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A Not-So-Small Delay

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Good Morning Folks. When last we spoke I was excited and preparing for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred expansion. More than anything I was excited that the launch was happening at a reasonable hour so that both myself who is in Central Time Zone and Ace who is in Eastern Time Zone could actually participate in the game together. Throughout the day we made plans to hang out and chitchat while making our way through the campaign that evening. It is really moments like this that we both look forward to when we are both reasonably excited about something at the same time and can do nonsense together. So often we are playing totally different things, but the stars seemed like they were aligning to give us a new game launch to dig our teeth into in a manner that was going to be enjoyable and not trying to stay up until midnight.

Then roughly thirty minutes before the game was set to go live at 6 PM CDT, the bomb was dropped that the launch was going to be delayed. In what has become one of the least correct posts in a while, they stated that there was a “small technical issue” that would lead to a “small delay” to the launch of the game. In true Blizzard fashion, they gave us no real information to work with, and as a result, the rumor mill started filling in the gaps. PC players were stating that it was a problem with one of the console releases that was to blame for the delay, Console players were stating that it was something to do with Steam’s rigid update schedule… and in the vacuum, we were left without any facts to go on. The rest of the evening was dictated by 2-hour blocks… of just needing a few more hours… which ultimately led to the game launching roughly six hours late.

Diablo IV has had a fraught history since its launch last year. So much so that “D4 Bad” has become a prevalent meme in the ARPG community with countless music videos released on the theme of it being “dogshit”. Admittedly some of these are bangers and largely feature a cast of characters from the ARPG streaming scene. The Vessel of Hatred expansion launch was a grand coming out for the game again, a cotillion where it was being presented to the world to show how much it had improved. Last night’s botched launch pretty much destroyed that goodwill in an instant. Pretty much every streamer to some extent had to deal with the return of the “D4 Bad” crew to their chats, and honestly… they weren’t wrong. How many games has Blizzard launched throughout the years, and how many of them have they bungled at the finish line?

What is even worse is that Streamers were left holding the bag for the botched communications surrounding this situation. Blizzard was simply not giving any real information about what is going on. Contrast this with the way in which Eleventh Hour Games communicated at the launch of Last Epoch when it had so many server issues. I was way more willing to show forgiveness towards a group of developers that were sharing what was actually going on, and how they were trying to resolve it… rather than last night’s refrain of “just a few hours more”. Raxx spent the evening playing various games with his stream, doing a bracket of games for him to play and eventually falling into chess.

Darth Microtransaction attempted to keep the attention of the crowd by giving away copies of the expansion, handing out battle passes, and then playing a betting game with his audience. He would bet that the game would launch within the next thirty minutes, and then when that time had passed he would give another five subscriptions away to his viewers. At one point I know he had over three thousand folks tuned in and watching his stream, in which he was playing a video he had recorded of Vessel of Hatred in the background while playing Old School Runescape in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and attempting to keep chat engaged.

Pohx who is quite possibly the sweetest person in all of the Path of Exile community, decided to give the launch of the expansion a go. He spent the evening playing Warcraft 3 custom maps and then eventually said fuck it and went to bed. I ultimately gave up around 9 pm and went to bed, I am not sure when Ace did but I don’t think they stayed up that late. I am glad that I gave up because the game did not roll out until after 11 PM my time and with it came a 23 gig patch… essentially negating the whole process of preloading the game that we did earlier this week. This is a massive black eye towards the game and towards the team behind it.

I was clearly annoyed enough to devote an entire blog post to that fact this morning, but in truth I was mostly having a chill night. I kept various Streams open in the background throughout the night so I could find out tidbits of information as they trickled out. The majority of the evening I spent in Path of Exile slowly chipping away at challenges, ultimately knocking two of them out. My map runners also brought about four divines last night so it was a pretty great time all around. I think my biggest frustration about this whole situation is the complete and total communications fail from Blizzard. I am not sure what they were thinking by trying to constantly diminish the impact of this outage because clearly, it backfired. Had they just been honest and set reasonable expectations… folks would have gone about their night and done other things rather than feverishly waiting for the launch of a game that was not coming… or at least that was arriving almost six hours late.

This morning I got in briefly and created a Spiritborn because I figured I might as well try the class while it was likely to have some grossly overpowered builds. I was happy to see that there was the option to create a character and start with the new campaign without also having to complete the original campaign. I’ve created a seasonal character because essentially my stable of standard characters is dead to me. I am probably going to go the whole poison Centipede build with it because it looks wild. I used to like playing the Monk in Diablo III, and I figure this is going to feel a bit like that based on the video footage I have seen.

I sincerely hope that the community did not devolve into death threats last night, but the Diablo IV team deserves some ire for their fumbling of this launch. More than anything they need to reassess how they communicate with players because what I saw last night was insufficient and sad.

A Cup of Hatred

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern this week. I have a very long post kicking around in my skull but have not quite committed to writing it yet, or honestly even know how to approach it. However tonight the Vessel of Hatred expansion launches for Diablo IV and I am planning on giving that a go. I did not last terribly long in Season 5, but I am interested to see how things sort out for all of the changes that they are making to the game to make it a bit more Diablo III-ish. Remember I was a D3 seasonal player for over a decade so that is not necessarily a bad thing for me. I am trying to decide if I am going to try out the new Spiritborn class or do my normal Barbarian run. If I go Spiritborn I will probably go the nonsensical-sounding centipede poison build, because might as well play it before it gets nerfed.

In other weekend news, my Minecraft nether tunneling project has finally paid off. Essentially I had been branching out of my main portal in every direction looking for the Warpwood biome, so that I could collect some resources from it and be able to grow the blue-green trees in my base. I really need to plant down some sign posts because my tunnel network is getting a little hard to navigate by memory. The thing I forgot about the Warpwood Biome though, is that Endermen spawn there so I might have to create some structures to be able to farm them for Ender Pearls. I doubt I have a dedicated post to the nonsense I have been up to, because quite honestly… digging tunnels is a big boring, but I find it relaxing.

I also spent a little bit of time this weekend playing around with Tiny Glade. This game essentially is a diorama-building tool that lets you procedurally generate really cool-looking castles and cottages and then terraform the land surrounding it. I wish there was a bit more “game” here like the ability to have tiny NPCs inhabit your world akin to Sim Tower. I used to love that game and then watching the tiny pixel people going about their day. The game is gorgeous though and if you get the hankering to build some cottage-core palaces then this is probably the game you have been looking for. Players have already recreated Rivendell and other massive structures from fiction. One of the neat things about the game is that there is a daily theme to help you get started in your creations.

I’ve also played a bit more Soulframe, but honestly… one of my core complaints about the game thus far appears to be a feature. One of the plots of the game is that this group that you are fighting back against has destroyed knowledge in the world, and as a result, all of your quest objectives show up as this foreign language that you cannot read. Then as you recover knowledge, you begin to be able to translate things a letter or two at a time. This is a cool idea from a storytelling aspect, but it largely just leads to a frustrating in-game experience as you have no clue what you are supposed to be doing or where you should be going. Even more frustrating is that it appears that objectives can be completed multiple times, so your sparrow friend who is supposed to show you the way to the next thing you should care about sometimes sends you back to things you have already completed before. It sure is pretty and combat feels fairly fun, but right now… I am struggling to attach to it due to the obtuse nature of the narrative. Souls players who love obtuse bullshit will probably be in their element here.

Instead of doing new things though, this weekend I fell back on the old and familiar and spent a lot of time playing Path of Exile. It is shocking how good the Currency Exchange system is and how well it works this late in the league. Normally speaking trade would be completely dead and it would be a chore to do any sort of large-volume currency swaps. However, the asynchronous nature of the Currency Exchange means that players are still actively putting things up for sale and creating open buy orders for things that they need. I sold so many Valdo’s Puzzle Boxes for 190 Chaos each, and they did not sit on the exchange for very long before getting snapped up each time.

I’ve been slowly chipping away at objectives and in theory, if I can get to 31 total challenges for the league I will be able to get the same sized totem as I had last league. I have a few candidates to get there, namely the two related to Scarabs that I am getting closer to finishing. I need to look at Sublime Starlight and see what the cheapest path to completing that is as well, given I have a pretty good backlog of the runes from the league mechanic. Arduous Atlas is easy enough, just requires a lot of brute force mapping and is only a matter of time not necessarily effort. I am slowly getting closer and closer to level 100 so the gear grinding goals or whatever that achievement is called might be within reach as well. I’m not super far from several o the ones un Unbelievable Undertakings, but those all for the most part will require me to spec into specific league mechanics to get through them.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend exploring The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and I am already a proud member of team Beds for life. I honestly have mixed feelings about the game. It is extremely well built and I think the idea of roaming around as Zelda, but so far combat feels fiddly. Legend of Zelda for me was always a combat experience first and foremost and a puzzle-solving experience as a fun secondary activity that blended along with the combat. I am not sure if Zelda gets better tools but right now killing anything feels a bit annoying so I find myself just avoiding combat whenever possible. Maybe that is the overarching theme that they were going for. I want to get deeper into the game but right now I am only a few hours in and not super far past the initial tutorial.

I have to admit I also don’t feel amazing giving Nintendo money right now. I had already bought Echoes of Wisdom, but their crusade against Switch emulation is a major bummer for me. Playing Switch games on PC has been my primary source of enjoying these games. I would buy the game on Switch and then play it on my PC via emulator because it was simply a more comfortable option than dealing with the short battery life and heft of the Switch console in handheld mode. Additionally playing via emulators allowed me to “patch” things out of games that annoyed me… for example, I ran mods to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom that removed durability from the game entirely. My guess is whatever the Switch 2 ends up being will be backward compatible and the current crop of emulators will likely successfully run all of the games on day one.

All that Nintendo will have done with their action is push the scene underground. They went from having three emulators that were open-source projects that they could easily keep tabs on… to having to deal with what will be countless unofficial forks that are being maintained by piracy distro groups. You can already buy the Miig Switch and Miig Dumper through AliExpress and the price of them keeps dropping. Basically, Nintendo has destroyed the methodology that allowed folks to buy legitimate copies and play them on legitimate Open Source emulators and will now force those folks to either play the inferior version on official hardware… or rely exclusively on distro groups and torrent sites to get the games.

AggroChat #495 – Just Let Your Soul Glo

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We start the show with a quick discussion about Path of Exile, and how we are now two months into a League, a position where things would normally be dead…  and that the Currency Exchange is still hopping.  This leads to a secondary discussion about Kodra’s woes as he attempts to do the Merchant Guild thing in the Last Epoch.  From there Bel talks about Witchfire with its Hexen meets Destiny meets Hades PVE extraction shooter gameplay. Bel also got an invite to Soulframe Preludes the next game from Warframe maker Digital Extremes and shares some of his early impressions.  From there we dive into the Magic the Gathering Commander situation with controversial card bannings, death threats, and Wizards of the Coast yoinking control of the format away from the players.  Tam shares his thoughts about playing Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and Thalen his early thoughts about playing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile
    • Currency Exchange in a Dead League
  • Last Epoch
    • Woes of Merchants Guild
  • Witchfire
  • Soulframe Preludes
  • The MTG Commander Situation
  • Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast
  • Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Iron From Fear and Lava

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Even thought I had used Modrinth to download and install mods, I had not actually been launching the game through it all this time. I had simply been copying the mods over manually into the appdata folder for Minecraft. However, I have learned… Minecraft mods update shockingly often. As a result, I have decided to copy all of my saved games over to a Modrinth profile and migrate to launching the game through it. All in all, it has been a pretty smooth transition save for the very first time I loaded the game. I am guessing there is some process of caching in all of my stuff that had to happen all at once. After that first time though, everything has felt effectively the same as launching through the Microsoft launcher.

I have been undertaking a few massive projects over the last few days. Essentially I decided that I needed a more reliable source of iron so that I could keep building nonsense. This meant that more than anything, probably the best option was to build a villager iron farm. This however is a massive pain in the ass and there are a bunch of competing ideas about how it performs the best. So just to make sure it worked successfully I decided to build it way the hell up into the air. This meant that I needed to get 3 villagers way up there… and a zombie. The zombie is the easy part, because they will follow you without much issue. Villagers however have to be moved either by boat or by baiting them with a work bench of some sort.

Unfortunately, I don’t have screenshots of this nonsense because I keep forgetting that this is what happens every single time I hit my default printscreen key instead of the F2 key. When I am in the middle of doing my nonsense, I fall back upon defaults and keep hitting the key that I hit by rote memory. It was a mess. I used a Composter since I had a few of those lying around, and took him as far away from the village by boat as I could before breaking the boat and dropping a composter… then dropping another one once they had bonded with the first one and then going back and breaking the one they were bonded with. I set the game to peaceful to make the move a bit less frustrating.

The biggest problem with all of this is the fact that the closest village to me is roughly 600 meters to the east of me… across a mountain range. I originally thought I would be making this trek no normal mode and spent some time laying down a pathway of torches… and then got the bright idea to just flip it to peaceful for the time being. I am not entirely certain how I would have dealt with the villagers constantly getting attacked, and I would have kept having to throw them in the boat to keep them from running away. Worse is that I would have had to do this three times, each time just as frustrating as the last.

For the “other side of the mountain problem” I did a bunch of pre-work and dug a straight tunnel from the Village side of the mountain to my side of the mountain, which would get the villagers close to where the Iron farm was going to live in the sky. Again I am coming in and taking screenshots after the fact so that I could have something for this blog post. Thankfully there really wasn’t anything messy in the route I randomly chose. I had to deal with a patch of gravel which is always annoying, but in large part, I could bore straight through the stone to the other side. Again I torched it off thinking that I would have to deal with mobs all along the route. If nothing else this gives me a faster path to get over to the village if I ever need to abduct more villagers.

As for the farm itself, it is the standard affair that you have likely seen dozens of internet guides on how to create. One room has 3 beds and 3 villagers, and then there is another room where you lure the zombie and set up so that the zombie can never reach them but has to have open air between the villagers and zombies so that they can see them at all times. The zombies trigger the spawning of an Iron Golem which then only has one area where it can spawn up top, covered with moving water… that pushes the Iron Golem into a pit with a block of lava that will kill it and drop the goodies into a hopper/chest system for collection. If you are wondering why I have a glass walkway… it is because the Iron Golems cannot spawn on glass making it a reasonable option for building scaffolding to check on things.

Each time you kill a Golem it drops at least four bars of iron and potentially some poppies. I have no clue at all WHY the Golem drops poppies but I guess I will never run out of red dye. It is honestly impressive how fast the farm works, and if I wanted to go through the hassle… I could set up three more of the exact same farm in the space I have set aside, but that would also involve luring 3 villagers and a zombie each time. Maybe I should have set up a Villager breeder farm first… but that sounded equally annoying. In truth I have replaced all of the iron that I used creating the farm already, so mostly I just need to spend some time AFKing in range and letting it do its work.

The placement of the Iron Farm is at least in part so that I can AFK down at the mob drop farm, and should in theory have my Slime Farm, the Mob Farm, The Iron Farm, and all of my automated crop farms running at the same time. At some point, I need to go into my drop farm and spiderproof it, which should be easy enough given that I now have access to moss carpeting from finding a lush biome during one of my nether portal adventures. I already have more string than I can ever really use, and if I need more… it would be more enjoyable to go find a mine somewhere and harvest cobwebs.

In other news, I have expanded my Bamboo Farm upwards considerably in an effort to try and speed up production. This is in large part thanks to the influx of iron I am getting from the Golem farm, allowing me to do more dumb things with hoppers. It takes a TON of hoppers to direct loot from the top two tiers down to the bottom two tiers. I might expand my Sugarcane farm, but really… I am not even sure I need that much Sugarcane. I am contemplating building a Cocoa Bean farm, but again… I am not even sure I need them, and there does not appear to be a good way to fully automate that. The best option I saw was a design where you have pistons holding back water and then letting the water harvest everything before you replant it. In my hardcore series, I did something like this for harvesting fields of crops and it worked well enough but if I am going to the trouble of building something… I want it to run on its own if possible.