July 2016 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Revising Memory

July 29, 2016 by Belghast

Of Pedestals

Wow-64 2016-07-29 06-16-01-25

For quite a while I have held the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft on a bit of a pedestal. That was the last time I was truly and completely devoted to the game, and is the point where I for better or worse thought the game took a sharp detour. It was shortly after the launch of the next expansion Cataclysm that I began this on again off again tourism with the game. So this year when the talk of “Vanilla” servers came up, I thought to myself that I had no desire to ever return to the launch of the game… but Wrath of the Lich King most definitely. It felt like the right mix of progress and promise wrapped up into an extremely playable package with awesome lore events and truly phenomenal raids. Sure there was the shit storm that was the Crusaders Colosseum, but for the time being we are going to forget that was even a thing. Yes I realized that it served a key story arc, but as a raid goes it was thoroughly disappointing after Ulduar. I can also remember really enjoying the questing in Wrath of the Lich King and some of those zones are ones that I still count among my favorite in the game. That was until I recently returned while leveling my Warlock. In part the distinction was made clear after recently leveling both my Rogue and Druid to 100 in the Warlords of Draenor quest content, then dropping down to my level 75 Warlock and attempting to push him up into the Cataclysm zones.

The key problem I noticed was the fact that content rarely synchronized terribly well. In the later expansions, you are allowed to collect a whole series of quests for a specific area and then do a whole bunch of different things there before returning to the quest hub to move to the next area. That simply doesn’t work in practice in Wrath of the Lich King, and I found myself constantly reaching the same point at different times, with the absolute worst of it involving sending me back to the same Harpy filled ravine in Storm Peaks each time after something slightly different. If that was the exception and not the rule life would have been golden, but zone after zone I found myself staggered just enough in my questing to be annoying and greatly drag out the leveling process with a ton of movement from one edge of the zone to the next. This of course was exacerbated by the fact that my Warlock only has slow flight, which makes traversing the bigger areas extremely painful. That said I remember definitely having to do all of these zones before flight, which only would have made them that much worse. I tried doing my stair step approach to the content, and found that not entirely working as intended… namely because there is no hero’s call quest that leads into Icecrown. At 79 I finally decided to pop over and see if I could start the quests, and sure enough I was able to finish up there and ding within fairly short order. The quest sequence inside of Icecrown is probably the best I experienced in my abbreviated push through Northrend.

Evolutions Were Made

So regardless of what I have said about Wrath of the Lich King in the past, I have to admit that significant upgrades have been made to the way we level characters. I mean I knew that The Burning Crusade quests were frustrating and slow, but even then there seemed to be a lot more batching up of related tasks than I experienced during the several zones in Northrend. Ultimately my big complaint with the more recent expansions has not been the leveling content, in fact I think questing through Pandaria and Warlords to be some of the most fun I generally have on a character. Even Cataclysm from what I remember was pretty fun, with the only real problem there being that each zone is an entirely linear experience and if you lose the quest chain somewhere you are simply dead in the water. I am sure as I level with my demons through the Cata zones I will find the same frustrations there that I found with Wrath, just in different ways. The little bit I have played of Legion feels like they have once again made a leap forward in the way the flow of questing feels, and I am sure at some point I will be complaining about all of the past content when I level my next batch of alts. When you spend a good deal of your time playing alts, the way the quests fit together really matters, and in games like Final Fantasy XIV where I don’t have quests to level alternate jobs… I miss it greatly.

We tend to lock things in our mind, that are colored by feelings and emotions that were happening at the time. In many ways the Wrath era had some of the most turmoil in my life in dealing with a job that I hated, and a downward spiral of events brought on by deaths and other traumatic events. However I will always think fondly upon that time because of the stability that my guild and raid team provided me during that time. They were always there and always supportive even when I decided I wanted to stop leading anything. It is because of all of this that Wrath was this shining moment for me in a long list of World of Warcraft experiences. However that sequence of events is nothing I would ever want to relive, and it is impossible to try and piece that era back together. In many ways my fondness for Wrath of the Lich King is no different than a parent trying to relive their own high school sports glory days through forcing their kids to make the same decisions they did. I need to come to the realization that there is no going back, and we can only keep moving forward and adapting to the changes as they happen. I still completely reserve the right to disagree with the direction various games are being taken in, but ultimately my only choice is whether or not I play. I can’t claw back change, and somehow bring things back to a state that I remember so fondly. My recent trip through Northrend has made me realize that even if I could… I wouldn’t actually enjoy the results.

Peak Pokemon

July 28, 2016 by Belghast

Nothing but Zubats

AWildZubat

There are several news outlets reporting that Pokemon Go has reached its peak and is now starting to trend downwards. This is zero surprising to me, simply because it would be hard for any game to reach this level of viral saturation… and then somehow manage to sustain it. There are a lot of factors at play here, not the least of which is our apparent short attention span when it comes to internet fueled phenomena. That said I personally am still playing it quite regularly, but with a lot less of the reckless abandon. On my drive into work every morning there are still a couple of parking lots I pop by and check that have given me good finds in the past. However I am largely not doing the evening walking thing, because we have had a streak of 100 degree days with some silly humidity going on. Whenever I stop anywhere however I still habitually whip out the phone to check if there is anything interesting around. I’ve made several trips to local hot spots in a constant search of something new. The game however has a lot of problems standing in front of it, and I believe that they more than anything are what is standing in the way of player retention. The truth be told, I feel like we are at a point of being rolled out to every market that really makes a difference, and that was probably never the intention… or at least not this soon. However the social pressure of players wanting to play desperately, and being willing to find other ways to do so… meant that if they did not push to other territories that they were ultimately losing their shot at that income stream.

The biggest problem with this game is that the experience is not equitable. I count myself lucky that I work in a town of 500,000 and live in a metro area of roughly 1 million. That said other than a dozen “hot spots”, Tulsa seems to be a wasteland of Pidgey, Rattata, Weedle and oh so many Zubats. When you get out to the suburbs where I live, even those seem to be few and far between that when I go on a walk I am catching them more out of a sense of boredom than any desire to actually waste the pokeballs on them. Similarly I get excited when I see the next tier of “mostly trash” Pokemon in the form of the Doduo, Caterprie, Venonat, and Spearow because it breaks up the monotony of an ocean of Pidgey candy. I said that I count myself lucky, because as miserable as it is to go a week without seeing anything interesting… I am still sitting just shy of level 20 with 76 Pokemon caught and 77 seen. Thusfar “the one that got away” was a Dratini that I lost due to the once super common “pokeball lock up”, where the screen would freeze on catch and you had either caught the Pokemon or not, but had no real second chance because you would have to restart the app to get control again. The folks that are in really dire straights are those who are unlucky enough to live in rural areas. I know when I have traveled to various small towns here in Oklahoma I have seen nothing but the regular assortment of random trash Pokemon, even surrounding Pokestops.

Servers On Fire

Another huge problem up until this point is that the servers have been anything but reliable. Another way that I am extremely lucky is that I have a wife who is super understanding about my desire to go hunting invisible creatures. She has suggested multiple times that we take road trips to check out other areas and see if maybe I can get far enough out of our zone to find something new and interesting. The problem there is that until this week you never really could rely on the servers actually being up at any given moment. It is impossible to tell the difference between what is just the servers on fire from usage, and what is Niantic actually performing maintenance. The reason being that the company behind this game seems to think the best policy is zero communication with their customers about basic up time information. So the one time a few weeks back when we actually decided to take a road trip, the servers looked fine when we left our house. Then by the time we actually reached our destination I could not catch anything without getting a string of constant application lockups due to the servers not responding. I went to a park that I thought would be loaded with Pokemon, and ultimately it was… however after trying to catch four things and getting four pokeball lockups, I gave up and headed home frustrated.

Now when I say that the experience is not equitable, I think it is worth mentioning the experience that the faction of AggroChat is having up in Seattle. They seem to have a cavalcade of hot and cold running Pokemon all of the time. Tam apparently lives across from some park that is an absolute hot bed of activity in the evening, and while we have those here they are nowhere near my house, and would be horribly awkward to drive to at 9/10 pm at night. Here in Tulsa there is a reddit that keeps tabs on what folks have seen and caught… and I know in Seattle they seem to be regularly catching things that we have never seen. So ultimately I feel like they need to tweak the base population to be a little more fair, and a lot less based on cellular activity which was the case with Ingress. I am sure this game is a phenomenal experience in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Chicago… but significantly less for those of us stuck in smaller population centers. So if we have reached “Peak Pokemon”, I feel like a good chunk of it comes from the frustration of wanting to play… and when you finally can keep connected to the servers, the only thing you see are the same critters you see everywhere. My kingdom for a Vulpix or I would quite literally wet myself if I probably saw a Pikachu or a Charmander.

Still Playing

All of this said… I am still very much interested in this game. The part of Pokemon that I enjoy the most is roaming around and catching new things, and for the most part this app lets me do ONLY that. However at some point I am going to get bored with the assortment of common and slightly less common Pokemon that I can regularly find here. I caught a Machoke on Monday, and that had been the first new wild Pokemon I had seen in over two weeks. Most of the new finds I am getting, are through sheer brute force evolution of less common critters. For example I got an Arbok yesterday, by finally getting enough candy to evolve and Ekans. While in part I am happy to tick off another checkbox in the Pokedex… I would have far rather seen an Arbok in the wild, or a Seaking, or a Gloom… or the countless other evolutions I have finally gotten enough candy to do. I am admittedly jealous of the folks who live in active enough areas to see that sort of stuff in the wild, without actually resorting to making Pokemon Go into a lifestyle. Sure there are folks that have been hanging out at the handful of hot spots every single night here in Tulsa, and I am certain they have seen some pretty awesome stuff. However what I am looking for is a game that I can play in the times between going and doing other things, and for the most part this game fits that bill awesomely. I am just hoping that at some point they give me something more interesting to see than another Rattata. Right now my app is telling me that I have caught 660 Pokemon, and quite literally I figure at least 300 of those have been Zubats. Largely I am just hoping at some point the game changes in a way that makes me still have hope that I will find something interesting in the wild. That is a huge part of what has nerfed my nightly walks is knowing that a trip around the neighborhood is maybe going to get me a couple Pidgeys, a Rattata and if I am super lucky an Eevee. I am curious what your own experiences have been? Are you having much luck “catching them all”?

The Leveling Game

July 27, 2016 by Belghast

Buckling Some Swash

Since the 7.0.3 patch landed in World of Warcraft, I have been more than a little obsessed with relearning classes given the significant changes to the bevy of talent trees. On my rogue I have more or less always been combat, other than a brief flirtation with subtlety during vanilla thanks to knowing a few insane “sub” rogues. If one thing should be certain by now is that I am not a huge fan of stealth mechanics, and my ideal “rogue” is that of a pirate or swashbuckler rather than assassin or thief. As a result it feels like Outlaw the rebranded combat is essentially tailor made for me. The spec itself is made up largely of huge sword slash moves and pistol shots, making it feel a lot to me like the Witch Hunter from Warhammer Online. The core of the gameplay focuses around either a melee slash builder or short range pistol shot builder, coupled with a slashing combo dump and a long range combo dump that also happens to stun the target… but is on a rather long cooldown. Other than these there is an additional combo dump called Roll the Bones which gives your character one or more buffs from a list of available buffs. For those who raided during Wrath of the Lich King, it reminds me quite a bit of the way Deathbringer’s Will felt. Completely unpredictable but when the buff is up it always does something interesting. When the patch landed my rogue was sitting at level 91 and had barely seen anything past the Garrison. As of yesterday I dinged 100 and have begun gearing him to at least do some basic content like LFR.

Not to be undone by the new school rogue experience, I opted to start working on my druid again which I generally play as feral. Feral mostly feels the same as it always has, which now represents the way combat rogue largely previously felt. In some ways I am grateful that it didn’t change a whole lot, but in other ways I admit I am a little disappointed. So many classes with Outlaw Rogue and Survival Hunter feel new and different and shiny… that the ones like Feral Druid and Protection Warrior that stayed largely the same feel a little diminished. Belgarou had been my character of choice for leveling during the AggroChat podcast for awhile now, and I had made slow and prodding progress. However last night I made a serious push and went from just shy of 96 to 100 in a single evening. Traditionally when I level characters I follow a basic pattern which will make completionists cringe. I tend to say in Shadowmoon Valley until 92, and then immediately drop those quests and swap to Gorgrond until 94. From Gorgrond I jump to Terrokar, and then again to Spires of Arak at 96. Finally I reach Nagrand at 98 and continue there until I ding, with the theory that spending the maximum amount of time in that zone will mean I will have the best gear to start angling for the 620 item level that unlocks that first LFR. The end result is a quick succession of zones each one giving me the maximum experience for my level and getting me to the level cap as soon as possible.

The Stable Fills

I am by no means the fastest at leveling characters, but I am doing largely okay when I can actually stick with a game for any given period of time. At this point I have eight level 100s, but that is nothing even vaguely close to the number that Grace has and hers span multiple servers. In theory the next closest to 100 would be Belglorian my priest, but honestly I am not super enthused about leveling it. At some point I want to try out the new Shadow with its Old God based lore, but I am in no real rush. I mean it would be awesome to have my tailor at max level when Legion lands, but I am thinking it might be too “finger wiggly” for me at the moment. There is of course my monk who is still sitting at level 53, but that means a return to more leather. I am kinda getting tired of wearing leather, since I just finished off my rogue and druid back to back. Also there is the problem that for whatever reason I have never been able to get into the flow of a monk. I really enjoy playing pugilist in Final Fantasy XIV, and I had a Monk in Everquest II… but for whatever reason the World of Warcraft version doesn’t feel as interesting. For me at least it feels very much like another dual wielding class, since I went the dpsy version. Brewmaster tanking felt odd, and “Fistweaving” I have heard is no longer a thing… so more than likely that means I will always be a sorta rogue on that class.

As a result it seems like my next leveling target is going to be the Warlock, because it is just finger wiggly enough for me to be able to enjoy it. Additionally all that time I spent leveling my Arcanist in Final Fantasy XIV has taught me a greater respect for damage over time classes. Generally speaking I have always been a demonology player, because I like running around with giant demon pets. However I might branch out a bit and try something new, it all depends on if I can get the swing of the new changes. In any case I am not exactly sure why I have been on this marathon leveling session, but I am mostly just going with the flow. I think part of it is also my attempt to catch them all as far as appearances go. I have added so many items to my wardrobe that it isn’t even funny. The hope is that in doing this push I will get at least one leather and one cloth class that I actually enjoy playing, that I can run old world content with for those cloth and leather pieces that I seem to be missing. I have a huge stash of plate and chain, because those are all classes that I play pretty frequently. The worst seems to be the finger wigglers, so I am hoping that I can make the Warlock into a soloing beast to farm up awesome transmog sets with. In any case… this has been my recent obsession and I thought I would share it with you.

A Chill Blaugust

July 26, 2016 by Belghast

Over the last few weeks folks have been pinging me, asking if Blaugust would be returning. I feel like I have put off this post as long as I could possible do so. Originally I was planning on calling Blaugust this year because I simply did not have it in me. However when I finally got around to posting that statement… I had folks come out of the woodwork to suggest that the contest was cool and all, but not terribly essential to the concept of Blaugust for them. They also started brainstorming ways to make it less stressful for me personally. Essentially last year was a perfect storm of events that made Blaugust extremely hard. Firstly we had a truly irrationally large number of people participating jumping from 52 the first year to 88 the second year. There was a period of time that I thought we would be breaking 100. The thing is… for whatever reason I decided to make this thing a contest, with a win condition. That means that I needed to take the tallying of numbers and such super seriously, because I would ultimately be handing out rewards at the end of the journey. The only problem with that was that due to the participation and the large number of folks “winning” each year the concept of having a true single winner seemed super silly. As a result the last two years I have relied on a random number generation to finally pass out the prizes, and that felt somewhat icky. So this year we are rolling back to a previous revision in our magical source control system… and taking a stab at what the root of the idea really was.

Blogging on a Schedule

If you were to ask me what caused me to launch this thing in the first place, I am not sure if I could actually pin it down to a single thought. However I wanted Blaugust to be about posting blog content on a schedule. I went from being one of the least prolific bloggers to one of the most prolific in a matter of weeks when I embarked upon my “grand experiment” of blogging each and every morning. In truth it was madness that I would ever suggest that someone do the same. Ultimately this year I broke my streak on purpose just to have it done and buried and behind me. However I did manage to make it a little over three years without skipping a single day, and it is a feat that I am rather proud of. However the rhythm I have settled into as a result of posting every single week day also feels pretty great. Additionally it is far more manageable because at least for my wife and I.. the weekends are the only time we really have to do much of anything together. I can bang out a post in 30 minutes when I am under the gun of having to get to work on time, but for whatever reason my blog posts on Saturday and Sunday often times took hours. I tried a bunch of hacks to get around this, like having a reoccurring movie/television column, or a summary column that recounted the best highlights of what I did that week. However none of it felt really fresh or meaningful, and instead just superseded any planned activities that we might have wanted to do that weekend.

The core message of Blaugust has always been that blogging on a schedule is a good thing. My thought was by challenging people to blog every single day for a month, then when they decided to roll that back to every other day, or only week days… it wouldn’t seem near that daunting. For some this absolutely worked and Blaugust has seemed to make a lot of blogs more active. The only problem is it has the opposite effect as well… the challenge “broke” some people and they would go for months without making a post after the challenge wrapped up. This was absolutely an unintended consequence, and one that really bothered me from the very first year. The last thing I want to do is in some way bully people out of the blogosphere by setting up some sort of artificial gate. Additionally the whole concept of having winners bothered me as well. If you sit down and create a blog, and commit yourself to posting on it and baring your soul to the rest of us… you are a big winner in my book. Blogging is one of those things that gets in your blood, but it also takes a lot out of the person doing it. So everyone out there posting on their own blogs be it MMO Gaming, Cooking or Stamp Collecting… you are all awesome to me. So in this reboot we are no longer going to think of this as a contest, but instead a festival of sorts. I want to embrace the positives that the event can bring, without adding to the pressure everyone is already under when trying to do their own thing.

Blaugust 2016

So what we end up with is a Festival of Blogging on a Schedule. What schedule you intend to stick with is entirely up to you, and honestly even if you do keep a schedule at all. 2016 has been this year when a lot of bad stuff has happened around the world, and I don’t want my artificial contest to be something that adds stress to anyone. If you want to push yourself to blog every day, awesome. I will be watching and will be tabulating those folks at the end, with probably a special sidebar image that denotes that. However I am not putting any real prizes on the line this year. This is the year that we are doing this thing for the sake of doing it. I always got the impression that no one was really in this for the gold at the end of the rainbow… so I doubt this will make any real difference. However I am trying to de-escalate the stress of the event, and I think by no longer making it a contest that might help. The hope is that you will take this month and make your own content creation more active than it has been in the past months. That is it.. that is the ultimate goal to get folks out there creating more awesome content.

The Rules

There really is only one serious rule, and that is the sign-up sheet. If you are going to start participating in Blaugust 2016 please take a few minutes to fill out this Google Form. It doesn’t ask an awful lot but what it does is important. It asks for…

Name of Blog
URL of Blog
Schedule if you Plan on Sticking to One
Twitter Handle if you use it
How you Heard About Blaugust

That’s it, nice and simple. I will tabulate the results and keep some sort of sidebar or event page with the collected information on it.

The other thing that I would ask is if you post to twitter please use the hashtag #Blaugust2016 just as a way of making things easier for folks to see as they are posted.

Resources

There is the Blaugust Nook over on Anook, and it is a great place to ask questions and have conversations with other bloggers that are doing this thing. Twitter as well is also a great resource, and I know personally that is where I end up holding most of my conversations with other bloggers. As far as Discord that seems to be the popular thing to be doing right now… I would prefer not to start a brand new server just for this event since I already have like twenty servers in my app. There are a couple of ones devoted to blogging so going to be pestering the folks who run those to see if they mind sharing. Additionally for anyone wanting to see what has happened in previous years there is always the Blaugust Category on my own blog, which I have been more or less fairly decent about tagging related posts.

Back to the Roots

Personally I will be going back to posting every day during the month of August. That said I might be staging some of the content on Saturday and Sunday so that it posts in the morning, rather than getting up and doing them and thereby impeding whatever activities we have planned. Giving up Saturday and Sunday was a strange thing for me when I did it, and on some levels I think it was a positive effect. That said there are lots of times that I have events that happen on the weekend that it feels artificial to wait until Monday to talk about. For example the passing of my cat Chloe this weekend… happened Friday night, and by the time Monday rolled around posting about it just felt like ripping a barely formed scab off the wound that was trying to heal. So for the first time in the history of Blaugust me posting every single day won’t just be my default interaction. It is going to take work to get me back in the habit of doing it, so I will essentially be struggling with you all to up my game and make more interesting content. One last word that I want to leave you with… is while everything about this keeps saying Blog, I don’t want to limit any creative outlet. If you are a vlogger or if you do twitch lets plays, or honestly any form of regular content creation, I don’t want to exclude you from this “festival”. Please sign up and let us know what you are creating and where you are creating it, and while blog means something specific… in my mind any sort of regular content creation be it blog, vlog, stream, or podcast feels like blogging to me. Additionally this is not just an MMO or Gaming thing… if you are out there blogging about your own personal stuff or another completely different industry… I want you to know that you are welcome as well. This thing started as a part of the MMO Gaming community, because most of the other bloggers I knew… were MMO Gamers. Last year Blaugust expanded quite a bit, and I hope it will as well this year into new and interesting areas.