Super Grape Stomper

Silent Observers

So far the issue of Wildstar Attunements has been a fairly polarizing one in the community as a whole.  So when I posted my write-up yesterday about why I didn’t think they were a horrible thing… I expected it also to be polarizing.  If you look at my statistics for the day, that single post got more unique viewers than anything else by a large margin.  However surprisingly even though it got forwarded quite a bit, I really didn’t end up with much commentary.  I expected someone out there to tell me how wrong I am, but that surprisingly didn’t happen.  I had a friend send me a private message about it however, thanking me for keeping my post “fair” and not adding to the vitriol.

So is it because I approached the post from a calm place talking about my own experiences with bad attunement systems that folks didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to tell me how horrible I was?  I am not so deluded to think that the majority of folks actually agreed with me.  One of the things I see sometimes in the blogosphere is when one blogger posts about another, telling them just how wrong they are.  I’ve done a few of these during my early days of blogging, but it really is not the type of thing I am interested in any more.  There is more than enough negativity out there, that I really don’t need to add my own.  I really hope that I can be a positive voice and talk about the good in things more than dwell upon the bad.  Ultimately I appreciate every voice, even the ones I don’t agree with.

Super Grape Stomper

WildStar64 2014-06-11 06-13-44-239 One of my favorite things in Wildstar is one that has surprised me.  I normally have this odd relationship with mini-games in MMOs, and generally try to avoid them.  However when I put the Moonshiners Cabin in my skyplot, I found the “This Aint No Bathtub Hooch” challenge to be insanely fun.  Most of the housing challenges can be completed every 30 minutes, and often times I will stomp grapes to make moonshine four for five times a night.  In part it is the rewards, or at least my attempt to collect all of them.  The high end reward is the purple quality bed I wrote about the other day, which is cool but I already have one.  The common rewards are either a neon beer sign or 150 reknown, and the rewards I am currently going after is the dye chest.  It contains within it one of five random dyes, and I believe I only have three of the five currently.  As a result I complete this quest over and over trying to get the last ones.

WildStar64 2014-06-11 06-15-09-102 As a side effect I have a truly silly number of beer signs, and I am basically covering the side of my ship in them.  I am not sure if they are tradeable, but if you need beer signs… I am your man.  The funny thing about it is there is zero market for them, because the Moonshiners Cabin is pretty much constructable by anyone who chooses to plunk down the gold it takes to build it.  The question is… will I still care about it once I have collected all of the dyes available.  It is a fairly easy and fun way to farm reknown, but I am just not sure if it is worth paying the weekly upkeep.  That is the dirty secret that no one really talks about in the housing system.  These cool things we can place, have to be repaired weekly to keep functioning.  So far all of the ones I have placed have had a 1 gold repair cost, which at this point is still a fairly significant amount of money.  So I have a feeling many of my things… including the crystal jumping puzzle will go away at the end of this week.  My mission however is to find the upgrade to my mining plot, because that is one of those things I have found massively useful.

Return to Cyrodil

eso 2014-05-14 22-15-30-478

As much as I have loved my time spent in Wildstar, I do feel bad that I have been horribly neglecting Elder Scrolls Online.  Wildstar is the new shiny, and as a result is getting my attention as I have a strong desire to level and get all the shiny baubles that come with it.  However this really doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of Elder Scrolls Online, because the games literally could not be any more different.  Things is I enjoy both immensely and hope to continue playing them both for some time.  As a result I am really looking forward to tonight.  For some time we have had these semi-regular “Faff about in Cyrodil” nights, and after taking last week off I am ready to get back into the swing of things.  The event should give me the focus to sit down and really enjoy Elder Scrolls for an evening.  I am not sure exactly what we will do yet, but I had a ton of fun at that Nord town we stumbled across with the Dark Anchor, so if nothing else I would love to head back out there.

Playing Wildstar and Elder Scrolls at the same time is an odd contrast.  The one failing of ESO, is that it is extremely hard to group with other players.  I really hope this is something they address in future updates because the game is in desperate need of better social systems to allow players to do content other than Cyrodil together.  Ultimately we do it…  only because that is what we CAN do as a large group.  Without a mentoring system, we are pretty much limited to PVP content because it allows multiple levels to blend together and get bolstered up to level 50.  I am mostly a soloist when it comes to questing, but the various folks who have tried to quest as a pair have found it extremely difficult to stay in sync while leveling.  It has mostly worked for the folks that are always on at the same time, but for those who are not…  if the partner gets even the slightest bit ahead it becomes extremely difficult for the other player to catch up.

After seeing how cleanly a game can manage disparate levels grouping together, my hope is that Elder Scrolls adds in some functionality for this.  The game is awesome, but other than PVP it is a largely single player experience.  That said the game does have some of the most enjoyable dungeons I have experienced, but I wish they had taken a queue from Final Fantasy XIV and simply scaled players down to the dungeons level.  After seeing this work in Wildstar I am shifting to the opinion that this is the way all dungeons should work.  A dungeon should have a fixed level and it scales the player to that level for the purpose of the content.  Sure give the players rewards for their own level…  but scaling down blows away some of the problem with “out leveling” content, and makes it easier to help guildies out when the content has “grayed out” for you.

Elder Scrolls Online

As stated above I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online and if you are Daggerfall Covenant I invite you to join in the fun regardless if you are in the guild or not.  The plan is we will meet up at Northern High Rock Gate in Cyrodil around 8:30 CST.  The guild is aligned to Wabbajack, and if we can manage to get people through the queue, it would be awesome to actually do this event on that campaign.  The fallback to this point has been Volendrung, and I hope to be online early to try and assess the feasibility of Wabbajack for the evening.  From there we will pick an objective for the night and wander off into the Cyrodil countryside in search of mayhem.  If you are not a member of the guild, just add @Belghast and we can get you into the fray.

#Wildstar #ElderScrollsOnline

2 thoughts on “Super Grape Stomper”

  1. I’m guessing it will be nigh impossible to get into Wabbajack with a group this evening. It’s pretty much been locked from 6:30 until midnight every night for the past week+. All the hardcore pvp’ers decided that the ‘jack was the place to be, and it’s almost always locked, while every other campaign is typically at 1-2 bars. Best to plan on Volendrung, methinks.

Comments are closed.