Belghast

Content by Belghast

AggroChat #94 – Chicken Horse Grand Prix

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Tonight Kodra, Tam, Thalen and a very sick Bel talk about Pax South, Magic Grand Prix, Warframe, Destiny, Final Fantasy Explorers and a bunch of other stuff!

AggroChat94_720

Tonight was a bit of a struggle to record.  Going to leave this as a disclaimer that Belghast is pretty sick, and somehow managed to come home with the Pax Pox from Pax South.  As a result there are several points during the show where his voice kinda falls apart.  Additionally we are down a handful of people this week, with Grace being busy and Ashgar being worked to death on call this weekend.  In any case Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen talk about a bunch of stuff, namely Pax South,  the Vancouver Magic Grand Prix, and MMOFPS Progression contrasting Destiny and Warframe.

Topics Discussed

  • Pax South 2016
    • Pax Pox
    • Ultimate Chicken Horse
    • Code Names
    • Pushfight
  • Grand Prix Vancouver
    • Magic the Gathering
    • Oath of the Gateswatch
    • My Little Pony Card Game
    • Hearthstone Format Changes
  • MMO FPS Progression
    • Destiny
    • Warframe
    • Defiance
    • Third Person Point of View
  • Final Fantasy Explorers
  • Elder Scrolls Online Revisited

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Tamriel Revisted

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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

Tamriel Revisted

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

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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

Golden Tickets

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

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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

Golden Tickets

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.