aggrochat Archives - Page 24 of 35 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Heavensward Hype

March 8, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 47 – Scrabble is for Olds

Last night is another case of us sitting down, saying we had nothing to talk about… and then ending up talking for an hour and a half about everything imaginable. We talked about Ashgar and the insanity he is currently going through working on his Relic Novus in Final Fantasy XIV. We talked my recent journey back into Bravely Default and how that game requires a certain measure of degenerate play to defeat encounters after a certain point. We talk about Tam’s brush with near death as he decides that no one should ever be bit by a Black Widow spider because it hurts like hell. I talk about my experiences in Blackrock Foundry and the World of Warcraft selfie toy filling up my twitter feed. I talk about hitting level 80 on my first character in Guild Wars 2… and how empty it feels since the last 15 levels or so were essentially given to me for logging in daily.

Our longest discussion however that spawned the quote that I am using for the title of this show was about board games and miniature gaming. We talk about “long” board games, those taking several hours to play out… and the frustration of having to devote that much time to a game you are essentially “behind the curve” in the entire time. We talk about games that require less time to get into and play, and that can be played for a number of times in a single evening. This also spawns a discussion into miniature gaming talking about the problems with Warmachine and Warhammer 40k contrasted with some of the strengths of Infinity. As always it is a long rambling discussion between a bunch of friends, and since you apparently like that as AggroChat listeners… then this should be a banner episode.

Heavensward Hype

Yesterday was a pretty huge day for Final Fantasy XIV in that Yoshi P was at Pax East giving a presentation on the upcoming expansion. Thankfully it was live streamed to the internet, and you can check out the entire presentation from yesterday over on their twitch video on demand page. Honestly at first I thought it was going to be a disappointing repeat of all of the information that had come out of the Tokyo Game Show back in December. The show started with essentially revealing the same information about the Au Ra race and the three new classes that happened during that show. However quickly it segwayed into showing us things like the amazing level 60 class sets. The above image is that of the Warrior set, and while I still intend to play Dark Knight as my main… I have to say I will be rapidly leveling Warrior as well. Instead of breaking rocks with axes… they seem to have just skipped a step and made the axe itself out of a rock.

Since this is essentially the expansion of the Dragoon… you would expect the level 60 class armor to be amazing. As the above image shows it was well worth the wait. My biggest hope is that they don’t have the female “belly hole” problem that the earlier dragoon armor had. I have to say though that I will continue poking things with a spear if for no reason other than the collect this gear. As usual I was not quite so amped about the caster sets, but then again I never really am. I have no clue what is going on with the Black Mage set , at least the current set is something I would happily wear. This set is a bit more “demon lady gaga” than anything else I can think of. If you want to check out all of the new class armors you should hit up this youtube video that shows each set in action. I am happy that maybe just maybe I will finally have a Bard set that I am not ashamed to wear.

Not a Spring Release

The biggest news to come out of yesterday is a firm and concrete release date for the first Final Fantasy XIV expansion… Heavensward. Within the next few weeks they are apparently releasing a brand new benchmark application to allow us to test out the Direct X 11 changes, and play with all of the racial customization options on the Au Ra. If this works like the previous benchmark it should allow us to export our saved characters and then import them into our actual game client. On March 16th the pre-orders will open and like usual the physical collectors edition is going to have some sort of a big dragon statute pack in. Apparently earlier they had announced that we would be getting a flying dragon mount as part of the collectors edition as well, which in truth are the type of rewards I care a bout. All of this time we had heard “spring 2015” for the release date, but it turns out that the game will be launching on June 23rd with early access starting June 19th… so not spring but summer.

It turns out that they apparently did have a May date in mind for the launch, and they tried to make it. However as Yoshi P apologized they wanted to make sure they had a very polished product for launch. I for one support pushing back by a few weeks to make sure we have a really polished game, because really… the first expansion is a crucial time for any game. I want to make sure they are able to keep this quiet momentum they seem to have going into the new content. That said we also still have one full major patch waiting in the wings, and I am not sure there would have been enough time for us to really get to complete that content before the expansion anyways. I feel like that is the prime difference here as there is with other expansions. Most expansions land at the tail end of a six month or longer lull with no new content. In the case of Warlords of Draenor it was at the end of a 16 month lull… even with the impending expansion… they still have content releases planned up to the moment 3.0 launches. So in the mean time I will be working on my crafting… because it sounds like we are going to need a team of crafters to complete our free company airship.

The Monkeysphere

February 15, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 44 – Tragic Relationships

As we were getting close to recording this weeks episode two things happened. Firstly we decided that it was probably better for all parties combined if we tried to record on Friday instead of Valentines day proper, that would leave the day open for any holiday plans that our cast might have. Secondly Kodra suggested that we try and record a Valentines episode talking about relationships in video games. At face value this seemed like a great idea, and generally speaking even if an idea is destined to fail… I am more than willing to try it. The problem is as we sat down to record, we quickly realized just how flawed and tragic most relationships in video games are. We can’t even make it past three relationships in the episode without hitting in the fact that man… video games are really bad at this.

The problem is that video games seem to be good at two emotions revenge fueled Rage, and utter soul crushing Sadness. We joked about indie games being hung up on sadness a few episodes ago when Tam kept giving each game Kodra talked a sadness score “Seven Sads out of Ten”. It seems as though we are not quite ready to talk about actual adult relationships that are productive and not abusive or hostile to the well being of the participants. I think the problem is more that we have not figured out how to do meaningful stories that are not relying on these elements as a way of moving the plot forward. After all if someone is happy with their life, chances are they are not going to go off and be and adventurer. In any case the episode ended up being pretty interesting to record in spite of itself.

The Monkeysphere

Yesterday Braxwolf wrote an interesting follow up to my post diving into my post and trying to explain some of his own thoughts. His post was awesome for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it gave me a real name to a theory that I have used for years. Once upon a time I was driving home and heard some researchers talking on NPR about the “monkeysphere” theory… well it turns out this is more properly known as the Dunbar number. Essentially it is the maximum number of people that we can care about at one time. The idea is that our brains are literally only capable of caring about a fixed number of people at any given time, so in order to start caring about someone knew… we have to punt someone out of the sphere. I’ve long thought about this and I think my zone of caring maybe works a little different than the extreme examples of these studies.

While I am not sure if my sphere is larger than most, but I think it is arranged in some distinct regions. I attempted to draw these out above, to make sense of them. If you take that 150 is the maximum number of people that you can care about at any time like the initial study I read, my numbers would break down to something like this. I generally have about 25 people that I would consider my inner circle, and these are folk that maintain their orbit relatively safely and I ultimately end up talking to them almost every single day. After that we fall into a close orbit zones of folks I would consider close friends, and among this group I would say there are about 50. From there you fall into what I refer to as the “hotswap” zone, to borrow a term from technology. This would be a field of 75 people that gets swapped in and out of the larger pool of every single person I have ever met.

Points of Data

Each person that I meet gets stored in my brain as a pattern of data… the closer I am to a person the more data points I remember. The odd thing is… when someone moves in and out of orbit I don’t delete that data. I can remember things about friends that I have not seen in years and may never actually cross paths with again. Essentially I feel like I have a fourth sphere that is made up of the thousands and thousands of people I have ever met in my life. At any time due to circumstance one of these people can come zooming into orbit and bump someone else out of that “hotswap” zone and I can functionally pick up where I left off, as though no time had passed. I realize that not everyone functions in this state of constantly looking for new interactions with people, and pulling them into their own personal gravity for as long as possible. But that is the way I work, as some sort of empathic computer looking for new inputs.

The biggest flaw in my system design however is the fact that there is no delete key. When a group of individuals break out of orbit attempting to shun me… there is no system available to write those individuals off as a “loss” and purge them from my memory. The sting of rejection will always be there, even after decades pass.. it can be summoned up on a whim with brilliant Technicolor realism. I can remember every disappointment, every failure, every time someone made fun of me. Which seems horrible until you realize that I can also remember every single positive event that has happened to me, each warm fuzzy felt and recalled at a moments notice. The problem is… this makes it extremely hard to ever truly forgive someone. I can reach a point of “being able to exist amicably” with someone, but I can never actually forget any of the transgressions… and in the back of my head will always end up holding a grudge. So having this deep empathic memory… is a double edged sword, but I would not change the way I function for anything.

AggroChat Game Club

February 6, 2015 by Belghast

Failure to Random

Last night was our second night of raiding in Blackrock Foundry, and our second night of attempts on Oregorger. This boss has become the pinnacle of everything I love and hate about Blizzard raid encounter design. The thing I love is the fact that it is a really inventive fight that lets us play pacman as we gobble up crates of ore throughout the arena before Oregorger can get to them. What I hate about it is the fact that there are some serious RNG elements to the fight. After our first night of attempts the raid lead and others poured over the logs, and did some serious research finally finding a video showing how the process worked. In theory Oregorger will always choose to go a direction where there a boxes So the theory goes that if you clear boxes in a certain order he will favor a specific path over others. The problem in practice is even then… there is still a large amount of RNG into the encounter as to which specific direction he will turn and charge.

You can watch the video we stumbled onto purporting to have the solution. The problem is no matter how many times we watched the video, no closely we aspired to follow the golden path… something went wrong. It is moments like this that I get frustrated since really I have no clue what is going wrong. If we can ever figure out the magic behind the box phase we will down this fight because we are now doing the first phase flawlessly, or what appears to be flawlessly. Largely this has always been one of the problems with World of Warcraft raid design. They tend to view “random” as a positive thing, and to some extent I get it… but don’t make these random occurrences raid wipes. The Oregorger encounter is long enough as it is… to have a single mechanic take out half of your raid. I guess I find myself preferring the Final Fantasy XIV raid design ethic of extremely difficult… but follows a predictable pattern. That way when you fail you know it is because you didn’t do something… not because the random element decided to screw you over this try.

Hans and Franz

When we took our break half way through the raid, we opted to switch gears and shift to the Hans and Franz encounter. The mob names are Hans’gar and Franzok, and I find it absolutely hilarious that they a reference a skit that came out when I was in elementary school… and large swaths of our raid was not even alive when it was a “thing”. But I am told apparently there is a State Farm commercial bringing the characters back… so I guess it makes sense. The encounter is in a room filled with conveyor belts with thin strips between them that don’t move. At the start of the fight the belts are off, but when it enters the environmental damage phase they turn on making it harder to avoid the obstacles. The first phase is avoiding the “pop tarts” as they have become referred to by the raid… which are these molten metal slabs that come into the room. The second phase of the environmental damage is avoiding the metal stampers, that come down from the ceiling in a certain pattern. There seemed to be four turns of a specific pattern before the encounter picked a new pattern. Granted it could potentially pick the same pattern twice in a row for eight turns.

There was also a tank swap mechanic happening, but as DPS I never quite grasped what was actually occurring. There was a point in the fight where a specific tank in the rotation needed to have an external damage cooldown cast on him while being slammed to the ground. The rest of the fight was simply avoiding damage that could be avoided, and pouring damage into the boss during the few times when they were standing still. This meant that you wanted to make sure you blew your dps cooldowns and took your second potion during one of the windows where you could stand on the non-moving sections and pour damage in. Everything about this fight is like a better designed Oregorger, and what I mean by that is… there is still a fun quirky mechanic, there is still an element of randomness… but the randomness is predictable and something you can adjust for quickly. I will admit on the first pull seeing everything play out felt like madness, but it was simply to adjust after that to match the pattern in play. As a result we downed Hans and Frans last night and I managed to pick up two more drops… one of which again I won’t be using.

AggroChat Game Club

I figure at this point… the statute of limitations on the podcast we announced our first AggroChat Game Club title. As a result I am going to talk about it today for anyone who happens to read my blog… but not listen to our podcast. One of the ideas we kicked around for awhile was to have a single title that all of us played during the course of a month. Then during the last show of that month we dive into the game completely with no concern about spoilers. The idea is for us to talk everything about that game, what we liked, what we didn’t like and how we felt about the major plot points. During Episode 41, we deliberated about a long list of games and finally decided to go with a consensus title for the very first one. As such we chose Citizens of Earth by Atlus, and over the course of this month all five of the AggroChat members are going to be playing it. To make things even more interesting… this is a title that is available on Steam, 3DS and Vita and in actuality we have folks playing each of these versions.

What I want from you… is to play along with us! I thought it would be fun if we also collected some of the best comments sent into us by listeners to the podcast that are also playing. So pick up the game on whatever platform you choose, play the game, and then send in your comments. We will try and pick out several of the comments we receive about the game and mention them while recording our podcast. The show in which we are recording is February 28th, so please try and have the comments to us by the 26th to make sure we have time to read them. Each of us are already knee deep in the game, and I look forward to this little experiment. For those wondering… all of the titles mentioned during AggroChat #41 that did not receive a “hard veto”, are still technically in play. We are sorting out how this club will work from this point on, but more than likely we will be round robin picking future titles from that same list. Hopefully you will join in the fun, and don’t forget to let us know what you think.

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So Damned Charming

February 1, 2015 by Belghast

Episode 42 – Gigantic Personality

This week is the first live show we have recorded in two weeks. In the intervening time Bel, Rae and Ash went to Pax South, and Rae and Ash managed to catch the dreaded Pax Pox. Kodra represented our podcast on the Inaugural episode of the TGEN Tribunal podcast featuring members from all of the various TGEN podcasts and then became the grand Wii Bowling champion of his cruise. During the course of this episode my cast members try and convince me that I am a “media personality” to which I still deny. In addition to all of this madness we talk about a lot of games.

Kodra talks about his experiences with the 3DS port of Citizens of Earth, playing a lot of Sudoku and the punishing game 1001 Spikes. Ash talks about a week of playing Final Fantasy XIV, and the rogue like overture. Tam talks about time spent playing the new generation of adventure games including Dreamfall Chapters and Life is Strange. Rae talks about some FFXIV and her frustrations with the current state of League of Legends Lag, as well as the controversy of them completely blowing off Pax South. Finally I talk about my experience taking media appointments at Pax South, and getting to play a lot of Gigantic and Moonrise. We deep dive into Gigantic talkinga bout our experiences playing together, and what the various champions we played were like.

Finally at the end I talk a little bit about my joining the staff of MMOgames.com. It is a big episode full of lots of stuff and I hope you all enjoy it. We are happy to be back and happy to be hanging out and recording aggrochat once more.

So Damned Charming

One of the things that makes me happiest in life is when a bunch of my friends happen to be playing the same game at the same time. Over the course of the last week Syl, Jaedia, Liore, Aro and a few others have started playing Final Fantasy XIV on the Cactuar server. This morning was the first time I had actually caught Syl on since she started up, because of time differences and the fact that last weekend I was kinda a Pax South. While waiting on one of my filters to run on the podcast this morning I popped over to see what she was up to in Camp Drybone. While there I played show and tell with various outfits and then decided to show off my Draught Chocobo, the two player mount that comes from the recruit a friend program. She I think jokingly asked if it could take her to Vesper Bay… but sure enough that was precisely what I did. Granted I had to run across three zones to get there but it was super enjoyable, and all the while she was emoting all sorts of happy things sitting behind me.

Its moments like this that make Final Fantasy XIV so damned charming. Sure there are problems like goofy invisible walls, or things being gated behind group content… but the overall package is just so adorable at times it hurts. I mean what is more awesome than a pair of Lalafell trekking across country on a big damned chocobo? I love how group friendly this game is, that any one of us can easily help another guildie get something accomplished. We have started over the last few weeks doing a guild raid night of sorts directly before our podcast on Saturday. Last night we managed to catch a few people up with Shiva and Ultros, and then turned around and finished the Chimaera fight for another guildie. It is so painless to make this happen, no fiddling with hotbars, no fiddling with gear sets… the game just auto levels you down to the content that you need to run. I think in part the ease of helping others is what leads to the game being so friendly to new players.

Hard Mode Roulette

Another thing that happened recently is we managed to complete all of the new set of dungeons, unlocking hard mode roulette. I have to say it feels like Square has ramped everything about this patch up since in theory it is the last major one we will get before the expansion. Everything is leading towards what feels to be us entering Ishgard and joining in the battle against the dravinians. I spoke about the Keeper of the Lake dungeon earlier, and it definitely ties in to this theme. The other two dungeons feel more like us dealing with consequences of our actions. In Wanderer’s Palace we face the King Tonberry and through the course of the events end up defeating him. Upon entering Wanderer’s Palace hard mode… we see that this really destroyed the Tonberry people allowing a beast tribe to come in and take over, enslaving them. So here I am hanging out with my Tonberry Buddies after saving the day.

In Amdapor Keep hard mode we are going back in to deal with the havoc that the cultists started the first time. Cleaning up the remainder of the demonic hordes that were summoned. This is really the first dungeon that it did not feel there was a vastly different storyline. Granted you take a completely different path through the keep, and face entirely new enemies, but the story of the dungeon itself felt a little on the weak side. I did remark several times at just how pretty the dungeon was this time around. In all cases the new content was rather challenging, forcing us to use our limit breaks to get through almost every encounter. So far of this new set I would definitely say that Keeper was the hardest, and is likely going to be the one folks bail on if any. I felt like maybe Amdapor Keep was the easiest, leaving Wanderers Palace somewhere in the middle. I love the hard mode dungeons and am amped to see what they give us with the expansion. In the mean time I need to make my way into World of Darkness and see how that works.

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