AggroChat Podcast

Wildstar Attunements

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Bon Voyage

Finally home and sitting on the sofa and starting to tackle the blog post of the day.  I ended up taking the day off from work to make sure I was able to do whatever my wife needed me to do this morning.  She however has been successfully ferried to the airport, and while I got turned around leaving the airport I got to flex my knowledge of the backroads of North Tulsa to get back home.  I am going to have to master highway 11 this summer during the Twitter Math Camp, where I am serving as a shuttle driver.  However for the time being I am nice and safe and home.

When I got here it was really nice out, so I opted to go for a little walk rather than having to do all of it this evening.  The thing this highlighted however is that I apparently need to try and find some earbuds with a longer cord.  If I moved my head too quickly they ripped out of my ears and went flailing to the ground.  If I am going to make it through the nightly ritual of walking I am going to have to do it to music.  So after while I guess I will make a trip out to target or best buy and see what I can find.  Once upon a time I had a set of head phones that had little behind the ear clips, so I am thinking I need to find a pair of those.

Wildstar Attunements

For some time now an infographic has been circulating around the internet outlining the “12 step process” for raid attunement in Wildstar.  I admit when I first saw it, I was extremely hesitant because it is quite the ordeal… however the longer I have “lived with it” the more I think it might be just want the doctor ordered.  I talked about my feeling regarding attunements and skill checks this weekend on the AggroChat podcast, but this mornings post is completely devoted to two excellent posts I read yesterday from Liore and Syl about the subject.  I am not going to preface or summarize the posts, because you really need to just read their own words on the subject.  Instead I am going to go off in my own rambly direction to talk about skill gates and attunements in general.  If you are curious about the 12 step image… it is spanning the right side of the page… for dramatic effect.

Evil Attunements

Once upon a time in another life I was a somewhat successful raid leader in World of Warcraft.  I lead a few raids during the 40 man era, but got really serious about doing it during the Burning Crusade 25 man era with the non-guild based raid groups of NSR and Duranub Raiding Company.  I know the pain that attunements can be all too tragically as a raid leader.  In order to get fresh blood into your raid, it meant either you spent time running old content and gearing those players up… or you resorted to stealing members away from fledgling raids that were maybe not as highly progressed as your own.

The problem with the World of Warcraft attunement system, was that it required an entire raid to complete.  This was a constant drag on the raid system, and meant lots of players would have to join one raid just to get keyed to be able to join a bigger one.  This system invoked so much animosity, just like it did back in Everquest where the system really saw the first light of day.  During the Planes of Power expansion, getting keyed for various planes became a power vacuum that only a few elite guilds allowed anyone to have.  Considering the raid designers for World of Warcraft were themselves the leaders of these elite raids… it was not surprising that the keying system ended up something very similar.

The Gatekeeper

The problem is that the attunements also served as a way to gate the content, and provide a level of gearing that you must be able to get past in order to proceed.  To some extent they have tried to do this with item levels, but that in itself is also inefficient.  Just because a player has a really high gear score, it tells you nothing about their ability.  I’ve known more than a few players who have reached high gear score out of persistence, and still perform horribly in a raid environment.  For ages these games have needed an objective measure for just how prepared a player is for the encounters contained within a raid.  Nothing feels worse than having to be that raid leader, and tell a player that they simply do not perform well enough for the raid to carry them along.

One of the best mechanisms I have seen in a game to gate based on player skill… is the not terribly creatively named “Gatekeeper” encounter in The Secret World.  In fact I have gushed about the need for this encounter on more than one occasion, but the latest is in the “WoW Needs a Gatekeeper” post.  This encountered required you to complete a specific test designed to exemplify your ability to heal, tank or dps nightmare level content.  Your reward for completing it, was literally the ability to get to the nightmare level gates in the game.  As a DPS player at the time, I have to say that the test fully prepared me for the rigors that would be Nightmare difficulty content, and I am sure eventually raid level content.

What was so great about the encounter was that it was entirely personal.  No one could carry you through it, or even assist you.  You had to come to a solution to the puzzle of how to complete all of the necessary tasks to progress forward.  This type of skill gate draws a clear line in the sand between the players that are ready and the players that are not, and takes a lot of the stress off the raid leader.  I don’t like elitism, but raiding was never one of those things designed for the masses.  It is designed to be an extremely rigorous skill based activity, much like high level PVP.  The harsh reality is that not everyone should be able to raid.  That is not to say that I don’t think there should be valuable high end content for everyone to complete.  But I don’t necessarily think that raiding should be something that every  player has the expectation of being able to do.

Why Wildstar Isn’t Evil

One of the coolest things about the Gatekeeper encounter is it gives players a shared struggle that they had to get through to be able to progress to the next level.  My friends and I still to this day talk about what a colossal pain in the ass the dps version was.  It took me 25 tries and I think it took my friend Warenwolf around 30… because we were both too damned stubborn to respec to the “optimal” path to complete it.  We beat the damned thing on our own terms, and now carry it as a badge of honor.  This is what raiding used to be, not about elitism, but about defeating something really hard together as a group and carrying with it a sense of pride in that accomplishment.  I honesty feel like Wildstar is trying to return to that era when you felt like you earned every inch of space in each dungeon or raid you completed.  I for one am fine with this change, even if it means I will likely never be able to raid again.  I just hope that they put in content to keep me entertained in my casualness.

The main reason why I feel like the Wildstar attunement process is just is the fact that for the most part it is a personal journey.  Steps 1-5 are entirely soloable, or at the very least zone events that will likely have other players completing them without the need for a premade group.  Step 6 requires a group but should be able to be completed through pugging if you need to.  To be honest every single achievement listed in the attunement, is either solo or something you can accomplish with either a freeform group inside of the zone, or puggable through the dungeon finder system.  Sure you can get your guild to help you out significantly on several of the steps, but the length of the quest chain means that not many guilds will be dragging players through it.  This means the onus of the entire event is on the player, and not on a guild or a raid to “catch them up”.  So while it is not a one stop shop like the Gatekeeper, I feel it creates a sufficient skill gate to make sure that the players are prepared for raiding in Wildstar will likely mean.

I feel like Wildstar is a game with so much casual but challenging content, that there is always going to be something for the players that cannot raid to do.  While World of Warcraft has made so many steps to make raiding an inclusive thing…  it feels like it lost the epic quality that it used to have along the way.  Some of my best moments in gaming came from Vanilla and BC era raiding, because when we FINALLY downed a boss… it felt like we had done something spectacular.  When I got that tier set…  it felt like it was a long fought struggle… and not something I gained by simply “putting in enough time” or “grinding enough currency”.  I feel like raiding could definitely use an infusion of hardcore again, even like I said earlier… if that means I won’t be able to participate.

#Wildstar #Attunements

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Band Back Together

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Lackluster Milestone

This past week I have been pushing hard to meet a personal goal.  Inside FitBit on your profile page they have this little progress bar with a weekly goal of 70,000 steps.  So I have been pushing all week to try and hit 10,000 per day to make sure I could reach this goal.  I thought lights and buzzers would go off when I hit it, or at the very least I would earn a badge for it.  Problem is that we recorded the AggroChat podcast last night, and immediately afterwards we went for our evening walk.  When I got back in my mind was on the podcast that I needed to edit and I spent until well after midnight doing just that.  So by the time I actually came back to the website and checked my progress…  the bar was back at 0.  I never got to see the bar full, because I really wanted to take a screenshot of it.  Unfortunately however they have no mechanism to go back and see how you did the previous week…  seems like a massive design flaw.

Right now my 7 day average is over 11,000 steps and my total for last week is 79,818.  I have to just be at peace knowing that I did in fact accomplish the goal… even though there is nothing showing that I did.  The problem with the fitbit is it is also a double edged sword.  When things aren’t being tracked I just as quickly stop caring about the overall progress as I started.  I try my best to charge my band at work when I am not going to be walking around for a bit.  However at one point Friday I got up to go to the bathroom… and started to take the “long route” that involves basically walking the entire floor…  but stopped the moment I realized I didn’t have my band on.  If it was not getting recorded… it was immediately not worth the effort.  I know this is a jacked up way of looking at things, but anyone who has done one of these always on pedometers likely experiences the same thing.  I am somewhat disgusted with myself because this is only steps away from “food only being good if you took a picture of it”, but alas the positive effects of the fitbit far outweigh the negatives.

Band Back Together

Last night was a fairly monumental occasion because for the first time in a month we had our regular cast of hosts for the show.  Rae has officially decided that she no longer hates us…  even though she swears that she never actually did.  She has started employing the wonders of her phone and setting an alarm for recording time.  This week we talk about all sorts of interesting things.  Kodra is going to be out next week at Origins game fair in Columbus Ohio.  This con has a pretty proud tradition of competitive gaming and he is going there to participate in the regional for the My Little Pony card game.  We’ve talked about this TCG before, but Kodra gives us a nice long rundown of the two decks he is considering taking to the competition and the strong points of each.

We talk for a bit about the World of Warcraft Alpha launch and more specifically its timing.  Finding it really interesting that for the most part it has no NDA.  I am wondering if this is going to be the case for all new Blizzard games considering Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm do not have NDAs associated with them either.  Finally we get around to talking about the real big event of the week…  all of us dipping our toes into Wildstar.  It was a really great show, and it was awesome to finally have the regular cast all in one place again.  Kodra introduced a new feature at the tail end of the show, where he, Rae and Ashgar talk about the League of Legends LCS games… and I sit in the background confused with nothing at all to add to the conversation.  That said I am going to try and watch a few games to see if I can get into it now that I am regularly playing league again on Thursday nights.

Shards Online

ShardsPreAlpha 2014-06-08 11-08-52-018 For the next several hours you can download and play the trial of Shards Online.  One of my good friends is on the community team for this game, so I have been promising for a bit that I would check it out.  At face value the game seems like the spiritual successor for Ultima Online.  Functionally playing it, it feels a lot like playing Neverwinter Nights mixed with a MOBA.  You essentially have the standard left click to attack auto abilities and then special abilities aligned to QWER.  Functionally it is a unity based game, so that means it should run well on multiple platforms.  The current client is pretty poorly optimized and on my laptop that has dual Nvidia 660 GTX video cards… I was only seeing around 30 frames per second.  However given time that should change as they optimize the settings.

ShardsPreAlpha 2014-06-08 10-52-36-268 The gameplay is really intuitive and straight forward, and for the most part I felt like I could take a number of mobs in the test shards.  The shards that are available are all significantly smaller than the final size, and designed simply to give a player a feeling for the gameplay.  The real promise to me is that players will be able to have a certain measure of control over their own game worlds.  In the days after I left Everquest, every so often I would dabble in the emulator server community.  I had insane amounts of fun redesigning zones and on one of my forays I completely reworked the way that  the entire butcher-block to crush bone sequence worked evening out the rough spots in the leveling curve and re-itemizing the entire thing.  I worked on bringing the Dark Elf influence to a higher effort with camps of actual Dark Elves scattered around the closer you got to crush bone.

ShardsPreAlpha 2014-06-08 10-51-24-355 So for me the promise of shards is that you can legally run your own server, and configure a community the way you want it.  That said I am not sure if this is a game for me.  I really do not like a click to move environment, and the graphics while charming feel like a throwback to an earlier era.  I simply do not have the nostalgia about Ultima Online that many players do.  I played a very small bit of it before finding Everquest and getting into that game.  So my “good old days” are not Ultima but instead a mixture of EQ, DAoC and Vanilla World of Warcraft.  As a result I feel like I am missing a piece of the charm that is this game.  For someone who pines for a return to the days of Ultima Online… I feel like this is your opportunity to get into a world and help shape it.  For me, it is just a really interesting novelty.

ShardsPreAlpha 2014-06-08 10-54-27-452 Shards is a game where you start out extremely weak and then build up your character over a number of painstaking levels.  As a result my desire to zerg rush camps and play action hero style caused me to see this screen a lot.  Not sure if there was really a death penalty other than having to wait for the release timer to tick down, but I died often enough to realize this is not my style of game in that aspect either.  I think it is going to be interesting and I hope we see a massive surge in funding thanks to the preview weekend.  I think the lackluster funding is mostly a side effect of kickstarter fatigue and the lack of kickstarter MMO projects that have actually released.  In a way however I also feel like Shards is a game for an earlier era, and is not really the type of game to appeal broadly to currently MMO gamers.  If you however want a trip down Ultima Online memory lane… this game is for you, and I hope you give it a try.

Clinging to Past Glory

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Twilight Zone

twilight-zone-logo Yesterday I am pretty sure a rift opened up and somehow transported us to another universe.  I would think that it was one or two limited events happening… but the entire freaking day was bizarre.  For starters we were supposed to go to a wedding with some family at 1:30 in the afternoon.  From the moment we woke up, my wife had text messages waiting from her family wanting to know if we were on the road yet.  We have no clue why they were wanting us to be on the road at 8 in the morning… for a 1:30 wedding, but apparently they did.  So I go out, get breakfast, write yesterdays blog post and go shower.  We leave the house around 10 am, which we think is pretty damned good for a 1:30 wedding.  While in transit my wife texts them saying that we should be there somewhere between 11:00 and 11:30.

You would think that the same family that was concerned that we were not on the road at 8 am… and continued to text all damned morning wondering if we had left yet, would be happy to know exactly when we would arrive. NOPE!  We get up to my wife’s mothers house and no one is there.  My nephew-in-law at some point ended up behind us, he was returning from working an early shift at the prison and was coming home to change.  He was literally the only other person there, we had no clue where anyone was.  Finally we get a text back stating that they are at a garage sale and that they have our least responsible aunt in tow with them… and her adopted daughter… and her hyperactive child.  So quickly what I thought was only a few people ordeal ballooned into a massive family group.  At this point I was wishing I had begged a way into just staying the hell at home and playing Wildstar… which launched yesterday.

Shortage of Chicken

Our family keeping to the insanity of the day decides that we are going to go eat before the 1:30 wedding.  They pick what appears to be an extremely busy restaurant, roughly 15 minutes away from where we were at the moment, but in the same town as the wedding.  Problem is we have a party of roughly a dozen people in a very small town, just a few minutes after noon.  I remark before we go on this journey that there is no way in hell we are getting out of the restaurant before 1:30 as it is a little after 12:30 when we actually arrive and get seated.  To make things even more surreal… most of us end up ordering the Chicken Strip basket.  Apparently they assumed no one would ever order that… because they only actually had a dozen chicken strips.  So we set about with the waitress to do some complex math and steal a chicken strip from each 3 strip basket trying to somehow divide the “loaves and fishes” enough to feed the family.

Somehow STILL we ended up short on chicken strips, but that doesn’t really matter considering the moment we got our food…  we needed to ask for to go boxes and go pay out.  Our family knowing that we were under a time crunch… apparently decided to talk incessantly instead of eat.  I knew I was under a constraint so I scarfed away until I managed to down the two chicken strips and a basket of fries in record time.  Everyone else walked out with food barely touched… so I am still wondering what the hell the point of eating before the wedding was since literally no one but myself and my nephew-in-law who also ate rapidly in silence, managed to get done with our food.  I went to pay out as everyone else attempted to load up their stuff and get on the road.  I don’t know where we are going… so I opt to follow my mother-in-law who takes us on another one of her “shortcuts” that end up taking twice as long to actually get anywhere.

Clinging to Past Glory

So at 1:40 we arrive at the site of the wedding, which thankfully was a very untraditional one.  Due to some rain and some technical difficulties they had yet to get anything underway.  Ultimately we arrived at just about the perfect time.  One of the things you need to know about Oklahoma and our culture is that we absolutely worship at the altar of High School football.  I am using the global we here because I could give two shits about sports in general, and the sportcentric culture made my own high school days miserable.  Given my size I was constantly recruited to the football team, which I wanted nothing to do with.  However I am very much not “joe everyman” when it comes to my area, and the majority of men eat, sleep and breathe football.  In fact the entire reason why everyone was showing up for this wedding was the fact that it was being held at the local football stadium… with the 52 year old groom wearing a football uniform and the 38 year old bride wearing a prom dress.  There were lots of jokes being made about “Redneck Weddings” but I feel this was a missed occasion, as it doesn’t get much more Redneck than this.

bridesmaids  If you have never attended a high school homecoming game… then this won’t make much sense to you, but traditionally each of the candidates for the homecoming queen are brought in one by one in a convertible of some sort that has been decorated with their name and grade on the side.  To keep with the homecoming theme of the wedding, each of the bridesmaids were driven in similar fashion.  The thing is… normally in a homecoming game when one candidate reaches the center of the field the next candidate starts behind them.  They say a few words about the candidate and them move on to the next one.  The bride in this case had written long rambling walls of super personal text… which when read by a male announcer just came off as surreal.  The thing is it took me about three bridesmaids to figure out that the announcer was not the person who wrote the text originally.

bride_arriving At first I seriously thought he was just rambling off the cuff, and as such could not figure out why he was going so slow.  In all seriousness this phase of the wedding took roughly an hour.  Each bridesmaid arrived in a car that fit their personality with a song playing in the background picked out by the bride.  I fully understand the whole “her special day” aspect but it was 85* in the hot sun, on metal bleachers.  She could have had a little common sense and kept things brief.  Today I am fairly sunburned thanks to this madness.  What made it even worse is the fact that she had roughly ten different bridesmaids that she had written two to three paragraphs about as they rode in.  Once they had all arrived the bride came in packed into a Rolls Royce.  When they opened the door it was like there was this giant poof of dress and tiny little arms sticking out from it.

groom_running_in

In what feels like the textbook definition of “clinging to past glory” the groom arrived by running out of a giant football helmet.  This is a tradition here for high school games that the entire team runs out of one of these insane inflatable helmets and then runs through a paper sign held up by the cheer leaders.  They asked all of the guests of the wedding party to go down on the field and make a “spirit line” as they call them… and then slowly the groom lumbered out onto the field breaking through the sign, having to stop a few times before making his way to center field where the rest of the wedding party was waiting.  I can’t say anything though because there is no way in hell I could jog from the end zone to center field without damned near collapsing, so the fact that he made it in good time while squeezed sausage casing like into a football uniform is damned impressive.

breaking_banner My niece captured a better picture of him actually breaking through the banner.  From there the wedding ceremony finally proceeded and after all of this setup… it actually went pretty quickly.  They did the standard “sand” ceremony thing that has become so popular lately at weddings.  Which I guess is fitting since it is a fairly blended family.  This is the fourth or fifth wedding for the groom, so in part we were shocked they were making such a big ordeal out of it.  The ceremony itself was proceeded by a preacher wearing a referee uniform, and every so often during the ceremony another ref would step up and throw a flag on the play.  The preacher and the ref would confer for a moment before the second referee would give a ruling.  Since it took them three years apparently to get to the point of actually having the wedding, one of the flags throw as for “delay of game”.  It was cute little thing, but at that point we had been out in the hot sun with no shade for over an hour and most everything had lost its mirth.

weddingceremonyAll told we were out there a little over an hour and a half, but I feel horrible for the folks who didn’t arrive at the last minute like we did.  In fact during the ceremony it rained a few times, and was raining before we arrived so not only did the early birds get cooked in the sun, but they also likely got drenched.  We were surprised just how big of an ordeal it was, but I wish the bride and groom the best of luck.  They certainly provided a memorable occasion, but one that was extremely strange to watch.  While all of us have deep Redneck roots… you don’t expect to see a wedding in a football stadium.  However I guess for some folks, the football stadium is their church, so only fitting that folks get married in it.  As interesting as it was… I would have gladly stayed home and played Wildstar instead.  Unfortunately part of being a responsible adult is showing up for this sort of thing even when you have zero interest in being there.

Peafowl on the Play

peacock To add to the strangeness of the day, while driving back home we stumbled across this walking through a field.  For those not familiar with Oklahoma…  I guarantee that the peacock is very much NOT a native animal.  In fact this was not even in someone’s yard, but instead in a random field out in the middle of nowhere.  I assume the little guy is a pet and had wandered a bit too far out of his domain.  Later on my wife posted this picture on facebook and found out that apparently it is in fact owned by someone in the vicinity, and that another person sees it almost every day when driving home.  Seeing this however just seemed to underline just how strange the day was.  Today I am meeting my mother for lunch, and I am hoping that we have a much more normal outing.

Finally Chua

WildStar64 2014-05-31 22-52-19-000 Finally after all the madness I got to come home and play some Wildstar.  At this point I had done nothing but create a couple of characters to reserve my names on Evindra the Role-Playing server.  I of course created Belghast the Chua Engineer, and really it is the animations that make this game enjoyable for me.  The most adorable thing so far is the dogpaddle animation when you try to swim.  I managed to get far enough along to get my robots…  and I love them so much.  The game itself… I am still not just head over heels for.  It has improved drastically since switching from Deadlocked to Steer…  and it works so much cleaner.  Deadlocked involved toggling back and forth between mouse look by clicking your left mouse.  The problem is I always forgot to do this before entering a dialog with an NPC.  So I would have to escape out, click off mouse look and then re-enter the NPC dialog box.

With Steer it works so much better in that if you are moving or in combat…  you have mouse look on.  If you are standing still, it gives you back your cursor so you can interact with NPCs or any other window.  This addon alone greatly improves my enjoyment of the game, and makes the entire experience rather enjoyable.  I feel like Wildstar is like a much better World of Warcraft.  This is no slight to either game, because I still feel like WoW does an amazing job of what it does.  However Wildstar seems like it might give it a run for its money.  Out of the box I feel absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of things to do in every zone.  The game just oozes complexity, and in part this is what made me dislike it quite a bit in beta.  It felt like I was entering the game and already at a disadvantage and trying to catch up quickly in learning what everything did.  I look forward to playing over the next few days and seeing exactly how much I do enjoy it after a week.

Contemplating Red

For a moment or two last night I thought that maybe we would not be recording an AggroChat this weekend.  When it came time to do the recording, it was just me and Ashgar with no sign of Rae.  After a bit I found out that even though he was travelling… Kodra would be available roughly an hour later than our normal start time.  Additionally I managed to convince Tam to join in the discussion as well, so before I knew it we had a full team ready to go.  The thrust of this weeks podcast is a discussion about Transistor… or at least the other half of the discussion we started last week.  Be warned this podcast is spoilerific once we start talking about transistor… however we give you fair warning before hand.  Prior to that we discuss Wildstar quite a bit as well as other games we had played last week.

I call this one Contemplating Red, because once we delve into Transistor we discuss the nature of the character of Red, the Transistor and the way the game treats gender roles.  In the time before we started recording, Kodra wanted to know if we could talk about whether or not Transistor was a deeply sexist game.  He was concerned that I might shy away from the topic, but I gave him the flag to go ahead because while I don’t want to necessarily dwell on controversial topics… I don’t want us to shy away from them either.  I think in the end we all reached a point of peace with the themes of the game, and after bringing all of our thoughts to the table… realized the entire game was so much deeper than any of us thought.  The end result is I am even more in love with this title.  If you’ve beaten the game, I highly suggest you listen and share your own thoughts either here in the comments or over twitter.

#StrangeWedding #Transistor #Wildstar #AggroChat

Nexus Destiny

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Bel Against Nature

treefrog As I said yesterday morning, last night we had a big end of school cookout to attend and in spite of my antisocial tendencies I enjoyed myself quite a bit.  However this morning I am paying for that enjoyment as my sinuses and lungs are full of crud from “extended exposure to nature”.  The food however was amazing as was the company.  This little guy showed up towards the end of the night, and we all ended up snapping photos of him.  Firstly I had zero clue that Tree Frogs existed in Oklahoma, secondly if they did I didn’t realize they could be green.  Most of the frogs you see around here are muddy brown or grey to mix into the surroundings.  According to the biology teacher in the midst this guy is NOT native to Oklahoma, but we have no clue where he comes from.

The other thing I am wishing I had snapped a photo of were the kittens.  One of them tried really hard to come home with us, and I totally would have been cool with that…  if I didn’t think it would completely upset the existing balance with our three cats.  These babies were the most chill and relaxed I have seen.  One of them I carried around in the crook of my arm on her back like I would a ferret.  She was all to happy to have my scratch her belly, and none of them really seemed to use their claws at all.  The most entertaining thing was listening to the back and forth with the parents as the various kids tried really hard to adopt one for their own.  One girl damned near outlined a PowerPoint presentation for exactly why she should have a cat.  But alas her mother decided that she would rather have a crying daughter than a divorce.

I have a sneaking suspicion that in our household this will not be the end of the talk of the adorable kittens.  Right now our eldest cat is extremely picky, and I am afraid bringing a little one into the mix would set her off.  That said it is impossible to find more relaxed cats than these I think.  I am such a softie when it comes to little furry things.  The desire to adopt them all is why we had six cats at one point.  Over the years we’ve had two bunnies, six different ferrets, two sugar gliders, a hamster, a guinea pig, and in total ten different cats to date.  So I am sure there will be more cats in our future, in spite of me putting up a good defense… I always eventually give in.  Right now I am happy with just cats and ferrets though, and I doubt I will branch out into other fuzzy children again.

Newbie Blogger Initiative

Today is the last day of the Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2014, and I feel like I should have probably done more.  This year I have set in a different role, doing more personal tutelage of participants than big informational posts.  Mostly this happened because as far as a advice goes I am not sure what I could say that has not already been articulated better.  I don’t really know what I am doing, and I am still very much figuring it out on a daily basis.  In a way I have been a Newbie this year as well in that this is our first year doing the podcast.  Tonight will be our 8th episode, so I am pretty proud of how that has progressed so far.  I am also very much a newbie at this whole streaming thing, even though this month I have cut down massively on the amount of time I have devoted to it.  May is pure hell, but hopefully as we move into June things will chill out quite a bit.

About mid month I reworked my blogroll so I have all of the Class of 2014 blogs listed there.  You should totally check them out because this crop is doing some pretty great things.  What has been the most interesting for me personally is that a number of my long term friends have opted to start or recommit to blogs this month as well.  I have each of them in my blogroll and I have been seeing some pretty great stuff come out of the “noobs”.  We as a community need this event, to help replace the many people who just stop blogging each year for whatever reason.  As someone who spends a lot of time doing this… I fully understand the desire to throw up your arms and stop.  That said we need this transfusion of talent each year to help keep the gaming blogosphere a vibrant place.

Here is a rundown of my NBI topics this month.

So I guess at the end of the month I didn’t do as poorly as I thought I did.  Six posts devoted to NBI2014 is probably better than I did during the 2013 run.  My only real regret is that I didn’t come up with anything brilliant for Syl’s Poetry Slam.  I think maybe the topic of “Magic” threw me for a loop, because I have a very negative feeling towards “finger wigglers” as I call them.  I am at home with swords and shields and shotguns…  but I have always shied away from casters and wizards and spell slingers.  I tried to come up with an epic about slaying an evil necromancer… but nothing really worked.  So I wish I had come up with something, but I am sure she will have plenty of entries this year to choose from.

Nexus Destiny

WildStar64 2014-05-31 08-21-05-015 Today is the beginning of the Headstart for Wildstar.  I think the servers came up last night at Midnight PST, which would have made it 2 am for me.  I have a deep seething hatred of all of these launch dates being centered around PST, but I not much you can do about it when a studio is from the west coast.  I was so damned happy when the Elder Scrolls Online times were all based on East Coast.  All of this gnashing of teeth aside, I got in this morning rather smoothly and created Belghast the Chua Engineer and Belgrave the Human Warrior.  Both of which are on Evindra the PVE-RP server… which is where all the sane and rational people seem to be rolling characters.  I say that jokingly, but almost all of my twitter list will apparently be on that one server, so even if folks are not all in the same guild it will be good to at least have them all centralized on the same server community.

WildStar64 2014-05-31 08-24-14-744 This is the new Belghast… while I could not do anything vaguely close to my traditional “Bel” look as an angry bunny/rat/thing I feel like I captured the “feeling”.  Something about playing as a Chua immediately made this game more enjoyable.  I think mostly it is the animations, and the fact that in early games I always favored dwarves or small races in general.  My original Everquest character was a Dwarf and my first WoW characters were all also Dwarves.  So while this seems like a huge departure race wise for me… someone who mostly rolls humans, it is more a “getting back to my roots” of sorts.  I am still up in the air about this game, but I am going to give it a fair shake.  I did not intend to like Final Fantasy XIV at all, but ended up having a blast playing it.  So I am hoping that Wildstar will be another similar case.  I feel like this is precisely the game that I would have loved… about five years ago, but I’ve changed massively since then.  Here is hoping there is a game inside of Wildstar that the current me will enjoy.  In any case I plan on still playing quite a bit of Elder Scrolls as well.

#Wildstar #NBI2014