house stalwart Archives - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Growing Stronger

April 7, 2014 by Belghast

It Fit… Barely

Yesterday was crazy busy but we got up and around and dealt with all of the things that needed to be dealt with. If you remember yesterday morning I was blogging in a lull between the flurry of activity, and waiting on the folks from Lowes to deliver the new fridge and haul away the old one. We had measured the slot in the wall and the unit in store what felt like a dozen times, and we thought it was going to fit, but just barely so. Turns out yes, we were in fact right, and as you can see from the picture to the right it is a snug fit up against the cabinet above the fridge. Granted this cabinet now becomes completely useless since the only person who can reach it is me… and the stuff that generally got stored up there was for my wife.

It is so tight of a fit that the fridge scraped the top left side of the fridge every so slightly as it was sliding into place. The only problem with the installation is that the hookups we have for the in door water… are from 1980. Meaning the equipment they sent out was completely inadequate to connect it. However it turns that what we have is bad practice anyways… and that you can get much purer water these days. So we are going to call the plumber and have them swap out our connection for something that will take the 10 foot braided cable that they brought with the unit. We have lived for over sixteen years without ice and water in the door… we can live a little while longer. We have been dealing with some issues with the washing machine that we will have them look at the way it is hooked up as well at the same time.

This means however that we are going to need to clean more. Recently we went through our dishes and pots and pans and gave damned near everything we had to the neighbor kid that roomed with us last summer. He got a place of his own, and for years I had been wanting to just get rid of all of that and buy back our pots and pans a single pan at a time. Really there are very few things that I actually need to cook, and I have a really nice deep skillet that I tend to cook everything in already. This way I can buy only the things I specifically need, and of much higher quality than we had back during our college days. The pots and pans we had were the kind you get an entire set of for 15/20 bucks.

They exceeded their lifespan, and all of them were scratched and marred from years of cooking. I figure they are good enough to make spaghetti in for a bachelor pad of a bunch of guys. If we apply that same logic to the rest of our cabinets we should be able to pair everything down nicely. We have stuff that we have never used in all the years we’ve lived in this house. Which tells me it is high time to donate it someplace and get it out of the house. The only real negative is, this means another weekend is going to be taken up by this sort of stuff rather than gaming. This is the unfortunate truth of the summer, we end up either doing little projects… or leaving the house to go wandering about. In either case… not a lot of gaming happens, and similarly I am not sure when I will return to regular Steampowered Sunday posts.

Growing Stronger

This weekend we somehow hit 103 members in the Elder Scrolls division of House Stalwart. One of the things over the years that we have tried to do is grow organically through friends/family and word of mouth. This allowed us to continue growing with tight knit individuals and a shared ethic. The launch of Elder Scrolls has seen our largest guild ever to date. Granted in World of Warcraft we have 265 accounts in the guild, but that since the launch of the game in 2004. At the very least this is our larges game launch. Both Rift and SWTOR I thought we were doing pretty damned well, but in both cases the guilds were only around 40-50 players.

What I find staggering is that we just keep growing. I have half a dozen players already waiting in the queue for me to talk to them about the guild and make sure they are a good fit for our guild ethics. This seems to be one of those games where each person is roping several of their real life friends into playing it. In some ways it reminds me a bit of the way World of Warcraft was at launch, and I am really hoping that reference is not a curse. So far things are going extremely well, and I have to say were it not for the Alliance of Awesome we would still be that 40-50 member guild. I feel like so much of this growth has nothing at all to do with me, and I am okay with that.

So far everyone seems to be getting along just fine. Folks are either swapping stuff freely by dumping it in the guild bank, or posting things on the guild store. In either case everything seems to be peaceful and drama free. Guild chat is constant and lively even at 6:40 in the morning when we have seven people online. I feel like there is a certain contingency of us that log in each morning before work, and I am guilty of specifically that this morning. The real challenge of course is going to be what we look like in three months. However I feel like I will still be chewing away on veteran rank 1 content at that point. So far I am loving the quests and loving the dungeons. Over the last few days I have not been streaming, in part because of how busy my life has been. Hoping tonight I can get back in the swing of things and stream some more, maybe even a Wayrest Sewers dungeon run.

The Big Alpha

The rest of the gaming world that is not obsessing over finding the next skyshard has been obsessing over the slow trickle of news coming out about Warlord of Draenor. With the launch of Elder Scrolls Online, I made a statement over twitter that I thought they would announce the start of Alpha on launch day. I was partially right… it was leaked and verified that the alpha was starting on 4/4 but the official patch notes did not post until 4/5. There is a lot there to talk about, and this was likely a brilliant move by Blizzard to keep themselves in the news cycle competing against the good news coming from the Elder Scrolls Online launch. I would love to be able to say that I will ignore WoD and still be happily playing Elder Scrolls Online at the end of the year when Warlords is likely to launch. I probably will be be honest, but I am also not a “one game guy” any longer. I know I will pop back in and play some Warlords because it lets me hang out with the OTHER half of House Stalwart… the folks that are diehard WoW players.

I can already tell this is going to be a bad expansion for me. Don’t get me wrong… I am amped to return to Draenor and see it in the “un-screwed” state. The problem is that from the weapon art leaks, I basically get to choose from two different kinds of weapons. Either bedazzled with crystals and jewels… or primitive as hell with horns and shit lashed on for no apparent reason. Neither are really things I go for in the weapon department. My absolute favorite sort is the Death Knight starter weapon, and a close second is Ashkandir… so I like well defined and crafted blades. Neither the Draenei or the Orc art styles are really something I have ever liked, so I feel like this expansion is going to involve me constantly transmogging away the offending graphics. Then again… I guess that is why we have the transmog system. I had just hoped to add some nifty new graphics to this mix.

Right now I am just glad that I am not in the Alpha, because I would not wanting to be trying to split time between Elder Scrolls Online and something else. I am thankful that I am wrapped up and enthralled in ESO, because otherwise I would be like the folks waiting with baited breath for the next MMO-Champion data mine extravaganza. That said I am periodically checking the site and seeing things like the weapon graphics, so I am still interested. Warlords of Draenor can stay comfortably “in the future” for me for the time being. I will always have amazing folks like the Godmother of Faff to keep me informed with what is going on. The only thing that I regret right now is not spending more time in Landmark. That game totally deserves more of my attention.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #HouseStalwart #WoW #WarlordsofDraenor

Savior of Glenumbra

April 5, 2014 by Belghast

Awkward Ex-Coworkers

We are having some minor issues with my wife’s vehicle, so as a result I had to get up crazy early yesterday morning to drive her into work. Crazy early because I still wanted to be able to blog like normal, and she generally leaves when I am about halfway done with my morning post. As a result it made the entire day feel sluggish. After work we made plans to go eat at one of my favorite restaurants near her workplace so I could get cheese tots and spicy chicken. The above shot is what the dish looks like… I snapped a photo some time ago to brag on her for bringing it home to me one night. We hung out and ate with another teacher friend of hers and it was a pretty awesome time… until something happened to taint it.

We had been there for a little bit, and our order had not arrived when I noticed someone walk in that looked vaguely familiar. While trying to place him I saw his wife walk in and immediately the combination of the two faces together snapped in my memory. These were some ex-coworkers and while they were nice enough… they came from a period of time when I was at the worst place I have ever worked. To make it worse they are both extremely good friends with what I considered to be the boss from hell. So it is not exactly the situation where I want to go over and “catch up”. Thankfully they were with what looked like parents and too busy with their own conversations to notice me much.

I hate that anyone associated with that workplace is immediately flagged as an enemy in my head, and I am not really sure how to get past it. Every place I have ever worked I have been the group rockstar, and the current environment is no less true… although in my present situation we have three rockstars working on the same team. This workplace however, from day one there was nothing I could ever do right. The boss would loosely stub things out in a project website, with roughly a single sentence describing what needed to be done.

If I asked questions as to what the hell he meant by that… I would catch hell for not taking initiative. If I figured things out on my own, and just got the job done… I would catch hell for not doing it exactly like he wanted it to be done. There was seriously a no win situation, and the two people that walked in represented that time period in my life. Every time I see someone associated with that period I just want to scream how much of an asshole that guy was and how he made my life complete and total crap. But instead I smile and nod and try my damnedest to ignore them and hope they walk away.

Savior of Glenumbra

Last night we got home fairly late from meeting the friend for dinner, so by the time I made it upstairs it was almost eight. At that point folks had already paired up into dungeon runs, so I opted to simply focus on finishing up the rest of Glenumbra. I feel like I am moving super slow, because I simply cannot chew through the Elder Scrolls content as fast as others seem to be able to. I have friends who have been “finished” with Glenumbra for some time, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they are nowhere near 100% on the zone… and quite truthfully as much time as I have spent there I seriously doubt I have gotten everything either. I do have all of the icons on the map turned from black to white, and have gotten 100% of the skyshards… so I feel like it is “good enough” for me to move on. Last night after finishing Crosswych I got the “Savior of Glenumbra” achievement.

I have to say… Stormhaven means serious business. I managed to get to level 18 in Glenumbra before moving on, but when I moved into Stormhaven that is supposed to be a 15+ zone I noticed everything hit considerably harder. Granted this could be in part to the fact that I am still mostly wearing level 14 gear, since I need High Iron which cannot be found in Glenumbra. More so I think that they have just ratcheted up the difficulty. Instead of fighting random bandits, you are now fighting random daedra. While they might not have the hitpoint pool… Clanfear are Clanfear… they all seem to be just as hard to kill. The new zone is just as lovely, if not slightly more damaged by the conflict. The screenshots are from the first town, which is a lovely little port just a ways inside of the zone line. I look forward to meandering my way across the zone like I did in glenumbra.

I swear this game was designed specifically for me, because it is littered with things to find and interesting things to kill. I love that crafting can be leveled without having ever crafted a single item. I am constantly bringing back bags full of gear that I got from killing baddies, and through doing nothing but deconstruction I have managed to get Woodworking to 10, and Clothing to 9. While I have been making plenty of blacksmithing items, I still have gotten most of my levels from deconstructing “found” things. This is the only game system I have ever played that supported leveling crafting through mass slaughter. I have to say I love it though, it lets me play the game the way I want to play it, and limit my time hovering over the forge.

Visiting a Friend

This morning I saw a tweet from Scopique thanking me for reminding him to feed his claim in Landmark… which in turn reminded me to log in and feed my own. As much as it might annoy me that we can only store five days worth of copper in our claim banks, it is in the very least forcing me to log in every few days to make sure I have it fully stocked. Right now I am in a weird place with my own claim. I need to go on another massive stone harvesting run, but I have not been able to bring myself to do so… because I would rather be playing Elder Scrolls Online. For a few days however my friend Syl has said that I should pop by her claim and see the progress. As a result I ended up with a pretty cool screenshot of the pair of us overlooking her claim.

I hope she won’t be cross with me for posting a picture of her Inn “in progress”. I have to say the interior is coming along extremely well. I love the fireplace and the basin, and on a rack behind me is a really cool lance that she made from scratch. I love the way the house is wrapped around the tree. Makes me realize just how much work I need to do on my own. I am really good at roughing out massive structures, but I always lack the drive to go back in later and do the fine detail work. She however seems to excel at it, putting the finishing touches on rooms as she builds them. Super impressed with what she has done so far, and hopefully at some point this weekend I will get the drive to log in and go on another massive stone farming expedition. If nothing else was cool to pop over and see her claim for a bit before logging to work on this here blog post. Is that blogception?

#ElderScrollsOnline #Landmark #Glenumbra #Stormhaven #ESO

Elder Scrolls Online Headstart

March 29, 2014 by Belghast

Prelaunch Countdown

At the point I am writing this blog post we are roughly 24 hours from the launch of Elder Scrolls Online. If you are really curious about the exact time… someone has created a page dedicated to that… with Europe Final Countdown playing embedded of course. Last night I made it to bed at a normal hour… or at least normal for me, but this morning my body conspired against me and decided that 4 am was time to wake up. While I had not planned this, it is actually going to feed into my idea of being up for the launch the moment the servers open. So tonight I will be heading to bed early, and trying to wake up in time for the launch in the morning. I normally get up at 5:30 in the morning during the work week, so really this will be good in the long run since Monday will not be quite so hellacious.

I have to say at this point I am completely amped, but also nervous. One of my favorite and least favorite things about a new game is pulling together the guild. It is always a struggle to make sure everyone is rolling in the right place, with the right faction. There are always opening day adjustments as you shift this thing or that, and trying to deploy the logistics to be able to get everyone moving in the right direction. This is by no means my first launch pulling together a guild, and likely it will not be the last either. No matter how much experience I have in making things work… I still get the jitters hoping it all goes off without a hitch. SWTOR was without a doubt the smoothest, since we were able to create the guild before launch through their web based tools, but even then there was plenty of confusion among the folks that were too lazy to sign up before the guild placement happened.

Elder Scrolls Online Headstart

I thought I would devote this mornings post to getting everyone ready for the big event. There are several things about this launch that should make things significantly easier. Firstly there are no servers to worry with, there is the North American mega server and the European mega server. I do not however know if characters cross over between the two. We will be focusing on the North American mega server for this, and I am hoping that our European friends will have decent lag there or even be able to roll there at all. Have I mentioned how much I hate regions in video games? House Stalwart will be aligning ourselves with the Daggerfall Covenant, as was decided in a poll that ran some time ago. This means that in order to play with the guild and group easily, you also need to roll Daggerfall Covenant. Guilds span factions, but it is logistically impossible to group together at low levels if you are of two different factions.

Thanks to the preorder bonuses however you will be able to roll any race in any faction. If you did not preorder, then grats… if you want to play with the bulk of the guild you have to play either a Redguard, Breton or Orsimer. Really if you were interesting in this game at all, you should have preordered to long before this point to make sure you could have that very important preorder perk. Those who did preorder… I am sure we will see plenty of elves in our guild as a side effect. Most of the people I know going cross faction classes are doing so in order to play a Bosmer, Dunmer or Altmer. I personally will be rolling an Imperial because it is the race that best fits the character of “Belghast”.

Getting Invited to the Guild

As I said earlier, my goal is to be up at the time the servers go live and get the guild created asap. One of the cool things about Elder Scrolls Online is the fact that you can friend people at an account level. The easiest way to get invited to the guild is to friend @Belghast, as the game uses a system similar to twitter. My goal is to get several people who can do invites in the interim and then deal with creating a formal “officer” structure later. Additionally I will be using the Alliance of Awesome Reddit thread to organize invites for the “new to Stalwart” crowd. For those who have access currently to our mumble server, I will be streaming the launch tomorrow in the “Bel is Streaming” channel. So that is a really quick way to get invited is just to pop into the channel and ask for one.

The only other real decision looming on the horizon is what campaign we want to choose for Cyrodil. There is a thread up on the Elder Scrolls website listing the various campaign names. At this point they are all named after the iconic weapons that you get in the Elder Scrolls series by doing quests for the various Daedra. As a result some of them are going to be far more popular than others. I would imagine that Wabbajack would fill up before any of the others, thanks to the fond memories of Sheogorath. Other names will appeal to the “sounds cool” crowd, and Auriel’s Bow will be full for the “I pick whatever the first name is in a list” crowd. Right now I am thinking either Volendrung or Dawnbreaker might be good options. Both are iconic weapons, but also not as iconic as say the Wabbajack. However this is something we can decide later.

Big Easy Summary

Where?

Daggerfall Covenant Faction
North American Mega Server

How?

When?

Servers go online at 7 am EST 3/30/2014

If you have any questions feel free to post them here, or over on the Reddit Thread, or via Twitter, or ask them the day of via Mumble. It is my goal to make this as clean and orderly a process as possible. There are always some issues with any game launch, but hopefully thanks to the copious amounts of stress testing we have done to this game… it will go nice and smooth.

Caroling in Ulduar

December 21, 2013 by Belghast

Tis the Season

It is that time of the year when we naturally reflect upon what was good and not so good from the previous year. I myself am planning a post like this in the not so distant future. However this blurb is not about that at all. Yesterday the amazing Queen of Faff, Alternative Chat posted her very on audible review of the previous year. It is most definitely worth a listen, but then again everything she does is worth a listen. I have to say that while I knew of her before this year, it was a few months ago that I first listened to her podcast. I have to say I am truly thankful for discovering it, because now along with several other podcasts I look forward to hearing each episode.

She brings a deeply thought out quality to the air that reminds me in many ways of NPR. I am very much an NPR junkie so I think this soft spoken and rehearsed manner suits me very well. In the podcast she has declared that 2014 will be the “Year of Faff”, and I wholly support this notion. Before her I tended to view “faffing about” as a generally negative thing. Now I have embraced my inner faffitude and find myself doing odd little things on a regular basis. I look forward to seeing what directionless madness comes form this new venture.

Caroling in Ulduar

Early in the week my good friend Rylacus, and the warden of House Stalwart while I was away… asked me if I would be willing to do an Ulduar run. He needed a single meta achievement to get his 25 man proto drake. I told him initially that I was not sure if I would be around, but if I was most certainly I would help out. I have had both the 10 and 25 man versions of the drake for quite some time, but as I know the achievements pretty well I am always willing to help out. Since last night ushered in yet another icebound weekend here in Oklahoma, I was most definitely available for faffing about in Ulduar.

My only requirement was that we try and get EVERYONE that came along their drakes. No one seemed to mind and as a result we filled the ranks with tons of folks hopefully seeking their own. Additionally we managed to knock out Algalon, who’s room is pictured above. Most of the achievements quite honestly were pretty easy at 90, or at least easy if you knew what you were needing to do. Yog’Saron of course takes a few tries mainly to remember exactly what we need to do. The three of us that went into the portal went insane because we could not remember how to exit. We then proceeded to murder everyone else in the raid.

After that little set back we pushed forward and got him on the next try earning everyone on their drakes. Currently the only really annoying meta achievement is the “kill 25 dwarves with razorscale” one. Initially we had this idea of just gathering up all of the dwarves and letting Razorscale enrage… theoretically killing them all. This would in theory kill us all, but we should have also gotten the achievement at the same time. Two things we found out… firstly the enraged flame breath is still not enough to kill a dwarf that is sitting at full health. Secondly we can easily survive the enraged form and ended up going four rounds after that in order to get all the dwarves.

Desperately Seeking Weapon

While I managed to walk away with some really cool transmoggy bits and two pieces of the tier 8 set, I did not further my overarching mission of finding some weapons for my shaman. Granted I didn’t really expect to do so in Ulduar, but the Heroic Scenario that we ran beforehand proved both painful and fruitless. My hope is today that I can finish running Siege of Orgrimmar and that the loot gods will smile on me and let me win the axe that can drop in the final part. If this continues to prove futile I may just run Throne of Thunder as well. I need to farm up the magical happy luck coins so I can turn them into extra roll chances for Siege, but I do not have the stockpile on my Shaman that I have on my other characters. Other than this… I am going to try my best to stay warm and hopefully continue having power since the entire world outside is coated in an inch of ice.