February 2014 - Page 5 of 9 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Elder Scrolls Online Impressions

February 15, 2014 by Belghast

Feels Good To Talk

This is one of those posts that I have been waiting to make for quite a long while now. Over the last few months there have been various naysayers, and with the lift of the press beta there was quite a bit of negativity towards The Elder Scrolls Online. As usual when someone has something bad to say, they seem to be willing to defy all the rules to do it. However those of us who have been anxiously awaiting the release of the game and been abiding by the rather strict NDA have had to sit and watch silently as all the negativity circulated. Finally this morning they announced that we were free to talk about any experiences from the Beta Weekend content. This means I can now talk as much as I would like about the 1-17 game as it stands which is quite a bit of content.

The Conundrum

Firstly let me start off by saying, that The Elder Scrolls genre is a really difficult one to make into an MMO. Over the course of the beta while listening to player complaints, I have come to realize that there is no one way that people play these games. To some people TES might be a game about stealth and carefully stealing goods out from under the shop keepers nose. For others it may be the grand narrative experience or the lore. For others still it might be about wielding arcane magicks or making deals with Daedra. All of these things are gameplay styles that are possible in the excessively moddable single player experience. However through all of these years the Elder Scrolls setting has felt somewhat lifeless.

The one thing I wanted more than anything else… was the ability to experience all these grand settings with my friends. But as you craft a cohesive mulitplayer experience, how do you make all of these things work with hundreds of players participating in the same experience. This game will not be for everyone, and as I have learned from social media and the forums… the game itself is very divisive. However for me at least the experience is something I am just not getting from other games. At its core this is in fact The Elder Scrolls… Online. This game lives and breathes the Elder Scrolls Lore and settings, and is immediately recognizable the first time you see a creature made famous by the series out in the wild.

Questing

At its core the game has a questing system very familiar to the Elder Scrolls setting. As you move around the compass rose at the top of your screen will highlight points of interest that are near you. You have the option to go over there and engage in the quest, or continue onwards on your own. The very first time I sat down to play the game, I completely ignored the quests wandering off on my own exploring the island of Stros M’Kai in the Daggerfall Covenant. This is completely supported as far as a play style goes. In general there are a handful of quests that are required for you to progress to the next area, however in addition to these there are many side quests that are completely optional.

Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes. Firstly they give you a chance at gear, and point you in the direction of places that you might want to explore. For example… above is an image of the amazing Dwemer ruins of Bthzark, which I might add looks and feels like a Dwemer ruin should. You can gain access to the ruins through a quest chain, but in most cases these small dungeons and ruins can be explored by simply clicking on the front door and going in. The game is chock full of hidden places that contain treasure chests and skyshards and all sorts of neat things to find along the way. There are books to read, satchels to root through, and crates to crack open. All of which can have really nifty things.

So while you can play entirely without questing, and there are times I do this… there are also a lot of really epic stories in the game that can only be accessed by questing. One of the things that makes this so enjoyable is the fact that everything is the game is fully voiced. Lyris Titanborn is a character that you will see a lot of through the course of the game, and especially with these signature characters they have spared no expense. Lyris for example is voiced by the ever popular Jennifer Hale of “Femshep” fame. You come to love the characters over time, I cheer inside each time Sir Cadwell as voiced by John Cleese appears in the storyline. The characters live and breathe and you really care about them. The Elder Scrolls series in general has had some really amazing characters, and this just continues the lineage.

Crafting

Over the course of the time I have been participating in the testing process, the crafting system has gone through a number of changes. The current version is probably my favorite crafting system to date in any game. If you are familiar to the way crafting worked in SWTOR, it is somewhat of a cousin. The difference being that while learning all of the really nice patterns in SWTOR involved silly amounts of random chance, everything in ESO is completely logical and predictable. Smithing for example in its most basic form requires you to go out into the world and gather ore and then take it back to a blacksmithing station and smelt it into bar form. From there you need an item purchased from a vendor that relates to the style of gear you are crafting. Redguard require star metal, Dunmer obsidian, so that each racial style requires a unique reagent. These are purchased for 21 gold, which is not a huge sum of money.

The quality and level of an item is determined by a number of controllable factors. Firstly the level is determined by how much of a given material you add. Whereas 3 iron bars might create a level 1 item, but 6 iron bars a level 4 and so on throughout the level range. Additionally you can add a reagent of sorts to improve the quality of the item, shifting it from white to green or blue and upwards. Finally you can add a statistics package to the item, and these are learned through research. When you get a drop out in the world there are a number of things you can do to it. Firstly of course you can sell it for gold, but as a crafter you are generally better off taking it to the crafting station. There you can either extract resources from it, or if it has a stat package on the item you can research that trait.

Researching takes a significant amount of time, generally a number of hours to as much as a number of days. However in the end you are granted the ability to apply that trait to that item type. The traits that daggers can have are different than the traits that a chest piece can have for example. The rewarding part about it however is that once learned you can reliably add that trait to level of that item. Another really cool thing is that you can improve your items at a crafting station similar to how you could in Skyrim. In doing so you have a chance of losing the item, but you can increase the amount of reagent you are using to greatly improve the chance of getting your item successfully.

I feel like I am not really doing justice to how cool the system works. Generally speaking when I roll a new character I can piddle about gathering iron ore and craft a full set of gear far faster than I could earn one from questing. The biggest bonus is that you can craft helm and shoulders at level one, whereas you do not begin to receive these until pretty far into the content. I highly suggest you check out the crafting simulator that is on the newly released esohead.com. I could talk about the nuances of the system for paragraph after paragraph, but it makes more sense if you can actually see how it works by fiddling with the widgets.

Welcome to the Frontiers

I am not normally a fan of player versus player in any game. However Elder Scrolls has me more than a bit excited to be honest. We are finally returning to the most successful pvp set up that any game has had… the Frontiers of Dark Age of Camelot. Essentially the factions each control their own completely sealed territory, and this represents what the players quest through on their journey to level 50. However in the center connected to these realms lies Cyrodil. The map is absolutely huge and would take you significant amounts of time to run across it even mounted. The overarching story of Cyrodil is that the faction that can take the keeps bordering the Whitegold tower, can then place an Emperor on the throne, giving that faction special benefits.

This however really sells what Cyrodil is short. This zone is a living breathing questing destination with all sort of things hidden for players to find. Just like the frontiers in DAoC, there are reasons for crafters, explorers, adventurers to go out here. The excitement is that in doing so you risk getting rolled by one of the packs of players trying to take the keeps and other objectives. Cyrodil of course can be completely ignored if you so choose, but I look forward to going out there with my friends and trying to find out fortunes. From what I have seen in action, PVP in Elder Scrolls Online works just as well as it ever did in Dark Age.

The video above is from the mega guild Gaiscioch, and it shows their guild taking over a keep. Unlike the zergfest that we have seen in the past years brought on my World of Warcraft, this is slow and sustained warfare. If you cannot hold a keep you are of no benefit to your faction, and holding a keep is an extremely difficult proposition. At one point in the video they are being sieged by two different factions at the same time. This is going to be something that is extremely common, but if you can take and hold a keep… there are benefits to your guild for doing so. I am not really sure if House Stalwart will ever pvp enough to hold keeps, but I can definitely see myself helping out as another group does.

Only Scratched the Surface

There is just so much that I want to tell you, but at this point I have rambled on at length about the game for a bit now. I am sure the moment I publish this, I will think of another dozen things to say. Like I said at the beginning… this is not the game for everyone. Elder Scrolls single player purists will be frustrated by the addition of all the people around them. Hardcore MMO players will likely be frustrated with the minimalistic user interface. Personally I admit I have that problem a little bit, but since this game is to support a WoW style LUA add-on system, pretty much all of my woes with the Spartan interface can be corrected easily. I’ve already seen add-ons in various states of progress that will let you have all the bells and whistles you could want.

This is the type of game that grows on you over time. The biggest problem is you cannot go into playing it with the expectations of it being something else. I feel like this game is trying to start its own little genre. There is more than enough meat on its bones to allow players to happily explore it for hundreds and hundreds of hours. I can’t talk about it much but there is an extremely extensive post 50 game that adds more content than I can really even wrap my head around yet. This is not going to be a game that we can “finish” in a few weeks time. Getting to 50 is only part of the journey, there are months of content waiting you after that point. That is not to say that someone who is absolutely crazy will not make it to the absolute end within the first month. But the average serious player will be chewing on this one for a long while.

It feels extremely awesome to finally be able to talk about it. At this point we have been cleared to talk about the first 3-4 zones per faction. So if there is anything you would like to see me talk about, please drop me a comment and I will try and work it in during a future post. I am happy to see the veil lift so we can hopefully start getting a positive buzz going among all the players who are out there enjoying themselves. The beta weekends have been full of players happy to be in the test and happy to be exploring the world. The game is still charting extremely well in its presales. If you plan on getting the game, I highly suggest you put in your preorder. The ability to play any race in any faction is going to be a huge boon going forward.

Married at the House of Vacuums

February 14, 2014 by Belghast

Belgarde Keep

Over the last two days there have been a couple of significant patches to Landmark. You can check out the patch notes here… here for more information. The most exciting of the changes is the fix to the way trees/plants/rocks kept respawning on our claims with no real way to remove them. In previous shots of my forest keep the overall view had been obstructed by a couple of giant trees. Now you can see a fairly clear view of the place. I have given up on calling it a temple, because really it no longer looks anything at all like a temple. Instead I have officially renamed it to “Belgarde Keep”. Last night I spent quite a bit of work starting to flesh out the details. You can see in this image that we now have the wooden posts sticking out from each floor as though they were coming from the ceiling beams. Additionally I have started replacing my main columns with ones that include some inset stucco.

Another really cool thing of note last night is that with the patches Sapphire and Ruby have been more sane and rational to collect. In fact if you are lucky you can now find surface spawn nodes. Over the course of a couple of these nodes I managed to gather up more of each gem than I had gotten to date allowing me to finally craft the Indigo Pick. Of course I got a rather crappy one on my first attempt, but all the excess sapphires allowed me to craft another cobalt pick, and after a little bit of farming tonight hopefully I will make a second shot at the Indigo. While they have reduced the amount of burled wood you need slightly to convert from raw to the craftable material… this still seems to be the bottleneck in almost everything that I want to craft. I made another attempt at a better axe last night and managed to get one just slightly faster.

At this point my focus over the next few days is to attempt to get a better Indigo pick, gather the materials for upgraded machinery and continue to work on fine detail for the keep as a whole. I need to start gathering the tier 5 resources but to be honest I am not even sure what they look like at this point. Right now the biggest thing I am not quite happy with in my keep design is the single pillar that supports the balcony. I expect now that the tree is out of the way I will rework that design feature extensively. I might try a curved balcony, I have ideas in my head on what that would be to craft but not sure exactly yet now to go about it especially since I would need to curve both the railing and the flooring.

Toxic Love

Earlier in the week I posted about the ongoing Love is in the Air event happening right now in World of Warcraft to coincide with Valentines Day. I had pretty much ignored the event until the last few days because in general, I queue for the dungeon each day and I walk away each day with nothing but a stack of useless Love Tokens. In past years I have queued faithfully each day only to somehow miss getting any of the pets and mounts. So this year I was not any more expectant of something cool… but since everyone else was doing it I felt I should probably start running them each day on all 6 of my 90s.

Finally last night my streak of nothing changed… at least to some extent. While I did not manage to get one of the mounts, I did however get the toxic wasteling pictured above. I realize it is just a ball of slime, but I find it far cuter than the other oozeling that I have. This is one of the newer models and minus the insane eyes… it kinda reminds me of a ChuChu from the Legend of Zelda series as pictured on the right. At least I feel like this years queueing was not a complete and total waste. While I would love to get the a Swift Lovebird I simply did not start the event soon enough to gather up the needed 250 tokens.

I have to share this image really quickly that @ManaBrownies posted over on twitter yesterday of ALL THE LOVEBIRDS. The thing that tickles me the most however is not the fact that you have multiple love birds and mini pet versions… but instead their guild name. I love that name so much, and if you don’t get the reference… which is probably likely since it is totally esoteric. I suggest you watch Empire Records, which oddly enough is on the long list of favorite movies.

Married at the House of Vacuums

In honor of Valentines Day I have another related factoid. My wife and I were Married at the House of Vacuums. Before we get to that point I have to explain a bit about our wedding in general. All we ever wanted was a very simple wedding. In college when we began planning it, we pictured this simple outdoor wedding with just the immediate family. However over time this plan morphed to nightmarish proportions. My mother took ahold of the guest list and started wanting to add everything under the sun, including my fourth grade teacher.

Then there was the fact that an outdoor wedding was simply not good enough. Since I grew up catholic, apparently you are not really married in the eyes of the church unless it happens inside of a catholic church. So she wanted us to have two weddings… the real outdoor wedding and then another smaller service in a catholic church so we were “legitimate”. I have never been really big on rules and regulations, and there was no way in hell I wanted to have two separate weddings just to make some religion happy. Especially one that I do not abide by myself and have not been a member of since I had the freedom to choose my own path in life. She was getting entirely too involved in the process and planning something neither of us wanted.

Finally there was the issue of who to walk my wife down the isle. She is from a split household, one that split years after her birth. So she had two complete households and as a result two fathers. Her step dad was a quiet and unassuming man, and would do literally anything for her… often making excuses to plan a trip up to college to come see us for the silliest reasons. Her biological father at that point in her life was not terribly engaged, and while I have come to love him… was very pushy and brash. So her step father would have been quiet about it, but wounded for life if he did not get to walk her down the isle. Whereas her biological father would have made a grand scene likely disowning us if he was not the one to walk her down the isle.

We had set and unset the date many times, but as the three ring circus careened off in a direction we were not willing to go with it, we decided that we needed none of it. All that mattered was that we were together, and as a result we opted to elope. That conjures visions of romantically running away to some fabled location, but in truth we simply managed to run around town and gather all the necessary things to be legally married in one day. We found a little marriage chapel in town, that had an opening the next day. While we were not technically married at the House of Vacuums, the marriage chapel we went to was around the corner in the same strip mall. My cousins and our best friend at the time stood up for us as witnesses, and we had a nice simple wedding service presided by a female minister that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of any longer.

Parts of our family, namely my mother was I am sure pissed at me for years over robbing her of her big day. However like everything else in our lives we managed to get married “our way”. My wife and I are both very non-conventional and pragmatic, so eloping to the House of Vacuums was simply “our way” of dealing with the challenges at hand. There has not been a single day I regretted our decision, and now I have an interesting story to tell. At the end of the day that is worth far more to me than having been crammed into a tuxedo and forced to go through a series of events we didn’t really want in the first place. At one point her biological father offered us a large sum of money to elope… but he never actually made good on that promise. I guess it was a good thing we did it because we wanted to.

International Cupid

February 13, 2014 by Belghast

Short term commitment

Yesterday a friend of mine asked me if it would be okay if she played Elder Scrolls with the House Stalwart group. She was not sure how into the game she was, so might only be around for a month or so. She wanted to make sure no one would be upset with her not staying terribly long. She was afraid that House Stalwart were more dedicated members and might take offense to that. I of course assuaged her fears, since Stalwart as a whole is super casual and primarily a social guild. However what came next was a realization that I am not sure I had actually admitted to myself.

When I go into one of these games I don’t really expect folks to last more than a few months. That has been the track record with new games and our guild especially. This was so much the case with Final Fantasy XIV that I even started what I feel is going to be a new thing for me. When I subscribed to that game I chose to do so for three months and then immediately went into the back end and cancelled my account. That way it would essentially self destruct after three months unless I made some form of manual intervention to renew it. While you might think this is me not having faith in the game… it is more that I am not having faith in myself.

Other than World of Warcraft, each game I have played has been a three to six month encounter. While there are still games that I play semi-regularly, the tempest of activity has usually died down into a spring breeze at or around the three month mark. It feels to me that we are inherently either gaming lifers, or game jumpers. If you look at my own guild our I would say we have roughly sixty players that have only ever played WoW and cannot imagine playing another game. Then there is a pool of forty or so that tend to play whatever happens to be the next great game in the internet cultural zeitgeist. This experience has lead me to the new stance of giving a game three months of subscription and then evaluating where I stand after that.

Cash Shop Expansion

Yesterday the big 2.6 patch went in over in Rift and I have to say I have been watching this one with a bit of excitement. There are a ton of new features going into the game and you can read highlights of them over on this little info blurb created by Trion. This is the point at which I am going to be a bit of a downer, because after logging in last night I realized… the things I am most interested are really freaking expensive. A big thing they added in was the ability to start applying cosmetic skins to your pets. This has been one of my key frustrations with the pet classes that unlike the WoW Hunter we had no real control over what our pets looked like. There have been some really ugly pets as well… I am looking at you emaciated beastlord blue tiger thing. Most of these have improved to where the base pet is at least passable, but I would never turn down the opportunity to tweak the appearance.

Problem is that they are really expensive, in order to get all of the new skins… something that admittedly not everyone is going to want… they are running a special on them for roughly $70 worth of in game currency. Once the special is over however that price quadruples for the full unlock. Individual class based unlocks are more reasonable at around $7 per class. These are of course guesstimates based on the fact that in the $20 bundle it breaks out to be 160 credits per dollar. I feel like the whole budgie mount thing has maybe unfairly colored my opinion of the cash shop as a whole. Once upon a time it felt extremely reasonable, but now everything just seems more expensive than I want to pay for it.

The biggest thing I was interested in during this patch was the Dreamweaving profession. Once again however I was hit by the realization that in order to play with that it would involve me plunking down some cash to buy another trade skill extension. I don’t want to roll a brand new character just to be able to play with the profession, and I don’t really want to unlearn any of my already max level professions from my characters to pick up this new one. I realize it is a first world problem, and in a game like WoW we would have no choice at all but to do just that. However last night I was being irrational and felt extremely frustrated by having to make that choice.

Basically the only thing left that really made me excited after having the other two shiny baubles behind a paywall I didn’t feel like crossing… was the bounty system. I will admit I am pretty excited about this. One of the features that I loved from Dark Age of Camelot that no other game has really gotten right was the ability to create trophies of certain mobs out in the world. Our guild hall was full of these because I was constantly going out and collecting the “remains” needed to craft them. Rift seems to have finally created a version of that system that looks like it will work in modern terms. However after the frustrations up until that point, I just didn’t feel like sinking in the needed research to figure out exactly how the system worked.

I am sure at some point soon I will revisit it and be happy as a clam hunting down trophies. I just fear that this is he new reality for a game like Rift. When we get a patch, it will involve a little bit of free content and a lot of content you will have to hit the cash shop button to be able to truly enjoy. My frustration mostly is due the fact that I am a patron and have been one since the transition of that program. I feel like overall that is a “bad deal” since the loyalty accrual is excessively slow, there is no monthly credit allowance, and we still end up having to buy the new baubles when they come out. Sure the various daily buffs are nice, and I likely would not have made it to 60 on my rogue without them… but it feels like there should be at least some regular allowance of credits that can add up over time to be able to buy stuff from the store.

International Cupid

Today in light of Valentines being tomorrow, I have a factoid that I rarely tell. It is really weird how chance, fate, kismet… whatever you want to call it works sometimes. My wife and I grew up thirty minutes apart from each other in neighboring towns. It turns out that we knew several of the same people, went to several of the same places, and were probably in the same room multiple times during our lives. We would not have met however were it not for a mutual friend in Belgium. During the early days of the internet, we were both IRC junkies. Internet Relay Chat opened up a door to a world much larger than our own, and let us converse with people around the world… breakout out of our very limited small town upbringings.

Chatrooms in truth were a lot like we view guilds today, as a little social family that you hung out with. People shifted back and forth between them freely, and much like running content with some friends guild you hopped back and forth between channels freely. I’ve always been interested in programming and for awhile I got really into writing IRC bots. I would build little games into them, with dice rollers, character sheets and combat. It was through one of these bots that I met Hans. He asked me to come help him out with one of the bots on his channel, and it was one of the nights I was in his channel working on it that I saw a familiar address pop into the channel. Back in that day, you could see what internet service provider someone was connecting from, and over time I learned to immediately recognize all the local ones.

Out of the blue I messaged the new person who had entered the room saying something dumb to the equivalent of “not often that I see a local”. Apparently I freaked her out a little, since at the time I was logged into the bot. Observational skills were never a strong point. Hans apparently verified that I was a nice guy, and non-stalkerish because over the course of the next few weeks we struck up a friendship. Over Easter weekend she was heading back to her hometown, and we decided to meet up and go to the movies together. At this point it was just two friends hanging out and meeting in real life. We got along just fine, but neither of us was really looking for anything at that point so dating didn’t even dawn on either of us I don’t think.

As fate would have it, I was planning on transferring to the university she was attending, so at the very least it would be awesome to have some friends on campus. It was not until I had actually transferred that sparks really happened. To be honest we moved very quickly from “dating”, to being essentially inseparable from that point onwards. There were no long drawn out courtship rituals for us, we were far more practical than that. I still marvel at just how odd it was, that we had grown up so close to each other, but that it took someone half a world away to introduce us. Years later as we talked about our childhoods we have come up with several points at which we were likely in the same place at the same time. Thankfully we have an international cupid to thank for finally connecting us.

The Mafioso’s Daughter

February 12, 2014 by Belghast

Weekly Routines

With yesterday being server reset day in World of Warcraft, I opted to take a break from my Landmark madness to do my weekly boss farming for mounts. Out of my stable of six level 90 characters, there are three that can solo Onyxia in a manner that makes me not want to pull out my hair. The very first time I tried doing Ony as a Blood Deathknight for example it took at least 30 minutes of diseases/deathcoil/icy touch to finally bring her down to the ground. However I have figured out that as Frost Deathknight, Retribution Paladin, and Enhancement Shaman I can make short work of her. As a result every Tuesday it has become a thing, for me to run those three characters through the fight in an attempt to get the ever illusive reins of the onyxian drake.

Of course like expected the kills went quickly but I had no better luck than any of the previous weeks getting the drop. It was at this point that I decided while I was farming content, I might as well take a few stabs at Kael’thas and his Ashes of Al’ar. The funny thing is… I don’t even like that mount, but it has become a point of pride for me to farm one up. So while I do at least one attempt every week, it is not like I would ever ride it. So far I have managed to solo the instance as Blood and Frost Deathknight and as Retribution Paladin… and I am wondering if I will be able to do it as Enhancement Shaman. Of course once again this week nothing of any interest dropped.

Finally while I was wallowing in my bitterness I opted to run all six of my characters through the holiday event instance. This year around it drops 480 necklaces, which unfortunately all of my characters have better. However I did manage to pick up a tanky necklace upgrade for my Paladin. Once again I am chasing a mount, but more than anything for total numbers… because there is no way in hell I would ever ride the Big Love Rocket around, but I would consider riding the Love Bird. More than anything I would be after the handful of pets. I normally don’t mess with the holiday events. Once I completed my violet proto drake, I have mostly ignored them. They are however pretty fast to run, since no queue last night lasted longer than 7 minutes as dps.

We Were Playing It Wrong

Over the last few days I have been complaining about the lack of Sapphire and Ruby or at least the difficulty of gathering it up. Yesterday I noticed the above tweet from Dave Georgeson, it seems like maybe we as a community was overlooking the intended way to get these. I had piddled around early in the game with a +1 discovery ring and didn’t see much difference, but at the suggestion of the tweet I crafted the Assessor’s Band and managed to get a +4 one. With it equipped alongside the existing +1 I am seeing a massive difference in the number of veins open to me as I wander through the world. I am sure you have been through the frustrating case of seeing a huge vein in the distance, but when you get up there finally there is nothing there. Well apparently that is what discovery is for.

After equipping the two rings, for the most part those veins stay in place as I get closer to them. Additionally the discovery trait also seems to interact with how often I get the rare drop from each item. This means I am getting more elementals, burled wood and as a result seeing more veins that have sapphire and ruby in them. They are still frustratingly rare, but less so. I did not play for extremely long last night, but I did manage to get a couple dozen gems of each type. Supposedly we are getting a patch today or tomorrow that will fix the issues that have arisen with boulders and trees spawning again on claims, with no real way to remove them. I am mostly waiting for this before I do much more building as I can’t really see my keep as a whole until I can remove some trees.

The Mafioso’s Daughter

Before I met my wonderful wife, there were plenty of missteps along the way. Most of them are not really entertaining in any fashion, but one I always felt like I dodged a bullet with… potentially literally. While I was still attending a junior college I met a really nice ballet major attending a nearby college. She seemed great, but early on I could tell that she was used to operating in a much higher tax bracket than I was. It wasn’t anything major, but her expectations of what “going out” meant were far different than that of my small town upbringing. After a few dates she pulled me aside and told me that she was starting to get serious about me… but there was something I needed to know.

It turns out that her family was connected to the mafia. She kind of brushed this off as no big deal or as something “I would get used to”. Her father ran some large electronics store, and they lived down the street from the Gotti clan in Long Island. We didn’t have Google back then, but over the course of a few online searches and some mapquest usage… it seemed like her story checked out. I’m a boy scout literally… I am not the type of person that “high crime” has ever appealed to. While I love watching shows like Boardwalk Empire, I have never once romanticized that lifestyle. It had become very clear over the course of the dates that she was “daddy’s little girl”, so I felt it was probably bad for my health if I did not let her down gently.

I did my best to be “less interesting” that I would hopefully make her lose interest in me, and over the course of a few weeks it worked. I wanted no part of the “family business”, but at the same time I didn’t want to break her heart… and have mine shot in the process. Sure I am probably over exaggerating the danger here, but it definitely freaked me the hell out. Looking back now I can regale you with the tale of the time I dated the Mafioso’s Daughter, but when I was going through it, nothing about it seemed funny. I doubt there was every a time where I would have just “gotten used to it”. Thankfully not terribly long after that I met my awesome wife, and everything before is now just a humorous footnote.