely difficult to solo… like the Subject 18 public quest area, and I have not been amped to try and do it again. So as a result these public quests kill tasks sit in my task list undone until I finally get frustrated enough to go over and repeat the process. This is the one thing I really wish they would change… instead of unlocking the public quest kill task at the end of a chain… just give it to players up front similar to the wanted posters were in World of Warcraft. That way if you are already in the area and are feeling your wheaties you can make a stab at the big boss.

The Rat Trap

The other aspect of the game that is quite literally killing me… is the fact that killing rats of ANY kind is a trap. Basically when I play any game I thoroughly believe in a scorched earth policy. If it is killable… it should probably die and die often to give me tasty tasty loot. I find myself ping ponging across most maps killing everything in my wake. The problem is… in Dragon’s Prophecy this is a brutal trap. Rats are generally non-aggro neutral mobs, that have a nasty habit of wandering into AOE attacks and adding onto whatever you happen to be fighting. They rarely have much hit points so the immediate thought is… this is no big deal.

The initial thought process… is so deadly wrong. While rats don’t do much attack damage and are fairly week… they pack the single strongest attack I have encountered in this game… Bacterial Infection. This appears to be a percentage based damage over time ability… that can take me from alive to dead in like 10 seconds. I have yet to really find a good way to counter this. Right now I take on of the strongest potions I have and pray I will survive. I would say that 90% of my deaths so far… have been to a damned stray rat.

This has lead me to play the game completely different than I normally would. I end up carefully picking my way through packs of mobs… drawing them around corners to try and fight in areas that are not so rat infested. It is so difficult for me to quell my “kill all the things” instinct and carefully pull my way through content. This basically has flipped me into dungeon tank mode… tanking an instance is the one time I am super cautious about my pulls. Everything about the guardian feels like the WoW Warrior on steroids, with more nuanced controls.

I am still not 100% sure why I am enjoying the game so much. It just feels like it is perfect for whatever state of mind I have been in. I am sure my enjoyment will fade over time, but right now the dragon taming aspect with some really amazing tanky gameplay has made this a real win for me. I always find it interesting when a game like this completely takes me by surprise. Everything about the setup for this game, sounds like something that would annoy me. I never really cared for runes of magic so the constant assertion that this was developed by the same people… was only taken as a negative by me. What we have instead is an extremely deep and subtle game, that I feel like I have just barely scratched the surface of its systems.

PK Comes through Again

Last week in response to a post talking about playing a Ranger again in Rift and farming cloth, PKDude99 the guy behind my favorite warrior solo build… posted a link to his favorite rogue build. This one is called the “Granpa said knock you out” build and is comprised of 41 Nightblade, 21 Riftstalker, and 4 Tactician. I have to say once again PK is completely right. The build works amazingly well, has extremely high damage output and next to no downtime. I can routinely take mobs 2 or more levels than me without any issue or added difficulty. I played with it quite a bit this weekend and was burning through the quests I worked on.

The funny thing is… as melee centric as I tend to be. This is the first time I have ever really seriously played a melee rogue in Rift. For whatever reason I was always drawn to the ranger/marksman builds that mimicked the WoW Hunter. I think it is mostly that traditionally I do not get along well with stealth classes. It always feels so tedious stealthing around and setting up the perfect moment to attack… then the combat itself is usually over in seconds. If you do not stealth around, usually you die horribly for your poor life choices.

Fortunately stealthing in Rift is completely different than my experience playing stealthers in the past. Stealth is a 30 second buff that you use only as a setup immediately before combat. Additionally you do not slow your movement speed, so combat still feels fast paced. Additionally it seems to not really matter if I open with a stealth attack or not… I can still chew through mobs just as effectively without a big opener. I feel like the Rift rogue is the “warriors” rogue… for someone who prefers fast paced combat to fiddly stealthy nonsense. I am sure most rogue types are ready to throttle me at this point… but I am enjoying it.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap this up so we can get on the road. We need to get to the airport, and then me on to work. I hope you all have a great day, and hope that you all go as much sleep as needed… unlike me. Not really sure what this week will bring, I tend to completely vege out on video games during these periods. I am sure I will play a good deal more Rift and Dragon’s Prophet… and I would like to get back in to some more SWTOR as well. Hopefully the week goes quickly.