MMORPG

Original Start is Best Start

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My schedule is completely out of whack right now because of the stuff I am doing in regards to the flooding in town. We are doing this 24/7 management shifts thing, and previously I took one of those sessions on Friday from 6 am to 3pm, and hoped to keep taking that shift given that it is the closest to my normal sleep patterns. Unfortunately due to some shuffling I am now going to be captain 2pm to 11pm… which is manageable but I’ve not gotten to sleep that late since I was actively raiding. As a result this morning I slept in considerably later than normal as I am not going into the office until right before my shift. The further results of that is that you are getting a blog post later than normal, and that I may partake of a nap at some point between now and 1:30 pm when I leave the house.

I’ve truly been all over the place game wise over the last few weeks and I blame it at least in part of my fragmented schedule due to the weather. One of the things that I poked my head into again was Elder Scrolls Online, in part because the Elsweyr expansion released… and also I find that name complete hell to try and spell. ESO does this interesting thing each time it releases a new expansion, in that it replaces the new player experience with one that begins right at the newest expansion. I believe this started with the Morrowind expansion, continued with Summerset and is now doing it again with Elsweyr, which leads to the problem I am in currently.

I am probably in the minority, but I greatly prefer the original starting experience that shipped with Elder Scrolls Online… aka the three starter islands of Khenarthi’s Roost, Stros M’Kai and Bleakrock. So after piddling around with a Necromancer which so far is nowhere near as much of my jam as I would have thought it would be… I wound up grabbing a character that was still on Khenarthi’s Roost to play around with just because I wanted to experience that start all over again. The funny thing about this is… this is how a character I created as a joke is winding up to be my primary alt. Van Belsing was largely created at the insistence of a friend of mine, and was never intended to be played, but here we are with the fact that I’m now level 8 on that character and having a lot of fun re-experiencing the original starting game flow.

As far as my main goes… I am nowhere near Elsweyr either and still digging into the Vvardenfell campaign. I have a weird requirement when I am playing my main character in that I will only do content in the order in which it was released. Now I had to pace this out a bit given that both Thieves Guild and Assassin’s Guild are not exactly expansion that you can fully complete in this manner given that there is a lot of faction grinding involved. However with the mainline content I have been extremely strict in this nature. I completed all 150 levels worth of original content doing the trip from Daggerfall to Dominion to Ebonheart before touching any of the expansion content.

Now I have a stack of content waiting on me and honestly… that isn’t a bad spot to be in. So often with MMORPGs I am a content locust and can easily gobble up all of the available content leaving me with a feeling of nothing left to do. However the content in Elder Scrolls online is so dense and story driven that I can only handle doing so much of it before I need to go play something else for awhile. The end result is that ESO is a game that I can seemingly constantly return to and experience fresh story driven content that has piled up and is waiting on me. Now I tend to stay subbed pretty much permanently so I can pop in and out at will. I cannot play the game without the magical reagent storage bag, because I like looting pretty much every object that crosses my path.

This is still a really damned good game, but all of that said… I still do think I prefer the story line that came with the original game the best. That is not to knock any of the expansion content, because it has all be excellent. I just prefer the core game flow of the old world. I realized there was a lot of gnashing of teeth and it was fashionable to hate on this game when it first released… but I loved it then and still love it now. It is like a comfy sofa that I can crawl back on at any point I like and take a nap. That might not be the best tagline ever for an MMORPG experience but it seems to have found a niche in my game play schedule that I keep returning to.

Tornado Watching

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Last night was effectively a repeat of Monday, but seemingly with more activity going on. I lost track of the number of Tornado warnings we were under at various points during the evening. The above photo is not mine but it is of a tornado that formed in my town. I quite possibly did the most Oklahoman thing ever and stood out on the front porch watching it happen. Before you chide me for not being safe… the storm cell was headed the opposite direction and at this point it was several miles away. Now this is not the first Tornado I have watched, but there is something mesmerizing about the process of watching it. It isn’t like the movies… the clouds feel like they are moving impossibly slowly as a plume of clouds begins to snake down towards the ground. In truth they are moving insanely fast but you just happen to be watching something massive occurring and the scale throws off any gauge of speed.

While we spent the night watching out for storms… the more insidious concern is the fact that we are having significant flooding. Thankfully where I live specifically… there isn’t much of a chance of flooding as I live outside of even what is the 500 year estimate floodplain. That said it is making travel around the area pretty rough as several of the roads that are normally completely safe to take are under water. Essentially we are in a rough spot as a state because all of the dams in this area are beyond safe capacity… meaning they are having to release way more water than they normally would. Effectively I think we are going to be past the 100 year floodplain estimates and will be setting ourselves up for the levels we have not seen since the “great flood” of 1986.

One of the things that you don’t expect in Oklahoma is the fact that we have the largest inland shipping port, and with it a huge navigational system. To add another monkey wrench into the works, last night two barges loaded with stuff broke free of their moorings and were heading towards one of the lock gates. The tugs were not available to try and round them up, because they had already rounded up two other barges that broke free earlier. So the concern is that if they slammed into the dam that is part of the lock system, and if it were to break… an entire town would effectively be wiped off the map not to mention other less immediate ramifications. For the time being however they appear to be hung up on some rocks and are still tied to each other… so folks are scrambling to try and anchor them in some more permanent fashion. Regardless the town in question has been evacuated in case things go south.

Basically right now we are living in a really weird time, and as such my game time has suffered. What you are getting from me instead in the meantime is a lot of random commentary about my life. I want to emphasize that I personally am safe and that my home is safe. The world around me however is less so… and it is interesting to be a spectator to all of the calamity going on around me. The area will most certainly be dealing with the ramifications going forward for a long time. I did however get some time to briefly play a bit of Necromancer in Elder Scrolls Online… and I have to say that the new game experience is a little weird. I am used to having the entire skill tree available to me from the start, and it seems like you only get access to something once you have used it? I didn’t get Two Handed Weapons for example until I had killed some stuff with one, at which point the skills opened up.

I still more or less plan on trying to play a Necromancer tank, but I probably should have gone through the tutorial to at least get some starter weapons. All I have found thus far in Elsweyr is a Two Handed Sword so I am using that for the moment. It feels really weird to be starved for skill points… seeing as on my main I have a stack of them that are sitting unspent. I figured a Dark Elf was probably the most likely to be a necromancer, so I went with that and with the scarred appearance. I hope to spend more time playing this when I am not dodging twisters. We were going to go buy flowers this weekend… but the Nursery is now sitting completely underwater so that won’t be happening. Memorial Day is going to be an odd one this year.

Minor Renovations

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Over the last few days I have been doing a number of minor renovations to AggroChat.com which is a site that you may or may not know about. Essentially the site is a mirror of the content that the various members of the AggroChat podcast do on the interwebs along with the resting place of each of our episodes. We use a plugin that is no longer actively supported… but still seems to work… to make a local copy of each post that comes out on the various sites that make up our group. What this means in practice is that the site is mostly filled with Aggronaut posts and podcast episodes given that I am way more prolific than the rest of our crew.

The site itself had been in a weird place for some time, largely due to the fact that the previous web host made it very hard to modify anything as I had to go through a manual install process. So over the last few days since moving the sites over the weekend I have been making small tweaks here or there to the site to refresh it. The main change that I made is to swap from the cumbersome theme that I had been using over to Generate Press, the same highly modular theme that I use with Aggronaut. What makes this theme extra awesome is the fact that the licensing allows you to pretty much use it on any site that you own.

I may be tweaking colors a bit, but I think for the most part things are now in a fairly stable state. The last major changes I made yesterday were to make private any content not related to the current staff, and to re-associate the podcast episodes to the AggroChat account instead of my account. What this gives me is a much cleaner Author widget in the sidebar that shows the last several podcast episodes lumped together as well as the last several posts from each author. Previously I really didn’t make proper use of the sidebar and now it has a much more consistent feel to it as well as linking to the various “AggroChat” branded social media accounts. I’m fairly happy with the current state of things and just felt like talking about it a bit this morning.

As far as gaming goes… I started my night attempting to do some Diablo 3. I say attempting because the thing that I really need to do is a round of bounties, and the thing that I keep struggling to do… is a round of bounties. For some reason over the last few days I have encountered issues where I get disconnected from Diablo and battle.net entirely… so much so that I often have to crash the client and restart it. This happened the other night while Grace and I were grouping up, which didn’t make it that big of a deal because she kept the session active. However when I am playing solo… this means whatever progress I made towards a round of bounties was lost since I only really need the Bounty Caches at this point and not whatever I happen to loot along the way. This also meant that Diablo 3 was not my final resting place for the evening.

My next go to was World of Warcraft Classic, but after screwing around on my newly minted Undead Warrior… I was not having much gusto there either. I think I might be in a holding pattern with this until it officially releases in August. Were they to tell me that they were not going to be resetting progress between now and release… then that would be one thing. However since leveling in Classic is not exactly fast… I am not exactly relishing the prospect of getting to a happy place in beta and then losing all of that progress for live. Classic served to tell me that yes I did in fact want to do this… and now I am more or less ready for launch.

Instead I largely opted to watch some episodes of The Toys that Made Us on Netflix. For the uninitiated this is a docuseries that outlines the various decisions that went into making the toy lines I grew up with in the 80s. I watched the first season when it initially was released, and yesterday was made aware that season 2 was available. So I watched the first of the new episodes on Star Trek toys, and then the majority of the episode on Transformers before I eventually gave up and went to bed. I think a lot of my restlessness from last night comes from the fact that I did not sleep well due to the storms. I was more or less dead to the world until the alarm went off this morning… and then was groggy enough that i couldn’t figure out how to turn the alarm off on my watch. Hopefully tonight will be more fruitful on the gaming front… and if not I will just keep on watching Toys that Made Us because it really is a charming show.

Thorns and Rebirth

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This weekend was the beginning of Season 17 of Diablo 3, and after largely taking off the previous one we were back in the saddle again. I started the season on PC and hope at some point to start playing it on the Switch as well at least far enough to get the various season rewards. To the best of my knowledge this is the first season to double back and start repeating, as I had all of the cosmetics that were handed out this time around. This is both a positive and a negative in that I will be able to pick up the things that I have missed in the past, but it also will lower my overall drive to play a given season if I know I won’t be getting anything brand new.

I am amped for this season however because it allows me to return to my favorite build in Diablo 3… the “stop hitting yourself” crusader. Generally speaking I pick which class I play in a given season based on which class sets are available through Haedrig’s Gift, and this season the one available for Crusaders is Invoker… aka the Thorns build. The inner tank in me just really loves running around and watching the monsters explode when they try and hit me, and apparently everyone is pushing this one up high on their tier lists for long term clearing. Which makes me really want to try and get a bonus stash tab and the cosmic effect bat wings this season. I had a lot of fun this weekend playing around with Diablo 3 and I just wish that my schedule would have synchronized better with my friends because apart from the Friday night push and while recording on Saturday… I never quite managed to group up again. I did however finish chapter 4 and get the full set of Invoker… and am now working on the Slayer chapter.

Also the “Decades Behind” thing is starting to gather steam and I am shocked that for the most part the AggroChat crew seems really interested in it… or at the very least it is a thing that they feel like they are insane enough to do. With that however I decided that maybe I should see if I can get used to playing an Undead Warrior… given that raiding Horde side means you don’t have Fear Ward and having an extra fear break would potentially be worth it. It is weird that I am now thinking in terms of optimization for something that I have literally “been there and done that” for… which is going to make the whole raiding experience feel weird. I know these bosses and the strats to take them down… I know the drop tables and which gear I should seek out. I feel like Classic WoW is going to be a master class in optimization as much as anything else in trying to seek out the items you need. Like for example… I want to tank every single Warlock when they get their Felsteed… because that boss can drop one of the best +defense guns in the game at the time of Vanilla. All of this shit is coming back and my memory is on fire with all of the things I used to do to make things functional. This is going to be a really interesting ride.

Lastly this morning is the first post from a brand new web host. Over the weekend I uprooted both Aggronaut.com and AggroChat.com and moved them over to a brand new location. For the most part things seem to be going smoothly, apart from a few hiccups here and there. Aggronaut seems to be having more problems than AggroChat but that is largely because I am needing to undo the various customization I made to make it work on the previous host. Like this morning I could not get image uploads to work, but I ironed that out in short order. It was a sequence of events that made me to abandon ship. Firstly I was paying way more than I would need to make… but you can never underestimate the power of my laziness when it comes to avoiding paying money for something. Next there was the problem where at some point automatic upgrades broke completely… which was a big boost for moving but again something I was willing to deal with for the short term.

The final straw however is that the host itself has been wildly unstable… I use a cloud app called Uptime Robot to track if my sites are up or down. The above spam is from my inbox and the messages showing my site is going unresponsive on a pretty regular basis. This finally was enough of a kick to get me to go off and find better options. As it stands I am in the process of moving things over one by one but with AggroChat and Aggronaut both moved that really is the bulk of the work. It took forever to transfer the 77,000 files for AggroChat and the 25,000 files for Aggronaut… which is bizarre considering that the bigger of the two sites is roughly half the age of the other one. I think I have an addon gone awry on AggroChat that we use to cache copies of posts from all of the AggroChat crew’s personal sites. Every so often it will go on a binge and add the same post over and over… and apparently this has happened more times than I realized.

It is returning… time to start planning

Whatever the case I am on new ground now, and if things continue to go as smoothly as they have I will probably write a proper review of the service during Blaugust. That is right folks… I have not forgotten about Blaugust and will begin talking about this years running shortly over on the Discord.