Month: March 2018

Go Team Moogle’s Pom!

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Go Team Moogle’s Pom!

I want to lead off this mornings post with a little bit of exciting news.  So over the last few weeks you have no doubt noticed the Twitch madness I have been involved in.  That is probably a tale for a different day, but I am trying to stream significantly more often than I used to.  I even have a lot of proper streaming infrastructure set up now including MrAggroBot my fearless chat bot who is getting an adorable avatar that the amazing AmmostArt is currently working on.  I have no clue what is going on but I think partially it is due to the fact that I have a super supportive community of folks from various sources that occasionally pop their heads in and say hi.  One of the main reasons why I don’t play a ton of single player titles is that they end up feeling like solitary experiences.  Sure when I am in super turtle mode that works, but most of the time I want to share my nonsense with someone out there.  In the MMORPG world… that is my guild and when I stream a single player game…  twitch chat starts to feel a bit like guildchat.

For awhile now I have been a member of the Moogle’s Pom Tavern Discord, largely because it already had a significant number of my friends collected in one place.  I knew it was home, much in the same way as the AggroChat slack because I found myself saying good morning to everyone there each day.  Now I mostly knew of the Moogle’s Pom Tavern because of their official/unofficial stream team.  Official in the sense that it is a fixed thing and invite only, but unofficial as I believe none of the members are Partners and cannot actually create an official team in the eyes of Twitch.  With my increase in streaming focus and frequency, I am pleased to announce that I have been invited to the team and now have a banner on my twitch profile talking about it.  I am super happy about this revelation because it truly is an amazing group of people and that I am exceedingly happy to be part of.

For those unfamiliar, a lot of the names are ones you have already seen me talk about or host on Twitch…  but here goes a full listing (alphabetized because it would have bugged me otherwise).

I highly suggest you check out all of these fine folks and give them a follow.  I’ve got them all in my Auto-Hosting rotation so chances are you might see them if you are checking my twitch page with any frequency.  The above image is of course not connected to this at all… but since we don’t have an official banner image for the team I decided to find a “Moogle” image to use instead.  If you are so inclined you can also check out the Moogle’s Pom Tavern wordpress which should in theory be getting bios for the last few of us shortly (because we need to write them).  However the page is current except for me and Visse who were the last few adds to the team.

All of this said I will probably continue to use the BelStreamTime discord when it comes to me going live and chatting with folks because it feels really weird to muscle my way in and take over a discord I am not intimately responsible for.  Also it gives me a nice place to integration with twitch and carry over roles and permissions as well as my emoticon.  Speaking of which I really need to set up the next few ranks worth of emoticons even though currently I am the only one who could use them.  That is another thing that happened over the weekend that seems a bit hard to take.  For awhile now the AggroChat crew has been parking their Amazon Prime subsciptions on me because they knew it made me feel super awkward about it… and it is apparently fun to pick on the Bel.  Sunday however during my stream I had a long time friend throw a legitimate subscription and some bits my way and I have this weird mix of “I am incredibly grateful” and “no don’t do that! I am not worth your money!”.

I am still not entirely sure how I feel about this whole subscription thing.  I feel happy that my friends want to support me, but I also feel super awkward taking any of their money.  I could reconcile them giving me a prime sub… because it was a thing they got for free that wasn’t being used anyways.  Now that I am getting some actual subs I just want to push the money back into their pockets and tell them “no no no you don’t understand, you are throwing your money away!”.  I am weird at accepting recognition in any form…  like when it happens at work I want nothing more than to crawl under my desk and hide until no one notices me.  The problem there is that now I am a manager over three teams… and I can’t exactly do that anymore.  I think maybe my recent foray into Twitch mirrors the transformation I have had to make in the real world, where I am publicly “on” more than I used to be.

AggroChat #193 – The Pyre Show

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat193_720

Tonight we record the March game of the month show… Pyre by Supergiant Games.  Transistor was almost universally our first AggroChat game of the year, and as a result we had pretty high expectations about this game.  However we wound up with a pretty wide swath of opinions ranging from love to hate.

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Bunny Fail Tank Returns

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Bunny Fail Tank Returns

I’ve talked about this a bit in the past, but I have struggled with Final Fantasy XIV since finishing the Stormblood main story.  I am not exactly sure why, but after leveling my Warrior through the questing process…  and then grinding up a Samurai I bounced.  When I say I bounced… I bounced hard.  I just stopped logging in entirely and even didn’t care enough to log in for most of the major holiday events that have gone on.  At one point I made an attempt to get back into the game and pushed through the new MSQ content right up until I reached the Drowned City of Skalla.  I could not bring myself to tank that with a random group and I told myself… I would wait until I had friends around to run it with me.  That event never happened and I got distracted by a bunch of games in the meantime.

The problem with this is that it sort of set up an artificial barrier between me and the content.  It was as though I had some sort of a mental block preventing me at just throwing myself at content the way I used to be willing to.  I knew I needed something severe to get me off high center and back into caring about what was going on in Final Fantasy XIV.  There used to be a time when I willing to log in each night and run experts with completely random groups of players from the roulette system.  However I developed some sort of barrier against doing that… one that I think was slowly chipped away given how freely I am willing to do my “SOS Roulette” nonsense in Monster Hunter World.

Watch Sleep Deprived Bel tries to remember how to Fail Tank in FFXIV from Belghast on www.twitch.tv
As a result last night I used the presence of an audience as a bit of a kick in the butt to get me back into Final Fantasy XIV and doing dungeon content again.  I streamed for a little over two hours and in that time I believe I ran four dungeons and made some progress in the MSQ afterwards.  In truth were it not for the MSQ slowing the pace down significantly…  I might have streamed longer throwing myself at more dungeons for gear currency.  I managed to pick up a chestpiece with tokens and now feel like maybe I can do this thing and catch my gear levels up to something reasonable.  At the start of the night I was 313 item level and by the end I edged it up a bit to 315.  Skalla and the next set of patch dungeons all drop gear that is an incremental upgrade, as well as some tasty tasty currency.  Basically at this point I need to reach a state where I can start doing expert roulette again to play catch up.

Bunny Fail Tank Returns

After taking a break from streaming and FFXIV I hopped over to Monster Hunter World for awhile and spent some time running nonsense with Grace.  I have been mostly running hammer when we are doing stuff, because it is a weapon that I like quite a bit… and one that I want to get better at using.  There are definitely times when I am fighting something that it feels like having something more than a longsword in my arsenal would help greatly.  We took down a Squirrel Blimp and I managed to unlock the third of my elder dragons while she ran around trying to find the Great Girros.  I was not in terribly long as I was already in a fairly sleep deprived state from the previous nights fragmented sleep schedule due to the launch.  All in all though it was a pretty great night and I want to thank everyone that stopped by to tune in and chat with me.  Also huge thanks to Solaria who actually joined my discord and hung out with me while I eased my way back into Final Fantasy XIV.  It’s fun lobbing comments at text messages scrolling across twitch chat, but it is even more fun when you have someone hanging out in chat to talk to over voice as well.

Dream Home

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Dream HomeOh No

When FFXIV Stormblood details were announced one thing my FC got excited about was the addition of a new housing zone. They took up a collection and when plots opened up they snagged a (much bigger) fancy new house. Meanwhile I was mortified. I’m a Roe, an officer in the Maelstrom, and a certified Merlwyb fangirl. I love Limsa Lominsa and I loved our little home in the Mists. I was happy that my FC family were happy in our new home, but I was already plotting and scheming to figure out how to get back to Mist.

It was frustrating for a while, because new housing purchases were locked to free companies only. That was a good idea to allow more FCs to enter the housing market, but it was maddening to see all the lovely plots I dreamed about getting locked up before I could touch them. Luckily they finally allowed individuals to purchase housing plots again, and I got to leap in and get the house of my dreams. Eventually.

First I had to figure out how purchasing housing works. One annoying thing was that when a plot is vacated, it gets locked out from new buyers but people can still transfer there. I found several free plots that were just what I wanted, but I couldn’t buy them outright because they still had this timer. In the end I bought a crappy plot way at the back of the zone that happened to be open, and then I could transfer to the one I actually wanted. Sure, it was a giant “waste” of money, but in the end I got my dream home. What is extra funny is that it is a spot that is basically “across the street” from where our old FC house was in the zone layout. It feels very familiar and cozy but also I have a better view of the ocean now Dream Home

Dream HomeSadly I used so much gil by having to essentially double purchase my house that I don’t have much leftover for buying furniture. At least now I have plenty of time to settle in and earn more cash for pretty house stuff. I might even fall down the crafting hole to make some things for myself!