wildstar Archives - Page 13 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Farmer Belghast

May 14, 2014May 14, 2014 by Belghast

Server Overload

One of the key parts of the preorder process for Wildstar is the ability to reserve a player name and a guild name. Since I am still up in the air about this game I figured I would go ahead and do this. The process theoretically opened yesterday morning and could be completed by going to the name reservation page and logging in. The only problem here is that their servers crumpled under the crushing weight of folks hammering this single page. I tried off and on throughout the day with no luck, and as I moved into the evening I still was not getting to a working screen. Moments ago I finally connected in and completed the process reserving Belghast and House Stalwart just in case. Far as I know you aren’t required to use the guild name, but I figure if nothing else I will create an alt guild or something so that the name lives.

Last night I decided to try something different and logged into the little Chua engineer I had created at some point during the beta. I am not sure if it was the difference in starter zone or the difference in playing a ranged tank, but for whatever reason I found myself enjoying the game last night. I embraced the cute and deadly aspect of the game and ran around blasting everything with my shotgun. Considering I tend to shy away from playing ranged in any form, this was the first I had really played one in Wildstar. I am wondering if this is the Guild Wars 2 effect, and that melee is just unsatisfying in this game. Also with this character I opted to go with the Explorer path, which more than anything involves a lot of jumping puzzles. Normally I cannot stand these, however they felt manageable with access to double jump.

The game still feels very much like a trip to Six Flags, but the Crimson Isle area feels far less busy. Maybe I could enjoy the game more starting here rather than Leviathan Bay. Now I feel like I owe the game a play through long enough to see if I like the third area better. This has been the case with most games I have played, there are certain starter experiences that I simply do not like. I am looking at you Night Elf areas, whereas I can seem to do Dun Morogh happily over and over. There are things I like about playing the Warrior that I don’t get to do on the Engineer, however I just don’t really like Ellevar as far as zones go. I was mostly okay with the Leviathan Bay route until I got there. I am wondering if I can shift course and go to Deradune, without having to reroll.

Farmer Belghast

After getting to 6 in Wildstar I opted to log back into ArcheAge for a bit and see what trouble I could get into. Last night I finally reached a point in the quest chain where I started getting quests asking me to craft certain items that required vegetables. This meant that I needed to grow them, and also introduced me to the concept of a public farm. During an earlier quest I was given a scarecrow that apparently allows me to claim a plot of land for my own, however the area surrounding where I was working seemed to be all claimed. As a result I just opted to plant my veggies in the public plot and pray. See interesting thing about this game is that pretty much every aspect of it… allows for other players to grief you. Pretty much anyone can come along and harvest your crops from the public plot if you do not collect them within a certain period. Farming is a real world time sink, in that I planted the crops and it took thirty minutes actual time for them to grow. I of course went off throughout the world and completely forgot about them. Thankfully upon logging back in this morning they were still there waiting for me.

What ended up distracting me, was a series of quests in the next zone over that involved slaughtering tons of critters to collect parts for a suit of armor. It seems as though through this quest chain you will be able to collect a full set of blue quality gear for whatever armor class you choose. I of course am going plate, because really… there is never an answer that doesn’t end up with plate armor. In Elder Scrolls Online I’ve tried a few times to play something OTHER than a plate wearer, but always end up dropping it and dumping myself in full plate. I also managed to pick up a really amazing green quality sword that is letting me cut through the mobs like butter. I am still very much enjoying myself, but I am wishing I had a few more abilities. Right now I have shield charge, shield bash, 3 hit combo swing, AOE root/damage, self heal, and channeled drain life. It is a pretty robust kit, but I really want another attack to combo with the charge/bash/strike thing I have going on.

One of the things I really want to try and figure out is smithing. Right now it all seems to be dependant upon me going into some cave somewhere and grinding mobs while waiting on Iron Ore pops. In theory I am fine with this, but I keep thinking there has to be a more efficient way to get ore. However almost every cave I have been in, has one or two higher level players lurking about, so I am beginning to wonder if that is in fact the only real way. At some point I need to sort out why I could not stream the game and get that going again. Dxtory boggles me because it seems like for some people it works great, however for me it never seems to produce the sort of results I actually want. On a positive note it does seem to be a better generic screenshot program than Fraps, or at least cause far fewer issues. If nothing else I am using the hell out of it for that purpose, but I want to solidify how to record games full screen with it and actually get OBS to stream them to twitch.

Faffing in Cyrodil

I am a horrible person because last night, yet again I did not participate in the google hang out pen and paper game. Honestly I just wasn’t feeling up to dealing with people. I need to get to the doctor soonish, because I fear something is wrong. For about a month now, when I breath in deeply there is a sharp pain on the right side of my lung. It started as a dull ache, so I thought maybe it was a muscle pain or something of the sort, however over the last few days it has become more sharp. Last night when we did our walk, I struggled a bit to keep going and got pretty dizzy. I hate going to the doctor, because I spent a good chunk of my childhood sick and in the doctors office. It has made me try and avoid them like the plague as an adult, the only problem is… I have actual medical issues that I probably should be going for. Last night I had just reached my fill of human contact so I did my own thing, because I really couldn’t handle needing any additional interaction.

I also knew I would need to be sociable today as we have a guild event scheduled in Elder Scrolls Online. Right now we have a handful of people signed up for it, but I am hoping we will get a bunch more people who didn’t know about the Anook event. I am not sure exactly how well this is going to work, as Delevax said most nights our PVP Campaign is locked by that time in the evening. Worse case scenario we end up guesting on another campaign, since functionally there is really nothing we cannot do while guested. The primary goal is to grab skyshards, the secondary goal is to get into trouble whenever we can. If in the process we happen along some quest objectives, it would also be cool to complete those. I know I have an objective out there from the last time I was running around with Zeli and Jabb, but it was not feasible for us to go get it. I am sure it will be fairly rough, but I am hoping if we stick together as a group we will be able to compete with the various veteran rank players.

Too Themepark

May 13, 2014 by Belghast

Crazy Fox-Wolf-Thingy

I find myself enjoying ArcheAge far more than I had really expected to. I have not really even gotten to the “open world” aspect of the game, but I find the questing and combat systems really enjoyable. At some point I managed to pick up the animal to the side of me that is some sort of a fox-wolf-thingy. I am not sure if it was from a quest or if I looted it from a mob, but in any case I have a pet now. My friend Errn informed me that this is my battle pet, but I had reasoned that much by noticing that it was fighting for other players. Thing is… when I got it, it was already like level 30. This means the thing probably kicks more ass than I do to be honest. One of the weird things about the game is that you can either have a mount or a pet out, but not both.

As a result I tend to run around with my battle pet out, and then use the glider poorly to manage to get around quickly. I really have no clue what I am doing when it comes to the glider. No matter how I try and control the thing, it seems like I am just falling through the air gracefully. I’ve watched various streamers be able to control where they want it to go, and I am completely in awe of their skill. Right now the closest I can get is to hover over the area I want to go and then fold up the glider by hitting R, causing me to plummet through the air. Obviously this works grand if you are close to the ground, but not so much when you have leapt off of a huge cliff with it. In the later case, I end up cursing the screen as I seem to flail around in midair on the glider.

I feel bad that I have almost entirely ignored anything going on with any of the quests. Since all of the cinematic are in Korean still I just end up skipping thing, which has lead me to feel like the quest dialog itself is completely meaningless as well. So I have zero clue what is going on in the world other than I am helping a series of villages defend against all sorts of things, and I am perfectly fine with that. The more killing I get to do in the course of the leveling the better, and right now I am really enjoying the “Over Achieve” and “Hidden Quest” options gained by going on a murderous rampage. While I seem to be swapping out gear pretty frequently, it doesn’t really feel like I am progressing my character along that easily. I’ve yet to figure out the rhyme or reason behind getting skill points, but I could really use a lot more of them.

Too Themepark

Firstly I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression from this title. I love Themepark MMOs, for what they give me… a carefully curated trip through an interesting world. I find that I enjoy both Sandbox and Themepark MMOs equally, at least generally speaking. However there is just something about Wildstar that maybe takes it a step too far. While playing this game, I literally feel like I am at Six Flags with so many things fighting desperately for my attention. When I walk into an area that I just explored and hear the “Challenge!” sounder it reminds me too much of a midway barker trying to get my attention. I’ve compared the visuals of the game to the Vegas Strip before, but really it reminds me a lot more of an actual real world Themepark. Everything is bright and polished to a shine, with every single inch of space covered with something designed to get my eye to look there. The above screenshot is of one of the rare sparse moments, and when the game is like this… I actually enjoy it. However I had to wait for a few minutes to take this shot for various mobs and players to move out of the way.

I am basically in the same place I have been for a couple of months. I recorded the above video on March 13th and I have had zero forward momentum since then. I’ve gotten on each beta weekend so far to play for a bit, but just found the overall experience lacking. There is a lot about the game that I think I would like, but something just doesn’t sit right with me each time I sit down to play it. The last game I felt this conflicted about was Guild Wars 2, and the end result of that experience is a game that even though I have free access to play it… I never have any desire to do so. With Wildstar I put in my pre-order in part to lock in my goodies for if I ever decided that I DID want to play it. Each day I consider cancelling it, because I am just not “feeling” this title. It isn’t the setting or the races or the goofy character models, but something more deeply set into the game itself. The funny thing is, I have been back playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and enjoying the hell out of it… but Wildstar that is a very similar experience just feels really odd to me. Time will tell if I shun the internet zeitgeist and sit out of this one.

Blue Water Land

I am still working my way through Coldharbor in Elder Scrolls Online, and last night I hit 48. The quests out here feel more epic than the ones leading up to them, in part because everything in Coldharbor seems to be absolutely dripping in lore. One of my joys in any Elder Scrolls title has been killing the various Daedra, and here I have an entire zone full of almost nothing but them. What is interesting is finding all of the inhabitants of the zone that have been tricked into the service of Molag Bal in one fashion or another. Last night I had a really cool moment where I helped out some Argonians and their Hist tree, and another where I gained the trust of a feral pack of Bosmer. This section of the game feels very much like Mass Effect 3, where I am wandering around this zone building an army to fight the daedric prince.

I am trying to decide if I am going to hold out with my level 44 gear until I ding 50. I have a really good daedric shield that just dropped, as well as my prismatic weapon that I am unlikely to replace until I leave cold harbor. Wondering if I can limp along until 50 and then craft an entire set of nice gear then. As of the close of the night I managed to make it roughly halfway to 49, and I still have large swaths of Coldharbor that have been completely unexplored. Still very much loving the experience of the game, but I am definitely finding that I need breaks from playing it. The gameplay towards the end of the game gets really intense, and if I am not feeling 100% I end up taking a lot of un-needed deaths. As a result I have been perforating my long play sessions with trips into ArcheAge, SWTOR and now a little bit of Wildstar. So far I really seem to be enjoying this mix.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #ArcheAge #WildStar #Themepark

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

May 11, 2014May 10, 2014 by Belghast

Graduation Day

I just thought I would start the post off with a picture of two ducks. These are the ducks that we encounter quite often on our evening stroll around the neighborhood. I guess they have decided that we are not really a threat, because shortly after snapping this photo the male duck decided to come up close enough to almost touch. Granted he might have just been putting some distance between me and his mate, but I would like to think we are a recognized thing by now. Now that you’ve had a lovely vignette, let me tell you about my day. My nephew graduated from college today, and being the loving family we are… we attended. This was an experience in both vertigo and insanely uncomfortable seating. For starters the basketball stadium it was held in had some of the steepest seating I had ever experienced. When they asked us to stand for the singing of the national anthem… I literally felt like I was going to topple over the “cliff” and down into the stands below me.

All in all it wasn’t really a bad day, but it was most definitely a tiring one. I did however manage to top 10,000 steps on the fitbit, instead of my usual 8,000 to 9,000. This was in part because we parked four blocks away from the stadium and walked it rather than fighting for parking. The whole side effect of today and what will inevitably happen tomorrow is that I simply do not have the “oomph” to stay up late enough tonight to do a Steampowered Sunday. In fact as early as we are going in the morning to see my mother, I won’t really have a chance to write a blog post in the morning either. As a result I am writing this one Saturday night, and will publish it in the morning. I hate when I have to “cheat” like this, but it is far better to do that than to miss posting something at all.

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

This morning I talked about the little family of robins, that had nested in the white rock. When I came home tonight there were two chicks poking their heads out of the nest until I got close enough to investigate. They instinctively ducked down to try and remain hidden but I was able to get my phone up enough to snap the photo on the side. I feel like each of these photos is somehow softening the blow of what I am about to say. This week you damned near did not get a podcast. Admittedly this is one part miscommunication and one part poor planning on my side. It was Friday during the day when I realized that I would not be home in time to record the podcast. Originally for some reason my wife and I thought my nephews graduation was early in the day. However upon further investigation Friday, we realized that it was at 4 pm in the afternoon. That meant in a best case scenario figuring 2 hours for the graduation, an hour for anything after the graduation, and another 2 hours drive to get back home… this put me being back around 9 pm, and hour after we normally record.

To make things more interesting it seemed as thought both Ashgar and Kodra were not able to record at all this weekend. Ashgar had a similar situation to me and when I spoke with him Friday it was from an airport as he was flying home for his sisters graduation. Kodra on the other hand, I am not really sure what was going on, but he was neither available Friday or Saturday evenings. He would potentially be available very late on Sunday, but that didn’t really give me much time to get things posted, since I normally post our new episodes Sunday. After some scrambling, it seemed as though Tam was also not available. As the day went on Rae and I discussed whether or not we even wanted to record with two people down. I was of the opinion that we would just take the week off, but I guess Rae was really gung ho about going forward. She thought in a worse case scenario it would just be the two of us and we would do a relatively short podcast.

Doctor Hannah to the Rescue

While my wife and I were walking Friday night, Rae was able to get ahold of a good friend of ours Dallian and he was able to fill in for us. I had long thought that Dal might be a really good fit for the show, and him being able to do it on such short notice was almost serendipitous. So we almost did not record the show, but in truth it ended up being one of the more enjoyable ones to make. We talk about a number of gaming topics from Wildstar, to ArcheAge and the obligatory Elder Scrolls Online discussion. We also dip our toes into the world of comic books and Magic: The Gathering and Dallian tells us the riveting tale of how he created the @Doctor_Hannah twitter account. Hopefully the amount of fun we had recording this one translates to our listeners.

Hopefully next week things will be at least partially back to normal. We should have Ashgar and Kodra back, but I believe Rae may not be available. Dallian is coming into town to visit us, and either we will have both Rae and Dallian or neither of them. In any case next week should be interesting as well. At this point I am going to close off this post and crash, as I need to get up super early to make my Mothers Day visitations. I want to wish all the Mother’s out there a very happy day, and I will see you all Monday morning for another early morning post.

#AggroChat #Podcast #ESO #Wildstar #ArcheAge

Technically Alpha

March 14, 2014 by Belghast

I Need an Off Switch

There are times I absolutely hate that my wife can sleep through almost anything, and get to sleep so easily. There is this thing she does that drives me insane, where right before sleep she winds up my brain by revealing some tidbit of knowledge that my mind takes the next hour and a half to digest before it allows me to go to sleep. Over the week we have had a really sick cat, and are treating her for her hyperthyroidism with a cream that I have to rub into her ear twice daily. She is getting better, but doing so very very slowly, so I had planned on calling the vet this morning to see if she needs to be seen again. Moments before my wife went into her nightly coma, she dropped the bombshell that she is not sure that “Little Shit” has been peeing.

Not only did this wake me up, but I went into a full blown panic attack playing the “what if her kidneys are shutting down game”. There was absolutely nothing I could do to calm down and I was up half the night literally… I finally laid down around 2:00 and drifted off to sleep about thirty minutes later when “little shit” decided to join us in bed. Her constant purring I guess clamed me down, because she “seemed fine”. This morning one crisis was adverted when I saw her pee in a place she isn’t supposed to, and another one started when she vomited and there were little red spots in the mixture that looked suspiciously like blood. All the while I am envious of the fact that my wife can sleep on command, and I end up fighting incessantly to get the few hours a night I end up getting. There was one night this week, that I thought was a “normal sleep” and my fitbit told me I had 32 periods of restlessness throughout the course of the evening.

Woah We’re Halfway There

I guess that is a bit misleading since dinging level 30 is by no means halfway to 60 effort wise… but it is at least numerically! Once again I engaged in leveling my Night Elf Mage while hanging out with friends on mumble. These are starting to feel a bit like impromptu podcasts, since we end up talking about the days gaming news and various sundry bits of geeky information. We seem to talk about everything other than the game I happen to be playing at the moment I am streaming. Originally my intent was to stream some Landmark last night, however the servers did not come back up until the wee hours in the morning. I know this because I also streamed some of that during my panic attack state to try and calm the hell down.

All in all as much as I hate to admit it, I am starting to like playing a mage. I am beginning to feel more useful in dungeons now that I have some semblance of an AOE in the form of Cone of Cold. It is still not my preferred method of game play, but I am not absolutely disliking the experience of pushing this character to 60. Yesterday the Godmother of Faff herself, @AlternativeChat posted about a new contest of sorts. The idea is with all the boosting going on, to level your way to 90 proudly with purpose. While I am fully in support of this notion, I am not sure if I qualify for it.

I currently have 6 90s, 2 85+, 2 70+, and my baby mage that my intent was to push to 60 and boost the rest of the way to 90. I feel like I have experienced the leveling content in World of Warcraft more times than most players. So I don’t really feel any shame in using my free boost to jump the character class I am least likely to play to the finish line. However I do feel that most of the folks who have never had a 90, and are using their boost to get there are missing something in the process. Some of the quests you have to struggle through along the way become a shared cultural experience. As much as I hate the “poop” quests of Burning Crusade, I like that I did them and shared in the same frustration as other players. Maybe that is an odd thing to say, but there are very few moments that all players have experienced. Anyways… you should definitely check out the post that sparked this discussion.

Like There is No Tomorrow

Also on the docket of last nights streaming, I decided to take a break from the mage after dinging 30 and play some Wildstar. In truth, once again I checked to see if the Landmark servers were back up yet… and since they were not, I opted to play the thing with the most current NDA drop. I have to say there are certain aspects of the game that are growing on me. The “soldier” archetype and the quests associated have definitely nailed my personal style of game play. Namely… explore the world and kill everything that gets in my path. Once again the “impromptu podcast” aspect of my streams continued as we discussed lots of gaming tidbits. I have literally considered stripping the audio from these videos and stitch them together into a podcast.

This is what nights on mumble are usually like, as we discuss more than just what we happen to be playing at any given time. I still am not really used to hearing my own voice yet, but I will get over that. As far as Wildstar goes… I cover this in the video, but after this weekend the Beta is significantly changing. Up until this point I have had essentially 24/7 access to the servers, and feel like I have generally squandered that by not playing. Once this change occurs I am honestly not sure what kind of access I will have. I know preordering gives you something, but I do not believe that we will keep fulltime access unless we have a 32+ character when the transition happens. Additionally I think those players will be unable to progress past level 17. The whole scenario is rather complicated, and I am not sure yet if I really grasp it. As the thread says, the only sign of a successful compromise is that no one is happy.

No Sleep Til… Landmark!

I had attempted to sleep for about thirty minutes, and then I realized that I was on the verge of going full blown panic attack… I opted to get up for a bit to try and calm myself with the dulcet tones of gaming. Generally speaking in the past when I have needed to relax like this I would play Minecraft, and since Landmark is my new Minecraft… I was thankful the servers were back online. I figured while I was running around anyways, I might as well stream some of it. I didn’t broadcast the fact I was doing so, because really I did not intend to be entertaining or talkative. What the video does show however is the inside of my claim and my latest project… completely redoing the dungeon. I have to admit at this point… it had been a few weeks since I had played Landmark.

Essentially I had gone high center on some of the crafting requirements. In order for me to get better machines and better tools it involved absolutely silly amounts of Burled Wood farming. For those of you who need a refresher, Burled Wood was a rare drop from almost any tree. You originally needed 100 to make a single Burled Wood plank, and then most of these extremely high end crafting machines and tools required 50 or more of these planks. This was one of the worst RNG grinds you could imagine. I simply reached a point where I could not bring myself to chop down the number of trees that it would need to get the things crafted that I wanted crafted.

Thankfully in yesterdays patch they completely turned this mechanic up on end. Now when chopping down trees they drop a single guaranteed “Heartwood” drop, with a rare chance of dropping more than one at a time. These are now the items needed to craft machinery and tools, and Burled Wood has been relegated to a “lesser” and also more reliable drop crafting material off of certain trees. What this means is if you need 27 Heartwood, you know that you will have to farm a maximum of 27 trees to craft that item. Even if you need 90 Heartwood… still having a fixed point that you have to farm is so much better than relying entirely on luck to get the drops you need to complete your projects. Thank you so much for taking this one back to the drawing board.

Technically Alpha

Another very exciting thing happened yesterday… I received an invite to the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the more interesting tidbits about this, is that there is apparently no NDA. We can blog about it, stream it… do whatever we want, with the caveat that we treat it like the alpha that it is. I am perfectly fine with this notion because I have been looking forward to “HotS” as it is lovingly referred to… for some time. Essentially Heroes seems to be set up to fix one of the problems I have with League of Legends. I am all about team play, and when I am playing as a team I only really care about the end objective… our win. When I play shooters I tend to be heavily objective and role based shooters that focus on the win condition and not individual player stats.

So much of the way game play works in League seems to be counter intuitive to playing as a team. Progression is almost solely based on personal performance, not performance of the team. One of the most frustrating mechanics I have experienced is that of “last hitting”, and this concept is entirely gone from Heroes of the Storm. Granted I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with the game play… since I did not realize I even HAD access to the Alpha until about 1 am in the full force of my panic attack. I think I made it about halfway through the tutorial before I made another futile attempt to sleep. So far everything feels like I expect it to, and the tutorial character of Raynor was rather fun to play. I look forward to cracking this open and experiencing the content for real over the weekend. I hope to stream some of it, but with the last beta weekend going on in Elder Scrolls Online… not sure how much of that will actually happen.