Hot Tub Party

Morning again all you readers in readerland.  I actually managed to get some sleep last night, and actually slept pretty soundly.  As a result I no longer feel like death warmed over.  Making it through yesterday was a bit of a struggle, and having sit in meetings and think intelligible thoughts a constant challenge.  There was one point when I was in the middle of a diatribe about some programming theory….  when I just lost my train of thought.  Poof it was gone… and I had to fumble around a bit to try and figure out where I was going with what I had just said.

Hot Tub Party

Last night was a pretty crazy night for House Stalwart in Rift.  Firstly earlier in the day I found out that longtime Stalwart member Nikajah plays on our server, so I got to catch up with her and her new mommy-dom.  She is not sure yet about abandoning the guild she is in, which is completely understandable… but she is at least now joining the Stalwart server channel.  Additionally her husband Ceredith is playing as well, but he seems to be in a much more serious guild.  Very cool to have contact with them again nonetheless.

A little later in the night I noticed an unfamiliar and unguilded face lurking in the server channel.  After taking a moment to query… I found out it was in fact a MoxieDoodle.  I remembered her talking about popping by in a Twitter conversation last week, so I quickly snagged her into the guild.  I got her acclimatized and introduced to the guild… and tried to force some upgrades on her like a good crafter.  She was pumped that we had also managed to snag a Cortical…  who is very much awesome people.

It was around or about this time that Nubzy started bemoaning the fact that Valkkon, Ilyenna and Arilith were playing on another server.  I told her that she should totally fix that, and next thing I know…  she did.  The three of them were longtime Stalwarts or at least members of our extended community of friends over on Argent Dawn.  The guild as a whole has been so much like rebuilding the best possible home we have ever had.  Its like this crazy pipe dream of having everyone awesome in one place at the same time… and it seems to be working out.

Since the three of them are serious roleplayers, I knew they had to see the Guild Hall.  First they were shocked that Rift had such a thing… next they were amazed at every turn they took as we explored it together.  The above photo is an impromptu Hot Tub party as we explored one of Rae’s newer additions to the Hall.  It was kinda funny… everyone just automatically sat in the pool…  well admittedly I tried /sleep first… but realized my head was underwater.  We hang out up there catching up for awhile before continuing on with the tour.

I am so immensely happy at how well the guild has worked out.  At first I had my doubt as to whether or not our guild would gain traction, and if breaking away onto our own was a good thing.  Any of those doubts have long since exploded as we are growing the way we have always grown… organically through friends and family.  Delevax quoted field of dreams to me the other day “build it and they will come”… and to some extent that is exactly what has happened.  To give evidence of how awesome the guild is… at one point last night there were four women involved in a rather heated discussion about who the best Doctor was over guild chat.

Forum Reboot

One of the things we have been working on over the last week or so is a ground up reboot of the Stalwart forums.  Previously Housestalwart.com was designed to be an extremely WoW-Centric website, and over the years as we have flitted from game to game I have attempted to make it less so… but never really succeeded on that goal.  Ultimately we had a divide between the players that ONLY cared about World of Warcraft and the nomadic group of players that cared about everything else.

With the reboot we are trying to make the forum feel much more holistic and discussion based.  There will be topics you can assign a discussion to, but not the hard folder structure that a forum usually has.  Additionally there is a really nifty “Activity” feed that is somewhat like a guild specific twitter, as players can post quick blurbs and other players can comment on them.  I feel as a whole it will be a much more social aware design.

To that goal, instead of signing up for a forum specific account we have wired it to allow players to log in with their Google accounts in addition to being able to a forum login.  The Google account would be used only for authentication, and it would allow you to alias out the name to whatever you are more comfortable using.  For example I log in with my named Google account and it gets Aliased on the forum to Belghast.  I feel this is going to work much better for the majority of players, making it easier to remember their forum information.

Our hope is that over the next couple of days we will have the site ready to soft launch.  At that point it should be open for business more or less.  Eventually the goal is to lock down the previous forum into read only mode… and it will then become the “Archives” allowing players to browse old conversations if they choose.  When this happens the HouseStalwart.com will redirect to the new forums and WoW.Tulsagamers.com will be the permanent address of the archives.  I will of course post again when it is ready for use.

Resolution… of a sort

It turns out that when you subscribe to Rift you do not in fact get your bags and character slots unlocked.  This is extremely frustrating and I feel that this whole process should be better explained or at least more transparent.  The problem at hand was that we had a guild member that was caught in limbo, and subscribing pretty much spent all the disposable money she had for the month.  I mulled around a bit to try and figure an option and finally landed upon one.

There have been multiple times in the past that Trion has given away complete copies of Rift at various conventions.  I know for a fact that they have done this a few times at Pax and at least once at GenCon.  Since I have a bunch of friends that are convention goers… I thought I would throw out a call and see if any of them still had one of these codes.  Sure enough, yesterday evening Tam did some digging through his bins of old convention swag and found a code for a full version of the game.

I passed this off to the player in Limbo and sure enough… boom she had full bag slots and character slots again.  The frustrating thing however is that without our deep network of friends…  this would not have been possible.  There needs to be a much clearer way to purchase the game and apply the code to your account.  I found out this morning that we have another guildie in this state of limbo… and while I was able to get ONE Pax code out of my network of friends… I sincerely doubt I will be able to find a second one.  However if you are reading this and have one… please let me know… he will be equally appreciative I am certain.

Morning Timeouts

Over the last few weeks something odd has been happening to me… and I just confirmed with CorticalScrub that it is happening to him as well.  Essentially as I start my morning post, I alt tab and fire up the Rift client.  This has been habit for some time, because often times I need to take a screenshot that I may have forgotten to… or at the very least it lets me claim my daily gifts.  However over the last few weeks in the morning I get what seems to be a timeout.  So I spend my time working on my post and flipping over periodically trying to reconnect.

This seems to continue every morning until 6:30-6:45 central time, and then magically goes away.  I have never had this issue at any other point in the day.  I have done some searching on the forums and have yet to find a definitive explanation.  If anyone knows what exactly is happening here I would love to know.  Do we have just a ton of non-US primetime players out there that are busying out the login server?  Is this just a case of everyone waking up at the same time?  I am super curious what is causing the phenomena.  If I ever find an answer I will post it.

Wrapping Up

Well I have a few other topics that I had originally planned on writing about… but I will save those as ammo for another day.  I need to get up and around and gather the trash.  Additionally since my cleaners was without power the last time I went… I really need to take the big blue bag of dirty work clothing there to get processed.  I hope you all have a great day, and please let me know if you have any spare Pax or GenCon keys.  I will be sure to find them good homes as players are dismayed by the fact that subscribing to Rift does not in fact make your account whole again.