A Month of Valheim

It has been about a month since I first posted about Valheim.  I hadn’t heard about it until Ula mentioned it in our Discord.  Apparently it was on the front page of Steam quite prominently, but I only open up Steam when I mean to go play a specific game or check out the summer or winter sales, so that wouldn’t have caught me.

Valheim on Steam

But Ula’s mention got me to take a look and, on seeing the price and overwhelming favorable reviews, I decided to give it a shot.

And now, about a month later, it is the game that eats up all my free time.  So how did I get there?

I have long said that I cannot make myself play a game I don’t enjoy.  Likewise, I often have to examine why a given game is suddenly my favorite to figure out why I keep playing that particular title rather than something similar.  And, as I mentioned straight out of the gate, Valheim puts together elements that are very familiar from other titles.  Critics of the title like to point out that there is really nothing new about the game, that you could find its features in a range of survival titles.  And I agree, there is nothing new under the sun.  But that goes for just about any title, so comparing features is too simplistic. Instead, it is which features in what measure that I think tips the balance for Valheim.

So, this is what I think is working in the game’s favor for me.

• Story and Sandbox Combined

Sandbox is always a dream for devs, as the right sandbox will keep players engaged and playing without the need to constantly add new content.  The world cannot go unattended, but the devs won’t see the game die off if they go a couple months without a new shiny for players to chase.

But too much sandbox can be a burden in itself.  The inevitable, “What do I do now?” issue.  As much as I have enjoyed Minecraft in the past, I whenever I finished some goal, like a rail line many kilometers long, I would plateau and stop playing because I had to find another goal on my own.

Valheim has a set of goals, objectives the game has set for you.  But they are not immediate, WoW-quest sort of goals.  Valheim doesn’t have something for you to do this minute.  The story has a pretty light touch on your day to day activity.  It is always there, there is that henge for the heads of the bosses sitting by the world spawn point, and some clues to guide you out in the wild, but the game is in now hurry to move you along.  So much of what I do is in furtherance of the over-arching tale, but I am not going down a checklist or escorting some NPC or anything like that.  I am often exploring, or gathering, or building, or crafting, or cooking, or doing whatever at my own pace.  There is always an outpost to be built, a base to be upgraded, and spots on the map that have yet to be uncovered.  I feel like there is always something to do and often end up saying I’m going to stop at hour X, and then find myself still going well past my set end point because I kept doing just “one more thing.”

• Co-op PvE

This is a big duo for me.  I have very little interest in random sandbox PvP.  Even as an EVE Online player, I put my PvP efforts into group efforts that defend our space or attack some foe.  Randomly ganking passers by… or, more likely in my case, being ganked by random passers by… holds no interest for me.  So having a PvE sandbox was a draw.

And, of course, the co-op aspect was big too.  My second post about the game was about the instance group setting up so we can play together.  The shared experience in a sandbox is a big drawn for me.  We all have different play schedules and some of us are on more than others, but we can all get together for big boss fights or go off on our own time to harvest materials to help build out the base or keep our food supply robust.

I probably wouldn’t be as interested in the game were it not for this option.

• Danger in the World

I don’t die a lot.  I went several days without a death the past week.  But I am careful in my exploration because I know I can get in over my head out in the wilds, like that time I wandered into the edge of a plains biome and got the Deathsquito surprise.

And even when you’re back in your base, danger can come find you, as Fergorin found out when he ended up having to face multiple troll attacks on our bases.  You cannot just wander about the world in daylight without keeping an eye out.  The game won’t let you have it all your own way.  Going out to mine copper in a black forest biome always means keeping your eye open, as the sound of that pick seems to attract hostile mobs.  There are few milk runs and there always seems to be a troll around the corner when you are at your most vulnerable.

• Simple Progression

I was a bit skeptical about upgrading my gear from trollhide armor, which gave me that sneak bonus, to bronze armor.  I’d lose my extra sneak and get slowed down as well, all for what seemed like not much of a boost in armor protection.  The upgrade values for armor or weapons are small, but they seem to add up.  At one point, back in leather armor, I would run from a group of three greydwarfs.  When I had bronze armor and a fully upgraded club, I would take on three but was very wary of the greydwarf brute as I wandered the black forest.  And trolls were to be kited with a bow.

Now, in iron armor with an iron mace the brute no longer terrorizes me and, once I get in a couple of open shots with a bow, I can stand toe to toe with a troll and finish him off.

Likewise, the swamp was a terror on our first run, where five of us together managed to wipe twice just getting in and out of one crypt.  Now I go solo into the swamp, looting crypts and hauling back iron scrap.  I need to take some care.  I have health and poison resist meads to hand and make sure my hit points and stamina are through food… because there is food progression too, so we’re past berries and mushrooms and onto sausages… and I know I can still get in over my head, so I watch my surroundings.

And now that we’re gearing up to iron I have started making some frost resist potions, because in the cold of the mountains you will freeze without them until you have the right gear.

Meanwhile, back at our main base in the meadows, greydwarf brutes now show up on their own, rather then the usual greylings.  And then there are the raids.  The game progresses its dangers as you progress you abilities.

• Light and Solid

I have run into a few bugs.  Once in a while I have to restart the client because I suddenly cannot open chests or use the forge.  Something has glitched and needs a refresh.  Likewise, I have also seen some bugged mobs, like the invisible deer, which I could only see because it climbed out of the water and was dripping wet.  But for the most part the game is solid, much more so than one might reasonably expect given some of its early access competition.

And it runs very well on my machine.  It is lighter and faster than WoW Classic.

• Right Game at the Right Time

I think this might be the main reason we’re playing this now.  We have, from time to time, run off to play Minecraft or some other title as a group when our current MMORPG had grown tiresome.

Valheim hit just at the right moment.  Over in WoW Classic we are, as a group, level 59 and have gone through most of the five player instances.  We still have some work to do, but after 18 months of being focused on old Azeroth, we were apparently ready for something a bit different.  If Valheim had launched two months into WoW Classic, I doubt we would have noticed, even if the game had sold twice as many copies.  There is always something popular at any given moment and I can pretty pretty oblivious to that sort of thing.  Had Ula not mentioned it, I certainly would have missed it.

And, of course, the game scratches a lot of itches for us, as I have detailed above.  We can play together in our own world at our own pace with something of a division of labor, dabbling in as much building, exploring, harvesting, farming, or whatever as we like, all while still working towards the next big boss.

The March Update Brings Market and Moon Changes to EVE Online

But perhaps not the moon changes one expected, among other things.

First though, what did downtime bring us?

There were the market changes, which I went over in detail in a previous post.

It is ADVANCED Broker Relations… I didn’t go to Advanced Broker school to be called Mister

Aimed at undercutters and market bots, updating orders now comes with a more significant charge that escalates the more times you change.  The skill Margin Trading has been changed to Advanced Broker Relations and will mitigate this change somewhat, but it still will sting if you update a listing a few times.

Also on the list for this month is module tiericide again, this time for capacitor boosters.  As in the past, these modules have be reworked to make more sense to somebody and fit into the pattern of module changes that have gone before.  Some day all the modules will be named and sized in a way that seems logical, though I doubt that day is today.

And, as mentioned in a recent EVE Pulse video, Moons will are getting a graphical upgrade, getting higher resolution textures and upgraded shaders.  They will look less like giant space potatoes close up.

Then there are a few things that did not come with the update that have been discussed recently.

First, there were the needlejack filaments, but we got those at the end of February, so they are covered.  People are able to yeet their fleets again.

Then there were the frigate escape bays, a feature set to be added to battleships.  But that was slated for the end of March, so it was only the rosiest of optimist that expected to see them today.

Finally, there was the change up to moon mining yields, the next stage of the mineral starvation plan to “fix” the New Eden economy.  With the February updates we got a radical reduction in asteroid density and the mineral contents of those remaining rocks.  Shortly after that hit, we got a warning in a dev blog that moon mining was next on the hit list.

I fully expected that change to hit today.  The moons of Delve, and in the off-Delve colonies, have been running on seven day fracking cycles to maximize the mineral takes before this change hit… and it didn’t hit.

I don’t know if that means that CCP has changed their mind or just wasn’t ready to implement that today.  Or maybe they did and they just didn’t put it in the patch notes.  Has anybody checked their moons today?

Anyway, it seems like a light update.  But CCP will do what it does, and there is always that Team Talos stuff on its own two week schedule.  Today’s extended downtime is over, the update is live, and the patch notes are available for you to read.  The general feedback thread still seems more interested in the red dot feature… or, more specifically, the ability to opt out of it… but that is EVE Online.

Return of the Ring – LOTRO Up Again

Hello! Thank you for your patience during our extended downtime. All indications are that things are on schedule. Thank you for being here!

LOTRO Twitter, March 6, 8:35am

Famous last words?

Standing Stone Games had been reminding everybody via various sources, including Twitter, that both Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online would be down pretty much all of Wednesday, March 6th, for what was described as “data center work.”  Time to muck with the servers I guess.  And, as the quote above indicates, hours into the work things looked good.

And then things began to unravel and the time to complete started to creep forward.  Midnight of the first day moved to 5am of the next.  That became 11am, and then 5pm, and soon the time had moved into Friday and began to threaten weekend play time.

These things happen.  If you have a server farm and bring all the machines down… machines that have been up and running sometimes for years at a stretch… some small percentage are going to fail when you go to bring them back up.  And that leaves out any changes you might intend to make to them or the infrastructure while things are down.

A computer looks almost like an appliance, nicely packed away in a box.  But it is not.  It isn’t even close.  An appliance is a serious of parts… and even software… designed specifically to work together and do a very specific set of tasks.

Your computer is disguised chaos, a thousand points of failure flying in tight formation, hacked together from a bunch of components that mostly work together.  I’ve worked on the hardware end of things and I’ve had various suppliers show up to tell us that the part we use is being discontinued, but they have a replacement that is pin compatible and functionally the same… and then had that part stop production because it turned out that the old part was actually out of spec or our design only worked due to some unintended behavior of the part of some such and now we have to hire somebody to sit at the end of the line and hand solder a surface mount resistor on one of the pins on every single unit with the new part while we work on a redesign.  True story.

So I feel for those members of the team trying to get things back up and running.

And come Saturday morning there seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel.  At about 5am Eastern or 2am Pacific time, the announcement went out that the servers were up again.

The game worlds have reopened. Thank you for your patience as we worked through these various data center issues in recent days.

LOTRO Twitter, March 9, 2:06am

But we were not done yet.

UPDATE: We are bringing back down the game worlds while we troubleshoot an issue with characters not receiving their proper account unlocks.

LOTRO Twitter, March 9, 2:36am

That persisted for a while, but about four hours later the servers were opened up again.

The game worlds have reopened. We appreciate your patience during this downtime, and thank you for being here.

LOTRO Twitter, March 9, 6:56am

That last one seemed to do it… but I held onto this post for another day because I wouldn’t be surprised if they found yet another glitch they needed to take things down to fix.

And, having gone more than two days past their planned outage, SSG has some offers for people to make them feel better about having been kept offline.  It is in the form of a FAQ.

Sales will be extended, everybody will get a bonus pack of various boosters, and VIP accounts that have logged in over the last 30 days will get 250 LOTRO Points.

DDO players will get something similar and have their own FAQ.

And so it goes.  They fared better that SOE did back in May 2011 when they were down almost 13 days, though that was due to a hacking incident.  And, of course, there is Alganon, which has been down since November 2017.

Now hopefully things will settle down a bit and SSG will get around to telling us when Moria is going to unlock on the LOTRO Legendary server.

Guardian with a Kill Mark

You know you’re in a target rich environment when even logi manages to get a kill mark.

Our fleet at the scene

A Nidhoggur tried to interrupt what was supposed to be a quick bubble clear op, got trapped, got a Lif dropped for support, then dreads, and then a fleet of bombers.  The latter dropped piecemeal at fairly close range and engaged us with torpedoes leading to a situation one might call a “feed.”

The end was a bunch of dead ships on the field, most of which were theirs.

Wrecks around the station, our cap chain visible in the distance

We escalated as well and sacrificed some dreads to kill their caps, but the end result was very much in our favor according to the battle report.

Battle Report Summary

And we got all the bubbles cleared in the end as well.  Op success.

And, since I mentioned it in the title, I suppose I had better show it off in the post.

Kill mark in the red circle

That little mark means I managed to get the final blow on somebody’s ship.

Oscar at Peace

After we moved into the old house… our first real, single family detached dwelling in the mold of the suburban American dream… and had settled in a bit, it became time to get a cat.  We had a cat at our old condo, a charmer named Woody, but he had passed and we decided not to think about another cat until we had settled down in a new home.  Getting there took a while, but once we had ourselves established in the autumn of 2000, we went looking for a cat.

Two cats actually.  The thought was that a pair would be happier.  And so one weekend we picked Felix from a rescue shelter.  He was an adult can of unknown age who had been living in the parking lot of the IBM facility on Cottle Rd. in San Jose.  When that was closed, the woman who had been feeding him collected him up and brought him in to find him a real home.  He was happy and friendly and liked people and warmed right up to me, so he came home with us the day we met him.

The next weekend we went searching for a companion.  Since I had chosen Felix… or maybe he chose me… my wife was looking for a cat for herself.  After some searching we came across a black kitten with a white tummy, white paws, and a little diamond shaped white spot on his forehead.  He wasn’t a tiny kitten, but about five months old.  My wife thought he was adorable and so we brought him home.

Earliest known picture of Oscar, hiding under our bed

He came with the name Dylan, but we changed that to Oscar, to match Felix as the “Odd Couple” of cats, and it turned out to be quite the fitting name.

When we brought him home we followed what we had been told and set Oscar up in the guest room with the door shut to keep the two cats apart until they grew used to each other.  That lasted for about 30 minutes.  They were almost immediately on either side of the door sniffing and meowing and obviously anxious to see who was on the other side.  There were no hostile signs, so we said, “What the hell” and opened the door and the two became immediate buddies.

Felix sharing his catnip pillow with Oscar

But while the two of them were pals for life, they had very different personalities.  Felix had to be around whoever was over to visit, greeting every guest, and was always happy to sit in anybody’s lap.  He was the good cat, gregarious and happy and always in the thick of things.

Oscar, on the other hand, was quite reserved.  He loved Felix and my wife, but held himself aloof from the rest of the world.  I joked that it took him five years to get used to me, but it was about the truth.  He wouldn’t go out of his way to find me, but would seek out my wife day and night to be close to her, preferably in her lap.

Felix would be in the thick of thing and Oscar would be peeking around the corner or sneaking around the periphery of any event, keen to know what was going on but not willing to go out there with all those strangers.  He was also always getting into everything.  While Felix was content with things as they were, Felix had to know what was under, behind, over, and around anything in the house.  He could be quite the wiener, and his nickname quickly became Oscar Meyer.

And then my daughter showed up and there was a whole new world of adventure for Oscar Meyer.  There was some combination of new stuff and a little human that was constantly around my wife and who, no doubt smelled a bit of her, that made my daughter and all of her stuff of immediate interest to him.  I don’t think my daughter had been home for more than 10 minutes before he appeared at her bassinet to see what we had brought home.

What do we have here?

Of course, he immediately tried to get into the bassinet with her and curl up.  She was nice and warm and that was a trait he loved in people.  We had to keep a close eye on him and even had to get a mesh “kitty tent” to go over my daughter’s crib to keep him out once she started sleeping there.  But her stuff was his stuff as far as he was concerned and looking back at the pictures he was around her and my wife a lot.

Life with Oscar and Felix was good.  They were pals and Felix, who would welcome anybody in our house, took up the slack with visitors as Oscar remained wary of strangers and really only liked my wife and daughter for years.  I remained under suspicion.

Of course, when it came time to go to the vet, I was the one who had to stuff the kitties in their boxes.  Felix would go easy, but Oscar… who could somehow sense I was coming for him even if left no evidence about… would run and hide under the bed the moment I glanced his way.  I recall once having to take the mattress and box spring off the bed to get at him.  Still, once in a while he would show up and hang out with me.

Hey, is that Age of Kings you’re playing?

Felix, older and having lived a harder life in his youth, passed away just about eight years ago.  Oscar though, he was in his prime at that time.  He was king of the house and soon had to rule over two new kittens.  The coming of Fred and Trixie worked out well, and the three of them became pals, with the two younger cats cuddling up with Oscar.

Black and white fur at rest

With three cats, everybody in the house had one.  Oscar remained ever my wife’s cat, while Fred would sleep with our daughter, and Trixie would hang out with me… though she would cuddle up on my wife in bed.  She knew where the warmth was.

Fred and Trixie were not with us long however.  They both suffered from a congenital issue that cut both of their lives short, feline aortic thromboembolism.  Fred went a year before Trixie, and in the interim she had to have a new cat to call her own, so Rigby joined us as a kitten.

Not being black and white, the new tabby kitten wasn’t welcomed very warmly.  It took a while for Trixie and Oscar to accept Rigby, but eventually they did.

Trixie, Rigby, and Oscar together on the tower

By this point Oscar was slowing down.  He was still king of the house, and held court on the couch where he would welcome any guest and sit in their lap… so long as it was warm… but he was more interested in sunny spots and treats than running around and playing.  Then Trixie passed and it was just Oscar and Rigby.

Those two were not pals.  When Rigby was young he wanted to play when Oscar wanted to sleep.  Later when Rigby came into his adult size, he stated testing Oscar over who was really the boss.  There were the occasional fights, but mostly it was the kitty equivalent of “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you!”

Oscar trying to pretend Rigby isn’t there

They could be cuddly at times, but their rivalry was never far from the surface.

 

And Oscar was getting older and slowing down even more so.  The vet told me a couple of times that 12 to 15 years is a good life span for a healthy cat.  Oscar hit 16 last year and was closing in on 17 this year, but time was telling on him.  His hips were bothering him, so we got him a heating pad to sleep on during the day.  He had gone deaf at some point, which meant that an already vocal cat had no real way to gauge his volume. He then got a bad ear infection about 18 months back that took a long stretch to go away with antibiotics, a respiratory infection late last year that sapped his strength before it was over, and then this past January an episode that looked like another ear infection (head tilt, problem with balance) but which the vet thought was an issue with his brain; not a stroke but some sort of episode.  His blood pressure was very high and in addition to his other symptoms he was blind in one eye.

I started writing this post after that day at the vet because he looked to be done, even crawling under our bed to be some place dark, something past cats I have owned have done that indicates their time has come.

Then he bounced back a bit.  The “maybe this will help” medicine the vet gave us seemed to actually help.  He got up on the bed with us the next day.  His balance improved, he could get around the house on his own, and he started eating again.  He wasn’t eating much though and he was far from his old self.  We made him as comfortable as we could and offered up food he really liked just to get him to eat more.  Even Rigby (mostly) stopped being a pain to Oscar and would groom him.

But it was borrowed time.  Oscar was eating less and less and was losing weight.  Even for an older cat who slept a lot already, a lot of his time was spent asleep.  And then when I got home from work Wednesday I found him in the middle of the floor of office.  My wife said he had used the litter box, but then just stopped in the carpet there and wouldn’t move.  She had food and water close to him, but he was just sitting there.  I found a cat bed he would occasionally deign to sleep in, put it down next to him, then placed him in it.  He curled up there and slept.  He did not move until the next morning when he was trying to walk to our bedroom.  I picked him up and put him on the bed in the dark room and he curled up again and stayed there.

I was working from home yesterday and my daughter was home sick from school, so we kept an eye on Oscar, but things did not look good.  There was no interest in food or water.  I let my daughter take him out in the back yard where it was warm (72 degrees) and sunny to see if that would stimulate him.  Oscar has never been outside and has shown no desire to ever leave the house.  But as a cat any new environment is of interest to him. He explored a bit, but could barely go a dozen steps before having to lay down and rest for a bit.

Out in the grass

While he was out there with my daughter I called the vet and made an appointment for one last check before the end.  We all went to the vet and cried a lot  as we said good bye.  He is at peace and suffers no more, but we are still sad today and miss him.

The end of an era.  We always grow attached to our pets, but after 16 years the bond is very strong and the parting all the more difficult.  Oscar had been with us since before my wife was even pregnant with our daughter, and we used to joke, when my daughter wanted a sibling, that he was her older brother.

It is even difficult to choose pictures to post of him.  We got our first digital camera as a gift just before we got Felix and Oscar and he has been a kitty of the digital camera and then the iPhone age.  There are literally hundreds of pictures of him to choose from.  But I think my favorites are from the early days, when he and Felix roamed our house and were such pals, and when Oscar just had to get into everything, so I will add a few more of those to the end of this already over-long post.