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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 and the Severe Asthma

February 3, 2014 by Belghast

Bel is a Sick Little Monkey

Right now I am feeling like a failure, for several reasons. For starters Steampowered Sunday never happened yesterday, because I kept waiting on the Everquest Landmark servers to stabilize enough to get in and record some gameplay. I thought it was going to be a cool idea to do SPS over a brand new alpha game that lots of folks were interested in. More so than that… I completely forgot that I had a raid last night, so I owe a lot of apologies to my raid group. I was feeling pretty shitty Friday night during the raid, and over the course of the weekend I just got to feeling worse. Yesterday was a bit of a haze and since the snow came down and my wife’s school was cancelled… I guess the day was lacking the normal sense of pressure that a Sunday has.

By the time I got drug down to our neighbors super bowl party, I had lost touch on what day it actually was. Sweet mother of god the food there… so much of it and so tasty. She had made these little bacon wrapped smoked sausages caramelized with brown sugar. I could have seriously made a meal on that alone. Like always she cooked for an army, and there were only 7 or 8 of us there. We left around halftime because we walked down and didn’t want to slip and fall on the way home through our poorly lit sidewalks. The food coma that set in just left me in a bit of a stupor. As a result I literally could not remember that I was supposed to tank a raid that night.

I am really hoping they had enough to pull the raid together but since the other regular tank was also slotted to be gone… I am seriously doubting they were. So I am posting it here, and I will post it elsewhere and say it in person… I am sorry I flaked on you guys. This is out of character for me, but it quite literally slipped my mind. I didn’t even realize I had done it until I got up this morning. Today I plan on trying to sleep as much as I can, because sleep heals. As a result I got up at 5:30 and emailed my boss saying that I would not be in and then slept until 10:30. I will be taking dayquil and breathing treatments to try and break the gunk up so that I can breathe again. I really need to be viable for work tomorrow. We are supposed to be getting a lot more snow and ice tomorrow, so we will see what exactly that means.

Belghast and the Severe Asthma

Since I am sick right now, I kinda wanted a factoid that blended with that. I have touched on this a few times but it is worthy of factoidization. I have extremely severe asthma, it has gotten slightly better over the years but there are times where my body still completely breaks down on me. I have a number of triggers ranging from weather changes, to strong perfumes and smells, and the worst of all is smoke both second hand and smoke from fires. This has been a thing that I have struggled with my entire life. My very first asthma attack happened before the age of one, when my mother heard me wheezing in my basinet at the end of the bed. My father had been an extremely severe asthmatic growing up and spent many a night under an oxygen tent… which was the 1950s treatment for such things. I don’t think I was officially diagnosed however until after age one, because the pediatrician kept saying “babies don’t have asthma”.

To make things even worse I have what they call a “primary immune system deficiency” which basically means I have a lazy immune system. So I tend to catch everything that is going around and it takes significantly longer for my immune system to wake up and realize there is something bad inside of me that it should be fighting. So this complicates the first thing significantly, as I almost always have some sort of a cold. If they drag on long enough there is a moment where it wakens the beast and my lungs start shutting down on me. This weekend is one of those times where a “nameless crud” has finally lingered long enough to trigger my asthma. Most of the time I can take a bunch of breathing treatments and be just fine. Every now and then it triggers a downward spiral that requires much more severe intervention.

Probably the worst of these was the 2005 Thanksgiving Holiday, over which I spent five days hospitalized. I know I mentioned this event in the little letter I wrote a few weeks back to some smokers in my building, but this is the worst case scenario that I am always worried about in the back of my head. Of course this was created by an unlikely chain of events. One of our friends had a house fire, and I went down to the house long enough to be handed prescriptions to take to Walgreens to fill. That was enough to trigger a negative reaction that lead to me going to the Emergency Room. They hooked me up to a BIPAP machine that would help me breathe, or at least force air into my lungs, and since my lungs were so swollen shut… it caused me to respirate insanely fast. So fast that they were scared I might have a heart attach that night, since my pulse was racing.

Eventually they were able to get things under control but it was five days before my blood oxygen levels came up enough for me to be able to go home. By day two I was absolutely stir-crazy in the hospital. All I really wanted was someone to bring me a laptop. This whole event has made me super aware and conscious of irritants in my area, and before this happening I probably never would have had to courage to tell the smokers what they were doing to me. With my large amount of weight loss, it has improved my asthma quite a bit. However there are still moments where something triggers that chain reaction and I go down for the count. I think this current situation is an accumulation of weeks of breathing colder than normal air mixed with some bug that is going around. But there you have it… a relevant factoid for a day when I am pretty sick.

Liberation Pingo

This post has already gone on pretty long at this point, but I didn’t feel like I could truly make another post without at least mentioning EQN Landmark. Friday evening late the Alpha keys went out to all of the founders, but I personally did not get it launched until Saturday morning after I made my blog post. At that point it was extremely hard to find a plot of land that was claimable. So I wound up in the middle of nowhere on the Liberation server and the tier 3 Pingo island. I feel like this may be a positive thing in the long run as there seem to be more than enough tier 3 resources to be had there. However this has involved a lot of my bouncing to other areas to pick things up. Right now I am building cautiously as during one of the server resets this weekend we lost all progress and I lost my crafting machines in the process.

The important thing to note… that if your tolerance for bugs is low. Save your money and wait until this enters beta. The game is very much an alpha product, but what is here is extremely fun. Essentially at this point it is much like the early days of minecraft. You wander around a very pretty world looking for resources that you can then take back to your claim and craft with. The area my claim is in rests deep in a forested valley and as a result very little natural light reaches it… so all of the pictures on my claim tend to be cast in shadow. Hopefully I can craft enough torches to fix that problem over time. The key progress I have made is I have been able to upgrade to the Iron Pick allowing me to harvest some higher end stuff, and I have been able to craft the selection tool as well as replacement crafting machines.

Right now the only frustration really is the long queues. At one point yesterday I waited for two hours in a queue, only to have the game crash out at 50% as it was loading. However as the evening went on this improved drastically. I just want to thank the EQN Landmark team because they really went above and beyond with this launch. I am pretty sure Dave Georgeson for example was up almost 48 hours straight working on the problem along with the rest of the team. So I have to say kudos for the work well done. I am already enamored with the game, enough that I have upgraded from Explorer to Trailblazer. There are a lot of systems simply missing right now, like it seems you can send a friend request… but the other party cannot respond nor is there a friend list. As a result we are using server channels so I have created a house stalwart one. Typing “/join stalwart” should get you in, and everyone that is friendly is more than welcome.

Me and My Tentacle

February 1, 2014 by Belghast

I Hate the NDA

I know you are thinking, “of course you hate them, you are a blogger” and to some extent yes that is the source of my frustration. However more than that I feel like in the internet age they are defeatist. We are in an age when people are actively ready to hand you their cash to participate in a pretty buggy experience. Look at how popular the Steam Early access process has been to date, and just how many people are actively playing games that are not close to being launched yet. I started playing Minecraft during really early beta and it was roughly two years before the game “officially” launched… all the while there was so much enjoyment to be had in the process of the alpha. Each step of the way it was the constant stream of videos that got people pumped to be playing it.

At any given time I am in a number of alpha and beta testing processes for video games. It has been a thing that I have done for years, and it seems like the more you test the more you get to test. In the case of two of those I am amped and ready to be gushing about those games and posting cool info about them. The problem is both of those are under pretty strict NDA processes. They moment they lift however I will be off to the races with information in hand ready to post. What the NDA seems to cause right now is an era of disinformation. Folks who you assume are in testing can make comments like “I wouldn’t get your hopes up” here and there… without actually touching their NDA guidelines and cause a negative buzz for the game before it even launches.

The Open Model

The negative seems to stick with us more than the positive, and it seems like everyone knows someone who knows someone who doesn’t like this game or that game and is more than willing to give you their laundry list of reasons in private. This I guess is why Trove has been so unbelievably refreshing. The official forums are Reddit, and from day one we have been able to post whatever the hell we wanted about the game. They know it is alpha, but they also are super transparent about the information. Yesterday they released the Gunslinger class seen above, and sure it is buggy but it is damned cool seeing the first additional class in the game come to fruition.

Thing is… we’ve known this was coming for some time. They have talked about it in the live streams, on reddit… posted various tidbits of information. So the community that has sprung up around this game was ready and waiting with open arms to see this new class and the new batch of player created weapons that would spring out of it. What this open model does is general some serious evangelism for your game, which is a good thing. People what to play games that other people are having fun playing. The above video is the entire reason why I started playing Minecraft.

Were it not for the X’s Adventures in Minecraft series of videos, I probably never would have gotten onto the Minecraft bandwagon at least not until EVERYONE was playing it. There was something so simple about the game play I saw and infectious but only because the person doing the lets play videos was so open and engaging about what he was doing. Games can really benefit from this simple grass roots support, and I feel like this is going to play a larger and larger role in getting folks into new games over time. I am sure we are also entering the era of the video casting shill… and we have seen a certain measure of that in the media recently with the payola scandal going on within the xbox one videocasters. All of this said… I just feel like right now the NDA does more harm than good. When a new game comes out, people crave information about it… and if the game company themselves won’t provide it, this is a great niche for the evangelists to fill.

Me and My Tentacle

I admit it… I just wanted a reason to name this post something goofy. Over in WoW I have spent a lot of time soloing old content for fun and profit. Namely I have been seeking the pets and mounts that drop in older content. I believe i spoke about my surprise that I could actually solo the Twin Emperors finally in AQ40 which had been the only road block from regularly soloing this instance. When I took down C’Thun I got one of those items I had always wanted to get back when we were raiding. The Vanquished Tentacle of C’Thun is a trinket that on use summons a Tentacle of C’Thun to come fight by your side for 30 seconds. Even back in the day this was mostly a novelty item… since it was stationary and as a result really not that useful unless you were fighting a mob that stood completely still. However how freakin cool is it to summon a tentacle on demand?

Another bit of madness I have engaged upon recently is trying to work my way through the Argent Tournament. Look I know you are all saying… why did you not do that in Wrath? Well I am bad at doing daily quest grinds… I always have a million other things I would rather be doing than dailies. So I piddled at them from time to time… but mostly I just hated the jousting mechanic. Now however it seems like that mechanic can be cheesed by the fact that I am a well geared level 90. Luckily I think I only have Gnomeregan and Darnasas left before I can get the tabard, which it is cool to have a port to Northrend. However this is something I am doing mostly for the large number of pets and mounts you can get. Not sure how super seriously I will take this, I doubt it will become a daily ritual like the Netherwing grind did. Right now I have a lot of different games that I ant to be playing, but this is my next faction “goal”.

Friday Forum Fodder

January 31, 2014 by Belghast

Bring on the Fodder

For awhile now I have had a forum segment kicking around in my head. The idea is that I use Fridays as a day to reflect on things that have been brewing out on the various games forums. My friends have thought this was madness, as it would likely devolve into flame based insanity. I however think that I can make it work, since so many topics start on the forums anyways. However based on recent events, especially relating to one of the topics I have chosen this morning… it still very much can get out of hand. Anyways…. if I don’t start this thing I won’t get it done in time.

Stop..ramming..pvp…down…my…throat!!!

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/11422312838

Yup that’s right… I have opted to leave the original forum post title intact for most of these unless it is offensive. Abusive use of ellipses aside there is nothing terribly offensive so here goes. This thread spawned a really interesting response from Bashiok stating hinting that in Warlords of Draenor a more permanent PVP toggle would be on it’s way. Now this has already been discussed by @AlternativeChat and @Qelric but I don’t really want to respond on what they have said… since the whole idea behind this is for me to respond to the subject matter contained within the forum post. I know this involves a bunch of semantics and blinders and whatnot… but it is a thing I am striving to do.

I have to admit my first reaction was “It’s about damned time”, as well as my second and third and fourth reaction. I have a love/hate relationship with PVP in general, in that I tend to love to hate on it. I am a massive Carebear at heart and get really excited about collaboration and community in online games and not so much about conflict and competitiveness. Please understand that this is coming from someone who tanked my servers first alliance Reins of the Black War Bear raid. Additionally I was a proud supporter of the South Shore vs Tarren Mill madness from vanilla and got to meet most of my servers hardcore PVPers during that time. However that is the root of it… I want to PVP when I want to PVP, and no other time. The problem lies that there are so many ways that you can get accidentally flagged without ever really intending it.

One of the things I do semi regularly is run around the Timeless Isle farming the named mobs. Generally speaking be it on the Timeless Isle or Darkmoon Faire I am a pretty welcome commodity since there never seems to be any tanks out there willing to tank the mini-bosses. The problem is as a Deathknight sometimes my diseases end up getting on flagged players and in turn flag me. Honestly I don’t know what it is, but I assumed it was the disease/bloodboil that I am constantly doing because I will end up flagged pretty much every time I do this public service. Granted the horde generally have the self preservation to wait until I have tanked the boss for them before killing me… but moments after downing the boss I am generally laying dead on the floor.

You might be thinking this means I rally support and start an epic land war? Nope… this means I do one of two things. Either I walk away for a bit and wait for my flag to clear before resurrecting, or I simply log out of the game and play something else for awhile. I seriously want zero part in PVP on a day to day basis and see it as an imposition on my play time. Ultimately that is what it is about for me, PVP is a gross inconvenience upon my time and forces me to somehow direct my attention to something other than my current goals. It is very much not a welcome distraction, and since I tend to play tanks… very few of the pvp skills have any meaning within the game I tend to play. PVP tanking was a thing I loved, but sadly that only really existed in a functional way in Warhammer Online.

Rift has had this PVP toggle for awhile now and it works extremely well. They brought it in during the much larger “faction as fiction” patch which is something I would love to see Blizzard do as well. Factions are meaningless things to me, and ultimately boil down as red vs blue in my eyes. I generally do not have much faction pride one way or the other… just like I have no sports team alignments. In an MMO the only “faction” I generally care about is my guild and its members. I tend to see the “Faction walls” as un-needed barriers that keep me from playing with half of the other players on the server. I started playing MMOs before these things really existed in Everquest, and have never really seen the benefit of them on the whole. Faction should be something that is character specific, that may limit where you can go in the world…. but not limit who you can associate with.

To summarize… “hell yeah” to the prospect of a more permanent PVP toggle. There have been a lot of people speculating how this might work, with faction cities etc. They can honestly take a pretty good queue from Rift in that when you are flagged as “No PVP” you can still be attacked by NPCs of that opposing faction. Thing is… you just cannot attack them back without turning off your anti-pvp flag. So this means that NPCs are more than willing to beat you into a pulp for being the pacifist you are. Players however… cannot. Running around in anti-war mode should have its limits, and this seems to be a pretty good way of handling them.

Why reforging removal is a mistake

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/11551045075

There are many versions of this thread out on the Battle.net forums, but this was one of the longest running sitting presently at three pages. Generally speaking I think a lot of these devolve into flames and get deleted before becoming truly “epic” threads. To summarize the original posters point… the believes that reforging was put in place to balance the classes and break the tyranny of having over powered classes. This opinion to me only seems to reinforce why reforging needs to go to be honest. I watched the blizzcon coverage the year they announced Reforging, and it was generally sold to the player base as a way of having MORE choice not having less. The problem is, like everything we the players have ruined it. I truly believe the intent, just like the intent of the current talent situation… was to allow us to have a bit more flavor in our characters. So that we could put our own spin on on the current spec and tweak the gear to perform the way we wanted it to perform.

The reality however is that we have systemized this and anyone who does not use Ask Mr Robot to reforge their gear to an “optimal” state is immediately “ doing it wrong”. Essentially… this is why we can’t have nice things. I personally ignore Mr Robot in favor of my own flavor on my spec, but I am sure I am a horrible person for doing this. Essentially just like the way the previous talent system was… we have an “illusion of choice” in that everyone is expected to change their gear stats towards the same ultimate ideal scenario. If this is a thing that every single player is doing, it means to me that the design of the system was inherently flawed in the first place. I applaud Blizzard for taking chances on building new systems, and I also applaud them for reversing that decision when it looks like it simply is another “non choice”.

If you have not gotten the impression already, I applaud them for deciding to remove reforging. While it was a really cool idea, it never quite worked out as well as I would have personally liked. The way it worked always seemed extremely limiting. I think we all envisioned a system where we could throw away useless stats from our gear in favor of the one that we really wanted in the first place. However the reality was dictated by some pretty rigid rules and only actually allowed us to change the secondary and tertiary stats, instead of getting more of the thing we generally want… our primary class stat. Additionally there is the issue of… if you are constantly reforging away a specific stat then the gear is simply itemized poorly.

Again I feel like this is another case where World of Warcraft can take a queue from Rift. Generally speaking the stats that I find myself personally reforging away are hit and expertise. This is because these stats can appear on every single piece of gear… however they are only useful in limited quantities until you hit the soft cap for every class. As a result you are lining up to remove them once you reach the higher tiers of raiding. How Rift has “fixed” this problem is certain stats only appear on certain pieces of gear. So you have a limited number of ways to gain that stat, so each and every piece them becomes important. Granted the hit/expertise issue is no longer going to be an issue at all… since they decided to simply remove the stat entirely.

Ultimately those are two completely different game design approaches. In the case of Rift they decided to make it work, by rationing the stats that players didn’t need as often. In the case of wow they kind just applied a general mallet to the approach and are now designing around the need for those stats in the first place. Both are completely valid approaches, and as always Blizzard seems to line up on the side of simplification rather than intricacy. If Blizzard were a toy it would likely be something made by Fischer Price and not some intricate model kit imported from Japan. There are places for both kinds of games and ultimately why I play more than just WoW. Currently it seems like the decisions they are making for Warlords of Draenor are really good ones, given the present state of the game…. however I am sure 2 years from launch we will be applauding them for undoing various things they did. World of Warcraft is a constantly evolving game, and I think as a whole this is a really good thing.

More Fodder Next Week

Mostly I am curious if this concept worked for you and if you actually enjoyed it? I am still evolving in my head what I want this to be. Generally speaking when I blog, I respond based on what I have heard said in the blogosphere without really going back to the original forum source… if a forum did in fact spawn the discussion. With this I am trying to essentially write what I would have written as a forum response… but instead in very long form blog format. Let me know if this works, or if it doesn’t how you would like to see it changed. Also remember tomorrow begins another experiment of mine… Factoid February. I still am not 100% certain what I will write… but I expect to devote one section a day to whatever the current “Fact” is.