March 2016 – Page 4

Death and Taxes

March 24, 2016 by Belghast

A Very Bad Day

Tuesday night I slept fairly horribly, and spent most of it tossing and turning and unable to regulate my body temperature between too hot and too cold. So yesterday I went into the day on a low point, with being extremely groggy and fumbling through activities. Unfortunately this also seems to be the sort of day when something horribly goes wrong. About 10 am yesterday morning we had a freak incident occur where a publish went wrong in the content management we use at work, that caused the entire xml cache to jettison itself and our main public facing website started throwing a “no nodes” error instead of serving content. I proceeded to spend the next five hours trying to fix the problem by republishing every single piece of content on the site… which is roughly 20,000 nodes worth. We got the bulk restored really quickly, and then spent the next three hours fighting with a handful of tricky node trees, that seemed to be super picky about the order in which things were published. By the time I exited work… all I really wanted was a drink… or four.

When I got home however we decided to get the monkey off our backs of our taxes. We itemize, and we also have them prepared… not that I think we can’t do our own taxes but I will happily throw money at someone for the piece of mind that come an audit we can point the finger at someone else’s legal team to sort it out for us. There is a level of stress that taxes invoke in me that is far higher than just about anything… so doing them on the day I was already having a shitty day was maybe not a great idea. Then again it wasn’t like the day could get much worse. The problem being that as we were flailing about the house trying to gather the last two or three bits of information before going… my wife and I were fussing with each other in a way that never really happens when money isn’t on the line. All of the stress and anxiety, is generally for naught as we get our taxes done… and generally get back a decent refund. The bigger stress last night was that I felt bad for missing the WoW raid… but thankfully it sounded like they had enough people to pull together without me. I hear they even managed to down Iskar which is a brand new boss for our group.

Today however seems like it is starting off much the same way as yesterday. I got to bed at a decent hour and it felt like I was getting good sleep… that is until about 2 am when I woke up thinking the alarm had gone off. For whatever reason it seems like we fell asleep with the television on, and that noise made me think the alarm was going off. In the middle of my trying to get ready, I noticed the smell of smoke. Like enough to make me start freaking out about if the house was on fire. So I started roaming the house to see if the smell that permeated got worse anywhere to indicate where it was coming from. I woke my wife when I decided to leave the house and go wandering outside to see if it was something from a nearby house. The smell was far worse outside, but once again it seemed to be diffuse without any real direction that it was coming from. I finally hopped in the car and drove the neighborhood, and when the smell was the same up the hill from us… I finally reached a point of solace that it was very much “not our house” and was able to attempt going back to sleep. This morning on the news we found out that apparently there is a massive grass fire burning north of us, but still about a thirty minute drive… so that has to be one hell of a fire to generate that thick of smoke as far away as we were.

Hilt Punch

Ultimately I ended up getting settled in after taxes and getting some food in me, roughly an hour after the start of the raid. I could have of course logged into World of Warcraft, and gotten pulled into the raid as a late comer. After the day I had however I was not exactly fit to be around other human beings, so instead I opted to chill out upstairs with the PS4 and some Destiny. One of the missions that has been eluding me for awhile has been the continuation of the quest that upgrades my legendary quality sword to exotic. There is a step early on where you need to get 50 “yellow bar” kills with the sword in PVE and 25 kills of players in the crucible. While I occasionally poke my head into the Crucible… I am not exactly a regular PVP player. That said last night I felt as combative as I was ever going to be… and my clan had suggested doing it on a week when Mayhem Clash was one of the highlighted modes. Supposedly “heavy ammo drops like candy” or so someone said and in truth… sure it is more common than other modes but not exactly easy either. There were so many times I picked up heavy ammo and instantly got gibbed by another player coming up right behind me before I could even get my sword out. So instead more often than not I simply punched players with the empty hilt of my sword, which counts as a sword kill nonetheless. Ironically in a lot of cases… the hilt without any ammo… still one shot players.

Spending an hour or two doing Clash had a few awesome side effects. Firstly I gained a fat stack of glimmer, more than enough to purchase the ship above from Petra in the Reef since I had recently reached rank 3 there. It also meant that after bashing my face against it for a bit… I managed to get all 25 of my kills… strangely enough the last six were gained in a single match, and single ammo pickup. I just got lucky and managed to time my jumps just right as to slash folks as they came at me in the air. This allowed me to knock out the next step pretty quickly, which was a special boss on the Dreadnaught. I remember when I read up on the quest folks talking about how challenging that encounter was and that how they really needed to use sword block effectively. In truth I would start out each foray by blocking an attack and then landing a succession of quick hits… but then would jump away and wait for my shields to recharge before repeating. Doing that it took roughly three engagements before I had that boss down. Now I am on a step that seems considerably more time consuming than any yet… where I need to collect special materials from the moon that supposedly occasionally drop from helium filament canisters and chests. At the same time I need to use my solar abilities, which is pretty easy given that I am rocking the Armamentarium for double the grenades and some item that allows me to pretty much do nonstop solar punches. Supposedly this means I need to kill 500 mobs with solar abilities and farm at minimum 100 helium fragment containers to get the drops. My goal is to finish that part so that the next Armsday I can pick up the final piece which is the Sunless Cell strike… and convince Squirrel and Jex to help me get through that. It feels good to get the crucible step out of the way… but I also know that next up is working on First Curse. That said I actually really enjoyed playing the Crucible and managed to get a couple of legendary engrams out of the process and a handful of exotics including a 310 Twilight Garrison.

A Statement vs A Discussion

March 23, 2016 by Tamrielo

I’ve been mulling over this post in my head for several days now, and still haven’t formed a clear picture of what I want to say. Rather than continuing to spin on it, we’ll see if putting text to screen makes things more coherent. Here’s hoping.

I love the Division. I hate the Division. It represents a path forward for MMOs that’s been sorely lacking for a decade now. It is chock full of some incredibly high-fidelity, compelling content. It also has content that makes my stomach turn, and it is very clear that it’s doing so intentionally. At times, the game intentionally tries to make me feel uncomfortable, and succeeds.

It manages to be a surprisingly inclusive game, with characters from all walks of life– it’s casually pro-LGBT and has some really great female characters who, from my perspective, feel like powerful women, not just dudes with boobs. One such character is why a friend of mine stopped playing the game. Video games tend not to put women in “lead” roles, either as heroes or villains. In the Division (spoilers to the end of this paragraph), I wound up facing a gang leader who was a black woman, and who, during the fight, hurled a variety of poignant epithets and taunts, one of which commented “oh, so you’re a cop, and you’re going to shoot me because I’m a black woman, is that it?”

It’s a nasty line, and it’s extremely effective. So effective that, like I said, at least one friend of mine up and quit the game right there. It links into my biggest problem with The Division, one that I’ve mentioned on the podcast: it asks questions, but doesn’t give me the ability to answer them. My only solution to a problem is to shoot and kill someone.

The world of the Division is a world of desperate people trying to cling to whatever little they have, and, in the chaos, warlords of various stripes amassing followers and carving out territory. You, as the player, are literally no different– you carve out territory in the name of making it “safe” (for you and yours) and kill anyone who gets in your way. It’s exactly what every other faction in the game is doing, and in-game ambience even spells this out explicitly. There’s a talk radio station that you can listen in on, where a slowly-freaking-out host goes on about your group, the titular Division, and asks if it’s really okay for a bunch of sleeper agents to come in and start using lethal force on whoever looks at them wrong.

As a player, I have no answer to this. My only solution to a problem is to shoot and kill someone.

What I crave in the Division is a dialogue, with the game and with the people in it. I want to be the last bastion of civilization that restores order and peace, not just the successful warlord that managed to kill everyone opposing them. The game makes a number of statements– “desperate times call for desperate measures” and asks if the ends justify the means, but doesn’t give me the ability to think about and answer that question. It uses uncomfortable situations not to open a dialogue, but for shock value. It’s disturbing, and there is no way for me to take a moral high ground or even ideologically defend myself.

At the same time, this is a game that represents what I’ve wanted in MMOs for a while– a richly-detailed world that my friends and I can jump into and have fun playing. An MMO where combat is *fun* and every encounter feels enjoyable and meaningful. A group system that doesn’t adhere to the standard “trinity” roles but has the ability for party members to fill specific niches that they come up with themselves.

I love what the Division represents, I just wish it wasn’t laced with so much stuff that bothers me deeply. As mentioned in the podcast, if I could buy The Secret World set in the Division’s engine and gameplay, I would buy that game yesterday and still be playing it instead of writing this post.

I haven’t been this conflicted about a game in a while. Maybe that’s the dialogue.

Sometimes We Fail

March 23, 2016 by Belghast

The Rookie Raid

For a little bit now, one of the highlights of my week has been the Rookie Raid night with my clan in Destiny. I think mostly after playing the game for roughly two years… I was really wanting to raid, and getting to step foot in Kings Fall each week has been a blast. There are still a lot of things that I absolutely screw up, but I feel like I am getting better. I have always been one of those people that learns by doing, and it simply takes several repetitions before something actually gets cemented in my head. The highlight of the night was the fact that I actually made it through the ship jumping puzzle on the very first time… and it only took me two tries to get over to the wall and get into the chest nook just after the ships. This is serious progress because some of those jumps on past attempts took me dozens of tries to actually get. Similarly I seemed to make it through the piston wall without a ton of issues this week which also felt good. I ended up jumping to the final platform… and then got confused thinking I went the wrong direction. So I guess even I shocked myself that I had made it through with I think two deaths this week, instead of the literally dozens in previous outings.

I’ve had to develop the practice of sitting down with my character once I have reached the final platform of a jumping sequence. I wouldn’t go so far as the say that I am afraid of heights, because in real life I can look out over balconies or off the roofs of buildings without much issue. I can climb up on things without much issue either… well apart from the fact that I have zero dexterity. However for whatever reason in video games… I get disoriented and almost dizzy when dealing with jumping sequences. There are certain games that have triggered this feeling more than others, like Mirrors Edge. However there are other games that are just as parkoury for lack of a better word… like Dying Light that don’t seem to bother me at all. It has to be something about the perspective or some technical detail that does it… but whatever the case… Destiny absolutely triggers these feelings. So as stupid as it sounds, I feel like every time I don’t fuck up a jump… it is a pretty major victory for me. It takes so much mental stamina to get me through one of the jump sequences that when I finish… I am constantly afraid that I will do something stupid that leads to me plummeting back down below and having to do it all over again. So my little practice of sitting makes it seem like it is far less likely for me to somehow get bumped and fall.

Oryx Cheats

One of the cool things about this week is that I got to learn a few slightly different roles during the fights. Namely I moved from platform duty to Ogre duty, which is way more my style. When our group does Oryx we do it “challenge” style which involves making sure the Ogres do not move before they die, allowing all of the blight orbs to spawn in essentially the same place. This allows us to pop them all at the same time, and deal almost all of the damage to Oryx in a single turn. That is at least when things work out. As one of the Titans assigned to this duty, we run complimentary bubbles making sure Weapons and Blessing are both up and dropped in the same place. This allows us to take advantage of our Touch of Malice and keep from killing ourselves in the process. The goal is to dip back into the shield between ogres to replenish the shields and give us more life to spend while pummeling the adds. This works great… until we have to go into the fight without a super bar. We somehow managed to make it through that round but it was getting super dicey as far as the whole “not killing ourselves” part. It was during the Oryx fight however last night… that shit just got weird.

I had heard before of the bugs in the Kings Fall raid… but luckily in the previous two weeks we had never really encountered any. This week however they struck back with a vengeance, starting with several of us mysteriously dying to “misadventures”. Other times the platform sequence got messed up, or our runner was unable to grab the orb for some reason… having the platform disappear beneath them before the transfer actually happened. The scariest was when we saw an ogre appear in the default T state that models are generally modeled in… and then disappear quickly… coming up through the ground with the normal animation. Essentially there was something seriously wrong with the server, and even though we tried several different tricks to right the ship… we ultimately had to call it to time. The goal right now is to pop back in Monday night and see if we can wreck Oryx given that we have a check point right at the boss. Sometimes we fail… but even in failing I had a really good time. The loot on the other hand is starting to get more scarce, and I got some relatively low light level versions of things… but I did manage to pick up another much needed slot in the arms. I’ve posted a gallery of the various things, including the 310 Armamentarium chest that was waiting on me at the mailbox. I am not really sure where along the way that dropped but but it is much appreciated because I love having the extra grenades. However as long as I am running Defender, I kinda feel like the Saint-14 helm is a must have.

I R Blogger

March 22, 2016 by Thalen

Gosh, where to begin? Between holidays and going into quasi-hermit mode for a little bit, I haven't posted in a while. Let's remedy that, shall we? What have I been up to?

Gaming-wise, I've mostly been playing Warframe for the past couple months; the game of being a space-ninja in space. It continues to entertain, mostly when enough of us are on together to do group content. There are daily sorties that consist of three missions of escalating difficulty which are decidedly tuned for a full group, and we've been having fun with those occasionally. They can get pretty rough at times, particularly since the missions have additional modifiers applied to them, such as being limited to a single weapon type, or all the enemies having improved armor or added elemental damage, etc.

We're ninjas on the moon, we carry a harpoon.

I've also been playing Stardew Valley a good bit. It's a very entertaining Harvest Moon / Animal Crossing style game where you farm, fish, fight monsters in an abandoned mine, befriend townsfolk and so forth. It's got that 'one more turn' aspect that can keep you playing far longer than you ever intended to. My first spring has just ended and summer has begun, and I've spent about half of what I've earned so far on summer crops. The rest is earmarked for a chicken coop once I can catch the carpenter lady at home to hire her.

It's simple yet, but it's mine.

I haven't been devoting as much time to reading recently as I should, but currently I'm working on Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh (who will be named a Grandmaster by the SFWA in May). She's an author I've been aware of for quite some time, and have always intended to read, but this is only the second book of hers I've read. I'm enjoying it so far. I've read a few other books over the past few months; I haven't decided yet if I'm going to post about them, or skip to the current book. Once I finish this book, I've got a copy of REAMDE waiting for me. Getting through that in a week's time might be a bit difficult, so having some previous books to talk about could be useful.

Finally, I've been re-inventorying my comic book collection and getting it recorded at a site that I started using recently, League of Comic Geeks. I discovered it initially via their app, which is excellent for organizing my weekly pull list, and have decided it's an easier site to record new comics than the one I was using. Also it's free, which is a big plus. I've recorded just over 5000 comics in it so far, which is about a third of my collection. This is one of a few things that I've been needing to do as part of the overall 'clean up my office so it doesn't look like a hoarder lives in it' plan. So far it's going well.