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Former Stature

October 20, 2013 by Belghast

Oatmeal Weather

As is the tradition, after the second weekend of the Tulsa State fair the weather has predictably cooled. As a result this weekend I broke out a long sleeved Henley and a Hoodie. Since my wife had Thursday and Friday off for Fall Break, I decided to ask off for Friday so we could spent some time together. Luckily I have a truly amazing boss and was completely fine with me taking off with no real prior notice. Of course I made sure I had no appointments and since half of the office was already off for fall break it was not a huge deal.

Bowling Trophy

On Friday we roamed around town a bit, trying to enjoy the fact that most of the world was working. On Admiral here in Tulsa there is this insanely huge flea market. We used to go there regularly in college but these days the place has developed a mind of its own. As a result it is nigh impossible to get place to park, so we have avoided it like the plague for the last few years. Once upon a time there was a factory closeout and shipping casualty store called Cheapo Depot that was interesting to shop at. Recently a new one opened up in the same location called Oops, and my wife had been wanting to go. Taking advantage of the empty parking lot we went by there.

The store itself was not that interesting, part dented can grocery store with a handful of factory overrun items. Basically nothing contained within is something that folks actually wanted out in the world. They had cases and cases of Tostitos Raspberry Salsa… and I could not even begin to fathom what that must taste like. Absolute none of the ideas I came up with… managed to sound good at all. When we were exiting the parking lot I spied the above prize. Since no one was around we had no clue what it was… but basically it was a D4 made of bowling balls. One of them had fallen off and was to the side… but at this point I really want to know the story behind it.

Route of Boredom

For some time I have had a fascination with Route 66, I guess it is a side effect of growing up in Tulsa and seeing absolutely everything under the sun branded with that moniker. We have attempted to travel the route once in the past, but got bored around Bristow. Yesterday I decided we should try and go the entire route from Tulsa to Oklahoma City… or at the very least Edmond. Ultimately we were looking for interesting things to take photos of… but after a bit we just started looking for anything interesting at all. The above shot came from a little thrift store near entrance to highway 66 on the outskirts of Tulsa. I have no clue what prompted someone to buy a republican and democrat mug for every year…. or even more so what lead them to end up in a thrift store as a complete set.

The rest of the route was a string of small towns with small speed limits that caused what is normally an hour and a half trip to Tulsa take roughly three hours. There really was not much in the way of attractions any longer, other than the normal tourist fare. I expected to see some sort of a remnant of the grand tradition. The oddest thing is in many places the original route 66 is sitting there, moldering beside the current road. They have removed the bridges in most cases but there are just vast tracts of crumbling asphalt that are no longer connected to anything at all. You would think they would have employed them as side roads, because asphalt in any state is pretty much better than a dirt road.

Former Stature

While wandering around yesterday we released we were within 30 minutes of Guthrie Oklahoma. Since we were forced to take Oklahoma History our freshman year in High School, I have always wondered around Guthrie the original state capital. Turns out the story is a bit more interesting than I could have imagined. I didn’t remember it being covered in class, but apparently the changing of the state capital was not a mutual affair. Apparently in the dark of night the state seal was stolen from the legislative house in Guthrie and carried to what would be the new capital of Oklahoma City.

Wandering around Guthrie, you see an almost abbreviated greatness. Once upon a time before statehood the town was in fact grand, and since that grandeur is marketable they have made a point of keeping up appearances. The buildings were really the draw for me. I love seeing the remnants of a bygone era. The current town of Guthrie is a very small thing, with not much more than a Wal-Mart. However being on the outskirts of the OKC metro, they live in a constant state of tourist destination. It was probably the most interesting stop of the weekend. While the adventure was not as grand as we would have liked, we did all that we really expected to do. Get out of the house and spend some time together unplugged.

Halloween 2013

October 19, 2013 by Belghast

Spooky Pasta!

One of the things I love in the various MMOs I play or have played… are the varried Holiday events. Some of them make an extreme effort to fit them into the lore of their world, and others just cut and paste a real world tradition onto their land. Both have their merits and both are enjoyable so long as they don’t involve too much grinding. Each game seems to pick and choose holidays, but there are two that every game seems to have… Christmas and of course Halloween.

Halloween time is generally my favorite holiday because the traditions itself usually involve killing lots of dark denizens of the night. Additionally the playing dress up theme usually means some cool weapon and armor skins that you can use throughout the rest of the year. Currently we are in the run up to Halloween itself, and as a result pretty much every MMO has some form of event going on marking the holiday. Going to take a few minutes this morning to talk about some of the cooler ones.

Nights of the Dead

This event runs in Everquest 2 from 10/15 through 11/11 and is probably the grand daddy of all Halloween events. Each year they keep adding new content, but still leaving all of the old content in place. Zam has a really great guide to the various quests and events. If you are one of the new to EQ2 folks who just partook of the free level 85 event… I highly suggest checking it out. However even with a brand new account you can still participate in most of the fun. My personal favorite event is the hedge maze that drops lots of nifty cosmetic gear.

Blood and Madness

Guild Wars 2 supposedly has a really amazing event called Blood and Madness that kicked off on October 15th that involved a series of limited time events (one day only) finally culminating in a big event that only exists Halloween night. Dulfy has a pretty comprehensive guild to the events, but for the most part if you are not already doing this series you have missed out this year. This has been my key bitch about Guild Wars 2 to date… I hate the concept of short run limited time events. The amount of busy work needed really only allows someone who ONLY plays GW2 to keep up… and because of this I just can’t be bothered to attempt it. I would love to see this as a long term event that ran the entire length of the holiday, but until then it will be out of my reach.

Autumn Harvest

Rift has an event called Autumn Harvest that starts on October 17th and runs through Halloween and potentially a little bit past. They have chosen to focus on the harvest aspect of the holiday and as such have sent you to a special version of the Realm of the Fae where you help Atrophinius and his minions bring in the amber sap harvest. There are a ton of cool things you can get, including a phantom version of several popular mounts. The coolest feature of the event however is that you can get these short time use potions that make tons of artifacts show up on the ground in the realm of the fae. This is a huge catch up on collections event. This year around there are a ton of new items to be gotten and you can check out this preview guide on Rift Junkies.

Hallow’s End

Hallow’s End is an event that occurs in World of Warcraft from October 18th through November 1st. There are tons of nifty things going on like trick or treating, but the meat and potatoes of the event is the Scarlet Monastery Headless Horseman instance. I have a love/hate relationship with this holiday. Every year it has been available (and that I have been playing wow) I have participated in the event… all for a shot at the extremely awesome flying headless horseman mount. Every single year I have come up empty handed. When a game company places an item in an event, like a mount… that is usable every day… and makes it a super rare random drop… I want to stab them.

All Saints’ Wake

Currently there is an event going on over in FFXIV that is completely new to me. All Saints’ Wake started a little early, but was intended to run from October 18th through November 1st. All of the time zones get a little discombobulated in the translation. While I am not partaken in the event yet, so far the other one I have seen has been what I would call “Holiday-Lite” in that there is a FATE going on that awards some sort of currency that you then use to purchase things off a vendor. Since the vanity gear system is not in place yet, this makes the things you can acquire super limited, but I plan on gathering them up just in case. One of the most humorous observations from last night is that apparently the Pumpkin helms… are repaired by Cullinarians.

The Rundown

That is the rundown of the big ones I know of that are going on, but like I said in the first part of the post… this is the one holiday that pretty much EVERY MMO celebrates. I can even remember in Hellgate: London there being a Halloween event of sorts that took its form in a Guy Fawkes day celebration… that happened to have a lot of Halloween themed stuff. I would be curious to hear about any events that are your favorite that I missed.

Subtle Tweaks

October 17, 2013 by Belghast

Fountains of Gil

Last night was the first night I have played FFXIV seriously since getting Pokemon. Well I suppose that is a bit of a misnomer as I was in game Tuesday night to help a guild member through the Garuda Primal… but suffice to say it was the first time I have really done something serious in a bit. In that time they released a fairly significant patch to the server, and it was for most of us the first time experiencing the changes. I have to say overall they are pretty positive. You can see the full patch notes here, but I will talk about a few of the significant items.

One of my largest complaints, that I have mentioned a few times is that this game has absolutely tons of gold sinks… but no really viable gold fountains other than crafted high quality end game gear. Even that has been dropping drastically as the best in slot HQ Robe of Vanya started out around 1.5 million gil and is now down to 400k gil on Cactuar. The main problem is, that in our little group since hitting 50 each of our pools of gil has been falling severely with no real way of gaining it back at a reasonable rate. Apparently Squeenix has heard our plea and implemented the strangest gold fountain I have ever seen in a game.

Apparently they did not like the fact that players were skipping trash packs in dungeons and doing “speed runs”, because when they put their fountain in it has in essence patched two holes in the boat. In the level 50ish dungeons, the trash packs now drop a not insignificant amount of gil… we were mostly seeing around 50 gil per mob. This means that the dungeon as a whole is a really good way to gain back some of that cash we have been losing. Over the course of the evening in running Amdapor Keep and Wanderers Palace once each I got around 6000 gil. That is not enough to make me wealthy… but it is enough to stave off the slow bleed of currency.

Subtle Tweaks

To make Wanderer’s Palace more appealing they have increased the number of “rockbooks” aka Tomestones that drop. Between a running of Amdapor and Wanderer’s I had enough to go out and purchase the Darklight belt, so I was pretty pleased with that. The trend continued last night with minor drops happening for our dps and healing, and not a single viable tank drop in sight. In the first picture in the post you can see I have swapped out my “so you decided to hit 50” chest piece for one that dropped in Wanderers… but sadly it was an exact side grade. I just wanted to look slightly different for a bit, so I snagged it.

In one of the patch notes threads, we had seen the extremely ambiguous patch note of “adjusted difficulty of level 50 encounters”, which we all took to mean that they made things more difficult. However upon running the two 50 4 man dungeons last night, it seemed like a lot of the fights were easier, or at least I was not taking nearly as much damage as before. Granted this could be to a large number of factors, not the least of which is that we are all fairly used to the encounters now. However it did feel like I was taking less raw damage than I was previously, especially on a few of the more troubling packs.

Goodbye Bullshit

In the past I wrote about the absolute hackery that was the Dark Devices FATE in Northern Thanalan. The FATE that essentially all players seemed to universally extend out as long as humanly possible to farm the constant flow of instant spawn cultists. If you were in the right group, and you got a tag in on every mob you could get some truly amazing experience. During one group we managed to get an over 300 chain of kills, and that FATE along was worth just over a half of a level a 48 when I was leveling my bard. However if you were NOT in the chosen party… you got to waste 15 minutes of your time and next to no experience for the process.

I am proud to announce that they did in fact fix that bullshit. Apparently now the cultists no longer instant spawn, and as a result there is no point in delaying the FATE. So as a result I am imagining that FATEs in Northern Thanalan are now nice and smooth, as quite honestly OTHER than Dark Devices it was a rather enjoyable zone for grouping. It is smallish in size but packed full of really high value fates including the really cool Chimera fate in the northern end of the zone that awards a pet. Hopefully as a whole the experience of grinding from 45 to 50 is better for most players. Our guild has just about determined that the best way to boost a player to 50 is to hang out in the zone and kill the various Garleans as fast as you can, rather than trying to FATE anyways. We’ve helped a handful of folks get the last bit towards 50 doing this, and it seems like something that is easily repeatable.

Party Like it’s 1995

August 7, 2015October 16, 2013 by Belghast

Flashbacks

I have been fairly oblivious to the world for the last few days, and as a result I had fallen behind on my news reader. The thing that I found most interesting was this article on Massively talking about a potential League of Legends Universe online TCG. I feel like I would love any game set in the League universe that is not League. The world they have built up around the MOBA has some pretty awesome lore, and in part that is why I continue to play the game in spite of my problems with the control scheme. My friends and I have talked about how successful we thought a single player game would be set in that world, but I could see an online TCG working as well.

Party Like It’s 1995

A friend and I were talking about this news, and he made the comment that it is 1995 all over again. In a way that is exactly what it seems like to me as well. For those who were not part of that scene during the TCG boom during the mid 90s… suffice to say every potentially marketable property got made into a card game. I like a sucker probably played most of them out of sheer love and nostalgia for Magic the Gathering the one that started it all. Some of them stuck around and gained a life of their own like Pokémon or Yugioh because they were driven by external motivators… and some were really amazing and died on the vine like Rage and Vampire: The Eternal Struggle.

However during the 90s… you could find a card game for any property you wanted to play, and I think among my friends we at least bought a starter deck of most of them. Magic the Gathering has had an online component for years, but for the most part it has never gained traction because it was arcane to get into, and Wizards of the Coast still very much favored the physical market. In essence it was a cheap copy of a physical property and the company seemed fine with that. What we are seeing now is a new crop of games conceived for online play, and that offer rule sets that would never really work in a physical card game.

The Next Boom

Much like we have seen for MMOs and MOBA… we are going to see a lot of companies entering this marketplace, trying to TCG-ize their existing intellectual property. Even though neither has released, it seems like the two leaders going into the marketplace are Hearthstone by Blizzard and Hex by their TCG business partner Cryptozoic. While they will be competing in the same space, and have quite a bit of overlap… I feel like each of these games is going after a slightly different player. Hearthstone is going after the “easy to learn, hard to master” demographic, with a deceptively simple mechanic that leads to extremely fast paced duels.

While I have not actually played it (hey Blizz flag my account already), I have watched more than a handful of youtube videos and live streams. Essentially it seems like a really straight forward rage style duel mechanic. The thing that I initially am not a huge fan of is the way that combat works. It seems like there is no real defense mechanic, or at least not one in the way I have come to expect from Magic: The Gathering. As a result the gameplay is extremely in your face and aggressive, but does not feel terribly nuanced.

Cryptic Gameplay

On the other side of things you have Hex: Shards of Fate by Cryptozoic… which is a oddly fitting company name for their approach. It feels like they are trying to be Magic: The Gathering 2.0 with an evolved rule set and extremely cryptic and nuanced gameplay. This is the type of game you go into already at a massive debt of knowledge, but as you learn the rules and uncover strategies you are rewarded for your ability to assimilate the information. It looks like it will support some extremely long running duels, much in the same way Magic did, with players coming back from the brink to snatch victory out of defeat.

Personally while I really want to play Hearthstone, Hex seems more my style. It is less Pokémon and Yugioh and more Magic: The Gathering… the game that started the craze and still has a honored spot in my heart. Currently I think there is more than enough market share for both of these games. However all of the late comers that are creating online TCGs… are likely going to get left out in the cold the same way all the other boom economies have worked. Mainly I don’t see anyone else bringing something truly unique to the table. During the physical card game boom, we saw lots of different themed versions of M:TG, and to a lesser extent I figure we will see this again.

Been There Done That

Currently both games are very fantasy oriented, so I expect the other genres to get on the act shortly. Since DC is working on a MOBA… I fully expect to be seeing a DC themed online card game. To be honest… the VS system that incorporated both DC and Marvel had a decent amount of success during the physical card game wars… so it might be a property worthy of resurrection in an online form. Additionally I fully expect there to be a Star Wars themed product offering with the upcoming 7th movie entering production. Then I am sure there will be other properties that jump on the bandwagon that we can’t even fathom being a card game… just like last time. The problem is… all of this has a feeling of “been there done that” for me.

I experienced this rush of excitement and crushing disappointment several times before during the 90s, as a property I cared about was turned into a truly un-inspired card game amalgam. To some extent we are still living through this each time an MMO spins up only to sputter out a year or so later. Another tidbit from my news feed yesterday was that Mummy Online was shutting down… I literally did not even know it existed in the first place. So MMOs are currently coming and going without me even realizing it. Basically I am bracing myself for a lot of shoddy card games to be released in a short period of time, trying to cash in on the “new” craze of digital collectible card games. So as much as I look forward to Hearthstone and Hex… I am entering what I feel will be a new trend with quite a bit of trepidation.