blaugust Archives - Page 13 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Farewell Wildstar

August 3, 2014 by Belghast

Day Two Rundown

We had an amazing turnout in day two, and while a couple of folks didn’t end up making a post we picked up several more in the process. Additionally there were two blogs that I missed in the day one rundown. I have to say I am still floored by the quality of content that folks are churning out. I guess once you get the ball rolling in something it just develops a mind of its own. I really need to figure out a better way of tracking the individual posts, as I have been up since 7 am and the last hour has spent simply pulling together this list of links. However it is totally worth it because there look to be some pretty amazing posts there. I plan on reading them immediately after posting my own morning post.

So there you go 41 day two posts, and two that I missed from day one. We are having one hell of an initiative so far, and I highly suggest you check out all of the posts. I have my super happy face on right now because It is going so smoothly thus far.

Farewell Wildstar

I finally did something yesterday that I knew was coming for awhile now. I logged into the Wildstar account website and cancelled my subscription. While I still have through October to play the game, I doubt I actually will. At this point I have not played for two and a half weeks, and simply have no real drive to do so. I did not actually make it to the level cap but stalled out at 26. Why am I quitting you might ask? Honestly I don’t really know. Everything about Wildstar is something that I should like, but once the amusement of playing a Chua wore off I was left once again with the game I played in beta… that just didn’t quite do it for me. I never really got into the game during the beta process and the highest I managed to get a character was to 10, but considering how much I had misjudged FFXIV in beta… I thought I owed it to myself to give the game a chance.

It does have a lot of nice things going for it, and the community and development teams do an awesome job of listening to the fans. Wildstar however is kinda like a monster truck rally, when what I really want is a book club. The game is awesome in an over the top 80s action movie kind of way, but after a point it just wears on you. The wow-raider me would have loved this game, but I have changed considerably since I was raiding five nights a week. I ultimately want something a little slower pace and a little bit more cerebral and less twitchy. Who knows at some point I might fire it back up, but I kinda doubt it. It was a fun experiment and I think overall it will do really well, but I think I wanted to like the game far more than I actually liked it.

I think what really started the downfall for me is as I watched our guild start to disintegrate around the time the free month ran out. The aspect of the game I really liked was its group content, and that was really damned fun. The problem is without active players, it became impossible to do the dungeons, and I was not quite ready to brave the dungeon finder. Additionally we chose the wrong faction as a guild. Not that I don’t love Dominion, but everyone I know from twitter and the blogosphere is playing on Evindra Exile side… which means we had no shot in hell of even getting their alts considering the 6 character per server limit. Sure I could have started over and rolled Exile… and I did make a few alts… but quite frankly I just didn’t enjoy the game enough to start from scratch. I wish all of you folks still playing the game luck, because it really is an interesting experience.

Not Final After All

Last night we got things back to normal and recorded Episode 16 of the AggroChat podcast. Once again we had our entire cast of myself, Ashgar, Rae and Kodra. On a whim we decided to pull in Tam as well since he was available. I have to say it was one of the more chill shows we have recorded in awhile and everything seemed to flow pretty naturally. I did absolutely no editing this time other than removing a few silences. It sounds a little different however because I am recording from a different machine in a different location. This weekend I had my main computer melt down and I have yet to get it back up and running. As a result I recorded from my laptop, but we struggled through and I think the end product works just fine.

We talk about a bunch of things like Shovel Knight, Rogue Legacy, League of Legends, falling out of love with Wildstar… but more importantly our return to Final Fantasy XIV. I guess for us it was not final after all. I personally want to set down some more permanent roots in this game, and despite the cost prohibitive nature of guild housing… we are starting to price and talk about the location we want to buy in. They made a ton of tweaks and in all cases it seems to have improved our enjoyment. If you are thinking about giving it a spin check out the free 14 day trial. We are on the Cactuar server in the Aether data center. If you get in add Belghast Sternblade to your friends list and give me a shout.

Writing Prompts

I slacked off yesterday or more so I got caught up in the excitement for just how amazing day one was… and forgot to post any writing prompts. Thankfully I had six already so it is not like you guys were at a loss for potential inspiration. That said I do intent to keep throwing out the occasional batch of writing prompts and adding them to a list I have collected on the nook.

What is your earliest gaming memory? We all have to come to gaming from somewhere, what brought you into the fold?
What is your favorite class? Do you play a new type each game that comes out or is there always one type of class that you tend to favor?
Do you follow a games lore? There is often tons of lore both in game and out of game, do you follow it and even track down the tidbits that are not obvious.. or are you mostly oblivious to it?

#Blaugust #FFIXV #Wildstar

Day One Rundown

August 2, 2014 by Belghast

Shock and Awe

That is really the only words I can think of this morning to explain my reaction to the huge turnout we have gotten for Blaugust. I want to thank each and every one of you that is plugging away on daily posting. I also want to thank the folks that have now joined on day two, and anyone else out there waiting in the wings that may or may not be chipping in the occasional post as well. When I came up with this idea in part due to my wife’s own may challenge, and my love of the concept of jamming together Blog and August into one word… I thought that maybe three or four people would join in the madness. As of yesterday we had 38 day one posts, and since then a handful more have added in on day two.

The thing I am happiest about is just how many of you have easily “grokked” my intent. I wanted to stir things up and get folks out of the doldrums that is the summer season. I have been doing the daily posting thing, so I thought it might be cool to challenge others to do the same thing. That said it is far less about daily posting than posting on a regular schedule. The other neat thing is that basically this is training for undertaking something more serious like NaNoWriMo. I could never have completed my novel last year were it not for my getting in the habit of daily posting before then. Basically if you can prove to yourself that you can write a ten sentence or more blog post each day, then that 50,000 word goal isn’t completely unreachable.

Day One Rundown

While this has been a bit of a pain in the ass to pull together this morning, I wanted to do a rundown of all of the posts that were made yesterday. I’ve read them all at this point and commented on several of them, and I have to say the world you all did is amazing. You are making this a truly amazing initiative and I have very little to do with the success. I think we all want to do awesome things, we just sometimes need the catalyst to make it happen.

Such an amazing list of bloggers, and I am absolutely humbled to have them supporting me in this initiative. Additionally to all these awesome posts the very cool gaming site MMO Games gave us a good write up about the event. The also awesome Anook.com has been featuring our nook as well so it should be giving us additional bandwidth to the initiative. So much blogger love going on I am still constantly amazed. It is still plenty of time to get started and join the madness, just check out my Gospel of Blaugust post for the rules.

Setting Down Roots

Over the last few years I have been flitting from game to game for some time, and it is really tiring. What generally happens is I get into a game and then the community we have built up around it starts to deteriorate. Without the people to sustain me, I start to get my own wanderlust since I crave the next place that has the happy guildchat spam I am looking for. One of the more enjoyable games I have played over the last few years was Final Fantasy XIV. Everything about the game felt “just right” until I ran out of content to level with. I love the fact that you can pour all of your effort into one character without feeling like you are missing out on anything. The only problem is when we last played the game shortly after launch, after you had run out of storyline quests you were pretty much forced to grind fates if you wanted to level anything else.

In the months that have followed they have patched some of these gaps. Right now I am still doing a fair amount of FATE grinding, but I am perforating it with trips through the Duty Roulette system. While this might seem grindy still to some, for me this is enough of a break to make me happy. The other thing that just feels right about the game is the community. It is this weird throwback to a time where people were generally cool to group with. I remember during Everquest, wipes happened and no one seemed to mind… they just picked themselves up and recovered. The WoW generation changed that, and introduced the culture of “your bad and should feel bad”. Last night we were running Hard Mode Ifrit and I made a mistake that ultimate wiped the raid. Not a single person was grumpy about it, they just explained what I should be doing instead and were happy to try again. That type of attitude is just refreshing, and I keep running into it over and over.

I have this feeling like I would really love to set down some permanent roots in Final Fantasy XIV, and I am starting to try and reach out into the community. This game has had me adding people to my friends list in the first time in literally years that I did not already know going into the game. It reminds me of the early days of wow, when we still cared about our fellow players and were happy to collaborate and coordinate on bigger things. One of the biggest gaps I am finding is there don’t seem to be any big public Linkshells for folks to communicate and cordinate with. I am kicking around the notion of starting one of these. There is so much content we have yet to see, and FFXIV is one of the only games in the last bit that all of us seem to be able to agree upon. Here is hoping that I won’t be writing another post in a months time on how the game just isn’t doing it for me any longer. Right now the game feels very much like home, and I look forward to logging into it each day.

#Blaugust #FFXIV

Amazing Community

July 31, 2014July 31, 2014 by Belghast

Computer Meltdown

All that I really wanted to do when I got home was to log into my computer and play some Final Fantasy XIV. Unfortunately my computer seemed to conspire against me. Everything seemed happy when I first got home and I had just queued for duty roulette and begun working on a FATE when something odd happened. The screen froze and turned black, and then moments later I was rebooting. Now I am notorious for ignoring windows updates, and I know in Windows 8 there will reach a point where it simply will not let you ignore them. Sure enough upon reboot it was installing new software, so I thought that maybe all that had happened is that I reached that threshold.

So I went ahead and booted up my machine and logged into windows. Everything seemed just fine, nothing really seemed out of the ordinary until I booted into Final Fantasy XIV again and then boom… the same thing. I thought for a bit that maybe it was my video card driver update that I applied last night, so upon rebooting I proceeded to roll back that driver. Upon booting into the game again… this time a brown screen then a black screen and then everything powers off. The thing is that the video card never actually felt hot when I reached back and felt the air vent on it. My initial thought was that the video card was just toast, which is disturbing because it was only a few months old.

As a test I swapped out to an older card and sure enough the machine booted right up. Unfortunately however upon firing up a game I was back at the black screen cycle. It was then that I noticed something. I took the side panel off my case and watched it boot up, and the fan on the processor heatsink was not moving at all. So I am guessing at some point it died, and potentially for awhile it was working intermittently. Processor overheating would in theory cause all of the things that I was experiencing. Here is hoping that there has been no permanent damage to it. A heatsink/fan combo is a relatively cheap thing to replace, so I ordered a new potentially better one from Amazon and it should be here Friday. Until then I guess I will be gaming on the laptop exclusively.

Meet Kenzi

Now other than my computer having a meltdown and throwing me into stress mode, there was some awesome that managed to happen yesterday. We added a new child to our family, and unfortunately she moves so damned fast that this is the only picture I have managed to snap since bringing her home. Thankfully the folks we got her from gave us a far better picture of her. However as you can see she apparently loves the ferrets. She has kept returning to the playpen to play with them through the bars. They seem completely enthralled by her as well, and moments after snapping this albeit blurry photo of her and Shiloh she also woke up Bellatrix and they were both following her every move. Being a kitten however she is rarely in one place for too terribly long.

We thought for a bit about a name and tried multiple characters from Harry Potter as well as Firefly, before finally settling on Kenzi. She seems far more like that character than any other so far. She is fearless and daring, and a little bit shifty at times. Not to mention the whole dark hair thing works well also. Kenzi was my favorite character from Lost Girl and really the only reason why I enjoyed that show for as long as I did. So I feel like the name is fitting. Right now she is batting my fingers as I type this and trying to hop up on the keyboard. While I think it is absolutely adorable… I need to finish this post up so I can get on to work. Here is hoping the ferrets wake up and steal back her attention.

So after writing my blog post she decided to crawl up on my shoulder. I am officially in love, not that I wasn’t already. I have always wanted a shoulder cat to hang out with me while I game. Now she is curled up under the lapboard that my laptop is on grooming herself, but she spent a good long while on my shoulder. This is totally going to work out… we just have to somehow figure out a way to stop the nibbling. She seems to like to attack my beard and bite it right now. Which is adorable, but will eventually get to be frustrating and potentially painful.

Amazing Community

For the last week or so I have been spending most of my evenings playing Final Fantasy XIV on the Cactuar server. I have to say I am starting to fall in love with the sense of community there, and on the entire Aether data center as well. Thanks to my time in wow and just how toxic that environment can be… I have been extremely gunshy about branching out and playing with people I did not already know. I’ve always been willing to group with my guild and their friends, but I had zero interest in poking my head out into the larger world. Quite frankly when I had done this in the past, I dealt with so much abuse as a tank that I had no interest in ever attempting it again. The problem is this negative attitude towards pugging carried forward into every game from that point on. The moment someone wanted to do something, and we did not have the requisite number of people I would immediately remove myself from the equation. This means I’ve spent an awful lot of time sitting around in games waiting for the magical number of people to log in so we could go do something fun.

Coming back to Final Fantasy XIV however I did so without much of my support structure. For most of this past week I have been the only person online at night in my guild, and as a result I finally decided to brave the Duty Roulette. This essentially is a random dungeon system that picks from any dungeon available to you. The awesome thing however is that for leveling, you gain experience as though the mobs were your level not the level you have been scaled down to. I went into this with the plan to attempt to be more social, so I started talking to the group the moment the instances started. Funny thing is…. other people talked back, and in very positive ways. Instead of running the dungeon in silence we started to banter back and forth much like grouping used to feel like during my Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot days.

So what caused this magical environment to appear in the face of so many games with toxic grouping environments? I honestly think it is two fold. Firstly at this point the only people who are playing Final Fantasy XIV are the players who are in it for the long haul, the players who are devoted too the franchise and willing to weather whatever storms might arise. There is a sense of general camaraderie that I have not seen in many games, and I think it comes from a shared struggle. I expected the servers to feel dead with the initial drop off of players after launch, but in reality while there are fewer overall players, they are just more focused in specific areas. While you cannot go to any zone and run FATEs, the zones where you can… are extremely active.

The other part I think is a weird little system that Squaresoft put into the game. Similar to league of legends, at the end of each dungeon or guildhest you can “commend” a player for their actions. You only get one single commendation per dungeon run, so it forces you to think long and hard about who best deserved it. Now there are some pretty significant rewards for having racked up a large number of these. This I think causes players to want to seem friendly, and through the course of pretending to be… they end up actually being cordial. I expected that the commendations would be almost exclusively reserved for the tanks and the healers, but it turns out that apparently I have made some appreciated contributions as well. At this point I am sitting around 25 commendations, and there is rarely a duty or hest that I don’t walk out with at least one. So apparently my banter, combined with the fact that I try my damnedest to interrupt everything as a DPS… is appreciated and matters.

I feel like Final Fantasy XIV is this strange time capsule where players have returned to the kinds of values that I used to appreciate so much while playing the games that existed before World of Warcraft. While I have not poked my head out into the raid community yet, I find it really impressive that I am playing on a server that has actual community events. This game feels like a crazy throwback… and I am loving it so far. It seems like somehow we managed to actually pick the right server to be playing on all those months ago when we picked the server name simply out of our love of the cactuar. The server even keeps track of the spawn times of hunt mobs, keeping a google doc to record when one last spawned and was killed. Granted the other day when I looked it had gotten a bit out of date, but just the fact that the server cares enough to create something like that is pretty awesome. I think the next thing for me is to try and find some social linkshells and meld into the broader community more.

Writing Prompts

Tomorrow is the official beginning of the Blaugust initiative, and as promised I will not leave you hanging. I will be posting a series of writing prompts each day to help turn the wheels and get your creative juices flowing. Please note of course that you do not have to write about any of the prompts I post. I am just trying to provide inspiration if it happens to be lacking.

What was the first game that made you “feel” something. I am talking about the first game that invoked a real human emotional response be it fear, love, outrage… we’ve all had it happen and I am curious about your first time.
What is your favorite boss encounter in any game and why. What makes that encounter stand out in your mind and what can be learned from it.
If you were an NPC in a video game, what type of NPC would you be.

Gospel of Blaugust

July 30, 2014 by Belghast

What is Blaugust?

With the beginning of August rapidly approaching, I thought it would be a good time to do another general rundown post for the Blaugust Initiative. The idea is really simple, and honestly was inspired by my wife doing something similar in the math blogging community. This all springs out of something I decided to do 442 days ago that I called the Grand Experiment, where I got up every morning and made a post… even if I didn’t really want to. Through doing this I have learned a lot of things about myself, and as a result the community as a whole has learned a lot about me. I feel like at this point I have almost transcended writer block, in that I can sit down at the keyboard and start a stream of conscious flowing and at the same time make it somewhat relative to the purpose of my blog.

Thanks to cramming together of blog and august, Blaugust was born, and the idea is to take the challenge during the month of August to write a new post every day. More than anything this is about pushing you out of your comfort area and into undiscovered territory. When you have to produce posts without being able to rely heavily on multiple days of pre-writing it can be a scary thing. What happened for me is that I also began to allow more of my personal life to slip into my posts. As a reader, I am far more interesting in the people behind the screen than what they might happen to say. I’ve never been a big fan of building myself a personal echo chamber filled with only people who think like I do. As a result I am interested in whatever my friends and fellow bloggers have to say, and I think free writing like this really brings that point home.

The Topic

One of the questions to come out of the whole contorted process of this initiative being born, was if we had to write on a specific topic. Ultimately you can write about anything that happens to suit you on a given day. You can diverge from gaming in any fashion if you like, and your blog doesn’t even have to be gaming related in the first place. Liore gave a really excellent example early on of writing a gaming related Foodie blog, and this would be an amazing thing and should totally happen. The purpose is to get used to writing on a schedule and not so much dictating what you happen to be writing about. Inspiration can be an extremely fickle thing, and if you want for it there end up being some massive lapses in your posts. The plan here is to make you realize that you don’t really need the muse to crank out interesting posts. If you allow yourself to do it, your personality will inhabit the writing and inspiration will find you mid paragraph.

The Guidelines

Since I also decided to make this a proper contest and give away some prizes among those who manage to finish I realized that I really needed some basic guidelines. I am not trying to bog this initiative down in rules, but at the same time the only way to have a fair ending is to make sure that everyone has followed some really basic guidelines.

Write A New Blog Post of no less than 10 sentences in length. This is essentially two large paragraphs, and feels about right for the minimum size.
Include a link back to the Blaugust Initiative Page. My hope is as this starts others will join in the challenge and play catch up.
Advertise the post on the Blaugust Blog. You will be given “blogger” level permissions to do this. More than anything this simply serves as a central repository for all of the awesome posts. Some folks have mentioned that they want to write some deeply personal journal style posts on occasion, and with these just make sure I have access so I can credit you.
If you advertise the post on Twitter, please include #Blaugust hashtag. Again trying to help spread the word and get folks to join midmonth.
Over the course of the month, repeat this process 31 times.
????
Profit!

The Rewards

I will be keeping track of who has posted a post each day during the course of August. On September 1st I will be holding a drawing for several prize packages. I hope you like games, and want to acquire more of them… because that is what is going to happen here. As someone put it.. write awesome stuff and get games! Over the course of a few years of the various bundle series, I have accumulated a bunch of duplicate game download keys. I can think of no better way to give away some of these than to reward the hard work of participating in this grueling challenge.

Grand Prize!

I hope you follow me on Steam, because I will be picking a game off of your Steam Wishlist and purchasing it for you. In addition to this I wil be letting you pick a game from my Humble Bundle surplus list as well. For this prize specifically I will be looking for someone who has actually posted a post on each day individually, rather than someone who has posted 31 posts in the month, but not necessarily one a day. This prize should represent the truest form of the challenge.
Three Also-Awesomes

Additionally I will be picking three individuals at random from the total pool of contestants to win the “Also-Awesome” award. To qualify for this you have to have started your posting on August 1st, and have written a total of 31 posts over the course of the month. I will have each of these folks in order drawn pick two games a piece from my Humble Bundle surplus list. I am varying the requirements here a bit to allow someone to have missed a day here or there but still have posted “catch-up” posts to be in the running for something.
The Catch-Up Artist

– Anyone who joins the initiative late is going to be in the running for this prize. To quality you have to have joined after August 1st, but managed to catch up and still write a total of 31 posts in the month of August. You can procrastinate however long you like, but I am expecting 31 well formed posts to get this one. After the above prizes have been picked from my Humble Bundle surplus list, the winner of this prize gets the chance to name one of the games for themselves. I promise the surplus list is more than big enough to support a wide variety of choices from all of the winners.
All Participants

I will be crafting some sidebar badges and banners that can be affixed to your website showing that you won the Blaugust challenge. Additionally you will be able to bask in the warm afterglow of knowing you accomplished something really awesome. Depending on the number of participants I reserve the right to make up a bunch of other awards along the way.

The Sign-Up

I have honestly been staggered by the amount of interest I have received since concocting this loosely strewn together plan in the first place. For ease of maintenance I am asking that all participants sign up on the Blaugust nook. All you have to do is go there and click the join button, and of course have an Anook account… but everyone should at this point because it is an awesome site. Right now we have several members ready to go, but I am hoping this last push for people will help get us a few more. I really appreciate each and every one of the people who have shown interest in participating in the challenge. Through the course of the month I will be posting some prompts on a daily basis that you can use if you like to help you out with coming up with something to post about. The goal right now is to give you two to three a day at the bottom of my own blog posts for the month. I know I risk forgetting someone in the process, but here is the list of the folks that I know have mentioned interest in the process.

There is still plenty of time to add your name to the big long list of folks who have already mentioned they are interested in the process. Even if we get no more people, this is more than enough to make sure we have an awesome month. I thank you all for following me down this path to madness, and I hope we make it out the other side unscathed.

#Blaugust