Focused Divergence

Suddenly I'm reminded of a Lemon Jelly song...

2011-11-04T08:09:00.001-04:00

Well, for the second time this year, I've gone and moved where my blog is situated. This move should be the last one, however.

My blog can now be found at http://www.reverendunk.com

Please be sure to update your bookmarks and RSS feed-readers =)

Defending Dungeons

2011-10-30T12:00:00.009-04:00

So I've been playing Dungeon Defenders a lot lately. And I mean, a lot. So I figured I'd do a mini-review slash intro (I say "mini" but it's going to be rather longer-ish) of it. I've now played it both on PC and 360 (it's running in the background right now, actually), but the majority of my playtime on it has been on the 360 version, so please keep that in mind.

Dungeon Defenders is a third-person RPG-ish tower defense game. Okay, that's a little vague... When you start the game, you have your choice of four different heroes that you play through the game with, that you can level up as you go, with varying combat moves and defenses. And of course, it's a tower defense game, so while you're running around killing mobs yourself (or supporting teammates or your towers), you have various towers that you can place to help you defend.

It's a bit unique in the tower defense genre (at least in my experience) outside of the active engagement part (which Sanctum did as a sci-fi FPS, and Orcs Must Die! has done as a fantasy 3rd-person combat), in that enemies will actively engage your defenses. A core component of every TD game I've played is the "mazing" you do on a level. That's the placement of towers and barricades strategically to make the route the enemies have to take as long as possible, while your towers whittle them down. In those games, enemies will only attack your defenses if you've made it impossible for them to reach whatever it is you're defending without them attacking something. There is no "mazing" in Dungeon Defenders, so to make up for that, and delay the horde, enemies will go after your defenses. Depending on tower placement, some that you don't think will get attacked, and some that you think will, don't.

As for characters to choose from, there is currently the Apprentice, Squire, Huntress, and Monk (which the game classifies as being harder to play, in order, with the Apprentice being the easiest). There are also apparently plans to release more hero types as well, and if the character creation screen is anything to go by, there's at least two already in the works, as they're present (in silhouette) and locked at the moment.

The Apprentice, which is your basic Black Mage-looking wizard type (with a bloodninja reference in his in-game description). His character attacks are ranged shots from his staff with an alt-fire AoE knockback. Both the shots and the AoE can be charged for added damage and knockback, as well. His towers consist of an elemental resistance-stripping Magic Barrier, a Magic Missile shooty tower, an AoE fireball tower, a local AoE lightning tower, and a wall-hack (it can shoot through walls) single-target massive damage cannon type thing. The Fireball and Lightning towers do elemental damage, and some enemies are immune to certain elements at random, so it's important to place magic barriers nearby to strip that resistance when they get attacked so that those towers aren't useless.

The Squire is a knight in shining armour, as you'd expect with heart boxers instead of greaves and chausses. His character attacks are melee attacks which can hit more than one enemy at a time, and his alt-fire is a blocking stance, which reduces the amount of damage you take (by how much, depends on your weapon) and prevents character movement while doing so. His towers are a spiked barricade, which hurts enemies that touch it, a bouncer blockade which is essentially a spiked horizontal wheel which will pop out and knock enemies back while damaging them, a ballista with bolts that will pass through all enemies in a straight line, a cannonball tower, which has long range, but a very narrow firing cone (as it doesn't rotate like all the other shooty towers), and a spinning sword blockade, which takes a bit to spin up (and only starts to spin up when enemies get close) but does large amounts of damage. All of the Squire's defenses are physical damage, so you don't have to deal with resistances, but since most of them are melee-range, there's still complications from the archer and suicide bombing enemies. And of course, your towers tend to take more damage just in general, since even the melee mobs can often get in a swipe or two before the tower finishes them off.

The Huntress is your ranged rogue class with a main fire of shooting her crossbow/gun (if there are bows, I've not encountered them), and an alt-fire of reloading said weapon. Her "towers" are traps with a set number of triggers (that you can increase via stats from equipment and levelling up). Her "tower" mechanics are one of the reasons she's listed as one of the harder classes to play as you have no barriers to stop the enemies, aside from a stun from one of your traps later on. Her traps consist of a proximity mine, which, as you'd expect, explodes in a certain radius when triggered, a gas trap, which stuns any non-poison-immune caught in the radius, a n inferno trap, which causes a massive conflagration that damages enemies the longer they're in it (that aren't fire-immune, anyways), a darkness trap which takes monsters' attention away from any nearby players (making it mostly a co-op only trap, and I've not seen it used there ever), and the ethereal spike trap, which does massive damage to a single target in it's radius, chosen at random (it could just easily go for the 100hp goblin nearby as for the 10k hp ogre you placed it for). This class works great in co-op but can be maddeningly frustrating in solo play, since two of her traps have to deal with elemental immunity, and you have to watch your trigger count so you can repair them before they expire, and if a trap of the same type as one you have placed has a blast radius large enough to overlap the trigger radius of the other, both will trigger.

Finally, the Monk is your stoic Shaolin-style guy with a polearm melee-range main attack and "chi" shots alt-fire, making it the only class that has both melee and ranged attacks. This guy is a great online support hero with the right stat allocation, but in solo play he can be even more frustrating than the Huntress. His "towers" are auras; domes that you place that have varying effects on enemies, and uniquely, one that affects players as well. There's the ensnaring aura which will slow any mob that walks into it (with lesser effect on large monsters, and non on bosses and poison-immune), the electric aura which does electric damage to anything caught in it (again, excluding lightning-immune), the healing aura, which will heal any player that's inside it, effectively making it a god-mode spot while it lasts, the strength drain aura which reduces the damage enemies in it do, and the enrage aura which has a chance to enrage enemies in it, making them attack each other. Different auras can be stacked, so you could have the ensnare placed in the same spot as your lighting aura to maximize the amount of damage the aura can do. Auras of the same type can not stack, however, so you have to be careful of your placement of duplicate auras. Part of the reason this is a hard class to play solo is that only one of your auras does direct damage (the other one that can damage, albeit indirectly, Enrage Aura, drains pretty quickly, and won't effect enemies that have a "real" tower in sight), and that aura does elemental damage. Another reason is that your auras are constantly draining, whether they're having enemies or players (depending on type) pass through their radius or not. They'll drain faster if they're in use, obviously, but Ensnare Aura will still drain as though in use, if a poison-immune monster walks through. They are, however, great support in multiplayer, with the right upgrades and careful placement, as you can support your whole team with just two or three auras placed in total. The special class abilities are great for multiplayer support as well.

Oh, that's right, each class also has two special abilities which cost mana to use/maintain. The ones that you maintain have a ramping mana cost the longer they're in effect. The reason I didn't mention them initially is that in solo play, I tend not to use them very often, and there's very few that I see used by others in online co-op. The Apprentice has a maintained cast-speed boost, and an activated (with a cast time that is affected by the other ability) massive AoE. The Squire has an activated circular slice ability, and a maintained damage/speed boost. The Huntress has a maintained invisibility (though you can still get hit by monsters if you're in the way of their attacks) and an activated penetrating shot. The Monk's abilities are both maintained ones, and they're both very similar to each other. One boosts the damage of nearby players while healing them, and the other boosts the attack speed and damage of nearby towers while repairing them.

Right. Now that I've got the basics of the currently available classes out of the way, let's move on to the basics of the game itself. It's fairly similar to most tower defense games out there, with the exception of the things I already mentioned. There's a thing; don't let the monsters get to the thing. All the monsters are dead and the thing isn't? Success! The "thing" in this case is called an "Eternia Crystal" (and various accomplishments {not achievements [not on 360, anyways]. I'll get to that later} unlock various crystal appearances), and instead of having a counter of X many enemies can not touch this, it has an HP bar, tying into the RPG aspect of the game. You build your defenses with mana, your currency in the game, which is helpfully provided by the chests that spawn at the start of each build phase (aside from a few challenge modes, you can build in the combat phase as well. There's just an absence of monsters in the build phase), and by the enemies when they die. Monsters also occasionally drop equipment which you can equip (obviously) or send to your item box to sell/upgrade later.

Most equipment can be leveled up by spending banked/currently-held mana as experience points for it. Upon leveling an item (or a pet) up, some of the stats on the item/pet will highlight and you select which one you improve. Most only go up by one point, but some go up higher, like a weapon's amage (selecting elemental damage if present scales faster, as some enemies are immune), projectile speed, things like that. Others only become available to choose every few levels like a pet's attack speed or an added projectile on a gun. The stat already has to be present for you to increase it, obviously, so you can't make your staff shoot an extra projectile if it's not already capable of shooting two. Sometimes there are penalties present on equipment too, but depending on what your previous item was, these can work in your favour by selecting them in the item leveling process. You can also use banked mana at the tavern's store to purchase pets or new items of gear, though the store only has 9 items in stock at the most; 3 pets, 3 armour pieces, and 3 weapons. If you purchase one, it isn't instantly filled with a new item. You have to go complete a new level for it to restock. The store also restocks normally while you're playing the levels too, but if you see something you want that you can't currently afford, you can lock it, so it stays in stock until you can afford it. Pets can also be attained via unlocking certain accomplishments, and beating challenges on certain difficulty levels.

Speaking of difficulty levels, the ones in this game are no joke. Every level and challenge can be played on easy, medium, hard, or insane, and even on easy the levels can become quite challenging. As the difficulty scales up, so do the number and strength of the enemies spawned, and on Insane, the Build Phase's infinite build time (which is something you can toggle on other modes) is replaced by a countdown. The enemies will start to come out whether you're ready or not. After you complete each level, you unlock three modes for that level. Survival mode, which is an endless (I think it actually has a cap, though) wave after wave of progressively strong and numerous enemies. Pure Defense mode, which makes the enemies ignore your hero completely, and your hero can't attack. In that mode you have to rely exclusively on your towers to defeat the enemies, and you can only build or repair during the Build Phase, so if one tower with a sliver of health is all that stands between the horde and your crystal, that tower's pretty much going down. And the third mode is a Challenge that takes place on that level. The Challenge for the first level, as an example, is you can't build towers at all; it's all on your character to beat back the horde. The second level Challenge is instead of protecting a crystal, you're protecting an ogre, that will walk around the map engaging the nearest enemies (and incidentally, if he walks near any of your towers his body will move them aside, ruining a lot of your tower placement).

The game was designed with online co-op in mind, (the PS3 and PC versions have cross-platform to boot. The 360 version does not, due to Microsoft's rules about cross-platform gaming on their system), but the solo offline mode doesn't suffer for it. Just as an aside, there are two types of online servers, there's the ranked servers, and there's the other servers. When you select online play (this applies to PC {and PS3 presumably} only) you can choose between the types. The reason for this is the characters you play on the ranked servers are online-only. The normal servers you can bring your solo play hero in, and vice versa. Difficulty & rewards scale up on multiplayer as well, so if a map normally spawned x monsters with y reward in solo play, it might now spawn 2x monsters with 1.5y reward with 2 players (I'm just making these numbers up btw, but it's similar to that).

Now I say that the solo gameplay experience doesn't suffer from the intent of online co-op, and that's true. But that's not to say that things are easier just because the difficulty isn't scaling from the presence of another player. On some maps, especially once you start having to defend multiple crystals, you'll become really stretched thin. You'll probably want to level more than one hero, maybe even all four. During the build phase you can switch out between your heroes (there's a hard limit of 24, I believe, so you could ostensibly have 6 of each currently available class, if you wanted to). This won't give you the ability to actively guard multiple crystals at once, without running between them, but it will allow for some more effective tower guarding. You could switch in your squire to build a bowling ball turret at the top of some stairs, switch to your apprentice and place some fireball & magic missile towers, switch to your monk to place ensnare auras on the approaches to your towers, and then finally switch to your huntress to actively engage the enemy. It doesn't have to be that complex, either. You could just prefer the apprentice's towers, but want to run around stabbing things on your squire. This also allows for self-power-leveling. You could have your hero with uber tower stats place all your towers, and switch in your lowbie and just stand there soaking up the xp.

If it hasn't become clear by now, I enjoy this game a lot. It's fun, it's addictive, I've poured a lot of time into it since acquiring it. That said, it's not without flaws. They're all fairly minor, but two are very annoying for me, personally (and I'm sure for others as well).

First off, the controls. Now this one may seem a little obvious, but tower placement can be a little iffy (especially aligning your cone of fire) on the 360 since you're controlling with the analog stick. These same issues are why every shooter on consoles has some form of aim-assist. On PC, the tower aspect is, of course, much more precise, but the hero combat can feel a little sloppy. On PC, hero combat generally works best in full camera zoom, or half-zoom. In full zoom, it's over-the-shoulder-cam, and it works well with aiming for your ranged classes, and charging into the thick of it if you're meleeing, as well as having good movement, but you lose situational awareness of what's behind you. You'll often take an arrow in the back because you didn't see it coming and lose your 30% bonus for not getting hit during that wave. In half-zoom, you can see what's going on around you a lot better, but character movement is a bit more clunky. Now, this is probably absent if you're playing the pc version with a controller, or using the controller for your hero and the mouse for tower placement, but I can't vouch for that since I don't have a wireless receiver for my computer.

The mana currency, as it is right now (hopefully they'll change this in a patch in the future, but they just as easily might not), is a bit inconsistent. When you end the build phase to go to the next wave, or the next level, any mana that is currently laying on the ground automatically gets banked. Any items on the ground also get sold and the mana from that gets banked. (Also, on multiplayer, this automatically collected mana gets split between the players, which I wish more people knew so they'd quit being dicks about collecting the loot instead of preparing for the next wave). This is fine. It's actually surprisingly thoughtful. It saves you the hassle of having to track down every single mana crystal and item after a wave is done. You just collect what you need, and don't have to worry about the rest. During the combat phase, items and mana that drop despawn after a while (and there's a hard limit on how many mana crystals can be laying on the ground at one time too, so if you have x amount of crystals worth 50 mana each, and x is the hard limit, if a mob drops a crystal only worth 5, one of your 50 pt ones poofs). Your characters have a set limit to the amount of mana they can currently hold as well, and the only way to raise that limit is to level up. My squire can currently hold 680 mana right now. When an item or a mana crystal despawns, it's gone. No automatic selling or banking - it's just gone. And that would be fine too, if mana wasn't the in-game currency. It's the inconsistency that's the problem. Either remove the despawn timer, and make me collect everything manually, or keep the timer and bank it automatically. This isn't game-breaking, but it is incredibly annoying to me.

My other major issue is with the accomplishments and achievements. Accomplishments work on the same concept as achievements. You get an accomplishment for reaching level 10. You get one for reaching wave 15 on a survival mode on medium difficulty. You get one for completing act 1. You get the picture. There's rewards for getting these accomplishments too. You get a tiny little trophy that's displayed in your player's tavern, some (most) of them unlock skins for your eternia crystal. Some even give you pets as rewards, like a little robot, that will attack in melee by doing a barrel roll at the enemy (the robot is basically a barrel with arms and jetpack feet). Accomplishments are achievements, just with a different name. But at the same time, they're not achievements. There is some overlap - with a lot more overlap on the (PC) Steam version - but there are Accomplishments that don't count as Achievements on either version I've played, that definitely should. The disparity between Accomplishments and Achievements is a lot more obvious on the 360 version (possibly PS3 as well?). I've easily clocked 50 hours on the 360 version, and the easiest "actual" achievement to unlock - and oddly, not the one I have (I unlocked the wave 15 on medium survival one) - is beating the game. In the end, achievements don't really matter to a lot of people. I'm (very recently) one of the people it does matter to. Again, it's the inconsistency that's the real problem here. If you have an in-game achievement-alike, tie it fully into the actual achievements. I can kind of justify it with the 360 version, since it's tied to a base gamerscore of 1000 - or 200 in this game's case since it's on XBLA - and every achievement has to have a point value, but on the steam version, that gap shouldn't exist.

All complaints aside, I really do enjoy this game. I consider it time and money well-spent (though it was gifted to me for PC, so I only actually bought it once). And now that I actually have a copy of it for PC, expect some gameplay videos in the future. Dungeon Defenders is currently available on Steam & PSN for $14.99, and on XBLA for 1200 Microsoft Points. (Personal note: While Steam isn't the only online distribution source you can buy the PC version at, it is the only one with bonuses {to my knowledge})

And if my word-a-thon 3000 with bracket abuse wasn't enough, or you just want to see some pretty colours, here's the gameplay overview dev diary (I'm having issues with embedding it, so sorry for the text link): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flCv9A6oJDM

Achievement Unlocked: OCD

2011-10-28T11:03:00.000-04:00

Aside from in WoW, I never really cared about achievements. Even within WoW, my interest only went so far; I was after titles and mounts, and there were achievements that provided those. In other games, I really didn't care. It was neat when they popped up, but I didn't seek them out. So why is it, that I now have an account at Raptr, and have it set up to tweet my achievements? Why now, do I suddenly care?

Gamerscore, that's why. I know it doesn't mean anything in the long run. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to 100% all the games I own on 360. I want that number to get bigger. I've even purchased some games for the 360 that I already owned on PC, though they were re-bought simply because the control scheme was more fun on console for me.

Some of the games have avatar rewards when you unlock certain achievements. Again, it's another meaningless thing. It's just a small cosmetic reward that I can choose to display or not. But it's a tangible reward, in a completely intangible setting.

None of it really makes sense to me, but hot damn does it have its claws in me. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some Dungeons to Defend...

One point One-Up

2011-10-19T17:37:00.000-04:00

Well, it is now four days after my participation in this year's Extra Life gaming marathon charity event, and while I still haven't found a way to describe it that rolls off the tongue, the event itself was an overwhelming success. I, personally, was able to raise $200 for a local hospital, and the charity itself was able to raise somewhere in the sum of 1.1 million dollars.

Let me say that again - Extra Life raised over ONE point ONE million dollars this year. Not bad. Not bad, at all.

As for personal experiences during the marathon, they're a bit varied. I'm very happy that I was able to participate, and raise money. I will absolutely do this again next year. Hell, there's a make-up day for those that weren't able to complete their 24 hours (or just found out about the charity) this coming Saturday, and I'm tempted to participate in that as well. But I will admit to some ... unkind ... thoughts in the days leading up to the event.

Parts of me were annoyed with myself that I never thought to send a message asking for retweets to Jesse Cox or Totalbiscuit on twitter until somebody else actually did. I actually had to sit here and remind myself, that all the money is going to charity, so as long as the donations are coming in, it shouldn't matter who got the donations. I shouldn't have had to say that to myself, not when I'd been saying it for about a week prior to that event.

I'm also, kind of annoyed that I wasn't able to stream the full 24 hours of gaming. My livestream program crashed with something like four hours of "official" marathon time to go, and I took it as a sign and went to bed, as I'd been struggling to remain awake for the previous hour. I really wanted to stream a full 24 hours of gaming. But I'd been awake for 9 hours prior to me starting the stream, and I had done at least four hours worth of gaming in that time.

If I'd been awake nine hours prior to starting the stream, then why didn't I start the stream earlier, you may find yourself asking. It's really quite simple. I was waiting for a store to open so that I could get some essentials for the marathon, and I didn't want to have to disappear in the middle of my stream in order to do so.

I know this post is a bit rambly, and for that, I apologize. Most of my blog posts tend to go that way, for one reason or another. Anyways, in conclusion, I'd like to thank all the people who participated in Extra Life this year, as well as all the people who donated, and the guys at Sarcastic Gamers for creating this charity.

Extra extra thanks to all the people who donated to support me specifically.
Extra extra extra thanks to Tomaj for keeping me company (and awake), both on skype, and the livestream chat for the entirety of my streaming.
And extra extra extra extra super thanks to Jen and James for all the support they gave me up to and during the event. The sheer amount of promotion they did for me, was unbelievable and they donated too. If I'd ever had any doubts how good people they are, they would've been dashed away.

Thanks again, guys. Extra Life was amazing, and I hope to see you guys next year! And in the time between then and now, as well, of course.

PS: Should you so desire, justin.tv saved about four and a half hours' worth of my stream at http://www.twitch.tv/reverendunk/videos that you can view (Warning: it's from the tail-end of my broadcast, where it was the least interesting and I was fighting to stay awake) for the next couple days. I'd thought they would save the entire thing, but it appears I was wrong.

Howdy, neighbour!

2011-10-11T21:12:00.000-04:00

Hey guys. If any of you have happened to wander by my blog in the last month or so, you'll have noticed that I haven't really said anything since I made my Extra Life post. While I have plenty I'd like to blog about, I've been holding it in reserve because I wanted the post about a very good charity (Extra Life durr) to be the top post until the event is over.

The day is quickly approaching when I will be participating - less than four full days until it begins, actually - so I just wanted to ask that, if you haven't already, you read the post I already made, and help support me in this venture any way you can, whether it be donations or even just spreading the word.

Also, as an extra FYI, any gaming that I do on the PC during the event, I will be live-streaming. Justin.tv will automatically tweet the URL when I go live, so if you're not already following me on twitter, that's what you'd need to do to get that info.

Links to my twitter and to donate, are at the top of the page from the little button and the massive header image, respectively. Thanks again guys, for any support you've either given or about to give, and I look forward to not getting any sleep over a 24-hour period for a good cause =)

Play Games. Heal Kids.

2011-09-05T17:08:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been looking at two charities that have received some recognition amongst gamers; Child's Play and Extra Life. Child's Play is definitely the more famous of the two as it's the charity run and supported by the Penny Arcade guys, as well as the charity that all donations from the Desert Bus For Hope event go to. Last year they raised two point two million dollars. All donations from that charity go towards buying things on an Amazon wishlist, set up by the participating hospitals to buy video games and such for the sick children to help raise their spirits.

Extra Life is a very similar but entirely different charity, that as well as being primarily supported by gamers also involves gamers on a more person-to-person level. Think of it as the Terry Fox Run, only with playing video games instead of running, if that helps. Somebody who signs up as a player, agrees to play video games - whether they be on console, PC, facebook, or their iphone - for 24 hours straight, and they get people to pledge a certain amount per hour played. So if you pledge $1, you're agreeing to donate $24 to the hospital that the player has chosen to support. The donations attained go directly to the hospitals. Extra Life asks their players to raise a minimum of $100 but of course, hopes for more.

Do NOT get me wrong. I absolutely believe that both charities are amazing and are doing great things. But I personally believe that Extra Life helps the sick children in a much more direct route; helping cure the problem, instead of helping them cope with it. Sometimes the cure isn't attainable in the child's lifetime though, and I understand the need to make them as happy as possible in the interim.

This October 15, I will be participating in the Extra Life charity event, and I encourage you all to support me in supporting them by pledging. This is my donation page.

For further information about Extra Life & Child's Play, I encourage you to read their websites, which can be found at http://www.extra-life.org and http://www.childsplaycharity.org

Transmogrification and you.

2011-08-20T23:25:00.000-04:00

Since Blizzard announced the upcoming Transmogrification feature, pretty much everybody and their brother who has a WoW-related blog is writing about it. Now it's my turn. Everybody's talked about how excited they are (or aren't) about it and how it opens up a whole new way to customize your character. If you look around online, nothing I'm saying here is breaking new ground. It's all been said before. But I've been having to repeat a lot of it lately, so I'm finding it necessary to just have it all written down in one place so I can just say "Read this => http://dft.ba/-Transmog"

Here's what we know about Transmogrification and Void Storage so far (and remember, this isn't released yet, so it's all subject to change):

- Void Storage will function kind of like a secondary personal bank. It will have 80 slots, and it will cost money to unlock.

- When you place something into Void Storage, it removes all enchantments, stats, class requirements etc on the item. If you take the item out of Void Storage (assuming you can, of course, which we don't know yet) it will come out as just the default version of that item. Void Storage essentially just stores the ID number of the item you've placed into it.

- To apply a look onto any item, the look you want will have to belong to an item that you've placed into Void Storage.

- The item you're borrowing the look from must be of the same type. You can't make Plate look like Cloth, and vice versa. This goes for weapons too; no maces if you're really using swords.

- There is an exception to the item-type rule with ranged weapons. You can make bows look like guns, guns look like crossbows, etc.

- You can not borrow the look from Legendaries or Heirlooms. Now running around Org with Thunderfury or Zin'Rokh unless you actually have them equipped.

- Some "silly" items (with "silly" determined by Blizzard) will not be able to have their looks borrowed. No dual-wielding fish or frying pans.

- You must have the original item to borrow it's look by placing it into Void Storage. Blizzard has stated that they're looking into a way of you getting some looks back such as the DK starter set, but no news on that yet.

- The item you're borrowing the look from must have stats. This means that you won't be able to transmogrify your shirt or tabard (unless Blizzard changes this for them). It also means, you can't have your dagger look like the Acolyte's Dagger - though you could make it look like the Ogre Pocket Knife which uses the same model.And no, the armour stat on an item doesn't count as a stat.

Here's what we don't know about Transmogrification and Void Storage:

- Fucking lots

If you haven't figured out how you want your character to look like, there are plenty of resources to draw from. There's a whole slew of websites devoted to RP sets. There's also the WoW Model Viewer, which can help you sort through all the models for a specific slot (with toggles for item type so you can turn off the types you can't/don't use), and also help with making sure you don't look like a clown (unless that's the look you're going for) with all of it on at once. I heavily recommend using WMV in conjunction with Wowhead so you can look up the item that you like (when you select an item in WMV there are two numbers that follow the name, the first is the item number), and you'll be able to see if that specific look is attainable. Some may not be, but Wowhead also has a little tab for each item that shows what other items share that item's model (often with just a recolour). If you're looking up a lot of items, copy http://www.wowhead.com/item= and paste it into your address bar followed by whatever number you want to look up.

Here are links to just a few RP gear blogs. There are many out there. Feel free to leave me links to any I didn't mention in the comments (as well as any corrections I may need to make) below. I'll edit them into my post.
It's For My RP Spec!
Oh, Azeroth
The Visual Roleplay Gear List
The WOW Debutante
World of Warcraft Fashion Guru

Blizzard Dev Blog Posts on Void Storage & Transmogrification:
Void Storage
Transmogrification

(Edited for additional links.)

MMOsolation

2011-08-19T22:10:00.000-04:00

Many many thanks to The Wayward Initiative for allowing me to do a guest post today. If you haven't already read it, please do so now. Linkety-link.

"stfu dabos ur a baddie"

2011-08-11T01:04:00.000-04:00

In between recording, editing, and uploading videos to Youtube, I've been playing WoW here and there. Despite having plenty to do on my main, and being in no way bored of him, I've been playing on the Oceanic Nagrand server. The time zone difference between mine and the server's is such that when I'm playing after midnight, I'm right in the middle of their prime time. I play Alliance-side on a Worgen DK named Dabos in a tiny tiny guild. Like 9 toons, but only two accounts tiny. I'm the only one in the guild to have logged on in the last month. On the toons there anyways. The owner of that guild is a friend of mine from Kael'Thas.

None of this is important, really. I'm just pussy-footing around the topic at hand, which is incidentally the topic of this post. That phrase was said to me in party chat maybe twenty minutes ago, and it's ruined my night. I was in a Utgarde Keep run, and the tank had commented to the mage that he'd never seen anybody kite mobs into his aoe range before. The hunter in the group said "what's that?", and I responded with "the opposite of what you're doing" because the hunter had been kiting away from the tank, and had been pulling mobs before the tank was ready.

Then the hunter said "stfu dabos ur a baddie". I don't know if he meant my dps, or something else, but that comment really bothered me. I have "/assist focus" macro'ed into every ability, and the first thing I do when I enter a random is /focus the tank. I'd taken Howling Blast out of my rotation because the aoe from it was almost getting me killed on every pull in previous randoms [with different people]. Maybe Howling Blast not being in my rotation any more was hurting my DPS. Maybe the fact that I could only attack what the tank was targeting due to the" /assist focus" macroed into my abilities. I don't know, I don't run dps meters.

But to be told that I'm a "baddie" really bothered me. It bothers me more, maybe, that I got called one by somebody whom as a tank would drive me insane. But I stfu'ed, and I finished the run. And I don't want to play WoW any more. At the very least, I don't want to group with people any more. I've mentioned in previous posts that I don't want to be dead weight. This type of stuff really bothers me. Fuck, maybe he was just being a douche or trolling. I shouldn't let it get to me. But I can't help but wonder if I really am a "baddie".

Unrelated to the above, I won't be posting any more videos to Youtube until August 29th. I received an automatic notification from my ISP that I was at 90% of my monthly bandwidth limit, and I still have 18 days left in that time period. I can't afford overage costs, and I might still end up going over the limit from normal usage. 10gb [my monthly limit is 105gb] really isn't that much to spread out over 18 days.

This post has no proper ending, unless you count this sentence, which you shouldn't (due to poor sentence structure).

Anatomy of an Audiosurf video

2011-08-08T10:36:00.000-04:00

Audiosurf is a great game, if you're a gamer, and music-lover such as myself. It's the only game I've ever recommended to people both in real life, and using Steam's recommendation thing, and I've been recommending it pretty much since I first got it. Whenever I get a new computer, or do a system recovery on a current one, it is always the first game on Steam that I install. It is also the bread and butter of my videos on youtube.

Other than WoW, it's the first game that I started putting footage from up on the web. I use videos from it to keep my recently-imposed schedule of (at least) one video a day, as it's fairly simple to put an AS video together. So I figured I'd do a post, going through, step by step, how I put together a video for it these days, while I edit some videos of it.

First off, I'll launch the game itself, and I'll sit down and play through an entire album by an artist. I'm editing videos from four albums (one album each) by Celestial Aeon Project, Metatronik, Obsidian Shell, and Oleg Serkov. As I play through an album, I'll write down the names of songs where I got Clean Finish and Stealth bonuses. If you're unfamiliar with Audiosurf, those are just multipliers that affect your final score, that you get by finishing a track without having hit any grey blocks and having any hit blocks on your grid. This gives me a rough guide of which songs from each album I'm going to be editing.

Playing through an entire album, and selecting the songs that I did well on is a lot more efficient than how I used to select tracks for editing. I used to select a specific song, and record footage of that specific song. Sometimes it would be an easy ten minutes of recording, but a lot of the time, one single track could take upwards of an hour to record a good run, with minimal framerate lag from the recording software. I still do a song or two, here and there this way, (most recently, my nyan cat video) but I mostly do it the album play-through way now.

After I've recorded the footage, and made my notes about which songs might be edited, I go to the artist's Jamendo page, and the pages for the songs that I've selected. For what I'm editing today, the first video I'll be working on will be a song from Celestial Aeon Project's album "The Fall of Ragnaros". Looking at my notes, I see that I did well on the songs "Stormfront" and "To the Depths". I open these pages up for a couple reasons. The first, and most important reason is to check which Creative Commons licenses are being used for the songs. Some of the CC licenses prohibit the use of music in the way that I'll be using them. Usually, the same license will be used for the entirety of an album - like with this album - but sometimes, there is a different license being used for a song, and the song's page will reflect that. In the case of this album, the CC license that's been used means I can use these songs for my Audiosurf videos, as long as I credit to the artist (accomplished by a link in the video description), and don't make any money off of the use (accomplished by disabling monetization of the video on the Youtube (if I had a Partner account on there and was making money off my videos by default, which I'm not, so it's something I don't have to worry about right now). I leave those pages open until I'm done my editing process, to speed up the writing of the video description (as I link to the artist's page as well as the page for the track so people can download the song, and support the artist).

Moving on, now that I've looked at the licensing info for the songs that I'll be looking to edit, I open up the audio files for those songs in my media player of choice. I use VLC player - despite owning a pro copy of Winamp - for the sake of convenience, but which you use really has no impact on this process. Since Audiosurf videos - at least, in my case - are more about the music, than the skill of my playing (though that's still a concern, otherwise the songs I did poorly on would still be in the running) I want to choose the most interesting track to listen to. For this album, it's a relatively easy decision, as I only did well on two songs. Both songs are good songs, but to me, "Stormfront" is the more interesting track, so that's the one I'll be editing.

It is only at this point that I finally launch my editing software. Once it's launched, I import the folder that FRAPS outputs its footage to. I did a lot of recording lately, so I have 641 GB of Audiosurf footage sitting in there, as well as another 295 of Torchlight footage that I'll be editing in the future. Needless to say, the importing process could take a bit of time to do. I usually put the kettle on while I wait for it to import. I then select all of my Audiosurf footage and place it on my timeline. Yes, all of it. Looking at it on the timeline, I skim through until I get to the footage of the specific song I'm looking to edit, which in today's case is about 18 minutes in. Then, I select the video tracks that involve that song, and put them on the second track of my video editor. If I'm editing more than one song I'll go ahead and do the same thing for the other songs as well. After I've moved the clips that concern what I'm going to edit onto the second track, I remove all the other clips from the first track.

Once I've done that, I go back to the media room section of my editor, and select all the (Audiosurf) video clips that don't have a little green checkmark on their preview image, I right-click them, and then select "Delete from disk". Audiosurf videos are the only videos where I do this, as there is a lot of footage of the game, that I straight up, just won't be using, and the raw footage that FRAPS puts out takes up a lot of hard drive space. When editing footage from other games, there's a lot of back and forth in my file usage, and transitions, and sometimes even if I'm not going to use the video footage from a clip itself, I may use a freeze-frame from it, or the audio track. But how I handle my Audiosurf videos is a lot more cavalier, and I use an entirely different method for them.

Once I've removed the unused video clips from my hard drive, I go about with the editing process. This normally doesn't take too long, but it depends. For my "album in one go" clips, it's just a matter of splitting the clips at the start and end points of the song, and removing the unnecessary footage from the timeline. For the songs where I specifically chose that song, it's usually the same process, there's just more footage being removed from the timeline, as well as a bit more video splitting. For those videos I'll do the necessary editing at the beginning and the end, but I'll also split the clip right as the video fades from the summary pre-loading screen to the track. When you hit restart while playing a song, that doesn't get shown again, and I like that information to be shown at the start of the video. I then go on to the clip where I finally succeed at completing a track, and go frame-by-frame to the very first frame after the Esc menu is off-screen, and split the clip there. I remove any footage that happens to still be between those important splits, and I close the gap on the track. None of this extra work is necessary for today's footage, though, so I just have to do my basic splits and timeline removal.

At this point, I like to watch the whole clip in the preview pane to make sure that I don't have any small gaps between my video clips that will show up in the final project as a quick flash of black. It's important to note that when dealing with raw footage recorded via FRAPS, that most video-viewing software isn't properly equipped to deal with the raw data available in the unprocessed footage, so there may be the appearance of extreme framerate lag. Video editing software's preview pane is better equipped for viewing this type of footage, but it is still going to look like there are dropped frames. I'm just looking for gaps in my playback, at this point though, so I try not to let those "dropped frames" bother me. Assuming, everything is okay, I move on to the end stages of the editing process.

What I do next depends on a couple things. If I intend to upload footage from another game today, or I've more videos that I intend to edit more videos, I'll save the project, and close the program. When I want to produce the video, all I have to do is open up my editing software, open the project file, and I have my fully edited video waiting to be rendered. If the video I'm editing is not an Audiosurf one, or it's a video that I want to use as the picture, for a picture-in-picture of a different video, I'll go to the produce tab, and render it as an mpeg-2 NTSC 1080p video. Your video editor's codecs and desired picture quality may differ, but I render all my videos in 1080p. For those videos, after they're rendered, I'll often go look at the finished file, and see if there's any issues with the final product that I didn't catch during the editing process, and if so, I'll fix them, re-render and watch it again. I don't do any of these pre-upload renders for my Audiosurf videos any more, as the editing process for them is fairly straight-forward, but I do this for all my other videos still.

Assuming, everything is ready to go, whether the video is an Audiosurf one or not, I'll go to the Produce tab again, and select the Youtube tab within that tab.This tab takes a lot of the work out of uploading my videos - though sometimes it doesn't work properly and I still have to manually upload. I fill in my youtube account information, and I select 1080p from the quality drop-down menu. This information is stored in between sessions, so I only really have to do this once. I then fill out the title, description and tags for the video as well as selecting the category for the video. The title and tag fields are a bit more limited than uploading directly from Youtube, as you can't put as much text in, but this is still handy if what I'm uploading is more than 15 minutes long. If I'm uploading a video that is more than 15 minutes long, PowerDirector automatically splits the video at the 15 minute mark, makes a playlist on Youtube for the videos, and fills in the tags, description and title for each of the videos, appending a"(x/y)" (where x is the current part number, and y is the total part number) to the video title. At this point, I also decide whether I'm going to upload the video as public or private. If you upload a video as private, you can then make it public later, by going to the video details on Youtube and changing it in the privacy settings. It will still show up in your subscriber's subscription boxes once it goes public, but depending on how long ago it was uploaded, it may end up being buried under more recent stuff. I generally select public, but sometimes I'll upload it as private, and then make it public the next day. It's up to you.

I then hit the Start button (Not to be confused with Windows' Start button), and it begins the rendering and uploading process. I generally do this even when I know that the uploading portion of it isn't going to work, as the video still gets rendered into files that you can manually upload, and are conveniently split at the 15 minute mark, if applicable, and are in your desired Youtube video quality. Also, in the case of my videos, I still end up with a 1080p quality video in a smaller filesize than I can easily get by rendering using a different codec. Depending what time it is, while the program is doing the rendering/uploading process I'll either go to bed, read a book, or play a casual game.

And that, is how I go about, from start to finish, making an Audiosurf video. And remember, for all that work, these are videos that take the least amount of work for me to publish. Hope this was informative, and thanks for reading. There will be four new Audiosurf videos today, so be sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel to catch those, or follow me on Twitter so you can see my updates on their release.

Divergently Focusing

2011-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

The worldwide premier of the documentary about raiding in World of Warcraft - "The Raid" - was tonight, and it was a really good movie. A little short, but put together very well. The music composition was amazing, and the editing was phenomenal as well. I'm a little surprised that there was censorship of the cussing, and what words were censored versus which one's weren't, especially considering that the general subject matter was gaming, and as I said on twitter while watching, gamers "fucking like to fucking swear". If you missed the livestream release, for the next 72 hours the video will be free to view - though I don't have a URL for that at this time, I'll post a link on my twitter tomorrow once I do. You can also purchase a standard definition DVD from createspace right now. I'm going to touch on that again briefly at the end of this post, but before I do, it's time to talk about my favourite thing: ME!

I've been working pretty hard lately at a lot of things. For a long time now, I've been recording game footage and editing it together with music. If you know where to look, you can even find a video tutorial I made back in Vanilla WoW about how to tame a worg from UBRS solo. Because at that time, you needed to tame different pets to learn their ranks of specific abilities, like max rank Howl in the UBRS worg's case. The video was poorly put together, but I made it and released it for the internet to enjoy.

It's been a long time since I made that video, and I've come a long way in a lot of ways. I've gone from using FRAPS and Windows Movie Maker, to using FRAPS, and a whole bunch of other programs. Those who read my twitter will have, presumably, read about all the difficulties I had with a recent video I made about fishing in Runic Games' Torchlight. That video has been completed, and uploaded, though still unlisted, and I used five different programs to put it together - not including Torchlight itself. I'm still not entirely happy with it; I'd like to work some more on the transparency I used in some of my overlays, for example. But I know that if I spend any more time on that video I'm going to lose my mind.

I still make a whole bunch of mistakes along the way.. During the editing of that fishing video, the audio track in one of the important bits became unsynched. I ended up having to rerecord that entire section, and then I ended up not using the recorded audio anyways. In a recent recording of gameplay footage, I forgot to tell FRAPS to record the audio, so I have an hour and a half of footage with no audio, that I can't rerecord. I'm still figuring out how I should approach the editing of that footage.

But I've progressed. I understand the basics of picture-in-picture, layering, transparency, fading audio. I now know that the vast majority of credits sequences in videos on Youtube are done incorrectly, and I also know that if the people who made those videos are aware of something being wrong, they can't put their finger on what. There's all kinds of tricks I've learned that a lot of people don't necessarily think about when they watch a video, but still register on the subconscious level.

Even the most basic of my videos, the Audiosurf ones, have come a long way, even in the relatively short time I've been doing them. While I still only use two programs to produce them, a lot more work and thought goes into them than you'd think. For every 5 minute song I play and upload, there's probably half an hour of raw footage going into the video editor. By it's very nature, uploading gameplay footage is copyright infringement, Audiosurf footage even more-so. But to help reduce the content ID matches for those videos, I've removed any previously uploaded videos that had content ID matches, and I now exclusively use Creative Commons licensed stuff, usually from Jamendo. On most videos featuring music, there's usually at least one person who wants a download link for the song, and it's nice to be able to legally provide one. None of this is stuff that you think about when you're just watching videos, until you start making them.

I'm devoting time to make sure I have good production quality on my videos. I try to make sure I'm constantly releasing stuff, and tagging it properly. I'm looking into 3D animation software to make myself a logo that I can overlay at the start of my videos. I'm looking into music composition software so that I can have copyright-free music in my introductions. These last two are highly worrisome, as I don't have any real talent in these fields of creativity, but I have such a strong idea of what I want that I have trouble describing it to others.

All this work is partially because I actually enjoy the whole process, but I'm trying to get noticed now. That's why I recently changed the URL for this blog (Please update your links & bookmarks if you haven't already) and for my twitter. Unfortunately, I wasn't unable to get the same account name across the various sites, so it's split between the names "reverendunk" and "ronove", but it's a lot less confusing than it was before. It's also why at the top of my blog, there's now links to follow me on twitter and subscribe to my videos on Youtube (But you're already doing that, right? ;p ). I've even resorted to changing my user name on Audiosurf so that any time I play a song, and get on a scoreboard, whether I'm recording or not, there's a chance people will check out my Youtube channel. I would love to do this type of thing for a living, as while I love cooking, it is a very high-stress profession. It probably won't happen, but, to that end, I've applied for an Ad Sense account, and will apply for a Partner account on Youtube once I reach a certain subscriber threshold. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing right, and if it's worth doing right, it's worth getting paid for. That's the theory anyways. I've no idea how successful this venture is going to be.

Now, for those of you who tuned into the livestream premier of "The Raid", and stuck around to the end for the contest details... A lot of you were surprised, and annoyed - myself included - to discover that the contest was only available to U.S. citizens. This is doubly odd, given that it was a worldwide premier. I can almost understand why they excluded other continents, but I'm slightly surprised that Canada wasn't included. I get that it's international, but really, it's on the same continent. Anyways, I've decided to hold my own contest. It's going to be a little different though. For one thing, there's not going to be any tangible rewards, and another is that it's not a real contest. You see, for something to be considered a contest, there has to be people who win.... and people who don't. Ronove don't play that game. If you enter the contest, you "win". What you "win" is an unlisted video made just for you, to your specifications.

There are some conditions of course. Your specifications can not cost me money. I'm currently unemployed - by choice, mind, but unemployed nonetheless - so I don't have any income to spend on this. If you want gameplay footage, and I don't own the game (though I do own a lot) you're either going to have to buy it for me (not recommended), or chose another game. They can't be lewd, rude or crude. That's a bit broad, but I'm slightly worried that if I go into specifics on that somebody might find a loophole, so let's just say that "lewd", "rude", and "crude" are terms to be defined by me on a submission-to-submission basis.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is subscribe to my Youtube channel (link at the top) and then send me a message on Youtube saying that you've subscribed, and what you want your video to be of, with "Focused Divergence" as the subject. There is no entry date for this contest. I shall do this in perpetuity. Only one entry per person, please. I know it's fairly simple to make another account, but let's go with the honour system here.

Your move, Reg

2011-08-01T00:11:00.000-04:00

It's an unfortunate thing that playing video games still has a social stigma despite how many people do so. My father even has video game consoles, though he doesn't play them very often. Embarrassingly enough, he actually has more than I do. Or did prior to my move, though even then I only had a PS3 and a DS.

When people ask me what I did last night, there's less condescension if I consistently state that I did nothing - with all the implications of a complete lack of a social life behind that statement - than if I were to say that I played computer games all night, despite the fact that I'm able to play computer games with my friends. Not all, in fact a large majority, of the games I play can be played with friends, but some can, and thus there's more social interaction involved.

What I think is even more unfortunate is how even within the limited circle of those who play video games, there's a stigma against those who play MMOs. It makes very little sense to me, really. They justify their bias behind things like how those who play them don't have social lives, and their wasting their lives playing the same thing every day, but I don't buy it. There's certainly people who do play MMOs all day, and only MMOs, at the expense of real life priorities, but the same can be said for other games. And as for the monotony behind playing the same video game every day, I'm sure there are still people who play Counterstrike and that was first released in 1999 - the same year as Everquest. And MMOs by their definition do have a lot more social interaction than your average computer game. Granted, some people choose to ignore that aspect and prefer to play alone, but those other people are still there and there will be some interaction.

Even within the group of people who play MMOs there's cliques that form around the discrimination of other MMOs. If you look at Vendetta Online, there are people comparing it against Eve, since they are both space-based MMOs. If you log into EVE, and mention World of Warcraft, you'll get made fun of. There's a phrase that constantly gets repeated in that game that when an Eve player quits in favour of WoW, the average IQ of both games goes up. If you log into DC Universe Online people will contrast it against Champions Online. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.

As far as entertainment goes, video games are relative new-comers, and MMOs even more-so with in that form of media. But when you get down to it, it's a form of entertainment. How does sitting down to play a computer game make me a "loser" when spending the same amount of time watching a movie doesn't? Why should I be discriminated against by people I know in real life for spending my evenings playing video games? Why should I be wary of mentioning to people who do know I'm a gamer, that I play WoW? It shouldn't matter, but somehow it does. If it didn't I wouldn't have had to post the journal I kept of my journey to a different blog to separate it from my gaming blog.

Just a thought.

PS: Shortly after I published this, Rock, Paper, Shotgun published an article entitled "Look, Single-Player People Are Just Better". You aren't helping, guys.

2(CaO) • SiO2 • 0.9-1.25(H2O)

2011-05-09T22:04:00.000-04:00

I spend the greatest portion of my waking hours at my job. Even more-so lately. The vast majority of my co-workers either cannot or will not pull their own weight. Yesterday, I worked an eleven hour shift because there was lots of work to do, and I didn't trust my co-workers - at least one of whom actually makes more than me, though since I'm done there in a couple weeks, that doesn't really matter - to do anything. When I left work last night, there was a very small list of things remaining to do. If something is on the list, I expect - as one should - it to be done. When I went in to work this morning, two hours early because I had to do inventory for my boss whom is on vacation till Wednesday, and because I expected one of my coworkers to call in "sick", I walked into a restaurant where the number of things to do when I left the night before consisted of about six, and a grand total of none of them had been done. This annoys me so much, I don't even know where to being with it. For the last eight or nine years of working there, the amount of work that the night crew does has been spotty at best, though the current crew is by far the worst we've ever had. I've had to work shifts as long because we're busy, sure. But not because I can't trust the people that work there to, I don't know, work, or to even show up. I take my job seriously; probably too seriously. But I get paid to do it, and it's called "work" for a reason.

This is my Armoury. That isn't some cosmetic gear set that I wear while bumming around in Orgrimmar. That is what I use every single time I'm logged into my main. Since the release of Cataclysm, my experience with the expansion has consisted of a small amount of levelling my alts, a couple hours in levelling in Vashj'ir on release night before going to bed so I could have some sleep before work the next day, and lots and lots of Archaeology [and the flying through the new zones that that entails.]

Aside from the aforementioned little burst of actual levelling on release night - which thanks to a full quest log, let me ding 81 [I was halfway through 80 before leaving Northrend] - I levelled to 85 from Archaeology. I've not done any of the new dungeons. I'm under-geared. I'm unprepared. And while I may - may, I say - have some skill, it doesn't offset the handicap I have against me. My friends and my guildmates - not to be redundant - may be willing to have me tag along with them to stuff I really shouldn't be present for. They've even managed to bring me along a couple times to places I wasn't particularly prepared or geared for in Wrath. But the preparation & gear gap was never as large then as it is currently. I don't particularly want to say no when such an invite is extended either, because it's nice to hang out with friends making pixels die and seeing big numbers on my screen, even if my numbers aren't that big comparatively speaking. But I spend too much of my day with the burden of other people not pulling their own weight to be the concrete shoes on my friends' feet.

Homeward Bound - I

2011-04-19T01:37:00.000-04:00

Let my boss know today that I'm leaving town on June 1st, and that I'll need a letter of recommendation before I go. The look on his face was worth it, just by itself, I think. Spent about the last five hours or so tooling around with all kinds of free map and gps apps for the iphone before caving and buying the one that got mentioned more than once - GPS kit.

It does everything I need it to do, and damn near everything I want it to do. Serve as a GPS, obviously. But it can also work off of offline maps, actually follow a damn route [I haven't played with that yet, but it's in there]. You'd be horrified to see just how many of the GPS apps - even some of the pay ones - are really just prettified versions of the google map app that comes with the damn phone. I don't need pretty. Pretty wastes battery. I need function. I need to be able to tell at a glance - assuming I can get enough of a signal for the GPS - where I am, and about how long before I have to pay attention instead of just enjoy the walk/bike. It also has the option to post your current position to Facebook and twitter. I'm not sure if I'm going to use the Facebook one, but I definitely intend to tweet at the end of every day of hiking. Even set up a twitter account for it with *gasp* my real name. Linkety link

It's remarkable how stressful planning all of the preliminary stuff for my journey is. I have a headache just from trying to find the right GPS app for my purposes. I predict much swearing as I pore through the Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario provincial maps for the TCT, as I scribble down which trails I have to go on for optimal travel. I downloaded Google Earth so I can plot the distance of one branch versus another, and so I can get a decent idea of the terrain. One trail, for instance, may be 5km shorter than another and end at the same point, but it may be all hills and valleys while the longer one could be flat, and thus actually take less time to travel. On the other hand, the longer branch may seem to have a more promising view. Then once I figure out all that, I need to download the trail specific maps for my route so that I don't pull a Bugs Bunny, and take a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

The name of the trail itself is an incredible misnomer as well. It's called the Trans-Canada Trail, but it's a whole bunch of different trails that interconnect, run through cities, or disappear entirely. It's not done, you see. There's probably about 6,000 km of it that they still need to finish according to the official website. Just a quick glance at my current location has three trail ends nearby.

I'm not even sure if I intend to hike it or bike it. Biking it will definitely save me some time, and allow detours away from my main destination to do things like say "Hello" to Hello Tauren [though I'd have to regretfully decline any of her lauded baked goods due to diabetes =( ], but I'd need to buy a new bike as well as a whole bunch of accessories for it to make travelling such long distances with it easier and safer. Saddlebags, a man-powered flashlight should I get caught in the rain, or still travelling after sunset due to uncampable terrain. That could easily set me back $1500 on top of all the normal gear I'd have to purchase. But, that initial expense may end up being cheaper in the long run, as hiking the trail could easily take double or triple the time, and I'd have to resupply along the way. These are the sort of things I have to come to a decision on soon.

Obviously I need to buy other travelling accessories. I'll need bear spray as well as a bear horn. I'd need a big hiking backpack if I'm walking as well as a normal backpack for food so it's separated. If I'm biking I can keep most of my personal belongings in the saddlebags and have a large-ish backpack for for run-over and food. I don't want to keep the food on the bags attached to my bike because if wildlife gets into it, I run the risk of having my mode of transportation muffed up. I need a good one-person tent, preferably one rated for the arctic. I don't expect to deal with those kinds of temperatures; that's part of the reason why I'm waiting till June, but they're sturdy as all get-out. Sleeping bag, either an air mattress or some foam pads. I've not slept in an actual real bed for something like six years now, so oddly, sleeping on the ground is going to be one of the easier hardships during my travels.

At the end of every day, I'll be tweeting my GPS location, and writing stuff down in a notebook. Every couple of days I'm either going to have to stay in a cheap hotel or a youth hostel. I'd avoid that if at all possible, but a lot of the travelling depends on my phone's GPS so I can't afford to let the charge run out. Especially if I need to contact emergency services [not even necessarily for myself. Us humans are bastards, and while I may be a prick sometimes, I'm not a bastard. I'll help when and where I can]

This trip is something I've wanted to do for at least five years now, probably closer to eight, honestly. I definitely made it a goal as something to do before I'm thirty. The original goal was to travel the whole thing, but I think I'd be content with the distance I have before me. It promises to be an incredible journey [cats rule, dogs drool!]. But right now? It's a headache.

It's the middle of April. It snowed here today.

2011-04-17T19:46:00.000-04:00

Well, it's certainly been a while since my last post, and it's likely to be a lot longer before there's another. Probably at least double, but closer to triple the time gap there was between this and my last. So in the interest of my sanity, I'm going to get a couple posts that I've had in my system all jammed in here like some crazy clown car of words. Be warned, this is probably going to be a big Wall of Text. Possibly even a Bear-Wall, but we'll see.

I might as well start with an explanation of why there's been such a dearth of writing as well as why that dearth shall continue after this gets published. When I first made this blog it was to catalogue my progression on levelling my druid alt via gathering professions [Archaeology/Herbalism/Mining]. At the time, doing that in between doing some Arch runs on my main [Faluzure] were the only things that kept me playing WoW. My enjoyment of Cataclysm expansion was kind of curbed somewhat thanks to Arch. To clarify, I like Archaeology a lot, and what I've seen of the revamp of the old world zones I love to bits, but I'm OCD enough that I didn't want to touch any of the 80-85 content on my main until I'd gotten all of the artifacts from Arch. That's why my main is 85 and still in ICC10 gear. That OCD-ocity was also putting a severe damper on my enjoyment of the game, because it was taking so long to do [especially in terms of completing the Nerubian artifacts, and especially especially because of that fucking Zin'Rokh].

When making this blog though, I was also fully cognizant of my ability to get distracted by other shiny games. That's actually where the name for the blog came from. I tend to focus heavily on what I'm doing, but i can also be easily distracted, thus Focused Divergence. So, while I named it knowing full well that I probably wasn't going to be writing about WoW all the time, when I wasn't playing WoW I felt guilty about it and thus wouldn't post about it. All of my previous posts were about WoW in some way, either by talking about why I hate goblins in the game so much, or comparing Rift to it, or talking about mods that I use[d] but damn near all of them were made while I wasn't not playing WoW.

But now, I've gotten myself into a bit of a gaming distraction loop, really. I've not been playing WoW, because I was enjoying myself more playing Rift [and seriously, that game got a lot right, right from the get-go. It's the only MMO I've played that was a serious contender for me continuing to play for more than 3 months total, post-exposure to WoW]. I've not logged into Rift for a month or more, because Dragon Age 2 came out. I've not been playing Dragon Age 2 [well, I've logged 8 hours on it, according to Steam], because you can import your save game from Dragon Age: Origins/Awakening for background plot-specific reasons. And with 199 hours played according to Steam [though that number is off because I've gone to bed with the game still running because I was tired, it's still within about 20 hours of accuracy], I've not finished my 'nice guy' playthrough of that yet, and I still intend to do a 'this is how I would react' and a 'bastard' run as well. And there have been games along the way that have briefly caught my attention that have been preventing me from playing that right now. Audiosurf is, as always, a constant distraction, especially since things are starting to pick up at work, as it's nice to just kinda zone out and basically just listen to music. The current 'Potato Sack' thing that's going on that's added content to the games in that bundle on Steam, that in theory, can lead to an early release of Portal 2 is put a stop to Audiosurf usage for me though. The content added to Audiosurf prevents me from playing my music with the character I prefer. It's possible that I would be able to do so if I completed the level I get forced into, but I'm rubbish with the character you're forced to use, so I can't be arsed to bother.

So now you know about the games that have been distracting me, and my flawed logic behind not posting about them. On to why the lack of posts shall continue. On June 1st, I'm heading back home to Ontario. Now, unlike any normal person, I'm not driving [I don't have a car, and even if I did I couldn't legally drive it], I'm not taking a bus, I'm not flying. I'm walking. And not walking with a side of hitchhiking, either. I'm walking the Trans-Canada Trail. Google's driving directions for the distance between where I am now, and where I intend to end up is 3,542.6km. I can't imagine walking the trail to be any shorter, so I figure that assuming I average 10 hours of hiking at an average of 4km/h that will be at least two and a half months of walking. Obviously some days I'll hike more, and some days less, and I still need to figure out how long my route is actually going to be, but either way, it's going to be a decent chunk of time. I think it'll be worth it in the end, but I like hiking anyways. Though I will admit, that half the enjoyment I get out of hiking is getting to come home and have a nice soak and sit down. In between now and June, I have to work out a whole bunch of things. I need to make sure my utilities and stuff get cut off at the proper day, I need to entrust my P.O. Box key to somebody to check for any extra bills so they can email me if I have to pay a bill online. I have to trust somebody else with my computer and a few other things to be shipped to me once I arrive at my final destination. I obviously still need to chart out my route for all the hiking I'll be doing as well as get supplies, such as a sturdy tent, hiking backpack, all those goodies. Plus, you know, food to start me off on the journey and a list of what type of stuff I might need to pick up along the way, should the trail happen to go through a town. It goes through my home town, for example, though by that point I'd pretty much just be showing up on my dad's door. Oh yeah, there's that too. While I will be telling my dad that I'll be travelling, I'm not telling him that my home town is my destination. I know that if I show up he won't have a problem with it, and I want it to be a surprise. And honestly, how much more surprised would you be than to discover that your son just walked across the country because he missed home [which I do - and I need a change of pace from where I live.]

Topic shift, oh my. And this is also where things start to get a bit Faulkner-y. Which is to say, that it's going to get a bit more stream-of-consciousness style of writing, as I flip rapidly through the posts that I've had in my backlog and been poking every now and then. Every topic change from this point forward will have a new paragraph, but not every new paragraph will be a new topic. I don't like having paragraphs as long as the previous one is on my screen as I write this, but I was always taught that when writing, a new paragraph should always denote a change in subject matter; though again, not necessarily a topic change.

I don't know exactly when I first found out that Big Bear Butt Blogger [ no link for you - he's high profile enough that if you don't read his stuff now {and shame on you} or have read his stuff in the past ] had a character on my server - and in the same guild as me too! - but I do know that when I found out, it was a hell of a shock to me. I actually hadn't read more than maybe one or two of his posts prior to realization because he was fairly druid-centric and I didn't play druids at all. But in terms of WoW-blogging he was a name. There's those names that if you've been to any WoW-related site they just seem to pop up. Tankspot, Petopia, Big Red Kitty, the Greedy Goblin, Big Bear Butt. These are names that even if you haven't read anything they've written, you've read of them. So yeah, bit of a shock to me to discover he had a character on Kael'Thas in The Zug Initiative. Even bigger shock to me, was upon him discovering I had recently started a blog of my own, asking for my URL. Now that I've actually started reading his stuff regularly, it doesn't surprise me at all that he'd ask for it because he's a hell of a guy, but at the time it was Big Name being interested in Little Name with genuine interest. It was encouraging, and a little daunting.

Sometimes at work, or on the way home from work I would find myself composing blog posts in my head. When I'd get home, I'd have a seed to work a blog post from, so I'd water that seed a bit, the thought would stagnate, I'd save the draft and walk away, never to return to that specific seed.

One of my favourite things about blogging is coming up with titles for the post. I was immensely proud of the pun in the titles for my addon posts, and I went into my goblin-hate post knowing generally what I was going to write about, but specifically what I was going to name it. I write the titles for my posts before I write anything else down at all. Even with this one. And it always ties in to something I'm saying, either the actual subject, such as my Leeloo arch posts, or the mod posts, or the way I'm going to end the entry, such as the goblin-hate one or this one.

I found that after I started blogging I became annoyed with my writing. At least in terms of using a first-person narrative. I've done enough creative writing on my own - and when such things mattered, I got good grades on them. Some of my poetry has even been published. But when writing my own viewpoint on certain things, I tend to be a bit more stream-of-consciousness than I'd like. Probably not in a true Faulkner way, but even a little bit annoys the hell out of me. I've not a liked a single one of his books that I've read and I have tried to like them. I'm going to go on record and state that while As I Lay Dying is a great band, it's an absolute shit book, groundbreaking or not. I've also noticed - and in one case - pointed out phrases and words that I tend to use a lot. I use "tend to", "however" "also" and "and finally" a noticeable amount. Noticeable to me, though possibly not to anybody reading what I've been writing. I overuse the hyphen and brackets to note a side though in a sentence. I use square brackets when I should be using parentheses, solely because they're faster to type. I'll start a thought at the beginning of a paragraph and get slightly side-tracked along the way. Not a noticeable amount until I go back to that main thought near the end of the paragraph and then the return seems jarring. Not to say, that I've ever been too satisfied with my style of writing in the past outside of blogging, but at least in that style, I've had some vindication by others saying, essentially "this is good enough.' This is good enough too, but it doesn't leave the same feeling at the end.

There was one more thing I was going to mention here, but I can't remember what it was, and none of my saved drafts seem to be mentioning anything I haven't already touched on. So I guess this it for this post, minus a few points that I remembered as I started this sentence. Since I know that a decent chunk of my guildies both happen to be Canadian and read this, if possible I'd like to meet up with you during my voyage home, though obviously even with some of those whom live closer to me - Chawa & Regis - I really couldn't provide too much of a time-line as to when such a thing could happen. I know when I'm leaving, but I haven't told my boss I'm leaving yet, so I don't know when my last day of work would be, or when my days off while working are more than a week in advance. I obviously don't know how long my cross-country hike will take me - I can make guesses, like I did way up top, but I won't know until I actually do it. Oh yeah, and I don't really know where any of you live. I know the city for Chawa & Regis, but some of my fellow [Canadian] guildies could live in B.C. or Nunavut which wouldn't really be along the way for me.

Oh, and for those curious about the tie-in between this entry's title and the entry itself, I promised Pacheco of Hello Tauren a new post before the heat-death of the universe.

The other half is killing people.

2011-03-11T22:26:00.000-05:00

Hmm.... What to blog about?

I could write about recently taking two characters to 20, and how I did some PvP along the way. How I levelled my crafting professions, making negative money, yet coming out ahead. Somehow. How I've reconnected with some friends whom I haven't played with since around Burning Crusade's release, and how much fun I'm having just chilling out with them. Having my old main off-tank [if that makes sense] tank for me again is a joy that brings back old times. But all that happened in Rift, and I'm not quite ready for another "omg less than three rift" post.

I could write about levelling Leeloo. Or archaeology levelling in general. Or my massive obsession with solving every artifact ion my DK so that I can go back to Vashj'ir and Hyjal to experience the quests that I haven't touched since Cataclysm's release night. An obsession that has left me flying across the world [of Warcraft{!}] at level 85 and still mostly in my ICC10 gear [with a trinket upgrade, and a few sidegrades]. But I haven't even logged in in about a week.

I could write about writing. Blog writing specifically, and how it has changed - even in this short a time - the way I think about writing things down. How I pace some of writing so that it's regular, but not too regular, and how a 'schedule slip' such as this one - even though i don't have an actual schedule - gives me feelings of guilt. About the phrases that I use in writing repeatedly, that I never really noticed until I started doing this. About how many of my friends blog. But I've been poking away at that post for a couple weeks now and I've made very little headway on it.

I could write about how much I love the guild I'm in, and the friends within it that I made both prior to and after joining it. And how cool it was to actually meet some of my guildies. How they were such a wonderful breath of fresh air after leaving my old raiding guild, even when I'm at my most bitchy, people-hating-est. But I just did.

I could write about the circumstances that lead to me leaving my old raiding guild and how much of a blow to my fragile self-esteem that whole situation actually was. How, despite my current guild note reading, "Be gentle. He's fragile." bothering me to no end, how accurate ti actually is, thus me not causing [too much of] a fuss about it. But that's a can of worms I'm not comfortable opening up in such an ... open ... place as this. Nevermind the fact that some of the people from that old raiding guild happen to read this.

I could write about five paragraphs about what I'm not going to write about, when I already knew what I was going to write about before I pulled up the page to write this. Write, write, write. I've used the word too much, it's starting to look odd to me now. Nevertheless, I'm going to use the word again. I'm going to write about goblins. Specifically, my severe racism against them.

In the years that I've gamed, I've had a go at more than a few games in the MMO genre. I've played Everquest, WoW, EQ2 briefly, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, DC Universe Online, Star Trek Online, Champions wait for it Online, City of Heroes/Villains, Aion, DDO, Rift, WoW, even some of those free-to-play Chinese ones that were rubbish to play, but hey! they were free. But the very first MMO I played - excluding a 3 day trial of EQ that I loved, but couldn't upgrade to because that was a decade ago and I didn't even have one credit card, nevermind the multiple that I have now {as well as the associated debt} - was Final Fantasy XI. Anybody who's ever played that game can probably already see where this is going, but I'm going to meander and get sidetracked along the - ooh! shiny! - way.

I started playing that game for a multitude of reasons. I liked the franchise, for one. Final Fantasy was the 3rd game - excluding Mario 1 / Duck Hunt - I played on the NES [Mario 3 and Legend of Zelda were the other two] and I'd played every FF game since. I'd even played Vagrant Story. I've since missed some along the way - FF Tactics Advance 2, Dissida, Kingdom Hearts [Yes it counts. No, I still haven't played it. I've also never seen any of the Godfather movies. I probably never will either.] - but I've still played a decent chunk of the franchise. Haven't always finished them, but I don't finish a lot of games I play, for various reasons. Regardless, it was a Final Fantasy game. More importantly, it was a Final Fantasy MMO, and that brief trial of EverQuest was enough of a taste of MMOs that I was craving more. And most importantly of all, it was a Final Fantasy MMO that a friend of mine played. I could give him the money to pay for my subscription [it was a bit more complicated than that, but that was the gist of it]. And before I got my own account, he let me make a character to fool around with, to see if I liked it.

Looking back on the game now, it's a marvel at just how bad the game actually is.Terrible account management and downright obtuse billing. No real questing per se [there are quests and missions, but they didn't give you any xp, and rarely did you get a tangible reward, let alone a useful one]. A broken economy. There was a limit to how many auctions you could put up, and all bidding on auctions was done semi-blind. You could look at the price history of any item, and see that the average price was, say 500 gil, but you wouldn't know if the ones currently up were actually for sale at a 1 or a 10'000 gil price until you actually bid on them. Want to increase your carrying capacity from 50 slots to 55? Do a wallet-braking quest. 55 to 60 slots? Even more wallet-busting.

While there are some interesting things, like linkshells/pearls which allow to essentially be in multiple guilds at once - though only talk in one at any given point - and the job system, which effectively cures altitis, it's all implemented in the game in such a way that, after the fact [and during the fact for a lot of people], that makes you think Square-Enix actually hates their players. This is incredibly apparent when you get down to the crux of any MMO; levelling your character. Levelling 1-10 you do so, and while you'll die here and there, it's definitely doable. Levels 10-15 you can do solo, but it's safer to duo that level gap with a friend. It's not safe, you understand, just safer. Levels 15 all the way to the level caps [fianl cap at 75, but artificial caps at 50, and every five levels after] you'll be grouping.There's no way around this. If you want XP, you have to group. If you're lucky, you're levelling one of the core classes that every group needs, but that doesn't mean things will be easier. A lot of the time, logging on for the sole purpose of levelling, either entails a long string of bad groups, sitting on your ass in town trying to put together your group for an hour, or sitting on your ass in town all night waiting for a group that needs a whatever.

Once you're in a levelling group, things don't get any easier. While FFXI was hardly the first MMO to include an experience point debt - EQ did it for one, and then compounded it with making you run back to your corpse naked to get your gear back - it is the only MMO I've played where it's felt so much like a giant neon in the sky that reads, "FUCK YOU". You lose 10% of the experience needed for your next level if you die. Need 25'000 xp to reach level 17 and die? You've just lost 2'500 xp. And if you had only accrued 2'200 xp, you've just de-leveled. And unless you've managed to get a great group [assuming you've managed to get a group at all], some time during your levelling you will die. And don't think for a second that after you've levelled to 75 you've avoided the hateful grind that is 'true' levelling in this game, and just have to worry about keeping a de-level protection buffer up here and there. Thanks to the subjob system, you'll have to level at least one other job to 37, and depending on what that job is, probably another to 18..

Every monster in the game, just to remind you how Square-Enix feels about their player-base [I'm falsely attributing here, but it doesn't feel false], is a complete and utter bastard. There's a monster type called Rarabs. They're essentially Rottweiler-sized kangaroo rats. And they will kick your ass. At some point in the game you will get killed by essentially an oversized rabid bunny. No joke. Also no joke, one of the most personally gratifying things for me when I tried WoW while still playing FFXI was seeing a bunny in the game, and punching it in the face. I ran around the Valley of Trials for at least an hour just killing critters. Once you start levelling in groups though, you tend to stay away from fighting them unless you're at risk of losing your EXP Chain [you string together the killing of higher level mobs by killing them quickly enough and you start to get bonus experience; EXP Chains are at the core of every decent levelling group], because they're not worth the hassle. A group of heroic adventures avoid bunnies, because they're more work than they're worth.

Levels 15-20 are done in a zone called Valkurm Dunes. A lot of people call it Valkurm Hell. Or just Hell. It's a zone packed to the tits with groups, often competing with each other for pulls, often full of people who've just discovered the sign in the sky - the FUCK YOU sign - and are new to grouping, and always full of people 'training' mobs to the zone edges because they aggroed something either they or their group can't handle. Your levelling bread-and-butter in this zone are dragonflies, crabs, and goblins. Goblins in FFXI can be both a blessing and a curse for your levelling group. Goblins have two abilities that have a bearing on your group levelling situation. They probably have more, but these are the only two that matters. The first is a big ol' massive stab - I can't remember what it's called but it works out to pretty much being kicked in the groin with spiky boots, while being elbowed in the face. With spiky bits. If you're lucky, that hits your group's tank. If you're lucky, your tank survives it. If you're me, it hits you. And you die. And you delevel. The second is called Bomb Toss, and this is the one that can be a blessing. At any point in the fight, the gobbo might pull out a bomb and toss it [an ability called Bomb Toss involving tossing a bomb!? What is this madness] The toss can go one of two ways. The goblin can mess up his through and drop the bomb at his feet which will kill him. Or he'll throw it properly, and the bomb will do AoE damage - that usually kills somebody. Usually me.

Dying is a part of any MMO. You learn from your mistakes and move on, right? But no monster in any other game has killed me as much as the goblins in FFXI. Goblins my group were fighting killed me. Goblins somebody else's group were fighting killed me. Goblins chasing me across the zone killed me. Goblins chasing somebody else across the zone killed me. Goblins. Killed. Me. A. Lot. And every time I died - often with the joy of joys that is a de-level - was that much longer I had to be in zone that was overpopulated in both goblins and morons. In the entire time I played FFXI, I had one good group in Valkurm, and they were Japanese so that was frustrating from the language barrier standpoint [pro-tip SE, if you have to learn another language just to accomplish anything, you're doing it wrong. {and yes, I'm aware of the auto-translate tool's presence. You're aware that it was a flawed piece of shit, that often made working with the Japanese players harder, right?}] But you learn from your mistakes and move on, right?

So once I'd had a taste of what an MMO could be - and this was Vanilla WoW, so this wasn't even necessarily what an MMO should be, just what it could be - I left it behind like a Prom baby. And I realize that that is an incredibly tasteless simile, but it's the most apt one for how I felt about FFXI when I quit. I've been playing WoW off-and-on for six-ish years now. I've had my ups and downs with the game in that time, but generally I've enjoyed myself. But when I came, I - to put it mildly - didn't like goblins. I still don't like goblins, even though WoW's goblins are nothing like FFXI's goblins. FFXI ruined goblins for me forever. In every game ever.

So now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Faluzure begins casting Wall of Text

2011-03-03T21:41:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned this before, but I've been spending a lot of time lately playing Rift. I've been enjoying myself quite a bit, but I don't think it will replace WoW for me. The only games [according to Steam] that I've logged nearly the same amount of hours as I have for WoW are EvE Online, and Mass Effect, and I've quit [and restarted] EvE more often than George Jetson got fired. And other MMOs that I've enjoyed this much have included Aion and DC Universe Online, and I don't play either of those any more. Even when I quit, I always come back to WoW. There's a reason it has the nickname "World of Warcrack". But Rift started to get me thinking about WoW.

A lot of MMOs get compared to WoW, either during development or after release, often unfavourably. Such is the curse of publishing an MMO in the aftermath of the titan that is World of Warcraft. But Rift, doesn't suffer in the shadow of Blizzard-Activision. At least, not in my opinion. In fact, in quite a lot of ways, Trion Worlds did things better. I'm of the opinion that WoW could stand to learn some things from Rift. Yes, you read that right.

Before I get started here, it does bear mentioning that the launch of Rift has been by far the smoothest launch for an MMO I've seen. The list of MMOs that I've been present for the launch of consists Aion, Champion's Online, DCUO, and Star Trek Online. There's been a few issues here and there, and one of the crafting professions is temporarily disabled due to player exploits, but it's been pretty smooth. No server crashes, no inability to log in, nothing. Part of this, I think is that they gave online reviewers access to the beta and, here's the thing, paid attention to what they said. Game reviewers colour a lot of people's views [or at least help them decide if they're on the fence] on a game, so it's important that any issues that a reviewer mentions - assuming it's fixable, of course - get fixed. Preferably before release. Prior to release, there was a patch that dealt with a few minor things in the PvE aspect, and a couple things that were explicitly mentioned in the BFF Report PvP review.

Let's start with one of the most obvious things that WoW could stand to learn from Rift's example. WoW's base UI is pretty simplistic,though they've taken some measures recently to improve on it [the new guild interface for example], and I know that they still have to consider older machines when they do any changes. The computers that could run WoW at launch can still run WoW, though with a lot of the settings turned down. But when you get right down to it, if you want to do more than change the scale of your whole UI or add a couple bars, you have to branch out to addons. And that's fine. My roommate raids comfortably with pretty much the default UI; he has mods, but from what I've seen they're more along the lines of Omen and Gatherer, and maybe Grid.

Rift's UI, straight out of the box, is pretty good. Everything's placed in a pretty logical function, raid frames darken or brighten depending on you're being relative range to the players in the raid. And it's customizable in-game. Not to the extent that is possible with mods in WoW, but that's not the point. Aside from your generic scaling of the entire UI, there's a menu option to re-arrange your UI. Want your minimap to be in the middle of your screen, just above your hotbars? Done. Want your quest tracker and group/raid frames to switch locations? Done. Don't want to see your pet frame or pet action bars at all? Done. And each element can have it's own unique scale and transparency. But now that you've done that to your liking for one character, you'll have to set it all up manually on any future characters, right? Wrong.

Any future characters you make on the same shard [read "server"], whether they're of the same faction or not can import the settings you've put together from any other. And not just UI positions either. You could import your UI from ToonA, your keybindings from ToonB, and your macros from ToonC, if you so desired. That piecemeal approach only works for characters on the same shard, but handily there's a way to import the whole thing [or just the UI placement, I'm not sure] for characters on other shards. There's slash commands. Just log in to the one character and type "/exportui name" and log on to the other and type "/importui name" That's it. And this is in the default game, at launch. Rift doesn't have addons [Yet. The developers aren't opposed to them, to my knowledge.]

There's a few other things that add a great deal to the convenience and ease of gameplay, but they're minor enough that I'm only really going to gloss over them. From your bag bar, it's possible to search your bags if you know the name [or even part of it] of what you're looking for. When at a vendor, your available cash is on their pane, so you don't have to glance down [or up, depending on your UI placement ;p] at your bags to see if you can afford to buy that new sword. Next to your gold display on the vendor window is a little button, that when pressed automatically sells all your vendor trash, leaving all your consumables, crafting materials, gear, etc unscathed. AoE looting. Let's say, you've managed to aggro a whole bunch of mobs, and then successfully kill them all. You're now surrounded by corpses to loot. Normally you'd have to loot them individually, but in Rift, if multiple corpses are in a specific radius of the corpse you loot, you loot them all, simultaneously.

Multiple crafting professions [I'd say all the non-gather ones, but I've only tried weaponsmithing, armoursmithing, runecrafting and outfitting so far] have the ability to break down items for crafting materials. Runecrafting works much like enchanting in WoW, in that you break down [or you would, if it wasn't disabled right now due to player exploits] greens and make runes that can put minor enchantments on specific slots of gear. If you're an armoursmith, you can break down pieces of armour for some metal bars and skins [as well as scraps, which can be combined into salvaged parts which, I'm told can be used in higher-level crafting]. Same deal with weaponsmithing, only you're breaking down weapons, instead of armour. These last things are hardly new approaches to crafting in an MMO, but it does stand to reason that a weaponsmith should be able to figure out how to get something usable out of an axe that is no longer useful, etc.

And finally, public grouping. This one gets it's own paragraph because it ties into a major thing I want to touch on. Public grouping, works like this. Any time you come upon somebody killing something you need to kill for a quest, you can click them, and click a little button on top of their portrait and instantly you're in a group together, and you both get credit. This is handy for normal questing, which is mostly done solo. But the public grouping system [which, if you're curious, you can toggle on your own portrait to private so that people can't randomly group you if you're feeeling anti-social {or douche-baggy}] works just a bit differently for the titular Rifts. When you're near a rift, and at least one other person is too, at the top of your screen [again, assuming basic ui positioning] there's a button labelled "Join Public Group". You click that, and then then you're in a group together, and - assuming the other person is at the rift for the same reason you are - you work together the help close it. This is extremely helpful, especially at some of the larger rifts or during invasions, when there's thirty some-odd people there, all busy making stuff dead or alive depending on their calling/souls [class/specs].

The titular Rifts, as they should be in a game called RIFT, are major points of the game. If it helps, [and it certainly helps me, in terms of describing them] they're like the pre-Cata elemental invasions, only they're everywhere. Some are minor rifts, that you can close all by yourself. Some are major rifts, where you'll need help. And every now and then there's invasions. Four or five major rifts and about a dozen minor ones open up at the same time, and start sending troops to outlying towns to conquer them. If you close all those major and minor rifts in time, a boss spawns. The reward system for closing rifts is interesting too. It kind of works like honour points in WoW. There's a specific currency used to buy stuff [gear, recipes, rift-related powers {one reinforces a wardstone in a town, which helps prevent that town from being captured}], and you acquire that currency by closing rifts. The amount of currency [and other minor rewards] you get for closing a rift, though are based on your contribution. You're going to get a bunch of the lower tier currency and a few of the higher tier ones if you're healing the group, or if you help kill the boss spawn. You might get a few of the low tier currency if you arrive when the boss is at 5% and help from there. And you'll get nothing if you stand around in the group doing nothing.

The Rifts also provide something that I, at least, have found lacking in WoW in a long time. Feeling heroic. Ask yourself this: When's the last time you did something in WoW, where you felt like a Big. Damn. Hero? For me, barring the rescue of lowbies from their certain death here and there, it was back in vanilla, when I killed Nefarion for the very first time. That was a long time ago. A lot of the time in WoW, I just feel like a glorified delivery boy, bringing So-and-so twenty bear asses, or at best, a mercenary, killing a boss for phat lewtz. Closing a rift, makes me feel good. Helping defend a town from an invasion? Makes me feel heroic.

And finally [again], a sense of humour. Now this is one thing that WoW doesn't lack. Blizzard-Activision are more than willing to make a joke. The gnome-killing fireball quest in Uldum, being a quest-giver in Hillsbrad, the inclusion of the hunter NPC that walks up and down the road from Orgrimmar to Razor Hill, by the name of "Tednug", and his pet cat, "Scratchfever". But a lot of other MMOs out there seem to have lost their sense of humour somewhere during development. This is just one example [the only one I've encountered so far, but I'm sure there's more]: When you kill a critter, you get a one minute debuff, essentially calling you a terrible person for just killing that rat/cat/deer/whatever. However, every now and then, when you kill one it's lootable. And that loot? Is a tear. With a tooltip with flavour text along the lines of "That coyote was someone's mother" or "I hope you're proud of yourself". And those tears can be collected for an Artifact set [I've not completed an artifact set yet, so I have no idea what the reward for doing so is]. The Artifact set itself, has flavour text that reads, "You're such a mighty warrior, aren't you?"

All in all, I've been enjoying myself in Rift, and I still enjoy playing WoW, but Blizzard-Activision could certainly learn a few things from Trion Worlds.

Oh, and if you're curious to see the BFF Reports on Rift, here are the links. Because no post by me is complete if it doesn't have any links!
First report
PvP report
Dungeon Guide report

Assistant Professor Leeloodallas, Multipass!

2011-03-02T14:49:00.000-05:00

That's right folks, it's time for another quin-level Leeloo update.

This section of levelling took way longer than it should have. Partly because I haven't been playing much, and partly because I apparently received a blow to the head and decided to go back to the Eastern Kingdoms after I dinged 34. I know what I said earlier, and it's still true; Eastern Kingdoms is a horrible continent to level archaeology on if you're horde and can't fly yet.

However, I was getting bored of things over on Kalimdor, and I was hoping that grabbing all the flightpaths in between each digsite would make things easier on EK as well as add some variety. I'm not too sure that I've accomplished the former as digsites in Redridge still entail running from Searing Gorge through mobs several levels above me, bu it definitely added variety. I've been dying in all kinds of new [to Leeloo] and interesting locales.

Truthfully though, aside from the grabbing of flightpaths in Eastern Kingdoms I haven't died all that much, which is a bit surprising considering how poorly geared Leeloo is. Aside from the three initial pieces of heirloom gear that I started this challenge with [Stained Shadowcraft Tunic, Spaulders and the Venerable Mass of McGowan with Crusader], her gear is kind of rubbish. The auction house at 30 had a complete dearth of useful gear, and at 35 what little there was that was an upgrade had exorbitant prices. 50g for some new pants? Bugger that for a lark.

I've also come to the conclusion that this would be a lot harder if Leeloo was anything but what she is, a druid. There are other classes that would do better, in terms of survivability like a hunter or a paladin, but survivability plus ease of travel? Druid hands [paws?] down. If you're thinking to yourself that at level 20, it wouldn't make a difference at all, but I've not bought any Riding skill yet. I'm not even sure I've been able to afford it yet, except at the time of my visit to Orgrimmar upon hitting 35. But the thing is, I've talented for a faster cat form, glyphed for a faster aquatic form, and if I'm outdoors I have travel form. These are hardly the top of the class, as it were, in the realm of faster travel, but they're constant, and relatively cheap.

I'm still bleeding money like a hemophiliac, though. The double-gathering is bringing in tidy sums of money, of course, but that money, as I mentioned when I started this silly venture, is being held elsewhere. Thankfully, my higher level gains has opened up both new zones to dig in, as well as better quality relics. Now the ones I'm solving for don't just vendor for 1g; sometimes they vendor for *gasp* 2g. So upon dinging 35, I was actually sitting on a mountainous sum of 15g - which I then promptly spent on training my druid [I didn't train at 34 due to not needing the newly unlocked abilities] and her profession skills. Mining and herbalism set me back 9g.

Finally, as the title of this post implies, Leeloo got herself some archaeology achievements and is now the proud owner of a Druid and Priest Statue Set as well as the title "Assistant Professor". That title has actually saved my life now, believe it or not. I was at a digsite in ... I honestly can't remember where, but there were nagas everywhere and it wasn't Darkshore. There was also a boss-level [boss-level, not ??-level] naga there that aggroed me despite me trying my very best to avoid her. She hit me twice fo 200-odd damage apiece when I was saved by a fellow archaeologist, a blood elf priest. After solidly thwapping the naga, and me thanking her, she let me know that she only saved me because of my title. Misplaced reasoning aside, that was pretty nice.

And now... Screenshots!

LUA's Your Daddy (And What Does He Two)?

2011-02-28T18:05:00.000-05:00

I really should be making another Leeloo gathering post today, but I've been playing the head-start of RIFT so the vast majority of my playtime in WoW has only consisted of scanning the auction house in the background while I catch up on my RSS feeds. Or while I make blog posts. And I'm finding that I really do enjoy making blog posts. So today, I'm going to hit up some mods again, while reusing my LUA pun.

TukUI
This is kind of an all-in-one, as is usually the case with mods that contain "UI" in their names. It's a very nice, minimal [and resolution-independent] package that takes care of pretty much everything. It handles your buff bar, minimap, bags, bars, nameplates, and to a limited extent also works as an LDB broker [like Titan Panel or FuBar] It also comes with a toggle between a dps/tank UI and a healer one, though I've not tried the healer one. This mod, no joke, replaced ten mods I was using previously [SexyMap, FuBar, Bartender, Bagnon, Sunn - Viewport Art, Recount, Tidy Plates, PitBull Unit Frames, SatrinaBuffFrame and TipTac] and uses about as much memory as one of the less mem-hog ones I listed.

This mod is pretty flawless right out of the box, and it's super easy to configure [though you do have to download something additional to do so; that's on the download page linked above as well]. If you do end up using it - or one of the three edits of it [ElvUI, Eclípsé UI, and Hydra UI] - be sure to stop by their forums. Aside from being pretty friendly there, they have a sub-forum for mods that have been built from scratch or have been skinned to mesh with the TukUI look [not the other three, sorry].

My only real gripe with it is the LDB broker portion of it. The way it is set up only allows for a maximum of eight things being displayed, which for me, is pretty limiting, but for others may be more than enough. Even so, I heavily recommend this mod.

Flight Map Enhanced
This mod does a lot of things that makes taking a flight anywhere in the game a lot more convenient. Amongst other things, it adds a list to the side of the map at the flightmaster separating flightpoints by their zone, with each zone collapsable. It shows on your world map any flightpaths you're missing, independently of whether you've fully explored the zone or not [a failing in Blizz having hard-to-see symbols on the new maps], though you have to talk to a flightmaster first for it to get a list of what's missing for that continent [and talk again once you've grabbed some, to refresh it's list]. You can click [or shift-click, alt-click, etc] anywhere on the world map, and not only will it auto-select the closest flightpath to where you clicked as your destination, it will show an icon on your minimap directing you to the closest flightpath to you.

I would love for it to have some optional TomTom support for finding new flightpaths, and directing you to the nearest fp once a destination has been selected, but their absence doesn't hurt the mod at all. And I may end up submitting a ticket or coding in support for it myself. We'll see.

TomTom
I originally installed this mod for integration with another mod that I not only no longer use, but can't even remember the name of. It puts an arrow on the screen that points to specific coordinates in a zone [it doesn't have to be the one you're in], as well as a range, and it updates as you head towards/away that waypoint. Upon death, it will instantly generate a waypoint to your corpse [or the instance portal if you died in a dungeon]. Despite the fact that I constantly use TomTom, I'm mostly using it via other mods and not by itself. Still, all-around a good mod [es evidenced by my wish for integration with Flight Map Enhanced, above].

ProspectBar
Despite the name, this mod handles milling, disenchanting, unlocking and opening of boxes, as well as the titular prospecting. I've only used it for milling so far, but it's amazing for that [way better than Panda, honestly]. It, oddly enough, puts a tiny movable [and collapsible] bar on your screen, that adds buttons that correspond to your herbs [and ores, boxes, and greens too, though as I said, I've not explored that aspect of it yet]. You click the button and presto-change-o you've milled [etc.] that herb [brackets are fun {nested brackets more-so}].

Well, that's it for this dose of addon-related blogging. For the amount that I actually say in these posts, the amount of time it takes to write them is kind of ludicrous. This one took about two hours to put together, though that's pretty much entirely due to the massive amount of linking I did in my rundown of TukUI [seriously, 15 links, not counting the one actually linking to it].

As always [let's pretend I've been saying this from the start {and that I'll remember to say it in the future}], I hope you've enjoyed my writing, or at the very least didn't hate it. And I hope you've found something new and shiny to ease your WoW experience. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an overlord I must abase myself before.

LUA's Your Daddy (And What Does He Do)?

2011-02-26T20:54:00.000-05:00

Like a lot of WoW players, I use addons. I use a lot of addons. According to the Curse updater, I currently have 25 installed [and I'm using a few others from alternate sources, so let's say... 30]. And this is assuming that I count all the multi-piece mods as one [all of the DBM stuff for example]. This is also the fewest amount of mods that I've had installed since I was in a raiding guild and we were still progressing in Molten Core. I constantly install, remove, and modify the addons I have installed. Emphasis on the modify. If I find an addon [or mod; I'm using the terms interchangeably here] that has one feature that I like, and three that, while nice, I'll either never use or are done better by something else I have installed, I'll go into the code and snip it out.

So, I thought it might be nice, from time to time, for me to go through mods that I've tried recently or am currently using indefinitely and give mini-reviews. I'll be avoiding the mods that are usually installed by the average user, whether they should be or not [Omen & GearScore for example]. So let's start things off nice and easy, shall we?

!BugGrabber and BugSack
These two mods are essential to me due to the sheer amount of add-on editing that I do. I've been fooling around with programming for fun for the past ten years or so, coding by hand everything from a javascript to LiteStep to Linux. !BugGrabber does pretty much what you would expect it would do based on the name; it grabs any LUA errors that pop up during gameplay and makes them faff off [unless you call them via the slash command]. BugSack is another mod by the same author that works hand-in-hand with !BugGrabber [it has a hard dependency on it, so you can't run BugSack without !BugGrabber]. What it does is takes all those LUA errors you may or may not have gotten and sets them aside for you to view in full, copy/paste to an outside source, etc. Usually after I've messed around with a mod's code, I'll log in and run around for an hour or two doing dailies and archaeology, and then have a look in the sack to see what - if anything - I need to fix.

_NPCScan and _NPCScan.Overlay
There are other mods that do what these two do - SilverDragon for example - but I personally find these two be easier to work with. _NPCScan, much like !BugGrabber above, does just what you'd think; it scans for NPCs. Specifically BC, Wrath and Cata rares for the achievements [or in the case of the TLPD, a mount]. It also allows you to add custom NPCs to scan for. All you need to know is the mob's ID number. Other information like what continent/zone it's in, helps reduce the memory use by only scanning for it in that area, but it doesn't really use that much to begin with. The separate Overlay mod puts an - surprise, surprise - overly on the map [world, mini or both - your choice] that indicates the mob's patrol path as well as spawn points if you desire to camp it, though that only supports the NPCs that the main mod scans for out of the box.

One gripe that I have with _NPCScan is that it doesn't have a config option within the game that allows you to select which raid marker it will put on the mob once it's found. It will put on the green triangle only, unless, of course you modify some files.

Overall, _NPCScan is a convenient mod to have if you're after those achievements, and the ability to add other mobs to search for improves it's potential greatly. Though the more mobs you add, the more often you have to clear your cache [info on that is on the main addon's website.]

Two additional things for _NPCScan that are of note:

If you desire to change what raid marker this addon applies to found NPCs, it's a really simple edit of one file.

Go into the addon's folder [Your_WoW_Install_Path\Interface\Addons\_NPCScan\] and open _NPCScan.Button.lua with any text editor [I recommend Notepad++, but whatever floats your boat] and search for the text "me.RaidTargetIcon = 4; -- Green triangle" [line 19] and change the 4 to the corresponding number for your preferred icon [The list here will tell you the numbers if you don't already know them]. You can change "Green triangle" too if you so desire, but there's no need; the double dash denotes a comment in the code, it has no real bearing on the final result. Save the file and you're done. [Obviously, unless you know what you're doing, you should leave the rest of the file alone ;p]

If you're like me, you're not content to have it just search for BC, Wrath and Cata rares. You want the mod to look for all rares. Everywhere. Well, that's some time-consuming work - searching for rares, rare elites, finding their ID number, blah blah blah. I know it's time-consuming, because I did it. A couple warnings before I give you a download link though =)
- First of all, you'll have to clear your cache a lot more often if you want to continually scan for the lower level rares.
- Secondly, I know that I'm missing some, so if you find a rare that doesn't trigger the mod, then please tell me the mob's name, as well as what zone you found it in.
- Thirdly, I did leave four mobs out intentionally - the Scarshield Quartermaster and the three beast bosses in the Servant Quarters of Karazhan. If you want to add them yourself, by all means, feel free, but I won't.
- Finally, how to "install" the bloody thing. Install _NPCScan and log into the game with it enabled at least once per character that you want to run it on. Then download my file. Browse to Your_WoW_Install_Path\WTF\Account\YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME\Your_Server_Name\Character_Name\SavedVariables\ and paste the file there. When asked to, override the original file with mine. You'll have to do that for each character you want this done to.
WARNING: If this messes up your WoW, your computer, your social life, your dog's eating habits, whatever - it shouldn't, but if it does - it is not my fault. Download here.

I think that about does it for this post tonight. This has taken a lot longer to put together than I originally thought it would, and I have some Juicy Bear Burgers just waiting to be nom'ed.

Polymorphic Monotony

2011-02-25T13:47:00.000-05:00

I originally wasn't going to post this, as [a] it's a mini-rant, and [b] it's something that I've already mentioned too much in guild chat and in our forums. But while I was in the shower I thought of this post's title and, well, I can't let something like that go to waste. So I guess I'll just have to go into more detail.

Before I get started, I should also mention that this is pretty much an "Accentuate the Negative" post. While I am complaining here, I'd like it to be clear that I do like WoW, and druids, and all their capacity for shapeshifting. It's the models that I have some issue with. The models for Travel Form and Aquatic Form, specifically. In and of themselves, they're perfectly cromulent models, and they're incredibly useful spells. But they're bland.

Perhaps they only seem bland because of the semi-recent changes to Cat Form and Bear Forms, and all the variety that they offer, but my point remains. They're bland. Travel Form is the greater offender in this case, since the model for that spell is actually a placeholder. Travel Form was originally going to be a stag, but they put in the cheetah model we know and love [and we do love it] as a placeholder in beta to be changed later. It's been three expansions. But both models have been in since release, and if nothing else, compared to a lot of other stuff we're seeing in-game they're poly-count is really quite low.

In all honesty, some of my complaints about travel form rise from the fact that I'm colour-blind [anomalous trichromancy, protanomaly for those curious]. It's not a huge deal as in a lot of games, WoW especially, it doesn't effect too much of the gameplay for me. I don't turn on WoW's colour-blind mode, for one thing. It does make Audiosurf a bit harder than it has to be though. And obviously, some of the more red-tinged zones tend to give me a bit of difficulty [Badlands, and Hellfire I'm looking at you], but I've adapted. Interestingly, it also seems to affect some forms of yellow as well. Not entirely sure if that's normal, but c'est la vie. That does cause some other interesting interactions though. Gathering in Badlands is doubly hard, if using the minimap to notice nodes. And seeing where I am on my screen while in Travel Form and in Azshara... I've been told by others that they've lost track of themselves momentarily there due to the camouflage tendencies of the cheetah pattern against the yellow ground with high vegetation. I pretty much have to shift out and cast a spell to find myself.

In other games I'd have an easy choice. I'd either stop playing the game, muddle through [I'm an exceptionally stubborn individual], or modify/replace whatever model was the root of the problem. While not the easiest thing to do in a lot of games, it's not all that hard to figure out. Thanks to the internet, if I can't figure out how to do something, about five minutes of looking on Google, not only will I have found thirty people who know how, but whom have done it better than myself. I have very little graphical talent, so if I've gone the route of model-editing over model-swapping, I usually end up going to these resources anyways.

WoW, however is a special case. There's plenty of models to choose from. If I wanted Aquatic Form to look like a makrura or a grouper, I could. If I wanted Travel Form to look like Ashtail or a different cat model, I could. It wouldn't even be very hard compared to some of the model swaps I've done in the past. But there's a caveat. I could change the Travel Form model [and incidentally have all mobs that use the model look like whatever I switched it to as well] but I won't. Blizzard's Terms of Use [You know, that thing that you don't read and you click the button that says you agree to?] disallows model swapping; "You agree that you will not, under any circumstances: ... D. modify or cause to be modified any files that are a part of the Game Client or the Service in any way not expressly authorized by Blizzard;". In other words, if I model swap, I run the risk of having my account shut down. No, thank you. I'll struggle on.

Also, as others have pointed out to me, I'm sure a redesign on Travel/Aquatic Forms [and hopefully Moonkin as well, though that's a form I don't use and thus have no opinion on] are in the works, though probably not even middling in their priorities. Soon™

Lord Magmathar hates archaeologists!

2011-02-24T18:33:00.000-05:00

I've decided to take some ... creative liberties ... with my pre-posted posts. That is to say, I'm going to be editing them to be a bit more bloggy, and leave out some unnecessary details. I did some minor editing to the first post, but this is going to be a bit more comprehensive. This one is going to combine my 20-25 & 25-30 posts.

Upon reaching 25, my /played was 16 hours, 59 minutes, 10 seconds [so 20 to 25 took about six and a half hours]

Initial impressions... This was a lot more challenging than I thought it was going to be, though only 2 deaths total. Also, Archaeology as a druid is kind of weird. I can survey in kitty/travel [and I'm assuming flight once I get it] form but when I go to loot the relic I get shifted out into caster form.

Started off my Arch/gathering in Eastern Kingdoms which turned out to not be so smart. That continent has to cater to essentially three locales for it's initial digsites due to how spread out the undead, human, and dwarf/gnome starter zones are. My choice of zones were initially 2 in Hillsbrad, 1 in Wetlands, and 1 in Redridge. I managed to finish up 3 digsites, before it became obvious that this continent was a bad idea. My locations were Redridge, Hillsbrad, and Duskwood.

Also, just to finish those three digsites, I had to fight through every inch of ground, with the lowest level mob I fought in them being 24 [Being only level 20 myself at the time], and often more than one at a time. I managed to get a full level out of those three sites.

I then switched over to Kalimdor like a good little Hordie. Most of my experience is, as a surprise to no-one, coming from herbing/mining and defending myself so I can get those nodes. I did end up completing two quests at 24 though.

At various digsites in Ashenvale, I was assaulted by Ursangous and Sharptalon, whom when you kill them drop quest-starter items. I turned those quests in for 2535xp [Ursangous] and 2405xp [Sharptalon] respectively. Each of those quests accounted for about 11% [22% total] of level 24.

At this point in this experiment I was pretty much bleeding money, thanks to training all my new skills and selling my herbs/rocks on a separate toon. Overall, I am enjoying myself though. I fully expect to be broke when I go hit town though, thanks to the joys of glyphs and gear upgrades

In between the 20-25 & 25-30 updates, I replied to some comments in the thread about mod suggestions, my self-hatred/insanity, and answered a couple questions. I also posted a mini-update of video footage of this process that I had uploaded to youtube. Due to youtube's time limitations on videos it had to be split into two parts which can be found here and here. Apologies in advance if you live in Germany. While recording it picked up the music stream I was listening to in the background, which caught me by surprise. Content ID matches on some of the songs have led to the videos being blocked in Germany.

Level 30!
Nothing too remarkable about the 25-30 leveling gap, though my death rate increased five-fold. Which is to say that 20-25 I died twice, and I died at least ten times this section. As a bonus these deaths were exclusively from the Stonetalon dig sites. One falling death up near the northern end, and nine deaths from the Grimtotem & alliance guards by the dig site near Malaka'jin.

Level 30 did unlock some new dig sites for me. No longer am I constrained to just Ashenvale, Azshara and Stonetalon Mountains! It gave me at least two more zones to dig in; Desolace and Southern Barrens. The astute viewer of the screen shot below will also notice that the Night Elf relic in progress is the Druid and Priest Statue Set. This is one of the few relics I have yet to complete on my main [/fistshake] and it will be Leeloo's first rare.

The title for this post was inspired by a comment from Chawa of The Wayward Initiative.

BAD IDEA (Take Two)

2011-02-23T21:21:00.000-05:00

This post, as well as the next couple, actually started off as a post on my guild's forums on the 15th. A little over a week later (that is, today) it occurred to me that given what I'm doing, a blog would actually probably be a better idea, as well as allowing me to write about other things without having to start up a new post, or leave it buried in a thread that nobody reads. Now it can be in a blog that nobody reads!

Original post follows:

So... I had an idea pop around my head the other day. Now, as ideas go, this one is pretty shit. But it won't go away. I know myself well enough to know that if I don't follow through on this it's going to nag at me for a long time.

The plan is this: level to 85 ONLY from archaeology, gathering, and defending myself from the mobs I aggro in pursuit of the first two.

Originally, the plan was 5-85, but arch can't be picked up until 20 apparently.

To help reduce how much I die, every five levels, starting at 25 I will raid the auction house for the best purchasable gear I can find - on that trip. No going back after switching to send myself some gold.

And on the note of gold, this will be funded solely from vendor trash, most notably the recently buffed sell prices of relics. All herbs and minerals will be mailed off to my bank alt for separate processing.

Like I said... It's a bad idea. One likely to drive me insane.
Well.... MORE insane. =p

I'll also be updating this post, every 5 levels with screenshots much like the first one below.
Oh, and one thing I forgot to include in the screenshot was my /played, which at time of this posting is 0 days, 10 hours, 29 minutes, 26 seconds.