MMORPG Archives - Page 376 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Rise of the Trade Cartel

February 25, 2014 by Belghast

Starter Islands Optional

I hinted about this yesterday, but I have since checked in on the NDA and everything is cool to talk about. Currently up on test is a number of changes to designed to improve the game play experience for those who felt that it was simply too “tutorial” for too long. It would not be an Elder Scrolls game were it not for a prison sequence introduction. So you still spend your few moments in Cold Harbor but instead of being deposited on a “starter island” you are deposited in the city of Daggerfall, Davon’s Watch or Skywatch depending on your faction. Once again I use the term “starter island” but each faction has a slightly different setup. In this city you have the option of starting quests there, venturing out into the country side to kill random stuff or going back to the docks and returning to the starter island experience.

The end result definitely feels more like a traditional Elder Scrolls experience, as when you exit the prison introduction you are usually dumped out to decide your own fate. I will also say however that fending for yourself in Daggerfall for example, is significantly more difficult than working your way through Stros M’Kai. I worked my way through a series of the city quests, but several of them were rather difficult considering at this point you really do not have much by way of gear having just finished Cold Harbor. I will likely always do the Starter Islands, because I really like the experience… but for those players who were expecting a much more “manifest destiny” experience the way is now open.

I have to caveat all of this with “subject to change”, because this is still on the test servers and nothing that we are seeing is absolutely guaranteed to happen. However the complaint about the on rails beginning has been a constant thread throughout the various tests I have participated in. Zenimax is taking this criticism to heart and tweaking the game as a result. Really they have been extremely responsive to critique, and I’ve watched as a number of things have changed based on tester input. They do have a few holy grails that I wish they would abandon, but most of these are fixable with addons. I am not a huge fan of minimalistic user interfaces, so I know I will be modding the crap out of mine to display more information more clearly.

The Market Economy

I recently watched the latest of Beau Hindman’s series of Gamer Hangouts in which the show focused on Elder Scrolls Online. Actually he had asked if I wanted to join in, but since I do not have a webcam I opted out… something that should be resolved this week. One of the big concerns late in the show was what exactly the player driven economy would look like. While I am not auction house wizard, and I generally only have enough gold to keep my armor repaired… I can already see that Elder Scrolls as a whole is going to have a very craft centric economy. Firstly this game has probably the most detailed crafting system I have seen anywhere. This is primarily due to the heavy research component in the game. While Maevrim talked a bit about enchanting in the video, the bulk of my experience is with Blacksmithing.

As you move about the world you will get various dropped items, sometimes these items include a trait. For example you might get a dropped axe with the word “Precise” on it that means it increases melee and spell critical. Now you can deconstruct every item in the game for raw materials, and this is going to be key for getting some of the rarer crafting components, however there is a special kind of deconstruction you can do called research. This allows you to learn the trait from the item, and it takes a significant amount of time… namely the first trait you research for each weapon type takes a minimum of 5 hours, and increases from there. Since traits are unique to a weapon type, and there are currently eight for each type… it takes an extremely long amount of time to learn them all.

What this means is that by nature crafters will be forced to specialize, working on learning the traits that matter the most to them… or if they are purely motivated by profit… learning the ones that players want the most. So I fully expect to see people advertising themselves as a master axe-smith, or a master sword-smith… instead of a general purpose smith. Granted the game does not distinguish between the two, and given enough time and resources the same person could learn every single trait in the game. Additionally each player starts off crafting only their own racial style, but through the acquisition of dropped books they can learn to craft items in any style available. So basically the ability to craft specific items with a specific stat is predictable… but requires a huge amount of work on the crafters part.

What makes the system even more interesting is that the best gear can only be crafted in certain places. I talked about this awhile back, but this also factors into the economy. Essentially players will likely be paying that master sword smith to go with them to some forgotten crafting station so that they can have crafted the best item for their specific chosen build. Additionally since you can improve a crafted item from white to green, blue, purple or orange quality, I imagine there will be a brisk trade in the reagents needed for that. Trying to improve an item with limited resources gives you a very slim chance of success… and if you fail you end up destroying your shiny new bauble in the process. As a result players at the end of game will be wanting to make sure they pour enough of these reagents into every attempt to give them the highest chance of success. These reagents are likely going to be among the most frequently traded items, and folks who farm them will likely be a pillar of the player driven economy.

Rise of the Trade Cartel

One of the more interesting things of note about Elder Scrolls is that as far as I know there is no Auction House system. What they do have instead is an interesting system called the Guild Store. Once you have at least 10 members (someone correct me if I am wrong on the number) you can start to list things to sell to your guild members. Since guilds are account based, and you can be in multiple (current limit is 5 guilds) I have a feeling that we will be seeing a whole new kind of player driven economy. I fully expect we will see a rise of large Trade Cartel guilds that allow players access to a larger marketplace to sell their wares. This is a different line of thinking on how an economy should work, since these trade guilds would essentially be part tradechat and part auction house rolled into one.

I also feel like similar to games without auction house systems, we will see players congregating in cities offering up their wares. This happened in Everquest and most recently I saw this happening a lot with crafters in Final Fantasy XIV. Since gear is so granular and specific to however a player chooses to build their character, I really don’t see a huge market for “premade” items. I think the real money will be made doing custom order crafting, and these trade cartels will be the way to find crafters for those purposes. In every game I there have existed various groups that colluded to control segments of the economy… so it will be interesting to see exactly how this plays out in a game that supports entirely player driven markets. I don’t really have the knack for this sort of thing, but I do hope I have some friends that do, because it will be interesting to see played out.

Of Bel and Grudges

Today’s factoid came to me in an interesting fashion last night. I had been playing Belganon my little Warlock, and was just about to shut down for the night when I saw a shout from a player name I recognized. He was trying to get people to run all nine challenge modes in one night for the purpose of getting gold in each. His message was a little oddly worded, and while I doubt he intended it… it sounded a bit like he was wanting to be carried through them. Granted my personal feelings towards the individual likely colored my interpretation. Thing is, once upon a time I raided with him in Vanilla, and while I thought he was a bit of a jerk… I always figured he was just mostly misunderstood. When he came back to our server during Wrath of the Lich King, he joined one of the uber guilds at the time… but since he was not well enough geared to raid with them, he pestered me for an invite to Duranub Raiding Company. During the middle of the raid, he was talking in a social channel about us… and said that he was slumming with us until he could get a real raid.

I punted him from the raid and have not talked to him since. He desperately tried to back pedal in tells, but the damage was already done… he was worthless to me. Just seeing his name come across chat brought up this boiling cauldron of anger. I still hold a grudge against him for his actions, and while he may have matured or changed… I will never know, because I will never give him another chance. The weird thing is… had he just done something that was only against me… I would likely be waiting to forgive him over and over. When you do something however that negatively effects a person or group of people that I care about… my protective instincts kick in and I will forever hold a grudge over it. I realize this is not a healthy behavior, but it is just something I have never been able to let go of. So I have a catalog of people that have wronged my guild or my friends, and every time I see that name or someone mentions one of them this flood of anger washes over me that I have to force back down. So while I cannot seem to root this instinct out of me… I can do my best not to act upon it.

Bad Warlock

February 24, 2014 by Belghast

Vampire Wife

For awhile I have talked about my rockstar teacher of a wife and the forensics class she is pioneering with another teacher this year. Yesterday I got drafted into helping her make various kinds of fake blood. Essentially we needed to find a ready simulacrum for the real thing, that could be produced cheaply and efficiently. So for awhile yesterday I kitchen turned a little horror show. I was employed in the mixing part, since I could shake the bottles fast enough to get them to mix. This is my preferred way of mixing almost anything, including the constant flow of cherry pomegranate drink mix that I imbibe. Some of the mixtures were winners and some were very much not.

Of the various recipes available we tried three primarily. The first one I had experience with in the past, and I didn’t think it would be the kind of blood she was wanting. I used to work in a fundraiser haunted house and we mixed buckets of water, karo syrup and red food coloring to make gore to slop on everything. This of course is way thicker than human blood and as a result doesn’t perform in any way similar. Next we tried a mixture of sweet condensed milk, and red food coloring. This was a little better but still way too thick, but it was a big grizzly to watch my wife eat spoonfuls of the red ichor. Apparently she thought it tasted good.

The final winner was evaporated milk and red food coloring. Granted all of these produced pinkish blood but apparently adding a little bit of green will correct the color. She tested the products against a vial of simulated lab blood that she got from a forensics supply house and the evaporated milk performed similarly. Today over lunch I have an errand to go pick up a pint of fake blood from a local party store. We had tried this earlier but the only place that had it was in gallon size… and extremely expensive. We wanted to test it out before committing to buying it in bulk. My hope is that the premade stuff will be best so we don’t have to mix anymore at home. But at the very least it lead to an interesting evening.

Bad Warlock

Among other things, lately I have been poking my head onto my little Dwarven Warlock a bit. I am still phenomenally bad at playing casters, and the warlock is no exception. However having a Felguard makes up for a lot of my own mistakes. He just quietly kicks everything’s ass while I flail around trying to mash the correct buttons. Something I find interesting, is that in the past I have tried my best to skip outlands entirely… I am actually enjoying the content. Maybe it is the idea that I know I will be revisiting everything in Warlords, but the entire expansion somehow feels fresher. I have a feeling with this guy that it will be Wrath that becomes pure skull drudgery.

I am not really sure I landed on this character to level, after all I have both a Discipline Priest and a Hunter within striking distance of 90. Ultimately I would still like to get everything up to 90 before Warlords but my Mage. The mage is my intended boost target, because while I struggle playing a Warlock, I would be an absolute disaster playing a Mage. Characters that can be described as “glass cannons” have never appealed to me in the least. However I hear that frost provides a much sturdier alternative, given that they now have a permanent pet to watch after them. To say the least I have been enjoying being bad at warlocking.

Interesting Changes a Brewing

I am honestly not sure how much of this I can talk about, so I will have to get some clarification on the NDA I am presently under before delving into it too deeply. However I will say that there are some significant changes in the starter experience in the works that will hopefully make a lot of people happy. One of the big complaints from the various test weekends is that it feels too on rails for too long. While I said you can hop off the rails at any point you like and level away. I have done a fair bit of my leveling by just killing random mobs out in the world and mostly ignoring the quests, it still feels like you are lead down a slowly widening tunnel until finally at some point you get dumped into what is the “real” game for the rest of the 50 levels. One thing I have to say is that overall… the Zenimax folks have been extremely responsive to feedback.

That is one of the aspects of this testing process that most people just won’t understand. The game has changed a lot over the last year, and for the better. While there are features missing that I would have liked to see, almost all of those are User Interface based and have been successfully added back into the game with addons. The core game itself is extremely clean, and if you play the game on a server that is not screaming because they are purposefully stressing it to the maximum… the game performs admirably and combat feels great. The negative is a lot of the clunky combat comments that people have are during weekends where they are purposefully trying to break the systems, and combat fluidity decreases under extremely stressed situations.

I think a lot of people are going to be happy with the proposed changes. I however have been in the minority and felt that the starter island experience for each of the races was an extremely good experience. Each of the islands, and I use that term loosely since each faction starts slightly differently… is chock full of interesting things to find and quests that you would not receive if you did not go out and explore off the beaten path. I still cannot say with any certainty that I have ever gotten 100% of the content on any one of the islands, let alone all of them. But I can understand the complaint that it just doesn’t feel Elder Scrollsy to exit the prison sequence and be dumped into another controlled setting. Cold Harbor does a good job of teaching you the basics, and a prison intro is one of the key requirements of “being an Elder Scrolls Game”.

Belghast the Band Geek

The title pretty much says it all, I was a band geek. For those not familiar with the American education system, the term Middle School refers generally to grades six through eight, and is some what of a transition period to get students used to having specific classes with different teachers, rather than a single teacher doing everything. As part of this time period we were essentially funneled towards various electives. During that sixth grade year we had to take a number of elective classes including vocal and instrumental music. While I did manage to get a lead role in one of the musicals… which I did horribly at, I was far more comfortable behind an instrument in a much larger group.

I began my musical career, if you can call it that.. playing the trombone, because face it… trombones are cool. I did well enough to be second chair, and I was fine there… good enough to be recognized as being decent, without having to deal with the pressure of leading the section. This was fine and good until I had a major sinus surgery in seventh grade, and buzzing sound needed to play trombone was something the doctor said would be extremely painful for me for quite some time. As a result I ended up transitioning to the percussion section. To be honest… I had always wanted to be a drummer, but my mother played percussion in high school and told me that by far the short end of the stick as far as band goes. I should have listened, but of course I was smarter and knew better.

She was absolutely right… when you march a several mile parade route with a woodwind or a brass instrument you spend most of the time carrying it by your side. If you march as a drummer, you end up playing a cadence non-stop the entire route. Being a big guy, I somehow ended up being picked to play the cymbals during parades. Sure you are thinking… cymbals are a joke of an instrument… but imagine marching for miles while carrying a 20 pound cymbal in each hand… attached by a leather thong that makes it impossible to get a good grip on it. Then having to bang them together… all the while not dropping the beat of the cadence. It was absolute hell, and by the end of a parade route like that I literally could not feel my arms for hours.

Luckily however parade routes like that were few and far between, and namely during the Christmas season only. After coming back from Christmas break I finally got to have some fun. It began concert season and somehow I managed to get picked to play the Timpani drums. I loved the sound of them, and it felt so primal to bang on them with my tiny felt donut covered sticks. This was the part of band that I really enjoyed. I finally felt like I had a real purpose. I got good at tuning the Timpani drum, and as we did the various contests that came with concert season I became a critical part of the setup crew. Some kids are truly gifted in band, but I did just good enough to be respectable without ever really shining. I managed to make all district several times, but never really pushed hard enough to make all state. While I played drums for a few bands, I never really kept with it… apart from occasionally drumming on my steering wheel while driving.

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.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

February 21, 2014 by Belghast

Rest In Peace

A few weeks back I had an idea for another regular column of sorts. The idea was that I would react to things I found on forums. I had enough fuel for one topic, but that’s where things went off the rails. It turns out that I really don’t read the various game forums as often as I thought I did, so Friday mornings became a mad dash for me to try and find something that inspired me in any way to write about it. After spending a few minutes this morning trying to do the same… much like I tried last week… I have reached the point where I am just filing this one away in the “bad idea” vault. Essentially the crux of this is in order to make it work I would have to devote more time than I currently have to trolling the forums.

I might make another stab at a feature, because Steampowered Sunday seems to work pretty well. Admitted it has been a few years since I have frequented the battle.net forums, and similarly with the rift forums as well. There seems to be a drought of substantive conversation out there, or maybe it really never was and I just applied substance in my head? I have heard for some time that forums are a dying thing, and by my attempts to find something worth writing about lately… it would almost seem to be the case. I am wondering if people have moved on to posting about things on the forums, and instead posting about them on social media or potentially sub reddits. I would be curious to find out you guys take on this. I know personally I tend to post things on my morning blogs rather than trying to find a home for them on a game forum.

Community Chest

Last night I had a fairly spastic night again, but towards the end of the evening I patched up Trove. Now I have not really followed the subreddit as closely as I once did, but they have been plugging away at this with high frequency. They seem like they have posted roughly a patch a week, and keep adding more features and polish. It had been roughly a month since I had last played it, and while Landmark has taken most of my “building game” focus, Trove is still very much an awesome game to play. I always sell the game as “minecraft with MMO loot” but as a whole the game is so much more than that. Right now I am loving the focus on the social community of a server, that really does seem like the ultimate win for trion is to make people care about the world.

One of the coolest additions that I saw last night was the community chest. For some time at the spawn point there has been a giant version of the in game chests, but inside of it now is a storage system. It allows players to donate items to noobies, and last night I was extremely thankful for this. I was able to pull a good weapon and a good shield out of the bin and jump straight into doing cool stuff. Another really cool thing is they added in /randomhead command, which you can see above I now have this really awesome engineer goggles appearance. This was the first thing to go into game to make abandoning the Fez and Moustache worth it!

The best quality of life change is the addition of a map. You can see above that each of the various biomes is now marked. I have not quite figured out what the red X icons are for, maybe dead bosses? Your home is marked with a little sign post to make it easier to find it. Of course this is still very alpha, and there are lots of bugs. Last night for example I killed six golden beetles… which are now super rare, and not a single one dropped the golden soul. Golden Souls are now needed to craft the gold torch, which in turn unlocks the ability to craft a robotic workbench opening up a whole new tier of crafting. That change went in some time ago, but crafting is now a tiered affair where crafting this thing unlocks the ability to purchase another thing.

I spent most of the night playing as Gunslinger because I had not really spent any time leveling that up. Right now I am level 12 Knight I believe, which gives me a good start each server reset, so I am hoping to bring Gunslinger in line to that same range. So far I am really enjoying the “rocket jump” ability where the Gunslinger fires at the ground and propels themselves high into the air. Really great for exploring areas. Another cool thing are the random quests while out in the world that provide fuel to the star meter shown on the right hand of the screen. This is something that the entire server works towards, so each boss you beat in the world helps leveling the world as a whole. Not really sure what happens when the world “dings” but the world I have been playing on has 46 stars.

Mostly my time spent playing last night has made me realize that I really need to devote more time to this game. While it is not as mind bending as Landmark, it has so much charm. Everything about the game, especially the user submitted weapons just drips “fun”. Especially as the game gets fleshed out, it has started to feel more and more cube world like, which is awesome. That game was a really great idea that was never really capitalized on. I might ping the Alliance of Awesome and see just how many of us are in Trove currently. Would be fun to have a night where we meet up on voice chat and wander about the world looking for mischief. Saying this is making me realize that I never actually mentioned the AoA before now… I should remedy that.

Alliance of Awesome

The blogosphere and the gaming groups they are associated with is a really twisted up community. Each of us have been the part of so many different groups that it became super evident with the launch of Landmark that we needed to come up with a way of standardizing some things. There was a period of time when several of us were joining upwards of seven different social channels, each of them with a different subset of players in them. I believe it was Scarybooster who first voiced the idea, but from there it spread quickly and the ever amazing Zelibeli became the ideas Champion. The idea was simple… to create a super alliance of all the different multi-gaming groups that our little community was associated with. After a few different tries we landed on using a subreddit as our “global forums” of sorts, and as a way for us to post about upcoming events in the various groups. Also it acts as a nice call to action to figure out what people are doing in the various games. Another big thing to come out of it is that we decided to start using “AoA” as our global social channel to span the various groups.

One of the challenges we have had in House Stalwart is trying to maintain guilds in each of the games we happen to be playing. When there is a rush of players it is an amazing thing and we have 50 or so active members. However after a few months this becomes a skeletal crew, and the question of whether or not it is actually worth keeping up arises. As it stands right now House Stalwart will focus on World of Warcraft Alliance side, Rift, and The Elder Scrolls. These will be the only “official” stalwart guilds, and for the rest of the games our members want to play we will be leaning on other AoA member groups to maintain them. This does two things…firstly it makes my life less spastic for trying to maintain a presense in so many games. Secondly it opens up so many more worlds to us. You can just take a look at the right hand side of the subreddit to see which guilds have active groups in which games. So when folks want to dabble in FFXIV or SWTOR or eventually Wildstar… they have a ready made home they can go to. While this arrangement is still very much in its infancy… it gives me a lot of hope for the future.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

I am in love with a gas station station… and have been since the first time I set foot in one. One of the things people not from this area find hard to understand, is the love that Tulsans have for the QuikTrip chain of stores. While I will use other Gas Stations, I will always go to a QuikTrip if one is available even if it is significantly out of the way. A little over a year ago, a friend of mine moved to town to accept a job at my workplace. She had heard me talk about QuikTrip but was skeptical, but within weeks of coming to town she was a devoted acolyte. Quite simply the chain is unlike any other gas station. Now I have had people sing the praises of Kumandgo, Casey’s, Flying J, PDQ… and many others that I have visited in my travels. None of them compare to the awesomeness of the QT.

Why do we love it? Well for starters even in the slummiest parts of town… QuikTrip is clean, well stocked, brightly lit and fully staffed 24/7. On top of this… they have actual food. Their breakfast offerings are especially awesome, but pretty much you can go into a QT any time of day and get fresh food that is not a “stomach bomb”. They have really great donuts and muffins… and if they ever have their limited time Red Velvet Muffins… you have to try them. They have a half dozen flavors of Taquito, Country Sausage, Jalepeno Sauage, Buffalo Chicken roller, cheese burger rollers… and fresh steamed buns. The newer stores have a place in store where they offer made to order food and coffee drinks as well. My friend Rae pretty much stops by every day to pick up a sandwich for lunch, because they have fresh made sandwiches and wraps.

Another really awesome thing about the chain is that they guarantee their gasoline… and were the first place I can remember doing this. It was their claim to fame back in the 80s, and has continued on to the current day. If you ever have a fuel related problem with your car, QuikTrip with pay to fix whatever it is… pending I am sure you can back up receipts of purchasing gas from there. Still however it is more than almost any other chain can say, and at the very least makes you feel better about purchasing your gas from them. Admittedly this is a huge chunk of why I always gas up before leaving town in the hopes that the tank of gas will last me until we reach another QuikTrip. Unfortunately their reach only extends so far, so once you leave the south central united states you have to rely on other chains.

The chain itself has really good cashiers, and the custom software they maintain is designed to be able to ring up I believe up to 16 customers at the same time. Once I finish writing this blog post, I will go to QuikTrip this morning and get a drink and a jalepeno sausage roll. I know that I can get in and out extremely quickly because there is a culture of efficiency that has sprung up around the store. Expected protocol is for there to be two lines at each and every cash register, one to the left and one to the right. As the QT employee finishes ringing up one, they immediately begin to ring up the next one on the other side, giving the first one time to walk away from the counter. When this works, it is a thing of beauty… but you can always tell neophytes when they try and form a single line.

I think in part QuikTrip is so successful because they have really good working conditions. They have managed to make the Fortune magazine top places to work list for 11 years in a row. In part this is due to their really odd practice of after 25 years with the company, you can take a year paid sabbatical, to do whatever the hell you want to do with it. This on top of paying significantly better than average wage allows them to keep good employees for the long haul. It is the type of place that folks either thrive in or they wash out really fast. As a customer and loyal devotee I really appreciate their attention to detail. I have long said that I could never live in a city that did not have QuikTrip… so pretty much that leaves me St. Louis Metro, Dallas Metro, and Kansas City Metro. Granted I am not sure if I would want to be without Taco Bueno, Arbys or Sonic Drive-In either… but the most important one is my beloved QuikTrip.