MMORPG Archives - Page 350 of 408 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Family but Not Family

August 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleeping In

This mornings post is coming significantly late because yesterday was extremely draining. I am not sure how much of it I said in previous posts but yesterday I went to the funeral of my Great Aunt in Oklahoma City. Both my Mother and Father have their own medical issues to where if they were forced to drive it on their own they would have struggled seriously. Right now my mother is going through some back problems, and my dad vision problems… so I knew that I really needed to offer to drive. They are the type that would not likely have come out and asked for it, but the moment I offered they latched onto the idea with both hands. Multiple times during the day my mom said how grateful she was that I drove. I hate driving, especially on longer trips, but I figured it was a thing I needed to do.

The draining aspect was that I felt like I was essentially parenting my parents. My mothers hearing has been going through the years and the multiple hour trips to and from the city involved a lot of me yelling at the backseat so she could hear me. Anytime my father and I would attempt to carry on a conversation she would mishear a snippet of it and start off on a tangent. Which was fine but trying to jump like that all day long including when we were inches away from each other… really can wear you down. I am starting to wonder just how long it will be before we need to get her a hearing aide. Her mother/my grandmother wore one for as long as I can remember, so I am sure that bad hearing is simply another ailment that runs in the family. Since I seem to be a sponge for the bad ailments that both of my parents have… I will likely inherit that one as well.

Family but Not Family

Something about this batch of the family that you have to understand is that even though we are only two hours apart… I have not seen most of them in years. The last time I saw any of them I believe was at my grandmothers funeral almost a decade ago. I do not believe that any of them came up for my grandfathers funeral, which I guess makes sense as he was not related by blood to any of them. So a few of them I have seen within the last decade, but the bulk of them I have not seen since I was five or six. A couple of the people were recognizable from my memory banks, others were not at all. One of them I only remembered as the person who bit me once at a family reunion at Great Grandpa Smiths house… and he has been dead for longer than I can remember. Another one of the daughters wasn’t even alive back then, so I had never met her in any form.

This brand of the family seems to have a genetic disposition for girls… my great aunt had two daughters, and then each had two daughters… then when you get to the grandchildren there were something like 25 daughters and 1 single boy. But if you think about it… my grandmother and great aunt came from a batch of four girls and a single boy, so maybe it is just a thing with the smith DNA favoring females. My grandmother and great aunt talked every single day until my grandmother passed away, so there was an extremely tight bond there. Most of my recollection of my great aunt and uncle was from them coming to my hometown to visit. My grandparents were dairy farmers so they didn’t really go anywhere… they could only go so far as they could get back home by milking time. As a result people came to visit them… not the other way around, so large swaths of time passed between visitations.

It is weird to step into a room where everyone knows you, but you barely know them at all. Maybe I just wasn’t listening as my grandmother tried to relate all of the details of their lives, and maybe it was just simpler because my grandma only actually had three grandchildren to talk about instead of a veritable army of them. In any case it creates this whole situation where you know they are all related to you, but none of them really feel familiar like family should feel. They all have really amazing families from the looks of it. I went up to one of the girls husbands, and asked if his name was “Mike” because for some reason I knew that it was. Finally we figured that that he manages a nearby QuikTrip store that I go to pretty often. I would love to get to know them all better, but unfortunately the connective glue is gone. With my grandma gone and great aunt gone… as sad as it sounds I doubt the family will get together again like this. My generation just doesn’t seem to be as well connected to the past as the previous ones.

Another Weapon Down

When I finally got home last night I decided to start working on my Bard relic weapon quest line. As we have gotten people up to fighting level I spent a bit of time over the weekend barding it up. There are just situations where double dragoons is not the best idea in the world, and I don’t necessarily mind playing at a bard, in fact for short periods of time I find it extremely relaxing. Over the course of a series of dungeons run to catch Kodra up to being able to do high level roulette, I picked up enough upgrades to take my bard to ilevel 65. The biggest problem was that I still had a less than optimal weapon, and that more than anything was limiting my damage output. Since I was not feeling up to playing with the big kids last night, who unlocked the various zones needed to do elite roulette I decided to quietly plug away on the relic weapon.

Thankfully I had the foresight to get Warenwolf to bind my materia to the precursor weapon some time ago. All I needed to do was start in on the quest chain proper. The Dhorne Chimaera was as easy as they came, and within moments of queuing it popped and then about ten minutes later I had collected that first piece. The next piece involved running Amdapor Keep, and I have to say this was probably the trickiest part of the night. The queue took about 20 minutes, but when it finally popped the team that I ran it with went extremely smoothly… zero wipes and other than the tank pulling things a little differently than I was used to I had my rune in about thirty minutes time. After some running about I was on the kill 24 mobs step, which took a little bit of time to do but with my healer Chocobo out it went pretty easily.

Next up was the Hydra in Halatali, and it died extremely quickly as well. I think it might have died faster than the time it took me to queue for it. Finally was the last three primal fights, and this would have gone quicker had I not queued for normal mode Ifrit first instead. I guess I was more tired than I realized. Both Hardmode Ifrit and Garuda died in a single attempt, and then Titan took about three before we managed to beat the boss. I still have yet to get the whole rock bomb thing every single time. Like there is one specific pattern that always gives me fits, but overall while it took all evening it was definitely a doable task to get my relic weapon quickly. I hear there was a bit of a rollback last night due to the massive denial of service attack going on… so here is hoping I log back in again this morning and have my relic. Now I just need to finish collecting the bookrocks to be able to make it a Zenith weapon.

#FFXIV

A Darker Doctor

August 24, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 19

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat, and welcomed back Kodra from GenCon. For the most part the AggroChat crew has had their heads firmly planted in Final Fantasy XIV and that much hasn’t changed. Kodra regaled us with the tales of what he did with his time at the convention. LARPs are one of those things I have always been interested in but never really participated in. I did a little bit of a local World of Darkness LARP in High School, but it wasn’t really my scene. As Kodra talks about the ones that happen at GenCon it feels far more like improvisational theater than gaming. In any case it sounds awesome and if I ever make it to GenCon I will totally join in the fun with him.

Additionally we talk a little bit about MMO design and theory and how Final Fantasy XIV has made tweaks to the game in order to support the community aspect. So far it is working because that is the overwhelming thing that I am enjoying the most from our time playing. We also talk a bit about Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition and our upcoming campaign. There has been some talk about maybe streaming it, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to happen. Rae talks at length about her awesome character concept, and I talk a bit about the Grudgebearer Cleric I will be playing as well. This weeks episode had a very non-video gaming feel to it, and it was pretty enjoyable.

A Darker Doctor

Yesterday was the day the world was introduced to the new Peter Capaldi Doctor Who. So as the world was enthralled by the BBC airing of the show and subsequent BBC America rebroadcast… where was I? Well I spent my afternoon shopping with my wife and then my evening recording AggroChat. With all of the weight loss my wife has gone through, she pretty much is in dire straights on trying to find a new wardrobe for the school year. I figured it was far more important to help her find that, than to sit at home and catch Doctor Who as it was originally broadcast. As a result I have just finished watching the show this morning, and I have to say so far I am very pleased. I don’t want to go into any spoilers really, because hopefully you are going to watch it yourself.

First off I have to say I am of mixed opinion on the new Doctor Who intro theme. You can listen to it here as someone has uploaded it to youtube already. It just feels over produced to me… and extremely “muddy” if that makes sense. I can tell that they went went back to the fourth doctor theme and sampled it heavily…. and that aspect I like, but all of the modern crap that they seem to have layered on top of it is frustrating. I would love to see them just make a nice clean Doctor Who opening theme without all of the auditory graffiti. I am sure over time I will get used to it, but right now it is just grating on my nerves. As far as the show itself the production quality was impeccable as always. I always like the episode that happens right after a regeneration because you get to watch the doctor in his most vulnerable state, when he isn’t quite sure of this new body.

With Capaldi it feels like gone is the zany doctor that flails about, and a different form of “Mad Man” has replaced it. I am liking the darker take on the doctor so far, and I am also liking the fact that the series is distancing itself from “companion as love interest”. I am sure to some of the more modern fans this will be a point of frustration, but to someone who has watched a lot of Doctor Who over the years, I prefer the days when the companion was just that… a travelling companion for the adventure. I think the franchise will be in solid hands for awhile now, and I would love to see Capaldi have a run to rival Tom Baker. I am tired of the Doctor changing quite as often as he has been, especially since we have long retconned the original storyline of a limited number of regenerations. Overall I enjoyed it, but I look forward to seeing more episodes to really set my opinion of it in stone.

Return of Ultima Weapon

While waiting on the audio to render last night for AggroChat I got pulled into an 8 man raid with the rest of my Final Fantasy XIV guild on Cactuar. One of the quests that was added to the game post launch in Mor Dhona takes unlocks the Hard Mode version of the Ultima Weapon primal encounter. I won’t go into any of the details surrounding the Ultima Weapon itself because spoilers… but in theory we had heard that everything about the Hard Mode of the encounter is significantly harder than the first few turns of the Bahamats Coil raid. After last night I am guessing that was in fact the case. This fight is absolutely insane, but I am pleased to say after three tries we managed to down it and clear it from all of our quest logs. I returned to my role as a tank, and since at this point I somehow managed to pass Ashgar in gear I ended up starting off the fight and playing the role of Soak of a lot of the bombs that happen during the fight.

What makes the fight so cool is that it is the first tank swap encounter that I have run into here in Final Fantasy XIV. This is a common mechanic in World of Warcraft now as a way of keeping both tanks engaged in the fight, and they seem to do it very well here as well. Now the swaps have to be timed carefully, but since Ash and I have worked together on many occasions this ended up fine. Essentially you have to hit provoke which raises your threat to 1+the highest targets threat, and then start spamming your highest aggro ability to make sure you gain a decent lead. Basically during the swap I would hit provoke and then spam butchers block a few times to make sure I had a nice lead. At this point the target would peel away from Ashgar easily and I would be in control again for another three stacks of the debuff.

Now the coolest aspect of the fight is that we didn’t even realize there were weapons to be gotten. I feel like this fight is worth more than an ilevel 80 item… but in any cases it was one hell of a fun encounter to be done with guildies. As hard as it was, I could totally see myself doing it again because this felt like a true challenge. It required each of us to do something to add to the fight. Towards the end of the fight we had to have a few DPS sacrifice themselves to make sure all of the bombs got blocked, and then we slowed dps allowing the healers to catch up and ressurect them. It was awesome seeing each person fully engaged in what had to be done. I am so proud of my guildies for accomplishing this, and now I have no doubt at all that we will do fine making progress in the Coil.

#DoctorWho #AggroChat #FFXIV

Fears Verified

August 23, 2014 by Belghast

Death Visits

It is shaping up to be a bad week. I realize at this point it is Saturday and the week is technically over, but bear with me. Thursday I got a text from my father telling me that my Aunt Inez had passed away. Technically she is a Great Aunt and the sister of my Grandmother that passed away close to a decade ago now. So given her age it is not terribly shocking news, but I feel horrible that she lived roughly two hours away… and I have not seen her since my Grandmothers funeral. At the least I think she attended the funeral, but that day was such a blur that I can’t really be certain. I know she was not at my Grandfathers funeral a few years ago, because she wasn’t well enough to travel. I don’t know the details of when the service will be, but I was figuring I likely should make the trip.

That was at least until last night I got a call from my mother. Another Aunt has been in and out of the hospital more times than I can count over the last few years. I say Aunt but again that is a bit of a misnomer since she is technically my second cousin… but she treated me like a nephew pretty much all of my life and I was too young to realize that my cousins and I did not have the same relationship to her. She has been in final stage renal failure for quite some time and having to take eight hour dialysis pretty much every other day. In fact when my Grandmother on my moms side passed away earlier this year, I had thought my Aunt would go before her. Last night on the phone my mother said that she had been given a terminal diagnosis and was being transferred to hospice. Yesterday they stopped dialysis which gives her a prognosis of two to four days at the most.

As at peace as I thought I would be with this… it turns out I really am not. In fact my mother called my cell phone at 7 am this morning…. and I am scared to death to return it. My wife and I had planned to come visit her today, since we couldn’t go together last night. My fear is that I am going to pick up the phone and call my mother back and find out that she passed in the night. I have a complex mix of feelings about how exactly I am with this possible event. So long as I don’t call her back, it is like it hasn’t happened yet… and for all I know it might not have. There is part of me that thinks it is a blessing, because she has not had any semblance of a qualitative life in the last six years or so. The single solitary joy she had was mealtime, and if that is the happiest you are all day long… then it tells me life is pretty horrible. Another part of me deeply mourns the fun and interesting aunt that she was for most of my life, and that she hasn’t been able to be for the last decade. I know that once I finish my blog post, I will call my mother back and whatever it is that has happened will not longer be sitting out in a buffer somewhere… but will be very real. This mornings post I guess is a way of psyching myself up to receive the news.

Fears Verified

I did not actually make it through my post this morning before receiving another call from my mother. It was in fact what I had feared, that my aunt passed away over night. She drifted off to sleep and never woke up and passed early this morning around 2 am. I guess they had known about this for longer than they had told me. She found out sometime on Wednesday, and at that point her and my mother went into planning mode, planning all of the elements of her funeral. Apparently she also threw all of her renal diet measures out the window and ate the things she had been craving. The one that I found the oddest was the fact that apparently she had been craving a snickers bar. So much so that she asked my mother to go out and get her one right then. By some quirk of fate my mother had purchased a snickers bar that morning and it was sitting there in her purse just waiting for the request.

My aunt was one of people that when she made up her mind she did it whatever it was. If she decided she wanted to go to a craft show, she would show up at the house early that morning and say “get in the car, we are going to a craft show”. More often than not my mother would tag along for whatever adventure it was that they were off to, be it going to a movie or going on a road trip. When I was younger there were many weekends she would decide that we were going off together to visit my cousins, and me and my Aunt would go off on an adventure where I am sure I would talk her ear off about whatever thing I happened to be into at the time. It turns out that when she realized there was no getting better, she set her mind to planning on her passing. It sounded like during the day yesterday she had set all of her affairs in order, making sure my mother had transferred enough to her own account to pay for the funeral. After that it seems like she decided she was done with everything that needed to be done and simply drifted off peacefully.

Just Dance

As not to end this mornings post on a somber note, I thought I would mention something that warms my heart. Final Fantasy XIV is a very charming game, and as such it seems to attract a certain type of gamer that is more than willing to stop and smell the roses. When I go idle I am notorious for starting up one of the many dances that I have been collecting in game. Often times when I return to the keyboard I will be joined by one or more people who have decided to take up dancing beside me. This happens as an almost nightly ritual in the housing ward our guild has a plot in. I will go down to the market board, and while checking out what has been posted I will start up a dance. Before I know it Naine one of the neighbors will have joined me, and on occasion others will as well. The community is weird like that, and I am growing to love it.

The above screenshot is of me and a new friend going through our little dance ritual while waiting on something to spawn. I feel like if you stop to dance with a Lalafell, you are destined to become instant friends. So the next time you happen upon someone dancing in whatever game you happen to be playing… take a moment to join in. It is moments like this that make the virtual world seem so much closer than just an assemblage of pixels. On a side note I am extremely happy to see so many friends either renewing their accounts or starting new ones to come hang out on Cactuar with us all. I am really hoping this will be a game I set down roots in for a long while. We are already involved in a bunch of different active link shells and it feels like we have connections far deeper than just our immediate circle of friends. I have not felt that way in any game since the early days of Warcraft, and I have to say it feels really awesome.

Cannot Be Tamed Questionnaire: Part 1

August 20, 2014 by Belghast

Packaged with a Bow

I am not sure if this was intended to draw out posts during Blaugust or not, but yesterday Jasyla over at Cannot Be Tamed posted a survey. I seem to be able to rattle on every morning without much issue, but I am always thankful when a ready made post is handed to me so neatly. In part my hope is that through my own blog post and Liore’s (who turned me onto this) we will get this one spread through out the Blaugust community and get Jasyla a bunch of responses. I am really not sure how far I will make it into the survey in a single post, but we will see.

Cannot Be Tamed Gaming Questionnaire

You can see the full text of the survey here, but I will attempt to answer all of the questions

1. When did you start playing video games?

I honestly do not remember a time when I was NOT playing video games. I would have to say age three or four maybe? The earliest memory I had of video games was that my parents owned a Sears and Roebuck Pong clone. More than actually playing it… I remember the desire to play it. Like from the moment it got hooked up to the television I wanted my hands on it. Though being as young as I was, my parents were super reluctant to let me play. It was finally my Uncle Billy who I think let me play for the first time, and I remember losing almost immediately. The thing is it intrigued me so much that I kept wanting to try over and over. That early experience pretty much imprinted my brain for video games permanently.

2. What is the first game you remember playing?

Well like I said in the above answer the first game I remember playing is Pong. The first game I remember absolutely loving however was probably Ms Pacman. My aunt was the first to get an Atari 2600 and all of us cousins played it nonstop over most of our formative years. I ended up getting a second hand Atari system not too long after that. The game I can remember playing the most of however was Seaquest a game where you rescued drivers from sharks in a little sub that could fire a weapon. It was also the first game I can remember playing that didn’t have just a constant repetition of levels. As you progressed through levels the colors would change and new enemies would be added, and we wove a complex storyline through these simple transitions.

3. PC or Console?

I am primarily a PC gamer, but it hasn’t always been that way. In fact I have a ton of rare console systems stored away in my closet including an 3DO, a NeoGeo and a TurboDuo. In fact during the years before I got hooked on MMOs I had a video game loft with all of my consoles hooked up and “on tap” through a complex series of A/B switches. I have spent large swaths of my time shifting back and forth between them. Prior to 1992 I was a hardcore console gamer and mostly an Super Nintendo JRPG fan. Then we got a PC and I got hooked on Wolfenstein, Doom and Civilization. As I went through college the 3D graphics changes were happening and I was all about playing everything in “GL”. It was during this time that I played Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, Fallout, Quake, Baldur’s Gate and pretty much anything i could get my hands on.

When I got out of college however I had a massive console resurgence with the Sony Playstation, Dreamcast, and Saturn systems. I didn’t really make the journey back into PC exclusivity until I got hopelessly mired in the original Everquest around the release of the Scars of Velious expansion pack. It has been my love of the MMO that has kept me glued to the PC, and while I have dabbled with the PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and PS4… I still prefer the PC. While until recently it was the MMOs that had kept me there, it is also the fact that I can modify my games freely. Everytime I install a new back of mods in Fallout 3, it makes it a completely new experience for me and I go through another 50 to 100 hour play through running back through all the content with fresh eyes. So when given the chance I will almost always gravitate back to the PC.

4. XBox, PlayStation, or Wii?

I started off my gaming life as a Nintendo Fanboy, but over the years their consoles have gotten less and less practical. All I really want is for them to release a good solid console without a gimmick controller. I don’t want new ways to play my games, I just want new content. I am admittedly these days a Sony Playstation fan. I have owned two different Xbox 360s, but it is really the value of the Playstation Plus subscription that keeps me attached to Sony. Over the last few years they have come off as the good guy in the console wars, and Microsoft coming off as the part of the stodgy corporate power. I realize that both are huge corporations hell bent on parting me from my money, but I feel less horrible about supporting Sony. Right now I have the PS3, PS4 and Vita in my office and they are hooked up so I can livestream the PS3/PS4 so I guess my alignment is pretty clear.

5. What’s the best game you’ve ever played?

The game I constantly keep coming back to over the years is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The game represents pretty much my perfectly crafted game. For starters it is lovingly drawn 2D animation and not 3D. It has an amazing soundtrack with awesome rock versions of the Castlevania classics. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Castlevania franchise, despite how many false steps it has taken over the years. I love the idea of hunting down Vampires, Werewolves, Ghouls, and all manner of things that go bump in the night. Castlevania is one of the first games I purchased for myself on the original Nintendo. I remember saving up my money and making a trip to Toys R Us to get it… and that was quite the pilgrimage considering the closest one was an hour away. Symphony of the Night was pretty much the pinnacle of “metroidvania” for me. It had roleplaying and leveling elements to keep me hooked, and an awesome world to explore and find all sorts of secrets. I have repurchased this game at least four different times, on various platforms and I have it installed on my Vita at the moment. When I am feeling horrible this is the game I boot up to take me back to a time when everything made sense.

6. What’s the worst game you’ve ever played?

I have played so many games since the days of the Atari 2600, but no game has ever absolutely confounded me as much as E.T. the Extraterrestrial. This game is the game that began my fear of movie tie-ins regardless of what they might be. I was still in elementary school when the movie came out, and absolutely loved it. So when they released it on my favorite console system the Atari, I had to get it right? There was nothing at all about this game that made any sense what so ever, and still to this day I cannot reason what the hell I am supposed to do. You alternated between getting humped by men in trenchcoats, to picking up piles of poo on the ground that were supposed to be Reese’s Pieces… to falling into trenches for no apparent reason. To make things even stranger… sometimes the trenches had things that looked like record players… that gave you credit of some sort for collecting them. But the most frustrating part was trying to get back out of the trenches, which involved extending your neck and levitating out… but you had to do so in exactly the right spot or you fell back down again. This was the first game to ever make me want to throw my controller across the room. After all of these years I still get angry thinking about the disappointment I felt as a kid playing this game. I have to say that the Ghostbusters Atari 2600 game redeemed movie ports somewhat, because I remember that game was really good.

Taking Longer than Expected

So at this point I am only 6 questions in… and there are a total of 21. This is going to take awhile, so hopefully you can bare with me as I answer a few questions each morning. I simply have run out of time this morning so I have to cut this off here. I blame the fact that I just had to look up images to go with each of the paragraphs. In any case tune in tomorrow for the next set of questions, where I hopefully make it through more than six!