landmark Archives - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

It’s Okay to Not Like Things

February 22, 2014 by Belghast

WoW Getting a Gatekeeper

Back in the beginning of January I crafted a post talking about how much I enjoyed The Gatekeeper encounter in The Secret World and how I felt it was a good thing to have in a game. I extrapolated this further and said that World of Warcraft really needed a similar Gatekeeper mechanic. At the time they had the proving grounds but they were universally ignored by players. Based on a post from Watcher on the forums… it seems like Blizzard is thinking along these lines as well. If I had to build a requirement for queuing for random heroics, I would have said that more than likely it would need Silver or better in the proving grounds in a specific role. Turns out based on that post, it seems Blizzard was thinking the exact same thing. Will this usher in a new area of better pugging? Honestly I am not sure.

The biggest thing that I do like from the statement is that the requirement is apparently completely ignored with a prebuilt group. This means you will still be able to carry your friends through the heroics to help gear them up. Those friends will just have to meet the proving grounds on their own if they want to be turned loose out into the wild. In the grand scheme of things this is just raising the bar on the heroics, but not really doing anything to fix the social causes for me not wanting to queue for them randomly. Without a “social justice” system similar to that of League of Legends or Final Fantasy XIV people will still be as big of dicks as they are today. It really is a catch 22… folks complain that no tanks want to run randoms… but when you do tank a random people generally treat you like shit. I decided some time ago that it was a package of frustration I could deal without in my life.

Being Neighborly

I have slowed down greatly in my time spent in Landmark. I am done with the bulk of the structural work on Belgarde Keep and now have begun some of the fine detail work. In order to complete this I really need to finish upgrading all of my machines, and that means farming copious amounts of materials. Namely mind numbingly farming burled wood. Thankfully since I am on a forest island, I can pretty much just roam around in my “front yard” to find this, but it gets really boring at times. As a result the bulk of my Landmark playtime is reserved for when I am watching netflix or something similar. I’ve already begun joining the AoA channel like I talked about yesterday, but for the most part there has been nothing but radio silence.

Last night however I got to meet a person who was new to me. Zarriya apparently is a longtime member of the Multiplaying community and friends with Zeli, so when she popped on we were both happy to have someone else to talk with as we built away. Funny thing is, she was not on very long before she wanted to pop by my claim and see the work I had done. It is wierd how this feels in a game like Landmark. It almost feels like inviting someone over to your actual house. I was a good ways off from my homestead so as I ventured back there she started on her way over as well. This is one of the areas the game really needs improvement. Firstly the friends list is not working, but even more so… we need an easier way to find each others claims.

I was impressed at how fast she found it off the /loc I gave her, because quite honestly… my brain does not function well on a coordinate grid system. If I could do like EQ2 and set a waypoint to the coord I would be happy…. actually I don’t know if that is in game or not. It just feels cool to have visitors in this game, since you have put so much work and effort into building your structures the way you want them. Right now I am mostly working on the sub basement, which I intend to be a dungeon. No proper keep can really go without one. So to start I’ve built a series of equal sized cells. Now I want to do some more open holding pens, but really to do that I need to gather up a lot of iron. Still very much enjoying the game, but also really looking forward to having more systems in place.

It’s Okay to Not Like Things

A good friend of mine linked me this video yesterday and it seems relevant lately, with the whole force fed narrative of Wildstar vs Elder Scrolls. While I like both of the authors of this article, the piece that MMORPG.com ran yesterday just feels like linkbait. If you are a fan of the MMO genre and want more games to be developed… we realistically need BOTH to succeed. There have been so many big name MMO failures over recent years, and even if you do not play the game any longer.. it still hurts to see one close down. The community is still reeling from the loss of Star Wars Galaxies, and similarly from City of Heroes. Both games had extremely vibrant and devoted communities, and both player bases are still trying to find a new home.

Similarly a certain segment of the population was being happily served by Warhammer Online, and Vanguard will have a similar player base abandoned when it closes down this year. Losing ANY game is a horrible experience. I will be honest… I like both Wildstar and The Elder Scrolls Online. I think they are both interesting games. The problem is I know for certain that I like one of them enough to pay a subscription fee, and the other one… I am not quite sure about. As a huge supported of Elder Scrolls, it feels like around every corner is another person trying to… pardon the colloquialism “piss in my cheerios”. So I do at times get defensive of ESO, because I think it is a really fun game. That is not to say that that I don’t also begrudgingly enjoy Wildstar quite a bit.

Personally I would love to see both games do well and find their own little niche. We need successful MMOs that are not named World of Warcraft. If we don’t then this might be the last round of AAA MMOs we so for awhile, or at least ones that were designed without having a massive cash shop component in them from day one. I still think the free to play MMO is alive and kicking, but the ones designed from day one to be free to play… feel money grubbing. They feel like they want to nickel and dime you to death each time you play it. SWTOR is one of those game I would love to be able to play periodically, but I just cannot stand playing it in their free to play mode.

I just wish I could get players past the tribalism of red versus blue. I am a carebear at heart, and I just want us all to get along. After all each of these games is a niche within a niche within a niche. Gaming as a whole is still a relatively small community, and when we attack each other we only serve to alienate people who might be waiting in the wings considering joining in. Right now the real decision if I play Wildstar will be based on launch timing. Right now we have Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls coming out in March, and Elder Scrolls Online in April both of which I am deeply committed to. I assume Warlords of Draenor will be a Christmas 2014 release since no word of the Friends and Family Alpha has leaked yet. So if Wilstar releases during one of the lapses… I might give it a shot.

Not So Neighborly Bel

There is a bit of brutal irony in me talking about it feeling good to have a virtual neighborhood in Landmark. We have lived in the same place for over sixteen years, and at this point we know exactly two neighbors. I consider myself “on waving terms” with several more, but really we know the family to the south of us, and the family that has been mentioned so many times in other posts that previously lived across the street from us, but now lives about five houses down the block. For the most part I like it this way. While it may not come across as such in my posts, I am pretty deeply introverted, so after spending the day dealing with people… I just want to shut the doors and see no one by my wife until the next day.

The funny thing about it is… apparently I am known by my neighbors but not my wife. In part this comes down to the fact that I get home about 4:30 when lots of other people are pulling into their houses, whereas my wife often times works late and doesn’t get home until 8ish some nights. A few months back we had a few fires in our neighborhood. Due to the extreme effect smoke has on me, my wife went out to investigate. Upon meeting some of our neighbors they asked her if she was “new in the neighborhood”. They apparently had never seen her and didn’t know she existed. Maybe it is not normal to live somewhere as long as we have and not know the ins and outs of everyone in the neighborhood. Thankfully the neighbor I write about so often… keeps track of everything going on and can keep us up to date on the intra-neighborhood politics. For the most part where we live is a pretty quiet place made up of a mix of aging folks that bought the homes during the 80s, and working class families with young kids.

My brother in law used to have these massive impromptu block parties in his neighborhood, and while it was nice that he knew every single person… it also felt fairly claustrophobic to me. For me going to work each day and “acting normal” is extremely draining. By the time I get home, I simply don’t want to have to care about the other people living around me. Its awesome that they are there, and are all relatively nice… but I don’t need to have any more people in my life that I have to interact with regularly. I am more than happy to cocoon up on the couch with my laptop and a game and forget the people outside my door exist. The irony is… that I end up playing multiplayer games. I think the key there is that the interaction with other people is on my terms, and in the quantity that I desire when I desire it. When someone rings our doorbell, or calls on the phone… it always feels like a horrible invasion of my personal space. I guess I am just wired oddly.

I Lived Threes Company

February 19, 2014 by Belghast

The Illusive Bottle

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had expected. Well that is a bit of a misnomer in that I knew we would be running errands, but I did not realize it would take quite so long nor be so frantic. My wife is a rock star teacher, this much I have said before. However she is tag-team teaching a forensics science class this year and as a result they are pretty much pulling the curriculum out of their asses as they go. For what they are teaching there really are no textbooks, and as a result no approve lab equipment really either. Enter the empty eye drop bottle on the right. You would think something like this would be relatively easy to find. You would also be completely wrong

She needs these for a faux blood typing lab, since it is against safety regulations to use actual blood. Funny thing is I can remember doing blood typing in freshman biology… odd how things have changed in two decades. We went everywhere we could think that might have little bottles including craft stores, pharmacies, finally we found eight of these at a local medical equipment/compounding pharmacy. Problem is to be useful… she needs 30. We picked up what we could find and proceeded onwards in search of the illusive idea. Finally at Michaels we found some flip top bottles that should also work. The problem is this took the count up to 25… still 5 short of the finish line. Supposedly today that Michaels location is getting some more in a shipment, so that means we will need to make our way back out there tonight to pick some more up. The preference would be to find more of the actual eye drop bottles, so my wife plans on calling around to the various compounding pharmacies today. This is the unknown life of the husband of a rock star teacher… the constant trips out for random things for the classroom.

Clearance Lego Haul

Roughly every six months the various store chains jettison one batch of toys to receive new ones. This is my favorite time of the season… because it means I can pick up cheap Legos. I have always loved building with Legos and I likely always will. This desire to build things is exactly why games like Minecraft and Everquest Next Landmark are so sticky to me. They are the dream of every Lego kid, the ability to create things without restrictions of having to have the right pieces. The above image represents the haul of new sets for me to play with over the last several weeks. They have come from a mixture of Target and Wal-mart and for the most part everything was 25-50% off. There is a certain price range that I am willing to snatch things up, and while the Jabba’s Sail Barge that I saw yesterday would have been awesome… it was not $70 worth of awesome.

So instead I play a waiting game to see if it will make a second price cut and drop down into the range which I am willing to buy it for. Last night while we were running around in the mad search for the bottles I managed to pick up the two Galaxy Squad sets above. I might be because I grew up in the “funky space lego” era, but I love new space sets. What was extra cool about this find as a whole is that last year I managed to pick up the Lego Star Wars TIE Fighter really cheaply, so now having an X-Wing to go with it is pretty awesome. I realize I am a big damned kid… but I am okay with this. Getting older is require, growing up and losing the childish wonder at things… is completely optional… and not something I suggest at all.

Boosting for Fun and Profit

I feel like today’s post would be incomplete without mentioning the price leak yesterday for the boost to level 90. I realize ahead of time that my point of view on this is going to be controversial, but it is my point of view anyway. I personally think the boosting to 90 thing is generally going to be bad for the game community, in that dropping a new player into a fully leveled character is a bit of an overload. Honestly I went through this myself when I accepted a scroll of resurrection and decided to boost a character to 80 that I would never actually level otherwise. Dropping directly into a level 80 priest, when I had never actually played a priest past 10 before… was to say the least disorienting. This is coming from someone who has six 90s, and three others waiting in the wings to reach the cap as well. I “grok” warcraft on a pretty deep level and understand how the systems tend to work.

If I was completely at a loss for dropping in the pilot seat of a fully realized character… I can only imagine what it is going to be like for someone who has never played the game, or has not played the game in years. After all this is the reason why Blizzard says they are giving us a boost to 90, so that we can recruit new friends and catch back up old ones. It just seems like a fundamentally bad idea, but like I said I realize I am in the minority as people seem to want the ability to skip the majority of the game. That is honestly the other problem I have with this idea. Fundamentally Warcraft and the MMO genre in general… are about leveling and gaining constant incremental achievements and improvements. If you do not want to level… then maybe you are playing the wrong genre? MMOs are always going to be about leveling in one form or another… be it leveling in actual character level, or grinding away to get the gear to move to the next tier of LFR. There is always a leveling treadmill there, because at its core this is what the genre is all about.

So after all of this… now I feel like maybe you are prepared for my opinion on the price point. I honestly think $60 is rather fair for what you are asking. You are asking for the luxury of being able to skip the majority of the game and jump straight to being inches from the finish line. It is absolutely a luxury, so it should have a luxury price tag associated with it. Understand that this is for additional 90s… we are still getting one for free when we purchase Warlords of Draenor. So the ambiguous planned social benefit of catching people up to the latest content will still be firmly intact… as everyone is going to have to buy the expansion anyway. If you think of it in terms as paying for a Faction and Realm Transfer combo costs $55 right now… then it is not really out of order to expect that creating a brand new 90 character to cost $5 more.

Mentoring Is A Better Answer

I still feel like boosting was a bit of a copout answer to the problem at hand. A much better solution would have been to finally implement a good mentoring system like so many other MMOs have. Rift, EQ2, City of Heroes, and so many others have systems that allow you to drop your level to that of your friends. We we had the bulk of players actively playing Rift this year, we took advantage of this weekly. On Wednesday nights we would gather up and assess what levels we had, then everyone would mentor themselves to the lowest person and we would go do content together that was relevant for that level. It was pretty glorious and my only complaint is that hey really need to make “queue for random mentored dungeon” a thing, because it was always a pain in the butt to do a dungeon together with all the manual mentoring.

The ever awesome @Gypsy_Syl posed this statement when I opened up this line of dialog on twitter last night. While I agree with her that this likely was the intent with the boosts, the question is what exactly are players rushing towards then? Leveling is pretty much the solo game, and all that awaits you when you hit the cap is for the most part group content or leveling another character. Mentoring systems would help with what the stated intent was… to allow you to play with your friends. If that was not their intent, then quite honestly they should stop selling it that way. Mentoring systems go far further for helping you play with your friends, since you and your friends get to experience content the way it was designed to be experienced together.

At the end of the day I tend to align with @MatthewWRossi who put it so poignantly in the above tweet. If a character is a struggle to level, then it won’t be something I play often once I get it to the level cap. Prime example of this was my rogue that I just recently hit 90 on. It was absolute skull drudgery to get it to the level cap, but I forced myself to do it… because I have not had a rogue at cap since burning crusade. Problem is while leveling it and the eventual LFR grind… I came to realize just how much I do not like playing a rogue. I pushed him over this finish line for reasons other than wanting to play the character, namely I wanted a max level transmute specialization alchemist… but each time I log over to the rogue to do something like a holiday instance, it just feels wrong. If you don’t enjoy the process of leveling the character, then to me at least it is highly unlikely you will enjoy the end result either.

I Lived Threes Company

Today’s blog post is going super long, but I guess I had a lot bottled up in me to talk about… no callback to the eye droppers intended. As I have said a few times I started out at a junior college for the first two years of my college education. So when it came time to transfer up to a four year university to finish off, I opted to get an apartment with a high school friend who had been doing the same. For a few months everything was peachy, and we lived pretty blissfully. Then one morning I was woken up by a bunch of strange men moving my roommates stuff out of our apartment. Without warning he decided to move into the “band” frat house, leaving me pretty much high and dry without much explanation.

It turns out that the landlords were coming that afternoon to kick him out of our apartment. When we got the place we had opted to each pay our half of the rent separately. While I had been religiously bringing my envelope down to the landlord on time, it seems as though he had not for the last two months. They were not going to make me catch up his side of the rent, but I just didn’t feel right not doing so. As a result it pretty much burned through all of my available cash, and the burden of keeping a place that I got intending to have a second income to support. At this same time, my wife and her roommate were living in the slums essentially. The place they were renting had literal holes in the floor and a very curious maroon stain creeping through the paint on the ceiling. So we both needed to get out of our current situation.

As a result we did the pragmatic thing, since it was a rarity that my wife and I spent a night a part at that point. We found a place that was ideal for three people, and after spending a few months watching the really nice caretaker renovate the place… we moved in. It was in a quite little trailer park roughly ten miles from town, so it gave us the feeling of having a home… more than a rental. So at that point I was basically living Threes Company, with two female roommates. Essentially my wife and I had the master bedroom together, and our roommate had another large bedroom on the opposite end of the trailer. The computers and consoles were set up in a “vestigial” middle bedroom that while it had a bed, the bed got used more as a couch than anything else.

The funny thing is that my wife’s father refused to admit that we were “living together in sin”. Anytime he needed to talk to my wife, he would not call our phone line at our end of the trailer, but instead he would call the roommates phone at the opposite end. Remember these are the days of dial-up… and since all of us were IRC junkies to boot… we had to have separate phone lines. I have to say the situation was damned near idyllic, and over the time living together the room mate and I developed a loving brother/sister type relationship. She is one of the few people we still keep in contact with from our college days, and while we don’t see her often not a week goes by that we don’t think about her. Our bonding was special, since she has Cystic Fibrosis… and when she was having a bad night it was not unusual that I would get employed to pound on her back to help break up the gunk so she could breathe. After all us respiratory system rejects got to stick together.

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.