MMORPG

The Impossible Plateau

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Forced Fasting

Screenshot_20140422_193251 This blog post is going to suck, I just wanted to get that out of the way now so you can avoid reading it.  In the mornings I muster the “oomph” to blog by channeling the dark arcane magic of coffee.  I am completely un-caffeinated today and it is horrible.  I am having to fast this morning as part of some blood work, and I have no problem with the not eating part…  but no coffee is hitting a little below the belt.  I totally imagine that once I have had my blood drawn I am going to go to the nearest QuikTrip and like try and drink straight from the coffee pot or something like that.  I’ve never really understood the purpose of fasting before blood work, since don’t you really want to see the persons stats how they actually are all the time?  What is the point of having this fasted idealistic state, when you know the person is going to screw everything up with caffeine anyways.

As part of our insurance plan at work, we are having to submit to a “biometric screening”, which seems really damned Orwellian to me.  The last few years I had been a conscientious objector to the process and as a result paid a significantly higher insurance premium, but this year that reached a critical mass.  If you do not take the screening your monthly insurance rates are literally over double what they would be if you submitted to the finger prick.  We did not find that out until after all of the normal screening sessions were finished.  So now I have to go to some massive last call session this morning.  I still think this entire process is bullshit.  I’m curious, are any of you having to do this for your work insurance?  My working theory is still that our HR department is incompetent and just simply cannot negotiate for new insurance plans worth a shit.

The Impossible Plateau

Last night I decided to faff about again in Alik’r and start the stream going while I did so.  There is a spot on the map that seems like it should have something cool at it, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get up there.  During a good chunk of the video I am trying to get up to the place and failing miserably.  I go for a really long swim, which I am sure was boring for everyone watching… and by everyone I mean no one.  Actually to be truthful over the course of the video I did manage to pick up two viewers.  First I was joined by ShinyWhip who apparently was bored and was willing to watch me go for a swim.  She got to watch me fail miserably at trying to solo a world boss as well.  Eventually I was joined by my guildie Saia who also got to watch me fail at a few things.  That is pretty much the subtext of my streams…  me failing at playing video games.

At some point I had to go afk for an extended period of time and I cut off the stream after returning.  Later in the evening I attempted a public dungeon with Warenwolf but we seemed to be missing a lot of the bosses.  Turning in the quest from inside gave us credit for the place, but I have never seen a public dungeon without a slew of optional bosses. In grand total I think we found three, and none of them actually seemed to drop anything of use.  Honestly I have been on a bad streak as far as bosses go.  I am reaching a point where the greens I craft seem to be significantly better than the blues I am getting as drops.  Crafting in this game is extremely overpowered, and I now have enough skill points dumped into blacksmithing that I have a pretty great chance of getting a temper off anything I deconstruct.

I dinged 38 last night, so In theory I could craft up an entirely new set of gear.  Not sure if this is really worth it however.  Thinking I am going to try and limp on with the 36 set I have until I ding 40, and then craft all new gear then.  The problem with crafting sets of gear is that it is a serious drain on your available tempers.  I am really not sure how many I have, but I don’t think I have near enough to be throwing them away randomly.  The big frustration so far with Alik’r is that I am still mostly finding Orichalcum.  I thought by now that I would be swimming in a sea of Dwarven Ore, but so far it has been extremely rare… which means I may not even have enough ingots to craft a full set of anything right now.

On Streaming

I am really bad about not touching social media or my RSS feed on the weekend, and as a result I usually have a significant backlog that starts sometime on Friday night.  Since I was off for Good Friday this past week, it mean this void started on a Thursday night.  As a result I missed this post by Scopique on his thoughts about streaming.  I am honestly not sure how I feel about streaming in general.  Twitch is one of those weird things that I am not really sure what to do about.  While I have a twitch channel and I stream somewhat regularly, and then dump said videos on Youtube…  I really don’t watch twitch much at all.  Well there was that period of time when all of us were watching Twitch Plays Pokemon… but that was more of the “trainwreck you just can’t help but watch” thing than something I genuinely enjoyed.  Generally speaking the only time I watch anything on twitch is when there is some presentation relating to a game I am playing.

As a result I feel kinda bad that I am streaming and love it when people watch my stream…  but I don’t ever actually end up watching anyone elses streams.  I feel like that is a big reason why my stream and youtube channel will never really be successful on their own.  They will always be attached to my blog, since the blog is what is really important to me.  I don’t fully get the twitch or youtube cultures, and in order to get either to really work it feels like you need to fully immerse yourself into said culture.  Right now I am streaming mostly because going back and listening to the things that my friends and I say on my stream entertains me.  I say all sorts of stuff and fifteen minutes later I cannot remember what the hell I just said, so it cracks me up the random stuff that comes out of my mouth while I game.  Ultimately I stream for the same reason I blog, because for whatever reason I find it entertaining and fun, and would probably be doing both even if I never had a single reader or viewer.  The stream however is just not something I think of as meaningful or permanent… it is very much a throwaway experience to me.  Entertaining for the moment it is happening, but not something to really ponder once the stream has been turned off.

That is not to say that there are not some absolutely amazing and entertaining folks out there.  Qelric for example does amazing videos, and her production value is just great.  I tend to watch whatever videos come down the pipe from her, because I find them equally entertaining and informative.  That said I have never really gotten into the “let’s play” culture on YouTube.  I tried doing some of it with my series on Trove… and really I just didn’t like the way it felt.  For a period of time I was trying to get people to do the like and subscribe thing… before I realized that I just didn’t really care much.  If people watch my YouTube channel and like my videos… awesome…  if they don’t… equally awesome.  I think the big difference is I am not trying to make a career out of being an internet persona.  I don’t need viewers or clicks or likes or whatever to get a pay check.  At the end of the day my blogging and my faffing about in streams and videos… is just something I do for entertainment.  I respect the folks who are trying to make this work as a career but I don’t think I could ever deal with the inherent instability that is trying to make a living off the whims of others.

Easy Targets

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Heartfelt Thanks

I want to lead off this morning by thanking everyone that responded yesterday to wish me well on my five year blogoversary.  It still seems a bit strange that I have been doing this that long, well technically I have been doing “this” the whole daily blogging thing only a year.  All the support you guys have given me has been awesome.  I greatly appreciate you all in so many ways.  I still feel like I don’t know what I am doing, but I just keep doing it anyways.  At this point the blogging thing is so ingrained in me that I think I would continue to post daily even if I had nothing to talk about.  Thankfully I always seem to be able to at least incoherently ramble, and that tends to fill a page faster than anything.

While we are on the topic of blogging and thanks, I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  I have touched on this a few times over the last few weeks, but it is approaching quickly.  May First is the official launch of the 2014 edition of the Newbie Blogger initiative, whether you are a veteran blogger or someone who has always wanted to create a blog… we need you.  This year proves to be a really interesting run as things are changing up quite a bit.  There are awards with prizes attached to them for various things.  Additionally we will have a return of the Syl’s ever fun NBI Poetry slam, as well as some event nights.  Right now a massive hearthstone battle royale has been confirmed, and you can check up the sign up information here.  There is also a great idea for a League of Legends night, that I hope gets enough support to make as well.

The thing about blogging is for every one of us that are blogging daily, there are another batch that have either abandoned their blog or are sitting by the sidelines trying to muster the nerve to start blogging.  I was one of those people five years ago, and a similar community got me started.  I implore you to embrace this opportunity and either reignite your blogging passion or light a brand new spark.  Folks are constantly saying that blogging is dead as a medium, but each of us that do so regularly are thumbing our noses at this concept.  We need fresh blood to keep this gaming blogosphere alive and healthy and events like NBI shine a bright light on new talent.  This will be my third year supporting the effort, and I look forward to seeing a new crop of bloggers step up and do a better job than I ever could do.

Lost in the Desert

Since I had not streamed on twitch in a few days I decided last night I would fire it up while I wandered around in the desert.  Alik’r is an interesting zone and almost feels like two zones.  There was a series of frenetic feeling quests in the town of Sentinel as you saved it from a zombie invasion.  All the while doing so there was a call to purpose, a feeling that you had to keep moving or something horrible would happen.  Now that I am out in the desert proper, the feeling of the zone has changed again.  Now as I sift through the dunes looking for various points of interest, the feeling seems to be much more relaxed and similar to the way Stros M’kai felt.  This is good and bad, good in that I feel like I can take my time through the content… and bad in that I am horribly prone to completely lose focus.

One of the things I am really loving are the creatures out here.  The game does a really good job of disguising the fact that you are often fighting the same damned creatures over and over.  The first time I really noticed this was in beta and playing the different starter zone experiences.  In Ebonheart you had the fiery Shalk, Aldmeri you had Thunderbugs, and in Daggerfall you had Assassin Bugs.  They were all essentially the same mob, but each performed slightly differently in the kinds of attacks they would do.  In the desert of Alik’r I noticed that Dunerippers were essentially crocodiles but vastly different in appearance.  They shared quite a bit of similarity in the base model and the sweep attacks, but also incorporated the mudcrab dig attack and a model swap.  Noticed the same thing happening with the Jackals, that look extremely different from wolves but behave almost exactly the same.

All of this give a feeling that the world is related, and that the various creatures of Tamriel evolved from the same core at some point.  I think that is the thing I love more than anything else, that everything in Elder Scrolls Online has a certain “sameness” to it.  It all feels like it is part of the same world.  While a Dwemer ruin in Skyrim might look vastly different from one in the Alik’r desert… they all feel like they were from the same race.  This adherence to a “racial stylebook” makes the game feel amazing.  One of my big fears with Elder Scrolls Online and the announcement of the three factions is that they would somehow destroy the natural diversity of the Elder Scrolls setting.  However thankfully you are just as likely to find a Dunmer or Argonian NPC in the desert as you are to find a Redguard in Riften.  The game has managed to maintain the jumbled mess that is the Elder Scrolls setting.

Easy Targets

After awhile hanging out in mumble by myself I was joined by the illustrious Zelibeli and Jabberant, who decided they were on their way out to Cyrodil.  This was to be Zeli’s first foray into the frontiers, so I decided to halt my questing and tag along.  I warned them that I sucked horribly at PVP, but still managed to love Cyrodil.  In every conceivable way it is the Dark Age of Camelot frontiers.  You have three different realms that border the region, with lots of objectives scattered around the map.  Just like Dark Age of Camelot there are also numerous other things to do out there than just PVP.  We attempted to meet up with one of the bigger conflicts at first, but ended up getting completely rolled by a veteran three player a few times.  One of the interesting things about Cyrodil is that it instant levels you to 50 for the purpose of the content.  The only problem is it bolsters you to the BASE stats of a 50… not a 50 with full gear.  This means that a bolstered character will always be significantly weaker than a true 50… and even weaker still than a veteran rank player.

In large scale siege warfare this really doesn’t matter much since it is mostly a numbers game.  In one on one combat… the difference is extremely noticeable.  I felt like I simply could not deal enough damage to the veteran rank 3 player.  While I out survived both Zeli and Jabb this was simply to my tanky nature more than anything else, and still even after having fought two other players the guy completely wrecked me.  As a result we ended up varying our goals and we set our sights on a skyshard.  One of the add-ons I have apparently shows the locations of all of the skyshards in Cyrodil, so I figured this would be a valuable excursion.  So we made our way to this tower guarded by goblins, with the skyshard very clearly at the top.  It took a few tries to finally reach the goal, as the moment we reached the tower initially we got attacked by several folks from Ebonheart also after the same goal.

Screenshot_20140421_211127

One of the cool things is there at the tower we picked up a quest to deliver a doctors bag to a town there in Cyrodil.  We did not do this however as the town in question was deep within currently Ebonheart held territory.  That seems like a grand mission for another night.  After a lot of faffing about we ended up picking up another guildie, Barose and heading to a dungeon.  I think it is really awesome that there are full dungeons scattered around the map in Cyrodil.  This one was a really nifty vampire dungeon and I ended up getting so much loot that I had to “mail bank” a ton of it to Rae.  Apparently I ended up sending her 9 emails full of it before the night was up.  The PVP dungeons seem to drop loot as though they were a group dungeon, but overall seemed easier in scale.  I am guessing they are rewarding us for the risk of doing PVE content in a PVP zone, where any group of players could hop into the dungeon and slaughter us in the process.

Overall it was a really great night and there is talk of trying to create some sort of formalized guild Cyrodil night.  If nothing else last night proved that there is plenty to do in Cyrodil even if you do not necessarily engage in siege warfare.  While I am not opposed to defending a keep or claiming one for our guild, I also want to explore all of the other dungeons out there and collect more skyshards.  For the longest time I had a point where I simply did not know where to spend points, but having leveled up a lot of abilities I seem to once again have more opportunities to spend them than points to spend.  I had a great time and I hope Zeli and Jabb both did as well.  Was really fun just hanging out and being horrible at PVP together.  You should totally join us the next time.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Cyrodil #PVP #NewbieBloggerInitiative

Five Year Blogoversary

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Something Profound

fivecake I feel like this morning I should post something deeply profound since as of this morning it means I have been doing this blog thing for five years.  Technically my first post was on the 17th, but it was really just a test to make sure the site was functional.  My very first “real” post was on April 21st 2009 contemplating the ramifications of what “dual spec” would do to our raid.  I have changed a lot in these five years, and while I wish I had posted more regularly early on, I do like the fact that you can see this evolution in game play and attitude over the years.  The original intent of this blog was to be a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog hence the title.

But looking back that idea didn’t seem to last more than a few posts before it started to morph into a blog about my adventures in raiding.  At that point I was in my “wannabe hardcore” mode, and in this fashion being plugged into the blog scene was probably more of a detriment to my enjoyment than a boon to my happiness.  I saw people doing really awesome things, and our little rag tag mostly casual raid just couldn’t keep up.  I am not super proud of some of the angry posts I made to that effect as we struggled to clear content in Wrath of the Lich King.  There are many times I wish I could just jettison the first couple of years worth of posts, because I really don’t know that version of me any more.

Personal Growth

Every so often through the back log of posts I stumble upon one that I had forgotten about and that I really am still proud to have written.  The biggest takeaway for me over these five years is that I have become much more comfortable in my own skin.  When I started writing for my blog, I tried to be this thing that I thought everyone wanted me to be.  The flawless leader, the archetype, the figurehead that did no wrong and always had the right words to say to fix the problems.  The longer it ran the more I realized I was not that person.  I was just as full of self doubt and confusion as the next player, and that they didn’t follow me because I knew all the answers…  they followed me because I cared enough to try.

So now I can look back at the first four years of my blog as me trying to “find my voice”, but I don’t really think I found it until I embarked upon my “Grand Experiment”.  There is something about having to write a post each and every morning that forces you to open up and be honest.  There comes a point where you just run out of spackle and polish to keep up your persona.  I would like to hope that by the time I entered into the idea, the “persona” of me was dwindling and I was left with just the real version…  but I can even see that over the course of this last year of daily posts I became far more honest with my public.  I still enter into each posting expecting no one to actually read it, and in that there is a comfort level that allows me to say some things that I might not say otherwise.

So while today is pretty cool that the blog itself has been around for five years now, I feel like the upcoming anniversary of the grand experiment is far more important.  That was really the moment when I decided a true direction for my blog, and in the last year I feel so blessed in the connections I have made during it.  The funny thing is… even after five years of doing this, I feel like I don’t really “know” anything about this trade.  I tend to just push forward with what seems to work, and figure out the rest of the details as I go.  As I enter into my third year of the Newbie Blogger Initiative… I really don’t feel like I am worthy of the title of “Mentor”, because I am still very much figuring things out for myself.

Breaching the Spotlight

I’ve always been one of those people who has preferred to be behind the scenes, and while I like knowing that people are actually reading what I write, I’ve tried to avoid stepping out into the spotlight.  Part of this comes from the whole “not really comfortable in my own skin” aspect of things.  I’m a big guy, and I probably always will be, but over the last year my wife and I have embarked upon a personal journey that has lead to both of us losing well over seventy pounds.  So while I am not going to be taking any “selfies” any time soon, I am feeling a lot more confident about myself as a result.  As such I am forcing myself to do things that I would have avoided before.

This started with my game streaming over on Twitch, and while I choose not to display my webcam on the stream… it is a start.  While streaming I started joining mumble and letting anyone pop in to chat, and I realized that I might have something interesting on my hands.  In listening to the old streams it really started to sound like a sort of impromptu podcast.  Out of this I talked to a few of my friends that I have talked with nightly in twitch for years, and we started a podcast.  Sunday we recorded our second episode and I am pretty happy with how things are turning out.  I made an attempt to go on camera with the Gamer Hangout vidcast but honestly the “in front of the camera” thing was just a bit too much for my anxiety.

Yesterday I got the opportunity to branch out from my comfort zone again, and while I was extremely nervous going into it… and likely drove my wife insane starting an hour or so before it was supposed to happen… it seemed to go off without a hitch.  I was invited to guest host MMORPG.com Game On podcast with Liore and Syeric.  The episode we recorded last night will not be posted until this coming Wednesday, but I am excited and scared to see how it turned out.  The multiplaying podcast did not happen this week, but I may end up getting rescheduled on this weeks show.  While it may not seem like a big leap for me to go from doing my own podcast, to joining in on others… it really is.  What has made Aggrochat so easy for me is we are just recording the same kinds of conversations we have had for years.

Aggrochat Chibis

belghast_shieldhat Rae is probably going to kill me for posting this, but meh she will get over it.  It feels fitting to show this off today, since five years ago she made the Belghast in Zul’Aman gear chibi that I still use for everything.  Right now everything we have for AggroChat is very much in a placeholder state.  We wanted to get podcasting before we lost our nerve, and did not want to wait for all the infrastructure to be in place.  One of the things she has been working on are Chibis for each of the podcasters so we can have a nifty chibi-fied logo version of ourselves.  Over the weekend she sent me what looks to be a final or near final version of my chibi.  I am absolutely in love with it, and can’t wait to see what the final version of all of them looks like put together.  Once she is finished with everything I am probably going to be updating the masthead to include this guy as well.  I want to thank all of you who have read my blog during the last five years.  You’ve made this a very interesting journey, and I can only hope I have to “oomph” to make it another five years.

World Without Warcraft

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Replace all the Tech

Yesterday was a really odd day for my wife and I in that it seemed to end with some results that we never really planned ahead of time.  The key focus of the day was to get out and move around so that hopefully we could get some steps in.  It is funny how the fitbit has gamified our lives, in that both of us want those extra steps whenever we can.  So when we went to a shopping center we parked purposefully way the hell out in the boondocks so that we would have to walk extra steps to get to our destination.  Thing is I find myself doing this little tweak almost everywhere.  It feels like cheating, but I guess in the long run it will be far better for my health to force myself to walk more.  The fact that I get “acheesements” for doing so just reinforces the behavior.

I wish we had gotten the fitbits a year ago when we first heard about them, because it makes me wonder where we could be today if we had.  One of the various errands we had to run was going to Sams Club to pick up a few things.  They have these amazing apples, and I was getting low on oatmeal.  Now that we have one around the corner from my house I tend to go there quite often.  We actually got our fitbits at Sams because they were significantly cheaper than anywhere else, even considering internet pricing without the shipping.  Turns out we need to shop there more often for tech, because we noticed they had the Samsung Galaxy s5 in stock and at a pretty massive savings.  Currently to get one through AT&T the carrier we use is $250 a 2 year contract, through Best Buy it was $199 with the same contract, but Sams had the price down to $160.

After we walked around the store for a bit and thought about it, we decided to upgrade our phones.  My wife decided she would rather have the maroon s4 instead of the s5.  So for about the same amount that we would have spent to upgrade one phone through AT&T we upgraded both.  The best part is that the mobile tech managed to keep our original phone plan.  We have been grandfathered into the AT&T unlimited data plan for years, and if we ever lost it… we would jump providers in a heartbeat.  So really in the grand scheme of things it is beneficial for them if they want to keep us as customers… to keep moving that plan down the road.  We are not massive data users, but I just like knowing I don’t have to ever think about that.

Now I am coming from the Galaxy S2 that I have had for over three years now, but so far I am liking the S5 quite a bit.  It has a lot of features that I had been missing like the extended bluetooth support that allows me to sync my fitbit directly with the phone.  Additionally it works with chromecast allowing me to use my phone as a remote control for plex and other chromecast apps.  We spent a good chunk of time after getting the phones trying to set them back up again for usage.  The battery life overall seems much better than that of my s2, which is odd considering how much larger the screen and everything else is about the phone.  I have not even attempted to play with the camera yet, but I have heard it is a big jump forward.  The oddest thing about yesterday is using our phones without our contacts… since apparently most of them were stored on the sim card and not in google contacts.  Sams did not have a data transfer cable, so I guess that is the one negative about using them to swap phones out.

Chromebook Time

acer-unveils-first-chromebook-with-haswell-for-249 Have I ever mentioned that my wife is amazing?  I believe I have in the past but here is yet another instance of this.  I am a habitual craigsist shopper but I go in slumps.  I will furiously check it daily for something and then ignore the fact it exists for months.  My wife on the other hand tends to do so pretty regularly, and if she knows I am looking for something keeps an eye out.  For awhile now I have been interested in a Chromebook because for me it seems like the perfect note taking machine.  I religiously use chrome already and pretty much use nothing but google docs as it stands.  I wrote my entire nanowrimo novel last year in google docs… and I still need to edit that.  Basically I needed a machine that I could take with me into meetings at work and take copious notes and then have easy access to them later to mail to my boss or anyone else who so needed them.  The chromebook really seems like the ideal solution for this, but I balked at paying full price for one… since really I was only going to use it for a super limited purpose.

At the suggestion of friends I had mostly been looking for an Acer Chromebook instead of one of the Samsung models.  Yesterday my wife asked me “what brand chromebook were you looking for?” which generally means she’s found something on Craigslist.  Sure enough there was an Acer c710 Chromebook for sale that looked to be in pretty good shape for $150.  I hem hawed around a bit and thought about it, and decided that still I did not want to pay that much.  So instead we counter offered $100 and figured that would be the end of it.  After awhile the guy responded back that he would take $120, which was better but was not exactly an immediate purchase type situation.  We were heading on our way to our favorite Indian restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner so we told him we would think it over and get back with him.

I realize it was only $20 but it seemed like a significant difference at the time.  Mostly because I feel like in buying a chromebook I am only going to use it for the most basic of things.  I already have a really nice full fledged gaming laptop, and this is really just for carrying with me to meetings or any place I need to show off something on the web.  My wife’s school system is getting chromebooks for her students, so there was also the side benefit of giving her a machine to play with in seeing precisely what she can do with it.  After thirty minutes or so of discussion we decided to just pass, and tell the guy we really didn’t want to spend more than $100 on it.  Apparently he was wanting to sell it and we were the only decent offer all weekend, so we shifted gears and went all the way across town to meet the guy.

The funny thing is, the kid grew up in the very small town my wife hails from, so any question about reputability was out the window there.  We’ve dealt with some pretty sketchy people over the years of using craigslist and sometimes you just get a bad feeling about things.  Anyone who is willing to admit that they are from a town of 3,000 is obviously not looking to do something untoward.  I actually used it last night while podcasting to bring up our show notes, and so far it seems pretty much what I expected.  Chromebooks are really just a machine that runs nothing but a chrome web browser.  Anything that would work in chrome seems to work great on the chromebook, for my needs it seems like it is going to be perfect.

World Without Warcraft

Last night we recorded our second broadcast of the Aggrochat podcast.  I am shocked, amazed and absolutely humbled that people seem to have listened to the first one.  At last check we were around two hundred downloads, and for our first effort that seems insane.  Last night we followed the same basic format we set up with the first show, and ended up getting caught up in a quagmire of a topic.  There was a thread on twitter during the week where someone made the statement that they thought the gaming world would have been better off without World of Warcraft.  We spent the majority of the hour and fifteen minute run time of this episode discussing what that world would be like, and what things simply would not exist without WoW.  Between the four of us we managed to take a bunch of different angles and the end result was this nostalgia filled romp through MMO gaming.

#AggroChat #GalaxyS5 #ChromeBook #WorldOfWarcraft #Podcast