MMORPG Archives - Page 359 of 408 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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July 10, 2014 by Belghast

When it Rains…

The old euphemism “when it rains it pours” is fitting today because it is absolutely drenched outside… and additionally we have been dealing with all sorts of issues this week. Over the weekend we had to deal with my wife’s vehicle and the tensioner going out in a rather dramatic way. For those that don’t remember we were driving Sunday and the bolt essentially sheared causing pretty much every light on the dash to come on at once and us to barely make it home before the engine overheated to the point of no return. Monday during the day we got that issue fixed and it was a rather simple mistake that lead to it. I thought we were done with our auto troubles for the time being, but reality seemed to have other ideas.

Yesterday over lunch I ran to Target to pick up cat food and while I was out something to eat. When I started up the jeep there was a very loud mechanical whirring noise that I didn’t recognize, but otherwise the vehicle seemed to perform fine so I tried my best not to think about it. As I was heading back from lunch and entering the edge of downtown I noticed that the red battery light had come on. At this point I am not really sure what to do… I’ve had a few alternators go out, and generally speaking that light combined with the whirring noise I heard earlier probably meant mine was dying. I parked in the garage and went into the building calling the shop to see if they could work me in. Sure enough they could, so I thought I would try and make my way there, hoping I did not get stranded along the side of the road. I mean we have AAA so in theory there was never really the chance that I would truly get stranded… but I crossed all my things in hope that I made it through successfully.

When I got out into the jeep I turned everything off that could possibly be drawing power. So by the time I made it to the shop I had a rather sweaty windblown hairdo that I am sure was extremely attractive. Thankfully the shop we use is around the corner from my house so I could drop the vehicle off and walk home. Just about the time I walked in the front door my phone was ringing. They had been able to assess the issues and said it was in fact the Alternator, that the bearings were bad and it would need to be replaced. About three thirty they called back letting me know the vehicle was ready for pickup. It is probably a bad thing that the girl behind the desk addressed me by name when I walked through the door. That means we have been in there entirely too often lately. Good news is that my Jeep appears to be fine now, and since both of our vehicles are paid off… I guess paying a car payment a piece worth of repairs is not too bad in the long run.

Return to Minecraft

A few days ago Zeli mentioned that she would be setting up an Alliance of Awesome Minecraft server so that her child could have a safe place to play the game. It is a whitelist based server, and since my Minecraft name is pretty easy to remember I asked her to go ahead and set me up. Last night I finally got around to logging in and playing. For some time House Stalwart has had a Minecraft server run by a member, and at this point we have conquered pretty much all of the land surrounding the spawn point for a few days worth of travel. While this huge sprawling city is awesome to behold, it doesn’t leave much room for you to go out and tame the wilds. So I opted to start fresh on a brand new server, since really the “taming the wilderness” phase of a new server is the most enjoyable for me.

Zeli started us off with a stack of steaks, a steel pick and steel sword, which is a pretty good toolset to gain a foothold in the wilderness. I however squandered this horribly. Having been so long since I played on a server, I forgot about all of the controls like /sethome and wandered around at night for awhile and down into a cave managing to get myself killed… and as such losing all of the nifty baubles that I started with. I really had no clue where I was in relation to the spawn point, so I pretty much set out to start fresh. We have a village near the spawner, and I managed to find it… which means that we also have the village trackstar zombies at night spawning near us. It took me a lot of deaths to finally get to a place where I had enough tools to defend myself.

I did not get terribly far, but right now I have the start of a mine dug into the side of a hill, with a bridge extending from it out into the water where I am slowly building a tower of sorts. I figure the mine will feed my need for resources and the tower out in the middle of a pond will give me plenty of defense. Just going to have to come up with a clever way to get in and out of said tower. The area I am in for some reason has a couple of golems spawned near me, which do a fair job of keeping the baddies away at night. I am guessing someone spawned the golems at the spawner and they just wandered off. Additionally there are mass amounts of horses and cows where I am set up at, meaning I have eventual transportation and a ready source of meat and leather. This time I did remember to type /sethome. Right now I am very much in the “locking things down” phase, trying to create something that will protect me entirely during the nights.

Farscape

While playing Minecraft last night I opted to hang out downstairs and watch Farscape. This is one of my favorite television shows, but I have not actually made it all the way through the series. I was at the very tail end of season three when Netflix lost the license to the show the first time. For awhile I was having them ship me individual DVDs but that process got rather frustrating. I could have of course gone out and found the episodes otherwise, but I got sidetracked. At some point in the last few years they managed to get the licensing set up again and all of the episodes are now ready for streaming in all their glory.

The thing I love the most about this show is that it actually has some pretty diverse aliens that are both a member of the crew and ones that you encounter along the way. The claim to fame of the show that it was done by the Jim Henson creature shop, and because of this the aliens that are brought to life by master puppeteers just have a realness to them that you cannot get with CGI. Dominaar Rigel feels like a real character and not a small puppet, and because of this the show has held its production value, whereas most science fiction feels cheesy a few years after it is made as our graphical standards keep increasing.

At this point I have just finished season three and am ready to start the fourth and final season. If minecraft continues to hold my interests, I will probably spend a few more nights watching Farscape and building away in the Alliance of Awesome server. In fact I think that is what I did last time I watched Farscape… build away on the House Stalwart server. Minecraft and watching television seem to go hand in hand for me. If you’ve never seen Farscape I highly suggest you check it out, as it has this whole Buck Rogers meets Star Wars feel to it. I pretty much like all of the characters except for a late addition to the crew … Jool. It is not that I mind her character, it is that I mind the sonic assault that is having her in any sort of action situation. When she gets freaked out she emits this high pitched scream that drives me up a wall.

The Pause Button

July 9, 2014 by Belghast

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Right now I find myself struggling to get excited about anything in the MMO genre. I think I part I am feeling this overwhelming feeling that there are so many games that are not MMOs that I want to be playing. For years I have just defaulted to playing an MMO for so many different reasons. For starters it was more or less my social lifeline and the primary way that I kept in touch with all of my friends. The guild House Stalwart that I lead and still do lead more often than not in absentia of late… was a vessel in which I collected all of my friends in one place. During the heyday of World of Warcraft this was a glorious thing, and kept me tied to the game because it was the place I could hang out with everyone at once.

When I entered the twitter and blog community this shifted considerably, and I started wanting to hang out with new and different people and had pure hell trying to incorporate all these new friends with my old friends as well. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and the end result has been a series of games played with a small subset of friends each time something new came out. I guess over the last few weeks I have realized that I no longer need the crutch that is MMOs as a way of capturing my friends and hanging out with them. At this point I pretty much have contact with everyone I have ever gamed with seriously outside of said MMO. Just because I am not playing the same game doesn’t mean I no longer have access to those people.

The Pause Button

At this point I really want to indulge my absolutely insane steam backlog, and start playing my way through it. In part this is because a single player game has something that an MMO will never have… a pause button. Over the last few months my wife and I have gotten more serious about exercise, especially since getting our fitbits back in March. Neither of us necessarily like doing it, but we know we need to and the payoff in the long run will be a much improved life. So much of my gaming life has been about getting home and getting everything done that needs to be done before gaming “primetime”. The problem is our exercise routine doesn’t fit into this plan, since in general we need to wait for things to cool off before going out and about. Sunday I made a walk in a heat index of 110 degrees, and that is not something I want to do again anytime soon.

What this means in reality is that I really cannot get involved in anything at all until I get back from my walk. This also means that for sake of sanity sake… this only gives me an hour or two to do anything structured and still be able to get up and around in the morning in a non-zombie state. So right now my exercise routine has pretty much destroyed my ability to do group MMO content, which is the primary reason why I plan MMOs in the first place. I don’t mean grouping to quest or grouping to PVP… but grouping to run Dungeons. Without the drive to do the next dungeon, the MMO experience I am finding is rather bland. At the very least that thing that used to drive me higher and higher in level just isn’t there right now.

The Treasure Trove

I am not saying anything dramatic like I am done with Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online or World of Warcraft or MMOs in general. Instead I am giving myself the leverage to not care about them if I so choose. I am sitting on what feels like a gold mine of narrative games that because of the feeling of having to log in nightly to whatever my current MMO was… I did not play. So you are likely going to see a lot more single player game coverage… and significantly less multiplayer coverage. I guess this is the good thing about having a blog format that revolves around my whims and not necessarily a specific game in it. I might end up losing some readers in the process, and I guess I am okay with that. I have become known for being an “MMO Gamer” and while I won’t stop being that, I will probably focus on more of the content that I would normally talk about during Steampowered Sunday.

Right now I want to actually finish some games. I have this horrible habit of getting near the end of a game, generally within an hour or two of beating it and losing the drive to push across the finish line. It is like I had so much fun playing the game that I don’t want the experience to end, and if I never go back and finish it up… it never has to. Right now I am within two hours of being the new Wolfenstein game for example, but I have been reluctant to do so… because I really enjoyed the experience on the way to the end. I am honestly the same way with novels and my bedside table is strewn with a ton of half finished books. In games the journey has always been so much more important than the destination… so I guess I avoid finishing the journey. All of that said it is something I would very much like to change. Back in the era of Nintendo, I had challenges with friends to see who could beat a specific game the fastest… so I know that me is somewhere deep inside waiting to get out.

Autopilot Gaming

All of that said… what did I end up doing last night? Playing World of Warcraft while watching movies. I was in the mood to hang out downstairs and watch stuff off Netflix, and after making a couple of attempts to play various games I settled to playing WoW. I have lost the ability to ONLY watch Television, after having done it as an activity while I was doing something else for so long now. That said games like Divinity: Original Sin require too much of me to be able to play them and keep track of a movie at the same time. WoW on the other hand is almost pure muscle memory at this point… I don’t have to think about the game to play it. So I decided to fire up one of my army of new hordies over on Scyers and at least get one of them into my guild of horde friends Bloodmoon Chosen. For years I have made an attempt to play Horde, because I have a large number of friends over there as well as Alliance. However because of my desire to have all of my slots available for Alliance, I kept relegating the horde to an alternate account. With the merger of Argent Dawn and The Scryers server, this gives me the ability to have 11 Alliance characters and 11 Horde characters.

The first movie of the night was Odd Thomas… which was familiar sounding but I did not have a clue why. It was staring Anton Yelchin… aka Chekov from the new Star Trek series, and more or less I have liked him in everything I have seen him in so far. Turns out that maybe somewhere deep in the bowels of my mind I realized this was a book series by Dean Koontz, but when folks on twitter informed me of such last night I was surprised. I really enjoyed the movie in a more action hero Donnie Darko kind of way, which likely makes zero sense anywhere other than my own head. It was good enough that it makes me want to track down a copy of the novels and read through them. I’ve never been a huge Koontz fan, and generally I tend to consider his novels a bit on the cheesy side… but I dig this protagonist. I like the whole unlikely crusader for good aspect of the story, and it tends to be a trope I enjoy in most movies.

The second movie of the night however was not nearly as enjoyable. One of my guilty pleasures is that I like John Cusack. I am a huge fan of movies like Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, but the unfortunate truth is that Cusack tends to play exactly the same character in every movie he is in. Edgar Allen Poe likely was a neurotic mess… but Cusack’ particular brand of neurosis doesn’t quite work here. Additionally while I can get behind the transformation of the cerebral Sherlock Holmes into the Robert Downey Jr. badass action hero… this doesn’t work at all for Cusack and Poe. I am honestly not sure what I was expecting, but after the high that was Odd Thomas I was just looking for something else and this movie showed up in one of my Netflix streams and I figured what the hell. Unless you are supremely bored and have literally watched everything else of substance in your movie feed… I would highly suggest skipping it.

For Science!

July 4, 2014 by Belghast

Rude Awakenings

At this point I have been up since right around 7 am, and have now walked almost 2.5 miles for the day. Why on earth have I done a thing like this. Over the summer months my wife has been getting up every morning and going for a walk, figuring that even if she is sedentary the rest of the day she has at least gotten a big chunk of steps in that can then be added to that evening by another walk. Last night she asked me if I wanted to go with her on the early morning walk, and I thought at the time it was a good idea. During the work week I am up at 5:30 in the morning, and get up and around pretty leisurely over the next hour or so. On the weekends I tend to allow myself to wake up naturally and then stumble to the QuikTrip and get breakfast.

This morning I was woken up by two things… first the weight of one of my cats not so gracefully deciding to plop down on my stomach, and moments later my wife petting my eyebrows. In the grand scheme of things I really don’t know what she was doing with them, but it sure as hell felt like they were being petted. I think she was bored of waiting for me to wake up and was trying to “annoy” me into coherence. So I stumbled out of bed, attempted to wet down the cowlicks in my hair and pulled on my walking shoes. I do a lot of complicated things in the morning, one of which is write a blog post, and almost every morning that is done well before 6:30. Apparently physical activity is not one of the things my body is willing to tolerate.

As I started down the path outside the house, it was immediately conscious of how hard it was to keep anything resembling a straight line. We were going extremely slow as compared to our normal pace, but it felt like my wife was racing on ahead of me and I was struggling to keep up. Nothing was really cooperating… not my thighs, shins, ankles… all of which screaming at me wanting to know what the fuck I was doing to myself. By the time we had made it most of the way through the first loop, my body was starting to wake up enough to keep moving forward on its own without me forcibly concentrating to move my legs one at a time. It wasn’t until we had finished the second loop that I was really ready to introduce speech into the equation. My wife kept saying things, and I would have to have her repeat them because I just couldn’t concentrate on both walking and listening at the same time. I feel awesome for getting up and walking a triple loop already, but damn did my body not want to play along with this notion. Here is hoping tomorrow will be easier.

For Science!

This title is extremely misleading, because in truth there is very little scientific about my poll. For starters the sample size is too small to really be meaningful, and the fact that I chose to distribute my poll through twitter and Google plus means the sample will naturally be skewed towards social gamers. All of that said… yesterday was the day that all of us day one Wildstar players got billed for our first month of playtime. In my case it was months of playtime because generally speaking I give every new game three months to hook me. From a standpoint of an Dominion player, I watched our guild turn into a ghost town over the last few weeks so I was curious to see just how many players were choosing to stay subscribed to the game. Additionally of the players who would be subbing… I was curious to know how many were doing it with a monthly fee and how many were trying to use the CREDD system.

I opted to use Strawpoll.me because I love the way it gives you instant results, and you can just simply watch the page as the responses roll in and it automagically refreshes itself. Firstly I want to thank all the helpers I had yesterday in spreading the poll. I got so many people willing to retweet this that it greatly improved the success of the results. If you look at the results above, we had at the time of writing this 238 total votes and of those 30% chose to subscribe to the game. Quite honestly this is about the conversion rate I was expecting just based on what I was seeing on the social networks. There were a lot of supposedly diehard wildstar fans that didn’t make the month. Of those that are subscribing 11 players are trying to pay through the use of CREDD, and I am assuming those folks were smart and bought several months in advance when they were still roughly a platinum per month. I have been watching the CREDD market over the last few days and it is slowly increasing, and at least on our server right now is roughly 4 plat per month.

We Are Not the Average Player

One of the things I think we as bloggers, podcasters and gaming pundits seem to miss however, is that we are in no way the average player. I think it is safe to say that the reach of this survey at least is firmly locked in what I keep calling the “internet zeitgeist”. This is a binge and purge cycle of latching onto a new thing and tossing aside the old one never to return to it. Wildstar was the new hotness for roughly a month, and now it appears that Divinity: Original Sin is the next hot thing. After that there will be something else that is a shiny bauble to draw away players attention. I am just as guilty of this as anyone, so I am not judging… just explaining that the way we play games does not represent how most people tend to play games. There will never likely be a game that stops our fickle ways, or at least we will never again have another multi-year long game like World of Warcraft.

I think the “average joe” I still enjoying Wildstar, and I think personally I just had the back luck of picking the wrong server/faction combination. As a result I have been flirting with rolling Exiles on Evindra, because the bulk of twitter seems to be playing that server/faction combination. I am still enjoying the game personally, but am just going through one of my down cycles right now. I will engage and be socially active for a very long time… but eventually I hit my threshold where I simply cannot take anymore human interaction. When this happens I duck my head into my shell and “turtle” for awhile, playing nothing but single player games.

Eventually I get to where I miss people again and venture back into society, but I figure I still have a few more weeks of turtling before I am ready to return to any sort of normal social interaction. I claim that I am an introvert, and folks have disputed that claim… but I think I just simply have built up more stamina for human interactions. That said there is always a point at which I just can’t handle any more, and this is one of those periods for me. So while I on one level I want to be playing Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online, when I actually log in and encounter other players my fight or flee instinct kicks in and I log right back out. So I realize I am adding to the feeling of the server being empty, but right now at this moment there is nothing I can do about that. I can only hope people will be around when this current funk fades.

#Wildstar

Three Hours Well Spent

July 2, 2014 by Belghast

Kidneys Safe, Vita Obtained

I have a running joke with my friend Rae, that each time I go off to meet someone to make a purchase from Craigslist that I am more than likely going to end up in a ditch somewhere missing a kidney. What can I say… I have a dark sense of humor. Regardless of this eventual fate, I am extremely cheap by nature, or more so I cannot stand paying more for something than I actually have to. As a result there are a handful of things I search Craigslist for a few times a week, one of them is the Playstation Vita. For a long while I have known that sooner or later I would get one, but seeing as I have a pretty lousy track record for playing handheld games… I most certainly did not want to pay much for it. Essentially handheld gaming is awesome if you travel a lot… whereas I actually actively avoid travel. If I am at home, I am more than likely going to be on my PC or one of my consoles rather than milling about on a handheld. That said I am still very much enthralled by handheld gaming, and the since I have a PS3 and a PS4… the Vita remote play functionality even as limited as it might be… seemed intriguing.

So the other day when I found a Vita that had been posted for a few days for $100 that came with two games… both of them something I would play, I honestly thought it was too good to be true. However over the course of a series of text messages I gleaned two things. Firstly that I suspected the person that was selling the unit was female, and that they did in fact seem legitimate. This is my own personal bias at work, but generally I consider women far more trustworthy than men, and potentially less likely to steal my kidney. I could not meet up that day so we scheduled a meeting for yesterday after work. Basically I did not want to mention it on the blog, because I really didn’t want to jinx it. There was a comedy of errors however when it came to actually meeting up. The person lived in a town roughly thirty minutes away from the southern most point of the Tulsa Metro. Since I prefer to meet at QuikTrip for safety sake, and that town did not have one… we decided to meet at one in Glenpool, thinking I had been there multiple times and it would be in the path she had to travel anyways.

Wrong QuikTrip

The only problem is that apparently Glenpool is big enough to actually have two QuikTrips… both of which are apparently across the street from a McDonalds. I must have looked insane walking around the QuikTrip parking lot looking for a pink and grey Chevy cruze. Like I was confused enough at one point that I even googled what a Chevy Cruze looked like on my phone, because I thought maybe I was not remembering which model was which. Once we realized we were at two separate locations she came to me because I had zero clue where she was. Everything checked out, the Vita is pretty awesome and only has a few scratches here and there on the case. It came with the vita unit, 4 gb memory card, charge cable, car charger, soft sided case, rubberized skin for the unit, Injustice Ultimate Edition game and The Walking Dead game. The owner had wiped it back to factory settings so all I had to do when I got home was set the unit up and I was streaming Resogun from my PS4 in a matter of moments.

The main reason why I knew sooner or later that I would get a Vita is that I have been a member of Playstation Plus for awhile. One of the awesome things about Playstation Plus is it is blanket subscription and does not care at all if you actually own the piece of hardware it is giving away games for. So since the moment I started subscribing I have been picking up every Vita game offered through the web storefront. As a result I now have a library of 35 good titles ready to download to my Vita. The only thing I need to pick up really is a bigger memory card, because quite frankly 4 gb will not hold much of anything. All in all this makes for another wildly successful Craigslist purchase. One of the things I am going to have to test out soon is the ability to play across the internet from my PS4 sitting at home. I’ve heard mixed reviews about it, but just the fact that something like that could possibly exist seems awesome. Also if you are on PSN and we are not already friends… look up “Belghast Sternblade”.

Three Hours Well Spent

I have seen the Realm Maintenance podcast a few times before, but never actually sat down to listen to it. I tend to listen to podcasts when I can during the day because it makes the work day go a little faster. Yesterday Godmother of Alternative Chat had linked this weeks episode, which is a special 100th episode that included her. The podcast was rather daunting, in that it was a 3 hour retrospective of a bunch of wow podcasters being interviewed and the results knitted together into a narrative. While it took me literally all of the day to get through it, listening in bursts here and there… I have to say it was three hours well spent. Listening to the collective pet peeves, advice and challenges of all of these extremely successful and popular podcasts was rather inspiring. I would not really put myself or the work we do with Aggrochat in the same league as any of these people, but it was awesome to hear that they had struggled with some of the same issues I had.

One of the most interesting takeaways from the whole show is that for the most part, all of the podcasters list radio and more often than not NPR as being an important influence. I guess to some extent that makes sense, because what is a podcast if not an online radio show. If I am in my car I am pretty much always listening to NPR, and I know personally I wanted to do a podcast out of a sense of awe of everything that radio can be. I’m a huge fan of This American Life and have even gone and seen Ira Glass in person, when he did a lecture here in town. One of the tougher questions the various guests were asked… was who their favorite podcast is. Most of them gave extremely diplomatic answers, but I have to say for me at least there are two podcasts that I pretty much drop everything I am doing to listen to when they are posted. The first of these is Alternative Chat, because Godmother somehow takes the production value of This American Life, and condenses it into a fifteen minute bite sized chunk. It is very easy to listen to because I know, no matter what else I have going on, that I will receive this fifteen minute vignette of awesome.

The other podcast that I listen to as soon as it is posted is that of the Battle Bards. There are two things that make this experience awesome. The first is the chemistry that has evolved between Sypster, MMOGC and Syl. Their tastes in music and games have this weird way of fluttering back and forth between complimenting each other and diverging at the same time. So on a specific topic you might get two of the three to agree, but I have never really seen all three agree on something at exactly the same moment. This chemistry aside, I love the focus of the podcast because I too am extremely passionate about video game music. While I might not know the whys and hows like they do… or even know the composers by name… when I am not listening to podcasts at work, I am listening to soundtracks. Video game music has always stirred my imagination in ways that nothing else quite can. It is this warm blanket of nostalgia that I wrap myself in regularly, and it is always awesome to listen to the Bards as they dissect various tracks that I know and love.

Overly Cerebral Morning

As is the case with so many mornings, I sat down to write with a vague idea of some of the things I might talk about. However as a whole this morning shaped up to be far more cerebral than normal. I wish I had pictures to at least accompany some of my giant walls of text, but alas you are going to have to settle for a really cool shot from Divinity II last night. When I got home from my adventure I piddled around with my vita for a bit, logged into Wildstar to claim another boom box and then after our walk settled into Divinity again for the rest of the night. I find it so odd that I have fallen so in love with a game that is over six years old at this point. Everything about the game still feels fresh and new to me, and I am loving exploring this world. All my of my friends are busy and enthralled with Divinity: Original Sin… but at this point I don’t even want to look at that game until I “finish” this one.

I have a feeling that “finishing” Divinity II is going to be a lot like “finishing” Skyrim. That there will always be something left unfinished and begging for me to wander around and finish at a later time. The only thing that makes me question this, is that already the game has made some significant changes that caused me to lose access to a number of quests. The world keeps getting stranger, and I am not really sure how I feel about the chief antagonist. He keeps showing up to taunt me, and then instead of actually attacking me… sends an army of fodder at me claiming it will “finish me off”. While I am sure I cannot take him down yet… I am level 30 and wondering how long this game actually runs. I am only in the second “area” so far, but not sure just how many more there are. I know of at least one more that is connected to the area I am in currently, but at this point I have put almost twenty hours into the game and feel no closer a finish than I did at the very beginning. I love when a game feels like it could go on forever like that.