Tales of the Aggronaut

Even When Bad, Its Good

January 5, 2014 by Belghast

Misplaced Weather

It is currently in the teens here in the Tulsa area, and the wind-chill is pushing it into the single digits and in some places negative numbers. Waking up this morning the entire world is covered in a blanket of white, albeit not a terribly thick blanket… but it is still coming down and shows no signs of stopping any time soon. Dear Canada, I believe you misplaced your weather. Can you please pick it up at the front office at your nearest convenience? A friend from twitter suggested that maybe Canada was not home and the weather was left with their nearest neighbor… which in that case seems to be the entire United States.

Here in Tulsa the weather is a nuisance more than anything else, primarily since my wife and I both head back tomorrow after a two week vacation. For us at least, knowing this was on the way we ran all of the errands we could think of yesterday so we could just hang out inside today in a blanket cocoon. I could go to the front door and take a picture of what is going on outside, but frankly I am just too damned lazy. I am wrapped up in two blankets and have a loudly purring cat on my chest… so yeah not moving. Hopefully the snow itself will not last terribly long, and so long as it sticks to just snow I figure we will be fine. It is always the ice storms that I am concerned about not the dustings of snow.

Had a Bad Day

Yesterday was a bit of a frustrating mess. Over the last several days I have been trying my best to make it through the Gates section of the Siege of Orgrimmar LFR on my Paladin. Since you cannot progress to the next step until you have beaten all of the bosses in the previous one, I found myself hung up there trying to get the last two bosses. Each and every group seemed to fall apart either during or directly before the Dark Shaman encounter. Over the course of the last few days since Tuesday I have been in no less than 8 Gates groups, and this yesterday morning it seemed for a moment like I would get through the raid finally.

We had made it up to Nazgrim but after one wipe the group completely disintegrated leaving me stranded with only needing the final boss. There are weeks that I cannot get the first bosses of a dungeon to save my life, however each and every one of the 8 attempts at Gates involved me starting over with the first encounter. I am not sure if I set them down hard, but after the extremely frustrating close call in LFR I got up from my cocoon and while pulling off my headset it completely snapped, leaving the right earcuff danging. The break was so close to the earcuff that I don’t think I could even attempt to bandage it along for a bit with duct tape.

It seems like I am extremely rough on headsets, as in the years of playing World of Warcraft I have gone through no less than eight that I can recall. No single headset has lasted more than two years before either falling apart on me or starting to malfunction somehow. Right now I am back to using a Logitech behind the head headset, but it itself has an issue with the left earcuff cutting out constantly and is only serving to infuriate me more. Granted these are all first world problems… and I should simply be thankful that I can replace the headset at my leisure rather than having to wait to do so. In fact as of writing this article I have already ordered a replacement. I am going back to an older plantronics design that previously I had gotten 2 years out of, which is pretty much the most I can hope for.

Even When Bad, Its Good

People are constantly down on LFR because it represents the absolute worst of humanity. The thing is… even at its worst I greatly appreciate its existence. I tend to be an altaholic, at present count I have 6 characters at 90 and a large number of characters within range of getting there. I have already begun raising my Discipline Priest Belglorian and within in the next few weeks it will likely join the ranks. I get frustrated in these games when I can no longer progress my characters, and because of the structure of traditional raiding, this generally meant that I got to progress whatever my main was…. but no one else. I have enough time to deal with carving out a block of time in my schedule for one stable raid group, but not multiple raid groups.

What LFR gives me is the ability to keep moving forward on all of my characters at my own leisure. I don’t expect a lot from the process, and I don’t expect the players in LFR to be marginally functional. I find it that I can compartmentalize LFR so that I only focus on my own role and ignore the fact that Rome is burning down around my shoulders. In doing so this means each and every one of my alts can at least achieve a certain level of gear. Granted I am not expecting them to be amazing, but I can keep moving slowly forward on all fronts… keeping me engaged in each character. Now even with this on demand raiding, I still personally don’t have time to run every character through. However I can get enough piecemeal progression to make me happy.

It is almost as though LFR was invented for someone like me, that likes to dabble in a lot of different things, but doesn’t so much care anymore about reaching the ultimate progression in any of them. So while I might complain about LFR, and get supremely frustrated at times… I am still very much thankful it exists. Despite all of the frustrations and set backs, it eventually goes just fine. Last night about 11 pm I finally managed to get a Gates group that was sitting on Nazgrim… the only boss I was missing. After a wipe we got the determination buff and came back and beat him on the second attempt. After all of the wait and all of the gold bags… I managed to pull the best possible drop I could hope for in the instances. My paladin is now the proud owner of Gar’tok, Strength of the Faithful and one step closer to being as well geared as I can get him.

Wrong Answer to Right Question

January 4, 2014 by Belghast

Morning Sucks

I have consumed my tasty oatmeal and my first cup of coffee for the morning, and I feel no more prepared to confront the day than when I started. For the last two days we have been setting a self imposed 7 am alarm in the hopes of trying to retrain our bodies to get up at a decent hour and hopefully go to sleep at a decent hour. While the 2-3 am slumber time has turned into a bit after midnight, getting up in the morning still seems no easier. I keep wondering if rather than Monday morning sucking… I have just allowed the last three days of vacation to suck equally. The adult inside of me realizes that this is all for the best, but the inner 13 year old wants to rage against the machine and go back to bed.

I had a pretty active day yesterday, which I assumed would make it easier to sleep. Instead it just seemed to make every inch of my body ache. We continued our junking madness this time discovering an entire downtown area filled with nothing but antique malls. That is a bit of an over exaggeration as there were a few businesses in there that were not, but basically it was three blocks of antiques. I am probably going to save the trove of pictures for tomorrow as I have an actual thing to talk about today. We did however crawl the entirety of the antiques district and found some potential options, and I got lots of random photos of interesting stuff to pad an entire themed blog post.

Disker Redux

I wanted to take a few minutes out of my planned schedule to update my readers on the whole Disker trojan issue from yesterday. Apparently it has been confirmed that the Trojan is being spread by a fake version of the curse client. How are people getting the fake version? More than likely this is yet another case of Google poisoning, with an illegitimate link getting higher ranking over the legitimate one. Basically as always if you actually know the address of the website you are trying to reach, you might want to go ahead and type the fully qualified URL in your address bar instead of relying on Google to get you there. This has happened in the past with sites like Facebook suddenly redirecting users to a completely different place or at best an article ABOUT Facebook.

When I see one of my family members using a Google search as their address bar, firstly I die a little inside, but secondly I try my best to correct the behavior. Each time you enter a phrase into Google you should take the few moments to verify that the URL it is sending you to is in fact a legitimate looking one. If you go to a site frequently… create a bookmark rather than relying on Google search as a bookmarking system for you. Criminals rely on the users laziness to carry off these nefarious schemes, and a little bit of diligence on your part goes a long ways to keeping you and your accounts safe. If a domain name doesn’t look right, don’t use it. At the very least do some research before using it.

Wrong Answer to Right Question

Now for the topic I had actually wanted to talk about this morning, and the reason why you are not getting a massive flood of junking photos. This is a bit of a spinoff topic as it started for me on the AlternativeChat blog. She herself was reporting on a Morning Topic from WoWInsider asking just how much players would be willing to pay for a boost to level 90. Surprisingly the most chosen answer is “Nothing, I wouldn’t want this option to exist.”. For the sake of transparency I myself also chose this option. In part I am not sure I want to live in a world of warcraft where nothing before level 90 actually mattered any more. Right or wrong the decision to allow boosts to 90 that can be purchased off the store is essentially telling the player base just this. Nothing that happened in the past decade actually matters.

Don’t get me wrong… I will happily accept the free level 90 that is reported to come with the expansion. As you can see from the image above I already have 6 90s, and several that are in close range of getting there as well. However if you look all the way at the bottom you see Belglaive my mage (which may or may not get re-rolled before I actually take the character seriously). The mage is pretty much the exact opposite of the type of character I like to play. I enjoy Sturdy and Melee, and the mage is neither. The only reason why I have a priest of significant level is because I accepted a scroll of resurrection and chose to boost that character to 80 in the process. Similarly the only way I am likely to get a mage to the level cap is with the free boost that comes with Warlords of Draenor.

That aside I think “boosting” is the wrong answer to the right question. The right question to ask is how can I get friends playing together faster. Blizzard seems to be choosing the option of being able to jumpstart the character to 90 so they are within 10 levels of their friends. This however is a pandora’s box of issues waiting to be opened. Firstly you are throwing a player into a character at the end of their life and expecting them to play catch up on learning the abilities. Despite the problems with pacing and out-leveling content, one of the great things Cataclysm gave us was a slow and steady introduction to the key character abilities as you leveled from 1 to 60 and beyond. By the time a character reached 60, the old world cap they had been spoon fed new abilities so that they could assimilate them at their leisure into their own hand crafted rotations.

Throwing a player at a level 90 character is essentially telling them that they should go to Noxxic or Icy-Veins and copy down the rotations that are listed there. While I greatly appreciate that each site exists, because I don’t care about the math behind my character… it does not really create fun and engaging gameplay. It seems so much more engaging and a better introducing to the game world to learn those same abilities slowly over time. Additionally I hate the idea that nothing I have done for the last 10 years of playing WoW has mattered. There are so many amazing places out in the world that this new crop of players will never likely see, and unique encounters they will never experience.

The Right Answer

By allowing for the boosting of characters to 90 you are basically robbing them of experiencing the World of Warcraft. Instead the game feels too much like an “end game is the only thing that matters” experience, which having played DAoC for years felt like a really hollow thing. I talked about my commentary being a “good natured rant” yesterday, and that really is my intent. For once I have no doubt at all that Blizzard has their heart in the right place. They asked the right question, how can we make it easier for new players to play with their friends. That is absolutely the question they should be asking, because despite the rough edges it is the community of players assembled, and more importantly the friends playing the game that make World of Warcraft worth playing.

I just think they are taking the easy way out in essence by boosting players over the leveling hump. The better choice, the choice that works well in every game I have played with the feature… is to add a rich mentoring system. This allows for mentor players to drop down to the younger players levels and experience the content the way it was meant to be experienced. There is no glory in facerolling a dungeon for a friend, just so they can get some quest completed. As a tank I have done this so many times, because I can pretty easily solo old content. During the Christmas break I took a friend into Blackrock Caverns so she could get the Christmas hat. While I was happy to do it for her, the experience was not exciting at all for either of us because I simply pulled everything as fast as I could and watched it evaporate around me.

If I could have dropped my level to hers, and gathered up a few more guild members to run that dungeon like it was meant to be run, I would have done so in a heartbeat. I love soloing old content, so I am not saying that there is anything at all wrong with that. However everyone should be able to experience the older dungeons the way we all did when we were at level. All players should be able to experience the severe trauma that comes with someone clicking too many candles in Blackfathon Deep, or trying to get the Postmaster to spawn in Strathholme. Mentoring provides two things, firstly it lets new players get in and experience some content with their friends characters. Secondly it lets the grizzled veteran experience those old glories through new eyes by seeing the content again with their friends.

There have been many times in the past that I thought they were primed to introduce a mentor system. When they made spell levels scale to the character rather than basing them on ranks… I felt this was the key step needed to catapult us towards a rich mentoring system. However for whatever reason one has not materialized and again with the talk of Warlords of Draenor I have seen no mention of this system. This is the correct way to let players experience content with their friends, without completely invalidating everything that came before level 90. I am not as opposed to having a single character boost to 90, but if this becomes a “priced to own” service that ramifications will likely be just as negative for the community as the dungeon finder has been.

Disker Du

January 3, 2014 by Belghast

Disker Du

I want to start off this mornings post with a bit of a public service announcement. There is a big of a troublesome malware circulating through the WoW player community and wreaking havoc with compromised accounts. At this point there is not a lot of absolute hard facts about it. You can check out the full thread on the wow forums for more details. According to support it seems to be occurring on systems that…

Are New or Newly Formatted
New WoW installs
Have Recently Downloaded and Installed Addons

If you follow the rest of the thread there is a lot of blaming going on with the Curse Client again. I do not really believe that this is directly involved as I personally use it and seem to be free of the malware. The worst part about this is that it seems to be really hard to detect. In order to check your own system you need to create an MSInfo file export. You can get into MSInfo by opening a run prompt in windows and typing “MSInfo32”. This will bring up the system diagnostics window, and under the File menu there is an option to Export. Once you have created this file, open it in a text editor like Notepad or my personal favorite choice Notepad++ and search for the string “Disker”.

So far on infected systems they have add the following entries that pop up in the search…

Disker rundll32.exe c:\users\name\appdata\local\temp\w_win.dll,dw Name-PC\Name Startup
Disker64 rundll32.exe c:\users\name\appdata\local\temp\w_64.dll,dw Name-PC\Name Startup

It is presently uncertain how the infection is happening. However there is lots of talk in the wow forum thread about potentially compromised ads on the wowhead website. Others complain that they got it while running the Curse Client. So right now there is just a bunch of speculation. One of the Blizzard forum MVPs Ressie has posted a really great guide for removing it from your system. The virus definition has been sent to the various malware scanner providers so hopefully it will start catching the pattern soon. While this is far from a zero day infection, it has been slipping through the cracks and malware software has been failing to detect it.

I highly suggest you take a moment this morning to create the MSInfo dump file and search it to see if you are infected. Currently this seems to be limited to the WoW Community but due to the nature of the trojan it could in theory compromise many of the authenticator based game clients. So even if you are not a wow player, I suggest you check your system just to make sure.

Junking Continued

Yesterday we did in fact leave town and head up to Muskogee for the purpose of hitting as many of the little junkshops as we could find. In theory we have been mostly looking for a very narrow cabinet to go behind the bathroom door and serve as a jewelry box, and lingerie and scarf storage. We only have about 26 inches to work with, so it is one of those situations where we will know it when we see it. As a result we are doing a lot of looking around. At the local hastings I found the above Tardis Jewelry box that I submitted as an alternative… but my wife didn’t really think that was the best option.

Additionally to this furniture search my wife is always on the lockout for interesting antique jewelry and scarves, whereas I am mostly interested in finding Legos and other interesting toys. While I have not broken into the bag yet, I think I may have found the mother lode or at least the best I have found so far. I don’t have pictures yet, but I will likely post some tomorrow. At one of the junk shops I found a huge bag of Legos. The bag itself is I believe is one of those ziploc “big bags” so far larger than a gallon… filled to the brim with Lego pieces. I got it for $20 and it seems to have the remnants of several sets I remember from the late 80s/early 90s.

Based on the pieces I can see it seems to contain most if not all of the above Lego ship the Caribbean Clipper from 1989. Additionally from what I can tell there seems to be pieces from the pretty epic Black Monarch’s Castle mixed in with it. There might be a few other sets mingled in, but immediate those are the two with iconic pieces that stood out to me. I remembered both sets from my childhood I just did not know them by name until looking them up this morning. At first glance I do not see any minifigures, which would be disappointing but regardless it seemed like a really good deal on some pretty old legos for only $20. We unfortunately are no closer to finding a workable cabinet than we were before we started. However the journey so far has been really enjoyable. Sifting through these junk stores is kinda like going to a really odd hands on museum. I keep snapping photos of the various nifty things we find.

And here are some of the oddities from yesterday…

Early Cartridge System

Not that these will mean much to anyone, but once upon a time there was a dark age of video gaming history ruled by Pong. In the second generation of home gaming systems there was an interesting entry called the RCA Studio II. At face value it was another Pong clone, but it offered the ability to have interchangeable cartridges to play other games. All of these were essentially just as primitive as pong as, but it offered some variety. While I didn’t see the actual Studio II base unit laying around they did have a wide assortment of the cartridges yesterday which was not really something I was expecting to see in a local area junk shop.

Pre-dazzler?

Ronco was notorious for hawking all manner of cheap stuff on the airwaves during the 70s. Apparently one of these was a Rhinestone and Stud setter. While I technically I was born in the 70s I did not remember this product at all. I do however very vividly remember the 80s version of this known as the “bedazzler” which at its core looks like exactly the same machine. So the question is… did is this then the “Pre-dazzler”? I snapped a photo because I think it was quirky, but the absolute best thing is I managed to dig up the original TV commercial on youtube. So much campy 70s goodness. Who wouldn’t want to wear rhinestones on their ass?

Unbearable

The other day I snapped a picture of a really creepy life sized Native American doll that was guarding one of the booths. When I stepped into that booth I literally jumped a little bit. Well it happened again yesterday. Yup you are seeing that right, it is quite literally a bearskin rug, strung out across a bed. From what I could tell it was in fact an actual bear, and not some sort of fake thing. It looked like real taxidermy, and was creepy in so many ways. Kinda makes me a bit sad to see such a pretty animal flayed open like that.

Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against hunting, I grew up here in Oklahoma and as a boy scout went through my hunters education class. I know how to shoot a rifle and could go hunting at any given point… I just choose not to. I do however love the taste of “game meats” and appreciate the folks that go out and fetch them for me. I have just never really found the notion of going out and shooting an animal enjoyable. If I faced this in the woods… I would more than likely want to pet it… and wind up mauled horribly.

Something Fruity

This one I just don’t really have words for. I could see having a single wooden pear with a break away section as a conversation piece or for decoration. However why would you ever need three of them? I personally find them fairly ugly, but I find it even more bizarre that someone obviously bought these at one point. You could create some sort of a pear tri-force I guess, and maybe have a Pear-Link try and rescue the Pear-Zelda? I am trying to make sense of this… and failing miserably. I figure we will end up going to a few more places today, so hopefully they give me some equally bizarre blog fodder in the process. I got home around 8 last night, so I really did not have much time to do anything of significance game wise.

Bronze Rhino

January 2, 2014 by Belghast

A Light Dusting

I have been struggling to try and get my sleep pattern under control. Last night I had all intent to go to sleep early. However when I got laid down around 10 pm I just could not keep my eyes closed. It is like the act of laying down gave me a second wind. Additionally while I didn’t have breathing difficulties sitting up, the moment I stretched out in bed my lungs started bothering me. Had I gotten up and taken a breathing treatment right then I probably would have been fine and gotten to bed at a decent hour. Instead I piddled around talking with my wife and finally coming to that same decision about midnight.

All the while we were laying in bed we kept making comments about the moon being really right. When I got up to go upstairs I noticed that the entire world was blanketed in a thin veneer of snow. I find it completely insane that our icestorm from a few weeks back could coat everything in ice, but not cover the roads… whereas this tiny snow managed to stick. I guess the temperature has been low enough to bring the radiant ground temperature down just enough. It did however serve to make the world nice and bright last night. While taking my breathing treatment I got to piddling around online… and wound up falling asleep at the keyboard. When I woke up it was 2 am and I once again troddled off to bed later than I had intended.

Bronze Rhino

Earlier in the week we had talked about going to Muskogee, but I am not sure if that will still happen with the over night snow and the obvious cold and windy climate. Tuesday we went out junking for a bit again, or more so we went to pay my wife’s car tag and happened to hit a couple of places in the same town. One of the stores we had been to before long ago when we used to go junking for fun. I didn’t remember it being the claustrophobic place that it apparently is today however. I have no clue how anyone would find anything in it. It has what appears to be booths, but each and every one is crammed with so much completely random stuff that I was afraid I would cause an avalanche.

The gem of the day however was a bin of Barbie dolls that looked like a scene from Law and Order SVU. My wife has made me promise not to post the picture of it, but all I will say is I felt bad for the Ken doll. Obviously someone was very curious about what was under Ken’s pants. The other thing I snapped was this large bronzed rhino… because seriously who doesn’t need a giant bronze rhino for their house? I am having trouble pulling together the situation that would have led someone to actually purchase this for their home. Even more so, I struggle with the logic that would have lead someone to purchase this for resale. I remember the junk store being run by a nice old woman, and this time it was by a much younger man. I am wondering if maybe the woman has passed and left him the store… and he simply no longer cares about it the way she once did.

Like I said before I had talked about going to Muskogee today. If you remember way back that is where I found all the great deals on LEGO sets, and they also have a large number of these antique malls along Highway 69. No I am not making up the name of that highway, we have to be adults here… no snickering allowed. Additionally my wife has found some good deals at the various shops in town so if we don’t go today I think at some point before next Monday we will end up going there. I find it hard to believe that my long vacation is almost over. I guess that is why I am most concerned about trying to fix my sleep patterns, because I know next Monday is going to be a massive pain.

No Love For Rogue

Yesterday I did my big years retrospective post, but another thing I would have written about had I not done that was that on New Years Eve I managed to ding 90 on my rogue. Within a few minutes of dinging I had equipped a whole slew of Timeless Isle gear. The funny thing is… each and every character I have gotten to 90 has been short a single item from completing a full set of gear. On my shaman he was missing shoulders, and on the rogue he was missing boots. However upon reaching the isle and doing the various onetime and weekly chests I quickly got a set. I am still missing a trinket, but hopefully I will get one from LFR. I managed to boost my gear score high enough to be able to do throne of thunder, so off and on throughout the day yesterday that is exactly what I did.

For some reason this game hates giving me weapons. So I managed to get four pieces of gear to drop, two of which were set pieces, and the other two were the exact same pieces as the set. So functionally all I gained was a two piece bonus. I did however manage to get enough motes on my paladin to craft one of the 463 weapons. I have bumped that up to 471 so it is at least “almost epic”. I feel bad in LFR because quite frankly until I get better weapons I will not really be of much use. Rogue is so weapon dependant, and quite honestly all of the classes I play tend to be. There is very little you can do to be of use with a complete crap weapon. I still feel this is a massive shortcoming with pandaria… it is extremely difficult to get weapons if you do not like PVP.