imported – Page 12

The Revenge of Blaugust

July 22, 2015July 21, 2015 by Belghast

What is Blaugust?

A few years ago I started down this path of madness that I have referred to as my Grand Experiment, where I started blogging every single day. It has been a grueling experience at times, but also something I would not trade for the world. I learned a lot of things about myself because when you are writing that many posts… something interesting happens. At some point in the process you break down the walls you are holding up between you and your readers and start being completely and often brutally honest with them. I sit down at the keyboard each morning and share a chunk of myself, and this bond I have developed with my readers is something pretty special. Last year I wanted to channel just a little bit of this with the rest of the blogosphere and started the Blaugust challenge. The idea is simple… during the month of August blog something every single day. If you succeed in thirty one days of posts… you are a Blaugust winner.

I had this idea that the only folks that would participate were seasoned bloggers. You know folks like me with years of blogging under their belts. The reality however is that a lot of new bloggers took up this banner as their own and produced some amazing stuff as a part of it. As such Blaugust has become this strange event that allows a lot of folks to essentially rededicate themselves to the craft of writing. After last year I was uncertain if I would be doing another one of these, but I was not so subtly urged by my readers that they were expecting it to happen once more. Last year we had 28 Challenge Winners that managed to make it through the month without missing a post, and another 21 Challenge Survivors that participated in the contest. I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of participation… but in the tradition of all internet things… lets make this year even bigger.

The Topic

First off let me get this out of the way. This contest is all about longevity and frequency and not necessarily about what you are writing. The idea is to get folks in the habit of regular posting, so that after a month of posting every single day… they can settle into a more reasonable schedule after August and do regular posts a few times a week. So as far as your blog goes… you can tell us whatever you feel like. These can be game posts, post about some other hobby you are really interested in, or just posts about your life. Somewhere along my path to madness I reached a point where I am essentially immune to writers block when it comes to Tales of the Aggronaut. I can sit down at the keyboard and start writing without any preparation and within a paragraph a theme starts to form and I am up and running with a new blog post. Inspiration is a fickle thing, and essentially I brute forced my way around it. The plan is to make you realize that you don’t need some magical muse to crank out interesting posts. Everything you say is already interesting so long as it is genuine and comes from your personality, and the rest is just simply taking notes.

The Guidelines

Last year… the month of August was a blur for me, and it was honestly hell for me to go through. When you had as many people blogging as we did, a good chunk of my morning was spent tabulating who blogged and who didn’t. Then when you factor in the international nature of this competition it was extremely hard to actually determine what day a given post was supposed to represent. As such this year I am going to be quite a bit more strict on the guidelines, because I would really like to exit the month of August with at least some bit of my sanity intact. I love you guys dearly… but I really need your help on this.

Write a new blog post of no less than ten sentences in length. This is essentially two large paragraphs and is a good solid minimum size. If you are doing a screenshot/photo blog just make sure your description explaining what the image is all about fits this constraint.
Include a link back to the 2015 Blaugust Initiative Page. My hope is that this will allow other people to join in the challenge and play catch up.
Advertise the post on the Blaugust Nook. When you join the nook I will be elevating everyone to “Blogger” access to do this. This is extremely key this year, because this is going to be how I log all posts, and if you do not do this you are not going to get proper credit.
Either in the title of your post or the first heading inside of your actual post.. please denote which day this post is for. Something like “Blaugust Day 21” just to make sure that I am giving everyone credit for the correct day, and this should help to stop the oddities of folks in vastly different time zones getting dumped into the wrong slot.
If you advertise the post on social media, please include the #Blaugust hashtag. Again we are trying to help spread the word and get folks to join in process… and at very least get folks reading the posts.
Over the course of the month, write 31 posts.
????
Profit!

The Vlogger Clause

Since this contest is far more about longevity and doing things on a schedule… I thought I would open it up to a slightly different audience this year. Blogging is awesome, and I love it dearly… but Vlogging is also awesome. Being willing to put yourself out there, and on camera… on a regular basis is quite the daunting task. As such I wanted to open this up to folks who are vlogging, and essentially allow them to count a daily vlog as a valid post for the month. As such I am going to throw some loose requirements around it.

Vlog must be at least five minutes in length.
Include a link back to the 2015 Blaugust Initiative Page in your videos “dooblidoo” and mention the Blaugust initiative at least once during the video.
Advertise the vlog post on the Blaugust Nook. When you join the nook I will be elevating everyone to “Blogger” access to do this. This is extremely key this year, because this is going to be how I log all posts, and if you do not do this you are not going to get proper credit.
Inside the “dooblidoo” mention what day you are posting for. Something like “Blaugust Day 21” just to make sure that I am giving everyone credit for the correct day, and this should help to stop the oddities of folks in vastly different time zones getting dumped into the wrong slot.
If you advertise the post on social media, please include the #Blaugust hashtag. Again we are trying to help spread the word and get folks to join in process… and at very least get folks reading the posts.
Over the course of the month, write 31 posts.
????
Profit!

Some Revisions

Last year I did some madness that I won’t be doing this year. Essentially the deck was stacked against anyone who was not ready to go on day one. Inevitably there were folks that started one or two days late, that got knocked out of the running for the big prize for not being there from day one. I didn’t really feel like this was fair, because ultimately they put the same amount of effort in during the course of the event, it was just that they had to play catch up a bit. As such I basically have three categories that I am going to be dividing people up into.

Challenge Winners – Anyone who makes thirty one blog posts during the month of August. I will be tallying the Results on September 2nd as to allow for all possible time zone strangeness.
Challenge Survivors – Anyone who makes at least fifteen blog posts during the month of August is going to be considered a “survivor”.
Challenge Participant – Anyone who did not quite make it to fifteen is still awesome in my book and deserves some recognition for showing up and joining in the fun.

The Rewards

As with last year I will be keeping track of these things in my big spreadsheet of blaugust, and at the end of the month on September 2nd I will be tabulating the results. From the contest winners I will be doing a drawing for several prize packages. I hope you enjoy games, and want to acquire more of them… because that is what we are going to do. Last year someone summed up the contest as “write awesome stuff and get games!”. Over the course of the years I have acquired a bunch of spare game download keys, so I will be dipping into this grab bag of awesome to get some prizes for folks. I will be using a secure dice roller to determine one Grand Prize winner and three additional prize winners from the pool of Contest winners.

Grand Prize!

I hope you follow me on Steam, because I will be picking a game off of your Steam Wishlist and purchasing it for you. Nice and simple. If there is something you have been craving like a special store mount or something of the sort from your favorite MMO, we can probably work that in instead.
Three Also-Awesomes

Additionally to a grand prize winner I will be picking three other individuals to get to choose something from the grab bag of awesome. May the odds ever be in your favor… because once again I will be relying on the dice roller to determine who gets first picking order from the grab bag.
All Participants

All participants are going to get sidebar badges to denote that they participated in Blaugust 2015 with special versions for the Survivors and Winners.

If there are any companies that would like to sweeten this pot, contact me because I would most certainly love to give everyone who participates in this contest something for doing this challenge.

The Sign-Up

In order to participate you need a few things. Firstly you need go over to the forums on the Blaugust nook and post your intention to participate in this handy forum thread I have created. This is going to help me prepare to start reading your posts during the month (if you are not already in my blog reader). Then as the month goes on post your new entries to the Blaugust Nook so that you get proper credit for them. The nook also serves as a jumping off place for the Blaugust community that builds up around this event. Share your struggles and your victories, and lean on each other for ideas. We are all in this together, and the hope is that at the end of the month each of us is stronger for the participation. As always if you have any questions feel free to pop me a line on any of the many avenues that I leave available for folks to contact me. Lets have an awesome August and a truly phenomenal Blaugust!

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
The Revenge of Blaugust

Social Games

July 22, 2015July 20, 2015 by Tamrielo

We’re back! Thanks for putting up with my week off; I’m feeling a lot better and more functional now.

I had a discussion with a friend recently about games as a social outlet. She had some trouble wrapping her mind around the concept of a video game being a social event; she viewed them as largely solitary activities. The idea that you might meet someone through the internet and have that feel “real” was confusing, because (as she put it), “In the end, you’re just interacting with your keyboard and computer screen.”

There’s a layer of abstraction that I think we often take for granted and is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t see it. To connect with someone through a game online, you have to view your game avatar as an extension of yourself, and other people’s avatars as themselves– the sprites or pixels you’re seeing on the screen are not only representative of actual people, but the act of moving the mouse or pressing keys is just the background noise for what you’re REALLY doing– interacting with those people.

I used a couple of examples to illustrate the kind of thing I was talking about to my friend. The first was straightforward– a game of catch. I tossed her a frisbee and she, intuitively understanding the game, tossed it back. I asked her why she did that, and how she was thinking about throwing the frisbee. Specifically, I wanted to know what she thought she was interacting with– the frisbee, her own hands, or me. I got a laugh and a “you, obviously”, and pointed out that she didn’t interact with me at all– she used her hands to throw the frisbee at a shape she was looking at that she identified as me. She made the jump pretty quickly about the difference between, essentially, user interface (hands, frisbee) and the game itself (playing catch with me).

From there, everything else is just layers, and it’s a pretty quick jump to a game like Mariokart (where you’re shouting at the people on the couch next to you) to an MMO (where you’re typing in chat or chatting over VoIP). Having gotten the connection, she had a followup question that I found insightful: “How do you know who to play with?”

It’s an interesting question, and one I have a hard time adequately answering for myself. A lot of MMOs have group search functions, like FFXIV’s Duty Finder or WoW’s dungeon queues, but I think it’s hard to make a solid argument that those are necessarily social experiences; you often don’t exchange a single word with the people you’re with, and it’s rare to see them after the run. I have my guild/free company mates, who’ve been slowly (for certain definitions of ‘slowly’) recruited over time and who form the core social circle I operate in. Other than seeking out a guild, however, I don’t know how you find a group like mine. There’s also the friends I know personally, the ones I’ve spent time in realspace with, who might be separated geographically but with whom I can still play games. I can’t always play with them, though, because we’re not always playing the same games or even necessarily caught up with one another if we are in the same game.

In the meantime, I’ve watched a number of my friends get into social mobile games, exchanging currencies and helping each other out in a variety of similar-looking-to-me titles. I heard a story recently about a couple who met playing Ingress, because they happened to keep showing up to the same place to score points or capture the location (I’m not really sure how Ingress is played). It makes me wonder if, done right, mobile games could be the new MMOs, bringing disparate people together who otherwise might not meet.

For me, the real appeal to video games is the social outlet– while I play a decent number of singleplayer games, a lot of my motivation to do so is anchored in wanting to talk to other people about them. One of the fondest memories I have is sitting and playing Chrono Trigger with my sister on the couch next to me, asking me questions about the story and what I was doing, and inserting her own thoughts on the matter. It turned a singleplayer game into a social experience, and I’ve talked about games with my friends ever since (and, indeed, have picked up games I would never have played otherwise because people I knew were playing them and would have stuff to say).

I think that a lot of modern games have pushed the social aspects aside to some extent, going for more convenient play with more temporary connections. I don’t think the desire to connect with people through games is likely to go away, though, and I’m interested to see where the next big social game comes from, that connects people like MMOs in the early-to-mid-2000s did, and the arcades of the 80s and 90s.

Source: Digital Initiative
Social Games

Love Our Guild

July 22, 2015July 20, 2015 by Belghast

Unlocking Dungeons

This weekend was a little bit split as far as gaming goes. I spent about four hours in SkyForge and the rest of it wandering around in Final Fantasy XIV. I had a bunch of side projects that I never really got off the ground. One of the things about being a tank is that you are constantly getting called on to do tanky things. Last night for example, I had all intentions of simply wandering around the new zones doing hunt mobs, but I ended up getting drafted to tank both Neverreap and Fractal Continuum for a friend who just dinged 60. Since this would allow him to unlock the content, and be yet another possibility for a daily expert roulette, as well as providing three of us in the dungeon run some tasty tasty first time bonus, I did not mind giving up my relaxing evening of hunting to help out.

Both runs went fairly smoothly other than Warenwolf falling off the side of the final boss in Neverreap. Luckily we had the stamina to go ahead and finish that boss without him. Fractal Continuum went extremely smoothly other than some annoyances with bomb placement on the final boss. Luckily the loot gods seemed to be at least a little favorable and Waren walked with a bow and some other items helping him inch towards that all too critical level 170 mark for Alexander. It is my hope that in this last week we will have increased our item level enough to be able to put a good attempt in on Bismarck Extreme tonight. I found out that apparently the dps constraint is that you be able to break the spine in a single attempt without also blowing every cooldown. Wednesday we were able to break the spine, but it was a “just barely” situation and we absolutely had to abuse every cool down available to get there.

Love Our Guild

Last night I had a moment when I was overcome with warm fuzzies. Folks were doing what they always do and filling my screen with green happy spam, and somehow it came around to the discussion of the free company. I am not sure if I remember who started it but someone made the comment that they were happy that I had recruited them into the guild, because if not for that they probably would not be playing. Then in a burst of activity a bunch of people chimed in with pretty much the same thing. So I wanted to talk a bit this morning about how much all of my guildies mean to me. There are so many days where I have had a rough patch, that I can log into our free company and within moments of seeing the cheery conversation I am in a much better mood. Having a happy guild family is ultimately what helps me keep returning to one game over another, and ultimately is what keeps me engaged in Final Fantasy XIV.

Sure the game is awesome, but having this big group who is willing to drop what they are doing to help someone else out, makes the experience so much better. Yesterday during the evening I worked through a backlog of dungeon runs that I had recorded, and came across a video that didn’t turn out quite as intended. Since the launch of Heavensward the guild crafters as lead by Solaria have been working away on making us an Airship. When it came time to launch it for the first time a good chunk of us gathered in the workshop basement of the guild hall. In part we hoped a cut scene would happen, and as a result I had OBS rolling away in the background recording the event. While the event did not turn out as I had expected, looking back on the footage it makes me exceptionally happy to see so many of my guild members roaming around in one place. I love the housing district for the constant flow of guild members popping in and out as they go off to other adventures, and this moment was probably the largest meeting of sorts we have had. It made me realize that we need to do something like this more often.

More SkyForge

The SkyForge open beta finishes up this Wednesday and in the mean time I plan on playing for a little bit each night. I have to admit while there are still problems with the game for me, it is growing on me in ways I can’t quite fathom. During yesterdays run I finally figured out something that had been bugging me. I said in my videos and in my blog posts that it seemed like the combo system was largely ineffectual, and for the most part this is true. However I noticed on my character to the right of the health bar was a charge counter of sorts marked with a lightning bolt. This is directly above the dodge counter that shows how many times in a row you can dodge, and how long before the counter regenerates when they are all spent. This lightning bolt number tied to the special combo attacks, and if I use a combo while I have a charge available it does significantly more damage. However any additional combos while that charge is regenerating end up being largely useless.

Knowing this is a thing, made combat feel more purposeful. Essentially I had one special move to use every 30 seconds or so, because that seemed to be roughly how long it took to regenerate a charge. When that ability was not available however I could happily wail away on the target then set up for the next special attack. This little bit of information seemed to dynamically change the way combat felt. Additionally doing the more open world zones, seemed much more enjoyable to me given that if I started wailing away on a boss, chances are someone would come along behind me to help me finish it. Running around with a group of other players also made me realize just how little damage the paladin does comparatively. In all honesty… I might end up playing quite a bit more of this game because it feels like I am starting to grasp the reason why it does the things it does. It is not the sort of game I would ever play as a primary mmo, but I have been enjoying playing it in these short bursts, where I complete a single objective and then log back out for awhile.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Love Our Guild

More SkyForge Thoughts

July 22, 2015July 19, 2015 by Belghast

Controller Support

One of the questions left unanswered from yesterday was whether or not the game had controller support. On a whim I picked up my controller towards the end of one of yesterdays streams and I noticed that I could in fact control my character with it. Today I popped into game with the mission of trying to test this theory out. It seems that maybe they are working on controller support but that it does not actually work fully. I could control my character perfectly using both of my analog sticks, and if I hit the A button on my XBox 360 controller I could perform any of the normal actions that require the spacebar. However it did not actually seem to interact with the world, and pressing A when not hovering over an objective did not perform the jump action, which is normally the default action for spacebar. I went so far as to go into the keybindings section and it would not let me bind anything to controller presses.

Now of course if you wanted to go so far as to use Xpadder you could easily get this game up and running. It takes care of the toughest part which is getting the analog movement feeling right. My hope is that in subsequent patches it is going to add full controller support, and then this game is likely to increase significantly in enjoyment. Left button spammy attacks feel less spammy when done with a controller button. Since writing yesterdays post I have added another few hours worth of gameplay, and I have to say my verdict is still very mixed. I even talked about it a bit on last nights podcast. On some level I am feeling about this game much the same as I felt about Guild Wars 2 when it was in testing. There is something that compels me to keep trying to figure it out, but at the same time I find it extremely easy to stop playing after completing a single mission. The act of running a mission just wears me out, in a way that content in Elder Scrolls Online used to wear me out. Things are so ridiculously tightly packed that on normal solo missions you spend so much of your time mindlessly grinding through huge encounters.

Isola Digs

This morning however I ventured into what seems to be another large shared cooperative zone, much the same as the very first mission in the game. It involved a series of around 25 smaller objectives that were scattered throughout the map. The frustrating thing about this zone in particular is that the objectives were super linear, meaning when I tried to do my normal thing and hop off the path… I missed an objective that I then later had to double back through the entire zone to go find again. As a whole though I have to say I like this style of zone so much better than the little instanced mini dungeons I had completed more recently. The game also feels better when lots of other players are wandering around, which greatly speeds up the amount of time it takes to burn through the various health bars of the bosses. This tells me that a lot of my frustrations was simply that I was soloing content designed for groups to take down. The fact that I could fairly easily solo content as a paladin, maybe points to that class being a little overpowered for this sort of thing? Then again tanks in most games are adept at soloing bosses that were originally meant for a group to take down… I am looking at you Deathknight.

The other cool thing about this region is that it seemed to be full of boss encounters that did not seem to be tied to a specific objective. There may be a quest that I missed somewhere that opened these up, but from what I saw there was a fire, water and wind warden. Above you can see me taking on the fire one. The only thing missing elemental wise is earth, which I did not really see while wandering around. I managed to get a few greens off these bosses, so my theory is they are just there to make your experience more interesting. The boss fights with other players helping were significantly more enjoyable, but I could still shield up as a paladin and whittle them down until I succeeded. There was only one single encounter where I even came close to dying. At the last minute a wave of players rushed in and helped me finish the boss off.

Combat Still Repetitive

All of this said… my problem with the combat still exists. It just doesn’t feel like I can do anything interesting with the encounters. I did add a new combo attack to my repertoire, and while I abused the hell out of it.. each individual fight still seemed to take a little bit longer than they should for the game to feel really “fun”. The mobs still suffer from the same problem where they tend to be one trick ponies, and keep using the same attack sequence over and over. There is almost always one thing that you should dodge out of, but other than that it is grind them down with your main attack until they are gone. There are a lot of things I do like however when it comes to the interactions with other players. This seems like a game where everything is open tagging, and if you are in an area and have dealt any damage to a pack… you seem to get full credit for the entire pack. Similarly if there is an objective, it seems like everyone can click said objective, and that seems to have changed from one of the closed beta streams I happened to watch.

As a result I found myself wading into a lot of fights that I did not strictly need to just to help out the other players. Unfortunately not a single one of them did I actually communicate with. There are a lot of ifs about this game, and I am not quite certain how much I will be playing of it. In theory I kinda dig the model of purchasing classes or having a slow tedious process of unlocking them. To some extent I wish I had gotten in on the ability to play the Berserker, because I think that might be a class I would really enjoy. I have heard that you can go to the training center and test drive all of the classes, much like you can test drive champions in a moba, so that might be one of the things I do next. At this point I have played around five hours of the game, and I have enjoyed it just enough to keep me coming back to try and find the secrets that I seem to be missing as to why this game is really fun. Ultimately there will be a point where I just give up on it, but I have not quite reached that yet. After all it gives me a bit of a diversion from leveling my Dragoon and gearing in Final Fantasy XIV. If you want to check out the last two videos I have posted since yesterday I will be embedding them below.