Spouse Aggro

As I slowly get better at this whole “MMORPG Blogger” thing, I tend to notice patterns. There are certain constants that each new group of players, each new generation of players, will bring up on forums and websites everywhere. One of these constants is the study of subscription numbers.

Wrapped up in that study, in that fascination for some people, is the number of accounts made, website hits, or downloads downloaded.

I hadn’t had to read about the fascination for a while, thankfully, until Cryptic announced “1 million accounts.” Right away, all sorts of everyone began to scream (myself included) about the fact that this doesn’t mean one million players, or one million anything. In fact, it only represented one million total of something, something that Cryptic thought was worth adding up. Whenever I noted this, though, I made to sure to include “..but that is still impressive.”

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“Can you turn the lights up a bit? So I can see the audience better?” Check asked, motioning downward with his hand, palm down.

The glaring lights in his eyes dimmed somewhat, and the house lights came up a bit. He could see, clearly now, an audience of around 200 people sitting nervously. Some of them smiled but most sat with mouths closed, nervously avoiding eye contact. He hated that reaction, that nervous reaction. Too many times had it meant that the person was actually about to attempt something very wrong.  This audience had been hand-picked from a list of millions, though, over the last year. Everyone had been checked and double-checked.

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I live in Texas. And here in Texas, the most important holiday is the day that the Super Bowl airs on the television. I am not kidding. We see less traffic at the little store I work at on Super Bowl day than on Christmas Eve or on Easter. I speak of those two Christian holidays because any other religious holiday is looked at as some kind of fantasy, some silly child-hood fairy tale. So those two holidays are a good measuring stick for things like this.

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No, that's not me silly.

Here it is, 9:30 AM and I’ve already been up for about 3 hours. I have walked the dogs, fed all the animals and fixed myself some breakfast. Leala has decided to sleep late, so I am keeping pretty quiet.

I really enjoy this little job I have, working in this pet store. It’s not glamorous at all and the money isn’t anything much, but I constantly help people there and I constantly learn new things from customers and from the books I borrow off of the shelves. I have learned to never trust only one source, but to go to many many sources to gain a general knowledge about something. In the world of pets/animals, there is opinion and there is science, and sometimes opinion passed off as science.

But I won’t be at this job forever. Not only has my asthma become almost dangerously worse there, but I have to be honest with myself and say that I tend to move on from job to job anyway. I have done it my whole life, with very few constants remaining at home. Here they are, though:

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Download/listen HERE!

EXPLICIT?

Spouse Aggro

Friday Feb. 5th

The show you listen to today is the result of a couple of technical breakdowns. Our normal amazingly complicated recording device (the iPhone) confused us by cutting off our recordings. By the time we got done, we had gone over the same subjects a few times and were a little tired of talking about them.

It’s especially hard when the first conversation you had was a really good one.

Anyway, we take 3 questions from Sarc over at www.lagwar.com. Thank you Sarc, not only for the great questions, but for the brilliant formatting that allowed Beau to skip your entire email and get right to the questions. Kiddin.

We are happy to be back to the short episode. Those hour/hour and a half episodes can be terribly boring, at least to us. If I talk that long I will usually resort to connecting too many dots.

The music for today is by Santigold, a cool female singer/rapper type person. Go check her out.

Enjoy!

Send emails to spouseaggro at yahoo dot com.

Website found at spouseaggro dot com.

Twitter name: spouseaggro

Skype name: beauturkey

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The Turkeys

Denmark, CA: Indie video game developer Aventurine announced plans to collaborate with New Age genius John Tesh on the soundtrack for their upcoming new expansion that goes only under the single code word: “Glitter.”

“We got the Tesh, what can we say?” said Aventurine owner/head developer Tico Torres. “He’s going to be a perfect fit for our new player experience, which we announced recently.” Tico spoke proudly about the new up-and-coming changes to the new player experience for their hardcore PvP MMORPG called Darkfall.

“As we’ve mentioned before we’re happy to see an ever-increasing number of new players entering the game and we’re also about to introduce several initiatives and special offers to further increase these numbers.” Tico continued, beaming. “We’re introducing a new feature possibly as soon as the next patch which provides optional protection against player attacks to brand new players. This functionality is very limited and only lasts a few hours but it should be enough to allow someone logging into Darkfall for the first time to learn to control his character and to get his bearings while still having proper access to the live game. ”

Some of those features include a special “Welcome Basket” that can be claimed by any new account holder upon entering the game for the first time. Inside the basket the 19 year old man would find a battle-axe, some incense and a blank journal to keep track of his exploits. Also, the new player will find himself welcomed home by the sound of glittering silver trumpets every time he logs in.

The changes are not without controversy, however, as the official forums for the game hosted post after post of poorly worded threats and entire paragraphs that warned, in detail, of what we think is death. Or disco, we can’t tell.

We reached The Tesh for comment, on break from his whirl-wind 50 city/2 year “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em” world tour:

While the exact date of release for this new expansion is not known, many fan-sties are estimating it’s arrival some time in the spring.

[...]

(This blog was fired off after a few incidents. Firstly, my calling out of a wanna-be “shock-jock” that spent his time yelling about how bad a game was while he played the game. Then, a run-in with a community member that thinks herself as some kind of representative of every group out  there ( “You can’t take away my gay card just because I’m married!” ) and then a recent line-in-the-sand drawn after a guild mate of my wife’s decided that his podcast was somehow funny when really it was just bland and unoriginal for using certain naughty words. Also, another member of my wife’s new guild used the name “Mypenus” for his character and became angry after someone reported him, as though the possibility of finding your 13 year old daughter chatting with some weirdo named “Mypenus” in a childrens game should have been just shrugged off.)

There are, needless to say, some very creepy people online. In fact, I would wager that right now there are people that I think I know pretty well that are some very creepy people. I would like to think that I have pretty well-equipped creep radar, but let’s be honest and say that none of us truly know each other until we know each other.

We shouldn’t be surprised when someone turns out to be nuts, or when someone we thought as cool turns out to be…well, even more nuts.

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OK, maybe not the best. But still, I bet I got a few NGE ragers to at least read this blog!

It’s so cool to see the new updates arrive in my email every so often, but to be honest I never got that far in SWG levels. I explored a lot, flew in my space-ship a lot and played house a lot. Yep, house. As in “Where should I put this space couch hunny?” I played years ago before the NGE and after. The difference? It runs better now, has more options (even with taking away what it did) and still looks pretty darn good.

I happily downloaded the update and logged in to find all my confusing stuff, still sitting there confusingly. Just like in my re-visit to EVE, I had to make some goals fast or my wandering mind would get distracted by some other icon on my desk-top.

[...]

I finally gave in to the offer waiting in my email for the past month: “Return to EVE for 5 days!” I knew it didn’t sound like much, but almost every time I had returned I was pleasantly surprised at how nicely the game was coming along. This time was no different.

I logged into my 5 year old account. The first thing I wanted to do was to check a look at the new planet animations/textures. I sat and watched clouds form into swirling masses, and watched twinkling light on a few surfaces. It was very, very impressive. I had to take inventory of all the stuff I had from before and where it all was, and soon realized that not only had I spent/given away most of my 100’s of millions last time, but some of the items I had spent the money on either no longer interested me or were somewhere wayyy off into 0.0 space.

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Ah, Vanguard. What a long strange trip it’s been.

Thanks to Vanguard, I have discovered a new way of playing, a new of looking at games actually. I have always played a little bit differently, but Vanguard brought my playing to an entirely different level. I think it was a combination of perfect timing and finding a game that was attempting to do something different.

Despite any “controversy” over where the game was supposed to go and where the game went, the game still is. While there have been many changes good and bad to the game, players tend to forget that you can pretty much play any game in almost any way you want, including Vanguard. Each game out there does have it’s physical boundaries that your character cannot cross, but other than that these games of ours have a lot of choices that many players tend to ignore.

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Yep, it finally happened.

Just happily exploring along, minding my own business when AGGHHHH!!! some guy runs up to me and starts hacking me up. His name was red and he looked like he had on full armor. CHOP CHOP SLASH CHOP! and I was down. I didn’t even bother attacking back, this guy has has spent a good deal of his time learning how to chop someone up. Good for him.

So, what did I learn by getting murdered (leaving my wife, children and home unattended to, what a bastard!) by some crazed fellow in the middle of nowhere?

For the record, I had been ganked one time before (or was it twice?) last time I subbed to the game. This is the first time I had been murdered this time around. Second time killed, though, being that some kind of skeleton thing killed me a few nights before.

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If you follow me you know how much I love lists. To be honest they help me focus my attention on a subject and help me make my point (I tend to use conversation as performance art!) Even with sometimes missing things that I would have liked to include on the list, I enjoy the way that lists get my point across. I would rather have an incomplete list than a rambling mess any day.

A few blogs ago I talked about my top 7 skill-based games, (it was more like 9) so I decided to go after my top 5 favorite developers. I thought of this before, and we have discussed many of these developers many times on the show and through all sorts of places online, but let’s see if I can really make myself (using such strict criteria as “only 5″) get my love for these developers across this screen to you.

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I can see it now…..

“What? I thought you said EVE sucked Beau!”

“What’s wrong Beau, had to start lissenin’ to Nu Metal???”

Har har, yeh yeh. First of all, my return to EVE has shown me what it has always shown me since I first started my account in July of ‘05: That the game will hook ya, easily. And anyway, I have never said the game sucked, I have only called it a “sausage party” (which it is, with a 4 or 5 percent female population. If you went to a get-together and there were 100 people and only 5 of them were girls..you would call it a…..) and that the general population of the game likes Nu Metal bands like Godsmack and Tool.

[...]

I just received my press packet today, and boy am I excited! Now our crazy friends across the pond will be able to enjoy Mabinogi like I have. This time, though, they can talk about the game obsessively instead of me! You have to give this game a chance, and once you get used to the graphics they become quite charming.

The game is filled with more skill-based goodness than pretty much any game out there now, and they are always adding content/skills to learn. I’m happy that my EU friends can play it too.

Here is the official press release:

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The more games I play, the more tired I become of class-based games. Of course, I fault no one for enjoying a class or for enjoying playing a role in a group, but I am just not really one of those people. I say a lot of things regularly, and one of my favorites is “I would rather be weak and unique than powerful and a clone.”

Now, let’s be honest. Even within the most skill-based games in existence there are still boundaries and limits on what you can do. And even within a game that has many, many skills to learn it is still very possible to be a carbon copy of someone else. No game has the ability to let us be literally anything we wish, but some are getting close. Also it is important to note that even within games that have seemingly limitless bounds for character creation, players still find a way to create templates for “MAX DPS” or for perfect healing.

Still, I am love with any game that allows me to do what I want.

[...]

A pretty small tid-bit, but it is something. This is from the official forums:

Hello Players,

Thanks,
Acclaim Staff

[...]

If I see somewhere I think is cool looking, I want to be able to go there without much restriction. Darkfall is allowing me to do this, leaving annoying invisible boundaries or ridiculous level restrictions out of the game. While I might run into a dangerous critter that would stomp me in a second, it’s easy enough to sneak around and to (seemingly) avoid detection. Still, you’re not sure what the creature is or how powerful it is until you attack it so you need to tread carefully or be ready to run. I like this aspect of the game, and I love the fact that I have to use my gut instinct to avoid death as much as my skill.

As I have been traveling, I have been binding myself to whatever town I come across. This isn’t as much of an issue right now and especially not as much of an issue as in other MMO’s where stepping foot in the wrong area will send you right back to your proper place in the funnel. In Darkfall, even if I wind up in a town that is normally surrounded by really scary meanies, I can survive. Recently in one town I was visiting (the towns are pretty dull, though, with a few NPC’s that stand there and maybe a handful of players) I saw the mountains in the distance and told myself that I meant to go there.

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We talk about lot’s of on today’s show! Most of it….whining.

Download/Listen HERE!

We talk about the announcement of a new documentary about raiding called…wait for it…the Raid Movie. The makers of the film haven’t actually made anything but are asking for your money anyway.

We whine about STO and how we think it might not do very well.

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To make sure everyone is clear on what I am talking about, I am refering to the “Return to Fallen Earth for 10 days” thing.

You know, you get an email that asks you to check out the game again, free, for 10 days. LotRO is doing one right now. The problem with this was that in the email there was no mention of “you need to have an account that has been inactive for 60 days or you will not get the free 10 days.“  Here, look at the email and you can see for yourself. IN fact, it is surprisingly void of much information at all! (The email was dated in my inbox which is based on Central Time as Jan 21st 12:18 PM.)

I have been back and forth with the customer service department, and soon after my first few contacts they put a forum post up on the forum, explaining the promotion. I know, I know…they should have had this information IN THE ORIGINAL EMAIL. (The forum post was posted at 6:56 PM the same day. Not sure what time zone.)

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The original Immersion rules can be found here.

I decided a long time ago that Darkfall would be a great game for the Immersion Project, a role-playish type of project in which I limit my access to information in order to make myself feel more connected to the world. When I say role-play, I am not just talking about “How art thou?” and not talking about playing a character other than me, but playing my character as though he was me. Or at least a person with my level of intelligence, slightly below average looks and ways of doing things.

Pretty!

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