Sometimes We Fail

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The Rookie Raid

Sometimes We Fail

For a little bit now, one of the highlights of my week has been the Rookie Raid night with my clan in Destiny.  I think mostly after playing the game for roughly two years… I was really wanting to raid, and getting to step foot in Kings Fall each week has been a blast.  There are still a lot of things that I absolutely screw up, but I feel like I am getting better.  I have always been one of those people that learns by doing, and it simply takes several repetitions before something actually gets cemented in my head.  The highlight of the night was the fact that I actually made it through the ship jumping puzzle on the very first time… and it only took me two tries to get over to the wall and get into the chest nook just after the ships.  This is serious progress because some of those jumps on past attempts took me dozens of tries to actually get.  Similarly I seemed to make it through the piston wall without a ton of issues this week which also felt good.  I ended up jumping to the final platform…  and then got confused thinking I went the wrong direction.  So I guess even I shocked myself that I had made it through with I think two deaths this week, instead of the literally dozens in previous outings.

Sometimes We Fail

I’ve had to develop the practice of sitting down with my character once I have reached the final platform of a jumping sequence.  I wouldn’t go so far as the say that I am afraid of heights, because in real life I can look out over balconies or off the roofs of buildings without much issue.  I can climb up on things without much issue either…  well apart from the fact that I have zero dexterity.  However for whatever reason in video games… I get disoriented and almost dizzy when dealing with jumping sequences.  There are certain games that have triggered this feeling more than others, like Mirrors Edge.  However there are other games that are just as parkoury for lack of a better word… like Dying Light that don’t seem to bother me at all.  It has to be something about the perspective or some technical detail that does it… but whatever the case…  Destiny absolutely triggers these feelings.  So as stupid as it sounds, I feel like every time I don’t fuck up a jump… it is a pretty major victory for me.  It takes so much mental stamina to get me through one of the jump sequences that when I finish… I am constantly afraid that I will do something stupid that leads to me plummeting back down below and having to do it all over again.  So my little practice of sitting makes it seem like it is far less likely for me to somehow get bumped and fall.

Oryx Cheats

Sometimes We Fail

One of the cool things about this week is that I got to learn a few slightly different roles during the fights.  Namely I moved from platform duty to Ogre duty, which is way more my style.  When our group does Oryx we do it “challenge” style which involves making sure the Ogres do not move before they die, allowing all of the blight orbs to spawn in essentially the same place.  This allows us to pop them all at the same time, and deal almost all of the damage to Oryx in a single turn.  That is at least when things work out.  As one of the Titans assigned to this duty, we run complimentary bubbles making sure Weapons and Blessing are both up and dropped in the same place.  This allows us to take advantage of our Touch of Malice and keep from killing ourselves in the process.  The goal is to dip back into the shield between ogres to replenish the shields and give us more life to spend while pummeling the adds.  This works great… until we have to go into the fight without a super bar.  We somehow managed to make it through that round but it was getting super dicey as far as the whole “not killing ourselves” part.  It was during the Oryx fight however last night… that shit just got weird.

Sometimes We Fail Sometimes We Fail Sometimes We Fail

I had heard before of the bugs in the Kings Fall raid… but luckily in the previous two weeks we had never really encountered any.  This week however they struck back with a vengeance, starting with several of us mysteriously dying to “misadventures”.  Other times the platform sequence got messed up, or our runner was unable to grab the orb for some reason… having the platform disappear beneath them before the transfer actually happened.  The scariest was when we saw an ogre appear in the default T state that models are generally modeled in… and then disappear quickly… coming up through the ground with the normal animation.  Essentially there was something seriously wrong with the server, and even though we tried several different tricks to right the ship… we ultimately had to call it to time.  The goal right now is to pop back in Monday night and see if we can wreck Oryx given that we have a check point right at the boss.  Sometimes we fail… but even in failing I had a really good time.  The loot on the other hand is starting to get more scarce, and I got some relatively low light level versions of things…  but I did manage to pick up another much needed slot in the arms.  I’ve posted a gallery of the various things, including the 310 Armamentarium chest that was waiting on me at the mailbox.  I am not really sure where along the way that dropped but  but it is much appreciated because I love having the extra grenades.  However as long as I am running Defender, I kinda feel like the Saint-14 helm is a must have.

 

I R Blogger

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Gosh, where to begin? Between holidays and going into quasi-hermit mode for a little bit, I haven't posted in a while. Let's remedy that, shall we? What have I been up to?

Gaming-wise, I've mostly been playing Warframe for the past couple months; the game of being a space-ninja in space. It continues to entertain, mostly when enough of us are on together to do group content. There are daily sorties that consist of three missions of escalating difficulty which are decidedly tuned for a full group, and we've been having fun with those occasionally. They can get pretty rough at times, particularly since the missions have additional modifiers applied to them, such as being limited to a single weapon type, or all the enemies having improved armor or added elemental damage, etc.

I R Blogger
We're ninjas on the moon, we carry a harpoon.

I've also been playing Stardew Valley a good bit. It's a very entertaining Harvest Moon / Animal Crossing style game where you farm, fish, fight monsters in an abandoned mine, befriend townsfolk and so forth. It's got that 'one more turn' aspect that can keep you playing far longer than you ever intended to. My first spring has just ended and summer has begun, and I've spent about half of what I've earned so far on summer crops. The rest is earmarked for a chicken coop once I can catch the carpenter lady at home to hire her.

I R Blogger
It's simple yet, but it's mine.

I haven't been devoting as much time to reading recently as I should, but currently I'm working on Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh (who will be named a Grandmaster by the SFWA in May). She's an author I've been aware of for quite some time, and have always intended to read, but this is only the second book of hers I've read. I'm enjoying it so far. I've read a few other books over the past few months; I haven't decided yet if I'm going to post about them, or skip to the current book. Once I finish this book, I've got a copy of REAMDE waiting for me. Getting through that in a week's time might be a bit difficult, so having some previous books to talk about could be useful.

Finally, I've been re-inventorying my comic book collection and getting it recorded at a site that I started using recently, League of Comic Geeks. I discovered it initially via their app, which is excellent for organizing my weekly pull list, and have decided it's an easier site to record new comics than the one I was using. Also it's free, which is a big plus. I've recorded just over 5000 comics in it so far, which is about a third of my collection. This is one of a few things that I've been needing to do as part of the overall 'clean up my office so it doesn't look like a hoarder lives in it' plan. So far it's going well.

Space Goats and Paid Content

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WoW Chronicles

Space Goats and Paid ContentLast Friday I managed to find a copy of the regularly back ordered…  World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1.  One of the huge problems World of Warcraft has had to date is that a lot of the lore just feels somewhat tacked on.  I feel like much of the story was written during some late night unbridled “wouldn’t it be cool if” sessions, and there was a lot of hand waving going on from about Burning Crusade onward.  What the chronicles project is trying to do is to set in stone a true canon about the world, and how all of the interlinking pieces actually fit together.  I wholeheartedly support this notion… I just wish someone had the foresight to do it a decade ago, or at least when they decided to start really mixing things up with the first expansion.  I am sure there has been a penciled together napkin sketch of what the world was intended to look like, that at least partially exists in the minds still of the people working at Blizzard.  The problem is when something is not written down and set into print… it becomes too easy to erase a line here and graft on a new segment of lore there that really conflicts with something that came before.

What I am wondering is how much narrative cleanup are they committed to do to make this canon really a living document? While this project doesn’t exactly burn down what was in place before… it does invalidate a lot of things that happened and in other cases it simply explains things that already exist.  For example… the book indicates that the Spirit Healers that we have used for years are essentially a rogue faction of Val’kyr.  The book goes into depth about the relationship between the void lords, the titans, the old gods, and classifies things that lacked classification like the wild gods which now include the pantheon of August Celestials.  What I really hope to see is some of these lore fixes making their way into the game in either the form of new quests, or old quest revisions.  I will say that having some sort of concrete font of lore that they can keep going back to, makes me at least somewhat excited for the future of the game.  Lore has always been one of the big problems I had with World of Warcraft, and how confused and messy…. and downright incomplete it always seemed.  Hopefully we will start to see the fruits of this project with the coming expansion Legion… which even before this seemed like it was going to be a complete loregasm.

Paid Promotional Content

I am going to take the tail end of this mornings post to complain about something that has been bothering me.  Granted I know it will do absolutely zero good since it is quite obvious the forces in question are not even reading my blog.  For years I have gotten messages from various companies wanting to place paid content on my blog.  There is a practice that is frighteningly common that gets called by a bunch of names… but essentially marketers want to pay established blogs to place pre-written and pre-approved articles which serve as a sort of advertising for a product.  Essentially the practice makes me feel dirty inside that they are even targeting my blog… but most end up getting caught in the spam filter.  Here lately several have made it through on my About page, and I have taken to responding to them directly.  I realize I should just brush these off as the byproduct of having blogged for as long as I have, but it really sticks in my craw.

I get super excited about products, and games… and the other things that interest me in the world.  I’m a geek and a lot of geekdom is geeking out about something.  That said I want to make sure it is understood that when I get excited about something… it is because I am legitimately excited and that there is not some nefarious force behind the curtain pulling my strings.  Sure I would love to make money on my blog, or at least love to reach a point where it is self sustaining… the problem is every option to monetize means I am giving up some of my control.  For example if I were to install advertisements… I wouldn’t be able to curate WHICH advertisements I allowed onto the site, I would have to accept anything the ad network wanted to place there.  So the notion of “supporting” products that I don’t necessarily believe in, really bothers me.  As a result I have shunned pretty much all advertising, and while I freely accept alphas and betas to games… I only end up writing about the ones that really interest me.  I have friends in the gaming industry, and it is awesome…  but no one is paying me to like their product.

Basically what it all boils down to is that my opinion is not for sale.  None of the folks that have been approaching me will actually read these lines, but I still feel like it is important to say it loud and publicly.  Tales of the Aggronaut has been a work of love for going on seven years now, and while my opinions shift and change based on new data… they are still very much my opinions and not carefully scripted speaking points.  That said I will always be open to reviewing products if someone wants me to do so.  That said I will only write about the product when I feel like I have had enough time to see the entire picture, and when I have something interesting to say about it.  I also will never guarantee a positive review.  I am not really a ranty blogger, but I do talk about the points that disappoint me in games or products and that is likely to happen.  If someone finds this in a search later on…  hopefully they will actually read it before asking me to do something shifty like accepting payola for content.  I am extremely luck in that I have a day job that can support my blogging shenanigans, and that I don’t need to somehow turn this into a profit center.  I don’t begrudge those who are trying to monetize their content, but I can’t ever really condone shillery.

I R Blogger

by
Gosh, where to begin? Between holidays and going into quasi-hermit mode for a little bit, I haven't posted in a while. Let's remedy that, shall we? What have I been up to?

Gaming-wise, I've mostly been playing Warframe for the past couple months; the game of being a space-ninja in space. It continues to entertain, mostly when enough of us are on together to do group content. There are daily sorties that consist of three missions of escalating difficulty which are decidedly tuned for a full group, and we've been having fun with those occasionally. They can get pretty rough at times, particularly since the missions have additional modifiers applied to them, such as being limited to a single weapon type, or all the enemies having improved armor or added elemental damage, etc.

We're ninjas on the moon, we carry a harpoon.

I've also been playing Stardew Valley a good bit. It's a very entertaining Harvest Moon / Animal Crossing style game where you farm, fish, fight monsters in an abandoned mine, befriend townsfolk and so forth. It's got that 'one more turn' aspect that can keep you playing far longer than you ever intended to. My first spring has just ended and summer has begun, and I've spent about half of what I've earned so far on summer crops. The rest is earmarked for a chicken coop once I can catch the carpenter lady at home to hire her.

It's simple yet, but it's mine.

I haven't been devoting as much time to reading recently as I should, but currently I'm working on Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh (who will be named a Grandmaster by the SFWA in May). She's an author I've been aware of for quite some time, and have always intended to read, but this is only the second book of hers I've read. I'm enjoying it so far. I've read a few other books over the past few months; I haven't decided yet if I'm going to post about them, or skip to the current book. Once I finish this book, I've got a copy of REAMDE waiting for me. Getting through that in a week's time might be a bit difficult, so having some previous books to talk about could be useful.

Finally, I've been re-inventorying my comic book collection and getting it recorded at a site that I started using recently, League of Comic Geeks. I discovered it initially via their app, which is excellent for organizing my weekly pull list, and have decided it's an easier site to record new comics than the one I was using. Also it's free, which is a big plus. I've recorded just over 5000 comics in it so far, which is about a third of my collection. This is one of a few things that I've been needing to do as part of the overall 'clean up my office so it doesn't look like a hoarder lives in it' plan. So far it's going well.