Tales of the Aggronaut

Everquest Current

August 2, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning everyone, hopefully you got a bit more sleep than I did last night. I ended up with another minor round of panic attacks and as a result did not actually make it to bed until after 1 am. However I seem to be mostly functional. Thanks a ton for all the warm wishes I received yesterday through either the blog, twitter, google+ or in game. We didn’t do anything really insane… just went out to dinner and then came back and chilled out downstairs. I piddled around a bit in Rift and eventually made my way over to the SOE Live twitch stream.

What Happens in Vegas

Normally we think of what happens in Vegas… stays in Vegas… however at SOE apparently what happens gets live broadcast over Twitch.tv for free. Having been a long fan of the SOE franchises, namely Everquest 2 I figured I would tune in last night for a bit and see if there was anything interesting happening. I have been immensely curious to find out what is coming down the pipe with Everquest Next. I have so many fears about how the game will turn out… sandbox can mean so many things and not all of them good for the long time survival of a game. So I like many tuned in thinking I might see a teaser for EQNext before the official unveil at Noon PST today.

You could tell that pretty much the only thing the crowd wanted to hear about WAS EQ Next and when Smedley took the stage… he did a pretty thorough job of baiting and teasing the crowd. However he did bring out the very famous Jeremy Soule of Skyrim fame to showcase his work on the Everquest Next theme. Within moments of it happening in the live broadcast the above theme was available on Youtube. I have to say… I am more than a little disappointed. Granted this is “sketch” as they called it, an early synth only version of the theme… but quite honestly it feels a little generic for lack of the better word.

If you listen to the Everquest 1 and Everquest 2 themes… there is definitely a shared lineage there. I expected this theme to carry on in a new way with the original “Everquest Notes” much in the same way that Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim take the same skeletal core of “TES Notes” and make them their own. But what we have is something vastly different and really does not feel at all like “Everquest” music to me. It feels way too ethereal, and not bombastic enough to represent an over the top franchise like Everquest. Apparently however gauging opinion from twitter and Google+ I am in the minority of my opinion.

I listened to the track over and over trying to find some shared lineage back to the original themes… and I think maybe just maybe I figured out what Jeremy Soule was trying to do. In the original Everquest theme… there is an odd little segment that always felt a bit out of place… that starts at roughly 0:46 and continues to 1:06. The more I listen to the EQNext theme the more I think he chose this odd little section to expand into a larger theme. I guess my hope is that Soule was starting with this segment and fading his way into the “EQ Notes”, and that the part that did the unfinished fade down is where the theme would pick up and grow into something we recognize.

I have a lot of faith in Jeremy Soule, I have a 4 disc set of Skyrim music that I listen to at work on a pretty regular basis. I was just shocked at what I heard and how little it represented “Everquest” for me. It also makes me afraid that they are really distancing themselves from the past, and kinda abandoning the Everquest lineage that came before. I love Norrath and probably always will, and while I don’t think I could ever return to playing Everquest 1 I am still a huge fan of everything that Everquest 2 has become. I want Everquest Next to draw upon this pedigree and not just completely abandon it.

Everquest Current

So much emphasis has been placed on Everquest Next, but last night was really about showing off Everquest Current. Both Everquest and Everquest II are seemingly unstoppable juggernauts of content. In the video above they announce the 20th expansion for the original Everquest, Call of the Forsaken. It is completely staggering to think of any MMO in todays climate making its way through 20 separate expansion packs. That is really one of the things that the SOE model has done… is allow aging communities to survive and be nurtured by what seems like extremely dedicated product teams.

I don’t really play Everquest other than occasionally logging in to my station account and remembering just how primate the old days were, so the first half of this trip down “everquest current” was interesting but had no real meat on its bones for me. I started to get a little excited when the EQ2 portion came up. While I am knee deep in Rift and living it… I will always have a deep nostalgia over EQ2 and all that it represents. As a result I want it to be awesome, and I want to to successfully draw players. In the above video they announce the 10th expansion for EQ2, Tears of Veeshan.

I remember spending a lot of time farming the North Temple of Veeshan for rep and gear back in the original game… and to some extend I always knew that EQ2 would take us back there. Additionally they will be opening up High Hold Keep, a zone that I travelled through numerous times on my way to the Karanas but never actually leveled in the area surrounding it. Apparently in the storyline we have dug too deep below the keep… and uncovered a band of Goblins that have taken it over. As a result it looks like similar to Kaladim, it will be a former city turned dungeon as you “retake” the keep.

What I found extremely interesting in the talk of going to the “Nexus Core” supposedly an area that powered the Nexus on Luclin. I have always hoped that one of the expansions would take us back to moon and see what remains of it, so maybe this will open the door to that actually happening. I really loved Luclin, I guess in part because this was the first expansion I was actually a loyal player for the release. I started playing Everquest just shortly after the release of Velious, and there was something magical about experiencing my very first MMO expansion pack.

The big reveal it seems was the addition of a 26th character class The Channeler, which is apparently on the SOE Live floor. The shots they showed of the class looked pretty cool, but it also seemed extremely confused. It is a priest archetype, but has a giant mage like elemental construct but wears leather and wields a bow. It will be interesting to see what the class plays like, and whether it feels like a ranger turned pet class or not. The unique mechanic is that the construct is customizable with the ability to swap abilities and appearances to make it into whatever the player wants. Again it will have to be something I see in action to be able to make sense of it.

Finally at the TAIL end of the video Holly Longsdale teased what was coming for expansion eleven. Based on the images shown… I would guess that the Everquest 2 timeline will be discovering the lost continent of Taelosia as see in the Gates of Discord expansion to the original game. I could be wrong… namely because I was not actually playing EQ at that time, but based on some of the artwork I remember… these odd tribal lizardish men look to fit that theme. I am not sure but I believe Taelosia is the last major landmass that has not made an apperance at least in part in the broken world setting. It is good to see that they have a long range plan of where to take the game next. I still would love to get a trip back to the moon however.

Wrapping Up

I am looking forward to seeing the actual Everquest Next announcement today around noonish pst. Additionally from Quake Con there is supposed to be a live demo of Elder Scrolls Online at 1:30 EDT so that should be awesome as well. I will likely be listening to both in the background as I work on various things today. I really hope that both are as awesome as I have built them up to be in my head. I hope you all have a great Friday, and that it leads to a great weekend. Hopefully other than picking up around the house and doing a few chores mine is pretty relaxing. Tonight at 8pm CDT House Stalwart is hosting a League of Legends beginner night for anyone that wants to get their feet wet, so that should be enjoyable. It has been so long since I have played that I am really looking forward to doing it for a few hours.

Fifteen Years

August 1, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I am struggling a wee bit to figure out what exactly to write about… so as a result I am just starting typing hoping something good comes out in the process. Yesterday was a fairly rough day as we were dealing with the fallout of rolling out a major system at work. As a result I spent most of the day grinding away trying to fix a few issues that had sprung up in the process. I rolled out one of the fixes, with another one for today that needs a lot of involvement from the customers. I decided it was far too big a can of worms to delve into late in the day.

Raincheck

I will admit yesterday during the day I had some seriously grand designs on what Wednesday night would look like. I had intended to pull together hunt rifts or even break up into 5 man teams and do some dungeoneering, but none of that really happened. For whatever reason my dinner last night just was not really sitting with me all that well, and I as a result didn’t really feel up to rallying the troops in some grand adventure. So as a result no real overarching mission for the night really occurred and I feel like I failed the guild a little bit.

What did happen however is that we knocked out two “kill 1000 planar creature” guild quests. So while we were not all in the same place, guild members were all over the world assisting in that purpose. I know Rae and I were camped out in Cape Jule at one of the source wells and we decimated what felt like thousands of fire elementals over the course of a few hours. Additionally there were little pockets of guild members in other places working away on invasion mobs all of them contributing to the total kill count.

So while we may not have been doing what I had intended, the guild as a whole did end up working towards a specific mission it seems like. After we knocked out the second of the planar creature quests, I joined up with Thalen and helped ferry out the lower level Rae and Tibuant to Steppes of Infinity to do an advanced crafting rift. I am hoping that someday we can do an entire night of these. They really provide a massive amount of materials for the crafters, and I can remember going out to Ember Isle before the expansion and doing entire nights of various people summoning thing.

The Best Loot

Since I was insanely busy yesterday… I really had zero time to catch up on my RSS feed. This morning when trying to figure out what to write about I ended up flipping through a few posts. One of them that caught my attention was from Keen and Graev posing the question… where should the best loot come from? I have some very specific thoughts about this honestly, so I figured it would be a good thing to rattle on about for a few. Ultimately I don’t think there should be one single place to get the best loot. I feel as though that has been part of the problem all along in these games is that there is generally one specific place to get all the best gear.

I feel as though there should be multiple paths to obtain really good gear for your character. Even if you are not raiding, you want to feel like you are constantly progressing your character to being able to doing bigger and better things. So I feel as though there should be viable gearing options from raiding, pvp, questing and crafting. Each path should provide similar quality rewards but involve vastly different activities. I see Raiding and PVP as the brute force approach to gearing.. you get in… kill some stuff and get loot quickly. Whereas the crafting and questing routes take far more time and commitment but you get to the end goal of nice gear eventually.

I remember how mystical the original Epic quests were in Everquest 1, and how they involved pulling together your entire guild to try and help one player get an item. Similarly in Everquest 2 they rolled out the heritage quests and eventually epic weapon quests that involved going on these amazingly drawn out adventures to obtain a mythical item. Why did this design stop? Why are there not entire sets of gear that you can quest for that involve multiple steps, figuring out riddles, solving puzzles, and eventually collecting another piece of a fabled gear set. This is really the gearing route that has been missing in games.

Additionally I see that crafting would be very similar but take a slightly different spin. To get the “end game” gear you would go through a series of quests to gather and refine the best materials, learn recipes from ancient trainers, and maybe factioning up with some kind of crafting guild. The end result would be the guild helping you craft the pieces that you could not yourself. Again however the final result is a long process that lets a player build up to end game gear. My biggest concern with crafting as the key to end game gear is that generally it means that a few crafters have access to the best patterns and the server as a whole suffers in the pocket book from that. I feel a more personal crafting path would benefit players more, like this NPC crafting guild approach.

Ultimately in my perfect game I would see all four of these paths to glory. Raiding and PVP provide the quicker and easier way to the good gear, whereas crafting and questing provide a much longer and more arduous approach but still provide the same payoff in the end. It is not to say that a player cannot mix and match these processes as well. One of the biggest frustrations as a raider is when that one slot that you have needed for months refuses to drop. If you had a way to embark upon a quest or rally crafting resources to fill that slot, I am sure most raiders would do so in a heartbeat. I think the real challenge is to treat all players as equals, instead of giving the development nod to one specific segment of them.

Fifteen Years

Today is a fairly auspicious occasion, and I figure I will close out todays posting by sharing it with you. Fifteen years ago today my wife and I got married in a very untraditional fashion completely fitting the two of us. It boggles the mind to think it is that long ago. We got together in 1996 and spent the last two years of college together, eventually moving in together when I woke up one morning to find my rat fink of a room mate moving out on me… because he had not been paying his half of the rent. Me, my wife and her roommate all moved in together and I literally spent the end of my college days living out an episode of threes company.

My family and hers were like oil and water… with the primarchs of each family constantly butting heads. I was raised Catholic and she Baptist… and my Mother and her Father nearly came to blows each time they were put in the same room. We wanted a simple wedding, outdoors… which quickly became insane as my mother started wanting to invite all sorts of bizarre guests like my fourth grade teachers. Additionally my mother wanted us to have TWO weddings… one with a priest in the Catholic church… and then the outdoor wedding.

Then there was the issue of which father would actually walk her down the aisle. Her step father was a quiet and loving man, and was one of the most amazing men I have ever known. Her biological father I have come to love, but at the time was extremely showy and overbearing… and would have made a very public spectacle if he did not get the honor. Whereas her step father would have likely been extremely hurt were he not the one to do it… but never would have let on or shown it. Essentially we had a logistical nightmare on our hands and no matter which way we turned… we were going to hurt someone.

Fifteen years ago today we took our first act of defiance as a couple and decided to piss everyone involved off and elope. We gathered up all the necessary bits of information needed to get married in the state of Oklahoma and found a wedding chapel in town. I jokingly say we were married at the House of Vacuums, because the chapel was a fairly nondescript building directly around the corner from there. I called my cousin and my wife called her best friend, and they stood as witnesses, and after a short service with a very nice female minister we were wed.

While this is a fairly untraditional beginning it fits the two of us extremely well. Neither of us are terribly showy people, and both of us rather severe introverts. I’m a geek and she is a nerd and together we have made a pretty amazing life together. I love her dearly and cannot imagine having spent the last fifteen years any other way. I hope the next fifteen years go as easily as these last ones have. There are times when I sit back and think to myself… man you have an awesome life, and in a huge part it is entirely because of her. She helps me stay grounded and is the voice of reason behind all my potentially poor choices. We make a pretty great team.

Wrapping Up

Well I have a ton of things to do today, so I need to be getting on the road. I have no clue what we will be doing for our anniversary, quite honestly it all depends on how both of our days go. She is already back to school and working every day since she wears a bunch of administrative type hats. At the minimum we will probably go out to eat together but not really do much celebration until the weekend. I hope you all have a great day… and to my wife who I know will be reading this later… I love you and happy anniversary.

Story Problems

July 31, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning cadets… welcome to the flight deck… err I mean… never mind. It is in fact another morning, and I may or may not have actually gotten some sleep last night. Enough that I was able to wake up ahead of the alarm clock and get a minor head start on the day… that I have gloriously squandered. I have a huge day ahead of me, namely that I have to fix an issue that I did not realize was broken until yesterday. The old process is a rats nest of ancient visual basic… so here’s hoping I can gut it and replace it with something that works better.

Story Problems

Yesterday Syp from Bio Break posted an article that rang true for me, called Living Story, Dead Interest. In the article he talks about how the whole “living story” construct in Guild Wars 2 seems to be lacking any real traction for him. That the rapid fire biweekly story changes are happening too fast for him to really know what is going on in that world. Based on the comments to the post including one from me… it seems like there is a wide variety of players that just are not getting into the direction that Arena Net has taken the game.

Ultimately for me my malaise with Guild Wars 2 goes a little bit deeper than this. There are so many things I like about this game. I think the world is gorgeous and does an amazing job of disguising that it is running on a relatively primate graphics engine compared to its peers. I think the combat is fun and easy to get into and gives an almost arcade quality to the experience. I love the changes they made to inventory management, and I love the ability to dump your crafting materials in the bank wherever you happen to be… and then later access your bank from every crafting machine in the world.

The problem is… even with all this good.. I just simply do not care about the world. It is wild and expansive… and feels completely dead to me. There are interesting races and locations, but I don’t feel like I know anything about them. The game chose to abolish two things… roles and quests, but the problem I have is that in neither case did they really replace them with something anywhere near as engaging. I am one of those people who actually does at least skim through quests as I am doing them. I feel they give me a sense of purpose out in the world.

In the world of Guild Wars 2… I can’t even recall the name of the world mind you… I feel like I have no purpose at all. My entire gaming experience is about popping around the world and performing whatever task is needed to check off various flavored dingbats on my map. The story just is not there for me, and the class quest line story is too few and far between to really matter. I don’t really feel like I care about any of the cast of characters I am supposed to. I don’t like the characters, I occasionally like that I recognize the person doing the voice acting.

Back to the problem at hand… the Living Story. My big issue is that Arena Net has chosen to create a series of disposable content, rather than fleshing out the world over time and making the entire experience permanently richer for it. Additionally I hate all content that expires.. I hate feeling like I am in a rush to experience it. The end result is not me being pulled into the content and running around in a mad dash to try and experience everything… but instead me simply giving up on the game entirely. Right now I end up logging in roughly once a month when the whim hits me… I kill a few things and log out, never really finding a purpose for playing.

Battle Bards

I tweeted about this yesterday, and often times retweet each time a new Battle Bards post is made, but I feel like this does not give enough credit to just how amazing this podcast is. One of my vices is gaming music, namely the grand sweeping tracks that are usually associated with massively multiplayer online games. Twice a month the Battle Bards… Syp, MMOGC, and Syl bring you a themed show delving into the truly excellent music that accompanies your gaming experience. If you are not listening to each new show you are really missing out because this is one of the best podcasts out there.

This latest post was especially nostalgic for me in that they chose to focus on the music of Everquest 2. I have so much love for the world of Norrath, and a good part of this is wrapped up in the music that has always been associated with it. I fell in love with Everquest the first time I heard the opening theme… it was so grand and sweeping and did not feel like any other game music I had experienced. Sure it sounds dated now but at the time it was a midi masterpiece, and I love the way that Everquest 2 drew upon this same musical style for its opening theme.

One of the interesting side commentary I had while listening to this podcast surrounds their feeling about the theme for Antonica. While everyone seemed to like the track, they did not feel that it sounded like an outdoor zone theme. It was commented that it sounded like something from a movie soundtrack and not that of a video game. While I agree with the last statement, I feel that EQ2 outdoor zones have a very movie aspect to them.

It would not be a fitting track for the scale of say a World of Warcraft zone, but for Everquest 2 it works well. Essentially all of these outdoor zones are on a scale that just isn’t seen in other games. Antonica for example is roughly 5-6 times the size of Elwynn Forest in World of Warcraft. It encompasses numerous distinct biomes, is the entry way to half a dozen dungeons and instanced zones. The sheer scale is very movie like and dramatic, so as you are roaming around it… this jaunty theatrical music seems to fit.

Ultimately this has always been the overwhelming thing that I loved about Everquest 2. Everything about the world feels epic in proportions. There is a dungeon out in in the Jarsath Wastes on Kunark called Chelsith that you have to approach by water. As you are swimming out you approach what appears to be a rock partially submerged, but as you dip under the water you see that this is the tip of the head of an ancient Iksar statue that has been long submerged… and that the entrance to Chelsith is t the base of its feet. There are so many moments like that, that just say over and over again… this world is massive.

Stalwart Online

Yesterday we soft launched our new guild website, and are super pumped that it is starting to get some traction among our users. It is still very much a work in progress and there are various bits and pieces that we want to do to expand it. The graphical style and skin work is 100% the product of my co-worker and our master guild hall decorator… Audrae. I know she has some future plans like to make the background swap each time the page loads, and have it pull from a pool of user submitted scenic shots. Right now we have a promotional shot from Elder Scrolls Online as a static background, but that should change before long.

Essentially to move to a more living and easier to use website, we needed to completely abandon our previous site. As a result we are soft launching this site and will eventually set the old forums into a read-only mode. They will always be accessible off the archives link in the menu, but this is only to keep from losing almost a decade worth of posts and material. Once we have made this shift we will redirect housestalwart.com to point to the new site as well as stalwartonline.com.

Essentially this is a revision in a long line of attempts to move Stalwart from being a game centric community to a larger multi-gaming community. We have had a presence in almost every game released in recent years, but the previous forums were extremely World of Warcraft focused. Despite my efforts to juggle the content in a way to keep them from being that… the old format just did not work that well. Now we are switching to a more discussion and category based system that lists all the new content equally without burying it under a series of folders.

Here is hoping that our members will like the switch and that the new forums will revitalize our community. Over the last year or so the old forums have been completely dead. As a result users have just stopped checking in over time. Here is hoping that the new content and new approach can draw them back out of the shadows and participating again. Our Rift guild has been wildly successful, and my hope is to harness this new energy to do some really cool stuff. In the past two week we went from 5 members and questioning if this was actually a good idea… to over 40 members and wondering what exactly we are going to do with everyone. It is definitely a good thing.

Wrapping Up

Well I have rattled on again and squandered whatever time I gained by getting up before the alarm. I need to get off here and finish getting ready. This morning I need to wake my wife up and make sure she is getting ready because she has a few things that she needs to get done today. I have a mountain of work awaiting me when I get to the office, and I feel like it is going to take every last bit of it to get through the day. I hope you all have great days… and feel free to check out our new website. I feel like the majority of my readers are guild members already.

Hot Tub Party

July 30, 2013 by Belghast

Morning again all you readers in readerland. I actually managed to get some sleep last night, and actually slept pretty soundly. As a result I no longer feel like death warmed over. Making it through yesterday was a bit of a struggle, and having sit in meetings and think intelligible thoughts a constant challenge. There was one point when I was in the middle of a diatribe about some programming theory…. when I just lost my train of thought. Poof it was gone… and I had to fumble around a bit to try and figure out where I was going with what I had just said.

Hot Tub Party

Last night was a pretty crazy night for House Stalwart in Rift. Firstly earlier in the day I found out that longtime Stalwart member Nikajah plays on our server, so I got to catch up with her and her new mommy-dom. She is not sure yet about abandoning the guild she is in, which is completely understandable… but she is at least now joining the Stalwart server channel. Additionally her husband Ceredith is playing as well, but he seems to be in a much more serious guild. Very cool to have contact with them again nonetheless.

A little later in the night I noticed an unfamiliar and unguilded face lurking in the server channel. After taking a moment to query… I found out it was in fact a MoxieDoodle. I remembered her talking about popping by in a Twitter conversation last week, so I quickly snagged her into the guild. I got her acclimatized and introduced to the guild… and tried to force some upgrades on her like a good crafter. She was pumped that we had also managed to snag a Cortical… who is very much awesome people.

It was around or about this time that Nubzy started bemoaning the fact that Valkkon, Ilyenna and Arilith were playing on another server. I told her that she should totally fix that, and next thing I know… she did. The three of them were longtime Stalwarts or at least members of our extended community of friends over on Argent Dawn. The guild as a whole has been so much like rebuilding the best possible home we have ever had. Its like this crazy pipe dream of having everyone awesome in one place at the same time… and it seems to be working out.

Since the three of them are serious roleplayers, I knew they had to see the Guild Hall. First they were shocked that Rift had such a thing… next they were amazed at every turn they took as we explored it together. The above photo is an impromptu Hot Tub party as we explored one of Rae’s newer additions to the Hall. It was kinda funny… everyone just automatically sat in the pool… well admittedly I tried /sleep first… but realized my head was underwater. We hang out up there catching up for awhile before continuing on with the tour.

I am so immensely happy at how well the guild has worked out. At first I had my doubt as to whether or not our guild would gain traction, and if breaking away onto our own was a good thing. Any of those doubts have long since exploded as we are growing the way we have always grown… organically through friends and family. Delevax quoted field of dreams to me the other day “build it and they will come”… and to some extent that is exactly what has happened. To give evidence of how awesome the guild is… at one point last night there were four women involved in a rather heated discussion about who the best Doctor was over guild chat.

Forum Reboot

One of the things we have been working on over the last week or so is a ground up reboot of the Stalwart forums. Previously Housestalwart.com was designed to be an extremely WoW-Centric website, and over the years as we have flitted from game to game I have attempted to make it less so… but never really succeeded on that goal. Ultimately we had a divide between the players that ONLY cared about World of Warcraft and the nomadic group of players that cared about everything else.

With the reboot we are trying to make the forum feel much more holistic and discussion based. There will be topics you can assign a discussion to, but not the hard folder structure that a forum usually has. Additionally there is a really nifty “Activity” feed that is somewhat like a guild specific twitter, as players can post quick blurbs and other players can comment on them. I feel as a whole it will be a much more social aware design.

To that goal, instead of signing up for a forum specific account we have wired it to allow players to log in with their Google accounts in addition to being able to a forum login. The Google account would be used only for authentication, and it would allow you to alias out the name to whatever you are more comfortable using. For example I log in with my named Google account and it gets Aliased on the forum to Belghast. I feel this is going to work much better for the majority of players, making it easier to remember their forum information.

Our hope is that over the next couple of days we will have the site ready to soft launch. At that point it should be open for business more or less. Eventually the goal is to lock down the previous forum into read only mode… and it will then become the “Archives” allowing players to browse old conversations if they choose. When this happens the HouseStalwart.com will redirect to the new forums and WoW.Tulsagamers.com will be the permanent address of the archives. I will of course post again when it is ready for use.

Resolution… of a sort

It turns out that when you subscribe to Rift you do not in fact get your bags and character slots unlocked. This is extremely frustrating and I feel that this whole process should be better explained or at least more transparent. The problem at hand was that we had a guild member that was caught in limbo, and subscribing pretty much spent all the disposable money she had for the month. I mulled around a bit to try and figure an option and finally landed upon one.

There have been multiple times in the past that Trion has given away complete copies of Rift at various conventions. I know for a fact that they have done this a few times at Pax and at least once at GenCon. Since I have a bunch of friends that are convention goers… I thought I would throw out a call and see if any of them still had one of these codes. Sure enough, yesterday evening Tam did some digging through his bins of old convention swag and found a code for a full version of the game.

I passed this off to the player in Limbo and sure enough… boom she had full bag slots and character slots again. The frustrating thing however is that without our deep network of friends… this would not have been possible. There needs to be a much clearer way to purchase the game and apply the code to your account. I found out this morning that we have another guildie in this state of limbo… and while I was able to get ONE Pax code out of my network of friends… I sincerely doubt I will be able to find a second one. However if you are reading this and have one… please let me know… he will be equally appreciative I am certain.

Morning Timeouts

Over the last few weeks something odd has been happening to me… and I just confirmed with CorticalScrub that it is happening to him as well. Essentially as I start my morning post, I alt tab and fire up the Rift client. This has been habit for some time, because often times I need to take a screenshot that I may have forgotten to… or at the very least it lets me claim my daily gifts. However over the last few weeks in the morning I get what seems to be a timeout. So I spend my time working on my post and flipping over periodically trying to reconnect.

This seems to continue every morning until 6:30-6:45 central time, and then magically goes away. I have never had this issue at any other point in the day. I have done some searching on the forums and have yet to find a definitive explanation. If anyone knows what exactly is happening here I would love to know. Do we have just a ton of non-US primetime players out there that are busying out the login server? Is this just a case of everyone waking up at the same time? I am super curious what is causing the phenomena. If I ever find an answer I will post it.

Wrapping Up

Well I have a few other topics that I had originally planned on writing about… but I will save those as ammo for another day. I need to get up and around and gather the trash. Additionally since my cleaners was without power the last time I went… I really need to take the big blue bag of dirty work clothing there to get processed. I hope you all have a great day, and please let me know if you have any spare Pax or GenCon keys. I will be sure to find them good homes as players are dismayed by the fact that subscribing to Rift does not in fact make your account whole again.