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    XerShade
    Its the new year and time for some new updates. The first updates we have are to the community as a whole. I have been working on integrating the Discord, Minecraft Servers, Patreon, Twitch channel, and pretty much everything I am currently running through the website. I have been working on bridging the many parts of the community together so that it is easier for everyone to use and manage the community. I will go over this in more detail as there's a few things that need some explaining, but for the most part all sections of the community are connected now through the website.

    The next big update is more of a change in my goals and focus in life. I will still be streaming gaming content, however I will be mostly working on websites and website themes for people and am dropping game development as an almost whole. I will still be helping others with their game projects from time to time, but for the most part I found that most of my game and application projects go no where and I want to focus that energy more into things I enjoy and don't have to spend as much time on, like websites and extensions for websites.

    Okay so with that bombshell out of the way there's one last elephant in this update room to deal with. In terms of gaming content I will be focusing mostly on Elder Scrolls Online, but I want to be a bit more active on the minecraft front. I will be working on ZombieCleo's server as well as my own more often, especially on Cleos as there is a build I want to complete before the next reset, or at least part of it since it is kind of a big idea and I might not have time to complete the whole thing.

    I will go over things in their own posts later, as all of these require a fair amount of expanding on, but for now thanks for reading.
    -XerShade
    XerShade
    Well, it's October so it's time for another community update. This one is a bit late because of IRL issues but there are a few things I wanted to update everyone on.

    First is I am going to be streaming Stellaris on Sundays when I can, however the last few week I've been not well. I've since gone to the doctors and am feeling a bit better, but this time of year is when I start to get very sick, very easily. Other then Stellaris for now I am planning on streaming Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 4 Survival Mode on the other days of the week that I can stream. There are currently some false audio claim issues with a few of my recent VODs, but they are being dealt with as fast as I can.

    I'll also be aiming to stream around 7 AM (GMT-5) every day for at least an hour, but health and other priorities like work and appointments will be put ahead of streaming. I'm also going to be going through my twitch archive over the next few months or so and cleaning up the collections and VOD information in preparation for a new section that's coming to the website soon.

    Finally I am going to try and put a fair amount of my time coding into working on the Society of Collaborative Streamers website as the code and systems I am working on there will also allow me to pull and manage my video content over on this website. As both websites are hosted on the same server I can use the database for both websites, and just display my content from the database on my website.

    Thanks for reading,
    -XerShade

    XerShade
    WARNING: THIS IS A RANT/VENT POST. I MAY NOT KNOW WHAT I'M ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT SO TAKE ANYTHING SAID HERE WITH A MASSIVE GRAIN OF SALT. ALSO NO HARD FEELING TO ANYONE OR ANY GROUPS OR ANY GUILDS IN THE GAME, JUST VOICING MY OPINION.
    Okay so the recent PTS changes on ESO have been causing a LOT of older players and end game guilds to fly off the handle with their rants, and quite frankly most of them have missed the point or don't know what they're talking about so my turn to rant. I'm going to go over the meaning of the DoT changes and what the big words of text a lot of people ignored or didn't understands mean and why not changing these things would be bad from a design standpoint.
    So this is the first point they made for the changes. It makes very little sense for a single target damage over time effect to do TWO AND A HALF times the damage of a single target spam attack that you should be weaving. At that point what's the point of using the attacks, other then because you have no other skills to slot and/or use. While they are essentially cutting the damage in half, if on player was to stand there and only use a spam skill, and the other was to maintain a DoT the DoT player will still out damage the non-DoT player.
    This is essentially the same as above, but meant to stop everyone from just picking AoE DoTs because they do the same damage and hit multiple targets. Now there's a choice, you can go for more damage via AoE tags, but it will cost more, or you can go for less damage with a single tag, and it will mean less strain on your resource bars. This is called balance.
    Essentially, healing is not the same as damaging things. Damage has to worry about penetration, mitigation, etc. Healing is just a simple, mitigation if they have a debuff, multiplicative if they have a buff so not as complex. You're probably not going to be spamming a heal over time you don't need to spam if you're managing resources properly or wanting to be super efficient about it.
    Again, unique things shouldn't be standardised just kept in line. What if the purpose of a unique skill or mechanic like healing if you're just going to standardise it to be the same as the rest of the damage skills.
    So as a test to see what they were actually talking about and if they were right, I did some math before ranting here. So to do this test I took the skill [esoskill id="97" tooltip="true"] and compared it to [esoskill id="389" tooltip="true"].
    So on the live server currently Killer's Blade does about 3244 damage for my character, while Blood Craze does about 1621 up front and 14480. So here's the issue, Blood Craze only has to be cast ONCE which means it's cost of about 1917 for my character has to be paid once only. If I was to cast Killer's Blade once every second, it would cost 8575 stamina for it to equal the damage, eventually it would over take it if I casted it ten times but it's almost 4.473 times the cost to EQUAL the damage, if I had to choose which ability I wanted I would pick Blood Craze no contest if we were talking raw damage output.
    Now let's look at the nerf, Blood Craze lost 63% of its damage per tick, this means it should do about 4778 damage over time, plus the 1621 up front damage. That's about 6399 damage total per single cast of the skill. I would have to cast Killer's Blade twice to get anywhere near that so yes, Blood Craze is still cheaper it's not as ridiculous for my character to want to use Killer's Blade now as the cost to match Blood craze is now only about 3430. Compared to the previous 8575 cost to match it, this new amount is MUCH more reasonable.
    Now I don't claim to be a game development expert, and that was all done using simple maths using only the numbers I have access to and I may have not done the math the same as the game, heck I may be WAY off the mark here, but the simple fact that I'm not locked into a DoT skill for my build to be at least semi-optimal is kind of the whole point.
    Damage over time skills should be used to augment single use abilities, not replace them and have their role filled with spamming auto attacks while you wait for the Damage over Time skills to expire so you can re-cast them, which on this current patch is what A LOT of my character's have turned into. My Templar currently is essentially cast all my abilities, then keep spamming my execute/spammable while mixing in autos between casts.
    Now my night Blade is specifically designed to do this play style. I did NOT make an alternate character to play the same style just as a magicka toon with fire instead of a stamina character with bleeds. However in order to keep up with what the veteran groups want and are doing I need to do this as my numbers won't hit anywhere near the numbers they are if I don't, and then they just kick me from the dungeon, and trust me I TRIED. The game's essentially become, "Play a DoT spammer, or don't keep up with everyone." which in a game that kind of prides itself on the whole sandbox experience, that's a little bit of an issue.
    So I like my DoT characters and will need to adapt once these nerfs hit, but the simple fact that non DoT builds are slotting these skills simply because they massively out perform everything else is the core issue ZoS was trying to get at. Anyhow sorry if this went on a bit long, seeing the same outcries and rants over and over and over with little to no insight into this matter made me want to rant.
    Thanks for reading,
    -XerShade
     
    XerShade
    I've noticed I have a habit of starting pretty much all my posts off with the word "so", without dropping myself into the trap of using it to start this post after that last statement, let's look at the goals and plans for this month.

    For the last month or so I haven't been feeling to well because of the weather and all of the storms and hurricanes so I haven't been up to streaming much. I am hoping to stream a bit more now that I'm feeling better and am working on a schedule for streaming. I have to plan it around my working hours, which can vary so it may be a little bit for me to sort everything out.

    As for news on the projects front, there's a couple of new things I am working on that I don't want to reveal at this time, but for the most part I am still just working on my website, the Society of Collaborative Streamer's website and a few scripts and tools here and there.

    Thanks for reading,
    -XerShade

    XerShade
    So one of the more annoying things I ran into while maintaining a Starbound server for a friend was every time we added or removed mods I would have to manually add and remove symlinks or files because of how the steam workshop works.

    So eventually I decided, why am I manually doing this when I can write a script, then simply upload the files to the server and then run the script. The result is a nice little script that you just tell it where the mods folder is and it will link the workshop mods to the mods folder. The script is below:

    FIRSTDIR=$PWD MODSFOLDER=${1:-serverfiles/mods/} echo "Attempting to switch to mods folder..." cd "$MODSFOLDER" || { echo 'Unable to find folder $MODSFOLDER, aborting...' ; e$ echo "Removing old links..." rm *.pak echo "Creating mod links..." for d in */ ; do MODFILE=$(find $d -type f -name "*.pak") echo "Created link for mod $MODFILE as ${d//'/'/.pak}..." ln -s "$MODFILE" "${d//'/'/.pak}" done echo "All mods have been successfully linked..." cd $FIRSTDIR
    To run the script simple save it in a .sh file of your choice, I personally call it linkmods.sh then run the following command chmod +x scriptname.sh. Once this is done all you need to do is run the script like so ./scriptname.sh {PathToModsFolder} the path to the mods folder is optional and will use a default value if no path is provided manually.

    The script is designed to work with the lgsm scripts out of the box by simply playing it in the same folder as the sbserver script, though you can manually tell the script where the folder actually is by passing the path as the first argument. After you tell it where the mods are located, simply upload the workshop content folders from your PC to the server then run the script. It will automatically delete any .pak files in the root folder, then go through each of the folders provided by the steam workshop and link any .pak files that it finds in those folders to the main folder.

    At the moment it is currently limited to one .pak file per folder, but I have yet to find any mods that have more then one .pak file so I haven't had the need to implement something to handle mods that have multiple .pak files, but for now one work around is to manually split the mod files into different folders, but again I will most likely add multiple .pak file support in the future.

    Disclaimer: This script is provided as is and I am not responsible for any mishaps or damage it may cause. I have tested this and use it on my friends live server with no issues, however if you discover an issue please let me know so I can look into patching it ASAP. Also I will NOT be adding support to automatically download the files from the steam workshop any time soon, as that would involve at the very least playing with the steam api, which I currently don't have the time or intention to learn right now as I have other projects on the go.

    XerShade

    What I've Been Up To

    By XerShade, in Announcements,

    So since the last update there have been a few changes to what I originally posted. So first and foremost Elder Scrolls Online is working again, I made some modifications to my computer to split the hard drive load, so it's not perfect but the game is now at least playable, instead of taking five hours to load one area.

    The next is that I am wanting to focus more of my time onto website coding and making content for twitch. While I do like coding games and programs, I feel that it's not really going anywhere right now so I want to focus my time on my twitch streams and website content.

    Not that big of an update, but wanted to post one. Thanks for reading,
    -XerShade

    XerShade
    So I've been a bit busy between not feeling well and having to deal with issues IRL so didn't find time to post one of these last month so pardon if it is a bit long.

    Okay so first of all I wanted to address the lack of ESO content recently. Unfortunately my computer is not working properly at the moment, as one of the cooling fans stopped working and this fan was responsible for cooling down my hard drive. While the hard drive is now working it did overheat a bit during a heat wave in July and is a bit damage now as pretty much everything reads and writes much slower now. This is really bad for ESO as it likes to load a lot of textures and stuff on demand which means every time I move to a different area it takes sometimes upwards of five minutes to load one NPC. I am currently working on saving up to either get a new SSD or a new computer to fix this issue, but for the short term I can barely sign on to do my daily crafting tasks so I won't be streaming ESO until this is resolved.

    So onto more technical matters. I have decided that due to a lack of any chat bots that do what I want it to I have decided to write my own to since I would need to heavily modify any that I download and use anyhow, so just going to save some time and effort on trying to adapt an existing bot and just create my own. This won't be done for a while but I'm hoping to get some basic functionality working by September if I have the time to code. There are some specifics I am working on still but there will be some cool viewer interaction features that should be fun for everyone and work on all areas of the community.

    Anyhow onto content for the foreseeable future. Due to the aforementioned damage and overheating of my computer I am currently limited to light weight and older games that don't munch on my CPU and HDD. Last week we started on a play through of Fallout 3 and I will be finishing that up before starting a new game, which is probably going to be Oblivion. Other games you may see on the channel are Minecraft, Warframe, and Stellaris. There may be the occasional programming stream but for the most part I am limited to less intensive games right now.

    Thanks for reading,
    -XerShade

    XerShade
    So I had a spare outfit change token lying around from who knows what in Elder Scrolls Online so I decided to have some fun. The end result was this.

    I know I probably made that sound more crazy then it actually turned out, but this is my main character and she's supposed to be a healer.
    Though I guess this is just the result of her being a Night Blade healer, and me wanting to get the most out of that token as this change alone would have cost about 30k gold. Definately got my gold's worth.
    XerShade
    So over the last couple of days I've been working on the website's theme to make it a bit easier for front end users to read and use. I did a couple of different designs but everyone I asked for the most part seemed to like the new grid layout we have for articles now.

    Before this update we were using an old style of displaying content, which was to have excerpts on the category pages. While I do kind of like this I can see why the feed back I got from people saying the website looked a lot cleaner and easier to read and find the content they were looking for with the new grid layout versus the old layout with excerpts.

    Just wanted to talk a little about the new layout in case anyone was curious about why it was changed to what it is now.

    Thanks for reading,
    -XerShade

    XerShade
    So it's that time of month again, the monthly community update that is. There's a ton of changes and things to talk about this time around, so apologies in advance if this drags on a bit.
    Okay so let's get the big announcement out of the way first. In Elder Scrolls Online my main guild I am active in is Hearts of Ice, obligatory shout out, and last week I was promoted to an officer as a third in command of the guild's trading faction. This means that I will be spending the majority of my time playing Elder Scrolls Online when I'm not busy doing other things. Overall I am looking forward to this and will be working out how to balance this promotion with doing my other content, speaking of.
    So there have been a lack of streams recently, this is partly because of the aforementioned time sink that is ESO now, and partly due to a lack of Ethernet cables. The issue with this is I would be playing the game on unstable Wifi and personally don't want to produce streams where I'm just getting frustrated at the game when it drops connection, or plays at 400+ ping. So while I work out getting a router and cables to split my Ethernet connection to my room so both my laptop using OBS and my desktop playing the game can have a reliable connection I am going to stick to video content for now.
    Okay so the big news and the sad news out of the way let's talk about changes to the website. I've recently been working on website content and features, and while I don't want to spoil too much I am happy to announce that we now have Patreon support on the website. You should now be able to sign into the website using Patreon and if you are a patron you will have access to any content that is available for your pledge tier. There's also some other features of this plugin that I am looking at for ideas for future project sub domains, but again, don't want to spoil too much right now. I do have plans to add other social media login options, but for now Patreon is the only method to login to the website.
    And to wrap this up I just want to cover some of the minecraft, discord, and other things. I am not sure what my stance is on playing minecraft at the moment, as I said above I'm really trying to advance in ESO and that's eating most of my free time right now. As for the community discord not much is changing except that I will be cleaning up the channels and adding some new ones for upcoming content and such.
    Sorry if this was a bit long but May was a busy month, especially in the last couple weeks and thank you for reading,
    -XerShade
    XerShade
    So it's that time of the month again, time for the monthly update. So a bit of exciting news starting out of the gate, I have recently been putting a lot of work in to planning out the website and the website for The Society of Creative Streamers.

    So let's start off at home first. I have moved the website back to WordPress as while I like Invision Power Board, it just didn't seem appropriate for what I wanted to do here. I do have plans to make use of the software, but that is for later in the post. Instead I will be using WordPress as it is simpler for me to post short posts, rants, updates, etc on WordPress, so expect more frequent posts, content, and other cool things. Also I am currently working on a custom theme, so if the website is a bit of a mess for most of May and June, sorry in advance.

    Now the exciting bit! I have been working on the community website for the The Society of Creative Streamers group that I am a member of for the last little while, and after banging my head on multiple walls for a few months I have a rough idea of how I want to get all of that sorted. I will be using my, now, spare copy of Invision Power Board to manage the content, and I think it will be better used for a larger website than a smaller one, this one.

    Over the next couple of months I will be pretty much focusing most of my non-relaxing efforts into getting these two websites off the ground and working. So in addition to health issues because of the rainy season this will mean less streams possibly, though I will try to stream at least once a week, and who knows there may be some sneaky web development streaming on occasion.

    Thanks for reading,
    -XerShade

    XerShade
    So over the last couple days I have been working out some kinks and putting together a few hacks and have decided on what the streaming channel's main focus for the next while will be. I have managed to get together a setup using my existing hardware that allows me to stream Elder Scrolls Online now, as well as stream other games with less lag and other issues.

    With the new setup the channel will primarily be focused on Elder Scrolls Online content, which has been my plan for a long time but I've never had the ability to stream Elder Scrolls Online reliably, with Minecraft and Stellaris as backups and/or break games for when I or the community needs a reak from Elder Scrolls Online.

    There is no definitive schedule yet, but what I'm looking at is Elder Scrolls Online on days I have to work, Stellaris when I don't and can sit down and play it for eight or more hours, and then minecraft, modded and vanilla, in between when I need to work on projects on them or don't really have any content plans for Elder Scrolls Online or just need a break.

    Still working out health and other issues so no idea on times but I am looking to have all streams be around 7AM (GMT-5) when I have work, and nights off will be started anytime but before 5PM (GMT-5) on Thursday and Sunday as I need to sleep then for work.

    Hope everyone enjoys the new content, and thank you for your patience while I smooth out the kinks in the plans,
    -XerShade

    XerShade
    So it's been a while since I posted something or worked on the community so I figured I would post about what's been happening recently. First some slight malfunctions. Earlier this month my dedicated server almost imploded. Fortunately before it actually did I managed to get most of my data off of it, note I said most. Unfortunately while I did get a file that was supposed to be the backup for the websites database it was corrupted and I was not able to estore the data, as such I will need to re-do everything on the website.
    Now on to brighter news, I have been working with The Society of Creative Streams group I am a member of to work on a new website for them so we could have a nice hub for all of our content to be displayed on. Progress has been a little slow, and don't really have anything to show yet but figured I would just let everyone know that I was working on it.
    As for community updates, the vanilla minecraft server has been reset, and is now on season two. We are also hosting a FTB: Sky Odyssey server for modded right now. The discord and community websites have been slowly undergoing an update and I am hoping to get the updates out as soon as possible, but as mentioned above some technical issues have put a little bit of a wrench in those plans.
    I have also been putting a lot of time into playing Elder Scrolls Online so expect some content related to that soon, though there will not be any video content for this as if I so much as load OBS ESO throws a tantrum. Other games I've been streaming are Divinity: Original Sin, Stellaris, and Ocarina of Time Randomizer. I don't really have a schedule for streams right now due to health issues so just keep an ear out on discord, I will post to the videos channel when I go live.
    Anyhow that's it for now, hope everyone enjoys the new content and updates and thanks for reading,
    -XerShade
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