podcast – Page 14

Tiny Wings

June 16, 2017 by Belghast

This is likely going to be a super short post because reasons. Last night was an interesting shift from my personal status quo because I guest hosted on the For the Lore podcast. They were recording their yearly E3 multi-episode and for also reasons… @Samodean was forced to miss. So as a result @ZenBuddhist pinged me over twitter to see if I was willing to join him and @LodurZJ as an alternate. In the past I have always really enjoyed guesting on other podcasts in part because it lets me see how exactly everyone else is doing this recording thing. AggroChat as a whole is largely done almost by accident, and it is sometimes nice to see how those who have a clear purpose actually piece together things. It had also been entirely too long since I had done this sort of thing. The only gotcha was their normal recording time is about 1 hour sooner than I could realistically get to the screen and settled in for the night. Thankfully they pushed it back a little bit and I was able to join in. Hopefully once again I did not make too much of an ass of myself. I am not exactly sure what their release schedule is, because in truth the only release schedule I know is our own. However in the near future you should be able to catch me on the first of a two part episode covering E3 2017 on the For the Lore site.

In other news… Stormblood has officially begun… or at least the head start for those who pre-purchased the game. This expansion had some fairly sweeping changes, and when I first logged in it felt like my hotbars were on fire. Many of the buttons that I had slotted were replaced by a shared pool of role specific abilities. So that mean’t things like provoke and stun now exist in that shared tree from which I was able to slot 5 abilities in total. This is ultimately going to lead to some interesting choices because unlike before with cross class abilities… there were way more than five choices from that pool that I wanted access to. I have a feeling we are going to be swapping up to attempt to tailor for specific fights. For example I now seem to have an AOE taunt… which isn’t that important for leveling… but I could absolutely see needing that on specific fights or if you were taking over the add tank on a specific encounter. For the most part Warrior feels the same with the big change being that we lost the 5 stack resource… that I never can remember the name of and instead get the beast gauge. This swap has a bunch of positive benefits to the class as a whole. For example there were many fights where I would need to hold back using Inner Beast for specific mechanics… but this meant there was the opportunity cost of being capped out at 5 stacks of the buff. Now I have a gauge that goes from 10-100… or functionally 10 stacks of my resource meaning that even while holding back an Inner Beast I can also keep building up at least one more attack in reserve. The other amazing quality of life change is I am not sure if this meter actually decays over time… I have been able to hold onto beast charges for way longer than I could have the equivalent stacks before.

The negative of the launch so far is that the Duty instance system seems to be toast. That means there is a point in the main story quest where you simply cannot proceed past. The folks that habitually skip cut scenes seem to be far worse off because it seems to keep them in a bit of a locked state where they can’t interact with NPCs at all. As a pretty rabid cut scene watcher… I did not have this problem but I did absolutely hit the wall already. There are some that are raging against the machine in chat, and others that keep telling them to calm down. There are of course new Jobs to work on and other things to occupy time until this gets fixed. I am absolutely certain someone somewhere is having a really bad day and working as hard as they can to remedy this. In truth we don’t even know if this is a development thing, but could instead be an infrastructure issue with the hosting environment. Whatever the case… folks are getting stalled out but that sort of goes hand in hand with the release of anything. All in all I am happy that my character largely is going to make the transition without massive horrible feeling changes, and that we get to explore a new part of the world. For the moment I am not bothering to glamour back my helm… and apparently have tiny floppy wings instead of bunny ears.

Friendtime Storything

April 28, 2017 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff

Once upon a time I recorded a podcast called “Bel Folks Stuff”. I am extremely talented at giving things super specific names. The idea was pretty simple, AggroChat in a smaller setting allowing me to branch out and record shows with individual friends. The central conceit of the show was that it was going to be somewhat of an interview show, where in theory I asked all of the participants the same questions each time. There were things that worked about the show, and there were things that didn’t really. It never gained much traction which was a bit of a bummer, but it is extremely to gain momentum when you are only releasing a show each month. In the grand scheme of things I am still fairly proud of the shows, and every so often someone asks me when exactly I am going to record some more of them.

In truth… while I want to do something similar, it feels weird to consider just starting up three years later and recording new episodes for the same show. I cancelled the show in June of 2015, largely because I was going through a bit of a rough patch in my life and something needed to change. At that point I was publishing Tales of the Aggronaut each morning seven days a week, recording AggroChat each Saturday, writing two weekly columns for MMOGames.com, and trying to squeeze in time to figure out when I can record with someone and get a Bel Folks Stuff episode in each month. Additionally work was a little insane with me stepping up to more of a managerial role, and then also attempting to raid in two different games at the same time. The show didn’t have a whole lot of listeners in the grand scheme of things, so it felt like it was the obvious thing to drop. Ultimately in the long run I wound up cutting back more severely in that I am no longer really associated with MMOGames.com at all… and I have dropped this blog down to a weekday morning only thing.

The show had a good run however of seven episodes where I got to hang out and talk with eight different friends. There was in fact a bonus episode where I got both Rowan and Scooter together to talk about gaming as a couple. For those who didn’t even know the show existed… here is a full list of the episodes that I now keep on the AggroChat.com page.

Huge thanks as always to @Gypsy_Syl, @RowanBlaze, @Sctrz, @Petterm, @QelricDK, @HeyItsLiore, and @Jaedia for making the show awesome and interesting to listen to. The biggest problem that I ran into as a whole with the show is the fact that out of the eight folks I had to schedule time with… only three were in anything even vaguely close to a drift compatible time zone. That meant the whole process of finding a time that they were conscious and I could record was a challenge. Unfortunately that is not really ever going away since a lot of the people I really want to sit down and have a chat with are European. However trying to juggle that along with everything else on my plate was a bit much. The problem is that I still have the desire to record something along these lines, but like I said before it felt weird just to start up doing the same thing again.

For awhile I have been trying to sort out how I wanted to functionally reboot “Bel Folks Stuff” and what changes if any I wanted to make to it. I got completely hung up on the concept of having a friend on the podcast and having them tell me… and our listeners a story. One of the constant threads among gamers is that we file away these experiences to recall at a later date as we tell tales to our friends and guildies. I mean I have spun a yarn about the “Bunny Incident” numerous times in the past, enough that you can just say those words and most of the people I play with know exactly what I am talking about. As I mulled over the concept a bit more I decided that I didn’t necessarily limit it to gaming stories only. Sure that solidifies the niche of listeners I had for the show… but in truth I am just not that super concerned about soliciting a huge number of listeners. There was a period of time I thought maybe this would be an alternate career path, but after attempting to do the writing for pay thing… I’ve come to realize how not compatible I am with that idea.

I name things oddly… and that is pretty much a given. The name “Friendtime Storything” came from a lot of mulling things over and some brainstorming with my friend Neph who is going to ultimately be a victim of this process. Now I simply need to figure out the list of people that I want to talk to and start scheduling times. In truth this mornings post is intended to be somewhat of a recruitment vehicle. What I am wanting to do is hard to explain without understanding what I was trying to do with Bel Folks Stuff in the first place. Mostly it will be me sitting down with a friend and having a good chat, with as the tag line states… a thinly veined excuse to make folks tell me a story. I feel like I need a show like this to pull in the people that I don’t have time to talk with on AggroChat. Right now we have a fairly fixed and reliable crew on that show with myself, Ashgar, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen. That has been “the crew” for a few years now and apart from missing an episode here or there, or bringing in some additional folks for a big show… that mix feels good the way it is. This show is going to let me snag people and do something different. The main plan is to release these episodes as sort of bonus material in the already existing AggroChat podcast feed. In theory I SHOULD have enough free bandwidth on Libsyn to sneak one of these shows in each month. There are a lot of things I would do differently had I a second chance… and one of them is to quit spawning secondary sites each time I had an idea to do something.

I am not entirely certain when this process is going to start, but I have a feeling that within the next few weeks an episode should appear.

AggroChat #141 – Games of the Year 2016 – Part Two

May 21, 2019January 29, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen and 9 Games

It is that time again. Time for the AggroChat crew to attempt to narrow down a list of games for our Games of the Year show. We have never actually been able to reach a consensus so instead we gather up a big ole list of games and talk about it each year as in a two part show. So six hosts… 3 picks per host… 18 games in total, or at least in theory that is the goal. This time around it seems to have mostly worked out as we have 9 games per episode.

During this second episode we visit our roman numeral friends talk about…

Pokemon Go
Dark Souls III
Overwatch
Stardew Valley
Stellaris
Tyranny
Final Fantasy XV
The Witness
Skyrim Special Edition

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Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.