tes Archives - Page 7 of 9 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Back to the Sewers

April 8, 2014 by Belghast

Jonquils say so

Here in Oklahoma we have had more than our fair share of ping pong weather of late. This weekend I was happily running around in shorts, however when I went for my walk last night that same choice was rather chilly. I wish the world would make up its damned mind to be honest, and preferably warm up. I am afraid that once again we will go from cold to hot without much of a middle ground like we did last year. We have a patch of Jonquils on the side of the house and they seem to think spring time has arrived as they are in full bloom and gorgeous as always. We had these growing up as well, and they were always the heralds of springtime. When they bloomed things were going to start warming up significantly. I really hope the weather gods are watching my flowers, because seriously I am tired of the cold.

This morning I am more nervous than normal, and for good reason. Our eldest cat has a thyroid problem, and today she is supposed to go into surgery to have hers removed. This is supposedly going to fix the imbalance that is causing her to be sick all of the time. For awhile now we’ve done a practice I like to refer to as “greasing her ears”, where I rub some thyroid cream (while wearing latex gloves) into her ears. This was all to get her thyroid levels stabilized enough to have the surgery. However I am wondering if this is something we can just do indefinitely now. I don’t really mind doing it, at least not as bad as trying to feed her a pill. She doesn’t really like it but she tolerates it well enough. I am just wondering since she is a fifteen year old cat, if doing this a few times a day would be better for her quality of life than a surgery.

Back to the Sewers

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVYesterday evening some friends and I decided to delve back into the Wayrest Sewers in search of loot, glory… and attempting to avoid the mess. We had run the dungeon Saturday evening and it seemed much easier than the others we had run. Thing is apparently this was not the intent of the dungeon, and seemingly in an effort to break the trend of chain running the place… yesterdays patch changed several things about the place. Firstly there were a large number of packs that previously could be split, this is no longer the case. There were instances where you had a Rat Feeder human npc in a pack of rats… and you could fiery grip the human out by himself then deal with the rats. Now when you yoink the human the rats properly come with him, no longer trivializing the encounter. Similarly there were humanoid pack mobs that you could single pull, or pull without engaging the boss they were attached to.

All of this lead for a much more difficult run than we were expecting. The above video is still uploading to youtube, so I’ve embedded the twitch broadcast instead. Several things were happening… firstly I am generally horrible at explaining fights. Secondly for everyone but myself, this was their first time into the instance. Thirdly two of our members were slightly under level for the dungeon. The result meant that at least one of the boss fights seemed far more difficult than it really should have been. The Garron encounter is rough, but it involves figuring out how best to deal with the adds… and it took us several tries to arrive at a strategy that was working. Namely killing things in the same order as not to break the CC. It was a good time had by all, and we got our youngins specifically some tasty loot.

It Runs on a Toaster

My friends and I have joked for some time, that the Elder Scrolls Online engine is so damned optimized that it could probably run on a toaster. I posted this a few days ago on twitter, but I still find it insanely amusing. This is from the ESO Reddit, and is apparently Elder Scrolls Online running at the absolute minimum settings which is 320×200. The game looks oddly playable, even if you can’t really make out who exactly you are interacting with. It looks oddly similar to a super pixilated adventure game from the 1990s. Thankfully my machine will run the game in its full Ultra setting 1080p glory… but I do find it awesome that the game can technically be run on some pretty ancient hardware and perform just as well. I honestly don’t notice much of a difference running it on my laptop as I do running it on my more serious gaming desktop.

The thing is… so many companies overlook this as an issue. One of the reasons why World of Warcraft has been so easy to spread as a game, is that it has super minimal requirements. You can dial back the settings and run it comfortably on a netbook. I feel like more than likely you could do the same thing with Elder Scrolls Online. I’ve heard rumors of it running through a virtual pc emulator on various tablets, as well as natively on the Microsoft surface. The important thing is, since the client is that optimized, it means when you have friends that want to join you… you can likely get them into the experience without them needing to shell out for a dedicated gaming machine. At the end of the day this is a social experience, and being able to play with your friends will ultimately be the key to longevity.

One of my good friends, Scarybooster is having some real life stuff going on, and as a result he doesn’t expect to be able to play the game again until June. He jokingly said that he hoped we would all still be playing by the time June rolls around. Considering the longevity most of us tend to have with games… that is a fair question. I really hope that this title is not another in a long line of “three monthers”. I would love this game to be a much longer lived title, because I feel like it has what so many of them have been lacking… depth. The world is deep and nuanced and almost strangles you with lore. The thing that I have always loved about Elder Scrolls is that it works much like our own world. There is no one clean lore path through the setting… but instead it is told through little tidbits spread across thousands of books… some of which are directly contradictory. History is a messy thing, full of partial accounts and factual inaccuracies… and the world of Tamriel gets this right. Here is hoping we will all still find the world compelling a year from now, let alone a few months from now.

#ElderScrollsOnline #WayrestSewers

Growing Stronger

April 7, 2014 by Belghast

It Fit… Barely

Yesterday was crazy busy but we got up and around and dealt with all of the things that needed to be dealt with. If you remember yesterday morning I was blogging in a lull between the flurry of activity, and waiting on the folks from Lowes to deliver the new fridge and haul away the old one. We had measured the slot in the wall and the unit in store what felt like a dozen times, and we thought it was going to fit, but just barely so. Turns out yes, we were in fact right, and as you can see from the picture to the right it is a snug fit up against the cabinet above the fridge. Granted this cabinet now becomes completely useless since the only person who can reach it is me… and the stuff that generally got stored up there was for my wife.

It is so tight of a fit that the fridge scraped the top left side of the fridge every so slightly as it was sliding into place. The only problem with the installation is that the hookups we have for the in door water… are from 1980. Meaning the equipment they sent out was completely inadequate to connect it. However it turns that what we have is bad practice anyways… and that you can get much purer water these days. So we are going to call the plumber and have them swap out our connection for something that will take the 10 foot braided cable that they brought with the unit. We have lived for over sixteen years without ice and water in the door… we can live a little while longer. We have been dealing with some issues with the washing machine that we will have them look at the way it is hooked up as well at the same time.

This means however that we are going to need to clean more. Recently we went through our dishes and pots and pans and gave damned near everything we had to the neighbor kid that roomed with us last summer. He got a place of his own, and for years I had been wanting to just get rid of all of that and buy back our pots and pans a single pan at a time. Really there are very few things that I actually need to cook, and I have a really nice deep skillet that I tend to cook everything in already. This way I can buy only the things I specifically need, and of much higher quality than we had back during our college days. The pots and pans we had were the kind you get an entire set of for 15/20 bucks.

They exceeded their lifespan, and all of them were scratched and marred from years of cooking. I figure they are good enough to make spaghetti in for a bachelor pad of a bunch of guys. If we apply that same logic to the rest of our cabinets we should be able to pair everything down nicely. We have stuff that we have never used in all the years we’ve lived in this house. Which tells me it is high time to donate it someplace and get it out of the house. The only real negative is, this means another weekend is going to be taken up by this sort of stuff rather than gaming. This is the unfortunate truth of the summer, we end up either doing little projects… or leaving the house to go wandering about. In either case… not a lot of gaming happens, and similarly I am not sure when I will return to regular Steampowered Sunday posts.

Growing Stronger

This weekend we somehow hit 103 members in the Elder Scrolls division of House Stalwart. One of the things over the years that we have tried to do is grow organically through friends/family and word of mouth. This allowed us to continue growing with tight knit individuals and a shared ethic. The launch of Elder Scrolls has seen our largest guild ever to date. Granted in World of Warcraft we have 265 accounts in the guild, but that since the launch of the game in 2004. At the very least this is our larges game launch. Both Rift and SWTOR I thought we were doing pretty damned well, but in both cases the guilds were only around 40-50 players.

What I find staggering is that we just keep growing. I have half a dozen players already waiting in the queue for me to talk to them about the guild and make sure they are a good fit for our guild ethics. This seems to be one of those games where each person is roping several of their real life friends into playing it. In some ways it reminds me a bit of the way World of Warcraft was at launch, and I am really hoping that reference is not a curse. So far things are going extremely well, and I have to say were it not for the Alliance of Awesome we would still be that 40-50 member guild. I feel like so much of this growth has nothing at all to do with me, and I am okay with that.

So far everyone seems to be getting along just fine. Folks are either swapping stuff freely by dumping it in the guild bank, or posting things on the guild store. In either case everything seems to be peaceful and drama free. Guild chat is constant and lively even at 6:40 in the morning when we have seven people online. I feel like there is a certain contingency of us that log in each morning before work, and I am guilty of specifically that this morning. The real challenge of course is going to be what we look like in three months. However I feel like I will still be chewing away on veteran rank 1 content at that point. So far I am loving the quests and loving the dungeons. Over the last few days I have not been streaming, in part because of how busy my life has been. Hoping tonight I can get back in the swing of things and stream some more, maybe even a Wayrest Sewers dungeon run.

The Big Alpha

The rest of the gaming world that is not obsessing over finding the next skyshard has been obsessing over the slow trickle of news coming out about Warlord of Draenor. With the launch of Elder Scrolls Online, I made a statement over twitter that I thought they would announce the start of Alpha on launch day. I was partially right… it was leaked and verified that the alpha was starting on 4/4 but the official patch notes did not post until 4/5. There is a lot there to talk about, and this was likely a brilliant move by Blizzard to keep themselves in the news cycle competing against the good news coming from the Elder Scrolls Online launch. I would love to be able to say that I will ignore WoD and still be happily playing Elder Scrolls Online at the end of the year when Warlords is likely to launch. I probably will be be honest, but I am also not a “one game guy” any longer. I know I will pop back in and play some Warlords because it lets me hang out with the OTHER half of House Stalwart… the folks that are diehard WoW players.

I can already tell this is going to be a bad expansion for me. Don’t get me wrong… I am amped to return to Draenor and see it in the “un-screwed” state. The problem is that from the weapon art leaks, I basically get to choose from two different kinds of weapons. Either bedazzled with crystals and jewels… or primitive as hell with horns and shit lashed on for no apparent reason. Neither are really things I go for in the weapon department. My absolute favorite sort is the Death Knight starter weapon, and a close second is Ashkandir… so I like well defined and crafted blades. Neither the Draenei or the Orc art styles are really something I have ever liked, so I feel like this expansion is going to involve me constantly transmogging away the offending graphics. Then again… I guess that is why we have the transmog system. I had just hoped to add some nifty new graphics to this mix.

Right now I am just glad that I am not in the Alpha, because I would not wanting to be trying to split time between Elder Scrolls Online and something else. I am thankful that I am wrapped up and enthralled in ESO, because otherwise I would be like the folks waiting with baited breath for the next MMO-Champion data mine extravaganza. That said I am periodically checking the site and seeing things like the weapon graphics, so I am still interested. Warlords of Draenor can stay comfortably “in the future” for me for the time being. I will always have amazing folks like the Godmother of Faff to keep me informed with what is going on. The only thing that I regret right now is not spending more time in Landmark. That game totally deserves more of my attention.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #HouseStalwart #WoW #WarlordsofDraenor

Wandering Osage County

April 6, 2014 by Belghast

Fridge Frenzy

I don’t really deal with change well, even if it is a positive one. As a result this morning I am a bundle of nerves and will maintain that state until the big event of the day is over. As the title might suggest, we are getting a new fridge today. We reached a point of equilibrium in determining that it had to happen immediately if not sooner. For awhile the freezer was not cold enough to keep ice cream, but cold enough for pretty much everything else. As a result we had been trying to eat up as much stuff from the freezer as we could to make the inevitable cleanout that much easier. I believe it was Thursday at lunch, I went home to take a breathing treatment… and since I was already home decided to fix some taquitos to help empty that box out.

I pulled them out of the package and they felt cold but definitely not frozen. This is the point at which I should have said to myself… self don’t eat this. However I am dumb… and this little warning klaxon never chimed in my head. As a result I got insanely sick starting about thirty minutes after finishing them off. Basically our food in our freezer was starting to go bad, rather than just not be fully frozen. As a result this morning we got up early… which 6 am is super early for me on a Sunday, and cleaned the house in preparation for the refrigerator to arrive sometime between the hours of 8 am and noon. The picture to the side is one I was able to find on the web of the fridge we ended up going with. We have a friend that works for Lowes and it seems as though he was able to hook us up with his employee discount. We purposefully wanted something simple… because generally speaking simple lasts.

The previous fridge we had was a wedding present, and we’ve had it happily chugging away for sixteen years. It was as bare bones as you can get, and it worked well for a long time. This one is not quite so bare bones, but has something we’ve always wanted… ice and water in the door. However my wife purposefully wanted one with separate slots for ice and water, again trying to keep the mechanism behind each as simple as possible. At this point we are just praying that one it does in fact fit the hole in our kitchen, and two the water line that exists works and everything hooks up nicely. Until those things happen… I will be a bundle of nerves.

Wandering Osage County

Yesterday it was absolutely gorgeous out, and as such my wife and I both had a serious case of wanderlust. There were certain things that needed to get taken care of, namely dropping her car off to get an oil change. The funny thing about having a FitBit is that it changes your behaviors in an effort to get more steps in. As a result we drove the car around to the Hibdon Tires location around the corner from our house, and walked back home through our neighborhood. We gathered up our cameras and were on the road after a pitstop a nearby QuikTrip. At first we had no real idea where we were going, then like so many of our other trips… this one started with a simple question. What happens if you go past Skiatook on highway 20. We could have looked on a map sure, but since we had never really been past the statuary on Skiatook’s main strip… we opted to just drive over there and see.

For a long while there is absolutely nothing, then all the sudden you arrive at Skiatook lake. Now we knew this existed, because you hear about it on the news, but I always expected it to be rather small. Instead you have a pretty huge lake, with what seems like a focus on fishing. There are lots of areas where there are submerged trees that would make for amazing bass fishing. There were a few boats in places that I wondered how in the hell they navigated around to that area. I am sure it was extremely careful use of a trolling motor and a lot of patience. We continued on past Skiatook lake, because again the road was way too nice for it not to go someplace. As a result we ended up in Hominy. Now mind you… in 1999 we lived in a town next door to Hominy, so this was not the first time we had been there. In fact we had a friend that lived there, and got our very first ferret as a rescue from the town.

Hominy was not completely foreign territory, but we had not really explored it in ages. We saw the semi-renovated train depot that now serves as the chamber of commerce and parked my jeep there. Like most small towns in Oklahoma, Hominy is visibly struggling to keep business. However they seem to have more pride than most. Instead of letting buildings set vacant and become a danger, some local artist had taken to painting murals to cover up the empty glass windows. Most of them are devoted to patriotic themes, and there is a store front “branded” for each of the branches of the armed forces as well as the coast and national guards. In addition there seems to be an Native American artist in the town who is similarly painting murals on the sides of buildings. While nice, this is not the sort of stuff that interests me. I love taking pictures of broken down buildings and urban decay.

The people in the town were super nice, and we ended up having conversations with a few strangers. There was this really nice lady that runs the Napa auto parts store that gave us the lay of the land. We also carried on a conversation with the guy that runs the nearby cafe, and watched him precariously teetering on a ladder… in a fashion that the ladder was not really designed to be used. He had just moved into the cafe had was putting up a new sign that would be easily seen from a tall hanging post. The town had a lot of potential, with these little areas where they had torn out a dilapidated building… that could be turned into nice little courtyards for outdoor dining, or even parks. In any case Hominy was a nice and safe place to wander around for awhile, and no one seemed to find it terribly odd that we were walking the town on foot with camera equipment.

You can see the full album full of photos I took in Hominy here.

Clearance Lego Find

I love summertime for the insane clearance deals you can find at various stores. Namely each and every Wal-mart seems to have complete autonomy on what they actually put on clearance. As a result if you are willing to hit multiples of them, you can find some pretty amazing stuff. From Hominy the easiest way to get back to the Tulsa area is to go through Cleveland… another town we were familiar with due to friends living there. While Hominy is pretty much your standard small town, Cleveland is pretty much just a bedroom community for Tulsa. That said they do have a newish Wal-mart, and at that point I was desperately in need of a bathroom. The prospect of clearance Legos was just a nice fringe benefit.

Just like it is up to each Wal-mart to determine what goes on sale, it is up to each to determine where exactly in the store it will be located. Some stores dedicate an isle or two to clearance, others jam it out in their garden centers, and the worst just mark down items on the shelf mixed in with normal priced stuff. Cleveland Wal-mart had one of the better setups that I have seen mostly in small town stores. They had two full isles dedicated to a mixed jumble of non-clothing clearance items mixed from around the store. This place seriously was the Lego motherlode. The above sets were originally $55 to $65 dollars, and I picked them up for $30 to $35 dollars. This is where I love having a smart phone. I end up looking up the sets and then determining if it is good enough of a deal for me to pick them up.

They had some of the really huge sets on clearance too, but even though the set might have been $90 originally… it sitting there for $70 is still a good chunk of change and not really worth it for me. Similarly there are times where the smaller sets are just not good enough for the price. THey had a Star Wars lego set, that was some sort of a probe droid. The only reason why I would have really wanted it were for the unique Jedi minifigs. But the realist in me had to think that really… the probe droid was made almost entirely out of otherwise not so cool pieces. So while you got a few nice minifigs, you also got a bunch of junk that you would likely never use again for another building. I am super happy with the sets I managed to pick up, and I am at least halfway to having all three TMNT minifigs. The other really awesome thing is that I didn’t even notice until I got home that the Star Wars set comes with Cad Bane… who is awesome.

Ding Twenty

Finally after all of this excitement I managed to get home and actually sit down to play. At this point I have played 46 hours of game time on my Dragon Knight since launch. I feel as though every level has been an accomplishment. At this point I am twenty, and I am pretty damned proud of that fact. Twenty feels like an actual accomplishment, instead of something you manage to get on your very first day of gameplay. One of the things that Elder Scrolls Online has managed to do… is to bring back a sense of accomplishment with each and every ding. In many ways so much of the game feels like a throwback to an earlier time when each and every thing was hard fought. When you step into a public dungeon, you can feel the Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest roots. This is the concept I wish I could convey properly to people, because I Think a lot more people would enjoy the game if they saw just how deep and nuanced it is.

The big event of the night is that we pulled together a group and delved into the Wayrest Sewers dungeon. So far other than the fact that it takes place in a sewer… and that you are slopping around in a lot of rat filled muck… I have to say this was my favorite to date. It feels in many ways like the Deadmines of this game, in that there is a really nice fight the rebels style storyline going through it. I won’t go into much detail, because I don’t want to spoil the storyline, but the quest reward at the end is a really nice heavy armor chest piece. Additionally a spiffy ring and sword dropped that I managed to talk my healer out of. That has been my favorite thing about these dungeons, is that folks are more than willing to swap gear around to whoever needs it. Like I managed to get a really amazing two hander, that I happily swapped over to Waren who is currently using that as his main weapon choice. As of today… we are exactly a week into the game, and I have to say I am still loving every minute of it.

#Lego #Photography #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #RealLife

Savior of Glenumbra

April 5, 2014 by Belghast

Awkward Ex-Coworkers

We are having some minor issues with my wife’s vehicle, so as a result I had to get up crazy early yesterday morning to drive her into work. Crazy early because I still wanted to be able to blog like normal, and she generally leaves when I am about halfway done with my morning post. As a result it made the entire day feel sluggish. After work we made plans to go eat at one of my favorite restaurants near her workplace so I could get cheese tots and spicy chicken. The above shot is what the dish looks like… I snapped a photo some time ago to brag on her for bringing it home to me one night. We hung out and ate with another teacher friend of hers and it was a pretty awesome time… until something happened to taint it.

We had been there for a little bit, and our order had not arrived when I noticed someone walk in that looked vaguely familiar. While trying to place him I saw his wife walk in and immediately the combination of the two faces together snapped in my memory. These were some ex-coworkers and while they were nice enough… they came from a period of time when I was at the worst place I have ever worked. To make it worse they are both extremely good friends with what I considered to be the boss from hell. So it is not exactly the situation where I want to go over and “catch up”. Thankfully they were with what looked like parents and too busy with their own conversations to notice me much.

I hate that anyone associated with that workplace is immediately flagged as an enemy in my head, and I am not really sure how to get past it. Every place I have ever worked I have been the group rockstar, and the current environment is no less true… although in my present situation we have three rockstars working on the same team. This workplace however, from day one there was nothing I could ever do right. The boss would loosely stub things out in a project website, with roughly a single sentence describing what needed to be done.

If I asked questions as to what the hell he meant by that… I would catch hell for not taking initiative. If I figured things out on my own, and just got the job done… I would catch hell for not doing it exactly like he wanted it to be done. There was seriously a no win situation, and the two people that walked in represented that time period in my life. Every time I see someone associated with that period I just want to scream how much of an asshole that guy was and how he made my life complete and total crap. But instead I smile and nod and try my damnedest to ignore them and hope they walk away.

Savior of Glenumbra

Last night we got home fairly late from meeting the friend for dinner, so by the time I made it upstairs it was almost eight. At that point folks had already paired up into dungeon runs, so I opted to simply focus on finishing up the rest of Glenumbra. I feel like I am moving super slow, because I simply cannot chew through the Elder Scrolls content as fast as others seem to be able to. I have friends who have been “finished” with Glenumbra for some time, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they are nowhere near 100% on the zone… and quite truthfully as much time as I have spent there I seriously doubt I have gotten everything either. I do have all of the icons on the map turned from black to white, and have gotten 100% of the skyshards… so I feel like it is “good enough” for me to move on. Last night after finishing Crosswych I got the “Savior of Glenumbra” achievement.

I have to say… Stormhaven means serious business. I managed to get to level 18 in Glenumbra before moving on, but when I moved into Stormhaven that is supposed to be a 15+ zone I noticed everything hit considerably harder. Granted this could be in part to the fact that I am still mostly wearing level 14 gear, since I need High Iron which cannot be found in Glenumbra. More so I think that they have just ratcheted up the difficulty. Instead of fighting random bandits, you are now fighting random daedra. While they might not have the hitpoint pool… Clanfear are Clanfear… they all seem to be just as hard to kill. The new zone is just as lovely, if not slightly more damaged by the conflict. The screenshots are from the first town, which is a lovely little port just a ways inside of the zone line. I look forward to meandering my way across the zone like I did in glenumbra.

I swear this game was designed specifically for me, because it is littered with things to find and interesting things to kill. I love that crafting can be leveled without having ever crafted a single item. I am constantly bringing back bags full of gear that I got from killing baddies, and through doing nothing but deconstruction I have managed to get Woodworking to 10, and Clothing to 9. While I have been making plenty of blacksmithing items, I still have gotten most of my levels from deconstructing “found” things. This is the only game system I have ever played that supported leveling crafting through mass slaughter. I have to say I love it though, it lets me play the game the way I want to play it, and limit my time hovering over the forge.

Visiting a Friend

This morning I saw a tweet from Scopique thanking me for reminding him to feed his claim in Landmark… which in turn reminded me to log in and feed my own. As much as it might annoy me that we can only store five days worth of copper in our claim banks, it is in the very least forcing me to log in every few days to make sure I have it fully stocked. Right now I am in a weird place with my own claim. I need to go on another massive stone harvesting run, but I have not been able to bring myself to do so… because I would rather be playing Elder Scrolls Online. For a few days however my friend Syl has said that I should pop by her claim and see the progress. As a result I ended up with a pretty cool screenshot of the pair of us overlooking her claim.

I hope she won’t be cross with me for posting a picture of her Inn “in progress”. I have to say the interior is coming along extremely well. I love the fireplace and the basin, and on a rack behind me is a really cool lance that she made from scratch. I love the way the house is wrapped around the tree. Makes me realize just how much work I need to do on my own. I am really good at roughing out massive structures, but I always lack the drive to go back in later and do the fine detail work. She however seems to excel at it, putting the finishing touches on rooms as she builds them. Super impressed with what she has done so far, and hopefully at some point this weekend I will get the drive to log in and go on another massive stone farming expedition. If nothing else was cool to pop over and see her claim for a bit before logging to work on this here blog post. Is that blogception?

#ElderScrollsOnline #Landmark #Glenumbra #Stormhaven #ESO