MMO Archives - Page 273 of 432 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Malfunctions and Malthael

January 16, 2016 by Belghast

Technological Betrayal

Yesterday was a really strange day, for several reasons. Firstly I opted to take the day off since the week as a whole had been one of the worst in a very long time. The summary can be that the project from hell… went to hell. During the course of the last two years, it has been common place that the vendor has invented new requirements on a regular basis. For example in a meeting on Wednesday they produced a network diagram of how the system should be designed… that would have been nice to see roughly two years ago when the project started. As a result it was once again up to us to save the day and try desperately to make things function. Over the course of 45 minutes I threw up a brand new reverse proxy server and configured a dozen or so redirects to get things functional again. It was all for naught however… because even with things configured their application was still failing to function at an acceptable level. So as a result the big launch was scrapped and we are now trying to regroup and decide when exactly the vendor application is working well enough to try this again. Essentially I know exactly how the Healthcare.gov team felt when vendors failed to provide a fully functional product.

Yesterday was supposed to be a chill day that I stayed at home, worked a little bit… and overall relaxed but that was not apparently in the cards. I woke up to find my cellphone locked beyond reason. I pulled the battery and it began a pattern of locking up after 10-15 minutes of usage. I tried uninstalling everything that was not critical, but the error message I kept getting was that TouchWiz was failing, that being the default shell of Samsung phones. I tried booting into recovery mode and clearing the application cache, and eventually I was left with only the thermonuclear option of resetting to factory settings. So I hurriedly started shifting all of my authenticators to running off of another device, and in several spurts of pulling the battery to reset the device I managed to use it long enough to do that. I held my breath, and hit the button resetting the device…. which actually took far less time than I would have thought. The thing is… all of the important stuff on the device other than the applications gets backed up to google drive, and all of my pictures to the google photos site. In theory I didn’t lose anything, and the moment I logged into my google account it started downloading everything that I had on my device before and restoring the application states. In any case… resetting a phone is not something I would want to do often because it caused more anxiety than just about anything I have done period. There are basically three devices that need to function for me to be happy… my phone, my laptop, and my gaming machine.

More Adulting

The other major problem of the day was our primary cable box. We have the in home networking thing where all of the cable boxes are supposed to talk to each other, allowing us to record programs and watch content from the DVR from any room with a box. This has not always worked as intended, but lately it just hasn’t worked at all. The first symptoms were that we could no longer access the DVR remotely, then could no longer schedule something to record. There have been a few situations where the box itself did not come up cleanly after a power spike… and I had to hard reboot it a few times. Yesterday I attempted another one of these reboots hoping to clear up the problems, and what I got instead was a dead box. I am extremely lucky in that I have a friend that I have known for years, that is a developer for the cable company. So with his help we tried a bunch of different things to troubleshoot the problem. The behavior that was happening is that after a hard boot it would throw two error codes Er:54 and Er:55 then start counting from H0:01 to H8:00 ish, and repeat that over and over forever. This happened once before and I let it sit like this for an entire day and it never recovered on its own.

Essentially what this is a sign of if you ever see this on your own cable box is that apparently it is trying desperately to dial back home. The H001-H800 is it cycling through frequencies from 1 mhz to 800 mhz trying to find a channel to communicate on. It has to dial home for it to be able to do a health check and make sure that the software is up to date. So until it finds a signal it won’t actually boot into the cable box software. Now on the cable side my box was showing as being a “non-responder” so for whatever reason, the communication framework inside the box was unable to talk… and essentially the box itself was dead. I unhooked the box and brought it to the local office, roughly a mile from the house and I have to say I am super impressed. They scanned the barcode on the back of the unit and walked into the back and handed me a new one with really no questions asked. Took it home, hooked it up… and at first I was only seeing the standard definition channels. I had to call into the main office and they sent some signal to my box that caused a reboot and after that everything was back to normal. I guess the box had been dying for awhile, because everything is much more responsive on this one with relatively no menu lag. I seriously think I am one of the few people in the country who actually loves my cable company, because I have had almost nothing but good experiences with them. At the very least I have had nothing like the horror stories I have heard about Charter, Comcast or Time Warner.

Diablo Day

The focus of yesterday however was that Diablo 3 Season 5 started at 5pm pst, and that was pretty much the only thing on my mind all day long. I am not sure what it is about Diablo season play, but it makes the entire experience more enjoyable for me. It gives us all a reason to start from scratch and re-experience all of the aspects of gearing up and learning everything all over again. There were a few hiccups at the beginning of the evening, right around the official launch time… but I assume those were all related to server load. I was able to use the new Rebirth function on my Crusader, but I had to log out and back in for it to take. Once we all managed to get in game four of us started a group and spend the majority of the evening rolling around together in a glorious murderball. At some point Ashgar dropped out and a little bit later Mor did was well, which ended up changing the group comp to include Carthuun and Grace’s “Precious”… otherwise known as the Kraken by the AggroChat folks. It was awesome to get to meet him and have him on voice with us.

We spent the majority of the night doing bounties and quite honestly that feels like the fastest way to level. We started playing at 7 pm my time… and I finally tagged out of the group around 10:30 and in that amount of time minus a few breaks I pushed from level 1 to 55ish. Today once I wrap this blog post up I will be back to working on my Crusader, and trying to decide what abilities I actually want to use. The problem with running around with three Wizards is that I always feel like I am way too slow to keep up. As a result I had to generally focus on movement abilities to try and keep ahead of them. Towards the end of our play session I started focusing on the few ranged abilities that the Crusader has, but regardless of what I do there will be no way I can really compete with the sort of damage that disintegrate throws out. The other side effect of my build is that I am focusing on some of the crowd control effects that I have like the flail whip that stuns, and judgement that is a big targeted AOE stun effect. The idea is that I am trying desperately to “tank” the stuff while the wizards burn it to death. I think the thing I like the most about Diablo seasons is that we hit it hard and heavy for a few weeks, and feel like we accomplished something… only to move on to other things until the next season comes along. It gives me the feeling of a new MMO launch, over and over… which for me really is the best part of an new MMO. That moment when all of your friends are super focused on the exact same thing for a period of time.

Pumpkin King

January 13, 2016 by Belghast

The Hammer

All day long yesterday I had been craving some more Victor Vran, so when I got home last night… I fed the animals… fed myself… and plunked down on the couch to play some more. Firstly I have to say how nice it runs on my aging gaming laptop. For many games that I would want to play downstairs… like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Fallout 4… they simply do not run well on the dual 650 video cards that the laptop has in it. This game however looks gorgeous and runs at a solid 60 fps, which makes me happy. Granted graphically it is a much more simple game than the ones I rattled off, but nonetheless it makes me happy. While roaming around last night I found this crazy boss fight, that spawned after taking down several other bosses in an area. Upon defeating the specter it announced that if I would only spare him… I could have access to his truly rare wares. When I opened up the vendor window I saw my very first purple weapon…. the Pumpkin Hammer. So I proceeded to liquidate everything in my inventory except my handful of favorite weapons… and was barely able to afford it.

It is every bit as cool as you might imagine. Firstly you are running around with a giant jack-o-lantern on a stick which in itself has a cool factor. To add to the effect however, when you hit anything… it spawns a pumpkin bomb on the ground… which moments later then explodes taking out more stuff. The only negative here is it actually cost me an objective last night. The objective was to take out a handful of monsters with the hammer… problem being that in one case at least the pumpkin bomb went off and finished off the monster and as a result it did not count. So that is something to watch, but what I like about it is the fact that the attack animation seems much faster than the standard hammer. It hits for slightly less than my previous hammer, but since I am able to hit more often it balances out in the end. Other than the hammer the ghost sold a few spells, that also looked pretty great… but after bankrupting myself I could not afford anything else. From the sound of the message it seems like the creature appears at random in various levels, so hopefully I can build back up my gold reserves by the time I see him again.

Guyver Time

Warframe and I have this strange relationship… where I have downloaded it for PC, PS3 and PS4… but never actually played it. I’ve seen friends on my various social media timelines playing it for ages, and been intrigued. The problem being that I apparently had the wrong impression of what sort of game it actually was. In my head I had this filed away as some sort of PVP experience, when in truth it is largely a PVE team based experience. Over the weekend Ashgar and Tamrielo discovered the game, and Monday night I was going to join them. Unfortunately there were some complications…. namely that for whatever reason my ISP could not connect to Warframe.com or any of the game servers for a period of time. As a result I instead spent the entire night playing Victor Vran and had a blast doing so. Since I spent the evening on the sofa, it meant that I needed to download the client again, and about half way through the evening I switched games.

So far I have to say I am pretty impressed. I am only running the game at 720p because I didn’t want to have any possible frame rate issues on the laptop, however the game itself looks gorgeous. In many way its missions remind me of the missions from Mass Effect 2 and 3. The most fun I had was this mission we did as a group where we entered a ship, triggered an alarm and then tried to hold out as long as we could. We managed to make it up until the point that the ship started spawning in waves of level 5 mobs… at which point we retreated to the extraction zone and held that tunnel for as long as we could before making a break for it. Towards the end these firebombing mobs started coming in and we damned near lost Ashgar. I myself came precariously close to dying a few times, only to get revived in a similar fashion to how you can players in Destiny. All in all it was a really good experience, and I think honestly the Excaliber warframe suits me pretty well. I like the blade, and for my main weapon I ended up choosing a bow. Later I spent a little money on the game and got some upgrades and now my secondary weapon is a heavy double firing pistol called the Kraken. I also spent some time making the suit look more “me”. Look forward to playing more over the coming weeks.

Cats and Wolves

January 8, 2016 by Belghast

Cattes a Plenty

At some point last year, lots of folks in my feed showed up with this Japanese app on their phones called Neko Atsume. From what I can tell it roughly translates to Cat Collector, and it is one of those passive things that I tend to refer as a “maintenance game”. The thing is…. I like cats. In fact as I write this post I have one on either end of my desk sleeping on their blankets. I for the most part avoided the game until recently when for some strange reason I decided to give it an install. Firstly I’ve talked about my problems with mobile gaming in general. I tend to install a game, play it a few times… and then never touch it again. Largely my life is not exactly mobile friendly, and if I have access to games…. I am generally at home when I can use a more traditional gaming system. This game however… fits that realm of do something… leave it sit for awhile… check back in on progress for a minute or two. I’ve found myself popping it open while waiting on a meeting to start, and the jolt of happy kittehs doing stuff seems to help my mental state.

The concept is really simple. You purchase cat toys, place them in your virtual yard… and the neighborhood cats will come visit you and leave you gifts if they enjoyed themselves. The gifts come in the form of silver or gold fish… with the later also serving as the cash shop currency of the game. As far as advancement… I have zero clue how that works. I know I have seen screenshots of folks with much bigger yards, but I have no idea how that actually occurs yet. The starter yard has a fixed number of mount points for items, and at any point you can pick the items up and replace them with other items from your inventory. I have a pretty simple yard right now, but it seems to draw cats in pretty well. You can play the game completely free and there is a conversion between silver fish and gold fish… but it is pretty painful. You can get 10 Gold fish for every 250 Silver fish, which is doable because over the course of a few days I have earned over 250. Right now it gives me tiny doses of happy especially when I pop over and my yard is completely full of cats doing adorable things. I fully expect that within two weeks time I will have abandoned this mobile game just like I have abandoned so many others.

Slowly Leveling

The other big project I have had over the last several days is working my way through the content in Destiny on my Xbox 360. This has been a somewhat crazy side mission, and I have to say… it has been interesting leveling from scratch for a second time. There were a lot of things I struggled with in Destiny playing through it that very first time, and for the most part none of them are big deals this time. I guess all of the time I have played on the Playstation 4 really has made me significantly better at the game, because swapping consoles has been a non-issue. Sure the 360 controller feels a little strange, but I seem to be able to switch hit between it and the dualshock without much problem. Admittedly I find the dualshock 4 significantly more comfortable, and if there was a way to make it work on the 360 I totally would. I guess you might ask yourself why exactly am I leveling on a last generation console… well I still have friends playing it. I have been really damned impressed at just how well the game plays. I mean admittedly it feels like someone smeared vasoline on the screen because everything feels a little fuzzy… given the lower resolution and with it lower texture detail. However the moment to moment game play is exactly the same… and the weapons and movement all feels just as responsive. I am sure at some point I will pick up an Xbox One, and at that point… in theory my 360 characters get to transfer over so any work I am doing now I can carry forward into the next system.

There are so many lessons that I have learned from playing through the first time. This time around for example I am stockpiling every single blue engram drop that I happen to get. The idea is that if I can wait to open any of them until level 40, I will be able to push up my light level quickly and get to a viable position to start doing content. I am investing a lot of time right now in this platform, but the hope is that eventually it will be the sort of thing I only play when I have people to play with. I still greatly prefer the Playstation 4 version, and those are the characters that I really care about. In theory I could have spent my level 25 boost on my Titan and probably would have been done by now, but there is something fun about doing this legitimately again. At this point I have beaten the main storyline of the original game, and darkness below. I am also a fairly significant way through the House of Wolves storyline, but it was getting late last night and I did not really want to deal with the Vault of Glass mission, so that is where I will pick up next time I play. I’ve reached level 25, which concerns me a bit… given that I have quite a bit to go before I can function very efficiently in the Taken King content. I mean in theory I could already be doing that… but sub 35 some of those later missions are a pain in the ass. Generally speaking on Destiny alts I push all the way to 40 before even really starting Taken King, so that I can burn through it easily. Given I need leveling fuel… I will more than likely start Taken King as soon as I finish up with House of Wolves. I guess I could do some Strike grinding, but I really really hate the Omnighoul strike, and that seems to be all I ever get in the level 20 range.

The Pathfinder

January 2, 2016 by Belghast

Flying Again

Wow-64 2016-01-02 09-20-57-69

Not being able to fly in Draenor has been an interesting experience, and mostly one that I did not fully realize what I was missing until recently. I had got so used to NOT flying… that it always felt strange when I entered the old would and could suddenly take to the skies again. I would lift off the ground in Stormwind or Ironforge and have this momentary pause where I couldn’t quite remember what I was supposed to do now that I was up above the world. I can’t say I gnashed me teeth wanting flight, in fact I think it was probably a much more enjoyable experience for me because I was forced to be on the ground. I made me actually learn the lay of the land in these zones, and it also got me using the flight point system again. However over the last few weeks I have been working on the final requirements for Draenor Pathfinder, and being shuttled around by one of my friends on her rocket makes me realize just how much easier everything is with flight. Why clear your way through a camp when you can just drop down on top of your objective? But it also has made me realize exactly why they disabled in the first place. Flight is overpowered when it comes to questing, and there is nothing more frustrating than working your way to a treasure chest in Tanaan only to have someone swoop in from above to snatch it from you before you can get to it. When I was wrapping up the last bits of faction yesterday I had this happen three times in the course of a ten minute period.

DraenorPathfinder

I honestly don’t so much care about flight for my max level characters, but instead for my characters that I have yet to level further. This means that I can pretty much chain quest my way to 100 by doing ONLY the objectives, and while this means I will be skipping a bunch of content… it is also content I have seen several times. The biggest boon to me is that it will make collecting treasures so much easier, especially the ones that involve a jumping puzzle. The negative is… that I will no longer be cycling through my collection of ground mounts, but in the grand scheme I think I will live. I realize this is months late, but it is still exciting to me to be able to return to the skies. While Draenor Pathfinder was kind of a pain in the ass…. I got lucky and managed to get several medallions from the current Christmas event that helped me leapfrog 1000 faction at a time. The problem is…. now that I am done with this achievement I am not really sure what to do with myself. I could either start pushing the rest of my alliance characters from 90ish to 100…. or I could return to working on my Orc Warlock to hopefully have a second 100 to play with Horde side. In any case… I topped a big goal off of my list and am pretty happy.

Last Gen Destiny

My Great Capture Screenshot 2016-01-02 09-14-03

Over the week I have had a friend of mine talking about picking up Destiny now that he realized you could get it for the Xbox 360. I myself have considered picking it up on that console for awhile, especially since I feel bad that my 360 doesn’t see much love. I had been trying to use PSTV to play PS4 downstairs where we have the exercise bike set up, and the lag is just enough that it makes Destiny largely unplayable for me. The answer on all of the forums seems to be to hard wire your PSTV into your network…. but I don’t have the ability to have Ethernet downstairs, and I question how well powerline adapters would work in my house. Which moves me to potentially relocating my Xbox 360 to downstairs and playing some Destiny on it. I ended up picking it up and I have to say… I am pretty impressed. The game for the most part “feels” the same… just at a much lower resolution. To some extent playing on the 360 feels like you are squinting while playing it on the PS4. Everything is just slightly lower resolution, which would make sense considering that Destiny runs at 1080p 30fps on the PlayStation 4 and it runs 720p 30fps on the Xbox 360. The difference is noticeable when you are standing still but for the most part in the heat of the battle I don’t really notice it that much.

The only negative of playing on the Xbox 360 however is that I am starting completely over. I’ve read that apparently you can log your characters in on either Xbox 360 or Xbox One… and the same goes for PS4 and PS3. So if I ever get a Xbox One at some point all of the effort I have done on the 360 will port over. Interestingly enough though that means that I guess I could have picked up a copy for the PS3 and played my existing PS4 characters on it. That said… I have heard some really bad issues with Destiny on the PS3. Everything I had read about the 360 made it sound like it was just a downgraded resolution… but I’ve heard the PS3 version is only running at a strange 624p and also has some framerate dip issues. Mostly I am still amazed at just how well it runs on last generation hardware, and while I won’t have that constant desire to take screenshots because the game is so damned pretty…. it will give me something interesting to do while riding the exercise bike. I have a woefully small number of people on my XBox Live account so feel free to add BelghastStern, and especially if you play Destiny on the 360 please let me know!