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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I managed to hit level 40 in New World, which means a bunch of things. Firstly it unlocks the next gear set available from the faction vendor, given that a few days ago I knocked out the quest to unlock access to it. Another thing that unlocks at 40 is the next tier of Azoth Staff which is gated behind the main story quest… which I need to spend some time catching up on in Weavers Fen. The last thing and the one that I personally consider the most important is the 4th tier of the player camp, which functions as though it were a Tier 4 Kitchen for crafting basic foods. This meant that in order to access this I would need to head out to Restless Shore and do the Lupine Observations quest.

In my travels, I unlocked a wayshrine over by the cave needed for that quest, and while roaming around the area I kept hearing what sounded like a major battle, especially when I was in a valley between two rocky outcroppings. One of the triumphs with New World is the way that sound carries. It is absolutely terrifying rolling up on a field of untouched resources, knowing the second that you start mining that everyone in the area will be able to pinpoint your location based on sound alone. This works for folks actively fighting in a region as well, and this sound lead me to the camp that I marked in green on the above map. I am not sure if I was prepared for the experience I was about to have.

There are a lot of glitchy areas in the game, with either way too fast or way too flow of spawn rates. This camp is one of these, and as I rolled up on the spawn I noticed two things. Firstly there were groups of players actively trying to keep the instantly spawning boars farmed down. Secondly that there were tons of precious boar carcasses littering the ground unskinned because no one seemingly had the time to stop fighting long enough to skin them. It was not long before I was invited into a group, and apparently, this was my life for the next hour or so. During that time I took my skinning from 125 to 200, put on an entire level between 40 and 41, and a truly dumb amount of weapon experience so that my Sword and Shield is one level from maxed and I put on about 10 levels into Warhammer and Great Axe as well.

The loot also just kept flowing, and shockingly I got my very first purple items while sitting at this camp. It reminded me of the way that farming camps used to pop up in Everquest back in the day. I keep having to pause and salvage greens in order to make way for more blues and purples. Sadly all of the purples were bind on pickup, or I would have happily shared the wealth. I got a duplicate of exactly the same item which was a level 51 totem of sorts that equips in the trinket slot. The blues I took back to Windsward and threw up on the auction house for pretty cheap prices in an attempt to move them quickly. Most of the weight though was in thick leather, which I admittedly had gotten very little of before this point.

The lack of queues has really cut down on my YouTube time, and after about an hour of farming, I had completely filled my bag and took a teleport back to my house. It was around this time that I finally tabbed out and tried to catch up on any pertinent videos when I saw this. Firstly Demone Kim is great and I have been following him since the early days of Genshin, and now that he is super into New World I have been enjoying his tips and tricks videos. Apparently, this farm is known and has been talked about in the community for the last few days. It was only happenstance and phenomenal audio system that lead me to investigate what in the actual hell was going on.

There has been some talk about whether or not this is an exploit, but truth be told this is far from the only place in the world where spawn rates are jacked up. I remember rolling up on a church in Brightwood to complete this one quest and the NPC was instantly spawning over and over. There was a handful of us in the church there for the quest and we kept killing it over and over, not necessarily to farm it but because it kept respawning and aggroing on it before we could leave. It kept dropping potions and gear, so the boar thing seems an awful lot like that. Now that it is well known it is going to get patched because I noticed in the notes that instant spawn church quest had gotten patched as well. If you need to level your skinning and are in the vicinity of Restless Shores, then it might be worth your time to pop over to the camp for a bit. I might go back out there and level my weapon skills some more pending there is actually an active group.

There are times when you want to make a blog post, but you don’t exactly know how to get started at the actual writing of it. This is one of these mornings because I am not exactly sure what I want to say… but I do know the general message. It is always hard when we come to gather to mourn the loss of someone from the gaming community, and over the last few weeks, we have lost a couple of big voices in Epic Insanity and yesterday Rades. In both cases I know the impact they left on this community largely by the way that their passing has impacted the mutual friends that we shared. In truth I knew neither of them, and there is a bit regret there because they both seem like extremely great people to be around.

That isn’t to say that I didn’t know “of” them both. I recognized the “Epic Insanity” logo from a few discussions I have been involved with and I absolutely remember Rades from Wildstar and the “Rainbeer Road Raceway” that he created. I was talking with my friend Grace about her memories and how she donated so many of these signs to the cause. He seemed like a chaotic force of joy in the world and based on the lives he touched, folks will be talking about his antics for a whole generation of players.

The blood elf with the fire festival sunglasses is probably the image that I will always have in my head when I think of Rades. The challenge however is that for whatever reason, in spite of how many people in common that we both seemingly cared about deeply… our paths never really crossed. I’ve thought a bit trying to figure out how that happened, given that we both got our starts in the WoW Blogging community and I have to figure both interacted with the Blog Azeroth crowd. The only thing I keep landing on is that he was a Horde player and that for most of my WoW Career until Warlords… I was a dedicated Alliance player. I never really read Orcish Army Knife, I think in part because I mentally thought of it as a “Horde” blog. Based on a few of Grace’s favorite articles that they linked me yesterday, I really wish I had because they were absolutely hilarious and poignant.

What this has made me think about is just how fleeting our connections are when we are potentially hundreds or thousands of miles apart and can’t physically lay hands on one another. While I didn’t know Rades or Epic Insanity, I have my own list of people that touched my life that we lost way too soon and that I end up thinking about at least once a week. My friend lists on various games and Twitter follows are littered with emotional landmines of folks who are no longer with us, but that I cannot bring myself to unfollow. Slurms, TenTen, Zann, Stropp, and Psychochild all come to mind as people that I miss talking to greatly. I finally did unfollow River, because his account got hacked and it was trying to distribute Malware, but I wish I still had it there preserved.

The thing is… I can’t say that I was super close to any of them… but at the same time they made up key building blocks of this community that I have come to call family. I am super bad at expressing how much I care about the folks that I spend my free time with. Like in the list of names that I just rattled off, I don’t think I ever said to them specifically how much they meant to me and how much I enjoyed whatever time we had interacted with each other. The connections we have online are so ephemeral and often not rooted in the day-to-day reality of our lives. I go into minor panic attacks every now and then when I have the sudden realization that I have gone several days without seeing anything from a specific person, and then spend the next hour trying to figure out what might have happened. Thanks if you have ever helped me on one of these panicked jaunts because I have this overarching fear that someone will slip from memory without me realizing it.

The thing is now that I have sat down to talk about this today, I am absolutely certain there are other people that we have lost that I am not thinking of right now. I’ve kicked around the idea of hosting a sort of gamer memorial page but wasn’t sure if that was creepy or morbid. The thing is… we know parts of each other, but rarely do we know the totality. You know what I choose to share with you, which is a fraction of the total picture of what makes up my life. So for example I got a window into the lives of Slurms or TenTen, that was curated for me to see but I can’t really say that I knew the totality of the person they were. I worry sometimes about what people will remember me for when I am gone. Above all else I want you to take away from this post that I care.

I might be bad at putting it into words sometimes, but if we have ever interacted for any length of time you have made an impact on me. I maybe care more about “digital ” friends that a lot of people do, because I cut my teeth on IRC. I met my wife on IRC and was introduced by a mutual friend from Belgium, so people have always been far more than the pixels dancing across my screen. Be it introversion or distance… there are very few of you that I will ever actually get to know “for real”, but I think it is important that you understand that it doesn’t mean you have not already impacted me greatly. The times we find ourselves living through right now, seems to conspire to rob us of the people we care about in the blink of an eye. I just want to make sure you understand that if you are reading these words and interacting with me… that you matter to me.

Good Morning Friends! This morning’s topic is going to go some places, and hopefully, you are along with me on this ride. I am very much a PC-focused gamer, but that does not mean that I don’t also spend a significant amount of time playing consoles like the Switch. Essentially PC will probably always be my platform of choice, but over the last few year when my wife determines it is time for sleep I have gone along with her. This means most of the time I am piddling around on either a phone, tablet, or my switch if it has sufficient charge until I reach the point where I am actually ready for sleep. This means I am always on the lookout for a novel use for one of these devices, especially if it allows me to continue having an experience similar to my gaming PC in a portable form factor.

This week the Ayn Odin went up on Indie GoGo and it is a device that I have been watching for some time as it went through R&D and development. The idea is to create an android based device with a comfortable form factor similar to the Nintendo Switch. The “Pro” version of the device is $265 and honestly seems like quite a deal, at least compared to the recent pricing of the Steam Deck. The thing is… I already have a way more competent android device that I use on a daily basis… my Razor Phone 2. For a few years now I have been chasing the concept of turning that into a more proper gaming device that includes some physical controls. The thing that really is the thing holding me back from completely embracing mobile gaming… is touch screen controls just feel like shit. I have giant fumbling fingers and they never offer the level of precision that I am seeing in a touch screen interface.

Since I have a Razor Phone, my first step on this journey was to pick up the Razor Kishi when it first landed on the market. Razor makes decent enough peripherals, and I have to admit the thumb sticks and buttons on the device feel solid. The first strike against the device however… is that it doesn’t fit their own phone. There are some rubber inserts on the sides of the device that are designed to create a firm grip when you dock your phone into it. However with the Razor Phone 2, it will not fit into the device unless I yank these two rubber bumpers out of the way. Without them in place however there are other problems that arise.

This image comes from Razor’s own marketing slides, and shows the back of the device. Essentially your phone is suspended between the two chonky sides of the device by an elastic band. Without the rubber bumpers in place that grip your device, the entire thing feels floppy in the hand. Given that I have nonsensically large hands that I have already discussed in the past, I am constantly causing the device to flex in unnatural ways given that it isn’t making great contact in the first place. While I have spent some time gaming in this manner, namely playing XCloud… it isn’t exactly an award winning experience.

Now we zoom forward to last week, as I was following news about the Ayn Odin device… I saw someone mentioning that it was just cheaper to get a burner phone and the device shown above and end up with the same results. The device in question is known as the Gamesir X2 and it comes in both a Type-C connection variant that I own and a Bluetooth connected version. I specifically went for the Type C model because it is powered by connecting to your phone, and allows for pass through charging of the device. There are a few things that I feel warrants discussion here. Firstly you notice that the sides of the device are completely flat, and not curved like that of the Kishi… which allows for you to support a fairly wide array of devices with this design.

The second bit which is significantly more important for me personally is the way that the device actually telescopes to fit the device. Instead of an elastic band, there is a sliding plastic bit that extends for most of the length of the device. The end result is that the majority of your device is supported and not just floating out there without a rigid structure. The extended portion is not flush, but in my personal experience with the controller it does not feel flexible like the Kishi did. Instead it feels more like I am holding a solid body handheld, which is ultimately the experience that I wanted. The negative of the Gamesir is the pricetag… which was originally $100 but has more recently fallen down to $60.

This is awesome if the games you want to play on Android natively support a controller. The challenge here is that most of them do not… which means you now have a rather expensive bauble that can’t really do what you want it to do. Genshin Impact for example fully supports a controller in the iOS platform but that feature has yet to trickle over to Android. Gamepad mappers have existed for quite some time but generally require you to root your device in order to get them to work… which triggers protection schemes that various mobile games have to stop cheating. Those that don’t have traditionally done something called Screen Cloning, which also shows up as “cheating” to various software scanning for such activity. For example if you try and use a popular app like Octopus while running Genshin, you are forced to log out .

Now is where things start to get super fiddly and Rube Goldberg device like. There is a piece of software called Mantis Gamepad that functions in a completely different manner. Essentially the only way to run a piece of software at a system level is either to root your device or to flip your device into developer mode. While in developer mode you can essentially debug software with low level permissions, which requires you to have some other device “Activate” it. This is done through something called the Android Debug Bridge or ADB, and if you are really curious you can see a description of how that works here. The above video explains how to get it up and running more specifically for Mantis Gamepad. The reality is that you have to either have access to a PC or access to another Android device in order to activate the Mantis app before it functions.

Once activated however you have a floating widget that now appears over games you launch from within the Mantis app. The buttons in the above screenshot shifted when I tried to pull up my screenshot app, but essentially you get a menu full of widgets that you can place over top of the controls on the screen. You also have the ability to assign “phases” and toggle between them so you could have one set of controls for action mode, and another set of controls for when you are in a dialog box for example. The final result was that for the first time ever, I could comfortably do my Genshin Impact dailies while sitting in bed using a controller with my phone. I tried a few different control schemes but ultimately felt more comfortable using face buttons for combat than I did triggers. This is probably just a me thing, given that the majority of my console years were spent playing Super Nintendo era games and not more modern titles where everything focuses on the triggers and bumpers.

I’ve tried a few other titles like Dragalia Lost and Tales of Wind and they worked perfectly fine as well. Now that I have a viable way to play android games, I am going to start branching out into emulation with this set up. Mostly I am making this post, just in case there is someone one there trying to do this same thing. I am going to start experimenting with Moonlight and Steamlink as well, and maybe even try some PlayStation Remote Play. I can already say however that using Microsoft XCloud feels awesome with this set up as well. I highly recommend the Gamesir, because so far it has come the close to giving me that Android Switch experience that I was looking for.