Comfort Gaming

Classy Defined

This morning I got up like I do most weekend mornings, and threw on enough clothing to make myself presentable.  Generally speaking I don’t shower until later in the day, so generally this means I have to throw on a skull cap to tame my hair that is sticking straight up.  In the winter this makes sense… in the summer not so much.  Honestly in the morning anytime I see someone in a skull cap or baseball cap… I pretty much assume they are doing precisely what I am doing.  As always I went to QuikTrip to gather up sustenance, and walked away with chocolate donut holes for the Mrs. and a jalapeño sausage roll for me.

While there… I saw the definition of classy.  This woman walked in, who looked like she was already three sheets to the wind.  What was she buying you ask?  Well she planted an “Olde English” 40 oz malt liquor on the counter.  Granted this is 8 am in the morning, most of the people in the place are buying donuts or juice or something more breakfast appropriate.  In addition she had a package of twinkies and asked the guy at the counter if he sold single swisher sweets.  After some fumbling around he found her a three pack, and I guess that was “close enough”.  So yeah… I guess that is how some people roll.  I am guessing this is not breakfast but a “night cap” of sorts.  Just not something I normally see in the neighborhood QuikTrip.

Comfort Gaming

I think I grieve differently than most.  Since the news of my grandmother, all I have really wanted to do is “turtle”…  aka pull my head inside my shell and forget that the world exists.  One of my chosen ways of doing this is to go off and play games that have always made me happy.  One of the games I always cycle back to eventually is Everquest 2.  It is like an old friend that I have spent so much time with, that I don’t even need to talk anymore… and I know that it understands me.  Yeah I am sure it is odd that I personify a game like that, but really EQ2 was a thing I did for “me” and no one else.  All the while raiding in WoW I would steal private time by logging into Norrath and wandering around aimlessly on my army of alts.

Just as a coincidence, right now my absolutely favorite event is going on in EQ2.  Once a year Chronoportals open up allowing players to revisit areas from the original Everquest.  Some of them are rather funny, like the Ancient Cyclops event in Sinking Sands.  Back in the day there were all sorts of “theories” for how you get the ancient cyclops to spawn.  Some of these involved killing all the madmen, spiders or mummies… and none of them really worked.  It was a fairly random chance that you would get him to spawn.  Why did players care? Well the Ancient Cyclops dropped the item needed to start the Journeyman Boots quest line, which of course provided the player with their own personal way of casting “Spirit of the Wolf”.  SoW Plx!

Basically they are a really awesome way of getting account bound gear for your alts.  I am not sure when I will actually level an alt again, but sooner or later I always seem to, and having these weapons and gear makes a bit difference.  On my Shadow Knight I am still using the sword that comes from the Lower Guk chronoportal event.  It is precisely the kind of mindless nostalgia that I need right now.  The above video has me running through several of the events, or at least the ones I could remember off the top of my head.  However if you are looking for a full listing, the place to check is Zam as always the amazing Cyliena does a great job as always with updates.

The Great Wipe

The end of Alpha is I believe next Wednesday morning, and the beginning of Closed Beta begins Wednesday afternoon/evening when the servers come back up.  What this means is everything we have created along the way… will be gone.  The only thing that will be kept are your characters, and the various entitlements like things that came from the trailblazer packs and things purchased from the store.  This means all of the claim data will be wiped.  I have a big mixed opinion about this.  I don’t mind the idea of losing the work I have done on my claim, but I really don’t like the idea of losing my claim in general.  I like my claim, I like where it is.  My frustration is that there will be a massive landrush Wednesday evening… which is going to suck.

My plan will be to try and get a spot similar to where I had it before on Liberation/Pingo, but if I cannot… who knows where I will end up.  Basically the acquisition of goods begins a new.  So that means we will have to go back to square one with only our extra special trailblazer axe to start and work our way through the gearing tiers again.  Here is hoping that with the addition of heartwood the grind for stuff is far less painful.  As a result I got in for a bit yesterday, but I didn’t really feel like doing much.  I made a few claims extension flags to see how well that worked, but really with everything going away, I don’t feel much like screwing with it.  I have a bit of my stuff templated, but really I found using super huge templates really awkward so I will probably build everything back from scratch.

The cool thing about closed beta is that each of us trailblazers are getting friend keys.  The notice from the other day says these are no longer going to be time limited keys… but instead permanent access to the beta from this point onwards.  I know a few people who wanted them, so I will be trying to hand mine out that way.  However there should be a lot of them up for grabs as I know a lot of people in the blogosphere who are Trailblazers.  My hope is that they pretty much limit the closed beta access to just the friend codes for a bit, at least until the great landrush is over.  My goal is to get another claim somewhere in a forested area and then start over from there.  I really liked being in the forest, especially since the later item grind ends up being wood, and not ore.

2013 Retrospective

Grand Experiment in Review

2012 was an extremely horrible year for me and at least professionally I would rank it as quite possibly the worst year I have ever had.  I would put it as worse than the year I was out of work for six months after the dotcom crash.  On September 11th 2012 my company suffered what they thought was a network attack, that only later the security guy pulled his head out of his ass and realized it was a regularly scheduled security scan… that he himself authorized.  The results of this was a massive overreaction that caused me and my team to spend the rest of the year and a good chunk of the beginning of this year rebuilding damned near everything that touched the web.  Why did we have to do this?  Because they quite literally pulled the servers out of the racks and sent them to the FBI, leaving us next to nothing to work off of.

So next to that year, this year has seemed like an absolute dream.  However it has been more than that for me.  2013 has been a year of personal growth and exploring new things.  In April when I finally pulled my head above water after the “faux” security incident, I really wanted to make a break back into blogging.  I fell off of the planet shortly after the security event and simply could not bring myself to write about anything.  Coming back I devised what I called a “grand experiment”, namely to blog each and every day even if I didn’t think I had much to write about.  At this point there are 237 posts categorized as “The Grand Experiment”, and without fail I have blogged every day even when it was a struggle to do so.

Has the experiment worked?  Well functionally yes I have managed to blog every day, but more importantly has it provided an interesting stream of content?  Quite honestly I don’t know.  Most of the time I feel like I am a little kid writing to a make believe audience.  When I talk to someone who mentions something I have written… I am always shocked.  I feel like no one actually reads my stuff, that I am mostly just writing it for my own benefit.  People seem to enjoy what I write, and I have a regular stream of readers… but I will never have the type of audience that the bigger bloggers have.  I am just too rough around the edges for that sort of thing.  For the most part I am happy with the results of a year of blogging and my long-term goal is to make it at least one full year of posts without pause.  That of course will be up April 26th of 2014, which seems like it is far in the future right now.  However I don’t see myself losing steam at any point soon.

A Healthier Me

Another big change in my life over the course of 2013 is that I am considerably lighter.  In March my wife and I began to shift the way we relate to food.  I say it in terms like that because really we have completely changed our relationship to food as a whole.  To say we went on a diet doesn’t really encompass the level of change.  Diets are about the short term, but we wanted to make permanent and long-term changes in the way we ate.  Namely we focused on trying to find a new and sustainable way to live.  At this point I am 70 lbs smaller and have hit a bit of a plateau over the last month.  However the fact that I survived both Thanksgiving and Christmas without breaking that plateau makes me happy enough.

My wife on the other hand continues to lose at a steady pace and is now down roughly 60 lbs.  At some point I need to get super serious again, as I have become lax of late.  However the current weight seems to be a place I can comfortable stay without any real intervention.  I have reached my goal and it is time for me in this new year to refocus myself and set a new one.  I will never be a small man, I come from a long line of really big people.  I am however happy enough being able to say I am a “smaller” man.  The thing I was not expecting to be honest were the health benefits.  As a whole I am far healthier than I was a year ago, and the primary benefit is that my Asthma that I have struggled with my entire life… and have even been hospitalized for… is really a mere nuisance these days.  I can go months on a single inhailer, and that is not a thing I have ever been able to do in my life.

Professional Growth

In the last year I have grown more into the role of the manager of my group.  I have learned to delegate more, which is something I have always struggled with in my life.  I was good at accepting assignments, but never very good at passing them on to my troops, instead trying to take them all on myself.  My team is pretty amazing and I would be lost without them.  I guess in some small way I have learned to have more faith in them, and trust that they will do as much diligence with an assignment as I would have.  As a result I have shifted more into the architect role for my group and part-time project manager and full-time traffic cop.  Making sure all of the assignments are going to the right places and all seeing at least some progress.

We usually have 50-60 active projects for a team of three people.  So it involves lots of juggling.  Various forces in my company want me to move up into a permanent management position.  However I simply do not want to distances myself from the “real work” enough to take them.  Additionally right now I am responsible for three extremely highly functional people, and I don’t think I  could cope with being put over less functional people that I would some how have to whip into shape.  I am not really great with confrontations, and as a result I think I would flounder.  Either that or it would be similar to me as a raid leader, and I would turn into a real asshole.  For the time being I think I am happy with where I am and what I am doing.

I Wrote A Novel

One of the things I have always wanted to do in my life was to write a novel.  I made several false attempts at various times over the years but never could seem to push myself to do it.  This November I joined the NaNoWriMo event, and over the course of the month knocked out my first novel.  I have no idea if it is actually any good, because honestly I have not even read it since finishing it up.  I plan in the new year to tear it asunder as I edit it, and fix any issues.  However regardless if it completely sucks, I have accomplished a goal.  I managed to write a novel, and that is a thing most people can’t say about themselves.  I didn’t do it to get famous, or be published, I did it mostly just to prove to myself that I could.

The weird thing about it is, November seems like a lifetime ago.  The whole concept of writing 1500 words per night was just absolutely draining.  My entire life revolved around that novel for those thirty days, which is honestly longer than I have stuck with anything like that in my life.  More than anything I feel like it was a venue of personal growth.  I did a thing I never thought I could, and I did so in a methodical way in which it felt like success was assured from the moment I started.  Sure I faltered a few times along the way, and there were a few days I didn’t write a blessed thing.  However I kept moving forward towards the eventual 50,000 word count goal and I achieved it.  I think more than anything I am proud of this accomplishment from 2013.

A Year of Gaming

This is a gaming blog afterall, so during 2013 I played a lot of games.  I played way more games than I can ever manage to remember, but I will try and run down a few of the big ones.  The list of major titles is as follows.

Oddly enough I am beginning this new year not entirely differently than I began the last year.  January 2013 I was still involved in the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and it was not until April that I really began to distance myself from that game entirely.  World of Warcraft and I have this love/hate relationship.  I get frustrated with it so much, because it seems that they always seem to take the most short sighted solutions to problems, and there are so many games that there that do various things it does…. so much better.  However as a total package I feel like the game is unbeatable.  It offers the most good things in one package.  The realization for me however after my 2+ years of absence from being serious about the game is that it is not about the game at all.  World of Warcraft is about the people playing it, and I had missed the ragtag group of people known as House Stalwart immensely.

The game I probably played the most often during the year however was Rift.  I want to love rift so badly, the promise of the game is really great.  The problem is it just lacks something that I can’t quite put my finger on.  It is a technically superior game in every aspect, but it is like it lacks a cohesive narrative that makes me care about the world every single day.  The dragons were a thing I thought I  could get behind.  But now that we have systematically killed each of them off, I cannot say in a single sentence what the world of Rift is.  I think that might be the problem, there is no one clear narrative to the game.  You cannot say “this game is” and have even half of the people agree on it.  I still play it occasionally and there is still an incarnation of House Stalwart there that Psynister and Fynralyl are keeping alive.  I thank them so much for being there, but I just can’t seem to care about the game right now.  I am sure at some point I will again.

Final Fantasy was another major force for the year.  This was a game I never intended to like because really I feel like me and Japanese RPGs had a messy divorce quite some time ago.  I had a group of friends actively wanting to play it, so against my better judgment I went along for the ride.  What I found however was a really well crafted narrative and dungeon experience.  If I could have kept experiencing new bits of immersive content, I would have likely stuck around.  However once you reached the end of the game, it was exactly that…  the end.  All paths lead to massive amount of grinding, and for whatever reason… while I can stomach grinding all day long in World of Warcraft… I could not stomach the particular FFXIV brand of grinding.  Namely I blame this on the overall lack of meaninful drops in the game.  If I have a chance of getting something cool while killing mobes, no matter how remote the chance… it feels exciting to me each time I open a loot window.  There was nothing that could drop from mobs in the world that I would ever care about.  Additionally gearing up to get to a point where we could raid, was just not a bridge I was willing to cross.

Games for 2014

There has been a game I have been in super secret closed door testing since February.  I cannot name the game by name, but I have to say I am still extremely excited about it even after most of a year testing it.  I have watched the game grow from something that felt polished to something that really is amazingly rich and polished.  I don’t think I will quit WoW this time for another game, because I have set down some pretty solid roots there again.  However I know I will also be playing this game, at the very least two to three nights a week.  It is probably the least wow-like game I have played in a long while, and because of that I feel like there is room in my heart for both games to have a unique space.

Past that I am really not certain what 2014 will hold.  I know that I am not really interested enough to purchase a PS4 or an XBox One, so I think I will be exiting the console mainstream once again.  I am mostly a PC gamer to be honest, and since my gameloft has been taken over by my wife I am okay with not having access to the consoles.  More than anything I am looking forward to the various stores beginning to liquidate their stocks of PS3 and XBox 360 games, so I can pick up the titles I always wanted to play but didn’t have the desire to pay for.  Additionally there are still a lot of things on the DS/3DS that I want to play, and I am looking forward to picking up the newest Zelda game.  I am sure there will be a number of surprises along the way, games that catch my fancy enough to deserve lots of blog posts.

I hope that 2014 will be as positive force in my life as 2013 has been.  Additionally I hope each and every one of you out there can say the same.  My friend @AlternativeChat has declared 2014 the “Year of Faff”, and I am down with this notion.  I think we all need to learn how to faff about in the game worlds we are in, because stopping and smelling the roses is the only real way I know to break the cycle of burnout.  I have tried my best to embrace this concept, and hope to continue to do so in the year to come.  More than anything, I feel like I am sick of jumping games every three months, and I get the sense that the gaming world as a whole is somewhat sick of that as well.  I hope we can each embrace our own faff, whatever that might mean.

Pre-Endgame Game

Limited Time Stuff

First off I guess let me open todays post with a complaint.  I really had nothing much to talk about as I sat down at the keyboard, so I did what I normally do and sifted through my RSS feed.  I spent most of yesterday super busy and really did not have time to read anything much.  One of the first posts was over on Rift Junkies talking about how apparently there was a new mount available for only four hours on the Rift store.  They are apparently calling this unstable artifacts, which is a clever excuse to make something super limited that costs a hell of a lot on the store.

I am not against the 2700 credit price tag, but I am against the concept of limited time items.  I hate when something goes into game only to be pulled out swiftly keeping anyone else from getting the item.  I honestly don’t care about the red Kirin at all, because I think the mounts are ugly, but for me it is more a principle of it.  When a game starts doing one time only things, I really lose interest quickly.  I get extremely frustrated anymore when I am asked to play a game on someone else’s schedule.  With the recent rapidly expiring world event each phase lasting only two days… this seems to be the direction that Rift wants to move in.

The more of this type of content goes into the game the less and less interested I am in it.  There are so many things about Guild Wars 2 that I think I would enjoy, but the fact that content expires roughly every two weeks keeps me from wanting to dig in and try it.  I don’t want to ONLY play this one game, and in order to farm up every new thing in the world… I would really have to do just that.  The whole playing the same game every single night concept just seems foreign to me.  There are so many different games I want to experience, so knowing I will go into a game missing out on things… makes me think my time is better spent elsewhere.

Pre-Endgame Game

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I guess while I am complaining, I might as well not stop with Rift.  Onwards to FInal Fantasy A Realm Reborn!  We absolutely lucked out as a guild and had eight of us reaching 50 within a few days of each other.  Well that is not true I guess, we had one super impatient gamer rush through to the end game and sit there without any additional support for about two weeks.  However the majority of us arrived at the end game at roughly the same time.  This made the sequence of three eight man instances seem not that horrible in part because it was fresh content for all of us.  However now that we have another three characters up to 50, I am realizing what a slog it really is.

So much of the end of the main storyline in FFXIV reminds me of the trials and tribulations of having to key players for various raid instances in both EQ and WoW.  Be warned there will be some spoilers, so if you care about that sort of thing, I would stop reading.  I will try my best to do as few as possible, but it is going to happen.  Essentially when you hit 49 you start down a sequence of events that leads to the finishing of the main storyline.  The first of these is Cape Westwind, yet another trial.  We have done this now three times… and quite honestly I cannot tell you exactly how the mechanics work.  The biggest pain is getting eight players online at the same time.

Next you run through a few quests and end up unlocking Castrum Meridianum…  which is surprise surprise another eight man dungeon.  This takes a little over an hours time normally if you are not doing the speed run chicanery… and now that every mob in the instance drops decent money there really is no reason why you would.  These places are decent money.  Once you finish up in there, you do a few more quests and wind up stalled on The Praetorium… yet another 8 man dungeon.  This one takes quite a bit longer than the previous one and is a wee bit trickier at times.  Finally after finishing this sequence of events you can finish the main storyline and unlock Amdapor Keep.

We have been working our way through these for Cyl, Opo and Tivo… and the problem with an eight man dungeon is trying to accommodate eight different play schedules.  We really only seem to have time to do one of the dungeons in the sequence per night.  Last night we were trying to figure out when we could pull together a group next…  and the problem is we are unlikely to be able to get ALL of the necessary players online until next week sometime.  As we started going through the days, there was one player that could not attend on each of the nights.  While the final storyline is extremely cool… it just seems like a lot of bullshit to have to slog through to even begin the end game grind.

Norrath Calling

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Towards the end of the night I ended up logging out of FFXIV and popping into EQ2 for a bit.  I have said it before, and I will say it again… sooner or later I always return to playing EQ2.  I am not sure if I am ready to be back in it yet, but I did some questing out in Withered Lands and enjoyed the relaxed pace.  My friend that recently returned was telling me excitedly about the guilds plans to start doing heroics, and while I think that is cool I don’t want anyone to factor me in their gaming decisions yet.  I already have a game where I am a key resource for running instances… I really don’t want another one.

That is not to say that I don’t enjoy tanking dungeons, because I do… otherwise I wouldn’t keep returning to playing that role.  I just find that tanking takes more out of me than it used to.  I cannot chain run instances like I once could.  So I find myself needing something else to play so I can have a bit of peace and quiet… and more importantly downtime.  Everquest 2 has always been a good filler of this niche.  I would like to get my Shadowknight up to 95 so I can be prepared for the new content when it releases as well.  I still feel like in many ways I am running from WoW, because I know that will only end up in tears of frustration.  I continue to ignore its sirens call by playing other things… just not sure how long that will work.

Halloween 2013

Spooky Pasta!

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One of the things I love in the various MMOs I play or have played… are the varried Holiday events.  Some of them make an extreme effort to fit them into the lore of their world, and others just cut and paste a real world tradition onto their land.  Both have their merits and both are enjoyable so long as they don’t involve too much grinding.  Each game seems to pick and choose holidays, but there are two that every game seems to have…  Christmas and of course Halloween.

Halloween time is generally my favorite holiday because the traditions itself usually involve killing lots of dark denizens of the night.  Additionally the playing dress up theme usually means some cool weapon and armor skins that you can use throughout the rest of the year.  Currently we are in the run up to Halloween itself, and as a result pretty much every MMO has some form of event going on marking the holiday.  Going to take a few minutes this morning to talk about some of the cooler ones.

Nights of the Dead

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This event runs in Everquest 2 from 10/15 through 11/11 and is probably the grand daddy of all Halloween events.  Each year they keep adding new content, but still leaving all of the old content in place.  Zam has a really great guide to the various quests and events.  If you are one of the new to EQ2 folks who just partook of the free level 85 event… I highly suggest checking it out.  However even with a brand new account you can still participate in most of the fun.  My personal favorite event is the hedge maze that drops lots of nifty cosmetic gear.

Blood and Madness

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Guild Wars 2 supposedly has a really amazing event called Blood and Madness that kicked off on October 15th that involved a series of limited time events (one day only) finally culminating in a big event that only exists Halloween night.  Dulfy has a pretty comprehensive guild to the events, but for the most part if you are not already doing this series you have missed out this year.  This has been my key bitch about Guild Wars 2 to date… I hate the concept of short run limited time events.  The amount of busy work needed really only allows someone who ONLY plays GW2 to keep up… and because of this I just can’t be bothered to attempt it.  I would love to see this as a long term event that ran the entire length of the holiday, but until then it will be out of my reach.

Autumn Harvest

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Rift has an event called Autumn Harvest that starts on October 17th and runs through Halloween and potentially a little bit past.  They have chosen to focus on the harvest aspect of the holiday and as such have sent you to a special version of the Realm of the Fae where you help Atrophinius and his minions bring in the amber sap harvest.  There are a ton of cool things you can get, including a phantom version of several popular mounts.  The coolest feature of the event however is that you can get these short time use potions that make tons of artifacts show up on the ground in the realm of the fae.  This is a huge catch up on collections event.  This year around there are a ton of new items to be gotten and you can check out this preview guide on Rift Junkies.

Hallow’s End

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Hallow’s End is an event that occurs in World of Warcraft from October 18th through November 1st.  There are tons of nifty things going on like trick or treating, but the meat and potatoes of the event is the Scarlet Monastery Headless Horseman instance.  I have a love/hate relationship with this holiday.  Every year it has been available (and that I have been playing wow) I have participated in the event… all for a shot at the extremely awesome flying headless horseman mount.  Every single year I have come up empty handed.  When a game company places an item in an event, like a mount… that is usable every day… and makes it a super rare random drop… I want to stab them.

All Saints’ Wake

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Currently there is an event going on over in FFXIV that is completely new to me.  All Saints’ Wake started a little early, but was intended to run from October 18th through November 1st.  All of the time zones get a little discombobulated in the translation.  While I am not partaken in the event yet, so far the other one I have seen has been what I would call “Holiday-Lite” in that there is a FATE going on that awards some sort of currency that you then use to purchase things off a vendor.  Since the vanity gear system is not in place yet, this makes the things you can acquire super limited, but I plan on gathering them up just in case.  One of the most humorous observations from last night is that apparently the Pumpkin helms… are repaired by Cullinarians.

The Rundown

That is the rundown of the big ones I know of that are going on, but like I said in the first part of the post… this is the one holiday that pretty much EVERY MMO celebrates.  I can even remember in Hellgate: London there being a Halloween event of sorts that took its form in a Guy Fawkes day celebration… that happened to have a lot of Halloween themed stuff.  I would be curious to hear about any events that are your favorite that I missed.