The True Cost of Shroud of the Avatar

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by moxiepilot, Aug 9, 2018.

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  1. moxiepilot

    moxiepilot Avatar

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    This past December I came across Shroud and decided to pick it up as a Christmas present to myself.

    Moxie’s Running Cost (MRC) - $40

    Hooray! Let’s install it on my laptop. Hooray an hour later I can play. I’m really excited! I run the game and the graphics card won’t support it. Solution: “Hey wife, I’m going to get myself another Christmas present. Want to come with me to the Nerd Store?”

    Arrive at the Nerd Store, eventually decide on a $1400 Predator 300. Don’t forget to buy Microsoft office, so add another $100.

    Get home, install everything, download Shroud: 3 hours later I’m good to go. Woohoo! It works, I’m jammin.

    MRC - $1540

    This game is fun. I need a house. NO! I need A VILLAGE LOT! January telethon rolls around, time to buy a Viking village lot. Hey, it’s not $640, so it’s a bargain at like $580, right?

    MRC - $2120

    Play, play, play. Grind, grind, grind.

    Don’t buy a Predator 300. They have this monitor flicker from manufacturing. Great laptop, bad screen.

    Well it gave up the ghost today and it’s going to be 3 weeks to get back from warentee. But. I. Need. My. Shroud. Solution: “Honey, I need to buy a desktop.” @kaeshiva would be proud of this dedication. :)

    Talk to my IT Nerd at work for 3 hours today. Hooray not working at work! Go to a different Nerd Store. Buy a desktop.

    I ended up with a $1999 Powerspec G461. But I need a monitor too. So, I sprung for the $999 Alienware 34” curved gaming monitor. OH BOY!

    There’s a storm tonight so I could only set a few things up, but I logged on for 5 minutes. OMG OMG OMG!
    Not sure what the wife will say when she gets home from her trip.

    MRC - $5118 and another $100 for Office...

    ...for a $40 game.




    I do love it :)
     
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  2. majoria70

    majoria70 Avatar

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    Lol I love your story. Aren't we an amazing bunch? ;) and what a fantastic wife you have.

    Luckily many of us look at this game as a long term thing and a source of entertainment. Look at the cost of eating out, going to movies, etc and add those up. Personally for myself As a gamer I do a lot less of all of those. Well that's my story and I'm stickin to it ;)
     
  3. redfish

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    You forgot the part about your immortal soul
     
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  4. Grimbone

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    Sometimes you just gotta treat yourself! ;)
     
  5. Feeyo

    Feeyo Avatar

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    Good story, sad decisions.
    Never ever buy a laptop for your gaming needs, it will be outdated pretty fast, and the total cost will be higher upgrading every time.
    Always go for the desktop as your main Rig, then decide on what parts you want and buy everything separate and build your gaming rig yourself. It is not hard to install a custom PC.
    This way you only need to upgrade small things to be up to date with the current games and next gen games.
    Office? meh go for LibreOffice. For every software pack you need on microsoft (paid versions) there is a good open source alternate.
     
  6. Lazlo

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    EXTREME SPREADSHEETS
     
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  7. Amber Raine

    Amber Raine Community Ambassador (FR)

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    That my dear friend is about the truth of it..

    To start Shroud cost me A Black Lotus (MtG)

    Let's not even get into the 2 new computers i have needed to get in the past 5 years :)

    I do love Shroud!
     
  8. Earl Atogrim von Draken

    Earl Atogrim von Draken Avatar

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    Don't forget the cost in nerves because of the beloved community ^^ so add another 10k for the average therapy :D
     
  9. Anpu

    Anpu Avatar

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    Nice story! Sadly almost mirrors myself.

    I just bought a GTX 1080 video card.... hehe
     
  10. Scanphor

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    Or if you can't / don't want to build yourself (I always have) - many good PC parts retailers offer pretty cheap build services with the parts you specify.

    Libre office is good - except there's a lot of cool stuff in Excel (best software MS do IMHO) that isn't in it - most of my spreadsheets don't work in it. Great for non-power users.
     
  11. Warrior B'Patrick

    Warrior B'Patrick Avatar

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    Greetings all, Yes I mirror soo much of your choices. Have spent a lot on this game but am still loving it and I was an original backer. I lay on an older Mac laptop and Surface Pro 4 so fustration cost something also. I will say in the true accounting of things all the cost does not go toward SotA. I use my computers for many other things like, Remote support of clients computers, Graphic builds of ads and docs, email, and others. But on the other hand you did not add loss of work time ;-), Family time (my wife does not play), or the telethons/live streams ($$).

    In all you have to be dedicated and I know many of the current players are waiting to see what E5 is going to be like. To quote Abraham Lincoln "Party on Dudes"*

    *Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure
     
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  12. Black777Lodge

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    Wow, that is dedication and sacrifice ! The legendary Black Lotus Wow !
     
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  13. Asclepius

    Asclepius Avatar

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    I can so identify with this
    A few years ago my very patient wife agreed that I needed a proper gaming rig. Sooo - Intel 3.7 Gh, 16 Gb Ram (later boosted to 32) NVidia GTX970 (4Gb RAM, surprisingly still works well) and SSD drive. Probably around $2500.
    Add the support to Shroud (2 accounts, regular telethons, yeah right,,,,)
    Rode Podcaster microphone for audio work.
    I was already hooked though - when Ultima 9 was released you needed a special 3D video card to play it, in parallel with your regular card. So there went $500 in 1995 money.
    Well worth while though
     
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  14. Amber Raine

    Amber Raine Community Ambassador (FR)

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    Yep... the year was 2014... the challange was .. "raise so much and Rustic Dragon will lick Starr Long".... I had 2 Black Lotus at 9.5 / 9.8 quality... I still have the 9.8 ... the 9.5 was sold ... So not only did it go to the love of Shroud.. it may have also went because i really wanted to see that lick ... a memory some of us (not only me) may never forget ;)
     
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  15. moxiepilot

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    I figured I wasn’t alone.

    Extreme spreadsheets! LOL
     
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  16. stile

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    My belief and I say this in seriousness since I was like 10 years old has been.. when you can't run a game, that means it's time to upgrade as games push the tech coming out, so that is the indication your tech is starting to get old.

    My entire life, whenever id buy a game.. couldt play it, thats when id start sinking money into new hardware.. and people be like... "for a game???"

    No.. you miss the point. The game is simply an alarm/indicator to me, that it is time to update my hardware. nothing more. If I don't do it for this game, then soon its going to be for every game, and then soon after for everything else. This is saying "need to start figuring this out" or its going to be an issue later.

    Many of my necessary computer upgrades in life where caused by new games from Origins :)
     
  17. craftymethod

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    The cost of Modern gaming FTFY
     
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  18. Elwyn

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    And I have a tale of a SotA box on a budget...

    $25 - I found an Optiplex 790 on the clearance table at a pawn shop, i5-2400, 12GB RAM, W7Pro COA, and an ATI card that was probably older than the computer (yes, this was an absurd price, even the CPU alone goes for at least three times that used, and I got enough RAM too!)
    $110 - GT 1030 - way below what people might think would work, just don't try to get more than 1080p out of it
    $70 - 600 watt power supply (replacing the 225 watt factory supply)
    $100-$150 - 250GB SSD that I had bought earlier for a time like this
    $0 - monitor - Thanks to HDMI, I can plug it into almost any modern TV, and I find random LCD monitors cheap from time to time too

    So about $350 for what was going to be a "spare" computer that I could also pack up and throw in the car, and I ended up playing on it most of the time. It gets performance from "good enough" in towns, to 1080/60 in adventuring areas, and falls flat in crowded dance parties. I have since upgraded it to 24GB RAM for another $110.


    But that offsets a Bad Stuff that I had to deal with...
    It's possible that the GPU in my Late-2011 17" MBP gave up the ghost because I tried playing SotA on it for a few months. Of course it died two months after the final end of the extended replacement warranty program. But I was able to find someone selling repairs via ebay. For about $250 plus the shipping it to him (which cost me another $50 or so, at least I already had an official shipping box), He replaced he GPU with a chip that was NOT from that era of Nvidia's bad batches of chips.

    There were still some glitches in the graphics when I played the game, not sure whether it was chip or software-related, but at that point I really didn't want to take a chance of it dying again. In any case, it would still run badly, so I would need to upgrade to 10.11 (it's on 10.9 right now) to get Metal support, which might make it run only not quite as badly.

    During the time it was not working, I got a Late-2012 13" to use, and found an Early-2011 17" as a future "oh-$#!+" spare, about $600 each. I also found a broken 2010 (?) 17" for $200, for more reserve parts, that turned out to have a missing CPU temperature sensor. (I'm sure there was a story behind that, as the heat sink showed no sign of ever having one.) So it cost a bit more than $300 for that GPU going out. But now at least I have some spares in case I ever need them. You certainly can't do all that with any Tim Cook-era glued'n'soldered "thin" MacBook Pro.
     
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  19. Nelzie

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    Oh boy that's a big ole pile of smackeroons!

    Hopefully that bonkers system will keep you taken care of for a good number of years!
     
  20. Nietzsche

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    Yeah, around 4 years ago I bought an iMac. I was excited to be able to play this game in Mac OS X as prefer the OS to Windows. Soon though I realized that the Mac client was no where near as optimized as the Windows Client. So I installed Windows with boot camp to play the game better. Which saddens me quite a lot :-( . A couple years later I noticed performance was not very great so I upgraded my RAM in my Mac from 16 mb to 32 mb. Actually this didn’t help with anything.

    At the start of this year I realized I’m going to need a much better graphics card than the one that is in the Mac so I bought a whole new computer with a GeForce 1080 Ti ( on of those fancy new ones )

    Well , in the end I was overly hyped to play this on a Mac and ended up realising it’s just not viable as the system resources are too great and the Mac client needs much more optimization to be competitive with the Windows client
     
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