Recursion Loop

I’m struggling a bit with the whole remaining vertical thing this morning.  I really did not get a good nights sleep, woke up several times.  However each time I managed to get back to sleep relatively easily since I had an army of cats trying to snuggle with me.  I find it odd that while there is one whole person missing from the bed…  they all decide that the best place to lay is on top of me.  After all these years, cat logic still completely evades me sometimes…  but then again so does most human logic.

Curious Bot

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I spent most of last night hanging out on the couch, fishing in Rift while trying to clear off the TV shows I had recorded from the DVR.  I had a rather large backlog and I was only 270 fishing so I knew I could do it for awhile.  In the process I managed to push up survival to 375 and I got fishing up to 305 so that now I can at least do the daily fishing quests for the area.  I spent roughly from 7pm until Midnight my time fishing away, the majority of which was off a bridge in the canal behind Tulan on Brevane.  I managed to pull up several nifty housing items so that part is still somewhat exciting for me.

The funny thing is… throughout the night I kept seeing the same player coming by and picking up all the normally non-aggro snapper hatchlings in the canal.  They would run a little path, spamming their AOE abilities… then finally stop and skin them all… pause and continue the route.  I tried to interact with the player but received no response.  When I logged out last night they were doing it… and now that I have logged in this morning from the above screenshot you can see they are still hard at work.  At this point it is obviously a bot, but a fairly advanced one from the looks of it.

The problem is… for whatever reason the petition system is borked.  I seem to have a completed ticket stuck in the queue from ages ago… that I cannot remove to replace it.  I would have gladly reported that Lisxande@Deepwood is a bot but unfortunately the system refuses to work for me.  What I have been doing in the meantime is reporting any issues like this as bug notes… since those will actually submit.  I doubt they will actually end up in the right place, but it makes me feel like I make at least doing something.  As a programmer… I have to give them some credit for scripting a rather complex process…  but it doesn’t make me not want to destroy them.

Recursion Loop

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Have you ever had one of those television shows that you are not really into anymore… but you have been watching for so long that you feel obligated to keep up?  That is precisely how I feel about the Anime Bleach these days.  I started watching it during the heady days of WoW raiding, and I was drawn to the interesting and massive cast of characters.  Additionally I thought the whole concept of a soul reaper was extremely cool.  However I realized something along the way somewhere, every single season of bleach is exactly the same.

Ultimately something strange will happen that puts someone or something in jeopardy.  Ichigo then discovers some new and dangerous threat that uses some strange and magical new powers.  He rushes into battle and gets his ass kicked by whatever this new threat is.  Then he spends the rest of the season learning some new even more powerful power from a mentor figure.  He finally confronts the baddest of the baddies using this new power…  and barely manages to defeat them… all because of his unbridled spirit energy.

The current season I am watching feels so rehashed.  There is a definite moment of “no wait… there is this one thing that is the most powerful thing in the world that we haven’t mentioned for seven seasons yet”.  I think to some extent I keep watching it, because the characters that are NOT Ichigo are still interesting to me.  The thing that kills me however is the first third of an episode ends up being essentially the last third of the previous one.  So it feels like there is so much building with very little payoff.

It is like that those ghost and super natural shows where it sounds like they find something… but they will never actually find evidence of anything at all.  I would love to have someone cut together an entire season of Bleach as one seamless show…  and trim out all the repeated content at the beginning of the show.  My fear is that after you cut out ALL the callbacks to other things…  you would end up taking a 13 hour episode down to like 4 hours.  The positive thing however is that I have officially watched down my queue of bleach, so I can comfortably let it stack up again.

Defiance

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Additionally last night while on my fishing binge, I decided to try and catch up on Defiance.  I really enjoyed the first few episodes of the show, but by the time I had watched episode three I started to lose interest.  I am not sure what it is about the show but I have for whatever reason not significantly imprinted on the characters yet.  As a whole the series reminds me of this odd mishmash of Firefly and Terra Nova…  but with High Elves and Cathar.  There are a handful of characters that I really like, mixed in with a bunch of other stuff I cannot bring myself to care about.

I keep thinking that if I watch it enough there will be this magical moment when all the sudden it becomes amazing and magical for me.  I’ve made it through I think episode 6 as of last night, but I felt myself fading in and out of paying attention…  so I am really not sure I caught enough of some of the episodes to fully understand what was going on.  It was I think during episode five that someone popped into Rift that I started up a conversation with.  I am going to try and chew through the rest of the episodes so that I can at least say I am caught up.  I feel like maybe since I am not really playing the game, I am not as committed to the universe.

I also feel like there has been a paradigm shift in science fiction.  There was a time, namely the 90s and some of the early 2000s that science fiction shows were a rarity on television.  Since something other than Star Trek was almost unheard of… you ended up watching whatever it was because there was literally nothing better on at the time.  So I feel like there are so many science fiction shows that we view through the rose colored lenses of nostalgia.  Today however the market is absolutely flooded with science fiction shows, and we have a lot more to choose from.  As a result I find myself being far more critical of a given show, because I know there are others out there that I could be watching instead.

I want to like Defiance as a brand… I want to like the video game and I want to like the television show.  I feel like I am watching in part to help support one of my favorite companies… Trion.  All of that said while both game and TV show sound like something I would like on paper…  the result of experiencing either has been lacking something for me.  I keep feeling like I just need to give both more time to grow on me, but I am wondering at what point I will decide that “nope, it is just not for me”.  As a consolation gift… I am at least immensely happy about having my title, pet and mount over in Rift as a result of the show.

Wrapping Up

Well I have pissed away an hour of time writing this long diatribe, and need to finish getting ready for work.  I hope you all have a great day ahead of you.  Mine will be stressful and frustrating as always I am sure, but hopefully I can actually get things knocked off my list that need to.  I am constantly thankful for the awesome team of people I have to work with, I just wish I had a bit more stability in “management direction”.  I am on this vision quest to finish leveling fishing, but I am hoping to finish it up tonight.

Fish On

Here goes my attempt to write one of these posts quickly.  I am certain I will fail at it, but this morning is trash day… and as a result I need to go around the house and gather the rest of it.  I am doing a bit better than I was yesterday morning, or at least I am feeling slightly more awake.  Today is the day my wife travels again, so not really looking forward to that one… but at least this time she will be back by Friday.  Unfortunately however it seems like she is going to have shittier wifi, so that will be annoying.  Why is it that a budget hotel can give you free wifi, but a ritzy hotel does not?

Fish On

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The last tradeskills I have to level are fishing and survival, and mostly due to the hours of doing next to nothing… I have put off leveling them.  I like the fishing system in Rift so much more than I did the one in WoW, but in either situation it is still a very passive activity.  That said it was designed hand in hand with Survival, so if I wanted to be able to make nifty stat increasing foods… I figured I would have to level the two skills together.  More or less that has been the case, except that the fishing always seems to lag behind the survival level.

The fishing system is much more enjoyable as a whole than the one from World of Warcraft.  Namely they have introduced several new things into the genre.  Firstly and the most important thing… you can target the water you want to fish in.  The thing that drove me insane over in WoW was the recasting over and over hoping that you got your lure in a school of fish.  Additionally there is a mechanic for telling you if you are fishing shallow or deep water, and different things can be caught in each.  The real hook for me however is that you have a decent chance of fishing up random artifacts and housing items.

I set out last night to fish and level survival all night long.  I literally spend roughly four hours fishing last night, and in that time I went from around 200 to around 270 in fishing.  Additionally I managed to level survival from roughly the same place to 300.  During the time I got a few dozen artifacts, and four housing items that were contained in chests that also rewarded crafting currency.  There is something strangely peaceful about fishing, and I had my hotkeys set up that I could fish entirely with my g600 mouse.  It really is the perfect activity to do while watching tv… I am still shocked no one has packaged this mini-game and created it as a mobile app that lets you fish up in game rewards.

Plane of Water

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Last Friday Trion had another one of their live streams talking about the future of Rift.  You should check it out over on twitch if you are interested, but be warned… it is roughly 2 1/2 hours long.  Essentially they teased a bunch of features for Rift 3.0, the next expansion in which they showed the picture above hinting that it would take place in the elemental plane of water.  Essentially at this point all of the dragons are now dead, and the Rifts still have not stopped… so it is time to investigate the planes themselves for the cause of the tears.

The coolest thing is, that they seem to have firmly adopted the D&D model of elemental planes with the quasi-planes intact.  If you notice in the above drawing you have a glacier, ocean, giant overgrown coral forest, underwater areas, undersea caverns…  a really rich environment rather than one giant non-descript ocean.  I personally am pumped over this expansion… I think I am one of the few people that really enjoyed Vashjir in WoW and while it obviously seems like they won’t be fully underwater… I am sure there will be elements of it.  They mentioned that they will likely begin releasing small bits of underwater content to test out the tech well before the expansion release.

The thing that really caught my attention however is that they mentioned they would be adding some more meat on the bones of the companion system.  That you would be able to level them, and assign them certain tasks.  This immediately got my mind spinning… and I thought to myself…  man would it not be amazing if they found a way to merge the Pet Battle system from WoW with the Crew Crafting system from SWTOR.  If I could send my companions off to go harvest ore, craft an item, or more importantly ferry crafting materials to my bank… I would be in heaven.  I was surprised at how much I liked both systems, and I would love to see them create a new hybrid system.

Finally they announced that there would once again be four new souls.  Essentially this one was expected… in each case there is one role that a given class lacks, and they are filling in these gaps.  Warriors will be getting a pure healer, Rogues will be getting a pure healer, Clerics will be getting a pure support, and finally Mages will be getting a tank.  The concept of a tanky mage is just intriguing.  I figure they have two ways they can go with this one… they can either make the pet tank, or give the mage magical armor to absorb damage.  As far as warriors, since they already have paladin souls… I am figuring their healer is going to end up being a lot like the WoW paladin with tons of single target heals and a combo point based healing finisher system.

In any case… I am now super pumped about the expansion.  I honesty did not expect to be hearing news about it quite yet, but given that it is Trion and with their rapid development cycle… it makes sense.  I am wondering about the time frame, knowing how Trion works it could be entirely possible that this is a November/December expansion release date.  That would make for a very merry Christmas indeed… essentially they would be delivering on the promise that Blizzard has never been able to…  an expansion per year.  This is about the speed the EQ2 has managed to maintain, so it is entirely doable so long as they always have a team devoted to expansion.

Rift Nights

One of the things I miss the most by being a nomad is the constant camaraderie of the Stalwarts.  I am trying a new experiment, and not sure how well it will work.  Right now in Rift we are not in a guild of our own, but because of this it opens up a lot more doors to grouping and regular open raiding.  It also makes it hard to organize the people who are used to playing together in other games.  As a result I have decided to start a server channel that way folks connected to House Stalwart that are playing Rift again can join in and get into group activity regardless of what server they are on.  Since everything is cross server it makes life easier for getting together.

Additionally I am going to try and set up Monday and Wednesday nights for group activities.  Roughly 8pm EDT til bedtime I am going to be around and available for random grouping with anyone that happens to be in the channel.  The idea will be to grab whoever is around, and pick an activity that suits our levels and numbers.  Rift is amazing good at giving something to do with varied group sizes.  Some of the many options.

 

  • 20 Man Raids – Require 20 well geared players
  • 10 Man Raids – Require 10 well geared players
  • Elite Dungeon – Require 5 Max Level fairly well geared players
  • Dungeons – Require 5 players gear level completely open
  • Chronciles – Require 2 players gear level varies – These are essentially 2 man raids, see all the storyline.
  • Crafting Rifts – Variable group size, special crafting rift lure awards high level crafting mats
  • Hunts/Greater Hunts – Variable group size, special hunt rift lure opens up a hunt leading up to a boss fight
  • Elite Rifts – Variable group size, special elite lure opens a dungeon like open world rift encounter
  • Raid Rifts – Variable group size, special raid lure opens a raid like open world rift encounter
  • Instant Adventures – Variable group size, over world objective based event, has cool mini bosses every so often
  • Rifts and Zone Events – Variable group size, essentially rifts and zone events form all over the world all the time.
  • Conquest – Variable group size… 3 faction pvp system, similar to DAoC frontiers and feels like Alterac Valley.
  • Scenarios – Variable group size… these are essentially like WoW Battlegrounds.  Not big on PVP but willing to try.
  • Basically there are a ton of different activities and the excellent mentoring system in Rift allows us to tailor the activity so that everyone is getting benefit.  I posted this note on our forums, and social media yesterday, but it is a bit too soon for it really to kick off.  However off and on through the night we had four people joining the channel and it at least became a more friendly chatbox option.  If you are a current or former member of House Stalwart, or just someone interested in this little endeavor check out our forums.  I will be turning off forum account sign-up moderation for a few days in case folks want to check it out.  We get an inordinate amount of spammers hitting our forum, so ultimately I will be turning it back on in the future.

    Wrapping Up

    I need to get up and around and finish gathering the trash.  I hope you all have a great rest of the week, and you get whatever accomplished that you need to.  I made some serious progress on one project yesterday, but as soon as I did four others popped up in need of attention.  Right now we have thirty five active projects for three people…  so I have become adept at juggling work.  It leads however to an extremely unstable and frustrating environment for me.  Thank god I have amazing people to work with on my team.

    Sinking Sands

    Morning is being a pain in the butt today…  or at least the whole trying not to fall back asleep thing is.  For whatever reason I really did not sleep that super well last night, and as a result I am super exhausted this morning.  Seems like a pretty horrible way to begin a new work week, so here is hoping that I figure out what switch I need to flip in my brain to wake the hell up.  The worst part is, that this is going to be an extremely stressful work week, so I have to get my act together.

    The Sinking Sands

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    I spent a good chunk of yesterday roaming around in the Sinking Sands region of Everquest II.  This has always been one of my favorite zones, and I try my best not to skip it on any characters.  I have a deep nostalgia for the region in part because I spent so much time in the Desert of Ro / Oasis of Marr area in Everquest.  This zone is like a nostalgic love song to the original zones, and there are so many points of reference and mobs that make an appearance. 

    The only real negative is that the sand giants and wraiths are no longer dread worthy encounters.  I can remember the constant chorus of “Sand Giant to Docks!” as yet another one of these death machines came roaming through the zone.  Almost as a callout to that era, there is the ghost of a sand giant that paths right along the dock region named “Hatar”.  Additionally Lockjaw still exists, but this time has his own dungeon rather than being a world spawn that will decimate the masses.

    I think one of my favorite things about the zone is it is completely flush with named spawns.  Each of them drops a single type of item, in flavors designed for each type of class.  So essentially if the mob drops a ring, then it will drop one for priest, warrior, scout and mage.  It feels like they have increased the spawn rate of these champions, because I can remember being out in the zone for days without ever encountering “Dune Digger”, a armadillo that spawns near the ramp leading down to the beach.  However over the last few days I have seen him up almost every single time I have passed his spawn point.

    The Lesser Faydark

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    I had made my way through the major quest lines of Sinking Sands when I noticed I was sitting at level 51.  I checked the wiki and sure enough that put me pretty much ideally leveled to start on Lesser Faydark.  Even dating back to the original Everquest, this has been a zone I disliked.  In that game it was mostly for the fact that it was populated with lots of things that could kill you almost instantly.  In EQ2, it is mostly due to my general dislike of “elven” and “fae” zones, and that it is annoyingly three dimensional.  It feels extremely difficult to traverse it because of the constant changes in elevation, and the tunnels that are used to connect things up.

    Additionally this zone is populated with a lot of flying things… that often times do not want to lower to the ground into melee range.  Since I play almost entirely melee characters it makes it an extreme pain in the butt.  However since I have never really done the quest chain I figured I would follow the timeline guide and start with the correct NPC and follow it through until I just could not.  So far it is every bit as annoying as I remembered… since you hop around the zone wildly.

    Another reason why I tend to avoid Lesser Faydark is it is off what they call the “golden path”.  Everquest has a really robust questing system, and so long as you say on the golden path you get these blue markers on your map showing you there region for a given quest.  However for whatever reason they decided only to apply these tools to a specific number of zones that make up the golden path.  So if you choose to stray at all, you are on your own…  thankfully I also have EQ2Maps which lets me search for what mobs spawn in what region.  I think that is probably the single best improvement they could do to the game, go back through and apply the golden path treatment to ALL zones.

    At the point at which I ended my Everquest II journey yesterday I was almost ready to ding 54, which is not bad considering I started the day at 48.  Leveling in EQ2 is just a relaxing experience for me, and that is precisely what I needed yesterday.  I keep thinking I need to play the game more often, and while I always eventually cycle back around to it… I also spend a lot of time ignoring it.  I have been kicking around the notion of trying to set up a rotation of games, in that I always play this game on this day.  It sounds good in theory, but I am just not sure I can bring myself to follow a schedule.

    Wrapping Up

    This is going to be a relatively short post today, as I am still fighting sleep.  I need to get up and around and hopefully woken up in the process.  I hope you all have a great day, and that you are not nearly as drowsy as I am this morning.  I am not sure what I will be doing tonight, either venturing back into the faydark or over in Rift leveling fishing.  I have to say the patron gifts are an interesting carrot that ends up making me log into Rift every day.  If you are a patron you receive a large loyalty gift every week, and a small loyalty gift everyday.  They do not accrue over time, so you have to log in each day to receive it.  I find myself being drawn to log in each and every day for the promise of free stuff.  Speaking of which… I think I will check on that right now before I head on into work.

    Foraging Sucks

    Getting a super late start this morning because… reasons.  Firstly the bed was super comfy this morning, and after not sleeping really well the last few nights I really did not want to leave it.  Secondly I had to shower and get dressed and go acquire food.  Thirdly my wife conned me into a trip to Wal-mart explaining that it would be less busy while folks were in church.  While it might have been less busy, it was still far busier than I would have liked.  But we are now back and it is 10 am and I am finally sitting down to blog.

    Foraging Sucks

    2013-06-21_214743 I have been in a really spastic way with my new laptop and wanting to download all the games and see how they run on it.  However yesterday afternoon I finally settled into one for awhile.  When the F2P conversion happened in Rift, one of the many things I did with my bonus shop currency was purchase Foraging and Weaponsmithing for Belghast my main.  The end goal was that he would have the ability to harvest all the things, as well as be completely self sufficient in both Armorsmithing and Weaponsmithing.  The reality behind this, has not been nearly as exciting as it sounds.

    Essentially over the last few weeks since the conversion I have been foraging everything I could find as well as mining all the low level ores so I could level both of the new tradeskills.  One of the stark realities thus far is that Foraging Sucks.  It is hands down the most painful gathering profession in rift.  I have never really spent much time doing it, as I always tend to focus on the armor making professions in any game.  The amount of herbs that you have to pick to get skills raises just seems unbalanced when compared with butchering and mining.

    It took me roughly four hours of running around high end Storm Legion zones to be able to gather enough herbs and lumber to level from 350 to 375.  The problem is not necessarily the harvesting… it is trying to find the right level of herbs that give you a skill up without running into the level of herbs that are too high to pick.  Essentially the storm legion foraging spawns are really really poorly designed…  or at least poorly designed for someone trying to level.  I remember being max level in mining before I hit level 54, so as a contrast it was so much easier.

    Grandmaster Weaponsmith

    It was shortly after dinging 375 foraging that I turned my focus to all the ore and lumber I had collected in the process.  Within another 30 minutes I had finished leveling weaponsmithing to 375.  Now I need to spend a good deal of time doing the daily quests so I can pick up those epic weapon patterns.  While this is not that useful now, I am really looking forward to seeing how self sufficient I am when it comes to the next expansion.  Part of me wonders if picking up outfitting, but not leveling it… would trigger the code that causes cloth to drop faster for outfitters.

    Onwards to Fishing and Survival

    2013-06-22_214452 Now my new goal is to work on leveling my fishing and survival.  This pairing is an odd one as they seem to be out of sync.  At 160 survival I need materials from the scarlet gorge/scarwood reach area, however at 160 fishing the optimal waters for skilling up are in Moonshade Highlands.  So essentially I will be focusing on leveling the survival skills and the fishing should take care of itself.  Finding shallow and deep water in the various zones is a bit of a pain also.  The pool shown in the image above is one of the few deep water spawns in Scarlet Gorge… and they are way up by the entrance to Foul Cascade.

    I am not sure if the shallow/deep water thing is easier if you are doing the guardian zones or not, but at this point I guess both factions are merged together.  I didn’t really run into the problem until this set of zones.  I have a feeling that in Moonshade the opposite problem will occur, that most of the water you find will be deep, as it tends to have ocean and lakes.  Fishing is somewhat mind numbing, but it is a good activity to do while trying to catch up on recordings from the DVR.

    Gold Rush

    EverQuest2 2013-06-22 12-03-31-26 This week the Gold Rush promotion began over in EQ2 and as a result I decided to pop over and level in my Swashbuckler a bit.

    If you’re a Gold Member this summer (June 21 – September 21), you will have access to a special daily spell that provides bonus coin loot (increase of 15%), an experience bump (increase of 10%), and additional mount speed (increase of 5%)! This spell grants these benefits for four (4) hours each day, all summer long! This is in addition to all of the other perks you receive with Gold membership.

    You will find this spell in your hot bar or in your spell book under abilities. Look for “Gold Rush.”

    With this happy little buff I decided to take Belgrifter over to the Clefts of Rujark dungeon and run around grinding the various higher level orcs for a bit.  The xp gain was actually far slower than I expected, but then I realized that I had my AA slider set to 50%.  Honestly I still have one of those instant 280 aa tokens that came with Chains of Eternity expansion.. so I am considering turning the AA levels off completely for awhile to maximize the xp gain.  With my magical werewolf healer mercenary I was able to pretty much wreck everything in the zone.

    While I didn’t end up getting an xp level, I did manage to get 3 AAs in the time spent just from killing all the named star mobs that I had not killed before.  I will have to sort through the loot I got, but I didn’t see anything that was better than what I was currently wearing.  I found running around the zone killing mobs a relaxing experience… that is one of the things I like most about EQ2 is that the combat is so slow paced that you can be doing something… and still do it without raising your blood pressure.  It is far less twitch and far more slow and steady… and there are certain moods where that is the perfect recipe for me.

    The laptop runs the game gorgeously, probably far better than any machine I have had so far.  I can crank all the things up pretty much to the highest setting and just bask in the beauty of this aging game.  I don’t care what people say, it still looks absolutely amazing.  They do zone design better than almost anyone else.  The sheer scale makes the world feel far more real than any other online game.  The scale of mountains and valleys and monuments are often lost but this game feels immense.

    Daily Dose of Cute

    20130623_102941 We have had bunnies in our lawn for years.  I think they end up living in the hedges in the backyard, and since we don’t have much in the way of flowers… or any sort of garden… they have been a welcome addition to our lawn.  However in all this time I have never seen a baby, even though I know they must be producing several for them to survive every year.  Today my neighbor’s son was mowing our lawn, and he almost hit this little guy with the mower.  Thankfully he is a nature loving boy, and is always looking for wildlife…  he shut down the mower, picked the stunned little bunny up and brought it around to show us.

    Is that not the most precious thing you have ever seen?  Apparently at this size they are fully weaned from their mother and essentially self sufficient.  We didn’t spend too much time with the bunny, as we didn’t want our human scent to rub off on it too much.  Additionally we placed it carefully under a bush near where it was found.  The little guy hopped around happily in the shade and hopefully will stay there til our lawn is finished being mowed. 

    I really hope this little guy makes it through the summer.  In years past I have had to fish the occasional bunny out of the pool… and it is always something that tears me up inside a little when it happens.  Hopefully it will remain a relatively moist year.  If it gets hotter I might have to try and figure out a way to give them a water dish they can more safely drink from.  Because seriously…  who cannot love something this cute?

    Wrapping Up

    Well I have rambled on at length for a long while this morning.  I hope you all have a great day and get accomplished whatever needs to happen on your Sunday.  I know we likely have to run around a bit later and continue with the whole “preparing for wife to leave” thing again.  Luckily this time it is a much shorter trip, so hopefully it won’t be nearly as stressful on me.