Belghast

AggroChat 51 – Awesome Outfits

Last night was a bit of an odd showing because for various reasons and the majority of the week it looked like it would be the Ashgar and Belghast show.  However some timing worked out well and we managed to talk our good friend Thalen into joining the fun.  Thalen is one of those people that I have known in some context for over a decade.  While he didn’t raid with us in LNR, he had connections to our raid through mutual friends and we spent a lot of time conversing with his raid Last Horse that Warenwolf also came from.  Post Vanilla he has been a pretty permanent fixture of any guild I have been part of, and for the late BC early Wrath era we together with a few others representing the founders of the Duranub Raiding Company.  Needless to say Thalen is one of those people that has always been in my life in one form or another for a very long time.

We had this strange meandering show last night where in truth none of us had really been playing much of anything super exciting.  We dove into a few odd topics like World of Warcraft making some bad calls with Warlords of Draenor, and how important it is for us to look awesome when we are playing games.  We talk about some of the lengths we have gone to in order to track down cosmetic gear.  As far as games discussed we talk Dungeons and Dragons, Mega Man ZX,. Shin Megami Tensei IV, Persona 4 Golden, Axiom Verge, and a little Darkest Dungeon.  We like always talk a lot about Final Fantasy XIV and what we have been up to there.  Thalen has now leapt ahead of me in the classes to 50 race… with six to my five.  However he did make a smarter call then I did with leveling Arcanist which essentially gets you both Scholar and Summoner.  I think if I can ever get my Arcanist to 30 I will be set, since I can queue as a healer from that point on.

Rotund Buddy

Yesterday I decided spend a bit more of my winnings from the Golden Saucer.  The first 8000 mgp I earned went towards buying the ponytail upgrade for the Aesthetician.  After that I was not quite certain what I should pick up.  I have been going back and forth on buying the blood sword for some time, simply because it is freaking awesome looking.  The problem is I am not sure if I have a decent looking shield to go with it…  and I really don’t spend that much time tanking on my Paladin other than very low level content.  It seemed like it might end up being a waste of 10,000 mgp.  Instead I decided to go with something that would make me happy all the time.  I ended up grabbing the “Heavy Hatchling” minion, which is adorably waddle-y fat.  It sits there barely staying upright and every so often almost looses its balance as it sniffs around looking for food.

The best part about the pet is that it doesn’t run around like a normal minion.  Instead it hops around on its butt.  I seriously was easily amused for a good ten minutes after getting it running circles in the Gold Saucer.  Most people I know have been working on saving the cash to get the Setzer jacket, which is cool…  but I was never much of a fan of Setzer in Final Fantasy VI to be honest.  He was a means to an end for me… he had the worlds only Airship… and I needed an Airship.  He never actually got any play other than those few times when you absolutely had to use every single character you had gotten.  The jacket is just too flamboyant for my tastes…  I think I prefer a dyed version of Snow’s jacket better for most cosmetic outfits.  Anyways I guess the next 10,000 mgp I end up with I will finally go ahead and pick up that blood sword.

Coil Revisited

Last night we decided to take a bunch of the new 50s into the Binding Coil of Bahamut to do turns one through four.  It many ways it felt like coming home, because it had been so long since we last did any of the content.  I managed to pick up another piece of the High Allagan plate armor, which was pretty awesome.  We had a bit of a stumbling block on coil turn 2, in part because we collapsed to early on the first attempt.  On attempt two we pushed through without much issue.  I was pleasantly surprised that we oneshot turn four, since I remember us having some issue with it.  Since we were doing so well we opted to go ahead and push into Turn 5, so that the new recruits could see the difference.  Unless you have experienced it… you cannot fully appreciate how much the content drops the bottom out on you when you get into turn 5.  I got all sorts of warm fuzzies though walking in because our experience of learning turn 5 was so enjoyable for me.

All in all the group did admirably, and we managed to make it to the dive bomb phase several times.  Admittedly we had myself, Ashgar and Cylladora that had been there numerous times…  but they picked up and learned the fight extremely quickly all things considered.  At the very least they made progress in a single night that took us several weeks.  I hope we can go back there with the same group and get them all through turn 5.  I have a feeling this is going to be a somewhat regular occurrence since you need turn 5 to unlock the second coil of Bahamut.  In other news… I am really hoping that we make some serious progress on the fourth phase of Turn 9 this Monday.  I am so ready to defeat that encounter so we can move forward into the Final Coil of Bahamut.  At this point we have a few months before Heavensward, and it is probably hoping for too much… but I would really love to defeat the Final Coil before the expansion lands.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Rotund Buddy

Twitch and Hitbox

Yesterday was a bit of a strange day in that I recorded two different podcasts that were not AggroChat on the same day.  Early in the day I recorded another episode of Bel Folks Stuff, that was completely on the spur of the moment since I was off for Good Friday.  Right now I am tenantively planning on releasing this on Wednesday.  Then in the evening I guested on an episode of the Multiplaying podcast.  While talking on that podcast or actually I think during the “after party” we were talking about Twitch and Hitbox.  During yesterday morning I did my first real test of using JoiCaster to stream to both Hitbox and Twitch at the same time.  Other than some technical difficulties it largely worked and I was able to produce a video of myself playing Darkest Dungeon.

The problem is that I had like five times the number of people watching the twitch stream as I did the hitbox stream at the same time.  So much so that I stopped watching the chat on Hitbox and wound up missing a few comments.  Last night I realized something, that my love of Hitbox is somewhat clouding my judgment.  Me trying to make that happen is kind of like trying to make MySpace happen because you happened to like this or that feature better than Facebook.  At this point Twitch is ubiquitous, everyone has an account and it is widely supported by lots of third party sites.  There are several things about Hitbox that just feel better, but there just aren’t the number of people there that there are on Twitch.  In theory I think I am going to abandon this whole multi-streaming thing and just stick with Twitch from this point on.  It pains me to say it, but Hitbox as cool as it might be… is just too late to the party.

Darkest Dungeon

As we announced last week during the AggroChat episode, this month I chose Darkest Dungeon as my round robin pick for the game club.  This is one of those games that I have seen circulating in among my friends but I largely avoided it, so that I could go into it fresh as a game club pick.  Yesterday I played it for the first time, in the block above you can see the result of my stream.  I have to say even though the game is pretty unforgiving… I am really enjoying the hell out of it.  At its core it is a rogue like RPG dungeon crawler, with a really awesome woodcut art style… and an interesting sanity mechanic.  So in part it feels a bit like playing Call of Cthulhu.  Everything seems to have a chance of effecting your sanity, and when your characters get too stressed a saving throw is triggered.  If they succeed this internal roll they gain a positive trait, and if they fail it… they gain a negative trait.

The cool thing is… these are not just passive debuffs but they actively change the way the character starts interacting.  For example in the above play session my Vestal gained the “greedy” negative trait… which oddly enough made her far more blood thirsty in combat.  There were a number of times where she just attacked without my say.  This morning when playing the game a bit one of my highwaymen got the fearful trait causing him to periodically retreat to the back of the pack, changing what abilities you could actually use to attack with.  The only real negative so far is that “the only way out is through” meaning once you start a mission it seems like the only way to leave the mission is to either finish it successfully… or kill off your party.  The positive there is that party members are roughly as disposable as they are in Rogue Legacy.  There are always fresh recruits available through the wagon in camp.  At this point I have lost one entire party… and a few single characters here and there and it feels like I am still making forward momentum.  I feel like this game is going to generate some interesting conversation at the end of the month.

Alligator Pears

Yesterday was a very strange day for me, largely because I was trying not to get too terribly involved in anything.  With the two podcasts, and not really knowing the scheduling of the second one I stayed out of the mix for most things.  This means that the vast majority of my time online was spent working on Botany.  At this point I have managed to take it to level 35 which is the beginning of the more grindy levels.  Thankfully I have for the most part a full allotment of leve quests to get me through them.   Working on harvesting has become my “during podcasts” activity, because it is slow paced and proding and does not require much attention.  So while recording both Bel Folks Stuff and Multiplaying I slowly worked my way through harvesting a ton of stuff…  namely Alligator pears.  I am not sure exactly what they are… but I certainly did manage to gather a dozen stacks of them.  In truth I kind of expect they would look a bit like an avocado in real life.

Now I need to figure out what item I need for my level 40 Botany quest and start collecting that.  So far that has been how I have leveled, I focus fire whatever item I need for the next quest and then when I collect enough of those I start doing Levequests.  Botany seems so much more peaceful than mining was, and I guess it is in part because it almost exclusively takes place in the games extremely beautiful forest areas.  There is just something relaxing about walking around, listening to the music and chopping down trees.  Today however I really need to spend some time working on getting actual content in that can earn me poetics.  I did take a break from the harvesting for awhile yesterday to run some new folks through Tam-Tara Deepcroft.  Tanking low level content is always enjoyable, and it gives me a chance to break out my sword and board and paladin it up.  The constant trickle of new players still manages to floor me, but everyone seems happy and well adjusted which makes me happy in turn.

#FFXIV #DarkestDungeon #Twitch

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Darkest Dungeon

A Good Friday

Today is a very excellent day…  other than the fact that I am actually awake at this hour of the morning when I don’t really have to be.  Without exposure to children to constantly remind me of an impending holiday, they tend to sneak up on me.  So at the beginning of this week when a co-worker asked me which day we got off for Easter I completely blanked…  and had a sudden rush of realization that it was in fact that time.  So I had expected to have to work today, which is part of what makes it such a truly good Friday.  As far as what I will be spending my day doing…  well we already have a list of things that I need to accomplish.  For example as soon as the tag office opens I will be venturing out to renew the tag on my jeep, and at the same time going to get a money order to pay taxes.

On top of this I also have planned to record two different podcasts today, which is going to make it an exceptionally busy day.  During the time in between I plan on streaming some Darkest Dungeon, which for those who have not listened yet is our March AggroChat Game Club game.  I have not played it at all yet, so I figured I would stream my first moments in the game today.  This was actually my pick in the round robin system we set up, and mostly because I had heard so many of my friends playing it a few months back.  I am not sure what to really expect other than the fact that it is a dungeon crawler RPG about mental illness.  The real question will be just how quirky the game is versus how fun and playable it is.  There are a lot of games out there with a quirky mechanic that is supposed to be the reason why you play the game.  Micromanaging mental conditions is not necessarily enough of a mechanic to keep me engaged, so hopefully there is a lot of good monster slaying fun as well.

Seven and Three

My week has been pretty much consumed with posts about the Developer Appreciation Week, and at least part of today will be consumed with trying to collect posts about the DAW2015.  But during the time in between I did quite a lot of raiding.  This week is easily our single best week in World of Warcraft raiding.  In total we managed to down seven normal mode bosses and three heroic mode bosses in Blackrock Foundry, including two first kills for us.  To recap that is Gruul, Oregorger, Darmac, Ka’graz, Kromog, Thogar, Hans & Franz on Normal leaving us Blast Furnace, Iron Maidens and Blackhand.  Then we repeated a kill of Heroic Hans & Franz and went on to take down Darmac and Gruul as well.  We spent most of last night working on Heroic Oregorger, which was the source of several frustrations…  namely because we were getting discombobulated on the order in which we need to pop the boxes on the second time.  We would end up tanking him where he stood when the boxes went down a second time, meaning that our normal order was jacked up because that place how was full of piles of the crap that he drops on the ground.

Unfortunately with all of these boss kills, I still have yet to pick up a pair of pants.  I am still to this day rocking 640 legs, and I am starting to get frustrated enough to dump the resources into crafting a set.  Honestly I have had some pretty shitty luck loot wise for awhile now.  I was hoping and praying that Gruul would drop me an upgraded sword, but alas nothing.  The best upgrades I have gotten in awhile seem to be from the Garrison loot crates that I get I believe every two weeks.  I did somehow manage to get two piece set bonus this week which is a positive.  I am not sure if it has helped my dps at all however, since I still seem to be bringing up the rear of the pack dps wise.  I am insane on AOE fights, but single target fights I fall to the bottom.  I think that might just be what Gladiator dps looks like honestly.  All in all it was a fun night, but once again last night we struggled with lack of healers.  For a period of time it looked like we were not even going to raid at all.  So to come through and manage to down Gruul I guess was quite a feat all things considered.

Alone in the Crowd

@AlternativeChat the biggest challenge I see about the WoW community, is that lots are playing, but few are truly joyful to be playing it

— Bel Writes Things (@belghast) April 2, 2015

I got into an interesting discussion yesterday with Alt that in truth all started from me misreading a tweet.  In the tweet she asked what piece of advice would you give a new player starting Warcraft, the wording however lead me to quickly misread it as “Someone you know who has NEVER played Warcraft before wants to start a game from scratch. Give them ONE piece of advice.” To which I and apparently several other people replied to try FFXIV… because if I had a friend that had not played an MMO and was looking to get into them, that is now the game I would suggest they try playing.  So I was being unintentionally contrarian because other responses to the question admittedly colored my own interpretation.  This lead down an interesting path where we start talking about why I am frustrated with the World of Warcraft community.  I said that I did not feel that most players feel “joy” in playing the game any longer, meaning that I think most people are playing the game because they have played the game for years and have one hell of a sense of inertia built up.

To which Alt drove down a course of discussion asking if the community even matters if you are mostly a Soloist.  I had a pretty knee-jerk reaction of yes… community always matters, but upon sleeping on this question I still feel the same.  There is this whole “butterfly effect” that happens in an online game.  Even if you are going out of your way to avoid other players, you are being effected by them.  You might wander through an area because the player density is less there, causing you to get into more battles along the way, than if you had followed the beaten path.  Similarly it might take you twice as long to complete a quest because other players in the area are farming down and actively fighting you for the spawns.  Essentially you are never alone when playing an online game, and even without you realizing it other players are imposing themselves upon your game time.  My theory goes something like this… if you play a game with an excellent community these random encounters feel less imposing.  In a game like Warcraft the systems are set up in a way that make you adversaries with every other player operating in the same space, fighting for the same resources.  The Garrisons have created this bubble world where you no longer have to interact with other players, but that world is a hollow shell version of the larger world.  I feel that games that create systems that allow players to share and collaborate instead of compete are more enjoyable experiences.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Seven and Three

Over the last several days I have been rattling off a series of studios and game teams that I appreciate.  Today will mark my final day of this process, but I am hoping that it has inspired some of you out there to make your own posts about the developers you appreciate.  The person I really appreciate is Scarybooster for getting this thing started back in I believe 2010?  Scary has a way of coming up with these great ideas, like he is the person who decided the Alliance of Awesome needed to happen as well.  Unfortunately he no longer updates his blogs, and has deleted more of them in the past than I can count.  So if you know Scary tell him he needs to stop doing that shit and keep coming up with interesting and awesome ideas.

Blizzard – Heroes of the Storm Team

I talked about League of Legends yesterday, and there is no denying it’s market domination in the MOBA arena.  The problem is League is far more complicated of a game than I care to play.  I get frustrated trying to figure out what I should build when, and then Blizzard comes along and creates an MOBA for someone like me.  This game does what Blizzard does best, boil a genre down to its most basic essence and polish it until it shines.  This is precisely how I feel about HoTS and its impact on the MOBA genre.  Through a series of quick this or that choices you can build out your character and get right back into the action without constantly being afraid that you built the wrong thing.  While friends have pointed out that this greatly limits what you can do with any given champion…  I am fine with this and in fact welcome it.  As much as I enjoy a “Tanky Darius” I would rather just have some clear messaging on what the intent of every champion was, and Heroes of the Storm gives this to me.  On top of this the map design is awesome, and each one feels equally enjoyable with its own specific mechanics.  I think the entire world is tired of playing Summoner’s Rift.

SOE/Daybreak – Landmark Team

Every time I talk about the company formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment, I do so with a little bit of heartbreak.  Daybreak is not the same company, but I feel like the people that are still there are trying their damnedest to make this situation work.  There is a lot of negative press that I could be talking about on my blog, about the poor decisions of the company managing Daybreak but for the most part I have tried not to.  I feel like there is plenty of negativity out there already on this subject, and that the people who are still there need our support now more than ever.  With that said this post goes out to everyone who has ever been a part of the Landmark game.  While I am not playing it right now, I still think it is an extremely cool concept and I keep meaning on jumping right back in.  Landmark is essentially the ultimate building game in every possible way, and the amount of stuff that the community has been able to create because of the excellent toolset developed by this team is phenomenal.  This game blew me away, and I am still constantly amazed by the sort of things I am seeing built.  So bravo to the folks who are no longer with the team, and bravo to the folks still there fighting to keep the ship going forward.

Undead Labs – All of the Them

For most of these I have singled out an entire team to talk about, but this time I am breaking that trend and instead talking about an entire studio.  I love Undead Labs.  I love their spirit, and I love their dedication…  and quite honestly I love the way they interact with the public.  I remember when State of Decay was about to release on the XBox 360 I was completely pumped for it.  I went home that night played the game for several hours and then wrote a pretty gushy blog post the very next day.  Within moments of posting the blog I had it being retweeted by Annie Strain the wife of Undead Labs Founder Jeff Strain, who then proceeded to engage with me in a back and forth about my blog post and the game in general.  That sort of genuine interaction is just so damned refreshing, and it seems to extend to every single team member.  I was lucky enough to get to hang out and talk to several of them during Pax South, and they all had this infectious joy over the games they had created and were creating.  While I still desperately want a multiplayer version of State of Decay, I have faith that sooner or later the team will give me something akin to that experience.  In the meantime they just seem like a really damned cool studio, and I look forward to watching as their latest game Moonrise progresses to launch.  Additionally I feel like I am probably buying yet another copy of State of Decay as the special Year One edition should be landing shortly.

Motiga – Gigantic Team

This is another tale of me just really liking a game studio.  I went to Pax South knowing next to nothing about this game other than the fact that it existed, had a cartoony art style and used a teal and orange color scheme it all of its marketing.  I walked away from Pax South being both a fan of the game and of the team behind it.  I was lucky enough to participate in several plays of the game, and got some time to talk to several members of the development and community staff.  They all seem just as amped about this game as the players did, and it was awesome to be coached by the folks who built the game…  or have them marvel when I apparently found a bug that nobody had actually found yet.  The game is just really damned fun, and that seems to be the focus on making sure the various champion interactions are enjoyable.  I have no clue what the timeframe for this games launch is but I look forward to it anxiously.  Playing it with two other members of the AggroChat crew against a minor YouTube celebrity, and defeating him…  was pretty much the highlight of my Pax South experience.  So keep up the awesome work and I look forward to playing this game with my friends when it releases.

Every Single Game Developer

While I have singled out a handful of individuals for specific games that I really love playing…  I feel like for this final day of my #DAW2015 love fest…  I want to change things up a bit.  Basically this goes out to every single game developer out there, regardless of what you are working on or for what company.  You guys are living the dream of so many of us who did not  choose to chase it.  While there are absolutely days I’m thankful I am not in that industry, especially as another studio decimates its staff to realign for this or that reason, there are other days where I pine over the path not taken.  You folks are my rockstars, and even if you are making a game that no one will ever play…  you are being awesome.  Games bring me so much joy, and there is a cast of often nameless and faceless people who struggled through crunch time to get that product into my hands.  As I talk about the games I talk about, I try my best to always be aware of the folks behind the scenes that made it happen.  So to all the game developers out there…  keep making awesome stuff and I will keep playing it.  Thank you all.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 3