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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.

Married at the House of Vacuums

February 14, 2014 by Belghast

Belgarde Keep

Over the last two days there have been a couple of significant patches to Landmark. You can check out the patch notes here… here for more information. The most exciting of the changes is the fix to the way trees/plants/rocks kept respawning on our claims with no real way to remove them. In previous shots of my forest keep the overall view had been obstructed by a couple of giant trees. Now you can see a fairly clear view of the place. I have given up on calling it a temple, because really it no longer looks anything at all like a temple. Instead I have officially renamed it to “Belgarde Keep”. Last night I spent quite a bit of work starting to flesh out the details. You can see in this image that we now have the wooden posts sticking out from each floor as though they were coming from the ceiling beams. Additionally I have started replacing my main columns with ones that include some inset stucco.

Another really cool thing of note last night is that with the patches Sapphire and Ruby have been more sane and rational to collect. In fact if you are lucky you can now find surface spawn nodes. Over the course of a couple of these nodes I managed to gather up more of each gem than I had gotten to date allowing me to finally craft the Indigo Pick. Of course I got a rather crappy one on my first attempt, but all the excess sapphires allowed me to craft another cobalt pick, and after a little bit of farming tonight hopefully I will make a second shot at the Indigo. While they have reduced the amount of burled wood you need slightly to convert from raw to the craftable material… this still seems to be the bottleneck in almost everything that I want to craft. I made another attempt at a better axe last night and managed to get one just slightly faster.

At this point my focus over the next few days is to attempt to get a better Indigo pick, gather the materials for upgraded machinery and continue to work on fine detail for the keep as a whole. I need to start gathering the tier 5 resources but to be honest I am not even sure what they look like at this point. Right now the biggest thing I am not quite happy with in my keep design is the single pillar that supports the balcony. I expect now that the tree is out of the way I will rework that design feature extensively. I might try a curved balcony, I have ideas in my head on what that would be to craft but not sure exactly yet now to go about it especially since I would need to curve both the railing and the flooring.

Toxic Love

Earlier in the week I posted about the ongoing Love is in the Air event happening right now in World of Warcraft to coincide with Valentines Day. I had pretty much ignored the event until the last few days because in general, I queue for the dungeon each day and I walk away each day with nothing but a stack of useless Love Tokens. In past years I have queued faithfully each day only to somehow miss getting any of the pets and mounts. So this year I was not any more expectant of something cool… but since everyone else was doing it I felt I should probably start running them each day on all 6 of my 90s.

Finally last night my streak of nothing changed… at least to some extent. While I did not manage to get one of the mounts, I did however get the toxic wasteling pictured above. I realize it is just a ball of slime, but I find it far cuter than the other oozeling that I have. This is one of the newer models and minus the insane eyes… it kinda reminds me of a ChuChu from the Legend of Zelda series as pictured on the right. At least I feel like this years queueing was not a complete and total waste. While I would love to get the a Swift Lovebird I simply did not start the event soon enough to gather up the needed 250 tokens.

I have to share this image really quickly that @ManaBrownies posted over on twitter yesterday of ALL THE LOVEBIRDS. The thing that tickles me the most however is not the fact that you have multiple love birds and mini pet versions… but instead their guild name. I love that name so much, and if you don’t get the reference… which is probably likely since it is totally esoteric. I suggest you watch Empire Records, which oddly enough is on the long list of favorite movies.

Married at the House of Vacuums

In honor of Valentines Day I have another related factoid. My wife and I were Married at the House of Vacuums. Before we get to that point I have to explain a bit about our wedding in general. All we ever wanted was a very simple wedding. In college when we began planning it, we pictured this simple outdoor wedding with just the immediate family. However over time this plan morphed to nightmarish proportions. My mother took ahold of the guest list and started wanting to add everything under the sun, including my fourth grade teacher.

Then there was the fact that an outdoor wedding was simply not good enough. Since I grew up catholic, apparently you are not really married in the eyes of the church unless it happens inside of a catholic church. So she wanted us to have two weddings… the real outdoor wedding and then another smaller service in a catholic church so we were “legitimate”. I have never been really big on rules and regulations, and there was no way in hell I wanted to have two separate weddings just to make some religion happy. Especially one that I do not abide by myself and have not been a member of since I had the freedom to choose my own path in life. She was getting entirely too involved in the process and planning something neither of us wanted.

Finally there was the issue of who to walk my wife down the isle. She is from a split household, one that split years after her birth. So she had two complete households and as a result two fathers. Her step dad was a quiet and unassuming man, and would do literally anything for her… often making excuses to plan a trip up to college to come see us for the silliest reasons. Her biological father at that point in her life was not terribly engaged, and while I have come to love him… was very pushy and brash. So her step father would have been quiet about it, but wounded for life if he did not get to walk her down the isle. Whereas her biological father would have made a grand scene likely disowning us if he was not the one to walk her down the isle.

We had set and unset the date many times, but as the three ring circus careened off in a direction we were not willing to go with it, we decided that we needed none of it. All that mattered was that we were together, and as a result we opted to elope. That conjures visions of romantically running away to some fabled location, but in truth we simply managed to run around town and gather all the necessary things to be legally married in one day. We found a little marriage chapel in town, that had an opening the next day. While we were not technically married at the House of Vacuums, the marriage chapel we went to was around the corner in the same strip mall. My cousins and our best friend at the time stood up for us as witnesses, and we had a nice simple wedding service presided by a female minister that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of any longer.

Parts of our family, namely my mother was I am sure pissed at me for years over robbing her of her big day. However like everything else in our lives we managed to get married “our way”. My wife and I are both very non-conventional and pragmatic, so eloping to the House of Vacuums was simply “our way” of dealing with the challenges at hand. There has not been a single day I regretted our decision, and now I have an interesting story to tell. At the end of the day that is worth far more to me than having been crammed into a tuxedo and forced to go through a series of events we didn’t really want in the first place. At one point her biological father offered us a large sum of money to elope… but he never actually made good on that promise. I guess it was a good thing we did it because we wanted to.

The Mafioso’s Daughter

February 12, 2014 by Belghast

Weekly Routines

With yesterday being server reset day in World of Warcraft, I opted to take a break from my Landmark madness to do my weekly boss farming for mounts. Out of my stable of six level 90 characters, there are three that can solo Onyxia in a manner that makes me not want to pull out my hair. The very first time I tried doing Ony as a Blood Deathknight for example it took at least 30 minutes of diseases/deathcoil/icy touch to finally bring her down to the ground. However I have figured out that as Frost Deathknight, Retribution Paladin, and Enhancement Shaman I can make short work of her. As a result every Tuesday it has become a thing, for me to run those three characters through the fight in an attempt to get the ever illusive reins of the onyxian drake.

Of course like expected the kills went quickly but I had no better luck than any of the previous weeks getting the drop. It was at this point that I decided while I was farming content, I might as well take a few stabs at Kael’thas and his Ashes of Al’ar. The funny thing is… I don’t even like that mount, but it has become a point of pride for me to farm one up. So while I do at least one attempt every week, it is not like I would ever ride it. So far I have managed to solo the instance as Blood and Frost Deathknight and as Retribution Paladin… and I am wondering if I will be able to do it as Enhancement Shaman. Of course once again this week nothing of any interest dropped.

Finally while I was wallowing in my bitterness I opted to run all six of my characters through the holiday event instance. This year around it drops 480 necklaces, which unfortunately all of my characters have better. However I did manage to pick up a tanky necklace upgrade for my Paladin. Once again I am chasing a mount, but more than anything for total numbers… because there is no way in hell I would ever ride the Big Love Rocket around, but I would consider riding the Love Bird. More than anything I would be after the handful of pets. I normally don’t mess with the holiday events. Once I completed my violet proto drake, I have mostly ignored them. They are however pretty fast to run, since no queue last night lasted longer than 7 minutes as dps.

We Were Playing It Wrong

Over the last few days I have been complaining about the lack of Sapphire and Ruby or at least the difficulty of gathering it up. Yesterday I noticed the above tweet from Dave Georgeson, it seems like maybe we as a community was overlooking the intended way to get these. I had piddled around early in the game with a +1 discovery ring and didn’t see much difference, but at the suggestion of the tweet I crafted the Assessor’s Band and managed to get a +4 one. With it equipped alongside the existing +1 I am seeing a massive difference in the number of veins open to me as I wander through the world. I am sure you have been through the frustrating case of seeing a huge vein in the distance, but when you get up there finally there is nothing there. Well apparently that is what discovery is for.

After equipping the two rings, for the most part those veins stay in place as I get closer to them. Additionally the discovery trait also seems to interact with how often I get the rare drop from each item. This means I am getting more elementals, burled wood and as a result seeing more veins that have sapphire and ruby in them. They are still frustratingly rare, but less so. I did not play for extremely long last night, but I did manage to get a couple dozen gems of each type. Supposedly we are getting a patch today or tomorrow that will fix the issues that have arisen with boulders and trees spawning again on claims, with no real way to remove them. I am mostly waiting for this before I do much more building as I can’t really see my keep as a whole until I can remove some trees.

The Mafioso’s Daughter

Before I met my wonderful wife, there were plenty of missteps along the way. Most of them are not really entertaining in any fashion, but one I always felt like I dodged a bullet with… potentially literally. While I was still attending a junior college I met a really nice ballet major attending a nearby college. She seemed great, but early on I could tell that she was used to operating in a much higher tax bracket than I was. It wasn’t anything major, but her expectations of what “going out” meant were far different than that of my small town upbringing. After a few dates she pulled me aside and told me that she was starting to get serious about me… but there was something I needed to know.

It turns out that her family was connected to the mafia. She kind of brushed this off as no big deal or as something “I would get used to”. Her father ran some large electronics store, and they lived down the street from the Gotti clan in Long Island. We didn’t have Google back then, but over the course of a few online searches and some mapquest usage… it seemed like her story checked out. I’m a boy scout literally… I am not the type of person that “high crime” has ever appealed to. While I love watching shows like Boardwalk Empire, I have never once romanticized that lifestyle. It had become very clear over the course of the dates that she was “daddy’s little girl”, so I felt it was probably bad for my health if I did not let her down gently.

I did my best to be “less interesting” that I would hopefully make her lose interest in me, and over the course of a few weeks it worked. I wanted no part of the “family business”, but at the same time I didn’t want to break her heart… and have mine shot in the process. Sure I am probably over exaggerating the danger here, but it definitely freaked me the hell out. Looking back now I can regale you with the tale of the time I dated the Mafioso’s Daughter, but when I was going through it, nothing about it seemed funny. I doubt there was every a time where I would have just “gotten used to it”. Thankfully not terribly long after that I met my awesome wife, and everything before is now just a humorous footnote.

Democratizing Access

February 11, 2014 by Belghast

Democratizing Access

Over the last few weeks there has been a subtopic that has sprung up several times in blog comments threads and occasionally over on twitter regarding the selling of beta access. More so a lot of the discussion has centered around the trend of the public paying to beta test a product for a company. For me I tend to lump all of these schemes together be it a kickstarter you might support, or steam early access or something like the trove or landmark presales. In all of the cases you are giving the company a stream of funding on the promise of getting early access to their game so that you can play it first. Quite honestly I am completely fine with this trend and think it is overall a good thing.

At this point I have been over a hundred alpha and beta programs for various games. I used to try and keep track of them all but to be honest I simply cannot. Every time I turn around I am in a new beta program with a new NDA. Previously getting into these programs, especially the more coveted ones involved knowing the right people or being extremely lucky with a random roll of the dice. I will admit I have talked to a friend of a friend who got me on that desired friends and family list more than a few times for a game I was extremely interested in. To be honest, the system that existed just is not fair to the gamer, and involved a whole lot of cronyism… did I abuse this fact to get access to what I wanted? Hell yes I did.

For the the concept of buying into a program just seems more just. If you care enough to plunk down your money in support of a game, then by all means you should have access to alpha and beta testing. I think it changes more than just that, in the programs I have been a part of recently that really worked well… the company is more accountable to its paid testers. They have been all the more responsive with feedback and taken bug submissions all the more seriously. Additionally in each of these games where I have been essentially a paid tester, I have seen a faster development of new feature sets and rapid patching schedules. Trove for example it is unusual that we go a week without a major feature being added.

For me at least, who is someone that does not mind adding my support to a title I believe in before I have seen it… this trend is a good thing. If you think about it in a certain light, this is really no different than preordering a game months in advance. When you decide to purchase that collectors edition, you are taking a gamble on the game being something you will want to play for the long haul. When The Secret World came out, I took a gamble and purchased the lifetime membership, thinking it would be a game that I would enjoy for a good time to come. While I do not play it every week, I still feel like I got my value out of that initial purchase, and log in frequently enough to feel like I am still using it. I think like most things, all of this is a matter of perspective, but I feel like this shift in systems is far more fair than the previous ones.

Cough Syrup Gems

Last night I managed to find enough sapphires to be able to craft my cobalt pick. Unfortunately it is a pretty crappy one, but so far the ones my friends have made have all been lousy. My hope is that once I can craft the indigo pick I will once again get a blue or better quality. For now however I am using my viridian pick on anything it can mine out, and then only switching to my cobalt pick to actually consume the rubicite and ruby veins. Speaking of which… if I thought sapphire was frustrating I feel like I am in for a long haul when it comes to finding the 120 ruby needed to craft the indigo pick. Right now the only way to find ruby is at the bottom of a surface spawning rubicite vein. Unfortunately like the above image shows… most rubicite you find on the surface is really just an upside down cobalt vein.

So whereas seeing red used to make me a sad panda… seeing blue in my rubicite veins has the same effect. Right now I have managed to gather up 45 of the 120 rubies, but I still need a large quantity of elemental rubicite as well. Luckly I have a ton of side projects that I want to complete, and as a result I still need large quantities of gold and tungsten and to be truthful cobalt and sapphires to be able to complete several of the upgraded crafting benches. Right now I have upgraded to the amaranthe forge, but the rest of my machines are at the lowest possible level. It is funny how often my machines get used by my neighbors. That is one of the aspects I love about this game, I will be in my little keep crafting away and next thing I know someone comes by to say hello and either ask if they can use my machines, or compliment me on the building. There is already a small but budding community happening in the various islands.

Between sessions of looking for sapphires and rubies I put in quite a bit more work on the Forest Temple that has now turned into more of a Forest Keep. I completed the wood brace beams in the ceilings of most of the floors, and started working on the basement “undercroft area”. Now all of the machines are located there and I decided to only display the most current machine to ease confusion. Additionally I built a “vault” area where I wrapped my vault portal in stone so that it just looks like a portal in the wall of sorts. I am almost to the point where I will begin fine detail work. I am considering trying to make some mosaics using the triangle block to inset in the walls, but I am not 100% sold on that notion. Essentially I would use the various ores as a sort of stained glass. I uploaded another album of photos to show the recent progress.

I’ve Never Used My College Degree

The title of today’s factoid is a bit misleading, since any college degree gets used to some extent at least in being able to check off a box on a resume search, however I have never been employed in a field that has actually used mine. Throughout High School I was torn between two loves, that being Art and Computers. There was a point in my senior year where I was enrolled in four different college degree programs for the coming year, because I simply could not make up my mind which path I wanted to choose. Being somewhat pragmatic, I chose to attend a junior college and get my basics out of the way on the cheap as I tried to make up my mind… the whole “what do you want to be when you grow up” question.

I decided to take an associates program that was brand new that year called “Desktop Video Production”. Primarily it consisted of lots of 2D and 3D animation work on the Amiga/Video Toaster, a fair amount of computer science and programming classes, and some old school production video work and classic video editing technique. Being a brand new degree program, everything was experimental and when a few of the classes didn’t make I had to get substitutions made so I could get out of there in two years. At this point I was greatly leaning towards art, so I opted to transfer into a four year university and enter the commercial art program. Since I had an associates, they decided to transfer any computer science hours that did not specifically map up to something they had as a computer science minor.

It was here that I made a shift again, the more into the art curriculum I got, the more and more I shifted to doing as much as I could on the computer. I became the lab manager for the fine arts lab, and tutored folks through Photoshop, Corel, Quark Xpress and a few 3D animation packages. It was around this point when I started looking at the job market that I realized exactly what the term “starving artist” meant. While in college I got a job as the system administrator and webmaster for a small internet service provider. It was here that I managed to get the “by the bootstraps” education in networking, server administration, and a good bit of serious web programming. I realized that if I wanted to be making a decent living, that I would be far better off following my computer tendencies.

Straight out of college I got a job as a webmaster for a fairly large company and over the years that morphed into more serious programming. At this point I’ve shifted back and forth between web and windows programming, even doing a small a bit of low level device driver programming on occasion. All the while almost entirely abandoning the Bachelor of Commercial Arts degree that I ended up with. Sure especially on the web there is a good aspect of commercial art that you end up doing, so this is why I say my factoid is a bit misleading. However it is very true that I have never once worked as an artist, at least for profit. The interesting thing about being a programmer without having a serious computer science background, is that I think it gives me a slightly different perspective. Often times when sitting in a room with computer science majors, I will come up with an off the wall solution that ends up saving the day. I guess in the end I am thankful for my non-traditional background.