May 2013 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tower of the Shattered

May 8, 2013 by Belghast

This is yet another slow start morning. I am not sure if I am just massively sleep deprived or what, but I have just been exhausted this week so far. Having to be in training all day yesterday, certainly makes the week feel bizarre as Wednesday now seems an awful lot like Monday part two. To add to the upheaval, my boss has been in the hospital all week thus far and they are thinking he might need emergency gal bladder surgery. So I have this odd mix of deep concern and worry wrapped in the knowledge that I am going to have to fill in for him in meetings and such. I am definitely not looking forward to the three hour block of meetings I have to attend this morning as his proxy.

Daily Bonanza

Yesterday was the first day I managed to complete both the Ashora and Steppes of Infinity daily quests. I have always had this tainted relationship with the concept of daily quests. On one hand I like the idea that I can repeat them over and over, and on the other hand I have always hated half of the ones that blizzard has come up with. I really really dislike “gimmick” quests and mini-game quests, and while playing wow it seemed like there was no set of dailies that did not involve at least one of these.

So I could have simply skipped the quests I disliked, and did the rest… but this always felt somehow wrong to me. There is a certain satisfaction rolling into a camp and there are no active quests available for you. I think another problem I have is that I LOVE kill quests. These seem to be the bane of the industry, but nothing makes me happier than getting a quest that tells me to go kill 10 of something pending they are relatively easy to find.

I love killing mobs, and can only go so long without randomly charging into a pack of them. I am sure this is a trait that drives my friends insane, because I am constantly in combat. So when I pick up one of these kill X quests, it gives my bloodlust a sense of purpose. Yes random quest giver man, I will go kill these ten rabid wombats for justice and great freedom!

The thing in particular that I have always liked about Rift daily quests is that they mix things up considerably. Today you might go to this camp and do three quests there as part of a daily, and tomorrow you might go to a completely different quadrant of the map and kill completely different things. WoW tried to do this, but it never felt the same, because on a daily basis there was a good deal of overlap from the previous quests. So for now at least I will continue to do my daily quests, because I need the money, faction and sweet sweet infinity stones.

Tower of the Shattered

On Tuesdays and Wednesday nights, the Alea Iacta Est Rift crew has been trying to gather together and run a few instances. The last few times it has been nothing but Empyrean Core over and over, but still been fun to run around as a group. Last night we pulled Tower of the Shattered from the random queue, and it was an extremely enjoyable experience learning a new place. Luckily Plasmodia had run most of the dungeons, and had some vague guidelines that helped us get through all the fights without a ton of wipes.

For anyone who has completed Cape Jule, the instance is a trip down memory lane as Auram the melodramatic monotone construct leads you through the zone. One of the first things that Auram does, is turn on a series of jump pads that enable you to move throughout the levels of the instance silently. I thought this was an extremely cool mechanic, as they added the feeling of platforming, without the need for skill jumps. All you really do is orient your body towards the platform you want to land on, and jump… the game takes care of the rest. The first set of jumps took a little getting used to, but there is no cursing or tears of frustration as you fail to land just right at the top and have to do it all over again. I am looking at you Guild Wars 2.

Another spiffy thing, was that most of the boss trash floors could be cleared by using this special “Execute” command that you got from Auram. Essentially you had to wait until each storm legion mob was alone, sneak up behind them… and then hit the special ability. Like all stealth checks, I failed miserably at them… and wound up with us having to clear an entire floor by hand. After that I gladly let Marklaar, who appeared to be excellent at them, to run as scout and clear the wings for us.

I loved Empyrean Core, but so far Tower of the Shattered is my favorite dungeon in Storm Legion. It is just the right mix of gimmick and stand up fight to make it enjoyable and not painful to experience. I feel like this is how you make an Occulus-like thematic dungeon, without making it pure hatred to run on a regular basis. Essentially you are given a choice, you can either use the stealth mechanic or fight the floors outright. You don’t seem to be punished for taking either path. In addition, just to ratchet up the coolness factor, there were tons of hidden chests we were able to find by kicking our way into air conditioning shafts.

Bad Decisions

If you are super close to me, you might already know this… but across the board I have not talked much about it. I’m fat, I have been all my life, and I likely always will be. I come from a fat family, from a proud German-American fat heritage and to make it even worse I am 6’4”. I will never weigh what someone considers normal, I have that whole “big boned” thing going on in addition to the excessive “chub”. However my wife and I of late have been trying really hard to be “less fat”.

On the most simple level we are just watching what we eat, making slightly better choices, and most importantly logging EVERYTHING. I’ve been using Loseit.com and their related phone apps which end up monetizing food for me. There have been several times I have made a mental decision of… Nope that food is just to pricy for me right now. When you reach a point where you cannot look at a donut without seeing 350 calories sitting there, it changes your outlook on food and American portions.

Over the course of the last 8 weeks we have been pretty religious about the process, and in doing so I am down over 30 pounds. My wife like usual, loses weight slower than I do when we actually attempt it, but she is down a good 20 pounds as well. We are both making progress, and definitely noticing it in the waistline and the fact that I keep having to move my belt up another notch. I am going to have to go jeans shopping again soon, but that is totally a good problem to have.

The Game Had Changed

However last night for whatever reason, we were both craving Mexican. One of the things we had decided is that we would take away the demonizing of food. If we want to eat badly, fine… just log it and try and do better so that you are still in a good position for the week as a whole. We both ordered Cheese Enchiladas, and the first sign that the game had changed was the fact that in both cases we barely put a dent in our plates. I managed to eat the enchiladas before I was just too stuffed to continue, and she made it through most of the rice and a single enchilada.

The problem is, we were both painfully stuffed the rest of the night. I am not sure if that adequately describes the state we were in… we were absolutely miserable at having eaten less than half of what we were normally finishing off. The other thing is we both felt horrible and sluggish, and still do this morning. Basically it is like our bodies are treating the food almost like a toxin. It feels like mine is screaming… “Wtf did you just do to me?”. So while I think the concept of a “cheat night” is a good one, I don’t think we can really do the full blown Mexican thing again.

This is probably the most personal post I have made anywhere, so feeling a little naked at the moment. However I promised myself I would share more about my life since it is my blog and nothing professional. I hope you guys have a great day, I am going to try and recover from the walking food coma of last night. I have so many meetings today, so I just hope I can escape with my sanity in place.

Hazy Shade of Neverwinter

May 7, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is an absolute paradox. For some reason I am more exhausted than normal, even though I went to bed last night at roughly 9:30 rather than my usual midnight timeframe. I am convinced that my body has a sweet spot of 5-6 hours of sleep, and anything over or under causes me to turn into a slug. I am hoping that as I digest this coffee that its sweet sweet caffeine lifts me out of this slump.

Hazy Shade of Neverwinter

Last night I really had nothing much going on, and do not have any real grouping options in Rift until tomorrow night, so with all the recent buzz surrounding it I figured I would fire up Neverwinter. Quite honestly I had not even booted the game since the day it released to the public, and had not actually played the game since before that. The game is “fun enough”, but for me at least it has lacked whatever spark makes me want to log in and play it.

I had left the game just long enough for the control scheme to feel awkward, but after a few minutes I was back acclimatized. Unfortunately it is not the kind of game you can play with a cat draped across your chest, or at least not play it successfully. As a result I didn’t last all that long in the title, before wandering off into something else. I have been trying to figure out exactly why this game is so lackluster to me, but others are loving it and consuming it completely.

Subscription is not a Barrier

I think I finally landed upon a nugget of thought. A subscription fee for an MMO has never been a barrier, or something that honestly gave me pause. Sure it did, when I first started playing these titles back with Everquest… but now that I am used to paying to play it is just one of those things I have come to expect from online gaming. For a whole segment of the gaming world, the subscription and box fees are real barriers to getting into the game and enjoying it.

As a result I am maybe somewhat falsely comparing Neverwinter to what has now become “premium” subscription games, or even “buy the box” titles. The real competitors with Neverwinter are the completely free games like Runes of Magic, that you can sign up on a website, download the client and never actually be forced to buy anything. When you narrow the scope down to only paying attention to the “absolutely free” games… it becomes super impressive.

No Egregious Pay Walls

What Neverwinter seems to give the player for nothing, is an extremely fluid experience with well crafted storyline, relatively solid classes, and no egregious pay walls restricting your field of play. You can get in and do essentially everything there is to do right now without obstacles standing in your way. Basically the game has taken a completely different approach to the free to play genre, in that it gives you a carrot instead of a stick. Namely that all of the options seem to give you something quicker, better or shinier for your coin rather than locking you out of functionalities.

I think this is the aspect of the game I have been missing all along when I played it or attempted to review it. I still do not think free to play is the “one true payment model”, but I think what Neverwinter is doing is a more equitable model than we have seen to date. The only problem is, the game introduces large swaths of “pay to win”, which is a concept that western audiences have claimed they do not want. But this is exactly what Neverwinter seems to be delivering, the ability to purchase astral diamonds and get nice gear in the process.

To Infinity Steppes and Beyond

As I said earlier, I really did not spend a lot of time last night in Neverwinter. I had a cat that was trying to “aggressively snuggle” and quite honestly the game just leaves me nonplussed overall. I logged back into familiar and happy Rift to work a bit on the Steppes of Infinity. Earlier in the weekend I had unlocked the daily quest content in Ashora, which is good for at least 10 plat per day for some really easy questing. I had hoped to do the same out in the Steppes for maybe an easy 20+ plat per day.

The quest chain overall was far harder to solo than the one in Ashora, and involved a relatively difficult boss fight. I truly do mean a boss, because it uses all the same kind of tactics that the bosses do in dungeons. While this was nowhere near the difficulty of the Gatekeeper fight in The Secret World, I feel like it would definitely give a similar “right of passage” feel for Rift, based on the level 60 boss encounters I have experiences in dungeons. The quest chain as a whole sets the player up for what to expect from later game content in general.

All this while I am struggling to stay awake, because after the weekend we had I was just exhausted all day yesterday. Before I gave in to sleep however, I was able to finish out gathering the 300 plat for my 130% speed mount. I wound up getting the Grey Ursin, because of the non-armored varieties I felt that was the nicest. Above is a quick picture I snapped before finally falling asleep of me on the new mount. Unfortunately I mostly purchased the mount for the overall mount speed boost… and am likely to never ride it. I like my Hellbug, White Tiger and Flaming Horse far too much to ride the angry looking bear.

Needing to wrap up once again, as I am out of coffee and need to consider moving onwards to work. I will be in training all day which will be the opposite of fun. I hope you all have an amazing day out there. I am going to work on not falling asleep in a boring training presentation.

Death of the Internet Service Provider

May 6, 2013 by Belghast

Monday mornings are without a doubt the worst thing to ever exist. I sit here and am tired and worn out from the weekend, knowing I am going to have to go be passably intelligent for the next several hours. It was a busy weekend, but unfortunately not busy in the kinds of ways I would have liked it to be. At this point I am just hoping to survive until evening so I can crash.

Sofa is conspiring against me

Saturday was an absolute whirlwind of furniture shopping. Sunday followed with a whirlwind of cleaning and then even more furniture shopping… because we are inherently neurotic and could not trust our opinions from Saturday. As of right now I have completely dismantled the gaming loft, and 20 years of console gaming is more or less neatly packed into office depot boxes. All that is left there is to remove one set of furniture and replace it with the love seat from downstairs and a new more minimalistic entertainment center.

There are so many things urging these projects on, but not the least of them is the fact that after over a decade my ISP is closing down DSL access. Yes you heard me right, I am still on DSL and have been in part because I was caught up in an anachronism. I literally had my DSL service through an old fashioned Internet Service Provider, and with it came the ability to call them at any time and get a person I actually had known for decades. Additionally I had perks like the ability to host servers, a static ip address, all things that I would no longer have in going to a less custom experience.

Death of the Internet Service Provider

While I have wanted to make the switch for years, simply because my 4 meg internet connection sucks massively in todays realm of all streaming all the time. I have not done so because there are a lot of legacy applications that my wife and her teacher friends use that I hosted off of a home server. Over the years my wife has moved on and is no longer using most of these, but her teacher friends still were. Windows hosting, is both painfully priced and painfully limited in kind of access you have. So up until now it has just been easier to host it myself.

We got an email and later a paper letter from my ISP stating that it was no longer financially feasible to continue with DSL support. So by June 15th we will be entering the greater broadband world, as that is the day we officially lose our “artisan” internet, as I have taken to calling it. Right now I am looking at 50 meg cable, because I sincerely doubt we need to bump all the way up to 100meg or whatever the top of the line is. I figure 50 meg is already 12 times more bandwidth than what we previously had, so the jump up any higher is just truly unfathomable at this point.

High Definition Daze

How this need links up to the desire to fix the game loft, is that we will be having to have cable run to the upstairs. So we might as well clean the loft and get it set up with proper cable while we are running it to my office. Two things still need to happen out in the loft. Firstly we need to haul out the stuff we are getting rid of, secondly we need to acquire a television and entertainment center and set them up. Television shopping is an almost surreal experience, and this is coming from someone who understands all the numbers and settings and features.

We are not really huge television people. I am sure this counts as blasphemy, but in our living room the largest television we own is a 32 inch 1080p from 2006ish. While I grew up as an only child, and use the television as background noise, we consciously consume it in small doses. We tend to record things on the DVR all week long, and then watch them as my wife grades on the weekend. As a result, I feel ill equipped for the realities of buying a television… I quite honestly rarely watch television in HD at all. It doesn’t really improve any of the programming I actually watching, since I tend to be violently allergic to sports casting.

Plans within plans

Right now the plan is to upgrade the living room television, and move our old 32 inch television up to become the game loft setup. All of this will allow us to pair down the living room to just our main sofa, which sets us up to move in the new furniture that we have yet to even purchase yet. So as of Saturday morning, we thought we had everything figured out. But upon a re-measure of the pieces, we were either going to not have enough room, or barely an inch of clearance on the wall it all was going on. Essentially we were back to the drawing board.

All of Saturday we had not really been looking at the home theater components/sectionals… that was just something that we stumbled into at the end of the day. Once we had gotten our fill of dust in our lungs… we decided to go back out and hit a few places looking specifically at the component sectionals. Quite honestly, I am glad we did, because it was at the second stop of the day that we found what I think will ultimately be our living room setup. After calculating what “Recliner > Console > Recliner > Chair > Chase Lounge” would end up being space wise, we still would have roughly 8 inches on either side to spare.

Of course being as neurotic as we are… we did not accept victory, but instead spent the rest of the day going from store to store trying to break the bubble we had just built. Fortunately, or unfortunately… depending upon your perspective we were not able to bust the deal. So now it feels like we really do have a final plan in place, now it just comes down to ordering the furniture and planning for delivery. which also involves having the loft done as a dependency… plans within plans.

Finally some gaming

All of this added up to just not much game time at all. By the time I made it home each evening I was extremely sluggish and worn out. Yesterday afternoon I took an hour long cat nap, so that helped quite a bit. By the time I made it into Rift I was almost sociable again. I finally unlocked the daily quest content out in Ashora, and apparently you can make roughly 10 plat a day by just doing those quests. Overall they seemed pretty easy to solo, and went fast enough. Just involved quite a deal more travel time than the previous daily quest zones had. I think Iron Pine Peaks has forever spoiled me with its efficiency and changing mob types.

After doing my daily quests, I had wandered over into Steppes of Infinity and began the quest chains out there, hoping they would also eventually unlock daily quests. Round about this time we had some life bloom in the guild, as Aleriase, Marklaar and Plasmodia all logged in within thirty minute of each other. We circled the wagons and decided to queue up for a normal dungeon.

Almost instantly we got assigned a random fifth, and were zoning into Empyrean Core. So I am wondering if it is just a case of not having a lot of upper level dungeons, but so far at 59/60 I have done three dungeons and each of them has been the same place. Not that I am complaining really, it is a fun dungeon and goes pretty quickly if players know the pitfalls. I managed to pull a second one hand sword from the dungeon, so I now have a matched set of Unstable Core Shards. Supposedly one hander and two hander dps have been normalized, and I have always preferred the look of dual wielding to two handers.

Getting back to normal

It was yet again, an awesome time hanging with the guildies. I know there are plans for both Tuesday and Wednesday night runs, so I am looking forward to those as well. The clock is ticking away, so I am needing to wrap this up. Thanks for bearing with me on the recent flood of personal posts. I made myself a promise to post about whatever was happening, regardless if it was exciting. Lately there has just been a good deal more real life happening than gaming. Hopefully this week things can get back to at least somewhat normal.

If you’ve made it this far in the post… I hope you all have a great Monday, or at least as good as a Monday can be. It serves to be a busy week for me, the server move that was scheduled for Saturday night is going to have to be rescheduled for tonight. Hopefully the rest of the week ends up better.

Spring Nesting

May 5, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is definitely one of those ones where I am struggling to wake up. It is chilly and I am currently swaddled in my fuzzy blanket after making a run to get breakfast. At the moment it just hurts to think, but I am hoping the migraine meds will kick in soonish and remedy that. In addition I have a cat who has decided the perfect place to be is on my chest between me and the laptop. Today serves to be a day full of cleaning, organization and home re-arranging.

Spring Nesting

I really don’t have much gaming wise to report, because yesterday nearly the entire day was spent going from furniture store to furniture store. As with every spring, the nesting instinct has kicked in and with it a list of home improvement projects and minor renovations. In this particular case, it has been decided that the living room furniture needs to go. We had talked about this for some time, but the season has brought on a new sense of urgency.

Quite honestly my recliner is super uncomfortable and our sofa looks like crap at this point. So we have needed to do something for some time. We are both successful adults, but we don’t really live like we are. Always in the past we have settled for whatever furniture happened to be readily available and looked nice, but this time we are working on holding out for just the perfect pieces. However after spending all day yesterday going from store to store, we remembered that exactly what we want… doesn’t actually exist.

A Few Simple Requests

So there are a few simple requests that we had. First that we had a recliner for me, since that is my favorite mode of seating. Second that my wife who is fairly tall be able to lay down comfortably, because at this point we are resigned to the fact that we will never keep the same bedtime, and she greatly prefers falling asleep on the sofa and then having me bring her to bed later. Lastly my wife has always wanted a chase lounge, or at least since a friend of mine from college had one that she fell in love with.

Ultimately after looking around all day, we stumbled onto a modular sectional that would potentially fit the bill. After getting super excited about it, we went home and measured only to find out that our living room was nowhere near big enough for it. After some shuffling around, we managed to come up with a combination that would fit all along one wall… essentially would be this awesome wall of furniture. The above picture is of a similar configuration, but not quite what we were going for… also actors and fake house and stuff.

Problem is, after coming home my wife started freaking out because the manufacturer website lists a different length than many of the furniture stores do. Today will involve a trip to the store and hand measuring a few of the pieces. Either it is going to fit absolutely perfectly, or be 10 inches too long… so we may or may not be back to the drawing board with this one. There is another configuration that is acceptable, but would end up with us needing to shop for an end table to complete the wall of furniture.

Hellbugs Ho!

So after the day of running around, standing, walking, sitting, squatting as we went from store to store looking for the perfect furniture, I was pretty wore out by the time we got home. Add to that a great sense of trepidation for the server move that was scheduled to happen at 10 pm last night, and I just didn’t feel like I could get into much of anything. My friends on mumble were happily scrimmaging over in League of Legends and engaged in the banter that only a LoL player could understand. However each of those maps takes between 30 minutes and an hour, so with my oddly truncated play schedule I just didn’t feel like I could take the risk of getting into that world.

As a result I logged into Rift and wandered around aimlessly for a while. I came to the realization yesterday, that each of the Carnage quests out in Ashora rewarded Infinity Stones. which could then be turned in for really nice level 60 gear. So my downtime activity has been mindlessly slaughtering packs of mobs to finish out all the infinity quests. I was in the middle of doing this when I stumbled upon an “Invasive Species” Rift, and before I knew it I was caught up in another roaming group in search of more “bug rifts”.

That is one of the things I have always liked, the way groups just kind of happen on their own. Then when you have a group together, it tends to stick together for awhile as well. I cannot count the number of times I have been randoming in Rift, and the entire group just stays together for two or three instances after the initial one. The community as a whole just seems to have a better sense of cohesiveness.

After a handful of Rifts on a slow mount, I had enough of the frustration for one evening. Unfortunately the ports are in bad places out in Ashora, and it was extremely hard to keep up with the 150% mount folks. I did not get any new mounts, but I did manage to get Skritt the red hellbug companion. So in the grand scheme of things I would be happy, even if I didn’t get any more doodads since I now have a Hellbug mount and its matching companion. I still would love to have the green ones, since green is my favorite color… but if it doesn’t happen it is fine by me.

Life Happens

I realize this is out of line with almost every post I have ever made on my blog, but I am hoping that my readers will be okay with that. Thing is, Tales of the Aggronaut, more than anything else is my blog about me and my gaming happens. Sometimes you have one of those days where very little gaming occurs, but a ton of life does. These are the days that always in the past have thrown me into a writers block, because I thought that no one would ever want to hear about what actually happens to the me being the screen.

In this most recent binge of daily posts I have decided that a goal of mine is to be more honest with what is occurring with me. To actually blog about what happens regardless if it feels interesting to me. I totally spent the entire day furniture shopping with my wife, and while some gaming happened it was the biggest event to occur that day. So as I started to blog this morning, it seemed the most logical thing to write about. I know I have dropped some subscribers of late, and maybe this will cause more to drop as well… but at the end of the day I feel like I have to be more truthful and show more of the person behind the keys to keep this up over the long haul.

If you’ve made it this far in the post, I hope you have a pretty great day. It is still a pretty dreary day out today, but we have indoor plans for the most part. I will be boxing up the 15 years of console systems in the loft, so that we can tear it down and hopefully rebuild it as a much more usable space. Right now the intent is to still have PS3, Xbox 360 and a custom gaming PC hooked up to a new TV with a new entertainment center.

While I love owning a Sega CD, Famicom, NeoGeo etc… they just take up a ton of room and are a pain in the ass to keep hooked up and “on tap”. I plan on running emulators for most of the console systems on the PC and then just knowing I have the others neatly boxed in my closet. Above is a picture of the “Game loft” during its heyday, and hopefully the new version will be a little neater, but every bit as cool.