August 2013 - Page 4 of 9 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Flood

August 19, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning all you people out in digital land… I am trying to wake up enough to string cognitive words together. I did not sleep much last night, and I will go into reasons later… but suffice to say I am exhausted. In addition I have a royal mess to deal with today, so I likely will be staying home. Hopefully once I have a schedule for the day I can catch a cat nap. Here is hoping that my old friend coffee will be enough to keep me going until then.

The Flood

Today is the first day back to school with kids for my wife, and as a result the weekend was fairly stressful with her trying to prepare for everything. During the summer I pretty much get a break from doing a lot of the household chores, but with the school year starting back up it is once again my job to take care of those things as she stresses out over lesson planning and grading on the weekends. Previously there was a load of clothing that we had started but not finished… so I started that up again.

Once finished I noticed that a pet bed had come apart in the wash. So I picked up the pieces and started a second load… this time of darks… since that tends to be the load we absolutely must do each weekend. I went along about my business and an hour or so later I went in there to check on the progress… expecting to swap it into the dryer. As I was walking towards the washer I noticed that the whites were wet… but it didn’t dawn on me until I was further down the hall what was happening. Essentially the laundry room, parts of the closet, the hall, and our bedroom were soaked in water as apparently instead of draining out the water drained all over everything.

The Aftermath

So I hollered up at my wife, but while she surveyed the scene she was still in “I am freaking out because of too much school work” mode… and simply could not take in additional information at the time. One of the positive side effects of owning a pool, is that we have a ridiculous number of beach towels for when people come swimming. So I got into the closet, pulled out all of the beach towels and started sopping up the water. This got up the bulk of the water, and I gathered those up in a trash bag and took them out into the back yard to hang up.

One of our neighbors brought down his wet/dry vacuum and got up the rest of the water as well as much from the carpet and pad as he could in the bedroom and closet. Finally I brought down my big fan from my office upstairs and set it up pointing at the floor and turned it on high, hoping that the air circulation would dry the carpet the rest of the way. After that it was pretty much just up to time to see if it would dry out. My jeans were in the washer load when it blew… and it apparently did not make it all the way through the rinse cycle… so since drying them out over night was not really an option I ran to the store and picked up another pair so I would actually have something to wear today.

The Denouement

The big air mover fan… made an odd kind of white noise… and all night long I kept waking up thinking I heard something strange. I am fairly resistant to change, especially in my personal space. The addition of a really loud fan on the floor beside my side of the bed was a rather disturbing change, and I ended up waking up every thirty minutes to an hour as the night went on. As a result this morning I am feeling completely sapped. The good news however is that the carpet is dry to the touch… there is still a dark spot which tells me it is not completely dry. We will leave the giant fan running for the next few days hopefully drying everything the rest of the way.

I emailed my boss to let him know what had happened… so my day today is pretty malleable. One of several conclusions will happen. We have the phone number of a reputable repair service, and I plan on calling them at 8 am. Either after explaining what happened they tell me that they think it is easily fixable… like a clogged drainpipe or they tell me that I most likely have a dead washing machine. So we either have the repair woman out… or I go to Lowes and buy a new one that is on sale… and hopefully am able to do so early enough to arrange for same day delivery. I believe Lowes will deliver, install and haul away the old unit… and we also have a line of credit there for such situations.

The Subligar

So since everyone on Mumble was playing Final Fantasy XIV… I continued on yesterday. The above picture is the result of questing around level 10. Essentially I had picked up all of the pieces… thinking they looked odd but not really noticing it much… until I finally picked up the pants. This is in fact a matched set of the level 10 quest gear in the “Lemon Lozenge” area of the game… yes that is what I called Lima Lominsa. The leather harness thing was a bit sketchy… but it looked okay-ish with my poofy red pants… that and I had gotten used to the occasional “nipple chest” from Rift and GW2. The pants… well I wasn’t paying much attention and I picked them up… despite warnings from my friends about the existence of the “Subligar”.

Turns out this is a running joke since FFXI but having to wear it… it doesn’t feel terribly funny. Personally I find this kind of armor completely bullshit. I am sure this is some dev’s odd kink at work, but too often this is what women have to wear ALL the time. At least when I started my next set of quests I was able to upgrade to something that covered me. Maybe I am an odd duck but I feel like armor should you know… be protective. There is nothing heroic feeling about having to wear a pair of underwear while fighting monsters with a big axe. If people want this crap in game… that is fine… just don’t make it a quest reward.

Ultimately after playing for about 10 minutes… I downgraded all my gear to my level 8 set… which realistically was only a few points of defense difference. What was so disturbing about it was… that my previous set was this really amazing “leather plate” appearance, with a unique chest piece graphic apparently for marauders… then in the course of a few quests go to lemon yellow panties. I posted a picture on G+ bitching about it… and was essentially met with a chorus of “QQ More” from the women… since this is pretty much every game experience for them. I totally get that… but no one should have to wear armor like this period.

It used to frustrated the shit out of me when I would find a nifty looking pair of plate pants… only to hand it to a female character and see it turned into a shiny metal bikini. I am completely fine with the irony of having the tables turned… but remember I am one of the guys supporting you. Make the assholes that dressed their companions in SWTOR in the Slave Girl outfit wear this… not someone who farmed for days to try and get proper Jedi robes for Kira. Once I could solo it… I literally ran “The Esseles” a good 50 times until I got the orange moddable robes to drop so she could have something decent to wear as I leveled up. Anyways rant about skimpy clothing over.

The Game

I am in a really odd place about Final Fantasy XIV in general. There is a lot about the game I am enjoying greatly. Then there are other things that bug the hell out of me. I honestly do not know at this point if I will be playing once it releases or not. I have not had this much trouble deciding if I actually like a game or not since I played Guild Wars 2. There are many aspects that I really dig like the whole jobs system… but so much of the game is just messaged really poorly. Essentially you have to have some ancestral knowledge from other players to keep you from screwing your character up.

For example… DO NOT SELL ANY ARMOR EVER! I did… I regret it. So something I did not realize… when you switch classes later you go back to level 1… and a ramification of this is that you will not be able to wear any of your armor period… other than the starter gear. I sold mine long ago… thinking I would not need it. As a result I had to run around buck naked in the Gridania starter zone until I could hit 5 and actually equip some gear. Luckily I pretty much have every set of gear from that point on, but to the best of my knowledge based on what I am seeing from the vendors… there appears to be no way to rebuy that level 1 equip-able gear.

So much of the game feels deeply foreign to me… as though they set out to purposefully buck the western MMO traditions. The game is at its core exactly the same as a World of Warcraft type MMO… just nothing is called by the right names, and nothing actually works in the same ways. Essentially most of my time playing has been building this translation matrix of figuring out what a thing is called… and what it means to me. I guess to some extent… that intrigues me… that the game can be so similar at the same time as it is completely foreign.

Like I said… at this point I seriously do not know if I will be playing this at launch. If I do it will likely be a weekend thing. My friends were wanting me to rush through the content… so I could get to some point where they needed a tank. Really though I was far more happy to piddle aimlessly than to try and push through the quests to reach a point that they were already at. I tend to out-level my quests by a large margin. I am still afflicted by my desire to kill everything in sight… and that seems to be a super effective means of leveling. The only mission type that seems to piss me off are the ones that involve using some emote on a target.

I guess at this point I have to say that I begrudgingly enjoy this game. There is something about it that is charming, and despite all the jacked up characteristics… like the Subligar… there is enough here that I find enjoyable that I could see playing it. I just am not sure if I could ever play the game seriously. I definitely do not have the same admiration of all things Final Fantasy that it seems to take to really be 100% committed to this. I guess I will see how I feel about things after the head start weekend next week. That will ultimately determine if I play or not.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to prepare to call the repair woman and see if I can get an assessment of the situation. If not… I will go to Lowes and see if I can get a washer delivered today. I hope you had a much better Sunday than I did, and that you have a great start of the work week. I am going to try and take a nap after I deal with these phone calls so that hopefully I stay fully functional. Hopefully the carpet finishes drying as do the towels out in the back yard.

Lego Episode

August 18, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out in digital land… I Belghast am doing my best to try and be noble and bloggified this morning… but seeming to fail miserably. If you have not figured out by now… this top paragraph is really just me psyching myself up to write. Think of it as the wind-up to a pitch, and while I do divulge important bits of information from time to time… mostly it is just my way of easing into writing about “things”. This morning I am still drinking a cup of coffee, so who knows what adventures my mind will go on throughout the course of the day.

Lego Friends

So a few weeks back my niece wanted Legos for her birthday. This was one of my happiest moments as an uncle, and I spoiled her fairly rotten. I may or may not have bought like $80 in Legos for her… because by god I am going to support the notion of my niece being into “building things”. I have to say I was extremely disappointed in what I was able to find however. It seems like all of the Lego City products have essentially nothing but male minifigures. On a completely seperate row… were the Lego Friends toys… and scattered in among those were an assortment of “real” Lego sets with female characters. So I ended up getting her a pink bucket with a girl minifig, a blue bucket with a boy minifig… and this princess horse grooming set because the minifig in that one looked a lot like her.

I was woefully sadden later to find out that she used some of her own money to buy a bunch of the Lego Friends sets. Feminist Frequency released a video on the Lego Friends and for the most part I agreed… that they were an un-needed aberration in Legoland. I had no clue why they existed in the first place. I could not understand why they did not just release a series of Lego city sets with female heroines. But yesterday I think I finally grok exactly what the Lego Friends do that the minifigures do not.

We spent most of our day yesterday either preparing for or spending time with family. We had a surprise get together for my wife’s fathers birthday, and this was the first time I had seen my niece in awhile. During my wife’s insane Lego find she found 3 sets for my niece. One Lego friends set, and two normal lego sets but with gender neutral themes and including girl minifigs. Thing is… when we gave them to her… she was excited about all the sets for different reasons… but she was especially excited about the Lego Friends set… because it she did not already have “Andrea”. I never once thought about the fact that the Lego friends might have names.

So I started listening to how she talked about Lego friends… and it finally made sense. She cares about the different characters and their personalities much the same way as a little girl assigns attributes to each of the members of the Barbie universe. The catch is that instead of teaching copious consumption… in that you need to buy Barbie all these things… like a dream house and a car… it is letting her BUILD things for her new imaginary friends. She talked about that she is building a house for all her lego friends… which is going completely off the map since none of the sets we have gotten for her so far was anything resembling a house. Essentially from my standpoint Lego Friends are “working as intended”.

She is having all sorts of imaginative play… but she is building various aspects of the universe inhabited by these five named minifigures. So I no longer feel like a horrible person for buying into this “Friends” franchise. She is building and creating and imaging all sorts of new experience for her “dolls” and it seems like it is the best of both the Lego and Barbie experience. She is having aspirational play imaging herself as a vet or a doctor or a home builder… but doing so in a way that she is actually making the things happen by building them… rather than waiting on another trip to the store to acquire another item. Here is hoping that she continues to build and create… and we will do our best to keep supplying a fresh set of bricks to incorporate into her little world.

Heroica

Part of the whole going to see family thing, involves going to a small town about an hour from Tulsa. With it being back to school time, my wife wanted to stop and see if they had any different school supplies… or more importantly ones on clearance at the small town Wal-mart. While we did not really find much in the way of school supplies they had a bunch of Lego stuff on clearance. I have seen the various Lego board games for awhile, but never actually picked them up. I have heard they were an awesome source for relatively rare pieces, but they were always way too expensive for me to just pick up on a lark to part out. I found these two Heroica sets for less than twenty bucks combined so I figured it was well worth that.

It got me to thinking… wouldn’t it be cool to run a D&D or similar pen and paper campaign using the Lego board games as a mapping system? I saw a picture from G+ the other day of a dad teaching his kids D&D using minifigures to represent their characters. It seems like father of the year material there, but wouldn’t it be cool if you also built the dungeon they were exploring out of Lego? Granted it would involve kitbashing a TON of these sets to find enough pieces to be able to do it… but it seems like a noble undertaking. Sadly I don’t really have enough friends nearby to really support a D&D campaign. When we do pen and paper we tend to do it as a google hangout… and I think the tactile experience of Lego everything… would be lost horribly over a camera.

Nipple Chests

When I finally got back home from our family outing excursions… I sat down on the couch just absolutely drained. I initially fired up Rift, but I just was not feeling up to grinding my harvest skills any further. Granted I know I could have played something else… but I am somewhat obsessed with getting my Cleric to a level at which he can do Storm Legion content. I logged into Mumble and everyone there was playing Final Fantasy XIV… so I figured… what the hell… might as well join them. The game is growing on me, I will admit… but I am just not sure to what extent. There are still so many things that bother me about the game in general.

If my character looks awesome… I feel awesome while playing it. This is why I am such a huge proponent of cosmetic gear systems. If I can set my appearance and always look amazing… I will feel happy while playing that character. Final Fantasy XIV has way too much of the bullshit you see in the above picture. Wearing a “nipple chest” and powder blue assless chaps does not make me feel heroic in ANY way. I just feel like a walking punchline to a horrible joke. This shit might fly in Japan… but I just feel like a moron walking around like this. Sadly earlier my character looked amazing… I had a really slick looking set of gear… that fit the way my character plays… but since FFXIV has no cosmetic system to speak off… I am stuck looking like an abomination if I want to wear the most effective gear.

There is definitely something charming about the gameplay however. It feels like a much better version of World of Warcraft. The world looks nicer, the character models themselves are awesome… and the way combat chains off other abilities is a huge step forward from the WoW model. The world seems fairly intricate as well, with lots of little things to explore and find. I am still experience the whole things named nonsensically aspect… like what the hell is a Guildleve or a Levemete in the first place? It feels like when Americans try and make ethnic sounding names that end up just being gibberish. The whole game could do with a better cultural pass to change the names of things into something that makes sense. As a result I can never remember what anything is called and just end up making names up for them.

I figure I will play the rest of the weekend and see where I feel about the game at the end of it. It is more enjoyable than TERA or Dragons Prophet for example… so were this a free to play game it would be a no-brainer as to whether or not I would be occasionally playing it. But the whole subscription thing is still a sticking point for me. I keep hoping that it will miraculously get better. One of the things I want to try out is the jobs system. I need to get up to around 15 to fully unlock the airship system be able to travel to the towns that have the guilds I want to pick up. I think I am more than likely going to switch to pugilist or lancer first after getting Maurader to 15.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to ramble on about meaningless stuff for another hour. I hope you all have a great weekend. I am guessing I will be splitting my Sunday between FFXIV and Rift. I might even go upstairs and build some more Lego sets since that seems to be on my brain. I still feel like I am potentially coming down with something… and as of this morning my wife seems similarly effected. Here is hoping it just ends up as allergies and nothing more serious.

Goodbye Elrar

August 17, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks. I am getting up and around rather slowly this morning as I still fell rather like shit. I have scarfed down my traditional QuikTrip Sausage Roll breakfast, and imbibed enough caffeine to be cognizant. Now I should really pretend to be brilliant and write up a post that people will love… or at least not hate. Like most mornings I feel like this is an insanely daunting task. We have a rather busy day of family gatherings and such… so I feel as though this morning there is added pressure to be expedient.

Goodbye Elrar

Roughly halfway through the day I had a moment to check my RSS feed and I stumbled across this article on Rift Scene. At first I thought I had misread the title… because for the last two years… Elrar has been the public face of Rift in general. But it turns out that in fact it was true… and that he was in fact “laid off”. I am not sure the reasoning behind this but I do know that most every player will miss him. As a big guy as well, I immediately identified with him, and after years of watching him on live streams I got used to his voice and antics. It feels kinda sad to know that the recent stream where he showed off the amazing hedge maze… was to be his last with us.

There isn’t much official word out there, and Trion really has not posted an official statement other than one from Dahanese across the dev tracker. I can only assume that this is more of the whole “changing direction” topic that Scott Hartsman mentioned when he took over as CEO. When he said “We’re going to rapidly be laying the groundwork for a new strategy for Trion” I don’t think any of us realized just how rapidly he would be geting to work. In the eight days since the announcement he has closed two offices and now sacked the public face of Rift.

Elrar went over on the MMO-Champions forums and posted this note…

Hey all,
I won’t be long – but wanted to say it has been the utmost pleasure getting to spend each day with all of you who make up the RIFT Community. You will be missed & I will fondly remember the time we had together.
Not sure what my future holds at this point, but I’m excited for the possibilities – gaming or beyond! I hold no ill will towards Trion or the folks still working hard to succeed today. The RIFT development team is full of kick-ass individuals who very much share the same passion for the game that I shared with you.
While I’ve never really used it, I’m going to try out managing my own Twitter account to better stay in touch with those who want to:www.twitter.com/GiantApproved
I’m also musing a Twitch channel, at least with my new-found free time, if I start anything up it would be at www.twitch.tv/elrar
Thanks again everyone & my best wishes to you all

I wish him the best of luck to him in his future ventures. I have loved having him as our community manager in Rift, and hopefully he will find another community to nurture in the future. Ultimately that is what a community manager does more than anything. I have so much respect for the community folks out there… my decade as a guild leader has made me realize just how difficult a job it is to always be on… and always be extolling the virtues of the company line. A CM has to buy into their product 200% and always be ready to present a positive spin on even the darkest of commentary. It would be so hard to meet a standard “fuck you all” thread with a smile and happily turn it around into a positive.

Ultimately I think the community team learns how to feed off the positive experiences to shield themselves from the negative ones. Combine that with the fact that every action they do is always under a microscope of scrutiny and you have a recipe for endless torment. However the community staff seems to feed off of it… draw power and inspiration and find a way to keep going the next day. Even in games where I have not liked or agreed with their community staff… I have had the utmost of respect for what they do as a whole. In the best cases I have become friends or at least friendly with the community team… and in cases like Elrar or Morteia I will miss them terribly.

Now to do my own amount of spinning… as much as I will miss Elrar… I really hate all the crap that has been shoveled in the direction of Dahanese over the last 24 hours. No one ever wishes to replace someone else, especially someone beloved by the community. This is not her fault and as a result the community really should refrain from giving her grief over the events. I am sure she is going to do the best job possible for us as players, and as sad as I am about the events… I welcome her with open arms in her new role. She will most certainly work her ass off to support the community and be a new face for us all to come to love.

Mining Madness

Last night I was pretty drained so I spent most of the evening running around trying to work all three harvest abilities up to 300 so I could officially start Storm Legion content. I feel as though this whole plan of mine might be madness… but I don’t really want to get too far into Cape Jule without the ability to harvest all the resources I find. I am wanting to level up my cleric so I can have a nice pre-3.0 healing resource to help the guild with dungeons and the sort. One of the things I have learned since the last time I leveled multiple harvest professions… is that regardless how much slower the skill-ups seem… that I am far better off finding camps of mobs that can be harvested rather than running around aimlessly looking for pops.

As a result I spent a good chunk of my time out in Shimmersand in the highest level area. I have been farming the above camp of crystaine and iron golems trying to hit 300. I managed to get butchering up to 300 while killing drakes in the same basic area. My real challenge is going to be finding an area of boglings or similarly forageable critters to kill to finish topping off foraging. Of the top of my head I really cannot think of any… but I figured I would try Stillmoor. I vaguely remember camps of life creatures… which are often times forageable. If any of my readers have a suggestion of where to go from 250-300 foraging… I would greatly appreciate it. Worse case scenario I will run around aimlessly and pick herbs in Iron Pine Peaks.

Another Shot

Awhile back I posted that I had cancelled my preorder for Final Fantasy XIV, and my commentary about the game in general. However apparently I still have access to this last beta phase. With a good number of my friends super excited about the game… I thought I would go ahead and download it last night. I figured giving it another shot is never a bad thing. Fortunately or unfortunately… my commentary above from earlier in the day still applies. The game is rather charming in many ways… but at the end of the day it is just not different enough for me to really be able to get past the “wow with chocobos” aspect.

Firstly… and this will be a huge killer for so many people… it has without a doubt the worst intro sequence I have ever had to sit through in an MMO. You are essentially surrendering thirty minutes of your life as you play through a completely unimportant sequence of events I assume intended to introduce you to characters that will for some reason be important later. The probably is… there is no Escape key to allow you to skip it… and after you have seen one of these sequences you pretty much never need to sit through it again. However on each and every character you are forced to slog through the annoying cutscene.

Once you get into the game… unless you know otherwise… you are treated to a series of banal quests as you run errands around town. I made the mistake of doing these the first time I sat down to play the game. Now I at least know that I can pretty much just go to my guild master, do that quest and go out into the world killing things with great zeal. The gameplay is enjoyable and the world is gorgeous… but it all feels like an poor fitting shoe. There is so much familiar but at the same time… so foreign. There are symbols and glyphs all over the place, that I feel like I am supposed to natively understand what they mean. Additionally things are called by weird names… and it almost feels like something was lost in the translation from Japanese to English.

That is pretty much the problem I have regularly with the title. It feels as though another culture set out to create World of Warcraft. So it is WoW but with a completely different set of cultural norms. So this is what adds to the whole familiar but odd at the same time feeling that I just cannot shake. I used to be a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series… but my affection for it stopped almost exactly at Final Fantasy VI. So there is a certain amount of nostalgia here… but at the same time it feels like it draws more heavily from the later games. So while I am casting spells I might recognize… the world itself does not feel familiar apart from a smattering of familiar critters.

I figure I will continue to play it off and on throughout the weekend with large sessions of Rift in-between… but I still feel confident in my feeling that this is a pass game for me. Like I said before… if this was a “buy the box” title, I would have gladly snapped it up and played it off and on when friends wanted to. However that said, there is no way I can see justifying a monthly subscription fee to play it. I know my friends who are extremely into the Final Fantasy setting will love the title. It is charming and does a good job of bringing the FF setting into the WoW Genre. But for someone who doesn’t really care about Final Fantasy… it comes off as just another WoW Clone… albeit a well done one.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to get on with the morning. In addition to the family gathering this afternoon, my wife apparently has a compiled list of things that she needs to run errand wise. So I need to finish this up and get on with the day. I hope you all have a great weekend, and hopefully I will see some of you either in Rift or in FFXIV. My current character name over there is “Belghast Sternblade” but anyone who has played with me long could have guessed that one.

Open Data

August 16, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people. I am mostly conscious today but feel like I am coming down with something. While it has not fully hit me yet, last night I felt relatively horrible. It is one of those mornings where I have been staring at the blank screen for ten minutes… finally comprehending that I am supposed to write something thoughtful or interesting. It is mornings like this that I question my decisions in life… and why in the hell I ever decided to do this blog every morning thing. However I shall persevere and push on… and try and be thoughtful and or interesting or at least something other than comatose.

Armory

I am addicted to armory systems. When I am playing a game that has them… I happily check up on literally everyone I meet just to see exactly how they are doing things. I am not a terribly competitive person by nature, but I love peering into the inner workings of other players. I have learned so much from sifting through the specs of other players. Additionally when I have gotten a good drop, I used to sift through the profiles of level appropriate guild members, to see if any of them could use it as an upgrade. If they could I would send that doodad off in the mail, because I would always rather an item go to use than end up as pocket change when sold.

The funny thing is… I thought EVERYONE liked Armory systems. I made a comment yesterday about how much I wished that Rift had one… and immediately got a couple of responses from twitter talking about how much each of the players disliked them. One player took the stance that they had never seen any good come of them… and that in generally they only served as a point for players to trash talk or tear down others based on their gear. The second player said she liked to keep her spec and gear secret, that she felt like it gave her an edge in PVP.

I guess I can see both points, but they are also both foreign concepts for me. Firstly I rarely if ever pvp, and when I do it is on a lark and only to help complete some world event or guild quest. I am pretty much anti-competitive and want everyone to just get along and work together towards some glorious common goal. That said I can also see how if you do not have a protective bubble of guildies surrounding you… how you could get exposed to players that want to pick apart your gear and “call you bad”. I’ve always found armory systems to be amazing diagnostic tools that provide easy access information sharing of how exactly a player is out performing you by so much.

Open Data

I think the king of all armory systems exists in Everquest 2. The odd thing about it… it was built by a third party developer. I have a friend that works in the tools division of SOE, and I can remember all these early attempts to make a reliable and excellent mobile application. Ultimately they decided as a company that they simply did not have the manpower to adequately support an extremely detailed data visualization and armory tool on all available platforms. So instead they shifted their focus and made an amazingly intricate data service. This would allow third party developers to build the ultimate armory application for whatever platform they chose to. The end result I feel was a master stroke, and they have provided better access to data than any other company out there to date.

After the data service was released, EQ2Wire a long time supporter of the community and the best news source came along and released a truly phenomenal armory system. Essentially it provided full access to everything you would care to learn about your character. In fact in many ways it provided more information about your character than you could actually access in game. It had all sorts of nifty auxiliary functionalities like lists of all the dungeon maker items you had collected, or all your spells with the ability to create a shopping list for reagents to upgrade them. When EQ2 did a massive reworking of the AA system, they offered the ability to look at the previous version of your AA profiles so you could easily see just how exactly you had specced your character.

So when I say that I would love to have an armory system in Rift. This is the system I would most like to see it patterned off of. I would love them to take the data they already provide about the game to fan sites… but roll into it all the information about the players and serve it up as an active data service. Hell I would even devote development time towards working on an armory system if one decided to pop up and turn into a github project. Likewise I am sure lots of other people would devote their time to it as well. It would be awesome to return to being able to scour the guild roster to see who can use an item, or who has an amazingly artful spec.

One of the nice thing that EQ2 did when they rolled out their system was adding the ability for your to go off the grid of sorts. When you check that box, your character information becomes cloaked from the data feed. This would satisfy those players who want to keep their spec and gearing close to their chest, for PVP purposes. A scenario like this is the best of all worlds since it would finally allow me to integrate an armory system into our guild website. I have been working on a social roll-up page that lists various pieces of meta data from our forum profiles in one place. So I have been able to integrate WoW Armory, and TSW Chronicle… but am missing the game we are playing the most often… and as such is what prompted this whole line of discussion.

Redeemed

Several of my friends are super devoted to League of Legends. For the League E-Sports crowd, I am going to sound like a complete moron… but my friends were watching whatever event was going on last night. I pay about as much attention to e-sports as I do to traditional sports… which is absolutely none. This was a funny realization for me, because I feel exactly the same way while watching both. Zero interest in watching someone else play a game, regardless of what that game is. I guess I get bored watching other people do things that I could just be doing myself if I cared enough to do them.

All of the talk of League however made me want to pop in for a bit. I had some RP sitting in my account and Riven is probably the cheapest I have ever seen her. I have been told multiple times that this was a champion I would probably like a lot. Previously I would say my three favorite champions were WuKong, Garen and Darius… all of which have an extremely similar play styles. Essentially I seem to be unable to get into any champion that is NOT a top lane bruiser style champion.

I fired up a quick 1v1 custom game to put Riven through the motions, and man… I have to say I love her. I have never gravitated towards female avatars in any game I play… I just find an inability to really get into playing them. However I had already found at least one female champion that I really liked… and that was the super murdery Vi. I can now add Riven to that list. Firstly she is another champion limited only by her cooldowns much like Garen. I really love that style of gameplay, as I hate having to watch my mana bar… and I think in many ways that is why I love Garen so much. Additionally she has an extremely high sustain, especially once you throw a bloodthirster on her.

She is kinda like my perfect fusion of WuKong with his insanely ganky E-Q-W combo that lets him hop in and bash things then sneak away… with my love of Garen and his complete lack of resources to fiddle with. I still suck horribly at League because I am diametrically opposed to its click to move control scheme… but when I play Riven I feel like I suck a little less. Additionally her combination charge/shield attack is extremely awesome at getting out of jams… like getting too close to a turret… which I may or may not do way the hell too often. At least I can add one more champion to the arsenal of ones that I really enjoy.

Wrapping Up

Well this has rattled on long enough… and I should really be getting on my way. Here is hoping that I get to feeling better, and that I really am not coming down with something. I figure it is likely just allergies as it has been all summer. My boss is out of the office today… which normally folks would think it is a good thing. However in my case that just means I have to fill in for him when a crisis arises. I really hope no crisis arises… I could use a nice and chill day. I hope you all have an excellent one, and that it begins an amazing weekend.