November 2018 – Page 3

Thanksgiving Ramble

November 22, 2018 by Belghast

This morning’s post is going to be fairly rambly… so just letting my brain go where it takes me.

For anyone who might be curious, as far as we can tell everything went well yesterday. Mother-in-law made it through the biopsy just fine and while she was a little out of it from the after effects of the anesthesia, but someone hung out with her last night to make sure all was right. We expect to see her today, but so far everything seems okay. The doctor made a comment that it did not look cancerous, but it will be awhile before we hear anything official back. However I want to thank everyone that reached out to me about it yesterday, I greatly appreciate it.

For those of us in the United States it is Thanksgiving, which in itself is a holiday with a shady past. However I do like the general concept of taking a day out to spend time with those you care about, share a nice meal, and remember all of those things that you are thankful for. A few years back I did this thing that I called a Month of Thankfulness, and tacked a paragraph or two onto the tail end of my blog post every morning. I had all intention of rebooting it this year, but as November 1st ticked around… It just did not happen. Given how busy and frustrating this month has been for me personally… it was probably a good idea.

Firstly I want to say that I am exceedingly blessed or lucky depending upon your point of view. I am constantly humbled by the fact that I got where I am today because of the help of countless individuals along the way who gave me the time of day and decided to take an interest in me as a human being. I’m not a very competitive individual, and I think I am proof that you don’t necessarily have to be to get ahead in the world. In fact I think collaboration and helping others is just as valid a means of forward momentum… as trampling others with your ambition.

That said I also feel like it is my responsibility to help out others as much as I can. Leading guilds and building communities was always my way of making this happen, and more recently that skill set has been applied to managing a team of fifteen individuals with all of their different needs. This is one of those moments where I wish gaming were more accepted, but as someone in management… I can tell you that everything you learn as a guild and raid leader is completely applicable to leading individuals in the workplace. Getting folks to band together to kill an imaginary monster is no less valid than trying to get them to finish a project by the deadline.

I’m very lucky that I have a partner in this journey that while she may not be into all of the things that I am… still considers them completely valid. She has her things and I support her in them, and she supports me in mine. I am also very lucky in that we have a comfortable life where we can both be doing our own things at the same time… but also feel like we are spending time together. That interaction though can easily transition into one of our many jaunts out into the world to go wandering and looking for interesting things. We’ve been together for over two decades at this point, and I cannot fathom existing without my navigator.

I am also extremely thankful to the AggroChat podcast crew and the assorted friends of the podcast we have gathered over the years. This group has become a family that I care about deeply, and even if we don’t happen to be playing the same game at the same time… is a place that I can easily settle into and that accepts me for my transient ways. While I have struggled at times with the constraints of recording a weekly podcast, there is no group of people I would rather be doing it with. I love all of my co-hosts so much, and if tomorrow we decided to stop it all… none of that would change.

I am extremely thankful to the folks who hang around and comment on my blog and who make up the greater blogging community that participate in events like Blaugust. You are all an inspiration to me each time I venture and and visit your blogs. The fact that I have a community is a good part of the reason why I keep talking. So often when you have a blog it feels like you are shouting into the void, and while I honestly find it easier to write like I am talking to myself… it is nice knowing that there is actually someone out there. We’ve shared so many events through this blog, and as I have said so many things… it is part confession, part exposition and part therapy. Thanks for being willing to keep reading my nonsense.

I think one of the hallmarks of my generation… is the fact that we have very permeable lines as to what constitutes family. For my mom, it is very much a case of blood is stronger than anything else, but weirdly I never latched onto that notion. I consider anyone who I care about and who is there for me… to be family. The news has been making a big deal about “Friendsgiving” this year, but in truth I would never refer to it as such. My friends are just as much my family as the one I was born into.

Maybe it is a side effect of not really having ever seen eye to eye with much of my family, or the fact that as my grandparents passed away… all of those formal holiday structures faded with them. Today I am going to be spending time with an assemblage of my parents and friends of the family, and it feels no less valid to me personally than we used to have to squeeze twenty people around a dining room table that only got the leaves put it in once a year. It will be a blend of my family, my wife’s family, and a few people that we wanted to make sure had a gathering to go to. The thing is… I think the most important part of Thanksgiving is the symbolic act of sharing a meal with the ones you love.

I am going to go ahead and wrap this post up because otherwise I will have written another four page epic… that on one actually wants to read. I hope all of you out there have a very Happy Thanksgiving… and even if you are not in the United States… take some time over the next few days to share a meal with some of the people that are important to you in life. That is the root of why I care about Thanksgiving, and it is that moment and tradition that I am thankful for among so many other things.

Lurk Longsword

November 21, 2018 by Belghast

This morning is a little bit odd given that I am not at work, but also had to get up at 5:30 like normal. I guess I technically didn’t but I still have things that need to get done. My mother in law is going into the hospital today for a lung biopsy, so I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, prayers or just general good vibes channeled her direction. Our hope is of course that it isn’t anything serious, but just the act of taking a biopsy from your lungs is fairly serious. A few days ago I wrote about how hardcore mobile gamers can be, and I guess further evidence proves that even more true. Yesterday I booted up Walking Dead Our World while waiting on a meeting just to check and see what objectives I should be focused on… and found that I had been kicked from the group that I wrote about. It seems as thought a group leader can see various stats about the players, and it appears that it is common place to purge anyone not killing at least 200 walkers a day.

I am WAY more casual than that… and I had apparently somehow avoided notice for a few weeks before the hammer dropped down upon me. I don’t even really know the people in the clan, but it was surprising how much it generally bummed me out. I’ve since joined another group, but I have to say… the drive to play is largely gone. Previously I felt like I was working towards something with a bunch of other players, but now I mostly just don’t care as I have to get acclimatized to another group of randos. I’ve contemplated forming my own group and calling it something along the lines as “Casual AF” and just seeing what sort of players I get to join. The clan size is limited to 25 players, so if you are in a group of high achievers I totally get why they might want to punt casuals. The objectives are things like kill 300 armored walkers with a specific character, and in a given encounter you might come across two of them… meaning at that rate you would have to take out 150 of these randomly occurring encounters to get the objective. The game is balanced for hardcore players, so also maybe not balanced for me personally. It was interesting while it lasted.

One of the things I love about the Kulve Taroth event is the random weapons that you end up walking away with. Generally speaking there are a few gems scattered in amongst the dross… and one of them is this longsword. The base damage is a little low, but it makes up for it in the utility of having a longsword with fairly reasonable paralysis on it. Ultimately I have been using this a lot as I have been taking on the Devil May Cry event quest where you fight four different monsters, and this ends up giving a fairly early proc of paralysis to help out the burn phase. It also works shockingly well on Kulve Taroth itself, which is goofy given how damned big that is to see it paralyzed. It does allow for a lot of good burn time whenever it happens which makes me heavily favor the weapon, and if I shifted out my item build a bit I could get quite a bit of white sharpness on it.

I also spent a good deal of time last night playing Final Fantasy XIV and managed to get off high center in the quest chain. There was a very specific quest that I was struggling with, that involved killing a bunch of mech suits that cast self destruct. This stupid thing took me roughly four attempts to finally get through it, and is one of those fights where the NPCs are vulnerable to death… and if they die you instant fail. I finally figured out exactly what I was supposed to be doing and on the last attempt it felt way less arbitrary. I will say this is one of the frustrations at times with Final Fantasy XIV… is that for all of the really good visual messaging… there are at times in the solo quests that they don’t give you much of an explanation of what you are supposed to be doing. My hope however is that this gets me unstuck and I can continue questing my way through all of the Main Story Quest content that I had missed.

Tiny Samurai vs Eureka

November 20, 2018 by Belghast

One of the things that happened over the weekend that we did not talk about on the podcast, nor have I mentioned on the blog… was the reveal of the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion Shadowbringers at the Las Vegas Fan Fest. I mentioned Fan Fest when I was talking about BlizzCon and how they only hold one when they have a big announcement to give us information about. As such you go into the experiencing knowing you are going to see something really cool, and while the trailer for Shadowbringers is cool… it was not the big reveal of the weekend. That said I do find it interesting that we are not going where I thought we were going at various points in the Stormblood storyline. It seems like in order to restore balance… we are to become the Warrior of Darkness.

The more important reveal however was that of the Blue Mage… aka the MMO class that I questioned if was even possible to do in a multiplayer game. With it they are introducing this concept of “Limited Jobs” and by that they mean Jobs that you can do… but are purely solo/open world only. Blue Mage will launch with 4.5 and be locked to a maximum of level 50 in progression. Like a Blue Mage in any other Final Fantasy game, you will not learn new skills by leveling up and instead learn them by fighting the monsters that perform certain abilities. So to learn Bad Breath you will need to fight a Morbal and watch it do that move… or similarly you will need to watch a Sabotender do 1000 Needles to be able to pick it up and start doing it yourself. I really dig this concept because it allows them to do this class with all of its flavor and power… without having to worry about balancing it against any other class. Level 5 Death would have been super hard to balance around… and I am wondering if they will start bringing other challenging classes in to the game under this Limited Jobs banner.

All of this thought about Final Fantasy XIV lead me to patch it up, and attempt to figure out where the hell I left off in the Stormblood post expansion main story quest. I bounced very hard on Stormblood and I am still not entirely certain why, but after leveling the Warrior and then grinding up the Samurai… I just ran out of steam. I’ve made a few attempts to get engaged again and similarly bounced out. Hell recently there have been a few times I logged into the game and then right back out when I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed to do in order to gain traction. All of this time however Sol has kept Greysky Armada active and there is a group of folks that do a cycle of regular events. Last night was Eureka night and I decided to log in and join the shenanigans.

Ultimately it was myself, Mor, eventually Neph and a character that I have seen around but can’t really place a person to… being babysit by Pix who deserves a hero medal for easing us all into the concept of Eureka. I remember when this first opened I spent some time solo grinding and managed to make it to level 2 just by killing random stuff. It seemed insanely grindy and a love song to Final Fantasy XI which itself was effectively the Japanese version of Everquest. Soloing it was miserable but with a group of friends it felt an awful lot better. Even more so once we started gathering up the materia shards that effectively gave us a 60% damage boost. I entered the night at level 2 and managed to push through to level 8 before we finally called it because it was getting late.

Seriously Pix deserves massive thanks at herding us around Eureka and helping us get the objectives we needed to get knocked out. Effectively he was out of group and AOE taunting everything onto him… while we sat there killing it down as fast as possible. As a result I spent most of the night as Samurai and while it took me a bit to remember how to play the class it eventually came back. When Neph joined us I feel like she went through the same thing with Machinist… which I guess is to be expected for as long as we have been gone. I know they have other themed nights, like one in which they do crafting maps… so for the time being I am probably going to be logging in and doing those activities at least until I get my bearings. I had an awful lot of fun, and I most of it was due to the fact that I was getting to hang out with a bunch of friends that I had not hung out with in a really long time.

Let’s Go Thoughts

November 19, 2018 by Belghast

Without really intending to… this weekend became largely about Let’s Go Pokemon, the new Pokemon game that released on the Nintendo Switch Friday. I went with Eevee, because quite honestly it is one of my favorite Pokemon largely for the sheer versatility that is available in the evolved forms. The starter Eevee however will be permanently locked in its adorable pupa stage, and I am mostly okay with that… as it keeps me from having to try and figure out which way I want to evolve my Pokemon. I decided to give my Eevee the super adult name of Wigglebum.

Similarly I decided to give my rival the super adult name of Buttface, because in most of the other Pokemon games that I have played… they turn out to be a dick. Unfortunately this one is rather awesome, and constantly cheering us on and giving us free stuff. Now I feel sorta bad when I am in a cutscene with the two of us… and I see the monaker that I unfairly bestowed upon them. Blue however is around to play the role of the butthead, but even he seems better behaved than I remember him… or in my case it was Red that was the Butt since I played Pokemon Blue not Red.

A few days ago my friend Hestiah posted a thread where she commented on a few of the Pokemon Go names that she came up as she caught them. This made me realize how generally boring I am when it comes to catching Pokemon, in that I never actually give them names. Maybe it feels better when I send them back to the professor to grind into candy if I didn’t name them in the first place. Ultimately she is the one who inspired all of this serious adulting… and has trickled down to the individual Pokemon as well. ZappyGirl started her life as ShockyRat, and then I decided to name her based on the whole Zappy Boi meme… and thankfully this game lets you rename your charges whenever the hell you want to.

The interesting thing about Let’s Go as a game is that it seems way the hell more sticky for me personally than any other Pokemon game to date. The truth is I don’t really like Pokemon combat, and it always felt weird to be beating up on random woodland creatures. In this game it has adopted a Pokemon Go sort of approach where the individual Pokemon appear and you walk over to them to engage in a capture session… where you have all of the same tools as you do in the handheld game. If you are playing in handheld mode you simply center the screen on the pokemon and throw the ball… if you are playing docked you have to do some motion controlling nonsense with a dettached joycon in order to capture. I am super disappointed that I could not play with my Pro Controller and just mimic the same behavior I do in handheld mode… as such I am largely playing this game undocked which sorta makes me a little sad.

Traditional combat still exists and is reserved for dueling other trainers, which feels a little better than kicking the ass of every random pidgey that happens across your path while roaming between two areas. Wigglebum however is a soul less killing machine and gives zero fucks about beating up her kin. She believes in Highlander rules… and there can be only one Eevee. The interesting thing about random trainer battles is just how insanely lucrative they are, and the fact that apparently you never really need to buy Pokeballs in this game? Most battles reward anywhere between 3 and 5 Pokeballs… and have just started paying out in Great Balls helping me keep in stock of those as well. When I am playing in motion control mode I fail an awful lot so I am guessing they are paying out to help stop the frustration of Nintendo and their determination to make me do stupid shit with my hands while playing their games.

The game feels extremely good and while it is mimicking Red and Blue… that doesn’t somehow ruin my experience because I have not played either of those since 1999/2000ish on a Gameboy Emulator? This is mostly a fresh experience to me and while it seems really familiar… I can largely chock it up to the fact that ALL Pokemon games feel somewhat familiar. I spent just shy of 9

hours over the weekend playing Pokemon Let’s Go, and while that might not sound like a ton of time… it is for me when it comes to a Pokemon game. I tend to bounce off of them pretty fast, and this time I just kept playing… until my switch battery ran out… and then went upstairs to dock it and try playing some more.

I am not terribly far progressed, but at this point I have made it through three Gyms and quite honestly the only one I had any issues with was Misty and the Water type gym. The only real problem there was Starmie and its inexplicable fire type moves??? I limped through it, but I had to take two runs at getting through her. Surge and Brock were both easy as hell and largely fell over when I attacked them. There are a bunch of weird moves that you can teach your starter, and according to Ashgar… while they have horrible names they are actually really good. So I might make my way back to that NPC and try a few of them. So far Doublekick and Tackle have been my money attacks… and everything else seems to largely be expendable.

Ultimately the game is super charming and if you like the concept of Pokemon, but maybe struggled a bit to get into it… I highly suggest you check this game out. If you are a Pokemon purist, some of the changes might frustrate you… but then again it is a Pokemon game so admit it… you are probably going to play it anyways. I’ve linked my Pokemon Go account but have not made it to the area of the game where it allows you to swap stuff back and forth. Last night Ash and I were going to try trading some stuff, but I ultimately fell asleep… so I will try and catch up with him tonight and do that thing. All in all… super fun game and my wife was shocked to see me playing it instead of something with more death, gore and dismemberment. There is still a time for childlike wonder in the Tales of the Aggronaut.

If you are so inclined… we also talk quite a bit about the game on the podcast this weekend.