Bucket list fail

by

Bucket list failA few months ago, around the time we learned Battle for Azeroth’s release date, I made a bucket list. I figured since it’s patch day I should revisit it. I’ve been running fairly cool toward WoW for the past year or more, still playing but not really engaged. So my bucket list felt very humble when I wrote it. And yet I did a very poor job checking things off. Here’s the list:

  • Get the mount from new Karazhan
  • Do a mythic +15
  • Get at least one artifact maxed out in the netherlight crucible
  • Cap my professions
  • Get all the First Aid achievements before it disappears
  • Save up some gold
  • Level at least one of my allied race alts to 110

How did I do? About 3 1/2 out of 7. Not great but not a total failure.

I didn’t get the Karazhan mount. I didn’t even try in the months since I wrote the list. I did become part of a group that intended to work toward M+15, but it lost momentum after a month or two and we never met that goal. I was really keen on both of these things but wrangling other people to do them with when I was on the edge of burnout just didn’t work.

I did get one artifact capped in the crucible, even before the freebies we got by siphoning off Sargeras’ sword. I will be honest though, it was not fun. It was not difficult, it just felt like an entirely pointless chore. Go pick up rocks to make this number tick up higher. If BfA has more of that in store I’ll be starting the expansion halfway checked out already.

On the profession front, I had envisioned capping everything on all my primary profession characters. I did finish all the ones I use regularly, or that are traditionally good for turning a profit. I came up a little short on my lesser-used profs. I think I’m still missing blacksmithing and leatherworking. I also never got close to the Field Medic First Aid achievement. I hate to leave something like that undone since it is going away forever, but reading people’s accounts of farming for it inspired me to spend my time on more productive things.

I made enough progress on the gold front that I’m willing to call that a win, since I didn’t set a concrete goal. I would have liked to have saved up enough to pay for the ridiculous dinosaur auction house mount, but I didn’t quite make it. If BfA continues the trend of the past few expansions I should have no problem taking my current balance and building it up enough to blow 5 million gold before BfA is over.

I was hoping to level more of my alliance race alts, but I did at least get one of them finished in time. I loved my baby mage, and she might end up being one of the first characters I level in BfA. I was very disappointed to see that we are not getting a leveling catch-up mechanic in the pre-patch like we did with Legion’s invasions. It would have been nice to rocket a few more alts up to 110 (or at least past the 60 – 80 slog) before BfA’s official launch.

Luck and Mini Bosses

by

At this point we are up to 41 blogs signed up for Blaugust in one form or another, with a significant number of folks hanging out in the Discord just for the sake of fun that we may be able to sway one way or another.  I am super happy with this early participation, and in side conversations there are a bunch of folks on the fence trying to determine just how much they can afford to participate themselves this year.  In that always be plugging style of conversation…  if you are at all interested in starting up a blog now is the time to do it.  Pop on by the sign up form and let us know your information and we will do our best to support you through that early blogging experience.  This is of course also an open offer as well to folks who are currently blogging and just want to up their frequency of posting…  or really want to help mentor the next crew of bloggers.

Since I last posted updates there have been a few new entries and you can see the entire list in an easy to use google sheet that I have been maintaining.

New Mentors

New Participants

The official pre-week starts on July 25th so there is still plenty of time to get a blog up and running before the official August 1st start.

Luck and Mini Bosses

There are times where I have the sort of luck that pisses my friends off.  For example I have pulled a couple of those ultra rare chase cards from Battle for Zenndikar and Kaladesh, just buying random single packs here and there.  Magic the Gathering just released its return to core sets with M19 and there are a bunch of interesting cards in it… namely a much needed reprint of Crucible of Worlds and brand new version of the classic legends era dragons.  Ultimately I would like to have a copy of each for eventual EDH brewing purposes, and as a result I picked up a fat pack on Friday in my post funeral travels.  Now a fat pack has 10 packs and seems to be for lack of a better term a partial piece of what would have normally been a full box.

They tend to be feast or famine, either you get the good end of the rare/mythic sheet or you don’t.  In this case I managed to pull 4 mythics out of those ten packs.  I took the above photo to show off everything that came out of that box, with the last two on the left side being just a couple of cool looking common foils.  I found it weird that I got a duplicate rare out of the batch so maybe they are doing the fat packs different than they have done before.  I was extremely excited that I managed to pull a Crucible of Worlds and at least two of the three color dragons.  Unfortunately I did not pull the big daddy of them all…  Nicol Bolas, the Ravager.  I still consider this an insanely lucky box, and walked away mighty happy with it.

Luck and Mini Bosses

As far as the rest of the weekend… it was largely spent hanging out and playing some Elder Scrolls Online.  I have now officially finished the Orsinium content and wow… I am exceedingly impressed with the quality.  If that is at all representative of what I have to expect from the follow up releases, then I am going to be a very happy boy.  I’ve since started on the Thieves Guild which is the next content release in order…  having largely skipped Imperial City due to its PvEvP nature.  I did however spent a chunk of last night running around and collecting Skyshards out in Cyrodil..  I am sure frustrating someone who was there to try and take keeps and mile forts.  The only actual PVP I got into was being found by a roaming murderball of Ebonheart Pact players…  at which point my screen froze and I crashed out of the game only to come back very dead.

The most fun however was prior to that when I was roaming around in Coldharbor with Ashgar and Tamrielo doing the public dungeon there.  It all started simple enough…  the three of us on Voice Chat when Ash mentioned mostly to himself that he was going to ignore the Public Dungeon for now until he could come back with a group.  I said that I had not done the public dungeon there for the same reason and Tam chimed in that he had largely been avoiding any group content.  Before long the three of us were converging upon Ash’s location and doing the public dungeon which had two quests inside of it.  Additionally we realized that there were a bunch of optional bosses in various corners of the place and we set forth to take each and every one down earning us a conqueror achievement.

I kinda love that this game does not care at all about where a player is in the progression, and that you can pretty much just group in for whatever happens to be going on.  I abused this power to help Void get some crafting materials by porting myself to Windhelm and then letting him piggy back in on that to get the shrine there.  I love that this game has decided that horizontal progression is the way to go because it has allowed me to invest resources in a really nice set of gear knowing I won’t be upgrading it anytime soon.  I love that I can just do whatever happens to cross my path and still feel like I am moving towards a goal in the form of Champion points…  knowing that I am also adding progression to every single character as I go.  I am very happy with the current state of Elder Scrolls Online.

AggroChat #212 – Respect Your Time

by

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat212

Tonight we continue our recent tradition of picking up on topics that we did not quite have time for on the previous episode.  First off we discuss our general feelings about “cheating” and by cheating we are talking about relying on guides, maps, and walkthroughs in additional to other more traditional cheats and mods.  From there Bel talks a bit about his experiences with Orsinium and how playing through all three factions of the original Elder Scrolls Online content is paying off. From there we discuss long games that have a very clear failure state and how generally lousy that feels when it occurs.  Finally we talk a bit about the recent ArenaNet community issues and share some of our feelings about it.

Topics Discussed

  • Walkthroughs Guides and Cheats
    • Respecting our Time
    • Enhancing the “Fun Loop”
    • When we would not use them
  • Elder Scrolls Online
    • Finishing Orsinium
    • Payoff for finishing all original Content
  • Long Games with Failure States
    • Kingdom Death
    • Civilization
    • Battletech
    • Sim/City Builder Games
  • ArenaNet Issues
    • Emboldening Bad Actors
    • “Other” on the Internet
    • The Stress of Game Development
    • Bel’s Brain Broke

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

NPC Memories

by

Once again I am going to lead off this morning with an update on the folks who have joined in the fun since my last post.  I have a sneaking suspicion that these will continue especially considering we have a bunch of folks in the Discord who have yet to actually fill out the sign-up form.  I am not officially counting someone until I have an entry in the sign up sheet from them.  Another thing that has happened is I was asked to record a quick demo for the for someone to mix into their podcast.  I am not sure if anyone else out there cares about such thing but I thought I would link it here.  I did find myself falling into radio announcer voice a bit but whatever…  I think it does a reasonable job of summarizing the event.

As far as the sign-ups we don’t have as many as we have had in past days.  I feel like this is going to probably slow down a bit and then pick back up just prior to the event starting around July 25th.

New Participants

I want to give an extra call out to RumorsMatrix who completely bucked the notion of WordPress vs Blogger and went off and created his own custom blogging software.  That is some awesome dedication and I highly suggest you check out [barely readable diary] because it is anything but.  I’ve had a few questions recently about the whole Mentor vs Participant thing largely because there were some in the community that were viewing Participant as the “newbie” role and didn’t necessarily feel like they were ready for the “mentor” title either.  Functionally this comes down to intent and less about who is new or not.

I’ve used the analogy of Blaugust as a Blogging Summer Camp, and in that concept the Mentors would effectively be the Camp Counselors.  As a mentor you should feel comfortable with other bloggers coming up to you and asking for advice or some form of assistance.  Participants on the other hand are folks who just want to join their blog into this nonsense and participate in the festival of blogging as a whole.  I do however intend to try and track a few metrics that were not in the form, namely folks for whom this is their first Blaugust, and folks who started a brand new blog for the initiative.  Ultimately if you just want to join in and have fun then Participant is likely the role for you.

NPC Memories

Last night I continued my journey in Elder Scrolls Online Orsinium DLC and knocked out a few more areas before ultimately getting pulled into a crisis at work.  You never want to hear the words “catastrophic failure” at 10 pm…  but we managed to get everything wrapped up by 11ish.  However it greatly cut into the flow of my evening and kept me from completing more than I otherwise would have.  The depth of this content continues to impress me as does the scale, and I keep thinking in the back of my head…  if all of these DLCs are this cool it might be a really long time before I chew through it.  It sounds as though the key differentiation between a DLC and an Expansion is the first is largely centered around a single zone and the later includes multiple areas.

NPC Memories

I am extremely thankful that I wound up finishing all three factions worth of content before starting any of the DLCs.  There were times I contemplated straying off that path but it is really paying off in spades.  During the original quest lines there are certain characters that stand out, and occasionally show back up multiple times during the course of the main story.  One of the interesting things is that if you have completed all three factions…  you end up getting recognized by characters that you have interacted with in all three campaigns.  For example Neramo is part of the original Daggerfall starting area of Stros M’Kai and when I bumped into him in Wrothgar he recalled our previous adventures.  Similarly you run into Rigurt the Brash a handful of times during the Ebonheart Pact story… and you can see how he is greeting me here.

Functionally this feels like the difference between starting Mass Effect with the first game and playing your way through all of them, each time importing your save game… and just starting with Mass Effect 3.  I am hoping this time commitment continues to pay off as we move forward through other DLC…  I did some googling and apparently at the least Neramo shows up a few more times in the future.  It is this level of scripting and quest detail that makes the game feel so good as people greet you differently based on your past experiences.  Sure it is an illusion and they are simply checking to see if this quest or that quest was completed, but it is a level of detail that is sorely missing in other games.  I still remember how painfully jarring it was when I encountered Alexstrasza in the Twilight Highlands after completing several arcs for her during Wrath of the Lich King saving Wyrmrest Temple…  and having her not remember my character in the least.

I have a huge backlog of Elder Scrolls Online content to get through and I am still greatly enjoying myself.