Good Morning Folks! My morning has been a bit on the odd side. I had to get up super early, run into the office, do a few things, and then get back home before an 8:30 meeting. As a result, I am getting a bit of a late start to the day. There is a topic that I have been mulling over in my head and I thought I would use today as a time to open a discussion. This year with Blaugust we have had a significantly larger reach than we have in previous years. At the time of writing, we have one-hundred-seven participating blogs and fifty-nine of them are completely new to the Blaugust event. This means our community is growing, but also as it grows some of the collective cultural tenets of the community are changing a bit. Right or wrong this was an event born out of the MMORPG Blogging community, and most of us old-timers have created blogs where we ramble on about our thoughts regarding the games we are playing and the new games on the horizon that we find ourselves pining for.
I appreciate a fresh perspective as folks arrive who have been wholly disconnected from this original community. I think there has been a good deal of shared growth since we opened up the call to pretty much anyone who creates regularly syndicated content in whatever form that takes. However this year I have seen a few entrants that are very clearly using Large Language Models as part of their daily routine. This feels like we are approaching a slippery slope here, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts. I’ve screwed around a lot specifically with Large Language Models that generate images off prompts. I’ve spent most of my time playing around with Stable Diffusion, and that is precisely what I think of it as… “play”.
It is a toy that I can fiddle around with and get some curious results from, but nothing I am doing do I truly consider to be a creative endeavor. I know other folks who have been in this same blogging pod for a while do the same. Sometimes we need an image to break up the text of a post, and can’t find anything that fits our exact requirements so it is pretty easy to turn to a picture generation machine and have it poop out something to fill this void. The thing is… when I do this, I don’t take any sense of pride in “creating” something because I did not. I typed some words into a magic box and it spit out a visualization, and while that visualization might be appealing it is a largely unrepeatable event. What I take pride in are the words surrounding that visualization that I pulled from my head.
So I am finding myself in a weird state looking at the prospect of folks having LLMs spit out the text for their blog posts, even if they are tweaking them later. Blaugust originally was an event centered around writing. That is humans who are sitting down to commit the thoughts that they are thinking to the digital page and then share them with peers. Typing some prompts into a machine and having it generate thoughts for you… feels like a bit of a violation of that original goal. I don’t care what ChatGPT regurgitated from stolen data… I care about what YOU think as the person behind the screen typing the thing that I am reading. I find zero value something that an LLM generates that is formatted to look like a number of posts that it consumed that were written by someone originally.
So I find myself in an awkward position. Blaugust 2024 as the rules of the contest stand, does not have any text forbidding the use of large language models to generate posts. As a result, I find myself having to tolerate some things that seem distasteful to me personally… and given the number of back-channel comments that I have received other Blaugustans also find it distasteful. Going forward for 2025 and beyond there is likely going to be an “Anti-AI” rider that the mentors will have to work through. Again I don’t so much care about the “AI as Clipart” trend of using it as something vaguely pleasant looking to break up large blocks of text. What concerns me is using Large Language Models to generate text posts instead of sharing your own thoughts.
I’m not purposefully trying to be a Luddite, but also believe there is value in human creativity that cannot be replaced by a regurgitation of consumed source material. Maybe I am off base here, and folks don’t mind the concept of LLM content mills… but given the number of sidebars I have had with folks I am guessing that will not be the case. Anyways I am opening this discussion, feel free to drop me your thoughts and feelings below.
The post Blaugust and Large Language Models appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Last night I dinged 97, and is often the case when I have freshly dinged and no longer worry about experience loss for a bit… I decided to try a few things. One of these was the new version of the King in the Mists fight that originally debuted in the Affliction League. This is now accessed through a fragment called An Audience With the King that can show up as Ritual rewards, and over the course of running a bunch of my Einhar/Ritual atlas, I found three of these. It feels like this fight is much easier than the version I remember from Affliction League, either that or I am much stronger than I was at the time I fought him initially back then. In my three kills I got 2 copies of Untouched Soul and 1 copy of the chase item Light of Meaning which is a rework of the Perandus Pact from Necropolis League. The version I got was the lightning damage variant which I sold for five Divine Orbs.
I feel like I have reached the point where I am starting to see the flaws of the Settlers of Kalguur league. Don’t get me wrong I am still having a blast and I still love the town mechanic, but there is a bit of an Achilles heel. Essentially any activity that does not produce copious amounts of gold… is the wrong choice for spending your time. Delve was doing decently gold-wise for a bit, but now just cannot keep up with running maps. However, even when running maps I average around 10,000 gold per map if I attempt to fully clear everything. It creates this scenario where you feel like you are being chased by a loan shark and never quite able to get ahead. I went to bed last night with a decent gold lead and woke up this morning to see that almost all of it was drained away by my 3000+ gold-per-hour upkeep costs that just kept ticking overnight. I am not actively running mappers right now, and I am barely shipping anything… and have heard that for folks with high-end mappers, their upkeep can be 30k to 100k per hour. Basically, I feel like I have to keep pushing in order to feed the beast, or feel like I am falling behind.
Last night I spent the tail end of my evening leveling a ranger that I am ultimately planning on going Deadeye to play Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. However, doing low-level content means that my gold drops shifted from 100 or so gold at a time to 5 gold at the best of times. This slowed my gains to a trickle which means that for the entirety of my leveling period, I maybe got 2000 gold, which doesn’t even pay for an hour of resource gathering. I am hoping that either GGG increases gold drops, or reduces upkeep costs because we are heading towards a mobile game scenario where it feels like you can never really get ahead. Sure there is zero penalty for letting the coffers run dry. Everything stops, and the game complains at you, but effectively all of your workers sit there until you are ready to feed them gold again. Alternatively, I could manually deallocate everything so that they stopped costing me any resources. I might end up doing that for a bit while I am leveling alts just so it doesn’t feel quite so bad to watch it all waste away.
Part of why I am leveling a bow character is that I managed to pull a pretty well-rolled Widowhail while playing my Righteous Fire Chieftain. No one plays Elemental Hit of the Spectrum with a Widowhail, but honestly, I sort of want to understand why. I got this quiver with attack all elements, bows fire an additional arrow, global accuracy increase, and crafted attack speed on it. In theory, once you multiply these values by 2.4 you end up with what seems like it would be a pretty solid elemental bow. Maybe it won’t work, but maybe my weird kludge Deadeye will work just fine. I’ve also been setting aside good Armor/Evasion gear that I have gotten from shipments and in theory, have most of everything ready to go for an attempt at this character. All I really need to do is farm up the gem… which I will absolutely do on my RF Chieftain because I can steamroll the Labyrinth.
For now, I am leveling double Lightning Arrow, one with a Mirage Archer setup in a Quillrain and one with a Ballista Totem setup in a Foxshade chest. I did try leveling with a gem that I have never used before and I think I might like it better than pretty much any bow gem for early levels. One of the challenges with bow leveling is when you first start out you don’t have access to Lesser Multiple Projectiles which means for a bit you just don’t have terribly good coverage. Galvanic Arrow however fixes this and is one of the first gem picks that you have access to upon reaching Lion Eye’s Watch. Essentially it fires out three bolts of lighting that fork giving you a good deal of coverage and allowing you to shred packs. I am sure someone will tell me all of the reasons why this is not a great skill, but having just used it until I got Lightning Arrow, I gotta say it felt pretty solid.
I got tired of looking awful and this morning I decided to go with a Vaal theme for leveling purposes. I went with the Vaal set from the 2024 supporter packs, the giant rolling Vaal orb pet, and the baby Vaal oversoul minion. I have a lot of MTX for Path of Exile, but I gotta say given how much enjoyment I get out of the game and how optional all of them are… I’ve never really felt bad giving them money. I am near the end of Act 3 currently, and I want to at least get up to level 56 tonight if possible so that I can see how the Widowhail combo feels in real-world usage. I might try and farm up elemental hit gems over lunch, or I could just stop being cheap and pay the 40-50 chaos they are going for currently.
Still hoping we see a patch before the end of the week that addresses the gold issues. Are you paying Path of Exile? What have you thought of the Settlers League so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Return of the King appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I played a heck of a lot of Path of Exile this weekend and a lot of that time was focused on gold acquisition to feed the league mechanic. I did some Photoshop magic to create a single screen that shows all of the parts of the town that I have maxed out. The only thing not shown here is the Recruiter which does not have its own doodad on the town view. Mining helped a lot because it means that I get gold from marking ore in my maps, which also means if I happen to find two nodes in a map it increases my gold gain significantly. Generally speaking, I am clearing 8k to 20k depending on a bunch of variables in each map but more often hover around the 10k mark. I still have my enchanter, disenchanter, mappers, and recombinators to max out before I have everything at the level cap of 11.
The thing is… I am not sure it is really worth pushing through to level everything up. Granted I have not put any effort into significantly upgrading my workers… but with capped shipping I seem to be largely getting the same results that I have always gotten. The main difference is I have three ships and all of the ports unlocked at this point. The league mechanic feels like it pays out significantly better in gear than it does in currency. This can be really cool as I will talk about a bit later when I go over my gear upgrades, but since gear isn’t selling amazingly well in this league due to the mechanic is generating so much of it… it is not like getting a ton of gear really helps your bottom line. So long as I get a few chaos per boatload I am mostly happy. I’ve yet to pull anything higher than an exalted orb from a shipment, and I think in truth I will be better served tweaking my map runners to be able to reliably do t16s.
That said occasionally you get some amazing gear from the mechanic. The gloves that I swapped to yesterday are better rolled than a pair that I was looking at on the market going for 8 Divines. I legitimately was contemplating making that purchase and I am so glad I did not given that I wound up with essentially the same thing for free. I’ve also been wearing league mechanic boots for a while now with no signs of finding reasonable upgrades. The big upgrade of the weekend though is that I sold a big ticket item and bought a rather expensive fractured sceptre base and then crafted it into a replacement weapon. Lastly, I swapped out my pseudo-six-link helm for a slightly better-rolled one. I had picked up my previous one for a steal and was able to flip it for 3 Divines when I only paid 1.5 Divines for the new one. For things like that I tend to overprice because I don’t necessarily care about a fast sale.
In other news, I ran into one of the new optional boss encounters that can show up in T16 maps. The Black Knight is in theory a replacement for the Black Morrigan encounter, but instead of showing up in the Viridian Wildwood, he shows up as a clickable hole in the ground called the Starfall Crater. Fighting him feels an awful lot like fighting Aul the Crystal King, so it was not a big deal to beat him since I have done that fight so many times down in Delve. I was hoping to get him to down Svalinn so I can make a dumb block build that triggers spellcasts… but mostly I just got a ton of Verisium and Runes. Really hoping that I can find a bunch more of him so I can try and farm the shield. All in all, it was a really fun optional encounter, similar to finding the Nameless Seer.
The biggest progress from the weekend is that I have completed the 115 normal and unique maps that make up the Atlas. On top of that, I have done Vinktar Square and am only lacking Doryani’s Machinarium from the challenge of running all of the unique maps. I am hoping a Doryani’s drops down in Delve soon because I am beelining to fight any bosses that I encounter down there. What prompted me to push through and buy the last few maps is that I needed the crafting recipes that they generated in order to craft my scepter. Truth be told, none of the maps were more than 20 chaos with Doryani being the outlier going for around 2 Divines. Now my focus really turns to trying to knock out some of the challenges that I am close to finishing up. Basically, my goal as always is to do enough challenges in order to unlock a totem pole for my hideout. Once I have done that… any progress after that is gravy.
Finishing out my 115th map also unlocked the last of the rewards in Kirac’s Vault, with that very last item being a simulacrum. One of the big changes that they made in this league is that Simulacrums essentially start 15 waves into the previous progress and cap out at 15 waves instead of 30. So essentially doing a 15 now is the same level of accomplishment as doing a 30 previously. I am a big fan of this change because it did previously feel like you spent a lot of time facerolling waves until they started to matter. I took a ton of deaths and basically lost any progress toward 97 that I had made… but managed to complete all fifteen waves. Truth be told in those last few waves… the trash mobs were WAY more difficult than the boss encounters. That said I did try really hard to split up Ominphobia and Kosis so that I did not have to be fighting them at the same time. I didn’t necessarily get anything amazing for my troubles but did manage to pull a few different copies of Megalomaniac.
I’ve not made it super far into Delve this league and am sitting around 150 depth. I have gotten several lucky divine drops from nodes, however, which has been great. Recombinators continue to be my most reliable method for earning a bunch of chaos quickly, and the currency exchange is freaking amazing. I need to spend more time down there, but the mapping has just felt better because it helps feed the league mechanic more efficiently. I’m mostly running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual strategy in maps and have lucked into one spawn of Black Morrigan that happily occurred when I was running a duplicating scarab so I got two copies. What has been shocking however is just how many Omens have been dropping from the map spawned ritual mobs. I’ve already pulled two Omen of Connections, a few Omen of Blanching, and pretty much every other more common Omen a half dozen times. The biggest challenge is that none of my trees have a lot of map drop support so sustaining maps is a big fraught at the moment.
All told however I am still having a freaking blast. This legitimately might be my favorite league even though the ground loot that is dropping in maps has not been that phenomenal. If I need money I can go farm up more resonators and fossils down in the dark, but for now, I am mostly able to afford anything that I really want. There are some upgrades that I still need… namely I have been trying to roll a large cluster jewel to replace the janky one that I am using currently. I also have a nice corrupted Cloak of Flame that I am slowly working on getting socketed and linked, but it is a bit of a stretch goal. I also have another Shaper Shield that I am occasionally trying to craft into something better than the one I am currently using. I like having some long-reaching goals though so I am not in any real rush to acquire anything. Getting my Six-Link chest due to getting Black Morrigan went a long way to improving my league experience. I also need to swap out some of my gems for Awakened versions, but it isn’t like I am struggling with anything currently.
I got a really nicely rolled Widowhail, and found a pretty nice quiver to go with it from the league mechanic… so I am starting to get that itch to try rolling a bow character. I’ve been stockpiling decent drops for that eventuality given that I seem to always end up wanting a bow character. I’m also contemplating trying to build something around Volcanic Fissure of Snaking again. Then there is the whole desire to try Lacerate of Haemorrhage Gladiator like literally everyone else in this league. Basically, I am starting to feel that alting itch, so I fully expect before the end of the week I will have rolled something new.
The post A Weekend of Upgrades appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Thalen
Hey Folks! For years we have had this tradition of recording a full spoiler show once all of the folks who are actively playing Final Fantasy XIV have completed the content. We knew this would be an epic undertaking given that we never got around to recording a post-Endwalker show. This is absolutely going to at a minimum be two shows… maybe three depending on how well the next show goes. We used to record these epic five-hour-long shows that I edited down into chunks… but have thankfully since wised up to just splitting them between several weeks. This week we cover everything that happens after the Endwalker MSQ credit roll until just before the halfway point of Dawntrail. Be warned, this is a full spoiler discussion as we recount the tale and talk about various details in depth along the way.
