Grand Experiment – Page 2

Steam Replay 2022

December 28, 2022 by Belghast

Something that has been floating around the social networks this week is the Steam Replay. I do not remember this existing in past years, so it seems like this is something brand new for Steam and they appear to be taking a page from Spotify which has a similar practice. If you are curious you can look at my full replay here, but this morning I figured I would talk about it a bit. I do my own tracking thing that I am currently working on, but I do appreciate Steam handing me so much information on a platter. I tend to devote a certain amount of time in the last few posts of the year to reviewing the year as a whole and this flows right into that pattern. Steam creates a number of handy infographics ready for you to download and share on social media. The above image is “formatted for Twitter” but they also have a square format for Instagram if that is more your thing. The first tidbit that I find interesting is just how high my session count is. I think this can be accounted for by two different behaviors that happen to me a lot. Firstly I often get into a game and then something comes up… cat knocks something over… wife needs my help… and I have to bail out of the game quickly. This is entirely why I bounced off Deathloop because that game refuses to let me save out quickly and return just as quickly to what I was doing. After failing to complete a stage three times because I kept getting interrupted I uninstalled the game and move on with my life. The other part of this is that I boot up a lot of games… and then do nothing with them. Sometimes I suffer from the “I have nothing to wear” syndrome where I have so many games but nothing quite sounds right. So before I settle in on something and hyper-focus for several days, I will often flail about trying to find the “right” game to play.

The thing that honestly shocks me with this one is the number of achievements. I realize in January and February I did burn through like twelve games in rapid fire, and honestly, that is probably why that number is so high. That is not exactly my normal pattern because in general, I do not give a fuck about achievements. I say that… but I am now going after a truly stupid achievement in Path of Exile that involves me playing a character up to Hillock and then logging out, and coming back and trying it again after the map resets all for the purpose of attempting to get a unique drop in that first map. I am not shocked that I spent most of my time playing either New World or Path of Exile because those really were the games of “this” year for me. Witcher 3 is so high because I poured into doing as close to 100% of the content run as I could when I was doing my “play everything to completion” thing at the start of the year.

I knew I was somewhat “out of band” in the sheer number of games I play in a given year… but I did not realize I was that far off. If I take this statement as evidence of how most people consume games, it would make me believe that the average gamer just plays a handful of games. The streak is interesting because I am almost certain that is New World, and it in truth should be longer because Steam tracks the Live client and the PTR client as separate games. There was a period of time when I was playing the PTR client every single day, and then when Brimstone Sands launched I switched over to playing Live again. The achievement count again I am certain is because in Dec/Jan/Feb I burned through a lot of single-player games.

This graphic shows how my gameplay stacks up as compared to new releases, recent releases, and what it calls a classic game… aka anything that is more than eight years old. I am sure some folks would bicker about the definition of “classic games” there, but I guess for me it makes sense. I do spend a lot of time jumping on the bandwagon of a brand-new game as it launches, but apparently only about a third of my gameplay is spent in that manner. I would have thought it was higher, to be honest. It does make sense that the bulk of my time is spent on games that release in the last few years because I often miss the launch and eventually get around to checking out the game a few years later. I think this is a side effect of how hyper-focused I can get on a single game and how I mostly push everything else aside when I am in that mode. Then there are just so damned many games coming out each year that it takes me a while to digest that they came out and get around to playing them.

This one confuses me quite a bit. Usually, when I see a graph like this, it denotes something like quadrants that are universal for everyone. This is clearly chosen from the games that I actually played during the year because no one would lay out a personality matrix based on these traits. It makes a lot of sense that MMORPG, Looter Shooter, and Medieval are so high on the list. That little corner seems to be my sweet spot. What I am shocked about is how high the Souls-like games are showing up on the list, but I guess that makes sense as well because I keep trying them… and then bouncing off them. Cyberpunk would be a much larger segment if I actually had bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. I own it on GOG instead which means none of my playtimes is getting logged here. Dark Comedy though… no clue where that one is coming from because while yes I do love that genre I am not sure which games that I played this last year are contributing to that.

I am still working on my larger “Grand Experiment” post that I make each year, in which I have been tracking monthly play patterns since 2012. I thought it would be fun to talk through some of the things on my Steam Replay this year in the meantime. Valve has this bad habit of starting things and not necessarily carrying through with them, but I am hoping that this becomes a yearly tradition. I personally find evaluating my habits interesting, and it has been really cool to see some of the Replays of my friends. What are your thoughts? Did you enjoy the Steam Replay as a concept? Feel free to drop me a line below. I am not exactly sure WHEN I will make my big post, but given the trajectory, it is likely on Friday. The post Steam Replay 2022 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Blaugust and the Grand Experiment

September 2, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! How is your day going? I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out why ShareX was not working… only to realize that it is no longer August and I should be looking in the September folder instead. My wife is a teacher and we are pretty sure she brought home some generic crud to us. She is a few days ahead of me but I am very much starting to feel awful. We’ve been playing the “is it allergies or something worse” game for a bit, but so far neither of us has run a fever or had the traditional Covid symptoms. Regardless I am more than a bit mentally lagged at the moment and I am just very thankful that I made it through “Blaugust Hell Day”, or the day that I have to tabulate everything and post the final tallies. So far it appears that I have mostly been okay on my counts, but I had minor stress out yesterday when I thought all of my graphics were posted in a non-transparent mode.

The truth about Blaugust is I am floored that it is still as big of a thing as it is. The entire idea behind it was somewhat dumb. At this point, I think my blog is known more for the frequency of my posts rather than if any of them are good. However, that was not always the case. In the first several years of the blog I would go months between posts, and each time I did… I found it harder to get up the confidence to post again. So on April 26th of 2013, I set forth on my “Grand Experiment” and decided that I was going to be posting every single day. Why April 26th? I legitimately have no clue other than that was just the day that I started posting… and kept posting for several years in this fashion. After a year of doing this nonsense, I somehow got it in my head that everyone should just hit the post button and challenged folks to a month of posting.

It cracks me up a little when I catch hell for not making it to 31 posts during a contest I started in 2014. It is all in good fun, but after doing the daily posting thing for 1120 days in a row… I decided that it probably was not healthy for me. I dropped my streak on May 21st of 2016 when I took both Saturday and Sunday off from posting. For me, at least the whole daily posting routine had become such a concrete part of my life that I was constantly in fear of failing. Even though Blaugust is just a month-long event, for 2018-2022 I have taken Saturdays off just like I do in my normal posting routine. Now I allow myself the leverage to just not post whenever I am “not feeling it”. This weekend for example is Labor Day weekend here in the United States and it is probably a crap shoot if I am actually going to post or not. I called Blaugust a “dumb idea” earlier because in part I think I thought I had figured out the formula for how to blog post… and the contest was pure hubris. Now I am more in line with the thinking that you have to figure out whatever pattern works for you and then stick to that rather than some dogmatic requirement.

I am not making a ton of traction in Path of Exile at the moment in part because I have generally felt like crap and the content that I am doing requires entirely too much concentration and reaction time for me to succeed. I did clear a few more maps to add to my total of 60 out of 115 cleared. I managed to pick up a few more uniques from Kirac’s quest and failed miserably at a third. I’m in this awkward phase of not quite having the survival to just run amok killing everything, and I am not entirely certain which knobs I need to turn in order to get there. Right now I am at the default cap of 75% on all elemental resists, 20% chaos resist, and 5% spell suppression… which seems really hard to get. I need to get through my 4th ascension honestly and have a couple of tokens saved up now. That is probably going to be my next major focus. I got through to the final boss phase and died to his slam, but have upgraded a few pieces of gear since then.

Because it requires so much less focus, I am spending more time playing Diablo 3 at the moment and have a mostly viable Whirlrend Barbarian build. I can comfortably clear T13 content and uncomfortably clear t16. Mostly my core problem right now is survival… which is admittedly always the problem with an early whirlrend build. I have all of the components to make a functional build, I just need to start upgrading things to ancient and finish upgrading my gems. I think my next push is to get my GR75 out of the way so I can start getting a chance at primal ancient legendary drops. I was able to do a GR66 without much issue other than having to be careful of stray projectiles, so I am certain I will be able to do it without much concern. I am back to being stalled on my old friend the Set Dungeon, so another focus soon will be getting one of those mastered so I can clear the way for other objectives.

I am also spending a minimum amount of time playing Tower of Fantasy each day. Essentially I knock out my bounties and then move on to other things. The biggest problem that I am seeing is that since I am no longer farming content… my character level is not keeping up with the requirements material-wise to keep leveling things up. I can technically level my main three weapons from 90 to 100 but I am lacking all of the materials that I would need to do this. My account still seems “lucky” as I have already pulled the new rate-up banner character/weapon called Balmung which is a matched pair of frost swords. All told it seems pretty cool. I will likely continue to dump free summons into the limited-time banners as I have everyone on the standard banner that I care about. Other than all of this nonsense, if you are in the United States I wish you all a great extended weekend. For the rest of the world… sorry that Monday is going to be oddly quiet. I will likely take the day off unless I have a burning passion to get something out of my system and into a blog post. The post Blaugust and the Grand Experiment appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Games Played 2021 Edition

December 30, 2021 by Belghast

The Grand Experiment – Tracking Games Played since 2012

Well friends it is that time once again to do my “Games Played” post for the year. Each year this image becomes significantly less readable as I am slowly expanding the width of what is shown in frame. For those who are completely new to the blog or might not have experienced one of these posts before I have a strange obsession. Back in 2015 I started keeping track of the games that I played during the year and have since then expanded my spreadsheet to included 2013 and most of 2012 all the way through the current year. Why do I do this? I honestly am not even sure at this point other than I enjoy making data points. The truth is that I used to use a service called Raptr and it was a great way of keeping track of what I had been playing at any given time. Once I moved away from it I lacked any meaningful way to collect the same sort of data for producing any sort of long term trends. In 2015 I started keeping track of things in a very simple format. If I played a game during a month, it got a tick mark regardless of how much time I spent playing that game. This allowed me to tabulate how many months during a year was I actually engaged with a specific title. There are ways to track things at a more granular level, but for me it was enough knowing what I happened to be playing at a specific time. This has allowed me to go back and see when I have dipped in and out of games like World of Warcraft or Rift, and when I actually started playing a new game for the first time. Since I started this officially in 2015, you might be wondering exactly how I was able to back populate up through 2012. The first way is that I am pretty prolific when it comes to taking screenshots in video games, in part because I need a constantly flow of them to break out the walls of text in these blog posts. At the time of writing this I have roughly 120 GB of screenshots in cold storage representing roughly 34,000 individual screenshots. I have an unknown number of active screenshots sitting in various directories on my machine that I have yet to file away properly but they represent roughly another 20 GB. On top of this my blog itself acts as a pretty great journal because if I am playing a game regularly, I am likely going to be talking about it. Combined this has given me a pretty good view of what I was doing at any point forward from 2013 when I first started the whole daily blogging thing.

Top Games Played of 2021

The rules for this whole experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game at all during a given month I fill in a box, and then tabulate the number of filled boxes to give me a number of months I played a game during the calendar year. There are going to be specific “forever games” that game a regular showing and then a bunch of games that I only play for one or two months at a time. The biggest difference this year is that I made an attempt to keep better track of the mobile games that I happened to be playing. As such you see games like Mitrasphere, Tales of the Wind, and Undead World: Hero Survival consuming a few months. When it comes to mobile games I have this pattern of installing one, playing for a few months out of boredom before I fall asleep at night and then never playing it again.

A new feature this year is that I actually got my shit together and started keeping proper track of the total number of games that I have played in each of the years. Notice there is this sorta trend where I dip back and forth between 70ish game years and 40ish game years. I think more than anything this denotes just how involved I was with any specific games that ate up all of my time, or if I was floundering a bit and trying to find something to really sink my teeth into… but failing miserably. This was very much a year dominated by only a handful of games, but you can see how it ranks against other years in the above bar chart. Let’s specifically look at only the games that I spent more than three months playing.

New World – 11 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 Months
Outriders – 6 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 5 Months
Destiny 2 – 4 Months

This is a year where I played an excessive amount of New World. While the game only launched in September I was pretty active in alpha/beta testing all the way through from February onwards when I got into the permanent testing group. I also had a massive resurgence of Final Fantasy XIV this year starting in June and continuing on through the release of Endwalker in early December. Outriders was a pretty significant game for me as well with it taking up four months in a row and then my recent revisiting in November and December. In January of the year I got deeply involved with Elder Scrolls Online again and spent several months hanging out with friends there and leveling some of my very first alts in the game.

If we compare this year to last year… you are going to see a few games that are conspicuously missing. The year of 2021 was a year without Blizzard games almost entirely. This started as me simply being disillusioned with Shadowlands and being unhappy with the way that expansion rolled out. By January of 2021 I had entirely bounced off of that game. Then when the news about the awful working conditions and allegations of abuse hit, I decided that I wanted nothing to do with that company. This put an immediate halt to my reoccurring Diablo 3 plans and lead me to ignore the launch of Diablo 2 Resurrection. So when you take away a game that I played 12 months in 2020 and another that I played 9 months… the entire picture starts to look significantly different.

Top 15 of All Time

Another thing that I find interesting is how the games that I have played the most number of months shifts over time. The above graphic is sorted by total months played and shows 2019, 2020, and 2021. Now one thing that I need to talk about quickly is that some of the previous numbers were off significantly. When working on this years data I noticed that the numbers being tabulated were completely missing some of the past years, which means that some numbers went up a bit as compared to last years numbers. For example I did not play World of Warcraft at all this year but it is going to show that it went up to 75 over the 69 I listed last year. So with this correction in mind this is what the top 15 list looks like now.

World of Warcraft – 75 Total Months
Destiny 1/2 – 69 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 67 Total Months
Diablo 3 – 55 Total Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 50 Total Months
Rift – 47 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
Guild Wars 2 – 19 Total Months
Minecraft – 17 Total Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
The Division 1/2 – 16 Months
Everquest II – 14 Months
New World – 14 Months

Something I have never really done previously but decided to this year, was to create another chart that shows every game that I have played over 6 months in bar chart form. Here is what that looks like.

For the most part the top six have held their places relative to each other for another year. World of Warcraft continues to hold onto that top spot, but having lost 12 months of play time… it is suffering. Destiny is also suffering a bit only having gained 4 months total as compared to Final Fantasy XIV with its 7 months of new play time. Diablo 3 only got 2 months worth of play time before I shut the door on all Blizzard games so it is going to suffer a bit in the future. Elder Scrolls continues to see regular revisits from me, but Rift is largely an artifact of a past era and now is standing there as a testament to what might have been. There is a significant drop down to Pokemon Go and MTG Arena, neither of which saw much play last year but still hold strong. What surprised me was that Guild Wars 2 is gaining traction, and I figure with the new expansion on its way I will spend some more time playing that. Minecraft gained a few months which honestly I always thought it deserved to be higher on the list given how emotionally important the game is to me. The real surprise is New World and how much I have spent playing it through all of the testing phases and now after launch. I really hope that game can make the necessary changes in order to be something that I want to revisit over time. I fully expect to stop playing it once the holiday event is over and I stop getting free easy expertise increases.

Longest Streaks

Most Number of Months Played Sequentially

This is something new that started last year based on a conversation that I had with my friend Tam. We were curious which games I had played the most number of months in a row without pause. This year I have expanded this a bit and added a bar chart to show games and length of a given streak. For the most part there is not a lot of change here, but we did add a new game to the “more than six months” list and technically there would have been two but I already had a much longer FFXIV streak. New World was added to the list with its eleven months, which is pretty solid to be honest as streaks go.

Another Year of Gaming

This year saw a significant number of changes to the format of this post. More than anything I just expanded upon some footnotes that I used to talk about in this final section and turned them into proper charts. As I said before this game was marked by a handful of games that I spent a lot of time playing, but that does not mean that I also did not have several one off experiences. For example I had twenty five games that I only booted up and played during one month, and among these were games like Dragon Age Inquisition that I played through to completion. I think more than anything we are all entering the third year of this pandemic and have had significant changes in the way we exist in life as a result. I know I did not expect most of the changes that have occurred in my own life, and would have had a hard time predicting any of them. I know for me at least I want to spend way less time in my office upstairs… where my gaming consoles and primary gaming rig are… because it also represents my work from home office. I play almost exclusively through Parsec now playing remote from my laptop downstairs and even most of my console gaming is done through a remote play app as well. It will be interesting to see what changes unfold during 2022, but for now I am not making any predictions. If you are curious about the past gaming trends since I have started this experiment you can find my posts dating back to 2015 below. The format for the 2015 post is not quite following what ultimately ended up as my standard going forward.

If you are even more curious, you can check out the raw list of data that I have shared freely for years. I am still not certain why I started doing this, but it does make for an interesting tradition at the end of each year. The post Games Played 2021 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Games Played 2018 Edition

December 27, 2018 by Belghast

Over the years I have developed two habits that help me keep track of what games I am playing in a given month. The first is that I take a lot of screenshots and archive them on network attached storage so that I can reach out and get one for this blog when I need it. The second is that since April of 2013 I have been blogging at a minimum every weekday… and for the first three years and some change… every single day. This gives me a pretty good record to know what I happened to be playing in a given stretch of time. Years ago I used to use the Raptr gaming service to track what games I happened to be playing, but as that got sold and my game time fragmented between multiple console platforms as well… it became harder for me to get a high level view of what I happened to be doing at a given period of time. As such I crawled back through my screenshots and my blog posts and started piecing together a map of what games I played in a given month. Now this is not necessarily tracking the length of time played… but instead that I played a given game during a specific month.

This is going to look like nonsense to my viewers but this image represents the top 25 games played since May of 2012… that I had either written or screenshot proof that I was playing at the time. Essentially I question the reliability of this record any further back than April of 2013, but I decided to extend it out as far as I could just for sake of tracking patterns. There are years when I play an awful lot of games… and then there are years when I don’t play many at all. This year for example I played seventy two different games throughout the year and eight of them I played for more than five months. On the other side of that coin 32 of the games that I played were singletons… where they were only played in a single month. Now some of these were new games that failed to gain traction like State of Decay 2 that I had been looking forward to greatly… and others are games like Horizon Zero Dawn where I booted it back up to return briefly to a game that I had played an awful lot more in the previous year. If you are curious enough to dig into the madness you can see the full google sheet that I maintain here. The biggest trend you will notice is that I am one of those people that revisits old territory quite often, especially when it comes to booting up an older MMO and spending a weekend or two exploring it again.

The problem with this concept is that it is really hard to keep track of a nice clean “Top 25” list as there are ultimately a lot of games that end up being tied for the same number of months. As such for this specific year if we set the benchmark at three months played… because there were thirteen games that spanned two months sorta skewing the results a bit. For games that I played three or more months however we end up with a list of twenty three games. So as a result lets run them down. One thing that I have done since last year is combined time played in Destiny 1 with time played in Destiny 2 since there was effectively a clean cut-over there with no real overlap.

Destiny/Destiny 2 – 12 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 12 Months
Pokemon Go – 12 Months
Monster Hunter World – 12 Months
World of Warcraft – 10 Months
Magic the Gathering Arena – 9 Months
Diablo 3 – 6 Months
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate – 5 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 4 Months
Neverwinter – 4 Months
Dauntless – 4 Months
Dragalia Lost – 4 Months
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr – 4 Months
Fallout 4 – 3 Months
Minecraft – 3 Months
The Division – 3 Months
No Man’s Sky – 3 Months
Assassin’s Creed Origins – 3 Months
Path of Exile – 3 Months
Warframe – 3 Months
Fallout 76 – 3 Months
God of War – 3 Months
Hollow Knight – 3 Months

So if we look at just 2017 against 2018 there are some interesting things at work here. Firstly mobile games played way more of a presence in my gaming diet than they have ever before with Pokemon go effectively being played at least once a month since it released in July of 2017 for a grand total of 18 months of it being on my radar. Dragalia Lost similarly has been played every single month since release, and in many cases almost every night before I fall asleep to at a minimum do the dailies. Another thing that happened this year was that Final Fantasy XIV seemingly feel completely off my radar with playing it only 4 months instead of the previous years 7 months. Destiny looks a little bit weird because there were two months of overlap between the games so 2017 shows it as “14” months because I didn’t have a great way of accounting for that… but during the last two years there has not been a month that I did not play the Destiny franchise and in truth that reaches all the way back to September of 2016 in contiguous play. Elder Scrolls Online held way more of a presence this year as being another one of those games that I played at least once a month all year long going up from 2 months the previous year. The real story of the year however is Monster Hunter World that sort of came out from nowhere and then was the game that I probably played the most throughout the entire year, and also inspired me to latch onto Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate when it released in August. Similar to Destiny 2 this is a game that I started on the Playstation 4 and then moved to PC when the staggered release for it happened… so my time accounts for leveling essentially twice.

This year also made a bunch of changes in the months played all time list, but considering how entrenched World of Warcraft is it is highly unlikely that anyone will dethrone it until I just completely quit cold turkey. Thankfully I can create a nice clean top 15 list here so lets review the “All Time” list.

World of Warcraft – 57 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 46 Months
Destiny/Destiny 2 – 45 Months
Rift – 39 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 38 Months
Diablo 3 – 29 Months
Pokemon Go – 20 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Fallout 4 – 13 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 13 Months
Wildstar – 13 Months
Monster Hunter World – 12 Months
Everquest II – 11 Months
Minecraft – 10 Months
Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 Months

This list is going to continue to shift over time, but with the selling of Trion Worlds to Gamigo… I have a feeling that ArcheAge and Rift are frozen in time and will likely not be gaining any more months played. Similarly Wildstar has officially shuttered and it is equally frozen on the list and will eventually work its way out of the top. Monster Hunter World and Pokemon Go are both climbing significantly and I feel like there is a good chance Destiny franchise will climb into the second place at some point in the future as I am playing it way more regularly than I am Final Fantasy XIV. Elder Scrolls Online is going to seize the third spot early next year as well. Diablo 3 is sort of the little engine that could and it will probably always be on the list, but the sporadic nature in which I play that game keeps it from really gaining ground. Fallout 4 is the one that sort of shocked me… but I guess I keep returning to it much the same way as I did Fallout 3 or New Vegas before. If you are curious you can see last years list on the Games Played 2017 Edition post.

This is largely a thing that I do for myself, but I guess the question is… does anyone find it interesting? What games did you play the most often this year and why? I would love to hear your answers in the comments.