Rumble, Beta and Everything After, + a Note on Addiction

I've been cranky. Irritable. Unenthusiastic regarding the appurtenances of the everyday. Blame the interrupted flow of particular chemicals my body has come to account for in maintaining its normal performance.  The particular chemicals are these:

Chemical #1.  Alcohol.  As I begin to recover from my serious, mysterious malady, I find it easier to put on weight. Well, I needn't do that. Therefore I'm cutting out the (infrequent) nightcap. And (far more frequent) beer. Started over a week ago. But, you know, I like beer. It took me a couple years but I've found the stores down here in south Charlotte area that stock the good lagers, pilsners, stouts and Kölsch. So when I'm going without--abnegating, if you will--I am cutting out things I like: the ritual of it, the practiced pour and the light streaming through the amber, the taste and the chill, the soft bite of carbonation, and the rush of relaxation massaging the brain (even though I know this last bit is simply the pleasant, dulling effect of socially palatable poison).  Oh, and the kids love hearing the burps that follow.

Chemical #2.  Endorphins.  The science is not settled on this, but let us assume for the sake of blargument (erm, blogged argument? Sure, whatever) that when we are addicted to things that do not themselves have a chemical component, it is our internal chemistry that dictates the existence and consequences of the addiction. So, yeah, endorphins. Brought on by (you guessed it!) Destiny. I've entered a stretch without it. First there was the Prime Family Vacation, consisting of a five-hour in-airport delay spent keeping the four under-ten primelets alive and entertained, followed by three days of comically outsized Chicago traffic and tourist expenses, then a nice couple of days with distant cousins in Milwaukee (although those days were marred by near-constant work interruptions). So, yeah, no gaming during the vacation. Then back home to D2 beta week, in which heavy workload went hand-in-hand with Wifey Prime's newfound refusal to go to sleep at night to all but preclude playtime. So, two weeks now with nearly no Destiny for ol' Subtimus. And the chemicals are playing havoc with my insides, and my mind-parts (which, yes, are insides also).

But check it: I did get in a few early-morning sessions with the beta. Enough to form a hint of an impression (that being, "Hmm. A less-polished, half-framerate Halo. But it's a start!"). And then, oh glory of glories, today I got in about twenty minutes of unexpected Destiny 1 clash-ing.

And it was good. (Who needs the Main Ingredient when there's the max range/kneepads Panta Rhei?) The pleasure chemicals roared through me and my mood has been level set at "all good, man" since. Also good.

Update on the rumble grind. Even before my prior post, I had finished up the rumble grimoire grind. And almost immediately thereafter, the skirmish grimoire grind. Salvage and doubles remain, and I really don't see there being enough time left in D1 for those, unfortunately. Granted, I've gotten pretty okay at those. They were always my worst modes, and I still have some severely thumbless matches, but I've also started a mini-collection of zero death mercy games in those playlists. But even so, I will not finish those grimoire cards in time. Which means, appropriately enough, I have failed. It means I didn't beat Destiny - at least not according to the strictures I placed on myself. (And no, I've never, not once, picked up a Trials card, so I don't even know if there's a wins-tallying grimoire card for that.)

But let me close with this: returning to D1 after the beta was like coming home from a mixed-bag vacation (looking at you, Chicago). You're back to the everyday, the ordinary, the familiar. But hey, it's familiar. You know where things are supposed to go, and you know the rules. There's not all this pressure to be having fun. And so, sometimes, in spite of yourself, you look around at the everyday, the ordinary, the familiar, and you realize: this--my life, my everyday life--is fun. No alcohol required.

(J/k, give me a damn beer.)

The Last Days of Destiny

I'm not ready, guys.

Unpopular sentiment, perhaps, but there it is: I'm not ready for the end of Destiny.

In the past, finding a favorite game and playing it into the dirt left me starving for the sequel.  I played a fair bit of Final Fantasy on NES, then really rocked out on Final Fantasy II on the SNES.  I was beyond ready for Final Fantasy III.  And then that became my new favorite.  Play-through after play-through, with hours spent grinding Ultima casts in the T-Rex forest.  Anyway, Final Fantasy was just one manifestation of my hobby.  Even during any period of grinding out play-throughs, I'd still be playing other games.  Because the hobby was gaming.    

Once I started my current career as an attorney, though, I probably would have abandoned the gaming hobby altogether.  Kids, work, limited free time, the usual.  Not exactly an unheard-of result.  But then, my one buddy achieved his long-standing dream of working full-time on AAA games.  He was with Microsoft Studios, and he touched several IPs in his time there.  He'd work on a game, I'd pick it up.  Of those, my favorite was definitely the original Mass Effect.  I sank so much friggin' time into that game, and coming out of RPGs I loved the unwieldy item management system.  Mass Effect 2 was a big improvement in terms of controls and game play; a step back for item management and story structure.  Throughout, though, the hobby was gaming.  Again, Mass Effect was just a manifestation of the hobby.

Then, more life stuff.  More kids, moving, longer work hours.  The hobby was fading once more.  I hadn't played anything in almost a year.  This was June 2015.  My buddy was coming to visit, so I figured I'd better have his current game on hand.  Now, my buddy had spent a lot of time stationed by Microsoft Studios onsite with one particular developer.  So when Microsoft Studios became 343 and this one particular developer poached a bunch of folks, my buddy was among the poached.  That developer, of course, was Bungie.  The game, Destiny.

I was slow to pick up what was going on with this game.  To that point, my social gaming had been limited to split screen Goldeneye in high school and dorm LAN Quake in college.  So I was wholly unprepared for just about every aspect of Destiny.  First forays into crucible were a shit show as I ran headfirst into the Thornpocalypse buzzsaw.  Over time, though, something happened with the mix of gear grind, PvP improvement and community.  I mean, you can interact with the best players, run into them in pubs.  Imagine randomly having John Daly on your card at the golf links.  Anyway, all this went into turning Destiny into more than a new favorite manifestation of the gaming hobby.  

Destiny became the hobby. 

That's why I'm not ready for the sequel.  Destiny 2 is not my hobby.  Sure, it may become my new favorite game.  It may even become my new hobby, but that is far from certain.  And this has never happened to me before.  I've never had a hobby just kind of . . . expire.  

And it's already happening.  Content drought, player population drop-off.  Clan's a hundred strong, and only ever two or three members on Destiny at a time.  But even so, every time I log on is my favorite time ever.  I'm scared of losing that feeling.

So no, I'm not ready.  But we'll get there, guardians.  

I hope.

Pretty much the above but spoken aloud by me, at times flubbingly because 2yo kid was talking to me at the same time:

The Last Days of Destiny on Subtimus Prime's Slapdash YouTube Stinkpot

In (muddled) Defense of Solo Queue Destiny

Diff'rent Strokes.  Clan Discord's been feeling the Destiny 1 Age of Triumph Raid Re-fresh Nostalgia feels.  "Oh, I'd have quit long ago but for playing with the folks on here" and such.  And that's good.  Great, even.  Or, it's great for many.  Most, perhaps.  But you and I? We're meeting Destiny the sub-optimal way, remember?

Soloists, we are.

And then, suddenly, a flurry of NOT being a soloist.

Conflicted Grouping-up(s).  Owing partly to "Spring" break for the kiddos (c'mon, I mean, it's Easter break, right? No judgments, but call it what it is), I had some time alone in March and April and spent some portion of it doing the Destiny things.  *I did a lot of shooting, if I'm being totally honest.*  My most consistent inviter on Destiny, this past year+, has always been Cat, and that continued during this Destiny-intensive time of mine, so we played together here and there.  He mentioned having proposed to his clan leader that we three run a Trials card together at some point.  In response, I was non-committal in word and ambivalent in emotion.  The running inside/not-really-inside joke between me and said clan leader basically amounts to: "Sassi is good at Destiny.  Subtimus, not so much.  Ha!"  Were I to attempt true end-game content like Trials, I'd be forced to confront the "not so much" part of that duality.  

Later in my Destiny-intensive time alone, I wound up doing a quick nightfall run with Cat and Sassi (feeling pretty slick about 0 deaths, 6 revives) and then roped them into doing some salvage in order to pump up my lagging salvage grimoire.  But the salvage portion was pretty painful, actually, since my usual inconsistency (some games I'll play alright, some not) showed up for the party.  But even where I was doing alright (never well/good, mind you, and let alone where I was outright sucking), it was well below what Sassi is accustomed to.  Vis-a-vis Cat, I felt like "Donnie Brasco" leaving Lefty to hold the bag with his gang.  Cat didn't say "But I vouched for you!"  He didn't need to.  I hope his clan didn't wack him.  

I left the fireteam after that salvage disaster and continued crucible bounties (which are working brilliantly since the patch, by the way, both for the weapon diversity in crucible and for the breadth of the bounty loot table) until I got a Crota invite from Jim.  It was to be my first raid, and it was terrifying.  I'd watched raid playthroughs, including Crota, and I'd even attempted a solo Crota run during Taken King.  But this was like transferring mid-year to a new school in a different country and trying to muddle through with the language after glancing over a "My First Hundred Words in [x]" book.  (I have done exactly that, though, and it wasn't sooooo bad.)  I got the Crota challenge emblems and a void and a solar primary out of it, but I in no way earned those things.  It was, however, good for at least one laugh:

Also, after over a year of chatting online with him here and there, I finally got to run some games with (as far as I know) this blog's sole reader.  That was a lot of fun, with some nice conversation and general catching up, and I look forward to doing it again, though time zone differences tend to indicate, in magic 8-ball speak, "outlook not so good."

Again with the Solo Stuff(s).  But now, back to a purer form of running solo, as the family vacation/travel stuff is pretty much over with and we're back to normalcy - meaning, about 45 minutes of Destiny every couple days.  

This morning I spent my minutes soloing the nightfall, and I recommend this as a great week for doing so.  Most weeks I'll check the modifiers on reset day and watch Esoterickk's solo run.  But I've only managed the solo once before. This week's daybreak / solar combo, though, equals:

You'll notice I use my unearned solar primary from the Crota raid.  But soloists without a solar primary shouldn't worry.  Any solid PvE primary will do, since the M.O. here is basically "chuck infinite solar nades" (as you shall see if you click through for the clip linked in the picture).

  

Finishing the Rumble Grimoire. Also, Fuck Sepsis

When I assigned myself the task of completing the grimoire wins for each crucible playlist, I was between houses - sans prime family - and staying at my parents' place.  Just me and my dad for a couple weeks, aside from the few days I stayed overnight in NYC for work.

As an aside, it's coming up on a month since my dad passed away after an unexpected and extraordinarily brief fight against sepsis (blood toxicity from a bacterial infection).  I am filled with regret, anger, disbelief and sometimes despair, but I am also glad for the times we spent together lately.  Particularly those aforementioned couple weeks when it was just the two of us.  I indulge this personal aside as background for the following entreaty: learn the signs of sepsis and be prepared to advocate for yourself or your loved one when facing medical providers and/or ER intake personnel.  This thing destroys bodies with a frightful quickness.  My dad went from "I think maybe my lunch meat was bad" to comatose in about 12 hours, and from that point, aggressive medical intervention could only get him another 44 hours of life.  As I wrote in clan discord server just before heading off to the airport to try to reach my dad before the inevitable: "Hold your peeps close, peeps.  Life can be a real MF sometimes." From sepsis.org:

I had already completed the Elimination wins without even realizing it.  So I started, in grimoire card order, with Clash and Control.  The 30 or so wins I needed in each of those playlists took just a couple days each, running juggernaut Titan with Feedback Fence, LitC/rangefinder/reinforced Eyasluna and LitC/aggr/reinforced Matador.

Since then (it was August 2016; now it's January 2017) I've been working on the Rumble grimoire.  I was at just under 30 wins when I started the process.  Now bumping up against 70.  So, yeah.  A few days for 60 Control/Clash wins.  Five months for 40 Rumble wins.  Holy hell.

Part of the drip drip drip of wins is from reduced playtime.  Part is the nature of the playlist.  By design, you should be winning about half your team-based playlist games.  Rumble, though?  Technically, you should be winning about 16-17%, or a sixth.  I'm a bit above 10%.  And that lines up with the matchmaking, I think.  I have:

·         a pretty good shot at about 80% of my games, where opponent ELOs are all within a couple hundred of mine;

·         an excellent shot at about 10%, where the ELOs are pretty tight to mine; and

·         no fucking chance at the other 10%.  

In those "no chance" games?  I'm against players on an entirely difference plane of existence.  A sampling of such opponents from my Rumble grind:

Guardian dot gg Rumble Rank	XBONE GT
24...................	Snipelogic
66...................	Conjector
95...................	Dzizy
115.................	Grip Funky
121.................	Cam
159.................	Mikke
174.................	Artyk
217.................	Vonify
256.................	Xayah
280.................	Ripsta
332.................	More Velocity
338.................	Edd1biP1nP1n
339.................	Flucz
371.................	Texas Prod
380.................	Narzuh
546.................	McNug
and.................
.......................
.......................
.......................
.......................
790.................	I Am CoolGuy

These players have short, simple GTs devoid of numbers subbed for letters and the injudicious application of the letter x (mostly). They don't sport scarab emblems (which emblem, paradoxically, more often signifies an opponent I can readily beat). They are not streaming (again, mostly). They don't emote or teabag (and yep, you guessed it: mostly *ahem, looking at you, McNug*). And they play differently from the rest of us. The play in a fashion that evinces (i) crazy good movement skill, (ii) crazy consistent mid-range eyasluna 3-tap ability (usually; some of these folks are artists with complete shit weapons, like Conjector with the Zarinaea-D) and (iii) *throwin' salt here* the ability to consistently survive shotty-melee-melee in the rare instance I'm able to get the jump on them.

Slightly exaggerating that last bit, which really is a function of the aforementioned crazy good movement skill, in the sense that there's no hitting these guys dead-on.

Anyway . . .

The recently-reduced skill-based matchmaking priority has made my grind a little more difficult, but I figure to wrap it up by the end of March if I can keep up my pace of an hour, maybe two, of gameplay four nights a week, minus Iron Banner weeks.

My loadouts for the grind are, lately:

-- bladedancer with quickdraw and invis super, extra-mag silvered dread machine gun, shinobu's vow double skips and either (i) vendor palindrome + trespasser or (ii) last word and but not forgotten or 1000 yard stare, memory of jolder;

-- striker with shoulder charge, transfusion and shockwave super and max agility, same machine gun as above, MIDA (or sometimes a max range shadow price), matador (yr1 matador, recently re-rolled with cascade and replenish for ammo purposes), mk.44 standasides, memory of jolder (this is a shoulder charge-focused build - MIDA gives more agility, jolder eliminates sprint cooldown, and standasides prolong the time during which your sprint can activate a shoulder charge; transfusion then triggers life support with each successful shoulder charge); and

-- voidwalker with life steal, embrace the void and scatter 'nades, same machine gun and matador as above, LitC/rangefinder/reinforced Eyasluna, Ophidians, memory of jolder.

This may be of interest to no one, but I close with a microtage of a few Rumble win clips from the first month of Rise of Iron:

"Recent ROI Rumblings" mid-November 2016