Missing a Raid
Yesterday was one of those days when I felt like I was moving through molasses the entire day. In part it was the whole staying up late and babysitting servers bit, but also we had so much stuff going on during the day connected to the two outages. It turns out that after much research they were not actually related. I knew I was not exactly in “fighting shape” so I let my raid leader know that I would not be attending the WoW Raid that night. This is in part a good thing because they were apparently talking about having to do a paired down raid due to limited healers, and it is probably a good thing to rotate folks a bit. At this point I would never mind having to sit out for a night because I have so much other stuff going on that I could be doing. When I got home I took a nap and that helped quite a bit, or at least made me feel something vaguely human.
I asked my wife not to let me sleep more than an hour, since I generally struggle with the concept of napping. If I take a nap, it means I am not likely to get a good nights sleep. My body plays this game with me, where it only wants to get five to six hours of sleep a night. When I nap, it means I am going to have this massive bout of insomnia that night. Thankfully the short nap managed to do what it needed to do and I was still able to sleep fairly well as a result. I spent most of the night hanging out on the couch catching up on Better Call Saul. The irony of be getting into this series is the fact that I have never actually watched Breaking Bad. I mean I have watched the first episode, but since my wife showed some interest in the show I didn’t really want to start it on my own without her watching along. Otherwise there would come a point where I would have to start back from scratch and watch everything over again. I managed to catch up through episode seven, and that show is just becoming more interesting as it goes.
Disconnected Dragoon
When it came to actual gaming last night, I was a bit more distracted. I spent some time logged into Final Fantasy XIV because our Free Company is just insanely vibrant, but I really didn’t do all that much gaming. I ran a few roulettes, and managed to get yet another piece of 130 gear thanks to another carbontwine, but mostly I just spent a lot of time hanging out at the free company house when I got up from my nap. It really is surreal to see the number of people online… and at some point I need to catch up with my whole guild census project and record all the new people in our spreadsheet. One of the problems with FFXIV is that there is no good guild notes functionality so we are having to keep an external list of which character belongs to which personality. Its tedious but for whatever reason I struggle to relate in game names back to twitter and blogger names. I spend a lot of time thinking “I think that is this person” but never fully committing because my memory is extremely fallible. That is my deep dark secret, that in other games I remember everyone… because I can check the officer notes.
I am not sure how I really made it through the sequence of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and World of Darkness… but I am guessing at this point I can just do those on auto pilot. I am hoping I was not “that dragoon” in most of the instances, because I managed to get several commendations. Generally speaking if I go in, and manage not to die… I get commendations. I should have spent the night working on botany, but instead I mostly stood around a lot staring blankly at the screen. I feel like over the last several nights I have been particularly antisocial. Largely when I am watching something on Television I stay off voice chat, and go for large periods of time without reading free company chat either. I know at some point Arkenor asked for a group, but it was not until it had actually formed that I noticed. I have been a less than stellar “Bel” lately, and I am hoping tonight I will be feeling back to my normal self. I feel like I have missed a lot of what is going on, and I am hoping to remedy that.
Time to Landmark
It has been well over a year since I last played Landmark in any fashion. That game has evolved in such a way that if you are not playing constantly you fall behind in the number of changes. At this point I simply feel behind the curve and it has been a real barrier from me jumping back into the game. This morning I read something interesting however, that Landmark plans to have one more major character wipe before opening its doors to the public. My theory is that this might be precisely the ideal time to pop my head back in and see how the game has progressed. Right now this wipe is slotted for sometime around April 29th. So my hope is that I can pop in and experience all of the new content fresh and not be so entirely out of touch with it. Honestly the most enjoyment I had in the game was the process of “leveling up” which was completing a series of arbitrary goals to keep moving up through the different types of picks and tools you can create. Once I had access to everything the game quickly became stale for me.
For reference when I last played the game… the Caves system was not yet patched in. So this means I have that and all of the player combat to experience fresh. The problem is I am torn on the whole Daybreak thing. I am still rather pissed about the layoffs, but at the same time the folks who are still on staff there are struggling to make this whole thing work. My Landmark account is a sunk cost as I purchased it so long ago. I might as well get some use out of it, and see what this game has become in the months since I let my claim get repossessed. There was a point where I realized I was only logging in just long enough to mine copper to pay the upkeep on my claim. This is one of the things I don’t like about upkeep systems. If you are only playing the game to pay upkeep, are you really playing the game at all? I am actually looking forward to the character wipe now and hopefully I will be able to reignite the spark I once had for this game.
Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Disconnected Dragoon