Factoid February Archives - Page 3 of 4

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.

Budgie Week Fiasco

February 7, 2014 by Belghast

Another Friday, Moar Fodder

Well another week has passed and it is once again time for Friday Forum Fodder. I have admittedly not been following the discussion around the interwebs as closely as I usually do during the week. I have a massive backlog of unread blog posts in my reader as spending the first half of the week sick and the second half desperately trying to play catch-up has left me with less lollygagging time. I did stumble across a couple of things that I found interesting so the topics are primed and ready to go.

WoW Up to 7.8 Million Subscribers

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3741-WoW-Up-to-7-8-Million-Subscribers

Apparently yesterday Blizzard had their Q4 2013 earnings call, and announced that they were currently sitting at 7.8 Million subscribers, which surprisingly is a 200k subscriber bump over the 7.6 announced in the Q3 2013 earnings call. Of course we all know that Blizzcon happened between those two calls, and that we had the announcement of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. However 200,000 players seems like an awful lot to simply account for the “Blizzcon Bump”. On Argent Dawn I have said before that we have been experiencing a bit of a renaissance with a large number of players coming back that I have not seen since Wrath, and some of them not even since Burning Crusade. This feels like something more substantial than just interest in the new and shiny bauble called Warlords.

With the release of Rift, something happened in the populace, a fracturing of sorts. That was the very first time I saw people leave WoW in a semi-permanent fashion. Always before when a new product released, players would drift away from the game only to return a month or two later. Something was different with the release of Cataclysm that broke the inertia of players to stay in one place. I myself was gone for a little over two years, and during most of that time I never saw myself seriously returning. For whatever reason I think a lot of us are resigned to the fact that the “wow-killer” simply will never exist. All of this effort spent trying to find a better experience than World of Warcraft just wound up leading us right back to the original.

I personally have come to realize that what WoW provides just does not exist in the same quantity or quality elsewhere. Sure various games do various components of the total WoW experience better, but no one game hits as many high points as Blizzard does. I have reached a point where I am mostly okay with the games flaws… and while I wish that it did certain things better, I can accept the fact that what it does is for the benefit of the many not the few. There are niche games out there that will scratch the various itches I have that WoW simply cannot. So while I am back in WoW I am also still very much playing Rift, TSW, Everquest Next Landmark and will be adding Elder Scrolls Online to that lineup. I have reached a point where I am okay with playing multiple games at the same time.

The beauty of World of Warcraft is that it is the game of consensus. It is that game that everyone plays when they can’t get anyone to agree on any other game. People play WoW because people play WoW. More than anything the large community that comes part and parcel with playing the game was the thing I had been missing since leaving it. When you play wow, you are instantly a member of something larger than yourself, and that is just an experience that is lacking with any of the other games. Don’t get me wrong, the other game communities are great, especially the fledgling Everquest Next community bolstered by SOE’s new sense of transparency. However it is still lacking in sheer size and volume of players. The Blizzard gaming community is big enough to support everyone, and that is a really rare and special thing.

Budgie Week Fiasco

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/412505-budgie-week-guide.html

Firstly I want to say, this is less about the specific thread but more about the Budgie Week event. I latched onto the guide threat by Seatin mostly because it was the only really active thread out there that coalesced all of the viewpoints in one place, whether or not he actually intended that to happen. Seatin does a great job of supporting the community with his guides and videos, so nothing I say should be held as a reflection on that. Additionally I love the folks at Trion, especially the team that is presently working on Trove. That is such a great game and the open process is so refreshing, including the use of Reddit as their primary forums. Additionally when Rift went free to play, I considered it to be one of the more just and equitable models. However some of the things they have been doing with the cash shop are feeling more than a little shifty.

Awhile back some of my friends were frustrated over the Squirrel mount that was released, in that they missed the ridiculously short window it was available for purchase outright in the game. This was really the beginning of a new trend, offering a cool mount for a very short time, and then putting a similar mount in a cash shop lootbox as the primary means of obtaining it. This was the case for the Squirrel mount, the Mech mount, and now looks to be the same basic thing going on with the Budgie mount. The shifty part this time is that they introduced a world event to make it seem as though you can actually acquire the mount that way. Problem is… with this being only a 7 day event it is simply impossible to gain enough of the “bird seed” currency doing these quests alone.

According to Seatin’s guide, if you got in on the first day of the event there is a maximum of 210 bird seed that you can obtain. The mount costs 850 bird seed on the vendor, meaning there is simply no way to obtain it without somehow augmenting your seed count. It turns out right now they are offering a limited time cash box that has a chance of dropping a different colored budgie mount, and you are guaranteed between 6 and 10 birdseed per box. The average seems to be 8 per trove, so in theory you need roughly 80 of these cash shop boxes to be able to purchase the bird. Granted you have a chance from each to get the OTHER budgie mount, but we aren’t even taking this into account. Essentially even doing your quests religiously every day, you would have to spend roughly $300 on the cash shop to be certain you get this mount while it is available.

Now Daglar has posted on the forums that this is a promo event, and they intend to run it several times a year, and by participating in all of them you should be able to get the mount. Even saying that… it still feels extremely bad seeing this unfold. This is the same kind of crap that I see over in SWTOR with making most of the truly unique looking mounts only available through the random chance of a cash shop box. The difference there is that you can actually post the items once you have gotten them on the auction house… whereas the cash shop loot in Rift is either soul bound or bound to your account. This whole event just leaves me feeling a little dirty for having supported their shirt to free to play so actively. I still think Rift is a great game, and I still think more or less it is a good value… they are just doing a few unsavory things that make me a little sad inside.

Bel Goes to Nasa

This mornings factoid digs pretty deep into the annals of time. Once upon a time I wanted to grow up to be a Scientist. I am not really sure what happened along the way to change that life ambition. If I had to guess it was probably the fact that AP Chemistry ate my lunch, but I managed to get out of it with a B, which seemed pretty damned good at the time. All that aside, I did really and truly want to be a Scientist, so I took the yearly ritual of the science fair extremely seriously. Through boy scouts I had gotten into model rocketry, so when it came time to pick a project I thought it would be interesting to do something related to that. With copious help from my father, we constructed a wind tunnel that ran on a shop vac, and proceeded to test the effects of airflow based on various model rocket fin shapes.

I think the key to winning a science fair is to have something cool to look at in your booth. I am sure there were many students that had more scientifically sound studies than I did, but I had cool photos of the pattern each of the fins had made. We tied string to each of the fins so that we could watch the pattern the thread made based on the airflow. The contrails that were created gave a clear picture of how each shape varied and was something nice and concrete that the judges to latch onto. I won the local level science fair and managed to move up to regional’s, but this was not something really new to me, because my pantograph had done the same my six grade year. In all honesty repeating a victory at the local level would have been more than enough for me.

When I got to regional’s however I was shocked at just how excited the judges seemed to be about my exhibit. So when it came down to time to present the awards, I don’t really remember what place I got in the main competition, because it was quickly overshadowed by the “special” award that I won. I got a trip for me, my family and my science teacher to NASA’s Johnson Space center. I have to say it was one of the cooler things I have experienced. A lot of the trip is a haze at this point, but I remember walking through a prototype of what would eventually become the international space station. I also remember getting to play around in the shuttle flight simulator, and meeting actual astronauts. All of which were pretty heady things for my little wannabe scientist seventh grader mind. But of course, High School happened… and I discovered computers and programming… and I jettisoned the thoughts of being a scientist out the airlock and moved on.

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

February 4, 2014 by Belghast

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

Most kids growing up end up working food service of one form or another, but I somehow lucked out and missed that experience during my formative years. Honestly I had a pretty good string of jobs throughout High School but probably the most bizarre would be that of Wedding Photographer… or more so the Photographers Assistant. My father was a machinist by day and professional portrait photographer by night and weekend. Essentially I grew up in the darkroom and was extremely comfortable around photographic equipment before most kids had learned to ride a bicycle. As I got older and needed an allowance, I often got drafted into helping out with the “family business”.

This was not as glamorous as it might sound. Essentially it usually meant sticking me up in a balcony somewhere during the service with a zoom lens and getting the nifty overhead shots that my father could not get from the ground. By my teen years I could name all the basic parts of a wedding, and could spot little variations coming before they actually happened. This whole experience has caused me to loathe weddings. Being the wedding photographer is a really uncomfortable experience, for a few hours you become part of the family and have to figure out how to wrangle your way through getting the shots taken. Thanks to tradition no one wants to take the photos before the wedding… and then after the ceremony it becomes a sheer struggle of wills to keep everyone in their clothing and willing to line up in the various shot arrangements that the bride and groom will want. Everyone wants to mingle with family because they go away… and while the photos don’t seem that important on the day of the event… they will certainly catch the fact that you didn’t get a photo of them with uncle bob afterwards.

This summer I had to reprise my role of Wedding photographer as I got asked by the same neighbor who cleaned up my blood mess to photograph her wedding. I mean seriously… how could I say no? So I gave it the good ole college try and I think overall the photos turned out pretty well. Within a few minutes of the ceremony ending I remembered all the reasons why I hated doing this in the first place however. We couldn’t keep the groomsmen from changing out of their clothing into shorts. This was an outdoor wedding in the middle of a August Oklahoma heatwave. I feel like I got the workout of my life trying to wrangle a bunch of people who did not want to stand still for photos. All in all however it was pretty successful and over time I managed to get everyone together. It did not help to improve my hatred of weddings however.

Giving Up, For Now

For the time being I am going to give up on building anything in Landmark. This is the fourth time in recent days that the servers have gone down and I have logged back into my claim being fully reset. I could clear it fast enough again with the select tool, but it feels absolutely futile since I know I will likely be logging back in again to nothing. Dave Georgeson posted this tweet last night which I seems positive… but we have had some optimism in the past as well.

I ended up clearing a little bit this morning so if things are still clear by the time I get home this evening I will consider that a positive sign and maybe just maybe start building again. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but it seems as though if you use ctl+v instead of delete when you have a large area selected… it appears that you harvest the materials contained within that area. I made the mistake of clearing the last time with the delete key, meaning I likely lost all of my props permanently. Honestly right now I wish I could figure out how to make torches, that is really the only prop I need to be able to craft a whole bunch of.

Another huge plus is that I managed to figure out the lightstone. Essentially unlike Everquest, it must be equipped in a slot. Since the slots are not marked at all, you just have to keep dragging them into each slot one by one until it finally fits there. You can see in the above picture the light radius that it gives off, which is more than enough to be able to see what you are doing. Really that is all I was wanting since my claim is mostly cast in shadow all the time. I like that aspect of it, and once I actually get my temple ruins built it should look really cool. Before I can really do that however I need to figure out how to make torches. I realize at this point I only have two crafting machines and based on what I saw yesterday there are like half a dozen or so that someone had out on their claim for people to use.

Since I can’t really craft I have been working on upgrading my tools. This morning I managed to craft the Heavy Silversteel Pick shown above. I am not sure if it is always a legendary item, or if I just lucked out in the randomizer. Previously I had been using the starter pick to clear any tier 1 material away from what I was actually wanting to harvest since the Pick/Axe combo was so much faster than any of the upgraded picks I had gotten. However this one seems to finally be roughly the same speed. Now that I can harvest another tier higher of material I am hoping I can craft the next set of crafting machines, and maybe even the next tool which I think is terrain paint, but I am not really sure. At this point mostly I am looking forward to the voxel database stabilizing enough for me to start building again.

Belghast the Eagle Scout

February 2, 2014 by Belghast

Waiting on Server Maintenance

Last night a pretty crazy thing happened. It was announced that Everquest Next Landmark would no longer be under NDA, meaning we can say whatever we want about it. With this happening on Saturday night, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to devote a Steampowered Sunday to this brand new game. Problem is up until now I have been a good little NDA abiding monkey and did not take even a single screenshot. So that leaves me without a lot of fodder to talk about for SPS. Another problem is, shortly after going off NDA they took the servers down to apply a fix for some issue that were going on.

The valiant Landmark team has quite literally spent all night working on the problem, and while it sounds like they are getting close they have yet to get things where we can log in. Which means for the time being my episode of Steam Powered Sunday is delayed. However the show must go on, and since it is uncertain if they will get things back up in time for me to write a Sunday post I am going to move forward with making my Factoid February post. It is not my intention to keep making two posts a day but it seems like that is going to be the case here at least.

Belghast the Eagle Scout

I grew up in a small town of roughly 2500, and with that upbringing came so many little tropes of small town life. The one that did because I wanted to, not because someone expected me to do… was Scouting. In essence it gave my dad and I an excuse to sneak off and do outdoorsy things. Granted these days by the very technology laced lifestyle I live, you could never tell that I was ever a good little boy scout. I even went so far as to be a camp councilor at the local scout camp for a season. The pinnacle of all of it was me getting my Eagle Scout during my sophomore year of high school.

Even more interesting than that, my Eagle award was a bit of a major occasion. I was the very first Eagle scout from my small-town troop in thirty years. They made a huge deal of it and it was attended by several politicians looking for a photo opportunity. As cool as getting that was, it was tinged with regret. Our troop had eight scouts all on the verge of getting their Eagle, and I was the only one who actually went through with it. Getting your Eagle is essentially a lesson in dealing with frustrations. You have to create an Eagle project proposal, and submit it for approval. It then gets kicked back for this technicality or that one, causing you to revise it over and over until finally several tries down the road they finally give you the green light.

More than anything it is that this perseverance that is what I think the project is trying to teach you. In the working world I cannot count the number of times one of my projects has suffered random rejections that are completely out of my control. The determination that in part I gained through the frustrations of trying to get Eagle have helped me to just keep pushing forward. So while it saddens me that I am the only one of my friends that actually completed the process, I am proud of myself for doing it nonetheless. So that’s today’s factoid… I am an Eagle Scout, and while I don’t always agree with the political stance that the Boy Scouts of America take on various issues. I am still proud of the lessons I learned along the way.