World of Warcraft Archives - Page 93 of 108

The Mafioso’s Daughter

February 12, 2014 by Belghast

Weekly Routines

With yesterday being server reset day in World of Warcraft, I opted to take a break from my Landmark madness to do my weekly boss farming for mounts. Out of my stable of six level 90 characters, there are three that can solo Onyxia in a manner that makes me not want to pull out my hair. The very first time I tried doing Ony as a Blood Deathknight for example it took at least 30 minutes of diseases/deathcoil/icy touch to finally bring her down to the ground. However I have figured out that as Frost Deathknight, Retribution Paladin, and Enhancement Shaman I can make short work of her. As a result every Tuesday it has become a thing, for me to run those three characters through the fight in an attempt to get the ever illusive reins of the onyxian drake.

Of course like expected the kills went quickly but I had no better luck than any of the previous weeks getting the drop. It was at this point that I decided while I was farming content, I might as well take a few stabs at Kael’thas and his Ashes of Al’ar. The funny thing is… I don’t even like that mount, but it has become a point of pride for me to farm one up. So while I do at least one attempt every week, it is not like I would ever ride it. So far I have managed to solo the instance as Blood and Frost Deathknight and as Retribution Paladin… and I am wondering if I will be able to do it as Enhancement Shaman. Of course once again this week nothing of any interest dropped.

Finally while I was wallowing in my bitterness I opted to run all six of my characters through the holiday event instance. This year around it drops 480 necklaces, which unfortunately all of my characters have better. However I did manage to pick up a tanky necklace upgrade for my Paladin. Once again I am chasing a mount, but more than anything for total numbers… because there is no way in hell I would ever ride the Big Love Rocket around, but I would consider riding the Love Bird. More than anything I would be after the handful of pets. I normally don’t mess with the holiday events. Once I completed my violet proto drake, I have mostly ignored them. They are however pretty fast to run, since no queue last night lasted longer than 7 minutes as dps.

We Were Playing It Wrong

Over the last few days I have been complaining about the lack of Sapphire and Ruby or at least the difficulty of gathering it up. Yesterday I noticed the above tweet from Dave Georgeson, it seems like maybe we as a community was overlooking the intended way to get these. I had piddled around early in the game with a +1 discovery ring and didn’t see much difference, but at the suggestion of the tweet I crafted the Assessor’s Band and managed to get a +4 one. With it equipped alongside the existing +1 I am seeing a massive difference in the number of veins open to me as I wander through the world. I am sure you have been through the frustrating case of seeing a huge vein in the distance, but when you get up there finally there is nothing there. Well apparently that is what discovery is for.

After equipping the two rings, for the most part those veins stay in place as I get closer to them. Additionally the discovery trait also seems to interact with how often I get the rare drop from each item. This means I am getting more elementals, burled wood and as a result seeing more veins that have sapphire and ruby in them. They are still frustratingly rare, but less so. I did not play for extremely long last night, but I did manage to get a couple dozen gems of each type. Supposedly we are getting a patch today or tomorrow that will fix the issues that have arisen with boulders and trees spawning again on claims, with no real way to remove them. I am mostly waiting for this before I do much more building as I can’t really see my keep as a whole until I can remove some trees.

The Mafioso’s Daughter

Before I met my wonderful wife, there were plenty of missteps along the way. Most of them are not really entertaining in any fashion, but one I always felt like I dodged a bullet with… potentially literally. While I was still attending a junior college I met a really nice ballet major attending a nearby college. She seemed great, but early on I could tell that she was used to operating in a much higher tax bracket than I was. It wasn’t anything major, but her expectations of what “going out” meant were far different than that of my small town upbringing. After a few dates she pulled me aside and told me that she was starting to get serious about me… but there was something I needed to know.

It turns out that her family was connected to the mafia. She kind of brushed this off as no big deal or as something “I would get used to”. Her father ran some large electronics store, and they lived down the street from the Gotti clan in Long Island. We didn’t have Google back then, but over the course of a few online searches and some mapquest usage… it seemed like her story checked out. I’m a boy scout literally… I am not the type of person that “high crime” has ever appealed to. While I love watching shows like Boardwalk Empire, I have never once romanticized that lifestyle. It had become very clear over the course of the dates that she was “daddy’s little girl”, so I felt it was probably bad for my health if I did not let her down gently.

I did my best to be “less interesting” that I would hopefully make her lose interest in me, and over the course of a few weeks it worked. I wanted no part of the “family business”, but at the same time I didn’t want to break her heart… and have mine shot in the process. Sure I am probably over exaggerating the danger here, but it definitely freaked me the hell out. Looking back now I can regale you with the tale of the time I dated the Mafioso’s Daughter, but when I was going through it, nothing about it seemed funny. I doubt there was every a time where I would have just “gotten used to it”. Thankfully not terribly long after that I met my awesome wife, and everything before is now just a humorous footnote.

Budgie Week Fiasco

February 7, 2014 by Belghast

Another Friday, Moar Fodder

Well another week has passed and it is once again time for Friday Forum Fodder. I have admittedly not been following the discussion around the interwebs as closely as I usually do during the week. I have a massive backlog of unread blog posts in my reader as spending the first half of the week sick and the second half desperately trying to play catch-up has left me with less lollygagging time. I did stumble across a couple of things that I found interesting so the topics are primed and ready to go.

WoW Up to 7.8 Million Subscribers

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3741-WoW-Up-to-7-8-Million-Subscribers

Apparently yesterday Blizzard had their Q4 2013 earnings call, and announced that they were currently sitting at 7.8 Million subscribers, which surprisingly is a 200k subscriber bump over the 7.6 announced in the Q3 2013 earnings call. Of course we all know that Blizzcon happened between those two calls, and that we had the announcement of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. However 200,000 players seems like an awful lot to simply account for the “Blizzcon Bump”. On Argent Dawn I have said before that we have been experiencing a bit of a renaissance with a large number of players coming back that I have not seen since Wrath, and some of them not even since Burning Crusade. This feels like something more substantial than just interest in the new and shiny bauble called Warlords.

With the release of Rift, something happened in the populace, a fracturing of sorts. That was the very first time I saw people leave WoW in a semi-permanent fashion. Always before when a new product released, players would drift away from the game only to return a month or two later. Something was different with the release of Cataclysm that broke the inertia of players to stay in one place. I myself was gone for a little over two years, and during most of that time I never saw myself seriously returning. For whatever reason I think a lot of us are resigned to the fact that the “wow-killer” simply will never exist. All of this effort spent trying to find a better experience than World of Warcraft just wound up leading us right back to the original.

I personally have come to realize that what WoW provides just does not exist in the same quantity or quality elsewhere. Sure various games do various components of the total WoW experience better, but no one game hits as many high points as Blizzard does. I have reached a point where I am mostly okay with the games flaws… and while I wish that it did certain things better, I can accept the fact that what it does is for the benefit of the many not the few. There are niche games out there that will scratch the various itches I have that WoW simply cannot. So while I am back in WoW I am also still very much playing Rift, TSW, Everquest Next Landmark and will be adding Elder Scrolls Online to that lineup. I have reached a point where I am okay with playing multiple games at the same time.

The beauty of World of Warcraft is that it is the game of consensus. It is that game that everyone plays when they can’t get anyone to agree on any other game. People play WoW because people play WoW. More than anything the large community that comes part and parcel with playing the game was the thing I had been missing since leaving it. When you play wow, you are instantly a member of something larger than yourself, and that is just an experience that is lacking with any of the other games. Don’t get me wrong, the other game communities are great, especially the fledgling Everquest Next community bolstered by SOE’s new sense of transparency. However it is still lacking in sheer size and volume of players. The Blizzard gaming community is big enough to support everyone, and that is a really rare and special thing.

Budgie Week Fiasco

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/412505-budgie-week-guide.html

Firstly I want to say, this is less about the specific thread but more about the Budgie Week event. I latched onto the guide threat by Seatin mostly because it was the only really active thread out there that coalesced all of the viewpoints in one place, whether or not he actually intended that to happen. Seatin does a great job of supporting the community with his guides and videos, so nothing I say should be held as a reflection on that. Additionally I love the folks at Trion, especially the team that is presently working on Trove. That is such a great game and the open process is so refreshing, including the use of Reddit as their primary forums. Additionally when Rift went free to play, I considered it to be one of the more just and equitable models. However some of the things they have been doing with the cash shop are feeling more than a little shifty.

Awhile back some of my friends were frustrated over the Squirrel mount that was released, in that they missed the ridiculously short window it was available for purchase outright in the game. This was really the beginning of a new trend, offering a cool mount for a very short time, and then putting a similar mount in a cash shop lootbox as the primary means of obtaining it. This was the case for the Squirrel mount, the Mech mount, and now looks to be the same basic thing going on with the Budgie mount. The shifty part this time is that they introduced a world event to make it seem as though you can actually acquire the mount that way. Problem is… with this being only a 7 day event it is simply impossible to gain enough of the “bird seed” currency doing these quests alone.

According to Seatin’s guide, if you got in on the first day of the event there is a maximum of 210 bird seed that you can obtain. The mount costs 850 bird seed on the vendor, meaning there is simply no way to obtain it without somehow augmenting your seed count. It turns out right now they are offering a limited time cash box that has a chance of dropping a different colored budgie mount, and you are guaranteed between 6 and 10 birdseed per box. The average seems to be 8 per trove, so in theory you need roughly 80 of these cash shop boxes to be able to purchase the bird. Granted you have a chance from each to get the OTHER budgie mount, but we aren’t even taking this into account. Essentially even doing your quests religiously every day, you would have to spend roughly $300 on the cash shop to be certain you get this mount while it is available.

Now Daglar has posted on the forums that this is a promo event, and they intend to run it several times a year, and by participating in all of them you should be able to get the mount. Even saying that… it still feels extremely bad seeing this unfold. This is the same kind of crap that I see over in SWTOR with making most of the truly unique looking mounts only available through the random chance of a cash shop box. The difference there is that you can actually post the items once you have gotten them on the auction house… whereas the cash shop loot in Rift is either soul bound or bound to your account. This whole event just leaves me feeling a little dirty for having supported their shirt to free to play so actively. I still think Rift is a great game, and I still think more or less it is a good value… they are just doing a few unsavory things that make me a little sad inside.

Bel Goes to Nasa

This mornings factoid digs pretty deep into the annals of time. Once upon a time I wanted to grow up to be a Scientist. I am not really sure what happened along the way to change that life ambition. If I had to guess it was probably the fact that AP Chemistry ate my lunch, but I managed to get out of it with a B, which seemed pretty damned good at the time. All that aside, I did really and truly want to be a Scientist, so I took the yearly ritual of the science fair extremely seriously. Through boy scouts I had gotten into model rocketry, so when it came time to pick a project I thought it would be interesting to do something related to that. With copious help from my father, we constructed a wind tunnel that ran on a shop vac, and proceeded to test the effects of airflow based on various model rocket fin shapes.

I think the key to winning a science fair is to have something cool to look at in your booth. I am sure there were many students that had more scientifically sound studies than I did, but I had cool photos of the pattern each of the fins had made. We tied string to each of the fins so that we could watch the pattern the thread made based on the airflow. The contrails that were created gave a clear picture of how each shape varied and was something nice and concrete that the judges to latch onto. I won the local level science fair and managed to move up to regional’s, but this was not something really new to me, because my pantograph had done the same my six grade year. In all honesty repeating a victory at the local level would have been more than enough for me.

When I got to regional’s however I was shocked at just how excited the judges seemed to be about my exhibit. So when it came down to time to present the awards, I don’t really remember what place I got in the main competition, because it was quickly overshadowed by the “special” award that I won. I got a trip for me, my family and my science teacher to NASA’s Johnson Space center. I have to say it was one of the cooler things I have experienced. A lot of the trip is a haze at this point, but I remember walking through a prototype of what would eventually become the international space station. I also remember getting to play around in the shuttle flight simulator, and meeting actual astronauts. All of which were pretty heady things for my little wannabe scientist seventh grader mind. But of course, High School happened… and I discovered computers and programming… and I jettisoned the thoughts of being a scientist out the airlock and moved on.

Belghast and the Severe Asthma

February 3, 2014 by Belghast

Bel is a Sick Little Monkey

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

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

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

Belghast and the Severe Asthma

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

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

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

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

Liberation Pingo

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

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

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

Me and My Tentacle

February 1, 2014 by Belghast

I Hate the NDA

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

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

The Open Model

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

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

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

Me and My Tentacle

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

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