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Comfort Gaming

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Classy Defined

This morning I got up like I do most weekend mornings, and threw on enough clothing to make myself presentable.  Generally speaking I don’t shower until later in the day, so generally this means I have to throw on a skull cap to tame my hair that is sticking straight up.  In the winter this makes sense… in the summer not so much.  Honestly in the morning anytime I see someone in a skull cap or baseball cap… I pretty much assume they are doing precisely what I am doing.  As always I went to QuikTrip to gather up sustenance, and walked away with chocolate donut holes for the Mrs. and a jalapeño sausage roll for me.

While there… I saw the definition of classy.  This woman walked in, who looked like she was already three sheets to the wind.  What was she buying you ask?  Well she planted an “Olde English” 40 oz malt liquor on the counter.  Granted this is 8 am in the morning, most of the people in the place are buying donuts or juice or something more breakfast appropriate.  In addition she had a package of twinkies and asked the guy at the counter if he sold single swisher sweets.  After some fumbling around he found her a three pack, and I guess that was “close enough”.  So yeah… I guess that is how some people roll.  I am guessing this is not breakfast but a “night cap” of sorts.  Just not something I normally see in the neighborhood QuikTrip.

Comfort Gaming

I think I grieve differently than most.  Since the news of my grandmother, all I have really wanted to do is “turtle”…  aka pull my head inside my shell and forget that the world exists.  One of my chosen ways of doing this is to go off and play games that have always made me happy.  One of the games I always cycle back to eventually is Everquest 2.  It is like an old friend that I have spent so much time with, that I don’t even need to talk anymore… and I know that it understands me.  Yeah I am sure it is odd that I personify a game like that, but really EQ2 was a thing I did for “me” and no one else.  All the while raiding in WoW I would steal private time by logging into Norrath and wandering around aimlessly on my army of alts.

Just as a coincidence, right now my absolutely favorite event is going on in EQ2.  Once a year Chronoportals open up allowing players to revisit areas from the original Everquest.  Some of them are rather funny, like the Ancient Cyclops event in Sinking Sands.  Back in the day there were all sorts of “theories” for how you get the ancient cyclops to spawn.  Some of these involved killing all the madmen, spiders or mummies… and none of them really worked.  It was a fairly random chance that you would get him to spawn.  Why did players care? Well the Ancient Cyclops dropped the item needed to start the Journeyman Boots quest line, which of course provided the player with their own personal way of casting “Spirit of the Wolf”.  SoW Plx!

Basically they are a really awesome way of getting account bound gear for your alts.  I am not sure when I will actually level an alt again, but sooner or later I always seem to, and having these weapons and gear makes a bit difference.  On my Shadow Knight I am still using the sword that comes from the Lower Guk chronoportal event.  It is precisely the kind of mindless nostalgia that I need right now.  The above video has me running through several of the events, or at least the ones I could remember off the top of my head.  However if you are looking for a full listing, the place to check is Zam as always the amazing Cyliena does a great job as always with updates.

The Great Wipe

The end of Alpha is I believe next Wednesday morning, and the beginning of Closed Beta begins Wednesday afternoon/evening when the servers come back up.  What this means is everything we have created along the way… will be gone.  The only thing that will be kept are your characters, and the various entitlements like things that came from the trailblazer packs and things purchased from the store.  This means all of the claim data will be wiped.  I have a big mixed opinion about this.  I don’t mind the idea of losing the work I have done on my claim, but I really don’t like the idea of losing my claim in general.  I like my claim, I like where it is.  My frustration is that there will be a massive landrush Wednesday evening… which is going to suck.

My plan will be to try and get a spot similar to where I had it before on Liberation/Pingo, but if I cannot… who knows where I will end up.  Basically the acquisition of goods begins a new.  So that means we will have to go back to square one with only our extra special trailblazer axe to start and work our way through the gearing tiers again.  Here is hoping that with the addition of heartwood the grind for stuff is far less painful.  As a result I got in for a bit yesterday, but I didn’t really feel like doing much.  I made a few claims extension flags to see how well that worked, but really with everything going away, I don’t feel much like screwing with it.  I have a bit of my stuff templated, but really I found using super huge templates really awkward so I will probably build everything back from scratch.

The cool thing about closed beta is that each of us trailblazers are getting friend keys.  The notice from the other day says these are no longer going to be time limited keys… but instead permanent access to the beta from this point onwards.  I know a few people who wanted them, so I will be trying to hand mine out that way.  However there should be a lot of them up for grabs as I know a lot of people in the blogosphere who are Trailblazers.  My hope is that they pretty much limit the closed beta access to just the friend codes for a bit, at least until the great landrush is over.  My goal is to get another claim somewhere in a forested area and then start over from there.  I really liked being in the forest, especially since the later item grind ends up being wood, and not ore.

Technically Alpha

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I Need an Off Switch

There are times I absolutely hate that my wife can sleep through almost anything, and get to sleep so easily.  There is this thing she does that drives me insane, where right before sleep she winds up my brain by revealing some tidbit of knowledge that my mind takes the next hour and a half to digest before it allows me to go to sleep.  Over the week we have had a really sick cat, and are treating her for her hyperthyroidism with a cream that I have to rub into her ear twice daily.  She is getting better, but doing so very very slowly, so I had planned on calling the vet this morning to see if she needs to be seen again.  Moments before my wife went into her nightly coma, she dropped the bombshell that she is not sure that “Little Shit” has been peeing.

Not only did this wake me up, but I went into a full blown panic attack playing the “what if her kidneys are shutting down game”.  There was absolutely nothing I could do to calm down and I was up half the night literally… I finally laid down around 2:00 and drifted off to sleep about thirty minutes later when “little shit” decided to join us in bed.  Her constant purring I guess clamed me down, because she “seemed fine”.  This morning one crisis was adverted when I saw her pee in a place she isn’t supposed to, and another one started when she vomited and there were little red spots in the mixture that looked suspiciously like blood.  All the while I am envious of the fact that my wife can sleep on command, and I end up fighting incessantly to get the few hours a night I end up getting.  There was one night this week, that I thought was a “normal sleep” and my fitbit told me I had 32 periods of restlessness throughout the course of the evening.

Woah We’re Halfway There

I guess that is a bit misleading since dinging level 30 is by no means halfway to 60 effort wise… but it is at least numerically!  Once again I engaged in leveling my Night Elf Mage while hanging out with friends on mumble.  These are starting to feel a bit like impromptu podcasts, since we end up talking about the days gaming news and various sundry bits of geeky information.  We seem to talk about everything other than the game I happen to be playing at the moment I am streaming.  Originally my intent was to stream some Landmark last night, however the servers did not come back up until the wee hours in the morning.  I know this because I also streamed some of that during my panic attack state to try and calm the hell down.

All in all as much as I hate to admit it, I am starting to like playing a mage.  I am beginning to feel more useful in dungeons now that I have some semblance of an AOE in the form of Cone of Cold.  It is still not my preferred method of game play, but I am not absolutely disliking the experience of pushing this character to 60.  Yesterday the Godmother of Faff herself, @AlternativeChat posted about a new contest of sorts.  The idea is with all the boosting going on, to level your way to 90 proudly with purpose.  While I am fully in support of this notion, I am not sure if I qualify for it.

I currently have 6 90s, 2 85+, 2 70+, and my baby mage that my intent was to push to 60 and boost the rest of the way to 90.  I feel like I have experienced the leveling content in World of Warcraft more times than most players.  So I don’t really feel any shame in using my free boost to jump the character class I am least likely to play to the finish line.  However I do feel that most of the folks who have never had a 90, and are using their boost to get there are missing something in the process.  Some of the quests you have to struggle through along the way become a shared cultural experience.  As much as I hate the “poop” quests of Burning Crusade, I like that I did them and shared in the same frustration as other players.  Maybe that is an odd thing to say, but there are very few moments that all players have experienced.  Anyways… you should definitely check out the post that sparked this discussion.

Like There is No Tomorrow

Also on the docket of last nights streaming, I decided to take a break from the mage after dinging 30 and play some Wildstar.  In truth, once again I checked to see if the Landmark servers were back up yet… and since they were not, I opted to play the thing with the most current NDA drop.  I have to say there are certain aspects of the game that are growing on me.  The “soldier” archetype and the quests associated have definitely nailed my personal style of game play.  Namely… explore the world and kill everything that gets in my path.  Once again the “impromptu podcast” aspect of my streams continued as we discussed lots of gaming tidbits.  I have literally considered stripping the audio from these videos and stitch them together into a podcast.

This is what nights on mumble are usually like, as we discuss more than just what we happen to be playing at any given time.  I still am not really used to hearing my own voice yet, but I will get over that.  As far as Wildstar goes… I cover this in the video, but after this weekend the Beta is significantly changing.  Up until this point I have had essentially 24/7 access to the servers, and feel like I have generally squandered that by not playing.  Once this change occurs I am honestly not sure what kind of access I will have.  I know preordering gives you something, but I do not believe that we will keep fulltime access unless we have a 32+ character when the transition happens.  Additionally I think those players will be unable to progress past level 17.  The whole scenario is rather complicated, and I am not sure yet if I really grasp it.  As the thread says, the only sign of a successful compromise is that no one is happy.

No Sleep Til…  Landmark!

I had attempted to sleep for about thirty minutes, and then I realized that I was on the verge of going full blown panic attack… I opted to get up for a bit to try and calm myself with the dulcet tones of gaming.  Generally speaking in the past when I have needed to relax like this I would play Minecraft, and since Landmark is my new Minecraft…  I was thankful the servers were back online.  I figured while I was running around anyways, I might as well stream some of it.  I didn’t broadcast the fact I was doing so, because really I did not intend to be entertaining or talkative.  What the video does show however is the inside of my claim and my latest project… completely redoing the dungeon.  I have to admit at this point… it had been a few weeks since I had played Landmark.

Essentially I had gone high center on some of the crafting requirements.  In order for me to get better machines and better tools it involved absolutely silly amounts of Burled Wood farming.  For those of you who need a refresher, Burled Wood was a rare drop from almost any tree.  You originally needed 100 to make a single Burled Wood plank, and then most of these extremely high end crafting machines and tools required 50 or more of these planks.  This was one of the worst RNG grinds you could imagine.  I simply reached a point where I could not bring myself to chop down the number of trees that it would need to get the things crafted that I wanted crafted.

Thankfully in yesterdays patch they completely turned this mechanic up on end.  Now when chopping down trees they drop a single guaranteed “Heartwood” drop, with a rare chance of dropping more than one at a time.  These are now the items needed to craft machinery and tools, and Burled Wood has been relegated to a “lesser” and also more reliable drop crafting material off of certain trees.  What this means is if you need 27 Heartwood, you know that you will have to farm a maximum of 27 trees to craft that item.  Even if you need 90 Heartwood…  still having a fixed point that you have to farm is so much better than relying entirely on luck to get the drops you need to complete your projects.  Thank you so much for taking this one back to the drawing board.

Technically Alpha

Play 2014-03-14 00-40-29-95 Another very exciting thing happened yesterday…  I received an invite to the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha.  One of the more interesting tidbits about this, is that there is apparently no NDA.  We can blog about it, stream it… do whatever we want, with the caveat that we treat it like the alpha that it is.  I am perfectly fine with this notion because I have been looking forward to “HotS” as it is lovingly referred to… for some time.  Essentially Heroes seems to be set up to fix one of the problems I have with League of Legends.  I am all about team play, and when I am playing as a team I only really care about the end objective… our win.  When I play shooters I tend to be heavily objective and role based shooters that focus on the win condition and not individual player stats.

So much of the way game play works in League seems to be counter intuitive to playing as a team.  Progression is almost solely based on personal performance, not performance of the team.  One of the most frustrating mechanics I have experienced is that of “last hitting”, and this concept is entirely gone from Heroes of the Storm.  Granted I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with the game play… since I did not realize I even HAD access to the Alpha until about 1 am in the full force of my panic attack.  I think I made it about halfway through the tutorial before I made another futile attempt to sleep.  So far everything feels like I expect it to, and the tutorial character of Raynor was rather fun to play.  I look forward to cracking this open and experiencing the content for real over the weekend.  I hope to stream some of it, but with the last beta weekend going on in Elder Scrolls Online… not sure how much of that will actually happen.

Being Bad at Mage

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Big Damned Beta Weekend

eso 2014-03-04 18-57-08-03 This coming weekend that leads into Spring Break here in the United States, represents the last public beta weekend before the 4/4/2014 launch of the game.  Now the beta client you will be getting to play has a significant number of changes in it.  For point of reference the one that was used during the last public beta weekend was from early December, and lacked a ton of the polish changes that have gone in since.  As a result even if you had completely written off the game based on past public beta experiences… you really owe it to yourself to patch the game up and give it another go this weekend.  While December doesn’t really seem that long ago, what has happened between now and then is what I like to refer to as a “hallelujah” build… aka the one that fixes so many bugs and makes the game feel nice and tight and polished.

So many of the quests that have been perennially bugged out during the beta weekends should now be fixed and working smoothly.  In many cases this involved subtle tweaks to the flow of the quest to make it work more reliably.  Additionally this build is the one that introduces mob collision and the ability to skip the starter island.  The mob collision seems to fix some of the complaints about “floaty combat” that players have made, and the combat animations themselves have tightened up considerably as well.  There are still a number of features missing that are in the private test build, but overall I think players will have a more enjoyable experience.  The game is very much an Elder Scrolls experience, but unfortunately if you were hoping it would morph into a standard MMO interface… that has not and likely will not happen.

Another cool thing about this weekend is with my dabbling in twitch streaming with my “Bel Faffs About” series, I recieved an email from support saying that I could stream the entire weekend if I wanted to.  Granted we likely have quite a bit of things to do over the weekend, and Saturday since it is going to be nice out we hope to go out and do some photography.  However as much of the weekend as I can, I will be streaming out my gameplay.  I am not sure at this point if I will be starting a fresh character, or picking up where I left off on my Orsimer Dragon Knight from the previous beta.  For those who have not already tested the content, they are asking each of us to start a new character and test the new starter experience sans islands.  It works pretty well but is considerably more difficult since at the level you fight some of the encounters, you really don’t have a full set of gear yet.

Technicolor Voxels

I am still very much learning this streaming thing… and I feel like I still have so much more to learn.  I was having some issues with FFSplit, namely in the inability to stream Trove.  So after a suggestion or two from friends I loaded up Open Broadcaster Software overall I like the way it is set up, and it seems more intuitive to me.  However it has copious amounts of settings, and I made the mistake of just accepting the defaults.  The above video is passable at times, but pixellated as all get out anytime there is action going on.  After some tweaking I improved the results with the WoW stream later in the evening.  Additionally I am noticing that I really need to drop the volume of the game by about half so that I am not fighting to speak over it.  I was honestly being fairly quiet last night… and I need not to do that.

It had been awhile since I had patched up Trove and played around on the server.  With all the excitement over “pretty voxels” and Landmark… my enthrallment with Trove’s simplicity fell by the wayside.  This is one of those games where if you stop playing for a bit, you are absolutely shocked at just how much has been done the next time you play.  One of the coolest things from the above video is when I find a tree fort in a higher tier zone, and go hunting for the mushroom king that rules it.  Last time I played they did not have real “dungeon bosses”, and they actually do hurt significantly.  I cheat quite a bit in that the community chest was stocked full of rainbow weapons.  However in my travels last night I did manage to pick up an upgrade that looks like the gun from Portal.

The gunslinger class is extremely fun, and it feels more responsive at times than the Knight does.  Granted the Knight was their “first class”, so I figure at some point down the line they will apply a round of tweaks to make it feel more unique.  If you watch through the video, you can tell I am heavily addicted to using the “rocket jump” attack, that shoots your character up into the air.  I am one of those players that jumps constantly, so this only adds to my enjoyment when I can hurdle over big obstacles.  One of the things I never could find however was the snow biome full of robots.  I am wondering if they made robot parts significantly harder to farm, by only making them drop off punch bots and the dungeon boss robots.  I will try doing another stream soonish with fixed settings to make sure the pixelization is gone completely.

Being Bad at Mage

So as I said above, by the time I got around to streaming World of Warcraft last night, I had tweaked my settings significantly.  While the gameplay in WoW never includes the kind of spastic jumping that Trove does, it seems to be smoother and not pixellated.  I continued my quest to push my Mage to 60.  Night Elf Mage is pretty much the least possible “Belghast” character in existence.  I have always had a problem with Night Elves, and I do not do amazingly well at “Finger Wigglers” as I call them.  That said I have this silly idea that I want to get one of every class to the level cap, and I figured the only way I would actually do this is by using my free boost to 90 on a Mage.  Traditionally the characters I was least interested in playing were the Mage and the Priest.  When I accepted a scroll of resurrection some time ago, I made an instant 80 priest.  So that just left the mage, that I have never really managed to level past about 20.

Firstly I am fundamentally bad at playing a Mage.  I know this.  I had been using Frostfire bolt all this time… because it was “the prettiest”.  Really though the animation does look amazing as compared to the stock Frostbolt… so that meant it had to be better right?  Wrong… apparently it is a spell that no self respecting frost mage would ever cast except in the rare case of a mob being frost immune.  Last night oddly enough I had one of the best mages I have never known watching the stream.  Helkim was commenting over twitter, since I fail at using Twitch chat and gave me the realization that I should never press frostfire bolt again.  Sure enough my damage went up to respectable levels in dungeons…  viva la shorter cast time!

Towards the end of the video someone took the bait.  I made this channel on our guild Mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming”, and since my friend Drathis has no self preservation instinct… he decided to join me.  Within a few minutes several other friends had popped into the channel, and I think before too much longer we had all pretty much forgotten I was streaming.  As a result you guys get a glimpse into what our mumble sounds like on an almost nightly basis.  This might be confusing to the listeners because we end up often times playing completely different games, and there will be cross conversations going on about each.  Everyone else in the channel that was not me, was playing Diablo 3 torment mode I believe.  If I did not have this burning desire to get my mage to 60… I would likely be doing the same.  Basically I decided that I would far rather level a character to 60, than level tradeskills to 600.

Micro Voxel Welding

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Big Damned Beta Weekend

eso 2014-03-01 09-16-13-09 This weekend they seem to have completely opened the floodgates and then some as far as Elder Scrolls Online testing goes.  It seems like every person that signed up for beta before a certain point, got their invite this weekend.  In addition to that, pretty much everyone who has ever tested got a buddy key.  So essentially if you wanted to test the game, you should have gotten your chance this weekend.  Admittedly I was more than a bit disappointed to see we were testing on an old version of the client that did not include the changed introduction.  In fact it seems like everyone in the test was expecting to see the new and shiny progression.  However I love Stros and Betnihk so I am more than happy to play through them again.

I had all these plans of trying to play a caster, but when it came down to rolling one… I just could not bring myself to play one.  Instead I am playing “ole reliable” the build I have enjoyed the most up to this point.  Dragonknight + Sword and Board and honestly each time I roll one, I perfect my build order a little bit for the next time.  You would think I would get bored of playing the same basic character over and over, but instead it just makes me like it all the more.  Essentially I have arrived at a point where the very first ability I take is Puncture aka the taunt/armor debuff.  Essentially the first ability you place on your bar, means it is also going to be the first skill line you will have available for morphing later on.  Essentially my goal in doing this is to get to Ransack the morph of Puncture, which adds a new ability that increases my armor for 12 seconds every time I use it.  This makes the ability really good for survival and essentially my opening becomes a combo of Fiery Grip, Ransack…  then mostly basic attacks to burn it down the rest of the way.

I just like the feel of playing this specific build, it feels very much like I want a tank to feel.  I decided this weekend to cast aside my traditional human builds and go with a proud Orsimer.  Normally I rely on swords, but I decided to start crafting him maces… because smashing things seems more fitting an orc…. also I don’t like the orc racial “giant machete” sword graphic.  The guild is absolutely insane right now, when I logged in earlier to take a screenshot of my orc, we had 25 members and there are at least five more that have not accepted guild invites yet.  Doing pretty great for a beta guild.  If you are playing the game add @Belghast to your friends list, and pending we actually know each other… and you are okay with the Three Tenets…  I will get you into the guild.

Level 60 Monk Get

Diablo III 2014-03-01 09-20-11-35 I have to say my monk looks pretty badass.  I know eventually I will upgrade out of that sword, but once we get the ability to transmog with the expansion, I can totally see dual wielding that graphic.  Before the ESO beta weekend madness started, I managed with the help of Warenwolf to push the monk to 60.  Really I am happy just knowing I have a character at max level before the expansion,  but I can see playing it quite a bit more trying to get paragon levels.  Running around in our impromptu groups has really increased my enjoyment of the game… especially now that we are getting some decent loot.  It is funny how loot factors into my enjoyment so much, and in many ways the complete and total lack of meaningful loot is what killed my enjoyment of FFXIV once the questing was done.

We tried an experiment that didn’t really work yesterday as well.  While I was pushing my way to 60, we had a friend join us in level 60 content with his level 10 character.  We thought surely the catch up experience would be amazing, allowing him to fly through the levels.  Problem is… he was not alive long enough to really catch the benefit of the xp windfall.  Every mob seemed to make a beeline for him, and one-shot poor Banzai.  So after getting him three for four levels this way, we opted to switch to our own characters in the teens and play for real.  I had not really played my Barbarian much, but playing him I could not think about playing Olaf from League of Legends.  At one point I picked up a legendary leaf blade… to which we dubbed him “Growlaf” the plant defender.

Complete and total rabbit trail here… but we started talking about how amazing it would be to have a game like Diablo 3, that instead used the champions we have grown to love from League of Legends.  For awhile my friend has talked about how bad he wanted a PVE game set in the League universe… and really this seems like the ideal fit.  They really would not have to change the champions that much to make them work in a Diablo setting.  Additionally I have already noticed, that post League we all kinda play Diablo like we are laning in League.  We move like League players move, especially when we are kiting a bad guy away to try and separate it from the pack.  While I enjoy league from time to time, it is really the character design that I like, and not the game itself.  If they gave me those awesome characters in a setting like Diablo that I do actually enjoy… I would probably waste innumerable hours playing it.

Micro Voxel Welding


Watch live video from EQNLandmark on TwitchTV

Hopefully this embeds just fine.  I wanted to share this because I thought it was really cool.  In last Wednesday’s livestream Dave Georgeson showed off a really cool “glitch in the matrix” of sorts that players have figured out.  One of the interesting characteristics of the voxel engine that Everquest Next Landmark uses is that it tries to buffer between differences in two objects and naturally fill in the gaps.  This can be something really cool or something really frustrating depending on how you use it.  Out in the wild, players have been using this to stretch the boundaries of the engine and create something that has been dubbed the “micro voxel” or as Dave calls it in the livestream “pips”.

The idea is to take a single square voxel of the smallest available size and reduce it using the square smooth tool to get a smaller base size to build with.  Having a tiny square is not that cool, but what is cool is the behavior you get in the engine when you place two of these beside each other.  The engine draws the gap between creating a thin bar.  This can then be used to craft really interesting things.  In the video Dave Georgeson shows off a steampunky claim that he has created making metal ladders and metal grating in all sorts of shapes.  Where I find this extremely cool is what this means for player crafted furniture.  In the video he makes a few book cases and desk that looks far nicer than anything I have been able to craft so far.

It does seem like this takes a lot of trial and error… and copious amounts of patience.  However at some point I want to get in and start trying to make furniture for my keep.  The other really cool thing mentioned is that we will be getting the ability to add on to our claim in the next patch.  So at this point I am trying to figure out which direction I want to grow things.  I like building large structures, so I was already to a point where I was feeling extremely boxed in.  I could very easily grow my existing property out to four total claims.  This might be the kick I need to get back in and do more crafting.  I am currently hung on a point where I need to farm just truly silly amounts of burled wood to complete all the things I want to complete.