July 2016 – Page 5

Zubat Infestation

July 13, 2016 by Belghast

So Many Zubats

I’ve slowed down a bit on the Pokemon Go namely because it is getting harder and harder to find new ones. At this point I have captured 49 different critters out of the 52 I have seen, and I’ve noticed an extreme deficiency in the number of electric, fire and plant types. I’ve spent my lunches roaming around to other areas of town, attempting to sort out where they might be hiding. I would assume that plant types could maybe be found in a park, but as far as Electric and Fire types… I have no clue at all. The single Fire type that I have managed to pick up comes from a Chilli’s parking lot… which I found more than a little hillarious. As far as electric types I have been near the electrical switching station in our neighborhood with little luck, but past that there is really nowhere that streams “electrical types”. I’ve heard rumors that they often times come out during thunderstorms, but considering we have had several and I have not seen any yet I am doubting that one. The reality is there are as many rumors for how to find specific Pokemon as there were for how to summon the Ancient Cyclops in Everquest, and I figure none of them are really true. Given that this is a map based game, in theory everything should be based on some sort of obvious landmark. Following that logic I keep wondering if I can go to a graveyard to find Ghost types, but I have not been willing to cross that line yet.

The huge truism however is that we have an over abundance of Zubats. Right now they are way more common than quite literally any other type of Pokemon. There was a point where I recently had 25 that I had captured and had just been too lazy to hand them in to the trainer. I’ve made six different Golbats, and now am simply just ignoring the flappy critters when I see one. Someone has been pretty much chain summoning lures on one of the Pokestops that I walk past on the way in and out of work… and every single time I get within range it is loaded with nothing but Zubats. As I walk through the parking garage… more Zubats. All of this is hilarious when I hear from Ashgar that he has yet to even catch a single one. Then things that are super common for other people like the Oddish… are next to impossible to find around me. At some point I am thinking I need to make a trip over to Fayetteville because my friend TangerineDada has all sorts of Pokemon that I have not seen anywhere near me. Then I ask myself… is it silly to take a road trip just for capturing Pokemon? Almost certainly but it is nonetheless entertaining.

Necropolis

For a little bit now my friend have been talking about Necropolis, a new dungeon crawler from Harebrained Schemes the makers of the very awesome Shadowrun tun based RPGs. This game keeps getting compared to Dark Souls, but I am not completely sure why the reference. Essentially this is a rogue-like dungeon crawler with procedural generated levels. This is the sort of game where you are not designed to get terribly attached to your character, because more than likely you are going to die quickly and often. Similar to Rogue Legacy it has a mechanic built into the game where your deaths serve a greater purpose in that your actions garner favor with the deity of the labyrinth. You can then purchase abilities at the scriptorium which tweak your experience allowing you to have more health, or hit harder all in an attempt to fine tune your character experience. The concept of the game seems right down my alley, and the art style is reminiscent of Journey or any number of not quite realistic cartoon shaded games of late.

The game however has a bunch of problems, that I am not sure if they are intentional or if they are simply bugs that will be patched out later. Combat feels more than a little bit maddening at times in that there seems to be no limit to the number of things that can be registering attacks on you at the same time. So this means that if you are unlucky you might round the corner and get six or seven mobs swarming you at the wrong moment. Normally speaking in brawler type games this is manageable in that the game gives you invincibility frames in the form of being staggered… so that not every thing attacking you can actually register damage on you at the same time. In Necropolis you can absolutely get surrounded and watch your health go from full to zero in seconds. However for all I know there might be a scriptorium ability that changes how that works. The other slightly frustrating thing is that combat feels a little sluggish. I played with an xbox controller and right bumper is the light attack and right trigger the heavy. Even light attacks are nowhere near as responsive as I would hope them to be, and heavy attacks require near perfect timing because of the extremely lengthy swing animation. All of this said… I enjoyed the little bit that I played and I want to figure out more of the game. There are two kinds of unfair gameplay… the ones that make you just want to throw your controller across the room, and then the ones that make you want to figure out how to avoid the pitfalls of the system. This at least for me appears to be the later, so I fully expect to play a bit more tonight and get a bit further.

Getting the Band Back Together

July 12, 2016 by Grace

Sometimes in MMOs you run into little bubbles of time where things seem to line up in some perfect cosmic way and draw you completely in. Most of the time when I look back at these eras of my past, there’s something to mar the nostalgic glow a bit. My first social guild was a magical time of exploring the possibilities of social games, but it was also saturated with drama that eventually was terminal. That progression raid group I was in during Wrath was great and Ulduar was amazing, but the culture of that guild was toxic beyond belief. My SWTOR raid was like a second home, where I met several of my best friends, but the game itself was so broken and buggy that it’s a miracle we stuck with it as long as we did.

One of these bubbles that doesn’t quite fit this pattern was my raid group in FFXIV. This was a group of people who happily threw themselves at the same boss fight every week for months on end, never completing it until it was long past current but enjoying the process and each others’ company enough that the victory was still sweet in the end. When Heavensward launched the group fractured a bit, first to make room for more raiders in our free company, and then again as folks drifted away from the game during that first extended period without fresh content. Luckily, events last week conspired to focus everyone’s attention back on the game, and we got together for our first raid of a renewed campaign last night.

All but one of us were in gear that was about the bare minimum to enter the content we were doing, and most of us had never seen the fights before. Sure, Sephirot and Final Steps of Faith aren’t exactly progression raiding for folks who have been playing this whole time, but they were new to us. It took pretty much a full hour to scrape off enough of our rust to kill Nidhogg. Even though I had finished the fight once before, this time felt far more satisfying because we earned every inch of that kill together as a team. Nobody could see it, but I had a huge grin on my face when the cheers went up after that kill, because I did not realize until that moment exactly how much I missed that sound. After that we easily handled Sephirot in a few pulls in part because the fight was easier but also because our coordination and muscle memory were slowly returning after months of disuse. We ended the night by killing the skywhale, which was the last boss we killed before drifting away last time. It was a fitting way of coming full circle. Now I can’t wait to really pick up where we left off and hunt down a sword-wielding murder-bug.

Hooray for getting the band back together! Long may we play!

Playing Together

July 12, 2016 by Belghast

This has already been an interesting morning so far, and it is only 6 am. I got up and did my normal routine of making coffee for my wife and I. I heard what sounded like rain so I took a peek outside like I often do, because the pool is an amazing indication of rain. All of those tiny droplets breaking the water show up far better than they do on land. As I stared out at the pool I noticed something moving around in it that I could not quite identify, so I took my cup of coffee outside to investigate. In the pool was this poor little field mouse that looked as though it had been swimming desperately trying to find a way out of the pool for awhile. I basically had two options… either help him now, or fish him out of the skimmer basket later once he eventually lost his battle with treading water indefinitely. I of course opted for the first, and started looking around the yard for something I could use as a ramp to help him get up and out of the water. I finally landed upon using a shovel and then began the battle of trying to convince him that I was actually trying to help. Once I finally got him up and out of the water he essentially collapsed on the shovel making it extremely easy to get him up and out of the water and over onto our deck. The little guy sat there for a bit before realizing that he should be afraid of humans, and eventually scurrying off in the general direction of the green belt behind our house. Sure he was what most people would consider a pest, but to me he was cute and fuzzy and in desperate need of assistance. I am absolutely a sucker for such things.

Last night also was a super interesting night. I had talked about events serving as a bit of a catalyst to get a large number of us back and engaged with Final Fantasy XIV. Part of that was “getting the band back together” as it were, and namely that meant reconstituting our raid team. So we spent last night working through some of the things many of us had sitting unfinished namely The Final Steps of Faith and Containment Bay S1T7. Before going into the fight Morehnai had warned us that the Nidhogg battle is little overtuned, and might be a bit difficult given that a bunch of us were sitting at exactly the 205 item level cap. He was really the only one of us that could be considered even the slightest bit over-geared with the rest between the bare minimum and just shy of 210. We also largely insisted on going into the fight completely blind, so this meant a handful of wipes as we started to learn the mechanics. The first wall was the add phase dps check, which we quickly sorted out and figured out ways to optimize our dps including me shifting to Deliverance stance for that big. Other than that it was largely working through the moving parts, avoiding damage that we didn’t need to take and ultimately more optimization before we ended up getting the sweet sweet kill. Sure normal mode Nidhogg is not exactly extreme raiding, but it felt like a good return to working together as a team.

After that we went through the Sephirot encounter, which was not surprisingly an awful lot easier. With that once again mostly being use learning what various things meant and how to avoid the damage. Sephirot being interesting in that there are a ton of non telegraphed attacks, namely the one where he turns to face a direction and then does a potentially platform wide attack. Other than that it was also learning the dance of his knock back attacks, and within a couple of attempts we had a dead member of the warring triad. Finally since we were short on time we popped back into Bismarck and killed us a sky whale earning Thalen a spiffy looking bow and the rest of us more Expanse Totems. Next week we are going to kill us a giant bug and hopefully clear the second half of Alex. Past that the sky is the limit, but it felt really good to be together and working as a team once more. Past that I wrapped up the rest of the story and it very much feels like we are saying goodbye to everything we have known over this expansion. I am seriously beginning to think that when Fan Fest happens in October that we will be getting the announcement of a new expansion, and not only that but that it will only be a few months away. The Deep Dungeon will serve as something for us to play with in the meantime and a vehicle which allows us to catch up all of those jobs that we never got around to leveling. In any case it feels like a really good time to be back in Final Fantasy XIV and back working together as a team.

Adorableness and Agitation

July 11, 2016 by Belghast

Mixed Weekend

This weekend was a bit of a mixed bag. One the positive side we decided to go visit the adorable kitten that is being taken care of by my Mother in Law. The little guy still seems to greatly favor me, and wandering around my beard… but this is a photo of him asleep behind my wife’s neck. To be truthful just a bit before this photo he was asleep behind my neck but she wanted kitten snuggles and swiped him. Unsurprisingly he settled right down and went back to sleep, having just finished a big meal a little beforehand. The kitten is almost heartbreakingly sweet, but is otherwise doing amazingly well. I also thought that maybe while I was in a new area and around a lake I would find all new sets of Pokemon, but for the most part on that front it was a complete bust. I found a handful of Pidgeys but that was honestly just about it. Which honestly I guess I am not terribly surprised given the cry on the Reddit about the need for better distribution of critters in deeply rural areas. Being around said kitten honestly was a bit of a mixed blessing, because on one level he is so adorable. On the other level it is a little bittersweet knowing that he will more than likely never come home to stay with us. The kitten is more more less already spoken for, and then there is the problem with his gender. After having a tom cat that had massive issues with spraying… we don’t ever want to live through that again. So for the last several years we have largely sworn off male cats. I just have no clue how to make sure a kitten never turns into a sprayer, because nothing we did to try and rehabilitate Mac ever seemed to make a difference.

As far as Pokemon Go is concerned, we recorded pretty much an entire podcast this weekend devoted to the game. However for whatever reason I didn’t really play much of it this weekend. During the podcast I burned an incense only to find out that I have a really hard time paying attention to that and podcasting at the same time. While I ended up getting a Psyduck after chasing it around my neighborhood for ages… I know for certain that I missed out on a handful of critters given that while the incense will draw them close, it doesn’t actually make them stay around for terribly long. I know for certain I missed out on a second Goldeen this way, and probably several others because I kept getting lost in talking and forgetting entirely that I had a timer ticking down. Friday night I did a little parking lot hopping, driving to different parking lots and walking around looking for anything interesting. Doing this I managed to catch a Snorlax, which apparently is super rare and I get why given how rough it was to actually capture. It started doing this thing that seemed like it was blowing the Pokeball to the side making everything curve out of the way. I wound up feeding it a berry, and getting some curve ball action going on to counteract it finally seeing that magical third twitch of the ball meaning I had successfully captured it.

The bulk of the weekend though, and yesterday especially I was just frustrated and filled with rage. I would love to be able to make sense of it but really there was no real reason for it. I just woke up Sunday morning with a horrible headache and everything seemed to anger me. I tried to isolate myself as much as possible because the moment I was actually around someone, like my poor wife I was snapping at them. The headache was intense, but not so much as to cause that sort of reaction. I struggled with finding something to really settle down and enjoy, that is until late Sunday afternoon I settled on finally watching through the tail end of the episodes of The Magicians. The uncomfortable sensation of wanting to play something, but nothing quite fitting the bill was maddening. I swear over the course of the day I booted up literally every game installed on my laptop only to log right back out a few minutes later frustrated. Probably the best thing I could have done was taken a nap… but given my less than friendly relationship with sleep that would have only lead to more problems. Basically for most of Sunday I was in essence a fussy baby, with my pacifier finally being mindlessly watching a television show. After I found something that actually seemed to keep my interest, I was then apparently able to log in and play something… and I finished the night by wrapping up my crystal grind for the new Relic weapon in Final Fantasy XIV. Now I am apparently in need of running a series of dungeons to “harden” the weapon or some such. Which makes me wonder if I can now do Snowcloak unsynced and solo it.