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.

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.

Good morning all you people in internetland… that’s right the forced cheerfulness means I had another one of my bouts of insomnia.  Last night it was not so much that I had another panic attack, it was more one of my classic “can’t shut brain off” nights.  I wound up getting back out of bed and coming upstairs and building in Minecraft.  After about an hour that calmed me down enough to be able to actually sleep.  But of course this will put me a little over an hour under my normal sleep schedule… and I am feeling immensely groggy this morning.  Coffee… take me a way!

Scavenger of Hunts

Yesterday I essentially did what I stated I was going to do.  I knocked out my guild harvesting daily and then proceeded to start working my way through the old world summerfest scavenger hunts.  Overall they were pretty fun, a few of them were more tedious than others.  Several of them taught me things about the zones they were in that I didn’t know.  For example I had no clue that all of the lakes in Moonshade are actually connected by a series of waterways, and that you can swim from one end to the other without breaking the surface.

The most annoying of them was a quest that starts in Iron Pine Peaks at the Chancel of Labors and involves taking ice cream to a NPC in Shimmersand before it melts.  You can teleport between the zones without issue, but my problem is that I always seem to get lost in Shimmersand and never can figure out which path goes where.  So it took a couple of tries for me… and after failing the first time I spent a little bit of effort trying to figure out the best route to the quest target.

After wrapping these up I started in on the newer scavenger hunts, starting with the continent of Dusken.  The first couple were relatively easy and just involved roaming around until you found the correct item.  When I got to Seratos things got considerably more annoying.  That task involved collecting a “Mystic Skull”, and pretty much all of them in the zone are hidden behind some sort of jumping puzzle.  I got mine from above a Storm Legion camp, that involved a mixture of off mount and mounted jumps to reach the prize.  I never could actually get up where the skull itself was… but I was able to get within reach of being able to loot it.

From what I have read, it seems as thought Steppes of Infinity is the king of all jumping puzzles…  so that one pretty much halted my progress for the evening.  Tonight hopefully I will get in at some point and continue on with doing the Brevane Scavenger hunts.  I just reached a point where I was done with mini-games for the day.  I am honestly shocked that each individual scavenger hunter quest does not reward better than it actually does.  When you complete each zone objective you only get 25 Summerfest Merit Badges.  This seems a bit daunting when the extra happy spiffy rings are 3000.

Spires of Bone

Seratos… otherwise known as “I hope you like random spires of bone and flesh and the color purple”.  This zone is pretty much a love song to a Death Rift.  So much of what is going on here… would give me nightmares if I stopped to think about it.  Pretty much the most creepy thing in the zone are these mountain ridges… that when you get up closer to them turn out to be giant molars.  Essentially this is the land of the shapers, that harvest flesh and then repurpose it into new shapes.  Originally you are thinking… okay they build undead abominations and such…  but no it doesn’t stop there.

Pretty much EVERYTHING in the zone is made of bone or flesh.  Nothing says death like a nice rotting flesh armoire.  I have this odd relationship with the zone… so much of it tweaks the “cool” factor for my inner thirteen year old that still wants everything to be covered in skulls and crossbones.  On the other side, the adult in me finds this whole theme deeply unsettling and something out of a Lovecraft or Barker novel.  At least there are no skinless corpses walking around, because seriously that would push it over the edge for me.

My favorite of the abominations… are these creepy floating things with two giant arms and a scorpion like tail…  and instead of a head they have another small pair of arms holding a weird china geisha mask in place where a head should be.  Whoever designed that thing is seriously disturbed… and also rather brilliant.  Quite honestly every single thing in Seratos is equally twisted, and it gives the entire zone this deeply disturbing feeling as you level through it.  After I finished with the warm and happy summerfest adventures…  this is where I chose to go to work on Belgrave my rogue.

Seratos also has the distinction of being the first major step up in content difficulty on the new continents.  I noticed this on my warrior, and it even seems moreso on my rogue.  The mobs seem to have more hitpoints, take longer to kill and do nastier things to me.  I remember a similar step up in difficulty around 58 in Morban or Kingsward.  The game is not playing around, and will happily dismember you…  which is fitting for the zone I am leveling through.

I managed to ding 55 and hopped over to Belghast and crafted myself a nifty set of swords.  You can see them in the above screenshot… the Insidious Vicious Karthite Saber.  They have a crazy glowing techblade feel to them, which feels fitting for the forbidden tech aspect of the entire Storm Legion expansion.  They look especially slick when I have them enchanted with my lighting graphic planar dexterity buff.  I pretty much worked on this guy up until the point I took my evening walk.

No Trials, No Tricks, No Traps?

Normally I am the biggest cheerleader for Trion on the planet.  While I have played Rift off and on over the last two years… there has only been about a three month period that I was not actively subscribed to it.  I can go on and on about how awesome a company it is.. and how good of an experience it is playing it.  But be warned I have a bit of a rant to get off my chest.  There is still a support ticket in play mind you… so this all may resolve itself, but I still feel like I need to say something.

I am an organizer of people…  I seem to have the ability to gather up a bunch of awesome folks and get them working towards a focused goal.  As a result in the last week or so House Stalwart on Faeblight has gone from 5 people to roughly 35.  A lot of these individuals were former Rift players, and their transition has been fairly seamless.  Something of note… almost every single one of our guild members is an actively paying Patron.  The problem I have run into is with the transition of players who never played Rift before, and are just now giving it a shot.

It was the assumption of pretty much everyone in my guild that when you started paying for Patron, you would unlock a lot of the ways your free to play account is gimped.  That it would give you access to the bank and to the auction house… and more importantly restore full access to your character slots and bag slots.  Having only 2 character slots and only 3 bag slots is pretty significantly and painfully gimped…  but it is something you would expect for not being a paying customer.  However when you start giving a monthly commitment of money… you expect those shackles to go away.

This was the assumption I had… and the assumption the other members of my guild had.  So last night when one of our new to Rift members chose to bump up to Patron level access and start subscribing to the game… we were all greatly perplexed to find out that while it unlocked her bank and auction house access… it did absolutely NOTHING for her gimped number of bag slots and character slots.  We all suggested that she try logging out and back in… and that did nothing.  We had her submit a service ticket… and got back a completely bullshit brushoff answer linking to two topics that had nothing to do with what was going on.

We told her to resubmit the ticket, because seriously the support answer was bullshit and not related in any way at all.  After doing this she started doing some reading.  Quite honestly everything on the forums was confusing… but it sounded like to restore her full access she would need to buy something they kept referring to as a “game pack”.  The problem is… there is no way through the accounts page or the in game store to actually “buy” the game.  This whole thing is a bit of a mess… if you become a paying customer in a free to play game… you expect to be restored to the same level as other paying customers.

I still love Trion… and I still feel overall that the free to play conversion is extremely good for former Rift players.  However it is starting to seem that the “No Trials. No Tricks. No Traps” mantra is a bit hypocritical when dealing with brand new players.  This needs to be fixed.  When a player starts subscribing to your game, they should have their account restored to a level that any sane and rational person would expect.  Either that or allow them to have a one stop easy access to bump their account up to the same level as someone that has paid for the game.  Buying those extra character slots and bag slots is a little egregious when someone is already committing to pay you a monthly fee for access to your otherwise free game.

Here is hoping that the second support ticket will get some resolution, and that this really is not the way they choose to do business.  As a guild leader and organizer of people… I have to say this will seriously throw a massive monkey wrench in my ability to get friends that have never tried the game into it.  I will now have to tell them that it will cost X dollars to restore your account to a state that you will be able to play it normally with bag slots and character slots that players expect to have with a paid membership.  Here is hoping that they will listen to some reason and modify the way this works… or at the very least be a good deal more transparent about what subscribing doesn’t mean.

Wrapping Up

Well I have ran significantly over in time… and need to get on the road.  I will update you guys tomorrow either way if the support ticket was successful.  I hope you all have a great day and a great beginning of the work week.  Tonight I had planned on popping into The Secret World since there is always a critical mass playing on Monday nights.  We will have to see if I actually follow through with this, or if I instead end up back in Rift.