Many Welps

Trove: Even More Dragon Taming

August 23, 2019KluwesLeave a comment

My last long term goal in Trove was to get all of the Primordial Dragos. Since I completed that I’ve been looking into what’s next. I’m at a point where I’m working on maxing out 2 classes and don’t have the interest to put time into more right now. My shadow hunter still needs to max out his gems. My dracolyte needs a 3 star empowered water gem with the right stats. Both of them need a full set of crystal level 3 gear. All of these are hard to get excited about and work towards. There’s not much I can do for these except play the waiting game and hope for good luck with drops.

So I’ve been looking at what I can work towards as a medium-term goal. One of the things I’ve been meaning to do for a while is to start crafting dragons that need dragon eggs. I have 6 sitting in my storage taking up valuable slots. I’ve put them on the back burner because the Primordial Dragons required all of my dragon coins for so long. There are 31 Dragons I still need to collect. These are the dragons I’m looking at crafting in the future. I’ve chosen them because I have the eggs and because they have the permanent stat boosts I want.

Inora, Flame of Enlightenment: 10% Max Health, 3% Attack Speed, 500 physical damage, 50 Magic Find
Yorin, the Dusk Shadow: 1000 Max Health, 10% Critical Damage, 50 Magic Find
Flakbeard, The Relentless: 10% Critical Damage, 1000 Max health, 50 Magic Find
Selene the Celestial Storm: 1000 Max Health, 1% Critical Hit, 50 Magic Find
Aurym, Keeper of Histories: 7% Attack Speed, 1000 Max Health, 50 Magic Find
Erel, The Ironbolt: 1000 Max Health, 1750 Health Regeneration, 50 Magic Find
Draccolatl, The Mellower: 5% Health Regeneration, 1000 Max Health, 50 Magic Find

Each of these cost 300 dragon coins and some crafting materials. If I log in every day and complete my daily star bars and 1 hourly challenge I can get up to 168 dragon coins a week plus some extra from weekly tomes. That’s about one new dragon every two weeks. That should keep logging in for a good long while.

Downtime Compensation

August 22, 2019Kluwes4 Comments

When I started up Trove yesterday I was asked to log in to my Glyph account. Since I play through Steam, this isn’t something I’ve had to do in a very long time. So I went through the process of changing my password and logged back in. I was asked if I wanted to link the account to steam, this was odd, the account had been linked to steam for years. When I clicked yes I got an error that it couldn’t be linked at this time. So I logged in again and skipped the linking and hoped I was logging in to the right account.

When I got into the game the general chat was full of people complaining about downtime. Apparently, the server had been down for the better part of a day. This is a very common occurrence in Trove. The server performance and uptime have long been a meme among the player base. If you’re not rubber banding, getting kicked out of the client, or crashing, you’re not getting the full Trove experience.

The one thing Trove has always been good about is providing compensation for when the game is offline or generally bugged. A few months ago the leaderboards were broken for weeks and there was a decent compensation for it. Trove seems to have server outages every few months always with compensation to be doled out. Yesterday, we were given a 1-day patron pass, a Streamer Dream box(special ally/mounts), and 6 lustrous gem boxes (upgrade materials).

Players aren’t always happy with the rewards. Some argue that a few loot boxes and a bit of patron aren’t worth missing a day in the game. Other’s want more, usually in the form of a golden dragon effigy (a free dragon). While I think it’s nice that we’ve come to expect something when the servers go down, I’d much rather have more stable servers.

I don’t think I’ve played other games that handed out items for downtime. I remember playing a few games that had entire server role backs and just continued on as normal. Are there other games that give out compensation for downtime? Maybe other games just don’t go down enough to actually notice it.

Running the Whole Shadow Tower

August 21, 2019August 20, 2019KluwesLeave a comment

20190820223149_1

Monday night was the usual Trove affair. Mondays are the best days to complete shadow towers because of the bonuses for drops. The plan was to run through our usual Shadow Towers with the 2 of us and then spend the rest of the night farming for Binding Darkness.

Binding Darkness is a crafting material used to make gem augments to reroll of boost stats on gems. It’s an important material once you have all of your gems leveled up as it further increases your power rank. Binding Darkness has a chance to drop from all Shadow Tower monsters and will rarely drop from normal world bosses.

The idea is to find a floor of the Shadow Tower that has at least 2 dungeon phases. A floor can consist of dungeon phases or wave clear phases and ends with floor boss. The wave clears offer fewer monsters overall and aren’t ideal. The dungeons contain a higher concentration of enemies and also have world bosses so running these have a higher chance of dropping bindings

20190819215751_1 — Ultra Daughter of the Moon

Jay is under the impression that the higher the shadow tower difficulty is the more chance binding has to drop. I’m not sure how true this is but we ended up running Ultra Weeping Prophet multiple times this week. This was a good mix of difficulty for the two of us and had 2 dungeon phases. I ended up with 10 binding darkness in about a half-hour which was enough to craft a few gem augments I needed. We didn’t end up farming for long because we had some more people interested in doing more shadow towers.

We’ve been dipping our toes back into streaming the last few weeks and have made some friends through our Twitch chat. We ended up running Ultra Darknik Dreadnaught and Ultra Daughter of the Moon with 2 other people. Our times weren’t fantastic but that was the first time we’ve been able to run the whole Shadow Tower in a very long time. The increased rewards were nice but it was awesome getting to run these with other people for a change.

Quick Impressions: Valkyria Chronicles

August 20, 2019August 20, 2019Kluwes1 Comment

One of my goals this month was to beat another game from my backlog. At the beginning of the month, I was debating on whether to play Argarest Generations or Valkyria Chronicles. I had already put some time into Argarest before the month started but I have been wanting to play Valkyria Chronicles since I owned a PS3. Realizing it was halfway through the month already, I had to make a decision, and quick. So I settled on Valkyria Chronicles this weekend.

I didn’t have a ton of time for gaming over this weekend. Saturday was one of my good friend’s wedding and Sunday we had some family obligations. I got in just enough playtime to sink my teeth into the game.

Valkyria Chronicles is a game about war and the people it affects. The Second Europan War has begun as Imperial forces invade Federation land for the precious resource Ragnite. Caught in the middle is the neutral nation of Gallia where we meet our main characters Alicia, leader of the town militia, and Welkin, a scientist returning home to take his sister to the capital.

This isn’t the game I thought it would be. I’ll admit I did very little research before buying it because JRPG World War 2 sounded like such an interesting concept. I was under the impression that this would something of a third-person shooter with some strategy elements. This was not the case. The gameplay is more akin to XCOM where you move units, give orders, and watch the action play out. Despite being a completely different game than what I thought, I quite enjoyed my time with it.

I’m looking forward to playing more of this in the coming weeks. I’m not sure if I’ll finish it by the end of the month but it’s been a while since a single-player game has caught my attention.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot

August 19, 2019August 19, 2019Kluwes1 Comment

Sometimes I get this thought in my head that I’d really like to play a mobile game. This is usually followed by an hour of scrolling through the Google Play store, downloading things, trying them out, and remembering why I don’t play mobile games.

This weekend, as I was scrolling through the Play store I saw a familiar name. The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. I clicked on it to see who the developer was and sure enough, it was Ubisoft. You see, the Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, MQFEL from here on out, wasn’t always a mobile game. I believe it was even brought up in the Blaugust discord not too long ago.

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MQFEL Then

It was an ARPG with a unique twist. The castles and dungeons you raided were built by other players. You had your own castle and you set traps and monsters for others to fight to protect your own loot. It was a cool concept and I bought into it as soon as I heard about it. I believe this was the 3rd game I ever bought in Early Access. On February 5th, 2015,MQFEL was a free-to-play game with plenty of microtransactions. It was still an enjoyable experience though I really enjoyed the self-awareness of the dialog. Unfortunately, a little over a year later the Ubisoft ended all service for the game October 25th, 2016. I see this title in my Steam library every once and a while and reminisce about it. I’m sure there were problems with it but I honestly don’t remember what they might have been.

MQFEL Now:

It’s a fairly new mobile game released last month. It has all of the mobile game trappings: energy, chests you open with keys, autorun missions, even a battle pass type system. At its core, MQFEL a simple ARPG. You’re given 3 skills with various cooldowns and you tap to attack. Each castle has 2 stages, one where you run through a dungeon opening chests and fighting enemies, and one where you fight a large group of enemies or a boss all at once. There’s enough active gameplay there to make it feel like you’re playing a game which, in my experience, is not something I can say for a lot of mobile games I’ve tried. In fact, using the autorun feature will cause you to miss some chests in the first stage dungeons.Sadly, the castle building and rading feature is not in the mobile game as far as I can tell.

For a game called The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, there is surprisingly little loot. I’m getting maybe one or 2 pieces of gear from each castle. All of my upgrades thus far have come from the chests in the cash shop that requires keys. I guess the Mighty Quest for Chest Keys doesn’t have the same ring to it. There are other game modes, trials, that allow you to get materials to upgrade your gear after it reaches the max level. There’s a power rank that seems to be the determining factor for difficulty. As long as you’re above the rank the dungeon is easy.. It can still be done if you’re slightly below but you need to do a lot of dodging.

Right now it’s held my attention over the weekend. A lot of that was probably due to nostalgia for the old IP. But who knows, I’m enjoying my short time with it, I may keep it on my phone a little longer.

Audio Drama Sunday: Mission To Zyxx Season 3

August 18, 2019August 18, 2019KluwesLeave a comment

Hubble's sharpest view of the Orion Nebula

It’s developer appreciation week during Blaugust. I’ve taken this to include all kinds of content creators and not just video game developers. So I would like to start this post by talking about how much I appreciate the Crew at Mission to Zyxx.

It’s hard to describe what this show has meant to me over the years. I first discovered it late one night while playing Elite Dangerous. I was bored of listening to whatever I was listening to and went hunting around for a sci-fi show. I knew nothing about it when I clicked on the podcast, but the idea of an improvised sitcom piqued my interest. That night I must have listened to half of season 1 before realizing how late it was. The next day I told my friends about it. From then on, we haven’t stopped quoting the show and discussing it every week after a new episode drops.

These guys are incredibly talented and funny. The production that goes into each episode is something I haven’t come across in another show. They’ve created a universe which I love to visit every week and characters that I want to spend time with. I look forward to every new episode when the show’s in season and I miss it terribly when it’s in the offseason. It’s a show I’ll listen to over and over and never get bored of. And it’s a show I’ll always recommend to anyone looking for a new podcast.

This week was the final episode od Mission to Zyxx’s Season 3 run. This has been my favorite season so far. Season 1 will always hold a special place in my heart but I felt this season the show really hit its stride. The orchestral scores played by FAME’s Macedonian Symphony Orchestra have added a lot to the production value. The music was always good but with the full orchestra, it sounds even better.

This season has featured some of my favorite episodes in the series.

This season added a new character AJ2884 a C.L.I.N.T, think stormtrooper, who joins the crew to become a Zeema Knight with Pleck. As much as I liked Beano from season 2, AJ is such a better character. By the end of the season, I can’t imagine another episode without him, he’s become an integral part of the crew. I like him so much I even bought the shirt!

After a slight delay in the release of the finale, I can say that it was well worth the wait. The episode was over an hour long. It was action-packed, funny, and wrapped up the season very well. I enjoyed the return of Beano and a few other characters from previous episodes and seasons. Plus, I enjoyed all the callbacks to earlier episodes as well.

So thank you guys for all of the hard work and time you put into the show. I’m eagerly awaiting season 4!

Motivation from Streaks

August 17, 2019Kluwes2 Comments

Today we are over halfway through Blaugust. This post today will mark 17/31 which is just as far as I got last year. Any post after this completes my soft Blaugust goal of writing more than I did last year. I’m still aiming for 31/31 days and I’m still feeling great about writing.

Every morning I wake up and see a little notification from WordPress on my phone. Today it says “You’re on a 21-day streak on I’m Not Squishy”. Do you know how exciting that is? I’ve never posted this many days in a row before and I don’t see a reason to stop. Lately, when I don’t feel like writing I think about this little notification. The thought of breaking the streak pushes me to write something for the next day or next few days.

I find that steaks are a great motivator for me when forming new habits There’s always a little voice in my head that says sure, you could skip this thing but then you’d break such a long streak. The streak itself is a fantastic motivator for things like flossing, working out, and now writing. When the streak breaks I feel a little guilty that I have to start over but then that starts a new streak and we’re off again.

I don’t like achievements and rewards based on streaks in games though. For example, there’s an achievement in Trove for consecutive log in days. The achievement unlocks mastery points and wings for logging in 45 days in a row. I guess if I consciously went after this goal I could do it but knowing that if I miss one day I’d have to start again kills any drive for me. This is the same with games with rewards for consecutive days logged in where once you miss a day you have to log in up to where you were before getting more rewards.

Anyways, I’m still enjoying the hell out of writing every day. It is definitely getting easier to come up with things to write about as the days go by. This is one thing I’ve always struggled with here but I feel like I’m getting better at it. I hope everyone has a strong finish to Blaugust whatever your goals maybe!

Taming Trove’s Primordial Dragons

August 16, 2019May 4, 2020KluwesLeave a comment

20190815194836_1 — Za’Hadeen, Heart of the Flame

Last night I accomplished one of my long term goals in Trove: unlocking all of the Primordial Dragons. These are special dragons that not only give stat boosts but boost the Power Rank of the gems associated with each one. These add a ton of PR. When I unlocked Scintilla last night my PR went up by 500, which is a decent jump.

These dragons are more expensive than most of the others. The biggest gate these are behind is the diamond dragon eggs. Until recently, these took a long time to come by. They were rewards based on your combined power rank across your account. I forget what the breakdown was but you had to have a fairly high combined PR to even get 2 fragments a day. The eggs cost 300 to craft, so 100 days logging in to collect the reward to make one egg. You need one for each dragon so a little less than a year to reach if you don’t miss a day collecting the fragments. We’re talking a very long term goal here.

20190815195211_1 — Palashien, Soul of the Sea

This has changed with the updates that restructured the leaderboards. Instead of rewards based on power rank, it’s now included in the daily star bar completion rewards. I believe you get one per star bar filled without the patron pass and you can complete the star bar 5 times. So we’ve gone from 300 days to get all the egg fragments from just logging in to 180 days but you have to complete the trove equivalent of dailies. Worth a patron pass you obtain 3 diamond dragon egg fragments for each star bar completed. So now we’re talking 15 a day for a total of 60 days doing dailies for three eggs. That’s still 2 months of playtime. There is a very rare chance these can be looted from an empowered gem box. I got one of my eggs this way, it announces it to the whole server when it drops and the chat is filled with “GG”‘s, it’s very nice.

So on top of this, you also need 400 dragon coins per dragon. They cost 100 more dragon coins than most of the other dragons. These are also a time-locked currency but there are a number of ways to get them. I have 2 tomes that once filled for the week will give me 40 dragon coins. Plus the first hourly challenge completed a day gives at least 5 coins. You can also buy dragon coins from the shop with cubits, the soft cash shop currency of Trove, obtained by completing the daily star bars. And of course you can just buy them straight from the shop with your credit card, but I’m too cheap for that route.

20190815195247_1 — Scintilla, Spark of the Sky

Dragon coins and the eggs are the biggest obstacles on the way to these dragons. They make the other requirements seem laughable. 5k gem dust for each dragon is nothing and 100k flux isn’t that hard to come by either.

So was it worth it all? Of course! All 3 dragons account for 5% of my total power rank for my highest classes. I’m interested to see if that number changes once I optimize all of my gems. Za’Hadeen is probably the best mount for dungeon farming and surface mining. While all of the other dragons shoot fireballs when you left-click, Za’Hadeen fires like a machine gun when the left click is held down. Scintilla is nice and shiny and Palashien is basically like flying around on a Dratini.

A Whole Lot of Mummies

August 15, 2019May 4, 2020KluwesLeave a comment

Last night my group wanted to play Strange Brigade. We didn’t have enough time for a campaign mission which can sometimes take upwards of an hour. So we tried out the horde mode setting. Originally, when we purchased the game, this was the only mode we thought there was but it’s taken us a while to play it because we’ve been enjoying the campaign so much.

Horde mode is a solid game mode. It’s a good thing we played a bit of the campaign first because a lot of the mechanics carry over to this mode. But there isn’t a tutorial, or at least not one as good as the campaign. Overall it’s not too hard to figure out. You kill enemies in waves, collect gold and can spend that gold on various items, weapons, and unlocking doors.

Action screenshots are hard to get in this game

Unlocking doors seems to add rooms with puzzles and occasionally health potions. The puzzles are an odd choice. There are 25 seconds in between each round to upgrade your items and spend your gold. So you can spend those trying to figure out the puzzle or just do it during combat. We didn’t end up completing any of them because the rounds were pretty intense by the time we unlocked some of those rooms. I still have no idea what kinds of things unlock when you figure them out. You also have the chance to spend gold to get a special weapon out of a crate. This is randomized so you can get anything from a crossbow with exploding bolts to a machine gun that freezes enemies. I found these essential as we climbed the waves.

We started Round 1 with only pistols and good ole’ fashion fisticuffs. The next round I was able to buy a weapon upgrade to a bolt action rifle. The enemies were the same ones we had been facing in the campaign for the first few rounds. Round 5 they minotaurs started spawning, probably the most challenging enemies we had fought so far. They’re tanky, run really fast, and hit like a truck. By round 10, I was starting to get the hang of things. Some new enemy types were spawning. The ones I particularly liked were skeletons with purples hearts that explode and kill other nearby enemies.

It looks like weapons upgrades are tied to your progress in the campaign. I was only able to upgrade to the third tier of bolt action rifle which I had bought during the story missions. I was only able to buy 1 extra grenade type that I had also unlocked earlier. I don’t mind this, I like the campaign mode enough that I know I’ll be playing it and unlocking things.

We ended the night after round 11 where we faced off against 3 giant minotaurs with swords. After killing all the normal enemies in the wave we had to take these bad boys out. The key was to shoot the glowing crystals on them until they fell over. Then a player had to run up to them and hold the left house to charge up their amulet that somehow damaged the giant sword-wielding cows.

We did all of this in about 45-50 minutes. The rounds are quick but very hectic. I found it to be a good mix of difficulty with the enemy density being overwhelming even with a 3 man group. After exiting there was a message that said I unlocked new starting spawn locations and that this was the highest wave reached on this map. I don’t know if we will have to start at Round 1 when we play again but I’m interested to see how the new spawns change things up.

Backlogged: Oxenfree

August 14, 2019May 4, 2020KluwesLeave a comment

Oxenfree 7_5_2019 10_18_33 AM.png Oxenfree was, uh, free a few weeks, maybe months now, ago on the Epic Games Store. Jay has been telling me for about 2 years now how good Oxenfree is. So I immediately picked it up and, in true fashion, didn’t play it for a month or two. He’s also the one who recommended SOMA to me and that is now one of my favorite games of all time. While Oxenfree doesn’t fall into the same caliber of the game for me, it was very good.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A group of teenagers go to a haunted island to drink and party. There they discover a mysterious cave and set off an event that has them being chased by an evil entity the rest of the night. There’s a mystery, time travel, and scary ghosts in the PA system! Yes, it’s a generic horror plot but Oxenfree’s biggest strength is it’s cast of characters. Every line of dialog is voiced and the characters are written so well that I actually started to miss them after the credits rolled.

Oxenfree 7_5_2019 10_29_40 AM.png

Oxenfree isn’t a game as much as it’s an interactive story. Like a TellTale game (RIP) with less quick time events. There aren’t a lot of choices to be made other than what the main character, Alex, will say next. It’s a very on-rails experience and while I’m sure I could have taken a slightly different route and had a slightly different experience I didn’t feel the need to replay it….until I went to go take screenshots for this post.

I completed the game in 2-weekend play sessions. In all, it took about 8 hours from start to finish. Like I said, I loved the cast of characters and the story had some fun twists and turns. Playing through Oxenfree felt like binge-watching a very good show, I just had to know what was going to happen next. The setting is a tourist island that seems to be closed for the season. The only full-time resident has recently died so you will end up in her house looking for answers. The characters manage to awaken some sort of ghost trapped in what appears to be a radio signal. Throughout the night this ghost possesses Alex’s friends as it tries to get back to the world of the living.

The visuals in Oxenfree are perfect for the story it’s trying to tell. Everything is lacking just a little bit of detail, it’s colorful, but also mostly covered in fog. I found that it set a great atmosphere for the whole story. I think if they were any more cartoony or realistic they wouldn’t have been nearly as effective. I also love that the loading screens show the polaroids that are taken in various parts of the game. These add a little more detail to the graphics and always feel like an intimate moment between the characters

Oxenfree 7_5_2019 10_24_26 AM

There is a bit gameplay in Oxenfree besides choosing dialog trees. Alex carries a radio with her that when tuned to certain frequencies can trigger events. Each zone on the map has some unique radio stations that are interesting to listen to, so it’s worth pulling it out when you enter a new area. Also, there are a few collectibles. I found a lot of them but I didn’t go out of my way to look for them all. I’d would recommend Oxenfree if you’re looking for a laid back game with a very good story.

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Alright back to the screenshot thing. See there’s a little detail I missed after the game returned to the screen. What I assumed was the new game button actually said “Continue Timeline?”. I needed screenshots so I went back in for some pictures and the opening scene was a little different than I remember. So I played on…for another few hours actually. I may need to go back and go through the whole story again and see what I can change the second time around.