Landmark Archives - Page 8 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Rocky Horror Rejection

February 6, 2014 by Belghast

Of Large Templates

After piddling a bit in Rift and running Onyxia on the three character that can easily solo her, I settled into Everquest Next Landmark and attempted to recreate my forest temple. I had managed to successfully template the entire structure and suck back up all of the material night before last, so my hope was that it would in fact be as simple as plunking down the template and moving on. The problem is, large templates are extremely hard to work with. After spending an hour placing and undoing the template trying to get it just right, I finally said screw it and started from scratch again. The above shot shows a rare moment when my claim is flooded in sunlight.

The biggest problem I have noticed with templates is that they seem to align to the smallest block size instead of whatever block size you happen to have set as your tool. When you are trying to move a template that takes up your entire claim… it becomes extremely hard to determine when exactly it is in the right spot. I managed to get it pretty damned close at times, but never quite perfect. In the above image I had run out of stone while working on the flooring, but I have since fixed that and finished the first floor for now. Eventually I will build a staircase up to the second floor, but until I have enough stone to make a second floor that point is moot. The temple as it is right now has taken roughly 200,000 stone.

The last thing I was working on last night before logging was building out the front porch area. There is a ramp leading up now that I smoothed out and a stone railing of sorts. My plan is to keep all of my crafting machines out here so that anyone who happens to be moving past my claim can use them. That has been one of the really cool things about Landmark is that all of these player towns have sprung up. It reminds me quite a bit of Horizons, in that a little crafting community is starting to spring up here and there. It would be really cool if they added some large scale public works type projects that they players can work on. I remember guarding crafters as they carried loads of ore and stone to the various bridge projects in Horizons. While there were so many flaws in that game, it really was innovative in its social crafting systems.

Right now my chief mission is to gather enough gold and burled wood to be able to craft the Golden Axe. I have heard you can gather wood much faster using it, and I am really hoping that it will also allow me to fell the largest of trees. I know it is possible to take them down, because I watched someone doing it the other night. Essentially to truly complete the first floor I will need lots and lots of trees. I want to put wood braces to support the second floor and have them jut out slightly from the sides of the building. I have always liked that look but to be able to do them I need a ton of wood. Additionally while searching for the gold ore needed… I hope to gather enough stone to begin construction on the second floor. Finally there are a few machines that I am missing from my porch, so I want to gather up the bits to make the one that can finish marble especially.

Rocky Horror Rejection

For anyone who has ever been to a live performance of the rocky horror picture show, you know that it is a really raucous occasion. Would you believe that I managed to get kicked out of a showing? While I was in High School the local performing arts theater thought they would be edgy and host a showing of the movie. For starters it was a far more sedate version of the Rocky Horror Picture show. There was no live group dressed as the characters and performing all of the scenes, and no virgin sacrifices. Everyone however did show up with a bag of items needed to do the various tributes to the scenes. Even in its lesser form it was still pretty fun, albeit greatly sanitized.

Things went south when we got to “Over at the Frankenstein Place”. This is the point where everyone in the audience raises their lighters into the air swaying back and forth slowly to simulate the “there’s a light” portion. Not being a smoker, I didn’t have a bic lighter on me… so I decided to improvise. Gathering up a bunch of news paper we had to protect ourselves from the water guns… I decided to craft a torch. I bound the newspaper together tightly and lit that bad boy. This was a classic bad move, because I did not expect it to flame up quite so brightly… and quickly. It was only a few seconds before we realize this was not going to be a good idea in any fashion so we stomped it out.

Moments later a security guard showed up and in his remarkable intellect muttered “all right who did that?”. We gave him our best confused look, and then one of my group pointed down to the rows below us and told him that it was someone down there. The thing you need to know is that we are in a huge concert hall style performing arts theater. We sat roughly midway up the main seating, and everyone else in the theater were bunched together down by the stage. There were a good 25 rows of empty space between us and the next person. The security guard proceeded to go row by row, searching the entire space for the hidden arsonist. All of this time we were absolutely rolling, but trying to keep it down just enough to not tip our hand. Fifteen minutes later the winded guard came back to our row and proclaimed “Very Funny… You are all out of here.”

So the bulk of us all got punted from the show unceremoniously. Looking back now, I could have theoretically started a theater fire, but at the time it sounded like a great idea. No one really seemed to mind getting forced out of the proceedings, since it really was a watered down version of the “real thing”. We wound up driving around for awhile and finally ended up milling around in a park for a while before taking our dates home for the evening. We probably had far more fun loitering than we would have had attending the rest of the show, so I guess in the grand scheme of things everything worked out okay. I just find it funny now because I can state that I got kicked out of the Rocky Horror Picture show.

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

February 4, 2014 by Belghast

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

Most kids growing up end up working food service of one form or another, but I somehow lucked out and missed that experience during my formative years. Honestly I had a pretty good string of jobs throughout High School but probably the most bizarre would be that of Wedding Photographer… or more so the Photographers Assistant. My father was a machinist by day and professional portrait photographer by night and weekend. Essentially I grew up in the darkroom and was extremely comfortable around photographic equipment before most kids had learned to ride a bicycle. As I got older and needed an allowance, I often got drafted into helping out with the “family business”.

This was not as glamorous as it might sound. Essentially it usually meant sticking me up in a balcony somewhere during the service with a zoom lens and getting the nifty overhead shots that my father could not get from the ground. By my teen years I could name all the basic parts of a wedding, and could spot little variations coming before they actually happened. This whole experience has caused me to loathe weddings. Being the wedding photographer is a really uncomfortable experience, for a few hours you become part of the family and have to figure out how to wrangle your way through getting the shots taken. Thanks to tradition no one wants to take the photos before the wedding… and then after the ceremony it becomes a sheer struggle of wills to keep everyone in their clothing and willing to line up in the various shot arrangements that the bride and groom will want. Everyone wants to mingle with family because they go away… and while the photos don’t seem that important on the day of the event… they will certainly catch the fact that you didn’t get a photo of them with uncle bob afterwards.

This summer I had to reprise my role of Wedding photographer as I got asked by the same neighbor who cleaned up my blood mess to photograph her wedding. I mean seriously… how could I say no? So I gave it the good ole college try and I think overall the photos turned out pretty well. Within a few minutes of the ceremony ending I remembered all the reasons why I hated doing this in the first place however. We couldn’t keep the groomsmen from changing out of their clothing into shorts. This was an outdoor wedding in the middle of a August Oklahoma heatwave. I feel like I got the workout of my life trying to wrangle a bunch of people who did not want to stand still for photos. All in all however it was pretty successful and over time I managed to get everyone together. It did not help to improve my hatred of weddings however.

Giving Up, For Now

For the time being I am going to give up on building anything in Landmark. This is the fourth time in recent days that the servers have gone down and I have logged back into my claim being fully reset. I could clear it fast enough again with the select tool, but it feels absolutely futile since I know I will likely be logging back in again to nothing. Dave Georgeson posted this tweet last night which I seems positive… but we have had some optimism in the past as well.

I ended up clearing a little bit this morning so if things are still clear by the time I get home this evening I will consider that a positive sign and maybe just maybe start building again. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but it seems as though if you use ctl+v instead of delete when you have a large area selected… it appears that you harvest the materials contained within that area. I made the mistake of clearing the last time with the delete key, meaning I likely lost all of my props permanently. Honestly right now I wish I could figure out how to make torches, that is really the only prop I need to be able to craft a whole bunch of.

Another huge plus is that I managed to figure out the lightstone. Essentially unlike Everquest, it must be equipped in a slot. Since the slots are not marked at all, you just have to keep dragging them into each slot one by one until it finally fits there. You can see in the above picture the light radius that it gives off, which is more than enough to be able to see what you are doing. Really that is all I was wanting since my claim is mostly cast in shadow all the time. I like that aspect of it, and once I actually get my temple ruins built it should look really cool. Before I can really do that however I need to figure out how to make torches. I realize at this point I only have two crafting machines and based on what I saw yesterday there are like half a dozen or so that someone had out on their claim for people to use.

Since I can’t really craft I have been working on upgrading my tools. This morning I managed to craft the Heavy Silversteel Pick shown above. I am not sure if it is always a legendary item, or if I just lucked out in the randomizer. Previously I had been using the starter pick to clear any tier 1 material away from what I was actually wanting to harvest since the Pick/Axe combo was so much faster than any of the upgraded picks I had gotten. However this one seems to finally be roughly the same speed. Now that I can harvest another tier higher of material I am hoping I can craft the next set of crafting machines, and maybe even the next tool which I think is terrain paint, but I am not really sure. At this point mostly I am looking forward to the voxel database stabilizing enough for me to start building again.

Belghast and the Severe Asthma

February 3, 2014 by Belghast

Bel is a Sick Little Monkey

Right now I am feeling like a failure, for several reasons. For starters Steampowered Sunday never happened yesterday, because I kept waiting on the Everquest Landmark servers to stabilize enough to get in and record some gameplay. I thought it was going to be a cool idea to do SPS over a brand new alpha game that lots of folks were interested in. More so than that… I completely forgot that I had a raid last night, so I owe a lot of apologies to my raid group. I was feeling pretty shitty Friday night during the raid, and over the course of the weekend I just got to feeling worse. Yesterday was a bit of a haze and since the snow came down and my wife’s school was cancelled… I guess the day was lacking the normal sense of pressure that a Sunday has.

By the time I got drug down to our neighbors super bowl party, I had lost touch on what day it actually was. Sweet mother of god the food there… so much of it and so tasty. She had made these little bacon wrapped smoked sausages caramelized with brown sugar. I could have seriously made a meal on that alone. Like always she cooked for an army, and there were only 7 or 8 of us there. We left around halftime because we walked down and didn’t want to slip and fall on the way home through our poorly lit sidewalks. The food coma that set in just left me in a bit of a stupor. As a result I literally could not remember that I was supposed to tank a raid that night.

I am really hoping they had enough to pull the raid together but since the other regular tank was also slotted to be gone… I am seriously doubting they were. So I am posting it here, and I will post it elsewhere and say it in person… I am sorry I flaked on you guys. This is out of character for me, but it quite literally slipped my mind. I didn’t even realize I had done it until I got up this morning. Today I plan on trying to sleep as much as I can, because sleep heals. As a result I got up at 5:30 and emailed my boss saying that I would not be in and then slept until 10:30. I will be taking dayquil and breathing treatments to try and break the gunk up so that I can breathe again. I really need to be viable for work tomorrow. We are supposed to be getting a lot more snow and ice tomorrow, so we will see what exactly that means.

Belghast and the Severe Asthma

Since I am sick right now, I kinda wanted a factoid that blended with that. I have touched on this a few times but it is worthy of factoidization. I have extremely severe asthma, it has gotten slightly better over the years but there are times where my body still completely breaks down on me. I have a number of triggers ranging from weather changes, to strong perfumes and smells, and the worst of all is smoke both second hand and smoke from fires. This has been a thing that I have struggled with my entire life. My very first asthma attack happened before the age of one, when my mother heard me wheezing in my basinet at the end of the bed. My father had been an extremely severe asthmatic growing up and spent many a night under an oxygen tent… which was the 1950s treatment for such things. I don’t think I was officially diagnosed however until after age one, because the pediatrician kept saying “babies don’t have asthma”.

To make things even worse I have what they call a “primary immune system deficiency” which basically means I have a lazy immune system. So I tend to catch everything that is going around and it takes significantly longer for my immune system to wake up and realize there is something bad inside of me that it should be fighting. So this complicates the first thing significantly, as I almost always have some sort of a cold. If they drag on long enough there is a moment where it wakens the beast and my lungs start shutting down on me. This weekend is one of those times where a “nameless crud” has finally lingered long enough to trigger my asthma. Most of the time I can take a bunch of breathing treatments and be just fine. Every now and then it triggers a downward spiral that requires much more severe intervention.

Probably the worst of these was the 2005 Thanksgiving Holiday, over which I spent five days hospitalized. I know I mentioned this event in the little letter I wrote a few weeks back to some smokers in my building, but this is the worst case scenario that I am always worried about in the back of my head. Of course this was created by an unlikely chain of events. One of our friends had a house fire, and I went down to the house long enough to be handed prescriptions to take to Walgreens to fill. That was enough to trigger a negative reaction that lead to me going to the Emergency Room. They hooked me up to a BIPAP machine that would help me breathe, or at least force air into my lungs, and since my lungs were so swollen shut… it caused me to respirate insanely fast. So fast that they were scared I might have a heart attach that night, since my pulse was racing.

Eventually they were able to get things under control but it was five days before my blood oxygen levels came up enough for me to be able to go home. By day two I was absolutely stir-crazy in the hospital. All I really wanted was someone to bring me a laptop. This whole event has made me super aware and conscious of irritants in my area, and before this happening I probably never would have had to courage to tell the smokers what they were doing to me. With my large amount of weight loss, it has improved my asthma quite a bit. However there are still moments where something triggers that chain reaction and I go down for the count. I think this current situation is an accumulation of weeks of breathing colder than normal air mixed with some bug that is going around. But there you have it… a relevant factoid for a day when I am pretty sick.

Liberation Pingo

This post has already gone on pretty long at this point, but I didn’t feel like I could truly make another post without at least mentioning EQN Landmark. Friday evening late the Alpha keys went out to all of the founders, but I personally did not get it launched until Saturday morning after I made my blog post. At that point it was extremely hard to find a plot of land that was claimable. So I wound up in the middle of nowhere on the Liberation server and the tier 3 Pingo island. I feel like this may be a positive thing in the long run as there seem to be more than enough tier 3 resources to be had there. However this has involved a lot of my bouncing to other areas to pick things up. Right now I am building cautiously as during one of the server resets this weekend we lost all progress and I lost my crafting machines in the process.

The important thing to note… that if your tolerance for bugs is low. Save your money and wait until this enters beta. The game is very much an alpha product, but what is here is extremely fun. Essentially at this point it is much like the early days of minecraft. You wander around a very pretty world looking for resources that you can then take back to your claim and craft with. The area my claim is in rests deep in a forested valley and as a result very little natural light reaches it… so all of the pictures on my claim tend to be cast in shadow. Hopefully I can craft enough torches to fix that problem over time. The key progress I have made is I have been able to upgrade to the Iron Pick allowing me to harvest some higher end stuff, and I have been able to craft the selection tool as well as replacement crafting machines.

Right now the only frustration really is the long queues. At one point yesterday I waited for two hours in a queue, only to have the game crash out at 50% as it was loading. However as the evening went on this improved drastically. I just want to thank the EQN Landmark team because they really went above and beyond with this launch. I am pretty sure Dave Georgeson for example was up almost 48 hours straight working on the problem along with the rest of the team. So I have to say kudos for the work well done. I am already enamored with the game, enough that I have upgraded from Explorer to Trailblazer. There are a lot of systems simply missing right now, like it seems you can send a friend request… but the other party cannot respond nor is there a friend list. As a result we are using server channels so I have created a house stalwart one. Typing “/join stalwart” should get you in, and everyone that is friendly is more than welcome.