Tales of the Aggronaut

Budgie Week Fiasco

February 7, 2014 by Belghast

Another Friday, Moar Fodder

Well another week has passed and it is once again time for Friday Forum Fodder. I have admittedly not been following the discussion around the interwebs as closely as I usually do during the week. I have a massive backlog of unread blog posts in my reader as spending the first half of the week sick and the second half desperately trying to play catch-up has left me with less lollygagging time. I did stumble across a couple of things that I found interesting so the topics are primed and ready to go.

WoW Up to 7.8 Million Subscribers

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3741-WoW-Up-to-7-8-Million-Subscribers

Apparently yesterday Blizzard had their Q4 2013 earnings call, and announced that they were currently sitting at 7.8 Million subscribers, which surprisingly is a 200k subscriber bump over the 7.6 announced in the Q3 2013 earnings call. Of course we all know that Blizzcon happened between those two calls, and that we had the announcement of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. However 200,000 players seems like an awful lot to simply account for the “Blizzcon Bump”. On Argent Dawn I have said before that we have been experiencing a bit of a renaissance with a large number of players coming back that I have not seen since Wrath, and some of them not even since Burning Crusade. This feels like something more substantial than just interest in the new and shiny bauble called Warlords.

With the release of Rift, something happened in the populace, a fracturing of sorts. That was the very first time I saw people leave WoW in a semi-permanent fashion. Always before when a new product released, players would drift away from the game only to return a month or two later. Something was different with the release of Cataclysm that broke the inertia of players to stay in one place. I myself was gone for a little over two years, and during most of that time I never saw myself seriously returning. For whatever reason I think a lot of us are resigned to the fact that the “wow-killer” simply will never exist. All of this effort spent trying to find a better experience than World of Warcraft just wound up leading us right back to the original.

I personally have come to realize that what WoW provides just does not exist in the same quantity or quality elsewhere. Sure various games do various components of the total WoW experience better, but no one game hits as many high points as Blizzard does. I have reached a point where I am mostly okay with the games flaws… and while I wish that it did certain things better, I can accept the fact that what it does is for the benefit of the many not the few. There are niche games out there that will scratch the various itches I have that WoW simply cannot. So while I am back in WoW I am also still very much playing Rift, TSW, Everquest Next Landmark and will be adding Elder Scrolls Online to that lineup. I have reached a point where I am okay with playing multiple games at the same time.

The beauty of World of Warcraft is that it is the game of consensus. It is that game that everyone plays when they can’t get anyone to agree on any other game. People play WoW because people play WoW. More than anything the large community that comes part and parcel with playing the game was the thing I had been missing since leaving it. When you play wow, you are instantly a member of something larger than yourself, and that is just an experience that is lacking with any of the other games. Don’t get me wrong, the other game communities are great, especially the fledgling Everquest Next community bolstered by SOE’s new sense of transparency. However it is still lacking in sheer size and volume of players. The Blizzard gaming community is big enough to support everyone, and that is a really rare and special thing.

Budgie Week Fiasco

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/412505-budgie-week-guide.html

Firstly I want to say, this is less about the specific thread but more about the Budgie Week event. I latched onto the guide threat by Seatin mostly because it was the only really active thread out there that coalesced all of the viewpoints in one place, whether or not he actually intended that to happen. Seatin does a great job of supporting the community with his guides and videos, so nothing I say should be held as a reflection on that. Additionally I love the folks at Trion, especially the team that is presently working on Trove. That is such a great game and the open process is so refreshing, including the use of Reddit as their primary forums. Additionally when Rift went free to play, I considered it to be one of the more just and equitable models. However some of the things they have been doing with the cash shop are feeling more than a little shifty.

Awhile back some of my friends were frustrated over the Squirrel mount that was released, in that they missed the ridiculously short window it was available for purchase outright in the game. This was really the beginning of a new trend, offering a cool mount for a very short time, and then putting a similar mount in a cash shop lootbox as the primary means of obtaining it. This was the case for the Squirrel mount, the Mech mount, and now looks to be the same basic thing going on with the Budgie mount. The shifty part this time is that they introduced a world event to make it seem as though you can actually acquire the mount that way. Problem is… with this being only a 7 day event it is simply impossible to gain enough of the “bird seed” currency doing these quests alone.

According to Seatin’s guide, if you got in on the first day of the event there is a maximum of 210 bird seed that you can obtain. The mount costs 850 bird seed on the vendor, meaning there is simply no way to obtain it without somehow augmenting your seed count. It turns out right now they are offering a limited time cash box that has a chance of dropping a different colored budgie mount, and you are guaranteed between 6 and 10 birdseed per box. The average seems to be 8 per trove, so in theory you need roughly 80 of these cash shop boxes to be able to purchase the bird. Granted you have a chance from each to get the OTHER budgie mount, but we aren’t even taking this into account. Essentially even doing your quests religiously every day, you would have to spend roughly $300 on the cash shop to be certain you get this mount while it is available.

Now Daglar has posted on the forums that this is a promo event, and they intend to run it several times a year, and by participating in all of them you should be able to get the mount. Even saying that… it still feels extremely bad seeing this unfold. This is the same kind of crap that I see over in SWTOR with making most of the truly unique looking mounts only available through the random chance of a cash shop box. The difference there is that you can actually post the items once you have gotten them on the auction house… whereas the cash shop loot in Rift is either soul bound or bound to your account. This whole event just leaves me feeling a little dirty for having supported their shirt to free to play so actively. I still think Rift is a great game, and I still think more or less it is a good value… they are just doing a few unsavory things that make me a little sad inside.

Bel Goes to Nasa

This mornings factoid digs pretty deep into the annals of time. Once upon a time I wanted to grow up to be a Scientist. I am not really sure what happened along the way to change that life ambition. If I had to guess it was probably the fact that AP Chemistry ate my lunch, but I managed to get out of it with a B, which seemed pretty damned good at the time. All that aside, I did really and truly want to be a Scientist, so I took the yearly ritual of the science fair extremely seriously. Through boy scouts I had gotten into model rocketry, so when it came time to pick a project I thought it would be interesting to do something related to that. With copious help from my father, we constructed a wind tunnel that ran on a shop vac, and proceeded to test the effects of airflow based on various model rocket fin shapes.

I think the key to winning a science fair is to have something cool to look at in your booth. I am sure there were many students that had more scientifically sound studies than I did, but I had cool photos of the pattern each of the fins had made. We tied string to each of the fins so that we could watch the pattern the thread made based on the airflow. The contrails that were created gave a clear picture of how each shape varied and was something nice and concrete that the judges to latch onto. I won the local level science fair and managed to move up to regional’s, but this was not something really new to me, because my pantograph had done the same my six grade year. In all honesty repeating a victory at the local level would have been more than enough for me.

When I got to regional’s however I was shocked at just how excited the judges seemed to be about my exhibit. So when it came down to time to present the awards, I don’t really remember what place I got in the main competition, because it was quickly overshadowed by the “special” award that I won. I got a trip for me, my family and my science teacher to NASA’s Johnson Space center. I have to say it was one of the cooler things I have experienced. A lot of the trip is a haze at this point, but I remember walking through a prototype of what would eventually become the international space station. I also remember getting to play around in the shuttle flight simulator, and meeting actual astronauts. All of which were pretty heady things for my little wannabe scientist seventh grader mind. But of course, High School happened… and I discovered computers and programming… and I jettisoned the thoughts of being a scientist out the airlock and moved on.

Rocky Horror Rejection

February 6, 2014 by Belghast

Of Large Templates

After piddling a bit in Rift and running Onyxia on the three character that can easily solo her, I settled into Everquest Next Landmark and attempted to recreate my forest temple. I had managed to successfully template the entire structure and suck back up all of the material night before last, so my hope was that it would in fact be as simple as plunking down the template and moving on. The problem is, large templates are extremely hard to work with. After spending an hour placing and undoing the template trying to get it just right, I finally said screw it and started from scratch again. The above shot shows a rare moment when my claim is flooded in sunlight.

The biggest problem I have noticed with templates is that they seem to align to the smallest block size instead of whatever block size you happen to have set as your tool. When you are trying to move a template that takes up your entire claim… it becomes extremely hard to determine when exactly it is in the right spot. I managed to get it pretty damned close at times, but never quite perfect. In the above image I had run out of stone while working on the flooring, but I have since fixed that and finished the first floor for now. Eventually I will build a staircase up to the second floor, but until I have enough stone to make a second floor that point is moot. The temple as it is right now has taken roughly 200,000 stone.

The last thing I was working on last night before logging was building out the front porch area. There is a ramp leading up now that I smoothed out and a stone railing of sorts. My plan is to keep all of my crafting machines out here so that anyone who happens to be moving past my claim can use them. That has been one of the really cool things about Landmark is that all of these player towns have sprung up. It reminds me quite a bit of Horizons, in that a little crafting community is starting to spring up here and there. It would be really cool if they added some large scale public works type projects that they players can work on. I remember guarding crafters as they carried loads of ore and stone to the various bridge projects in Horizons. While there were so many flaws in that game, it really was innovative in its social crafting systems.

Right now my chief mission is to gather enough gold and burled wood to be able to craft the Golden Axe. I have heard you can gather wood much faster using it, and I am really hoping that it will also allow me to fell the largest of trees. I know it is possible to take them down, because I watched someone doing it the other night. Essentially to truly complete the first floor I will need lots and lots of trees. I want to put wood braces to support the second floor and have them jut out slightly from the sides of the building. I have always liked that look but to be able to do them I need a ton of wood. Additionally while searching for the gold ore needed… I hope to gather enough stone to begin construction on the second floor. Finally there are a few machines that I am missing from my porch, so I want to gather up the bits to make the one that can finish marble especially.

Rocky Horror Rejection

For anyone who has ever been to a live performance of the rocky horror picture show, you know that it is a really raucous occasion. Would you believe that I managed to get kicked out of a showing? While I was in High School the local performing arts theater thought they would be edgy and host a showing of the movie. For starters it was a far more sedate version of the Rocky Horror Picture show. There was no live group dressed as the characters and performing all of the scenes, and no virgin sacrifices. Everyone however did show up with a bag of items needed to do the various tributes to the scenes. Even in its lesser form it was still pretty fun, albeit greatly sanitized.

Things went south when we got to “Over at the Frankenstein Place”. This is the point where everyone in the audience raises their lighters into the air swaying back and forth slowly to simulate the “there’s a light” portion. Not being a smoker, I didn’t have a bic lighter on me… so I decided to improvise. Gathering up a bunch of news paper we had to protect ourselves from the water guns… I decided to craft a torch. I bound the newspaper together tightly and lit that bad boy. This was a classic bad move, because I did not expect it to flame up quite so brightly… and quickly. It was only a few seconds before we realize this was not going to be a good idea in any fashion so we stomped it out.

Moments later a security guard showed up and in his remarkable intellect muttered “all right who did that?”. We gave him our best confused look, and then one of my group pointed down to the rows below us and told him that it was someone down there. The thing you need to know is that we are in a huge concert hall style performing arts theater. We sat roughly midway up the main seating, and everyone else in the theater were bunched together down by the stage. There were a good 25 rows of empty space between us and the next person. The security guard proceeded to go row by row, searching the entire space for the hidden arsonist. All of this time we were absolutely rolling, but trying to keep it down just enough to not tip our hand. Fifteen minutes later the winded guard came back to our row and proclaimed “Very Funny… You are all out of here.”

So the bulk of us all got punted from the show unceremoniously. Looking back now, I could have theoretically started a theater fire, but at the time it sounded like a great idea. No one really seemed to mind getting forced out of the proceedings, since it really was a watered down version of the “real thing”. We wound up driving around for awhile and finally ended up milling around in a park for a while before taking our dates home for the evening. We probably had far more fun loitering than we would have had attending the rest of the show, so I guess in the grand scheme of things everything worked out okay. I just find it funny now because I can state that I got kicked out of the Rocky Horror Picture show.

Most Unfortunate Name

February 5, 2014 by Belghast

Of Voxel Wipes

So when last we were together, I had mentioned that Dave Georgeson had posted a rather lengthy topic about just how the issues with the voxel wipes and how they fixed it. Since he urged us to get in and build again, I figured I would finally start to plunk back down some of the stone I was saving up into the design for Temple Belghast once more. As of last night the above image is roughly where I was at in the creation. The very basics of the first floor were in place along with a porch in front where I would keep my crafting machinery so that anyone who happened to be wandering by could use it. I was happy with the progress so far, and while I had run dry on stone again it seemed as though I had a clear plan.

So I decided to take a screenshot and post it on twitter, and then bam moments later @Lemanicus informed me that there was another voxel wipe on the way tonight. I am so amazingly thankful that they spoke up because I would have lost all that stone once again. Basically at this point my claim has been voxel wiped five times or so, and each time I have lost a bunch of stone in the process. This time thankfully I was able to create a template and then suck back up all that stone into my inventory. Interesting thing of note… if you want to recover a large amount of resources that you have already placed down on your claim, you can select the region and hit control plus X at the same time. Using the windows cut shortcut sucks up all those resources back into your inventory which thankfully means I have all the mats to rebuild this creation once things stabilize.

At this point I just want a real “all clear” to be sounded. I am not cross or anything because I knew what I was getting into by playing a game in a super alpha state. In the meantime I can still manage to gather resources and as of last night I crafted the smooth tool and a tungsten pick. Since the Legendary pick has spoiled me it is my plan to keep gathering resources until I can craft more picks trying to get another legendary. The amount of material that the legendary quality pick removes per swing is just insane. For the time being I can simply clear most of the material with my silversteel pick and then mine out what requires the next tier up afterwards.

As far as the game goes… right now I would suggest players wait for a bit unless they are prepared for some frustrations. Don’t get me wrong the game is really amazing, and I am loving every minute of it. Then again I also loved every minute of the early buggy as shit days of minecraft, so it feels like I have lived through this all before. Getting in right now is not for everyone, so be warned before you plunk down your money hoping to get in on the ground floor of this new game. The path to success is often paved with the tears of alpha testers. One of the funniest things about the voxel wipes is that the props remain in the same place. I find myself going to The Hollows zone a lot, which is a Tier 2 area on the Liberation server. One of the nice denizens has created a really great crafting station just off the wizard spire. When the voxel wipe happens the desert reclaims their plot, but you can still see and use the machines that are now half buried in sand. Thankfully I have been able to recover every prop I have placed apart from my first set of crafting machines that unceremoniously disappeared on me.

Most Unfortunate Name

This mornings factoid is inspired by my wife as we tried to get to sleep last night and wound up being purred off to slumberland by one of our cats. I am very much an animal person and always have been. I have three cats and three ferrets currently, but in the past we have had as many as six cats at one time and an assortment of other animals including two sugar gliders, a guinea pig, a rabbit and an extremely spoiled hamster. All of our animals have been for the most part rescues minus the guinea pig and hamster. Even then, we got the guinea pig days before that pet store had a fire in which she would have surely died from smoke inhalation… so in a way we rescued her as well.

I tend to give most of my babies “people” names because they are in fact a member of our family. Our “furkids” are likely the only children we will ever have, so we tend to treat them as such. We don’t go to the insane lengths some folks do, but this is definitely their house… and we just happen to share it with them. Growing up out in the country we didn’t have indoor animals, but instead had what is generally referred to as “barn cats”. The above baby followed us home Thanksgiving 1999 has has been with us since. Following my normal pattern I gave her the name of Sascha which I have always thought was a pretty name. The problem is… that unknown to me my wife who is a school teacher had a student named Sascha as well. Every now and then there is one of those students that teachers absolutely hate… and for my wife it was Sascha.

So over time she found it harder and harder to call the cat by her real name. At this point she was so tiny, so much so that she couldn’t even climb the stairs to our second floor. She has also been an extremely curious cat, getting into everything. She has figured out how to open pretty much any door that is not locked by pressing up on the bottom of it until the latch gives, additionally she opens the cabinet doors and crawls inside. So as she was getting older there was a constant refrain of “you little shit!” as we discovered whatever mess she had made. After awhile this just got shorted and stuck as her name… and from that point on she has been lovingly referred to as “Little Shit”.

I say this is an unfortunate name, because really she is without a doubt the sweetest cat we have ever had. She is always there to curl up and snuggle and tends to sleep on our pillows at night. Since she has been with us since five weeks old, since simply doesn’t know that she is not a human as well. So I am sure she has no clue what her name means, because we always say it in a loving way. The only time she actually gets referred to by her given name is when we have to take her to the vet, which thankfully is not terribly often. At this point she is old and set in her ways, but she is one of the most precious animals we have ever had. At this point however it would just feel wrong to try and name her something other than the moniker she once earned.

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

February 4, 2014 by Belghast

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

Most kids growing up end up working food service of one form or another, but I somehow lucked out and missed that experience during my formative years. Honestly I had a pretty good string of jobs throughout High School but probably the most bizarre would be that of Wedding Photographer… or more so the Photographers Assistant. My father was a machinist by day and professional portrait photographer by night and weekend. Essentially I grew up in the darkroom and was extremely comfortable around photographic equipment before most kids had learned to ride a bicycle. As I got older and needed an allowance, I often got drafted into helping out with the “family business”.

This was not as glamorous as it might sound. Essentially it usually meant sticking me up in a balcony somewhere during the service with a zoom lens and getting the nifty overhead shots that my father could not get from the ground. By my teen years I could name all the basic parts of a wedding, and could spot little variations coming before they actually happened. This whole experience has caused me to loathe weddings. Being the wedding photographer is a really uncomfortable experience, for a few hours you become part of the family and have to figure out how to wrangle your way through getting the shots taken. Thanks to tradition no one wants to take the photos before the wedding… and then after the ceremony it becomes a sheer struggle of wills to keep everyone in their clothing and willing to line up in the various shot arrangements that the bride and groom will want. Everyone wants to mingle with family because they go away… and while the photos don’t seem that important on the day of the event… they will certainly catch the fact that you didn’t get a photo of them with uncle bob afterwards.

This summer I had to reprise my role of Wedding photographer as I got asked by the same neighbor who cleaned up my blood mess to photograph her wedding. I mean seriously… how could I say no? So I gave it the good ole college try and I think overall the photos turned out pretty well. Within a few minutes of the ceremony ending I remembered all the reasons why I hated doing this in the first place however. We couldn’t keep the groomsmen from changing out of their clothing into shorts. This was an outdoor wedding in the middle of a August Oklahoma heatwave. I feel like I got the workout of my life trying to wrangle a bunch of people who did not want to stand still for photos. All in all however it was pretty successful and over time I managed to get everyone together. It did not help to improve my hatred of weddings however.

Giving Up, For Now

For the time being I am going to give up on building anything in Landmark. This is the fourth time in recent days that the servers have gone down and I have logged back into my claim being fully reset. I could clear it fast enough again with the select tool, but it feels absolutely futile since I know I will likely be logging back in again to nothing. Dave Georgeson posted this tweet last night which I seems positive… but we have had some optimism in the past as well.

I ended up clearing a little bit this morning so if things are still clear by the time I get home this evening I will consider that a positive sign and maybe just maybe start building again. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but it seems as though if you use ctl+v instead of delete when you have a large area selected… it appears that you harvest the materials contained within that area. I made the mistake of clearing the last time with the delete key, meaning I likely lost all of my props permanently. Honestly right now I wish I could figure out how to make torches, that is really the only prop I need to be able to craft a whole bunch of.

Another huge plus is that I managed to figure out the lightstone. Essentially unlike Everquest, it must be equipped in a slot. Since the slots are not marked at all, you just have to keep dragging them into each slot one by one until it finally fits there. You can see in the above picture the light radius that it gives off, which is more than enough to be able to see what you are doing. Really that is all I was wanting since my claim is mostly cast in shadow all the time. I like that aspect of it, and once I actually get my temple ruins built it should look really cool. Before I can really do that however I need to figure out how to make torches. I realize at this point I only have two crafting machines and based on what I saw yesterday there are like half a dozen or so that someone had out on their claim for people to use.

Since I can’t really craft I have been working on upgrading my tools. This morning I managed to craft the Heavy Silversteel Pick shown above. I am not sure if it is always a legendary item, or if I just lucked out in the randomizer. Previously I had been using the starter pick to clear any tier 1 material away from what I was actually wanting to harvest since the Pick/Axe combo was so much faster than any of the upgraded picks I had gotten. However this one seems to finally be roughly the same speed. Now that I can harvest another tier higher of material I am hoping I can craft the next set of crafting machines, and maybe even the next tool which I think is terrain paint, but I am not really sure. At this point mostly I am looking forward to the voxel database stabilizing enough for me to start building again.