MMO Archives - Page 376 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Farewell Wildstar

August 3, 2014 by Belghast

Day Two Rundown

We had an amazing turnout in day two, and while a couple of folks didn’t end up making a post we picked up several more in the process. Additionally there were two blogs that I missed in the day one rundown. I have to say I am still floored by the quality of content that folks are churning out. I guess once you get the ball rolling in something it just develops a mind of its own. I really need to figure out a better way of tracking the individual posts, as I have been up since 7 am and the last hour has spent simply pulling together this list of links. However it is totally worth it because there look to be some pretty amazing posts there. I plan on reading them immediately after posting my own morning post.

So there you go 41 day two posts, and two that I missed from day one. We are having one hell of an initiative so far, and I highly suggest you check out all of the posts. I have my super happy face on right now because It is going so smoothly thus far.

Farewell Wildstar

I finally did something yesterday that I knew was coming for awhile now. I logged into the Wildstar account website and cancelled my subscription. While I still have through October to play the game, I doubt I actually will. At this point I have not played for two and a half weeks, and simply have no real drive to do so. I did not actually make it to the level cap but stalled out at 26. Why am I quitting you might ask? Honestly I don’t really know. Everything about Wildstar is something that I should like, but once the amusement of playing a Chua wore off I was left once again with the game I played in beta… that just didn’t quite do it for me. I never really got into the game during the beta process and the highest I managed to get a character was to 10, but considering how much I had misjudged FFXIV in beta… I thought I owed it to myself to give the game a chance.

It does have a lot of nice things going for it, and the community and development teams do an awesome job of listening to the fans. Wildstar however is kinda like a monster truck rally, when what I really want is a book club. The game is awesome in an over the top 80s action movie kind of way, but after a point it just wears on you. The wow-raider me would have loved this game, but I have changed considerably since I was raiding five nights a week. I ultimately want something a little slower pace and a little bit more cerebral and less twitchy. Who knows at some point I might fire it back up, but I kinda doubt it. It was a fun experiment and I think overall it will do really well, but I think I wanted to like the game far more than I actually liked it.

I think what really started the downfall for me is as I watched our guild start to disintegrate around the time the free month ran out. The aspect of the game I really liked was its group content, and that was really damned fun. The problem is without active players, it became impossible to do the dungeons, and I was not quite ready to brave the dungeon finder. Additionally we chose the wrong faction as a guild. Not that I don’t love Dominion, but everyone I know from twitter and the blogosphere is playing on Evindra Exile side… which means we had no shot in hell of even getting their alts considering the 6 character per server limit. Sure I could have started over and rolled Exile… and I did make a few alts… but quite frankly I just didn’t enjoy the game enough to start from scratch. I wish all of you folks still playing the game luck, because it really is an interesting experience.

Not Final After All

Last night we got things back to normal and recorded Episode 16 of the AggroChat podcast. Once again we had our entire cast of myself, Ashgar, Rae and Kodra. On a whim we decided to pull in Tam as well since he was available. I have to say it was one of the more chill shows we have recorded in awhile and everything seemed to flow pretty naturally. I did absolutely no editing this time other than removing a few silences. It sounds a little different however because I am recording from a different machine in a different location. This weekend I had my main computer melt down and I have yet to get it back up and running. As a result I recorded from my laptop, but we struggled through and I think the end product works just fine.

We talk about a bunch of things like Shovel Knight, Rogue Legacy, League of Legends, falling out of love with Wildstar… but more importantly our return to Final Fantasy XIV. I guess for us it was not final after all. I personally want to set down some more permanent roots in this game, and despite the cost prohibitive nature of guild housing… we are starting to price and talk about the location we want to buy in. They made a ton of tweaks and in all cases it seems to have improved our enjoyment. If you are thinking about giving it a spin check out the free 14 day trial. We are on the Cactuar server in the Aether data center. If you get in add Belghast Sternblade to your friends list and give me a shout.

Writing Prompts

I slacked off yesterday or more so I got caught up in the excitement for just how amazing day one was… and forgot to post any writing prompts. Thankfully I had six already so it is not like you guys were at a loss for potential inspiration. That said I do intent to keep throwing out the occasional batch of writing prompts and adding them to a list I have collected on the nook.

What is your earliest gaming memory? We all have to come to gaming from somewhere, what brought you into the fold?
What is your favorite class? Do you play a new type each game that comes out or is there always one type of class that you tend to favor?
Do you follow a games lore? There is often tons of lore both in game and out of game, do you follow it and even track down the tidbits that are not obvious.. or are you mostly oblivious to it?

#Blaugust #FFIXV #Wildstar

Day One Rundown

August 2, 2014 by Belghast

Shock and Awe

That is really the only words I can think of this morning to explain my reaction to the huge turnout we have gotten for Blaugust. I want to thank each and every one of you that is plugging away on daily posting. I also want to thank the folks that have now joined on day two, and anyone else out there waiting in the wings that may or may not be chipping in the occasional post as well. When I came up with this idea in part due to my wife’s own may challenge, and my love of the concept of jamming together Blog and August into one word… I thought that maybe three or four people would join in the madness. As of yesterday we had 38 day one posts, and since then a handful more have added in on day two.

The thing I am happiest about is just how many of you have easily “grokked” my intent. I wanted to stir things up and get folks out of the doldrums that is the summer season. I have been doing the daily posting thing, so I thought it might be cool to challenge others to do the same thing. That said it is far less about daily posting than posting on a regular schedule. The other neat thing is that basically this is training for undertaking something more serious like NaNoWriMo. I could never have completed my novel last year were it not for my getting in the habit of daily posting before then. Basically if you can prove to yourself that you can write a ten sentence or more blog post each day, then that 50,000 word goal isn’t completely unreachable.

Day One Rundown

While this has been a bit of a pain in the ass to pull together this morning, I wanted to do a rundown of all of the posts that were made yesterday. I’ve read them all at this point and commented on several of them, and I have to say the world you all did is amazing. You are making this a truly amazing initiative and I have very little to do with the success. I think we all want to do awesome things, we just sometimes need the catalyst to make it happen.

Such an amazing list of bloggers, and I am absolutely humbled to have them supporting me in this initiative. Additionally to all these awesome posts the very cool gaming site MMO Games gave us a good write up about the event. The also awesome Anook.com has been featuring our nook as well so it should be giving us additional bandwidth to the initiative. So much blogger love going on I am still constantly amazed. It is still plenty of time to get started and join the madness, just check out my Gospel of Blaugust post for the rules.

Setting Down Roots

Over the last few years I have been flitting from game to game for some time, and it is really tiring. What generally happens is I get into a game and then the community we have built up around it starts to deteriorate. Without the people to sustain me, I start to get my own wanderlust since I crave the next place that has the happy guildchat spam I am looking for. One of the more enjoyable games I have played over the last few years was Final Fantasy XIV. Everything about the game felt “just right” until I ran out of content to level with. I love the fact that you can pour all of your effort into one character without feeling like you are missing out on anything. The only problem is when we last played the game shortly after launch, after you had run out of storyline quests you were pretty much forced to grind fates if you wanted to level anything else.

In the months that have followed they have patched some of these gaps. Right now I am still doing a fair amount of FATE grinding, but I am perforating it with trips through the Duty Roulette system. While this might seem grindy still to some, for me this is enough of a break to make me happy. The other thing that just feels right about the game is the community. It is this weird throwback to a time where people were generally cool to group with. I remember during Everquest, wipes happened and no one seemed to mind… they just picked themselves up and recovered. The WoW generation changed that, and introduced the culture of “your bad and should feel bad”. Last night we were running Hard Mode Ifrit and I made a mistake that ultimate wiped the raid. Not a single person was grumpy about it, they just explained what I should be doing instead and were happy to try again. That type of attitude is just refreshing, and I keep running into it over and over.

I have this feeling like I would really love to set down some permanent roots in Final Fantasy XIV, and I am starting to try and reach out into the community. This game has had me adding people to my friends list in the first time in literally years that I did not already know going into the game. It reminds me of the early days of wow, when we still cared about our fellow players and were happy to collaborate and coordinate on bigger things. One of the biggest gaps I am finding is there don’t seem to be any big public Linkshells for folks to communicate and cordinate with. I am kicking around the notion of starting one of these. There is so much content we have yet to see, and FFXIV is one of the only games in the last bit that all of us seem to be able to agree upon. Here is hoping that I won’t be writing another post in a months time on how the game just isn’t doing it for me any longer. Right now the game feels very much like home, and I look forward to logging into it each day.

#Blaugust #FFXIV

Sixteen Years

August 1, 2014 by Belghast

Blaugust Begins

At this point the first few blaugust posts are starting to trickle into the nook and I am super pumped that this apparently is going to be a “real” thing. I have to admit at this point that the inspiration here is from my wife. During the month of May she decided to try and follow my posting every day tradition, and in the process she gathered up a bunch of math bloggers that also wanted to try it. While not everyone succeeded in posting something every day, including my wife… it did stir up a lot of new and interesting content in their blogosphere. Since August is such a dead time normally, my hope was that an event like this would get people moving again and a bunch of interesting stuff would flow as a result.

I had hoped that maybe I would get a couple daring bloggers to take up the challenge, but instead this seems to have developed a life of its own and right now we have over 25 bloggers committing to the daily routine. If nothing else this is going to be another awesome opportunity for networking and community building. Some of the best friendships are forged in the fires of shared struggle. Since the process has begun I now have to device the best possible way to track progress. Right now I am thinking a google doc spreadsheet, that way I can share out the link to the bloggers. If I happen to miss giving credit for a post they can correct me, because they can actually look at my tracking mechanism. I want to thank everyone so far for also posting their posts on the nooks blog. This is going to make the entire process significantly easier for me.

Sixteen Years

August first has way more significance for me than just the beginning of Blaugust. Sixteen years ago today my wife and I were married. If you want to check out the tales of us getting married at the house of vacuums you can see that here, as I talked about it during my factoid february initiative. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t realize how lucky I am, in that I have found someone compatible with me. Together we live a pretty damned charmed life if I do say so myself. As many folks commented during the math conference, we really do make an awesome team and both of us seem to be capable of focusing on the task at hand without getting bogged down in the minutia of it. We often bicker as we work through problems, but I cannot remember the last time we had an actual “fight” which I guess says a lot for the success of our marriage.

There is also not a morning that goes by where we do not say “I love you” more than a few times. Granted a good chunk of the time it is simply our single line of text that says “loves”, but inside of that simple word encompasses so much. Another hallmark of our relationship is that we support each other in pretty much any endeavor. She is completely supportive of my blogging and podcasting and gaming and streaming… and while she has spent more time than she can probably recall waiting on me to finish something up. She also totally gets why my guild and my community are so important to me. She has her own completely separate community, and since I get the importance too, that is why I took time off from work to help with the math conference she organized. At the end of the day we “get” each other, and that is more than you could ask for in a relationship. I am truly lucky. I included a picture of Kenzi conked out on my wife’s lap yesterday because really… is there a reason not to? My god this kitten is adorable.

Want to Try FFXIV?

Over the last couple of days there have been a few really cool developments in Final Fantasy XIV. First off they just announced yesterday that you can now get a free 14 day trial of the game. If you’ve always wondered what it is like to play, but did not want to plunk down the money to do so… now is your chance. I know my friend Calamity Jess had been kicking around the notion of playing and lamented the other day that there was no way to try it out without coughing up the full price. Now folks have an excellent way to do just that. Granted there are some severe restrictions on what you can and cannot do. You can’t join a guild, or pretty much use any of the social communication channels. I do believe you can join a linkshell however, which I am guessing is precisely what we would do for the various folks trying out the game so that they can have some means of communication.

For those wondered I am located on the Cactuar server, which is one of the most highly populated servers in the game on the Aether Data Center. For World of Warcraft players, the data center is like the Battlegroup in that when you do the duty finder it pulls from players in that grouping of servers. If you are a member of the Alliance of Awesome community, a former House Stalwart member, or just a reader of this blog I would be more than happy to have you hanging out on Cactuar. One thing of note, sometimes Square decides to bar new character creation on Cactuar, so it is best to try and create your characters in the morning or during the day. During primetime most of the high population servers reach a locked down state.

Lets Be Friends!

In addition to offering free trials of the game, they have now opened up a recruit a friend program. You are seeing this right, that is in fact a two seater Chocobo… and I want one really badly. If you end up liking the game and sticking around I would love it if I could recruit you. The system works similar to most of the other recruit a friend programs and you can read the full details here. After 30 days of paid subscription both the recruiter and the recruit get a nifty item that increases all experience gain by 20% below the level of 25. This is kinda huge in that a lot of the rough spots leveling wise happen before 25 when you don’t really have all the bells and whistles for your class. For example Gladiator is a bit of a slog until level 26 when you pick up the 3rd step in your primary combo Rage of Halone. Anything to help speed that process up is a massive boon. Additionally it also increases your craft experience, which in itself is a slog to level.

After 90 days of paid subscription the recruiter gets the spiffy two seater Chocobo mount. The person being recruited of course gets the normal “veteran” benefits from a paid subscription which in themselves are pretty cool. As you can see here for 90 days subscription you get 3 pets, a swimsuit, a appearance change potion, and a flying eyeball mount. They have one of the better veteran rewards programs, because really at each step there is something really cool there. Right now I have gotten the 180 day step which gives me an awesome pet that summons a warrior of light from final fantasy 1. I tend to cycle it until I get the black mage, because the FF1 black mage is adorable. Anyways if you try out the game and want to stick around I would appreciate being given the opportunity to make you a recruit!

Writing Prompts

The first posts are rolling in and folks seem to have plenty of inspiration behind them. That said I plan on still posting a series of daily prompts to help out those folks who need a little bit of inspiration.

What is your proudest gaming accomplishment? What think took you the longest to complete or required the most skill. What thing makes you the happiest that you have accomplished.
What is your favorite game biome? Games often have the same kinds of generic climates spread through the zones and levels. What is your favorite type of climate and why?
What is your favorite grouping experience? Even the most staunch solo artist eventually groups up, what is the best thing that has happened while grouped with other players?

Amazing Community

July 31, 2014July 31, 2014 by Belghast

Computer Meltdown

All that I really wanted to do when I got home was to log into my computer and play some Final Fantasy XIV. Unfortunately my computer seemed to conspire against me. Everything seemed happy when I first got home and I had just queued for duty roulette and begun working on a FATE when something odd happened. The screen froze and turned black, and then moments later I was rebooting. Now I am notorious for ignoring windows updates, and I know in Windows 8 there will reach a point where it simply will not let you ignore them. Sure enough upon reboot it was installing new software, so I thought that maybe all that had happened is that I reached that threshold.

So I went ahead and booted up my machine and logged into windows. Everything seemed just fine, nothing really seemed out of the ordinary until I booted into Final Fantasy XIV again and then boom… the same thing. I thought for a bit that maybe it was my video card driver update that I applied last night, so upon rebooting I proceeded to roll back that driver. Upon booting into the game again… this time a brown screen then a black screen and then everything powers off. The thing is that the video card never actually felt hot when I reached back and felt the air vent on it. My initial thought was that the video card was just toast, which is disturbing because it was only a few months old.

As a test I swapped out to an older card and sure enough the machine booted right up. Unfortunately however upon firing up a game I was back at the black screen cycle. It was then that I noticed something. I took the side panel off my case and watched it boot up, and the fan on the processor heatsink was not moving at all. So I am guessing at some point it died, and potentially for awhile it was working intermittently. Processor overheating would in theory cause all of the things that I was experiencing. Here is hoping that there has been no permanent damage to it. A heatsink/fan combo is a relatively cheap thing to replace, so I ordered a new potentially better one from Amazon and it should be here Friday. Until then I guess I will be gaming on the laptop exclusively.

Meet Kenzi

Now other than my computer having a meltdown and throwing me into stress mode, there was some awesome that managed to happen yesterday. We added a new child to our family, and unfortunately she moves so damned fast that this is the only picture I have managed to snap since bringing her home. Thankfully the folks we got her from gave us a far better picture of her. However as you can see she apparently loves the ferrets. She has kept returning to the playpen to play with them through the bars. They seem completely enthralled by her as well, and moments after snapping this albeit blurry photo of her and Shiloh she also woke up Bellatrix and they were both following her every move. Being a kitten however she is rarely in one place for too terribly long.

We thought for a bit about a name and tried multiple characters from Harry Potter as well as Firefly, before finally settling on Kenzi. She seems far more like that character than any other so far. She is fearless and daring, and a little bit shifty at times. Not to mention the whole dark hair thing works well also. Kenzi was my favorite character from Lost Girl and really the only reason why I enjoyed that show for as long as I did. So I feel like the name is fitting. Right now she is batting my fingers as I type this and trying to hop up on the keyboard. While I think it is absolutely adorable… I need to finish this post up so I can get on to work. Here is hoping the ferrets wake up and steal back her attention.

So after writing my blog post she decided to crawl up on my shoulder. I am officially in love, not that I wasn’t already. I have always wanted a shoulder cat to hang out with me while I game. Now she is curled up under the lapboard that my laptop is on grooming herself, but she spent a good long while on my shoulder. This is totally going to work out… we just have to somehow figure out a way to stop the nibbling. She seems to like to attack my beard and bite it right now. Which is adorable, but will eventually get to be frustrating and potentially painful.

Amazing Community

For the last week or so I have been spending most of my evenings playing Final Fantasy XIV on the Cactuar server. I have to say I am starting to fall in love with the sense of community there, and on the entire Aether data center as well. Thanks to my time in wow and just how toxic that environment can be… I have been extremely gunshy about branching out and playing with people I did not already know. I’ve always been willing to group with my guild and their friends, but I had zero interest in poking my head out into the larger world. Quite frankly when I had done this in the past, I dealt with so much abuse as a tank that I had no interest in ever attempting it again. The problem is this negative attitude towards pugging carried forward into every game from that point on. The moment someone wanted to do something, and we did not have the requisite number of people I would immediately remove myself from the equation. This means I’ve spent an awful lot of time sitting around in games waiting for the magical number of people to log in so we could go do something fun.

Coming back to Final Fantasy XIV however I did so without much of my support structure. For most of this past week I have been the only person online at night in my guild, and as a result I finally decided to brave the Duty Roulette. This essentially is a random dungeon system that picks from any dungeon available to you. The awesome thing however is that for leveling, you gain experience as though the mobs were your level not the level you have been scaled down to. I went into this with the plan to attempt to be more social, so I started talking to the group the moment the instances started. Funny thing is…. other people talked back, and in very positive ways. Instead of running the dungeon in silence we started to banter back and forth much like grouping used to feel like during my Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot days.

So what caused this magical environment to appear in the face of so many games with toxic grouping environments? I honestly think it is two fold. Firstly at this point the only people who are playing Final Fantasy XIV are the players who are in it for the long haul, the players who are devoted too the franchise and willing to weather whatever storms might arise. There is a sense of general camaraderie that I have not seen in many games, and I think it comes from a shared struggle. I expected the servers to feel dead with the initial drop off of players after launch, but in reality while there are fewer overall players, they are just more focused in specific areas. While you cannot go to any zone and run FATEs, the zones where you can… are extremely active.

The other part I think is a weird little system that Squaresoft put into the game. Similar to league of legends, at the end of each dungeon or guildhest you can “commend” a player for their actions. You only get one single commendation per dungeon run, so it forces you to think long and hard about who best deserved it. Now there are some pretty significant rewards for having racked up a large number of these. This I think causes players to want to seem friendly, and through the course of pretending to be… they end up actually being cordial. I expected that the commendations would be almost exclusively reserved for the tanks and the healers, but it turns out that apparently I have made some appreciated contributions as well. At this point I am sitting around 25 commendations, and there is rarely a duty or hest that I don’t walk out with at least one. So apparently my banter, combined with the fact that I try my damnedest to interrupt everything as a DPS… is appreciated and matters.

I feel like Final Fantasy XIV is this strange time capsule where players have returned to the kinds of values that I used to appreciate so much while playing the games that existed before World of Warcraft. While I have not poked my head out into the raid community yet, I find it really impressive that I am playing on a server that has actual community events. This game feels like a crazy throwback… and I am loving it so far. It seems like somehow we managed to actually pick the right server to be playing on all those months ago when we picked the server name simply out of our love of the cactuar. The server even keeps track of the spawn times of hunt mobs, keeping a google doc to record when one last spawned and was killed. Granted the other day when I looked it had gotten a bit out of date, but just the fact that the server cares enough to create something like that is pretty awesome. I think the next thing for me is to try and find some social linkshells and meld into the broader community more.

Writing Prompts

Tomorrow is the official beginning of the Blaugust initiative, and as promised I will not leave you hanging. I will be posting a series of writing prompts each day to help turn the wheels and get your creative juices flowing. Please note of course that you do not have to write about any of the prompts I post. I am just trying to provide inspiration if it happens to be lacking.

What was the first game that made you “feel” something. I am talking about the first game that invoked a real human emotional response be it fear, love, outrage… we’ve all had it happen and I am curious about your first time.
What is your favorite boss encounter in any game and why. What makes that encounter stand out in your mind and what can be learned from it.
If you were an NPC in a video game, what type of NPC would you be.