Uncategorized Archives - Page 125 of 165

Pax South Excitement

September 17, 2015 by Belghast

Excitement Grows

Last year Pax South was quite literally the first gaming convention I had ever been too. Granted I have been to comic conventions and scifi fan conventions over the years… but never a gaming one. I didn’t really know what to expect but Liore gave me some advice… that as soon as you get in the doors the anxiety fades away because you realize that these are “your people”. I didn’t really believe her until the convention was actually underway… and absolutely I had this overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be just fine. I never strike up conversations with strangers, yet I found myself idling chatting with people while standing in the queue room like a pro. There was just this aura of acceptance that I felt, when quite literally anything anyone was into was awesome. The only problem was that it was quite literally an overload on my senses and while I technically knew a bunch of people at the convention, I only actually managed to meet up with the AggroChat folks that I had planned on meeting up with… and Lonrem from Anook. Well I guess that is not entirely true because that Friday I had a bunch of press meetups scheduled to talk with various game devs. At the end of the two days I attended, I was worn out beyond belief… but I was pretty damned happy with my experience. I had originally decided to try and attend as many local conventions as I could… but ultimately that fell through for one reason or another.

After having done a Pax I realized that the highlight for me was not necessarily the show, but getting to hang out with people that I do not normally get to hang out with. It felt like this giant summer camp for gamers and geeks… and it was fairly magical. With this in mind I set my sights on Pax Prime… but nothing really went as I had hoped there. Firstly I missed out on getting tickets, and second we were not accepted for press passes. Then thirdly… August is a really bad time for me. My wife is a school teacher and Pax Prime happens exactly at the beginning of our School year here in Oklahoma. It would have been extremely rough on my wife for me to have been away during those first weeks of school, when she ends up having to rely on me the most because she is simply stressed beyond the point of coping. So while I was sad that I didn’t get to attend, I still had hopes that I could con more people into joining me at Pax South this year. Since I know what is important to me now… I know what to focus on, and that is planning on meeting up with people. The problem we ran into was that on the convention floor the cell service was complete crap. So my theory is that we will need to figure out meet up points ahead of time this year, rather than trying to rely on some sort of impromptu thing.

More People More Fun

The above picture was hands down the highlight of my Pax experience, not because I we were playing Gigantic really, but more than the three of us were playing together. The gravy on top is just the fact that we happened to be beating a YouTube celebrity in the process. Now we zoom forward to yesterday… they opened the flood gates and started taking sales for the 2016 Pax South in San Antonio Texas. This time I managed to get in on the three day passes, which there are actually still a few left. As of right now I know that myself, Rae, her brother, Ashgar, Thalen, Dallian, Lonrem, and Helkim are confirmed going… or at the very least have their tickets in hand. I am sure in the coming weeks I am going to start hearing of more people going, and I plan on starting up something to keep track of who is going and on what days so that maybe we can meet up and hang out. I need to start doing some research into what eating options are there in the Riverwalk area, because I absolutely do not want to try and go to that Chillis again out of desperation and hunger. I am also hoping we can maybe coordinate hotels, because I really liked the one I stayed in last year… but it was out by the airport. However if there are many of us it would not be an issue at all to carpool into the convention each day. I feel like I have the whole parking situation under control after having done it last year. I have to say I am extremely excited, and hoping this one is going to be bigger and better than last year. I mean this is the only Pax that does not sell out in a matter of minutes… so honestly I am fine with that. The concept of trying to get tickets to any other Pax seems like a stressful situation. I realize it is still months away, but I want to try and make the best of this coming years show.

Performance Anxiety

September 9, 2015 by Belghast

Cash Shop Fodder

With the impending launch of the Wildstar free to play model, I thought I would talk this morning about one of my problems with cash shops in general. One of the most popular items in any MMO cash shop is the “experience potion” for lack of a better generic term. These are items that grant a limited duration buff and increase the aquisition of something. These sometimes apply to experience but also pvp systems and token currencies. They seem to be fairly ubiquitous when it comes to MMOs and they often times hand them out like candy in your introductory packs. My theory is that they want to get players hooked on these early so they keep coming back to the cash shop anytime they run out. Now if you had boomboxes in Wildstar you already have a few of these more than likely. My problem is… I never spend them. I just logged into my Rift account to take a quick census and I am currently sitting on somewhere between 150 and 200 of these in various forms. They are generally locked from you selling them on the auction house… and since I am not using them they just take up inventory space.

The problem I have with them is that I feel like there is a value associated with them. They cost money, and I want to make sure I get my most out of them. So when a game gives me one.. I hold onto it forever never quite finding the right time to spend it. If the potion is an hour long, it feels like I need to find the perfect time to use it when I will have an hour of uninterrupted time at the keyboard. Even more so it feels like I have to figure out the optimal way to spend my bonus experience time. I do a lot of running around aimlessly in video games, and when I have used an experience potion it feels like I am “on the clock”. I have to get the most out of my time and need to do whatever I am doing with minimal downtime. As a result I just end up crushed with indecision and so they sit in my inventory unspent collecting dust. I end up resenting them being there, because they are taking up space that I could be using for other things. I didn’t want them in the first place, and the game keeps handing them to me like they are important and special… and something that SHOULD be desired.

Performance Anxiety

This just highlights a bigger problem I have in games, that I will call performance anxiety for lack of a better term. It is like there are times when I have to be super focused on the game and take it more seriously than I really want to. When I sign up to raid I accept the fact that once the raid starts it is “go time”. The rest of my game time however I want to be able to stop and smell the roses. The problem is when I group with another living person… I feel like I am also “on the clock” and responsible for making the most of that time grouped together. So instead other than dungeons and raids I actively avoid grouping with anyone. That way I am only responsible for my own enjoyment and won’t feel guilty when I need to step away from the screen because my wife needs me, or the animals have knocked something over and I have to go investigate what they just broke. The worst is when I am in an MMO and there are quest objectives to be done. I feel like I not only have to be aware of my own needs… but the needs of everyone in my party and assure that they also accomplish whatever they need to get done before moving on myself.

I realize all of this is irrational, but this is the sort of mental struggle I go through each time I accept someone else’s group invite. Most of the time I can steel myself against the anxiety and just push forward, but there are other times… when I just cannot risk taking responsibility for others. I talked some yesterday about my current desire to “hide out” and as such I thought I would talk a bit this morning about the other side of the coin. Grouping with other people is often times a draining experience for me. I shift into responsible adult mode, and step up to the plate like I know what I am doing. I am willing to take on this mantle for my friends and my guild… but I am rarely willing to take on this mantle for strangers. I realize most other people don’t quite have the hang up I do with grouping with strangers. So when someone asks me to tank something, or dps something… I always feel strange asking if it is a guild only group. The worst of these experiences so far has been when it comes to partially queuing for raid content. The anxiety that comes with tanking for strangers in a dungeon… is nothing compared to the anxiety of tanking for a raid group full of strangers. For me at least it ranks among the least comfortable experiences, and I would rather simply do nothing… than queue with a bunch of people I don’t know.

Opening The Curtain

I get the impression sometimes that folks seem to think I have my act together. The truth is I am just as strange and vulnerable as the next person. I put on a really good front sometimes, and I do a fairly good job of pushing down my own insecurities. You might ask yourself… why in the world would I be opening up like this? Well the truth is that I know there are lots of people out there with their own quirks, that think they are somehow lesser for them. My theory is that by showing the weak points in my own armor, that others might be more comfortable with themselves as a result. Once this down cycle finishes I will be back to my normal self again, and the armor will go back up. In the mean time I am talking about the things I am struggling with, in hopes that it might help someone out there. We all have our own hang-ups and we learn to deal with them however we can. My coping mechanism tends to be disappearing for a bit while my shields recharge. Tonight I will be submitting myself to a raid group where I assume that we are ultimately going to have to PUG people… even though every fiber of my being tells me to run screaming into the night. There is a certain power in knowing your own limitations and forcing yourself to face them. I’ve learned over the years that everyone is broken inside… just most are better at hiding it than others.

Hibernation Season

September 8, 2015 by Belghast

Hiding Out

Every now and then I go through these periods where I run away from the groups and games that require me to interact with other people and for lack of a better term “hide out”. They are usually paired with a period of high stress in my life, and I guess the current work stress mixed with the life stress of a bunch of big things looming on the horizon… could count as that. I also just went to the doctor and found out that I am dangerously low on Vitamin D. Generally speaking a healthy range is between 30 and 70 and on the test I came back with a score of like 10. Vitamin D effects all sorts of things… not the least of which is mental health and mood, so I would not be surprised if all of the bouts of depression were related to that chemical deficiency in particular. I am taking some insane 50,000 unit Vitamin D supplements once a week to help balance me out again, but I am still in the thrall of that desire to hide away from the rest of the world.

I think in part this is why I have not really been around in Final Fantasy XIV much because I have helped to build this wonderful and interactive world… that likes me being around. So when I am around I feel obligated to interact and be friendly…. and right now that is just too much of a drain on me. Similarly I have an issue with Wildstar because the Black Dagger Society is so damned friendly that I feel like an asshole if I am not also friendly back. As a result I end up playing a lot of Diablo III because I can get lost in a private game without the feeling of needing to reciprocate too many social graces. This is definitely a me thing and not due to any of the amazing people in my life. I am broken, and every now and then I just need to retreat inside myself until I am “less broken”. What I do when I am like this is hang out downstairs and binge television shows. I don’t really watch TV on a regular basis apart from Walking Dead/Fear the Walking Dead which becomes Monday morning water cooler discussion at work. I am what is wrong with broadcast television… I either record a show or watch it from a combination of hulu/netflix/amazon prime. The concept of watching a television show as it airs just seems so damned strange to me now. The problem being… I am the reason why good shows get seen as failures… because they are designed for people like me… not the nightly television viewing public.

The Strain

Awhile back one of my coworkers told me about the show The Strain. The problem with not watching television is that you also don’t really find out when a show is on the air. I love movies and television shows about things that go bump in the night, and as such I have a deep respect for the director Guillermo Del Torro. This show is apparently an adaptation of a graphic novel by the same title from 2009. There is really no disguising the fact that this is a vampire show… but not one in the Ventrue/Toreador tradition that we have seen Hollywood obsessed with lately. These are the Malkavians and Nosferatu that hide in the shadows. This show brings back a return to “vampires as monsters” instead of “vampires and glittery swoony boyfriend material”. The problem is I am not sure how much more of the plot that I want to give away other than that. Suffice to say you end up with a badass team of Vampire Hunters, lead by a grizzled old Van Helsing type that is played by none other than “Argus Filtch” aka David Bradley. The show has a very “zombie apocalypse” feel to it, but with smarter hunters stalking their prey rather than the mindless oppression of a world constantly looking for food. If you like the monster genre, I highly suggest you check it out. Even if you don’t normally like monster movies… it might be worth your time because the characters are really excellent and with their own interesting flaws. The first season is available on Hulu, and the show has been picked up for a second season.

Constantine

Constatine might be the “least NBC” television show I have ever watched. I am not really sure what the network executives were thinking when they greenlit this show…. but honestly it was not destined for broadcast television. The show developed a very small but fanatically devoted following… and honestly after finishing the first season I can see why. Sadly watching this show I felt pangs of regret… because I am part of the reason why the show never got a second season. I recorded it on my DVR and then binge watched it months after the show was cancelled. This is going to be another Firefly/Space Above and Beyond regret for me… because really the show is quite amazing. It does an excellent job of presenting the character of John Constantine with all of his flaws… and virtues. They did a much better job with the casting this time around than the Keanu Reeves movie…. which while they failed miserably at Constantine did a pretty damned good job of capturing the setting. I am still holding out hope that someone might pick this up as a Netflix, Hulu or Amazon exclusive. They have already announced that the character of John Constantine would be appearing regularly on Arrow, so there is at least hope keeping this franchise alive. Placing this show on NBC however…. was just destined to fail. I think had it even appeared on the NBC Universal owned USA network… it might have found a home.

Killjoys

This show… took me a few episodes before I got into it… but now I am currently watching my way through it and I love it. What it reminds me of is Firefly… but a show set in a different corner of that universe. In Firefly you were out on the outer rim of society… in a lawless wild west simulacrum. This show instead is about the bounty hunters operating in and out of the core worlds, the Killjoys. So far the show has spent equal time on and off of civilized worlds, and as it progresses there is an interesting world emerging. The bulk of the show is set in an area of space known as the Quad… which is a planet orbited by three dwarf planets. Qresh being the central planet ruled by the nine families, and between them is an unsteady peace… along with comes a very brutally cold war. Westerly gives you a big barren wasteland world, that was exploited by the “The Company” for natural resources and then sometimes nuked from orbit when the worker class rebelled. Lieth is the farmland world, filled with “indentured servant” farms and their own share of illegal farming going on. Finally you have Arkyn that so far in the series we have not heard much about… other than the fact that something went really wrong there… and folks tend to call it a “dead world”. I am only about halfway through the first season and I have to say I am loving it. The first episode does not do a great job of really showcasing the feel of the show so I would say give it at least three before you decide if you like it or not. As soon as I wrap this up I plan on returning to watching the show… which is available through Hulu… but you have to connect to your cable provider to grant access to it… and have to play it through a web browser. Both of these things I find annoying but I am dealing with it. What are some of your most recent favorite shows?

Demon Hunting

September 7, 2015 by Belghast

Digital Resurrection

Yesterday was the day of me bringing back machines from the dead. During the week my secondary machine gave up the ghost, the one that I use to remote in from work on a regular basis and the one that I use to manage my media server. I came home from work on Tuesday and and my second machine was screaming, literally. Emitting an insanely loud noise, but I really did not have time to investigate it so I put that off until the weekend. My immediate thought was the processor fan, and that the system had overheated. Luckily I happened to have a spare one of these because I thought this processor fan had gone out before. Turns out that when I popped it open on my table, it was not the processor fan at all but the video card. The Asus 550 ti finally gave up the ghost and thankfully I have a whole slew of video cards to attempt. So I threw in my lowest power consumption, lowest heat card… which was a HD 7500 series card that came with an older machine that I replaced. Sure enough machine booted up just fine and the box is working once again.

For my second act of machine resurrection I decided to go a bit further back. In October 2014 my y500 laptop with SLI 650 gtx cards died. Well died is the wrong term, because it simply just stopped booting. It would hang on the Lenovo bios screen and refused to go any further. After spending a few weeks without ANY help from Lenovo or any other source… I ended up purchasing a really good deal of a laptop in a Lenovo y580 from Craigslist and moved on with my life. Problem being… this has been a bit of an obsession in my life. Every few months I go on a binge of searching for other people who have had the same problem. Numerous people had reported that it was the SSD, and when I cracked mine open I seemed to only have the one hard drive. I even went so far as replacing the hard drive with another one that I had laying around and nothing. Turns out there is a different kind of SSD than I even realized existed… a caching SSD which looks a lot like a funky RAM chip. While I was fiddling with machines yesterday I cracked open my laptop and saw the little SDD chip… removed it… and then BOOM it booted. In fact right now I am writing this blog post on the laptop. It seems perfectly fine, but just boots a little slower. Spending today patching things up to see which of the laptops actually performs faster. My theory is it will be this one because for the games that COULD support SLI it ran quite a bit faster.

Demon Hunter

As far as gaming goes, yesterday I spent my day piddling around in Diablo 3. For some reason I got the desire to start a new character and as of last night I got it to 40. I had never really played a demon hunter before yesterday, but I have to say I kinda dig it. I am playing a largely degenerate build where I am doing whatever I can to keep up the ability of Rapid Fire. I have heard this ability becomes less awesome as gain levels… but for the time being it is an insane machine gun ability that whittles down mobs quickly. Mostly this all came about as I was working my way through farming materials by doing bounties. I figured I might as well get the benefit of leveling as well, so I rolled a new character and once I hit 10 proceeded to spend my time doing bounty after bounty. This seems like an insanely fast way to level a character. Not sure how much I will actually play the demon hunter in the long run, but for the time being it is a fun diversion. I am not really sure why I am so drawn to Diablo at the moment. There are things I should probably be doing in Final Fantasy XIV, and other things I should be doing in Wildstar. However for the time being this seems to be the right amount of interactivity. Diablo I can just shut my mind off and play, and that seems extremely intoxicating at the moment. It also lets me hang out downstairs and watch stuff on the chromecast, because I guess I need the relaxation.