World of Warcraft Archives - Page 41 of 109

Space Goats and Paid Content

March 22, 2016 by Belghast

WoW Chronicles

Last Friday I managed to find a copy of the regularly back ordered… World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1. One of the huge problems World of Warcraft has had to date is that a lot of the lore just feels somewhat tacked on. I feel like much of the story was written during some late night unbridled “wouldn’t it be cool if” sessions, and there was a lot of hand waving going on from about Burning Crusade onward. What the chronicles project is trying to do is to set in stone a true canon about the world, and how all of the interlinking pieces actually fit together. I wholeheartedly support this notion… I just wish someone had the foresight to do it a decade ago, or at least when they decided to start really mixing things up with the first expansion. I am sure there has been a penciled together napkin sketch of what the world was intended to look like, that at least partially exists in the minds still of the people working at Blizzard. The problem is when something is not written down and set into print… it becomes too easy to erase a line here and graft on a new segment of lore there that really conflicts with something that came before.

What I am wondering is how much narrative cleanup are they committed to do to make this canon really a living document? While this project doesn’t exactly burn down what was in place before… it does invalidate a lot of things that happened and in other cases it simply explains things that already exist. For example… the book indicates that the Spirit Healers that we have used for years are essentially a rogue faction of Val’kyr. The book goes into depth about the relationship between the void lords, the titans, the old gods, and classifies things that lacked classification like the wild gods which now include the pantheon of August Celestials. What I really hope to see is some of these lore fixes making their way into the game in either the form of new quests, or old quest revisions. I will say that having some sort of concrete font of lore that they can keep going back to, makes me at least somewhat excited for the future of the game. Lore has always been one of the big problems I had with World of Warcraft, and how confused and messy…. and downright incomplete it always seemed. Hopefully we will start to see the fruits of this project with the coming expansion Legion… which even before this seemed like it was going to be a complete loregasm.

Paid Promotional Content

I am going to take the tail end of this mornings post to complain about something that has been bothering me. Granted I know it will do absolutely zero good since it is quite obvious the forces in question are not even reading my blog. For years I have gotten messages from various companies wanting to place paid content on my blog. There is a practice that is frighteningly common that gets called by a bunch of names… but essentially marketers want to pay established blogs to place pre-written and pre-approved articles which serve as a sort of advertising for a product. Essentially the practice makes me feel dirty inside that they are even targeting my blog… but most end up getting caught in the spam filter. Here lately several have made it through on my About page, and I have taken to responding to them directly. I realize I should just brush these off as the byproduct of having blogged for as long as I have, but it really sticks in my craw.

I get super excited about products, and games… and the other things that interest me in the world. I’m a geek and a lot of geekdom is geeking out about something. That said I want to make sure it is understood that when I get excited about something… it is because I am legitimately excited and that there is not some nefarious force behind the curtain pulling my strings. Sure I would love to make money on my blog, or at least love to reach a point where it is self sustaining… the problem is every option to monetize means I am giving up some of my control. For example if I were to install advertisements… I wouldn’t be able to curate WHICH advertisements I allowed onto the site, I would have to accept anything the ad network wanted to place there. So the notion of “supporting” products that I don’t necessarily believe in, really bothers me. As a result I have shunned pretty much all advertising, and while I freely accept alphas and betas to games… I only end up writing about the ones that really interest me. I have friends in the gaming industry, and it is awesome… but no one is paying me to like their product.

Basically what it all boils down to is that my opinion is not for sale. None of the folks that have been approaching me will actually read these lines, but I still feel like it is important to say it loud and publicly. Tales of the Aggronaut has been a work of love for going on seven years now, and while my opinions shift and change based on new data… they are still very much my opinions and not carefully scripted speaking points. That said I will always be open to reviewing products if someone wants me to do so. That said I will only write about the product when I feel like I have had enough time to see the entire picture, and when I have something interesting to say about it. I also will never guarantee a positive review. I am not really a ranty blogger, but I do talk about the points that disappoint me in games or products and that is likely to happen. If someone finds this in a search later on… hopefully they will actually read it before asking me to do something shifty like accepting payola for content. I am extremely luck in that I have a day job that can support my blogging shenanigans, and that I don’t need to somehow turn this into a profit center. I don’t begrudge those who are trying to monetize their content, but I can’t ever really condone shillery.

Of Immersion

March 17, 2016 by Belghast

That Word

One of the things that I have come to realize over the last few days is that apparently immersion in a video game is not really that important to me. What I mean by that is that sense of “losing yourself in a game” and for lack of better verbiage start thinking like your character. This is one of those things that role players do amazingly well, and something that I have honestly always struggled with. So what ends up happening when I play a pen and paper game for example… is that I ultimately always play a version of myself. The same is true for MMOs that I create this “super me” where I change my features to match what I guess internally I consider the idealized version of myself. I created the above imagine some time ago to illustrate that point, that essentially I keep creating the same character over and over… and the games that refuse to allow me to create that character… I quickly lose interest in. The reason why this has reared its head once more is the fact that I keep reading Division reviews that say the same thing. There are a host of critics that find it jarring that they are having to fight people in essentially heavily armored hoodies. There are so many that state that it “breaks their immersion” to fight something that takes so many bullets to make it fall over, even though they are not terribly well armored. This is not the first time something like this has come up, and each time it makes me question… am I ever really immersed in a game?

The thing is… I geek out about the lore and world-building that happens behind the scenes of the worlds that I am inhabiting. I use the world inhabit because there are times I feel like I am wandering around through a realistic looking setting. I remember the sheer awe I felt the first time I left Kaladim in Everquest and turned around to see just how massive the entrance really was. I am a screenshot junkie and I am constantly snapping photos of the various vistas in the games I am playing. I get thoroughly impressed when I am wandering a game like The Division that makes me feel like I am actually wandering Manhattan. The thing is… there is never a point for me where I don’t realize I am playing a video game. I’ve yet to really experience that transcendent moment that some folks talk about, where they blend into the story and get swept away as though it were really happening. I mean a game can tug on my emotions, and make me feel all sorts of things… but it is always a game, and I am always me experiencing it not some other character. I got to thinking about the reason why this might be… and I finally landed on a possible answer. When I am playing games… there is never a moment when I am not also doing something else. If I am downstairs, the television is almost always on in the background, or I am carrying on a conversation with my wife at the same time. If I am upstairs I am monitoring slack, discord or instant messenger conversations on my second monitor (or at least making an attempt at doing so) and while playing PS4 I am constantly waking my PC up when the screen goes to sleep so I can do the same. Even back in the day when I would play a Nintendo or Super Nintendo game in my childhood bedroom… I would be listening to music or trying to jot down notes about where I found this or that. I guess I have always been a habitual multi-tasker with one foot always in the next activity, or the one after that… and because my mind is always thinking about other things and other possibilities it is very hard to get all that engaged in the one I am currently doing. So when I play a game… I want a really awesome world with really fun game mechanics… but a lot of the sticking points that seem to bother other people just simply don’t even register until I read it from someone else’s perspective.

Going Dark

A good chunk of last night was spent doing Mythic Dungeons in World of Warcraft. The normal Wednesday night raid group did not meet this week because we were down four or five people. When I got home I popped into Discord and ultimately wound up logging in and tanking a couple of Mythic dungeons, something that for whatever reason I had never actually done. Of note… unless it is late in the evening there is never a time when I am going to turn tanking for a full guild group. Now if we are having to pug people… you are likely going to see me check out completely, but I really do enjoy tanking for friends and friends of friends. After a couple of runs however I had my fill and ultimately logged from WoW for the evening. I popped into The Division and did a cleaners mission that was super stressful and wound up with me rezzing at the check point a number of times. The problem I have been having is that I am starting to feel severely under geared for my level, so after having watched so many dark zone videos where the loot seems to drop like candy, I decided to make my way over there even though I have heard so many times that “solo dark zone” is a bad idea. Within a few minutes of wandering around, I was absolutely slaughtered by a rogue agent… but the thing is it didn’t really bother me that much because I had yet to actually pick up anything decent. Instead I opted to simply hunt right around the nearest Extraction point, where I noticed there were lots of people who seemed completely happy not to shoot me in the back.

I wandered around for a little bit and in that time managed to successfully extract a couple of loads of stuff. A few of the items were blue upgrades… but the bulk was simply just stuff that I could sell and push me closer to my goal of a nice weapon available on the main base weapons vendor. I had quite a bit of fun, and I can absolutely see how exploring this super dangerous area would be amazing with friends. My schedule has been pretty damned wonky over the last few weeks so I am kinda hoping that I can connect with some of my other friends playing this game over the weekend and do some dark zone fun. I realize that I am in an awkward level not being 30 yet, but I still think it could be a lot of fun to wander around out there and see what we can take down. Last night I finally dinged 15, which again makes me so far behind the pack it isn’t even funny level wise. Lately I had been pushing my way around the lower zones trying to finish them, when in truth I probably should just skip ahead to the 15ish areas and do whatever is available out there. I poked my head into Flatiron and immediately started seeing greens that were massive upgrades over what I happened to be wearing, so I am guessing that is precisely what I should be doing. The problem is… I have spent so much time wandering aimlessly that I have out leveled the areas I still have some quests in. I figure I can always go at a later date and mop those up after I have hit the cap.

Hellfire Assault

March 3, 2016 by Belghast

Weekends are Bad

One strong constant in my life is that weekends are bad for me when it comes to making plans. This is counter-intuitive since for MOST of the living world… weekends are the time they can regularly commit to doing stuff. The truth is that weekends are really the only time that my wife and I are both together and pointed in the same direction for any lengthy period of time. During the week she has a mixture of responsibilities, commitments, and spur of the moment activities that often times keep her from getting home until eight or nine in the evening. Whereas I tend to have a fairly predictable schedule, that gets me home by 5 pm CST most nights. This means that the only time we actually get to do anything as a couple is on the weekends, and as a result I have tried really hard to be pretty sparse with committing myself to things that occur on Saturday or Sunday. I am already breaking that rule heavily with the recording of AggroChat Saturday nights… but generally speaking by the time our 9pm CST start time rolls around we are home anyway. There however have been a long list of activities that have happened on Sunday and Saturday afternoons that I have flaked like mad on. There was the whole pen and paper role-playing game that happened at 2pm CST, that by some freak occurrence I managed to make four or so of… before life caught up with me and I started being unavailable. Then similarly I thought “Sunday is TV Night” and started trying to raid with my friends Horde side… only to find that I am just barely making it into my chair some nights before Walking Dead. As it gets nicer outside… we push back our range of activity further… so pretty much the entire summer months are a no-go for planned activities on the weekend.

As a result I thought I was pretty much done raiding in World of Warcraft at least until Legion hits. Then my good friend Carth decided to pull together a casual raid group and after everyone voted on the best day of the week… I lucked out and it landed on Wednesday nights. This is pretty much the perfect raid night for me, given that my wife is already committed to church that evening and I can pretty much do whatever I want to do without causing a major imposition. Last night was the first official outing, and we planned on raiding from 7:30 pm cst to 10 pm cst but wound up going a little over due to the overall successes of the group. We absolutely had a few “ringer” dps in the mix, but even accounting for that… I think we did really well. For a bit we would end up having to pug some people… but we managed to pull together a 10+ player team. The roster was super comfortable and included so many long time friends: Carthuun (on Aalis), Tick (on Taavish), Giulietta, Kylana, Edana (@catinglasses), Jasmynne (Carth’s Wife), Bleddwen (@KerynWeylan)…. with myself and Damai tanking and a mixture of ringers that cycled through for which I don’t know all of the mains from Praetorian Guard.

Significant Progress

We did significantly better than I expected on our first outing. We managed to clear up to Iskar in a single evening, and the only boss we really struggled a bit at was Kilrogg. That is pretty much the first fight where the mechanics really start to matter, and as a result it took us two attempts for folks to get the whole visions thing down solidly. On the second go however everything seemed to just work like plan. It was a bit messy at the end, but any kill you walk away from with a victory is a good kill in my book. The awesome thing about all of this as well is that we got a lot of gear for people who needed it. Bleddwen one of the two healers… that was quite literally drafted last night on the spot… walked away with I believe eight pieces of gear. Our other healer walked away with three pieces, but one of those was a tier set piece. I managed to pick up my first piece of tier gear as well, and I am hoping next go round Kormrok will be nice and drop the Warrior piece so I can throw on that two piece bonus. As much as I loved raiding with my Horde side family, I have to say it felt good to be Belghast again in a raid. I mean I have done Gladiator dps for awhile now, and it is really fun… but what I mean is Belghast the tank. It kinda felt good to go back to my roots with the character that was my main through most of those really memorable fights.

It doesn’t hurt that the folks that we raided with… are for the most part the folks I play all of these games with. The two healers we had… have healed me many times in Final Fantasy XIV so it felt natural to see that relationship shift to World of Warcraft. The awesome thing about this as well is that it seems like we have two tanks and two healers locked down solidly. That means we probably need a shift healer and potentially a shift tank to fill in the gap, but otherwise we have a really solid team. There is a certain amount of learning mechanics on the fights, like Iskar… but I forsee us being able to start Heroic before too long. It would be amazing if we could push through it as well and get folks some Moose loving. In any case it was a nice, relaxing and casual raid night, with the folks I probably would have been hanging out with anyways. The only gotcha seemed to be that we were having trouble with our normal Teamspeak server, and as a result are probably going to be migrating to Discord for next week. I had been wanting to give Discord a real world trial, and this seems as good as any time. I love the concept, and I just wish that it were a slack plugin rather than a completely separate application. For text chat purposes, I still like Slack and their notification system just works better… however for voice… at least based on testing last night Discord is seeming to be the new way to go.

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast

Contemplating Forge

Last night was another night that was all over the place. Firstly I decided to reinstall Forge.gg and give it another chance. I have so many mixed emotions about this service, I like the concept that I can grab short clips at the end of my gaming session. I dislike the fact that I can ONLY grab short clips, which are generally too short to show a boss fight for example. I like the always on nature, and that it can just run in the background without me feeling like I need to be entertaining. However I ran into some issues last night where apparently even though I had push to talk set… it was still actively picking up my microphone the entire time as you can see in the above clip. So you get a snippet of a conversation between my wife and I about something I don’t even remember. I like the idea of streaming but I don’t always want to be actively interacting, and forge is this great middle ground. Ultimately I wound up muting my microphone at a system level just to make sure that it was not picking up. I am hoping this is just a bug in the current client, and I will crawl the site to see if I can find out why this was happening.

The other gotcha it seems is that it did not pick up and start recording Elder Scrolls Online. I spent the first part of the evening doing garrison dailies and doing at least one Tanaan objective in World of Warcraft and it recorded all of that perfectly. However as soon as I swapped into ESO, it never came up with the forge icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen letting me know it is recording. I will say that the really really nice thing about the client is sometime in between my last attempt at using the service and this one… it seems to work nicer with Fraps because there is no way I am giving up that just to use the service. I am too used to having a common and centralized screenshot tool for all of the games I play. It is an absolute necessity that I have a fresh source of new screenshots for this blog, and I hate having to try and find the screenshot directory for each individual game. So instead I tend to unbind the screenshot key if it is allowed and just use Fraps for everything. It was awesome last night that I was able to use fraps just fine while still recording on forge…. at least when it came to World of Warcraft. I am going to be a sad panda if that ends up being the issue with it recording Elder Scrolls Online.

Return to Greenshade

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The bulk of my time last night was spent wandering around Greenshade in the Elder Scrolls Online. Generally speaking I tend to play this game by wandering aimlessly from objective to objective, but last night I actually seemed to move through the zone with a purpose. That purpose being ingratiating myself to the Court of the Wilderking, a forest spirit that controls the Valenwood and that the local Bosmer worship as a God King. As part of trying to quell the rebellion and steal forces away from the Veiled Heritance, my mission was simple… get the support of the Wilderking to get the support of the local forces…. thus ending the rebellion. I of course did a bunch of other stuff along the way, and I am not entirely complete with the main story sequence… but I am having a blast. I got sidetracked in helping a friend level in World of Warcraft, and then again by the Love is in the Air event…. and finally I am settling back into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. Granted currently I will probably continue to hop games like mad because there is just so damned much stuff that I want to be playing. In Elder Scrolls I have yet to see any of the Imperial City content, or Orsinium… and they are just about to release the Thieves Guild as well. So much catching up to do… but at the same time I feel like I have all the time in the world to do it because I am not playing the game at a serious end game focused level.

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The other big happening of the night is that I finally dinged Veteran Rank 4, allowing me access to the next tier of crafted gear. I was doing awesome…. until I screwed up and rushed to get my shield made and forgot to go to the set crafting area. Originally I was planning on having 5 piece Alessia’s Bulwark, and 4 piece Ashen Grip… except I am now sitting at 3 pieces in that set because I got sidetracked and ended up making a non-set shield. Unfortunately I am completely out of the right kind of wood so I will need to do some more adventuring before I can finish things out. For the time being I have opted to abandon my costume and go with the actual armor look because I dig the Imperial armor look. I will probably always favor the Dunmer sword type, though recently I did enjoy using an axe for a bit. The game looks amazing on the laptop, and I am so damned happy with how well everything is performing to be honest. It does get a little hot but then again what gaming laptop doesn’t. My previous one had a SLI graphics card configuration so had insanely hot air venting out of both sides of the laptop. At least this setup isn’t continuously baking my mouse hand. I just need to sort out why exactly Forge was not recording the game.

The Division

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Also looming on the near horizon is the launch of The Division. At this point it is absolutely certain that I will be playing it on the PC, at least at first. When the price comes down a little I will probably also pick it up for the PS4 so that I have access to it for any of the friends that happen to be playing there. For the last few days since the end of the beta I have trying to sort out how best to organize folks for the upcoming launch. The game itself does not really have guilds or clans or any structure like that…. at least that I saw in the two betas I have been part of. So as a result this is going to make getting stuff going a little more difficult than in other games. However my friend Sigtric, the man who coined the hashtag #BelEffect is firing up a Discord group and attempting to get it to be the official/unofficial chat server for the game. If you are going to be playing I highly suggest you pop by and join the “Gone Rogue” community. There is a shared general chat and breakout channels for PC, PS4, and Xbox One to make organizing things a little easier. I honestly wish I had something like this for Destiny. Discord is one of those things that is growing on me, and while I still find Slack easier to use… there is a point in the near future where I could see abandoning traditional voice servers and moving to Discord entirely.