The Libby App

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Generally speaking, I figure I am probably the last to learn about most things. This morning’s blog post is going to be one of those situations. I am assuming that all of you have already had experiences with the Libby app, but on the off chance that even one of you has not… I am going to devote a blog post to it. This next part is going to be extremely embarrassing considering that one of my oldest, longest, and “bestest” friends is a Librarian… but I’ve not had an active Library card for a few decades. As much as I love Libraries and as much time as I spent in them growing up… as an adult, they have just not been a huge part of my life. I read so slowly that the constant pressure of feeling like I have a deadline looming over my head means that in most cases I just bought books outright rather than borrowed them. Recently I discovered something called the Libby app and it has changed how I have thought about our wonderful Library system.

For those unfamiliar, it essentially acts as a glue between the physical library presence and digital services. You can log in with your Library card/Account and effectively gain access to all of the digital books and audiobooks that your library has on offer. You can configure it to connect to your Kindle account and download it directly to your e-Reader and then it also facilitates the check-in process when you are finished and removes the book from your devices. All of this honestly seems like magic and it interoperates seamlessly between a Web Client, your dedicated devices, mobile phones, and tablets. You can be consuming the same item on all of those and it will helpfully leap you forward to where you last left off, which admittedly is a huge deal for me because I often start something on my desktop and then continue it on my phone.

What I love the most however is that it grants me access to a large library full of audiobooks. I am not sure what it is exactly about the audiobook experience that I love so much. I can remember as a kid loving story time and listening attentively as teachers read to me in class. My wife cannot handle audiobooks, but she is very much NOT an auditory learner but for me… I love throwing one on while I am doing something else. This week I’ve been listening to Gideon The Ninth while playing Path of Exile because I have more or less committed the game to muscle memory and can devote my processing resources to consuming the book. So I have been shifting back and forth between listening to it while working during the day and listening to it while playing at night, all without the app really missing a beat.

One of the things that are somewhat cool is the fact that you can in theory be connected to multiple library systems at the same time. I am extremely lucky in that the Tulsa City-County Library system is vast and expands out into many of the communities surrounding the greater metro area. However, I noticed that Bartlesville a larger town nearby also supports the Libby app under their digital services, which means, in theory, I could go there and get a library card and then effectively merge the reach of both library systems together. Again I am going to assume that I am the last to know any of this, but like I said at the beginning of the post I figured it was cool enough that I would devote a blog post to talking about it just in case someone else out there was a similar late bloomer. It seems silly but this has very much revitalized how I consume books and made me want to consume more of them.

As far as Gideon the Ninth, I kinda love it so far. I am not even sure how I would describe it to someone else, but a Dune meets a Death Metal Harry Potter sort of sprung to mind. While I would never give a dime to anything that might benefit the horrible Terfmaster general that is J.K. Rowling, I cannot discount how important the Harry Potter series was to me and how it still sorta colors how I view other media at times. Gideon The Ninth is set in this weird timeline where death magic and all of its many forms effectively dictate society. I am sure I will talk about it more at length as I continue down the series but since I missed the boat when it was all the rage among my Twitter friends I am catching up. I had mentally put a pin in the title thinking that I would enjoy it and am now just experiencing it. I tend to consume series more than individual books. For example, I have been absolutely ravenous when a new Dresden novel comes out. Another book that I have pinned in my memory is The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I will probably start on once I have consumed everything in this series available.

Audio books just fit my life more easily than reading does, which makes me a little sad to be honest. I’ve never been one to choose reading over something else. That is my wife and she will happily sit in the living room and consume a stack of books in a single weekend. Me, I tend to pick at them like leftovers slowly and over time… and usually before going to sleep which means I maybe get a chapter read before sleep claims me. Audiobooks however I can easily listen to while playing one of my “forever games” like Path of Exile that does not require a lot of higher level processing from me and is more mechanical reflex and repetition than anything else. My goal for this new year is to consume more books in this manner. Since I know I have a ton of avid readers in among my followers knowing that I am greatly enjoying Gideon The Ninth and that I love Dune, Dresden, the Witcher series, and a lot of 70s/80s science fiction… feel free to give me some more modern suggestions to throw in my list to consume.

The Trade Rabbit Hole

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Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to go down a bit of an odd tangent and talk about trading in Path of Exile. The last league was the first time I bought anything from other players. Once that barrier was broken, I interacted with Trade many times during this league and have been occasionally selling things. Yesterday I dove further down that rabbit hole and set up a structure for selling goods and the above is the view many strangers have seen… as I invited them to a party and then they popped over to my hideout to make a purchase. Most of the trades are peanuts, and even more, I have passed up because it was not convenient to pop to my hideout because I was in the middle of something and it wasn’t worth 1 Chaos to stop doing whatever it was. For those unfamiliar with trading in POE, I figure I should probably give a high-level rundown.

Essentially every thing that is not associated with a quest… aka colored green, can be traded with other players. Since POE does not use a gold equivalency and instead you receive usable items bartered back to the player from vendors, the trade economy runs also on these currencies of equivalent value. You can check sites like POE.Ninja to see what the rough value of each item is but effectively there is a spectrum of value. If we consider Chaos Orbs to be equivalent to a dollar, then Exalted Orbs would be roughly 10 dollars, and Divine Orbs the next major currency would be roughly 240 dollars. This scales upwards based on rarity with Mirrors of Kalandra being the king of all currencies at roughly 56,900 Chaos Orbs for one. For most purposes, small trades are priced in Chaos, and large trades are priced in Divines.

Grinding Gear Games manages the flow of goods through its website which serves as a central clearing house of all listings. Unlike the ill-fated Diablo auction house scheme of old, GGG takes no cut of the trades and only profits through the sale of Stash Tabs. In order to list things publicly you have to have something called a “premium” stash tab which costs roughly $4 at a non-discounted price. A premium tab can be flagged as public, which means that items contained within it will be cataloged for sale on the website. You can then right-click on an item to set a price or if you choose you can denote that everything within a single tab is a fixed price. When you search the Trade site, all of the items listed are sitting somewhere in a player’s stash tab and the “Direct Whisper” button sends a specifically formatted message in that player’s language denoting that you want to make a purchase.

From there a fairly scripted sequence plays out like clockwork. I am not sure HOW the order of operations became enshrined but it is most definitely a thing. Here is my quick rundown of what commerce looks like in Path of Exile.

  • The person wanting to make a purchase clicks the Direct Whisper button on the website while logged into the game. This will send a specifically formatted message and make a loud ping noise to the seller.
  • If the seller is able to meet up with the player and conduct a trade, the seller will invite that player to a party indicating that they want to make the sale.
    • Of note, there are lots of times when it is just not convenient to try and sell something, especially if it is for only a few Chaos Orbs. This is also part of the culture and if you don’t get a response you just move on to the next listing.
  • The buyer and the seller both return to the seller’s hideout.
  • The encoded message that was sent with the Direct Whisper button will have indicated what trade tab the item the person wants to buy is located in, and when the seller goes into that tab the item in question will be highlighted with a purple outline.
  • The buyer waits, usually on the waypoint pad for the seller to open a trade window.
  • The seller retrieves the item and opens a trade, and places the item in the window.
  • The buyer places the amount of currency from the listing in the trade window and hits accept.
  • The seller mouses over all of the currency in order to verify the item and hits accept.
  • There may or may not be any communication that takes place, if there is any it is usually a short “thx” or “ty” or something along those lines.
  • Either the seller or the buyer disbands the party and the buyer leaves the hideout to go about their way with their new item.

Where things break down slightly is when someone uses the formatted message but wants to haggle. I’ve had a few of these take place. If the item is a single Chaos I am more than likely willing to take lesser currency in its place. However, I had one person yesterday say they wanted to buy a jewel that was going for 120 chaos… and then when we get to my hideout tell me that they only have 29 Chaos and wanted to “make a deal”. You are just too far off from the price at that point and I have no interest in 9000 Scrolls of Wisdom. The thing is… this has happened exactly three times so far, two with dollar store items that I had up for sale and once with the high ticket item. Most trades just function like an automated machine.

In my bank, I have six tabs that I have flagged as public and have goods for sale. Essentially I have 3 “bulk” tabs that have items priced at 1 Chaos, 5 Chaos, and 10 Chaos accordingly. I made these breakpoints because they sorta represent several common breaks that I have seen for items. If an item is worth 12 Chaos… I am going to just dump it in the 10 Chaos bin. If an item is worth 8 Chaos… the 5 Chaos Bin et cetera. The other three tabs are for items of higher value or items that I really want to custom price for whatever reason. Since setting this up, I have made a large volume of trades and while most of them are nickels and dimes… if I am sitting in my hideout it takes almost next to no effort to turn an item I would have previously vendored into a chaos orb.

The problem of course comes with pricing items. Exilence Next is a great tool that will let you price out everything in one or more stash tabs and is somewhat useful for letting you know that you might be sitting on some hidden value there. Example… I sold a few cards this season that was worth a few divine each and would have had no clue I was sitting on that without this wide sweep. The problem is it takes a significant amount of time to run a scan because the API only allows it to send 30 requests every 5 minutes… which means if you are cataloging MANY stash tabs it can take half an hour for a run to complete. This is not a great option for price-checking something on the fly.

That is where Awakened POE Trade comes in, and I have been talking about it for a while now. Once configured you can mouse over an item in your inventory or stash tabs, hit control+d, and it will bring up a guesstimate of if an item has value. The best thing that it is useful for is indicating the tiers of the rolls on a specific item. The challenge is that the number that it brings back is in the category of a “wild-assed guess”. However, you can turn off and on specific attributes that add value to an item and it will search on those parameters and try and bring back a more refined estimate. Generally speaking, I think it overvalues the items that I find based on my own experience, so I apply some “gut math” to tone that down. For example the 120 Chaos Jewel I was talking about earlier, indicated that I should be able to get as much as 200 Chaos for it. That seemed outrageous so I dropped down to the price tag that I was using… and then ultimately just gave it to my friend who is playing Poison SRS because it seemed significant for that build.

I am not necessarily going hardcore into trade, because it is a means to an end for me. I care about currency in a league only insofar as it solves problems with my builds. I’ve invested likely four divines worth of currency in my Righteous Fire build and it is so much nicer to run than it was previously. I thought it would be interesting to look at the general state of my currency tab from 12/13 on the left to 1/4 on the right. So if you only look at liquid assets, and consider that I have spent 4 divines… on the 13th I had roughly 39 Chaos, and counting what I have spent so far I’ve had roughly 2600 Chaos this league. The biggest difference between this league and other leagues is that I have been dabbling in trade and turning things I was not using into resources that I can then spend on items that I will use. I am not specifically doing things for the purpose of making currency but it is nice to be able to afford upgrades over time.

I am very much doing this as a side thing, and I certainly hope I never turn into an Auction House Baron. However, it is one more step on the descent into madness that is Path of Exile. I am not necessarily changing HOW I play the game. I’ve focused a bit more on Delve and I am making a good profit from it… but I also really enjoy playing Delve. I think when it is no longer as compelling I will move on to doing something else. I think the next step on the path to hell however will be dabbling in bulk selling. There is a discord out there where folks can post an export from Exilence and have others bid on bulk items. I figured somewhere out there was someone playing an arbitrage role of buying items cheaply and bundling them with other like items then selling for a profit. I’ve found that place but also I have yet the desire to wade into those waters.

This morning’s post if nothing else is an attempt to demystify what seemed at first to be a terribly cumbersome system. While I would likely prefer an anonymous trade system that did not require anything of me, something more akin to the trade boards from Everquest II or Retainers from FFXIV, this is also not awful. It reminds me quite a bit of the Nexus in Everquest, which required players to effectively be a vendor. However, it is not even something you can bot like you could that because it requires effort from the players involved which also lends a weird human touch to the process. Sure most trades go by without comment, but occasionally conversation does happen. Especially on those single chaos items I am way more willing to offer deep discounts and take assorted “bubblegum” currency if it helps someone get a random item they needed.

The Abyss Stares Back

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Good Morning Friends! I am going to apologize ahead of time, but you are going to get another post completely full of Path of Exile nonsense. We are continuing my descent into madness… literally as I keep going deeper into Delve game mode systems. Last night I discovered Abyssal Cities and I am now on the lookout for as many of these as I can find. Since I missed the launch of the Delve league some four years ago, it floors me just how complete this game mode really is. While you do have to keep running maps periodically to build up a stockpile of Voltaxic Suphite to power your crawler friend and light the way, other than that you can pretty much get anything you could in almost any other game mode down in the darkness. I’ve gotten roughly a dozen Divine Vessels and a couple of dozen Offering to the Goddess that just drop randomly from stuff down in the depths rather than having to hope and pray you to see any of them above ground.

From what I understand there are three kinds of cities that can be found underground. The first is the Vaal ruins that I had been exploring previously and these supposedly start showing up somewhere around a depth of 30. I found my first Vaal city in the 70s, so your mileage may vary of course. Abyssal cities that I found last night and that are highlighted on my Subterranean Chart above in a yellowish outline start showing up in the low 100s. Primeval Ruins are the third kind that I have not seen yet, and those appear around 170 depth. Each City type can have a boss node, and I’ve yet to encounter any of those… and ultimately that is really what I have been searching for. I have a tunnel system around 70-80 depth that has produced five or six Vaal Cities, and last night I opted to dive down deeper and start expanding out around 100ish and almost immediately stumbled onto this first Abyssal City.

Because I got distracted by doing other things… I did not get nearly as much time underground. However, in my limited time, I managed to pull out all of those resonators sitting in my bank. Pending those resonators sell at least as quickly as my previous batches and for the same prices that is roughly 110 chaos worth of items that I pulled out, not counting a few nice pieces of gear that I am selling individually. I tend to price my items just high enough that I am not going to get instant sales which would interrupt the flow of my evening. Instead, I expect to throw items up cheaper when I am more in the mood to field trade requests. If someone wants to pay my inflated prices though, I am willing to stop what I am doing… waste a portal, and go make the trade. I will never be an auction house oligarch but I am making more than enough currency to keep fielding my nonsense plans.

Speaking of currency, I saw my first raw divine orb drop in the depths. This is only the second Divine Orb that I have seen in this league. I’ve seen an Exalted Orb or two in the dark below which keeps building onto my theory that almost anything can drop off node encounters. So far I’ve yet to see anything that is influenced by Elder, Eater, or Exarch so I am guessing that those items are probably limited to bossing or bossing adjacent activities. I have however seen a number of Synthesized and Fractured items below as well as more than a fair number of delve-specific explicit modifiers on items. I only know this because I continue to keep using Awakened POE Trade to price-check anything that looks like it might hold value, which tells me how good the rolls are on a given item and will call out league-specific mechanics.

I am absolutely certain that from this point forward… I want to go into Delve earlier than I did in this league. I am having a freaking ball with my time down there and getting enough currency to be able to fund upgrades to my builds. This is far from a high-yield currency strategy, but it seems reliable and also something that I already enjoy doing. The wide variety of items that I can see is honestly what keeps pushing me forward. I love seeing things that I have yet to see drop, and that happens way more often in Path of Exile than it does in a game like Diablo III. By midseason in D3 I have seen literally everything but Primal Ancient versions of things, and it all sort of blurs into this giant haze of orange text. Sure most of everything that drops is ignorable, but in every round, there is at least one thing that is worth hovering over to check the roll.

The last big thing that I did yesterday was spent some time respeccing my Atlas tree. I was already leaning into Delve a bit, but I removed “Wandering Path” and took all of the notable nodes associated with Niko as well. Basically, in Path of Exile the “trees” are comprised of small nodes often referred to as travel nodes, and big nodes which are referred to as “notables”. Wandering Path is a specific strategy for the Atlas tree which the effectiveness of all of your small travel nodes, but makes it so you get zero benefits from any of the notable nodes. This is great for when you are finishing your Atlas because every map you run will shower you with new maps to fuel your further exploration. However I am getting more than enough “map sustain” through Delve, and I no longer really need it from mapping as such I opted to focus on Strongboxes, Smuggler’s Caches, Ritual Altars, and Delve. I might whittle further into the atlas tree to try and pick back up Essences but for now, I am happy enough.

So essentially I am maining Righteous Fire and focused with it on progression in Delve. I have no clue what I am doing with Summon Raging Spirits in the least, or what I can really do to that build other than shift it to poison. I just am not sure if I care enough about it to fix the problems I am currently having with it. I am getting that old familiar itch of wanting to start something else to play with. I really want to see what the Seismic Trap life is all about, so I might be going down that path at some point soon. I am still periodically playing “BelginnersLuck” as I attempt to get Hillock to drop a unique and am to the point where if I am fast enough I can kill him before he can do the regeneration phase. I am so completely consumed with Path of Exile and all of its deep systems. I have no clue when I will climb back out of this chasm I have dug for myself, but for the moment I am happy.

Digging Too Deep

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Well, my friends, it is far from the morning, and I am finally doing my first proper blog post of the year. Technically, I could have just called this a loss because of the holiday, as this is the day I actually got off officially in lieu of New Year’s day. I guess I should start things off by wishing you all a Happy New Year. My morning was less than fun because I spent it dealing with technical difficulties in my main machine. I finally sorted it out and it was thoroughly dumb, but not before I uninstalled Steam… without remembering to back up all of my games that were on my C drive. This isn’t the end of the world because most of my games were actually on another drive, but it will require me to reinstall a few things. I went completely down the wrong path because the Xbox Game Pass app apparently mounts a bunch of virtual drives and I got super confused sifting through event viewer thinking it was a hard drive failure.

I am still deeply enthralled in Path of Exile and more specifically the Delve mechanic. In past leagues, I had spent a few minutes exploring the dark depths, but never really engaged with it fully. I knew enough that I liked it, but was largely focused on mapping as my key progression path. Instead, I poured my heart and soul this weekend into Delve and made pretty solid currency for me at least. More than enough to fund several key set pieces to improve problems with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. All told since diving into Delve I have produced somewhere in the neighborhood of five divines worth of currency. Granted I have also spent about two divines worth of that same currency righting the ship on my build as well as funding a few upgrades for one of my friends. Suffice it to say I am shocked at just how well it has worked, and I have a feeling in future leagues I will dig down into the ground well before this point if for no reason other than it seems to be a stable source of funds.

For those who have no clue what I am talking about, Delve was a league mechanic from roughly four years ago which involves exploring the depths under Wraeclast for fun and profit. Essentially the cycle involves running maps for Niko to collect Voltaxic Sulphite which you then use to power The Crawler which is essentially an automated tractor-like thing that plods along fixed courses stringing lighting along behind it. Each “camp” presents you with a series of monster spawns and gives you some sort of rewards like gear, divination cards, raw currency, and azurite that is used to upgrade how far you can delve safely and the radius of your light. The light is key because the monsters in the depths take no damage if they are not in some light source, and you eventually take significant damage yourself if you stay in the darkness too long.

Sometimes the rewards are significant, like this node that dropped a who slew of maps including one that was unique and a unique hybrid flask. Other times it might be a few dozen chromatic orbs, but the sheer volume of “bubble gum” currency is large enough that it is very likely you would never run out. Thanks to my adventures in the deep I have recolored several items for folks and even managed to six-link a few things. While it isn’t always going to be exalted orbs or divine orbs… you end up getting enough raw chaos to make the entire journey feel worthwhile. Where the real money that can be made however is selling the delve-specific items like resonators and fossils, though the later you really need to find someone wanting to purchase them in bulk.

Deep down veiled in darkness are a number of interesting things. The only ones that I have really found yet are Vaal Cities, and I have found I think five of them so far. Each node in a Vaal City involves opening up a chamber filled with corrupted monsters and a dozen or so chests full of loot. The above example is from my completing a single Vaal Chamber. All of the mechanics that can spawn in maps, seem to have nodes down in delve as well and I have taken down a number of Harbingers, Beyond spawns, and even some Breach and Abyss nodes. From what I understand as long as I keep expanding the network of tunnels it will keep spawning new nodes to explore off to either the right or left of the central column. In the second screenshot of this blog post, I did some cut/paste work and pieced together a ton of individual screenshots to show how far I have explored one side so far.

All of the currency that I am generating is allowing me to resolve some of the problems I had with my resists and survivability. At this point, I have upgraded most pieces of gear so my next target is likely to go find better quality versions of each unique that I am using. When I cobbled together the build in the first place I bought the cheapest versions of each that I could afford, and now that currency is a little freer and that Poison SRS is the flavor of the week taking some of the pressure of RF Juggernaut prices I might be able to pick up some deals. I had some moments with the build where I doubted if it was my jam, which is ultimately what led me to roll my own SRS-flavored build. Now that I have invested some more currency in the build I am enjoying myself again.

The real question I have though is if I am going to spend any more time investing in the SRS build that I currently have. There are some significant survival problems with my current build-out. My resists are not in a horrible state, so really I think the problem is that I either don’t have enough spell suppression/block or really need some more regeneration and armor. I could pivot my build into the Poison SRS variant, but that would involve a pretty significant investment at this point. I am just not sure if it is worth it considering that I would probably rather be spending currency on Righteous Fire. Summon Raging Spirits however is a much better bossing build, so if I could solve my mapping survival I could probably use it to catapult progress into finishing the major bosses. I guess I need to make a concerted effort to explore my POB and compare it to what I would need to change to pivot over into the Poison variation.

There are other games that I am interested in… but right now Path of Exile is tweaking all of the dopamine centers in my brain. I am going to stay with this ride until it eventually drops me off somewhere a spent husk of a human.