MMO Archives - Page 384 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Manifest Destiny

June 15, 2014 by Belghast

The Doldrum

Last Tuesday my wife flew off to her first conference of the year, and for the most part I had been unaffected by this. Sure I’ve missed having her around, but during the work week my time is so metered that I barely notice that I exist, let alone another person. However the first Saturday is always the day it really hits me. It doesn’t help that we are struggling with record pollen counts and the cottonwood is blowing with a vengeance that means I cannot breathe at all… and feel generally shitty. As a result I have completely fallen off the walking wagon, I am sure Monday I will get back into the swing of things, but the last several days I have walked a rather pitiful amount.

Right now I feel very lonely, and as a result have been forcing myself to hang out on Teamspeak as much as possible. For the most part the whole dumping of mumble thing has gone relatively smoothly. The folks I chat with on a nightly basis have just transitioned cleanly, leaving only a few stragglers on mumble. I am looking forward to Wednesday when she flies back into town, and in the meantime I am trying to busy myself and surround myself with as many friends as possible. My natural instinct is to “turtle” and pull my head up inside my shell, never to be heard from again. But I know based on past experience that is exactly the wrong reaction to feeling a bit depressed. I just have to get through a few more days for this current salvo.

Manifest Destiny

Literally within moments of posting yesterdays blog entry, I had a friend of mine hook me up with a Destiny alpha code. I love our community so damned much, and I am not sure if this person wants to be named by name… but yeah thanks so much. After a 6.9 gig download that went remarkably faster than I expected and next thing I knew I was logging in and creating a new character. My instinct was to go human, but for whatever reason they do not have any facial hair options. I cannot create a “proper” Belghast without a beard, so instead I choose to go their robot option called the Exo, which had some really slick configuration choices. The other racial option was some sort of tank grown looking protohuman called an Awoken that seems to be based on vampires/ghosts/elves in appearance. If you are familiar with Defiance, they feel a lot like the Castithans.

So this won’t be the only comparison I make the Defiance, because really so far Destiny feels like Defiance done better. I feel like Defiance was an MMO with Shooter elements, whereas Destiny is a Shooter with MMO elements. Subtle difference there, but being a really solid shooter first… and gear swapping mmo second seems to make all the difference in the world. Defiance was a cool idea, but the moment to moment gameplay felt unexciting, because it lived halfway between two worlds. Everything about the shooter elements of Destiny is solid, and while I fail miserably at playing console shooters… I was able to pick up the controls quickly and felt like I had more control that I normally do with a gamepad. Right now I am somewhat hooked, and hope to get in and play with some friends and explore the ruins together.

I still do not know quite how to hook up a mic and get it working, but I streamed most of my gameplay yesterday to twitch and then dumped it to my youtube channel like I normally do.` In the beginning I was super uncertain of the controls, but by the end of my play session I was starting to feel far more confident with aiming the dual analog sticks. Destiny is a title that I went from mildly interested in, to really looking forward to the release. I fully expect to pre-order this title and play it when it launches in September. I chose to play the Titan which is the closest thing they have to a tank in the game. I’ve you’ve played Mass Effect, it feels really similar to the paragon, in that you have a mix of ranged weapons with super powerful melee attacks. I would like to see how this plays with a group, because I kept encountering things I definitely could not take by myself. At this point I’ve beaten the first “on-rails” mission and opened up the more open world missions. Look forward to playing this a lot more over the next months.

Dances with Orcs

While I was piddling around and streaming things, I also spent a good chunk of yesterday playing Warlords of Draenor. I figured since I have been granted the ability to play the Alpha, I should probably be testing it. Also in a way I am playing it in memory of River, since he was so amped about being invited to the alpha. The game is trying super hard to be modern and relevant, but under the covers it still feels like a ten year old game. I am still working my way through the quests which have the added benefit of building my Garrison. Yesterday I completed a sequence of quests to unlock the Alchemy Hut and in theory the ability to run alchemy crafting missions. I have not however gotten enough Draenor era herbs of the right kind to be able to complete this.

Something I am highly enjoying is the fact that while I am out in the world, I am constantly gathering new followers for my Garrison. Some of them are even call backs to the TBC era Draenor. If you are like me and completed the netherwing dailies to get those mounts, you will remember the fel orc that buzzes past the tower constantly… Mulverick!!!! Well one of the early quests involves rescuing him from an Ogre strong hold. When you do he agrees to join your garrison as a follower. While I spent most of my time playing alliance, I am really hoping when that content opens up that we see similar nostalgic references. Ultimately that is going to be the hook for people if they can manage to wield it correctly. Nostalgia is a pain, and even as jaded as I currently am about the experience… this game can still manage to hit me in the feels occasionally.

So while streaming yesterday, some random stranger in the channel suggested that I run the first instance… and while I had nothing better to do, I figured sure… what the hell. So I joined a group in progress that had cleared to the first boss of Bloodmaul Slag Mines and apparently lost their tank. It got off to a bit of a rocky start as as soon as I pulled the boss I disconnected from the server. Warlords of Draenor is very much an alpha, and as such I have had more than my fair share of issues staying connected. However once I got back in the run went relatively smoothly from that point on with zero deaths. I still am not sure how I feel about the current state of Deathknight Tanking. The rotation feels off with large empty spaces where I can really do nothing at all. I am slowly moving things around, using soul reaper a lot more and using death siphon each time it is up… and things are starting to feel a bit better. I will continue to test and see if I can hit on the magic feel good spot for the class, but in its current state… I am considering going back to warrior tanking.

AggroChat Talks E3 2014

This week we were without Kodra and Ashgar because of various real world commitments, so once again we grabbed Dallian and Tam and talked about the various things that happened during this years E3 show. I have to say I thought this years show was strong enough that I actually went out and bought a playstation four at least in part to what I was seeing. We talk about so many different things that it ends up being a bit more disjuncted than normal, but overall upon listening to it and editing all morning… I think it is a pretty strong show. You can hear our take on what is coming down the pipe gamewise. Right now the game I am looking forward to the most is No Man’s Sky, and we talk at length about it. I would be curious to find out what you thought of this years showing as well.

Four Job Fiesta 2014

One last quick blurb… this years Four Job Fiesta is now open! I have officially registered by not started. It looks like this year I will be starting as a Knight, which should be pretty simple. If you are interested at all in Final Fantasy… or better yet are interested in making money for a great charity… you should totally sign up and play along with us. I will likely be streaming good chunks of my gameplay. I am pretty much forced to play this because Ashgar holds a gun to our heads and makes us sign up each year. We love him dearly and do not want to face his wrath. But really it is a pretty fun time, and there is a lot of community spirit going on as folks complete the game. Here is hoping I do not get stalled and actually finish this year.

#FFV #FourJobFiesta #AggroChat #WarlordsofDraenor #Destiny

Enter the Warlords

June 13, 2014 by Belghast

Home Warden

As I talked about at the beginning of the week, my wife the teacher has started her whirlwind summer tour of the country and she ping pongs between various mathematics related conferences. As a result I am holding down the fort here at home, and at the same time having to take care of our neighbors pets. In the past there has always been this mad dash the few days before my wife gets home to pick up and house and make sure everything is in proper working order. However this time around I have been doing a much better job of picking things up as they happen. Here is hoping there will be no 11th hour cleaning fest… which admittedly is mostly just picking up trash around the house that I have allowed to stack up when I reverted to full on bachelor mode.

The hardest thing about being home alone has been maintaining my walking regiment. I am letting it split a bit, in that I am not walking a “three loop” around the neighborhood each night, but instead I am simply adding additional steps into my day so I don’t really have to. Admittedly I should be pushing myself harder and doing the loops anyway, but without my walking buddy I have lost a good chunk of the reason why I walked past 10,000 steps in the first place. So for now I am getting to 10,000 and then calling it good… even going so far as to walking loops around the living room one night to get the last couple of hundred steps in. All in all I am pretty proud that I have survived thus far and not really let any balls hit the ground. This weekend however… who knows how well that is going to work since it will be hard to fight the desire to be sedentary.

Enter the Warlords

Several days ago I apparently got into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program. Based on the time that passed between the launch of it and me getting in, I am guessing I was in the second wave of invites overall. With all the excitement of my wife getting ready to go on her trip, I had stopped checking my inbox for such things… and it ended up getting filed away under “promotions”. So I did not actually get in and attempt to play it until the night before last. Since for some time I had settled on Blood Deathknight as my “favorite” wow class, I opted to create one of those. Right now the only content available is the Horde content that centers around a campaign to build your Garrison in Frostfire Ridge. As a result of this I created an Orc Deathknight given that generally this is my favorite Horde Race when I actually play that faction.

Wednesday night was our regularly schedule “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and as such I got over to actually booting up World of Warcraft pretty late in the evening. So I was tired and probably a bit confused… so when they landed me in Frostfire Ridge with a toolbar full of abilities that made no sense… I had a very much “wtf is this shit” moment. I knew going into the Alpha that they had removed Blood Boil and merged it with Pestilence. I did not however know that they also removed Rune Strike and Heart Strike… and even Blood Strike. So I could not for the life of me that night figure out how to set up a Deathknight Rotation. After consulting the Sage Qelric, I managed to reason out a rotation once you filled in the missing bit of the information. They are apparently expecting us to use Pestilence as our Blood Rune consumer now.

Getting Into Things

Once I figured out the rotation and remembered how I normally set up the rest of my bar, things started to fall into place. Its funny how many abilities I didn’t even remember using but where just muscle memory for playing a Deathknight. Each time I used one of these… I had to track it down and put it on my bar in the “correct” place. This would have likely been less jarring if I had essentially not been playing much wow for the last five months. I made another attempt to play last night before our League of Legends night, and found it still pretty lousy feeling. However afterwards I finally started to get back into the swing of things. I still keep wanting to do things that wildstar allows me to do, and I keep trying to sprint… but overall I have managed to get through the first few quests and ding 91.

I have an Inn and a Barracks in my Garrison and my very first follower that I can send away on missions. So far I am digging the way Garrisons are just integrated into the storyline. At first I was concerned that they might be this big mini-game that was entirely skippable. However they have managed to integrate it into the storyline of building a base in this foreign land. I managed to find an ogre merchant that I could bribe to come trade with me at my Garrison. I am wondering if he will eventually show up there and become a merchant that I can buy and sell from. For the time being as far as I know that has not actually happened. I will probably play some more tonight and stream some of it. The Deathknight rotation still seems off somehow… like there is way too much downtime waiting on my runes to recycle. I guess it gives me plenty of time to weave in Soul Reaper and Death Siphon… which I am finding I like considerably more than Death Pact.

Warlords of Draenor

For at least some of tonight I will likely be playing some Warlords of Draenor. Since I am one of the few people in Alpha Currently… I feel like I need to do my job as a tester and… test content. When I say few… that is a bit of a misnomer because it seems like everyone and their brother are in the friends and family alpha. Blizzard has without a doubt the biggest family I have ever seen. If you are also in Warlords Alpha, you should totally throw me a Battletag invite (Belghast#1752). If you do so however please tell me how the hell I know you. It would be nice to have some friendly faces on the alpha server until they hook it up to the “real” battle.net accounts. Going to also start joining an “AofA” server channel if any of the other Alliance of Awesome community members happen to be playing.

#WoW #WorldOfWarcraft #WarlordsofDraenor

Remembering River

June 12, 2014 by Belghast

High Latency Rememberance

I am at a bit of a loss of words on how exactly to start this post. Yesterday was a very sad day for the gaming blogosphere. It was early afternoon when we got the news through a post on his blog, and the sorrow reverberated through the community like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Christopher Cavelle, the man we know better as River the author of the “A High Latency Life” blog passed away due to complications from an emergency surgery. It seemed like we had all just talked to him the other day, and it seemed absolutely impossible that this man was now dead. He had recently gotten into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program for World of Warcraft, and the last discussion I had personally was with him regarding his excitement. So it seems completely impossible that he is now gone.

River was like this elemental force of mischief. He had a way of showing up at exactly the right time and adding exactly the right quip to any conversation that involved him. While often bawdy, he carried with it a genuineness that made everyone love him, even if they were on the opposite side of a discussion from him. The way he crafted his blog was a thing of beauty and something I can only aspire to be able to do. He could take a rant and wrap it in an easy to swallow coating of humor that made you forget why you might be mad about his point of view by the end of the reading. It will always be his sense of humor that I remember the most, because he had this unique often self deprecating style that just worked. Even when he was being aggro, there was this loveable curmudgeon characteristic to it that made you smile.

A Small Tribute

The other characteristic that his blog was most known for was the fact that he almost always included a scantily clad woman to go along with his post. Unfortunately this was also the reason why I generally kept his blog out of my feed reader due to the often “not quite safe for work” nature. My boss has always had a habit of just swinging by my desk the moment I decide to take a break and read some of my RSS feed, and the last thing I needed was a picture of a woman doing questionable things to an ice cream cone sitting there. This however became one of those hallmarks that the community joked about, and yesterday when the news broke Syp suggested that today we all post a “scantily clad woman” in honor of @TheeRiver. So today I am following that suggestion and posting some really awesome Vi cosplay, since she is not only amazingly hot… but a brutal force to be reckoned with.

One of my regrets going forward will be that I never really got to know River on a personal level. He was genuinely one of the nicest people on twitter, and was quite literally one of the first people to ever befriend me. But I feel like I only really knew him on a surface level. There were many times where it felt like we were friends mostly through the other friends we happened to have in common. For me at least, I tend to get extremely close to someone when we share a guild or have struggled through something together, and that just never seemed to work out right. You can measure the weight of a person by the impact they have on their community, and this man left so many people changed in his wake. Recently he had gone through his own change when he decided to take an impromptu poll on the topic of gender and gaming. HIs post “Yes All Women” was his post about having his eyes opened that, yes the problem was really that prolific. I had hoped that we would get to hang out and play together in the Warlords alpha, and finally get to know him more closely, but unfortunately he was taken from us before that happened.

Our Community

There have been so many times that I have tackled with whether or not we actually have a community here in the gaming blogosphere or instead just a series of island states with temporary alliances. I’ve reversed my view significantly since that rather cynical post, but you cannot look at something like this without realizing that we really are a community in every sense of the word. Yesterday Syp once again said something rather cogent, that “Times like this, I wish there was a real world hangout for all us bloggers to get together and hug.” And it is true… I wish I could give all of the people in this community that are hurting from this loss a big damned bear hug. That is one thing that @Ardua and I have in common… we are huggers, and there are times when nothing else will quite do as much as a big heart felt hug. So while I am at still at a loss of words and bewildered by just how sudden this happened… my role in this is to be there for the people who did know River on a more personal level and are broken in side over his loss.

In a way Twitter and the blogosphere is his ephemeral thing… that was just expect to always be there even when we cannot be. The show must always go on, and our absence does not somehow stop the proceedings. As a result I find that we tend to take for granted that every member of this community will always be in exactly the same place as they will always be. I feel like this is an opportunity to reach out and let the people we deeply care about in this community know it. There are so many people that make every single day a better place for me. It has been popular lately in the media to talk about how the internet is pushing society apart. I submit to them that for introverts like myself, the internet opens up a new world full of people we would likely have never met otherwise, and as a result we are enriched by these experiences. There are people in my life that I love dearly, and would do anything in my power to help… and will likely never actually meet face to face. Just because distance and circumstances separate us… it does not make us any less of a community and in many cases a family.

River you will be missed.

Super Grape Stomper

June 11, 2014 by Belghast

Silent Observers

So far the issue of Wildstar Attunements has been a fairly polarizing one in the community as a whole. So when I posted my write-up yesterday about why I didn’t think they were a horrible thing… I expected it also to be polarizing. If you look at my statistics for the day, that single post got more unique viewers than anything else by a large margin. However surprisingly even though it got forwarded quite a bit, I really didn’t end up with much commentary. I expected someone out there to tell me how wrong I am, but that surprisingly didn’t happen. I had a friend send me a private message about it however, thanking me for keeping my post “fair” and not adding to the vitriol.

So is it because I approached the post from a calm place talking about my own experiences with bad attunement systems that folks didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to tell me how horrible I was? I am not so deluded to think that the majority of folks actually agreed with me. One of the things I see sometimes in the blogosphere is when one blogger posts about another, telling them just how wrong they are. I’ve done a few of these during my early days of blogging, but it really is not the type of thing I am interested in any more. There is more than enough negativity out there, that I really don’t need to add my own. I really hope that I can be a positive voice and talk about the good in things more than dwell upon the bad. Ultimately I appreciate every voice, even the ones I don’t agree with.

Super Grape Stomper

One of my favorite things in Wildstar is one that has surprised me. I normally have this odd relationship with mini-games in MMOs, and generally try to avoid them. However when I put the Moonshiners Cabin in my skyplot, I found the “This Aint No Bathtub Hooch” challenge to be insanely fun. Most of the housing challenges can be completed every 30 minutes, and often times I will stomp grapes to make moonshine four for five times a night. In part it is the rewards, or at least my attempt to collect all of them. The high end reward is the purple quality bed I wrote about the other day, which is cool but I already have one. The common rewards are either a neon beer sign or 150 reknown, and the rewards I am currently going after is the dye chest. It contains within it one of five random dyes, and I believe I only have three of the five currently. As a result I complete this quest over and over trying to get the last ones.

As a side effect I have a truly silly number of beer signs, and I am basically covering the side of my ship in them. I am not sure if they are tradeable, but if you need beer signs… I am your man. The funny thing about it is there is zero market for them, because the Moonshiners Cabin is pretty much constructable by anyone who chooses to plunk down the gold it takes to build it. The question is… will I still care about it once I have collected all of the dyes available. It is a fairly easy and fun way to farm reknown, but I am just not sure if it is worth paying the weekly upkeep. That is the dirty secret that no one really talks about in the housing system. These cool things we can place, have to be repaired weekly to keep functioning. So far all of the ones I have placed have had a 1 gold repair cost, which at this point is still a fairly significant amount of money. So I have a feeling many of my things… including the crystal jumping puzzle will go away at the end of this week. My mission however is to find the upgrade to my mining plot, because that is one of those things I have found massively useful.

Return to Cyrodil

As much as I have loved my time spent in Wildstar, I do feel bad that I have been horribly neglecting Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar is the new shiny, and as a result is getting my attention as I have a strong desire to level and get all the shiny baubles that come with it. However this really doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of Elder Scrolls Online, because the games literally could not be any more different. Things is I enjoy both immensely and hope to continue playing them both for some time. As a result I am really looking forward to tonight. For some time we have had these semi-regular “Faff about in Cyrodil” nights, and after taking last week off I am ready to get back into the swing of things. The event should give me the focus to sit down and really enjoy Elder Scrolls for an evening. I am not sure exactly what we will do yet, but I had a ton of fun at that Nord town we stumbled across with the Dark Anchor, so if nothing else I would love to head back out there.

Playing Wildstar and Elder Scrolls at the same time is an odd contrast. The one failing of ESO, is that it is extremely hard to group with other players. I really hope this is something they address in future updates because the game is in desperate need of better social systems to allow players to do content other than Cyrodil together. Ultimately we do it… only because that is what we CAN do as a large group. Without a mentoring system, we are pretty much limited to PVP content because it allows multiple levels to blend together and get bolstered up to level 50. I am mostly a soloist when it comes to questing, but the various folks who have tried to quest as a pair have found it extremely difficult to stay in sync while leveling. It has mostly worked for the folks that are always on at the same time, but for those who are not… if the partner gets even the slightest bit ahead it becomes extremely difficult for the other player to catch up.

After seeing how cleanly a game can manage disparate levels grouping together, my hope is that Elder Scrolls adds in some functionality for this. The game is awesome, but other than PVP it is a largely single player experience. That said the game does have some of the most enjoyable dungeons I have experienced, but I wish they had taken a queue from Final Fantasy XIV and simply scaled players down to the dungeons level. After seeing this work in Wildstar I am shifting to the opinion that this is the way all dungeons should work. A dungeon should have a fixed level and it scales the player to that level for the purpose of the content. Sure give the players rewards for their own level… but scaling down blows away some of the problem with “out leveling” content, and makes it easier to help guildies out when the content has “grayed out” for you.

Elder Scrolls Online

As stated above I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online and if you are Daggerfall Covenant I invite you to join in the fun regardless if you are in the guild or not. The plan is we will meet up at Northern High Rock Gate in Cyrodil around 8:30 CST. The guild is aligned to Wabbajack, and if we can manage to get people through the queue, it would be awesome to actually do this event on that campaign. The fallback to this point has been Volendrung, and I hope to be online early to try and assess the feasibility of Wabbajack for the evening. From there we will pick an objective for the night and wander off into the Cyrodil countryside in search of mayhem. If you are not a member of the guild, just add @Belghast and we can get you into the fray.

#Wildstar #ElderScrollsOnline