November 2014 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Game Launches

November 14, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Chocobo

I have to start off this mornings post by showing off my pride and joy. Some time ago Final Fantasy XIV put in a player reward system for recruiting new players. Since then I have had a number of folks use codes to get themselves a +25% xp helm while leveling. It seems as though one of them has finally reached the 90 days of subscription time point because in my mailbox there was sitting a Draught Chocobo Whistle. This is a two player mount allowing any group member to hop up on the back of your Chocobo with you. What makes it even more awesome is the fact that it does not scale down for small races. This means unlike my real chocobo… this one towers over the landscape making me feel epic. In theory it can’t scale as it has to support the largest of the player models… the Roegadyn.

If my calculations are correct this wonder of nature is thanks to the very awesome Solaria Neferim aka @CatInGlasses. The only sad thing is that I could not bring myself to wait until she logged into use it. It would have been fitting if my first passenger was her. In any case I am super grateful to have this awesome mount, and while I have already thanked her multiple times… I figured I would also post about it here in my blog. There are a few times where this mount will come in extremely handy… as did my two player rocket in World of Warcraft. Supposedly when they put in the marriage system they are also adding in a mount from going through the “Eternal Bond” ceremony. I am hoping they allow same sex marriage… which I believe they have already said they would. Thalen and I are already talking about gaming the system… because we like free mounts.

Game Launches

Yesterday morning while I slept the second dark portal to Draenor opened, letting players spill into the unspoiled planet to begin the Warlords of Draenor expansion. So as I slept and while I worked folks ground away madly trying to level to 100. By the time I reached home last night two of my guildies had managed to push across the line and ding 100. One of course questions why exactly they rushed to hit the finish line, given that they just spent over a year waiting on new content… but that is beside the point. For the most part the servers were largely unstable last night which has lead to much raging on the forums. Maybe it is just that I have lived through so many of these at this point, that I just expect things to go poorly. Blizzard is claiming that a major Distributed Denial of Service Attack is going on against their servers. It may very well be, considering that they came out against GG rather vocally at Blizzcon… and those folks seem to really like resort to this sort of behavior. By the same token it seems that every game launch lately has claimed to have a DDoS, which is a handy excuse because it means it is out of the companies control.

Ultimately at this point while I understand the frustration of the players, and I feel like Blizzard should have been better prepared… most game launches are just not smooth at all. Trying to be prepared for a stampede of wildebeests hitting your server, knowing that in a few weeks time most of them will have disappeared… feels like sheer madness. I think companies have done the math and realized that it is simply better for them to weather the first few days, because the most demanding players aren’t likely to be sticking around in any case. The players who are in it for the long haul will sit there waiting out the issues and keep plugging away slowly. Ultimately the problems seem to be revolving around the new systems they introduced like the Garrisons… and given time patches will arrive and problems will be fixed. It has been years since there has been a significant problem in World of Warcraft that was not remedied within days if not hours. All of this said, given the debacle that was the Diablo III launch… you would think they would be better prepared for the onslaught.

Slowly Plugging Away

I had apparently quit messing around with the Warlords Alpha before they put in the Tanaan Jungle “fight for the dark portal” sequence. I have to say I am sufficiently impressed. The arrival through the Dark Portal feels like you storming into a new world, and establishing a foothold. When we first stepped through the Dark Portal into Outland… the war was already waging and we were but a pawn in the larger plan. This time we are a hero of the alliance and feel crucial to the war strategy. Some folks have a problem with this, but I have enjoyed the fact that my stature seems to keep improving from expansion to expansion. If you contrast the openings of Wrath where we were very much still a trooper, to the opening of Pandaria where we start as just another soldier and elevate towards a significant hero over the course of the first few zones. Warlords of Draenor feels like it is aware of that past and builds upon it.

The other thing that the introduction does extremely well is introduce you to the title characters of this expansion… the Warlords of Draenor. One by one you encounter the various characters from the wallpaper as you fight to gain purchase in this new realm. By the time you finally reach Shadowmoon Valley or if you are Horde Frostfire Ridge… there is a sense of urgency that you must prepare for the incoming Iron Horde invasion. The game does a good job of instilling the player with a sense of purpose and a reason why they are here in the first place. Unfortunately a lot of this was completely wrecked by the fact that the servers were barely playable last night. There was a point fairly early on where I got completely derailed by the fact that entire regions of the map were locked in a time frozen state. Moving forward into another region would suddenly allow time to catch up, all of which became extremely disconcerting… but I am sure over the coming days this will clear up.

Poetics Ho!

Instead of hanging out and waiting on the servers to improve, I logged figuring I would lessen the server load by at least one… and played some Final Fantasy XIV. I managed to pull together an Expert Roulette group with my friend Spiral Sun and Warenwolf healing. This and a couple of Syrcus Tower runs managed to push me to my goal of 825 tomestones of poetics, and the Ironworks Trousers of Fending. This takes Belghast Sternblade my character on Cactuar to ilevel 111 which makes me extremely happy. In addition to that I managed to pick up another Sands of Time and another Oil of Time, which will always come in handy. The only negative thing is that I still have yet to get the Dragoon pants from Amon. At this point it is more a point of pride than anything, because I have more than enough Tomestones of Soldiery to just buy that set of pants. For the time being I figured I would just save up until I hit 1300 and get another weapon… since the 110 weapon seems to be the most beneficial item you can really get.

I still need about 100 Poetics bookrocks to cap for the week, but a few more expert roulettes and I will be there without much issue. Right now my weekend is going to be a bit of an odd one. Tomorrow we are travelling to Oklahoma City to look at a laptop. A few weeks ago mine started having issues, and in spite of all of my trouble shooting… and posting on the Lenovo forums… I have yet to find an answer to resolve it. Unfortunately it is also about six months out of warranty. I did however like it so much that I am looking at a slightly newer model. The cool thing is that the second video card that is in my current laptop, will fit in nicely with this new model, as well as give me a swappable BluRay drive. In any case I am doubting I will get in much play time tomorrow other than what I happen to do during our normal podcast time.

Perspective and Experience

This morning I am thankful for the gift of perspective and past experiences. There have been more than a few rage-y posts that I have made over the years regarding the launch of new games and new expansions. The one that I remember the most recently is the 1017 debacle that was the launch of Final Fantasy XIV. After a point it becomes easier to resign yourself to the mantra “this too shall pass”. Companies always fix problems, server loads always lessen, and leveling is not a race. I think one of the smartest things that Blizzard could have done was remove the concept of a World and Server first for the purpose of leveling. It encourage players to engage in self destructive behavior, burning themselves out within hours of a new expansion releasing. My hope is that while there are obviously some players rushing headlong towards oblivion… that this will cause players to level at a more sedate pace.

While the server frustrates are real, and they seem epic at this point… I am thankful for the perspective that in the grand scheme of things… this can’t even be termed as a rough launch. With the recent launch of Rift’s Nightmare Tide expansion… I quite literally lost 24 hours of progress made on my characters and tradeskills when they suffered a catastrophic hardware failure that caused a rollback. With the launch of Final Fantasy XIV they were so wholly unprepared for its success that the game did not even include a queue system, and players were force to set up hardware macros to keep trying to log in… and as such unintentionally DDoSing the lobby servers. When World of Warcraft initially launched it was a good solid month before the game was really reliably playable. I remember waiting thirty minutes in the mines around Elwynn forest for loot from a kobold corpse to show up in my inventory.

Sure you might have a queue on your server, but it is nothing compared to the reported 20 hour login queues that players experienced during the recent launch of ArcheAge. Nor does it really compare to the fact that when the Landmark paid alpha rolled out… I rebuilt my claim four separate times before I actually managed to get one that stuck around for more than a day… as they kept having to wipe the voxel data due to bugs that caused corruption. Admittedly… that was an alpha, but one players paid to get into… and caused equal amounts of frustration. All of these things taken into account… I can’t even call this a bad launch yet. Granted over the coming days things are either going to improve… or they are going to get drastically worse. In either case I will re-evaluate, but for the time being I am thankful to have the presence of mind to just go play something else for awhile.

Collaborate Not Compete

November 13, 2014 by Belghast

For Azeroth

Last night while I slept Warlords of Draenor launched in the United States. Once again the launch time was based on Pacific Standard Time meaning that it occurred at 2 in the morning for me. I actually got to see some play last night from Qelric, due to the fact that this time it actually launched ahead of time for our European friends. I think it is pretty awesome that finally it launched for them at the same time it was slotted to launch in other territories, it just meant that they technically got a head start. In part I think this decision was influenced by the fact that with this expansion they have completely removed the concept of world and server firsts. So while folks are hustling around like mad, presently there are nine people online in guild for example… there really isn’t much of a broader point to it.

I think removing the world and server firsts was a good step, but I think it is so ingrained into the Warcraft culture to rush headlong towards the finish line. My hope is that this will at least cause some of the players to slow down and enjoy the journey. That said I realize I will probably level quickly… because I always seem to level quickly. This is more of a necessity this time around since I am actively juggling two different games and trying to be available for grouping in both. Unfortunately I will not really get to experience Draenor until after work, though I have popped in this morning to at least take a screenshot of the trio standing outside the Dark Portal. I must admit that while I played in Alpha… nothing I did actually felt real. This time around I will be actually working on things like Garrisons permanently, so I think a lot of the stickiness of this expansion will have more effect.

Awesome Communities

The other day I made a connection that I had failed to grasp until then, when a friend from twitter pointed something out to me. For weeks I have been talking about just how amazing the community has been playing Final Fantasy XIV. It is the little things, like the fact that the other morning I zoned into North Shroud looking for the B Rank Phecda. It has been common place for me to /shout in zone asking if anyone has seen the spawn. I had a pretty quick response from a player who not only gave me the location, but also hung out at the spawn point to help me kill it… even though she didn’t need the kill. Then a good ten minutes later, another person sent me a tell asking if I still needed it, because they just ran past the big bear. This little Vignette plays out over and over… and I have added so many random strangers to my friends list through casual interaction like this. There is this global sense that we are all in things together that I cherish.

If I had to rattle off the four best server communities I have been part of it would have to be Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, Landroval in Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World (mega server), and Antonia Bayle in Everquest II. In each case there have been so many positive random encounters that make living in those worlds enjoyable. I’ve had completely random strangers run up to me in Bree on Landroval offering me crafted goods to help my leveling process. I’ve had folks offer me a group during the various Everquest II holiday events, that then turn into multiple hour long treks through the world. I’ve had random strangers stop me in the Secret World to tell me that they liked my outfit, and ask where I got various bits of it. These casual interactions remind me of the way servers used to feel back during the early days when the MMOs were a little less “massive”.

Collaborate Not Compete

It was around this time in our conversation that my friend pointed a thread of connection between all of these games that I had never really noticed myself. None of those games have real and meaningful faction rivalries. Sure in The Secret World and Everquest II you have certain alliances, but largely this work out to be personal choices. Being Templar versus being Illuminati is largely just a flavor choice, since from the moment you get out of London or New York you are grouping together and communicating freely. Games like Final Fantasy XIV and Lord of the Rings online don’t even have these artificial divisions. From the moment you start playing any of these games, you are instilled with this spirit that all of the players are ultimately battling something more sinister than they can imagine. So it makes perfect sense to lend another player a helping hand along the way, since you are not competing against each other in any meaningful way.

There might be a certain measure of self sorting going on when it comes to players of these games as well. Since none of the four really have a strong PVP aspect, that flavor of super competitive player is just not interested in playing them. That means you are left with a more collaborative “role-playing server crowd” type player. Ultimately this shared struggle, and spirit of cooperation has always been why I have self sorted myself onto Role-Playing servers, because in general this type of player is more prevalent there. Essentially what I am coming to realize is that the awesome communities that I have held out as paragons against normal online gaming horribleness… all exist for pretty similar reasons. They are all environments that teach the players to get along with each other, rather than compete.

Collaborative Environments

To tie into today’s post, I am thankful that games exist that teach players to work together rather than work against each other. So many games set up an artificial conflict between players, and try desperately to draw them into it. As I said in my “Sandboxes and Sheep” post, these artificial faction boundaries have no meaning to me personally. I have no real emotional ties to the Horde or the Alliance, other than the fact that I mostly chose Alliance because that is where the Dwarves were. However this decision did not immediately make me hate the horde, in fact I have 11 Alliance characters on Argent Dawn… and 11 Horde characters on The Scyers… the realm that is connected to Argent Dawn. Over years of playing on that server I made just as many friendships across the faction barrier as I did within my own pool of players. In fact one of my key problems with World of Warcraft has always been that it made us choose sides in a war that was largely meaningless to us.

All of this is the reason why I am thankful that there are games that have transcended faction. I was hugely impressed when Rift decided to abandon the artificial conflict with their “Faction as Fiction” patch removing the hard lines between Defiant and Guardian. I think as a whole that game has been greatly improved for doing so. More than that however I am thankful for the games that never put up those walls in the first place. Eorzea is this wonderful land where the races don’t always get along, but they are not openly warring either… because the writers have created a threat so great that in its face… squabbles seem petty. After talking this whole situation through, I feel like this sort of environment really does breed a player willing to help others freely. It is for that spirit, that I am thankful for. If you are actively making your community better, you are doing awesome work.

Carried through Garrosh

November 12, 2014 by Belghast

Strange Days

Of all of the things that I had planned to do yesterday, the events that unfolded were completely unforeseen. As it was Veterans day yesterday, I was off and took care of a few things around the house. Namely considering the extreme dip in temperature I wanted to get the heating and air guys out to do our winter check up. We have an air conditioning unit from 1980 the year our house was built, and it continues to limp along valiantly. At one point we had discussed getting a new unit, but the good folks from our heating and air company informed us that we were simply better off to just keep limping along with the one we had. Apparently they do not make units quite like the one we have any longer. So as a result we have paid for a yearly maintenance contract that mostly involves a winter and spring checkup. When things break, and they have in the past we get deep discounted parts and labor while under contract. The cool thing is that there have been a lot of little things that they simply did not charge us for, so I feel like overall it is a good plan.

Wow-64 2014-11-11 09-42-42-476 While waiting on the heating and air guy to show up, I spent a good deal of time running dungeons and raids in Final Fantasy XIV. Since Rae was off as well we managed to get her a Sunken Temple of Qarn run and would have gotten Snowcloak but she had still not done the Ramuh fight, so at last check was still catching up to the main storyline. Since I had been kicking around the notion of playing some World of Warcraft with the launch of Warlords of Draenor, I decided I should probably poke around in game and at the very least do the precursor quest out in the blasted lands. The quest chain itself was rather enjoyable, as you assist Murad in staving back the tide of Iron Horde that have come through the portal. I think Murad is going to be the character we get the closest to during the course of this expansion. Essentially I feel he is going to be this expansions Chen Stormstout as it were, and I am okay with this notion especially after seeing the motivation behind why he acts he way he does.

Carried through Garrosh

While fiddling around in game I bumped into so many people that were shocked to see me online. I joked that they were just seeing a shadow, and that I wasn’t really playing World of Warcraft. Mostly I don’t want people to think I am “back” because the last two times I have showed up in game… it didn’t last for terribly long. I was just there long enough for folks to get accustomed to relying on me for things again, and I really don’t want to disappoint them once more. Damai has done an awesome job of holding things together in the guild. In the time since the launch of Warlords of Draenor he has fallen into the role of General, keeping the raid group moving forward and organizing weekly flex raids to help pull up folks that didn’t quite have the gear to do larger things. He popped into the game while I was roaming about and said “you should really come get your Garrosh weapon tonight.” I of course protested, saying I was unprepared and undergeared… but he waved away all of this notions and said that I just needed to show up.

I figured what the hell did I have to lose. I knew the Siege of Orgrimmar raid at least somewhat form doing the LFR incarnation, and I had no firm plans for that evening. Last night was to be their final time running Garrosh, and one of the final times available to get the heirloom weapons from it. So after not having played WoW for at least six months I found myself getting pulled into the final raid of this current expansion. To make matters even more interesting, apparently we were doing Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar. In Damai’s words “Heroic is the new Normal” and as we got underway it certainly seemed as such… that is until I actually attempted to dps anything. Essentially it was through a combination of skill and gear that they were able to make everything look this easy, and clearly I had neither. In fact I brought Belghast, one of the last characters I had managed to push up to 90 organically and had not really geared much. He was sitting at 496 ilevel before walking into the instance, and through the course of the evening that improved to 540. I quite literally soaked up almost a full set of gear, and now he is in a far better place for the purpose of leveling in the expansion.

Rift Repaired

I’ve talked some about the Rift that existed when I returned to the game last time. I fought hard to try and mend it, but ultimately failed. What I did do apparently however was start to break down the walls between the factions within. It seems that once the two warring captains had moved on to other things… one of them to a mythic raid, and another to move on to his own guild… things seem to have repaired themselves. It seems as though there has been somewhat of a “Pax Stalwartia” as folks have flourished once the drama went away. I would like to think it was the forcing of sides to talk that helped this along, but really I think I was more of a hinderance than a help. I actively tried to keep the pieces of the puzzle together, when I should have surgically cut the damage limb from the guild. I have a problem with never quite wanting to give up on someone, that I keep seeing the best intentioned version of them buried deep under the bullshit.

Maybe if I had never shown back up, we would have reached a state of peace faster, or maybe the guild would have quite literally cleaved in two… I will never actually know. That is the fate that the guild seemed to be heading towards when I returned… two factions, one of which would win the guild, and the other would be exiled. Instead now we have the bulk of the guild cooperating together, and only a few ended up leaving. In any case I was extremely proud last night to see everything going so amazingly smoothly. It was a supremely odd sensation to be carried to victory on the backs of the guild that I founded ten years ago. I can’t take responsibility for last night, other than that long ago I set the wheels in motion and caused these people to meet each other. More or less I have been gone since the beginning of Cataclysm, and in that time they have really done amazing things as a team.

Pax Stalwartia

Maybe last night was what I needed to see. For some time Rylacus had told me that things had improved in the guild, but I didn’t want to believe it. I have talked many times about never being able to go back. If I could teleport to those days in Late Night Raiders, or Duranub Raiding Company… or even No Such Raid… I would have. Last night felt like a mix of all of these rolled together. Folks were jovial and happy, and not a single person got grumpy when we wiped. They enjoyed the presence of one another, and enjoyed what they were doing. There was so much excited talk about what was to come in the expansion, and tentative plans to raid come December 2nd when the raid opens. It did my soul good to see this happening. I feel like they deserve me going into this with an open mind, because maybe home does still exist after you leave it.

All of this said, my heart still belongs to Eorzea, and the amazing community that I have found on Cactuar. I have so many goals that I want to accomplish there, and we have this amazing mass of folks gathered. I am never going to play just one game, it isn’t in my nature. So while I am “playing” Rift, and by that I mean logging in every single day to run my minions on missions… I am not really “playing” the game. Nor am I really playing most of the games I log into periodically. For the time being I think I am going to be playing Final Fantasy XIV and allowing myself to also play some World of Warcraft at the same time. I find it comforting that both House Stalwart and Greysky Armada exist… and both are completely different guilds. I’ve left my mark permanently on both, and I think both are really amazing places to play. What I find the most comforting however is that in both cases I am not responsible for their destiny. That in both cases the guilds are taking care of themselves.

Old Friends

Last night was this strange trip down memory lane as I experienced folks in a way that I have not since the beginning of Cataclysm. So many of my friendships from World or Warcraft were forged in battle, and in a way it took battle once again for me to really remember why we were friends in the first place. I am thankful to have a group of friends that are still out there, keeping on without me. That seem to be willing to accept me for whatever I happen to be at the moment, and welcome me back time and time again with open arms. I am extremely lucky to have lots of pools of these kinds of friends scattered from game to game, that are happy to see me show up, and don’t hold a grudge against me when I ultimately leave. It is comforting to know that the universe is just fine in the absence of your presence.

I realize that might sound like a strange thing, that I am happy to not be needed. You have to realize however that all I ever wanted was for House Stalwart to give them a framework upon which to do awesome things. So much of my time in Vanilla, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King was spent being a catalyst, and enabling things that didn’t happen when I wasn’t around. The guild was absolutely a cult of personality, and when the personality went away… people didn’t interact at all. So to see this guild that functions entirely without me being around, makes me happier than anyone would really know. I am thankful to have all these awesome people step up and take over the mantle of leadership. I have never been happier to be obsolete in my life, and it is my hope that I can continue to be so for a very long time.

Hunting Bookrocks

November 11, 2014 by Belghast

Deep Freeze

Last night was another prime example of the odd weather patterns here in Oklahoma. When I got home from work it had managed to heat up enough to kick on our air conditioning. Then over the course of one of the worst wind storms I can recall, that pretty much wrecked the gate to our backyard… it dropped from a balmy 80 degrees to 33 degrees and still really windy this morning. Being veterans day, and being that I am off work today… I had planned on having the Heating and Air guy out today to do our yearly “winter” inspection. I am guessing that I picked the perfect day because tonight it is supposed to plummet even colder. I realize that all of you northerners are thinking that the temperatures I am describing is nothing… but for someone raised to live in 70 degree to 115 degree climate this is pretty cold.

The problem with the heating and air folks coming out is the fact that my office was a mess. I have a bad habit of just tossing empty boxes in the corner and over the course of a year the pile of boxes had gotten pretty epic. It made me realize just how much stuff we order from Amazon. While we do not have curbside recycling here, we do however have these little bins called “Mr Murf” that I can take the cardboard to. So I have loaded the back of my jeep with the various assorted boxes, condensing them as best I could. In addition I went out into the backyard and unhooked the hose from the house in preparation for a hard freeze. The last step was to gather up all the trash and put the bin out next to the curb, feed the cats, feed myself and sit down to blog. All in all I have had a damned productive day and it is only 7:30 in the morning.

Hunting Bookrocks

I rushed around so much this morning so that, one it would actually get done, and two I could spend the rest of my day leisurely farming for bookrocks in Final Fantasy XIV. Before I finished the night last night I managed to cap my Tomestones of Poetics, and similarly I am close to another piece of armor with my Tomestones of Soldiery. Generally speaking running content on reset day yields some of the best results, so I will more than likely be hitting a mixture of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and Expert Roulette in an attempt to get the precious precious bookrocks. At this point I really want to get my pants drop out of Syrcus Tower so I can stop running it as a dragoon. Ultimately I would rather be running it as a class that has a higher likelihood of getting drops like my Bard. However given my past luck with MMOs, I know the moment I take anything other than the class that can roll “need” on them… they will start dropping every single time.

In The Burning Crusade I raided Karazhan every single Sunday for over a year. During this time tanking it, I managed to get Attumen’s mount, but never managed to get the tanking necklace that eluded me. After a years time I got tired of dragging a character in there that only needed a single item, so I started healing it on my paladin… letting another up and coming tank take my space. The first time I was in there as a Paladin… the tanking neck dropped. That has always been the case for me… I have exceptional luck early on and then there are one or two items that will not drop no matter how many times I attempt to get them. Then there are super rare items that everyone seems to be able to get but just end up taunting me. I am looking at you Headless Horseman mount. When I was farming that regularly, almost every time someone in my instance would get their mount… but I would not. I guess it could be worse… I could be Rylacus or Tamrielo… who simply don’t get drops at all.

Rapidly Backpedaling

I am still completely up in the air as to whether or not I will be playing Warlords of Draenor come Thursday. Had you asked me two weeks ago I would have said an absolute and resounding “Nope”. Then Blizzcon happened… and the extreme heartstring tugging of the Looking for Group documentary. That thing crit me straight to the feels for 9999… yeah I am still thinking in Final Fantasy numbers here. Unfortunately I felt things that I have not felt stirring in me about World of Warcraft since probably I last set foot on Draenor or at the very least last set foot in Northrend. This started an unraveling of my resolve against playing World of Warcraft. Basically there are two important pieces of data. The first being that my subscription does not officially run out for another 19 days. The second being that thanks to them opening preorders what seems like a year before the expansion actually launched… I’ve already pre-purchased the game and used my boost to 90 to push up my Night Elf Mage.

So there you have it… I have both access to my account to play, and the expansion already sitting there waiting on me. The problem is my problems with the expansion are still there. There is an excellent video from Qelric condensing her views about the Death Knight class in the expansion, and while I have never been able to be that concise she sums it up nicely. All that I have been able to say… is that they just felt wrong somehow. Like I never could quantify exactly what that meant. All of that said… if I do end up coming back I will more than likely do so on Belghast my warrior, with a return to protection tanking. I managed to get into Belghast a little bit right before I quit playing before the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and was having a reasonably good time with it. The protection changes seem to be mostly good, and the feel is solid. I would be kinda nice to set foot in Draenor on the character that came into its own during the Burning Crusade expansion. BC was the era where I transitioned from Hunter main to Warrior Tank main, so there is a whole bundle of nostalgia wrapped up in that setting.

The one thing I know for certain… I will never be leading the World of Warcraft House Stalwart again. When I came back last year, I fought hard to try and mend the rift that had built up in the guild in my absence. I tried desperately to get the two factions to talk to one another, but no amount of me acting as a bridge between… managed to actually help. This broke my resolve, and eventually the problem child in the equation left… and things apparently have been rather blissful in his absence. World of Warcraft is not a game I can play seriously any more. I tried to go back to raiding regularly with this last expansion and it just did not fit with the way I want to play the game. So long as I was a damned dirty casual I seemed to be enjoying myself, but the moment people started relying on me for anything… I was back in the position that I fought so hard to escape the first time. If I do play again, it would be as a secondary game the same way that I continue to play Rift. It is time for the Warcraft branch of House Stalwart to have a true leader, not just a figurehead that long ago stopped loving that position.

Given that it is Veterans Day here in the United States, I thought it fitting to show my thankfulness for the service of our men and women in the armed forces. This actually means quite a bit to me, because while I have never served in the Military myself… both of my grandfathers did. We lose sight on just how hardcore World War 2 must have been. The Grandfather on my fathers side was wounded during the D-Day invasion, and had a machine gun emplacement shoot down his back as he was trying to duck into a foxhole. Had he not happened to quite literally fall on a medic, he would have died as the machine gun and sliced through his lung and it was collapsing. They bandaged him up just enough to send him back out into battle, where he eventually participated in the Battle of the Bulge. During that leg of the campaign it was so cold that he lost half of his toes to frostbite.

My Grandfather on my Mother’s side was in the Tunisian front and captured during the Battle of Kasserine Pass, and spent time in a prison camp. Eventually he joined in with others and staged and escape managing to eventually get back to Allied lines. While on the run he was aided by various farming families in the Italian countryside. My wife’s step father on the other hand was a veteran of the Korean Conflict. He was a member of the Chosin Few, a group of service men trapped on a peninsula in the Chosin Reservoir that held off Chinese forces. The thing that I found the most interesting is that all three men were completely stoic about their service. Not a single one of them wanted any recognition for what they had done for our country. In fact none of them really wanted to talk about it at all. It was only later in life that each was willing to give us little tidbits of information regarding what all they had been through. I quite literally cannot imagine what they had to go through to survive, and I am thankful that I will never have to know. So on this Veterans Day I am thankful for all of the men and women who have served our country so that I can have the life of safety and personal freedoms that I lead.

#FFXIV #WoW