Trove Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Path Not Taken

May 3, 2014 by Belghast

A Question Answered

I am getting a super late start today, or more so I am sitting down to write my blog post this morning later. I dropped the dry cleaning off yesterday morning, and then shortly after decided I felt entirely too bad to exist in the real world. So I went home and took breathing treatments throughout the day, in an attempt to convince my lungs to stop being assholes. It has mostly worked, but this meant that I needed to get up relatively early this morning and go pick up the dry cleaning so we would have it for Monday morning. I still have plenty of shirts in the closet to cycle through, but my wife had reached the limits of her wardrobe.

It seems like at least once a year a new social media technology is released, and the internet zeitgeist all flocks to it. I generally sign up for these the moment they happen in an attempt to stake my claim flag and then they sit dormant for years until I finally decide that I want to start using it. One of these is Anook, and I asked a very simple question last night on twitter.

While I was expecting someone like Maeka who has been posting on the site for a good deal of time to chime in, I did not expect to be drawn into a length conversation with the Community Lead. As you can see, we talked a lot and I started to buy into the vision. The problem that they see it is that there are all these services, that you load up with content once… and then forget about. Facebook is this way for me, I have a profile because I know that certain people would rather be notified of my content through that vehicle… but I don’t actually USE facebook. I hate the service, I hate the way it feels, so I feel bad each time someone sees the content that somehow got set up to syndicate from twitter… and thinks I am actually using that as a means of communication.

I know going into this that Anook is not what I have been longing for. I would love to have a gamer focused site that acts as a social glue for everything else I have content on. A single point of syndication for G+, Twitter, Steam, Raptr, Battle.net, Glyph, Playstation Network, Xbox LIve… whatever services I happen to have accounts on including my own blog and podcast. I think this is a niche that if someone fills it, will be amazing. What Anook is instead is trying to focus on creating a community with the ability to talk about disparate topics. I see this as trying to be a social network, but almost from a guild website type of approach. In the short time I am going to start populating it with my content, be it youtube vids, the podcast or my daily blog posts.

In the long term I could see maybe starting to try and use this for some of our other ventures like Stalwart Gaming or the Alliance of Awesome. When I first signed up for the site at launch, it felt fairly primitive, and I really did not grasp the concept. It just felt like Raptr or Steam without the nifty automation and game tracking functionality. Now I can see what it is trying to be, and while I may not be 100% sold on it, I definitely appreciate their goals. More than that I appreciate the kind of specialized attention this Community Lead gave me in trying to win me over to their vision. Hell that along is going to make me loyal to the cause more than anything. I will always reward amazing service with my patronage.

A Path Not Taken

This morning is going to be a bit “gaming lite” again, but with the hustle and bustle of the Newbie Blogger Initiative I’ve sat on a tale for a few days. I wanted to make sure I got the posting underway proper before taking a lot of screen real estate for something personal. My wife is a teacher, and this year her schedule aligned just right to allow her to attend the junior assembly. This is one of those deals where someone inspiration comes and talks to the kids about the dangers of the world. This is the sort of thing I as a teenager used to ignore, taking a sketch pad and doodling up in the bleachers instead of actually listening. I am sure for some of the kids there this will definitely be the case.

As the speaker was introduced, my wife thought the name sounded familiar but shrugged it off. Then he started talking about living in a town of 3500 in Northeastern Oklahoma. At that point she started to wonder if maybe he lived in her hometown. Finally when he started talking about his son… it hit her like a sack of bricks. Growing up I was best friends with two other guys, and for the most part we were inseparable. The man on the stage telling his story was one of those two boys father. He had been almost a surrogate parent to me, as much time as I had spent over at their house throughout Middle School and most of High School. When we first got together in College I was still telling stories about him and his son with fondness.

The thing is something changed along the way, and his son was getting into some pretty bad stuff. Alcohol changed to Marijuana changed to Cocaine binges… and eventually I had heard he was even dabbling in Heroine… not that you can actually dabble in that. Two things happened my junior year, one I started distancing myself from him… and two I got really sick. The combination of the two ended up with me picking up some new friends, ones better for my well being… and while we had no falling out or anything… we just faded apart. At some point after graduation we had managed to get back in contact. He was running a record label out of Ohio, and prided himself in sending me lots of indie recordings of the bands he was working with.

Every so often he would call and we’d end up talking for a few hours. When he moved back to town he got married, had a couple of kids and settled down as the director of an area Arts festival. I thought that things were going pretty well for him, or at least on the surface he seemed to have gotten his shit together. I visited him at least once at his office, and we went out to lunch, and then at our ten year reunion we of course hung out. So it was with complete shock that a few years later I hear that he was not okay at all. At some point the drugs had returned, and one day while driving home at lunch to get a fix he hit a special needs kid who had been riding his bike along a busy thoroughfare. The report is that my friend didn’t even stop the car, and the cops followed him to his house an arrested him on the spot.

They say he was going fast enough when he hit the kid, he practically exploded. They had to cremate him because there simply was not enough to bury. So as my friends father was retelling this tale, my wife is sitting there in shock because she knows the other side of a lot of the tales he is telling. She has this cold realization that had I not made a change and distanced myself… that it could have very well been me. I hung in the same circles, but there was just a point where their behavior was getting a bit too risky for my tastes. My friend deserves his fate, he did not get there over night, but over a course of multiple years of bad decisions. However I feel horrible for his parents, because as parents go… they were awesome. They were always so good to me, and treated me like another member of their family.

Once the assembly was over, my wife rushed up to the stage and introduced herself to his father, and apparently he just gave her a huge hug. Then asked how I was doing and how things were in our lives. He really was like another parent, and I feel like I need to get a hold of him. He lost his son, in ways that he will never get him back, but maybe I can reach out and be a little closer to him and his wife. They were always so good to me, that I want to be there for them however I can be. So what makes the whole situation that much more odd, is that I was one of those kids who didn’t pay attention to this sort of thing. I ignored more than my fair share of drug assembly, and ditched them whenever I could. However I am living proof that changing the path you are going down can make all the difference in the world. I could have easily been my friend, and that alone is pretty sobering.

Bangkorai is Huge

Last night I spent most of the night streaming some Elder Scrolls Online gameplay. Bangkorai is freakin huge. Each time I feel like I might be nearing the end of the zone, I keep finding a pocket of stuff that I have missed. At this point I am extremely overleveled for the content at level 45, and the highest mob I have found at all has been 43. This is a thing that keeps happening to me, I seem to move extremely slowly through content. My whole general approach to Elder Scrolls Online is to kill every single thing in my way. This means I probably kill far more badguys than the average gamer. I have watched my friends play through content, and they go out of their way to skip combat. This game gives you really good ways to skip combat in the form of “disguises”, however I NEVER use them. The only time you will actually see me wearing one is when the quest literally cannot be completed without one.

A good chunk of the night was spent working on a series of quests in an occupied town. I could have skipped almost all of the combat entirely by wearing the disguise. However I ignored the fact that it was in my inventory and proceeded to lay waste to everything with a red diamond on it. Which is a big funny considering my character is racially imperial… but apparently I like killing my own kin? I am still enjoying the hell out of the game, and while I am super interest in ArcheAge I keep telling myself… to wait until I reach a point in Elder Scrolls Online where I am not quite so in love with it. The game keeps giving me sufficient reason to log in every night and play, so until it stops doing that I will keep playing it. ArcheAge will always be there when things start to get dull and I want to do some full on sandbox… however as time consuming as it seems based on the few streams I have watched… maybe I am better off with Themebox or Sandpark.

Contest Entry

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVToward the end of the night Rae pulled me over into Landmark. She has been working on the big contest that they have going on and wanted some feedback on her building. So far I think it looks pretty great, but this has been where she has spent all of her effort of late. Personally I still have so much to do on my temple complex that I am almost mired in a building funk because of it. Towards the end of the video I end up traipsing back into my own claim. I am not really sure where I am as far as the game is concerned. I like the game so much, but right now there is not something about it making me to want to log in regularly. I think maybe once there is combat or something other than “Lego mode” I might feel more strongly about the game. Quite truthfully lately I have enjoyed Trove more… and it is far more primitive. The reason behind that seems to be that there is more to “do” in trove. Definitely going to be active in the Landmark community, but right now past the initial rush of wanting to build something… there just isn’t much “stickyness” to the community.

#PathNotTaken #ANook #Landmark #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO

Class of 2014

May 2, 2014May 2, 2014 by Belghast

Class of 2013 Revisited

Now that we are officially underway in the Class of 2014, I thought it would be interesting to look back and see just how well the fruits of our efforts with the 2013 have paid off. I have to say based on past experiences I was expecting to see about half of the blogs either no longer resolving or not having been updated in months. However it appears that the class of 2013 was one of the most productive to date. Looking up my blog post from the close of NBI 2013, I counted 23 blogs that finished the event. Out of those fifteen are still updating fairly recently, or have at the very least had a blog post in the last few months. A handful have even been updated semi-weekly for the past year. I think this is pretty cool that the Initiative was able to create some really dedicated bloggers.

Here is a quick rundown of the folks who beat the odds and have kept up with their blogging habit on a regular basis.

All of you out there that are still updating your blogs regularly… take a well deserved bow. There are some massive lapses in posting in the history of this blog, so the drive to keep making content is something I truly respect. Last year seems to be the most successful year to date, and here is hoping that going into 2014 we can top that.

Class of 2014

It is still pretty early in the process but I wanted to get some link loving started already to the folks who signed up right out of the gate. I expect as the month rolls on we will have significantly more participants, but already we have an extremely impressive crop. So if the group we have gathered already are any indication for what we are likely to see in 2014 as a whole… I feel like this is going to be a really great year. One of the big challenges when the Newbie Blogger Initiative was rebooted last year, was to not only get new bloggers into the community, but also to retain them. It seems to be working and I tip my hat to the folks who have been making sure this happens. Without further ado… on with this years list of blogs.

A few of these folks I have already engaged with via Twitter, and I am hoping to be able to do the same for the others as well. If you are not already there, twitter is somewhat a vital too for maintaining the sense of community as a whole. Generally speaking that tends to be how the majority of the gaming blogosphere communicate with each other on a regular basis. My contact information is at the top of the right side bar and I welcome anyone to approach me in any venue I happen to be using. If there is anything I can do to help make your blog more successful, please let me know.

Gaming Lite

The last few days I have been all over the place as far as gaming goes. I recorded a new Trove video the other night as I tried to figure out all of the changes… which are pretty massive. Adventuring now seems to revolve around the creation of portals that take you to various tiered worlds. Additionally there seems to be a system now that prevents you from equipping too high of level of a weapon. I end up screwing myself over by upgrading the one set of weapons I could equip… too high to actually equip them. So now I am back at square one, working on leveling up my Knight and finding weapons to do so with it. The pace of the game seems to be significantly slower, and I am going to have to figure out exactly what all has taken place since I last played. I still really dig trove in that it is a funky and friendly little world full of random adventure.

Another random thing I did the other night was decide to record a walkthrough of our guild hall in Rift. I still love what she did to the place and how awesome it looks. I have been pining for Rift lately, so I will likely start poking around over there again. I wish I could get some elite groups honestly, but the random dungeon finder queue is insane. I might end up working on my tank spec and doing some streams of me tanking for random pugs. I am just not sure if I really want that kind of stress. Surely as long as the queues are… folks will be appreciative of tanks right? At least that is the theory and I hope they don’t rip me to shreds. There are a few other streamers that I might be able to connect with that also seem to want to do elites, so maybe I can get that going. Right now both my Warrior and my Rogue are geared almost entirely through the free patron chests that we get every week.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVLastly I am still playing a ton of Elder Scrolls Online on a nightly basis. I streamed for about an hour last night as I wandered around in Bangkorai trying to finish up objectives that I still have out there. I ended up completing a few major quest steps, and generally faffing about killing lots of imperials. I show off my new armor and my new fast pony. I finally gathered up the 42,700g needed to buy the +25% speed mount, and while it is not necessarily the color I would have chosen… I am happy enough with it. It seems like the campaign against bots is actually working, as the few places I went last night with bosses… the traditional gathering of bots was absent. I feel like Zenimax is trying hard to combat the gold spammers and botters, but it is a constant and ever changing battle. Right now they have shifted almost entirely to using the email system… which is a bit more manageable. I am religiously reporting each and every spam email I get, hoping that over time they can lock down on these accounts. I am super interested in ArcheAge, but right now honestly I am still having a ton of fun playing ESO.

Being Bad at Mage

March 12, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

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.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

February 21, 2014 by Belghast

Rest In Peace

A few weeks back I had an idea for another regular column of sorts. The idea was that I would react to things I found on forums. I had enough fuel for one topic, but that’s where things went off the rails. It turns out that I really don’t read the various game forums as often as I thought I did, so Friday mornings became a mad dash for me to try and find something that inspired me in any way to write about it. After spending a few minutes this morning trying to do the same… much like I tried last week… I have reached the point where I am just filing this one away in the “bad idea” vault. Essentially the crux of this is in order to make it work I would have to devote more time than I currently have to trolling the forums.

I might make another stab at a feature, because Steampowered Sunday seems to work pretty well. Admitted it has been a few years since I have frequented the battle.net forums, and similarly with the rift forums as well. There seems to be a drought of substantive conversation out there, or maybe it really never was and I just applied substance in my head? I have heard for some time that forums are a dying thing, and by my attempts to find something worth writing about lately… it would almost seem to be the case. I am wondering if people have moved on to posting about things on the forums, and instead posting about them on social media or potentially sub reddits. I would be curious to find out you guys take on this. I know personally I tend to post things on my morning blogs rather than trying to find a home for them on a game forum.

Community Chest

Last night I had a fairly spastic night again, but towards the end of the evening I patched up Trove. Now I have not really followed the subreddit as closely as I once did, but they have been plugging away at this with high frequency. They seem like they have posted roughly a patch a week, and keep adding more features and polish. It had been roughly a month since I had last played it, and while Landmark has taken most of my “building game” focus, Trove is still very much an awesome game to play. I always sell the game as “minecraft with MMO loot” but as a whole the game is so much more than that. Right now I am loving the focus on the social community of a server, that really does seem like the ultimate win for trion is to make people care about the world.

One of the coolest additions that I saw last night was the community chest. For some time at the spawn point there has been a giant version of the in game chests, but inside of it now is a storage system. It allows players to donate items to noobies, and last night I was extremely thankful for this. I was able to pull a good weapon and a good shield out of the bin and jump straight into doing cool stuff. Another really cool thing is they added in /randomhead command, which you can see above I now have this really awesome engineer goggles appearance. This was the first thing to go into game to make abandoning the Fez and Moustache worth it!

The best quality of life change is the addition of a map. You can see above that each of the various biomes is now marked. I have not quite figured out what the red X icons are for, maybe dead bosses? Your home is marked with a little sign post to make it easier to find it. Of course this is still very alpha, and there are lots of bugs. Last night for example I killed six golden beetles… which are now super rare, and not a single one dropped the golden soul. Golden Souls are now needed to craft the gold torch, which in turn unlocks the ability to craft a robotic workbench opening up a whole new tier of crafting. That change went in some time ago, but crafting is now a tiered affair where crafting this thing unlocks the ability to purchase another thing.

I spent most of the night playing as Gunslinger because I had not really spent any time leveling that up. Right now I am level 12 Knight I believe, which gives me a good start each server reset, so I am hoping to bring Gunslinger in line to that same range. So far I am really enjoying the “rocket jump” ability where the Gunslinger fires at the ground and propels themselves high into the air. Really great for exploring areas. Another cool thing are the random quests while out in the world that provide fuel to the star meter shown on the right hand of the screen. This is something that the entire server works towards, so each boss you beat in the world helps leveling the world as a whole. Not really sure what happens when the world “dings” but the world I have been playing on has 46 stars.

Mostly my time spent playing last night has made me realize that I really need to devote more time to this game. While it is not as mind bending as Landmark, it has so much charm. Everything about the game, especially the user submitted weapons just drips “fun”. Especially as the game gets fleshed out, it has started to feel more and more cube world like, which is awesome. That game was a really great idea that was never really capitalized on. I might ping the Alliance of Awesome and see just how many of us are in Trove currently. Would be fun to have a night where we meet up on voice chat and wander about the world looking for mischief. Saying this is making me realize that I never actually mentioned the AoA before now… I should remedy that.

Alliance of Awesome

The blogosphere and the gaming groups they are associated with is a really twisted up community. Each of us have been the part of so many different groups that it became super evident with the launch of Landmark that we needed to come up with a way of standardizing some things. There was a period of time when several of us were joining upwards of seven different social channels, each of them with a different subset of players in them. I believe it was Scarybooster who first voiced the idea, but from there it spread quickly and the ever amazing Zelibeli became the ideas Champion. The idea was simple… to create a super alliance of all the different multi-gaming groups that our little community was associated with. After a few different tries we landed on using a subreddit as our “global forums” of sorts, and as a way for us to post about upcoming events in the various groups. Also it acts as a nice call to action to figure out what people are doing in the various games. Another big thing to come out of it is that we decided to start using “AoA” as our global social channel to span the various groups.

One of the challenges we have had in House Stalwart is trying to maintain guilds in each of the games we happen to be playing. When there is a rush of players it is an amazing thing and we have 50 or so active members. However after a few months this becomes a skeletal crew, and the question of whether or not it is actually worth keeping up arises. As it stands right now House Stalwart will focus on World of Warcraft Alliance side, Rift, and The Elder Scrolls. These will be the only “official” stalwart guilds, and for the rest of the games our members want to play we will be leaning on other AoA member groups to maintain them. This does two things…firstly it makes my life less spastic for trying to maintain a presense in so many games. Secondly it opens up so many more worlds to us. You can just take a look at the right hand side of the subreddit to see which guilds have active groups in which games. So when folks want to dabble in FFXIV or SWTOR or eventually Wildstar… they have a ready made home they can go to. While this arrangement is still very much in its infancy… it gives me a lot of hope for the future.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

I am in love with a gas station station… and have been since the first time I set foot in one. One of the things people not from this area find hard to understand, is the love that Tulsans have for the QuikTrip chain of stores. While I will use other Gas Stations, I will always go to a QuikTrip if one is available even if it is significantly out of the way. A little over a year ago, a friend of mine moved to town to accept a job at my workplace. She had heard me talk about QuikTrip but was skeptical, but within weeks of coming to town she was a devoted acolyte. Quite simply the chain is unlike any other gas station. Now I have had people sing the praises of Kumandgo, Casey’s, Flying J, PDQ… and many others that I have visited in my travels. None of them compare to the awesomeness of the QT.

Why do we love it? Well for starters even in the slummiest parts of town… QuikTrip is clean, well stocked, brightly lit and fully staffed 24/7. On top of this… they have actual food. Their breakfast offerings are especially awesome, but pretty much you can go into a QT any time of day and get fresh food that is not a “stomach bomb”. They have really great donuts and muffins… and if they ever have their limited time Red Velvet Muffins… you have to try them. They have a half dozen flavors of Taquito, Country Sausage, Jalepeno Sauage, Buffalo Chicken roller, cheese burger rollers… and fresh steamed buns. The newer stores have a place in store where they offer made to order food and coffee drinks as well. My friend Rae pretty much stops by every day to pick up a sandwich for lunch, because they have fresh made sandwiches and wraps.

Another really awesome thing about the chain is that they guarantee their gasoline… and were the first place I can remember doing this. It was their claim to fame back in the 80s, and has continued on to the current day. If you ever have a fuel related problem with your car, QuikTrip with pay to fix whatever it is… pending I am sure you can back up receipts of purchasing gas from there. Still however it is more than almost any other chain can say, and at the very least makes you feel better about purchasing your gas from them. Admittedly this is a huge chunk of why I always gas up before leaving town in the hopes that the tank of gas will last me until we reach another QuikTrip. Unfortunately their reach only extends so far, so once you leave the south central united states you have to rely on other chains.

The chain itself has really good cashiers, and the custom software they maintain is designed to be able to ring up I believe up to 16 customers at the same time. Once I finish writing this blog post, I will go to QuikTrip this morning and get a drink and a jalepeno sausage roll. I know that I can get in and out extremely quickly because there is a culture of efficiency that has sprung up around the store. Expected protocol is for there to be two lines at each and every cash register, one to the left and one to the right. As the QT employee finishes ringing up one, they immediately begin to ring up the next one on the other side, giving the first one time to walk away from the counter. When this works, it is a thing of beauty… but you can always tell neophytes when they try and form a single line.

I think in part QuikTrip is so successful because they have really good working conditions. They have managed to make the Fortune magazine top places to work list for 11 years in a row. In part this is due to their really odd practice of after 25 years with the company, you can take a year paid sabbatical, to do whatever the hell you want to do with it. This on top of paying significantly better than average wage allows them to keep good employees for the long haul. It is the type of place that folks either thrive in or they wash out really fast. As a customer and loyal devotee I really appreciate their attention to detail. I have long said that I could never live in a city that did not have QuikTrip… so pretty much that leaves me St. Louis Metro, Dallas Metro, and Kansas City Metro. Granted I am not sure if I would want to be without Taco Bueno, Arbys or Sonic Drive-In either… but the most important one is my beloved QuikTrip.