everquest next Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Wild Podcast Appears!

April 13, 2014 by Belghast

The Birth of AggroChat

This mornings blog post is going to be heavily related to what we did yesterday. Firstly… I have long thought that some of the conversations we had on the House Stalwart mumble sounded pretty damned close to many of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. While I did not think we would ever be as polished as Alternative Chat, or as awesomely thematically focused as the Battle Bards… I thought our people had something interesting to add to the mix. This is happening super fast to be honest, but that is probably a good thing. I was afraid that this would end up being yet another idea we had, that we never quite capitalized on.

We first talked about doing this on April 9th, and here it is the 13th and we have our first show up. I am sure at this point it is somewhat awkward of a recording but we will get better. Additionally at some point I will lean how the hell to use audacity and make a better sounding introduction. We have a super ghetto libsyn page up right now, and that will also be changing hopefully over the coming weeks. Rae is working on some really awesome chibi versions of the co-hosts and she would likely kill me if I posted the pencil versions before she has time to pretty them up. If you guys did not know it was Rae that drew the original Belghast chibi that adorns this blog, so the new ones are truly awesome. Since libsyn needed a 1400×1400 square image I threw together a truly obnoxious placeholder image.

A Wild Podcast Appears!

As I alluded to above… last night at 8pm EST we did our very first recording. It was a little awkward starting out, but as the night went on things felt more natural. There was a point at the end where I finally looked at the clock and noticed we had been rambling on for an hour and decided to cut things off. In truth we hang out on mumble damned near every night, so I knew that once we got over the hump of doing this “for real” things would begin to flow again. We covered a pretty wide gamut of topics from ESO Craglorn Adventure Zone, to Heroes of the Storm, to My Little Pony Card game and many many stops in-between. I will leave it up to you guys to determine if it is a worthy pursuit. I am pretty happy with the way things turned out, for it being our very first podcast… and none of us really know what the hell we are doing. Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the end result.

Right now we are very much in a “finding our format” mode. Functionally we have been keeping things really simple. We all share access to a google doc that is a running show topics of sorts. In this first episode we barely scratched the surface of all the things we ended up brainstorming. Mostly I would like to see us keep things pretty lose, but we might start doing a section for news after the what we are playing bit. While the “what everyone is playing” thing is pretty generic, it seems to work really well to break the ice and get things rolling. I’ve seen numerous podcasts and video casts do that one… so I felt not shame in blatantly stealing it.

Rivenspire is Serious Business

Yesterday morning pretty early I finished up the content in Stormhaven and moved up into the Rivenspire area. The transition between Glenumbra and Stormhaven was pretty extreme, but there seems to be an equally steep divide between Stormhaven and Rivenspire. Single pulls are pretty much a thing of the past, and it is very unlikely that I now find smaller than a three pull when I am running around. As a result of this and a result of the fact that I have a really awesome onehander right now… I am back to mostly playing as sword and shield instead of two hander. I am still really enjoying the content, and if you played through SWTOR at all… Rivenspire feels a lot like Alderaan.

You have these competing families vying for control of the land, with one of them having gone completely off the deep end. Additionally there is a very “Castlevania” feel to the zone, which tells me as I get deeper in I will like the content even more. Few things make me happier than slaying Werewolves and Vampires…. and the zone also has a pretty heavy contingent of Daedra to boot. In fact one of the public dungeons I ventured into thinking I could solo it… and ended up getting bailed out by my friend Warenwolf. It easily had to have a dozen different bosses in it including the ones associated with the quest chain. It is truly insane the amount of loot you get in a group public dungeon like that. We both had to resort to “mail banking” where we mail the items to a friend and they return it back to us later.

Tag Team Farming

While recording the podcast last night, Rae and I spend most of it faffing about in Landmark. The thing that has had me high center in my building project is a complete and total lack of stone. My structure is almost entirely made of stone and it took over 200,000 to get to the point at which it is today. Last night I went out into the desert and dug down, as underneath sand is generally a solid bed of stone as far as you can possibly dig. Before I knew it Rae had joined me and we were carving out a massive swath of stone beneath the ground. While recording we managed to harvest up over 300,000 and as a result I went back and added in floors/ceilings to my stone superstructure. This makes me happy as I was getting tired of seeing the grass growing up in the middle of my keep. From here I am not quite sure where I am going next but I have a few ideas.

If you are in game you should totally swing by Liberation/Levee and check out Rae’s adjoining claims. They are located on a hill southeast of the spire, and the low settings I have to run the game on for my laptop to not completely die… are not doing it justice. She has this really awesome garden area, and then down the hill she has a guest house. Her main house is carved out of the hillside and a subterranean area. If you are in need of a crafting hub she also has pretty much all of the machines. She has another super secret project, but I won’t be showing it since i think she is going to try and enter it in the “Landmark’s Landmarks” contest. Here is hoping she does well because it is looking really cool.

Elder Scrolls Launch Day

March 30, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sabbatical

Normally this morning you would have been reading about my misadventures playing a new to me game from my steam backlog. However we are taking a week off from that feature, mainly because I knew I would be busy this morning with something else. However we will get to that later, and the reasons why I got up at 5 am this morning to be prepared for it. Instead today we are going to talk about a few games and the highlight of my day yesterday. For awhile now I have been doing the “Bel Faffs About” thing where I stream a game as I play it, and invite people into my “Bel is Streaming” mumble channel. The usual suspects are my guildies who come online and are entertaining so that I don’t have to.

Yesterday I got to hang out with some of my favorite people from twitter, namely @Gypsy_Syl, @NexusRangers, @GameByNight and after awhile the very awesome @TipaDaKnife. I got to hang out the longest with Syl and it was a blast. The only problem is I am so used to listening to her talk about video game music thanks to the amazing Battlebards podcast… it was a little weird to be talking about anything else. Everyone was great and it made for a fun afternoon, even though after getting up at 4 am I was quite a little slap happy as the night went on.

Mithril or Bust

Yesterday we played a lot of Landmark as we hung out, and the missions of the day were really two fold. Firstly I wanted to try and finish my work on gathering the resources for the Mithril pick. Currently this is the highest in progression you can go as far as mining, and thanks to the changes they made to the Founders Pick being able to harvest ANY tree… there is not a resource mining or wood that I cannot consume. The other mission was to be able to craft the rest of the basic machines for my claim so that others can use them. One of the odd things that was different from alpha is that there are both public and private machines. The private machines are labelled as “Refining stations” and allow you to work resources at a progressively better rate, returning more finished materials than went into creating them.

For some time now I have felt a little bit bad for grabbing such prime real estate, but not having done anything on it but clear the ground. In the above screenshot you can see the foundation for Belgarde Keep from the spire, so it really is a very short run away. The problem is as I progress through the crafting tiers I am in constant need of stone. Yesterday at one point I decided to dig down in the desert for as long as I could and harvest as much stone as I could. Unfortunately that happened to be exactly the same time @GameByNight decided to use the “teleport to friend” option. I had been down there long enough that the ground above me was respawning leaving us essentially trapped underground. Thankfully the evac to safety option works remarkably well.

What you are seeing in the pictures represents roughly 350,000 stone worth of building. I managed to gather 200k doing my “big dig” and poured another bit into it over the course of several trips. Sometime soon I will have to do another one my grand harvesting missions and try and make some more progress. Essentially I am building a greatly scaled up version of the building I created in alpha. I am changing up the design significantly but not the overall building type. I like big open air temple like spaces. Essentially I am building much the same type of structures that I used to build in Minecraft. The smooth tool and the ability to craft curved shapes is nice, but I really prefer straight and chiseled edges.

Elder Scrolls Launch Day

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVLast night I went to bed seriously early for me, after having gotten up at 4 am the day before. I had heard rumor that the servers would be opening this morning for the Elder Scrolls Online slightly early, but was not certain that was going to be the case. I ended up waking up about 4:45 and by the time I made coffee and got upstairs, there were a few other guildies also sitting on mumble waiting for things to open. Sure enough a little bit after 5 am CST I was able to log in and create Belghast Sternblade for real. Thing is… it did not take me terribly long on the character creator because I have created this character literally a dozen times now throughout a years worth of testing. I am a simple person, and tend to create the same basic character in each game that I play. So I managed to get in extremely quickly and create the guild long before anyone else logged in.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVSince early this morning I have been hanging out in the “Bel is Streaming” channel as lots of other people have popped in to join me. Honestly far too many to list here, but it has prove to be a really enjoyable and entertaining day. I will be exporting the stream to youtube eventually but here I am posting the various twitch links. If nothing else they are fun to open up and listen into our conversation in the background like it was a podcast. I am for the most part live streaming all day long. While this is a headstart, this is one of the smoothest launches I have participated in. THis folks is why they had us stress test the hell out of stuff during the weekend betas, and every indication shows that they learned a lot of information. The mega server tech seems to be holding up and scaling well.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVRight now I am having a blast, so if you have access to the House Stalwart mumble server, pop by and say hi. I plan on going right back to the game, that is open in the background and continuing my odyssey. However I wanted to take a moment and make my post before it got any later in the day. Hopefully you all are having as great of a weekend as I am.

Communal Harvesting

March 28, 2014 by Belghast

A Circus with Wi-Fi

While yesterday was considerably better than Wednesday, it was still pretty freakin stressful. It just seems that after essentially five days out of the office so much crap has stacked up that I absolutely have to deal with. I keep threatening to run away and join the circus, but I don’t think anyone really takes me seriously at this point. Afterall I would have to find a circus with wi-fi and fiber… because really satellite internet sucks. My boss asked me what exactly I would do at the circus, and I guess probably the easiest role to play would be “bearded lady”. All I would really have to do is cross dress… and I guess I could deal with that.

Yesterday I managed to get over 10,000 steps with my fitbit for the first time so that is a little bit of a personal goal met. In part we only managed to do this because we spent most of the evening shopping for a refrigerator. The problem being that our house has one of those damned annoying “over the fridge” cabinets. This means that we have a fixed amount of space that we can slide one in. Problem being that if the numbers are not lying horribly… everything is about half an inch too tall. We think actually the fridge we are looking at will fit just right, but if not we might have to do some “day of arrival” modification to the cabinet. I was going to try and doctor this with a dremel, but yesterday one of my friends suggested a hand planer. The fridge is still mostly functional (except for ice cream) so I think we have a little bit of leeway.

Bigger Claim

I made it home well before my wife last night as is usually the case, so I ended up popping upstairs to play some Landmark. In truth I first tore apart my computer and installed a brand new Geforce 750 ti 2 gb superclocked card that arrived. It dropped into the machine without any issue, other than a little bit of confusion windows 8.1 had when I first booted up. However as I was re-downloading the geforce drivers it seemed to magically right itself, so I am guessing behind the scenes windows was doing something. I love my wife dearly for not balking at me wanting to pick one of these up, but overall she is super supportive of my obsessions just as I am of hers. She also got a care package full of jewelry yesterday, so she also got something nifty in the mail.

I have to say that if I thought Landmark looked amazing on Medium or High, it looks all the better on Ultra. My early evening obsession was in getting the two claim extension flags crafted so I could expand my hold on Liberation/Shield. With the help of my good friend Rae I managed to gather up enough Elemental Tin to craft two of these flags. Thing is… while applying them I realized that the upkeep costs are not weekly like I assumed, but daily. Before adding my additional claim flag the upkeep cost was 300 copper per 24 hour period. Adding one claim flag doubled this. So while I don’t really see a problem harvesting 600 copper per day (and you can keep a stockpile of 5 days worth on your claim), I am not sure if I really want to do 900 a day and add the second flag. So right now I will just sit on that for the time being, and if a friend needs it to expand their claim I will mail it their way.

Communal Harvesting

When I finally got home in the evening from our whirlwind tour of the various appliance stores in town, I sat down with the purpose of working on upgrading my tools. However my friend Rae and my friend Lethbridge were already grouped together in search of the illusive “thistle seeds” that only come from a super rare desert tree with purple flowers. One of the coolest features of the Closed Beta that was not in the previous Alpha incarnation (at least that I know of) is the way grouping works. If you and I are grouped and in the same area… essentially you have to be in visual distance of each other… when I harvest you get a copy of everything I loot, and when you harvest I get a copy of everything you loot. What makes this awesome is that while someone is harvesting one node, you can pop over and harvest a completely different node and share the benefit.

I am not entirely sure if this is a “feature” or a bug, but Audrae was way more progressed than me tool wise. She and I played early in the evening, and then two hours later when I got home from the fridge-go-round she was still playing. During that time she had progressed to a tungsten pick, and as we wandered around the their two zone looking for these trees she was able to harvest… and therefore transfer a copy to us of much higher materials than we could ever do on our own. Essentially this means you can leap frog your friends over hurdles by wandering around and harvesting with them. So while at the time I could not harvest the tungsten and gold, I could do iron or stone or a tree and still be somewhat useful. Towards the end of the evening I arrived with a lot of help at the same place she is in the progression: Tungsten Pick and Gold Axe.

Currently we are tag teaming the harvesting of cobalt in trying to get those picks, as well as wandering around the “old growth” forest biome looking for the illusive “Ancient Rootstock”. This then gets refined into Vital Heartwood which is used to craft the haft of the Cobalt Pick we now lust after. At this point honestly we are mostly focusing on item progression, and at some point soon hopefully I will have compiled a stockpile of materials to begin rebuilding “Belgarde Keep”. The new version will be considerably bigger as I have two claims to work with now, but for the most part I plan on using the same sort of construction. This means I am going to need millions and millions of stone, which luckily I am getting while I wander around the world harvesting other things.

In the curious footnote department… I noticed that in closed beta the loading screen has now completely dropped the “Everquest Next” verbiage from the logo. It is now identified as “Landmark” and so is the client itself. I am wondering if this is an attempt to start trying to clear up the confusion of how this connects to Everquest Next as a whole? They have been up front about their intention that this is a completely separate game, that will share tech with Next, but have its own objectives. So I guess this is the beginning of trying to divorce the two brands in the minds of the players.

The Great Landrun

March 27, 2014 by Belghast

Joining the Circus

I have decided, that after the day I had yesterday, I am going to run away and join the circus. Not that I particularly want to be a part of the circus, and especially not since clowns have always freaked me the hell out. It however seems like the proper thing to do when you’ve had a day as bad as the one I had yesterday. Lets scan back through the annals of time to September 11th 2012, and “the event”. I had just returned back to work from taking a few days off for the death of my Grandfather, when a gross overreaction to a security scan gone wrong changed my life for the worst.

Yesterday was my first day back after taking two days off for the death of my grandmother. As I was travelling in I got a text from my boss making sure that I would be there. When I got in, things were bad. Seems as though a security scan gone wrong had locked up and was not essentially DDoSing our websites. So I spent most of the morning dealing with trying to triage our servers as the scan completed. Finally someone had to go in and force cancel the scan because it seems like things had hung up completely. I ended up spending a good chunk of my afternoon dealing with the fallout. Then on top of that we had a major GIS system release, that kept me there until after 5:30. Which doesn’t seem very long until you realize that I generally work 7 to 4.

Basically I was already not in the best shape after losing my grandmother, and to walk back into this shit storm… was almost more than I could handle. However I managed to soldier through and do the stuff that needed to be done to get through the day. Apparently this is what happens when I lose a grandparent… the world plots to destroy me. I feel like it is appropriate still to run away and join the circus. That seems to be the thing you are supposed to do when you have had a phenomenally bad day like yesterday. The only problem is it might be difficult to find a circus with wi-fi, so I guess I will just limp through the rest of this week and try really hard to recuperate this weekend. To add some icing to this cake, it seems like we need to go refrigerator shopping. While most of the food is still freezing well enough, we have reached the point where Ice Cream is no longer “icy”, but instead more yogurt like consistency.

The Great Landrun

Yesterday afternoon Landmark reopened and we were greeted by a slew of new servers and some completely new island names. Gone was my beloved Liberation/Pingo so I knew I would have to venture out and find someplace new to call home. I spent a bit of time popping between the tier 1 zones until I settled upon Liberation/Shield. Originally I thought I would only be in game long enough to stake my claim and then run off and play some Diablo 3. I was apparently wrong. It turns out that this time around we had to gather up enough materials to be able to craft our very own claim flags. By the time I landed on the island I noticed that the claimable land was already shrinking… and while doing a lot of complaining over twitch… I proceeded to try and gather the mats to make my claim flag.

With the founders pick, it was actually rather simple. The claim flag requires 7 elemental iron, 10 heartwood, and 10 sapphire. Before I really knew what I was doing I had gathered up the iron and the heartwood and only needed to find some sapphire. However a short run from the portal spire I managed to find a patch and get more than enough gems to finish my flag. I zipped to the portal which now has not only a forge but a sawmill as well as a brand new mailbox. I was shocked and amazed that I was able to make a claim within visual distance of the spire on Liberation/Shield. I proceeded to faff around for the next thirty minutes clearing my claim to prepare to try and rebuild Belgarde Keep.

Grappling Hook Lust

After I ate some dinner I popped back in and started streaming again. Granted like usual I am in with my friends on mumble and we are not necessarily talking about Landmark. However before too long the all consuming mission of Rae and I was to get back our grappling hook. Being able to zip around the map rocks, and NOT having it made me sad. So I popped around the map looking for a machine capable of making the grappler. Turns out it is the outfitters workbench that can craft it, and just southeast of the portal in Liberation/Shield has a really great claim. Serac has apparently poured through the creation of some of the better machines, and will hopefully serve as a nice outpost close to me for building all the stuff I need to build.

While it took damned near all night to find 20 elemental tin… since surface tin seems to be a rarity, I did manage to cobble one together before I had to go to sleep. The only problem… I had forgotten just how bad the Bronze Grappling hook sucked. For starters the cord is insanely short, so you can only grapple very short distances. On top of that it has always felt like it is far more random in its hook points than the later ones. All of that said… any grappler is better than no grappler. At least now I can dig my way into a hole with impunity, knowing that I can zip back up to the surface just by hitting E.

If any of the SOE folk are reading this… you guys should totally sneak me a prime grappler code under the table. I still want to know how those things work as compared to the highest tier grappler I crafted in Alpha, which I believe was Viridium. Another really amazing addition this time is the mailbox I mentioned earlier. Throughout the night I mailed several sets of “claim flag mats” to various friends who did not have the luck to start the game with the Founders Pick. With the massive run on land going on, I wanted to make sure most of them had the chance to claim a decent space while they were still available. Now if you were an alpha player… you are on your own since it is relatively simple to gather up the materials after getting in and seeing just how common Iron, Heartwood and Sapphire really are.