elder scrolls online Archives - Page 25 of 26

Belghast and The Ark

February 17, 2014 by Belghast

Horribly Sidetracked

Saturday when I wrote my little impressions piece on the Elder Scrolls Online, I managed to get horribly sidetracked in the process of explaining the questing section. At one point I said “Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes” but only actually managed to give you a single purpose. I managed to get myself on a tangent and forget what I was saying. So let me take another stab at explaining the questing system. Generally speaking when you go into an area there is a critical path that you can take to go through it with the least number of quests. If you want to piddle around and carve your own path this is a good thing.

For example in Stros M’Kai the Daggerfall Covenant starter zone, you are asked to find one of three crew members before continuing on. You can literally just find one crew member and be just fine, and the game will allow you to continue forward. However you can find all of the crew members, and each one will do something for you in the final quest before leaving the desert island. Additionally your choices matter going forward. If you choose to kill someone, or fail to save someone… they won’t be there later on at a critical time when you could use your assistance.

That is one of the things I like most about the questing system. It works much like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, in that you get introduced to a character that keeps popping back up in later quests and even later zones. Failing to save a character, means they will no longer exist in the later stages. Occasionally the game will force you to make a hard choice, between two sets of NPCs. When this happens one of those paths will forever be sealed from you. I you choose to help this person, the other person will either die or be so infuriated that they will never help you again.

Basically your decisions matter, and they matter a lot. So while it might not seem that the immediate consequences are all that bad, they will have future ramifications. So while the first purpose of side quests is to get gear, the second purpose is to unlock future story points. You never know when a person you have helped will show back up and lend assistance later. Often times this is in the form of making a future quest a little easier as they lend some unique ability to the fight. However in a few cases this means you may have missed out on a really cool quest chain because the NPC was not there to give it.

Turret Orchestra

After my little write up yesterday about Portal 2… I got a whole lot of responses that amounted to “no wait, you haven’t even gotten to the good part”. Then that they apparently couldn’t tell me about the good part without massive spoilers. Sure enough I managed to play through to the beginning of chapter 5, and the game has changed once again ever so slightly. Now I think I want to know what is going to happen enough to continue playing. I have my assumptions of the end result, but who knows they might be completely wrong. For the most part I have managed to stay blissfully unaware about the ending of the game to this point.

There were a few really annoying levels, but now I am in a part that is more freeform. The coolest thing I have seen to date is the Turret Orchestra. While roaming around in this new free form area, I kept hearing this music playing that sounded kind of like a bunch of accordions. Finally I was able to see what it was, and it was several of the turrets playing in unison. I have a feeling that I will somehow be freeing the various robots under the control of GlaDOS, or at least that seems like a potential subtheme for the game.

Like I said right now I have no real idea where exactly I am heading apart from following what seems like an obvious path carved out for me. I am sure at this point I will plan the game to its conclusion, so it managed to get its hooks into me. While I am not sure if I would call it a truly great game yet, it is enjoyable. I am sure there is some grand reveal to happen down the road, that will make me shift my opinion again. However I stand by my original assessment. Fun game with a cool gimmick.

Belghast and The Ark

It will come as no real surprise to anyone who has ever followed me on the various social media platforms that I use… that I am a pet person. That said there are probably few people who really know how deep that particular rabbit hole goes. As it stands right now, neither my wife nor I plan on having children. My wife swears that teaching high school is the strongest form of birth control known to man. This is not to say we don’t have children, they just happen to be covered in fur. I personally have always had a close affinity with pets, and even if it is something I would not want for myself… I seem to be able to befriend animals quickly. While I would never have a bird, each time I went over to a friends house one of his birds would hop up on my shoulder and stay there until I finally placed him back on his perch.

kitties_sunning Currently we have three cats, all of which are pictured above sunning themselves in the afternoon light of our stairwell. On the left is the mammoth monster cat Chloe, in the back is our mostly black Calico Allie, and if you have been reading these factoids you have already met little shit. Each of them is a rescue, because I believe all animals deserve a second chance at a great home. Each rescue especially has its own personality, and comes with its own quirks. These “quirks” can be frustrating at times, but they make up the complex personality of each animal… so even the annoyances you come to love. Chloe for example obsessively licks anything and everything… which can be sweet at times until she hops up in bed with you at 3 am and licks your arm. Seriously there is nothing freakier than waking up to that. She however is the most amazing snuggler, when you can succeed at the complex game of keeping your arms and hands away from her mouth.

Similarly we also have three ferrets, and they are some of the most adorable animals you could ever have. Here they are snuggled together under a blanket in their playpen. At this point I have woken two of them… and moments later they will be bouncing around the cage like mad. This is the problem with ferret photography… you get one chance to take a shot before they go super sonic. From the left we have our old man… Smokey that came to us as part of a rescue pair of littermates. His sibling Bandit passed away some time ago, and he himself is nearing the end of his journey as well… but we are trying to make him as comfortable and happy as we can while we have him. Next to him is Shiloh, that was a returned to a local pet store and put back up for adoption. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever return her because she is so adorable, and has a little badger face. Finally we have miss “Bella” which is short for Bellatrix, the name her original mommy gave her. She had a much older ferret named Judah that Bela apparently upset regularly, so it was with many tears that she gave her over to us.

Over the years we’ve had lots more animals, including a hamster, a guinea pig, and a pair of sugar gliders. All of them have been our babies while they have been with us, and we have sought to give them the best home we can. Often times it is these little guys that are the reason for me getting a slightly later start than normal. When one is begging for attention… and they are damned good at giving you a guilt trip… how can you possibly say no? The best at begging has to be Bela. She will run over to the edge of the playpen and press her body against the ground sticking out her snout in his pouting “poor pittiful me” look. You would think she NEVER got played with ever. The moment I reach down into the playpen she will bolt over to me and wait to be picked up. All she really seems to want is to be picked up and carried around for a bit before finally going back into the playpen and snuggling up for a nap.

Elder Scrolls Online Impressions

February 15, 2014 by Belghast

Feels Good To Talk

This is one of those posts that I have been waiting to make for quite a long while now. Over the last few months there have been various naysayers, and with the lift of the press beta there was quite a bit of negativity towards The Elder Scrolls Online. As usual when someone has something bad to say, they seem to be willing to defy all the rules to do it. However those of us who have been anxiously awaiting the release of the game and been abiding by the rather strict NDA have had to sit and watch silently as all the negativity circulated. Finally this morning they announced that we were free to talk about any experiences from the Beta Weekend content. This means I can now talk as much as I would like about the 1-17 game as it stands which is quite a bit of content.

The Conundrum

Firstly let me start off by saying, that The Elder Scrolls genre is a really difficult one to make into an MMO. Over the course of the beta while listening to player complaints, I have come to realize that there is no one way that people play these games. To some people TES might be a game about stealth and carefully stealing goods out from under the shop keepers nose. For others it may be the grand narrative experience or the lore. For others still it might be about wielding arcane magicks or making deals with Daedra. All of these things are gameplay styles that are possible in the excessively moddable single player experience. However through all of these years the Elder Scrolls setting has felt somewhat lifeless.

The one thing I wanted more than anything else… was the ability to experience all these grand settings with my friends. But as you craft a cohesive mulitplayer experience, how do you make all of these things work with hundreds of players participating in the same experience. This game will not be for everyone, and as I have learned from social media and the forums… the game itself is very divisive. However for me at least the experience is something I am just not getting from other games. At its core this is in fact The Elder Scrolls… Online. This game lives and breathes the Elder Scrolls Lore and settings, and is immediately recognizable the first time you see a creature made famous by the series out in the wild.

Questing

At its core the game has a questing system very familiar to the Elder Scrolls setting. As you move around the compass rose at the top of your screen will highlight points of interest that are near you. You have the option to go over there and engage in the quest, or continue onwards on your own. The very first time I sat down to play the game, I completely ignored the quests wandering off on my own exploring the island of Stros M’Kai in the Daggerfall Covenant. This is completely supported as far as a play style goes. In general there are a handful of quests that are required for you to progress to the next area, however in addition to these there are many side quests that are completely optional.

Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes. Firstly they give you a chance at gear, and point you in the direction of places that you might want to explore. For example… above is an image of the amazing Dwemer ruins of Bthzark, which I might add looks and feels like a Dwemer ruin should. You can gain access to the ruins through a quest chain, but in most cases these small dungeons and ruins can be explored by simply clicking on the front door and going in. The game is chock full of hidden places that contain treasure chests and skyshards and all sorts of neat things to find along the way. There are books to read, satchels to root through, and crates to crack open. All of which can have really nifty things.

So while you can play entirely without questing, and there are times I do this… there are also a lot of really epic stories in the game that can only be accessed by questing. One of the things that makes this so enjoyable is the fact that everything is the game is fully voiced. Lyris Titanborn is a character that you will see a lot of through the course of the game, and especially with these signature characters they have spared no expense. Lyris for example is voiced by the ever popular Jennifer Hale of “Femshep” fame. You come to love the characters over time, I cheer inside each time Sir Cadwell as voiced by John Cleese appears in the storyline. The characters live and breathe and you really care about them. The Elder Scrolls series in general has had some really amazing characters, and this just continues the lineage.

Crafting

Over the course of the time I have been participating in the testing process, the crafting system has gone through a number of changes. The current version is probably my favorite crafting system to date in any game. If you are familiar to the way crafting worked in SWTOR, it is somewhat of a cousin. The difference being that while learning all of the really nice patterns in SWTOR involved silly amounts of random chance, everything in ESO is completely logical and predictable. Smithing for example in its most basic form requires you to go out into the world and gather ore and then take it back to a blacksmithing station and smelt it into bar form. From there you need an item purchased from a vendor that relates to the style of gear you are crafting. Redguard require star metal, Dunmer obsidian, so that each racial style requires a unique reagent. These are purchased for 21 gold, which is not a huge sum of money.

The quality and level of an item is determined by a number of controllable factors. Firstly the level is determined by how much of a given material you add. Whereas 3 iron bars might create a level 1 item, but 6 iron bars a level 4 and so on throughout the level range. Additionally you can add a reagent of sorts to improve the quality of the item, shifting it from white to green or blue and upwards. Finally you can add a statistics package to the item, and these are learned through research. When you get a drop out in the world there are a number of things you can do to it. Firstly of course you can sell it for gold, but as a crafter you are generally better off taking it to the crafting station. There you can either extract resources from it, or if it has a stat package on the item you can research that trait.

Researching takes a significant amount of time, generally a number of hours to as much as a number of days. However in the end you are granted the ability to apply that trait to that item type. The traits that daggers can have are different than the traits that a chest piece can have for example. The rewarding part about it however is that once learned you can reliably add that trait to level of that item. Another really cool thing is that you can improve your items at a crafting station similar to how you could in Skyrim. In doing so you have a chance of losing the item, but you can increase the amount of reagent you are using to greatly improve the chance of getting your item successfully.

I feel like I am not really doing justice to how cool the system works. Generally speaking when I roll a new character I can piddle about gathering iron ore and craft a full set of gear far faster than I could earn one from questing. The biggest bonus is that you can craft helm and shoulders at level one, whereas you do not begin to receive these until pretty far into the content. I highly suggest you check out the crafting simulator that is on the newly released esohead.com. I could talk about the nuances of the system for paragraph after paragraph, but it makes more sense if you can actually see how it works by fiddling with the widgets.

Welcome to the Frontiers

I am not normally a fan of player versus player in any game. However Elder Scrolls has me more than a bit excited to be honest. We are finally returning to the most successful pvp set up that any game has had… the Frontiers of Dark Age of Camelot. Essentially the factions each control their own completely sealed territory, and this represents what the players quest through on their journey to level 50. However in the center connected to these realms lies Cyrodil. The map is absolutely huge and would take you significant amounts of time to run across it even mounted. The overarching story of Cyrodil is that the faction that can take the keeps bordering the Whitegold tower, can then place an Emperor on the throne, giving that faction special benefits.

This however really sells what Cyrodil is short. This zone is a living breathing questing destination with all sort of things hidden for players to find. Just like the frontiers in DAoC, there are reasons for crafters, explorers, adventurers to go out here. The excitement is that in doing so you risk getting rolled by one of the packs of players trying to take the keeps and other objectives. Cyrodil of course can be completely ignored if you so choose, but I look forward to going out there with my friends and trying to find out fortunes. From what I have seen in action, PVP in Elder Scrolls Online works just as well as it ever did in Dark Age.

The video above is from the mega guild Gaiscioch, and it shows their guild taking over a keep. Unlike the zergfest that we have seen in the past years brought on my World of Warcraft, this is slow and sustained warfare. If you cannot hold a keep you are of no benefit to your faction, and holding a keep is an extremely difficult proposition. At one point in the video they are being sieged by two different factions at the same time. This is going to be something that is extremely common, but if you can take and hold a keep… there are benefits to your guild for doing so. I am not really sure if House Stalwart will ever pvp enough to hold keeps, but I can definitely see myself helping out as another group does.

Only Scratched the Surface

There is just so much that I want to tell you, but at this point I have rambled on at length about the game for a bit now. I am sure the moment I publish this, I will think of another dozen things to say. Like I said at the beginning… this is not the game for everyone. Elder Scrolls single player purists will be frustrated by the addition of all the people around them. Hardcore MMO players will likely be frustrated with the minimalistic user interface. Personally I admit I have that problem a little bit, but since this game is to support a WoW style LUA add-on system, pretty much all of my woes with the Spartan interface can be corrected easily. I’ve already seen add-ons in various states of progress that will let you have all the bells and whistles you could want.

This is the type of game that grows on you over time. The biggest problem is you cannot go into playing it with the expectations of it being something else. I feel like this game is trying to start its own little genre. There is more than enough meat on its bones to allow players to happily explore it for hundreds and hundreds of hours. I can’t talk about it much but there is an extremely extensive post 50 game that adds more content than I can really even wrap my head around yet. This is not going to be a game that we can “finish” in a few weeks time. Getting to 50 is only part of the journey, there are months of content waiting you after that point. That is not to say that someone who is absolutely crazy will not make it to the absolute end within the first month. But the average serious player will be chewing on this one for a long while.

It feels extremely awesome to finally be able to talk about it. At this point we have been cleared to talk about the first 3-4 zones per faction. So if there is anything you would like to see me talk about, please drop me a comment and I will try and work it in during a future post. I am happy to see the veil lift so we can hopefully start getting a positive buzz going among all the players who are out there enjoying themselves. The beta weekends have been full of players happy to be in the test and happy to be exploring the world. The game is still charting extremely well in its presales. If you plan on getting the game, I highly suggest you put in your preorder. The ability to play any race in any faction is going to be a huge boon going forward.

International Cupid

February 13, 2014 by Belghast

Short term commitment

Yesterday a friend of mine asked me if it would be okay if she played Elder Scrolls with the House Stalwart group. She was not sure how into the game she was, so might only be around for a month or so. She wanted to make sure no one would be upset with her not staying terribly long. She was afraid that House Stalwart were more dedicated members and might take offense to that. I of course assuaged her fears, since Stalwart as a whole is super casual and primarily a social guild. However what came next was a realization that I am not sure I had actually admitted to myself.

When I go into one of these games I don’t really expect folks to last more than a few months. That has been the track record with new games and our guild especially. This was so much the case with Final Fantasy XIV that I even started what I feel is going to be a new thing for me. When I subscribed to that game I chose to do so for three months and then immediately went into the back end and cancelled my account. That way it would essentially self destruct after three months unless I made some form of manual intervention to renew it. While you might think this is me not having faith in the game… it is more that I am not having faith in myself.

Other than World of Warcraft, each game I have played has been a three to six month encounter. While there are still games that I play semi-regularly, the tempest of activity has usually died down into a spring breeze at or around the three month mark. It feels to me that we are inherently either gaming lifers, or game jumpers. If you look at my own guild our I would say we have roughly sixty players that have only ever played WoW and cannot imagine playing another game. Then there is a pool of forty or so that tend to play whatever happens to be the next great game in the internet cultural zeitgeist. This experience has lead me to the new stance of giving a game three months of subscription and then evaluating where I stand after that.

Cash Shop Expansion

Yesterday the big 2.6 patch went in over in Rift and I have to say I have been watching this one with a bit of excitement. There are a ton of new features going into the game and you can read highlights of them over on this little info blurb created by Trion. This is the point at which I am going to be a bit of a downer, because after logging in last night I realized… the things I am most interested are really freaking expensive. A big thing they added in was the ability to start applying cosmetic skins to your pets. This has been one of my key frustrations with the pet classes that unlike the WoW Hunter we had no real control over what our pets looked like. There have been some really ugly pets as well… I am looking at you emaciated beastlord blue tiger thing. Most of these have improved to where the base pet is at least passable, but I would never turn down the opportunity to tweak the appearance.

Problem is that they are really expensive, in order to get all of the new skins… something that admittedly not everyone is going to want… they are running a special on them for roughly $70 worth of in game currency. Once the special is over however that price quadruples for the full unlock. Individual class based unlocks are more reasonable at around $7 per class. These are of course guesstimates based on the fact that in the $20 bundle it breaks out to be 160 credits per dollar. I feel like the whole budgie mount thing has maybe unfairly colored my opinion of the cash shop as a whole. Once upon a time it felt extremely reasonable, but now everything just seems more expensive than I want to pay for it.

The biggest thing I was interested in during this patch was the Dreamweaving profession. Once again however I was hit by the realization that in order to play with that it would involve me plunking down some cash to buy another trade skill extension. I don’t want to roll a brand new character just to be able to play with the profession, and I don’t really want to unlearn any of my already max level professions from my characters to pick up this new one. I realize it is a first world problem, and in a game like WoW we would have no choice at all but to do just that. However last night I was being irrational and felt extremely frustrated by having to make that choice.

Basically the only thing left that really made me excited after having the other two shiny baubles behind a paywall I didn’t feel like crossing… was the bounty system. I will admit I am pretty excited about this. One of the features that I loved from Dark Age of Camelot that no other game has really gotten right was the ability to create trophies of certain mobs out in the world. Our guild hall was full of these because I was constantly going out and collecting the “remains” needed to craft them. Rift seems to have finally created a version of that system that looks like it will work in modern terms. However after the frustrations up until that point, I just didn’t feel like sinking in the needed research to figure out exactly how the system worked.

I am sure at some point soon I will revisit it and be happy as a clam hunting down trophies. I just fear that this is he new reality for a game like Rift. When we get a patch, it will involve a little bit of free content and a lot of content you will have to hit the cash shop button to be able to truly enjoy. My frustration mostly is due the fact that I am a patron and have been one since the transition of that program. I feel like overall that is a “bad deal” since the loyalty accrual is excessively slow, there is no monthly credit allowance, and we still end up having to buy the new baubles when they come out. Sure the various daily buffs are nice, and I likely would not have made it to 60 on my rogue without them… but it feels like there should be at least some regular allowance of credits that can add up over time to be able to buy stuff from the store.

International Cupid

Today in light of Valentines being tomorrow, I have a factoid that I rarely tell. It is really weird how chance, fate, kismet… whatever you want to call it works sometimes. My wife and I grew up thirty minutes apart from each other in neighboring towns. It turns out that we knew several of the same people, went to several of the same places, and were probably in the same room multiple times during our lives. We would not have met however were it not for a mutual friend in Belgium. During the early days of the internet, we were both IRC junkies. Internet Relay Chat opened up a door to a world much larger than our own, and let us converse with people around the world… breakout out of our very limited small town upbringings.

Chatrooms in truth were a lot like we view guilds today, as a little social family that you hung out with. People shifted back and forth between them freely, and much like running content with some friends guild you hopped back and forth between channels freely. I’ve always been interested in programming and for awhile I got really into writing IRC bots. I would build little games into them, with dice rollers, character sheets and combat. It was through one of these bots that I met Hans. He asked me to come help him out with one of the bots on his channel, and it was one of the nights I was in his channel working on it that I saw a familiar address pop into the channel. Back in that day, you could see what internet service provider someone was connecting from, and over time I learned to immediately recognize all the local ones.

Out of the blue I messaged the new person who had entered the room saying something dumb to the equivalent of “not often that I see a local”. Apparently I freaked her out a little, since at the time I was logged into the bot. Observational skills were never a strong point. Hans apparently verified that I was a nice guy, and non-stalkerish because over the course of the next few weeks we struck up a friendship. Over Easter weekend she was heading back to her hometown, and we decided to meet up and go to the movies together. At this point it was just two friends hanging out and meeting in real life. We got along just fine, but neither of us was really looking for anything at that point so dating didn’t even dawn on either of us I don’t think.

As fate would have it, I was planning on transferring to the university she was attending, so at the very least it would be awesome to have some friends on campus. It was not until I had actually transferred that sparks really happened. To be honest we moved very quickly from “dating”, to being essentially inseparable from that point onwards. There were no long drawn out courtship rituals for us, we were far more practical than that. I still marvel at just how odd it was, that we had grown up so close to each other, but that it took someone half a world away to introduce us. Years later as we talked about our childhoods we have come up with several points at which we were likely in the same place at the same time. Thankfully we have an international cupid to thank for finally connecting us.

Beardly Dedication

February 8, 2014 by Belghast

Press NDA Lifted

There has been a lot of confusion in the last 24 hours as Zenimax has lifted the NDA just far enough to allow a bunch of press outlets to post stories. Massively crafted a really poorly worded tweet stating that the ESO NDA Had lifted. Even though they followed up almost immediately with a correction stating that it only applies to the press and media beta… it has caused massive amounts of confusion. As a result there are so many video leaks going on right now, a good number of them seem to have an axe to grind with the game in general. I am still very firmly under a gag order but I feel that is a bit of a disservice to the game as a whole.

Most of the albeit scathing reviews of the game seem to be missing the general point. I feel like right now a lot of people are going into this game with the expectation of it being something that it is not. This is the problem of a broad game like The Elder Scrolls. Every player has a certain way that they want to play the game, and if their chosen game play isn’t supported then obviously it is a horrible game. Apparently there are players out there who legitimately do nothing but steal stuff from stores, or players who do nothing but kill quest giver NPCs. These are just a few of the fringe game play styles that I have seen mentioned on the more public forums that certain fragments of the population are up in arms over.

Thing is… the game seems to be selling extremely well. The game has firmly been on the top 10 best sellers list on Amazon.com since releasing. So lots of people still have interest in the game despite the sour grapes reviews that are coming out. At this point I feel like Zenimax needs to open the flood gates and let the actual fans who have been sticking by the title speak for it. This is not an insignificant number of players mind you, but each of us is bound by the same NDA gag order, and unable to say a single thing in defense of the title. Keeping the NDA in place, and stating that there will not be a fully open beta before release… only serves to give the public the impression that the game has something to hide. The game has absolutely nothing to hide, and I look forward to the day when I can talk about it without hedging everything I say in grand generalizations. The video I linked above is my favorite of the batch of “reviews” and Dan Bull seems to “get it”.

Forest Temple that Isn’t

I have still been plugging away on building my “Forest Temple” and posted some photos the other day yesterday on the EQ Next Reddit. Turns out my name is a bit controversial. I am building a temple in a deeply forested region of the Pingo island, so to me that is a Forest Temple. But apparently to a lot of people that has a specific meaning, which is the Forest Temple from Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. I am just too old for this to have a significant meaning to me I guess. Ocarina of Time came out when I was in college, and while I played it and enjoyed it… it really didn’t imprint on me as being anything more than a fun game. A Link to the Past is my Zelda game and the one I hold up as the pinnacle above all others. For me the Zelda franchise is best in its 2D form.

So to clariify… I will try and come up with a better name for my place, because I don’t want to give the impression that I am trying to build “The Forest Temple”. At this point I have massive amounts of resource farming to complete the temple. I want to do one more floor and a ramparts area at the top, as well as build out the undercroft more fully. Right now I am planning on moving the craft machines from the porch area to the undercroft. I hope I can unlock the paint tool because I think with that I can help to age the temple with little bits of mossy grass on the stone. I also want to do some work to make things more intricate, but i figure over time I can work out the fine details. I posted an album of pictures of my most recent progress.

Beardly Dedication

This is one that my wife suggested so I am running with it. Early my Sophomore year in High School I started growing a beard, and unlike my friends who were cursed with the inability to do so… I was able to grow one rather successfully. From that point until today I have only been clean shaven twice… and both of those times were horrible mistakes. Granted I vacillate back and forth between a full beard and a moustache/goatee combination… but for the majority of 22 years I have been proudly dedicated to beardom. Basically my beard started as a way to make me look older, because I suffer from a baby face. If I were to shave right now at age 37… I would look like I was about fourteen. Well maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is not a good thing to say the least.

The first time I shaved my beard was during my Junior year. I was completely smitten with a girl who barely knew I existed. I asked her out to the prom and she accepted, but she really pressured me to shave off my goatee at the time. I should have stuck to my guns, because quite honestly nothing about that night was worth the pricetag of shaving my beard. I did not realize I was mired quite so deeply in the friend zone as I actually was, and at least if I had my beard I could have stroked it while pondering the situation as she danced with someone else the majority of the night. Beard stroking apparently is a legitimate thing, and it actually spurs on mental activity.

The second time I shaved it… I did it mostly by accident. I took off a little too much from one side while trying to even out my beard. Rather than shaving down to a goatee, I decided that my wife had never actually seen me clean shaven. At that point we had been together five or six years, and she was polite about it… but told me to grow it back as soon as I could and to never do it again. Apparently the beard suits me, either that or she couldn’t handle the fact that she looked like she was married to a teenager. I figure at some point when I do actually want to look younger I can instantly loose 20 years by shaving, or at least this is my planned exit strategy. The actual secret to my beard is more akin to the fact that I simply hate shaving and will do whatever I can to avoid doing so. At one point this year I was sporting a beard that would make the guys of duck dynasty take notice… but that was more a test of just how long I could let it go than anything else.