elder scrolls online Archives - Page 24 of 26

Playing With Dolls

February 26, 2014 by Belghast

Goodbye to Justice

Yesterday the ever amazing Qelric posted an interesting video surmising that Justice and Valor points may be on the way out. This of course was a conclusion drawn based on various tidbits of information that has been released over the last few days. I don’t think Blizzard is terribly happy with the current Justice/Valor situation, but in truth I think this is mostly because over the last couple of expansions they have lost sight on why it existed in the first place. The pinnacle of the system “working as intended” I feel arrived during Wrath of the Lich King. At that point if you were completely unlucky in getting the right dungeon drops, you could save up and eventually buy even set pieces with this “consolation currency”.

Sure it also modified how we viewed gear, since only certain pieces could be bought with valor but generally speaking you could get a two piece bonus with the current tier without actually having to rely on raid drops. I did not play much during the cataclysm era, so I cannot really recall how the system worked then, but during Pandaria it has changed into something mostly useless. The gear you can get with Valor is a much watered down version of what you can get through even the latest tier of LFR. As a result Valor has become a currency almost exclusively reserved for spending on item upgrades. So quite honestly… I don’t think the valor/item upgrade system is really working as intended either.

I feel like right now Blizzard is going through a lot of growing pains, in part due to the fact that there has been a fairly constant changing of the guards when it comes to decision making. I feel like we are seeing a classic case of “I don’t know what the original intent was, so lets just get rid of it.” As a programmer I completely understand this, since if you look at some code and you cannot fully grasp what is going on, the instinct is just to gut it and replace it with something that does make sense to you. As a result we are seeing a lot of these “re-writes” going on, tanking stats not working the way we want them… lets get rid of them. Juctice/Valor mutated in purpose over the last few expansions… well lets get rid of that too. I feel Justice points used to fill a niche that was highly needed in the game, so my hope is that we can return to the way things worked during Wrath.

Massive ESO Beta Weekend

For those who do not know already, this weekend there will be another massive beta test weekend over in The Elder Scrolls Online. They have also announced that by participating in the testing you will be eligible for an in game Monkey pet at release. Millions of beta keys have been sent out at this point, and most of them came with a buddy key attached. So hopefully all of you that are reading this will be in this weekends testing. I have my public beta client tested up and will be popping in to hang out with you all. If you are playing this weekend feel free to throw @Belghast a friend invite. You can do friends lists in two ways, either you can friend a specific character or you can friend the root account identifier. They follow twitter like syntax so prepend all account invites with the @ symbol.

I believe that weekend testers will be able to see first hand the new starter experience, as well as the new collision detection. This is something that had been in the works for awhile, but since it had also been a major weekend test complaint they were able to get the collision detection in before launch. Essentially now you can no longer run through NPCs, enemies and other players in PVE settings. This has been disabled for PVP however since managing collision detection with hundreds of players in the same area becomes problematic. Additionally and some of my readers will appreciate it, what were essentially Midi tracks have been replaced with the full orchestral equivalents. The game feels and sounds amazing.

I have a spare buddy key that I would love it to go to one of my readers. So if you are interested in testing this weekend, and do not mind downloading a roughly 30 gig beta client… post in the comments and we will figure out a way to get you the key. I think most everyone I know already has access to this test, and I look forward to seeing them all over the weekend.

Playing With Dolls

Yesterday my good friend @Gypsy_Syl posted the above video to twitter in response to another friend. Without really meaning to, she helped to pick out today’s factoid. As a kid I played with dolls, in fact I owned a Barbie and a Ken doll and eventually down the line a Cabbage Patch doll as well. I am thankful that my father didn’t make a big deal about it, and I obviously grew up no more scarred than any other kid is by their childhood choices. In part a good chunk of it is likely that I was “mostly” raised by women. My mom and dad were busy working all of the time, so my caretaker and playmate was my Grandmother, where I spent most of my early years. Next door there was a little neighbor girl, that became my best friend and constant companion.

So instead of forcing the issue and playing Gi-Joe or Star Wars, I just went with the flow and played whatever she wanted to play. While Crystal was not really a “doll” type, my cousin most definitely was. So I can remember playing barbies and strawberry shortcake and whatever else she wanted to play. At this young age I just got used to relating to women, and even today I am far more comfortable in the kitchen come holiday time than sitting around the living room having to pretend to know anything at all about sports. While I am 6’4” and have a mountain man beard and can generally pass as one… I am most definitely not the “manly man” archetype. So when it comes to long-term friendships, I tend to flock to either women or other guys like me that are not drenched in an overabundance of testosterone.

One of the things that frustrates me is that gender is associated with toys in the first place. The whole topic of boys playing with dolls started when another friend, @MMOGC mentioned that it was impossible to find pictures of girls playing with train sets. I have encountered the problem myself when dealing with Lego sets. It is damned near impossible to find Lego sets that include female minifigs. My niece has decided she is into lego, and while she is a huge fan of the “Friends” line of mutant minfigures… I am trying to also provide as many cool normal minifigs as I can in the process. While they exist freely in the minifigures packs, it is almost impossible to buy a Lego City set and see a woman performing any role there. Why can’t there be Women Fire Fighters or Police or hell… even Sanitation workers? Somewhere over the years it was decided apparently that Lego was a “boy toy”, and while there are “pink” Legos, they simply do not have the same variety as the normal kind. However I am still going to do my best to support the habit of building and creating things, even if it means the really cool stuff is harder to find.

Rise of the Trade Cartel

February 25, 2014 by Belghast

Starter Islands Optional

I hinted about this yesterday, but I have since checked in on the NDA and everything is cool to talk about. Currently up on test is a number of changes to designed to improve the game play experience for those who felt that it was simply too “tutorial” for too long. It would not be an Elder Scrolls game were it not for a prison sequence introduction. So you still spend your few moments in Cold Harbor but instead of being deposited on a “starter island” you are deposited in the city of Daggerfall, Davon’s Watch or Skywatch depending on your faction. Once again I use the term “starter island” but each faction has a slightly different setup. In this city you have the option of starting quests there, venturing out into the country side to kill random stuff or going back to the docks and returning to the starter island experience.

The end result definitely feels more like a traditional Elder Scrolls experience, as when you exit the prison introduction you are usually dumped out to decide your own fate. I will also say however that fending for yourself in Daggerfall for example, is significantly more difficult than working your way through Stros M’Kai. I worked my way through a series of the city quests, but several of them were rather difficult considering at this point you really do not have much by way of gear having just finished Cold Harbor. I will likely always do the Starter Islands, because I really like the experience… but for those players who were expecting a much more “manifest destiny” experience the way is now open.

I have to caveat all of this with “subject to change”, because this is still on the test servers and nothing that we are seeing is absolutely guaranteed to happen. However the complaint about the on rails beginning has been a constant thread throughout the various tests I have participated in. Zenimax is taking this criticism to heart and tweaking the game as a result. Really they have been extremely responsive to critique, and I’ve watched as a number of things have changed based on tester input. They do have a few holy grails that I wish they would abandon, but most of these are fixable with addons. I am not a huge fan of minimalistic user interfaces, so I know I will be modding the crap out of mine to display more information more clearly.

The Market Economy

I recently watched the latest of Beau Hindman’s series of Gamer Hangouts in which the show focused on Elder Scrolls Online. Actually he had asked if I wanted to join in, but since I do not have a webcam I opted out… something that should be resolved this week. One of the big concerns late in the show was what exactly the player driven economy would look like. While I am not auction house wizard, and I generally only have enough gold to keep my armor repaired… I can already see that Elder Scrolls as a whole is going to have a very craft centric economy. Firstly this game has probably the most detailed crafting system I have seen anywhere. This is primarily due to the heavy research component in the game. While Maevrim talked a bit about enchanting in the video, the bulk of my experience is with Blacksmithing.

As you move about the world you will get various dropped items, sometimes these items include a trait. For example you might get a dropped axe with the word “Precise” on it that means it increases melee and spell critical. Now you can deconstruct every item in the game for raw materials, and this is going to be key for getting some of the rarer crafting components, however there is a special kind of deconstruction you can do called research. This allows you to learn the trait from the item, and it takes a significant amount of time… namely the first trait you research for each weapon type takes a minimum of 5 hours, and increases from there. Since traits are unique to a weapon type, and there are currently eight for each type… it takes an extremely long amount of time to learn them all.

What this means is that by nature crafters will be forced to specialize, working on learning the traits that matter the most to them… or if they are purely motivated by profit… learning the ones that players want the most. So I fully expect to see people advertising themselves as a master axe-smith, or a master sword-smith… instead of a general purpose smith. Granted the game does not distinguish between the two, and given enough time and resources the same person could learn every single trait in the game. Additionally each player starts off crafting only their own racial style, but through the acquisition of dropped books they can learn to craft items in any style available. So basically the ability to craft specific items with a specific stat is predictable… but requires a huge amount of work on the crafters part.

What makes the system even more interesting is that the best gear can only be crafted in certain places. I talked about this awhile back, but this also factors into the economy. Essentially players will likely be paying that master sword smith to go with them to some forgotten crafting station so that they can have crafted the best item for their specific chosen build. Additionally since you can improve a crafted item from white to green, blue, purple or orange quality, I imagine there will be a brisk trade in the reagents needed for that. Trying to improve an item with limited resources gives you a very slim chance of success… and if you fail you end up destroying your shiny new bauble in the process. As a result players at the end of game will be wanting to make sure they pour enough of these reagents into every attempt to give them the highest chance of success. These reagents are likely going to be among the most frequently traded items, and folks who farm them will likely be a pillar of the player driven economy.

Rise of the Trade Cartel

One of the more interesting things of note about Elder Scrolls is that as far as I know there is no Auction House system. What they do have instead is an interesting system called the Guild Store. Once you have at least 10 members (someone correct me if I am wrong on the number) you can start to list things to sell to your guild members. Since guilds are account based, and you can be in multiple (current limit is 5 guilds) I have a feeling that we will be seeing a whole new kind of player driven economy. I fully expect we will see a rise of large Trade Cartel guilds that allow players access to a larger marketplace to sell their wares. This is a different line of thinking on how an economy should work, since these trade guilds would essentially be part tradechat and part auction house rolled into one.

I also feel like similar to games without auction house systems, we will see players congregating in cities offering up their wares. This happened in Everquest and most recently I saw this happening a lot with crafters in Final Fantasy XIV. Since gear is so granular and specific to however a player chooses to build their character, I really don’t see a huge market for “premade” items. I think the real money will be made doing custom order crafting, and these trade cartels will be the way to find crafters for those purposes. In every game I there have existed various groups that colluded to control segments of the economy… so it will be interesting to see exactly how this plays out in a game that supports entirely player driven markets. I don’t really have the knack for this sort of thing, but I do hope I have some friends that do, because it will be interesting to see played out.

Of Bel and Grudges

Today’s factoid came to me in an interesting fashion last night. I had been playing Belganon my little Warlock, and was just about to shut down for the night when I saw a shout from a player name I recognized. He was trying to get people to run all nine challenge modes in one night for the purpose of getting gold in each. His message was a little oddly worded, and while I doubt he intended it… it sounded a bit like he was wanting to be carried through them. Granted my personal feelings towards the individual likely colored my interpretation. Thing is, once upon a time I raided with him in Vanilla, and while I thought he was a bit of a jerk… I always figured he was just mostly misunderstood. When he came back to our server during Wrath of the Lich King, he joined one of the uber guilds at the time… but since he was not well enough geared to raid with them, he pestered me for an invite to Duranub Raiding Company. During the middle of the raid, he was talking in a social channel about us… and said that he was slumming with us until he could get a real raid.

I punted him from the raid and have not talked to him since. He desperately tried to back pedal in tells, but the damage was already done… he was worthless to me. Just seeing his name come across chat brought up this boiling cauldron of anger. I still hold a grudge against him for his actions, and while he may have matured or changed… I will never know, because I will never give him another chance. The weird thing is… had he just done something that was only against me… I would likely be waiting to forgive him over and over. When you do something however that negatively effects a person or group of people that I care about… my protective instincts kick in and I will forever hold a grudge over it. I realize this is not a healthy behavior, but it is just something I have never been able to let go of. So I have a catalog of people that have wronged my guild or my friends, and every time I see that name or someone mentions one of them this flood of anger washes over me that I have to force back down. So while I cannot seem to root this instinct out of me… I can do my best not to act upon it.

Bad Warlock

February 24, 2014 by Belghast

Vampire Wife

For awhile I have talked about my rockstar teacher of a wife and the forensics class she is pioneering with another teacher this year. Yesterday I got drafted into helping her make various kinds of fake blood. Essentially we needed to find a ready simulacrum for the real thing, that could be produced cheaply and efficiently. So for awhile yesterday I kitchen turned a little horror show. I was employed in the mixing part, since I could shake the bottles fast enough to get them to mix. This is my preferred way of mixing almost anything, including the constant flow of cherry pomegranate drink mix that I imbibe. Some of the mixtures were winners and some were very much not.

Of the various recipes available we tried three primarily. The first one I had experience with in the past, and I didn’t think it would be the kind of blood she was wanting. I used to work in a fundraiser haunted house and we mixed buckets of water, karo syrup and red food coloring to make gore to slop on everything. This of course is way thicker than human blood and as a result doesn’t perform in any way similar. Next we tried a mixture of sweet condensed milk, and red food coloring. This was a little better but still way too thick, but it was a big grizzly to watch my wife eat spoonfuls of the red ichor. Apparently she thought it tasted good.

The final winner was evaporated milk and red food coloring. Granted all of these produced pinkish blood but apparently adding a little bit of green will correct the color. She tested the products against a vial of simulated lab blood that she got from a forensics supply house and the evaporated milk performed similarly. Today over lunch I have an errand to go pick up a pint of fake blood from a local party store. We had tried this earlier but the only place that had it was in gallon size… and extremely expensive. We wanted to test it out before committing to buying it in bulk. My hope is that the premade stuff will be best so we don’t have to mix anymore at home. But at the very least it lead to an interesting evening.

Bad Warlock

Among other things, lately I have been poking my head onto my little Dwarven Warlock a bit. I am still phenomenally bad at playing casters, and the warlock is no exception. However having a Felguard makes up for a lot of my own mistakes. He just quietly kicks everything’s ass while I flail around trying to mash the correct buttons. Something I find interesting, is that in the past I have tried my best to skip outlands entirely… I am actually enjoying the content. Maybe it is the idea that I know I will be revisiting everything in Warlords, but the entire expansion somehow feels fresher. I have a feeling with this guy that it will be Wrath that becomes pure skull drudgery.

I am not really sure I landed on this character to level, after all I have both a Discipline Priest and a Hunter within striking distance of 90. Ultimately I would still like to get everything up to 90 before Warlords but my Mage. The mage is my intended boost target, because while I struggle playing a Warlock, I would be an absolute disaster playing a Mage. Characters that can be described as “glass cannons” have never appealed to me in the least. However I hear that frost provides a much sturdier alternative, given that they now have a permanent pet to watch after them. To say the least I have been enjoying being bad at warlocking.

Interesting Changes a Brewing

I am honestly not sure how much of this I can talk about, so I will have to get some clarification on the NDA I am presently under before delving into it too deeply. However I will say that there are some significant changes in the starter experience in the works that will hopefully make a lot of people happy. One of the big complaints from the various test weekends is that it feels too on rails for too long. While I said you can hop off the rails at any point you like and level away. I have done a fair bit of my leveling by just killing random mobs out in the world and mostly ignoring the quests, it still feels like you are lead down a slowly widening tunnel until finally at some point you get dumped into what is the “real” game for the rest of the 50 levels. One thing I have to say is that overall… the Zenimax folks have been extremely responsive to feedback.

That is one of the aspects of this testing process that most people just won’t understand. The game has changed a lot over the last year, and for the better. While there are features missing that I would have liked to see, almost all of those are User Interface based and have been successfully added back into the game with addons. The core game itself is extremely clean, and if you play the game on a server that is not screaming because they are purposefully stressing it to the maximum… the game performs admirably and combat feels great. The negative is a lot of the clunky combat comments that people have are during weekends where they are purposefully trying to break the systems, and combat fluidity decreases under extremely stressed situations.

I think a lot of people are going to be happy with the proposed changes. I however have been in the minority and felt that the starter island experience for each of the races was an extremely good experience. Each of the islands, and I use that term loosely since each faction starts slightly differently… is chock full of interesting things to find and quests that you would not receive if you did not go out and explore off the beaten path. I still cannot say with any certainty that I have ever gotten 100% of the content on any one of the islands, let alone all of them. But I can understand the complaint that it just doesn’t feel Elder Scrollsy to exit the prison sequence and be dumped into another controlled setting. Cold Harbor does a good job of teaching you the basics, and a prison intro is one of the key requirements of “being an Elder Scrolls Game”.

Belghast the Band Geek

The title pretty much says it all, I was a band geek. For those not familiar with the American education system, the term Middle School refers generally to grades six through eight, and is some what of a transition period to get students used to having specific classes with different teachers, rather than a single teacher doing everything. As part of this time period we were essentially funneled towards various electives. During that sixth grade year we had to take a number of elective classes including vocal and instrumental music. While I did manage to get a lead role in one of the musicals… which I did horribly at, I was far more comfortable behind an instrument in a much larger group.

I began my musical career, if you can call it that.. playing the trombone, because face it… trombones are cool. I did well enough to be second chair, and I was fine there… good enough to be recognized as being decent, without having to deal with the pressure of leading the section. This was fine and good until I had a major sinus surgery in seventh grade, and buzzing sound needed to play trombone was something the doctor said would be extremely painful for me for quite some time. As a result I ended up transitioning to the percussion section. To be honest… I had always wanted to be a drummer, but my mother played percussion in high school and told me that by far the short end of the stick as far as band goes. I should have listened, but of course I was smarter and knew better.

She was absolutely right… when you march a several mile parade route with a woodwind or a brass instrument you spend most of the time carrying it by your side. If you march as a drummer, you end up playing a cadence non-stop the entire route. Being a big guy, I somehow ended up being picked to play the cymbals during parades. Sure you are thinking… cymbals are a joke of an instrument… but imagine marching for miles while carrying a 20 pound cymbal in each hand… attached by a leather thong that makes it impossible to get a good grip on it. Then having to bang them together… all the while not dropping the beat of the cadence. It was absolute hell, and by the end of a parade route like that I literally could not feel my arms for hours.

Luckily however parade routes like that were few and far between, and namely during the Christmas season only. After coming back from Christmas break I finally got to have some fun. It began concert season and somehow I managed to get picked to play the Timpani drums. I loved the sound of them, and it felt so primal to bang on them with my tiny felt donut covered sticks. This was the part of band that I really enjoyed. I finally felt like I had a real purpose. I got good at tuning the Timpani drum, and as we did the various contests that came with concert season I became a critical part of the setup crew. Some kids are truly gifted in band, but I did just good enough to be respectable without ever really shining. I managed to make all district several times, but never really pushed hard enough to make all state. While I played drums for a few bands, I never really kept with it… apart from occasionally drumming on my steering wheel while driving.

Rails Are What You Make of Them

February 18, 2014 by Belghast

Going Off Script

There was a topic yesterday that started with Tobold’s post and wound up in a G+ comment stream. While I believe Tobold’s comments about on rails gaming were initially about a certain game that is still under NDA with a space theme… it eventually wound its way to Elder Scrolls Online. To which I added the information I posted yesterday on my own blog, about the fact that the majority of quests are skippable, and that there are a very few that actually need to be completed to move to the next area. But the root of the problem here I think is that after a decade of playing themeparks… we have gotten extremely good at seeing rails. Moreso I think we are so trained to stay inside of the lines that we are afraid to break out of the little protective cage the themeparks have built for us.

For the longest time I fought the “quest to level” construct and then over time I managed to get extremely good at mindlessly grinding them. There was a time when I could take a character from 1-85 in less than seven days in World of Warcraft. The problem is… this is a thing I do to level quickly, and not something that comes instinctual. I am constantly deviating from the path, and poking my head into places I shouldn’t be. If I have 10% to go to a level, my instincts are not to grind some quests, but instead to go kill some really high level mobs. You can blame Everquest for this type of “go kill things” upbringing, and I am still happiest when mindlessly slaughtering bad guys. So when I am out questing, skipping that bad guy for the sake of speed is not usually a thing that ever enters into my mind.

So when I was plunked down on Stros M’Kai in the Daggerfall Covenant for the very first time… I willfully and gleefully ignored the quests that were given to me. I wandered off and explored the island, gathered some crafting bits, found lots of treasure chests and leveled happily oblivious to the fact that there was a rail. Sure eventually I reined myself in and did a few quests, but the vast majority of that first couple hour play through was aimlessly exploring. If I found a cave I poked my head in to see what was there. The little voice in the back of our head that says “don’t go there yet, you will have a quest for it later” is something that we end up doing to ourselves.

Rails Are What You Make of Them

For the most part I would agree with Tobold’s assessment of that space game, but since so many people love it I continue trying to give it a second and a third and a fourth chance. I went through this same thing with Guild Wars 2, I kept trying to see what people liked about it… because I honestly didn’t understand it. Over the weekend I maybe landed at how to enjoy it. Once I finished the tutorial, I went completely off the rails, wandering around aimlessly killing lots and lots of things and getting nifty bits in the process. That mode of play made the game enjoyable for me. Quests are a really good way to level, and I think they also do an excellent job of telling the story. However something we have forgotten along the way is that they are mostly optional.

We can blame World of Warcraft for this to be honest, but not in the way you might think. WoW brought quests out into the open, where they had always been something for insiders before. In Everquest you went around /hail-ing every single mob you encountered because maybe just maybe they might have a quest for you. In Dark Age of Camelot, you did the same thing trying to locate the “Kill Task” quest giver for a specific area. City of Heroes gave you specific contacts you needed to talk to that acted as a hub for running future missions. Finally World of Warcraft gave us the now ubiquitous golden exclamation point… taking complete all of the subtlety out of it. Still… even in WoW it was not until Burning Crusade that I really started to lean on quests as the crutch that they are. I got a good number of my levels by going off the beaten path and looking for neat things out in the world.

To some extent it is also the fault of games that have stopped giving us things to find just over the next ridge. There should always be things just out of the way for us to go looking for, because this act reminds us that there is another way to play the game than just mindless questing. This self directed fun is crucial, and is what ends up making a game stay fresh. I tend to cycle through two modes of gameplay… aimless wandering and mindelss questing. I find both to be really enjoyable when I am in the right frame of mind. I think this is why I can return to WoW all these times and still be happy with what it is. That said I am constantly going off script in that game as well. There are so many nooks and crannies that often lead to treasure or at least interesting things to kill. Basically… these rails that we keep seeing, are something we’ve allowed ourselves to see.

Dungeons of Belgrade

With all the talk of ESO lately, I am still very much playing Landmark on a daily basis. Last night I got in and worked on Belgrade Keep for a bit. I tweaked the exterior a bit adding supports to the first balcony and then building out an entirely new balcony from the top of the castle. Additionally I added some more of my custom columns to the corners of the ramparts to tie the visual theme together, as well as adding some to the ground floor to mark the entrances to the ramp leading up to the keep and the entrance to the crafting undercroft. I thought I was nearing a point where I needed to simply grind out the various accoutrements to decorate the keep. I was completely wrong however.

I decided that Belgrade keep needed a proper dungeon, so I spent the majority of the night watching episodes of Arrow on Netflix and hollowing out the basement by hand with the remove tool. One of the things I have noticed that removing large blocks of material with the select tool often ends up leaving weird fragments. So I tend to do it manually simply because I like the results better. After having spent hundreds of hours hollowing out tunnels branch mining for diamonds in Minecraft… I find I have an affinity for that sort of work. The plan is to divide up the sub basement into cells, maybe with a torture area… but that all depends on how creative I am. I am curious if I have enough room for a second sub basement to be honest, because I can seemingly dig down further.

My Father the Builder

I really need to sit down and brainstorm out the rest of the month, because when I am not staring at a blank page I am full of ideas with factoids. However when I sit down to write at 6 am, my mind is mush and devoid of any good ideas. So today’s factoid is going to be a little odd, be warned. I am not a terribly handy person, as in I am not a manly man builder type. I can watch a youtube video and figure out most things, but I have a bit of a mental block about things that are mechanical. In part I think it is because my father is so damned amazing at it. I realize he grew up in an era when if you didn’t fix it yourself it stayed broken, and my grandfather was the king of tinkerers. For me however, since I spent most of my childhood sick… I just simply was not exposed to it… apart from getting to be the loyal “flashlight holder”.

At a young age I think I told myself I couldn’t do this. There are things that are well in the realm of my mastery. You give me a few boxes, scissors, magic markers and tape… and I will build for you a GI-Joe base that will make you weep. However you dump a heap of mechanical bits on the table and I cannot see the same possibilities. Growing up with a machinist for a father was a really interesting and awesome thing. When I broke a wheel off one of my hot wheels… he would take it away to a magical land where it would come back with a shiny new wheel better than the previous. He would take it over to work and machine out of scrap aluminum a wheel, then carefully wrap it in electrical tape for traction…finally carefully attaching it back to my hot wheel. My father could make magic happen.

I just wish I appreciated it more at the time. When Star Wars was all the rage, I wanted nothing more than the Death Star play set. I did not grow up with a lot of money, so spending $100 on a cheap plastic and cardboard play set was really out of the question. That Christmas instead my dad hand crafted me a Death Star that was far cooler than anything store bought ever could have been. I am still not sure exactly how he built it, but he had some long screw running down the back of the unit with a crank up top. and a machined elevator that rode up and down on the screw. So that I could crank my action figures up and down between the floors. Now I appreciate just how ingenious it was, but probably at the time I wished I had the “real thing”.

As my father is getting older, I am starting to have to figure these things out on my own. I know at some point he won’t be there to call for advice. Someday I will have to learn the lessons he had to learn. I admit it scares me, to think about a world where a master builder like my father doesn’t exist. I don’t think he really knows how in awe of his abilities I am, and how much I wish I had his natural intuition for how things should go together. I should really remedy that, but my father is a lot like me, and not really great at saying these sorts of things in person. There are times I think that maybe he DID pass on his legacy to me, but that it just changed over the years. I am good at computers and hacking around with software to get it to work the way I want it to work. Then when I can’t find whatever it is that I am looking for, I know that I can crack open Visual Studio and build it myself. So maybe just maybe I have some of that same magic too.