Grand Experiment Archives - Page 197 of 200

Forever Downwards

May 9, 2013 by Belghast

It’s a rainy Thursday morning here in Oklahoma, and it took everything I had to pull myself away from the covers. The constant rhythm of the rain was absolutely intoxicating, and was calling me to stay in bed and sleep. Unfortunately with my boss still out, I am thrust into the role of his proxy and end up having to attend all the meetings he was supposed to attend. The biggest positive however is that since it is Thursday, there is only one more day in the week.

Rewarding Exploration

One of the things that the Elder Scrolls games have taught me is to explore every corner of the map. You never know where something extremely cool is hiding. I’ve always appreciated it when a game likewise rewards players for getting “off the path”. When Rift launched, it quickly became known for all the explorer moments that occurred on the tops of mountains, bottoms of the ocean and forgotten dungeons. There were a number of things that could only be found by straying from the path.

I can still remember the first time I stumbled onto a puzzle, or a cairn and remembering how cool that felt to have found something in the game on my own. It also reinforced the gameplay style of wandering all over the map looking for possible Easter eggs. From that point onwards I was traipsing across the tops of mountains, just because I could and just to see if there might be something to be gained from doing so. I have been glad to see that Storm Legion if anything has ramped this instinct up.

Forever Downwards

Yesterday I stumbled onto a hidden path and experienced one of the coolest of these “Explorer Moments”. I had been doing a few quests in what appeared to be a partially submerged Brevanic ruins. Leading off to the side of the entrance tunnel was a non-descript path that truncated in a flooded room. This just screamed to be explored, so I started swimming downwards into the abyss. The tunnel continued to wind downwards through bend after bend, with no sign of stopping.

I had been through what felt like a dozen of these turns when I reached the point of no return. My breath meter was at the halfway point, and I decided to push on ahead… because surely there had to be a reason for the tunnel to exist even if it was just an instance zone in. At roughly the 1/4 of my breath bar mark, I noticed the tunnel straightening out and a break in the water leading up into a chamber.

The Patient Sentinel

Upon breaking out of the water and entertaining the chamber, I was rewarded with an achievement: Deep Learning. Across the room waiting on me, was a holographic construct with a quest, and a lever that appeared to enable a teleport to the surface. The quest was actually part of a chain, and ultimately lead to some pretty cool storyline. To me however, the coolest piece of this whole experience is that now I apparently have permanent teleport access back down into the bowels of the Storm Legion base.

It is little moments like this that make games worth playing. This type of stuff is why the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are so much like crack for me. There is always something cool off on the horizon, that I know I can go over to and explore. Rift does a really good job of lacing the gameplay with little discoveries that you can only find if you deviate off the path.

ARAMination

Originally I had plans to run dungeons with the Alea Iacta Est folks, but as the night wore on my friend Plasmodia to to feeling woozy. Seems as though her supervisor had brought back some form of the “convention crud” and she was beginning to run a decent fever. We all agreed that she should be ushered off to bed, but with that we had lost our tank but more importantly our 4th member. I have not minded our instance runs where we pugged a single person in, but the more you add the more unpredictable the process becomes.

Throughout the week my friends have been diligently playing League of Legends matches every night, and I’ve felt bad for not joining them. In large part I had been coaxed into playing the game, so that I could be a stable fifth player for them. With my resurgence of Rift, I have been anything but that. I think part of the issue is that I just do not like the game nearly as much as they all seem to. I have fun, and it is enjoyable when I am playing with a full group of friends, but I am often times thinking about other games.

Not Competitive Enough

This shows badly in my game play, and my lack of improvement. I am not super competitive, and I just don’t seem to get the adrenaline rush they all do from killing other players. When we have scrimmaged against each other, I have enjoyed beating someone I know far more than I have enjoyed beating any of the random players. I have learned to assimilate a lot of the language and phrasing that has come with the game, but it rarely if ever is the thing I am looking to discuss as a group.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy the game and I enjoy playing with my friends when we play the game together. However I just find myself lacking caring about things like build order, and last hitting, and all the other trappings that come along with the game. I have watched a friend go from not knowing the game exists, to super hardcore about it, and all the while I am just struggling to understand why anyone would play the game if not for others.

The prime example of this difference really came up last night. We had managed to pull out a “back door” victory in the ARAM gameplay mode. What this means is a player hides in the bushes from the other team, and then when they are charging down the lane, sneaks back and takes out their nexus ending the match. It essentially catches the other team with their pants down, and steals a win. It is extremely cool when it happens for your side, and extremely defeating when you have it happen to you.

A Difference in Motivation

After this whole chain of events, while I thought it was cool… she was talking about how pumped she was and that she would not be able to sleep after that. I seem to lack that adrenaline rush entirely, because while it was nifty that we had won, and I was proud of her for her maneuvering… it was just another match to me. The problem is, because of this lack of adrenaline and craving for victory… I still make the same bad decisions and still fall for the same traps. Winning the map just doesn’t mean that much to me.

This is my problem in every game I have tried to do any player versus player gameplay. I just don’t care about the outcome as much as other players do. When there is not a direct correlation between money and loot on the line, winning over another player for sheer bragging rights doesn’t mean much of anything to me. Now on the other hand, I have always had the drive to push to kill that raid boss, or clear that raid instance… because I knew there was a chance at tangible goodies awaiting me.

While I try my best not to be, I am very loot driven. If you lay out three paths before me… one gives tokens, one gives nice gear, and the other lots of experience… I will always go for the one that gives the nice gear. One of the reasons why I have so much bloodlust in these games and literally kill everything walking, is I know that any single mob could have the chance of dropping something really cool. When you remove loot from the equation, you remove a ton of my motivation to achieve.

Since I am very focused on improving my character through gear… League of Legends feels like rerolling a new character, getting it to level 10, and then rerolling something else… over and over and over. You never reach that point that you can do amazing things, because you’ve built up your character in the process. I think the methodology of the game works and levels the playing field for all players. But the fact that I start over at square one in each match really drops my enjoyment whether or not I want it to.

Rambled Long Enough

Well I’ve rambled on at length about League of Legends, and how generally ill suited I am for the game. The tail end of this post feels like me thinking through things on paper. I enjoy League still when we have a voice server full of people playing together, but if given a choice I will always choose to play an MMO. I just feel extremely bad for abandoning my friends, when they really have needed a stable fifth person. Looking at my calendar, it looks like today is going to be super busy with my boss being out of the office. I hope all of you out there have great days that are far less stressful than mine looks to be.

Tower of the Shattered

May 8, 2013 by Belghast

This is yet another slow start morning. I am not sure if I am just massively sleep deprived or what, but I have just been exhausted this week so far. Having to be in training all day yesterday, certainly makes the week feel bizarre as Wednesday now seems an awful lot like Monday part two. To add to the upheaval, my boss has been in the hospital all week thus far and they are thinking he might need emergency gal bladder surgery. So I have this odd mix of deep concern and worry wrapped in the knowledge that I am going to have to fill in for him in meetings and such. I am definitely not looking forward to the three hour block of meetings I have to attend this morning as his proxy.

Daily Bonanza

Yesterday was the first day I managed to complete both the Ashora and Steppes of Infinity daily quests. I have always had this tainted relationship with the concept of daily quests. On one hand I like the idea that I can repeat them over and over, and on the other hand I have always hated half of the ones that blizzard has come up with. I really really dislike “gimmick” quests and mini-game quests, and while playing wow it seemed like there was no set of dailies that did not involve at least one of these.

So I could have simply skipped the quests I disliked, and did the rest… but this always felt somehow wrong to me. There is a certain satisfaction rolling into a camp and there are no active quests available for you. I think another problem I have is that I LOVE kill quests. These seem to be the bane of the industry, but nothing makes me happier than getting a quest that tells me to go kill 10 of something pending they are relatively easy to find.

I love killing mobs, and can only go so long without randomly charging into a pack of them. I am sure this is a trait that drives my friends insane, because I am constantly in combat. So when I pick up one of these kill X quests, it gives my bloodlust a sense of purpose. Yes random quest giver man, I will go kill these ten rabid wombats for justice and great freedom!

The thing in particular that I have always liked about Rift daily quests is that they mix things up considerably. Today you might go to this camp and do three quests there as part of a daily, and tomorrow you might go to a completely different quadrant of the map and kill completely different things. WoW tried to do this, but it never felt the same, because on a daily basis there was a good deal of overlap from the previous quests. So for now at least I will continue to do my daily quests, because I need the money, faction and sweet sweet infinity stones.

Tower of the Shattered

On Tuesdays and Wednesday nights, the Alea Iacta Est Rift crew has been trying to gather together and run a few instances. The last few times it has been nothing but Empyrean Core over and over, but still been fun to run around as a group. Last night we pulled Tower of the Shattered from the random queue, and it was an extremely enjoyable experience learning a new place. Luckily Plasmodia had run most of the dungeons, and had some vague guidelines that helped us get through all the fights without a ton of wipes.

For anyone who has completed Cape Jule, the instance is a trip down memory lane as Auram the melodramatic monotone construct leads you through the zone. One of the first things that Auram does, is turn on a series of jump pads that enable you to move throughout the levels of the instance silently. I thought this was an extremely cool mechanic, as they added the feeling of platforming, without the need for skill jumps. All you really do is orient your body towards the platform you want to land on, and jump… the game takes care of the rest. The first set of jumps took a little getting used to, but there is no cursing or tears of frustration as you fail to land just right at the top and have to do it all over again. I am looking at you Guild Wars 2.

Another spiffy thing, was that most of the boss trash floors could be cleared by using this special “Execute” command that you got from Auram. Essentially you had to wait until each storm legion mob was alone, sneak up behind them… and then hit the special ability. Like all stealth checks, I failed miserably at them… and wound up with us having to clear an entire floor by hand. After that I gladly let Marklaar, who appeared to be excellent at them, to run as scout and clear the wings for us.

I loved Empyrean Core, but so far Tower of the Shattered is my favorite dungeon in Storm Legion. It is just the right mix of gimmick and stand up fight to make it enjoyable and not painful to experience. I feel like this is how you make an Occulus-like thematic dungeon, without making it pure hatred to run on a regular basis. Essentially you are given a choice, you can either use the stealth mechanic or fight the floors outright. You don’t seem to be punished for taking either path. In addition, just to ratchet up the coolness factor, there were tons of hidden chests we were able to find by kicking our way into air conditioning shafts.

Bad Decisions

If you are super close to me, you might already know this… but across the board I have not talked much about it. I’m fat, I have been all my life, and I likely always will be. I come from a fat family, from a proud German-American fat heritage and to make it even worse I am 6’4”. I will never weigh what someone considers normal, I have that whole “big boned” thing going on in addition to the excessive “chub”. However my wife and I of late have been trying really hard to be “less fat”.

On the most simple level we are just watching what we eat, making slightly better choices, and most importantly logging EVERYTHING. I’ve been using Loseit.com and their related phone apps which end up monetizing food for me. There have been several times I have made a mental decision of… Nope that food is just to pricy for me right now. When you reach a point where you cannot look at a donut without seeing 350 calories sitting there, it changes your outlook on food and American portions.

Over the course of the last 8 weeks we have been pretty religious about the process, and in doing so I am down over 30 pounds. My wife like usual, loses weight slower than I do when we actually attempt it, but she is down a good 20 pounds as well. We are both making progress, and definitely noticing it in the waistline and the fact that I keep having to move my belt up another notch. I am going to have to go jeans shopping again soon, but that is totally a good problem to have.

The Game Had Changed

However last night for whatever reason, we were both craving Mexican. One of the things we had decided is that we would take away the demonizing of food. If we want to eat badly, fine… just log it and try and do better so that you are still in a good position for the week as a whole. We both ordered Cheese Enchiladas, and the first sign that the game had changed was the fact that in both cases we barely put a dent in our plates. I managed to eat the enchiladas before I was just too stuffed to continue, and she made it through most of the rice and a single enchilada.

The problem is, we were both painfully stuffed the rest of the night. I am not sure if that adequately describes the state we were in… we were absolutely miserable at having eaten less than half of what we were normally finishing off. The other thing is we both felt horrible and sluggish, and still do this morning. Basically it is like our bodies are treating the food almost like a toxin. It feels like mine is screaming… “Wtf did you just do to me?”. So while I think the concept of a “cheat night” is a good one, I don’t think we can really do the full blown Mexican thing again.

This is probably the most personal post I have made anywhere, so feeling a little naked at the moment. However I promised myself I would share more about my life since it is my blog and nothing professional. I hope you guys have a great day, I am going to try and recover from the walking food coma of last night. I have so many meetings today, so I just hope I can escape with my sanity in place.

Hazy Shade of Neverwinter

May 7, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is an absolute paradox. For some reason I am more exhausted than normal, even though I went to bed last night at roughly 9:30 rather than my usual midnight timeframe. I am convinced that my body has a sweet spot of 5-6 hours of sleep, and anything over or under causes me to turn into a slug. I am hoping that as I digest this coffee that its sweet sweet caffeine lifts me out of this slump.

Hazy Shade of Neverwinter

Last night I really had nothing much going on, and do not have any real grouping options in Rift until tomorrow night, so with all the recent buzz surrounding it I figured I would fire up Neverwinter. Quite honestly I had not even booted the game since the day it released to the public, and had not actually played the game since before that. The game is “fun enough”, but for me at least it has lacked whatever spark makes me want to log in and play it.

I had left the game just long enough for the control scheme to feel awkward, but after a few minutes I was back acclimatized. Unfortunately it is not the kind of game you can play with a cat draped across your chest, or at least not play it successfully. As a result I didn’t last all that long in the title, before wandering off into something else. I have been trying to figure out exactly why this game is so lackluster to me, but others are loving it and consuming it completely.

Subscription is not a Barrier

I think I finally landed upon a nugget of thought. A subscription fee for an MMO has never been a barrier, or something that honestly gave me pause. Sure it did, when I first started playing these titles back with Everquest… but now that I am used to paying to play it is just one of those things I have come to expect from online gaming. For a whole segment of the gaming world, the subscription and box fees are real barriers to getting into the game and enjoying it.

As a result I am maybe somewhat falsely comparing Neverwinter to what has now become “premium” subscription games, or even “buy the box” titles. The real competitors with Neverwinter are the completely free games like Runes of Magic, that you can sign up on a website, download the client and never actually be forced to buy anything. When you narrow the scope down to only paying attention to the “absolutely free” games… it becomes super impressive.

No Egregious Pay Walls

What Neverwinter seems to give the player for nothing, is an extremely fluid experience with well crafted storyline, relatively solid classes, and no egregious pay walls restricting your field of play. You can get in and do essentially everything there is to do right now without obstacles standing in your way. Basically the game has taken a completely different approach to the free to play genre, in that it gives you a carrot instead of a stick. Namely that all of the options seem to give you something quicker, better or shinier for your coin rather than locking you out of functionalities.

I think this is the aspect of the game I have been missing all along when I played it or attempted to review it. I still do not think free to play is the “one true payment model”, but I think what Neverwinter is doing is a more equitable model than we have seen to date. The only problem is, the game introduces large swaths of “pay to win”, which is a concept that western audiences have claimed they do not want. But this is exactly what Neverwinter seems to be delivering, the ability to purchase astral diamonds and get nice gear in the process.

To Infinity Steppes and Beyond

As I said earlier, I really did not spend a lot of time last night in Neverwinter. I had a cat that was trying to “aggressively snuggle” and quite honestly the game just leaves me nonplussed overall. I logged back into familiar and happy Rift to work a bit on the Steppes of Infinity. Earlier in the weekend I had unlocked the daily quest content in Ashora, which is good for at least 10 plat per day for some really easy questing. I had hoped to do the same out in the Steppes for maybe an easy 20+ plat per day.

The quest chain overall was far harder to solo than the one in Ashora, and involved a relatively difficult boss fight. I truly do mean a boss, because it uses all the same kind of tactics that the bosses do in dungeons. While this was nowhere near the difficulty of the Gatekeeper fight in The Secret World, I feel like it would definitely give a similar “right of passage” feel for Rift, based on the level 60 boss encounters I have experiences in dungeons. The quest chain as a whole sets the player up for what to expect from later game content in general.

All this while I am struggling to stay awake, because after the weekend we had I was just exhausted all day yesterday. Before I gave in to sleep however, I was able to finish out gathering the 300 plat for my 130% speed mount. I wound up getting the Grey Ursin, because of the non-armored varieties I felt that was the nicest. Above is a quick picture I snapped before finally falling asleep of me on the new mount. Unfortunately I mostly purchased the mount for the overall mount speed boost… and am likely to never ride it. I like my Hellbug, White Tiger and Flaming Horse far too much to ride the angry looking bear.

Needing to wrap up once again, as I am out of coffee and need to consider moving onwards to work. I will be in training all day which will be the opposite of fun. I hope you all have an amazing day out there. I am going to work on not falling asleep in a boring training presentation.

Death of the Internet Service Provider

May 6, 2013 by Belghast

Monday mornings are without a doubt the worst thing to ever exist. I sit here and am tired and worn out from the weekend, knowing I am going to have to go be passably intelligent for the next several hours. It was a busy weekend, but unfortunately not busy in the kinds of ways I would have liked it to be. At this point I am just hoping to survive until evening so I can crash.

Sofa is conspiring against me

Saturday was an absolute whirlwind of furniture shopping. Sunday followed with a whirlwind of cleaning and then even more furniture shopping… because we are inherently neurotic and could not trust our opinions from Saturday. As of right now I have completely dismantled the gaming loft, and 20 years of console gaming is more or less neatly packed into office depot boxes. All that is left there is to remove one set of furniture and replace it with the love seat from downstairs and a new more minimalistic entertainment center.

There are so many things urging these projects on, but not the least of them is the fact that after over a decade my ISP is closing down DSL access. Yes you heard me right, I am still on DSL and have been in part because I was caught up in an anachronism. I literally had my DSL service through an old fashioned Internet Service Provider, and with it came the ability to call them at any time and get a person I actually had known for decades. Additionally I had perks like the ability to host servers, a static ip address, all things that I would no longer have in going to a less custom experience.

Death of the Internet Service Provider

While I have wanted to make the switch for years, simply because my 4 meg internet connection sucks massively in todays realm of all streaming all the time. I have not done so because there are a lot of legacy applications that my wife and her teacher friends use that I hosted off of a home server. Over the years my wife has moved on and is no longer using most of these, but her teacher friends still were. Windows hosting, is both painfully priced and painfully limited in kind of access you have. So up until now it has just been easier to host it myself.

We got an email and later a paper letter from my ISP stating that it was no longer financially feasible to continue with DSL support. So by June 15th we will be entering the greater broadband world, as that is the day we officially lose our “artisan” internet, as I have taken to calling it. Right now I am looking at 50 meg cable, because I sincerely doubt we need to bump all the way up to 100meg or whatever the top of the line is. I figure 50 meg is already 12 times more bandwidth than what we previously had, so the jump up any higher is just truly unfathomable at this point.

High Definition Daze

How this need links up to the desire to fix the game loft, is that we will be having to have cable run to the upstairs. So we might as well clean the loft and get it set up with proper cable while we are running it to my office. Two things still need to happen out in the loft. Firstly we need to haul out the stuff we are getting rid of, secondly we need to acquire a television and entertainment center and set them up. Television shopping is an almost surreal experience, and this is coming from someone who understands all the numbers and settings and features.

We are not really huge television people. I am sure this counts as blasphemy, but in our living room the largest television we own is a 32 inch 1080p from 2006ish. While I grew up as an only child, and use the television as background noise, we consciously consume it in small doses. We tend to record things on the DVR all week long, and then watch them as my wife grades on the weekend. As a result, I feel ill equipped for the realities of buying a television… I quite honestly rarely watch television in HD at all. It doesn’t really improve any of the programming I actually watching, since I tend to be violently allergic to sports casting.

Plans within plans

Right now the plan is to upgrade the living room television, and move our old 32 inch television up to become the game loft setup. All of this will allow us to pair down the living room to just our main sofa, which sets us up to move in the new furniture that we have yet to even purchase yet. So as of Saturday morning, we thought we had everything figured out. But upon a re-measure of the pieces, we were either going to not have enough room, or barely an inch of clearance on the wall it all was going on. Essentially we were back to the drawing board.

All of Saturday we had not really been looking at the home theater components/sectionals… that was just something that we stumbled into at the end of the day. Once we had gotten our fill of dust in our lungs… we decided to go back out and hit a few places looking specifically at the component sectionals. Quite honestly, I am glad we did, because it was at the second stop of the day that we found what I think will ultimately be our living room setup. After calculating what “Recliner > Console > Recliner > Chair > Chase Lounge” would end up being space wise, we still would have roughly 8 inches on either side to spare.

Of course being as neurotic as we are… we did not accept victory, but instead spent the rest of the day going from store to store trying to break the bubble we had just built. Fortunately, or unfortunately… depending upon your perspective we were not able to bust the deal. So now it feels like we really do have a final plan in place, now it just comes down to ordering the furniture and planning for delivery. which also involves having the loft done as a dependency… plans within plans.

Finally some gaming

All of this added up to just not much game time at all. By the time I made it home each evening I was extremely sluggish and worn out. Yesterday afternoon I took an hour long cat nap, so that helped quite a bit. By the time I made it into Rift I was almost sociable again. I finally unlocked the daily quest content out in Ashora, and apparently you can make roughly 10 plat a day by just doing those quests. Overall they seemed pretty easy to solo, and went fast enough. Just involved quite a deal more travel time than the previous daily quest zones had. I think Iron Pine Peaks has forever spoiled me with its efficiency and changing mob types.

After doing my daily quests, I had wandered over into Steppes of Infinity and began the quest chains out there, hoping they would also eventually unlock daily quests. Round about this time we had some life bloom in the guild, as Aleriase, Marklaar and Plasmodia all logged in within thirty minute of each other. We circled the wagons and decided to queue up for a normal dungeon.

Almost instantly we got assigned a random fifth, and were zoning into Empyrean Core. So I am wondering if it is just a case of not having a lot of upper level dungeons, but so far at 59/60 I have done three dungeons and each of them has been the same place. Not that I am complaining really, it is a fun dungeon and goes pretty quickly if players know the pitfalls. I managed to pull a second one hand sword from the dungeon, so I now have a matched set of Unstable Core Shards. Supposedly one hander and two hander dps have been normalized, and I have always preferred the look of dual wielding to two handers.

Getting back to normal

It was yet again, an awesome time hanging with the guildies. I know there are plans for both Tuesday and Wednesday night runs, so I am looking forward to those as well. The clock is ticking away, so I am needing to wrap this up. Thanks for bearing with me on the recent flood of personal posts. I made myself a promise to post about whatever was happening, regardless if it was exciting. Lately there has just been a good deal more real life happening than gaming. Hopefully this week things can get back to at least somewhat normal.

If you’ve made it this far in the post… I hope you all have a great Monday, or at least as good as a Monday can be. It serves to be a busy week for me, the server move that was scheduled for Saturday night is going to have to be rescheduled for tonight. Hopefully the rest of the week ends up better.