MMO Archives - Page 308 of 438 - Tales of the Aggronaut

FATE Grinding Go!

July 25, 2015 by Belghast

Home Improvement is Scary

A good chunk of our week has revolved around planning for some renovations around the house, and I have to say the whole process kind of wigs me out. I have been acting pretty calm and collected because I know it also stresses my wife out… but I feel like I am wading out into an ocean that I know very little about. The long and short of it is that we live in a house with wood siding, which is not exactly ideal for the climate extremes of Oklahoma. Additionally our climate seems to really be a positive environment for termites… and when we moved in we knew the house had some issues. Then a little over a year after moving in… we had our first swarm. We have been on a termite plan since and it has been nearly a decade of having zero activity, but we know there is some underlying damage in the siding, but other than cosmetic issues we had not really had any problems.

That is of course until recently when we during a particularly hurricane like horizontal rain… we had a very small leak in our kitchen ceiling. After having the roofers out, they thought it was coming in along the garbage edge of siding and up over the flashing. This is the point at which we first noticed… just how bad our siding really was. Throughout the course of the week we had numerous contractors out who gave estimates… and we think we have maybe decided on a company and a product. Right now we are looking at replacing all of the wood siding with fiber cement, which is this crazy stuff that feels like ceramic tile, but looks like wood. But this means some major money, which has us also sorting out financing options. Being an adult is an extremely frustrating thing. We think we have a plan figured out… but even though I know this is something that really needs to be done… it is a massive decision. I know things will work out in the end, but this whole process is exceptionally stressful for the moment.

CPUCores

I was asked by someone on my steam friends list last night, if this program worked since I had been running it. I actually just started testing it last night, even though I purchased it long before it showed up on steam. I do not remember how much I paid when I bought it, but I want to say it was somewhere around the $10 mark. It promised to improve your FPS by improving your CPU utilization, and this is something I had been frustrated by in the past. The machines I use are quad core or six core… and it always felt like very little of my CPU time was actually being used. At the time I figured what the hell, purchased it… and then got busy messing with other things. When they went on steam the developer was nice enough to send me out a Steam key as well, and yesterday I actually started testing it. Is this digital snake oil? Well honestly… all I can really offer is a heartfelt shrug.

I did some testing this morning with World of Warcraft which is one of the most poorly optimized games that I have played when it comes to utilizing multiple cores. Hell lets me honest, the game itself is horribly optimized in general… but my theory was that this game seems to be extremely CPU limited, so in theory if CPU Core optimization would help any game it should help this one. The above graph is taken from task manager and shows that for the most part all of the cores are running at around the same amount of load and an overall 36% utilization of my CPU. In World of Warcraft itself I was standing in my Garrison and setting roughly 30 frames per second. The latest release of CPU Cores features a “CPU Cores It” button allowing you to scan your current process list and apply the change to an application that is running. If you look at the graph below you see that with CPUCores turned on, it is now pegging two of my six cores and as a whole the CPU utilization is now 64%. In game I was still standing in my Garrison but saw a jump from 30 fps to 40 fps… which is not really earth shattering but still not too shabby and is in line with what a lot of the reports seemed to indicate.

The confusing thing is however… that it seems like CPUCores is only really using two of my six cores. There are some settings in there to manually override what cores it is actually using to run things, so I figure I will continue to fiddle with it and see what I can get from it. I didn’t actually record any of my measurements last night, but I saw a bigger jump when using my laptop. I actually started to see comparable performance to my desktop which was kinda massive. The general advice in the community is that this is designed for medium end systems to get some additional performance out of them, and that if you already have an extremely high performance system… it is likely not going to do anything for you. Normally speaking I run Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward on my laptop around 30-40 fps… but last night with CPUCores running I was seeing 60-70 fps which is a big jump. Laptops are notoriously bad at CPU utilization because they are designed to safe energy whenever they can. I feel like maybe that is the magic bullet here for using this application, because honestly the results on my gaming desktop do not warrant the purchase. I largely bought the app because I was curious if it worked, and for the most part it does seem to do something… because a 10 fps increase is still a 10 fps increase no matter how you chop it. My hope is that over time it will continue to work better and it seems like they are just now starting to try and optimize for AMD processors. As always… your mileage may vary and I probably would not have paid the current $20 price tag on steam.

FATE Grinding Go!

So it appears that with 3.0.5 the changes to FATE experience have been noticed by the community. As I looked at Duty finder it actually scrolled for the first time in a long while, with multiple FATE parties happening in different zones. I decided to join the train in Dravinian Hinterlands and it seemed like the time spent was worth my time. I had dinged 58 earlier in the day while running a dungeon with guildies, and after a bit of FATE grinding I managed to get to around the halfway mark to 59. It is my hope that today I can run some more dungeons and FATEs and make a serious push for 59. The community seems to have been reinvigorated by the patch, and it is shocking just how good Square Enix is at timing their content. In the days leading up to this recent patch it felt like there was a slowing down as people finished their Law grind. Instead now everyone is actively buzzing again as they are trying to get as much Esoterics as they can, so that within three weeks they can get those tasty tasty level 200 weapons.

When I decided that I needed a break from FATE grinding, I opted to pop over into SkyForge and work on finishing unlocking all of the costumes. After having played the tutorial as every class currently in the game… I have to say they all feel very unique. You have everything from the mad bomber feel of the Alchemist, to the skill shots of the Archer, to the insane melee flurry that is the Slayer. The problem is… the three classes that you get to choose from at the start are without a doubt the most generic feeling of all of the classes that I played. This is rather unfortunate because while I feel it gives people a desire to unlock that class that they really want to play, it makes the initial grind feel meaningless and pointless since you ultimately have to play the lesser of the starter evils to get there. I feel like this game could benefit from the Marvel Heroes approach to classes, allowing you to play a little of each of them and then after the tutorial choose the one you wanted to unlock. I feel like eventually they will let us outright purchase these classes, but I have found that option sorely missing from the cash shop. I would absolutely pay to unlock the Berserker for example or the Slayer… but since I missed out on the founders packs I have no real way to do that.

Scattered Evening

July 24, 2015 by Belghast

Orcs Must Die Unchained

This morning I am struggling more than a little bit. The last couple of nights have combined being up fairly late with not really sleeping that terribly well on top of it. As a result I am significantly more groggy than normal this morning and also more than a little late getting started with the blog post. A good chunk of this mornings posting time was spent playing the opening tutorial for Orcs Must Die Unchained. A few weeks back I posted my treatise on exactly what I meant when I said I wanted a PVE MOBA. One of the first comments came from a friend of mine… who may or may not work for Robot Entertainment. He said they were just patching in a new gameplay mode that sounded pretty close to what I was describing. So yesterday myself and practically everyone I know who signed up for beta… got into the game and I finally got around to testing it out this morning.

I have to say what I have seen briefly in the tutorial gives me hope that maybe this might fit the bill. I am going to have to spend more time playing it to really see, but it feels less tower defense and more dungeon keeper which I am okay with. Granted I did not play Orcs Must Die 2, and I am guessing a lot of the gameplay evolutions come from that title. The tutorial starts you off playing the sorceress which was a strike against it, but I am sure as soon as I can get my hands on a melee champion I will be just fine. It seems like there is a lot to figure out as far as trap placement, because I absolutely thought I would stop most of a minion wave… but barely phased them. There is also an interesting card collecting aspect that allows you to summon specific minions in each “warcamp” which seems pretty interesting as well. I will spend some more time this weekend playing this to give it a more proper test, but so far it seems interesting.

Astebreed

This weekend is the AggroChat Game Club show devoted to Ashgar’s pick… Astebreed. The bulk of my evening was spent playing this and I made it to chapter five before my thumb got sore enough that I wanted to take a break. I am really really hoping that the game will let me continue where I left off… because I am not really looking forward to playing back through the four chapters to get to the point where I left off. My opinion of the game is somewhat mixed right now, but hopefully I will get some more play time in before Saturday. I am not sure how far from the end of the game I really am, but based on some quick googling it looks like the game has six chapters as a total. The game play has been fun, especially since it lets me win by slashing things to death with a sword… which is not exactly something that most SHMUPS do. I wouldn’t really call this a bullet hell shooter, but there are definitely moments where there is a silly amount of stuff on screen that you have to try and navigate.

The biggest positive is the fact that your ship actually has a surprising amount of health. Usually in a SHMUP you get one or two hits before you lose a life, and in Astebreed you can actually soak up a surprising amount of damage before having to be concerned with death. Essentially at the end of Chapter 5 I encounter what I would consider the first really hard boss, and quite frankly by that time my thumbs were sore and I was ready to just be done for awhile. The boss had this super annoying attack that caused you to fly around the screen to avoid it… which meant you were not putting ANY damage into the boss. My theory is that you needed to use your missile lock type functionality while flying around to avoid damage… but I didn’t put in enough attempts to really test this one out. According to steam I have only actually put in 71 minutes… but it felt like significantly longer. I did manage to get a very “Bel” achievement called “Too Much Destruction” where I apparently killed 30 of these missile batteries on the boss at the end of Chapter Four.

Scattered Evening

The rest of the evening was significantly less focused, and I think a combination of sleep deprivation and having spent a little over an hour mashing buttons on a controller furiously left me in a bit of a stupor. I ultimately went downstairs and booted up the laptop, patching things up so that I could do something. I managed to watch through the first four episodes of the Humans television show, and I am actually enjoying it quite a bit. It is an excellent mix of creepy and endearing at the same time… and I am happy to see Katherine Parkinson that I know largely from IT Crowd. I attempted to play some Final Fantasy XIV but ultimately logged out after running a Vault on my Dragoon. I was feeling super disconnected from the world and my free company, so I slinked off into the shadows and booted up something I could solo without any human contact. Right now that game is SkyForge, and I spent some time working through another big open area… and my desire to “complete all the things” is ultimately what lead me to stay up so damned late again… only furthering the zombie like state.

The strangest thing about SkyForge so far is the fact that I do not have a single person on my friends list. Even in games that I am only thinking of playing for a few minutes… I still usually have a batch of people on my radar of sorts. I think this is a side effect of Final Fantasy XIV being my social game right now… and this being a game when I just want to blend into the crowd. I am not terribly opposed to having people on my friends list and you can find me there as Belghast Sternblade, but this is absolutely not a grouping game for me right now. I am enjoying poking my way around and soloing the content, and as counter intuitive as it might sound… I am really starting to enjoy the fact that every mission seems to have both solo and grouping options. Last night I very much felt like my interaction batteries were completely drained, so I just needed to spend some “me time” while slicing enemies with a sword. All things considered though the more I play of it, the more enjoyment I am getting out of SkyForge. It seems like just about the perfect foil to Final Fantasy XIV and does a good job at giving me an option to play that doesn’t require a lot out of me.

Begrudging Enjoyment

July 23, 2015 by Belghast

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.

A Small Patch

July 22, 2015 by Belghast

Blaugust Clarifications

Yesterday I had a handful of questions about Blaugust that I thought I should address this morning, just in case anyone else had it. Firstly it is absolutely okay to write content ahead of time and stage it to release over the course of the month. With both Pax Prime and Gamescom happening during the month of August, this is more than likely going to cut into some writers schedules. I know last year there were several folks doing great… and then they went to Gamescom and dropped off the face of the planet. Being able to cover schedule irregularities is a necessary coping skill to deal with keeping a schedule. While I personally prefer not to schedule posts ahead of time, quite literally everyone else does this. So for the purpose of Blaugust this still absolutely counts towards your thirty one posts.

Another question that I had is whether or not it is cool to tell a story in thirty one parts. This is also absolutely fine, and like I said yesterday this is a challenge about longevity and regularity… not necessarily what you are writing about. A prime example of this is during my NaNoWriMo run in 2013… I knew that I could not do it and blog at the same time. So instead I just posted my nightly words each day as my blog post. So over the course of the month I essentially broadcast the draft of my story to the world. In the case of the person who asked me yesterday, they wanted to write the back story of their primary game character over the course of the month. That seems completely valid, and at the same time something that would be extremely awesome. The constraints of this contest are about producing thirty one posts during the month, and so long as those posts mean the constraints of the challenge you are doing just fine.

A Small Patch

I have a good friend Rylacus who is going to be starting Final Fantasy XIV soon. Over the year plus I have been contiguously playing this game I have talked to him about the patching schedule. I mentioned that about once a quarter we get a big patch, and usually more than once a month we get little minor patches. The problem being that he had no real frame of reference as to what I meant by those two things. Yesterday 3.0.5 was released and this is absolutely what I would call a “small patch” by FFXIV standards. When I linked him the patch notes he was completely floored by the fact that we call that a minor patch. A lot of things happened yesterday, not the least of which is the introduction of the Esoterics tier of Tomestones. I keep thinking at some point they are going to run out of goofy names to call these, but they seem to have a limitless fount of them. This allows players to purchase item level 200 items, and returns us to the state of the weekly tomestone cap of 450. The weapons once again are priced just enough to force players to hit that cap three weeks in a row to get them.

Yesterday was also another significant moment for me and my Warrior as I finished upgrading all of my gear to level 180 (other than the Alexander ring that I should be getting tonight… ). This means I am essentially “done” gearing with Law and can now start diverting that to my Dragoon who is roughly halfway to level 58. I was reaching this point where running dungeons was not nearly as important for me as it had been in the past, and then bam… a small patch releases and once again I am infused with this desire to hit the dungeons every single day. This time around Expert Roulette is going to be my key focus, and we have learned in the past that through running a single roulette every day for several days in a row.. you can cap your tomestones without doing anything terribly insane. What I marvel at however is the timing of their content. Quite literally just as we started slowing down our dungeon running fervor… they launched yet another tier of gear giving us even more reason to get excited about running dungeons again. This game is absolutely phenomenal at figuring out the right mix of carrot and stick.

Final Coil

Another huge thing yesterday is that Savage Alexander opened and now the bleeding edge of Final Fantasy XIV raiders can throw themselves against that content. As of this morning it seems like only a handful of free companies have defeated the first turn, and only one or two have managed to defeat the second. So it seems like it will take folks a good deal of time to actually conquer this raid. For our guild however, we are still very much in the gearing process and have yet to be able to field a reliable “normal” Alexander run on a regular basis. What our Monday night group has been working on instead is finishing out the Final Coil of Bahamut. I realize we are quite literally “months behind” as the saying goes, but I am still very much enjoying myself. We managed to take down Turn 12 on Monday night and made what I feel is significant progress on Turn 13. Ultimately it will probably take us a few more weeks, which is good… because we still only have one geared tank for the Monday raid.

As a result… I ended up solo tanking turn 13… which is quite possibly the most hectic thing I have done in a long time. My world became entirely centered around making sure I had five stacks of wrath at the right moment… so I could hit Inner Beast plus another cooldown… in order to survive the tankbuster… which of note means that it literally does enough damage to decimate my 25,000 hit points. The worst timing however was on the pull when quite literally I was hitting my fifth ability and gaining my fifth stack of wrath… as the attack was casting that I needed Inner Beast for. Needless to say that night stressed me the hell out… but hopefully we can down him soon. I would love if the axe dropped, because it is super amazing looking. What I really hope however is that we can finish gearing and start work on Bismarck Extreme, Ravana Extreme and Alexander for gear.