GW2: Plenty of Problems, But This Ain’t One of ‘Em

MassivelyOP has successfully trolled me into another blog post. This time, it’s regarding the GW2 Skyscale flying mount, wherein it’s patently obvious that no actual firsthand experience was involved at the time of writing.

Yes, I understand that articles are written way in advance. But could you kindly resist from making statements with no basis in reality, then?

Pet peeve: Verifiably wrong things, stated as facts.

“The only way you can actually spend more than a few seconds in the air is if you jump off of something really tall and glide down.”

“Also, there are no flying mounts in GW2. At best they glide. Literally any mount in any MMORPG that flies (i.e. stays in the air indefinitely by design) is superior.”

You know who you are.

I’ve been up here for half an hour, sorting through my inventory bags, and then alt-tabbed out to write this blog post.

I dunno about you, but in my book, that certainly seems longer than a few seconds in the air, pretty indefinitely, by design.

Granted, any horizontal X-axis movement is going to lower me steadily, and incrementing the vertical Y-axis without a friendly wall to cling to involves waiting for a minute for Bond of Vigor to cooldown and recharge half of the green flight bar.

At a certain height exceeding the point you took off from, there is also some sort of ceiling where the flight meter is drained very quickly, so that you lower back to maximum hover height, possibly in an attempt to keep you from ascending forever into the skybox to insta-die.

For horizontal gliding and SPEED, once you get the hang of downward diving for acceleration and then climbing back up with mount ability key 2, the griffon is superior. 

For vertical takeoff and landing, fine-grained control in a small area and indefinite HOVERing (40 mins and counting), that’s where you look towards the skyscale.

Honestly, given its specialities, I’m more or less convinced that its main role is to cover one of WoW’s flying mounts’ features – lording it over the hoi polloi by hovering on a gigantic dragon, mount and rider doing their best to block the trading post from view.

And yeah, you can use it as a hybrid springer with finer-scale control, crossed with a slower gliding griffon, just with added infinite hover potential.

There have been some criticisms over the whole process of attaining one.

For someone who had been previously all psyched up to finish legendary medium armor, the collections did not really raise massive alarm bells, which might be more an indication of how mentally unbalanced the Achiever portion of my brain can get.

There were some identical go-here, go-there un-clued collections which were of poorer quality. Resorting to a third-party guide to get through those quickly is probably what 95% of players do, me included.

There were some nicer legendary-style collections, themed, with better clues and directions, including visible waypoint markers! which sent players back to old maps to revisit content. I liked those.

There was massive dismay at timegates, of which I personally did not find too onerous. They are pre-set stopping points. Being content to be a couple days behind meant that I made a nice killing selling timegated components for the first two days – grow lamps for 70 and 60 gold on the TP. After the 15% tax, that’s 110g contributed to my legendary medium collection from players who need it now. Sweet.

Anyway, ArenaNet tweaked some of the timegates after reading the feedback, so that’s even better. They’re actually listening and demonstrating it! And communicating! What is this, I don’t even-…

There was a huge histrionic fainting uproar at the revelation that 250 of each LS4 map currency would be needed in a later collection.

My only criticism is that it would have been really nice to know all the requirements before, and not reliant on the first few players to unlock the next collection, just so that each player could plan ahead and make more efficient use of their time.

I get that there’s some drama and excitement and even prestige for the spades/explorers/first-to-gets by keeping some of these secret, but it was a little irritating to know that the previous days could have been better spent.

I’d been somewhat laggard catching up with the LS4 maps, having not been actively playing for much of the time they were released, so I had only about half the currencies needed. That meant a furious altholic hearts-grind for 2-3 days, pulling out some 11+ characters and cycling them through easy hearts to buy 5 currency each for karma.

It’s not something I do on a regular basis for sure, but I found it mildly interesting for the three days to go into super-efficient achiever grind mode. The benefits of having a secondary Achiever function. Fortunately, I was already in the mood for grinding.

If not, well, there’s always tomorrow.

Oh yes, since it’s been two weeks, I assume that most people who cared have at least logged in to check out the first episode.

If not, too bad, you can take this like a teaser image instead. You’ll see this at the very beginning episode anyway.

I love this. The scale is awesome.

A few more landscape shots of the new map.

P.S. 50 minutes and counting. I guess it’s time to come down now.

GW2: New Map

Wow.

Avoiding spoilers, suffice to say that there are some serious stops being pulled out.

Visually it knocks your socks off.

I am so happy I have the monitor I have right now.

I have a FANTASTIC spoiler-laden shot of a really big dragon, that is absolutely done justice in 3840×1080, but we’ll save that for a later post, after folks (me included) have had time to go through the latest release.

Minecraft: Regrowth – The Expansioning

There’s something about Regrowth that checks nearly all my boxes.

I really like the feeling that I’m solely responsible for populating a nearly barren world with life again, similar to a skyblock, minus the scary stress of falling off a floating island into the void or feeling obliged to put down a -floor- everywhere.

Not to mention, if you gave me creator responsibility for floors, they’ll wind up all flat, because I’m lazy, and I’ll go for the easiest way out.

Adding trees and grass and plants and flowers organically though, that I can do.

There’s something special about wandering through the dark night and dull brown wasteland and being able to find your way back to your base, because it is the only brightly torch-lit green and growing oasis in a sea of cracked sand.

It’s the best of both worlds – ample room to spread out (just takes a little filling in and landscaping) yet it bears the stamp of something intensely personal and handbuilt.

I’m especially fond of how organic the process is, since I’m not much of an aesthetic builder. I clear room for myself because I want to put something functional there.

This tiny outpost across a short sea channel from my original base? Placed there once upon a time for the purposes of Enderman hunting, because I couldn’t find any in my carefully dug moat-surrounded well-lit compound.

Regrowth being Regrowth, I have crops for that now.

It makes you invest effort gaining the initial resource to make the seeds. Then, after the growing and breeding process is past, you’ve unlocked the key to nearly infinite resources… given sufficient planting room, some means of coaxing the crops into growing quickly, and ways to harvest them.

A dinky little growing and cross-breeding chamber is soon outgrown and obsolete.

Which leads to something slightly more ambitious… except that further expansion space has been blocked by another room existing behind said wall…

And so we expand into the next room, dug deep into a convenient side of the mountain (the tallest around, a rare sight as one happened to spawn in a Mountainous Wasteland biome, surrounded by ordinary flat Wasteland and Ocean and Beach biomes.)

Which has, over time, become one VERY long, sprinkler-fed hallway containing every crop discovered so far, a precious underground seed bank in a mountain bunker far from harm.

Outside, an incongruous sight floats, against the background of my little hobbit hole in the side of a mountain.

Functionality overtaking aesthetics, as is the case of most of my machines. I’m unfamiliar with most of the things I try, so it’s all about just getting them to -work-. Functional = success, as far as I’m concerned.

An Agricraft wooden water tank was initially built and expanded, in the hopes of catching sufficient rain. It soon became obvious that neither it, nor the Railcraft water tank originally attached to it, was going to cut it, hence the installation of a Buildcraft pump, powered by three cheap ‘free’ wooden engines, pumping water from a 3×3 infinite water source.

Even the world’s longest crop corridor turned out to be lacking, in the sense that it wasn’t generating sufficient quantities of desired resources.

The second generation, slightly-more-modern, perhaps-one-day-automated farm, became a project on a somewhat more ambitious scale.

Not even the slighest bit complete, the originally intended building for one’s house/base/inventory storage has been taken over by a sudden spurt of interest in unlocking bits of Thaumcraft4 (hence the magic workbenches visible in the farm.)

The ground floor has now been hijacked for Essentia distillation and housing in Warded Jars.

Walking to the modern farm compound from the original hobbit hole base is a short trip through several naturally occuring caves.

Just a couple days ago, I finally installed a functional cobblestone bridge after getting tired of sinking into the deep water of this half-submerged cavern.

The cave before this one used to  be smaller, but got hijacked as an underground peat bog while I was on a peat-fired engine Nether quarry phase.

Which then got widened out further and little wood frames installed to make harvesting peat slightly more convenient, without getting randomly washed around by the water sources necessary for making peat.

I’m now in a minor bee phase. It might be my first serious attempt at exploring Forestry’s Bees and Magic Bees and Extra Bees mods.

For now, it’s very low tech, taking up the room previously occupied by some lower-end machines and pipes, but ill-formed plans are already spinning around in my head to develop things on a slightly grander scale.

The machinery, meanwhile, has moved slightly further inland.

I made a very low-power input system for squeezing crops into fruit juice, which then goes into a fermenter to produce biomass for a biogas engine. (Except the squeezer which used to be there has now been hijacked to produce Seed Oil elsewhere.)

Progress has been more satisfying ever since I realized I’d actually unlocked steel ingots, which then opened up the Mekanism mod, a source of a lot more predictable and reliable tech machines and pipes and RF cables that work much more like the Thermal Expansion or Ender IO stuff I’d gotten spoiled with in prior modpacks.

(I’m sure Buildcraft pipes have a lot more sophistication I’m still failing to appreciate, since there are apparently gates that allow for some really complicated and specific programming.

But you know, most days, you just want your tap to work when you turn the faucet knob and don’t really feel the need to -have- to program an Arduino-controlled garden sprinkler cum fish tank aquaponic system just to get some water.)

There’s still plenty of room for haphazard machinery, of course. Mostly brought on by the fact that I don’t actually -have- that much -safe- building space, nor much of a plan where machinery is concerned.

In the foreground is a legacy experiment to process Oil into Fuel. Said Fuel was successfully produced, and then hoarded, since the original resource is limited and I don’t like non-renewable power.

Somewhere in the center is my slightly larger 2×2 Liquid Fueled Firebox at the base of a steel 2x2x3 High Pressure Boiler tank, with some parts cannibalized from my original mimum size experiments with liquid fueled boilers.

The really nice thing about it is that it burns up Creosote Oil, an otherwise nigh-useless byproduct of Coke Ovens, which I use to make Coal Coke (necessary in the process of steel-ingot production) from an absolutely renewable source of Coal grown from Regrowth crops.

It produces a sizeable quantity of steam.

This was originally directly hooked up to an Industrial Steam Engine, except that I noticed a fairly noticeable quantity of Creosote Oil was being burned up to heat the firebox to steam-producing temperatures, and that the Engine wasn’t quite coping with the amount of steam produced and was threatening to overheat, necessitating the steam supply to be shut off and left in the boiler “wasted.”

Enter the fairly ambitious (for me) Steel Tank project to hold a large quantity of steam in reserve.

This multi-block structure can hold up to 10,976 buckets of steam. (And yes, I ran out of space to put it, and thus decided to float it.)

It can probably power a whole array of Industrial Steam Engines, except that I’ve still been too lazy to make more, nor do I have the need for that much more power just yet.

It’s likely just a matter of time though.

Stardew Valley Days

This game is a dangerous time-suck.

I boot it up to get a few screenshots, and before you know it, I’m doing the “just one more turn” thing into the wee hours of the morning trying to make the crops grow up to the point where I can reap the rewards, and oh look, the seasons changed, my plants are dead, I need to plant more seeds and make them grow up to fruiting stage again.

It probably didn’t help that I spent most of the spring fishing.

In every conceivable spot I could find. Because the minigame is devilish in a casino-like sense, involving just enough skill that makes you think you can control the outcome sufficiently and enough RNG from different fishing locations and different fish biting on the hook (and a high amount of variance on the basic rod) that the outcome is never guaranteed.

Bought a farming game; Went fishing

Somewhere along the line, the community center quests were unlocked. This asks the player to turn in one of practically every item there is in the game for rewards, in themed bundles like fall crops or spring forage or night-caught fish.

Naturally, this fed my hoarding tendencies to no end. Turning a profit is now tricky, because I’m more inclined to keep it in a chest instead.

Still, a sandbox is a sandbox.

Some people choose to min-max their farming to optimal sprinkler patterns and industrial crop generation.

Some people choose to decorate their house with pretty bits, or play the NPC dating sim portions.

Me, I’m tootling around on my dinky little unoptimized but immersive farm, watching the crops grow and the days go by, while I mostly fish the hours away.

I’m also dead certain half my played hours are spent holding down “A” or “D” to criss-cross a multitude of screens “running” here and there, at a pace other games would call walking speed. Sneakiest time-wasting mechanic ever.

Before you know it, the natural tendency of humans to rationalize kicks in. “Gee, I just spent hours playing Stardew Valley. I must really like this game!”

(Not to mention the sunk-cost fallacy.)

For pleasant whiling away of hours to cheerful music and idyllic pastoral settings, especially if you only own a PC and can’t play Harvest Moon/Rune Factory variants, Stardew Valley can’t be beat though.

The inside of my modest chicken coop:

With two extremely free-range hens.

I’ve been keeping the bulk of the overgrown grass around, because they’re apparently a free source of hay.

The silo’s currently clogged with 240 pieces. Am still progressing toward a barn and larger farm animals ever so slooowly.

In the meantime, the hens are running amok in the tall grass and I have to admit that I rather like it that way.

(Fortunately, in-game hens are nice enough to return to the coop to sleep every night, and Stardew Valley doesn’t implement any “farm livestock happily run off and get lost without fencing” mechanics or have any free-roam hen predators around either.)

Before you know it (or rather, 15 Steam played hours later,) fall is here.

And the Stardew Valley farming saga continues.

Dipping a Feathered Toe into Endless Space

I think I may as well make it semi-official, and admit to myself that my subconscious is asking, nay, demanding a break from GW2.

These days, I can only muster the energy to log in for just long enough to snatch three dailies, one of them the easy Wintersday ‘open 3 presents’ gimme, and that’s about it.

Home instance, guild hall instance, ascended crafting mats? Pshaw.

I heartily doubt that I will know what to do when the Wintersday dailies are no more and I end up with a more tedious PvE or PvP or WvW one.

Instead, I’ve found myself lining up a whole list of Steam games and eyeing them greedily and excitedly.

While I’m not aiming for a 12 in 12 challenge (concept as introduced from Soultamer Gaming), because -finishing- or -completing- is off the table for the time being (that achiever-ism is what’s prompting some of the personal burnout in the first place, as I feared once raids got onto the table), I’m fully intending to play a lot more than 12 games this year in a whizz bang whirlwind tour, going as far as I feel like and then stopping when I don’t.

One of the first I found myself diving into is Endless Space, a 4x space exploration strategy game by Amplitude Studios.

It’s mostly kicking my ass.

I’m just persevering a lot longer than I did previously.

The initial hurdle were all the new Endless space-specific concepts and unfamiliar UI. It’s Civ-like enough to start, and then diverges sufficiently to be confusing and frustrating, needing to read every tooltip to figure out what this resource is, what that tech does and so on.

The AI is also pretty unexpectedly aggressive. I play this sort of strategy games mostly for the escapist narrative of slow inexorable global conquest. The darn Endless Space AI puts up much more of a fight than I’m used to, especially since I have no clue regarding optimal path strategies for planetary buildings, tech tree and ship design.

It’s been a very up-and-down journey of being pretty behind, getting ahead, thinking I’m getting ahead (but probably the other factions have caught up or surpassed me) and then getting brutalized out of nowhere and quitting for the night, resolving to reload 10-20 turns into the past and try a different strategy tomorrow. (Why yes, I do ‘cheat’ in this fashion.)

For example, I went to war with one faction on fairly equal tech terms and was invading their planets, when midway out of nowhere, they showed up with a bigger ship class and started blowing apart all my ships. (Cue the future past strategy of figuring out just how they got a bigger ship hull and doing it at the same time as they were. Not to mention, desperately trying to move beyond guessing what was a good ship build to actually effective ship designs.)

Then I run into another faction, who turn around and use yet another strategy of just tactically retreating and refusing to hold still to be killed.

W.T.F. I have never wanted an interdictor card to stop the offensive retreat so badly. It’s not that they could actually do anything to my ships, they just kept slipping off.

That same faction was busy using swarms of weak fleets consisting of one or two ships. Individually, they would get killed in a space battle, but since my two fleets could only be in so many locations at once, they kept putting up blockades on every planet and tying up my two fleets since they were only allowed to attack one fleet at a time (which then ran away). 

Bloody infuriating AI.

The turns seemed to happen simultaneously as well, so AI being AI, they moved all their fleets a lot faster than I could react, and instigating fleet battles interrupting my chain of thought, which I then had to deal with (whereupon brave sir AI bravely ran away.)

Cue the next day’s strategy of establishing my own blockading ships to create a very long border front so the zippy little things couldn’t get past the Great Wall of Tengu.

Oh yes, I’m playing space tengu, did I mention that?

Avian bipedal creatures. Check.

Asian/Japanese influences. Check.

The only difference is that where GW2’s tengu are isolationist, Endless Space’s Hissho are expansionist and military-minded. They get a Bushido Bonus where their whole empire gets happier when they win space battles or invade another planet.

It’s a good excuse to admire bird-shaped spacecraft.

Space battles are quite cinematic to watch and screenshot, though they do get a bit repetitive. The attacking fleet jumps in and both fleets close to range, exchanging broadsides like navy ships of old at three different ranges (long range, medium range and melee range.)

There are different weapons that are effective at different ranges, that have to be preset and designed onto your ships beforehand. It’s not at all obvious which is better than another, unless you sit down to patiently read all the tooltips, calculate numbers, look up guides telling you non-stated numbers like how armor is calculated or how many rounds there are in each phase and so on.

This does put a bit of a initial damper on immediate success and constitute a learning curve. Especially since the numbers have apparently changed over time from one version of the game to the next, so you’re never quite sure if what you’re reading up still applies.

Missiles. Missiles are scary to watch when they drift towards my fleet. They take about three rounds to hit, so it’s a tense wait to see just how many get past one’s defenses.

My first game is likely to wind down by this weekend.

After plenty of reloading, I managed an Expansionist Victory by methodically exterminating the Pilgrims faction – hey, they declared war on me first! I had a peace treaty going with them while I was reducing the number of Horatio clones (essentially a whole faction of bald mesmers who think only their likeness should spread across the galaxy) to a more reasonable number.

The Horatio gracefully surrendered with a cease fire, offering me two planets, and I let them live, while the dastardly Pilgrims broke their peace treaty and declared war (on me!) with their ship swarm. Genocide is the only reasonable response to this sort of unwarranted aggression.

I’m still continuing with the game, even after the victory, since I haven’t completely annihilated all of the Pilgrim planets yet.

As usual, the surprisingly feisty AI continues to surprise. Just as I think I’m finishing up with this one faction, the other faction in the tiny spiral galaxy – previously assumed cowed into submission – has launched fleets of the largest ship class at my planets and we’re at war again.

Since I ignored the tedium of ship design several tens of turns back and was just slowly moving my monster fleet from planet to planet swallowing up the pilgrims, this calls for yet another reload the next time I sit down to play, some invested non-fun time making my own largest ship class designs, and more careful guarding of my borders before a repeat incident occurs.

I’m not sure if I like Endless Space that much to play too many more games of it.

On the one hand, it is said that the factions are all pretty distinctive and utilize different strategies for victory. There’s, in fact, multiple viable paths to victory including peacenik options that look more achievable than the older Civ series style of 4x games (I tended to just go for tech victories after military dominating all other factions in the world into submission.)

Endless Space feels crunchier and more strategic. As in, if you like a game where you constantly have to be sure you’re picking the optimal right moves to progress ahead and always stay alert and have a challenge, it can probably do that for quite a while (until you master every single nuance, repeat stuff in the right order and figure out exploits to consistently foil the AI, that is.)

On the other, it’s not exactly what I personally like in a 4x. Having to save and reload or get my butt kicked because I didn’t think 20 moves ahead is not exactly conducive to relaxing fun being an unstoppable conqueror or casual empire-building.

I might see if I can tweak down the difficulty levels and try a larger sized game for my next go, I was crammed in one arm of a tiny spiral map with two other factions for my first learning game and lebensraum was definitely an issue, especially when you have no clue what you’re doing, leading to the computer AI colonizing all the things first.

We’ll see. I might get distracted with Endless Legend next, which was also something I was champing at the bit to play and prompted a Winter Steam sale purchase.