Burn It All Down

Diminishing Returns

Wow-64 2014-02-24 06-17-22-04 This morning I am feeling absolutely horrible.  My lungs have conspired to rebel against me again, and since there is a good chunk of weather on the way this weekend, I am hoping I can get it under control before then.  Yesterday the world was all a twitter about the blog post that Blizzard was going to release at 6 pm PST…  see what I did there?  Twitter was was full of speculations of what this news announcement might mean.  Some predicted the start of Warlords preorders, but eventually Rygarius the coffee bird eventually explained that it was going to be more of a roadmap type post.  With that I believe most of our fearless brits opted to get some sleep and just check it out in the morning.

At least I am really hoping that they ended up getting a good nights sleep, because what ended up posted really did not feel like it was worth staying up until 2 am for.  Don’t get me wrong I am not trying to disparage the blog post itself, but it was not the shock and awe that players were hoping for.  For me personally there were a few things that concerned me.  Firstly the tweaking of the Racial abilities.  I wholeheartedly agree that some racial perks are better than others… however many of us chose to PLAY those races for that reason.  When this goes love will they give everyone a free racial change for each character?  Some of the racial perks that I am personally most attached to are some of the fluff ones.  For example I am still reeling from the loss of Find Treasure on my dwarves…  but not sure how I would feel if we lost Explorer as well.  I mean I fully expect to lose Every Man for Himself, but I would hate to lose the fun traits in the process as well.

The part of the post that worries me the most however is the talk of crowd control.  It starts off with the statement “One other big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there is currently simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game, especially when it comes to PvP.”.  Now are they only talking about removing CC for the purpose of PVP here?  Or is PVE once again getting the shaft for the sake of a game I have no interest in?  I have to say my favorite era of dungeon running was burning crusade, in part because crowd control was absolutely mandatory.  Even in tier 6 gear, you needed to CC or you would die.  The problem with that era however was that crowd control was not distributed equitably, and over the years each class has gotten some form of permanent or temporary crowd control.  Problem is the dungeon design has just not required doing anything other than smashing into objects with your face repeatedly.

My hope was with the return to Draenor, and the focus on heroics as a way to gear up for raiding…  that we would see a return to this more strategic era of dungeoning.  However if they feel that Pandaria had too much CC…  and by that I mean no one CC’d anything at all EVER…  it gives me great concern for what dungeons might look like going ahead.  Maybe I am coming off a bit half cocked here, since they did qualify the statement with PVP, but the diminishing returns changes would keep a fight like the PVP encounter in Crusaders Coliseum from really being viable in the future.  The one thing I did notice they left completely off the list of diminishing returns mentions…  taunt.  This was honestly the secret to us beating the crusaders coliseum fight, that the tanks would swap off taunting the hardest hitting mobs and kite them around.  A druid taunt, warrior taunt, deathknight taunt and paladin taunt all had unique diminishing returns stacks, so we could swap targets to keep them tied up.

Burn It All Down

As a programmer, I read these changes in a completely different light… because I have been them before.  When you get dropped into a situation where you have some severely outdated code, the knee jerk reaction is to burn everything to the ground and build it from scratch.  This reaction is in part because no one still exists that remembers why the code worked the way it did.  This is what this current phase of Blizzard development feels like.  No one remembers why they had hit and expertise and all these other things…  so lets just simplify everything and get rid of all things that are not strictly needed.  As a programmer I totally get this, because it feels like they are trying to minimize the variables that they have to deal with.

I figure at this point there has been a prodigious amount of turnover in the folks that are working day in and day out on World of Warcraft.  The guy that wrote this or that code is simply not around any longer to explain why exactly he named that variable “Football” when it is just passing data around.  My fear is that in this minimalistic approach we are going to lose some of the things that make Warcraft feel like Warcraft.  I am trying my best not to fall into “change is bad” mode, but in many ways the sequence of changes feels like knocking down a 300 year old building, to put up a mini-mart.  Maybe I will be wrong, and maybe the end result will feel fresh and shiny… in the same way that Diablo 3 2.0 has felt for me.  At this point… you can just file all of this in a bin called “concerns”.

Fun With Demons

Diablo III 2014-02-27 19-29-26-32 Last night my friends and I continued our trek through the demon infested realm of Diablo 3.  The big thing we have noticed is that the game gives players insane catch up experience when the level ranges are not even.  This accounts for how I went from 37 to 50 in a night, because most of the players were significantly higher level than that.  Last night the experience curve flattened significantly, so during the course of the evening I managed to go from 50 to 58 before I just felt too lousy to continue.  As a result however I am knocking at the door of 60 and have no doubts that I will finish off leveling my monk before the expansion.  Granted most of this weekend will be spent in Tamriel playing with the multitude of folks who are getting in for the weekend test.

Diablo III 2014-02-27 22-13-29-27 We managed to get a second puzzle ring, so for most of the evening both myself and my friend Warenwolf were running around with our treasure goblin pets.  We managed to get a ton of legendaries, but oddly enough I got three different versions of the same item… the Saffron Wrap.  Apparently the game thinks I need a lot of belts… maybe it knows that I actually only have one in real life… that I keep punching new holes in as I lose weight.  The score of the night came from when we beat Belial.  There were several points through the night where we learned just how impressive “ignores durability loss” can be, as we took a number of chain deaths to freezing, poison bomberman, electrical orb mobs.  The sad part of the evening however is that I no longer have my ghostly fallen champion pet, because I reached the point where I absolutely had to upgrade out of that axe.

The Final Factoid

Well as I was reminded by my wife, today is the final factoid.  I have somehow made it through an entire month of writing these.  As a result I think it is fitting that I close this factoid off with one relating to the purpose of this entire month.  I do not like writing about myself, at least I do not like talking about personal details.  Talking about gaming is a space of comfort for me, and I have no problem discussing me the gamer…  but I always shy away from talking about me the person behind the screen.  I guess in a way I feel like what I have to say about myself is pretty boring, and the more people know about me…  the more likely they are to reject me as a friend.  I grew up as an “only child”, and we lived just far enough out of the city limits to greatly limit the number of kids I had to play.

For years I craved having someone else to be there and play with, and that craving has carried through to my gaming life.  I end up trying to collect people into my little digital family.  I have deep anti-social tendencies that I struggle with, but online I can have just as much interaction with someone as I want, but then still be able to shut down the game, or twitter and walk away and have seclusion time as well.  2013 was a year of great personal growth for me.  I completed NaNoWriMo, started the daily blogging thing and ended up losing 70 pounds.  In a way Factoid February was a way of trying to get used to opening up and talking more about myself and my life in my blog.  For the most part I think it has worked, and I did manage to complete the month writing something new each day.  There were times I had to sit and think for quite a bit before deciding what to write about, but I struggled through.

The odd thing is… it seems as though people have enjoyed it.  Looking through the blog statistics, it seems as though my average daily readership has increased a bit during the month of February.  I am not sure if this is in part because I am writing more personally… or if I have just gotten more exposure thanks to the amazing folks who regularly retweet me like @RowanBlaze and @AlternativeChat.  It gives me huge fuzzies when I see people are reading what I have written, but I have to say at this point… even if I had zero readers I would likely keep doing whatever it is I am doing.  I find the process of waking up in the morning and dumping my thoughts onto the page while drinking my coffee amazingly therapeutic.  On the weekends when I am forced to vary my schedule a bit, the day just does not seem entirely right… until I have done my blog purge.  I want to thank all of you for coming along with me on this journey.  Not entirely certain where I am going next, maybe more features…  maybe more of the same, but I appreciate that you all are on the ride with me.

Everything You Loved, Just Better

The Beauty of a Patch

Diablo III 2014-02-26 18-50-24-23 This past Tuesday we finally got the ever amazing patch 2.0.1 in Diablo 3 bringing us a slew of promised Reaper of Souls changes.  The first of these was something that I had yearned for since release…  a decent social system with the ability to form guilds.  While they call them clans, we have the basic structure now to build House Stalwart inside of Diablo 3 as well.  This was one of the first things we did Tuesday after the servers came back up, and now many of us proudly sport the <HS> beside our names.  It is funny how much more enjoyable the game is for me to see happy green spam from my guildies as they get cool stuff out in the world.  That second it takes to say the obligatory gratz changes the feeling of the game entirely for me.

Additionally there is now a functionality called Communities, which are in a sense a big chat channel.  It functions in many of the same ways as a guild, in that you can see who is online that is a member of the community for easier grouping.  My only real complaint here is that you have to manually join the community chat each time you log in.  I am really hoping they fix this so that you can toggle certain communities on.  Tuesday night we also created the Alliance of Awesome community, and it is now out there open for the public to join.  We have a few people in it, and last night I noticed that Scopique created a Combat Wombat guild, since he was sporting the <CWBT> clan tag.  So the functionality seems to be working well, sub clans but one big community.

Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys

Diablo III 2014-02-26 20-25-36-15One of the biggest changes we have seen so far is that the loot is much better.  Not only do we get more usable loot, with far more interesting statistics, but since the patch went live we are seeing more “legendaries”.  Last night I found what has to be the coolest one yet.  The Puzzle Ring, when equipped summons a treasure goblin pet that follows you around.  As you kill things he runs over and “eats” any white quality items that happen to drop.  Upon eating the thirteenth item in this fashion he drops something good on the ground.  I only had this actually happen twice during the play, but each time it was simply a yellow item.  However as the item says there is a chance of this being a legendary.  At this point I cannot see a reason why I would ever get rid of this ring.  I mean even if I got something significantly better stat wise, the effect and the coolness of having my own personal treasure goblin makes up for it.  The only problem is when we fight an ACTUAL treasure goblin, I maybe… sometimes… get confused and try and attack the pet instead of the real thing.

Diablo III 2014-02-26 20-49-29-45 So the puzzle ring was amazing, but the cavalcade of awesome didn’t stop there.  A little bit later after downing the butcher, I managed to get a legendary one-hander to drop.  Now just stats alone, it was better than anything I had…  but once again it is the special effect that makes it truly great.  While using this weapon there is a chance to summon a ghostly Fallen Champion, and while I don’t have any stats on this… it happens a lot.  It took us a bit to realize exactly what was happening, but my ghostly buddy seemed to help speed up our kills significantly.  At this point I have managed to pick up better damage weapons, but I am rocking this is my offhand just for the procs… which seem to make up the gap.  At some point I will pass this off to my Barbarian or Crusader, because it really is rather good. 

Everything You Loved, Just Better

Diablo III 2014-02-26 22-44-30-56 So last night I spent most of the night running around in either a three man or a four man group.  I don’t even know what difficulty we were playing on, but I know we ratcheted up a few times from normal.  Around 7 pm I was sitting at 37, and at 10:30 when we stopped playing I had just dinged 50.  The experience gain for grouping has significantly improved, and if we do another night of this I have no doubt that I will get my first Diablo 3 character to the present level cap.  A few months ago… I was deeply uncertain if this would happen before the expansion actually landed.  Everything about Diablo 3 just feels “fresher”, like the world has a shiny coat of paint… and in part this is the magic of finally getting meaningful drops.  Also there is the side benefit that the crafting system finally makes a marginal amount of sense.  So many things have been tweaked to make far more sense… like condensing all the flavors of heal pot into one… and making them stack to 100.

I still dislike click to move as a control scheme, but it feels as though the hours I have spent playing League of Legends has improved my dexterity at doing so.  While I still die a lot to standing in the stupid…. and man we got some seriously bad combinations of stupid at the same time…  there seems to be a far greater chance that I will come through it all successfully.  There were a few times last night where I ended up kiting mobs around when I was by myself, and were not for the little bit of experience I have laning in LoL… I never would have survived.  Granted I am still pretty freaking horrible at laning, but it has made me a much better Diablo player just in the bit I have done.  Hopefully tonight we can push our little team of characters to 60 and start gaining some Paragon levels.

Belghast the Altar Boy

I was raised Catholic in a very protestant area of the world, and this was an area for confusion during most of my childhood.  I still remember one day in elementary school one of the southern Baptist children coming up to me and asking me “why I don’t believe in god”.  Idiocy like that aside, I have never been very “religious” and at this point I am not a practicing anything.  I can’t even attest to having something that you could quantify as a formal doctrine of beliefs…  I mostly just spend my time trying to be a good person… and winging it.  However as any good catholic should be… I was an Altar Boy.  No this is not the beginning of a priest sex abuse tale, because really my priest was one of the coolest people I have ever known.  He would probably be classified as a heretic, but he was the first person that told me it was okay to question  my beliefs.

The funny thing about being an Altar Boy is that forever will it color the way you feel about the heart of the Catholic church… the Mass.  Before they started with the incense crap recently, forcing to simply not attend Christmas Eve Mass… I did so every year to appease my mother…  who refuses to believe that I am not a “good little catholic boy”.  Even to this day, I can hear certain phrases in the Mass, and immediately feel the instinct to do something… like walk over to pick up this thing, or move to this area of the altar.  As an Altar Boy you learn this oddly choreographed dance to prove the priest whatever he needs before he actually needs it.  I use the term “Altar Boy” but in truth our parish was pretty progressive and had plenty of “Altar Girls” as well.  The priest claimed that we simply didn’t have enough people, but in truth I think he just enjoyed shaking things up a bit.

I really don’t miss much about being a practicing Catholic.  We were a satellite parish attached to a significantly larger one, and as such we shared the same priest.  So each Sunday morning at 7 am he would come to our church, perform mass and then return to do the several masses there as well throughout the day.  Seven in the morning seemed like the ass crack of dawn to me as a kid, and while I write each morning at 6 am… it doesn’t mean I am actually fully verbal until about 9.  I do however miss the priest, he has long since retired but he really was a deeply interesting man.  Once upon a time in another life he was a fairly successful commercial artist, working for an advertising agency.  For reasons I never asked him, he decided to give that life up and enter the priesthood.  I always got the impression there was quite a bit of sex, drugs and rock and roll… and he just tired of the life and wanted something more meaningful.  So much of my outlook on life comes from this man being the first person who told me that religion was a deeply personal thing, and it was natural and in fact encouraged for me to question things and figure out my own path.

Eternal Pessimist

The Sick Kid

Growing up I was that kid that was sick all of the time.  During my elementary School Years it was a rarity that I was not in the doctors office at least once a week with something.  In part this was completely legitimate, because I was born without a fully functioning immune system.  Basically to put it simply I have a “lazy immune system” meaning that it takes a really long time before my body reacts to things it should be reacting to.  It is like that kid that hosts a party, then realizes way too late that shit is going to get out of control.  Then at that point, he can’t kick everyone out without calling the cops.  In this analogy the cops are antibiotics, of which I know by name and color and even oddly enough I associate some of them with their taste.

On top of this I also have pretty severe asthma, but I grew up in a household where no bruise was just a bruise…  it might after all be the early stages of Necrotizing fasciitis.  My mother tends to be quite a bit of a hypochondriac, and as such passed along some of those traits to me.  My wife finds it funny, because I always go into a situation expecting the worse.  The problem is…  because I grew up in a doctors office, I have developed a severe hatred of going to the doctor.  So instead I deal with it until I absolutely cannot any longer, in part because I always fear it is going to be worse than it actually is.  In the end I am always relieved when I am not really dying of some dread disease… but getting me to actually go to the doctor to get that relief is extremely difficult.

Eternal Pessimist

Part of asthma is knowing when it medicate yourself to stave off things from getting worse.  I have a full arsenal of tools at my disposal to keep my lungs from going into a complete state of lockdown.  The problem is, I try and apply this same logic to everything else.  I always keep an arsenal of over the counter medications at my disposal and there rarely is a day where I am not taking something.  So I am an odd mix of actually being sick, but also making it far worse than it actually is.  For the most part on a day to day basis I am fairly healthy, but I am always looking for the next illness waiting around the corner.  I guess as a eternal pessimist I am always looking for the worst thing to happen, and then confused when it didn’t.

As a programmer expecting the worst is a really useful survival trait.  It means I always have a backup plan for when the shit hits the fan.  So this instinct of expecting the worst has been a really successful trait in my day to day working life.  The problem is in my personal life and my health especially it is not the best thing.  I am thankful I have a wife that calls me out on my shit, more often than not.  The only problem is, since I cry wolf so often…  it can be hard to get the severity of something across.  When I had my bathroom bleed out moment… since she is so used to me cutting myself on this thing or the other… she didn’t grasp the severity immediately as I stood there blood spilling out on the bathroom floor.  I am working on trying to freak out less about non-consequential things… so that the big ones actually are meaningful.  I am pretty prone to panic attacks, but they are getting better… as I learn to calm the hell down.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

Rest In Peace

A few weeks back I had an idea for another regular column of sorts.  The idea was that I would react to things I found on forums.  I had enough fuel for one topic, but that’s where things went off the rails.  It turns out that I really don’t read the various game forums as often as I thought I did, so Friday mornings became a mad dash for me to try and find something that inspired me in any way to write about it.  After spending a few minutes this morning trying to do the same… much like I tried last week…  I have reached the point where I am just filing this one away in the “bad idea” vault.  Essentially the crux of this is in order to make it work I would have to devote more time than I currently have to trolling the forums.

I might make another stab at a feature, because Steampowered Sunday seems to work pretty well.  Admitted it has been a few years since I have frequented the battle.net forums, and similarly with the rift forums as well.  There seems to be a drought of substantive conversation out there, or maybe it really never was and I just applied substance in my head?  I have heard for some time that forums are a dying thing, and by my attempts to find something worth writing about lately…  it would almost seem to be the case.  I am wondering if people have moved on to posting about things on the forums, and instead posting about them on social media or potentially sub reddits.  I would be curious to find out you guys take on this.  I know personally I tend to post things on my morning blogs rather than trying to find a home for them on a game forum.

Community Chest

Trove 2014-02-20 22-17-10-33 Last night I had a fairly spastic night again, but towards the end of the evening I patched up Trove.  Now I have not really followed the subreddit as closely as I once did, but they have been plugging away at this with high frequency.  They seem like they have posted roughly a patch a week, and keep adding more features and polish.  It had been roughly a month since I had last played it, and while Landmark has taken most of my “building game” focus, Trove is still very much an awesome game to play.  I always sell the game as “minecraft with MMO loot” but as a whole the game is so much more than that.  Right now I am loving the focus on the social community of a server, that really does seem like the ultimate win for trion is to make people care about the world.

One of the coolest additions that I saw last night was the community chest.  For some time at the spawn point there has been a giant version of the in game chests, but inside of it now is a storage system.  It allows players to donate items to noobies, and last night I was extremely thankful for this.  I was able to pull a good weapon and a good shield out of the bin and jump straight into doing cool stuff.  Another really cool thing is they added in /randomhead command, which you can see above I now have this really awesome engineer goggles appearance.  This was the first thing to go into game to make abandoning the Fez and Moustache worth it!

Trove 2014-02-21 06-18-35-45 The best quality of life change is the addition of a map.  You can see above that each of the various biomes is now marked.  I have not quite figured out what the red X icons are for, maybe dead bosses?  Your home is marked with a little sign post to make it easier to find it.  Of course this is still very alpha, and there are lots of bugs.  Last night for example I killed six golden beetles… which are now super rare, and not a single one dropped the golden soul.  Golden Souls are now needed to craft the gold torch, which in turn unlocks the ability to craft a robotic workbench opening up a whole new tier of crafting.  That change went in some time ago, but crafting is now a tiered affair where crafting this thing unlocks the ability to purchase another thing.

I spent most of the night playing as Gunslinger because I had not really spent any time leveling that up.  Right now I am level 12 Knight I believe, which gives me a good start each server reset, so I am hoping to bring Gunslinger in line to that same range.  So far I am really enjoying the “rocket jump” ability where the Gunslinger fires at the ground and propels themselves high into the air.  Really great for exploring areas.  Another cool thing are the random quests while out in the world that provide fuel to the star meter shown on the right hand of the screen.  This is something that the entire server works towards, so each boss you beat in the world helps leveling the world as a whole.  Not really sure what happens when the world “dings” but the world I have been playing on has 46 stars.

Trove 2014-02-21 06-26-23-20 Mostly my time spent playing last night has made me realize that I really need to devote more time to this game.  While it is not as mind bending as Landmark, it has so much charm.  Everything about the game, especially the user submitted weapons just drips “fun”.  Especially as the game gets fleshed out, it has started to feel more and more cube world like, which is awesome.  That game was a really great idea that was never really capitalized on.  I might ping the Alliance of Awesome and see just how many of us are in Trove currently.  Would be fun to have a night where we meet up on voice chat and wander about the world looking for mischief.  Saying this is making me realize that I never actually mentioned the AoA before now… I should remedy that.

Alliance of Awesome

The blogosphere and the gaming groups they are associated with is a really twisted up community.  Each of us have been the part of so many different groups that it became super evident with the launch of Landmark that we needed to come up with a way of standardizing some things.  There was a period of time when several of us were joining upwards of seven different social channels, each of them with a different subset of players in them.  I believe it was Scarybooster who first voiced the idea, but from there it spread quickly and the ever amazing Zelibeli became the ideas Champion.  The idea was simple… to create a super alliance of all the different multi-gaming groups that our little community was associated with.  After a few different tries we landed on using a subreddit as our “global forums” of sorts, and as a way for us to post about upcoming events in the various groups.  Also it acts as a nice call to action to figure out what people are doing in the various games.  Another big thing to come out of it is that we decided to start using “AoA” as our global social channel to span the various groups.

One of the challenges we have had in House Stalwart is trying to maintain guilds in each of the games we happen to be playing.  When there is a rush of players it is an amazing thing and we have 50 or so active members.  However after a few months this becomes a skeletal crew, and the question of whether or not it is actually worth keeping up arises.  As it stands right now House Stalwart will focus on World of Warcraft Alliance side, Rift, and The Elder Scrolls.  These will be the only “official” stalwart guilds, and for the rest of the games our members want to play we will be leaning on other AoA member groups to maintain them.  This does two things…firstly it makes my life less spastic for trying to maintain a presense in so many games.  Secondly it opens up so many more worlds to us.  You can just take a look at the right hand side of the subreddit to see which guilds have active groups in which games.  So when folks want to dabble in FFXIV or SWTOR or eventually Wildstar… they have a ready made home they can go to.  While this arrangement is still very much in its infancy… it gives me a lot of hope for the future.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

QuikTripGeneration3Store1I am in love with a gas station station…  and have been since the first time I set foot in one.  One of the things people not from this area find hard to understand, is the love that Tulsans have for the QuikTrip chain of stores.  While I will use other Gas Stations, I will always go to a QuikTrip if one is available even if it is significantly out of the way.  A little over a year ago, a friend of mine moved to town to accept a job at my workplace.  She had heard me talk about QuikTrip but was skeptical, but within weeks of coming to town she was a devoted acolyte.  Quite simply the chain is unlike any other gas station.  Now I have had people sing the praises of Kumandgo, Casey’s, Flying J, PDQ… and many others that I have visited in my travels.  None of them compare to the awesomeness of the QT.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWhy do we love it?  Well for starters even in the slummiest parts of town… QuikTrip is clean, well stocked, brightly lit and fully staffed 24/7.  On top of this… they have actual food.  Their breakfast offerings are especially awesome, but pretty much you can go into a QT any time of day and get fresh food that is not a “stomach bomb”.  They have really great donuts and muffins… and if they ever have their limited time Red Velvet Muffins…  you have to try them.  They have a half dozen flavors of Taquito, Country Sausage, Jalepeno Sauage, Buffalo Chicken roller, cheese burger rollers… and fresh steamed buns.  The newer stores have a place in store where they offer made to order food and coffee drinks as well.  My friend Rae pretty much stops by every day to pick up a sandwich for lunch, because they have fresh made sandwiches and wraps.

Another really awesome thing about the chain is that they guarantee their gasoline… and were the first place I can remember doing this.  It was their claim to fame back in the 80s, and has continued on to the current day.  If you ever have a fuel related problem with your car, QuikTrip with pay to fix whatever it is… pending I am sure you can back up receipts of purchasing gas from there.  Still however it is more than almost any other chain can say, and at the very least makes you feel better about purchasing your gas from them.  Admittedly this is a huge chunk of why I always gas up before leaving town in the hopes that the tank of gas will last me until we reach another QuikTrip.  Unfortunately their reach only extends so far, so once you leave the south central united states you have to rely on other chains.

The chain itself has really good cashiers, and the custom software they maintain is designed to be able to ring up I believe up to 16 customers at the same time.  Once I finish writing this blog post, I will go to QuikTrip this morning and get a drink and a jalepeno sausage roll.  I know that I can get in and out extremely quickly because there is a culture of efficiency that has sprung up around the store.  Expected protocol is for there to be two lines at each and every cash register, one to the left and one to the right.  As the QT employee finishes ringing up one, they immediately begin to ring up the next one on the other side, giving the first one time to walk away from the counter.  When this works, it is a thing of beauty… but you can always tell neophytes when they try and form a single line.

I think in part QuikTrip is so successful because they have really good working conditions.  They have managed to make the Fortune magazine top places to work list for 11 years in a row.  In part this is due to their really odd practice of after 25 years with the company, you can take a year paid sabbatical, to do whatever the hell you want to do with it.  This on top of paying significantly better than average wage allows them to keep good employees for the long haul.  It is the type of place that folks either thrive in or they wash out really fast.  As a customer and loyal devotee I really appreciate their attention to detail.  I have long said that I could never live in a city that did not have QuikTrip… so pretty much that leaves me St. Louis Metro, Dallas Metro, and Kansas City Metro.  Granted I am not sure if I would want to be without Taco Bueno, Arbys or Sonic Drive-In either… but the most important one is my beloved QuikTrip.