Tales of the Aggronaut

Sinking Sands

June 24, 2013 by Belghast

Morning is being a pain in the butt today… or at least the whole trying not to fall back asleep thing is. For whatever reason I really did not sleep that super well last night, and as a result I am super exhausted this morning. Seems like a pretty horrible way to begin a new work week, so here is hoping that I figure out what switch I need to flip in my brain to wake the hell up. The worst part is, that this is going to be an extremely stressful work week, so I have to get my act together.

The Sinking Sands

I spent a good chunk of yesterday roaming around in the Sinking Sands region of Everquest II. This has always been one of my favorite zones, and I try my best not to skip it on any characters. I have a deep nostalgia for the region in part because I spent so much time in the Desert of Ro / Oasis of Marr area in Everquest. This zone is like a nostalgic love song to the original zones, and there are so many points of reference and mobs that make an appearance.

The only real negative is that the sand giants and wraiths are no longer dread worthy encounters. I can remember the constant chorus of “Sand Giant to Docks!” as yet another one of these death machines came roaming through the zone. Almost as a callout to that era, there is the ghost of a sand giant that paths right along the dock region named “Hatar”. Additionally Lockjaw still exists, but this time has his own dungeon rather than being a world spawn that will decimate the masses.

I think one of my favorite things about the zone is it is completely flush with named spawns. Each of them drops a single type of item, in flavors designed for each type of class. So essentially if the mob drops a ring, then it will drop one for priest, warrior, scout and mage. It feels like they have increased the spawn rate of these champions, because I can remember being out in the zone for days without ever encountering “Dune Digger”, a armadillo that spawns near the ramp leading down to the beach. However over the last few days I have seen him up almost every single time I have passed his spawn point.

The Lesser Faydark

I had made my way through the major quest lines of Sinking Sands when I noticed I was sitting at level 51. I checked the wiki and sure enough that put me pretty much ideally leveled to start on Lesser Faydark. Even dating back to the original Everquest, this has been a zone I disliked. In that game it was mostly for the fact that it was populated with lots of things that could kill you almost instantly. In EQ2, it is mostly due to my general dislike of “elven” and “fae” zones, and that it is annoyingly three dimensional. It feels extremely difficult to traverse it because of the constant changes in elevation, and the tunnels that are used to connect things up.

Additionally this zone is populated with a lot of flying things… that often times do not want to lower to the ground into melee range. Since I play almost entirely melee characters it makes it an extreme pain in the butt. However since I have never really done the quest chain I figured I would follow the timeline guide and start with the correct NPC and follow it through until I just could not. So far it is every bit as annoying as I remembered… since you hop around the zone wildly.

Another reason why I tend to avoid Lesser Faydark is it is off what they call the “golden path”. Everquest has a really robust questing system, and so long as you say on the golden path you get these blue markers on your map showing you there region for a given quest. However for whatever reason they decided only to apply these tools to a specific number of zones that make up the golden path. So if you choose to stray at all, you are on your own… thankfully I also have EQ2Maps which lets me search for what mobs spawn in what region. I think that is probably the single best improvement they could do to the game, go back through and apply the golden path treatment to ALL zones.

At the point at which I ended my Everquest II journey yesterday I was almost ready to ding 54, which is not bad considering I started the day at 48. Leveling in EQ2 is just a relaxing experience for me, and that is precisely what I needed yesterday. I keep thinking I need to play the game more often, and while I always eventually cycle back around to it… I also spend a lot of time ignoring it. I have been kicking around the notion of trying to set up a rotation of games, in that I always play this game on this day. It sounds good in theory, but I am just not sure I can bring myself to follow a schedule.

Wrapping Up

This is going to be a relatively short post today, as I am still fighting sleep. I need to get up and around and hopefully woken up in the process. I hope you all have a great day, and that you are not nearly as drowsy as I am this morning. I am not sure what I will be doing tonight, either venturing back into the faydark or over in Rift leveling fishing. I have to say the patron gifts are an interesting carrot that ends up making me log into Rift every day. If you are a patron you receive a large loyalty gift every week, and a small loyalty gift everyday. They do not accrue over time, so you have to log in each day to receive it. I find myself being drawn to log in each and every day for the promise of free stuff. Speaking of which… I think I will check on that right now before I head on into work.

Foraging Sucks

June 23, 2013 by Belghast

Getting a super late start this morning because… reasons. Firstly the bed was super comfy this morning, and after not sleeping really well the last few nights I really did not want to leave it. Secondly I had to shower and get dressed and go acquire food. Thirdly my wife conned me into a trip to Wal-mart explaining that it would be less busy while folks were in church. While it might have been less busy, it was still far busier than I would have liked. But we are now back and it is 10 am and I am finally sitting down to blog.

Foraging Sucks

I have been in a really spastic way with my new laptop and wanting to download all the games and see how they run on it. However yesterday afternoon I finally settled into one for awhile. When the F2P conversion happened in Rift, one of the many things I did with my bonus shop currency was purchase Foraging and Weaponsmithing for Belghast my main. The end goal was that he would have the ability to harvest all the things, as well as be completely self sufficient in both Armorsmithing and Weaponsmithing. The reality behind this, has not been nearly as exciting as it sounds.

Essentially over the last few weeks since the conversion I have been foraging everything I could find as well as mining all the low level ores so I could level both of the new tradeskills. One of the stark realities thus far is that Foraging Sucks. It is hands down the most painful gathering profession in rift. I have never really spent much time doing it, as I always tend to focus on the armor making professions in any game. The amount of herbs that you have to pick to get skills raises just seems unbalanced when compared with butchering and mining.

It took me roughly four hours of running around high end Storm Legion zones to be able to gather enough herbs and lumber to level from 350 to 375. The problem is not necessarily the harvesting… it is trying to find the right level of herbs that give you a skill up without running into the level of herbs that are too high to pick. Essentially the storm legion foraging spawns are really really poorly designed… or at least poorly designed for someone trying to level. I remember being max level in mining before I hit level 54, so as a contrast it was so much easier.

Grandmaster Weaponsmith

It was shortly after dinging 375 foraging that I turned my focus to all the ore and lumber I had collected in the process. Within another 30 minutes I had finished leveling weaponsmithing to 375. Now I need to spend a good deal of time doing the daily quests so I can pick up those epic weapon patterns. While this is not that useful now, I am really looking forward to seeing how self sufficient I am when it comes to the next expansion. Part of me wonders if picking up outfitting, but not leveling it… would trigger the code that causes cloth to drop faster for outfitters.

Onwards to Fishing and Survival

Now my new goal is to work on leveling my fishing and survival. This pairing is an odd one as they seem to be out of sync. At 160 survival I need materials from the scarlet gorge/scarwood reach area, however at 160 fishing the optimal waters for skilling up are in Moonshade Highlands. So essentially I will be focusing on leveling the survival skills and the fishing should take care of itself. Finding shallow and deep water in the various zones is a bit of a pain also. The pool shown in the image above is one of the few deep water spawns in Scarlet Gorge… and they are way up by the entrance to Foul Cascade.

I am not sure if the shallow/deep water thing is easier if you are doing the guardian zones or not, but at this point I guess both factions are merged together. I didn’t really run into the problem until this set of zones. I have a feeling that in Moonshade the opposite problem will occur, that most of the water you find will be deep, as it tends to have ocean and lakes. Fishing is somewhat mind numbing, but it is a good activity to do while trying to catch up on recordings from the DVR.

Gold Rush

This week the Gold Rush promotion began over in EQ2 and as a result I decided to pop over and level in my Swashbuckler a bit.

If you’re a Gold Member this summer (June 21 – September 21), you will have access to a special daily spell that provides bonus coin loot (increase of 15%), an experience bump (increase of 10%), and additional mount speed (increase of 5%)! This spell grants these benefits for four (4) hours each day, all summer long! This is in addition to all of the other perks you receive with Gold membership.

You will find this spell in your hot bar or in your spell book under abilities. Look for “Gold Rush.”

With this happy little buff I decided to take Belgrifter over to the Clefts of Rujark dungeon and run around grinding the various higher level orcs for a bit. The xp gain was actually far slower than I expected, but then I realized that I had my AA slider set to 50%. Honestly I still have one of those instant 280 aa tokens that came with Chains of Eternity expansion.. so I am considering turning the AA levels off completely for awhile to maximize the xp gain. With my magical werewolf healer mercenary I was able to pretty much wreck everything in the zone.

While I didn’t end up getting an xp level, I did manage to get 3 AAs in the time spent just from killing all the named star mobs that I had not killed before. I will have to sort through the loot I got, but I didn’t see anything that was better than what I was currently wearing. I found running around the zone killing mobs a relaxing experience… that is one of the things I like most about EQ2 is that the combat is so slow paced that you can be doing something… and still do it without raising your blood pressure. It is far less twitch and far more slow and steady… and there are certain moods where that is the perfect recipe for me.

The laptop runs the game gorgeously, probably far better than any machine I have had so far. I can crank all the things up pretty much to the highest setting and just bask in the beauty of this aging game. I don’t care what people say, it still looks absolutely amazing. They do zone design better than almost anyone else. The sheer scale makes the world feel far more real than any other online game. The scale of mountains and valleys and monuments are often lost but this game feels immense.

Daily Dose of Cute

We have had bunnies in our lawn for years. I think they end up living in the hedges in the backyard, and since we don’t have much in the way of flowers… or any sort of garden… they have been a welcome addition to our lawn. However in all this time I have never seen a baby, even though I know they must be producing several for them to survive every year. Today my neighbor’s son was mowing our lawn, and he almost hit this little guy with the mower. Thankfully he is a nature loving boy, and is always looking for wildlife… he shut down the mower, picked the stunned little bunny up and brought it around to show us.

Is that not the most precious thing you have ever seen? Apparently at this size they are fully weaned from their mother and essentially self sufficient. We didn’t spend too much time with the bunny, as we didn’t want our human scent to rub off on it too much. Additionally we placed it carefully under a bush near where it was found. The little guy hopped around happily in the shade and hopefully will stay there til our lawn is finished being mowed.

I really hope this little guy makes it through the summer. In years past I have had to fish the occasional bunny out of the pool… and it is always something that tears me up inside a little when it happens. Hopefully it will remain a relatively moist year. If it gets hotter I might have to try and figure out a way to give them a water dish they can more safely drink from. Because seriously… who cannot love something this cute?

Wrapping Up

Well I have rambled on at length for a long while this morning. I hope you all have a great day and get accomplished whatever needs to happen on your Sunday. I know we likely have to run around a bit later and continue with the whole “preparing for wife to leave” thing again. Luckily this time it is a much shorter trip, so hopefully it won’t be nearly as stressful on me.

Lenovo Y500

June 22, 2013 by Belghast

Today we return to the normal morning routine of blogging after I wake up. Sadly this morning it just took me a really long time to get up and around. Yesterday when I got home from work I was feeling awesome, and made all these plans for today. This morning it feels as though the world has been dropped on top of me… and I want to do exactly nothing. Here is hoping a revisit from my old friend caffeine will jump start my systems. I had been trying to stay away from caffeine since I had been having heart palpitations, but this morning I need to use and abuse my old friend.

Lenovo Y500

At this point I have had roughly half a week to get used to my new laptop. My last three blog posts were written using it in fact. I have to say overall I am absolutely loving it. I had been concerned about whether or not I could get used to the smaller form factor, but right now I am finding I greatly prefer it. I loved my Asus g73sw but it was really heavy laptop… when I carried it in my backpack it was a noticeable strain on my back. Additionally it was a pain to try and balance on my lapboard as I barely had any room for my mouse.

The Y500 on the other hand I have worlds of room and could bump up a larger mousing surface and still have plenty of room on my lapboard. Additionally it doesn’t feel as heavy on my legs as the Asus was… after using it for awhile on the sofa while reclined, when I got up my thighs would be almost cramping. The fact that the Y500 packs all of its power in a 6 lb package… I would say 8 if you are carrying the power brick with you… is really remarkable. This is no “ultrabook” but it is seriously compact for the gaming juggernaut it is.

The Performance

Laptop graphics will always be slightly worse than their desktop counter parts. This has been my experience with every laptop I have ever owned. So if you can run the game at high on your desktop… the equivalent card will likely only be able to run it at medium in a mobile form factor. However I have been pleased with just how well the dual video cards in this model perform together. In the past I had one of the early SLI configurations, and I was not terribly happy with it. It always felt like I got far better performance with just a single card and SLI disabled than I did with SLI mode engage in most games.

That luckily seems to be in the past as I have gotten really solid performance out of all of the regular games I play. Rift runs happily on very high settings and the game looks amazing, and I am able to run around smoothly in the content at 1920×1080. Additionally a bellweather for me has been Star Wars: The Old Republic. My desktop has always run the game on high settings and had plenty of graphical processing power to spare. However the Nvidia 460m in the Asus laptop struggled with the game mercilessly.

I could never quite find a setting that made things feel smooth, even on the lowest of possible graphical settings. That said I have heard a lot of problems with the 460 and that game even on desktops. This laptop however runs Star Wars: The Old Republic happily at high settings on 1920×1080 resolution and a framerate that fluctuates between 45 and 60 frames per second. Quite honestly every game I have thrown against it, it has done well with. I feel like the last few days have been mostly taken up by downloading a game and seeing how it runs on the Y500. But I guess that is pretty average when you have a new toy to test out.

The Features

lenovo-laptop-ideapad-y500-4side-15L

12 GB DDR PC3-12800 Ram
15.6” LED Screen – 1920×1080 max resolution
Intel Core i7-3630QM 2.4 ghz Quad Core Processor
Windows 8 64 bit
1 TB 5400 rpm hybrid hard drive with 16 GB SSD Cache
Dual Nvidia GeForce GT 650M Video Cards with 2 GB DDR5 Ram per card
lots of other little things that wont seem nearly as important

I have to say it is the dual video cards that really peaked my interest. The concept of a SLI setup in a laptop just seemed grossly improbable. But so far the laptop does an amazing job of what it does. You would think that it gets absolutely molten hot with all that processing power. However the cards run relatively quiet and while it gets warm it is nothing uncomfortable. This is in a large part due to the massive cooling system. If you look in the above picture the big trapezoid shaped grill is loaded with fans.

The panel can be removed for easy cleaning… however the Y500 goes one step further. The other day when I was fiddling around in some of the preinstalled software, I noticed a power control system that had something interesting… fan cleaning mode. It is exactly what it sounds like… your system fans turn backwards for a short period of time extremely rapidly… sounds kinda like a jet fighter taking off when it happens… but it spins free any dust clinging to the blades. I thought this was pretty innovative and a feature I wished I had seen in other laptops.

The Price

The laptop is definitely not cheap, but it is a bargain for the features included. This performs as well as entry level Alienware laptops for like half the price. Essentially you have two options for buying the laptop. You can get it from one of the various discount resellers… I ended up getting mine for Tiger Direct, but you can actually get it cheaper overall from Lenovo. The problem with ordering from Lenovo they are currently having like a one month lead time before they actually ship your laptop.

Lenovo Y500 Series Laptop

Additionally I decided to order my laptop refurbished. I have always had good luck with refurbished products in the past. Some people shy away from it, but realistically it is the only time you can purchase electronics and know for certain that thorough testing has been performed on it, and that it will be guaranteed to power on. usually electronics are unit tested, and your individual unit may or may not have had a full battery of tests performed. Anyways… usually buying refurbished also knocks about 100 bucks off the price… and since this was a replacement for a dead laptop… and not a planned expense, dropping the price in any way I could is a huge plus.

This is the precise laptop I ordered, and it has actually come down in price a little bit.

That is always the way it goes. You buy something and it drops in price, but fortunately it was only like $50. So far like I said I am really loving the laptop and it has been able to do anything I can think to throw at it. Essentially if you are looking for a solid gaming laptop I would highly suggest it. I know a few other gamers in my little circle have purchased them and had similar glowing reviews. I never really would have considered Lenovo capable of creating a solid gaming machine, but they somehow have. I would be interesting to see if they follow through and start releasing prebuilt gaming desktops as well.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully I did not just bore you with a lot of hardware review… but I thought it would be good to do a deep dive into my experience. Also as I said I have mostly been testing the laptop rather than seriously gaming the last few days. I hope you all have an amazing weekend and I hope I manage to get up and around and productive. At this point I am going to go back to more testing of the laptop and maybe even a little actual gameplay.

Bel VS F2P

June 20, 2013 by Belghast

I am breaking the mold yet again tonight and knocking out a topic that I have been kicking around in my head all day. Quite honestly the topic is not my own, it was suggested to me by Syl of MMO Gypsy. There is a really interesting discussion on this weeks Cat Context podcast between Syl and Liore about their feelings regarding free to play games. I started the discussion up on twitter as well, because I tend to align more to Syl’s thought in that free to play is generally a good thing.

The Non-Believer

The funny thing is… I did not always have this opinion. In fact there was a time I was pretty vehemently anti-free-to-play model. I even believe at one point I wrote a blog post about the fact that I did not believe the industry pundits that all games would be switching over to free-to-play in order to survive. I really disliked the thought of a pure free to play game.. and in part this was due to some bad experiences with early games in the genre.

My first real taste of the free to play genre was with the blatant wow clone Runes of Magic. During one of my bored with WoW phases, I ventured out… downloaded it and tried to get into it. The problem is, the game at its core was this fairly horrific grindfest, that could only be sped up by spending “diamonds” on the in game store. It had some other fairly egregious money sinks in that most of the mounts that were available were “rental” only, giving you it for a fixed number of hours at a time. Some of the only permanent mounts came from… you guessed it the cash shop.

Later on I had gotten into the closed beta for a pretty nifty game called Allods. It was essentially a very unique looking russian/steampunky wow like game. I played the heck out of it in beta and really enjoyed it, and was looking forward to launch. Then towards the end of the test period they introduced their take on the cash shop. I don’t remember a ton of details other than the fact that so many things were pay-walled behind real money transactions. One of the mini-games i refuse to play in an MMO… is inventory maintenance… and the only real way to increase your bag space was through dumping cash into the in game store.

Both of these games served to give me an extremely negative impression of what this whole free to play genre was. Combine with the fact that the servers I was playing on seemed to be entirely populated with kids… aka people unable to buy their own subscriptions to games… I thought subscription gaming was the only way to maintain a thriving community. As new free to play conversions entered the market, I would give them a spin, especially if it was a game I had played before. Every time I would walk away disgusted by the horrible community I found there.

What Changed?

When Everquest 2 first launched its forray into free to play, I really paid no attention to it. Essentially it held nothing for me. Gameplay was essentially corralled off to its own dedicated server, so you could not play with your friends currently subscribed to the game. Additionally the various tiers of access felt extremely punitive, locking away functionality behind numerous paid gates. However after a period of time they decided to open up the free to play options on all servers. This is the point at which I started to notice changes in the game.

Firstly the station cash shop is pretty amazing, stocking all manner of things from nice cosmetic armors, mounts, amazing houses, and various buff potions. With my 500 station cash a month stipend from subscribing, I was able to pick up all sorts of things that improved my enjoyment of the game. Additionally I noticed the server populations start increasing, and these players were not necessarily the “unwashed masses” I had seen in my earlier ventures into free to play games. Some of these folks were really solid community folks, that just lacked the ability to commit to a month subscription.

The game was still extremely limiting for free to play players, but at least you got to play on the established servers with existing players. The guild I was a member of saw a massive influx in recruits and at one point we had 20-30 players on some nights during the peak of this influx. Additionally it felt like we were seeing a faster speed at getting cool features out to the players like the dungeon creator, eqemote, and new content areas like sirens grotto and skyshrine. It felt like there was a new kind of free to play player that I had not seen before, one that just wanted to play the game without commitment and had no qualms about spending money at their own pace.

Eventually recently they have completely dropped all race and class restrictions from free to play players, and we have seen another big jump in people in the game. There are still some functionality locked away, but the game is at its most playable state for a subscription free player. The game feels more healthy in every sense of the word since the free to play conversation happened. The cities are bustling, the zones have players available for grouping, and the brokers are completely loaded with goods.

Changing My Opinion

After watching the transformation the free to play model has had on the Everquest 2 community, and seeing the numbers released at just how much better Star Wars the Old Republic has been doing since it made its jump. I started to turn my opinion around on the payment model as a whole. While there are still some pretty egregious practices going on, I think for the most part these games are doing better under the new pricing schemes. I will always prefer the option to subscribe, but having free access to my characters gives me the ability to boot up a game I have not visited in months on a whim and spend a few days without feeling the need to fire up my account officially.

I feel like as the conversions happen, each game gets a little better at the model. So far Rift seems to be the best conversion I have seen, in that they chose the route to give subscribers bonus “premium” perks… like increase in coin, token and mount speed. Additionally they have taken the cash shop model to heard and provided hundreds of cosmetic armor available from day one. Sure there are lots of questions about whether or not they took things too far… but really I don’t believe any game has come even vaguely close to “play to win”. No cash shop has offered something so amazing that better cannot be attained in game through grinding out whatever passes as end game content.

Ultimately at the end of the day the real question is, do you want your favorite virtual landscapes to stay alive and well… or are you willing to see them suffer just to make sure they stay away from a free to play model. I don’t think it is about success or failure anymore… but more about survival. These games cost a significant amount of money to keep up and running and keep staffed. These are old figures, but it was reported that between 2004 and 2008 Blizzard spent 200 million dollars on upkeep of the World of Warcraft servers. Dividing that out it ends up at over 4 million dollars per month in upkeep and maintenance fees.

Granted most of the games that have gone free to play don’t have the number of servers or staff that Blizzard has, however I am sure it is still a fairly staggering amount. If they can get 5 players that are willing to pay 5 to 10 dollars on cash shop items per month, instead of 1 player that pays their 15 dollar subscription fee, they end up well ahead and have more money to invest in the game. The games that have gone to free to play seem to be doing well with the model, and that income gets invested in making new content. When Vanguard made the switch to free to play, the influx of new money allowed them to invest the first month in half a decade in development. As a result the players got the benefit in the first ever holiday event, and major server patch.

The Last Starfighter

Right now realistically there are two subscription model games left: The World of Warcraft and Eve Online. Eve is kind a bubble in itself without any real competition in that space, however World of Warcraft has been losing subscribers on a regular basis of late. After the successes of the Star Wars the Old Republic conversion, and if Rift ends up being as successful as it is looking just by the server activity and players returning with a vengence… I feel that before the end of the year we will at least hear about plans for a free to play conversion for WoW. We know that Titan is a long ways off, and their development cycle has always been prodigiously slow. They lack the hook of new and fresh content to keep players engaged.

I feel like the big announcement at Blizzcon will be a conversion to some form of a free to play model, or at least a tiered payment model. There is a huge part of me that mourns the subscription era, but I think it has been shown that the hybrid model ends up wildly successful. The folks that want those premium features are still willing to pony up for a month subscription, whereas the folks that are not wiling to have the monthly commitment are still going to buy the occasional doodad or account unlock.

For me the real takeaway is that whatever keeps these companies healthy, and keeps developers and support staff in their seats instead of hunting for jobs is going to be better for the players in the long run. Right now it is seeming like the free to play model is doing that. Rift for example has had to roll out a couple of new servers just to handle the influx of players. Personally I have had at least 8 friends start playing the game again, with more waiting in the wings to see just how successful the first volley is. When we are talking about MMOs that are not blizzard… we really are not talking about a lot of profiteering going on there. Ultimately they are fighting for survival, and if the free to play model gives it to them… I feel we are more likely to be able to keep playing the games we want to play.

Wrapping Up

This post ended up far more rambly than I intended it to. I can’t say I am really passionate for or against the free to play model, but at this point I feel like i understand why it is occurring so frequently. I love playing MMO games, it is the one thing I always fall back on. I am in theory embracing free to play, because it seems like the most likely way for these companies to continue getting the money they need… to keep supporting the worlds I care about. Ultimately none of these companies make these games out of the goodness of their hearts. They need our money to make sure they can survive and grow, and at the end of the day… how ever that happens I feel is pretty much fair game so long as it isn’t done in an exploitative manner.