Teabags and KY Jelly

Special People

2011-09-12T19:30:00.000-05:00

I do have to laugh at people getting bent out of shape in this game. Normally, they're not worth me wasting time to blog about, but the story of Hazukii and his imaginary war with me is worth telling just for the lulz. A while back, we apparently jumped his shout group trying to pop Cirein-Croin. The ensuing conversation looked like this:

Aside from the fact he thinks I'm some sort of German, the biggest thing to take note of here the screenshot won't show is that there were multiple groups here. There was apparently a trio who had taken forever killing. Hazukii's group was all gathered up somewhere around the bridge area. A third group including Spccdog was vying for the ??? as well. The latter had been shouting his claim over the ??? in his typical obscene manner, which didn't exactly lend itself to us wanting to cooperate with him. This event happened before SE added multiple pops for the big NMs in Abyssea, which really kind of renders the entire conversation moot at this point.

Anyway, Hazukii got butthurt over it, somehow thought a bunch of JP people would get pissed at me, ruin my reputation and globally blacklist me. Newsflash to that part is that I don't interact with JP players enough to care. I have shouts filtered for a reason. If there's something I want to get done, I have a friend list. If enough people aren't in linkshell or on my friend list to get said task done, I just go do something else. I don't waste my time shouting or reading shouts to get things done.

Fast forward a few months and we're in the same general area of Abyssea. I see Hazukii come up and actually ask for one of his friends to leech something from our group. Imagine that...

Fast forward a few more months to this past Sunday. Our scheduled event was to spam Amhuluk since we had a lot of demand for it's +2 items. Earlier in the week, we had camped Asanbosam and generally filled up everyone who was there with KIs for it. Just so happened this past Sunday, we had 5 people who weren't at the previous farming, so we decided to put KIs on them. Turns out, Hazukii was in some sort of cruor party and he gets butthurt when we show up and started killing a few bats. Nevermind they were bats we had aggro'd and there were probably another 20 or so floating around for someone to pull. Also nevermind his cruor party was spread out mostly over the colibri. Also nevermind the fact that if you're going to do a cruor party, using critters next to a relatively popular NM is just asking to get interrupted/slowed down.

He babbles something in /say that I missed. I was only made aware of it when a few of our LS members collectively said "lolhazukii". Then he sends me a tell and the conversation from that point pretty much mirrored the above screenshot, except he learned how to spell "douche", I'm apparently just like Hex and Obsidian is the "new resu". Also, he again somehow thinks the reason he should waste his time to tell me these things is because, apparently, "it does me good to hear it". There was nothing he said that I took offense to, but I blacklisted him cause I wanted to focus on stuff that mattered rather than feed some frail ego.

You see, he somehow thinks my M.O. (and thus, Obsidian's) is to just show up and wreck people's events. I'm the first to admit we don't get along with everybody and I'm the first to admit if someone left our shell under bad terms, I'm not particularly prone to cooperating with them. However, there are a ton of instances where we've changed our schedule around or politely asked "@?" when wanting to pop a particular NM and gone off to do something else if the number was large. There are also plenty of times where we've been jumped by the very same shout groups Hazukii seems to participate a lot in.

The "cruor party" he was in was a sham at best. The bulk of it moved slightly south to bounce between vultures and colibri after Hazukii left. I even got to talk to a couple old buddies and made a new friend who all admitted they didn't know wtf was going on early on in that party when Hazukii was around. I don't know who organized it. I didn't get the impression Hazukii did, but one thing was clear...the party wasn't doing anything good. It was all melee, one mage and a bunch of melee that didn't know how to survive apparently. If that had even looked remotely more organized when we showed up, we probably would have asked what they were doing. Given Asanbosam wasn't up when we got there, we figured they were there camping it and just got down to work ready to camp against them.

Later in the day, Hazukii shows up to Minax Bugard with a former LS member (Xanatos). While I seriously doubt he ran to that NM with the intention of trying to slow us down, he certainly made up his mind to try to do so once he saw us. I still had him on my blacklist at the time and I decided to take him off it when I saw some of my LS members defending me in /say. Between what amounted to jabs about his choice of NIN gear and some other idiotic comments by him he apparently thinks phase me in the least, Drakus ended the conversation with "last word" spam. I put him back on my black list once I had been entertained enough again. One thing he said that was rather comical...

...somehow a DRG at an Abyssea event with 18 people is mega-lulz. I don't know what he has leveled other than NIN and don't really care. I do know what I have leveled and how long it had been at that point since I wasn't on a support, healing or treasure hunter job. Typically others in the linkshell get to fill in the melee spots now. So it was rather amazing he somehow went back to a 2004 job crack to try to offend me and showed just how uneducated he probably is. Doesn't really matter what melee jobs you have in an 18 man abyssea alliance as long as you got the important staggers covered. Sure...we could have brought in 7 WARs I suppose and killed a little faster, but hey...loldrg anyway.

Hazukii represents a source of comedy for us now. Mostly because his jabs and ease of butthurt are so pathetically bad. He may liken me to Hex or compare us to Resu. He may do so having once been in Resu himself and drinking the Kool-aid. He seems to love speaking w/o knowledge or viewing the entire picture though, which is pretty typical of one who gets butthurt so easy. One thing I've learned in my travels in life...lonely and ignorant people are the fastest ones to become morally outraged. Sad thing is, these outrages are typically based in their own selfishness to the point where the expression of outrage is just to draw attention to themselves moreso than to actually try to fix whatever pissed them off. I'm guilty of it myself from years ago, but hey...everyone learns shit in their own time. When morality simply becomes a crutch to fulfill one's own selfish desires, it becomes immoral. It also becomes comedic.

He can have his little war if he wants. No one in Obsidian cares enough about him to go chase him down or harass him. It's like they say though...there are reasons why some people just don't get along with others. To them, it's everyone else's fault. To everyone else, it's button-pressing time when the inevitable blow-up happens. Wonder if he actually knows he was being trolled when he "won" by popping Minax Bugard between our pops...

...probably not.

TF3: Dark of the Moon

2011-07-03T10:05:00.002-05:00

TF3 finally showed up this week. I won't say I was waiting anxiously for it's arrival, but I will say I was at least a little excited that it was here. From a long time fan's standpoint, I had felt like the first movie was great, despite some rather stupid designs. The second movie, I don't have to rehash what an atrocity that was other than to say it's glaring flaws were action sequences moving around too fast to really catch all the intricate detail ILM put into the fights and what I feel amounted to Michael Bay not having a writer's leash on him.

So we get to TF3 and my expectations are that it'll likely fall between TF2 and TF1 on good movie scale.

About a month ago, Drakus and I started planning out getting together to watch this at an IMAX. Turns out, the IMAX in his neck of the woods had closed and the one I usually went to at Opry Mills was still closed due to the Nashville flooding that happened a year or so ago. Oddly enough, IMAX option were pretty limited at that point. It was either a 5 hour drive to Fayetteville, Arkansas or it was a 4 hour drive for him to Nashville anyway so we could go to the Hendersonville, TN IMAX. We opted to meet up in Nashville.

So we hooked up, got our tix, etc...and if you haven't seen the movie, this is where you should stop reading.

Real 3D

First thing to note about TF3 is that it's in Real 3D. James Cameron (of Avatar fame) was on hand to help Bay film this. It's clear from the onset of the movie that they were telling the truth about the 3D part of this being at the forefront of their thoughts rather than treating it just from the post-production standpoint. As most reviews would indicate, the opening 10-15 mins of the movie are just awesome. The overall 3D presentation wasn't on the scale of Avatar as I felt Avatar did a much better job of immersing you in the actual environment. TF3 has some moments/sequences where it's almost there, most notably the opening space sequence and the building slide. Aside from that, I didn't think the 3D aspect of it really added that much to the presentation.

Megan Fox/Rosie Huntington-Whitely

One of the other "major" changes was the lack of Megan Fox. When I read she had been fired from the movie, I literally felt like doing a happy dance. I've probably bitched on this blog about her before, but my main issues with her were that she just looked too fake and her character was completely useless. Both of those traits are pretty typical of the lead female role in a Bay film, so I wasn't really holding that against her too much, she just seemingly became the poster child for what everyone hated about the TF films in general and a good chunk of it she brought on herself with her various media appearances.

Her replacement was Rosie Huntington-Whitely.

Who?

Yeah, a lady Bay managed to pick up straight off the runway modeling Victoria's Secret products. Zilch in the way of acting experience, unless you count modeling as acting.

BRING BACK MEGAN FOX!!

...or wait. I was willing to give her a chance, especially considering I just didn't want Fox's character or Fox herself in the last installment. Much to my surprise, she did pretty good. Don't get me wrong, no one goes to see a movie like TF3 for potential Oscar-nominated performances, but if you had to give an oscar to Fox or RHW for their TF performances, RHW is going to win. Her character is actually semi-useful to the plot and she doesn't stand around screaming "SAAAAAAAAAAAAM!!" the entire movie. Hell, there isn't even a slow motion, oiled up running sequence involving her. There is a shot where she's standing there and shit's blowing up behind her moving in slow motion, but she's mostly clothed, remarkably clean and not really doing anything but staring at the bayhem going on around her.

My only major gripe with her is that there are couple times in the movie where it seems like her face does the whole "MY PREEECIOUUUUS" thing that Bilbo Baggins' face did in Fellowship of the Ring.

The Wreckers

Bay had promised the twins (Skids and Mudflap) and their obnoxious personalities would not be in TF3. As information and pictures of the movie toys were coming to light, it was starting to look like Bay was replacing the twins with a trio called The Wreckers.

Now bear in mind, The Wreckers have a long history and when I saw the initial images of the toys, I just groaned. All 3 turned into souped up nascars complete with sponsorships from big boys like Lowe's and Target. Topspin has a mullet. Roadbuster has a ballcap. Leadfoot is bald with a beer gut. All 3 of them have wrap-around sunglasses.

Can you say, rednecks.

This was actually the one part of the movie I was dreading, but credit to Bay and Co., they threw everyone off. The Wreckers are actually pretty fkn awesome, albeit minor characters in TF3. Right off the bat, they're introduced with "We don't let them off the base because well...they're assholes" by the CIA director. Then they speak and they're not redneck or stupid at all, but yes, they are assholes and they're enjoyable additions to the movie.

Plot

The cheesy writing and dumbass story of TF2 was a huge sticking point and fodder for most of it's ridicule. The first 10-15 minutes of TF3 has more story in it than TF2 did as a whole. That's not saying much, but it's clear they put a lot more time and thought into actually trying to tell a story in this movie. They'll blame the writer's strike as the primary culprit for the TF2 bullshit, but I don't buy that as a whole.

At it's core, the plot of TF3 is basically derived from set of G1: Season 1 cartoons called "The Ultimate Doom". I suspect this was done primarily as a fan wank, but it's pretty funny watching just how closely it follows that original plot line. It's almost like the writers, in this case, decided to just fluff up the original story with a few new plot twists, deaths and whatnot, then make a huge movie out of it.

And yet, somehow it worked.

Bay clearly goes for the jugular when it comes to leaving open ends for a 4th installment. Pretty much every main character is killed off. Shockwave (more on him in a min), Ironhide, Wheelie, Starscream, Sentinel Prime, Barricade, Soundwave, Laserbeak, and Megatron.

Shockwave was probably one of my bigger points of contention with this movie. Vast majority of the ad campaign for this movie leads you to believe Shockwave is the primary antagonist. This was much to the glee of G1'ers as Shockwave was always the cold and calculating brainiac that most felt could lead the Decepticons. Turns out, all of Shockwave's appearances in the movie were basically shown in the trailers. He had maybe...3-5 more minutes of screen time on top of what most had already seen in the trailers. Completely irritating.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he was in there in some capacity, but he's one of the bigger characters in the TF Universe. He was mostly killed by humans. He had virtually no lines other than a few grunts. I just didn't see much of a point in having a character that's been as developed as he has over the decades in such a minor role, much less a role that showed most of his screen time in the trailers.

A few plot points that ended up being purist shout-outs:

- Sentinel Prime has always been somewhat of a background character until lately, when shows like Transformers: Animated or games like War for Cybertron develop his character. Prior to that, it had always just been mentioned that he was the leader before Optimus.

- Ironhide getting wasted, and rather brutally, by space rust and his actual death lines are reminiscent of some of the various ways he's been killed in other continuities.

- Megatron's line "All Hail Megatron" is more or less a direct shout out to the IDW Comics series by the same name. That series was very popular with G1 purists as the writers for that series managed to capture why the war was being fought and why it will likely never end.

- Rosie Huntington-Whitely's character name of "Carly" was the name of the woman that eventually married Spike (Sam) in the G1 series. This was who fans wanted to see portrayed from the start, but for whatever reason, Bay decided to go with "Mikaela Banes".

- Leonard Nimoy voices Sentinel Prime in this movie. Nimoy also voiced Galvatron in the original G1 movie. A number of Spock references were seen throughout the movie. The first was literally an episode of Star Trek and Spock being referenced as "going crazy". The second was Bumblebee using Spock's line "I am and will always be, your friend". The last was Sentinel Prime saying "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." The last two are obviously a little more obscure than the first, but they're Spock references nonetheless.

Conclusion

Go see it in IMAX if you can. Otherwise, make sure you see it in 3D. The vast majority of the things that made TF2 suck are gone from TF3 and I dare say this one was actually better than the first. It drags on a little bit, but for the most part, the story is fluid, the action is breathtaking at times and it's probably most violent of the 3 films. I wouldn't expect a sequel to this, but I would definitely expect another director to take a shot at a series reboot.

Spielberg coming out of that Executive Producer chair perhaps?

MOAR JOB UPDATES/ADJUSTMENTS

2011-06-03T16:00:00.002-05:00

I'm not exactly sure what the current dev. team is thinking. They're actually working, and mostly in a good way. Unfortunately, they still seem to keep missing some of the bigger points about job balance.

I get all jobs need to be unique. I get there has to be a certain level of work you have to put into a job to get it up to an acceptable level from a gear and skill standpoint. What I don't get is how a select few jobs can keep getting mega-buffed while others that have needed buffs for a very long while have continued to be ignored or just get a bone thrown it's way from time to time.

The cyclical nature of this game is pretty funny to watch. The first few years, it was all about dual wield burns anywhere you could keep a chain going. Then it became all about 2H'er burns. Now it's obviously about Abyssea burns, but the common denominator in all of that is the relevance of a couple jobs in comparison to the rest.

Those jobs? WAR and WHM.

The game has been changed to a point where if you have a NIN, WAR, WHM and BRD, you can pretty much tackle the vast majority of the content. You don't even truly need all 4, but from an Abyssea standpoint, any other healing or melee jobs just come up on the short end of the stick if you're trying to low man things. The name of the Abyssea game is KI acquisition. Want to cover all the red staggers? Bring a NIN and WAR. Want to attempt to farm up fast gold chests? Bring 1 or 2 Fell Cleavers (preferably WAR cause DRK GAxe just doesn't cut it). Want to keep them alive? WHM is pretty much your only option. That or an army of people with Cure 4.

Sure, other DDs can dump out some damage that's on par with some pimped out WARs, but why fill up a slot in an event with a job that's only there for a potential blue stagger? Why claw your eyeballs out watching a PLD tank something when a NIN can bust out so many different staggers, avoid getting hit most of the time (thus drastically lowering your target's TP gain) and dish out exponentially more damage?

So, to address this, here's what I would suggest to the dev. team:

Give all jobs access to the elemental trigger skills 175 and below. Energy Drain, Tachi: Koki and Blade: Ei are the only 3 that wouldn't be covered. You can still leave other potential WS like Penta Thrust (150) with their current job-specific traits and it's not like these weapon skills do a shitload of damage to begin with short of using a brew. Even then, the truly good brew-skills (jinpu aside...) are all upwards of 300 skill anyway.

Toss in some Lv.1 weapons people can carry around. Hell, make them available through dominion credit purchases since there's really nothing else useful out of those. Between people being too f***ing lazy to actually skill the weapon to begin with and the potential for 3 out of the 13 current staggers to not be covered, I don't think game balance is going to be thrown completely out of whack.

As for specific job adjustments...a lot remains to be seen. A true balance in a specific role (which I define as Tank, Healer, Support, Front-Line DD and Back-Line DD) means a player's skill and equipment are what set them apart from their team members. Right now, a completely pimped out BST can get trashed by run-of-the-mill MNK or WAR. I get there are niches for each job, but really...it kind of sucks when you need X job because it's just so far superior to dishing damage and not because there's a JA or Trait you need to win.

A DRG, SAM or WAR don't need anymore adjustments, but one or more or all tend to be in the notes when it comes update time.

...well, I personally would love for a DRG to have actual pet commands, but that's a story for a different day.

RDM and SCH both need Cure 5. WHM has had the ever-loving shit buffed out of it to the point where RDMs, outside of Abyssea, are simply there for Refresh II and barely considered within Abyssea. SCH doesn't even have that and I'd contend the main benefits of SCH main are the same things you can get from subbing SCH, but then again, why would you when subbing RDM for Convert and Refresh would probably trump it?

Anyway, I could go on for hours about this, but I won't. I'm going to wait until Lv.99 comes about before I truly pass judgement on SE's job adjustments. All I know is, I'm sick of having to make sure there's a NIN, and WAR for every event we do.

When the Cat's Away...

2011-03-22T14:34:00.007-05:00

Earthquake in Japan has provided for some unusual circumstances in the world of FFXI the past couple weeks. Namely, the lack of it. SE shut the servers down by request of their power company while they worked to deal with the ongoing nuclear matters to their north.

For me, that decision was a no-brainer. Do your social duty to your fell countrymen in the face of one of the worst disasters to ever happen on the planet, let alone Japan. As a result of the service being interrupted for an undetermined amount of time (despite SE announcing today service would be restored on Friday), they've given us the entire month of April for free. I donated the $25 I would have normally spent to the Red Cross.

The forced break from FFXI has actually been refreshing to me in a lot of regards. It's felt rather nice to come home after working and not have to feel like I'm going to spend the next 3-4 hours catering to linkshell members by organizing events. I've managed to make a little bit of a dent in the pile of games I've had sitting around for a while as well. God of War II, God of War III and Bioshock have all been played through now (yes, I know they came out a long while ago...).

What hasn't been refreshing to me is the doom and gloom expressed by a number of people on various forums regarding FFXI. I expected a few asshats to complain about the servers going down, but the sheer number of threads that have opened up on the new official forums about it and the number of semi-flippant remarks on other community forums is just absurd.

SE getting compared to Blizzard seems to be one of the more common complaints. Blizzard has a number of data centers around the world. Not many people have looked at the math involved in it though. For starters, Blizzard has 10 data centers to support it's 10+ million user playerbase. That's approximately 1 data center for every 1 million users.

SE hasn't had more than 500k users for at least half a decade, so why someone would think SE would have the money and time invested in a second data center is absurd. If one is going to use Blizzard's set up as the standard, one likely needs to do a lot more research into the cost and maintenance of a data center located on a different continent. It ain't cheap.

Again, assuming Blizzard's set up is the "gold standard", here are some other ridiculous numbers to think about from that article.

- 10 Data Centers on 3 Continents.
- 4 in the USA, 3 in Europe, 3 in Asian regions.
- 20,000 Systems
- 13,500 Server Blades
- 1.3 PETAbytes of storage. Note that is the level above Terabyte. Also note, most of your standard home PCs come equipped with 1-2TB of storage if you want an accurate idea of just how much space that actually is.
- 75,000 CPU cores. (Which means a lot of their "20,000 systems" are likely dual or quad core CPUs)
- 112 Terabytes of RAM. 100x more RAM than most home PC's have in hard drive space.

And that's Blizzard as of that article's 2009 publishing. SE's playerbase is 5% of that. I can bet you a year's salary as WoW's membership numbers fall (and they will eventually), those data centers will be shut down. As far as I know, SE's userbase never really exceeded a million users and thus, never really required the use of more than one data center. I can also guarantee you Blizzard didn't set up 10 data centers at the onset of WoW being published.

Here's another article to shed some more light on what data centers actually cost to build and maintain. Feel free to click on some of the links to further educate yourselves on the matter.

Bottom line is this.

SE's decision to shut down the servers was forced. People don't typically build their business infrastructure models around the notion a huge natural disaster will occur on the scale of the one that hit Japan. Aside from hardware maint. and updates, this is the first time in EIGHT years of service this has happened. It took a 8.9-9.0 Earthquake (only 5 have occurred that high since they started recording earthquake strength), a Tsunami that literally wiped entire cities off the map and an ongoing nuclear crisis to make that happen. I mean seriously...that's about a step short of the second coming of Christ on the "What could shut us down for a while" scale.

On top of that, I haven't found any other example of this happening elsewhere to any other MMO except during WoW's beta testing phase when a tornado directly hit the Virginia Data Center.

Crying about it happening is just completely selfish. Crying about SE not having a backup data center is just ignorant as the costs simply aren't met with SE's current subscription base. People suggesting the playerbase will suffer because SE didn't have a backup server in place might be right as MMO's generally work on addicting players to content, but I'd suggest anyone who actually quits FFXI over all the stuff going on in Japan...good riddance.

Long Time No Blog

2011-02-28T15:02:00.002-06:00

Tons of changes in my life since my last post. So let's get right to it.

"Job" Finale

My full-time "job" came to an end. It was essentially a consulting gig through my business that ate up a lot more of my time than it needed to. While driving home from the Thanksgiving trip to Maine, I pretty much came to the conclusion that I needed a different direction in my life. What I had been brought into that company for was not coming to fruition.

The primary reason I was brought in two years ago was to eventually replace their main IT guy when he retires as he is 60+ and pretty much the only guy there that knows anything about the database and IT infrastructure he has set up over the years. They all knew they weren't just going to get a guy right off the street and have them step in to take his place. They need to start training someone and sooner was a lot better than later.

The specific skillset they needed was someone with rather extensive database programming skills along with the ability to create various forms of media. Media being books on various programs they're selling and whatnot along with videos for various shows they attend. This was something I knew going into the initial sit-down with the powers that be. This was also something I made abundantly clear: My skill set does NOT include either of those.

Y'see, I'm basically an entrepreneur. I've owned my own business for the better part of 11 years now. My skillset is mostly confined to the typical issues a small business or residential end-user runs into. That doesn't mean I wasn't capable of learning what they needed, but they had a choice to make when they sat down with me.

Do you have the time to invest in training me or would you rather find someone who already has the skillset you're looking for? Odds are, the latter was going to cost them a lot more than they were willing to pay, especially after this fiasco.

Anyway, in typical fashion (wasn't typical to me at the time, amazing what you learn), they decided to do in-house training and give me a shot. I was happy because it basically meant my monthly business expenses were covered and then some, so I wasn't having to chase down every single penny to make ends meet. They were happy cause it meant my "boss" was freed up to work on more meaningful stuff to the ownership rather than having to spend a lot of time on bullshit like "can you change my desktop background?" or "this entire section just lost power because someone plugged in a jet engine to use as a space heater and we're too f***ing dumb to go flip the same breaker it trips every single time this happens."

So we're about two years after the hiring and I'm at a crossroads mentally. I'm tired of the politics and 15 chieftains who all have less stinky shit than the other ones, so therefore their request takes priority over someone else's. Very little training has taken place between my boss and myself because of constant changes, most of which were reactionary and caused huge ripple effects in the way things were setup system-wide. I'm not against change mind you, the problem with change and their ownership is that one tells you to do it one way, another tells you to do it differently, then you get them together to figure out a solution and they change their minds the next day and want you to do something totally different. If that happened every now and then, I'd be slightly frustrated, but I'd accept it. This wasn't an every now and then type of thing though. This was basically an every day thing.

I come back from the Thanksgiving trip to find the following:

- Owner has retired effective immediately.
- They've decided to merge two of their companies together.
- They've decided to create a new company in one of their old company buildings.
- They've decided to open a new company in TX.
- They've also decided to open a branch extension in the same location in TX (2 companies, one building).
- The accountant that fired me on April Fool's day via word of mouth was now the president.

My initial inclination was just to give them the finger and walk right then. One of these days, I'll learn to listen to those a lot more closely. I opted to stick it out because I knew how much crap it'd put on my boss' shoulders if I left. His Dad was about to pass away at the time (ended up passing away about a month later) and he already had a ton on his plate from the sweeping changes that were taking place thanks to the new leadership.

So as the holidays progressed and we got into 2011, I made up my mind to leave. Just was a matter of finding the right moment. I had it in my head that I wanted to finish the setup of the major stuff, then walk and I was probably about two weeks from it. Apparently, the accountant/president had similar thoughts and decided to go ahead and release me the day after my last blog post. The logic behind this release actually made a little sense, but...

...the part about "not having to pay IT consulting after 90 days" was simply ludicrous. What they don't realize is that while they may get someone with a skillset that's better suited for their needs, the notion that they won't have to pay an IT guy after 90 days with the new guy is based in fantasy and the reason why is because their structure is set up for constant change. Constant change means the need to redo various aspects of the company's IT infrastructure. Constant change means they bring most of the need for an on-hand IT guy on themselves.

The writing was on the wall when I got back from Thanksgiving. I knew it, but opted to stay to help my "boss" get through what was undoubtedly going to be one of the most tumultuous times he's had there. I was "Fired" back in April cause the accountant was allegedly watching out for the bottom line. A short while after this, I realized the accountant was basically just playing favorites and trying to figure out ways to line his own pocket better. His son was hired on as a broker for a sister company. He failed. Instead of releasing him like everyone else, they moved him to the main building to do...the same thing. Anyone care to guess what the result was? Yep. Failure. Again, instead of releasing him as they do with anyone else, they moved him over to a different company to take care of the accounting, all while remaining on the payroll for the company he had essentially failed twice.

Once these changes had been decided, the guy that was figureheading the "new" company was basically a guy that had been doing accounting work. The guy taking his place?

If you said, "the son", then you'd be correct. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against his son. The dude is actually really nice, he's just not a salesman. There's nothing wrong with that, some people just aren't cut for it. The problem is his father basically letting him continue to suck money from the company while contributing nothing to it while firing people who were actually making contributions.

Anyway, we're 45 days out since I was "fired" and apparently a lot of the same issues I was dealing with when I was there are still there. Case and point:

Their phone system was down per a former co-worker I ran into at Wal-Mart a couple days ago.

So anyway, I'm happy and basically done with that company. I'm back to running my own business full time again and making plans to return to school and expand my skillset during the fall semester. While a lot of people have made a point of telling me that I'll probably be called back in at some point, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. All I know is, right now, if they called, they'd have to pay me a lot more money, offer up some guarantees and actually treat me like a person. I have better shit to do with my time than coddle and massage huge egos.

FFXI

They really should rename this game to "Abyssea".

However, I do love the new approach to development they've taken with FFXI. They're making a much more concerted effort to communicate with their playerbase. Is that because FFXIV is a huge failure at the moment and they're trying to do everything they can to retain the FFXI player base? Possibly, but I don't really care. I'm going to enjoy it while I can.

Chest-bitching jobs is a lot of fun and a great way to create a lot of flexibility with our group. Been trying to ween us off PLD usage lately by having people volunteer to chest-bitch MNK or NIN. Normally, our runs consist of 18 people all concentrating on one thing. While we've had huge success doing that, I think it's getting close to time for us to start splitting up into 2 or 3 groups. PLD tank isn't the best way to go about this, so I'm basically working to position ourselves better to handle this.

As for my own in-game accomplishments, I've managed to do the following:

- 5/5 DRG AF3+2
- 2 BRD AF3+2 pieces (head and legs)
- BLM to 90
- MNK is on the way to 90.
- On the way to finishing Caladbolg.

Still got a few other things to round out, but time has started becoming sparse for me again. Maybe another blog post in the near future about that, but who knows really...

See you soon. :)

Random Murmurings...

2011-01-13T09:48:00.004-06:00

The November-March time period for me is growing more and more hectic. Typically, the holiday family shenanigans would eat up a ton of my time (and rightfully so) during Nov and Dec. That generally rolls into the busiest time of the business year for me in the form of tax season.

This holiday season and the start of tax season has been especially bad for me from a time standpoint. There's been very little down time at all when there was usually at least one day/week where I could just sit and decompress from all the stress that has built up. It'll make me sound old(er), but it truly seems like people don't know how to slow down anymore.

That or I can't keep up.

Take your pick.

Anyway, part of the hecticness (is that a word?) is related to FFXI. After undergoing a renaissance of sorts with Abyssea, level cap increases, etc, a lot of transformations have had to take place within our linkshell. Seems silly to me that helping lead a linkshell, which I had always viewed more as a hobby than a job, was eating up so much of my time. It has though. At this point, we seem to have most everything in place with a few minor tweaks to debate out as we find someone trying to figure out how to get a leg up on someone else.

That's one thing I've never understood. I get that it's human nature to be self-serving. Most decent humans can figure out how to cooperate and meet their own needs through a combination of teamwork and patience. There's always those one or two people though, that, no matter how much effort the leaders or team members put into making them better, they're always trying to figure out a way to game a system that's in place.

It's probably utopian of me to think that everyone on a team should be working to help each other out when they can. It's an MMO, not everyone has the same play schedule, so it's hard to gauge just how much effort one is putting in when they typically are on about 1/4 of the time as others. I've always operated under the idea that "You get what you put in."

And yes Jess, if you put in penis, you get penis.

There's so much new content in Abyssea that it's hard to apply some of those principles to it. Some NMs, like Hedjedjet or Fuath, are regularly camped and can be taken down with a small degree of difficulty in low man groups. Unlike Scars, and especially before they dropped the respawn time of NMs to 10-15 mins, these roaming NMs drop items for the +2 stuff, so it becomes an issue of time invested vs. reward gained. Camping NMs is never fun and I've always been opposed to spending mass amounts of time camping them. At the same time, you want to figure out the best and most efficient way of knocking those NMs out to progress through your linkshell's wish lists. "You get what you put in" really only applies if you're working to take other people who share similar interests from the linkshell with you.

Tough to balance and easy to manipulate.

Also on Abyssea, man it's tough getting new people up to par for it. You almost need a damn minor league system to help push returning/new people through to get their basics down, but even then, cause they missed the main push, you always end up with 1-2 people who "don't have X atma". I started compiling a list of what people need to get before they really start actively participating in Abyssea events. A lot of it can be picked up through the course of normal activity, but...

...sometimes not for a few weeks.

Anyway, the list:

1. Fluxes, all zones, no question. You show up and say "I don't have this flux", booting you from the run until you're 100% certain you have all the fluxes.

2. Celerity Abyssites. They're all solable. Get them, maximize your stone regen time.

3. Sojourn Abyssites. 4 of the 6 require NM kills. 2 are soloable. Strongly suggested to simply watch for when your linkshell is heading to a specific zone one of the NMs that drop it are in. 48 mins/stone as opposed to 30 mins/stone will go part and parcel with the celerity Abyssites.

4. Fortune Abyssites. 4, 5 and 6 will generally be lumped together. These particular ones aren't going to be soloable for the most part, but can be picked up typically through normal LS runs.

5. Kismet Abyssites. 2/3 are soloable. The last, not so much, but that chariot isn't a huge deal for a group to take down during a Grauberg run. I point these out cause it really fkn sucks building lights. The less time you spend doing this, the better and having those 1-2 people getting killshots w/o max lights just irritates and slows down everyone else.

6. Abyssites of Furtherance and Merit. A lot of these can be soloed. More HP/MP/Stats from cruor buffs = more better good.

On a side note, why does SE still have the individual options for cruor buffs?

7. Make a beeline for Razed Ruin, Voracious Violet, Allure and Minikin Monstrosity atmas. Sure, there are other atmas that are important, but odds are, no matter what job you play, one or more of those 4 atmas are going to be infused.

Lv.90 Gungnir

Finished this up last night. I'm still pissed I wasted so much time grinding out Lv.85 Gungnir only to have SE knock out 80% of the requirements. I'm halfway expecting they'll knock out a couple of the Lv.90 requirements in the next update.

At this point though, I get 2-3 months to not worry about a relic magian trial whereas before, I was typically up against the clock right up until update day finishing my previous ones.

I speculated before that the Lv.95 version of Gungnir will end up sending us to Xarc to knock out our respective fragment NMs. Still haven't swayed much from that thought process, but I'm starting to entertain the possibility that this whole attestation NM thing is an aberration to the killshot pattern as a whole and we'll be back to killshots for lv.95.

As of this writing though, Kreoss and I have finished our Lv.90 relics with Gawayne and Junin both sitting at 4/5 as they weren't finished with their trials when we did the first couple runs.

It took us 6 runs to get the 5 kills. The first run we attempted gave us a few sore reminders about how the attestation NMs worked. Also put a spotlight on the fact that not everyone knows where the extensions are in the zone. With a few tweaks and repositionings, we got these runs down to the point where we could get in, kill the 3 NMs necessary and get out in under 2 hours.

Last night, we ended up knocking out 4 of the 5 NMs. The 4th one being the BRD/BLM/WHM for Teysa's Dagger paper. Obviously this means we have a new wave of relics coming up behind us potentially, but I suspect that's not going to happen any time soon.

Many, MANY thanks to the guys like Kaylea, Kaelis, Drakus, Milie and a whole host of others who were there every run they could be to help push us through. These things aren't the easiest in the world to Duo or Trio, much less attempt to nail down 3 of them in one run with 2-3 people. It's rather amusing to watch these NMs take down a fully buffed, Lv.90 PLD in the sac process in a matter of 5 or 6 swings (lolgawayne).

We got one more run to do for Gaw and Junin, then hopefully I can just put this behind me for a while. In a lot of ways, this trial was worse than 2000 killshots given the amount of man hours invested from everyone involved. 2000 killshots could basically be done whenever with about 40~ hours. Dynamis could only be done every 72 hours and when you figure about 10 people per run investing 2-3 hours at a time over the course of 5 runs, you can see it easily trumps the killshots trials.

Even though I can't say everyone in our linkshell is always helping other linkshell members get their stuff done, I can say when the major stuff shows up, we got a very solid group of people that pitch in and help, so again, thanks to everyone that pitched in and got us through this.

Lancer's Plackart +2

As a b-day present, a few of us got together to knock this out. I wasn't really expecting to finish it, and it looked like I wasn't going to thanks to Shaula being stubborn on the Lancer's Body seals, but it happened. I had picked up a few Ardor Cards from NMs like Bennu and Alfard. Going into this impromptu event, I was sitting at 6/9 cards and 8/10 seals.

I rounded up everyone I could who was on same tier with me (our prio system is tiered based on 1st-5th priorities and grouped by what +2 items are required) and we headed out. Got Hedjedjet first thing. He somehow went unclaimed during the fight and we weren't sure if he had to deaggro or just go unclaimed for the whole restaggering bit. We erred on the side of caution and just killed him. Our reward?

One Thunder Belt.
One Card of Ardor.

So we figured we needed to restagger. While waiting for repop, we knocked out a few Shaulas, which had managed to drop a shitload of RNG and WHM body seals, but only one DRG body seal.

Second Hedjedjet comes along and we killed w/o having to deal with the unclaimed issue. The drops from that one were:

2x Card of Ardor.
1x Jewel of Ardor.
SoulScourge.
Thunder Belt.

So, I was done with the +2 portion of the body, just needed that last, pesky body seal. Back to Shaula we went. Nada. More RNG and WHM...

Not that Mav minded all the RNG body seals...I think he started from scratch and finished his +1 and then some...

More linkshell members came out to join us and we got Hedjedjet again. We ran into the unclaimed issue and, thinking back to the first, we grellowed it again. Our reward?

Thunder Belt.
1x Jewel of Ardor.

So ok...one of those kills we just got unlucky on, which was it...

Back to Shaula, who finally dropped the last seal I needed. Awesomely enough, pretty much every Shaula since has dropped 1-2 DRG body seals...

My luck is seriously weird sometimes. There's no question I'm lucky most of the time. My bad luck tends to manifest itself when I'm || close to finishing something.

One objective to go in a relic trial?

Geirskogul whiffs 7 times in a row.

One more item to finish a +1 or +2 piece of armor?

Need at least 10 kills before I'm done.

.1 away from a new WS?

Usually takes an hour or more before I see it.

But up until those points in each of those scenarios, I'm lucky in how fast I get there.

At any rate, I've got +2 head and body now on DRG and +1 everything else. The +2 legs and feet might take some more time given the NMs that drop the cards in Qty. 3 are T3 VNMs...and getting those abyssites suck to begin with. Really wouldn't surprise me if I finished the lower gear priorities on my wish lists before I finished those 2 particular pieces.

I'm torn on what's better for WS though. Lancer's Plackart +2 or Ares Body. I'm of the mindset that in Abyssea, Ares is better, but out of Abyssea, the plackart is better.

Acc is more or less wasted on me given the sheer amount of it I have on my relic and various other pieces of gear. So it's really a question of what's better? 15 Dex or 10 Att? DRG only has a DEX mod in Penta Thrust, which I rarely use anymore. Obviously DEX helps Drakesbane potentially reach another crit tier, but in Abyssea, I'm likely well beyond the crit cap from cruor buffs and atma like Razed Ruin.

Testing must be done!

Testing must also be done on the whole "Set: Damage occasionally varies with wyvern's HP". I whacked a lady bug with a 2600 crit melee swing shortly after I got the body. My wyvern's HP was 100%, so I'm wondering if it's just a straight 1/1 percentage boost to the damage you would have normally dealt as most of my relic crits are in the 1200-1300 range.

That's all for now though...

Benji: 1995-2011

2011-01-03T16:02:00.004-06:00

This isn't an FFXI related post, so if you come here strictly for that, then sorry, you'll have to wait another day.

Today I woke up with a long list of tasks to do. I ended up getting none of them done and had to bury my dog.

My sister found Benji as a puppy in the parking lot of a nearby Minit Mart about 16 years ago. She was out for a drive with Dad practicing for her driver's test. Benji was so small that my sister feared she would get run over cause she was hard to see. This resulted in her being brought home with her with the intention of being taken to the pound the next day.

Most people know how that story goes.

The part that was uncommon was that she managed to win my mom over in that one-day moratorium. Y'see, Mom hates dogs. She was attacked by one as a little girl and has hated/feared them ever since, no matter the size. The second Benji showed up in my sister's arms, she was pretty much ordered to take her back. Dad intervened. The dog was staying at least until the next day. It was getting dark out and the pound was already closed anyway.

Naturally, my sister and I are playing with Benji. So full of life and energy as a lot of puppies are. She's a little skittish naturally due to her size, but once she warmed up to you, she couldn't get enough attention.

Later that evening, Mom is sitting on the couch scowling at Benji. I'm not sure what possessed Benji to try, but she walked right up to the couch and started trying to hop up next to Mom. Benji was so small though, that she couldn't make it. Mom, being undersized herself, seemed to empathize with that. She ultimately helped Benji up onto the couch and seemingly from that point forward, Benji was officially part of our family.

Benji was you typical dog. Couldn't get enough attention. Definitely couldn't get enough food. Randomly left "presents" around the house if we didn't get her outside in time. Some of her more endearing qualities were:

- Yapped at anything that came into the yard or if the doorbell rang. Her bark could actually wake Dad up from a deep sleep (Dad's legally deaf).

- Fiercly protective of people she loved, even if someone she loved was acting like they were going to harm someone else she loved. It was a fun game to play at times to get her stirred up. You could simply hold your hand out and move a little bit towards another person. If you had eye contact with Benji, she'd rush toward you, teeth bared and barking. She would never actually bite you, but she'd certainly let you know she didn't approve.

- She never played fetch. No matter how many times I tried to train her, she'd just look at whatever I threw as if to say, "Dumbass. Now you get to go get it."

- Tuft of hair on the top of her head that was the only indication she had some poodle in her. Benji was mostly terrier. That tuft of hair was basically like pipe cleaner. You could bend/style that in any shape you wanted w/o having to use anything to hold it in place. We commonly had her running around with a mohawk.

- She had a snaggletooth. If you whistled for her, sometimes her upper lip wouldn't be covering said tooth. So the expression you'd get when she'd look up was one that looked like sheer befuddlement when it was supposed to be one of attention.

- She was scared of her collar clanging against her water bowl. Never really understood why this scared her, but it did. We tried using plastic dog tags, changing her water bowl to a plastic one, etc, but nothing worked. It wasn't until the past year or so when she started going deaf that she seemed to not care if her collar hit her bowl or not. Otherwise, she'd stand just far enough away to lap the water with her tongue outstretched.

- Loved baths. A lot of dogs do and she wasn't any different. She'd get a bath and then run around the house like a crazed animal rubbing up against anything she could.

For the past year or so, her health had been failing at a rather rapid pace. I'm about as anti-euthanization as it gets and felt if meds could keep her from suffering, that was the better option. She had a whole host of problems due to age. Irritable bowels, arthritic joints, kidney failure (which required dialysis every couple days the past few months), and most notably, going blind and deaf.

Most days, on all of her meds, she seemed fine and about as alert as a blind/deaf dog could be. She could hear you whistle for her still and my guess is could still make out shadows, but you'd catch her running into things she normally wouldn't. She found it harder and harder to walk and even harder to control her bowels.

A couple weeks ago, we had to take her in for an emergency visit due to some blood being in her urine. One complete set of tract infection meds later, the problem hadn't really cleared up, so my folks made the decision to go ahead and have her put down.

When they called me this morning to tell me the news, I rushed over to the vets office hoping I could say bye to her. On the way, my sister calls me to tell me they're holding off until she and I got there.

It's rare that people get to say goodbye to their pets in this manner. Sure, pets are euthanized all the time, but typically said euthanizaton happens after a pet has suffered something traumatic or has generally lost all sense of self. Benji was still completely coherent of her surroundings.

I got to the office and found Benji waiting for me. She was so weak, she could barely stand up, but she tried. I just held onto her for the longest time waiting for my sister to get there. Once she did, she and I just started sobbing. Even though I knew the decision to have her put down was the right one, I never imagined it would be so hard to let go.

I've lost pets before. Most infamously, my cat that had congestive heart failure She managed to hop up onto the couch I was laying on and headbutt me one last time to let me know she was leaving. She was dead the next morning. In that case, I had a sense she wasn't going to make it to the morning and I did get to say bye, but she got to die her own way. Benji really didn't.

What Benji did get to do though was have her family around her to say bye. Sitting in the vet's office with Benji in my lap shortly after she was given the tranquilizer shot (the precursor to the final euth. shot), she let me know things were ok. She let my sister know too. The dog that was unable to stand moments before managed to paw at both my hand and my sister's hand before she passed out. It was a weak paw, but we both got the message. Soon enough, she was snoring loudly in my lap.

Shortly after that, the final shot was administered and we ushered Benji off into doggy heaven.

There aren't many instances in life that will cause me to sob uncontrollably. There are plenty that might make me well up a bit, but nothing like that. After she was pronounced dead, I picked her body up to place in her box for carriage home. I didn't realize how limp she was going to be and I broke down uncontrollably, missing her box almost completely.

The vet offered to place her in a bag for me and put her in there, but there wasn't any way I was allowing that to happen. I get that vets do this sort of stuff on a daily basis and having the owners in there likely makes their job a lot more difficult. I just didn't want Benji's body to be shaped by the bag. As morbid as this sounds, every pet I've buried up until this one had been through the bagging process and the positions their bodies ended up in was just horrifying to me.

Working through the sobs, My sister and I managed to get Benji curled up in her box, placed the lid on it and proceeded to come home with her.

What Benji has meant to our family over these years can't be worded. Most pet owners will just understand. We've had a lot of pets and, while most of them ended up being taken from us way too early, the one constant that touched every single pet we've ever owned sans one, was Benji. Up until the past year or so, we would be greeted through the door by her barking and her coming up to greet us when we walked through the door. Again, this isn't uncommon for most pet owners, but most pet owners wouldn't think of it a second for other pets. However, their own pets doing this ends up being taken for granted.

We were fortunate. We knew the end was near. Even as far back as 5 or so years ago when arthritis set in, we knew. So our family simply did their best to enjoy what time Benji had left here. Sure, she aggravated us at times, but even if she got in trouble, it wasn't long afterwards that she was right by our sides getting loved on.

Benji's life was one of incredible luck and circumstances. Most can read her story and see that given where she came from.

What most won't see is that even though she was that lucky, we were infinitely more lucky to have her.

R.I.P. Benji. You were loved and you will be missed greatly.

P.S. The decision to keep her alive vs. put her down over the course of the past year has come up quite a bit. Meds generally kept her happy and moving around, but as time wore on, they weren't having the same effect. One of the biggest things that came out of our decisions was my oldest niece being old enough to remember who Benji was as she gets older. Around 2.5-3 years old, not many memories stay. Since she's over 4 now, it's far more likely she will remember and that does nothing but positive things towards Benji's memory.

End of 2010

2010-12-27T08:30:00.003-06:00

As the end of this year approaches, it's time for me to review the results of my resolutions:

1. Resolution: Weigh 165-170lbs by 2011.

When I initially stated my weight was 195lbs, I found out a short while later my scale was broken. I was actually about 210. While I didn't hit the goals I initially set out to hit (165-170lbs, lose 30lbs), I came close. I'm checking in between 185-190 now, which means I lost 20-25lbs over the course of this year.

Admittedly, my weight loss wasn't at the forefront of my thoughts throughout most of the year and I lost a good chunk of that before March. The good news here is that I made enough minor changes to know I can maintain the weight loss it would seem. If 2011 works out the same as 2010 did, I'll hit my goal of 165-170lbs.

2. Resolution: Database Programming. Learn it. Love it.

Yeah this one didn't go as easily as I thought. Buying and reading books on this subject just put me to sleep most of the time. I wouldn't call myself an expert on the subject at hand just yet, but I made some in-rows.

Learning it: Yes.
Loving it: No.

3. Resolution: Debt under control enough to re-establish my own independence.

This resolution revolved mostly around trimming 3 people off my debtors list. I succeeded in doing this and then some. Now I have just one debtor and that one will take a few more years to pay off.

4. Resolution: Girlfriend moved to KY by the end of July 2010.

Didn't work out. She insists on finding a job before she moves and I'm insisting she won't find one until she's actually here. She's got some other legit concerns as well like medical insurance, etc.

She's actually self-imposed a deadline of July 2011 to move down here now.

5. Resolution: Improve my credit score by 50-100 points.

Great how fast credit can get destroyed but how long it takes to build. Despite having 0 new negative entries and clearing off a few others in 2010, my credit score went up a whole 12 points.

The whole goddamn system is a sham.

6. Resolution: Level at least 2 more jobs to 75 in 2010.

I stated BLM would be my next job to 75. I also wrote that blog post before SE announced they would be lifting the level cap to 99 and before they released Abyssea.

Abyssea changed the way jobs are leveled and pretty much everything about FFXI. While I did get bard up to end-game level (currently sits at 87), I didn't level BLM. However, I don't fret that too much given I can take BLM from 40-90 in a matter of 2-3 XP parties in Abyssea.

Anyway, I got to most of my goals for 2010 or a good chunk of the way there. I would expect to have similar goals for 2011, but I haven't given much thought to it. Eventually, I'll make a 2011 resolutions entry.

In the mean time, hope everyone had a great 2010 and can look forward to an even better 2011.

New DRG Stuff from Dec. Update

2010-12-09T08:52:00.002-06:00

Got DRG to 90 last night and had a chance to fiddle around with the new stuff SE gave us. Didn't do any in depth testing, but...

Breath Commands

- Both of the breath moves are actual pet commands and not stances as some had speculated.

- Neither breath appears to be gimped. All of the same factors apply that would normally apply when triggering these breaths normally.

- This basically means I have to start carrying around my Wyvern HP+ set even when I'm subbing SAM.

- They do not share a timer.

- You cannot target other players with Restoring Breath.

These additions are huge for DRG and a bit of a god-send for mages who hate that DRGs are such MP sponges. Being able to cure myself for a huge amount once every minute will likely help ease up MP consumption rates and make DRG a lot more effective from a soloing/duoing standpoint. Smiting Breath is useful not only just for damage output potential, but for manually hitting up magic bursts if the wyvern is smart enough to use the correct breath.

Dragon Breaker

Admittedly, I only used this once last night on Cuelebre. However, the reductions it caused were very noticeable. Looked like the effect lasted approximately 3 minutes as well. Again though, I was just eyeballing that and didn't pay super close attention to it.

AF3 Body + Hands

Shit those things are smexy. The full set is probably one of the best sets of armor I've seen in this game. I was impressed with the original pictures that were shown on the Heroes of Abyssea microsite, but those were on a Hume. On an Elvaan, there's a lot more to see. Screenshots soon to follow hopefully...

And...hopefully getting the +1 or +2 versions of it aren't all that difficult.

Lv.90 Gungnir

So after reducing the relic trials to basically nothing...(really? 80% reductions?), I learned what the requirements were for getting the Lv.90 version of my relic.

For the record, I went into acquiring this particular piece of knowledge with a little bit of hope given how much they had reduced the previous trials, but part of me also had a sense of dread considering just how much time I actually wasted trying to get to this point anyway.

The trial is....

Kill Dagourmarche 5 times.

Don't remember him?

Yeah he would be this guy.

So...after enduring the bullshit that was:

1500 Geirskogul uses on Amorphs.
2000 Geirskogul killshots on Lizards.
2000 Geirskogul killshots on Arcana
2000 Geirskogul killshots on Vermin.
2000 Geirskogul killshots on Aquans.

Then getting no-lube sodomized by their 80% reductions on the trials...

Now I have to trudge into Dynamis-Beaucedine a minimum of 5 times, run all the way up to Nue's tower (anyone who's ever popped attestation NMs know what a bitch this actually is), then kill said NM 5 times.

Nevermind the 500k entry fee (x 5).

Or the 72 hour cool down...

At least it's not 2000 killshots again.

The part about this that bothers me isn't really the trial itself, it's just what the pattern seems to establish. If I have to go kill this NM 5 times, I suspect Lv.95 Gungnir will require me to go kill Gungnir itself 5 times.

Which leaves killing DL or something else Dynamis-related 5 times for the Lv.99 version.

Obviously, SE could throw a curve ball and just change it to something different, but I somewhat doubt it. SE hasn't been very creative in the trials for relics (or mythics for that matter).

Good thing is, it means Rustnarok will be completed and I'll have a buddy to take these down with.

...

2010-12-06T09:31:00.002-06:00

I will fkn punch babies.

Hate you sometimes SE.

(Especially if that applies to 2H relics.)

Level 90 DRG...Some Other Random Sh*t Too.

2010-12-01T08:14:00.003-06:00

We interrupt this long, blog writing hiatus to shoot out a few quick blurbs on the new JAs they've announced for the Dec. update.

Most notably...DRG.

Dragon Breaker (DRG Lv.87 Ability Delay: 10 min. Effect Duration: 3 min.)
Lowers accuracy, evasion, magic accuracy, magic evasion, and TP gain for dragons.

Smiting Breath (DRG Lv.90 Ability Delay: 1 min.)
Orders the wyvern to attack with its breath.

Restoring Breath (DRG Lv.90 Ability Delay: 1 min.)
Orders the wyvern to heal with its breath.

My first reaction to seeing these was FUCK YES!~

You see, I've been wanting a way to manually control the wyvern in the same way a SMN or BST or PUP could control their pets. As it stands right now, the only thing I can do as far as pet commands go are Call, Dismiss and Spirit Link. Obviously I can trigger other things the wyvern does depending which sub I have, but a way to send a wyvern in to attack or to call it back ("pet pulling") would be awesome. I've never understood why SE didn't implement this.

After the initial euphoria wore off, the questions started coming to mind about those breath abilities, namely Restoring Breath. Smiting Breath is blatantly obvious. There's not much you can do with it aside from potentially telling your wyvern to go nuke a target you're not currently engaged to.

Can Restoring Breath be used on other party members in the same manner a cure spell or a waltz would?

Is Restoring Breath influenced in the same manner as Healing Breath? Meaning, load up on Wyvern HP+ gear and boost it?

Will Deep Breathing work with it as well?

All of that will be answered when I hit 90 obviously, but it's at least fun to think about for now. So many possibilities, but, as is the case with any pet...

...the pet has to be alive.

Lv.85 Gungnir

It's getting harder and harder for me to find my way through these trials that SE puts in for relic holders. I knocked out about 250 of the objectives a couple weeks after Scars came out, but then I just had zero motivation to take it further.

With the previous 4 trials, I basically had to piss myself off completely before I was motivated to do them. Then I'd just hunker down for a week or so and pray I didn't Whiffskogul too much.

This particular trial was easier than the rest (except the first one, where I didn't have to land killshots, just use the WS itself). I just couldn't find the motivation at first, then I couldn't find the time. The trip up to Girlfriend's parents afforded me some time to work on this.

It actually afforded me more time than I thought it would.

I now have Lv.85 Gungnir just in time to be slapped with the next trial that will probably consist of 2500 kill shots on plantoids.

"Sh*t My Dad Says"

For the drive to Maine for Thanksgiving, I picked this book up on CD. Some seriously funny shit in there that damn near caused me to wreck a couple times from laughing. It's $10. Go to B&N or Borders or Amazon and get it.

Paraphrasing some of the more memorable quotes:

"Son, you're 4 years old. It's time to shit in the toilet. This isn't one of those negotiation things where we go back and forth. This ends with you shitting in the toilet."

"First thing about driving is that a car has 5 gears. What's that smell? Ok, first thing before that first thing: if you fart in a parked car, that makes you an asshole."

For those of you that don't know, this book basically started cause of a twitter account. Said twitter account can be found here:

http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays

It's been spun off into a TV show I have yet to watch as well.

One Ring To Ru...Yeah No.

"Engagement rings are pointless. Indians gave cows...Oh sorry, congrats on proposing. We good now? Can I finish my indian story?"

I figure another quote from "Sh* My Dad Says" is appropriate for this section...

I got Girlfriend the engagement ring she and her family have hounded me about since they initially met me.

Now I need to figure out how to stall the wedding for nearly 3 years like I did the ring...

Anyway...back to my hiatus...

Gungnir vs. Ryunohige vs. Rhongomiant

2010-10-12T13:12:00.003-05:00

Actually, it's just a post about the super weapons in general.

Been seeing a lot of debate over which one is better than the other and not just limited to the Polearms themselves. Great Katana, Scythe, Great Axe, etc seem to be under scrutiny as well.

The part that's been bugging me is that some will simply dismiss one of these weapons as a waste. Don't get me wrong, some are (i.e. Claustrum...), but to simply dismiss one of them because it gets beaten in a parse under certain circumstances is just completely stupid.

People have their reasons for upgrading these things. Most of the time, it revolves around wanting to be the best they can be. Other times, it's handed to them via linkshell contribution (an Aegis or Gjallarhorn for example) because of the undeniable impact they have on the team itself.

I'm of the opinion SE designed relics to be the best weapons in the game. When Mythics were released, I formed the opinion that SE intended for them to be in the same class as relics, just in a different manner. Initially, when the Empyrean Weapons were released, I was irritated at SE's wanting to put these in the same class as Relic/Mythics and seemingly making them far easier to obtain. Obviously that last part has been debunked, so now I'm of the opinion all 3 weapons are in the same class.

Which is better?

Who knows really. There aren't enough of them out there that can actually be parsed together consistently enough to see, but I'd be willing to bet each one would win about the same number of times. While it's fun to present cases based on numbers, etc, most people presenting said cases aren't presenting numbers that are different enough to really justify it.

A good example is a BG thread debating Ryunohige vs. Gungnir (continues into page 8).

There's a lot of math on display in that thread. First, the facts outside of the obvious stats:

Gungnir:

1. 2.5x damage proc (not a high %, probably around 5%).
2. Double Light capability.
3. Higher fSTR cap.

Ryunohige:

1. Can maintain near constant aftermath effect. (100TP Increases accuracy, 200TP Increases Attack, 300TP Occasionally attacks twice (~45%?))
2. "Augments Jump" either forces the crit on Jump or increases it's Acc.

I look at the facts there and immediately think of everything that a weapon's base damage and your level of accuracy affect. It's a lot of stuff. Gungnir's got it beat statistically in every category. Base damage is 6-7% higher. It's got a full time, built in Acc+30.

Mythic aftermath effects do not stack. While having 3 different options at your disposal based on what you're fighting is pretty handy, it takes some serious timing if you want to max your Acc potential. Even launching a Drakesbane with 190TP is going to have it coming up short in the Acc dept. against Gungnir. It's highly doubtful anyone would intentionally launch Drakesbane in the 200-299 range to get the Att+ effect, but even then, if they did, you're probably locked into some form of Acc food and the Gungnir DRG is probably wolfing down Carbonara or Yellow Curry Buns.

Having a full 3 minutes of a rather insane Double Attack rate though is where Ryunohige is going to make up a lot of ground and, in the right hands, possibly even surpass a Gungnir.

But, we're back to the facts. With the inclusion of Spirit/Soul Jump now along with Sekkanoki and Conserve TP, odds are, that Ryunohige DRG is going to waste a lot of TP trying to keep that Double Attack aftermath active. Obviously, having an atma like Eccentric Eve's active is going to mean a lot of fights START with that DA aftermath active, but it doesn't necessarily mean it will remain that way. You also have to look at timing.

Say you have a pretty standard 5 hit build starting from 0 TP and you swing every 3 seconds. In a 3 minute period of time, you will have thrown out a minimum of 60 swings. If every 5 swings is essentially a WS you can use, then you've effectively landed 12 weapon skills in a perfect world.

But the world isn't perfect.

At some point a Ryunohige DRG wanting to maintain that DA Aftermath is going to have to build up 300TP. Without Eve's atma, said DRG is looking at having to swing 12-15 times. If they're smart, use meditate and jumps (all of which the Gungnir DRG obviously has too...), then you effectively halve that number. Either way, that Gungnir DRG is going should be able to launch 2-3 more Drakesbanes in the time it took you to store that 300 TP.

Factoring a 45% Double Attack rate into the equation halves it further if it actually kicks in.

(Which is one thing Byrn seems to miss in his arguments...a Relic DRG can actually use Drakesbane too...)

So which would win? Honestly it's probably a wash.

But the point is, they aren't wasting money or time or resources by upgrading one over the other.

My biased opinion though is that Gungnir would win most of the time, but not by a lot and since both weapons essentially cost the same, I don't really give a shit.

Rhongomiant though...remains to be seen. :)

Loot Whore Qtipus

2010-09-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

I've been on an incredible run of luck lately in terms of item acquisition...

Einherjar

Loot Whore mode started 2 Odins ago where I picked up:

To understand how I got all 3 of those items in one run, you have to understand our bidding system. The only item I won outright in terms of bids was the E.Body. The other two items had myself and a couple others placing minimum bids of 4. Normally when someone places bids like that, they kind of want an item, but are willing to lot it out with other people. W.Body and Hofud both saw me win the subsequent lots, which is highly unusual for my level of luck at times.

And before Kreoss chimes in about a golden horseshoe shoved up my ass as it relates to my luck, I need to point out the vast majority of my luck is centered around crafting. I don't really consider most of that luck so much as persistence. The only "lucky" craft I believe I've ever had was a pair of Unicorn Leggings +1 back when they sold for 20 mil. Since then, I've been squarely in the center of the odds. My current 0/72 streak on cursed cap+1 is a good example of that. :)

ANYWAY!

E.Body was naturally turned into this:

I got the Crimson Scale Mail as well, but didn't really care enough about it to take a picture. However, I do need to thank Alaistair for making it for me.

Dynamis

AF2 from Dynamis has been mostly irrelevant for a very long time. There are some niche pieces that can be used for various sets and a few that are full time (BLU Body, RDM Hat come to mind), but for the most part, the rest of it is junk compared to what you can get in the slots now.

Since it's introduction though, I've wanted Wyrm Mail +1. Haste on any body piece is rare to find, or likely was until the introduction of the AF3 bodies. If you go by the standard of Acc > Haste > everything else, then you already know I'm at or near the Acc cap on pretty much everything I fight. So the only thing that's really been left has been for me to tweak out things with haste gear.

At any rate, we've not had much luck in Tav runs as it relates to body pieces. We've picked up a few BST-1, WAR-1 and "new" job-1 bodies but nothing really substantial until the last Tav run. With the level cap increasing, Tav is becoming increasingly easier to deal with. Before, taking on clusters was pretty much just a "grab your ass, put your head between your knees and pray" type of endeavor. While they still pack a punch if they blow up, they aren't all out devastating like they used to be 10 levels before. This pretty much lent itself to my simple dynamis philosoph of "more kills = more drops".

We finally had a breakthrough.

Kimille was the one that wanted that forever and it would have completed her RDM AF2+1 set. Unfortunately, she wasn't at the run for reasons related to baby, moving, remodeling, etc, so Rudithina picked it up. I dunno if anyone's tested it, but from what I can tell, there's not a huge gain in terms of stats. It's not like the AF2+1 hat where MND+3 gets added to it, but still, it's a rare drop and it's a whitebox for a piece that a lot of RDMs use.

About 1 kill after that...

Can pretty much see in that picture how I felt after seeing that. Holy shit what a relief. Everyone's got that one item they tend to obsess over. I felt like leaving the run right then and turning in all the stuff for it, but I waited until after the run was over then sat at my PC staring at Sagheera trying to fast forward time a week or figure out a way to hack SE's servers and speed their clocks up.

Anyway, I picked this up this past Sunday:

And this has found it's way into my TP build. Next things on my list at this point are a Bullwhip/Goading Belt (haven't decided which...), AF3+1/2 Hat and Feet and a Lancer's cape. Just with the +1 versions of the AF3, the cap and the goading belt, I will have added 6% to my TP build while not sacrificing much in the way of ACC at all. (+2 from body, +1 from hat, +1 from feet, +1 from back, +1 from belt). That would put my TP build at 23% haste. Bullwhip belt obviously puts me at cap, but I have some slight reservations about how much damage I'd be taking. Getting +2 Hat and Feet would pretty much put me at cap w/o having to worry about the amount of damage I'd take, but there's part of me that wants the Bullwhip belt and the AF3+2 just so I can full time in Ares Body (unless AF3 body is just insanely better).

Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the first on the server with a full DRG AF2+1 set, but I'm glad I finished it.

Abyssea

Abyssea is rather...odd. I love it to death, but I really dislike having to figure out how to handle drops given a lot of the high demand items can be obtained by sending in low man teams to deal with, so it's almost a waste of points trying to control it that way. It's also a waste of time trying to kill these things for anything other than atma purposes during a normal LS event.

With that said, I did some experimentation last night. I grabbed Drakus, Kaelis, Kaylea, Mav and Theora and we ran around to kill a few NMs. Chasmic Hornet, Khalamari, Gangly Green(?) and Bakka were at the top of the lists. The set up was DRG/WHM, BLU/NIN x2, THF/NIN, RDM/BLM, and BLM/Beard. Hornet got killed twice and I picked up:

This made me very happy. I had semi-bad luck with this drop, having killed the hornet at least a dozen times during the course of normal LS events. Was rather convenient for us to kill this since it was often on the way to a gigas pop we were farming and it dropped a semi-decent piece of abyssite to the puller. I knew I'd get it eventually, I just didn't expect it in this fashion.

Short while later, we found ourselves in Highlands looking for the other 3 NMs. Bakka was being taken down by a group of BSTs, so no go on that. Khalamari was up and was an easy kill, especially since Raiden Thrust terrorized it and we pretty much knocked 2/3 of it's life off while it was frozen. Mantle Pierce didn't even hit me that hard, just 600 damage. Killing it netted me this:

Although I have to say I didn't mean to lot that. I have a bit of mixed emotion about this hat. I want cursed cap+1, which essentially gives better modifiers, just no attack and w/o the acc penalty. I tend to think this helm, for non-relic users, isn't going to be as powerful as they think. But yeah, I lotted it accidentally over Mav's 80 point lot and I didn't realize I did until I saw the screenshot above. It was no big deal though, we'll kill it again very soon and get Mav this hat.

Anyway, I'm expecting an insanely unlucky thing to happen at some point soon. Not sure what, but it's completely rare for me to go on streaks like this. Part of me thinks I'm already suffering the bad luck just from the simple fact no one's found the quest to give DRG head seals yet. Most have a suspicion, but nothing confirmed. Just the NMs that drop it that aren't all that much of a pain, just requires more than one person. :)

Shitty Computer Techs Part 2

2010-09-22T08:16:00.004-05:00

At this point, I'm rather enraged. Nothing ever goes right with this software. Essentially, I knew how to check and verify the validity of that error that popped up, but I didn't have the expertise or the tools to really fix it. This was especially true since any modification to the SQL backend required a tool only the Xactware techs could use.

So I went to check and sure enough, "xm8_shared" didn't exist. In it's place?

"xm8_shared1"

Worst thing is, I couldn't connect to it at all via the SQL command console. Only thing I could really hope at this point was that the Xactimate backup actually backed that up.

I ended up calling the Xactware techs and spending the next 4 hours on the phone with one who seemed to know how to handle SQL databases with ease. He webex'd into the server and verified the xm8_shared database actually still existed and fortunately, it did. Now the question became how to get it corrected. Changing the XML files that point the client software to the database location didn't work. Recreating the database didn't work. Uninstalling SQL server and reinstalling it didn't work. It was pretty obvious something was there cockblocking the client software from seeing that database.

Eventually, we got the software to work, albeit patchwork. When they'd open it up, it'd still give them an error, but hitting retry or cancel would let them access their data. At that point in the day, that was good enough. They could work and it meant the Xactware tech and I had a chance to step away and think about what we could be missing that's causing that error.

So we basically button up all our work and I go back to finish setting up what started all of this crap to begin with...that Blackberry app. Come to find out, most of it had already set up, I just needed to verify it was working, which it was, so thankfully I didn't have to spend more than another 10 minutes on that.

Tuesday of next week rolls around and I'm still poring over Xactware support docs trying to figure out what could have happened. I get a text from my favorite employee/successful woman stating:

"can't upload estimates, got some due. xact tech says it's a network hardware issue."

Man was I annoyed.

I replied with: "give the xactware tech this case no. and tell him he's an idiot."

How in the hell can one say it's a network issue when clearly everything else on the network is running fine? Internet's fine. Their accounting software is running fine. Their printers are all working fine. Hell, even their remote web workplace was running fine. To further that point, how the hell was said tech webex'd into her damn workstation if the network wasn't fine? Wouldn't you think if there were some sort of network hardware issue something else wouldn't be working as well?

"he says he can't ping the server"

... . . . ."what's his name?"

"devin"

"click start, click run, type 'cmd', type 'ping 192.168.1.2'. does it say 'request timed...' or 'reply from...'?

"reply from..."

"now type "ping 'servername'"

"reply from..."

"tell him to call me."

"ok, but be nice."

"no."

So "Devin" calls me and he sounds pretty much like I expected. Like a complete and total f***ing moron. How the hell did this guy get hired? I could only surmise that he was exceptional at reading flow charts and not thinking, which seemed to fit the bill for most of the level 1 Xactware techs. Anyway...

"Forgive me for saying this, but how can you screw up a simple ping command?"

"What do you mean?"

"You told her you couldn't ping the server and I just walked her through the process via text and pinged it by it's DNS name and it's IP address with successful responses."

"It wasn't replying when I tried it."

"Can you spell ping?"

At this point, I was remoted into the workstation he was remoted into. I told him to duplicate what he did.

ping 19216812

/facepalm

"Does your period work?"

"Yes"

"Ok, you missed about 3 of them in that command."

"Oh."

"Send me to a better tech. I don't want you touch the shit here anymore."

Then I called SCPSW back and told her he was a complete fuck up and to be expecting a call from a different tech, hopefully the one I had been dealing with the previous Friday.

Later that afternoon, I got another text from her stating they had band-aided the problem, but they needed me to talk to them ASAP. I called them up, got the same tech I had from before and was informed that I would most likely need to uninstall and reinstall Xactimate completely from the network along with SQL server before that error would go away.

That didn't sit too well with me. The next day I was going to have to actually be able to do something on that scale was the upcoming Friday, which was 3 days out. That or go burn the midnight oil and pull an all-nighter. So before getting off the phone, I double checked to make sure they were mostly functional and they were. So I scheduled them for Friday and at the very least, it gave them a heads up on how to plan that day as it related to Xactimate.

Thursday rolls around and apparently, another issue has come up and SCPSW has taken it upon herself to talk to the Xactimate techs again before asking me.

On a mostly un-related note, I should probably rethink how I train people in the art of asking for technical support. I probably need to add "If I tell you shit's broken and it will be fixed on X day, don't try to get it fixed sooner or have anyone else screw with it until it's fixed..."

Common sense? Maybe...

Anyway, she managed to get "Devin" again.

"'devin' says we can't open a profile cause of network hardware issues"

/snap

"And you believe him?"

"I don't know..."

"I do. Tell him to fuck off and go shove his head through a monitor."

"That's not nice."

"I'm not in a nice mood when it comes to this issue. Last thing I need is some sort of imbecilic, training wheels wearing, flow chart reading idiot getting in there and making things worse. Tell him to escalate you and to never answer a call from your login again."

"Ok."

About 20 minutes later, I get another phone call from her. This time I'm on 3-way with her and...Devin.

Big. Big. Mistake.

"Hello?"

"Yes, I'm here."

"Oh Hi. I just wanted to say there's definitely some sort of network har...."

"If you say those 3 words again, so help me I will come to your facility and get you fired. Use your goddamn head pal, not your flow chart."

"It can't be anything else if I can't talk to the server."

"Really? Everything BUT your application is talking to the server. Your application was talking to the server before we uninstalled the workstation off that laptop to set up the blackberry app base. Don't give me this shit about network hardware. So unless you can tell me everything the uninstall process does, which was the point the issue was created, stop wasting my f***ing time with your flow chart bullshit."

"I don't know then sir."

"Awesome, a non-flow chart answer. Did you check the firewall? Did it maybe do something to that?"

"Yes, the firewall is off."

"Off? There were exceptions written for SQL and Xactware. Did you turn it off?"

"Yes."

"Are you in the server right now?"

"No."

"What about DNS entries, have you tried changing the XML file's pointer to the server's IP address instead of it's name or running the ipconfig /flushdns command?"

"I can try that now."

Few seconds later...

"Didn't work."

"Ok we'll just proceed as planned tomorrow. You're just going to have to call your insurance carriers and either fax them a copy of your work or tell them it will be there before close tomorrow."

Not satisfied this guy was capable of actually checking those things and somewhat pissed off at myself that I didn't think of the server's firewall sooner, I made a beeline for the nearest computer so I could check for myself.

Normally, when a program uninstalls, it's not going to modify firewall entries on ANOTHER computer. Maybe on it's own if necessary, but not on a different computer. When I had initially set this server up about a year ago, the firewall cost me about 2 hours of time. I had incorrectly assumed that the SQL Server 64-bit installation package would write it's own firewall entries/exceptions, but it didn't.

Knowing the Xactimate installation process was already a piece of shit, I didn't want to leave anything to chance at this point. Upon logging in, I see...

The server firewall is on.

(Good)

The exceptions for SQL and Xactimate commands were missing.

(Bad)

How in the hell did that happen. "Devin" has proved his idiocy yet again by essentially lying about the server firewall and Xactware's developers have some explaining to do. Well they might. I could have been that "Devin" was in there screwing around with the server. I turned the firewall off and magically...

...that error and all their communication issues disappeared. Fucking imagine that. So I write up the exceptions again and their problems are fixed. I wasn't altogether pleased with myself, but relieved at that point that I wasn't going to have to spend an entire day monkeying around with this software again.

At least until I got a call from the owner about 2 hours later...

"Hey we can't find this new profile we signed up for."

"Name?"

"It's for Nationwide."

"And they're on 27.1?"

"No, 27.0"

"Sonofa...Xactware support strikes again."

"What do you mean?"

"They told me when I installed 27.1 that it was just a service pack and no dual license version of it would be necessary. You should have the chat log in your email."

"This mean we're seeing you tomorrow anyway?"

"Yep, just shouldn't be an all day thing..."

To round things up:

- An online chat rep didn't have a clue about the disappearing text issue.
- An online chat rep lied about the need for a dual license version.
- An online chat rep didn't have a clue about "No version selected."
- The Blackberry app installation apparently screws with server firewall settings (not completely verified).
- The rep named "Steve" knows his shit.
- The rep named "Devin" needs to find another profession.
- The rep named "Jonah" needs to learn how to back up all data.

And this is all before I install the dual license version of version 27, which fortunately was a blank database because they haven't done any work with the one, single, insurance company that's still using it. Even then, there were still unnecessary hassles that could have been prevented if the Xactware techs were competent and the developers actually tried to install their software on stuff other than their own machines before releasing it to the public.

And as usual, all force-fed shitcakes have the icing that appears after the initial taste of shit subsides. That icing?

On my way home last Friday, text from the franchise owner where I live...

"Hey, we need 27.1 and blackberry app set up."

...

Cue the Castle Crashers them. I'm out.

Shitty Computer Techs Part 1

2010-09-21T15:19:00.005-05:00

Sorry for lack of updates lately. This post would be partially why.

Most of you know, I "work" as an independent contractor for a company here in town. I'm contracted out through my computer repair business that I've been running for the past 10ish years. Over the years, I've built up a clientele that's generally sustained me during my best and worst periods as a business owner.

A few of my clients happen to be franchise owners all working under a nationwide network of insurance repair/restoration specialists. Basically, the company you pay insurance to, contracts out companies like these to do the work. Each of these insurance companies generally require estimates to be written in a piece of software called Xactimate.

Most people will sing the praises of said software. It does what it's supposed to for the end user.

For the techs installing it and, to an extent, supporting it, not so much.

Xactware is the publisher of Xactimate. My first install of Xactimate came back in 2001. That install was easy since this franchise hadn't used it at all and we didn't have to worry about data. Pretty much every update since has sucked major shit.

And not just major shit.

Shit through a coffee straw for at least 10 hours a day.

This is further compounded by their approach to technical support. Before I get into that though, there's more to explain.

Basically, the Xactimate software operates in profiles. Each profile is basically the insurance companies the particular business wants to deal with. State Farm, for example, has their own set of price lists to build estimates with along with a number of other guidelines. All of that is different for someone like Allstate or USAA or Metlife.

The single biggest issue is that when one insurance company starts accepting the standard for a particular version of Xactimate, then the business itself has to carry licenses for multiple versions of Xactimate until the rest of the insurance carriers catch up. This costs extra $$ each month to the tune of at least $50 per user license you want to "upgrade" to a multi-license.

Nevermind the fact the Xactware techs could just make some goddamn software that's backwards compatible. Or at the very least, give them the option to "Save As..." in an earlier version's format. Nope...probably affects their bottom line way too much.

There's also fault with the insurance companies mandating X version of Xactimate or we won't do business with you. Pretty much every other business model I deal with will accept information at least 3 versions old. Quickbooks comes to mind with their internet banking/support/end of life model. You got a version over 3 years old, sorry, no support for you. To me that's fair enough. To top it all off, it's not even a complete number change for versions. Quickbooks at least goes by year for example. Quickbooks 2008, 2009, 2010, etc. Xactimate? 25.0, 25.1, 25.4, 25.5, 27.0... and NONE of them are backwards compatible. So if State Farm says "25.5 only!", it doesn't matter if you're on 25.1 or 25.4, you have to upgrade if you want State Farm reps to do business with you.

That, my friends, is complete and utter bullshit.

So anyway, back to the Xactimate portion of this story. When they release a new version, I cringe. It's never just a simple upgrade. There's always something more complicated involved. Usually I have to uninstall a version that won't be used anymore or I have to uninstall the client software completely and reinstall it.

The version I installed for my customers in late May/early June was version 27.0. Oddly enough, the install went smoother than I had expected. Shortly after the install though was when the problems started to surface. Across all 3 of these franchises and one completely separate insurance repair business that uses said software, they were having issues with "disappearing text".

..ok.

The first I heard of it was when the owner of the franchise in Elizabethtown called me and told me about it. She was irritated that they were having to save their progress essentially every minute or two in order to avoid losing work. She had already done what I had trained her to do prior to calling me. She had spoken with the Xactware reps to see if this was a common issue. The Xactware reps told her:

"It's a Keyboard/Mouse driver issue."

She says that to me and, I admittedly gave it some thought as long as it was an isolated incident. While researching it further, I got it out of her that it was happening on 6 of her other workstations.

The local franchise had it happening on 2 of their workstations.

The Owensboro franchise had it happening on 1 of theirs.

The independent company out of Morgantown had it happening on 1 of his.

So quick math:

10 workstations having this problem across a 4 city area.
7 different sets of keyboards and mice across 2 different interfaces (PS2 and USB).
A generic Keyboard/Mouse driver that hasn't changed in at least a decade.

...and the Xactware rep stood by his Keyboard/Mouse driver issue claim.

So I jumped through his hoops and some of my own. I tested out every possibility from a malware infection, to uninstalling/reinstalling everything completely from one of the smaller franchises to even all out wiping a workstation exhibiting the symptoms and reloading everything, including Windows, from scratch to no avail.

Now I'm convinced it's a bug in the software or some sort of simple setting. After getting nowhere with the Xactware reps, I pretty much just told the franchise owners to just save frequently and wait for the next patch and that if it got too maddening, keep hounding Xactware about it until they fix it.

This brings us to earlier this month. Version 27.1 is now out. During the course of any upgrade, I'll get online with a rep and ask for shit to look out for. Am I going to have to uninstall a previous version? Will they need to activate their license key for the new version? Will we need to install a "D" (for dual license) version of the previous one in case some insurance companies aren't up to the latest version yet? The answers to those questions were No, Yes, No respectively. He even said "this is just a service pack, not a complete upgrade".

I also brought up the disappearing text issue again and my confidence in their support staff dropped further when he sent me a link to a support bulletin that had nothing to do with text disappearing. Matter of fact, it didn't even use the words "text" or "disappearing". It was related to a database issue where estimates would get their names changed.

So I pretty much rescinded to the fact that I was in for a long day. I did the backup before the upgrade and started it. The initial part went smoothly, converting all of their data over to the new version, etc. The subsequent workstation upgrades sucked. The installer kept giving me an error at the point where you select which version to install (27.1...). The error?

"No version selected."

...there's a green check next to 27.1.

"No version selected."

...gotta be fucking kidding me.

So back to the Xactware reps I go. His response?

"You need to rename the Xactimate27 folder located in the Application Data and Program Files directories to something like "Xactimate27Old".

Ok really? WTF does that actually have to do with an installer not being able to recognize a f***ing checkbox?

I put him on "hold" while I followed his instructions. Not believing a damn word of them, I RDP'd into another workstation to test my own theory out while doing his instructions on the actual workstation I was at.

Renaming Directories? Fail. Same error.
Uninstalling/Reinstalling? Win.

Despite seeing this with my own eyes, the Xactware rep said it wasn't necessary to do that. I pretty much cut him off after that and just went about the task I was assigned. The installations on the rest of the computers went smoothly and just when I thought I was going to get out of there relatively quick...

"HEY THERE'S A NEW BLACKBERRY APP I WANT YOU TO SET UP BEFORE YOU GO!"

Ugh...

So I go look at this app. This app looks useful and time saving for writing estimates. Unfortunately, they have to do the following to get it to work:

1. Set up a local install of Xactimate 27.1 on a dedicated machine.
2. Buy an entirely new license key. Note: This is not the same as a client access license to even access the data. This is just the key to install the software and identify your account on the Xactware servers.
3. Buy/modify an existing license.

Ugh^10.

Mostly because I knew explaining this to her was going to be an entirely pointless endeavor, but she'd hound me for the answers to "Why?" anyway.

Although I do have to say it was rather entertaining watching the look on her face when she realized her laptop was going to end up being the guinea pig for this. So...

...I uninstalled the network versions of Xactimate off said laptop. Then as I'm getting ready to install the version she needs to sync up with the app, I start getting people asking why they can't get into Xactimate. I go to a workstation and try to open the software.

"Unable to connect. The database 'xm8_shared' doesn't exist."

...oh fuck/shit/piss/goddammit?

New Jumps

2010-09-15T15:39:00.002-05:00

Just a quick blurb to point out...

The tweak to Spirit Jump and the addition of Soul Jump essentially gives me 100TP instantly.

Dragoon is broken.

That is all. :)

Obsidian Site Down...

2010-09-08T10:20:00.005-05:00

Obsidian's website is hosted on a server in or near Dallas. For those of you that don't know...

...that's been the tale of the tape the past couple days. That line isn't moving east or west at all, it's moving north. So far, estimates are that it's dropped 6-15" of rain in the Dallas area. It's name is Tropical Depression Hermine...

Guessing the company that hosts it lost power long enough to drain the battery backups.

That or the webserver is sitting under water.

Time will tell... :)

In the meantime, for those of you wondering, yes we canceled dynamis today. Likely too many people going to be caught up in download congestion hell for us to get it started on time with a reasonable amount of people.

...That's It?

2010-09-07T09:26:00.003-05:00

Day before the update and we get, Walk of Echoes notes, Fishing notes, a blurb about an additional search option and some Abyssea notes. Nothing overwhelming in my opinion. Did we really need more fishing options for Inside the Belly? I hate magian trials with a passion, so that blurb is just useless to me. Walk of Echoes...had to be living under a rock if you didn't at least assume it was going to be changed.

The Abyssea notes however...Horst <3.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not fapping to the Abyssea notes or anything, but it seems SE was listening a bit. Even just a tiny bit.

Now if they'd just let us buy entire stacks of keys in one go, make key items 100%, and let us turn our excess time back into stones...

Kind of a fizzle so far after coming out strong with update notes. Hope the final version update has a number of surprises. Can't wait to see what the stats are on AF3. :)

Job Adjustments (Part 2)

2010-09-03T08:24:00.002-05:00

As previously announced, the September version update will see the unveiling of a variety of new job abilities, traits, and spells. Besides these additions, existing job abilities will also see wide-ranging adjustments and refinements.

The following adjustments will be made to existing job abilities:

- The warrior ability "Restraint" will no longer prevent the user from dealing critical hits.

- The thief ability "Despoil" will have an increased success rate, and the status ailment inflicted upon the enemy will be displayed in the message log.

- The beastmaster ability "Call Beast" will receive four new jugs:
Curdled Plasma Broth / Goblin Bug Broth / Bubbling Carrion Broth / Chirping Grasshopper Broth

- The beastmaster ability "Reward" will have minimum level requirements placed on pet food as follows, and the healing effect will be increased accordingly for food of higher levels:
- Pet Food Alpha (Level 12)
- Pet Food Beta (Level 24)
- Pet Food Gamma (Level 36)
- Pet Food Delta (Level 48)
- Pet Food Epsilon (Level 60)
- Pet Food Zeta (Level 72)

- The bard songs "Chocobo Mazurka" and "Raptor Mazurka" will be effective in non-field areas.

- Elemental ninjutsu will receive a damage increase.

- The dragoon ability "Spirit Jump" will be affected by the "Jump Recast" merit point skill.

- The enhanced effect of the dragoon ability "Spirit Jump" when your wyvern is present will be increased further.

- Wyverns summoned with the dragoon ability "Call Wyvern" will be able to level up with experience gained in Abyssea.

- Summoners level 76 and above will see a decrease in the amount of MP required to sustain summoned avatars.

- The following blood pacts will have their effect duration lengthened commensurate with summoning magic skill, regardless of whether or not the skill has been increased to its maximum:
Shining Ruby / Glittering Ruby / Hastega / Crimson Howl / Frost Armor / Rolling Thunder / Lightning Armor / Ecliptic Growl / Ecliptic Howl / Noctoshield / Dream Shroud

- The maximum amount of MP drainable using the summoner ability "Elemental Siphon" will be increased.

- The maximum amount of MP restorable with the blue magic spell "Battery Charge" will be increased. This will be accomplished by reducing the rate of MP restoration slightly, but increasing the total duration of the spell effect.

- Your assigned set of blue magic will remain stored even after changing jobs.

- It will now be possible to accumulate TP and increase marksmanship skill using the corsair ability "Quick Draw."

- The duration of the corsair ability "Double Up" upon a roll of 11 will be reduced to five minutes.
*To compensate for this, enhancements to "Lucky 11" rolls are being planned for future updates, so please stay tuned!

- The puppetmaster ability "Deus Ex Automata" will be added.
- Deus Ex Automata (PUP Lv.5 / Ability Delay: 1 min.)
Calls forth your automaton in an unsound state.

- When level restriction results in a puppetmaster's automaton being deactivated in a state of full or nearly full health, the ability "Activate" will become immediately usable.

- The following items usable with the puppetmaster ability "Repair" will provide immediate HP restoration in addition to their existing Regen effect. Their purchase price will also be reduced.
Automaton Oil / Automaton Oil +1 / Automaton Oil +2

A number of things to note here, so going job by job...

Dragoon: All I have to say is, FUCK YEAH!~ Hopefully they make High Jump's merits work with Soul Jump right out of the gate too, but it is SE and they might just want to observe it. The "enhanced effect of Spirit Jump" being increased has my interest piqued a bit too. Right now, with wyvern present, you basically sacrifice your random VIT jump modifiers for 1.5x the TP you would normally get.

For me personally, I haven't noticed a huge difference in terms of damage between Jump and Spirit Jump. More often times than not, I'm between 250-400 on Spirit Jump. Jump was always about the same for me with a slightly higher floor and ceiling. Yes, that means I'm sacrificing some damage every minute and fifteen seconds, but if I'm getting to a WS faster, trust me, I'm overcoming that really easy.

Now they're talking about enhancing that effect further. I won't complain, but I will ask:

What's made them think it was really necessary?

As for the whole wyvern leveling up in abyssea thing, truthfully, I never noticed it didn't. On top of that, most of the stuff I'm fighting in Abyssea tends to wipe the wyvern out pretty quick anyway unless it's just an xp-fest.

Ninja: Elemental Ninjutsu getting a damage boost is something that's long overdue. Likely makes those Group 2 merits a lot more useful as well. If it's a 1% increase, then SE is just cockteasing the poor NINs. However, I don't think it'll be that minimal.

Summoner: Less MP consumption for keeping Avatars out post-76 is always a good thing. I believe this is directly aimed at either trying to extend the life of Avatar Favors or trying to get the SMNs to use their Avatars in melee situations more.

Increased MP from Elemental Siphon is never a bad thing.

The blood pacts blurb I'm not really sure I understand, so if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me. It looks like summoning skill effects the duration of those instead of the effect?

Corsair: Getting TP from Quickdraw = Awesome. The other part...wut?

Beastmaster: More pets each update seems to be the norm. The last batch of pets given to them were rather awesome and the names of these jugs seem to imply they're about to get stronger. Pet Vulture is about the only one I could guess with any certainty. The others seem to imply they're going to get a couple vermin pets and maybe a clot pet?

Not sure what to make of the food. Never really paid attention to their affects to begin with. Adding levels to it seems rather logical unless you used the strongest food early on while leveling BST. Increasing the food's effects as you level up can't be a bad thing and given the multiples of 12 they've gone by, is a new level 84 food coming soon?

Cooks start making some Zeta...I suspect there's going to be a spike in demand.

Warrior: Uh...what? Restraint will allow you to deal crit hits now? Wasn't the point of the JA to begin with the exact opposite? Oh well, if it's just a reduced chance to land crits while still building up WS power, no one will complain.

I still somehow get the feeling SE's fucked something about this up...

Thief: Anytime you add information, it's a good thing. Being able to see what Despoil actually does isn't going to be game breaking, but it's a nice touch. Increased success rate is never bad either.

Bard: Long time coming. Don't know why this song never worked indoors.

Blue Mage: That right there was probably the single biggest reason I never leveled BLU for a sub. I don't want to think about what spells I have to set every single time I change jobs. Despite Mazurka being in the game longer, this particular aspect felt like it was far more overdue than the aforementioned mazurka.

Puppetmaster: Meh, who gives a shit. That automaton's gonna die in about 2 hits anyway. :)

With the update looking like it's going to be Sept 8th and Labor Day in there before hand, I wonder if this is the last bit of update info we'll receive before the actual update. Hopefully not. I suspect there will be Abyssea adjustments (stone counter please...) that they'll announce prior to the update, but who knows. They may just reserve those notes until day of.

Lots of Info...

2010-08-30T10:15:00.008-05:00

There's a lot to get to, so I'll just get right to it.

SE's released a couple of bombshells (or at least what most consider to be bombshells) since my last post. I did a lot of job speculation in that post and SE confirmed a few of the things I speculated about. Doesn't mean it's good though.

Job Abilities (Part 1):

Divine Caress: (WHM Lv.83 Ability Delay: 1 min. Effect Duration: 1 min.) If the next spell you cast cures a status ailment, your target will gain enhanced resistance to that ailment.

Did WHM really need yet another buff? A one minute ability coupled with a one minute endurance makes this sound like yet one more thing for a WHM to keep up with. Might be handy in situations where a critter is known for spamming a certain enfeeble or two, but the effectiveness of this is definitely going to be called into question. Does it make you virtually immune? Is it basically casting Bar-whatever? Is it going to work in conjunction with an Accession removal thus making SCH a rather permasub? Who knows...

I do know this...time to shift your focus to other support jobs SE. WHM is a powerhouse now.

Saboteur : (RDM Lv.83 Ability Delay: 5 min. Effect Duration: 1 min.) If the next spell you cast is enfeeblement magic, its effect and duration will be enhanced.

I had semi-speculated about this before and I'll stand by my previous comments. If this doesn't do anything over the caps for enfeebles, it's pretty much pointless. On top of that, 5 min delay vs. 1 min duration...something seems off there.

Spur: (BST Lv.83 Ability Delay: 3 min. Effect Duration: 90 sec.) Grants "Store TP" effect to pets.

I don't know enough about BST to really make an educated comment on this, but I would venture to guess depending how much that Store TP value is will determine just how useful this ability turns out to be.

Tenuto: (BRD Lv.83 Ability Delay: 15 sec. Effect Duration: 1 min.) If the next song you cast affects yourself, it will not subsequently be overwritten by other songs.

This looks like something that was long overdue. Now give COR something like this and you're set.

Soul Jump: (DRG Lv.85 Effect Duration: 3 min.) Delivers a high jumping attack on a targeted enemy which suppresses enmity. Effect enhanced when wyvern is present. The recast timer for Soul Jump is shared with High Jump.

From previous comments, I'm still not particularly sure where SE was going with these jumps. The TP bonus from Spirit Jump is nice and it'd only follow the pattern for TP to be added to Soul Jump, but this pretty much rendered our Jump timers mostly useless if building TP is your thing. Given the extra damage from the VIT modifier on the regular jumps, I'll probably opt to just use Jump in conjunction with Soul Jump for the time being if things play out the way they did with Spirit Jump.

Blood Pact: Ward "Earthen Armor": (SMN Lv.82 Ability Delay: 1 min.) Mitigates the impact of severely damaging attacks for party members within area of effect.

Seems like something was lost in translation here. Is this basically a more potent stoneskin? Does it just reduce damage if you get crit. hit?

Blood Pact: Ward "Tidal Roar": (SMN Lv.84 Ability Delay: 1 min.) Lowers attack for enemies within area of effect.

This sounds rather useful if a critter isn't immune to it. Then again, I'm not sure I know of many things that are actually immune to this sort of enfeeble. SMN may have just found itself a more permanent spot in the tank party.

Efflux: (BLU Lv.83 Ability Delay: 3 min. Effect Duration: 1 min.) If the next spell you cast is a "physical" blue magic spell, a TP bonus will be granted.

Sekkanoki v2.0 for BLU?

Courser's Roll: (COR Lv.81) Enhances "Snapshot" effect for party members within area of effect. Lucky number: 3. Unlucky number: 9.

Haste for CORs and RNGs alike. Biggest question is...how much faster will this kill your Rangers?

Blitzer's Roll: (COR Lv.83) Reduces melee attack delay for party members within area of effect. Lucky number: 4. Unlucky number: 9.

Something long overdue for Corsair. Been some debate over whether it actually reduces the weapon delay (thereby screwing with your TP builds) or if it's just a form of haste. COR is already a valuable asset to have in most situations and, personally, I don't really care if it messes with my delay. I have other Store TP gear options I can pick up w/o sacrificing much of anything else. Swinging faster never really hurt anyone...

...mostly.

Feather Step: (DNC Lv.83 Ability Delay: 15 sec.) Lowers a target's critical hit evasion. If successful, will earn you a finishing move. The recast timer for Feather Step is shared with Steps.

This one has me intrigued a bit. DNC has really found a niche for itself thanks to haste samba, but if this gives them the ability to actually directly increase their party's damage output in a manner that's essentially equivalent to having Minuet or various Corsair rolls, holy shit. If it's something like a 5% increase in crit hits overall, look out.

Job Traits (Part 1)

This will essentially be a few quick blurbs about what each of the jobs listed will be getting.

MNK/NIN: Again, who does skillchains anymore and more importantly, who does skillchains with Monks and Ninjas? Thanks for the boost in damage SE, but unless these jobs are subbin' SAM and abusing Sekkanoki, I can't imagine this will change any perception about their overall impact on endgame in general.

WHM: This should have gone to RDM unless SE is positioning WHM to be a tank. Which is possible I guess...

RDM: See MNK/NIN. Also see, RDM nuking?

THF: DW1 = Hosed. Guess it's a nice option, but back to wielding 1H THF knife while soloing you go THFs...

DRK: Because DRKs didn't have enough ways to die fast. Can't wait to see the effect this has on Kreoss' Ragnarok though...

BRD: Useful I guess if a BRD wants to whip out a Joytoy and take a couple swipes at a bad guy while running through their song rotations. This is also another trait that should have gone to RDM.

COR: Ok, awesome. Now fix their Marksmanship skill.

PUP: Still LOL. Just 99.8% LOL now.

Spells

A number of interesting things in this category. I'll simply go down the list by jobs:

Red Mage: Getting a number of spells. Refresh II is obviously the huge one. Addle can be awesome as long as 99% of the things in this game aren't immune to it. Gain-VIT, Gain-MND will likely follow the same pattern as the Bar-spells and as long as they can be used with Accession, should be useful for RDMs overall. Aero IV also coming down the pipe as well, but that was to be expected.

White Mage: Cura II, Boost-VIT, Boost-MND. Cura could already go beyond Curaga II in terms of healing potency and made it the most efficient AoE curing spell available to WHM as long as Afflatus: Misery was active. Cura II likely continues that trend. I'd speculate it's probably going to be along the lines of Curaga IV potency. Boost-VIT and Boost-MND are like the AoE versions of what RDM is getting.

Paladin: Enlight. Probably screws over Excalibur and Hauteclaire owners a bit, but the bigger questions will be it's enmity generation, duration and MP cost. Seriously doubt this changes much of anything in regards to tanking though.

Black Mage: Likely got the lion's share of ZOMG spells. Aspir II, Aero V, Break, Stoneja, and Waterja. First, Aspir II will probably have the same effect on BLM as Refresh II has on RDM. My thoughts on Break are similar to Addle. Very useful if 99% of the bad guys in this game aren't immune to it. Personally, I thought RDM should have picked this spell up instead of BLM, but that's relatively minor. Aero V was to be expected. The use of -ja has me perplexed a bit though. Are they taking the Cura approach with BLM nukes now? More MP efficient? Damage potentially increased by how much you've dished out? AoE that doesn't draw that much hate? Extra magic burst damage? Time will tell, but as was stated at Vanafest.

BLMs are basically like a fly that just nukes and nukes until it gets swatted down. They apparently now have more tools at their disposal to draw the attention of the swatter.

Scholar: Animus Augeo, Animus Minuo, Water V, Regen III. Those enmity spells could be huge. The rest aren't a surprise at all.

Bard: Ballad III, Earth/Water Carol II, Foe Lullaby II, and Sentinel's Scherzo. Well Ballad III is def. huge. Foe Lullaby is right up there and likely means Horde Lullaby II is coming down the pipe. Lots of speculation on what Ballad III will actually do, but until someone actually sings the song and sees it, no one will know. It's safe to say Ballad III and Ballad II likely are replacing the standard Ballad II/I combo. The 2nd tiers of carols will come in handy against specific monsters (think Tiamat, Sarameya, Krabkatoa etc...). No telling what the hell Sentinel's Scherzo is, but the word "Sentinel" is associated with Monks quite a bit in this game but is actually defined as some form of guarding. Scherzo is a musical term that essentially means "fast".

My guess would be this song does something to one's counter rate.

Dark Knight: They get Aero III and EnDark. Endark is a little bit of a surprise, but not so much since this and it's counterpart have essentially been in the game for a while. Most recently on the Plaga Scythe. I'll still contend this is simply another way for a DRK to get themselves killed faster, but we'll see what happens with it.

Ninja: Myoshu: Ichi, Yurin: Ichi. Uh...what? More tools for Ninjas to carry around? Tons of speculation on what these will actually do. Drakus seems to think they'll follow the Aisha: Ichi mold and do something along the lines of Evasion and Defense Down. If that's the case, do they stack with the other things (like Gungnir's def. down proc or Angon) that are similar in nature? Aisha: Ichi actually turned out really good for NIN, so hopefully these follow the same mold.

Weapon Skills

SE released the a video (seen below) today of more new Weapon Skills. There's part of me that simply facepalmed at the notion of yet another weapon with a specific weapon skill tied to it.

Then there was another part of me that figured most people would never get these Weapon Skills if they tied them specifically to their Emp. Weapons. It's pretty obvious now that SE had no intention of people getting these weapons in a reasonable amount of time, which made me feel better about my (continued) time investment into Gungnir, but do these weapon skills really look like they're added incentive to get the Emp. Weapons? They're still unfinished yes, but I'm still a little baffled at how they're handling these things.

Anyway, screengrabs of each weapon skill and a quick blurb on what I think of them:

Cloud Splitter:

Looks thunder-based...

Chant du Cygne:

Name actually translates to "Swan Song", or last act. I guess you could say the Zorro Z was always his last act in a battle. Maybe fire-based like a number of other sword weapon skills.

Victory Smite:

Combo +1? Even the same sound effect...

Rudra's Storm:

A quick wiki search of "Rudra" shows a mythological wind god. Lines up with most of the rest of dagger's weapon skills and the animation supports this. Although part of me thinks that's an awfully dark tornado...

Torcleaver:

"Tor" is a rocky pinnacle. Cleaver is self-explanatory. The animation is a rocky cleave. Earth-based probably.

Myrkr:

AoE damage? Aside from being a named ripped out of Star Wars lore apparently...I can't really tell if this is a healing or damaging weapon skill. Leaning towards healing...

Jishnu's Radiance:

There's probably some sort of mythological reasoning behind the name of this weapon skill, but for humor's sake, I'm just going to say a developer at SE is a fan of this guy.

Ukko's Fury:

Two-hit? AoE? Hard to tell. They dipped into Finnish mythology for the name though.

Quietus:

I'LL GIVE YOU PRETTY PRETTY...demon wings? Does it do 0 damage if you've got this flowing through you?

Camlann's Torment:

Very cool reference to King Arthur's final battle. Half-hearted animation though. Looks like half a Geirskogul.

Tachi: Fudo:

Likely a reference to the Buddhist god Acala. Fudo is the Japanese version of him. I'll go with the destroyer version depicted in wiki for the inspiration behind this WS. Probably the 2nd coolest animation out of all of them presented in the video.

Dagan:

More flowers! Probably some sort of self-buffing weapon skill as it's club and that's generally what they do. Referencing possibly Dagon, a fish god or nature god in several different mythologies.

Wildfire:

Typical gun WS. Aim, point, blow shit up.

Blade: Hi:

Likely the best animation they've put in for this batch. I mean, who wouldn't get excited at the prospect of sending a dragon straight up the ass of a bad guy? I can't think of a better way to say "Hi" than that really...

Conclusion

I'm starting to get rather excited for the update. Mostly because it's either coming really soon or SE has some bigger stuff to tell us before it happens. We still have Job Adjustments Part 2 incoming (guessing Wednesday). I'm guessing the update will actually happen on Sept. 13th.

There's not much that's been shown so far that's really surprised me, but there are a lot of much needed additions being shown and that's a lot to get excited about.

More DRG Refinements?!??

2010-08-25T08:47:00.003-05:00

SE Released this blurb today...

The impending version update will usher in the second stage of the level cap increase, bringing players' maximum attainable level from 80 to 85!

To provide a fitting challenge to players who achieve these newfound heights of power, we will be adjusting monster level and placement in certain Treasures of Aht Urhgan areas to create daunting new battlegrounds.

A host of new abilities, job traits, and spells will also be added for the newly-unlocked levels. Needless to say, these will be designed to provide players with exciting new possibilities while preserving game balance as they achieve even higher levels in the future.

New Job Abilities

- White Mage: An ability offering increased resistance against status ailments.
- Red Mage: An ability that enhances the potency of enfeebling magic.
- Bard: An ability that prevents songs cast on oneself from being overwritten.
- Beastmaster: A new pet command.
- Dragoon: A new jump.
- Summoner: New blood pacts.
- Corsair: New phantom rolls
- Dancer: A new step.

New Job Traits

- Monk: Skillchain Bonus
- White Mage: Shield Def. Bonus
- Red Mage: Mag. Burst Bonus
- Thief: Dual Wield
- Dark Knight: Crit. Atk. Bonus
- Bard: Fencer
- Ninja: Skillchain Bonus
- Corsair: True Shot
- Puppetmaster: Crit. Def. Bonus

New Spells

- Enhancement spells that increase the attributes of party members
- Magic spells to manage enmity levels
- A song that reduces damage taken by party members
- New ninjutsu
- New blue magic spells

These new abilities will be covered in further detail in future articles, so keep watching this space!

Naturally, the part that stood out to me was:

- Dragoon: A new jump.

After what they did with Spirit Jump in regards to it's shared Jump timer, I'm going to approach this with a bit of trepidation. The picture given doesn't really offer any clues.

It begs the question though...

Does SE really think DRG needs more refinements? As it stands, it's only real weak point is it's inability to control the wyvern the same way a BST, PUP, or SMN would control their pets. It's already one of the more powerful soloing jobs in the game. It's not going to win spike damage awards for zergs, but it's typically going to hold it's own.

The addition of Spirit Link modifications, Spirit Jump's bonus TP and Sekkanoki (from SAM sub) have essentially turned this job into a bit of a WS monster. While that's not unlike most jobs that typically sub SAM now, it's set apart by it's ability to shed hate. Which means the DRG is typically alive longer than anyone else.

The number of JAs a DRG/SAM has is already ridiculous. A quick run down:

Spirit Surge
Call Wyvern
Jump
High Jump
Spirit Jump
Super Jump
Spirit Link
Hasso
Seigan
Third Eye
Meditate
Sekkanoki
Ancient Circle
Warding Circle
Deep Breathing
Angon

That would be 16 JA's worth of timers to keep track of. Not complaining, but rather pointing out DRG is already very flexible and potent. While a WAR has the same number, almost every one of their JA's are oriented towards offense. Same with DRK. Now SE is adding another Jump and I really have no idea what it could be. While I suspect it's going to be something along the lines of Lancer, it really wouldn't surprise me if SE just added a 5th jump that shared the timer with High Jump. If this is the case, then it seems rather obvious what 2 of the "super merits" will be once they introduce them. Spirit Jump and "New" Jump timer reductions.

Adding another offensive Jump JA that gives TP on it's own timer will simply break DRG. Not that I would mind being broken in a good way, it just doesn't mesh with their whole "game balance" schtick.

Other Teaser Thoughts

Red Mage

RDM appears to get the shaft again. Magic Burst Bonus? Do people actually do skillchains anymore? Are RDMs actually used a lot for nuking? What's the point of this if the only time RDMs generally nuke is when they're soloing? Seems like it's just a bone to throw to them.

Add that to the fact that Bard is getting Fencer natively and WHM is getting Shield Def. Bonus natively and it just makes you scratch your head quite a bit at what SE's idea of RDM actually is now. That's not to say RDM isn't a strong job and a lot of other support jobs have caught up with or even surpassed RDM's abilities, but it just seems to me SE really has no idea what role they want this job to fulfill.

RDM has generally been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. It was basically a SCH before SCH existed in this game. It could bounce back and forth between main healer or nuker with ease and solo (albeit very slowly) things no other job could even sniff. In a number of situations, you could even utilize them to tank.

However, with the enmity adjustments to the spells RDMs most commonly used to hold hate, RDM tanking isn't what it used to be. WHM has apparently become the darling mage to SE and has received god knows how many boosts and adjustments over the past couple years. The addition of SCH pretty much gave RDM a rival in terms of efficiency, but SCH has the ability to AoE buffs, mini-convert and has access to higher tiers of nukes. RDM seems to have just become the Enfeeble King while all the other support jobs around it continually receive boosts or spells (via leveling) that made RDM unique.

Again, it doesn't mean RDM is completely useless. I won't turn my nose up at all to them. Depending what they do with that "Ability that enhances the potency of enfeebling magic" they teased, they could be on their way to making a comeback. As Kaelis pointed out to me earlier, if that new JA allows an enfeeble to exceed the cap, it's game on, but as it stands, he can hit the slow cap on monsters with just one merit in Slow II and the use of gear, so that JA is essentially useless. Couple that with the fact that on most stuff that matters, targets are immune to most enfeebles anyway.

I suspect it's all but inevitable that RDM will eventually get Raise 2 and Cure V, both of which will go a long way towards boosting their main healing efficiency again. There's also the blurb in there about "Enhancement spells that increase the attributes of party members". RDM is the current king of Enhancing Magic from a skill standpoint, so hopefully that means they'll be seeing these spells in their repertoire. There's speculation said spells are going to be Brave and Faith, which would be huge, but if that's the case, those spells sound a lot more SCH-oriented than RDM oriented. Especially when you consider most of RDMs "enhancing magic" is related to self-only spells and SE specifically states "of party members".

Time will tell though...

Thief

Thief getting native Dual-Wield is huge. I believe this means they will become a much larger force in terms of offense. Obviously depends what level of DW they actually get natively, cause if SE just gives them DW1, expect lots of QQing and no change whatsoever to their current habits.

Ninja

This is another job in sore need of attention. It's basically become PUP in terms of usefulness. Actually, it's probably behind PUP in terms of usefulness now. They're getting...JT: Skillchain bonus and "New ninjutsu". Three questions spring to mind:

Who does skillchains anymore?

Is "ninjutsu" singular or plural?

Does SE know no one knows if "ninjutsu" is singular or plural and is just being vague?

I hope they get some of the :San spells they've been needing. Utsusemi: San wouldn't be game breaking given most critters people fight have a wide variety of AoE moves at their disposal. With the -PDT katanas in the Magian Trials and the creation of the Versa set (which does nothing in terms of haste...), it seems SE is starting to pave the way a bit to give NIN the ability to survive a little easier. Tactical Parry was a bit of a step in the right direction and Aisha: Ichi seems like a good way to help extend survivability (if it lands).

I may just be a little biased or looking at this from a glass half-full perspective though...

Give them some Enmity ninjutsu, Utsusemi: San and then watch 'em work SE.

Bard

Just when you think Bards hated SE enough...

Along comes "A song that reduces damage taken by party members".

Will that be potent enough to justify losing march, madrigal or minuet? Guess that depends on what you're fighting. In BRD-swap situations, I can see one minuet or a madrigal being given up to have this song placed on. Einherjar comes to mind against foes like King Behemoth. Zergs against guys like Briareus might find this song very useful too. This is definitely something worth watching and testing.

Bard getting the Fencer job trait seems kind of pointless. I don't know of many Bards that actually go out and solo. However, given that Bard has access to a ton of good WS gear, maybe this is a good way for them to blow off some steam over having to change to bard in the first place. Not that they have any real good ratings in weapons aside from the B- in Dagger...

Lolmeleebrd...

Dark Knight

Getting the job trait "Crit. Atk. Bonus". Really? DRKs needed this? Ok...thanks I guess?

(Note to self: Pray third eye isn't a bitch).

Enmity Spell

So which job(s) is getting that? When they say manage, do they mean multiple spells? One that increases enmity and one that decreases it? How much fun could I have by casting a spell that increases enmity on someone? >:D

Obviously, that's only if that spell can be cast on other people. I doubt it's going to be related to Ninjutsu since SE went out of their way to give that it's own blurb. But...

...what if it's a level 42(?) RDM spell? Does this make PLD/RDM much more viable as a tank? Hell, does that put NIN/RDM back in the tank discussion? Speculative at this point, yes, but rather fun to think about.

Conclusion

Nothing real exciting here for now. I would imagine once more details emerge, we'll know just how much of an impact these changes will have. Jury's going to stay out on the new jump for DRG until I actually see a better description of it as well as a lot of the other stuff here.

One thing for certain though: Massive RDM and NIN QQ'ing will be coming.

MP Grimlock

2010-08-19T10:41:00.004-05:00

Finally got my hands on one of these...

Being able to do that makes it completely worth it. :)

Productive Week is Productive

2010-08-16T09:42:00.006-05:00

Pretty productive week in game. I'll go events first, then personal stuff.

Einherjar

Learning more and more each run that Lv.80 is pretty much the difference between Obsidian needing 30+ people to win and needing 20 people to win. We ended up mauling T3 Saturday morning with 23 people. Granted, the room was kind of a slouch, but usually, the boss fight is the tell-tale sign of how strong your group is. We had Cerb and, while the fight went on a little longer than I would have expected, he still went down with relative ease.

The T3 prior to this one saw us fighting Behemoth with 31 people. Typically, KB rapes most groups. He's the only boss I dread seeing pop. Our 31 man group destroyed him in less than 30 seconds. I'm not sure if we just got a gimp KB, but not even one Meteor went off. Gives me quite a bit of hope in regards to the future of this event.

Abyssea

We knocked out Briareus for the first time using the CS/Stun + Zerg method we commonly use against Dynamis Lord. The fight dragged on long enough that we actually ran out of CS/stun and ended up getting a little sloppy the last 5%, but needless to say, they pulled it out. After finishing him off, we teleported out for a few job changes so we could start hunting other NMs and gathering key items for the Behemoth boss of the plateau. I'm currently missing the Carabosse key item.

We attempted her during the same run, but that fight seems to be more about outlasting that damn fairy than it is anything else. We simply ran out of time since we had burned up a lot killing the Ram NM, the Liege Fly NM, the smaller fairy NM, Megamaw Mikey, Chasmic Hornet and Piasa. This run was easily our most productive out of all that we've done thusfar.

Saturday saw us going into Tahrongi for an XP session turning into an NM hunting session. I just have to say, Adze is a bitch. I hate gnats. I now hate gnat NMs even more. Along with Adze, we farmed up items to pop the manticore NM and we took down Minhocao as well. The good news from this is while farming the manticores, huge gold chest popped that gave me the 2nd item needed to pop Lacovie. Not anything I'm going to pop any time soon, but we have a set. :)

HQ Stuff

Ended up going 1/19 on these after getting another abjuration. This is part of a project I've started to tweak out most of my gear. Especially now that angel skins have finally bottomed out thanks to their addition in Abyssea and MMM (allegedly...). That's something that's been long overdue.

And as they say...

Out with the old...

In with the new...

Now for that damn cap (0/55) and the feet (0/10)...

Trial 1851

Ended up hitting this hard this week. We had Monday off from events and I ended up knocking out something like 300 of them. Wednesday saw me knock out another 300 or so. Friday saw me knock out 500. Saturday night saw me get below 500 remaining and Sunday saw me finish it off.

Naturally, when I saw this...

I knew this was coming...

Naturally, I can only say I really do not feel good that I completed this.

Off to the moogle I go...

Do I feel good that I don't have to grind anything for at least a couple weeks? Yes. It's just hard to enjoy completing this when you know something even more asinine is coming down the pipe from SE. I don't think my trial is the hardest relic trial by any means since I'm virtually whiff-proof thanks to the Spirit Link update, Meditate (if you have a pocket healer) and a few extra TP tweaks to DRG, but it's long and it's annoying. 1851 ended up going by faster than 1850 despite there being an additional 500 killshots.

In talking with Alaistair last night, we both feel like a trial could be something ridiculous like 10,000 uses of a WS as long as they aren't killshots and we'd be a little more accepting. Realistically though, what else can SE come up with for the relics? Going to call my shot right now for next update:

2000 killshots on Beasts.
2500 killshots on Birds.

Birds might be wishful thinking...

Anyway, DRG picked up +1 STR, +1 DEX, +3 Base Damage, +5 Accuracy over the weekend. Will be interesting to see how it stacks up on boss fights and whatnot.

Hasbrotoyshop.com Customer Service

2010-08-13T08:22:00.014-05:00

Since Theora requested it, I'm going to try to tell this story mostly in pictures...

A few weeks ago, I ordered the following two items from Hasbrotoyshop.com:

Shortly after the order...

I look at the tracking number and see I'll receive my order a in a couple days. A couple days go by, I receive my order and it is:

I pick up my:

I'm told I'll be sent:

This is so I can send back:

Before they'll send me:

They'll also confirm the "escalation" via:

Ok, whatever.

A week goes by:

Few more days:

"I'm sorry sir! We'll put an urgent notice on this escalation!"

Home Made Porn

2010-08-12T09:39:00.002-05:00

I have a lot of customer stories that I've accumulated over the years, but this one probably takes the cake. Nudity is nothing new in my line of work. Matter of fact, I've been dealing with nudity since my college days delivering pizza. One would think that wouldn't necessarily transfer over to the computer repair field, but...yeah it does.

A couple days ago, I picked up a computer from a customer who, for the most part, has been a good one but has pissed me off a couple times with semi-unrealistic expectations. The problem I was addressing this time was the typical "slow computer" complaint. Malware being the most likely culprit.

As I'm talking to him and bundling things up to leave, he remarks:

"Oh don't mind the porn on there. Save it if you need to reload windows."

I've heard that request a few times. More often times than not, the "porn" that's on someone's computer involves semi-racy pics of various Hollywood actresses. Still, part of me cringed a little when he said it because I felt like I was about to back up a bunch of gay porn this guy viewed in his free time. My initial impression of said guy was obviously that he was single and that he was gay. Nothing wrong with his choices. I just have no interest in learning about what he does in his free time. I mostly just chalked this comment up as a joke since I had joked around with him before about the sheer amount of porn I run into while repairing computers.

Back at the shop, I hook his computer up, load it up into Safe Mode (fastest way to start a malware cleaning), and am greeted by a picture of a middle-aged woman posing on what looks like some sort of stool in see-through lingerie.

Uh...ok. So probably not gay, just overly happy.

The woman herself wasn't particularly attractive, but the image on the background looked professionally done. I figured it was probably off of a site he frequented since he was middle-aged himself.

After running a few utilities to see what was going on with it's sluggishness, I came to determine that he did have a malware infection and a rather nasty one. I called him up to let him know I could clean it, but it'd probably be faster if I just wiped it and started from scratch given the sheer amount of data he had on it.

(250GB hard drive, 210GB taken up...)

He approved the wipe and gave me a list of things to back up. Among the items...

...his "home made porn collection".

My original inclination was to tell him no. I really had better things to do than to back up what amounted to 200GB of home made porn. Then I thought about it for a second.

All I'm really doing is just copying a folder from one hard drive to another. I won't actually be viewing the content, which was my only issue. It became apparent to me this lady that was on his desktop was likely his wife and I really had no desire to see anything more of her or anything more of him.

So ok, I shot him the price, he approved and off to the data backup process I went. After backing the data up (took about 2 hours to transfer that amount of data...), I went to open Picasa so I could check out some of the results from a different data recovery process only to find that Picasa had indexed all of the pictures I had just transferred over from the backup job...

First pic: Full nude of said woman.
Second pic: Another full nude.
Third pic: Full nude of said woman getting her boob sucked on by fully clothed customer.
Fourth pic: Nude of said woman having oral sex performed on her by fully clothed customer.

That was quite enough for me. I closed Picasa and tried to figure out a way to burn the images from my brain, but to no avail. I'm sure a screwdriver through the temple would have worked, but I do prefer living. You can't un-ring that bell.

I finished the job up for him and delivered this back to him yesterday. Clean reload of Windows, all of his home made porn in a directory on his desktop (instead of hidden 7 folders deep in his my pictures directory...). I made sure I pointed out where it was at and that it didn't make any sense to bury it that far down if you were just going to display a picture from it as his desktop background.

As he's writing the check for it all, none other than his wife comes home.

Or, as I was introduced "This is my ex-wife".

Now this story just got really interesting to me. You see, the thing about seeing someone naked on the internet is that odds are, you aren't going to meet them face to face. It's generally human nature to think of things in their simplest forms and once you see someone naked, that's pretty much the first image that will pop into your head any time you talk to them or see them.

This guy had 200GB of home made porn on his computer starring the woman that I was just introduced to as the ex and the only thing that ran through my head when I shook her hand was:

"I'VE SEEN YOU NAKED AND GETTING PLEASURED HOLY SHIT WHAT WERE YOU THINKING"

To each their own. People are allowed to live out whatever sexual fantasies they want obviously, but it becomes a bit of a different ball game when what was supposed to remain private ends up being viewed by someone else. Given the image that was on his desktop, I seriously doubt I was the first one that viewed it. Hell, I went out of my way to try to avoid viewing it.

Ex: Did you save all his data?
Q: Yes Ma'am.
Ex: How much was there?

(At this point, it becomes rather clear from the glance she gives him and how fast he's trying to finish the check to me that she knows...)

Q: About 200 gigs.
Ex: Is that a lot?
Q: Let's just say they don't make flash drives that size yet.
Ex: What was it mostly?

(Oh shit...how do I answer this.)

Q: Pictures and movies, like any large backup job.

She looked over at her ex...

Ex: What have you been downloading?
Q: It was a bunch of old stuff.

(Oh damn. I said too much.)

Ex: Pictures of me?

(God, I'm dying on the inside from laughter and I think it's become rather obvious she knows it too)

Q: A few.
Ex: I thought I told you to delete those.
Customer: I did!
Ex: Were they naked pictures of me?
Q: Yep, a lot more than naked.

At this point, my customer just hands me the check and hangs his head. Also at this point, it's pretty obvious why this lady became his ex and quite possibly the reason he's flamboyantly gayish now...

What was not so obvious was why they were still living together in the first place...

I decided it was a good time to leave before I got caught in the line of fire. I'm expecting a phone call later today from said Customer with the inevitable ass-chewing that will likely result. :)

Hate RMT Tell Bots

2010-08-11T10:00:00.003-05:00

Who doesn't?

SE's filters obviously are a piece of shit. Until they do something semi-drastic like limit the use of tells for people under level 30 to those on their friend lists, the problem isn't going away no matter how many times we report the stupid bots. So after receiving the same tell from oosale.com 5 times in a row from the same bot character, I decided I'd have a little fun at their expense.

When going to their site, the first thing I noticed that was extremely odd was the fact they ask you for your character name, your Paypal email address, your phone number (which I put in as 888-382-5633, spell that out on the phone if you're that bored) and what game you play. Not particularly sure why that information is relevant unless you already have an account, but since it was a required field, naturally I made a bunch of shit up.

Please wait for a site operator to respond.

You are now chatting with 'Tolly'

Tolly: Hello,welcome to Live Help.How may i help you please?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Hello Tolly, I had a quick question for you.

Tolly: ok

Tolly: What is the matter?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: How does it feel to work for a company that harasses the piss out of random people multiple times an hour in an illegal manner?

Tolly: It is really bad

Tolly: What is your feeling ?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Is it really or do you get that question a lot?

Tolly: Yes , so many

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Awesome, do you mind if I waste about 3 hours of your time?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Can I have all your personal information too?

Tolly: If it is necessary, i will let you know

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Where is your company located?

Tolly: Why need i tell u?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Well, I figure since for a chat, you require player names, paypal email addresses, etc, you can at least tell me where your company is located.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: I'm guessing China

Tolly: Have you ordered before?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Nope and I don't have any intention of doing so. I just want to waste your time.

Tolly: You waste your time, not me

Tolly: lol

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Not really. You see...

Haklfjfhkhklhas: You're sitting in a cubicle farm having to deal with assholes like me.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: I'm sitting at a desk being the bored asshole with nothing else to do at the moment.

Tolly: In fact , i like you

Tolly: So do i

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Riiiight. So where's your company located?

Tolly: You can guess

Haklfjfhkhklhas: What type of legit company doesn't disclose that information?

Tolly: I have not asked your information

Tolly: so please do not ask me , ok?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: No, you "Tolly" have not asked me in this chat for my information, but to even get to the point where I can talk to "Tolly", your chat form required personal information.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: It required...Phone number, Paypal Email address, Character name...

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Just for a chat

Haklfjfhkhklhas: and that's not to even mention all the bullshit you guys cause in the various games you "service"

Haklfjfhkhklhas: So again

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Where's your company located?

Tolly: on the earth

Haklfjfhkhklhas: That's a start

Haklfjfhkhklhas: now narrow it down to the continent it's on

Haklfjfhkhklhas: then the country

Haklfjfhkhklhas: then the province

Haklfjfhkhklhas: then the city

Tolly: then the street

Tolly: then the door

Tolly: then the room

Tolly: then ??

Haklfjfhkhklhas: you're getting the idea

Tolly: Yes, so you want to know , where i am sitting ?

Tolly: What i am eating

Haklfjfhkhklhas: No, just where your company is located.

Tolly: Who i am talking to

Haklfjfhkhklhas: how much do you get paid an hour?

Tolly: Why you want to know that fucking answer

Tolly: Nothing

Haklfjfhkhklhas: you work for free?

Tolly: Yes

Tolly: I am so boring

Tolly: and need somethings to do

Tolly: So i am here just for some food

Haklfjfhkhklhas: so you write bots that spam personal messages to anyone who's currently signed into a game for fun?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: or is that a diff. department?

Tolly: It is not me

Tolly: I do not do that stupid thing

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Does that guy have to talk to people at all?

Tolly: I even who you are saying

Tolly: do not know*

Haklfjfhkhklhas: The guy that writes the advertising bots, you're not him?

Tolly: Yes, i am so sorry

Tolly: I am a new guy here

Haklfjfhkhklhas: and you don't write the advertising bots?

Tolly: Of course

Haklfjfhkhklhas: who does?

Tolly: Today is my second time

Tolly: work here

Haklfjfhkhklhas: who writes the advertising bots?

Tolly: So sorry , i have no idea

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Can you find out?

Tolly: It is a little hard

Haklfjfhkhklhas: I'm sure if you work at it, you can find out.

Tolly: But i have no right to do it

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Sure you do. You work for a company that's using an illegal means of advertising.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: As well as selling illegal goods.

Tolly: I am unable to do what you hope to do

Tolly: so sorry

Haklfjfhkhklhas: So back to my original question for now. Where's your company located?

Tolly: Why are you interested in it ?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Why are you interested in hiding it?

Tolly: Becaues it is private

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Why is it private?

Tolly: i do not know

Haklfjfhkhklhas: You guys make a public nuisance of yourselves. One would think the rest of the company would be public.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Is it private because the boss told you not to tell anyone?

Tolly: Bingo

Haklfjfhkhklhas: So you willingly work for someone doing illegal things?

Tolly: illegal?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Yep, illegal.

Tolly: It is legal

Tolly: Why you say that

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Is it? You guys pretty much violate the Terms of Service for every game you provide currency for.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: The whole "not allowed to advertise the sale of virtual goods" and "not allowed to sell the intellectual property" part of the Terms of Service

Tolly: What is the difference between legal and illegaal?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: the difference between legal and illegal is often times just the border to a country.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: or hiding behind one's govt. while essentially stealing someone's property and profiting off it.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Which is why you guys are doing.

Tolly: But we do not do that thing

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Do you not?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: You sell WoW gold right?

Tolly: I am just talking to you, it is my job, i do not care other things

Haklfjfhkhklhas: So if you were employed by someone selling child sex slaves, you'd just sit at your desk and do it cause it's your job and not care about anything else?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Tolly: But that thing my company do not do

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Section 11:

Tolly: ok

Haklfjfhkhklhas: World of Warcraft Terms of Service:

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Ownership/Selling of the Account or Virtual Items. Blizzard does not recognize the transfer of WoW Accounts or Blizzard Accounts (each an "Account"). You may not purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, or offer to purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, and any such attempt shall be null and void. Blizzard owns, has licensed, or otherwise has rights to all of the content that appears in the Game. You agree that you have no right or title in or to any such content, including without limitation the virtual goods or currency appearing or originating in the Game, or any other attributes associated with the Account or stored on the Service. Blizzard does not recognize any purported transfers of virtual property executed outside of the Game, or the purported sale, gift or trade in the "real world" of anything that appears or originates in the Game. Accordingly, you may not sell in-game items or currency for "real" money, or exchange those items or currency for value outside of the Game. "

Haklfjfhkhklhas: There's a section like that in virtually every game you guys "service"

Haklfjfhkhklhas: and yes, your company does not sell child sex slaves, but to say "it is my job, i do not care other things" is simply turning a blind eye to the actual issues

Tolly: I just want to say that if you want to buy something and the other buy want to buy it , this is busniess

Tolly: sell*

Haklfjfhkhklhas: That's the drug dealer mentality.

Tolly: So you care all things

Haklfjfhkhklhas: The whole reason drugs exist is because "you want to buy something and the other buy want to buy it, this is business"

Haklfjfhkhklhas: No I just find it humorous there are actually people in this world who get involved in things like that in the first place.

Tolly: I agree with you

Tolly: It is not good

Haklfjfhkhklhas: LOL! no you don't. you wouldn't be working there if you did :)

Tolly: But i can not find other work

Tolly: Maybe one year later

Tolly: I can do it

Haklfjfhkhklhas: That's still no excuse.

Tolly: I am just leaving school

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Lots of people can't find work. Don't see them resorting to illegal business practices to make ends me.

Tolly: it is difficult to find a desired job for mr

Haklfjfhkhklhas: So go back to school?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Work fast food?

Tolly: I have graduated

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Where from?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Did you just get fired or are you currently selling something illegal to another person?

Tolly: I am a good boy

Tolly: Just the life is hard

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Still just excuses.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Your life is hard, your boss' life is hard (although probably not as hard), so to make ends meet, you guys make things hard for other people by irritating the piss out of them

Tolly: But what can i do to satify your need?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Well for now, you can find the guy that writes the advertising bots and punch him in the nuts repeatedly.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Preferably once for every person, every day he's irritated.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Which should come out to around a few million ballsack punches.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Then go do that to your drug lord/boss.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: If you were playing a game to get away from things after a hard day of work, would you want to be receiving advertisements for a product you're not interested in repeatedly?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Likely not. So why work for a company that does that to other people.

Haklfjfhkhklhas: How many customer service representatives do you guys have?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: And can I just say, your english is a lot better than the guy who writes those advertising bots?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: Hello?

Haklfjfhkhklhas: I think I'll do this at least once or twice a day. This was a lot of fun. I'm sure we'll run into each other again. :)

Obviously, "Tolly" has had several of these conversations. Obviously, he doesn't care and he's a smart ass. However, I managed to waste about 30 minutes of his time and because this was such a fun exercise, I think I'll go through with my promise there at the end.

That or I'll find someone to write me a bot and just spam their LiveChat...

Abyssea Thoughts and Other News

2010-08-09T09:05:00.004-05:00

I got invited to do Salvage with Ringthree last night to help him kill a frog. Prior to entering, I witnessed a lot of debate between the other members on how best to handle the organization of their Abyssea runs and it got me to thinking about Obsidian's.

As it stands, we basically just go free lot on items. I know over the long haul, that's probably going to end up leading to a lot of butthurt over various items. That's been one of my biggest issues thusfar in organizing Abyssea runs is that people seem to be a lot more adamant about what they want to do and willing to force an organizer's hand to get their way. Really kind of irritates me to no end.

My priority in organizing these things has been to try to nail down as many pieces of Abyssite for our members as we can. I feel like getting the core a large number of these will just make our runs that much more efficient since it seems they really only take effect if a person holding a particular Abyssite actually gets killshot. If only 2 or 3 of us have Kismet Abyssite, for example, then our odds of capping Azure light faster are rather small. Some will look at that and say "just make sure the people with kismet get killshot". I can only counter that with "have you ever tried to get 18 people on the same page as far as killshots go?"

Getting Abyssite is boring though. Most people don't see the usefulness in doing this. They just see a pair of Tumbler Trunks and want to go kill that damn tiger or want to go XP a job somewhere. The worst ones are when people want to come as a melee job so they can skill up or refuse to come as a critical support job because their PUP needs XP. It's because of things like this that I've probably sent more Obsidian people off to other groups. Bottom line is, if you're not the one organizing it or are unwilling to do what it takes to help the team accomplish it's goals, then we don't want you in our runs. I think this is the major thing that has to be understood from the onset. It's not a doctrine on anyone personally. It just takes everyone being on the same page to make the best use of the time allotted in Abyssea.

The Basics:

Telepoints: We're to a point now in our runs where we'll likely stop allowing people to come if they don't have all the telepoints. They don't take long to get and it really just means you're going to miss only one run.

Abyssites: A number of Abyssites can be picked up via cruor purchase or via quests. These are generally things to get on your own time.

Understanding of Time: This is probably the most fundamental aspect of Abyssea. Learning how to manage your time. Going in with an ally of 18 people where 10 of them only have 2 stones and the other 8 have 120 mins is just maddening. Try to always have 90 mins available for any organized run.

The Categories:

You can classify Abyssea runs into one of three categories. I tend to think the structure for the overall group hinges on these three categories.

XP/Farming run: Pretty self-explanatory. You spend copious amounts of time farming up key items via gold chests or leveling jobs all while building up a time buffer for a future run. These seem to be necessary. It doesn't always work out where people end up having just as much time left over as they entered with, but as long as you're running out with pop items and whatnot later on, then you should be in good shape.

Basic/Forced Pop NM run (Bazaar pops): The vast majority of the items that come off these NMs have silly drop rates. And by silly, I mean insanely high. Not all of the details have been fleshed out on a number of them, but from what I can tell, if it's a pop item you can buy from a Bazaar, it's got a good drop rate and is easy to get to. I don't necessarily feel these are important enough to allow any form of bidding on since the drop rate is what it is. Using Obsidian's current rules, we'd basically end up with a ton of 4 point bids and no real exodus of points.

The biggest issue with these types of NMs is that people see how simple they are and don't particularly understand anything beyond "We can just go do this real quick". "Real quick" is 15 mins. 15 mins is a huge chunk of time if everyone's only going in with 90. There are a number of ways to handle this sort of issue though.

Obsidian Dynamis/Einherjar style bidding:

The first idea is to simply do bidding the way we normally do for Dynamis or Einherjar. On paper, it looks like you can just pick the zone and then just do blanket bidding for every item that can drop in the zone (or just further classify what you're going after). It's easy. It's painless (from an admin standpoint). The cons to this are that we end up with some butthurt if we don't go after an NM we listed or potentially set up someone to believe we were going to go after. Or we kill something that wasn't on the list to kill originally because it happened to be up in our way (clusterfuck). Are you going to just leave an NM sitting there if you know it drops something good because it wasn't on the original list to kill?

Lists:

Have everyone make out a list of the top 5 items they want from each zone and limit bidding to that. You can easily build runs around this and knock out a couple items at a time potentially. The pros to this is it basically provides a lot of input from the members themselves. The con to this is when do you decide to move on to a diff. item? You have 10 people wanting tumbler trunks, but 5 have it listed at number 1 on their list, 3 have it listed at number 3 and 2 have it at number 5? Do you build an entire run around those 2 who have it listed at number 5 (should you run out of time and only get 8 done) or do you wait until more people have it listed before doing it again?

Freelot:

Because of how frequently stuff drops, we currently employ this tactic. Again, it's not something I'd like to permanently use, but it's doing it's job for now. There's about 14 of us who make it to every Abyssea run, so the primary con to this (having someone who rarely comes get something over someone who's there every run) isn't a huge issue. The pro to this is it makes everyone feel like they're on equal footing for every item which, in some cases, can cause people to enjoy their time more. I'm not a big proponent of this mentality, but I do acknowledge it exists.

Key Item Pop/Big Shit: This is the third and final category and where I feel points should be used heavily for anything that drops as they seem to generally requires a ton of people. There's a lot of stuff that drops from these particular baddies that I feel really isn't much better than some of the stuff that you can get from the 2nd category, but because of the time involved in farming up the key items and such, this is where a member's time invested becomes important.

These are also runs where, odds are, this is the only thing you're going to do during the run. That might not make a huge difference to some people, but I tend to view events where I'm potentially going to be spending an hour or more fighting one thing, and one thing only, as events where people need to go all out in terms of preparation and research. The people who do are generally the ones who spend the most time in the events themselves and should have a mechanism in place, from an organizational standpoint, that gives them a better chance to obtain what they want and get rewarded for their work.

Points Allocation

Final topic on Abyssea revolves around how to reward points. There isn't a cookie cutter method to it since there are so many different things to do. If you go by what I've laid out so far, I tend to think points should be awarded accordingly:

Category 1: XP/Farming Session

No points per hour, points per key item that drops.

Category 2: Basic/Force popped NMs (Bazaar)

Points per hour, points per key item (if you're going after those).

Category 3: Key Item popped/Big Shit

Points per hour, points per bad guy killed.

How many you reward is up for discussion, but that's generally how I feel about how rewards should be distributed. I think most groups have found themselves with members who have a lot of different ideas about how to run things. Obsidian is no exception. We have yet to really open an official debate on this subject, but a lot of the sacks have discussed these sorts of things at length amongst themselves. Most of us are on the same page even though our agendas for what we want to do are slightly different.

I think the biggest thing all of us understand though (and I find this to be completely critical to the success of any group):

We all know we're going to get what we want individually eventually and have the patience to wait and develop something that's good for everyone.

Other News!

Trial 1850

This trial fucking sucked. Not because of what I was killing, but because of the lack of options. You basically have:

Ifrit's Cauldron: Bombs. Spread out like crazy and involves a lot of running.

WotG zones with Djinns: See previous entry. Plus the perpetual Bio effect I'd probably have on me will just make the damage range of Geirskogul even more ridiculous. (Remember, most infuriating part of these trials is using the WS and leaving 1% of life on the target...)

Sky: Not exactly the paragon of kill speed excellence up there. Do I want to risk getting Despot'd killing dolls or do I want to watch my wyvern die a lot to the AoE from Golems? That leaves...

Ro'Maeve: Needless to say, I'm not the only one who realized these things about the other 3 locations. You basically just run a loop and grab whatever arcane critter is up and kill it. On good days, I'd get somewhere around 70 kills/hour. On most days, it was more like 30 kills/hour because people loved to team up there. Not that I blame them. It's just hard to work in a huge group when the relic trial requires the kill shot and you don't have much HP on a monster to build TP to begin with.

I made up my mind around the middle of last week to not leave Ro'Maeve until this damn trial was done. I started the day Friday with about 700 kills to go. I knocked out 200 on Friday night. I then got some help in the form of Kaelis and Jance for the remaining 400 or so. We essentially set it up so that they would pull and I would kill. This worked out for them both as Jance should have knocked out about ~200 (since he joined far later than Kaelis) of his gun trial and Kaelis got a few random completions for a BLU sword trial (needed thunder day/weather).

I also need to point out the following:

If I'm in the zone with you and you need the same kills as me, don't even bother trying to ask me to team up. If you don't understand what the relic trials involve, then there's no need for you to waste my time or yours unless you're capable of being self-sustaining and willing to pull for me.

I've already snapped at 2 idiots in Ro'Maeve because they started bitching that I wouldn't team up with them. It's not that hard to understand:

"I have to get killshots, the more people you have, the less likely I build TP."

"I have to get killshots, the more people you have, the more likely it is someone's an idiot."

One guy even offered to let me join his party and continue to let me do my own thing. Anyone care to guess what type of response that got out of me?

"I'm not doing the work for you."

Anyway...by about 11PM Saturday night...

And about 11:01PM Saturday night...

I promptly went to help Theora kill off Tenzen and unload about a month's worth of frustration.

Plus I hate Tenzen anyway and any chance I get to skullfuck his ass, I'm taking it. (That's another story for another day...)

Trial 1851

After 1850, I was semi-dreading 1851. Mostly because it's 500 MORE killshots. The good news is that there are far more options for these than that of arcana. Generally speaking, vermin are in packs and in areas with 6 min respawns. Arcana are not generally in this category. On top of that, I can drag my pocket RDM out with me to help speed things along.

Pretty much just screwing around testing various camps out yesterday, I managed to knock out 250 of these in around 4 hours of killing stuff. There was probably about an hour or so of me wandering around to boot. It makes me feel a lot better at the moment that I likely won't have to invest 2 entire workweeks to get this trial done.

That still doesn't make me hate SE any less for piling this amount of shit on a relic holder. The only real silver lining to this is that I have a very effective way of shutting people up when they start bitching about their trials.

(Glacian) 750 more Tachi: Goten uses >.<
(Qtipus) You can log in as me and do my trial if you hate yours so much.
(Glacian) No thanks.
(Mav) Q takes all the fun out of bitching about trials.

Hopefully by the end of the weekend, I'll have a level 80 Gungnir, but realistically, I'd put it by the end of next week.

Cookout 2010 Stories: Vol 4

2010-08-01T22:44:00.013-05:00

This final entry into the cookout stories will consist of some random things that happened over the course of the trip and the final day/night.

Cooking Out!

Most of Sunday was spent loafing around and actually doing what the name of the event implies. Cooking out.

The menu included the basics:

Hot Dogs.
Burgers.
Potato Salad.
Actual Salad.
Sangria.

Kay fixed the potato salad. Eri grilled the burgers and dogs. Kreo fixed the sangria and I'm not sure who fixed the actual salad.

Drakus + Food = Amused.

Shootin' the shit while eating out on the deck.

More shit-shootin'...

I need to smack someone for managing to get both my bald spot and my gut in the same picture...

Gracie the Sidekick

Stripes got his own column mostly due to his ability to find hiding places, so I figure I should at least put a small blurb in here regarding Gracie. She's a rather laid back kitty that's been declawed. So she was an easy one to play with whereas Stripes, still having his claws, could pretty much maim you in a heartbeat.

Doesn't mean Gracie couldn't still kick your ass though...dog better not be on my porch bish!

Patrolling the window...

...more patrolling.

Gracie was often times found on the backs of furniture or on top of keyboards and would often times go limp when you picked her up.

A Collection of...Backs of Heads...

We apparently managed to get a near complete collection of the backs of our heads...

Kreoss...

Kaylea...

Kaelis...

Suraph...

Me...

Not sure how we managed to do that, but slightly humorous that we did...

To Baltimore! Again...

As Noon on Monday rolled around, it was time for a number of us to depart. Kaelis and Eri were driving back home. Kreoss and Kay were flying back home out of Baltimore. This means that we were going to have to drive to Baltimore to drop 'em off.

This also meant we were going to have to take 5 people in one car or someone was going to be sitting at the house for a number of hours...

Drakus was highly amused and stayed at the house.

Off to Baltimore we go yet again. This drive seems to get faster each time we made it. The odd thing about this particular excursion was that I actually got to see what the outside of BWI looked like. Every other time I had been there, I was changing planes, so I couldn't actually get out to roam around much.

One thing I do have to note about this airport is:

Their parking system is f***ing fantastic. They got these little sensors above each parking space that relays a signal to a post out on the main drive areas as to how many spots are available in each row. Makes finding a space incredibly easy. This is being compared to BNA's airport parking system of "LOT FULL" only to see about 50 spaces open as you pull in or "582 SPACES AVAILABLE" and I can't find a single one.

We go through the whole check-in process. Kay and Kreo have both checked in online, but couldn't print passes. Kreo had some bags he had to check anyway, so he got to go stand in line.

Kay, on the other hand, just had a carryon, so she had the option of going up to a kiosk and just reprinting her boarding passes...

...if she hadn't forgotten what her confirmation number was.

She swore up and down she had it memorized, but obviously, she didn't. Reception was rather bad there, but after fiddling with our phones, we finally got logged into AOL mobile and got her correct confirmation number. But!

In that time, Kreo managed to go through the line, get his bags checked and his boarding passes reprinted...

Final picture at the airport before parting ways.

Final Toys R Us?

After Suraph and I saw them to the security line, we left and headed to the last Toys R Us we had mapped out from a couple days prior. It wasn't too difficult to find, but again, nothing new as it relates to Transformers.

Unless you count this:

Really? A fkn fishing rod? WOO SLAP AN IDENTIFIABLE BRAND ON ANYTHING AND IT'LL SELL I TELL YOU WHAT!

Although...now that I think about it. That fishing rod could probably transform into a nice whipping stick for the dipshit marketing execs who thought this would be a good idea...

Oddly enough as well, Suraph found a game for $5 that he's apparently very fond of:

Upon exiting the Toys R Us, we stopped to take a picture at a very easy target:

Back at Launchpad...

Suraph, Drakus and I spent the rest of the evening just relaxing and cleaning things up. While watching TV, eating pizza rolls and broccoli-stuffed chicken, and playing Southpark's tower defense game, we got wind of some air travel troubles coming out of Baltimore.

The first was rather obligatory. Kreoss wouldn't have luck if he didn't have bad luck. He had basically cursed himself on the way to the airport by remarking that his flight will probably be delayed. I just piled onto said self-cursing by confirming it would be and sure enough...his flight was delayed by about 30-45 mins. Nothing too bad really, especially when compared with the later shenanigans.

Kay's flight ended up being delayed by about 6 hours. This was due to a litany of reasons. The first was a mechanical problem. The second was they had missed their window to take off due to the mechanical problem despite being out on the runway ready to leave. The third was they had reached the max amount of time they could be on the plane out on the runway and had to get off. The last was weather-related. Don't get me wrong...Southwest rarely has issues like this and Suraph could speak more to the conditions surrounding the problems, but it seems to me the BWI-Hartford flight could have just piled onto a bus and got there before they ultimately did.

On top of that, and I usually hate "if we had known...", but if we had known this sort of stuff was going to happen, Kay could have just caught a ride with Suraph the next morning on his way back to NH. Needless to say, clusterfuck.

But while she was miserable at the airport, the 3 of us were comfy and cozy pigging out on junk food and playing games. :)

(Yes, that's a rub-in...)

She ultimately got in around 1AM.

The Drive Home

Tuesday morning came too quickly. We had packed up most everything the night before, so there was really little to do when we got up aside from shower and do some final checks to make sure we didn't leave anything.

The plan this time was for Drakus and I to take the 68-79-64-BG PKWY-65 route back to Bowling Green. We had mapped out a few Toys R Us' to visit along the way, so it was indeed, not the final Toys R Us visited on this trip.

We got down the mountain and about 20 minutes out though when it hit me.

No I didn't forget anything.

Unless you count taking a poop before leaving as forgetting something...

Not even 30 minutes into the drive and I already had to pull off. We pulled off at a gas station that had a rather nice bathroom, but skimped severely on the quality of the toilet paper. You couldn't pull more than one or two sheets out at a time without it breaking and that's rather infuriating.

It's also a sign you should probably pull out a little extra if it's that brittle. I spent more time getting the toilet paper ready than I did doing my business.

Anyway, now that I was done, back on the highway we go! First Toys R Us we pulled off for wasn't open yet, but we were close enough to it opening that we just killed some time exploring a nearby K-Mart, Wal-Mart and Target. Said TRU had nothing new though, so back on the road.

Second TRU, we hit the jackpot. I found some figures I had been looking for. Thrust and Drift specifically. Drakus ended up buying the 4-pack of Generations: Wave 1, which included the 2 I had just picked up along with TF: WFC Prime and TF: WFC Bumblebee. After picking up some McDonalds, we got back out onto the highway headed for the third, and last TRU mapped out for us along our route. That TRU had nothing new either, so it was time to just kick back and drive.

Until we ran into some of this...

Yes that's me driving while taking a picture.

The weather got a little rocky after that last TRU, which slowed us down somewhat. On top of that, there was a ton of construction happening on I-64 at the WV-KY border that kept having lane closures and jamming traffic a bit. There was also apparently some sort of wreck or cop convention that actually had us stopped long enough on the highway for me to get one of the new Transformers out of it's package and show it off.

Once we were about 15-20 miles into KY though, it cleared up completely and the rest of the drive to Lexington was w/o incident. Drakus had never seen a castle before either, so this was a treat for him to get pictures of as we were driving by:

(He obviously doesn't know which way is up on his camera...)

About 5 miles after this though, we discover the on ramp to the BG Parkway was closed. This resulted in us having to drive around to Versailles and get onto said parkway there through a huge clusterfuck of traffic as we had managed to hit Lexington during rush hour. Once past that, everything else went smooth.

We get back to my place, divvy up the luggage and then head in so that Drakus can log himself in to one of my comps. The purpose for this is that he wasn't going to be home in time to catch Einherjar. The other thing he didn't count on was that I was still seeking vengeance for the joke played on my character while I was sleeping.

You see, I woke up to find Gungnir stuffed in storage on one of my mannequins and I was carrying around a Gae Bolg instead. Turns out Lect was the mastermind behind this joke, but since Drakus, Kreoss, Kaelis and Suraph were all there to take part, they're getting the favor returned.

Drakus got home a couple hours after Einherjar ended to find:

- His mog house furniture all shoved to one side a la Tetris.
- All of his gil divided up and sent to each of his 10 mules.
- His HP was set in Rabao.
- The idea was planted that some of his BLM gear was moved.
- His 8 DB slots had 1 gil ea. in them.

He made it home safe obviously as did everyone else.

Conclusion

It's hard for me to say "most" as it relates to anything to one of these cookouts. Each one of them have something awesome that happen each year. First year was awesome just cause it actually happened. Second year was awesome because it involved a pool and a pair of people that really need to show up to the next one, but having kids kind of puts a bit of a wrench in the ability to do so. Last year, in Maine, the locale was obviously one of the awesome pieces there along with the cooking clinic Kay's mom put on. This year was awesome because of the locale and a number of other things.

It's obviously a tradition we've started that we hope to keep going. Next year has been discussed to take place in FL, but we're still a long way away from that time period and who knows what circumstances will be around when it comes time for this to happen again. Tons o' fun was had by all.

Bonus: Married Man Wins...Twice

I alluded to this in the previous post, but here's your Cookout: Moment of Zen

We had a number of multiplayer games we were abusing while hanging out. One of these was Mario Party 8. I was taking a nap when the shenanigans were going on, so I only got filled in when I woke up.

One of the mini-games in MP8 is apparently reminiscent of an SNL skit featuring Alec Baldwin:

There's not really much else I can say to introduce this...

...but there's a whole lot I can say about it after you watch it. Left to right is Kreo - Drakus - Kaelis - Suraph. Out of that quartet, Kaelis is the only married one. This video is actually the second time the four of them got stuck with that mini game...

...and Kaelis won them both despite the fact he never played MP8 up until this cookout. Anyone else find it odd the married guy is the best one at masturbation wii games? :)

Not so sure about that whole marriage thing myself now...

Cookout 2010 Stories: Vol 3

2010-07-29T14:50:00.012-05:00

Most of our third day saw us descend from high atop Mt. Cranky to mingle among the commoners 2 hours away in Baltimore at Camden Yards. This day of the trip was pretty much the only thing we had pre-planned prior to actually getting together.

Odin

Before heading to Baltimore, we had some Einherjar business to take care of. As luck would have it, our Einherjar timing worked out so that we had an Odin to fight during our cookout for the second year in a row. It's always interesting doing an event like this with a group of people as opposed to the general solitude most of us play games like this in.

Since the level cap increase, we've done Odin twice. Both times have been ridiculously easy. We started utilizing Odin on Odin crime at the starts of the fights, so our team really only has 80ish% of his health to deal with. I tend to view this as a way to make up for time lost actually entering Valgrind, but that really didn't have anything to do with the level cap increase itself.

Both times we've fought him, we've been done in about 15 mins tops. He's pretty much a cakewalk now. Don't get me wrong, he can still cause a lot of havoc at times (looking at you 50% mark + valks or 30% mark + valks), but he's nowhere near the time nailbiter he used to be.

Drops yielded a long overdue E.Body and a pair of M.Legs Kreoss actually won the lot on, then inexplicably dropped his lamp before they distributed to him and Jess ended up getting them. Not that he cared much about them to begin with since it was a 3-way lot of 4 point bids on them, but that was still cause for some ridicule. Once done, the rest of us that hadn't showered yet got cleaned up and we loaded up the Vue and the Crankyvette to make our way to Baltimore.

FUCK SLOW DOWN

Normally I drive a 4 door sedan, not a 4-door SUV. Driving along I-68 in the mountains was rather challenging for me. At one point, there's a curve that lasts for literally 2-3 minutes. The Gs presented on one's body on this curve in an SUV with an ABS system about as sensitive as a WoW'er that just got dumped by a man he thought was a girl actually got me to get Kay to call Suraph and tell him to slow down.

Y'see, I'm lead-footed by nature. That's the irony presented in this story. If I'm asking someone to slow down on the highway, it's akin to McDonald's running out of hamburgers AND fries in the same night. If it had just been me in the Vue, I probably wouldn't have asked, but since 3 others were with me, it had me a little concerned. Naturally, the only thing that was my saving grace was the fact that Kreoss was getting carsick and actually falling asleep with his mouth open.

That translates to an escape from ridicule. :)

Sports Talk Radio Makes Erimentha Go ZZZZZzzzzz

One other thing I discovered during this drive that was rather comical was the effect of Sports Talk Radio on Erimentha. Eri had just finished telling a story or having a conversation or something and I decided to try to catch up on what was happening in the sports world before we actually went to the sporting event...

I flipped the switch on the radio, found a station and, I shit you not, Eri was out cold in a matter of seconds.

So naturally, just for testing purposes, I turned the radio off.

She woke up.

I turned it back on.

She went to sleep.

Ok, probably not that exaggerated, but still funny nonetheless. :)

Toys R Us Hunting

Naturally, on any road trip, I'm going to stop off at Walmarts and Toys R Us'es to hunt for Transformers. Before we left, we mapped out that there were 3 of them along our way to Baltimore. We figured we'd get some lunch in the area around the first one.

This was also a great example of GPS fail. The GPS in BOTH vehicles got us to the vicinity, but pretty much made us drive an extra 10 miles through city backroads to get to it when it was actually sitting right off the interstate about 5 miles ahead of the exit the GPS told us to get off at. I forget the name of the first city we pulled off at (I want to say Hagerstown).

Anyway, after getting into the vicinity, I'm still following the Crankymaro. I spot the Toys R Us and then get led around the mall it's in. After about 3 minutes of this and getting further away from said Toys R Us, I remarked that Suraph is either screwing with me or he's lost. Turns out...he got lost.

In a mall parking lot.

With 2 GPSs.

TALENT! :)

After realizing he wasn't getting anywhere, he pulls over into a remote section of the parking lot and lets me take the lead. After about half a dozen nearly-hit pedestrians (GTFO OFF MY ASPHALT OLD PEOPLE! TOYS R US OR BUST), 1 dozen zigs and 2 dozen zags through one of the dumbest parking lots I've ever seen, we arrived! And I promptly corrupted someone else's kid by cussing the minute I got out of the car. Even to the point Suraph was embarassed to be seen with me cussing in the presence of a 3 year old I didn't know was there. :)

And all of that turned out to be for naught. Nothing new there. So we piled back in and headed up the parking lot a ways for lunch...

Olive Garden

Since we knew we were going to have one more Toys R Us stop along the way, we figured we'd rearrange passengers based on the following criteria:

"I give a shit about Toys R Us"

and

"I don't give a shit about Toys R Us"

The first group would pile into the Vue. The second would pile into the Crankilac. In my car wound up Drakus, Kreoss, Kay (there cause of me and not cause of Toys R Us...) and myself. In the Crankybaru, Kaelis, Eri and Cranky.

This is the sort of stuff that happens on a road trip when you have a 15-20 minute wait to seat a group of 7 at Olive Garden.

Lunch was rather uneventful outside of that. Lots of conversation about a wide variety of topics along with Kreoss' introduction to Touchdown Jesus and what's left of him after getting smote by lightning. Anyone else familiar with the region also knows that lightning bolt was probably aimed for porn shop, but in typical Ohio fashion, somehow managed to even cause that to fail in a football-related manner.

Lunch done, piling back into the vehicles and...off we go.

Toys R Us #2 - Frederick, MD

We pretty much agreed we'd just meet up in Baltimore from that point as trying to stay together on the highway is far more of a pain than it needs to be. About 30-40 miles later, we come up on our next Toys R Us exit. Yet again, both GPS's failed. Apparently, the highway the exit lands us on actually ENDS in the middle of a Toys R Us.

Nevermind the fact that said highway actually goes on for miles afterwards and the Toys R Us itself is actually a right turn off said highway. Again my keen Toys R Us senses saved us some time and I spotted the sign for it before anyone else did. This trip proved fruitful however. We picked Drakus up the newly redone Seaspray figure and I picked up the core combiners 5-pack called Bombshock. This excursion actually didn't cost us much time as it relates to the Crankibu since they had to stop off for some meds or something I can't remember...

Unfortunately, time was a little short and we weren't going to be able to make it to the third Toys R Us that was actually in Baltimore. So we just headed straight for the game.

Parking Disaster

I've been in enough big cities to know that during a huge sporting event, Downtown Anything = Long Waits in Traffic. Baltimore was easily the worst in this regard. We literally spent about 45 minutes trying to drive about a mile to a parking structure off the interstate. There's pretty much 3 things in this world that make me insta-tantrum:

1. Dishonesty.
2. Stealing.
3. Idiotic Traffic Congestion

Anyway, we finally found a place to park and walked up to where Suraph, Kaelis and Eri were all waiting for us.

For the record, I went asshole on the parking structure and parked my big ass SUV in a "Compact Cars Only" spot.

We're here!

Camden Yards has always been ranked rather high on the list of "Best Ballparks". I became somewhat enamored with it after watching the 1993 All-Star Game when I watched Ken Griffey Jr. hit the warehouse during the home run derby. It wasn't some out-of-the-park-and-bounced-to-the-warehouse dinger. The guy hit the warehouse wall on the fly. Seeing that warehouse brought back a lot of the memories I had as a kid watching baseball. Not that I really liked my memories of Jr. roughing up my favorite pitcher (Steve Avery, at the time) the following night in the All-Star Game, but yeah, that's why I wanted to see a game here.

View of the warehouse from our seats.

So after the huge parking struggle, we get up to the gate and find...a long ass line. Starting to think it would have been a better idea to pre-order the tix. BUT! That didn't sway us. Stand in that line we did. Sweat and Stand. Walk 2 steps. Sweat and stand. Walk 2 steps.

Are we there yet?

No?

Fuck.

Only 4 more cattle herd rows to go! (That's no one we know in that pic...she just got in the way of me trying to get a picture of the stadium section picture on the wall).

Section 58, Row 15 x7 Please!

Turns out the Orioles number their sections funny. I found what I thought to be section 58 only to discover the numbers hanging from the rails were deceiving. Normally, I'd think the section was identified on the outside, but nope...designated on the inside. So we had to move once we got seated the first time. Was rather odd (or just a sign of how much the Orioles suck..) that we found the same 7 empty seats (seats 4-10, row 15) in section 60 that we did in Section 58 (seats 4-10, row 15...).

With it being 96F with 100% humidity, Drakus made a good call regarding getting tickets along the third base line. Why? No sun on us. Was still cramped seating and hot as fuck though, so this picture of this Diet Coke is to commemorate the one, and only time, I've ever been happy paying $5 for a Diet Coke. Not pictured is the empty canister that was housing the $4.50 ice cream I crushed.

Miguel Roidjada. One fan, after watching Tejada almost hit a homer declared:

"HEY TEJADA! GET BACK ON ROIDS!"

The outfielder's last name in this picture is "Pie". Simple right? Fuck no. It's pronounced "Pee-a" Suraph just resorted to calling him "Cake". Much simpler and, probably not coincidentally, reflected the opinions of some fans.

"HEY P.A.! GOD FORBID YOU GET THAT UNIFORM DIRTY!"

Fan was right. Cake managed to go the whole game w/o so much as a smudge.

Pictured Lower Right to uh....Guy with Ballcap:

Suraph - Kreoss - Erimentha - Kaelis - Drakus.

This is a picture of the Baltimore sky line during the night. Just random picture. :)

Onto the game itself in quick-note style:

- Before we were even completely seated, the Toronto leadoff hitter knocked the very first pitch out into the bleachers. 1-0 Blue Jays.

- Whoever is employed as the "Other Games" scoreboard operator needs to be fired. That damn thing was barely updated the entire game.

- Baltimore took the lead a few innings later 2-1.

- Baltimore quickly lost the lead later. Down 3-2.

- Some guy a few rows up had an entertaining conversation with the Beer Guy. It ended with:

Guy: MILLER LITE SUCKS
Beer Guy: IT'S COLD! THAT'S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW!

- Toronto ended up winning 3-2. The important thing to note here is that no one in the ball park seemed to care. At least the 7 of us didn't. I cared more about the 10-5 drubbing Drakus' Yankees got at the hands of Kreoss' Devil Rays.

- The only thing missing from this event was someone who's been MIA for a long while. We needed a Canuck there since the game was basically USA vs. Canada.

Random pictures from the game:

Down at field level after the game was over.

The Orioles' retired numbers.

The shop Kay just had to get hats out of before the game started. :)

I amused Drakus.

Group shot! Left to right: Erimentha, Kaelis, me, Kaylea, Suraph, Kreoss, and Drakus.

And with that, we left...getting out of downtown Baltimore after a 30,000ish people event wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. It really only took us about 20 minutes to get back to the interstate.

"If It's More Than Two Miles Off the Interstate, It Shouldn't Get a Sign"

The Crankyvenger had a decent head start on us though. We weren't exactly racing to get back, but we had agreed to meet up as we got closer to home so I could follow Suraph back up the mountain. At one point, Cranky had to pull off for gas, discovered the gas station mentioned on the road sign was about 7 miles off the highway, cussed a lot and got back onto the highway.

This waste of time caused him to mutter about the sub-title of this section for a good while. It also gave us a chance to catch up to him completely. I ended up actually passing him on the highway before he actually found a gas station.

State Trooper

As we got closer to home and back onto I-68, I happened to look in my rearview mirror and see the unmistakable headlights belonging to a Ford Crown Victoria. Anyone who's done any significant road travel understands that if a pair of these are tailgating you, you're probably about to get pulled over.

Well these were tailgating me and, trust me when I say, I've been pulled over enough to kind of get an idea of their habits. Yes I was speeding down that mountain highway to the tune of about 20mph over, but I was also in a huge crowd of cars all doing the same. I took the next opening in the right lane and merged into the traffic to try to force the trooper's hand. If he was going to pull me over, he'd follow me.

Fortunately, he didn't. However he got right up on the tail end of the Crankyolstice and proceeded to tailgate him for a good long while. Suraph didn't change lanes or even bother to slow down. Come to find out Suraph thought it was me the entire time. Eventually, the Trooper just decided to pass on the right and zip on down the highway at speeds easily exceeding 100mph (we were doing 85 when I saw him...).

The great part of this story is, Suraph apparently thought I was the one that was passing him and had his own special "WTF?!??!" moment as it relates to it. This was either due to him remembering that I didn't want to go too fast around those curves in an SUV or due to him forgetting about that and thinking I knew the way home myself...

Back Home

All of us were happy to get back after spending approximately 6 hours on the road and 3.5-4 hours outdoors, most of which were in sweltering conditions. After a short round of Castle Crashers and the obligatory checking of our AH items and whatnot, it was time to crash.

More Stories next week with (hopefully) a surprise video proving a long standing observation. :)

Cookout 2010 Stories: Vol 2

2010-07-26T16:14:00.006-05:00

The second day was relatively uneventful. We mostly just hung out and shot the shit. Between various video games we were playing and Drakus' obsession with Magian trials...we managed to squeeze in some quality outdoor time under the stars and we managed to watch Zombieland.

However, my day started off with...

Stripes the Cat

Stripes is one of Suraph's two cats (the other being Gracie). Stripes doesn't like people much. This shouldn't come as a surprise given who his owner is, but I digress. It takes a bit for Stripes to warm up to you. Combine that with the fact that Stripes had never been to this particular environment before and you have a recipe for one scared cat.

So Friday morning rolls around and I stumble into the bathroom after waking up to be greeted by this:

Yes, Stripes the Cat, despite my door being shut, had managed to come into the room and hide out in the bathroom sink.

Obviously, my presence didn't scare him off.

He even stayed in the sink long enough for me to go find my phone to take pictures of him.

This apparent "fraidy cat" isn't too scared of cameras.

As you can see, he likes to pose.

Suraph says this is Stripes' way of showing he's warming up to you. It was also a game he seemed to like to play called "Let's see if those idiots can find me now".

At one point a couple hours after finding him in the sink, Suraph went to look for him since he didn't come up for food. We couldn't find him anywhere and started thinking a door had been left open and Stripes got out. We gave up after a bit hoping he'd just turn up once it got a little more quiet around the house.

About an hour after the search, Eri comes up exclaiming she had found Stripes.

You see...Stripes apparently found a small opening in the mattress Eri was taking a nap on. Upon laying down on said mattress, Stripes started moving around giving Eri the feeling she had just somehow landed herself in a Japanese anime. After a short bit of searching, she discovered said opening and Stripes the Cat's head peeking out of it.

Throughout the rest of the trip, we found Stripes the Cat in places like:

Laundry Hamper.
Luggage.
Bathtubs.
Trash Can.
Inside various cabinets.
Drakus' Beard.

(Ok, I'm kidding about that one...)

My personal favorite...

This would be Stripes the Cat figuring out how to enter the TV stand from the backend. The last day Suraph, Drakus and I were up there, we're eating dinner and playing Southpark's Tower Defense game when we see Stripes' head peek up over the TV. Mind you, this is a 40"ish LCD TV, so he had to do some work to peek up over that thing. Before we knew it, he was down in the stand crawling around before coming to rest next to the satellite box and the DVD player.

Needless to say, Stripes the Cat stole the show on many occasions.

Japanese Steakhouse

Dinner Friday night was provided by a Japanese Hibachi Steakhouse that Suraph was fond of. This, in and of itself, is surprising given everything at this place had flavor in it, but that's beside the point.

During dinner, I kept trying to figure out how to convince our chef to tilt the onion volcano in Kreo's direction to burn off his goatee.

The primary things of note during the dinner though were:

This restaurant has disco balls that light up when they sing Happy Birthday to someone...

This restaurant also buries little flashing fake ice cubes in bowls of ice that sushi is served over. This cube fascinated me to the point I basically unburied it and wondered just how water-proof it was. One toss into Kay's water later and I concluded it was indeed completely waterproof.

Once finished, we retreated back to Chateau de Cranky and lazed around some more.

4-Player-Palooza and Late Night Castle Crashing

Just reading this title makes it sound like we filmed our own version of "Harold and Kumar". So I probably need to say, no, we did not make "Kaelis and Kreo Go To White Castle" (although we did try to make "Kreoss Does Mountain Critters"). This title refers to a rather fun game called Castle Crashers.

http://www.castlecrashers.com/

I had been told about this game by Inbred before. I didn't bother downloading it at the time cause I already had enough on my plate to play. He professed how great this game was time and time again. While we were on a 4-Player, button mashing game kick playing games like TMNT: Arcade and TMNT: Turtles In Time, Suraph suggested we give Castle Crashers a try and that he had it stored on his USB drive.

So we pop it in and holy shit is that a fun game. Personally, I can't imagine trying to play this game solo, but if you got some buddies over and you got 4 controllers, hook that sumbitch up and play it. The humor is right up a group of guy's alley for the most part. For example:

Rocket-Shit Deer.

Trailer:

We generally traded off who was playing. Before we knew it, the women had gone to bed and it was 3 AM...

Looking back on it, I'm half surprised we didn't wake them up laughing at the Owl that shit itself to death.

On top of that, the music for this game is goddamn outstanding. If I ever find the soundtrack for this game, I'm buying it. I'm probably buying a copy for random people too since it's that goddamn outstanding.

Main theme for example:

I mean, how does that not get you pumped up to kick some ass? That's seriously a piece of music you put on while driving down the interstate challenging a Hurricane to come try to knock you off the road.

Anyway, as stated before...nothing much happened the 2nd day we were there. Just a whole lot of lazing around. More to come soon. :)

Cookout 2010 Stories Vol. 1

2010-07-23T08:20:00.005-05:00

Interrupting the TF: WFC reviews with something most will likely find far more entertaining. From July 14th-20th, our annual cookout took place. This year, it was in King Cranky's summertime abode high upon mountain tops in West Virginia/Maryland.

The Drive

The plan this year still involved driving. I originally contemplated flying into Baltimore and renting a car. However, after realizing the sheer amount of equipment that was going to be needed, I opted to get a new set of tires at Sears for Dad's SUV ($800...) and just haul myself up there. Besides, the drive itself is only about 8.5 hours w/o any stops. A far cry from the near 40 hours spent on the road from last year.

Anyway, my part of the plan was as follows:

- Drakus drives up to my house.
- Drakus and I drive back to Nashville to pick up Kreoss.
- The 3 of us drive to WV via I-40, I-81, I-70, and I-68.
- Stop at every Wal-Mart along the way to hunt for Transformers.

Suraph's part of the plan was:

- Pick up Kaylea at the Baltimore airport, which was about 2 hours away and along his way down from where he normally lives in New Hampshire.

Kaelis/Erimentha's part of the plan was:

- Drive from Ohio to WV, about 7ish hours according to mapquest.
- Bring Skyline chili.

The drive up took a little longer than expected due to my apparent inability to stay up all night anymore. Two 5-Hour Energy shots didn't even keep me from having to pull off and doze for a bit. Those 2 shots did give me a rather bad case of the jitters though.

Or it could have been those 2 shots + all the caffeinated Diet Coke I had been drinking...

Anyway, onto the stories!

The Meetings!

I've never met Drakus or Kreoss face to face. I've known Drakus a lot less time than Kreoss. Seems this time every year, Kreoss has something really dumb go wrong in his life that prevents him from coming to the cookout. In fact, it's such the case that it's become a bit of a running gag. We send him the invite, he starts bracing for the worst.

First year: Truck blew up.

Second year: Moving.

Third year: Divorced (long story, just know that it wasn't Kreoss' fault)

This year: Almost. He was apparently in the Philippines at some point the week before the cookout purchasing a number of items. In other words: someone got his CC information and cleaned his account out. Fortunately, this amounted to only a couple hundred bucks as it was middle of the month and he had paid all of his bills and had taken out the cash he was going to need for the trip. His flight also got delayed by about an hour.

Back to Drakus for a moment though. Drakus was driving up to meet me at my place from Memphis, TN. I was in the process of getting some last minute things together and heading for the front door. As I opened the door and got ready to go out, there was Drakus. Damn near ran into him.

For those of you that are wondering, I first thought that this was his "I hate BLM and I hate you for making me play it" face. Then I realized...this expression never changes. :)

(kidding...)

Anyway, we loaded up, hung out with the folks for a bit and hit the road back to Nashville. The primary reason he was meeting me at my place instead of just say...leaving his car at the airport is that he was a little paranoid about leaving his car someplace he didn't know. Not that I blame him, but it's probably less likely something stupid was going to happen to his car at my house than it was at the airport.

Once back in Nashville, Drakus and I were hungry, so we stopped off at Jack-In-The-Box. Then killed a couple hours driving around Nashville waiting for Kreo's delayed flight to come in. Toys R Us, Wal-Mart, The Great Escape and a couple of video stores were visited. As it got closer to time, we headed to the airport where I was going to try to time it so I could get Kreo and get out of the airport w/o having to pay a parking fee.

The following conversation took place via texts while Kreo was at his layover in New Orleans:

Q: Any baggage other than carryons?
K: Yeah I got checked bags
Q: K, we'll meet you at your bag belt.
K: U got it.

(seeing "U" in place of "You" always gets me to make fun of people...)

Q: What r u wearing and do u feel like touching urself?
K: Black shirt and hat...no to the last part :p
Q: Could you possible be more vague...
K: Oh and my hair is back to it's natural dirty blonde. Not red or bleached like a lot of my facebook pics.

(for the record...there's exactly ONE picture of Kreoss on his FB page. The rest were of his cats and Disney characters)

K: plain black polo and black kangol hat with grey jeans...I guess i could have picked something that stands out more.
Q: K, we stand out. We won't be hard to find.

(I say this planning to be standing at the base of the escalators scratching my ass.)

Once he landed, he was easy to spot. Ponytail, Goatee and black hat. He actually caught Drakus and I both looking up at the Arrivals/Departures board. After a short wait for his bags, we got out and on the road.

And no, I didn't beat the parking clock. $2.00 please!

Fuckers.

11PM Gas Stop + McDonald's Redneck Love

After a few hours, we're outside of Knoxville and I decide to pull off for gas and get some snacks. I found a combination Love's Travel Stop + McDonald's. After filling up, Drakus, Kreo and I decided to go get ourselves a late night snack. I got a huge Diet Coke and some snack wraps, Kreo got a couple cheeseburgers and Drakus got something fruity...

We go back to the Vue to eat and notice a "big-boned" McDonald's employee and her boyfriend out in the front. The boyfriend is the stereotypical redneck. Boots, dirty jeans, old T-Shirt. The girl I couldn't really tell about since she was in a McDonald's uniform, but she appeared to be Hispanic. Since we didn't really have anything else to watch while we were eating (and also cause the Vue was pointed directly at where they were standing), we just sort of kept our eyes on them.

...And then they started making out...

......and then we collectively wondered if she had touched our food since she had been the one, who just about 10 mins earlier, had taken our orders.

Sad thing is. They couldn't wait to make out apparently. Once they were done sucking face, they held hands and walked to their car...

...which was parked right next to mine.

This is going to be a great trip. :)

Knoxville Walmart Hunting, Magellan vs. Droid.

Aside from the Transformer hunting, the purpose for Walmart stops is to stretch and wake up a bit. Once we hit Knoxville a short bit after witnessing redneck love, we spent about 20 minutes searching for a Walmart we had seen from the side of the road. Drakus had brought his GPS with him (Magellan) and Kreoss brought his phone with the built in GPS (Droid). However both were being a little retarded in regards to their signals and we ended up looping through a neighborhood about midnight.

The primary thing to note here was:

I didn't bring directions to our final destination because I knew we'd have both of those devices. This wasn't a good sign. :)

Virginia Is One Fat State

One theme of the drive up was that it seemed like I had picked the longest routes possible in two states. I picked I-40 in TN, which basically equates to driving the entire length of the state. I picked I-81 in Virginia, which basically equated to driving through the state diagonally. There were slightly faster routes like I-79, but I've been through those mountains in West Virginia before and I didn't want any part of those again during the night.

Trust me, when you walk into a gas station at 2AM to pay for gas, run into 2 people making out only to discover that it's 2 dudes with 3 teeth between them making out, you tend to want to avoid nighttime travel through that region.

Anyway, the drive through Virigina seemed like it was a lot longer than it should have been. Might've been cause we were tired or that we had pulled off a couple times to try to catch a few winks of sleep, but it really just seemed like that stretch of 81 went on for-f***ing-ever.

The Arrival

We met up with Suraph and Kay at the Country Club Mall in Cumberland, MD. Suraph had sent me directions to get to the house from I-68, but they were directions like:

Turn left at the missle plant.
Turn right at the T intersection with O'Beery McLiquors (which actually exists btw...).
Turn left at the pile of dead deer and go straight up the mountain. We're at the very top.

So we opted to just meet at the mall and follow him up. A short lunch at the Cafe Court and a brief supply run in Wal-Mart and Gamestop and we were headed up to the house.

See?

This would be the view from the short walk up to the actual top of the mountain. This would also be the view of Suraph's house.

View from the deck.

Another angle from the deck.

Yet another angle from the deck.

Needless to say, this was a kick ass spot for a cookout.

Nerd Cave V2.0 Construction

Naturally, a cookout wouldn't be a cookout w/o building the Nerd Cave. The first 2 years, the Nerd Cave was pretty much prebuilt. Last year and this year, we had to put some effort into it.

This would be where Drakus, myself and Suraph spent most of our playing time. The respective stations are from top to bottom. Suraph stole his folks' computer monitor once he discovered it supported HDMI. He basically had his computer at his feet and his 360 by his side.

This table and the table behind the couch was where Kaelis and Erimentha typically had set up their netbooks. You'll also note Kay's notebook is there too an the red recliner was occupied by Kay for most of the trip. She wouldn't share. :)

Most of our gaming time was actually spent in front of this TV playing multiplayer games like TMNT, Castle Crashers, South Park, Mario Party 8, Mario Bros Wii and Super Smash Bros.

Speaking of Mario Party 8, there will be an insanely funny video from the cookout that I will post barring any interference from the 4 men filmed in it.

Anyway, that was pretty much it for Day 1. More stories soon to come. Some topics to look forward to:

Stripes the Cat
Orioles vs. Blue Jays
Late Night Castle Crashing

It Starts...

2010-07-14T16:23:00.002-05:00

Cookout 2010 is starting to {Gather together.} Gone for a week or so and will hopefully post up some pictures as shenanigans happen this year.

Hosting this year is: Suraph
Attending this year are: Kaylea, Kaelis, Erimentha, Kreoss, Drakus and yours truly.
Cooking/cleaning everything this year: Kaylea.

Transformers: War For Cybertron Review: Characters Part 2

2010-07-01T10:19:00.019-05:00

Last post I made revolved around the Autobots. This post really needs no introduction, just time to talk about the Decepticons.

Megatron

Like Prime, you can't have a Transformers story without Megatron being involved. Most of the time, he's the main villan. From time to time, he'll take a seat to the likes of bigger threats like Unicron, Bludgeon or some human that apparently figures out a way to destroy them easily. Unlike Prime though, Megatron has been butchered into many different forms and voices. Starting out as a Walther P38 (G1), then a tank, then a T-Rex, then some sort of a 10-mode hand/dragon thingy, back to a tank, then a spaceship, then the batmobile,then a spider, then a helicoptor, then back to a spaceship and finally back to a tank. From the fandom's standpoint, I don't think most really care WTF he is as long as he A) has a huge fkn cannon on his arm, B) a bucket head and C) insatiable lust for power. In TF:WFC, he meets all requirements, something that hasn't happened very frequently for him in general.

Starscream

You can't have a story with Megatron without including Starscream in the picture. Habitually trying to overthrow Megatron's leadership and often times finding himself shot, beaten up or even killed as a result, Starscream pretty much just adds a facet to Megatron's personality that you can't really compare with. Starscream is always some sort of a jet or "Seeker". Much like the word "Prime", "Seeker" has really taken on a form of rank in some storylines. One aspect of TF:WFC that is being dealt with is how Megatron and Starscream meet. A number of storylines have referenced Starscream's history as a non-factioned scientist that was teamed with Jetfire, but have never really gone into detail how he was convinced to join the Decepticons. Like Megatron, the fandom really only cares about a few things as it relates to him. If you're going to use his character he A) Has to fly, B) Has to be a coward that gets his ass kicked and C) be an egomaniac. Also like Megatron, this game succeeds on all counts and it takes Starscream all of about 10 seconds to start trying to overthrow Megatron after he joins.

Soundwave

I consider Soundwave to be the last of the "Big 3" in the Decepticon ranks from a continuity standpoint. His primary function is to disrupt communications and spy. Most of his incarnations have been that of something associated with emitting loud, obnoxious noises or jets. His most famous incarnation is his G1 form though. A tape deck that spit out the likes of Ravage, Laserbeak, Rumble and Frenzy. Ravage and Laserbeak were typically used for spying while Rumble and Frenzy were typically used for fighting alongside Soundwave. In later seasons of G1, and in seeming defiance of CD technology, he picked up another 5 cassettes (Ratbat, Squawktalk, Overkill, Slugfest, and Beastbox). While the latter weren't overly important, he was typically identified in conjunction with Laserbeak and Ravage given his recon responsibilities to the team. His other primary characteristic was his boring and uncreative personality emphasized by his overly exaggerated computerish speech. Memorable phrases include "Soundwave: superior. Constructicons: Inferior." and silly names he spouts for his cassette operations like "Laserbeak. Eject. Operation: Infiltration." There's really only one appropriate person for this guy's voice and even though Issac Singleton Jr. did a great job in the game, he's not Frank Welker. One other huge point of contention: How in the blue hell do you have Laserbeak, Rumble and Frenzy, but not Ravage...

Thundercracker

This guy has never had that much of a spotlight, but typically, when someone thinks of Starscream, they think of the 2 jets who are under his command in Thundercracker and Skywarp. They did a little bit of character development with this guy by classifying him as a scientist and having him act rather analytical in relation to his surroundings and missions. I found this to be a little refreshing given he's usually just a drone that makes a wisecrack at Starscream's expense from time to time and is always a repaint of Starscream's toy.

Skywarp

Typically portrayed as a mischievous teleporter, Skywarp has had a lot more character development over the years than the aforementioned Thundercracker. His presence, aside from completing the standard Seeker trio, actually kind of bothered me. Not completely sure why as his dialogue wasn't horribly bad and they didn't do anything so outlandish with his character it made me resent him. He just seemed a little out of place for the one mission you have the option of playing him in.

Barricade

This guy's presence in the game actually irritated me a lot. Aside from his role in Bayformers 1, he's really had no significant history at all in the lore. He actually started out as a mini-bot in the G1 series. Thankfully, he only shows up for one mission and I suspect that was more to fill out the Decepticon ranks and he was available thanks to current trademarks Hasbro has.

Breakdown

Unlike Barricade, this guy does have a little bit of history. He was originally part of the Stunticons gestalt team. I'm not saying "Gestalt or GTFO", but this guy really seemed like Barricade in the sense they were just reaching for filler and Hasbro happened to have a trademark on the name. He's been depicted as a bit of a vain soldier throughout his career and has always been some form of a fast car.

Brawl

This is another guy along the same lines as Barricade and Breakdown. He was originally a tank that was part of the Combaticons gestalt team. Usually portrayed as a very angry/pissed off character, they definitely did not go lightly on this trait in TF:WFC. Again, this isn't "Gestalt or GTFO", I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around guys like this as individual characters. It's not as bad as having Breakdown, who virtually has no recent history, though. Brawl and Barricade at least had semi-prominent parts in Bayformers and the toys to go with them. Unfortunately, none of the last 3 had enough history outside of being a footnote or part of a gestalt team that make me think they were relevant enough to justfy as having playable characters people could identify with.

Trypticon

Like Omega Supreme, this guy is last and certainly not least. They followed the whole marketing 101 path by including this guy's appearance in the original game trailer. During his G1 days, he seemed to mostly be a bit of a babbling, blundering idiot that served as the Decepticon's main base. This was always a bit of a turn off considering his counter-part, Metroplex, wasn't. In TF:WFC, he's a huge force to be reckoned with. As far as city-sized bases go, the Autobots had Omega Supreme, Metroplex and Fortress Maximus. The Decepticons had Trypticon.

Well, they had Scorponok too, but he doesn't really count as he really didn't utilize his city mode much and kind of went his own direction.

Anyway, Trypticon is generally depicted as some sort of a beast along the lines of a T-Rex or dragon. His original toy was a little innovative in the sense it was one of the few Transformers that actually walked (Omega Supreme being the first years earlier). They beefed Trypticon up quite a bit for TF:WFC, but pretty much all of the visual cues that make him instantly recognizable are there. Without giving too much away (slight spoiler), the boss fight with him is pretty much a great representation of what small bot vs. big bot should be.

Next post, I'll go over the other facets of the game. I'm hoping to have them all done by the end of the week as next week, I'll be out of town for our summer get together.

And we all know that's going to produce at least a couple weeks worth of blog entries.

Transformers: War For Cybertron Review: Characters Part 1

2010-06-30T08:27:00.021-05:00

After pretty much everything you could think of conspired against me, I finally got through the campaign mode. SE releasing an update wasn't enough of a deterrent for me to avoid playing this game, but...

...my recently repaired 360 going kaput was. It's funny really. I've waited since the announcement of that game late last year for it's release and wouldn't you know the 360 that I hadn't had a single issue with since it's repair decided it didn't want to work anymore.

Eh, probably shouldn't say "didn't want to work anymore." Should probably say "worked when it wanted to." After taking it apart again and redoing the heatsinks. It worked long enough for me to get through a couple chapters of TF:WFC. I stopped afterwards because the game is so heavy that I felt bludgeoned over the head.

(I loved every minute of it btw...)

During the break, I leveled DRG. Next day...360 didn't want to work, so back to leveling I went. Next day (Thurs...), it worked and I got through the rest of the Decepticon campaign. Day after that, didn't work. Fuck it, I'm buying a new 360. Anyway, onto the review. This review will actually be split up into several parts. Tenatively, it will look like this:

Characters Part 1: Autobots
Characters Part 2: Decepticons
Campaign
Multiplayer
Overall/Final Thoughts

High Moon Studios and Activision did their home work. I've always felt if someone was going to pick up the franchise, I didn't particularly care if they were true to the lore and the history, but the characters themselves had to have their unmistakable physical traits somewhere that made you say "That's Starscream!" or "That's Megatron!"

The number of playable characters in this game is a huge selling point. The dedication to making them identifiable is very noticeable. Pretty much anyone who grew up watching the original G1 cartoon will be hard pressed to not squeal with glee when they see a lot of their favorite characters in full 1080p and their personalities permeating in everything they do.

Autobots

Optimus Prime

You can't have a Transformers game without O.P. The game starts before Optimus actually became a Prime though. For you non-lore people out there, "Prime" has taken on the meaning of leader. It's a bit of a far cry from the whole "Orion Pax" story line that was presented in the original G1 cartoon series, but again, revisionist history isn't what's important here. What's important is that they got the character right. They brought in Peter Cullen to do the voice. They gave him his big ass orange axe (even explaining at one point how he's able to use it...). They even went into detail how he became a Prime and how the Matrix of Leadership was created.

Bumblebee

Given his prominence in the movies lately, Bumblebee has almost become another required character for any iteration of a Transformers story. True to form, he works as a scout with a few stealth abilities. His personality is rather bubbly in this game despite a war ravaging around him, but in pretty much any continuity, this was the case. He disappeared after the G1 story lines were done and made his on-screen reappearance nearly 20 years later in the first Bayformers movie. Why this was the case, one can only guess given his prominence in the original series.

Ironhide

Gruff, no-nonsense, old-timing, soldier to the core. Ironhide often times is depicted as the old, cantankerous, grumpy friend of Prime's and/or his second in command. He's also depicted as loving huge guns and spoiling for a fight. Aside from the Transformers: Energon incarnation (or abomination depending on your perspective), Ironhide has always been a fan favorite for his "Asskicking first, questions second" approach. Ironhide's design is probably the closest anyone's seen to his G1 version, but then when you look back at the G1 version, it's no wonder Megatron offed him in one shot in the movie. My only gripe with this version of him is...you guys had Peter Cullen right there! Why did you not let him reprise his role? They went so far as to write Ironhide's personality to be similar to the cowboy-ish phrase spewing G1 incarnation, why not just give him his original voice...

Ratchet

Ratchet's had many diff. personalities in the various continuities he's appeared in. His G1 personality was that of a gruff, slightly cranky, medic. The medic part of his character has been his primary identification with fans. These traits were exasperated in the Transformers: Animated series and seemingly non-existent (medic part aside) in his movie portrayals. Overall, he's the go-to bot for repairs and he's no different in this game.

Jetfire

Yeah, talk about a character portrayed in a wide variety of fashions. His original incarnation was that of a scientist and not the bumbling, senile, old geezer that farts parachutes in Bayformers 2. Jetfire's G1 history is portrayed accurately here as we witness his work with Starscream before he turned to the Decepticons. Generally depicted as a humongous jet (heh...get it..."Jet"fire...) with a huge arsenal, he often times just wants to be left alone to study and not be bothered with all the fight stuff. Immersed in a war with the possibility of massive loss of life, Jetfire takes up the Autobot mantle.

Sideswipe

This character has always been a bit of an enigma to me. In most versions of his fiction, he's generally a bit of a hot-headed soldier with a lot of skill and a love for being fast and sleek. He's also depicted as being rather inseparable from his brother, Sunstreaker (who isn't present in this game). While there's only one mission that you can use him in, he has a few one-liners that got a chuckle out of me.

Warpath

This guy's appearance was a bit of a surprise to me. I could see him in a cameo role, but not as a playable character in the main storyline. Not that it was a bad surprise, it's just that Warpath hasn't had a lot of the spotlight put on him. He's always been a bit of a fan favorite given his penchant for verbally onomatopoeia-izing all of his actions (KERPOW! BLAM! SHAZAM!), but never really had the spotlight on him for any real length of time. Pretty much any version of this guy has him with a huge cannon sticking out of his chest and turning into some form of a tank. Same holds true here. The mission he's on in this game is with Ironhide and the dialogue between the two is rather priceless.

Silverbolt

Leader of the Aerialbots. Afraid of heights. He was a bit of a surprise as well, but not as much as Warpath. In the G1 series, the Aerialbots (all 5 of them) were sent back in time and had a (in)direct hand in the emergence of Optimus Prime (re: Orion Pax storyline...). The fact he's afraid of heights and is a bot that flies is played up in a bit of a humorous conversation he has at one point. He's one of the characters who's name gets used quite a bit and is usually depicted as some sort of a flying...something. He's pretty much been everything from a Concorde to a Stealth Bomber to...a bald eagle. Most fans will identify him as the gestalt body of Superion when he merges with Air Raid, Fireflight, Skydive and Slingshot. Speaking of...

Air Raid

This guy was probably the biggest surprise of them all. His appearance along with Silverbolt made me think that Superion wasn't far behind, but a las, this is not the case. Fireflight, Skydive and Slingshot are nowhere to be found. Air Raid's name makes it hard for him to be depicted as anything other than some sort of a jet and this holds true. Impulsive to the max, he had one of my favorite mottos of all time: "If you look first, you may not leap." Regardless, he plays a semi-major role in this game which is what made the surprise as large as it was for me given his relative obscurity in the various timelines otherwise.

Omega Supreme

Last and certainly not least. The original trailer showed the big 'bot blowing up a ton of crap (effective marketing 101 to Transformers fans btw). Every incarnation of Omega has him as the last line of defense and speaking very...voice synthesizerish. He's also always been depicted as some sort of a very large transport vessel. Was very happy to see how he was used in this game. I just have to say the last couple chapters of the Decepticon campaign where Omega Supreme is pretty much rampaging to meet his objective of destroying Megatron are about as G1 as you're going to get.

Next post (hopefully): Decepticons.

Upon Closer Inspection...

2010-06-29T13:01:00.003-05:00

Dragoon hit 80 last Friday. I didn't really get to toy around with it much until the next day due to level sync and I haven't really put all my thoughts together on how the level cap increase has affected this job aside from a few quick blurbs. Dragoon was a focal point in the update notes from the various job adjustments SE had lined up for it. Many believed it was going to become a TP powerhouse, myself included. I didn't get my hopes up too high though as I knew the changes looked good on paper, but often times, how they play out in game is a completely different matter.

First I'll go over the job adjustments themselves.

Spirit Jump

I'm still not sure what "suppresses enmity" means. I've done a little testing and from what I can tell, strictly from eyeballing, it looks like it does nothing to enmity at all. Granted, I haven't really been able to test that in a better situation like on a Salvage boss or something to that effect, but still, you'd think something would visually clue me in that it does effect enmity somewhere.

The nifty thing about this jump is that it will give you 1.5x your normal TP if your wyvern is out. I didn't notice this when I originally got the Jump. Akeem pointed it out to me a couple days later. I initially thought it was a flat amount of TP instead of a multiplier, but further testing showed otherwise.

The crappy thing about this jump is that it shares the timer with normal Jump. The crappier thing is that it overwrites your Jump merit timers. So now there's a debate. Keep in mind, the debate really hinges on which jump does more damage on average. I still need to do more testing on this facet of it, but it looks like they're about the same regardless of the wyvern being out.

In a 15 minute period, you can get 12 Jumps in against 9 Spirit Jumps if your merit timers are fully merited. While look at 12 vs. 9, it looks like a no-brainer. When you factor in TP gain however...

Jump: 17TP * 3 = 51TP extra gained over a 15 minute period.
Spirit Jump: 9 * 9TP (I hit 17TP/jump, the 50% bonus rounds up I have confirmed). 81TP extra gained over a 15 minute period.

With Carbonara, Spirit Jump basically gives me a free WS over a 15 minute period. Does an extra Drakesbane do more damage than 3 Jumps? Guess it really all depends on what you're fighting. On top of that, there really aren't many battles where a DRG is going to be standing there wailing away for 15 minutes. You get the idea though.

The main reason I bring this up is that there are a number of times where you end up at 99TP just begging for something to hit you or the time between swings and you camping your WS macro just seems to drag on forever. I pretty much view this as allowing a DRG to have a pseudo-5 hit build w/o having to stock up on Store TP gear and that's a good thing.

Now if SE would just fix that whole timer issue...

TP from Spirit Link

Pretty much made the {pettp} function relative to a Dragoon again. As I said in an earlier post, it's pretty much exactly what I thought it'd be. Wyvern usually about 15-20TP when you use it and the master gets half of it. It does work when the Wyvern is at full health and you have Empathy merits as well.

Personally, I would have liked to see them give us basic pet commands outside of "/pet "Dismiss" {me}". Really gets annoying switching targets or having to swing to get the Wyvern to do anything.

Conserve TP

Nice job trait and there's rampant speculation that Dragoon actually has Conserve TP II since level 1 shows up at level 45. I've little to no experience with how this trait actually works, but it's often times compared to Conserve MP.

The thing about this trait is that it's a little irritating. It's nice when it kicks in, but it seems so random in it's values that it's hard to tell when it kicked in and when you missed a WS entirely. In Dynamis the other day, for example. We're fighting a Yagudo Liberator. Typically, on WHM, THF, MNK and PLD beasts, I'll smash my Leg Sweep macro trying to prevent them from 2-houring (or to minimize their effect in the MNK's case...). The Liberator used Perfect Dodge a split second before I hit my macro.

"Qtipus uses Leg Sweep, but missses the Yagudo Liberator."

I was looking at my TP bar when I hit the macro and it returned 16TP like Leg Sweep normally would, but I had missed. This baffled me. I essentially got all of my TP for missing a monster. Not that I'm complaining, but if that's what that trait's capable of, that's awesome. I'm just irritated cause it makes it rather difficult to judge TP return values.

Sonic Thrust

This WS is going to get me in a lot of trouble. Not only is it rather strong, but it's a rather short (guessing 5') front cone AoE. I used it a number of times in Einherjar and Dynamis on crowds of critters and instantly drew an ass-raping, but...

...as crazy as this sounds, I seriously think a group of DRGs and WARs using their spiffy new AoEs could probably wipe out a large number of critters. A well timed sleep or some bouncing hate between shadows and third eye can likely keep people going long enough to prevent any serious damage from occurring.

Onto Subjob-Specifics though...

Dragoon/Samurai

This was the one that had me losing the most room in my pants. I couldn't wait to use Sekkanoki. True to form, that Job Ability is going to get me in a lot of trouble. Back to back Drakesbanes pretty much destroyed anything that I touched in Dynamis. Back to back Leg Sweeps pretty much neutralized Hundred Fists. Back to back Geirskoguls would obviously produce light and something pretty, but still did less damage than back to back Drakesbanes.

When used in conjunction with Meditate and Jumps, it's rather easy to get 3 WS off in a matter of 5-8 seconds. Unfortunately, 3x Geirskogul doesn't make double light. Unless my timing was just off that is...but 99% sure it doesn't.

Note to self: Make sure Super Jump or High Jump are up before popping Sekkanoki.

Double Note to self: Remember you moved your Super Jump macro down one spot to accommodate Spirit Jump...

Dragoon/White Mage

I wasn't looking as forward to this as I was subbing Samurai. This was partly because I thought Haste was level 42 for WHM. Turns out I was wrong and it's 40. In helping Drakus kill leeches the other night for a Katana trial, I discovered DRG now has access to:

Haste
Stona
Teleport-Yhoat
Teleport-Altep
Cura
Barvira
Banishga II

The first 2 spells are absolutely HUGE. Haste lasts the full duration of 3 minutes and appears to be full powered. Stona really needs no explanation. Pretty much anyone subbing WHM just got a spot to help remove statuses against things that like to cast or breath things that petrify you.

(Looking at you Gi'Ghi Rockchopper, Jailer of Temperance and Jailer of Faith!)

The teleports are a nice way to transport around, but too little, too late unless you've not done any FoV's. Cura is rather interesting in the sense that I can pretty much AoE wake people for half the cost now. The rest are just meh. Looking ahead, the rest of the spells from /WHM that I look forward to are Cure IV, Repose and Flash.

Dragoon/Red Mage

I didn't tinker with this subjob much. I mostly just wanted to use convert. Might prove useful if a group is overloaded with melee and not enough support. Nothing really noteworthy in the spell list either between 38-40 unless you like Ice Spikes...

Depending on how they handle the implementation of Refresh from a subjob, this could be the subjob of choice by the time the cap is raised to 99. I may still prefer /WHM to this given the fact that I can remove a lot more of the potential status effects I encounter while out soloing, but it may be that a fully powered Refresh, Haste and Convert from /RDM tips the scales.

Other Subs (BLU, DRK, WAR, SCH, etc)

I've never subscribed to the notion of DRG/BLU. The reasons are A) I'm cheap and don't want to burn an RR item, B) I'm reckless and always need to have RR up, C) Really don't like having to rely on items and TP to remove status effects and D) Really don't think BLU offers anything outside of Cocoon that makes it worth leveling. In short, there really isn't much of anything I've seen out of /BLU that makes me believe it's better than subbing WHM or RDM.

DRG/SCH is pretty much in the same boat to me. Aside from using Accession + -Nas, /WHM and /RDM seemingly do it better. Sublimination was nice until Convert became accessible. DRG/WAR and DRG/DRK just seemingly found faster ways to get themselves killed.

And before anyone asks, DRG/DNC isn't even on my radar.

Conclusion

What I think came out of this update more than anything is that Dragoon simply became a lot more flexible than it used to be. You could effectively say that about most jobs, but from a soloing and role standpoint, Dragoon gained access to a number of useful things that definitely make it easier to fulfill certain points in party setups.

I don't believe Dragoon was put over the top in terms of spike damage output. SAM, WAR and DRK are still the kings of that, but it did close the gap quite a bit by virtue of that extra WS that's gained not only from Sekkanoki, but from the little TP tweaks we got. Having a DRG/WHM around might give your mage a little bit of a breather in low man situations as well.

It's definitely changed how the job is play. Not drastically, but enough for me to feel like I'm learning something new on a daily basis about it again and that's a lot of fun in and of itself.

Relic Acquisition

2010-06-28T13:24:00.003-05:00

No big secret. I really dislike SE for the Magian Trials they've put together for Relic holders. While the time involved in picking up a relic is the main issue as it relates to the amount of time the Magian Trials take on top of that, the main focal point I believe a lot of people miss are the different methods used to pick up a relic. You can pretty much sum up the methods by categorizing them into one of three categories. "The Grind", "The Hybrid" and "The Hand-off".

The Grind

Without any concrete numbers, it's hard to say which of the three happen more frequently. Personally, I feel this is the one that happens the majority of the time, but I'm also aware that a lot of the relics Obsidian has created over the years were a product of this method.

The definition of this method is simple. You park your ass somewhere and grind out the money necessary, gil, by gil, by gil until you've acquired all the coins for your relic. There are a lot of creative ways of doing this. Some utilize the crafting market. Some utilize linkshell points to sell items from the bank. Some just spend hours on end farming up various items to make money. Some probably use a combination of all of the above.

In most cases and going strictly out of bazaars, you're looking at maybe picking up 4-5 coins/month on average. Taking out the 30 coins you get as a refund, this means the ~150 coins you need are going to end up taking upwards 2-3 YEARS to grind out. This method is likely the one favored by people who don't have a ton of time to invest each week. And by "ton of time", I mean more than 60 hours/week like some unemployed, basement dwellers have.

The Hand-Off

Simply put, this is when a linkshell just hands you the coins to upgrade a relic. How you earned the distinction is irrelevant. Did you put in a lot of time to earn the trust of the leaders that you'd come as that job to nearly every single event? Does the linkshell feel like you deserve it? Does your LS Bank have a mountain of gil they just don't want to sit on?

The time involved personally isn't a whole lot necessarily. You show up to a couple Glacier and a couple Xarc runs (if necessary) to make sure you get the required drops from there, then you just sit back and let the linkshell do the work for you. That or let them hand you money and you can spend time sifting through bazaars or wheeling n' dealing with other Dynamis groups.

The minimum amount of time necessary here w/o making bazaar purchases is likely along the lines of 3-4 months. At best, we've seen around 300-350 singles from the city zones. Usually we would see 1-2 100s drop. You figure 8 runs a month at around 4-5 coins each and you're going to end up finishing a relic start to finish if you just spam the city you need coins from. This isn't the method typically utilized though. Most of the coins in The Hand-Off are picked up out of bazaars by selling huge money drops from other areas or by facilitating trades with other groups. Realistically, it's 2-3 months unless there's a huge pile of coins already laying around.

The Hybrid

Pretty much what it's name implies. Your linkshell will help you do some of the heavy lifting while the bulk of it is still on your shoulders. This is pretty much what the Obsidian system does. When there isn't a sponsor, we sell coins back to the upgraders for the cost of the month's runs. Total cost of runs divided by number of coins we collected. Toss in a points cost per coin for a bit of a control means (and to keep people participating) and you end up with a means for an upgrader to get coins at a fraction of what the idiots in bazaars sell them for.

(Yes, I know. Supply and Demand...)

This method still requires an upgrader to spend a lot of time making money, but has the potential to knock a lot of time off the upgrade process by virtue more bang for their buck.

How this relates to Magian Trials

A lot of it is perspective. It's blatantly obvious that SE intended for these relic weapons to have a long, arduous process to obtain. While I can see them sitting at a table and trying to map out, on average, how long it should take to get the weapon itself, there is no way they could have foreseen how creative their user base is.

When you look at some players like Warutu and Arrow on Odin or even a number of others across the servers with 4 or 5 or more relics, it's pretty obvious they've figured out a really really good way to make money and make a mockery of SE's "intended time frame" in the process. These are the types of players I believe SE was focused on when they decided how to handle the Magian trials.

In my mind, SE took a look at that and figured they didn't grind enough, so...here's a bunch of grind quests for you to keep up with. When you look at it from a time invested standpoint, the new Empyrean are on par with the time it takes using "The Hand-Off" method. If SE has data showing most relics are completed in this time-frame, then yeah, I can understand where the logic would dictate the amount of time necessary to reach that stage through the Magian Trials.

However, the key point that SE seems to be missing is:

Relic holders have already gone through the bullshit of a grind quest. There's no real need to put another grind quest on top of it and keep piling on to the extent they have been. Few hundred killshots, ok. Few thousand, not ok. Hell, even toss in some more mat acquisition to upgrade through the VNM process if necessary, just stop with the mindless crap that's being fed to us.

On top of that, there's not much of a justification to keep going through these quests. Most relic holders likely will just cause they don't want what they spent a lot of time obtaining to go completely obsolete, but let's look at it for a minute:

Current Final Form Gungnir: DMG 112, Delay 492, Accuracy +25, Additional Effect: Weakens Defense, "Geirskogul".

Current Final Form Rhongomiant: DMG 111, Delay 492.

Yes, Gungnir has the Accuracy and the hidden damage multiplier that kicks in < 5% of the time. Having the Accuracy isn't as huge a deal as people would like to think since most Acc issues can be overcome with food or even with food, you're nowhere near Acc cap anyway.

While I won't comment just yet on the 2-Leaf Chloris whatever you need 50 of for the final form of the Empyrean polearm, I will say that if the way VNM mats were handled are any indication, it's likely it won't take anywhere near the amount of time it takes to gather all the mats for a relic on average.

Now the question to a relic holder becomes:

Do you want to spend a couple months upgrading a different weapon that amounts to relic-1 or do you want to continue to grind things out?

I spent a couple years upgrading Gungnir. I spent upwards of 60 hours knocking out Trials 1040 and 1041. I'll likely spend upwards of 70 hours knocking out Trial 1850 and 1851. I'm not saying the Empyrean Polearm would beat a fully upgraded Gungnir in a parse every time, but it'd be close and would likely pull out the win from time to time.

To a person considering upgrading a weapon, do you want to...:

A) ...spend upwards of 100 million gil, then follow that up with using the WS 1500 times, then follow that up by using the WS 5000 times to killshot various critters?

or

B) ...kill rather easy NMs 41 times then start trying to collect 50 VNM items to take a weapon that's simply 1DMG lower than the fully upgraded counterpart.

To the person considering upgrading a weapon, do you..."

A) ...understand the relic trials are likely not over and there's likely more of these asinine killshot quests forthcoming?

or

B) ...understand the Empyrean trials are definitely not over and there's likely more NM camping and item collection quests down the road?

Conclusion

Since I already have Gungnir, obviously my choice is made. To someone who hasn't quite finished a Relic yet or is considering starting one, the logical choice is pretty obvious from a time vs. result standpoint.

I can say this is not making me want to continue my subscriptions to SE's services. It's just sign of the times, but I simply don't feel like I have the time to continually go through crap like this and there really isn't anything else left for me to accomplish in FFXI. A lot of the games I've missed out on are starting to become a lot more appealing to me.

Yes, I've given feedback on the matter.

Several times.

A lot of good it's done obviously. :)

DRG Update Notes

2010-06-22T00:34:00.004-05:00

Spirit Jump: Shares timer with normal Jump. You do not get 3 attacking jumps to use. Still uncertain what "suppresses enmity" means as it seemed I neither shed nor slowed the rate I gained enmity against the vultures I was fighting. Might be a bad test subject though. Overrides merits on Jump. I really hope this is a fuckup on SE's end and not how they intended it to work, but somehow, I doubt it is.

Conserve TP: Kicks in a lot more frequently than I thought it would. About every other WS I end up with an extra 4 or 5 TP and I've seen as much as 15. Kind of irritating that I can't tell when all the hits of a WS landed or when I crit most of the time now though...

TP from Spirit Link: Pretty much exactly what I thought. I get ~10 or so with each link. Nothing new to report here.

Sonic Thrust: This is going to get me in trouble. Seems to have Transfixion property, but unsure if anything else is there. Couldn't test thoroughly due to party set up, but I suspect it has Scission properties as well. TP multipliers seem to 100 TP = 1.0, 200 TP = 1.5 300 TP = 2.0, but that's just based off about 10 eyeballs of each. Seems to also have a heavy lean on STR. The Cone AoE seems to be short and narrow as well as I had 4 birds lined up and hit 3.

BTW...nothing has amused me more lately than seeing 3 Seaboard Vultures take 1.2k, 1.2k, and 1.6k damage from a single, one hit WS...

You learn this at 300 skill. Max merits + Love Torque means you can use it after skilling up one polearm level upon hitting 76. Otherwise, if math plays out, you're waiting until 79 to learn it.

Skillcaps: Appears to be an increase of 5 polearm skill per level currently. This should put DRG at a natural cap of 306 when they hit 80. All I have to say is...

/drool @ 329 polearm skill...

Trial 1850: Fuck you SE.

(1500 Geirskogul kill shots on arcana...)

Trial 1851: Fuck you in the ass with a sandpaper covered cock and no lube SE.

(2000 Geirskogul kill shots on vermin...)

Current Conclusion: Not the TP monsters the paperwork originally lead us to believe. A number of nice tweaks, but nothing significant enough to really move us up a notch or two as it relates to the job itself. Looking forward to Sekkanoki, but we pretty much know what that will do.

More later as I progress up the chain of info and digest the rest of the gear that has apparently obsoleted most of what I'm wearing now...

June Update...

2010-06-21T16:03:00.003-05:00

k...

So I said a while ago "BRING ON THE UPDATE /flex"...

I probably should have trained harder...

Sifting through everything. No idea when I'll be able to post my thoughts on it as there's this and Transformers: War For Cybertron coming out tomorrow.

Needless to say, I'm glad I went meriting Sunday afternoon...

EDIT: Needless to say also...I got a lot of gear work to do.

Adjustments of the Job Persuasion!

2010-06-17T08:17:00.003-05:00

Per usual, SE saved the best update news for last.

Well maybe not so much usual depending on how you like the news they deliver, but at the very least, they delivered what I perceive to be the best news of the update today and something that's been anticipated for a while.

Job adjustments!

With the amount of data they just dumped on us, one has to suspect most of the FFXI community is in a bit of a state of shock. A lot of this is stuff that I wouldn't have anticipated until at least the 2nd level cap increase scheduled for the Sept. update. So this means that the Sept. update will be completely lackluster aside from new spells being added or this is simply a sign of just how refocused SE is on the endgame aspect of FFXI.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time going over all of the job adjustments in detail. Instead, I'm just going to go over how I think the adjustments will impact the jobs I actually have leveled.

Dragoon

On paper, my favorite job looks like it got the most significant boost out of any of the job adjustments. A quick run down:

Spirit Jump: Delivers a short jumping attack on a targeted enemy which suppresses enmity. Effect enhanced when wyvern is present. (Lv.77 Ability)

Conserve TP: Occasionally reduces TP consumption on weaponskills. (Lv.45 Trait)

Spirit Link: When dragoons use the "Spirit Link" ability, half of their wyvern's TP will be transferred to them.(Existed already, Lv.25 Ability)

Sekkanoki: The level requirement for the samurai ability "Sekkanoki" will be reduced from 60 to 40.

Dragoon was already a monster to begin with thanks to SE's decision to change the gear group from light armor to heavy armor, the additions of Hasso and Seigan, and to the 2H weapon update from years ago. A DRG/SAM with a decent gear set up mixing in at least some Askar could spam WS with the best of them and dish out a good chunk of damage to boot.

Meditate combined with the Jumps TP means you essentially have a free weapon skill. Zanshin combined with a DRG's innate accuracy bonus means a DRG isn't missing much. The ability to shed hate via High Jump and Super Jump means that DRGs are often times the last melee standing in various battles, not to mention what that actually does for conserving your support staff's MP pool. Bottom line is, DRG as it is, isn't typically going to win the damage spike trophy, but it's going to be up there consistently.

Now that appears to change. Keep in mind, a lot of this depends on how SE implements this stuff. If Spirit Jump, for example, offers no TP return, then a lot of this is just moot. However, if Spirit Jump gives same TP return as Jump and High Jump, well this means if all timers are up for me and the jumps connect, then I'm pulling down 51 TP from my jumps alone. Couple this with the potential to conserve TP after using a WS, the ability to limit yourself to only using 100TP every 5 minutes and the ability to yanking a little bit of TP off your wyvern and well...you get the idea.

That's what is on paper though. Conserve TP is still a bit of an enigma from what I can gather. I haven't found any solid proof on how often it actually kicks in. Obviously, any extra TP you have left over is a good thing, but if it's only got something like a 2.5% chance of kicking in and you can save a max of 10TP...yeah not something to get overly excited about.

The Spirit Link modification is a little bit of a surprise to me. The biggest problem with that is the wyvern doesn't have TP all that often. A lot of people don't realize that a DRG's wyvern uses it's TP when it uses a healing breath or an offensive/elemental breath. So there aren't a great deal of situations where your wyvern is just sitting on a humongous pile of TP. It's most practical melee/party use is if you're stuck at something like 87TP and are about to miss a SC waiting for that next swing. It's solo use will be a lot more practical as the time between healing breaths in most cases is far greater than the time between your WS in any situation. It's still limited to only being used every 3 mins, but in a zerg situation, every little bit of TP helps...

...as long as the DRG remembers to use Spirit Link now before they use Spirit Surge...

Spirit Jump, potential TP gain aside, perplexes me a bit. Why did DRG need another jump that suppresses it's enmity when we already have one that sheds 50-60% and one that sheds 99%? I'm not complaining, it just doesn't seem all that logical. Realistically, DRG didn't actually need another Jump ability. Shit, as a fully merited DRG/SAM, I've got a JA list a mile long already. Jump, High Jump, Super Jump, Call Wyvern, Spirit Surge, Spirit Link, Hasso, Seigan, Angon, Deep Breathing, Meditate, Ancient Circle, and Warding Circle.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that I've got another means of dishing out damage and gaining TP, I just think the effect is a little ill-conceived. It's on a 90 second timer, which likely means it will shed something like 15% of your enmity without your wyvern out and 30% with.

As a side note, it's also going to f**k up my timers. Jump and High Jump timers are max merited. So out of the gate, I have a 75 second jump, a 90 second jump and a 150 second jump. Wasn't too hard to remember that I could use High Jump every other time I used Jump. Spirit Jump just doesn't line up all that well from a timer standpoint, but that could be beneficial depending if you somehow managed to pull hate right after using Super Jump...

Sekkanoki is what I'm most excited about though. There are a number of times where I'm well over 100TP waiting for someone to fire a WS I can chain with or waiting for a move to stun with Leg Sweep. This JA is obviously not just limited to DRG, but with the ability of DRG to gain TP, I'd say this is the one job that would benefit the most from it.

Paladin

What can I really say here? PLD has become SE's prodigal son and NIN has become more of the red-headed, bastard, step-child.

Divine Emblem: Enhances the accuracy of your next divine magic spell and increases enmity.(Lv.78 Ability)

Crit. Defense Bonus: Improves Defense against critical hits.(Lv.79 Trait)

Shield Defense Bonus: Reduces damage taken when blocking an attack with a shield.(Lv77 Trait)

Shell IV/Phalanx: Self-explanatory (Lv.80 and Lv 77 spells respectively)

I'm the first to admit that I'm not an expert tank. It's only been recently that I've spent a ton of time on the job thanks to the various events Obsidian is expanding in to. My take on these may not be as thorough as someone with a lot more tanking experience.

Divine Emblem seems kind of pointless. How often does a PLD actually use Divine Magic outside of Flash? Not very often. This leads me to believe that this JA was specifically designed for Flash. I guess it depends on what type of enmity it actually adds to flash (if SE decided to go fancy and basically put provoke hate on flash...), but having this ability every 10 minutes just doesn't seem worth it to me. I think this is SE's acknowledgment of PLD/NIN not having very many ways of pulling hate currently. It still doesn't have very many ways of pulling hate though.

Guessing that PLD will get provoke at some point very soon...

Crit. Defense Bonus jury is out on this one until more testing is done. 1-2% reduction = worthless. 5%+ = awesome.

Shield Defense Bonus is probably the 2nd most useful thing to come out of these notes for PLD. Max shield skill already gave a nice reduction in damage and this is only furthered.

Shell IV was obviously coming. Phalanx...not so much. RDMs everywhere are crying now about their Phalanx II merits being a complete waste since they seem to think dumping them on a PLD is the only logical use for it. (There are some that would argue Phalanx II is useless anyway and really became that way once SCH could use Accession and sub RDM...) Personally, it's a welcome change. Now I don't have a reason to sub RDM aside from Haste maybe. PLD/SCH anyone?

Dark Knight

It's pretty obvious SE's focus for DRK was to get them to use their MP a little more. It looks like they just might succeed...

Nether Void: Increases the absorption of your next dark magic spell. (Lv.78 Ability)

Occult Acumen: Grants bonus TP when dealing damage with elemental or dark magic.(Lv.45 Trait)

Aspir II: Self-Explanatory (Lv.78 Spell)

T3 nukes: Self-Explanatory (Lv.76+ spells, Stone and Water for starters)

Nether Void is probably going to be used most commonly before Absorb-TP, Absorb-STR, Absorb-DEX, Drains and Aspirs. That is, if SE actually allows it's use to be extended to the Drains and Aspirs. DRKs can rejoice though. Now they have something to use in tandem with Dark Seal that can potentially absorb copious amounts of whatever they cast...

Occult Acumen baffles me a little. You get TP if you deal damage with elemental or dark magic? Is that what that translates to? I may need a little help understanding exactly what this does, but it seems like they're trying to give DRK the ability to get TP by casting nukes...

Aspir II will probably follow in the same footsteps as Drain II. A more powerful version of the original that potentially increases the max MP cap for any amount of MP you drain over the top of your own. More MP, even if it's temporary, would likely help out given the fact that DRKs are about to get T3 nukes.

T3 nukes surprised me a little bit. I figured SE would likely just add a lot more DRK specific spells along the lines of something like Absorb-STR II as opposed to giving them the ability to nuke. While they still may do that, DRK subbing RDM potentially just became a soloing beast. W.Body just got a lot more popular...

White Mage

If PLD is SE's prodigal son to NIN's red-headed bastard step-child, then WHM is SE's darling to RDM's pimply sibling. Shit, could they possibly buff WHM anymore than they already have? The last round of WHM job adjustments pretty much blew any other mage job out of the water in the healing role. While other jobs like RDM and SCH can still fulfill the role, they can't do it like a WHM can now and SE just opened that gap up a little wider.

Divine Benison: Quickens spellcasting for status ailment recovery magic. Grants a bonus to enmity reduction (Lv.50 Trait)

Protect/Shell V: Self-explanatory. (Lv.76 spell)

Baramnesra: Self-explanatory. (Lv.78 Spell)

Cure VI: Self-explanatory. (Lv.80 Spell)

I'm sure all the WHMs will love having the ability to cast status removal spells faster and the loss of enmity while spamming Esuna and whatnot in the heat of battle will definitely help, but...was it really necessary?

Protect and Shell V have just become #1 and #2 respectively on the most useless WHM spell list if they don't have the potency of a merited Protectra or Shellra V. And if they do...hooboy...pissed off WHMs everywhere.

Baramnesra is a nice little addition. Probably won't amount to much of anything, but it's still nice they seem to acknowledge EVERYONE F**KING HATES AMNESIA. GIVE US A SPELL TO ACTUALLY REMOVE IT.

Cure VI will be interesting to see how it plays out. Cures 1-4 all had a progressively higher level of enmity associated with it and Cure V essentially has the same enmity as cure 3. Did they continue the hate progression of Cure 1-4 or did they just equate the enmity associated with it to something like Cure 4. MP will likely be an issue with this spell as well. I suspect this is meant more to use while subbing RDM and using Convert than anything else.

Conclusion

I mentioned to Old Man earlier that if this year is indeed FFXI's "last hurrah" in regards to significant updates, then SE is dropping update nukes everywhere. I believe that, while most of these things are limited to just being on paper, DRG, DNC and DRK are the top 3 most affected jobs by this update. All of the other jobs typically got stuff that just follows normal progression or gives them a one off that doesn't really affect their playstyle all that much.

MNK will be one to watch out for given they can now guarantee a counter every minute (if you utilize MNK tanks). RNG picking up a forced double damage JA along with Conserve TP and the new True Shot trait will also be another one to watch for. COR may become more of a soloing force now that they have a movement speed roll that has virtually no cast time. I'm also curious to see how Libra is going to be utilized. Will the information provided show enmity levels for party members or just as it relates to the SCH itself?

Either way, a lot of new and fun stuff coming up this Monday. For the first time in a while, I'm really excited about an update. I just hope SE doesn't pull the rug out from under us as they have done a few times in the past.

Trailer Park Trash

2010-06-16T15:31:00.002-05:00

I shared this story in linkshell yesterday before the Odin run, so most of you have probably already read some variation of it. Just for content and memory's sake though, I figure I would post it here.

Yesterday, as I was heading to Elizabethtown yet again, I pulled off at a Shell station to fill up my car. It's a rather poorly designed gas station that doesn't have enough room between the side of the store itself and the gas pumps to fit 2 cars. Means if the only pump open is blocked by someone else, you're going to have to back into the open pump.

This was the case yesterday when I pulled into the station. So I position my car and start to back in to get my gas. As I'm doing so, I notice this Toyota truck, probably late 90s, all beat to hell pulling away. Whoever is driving is obviously trying to do something else as they're zig zagging a bit, but they inevitably go around the back of the building.

I finish backing up and get out of the car. As I'm pulling my credit card out of my wallet, I see a black scion pull into the pump on the other side. Only reason this caught my attention was the fact that there was a little dog yapping from it.

A few seconds later, after I've swiped my card and had the pump tell me to start fueling, the Toyota that I had seen zigzagging away comes back and backs up almost to the point of touching the Scion across from me. Out of the truck steps what I can only describe as trailer trash. All the stereotypical signs were there. Greasy, matted hair. Tank top with inappropriate adjective across the chest like "Bootylicious" or "Take a picture". Dirt stained, frayed shorts and mismatching flip-flops.

Within a couple seconds, she's at the driver's side window of the Scion knocking on it. The little old lady in the car had yet to get out to start pumping her gas. She rolls down the window and the next thing I hear is:

"NUH-UH I DONE PREPAID FOR GAS AT THIS PUMP AND YOU'RE GONNA STEAL IT"

At this point, I'm not sure what the old lady did, but it was something that was interpreted as laughing to Trailer Trash. This sets Trailer Trash off on a bit of a tirade, most of which I couldn't understand due to her apparent lack of English speaking skills.

A few seconds of this goes by and, again, Old Lady says something. Whatever she said caused Trailer Trash to start throwing ethnic slurs at her. Things I picked up:

(Note: I have no way of typing out the way she sounded in saying these things, just assume there's a thick southern drawl butchering these words.)

"Ya'll wetbacks shouldn't even be in this country!"
"Need to elect the Arizona Gov. to be the president!"
"My taxes go to pay for your lazy asses."

Now even I'm a little irritated. To her credit, Old Lady just rolled up the window and went to a different pump.

Credit didn't last too long though...

While Old Lady is pulling into the next pump, Trailer Trash is mumbling to herself and looking around almost like she's talked smack and trying to make eye contact with anyone that approves of what she said to bolster her show. When Old Lady parks, she gets out of the car, looks over at Trailer Trash, opens her arms wide and proceeds to say twice:

"THIS FREE COUNTRY! GOD BLESS AMERICA" in an accent that didn't really sound Spanish or Mexican to me...

I knew what type of firestorm that was going to set off. For those of you inexperienced with the Trailer Trash mentality, you don't have to look any further than a lot of the people they find for Reality TV shows. Uneducated Trailer Trash with heaping doses of attitude are exactly the type of people they look for to film. The Trailer Trash that Old Lady had just provoked had all of this in spades.

Now to set this scene up, here's what you need to know:

Old Lady is about 4'10".
Trailer Trash is about 5'5".

(That would be my mom and my sister's height respectively...)

Our 3 cars are currently in an L shape. My car is at the angle of the L. Trailer Trash is on the opposite side of the pump I'm at and Old Lady has parked at the pump adjacent to mine.

Within about 5 seconds, Trailer Trash has made her way over to Old Lady and got right in her face. I watched with a bit of a sense of dread because I knew something really dumb was going to happen if I didn't step in. Trailer Trash's back is to me and she's just yammering away inviting the Old Lady to fight her. Within about 3 seconds...

...Trailer Trash goes from staring down at someone half a foot shorter than her to staring up at someone half a foot taller and about 100lbs heavier. I had positioned myself directly between them.

Trailer Trash seemed a little stunned at my appearance, but in typical Trailer Trash fashion, she overcame that pretty quickly and started jawing at me.

TT: WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT THIS AIN'T NONE OF YO GODDAMN BUSINESS

(Bad breath...holy shit...bad breath...)

Q: Your idiocy is hurting my ears and my brain. That makes it my business.

TT: ARE YOU CALLIN' ME A IDIOT

(yes, she said 'a idiot', not 'an idiot' before you grammar nazis out there correct me)

Q: Caught on quick didn't you...

TT: THIS AIN'T NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS

Q: Are you really trying to fight someone twice your age over your own moronic mistake?

TT: OH NO I KNOW YOU DIDN'T JUST CALL ME A MORON

She starts to get up in my face and I took a step back not wanting to take another blast of that breath she was wielding...

Q: Do yourself a favor. Just go back to your truck, finish fueling and leave.

TT: DUMB BITCH DONE TRIED TO STEAL MY GAS

Q: No, she pulled up to a pump that looked vacated because you were a moron. Who the hell pays for gas at a pump they're not currently parked at then needs to drive around the entire building before pumping their gas.

TT: I PREPAID AT THI---

Q: Yeah yeah, I get it. You prepaid. Go finish your gas and leave.

TT: I AIN'T NO MORON

Q: Whatever you want to believe lady. You were about to do something dumb before I stepped in and you haven't exactly made yourself look like anything more than a fucking bitch.

TT: FUCKING BITCH?!?!?! YOU CALLIN' ME A FUCKING BITCH?!?!?!

Then she ranted for about 2 minutes...

A few years ago, I probably would have tried to out-stupid her or out-shout her, but I let her rant. Mostly because it was entertaining watching her stamp around spouting stuff that my 3.5 year old niece could out-wit. Finally dawned on her that her words were having no effect on me...

TT: WHAT THE FUCK IS SO FUNNY

Q: You really have no clue how dumb and entertaining you are do you?

Then Trailer Trash burst into tears and this was my chance to go "Q" and really pour salt in the wounds.

Q: See, this is what happens when the bully gets bullied. The bully goes home crying. Here's one of my business cards. Please take it to your crack smoking boyfriend and beg him to come kick my ass. I won't mind getting my ass kicked one bit if it means you get removed from society for a couple years. As a matter of fact, I'll give you a free shot right now. You want to fight so badly? Go ahead, punch me in the face, the balls, wherever you want. Spout more of your reality TV educated filth at me while you do it.

Trailer Trash then proceeded to tear my business card up right there and go back to her truck. During the argument, her gas pump had clicked off (mine as well), so she just yanked the pump out, threw it back in it's stand and sped off. I watched her to make sure she wasn't going to just do a loop around the building then come ram us or something. As she's pulling out onto the main highway, Old Lady puts her hand on my shoulder and says...

"She watch much TV. Needs read book or two."

I looked at my cell phone afterward to see how much time had passed. Seven minutes. All that bullshit took place in 7 minutes. Then I looked around to see if we had attracted a crowd. The car that was on the opposite side of Old Lady's pump had left at some point and I guess no one in the store heard or saw Trailer Trash's mannerisms (or didn't care enough) to come out to check on things.

I asked Old Lady if she was all right. She just simply says "Yes. Idiots not new to me." So I told her to have a better day and went on my merry trip.

I still haven't figured out what nationality she was. She clearly wasn't asian and the accent didn't sound like one from someone who spoke Spanish primarily. The part that surprised me the most out of the whole 7 minute event was that I didn't even get mad or nervous about it. Normally I hate physical confrontation of any sort and it's not uncommon for the heart rate to jump up high and for part of my face to twitch when I feel like I'm getting ready to have to throw fisticuffs.

After sharing the story with Girlfriend and a couple other friends on my way to E-town, I reflected on it a bit more and questioned whether I would have done the same thing if it had been Male Trailer Trash hurling slurs like that and threatening physical confrontation with an Old Lady. I like to think that I would, but until I'm in that situation (and history doesn't suggest that I wouldn't), I won't know for sure.

It just drives me bonkers hearing hate spewed like that because of someone's race or nationality. Joking about it is one thing. Most people understand the stereotypes associated with their race or nationality and can appreciate some good jokes at their expense from time to time. When someone just spouts them because they don't know any better, as much as people just want to say call the cops, it really just comes down to your neighbor helping your neighbor. Neighbors have to teach tolerance. Threats of calling police just build walls. Not saying my approach in that situation was correct, but Trailer Trash is likely not going to be doing idiot stuff like that for at least a little while. Maybe after she gets herself embarrassed a couple more times, it'll sink in...

Tech Stories...

2010-06-14T09:40:00.002-05:00

When I get up in the mornings, one of the first things I do is check my schedule. I already knew I had to make a small road trip this afternoon to our sister city, Elizabethtown. I also knew I had to make a stop on the way up or on the way back in Cave City.

So as I'm planning out what equipment I need to take with me and reviewing the reasons I'm actually going up there, I get a phone call from my "boss" at work. Rare that he calls me that early, so naturally, I'm dreading what he has to say.

Boss: "They're having issues over at the other building this morning. Can you stop there first?"

Q: What issues?

Boss: Can't log into the database.

Q: That's not an issue at their building then.

Boss: Ok, just get there a little early and try to figure out what's going on.

Q: On it.

So I rush my shower, fucked up shaving (seriously, I have a huge hairy spot I apparently missed along the side of my adam's apple atm...), brushed my teeth, busted the button off a favorite pair of my shorts (I'M LOSING WEIGHT DAMMIT THAT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN) and then got in my car and headed to work.

Upon arriving at work, I get stopped at the door by a couple of the guys smoking (since they apparently had nothing better to do as the computers were down...) who felt the need to let me know the computers were down.

I stepped inside and promptly got stopped by the front secretary who wanted to let me know the computers were down.

I walked around the corner no further than 10' away from the front secretary's desk and was stopped by a broker who wanted to let me know the computers were down.

15' away from that stop, I got stopped yet again...

(If you guessed it was to let me know the computers were down...you win a cookie.)

That guy was also the guy who pointed out the spot I missed shaving this morning.

So here's the morning tally thusfar:

1x Boss phone call.
1x Button popped off shorts.
1x Missed spot shaving.
5x redundant messages about the computers being down.

How many of you think I'm about to rage at this point?

Fed up with the repeated stoppings, I found the nearest manager's telephone. Pressed the intercom button...

"ATTENTION EVERYONE WHO CANNOT LOG ON TO THEIR COMPUTERS CURRENTLY. I AM COMPLETELY AWARE THE SERVER IS DOWN. I DO NOT NEED TO BE STOPPED BY EVERY EMPLOYEE IN THIS BUILDING TO LET ME KNOW THE SERVER IS DOWN. I WILL HAVE YOU BACK UP AND RUNNING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. I REALIZE MOST OF YOU CANNOT FATHOM THE IDEA OF NOT BEING ABLE TO SURF THE INTERNET OR CHECK YOUR UPDATED ONLINE POKER LISTINGS FIRST THING MONDAY MORNING, BUT PLEASE DO NOT STOP ME TO TELL ME THAT THE SERVERS ARE DOWN."

And naturally after that announcement, 3 more jackasses thought it'd be funny to tell me on my way to my office that the servers were down.

So the first thing I did after getting the server back up...

...I killed their accounts.

Then left to go to the other building to fix their issues. The other building was a simple fix. Stupid BIOS on their server was trying to boot from a USB backup drive. They apparently had a power outage over the weekend that lasted long enough for their battery backup to shutdown their phone server. While over there fixing that...

I got the phone call from the main building that a certain 3 employees were unable to log on.

Q: Oh really?

Their Boss: Yeah, they lose money if they aren't on the phone.

Q: Tell them I had my jackass quota for the day and they'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Their Boss: What do you mean?

Q: You heard that big announcement I made over the intercom, right? Specifically the part about not stopping me to tell me the server was down?

Their Boss: Yeah, they stopped you didn't they.

Q: Yep. I'll reactivate their accounts, but I figured I'd cost them some fuckoff time in the process.

Their Boss: Ok. I'll get on their asses too.

And now here I am. Everything's back up. I have 3 pissed off employees at me who apparently didn't realize how, to paraphrase Jim Rome, Unfunny, Uninspired and Unoriginal (UUU) their jokes were and a couple bosses who don't like down time at all.

The grand total of time lost as a company (3 idiots aside...)?

30 minutes.

And now if you'll excuse me, there's a lady Bic in the restroom I need to patch my neck up with.

HAPPY FUCKING MONDAY EVERYONE. :)

Transformers: War For Cybertron Demo

2010-06-11T10:05:00.002-05:00

It was announced a few days ago that a demo for the forthcoming Transformers: War for Cybertron was going to be released exclusively for XBox Live. Needless to say, I was kind of waiting with rather diminished hopes for this release.

You see, there hasn't been a good Transformers game really ever. There have been movie spin-offs (which brings into question how much you liked the Bayformers). There was a spin-off of the Transformers: Armada series that was decent, but average at best. There was a Transformers: Animated game for the DS that was really nothing more than a Lost Vikings ripoff.

(You couldn't even transform on most levels...)

Beyond that, nothing.

So there's been this franchise more or less sitting there just waiting for someone to take the reigns and make something great out of it for a console. Transformers have been around for 25 years. A lot of different takes on the lore. A lot of different toy lines. A lot of different TV shows.

Also a lot of screaming about what Michael Bay has done to various childhoods that happened in the 80s-early 90s...

Yet nothing for a console worth more than a footnote. Movie-based games have really never been good and always feel like more of a cash grab than something completely original and fresh.

Earlier this year, what most fanboys have been waiting for was announced. A completely original game, original story, original everything pretty much steeped in the history of a 25 year product. Recognizable major characters. Recognizable minor characters. Recognizable premise.

Naturally, I read that announcement with a lot of trepidation and took an "I'll wait and see" approach.

Promised in the game were Co-Op gameplay, multiplayer battles, and one massive story.

When you introduce your game with Omega Supreme blasting the shit out of pretty much everything in front of him, you're gonna get people's attention.

As time wore on and more and more details about this game have emerged, I've gotten more excited. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind revisionist history. Throughout the various cartoon series, you could pretty much tell which character was which through some sort of iconic piece of armor or weapon or physical feature. Almost every series will mix in a couple of new characters. Most people are offended by the way Michael Bay has portrayed the various Transformers and his whole take on the franchise in general.

(Don't blame Bay btw...Hasbro has pretty much just as much say in the designs.)

And now the demo has arrived. Naturally, with it being a demo, there's not much to it, but you can already tell just how many features will be available for it. Right now, the only thing available to play are a couple multiplayer options. You can play as 2 of the 4 available classes of 'bot. Scout and Soldier.

As their class names would indicate, the Scout class are the smaller and stealthier bots available to play. They aren't packing as much firepower, but off the bat, you can choose between a number of different weapons including ones similar to a sniper rifle and a shotgun.

The Soldier class are bigger, beefier, and slower with a lot more firepower. If you want to clear a congested area out, this is who you drop into the middle of the fray. Both classes can currently level to 3 and there are a few customization options available via the character creation process. Options like what weapons to start the battles with. Passive traits (i.e. a trait that does more damage if you tag someone from behind) and active special abilities. "Whirlwind", for example, is simply your Soldier-class bot whipping out a humongous hammer and proceeding to go apeshit in a congested area.

Among the various weapons are melee attacks as well. A Scout will whip out a dagger-esque weapon while a Solder will whip out a hammer or an axe. There are grenades you can throw that don't seem to do any damage, but if you're in the vicinity when it blows, your circuits are scrambled and you can't really tell WTF is going on.

And naturally, it wouldn't be a Transformers game if you couldn't transform. Transformation is seamless and the abilities you have while in vehicle mode are obviously determined by what vehicle you are. Currently there's a Tank and a Car (Soldier and Scout respectively). Right now, the biggest benefit I can see to a vehicular mode is simply to GTFO of a sticky situation.

With the game being built on the Unreal Tournament engine, it's naturally got a UT feel to it. My best description of what multiplayer feels like at the moment is a cross between your typical Over the Shoulder shooter and a Demolition Derby game like Twisted Metal. There is definitely a really good feel to the multiplayer aspect and it gives me a lot of hope for the single player portion of the game.

At any rate, go download this demo and give it a try. High Moon Studios and Activision are doing a kick ass job with this game. Anyone who grew up watching Transformers will notice a lot of nods to the original lore, and that makes this TF fan very happy.

BRING ON THE UPDATE /flex

2010-06-01T10:18:00.004-05:00

Month in Review...

Now that May has come and gone, it's time to look at what I actually got done. I had mentioned several times I was going to refocus a lot of time into FFXI during this month as the impending level cap increase meant I had a lot of subjob leveling to do. The relic trials also meant I had a lot of additional grind time to do as well. All of this on top of my day to day responsibilities in real life and linkshell life.

Trial 1039 and Trial 1040

Trial 1039 and Trial 1040 ate up a lot of time. Approximately 60-65 hours between them. End result is Gungnir's base damage is 107. On top of that, it's pretty clear from the gap in numbers that there's likely going to be at least one more trial added to Gungnir. If it follows the theme of SE's announcement, it'll be WS related and not anything that actually modifies the stats of the weapon itself any further.

They've surprised me before, but the only thing I can think of that they'd logically do would be similar to what the elemental sea gorgets do. Just increase the damage and accuracy by a flat rate.

BTW...if it turns out they lower the requirements for these two trials, I'll probably /ragequit. That or I'll procrastinate even longer about getting them done.

Subjobs

This is what I spent most of the Memorial Day weekend focused on. I put an ERonfaure_S party together Friday when I got off work and went to town to finish up Warrior. Saturday after Einherjar, I put another party together and took NIN from 37-50. Sunday, I skipped Dynamis (mostly cause it was full, it was Valk and I'm trying to get the linkshell used to other leaders) and took RDM from 37-50.

By the time Monday rolled around, needless to say, I was burned out of XP'ing, but I got bored pretty quickly, put a party together and took THF from 37-50.

All of the parties I ended up using Airybreeze's account to PL. I can't remember everyone that I brought along, but between Gawayne and myself, we accounted for 100 job levels alone. My current estimate is that I PL'd approximately 350 subjob levels for Obsidian members.

The final subjob level count over the past week looks like this:

WAR: 37-50
THF: 37-50
RDM: 37-50
NIN: 37-50
SAM: 47-50

Only ones left are ones that I consider to be fringe at best. I have BLM at 40, SCH at 11 and DNC at 37. BLM sub for WHM is probably going to go the way of the dodo after the June update. SCH sub is still arguably the better sub for WHM, but I haven't had the inkling to work on it when RDM is about to get a significant boost in subjob standings for WHM. DNC is one of those subs I leveled originally for shits and giggles and will likely remain that way.

I did utilize some rather odd party setups thanks to having a pretty endless supply of MP handy to keep us alive. Some not so uncommon jobs like SAM/WAR to use for tanks. Some rather uncommon jobs like BLU/BRD or SCH/BRD to make sure we at least had madrigal and probably the oddest combination was the use of SCH/COR at one point to boost XP gained.

Not that I'm going to rush back out there to do that any time soon, but things like this definitely are a lot more fun for me amongst friends rather than the random party invites that tend to result in craptastic parties.

Wyrmal Abjuration: Legs: O

I now have fast pants. I started trying to get these about 4 years ago, stopped trying about 3 years ago due to disputes over how loot distribution was handled and finally picked them up Saturday evening.

It pretty much boils down to preferences for looting systems. The system I previously tried to get these in utilized job priorities. The pro for this is rather obvious. You put the gear that's best for the job on the person that's got the job leveled. The cons for it tend to be along the lines of "that person never comes on that job" or "Newb to the linkshell can get minimum points required and trump someone else who has been there for a long time by virtue of job priority."

The system Obsidian has always used has been "If you can use it, have the points to win it via bidding and meet a minimum level (70+), it's yours". The main pro to this is it levels the playing field almost entirely. While some will laugh at a Bard winning Hecatomb Harness, it's not really a leader's place to control every aspect of how someone spends their points. Is a Hecatomb Harness useful to the Bard? Not really no, but SE put the job on there and those are ultimately the rules that apply. The system for distributing loot is as black and white as we believe it can be.

The main con to using a system like this is it opens the door to some butthurt feelings when people don't win a bid or when someone does something shady (like snipe bidding). In the end though, that's easier to deal with than the butthurt feelings people are going to get when leader's change the rule on the fly to favor those who are in favor with them. From a leader perspective, I'll take someone whining about not winning a bid over whining about a rule that was suddenly changed to favor someone else. At least with this perspective, my credibility as a leader is still in tact and that's what being in that position ultimately comes down to, how credible you are. If you have people questioning your intent with decisions and the questions revolve around favoritism, you're going end up with a pretty rude awakening.

Hindsight is always 20/20 though.

At any rate, this isn't really an item I coveted. It was an item I thought I needed to help with pulling in Dynamis, but I adapted by learning movement patterns of certain pulls and by preparing crowd control for pulls I knew I didn't have much time on. Best way I can describe this item is it's that one item you know you want, but it's not really a high enough priority to take the initiative to get it, yet you twinge a bit every time you see someone wearing them.

If Murphy has anything to do with it, I'll likely die more during pulls now that I have these pants.

Mog Bonanza

Finally got around to buying 100 marbles again. Guarantees me a rank 4 money prize at least to cover the 200k expenses and then some. I picked the same numbers that didn't win anything last year, so hopefully the odds roll around to my favor again like they did in 2007 and I pick up something nice.

I do wish SE would streamline the whole marble purchasing process though. I really hate the "one-at-a-time" approach. I probably could have been done in half the time if I had the option to buy 5 or 10 at a time and just enter the numbers successively.

That's just me though...

Anyway, I am now completely ready for the update. I gots my marbles, I gots my subjobs, I gots my Gungnir+1 and I gots my fast pants. Do your worst SE. :)

(Except for whatever plans you have for relic trials...how about cutting us a break for once...)

Magian Update Notes

2010-05-27T07:05:00.001-05:00

http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics/ff11us/detail/5475/detail.html

Trial Objectives Revisited

Certain trial objectives have been reevaluated and will see target quotas reduced among other adjustments. You need not fear if you've already embarked on a trial, for these changes will also be reflected in trials underway at the time of the update.

Mother Fuckers...

The Manly Man Award

2010-05-25T09:37:00.003-05:00

Every now and then, stories come across that you can't really describe as anything other than "Manly". I'm not a huge proponent of Hockey. As a matter of fact, I go out of my way to make fun of it at times. Not to the level of soccer mind you, but yeah...

So this story about a Chicago Blackhawks defenseman named Duncan Keith taking a puck to the mouth, getting 7 teeth knocked out and coming back a short bit later to assist on a goal comes across my reader this morning and my first reaction was to cringe.

Then I read the story.

I've always known hockey players are either the toughest bastards, dumbest bastards or a combination of both in sport today. It's pretty much the anti-soccer. Soccer guy gets kicked in the shin and he flails around on the ground like he just stepped on a land mine. Hockey guy gets his neck slashed open and is already questioning how soon he can get back out there to play. I've always known not to piss off a hockey player. Soccer guy however, open season.

Anyway, back to the Manly part of this post. Duncan Keith took a puck to the mouth. He lost 7 teeth. He went to the bench, got nova-caned up and went back out to the ice. Obviously, losing teeth is nothing like getting your neck slashed open, but that shit still hurts. The part that makes this the most interesting would be some of the quotes that came out of it:

Duncan Keith:

I took one breath and it felt like my whole mouth was missing, so I knew there were some teeth gone. I saw a couple fall out, and I had one in the back of my throat. I could feel it and coughed it out. A bunch of them disintegrated, it felt like.

He furthers this by saying:

I had seven needles in my mouth. It's all frozen right now. Just a bunch of needles in my jaw, gums to freeze it up. Might need some more soon, because it's starting to wear off. I can feel it.

He later goes on to say:

I just wanted to get out there as quick as I can, and the trainers and dentists and doctors did a good job," Keith said. "Honestly, I was fine. You get hit in the teeth, obviously it hurts the gums, but it's not like you got your jaw smashed in or anything like that.

"It's tougher talking, but it's not as bad as you think it is.

No sir, trust me. It's exactly as bad as I think it is and I want none of it. You get a Manly Man Award.

The humorous part of this comes from his teammate, Patrick Sharp.

He'll have a great smile in a couple of weeks. "He's spitting out teeth in the locker room and comes back and assists on the Bolland goal. He created the whole play, taking the big hit to set it up. And he's skating around before the power play, telling us what to do, but he's mumbling. I don't think anyone understood what he was talking about. But he's one of our leaders.

So kudos to Mr. Keith. You made me respect Hockey for at least a short while. Even though I don't like the sport much, I do like the toughness of it's players.

Trial 1040, Campaign and Subjobs

2010-05-23T22:43:00.005-05:00

Trial 1040

Hours spent:

Wed: 6PM-11PM
Thurs: 6PM-11PM
Fri: 4PM-1AM
Sat: 12PM-1AM
Sun: 8AM-4PM

That's what it took from a time standpoint to finish up Trial 1040. For those sucky with math, that would be 40 hours. Yes, I practically spent an entire workweek upgrading an item I already spent an entire year of my life sitting in my mog house completing. That doesn't even include the time I spent in Trial 1039. I get that SE wants you to spend time with their game and all, but adding that after the amount of time necessary to finish the weapon in the first place is just dumb.

Huge thanks to Kaylea, Drakus, Lectrikelion and Mav for spending huge chunks of time with me to make this go faster. I likely wouldn't be finished with this until the end of summer at the solo pace.

Just to recap:

Trial 1040 requires me to use Geirskogul to land the killing shot on anything classified in the lizard family. Sounds easy enough right?

On paper it is. Certainly these critters aren't hard to kill, but it's what isn't on paper that makes this maddening.

For starters, I'm swinging a weapon against creatures that don't have enough HP for me to really build up TP, use a WS, build up TP then finish it off with Geirskogul. So this means I'm essentially forced to just whittle down the targets with normal melee swings.

As it gets closer to the 10% mark, I would fire Geirskogul. Upon firing one of the following things would happen:

1. Target would die and I'd get credit towards trial.
2. Geirskogul would miss.
3. 2.5x Damage would kick in and kill before I could fire my WS.
4. Geirskogul's humongous damage range would prevent me from getting the kill shot.
5. I'd get petrified (Baleful Gaze, yes I know you can turn away and I did most of the time) and Qiqiru would finish off the lizard before I could get disengaged.

Conversations with most relic owners will show that it would seem the relic WS's have a higher rate of missing than most other WS. That or maybe I'm just spoiled by all the multi-hit WS I use. Despite it's animation appearance, Geirskogul is a 1-hit WS.

Number 3 wasn't a huge issue, but always seemed to show up when I was on a particularly bad stretch of Crapskoguls happening.

Number 4 was, by far, the most maddening out of all of these possibilities. The same TP return for Geirskogul presents a damage range anywhere between 350-1200 on the lizards and raptors I was fighting out in Teriggan. I would usually try to have a Daedaleus Wing handy from the chests and hope that I could get it slept (with Airybreeze as my mule) long enough for me to use it and finish it off with the wing. This wasn't the case most of the time this happened. Usually it'd have just enough HP left to kill itself on my Shock Spikes or enough for Qiqiru to finish it off in one blow.

At any rate, for the third time (original, trial 1039, trial 1040):

That photo turned out a lot larger and crappier than I thought it would. Gogo iPhone camera...

Between trial 1039, 1040 and minimal effort in campaign to rank up, I pretty much went from start to finish in capping Desperate Blows on DRK from the XP I picked up. That would be 22 merits primarily just from 2 Magian trials. If that alone isn't any indication how much of a time sink these things are, I don't know what is.

Campaign

Been working on the medals for this since Fiat Lux happened the past week and the allied ring is available. Picked up {Wings of Honor $ $ $ $} late Sunday night, so I should be able to get an Allied Ring at some point Friday evening or Saturday morning.

I enjoyed Campaign when it first came out. The main pros for it are generally along the lines of it being a way to kill that down time while seeking a party and because there are genuinely some good pieces of gear you can get from it. The primary con, and the main reason I stopped caring about my medals, is the whole 30-day bullshit SE implemented. To be fair, I thought the 30-day stuff was crap when they first released campaign, but I didn't mind it as much as I do now.

Campaign is the only thing in the game you have to maintain in order to participate in various events associated with them (Splitting Heirs and Fiat Lux being the 2 primary ones). I get why they implemented it, but it's a really poor way to keep people interested and paying their monthly subscriptions. When this started feeling more like a chore instead of a game, I stopped caring. At one point, I had the Starlight Medal. By the time Fiat Lux came out in late March, I had fallen 4 ranks.

I can't really say I'm motivated now to get the top rank specifically for Fiat Lux as I'm not overly excited about the gear itself. Given these are the final ranks, I'm just going to get up to the top and hopefully have the patience to maintain it so that I can participate in the XP loss with my friends whenever they need me.

Subjobs

After an old man nap upon completing Trial 1040, I came back to find that Gawayne was seeking someone to replace a member of his subjob party in E.Ron_S. I needed a couple more levels on SAM, so I joined them. I popped my Emp. Ring and one charge from my Anniversary ring and killed level 47-50. This got me to thinking a little bit more about what subjobs I actually need to finish up.

For DRG, SAM and WHM are pretty much the only two that I ever use and I can't see that changing much. RDM or BLU might become more prevalent, but I'm still not sold on them as full time subjobs when WHM offers so much more in terms of self-preservation. WAR becomes somewhat tempting with the ability to use Bergressor in tandem, but it's not a deal breaker as Hasso is essentially the same thing. DRG is pretty much done.

For WHM, I'm not completely sure I want to even level this past 75. I may do it out of sheer boredom one day, but given my feelings on the job in general (despite the fact it's max-merited), I just can't see myself using this job enough for me to dump more time into it.

For PLD, I gotta do WAR, NIN and RDM. All 3 of these are at 37. This job, unfortunately for the most part, is going to force me to level subs that would come in handy with my other jobs in niche situations. The exception here being RDM will turn WHM into a juggernaut.

DRK pretty much goes along the lines of DRG. The only other exception here is THF. This brings my tally of subjobs to level to 4. WAR, NIN, RDM and THF. All of these are 37. With the Gungnir trials out of the way and with my minimal participation in campaign, hopefully I can knock a couple of these out each week and be done with subjobs entirely before the June update hits.

Anyway, still working on a complete breakdown of the Noct helm and Noct body as it compares with other items in those slots for the jobs that can use them. Hopefully that's done sometime this week...

Trial 1039, Dynamis Run Jacking, Stuff.

2010-05-17T09:36:00.003-05:00

Trial 1039

I knocked a huge chunk out of Trial 1039 yesterday. Started the day needing 898 more Geirskoguls on Amorphs and ended the day needing only 240ish more. The primary reason for the surge is that I finally relented and took a mule down there to two box. Normally I just leave the mules in the Hazhalm area cause it's such a pain to get them back out there at times, especially when I'm running late by my standards.

While I'm glad that I'm about done with this trial, the next one I'm dreading will take far longer. The primary targets I'm considering for Trial 1040 are Bugards in Vunkerl Inlet, Raptors in Uleguerand Range or some Lizards in Cape Teriggan (can't remember what they actually /check). With Geirskogul's damage range being kind of random, it's going to be a little on the difficult side gauging when to use it to try to kill a bad guy, much less 1500 times.

Should have 1039 done tonight and with any luck...1040 done by 2011...

Dynamis Run Jacking

Part of me understands when our run gets jacked by a JP group that doesn't use the Dynamis Calendar. I don't like it, but short of getting up early to break a glass on the zone to delay the group, it's pretty difficult to actually communicate effectively enough to prevent it from happening. For a 2 month stretch late last year, we had an issue with a group led by Aatst called DynamisBunpai or something to that effect. The first time it happened, we just changed runs. The next week when it happened again, we tried to communicate with them about it, but were ignored. This was something that continued the next couple times it happened. Finally, I just got pissed off and started breaking glasses, which got their attention and we haven't had an issue with them since.

For the most part, Odin's NA Dynamis scheduling seems to get along fine. Aside from me f***ing up and scheduling a start time later than it should have been that caused us to bump LB from a Tav run and a random JP shout group that delayed a San d'Oria run by an hour, we haven't had any issues. At least until yesterday...

I'm down killing leeches when I caught wind of BBQDynamis gathering for Dynamis Tavnazia. Our run leader pointed out the calendar and Namicat's response was "I know, we'll try to hurry" or something to that effect. Naturally, our reaction was to try to hurry everyone down there to preserve our time slot, but that didn't happen and the obviously rushed-together BBQ group got into the zone before us about a half hour before we were scheduled to start.

My understanding of the conversation that took place afterward between Namicat and the run leaders led me to believe he knew what was posted on the Dynamis Calendar and didn't give a shit. A quick look at the calendar itself showed BBQDynamis scheduled for their customary time slot in Dynamis-Valkurm and our runs in their correct slots.

Nothing we can do about the run jacking aside from prepare our crew for when we could potentially enter now. So I started going over what to look for in order to determine how long they were going to be in there. The extensions in Tav look like this:

Start: 15 minutes
Nightmare Bugard: 15 minutes
Nightmare Antlion: 30 minutes
First floor ???: 30 minutes
Second floor ???: 30 minutes.

There's a grand total of two hours in there and you pretty much have to start moving the second you enter. I explained that the main thing to look for was their subjobs. While it's relatively common to get the first two extensions before completing the subjob requirements, it's safe to say a group isn't going to make it very far if they don't get their subjobs unlocked ASAP. So worst case is, we push our run back by 1.5 hours at most. Best case is...they don't get any extensions at all and pop back out 15 minutes after they enter. Most likely case was failing to get past an hour, which made us 30 minutes late.

They entered with 12 people. This was something else that worked out in our favor as a good portion of the stuff in there is kind of slow to take down even with 18. After about 10 minutes, their numbers grew to 14.

...then dropped to 10.

...then grew to 14.

...then dropped to 10.

...then grew to 15.

~50 minutes into their run and they still did not have their subjobs unlocked. Our group also observed a number of people that either HP'd or warped out presumably due to a wipe or 4. If I had to guess, I'd say the Nightmare Worm had it's way with them via Draw-In and some Nightmare Bees spawning from a nearby door right on top of them. We've all been there at one point in our Dynamis Tavnazian lives.

An hour after they started, they popped out in a body pile as expected. I felt this was the best time to point a couple things out to them.

The first being, if you're going to jack someone's run, come up with a better excuse and don't be a douche about it. It's pretty obvious Mr. Namicat that you're aware of the Calendar's existence. If you guys didn't have enough for Valk, then check the damn calendar and find a zone you do have enough for that won't interrupt another shell's schedule. While Obsidian was being bumped by JP groups, we've always respected what any other shell had scheduled, including yours. If you don't want to return the favor, then I truly hope you can cash the checks you're writing.

The second being, if you're going to jack someone's run, then at least succeed and make it worth the time of the people you put in a position they don't necessarily want to be in. Your crew lost God knows how much XP while you tried to rush them in. You would have been better off going to Bastok or Sandy. I'm not saying people don't have issues with Tavnazia, we certainly have, but the fact you rushed them in intentionally trying to jack a run combined with the fact you failed miserably in said run certainly provided us with some comedy. Your crew failed to get subjobs until ~50 INTO the run. Both of our crews had subjobs unlocked within 10 minutes of entering.

Amazing what a little preparation can do...

...also amazing what Karma can do.

It speaks volumes when members of BBQ that don't do Dynamis with that group talk about it's poor organization and compare it to the arm of AIG that lost billions in the financial collapse.

At any rate, I suppose it's our move next...

Might be time to revisit the old EU Run Setup and have a Tavnazia around midday Wednesday...

VNMs

Spent most of Saturday evening running our crew through the various T2 VNMs along the different paths. Lamprey Lord and the two Fairies are some serious bastards if you try to tank them straight up. The rest of 'em were relatively easy to take down.

My biggest issue with VNMs at the moment is we either have too many people there or we don't have the right job combination for what's been proven effective against them.

Scheduling

Up until this point, we've tried to get at least one event per week in. It's pretty obvious now what our strong attendance times are and where we have most of the interest, but for some of the more mundane stuff like farming in general, it's getting kind of irritating having low numbers show. Our group is small enough to where if someone is a little patient, they'll basically get leftovers for minimal effort or cost. I've never been a huge proponent of making everyone pass items and essentially destroying them, but there's part of me that thinks we should consider doing this on the bigger ticket items. Or at least forcing everyone to lot/pass stuff instead of letting it auto-distribute.

Overall, I'm still relatively happy with turn out, but as with any shell expanding into areas like we have, it's still a learning process. Aside from the item distribution, I think we still have issues with perception and communication about "official" events. It's kind of a general belief that when the new website is done and running, this will be fixed.

Summer "Get Together" 2010

This year's Get Together will be from July 15th-July 19th at King Cranky's abode in West Virginia. The currently RSVP'd list of people include Kay, Suraph, Lectrikelion, Kreoss, Kaelis, Erimentha, Yoteo and myself with invites sent to a few other people like Mexibishe, Cuban, Kimille etc. Due to space limitations, we're probably not going to have more than 10 people there unless some don't mind tents/sleeping bags or spooning with other men...

The primary caveat to this year's invite list is:

King Cranky Cat has to like you. He generally likes everyone despite his gruff online appearance. This caveat has actually been present at all of the Get Togethers, but since it's King Cranky, we like to point it out as it's a rather humorous facet of his personality.

General plans at the moment are for everyone to make their travel arrangements to either arrive at the Baltimore Airport on the 15th by 1:00PM or drive up from wherever they live. Then to have their flights home leave from Baltimore Airport no earlier than 5:00PM on the 19th. King Cranky will pick us up from the airport and I'll be renting a car for the haul back to Cranky Caverns. (Anyone that wants to pitch in for the rental fees and whatnot, feel free to...)

Anyway, back to work for now. Slow day here today, so I had some time to do some blogging. Hopefully that trend continues as I have a lot of other stuff to blog about. :)

Betty White on SNL

2010-05-10T15:42:00.005-05:00

I admittedly am not a huge SNL honk. Typically, my viewings of it consisted of the marathon variety with a bunch of buddies, some booze and some snacks. I, among others, understand when change to a cast has to happen, but a lot of the times, don't have the patience to watch week in and week out as sketch comedy writers/actors work to establish themselves. I've always been of the mindset "just show me the highlights".

Earlier this year, when I heard Betty White was the subject of a Facebook campaign trying to get her to host SNL, my first thought was...why? I had seen a lot of her in Golden Girls thanks to my Mom's religious viewing of the show (even to this day...) and didn't think anything particularly fond about it. I didn't think much of it, but blurbs about it kept showing up around the various sites I read. CNN.com seemingly had something about her hosting almost every other week, but usually inserted into other ideas like "SNL plans Women of Comedy Show".

So, we get to earlier last month and Betty White is all but confirmed and people are going crazy happy about it. A lot of news websites are starting to wax nostalgic about Betty White and use that as a platform to discuss the power of social networking. I still wasn't sure what the big deal was, so I started doing some reading up on her. I knew she was old, but wasn't sure just how long she had been in the business (the answer to that is 70+ years). I also knew I laughed hard when I saw her in that Snickers commercial with Abe Vigoda.

As various news outlets started running more and more clips of her along with her newest interviews, I started becoming a fan. A lot of the reason I did I think relates to how similar she was to one of my grandmothers. No subject was off limits with her. You had to pay close attention or some of the jokes she would make would just go right by you.

What eventually sold me on tuning in to my first live SNL in probably 15 years was her appearance on Jimmy Fallon's Late Night. Typically, as someone ages, things start to slow down and the brain is among them. For her to be 88 years old and playing Beer Pong (even if the liquid in her cups was water...) was impressive to me. On top of that, she actually busted Fallon up with one of those Grandma-esque jokes. Here's one segment linked from Hulu, so I fully expect it to be taken down at some point in the next 3 weeks:

Seriously, at 88+ years old, I can only hope my brain is working a fraction of the speed hers is working if I make it to that age.

Onto the SNL episode itself...

By the time it aired, I had a pretty good idea what to expect. There was going to be lots of perverted old lady humor. Betty White's recent success pretty much revolves around the idea that someone who looks like such a sweet person couldn't possibly say some of the things she says. She certainly didn't fail to deliver on that part.

The skits they did were more or less rehashes of things I've seen them do in the past. Skits like Delicious Dish (think Schweddy Balls with Alec Baldwin), the MacGruber stuff that's been rather prominent since they produced an upcoming movie about it and some variation of a couple talk show format skits that usually end up being boring until the punchline hits.

Where I thought she was at her best was during the Scared Straight skit:

...and the digital short SNL produced:

(Yes, I know that's a stuntman...it's the end that cracked me up.)

A few other notable quotes:

"You know, if I could go back in time, I would lez it up 24 hours. Believe me, one thing I would not miss...

...Balls.

Terrible little things."

On her Mexican son's admission to being gay:

"Aye yi yi...that explains why he doesn't like tacos!"

Anyway, the episode was probably among the best I've seen. There wasn't a huge variation in content from skit to skit, but at 88 years old, Betty White delivered with a near perfect sense of comedic timing that pretty much shows age really is just a number when you compare it to the performances of some of the past hosts I've seen.

There's also a number of Web-only related SNL skits with Betty White available on hulu.com.

Bottom line is this:

This lady is probably one of the last links to a generation of TV stars that really laid the ground work for what we view today. Big props for anyone that took notice of the Facebook page and got the wheels turning to get her into the spotlight at least one last time. Not that I think she's going to any time soon...you never really know, but the fact that the cast paid tribute in a manner I've not really seen from an SNL show speaks volumes about her contributions to the industry as a whole. She's not necessarily someone people list when they start talking about influences or things of that manner, but she's been around long enough to gain a lot of respect.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

2010-05-04T09:23:00.002-05:00

I know I'm about 9 months behind in playing this game but...

Holy shit this is a great game.