Pax South

Pax South: Lessons Learned

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Wizarding School

I am in fact apparently a wizard.  Last night we recorded a double episode of AggroChat, and even though I purposely took an hour and a half nap… by the time we wrapped up and I go into bed at one in the morning I was completely toast.  Generally speaking when we record AggroChat I tend to do what I call the “rough edit” that night, which mostly means putting all the pieces together in the right order and then head on to bed rather than wrapping up all of the small details like I used to.  Then Sunday morning I get up, have breakfast, have coffee and by the time I can actually form words…  I do all of the bits that end up posting the episode in various places.  This morning I did apparently everything related to two separate podcast episodes, and pre-staged it all so that in theory everything will publish next weekend while I am at Pax other than the anook thread since there is no way that I know of to schedule one of those.  I absolutely positively feel like a wizard… and the only downer is that all of this work… and I still need to make interesting words on Aggronaut.

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As I am writing this blog post I am realizing that I have roughly four days left to plan all of the shit I need to do before Pax South.  This is the point where my anxiety kicks into overdrive.  I think of the most part I have everything ready that I need to have ready for the show.  Once again I am doing the “unofficial media” thing as MMOGames.com has me booked for a few media appointments.  This time around I think I am far more mentally prepared for this reality than I was last year.  I also feel like I know more things about Pax in general and especially the Pax South setup than I did last year.  This time around I am also going to have a bunch more friends to hang out with, so while I am overall less interested in the panels this time around…  I am far more interested in the people.  The only bummer is that a bunch of people that I failed to connect with during the inaugural year…  are not going this year.  So this morning, largely for my own benefit to get my shit in order… and partially for the benefit of people who didn’t attend last year…  I am going to run down some of the things I learned.

Things Learned at Pax South 2014

Internet Sucks

The biggest takeaway from last year is the fact that the internet is going to suck.  I guess part of me expected that a major convention center to have open wifi access, since I just assume that is as integral a part of anyone’s life as it is mine.  They don’t… in fact several of the media appointments last year we had sidebars about how frustrating it was to get their own network up and running so they could run their own games.  There will be of course cellular internet through your phone provider… but I would not expect it to work.  I tried to live tweet the Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns announcement…. and two hours later those tweets were still slowly filtering their way to the internet.  If you need to meet up with people… trade cell phone numbers.  For the most part while text messaging was a little sluggish, they were still going through because non-media texts really do not require much of a connection to go through.  As a result our master plan for keeping connected is to start a group text message thread that hopefully everyone can keep running throughout the weekend.

Pax Pizza Sounds Better than It Is

Now I am not picking on Pax Pizza in general, because they are trying their best to feed the masses.  However if you have ever had one of those small round microwave pizzas that Sams Club and CostCo sell by the case, you’ve had Pax Pizza.  The food options inside of PAX were pretty limited, but do include standard fare like hamburgers, hotdogs, chips, pop and water.  There is a food court just down the Riverwalk that includes a lot of things… but this was pure madness the night we tried to go there.  My big suggestion is to bring some food with you, for the most part I survived in Cliff Bars and Beef Jerky and brought my own water bottle that was relatively easy to refill.

Messenger Bag not Backpack

This suggestion might seem a little counter intuitive at first, since backpacks are FAR easier to carry than a messenger bag… but hear me out.  Everywhere you go at PAX you are going to get crammed into very tight spaces with a bunch of strangers.  You know what you cannot really do when you are stacked front to butt with a bunch of people?  Guard your valuables…  and you are getting jostled so much that you really honestly could not tell if someone was getting into your backpack.  So sure you can group up in a way so that your buddy is on watch, but it is just easier to be wearing something that you can sling over your shoulder so that your hands can rest on the bag in front of you.  Thankfully I thought this though last year, and took with me a new canvas messenger bag…. but my reasoning was that it seemed like it would be easier to get into it at a moments notice.  However after seeing the queue room…  I was super glad I didn’t have a backpack for sheer paranoia and anxiety reasons.

You are Constantly Walking

It is hard to fully appreciate just how much walking you are going to do at PAX.  The convention center is pretty large just by itself, and things are spread out all over… and in addition to that if I am remembering correctly there are three distinct floors…. with something happening on pretty much all of them.  The amount of time I spent sitting was pretty non-existent, with “Statue Hall” and the tables near the concession stand being the only real areas for hanging out while seated.  So absolutely wear comfortable shoes…  but even then… it won’t really matter.  The biggest complaint I had was by the time I hit the hotel room I was just dead to the world… and still had to somehow knock out a blog post and do any of the other things I need to do to check into the world.  The lack of internet during the day meant that there was pretty much no way I could do this during bits of downtime.  I am honestly concerned about this one, because I am not walking nearly as much as I was before Pax last year…  I will survive.

Nowhere to Charge Devices

You ever seen people huddled around a single power jack at an airport?  That is absolutely going to happen at PAX.  There were a handful of places where you could sit down near an outlet, and they were essentially the most heavily guarded spots available.  As a result… bring a power bank.  These devices are pretty ubiquitous and since it is inevitable you are going to be on your phone for much of the show…  I highly suggest having one and plugging in while you attend panels.  I ended up getting a pretty cheap one for this year from Amazon that in theory will charge my phone three times, but if I can get one good charge I will be relatively happy.

Patch Your 3DS Streetpass Now

One of the traditions I was indoctrinated into by Ashgar last year was collecting StreetPasses on my 3DS XL.  For whatever reason… every single person walking around seems to be carrying their 3DS almost entirely for this purpose.  A single pass through the main room and I would need to find someplace to stop and clear out my streetpass queue to allow new people in.  Why this is awesome is that when you get a game like Bravely Default… that has a minigame based on the number of street pass users you have available… it is absolutely amazing to bring an army.  That said in order to get the full benefit… you need to make sure that all of your games and apps that can collect streetpasses are all patched up and running the latest revision.  Since you won’t have internet access… do it either now before you leave, or from your hotel room.

Ask an Enforcer

If you have any questions or need help with anything…  your friends in orange are there to help.  The enforcers are a great part of the PAX experience, and they will quite literally be directing you to where you need to be.  If you have any questions about what a given line is for, or where you need to be to attend a specific panel, these fine folks are going to be able to point you in the right direction.

Daily Carry Bag

As I said before last year I carried with me a canvas messenger bag, and it worked out excellent.  The biggest thing I liked about it was just how easy it was for me to fiddle with it while waiting in line.  I could fish out my power bank, 3DS, or chomebook quickly based on whatever I needed to deal with at the moment.  It also serves as a handy way to keep any swag you happen to pick up along the way.  There will be booths on the main floor that have really nice shopping bags… but these are awkward to juggle while standing in line.  Bring a good bag, it will be your best friend.  Right now here is what I am looking at carrying with me, just as a way of helping you think through what you might need.

  • Water Bottle – seriously this is key. Stay hydrated by making sure you have something easy to refill.
  • Cliff/Quest/Whatever Bars – these are easy ways to get some food in you when you are hangry.
  • Beef Jerky – easy portable protein, I can live off this stuff.
  • Dried Fruit – going to add this one to the list this year, thinking some dried fruit might help mix things up.
  • Chromebook – lightweight, easy to carry device for taking notes.
  • Small Physical Notebook – because sometimes you need to actually write something down.
  • Digital Recorder – this is new this year, instead of trying to record audio on my phone I got a small digital stereo recorder.
  • Nintendo 3DS – because streetpasses are awesome.
  • Business Cards – last year was shocked at the number of times I was asked for one… this time I came prepared.
  • Power Bank – for recharging your phone or anything else that will recharge off of a USB port.
  • Tiny Bottle of Advil – the floor is loud, and without a doubt it is going to give me a headache, so the scout in me wants to “be prepared”.
  • Hand Sanitizer – because humanity is a messy huddled mass… and you want to stave off the PAX Pox.

This is essentially what I carried last year and it worked out well.  The only two things that I am really adding new this year are the Dried Fruit, because I think it might be beneficial for me to be able to snack on.  I am also adding a dedicated Digital Recorder, because trying to record audio on my phone was complete bullshit last year.  I contemplated trying to add a proper camera, but I didn’t want to add another device to my bag.  I am once again going to make do with my phone camera, but I will just need to take into account that I cannot simply snap a quick photo, do to the horrible lighting conditions on the floor.  I am really hoping the whole text message network thing is going to make meeting up with people easier.  If you too are going to be on the floor, let me know… because I would love to catch as many people as I can.  It is my hope that this is going to be an amazing year, and the goal this time now that I feel like I have my feet under me… is to see as many people and games as I can.  One last quick note is… that if you find yourself getting overwhelmed there are actually lots of relatively quiet places you can go hide out.  There is always the AFK room that PAX runs specifically for this purpose, but even then I found lots of other places on the third floor of the convention center where I could get away for a bit.  The further from the main floor you get, the more sane and rational the crowds become.

 

 

Shamen and Pax South

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Prepping for Pax South

Tis the beginning of the year, and we are now roughly three weeks away from Pax South, and I have to say…. I am a bit concerned.  It is going to be an awesome time no matter what because right now I know of like a dozen friends that are going to be there… so going to have plenty of people to hang out with.  What concerns me though is it seems like Pax South as a whole is a much less hopping place.  By this time last year, all three days of the show were down to “low” rating, and Saturday and the Three Day Passes had been sold out for a very long time.  Additionally they had already posted a picture of the convention floor and who was going to be inhabiting what booth space.  As far as the passes, Saturday was still available on Friday… and just looking at the schedule there don’t seem to be as many “big name” presentations as there were last year.  Last year after all we had the world announcement of Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns happening, as well as I believe the first real information about Sid Meier’s Starships.  Now…  what I see instead is very light on the game content and very heavy on the youtube and stream celebrities.

All of this said I am going to have the best time this year…. because what made last year so much fun was running around with Ashgar and Rae.  This time around I will be running around with Ashgar, Rae, Thalen, Dallian, Damai, Lonrem, Helkim, Paragon, Tick, Rylacus, and hell probably several others that I am failing to rattle off on the top of my head.  It is the people that make the place awesome, and it is my hope to meet up with as many people as I can over the two days I am going to be there.  So if you are planning on going to Pax South please let me know.  I did a poor job of actually connecting with people last year and I hope to fix that.  The other thing that is going to make this year awesome is that I am no longer going to have to worry about somehow abandoning my wife.  Last year she went running around during the day, utilizing the hotels shuttle service, and by all accounts had a lot of fun, or at least enough fun to want to come back again this year.

The problem being that I always felt guilty for leaving her at the hotel and felt the strong pull to rush home at night so we could go out to dinner and such.  This time around we are also bringing one of her friends so she now also has someone to run around with and wander San Antonio.  What is hilarious is… she feels like I am being awesome, and I think its awesome because I will feel less guilty all the time.  This also means I will probably experience a lot of the nighttime content of Pax and go to the concerts and such, and maybe some of the after parties.  Granted on Saturday night I don’t want to be out too late… given that I will be driving the eight or nine hours home on Sunday.  In any case…. if you read the blog or you listen to AggroChat, drop me a line and it is my hope to catch up with as many people during that weekend as I can.  I will be getting into the hotel room late Thursday night, and I am staying about six miles away from the convention center out by the airport… in part because we had a great experience there last year…. and the whole free shuttle service to various destinations thing was awesome for my wife.  So yesterday we did a bit of juggling to change our arrangements, and now have a double suite so it should be awesome.  There was talk last night about maybe trying to get in together and see Force Awakens as a group while down there… since supposedly there is a theater a few blocks away.

Shamanism

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One of the things I am really enjoying about World of Warcraft right now is the ability to fly.  I realize that I was heavily in the “no flight in draenor” camp, and for the most part I still am.  That said… having it makes everything so damned much easier, and questing through the zones is greatly improved.  I feel like WoW content however desperately needs the grounding of players at the beginning of an expansion to keep folks from just blowing through everything instantly.  In the past once you had a single character at the new level cap you could purchase flight for your other characters, and that was a great option….  but an extremely expensive one.  I think personally I like the Draenor Pathfinder option because even though it was a pain in the butt to complete…  now that I have done it the benefit can be used by every single character on my account.  As a whole I am a huge fan of account wide unlocks and they actually make it far more likely for me to play other characters.  In Final Fantasy XIV everything that I have exists on a single character, and as a result I am completely disincentive from trying any more characters.  Same goes for games like Rift that while I have alts…  I always tend to play the same main character because he has the best toys.

I feel like playing an Enhancement Shaman is a little broken…. in a good way.  After having leveled several other characters, this one seems to be the easiest.  I can just straight up shred most mobs without my totems, or heroism….  but then I always have those things waiting in reserve for big mobs and elites.  The speed of killing things is just so damned fast, and since I have crafters that can feed me gear….  walking around with a pair of level 630 blue weapons really makes a huge difference.  I still don’t fully understand why the crafted blacksmith weapons start at 630 unlike the 640 that all of the other gear seems to start at, but in any case I am fine with it…. it is a huge dps boost over the weapons I am getting in the zones.  The thing that I cannot wait for in WoW however is the new transmogging system.  WoWhead, being the awesome folks they always are has put up a preview system to show you all of the transmog gear your characters are going to get granted from quest completion.  I am really really hoping that the new system is account wide like Diablo 3, because there are certain characters like this shaman that simply don’t have a lot of cool gear to work with yet.  I guess I should farm more old world content to get him a decent set to run around in.

Pax South Excitement

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Excitement Grows

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Last year Pax South was quite literally the first gaming convention I had ever been too.  Granted I have been to comic conventions and scifi fan conventions over the years…  but never a gaming one.  I didn’t really know what to expect but Liore gave me some advice…  that as soon as you get in the doors the anxiety fades away because you realize that these are “your people”.  I didn’t really believe her until the convention was actually underway… and absolutely I had this overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be just fine.  I never strike up conversations with strangers, yet I found myself idling chatting with people while standing in the queue room like a pro.  There was just this aura of acceptance that I felt, when quite literally anything anyone was into was awesome.  The only problem was that it was quite literally an overload on my senses and while I technically knew a bunch of people at the convention, I only actually managed to meet up with the AggroChat folks that I had planned on meeting up with… and Lonrem from Anook.  Well I guess that is not entirely true because that Friday I had a bunch of press meetups scheduled to talk with various game devs.  At the end of the two days I attended, I was worn out beyond belief… but I was pretty damned happy with my experience.  I had originally decided to try and attend as many local conventions as I could… but ultimately that fell through for one reason or another.

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After having done a Pax I realized that the highlight for me was not necessarily the show, but getting to hang out with people that I do not normally get to hang out with.  It felt like this giant summer camp for gamers and geeks… and it was fairly magical.  With this in mind I set my sights on Pax Prime…  but nothing really went as I had hoped there.  Firstly I missed out on getting tickets, and second we were not accepted for press passes.  Then thirdly…  August is a really bad time for me.  My wife is a school teacher and Pax Prime happens exactly at the beginning of our School year here in Oklahoma.  It would have been extremely rough on my wife for me to have been away during those first weeks of school, when she ends up having to rely on me the most because she is simply stressed beyond the point of coping.  So while I was sad that I didn’t get to attend, I still had hopes that I could con more people into joining me at Pax South this year.  Since I know what is important to me now…  I know what to focus on, and that is planning on meeting up with people.  The problem we ran into was that on the convention floor the cell service was complete crap.  So my theory is that we will need to figure out meet up points ahead of time this year, rather than trying to rely on some sort of impromptu thing.

More People More Fun

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The above picture was hands down the highlight of my Pax experience, not because I we were playing Gigantic really, but more than the three of us were playing together.  The gravy on top is just the fact that we happened to be beating a YouTube celebrity in the process.  Now we zoom forward to yesterday…  they opened the flood gates and started taking sales for the 2016 Pax South in San Antonio Texas.  This time I managed to get in on the three day passes, which there are actually still a few left.  As of right now I know that myself, Rae, her brother, Ashgar, Thalen, Dallian, Lonrem, and Helkim are confirmed going… or at the very least have their tickets in hand.  I am sure in the coming weeks I am going to start hearing of more people going, and I plan on starting up something to keep track of who is going and on what days so that maybe we can meet up and hang out.  I need to start doing some research into what eating options are there in the Riverwalk area, because I absolutely do not want to try and go to that Chillis again out of desperation and hunger.  I am also hoping we can maybe coordinate hotels, because I really liked the one I stayed in last year… but it was out by the airport.  However if there are many of us it would not be an issue at all to carpool into the convention each day.  I feel like I have the whole parking situation under control after having done it last year.  I have to say I am extremely excited, and hoping this one is going to be bigger and better than last year.  I mean this is the only Pax that does not sell out in a matter of minutes…  so honestly I am fine with that.  The concept of trying to get tickets to any other Pax seems like a stressful situation.  I realize it is still months away, but I want to try and make the best of this coming years show.

 

 

In Mourning

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So It Happened

statesman_dead A couple of days ago I talked about the present rumor that AOL would be shutting down all of its enthusiast press websites… as far as we are concerned that was Joystiq, Massively and WoW Insider.  Yesterday I first saw that it was officially in reading Brianna Royce’s touching announcement on Massively.  I have to saw that as well written as it was… it was breaking my heart to be reading it.  At this point I am not really sure how much of meaning I have to say about it.  It just flat sucks, and seems to follow the model that everything AOL lays its hands on goes to shit.  The most frustrating part is that it seems so senseless considering that from what I could tell all of the publications were doing swimmingly, in spite of draconic and ham-handed budget cuts.  I feel bad because I really did not follow Joystiq at all, but I did however read Massively and WoW Insider on a near daily basis.

While I didn’t always agree with every article, I felt like the site needed to exist.  There is a blogger that I am not even going to dignify by naming, that seems to be dancing on their grave with their “I Hope Massively Shuts Down” post.  I am done with that site and anything associated with it, and I think it was the last straw for a lot of people who had long only half heartedly followed it.  In fact I am officially done with rant blogs in any fashion.  But all of this is side tracking me from the purpose of today’s post.  I feel strongly that all of these writers will find homes either in community work or on another gaming website.  Today I compiled the list of twitter accounts for the writers that had them, for Massively and WoW Insider.  I figure this is the best way to follow people and see what they end up doing over the coming months.  February third will be the final day of all of the Joystiq connected sites.

Massively Cast

WoW Insider Cast

Pax South Panel Rundown

I had happy things to talk about in Final Fantasy XIV… but quite honestly after writing the first part of today’s post I am really not amped up and prepared to write them.  Instead I am going to close out today’s post with something I have been working on over the last few weeks.  One of the cool things about the age we live in is that sooner or later most things end up on Youtube.  For those that did not have the benefit of travelling to San Antonio for the inaugural Pax South show… or if you are like me and missed a bunch of the panels because you were doing other things…  I thought I would compile a list of everything that I could find online.  I did not record any of these and as such I do not take any responsibility for the quality… but this is the best of what I could find.

Game Panels

Conversation Panels

I am still missing a LOT of panels, but as I find them I will try and update the list to include them.  One of the big problems that I saw was that Gearbox and Bioware were pretty much doing their own things… and NONE of their panels were listed on the official Pax South registry, making it really hard to catch them.  I am really hoping I can find recordings of some of the ones by Bioware, but for those I don’t even know the name of said presentations to go off of.  If you know of any obvious ones that I am missing, I would appreciate a comment below to let me know.  In any case, I hope you have an awesome weekend and that you go out and do awesome things…  to help us forget that our gaming ecosystem is suffering a loss.