MMO Archives - Page 237 of 438 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Shaders and Eyasluna

December 20, 2016 by Belghast

We have one week down officially for the Sparrow Racing League… and I have to say I am still having a blast. There is just something about this game mode that makes me happy… and the bounty of rewards available only serves to sweeten the pot. It seems that when SRL goes away officially… it will still be available through the private match list so there is even talk of organizing an unofficial league of sorts to race during the off time. There is just so much to like about this event that it hard to place my finger on what exactly makes it special. You have entire sets of gear up for grabs, with light levels up to 400. I have to admit a lot of my drive to keep on racing is for the glimmer of a chance at finding some light 400 items. So far I have gotten one, that I ultimately infused into my best fusion rifle that I am not pretty partial to. A good amount of my gear is sitting at 399 light with my two severe hold outs being my artifact at 393 and ghost shell at 394. There are technically ghosts available through the SRL but I have not personally seen one. As far as the Artifact I guess my option there is probably doing some Court of Oryx because I have heard they drop there up to light 400.

Probably my personal favorite thing about the event is the availability of all of these interesting shaders. You can check my twitter feed for a shot of one I found last night called “Ghast” which given my name seems a little fitting. The above shader is my current favorite called Krokos which is mostly white with purple accents… that just happens to look really cool with the PS4 exclusive Jovian armor set. There are fourteen shaders up for grabs… and I have managed go get thirteen of them with the last one tied to the record book achievements. According to Destiny Tracker I have raced 68 times and played a total of 7 hours 38 minutes of the Sparrow Racing League… which is pretty much entirely this year given that for whatever reason I only raced last year on my Hunter and Warlock. Generally speaking I do a few runs to clear up the bounties and then retire downstairs to racing through the remote client, because really… me winning or losing doesn’t much matter when I am largely in it for the possibility of maybe just maybe hitting 400 light level. The goofy part is that even with the input lag caused by remote play… I still generally end up finishing in the top three and have even managed to win a few maps in this fashion.

The other huge perk of the SRL is that it levels your crucible rep while at the same time giving you access to some older legacy crucible weapons. Of these the one I have been wanting since initially coming back to Destiny during Taken King is the Eyasluna. This weapon is essentially a legendary version of the Hawkmoon, a personal favorite of mine in the exotic hand cannon category. Over time I strayed away from Hand Cannons due to the ammo issues, but have recently started getting used to them again and even bought the vendor Palindrome last time I was capped on Legendary Marks. When I saw this weapon was on the list of available items… it has been my hope to see it show up on my end of match rewards list and finally last night it did. I am not really sure what a god roll looks like on this weapon, but I can make the one I got work with Triple Tap, Braced Frame and Grenadier. While this is going to drop me down to 9 instead of 10 shots in the magazine… it gives me 5 points from maxed stability which should make it insanely easy to headshot with. The range of 38 is pretty solid for a Hand Cannon as well and the 81 impact is nothing to complain about. I spent some time running around with it last night… and I think I am going to like it.

If you were not around for the Sparrow Racing League last year, I highly suggest you get in on the Dawning event while it is available. We still have two more full weeks of racing… but at some point soon I am going to have to care about the other side of this event… which is the strike list scoring if I hope to complete my record book. Playing SRL really has made me realize how much I miss games like Wipeout, and the fact that we will at least get to play this game type in private matches going forward gives me some solace. The only thing that worries me is that a lot of my enjoyment right now absolutely comes from the fact that I have a shot at interesting rewards at the end of the match. With this carrot removed… will I care about it nearly as much? As a final side note…. I have to thank Playstation support for taking care of my issues yesterday quickly. It took some doing… but I finally managed to find the correct link to get some resolution with. Within a few minutes and a few questions answered… they reset my compromised account back to the original email address and I was able to get in and take control once more. Additionally when I got home I added the two factor authentication… which I did not even know they offered until yesterday. I guess when they introduced it they didn’t make much of an announcement. In any case… after talking to some folks who got compromised there was a pattern to these attacks.

They transferred 50 of whatever the local currency was to the wallet… for me it was Dollars for others it was Pounds Sterling or Euros.
They changed the Sign-In email for the account… which frustratingly invalidates the links being sent out in email that allows you to quickly contest these actions
They created a sub account and set it up with unlimited purchasing rights.

What they were planning on doing from there is unknown because I think I maybe got things stopped in time to be able to find out. I had already put in a Paypal dispute, and Sony asked me to cancel that and they refunded the $50 taken from within their system. They were quick to point out that they had no legal requirement to do this… since all sales are final… and that they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts as a one time exception. Whatever makes me feel better at the end of the night, because in the end I got my money back without having to claw it back through paypal. The gotcha however is that instead of refunding it to the bank… they just placed it in my PSN wallet, which in truth I guess is fine given that I was going to pre-purchase Horizon Zero Dawn at some point anyways. It was a frustrating start to the morning, but in the grand scheme of things everything seems to be restored to normal. The only thing that I am going to do as a follow up is to get them to completely remove the sub account. For now I have changed its password and decimated it through parental controls so it really can’t do anything.

Icecrown Challenge

December 16, 2016 by Belghast

The world is a truly bizarre place sometimes. There are a lot of folks that make up my twitter timeline that I know… but only in a slantwise way. I recognize them, and am even happy to see posts show up as my feed scrolls by, but I really don’t know much about them. ArcaneRatsel is one of those folks, and I largely followed her because she does amazing things for the Warcraft community as a whole. She was part of an expansion of my timeline as I attempted to follow more positive Warcraft folks. For example she did this crazy thing where she essentially created faction logos for anyone who was interested…. and as a result created a truly silly number of them. She is also involved in the Running of the Gnomes that supports Cleveland Clinic, Running of the Trolls that supports the Trevor Project, and now the Icecrown Challenge that supports the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. To say she is a “good egg” is a big understatement… but again this is largely someone I only knew existed in passing and occasionally but rarely ended up in the same conversation with. So yesterday all started with a really simple thing… she said she was passing through my state to visit family. It is not like Oklahoma is a popular destination spot, so generally when I see that I comment and welcome whoever it is to the state.

After a handful of back and forths… the conversation quickly moved to DMs… because in the oddest of coincidences apparently we grew up in the exact same town of 2500 people. There is a little less than a ten year difference between us in ages, so we are for all purposes of different generations. It is not like we should have had a lot of overlap… but we absolutely did. My Mother was a teacher at the High School for decades… and it turns out her Mom was as well. In fact her Mom was my Freshman English teacher, and for a period of time went to the same church as I did. Through either the church thing or the teacher thing… I know I wound up in their home multiple times throughout my “growing up” period, and as we found out last night my dad who was an armchair professional photographer took portrait photos at least once. If you were to do an “as the crow flies” we grew up less than a mile apart, in fact from my house you could look out over the pasture and see hers. Ultimately… the world is a really strange place sometimes and what seems like massive distances can be shortened in an instant. I mean after all my wife and I grew up thirty minutes apart, and were in turn introduced by a mutual friend in Belgium. It is also weird how someone who is a complete and total stranger can suddenly become of much more significance from a single thread of connection.

Now when I first saw the Icecrown Challenge I was thinking… “Bel you should do this thing, because you clear Icecrown weekly anyways”. Now that I have some connection to at least one of the folks responsible for running the event… it was simply something I couldn’t NOT do. So last night I set my stream up and streamed my adventure across Icecrown… with a lot of help from my audience. By help I mean absolutely throwing a monkey wrench in the proceedings. I was all set to try and clear as fast as possible, but things happened along the way. You can watch the entire stream as a Beam VOD, but suffice to say… I am not taking full responsibility for some of the madness. I’ve been interspersing some of the wing boss kill times throughout this post that I lifted from my recording. I am just going to lay them out here to see if you can find the problem…

Professor Putricide – 11:11
Blood Queen Lana’thel – 14:46
Sindragosa – 26:56

It took me 3 minutes and 35 seconds to clear from Putricide to the Blood Queen, and based on some probably wrong math…. 12 minutes and 10 seconds to get to Sindragosa. The majority of that time was spent on attempting to do the Dreamwalker fight. My viewers told me with the utmost confidence that I could absolutely heal the dragon to full with a single bandage, and I am sure that is absolutely the case…. but not on heroic where she is constantly taking damage over time. So I wasted a good ten minutes and a I think eight bandages trying to make this work… only to get instantly interrupted when I started challenging the heal. So essentially all of the time I had made up to this point was completely blown and I ultimately had to jump in a portal to reset the encounter. Now were I choosing to run it on my Paladin, life would have been dandy. I know that I can heal her to full with a few flash of lights and move on with my life. In fact that was a large chunk of the reason why I used to always run this place weekly as a paladin. However last night I had to simply move on with my Warrior.

After the huge ball of frustration that was Dreamwalker… I finally looted Arthas and paused my timer at 31 minutes and 49 seconds. As per are the rules of the Icecrown Challenge… I then turned around and donated $31.49 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Additionally as part of the rules of the contest… I challenged Mort, Ashgar, and Thalen to also take the contest and make their own donations. The donation drive runs for I believe a month and officially started 12/13. Right now they have roughly $400 in donations and I feel like we can get this higher. Even if you are not directly challenged, you can totally start your own branch of the tree like I did. I would love to see this trickle through all of the little offshoots of the community… because lets face it… running Icecrown is fun. While I might grouse a little bit about losing ten minutes… that “wasted” time just meant I donated a little bit more money towards a really good cause.

Social Structure and MMOs

December 15, 2016 by Belghast

I’ve talked off and on about Imzy, and how it is filling a niche for me at least that Google+ used to in that it allows for a sort of long winded discussion that twitter just simply doesn’t. Yesterday I read a post there that made me realize something I had been trying to sort out in my head for awhile. The vast majority of my gaming time is spent playing MMOs and I tend to have several that I am in various states of active in at the same time. However I rarely if ever gain any sort of permanent traction in them, and after a few weeks of play tend to fade away again until the whim hits me to fire it back up. I go through a cycle of curiosity that leads to excitement… that leads to confusion and disillusionment that ultimately ends with me leaving once more. I will pick up a game and for a few days to weeks it is going to be the most interesting thing in the world as I get adjusted to the systems and mechanics again. However I always reach this point where an overwhelming sense of “what now” hits me. When that happens I wind out going right back to whatever it is happens to be my core game… which if we are being honest with me is an alternation of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. I have been working on my games played during 2016… and decided to extend that out to all of the games that are easy to track thanks to my blog. There is a clear pattern of when I start getting super excited about WoW I shift away from FFXIV and versa vicea. There is of course some overlap, but you can see a back and forth pattern that emerges.

So the question is then…. what do these two games seem to have that so many others don’t. The answer was sitting there waiting for me to notice. I often talk about games having great communities… but generally speaking this is in broad terms and extremely non-specific. Most games have some excellent niches in them, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t really do much to add core enjoyment for me. I keep returning to World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV… because those are the games that I have established communities in. There was a time when I was willing to branch out and meet new people… plunk myself down in a brand new game and start growing an entirely different infrastructure. The community that I have right now… is in large part the result of me doing this over and over. Each new game I go into I meet a whole new cast of people… but at some point that began to change. As I gathered a larger and larger core of players… I stopped looking outside to the community nearly as much and instead looking to my guild. While I am still meeting a lot of new people… they are coming with the pedigree of knowing someone I already know and am familiar with… which of course speeds up the social footnotes that come from meeting anyone new.

Last night was a prime example of this happening, because we were raiding in World of Warcraft and had someone pop by and join…. that I had not personally played with in several years. My personal community in House Stalwart within World of Warcraft seems to have this ability to stay evergreen… and always have a certain chunk of the population that is active and always happy to be there. House Stalwart my guild has existed for twelve years… in spite of my actions. When I left WoW to start playing Rift I tried my best to burn down everything about the game… actively recruiting people away to play this new an exciting game. I did the same thing for Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online… and countless other games. However at its core… the guild still remains and not only that… but has remained viable for the purpose of doing interesting end game content the entire time. Similarly the Final Fantasy XIV guild… while considerably younger just seems to endure whatever boom and bust cycles we go through population wise, and in both cases…. I know that I can return at any point and will be welcomed back with open arms. In truth I think pretty much everyone who has touched either guild feels the same way… which is why folks are constantly showing up from out of the woodwork and reintegrating back into the core at least for a little while.

So the problem that exists with nearly every other game… is I just don’t have anything close to this infrastructure… nor do I really have the emotional or intellectual strength to try and forge it. There have been House Stalwart offshoots in damned near every MMO that has existed… or at least as a guild community we have chosen a specific server and faction to all roll on. However for most… these interludes serve as a vacation from the game they were already playing… and after a break most folks wind up going right back to the familiar. In a traditional MMO I need to have something that I am building towards, and that object on the horizon is usually doing interesting things with my friends. So while it is absolutely fun to pop in and play Rift or ArcheAge for a weekend… I find hard keeping motivated when I know I have no real facilities to do any of the big interesting things… other than pugging. I am spoiled to be honest, and so many years of not having to PUG has soured my experience as a whole. Any random person I encounter is somehow tarnished by the memory of all of the good times I have had with my guild throughout the years. After generations of MMOs… this has lead me to be rather insular in my gaming habits and tending to return to the folks I already know and respect rather than trying to create something new.

So now days I tend to operate in two modes. I have the games that I am active in and have deep social connections… and the games that I slink off to when I need to limit my social connectivity and turtle for awhile. I tend to gobble up whatever new content is available, and then happy drop that game by the wayside as I return to active duty again. Games like Star Wars the Old Republic, The Secret World and Elder Scrolls Online are great for this role, given that they all have deeply engaging stories that you can find yourself completely lost in… so much so that you forget that you are essentially alone in a crowd of strangers. There are a lot of games that I think I would enjoy… if I had a similar stable infrastructure. However at this point… to be honest… folks are pretty stratified in their gaming habits. I can no longer really make an impassioned argument as to why they should abandon X game that they know and love for Y game that is new and different. I know this boom and bust cycle all too well at this point… and while it is a hell of a fun ride, to some extent I am getting that fix elsewhere. For me personally… the Diablo 3 season mechanism perfectly emulates the feeling of “unwrapping” a brand new MMO and rushing with your friends to level as quickly as you can. This time however we all know it is perfectly fine to fade away once you have achieved your goals… because its a game we will all return to again and again as new seasons happen. I have been the cause of so much frustration and disappointment in my gaming career… that I guess in some part I would rather slink off alone… than get folks excited about yet another game that I am sure we will all abandon within three months time. However that same instinct… is what keeps any of these games from actually gaining traction. What I realized this week when reading the post on Imzy is just how desperately I need that social infrastructure for me to be able to enjoy a MMO.

Warlock Banana

December 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night did not go exactly as expected, but I am pretty pleased with the results anyways. Last night was a good night, and it started from the moment I got home and got a bunch of things accomplished while waiting on the rice cooker. After a furious round of chores, my wife and I sat down to eat and then I was off to play some PS4. With my leg in its current mauled state it hurts to sit on the couch given that in order to use my laptop I need to use the recliner. This ends up putting pressure on the four wounds and while I can take it for a few minutes… it doesn’t exactly make for comfortable gaming. As a result I am largely upstairs right now, and other than being isolated from my wife it does give me access to my gaming consoles and my legit gaming desktop. The original goal for last night was going to involve running around and doing stuff with some friends in Destiny, but while waiting for that to happen I decided to start doing Iron Banner on my Warlock. I had not actually touched the Banner on either the Warlock or the Hunter during Year 3, and as a result I had the Lady Efrideet quests to complete which also reward some gear. I managed to exit the week long even with my Titan main at 393, Warlock caught up to 391 and my Hunter lagging a bit out of disuse at 389.

I’ve tried a whole slew of weapons and honestly nothing makes me nearly as happy as my Year 2 Iron Banner Auto Rifle… the Haakon’s Hatchet. So for the most part playing on my Warlock meant swapping this over via Destiny Item Manager. For those who are not using this I highly suggest installing the chrome plugin, because it greatly improves the utility of being able to swap gear while playing the game. Essentially I swapped my Auto Rifle and my Gjallarhorn over and was off to the races. There is a part of me that is sad that this Auto Rifle just simply doesn’t exist any more. I wish there was something you could do, like a weekly bounty for Lord Saladin that rewarded the year two weapons… just a random draw at the huge vat of available options. Range Finder is one of those perks on a weapon that I feel like gets overlooked a lot, but given the normal crap range on this weapon… with that perk it allows me to melt targets an entire map away it seems. Counter Balance and Perfect Balance on the same weapon always makes it feel great and I think a huge part of why I keep favoring this weapon… is that I have used it so much that I can predict exactly how it is going to behave in pretty much every situation.

Throughout the course of the evening I managed to go from Rank 0 to Rank 5 and complete all four of the bounties on my Warlock along with the three one time Lady Efrideet quests. That meant I saw an awful lot of gear as a result. Most of it was largely “more of the same” but I am picking out a few items to talk about. Firstly I am not a huge fan of Sidearms, but I am trying to learn how to use them. They play this interesting role of operating somewhere just outside of shotgun range but largely something you swap to when you empty your primary. Normally speaking I would just infuse this into a weapon I am more familiar with but for the moment I am holding onto it largely because I think the perk package looks interesting. With Hand Loaded and Range Finder… this means my side arm is going to have a massive operating range, and with Quickdraw I will be able to swap to it extremely quickly. Combine this with the already insane Stability and Rate of Fire on the weapon… and it might be useful if I can learn to use it well.

One of the strange things about Iron Banner is that your drops seem to be extremely character dependent. For example this time around the drops that were available were Class Items, Helms, Artifacts, Ghost Shells, Scout Rifles, and Fusion Rifles. On my Titan I got Fusion Rifles almost exclusively, save for a single Distant Star Scout Rifle drop. On my Warlock… the Scout Rifles were raining down upon me. I still think that more than likely I am going to be using the vendor roll which includes Full Auto… giving me a crazy high power auto rifle hybrid thing. However I did manage to get a few other interesting rolls, including the one above that I thought were worth talking about. Firstly to spec this out I would end up taking Braced Frame… which I really don’t like doing because it reduces the magazine size. For the second pick I would ultimately take High Caliber Rounds to give some stagger and a bit more impact, and lastly would probably go for Firefly… just because right now I don’t have a decent scout rifle with that on it. For the un-initiated Firefly makes it so that when you kill a with a headshot… it causes it to explode dealing damage to all other mobs around it. Firefly does a really great job at helping with wave clear and it is just fun to watch all of these things explode. All in all it was a pretty great week in the Banana, and I am hoping the next time it comes around I can maybe push my army of characters up to 400ish.