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Death of the Internet Service Provider

May 6, 2013 by Belghast

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

Sofa is conspiring against me

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

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

Death of the Internet Service Provider

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

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

High Definition Daze

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

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

Plans within plans

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

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

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

Finally some gaming

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

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

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

Getting back to normal

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

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

Spring Nesting

May 5, 2013 by Belghast

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

Spring Nesting

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

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

A Few Simple Requests

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

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

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

Hellbugs Ho!

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

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

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

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

Life Happens

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

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

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

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

Sixty Candles

May 4, 2013 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings where I am struggling to write. I know I have a lot of things to do today, but just am having trouble getting started. It is a cold, dreary and rainy morning, and that definitely does not help the sluggishness. I’ve been out already, gotten breakfast and filled up the gas tank on my wife’s car but as I sit here to write the words are now flowing as well as they usually do.

Gameplan Changed

Last night I had all these plans of riding along on the Hellbug raids in search of a purple mount, but that didn’t actually happen. Instead I wound up getting distracted once more by carnage quests, and as I saw my experience bar moving I decided I would push for level 60. I am normally one of those people that levels extremely quickly. In fact I used to pride myself that in WoW I could take a character from 1-85 in 7 days.

So as a result the fact that I still did not have a max level character almost six months after the release of Storm Legion was a bit of a point of embarrassment. I hit a massive wall along the process however, and the crap spec that I thought was decent… presented an impassible barrier as I tried to grind through the content. Every few weeks I would fire the game up, and try again knowing I was only three levels from the cap. I should have sought help, but I had been hearing the same grindy comments from others and assumed that was just the master plan.

Sixty Candles

Thanks to a post from Wilhelm, I finally got out of the funk and found some specs that actually worked. As a result the game has been a blast for me. Last night I finally dinged 60 and it was a complete accident. Over in Kingsward I found this really great sequence of quests that started at the Academy, and culminated in a siege on the tower of dawn. The whole feeling of taking back a part of the world for the royal family was amazing. I don’t want to give away more spoilers than that, but as a whole it ranks up with some of the most epic quest chains I have experienced in any game.

The other night in Empyrean Core I had gathered up a few items for level 60, and the quest chain at Dawn Tower provided a really nice blue sword. So after completing that I set out to explore Ashora. I had been out there before, during some guild event that involved doing an invasion out there, so I had at least one of the ports. The zone is pretty awesome looking, but also would have been super dangerous if I had explored it before now. I was originally going to work on the quests, but just ended up wandering around and exploring the map for most of the evening.

Money or Mount

Now I am not sure what my next goal is. Ultimately there are really two competing goals. Firstly I feel like to be anything but a detriment to world events… I need to get the 130% speed mount. In order to get that I need to gather up 300 plat. Considering I am one of those players who is habitually poor in every single game, this is a pretty insurmountable obstacle. I cannot even fathom having enough money to be able to purchase the 1000 plat 150% mount.

So the ultimate question is, do I begin actively searching for Hellbug rift raids, knowing that they will be annoyed by the fact that I am slow… or do I grind out the 300 plat and buy my mount first. I have no clue how long the Hellbug rifts will be active, but knowing Trion it will likely be at least a month. The only problem is, I have yet to unlock any daily quests, so I have no clue exactly HOW I will get the money. Money is just not a thing I worry much about in MMOs. It is odd, in the real world I am completely financially stable, but in games my characters are habitually broke. This feels somehow backwards from most MMO stereotypes.

Oh well I need to finish this up so we can go out and do things. Though honestly I am not sure exactly what we will be doing as rainy and icky as it is out there. If you’ve made it this far in the post, I hope you have a great Saturday and an awesome weekend in general. I have a server move to do at 10 pm tonight, but I will likely be gaming before and after it. Figure I am going to have to take a nap today for optimal clarity of thought during the downtime.

Breaching the Core

May 2, 2013May 2, 2013 by Belghast

One of the pains of living in Oklahoma is the shifting weather patterns. Last night when I went to bed it was roughly 80* and this morning as I am waking up it is 45*. At this point I wish it would just pick a season and go with it, because flipping back and forth between heat and air conditioning is a pain in the butt. Despite the weather annoyances, yesterday went pretty awesome for me. I had two fairly huge meetings, both of which went extremely well, and the roadmap I had slaved over was well accepted.

Hellbugs on my yard

Yesterday it was announced in the patch notes that a new kind of Fire Rift was opening up in Telara. These “Invasive Species” rifts have a chance of dropping either the hellbug mount pictured above, or a hellbug companion pet. Rift Scene has a good writeup by Cupcakes about the event, and last night I started to see players on these new mounts showing up in Tempest Bay. It was late in the night and I honestly forgot to take a screenshot, so I am doing something I dislike doing and linking to the Rift Scene image for reference… hopefully I have given sufficient credit.

I spent the better part of the evening roaming around trying to find one of these Hellbug rifts. After roaming around Morban, Kingsward, and eventually several old world areas I came up completely empty handed. Going to need to do some research to see where they are more likely to spawn. I really want either the purple one, or the super rare green one. While I played enough defiance to know it was not really a game for me, I am all about cross overs and new mounts.

A.R.A.M.

I popped onto mumble, and after a bit of chatting with my friends and listening to their banter about League of Legends, I allowed myself to get drawn in for a quick map. I was reintroduced to the concept of A.R.A.M. aka All Random All Murderbridge. We had done this the night before, but I didn’t realize it was an actual “thing”. Apparently the Howling Abyss really wants me to play Nunu, because once again I got him assigned to me as my random champion.

I promise Nunu is not like the only champion I have unlocked. The game should have been able to pick from Alistair, Annie, Ashe, Darius, Garen, Graves, Jayce, Kennen, Olaf, Shen, Tristana, Udyr or Wukong… but instead in both cases it picked Nunu which is part of the weeks free rotation. Apparently it thinks I need more Yeti in my life. Moaning aside, I have to say I am finally feeling like I am getting used to him.

Once again ARAM assigned us one champion that we were familiar with and one that we were not per team. So it essentially ended up with Tam playing Morgana vs Rae playing Nidalee… and then Drathis trying to play Alistair vs me trying to play Nunu. It was a really good match and we had a “no towers down” stalemate at midbridge for most of the map.

Tam and I actually managed to make a break, get a 15 minute into the game double kill, and drop two towers. Then all hell broke loose as my shitty DSL internet connection fell apart. My ping climbed up to 500, then 1500, then 3500 and disconnected me from the game. At which point we never really recovered. In true sportsmanlike tradition, Drathis and Rae asked if they should hang back until my connection stabilized but we urged them onwards… since a map against friends is a map against friends.

Breaching the Core

I wrote about this the other day, but over the weekend Plasmodia and I had talked about trying to pull together some groups on Wednesday nights. We had set a startup time of 9pm Central, and after my one ARAM map it was getting close to the meet up time. We managed to pull together a really solid core of a team, and they were totally willing to run non-elite dungeons so my nub arse could join in. We ended up with Plasmodia tanking, Marklaar running support, me dpsing, and Aleriase healing. This left us only needing a single dps, so the queue times were near instantaneous.

We got assigned Empyrean Core, which a few of us had never seen before. The zone itself was amazingly beautiful, full of super intricate widgets and bobbles. The thing that really surprised me however was just how challenging the dungeon still was. Previously the Elites were super hard, but the normal dungeons were a bit faceroll-y once you actually managed to hit cap. Last night I was the only under level player, and it each of the boss rights were still rather challenging.

We ended up doing two runs last night, and getting assigned Empyrean Core both times (apparently this is a problem in Rift). I had a complete and total blast, and hanging out with the Alea Iacta Est rift contingency was awesome. Aleriase mentioned that they had been trying to start doing group nights both Tuesday and Wednesday, so I am completely down with doing more of this in the future. I am not sure if we will regenerate the numbers needed to raid, but any kind of grouping with friends is always a positive.

Dungeoneering Challenge

I had almost forgotten just how much I have missed running challenging content with friends. I have been in a real lull of good group content of late. The last time I feel like I was truly challenged in a dungeon was back in The Secret World, running the Nightmare mode content with the friends I have been playing League with. The content was brutal, we had to constantly think on our feet, but the adjustment process was a blast.

I had hoped that with Pandaria we would at least have a period of time when heroic content was an actual challenge. But from the first night, we essentially steamrolled the dungeons we ran in greens and a smattering of quested blues. I think in part that is a good reason why I got bored of WoW so quickly this time around. WoW for whatever reason has forgotten how to be challenging, without resorting to random or downright “Cheap Shot” tactics. Random chance that a mob kills you outright, or does something so horrible you just can’t recover is not challenging, it is just annoying.

If I can actually muster a regular group in Rift, I can see myself sticking around for awhile. In these games I am happiest when the groups come easily, and we can go off and smash baddies together each night. I get bored and slog down when the grouping stops, and my only option becomes pugging. So much of the grouping experience… are the people you experience it with. In most cases, I would rather not play a game at all than to deal with pugs.

Tiny Two-hander

Last night gathered up some much needed gear for 60 through the various dungeon runs. One of the few pieces that I could actually equip now, is a Protector’s Sword of Slaying pictured above. This was a pretty massive upgrade over the two level 58 green one-handers I was using, but as you can see above, the scale feels a wee bit small for a Bahmi. Maybe I am just used to the final fantasy-esc big dude with an even bigger sword trope that wow ran with, but it is just too “normal” for me to feel epic about it.

I will say though it has been fun trying to two-hander. I’ve always gravitated towards dual wield, and in the original rift game what kind of weapons you wielded really mattered for your soul. As such I always gravitated towards paragon heavy souls, which were the dual wield tree. I had not however played around with a two-hander since they made it no longer matter what weapon you were wielding with which soul. That alone has been fun and well worth any wipes that happened in the core.

I am really hoping that over the next few days, I can use this sword as a dowsing rod to help me find some of those hellbug rifts. I would really love to have one of those mounts, and I have missed out on so many other cool mounts thanks to my bad luck and my wanderlust. I am super grateful to my guildies for pulling together the groups last night. I had a blast and look forward to doing it again.

I see my time is running short, and my coffee has run out. If you’ve made it down this far in the post… I wish you the best of days. I will have to pull my coat back out of the closet as I go off to work, but I am hoping that by the weekend it will be warm again. Hopefully it is pleasant wherever you are.