Tales of the Aggronaut

Statistics Funk

One of the problems with creating content is every now and then you will have something that you are very proud of, but the community doesn’t seem to be all that interested in.  That is not to say that I am not proud of most of the things I am involved in.  I love what this blog has become, and I love AggroChat…   but that seems to be less about me and more about the group dynamic that we have assembled.  However I feel like “Bel Folks Stuff” was one of those projects that I poured more of myself into than most.  The idea was that I would grab interesting people and have natural conversations with them where we discussed whatever happened to be on their mind.  I feel like for the most part that mission has succeeded, and I am very proud of the six episodes we have so far.  In the episodes I have talked with:

1. Gypsy Syl
2. Rowanblaze and Sctrz
3. Alternative Chat
4. Petter Mårtensson
5. Qelric
6. Liore

Unfortunately after the release of the latest episode I did that thing you are never supposed to do… I did a deep dive into the statistics.  In many ways this secondary podcast has been a labor of love, and right now it gets several orders of magnitude fewer listeners than AggroChat.  So I question…  what I did wrong with it?  Maybe I have simply done a poor job of advertising it?  It isn’t part of The Gaming and Entertainment Network so that right there is one strike against it.  I release them with questionable regularity, which is another strike against it.  I also question whether or not it was a good idea to treat it as separate from the other things that I do.  I have wondered for awhile if I should have just released it as part of the AggroChat content stream.. as a sort of bonus episode or something.  In any case… since looking at the stats I am exceedingly bummed about the limited audience.  Maybe there just is not the appetite for listening to gamers rattle on?  Anyways… this isn’t going to necessarily stop me from making more but I also feel like my guests have been awesome in their willingness to do the show…  when there really isn’t much benefit from it.

Foundation of Folks

For some time now, I’ve had various people tell me that I use exercise any connections I have within the games industry to turn the “Folks” podcast into an industry interview show.  I suppose I could do that, but the problem is I am afraid that would fundamentally change the nature of the show.  It might be idealistic, but I wanted to create a show without pretense about its purpose.  I wanted to have people on and just talk, and whatever topics we happened to cover naturally is what we would end up talking about.  If I have people on the show that are known for this or that, there is the pressure to ask them about what they are famous for.  By the same token, I would feel obligated to give them time to plug whatever hot project they happen to be working on.  At that point we have a traditional interview show and not what I was hoping for.  Maybe it is strange but I was hoping to have authentic conversation with a bunch of people, and almost forget for a time that we were recording the conversation.

I guess I question if I could talk “industry” folks into that sort of notion.  So far the people I have had on the show I have a deep connection with already.  These are people that I have gamed with, blogged with, or exchanged more tweets than I can count.  Right now it feels like I am just having a conversation with a friend.  I worry that I cannot keep up that dynamic with people I am not quite so personally invested in.  Then there is the problem of how would I even sell this notion to someone, when I obviously cannot guarantee much in the way of listeners.  That is the obvious sell for most big podcasts… is “talk to me and I can give you X number of ears”.  I don’t have that going for me on any level.  So yeah right now I am in this existential funk about “Bel Folks Stuff” and even though I love doing it… I am questioning if it is worth the scheduling headaches and the extra work on my part to keep it up.  I want to keep it up, but damn…  just bummed.

Second Static

Last night when I got home… I was wallowing in my frustration over the podcast…  so much so that I forgot that last night was to be the inaugural running of the second static group within the Free Company.  The guild has been insane, and we are apparently so active and so prevalent that we jumped from 16th to 6th in the FFXIV free company activity standings.  I will say for some time there has not been a single city I have been in that I did not at least bump into one person with the [GREY] tag.  In order to help get the second static off the ground, myself and Kodra has offered to fill in as whatever role they needed us in.  I ended up main tanking to Damai’s off tank as we managed to work through several content items.  So while I started the evening in a bit of a malaise I finished it pumped about the prospects of having two active static teams within our free company.

We started off with Garuda Extreme, which I know very well…  just not well enough to explain adequately apparently.  This always seems to be a thing for me… I can do something, but I can’t necessarily tell you how to do it.  For awhile we tried using the Duty Finder to fill our missing slots, but honestly had significantly more luck creating a party in the Party Finder.  We met a few nice people on the server as well.  We managed to clear Turn 1 and Turn 4 of Binding Coil of Bahamut as well.  I was pleased that we one shot 4, since I remember having a significant amount of trouble with it initially when Ashgar and I tanked it.  To add to the confusion for the sake of this arrangement… the roles were flipped from what I am most used to.  The positive is… I feel like I could actually farm four over and over in an attempt to get my bear mount.  I need to figure out which piece of high allagan I am missing so I can focus down those.  I would really love to wear that full set of gear.  Anyways the end of the evening was definitely better than the day, so I am thankful that I have such an awesome group of people to spend my game time with.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Foundation of Folks

Bel Folks Stuff #6 – A Good Friday with Liore

Listen to the Episode Here

I had these grand ideas about having two episodes during the month of March to make up for the fact that I missed a February episode.  That never quite worked out.  I had a handful of people that I had talked to but scheduling never quite worked out since I try really hard to squeeze these episodes in whenever my wife is otherwise busy.  With the weekly schedule of AggroChat and the various guest spots I end up getting called on to do, it means she is having to bend her time around me quite often, that I try my best not to make this podcast also do that.  As such I tend to schedule people on a whim, and I am super thankful that the amazing Liore was amicable about that sort of timing.  I literally talked to her Thursday to see if she was available, and we recorded on the afternoon of Good Friday since we were both off work.

Liore and I have known each other for what feels like forever.  She’s been in my guilds, I’ve been in her guilds… and for a period of time in Rift we raided together multiple times a week.  During all of this time we have forged an unconventional friendship.  It feels like we end up on opposite ends of so many discussions, but at the end of the day we do so with the greatest of respect for the other.  During this podcast we talk about all sorts of things, but one thing in particular we highlight because we found it extremely humorous.  Both of us have been getting commentary from the community about a supposedly rivalry between the two of us since we do similar columns now for gaming websites that are technically in competition with each other.  I had a blast spending the afternoon talking with Liore, and had I allowed myself to do so I could have easily spent another full hour chatting away.  I always love it when the conversation flows naturally.

Race to the Bottom

Yesterday we saw the release of the WoW Token out into the wild, and the demand for gold greatly outstripped the availability of people snatching up subscription time.  At the beginning however it was skewing the other direction.  The token started at a prematurely low 30,000g and I watched it yesterday raise up to 35,000g before taking a big dive into the territory that it is currently sitting.  Someone thought ahead and created an excellent stock market like tracking system on https://wowtoken.info/ and you can see the bottom starting to drop out.  Thing is…  most players already have an active subscription for the moment.  It was not until the end of the month when in other games with similar systems we started to see the demand finally climb again.  My advice, just like Wildstar is to snatch up these cheap tokens now because once the system matures a bit you will be paying significantly more per month of subscription.

The reason why I feel like this is the largest benefit of a system like this is it removes the temptation of players to turn to less than legitimate sources of currency.  When I wrote about this a month ago, my research at the time indicated that in the aftermarket this same $20 was buying players around 100,000 gold.  This means the legitimate route now costs you roughly five times as much as the illegal market, which is still going to be a huge draw for some players.  The WoW Token is a failure for Blizzard unless they can squash the third party gold sellers by starving them of their market.  Right now the token is new… and a lot of people are trying it out.  Given a month or two of sanity they will realize that it is greatly overpriced.  I guess for me, I won’t be doing this token unless I can buy a couple and get a big ticket item like an expedition yak, one of those things I have always wanted but was much too far out of my price range.  I have a feeling that this is going to be the case for your average customer.   If by the end of the month we do not see a massive spike in the price of a single token… then I will be extremely surprised.

End of an Expansion

Now for the hardest part of my morning… how exactly do I talk about the wrapping up of the storyline in Final Fantasy XIV 2.55 without giving any spoilers.  I chose a very careful screenshot out of the stack of them that I took because this one really doesn’t say much about what is going on.  In the most spoiler free fashion I can, I am going to talk about my impressions of the events.  I have to say Final Fantasy XIV knows how to end an expansion.  This is hands down the most satisfying and at the same time most anxious ending to an expansion I have ever experienced.  In games like World of Warcraft everything is generally resolved at the end, and all the loose bits tied up… because the intent is for that expansion to live on its own forever without actually continuing the storyline in the next expansion.  In Final Fantasy XIV…  every aspect of this closing means massive ramifications that will hopefully be resolved as we travel into Ishgard.  Instead of wrapping up the lose ends neatly… for each one that is concluded two more ends stand open waiting to be explored.

The awesome thing is… this game has proven that it WILL actually explore them.  How frustrating has it been in the past as games have hinted at things, that never saw fruition.  After all there are still I believe three portals under Wyrmrest temple that go nowhere, that will likely NEVER go anywhere because the narrative has moved on past the original plans.  I expect that each event that happens during the closing of “A Realm Reborn” is going to factor heavily into a future storyline chain.  It was a pretty shocking and brutal conclusion, but it makes me damned happy that I am playing this game.  I quite literally did not see this one coming, and I highly suggest you push hard so that you can see this content before the expansion.  I pushed through in part because my friend Ashgar said that the trailer that was releasing this Friday supposedly spoils some parts of this impact.  As the credits rolled they showed a number of scenes from the past block of content… and I have to say sometimes you lose sight on just how much we accomplished during “A Realm Reborn”.  I am extremely excited to see what happens as we turn our eyes “Heavensward”.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Race to the Bottom

Family Calls

Over the weekend we had a crisis arise, but not one that directly effected our family.  Early on Saturday around 2 am in the morning, my former brother-in-law while drunk wrapped himself around a tree.  He was exceptionally lucky for many reasons.  Firstly for hitting a tree he managed to get out of it with this life…  but with several broken ribs and a collapsed lung.  Secondly he managed to do all of this without injuring anyone else, and on private property…  so there were no charges.  Thirdly this means he did not get a DUI, and also means he is not in jeopardy of losing his job which in the contract has a morality clause.  The problem is since death of my wife’s sister, a half dozen years ago…  he has managed to systematically burn every bridge he had to rely on.  My wife’s sister was a stabilizing force in his life, and without her he simply went out of control.

The thing is, given the age difference between my wife and her eldest sister this man was in many was as much a father to her as anyone else.  He was this constant force in her life, which has made it impossible to completely write him off like so many have.  So my wife got up at 3 am on Saturday and sat with him until 5 pm when someone finally relieved her.  He never once thanked her for this or apologized for putting her through this…  but nonetheless she feels obligated to be there.  In a way I think she feels like her sister would want her to be there, trying to watch out for him.  Last night she packed a bag, and went off to the hospital to stay the night, and took off work to spend the day there today.  This morning I am a bit out of it because I never really sleep well when she is not at home.  The cats kept me company, but I kept rolling over in bed being surprised that she was not there beside me.  I have a feeling this is going to be a long day for both of us.

Defeating the Steps

With the 2.55 patch Final Fantasy XIV added the rest of the story line to set up the release of the expansion coming in June.  With it came yet another Trial, the problem being that this trial is significantly different than the others.  Instead of a big boss battle, you have an epic fight against a dragon on a bridge in which you with the help of your Ishgard allies use all sorts of machinations at your power to win the day.  There are far more moving parts than your average story mode trial, and this means that players need to know their roles and perform them with split second precision at times.  As such this has become the bane of the duty finder, causing players to simply not queue for trials roulette right now.  I talked about this effect in other posts, since it has seemed to take a significant amount of time to fill trial duty parties.  I myself queued three different times and each time the group failed… and then slowly disintegrated beyond our ability to stitch it back together.

Last night during our normal raid spot we took this encounter on, since we were down a few key people.  I played the role of tank, which is a confusing mess of picking up adds and trying to drag them to the front of the bit dragon…  so that the players with cannons can hit them.  All of this time we are trying to avoid being stepped on and taking around 3000 hp worth of damage, often times being stunned at inopportune times.  As the Dragon nears the cannons he explodes them causing AOE damage to anyone standing around them… and to the adds if they happen to be in range of them.  At key points during the fight two players have to use these pillars to chain the dragon in place… and a third has to target and fire the Dragon Killer weapon.  The timing here is super tight, if the dragon is not chained he will simply dodge the attack.  In any case on our third attempt we managed to get all of the pieces in the right order and defeated the trial.  Now I have waiting ahead of me what is supposedly the most important storyline in the game yet.

Moggle Mog Revisited

When we managed to down Moggle Mog extreme, there were a number of players missing from the group.  As such last night we had four players who had not seen the encounter.  We considered going and fighting Titan Extreme, but honestly none of us really relished the though of throwing ourselves against that.  Moggle Mog and Titan are examples of two very different primal fights.  In Titan it is all about repeating the same procedure over and over until you beat the boss, something we are apparently not great at.  Moggle Mog on the other hand involves a lot of thinking on your feet and adjusting to the situation as it happens… a type of game play that we seem to excel at.  With the new players that had not seen the fight it took us a handful of tries, but we managed to down him once more and got one of our newer players Grace a spiffy pink ribbon.  I got the last one but unfortunately it doesn’t show up under my plate armor.  I would absolutely wear it with pride however if it did show up.

Afterwards I started working through the post Steps of Faith content, but that was ultimately short lived.  I was significantly more tired than I realized and before long I was logging for the night.  I snapped this photo of me hanging out with Tataru, Minfilia’s right hand woman.  Not sure why exactly, but early on in this game I latched onto her as one of my favorite characters.  She is awesome and I feel deeply under appreciated in the Final Fantasy XIV scions storyline.  There have been many times where she has saved the day, and gotten nothing more than a half heated acknowledgement by Minfilia.  For all of these reasons I feel like Tataru and I are buds, and it was a cool moment in the story that allowed me to snap this photo.  I would far rather be working for her, than the often clueless leader of the Scions.  Tataru at least would know how and when to use a linkpearl, and I have actually seen her do things that were actually helpful…  rather than just playing at the whole damsel in distress thing.  Tataru for Scion President 2016!

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Defeating the Steps

Rainy Weekend

The problem with three day weekends… is that ultimately you find yourself in need of a fourth day.  While I kept a pretty strict schedule, for whatever reason having three days off in a row tends to shift you out of work mode and into vacation mode.  This morning getting up was absolute hell, and my wife is going through the same thing.  I watched her start to get up only to face plant back on the bed…  a move I likely would have tried had I not needed to get up and turn off the alarm.  In the grand scheme of things I managed to get to bed fairly early last night, or at least early for me.  To make matters worse I am supposed to be in this conference call most of the day…  which for those indoctrinated means fighting desperately to keep from falling asleep and snoring as someone on a speaker phone drones on at length about something.

To make matters worse I am freaking freezing this morning.  Not literally but we are going through one of those periods that we do here in Oklahoma where I am uncertain if we should have on the heater or the air conditioner.  So since it is 55F outside I am upstairs with my zipper hoodie on trying to warm up.  We were supposed to have this lovely Easter weekend, but in truth it was cloudy, windy and rained most of the day.  We went out at one point to visit family in the hospital and it only managed to warm up to around 53F.  The highlight of yesterday however was that getting out and about, and it being relatively lousy out meant that we were able to go to our favorite Desi restaurant and not have any semblance of a line.  Their awesome Desi Rice ended up making both lunch and dinner for me yesterday.  There are times I wish we had a place closer, but I think it would lose some of the specialness of having to make a pilgrimage to go eat there.

Guild Runs

One of the simple pleasures of the weekend came from running lots of content with my guild.  I am amped that folks are getting into their 50s and needing content that will actually pay out in tomestones.  This has been a point of internal conflict for me lately, is that I desperately want/need to cap poetics, but I also want to be there to help people when they need runs.  With the influx of people into our guild I could easily spend every waking moment tanking this or that for one of our free company members.  The problem is for the low level stuff it puts me no closer to my weekly cap goals.  Now that the 130 weapon is within sight, I really really want to get one.  This means that I am going to need to gather up 1300 poetics, which in turn means that I am going to need to cap several weeks in a row to reach that.  So it frustrates me that while I enjoy running stuff for the lowbies, that I am spending time on content that won’t get me any closer to that goal.

Saturday and Sunday however, lots of people needed lots of upper level content which allowed me to feel useful and helpful, but at the same time keep inching towards the goal of hitting 450 poetics for the week.  Over the course of the day we ran experts and hardmodes, each of them slowly incrementing that total so that by the time I slept I was only around 100 poetics away, which seems doable tonight between raiding, the daily expert, and potentially running the new trial.  That honestly is my huge hope for tonight is that we will be able to run the Steps of Faith trial really quickly, because I have tried with two random groups only to have half of the group bail on me after a single failure.  That trial is also gumming up the works right now of the trial roulette because the moment people random into it, they are abandoning party and taking the penalty.  The result is that people seem to just be avoiding the trial queue, because we ran a few this weekend and they took forever to form.

Loot and Mental Breaks

I’ve spent what feels like a silly amount of time playing Darkest Dungeon this weekend, and I have to say I am still loving it.  Essentially I have been playing through at least one adventure per day, which seems to be about the right amount for me in one sitting.  After that I log into whatever game I am going to be playing for the night.  At this point I have lost one entire party, a couple of singles and pushed three characters to the point of having a mental break.  That said I am having a blast doing it and I finally defeated the Apprentice Necromancer, the first real objective in the game.  Right now my ideal party would include a Bounty Hunter, a Highwayman, a Jester and an Occultist.  No particular reason other than the group comp seems to work really well for me.  As far as healers go I really really like the Occultist, because I guess I am really good at winning the roll that keeps him from bleeding my characters.  I have seen as much as 16 points of health healed on a single turn by an occultist, whereas the plague doctor seems to only be able to dink heal single points.

The bounty hunter right now is my absolute favorite hero, but that might just be because he looks pretty much like every character I tend to play in games.  I love the whole grappling hook thing, and the ability to use it as either a ranged weapon or to pull targets within his melee range.  Highwayman just seems really strong with his range abilities, and if the target can bleed he has a nice attack there as well.  Jester is really brutal, with two attacks that deal a lot of bleed damage.  The biggest problem I have with them is that one of their best attacks is this jump dirk ability that also places them in the first slot in your party, potentially pushing the bounty hunter out of melee.  So I try really hard not to actually use that ability unless I think I can finish someone off with it, because the person in the first party position tends to soak some of the worst attacks.  So far I am going into dungeons with lots of food, bandages and torches and doing remarkably well.  I am sure as I go further the game is going to get more punitive.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Loot and Mental Breaks