This week Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tam and Thalen talk a bunch of stuff including how gaming applies to business leadership roles.
This week we have a bit of a strange cold open as we talk about our recent system building experiences and the fact that next week we are actually going to need to record a proper sound check. From there we delve into World of Warcraft and talk about our experiences with the new Karazhan Raid and Trials of Valor, as well as experiences with progression and wrapping up the Emerald Nightmare. Belghast talks about his experiences in Starfall Prophecy the new Rift raid, and Tam discusses his experiences in Dishonored 2. Finally we get around to the discussion that named this show as Tam talks about a recent class project.
Things Discussed – Impromptu Building New Systems – WoW – New Karazhan Raid – Trial of Valor Raid – Rift – Starfall Prophecy Expansion – Dishonored 2 -Tam’s Class Project
Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen talk Blizzcon news, Guild Wars 2, and Dungeons and Dragons stuff
Tonight we wind up delaying the Cthulhu show another week because of continued technical difficulties with that game, which is probably a good idea since we had a lot of other stuff to talk about anyways. We start off with Bel getting griefed by the rest of the cast as he tries to do the intro, and it just sorta flows from there. This week was Blizzcon and we talk about some of the exciting stuff to come out of it. Then we get into a length discussion about our changing attitudes towards Guild Wars 2, and finally wrap things up with some discussion about the new Volo’s Guide to Monsters release.
Topics Discussed: Blizzcon – Overwatch – Sombra – ARG – Diablo 3 – Anniversary Event – Necromancer – World of Warcraft – Micro Holidays – Argus – Nighthold raid – Tomb of Sargeras raid – Starcraft 2 – Deepmind integration – This is how we make Skynet – Hearthstone – Mean Streets of Gadgetzan – Heroes of the Storm – Varian – Ragnaros – Guild Wars 2 – Fractals – World Events – Mad King’s Labyrinth – Dungeons and Dragons – Volos Guide
Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tam and Thalen Discuss Diablo rumors, Overwatch Co-Op, Master Catching Games, and Guild Wars Deckbuilding in MMOs
Tonight we have another in a long line of shows where we go into it not really having a clue what we are going to talk about… then wind up discussing topics for a couple hours. This week we start off talking about Diablo… the largely forgotten Blizzard game and the beginning of Season 8. We then veer off into tinfoil hat territory as we talk about some of the popular rumors surrounding Diablo 4. We talk about how much we are enjoying the new Co-Op PVE mode in Overwatch, and how we wish it was a permanent addition. We also shift course into a discussion about how games seem to have an obligatory e-sports friendly design these days. We also discuss our recent progress in the World of Warcraft Emerald Nightmare raid, and now much we are looking forward to Karazhan landing this coming week. Finally we get into a lengthy discussion about the deckbuilding style of MMO design, namely with Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Secret World and to some extent Rift.
Topics Discussed – Diablo 3 Season 8 – Diablo 4 Tinfoil Hat Theories – David Brevik – Bill Roper – Co-Op Overwatch – Designing For E-Sports – Co-Op Gameplay – Pokemon Sun and Moon Demo – World of Final Fantasy Demo – WoW Emerald Nightmare Raid – Guild Wars 1 Ability System – Deck Building MMOs
This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely when it came to Sunday morning. Generally speaking I have the process of finishing up an AggroChat episode down to a fairly regimented process. Saturday night before I crash I try to do what I call the initial edit, which is most of the actual edit work. Then Sunday morning I write the small bit of copy, and upload and syndicate the podcast to the various sources where it gets put. However this week was the first week doing all of this on the new machine… and I was not prepared. For starters we recorded a really long show mostly about the Final Fantasy XIV 3.4 main story quest. We did not unfortunately ONLY talk about that, and that meant we had almost three hours of recorded audio to process… and didn’t actually finish things up until around midnight my time. Instead of staying up further, I decided to crash and deal with it in the morning. Then Sunday it was a carnival of errors, as the version of audacity on my new machine was apparently slightly newer than the version I had been using which means a lot of the filters had different options… or at least were arranged in different ways. Additionally there was the process of trying to find all of my source files off of the old machine, which is thankfully still accessible over the network.
The worst part of it however was the changes to the Truncate Silence filter…. which is a crutch we lean on heavily for AggroChat. We are fairly pensive folk, and as a result there are a lot of lengthy pauses in conversation. With truncate silence that 3 hours of audio becomes 2 hours… but on my first attempt it maybe clipped a little more than actual silence. For whatever reason it was clipping the hell out of anytime Kodra talked, giving his speech a record skipping characteristic. However this is not something I realized until I was just about to upload the files to our host. Thankfully I caught it in time and was able to redo that portion, lowering the granularity of the filter. This mean’t what is normally a couple hour process… ate up I think four hours in total. Admittedly I was piddling around in Guild Wars 2 during much of it, so there were probably moments when I didn’t notice a filter had finished here or there. The positive however is that every filter applied went massively faster than on the previous AMD FX-6300 based processor. That was really my hope with the new i7 based system, is that it would be able to chew through rendering tasks far more successfully. As with any system there is going to be an adjustment and moving in period, and I am hoping that now that I have finished a single podcast on this machine additional ones will be much quicker.
As far as the weekend itself went, I was all over the place. I played a significant amount of Destiny, completing a bunch of bounties and discovering the Archon’s Forge… or more so how easy it was to get a pick up group. Much the same way as the court of Oryx, you seem to be able to just show up and folks will either be doing it… or quickly swarm when they think anyone else is. I also played a lot of World of Warcraft, completely a few mythic dungeons as well as successfully completing my first Mythic+ keystone. I’m looking forward to seeing that upgraded loot in the weekly order hall chest. In addition to that I completed the five time-walking dungeons on both Belghast and Exeter, and on the later I used it as a way to gear him up. I am now sitting over the 825 cap needed to get into LFR so my hope is tonight I will be able to run the two parts available and potentially get more upgrades that way. Generally speaking on Belghast the 835 rewards are not super enticing, but I still ran it this week for the purpose of getting some rune stones. I also need to do a bunch of fishing, as I now have the pattern to turn the 300 versatility food that I spent a chunk of the weekend crafting… into a 375 version. I am only using this stuff for raiding and mythic+ attempts, as I keep a bank full of Faronar Fizz for other stuff.
The biggest take away from the weekend is that I am actually finding myself legitimately enjoying Guild Wars 2. Recently it had been a game that I was dipping my toes into for the sake of my friends that were also playing it. However before the podcast we ran several of the story mode dungeons and they were pretty enjoyable. Enough so that when I sat down to decide which game I would play during the podcast, I decided to go ahead and stay with Guild Wars 2. That means that I spent the next three hours roaming aimlessly completing little objectives here and there, and mostly finding my way to the next story mode dungeon. The post 80/ Heart of Thorns mastery leveling is pretty slow. In all of that time I only managed to get about half of a mastery level… and then I ended up wasting a bunch of experience because I didn’t notice I needed to click through and train it. I am pretty not sure what my purpose in game is, but I am still fairly dead set on the warrior… and more importantly hammer warrior. That makes me the make shift tank for the group, and I have been using rifle lately as my dps weapon because it allows me to have something that I can hit things with at range. At some point I want to pick back up where I left off in attempting to level armor smithing, but right now my craft window looks somewhat like madness to me. All in all I feel like I have come to terms with the game in accepting what it is… and more importantly what it is not.
