AggroChat

What I’m Playing: August 9, 2015

August 9, 2015 by AggroChat

Blaugust 2015, Day 9

I had hoped that talking about what I’m playing once a week would inspire me to play more games, or at least mess around in a few different games. No such luck this week.

These bears just get me

Alphabear: I’m stalled out at chapter 4, mostly because I have to wait for some of my better bears to wake up before I can beat the daily levels and unlock the boss. I still love this game and play it daily.

Diablo 3: Got my wizard up to level 50. Not really a huge change from last week. I really need to push if this is going to happen before the new stuff arrives.

Hatoful Boyfriend: OMGWTFBBQ. I’ve now played through every possible ending. This game. Just…wow. It does an amazing and very weird job of bringing absolutely everything together. Go play it right now.

FFXIV: My Monday night raid group finally killed Bahamut, thus finishing the content that existed prior to the expansion. My Wednesday night raid group killed Bismark Ex this week. We were missing a few people and had to pug, so I’m looking forward to killing more things with my friends and FC mates instead of strangers.

WildStar: I’ve been doing a lot of dailies and running tons of shiphands as I work on my guides. My experiment to see how much money I make casually in one month is going quite well. I’ve made over 38 plat already since August 1. I have a few ideas of what to spend it on at the end of the month, but if you have any suggestions let me know! Right now I have enough glory to upgrade at least one item to a raid-quality piece, but I’m holding off because I don’t want to dish out the money to upgrade and rune it during my experiment.

That’s pretty much it for this week! There’s a few games I probably should have been playing (FFV I’m looking at you). I also was almost tempted to play some WoW since they sent me a 7 day trial. Fortunately I stayed strong and stayed away, mostly because I didn’t feel like re-installing it and also because the free 7 days expired before the expansion announcement hype.

Source: Moonshine Mansion

AggroChat #69 – Ahk Mourn and Key Limes

May 21, 2019August 9, 2015 by AggroChat

Last night we had the whole gang back of Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen. Kodra fresh back from Gencon had many tales to tell of his proclivity for LARPing and his further descent into the Magic the Gathering Origins base set. He has now purchased a box, but instead of opening in one sitting he has decided to do something extremely cool with it, turning it into a series of mini draft for him and some of his Seatle area friends. Grace continues to spend time in Wildstar and in an effort to try and catch up Belghast has spent some time leveling there. There was a discussion of the various points that people stall out in that game when they outlevel their quest content. Grace also managed to play through Hatoful Boyfriend enough times to see every possible ending… and is amped about our impending AggroChat show.

For Tam and Ashgar this was a very Sword Art Online week, with Ashgar watching through the entirity of season one so that he can join Tam in playing Hollow Fragment on the PS4. Thalen rekindled his own Magic the Gathering roots as he began playing the brand new free to play Magic Duels. Additionally there is a new event happening in Marvel Heroes where bonus experience is given to playing the Fantastic Four which spawns a conversation about the hero teams we liked growing up. Bel talks about his Bel’s Big Adventure Minecraft series and the quirks of playing Minecraft with a singlular purpose, and his adventures on the Everquest II Time Locked server. Finally we talk the elephant in the room… the World of Warcraft Legion expansion announcement from GamesCom. It was a lengthy discussion dense show, and hopefully you will all enjoy it.

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Screenie Saturday: Scorchwing

August 8, 2015 by AggroChat

Blaugust 2015, Day 8

The bird itself

I spent a lot of time last night sitting around waiting for Scorchwing to spawn so I could kill it for my daily contract. There’s almost always a crowd, especially on contract days. I love the atmosphere, it gets pretty festive and silly, which inspires lots of screen shots.

Waiting for the flaming chicken to appear

After we had killed it I looked back through my screen shot folder and realized that I probably have more images of Scorchwing than anything else in the game. The earliest, like the one at the top of this post from last July, are of Scorch. The long time it took to kill it meant waiting around when it spawned so you had enough people.

Sometimes you find kindred spirits

The later images are all about the community silliness of waiting for the spawn. I like the Scorchwing fight as far as world bosses go. And I like that it brings big groups together and helps remind me how vibrant a place my server is.

So many people engaged in poultricide

Still, waiting around for a random spawn timer isn’t really engaging gameplay. I wonder if all the changes coming with F2P will standardize Scorch’s spawn to bring it more in line with the other daily contracts. If so, I’ll be glad of the time it saves me, but a little sad if we lose this weird excuse to have a party in the middle of Blighthaven.

Source: Moonshine Mansion

Fridays Are For… Yelp?

August 7, 2015 by AggroChat

Friday has become a weird blogging day for me lately. My habit is generally to write out a post the night before, as the last thing I do before going to bed. Having tried writing posts at different times of day, however, I’ve noticed that the thoughts I have and the kinds of things I write about are very different depending on when I write the post.

As part of this, I started working on trying to seed in posts at different times, so that I’m putting a post up every day, but not always at the exact same time every day (and, more importantly, not writing them at the same time every day). Given that I’ve missed a few Fridays because Friday apparently is a busy-ish day for me most weeks, this hasn’t worked out so well.

On the other hand, writing at 2:30pm rather than 1am means that my mind is on different things. Right now I’m thinking about how difficult it is to find trustworthy reviews of places. I need to get my oil changed, and according to yelp there are about 40 places within a reasonable distance I could go to do this. Yelp reviews have fallen into the problem of public reviews in general– pretty much no one ever gives something an accurate number of stars– it either gets 5 stars (if it was a good experience) or 0/1 (if it wasn’t), and figuring out what kind of place I’m going to based on a bunch of random people’s one-sided reports isn’t terribly useful now that everyone uses Yelp.

The same is true of apartment hunting, restaurants, glassdoor company reviews… everything. Everything is three to three-and-a-half stars, and often reading into a particularly bad review suggests that the fault miiiiiight not lie with the company in question, although sometimes it does.

What I’ve been mulling over is the idea of a yelp-style concept that plugs into existing social media (yelp may already do this, but it’s poorly advertised), so that what you get is your friends’ and acquaintances’ reviews of things. I feel like, properly done, it would drive more casual and more helpful reviews while also encouraging people to both review more often and at a higher quality. Instead of a star system, it could just say “friends have posted from this location X times in the last Y days” and show you what they’ve had to say over time (and you’re more likely to actually care, because it’s your friends).

Food for thought. Time to make some key lime pie.

Source: Digital Initiative
Fridays Are For… Yelp?