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What I’m Playing, August 2, 2015

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Blaugust 2015, Day 2

To save myself some time and stress I’ll be devoting Sundays to a quick update of what games I’ve been playing for the week and any progress I’ve made. Over the past week I’ve played:

My much fancier looking level 70 wizard.

My much fancier looking level 70 wizard.

Diablo 3: I’ve been trying to get a second seasonal wizard up to level 70 before patch 2.3 arrives. Why? I don’t know. That may be the reason why so far I’m only 44.

WildStar: This week I’ve been trying to get a head start on Blaugust by running shiphands and taking lots of notes and screen shots for some guides. I also managed to save enough plat to finally buy the highest rank of riding speed. Sadly it doesn’t feel all that noticeable. On the plus side while farming shiphands I looted a second Supernova White Dye which helped me regain some of the plat I spent. I’ve also set aside a project for the month for this game. At the start of the month I took all my money and sent it to an unused alt, and I will be tracking how much I make over the month starting from 0. After playing yesterday and today I’m already up to 3 plat. I’m curious how much playtime it will take to be able to afford a CREDD, and how much I will end up with at the end of the month!

Crimzon Clover WORLD IGNITION: Last month’s Aggrochat game of the month was Astebreed, which got me in the mood for more bullet hell shoot ’em up gameplay. I honestly liked this game more than Astebreed, mostly because having a sword just felt like cheating to me.

Hatoful Boyfriend: This month’s Aggrochat game of the month. It was my pick, because it has been sitting in my Steam library for a while and I really wanted an excuse to play and talk about it. I’m going to save my opinions for the podcast for now. A note for anyone who might want to play along: I found out the hard way that this game has potential save issues. Make sure to double save each time you save or you might end up like me, staring at a screen with nothing but a pigeon picture and no way to progress 🙁

Final Fantasy V: I’m participating in the Four Job Fiesta and I feel like I’m way behind. I need to spend some more quality time with this one soon.

Alphabear: This mobile bear word puzzle game keeps me entertained at the doctor’s office and when I can’t sleep at night. The $5 for infinite honey was money well spent.

Final Fantasy XIV: Where I’ve been spending most of my time this week. I’m close to being done with gear from Alexander normal mode, and am working on the esoterics grind so I can buy my weapon on Tuesday. Our Wednesday raid was plagued with computer issues this week, so I’m really hoping we can get everything to go smoothly for a Bismark Ex kill next week. Part of me wants to look for another static in addition to my current one.  I’d like to start to work on Alexander savage, but I don’t know if I will truly be able to devote the time and energy to it.

To finish up, I want to touch on Bel’s daily writing prompt from Friday: What game that you are not playing, do you still have a deeply nostalgic connection to and why?

There’s obviously a ton of games from my childhood and growing up that would fit this, but the game I want to talk about is SWTOR. Just the fact that it was Star Wars and it was really fun (once you got past the bugs) is enough to mark it as special to me. On top of that, it marked the first time I worked up the courage to join a guild full of people whose blogs I read. I didn’t know these folks beforehand, I only knew what I read in their blogs. It felt incredibly weird to apply and I was very nervous that I’d make an ass of myself. For some reason they actually let me join, and being part of that guild was one of my best MMO experiences. I made some friends that I still talk to on a daily basis and have met in real life. More importantly I got over my fear of reaching out to people whose blogs I read, and ended up joining amazing guilds full of bloggers in multiple other games! It turns out that most of us are just regular gamers who just happen to make a little extra time to share our love of gaming with the internet. Since it is Blaugust and you’re inundated with posts from dozens of different people this month, why not consider reaching out to say hi to some of your favorites?



Source: Moonshine Mansion
What I’m Playing, August 2, 2015

On Lessons not Learned

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Blaugust Post #1

It’s August 1, which means it’s the 2nd Annual Blaugust. I participated in this last year in order to get more practice writing in general. I did a pretty good job of it, and then I moved halfway across the country and didn’t keep up nearly as well. This Blaugust post is the first one in over a month, after all.

What Changed

I feel I have gotten a bit better at actually hitting publish on random thoughts I type up. I have fewer half-completed posts just sitting around since August of last year, compared to before I did Blaugust.In addition, writing a post isn’t really an ordeal. Some of my posts get a bit rambly, but I try not to evaluate the quality of a post purely based on its length. As long as a post contains something that might be considered interesting or informative to someone, I’m pretty happy.

Louisoix

What Needs Work

I’m still lacking in “make post time” since the move. I might have to borrow a note from Bel here and write a post in the morning. I get up early enough for this, but it would mean a bit of a change in schedule. I do get a bit self-conscious about what I’ve been playing, as it’s just been “Final Fantasy” for a while now, and I feel like it’s a bit boring saying the same thing over and over (although I haven’t been doing the same thing constantly, so it’s kind of a silly concern). We’ve got another month to work these things out. Maybe I’ll even play something that Isn’t Final Fantasy 5 or 14.

The Job Fiesta is still going on, though…



Source: Ashs Adventures
On Lessons not Learned

Blaugust Begins!

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Blaugust 2015, Day 1

blaugust_2015_logo

What the hell is a Blaugust? It’s a challenge to write one blog post for every day of the month of August! Check out this post by Belghast, the evil mastermind behind Blaugust, to get the details. Since I’m officially part of the Aggrochat collective now, I figured I had little choice but to at least make a solid effort at this Blaugust thing.

The first day of Blaugust marks a change for this blog as well. If I’m going to make it through a whole month of daily posts I need a little more flexibility in what I write. So as a trial, for the next month Moonshine Mansion is unofficially a general gaming blog. If it works out and encourages me to write more then it might become permanent. Otherwise I reserve the right to go back to “mostly WildStar” at the end of the month.

Bel’s prompt for the first day was “What are you hoping to get out of Blaugust this year?” For me the answer to that is just to get in the habit of posting more frequently. I know I will never post every day, that’s just way too much for my schedule to handle all year long, but I’d like to make sure I post something at least once or twice a week once Blaugust is over. Getting in the habit of having something to say every day should help with that. I’m also looking forward to just being a part of the community of bloggers that are going through this weird ritual together. I have some fun things planned for this month to help prepare some content in advance and save my sanity a bit. The one thing I’m most excited about is a series of Shiphand guides, which will debut on Monday.

Will I be able to post every single day? Will I give up and run screaming into the night? The only way to find out is to come back and visit me each Blaugust day! Wish me luck, friends!



Source: Moonshine Mansion
Blaugust Begins!

69 Challengers

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The Anook Thing

Blaugust is officially upon us, and with it comes a deluge of people posting to the Nook.  I just wanted to take a few moments to highlight a few things as far as that goes.  First off Lonrem made an awesome post on how to get the most out of posting on Anook.  Also of note the very awesome Green Mushroom aka Void has been creating forum posts each day to collect the various daily posts.  This is a pretty great idea as it makes it easy to read everything that has been happening for that day in one place.  While this is amazing idea I also highly suggest that you advertise your post separate from this forum thread.  The Anook Community prize is going to be solely based on how many hearts various posts get from the Anook Community as a whole.  Our forum is a great place for collaboration and communication with other Blaugustians, but the only people that will actually see it are people who are following the nook.

Basically you have two options to make a post see larger circulation.  You can either create a blog post on your profile page, which will allow you to attach images and keywords as well as associating it with a game.  This however takes some time, and feels a little repetitive when you are already writing a separate blog post.  What I tend to do however is to click through to the Blaugust Nook, and at the top of the screen is a box that says “Share What’s on Your Mind”.  Generally speaking I open this box, link to my blog post… write a quick blurb about the post and then associate it with a game.  This will create a post automagically shared with the Blaugust nook and also associated with the individual game nook.  From there if you so choose you can click the Megaphone icon to share it with any other nooks that you might think would be interesting.  My key problem generally is that I tend to write posts that cover multiple games… which makes it really hard to determine which to associate it with.

69 Challengers

At the time I am writing this Saturday morning… we currently have 69 Challengers.  As we went on through the month last year we picked up steam, so that at the end of the proceedings we had fifty people who had either participated or won the challenge.  I am completely blown away by the support I have seen thus far, and I am amped to see what the end of the month will see our numbers at.  I have to admit there was a period of time when I didn’t think I would do Blaugust again.  For some people it was this amazing experience, and others… it ended up causing them to take several month lags in their posting.  The last thing I wanted to do was contribute to bloggers…  not blogging.  However as we got closer to August this year more and more people asked me if I was running it again because they were really getting excited.  At this point… I am absolutely happy that I did because apparently this challenge strikes a primal chord with folks.  The happiest moment however is that I am watching it branch out of my little circle of blogger friends and helping to discover brand new circles that I didn’t even know about.  I think we are going to have really great things happen this month.  Now…  for the updated list of participants as of Day One.

Returning to Norrath

EverQuest2 2015-07-31 18-21-14-24 As I mentioned during the Games of the Week post, I plan on diving back into some of the games I am linking to as well.  I am mostly focusing on free to play games, that have no barrier of entry for folks to pop in.  That said however… as I delved back into Everquest II last night…  I had a barrier of entry.  It turns out that the time locked progression server Stormhold is for subscribers only, so for the moment… I am once again subscribing to EQ2.  This has always been one of those games that I have had rose colored lenses for, because I have this deep connection to Norrath.  In many ways it was my first MMO World, because in truth… Phantasy Star Online doesn’t really count when it comes to the whole “rich lore driven world” aspect.  It had been since March 2014 that I had poked my head into Everquest II, which is a bit of a long absence for me.  This is one of those games that I have tended to play every few months, and in spite of having it installed I really have not given it much loving.  I have to say…  maybe that was for a reason.

In many ways this game is a time capsule locked in a different graphical era.  I’ve never been a fan of the “new” models that they released in an attempt to sell the game in Asian markets, but I have to say the original models look extremely dated at this point.  It isn’t so much the models as the fact that they are animated so poorly as compared to modern titles.  I guess in the time I have been away I have gotten accustomed to the way the other worlds looked.  In truth this game ties back to a time when the fact that we were playing online at all… was miraculous and as a result we simply accepted that a lot of things didn’t look nearly as clean as the console counter parts because we were getting huge worlds to explore.  Another thing that nostalgia does is makes you look back upon experiences as better than they actually were.  I remember having all of these fond memories on the Isle of Refuge…  but unfortunately the act of playing through it again is something entirely different.  The later start zone experiences work so much better than the Isle, and I found the whole experience of leveling through it again to be cludgy and annoying.  Even worse was the transition to Freeport, because quite honestly I am not a big fan of the redone versions of Freeport and Qeynos.  I miss the small dungeon zones attached to Freeport as way of leveling through to 10 and being able to survive the commonlands.

For the time being I am running my Iksar Shadowknight just outside the gates of Freeport in the Commonlands, and I am able to take down level 9 and 10 mobs at level 6.  My working plan is to grind my way to 10 and then start questing in the commonlands proper again.  The problem being…  I just ran out of drive to make this happen last night.  I finally logged into Final Fantasy XIV and worked on my hunts there instead of continuing the leveling process.  Another thing I had forgotten, is just how slow the leveling curve in EQ2 used to be.  Getting to 10 is going to feel like a significant accomplishment, since I am not dual boxing this game the way many other people are.  Basically this time locked server experience is reminding me that you can never actually go back home.  You change and your home changes… and things are never quite the same.  I still had some fun poking my head into Norrath again, and if I can get over this hump I think I will enjoy myself again as an “off night” game when I am not feeling like much human interaction.  I have definitely been going through one of those slumps lately, where I am perfectly fine to chat with people over twitter but somehow grouping up and doing content together just seems to taxing.  I need to get past this however because I need desperately to cap Esoterics this week.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
69 Challengers