Tales of the Aggronaut

Whim Republic

August 14, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks. In many ways last night was a far worse night than the previous… but for whatever reason I am feeling awake and rested this morning. I wish to god I understood sleep patterns, and why getting significantly less sleep ends up with me feeling better in the morning. Previously I had been used to 5 to 6 hours of sleep, but here lately consequence has ended up with me getting to bed a little bit earlier. More often than not… getting extra sleep just ends up making me feel horrible as a result.

Harvesting Moonshade

I spent a little bit of time when I first got home helping out a guild member orient herself to Ashora. However after assuring that she got all of the porticulum points… I logged back in Belgaroth and continued down my rabbit hole of leveling as a pure harvester. At the point at which I left off yesterday I had just finished up Freemarch and was entering into Stonefield. Stonefield actually went extremely quickly as I found that all of the rock golems gave extremely fast skill-ups. Additionally there were large fields of the mountain goat like creatures that I could gather up and AOE down.

Once I moved into Moonshade everything slowed down quite a bit again. Firstly I was finally catching up to where the character was at foraging wise… so this meant now having to manage leveling a third skill. I managed to push up rather quickly in harvesting on the various ram like creatures near the Defiant portal. The only problem is they petered out about 200 and the transition point to train the next tier is 225. I found the same essential problem killing boglings and skinning them out in front of the Dwarven Relcaimer camp. At roughly 200 everything slowed down.

Unfortunately the zone did not have any lower level golems or earth elementals… so I had to run around the zone randomly pushing up my mining from picking up Cobalt Lodes. I noticed that the Golems up near Hammerknell all required 170 mining, so that was ultimately my goal. After about 30 minutes of farming Cobalt I managed to push up to that point. The Golems all give skill-ups but they are fairly annoying since after killing each one it spawns three little phantoms. Additionally if you do not harvest the golem immediately it fades often times before you have killed the three phantoms. So it is this delicate juggling act of trying to mine the golem as the phantoms are spawning and before they have really begun attacking you.

This is the point at which I left off for the night. I figure tonight before we pull together the guild night festivities I will try and finish up pushing my trades to 225 so I can learn the next tier and move into the endgame zones. Hopefully I can find a ready source of mobs to mine, forage and butcher as that makes it go so much quicker than having to run around and try and find nodes to harvest. I would rather kill hundreds of mobs at one camp, than try and find 50 nodes spread out throughout a zone.

Whim Republic

Early in the evening one of my friends on mumble had been playing Star Wars the Old Republic and talking about it. After we got finished with our walk I decided to patch it up and pop in for a few to poke my head around. When I was last playing I had been alternating between leveling a Dark Side Sith Sorcerer and a Light Side Sith Juggernaut. I have to say I almost immediately regret my decision to log in when I was confronted with the warning screen letting me know that I was no longer a subscriber and should as a result feel horrible. They gave me a nice chart showing me all the ways I should feel horrible in the various basic features of the game that I would be losing by logging in.

I guess to some extent I had forgotten exactly how miserable an experience it is to try and play SWTOR as a free to play title. There I sat with my no-crew skills, my one hotbar, my inability to use various sundry features like displaying titles, my bank, the auction house. I had a stack of credits that had apparently built up from the last time I subscribed so I decided to start trying to make my character playable by unlocking various things. Essentially each one of these items can be unlocked permanently at an account level, but it would literally cost you multiple hundreds of dollars to get your account back to a state at which it would not feel absolutely horrible to play.

All the while I am going through this… I am marveling in the back of my head just how horrible an experience this is as compared to Rift. When I was trying to do my now dead in the water “How To Rift” series, I created a brand new account for the purpose of seeing what exactly the limitations were. Surprisingly enough logging in and playing on a free to play character pretty much felt exactly like logging in and playing on my main. There are a few limitations, but they are essentially unlocked through the loyalty system the moment you spend any money. You are gimped on the number of bag spaces, but as compared to SWTOR this seems like a truly minor thing.

Lack of Loyalty

I guess what feels so exploitative about SWTOR is the fact that I spent a good deal of money with that game. I bought the collectors edition package at launch, and subscribed for I think a total of 9 months. That is far longer than most players did, I feel as though I should get some of these features grandfathered in. I fully expect to be limited on total character slots, or the ability to play the newest content… but it feels like complete shit to log into my characters and have zero recognition for money spent when they were struggling along trying to make the subscription model work. What they are missing essentially is a loyalty system along the lines of what Rift has put in place.

When I logged into Rift after the free to play conversion… I was literally showered with loyalty rewards and the in game credits currency. I want to say I had roughly 100k credits and was at roughly 3/4 of the way through the purple tier of loyalty. I felt like they cared about me as a longtime subscriber, and they were more than happy to welcome me back and shower me with gifts. Granted I am STILL a subscriber, there has only been about a three month period since the release of the game that I did not subscribe. The experience all feels so much nicer however that they give me rewards I want to build towards, and make me want to spend money on the game because I want to support them.

On the other hand in SWTOR I feel like I am a cow being milked for whatever money they can get out of me. Everything about their system just feels cheap and insidious. Instead of adding new features to the game and pay-walling those… they seemed to have chosen arbitrary basic features to hide away from the unwashed masses of non-subscribers. So essentially without paying that monthly fee you get an extremely broken feeling gameplay experience. I know I have commented multiple times about how horrible their free to play model is, but I guess I forget just how bad it really is… until I experience it again each time.

The above video was compiled by Rift Scene and compares and contrasts the features of SWTOR, TERA and Rift. If you are not really familiar with the differences between the Rift and SWTOR free to play model it is well worth watching. I hope I will remember just how bad it is, the next time I get the urge to patch up the game and log in. There really is nothing there for me there unless I choose to subscribe, and I have no desire to do that since I know the next time I lapse I will be treated the same. The main difference for me is that I feel like EA Bioware really does not deserve any of my money. Trion on the other hand, gives both the outwards appearance that they care about me as a player, and as a result I feel like giving them all the support in the world.

Wrapping Up

Well time to get on the road. Todays post ended up far more ranty than I had intended it to. I am just still shocked at how bad the SWTOR free to play model is when it actually comes to playing it. On paper it looked horrible, but as a non-subscriber attempting to play the game it feels even worse. I hope you have a good day and you find absolutely nothing to rant about. I have a massive list of things I need to get done, so here is hoping I have the “oomph” to do them.

Wrong

August 13, 2013August 13, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks, and welcome to another episode of “Bel tries to think of something to write about in the morning”. Last night was kind of an odd night. We had to run a number of errands so it ended up with me getting home fairly late and missing most of the “nda” event. Afterwards I logged into Rift for a bit, but kept getting disconnected. I think it was jealous for cheating on it with another game. When it finally stabilized I did a bunch of silly things and finally it was time for our evening walk… and I was in bed by 10:30. Theoretically I should be recharged and ready for the day… but I feel all sorts of fuzzy mentally.

Silly Things

One of the things that I spent my massive amount of points on that I got from being a longtime subscriber to rift… was on the tradeskill extension unlocks for my main. As a result he has Mining, Butchering, Foraging, Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing and Artificer. Which to some extent has started me down the road to madness. Since I have pooled the majority of my tradeskills on one character, I have the overwhelming desire to rework all my other characters so that they are pure harvesters. Lately we have lacked a healer when I attempted to pull together dungeons and such with our 50+ crowd, so I thought I would bring my cleric Belgaroth out of retirement since he was already 50.

The problem is… this also began my descent into insanity as I noticed he had the odd combination of Weaponsmithing, Apothecary and Foraging. None of the tradeskills were terribly high, so I decided this was the opportune time to rebuild him as a master harvester. The only bad thing about this is that I spent all of last night roaming around Freemarch collecting ore and skinning wolves. When it came time for our walk last night I had just finished up on Freemarch and was headed into Stonefields. Since I have recently done this whole level all the tradeskills thing on Belghast when I picked up foraging… I am hoping it goes more quickly since I pretty well know the areas I need to be in for each type of material. I don’t really want to get too much further into the Storm Legion content without having his harvest abilities up to snuff.

Wrong

So two things happened yesterday… firstly I stumbled across the video above… and one of my posts got picked up by MMO Melting Pot a site that aggregates posts from the community normally relating to World of Warcraft. I like the site, and they do a decent job of promoting various blogs, but almost every trolling comment I have received has happened when they have featured one of my posts. Normally the trolls don’t really bother me but this one just stuck in my craw.

No, sorry the author of this post is flat out wrong.

So I have no problem with someone disagreeing with my opinion. It happens on a regular basis and people seem to be able to do it well. I have a problem with the fact that this poster said my opinion was wrong. It is impossible for an opinion to be wrong. It is not a fact based statement generally, but the way someone feels or believes, and as a result there is no right or wrong. It is in fact their opinion until they decide to change it. My blog while it has little factual nuggets at times, is pretty much my view on the world as I know it. While you can get grumpy or disagree with what I say, saying that said opinion is wrong just is not an option.

Now to the video above… I linked it into this segment because in some small way it is addressing as the video calls it the “nerd on nerd violence” aspect that is trolling. I disagree vehemently with folks all the time… prime example is the whole “tank” series of posts. All the while I was posting my good friend Rowan was posting the counter point on his blog. We don’t always see eye to eye and we disagree plenty… but at the end of the day I still love him like a brother… and I would never dream of calling his personal opinion “wrong”.

I’ve tried super hard myself to present a mostly positive outlook into our community, which in my case is the collection of gaming blogs out there. While the above video has nothing to do with that, I feel like it has a lot of threads of truth about our own community or ANY geek community in general. Geeks seem to like eating their own, because they do not measure up to some standard they have set in their heads. I have been guilty of this multiple times myself, and I try and take a step back and realize that we are a niche of a niche of a niche… and the quite frankly we need all the awesome people we can get. I have so much respect for the cosplayers out there, whereas I put my ideas on paper and hit a publish button from the comfort of my office… they wrap themselves in those thoughts and parade it for the world to see. I cannot imagine how much self confidence it takes to do that… and I have nothing but the utmost respect for ANYONE who even vaguely attempts to cosplay something.

Gearpunk Dice

My good friend Tesh is making another run at Kickstarter, and this time it seems to have gotten massive traction. The above dice are just a production sample from his blog but gives you a feel for what the gearpunk dice will ultimately look like. This campaign is for metal dice and he is offering essentially three designs… Tinker Dice, Gearpunk Dice and Fudge Dice. Essentially through a combination of the Gearpunk polyhedral dice, and the tinker dice you have what is like the ultimate gear punk dice collection for your gaming needs. I was a big fan when they were plastic, and I am an even bigger fan now that the metal seems to be going over like gangbusters.

[edit] Apparently I was extremely tired this morning… because I completely neglected including the Kickstarter link….

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tishtoshtesh/tinker-dice-steampunk-metal-dice

This one is easy now… the initial project requested $1000 and now they have received enough funding to do that almost ten times over. Essentially the dice are now a guarnteed thing, so make sure you do not miss out on this offering. They have been available through his shapeways site for some time, but this is a much better deal. I am extremely happy to see this campaign doing so well, and it could not be supporting a nicer gamer and blogger.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this thing up. Today is the first day back for my wife, and as a result it has thrown my morning into a complete state of disarray. I am not used to having to get ready with another human being roaming around the house. Additionally now pretty much begins hell for me until roughly mid September as the whole back to school ritual dominates my life. I am essentially bracing for it now, and expecting my time to be whittled away as we need to run this or that errand to prepare. I hope you all have a much better series of days ahead of you, and that the work week has been going well.

Mordheim

August 12, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning people out in internet land. I am slowly waking up and drinking my cup of coffee. Usually caffeine makes everything better, so here is hoping it does the trick once again. I had a pretty chill weekend. Yesterday I hung out on the sofa with my laptop and play assorted games while watching the tail end of Hemlock Grove and continuing with Luther. Both really great shows that I would suggest to anyone that is interested. The more I think about it the more Hemlock Grove reminds me of Once Upon a Time meets Silent Hill. I really don’t have a ton of ammunition to write about this morning, so here goes nothing.

Mordheim

I think we all have those games we have a bundle of “what ifs” about, that never quite lived up to our expectations. One of the biggest for me will likely always be Warhammer Online. I loved the intellectual property the game was based on, and I think they did a really good job of bringing it to life. The game introduced so many interesting mechanics like “physical tanking” and “public quests”. They did several things well and I was happy to see other games adapt their ideas.

Ultimately the problem for me was the lack of a viable PVE experience after level 25. I realize this was an attempt at making a PVP centric game… and that honestly is its failing. People just don’t want that, or at least didn’t want that at the time of the release of Warhammer Online. As a longtime fan of the Warhammer setting, there were various touchpoints they hit for me, and various other ones that I would have liked to have seen. There is one thing especially that I have always daydreamed about that I wish they could have pulled off.

Mordheim was released as a stand alone boxed game from Games Workshop that takes place some 500 years before the setting of Warhammer Fantasy. Ultimately the short version of the storyline is that a comet crash lands depositing this new material known as Wyrdstone. Small warbands that the players control have to enter the city and try and uncover as many pieces of this new mineral as they can. Not only do they have to contend with other warbands of players, but they also have to contend with the Skaven that have taken up root in the city.

I have always thought it would have been amazingly cool if they were able to either implement a public quest area that was Mordheim. It would have been a lot like the Darkness Falls experience in DAoC with the ability for one faction or the other to control key points within the city while still having to fend off waves of NPC skaven that will attack the placements. This would give an interesting three way balance between two factions of players and a third npc faction that wants to kill both of them and take the Wyrdstone for themselves. I can’t say that this would have turned the tide of a losing game, but it definitely would have made for some interesting gameplay.

Eloping

After this weekend I am more convinced that we did the smart thing when we decided to elope and opt out of a traditional wedding. One of our friends has decided that she is finally going to marry the guy she has been with for some time. There have been multiple dates in the past but none of them actually came to fruition. However now they decided to set a date two weeks from now… and are trying to pull everything together for a traditional wedding last minute. The end result is complete and utter insanity.

As a result of all of this… my wife literally spent a good chunk of Friday night, most of Saturday and almost all of Sunday dealing with dress shopping. She came hope with a disturbing looking teal number that appears to have come from Florida circa 2000… as it seems to have a number of “hanging chads” along the skirt. It is ugly as hell… my wife knows it, I know it… but it makes the bride happy so you deal with it. But as we watch this logistical nightmare play out in front of me… we have turned to each other at several points and said “god I am happy we eloped”.

Ultimately I am going to end up as the photographer for the wedding… which should be a decent idea… as it will give me something to busy myself during the whole event. I really really dislike weddings, and all the fluffy white wonderland that they seem to be. I try my best not to be a grump about it, because for whoever is having the wedding it is a massive happy occasion. I would just far rather send a nicer gift and hope they don’t mind the fact I didn’t attend. I do find myself bringing a crappier gift when I attend the wedding… because I feel as though my suffering should count for something.

Chasing a Dream

I stumbled across this video while checking into G+ this morning. I thought it was a really cool feel good story about how a guy chased down his dream of owning a video game store. He mentions an IndieGoGo campaign but unfortunately I have not been able to dig up that link. We have a handful of game stores like this in the Tulsa area and I try to frequent them whenever possible to support the concept of the hometown video game store. I guess I find this whole thing extra neat because many times my wife and I have talked about the pipe dream of us building a store that fed off our own passions.

Ultimately it would end up as a educational curriculum, traditional book, video game and pen and paper shop. The franken-shop would have a bunch of only vaguely related things crammed together in one place. Granted we will never actually likely build said store, but it is a fun daydream. Logistically any kind of retail venue would be a nightmare and I feel as though you are always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in this market. I think it would be cool to have an apartment located over the store like the old type general store clerks used to have. There is just something special about a stored owned by someone that has a passion for whatever they are selling. Hopefully at some point I can dig up the IndieGoGo link and post it.

Wrapping Up

This seems like another really short one, but to be honest I did warn you guys that I did not have a lot of ammunition this morning. Hopefully something will happen throughout the day that I deeply care about. Fortunately or Unfortunately depending upon the perspective, I have another one of those NDA bound things going on tonight, so not sure if I will have much gaming to be able to talk about tomorrow. Hopefully you have a great start of the week, I have a lot going on at work that I need to make headway in.

Folklore Roulette

August 11, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning my loyal readers… or at least I think I have some loyal readers. Over the last week or so I have done a quite a few thematic posts spurred on by the announcement of EQ Next. Today is going to be a bit of a throwback to my “what Bel did” posts. Yesterday was a busy day but also a pretty relaxing one. We got out early and ran a bunch of errands including a haircut for me. I was getting rather shaggy… I was to the point where I could theoretically ponytail it up… just a horrible one.

Lego Maniac

When we finally got home and settled in I engaged in something I had been planning for awhile. When we set up the game loft, the intent was to also make it a place for me to build with my Legos that I have been amassing. So as a result there is a fold out table underneath the loveseat and finally yesterday I gave this concept a trial run, Over the last several months I had accumulated a large number of sets that I had yet to build, and this was only compounded by the awesome haul that my wife found last week. It had become a running joke that I collected Legos but never actually built them… so I intended to rectify that.

My grand scheme is to eventually come up with a storage system so that I can sort out the Lego bits into component types. But I have not settled on the best and most efficient means to do that. However in the meantime I would like to build every set I have at least once as it was intended. The entertainment center upstairs has been rather barren so it will serve as my showcase for built sets. The above picture shows a wide assortment of things I put together yesterday.

In the picture is a Captain America set, a Ninjago one, The Gandalf arrives set from Lord of the Rings, a couple of Star Wars sets including an Ewok Attack one… and two different Harry Potter sets. I barely scratched the surface of the unbuilt sets I have accumulated over the last little bit. Essentially anytime I find a set on sale for a price I am willing to pay I snap it up. Building anything with Legos makes me immensely happy. It is like returning to a simpler time. I can remember building by myself or with my cousins and creating grand machinations, and I guess to some extent I am capturing a small piece of that. Not sure if I will return to builder mode today or not, but I had a blast doing it yesterday.

Folklore Roulette

So as I built away with the Legos I decided to fire up Netflix on my PS3 and watch something. Hemlock Grove has been sitting in my recommendations for some time, so I figured what the heck. I like werewolves, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse was hands down my favorite of the World of Darkness games… so I would at least give it a shot. After watching nine episodes I can say that I really like the show… but I am not really sure why. It kinda has a twin peaks meets world of darkness feel to it. The biggest thing I realized immediately is just how under-billed calling it a “Werewolf” show is. There is a lot going on in thee town of Hemlock Grove.

Essentially you are presented an odd hodgepodge of Slavic folklore traditions mixed with some Reanimator style science-horror. You have psychic vampires, demons, possible alien hybrids, Romani seers, some crazy demonic wolf terrorizing the town… and of course a noble werewolf trying to reluctantly protect all of it. The demon wolf very much feels like a Black Spiral Dancer from White Wolf, at least the description we have been given of what a “Vargwolf” is.

I want to maybe finish out the series today, because seriously there is a lot of crazy shit going on in this little town… and I feel that sooner or later it is all going to come to a catastrophic end. If you have ever been a fan of the World of Darkness series of games, I would highly suggest checking it out. The acting is very good and at some times there are parts that remind me a little bit of American Horror Story season one. It of course has the requisite HBO style gratuitous tits and ass thing going on… so be warned if you have little or sensitive eyes in the room. I am not really sure when this became a requirement for “edgy” television but I wish it would work its way out.

Festival of Unity

One of the coolest things about playing Everquest 2 on Antonia Bayle has always been the massive player run events. Today is kicking one of the largest yearly events called the “Festival of Unity”. It starts this afternoon at 3pm EDT at the Qeynos Claymore in Antonica. You can check out the full information about the festival here on their homepage. Also Stargrace did a nice write-up about the festival over on MMOQuests. I am not sure yet if I will be attending it, but even if I do not I think it is an extremely cool concept. Antonia Bayle has by far the coolest community I have ever experienced on a Role Playing server, and I am always happy to get the word out when an event is going on.

Wrapping Up

Today’s post feels a little bit shorter than normal, but I am out of meaningful things to say. Hopefully you have a great rest of the weekend. My wife has gotten roped into assisting a friend with her wedding planning, so more or less I will be holding down the fort alone today. Going to have to start up laundry and the sort soon. Speaking of fortifications… thankful that so far I seem to have thwarted our escape artist ferret. She is sleeping peacefully in the playpen and has not found a way to climb out since yesterday. Here is hoping that the ramparts hold.