Thumper Logic

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Cheat Day

One of the rules of the “Grand Experiment” has been that I would sit down each morning and write a blog post.  A lot of my friends in the blogosphere write their content at their leisure and stage the publishing at a date of their choosing.  There is technically nothing wrong with this practice, but the entire idea behind the experiment, was to force myself to write every day.  So as a result I have always considered it cheating to do what I am doing right now… writing a topic the night before I intend to post it.  These lofty ideals are one thing, but every now and then real life throws me for a loop.  Generally speaking on the weekend my posts end up being considerably later because sometimes I have to accommodate life in the process.

However our weekend plans have been altered quite a bit and as a result my wife and I are carpooling together tomorrow.  This means that I won’t really have my traditional “drink coffee slowly and contemplate the universe” time in the morning…  or at least I won’t be able to faff about as much as I normally do.  So as a result I am admitting to my “blatant cheatery” up front and hoping you won’t mind terribly much that you are getting a slightly stale topic by the time I post it tomorrow morning.  I could have lied to you, and posted this without you really knowing the difference…  but I am always willing to admit my failings freely.

Thumper Logic

Thumper-GIF One of the things that I have not talked about much is that the Grand Experiment is far more for me than just writing every single day.  It has also been an effort to surround myself with as many positive influences as I can, and limit the amount of negativity I have in my life.  I am not just trying to bury my head in the sand.  I assure you that I see just as many negative things on a daily basis as anyone, I am a pessimist by nature.  However I had noticed that the more negativity I surrounded myself in, the more negative I became and as a result the more unhappy I was.  You know how they say “fake it until you make it”, well it turns out it works pretty well for being happy as well.  If you can’t be happy, adopt the trappings of being happy until I actually sinks in.

In addition to trying to limit my exposure to negativity… which means I pretty much stop reading game forums when they exit the alpha and beta phases… I have been trying really hard not to write many “rant” posts.  In doing so I have realized just how unbalanced and ranty the world seems to have become.  If you look at the popular review sources, it seems as though we absolutely love to hate video games.  There are popular youtube personalities that I have never seen give a single game a positive review, however people line up to watch them.  I am sure that the occasional video like this is funny, but after awhile it changes into something else.  IT feels like these reviewers are trying to enact their revenge on an industry they believe has “wronged them” somehow.

People Want Different Things

Yes I am in fact breaking this image out again.  It is perfectly okay for you to not like something, but just because you don’t like a thing does not mean it is immediately “bad”.  I may not have enjoyed War and Peace… but that does not make it any less of a classic.  Sure there are of course the occasional game that are horrible in an academic sense… I am looking at you Superman 64, but these are really rather rare.  If a game comes out and at least one person enjoys it then I cannot really call it a “bad” game.  There are games that are a financial failure, but that is a completely different line of discussion.  Over the last few years it has become extremely “cool” to hate everything, and a lot of this was ushered in by the “hipster” movement.  If you read the reviews of games, you would have the impression that the industry is doing horribly and making nothing but utter crap.  However they seem to be making more money than ever, in part because very few people who consume these games actually pay attention to internet reviews.

At this point I am just too damned old to care much about looking cool on the internet.  I feel no shame in gushing about the things I am really enjoying, and just glossing over the things I don’t so much enjoy.  Over the weekend I appeared on the Game On podcast, and eventually the topic came around to Wildstar a game I really don’t like very much.  I had a few options of where to go with my commentary.  I could of course have spun up a mighty rant that would nuke the game into oblivion from orbit.  Instead I chose to share my reservations, but also talk about a few of the things that I thought the game was doing right.  It is your choice as a player, or a blogger, or a youtuber to either dwell on the good parts or the bad parts.  Right now I am making the conscious choice to look for the good in both people and games, and so far I am much happier for doing it.

The Curse of the Fanboy

I hope it feels so good to be right.
There is nothing more exhilarating
than pointing out the shortcomings
of others, is there? – Randall
 

One of the worst curses you can give to another gamer is to call them a Fanboy, because it immediately belittles anything they may or may not have to say in response to your criticism.  I guess my question is, why aren’t we all “Fanboys” over something.  For the majority of us, gaming is our hobby, and even in those for whom it is a job…  at one point or another it was also their hobby as well.  We are all geeks here, cut from the same core fabric even if we claim to not acknowledge it.  We all love games, more deeply than any of us would ever care to admit.  At least at some basic level we all have to admit that games are absolutely magical.  They can bring us to tears, make us laugh, and cause us to plunk down another $60 like a junkie in search of a fix.  If we do all of these things, then why the hell SHOULDN’T we love it, and be more than happy to raise our hands high and yell “FUCK YES I’M A FANBOY”.

I love games, or I wouldn’t be spending each and every morning writing about them.  Sure you get a fair dose of my personal shenanigans and that of my friends… but this is a gaming blog devoted to my love and obsession of video games.  I am not trying to make games better than they are, because they seem to be just as good today at getting me to spend countless hours a night playing them than they were when I was a child.  Sure I hold up certain games like Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Castlevania: Symophony of the Night on a pedestal, but my love of those games should not somehow tarnish something that doesn’t do the same thing as those games did.

What gets lost in the shuffle is the people behind the games that folks all too often want to tear down.  No one goes into a game trying to build something that the players will hate.  Each and every one of them has lost sleep at night trying to make the best possible game within the constraints they were given.  Just as I started writing about games because I love them, they all aspired to be part of this industry that quite frankly has some pretty shitty conditions placed upon them.  No child says that they want to grow up to work in an industry that is ultimately thankless and will more so make large segments of the fan base revile you.  I am just waiting for it to be acceptable to like something again without someone else feeling the need to put you down for doing so.

Cast of the Aggrochat

aggrochat_bubbles_trans

I feel like I got a little preachy during the course of this post, but it is really how I feel.  I am going to unabashedly love things, until I don’t then move on to other things that I love equally well.  So far I feel like my mission of being more positive has paid off.  I am surrounded by some pretty amazing friends, and I feel so thankful to have all of you supporting me on a daily basis.  While I have a deep protective streak, which leads me to play all the tank classes that I end up playing… I feel no need anymore to protect you from what I deem a “bad game”.  You might see me wax philosophical about how I don’t quite grasp a game, but that is coming from a place of wanting to learn what people see in it… and not from a place of hatred.  I wanted to close things out on a really positive note by showing off something that I really love right now.

Rae has been hard at work over the last few weeks since we got the odd idea to start Aggrochat.  She has been capturing the essence of our personas in Chibi form and I think she did a damned fine job.  From the left we have Rae riding Ashgar the bear, with me in the middle, and the ever stylish Kodra on the far right.  There are a few inside jokes in the peace but I figure it is universal enough for most to enjoy it.  She does amazing work, and is the creator of the original Chibi Belghast that I have used for ages as avatars and in the masthead of this website.  Over the coming weeks we will be branding our libsyn page into something more fitting a proper podcast.

Point Paralysis

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Maybe I didn’t suck

For whatever reason this morning I am absolutely struggling to remain conscious.  I feel like maybe I drifted into the “too much sleep” territory last night.  We ended up with a heavily altered game play, in that when my wife got home last night we ended up taking our evening walk and combining it with some extra steps to go walk to eat dinner.  This was awesome in that it meant that my playtime was not perforated last night by going out to walk, but I seem to have squandered the benefit by going to bed early.  For whatever reason around 9 pm I got irrationally tired and after dealing with a few chores crashed out on the bed with two cats snuggled up beside me.  Normally I get pretty much the same 6 hours of sleep every night, but last night I got a little closer to 8 hours and I feel groggy as hell.

Awesome thing happened yesterday, in that the podcast I was a guest on over the weekend published the episode.  I feel humbled that I was offered to join in the fun, and the end result was really nice.  I listened to it yesterday after getting out of our weekly staff meeting, and I have to say I was a bit scared to do so.  I was worried that maybe I would have come off like an ass or something, but overall it seemed to flow really nicely.  Every now and then podcasts will have a guest on that is abrupt and disruptive… and I am always afraid I will be that guy.  Each podcast has a certain feel to it, and I was hoping that I was staying true to that.  It is still really damned weird to hear my own voice, but after doing this streaming thing and our own podcast I am starting to get used to it finally.

Point Paralysis

Screenshot_20140424_062015 Yesterday one of my guildies and fellow bloggers Werit posted a piece on something I think all of us have felt, that he calls “Skill Point Paralysis”.  One of the big features of Elder Scrolls Online is that the game is not so much about how you play the game but how you choose to build your character.  You can be damned near anything you can imagine within the frame work of the game.  You want to play a spell slinging rogue, or a tanky archer?  Sure you can build both of those in damned near any “class” as well.  The problem is without a reasonable undo system, it gives a false sense of importance on every single skill point.  It is a bit like playing a chess match and being afraid to make a move for fear it was the wrong one.  I have had the benefit of playing this same character over a dozen times throughout the various beta test phases.  Over that time I have refined exactly what I want to do, but still I will find myself with four points pooled up and not really sure where to spend them.

So I thought I would spend a few minutes this morning talking about the type of decisions I make.  Essentially I tend to divide things up in my head into three categories:  Active Attacks, Passive Buffs, and Utility.  At the end of the day I can only have five active attacks on my bar at any given time, so as a result I tend to discount the value of choosing one of these.  Also picking up a new active attack means I need to devote some time into raising it and unlocking the morph.  After a point new abilities are not really as useful as old abilities until you can morph them.  So that means I need to be committed to a new ability choice if I want to go down that path.  I will occasionally pick up an ability if it sounds interesting, but if you notice in the above screenshot I have Power Bash at level 1… in part because I have not really used it much in combat.

Utility abilities are a special kind of actives, and I generally limit myself to only having one of these on my bar at a time.  Sometimes these are survival cooldowns, self heals or group buffs… but most of the time I classify things into this category that are only “situationally good”.  For example I love beyond love the Silver Bolts ability.  However it is only really worth putting on my bar if I know I will be fighting Daedra or Undead… or now that I have the fighters guild rank 7 passive Werewolves.  If it is an ability that I will use only 20% of the time, I greatly devalue picking that with my skill points.  Sometimes however these abilities are useful for things other than their original intent.  Even if you are fighting something other than the mob types mentioned above… Silver Bolts still becomes a pretty potent weaponless ranged attack if your character happens to be lacking one of those.

Always On is Awesome

The final category is where I tend to spend MOST of my points.  If you look at the above screenshot I have every single passive ability that I can currently get in the sword and board tree.  Similarly if you would look at my Heavy Armor and Imperial Racial trees their passives would be completely filled as well.  If I have a useful passive to buy, I will almost always choose that over something else.  Passives do not require me to change my play style to incorporate them in, nor do they require me to level them to make them truly useful.  Instead they are a single pick that makes my character immediately and permanently better.  In a game I will always favor something that gives me a permanent boost over something that gives me a situationally better boost.  I like “always on” things, because if I can be awesome all of the time, it is better to me than being awesome some of the time.

Finally I have limited myself to a single tradeskill for the time being.  Until the points begin to flow like honey later as I wander around the world collecting them…  I have narrowed my focus to two weapons (sword and shield and two handed), three class trees (because really you want to cherry pick abilities between them), one armor type (heavy is the only choice I ever seem to make), racial tree, and a single tradeskill (blacksmithing).  Now I will occasionally pick up some especially valuable picks like Soul Lock from the World tree, that gives you a chance to fill soul stones each time you kill a mob.  Overall I  have narrowed my focus to a specific set of abilities.  The big thing I see players doing that gets them in trouble is trying to tackle more than one weapon at a time early on.  I did not pick up a second weapon until 20 or so, well after I had the ability to hot swap between them.  Trying to spread yourself too thin is something that will ultimately lead to making the game harder than it really needs to be.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #SkillPoints

The Impossible Plateau

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Forced Fasting

Screenshot_20140422_193251 This blog post is going to suck, I just wanted to get that out of the way now so you can avoid reading it.  In the mornings I muster the “oomph” to blog by channeling the dark arcane magic of coffee.  I am completely un-caffeinated today and it is horrible.  I am having to fast this morning as part of some blood work, and I have no problem with the not eating part…  but no coffee is hitting a little below the belt.  I totally imagine that once I have had my blood drawn I am going to go to the nearest QuikTrip and like try and drink straight from the coffee pot or something like that.  I’ve never really understood the purpose of fasting before blood work, since don’t you really want to see the persons stats how they actually are all the time?  What is the point of having this fasted idealistic state, when you know the person is going to screw everything up with caffeine anyways.

As part of our insurance plan at work, we are having to submit to a “biometric screening”, which seems really damned Orwellian to me.  The last few years I had been a conscientious objector to the process and as a result paid a significantly higher insurance premium, but this year that reached a critical mass.  If you do not take the screening your monthly insurance rates are literally over double what they would be if you submitted to the finger prick.  We did not find that out until after all of the normal screening sessions were finished.  So now I have to go to some massive last call session this morning.  I still think this entire process is bullshit.  I’m curious, are any of you having to do this for your work insurance?  My working theory is still that our HR department is incompetent and just simply cannot negotiate for new insurance plans worth a shit.

The Impossible Plateau

Last night I decided to faff about again in Alik’r and start the stream going while I did so.  There is a spot on the map that seems like it should have something cool at it, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get up there.  During a good chunk of the video I am trying to get up to the place and failing miserably.  I go for a really long swim, which I am sure was boring for everyone watching… and by everyone I mean no one.  Actually to be truthful over the course of the video I did manage to pick up two viewers.  First I was joined by ShinyWhip who apparently was bored and was willing to watch me go for a swim.  She got to watch me fail miserably at trying to solo a world boss as well.  Eventually I was joined by my guildie Saia who also got to watch me fail at a few things.  That is pretty much the subtext of my streams…  me failing at playing video games.

At some point I had to go afk for an extended period of time and I cut off the stream after returning.  Later in the evening I attempted a public dungeon with Warenwolf but we seemed to be missing a lot of the bosses.  Turning in the quest from inside gave us credit for the place, but I have never seen a public dungeon without a slew of optional bosses. In grand total I think we found three, and none of them actually seemed to drop anything of use.  Honestly I have been on a bad streak as far as bosses go.  I am reaching a point where the greens I craft seem to be significantly better than the blues I am getting as drops.  Crafting in this game is extremely overpowered, and I now have enough skill points dumped into blacksmithing that I have a pretty great chance of getting a temper off anything I deconstruct.

I dinged 38 last night, so In theory I could craft up an entirely new set of gear.  Not sure if this is really worth it however.  Thinking I am going to try and limp on with the 36 set I have until I ding 40, and then craft all new gear then.  The problem with crafting sets of gear is that it is a serious drain on your available tempers.  I am really not sure how many I have, but I don’t think I have near enough to be throwing them away randomly.  The big frustration so far with Alik’r is that I am still mostly finding Orichalcum.  I thought by now that I would be swimming in a sea of Dwarven Ore, but so far it has been extremely rare… which means I may not even have enough ingots to craft a full set of anything right now.

On Streaming

I am really bad about not touching social media or my RSS feed on the weekend, and as a result I usually have a significant backlog that starts sometime on Friday night.  Since I was off for Good Friday this past week, it mean this void started on a Thursday night.  As a result I missed this post by Scopique on his thoughts about streaming.  I am honestly not sure how I feel about streaming in general.  Twitch is one of those weird things that I am not really sure what to do about.  While I have a twitch channel and I stream somewhat regularly, and then dump said videos on Youtube…  I really don’t watch twitch much at all.  Well there was that period of time when all of us were watching Twitch Plays Pokemon… but that was more of the “trainwreck you just can’t help but watch” thing than something I genuinely enjoyed.  Generally speaking the only time I watch anything on twitch is when there is some presentation relating to a game I am playing.

As a result I feel kinda bad that I am streaming and love it when people watch my stream…  but I don’t ever actually end up watching anyone elses streams.  I feel like that is a big reason why my stream and youtube channel will never really be successful on their own.  They will always be attached to my blog, since the blog is what is really important to me.  I don’t fully get the twitch or youtube cultures, and in order to get either to really work it feels like you need to fully immerse yourself into said culture.  Right now I am streaming mostly because going back and listening to the things that my friends and I say on my stream entertains me.  I say all sorts of stuff and fifteen minutes later I cannot remember what the hell I just said, so it cracks me up the random stuff that comes out of my mouth while I game.  Ultimately I stream for the same reason I blog, because for whatever reason I find it entertaining and fun, and would probably be doing both even if I never had a single reader or viewer.  The stream however is just not something I think of as meaningful or permanent… it is very much a throwaway experience to me.  Entertaining for the moment it is happening, but not something to really ponder once the stream has been turned off.

That is not to say that there are not some absolutely amazing and entertaining folks out there.  Qelric for example does amazing videos, and her production value is just great.  I tend to watch whatever videos come down the pipe from her, because I find them equally entertaining and informative.  That said I have never really gotten into the “let’s play” culture on YouTube.  I tried doing some of it with my series on Trove… and really I just didn’t like the way it felt.  For a period of time I was trying to get people to do the like and subscribe thing… before I realized that I just didn’t really care much.  If people watch my YouTube channel and like my videos… awesome…  if they don’t… equally awesome.  I think the big difference is I am not trying to make a career out of being an internet persona.  I don’t need viewers or clicks or likes or whatever to get a pay check.  At the end of the day my blogging and my faffing about in streams and videos… is just something I do for entertainment.  I respect the folks who are trying to make this work as a career but I don’t think I could ever deal with the inherent instability that is trying to make a living off the whims of others.

Easy Targets

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Heartfelt Thanks

I want to lead off this morning by thanking everyone that responded yesterday to wish me well on my five year blogoversary.  It still seems a bit strange that I have been doing this that long, well technically I have been doing “this” the whole daily blogging thing only a year.  All the support you guys have given me has been awesome.  I greatly appreciate you all in so many ways.  I still feel like I don’t know what I am doing, but I just keep doing it anyways.  At this point the blogging thing is so ingrained in me that I think I would continue to post daily even if I had nothing to talk about.  Thankfully I always seem to be able to at least incoherently ramble, and that tends to fill a page faster than anything.

While we are on the topic of blogging and thanks, I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  I have touched on this a few times over the last few weeks, but it is approaching quickly.  May First is the official launch of the 2014 edition of the Newbie Blogger initiative, whether you are a veteran blogger or someone who has always wanted to create a blog… we need you.  This year proves to be a really interesting run as things are changing up quite a bit.  There are awards with prizes attached to them for various things.  Additionally we will have a return of the Syl’s ever fun NBI Poetry slam, as well as some event nights.  Right now a massive hearthstone battle royale has been confirmed, and you can check up the sign up information here.  There is also a great idea for a League of Legends night, that I hope gets enough support to make as well.

The thing about blogging is for every one of us that are blogging daily, there are another batch that have either abandoned their blog or are sitting by the sidelines trying to muster the nerve to start blogging.  I was one of those people five years ago, and a similar community got me started.  I implore you to embrace this opportunity and either reignite your blogging passion or light a brand new spark.  Folks are constantly saying that blogging is dead as a medium, but each of us that do so regularly are thumbing our noses at this concept.  We need fresh blood to keep this gaming blogosphere alive and healthy and events like NBI shine a bright light on new talent.  This will be my third year supporting the effort, and I look forward to seeing a new crop of bloggers step up and do a better job than I ever could do.

Lost in the Desert

Since I had not streamed on twitch in a few days I decided last night I would fire it up while I wandered around in the desert.  Alik’r is an interesting zone and almost feels like two zones.  There was a series of frenetic feeling quests in the town of Sentinel as you saved it from a zombie invasion.  All the while doing so there was a call to purpose, a feeling that you had to keep moving or something horrible would happen.  Now that I am out in the desert proper, the feeling of the zone has changed again.  Now as I sift through the dunes looking for various points of interest, the feeling seems to be much more relaxed and similar to the way Stros M’kai felt.  This is good and bad, good in that I feel like I can take my time through the content… and bad in that I am horribly prone to completely lose focus.

One of the things I am really loving are the creatures out here.  The game does a really good job of disguising the fact that you are often fighting the same damned creatures over and over.  The first time I really noticed this was in beta and playing the different starter zone experiences.  In Ebonheart you had the fiery Shalk, Aldmeri you had Thunderbugs, and in Daggerfall you had Assassin Bugs.  They were all essentially the same mob, but each performed slightly differently in the kinds of attacks they would do.  In the desert of Alik’r I noticed that Dunerippers were essentially crocodiles but vastly different in appearance.  They shared quite a bit of similarity in the base model and the sweep attacks, but also incorporated the mudcrab dig attack and a model swap.  Noticed the same thing happening with the Jackals, that look extremely different from wolves but behave almost exactly the same.

All of this give a feeling that the world is related, and that the various creatures of Tamriel evolved from the same core at some point.  I think that is the thing I love more than anything else, that everything in Elder Scrolls Online has a certain “sameness” to it.  It all feels like it is part of the same world.  While a Dwemer ruin in Skyrim might look vastly different from one in the Alik’r desert… they all feel like they were from the same race.  This adherence to a “racial stylebook” makes the game feel amazing.  One of my big fears with Elder Scrolls Online and the announcement of the three factions is that they would somehow destroy the natural diversity of the Elder Scrolls setting.  However thankfully you are just as likely to find a Dunmer or Argonian NPC in the desert as you are to find a Redguard in Riften.  The game has managed to maintain the jumbled mess that is the Elder Scrolls setting.

Easy Targets

After awhile hanging out in mumble by myself I was joined by the illustrious Zelibeli and Jabberant, who decided they were on their way out to Cyrodil.  This was to be Zeli’s first foray into the frontiers, so I decided to halt my questing and tag along.  I warned them that I sucked horribly at PVP, but still managed to love Cyrodil.  In every conceivable way it is the Dark Age of Camelot frontiers.  You have three different realms that border the region, with lots of objectives scattered around the map.  Just like Dark Age of Camelot there are also numerous other things to do out there than just PVP.  We attempted to meet up with one of the bigger conflicts at first, but ended up getting completely rolled by a veteran three player a few times.  One of the interesting things about Cyrodil is that it instant levels you to 50 for the purpose of the content.  The only problem is it bolsters you to the BASE stats of a 50… not a 50 with full gear.  This means that a bolstered character will always be significantly weaker than a true 50… and even weaker still than a veteran rank player.

In large scale siege warfare this really doesn’t matter much since it is mostly a numbers game.  In one on one combat… the difference is extremely noticeable.  I felt like I simply could not deal enough damage to the veteran rank 3 player.  While I out survived both Zeli and Jabb this was simply to my tanky nature more than anything else, and still even after having fought two other players the guy completely wrecked me.  As a result we ended up varying our goals and we set our sights on a skyshard.  One of the add-ons I have apparently shows the locations of all of the skyshards in Cyrodil, so I figured this would be a valuable excursion.  So we made our way to this tower guarded by goblins, with the skyshard very clearly at the top.  It took a few tries to finally reach the goal, as the moment we reached the tower initially we got attacked by several folks from Ebonheart also after the same goal.

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One of the cool things is there at the tower we picked up a quest to deliver a doctors bag to a town there in Cyrodil.  We did not do this however as the town in question was deep within currently Ebonheart held territory.  That seems like a grand mission for another night.  After a lot of faffing about we ended up picking up another guildie, Barose and heading to a dungeon.  I think it is really awesome that there are full dungeons scattered around the map in Cyrodil.  This one was a really nifty vampire dungeon and I ended up getting so much loot that I had to “mail bank” a ton of it to Rae.  Apparently I ended up sending her 9 emails full of it before the night was up.  The PVP dungeons seem to drop loot as though they were a group dungeon, but overall seemed easier in scale.  I am guessing they are rewarding us for the risk of doing PVE content in a PVP zone, where any group of players could hop into the dungeon and slaughter us in the process.

Overall it was a really great night and there is talk of trying to create some sort of formalized guild Cyrodil night.  If nothing else last night proved that there is plenty to do in Cyrodil even if you do not necessarily engage in siege warfare.  While I am not opposed to defending a keep or claiming one for our guild, I also want to explore all of the other dungeons out there and collect more skyshards.  For the longest time I had a point where I simply did not know where to spend points, but having leveled up a lot of abilities I seem to once again have more opportunities to spend them than points to spend.  I had a great time and I hope Zeli and Jabb both did as well.  Was really fun just hanging out and being horrible at PVP together.  You should totally join us the next time.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Cyrodil #PVP #NewbieBloggerInitiative