July 2015 – Page 15

Sohm Al with Neighbors

July 3, 2015July 2, 2015 by Belghast

The Teamspeak Conundrum

Yesterday I spoke for a bit about one of the reasons why I have not streamed that often. Namely that I have friends who would prefer not to be broadcast over my stream, which means when I DO stream… I have had to wall myself off from my social network of friends by dropping down to the “streaming” channel. As a result there is only so long I can seem to go without popping back upstairs because I simply get lonely down there all by myself. Over the last year or so I have tried to figure out a set up that would work, to let me stream freely without the fear of broadcasting my companions. The defacto tool is Virtual Audio Cables, but folks have talked about it being cumbersome and the more I looked into it… and they started talking about setting up batch files to do this or that… it honestly scared me away. Honestly even the website seems a bit cludgy… so I kept looking for other solutions.

In the mean time I made attempts to make this process work using both Voice Meter and Breakaway Audio. Neither tool admittedly was designed to do this, but I had found guides online that supposedly allowed it to work. Problem being after setting everything up… it never seemed to work for me and there was extremely limited documentation on what I could do to tweak my setup. Last night I finally decided to dig down into Virtual Audio Cables, and found the guide embedded above. For starters… this is the point at which I complain that YouTube is the worst means of disseminating information. What I needed in all of these cases was a good blog post with annotated screenshots… all I could actually find were a series of haphazard videos. That said the above video, when followed actually produced the results exactly like I wanted. Last night I was able to stream practically all night long, while hanging out with friends… and not broadcasting a single thing they said. Additionally I bound a separate push to to talk key just for the stream so that folks watching the stream are not getting “half” of the conversation. The videos below are the results of my evening of streaming.

Sohm Al with Neighbors

The picture does not exactly go with this story… but oh well it is my prerogative. Solaria’s fishing outfit looks amazing, and it makes me want to level fishing. It does however show you that the Greysky Armada spends a ton of time milling around our guild house in The Mists. One of the things I love about this game is that we are constantly interacting with our neighbors. Last night Damai and I were talking in /say and a neighbor joined in, saying that he needed a dps and a tank for Sohm Al the second dungeon in Heavensward. Damai was already spoken for, but I offered up my own services as a tank. We queued and got in quickly and the below embedded video is the results of that run. I did a few stupid things, one of which that wiped the party but we had a great time running dungeons with people who were essentially complete strangers until I last night. I think it is awesome that you can have these casual run in acquaintances.

During the early days of World of Warcraft had this rich tapestry of social connections that reached into many of the other raiding guilds on the server. When I needed someone for an activity our raid was running, I could reach out into these social channels and draw upon dozens of different people who were milling around looking for something to do. Cataclysm however pretty much destroyed this network, and I have never really been able to build an equivalent in any other MMO… that is until Final Fantasy XIV. The people here on Cactuar seem to crave interaction with folks outside of their insular guild units. I am in my maximum number of linkshells and while folks get lost in their own little world… especially while leveling in Heavensward… I have still been able to draw upon them to fill groups. As we move into more “maintenance” mode this is going to become more true. The only thing I wish was that there was a way to create more “formal” guild alliances. There are a handful of free companies that we hang out with regularly, and it would be nice to have a shared channel of communication that was not “opt in” like a linkshell.

Another Titan Extreme

Wednesday is normally the raid night of our second guild static. Since the raid leader was not around he left it up to Damai to organize something… and while we did not really have the appropriate numbers to work on Second Coil of Bahamut, there were still a large number of folks needing Extreme Primals to unlock more content. I was asked if I “felt like tanking Titan Extreme” to which I replied “there is never a sequence of events that exists… where I feel like tanking Titan Extreme… but I will if you need me”. Titan Extreme is just one of those fights that is maddening on so many levels and I would place it among the five hardest fights in all of the A Realm Reborn content. That said I make it out in my mind to be far worse than it actually is, and at this point I have the dance memorized. This fight is absolutely about repeating the same sequence of actions over and over until the boss falls down, and as I have commented in the past… this is the sort of fight we fail miserably at. We are amazing at fights where we have to think on our feet and adjust to change… but doing this on Titan extreme ultimately ends up screwing the entire raid when it comes to Weight of the Land damage.

What I found amazing is just how challenging this encounter still is even though many of us were being downscaled to 50, and our gear downscaled with us. A Realm Reborn content is absolutely going to remain relevant for new folks that have yet to experience it. This makes me more happy than just about anything else in Heavensward. We still have a bunch of people coming up through the ropes that have not seen any of the 2.0 raid content, and my hope is that we can have an old school night where we work on this as a guild and get people through it. This is what I wanted from World of Warcraft all along… a way to run old content and make it still relevant to current players. There were epic experiences like Blackwing Lair and Ulduar that are just diminished because we overgear the shit out of it, and there is no real way NOT to be overpowered… other than making some alts and level locking them at fixed points in time. Granted we tried to do this once with a raid of level 60 locked alts… but it still was not the same. Final Fantasy XIV however seems to have figured out how to make it work, and I am damned thankful. We eventually got the kill and I edited out just that part in the above video.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Sohm Al with Neighbors

Zero to Hero

July 3, 2015July 1, 2015 by Grace

The past few weeks have been a bit of a WildStar whirlwind for me. I had been on a bit of a hiatus for the beginning of this year, playing some WoW and mainly Final Fantasy XIV instead. But like everyone else on my friends list, I heard the announcement that WildStar is headed to F2P this fall and came back to poke around again.

The timing of this was perfect since it matched up with the anniversary event. Hooray for free pets and toys and such! I even got to participate in the “special event,” pictured above. It was amazing to see so many players in one place together, but I will never be able to un-hear the sound of 500 medics all casting at once. I think my computer still has nightmares about it.

I’m really excited about the transition to F2P. From the look of it, Carbine is being pretty generous about what bits of the game will be “free.” Even though I haven’t been playing constantly, I have been subscribed via CREDD since launch, which means I hopefully have some extra goodies heading my way when the transition happens.

The best thing about the announcement is simply that it brought me back to this game that I love. I’m finally caught up on all the changes that were made while I was away, and invested in my character and the world again. I even got raid attuned, with a lot of help and peer pressure from my wonderful guild. I can’t wait to tell you all about what raiding is like in WildStar!

Source: Moonshine Mansion
Zero to Hero

Hell Levels

July 3, 2015July 1, 2015 by Belghast

Playing with Forge

Last night I spent a good chunk of time playing with Forge.gg and in doing so I forgot the problem from before… that it ultimately broadcast all of the audio from teamspeak. However I did manage to pull a few nifty clips from one of the dungeon runs. The problem being I have no clue how exactly to embed them in a site. There are a bunch of features that I would love to see added to forge, namely the ability to easily get an embeddable snippet. Similarly I would love to see a feature like Twitch and Hitbox have to export the video to youtube. The big take away from last night is that I need to sort out how to extract teamspeak audio from my stream. This has been on my ToDo list for some time but I have yet to actually sit down and do anything about it. Which is somewhat unfortunate since I have several different tools installed right now that can essentially do the same thing. I started working through a tutorial for something called Breakaway Audio this morning, but have been running into issues… namely Teamspeak doesn’t seem to recognize the channel I set up for it.

Ultimately it would be awesome to solve this issue because I think I would end up streaming quite a bit more. The big thing for me is that I have to choose between being sociable with my friends on teamspeak… or streaming what I am doing. However if I solve this issue… in truth I am probably not going to mess with Forge that much, and simply just use Twitch. The always on functionality is cool… but I have to disable FRAPs to make it work which takes away my primary means for collecting screenshots from games. Generally speaking I disable whatever screenshot functionality exists in a game, and then use FRAPs to collect the screenshots in a generic “gameshots” folks, giving me a quick place to look for something I want each morning when I work on my blog post. To get Forge to work however I have to completely exit out of this software and it did not seem to work with DxTory either which has always been my fallback general screenshoting software. I still feel like maybe Forge isn’t a great fit for me, but I see a lot of people using it and enjoying it.

Hell Levels

Once upon a time in Everquest there was the concept of a “Hell Level” meaning that there were certain levels that were far more difficult to get than others. While back then these were literal mathematical break points where the experience needed was greater than the previous levels or the levels after. However this term has continued on into MMORPGs as a frustrating patch in the leveling curve. Right now it feels like 58 is a Hell Level because I very quickly hit another level wall, and really did not have much in the way of experience between it and the last one. So I am currently running around in the Dravianian Hinterlands doing quests, in an attempt to make up the difference. The problem being at this point I have yet to even reach the halfway point through level 58. I am pretty sure that the folks that are sixty in the guild have simply chain run dungeons.

Viva La Fake Friday

Today is my “Friday” for this week! This is because here in the United States most of us are getting off Friday for the Independence Day holiday. I opted to also take Thursday because we have things we are going to be doing over the break. For whatever reason my family growing up always did some project over the fourth, and recently I started talking about wanting to rearrange my office to be a better set up for gaming and streaming. My wife jumped on this and said we could do a lot of the little things we had been wanting to do over the extended break. This escalated quickly and now we are having a small dumpster delivered in our front yard on Friday. As a result I am going to be flipping a lot of my posting, meaning I will be writing posts each night and working on stuff around the house during the days. The first of these is likely to begin tonight, but to you the reader… it will appear just like any morning post.

I always feel the need to be honest with my readers about my schedule, because I guess to me staging content ahead of time… feels like it breaks the nature of my whole experiment. The original idea was that I would post something every morning without fail, and for the most part I have done this. Just sometimes the writing actually occurs the night before. I hope I survive the next few days because the whirlwind of change is about to suck me in. My hope is that when I exit on the other side I will have a much better space to do my PC gaming in, and if I can also sort out my audio issues… my hope is to also begin streaming a hell of a lot more. The next few days however might be a lot less talk of gaming… and a lot more talk of my failings at doing home improvement stuff.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Hell Levels