AggroChat #137 – The Diablo 2 Game Show

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Thalen discuss the November/December AggroChat Game Club Title – Diablo 2.

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Tonight we wrap up season 3 of AggroChat with the November/December AggroChat Game Club Title Diablo 2.  This pick was made by Grace and is largely an attempt at seeing just how well this game still holds up as compared to the titles we are used to.  Join us as we talk about reconciling our memories of the game with the reality of playing it again.  Additionally we get into a bunch of slantwise connected discussions during the process.  

Games Played 2016 Edition

Games Played 2016 EditionFirst I want to take a quick moment to talk about the awesome avatar adorning the right side of this paragraph.  Some time ago I talked about doing the Icecrown Challenge and to the best of my knowledge most of the folks I challenged have since completed their own and donated some money to the cause.  I still feel slightly sorry for Mort who ended up taking almost 50 minutes to get through the raid because had apparently never actually raided during Wrath of the Lich King.  I did the challenge because one…  I end up doing Icecrown Citadel almost every week anyways, and two because of the weird connection that Ratsel and I just found out that we have.  Then of course there is always the part that it is a good cause.  Of all of the reasons however… none of them was to win any prizes but apparently I did.  The prize I happened to win was the amazing Faebelina doing an avatar, and instead of my character I chose to have her do a “Me”.  So I supplied her some images and set her loose in a specific direction… and largely wanted to see what she came up with on her own.  The end result is something really interesting that so far everyone has said “yup, that looks like you”.  In the end though I really need to get the hat, hoodie and shirt so I can cosplay myself.  I am mostly using it on my “real life” accounts but I wanted to show it off nonetheless because I think it is really cool.
Games Played 2016 Edition

Full Spreadsheet Link

Last year I realized that with the whole daily blogging thing that I had a decent way of telling exactly what games I had played during the year.  Like I often do I took to Google Sheets and started a spreadsheet trying to track what games I played during what months.  This year I went sorta overboard with that concept and you see the image above as a result.  Essentially if I talked about a game during a given month… I put a 1 in that square and ultimately colored it it.  Then in the last column I did a calculation that added up all of the months that a given game appeared in… and as a result you have the sort above…  by number of months played and then alphabetically.  The first thing we can take away from this graphic is that there is no denying the fact that I am an online and MMO gamer.  Based on the data above I played the following MMOs…

  • World of Warcraft – All Twelve Months
  • Destiny – 10 Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 10 Months
  • Rift – 8 Months
  • Diablo 3 – 6 Months
  • The Division – 5 Months
  • Guild Wars 2 – 4 Months
  • Overwatch – 4 Months
  • ArcheAge – 3 Months
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 3 Months

As far as non-online games that I played…  you end up dropping down significantly into single digit territory with only a handful of games like Fallout 4, Skyrim, and No Man’s Sky making that repeat list.  The big shocker for me is always seeing all the various singlets I end up playing throughout the year that I completely forget about.  All told I played 57 different games during the year… which seems like a lot but is a bit down from last year and it’s 67 unique games.  So I feel like the real tale of the year is just how much World of Warcraft and Destiny I wound up playing.  Sure FFXIV is up there at 10 months but some of that is a technicality while I was subbed but only logging in once a week or every few weeks.  Destiny and World of Warcraft really were constant things throughout the course of the year.  This was the year I feel like I really learned to love WoW again, more than just a passing fancy that let me play with my friends.  With the launch of Legion I was legitimately and unabashedly happy to be playing the game for the first time since the launch of Cataclysm.  In fact Destiny dropped off the Radar only for the blip around the launch of Legion because I was just playing that game so damned much.

Even More Madness

Games Played 2016 Edition

Full Spreadsheet Link

The problem with spreadsheets is that they crave more data… and once I start down a path I tend to go into really insane territory.  I had data that I had collected for 2015, and now data that I had collected for 2016.  I wondered what would happen if I went all the way back to 2013, the year I first started the daily blogging experiment.  Now of note… the 2013 data is super spotty given that I did not officially start the daily blogging thing until April.  However I managed to piece together some data based on my archive of screenshots mixed with actual data from the blog.  The end result is a view of the games I have played since 2013 copied into my weird google sheets format.  Once again you can see that I really am an MMO Gamer overall.  The top ten games played in total number of months is as follows…

  1. World of Warcraft – 37 Months
  2. Final Fantasy XIV – 35 Months
  3. Rift – 35 Months
  4. Elder Scrolls Online – 24 Months
  5. Destiny – 19 Months
  6. Diablo 3 – 16 Months
  7. ArcheAge – 13 Months
  8. Wildstar – 12 Months
  9. Everquest II – 11 Months
  10. Guild Wars 2 – 9 Months
  11. Trove – 9 Months

Of note… Trove and Guild Wars 2 are technically tied for 10th place with the same number of months.  The only one that gets a little weird is Elder Scrolls Online, because I am counting time spent playing in the Alpha and Beta process which I could not of course talk about on my blog.  However I entered that process in February of 2013 and we had one or two events a month through launch.  During that four year period I played 172 different unique games.  Again however if you look at the distribution of titles played…  you have to go pretty far on the list until you get into single player territory with Minecraft, Fallout 4 and Final Fantasy V leading there.  Minecraft technically can be a multiplayer game, but generally speaking I go on single player building binges.  Final Fantasy V pretty much accounts for all of the years I have gotten talked into participating in the Four Job Fiesta thanks to Ashgar.

At some point I want to true up the data even further by going through my screenshot archive and sorting it by dates.  I have literally every screenshot I have taken over the last several years archived and sorted by game sitting on a network attached storage device.  I am maybe a little obsessive about such things, especially since screenshots tend to play such a large role in my blog.  I like having a deep archive of things that I can go back to for getting reference material.  From that I should be able to get a few more games that maybe I played but didn’t actually write about.  However I think for the most part this represents a pretty true picture of my gameplay for the last four years.  It took awhile to compile, but much of it was done while hanging out downstairs on the laptop as we watched something on television.  The end result gives me a really interesting tool to use going forward, and I plan on keeping the spreadsheet up to date as I go through 2017.  The biggest thing we can take away from this however is that…  firstly I am a creature of habit and keep returning to the same games over and over.  Secondly I tend to be one of those players that keeps returning to MMOs that I have played in the past to see how they are getting along.  Lastly…  I really do not play the number of single player games that I would like to play, mostly because while playing them I get lonely.  It feels strange to roam around a world without lots of other people sharing it with me.

 

 

 

Tunneling Addiction

Tunneling Addiction

I think we need to talk.  I have a significant problem on my hands… and that problem is Minecraft.  What I mean by that is that I have been obsessing about the game since Christmas day, and wound up staying up until 1:30 last night.  I apparently was digging more tunnels that never seem to end… and just when they appear that they might… I find a way to start a new one.  I’ve said before how my bases in Minecraft tend to be more a complex of interconnected tunnels and underground areas than really anything big and above ground…  and in truth that is happening again in a big way.  The project I happened to be obsessed with last night, however was my treasure room.

Tunneling Addiction

When I play Minecraft, it is less that I am willfully building structures and more like discovering them in the existing land.  I almost always start out exactly the same way… which is burrowing into the side of a nice large hill with the purpose of creating a temporary shelter to survive that first night.  However what inevitably happens is that I then use that cave as a sort of starting point for burrowing deep into the hillside and connecting up a bunch of disconnected areas.  Then it is almost as though I am uncovering a lost civilization… and connecting up pieces to create a former empire or something.  Which lead to the thought that I really needed a proper warehouse/treasure room… and where better to put it than deep under the ocean.  I have a dock of sorts and off of it is a large building hovering out over the water… which then leads to my obsession of the night which is a large stairwell shaft that leads down into the water and underground beneath the ocean finally ending up in a room with tons of chests for storage…. and then apparently I dug a shaft back up to create a skylight of sorts.

Tunneling Addiction

There was then a point last night when I realized that I had no real way of getting back out of my tunnel system other than jumping from one of the many bridges I have built.  As a result I constructed this entrance point of sorts that leads out onto the mainland…  and being me I then apparently started off a whole new tunnel complex to the left of the above screenshot.  Now my previous tunnels had quickly ended up in the ocean… where I built some sort of an outpost.  One of which literally is a staircase that goes deep down into the ocean and all the way down to bedrock.  That was a bit of a challenge to build and I ultimately flipped on creative mode since I had to be underwater for large chunks of time during its construction.  It is cool however because as you are going down the staircase I have windows that allow you to see out into the ocean and it is really cool when the sun is coming up and the water is swarming with squid.

Tunneling Addiction

This new tunnel project however that has consumed most of today… is apparently going off in a direction where there is nothing but land and mountains.  So as a result each time the tunnel has broken free of the mountain briefly I have created a little outpost or at least an exit into whatever area happens to be surrounding it.  There are roughly five of these… and another that I discovered yet another ravine while tunneling, so I took time to build a ladder all the way down to its floor.  The problem with my tunneling obsession is that I have zero clue where exactly I am going or if I will ever reach a point where I consider it “done”.  This is ultimately the challenge I face each time I boot back up Minecraft, is that I get caught up in a project that I never quite know when it is going to let go of me.  However since it had literally been a few years since I last built anything in the game… I am guessing I had a lot of tunneling pent up inside of me.

Tunneling Addiction

Tunneling Addiction

I think we need to talk.  I have a significant problem on my hands… and that problem is Minecraft.  What I mean by that is that I have been obsessing about the game since Christmas day, and wound up staying up until 1:30 last night.  I apparently was digging more tunnels that never seem to end… and just when they appear that they might… I find a way to start a new one.  I’ve said before how my bases in Minecraft tend to be more a complex of interconnected tunnels and underground areas than really anything big and above ground…  and in truth that is happening again in a big way.  The project I happened to be obsessed with last night, however was my treasure room.

Tunneling Addiction

When I play Minecraft, it is less that I am willfully building structures and more like discovering them in the existing land.  I almost always start out exactly the same way… which is burrowing into the side of a nice large hill with the purpose of creating a temporary shelter to survive that first night.  However what inevitably happens is that I then use that cave as a sort of starting point for burrowing deep into the hillside and connecting up a bunch of disconnected areas.  Then it is almost as though I am uncovering a lost civilization… and connecting up pieces to create a former empire or something.  Which lead to the thought that I really needed a proper warehouse/treasure room… and where better to put it than deep under the ocean.  I have a dock of sorts and off of it is a large building hovering out over the water… which then leads to my obsession of the night which is a large stairwell shaft that leads down into the water and underground beneath the ocean finally ending up in a room with tons of chests for storage…. and then apparently I dug a shaft back up to create a skylight of sorts.

Tunneling Addiction

There was then a point last night when I realized that I had no real way of getting back out of my tunnel system other than jumping from one of the many bridges I have built.  As a result I constructed this entrance point of sorts that leads out onto the mainland…  and being me I then apparently started off a whole new tunnel complex to the left of the above screenshot.  Now my previous tunnels had quickly ended up in the ocean… where I built some sort of an outpost.  One of which literally is a staircase that goes deep down into the ocean and all the way down to bedrock.  That was a bit of a challenge to build and I ultimately flipped on creative mode since I had to be underwater for large chunks of time during its construction.  It is cool however because as you are going down the staircase I have windows that allow you to see out into the ocean and it is really cool when the sun is coming up and the water is swarming with squid.

Tunneling Addiction

This new tunnel project however that has consumed most of today… is apparently going off in a direction where there is nothing but land and mountains.  So as a result each time the tunnel has broken free of the mountain briefly I have created a little outpost or at least an exit into whatever area happens to be surrounding it.  There are roughly five of these… and another that I discovered yet another ravine while tunneling, so I took time to build a ladder all the way down to its floor.  The problem with my tunneling obsession is that I have zero clue where exactly I am going or if I will ever reach a point where I consider it “done”.  This is ultimately the challenge I face each time I boot back up Minecraft, is that I get caught up in a project that I never quite know when it is going to let go of me.  However since it had literally been a few years since I last built anything in the game… I am guessing I had a lot of tunneling pent up inside of me.