October 2018 – Page 6

Slashing Pickles

October 11, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I finally took a bit of a break from my vision quest to get the final form of the Diablos hammer. You can see me in the above photo with the next to last form here, but unfortunately the final revision requires three Black Spiral Horn+ which is proving to be more of a challenge than I realized. At the time of writing this… I now finally know why it has been so rough and why I keep getting Twisted Horns instead of the component I am actually seeking. One of the weird things about Monster Hunter World or the Monster Hunter franchise in general… is there are certain components that you can only get by killing a monster and carving it… and others you can only get if you capture the monster. As it turns out apparently unlike Majestic Horns from the normal Diablos… you can only get Black Spiral Horn+ by killing the monster and carving it up. This is unfortunate since the PC culture seems to be capture everything, even when there are similar hammer bros with me trying to get the upgrades.

Last night however I went down a different path, that is unlocking Deviljho and starting to farm for some of those weapons. Namely I really want the Lance, as it seems to be pretty freaking brutal. Similarly I have been working on assembling a guard set… that is going to turn around and help me farm the pieces I need from Black Diablos a little more efficiently. Now that I have broken the trend of “Longsword Everything” I am starting to see that the game is more enjoyable if you sorta treat it like MegaMan. What I mean by that is certain weapons tend to be easier on certain bosses than other weapons, and as I am starting to shift things up and learn new things… I am finding it way more enjoyable to just switch to the appropriate weapon rather than to force myself down the path of slow and tedious Longswording. That said… I do tend to fight Deviljho with a Longsword.

By the end of the night I had crafted this monstrosity, or Grief Lance the first form of the Deviljho lance weapon. Essentially now I need Five more Tailfangs, a Gem, and two Scalps… which again only drop if you kill the monster and carve it. Functionally I am going to have to get good at soloing Deviljho or else be that guy that breaks traps. I don’t want to be that guy because the PC community is relatively small in the grand scheme of things and I don’t want to get that reputation. Alternatively I could just start asking people since text based chat is a thing that works easily on the PC… even though very few people actually say things in it. I might simply start asking nicely if we can kill not trap on both Deviljho and Black Diablos so I can get the bits I actually need. I’ve fallen back into my old ways of really enjoying the SOS Roulette lifestyle, which is in part why I have put off downing Xeno’jiiva if only because it is such a prodding long fight.

When I say it has a relatively small community, you have to take that with some perspective… because it still manages to regularly rank in the top five games on steam for concurrent players. There is no real way of knowing how many players there were on the PS4 but the community definitely feels smaller. My personal theory is, that we ended up grouping an awful lot with Japanese players… and while they do exist on the PC there are far fewer of them. It does however feel way more populated than what I have seen of the Xbox One community, so there is at least that. Over 45,000 players is nothing to sneeze at, but that has fallen off significantly from the all time peak of over 320,000 players. I have a feeling however that as soon as the Kulve Taroth event opens up… we will see a lot more activity. There was a big loss of players surrounding the release of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate on the Switch, so I have a feeling a lot of people are still chewing through that game. Personally… I just like the feel of Monster Hunter World much better.

Farewell Google Plus

October 10, 2018 by Belghast

A few days ago we got news that Google Plus had a vulnerability that exposed profile information, even when the users had flagged that as private to the circles based visibility system. They didn’t report this until Wall Street Journal was about to break the story, so for starters that is kinda bad. Their response to this whole situation however is interesting an unique in the tech world… but also very google. Instead of agreeing to fix the bug… they just decided to sunset the service as a whole. So within the next ten months or so Google Plus as we know it will cease to exist and join the long graveyard of services that google decided to axe… the most important of these for me personally being Reader their RSS Feed Reader.

One of the problems with Google is at the end of the day you have to remember they are primarily a search engine and advertising company. Anything that does not align with those two missions is suspect to disappearing at a moments notice. Part of me would like to believe that Gmail and Google Docs are safe since they are both products being sold… but even then I think the only thing that is sacred is Search and the Advertising services that fund seemingly everything. That means all of these products that people rely on… Google Voice, Google Fiber in their homes or anything they may have purchased on Google Play are honestly likely suspect to the whims of whatever seemingly random business decisions Google Corporate makes.

As far as Google Plus… I was an early adopter and had an awful lot of fun on the network. There are a bunch of people that I never would have known were it not for the service. It seemed to have a very high adoption rate among MMO gamers, and I used it almost rabidly around the launch of Star Wars the Old Republic with a good deal of our guild coming from connections made through Google Plus. It was almost a simpler version of the internet, when no one seemed to worry about follow counts or were afraid of interactions… and instead sort of widely followed anyone who seemed to have anything even vaguely close to similar interests.

What made Google Plus special however was the Circles system, or a way of walling off certain groups of users from seeing content not intended for them. I had tons of circles for various interests, and it felt safe to be open and free with ideas and opinions… when you are targeting a specific community in mind. Granted what this meant in practice for myself and other bloggery types is we sort of made Plus a massively multiplayer chat engine. I regularly posted these massive diatribes about various in game things… instead of posting them on my blog which in itself was a bit of a problem. The rapid fire nature of getting interaction and commentary made it super appealing, and I think there were some folks who largely switched to “blogging” through G+ at the time.

It was not a network without controversy, and the biggest one for me personally was the enforcement of Real Names sometime in 2011. I started dinking around with the internet as a whole in 1993-ish which in some minds makes me an early adopter… and in other minds makes me a babe in the woods. Regardless… back then there was a golden rule of using the internet… NEVER SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION WITH ANYONE. You never knew who was on the other end of the connection talking to you, and as such you really shouldn’t give them any information that they might be able to use to harm you. As such I have a really hard time actually using personal information online, and this is why you either see me posting as “Bel Temple” or “Belghast Sternblade”, because I grew up in a culture that used handles to relate to each other and real names.

It is not that I am trying to hide my identity or troll anyone, because I have been using the name Belghast as a static gaming moniker for decades… and honestly before that I went by Exeter on IRC. Those are real identities to me, much like the handles that I know people by are similarly real. I know Ashgar’s real name, and have met face to face with him on several occasions… but I still end up calling him Ash because that is his name in my brain. I mean gaming culture sort of does this, in that we relate to each other by tags and handles that seem just as real as any other attribute that you might associate with someones name. Regardless I played along for awhile and branded my Google Plus by my actual name… and it made me deeply uncomfortable the entire time. “Bel Temple” was my eventual half way point, since I do actually respond to “Bel” in real life just as often as I do “Mark”.

Ultimately it wasn’t a controversy that drove me away from Google Plus, but instead a whole sequence of things that are likely unrelated. In April of 2013 I rededicated myself to blogging and started posting on Tales of the Aggronaut every single day of the week and managed to carry that forward for a little over three years. During that time… any energy or thoughts that I might have posted on Google Plus… I instead directed towards the blog which was in constant need of fodder. It took several months before I realized that I just wasn’t interacting on the network anymore. Even then… I couldn’t seem to find the oomph to get reconnected. Folks faded away, things started getting more political… and my interest in social media in general waned.

The truth is… my appetite for interaction is in twitter sized bites and not grand multi paragraph posts anymore. I miss the golden age of Google Plus much like I miss the golden age of any thing that I have interacted with and then ultimately out grew. It bums me out a little bit that it is going away, but at the same time… much like other things I have mourned like Toys R Us or City of Heroes… I wasn’t actually using it myself. I think the future of Facebook like interaction will ultimately belong to things like Diaspora that allow you to carve up small but interconnected communities, much like we have with Mastodon and Nineties.cafe. I find myself feeling less comfortable being part of the hive, and instead wanting to be part of smaller guild sized communities. I don’t really think I am alone in this.

Whatever the case though… Google Plus is leaving and with it I do mourn the promise of what it was for awhile and what it could have been. I noticed this morning that when the news broke on October 8th they apparently did something to break the syndication process, and with it all of my posts went back to being shared only with myself. However I plan on syndicating this one specifically with Google Plus manually. While I have a ton of different social media accounts, in truth the only three that actually matter are as follows.

Twitter – @Belghast
Mastodon/Fediverse – @Belghast@Nineties.Cafe
Discord – belghast#8796

I can be pretty slow to respond at times unless I am actively engaged with a given network at that moment, however those are the three that I actually use by choice. Everything else I am mostly just using as a syndication platform for Tales of the Aggronaut and is ultimately not likely going to get an interactive response from me. If we only have contact through Google Plus, and you don’t want that connection to die… then I suggest you follow me from one of those. Then again if you have made it this far… you can just quietly watch from the wings as I continue to do my daily blog posts and weekly podcasts.

Stop Hammer Time

October 9, 2018 by Belghast

I am deeply susceptible to getting distracted by a side mission. This is in part why I never found the Thief, Warrior and Mage stones in Skyrim and had to eventually wind back around when I found out I missed something. I have a bad tendency to wander off the path, and in theory given that I have played through all of this content before… I should be able to maintain more focus. However that has not been the case and I keep going off on tangents, like my most recent one of farming Diablos over and over trying to get the pieces for it’s rank 7 hammer. At this point I need Majestic Horns… which you only get if you manage to break both of the horns. I need a lot of these… some for the Hammer and some for the shoulders as well that grant two ranks of slugger. The biggest problem I am running into is that Majestic Horns don’t appear to be 100% drop if you break both horns, and instead there is a consolation item that I keep getting.

Additionally I am going to need a ton of parts from Black Diablos so I have been trying to focus on the quest where you hunt both at the same time. I need 3 Black Spiral Horn+ which I assume also comes from breaking Black Diablos horns… and I need one more of the Black Diablos Carapace which seems to drop more frequently. Thankfully I already have the Wyvern Gem needed to craft the weapon so I won’t be stalled out waiting for that to happen. So last night I spent pretty much the entire night jumping into SOS Roulette with various groups, fighting a bunch of Diablos… focusing on trying to break the horns… while watching Ozark season 2 on Netflix on my second monitor. All in all it was a good night… even though Ozark in general gives me some massive anxiety since there is a bunch of stuff that just aint right going on with that show.

In theory tonight will be more of the same. I crafted the highest pre-Nergigante metal hammer available because it had a cheap enough material cost, and I figured at some point I could upgrade it into the Nergi hammer if I so choose. It serves as a decent replacement for the Zorah hammer I had been using until this point. At some point I need to sort out what I actually want my armor set to look like, given that I am gearing for completely different stats as hammer than I would normally as Longsword. I also really need to farm a bunch of Nergi to get parts so I can craft the final step of that Longsword after I down Xeno’Jiiva. Right now I just don’t have the patience to take on Xeno since I really don’t like doing that fight solo… because it seems to take so freaking long. At some point I will force myself through it so I can at least start moving up my Hunter Rank again.

Three Dragons Down

October 8, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about collecting the final bits needed to unlock the layered cosmetic armor from the Harvest Festival in Monster Hunter World and seeing just how much further I could progress. As of Saturday night I had managed to catch back up enough to be sitting on the “kill the three elder dragons” quest that you can see in my quest tracker. On the podcast we talked a bit about how Monster Hunter World supports the acquisition of skills and how that is generally more important than the acquisition of gear. This is a weird concept for me personally since I tend to be a dyed-in-the-wool RPG grinder, that can seemingly perform repetitive tasks so long as there is a shiny gear payout at the end. My baseline is always to gather more gear to get over any obstacles that I might be dealing with.

However the importance of understanding how not to die… is extremely noticeable in Monster Hunter World. When I managed to get through Pink Rathian without breaking the tale, in one shot with no faints… and then similarly get through Nergigante on my first shot… with no faints… I started to question if I had simply gotten better at the game. For awhile I thought it was just me having a hammer this go around, but Nergi was sorta the turning point in my opinion. However the Elder Dragons still served as a bit of a roadblock. I managed to down Kushala Daora on the first attempt, which doesn’t shock me given I remember taking it down relatively easily before as well. However I spent the majority of Sunday afternoon working on Teostra and Vaal Hazak.

When I fought the Elder Dragons on the PS4 version… I did a lot more prep work than I did here. I rolled into Teostra with a significant amount of fire resist gear… something I did not have this time. The challenge with Toaster as I call him more frequently… is that he just does an awful lot of damage and likes to get in real close to you before ulting. I believe in the grand scheme of things it took me three attempts to get through Toasty this time around, and I am mostly okay with that… it was more about not getting hit than it was about dishing out massive amounts of damage. I think that is part of where I am at mentally now is I know not allowing yourself to get carted is seemingly more important than getting in and unleashing hell upon the monster… then opening yourself to a single hit attack that decimates your health reserves.

Similarly with Vaal Hazak the challenge was fighting… while having your health bar constantly shredded by effluvial building. Eventually I will have the parts to make a few pieces of gear that grants me complete immunity from the effects of the Effluvium, but for now I had to employ a strategy of stick and run… trying to avoid build up for as long as I could while dealing as much damage as I could. I think in the grand scheme of things it took me four tries to get through Vaal Hazak this go around. I’ve now entered the realm where I fairly comfortable feel like I can SOS Roulette my way into content, and that is probably something I am going to take advantage of more as I move forward.

Unfortunately however I cannot SOS Roulette my way through Xeno’Jiiva, because it does not show up in your list of available monsters until you have defeated it at least once on your own. I mostly got in long enough to unlock him and then bailed last night because I did not have the patience for this sort of fight. The problem with Xeno is that it is just soul crushingly long… no matter how well you do there is always going to be a lot of avoiding its movements while banging on its feet… for a good thirty minutes it seems. So instead last night I piddled around in World of Warcraft on the Paladin while watching the season premiere of Walking Dead, instead of trying to make progress on the giant blue dragon. All in all though it feels good to be getting back to around the place where I left off… I am not looking forward to getting through Tempered Kirin again… but I will have awhile to deal with that. I have not been grinding anywhere near as much as I did before, so I expect to defeat Xeno and still have a lot of ways to go until I hit the first bottleneck of Tempered Bagel.