Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 719

Modding Tamriel

February 7, 2016 by Belghast

Struggling to Record

Last night was one of the worst ideas I have had in awhile. I am still extremely sick, and for the most part don’t really have a proper speaking voice. The problem being, that Saturday night is the night we record AggroChat. This seemed to be an off week for most people. Grace was busy, and Ashgar was being worked to death in the “on call” rotation. The smart and adult thing to do would have been to simply apologize to our listeners and take a week off. However I am hopelessly chained to this notion of not missing an episode… either in my daily blog posts or weekly podacsts. I guess there is a part of me that is afraid that if I ever go by without making a post, that all of this will fall apart. That people will go their own separate ways and whatever thing we have called AggroChat will just cease to exist. I mean I am deathly afraid that if I miss a day of posting on this blog… that day will turn into six months before I start posting again. So there was what I should have done…. and then what I did. The end result is me today not really being able to talk, and afraid that I won’t be magically better by tomorrow morning for work.

The show itself went pretty well, I just felt like I struggled to try and maintain a voice that could actually be heard and understood. Quite literally I sound like I am going through puberty, where my voice cracks and squeaks at uncontrollable times. My vocal cords I guess have been ravaged by the congestion and the constant coughing. To make matters worse yesterday my eyes started watering uncontrollably and are all bloodshot. Basically I feel horrible, and will probably end up taking a sick day Monday as a result. The worst part has been trying to get any rest in this state. I’m taking NyQuil but it doesn’t seem to actually do much. My night felt like it was perforated by getting up every hour on the hour to readjust myself. I am hoping after staying up all day today I will be tired enough that I just simply collapse tonight and don’t much care what position happens to be comfortable. I realize this is just a cold…. but my god is it one of the worst ones I have had. I swear I have had the honest to god Flu and it has effected me less annoyingly.

Questing Auridon

It wouldn’t be me if I went too terribly long without adding some interface addons into Elder Scrolls Online. Right now I have Dustman, a mod that auto sells junk items and allows you to auto sell other items that you don’t really want, which is one of those things that I end up trying to find in any game I play. I also have Lore Books and Skyshards that simply mark the location of any books or shards that you have yet to collect. I also found a really cool mod called Undiscovered which marks areas that have some sort of a POI that you have yet to visit, which makes completing maps much easier. The best of the mods however is the Minimap I am using which is ultimately something I complained about not having back in early testing. I love the compass rose, but it doesn’t really replace the minimap… and I found myself spending too much time with my map open when I lacked the minimap. Having this makes the overall experience of moving around the world so much more enjoyable for me, because quite frankly…. I have gotten used to always being able to see that top down view. The only negatives are that most of the really awesome interface mods that I ran during the first days of the game…. seem to be long gone. I guess I should probably check the non-curse sites just to make sure that they might not be still lurking out there. I realize that I am essentially “Wow-ifying” Elder Scrolls by adding these mods in…. but quite frankly I don’t care. It makes my experience more enjoyable.

The biggest improvement so far is that the Veteran system was replaced by the Champion system, and it finally feels like I am making forward momentum again. I like that doing a few things here and there ends up earning me a point that I can spend on improving my character. It also feels like they have put some serious polish in place, because in playing Friday night and most of the day yesterday… I really didn’t encounter any bugs. All of the deeply scripted events went off without a hitch, and while I had gotten used to having to log in and out to get things to trigger during those first days of the game…. all of that seems to be a thing of the past. The other really positive thing is that the community seems to be pretty cool. I’ve gotten a lot of impromptu help, or folks asking if I wanted to join in for this world boss or that anchor. I’ve not really seen anything that made me cringe, which is a huge plus given that there were plenty of cringe worthy happenings during those first months. I am not sure how long I will remain playing the game, but I gotta say I am enjoying myself…. which is huge given the funk I have been in lately of not really knowing what to play.

Tamriel Revisted

February 6, 2016 by Belghast

Point Click

Yesterday I kept being reminded by co-workers of just how horrible I sounded, so after I finished with my critical meetings I took off and headed home around 12:30. After eating a hastily grabbed lunch of convenience store pizza… I collapsed on the sofa trying to force fluids while finding something comforting to watch. I guess my version of comforting is a little different than most people, because I wound up watching the entire first season run of Rick and Morty. Granted I have watched a lot of this show, but it turns out there were a handful of episodes that I missed when they originally aired. Whatever this thing is that I caught down south, it is very much kicking my ass. Blogging has been a real struggle because it is very difficult to string thoughts together into enough of a cohesive mass to make into a blog post. It is my will along that I am committing fingers to keyboard and producing words… because I simply do not want the streak to stop. I am a couple of months away from my official three year anniversary on the whole daily blogging thing, and the seventh anniversary of my blog. So until I hit that at the very least, I will keep up doing the daily thing even if I have to struggle to make words happen.

Lately my crutch while sick has been Diablo 3, but I feel like I am running out of things I care to do right now. I’ve gotten the seasonal rewards, but more than anything I am farming content in the hopes of getting the last few items I need to drop for the build I am working towards. Clearing regular rifts and doing bounties is the sort of mindless interaction that works well when I am sick, but I am quickly reaching the point where I am questioning why I am bothering? The other side mission has been to gear my monk, but once I found out from several folks that you only get one set of gear per season…. a lot of my gusto was lost. I thought I would be able to go kill the bosses I needed to get my first set of gear, on my second character and be up and running and clearing content pretty quickly. Alas that is very much not the case, and my best option is to ride along with Rae who is regularly clearing TX stuff… but honestly after being able to participate, going back to just having to pray to stay alive… makes it pretty uninteresting. Yesterday my big problem was the fact that I had a very needy game install going on in the background, that kept slowing down my teleportation to the point that the battle.net would disconnect me before actually ending up in zone with Rae.

Worst Install

On a whim yesterday afternoon around 1 pm, I started installing The Elder Scrolls Online. I guess I had forgotten just how painful the install process was, because it took until roughly 8 pm for it to finally complete. During the last hour of that time I was pretty much unable to play anything else on my laptop. The thing is… I have installed much larger games in far less time…. so I have to fault the launcher for just how painfully slow it was going. I mean I say this as someone who was installing to a laptop that is using a AC Wireless card capable of 650 MB connection on a total internet connection that generally runs around 150 MB down. I should have been able to completely saturate my pipe and had this game down in short order… but it took quite literally 7 hours to finally get installed. Now for a good chunk of that time I was still playing Diablo 3 so that could have been slowing things down… but the total download was tortuously slow. The last hour or so it was thrashing my hard drive badly enough that I really could not do anything else functional on the machine, so I wound up mostly fiddling around on my phone while watching television. The problem with ESO was that I honestly can’t remember why we stopped playing, other than the fact that one by one we just stopped until I was one of the last four or so people still active. For me I guess the Veteran game system was so bloody boring because it felt like I was no longer making reasonable process. I made it roughly two zones into the Aldmeri campaign, when finally my desire to keep playing petered out.

I guess recently I had been curious about what was going on in game, and they have done a few high profile DLC releases. So around 8:30 last night I finally was able to log in and poke around. Firstly I have to say I guess playing this game for roughly two years in testing… means that I have some serious muscle memory going on. While I had to reset all of my talent points, I can still for the most part remember exactly how I played it. All of the little things like dodging, and blocking attacks… came back without any effort and before long I was up and running and questing again. I feel like maybe this is the speed of game that I need right now. What I am struggling the most with in my current state is interacting with other human beings. I have been pretty much oblivious to twitter and slack since coming back from Pax South, and as a result I am kinda cocooning in my own little world again. Much like SWTOR…. ESO was a great single player game… and as a result I found myself really enjoying questing around last night. That is of course until the nyquil kicked in and I simply couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer. I figure I will put in some more time today playing and maybe talk a bit about my experiences on AggroChat tonight. That is of course if I have any voice left. Right now my voice is pretty damned squeaky so I am thinking we might have to rely on someone else to do the bulk of the talking this evening.

Golden Tickets

February 5, 2016 by Belghast

Ultimate Movie Edition

It seems that last night while I was in my own little world of coughing and clicking the mouse button aimlessly… some more information came out about a promotion that will be landing along with the Warcraft movie. Over on reddit there is a thread with a screenshot taken from a supposed survey that was being passed around. Basically this is them giving away a free copy of the game, because now when you buy the base game you get through Mists of Pandaria for free. In theory once they release Legion it has been their standard to give everyone playing the game everything but the latest expansion, which is also the method that SOE chose to end up with on Everquest and Everquest II. So I guess the only real question is… will this work? There are most certainly going to be former players of the game that go to the theaters and see this movie out of a sense of fond nostalgia. Even if I was not currently playing Warcraft, I would be going to see it because it is a world I have deeply cared about. This would be the case for pretty much any other world I have loved in the past… and no matter how much of a debacle the Dresden television series was… if they made a movie I would be there on opening night.

So for former players this is basically a ticket to play the game for free for a month, and I have a feeling that pretty much every single one of them will at least poke their head in for a few days. Nostalgia is a very strong motivator, and is absolutely the reason why I keep ending up subscribed to this game. Now for the folks that are going to the theaters because they like big fantasy action movies… I think that is a potentially bigger prospect for new players. World of Warcraft has always had this ability to convert non-gamers into WoW players, in a way that no other game than Pokemon has seemed to be able to do. This movie, if it ends up like I think it will… seems like it is going to be the perfect primer course in the “history of the world” and give watchers enough of a taste for the setting that they might just check it out further. It does not hurt at all that some of the movie stars like Robert Kazinksky are being extremely public about their own experiences with the game and painting it in a very positive light. This feels very much like… “you watched the movie, now you can go home and live in the world”. I think it is going to work better than they might have even imagined, because the barriers between gamer and non-gamer keep slowly breaking down. It is not a far stretch for someone who is already playing Candy Crush, to go home and play Warcraft instead. After all the only way this genre is going to grow… is by converting a brand new generation of players.

Second Seasonal

I have to admit that my spigot of post ideas has pretty much been closed down to a trickle. It is really hard to think when you go into a coughing fit and would swear that you just felt your brain rattling. In this state I am just not doing much gaming other than logging in each night and playing the garrison game, and ending up over in Diablo 3. The simple fact that it is pretty lightweight on interaction, other than your mouse hand makes it something I can stand to do. Yesterday I had managed to get to within four levels of 70 when I finally caved and pestered my friend Rae for a boost. We ran around doing Torment VI for a bit, because I believe that was the highest that a sub 70 could go do. I managed to ding 70 in very short order, but when I sat down to craft something…. I realized I was almost completely out of the white parts. So I am guessing I will roll something new again if for no reason other than to run around and collect white weapons to turn into parts.

The next goal is to do the steps required to unlock the armor set, and then try and sort out exactly what I want for a spec to go with it. The irony is this is actually my first monk to hit 70, which reminds me that at some point I should really push up my non-seasonal monk so I at least feel like less of a slacker. I am sitting in this place where pretty much every game I think of playing leaves me uninspired. I am not entirely sure what can pull me out of this rut, or if it is simply a side effect of being sick. We have a clinic at work that employees can go to for free, and I went down there and got checked out. Turns out this “pox” is simply a virus, and there isn’t much that they can do rather than simply let it run its course. In theory over the weekend I should start to feel significantly better, and I am pretty much assuming that whatever the maximum recovery time will be the case for me. I have a largely broken immune system, and not only do I seem to catch everything… but I seem to get over them extremely slowly. My plan is to chill out, and get lots of rest this weekend, and hopefully by Monday I am a new person. My biggest concern right now is whether or not I will actually have a voice come Saturday when we record AggroChat.

Golden Tickets

February 5, 2016 by Belghast