MMO Archives - Page 317 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Axe to Grind

May 12, 2015 by Belghast

Lung Infections Suck

I’ve been in a strange place the last few days, where I am still recovering from what has turned out to be an infection in my lungs. It has been allergies central around here and unsurprisingly my lungs have reacted negatively to it. I had been dragging along for awhile with what felt like a constant persistent dry cough. Last Friday I finally decided to go to the doctor when I coughed up a small bit of blood. Turns out my lungs were actually in far worse shape than I thought. Since then I have been on a pretty heavy dose of prednisone and am on the mend, but man… I have to say I am still drained as hell. I attempted to go to work like normal yesterday but ended up coming home about halfway through the day. Today I am making another attempt to go a full day, so I am hoping the strength stays with me. What is so strange about this one is just how drained I feel as a result of simply existing.

Why are my lungs betraying me you might ask? The above photo is not intentionally abstract but instead my my phones camera attempting to focus on what are ultimately hundreds of tiny particles of Cottonwood seed. This is what we jokingly refer to as summer snow, and with all the rain we have been getting the Cottonwoods have been blooming in overdrive blanketing the law with a mat of white fabric and making the air look like it is quite genuinely snowing. Thankfully I have a day or two of reprieve thanks to the recent round of storms, but I am sure as soon as things dry up again the bloom will begin a new. Normally this happens around my birthday in June but I guess all the moisture moved up the time table. In any case it sucks to live through and I am just hoping that I can limp through until it has finished. In the meantime I will continue to take this high dose pack of prednisone and antibiotics and pretend to be a normal human being.

Axe to Grind

For months now we have been slowly keying folks through the various primal fights in our Final Fantasy XIV free company. While a chunk of us have been sitting on the Ifrit step, the final of the original set of Extreme primals… it seemed like every time we set out to attempt it we were missing a seventh or eighth that also had it unlocked. So we would once again shift focus and do another round of Garuda or another round of Titan to get people caught up. Last night, finally after a new round of Titaneers we managed to get eight people on at the same time with the ability to do Ifrit. Now I realize I could have been pugging my way through the primal encounters, and with all of the mount farming parties this is a relatively straight forward prospect. There is just something rewarding about doing a fight that is new to you, with nothing but your free company surrounding you. It makes the kill that much sweeter and the experience that much more magical as you accomplished a new mission with friends. Once again we went into the fight without much research, but managed to pick up the basics extremely quickly.

It took us several attempts but by the end of our first night ever working on the boss we had downed an Ifrit and moved on to other things. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to get this quest out of my log. I know the big push for this at least from Ashgar’s side was to get the sweet axe I am pictured holding in the first picture. For those who have completed some of the later story, you will recognize this as the axe that Moenbryda wields. It is just one of many weapons you get as a reward for defeating the original trio of Primals, but I went with the axe because it is probably one of the more unique appearances in the game. Now I doubt if it will ever offset my usage of my Malignant Mogaxe, but it is still pretty awesome to have it as an option for when I decide to change up my outfit a bit. Glamouring/Transmogging/Wardrobes are one of the simple pleasures of a modern MMO. The ability to look like you want to look is what makes these games fun to play for me. Gone is the era of looking exactly like every other player in the game, and here to stay is the ability to craft your own appearances. After playing Everquest and being able to tell every single item a player was wearing based on its color and appearance… I have to say I am happy to be living in modern times.

Back to Nael

Yes I realize this is not a picture of Nael Van Darnus but I didn’t snap any pictures from our attempts on Turn 9 last night. Instead this is a picture of me rocking the Garuda bow because I finally feel like I have an outfit floofy enough to support it. This weekend I managed to finish getting my 120 set from World of Darkness which makes up a chunk of the outfit above. Since picking up the Garuda bow I have been looking for a reason to use it, and finally I think the gold and white in the Bogartyr coat works well enough with the gold and white on the bow. Now if anyone tells me that is really blue and black I will reach through the internet and punch them in their soul. A few weeks back we set down on a new mission, which involved alternating between working on coil and working on other things. Since then we have finished the original three primals, Leviathan Extreme and Odin and as a result feel like we are no longer beating our heads against the wall that is turn nine. Coming back to Nael tonight felt far more fresh than it has in a long time.

I was somewhat concerned that we would have lost progress, but in truth we picked up right where we left off and started making fast progress. Everything about the fight is smoother now and we have been making it into the final dance phase every single attempt. The awesome thing about this is that it feels like last night we were finally getting the pattern down. In fact the last few attempts we were making it to the dive bombs phase consistently. Now if we can just master where the dive bombs need to go… I have a feeling we will be clearing turn nine finally and moving on to the final coil. I love my static group, and I love the way folks just keep plugging away without getting frustrated. We have been on this boss for a very long time, and no one seems to have any diminished desire to KEEP doing the boss, or keep trying to succeed. In fact everyone seems to keep doing little things here or there to tweak their performance and make things work more smoothly. I love my free company, and I love the raid we have built around it… my hope is that we can keep trying to get more people into the mix and maybe with Heavensward expand to a third static because the two we have now are just awesome.

Botany Mastered

May 10, 2015 by Belghast

A Very Cardgamey Show

It seems when I think we have nothing to talk about… we end up talking for two hours finally having to force ourselves to stop talking to close out the show. Last night was one of those night as I was joined by Tam, Kodra, Thalen and Ashgar. Sometimes a clear theme is presented and last night inadvertedly this happened. As we rambled through the various things we have been playing, it turns out that a lot of us had been playing card games in one form or another. We got this interesting peak into the secret underground gaming scene of Seatle that Kodra has now apparently gotten his ticket into. He recorded this weeks AggroChat on a quick jaunt away from this all day gaming event that was happening in a nearby hotel. The kind of event that isn’t advertised, and that you apparently have to know someone to get into. This is not starting to sound like fight club at all is it?

Other than that I shift things around a bit in the show and I actually go first. Usually by the time we get around to the games I have been playing my co-hosts are bordering on being asleep so I opted to talk about my stuff first. Which was a large course of Echo of Souls, and beating Wolfenstein The Old Blood which is an absolutely enjoyable but exceptionally short version of the original Wolfenstein game redone in New Order style. Machinegames has somehow created this magical mix of the glory days of the 90s era shooter mixed with the narrative power of modern gaming. Ashgar once again is going through his DS collection and playing things that he had not beaten before, this time jaunting down a time travelling avenue. Thalen extolled the joys of Hand of Fate, and Kodra rediscovered Heroes of Might and Magic 3. More than that however we talked a lot about card games and board games in general. Was a fun and chill show to record and hopefully that comes across in the production.

Botany Mastered

Last night while recording the podcast and editing it I spent my time in Final Fantasy XIV working on Botany. For some time I have been working on pushing up the two critical harvesting abilities Mining and Botany before actually starting the Disciple of the Hand push. I figured having the ability to go out into the world and gather things would be beneficial when making the push to level all the other things. The Disciple of the Land classes also gave me a bit of a buffer to psyche myself up for diving headlong into the pit of madness that is crafting. At this point begins the money grind and thankfully I am up to almost 2 million gil to help support this push. I guess the first order of business is to level all of the professions to 15 so that I can get the best cross class abilities to help with the rest of the grind. My original thought was to take everything to 15 in no particular order, and then start walking them up 5 levels at a time. So take everything to 20, everything to 25 etc. This also allows me to convert all of the crafting gear along the way hopefully keeping my vaults from overflowing.

Another thing that I really need to start doing is working on my beast tribe daily quests. One of the things that Ashgar talked about on the podcast was the interesting quest that comes at the end of maxing each of the factions. There is apparently a storyline that somehow joins up all of the rebellious beast tribe factions into a “Justice League” of sorts. I would really love to see this storyline before Heavensward launches, but at this point I have right around a month to accomplish all of this. I am not sure if I have given myself enough time, especially given that I keep dinking around in other games at the same time. I am starting to feel under the gun with wanting to accomplish so many things before I officially say goodbye to “A Realm Reborn”. So far FFXIV 2.0 has been an amazing ride and I am amped about what Heavensward and 3.0 has to offer. I guess tomorrow night the 2.57 patch will be going in, and I am wondering what exactly it will bring as well. I would be extremely happy if they uncapped Poetics gains… but I somehow doubt that will be the case.

Bad At Shadowrun

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time working on Shadowrun Dragonfall and I have decided that I need to just start over. I spent too much of my time on my main character too focused on a specific tree. I was planning on going all melee all of the time and quite frankly that is a poor choice to go with. I spent most of combat running around the room chasing down mobs that would move away from me and attack from ranged. Additionally I am going to have to throw out some of my instincts because I straight wiped my party trying to stay and fight against unwinnable odds. All of that said there are aspects of the game I am really enjoying, but right now I am just pretty horrible at actually doing it. I also need to learn to save far more often because this game will straight kill you at times with a smile. It is going to be an interesting show when we ultimately talk about this game but I am really wanting to make it further than I did with the previous games. I would love to beat this one because in many ways the gameplay reminds me of the Fallout series.

The thing is the game gives you one of every classes so I guess what you end up playing is just for flavor. I will probably go Street Samurai once again because that was always my favorite character to play in the actual Shadowrun campaigns I have been in. I didn’t really care that much for the little dwarf I rolled so I will probably go something more generic like a human this time around. All in all I was a fun several hours I spent yesterday, and as it is raining insanely outside… I plan on going downstairs and hanging out on the sofa all day while watching Netflix. Shadowrun is precisely the perfect kind of game for a day like today. So I will either be doing that or be working on tradeskills in final fantasy. In any case I have a gloriously lazy Sunday ahead of me. These are the types of days that gaming was made for. This massive lung infection has gotten me out of having to travel for Mother’s Day so right now we are planning on having a re-roll there next weekend when the world is not actively trying to kill us. Hopefully you have an awesome day too.

Talkback Challenge 1

May 8, 2015 by Belghast

Avoiding a Topic

First off I have to say I am a huge proponent of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, and try my best to do whatever I can to support it. Unfortunately I do a pretty bad job of actually participating in anything that is going on the forums. This year I had told myself that I would try really hard to participate more and do more of the various writing prompts. You know that whole “lead by example” type argument. The problem is the very first topic is something that I find both repulsive and deeply scary at the same time. Izlain seems to love to revel in controversial topics, and has recorded podcasts on various incendiary topics in the past, so I really should not be shocked this ended up as a writing prompt.

The aim of the Talkback Challenge is to engage new bloggers on a topic and provide contrasting views on that specific matter. It is also designed to encourage follow-up discussions and blog posts which further widen the level of interaction. The goal is to generate discussion on newbie blogs, raise their respective profile and share traffic. The NBI has run such activities for several years now and they have proven both informative and engaging. The opening topic for debate this time round is “how did GamerGate affect you”?

The prompt itself is pretty straight forward. How were you effected by GamerGate, but the answer as always is far more nuanced. I just finished writing my Bonanza post over on MMOGames and during the course of it I ran through all of the responses to this question that were available at the time of posting. I was somehow bolstered by the fact that the majority of these posts seemed to have no real effect. The problem is… for those who were effected this is a really touchy subject. The fact that someone actually wants to be talking about this makes me realize that in truth they were largely left unscathed. All of this said, I am going to tackle this topic because I promised myself that I would actually do the writing prompts.

Talkback Challenge 1

GamerGate cycled through the community like nothing I had ever seen before. It was swift and it was obnoxious… and quickly moved into the realm of the really damned creepy. Folks were using the tag without really understanding the consequences. The claim of the movement is that GamerGate is “About Ethics in Journalism” but this claim has never really matched up to the effects seen in the community. So much so that this has become a meme and filed away in the internet as yet another meaningless phrase. What I saw instead was a lot of my friends getting really scared to speak their mind. This hive mind of hatred seemed to be going after anyone who was “different” from what they saw as the cultural norm. This meant that women and the lgbt community seemed to garner the brunt of the assault. I talked to lots of friends who considered just stopping blogging because of the fear and paranoia that was rampant.

The problem is I am by nature not extremely combative. You can make personal attacks against me and it really usually doesn’t phase me. However when you take on my friends, and make them feel less than what they are… then I start to get upset. In the grand scheme of things I didn’t speak out as harshly as I probably should have on the subject. I made a pretty general post about how I wish we would “Be Awesome Human Beings”. Which drew the attention of a Gater that followed me and proceeded to try and argue with me about ethics in journalism in the comments. I didn’t want to get drawn into his discussion and he kept trying to bring me back to his personal brand of right wing philosophy. Ultimately I ended up un-following and blocking the person on twitter. Within a few days of posting this relatively straight forward article, my blog came under fire of a DDoS. At first I thought nothing about it, since hosting companies get denial of service attacks all of the time. The thing is… it seemed to be targeted at ONLY the server cluster my blog was on.

Message Delivered

A short time after that my twitter handle appeared on a list of supposed “Social Justice Warriors” that were to be avoided. Granted half of the people I know ended up on that same list, but while it was a point of pride… it also felt a bit like a veiled threat. It felt very much like a list of people who “thought wrong” and should be targeted. When you combine that with the DDoS I won’t like it freaked me out a bit. I tried my best to exorcise my social networks of any Gamer Gate sympathizers, or at least the ones who were loudly supporting it… and I moved on with my life. I tried my best to support those who were getting attacked, but I didn’t feel like I supported the other extreme either. Ultimately I just wanted us all to get along and stop being assholes to each other. That is the mission I have kept trying to move forward. I am a tiny blue dot in a very read ocean, but I manage to get along with most of my friends, coworkers and neighbors because we respect each other not enough to try and jam our own personal philosophies down each others throats.

The problem is Gamer Gate has left me scarred. When someone new follows me on social media the first thing I do is scan down through their posting history to make sure they are not somehow a GG leaner. I don’t want to make people out to be the bogeyman of the internet, but I also don’t really want that sort of influence screwing up my relatively happy place. I have tried my best to limit the about of negativity in my world. It ultimately makes me a happier person, and GG and the vehemently Anti-GG communities both are something I can do without. That said I am by no means trying to be neutral anymore. I am not a supporter of the GamerGate community by any means, and the whole situation deeply saddens me. I don’t want to be made to feel like shit for anything I do, from anyone. So I am going to keep doing what I am doing, and keep enjoying the things I enjoy and try my damnedest to forget the negative forces still exist. You cannot get me to believe like you do by yelling at me louder, and you cannot convince me of your point with circular logic. Ultimately I hope the internet and gamers in particular mature and learn to make decisions on their own merit and not connected to some larger agenda.

Disappointment Comes From Love

May 7, 2015 by Belghast

The Room

This is the point where I admit that I had never actually made it all the way through “The Room” before last night. I’ve sat down several times to watch it, but it was just too bad and too awkward for me to struggle through it. I feel like this is the sort of movie that is just more fun with a large group of people. So when I saw that Rifftrax would be doing it, I thought it would be a blast. I’m getting to be a regular at this whole Rifftrax live thing, and by live I mean sitting in a theater as the show is live simulcast from where they are actually at in Nashville. So far I have seen Godzilla, Anaconda, and a strange 1950s Santa Claus movie from Mexico. This season they have dubbed the “Crappening” with The Room, Sharknado 2, Miami Connection and Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny.

As far as The Room itself… they commented last night that it was a movie made by a man who had never actually seen a movie… or another human being. This film is just so out there, and the funny thing about it is that I still don’t think Tommy Wiseau realizes quite how bad this movie is. I mean at this point it has brought a relative state of infamy to all of the actors, but that isn’t exactly the same thing as fame. So as insane as the movie is, you can imagine that it gets cranked up a notch when the Rifftrax folks are lampooning it. The only problem with going to this movie with co-workers… and being named Mark… is that from now on I am going to be hearing a lot of “Oh Hai Mark” as I walk around the office. To which I will of course have to respond… “Oh Hai Doggy”. It was a great evening though and I look forward to the next one.

Subscription Drop

Yesterday the Quarter 1 earnings call happened at Blizzard/Activision and it should shock exactly no one that the World of Warcraft subscription numbers are once again down. With the launch of Warlords of Draenor the subscription numbers spiked at around 10 million players and has now dropped once more to the 7 million range. Each expansion gives the subscribers a spike and then things taper off from there, so this was going to happen no matter what. I will admit that I did not expect the bleed to happen quite so quickly. That said given my own feelings about the current state of the game, and the general rumblings within the community I guess it should not really surprise me. I agree with something that Alternative Chat said yesterday on twitter, that what we are seeing is a lot of people who came back and played the game for the month that came with their boxed copy, decided that they did not really like what they saw and left again all without actually subscribing.

If nothing else this seemed to be the trend within my own guild. Folks would come back and were extremely active until they got their first character to level 100, and then tapered off their playtime ultimately leaving again shortly after that point. My own time with this expansion is not all that different, and were it not for the fact that I am still raiding I would have left a long time ago. I leveled three characters to 100, and got the rest of my army of alts to “garrison” level. I spent the first month logging every single character in religiously and doing their garrison chores, and now I cannot be bothered to do them on more than just my main. The first character ran a lot of heroics, and now subsequent 100s jump straight to the LFR queue for gearing. During the launch we had 30 to 40 people on each and every night and it was insanely active. Now when I log in nightly to run my garrison stuff there are at most three other people on during non-raid times. While my guild is not exactly a bellwether for the game, it does at least show that something is fundamentally wrong.

Disappointment Comes From Love

.@eljeppy it is impossible to be disappointed if you don't love something 🙂

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) May 6, 2015

Yesterday I made a comment on twitter and this morning it still seems very true. This time around the folks that are complaining about Warlords are not necessarily the people who simply want to watch Blizzard burn down around them. This group are players that still love the franchise but are disappointed at what it has become. Ultimately you cannot be truly disappointed in something, unless you really do love it. I mean if you hate something, then it is impossible to be disappointed because it simply doesn’t matter that much to you. The problem is I am not exactly sure how this ship can be righted. Blizzard seems to be committed to the path it is on, because the 6.2 patch is largely just “more of the same”. The problem being that I see nothing in that patch that is going to keep people glued to the game for another quarter. The naval missions seem interesting, but at this point folks are just sick of the lost potential that is the Garrison.

Wow-64 2015-05-05 22-04-20-51 What we need now is an expansion announcement to bolster hope in the faithful, the problem there is I am seriously doubtful that we will see an announcement until Blizzcon. November is two quarters away, and I am just wondering if whatever does get announced is going to be too little and too late to keep from another subscription drop. Lots of people are talking about an expansion tying into the movie, but that movie is still a full year away. The 16 month lag in content between Pandaria and Warlords is still very fresh in everyone’s minds and quite frankly Blizzard does not have the luxury of waiting that long. They need a new world for us to start daydreaming about now, rather than waiting for a movie that may or may not be successful. The positive is that Blizzard is still doing remarkably well in spite of World of Warcraft. Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Starcraft II, and Diablo 3 all seem to be doing awesome. So maybe they just don’t care as much about their MMO as they once did? If nothing else these months leading up to Blizzcon 2015 are going to likely forever shape the face of Warcraft.