Destiny

AggroChat #220 – I Am Gorb!

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat220

Tonight we record a show that has almost nothing to do with Gorb…  but you are going to get that as a name anyways because reasons. This is another one of those shows that has a bunch of topics that kept rolling over from other shows until we managed to align enough of them that sorta made sense together.  Tonight we talk about MMOs an awful lot covering the life cycle of the new player experience, returning player experience and the completely and total nonsense that happens at end game with power creep.

Rough Approximation of Topics

  • DPS Shortage
    • Why We Apparently Only Know Tanks and Healers
  • The New Player Experience
    • World of Warcraft
    • Final Fantasy XIV
    • Destiny Series
    • Warframe
  • The Returning Character Experience
    • All of the Above Again
    • How The Secret World did it Poorly
  • Power Creep
    • Why did we stat squish only to be irresponsible again?
    • Mudflation the term that actually came from MUDs
  • Nintendo Direct
    • We accidentally talk about stuff coming out on Switch

 

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June 2018 Gaming Goals

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May has passed us by and I don’t feel like accomplished much of anything. Losing our air conditioning has really changed the amount of time I’m willing to spend locked in a tiny room with a heat-generating PC. But I did manage to meet some of my goals for the month despite the heat.

May Goals in review:

WoW: Keep playing in the M+ nonsense group. Nope. Between losing interest and the temperature in my office, I just couldn’t make it anymore. This makes me super sad.

Finish all the priest transmog sets up through the first tier of MoP. Done! I managed to get the LFR sets done for all of the Pandaria raids last month, in addition to finishing off all versions of the sets from the Terrace of Endless Spring / Heart of Fear tier.

Level the new mage to 75. Done! Switching from TBC to Wrath zones and throwing in a few dungeon runs to speed things up really saved my sanity.

Destiny 2: Check out the new expansion. Done! I played through the story on 2 characters but that’s as far as I got.

Stardew Valley: Try multiplayer. Not quite – I tried some of the other beta changes but not the multiplayer part.

June Goals:

WoW: Finish at least 2 more priest transmog sets. Soloing is getting harder as I keep creeping closer toward the current expansion, but I should still be able to finish off the MoP sets without help.

Level the new mage to 100. I’m being ambitious on this again because I finally got out of the TBC/Wrath stage and the leveling is going much faster again. I finished off May right around 84, and once I get to WoD it should go super fast.

Heroes of Hammerwatch: “Beat the game”. I put that in quotes because I’m excluding NG+ nonsense. This was our Aggrochat game of the month for May and I really enjoyed it. I think I made it to the last boss but haven’t beaten it yet. I want to do so before I move on to other things.

That’s it? Just a couple simple WoW goals and finishing one game I’m almost done anyway? Yep.

I’m in a real gaming lull right now. I just don’t feel very excited about games in general at the moment. Combine that with my lack of climate control and it is really hard to spend time in my office at all. Hopefully that will turn around in a couple weeks when our new system finally gets installed. In the meantime I’ll be chasing my simple WoW goals in very small doses, and focusing on my crafty projects instead. Downstairs in the basement, where it is nice and cool.

Backyard and Banana

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Backyard and Banana

Last night was a pretty chill night and was spent either gaming or hanging out on the patio off our bedroom.  Here is a photo from my chair as I waited to top off the pool and played Monster Hunter Generations.  There was a nice breeze and it was making the wind chimes do all sorts of happy sounds.  My wife was hanging beside me doing school work…  because unfortunately it is both hobby and job rolled all in one.  I love our backyard even though I don’t spend anywhere near as much time as she does out in it.  Last night however was a perfect storm of overcast and cool which is about my sweet spot for outdoors.  My eyes are super sensitive to light and there are times where while I am sitting in the shade… the world itself is just too bright for my tastes.  The flowerbabies of course are doing okay still, and I need to wrap up this post soon so I can go out and give them all a drink.

As far as Monster Hunter Generations…  I am largely playing it over 4 Ultimate because of the impending release of Generations Ultimate for the Switch.  Monster Hunter is way too complicated a game for me to really enjoy playing it on a tiny screen with a thinkpad trackpoint nub serving as my second thumbstick.  That said I do know that whatever effort I make is going to transfer over to the Switch so it feels like it is allowing me to have a bit of a headstart as it were.  There are still three months until the release of Generations Ultimate and that gives me some time to casually work on leveling my Palicos and progressing through the quests to a point where I might not be completely on ground one at launch on August 28th.  I am super looking forward to having a newish to me Monster Hunter experience to sink my teeth into…  that I will be able to play on my 43 inch monitor upstairs.

Backyard and Banana

The tail end of the evening I settled into playing some Iron Banner in Destiny 2 as I had not honestly played much of that since Curse of Osiris.  I am nowhere near as good at Crucible as I once was because I am simply out of practice, but then again I never was terribly good in the first place.  I did manage to turn in a couple of packages, one of which getting me the Auto Rifle that looks like Scathelocke.  I am super pumped about it because firstly I love Auto Rifles and secondly…  I had really wanted to try that weapon out and was afraid that I lost my chance when the season changed.  There is another auto rifle available as faction rewards so I am wondering if I want to try grinding out 30 packages…  and I pretty much figure the answer is no.  I do however want the super high rate of fire weapon because it has auto loading holster and high impact rounds and seems like a much better version of Perseverance/Valakadyn…  which are both weapons that I hated on the console but have come to enjoy with a mouse and keyboard.

I have significant problems with Destiny 2… but damn does that mechanical loop still feel fun.

Chat Goes On Left

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Chat Goes On Left

One of the things I am realizing is just how bad I am at responding to messages some nights.  Last night for example I was mindlessly grinding away in Destiny 2 while watching video full-screen on my second monitor.  All the while various folks were messaging me on lots of different platforms including battle.net, slack, discord, and even some resorted to twitter.  All of which I was largely oblivious to as I happily ground public events and took down high value targets pushing the warlock up in level so that I can start doing the weeklies on that character as well.  The problem is really two fold, firstly that I am so used to soloing at this point that I am not really watching messages like I used to for the sign of someone else popping online.  The second issue I will get into shortly.

At this point my Warlock is level 28 so nearing 30 but apparently completely capable of wearing gear of decent level because I am now rocking an energy weapon that is 350.  It is super hard going back to the warlock after only really playing the Titan for a good deal of time.  Hunter is simple…  multi jump will always be multi jump.  Warlock on the other hand has the wrong version of Titan jump and no matter how long I play it I never can quite get used to it responding the opposite way that I am expecting.  I feel like folks either bond with Titan or Warlock jumps…  and from that point on the other one just doesn’t feel like a jump should feel.  Hunter on the other hand always feels like you are riding around on a midair pogo stick.

Chat Goes On Left

Now the other problem I was talking about earlier is that Destiny 2 UI design is designed wrong.  What I mean by that is in literally every MMO I play the chat box location is on the left hand side of the screen as illustrated above by my UI in World of Warcraft.  The chat you care about appears on the left hand screen, and in this ElvUI layout the chat I don’t care about at all ever…  appears on the right hand side of the screen.  This is pretty much how I lay out every MMO that allows me to shift around the UI, but I cannot remember a game off the top of my head that does not default to having the chat left justified for lack of a better term.  Destiny 2 on the other hand creates a super spammy loot window that you cannot remove on the left hand side of the screen and gives you the chat you actually care about on the right hand side of the screen…  that will constantly minimize to just a tiny notepad document looking icon.  When you receive a message it does not de-cloak and show you said message…  however any time some jackass loots some random item the game takes every opportunity to make sure you know about it.

This is a broken design and causes me to simply ignore that chat exists because it does not conform to the cultural standards I am used to.  By culture I mean the general cultural design of MMO games, of which Destiny 2 is a part of regardless of how Bungie feels about that label.  To make things worse…  Bungie themselves taught us that the only place that matters for text was the left hand side of the screen in Destiny 1 as they placed all of that spammy nonsense there.   There is in theory a sound that is supposed to play when someone messages you, but whatever sound that is is either inaudible to me personally…  or just blends into the din of everything else happening in game because I never notice it.  \

Ultimately what my inability to notice chat cost me last night was a run through the raid as my friends over in TQMB were trying to reach out because they needed one more to get started.  I am hoping when they put in the clan chat they also give us the option to swap the locations of the two chat panes so that the spammy nonsense goes on the right and the important chat goes on the left.  Otherwise I am honestly not sure if I can ever fully train myself to look for chat in a weird location.  After over two decades of online gaming… I am just too indoctrinated into a “chat on the left” mentality.