Tales of the Aggronaut

Wildstar Woes

August 21, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. I am trying to muster the “oomph” to do another days post. For whatever reason since the “flood” happened, I have not been sleeping well at all. I assume it is all the noise from the air mover fan we have had pointed at our carpet to try and dry everything out. Luckily at this point… I think the carpet is completely dry so here is hoping that turning it off tonight will render a full nights sleep.

Wildstar Woes

With all the recent strife caused by our washing machine and the subsequent damage… my morning posts have pretty much been dominated by that. However in the gaming world there was quite a little shake up… at least as far as the twitter-sphere is concerned. Monday Carbine announced the business model for Wildstar… and it was shockingly subscription based. I think most of us in the blogging circles had been expecting Wildstar to launch as a free to play or some sort of hybrid model. Instead we are getting a full subscription game with an implementation of the PLEX system from Eve.

Essentially all players will have to do one of two things to continue playing. Either they will pay a monthly subscription fee, or they will purchase and consume a C.R.E.D.D. on the open market that another player has purchased speculating that they can sell it for enough in game currency to make it worth their while. EQ2 also has a very similar system to this with the Krono, and it seems to work well enough at removing large sums of in game currency from the market. The big negative however is that mere mortals are unlikely to ever possess enough currency to buy one of these subscription tokens.

In the games I have played that have them they usually start off reasonable enough shortly after the program launches… but over time it continues to trend upwards gaining in game currency value. For example when I bought my first Krono in EQ2, they were selling for 500-600 platinum. However the last time I sold one, I was able to get almost 1000 platinum for them in a few months time. Additionally the REX token in Rift launched at around 600 platinum and now fetches roughly 1500 platinum depending on the server. Essentially it is constantly pushed out of the reach of anyone that is not an auction house baron or a habitual gold farmer.

Killing Casual Interest

Essentially in my experience there is really no way that anyone casually interested in a game like this can afford to buy the subscription tokens from the market. They are stuck with subscribing to keep their access turned on. For me my interest in Wildstar has gone from passing to pretty much dead zero. All thanks to the announcement that there will be a subscription attached to the game. Don’t get me wrong… I love subscriptions in games that I am really interested in. I will happily pay a monthly fee to support the game and gain buffet style access to all its features. But I am simply not “really” interested in Wildstar.

The problem is… in my large circle of gaming friends it seems very few players actually are. There are a bunch of us, that likely would have picked the game up were it a “buy the box” or free to play model. We would have given it a shot, seen what it was like in close up and maybe for some of us… it would have clicked. But the fact that I know there is both a box cost and a reoccurring subscription fee really makes the game something I don’t want to take a chance on. In a world where most of the games I have been playing… are free to play… that subscription fee seems like an awfully binding commitment.

Ultimately I will be sitting in the wings, waiting for the eventual switch over to free to play. That seems to be the thing to do these days… and what started off as a way to bail out a sinking game seems more and more like an actual business model. It feels as though there is the initial 6 month money grab of subscriptions… then a planned deployment of free to play to catch the players like me who were only casually interested in their net. If this is really in fact a business model, it seems like a very disingenuous one.

There are players who are supremely devoted to the subscription business model. One of my good friends Liore, has gone through a whole arc as a game she deeply cared about… namely Rift went free to play. While she has softened to the idea of the Rift free to play implementation… since arguably it is likely the most player friendly one on the market.. she still is not a huge fan of the “death of the subscription”. When a game company sets out to do a 6 month money grab then convert to free to play… they risk alienating all the players that are extremely pro-subscription.

Of Subscriptions

I guess at the end of the day… my problem is not that Wildstar has gone subscription at all. It is that Wildstar is not interesting enough to me to make me WANT to pay a subscription for it. Granted I have yet to play it at all… so maybe the proof is in the play style… but right now having only received the publically available information I am just not interested enough to commit to it. Additionally I seem to have a love/hate relationship with Science Fiction MMOs. I enjoy the hell out of them for a short period of time… but the scifi genre in general seems to lack the hooks to keep me there for long. Granted that would probably all change if a Mass Effect or Fallout MMO were ever to release. However I highly doubt either of those would happen, and quite frankly after SWTOR Bioware should farm out the “MMO” portion to someone more experienced.

Getting back on track… I don’t see anything fundamentally flawed with the subscription model. I pay a subscription to Rift, even though it is the best free to play model out there. I do it because they reward me in so many ways for doing so. Similarly I used to pay a subscription to EQ2, Lotro, DDO, etc… all of which are free to play games… because the subscription gave me something more than I could get otherwise. Ultimately this comes down to a case of me just not being that interested in Wildstar. The main issue with the subscription model is it turns off the revenue stream from players like me that might have bought the box if there were no strings attached.

Ultimately right now there are entirely too many good options for a player to play for no money outlay at all. It used to be that all you could play for free were a handful of subpar eastern games. Now you have games like The Secret World and Rift at your disposal… both of which are games I would happily pay a subscription fee for… but don’t have to. Essentially Carbine is asking players to take a gamble on their game… by buying the box and paying a monthly subscription and I feel as though a lot of players just are not willing to do that any longer. This is simply my point of view based on the “temperature” from both social media and blogs in response to the rather “shocking” announcement of Wildstar’s payment model.

Grain of Salt

Essentially you can take everything I just said today with a grain of salt. Just because I was shocked that Wildstar did not go free to play… does not necessarily mean I am opposed to the subscription model entirely. For example… if Elder Scrolls Online were to come out tomorrow and announce that they were going to be subscription only, it would be equally shocking. However I would care far less, because ESO is a game I am already 110% committed to playing at launch. From the moment it was announced I have been figuratively been like Fry begging them to “Take My Money!”. The difference is.. ESO is a title I deeply care about and have been wanting to play literally since the first time I played Morrowind.

I had played Daggerfall before, but with Morrowind I was already used to the MMO construct thanks to lots and lots of Everquest 1. All the while I was playing the game I kept thinking… man this setting would be so much more enjoyable if I could play it co-op. So I have been 100% sold on the concept of an online Elder Scrolls game since that moment. Each additional TES game.. has made me want the ability to play it with my friends even more. When I heard that Zenimax was working on an MMO, I hoped beyond all hope that it was the Elder Scrolls setting. At this point they could charge a $200 box fee, and $20 a month subscription… and I would likely still figure out some way to play it.

I feel however that this level of buy in from an MMO player is extremely rare right now. We are literally deluged with really good options that cost us next to nothing to play. The MMO climate is nothing like when WoW launched or even when Warhammer Online launched. Players are not looking to ditch their current game for something new… they want to dip their toes in the water first to make sure they like it better. Having both a box fee and a subscription fee sufficiently raises that barrier just high enough that a good number of players, myself included will not commit to the game unless we are completely sold on it. For an unproven brand, from a publisher that is notorious for selling their games short (NCSoft)… it just seems like a massive hurdle to cross.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get on the road. We are taking delivery of the new washing machine today… so I am only working a half day. Essentially I need to get to work and do a full days work in 4 hours. I hope you all have a great day and I hope everything goes smoothly with the delivery and install of the new washer. Last night was a bit of a mad dash around the house to try and clear room for the folks to move it into place. I think I am as ready as I will ever be.

Fishing for Pants

August 20, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning all you people out in digital land… I am slowly attempting to wake up. Last night I crashed around 8:30, that was the point at which I just could not go on any more. I slept like crap the night before last, and spent all day yesterday dealing with various things around the house… so by that time I was just falling asleep in my chair. Here is hoping that a combination of coffee and writing will rouse me from my mental slumber.

Towel Trick

Yesterday was pretty much a continuation of damage control for our little flood that happened Sunday evening. I stayed home from work in the hopes of having someone come out to repair the washing machine… or at least advise us that it was kaput. One of my wife’s friends had given us a phone number of a repair lady that she had used in the past, so at 8:00 am on the dot I left a rather detailed message. At this point I went about doing as much damage control as I thought I could.

Previously we had used essentially every towel we had in the house to soak up the water and attempt to prevent additional damage. As a result we had a massive heap of soaked towels. I took them out Sunday evening and placed them laid out on the concrete around the pool in the backyard. My thinking was that the heat of the concrete combined with the wicking effect would suck he water right out. My theory may or may not have worked… but at some point the neighbor boy that mows our lawn came through and… rather thoughtfully picked up all the towels before mowing. However this means he deposited them stacked in a heap on one of our lawn chairs.

So of course as I came out yesterday morning they were all still soaked, but thankfully not moldy yet. First order of business was to lay them out as flat as I could… but this time I decided just to drape them over every piece of lawn furniture we had. By noon the majority were fully dry, and the last few were just mildly damp. So I dumped the remaining ones in the dryer for a few minutes to finish drying them. Yes I realize the absurdity of drying essentially dirty towels… but my whole idea here was to try and keep them from molding while we were down a washing machine.

Fishing for Pants

One of the big problems ahead of me… was the fact that the load we were washing was still sitting in the stagnating pool of gain infused water in the washing machine. I had to find a way to get these out and dried so I pulled the wicker basket we keep in the bottom of the closet as a clothes hamper and lined it with trash bags. Then I began the process of fishing for pants. The water had turned a dark murky color in the hours since the breakdown… and quite honestly finding the clothing was a bit of a challenge. But with perseverance I dumped each and every soaking garment into the bag lined basket.

I hauled the mess out into the backyard and proceeded to wring out each of the garments all the while not getting the mess of water on myself in the process. This turned out to be a bit more of a juggling act than I had planned… and at this point I am pretty sure that my hands will permanently smell of Gain detergent… but I guess there could be far worse things to have infused into your skin. It was a bit like playing Tetris with wet clothing trying to figure out a place to have each hanging by itself without overlapping. I thought briefly about going to the store and buying a couple of hooks and a clothes line… but we really did not have a good place to string one up. That might be something we need to remedy.

Sunday night we had a wet/dry vacuum that a neighbor had brought down, but when we were finished extracting the liquid from the carpet, he took it back down to his house. So there I was, with a bunch of Gain smelling murk in a dead washing machine that I really needed to extract. I roamed around the kitchen and found a pitcher that we don’t really use… and that combined with a Rib Crib cup served as my vessel for bailing out the washing machine. This was an annoyingly tedious process and I essentially extracted roughly 3-4 gallons of liquid from the machine. I finally got it down to just a little bit in the bottom… at which point I employed a bunch of dollar store knock off “sham-wows” we had laying around.

Spending Money

That did the trick and the washing machine is essentially as dry as I can possibly get it. Essentially at this point I had given up hope on the machine repair lady coming out and making this a simple task. After talking to my father… his theory was that the pump motor had seized up since that is what happened to their last washing machine. I was fine with this theory… and it generally meant that I needed to pick up another washing machine. The same neighbor that brought down the vacuum works at Lowes, so I decided it was time to go visit him. My ultimate hope was that they could have something delivered that day… albeit a grossly unrealistic hope.

Essentially they were running a special this week on a Roper Washer and Dryer pair, for $299 a piece. Roper is a sub brand of Whirlpool and is essentially more than likely manufactured here in Tulsa at the Whirlpool plant. We have had a Roper refrigerator for 15 years and counting… so it is a brand that I am very familiar with. Essentially it is a no bells or whistles functional machine, and that was perfectly fine for me. My niece inherited the Roper washing machine that my wife’s sister had and it is still going strong. So I decided to go ahead and just pick up a new washer, in hopes of having to delivered and installed quickly.

My basic theory was this… if a new unit is roughly $350 after you pick up the hookups… it would cost me at least $100 to have someone come out and look at my current washer. So do I throw money at a seven year old admittedly bargain basement washing machine… or do I just save that hassle and buy a new one. The earliest they could have one delivered was Wednesday afternoon, so I latched onto that before that day filled up. So on top of wasting all yesterday messing with “the flood”, I am going to also have to take on Wednesday afternoon. Quite honestly at this point I just want it done so we can go on about our lives.

Television Recycling

Since the day was already shot… and I was too hot and grumpy to go back to work at this point and play nice with the people that want me to do stupid things. I decided just to make the day into a “whatever needed to get done” day. For a few weeks I had been hauling around in the back of my jeep a load of clothing intended to go to Goodwill. Since I am down 55 lbs and my wife is down roughly 40 lbs… we had a lot of clothing we could no longer wear. So like always we go through a mad cleaning frenzy and bag it all up with the intent of donating it to Goodwill. The problem is… I didn’t actually take it to Goodwill that weekend and as a result I have had eight bags of miscellaneous clothing in the back of my jeep for almost a month.

The main reason why I had not taken it yet was the fact that we also had a 27” CRT television. So I packaged I went through the house gathering any additional donate-ables and cleared room in the pile that had shifted greatly for the television. I get to the donation center… and start unloading everything… and the nice man working there informs me that they cannot accept CRT Televisions. I guess when the HDTV switch happened… they were absolutely flooding with them… and quite frankly they do not sell in any of the centers. It makes sense but was not something I thought about ahead of time. Hell we used it as our bedroom television until recently when we went through the cable upgrade.

What was awesome of him however… is that he told me Best Buy would take the television and recycle it. So I finished unloading everything into his bin, got a donation receipt and headed over to our local Best Buy. Supposedly they were giving 50 Best Buy points for people turning in their old televisions… which is next to worthless in their rewards pyramid scheme. So I went inside and inquired at the front desk where I should bring my television. They pointed to a corner up at the front of the store… so I hauled it in and set it down in the approved cubby. I guess I could have asked for my points bounty, but at this point I was hot and tired and could give zero shits. Finally I was able to go home and chill out for a bit.

Wrapping Up

I’ve rattled on enough for one day… but this essentially covers the bulk of my “day off” from work. Looking forward to having this entire mess past me. Wednesday they will deliver and hook up the new washer, and once that is done I will start the laundrypalooza of trying to catch up and wash all the crap that got stranded in the process. I have it all neatly packed in a few empty steralite boxes… which admittedly it felt a little silly to be folding and storing dirty laundry. Anyways… I hope you all have a great day, and that your week has been going better than mine.

The Flood

August 19, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning all you people out in digital land… I am trying to wake up enough to string cognitive words together. I did not sleep much last night, and I will go into reasons later… but suffice to say I am exhausted. In addition I have a royal mess to deal with today, so I likely will be staying home. Hopefully once I have a schedule for the day I can catch a cat nap. Here is hoping that my old friend coffee will be enough to keep me going until then.

The Flood

Today is the first day back to school with kids for my wife, and as a result the weekend was fairly stressful with her trying to prepare for everything. During the summer I pretty much get a break from doing a lot of the household chores, but with the school year starting back up it is once again my job to take care of those things as she stresses out over lesson planning and grading on the weekends. Previously there was a load of clothing that we had started but not finished… so I started that up again.

Once finished I noticed that a pet bed had come apart in the wash. So I picked up the pieces and started a second load… this time of darks… since that tends to be the load we absolutely must do each weekend. I went along about my business and an hour or so later I went in there to check on the progress… expecting to swap it into the dryer. As I was walking towards the washer I noticed that the whites were wet… but it didn’t dawn on me until I was further down the hall what was happening. Essentially the laundry room, parts of the closet, the hall, and our bedroom were soaked in water as apparently instead of draining out the water drained all over everything.

The Aftermath

So I hollered up at my wife, but while she surveyed the scene she was still in “I am freaking out because of too much school work” mode… and simply could not take in additional information at the time. One of the positive side effects of owning a pool, is that we have a ridiculous number of beach towels for when people come swimming. So I got into the closet, pulled out all of the beach towels and started sopping up the water. This got up the bulk of the water, and I gathered those up in a trash bag and took them out into the back yard to hang up.

One of our neighbors brought down his wet/dry vacuum and got up the rest of the water as well as much from the carpet and pad as he could in the bedroom and closet. Finally I brought down my big fan from my office upstairs and set it up pointing at the floor and turned it on high, hoping that the air circulation would dry the carpet the rest of the way. After that it was pretty much just up to time to see if it would dry out. My jeans were in the washer load when it blew… and it apparently did not make it all the way through the rinse cycle… so since drying them out over night was not really an option I ran to the store and picked up another pair so I would actually have something to wear today.

The Denouement

The big air mover fan… made an odd kind of white noise… and all night long I kept waking up thinking I heard something strange. I am fairly resistant to change, especially in my personal space. The addition of a really loud fan on the floor beside my side of the bed was a rather disturbing change, and I ended up waking up every thirty minutes to an hour as the night went on. As a result this morning I am feeling completely sapped. The good news however is that the carpet is dry to the touch… there is still a dark spot which tells me it is not completely dry. We will leave the giant fan running for the next few days hopefully drying everything the rest of the way.

I emailed my boss to let him know what had happened… so my day today is pretty malleable. One of several conclusions will happen. We have the phone number of a reputable repair service, and I plan on calling them at 8 am. Either after explaining what happened they tell me that they think it is easily fixable… like a clogged drainpipe or they tell me that I most likely have a dead washing machine. So we either have the repair woman out… or I go to Lowes and buy a new one that is on sale… and hopefully am able to do so early enough to arrange for same day delivery. I believe Lowes will deliver, install and haul away the old unit… and we also have a line of credit there for such situations.

The Subligar

So since everyone on Mumble was playing Final Fantasy XIV… I continued on yesterday. The above picture is the result of questing around level 10. Essentially I had picked up all of the pieces… thinking they looked odd but not really noticing it much… until I finally picked up the pants. This is in fact a matched set of the level 10 quest gear in the “Lemon Lozenge” area of the game… yes that is what I called Lima Lominsa. The leather harness thing was a bit sketchy… but it looked okay-ish with my poofy red pants… that and I had gotten used to the occasional “nipple chest” from Rift and GW2. The pants… well I wasn’t paying much attention and I picked them up… despite warnings from my friends about the existence of the “Subligar”.

Turns out this is a running joke since FFXI but having to wear it… it doesn’t feel terribly funny. Personally I find this kind of armor completely bullshit. I am sure this is some dev’s odd kink at work, but too often this is what women have to wear ALL the time. At least when I started my next set of quests I was able to upgrade to something that covered me. Maybe I am an odd duck but I feel like armor should you know… be protective. There is nothing heroic feeling about having to wear a pair of underwear while fighting monsters with a big axe. If people want this crap in game… that is fine… just don’t make it a quest reward.

Ultimately after playing for about 10 minutes… I downgraded all my gear to my level 8 set… which realistically was only a few points of defense difference. What was so disturbing about it was… that my previous set was this really amazing “leather plate” appearance, with a unique chest piece graphic apparently for marauders… then in the course of a few quests go to lemon yellow panties. I posted a picture on G+ bitching about it… and was essentially met with a chorus of “QQ More” from the women… since this is pretty much every game experience for them. I totally get that… but no one should have to wear armor like this period.

It used to frustrated the shit out of me when I would find a nifty looking pair of plate pants… only to hand it to a female character and see it turned into a shiny metal bikini. I am completely fine with the irony of having the tables turned… but remember I am one of the guys supporting you. Make the assholes that dressed their companions in SWTOR in the Slave Girl outfit wear this… not someone who farmed for days to try and get proper Jedi robes for Kira. Once I could solo it… I literally ran “The Esseles” a good 50 times until I got the orange moddable robes to drop so she could have something decent to wear as I leveled up. Anyways rant about skimpy clothing over.

The Game

I am in a really odd place about Final Fantasy XIV in general. There is a lot about the game I am enjoying greatly. Then there are other things that bug the hell out of me. I honestly do not know at this point if I will be playing once it releases or not. I have not had this much trouble deciding if I actually like a game or not since I played Guild Wars 2. There are many aspects that I really dig like the whole jobs system… but so much of the game is just messaged really poorly. Essentially you have to have some ancestral knowledge from other players to keep you from screwing your character up.

For example… DO NOT SELL ANY ARMOR EVER! I did… I regret it. So something I did not realize… when you switch classes later you go back to level 1… and a ramification of this is that you will not be able to wear any of your armor period… other than the starter gear. I sold mine long ago… thinking I would not need it. As a result I had to run around buck naked in the Gridania starter zone until I could hit 5 and actually equip some gear. Luckily I pretty much have every set of gear from that point on, but to the best of my knowledge based on what I am seeing from the vendors… there appears to be no way to rebuy that level 1 equip-able gear.

So much of the game feels deeply foreign to me… as though they set out to purposefully buck the western MMO traditions. The game is at its core exactly the same as a World of Warcraft type MMO… just nothing is called by the right names, and nothing actually works in the same ways. Essentially most of my time playing has been building this translation matrix of figuring out what a thing is called… and what it means to me. I guess to some extent… that intrigues me… that the game can be so similar at the same time as it is completely foreign.

Like I said… at this point I seriously do not know if I will be playing this at launch. If I do it will likely be a weekend thing. My friends were wanting me to rush through the content… so I could get to some point where they needed a tank. Really though I was far more happy to piddle aimlessly than to try and push through the quests to reach a point that they were already at. I tend to out-level my quests by a large margin. I am still afflicted by my desire to kill everything in sight… and that seems to be a super effective means of leveling. The only mission type that seems to piss me off are the ones that involve using some emote on a target.

I guess at this point I have to say that I begrudgingly enjoy this game. There is something about it that is charming, and despite all the jacked up characteristics… like the Subligar… there is enough here that I find enjoyable that I could see playing it. I just am not sure if I could ever play the game seriously. I definitely do not have the same admiration of all things Final Fantasy that it seems to take to really be 100% committed to this. I guess I will see how I feel about things after the head start weekend next week. That will ultimately determine if I play or not.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to prepare to call the repair woman and see if I can get an assessment of the situation. If not… I will go to Lowes and see if I can get a washer delivered today. I hope you had a much better Sunday than I did, and that you have a great start of the work week. I am going to try and take a nap after I deal with these phone calls so that hopefully I stay fully functional. Hopefully the carpet finishes drying as do the towels out in the back yard.

Lego Episode

August 18, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out in digital land… I Belghast am doing my best to try and be noble and bloggified this morning… but seeming to fail miserably. If you have not figured out by now… this top paragraph is really just me psyching myself up to write. Think of it as the wind-up to a pitch, and while I do divulge important bits of information from time to time… mostly it is just my way of easing into writing about “things”. This morning I am still drinking a cup of coffee, so who knows what adventures my mind will go on throughout the course of the day.

Lego Friends

So a few weeks back my niece wanted Legos for her birthday. This was one of my happiest moments as an uncle, and I spoiled her fairly rotten. I may or may not have bought like $80 in Legos for her… because by god I am going to support the notion of my niece being into “building things”. I have to say I was extremely disappointed in what I was able to find however. It seems like all of the Lego City products have essentially nothing but male minifigures. On a completely seperate row… were the Lego Friends toys… and scattered in among those were an assortment of “real” Lego sets with female characters. So I ended up getting her a pink bucket with a girl minifig, a blue bucket with a boy minifig… and this princess horse grooming set because the minifig in that one looked a lot like her.

I was woefully sadden later to find out that she used some of her own money to buy a bunch of the Lego Friends sets. Feminist Frequency released a video on the Lego Friends and for the most part I agreed… that they were an un-needed aberration in Legoland. I had no clue why they existed in the first place. I could not understand why they did not just release a series of Lego city sets with female heroines. But yesterday I think I finally grok exactly what the Lego Friends do that the minifigures do not.

We spent most of our day yesterday either preparing for or spending time with family. We had a surprise get together for my wife’s fathers birthday, and this was the first time I had seen my niece in awhile. During my wife’s insane Lego find she found 3 sets for my niece. One Lego friends set, and two normal lego sets but with gender neutral themes and including girl minifigs. Thing is… when we gave them to her… she was excited about all the sets for different reasons… but she was especially excited about the Lego Friends set… because it she did not already have “Andrea”. I never once thought about the fact that the Lego friends might have names.

So I started listening to how she talked about Lego friends… and it finally made sense. She cares about the different characters and their personalities much the same way as a little girl assigns attributes to each of the members of the Barbie universe. The catch is that instead of teaching copious consumption… in that you need to buy Barbie all these things… like a dream house and a car… it is letting her BUILD things for her new imaginary friends. She talked about that she is building a house for all her lego friends… which is going completely off the map since none of the sets we have gotten for her so far was anything resembling a house. Essentially from my standpoint Lego Friends are “working as intended”.

She is having all sorts of imaginative play… but she is building various aspects of the universe inhabited by these five named minifigures. So I no longer feel like a horrible person for buying into this “Friends” franchise. She is building and creating and imaging all sorts of new experience for her “dolls” and it seems like it is the best of both the Lego and Barbie experience. She is having aspirational play imaging herself as a vet or a doctor or a home builder… but doing so in a way that she is actually making the things happen by building them… rather than waiting on another trip to the store to acquire another item. Here is hoping that she continues to build and create… and we will do our best to keep supplying a fresh set of bricks to incorporate into her little world.

Heroica

Part of the whole going to see family thing, involves going to a small town about an hour from Tulsa. With it being back to school time, my wife wanted to stop and see if they had any different school supplies… or more importantly ones on clearance at the small town Wal-mart. While we did not really find much in the way of school supplies they had a bunch of Lego stuff on clearance. I have seen the various Lego board games for awhile, but never actually picked them up. I have heard they were an awesome source for relatively rare pieces, but they were always way too expensive for me to just pick up on a lark to part out. I found these two Heroica sets for less than twenty bucks combined so I figured it was well worth that.

It got me to thinking… wouldn’t it be cool to run a D&D or similar pen and paper campaign using the Lego board games as a mapping system? I saw a picture from G+ the other day of a dad teaching his kids D&D using minifigures to represent their characters. It seems like father of the year material there, but wouldn’t it be cool if you also built the dungeon they were exploring out of Lego? Granted it would involve kitbashing a TON of these sets to find enough pieces to be able to do it… but it seems like a noble undertaking. Sadly I don’t really have enough friends nearby to really support a D&D campaign. When we do pen and paper we tend to do it as a google hangout… and I think the tactile experience of Lego everything… would be lost horribly over a camera.

Nipple Chests

When I finally got back home from our family outing excursions… I sat down on the couch just absolutely drained. I initially fired up Rift, but I just was not feeling up to grinding my harvest skills any further. Granted I know I could have played something else… but I am somewhat obsessed with getting my Cleric to a level at which he can do Storm Legion content. I logged into Mumble and everyone there was playing Final Fantasy XIV… so I figured… what the hell… might as well join them. The game is growing on me, I will admit… but I am just not sure to what extent. There are still so many things that bother me about the game in general.

If my character looks awesome… I feel awesome while playing it. This is why I am such a huge proponent of cosmetic gear systems. If I can set my appearance and always look amazing… I will feel happy while playing that character. Final Fantasy XIV has way too much of the bullshit you see in the above picture. Wearing a “nipple chest” and powder blue assless chaps does not make me feel heroic in ANY way. I just feel like a walking punchline to a horrible joke. This shit might fly in Japan… but I just feel like a moron walking around like this. Sadly earlier my character looked amazing… I had a really slick looking set of gear… that fit the way my character plays… but since FFXIV has no cosmetic system to speak off… I am stuck looking like an abomination if I want to wear the most effective gear.

There is definitely something charming about the gameplay however. It feels like a much better version of World of Warcraft. The world looks nicer, the character models themselves are awesome… and the way combat chains off other abilities is a huge step forward from the WoW model. The world seems fairly intricate as well, with lots of little things to explore and find. I am still experience the whole things named nonsensically aspect… like what the hell is a Guildleve or a Levemete in the first place? It feels like when Americans try and make ethnic sounding names that end up just being gibberish. The whole game could do with a better cultural pass to change the names of things into something that makes sense. As a result I can never remember what anything is called and just end up making names up for them.

I figure I will play the rest of the weekend and see where I feel about the game at the end of it. It is more enjoyable than TERA or Dragons Prophet for example… so were this a free to play game it would be a no-brainer as to whether or not I would be occasionally playing it. But the whole subscription thing is still a sticking point for me. I keep hoping that it will miraculously get better. One of the things I want to try out is the jobs system. I need to get up to around 15 to fully unlock the airship system be able to travel to the towns that have the guilds I want to pick up. I think I am more than likely going to switch to pugilist or lancer first after getting Maurader to 15.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to ramble on about meaningless stuff for another hour. I hope you all have a great weekend. I am guessing I will be splitting my Sunday between FFXIV and Rift. I might even go upstairs and build some more Lego sets since that seems to be on my brain. I still feel like I am potentially coming down with something… and as of this morning my wife seems similarly effected. Here is hoping it just ends up as allergies and nothing more serious.