mmofps Archives - Page 22 of 42 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Derpy Banana

December 7, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I moved a little bit out of my comfort zone and decided to do what I had hoped to do some time ago… and test Beam.pro. Firstly you have to understand that I have gone around and around with streaming services because none of them really seemed to fit me. Twitch is the ten ton juggernaut in the room, and in a way that generally makes all other services irrelevant. That said… I feel like it is a generally inferior experience for both the viewer and the streamer. The lag delay between video stream and chat is horrendous and it pretty much makes any attempt at having a conversation with someone watching you impossible. Hitbox seemed really cool other than some weird issues I had regularly with stream quality. It however had little to no lag between video stream and chat and made it super easy to have conversations over. They also seemed to have way better back end tools to support the day to day management of your stream and syndicating it to various social media platforms when you go live. Beam however entered the ring some time ago, or at least came into my general consciousness when my friend Maeka decided to switch over to streaming on it exclusively.

Destiny_20161207062529 — Braced Frame – Snapshot – Range Finder

So Beam represents a more twitch like experience in quality, but with far better chat delay and an interesting reward model for viewers and streamers. Watching streams earns folks sparks, that can then be spent on either unlocking features for your own channel… or spending those sparks on other streamers who often offer weird things like sound boards for you to play with. I admit the gamification aspect of the streaming interested me, and I find myself way more connected to the concept of letting a stream run while I am doing other things because I know that eventually it is going to benefit me. For example… something I have always wanted was the ability to create an AggroChat team, and that functionality apparently unlocks when I hit 5000 sparks… to which I am sitting at roughly 2000 currently after a few days of usage. Over the weekend I got my setup rearranged and organized so that things were going through the appropriate devices, thinking that sometime in the future I might maybe start streaming again. However a thread on the That Gaming Forum Imzy was the catalyst needed to go ahead and push me across the line to trying to stream something properly. When I got home last night I quickly assembled a fresh OBS install and pulled in the artwork I had from the previous attempts and before long I was up and running.

Destiny_20161207062455 — Perfect Balance – Snapshot – Headseeker

The end result is me playing some of the absolute worst Iron Banner ever, but you can check out the VOD here on Beam. I spent way more time turning my head to the left and checking chat than I did actually playing the game. This is compounded by the fact that before last night I had played a half dozen Rift matches period, and it is a vastly different style of gameplay than I am used to in the Crucible. Generally speaking I am used to the “rush to the choke point” style of game play that comes from Control or Supremacy, and in trying to play Rift that way… I died a lot. Later on in the night after I chilled the hell out and started taking things more slowly… I started doing better but unfortunately this was LONG after I ended my stream. I was still recording, however when I configured OBS I ended up accepting the default flv format… which Adobe Premiere seems not to know what to do with. So I am either going to have to find a plugin that lets me import them… or find something to convert that to a format so I can actually properly edit it. I did get one really solid match recorded, and I would like to edit that up and post it on my youtube channel at some point.

Perfect Balance - Extended Mag - Zen Moment — Perfect Balance – Extended Mag – Zen Moment

One of the big positives about Beam is that they are now owned by Microsoft which in theory means they are going to get more support. The negative there is that Microsoft has a long and storied history of abandoning products… zune anyone? However the killer feature seems to be that it integrates perfectly with the Xbox One… which also adds to a little platform bias. Most of the streams I have watched were streamed from an Xbone… so it confused my viewers when I said I was playing Destiny on the PS4. Ultimately I have a pretty cool setup that I am happy with in that in my office I have my desktop beside what is essentially a console gaming area. In a storage cabinet beneath my 48 inch television I have a PS4, PS3, Xbox 360 and now Xbox One all connected through an HDMI switch that then goes through a splitter before going into an Elgato HD that I picked up off craigslist for around $35 used. That then feeds into my PC and is served up by OBS using the Elgato streaming tools. So that means quite literally anything I can connect to my television through HDMI can then end up getting streamed out. At one point I had my WiiU connected here, but I took that downstairs so I could hang out in bed and play on the weird remote device. Also Nintendo has some pretty draconian practices surrounding streaming and youtube videos so I figured it was probably a good idea NOT to do that.

At one point I drew up this diagram quickly to show how my set up works. The key element there is the splitter and you can read more about that in a previous post I made back in June 2014 when I got the setup running. As far as Iron Banner itself… I have interspersed some of my best rolls from the night in amongst the paragraphs. In total I am sitting 3/4 of the way through Rank 3 and have picked up 3 fusion rifles, 1 scout rifle, 1 pulse rifle, 2 legs, and a helm… that I then bought the 100% roll from Lady Efrideet and infused that into it. I feel like I made a decent start to getting to Rank 5 and I finally grasped the unique rhythm of the game mode as I went through the night. I suddenly stopped being the lowest person on the team to vying for the top spot once again. I am not terribly great at crucible but I am generally not as bad as I am in the stream test. However that wasn’t really the purpose of the stream… it was to test out Beam.pro and I think so far I am saying it passes with flying colors. I accepted the absolute default settings and it performed admirably. Now is the time for me to actually set my channel up properly and try and sort out how precisely is the best way to use the service.

Space Diablo

November 29, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a good night. It was a fairly crappy day at work because we were still dealing with the ramifications of events that happened over the break. Nothing says excitement like an 8 am conference call. That said I had an amazing bowl of chicken noodle soup waiting on me when I got home. Sunday during the day we made a batch of soup in the crock pot, and for whatever reason soup is all the more amazing on day two. This time around I added a little shredded cheese to it and it was insanely good and the perfect thing to at least in part make me forget the day that lead up to it. As far as my evening the bulk of it was spent hanging out with Grace and Mor in Destiny. While I consider myself still very much a fledgling player, they are more so… and as a result it was kinda fun just to ride along as Mor experienced all of the content for the very first time. The big take away from the night however is that the year one strike bosses are still insane bullet sponges. I kinda find it sad that they never went back and updates these strikes, when much better year two versions exist. The walker in the Devil’s Lair normal difficulty strike… is quite possibly the hardest strike boss ever… or at the very least the one that takes the most time to bring down. I solo walkers out in the patrol zones for fun… and this one just would not die.

Mor calls the game “Space Diablo” and it is fitting because really in the end we are all after tasty loot. Since I had already done most of this content before a bunch of times, I opted to play my Warlock which is generally my least progressed character. On the Stormcaller spec for example I only had the base abilities unlocked that you exit the mission with. By the end of the night however I had a significant amount unlocked, and gear wise my Warlock has suddenly pulled out ahead of my Hunter. The thing with Warlock is that I like literally everything about it… except the jump. Squirrel will probably fight me on this one, but it just feels wrong. It doesn’t work the way I want it to work… and in truth if I could just give my Warlock the Titan jump… everything would be peachy. Then again I would give literally every class the Titan jump, and part of me hopes that they introduce a second round of artifacts that do just this… allow you to customize each character by giving them a different class jump. I don’t think that is likely ever going to happen, so in the meantime I will have to console myself with having permatracking thanks to Memory of Gheleon on every character. If nothing else that artifact is amazing for finding chests… which considering just how many there are in the plaguelands greatly increase how much glimmer I am getting.

Once things wound down in Destiny, I disappeared downstairs and worked on my Deathknight for awhile. Sunday with the start and stop nature of work, I didn’t get terribly far in knocking out some of my dungeon quests. In fact there was a point where I had queued for a dungeon, and shortly after the second boss had to drop group to hop on a work conference call. Were it a guild group this probably would not have been a show stopper given that I could alt tab back and forth as needed, however I excused myself from the PUG and became resigned to not actually finishing up Stormheim. So last night I started off by running Halls of Valor, which went extremely quickly and allowed me to move on in good conscience to Highmountain. Right now I am largely just focusing on the main story of the zone and ignoring any offshoots for the moment, because it already seems like I am going to ding 110 well before wrapping everything up. At the moment I am sitting at 60% into 108, and have just started the quests in High Mountain meaning I have most of an entire zone to level through. I will absolutely ding before leaving this zone, and then I can begin the slow process of gearing through World Quests. I have to say that I love Frost Deathknight for both a leveling and dungeon running spec, and it is going to dethrone my Paladin as my primary alt.

All of this said… I am not likely to work on my Deathknight tonight because I have a date with Final Fantasy. I am too old to stay up and play at the official launch of a game but instead have it sitting waiting for me on my PS4 for when I get home.

Unintended Stealth

November 23, 2016 by Belghast

I had every intent last night of going home and working on my Deathknight. This week the world boss is The Soultakers, which finally allows folks to unlock the hidden frost appearance. I had been enjoying my newly humanized Deathknight after years being a Worgen, but had largely been taking my time in pushing through the levels. However with the promise of an artifact appearance waiting on me, the goal was to get home and push as hard as I could to get to 110 before the week was finished. Recently they patched the game to make all artifact appearance drops from world bosses a 100% drop chance. Apparently however there is a giant asterisk looming behind that statement. What I am hearing now is that in order to get the appearance you have to be artifact knowledge rank four, which is completely impossible for me to actually obtain during this week, at least without the impending catch up mechanics. So instead I went upstairs to try and solve another issue. According to my friend Squirrel, apparently I have not been online on PSN in over thirty days… so after some back and forth we determined that I had apparently inadvertently set myself to appear offline. For awhile now I had seen a red X beside my portrait in the PS4 menu, but I always just assumed that meant I had a flaky connection. However apparently on my profile page I hit the wrong thing and flipped myself into some sort of stealth mode. After fixing that… I also started getting updates as to what my friends were doing, so when Squirrel joined a party I decided to hook my headset up and join as well.

The plan for the evening was supposedly a Hard Mode Wrath of the Machine, but due to the holiday messing with everyone’s raiding plans… it was just Squirrel, myself, Jex and Havel that were available. The original thought was that if we could somehow muster the folks that we would end up running a normal to show me the ropes. Instead we just ended up completing various crap that I had sitting undone. I am the worst at actually grinding through quests, and the Gjallarhorn was something I tried when I was sitting at 340ish and found maddening. There are wave and waves of exploding shanks that have this nasty way of sneaking up on you when you are least expecting. I would ultimately end up getting blown up and failing out… and unfortunately this is one of those quests where you have to complete a bunch of stuff if you die at any point. The goal originally was to pester someone to come help me, but I never got around to doing it. Last night they were willing to help and I was more than happy to knock a quest out of my inventory.

Similarly I had been sitting on the Thorn quest for at least a week now, having completed the last of the crucible kills during the recent Iron Banner. In order to do this one I needed a key, and had never actually finished the Sepiks Perfected strike quest… which rewarded a key. So next up my friends set about to helping me complete this quest. Unfortunately I have not actually spent any time with the gun, but seeing as I never got the year one variety I have always been curious just how it feels. There was a time where I used hand cannons above pretty much any gun, but the short range and ammo capacity nerfs have ended up with me favoring other things. If nothing else I might throw this up on my hunter and be the stereotype, even though this version of thorn is significantly defanged from the original.

Lastly when I opened the chest to pick up the Thorn, I managed to pull a pretty sweet new sniper with significantly higher light than the one I was using. I like the super high damage archetype of snipers, so this has already seen some use given that it is solar burn week. We attempted a random heroic after completing the Thorn quest but for whatever reason I failed to get credit from my Future War Cult quest. I am super thankful to all of the help that Squirrel and Jex were willing to dish out last night, and I really want to figure out a time when I can hang out properly and do more Destiny stuff. I knew I missed them, but I didn’t realize how much until the middle of last night hanging out killing baddies.

A Good Weekend

November 21, 2016 by Belghast

This past week was the week of seemlingly smooth and fast clears. Wednesday night we worked on progression content, which mean’t that we spent the majority of the evening wiping to new and exciting things. However the end result of that evening was that we downed Odyn and made a decent amount of progress on Guarm. The only negative aspect of that is that it also means that none of us actually saw progress on the quest chain that haunts us. We kicked around the notion of having an Emerald Nightmare clear night, that I ultimately decided would be Friday. I set up a calendar invite and hoped, and then was pleasantly surprised at the number of folks that signed up. In fact we technically had more than our normal raid nights, and other than some starts and stops while waiting on folks or dealing with disconnections… it was a very smooth evening. So smooth in fact that I seriously wonder if we could have cleared the entire place in an hour. I mean because of the various time spent waiting… that was not a thing that happened however it seemed like we might have been on pace for it. That general smoothness continued on last night with Karazhan, but so did the whole waiting business. Thalen got sidelined with family stuff, and we had the option of either filling his slot or waiting. It turned out we ended up getting started roughly an hour and a half late, but once again things went amazingly smoothly. So much so that I think next week we are going to make a proper attempt at a Nightbane run. We would have one shot every boss… were it not for the fact that we tried some madness for an achievement on Medivh.

Another big part of my weekend was roaming around and exploring the Comet of Ahnket in the Rift Starfall Prophecy expansion. At this point I am sitting around 66 1/3 and feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the Scatherran Forest zone. Firstly I have to say this expansion is charming as hell so far, namely because of the two companions that follow you around at times… but also because it is a great example of environmental storytelling. Every area is packed full of little things to be scene and experienced much in the same way the zones are built in Guild Wars 2. Lots of things are happening in the background and all it takes is you sitting still long enough to experience them. The best of these vignettes has to be the hedgehogs who are stuck in a ball rolling… until one of them realizes that they can just let go of their feet to stop. Similarly there is this adorable sequence where you are playing hide and seek with baby unicorns, and you have to go out and find them so that you can lead them back home. The only negative so far is that I feel woefully undergeared for some of the content, and there is a bit of an uneven difficulty level happening. There was an area full of spiders… and they seemed literally twice as tough as any of the other equivalent level 66 mobs. I could take down entire packs of humanoids… but a single spider was a race to see if I could finish them off before they finished me off. Getting a second spider meant absolute certain death. All in all though I am really liking the expansion and it feels much more like Storm Legion did as far as content goes.

Finally I spent a good deal of time playing Destiny this weekend and was able to push my Titan to the 385 barrier. This is the point where you stop getting upgrades from legendary engrams, and are stuck relying on faction rewards that stop at 390… and exotic engrams that will take you all the way to 400. This means I am hoping tomorrow starts a small arms week for the heroic strike list because I absolutely need to spend some time farming. In theory I believe the Archon’s Forge will go up to 400 when it comes to end of event rewards, but not anything coming from an engram. I spent some time working on my Hunter and Warlock and getting both of them through the Rise of Iron story so I can have three sets of world bounties to work on each week. I realize they just reward engrams at this point… but if nothing else it can be infusion fodder to help work up additional weapons and armor. I need to find the free time to try and sign up for one of the machine raids so I can see the content and get some more tasty gear. However 385 is a completely respectable place to be, and in theory during the next iron banner I should be able to make a decent dent into pushing that number up into the 390s. It was a great weekend and especially considering we have a short week ahead of me.