MMORPG

Faffing the Steppes

by

Fitbit Logic

So this is the point where I am supposed to come up with something interesting to talk about for a blog post.  I kinda over did it a bit yesterday with the double posting, but that family drama piece really needed out of my head.  Once I finished posting it, we both dressed and went out into the world to run the errands that needed running.  The fit bit does funny things to you.  I find myself parking way the hell out in the middle of nowhere just to be able to get some extra steps in.  This also permeated our grocery store trip.  I am normally one of those people who goes exactly to the areas of the store for the items I need and then zips straight out.  I used to be able to do the weekly shopping trip in about fifteen minutes.

However yesterday we purposefully meandered up and down every possible isle, not because we didn’t know exactly what we needed… but we were trying to milk the trip for as much walking as humanly possible.  So we wandered up and down the isles, saving the frozen foods for last.  Not unexpectedly we probably bought a lot more groceries than normal but we got our maximum amount of walking from the trip.  It feels like cheating, since I am going out of my way to try and put in as many steps as possible into everything I do.  However… I guess that was really the point of gamifying exercise.  Funny thing is, last night at one point I got up to get a drink while watching the walking dead.  When I got back I ended up pacing around for a bit while watching the television before sitting back down.

Faffing the Steppes


Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTV
Most of yesterday was spent faffing about in World of Warcraft.  With the impending launch of Reaper of Souls tomorrow, and the headstart for Elder Scrolls Online soon… I really want to get my mage to 60 so I can boost it.  My gameplan in general has been to work on quests while not in a dungeon.  But I am pretty much habitually queuing at every chance I get.  This has been interesting to say the least.  Normally speaking I can stomach pugs if I am not tanking, and for the most part this has been the same with playing a mage.  The only problem I run into is when I have a tank that simply doesn’t know what they are doing.  To make it worse, many of these tanks in question are not speaking English.  I really question the logic behind blizzard lumping non-english and english speaking servers together.

Granted this happens with European servers in pretty much every single game.  However speaking more than one language is a much more common occurrence there.  While I can pick out a few words here and there of Spanish, I am by no means fluent enough to get my point across.  At one point last night the tank in question skipped half of the zone.  Since we were all leveling, and killing things means more experience… I didn’t really get the point.  Since the tank was only speaking Portuguese I had no real way of conveying my questions.  Maybe blizzard needs to look into embedding Google translate into their API, or maybe that is an add-on idea waiting to happen.  There have been many games that have bridged the language gap very well with some auto translation.  I think maybe it is time for Blizzard to look into doing the same.

Veronica Mars

I finally got around to watching the Veronica Mars movie this weekend, and I have to say I liked it quite a bit.  I started watching the series on a random whim, and thought my wife might also enjoy it.  So together we worked our way through the entirety of the series when it was on Netflix.  It is one of those rare instances where a TV show appeals equally to both of us.  Mostly for me…  I like the title character.  I love the random quirky smartassery that comes out of her mouth, and the creative solutions to awkward situations.  I find it odd just how this show, much like Firefly has found such an active “life after death”.  If nothing else this proves to me that Hollywood knows exactly jack shit about what people want.  Kickstarter and similar community backing seems to be a way for the huddled masses that don’t fit into the neat bubble of “pop culture” to finally get the things they have always wanted.

I did not back the show, mostly because I was feeling more than a little bit of Kickstarter fatigue when it happened.  Thankfully not everyone was me.  When it came out I bought the $20 digital copy from Amazon, because I wanted to put my money where my mouth.  The only problem with the digital offerings here is they are all pretty much heinous, and none of them are really compatible with my chosen method of watching television and movies.  Namely I prefer to stream things to my television using Chromecast and Plex.  Granted I could do the crappy tabcasting thing, which is fine for say a twitch stream, but ends up annoying me when trying to watch something more “long form”.  As a result I went out an acquired a downloaded copy of the movie to back up the one I paid for.  Dear Hollywood…  your DRM is dumb for making me pirate the movie after paying legally for it.  You are doing it wrong.

As far as the movie itself goes…  I liked it a lot.  I am not sure exactly how I can give it a proper review without absolutely giving everything away.  The characters I liked from the television show that I cared about, all made cameo appearances even if they didn’t always factor heavily into the plot of the movie.  The quality of acting and cinematography was great, especially considering this did not go through the traditional channels.  That said however… the movie felt a bit off at times, or more so it just felt like I was watching an hour and a half long episode of the television show.  The movie ends in a perfect place for them to pick up a sequel or even another television show.  So here is hoping this is not the last we see of Veronica Mars.

Comfort Gaming

by

Classy Defined

This morning I got up like I do most weekend mornings, and threw on enough clothing to make myself presentable.  Generally speaking I don’t shower until later in the day, so generally this means I have to throw on a skull cap to tame my hair that is sticking straight up.  In the winter this makes sense… in the summer not so much.  Honestly in the morning anytime I see someone in a skull cap or baseball cap… I pretty much assume they are doing precisely what I am doing.  As always I went to QuikTrip to gather up sustenance, and walked away with chocolate donut holes for the Mrs. and a jalapeño sausage roll for me.

While there… I saw the definition of classy.  This woman walked in, who looked like she was already three sheets to the wind.  What was she buying you ask?  Well she planted an “Olde English” 40 oz malt liquor on the counter.  Granted this is 8 am in the morning, most of the people in the place are buying donuts or juice or something more breakfast appropriate.  In addition she had a package of twinkies and asked the guy at the counter if he sold single swisher sweets.  After some fumbling around he found her a three pack, and I guess that was “close enough”.  So yeah… I guess that is how some people roll.  I am guessing this is not breakfast but a “night cap” of sorts.  Just not something I normally see in the neighborhood QuikTrip.

Comfort Gaming

I think I grieve differently than most.  Since the news of my grandmother, all I have really wanted to do is “turtle”…  aka pull my head inside my shell and forget that the world exists.  One of my chosen ways of doing this is to go off and play games that have always made me happy.  One of the games I always cycle back to eventually is Everquest 2.  It is like an old friend that I have spent so much time with, that I don’t even need to talk anymore… and I know that it understands me.  Yeah I am sure it is odd that I personify a game like that, but really EQ2 was a thing I did for “me” and no one else.  All the while raiding in WoW I would steal private time by logging into Norrath and wandering around aimlessly on my army of alts.

Just as a coincidence, right now my absolutely favorite event is going on in EQ2.  Once a year Chronoportals open up allowing players to revisit areas from the original Everquest.  Some of them are rather funny, like the Ancient Cyclops event in Sinking Sands.  Back in the day there were all sorts of “theories” for how you get the ancient cyclops to spawn.  Some of these involved killing all the madmen, spiders or mummies… and none of them really worked.  It was a fairly random chance that you would get him to spawn.  Why did players care? Well the Ancient Cyclops dropped the item needed to start the Journeyman Boots quest line, which of course provided the player with their own personal way of casting “Spirit of the Wolf”.  SoW Plx!

Basically they are a really awesome way of getting account bound gear for your alts.  I am not sure when I will actually level an alt again, but sooner or later I always seem to, and having these weapons and gear makes a bit difference.  On my Shadow Knight I am still using the sword that comes from the Lower Guk chronoportal event.  It is precisely the kind of mindless nostalgia that I need right now.  The above video has me running through several of the events, or at least the ones I could remember off the top of my head.  However if you are looking for a full listing, the place to check is Zam as always the amazing Cyliena does a great job as always with updates.

The Great Wipe

The end of Alpha is I believe next Wednesday morning, and the beginning of Closed Beta begins Wednesday afternoon/evening when the servers come back up.  What this means is everything we have created along the way… will be gone.  The only thing that will be kept are your characters, and the various entitlements like things that came from the trailblazer packs and things purchased from the store.  This means all of the claim data will be wiped.  I have a big mixed opinion about this.  I don’t mind the idea of losing the work I have done on my claim, but I really don’t like the idea of losing my claim in general.  I like my claim, I like where it is.  My frustration is that there will be a massive landrush Wednesday evening… which is going to suck.

My plan will be to try and get a spot similar to where I had it before on Liberation/Pingo, but if I cannot… who knows where I will end up.  Basically the acquisition of goods begins a new.  So that means we will have to go back to square one with only our extra special trailblazer axe to start and work our way through the gearing tiers again.  Here is hoping that with the addition of heartwood the grind for stuff is far less painful.  As a result I got in for a bit yesterday, but I didn’t really feel like doing much.  I made a few claims extension flags to see how well that worked, but really with everything going away, I don’t feel much like screwing with it.  I have a bit of my stuff templated, but really I found using super huge templates really awkward so I will probably build everything back from scratch.

The cool thing about closed beta is that each of us trailblazers are getting friend keys.  The notice from the other day says these are no longer going to be time limited keys… but instead permanent access to the beta from this point onwards.  I know a few people who wanted them, so I will be trying to hand mine out that way.  However there should be a lot of them up for grabs as I know a lot of people in the blogosphere who are Trailblazers.  My hope is that they pretty much limit the closed beta access to just the friend codes for a bit, at least until the great landrush is over.  My goal is to get another claim somewhere in a forested area and then start over from there.  I really liked being in the forest, especially since the later item grind ends up being wood, and not ore.

Gadgetzan Bound

by

Obligatory Update

Yesterday while I was in training I got a text from my mother.  It seems as though the lasix is doing what it is supposed to do and my grandmothers kidney function is improved.  At this point they are talking about maybe taking her off the ventilator today, and trying to wake her up completely.  For the last several days they have kept her sedated with propofol aka “the Michael Jackson drug”.  This has been allowing her to rest and hopefully heal.  As always I want to thank you all for the support.  I am not sure if I want to hope that things are turning around yet or not, because I really don’t want to jinx things.  If they can take her off the ventilator that means she moves out of ICU and up to something called a telemetrics floor.  Which I believe means all the monitoring of ICU, just without the critical nature.  I of course will report in with what has happened one way or the other tomorrow.

Gadgetzan Bound

Wow-64 2014-03-20 06-27-59-97 Last night I did not get a ton of playtime but the time I did get I continued working on my Night Elf Mage.  At this point I am 45 and sitting in Gadgetzan, having more or less completed Thousand Needles.  Tanaris feels much the same, even though it has changed massively since when I was first out here leveling my Hunter back in 2005.  The flavor of the zone is still there… namely the conflict between the goblins of Gadgetzan and the south seas pirates.  While not as hard hit as thousand needles, the zone has lost a significant amount of dry land during the Cataclysm.  In many ways this has made some of the places more enjoyable.  I especially liked the shallow lake full of sea giants.

Back in Everquest, the iconic “dangerous” mob was the Sand Giant, and Sea Giants have that same sort of feeling.  I remember the first time I encountered one, and I also remember it completely kicking my ass.  So while it feels odd that I am openly hunting them during a kill quest, it also feels cool to know that I can now take them down.  Additionally you might notice that I finally got off my duff and made some glyphs.  I have to say the “unbound” elemental is so much cooler than the stock frost elemental.  On top of that it has a much more soothing sound as opposed to the default “water boiling” noise.

I only managed to put on a few levels last night, but mostly because I was not feeling up to pugging.  There are days I can deal with the frustration and stress and there are other days I cannot.  Last night I just wanted to wrap up in my cocoon on the sofa and vege out for a bit.  I ended up going to bed fairly early, which I am sure is something my body needed.  I still feel like I am half coming down with something, half allergies going haywire.  According to fitbit I managed to get over six hours of sleep last night, which is pretty damned good for me.  Traditionally I barely get five hours on the best night.

Out of Touch

The oddest thing about being in a serious training class, or at least one with the word “bootcamp” in the title means that I really am disconnected from the world while doing it.  This has been odd, I am so used to knowing about everything happening within minutes thanks to twitter and google plus.  Being disconnected has created this sense that I am missing something important.  Yet instead of trying to catch up last night, I mostly just kept ignoring it.  I guess my mind is going into weekend mode when I really don’t check into stuff much at all.  Training has been good, but it was one of those situations where I did not realize quite how much I already knew about the software.  Day one was pretty much just a review of concepts we already knew.

Hopefully today we will get into the hardcore nuts and bolts of tearing stuff apart and reassembling it in a fashion we want.  The instructor is pretty hardcore, in that I guess at one point he was over the hardware division at Microsoft, as well as other things.  Nice guy, seems to know what he is talking about.  The time has gone extremely quickly, and I think it helps that I am taking it with two other co-workers.  I guess right now it just feels like I am in this bubble that is not entirely “the real world”, but instead some odd “training world”.  Oh well just today and tomorrow and then we are back to normality.

Steamboat Willy

by

Good Thoughts

I guess I was wrong to post yesterday that I thought things were getting much better with my Grandmother.  While eating dinner last night I got a rather frantic call from my mother.  Turns out that things are not going as well as we had thought.  Her kidneys are functional, but not working nearly as efficiently as they should.  Now it might be that they are just overwhelming from not working for so long that the toxins built up in the body are too much for them to deal with.  It could be a lot of things, but basically she is not moving fluids like she should be.

Now at this point they are trying a few things, the first of which is to give her Lasix.  When my mom told me that I listened but was thinking in the back of my head “what the hell does eye surgery have to do with kidneys”.  Later I googled and found out that both “Lasik” and “Lasix” are two completely separate things and one of which is in fact for fluid retention.  Essentially at this point one of several things is going to happen.  Either the Lasix does it magic and she starts moving fluids again normally, helping her kidneys chew through the toxins.  Next possibility is that it increases her blood pressure enough for her to take normal dialysis to help the kidneys catch up.  Final option is that if her blood pressure remains low or drops, they will have to transfer her to Tulsa so they can do a “slow dialysis” which I don’t fully understand, but apparently it is a thing.

I am not a very religious man, but my grandmother very much is.  She is as staunch of a catholic as I know, and even if I don’t believe something… I have to respect anyone that puts that much faith in anything.  As a result I thank you all for all the prayers and good vibes you are sending her way.  While I may not be completely sold on prayer, I do feel like the power of positive thinking is definitely a thing.  So I am hoping that the prayers and thoughts help.  Grandma is one of the biggest influences on the person I am today, and I am just not ready to lose her yet.  She is the last Grandparent my wife and I have… and she really has whole heartedly adopted my wife as one of her “grandchildren”.

Steamboat Willy

Wow-64 2014-03-19 06-04-55-35

As a result of the news that I got while eating dinner, I really didn’t feel like being around people much last night.  At the very least I did not feel like streaming, because I really was not up to trying to hold a one sided conversation with myself.  I continued pushing forward with my mage and managed to ding I believe 42 before I called it a night.  This lead me from Feralas to Thousand Needles.  It has been quite a long time since I had completed any of the new “raceway” quests… with the raceway under the newly formed lake.  I have to say I found them enjoyable, and I am thankful they used the same underwater tech here that they did in Hyjal.  The highlight of the quests for me is the fact that you get a really awesome boat to ride around in while you are in Thousand Needles.

The frustration of leveling with full heirlooms is that you generally only get to do a single quest hub before moving on to the next zone.  Granted the fact that I have been queuing for dungeons has really escalated this factor.  I want to get to 60 so I can use my boost, but at the same time I don’t.  That said I know if I do not end up boosting this character, it will languish a slow death in outlands and northrend and never quite make it to the level cap.  I am enjoying my Mage quite a bit, but not enough to get me to push through the segments of content that I am bored with.  The problem is that one you get higher in level the dungeons become a slog, and the difficulty ramps up meaning there is a lot more failure.  Right now pugging is relaxing because we could literally do anything and make it through the dungeon, when we actually need to care about damage and a bit of strategy… the enjoyment drains.

Adventures in DRM

Much like the 15 games that influenced me project, there is another one that I have been obsessing over.  My friend Beau Hindman mentioned this the other day, that he was trying to distill his musical tastes down to a single 10 song play list.  For me this mission has morphed quite a bit.  Back during the 80s and 90s I was a “mix tape” maker.  I rarely if ever listened to music as intended, or if I did… it was because the arrangement of songs on an album was absolute perfection.  As we moved into the MP3 era I have continued this trait, making sublime little mixes of music for specific moods.  So the project at hand has been to create a mix tape that talks about my tastes in music.  Since it is so damned easy to use youtube for this purpose I simply strung together a sequence of music videos and while streaming Monday night, I had that playing in the background.

I didn’t really think much about it, and when I checked my stream over on the second machine… I didn’t hear the music coming through.  So I mentally shrugged and figured it was something to do with codecs and whatnot.  Turns out that the music was in fact recorded, and as soon as I did the twitch export to youtube, the DRM klaxons twanged.  Their song matching system is ruthlessly efficient, and they properly identified every single track that was playing looped in the background.  So I thought to myself “great, this means they will likely strip the audio from my videos” or even worse un-list them completely.  Apparently no, that is not the case at all.  Basically the key stipulation is, that I cannot monetize the videos now that I have acknowledged I have used someone else’s music.

I guess at the end of the day I am fine with this.  I have trouble with the concept of monetization in general.  Like I am not against someone else profiting from their hard work.  I have however always been against putting advertisements on my blog, and I tend to feel the same about my budding youtube feed.  If I thought I had a shot in hell of actually making enough income to offset my position as a senior developer… I might feel differently.  What I do with my gaming is a hobby, and I just don’t think what I do is good enough that it is actually worth making money on.  Anyways long story short…  I am fine with this stalemate I seem to have created over copyrighted works.  I get to listen to whatever the hell I want to, and apparently continue making videos.  The only negative side effect is that apparently these videos are now banned in Germany.

Radio Silence

I will likely be pretty quiet on most of social media this week.  Today through Friday I will be attending Sharepoint development training.  So while I will check into the world periodically I won’t be very reachable.  You guys hold down the fort while I am gone.  Additionally I figure my evenings will be spent at the hospital again.  I had stayed away for a few days because I felt like I was coming down with something.  However I think that something is just “allergies” and the negative side effect of nature deciding to wake the hell up again.  So yeah…  don’t do anything I wouldn’t do?