Lurker's Lair

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A long time tradition in the original Elder Scrolls forum kept alive by The Hall of Torque through the years.  Don't lurk, post!

smells like a new forum lurk

I wish more of my friends were still active. If nothing else, more active guildmates would help a lot with upgrading guild hall stuff. It's just 2 of us now and that one friend of mine has RL stuff keeping her from being on as much lately.

At least the daily Dry Top stuff gives me reason to keep going, whether or not I plan on doing much else beyond dailies and all. During that time, the group I'm doing it with has a good time together. It's more like we're just chatting and cracking up, and the events across the map and getting stuff done and looting things is just a bonus.

That, and for a while now, I've had suspicions that 1 or 2 other girls that are regularly there might have a crush on me but are just too shy to say anything.

In other news, I've been watching some Fallout-related videos of people doing ridiculous challenges and objectives, some of which end up being really comical. Like, a gunner farm using cages to have gunners that get released into a death trap to then loot them, go to town to sell the stuff, wait for more to get into the cages, expand the cages, etc. It ended up with over 50 of 'em at once.

* lurk *

It's finally Summer but only a few days at a time, like right now. Then it rains and temperatures drop to about room temperature again, as a high point in the afternoon. People are fleeing the country in droves to get scorched in the sun by the Mediterranean or something, if they have the time and money. A typical Dutch Summer then. 

As for gaming, I'd like to get into submarine sims again since I had fun with Silent Service 2 in the 1990s, but my priorities are elsewhere. Too little time in a day. I'll just log into GW2 and do some inventory maintenance, and maybe even do some gameplay with one of my lower-level chars, just to get back into it.

sweltering lurk

I got into Project Zomboid recently. It's basically The Sims 1 but with surviving a zombie apocalypse thrown in. Granted, it's still being developed and we already know there's a batch of new content coming in the near future that will do things and add more to the game, but even as it is, it's pretty good. The game world is huge, and that's just looking at what's currently actually on the map, and there's still a bunch of areas that don't have anything yet.

I'm playing with debug and cheats enabled because I'm kinda doing my own story bit with it. My character has the veteran occupation, and I'm playing it like she's still an active soldier in the hot zone, doing similar to the Decision games, a lone soldier trying to take back and secure areas from the endless hordes. I started in West Point, which was apparently the worst mistake ever for a new player, but because of how I'm doing things, it hardly matters. Her personal residence, and then certain spots in each particular town are fortified. Muldraugh has a full base, but that was too much work really so for the rest, it's just smaller outposts, but they're still safe from the zombies as they all have perimeter fences and the settings are so the zombies can't destroy player-made constructions. They'll just keep futilely making a racket at the fence lines until I feel like dealing with them.

Her name is Jessica Walker, a reference to the same char name I used in Last Stand: Union City that came up through random generation that I thought was nice enough. All the rest of this is just personal storyline stuff, since the game has no means of tracking any of it. She's a Lieutenant, directly leading Cobra Squad ( Quake reference ) of Gorgon Platoon, which is part of Amazon Company. I'm still working on the rest. There's not a whole lot to work with so I gotta get creative on my own and fit it into Knox County, Kentucky in an alternate 1993 timeline.

In the future, when NPCs are added, and depending on how they work and everything, I might make it out like some of them are part of her unit. It could be really fun, but that's likely a long ways off.

* lurk *

Next April will be the 20th birthday of Guild Wars, so I thought I'd download it again and have a look at my old account. It looks quite dated now of course, but funnily enough there are lots of people revisiting the game these days, or maybe they never really left. Going back to pre-Searing Ascalon is really nostalgic, I had a character still in pre on my second account but unfortunately that one was on a no longer existing email address, so I lost it, and my primary account only has level 20 chars that have been there and done that. Maybe I'll just create a new one for nostalgia's sake.

20 years of lurk

I did that Wayfarer special quest the day before the 3-day headstart for GW2 to get a free tormented weapon as a final HoM addition. I told my guild and alliance friends that I'd see them in GW2, and after I logged off that time, that was it. I never looked back. Unfortunately, I only got to keep in touch with 2 friends into it, and neither of them really play anymore that much, if at all. Everyone else, I have no idea.

Been busy with the release of Janthir Wilds. Overall, it's good, but there's some drawbacks to certain things, depending on what all you wanna do. The warclaw being unlockable through the story is great. It's the only mount I otherwise didn't have access to, and it's pretty versatile. Having spears for land across all classes is iffy because they all function differently. I use one now instead of a greatsword but I still main the dual pistols on my guardian. It's a huge spike weapon but the cooldown leaves me auto-attacking with a really crappy attack skill until I can fire off the combo again, so it's basically a more extreme version of what I had, but it makes for a great opener, doing a heavy damage combo then switching to my guns from there, etc.

I haven't gotten around to decorating my homestead yet. Right now it's just the one-stop node farm of choice since I can use the collection boxes and do 5 minutes of farming nodes in about 30 seconds. Because I had the deluxe version, I got the eldritch tools and because of them changing them post-launch, I got free glyph selection boxes to put in the collection boxes, which makes them harvest their respective nodes with the same bonus as my actual gathering tools, since I gave each box the same glyph I have on the respective tool.

I'm curious where they're gonna go with it all as they release more of the expansion each quarter. Hopefully they'll keep the momentum going that they started with because they did pretty good, IMO, and we could potentially see some mysteries finally get solved.

* lurk *

I saw a nice and positive review of Janthir Wilds on YouTube which got me thinking I might even get it, although I skipped Soto, the previous expansion, simply because this new one has new landmass to explore. But I can wait, if I go back into GW2 I should at least finish the Icebrood Saga first which I'm halfway through in with my guardian and I really feel I should finish it sometime before doing any new content.

ice cold lurk

I like having all the expansions. Yeah, there's been a lot of criticism for SotO but I happened to like it. I like the Wizard's Tower aesthetically, and the whole society of sorcery with the wizards and their experiments with magic kinda fits what I wish there was more of in say, Skyrim's College of Winterhold mages guild, etc.

I'm not looking for what new places we go in the expansions so much as what we can take from them. I do a daily run of Dry Top with a group of other regulars, and we're getting T6 maps consistently now. Sure, Janthir Wilds has some good locations and all, which is great on its own, but I also like that I can take my warclaw and spear into the rest of the game. SotO gave us weapon mastery in place of another set of elite specializations, and rift hunting weeklies gave people doing rifts reason to go back to older maps depending on where they were that week.

We still got more to come with JW though. What we have now is just the initial launch, and there's 3 more quarterly releases to go before it's finished. Masteries will be expanded on, new map stuff to explore will be added, and of course the story will continue. I can't remember for certain but I think there's 1 more expansion planned at least too, before we hit a finale. There's no telling what we'll get there.

* lurk *

I have my second Guild Wars account back! I dug up the boxes with the discs I bought back in 2007 (no download-only back then) and they included the cards with the verification codes. I submitted a ticket to restore it, providing the codes and the character names as well as a new email address to attach to it, and now I can access it again! Great!

It turns out I got further with the 8 chars on that account than I thought, I simply hadn't made a lot of screenshots to record their progress like I did before. It wasn't just Factions either, I added Prophecies and Nightfall as well back then. My Canthan warrior was in Lion's Arch after finishing the Factions campaign, I got all of the heroes from Nightfall, and my other chars were all over the place in various campaigns, with one halfway through the Prophecies missions. And one little level 8 ranger was still in pre-Searing Ascalon where she'll stay permanently.

I'll have to get used to the old interface again as well as all the other stuff that's so different from GW2, but that's fine. I had to turn the resolution down from my monitor's native one because the panels looked tiny even at the Large setting. Back in 2006 I started the game on 800x600, can you imagine?  There's still lots to explore for these chars, as opposed to the ones on my main account who have all been there and done that, so it should be fun rediscovering the game like this. I'm looking forward to it!

revisiting lurk

Heh, yeah, I ended up doing all the stuff on all my chars. All the campaigns, got all the heroes, etc. The only real difference was some achievement based stuff, like legendary defender which required getting maximum rewards across all the missions, and mapping the overall world. I did ones like that those just on my main char. I still didn't do everything though. Once I got the last few HoM points so all the item rewards for GW2 were unlocked, I was good. To this day I still haven't used any in-game titles, so none of those ever really mattered to me. GW1 was different because of Nightfall and EotN with Lightbringer and the faction titles providing bonuses for certain things.

I'm still convinced in GW2 we'll see Menzies at some point. Certain plot points have opened the door to the possibility and we've had a few teaser things to make sure we never totally forgot about him, and he's still a loose end that was never addressed. It would certainly be interesting to finally see that, get an in-depth look into the Shadow Army, etc.

* lurk *