Good morning folks, and welcome to another episode of “Bel tries to think of something to write about in the morning”. Last night was kind of an odd night. We had to run a number of errands so it ended up with me getting home fairly late and missing most of the “nda” event. Afterwards I logged into Rift for a bit, but kept getting disconnected. I think it was jealous for cheating on it with another game. When it finally stabilized I did a bunch of silly things and finally it was time for our evening walk… and I was in bed by 10:30. Theoretically I should be recharged and ready for the day… but I feel all sorts of fuzzy mentally.
Silly Things
One of the things that I spent my massive amount of points on that I got from being a longtime subscriber to rift… was on the tradeskill extension unlocks for my main. As a result he has Mining, Butchering, Foraging, Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing and Artificer. Which to some extent has started me down the road to madness. Since I have pooled the majority of my tradeskills on one character, I have the overwhelming desire to rework all my other characters so that they are pure harvesters. Lately we have lacked a healer when I attempted to pull together dungeons and such with our 50+ crowd, so I thought I would bring my cleric Belgaroth out of retirement since he was already 50.
The problem is… this also began my descent into insanity as I noticed he had the odd combination of Weaponsmithing, Apothecary and Foraging. None of the tradeskills were terribly high, so I decided this was the opportune time to rebuild him as a master harvester. The only bad thing about this is that I spent all of last night roaming around Freemarch collecting ore and skinning wolves. When it came time for our walk last night I had just finished up on Freemarch and was headed into Stonefields. Since I have recently done this whole level all the tradeskills thing on Belghast when I picked up foraging… I am hoping it goes more quickly since I pretty well know the areas I need to be in for each type of material. I don’t really want to get too much further into the Storm Legion content without having his harvest abilities up to snuff.
Wrong
So two things happened yesterday… firstly I stumbled across the video above… and one of my posts got picked up by MMO Melting Pot a site that aggregates posts from the community normally relating to World of Warcraft. I like the site, and they do a decent job of promoting various blogs, but almost every trolling comment I have received has happened when they have featured one of my posts. Normally the trolls don’t really bother me but this one just stuck in my craw.
No, sorry the author of this post is flat out wrong.
So I have no problem with someone disagreeing with my opinion. It happens on a regular basis and people seem to be able to do it well. I have a problem with the fact that this poster said my opinion was wrong. It is impossible for an opinion to be wrong. It is not a fact based statement generally, but the way someone feels or believes, and as a result there is no right or wrong. It is in fact their opinion until they decide to change it. My blog while it has little factual nuggets at times, is pretty much my view on the world as I know it. While you can get grumpy or disagree with what I say, saying that said opinion is wrong just is not an option.
Now to the video above… I linked it into this segment because in some small way it is addressing as the video calls it the “nerd on nerd violence” aspect that is trolling. I disagree vehemently with folks all the time… prime example is the whole “tank” series of posts. All the while I was posting my good friend Rowan was posting the counter point on his blog. We don’t always see eye to eye and we disagree plenty… but at the end of the day I still love him like a brother… and I would never dream of calling his personal opinion “wrong”.
I’ve tried super hard myself to present a mostly positive outlook into our community, which in my case is the collection of gaming blogs out there. While the above video has nothing to do with that, I feel like it has a lot of threads of truth about our own community or ANY geek community in general. Geeks seem to like eating their own, because they do not measure up to some standard they have set in their heads. I have been guilty of this multiple times myself, and I try and take a step back and realize that we are a niche of a niche of a niche… and the quite frankly we need all the awesome people we can get. I have so much respect for the cosplayers out there, whereas I put my ideas on paper and hit a publish button from the comfort of my office… they wrap themselves in those thoughts and parade it for the world to see. I cannot imagine how much self confidence it takes to do that… and I have nothing but the utmost respect for ANYONE who even vaguely attempts to cosplay something.
Gearpunk Dice
My good friend Tesh is making another run at Kickstarter, and this time it seems to have gotten massive traction. The above dice are just a production sample from his blog but gives you a feel for what the gearpunk dice will ultimately look like. This campaign is for metal dice and he is offering essentially three designs… Tinker Dice, Gearpunk Dice and Fudge Dice. Essentially through a combination of the Gearpunk polyhedral dice, and the tinker dice you have what is like the ultimate gear punk dice collection for your gaming needs. I was a big fan when they were plastic, and I am an even bigger fan now that the metal seems to be going over like gangbusters.
[edit] Apparently I was extremely tired this morning… because I completely neglected including the Kickstarter link….
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tishtoshtesh/tinker-dice-steampunk-metal-dice
This one is easy now… the initial project requested $1000 and now they have received enough funding to do that almost ten times over. Essentially the dice are now a guarnteed thing, so make sure you do not miss out on this offering. They have been available through his shapeways site for some time, but this is a much better deal. I am extremely happy to see this campaign doing so well, and it could not be supporting a nicer gamer and blogger.
Wrapping Up
Well I need to wrap this thing up. Today is the first day back for my wife, and as a result it has thrown my morning into a complete state of disarray. I am not used to having to get ready with another human being roaming around the house. Additionally now pretty much begins hell for me until roughly mid September as the whole back to school ritual dominates my life. I am essentially bracing for it now, and expecting my time to be whittled away as we need to run this or that errand to prepare. I hope you all have a much better series of days ahead of you, and that the work week has been going well.
Interesting. I get featured by the Melting Pot every now and then, and it has a pretty big influence on my page views (which is partly because I don’t have a lot of them otherwise). On the other hand, I have never or only very rarely noticed an increase in problematic replies. Getting featured by the pot doesn’t do much in the way of replies for me.
I blame that on my way of writing posts though. I often don’t present an “outrageous opinion”, but more of a weighted and balanced argument, and then only give a short conclusion afterwards. There’s a good chance most people have gotten bored and stopped reading by that point. 😉
I’ve long had it set up that my main character is a pure harvester and feeds materials back to my 2 crafting alts. And then when I made a character of the 4th calling, it also became a pure harvester since it also could feed the already master crafter alts, so why duplicate? I also set up the alts so that there’s not a whole lot of overlap in required materials, so they could keep the bank usage down. My setup looks like this:
60 Cleric main — Harvester
60 Warrior alt — Harvester
56 Mage alt — Outfitter, Apothecary, Runecrafter
60 Rogue alt — Weaponsmith, Armorsmith, Artificer
It’s worked well for me since the early days of Rift.
@PK That is definitely the setup I am moving towards. Since I do so much crafting for guildies my goal is to make sure that every character can harvest all the things. That way I can have a stockpile of resources to funnel into various bits of gear for people when they need it.
There are opinions and there are opinions. If you are going to say that your opinion is that the world is flat and that the sun moves around the sky in a moebis pattern, you can be proven to be wrong. I have found that some people like to couch their bizarre beliefs as opinions because they don’t want to have to defend them. Saying the are opinions does not make them right or
But even subjective opinions, things that are open to legitimate debate, can be viewed as “wrong” for the purpose of debate.
For example, if you wrote a post declaring that The Deadmines in original WoW was the best instance ever in the game, I would feel completely justified in writing a comment that started with, “You are wrong.” So long as I followed that up with an alternative, say Sunken Temple, and some reasoning as to why it was superior, I think that would be a perfectly legitimate response. The implication of “You are wrong” in that set of circumstances is clearly “From my point of view” or “In my opinion” as we are debating something that is clearly subjective.
Likewise, in the post to which you refer, the person responding provided a list of reasons as to why he felt your opinion was wrong in his world view. Your opinion was that things should be done in a certain way, and he disagreed and backed it up. Getting wrapped around the axle over the opening phrase seems to miss the point and comes off as being over-sensitive. I would rather have that comment and its reasoning on a post than not have it. Not trolling at all, just a very different view on the subject.
Or such is my opinion.
I still disagree that an opinion is every truly “wrong”. Couching a factual inaccuracy behind a belief is a completely different territory to me, but I understand what you are saying. Ultimately my problem with that poster is the way he phrased it as much as anything. If you have to preface a statement you are about to make with “sorry but” or “no offense but”, chances are you probably shouldn’t make said statement in the first place. That is like the windup pitch for something that you know is going to be inflammatory. Granted I have done it more than one time in the past, and I likely should not have. As I said it makes you come off as a troll, or at the very least way more aggressive than you likely intend to.
Then again… since I approve all comments from anyone who has never commented before… had it actually offended me that much I would have just not approved it. I just thought the phrasing was needlessly inflammatory.
I dropped Butchering on my Apoth/Outfit/Butcher Mage and switched it to Foraging so that I’d have a better source of herbs than a lower level alt and I already had a 51 Warrior with Butchering so it was a duplicate. Then I started leveling that alt far beyond my mage, so I dropped Foraging and switched it over to Runecrafting because my runecrafting alt was at 300 but only level 23 and I now have three characters in 50+ content. After I got the Mage’s Runecrafting to 301 I found out that there’s a faerie in each faction “capital” that will teleport you to Tempest Bay at any level during Summerfest.
So most of my profession switching lately has been quite a failure overall as there’s no reason to have duplicates of any crafting profession in this game. Well, I guess technically doing so does provide you with an easy way to cheap the daily crafting quest system by making things on a high level alt to use on the low level’s professions without increasing the profession, which allows you to get cheap and easy craftsman’s marks.
That is pretty awesome… I caught a comment last night about there being a way to teleport but I didn’t fully grasp it in the middle of all my random disconnects. I need to port all the characters that do not yet have a way to Tempest Bay over there. Well I guess technically ALL of my characters can get there via the teleporter thingy, but this is much easier 🙂
“but at the end of the day I still love him like a bother”
Hehe… best typo ever!
lol… yeah so I write these around 6 am each morning… I will have to fix that one