Crazy, freaky, scary

So, I went off a bit yesterday about how frustrating it is that my carpenter never gets any skillups.  All of my other tradeskillers are fine, but the carpenter just can’t seem to get skills to save his life.  Each level, I would fall further and further behind.

I log on last night to blast out another work order because completing 1 would give me another level.  When I started, my sculpting skill was 82 with a level cap of 165.  For weeks, I was averaging about 1 skill up for every 50 or so crafting sessions.  Last night, before I had completed my 12 feyiron sconces, my sculpting skill was maxed out.

Either that was an amazing coincidence, there was some issue with tradeskilling that just happened to get fixed or (/em peers into the corners) someone from SOE was peaking at this site.

I don’t favor the last.  In fact, I just say it to be silly.  Even if someone did happen to read this and look into the issue, there is little chance that they would have had the time to fix it so quickly.

Coincidence or not, though, I am appreciative of the fix.  It is nice to be able to craft items in less than 7 minutes per attempt.

So happy over the fix I was last night that I crafted the begeezus out of carpenter and ran myself out of my current tier supplies.  Guess it’s time to go harvesting again.

At the conclusion of that crafting session, I set off again to attempt to hit 59.  I have been sitting at 92% of level since Sunday night.  The abridged version is that I am still not 59, but I am slightly closer.  I think I logged off at 96% last night.  I am still just so freaking sleepy that I can’t keep my eyes open once I sit down at the PC.

I did get to play around with the particle effects setting some last night and I did actually find a setting that resulted in my video card cooking along like a champ.  Unfortunately, that setting also caused the ground-spawn shinies to completely disappear and I had to declare “hell no” on that.  I figure this weekend I’ll completely reload the box and see if there is a change with a fresh load.  If not, I may just go back to my old video card and write this up as a fairly expensive failure.  Given time, I could probably fix it, but I am just not motivated to.  After spending 8 to 12 hours every day working on computer equipment, I simply don’t want to have to worry about it when I get home.

I also need to do some research this weekend.  Last weekend, I paid to move my original EQ2 toon from my original server to my current server.  The reasons for doing that were beyond silly, but they were enough for me.  Where things get even sillier, however, is that he was a wizard and I have already created another wizard on my main server who is higher level than my original.  I certainly don’t need 2 wizards on the same account.

I’ve been thinking I might run the betrayal quest to see if it will let me change his class to warlock at the conclusion.  I know that the game allows you to do that if you play like a monk and switch to Freeport since Freeport doesn’t have monks.  But, since both goods and evils have wizards, I’m not sure if the game mechanic will allow for a class change.  I hate to delete him simply because he was a day 1 toon… which means that I have things in his inventory, bank, and equipped that are no longer available in the game.  None of it is valuable or even nice.  It is just a nice nostalgic throw-back to the original game.

In other news, I went to a Chinese buffet for lunch and I think I’m going to explode… or pass out… or pass out and then explode.  Someone wake me up at 5 please.

So much hate… /em bursts into flames

I had every intention of getting home last night and finishing up level 58.  Didn’t happen.

The first little derail came in the form of me passing out on the couch almost the second I walked in the door.  I knew I was tired, but geez.

I woke up around 8:30 and debated just going straight to bed, but decided to go ahead and log on to try to bust out that level.  Enter derail #2.

I ran my normal gauntlet of logging on the various alts first to check auctions and to tradeskill a bit.  I love tradeskilling, but I can’t do marathon sessions.  So, I generally spend a little bit of time at the beginning of my play session on each character.  I may not make a full tradeskill level, but at least I am moving forward each day. 

I kind of have to alter that approach every once in a while when my various tradeskillers catch up to each other in level.  Right now, both my carpenter and my jeweler are in their 30’s, so they need many of the same components.  When that happens, I just focus on one until they reach the next tier.  The smart money would be on working my jeweler first since jewelers make the adepts for scout classes and my dirge could definately use them, but I always work the carpenter first.  Why?  Because.  How’s THAT for an answer.

I had already made all of the recipes my carpenter has for this level, so it was either do the slow grind for 2% per completion or do some tradeskill writs for the exp bonus at the end.  I ran a normal work order first where I had to crank out 12 feyiron sconces and then decided to try my hands at a rush order.

Here is where my tradeskilling is pissing me right the feck off.  Every tradeskiller I have maxes out his skill points within the first few minutes of reaching a new level… usually on the first 1 or 2 combines.  Not my carpenter though.  Not by a long shot.  His current max skill in artestry or sculpting or whichever skill it is that carpenters use is 165.  His current skill level is 82.  I did 73 combines last night and got 1 skillup… and I was a button-mashing, special-firing fool.  1 skill up.

The end result of that is that every crafting session update results in a massive drop in the durability if I am not constantly mashing buttons firing off specials.  Of course, madly mashing buttons and firing off specials slows down the whole creation process.  My rush order called for me to make 6 paintings of a stone building in 7 minutes.  It took me 6 minutes to complete the crafting session on attempt #1 because all I was doing was fighting the durability drops.

By the time I declared that tradeskill session a heart-felt “piss off,” I was in a borderline cranky mood.  I was sleepy and my skill-ups weren’t playing fair and I wanted to bite something.

I logged on the dirge to bust out the rest of my level.  I was at 92%, so it shouldn’t have taken long.

I ran off to The Sinking Sands to finish a writ I had there and then thought I would try the next from the Peacock series questline.  To cap off the level, I planned on hitting The Pillars of Flame and completing a quest I had there.

I landed in SS, jumped on the carpet, and immediately started getting graphical lurches… and I was PISSED.  I thought I had gotten all of that crap fixed.  I kept thinking, “When you drop $300 on a video card and upgrade from 256 meg of video memory to 640 meg of video memory, you would THINK the performance would improve… not degrade.”

Long story short, I didn’t do shit.  Once the carpet ride was over, I called back to Qeynos and logged off.  I hit the EQ2 boards and read through some technical forums.  I found Sony’s official list of supported video cards and found my new card safely on the list.  I followed Sony’s link to the latest and greatest drivers and started the download only to realize that it was the same driver I installed the other night.  Finally, I hit nVidia’s forums… and discovered that thousands of other EQ2 players have run into the same problems with this same video card.

My fault for not researching more.

As it turns out, nVidia insists that their driver is fully designed for running EQ2 and is pointing their finger at Sony.  Sony is insisting that the fault lies with nVidia and is pointing in their direction.  They are both maniacally waving their fingers at the other and screaming, “Yo’ fault” and doing their best to pretend that they have done everything in their power to resolve the issue.

From what I read, however, there are some work arounds.  You can turn all particle effects off for one.  I think that will probably resolve the issue I’m having because I don’t have any problems at all when I’m running around on one of my alts.  As soon as I get the dirge on, who is constantly surrounded by particle effects because of his song buffs, I start having issues.

So, be warned.  If you are debating building a new machine or upgrading an existing machine, the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS Extreme is probably not your best choice if you are an EQ2 player.  Until whoever is at fault (be it SOE or nVidia) mans up and admits that they are the ones at fault, this card will have issues for some.  Some people report no problems at all, but this card seems to be the problem child with EQ2.  I would just return the card, but the one company in the equation that I can honestly say is NOT at fault here is TigerDirect.  No reason that they should pay the penalty for SOE and/or nVidia being hard-headed.

Besides, beyond all of that, the card is freaking amazing.  Even the google homepage looks better now.  It’s just too bad that the one thing I bought it for seems to be the achilles’ heel.  Still, what kind of an IT geek would I be if I just admitted defeat?  It’s time to get nasty on the little electronic bastard and see if I can jury-rig it into submission.

On an unrelated note, if you don’t usually read Brackish Waters, you should definately go check it out today.  Very interesting read.

Brain like an etch-a-scetch

Off and on throughout the morning and early afternoon, I keep coming back to this page and just staring at it trying to think of something interesting (or pointless) to write about.  Ideas have come and gone… mostly things that would be interesting to me and no one else, things I have written about very recently, or just things that I could say and be done with in one sentence or less.

I’ve been very tired this week.  I’m not sure why, but I am just not sleeping worth a damn.  When I am awake, I haven’t been feeling very well… and that all has been punctuated by a very strange recurring pain that I have had in my lower back for about the last week.  The logical part of me knows I should probably go to the doctor, but the logical part of my personality has long been supressed by my “Pfft.  I don’t give a shit” side.

EQ2 has been a lot of fun lately… if a tad frustrating.  I enjoy taking my time to level and explore and I like breaking up my time with tradeskilling and just doing nothing in general.  While nothing has been openly voiced, I get the feeling that there are those within my guild who are becoming frustrated with my lack of urgency at reaching raiding capacity and level.  I’m not sure what they are so concerned about.  Whenever I finally reach the appropriate level, I’m just going to be cannon fodder.  I don’t have any gear that will foster even a remote chance of survival and all of my combat arts and songs are apprentice 2 level at the max.  I think they forget that I haven’t been playing for years, so when they rattle off solutions like, “Buy more gear and spell upgrades,” they just assume that I have the money to do so.

The faint tuggings for SWG are still present.  One of the things that I enjoyed about that game was that no one had any expectations from anyone else.  The high end game was purely focused around PvP… a gaming element that I absolutely despise.  There are no raids in that game, so if you don’t PvP, the game turns into finding some way to entertain yourself once you are done leveling.  Sound boring?

Well, it got that way which is why I quit playing it.  Still, the ‘no expectations’ part of that game had a strong appeal for me.  It was a nice change of pace from the constant raiding that I left behind in EQ1.

The last couple of nights, I have found myself eyeing my consoles a bit and debating spending some time playing some of those old games.  It has been such a long time since I have even turned on a console that I’m not even sure how I have them hooked up any longer. 

When I mention my consoles, I’m talking OLD consoles.  I have an original Playstation 1, an N64, and a Sega Genesis.  I have no interest in the newer consoles.  I see them and they just don’t appeal to me.  I play them at a friend’s house and I just don’t understand what is so fun about them.  The biggest mystery to me is the whole Guitar Hero or Rock Band phenomenon.  Personally, I just don’t get what is even remotely fun about those.  I have tried them both and was just bored to tears by both.

Maybe it is because I have done the real thing.  I spent several years as a professional musician playing in a band and traveling from town to town, city to city.  I’ve played in front of crowds ranging in size from 10 people to several thousand.  Holding a toy guitar in my hand and mashing color-coded buttons?  I think I would have more fun breaking out one of those old Simon games that were so popular when I was a kid.

Anyway, funky mood today leading to a lack of anything to say.  Maybe I’ll actually get some rest tonight and get back to my regular schedule of unimportant babbling.

An eternity in child years

When I was a child, I was obsessed with Star Wars toys.  I wanted to have them all and I would get the shakes whenever a new toy would come out that I didn’t have.  I would beg and plead and promise my soul to the evil demons of household chores if I could just have this one toy right now.

The worst were the promotional toys.  Those were the special pre-release toys that would be featured in the next movie and all you had to do to get them was to send in so many proofs of purchase from other toys… and wait 4 to 6 weeks for delivery.

4 to 6 weeks?  I’ll freaking die before then!!!

Those weeks would pass by very slowly.  Every single day after mailing the proofs of purchase in, I would race home from school and shriek, “Did it come yet?”  With patience born of lots of alcohol, my mother would reply, “I just mailed them today.  You are going to have to wait.”

Day after day, I would impatiently wait and day after day, I felt the irrational disappointment that only a child can feel… that disappointment that tells you that you just simply aren’t going to make it through the waiting.  When I was a child, I could have forgotten to put clothes on in the morning if my mother didn’t remind me, but I never once forgot that I was waiting for a new toy to arrive.

That old feeling came back a bit recently.  The Sunday before Thanksgiving, I ordered a new video card.  My old card was probably still okay, but there were definately some struggles along the way.  If I would join a full group in EQ2 and everyone was firing off specials, I would literally miss the entire fight because I would lag out beyond the ability to move.  I can only imagine how bad it would get when I start raiding.

I could have just ordered the card with standard shipping and it probably would have arrived yesterday, but dammit… now that it is me who is paying the bills, I don’t want to wait!!!  So, I dropped an extra $20 for second day shipping.  That would have put it in my grubby little mits on Wednesday and I would have plenty of time to install it and tweak everything over Thanksgiving.

Except, there was a glitch.

I raced home from work on Wednesday and went straight to the complex office…

And they had closed early.

NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

So, I paid extra for shipping and STILL didn’t get the card until yesterday.  If it hadn’t been so bloody cold outside, I probably would have spent Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday camped out by the office with my face pressed to the glass looking for movement inside that would indicate someone had come in for something… someone who I could pester until they handed me my package.

After all that anticipation, I anxiously ripped open the box when I got home yesterday and immediately set to busting open my PC and getting it installed.  Once that was done, I jumped into the game……..

And saw no performance improvement whatsoever.

It was just like the time my new Boba Fett toy arrived with both of his arms broken off.

To be fair, I didn’t do much tweaking to the card.  I was anxious to get into the game, so I basically just popped the card in, removed the driver for the old card, and installed the driver for the new card.  I know better.  I didn’t check for driver updates or upgrades and I didn’t go through the card settings tweaking performance issues here and there.  I was impatient and I have a list of things to go through tonight when I am of more sound mind.

While I was installing the card and giving it a good test run, I had Shut Up!  We’re Talking #14 running on my other PC as I hadn’t heard it yet.  When I got into the game, I was mostly just running around harvesting nodes and jotting down notes about how the card was performing.  I was up on one of the islands in Kingdom of Sky at the time just looking around when I heard Darren name this site as the blog of the week.  Somewhat stunned, I turned my attention over to my second PC and rewound the pod cast a bit to be sure I had heard correctly…. and prompty ran off the edge of the island and fell to my death.

As I laughingly explained in guild chat what had happened, one of my guild mates said, “Dude.  Why didn’t you cast evac?  You had plenty of time before you died.”  “Because I didn’t think of it, smart ass.  Anyone else want to comment on my stupidity?”  What ensued was a good hour of abuse and general comments about my complete lack of intelligence.  As I sat there soaking up the abuse, I smiled to myself and thought, “Yes, I truly belong in this guild.”

For Darren, Aaron, Adam, and Mike, thank you for the kind words.  I was truly surprised to hear you mention this site just as I continue to be surprised day by day by the people who find their way here.  When I created this site, I really just did it for the benefit of a few friends that I used to talk games with in e-mails.  As our schedules have become more and more hectic, we all have less time to swap gaming stories in e-mails.  So, I just thought I would create this site and write my thoughts down here and they could just visit any time they wanted to find out what I was up to.  I didn’t actually think anyone other than those few would even find their way here.

Thanks for the nod guys… and thanks to those who come here and read and suffer through my often plodding and random thought processes.

Holiday black and blues

You know, it really sucks being the favorite charity case for everyone I know.  I’m not sure what part of, “No thanks.  I really don’t like Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving food” is oh so terribly hard to understand, but I have to go through this same shit every year.  Usually, the end result is that I end up caving just to shut people up and go to someone’s house for dinner because, “If you don’t like turkey, you have never had a good one.  I promise you… you will love the way I cook it.”  I then leave several hours later thinking, “Yup, just another turkey that tasted just like all the others” and fighting desperately to not throw up for the next 24 hours.

Not this year.  I flat refused everyone and ignored all the hurt looks.

Not that my temporary freedom helped me much today.  “So, what did you end up having for Thanksgiving?”  “Oh, I had a hamburger for lunch and didn’t eat dinner.”  Seems like a perfectly close-ended statement to me, but making it has resulted in more than a dozen comments of, “Really?  You should have come over to our house.  Next year, you are coming for Thanksgiving so you won’t have to be alone.”

Umm, look.  Put away the puppy-dog eyes.  What that I just said makes you think that a hamburger isn’t exactly what I wanted?  If I had wanted to come to your house, don’t you think I would have accepted your original invite?  It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, but the last time I checked, there was not a law anywhere on the planet that says, “You must love turkey and gorge yourself on Thanksgiving.”  Ask me again next year and I’m likely to be rude about refusing this time.

In all of my years, I have actually enjoyed 2 Thanksgivings… and they were the 2 that I spent on my terms.  This year was one of those two.

Yet despite the fact that I spent the day exactly how I wanted to, suddenly everyone treats me like a 36 year old orphan… and it is pissing me off quite frankly.

Beyond all of that, things have been decently amusing the last few days.  I spent much of Thursday playing EQ2 with some interludes to watch some football and one to set a toe that I broke when I misjudged the doorway.  /sigh  Friday, I had to work all day and ended up falling asleep on the couch almost the minute I got home.  Saturday and Sunday were spent mostly playing.

Saturday, I did a full spectrum of things ranging from knocking out a couple of gray HQ’s to working on Peacock Club quests to heading off to the Breeding Grounds with my guild buddy.  While at the Breeding Grounds, I dinged 58 and hit AA #72.

Yesterday, I was having serious issues, but in talking with others, it seems it wasn’t just me.  Zoning took anywhere from 30 seconds to up to 12 minutes.  I quested for a while and even managed to complete a few, but many of the quests I am on require frequent zoning.  It got to where I would zone and just go to the other room and watch football until the next commercial.  Sometimes the zoning would complete by the time I got back and sometimes not.

Finally, I just got sick of it and parked my butt in a tradeskill instance and worked on crafting.

The final count for the weekend was decent though.  I hit 58 on my dirge and got 82% into that level.  I hit 2 AA’s.  I moved from his 2 room apartment in SQ to a 3 room house in SQ.  I leveled his armorsmithing from 20 to 27.  I leveled my (future) provisioner from 11 to 17.  I leveled my jeweler from 20 to 31 and leveled his combat level from 19 to 22.  I leveled my carpenter from 31 to 34.  And, in an act of pure weirdness, I server transferred my original day 1 character from Najena to Unrest to be with the rest of my toons.

Of course, I could have just deleted him and re-created him, but here is where I get truly strange.  I had claimed my pre-order statue and some painting on him and I didn’t want to lose either.  So, I paid the money to have him moved. 

It was really strange looking through all of his stuff again.  Everything he is equipped with and everything he had in inventory and in the bank are all items that no longer exist in the game.  Of course, it is all worthless, but it was kind of neat seeing it all again.  It just reminded me of my brief adventures at launch.

Of course, now I have another toon to tradeskill with.  Tailoring, here I come. 

The real life final count for the weekend wasn’t quite as good.  I broke at least 1 toe… maybe 2.  I haven’t fully decided on the second yet.  I slashed my left arm on a broken piece of wiring that was sticking out from the car port and I bruised my ribs when I lost my footing and slammed into the handrail on the stairs leading up to my apartment.

One of these days, I’ll learn how to walk in a way that doesn’t result in bodily injury.