Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Yeah, I'm declaring this a snow day, thank you very much. I suspect the office can manage without me today, and my co-tech is in walking distance is there's any real need. When I got up yesterday (which was a little early), I peeked out the window. "Okay," I said, "there's just frost on my windshield - no snow yet." About a half hour later, everything was dusted. And the snow, while not always heavy, really hasn't stopped falling since. A couple people bowed out due to weather, but we gamed last night. So when I got home (finding the sidewalks shoveled, but only a single lane plowed through the parking lot some hours back), I got out my shovel and started digging. I think I cleared about six parking spaces myself. It's not like anyone else is going to do it. Given that, I feel surprisingly well. Which, I'm not sure if I should take as a good sign or simply a sign that the aches haven't set in yet. And there's been another few

"How is it you're not interested in playing Amber? It's so open." "That's the problem." It feels like you either get that perspective or you don't. There was a time when we created characters that came to mind, dropped them into a game, and ran with it. Somewhere along the line, though, I gained an appreciation for story and consistency . Characters who are made within the framework of a setting simply fit better. It's easier and cleaner to weave stories around them when they have built-in hooks that match up with the world. Playing a half-elf in a world where humans and elves are at war opens up a lot of opportunities for interaction right there, and several possible goals and motivations. You lose all that with a character that's totally generic or built for a different world entirely. But multiversal settings (like Amber) can accommodate anything, right? Everything should "fit." Maybe, except when you get multiple charac

Just reflecting a little... Wrath of the Lich King was released on November 13th, 2008. - By January 22nd (almost 10 weeks later), I had one character at max level. A few guildmates had beaten me there. - By February 23rd,I had some dungeon experience and my main was at max level. - By February 27th (roughly 15 weeks in), I had started on heroic dungeons with guildmates. There were some rough patches and wipes, but generally success. - Raiding? It looks like we started somewhere around September in 2009, not quite a full year into the expansion. Cataclysm came out December 7th, 2010. - By December 11th (fifth day), my main was max-level. A handful of guildmates did it faster and were already queueing up for random dungeons. - By December 15th (a week in), I'd started the occasional dungeon run with guildmates. Others are randoming daily. - By December 23rd (two weeks in), I'd tried at least one heroic. And it was almost painfully hard. Y'know... I'm not

Okay, so you're in a fantasy world. The technological level is fairly limited, but there's magic to make up the difference. Now take a look out over the port and start thinking... Ships are good for getting people and cargo around. Handy, that. They don't require gateways or knowledge of your destination, technically, so you can explore with them. That's awesome! I want one of those. But why limit yourself to the seas? With magic, you can have a ship that can soar through the air, or cross planes! The form of a ship, however, is designed with the sea in mind. If you take that out of the equation, you should actually build things differently, shouldn't you? Let's start with the bottom of the hull. That's really only suited to sitting in water. If you don't want to be limited to seasides, what then? Well, if you make the bottom flat, at least it can sit upright on the ground. Heck, that's a really good place to put some sort of entrance or loa

"Oh look, a fantasy trilogy. Sure, why not? I'm always down for a decent fantasy novel, and these have been recommended." "Whoa. Messing with the time stream already. To what end? Wait... WTF? So who is this now compared to who that was? Hrmm... well... okay, sure, time to settle in for the ride." Rhapsody has been a fairly good read, but with some major differences from what I'm used to that leave me a bit muddled in my assessment of it. The main characters are generally well-done, though Rhapsody herself has a bizarrely massive blind spot in her perceptions. The story is enjoyable, covering a huge span of time and space - yet in many ways, it doesn't really go anywhere. The confrontation with the book's "big bad evil guy" has an interesting twist, but doesn't make much of a climax because of it. Overall, I think the story told feels like little more than setup for the rest of the series, which a good novel (even as part of a ser

Professions Wow, I have picked a lot of herbs. @.@ My warlock was made primarily to try out the class and have someone to do inscription. Amusingly, after grinding his skill up to high-end Wrath levels, we had another player int he guild become active with their scribe - this story gets better later. I also took tailoring with him, because it didn't require specific gathering support and in the Burning Crusade era, bind-on-pickup tailored items were the way to go. So I've been leveling his inscription again, though the glyphs taper off. Cataclysm inscription seems to be more about making relics (which are more universal than they used to be) and off-hand items. I decided to drop his tailoring as it's not nearly so important or useful when I have another character that does it. Instead, I took up alchemy and leveled that up from zero. I was actually able to cap it before inscription, go figure, but both are maxxed out now. And the same player that became an active s

For a couple days, I've been telling myself maybe the sore throat was dry air and particular sinus drainage while sleeping or something. Today I'm all stuffy-headed. Think I'll have to admit to actually being sick. Not a real fun time for it, but what can you do?

When I review something, I tend to be critical. "It's good, but..." pointing out the flaws. Often, the better something is in my mind, the less I find to say about it. I walked out of Tron: Legacy pretty well speechless. Maybe it's not a perfect movie, if such can even exist, but on a five star scale, I'd give it all five. Someone took something from my childhood and made a sequel. And it didn't suck. But not only did it not suck, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire ride. Maybe I'm biased and giving it something of an easier time subconsciously. Still, this movie is nothing but a win to me. It left me with a smile on my face and a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. I've been following this movie to some small degree for quick a while, catching stories on IO9.com and such. Commercials have been hard to avoid on TV. So I knew some of what I was going into - a father/son reunion in difficult times. And I knew there were lots of things that could have gone w

GMing is often a labor of love. It just happens to start out more love and become more labor as time goes on. And often, a laboring GM reaches a point at which the weight creation and arbitration outweighs the reward. Sometimes, it may even be taken to an extreme . Maybe I hit that point of burnout one too many times. Mostly, I blame a lack of inspiration and creativity on my part. Seriously, ideas once flowed like water when now it more often feels like I'm trying to wring the same out of a stone. Ultimately, though, I simply don't feel like running a game unless I've got some idea of it that appeals to me. I've been over that before. I don't require strict adherence to an envisioned plotline, but I require something to work with beyond "Let's play X!" It's much the same when the subject is being a player. If the character is interesting to me, I'm so much more into the game than if I've crammed together a collection of stats, or i

It occurs to me that I never put impressions down here after finishing book 4 in the Incarnations of Immortality. The first remains my favorite. This one was okay, but nothing special. The whole deal with connections between incarnations is starting to feel a little old at this point rather than novel. The main character feels a little shoe-horned into the role of War - earlier in the series, it was indicated the depicted cosmology doesn't apply to everyone, but here we have someone whose beliefs don't fully match dropped right in. Mym, in fact, seems a pretty poor choice as War, in spite of being really pissy at the very moment of his selection. Also the romantic professing of absolute, undying love is a little cheesy the first time and eye-roll-inducing the second. Overall, meh. No real highlights in my mind, but I don't quite feel robbed of my time and money (it was bought used, though).

Stood in Fire I was cheerfully taking care of some daily quests and had taken a portal to Uldum, then flitted over to the Ramkahen quest giver on my hippogryph when something happened. Mind you, this rough sequence of thoughts took place very, very quickly: - Okay, almost there... - Is that a beam of fire? Wait, why's there fire all around? - Was that a level-up fanfare? No, wait, that was an achievement. - Why am I dead all of a sudden? - Oh. OH! Deathwing made a pass at the zone and killed everyone. Well I didn't expect that in Uldum. - Awwwww. I don't even get to see him? I pan around and all I see are the flaming fields. Blacksmithing Blues And not rares, either. No, as I'm leveling up blacksmithing, I'm feeling increasingly disappointed with it. It's not even that it's bad per se, just bland. Every profession gets a self-buff of sorts. Gathering professions probably suffer a little in the long run due to having static benefits that don

Uldum Neat little story about being captured on the way in, then there's a couple plotlines running. One is helping the Ramkahen secure and protect their lands. That's relatively typical fare, it feels like, though there are some interesting strategy quests where you give directions to a group in a vehicle-like interface. The other plotline involves Harrison Jones, with all the requisite Indiana Jones references and homages. Most of this, I loved. It also saw me to the first couple deaths I had by not being cautious enough in stealthing about with an item. What can I say, stealth is so foreign to a paladin I just don't know how to use it? Still, I really enjoyed all this after his brief appearances before. There were, however, some quests in the zone that got a little tedious. Kill X creatures or Collect X drops get a bit wearying, and the monotony of sand probably doesn't help. But the ruins were lovely, and there were a lot of quests that were more unique or fla

Last night's Guild Wars session was unproductive, at best. Actually, it was probably a net loss. But that happens once in a while. We first went to try The Deep. I'm really not clear on the story of the place, but it's one of those hard "elite" zones that require special entry conditions. It also allows a party size of 12, which is unusually high. None of us really read closely what we were getting into. In fairness, the Wiki page is looong. I skimmed it, but totally missed the part that describes how "section 0" splits the party into four groups of three. Without that critical piece of information, we got split up in non-optimal ways, and even had a hero stuck back at the entrance, so had one group shorted. Most of us died on our first group of mobs. Our most dedicated and skilled player got farther, but only delayed the inevitable. The place requires much more planning and tactical use of tanking than we're accustomed to, it seems. It was a lot

I go out to a "Christmas party" dinner I'm invited to and I get back to find the office of the computer I was virus-checking to be closed and locked. Cuuuurses! Of course, it doesn't help that it took and hour and a half for food to be served, and the whole thing through dessert was close to three hours. Doesn't leave much time in the night to accomplish things at work anyway.

A few days in, I have to hand it to Blizzard this time around. This has been the cleanest MMO/expansion launch I've seen. Not flawless, but I've not been stuck waiting in queues. I haven't seen any major delays. I haven't read about servers crashing. Granted, Blizzard has a lot of experience and a huge infrastructural lead on anyone else, but this is how you release new content and make a good impression. Guild Limits and Advancement Let's see... total rep from 0 to Exalted is 42,000. The official weekly limit is 3500 rep (3849 for a human character). So based on math alone, it looks like a 12-week journey to be Exalted with your guild, assuming you can continue to maximize that (which may not be accurate if you run out of quests after a week or two). Or just under 11 weeks for humans. I'm not sure what I think of that. On one hand, a three-month period of "getting into" a guild seems sort of reasonable. On the other hand, for those of us who h

Acquisition Since I was working nights anyway, it seemed easier to swing by and pick up my copy around midnight on the way home. I showed up at about 11:50, and the line moved after the turn of the hour pretty quickly. Simple and easy. There were, perhaps, forty customers (give or take) present, including gabefinder who had been waiting since around 10. Even if I were home bored, I wouldn't have come that early. Then again, I didn't spring for a collector's edition either. Installation So, I got home with slightly less than an hour before Cataclysm content was due to go live. Plenty of time to get installed. And it was. I think the pre-expansion patch (which really contained a good bit of the data and was a download) took a lot longer. So far, so good. Go-live! 12:01 am, December 7th. Hmm. No, everything seems normal and "old." No worgen, no XP bar. While discussing this and after a couple logins, a server message came up announcing the new content was r

Last night in GW, a group of us completed our scavenger hunt quest for the black moa chick mini-pet. Overall, it was much longer and more complicated than I first thought, but turned out to be slightly less painful than I feared. That was thanks largely to some short-cuts and piggybacking made possible by more advanced players in the guild. It's a reasonably cute little black, kiwi-like bird and, as a unique-level pet, means one more point in my Hall of Monuments. I'm not quite sure what's planned next. I have some desire to go through the War in Kryta stuff. It's more plotline, which is probably GW's strong suit. And getting those mobs out of the way for other things would be nice. It looks like the next "easy" points for my Hall come from getting at least one more hero character appropriately outfitted and saved there. Otherwise... what? A bunch of armor sets that cost a good bit of money and don't visually appeal to me more than what I have? I gue

That's not to say we'll never set foot in Icecrown Citadel or anything else again, but Tuesday marks the release of Cataclysm. With that comes new content, new levels, new gear that will quickly (though perhaps not immediately) outstrip the old. It's going to be different, and it's going to be a while before we have 10+ guild members geared up to tackle the new raids. I imagine for a several weeks, there will be more focus on 5-man dungeons, which are said to be more tactically challenging than Wrath's (though, in fairness, Wrath 5-mans weren't so horribly easy when they were new either). Roles, positions, and dynamics may change along the way. We'll just have to see how things go. So we ducked into Obsidian Sanctum and, after some differing opinions, decided to try with three drakes up. We've done it before. And it worked this time about as I remember before. A couple wipes with us getting better and one accidental face-pull (somehow, that almost alwa

Heh. I thought filling out USPS customs forms was annoying before. It doesn't help that that's a cutoff point as far as weight - and I don't have a good way to weigh a package at home - so I'm often not sure which I should be filling out until I'm at the post office. But now (I don't recall this being the case last year), they want very specific details of contents put on forms. And instead of being a couple sheets, you have to write firmly enough to copy through six or seven times. AND everything you print on the form, the mail clerk apparently has to re-key into the computer, slowing things down at the post office (apologies to all those behind me). Y'know, the world used to be simpler.