Guinea Pigs and Stone Men

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In what is seeming to be the continued tradition of writing disclaimers at the top of my blog posts. I am still fine even though everything around me seems to be going batshit crazy. I officially cannot travel to see my parents right now as the highway between me and them is blocked with flood water. In my suburb the water has receded, but the city of Tulsa proper is struggling. I am getting pulled into some support of the flood prep effort, which is why I did not blog at all Friday. I got up for work at 4 am and was in the office at 5:30… which left me no time at all for my traditional blogging.

Yesterday was of course a holiday here in the United States, and I contemplated writing a post… but could not bring myself to actually do so. Instead I more or less spent the weekend recuperating from the madness that has been our life over the last several weeks. Saturday night we had another string of Tornadoes, and there is a high chance that tonight will be a repeat of that process again. My wife just happened to be up and around at 1 am when the warnings started happening, so my slumber was briefly interrupted as we lay there in bed trying to determine if we need to worry about it. It managed to touch down in a few places but nowhere near us so we rolled over and went back to sleep… still leaving the television on just in case.

As far as gaming goes I have been all over the place. Some years ago I backed the Crowfall kickstarter, in part because it seemed like it was gaining a bunch of steam within the greater internet zeitgeist. I figured either I would really like the game or else it would at least give me a cheaper copy to try it as is often the case with kickstarter pricing. However over the period of time since Alpha went live the game itself has seemed more of a tech demo than an actual game Periodically I would poke my head in and think to myself “yup that is an unfinished mess” and move on with my life. This time however I am starting to see the early signs of a functional game, and as a result I spent more time playing it this weekend than I have to date.

Crowfall itself is this bizarre amalgam of Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online and Everquest Landmark all sorta rolled into a single game that neither explains itself nor really gives much in the way of breadcrumbs as to how you should be approaching it. As a result I personally found myself perplexed by the game each time I had logged into it in the past, and this time I resorted to actually watching a tips and tricks video to somewhat ease the transition into the mindset required to be playing it. Effectively there are three modes to play the game and each have their own specifics. Eternal Kingdoms is effectively sandbox mode where you have total control over the world and can fiddle around and build til your heart iscontent. God’s Reach is effectively newbie mode, which is a largely PVE experience that allows you to get a taste for how the game will feel. Campaign is the PVP conquest mode which resets every so often and pushes the players back to square one. At this point I have only dinked around with the first two modes, and my allergy to PVP will largely keep me out of the third mode for some time.

Where the comparison to Eve Online comes in is the fact that the game has decided to have offline skill progression. This means that probably the very first thing you should do in the game is decide to make a primary and a secondary path which will allow you to begin accumulating skills in a sort of alternate advancement system that is independent of your characters. I have no clue how fast this acquisition is, but it always feels like I have a ton of points anytime I have logged out of the game for awhile. Right now I am working my way through the Crafting and Combat basics… with a focus on crafting to in theory be able to build better stuff for myself.

The above image represents the tree within “Crafting Basics” and I am nowhere near maxing it out, which I assume is required to move on to the next sub tree in the master list posted two images above. All of the pips seems to largely focus on efficiency and success of the patterns, and over in the combat tree they largely focus on increasing your stats and less on granting abilities which are done at a per character level. Right now I have spent most of my time on a Guineacean Knight aka Sword and Board and a Stoneborn Champion aka the big axe wielding warrior. The one credit I have to give them is that the character models they have created are glorious. The character animations however leave a little something to be desired.

The gameplay largely involves a mix of combat and crafting and you sort out how to make yourself the tools necessary to navigate the world and its combat system. It all starts out by gathering wood which then allows you to make the most basic of crafting implements. From there you can work your way through tiers of materials and at least cobble together some basic armor, and once you find the next tier of uncommon materials and a crafting bench some decent armor. I’ve not encountered anything I would call a unique drop, and effectively everything seems to come from crafting. This is going to be a key point in a few moments.

Up until this point everything was a fairly pleasant experience, but the game was just about to hit me with a sucker punch. As I expanded out from the starter areas I started encountering more difficult monsters. At which point I stumbled across this trio of skeletons… and took my very first death. In Crowfall when you die apparently everything that you were carrying in your inventory and that was not equipped on your person stays at the point of your death in a grave marker form. In order to get back your stuff, you have to get back to wherever you died… and tediously loot your items one by one with no bulk loot option. If you read the forums this is designed to purposefully lead to some tension surrounding if you can successfully loot your corpse before trouble arrives.

I spent a good hour and a half trying to clear the camp of 3 skeletons… that if I was super careful I could split a single mob of that pack. I could not however managed to take down two of them at a time… which meant that I would ultimately die again… strand another tombstone and have to repeat the process. I finally Leeroy Jenkins’d my way into looting enough stuff off my corpse to be able to get started again, but I have to say the entire experience put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. That said… once I got back some basic crafting tools there really was nothing on my body that I could not get back given enough time harvesting which I guess is the one golden takeaway from the experience. Death is a loss of time and opportunity, but doesn’t really do anything to permanently impact your progression.

There are a lot of titles that are nostalgic about various aspects of games gone by. Crowfall is very much a game that is nostalgic about the realm versus realm game play of Dark Age of Camelot and having to do corpse runs. That is not at all something I am nostalgic about other than being able to tell the gamer version of “in my day” stories about how rough we had it. Death is a bad enough set back… I just don’t feel like we need additional penalties tacked onto it, especially when it effects the items that I had spent the previous two hours of game play fastidiously assembling. Ultimately I find what Crowfall is doing interesting… but I also figure at this point it is pretty certain that the game that exists is not really in my wheelhouse.

All of that said… I am glad the game is progressing and has turned into something more than a tech demo. I will continue to watch it evolve into whatever it is planning on becoming. It isn’t really my jam but I figure it is someones out there. If you have deep nostalgia over the way Dark Age of Camelot used to be, then you might want to check it out. Otherwise you can just keep watching me as I poke my head back in periodically.

Tornado Watching

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Last night was effectively a repeat of Monday, but seemingly with more activity going on. I lost track of the number of Tornado warnings we were under at various points during the evening. The above photo is not mine but it is of a tornado that formed in my town. I quite possibly did the most Oklahoman thing ever and stood out on the front porch watching it happen. Before you chide me for not being safe… the storm cell was headed the opposite direction and at this point it was several miles away. Now this is not the first Tornado I have watched, but there is something mesmerizing about the process of watching it. It isn’t like the movies… the clouds feel like they are moving impossibly slowly as a plume of clouds begins to snake down towards the ground. In truth they are moving insanely fast but you just happen to be watching something massive occurring and the scale throws off any gauge of speed.

While we spent the night watching out for storms… the more insidious concern is the fact that we are having significant flooding. Thankfully where I live specifically… there isn’t much of a chance of flooding as I live outside of even what is the 500 year estimate floodplain. That said it is making travel around the area pretty rough as several of the roads that are normally completely safe to take are under water. Essentially we are in a rough spot as a state because all of the dams in this area are beyond safe capacity… meaning they are having to release way more water than they normally would. Effectively I think we are going to be past the 100 year floodplain estimates and will be setting ourselves up for the levels we have not seen since the “great flood” of 1986.

One of the things that you don’t expect in Oklahoma is the fact that we have the largest inland shipping port, and with it a huge navigational system. To add another monkey wrench into the works, last night two barges loaded with stuff broke free of their moorings and were heading towards one of the lock gates. The tugs were not available to try and round them up, because they had already rounded up two other barges that broke free earlier. So the concern is that if they slammed into the dam that is part of the lock system, and if it were to break… an entire town would effectively be wiped off the map not to mention other less immediate ramifications. For the time being however they appear to be hung up on some rocks and are still tied to each other… so folks are scrambling to try and anchor them in some more permanent fashion. Regardless the town in question has been evacuated in case things go south.

Basically right now we are living in a really weird time, and as such my game time has suffered. What you are getting from me instead in the meantime is a lot of random commentary about my life. I want to emphasize that I personally am safe and that my home is safe. The world around me however is less so… and it is interesting to be a spectator to all of the calamity going on around me. The area will most certainly be dealing with the ramifications going forward for a long time. I did however get some time to briefly play a bit of Necromancer in Elder Scrolls Online… and I have to say that the new game experience is a little weird. I am used to having the entire skill tree available to me from the start, and it seems like you only get access to something once you have used it? I didn’t get Two Handed Weapons for example until I had killed some stuff with one, at which point the skills opened up.

I still more or less plan on trying to play a Necromancer tank, but I probably should have gone through the tutorial to at least get some starter weapons. All I have found thus far in Elsweyr is a Two Handed Sword so I am using that for the moment. It feels really weird to be starved for skill points… seeing as on my main I have a stack of them that are sitting unspent. I figured a Dark Elf was probably the most likely to be a necromancer, so I went with that and with the scarred appearance. I hope to spend more time playing this when I am not dodging twisters. We were going to go buy flowers this weekend… but the Nursery is now sitting completely underwater so that won’t be happening. Memorial Day is going to be an odd one this year.

Minor Renovations

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Over the last few days I have been doing a number of minor renovations to AggroChat.com which is a site that you may or may not know about. Essentially the site is a mirror of the content that the various members of the AggroChat podcast do on the interwebs along with the resting place of each of our episodes. We use a plugin that is no longer actively supported… but still seems to work… to make a local copy of each post that comes out on the various sites that make up our group. What this means in practice is that the site is mostly filled with Aggronaut posts and podcast episodes given that I am way more prolific than the rest of our crew.

The site itself had been in a weird place for some time, largely due to the fact that the previous web host made it very hard to modify anything as I had to go through a manual install process. So over the last few days since moving the sites over the weekend I have been making small tweaks here or there to the site to refresh it. The main change that I made is to swap from the cumbersome theme that I had been using over to Generate Press, the same highly modular theme that I use with Aggronaut. What makes this theme extra awesome is the fact that the licensing allows you to pretty much use it on any site that you own.

I may be tweaking colors a bit, but I think for the most part things are now in a fairly stable state. The last major changes I made yesterday were to make private any content not related to the current staff, and to re-associate the podcast episodes to the AggroChat account instead of my account. What this gives me is a much cleaner Author widget in the sidebar that shows the last several podcast episodes lumped together as well as the last several posts from each author. Previously I really didn’t make proper use of the sidebar and now it has a much more consistent feel to it as well as linking to the various “AggroChat” branded social media accounts. I’m fairly happy with the current state of things and just felt like talking about it a bit this morning.

As far as gaming goes… I started my night attempting to do some Diablo 3. I say attempting because the thing that I really need to do is a round of bounties, and the thing that I keep struggling to do… is a round of bounties. For some reason over the last few days I have encountered issues where I get disconnected from Diablo and battle.net entirely… so much so that I often have to crash the client and restart it. This happened the other night while Grace and I were grouping up, which didn’t make it that big of a deal because she kept the session active. However when I am playing solo… this means whatever progress I made towards a round of bounties was lost since I only really need the Bounty Caches at this point and not whatever I happen to loot along the way. This also meant that Diablo 3 was not my final resting place for the evening.

My next go to was World of Warcraft Classic, but after screwing around on my newly minted Undead Warrior… I was not having much gusto there either. I think I might be in a holding pattern with this until it officially releases in August. Were they to tell me that they were not going to be resetting progress between now and release… then that would be one thing. However since leveling in Classic is not exactly fast… I am not exactly relishing the prospect of getting to a happy place in beta and then losing all of that progress for live. Classic served to tell me that yes I did in fact want to do this… and now I am more or less ready for launch.

Instead I largely opted to watch some episodes of The Toys that Made Us on Netflix. For the uninitiated this is a docuseries that outlines the various decisions that went into making the toy lines I grew up with in the 80s. I watched the first season when it initially was released, and yesterday was made aware that season 2 was available. So I watched the first of the new episodes on Star Trek toys, and then the majority of the episode on Transformers before I eventually gave up and went to bed. I think a lot of my restlessness from last night comes from the fact that I did not sleep well due to the storms. I was more or less dead to the world until the alarm went off this morning… and then was groggy enough that i couldn’t figure out how to turn the alarm off on my watch. Hopefully tonight will be more fruitful on the gaming front… and if not I will just keep on watching Toys that Made Us because it really is a charming show.

Bugout Bags and Hidey Holes

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I made an attempt to write this post earlier… but my internet at home seemed to be having issues due to the storm and WordPress ate the entire thing (even though I thought it had saved a draft…  not sure what I think of the latest version).

The last twenty four hours have been exceptionally strange to live through.  First you have to understand that I have lived in the area known as “Tornado Alley” for my entire life, growing up an hour north of Tulsa and living in the Tulsa area since 1999.  We largely take Tornados with a grain of salt, and while most of the cells that do pass overhead produce a Tornado at some point… the likelihood that you are going to get hit seems fairly small in the grand scheme of things and the prep work you go into seems often times for naught.

Yesterday however was a different beast entirely from what we are used to.  We had been hearing for days that we were going to get bad storms… but given that it is May in Oklahoma that is effectively like telling me the sky is blue.  What made us really take notice is when several of the school districts decided to preemptively cancel class. On the same day in 2013 a EF5 Tornado hit Moore Oklahoma and killed 24 and injured 212…  including directly hitting the Plaza Towers Elementary School. When the weather folks tell you that there will be multiple major storm cells throughout the day… I guess we have learned the lesson the hard way to take note.

My wife got out a little early and I left right at 4, which allowed me to get a couple of errands done before making it home before anything major had started.  My wife scrambled around and gathered all of our important stuff and some basic supplies and packed them into a rolling carry-on style duffle bag, sticking in in our “hidey hole”.  The rules of shelter are basically that you need to get to a room on the lowest level of the home with no exterior walls. The problem with our house is the only place that fits these requirements that you can actually get human beings into…  is the laundry room. So we created a little makeshift pantry of sorts on top of the washing machine and prepared for the worst.

There were a few of what I would call close calls, as in a storm that had produced Tornados passed within 10 miles of the house.  One of which was close enough to trigger the sirens… at which point we went to the laundry room to ride it out, at least until the news that was blaring in both the livingroom and the bedroom gave us an updated trajectory.  That is the thing about Tornados… they tend to behave in a fairly predictable manor. That is not to say that you should not respect every single one of them… but there are certain areas that get hit more than others. Often times the storm turns right before it gets to where I live and passes a little south of us… as did the two cases above.

The double whammy however is that as we were getting ready this morning… the news was projecting a Tornado headed directly for our house.  It was serious enough that the Tornado Sirens blew seven separate times during the course of the thirty minutes it took to clear us. I am uncertain if there is any damage, but I am guessing it passed by the outskirts of my town.  When it hit Tulsa International Airport however the storm turned… much like the others had and passed just south of us… by about five miles. What it largely caused is a delay in me getting ready and blogging… but we did hide out in the laundry room for a bit to make doubly sure we were safe.

Today I am sorta living in a permanent state of stupor.  When you live in this region you do this thing when you finally surrender and decide you are perfectly okay with death so long as you get some sleep in the process.  I finally reached that point around 10:30-11 pm and I have no clue when my wife fell asleep, but we left the television blaring in the thought that if something major was about to happen we could jump up and get into our shelter quick enough.  I changed into night clothing, but I think my wife more or less slept in the clothing she had been all night long. You don’t exactly sleep soundly when you fall asleep in that state.

As far as gaming goes I spent the majority of the night playing Diablo 3 in little doses, but did manage to group up with my friend Grace during part of it.  My lack of attention to detail and the fact that I am still under her level a bit… meant I largely spent the night dying a lot. That said I knocked out a few steps in the seasons journey and managed to gather up a few pieces of gear.  I am one step away from completing Slayer… but that step requires me to do rounds of bounties until I gather enough crafting bits to cube a piece of jewelry. The challenge there however is that as the night went on I kept getting disconnected making a round of bounties impossible to complete.

I’ve decided that my favorite part of this season and the patch that came with it is the fact that you can now peek ahead in game to what is needed by steps in the seasons journey you have not yet reached.  Previously you had to keep open a wiki and keep alt tabbing back and forth to see what you could be working on while you were waiting on something else that you could not necessarily complete at that moment.  I really want the fiery cosmic bat wings that come from finishing ALL of the seasons journey steps, so I have a feeling over the coming weeks I will be spending a lot of time playing Diablo 3.