MMORPG Archives - Page 344 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Mafioso’s Daughter

February 12, 2014 by Belghast

Weekly Routines

With yesterday being server reset day in World of Warcraft, I opted to take a break from my Landmark madness to do my weekly boss farming for mounts. Out of my stable of six level 90 characters, there are three that can solo Onyxia in a manner that makes me not want to pull out my hair. The very first time I tried doing Ony as a Blood Deathknight for example it took at least 30 minutes of diseases/deathcoil/icy touch to finally bring her down to the ground. However I have figured out that as Frost Deathknight, Retribution Paladin, and Enhancement Shaman I can make short work of her. As a result every Tuesday it has become a thing, for me to run those three characters through the fight in an attempt to get the ever illusive reins of the onyxian drake.

Of course like expected the kills went quickly but I had no better luck than any of the previous weeks getting the drop. It was at this point that I decided while I was farming content, I might as well take a few stabs at Kael’thas and his Ashes of Al’ar. The funny thing is… I don’t even like that mount, but it has become a point of pride for me to farm one up. So while I do at least one attempt every week, it is not like I would ever ride it. So far I have managed to solo the instance as Blood and Frost Deathknight and as Retribution Paladin… and I am wondering if I will be able to do it as Enhancement Shaman. Of course once again this week nothing of any interest dropped.

Finally while I was wallowing in my bitterness I opted to run all six of my characters through the holiday event instance. This year around it drops 480 necklaces, which unfortunately all of my characters have better. However I did manage to pick up a tanky necklace upgrade for my Paladin. Once again I am chasing a mount, but more than anything for total numbers… because there is no way in hell I would ever ride the Big Love Rocket around, but I would consider riding the Love Bird. More than anything I would be after the handful of pets. I normally don’t mess with the holiday events. Once I completed my violet proto drake, I have mostly ignored them. They are however pretty fast to run, since no queue last night lasted longer than 7 minutes as dps.

We Were Playing It Wrong

Over the last few days I have been complaining about the lack of Sapphire and Ruby or at least the difficulty of gathering it up. Yesterday I noticed the above tweet from Dave Georgeson, it seems like maybe we as a community was overlooking the intended way to get these. I had piddled around early in the game with a +1 discovery ring and didn’t see much difference, but at the suggestion of the tweet I crafted the Assessor’s Band and managed to get a +4 one. With it equipped alongside the existing +1 I am seeing a massive difference in the number of veins open to me as I wander through the world. I am sure you have been through the frustrating case of seeing a huge vein in the distance, but when you get up there finally there is nothing there. Well apparently that is what discovery is for.

After equipping the two rings, for the most part those veins stay in place as I get closer to them. Additionally the discovery trait also seems to interact with how often I get the rare drop from each item. This means I am getting more elementals, burled wood and as a result seeing more veins that have sapphire and ruby in them. They are still frustratingly rare, but less so. I did not play for extremely long last night, but I did manage to get a couple dozen gems of each type. Supposedly we are getting a patch today or tomorrow that will fix the issues that have arisen with boulders and trees spawning again on claims, with no real way to remove them. I am mostly waiting for this before I do much more building as I can’t really see my keep as a whole until I can remove some trees.

The Mafioso’s Daughter

Before I met my wonderful wife, there were plenty of missteps along the way. Most of them are not really entertaining in any fashion, but one I always felt like I dodged a bullet with… potentially literally. While I was still attending a junior college I met a really nice ballet major attending a nearby college. She seemed great, but early on I could tell that she was used to operating in a much higher tax bracket than I was. It wasn’t anything major, but her expectations of what “going out” meant were far different than that of my small town upbringing. After a few dates she pulled me aside and told me that she was starting to get serious about me… but there was something I needed to know.

It turns out that her family was connected to the mafia. She kind of brushed this off as no big deal or as something “I would get used to”. Her father ran some large electronics store, and they lived down the street from the Gotti clan in Long Island. We didn’t have Google back then, but over the course of a few online searches and some mapquest usage… it seemed like her story checked out. I’m a boy scout literally… I am not the type of person that “high crime” has ever appealed to. While I love watching shows like Boardwalk Empire, I have never once romanticized that lifestyle. It had become very clear over the course of the dates that she was “daddy’s little girl”, so I felt it was probably bad for my health if I did not let her down gently.

I did my best to be “less interesting” that I would hopefully make her lose interest in me, and over the course of a few weeks it worked. I wanted no part of the “family business”, but at the same time I didn’t want to break her heart… and have mine shot in the process. Sure I am probably over exaggerating the danger here, but it definitely freaked me the hell out. Looking back now I can regale you with the tale of the time I dated the Mafioso’s Daughter, but when I was going through it, nothing about it seemed funny. I doubt there was every a time where I would have just “gotten used to it”. Thankfully not terribly long after that I met my awesome wife, and everything before is now just a humorous footnote.

Blame it on Lady Vox

February 9, 2014 by Belghast

This is happening a little out of the normal order. Since I wanted to devote a long post to Everquest Next Landmark for Steampowered Sunday, I decided against cluttering the bottom of the post with a factoid. So today I am doing a second really quick post as a sort of addendum. On the days when I have an already existing “thing” for that day, I might start doing this. The Friday Forum Fodder felt a little odd to have a factoid glued to the bottom. I still question if this feature is worth doing, or if folks are going to get bored of me talking about myself.

Blame it on Lady Vox

Since I posted a big long lovestory to Everquest Next for my Steampowered Sunday post, it feels only fitting to chain this factoid on the same day. My first real MMO experience was Everquest, and like I said in the other post it will always hold a special place in my heart. I love the setting of Norrath and its places, peoples and legends. That said I would have likely never gotten into the game on my own. I was one of those people that watched the game as it was being developed with great interest, only to get a bit soured at the thought of paying a monthly subscription. On my Amiga I had flirted with playing Air Warrior and EGA Battletech a bit over the GEnie service, and had already felt the sting of paying an hourly rate to play games. So the thought of doing that again really didn’t set well with me.

So it was very reluctantly that I accepted a request from a friend and co-worker of mine to come to his house one night after work and run his second account during a Everquest raid. The guild he was in had been preparing to take on the great dragon Lady Vox in Everfrost, and that night after work they were going after her. He normally dual boxed Everquest with his Iksar Monk and Halfling Druid, but since he would be pulling the mobs clearing up to Lady Vox he really needed to concentrate on doing that one thing. So I got what ended up being a few minute explaination of how to control my character, how to memorize spells… and which spells to cast… and we were off clearing our way through the ice giants and goblins on the way to the dragons lair.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I had never really played an MMO at this point, and very much never been on a raid of any kind, but I thought it was amazing how everyone in the party worked together towards a common goal of clearing the lair and finally battling the dragon. I stood back and cast nukes, occasionally throwing a heal here or there when someone looked like they were getting low. The battle was absolutely insane, with so many things going on at once that I had no clue what happened. At some point things started to get really hectic when folks started dying left and right. Sooner or later it was my turn, and my friend rather hurriedly explained where i needed to go to get back tot the fight. Luckily a ranger died about the same time so I followed her back into the lair.

My friend told me to “mem a nuke” and it was a few minutes before it dawned on me what exactly he was saying. I did just that and ran back in just in time to land the killing blow. So on my first night playing any MMO… I managed to slay an internet dragon. On that night I also got to see my very first instance of loot drama…. as there was an argument that erupted over who got the “zero weight backpack”. I have to say I was hooked, and the very next day I picked up a copy and rolled my very first character… Exeteroth the Dwarven Cleric. Turning around upon exiting Kaladim and seeing the giant dwarven statue still is one of the most epic experiences I have had in a game. Nowadays it looks so primitive, but at the time it was just staggering that something so big could exist in a video game. While the forced grouping and frustrations that it caused ultimately lead me to quit the game after a few years, Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart, as will my very first dragon raid.

Beardly Dedication

February 8, 2014 by Belghast

Press NDA Lifted

There has been a lot of confusion in the last 24 hours as Zenimax has lifted the NDA just far enough to allow a bunch of press outlets to post stories. Massively crafted a really poorly worded tweet stating that the ESO NDA Had lifted. Even though they followed up almost immediately with a correction stating that it only applies to the press and media beta… it has caused massive amounts of confusion. As a result there are so many video leaks going on right now, a good number of them seem to have an axe to grind with the game in general. I am still very firmly under a gag order but I feel that is a bit of a disservice to the game as a whole.

Most of the albeit scathing reviews of the game seem to be missing the general point. I feel like right now a lot of people are going into this game with the expectation of it being something that it is not. This is the problem of a broad game like The Elder Scrolls. Every player has a certain way that they want to play the game, and if their chosen game play isn’t supported then obviously it is a horrible game. Apparently there are players out there who legitimately do nothing but steal stuff from stores, or players who do nothing but kill quest giver NPCs. These are just a few of the fringe game play styles that I have seen mentioned on the more public forums that certain fragments of the population are up in arms over.

Thing is… the game seems to be selling extremely well. The game has firmly been on the top 10 best sellers list on Amazon.com since releasing. So lots of people still have interest in the game despite the sour grapes reviews that are coming out. At this point I feel like Zenimax needs to open the flood gates and let the actual fans who have been sticking by the title speak for it. This is not an insignificant number of players mind you, but each of us is bound by the same NDA gag order, and unable to say a single thing in defense of the title. Keeping the NDA in place, and stating that there will not be a fully open beta before release… only serves to give the public the impression that the game has something to hide. The game has absolutely nothing to hide, and I look forward to the day when I can talk about it without hedging everything I say in grand generalizations. The video I linked above is my favorite of the batch of “reviews” and Dan Bull seems to “get it”.

Forest Temple that Isn’t

I have still been plugging away on building my “Forest Temple” and posted some photos the other day yesterday on the EQ Next Reddit. Turns out my name is a bit controversial. I am building a temple in a deeply forested region of the Pingo island, so to me that is a Forest Temple. But apparently to a lot of people that has a specific meaning, which is the Forest Temple from Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. I am just too old for this to have a significant meaning to me I guess. Ocarina of Time came out when I was in college, and while I played it and enjoyed it… it really didn’t imprint on me as being anything more than a fun game. A Link to the Past is my Zelda game and the one I hold up as the pinnacle above all others. For me the Zelda franchise is best in its 2D form.

So to clariify… I will try and come up with a better name for my place, because I don’t want to give the impression that I am trying to build “The Forest Temple”. At this point I have massive amounts of resource farming to complete the temple. I want to do one more floor and a ramparts area at the top, as well as build out the undercroft more fully. Right now I am planning on moving the craft machines from the porch area to the undercroft. I hope I can unlock the paint tool because I think with that I can help to age the temple with little bits of mossy grass on the stone. I also want to do some work to make things more intricate, but i figure over time I can work out the fine details. I posted an album of pictures of my most recent progress.

Beardly Dedication

This is one that my wife suggested so I am running with it. Early my Sophomore year in High School I started growing a beard, and unlike my friends who were cursed with the inability to do so… I was able to grow one rather successfully. From that point until today I have only been clean shaven twice… and both of those times were horrible mistakes. Granted I vacillate back and forth between a full beard and a moustache/goatee combination… but for the majority of 22 years I have been proudly dedicated to beardom. Basically my beard started as a way to make me look older, because I suffer from a baby face. If I were to shave right now at age 37… I would look like I was about fourteen. Well maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is not a good thing to say the least.

The first time I shaved my beard was during my Junior year. I was completely smitten with a girl who barely knew I existed. I asked her out to the prom and she accepted, but she really pressured me to shave off my goatee at the time. I should have stuck to my guns, because quite honestly nothing about that night was worth the pricetag of shaving my beard. I did not realize I was mired quite so deeply in the friend zone as I actually was, and at least if I had my beard I could have stroked it while pondering the situation as she danced with someone else the majority of the night. Beard stroking apparently is a legitimate thing, and it actually spurs on mental activity.

The second time I shaved it… I did it mostly by accident. I took off a little too much from one side while trying to even out my beard. Rather than shaving down to a goatee, I decided that my wife had never actually seen me clean shaven. At that point we had been together five or six years, and she was polite about it… but told me to grow it back as soon as I could and to never do it again. Apparently the beard suits me, either that or she couldn’t handle the fact that she looked like she was married to a teenager. I figure at some point when I do actually want to look younger I can instantly loose 20 years by shaving, or at least this is my planned exit strategy. The actual secret to my beard is more akin to the fact that I simply hate shaving and will do whatever I can to avoid doing so. At one point this year I was sporting a beard that would make the guys of duck dynasty take notice… but that was more a test of just how long I could let it go than anything else.

Budgie Week Fiasco

February 7, 2014 by Belghast

Another Friday, Moar Fodder

Well another week has passed and it is once again time for Friday Forum Fodder. I have admittedly not been following the discussion around the interwebs as closely as I usually do during the week. I have a massive backlog of unread blog posts in my reader as spending the first half of the week sick and the second half desperately trying to play catch-up has left me with less lollygagging time. I did stumble across a couple of things that I found interesting so the topics are primed and ready to go.

WoW Up to 7.8 Million Subscribers

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3741-WoW-Up-to-7-8-Million-Subscribers

Apparently yesterday Blizzard had their Q4 2013 earnings call, and announced that they were currently sitting at 7.8 Million subscribers, which surprisingly is a 200k subscriber bump over the 7.6 announced in the Q3 2013 earnings call. Of course we all know that Blizzcon happened between those two calls, and that we had the announcement of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. However 200,000 players seems like an awful lot to simply account for the “Blizzcon Bump”. On Argent Dawn I have said before that we have been experiencing a bit of a renaissance with a large number of players coming back that I have not seen since Wrath, and some of them not even since Burning Crusade. This feels like something more substantial than just interest in the new and shiny bauble called Warlords.

With the release of Rift, something happened in the populace, a fracturing of sorts. That was the very first time I saw people leave WoW in a semi-permanent fashion. Always before when a new product released, players would drift away from the game only to return a month or two later. Something was different with the release of Cataclysm that broke the inertia of players to stay in one place. I myself was gone for a little over two years, and during most of that time I never saw myself seriously returning. For whatever reason I think a lot of us are resigned to the fact that the “wow-killer” simply will never exist. All of this effort spent trying to find a better experience than World of Warcraft just wound up leading us right back to the original.

I personally have come to realize that what WoW provides just does not exist in the same quantity or quality elsewhere. Sure various games do various components of the total WoW experience better, but no one game hits as many high points as Blizzard does. I have reached a point where I am mostly okay with the games flaws… and while I wish that it did certain things better, I can accept the fact that what it does is for the benefit of the many not the few. There are niche games out there that will scratch the various itches I have that WoW simply cannot. So while I am back in WoW I am also still very much playing Rift, TSW, Everquest Next Landmark and will be adding Elder Scrolls Online to that lineup. I have reached a point where I am okay with playing multiple games at the same time.

The beauty of World of Warcraft is that it is the game of consensus. It is that game that everyone plays when they can’t get anyone to agree on any other game. People play WoW because people play WoW. More than anything the large community that comes part and parcel with playing the game was the thing I had been missing since leaving it. When you play wow, you are instantly a member of something larger than yourself, and that is just an experience that is lacking with any of the other games. Don’t get me wrong, the other game communities are great, especially the fledgling Everquest Next community bolstered by SOE’s new sense of transparency. However it is still lacking in sheer size and volume of players. The Blizzard gaming community is big enough to support everyone, and that is a really rare and special thing.

Budgie Week Fiasco

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/412505-budgie-week-guide.html

Firstly I want to say, this is less about the specific thread but more about the Budgie Week event. I latched onto the guide threat by Seatin mostly because it was the only really active thread out there that coalesced all of the viewpoints in one place, whether or not he actually intended that to happen. Seatin does a great job of supporting the community with his guides and videos, so nothing I say should be held as a reflection on that. Additionally I love the folks at Trion, especially the team that is presently working on Trove. That is such a great game and the open process is so refreshing, including the use of Reddit as their primary forums. Additionally when Rift went free to play, I considered it to be one of the more just and equitable models. However some of the things they have been doing with the cash shop are feeling more than a little shifty.

Awhile back some of my friends were frustrated over the Squirrel mount that was released, in that they missed the ridiculously short window it was available for purchase outright in the game. This was really the beginning of a new trend, offering a cool mount for a very short time, and then putting a similar mount in a cash shop lootbox as the primary means of obtaining it. This was the case for the Squirrel mount, the Mech mount, and now looks to be the same basic thing going on with the Budgie mount. The shifty part this time is that they introduced a world event to make it seem as though you can actually acquire the mount that way. Problem is… with this being only a 7 day event it is simply impossible to gain enough of the “bird seed” currency doing these quests alone.

According to Seatin’s guide, if you got in on the first day of the event there is a maximum of 210 bird seed that you can obtain. The mount costs 850 bird seed on the vendor, meaning there is simply no way to obtain it without somehow augmenting your seed count. It turns out right now they are offering a limited time cash box that has a chance of dropping a different colored budgie mount, and you are guaranteed between 6 and 10 birdseed per box. The average seems to be 8 per trove, so in theory you need roughly 80 of these cash shop boxes to be able to purchase the bird. Granted you have a chance from each to get the OTHER budgie mount, but we aren’t even taking this into account. Essentially even doing your quests religiously every day, you would have to spend roughly $300 on the cash shop to be certain you get this mount while it is available.

Now Daglar has posted on the forums that this is a promo event, and they intend to run it several times a year, and by participating in all of them you should be able to get the mount. Even saying that… it still feels extremely bad seeing this unfold. This is the same kind of crap that I see over in SWTOR with making most of the truly unique looking mounts only available through the random chance of a cash shop box. The difference there is that you can actually post the items once you have gotten them on the auction house… whereas the cash shop loot in Rift is either soul bound or bound to your account. This whole event just leaves me feeling a little dirty for having supported their shirt to free to play so actively. I still think Rift is a great game, and I still think more or less it is a good value… they are just doing a few unsavory things that make me a little sad inside.

Bel Goes to Nasa

This mornings factoid digs pretty deep into the annals of time. Once upon a time I wanted to grow up to be a Scientist. I am not really sure what happened along the way to change that life ambition. If I had to guess it was probably the fact that AP Chemistry ate my lunch, but I managed to get out of it with a B, which seemed pretty damned good at the time. All that aside, I did really and truly want to be a Scientist, so I took the yearly ritual of the science fair extremely seriously. Through boy scouts I had gotten into model rocketry, so when it came time to pick a project I thought it would be interesting to do something related to that. With copious help from my father, we constructed a wind tunnel that ran on a shop vac, and proceeded to test the effects of airflow based on various model rocket fin shapes.

I think the key to winning a science fair is to have something cool to look at in your booth. I am sure there were many students that had more scientifically sound studies than I did, but I had cool photos of the pattern each of the fins had made. We tied string to each of the fins so that we could watch the pattern the thread made based on the airflow. The contrails that were created gave a clear picture of how each shape varied and was something nice and concrete that the judges to latch onto. I won the local level science fair and managed to move up to regional’s, but this was not something really new to me, because my pantograph had done the same my six grade year. In all honesty repeating a victory at the local level would have been more than enough for me.

When I got to regional’s however I was shocked at just how excited the judges seemed to be about my exhibit. So when it came down to time to present the awards, I don’t really remember what place I got in the main competition, because it was quickly overshadowed by the “special” award that I won. I got a trip for me, my family and my science teacher to NASA’s Johnson Space center. I have to say it was one of the cooler things I have experienced. A lot of the trip is a haze at this point, but I remember walking through a prototype of what would eventually become the international space station. I also remember getting to play around in the shuttle flight simulator, and meeting actual astronauts. All of which were pretty heady things for my little wannabe scientist seventh grader mind. But of course, High School happened… and I discovered computers and programming… and I jettisoned the thoughts of being a scientist out the airlock and moved on.