Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 763

Ravana Attempts

August 18, 2015 by Belghast

Unbreaking Google+

Last night I had a message from a long time friend of mine, asking me why I was no longer posting my daily posts on Google+ to which I kinda gave a head tilt and went “huh”? I had certainly seen my posts making their way to G+ anytime I checked my messages over there. Then I took a closer look and saw that they all said “shared only with you” which kinda defeats the purpose of syndicating posts in the first place. It turns out that nothing I have posted since July 28th has made it to G+ which is more than mildly frustrating. I un-linked my account from Jetpack Publicize and relinked it a few times, but I never saw the prompt that I once saw asking me to select what type of sharing level for my posts. So I took to the search engine to try and figure out what was happening. Sure enough it seems like Google did something to change its policies with what level of access external apps have access to your account. You apparently need to go into Settings > Manage Apps & Activities and then find the WordPress app or whatever else you are using for syndication. This will allow you to edit the permissions for how it will be sharing to your feed, and like I said before apparently the new default is “Only You”.

After posting about this last night it seems that this pretty much happened for everyone universally. I thought I would take a quick moment and at least explain how to fix it. As far as syndicating my posts… I tend to take the approach of broadcast what I write pretty much everywhere. Each of the social networks kinda has its own vibe and while I greatly prefer using Twitter, there are folks that read my content that equally greatly prefer G+ or Facebook or even Tumblr. My goal has always been to deliver my content as in as painless of a manner as possible for folks to read. I personally am not a huge fan of Facebook, and in fact I went through the crazy process of deleting my personal account once upon a time because it annoyed me. However when I started blogging I signed up for an account just for the purpose of reblogging my content because I know there are people who do prefer to use Facebook. Granted it might get annoying as shit if you follow me on multiple platforms to constantly see duplicate postings, but I guess that is a chance I am willing to take because I don’t want anyone to feel excluded or left out of the process. Maybe this is strange but my daily posting thing… feels like all of us are taking a journey together and I don’t want to leave anyone behind.

Ravana Attempts

As is always the case last night was we gathered up the Monday team and did some eight player content in Final Fantasy XIV. We started the evening by burning through all four parts of Alexander Normal for the folks who are not running it and capping out early like I am. At this point my Warrior is sitting at level 190 and I have everything I can get out of Alexander other than the chest piece. So as of today I will be largely running the place to help out the gear on my Dragoon. At some point I hope to get the chest piece but largely for cosmetic reasons because the Alexander gear set looks amazing. Last week we managed to burn down Bismarck Extreme and now both the Monday and Wednesday teams are keyed for the next primal encounter. As such instead of beating the sky whale again we decided to make attempts on Ravana Extreme. Now going into this place we had heard horror stories about how rough the encounter was and how it was another Titan Extreme where you had to move exactly at the right time and keep repeating a pattern. Honestly I didn’t see that at all. Instead I saw an encounter with a repeatable pattern but significantly more wiggle room to adjust as we went.

We made some serious progress last night, and I think more than likely we will be able to defeat him next week. Each attempt we kept creeping closer to the goal, and essentially what is going to be the make or break moment is dealing with the Final Liberation phase. If we can learn that particular dance we will have the encounter, and it honestly did not feel like we were too terribly far off from that process last night. Granted at this point we are significantly better geared than the first groups that attempted the fight, but my hope is that we can get in and start farming this guy so that folks can get the really awesome weapons. In truth I hope that we can farm both primals because there are absolutely weapons that come from both of them that I would like to see. We had the two handed sword drop from Bismarck last Monday and it looked amazing. It is the stupid things like getting glamour items that motivate me, and at some point I want to organize 2.0 extreme primal farming runs so that we can start to get folks their ponies. As it stands we only have a couple of ponies in the guild, and I think my Leviathan pony was the first. We need to figure out a method because really I would like to make sure everyone gets at least ONE primal pony before other people roll on it. Granted eventually it would be awesome to have people get a full set, but I would be happy with having everyone with just one as a starter.

Entering Whitevale

This morning I am having one of those mornings when I am easily distracted. The cats are tearing through the house chasing each other like they have gone mad. There is a dog barking and it sounds like it is coming from my back yard… even though it is really across the green belt. I keep flipping over to twitter, and having to force myself to put my fingers back on my keyboard and type in my WordPress window. Largely since this is Blaugust I wanted to include this little tidbit because it absolutely happens to me too. There are days when you cannot keep your train of thought, and I have learned to just go with it. Start writing the things that seem most natural and eventually somehow you will get back on track. Last night was one of those nights for me as well, and I flipped back and forth between games quite a bit as the evening wore on. Before the raid I spent time over in Wildstar with the purpose of trying to “finish Galeras”, which is a bit of a daunting task because there are a silly number of quests in that zone and many of them you will never actually find unless you go wandering around aimlessly. Bit by bit however I explored the regions of the map that had yet to be explored and I am now relatively confident that I have at least gotten most of the quests out of the way.

That now means the moment I have been dreading is upon me… and I had to take the flight out to Whitevale. I guess in part the reason why I have been avoiding doing this is that Whitevale ultimately was the zone that broke me when I played the game at launch. I am not sure entirely what it is about the place, but it felt like moving slowly through molasses. I think in part it was due to the fact that Dominion side there simply were never that many players in the zone, meaning that I could never get a group to do any of the group objectives, and the mob density meant that it was super hard to move anywhere without having to fight a dozen mobs. The zone also seemed to have a higher concentration of the challenger and superior difficulty mobs than the other zones. It seemed like I could not move anywhere without seeing one of those horrible flashing red shielded mob types that I had to try and chew through in vain. As a result I have honestly been scared of getting to this zone because it was my fear that once again it would break me. I have actually been enjoying the content so far, and finding playing the game refreshing. So hopefully maybe I can make my way through Whitevale because supposedly everything on the other side of it… is significantly better.

Social Robots

August 17, 2015 by Belghast

On Introversion

Every so often I hear something that makes me stop in my tracks and evaluate my own personal feelings about something. For awhile now there have been a chorus of folks warning us about the evils of technology and how we are losing our ability to relate to other human beings by replacing face to face conversation with a combination of text messages and email. This has honestly disturbed me a bit, simply because my life is actually so much richer thanks to the ease of non-face-to-face communication options. You probably don’t think that someone who can rattle out a post every single morning is an introvert, but in truth I am happiest when in my home with only my wife, the cats and the ferrets to keep me company. I suffer from a truck load of anxiety when dealing with people out in the real world. I do fine in social situations, but I also suffer from an irrational amount of stress leading up to it. I know deep down inside that I will enjoy myself when we go out to dinner or a movie with friends, but up until the moment we are actually leaving the house… every instinct in my body is telling me to call… cancel… and stay in the comfort and safety of my home.

There are times when I get this irrational fight or flight instinct, and I have learned over the years how to trick myself into ignoring it. The problem is it is still there and no matter how minor.. face to face interaction and using the phone… both stress me out beyond reason. If I need to make a call, like something as simple as making a doctor appointment… I will put it off until I have almost run out of time to do it. So when I hear people talking about how non-face-to-face communication is degrading the fabric of society… I get more than a little defensive. The ability to chat with friends over instant messenger, or hang out with folks on Teamspeak… give me a way of reaching out and hanging out with people without triggering all of the anxiety of sitting across the table from someone. I am by no means frozen by my fears… because I get out every day and talk to people, and put on my best friendly southerner act. The problem is I can only handle so much of this before my buffer of civility is drained and I need to get the hell away from other people.

Social Robots

So while listening to NPR over my lunch break, I thought I was preparing for yet another speech on how we just need to sit down and hang out together more often. It was then when they threw me a curveball. This discussion was about how we are interacting more with devices and how folks love talking to things like Siri or the new Amazon Echo. They talked about how we are on the cusp of having “social robots” in our lives that interact with us. Largely the discussion was about the dangers of interacting with things that have no empathy can have no ability to actually care about us as human beings. They talked about a study where they introduced a child to a what they kept terming a “social robot”, essentially one that mimics and mirrors human behavior. There were technical difficulties and after a few minutes of interacting the robot shut down. The child saw this as rejection… as this device “not liking her” and was extremely distraught.

With more and more AI entering our science fiction, with movies like Her, and the television show Humans… this is going to come up and ultimately we are going to have to deal with issues we have never dealt with before as a culture. The problem I have with this whole line of thought though, is that she kept saying that robots were incapable of empathy. As a programmer by trade I think maybe I just have a different line of reasoning behind this. What is empathy but essentially our way of decoding a series of inputs from another human being. What we call empathy is realy not that unlike what computers do with every single decision they make. They read in a set of data points, and then make a decision based on a predetermined matrix of possibilities. Without realizing it we are doing this every time we determine what someone is feeling or thinking… we are unwittingly taking posture, facial expressions, vocal intonation, and comparing to our own experiences to break down that sequence of data into a “feeling” or an “emotion”.

Human Machines

I would go so far as to say that essentially we are machines in the most basic sense of that word. Granted we are exceeding complicated machines, but every single function of our bodies is a system built upon a system built upon the encoding that we received at birth through our genetic make-up. We consume nutrients to power the cells in our body that are then programmed to behave in certain ways just like the code of a computer. While we have yet to delve into genetic hacking on a large scale, it has been happening in the lab for over a decade to produce new medicines. While there are ethical dilemmas standing in the way, I feel like by the end of my life time we will be treating diseases by rewriting segments of our internal “code”.

All of this said… since we are basically machines running custom hardware, executing custom code, and reacting to a lifetime of custom data inputs… doesn’t it seem naive to think that robots will forever be incapable of empathy? Machines are good at analyzing data, making assumptions on that data, and then reaching a decision. Since what we think of as “empathy” is essentially us doing exactly that thing… I cannot believe that eventually we will have machines that can mimic those processes that we consider as “unique” or “special”. I know this is a strange topic for a gaming blog, but every now and then one of these topics happens and I want to write about it. For ages these topics have just gotten filed away in my head for a later discussion… that never actually happens. Since this is Blaugust the month of pushing people out of their comfort zone I thought to myself… go for it, post it. Futurism is a past time that I love to indulge in, and I had an excellent discussion about it while recording one of the Bel Folks Stuff episodes. I think dreaming and envisioning these ideas helps us to formulate ways to deal with it when it ultimately becomes a reality. I would love to hear folks thoughts about this… or honestly if you just want me to shut up about these side topics and stick to game blogging.

[Edit]

Real quick edit to embed the Aspen Institute talk that inspired this post.

Herald of Andraste

August 17, 2015 by Belghast

Endless Faffing

It is funny how a conversation can set someone down a path. During the Saturday night recording of AggroChat 70, we got onto the topic of Ashgar playing Mass Effect again, which not surprisingly lead to some discussions of Dragon Age as well. For whatever reason I have struggled to play Dragon Age Inquisition, and in truth I had the same issue getting started in Dragon Age 2. It was a good year and a half after the release of that game before I finally managed to play my way through it, and I was beginning to wonder if the same would be true for Inquisition. At face value the game seems like the perfect mix of Dragon Age storytelling with Skyrim-esc open world exploration. The problem is the mixture together seems to be a confusing mess for me personally. Even though every single person I have talked to says to leave the Hinterlands… I struggle bringing myself to do this. The Elder Scrolls player in me wants to wander about seeing what all I can find in this nook or that cranny. Which means I have spent twelve hours so far playing the game and have not really accomplished much. Yesterday however I started trying to force myself to knock things off my quest list rather than wandering around and seemingly gathering up an endless number of them.

Not surprisingly as you can see above I am playing a Dwarven Two-Handed Warrior. That pretty much means I will always be grouped with Cassandra, because of the two tanky options I have encountered she is preferable to Blackwall. I don’t mind the character of Blackwall at all, in fact I kinda like it… but compared to Cassandra… well there just is no comparison. For most of last night I ended up playing with Vivienne as my mage, and quite frankly… I think I am switching back to Solas. Vivi apparently disapproves of my whole wanting to help the Mages thing, which is something that happens while I am playing Dragon Age. Normally I am more than happy to see Mages slaughtered by the dozens… but this game mythos actually makes them into characters I can sympathize with. It feels like they have simply drawn an unlucky lot in life, and are oppressed for it. Those Tevinter however… I am still more than happy to slaughter them by the handfuls. I guess ultimately last night I turned some sort of a corner and managed to get into the game just enough to make me want to keep playing it. Previously it was a pretty if not slightly awkwardly controlling Skyrim clone… but last night it finally became a Dragon Age game for me.

Herald of Andraste

I did not mention my favorite party member yet I guess. You can see in the background Sera, the awesome elvish archer you pick up in Orlais. She is sassy, irreverent… randomly shakes her ass at Vivi… and is having absolutely none of my shit. Grouping with her reminds me of the many nights Tarantella has hung out with us on voice chat, and I mean that in the best possible way. I’ve reached the point finally where I just want to play more of the game, and I had to pull myself away from the screen last night in the middle of a big action sequence because otherwise I would be non-functional this morning. The only negative is that the next few nights are largely spoken for. Tonight I have my original Final Fantasy XIV raid team, and Wednesday I have a second Static… with Tuesday sandwiched in between which I have been attempting to devote to some Wildstar play. My fear is that if I wait too long I will lose the momentum that I have going right now. I am not sure why this game in particular has been such a struggle for me to get into. I think part of it honestly has been that generally speaking I play single player games on my laptop downstairs. Dragon Age Inquisition will functionally run on said laptop, but it looks like shit and suffers from the shiny hair syndrome that occurs when you attempt to play the game on crappy hardware.

Instead I need the firepower of my full gaming machine upstairs to do the game justice. I am just not used to playing 50 to 100 hour games on my desktop. I guess in the grand scheme of things I am going to have to get used to it, because Witcher 3 suffers from pretty much the same issue. My laptop while more gaming oriented than a lot of them, is just dated at this point. It will run most of the MMOs I want to play decently, but the GTX 660m card in it just cannot handle the PS4/Xbox One era of gaming. At some point I will upgrade it and everything will be fine, but for as little as I have actually used my laptop of late… I just can’t see that as a sensible expense. I have a fairly checkered past when it comes to laptops. I’ve owned several “gaming” laptops over the years and each one dies a fairly spectacular death after a year or two of use. As such I pretty much have resigned myself to picking up cheap second hand laptops, because each time we have spent full price on one… it has lasted just long enough to get out of warranty before suffering some catastrophic and largely un-repairable error. The laptop I have now has been a trooper and in spite of it having a dated video card runs most everything that I want to play. It will run FFXIV in DX11 at around 40 fps which has made up the bulk of my recent game time.

Blame Origin

I am honestly not really sure why it has taken me this long to boot up Dragon Age Inquisition, and why it required the AggroChat show to remind me of its existence. I think part of it is the fact that it is on Origin, a client that unlike Steam I never actually have running. When I have a game on steam, I see it sitting there in the list mocking me… so I end up booting it up periodically. Origin however is in a completely different client that only really has Bioware games for me. I have been going through this down cycle lately where I am largely keeping to myself. Inquisition would have been the perfect game for this sort of activity, but out of sight out of mind. Honestly Origin works perfectly fine from what I can see, but as a testament to how little I use it… I had not actually added a single person to my friends list until last night when I imported my PSN network. I only did this because at some point we are going to try both some Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and some Dragon Age Inquisition Multiplayer. In spite of Origin doing a fair job, it still annoys me that I have to use it at all. Steam for me is a value add, because it gives me quick access to all of the games I want to play and represents a generally cheap and ubiquitous portal for purchasing them. Origin however falls in the same category as UPlay… as that piece of software that I am required to use but constantly frustrated by.

Last night I actually took some time and poked around the Origin store, and I came to the stark realization that honestly… the only EA games that I care about are the Bioware games. For the most part everything else is either a franchise I have grown out of like Battlefield, or one I have never quite gotten into like Sims… or a string of sports games that I have never had any interest in. EA largely produces games that I don’t care about, and I guess that is why having my beloved Bioware games blockaded behind the service feels so wrong. The funny thing about it is that the supposed core reason behind EA pulling out of Steam, was that they did not like having to discount their games on a regular basis. It seems that EA is having to discount their games even further than Steam generally did to get people to nibble. I noticed last night that Titanfall, the game that was supposed to herald in a new era of Xbox One supremacy… is down to $10 for the Deluxe digital collectors edition that once sold for $100. The only real positive however is that Origin also has cloud sync, so when I installed Mass Effect 3 it synchronized all of my save game data from the Bioware servers and it remembered everything that I had unlocked. All of this Origin ranting aside… I expect my solo gaming to continue on for a bit longer as I get some more Dragon Age Inquistion gameplay in. In truth I have reached a good pausing point in Final Fantasy XIV as I have essentially finished getting gear on my Warrior from Alex normal (minus the chest piece) and have upgraded every slot on my Dragoon to 180, giving me two viable characters for endgame shenanigans.

Blaugust Halfway Check-In

August 16, 2015 by Belghast

Tabulating Results

We are now at the halfway point of Blaugust, and I thought it would be cool today to take note of who has achieved their “Survivor” rank or not. As a refresher I have changed the requirements slightly from last year, and you can find the entire rules post here. Last year a significant portion of the contest was about not missing a single day, and quite honestly there were a bunch of people who got their 31 posts in… but had not done them contiguously so it felt dishonest to rule them out just because they missed a day. Instead this year I am judging the contest based on number of posts, which allows people to play catch up if they need to. At this point we are technically on day 16, and I had said I was going to classify anyone as a survivor who had managed to make 15 posts during the month. There are a lot of folks on this list, and a lot more than are only one or two posts off from it. That said I thought it would be awesome to celebrate those who have already reached the halfway point.

I'm really starting to see the benefits of #Blaugust.

— Sonja (@SGMSoultamer) August 16, 2015

I am going to pick on SoulTamer a bit because she made this tweet yesterday. When I see something like this is makes me exceptionally happy inside. Blaugust is a strange ordeal, for some people it gives them strength and they reach the other side a more prolific blogger. For others it defeats them and they go for month or more long lapses afterwards. It was for that second group that I considered not actually doing it this year. I didn’t want to be the cause of anyone dropping off the radar in our game blogging community. However there were enough people constantly asking me if I was going to do it that I reluctantly said yes. I am happy that I have and I am immensely proud of the progress everyone has been making towards the final goal. Another note… just because your name does not currently appear on this list does not mean all is lost. You can still reach 15 posts and you can still reach 31 for the month, and I think this is the aspect of the 2015 running that I like the most. Instead of demoralizing someone for missing a day, there is always hope that you can catch up and cross the finish line as well. So I challenge all of you folks who are not on the list to get there!

AggroChat 70 – Calibrating “Main Gun”

This week we are joined by Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tam and Thalen, with Kodra having to deal with some family stuff. I was not certain how much we would have to talk about, but like always we managed to fill a show full of all sorts of games that we had been playing. Thalen starts it off talking about his further adventures into the Magic Duels free to play game. Similarly with the launch of Fallout Shelter for android he has started playing that as well. Finally he talks about the recent Fantastic Four event in Marvel Heroes and how The Thing is the tankiest of tanks. Tam spent the day at an Infinity Tournament and talks about just how awesome the Seattle minature gaming scene has been.

Grace talks about her recent swap to spending most of her time in Wildstar and the excitement surrounding the impending free to play drop that is now on the public test server. Additionally she talks about her recent foray into the PVP system, and how generally cool the community seems to be surrounding it. While board games are normally the territory of Kodra, Grace mentions the Exploding Kittens card game and how much fun she has had with it since receiving it. Ashgar has followed in Tam’s footsteps and talks about his experiences playing Sword Art Online Hollow Fragment. Ash has also started on a brand new playthrough of Mass Effect with the intent of carrying one save game from one all the way through three. This of course spawns a conversation where we talk about our experiences with the Mass Effect series.

Finally I talk about my recent return to Rift, and my obsessions with Hellgate London. Additionally we talk about next weeks show, where we plan on talking about the storyline of the Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward expansion. We have purposefully kept discussion of plot points to a minimum, but we feel it is generally safe enough to start talking about where we think the game is going. We are announcing this ahead of time for the purpose of letting our listeners and readers join in the fun. Do you have any interesting theories or are there parts of the story that you didn’t quite grasp? We are taking in questions via email for this coming show, and we will go over them on the air. I should be a lot of fun and it is our first real attempt to do something like this.

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