housing Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Sohm Al with Neighbors

July 2, 2015 by Belghast

The Teamspeak Conundrum

Yesterday I spoke for a bit about one of the reasons why I have not streamed that often. Namely that I have friends who would prefer not to be broadcast over my stream, which means when I DO stream… I have had to wall myself off from my social network of friends by dropping down to the “streaming” channel. As a result there is only so long I can seem to go without popping back upstairs because I simply get lonely down there all by myself. Over the last year or so I have tried to figure out a set up that would work, to let me stream freely without the fear of broadcasting my companions. The defacto tool is Virtual Audio Cables, but folks have talked about it being cumbersome and the more I looked into it… and they started talking about setting up batch files to do this or that… it honestly scared me away. Honestly even the website seems a bit cludgy… so I kept looking for other solutions.

In the mean time I made attempts to make this process work using both Voice Meter and Breakaway Audio. Neither tool admittedly was designed to do this, but I had found guides online that supposedly allowed it to work. Problem being after setting everything up… it never seemed to work for me and there was extremely limited documentation on what I could do to tweak my setup. Last night I finally decided to dig down into Virtual Audio Cables, and found the guide embedded above. For starters… this is the point at which I complain that YouTube is the worst means of disseminating information. What I needed in all of these cases was a good blog post with annotated screenshots… all I could actually find were a series of haphazard videos. That said the above video, when followed actually produced the results exactly like I wanted. Last night I was able to stream practically all night long, while hanging out with friends… and not broadcasting a single thing they said. Additionally I bound a separate push to to talk key just for the stream so that folks watching the stream are not getting “half” of the conversation. The videos below are the results of my evening of streaming.

Sohm Al with Neighbors

The picture does not exactly go with this story… but oh well it is my prerogative. Solaria’s fishing outfit looks amazing, and it makes me want to level fishing. It does however show you that the Greysky Armada spends a ton of time milling around our guild house in The Mists. One of the things I love about this game is that we are constantly interacting with our neighbors. Last night Damai and I were talking in /say and a neighbor joined in, saying that he needed a dps and a tank for Sohm Al the second dungeon in Heavensward. Damai was already spoken for, but I offered up my own services as a tank. We queued and got in quickly and the below embedded video is the results of that run. I did a few stupid things, one of which that wiped the party but we had a great time running dungeons with people who were essentially complete strangers until I last night. I think it is awesome that you can have these casual run in acquaintances.

During the early days of World of Warcraft had this rich tapestry of social connections that reached into many of the other raiding guilds on the server. When I needed someone for an activity our raid was running, I could reach out into these social channels and draw upon dozens of different people who were milling around looking for something to do. Cataclysm however pretty much destroyed this network, and I have never really been able to build an equivalent in any other MMO… that is until Final Fantasy XIV. The people here on Cactuar seem to crave interaction with folks outside of their insular guild units. I am in my maximum number of linkshells and while folks get lost in their own little world… especially while leveling in Heavensward… I have still been able to draw upon them to fill groups. As we move into more “maintenance” mode this is going to become more true. The only thing I wish was that there was a way to create more “formal” guild alliances. There are a handful of free companies that we hang out with regularly, and it would be nice to have a shared channel of communication that was not “opt in” like a linkshell.

Another Titan Extreme

Wednesday is normally the raid night of our second guild static. Since the raid leader was not around he left it up to Damai to organize something… and while we did not really have the appropriate numbers to work on Second Coil of Bahamut, there were still a large number of folks needing Extreme Primals to unlock more content. I was asked if I “felt like tanking Titan Extreme” to which I replied “there is never a sequence of events that exists… where I feel like tanking Titan Extreme… but I will if you need me”. Titan Extreme is just one of those fights that is maddening on so many levels and I would place it among the five hardest fights in all of the A Realm Reborn content. That said I make it out in my mind to be far worse than it actually is, and at this point I have the dance memorized. This fight is absolutely about repeating the same sequence of actions over and over until the boss falls down, and as I have commented in the past… this is the sort of fight we fail miserably at. We are amazing at fights where we have to think on our feet and adjust to change… but doing this on Titan extreme ultimately ends up screwing the entire raid when it comes to Weight of the Land damage.

What I found amazing is just how challenging this encounter still is even though many of us were being downscaled to 50, and our gear downscaled with us. A Realm Reborn content is absolutely going to remain relevant for new folks that have yet to experience it. This makes me more happy than just about anything else in Heavensward. We still have a bunch of people coming up through the ropes that have not seen any of the 2.0 raid content, and my hope is that we can have an old school night where we work on this as a guild and get people through it. This is what I wanted from World of Warcraft all along… a way to run old content and make it still relevant to current players. There were epic experiences like Blackwing Lair and Ulduar that are just diminished because we overgear the shit out of it, and there is no real way NOT to be overpowered… other than making some alts and level locking them at fixed points in time. Granted we tried to do this once with a raid of level 60 locked alts… but it still was not the same. Final Fantasy XIV however seems to have figured out how to make it work, and I am damned thankful. We eventually got the kill and I edited out just that part in the above video.

Lalafellication

August 5, 2014 by Belghast

Blaugust is About Blogging

Earlier I had most of a blog post finished when my system took a dive on me. Nothing appears to be recoverable so you are going to get my rapid fire version. It seems that too many people are getting hung up on the notion of daily blogging. Yes I am having a contest and giving away prizes, and yes this entire thing started as me challenging people to take the daily blogging routine I do. That said more importantly, Blaugust is about Blogging and doing so regularly. If you normally post once a week and you begin posting three times a week thanks to this initiative, then I consider it more than successful.

If you don’t feel you can do the daily blogging thing, then alter it to fit your needs. There are a few people who have ramped up their posting in the spirit of Blaugust, and that is awesome. I feel like posting on a schedule is a valuable thing, and if you can’t make seven days a week… try five and if that is even too much then try three. The hope is that you will develop a routine that becomes far harder to break than individual one off postings. I went through huge lapses in my blog before I adopted the daily stance, and I pretty much started this without much ramp up. It was a struggle at first but over time it became significantly easier and now I can crank out a post about almost anything. Find what works for you, and stick with it.

I plan on editing back in a list of the day four blogs.

Hitbox Sorta Fixed

A few days ago I posted railing about the various shortcomings of the hitbox live streaming service, and since then they have attempted to fix a few things. Previously I had used twitch to back up my live stream to youtube, making it significantly easier to share and embed in blog posts. When I switched over too hitbox I thought things were going to work similarly. Unfortunately the entire time I have used hitbox the export to youtube process has been broken. This week they seem to have fixed it with a few limitations that make it damned near useless to me. Yesterday I tried to export all of the videos that were hanging out on my hitbox page in limbo and out of the whole batch only two made it there. The two videos were in the 20 to 30 minute range, and anything longer failed.

I guess this means that unlike twitch that can export up to two hours of video to youtube, hitbox is going to limit the users to only 30 minutes at a time? For me at least this makes the feature meaningless, and since I still cannot download the videos I have already recorded it means my various series on youtube have glaring holes as I number things sequentially. The only positive is that you can apparently embed video directly in your posts now, so here is hoping that actually works. I am wondering if trying to embed it in live writer is what ultimately crashed my system earlier, so I am going to not test the waters until I have finished today’s blog post. In any case I still like hitbox for the fact that there is no stream delay, and it makes having a conversation much easier. The problem is with the fact that I now have to record the video locally and manually upload to youtube, it has severely soured my streaming of late.

Lalafellication

Last night I took the plunge and did something I had been considering for a few weeks. As part of the preorder process I had a vial of Fantasia sitting in my inventory. This allows you to re-edit your appearance, and in practice change your race and even gender in the process. While I liked the look of Belghast the Highlander, I had long wished I had embraced the adorable and went Lalafell. I think I only made it as far as I did in Wildstar because I thought the Chua I was playing was adorable. So last night I took the plunge and you can now see the end results. So far I have no regrets.

I ran a few instances last night and everything about combat is now cute. It did take some getting used to the difference in perspective, and it may have caused me to step in some bad stuff that I thought I was well clear of. All things considered I really like the decision I made because now I can take adorable pictures everywhere I go, and participate in the ever popular “if I fits, I sits” meme. Everything I do seems cute and harmless, even when I do a dragoon jump into things. I am a fan and I am sure it will make my adventures far more memorable.

Completely Broke But Happy

The other big thing that happened last night is that all of us pooled our money together and bought a small house in The Mists, the housing zone for Limsa Lominsa. Basically it was a zone of compromise in that a few of us preferred Gridania and others preferred Uldah, but everyone was pretty amiable too the notion of the Limsa housing. The other huge benefit is that we found absolute prime real estate in the third housing ward. We are guessing that the house must have been repossessed because it is smack dab in the middle of the zone with a Market Board and Summoning Bell steps outside of our front lawn. We don’t have a lot in the house but we did manage to pick up a Chocobo Stable, Aetherite Shard and a Mailbox allowing us to cheaply port from anywhere in the world to our house. Now I will have to begin the grind to try and get the 300k gil needed to buy my personal room.

This whole experience highlights what I have been saying about the server community on Cactuar. Within moments of purchasing the house and getting the basics configured we were swarmed by our neighbors welcoming us to the neighborhood. It seems they were super happy to see the house occupied and we now have a few friends in the houses surrounding us. The guild that was visiting in the picture lived in a huge house above us, and apparently since this house went dormant they were no longer able to jump down through our plot, because they were blocked by the building bounding box. They were extremely appreciate of once again having a fast route to the market boards. Later in the night we had some other neighbors welcome us, and it is this sort of interaction that I am valuing the most about the server. This is the first time in a long time I have felt like I was part of a larger community. Final Fantasy truly is a special game, and I hope especially as more people return to it we can set down some permanent roots here.

#FinalFantasyXIV #HitBox #Blaugust

Inappropriate Bed Time

June 9, 2014 by Belghast

Lazy Sunday

Yesterday we pretty much had the textbook definition of a “Lazy Sunday”. After getting almost 13,000 steps on Saturday, I only managed to hit 3,500 yesterday. We had rain to deal with off and on all day, and pretty much opted to stay indoors and vegetate. I think given how hard we have pushed we both could use a day off. Also my wife has been out of school for a week but never really gotten a single day to just recuperate. To make matters worse Tuesday she is flying out for the first of many conferences she will attend this summer. As such it also begins the part of the summer that I hate the most… trying to get used to being alone and then simultaneously get used to being not alone.

I am probably odd that it takes time for me to ease into any change in my environment. I have always been someone who could adapt to rapid and momentary interruptions extremely well. I remain calm under pressure, and get hyper focused on fixing whatever issue is at hand. Ironically I am extremely horrible at dealing with sustained change. When my world is thrown upside down but not immediately righted… I am not a happy camper. I have these little rituals, like this morning blogging thing… that when I do not get to observe them… nothing else is really right the rest of the day. So you can imagine how much turmoil the summer brings me since I tend to have a wife one week and then she is gone the next… and this lasts for at least the month of June but often times some of other months as well.

Easily it takes me a good three days to adjust to any change, sometimes longer. So if she is gone a week 3 days of that will be with me in personal turmoil as I adjust to her being gone. Then when she comes back there will be another three days of me adjusting to the fact that it is no longer just me and the cats in the house. I feel like I deal with all of this fairly well considering, but there are generally some severe low points while she is not around. Thankfully this year she will be travelling back on my Birthday, because in past years she has been gone for it… making it all that more of a depressing occasion. The week days are pretty easy thankfully because the routine of work keeps me pretty busy, and then at night I end up gaming the night away. The weekends on the other hand are pretty rough to be all by myself in the house. Hopefully this year will be a bit easier since I will still need to maintain the routine of walking every night.

Inappropriate Bed Time

Among my friends I have developed a reputation for having unnaturally good luck when it comes to drops and getting the random number generator to perform for me. One of the nifty things that I added to my house is the Moonshiners Cabin. Once every thirty minutes you can play a mini-game to brew a batch of moonshine. So far this is one of my favorite housing mini-games because really… it takes zero skill, just the ability to do a few tasks quickly. If you complete the game you get to roll for 150 reknown, a Neon Beer sign pictured above, one of 5 random dye colors, or the penultimate reward a purple quality “Granok Four Poster Bed”. The bed is also pictured above, but given my odd lighting in the house I am not sure if you can really see it in all its glory. It is a rather large bed decorated with so many odd things. Let me run them down really quickly… a pair of steer horns, a target riddled with bullet holes, a pink heart pillow, a camo pillow, a tiger striped pillow, stage lighting, a camera pointing at the headboard, an LCD monitor showing the beds headboard, and a clothes line with a bra and a pair of tube socks.

I am pretty sure the owner before me was rigging the bed to film porn, but I am not 100% sure. Maybe they were just part of some elaborate sleep study. In any fashion it totally fits the motif of my house which is “Intergalactic Airstream Trailer”. Essentially I want to be that crazy Chua in a teardrop trailer lost somewhere deep in the woods. Right now I am sharing my house with my pet carrots, and I intend to add as many adorable plushies as I happen to find to the house just to crank up the uneasiness factor. I am decorating the house as a “Chua Unhinged”…. which in reality is pretty much every chua everywhere. I was too cheap to buy a proper divider, so I am just using a forest of Elden Holograms to provide a visual divider between the living room and the bedroom. In the bedroom you have the creepy bed, a Chua regeneration chamber, a Chua mechanical arm… that holds a really huge missile. All things that any proper marginally insane Chua would need on a daily basis.

The thing that still has me over the moon about the Wildstar housing system is that so much of it is “functional”. I love Rift and EQ2 for having super detailed cosmetic housing systems… and to be honest in both cases the systems are generally more detailed in what you can do with them. The trump card that Wildstar plays is that they have given you a reason other than for bragging rights to have a cool home. So many of the things that you place in your home can be interacted with and used. For example this is a shot of my friend Tam’s house and he has a crafting table, that works just as well as the crafting tables in any of the cities. Since we are neighbors I can pop over and use it at any time, as well as mine his ore for him… with him getting the lions share of the reward from doing so. They have managed to create housing that not only is interesting and functional… but that also still has deep social ties.

Thirty Minutes Too Late

Throughout most of the weekend my friends and I had been missing each other online for the purpose of running the first Adventure. We often had four within the right level range but not quite five. I am prone to fits of walking away from the screen without warning, and at one point last night I did just this to cook dinner. When I got back in they were about halfway through running the adventure without me. This is no biggy, because I am sure I will get in on another run… but the worst part is I think I am the only one of us who is actually building fully tanky. I feel sorry for Rae because she got drafted into tanking as a Stalker with no tanking gear and no experience using any of the tanking abilities for her class. I stole the above photo from Scopique… and I am assuming at some point today he will have a rundown on his blog.

It sounded like they had a fairly rough time, but everyone soldiered through… no pun intended. I am curious if the engineer tricks will make it easier or not. One of the things I am really digging is that the engineer has a lot of active mitigation. There is this death and decay like mechanic that I drop called Unsteady Miasma. Firstly it deals AOE damage to the group in a 5 meter circle, but the important thing is it gives up to five mobs a debuff called blunder. When that procs it causes their chance to be deflected to increase by 28% at the current tier. As a result this causes me to deflect a not insignificant number of their attacks once you factor in my own deflection bonuses. This is the sort of thing that you want to keep up all of the time, and when I started doing so I noticed my ability to solo 3 man bosses increased massively.

At this point I figure I am about halfway through Auroria, and roughly halfway to level 21. My intermediate goal for the weekend was to hit 20, and I did so just barely. One of the cool things about adventures is that if you are over the suggested level it mentors the party down. This means at least to some extent the content stays evergreen. I am doing a really poor job of following the quest chains, and as a result I have stuff scattered all over the map that is incomplete. Deredune was pretty straight forward, but I was subjected to more than a few “whats over here” moments… and when I got to Auroria the gloves came off completely. I have followed so many wild goose chases in search of ore or an explorer quest item. I feel like I am doing a really poor job of progressing considering I am already starting to lag behind some of the guild members. That said… as busy as I was last week I didn’t really feel like I got to play much.

Wildstar Adventures

Tonight is going to be a busy night to say the least. We will have to do the traditional mad dash around the house to gather up items and pack my wife for her trip. So I am really not sure how much time I will really get to play. However if I do manage to get a solid block of time before or after my walk… I want to run the first Adventure. So this is my goal, I just have no clue at all if I will accomplish it.

#Wildstar #Housing

Rocket House

June 3, 2014 by Belghast

Beard Reset

Last night I went after work to get my hair cut, as I was in pretty dire need of one. While I was there I did something rather drastic, I hit the reset button on my beard. Usually during the winter I grow my beard out to combat the cold, and then during the summer I trim it back up… sometimes even trimming it down to a Vandyke. This time I opted to keep it a full beard but just bring it down to something more manageable. Over the last several weeks as the heat has risen, our evening walks had become more and more frustrating. Sunday night I had reached a sort of critical mass as I got so freaking hot during the walk that I took a dip in the pool the moment I got back to the house. While I may mourn the loss of my big bushy beard… I realize that it was only about six months of growth and by the time winter rolls around again it will be back with a vengeance. One of the good and bad things is that I grow beard hair extremely quickly.

Rocket House

The highlight of last nights play time was finally unlocking the ability to have a house. I have long been a sucker for housing in any game that happens to have it, and the Wildstar model seemed extremely intriguing in beta… but I never actually managed to get a character high enough to unlock it. Apparently you can get your housing quest completed at level 14, and after running around all night myself, Tam and Ashgar all went off to Illium to do just that. I’ve not really spent much effort and more importantly money on the house yet, but I am sure it will become quite the gold sink for me. At this moment I have the Rocket Ship house that came with preordering the game, as well I managed to pick up a few decor items in my travels and mostly have just wanted a place to stash all of it.

One of the more interesting things that I have managed to pick up is a Meteor Crater kit. I added it to my plot but I am not really sure if I will keep it. Honestly I have no clue what I will be doing with my place at all to be honest. Right now it is mostly a dumping ground of various decor items I pick up in my travels. The cool thing is that already I have access to several rather nice buffs, including a 5% quest and monster xp one that I will likely start using while playing. At this point my goal in life is to get 2+ more gold I need for a mount at level 15. At the end of the night I was roughly 1/3 of the way into 14, so I don’t really have a ton more time to accumulate it. My theory is that I will go find some mobs that drop good stuff and blow them to smithereens.

I wish I had done a better job of documenting our travels last night, because we ended up doing several really cool things. Firstly the three of us did the level 13ish ship mission where we investigated the asteroids and what was killing the miners. I had managed to do this in beta and it was one of those points that made me re-evaluate how I felt about the game. The mission is extremely cool, and really shows off what the game can be. While wandering around Ellevar we managed to stumble across a world boss that was unlocked by the explorer path. Both Tam and I are explorers so ran around this circle unlocking the six locks on the cage. What spawned as a result was this massive void walker looking thing that was extremely difficult. I have a whole new respect for their encounter design after seeing this guy.

I have no clue what this guy was even called, because the shit hit the fan almost immediately after starting it. For starters he dealt massive damage to me as the tank, and kept dropping this crazy latticework of laser beams on the ground that I would have to dodge out of quickly. It seemed as though he was also leaving a green mist on the ground. The main problem was that none of us were really prepared for a dungeon style encounter, as no one was really set up to be the primary healer… and I honestly was not really configured to be the primary tank. I had to self rez about halfway through the fight but we managed to hold on long enough to take the guy out. As the fight continued he split into two, that became four, that finally became eight individual mobs. All I know is the overall experience was insane… and makes me want to find more of these unlockable bosses.

Growing On Me

I have to say the game is inexplicably growing on me. We were talking last night, and really Wildstar is like Guild Wars 2… but with a purpose. The big problem I had with GW2 was that nothing I did felt like it actually mattered. I wandered through the zones completing mini objectives, but nothing really felt that important. Wildstar feels like taking the Guild Wars 2 “so many things to do” model and wrapping it around a solid questing model with interesting storyline. The entire world feels so feature rich that it was absolutely overwhelming during beta after coming from the much more sedate and Spartan Elder Scrolls Online. I feel completely inundated with things to do, and little side missions to complete, especially when you factor in all of my explorer path content.

The content density is crazy, but as I am starting to get accustomed to it… I am enjoying it more and more. The overall game feels like a love song for Vanilla and Burning Crusade era World of Warcraft, but updated and modernized and packed with an insane number of features and baubles and widgets. As much as I don’t think there really is such a thing as a “WoW Killer”, this game probably has as close of a shot as any. There have been so many players that have lamented the changes that World of Warcraft has made over the last several years, and this is a game almost entirely for them. After fighting the summoned world boss last night… I am actually looking forward to seeing what their dungeon and raid content looks like. I don’t think I will ever again be a serious raider, but this game might make it happen more than anything I’ve experienced to date.

Not Leaving Elder Scrolls

While I have spent a lot of time talking about Wildstar lately, because it is shiny and new and I am finally starting to see what other folks have seen… this does not mean that Elder Scrolls Online has been tarnished at all for me. The two games are so drastically different that they don’t even occupy the same space for me. I am slowly working my way through the Auridon content, and I even logged in last night for a few minutes. I have a feeling since today is the official launch day for Wildstar, that it will likely be completely unplayable… and as a result I may just take the more relaxing route and play some Elder Scrolls. On twitter there has been a lot of talk about leaving Elder Scrolls, and this is definitely not me. In fact I am probably bumping my subscription up from 3 months at a time to 6 months at a time. I tend to play all the games at the same time… but there is a point where I could see myself maybe setting down to just Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and Landmark (if the landmark combat ends up being great). As it stands now however I am not abandoning anything for the time being.

#Wildstar #WorldBoss #Housing #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO