Good morning you happy people of the digital domain. Last night at least in one way did not go at all like I had expected. My wife and I originally planned on travelling to my hometown last night to go visit my Grandmother on her birthday. However my wife got held up at work, and didn’t end up making it home until six thirty or so. I called my mother at some point to find out “how late is too late”, only to find that she simply was not feeling well today and had been sleeping a lot. Tuesday she had oral surgery so I think she was simply recovering from that. As a result I made a long call to her, that way she could continue resting rather than entertain guests. I figure we will make a trip up to see her over the weekend.
The Event
September 11th has a weird significance to me. Sure I remember watching as the World Trade Center events unfolded, but I am not talking about that at all. Nor am I necessarily talking about my Grandmothers Birthday… which unfortunately the World Trade Center bombings have made the easiest date for me to remember ever. For me… 9/11/2012 was the single worst day I have ever had to experience in my career. I found out yesterday that a coworker never really understood why we called it our “9/11 event”… we were not being metaphorical… that is simply the literal date it happened.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the day that we completely burned down our web infrastructure, and had to begin rebuilding it all from scratch. Essentially one of our security personnel mistook a routine network intrusion scan, from a company that we pay to do exactly that… as an actual breech of our network. 9/11/2012 is the day the decision was made, by forces other than our department to shut everything down… take all the sites offline… and ship the machines off for federal investigative forensics. It was the single worst overreaction I have seen in my history as an IT professional.
The result of all of this meant the beginning of a very dark period of that involved lots of 60-70 hour weeks trying to rebuild our infrastructure from the ground up. Additionally it was the beginning of one of the biggest lapses in content my blog has experienced. Much like the real 9/11 has completely changed the culture of the United States… this event completely changed the culture of our company. From that point on… even though we realized within a few days that we essentially cried wolf and that nothing at all had happened that was not included in a network intrusion service that we pay for… all things going forward carried an undertone of extreme security.
We have survived and I feel like the department as a whole is better off, but it was an extremely bad period to be me. It did allow us to “reboot” several things in the way our processes work, and shed old code that had been sitting around since the early 90s. The irony is… that a year after the fact we are still not completely done rebuilding everything we demolished that day. We have rebuilt all of the important infrastructure, and added numerous new things to the mix… but there are still a handful of minor legacy systems that we have not addressed. You can only do so much with a staff of three people to completely rebuild two decades worth of infrastructure.
One Room Dungeon
Last night was another guild night Wednesday over in Rift. Originally I thought I was going to be considerably late due to the whole visiting my grandmother thing. Instead I got home at a decent hour after taking my wife out for dinner and running a few errands. When I logged in, we had a large assemblage of players available so I started asking for volunteers for a little mission. Archive of Flesh is a level 57-60 dungeon, that supposedly has a chance to drop a doodad that is required to upgrade the depleted chest piece to its third state, and level 57 spec specific chest piece. What I gathered up for volunteers was Caithris 57 Tactician support, Delariond 60 Mage dps, myself playing a 57 rogue, Lukian a 60 cleric tank, and Psynister a 56 cleric healer.
What we experienced with that group composition was almost raid like difficulty. However over the course of multiple wipes… we managed to struggle through, learn the encounters and completed the dungeon. The odd thing about Archive of flesh is that in essence it is a one room dungeon. Everything of any significance occurs in the room pictured above… or the upper pathways over the room. The room changes slightly over the course of the encounters as new bosses are revealed, each one slightly changing the rooms dynamic. But I just found it interesting that you could make a completely compelling dungeon.. without involving any crawling at all.
To some extent the Trial of the Crusader raid in WoW did exactly this. However that really never felt like a compelling experience. It felt more like a slipshod raid that allowed the designers to roll something out quickly, rather than spending much time on creating a new zone. This on the other hand felt like a completely story driven experience so that you almost forget that you have not left the entrance to the dungeon. Weird thing is… Golem Foundry… that we ran directly after this dungeon… had almost the same kind of thing going on. Single room with various shafts and hatches that reveal new encounters. Both of them felt really good, and I really enjoyed the essentially “trash less” dungeon experience, without making it feel overly cheap like the Crusader encounters.
It was a fairly good run, as most of us walked away with extremely significant upgrades. Unfortunately the upgrade doodad did not drop, so none of us were walking away with a really nice upgraded chest piece out of the ordeal. Rae (Caithris) and I both walked away with half a levels experience towards 58. I hope I can catch my rogue up and push it to 60 within the coming weeks. This is largely selfish I realize, but since my warrior is already raid ready… I would really like to start running my rogue that actually needs some loving with the various guild dungeon runs. Additionally I really like playing rogue for support than I did playing Warrior. Bard and Tactician just feel better overall than the somewhat confused Beastmaster role.
Overall though it was a really great night. We got in… ran a couple of dungeons and had a blast doing it. I hope we can continue to do this as a regular thing. The only frustration is we had a large number of folks that showed up after we had already pulled together a group. As a result we were two short of making a second group. So here is hoping that we can get a few more higher level folks up there and start running two groups on Wednesday nights. I know we have the folks in our numbers, it is just a matter of getting people online during the time period. In hindsight we should have broken apart our group between the two dungeons and tried to get some of the folks waiting in the wings in the process. But quite honestly at the time none of us really thought about that.
Wrapping Up
This feels like a really odd post… breaking a lot of the normal formatting that I do with my blog. Hopefully it is still overall readable. I figure tonight will be a return to FFXIV after the server maintenance. I am really hoping that Cactuar will be unlocked and some of the folks who have been waiting to roll there can start their characters. My goal for tonight is to run Cutter’s Cry and maybe another Sunken Temple of Qarn. I really want to see what is in the “treasure room” that we completely missed. I hope you all have a great Thursday and that it serves as the gateway to a really awesome weekend.
I hope the security moron was fired or at least severely reprimanded for incompetence.
I would have gotten on, but I thought you were going to be away. Not that it matters, Achillea’s only 51.