Faffless Wednesday

Banging Doors

Well it happened again last night, I was woken up by one of our cats banging on the closet door.  The problem is after I finally got her crackhead self settled down and up into bed with us…  I once again was completely wide awake.  Problem is this time it was at 12:45 when it started, so there I lay in bed at 1 am completely unable to get back to sleep.  So I sat there for a bit, finally deciding to get up and go upstairs and play something for awhile to hopefully tire myself back out again.  The game of choice was Defiance, but I will go into that more later.  I managed to get to a state where I thought I might sleep around 2 am, but the rest of the night was extremely fitful.

According to fitbit I was awake 9 times during the night.  I have no clue what is going on with me that my body keeps thinking I am fully awake at any point I wake up.  I have always struggled with sleep, and as a result cannot nap for fear of not being able to sleep that night.  This whole waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep thing that has plagued me the last two nights is brand new however.  Right now this morning I feel mostly normal, albeit a little sluggish… I just fear for what this will mean as the day wears on.  Yesterday was rough since I had been up since 3:45, especially about 2 pm or so it became torture to try and do anything productive.  I might have to start resorting to taking a sleep aid, but I hate how groggy they make me feel in the morning.

Faffless Wednesday

Last night for whatever reason we simply did not have a good turnout for our normal “faff about” in Elder Scrolls Online event.  It could be that people were just busy, or it could be that the Wildstar servers were up for some reason yesterday and folks are anxious for the head start coming Friday.  In any case there were just three of us that showed up with the purpose of doing the event, so we decided that it was really too few to do a dungeon, and too few to really do anything meaningful in Cyrodil.  As a result we just kinda piddled around doing our own thing and chatting back and forth.  PK and Delevax joined the rest of us on mumble and we hung out while playing.  I have not really as much time to play Elder Scrolls Online that I would have liked.

Lately my weekends have been scattered with little landmines of not being able to play anything, and then last weekend the amazing single player games Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order got my devoted attention.  At this point I think I am about two hours away from finishing Wolf, and transistor was a punch in the gut…  but a very good one.  I had been looking forward to Wednesday because I knew I would devote myself to playing nothing but Elder Scrolls Online, even if the “event” didn’t happen.  I have to say I love the veteran content, and more importantly I love that mobs are once again difficult.  There were always a couple of types of encounters that were painful for me…  I am looking at you Harvesters…  but for the most part I had reached a place where I could steam roll in entire packs of mobs.  There were several late game public dungeons that I solo’d my way through, so my skill level with the game had reached a point where it was simply greater than the challenge.

Veteran content reset that equilibrium.  I literally can get my ass kicked by a mudcrab if I happen upon a pack of three, and even in the case of two at a time I have to use Green Blood to heal myself while dealing with the second one.  I like that the game instantly became a challenge again the moment I completed the storyline.  The result is that while I do the Aldmeri Dominion content, the game feels fresh to me since I am having to relearn how to manage tough encounters.  Last night I finished up Kenarthi’s Roost and moved on into Auridon.  Since this is the content I have done the least, I am really enjoying winding my way through elfland.  I’ve decided that I really like the Bosmer…  I was talking last night with Euron that they remind me quite a bit of the Witch Elves from Warhammer Fantasy.  As much as I want to dislike her, I have to admit that Queen Ayrenn is pretty awesome as well.

Figuring out Defiance

I wrote yesterday mornings blog post at about 4 am, and then proceeded to faff about in Defiance for the next hour until 5:30 when the alarm normally goes off.  During that time I think I finally figured out how to enjoy the game.  There was always something I liked about it, but the experience just felt lacking in some way.  Like I didn’t quite grasp how the questing system worked or how the world exploration worked.  The first change I made is that I started playing the game with the Xbox 360 controller.  While it controls competently with the keyboard and mouse, everything feels like it just works better with the controller.  I guess this is the side effect when you develop a game for consoles, but I am slowly getting used to playing an FPS with a controller.  I find the lack of focused aiming to be far less of a detriment that I thought it would be.

Secondly I had a major epiphany while playing as I stumbled across and Arkfall.  I started treating this game like it was Rift, in that so many times in Rift I just spend my time ping ponging from tear to tear closing the Rifts.  Doing this so far has been worth a ton of experience and my Ego rank is slowly climbing.  Additionally you seem to get some really good rewards for doing it, and I am starting to bump into other players as well which makes the experience overall more enjoyable.  I always felt like the thing that was lacking was that I didn’t really have anyone to play the game with.  I am hoping as this game transitions from “buy the box” to “free to play” that folks will start filtering back in.  It might just be the recent time spent playing and FPS, but I am enjoying the game quite a bit.  Therein lies the problem however…  I simply have too damned many games to play.

League Beginner Night

Tonight I’m Playing League of Legends.  Once upon a time in House Stalwart we did these league beginner nights, when we coaxed new players to League of Legends onto mumble and did some vs bots or custom 5v5 gameplay.  The purpose was to ease folks into the game and let them soak up some of the knowledge of a few of our more veteran players.  When the Alliance of Awesome folks started talking about League, I figured it was a good time to try and resurrect this concept.  So tonight I will be playing some league and hanging out on mumble with folks while doing it.  I am just hoping to get in some practice playing Braum, but if not I will probably default back to Wukong, Garen or Darius.  I would actually love to play some Varus since I have yet to do so since picking up the PAX skin.  If you are interest in joining up check out the Anook event, the goal is to start around 9 PM CST to make it doable for the West Coasters.  There are technically only a couple of people signed up, but I know we will have a lot more just from word of mouth.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance #LeagueofLegends #LoL