MMO – Page 209 – AggroChat

Week In Gaming 8/30/2015

August 30, 2015 by Belghast

Stressed but Still Here

This week turned out to be a shockingly stressful one, but thankfully all of said stress happened at work… and I could more or less leave it there as well. There has been a twinge of sadness as well because months ago I had hoped to be able to attend Pax Prime and get to hang out with friends there. However that didn’t quite work out, and since I lacked tickets to go there… because AggroChat was not apparently qualified as a media outlet, I stopped pushing quite so hard. The beginning of the school year is especially rough on my wife, and it would have been even more stressful to be travelling during this time. As such I am doubting that Pax Prime will ever really be in my cards unless for some reason they decide to move it either earlier or later in the year. I will always have Pax South however, and I fully intend to go this coming year. I am going to be trying to talk as many people into attending as I can, and hopefully can organize a meetup or something while there. There were plenty of people at Pax South last year but I was completely overwhelmed by it being my first real convention, and the internet was pretty horrible… so I missed most of them. Anyways… on with what is I hope becoming a Sunday tradition, where I review the games I played over the past week.

Final Fantasy XIV

Currently “The Rising” event is going on in Final Fantasy XIV that marks the yearly anniversary festival. This year the quest that goes along with it is one of the most touching quests I have experienced in a game before. I don’t want to spoil too many details about it, but suffice to say there is a little bit of fourth wall breaching going on. Diehard Final Fantasy XIV fans have this hero worship for Naoki Yoshida and the rest of the team, and it is absolutely well earned. It feels like there is very much a symbiotic relationship going on there, and they understand fully just how important the loyal fans are to the continued success of the title. The game is in this interesting place where it is extremely humbled by the fact that it launched in 2010 and failed to capture hearts and minds. They are putting everything into the game and leaving nothing on the table, and it shows. Other than the anniversary event we worked on Ravana Extreme attempts, and I have every hope that we will be able to down him this coming Monday. Past that I have honestly been taking a bit of a break from Final Fantasy XIV, or at least not really logging in every day.

Diablo 3

If you are wondering where the bulk of my game time was spent, you can look no further than Diablo 3. I am not sure if it was my time playing Hellgate London, or the fact that I finally pulled my head out of the sand and realized there was such a thing as a “season”. Whatever the combination I have been pumped to be playing Diablo 3 again and have been spending a lot of time with my friend Grace was we worked on pushing up our seasonal characters. At the beginning of the week I managed to get my Crusader from last season to 70 with the help of Grace and her crazy torment farming ways. Then Friday when the new season opened I started work immediately on a female Barbarian. As of last night I am now level 60 and making the final push to 70. That is really what I intend to spend most of my time today working on, and hopefully by tonight I will be sitting at 70 and starting to work on gearing up for doing torment and beyond. I am having a blast, and I am not sure whatever mental block cleared that has allowed me to get involved once more with the click to attack madness.

Wildstar

I can’t say that I have made stellar progress since last week, but I am continuing with my new tradition of trying to play Wildstar Tuesday nights. At this point I am level 25 still in Whitevale but I think maybe I can see the end of the zone. My hope is to move on past it this week and hopefully into something less desolate. I feel about Whitevale the way I feel about most desert zones in MMOs. I have come to realization this week that it is never the biome necessarily that I like or dislike, but instead the zone design. I was warned that Malgrave is coming up, and a desert… but from what I have seen of the imagery inside it seems like something I will enjoy. I want to devote more time to this game, but for now I am going to settle with making it a Tuesday night thing.

Hearthstone

The game that I played that shocked me the most this week was Hearthstone. I have not really spent much time playing it since release, and with the addition of a new expansion of cards I decided to poke my head in. This is where I found a brand new game mode called Tavern Brawl. Apparently you have a different weekly challenge, and this week was essentially playing with a randomized deck. I played hunter and had a good amount of success. Playing with a random assortment of cards, including many of the brand new Grand Tournament cards gave me a nostalgic feeling much like the early days of Magic the Gathering. I used to love the days when I was limited based on the cards I physically owned and as a result made some odd decks to try and weave in my favorite elements. In truth I would probably play Hearthstone more often if this random brawl option thing was a fixed item. I know this coming week there will be a completely different Tavern Brawl, but I will likely poke my head in to see what it is and give it a shot. This might breathe new life into the game for me, and for that I am kinda pumped.

Fallout Shelter

My week in review would not be complete without at least talking a bit about Fallout Shelter. Now I have been technically playing this game for awhile now but since I do not regularly use my iPad, the sessions were limited and I went weeks between opening the app. With the release of Fallout Shelter for android I have been playing it far more often on my phone, and it has now become my default “moment of downtime” game as I check in on my little post apocalyptic ant farm. All things said I learned a lot of lessons playing it on the iPad that I have now applied to this new vault. Where Vault 999 was a relative failure, Vault 861 is pretty damned idyllic. Through a bit of luck of drops, and some careful planning I have managed to create a pretty safe environment that can absolutely shred raider attacks. I had a random person show up at the vault that was fairly warriorly, and once I equipped her with power armor and a plasma pistol she has been roaming the wastes dispensing justice. At the same time she has become a major source of income and the gear she brings back I am slowly outfitting all of my settlers in. I have jokingly started calling the restaurant on the first floor Cafe Death, because the raiders always go there…. only to get shredded by all of my shotgun toting vault dwellers. The only thing that I feel bad about is that I essentially have one couple that is slowly populating my vault. I have left them in the room for weeks now and they have half a dozen offspring roaming around as a result.

Hatoful Boyfriend

The last game that I played a significant amount of this week was of course Hatoful Boyfriend, and last night we recorded the AggroChat game club show for it. This was Grace’s pick and I think a lot of us went into this assuming that we would end up hating the game. We were mostly wrong as the vast majority of us had lots of good things to say about the game. To make it even crazier this is the first game that the majority of us have actually played through more than one… but given that an individual play session tends to only be around the hour long mark that makes sense. If you want to hear our length discussion about dating “Birbs” after the apocalypse you should totally listen into the show.

[AggroChat] [Direct Download] [iTunes] [Stitcher]

On Bug Repellant

August 30, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #28

I didn’t think this was going to happen at the start of this year, but this weekend I find myself in Seattle, attending PAX Prime with Tamrielo and Kodra. I’ve previously been to East (twice) and South, but this is my first time coming to the original venue. It’s also my first time attending any event where there’s been a Final Fantasy 14 Battle Challenge. The enemy for this event is Ravana, normally encountered as part of the Heavensward storyline at level 53. This one’s been scaled up a bit to be an appropriate challenge for level 60 characters.

We met up with another member of our free company, which meant we had 4 people familiar with the fight. Joining us were 3 people who had never played Final Fantasy 14 before, and one who did play, but was not high enough level to have seen the fight. We got through the slaughter phases pretty well, but we had some issues with the defensive phases.

In the end though, we emerged victorious. It was actually kind of satisfying helping people who hadn’t seen it before get through, and we got nice new shirts out of the deal.

Second Winds and Diablo

August 29, 2015 by Belghast

Desi Wonderfulness

Last night was a bit unusual as far as our Friday nights go. Generally speaking we come home from work, and I play video games while my wife attempts not to fall asleep… always failing that battle around 9/9:30 ish. Instead we went out for dinner with some friends, and I got to eat at one of my favorite restaurants… Desi Wok. I generally refer to it as an “Indian restaurant” but in truth it is a “Desi” restaurant as the name implies, focusing on an amalgam of traditional Indian cuisine mixed with some more Chinese inspired dishes. My wife got the always tasty Chicken Tikka Masala, and I went with my most recent favorite an ambiguous dish called “Chicken Desi Fried Rice”. The dish comes out bright red and spicy as hell, pretty much the way I like it. The problem is it is way more food than you can eat in one sitting so I always end up taking home about half of it. My wife decided to order a Mango Lassi which she had never actually done from Desi Wok, and in my confusion I wound up getting one for me too… but no actual other drink. This meant I consumed a lot of water in my vague attempt to control the spice of my dish.

By the time we finally got home last night I was drained. We made a stop off at Target, and all the while I was moving around the store at a snails pace. I literally think my wife would have been dragging me through the store if I had a rope tied onto me. She kept having to stop periodically and look back at me to see if I was keeping up. I am guessing it was the beginnings of a tasty food coma. But in all honesty it could simply be the weight of this week crashing down upon me. Each and every day there has been some major crisis that I had to deal with. We had a production database get wiped one day, and another day we were trying to diagnose why a piece of software built in Visual Basic 6 wasn’t working any more. For starters I had no clue that anything built in VB6 would run on a Windows 7 machine. Visual Studio 6 was the brand new technology…. when I was in college almost two decades ago. All the while during each of the issues I acted as the manager and facilitator, which is a bit of a new role for me. I am not used to being the one directing the action rather than the one with my hands buried deep in the guts of the software trying to sort things out manually. Putting your faith in someone else to fix things for you, is way the hell more stressful than being under the gun to fix something yourself.

Second Winds and Diablo

Yesterday was the beginning of the brand new Diablo 3 fourth season, and this time I wanted to get in on the ground floor instead of creating a character a few days from the end. Earlier in the week I had talked about my plans on what exactly to create for this new seasons and I finally settled on rolling a Femme Barbarian. I have an absolute love of Sonya in Heroes of the Storm so any attempt to recreate that character seems amazing to me. However I spent the first half hour or so of gameplay complaining to my friend Grace about her lack of armor. She was awesome about it and I am sure was just patting me on the head as I complained about something that every woman on the planet has complained about at some point… the shitty armor options they give female characters in video games. Yes I realize the male barbarian starts in essentially a furry diaper, but that changes pretty quickly as you find gear and at this point at level 37 I am still wearing a bra of some sort. I finally learned to ignore it mostly and got on with the game play.

Grace had started her traditional Wizard earlier in the night, and was about five levels ahead of me by the time we both managed to get on at the same time. We proceeded to spend the rest of the night running bounties and rather quickly I was able to catch up in levels. I am not sure what it is about Diablo right now but it is really hitting the spot. The only negative being that the Barbarian starts out in a fashion that I don’t really enjoy that much. The first attack and the first secondary attack… are both not really my thing. Thankfully you get Cleave pretty quickly, and before the end of the night I finally was able to pick up whirlwind which serves as not only a great group attack but also a decent way of getting out of things since you seem to ignore slowing effects when you are spinning. My hope is that at some point today we can hook back up and start leveling again. Other than that I am looking forward to tonight’s AggroChat show because we are finally going to talk about Birb boyfriends and why that game is pure madness.

Drag Experience

August 27, 2015 by Belghast

Youtube Gaming

The big buzz worthy thing that is happening right now is that Google is rolling out its Youtube Gaming platform. It proudly announces that finally there is a youtube for gamers! Which causes me to pause and ask… wasn’t YouTube already for gamers? At least 90% of the content that I watch on YouTube tends to be video game related so… I think it was doing a fine job before. What gets slightly lost in the marketing spin however is that they are now offering twitch like streaming services. Which in itself is a big confusing because I have had the ability to stream to YouTube for roughly a year now. There was even a page in my channel settings that explained how to connect OBS to the YouTube RTMP servers. I guess the big difference is that people are starting to actually use it. I played around a bit watching various folks streaming and there were a few issues. The biggest thing I kept running into was the stream was hitching periodically. It also seemed that people were confused and simply unprepared to field YouTube chat. Also it feels strange that when I interact with other people I show up as “Tales of the Aggronaut” which is my YouTube channel and not “Belghast”. I am wondering if this is a setting somewhere I can configure, but thusfar I have not found it. In fact there seems to be really limited configuration options for channels in the first place, which means… I sure hope you had your YouTube channel set up how you wanted it before the gaming site imports it!

On some level I find this all interesting, but mostly in passing. I’ve recently switched from attempting to make Hitbox a thing, to giving up and just using Twitch because I simply got more random viewers. I felt like Hitbox was the superior service in every way, because the most crucial thing for me is minimal delay between your stream and the channel chat. It becomes so awkward to try and hold a conversation with someone who happens to be watching your stream where there is a lengthy delay. Twitch recently put in functionality to help alleviate some of this, and it works… sometimes. In order for me to even consider switching to YouTube, there would have to be a set up similar to Hitbox where there was little to no delay. The problem being that what I am hearing in practice is that the chat delay is often longer than that of Twitch currently. I guess at some point I will swap the configuration in OBS and give it a test to see how precisely it works. The other thing that concerns me is that from what I understand your stream gets backed up to your YouTube channel regardless. I liked being able to pick and choose what I exported from Twitch, keeping my YouTube channel as a cleaner version of whatever I happened to stream. What are your thoughts so far if you have tried it or watched someone else streaming on it?

Drag Experience

When Diablo 3 2.0 was released the AggroChat folks played it quite a bit. For the most part all of us had characters in the level 60ish range… that is except for Kodra. Kodra had not really played much Diablo 3, but we knew that the game granted some extreme experience to folks being drug along with you. Over the course of a few play sessions we managed to catch him up, but it was an exceptionally fraught experience for him. Last night after our Final Fantasy XIV raid, my good friend Grace asked if I wanted to tag along as she farmed in Diablo. She would get bonus loot and I would be able to soak in the lions share of experience. During the course of an hour and a half I went from level 40 on my Crusader to level 70 gaining about 5 paragon levels after that. I got to experience first hand the sort of game play Kodra did, and I have to say I understand why it frustrated him. I would have leveled so much faster… if I could stay alive. Grace was farming Torment V which meant if anything even glanced in my direction I exploded in a violent eruption of giblets. I was simply playing a different game than what she was… which was more akin to dodgeball. Carefully trying to stay in the part of the screen where the mobs were not spawning, and dodging projectiles as they came in.

The resulting experience however was just silly. There was no point in ever repairing my completely broken body, because I was leveling out of my gear too fast for it to matter. Finally when I hit 70 I was able to piece together enough gear to be “passable”. The biggest problem is just how behind the curve you end up being when you finally hit the level cap. While I could survive damage for a bit, I lacked any semblance of gear to be able to actually do Torment V style damage. We did manage to encounter a few bugs that kept us from getting loot. The saddest of these occasions was when some treasure goblins died just out of bounds and I was able to watch a dozen legendary patterns rotting in a place I could not loot from. However we also completed a number of bounties, and from those I got plenty of patterns as well. This allowed me at the end of the night to craft a few legendaries and a green chest piece and get my gear at least to a point where I could function. I am super thankful for the speed run, because this gives me something to dink around with until the new season starts Friday. Right now the game plan is to start a Female Warrior, since I love Sonya so much in Heroes of the Storm. The crusader is awesome, but I am not sure if I want to duplicate that experience again so quickly.