MMORPG.Social

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It has been roughly a month since we embarked on this journey of the MMORPG.Social Mastodon instance and I have been wanting to report back how things have been going.  For the uninitiated Mastodon is as social microblogging platform that runs on a technology called ActivityPub  which provides the functionality of decentralizing your access to a larger network.  What I mean by that is all of the individual Mastodon/Pleroma/PixelFed/GNUSocial and a bunch of other similar ActivityPub based tools “federate” with each other and effectively link up to form what folks commonly refer to as the Fediverse.

What this means in practice is that you address people not only by the @name convention but also @instance following the name.  In doing so you can follow and communicate freely with anyone using any of the ActivityPub based federating instances.  Because of this freedom it becomes more about choosing the local instance that most closely reflects your interests than simply dog-piling on the largest one.  Some numbers for example of the biggest instances…  Pawoo.net which is a mostly non-english speaking instance has as of the time of writing this… 441,376 users.  Mastodon.Social which is lead by the creator of the Mastodon software and largely considered to be the flagship is at 306,065 users.  On the other end of the spectrum you have thousands of single or handful of users instances that cater to very small communities.

Why Change Instances?

I’ve moved around quite a bit on the Fediverse, largely because as I got more engaged with the community I had reasons for popping elsewhere.  Thankfully Mastodon specifically gives you the tools to direct users from one profile to another profile and export/import the users you were following to make picking up your home and moving it a little easier.  Just for reference…  here is a run down of the people I have been on the Fediverse.

  • @Belghast@Mastodon.Cloud – a large generic instance that was being used as overflow for Mastodon.Social when I first found out about the existence of the Fediverse.
  • @Belghast@Elekk.xyz – I quickly realized that having a good local was more important than being on a big instance and this was an amazing home run by @Noelle who also serves as one of the moderators for Mastodon.Social and in general does an awful lot to help support the Fediverse in general.  Even though I am not actively using Elekk.xyz I fund her Patreon just to help support her efforts.
  • @Belghast@Nineties.Cafe – My good friend Liore decided to start her own Mastodon instance, and with that I migrated myself from Elekk.xyz to Nineties.Cafe.  The first month was a glorious time, much like the launch of a new MMORPG but over time folks stopped posting and now there are only a handful of us that seem to check it these days.
  • @Belghast@MMORPG.Social – I initially just signed up here to support the very awesome Gazimoff who is running the instance, and in the end wound up migrating completely because it has become a really cool environment.  Lots of MMORPG players hanging out and talking about the games they are playing.

Ultimately I didn’t have to move at all and I could have continued communicating with people from Elekk, Nineties and MMORPG all through my original Mastodon.Cloud account.  However one of the things I love about having a good local instance for a home, is that you get access to the Local feed that shows what everyone is publicly talking about on that server.  Each time I have moved it was because I wanted to be part of that local environment and keep taps on what was happening.  There is of course the Federated timeline which shows you everything being said by anyone that your instance is federated with, but that can be at times like drinking from the firehose.

Admittedly one of the hardest things to get used to for a long time avid Twitter user like myself, is how generally slow the pace is on the Fediverse.  You have to sort of think back to those early days of twitter when you weren’t following a couple of hundred very chatty people to get the same sort of experience.  Over time I have found people from lots of different instances that I follow, and because of it I have knitted together a community of people that I talk to on a regular basis.  However I want to throw out the warning that Mastodon and the Fediverse in general is going to feel like a really quiet place at the beginning before you branch out and find your tribe.

Why MMORPG.Social?

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The instance has been going for roughly a month at this point and we have way more users than I ever expected at this point.  Gaz also has been working super hard to give lots of different options for the user base and even got us an official Mascot.  I have no clue if the mascot has a name… but I propose Mortimer.  Normally folks just stand up and instance and call it good, but Gaz has been doing a lot of fiddling under the hood to stand up infrastructure to support growth.  Here are some examples…

  • https://mmorpg.social – this takes you to the default TweetDeck inspired interface that personally I find super comfortable since I generally use either that or a mobile client to access Twitter.
  • https://lite.mmorpg.social/ – for those who prefer the twitter web client experience, Gaz stood up Halcyon which is a lightweight twitter clone interface.
  • https://blog.mmorpg.social – is a WordPress site where he posts information about the instance which is pretty new but also super useful.
  • images.mmorpg.social – is not directly reachable but serves as the infrastructure for AWS S3 where he is now hosting all of the images for speed and reliability
  • mail.mmorpg.social – is also not directly reachable but is a dedicated mail server that handles that functionality again for speed and reliability since registration requires email notification

On top of that I believe he is experimenting with PixelFed which is an activitypub implementation that gives you a more Instagram like experience, but the challenge there is making it blend in seamlessly with the rest of the network so folks who prefer that Insta experience can still hang out and communicate with those who prefer the Twitterish one.  So much of this is contained in a really excellent “Getting Started” post that he crafted as a way of easing new users into our little corner of the world.

Adjusting Expectations

I think one of the challenges of the Fediverse is that so many people hop on that bandwagon thinking it will immediately replace Twitter as their daily driver network.  I too went into it with those expectations and quite frankly I was placing too much pressure on it to fill some predetermined niche I already had carved out.  As I have moved through the Fediverse and tempered that opinion…  I’ve realized that more or less it is a completely new continent to explore.  Sure you are ultimately leaving a bunch of people behind in that journey, but you are also going to meet a ton of people you might never have met if you didn’t hop on that boat to the new expansion content.

At it’s core MMORPG.Social was created to fulfill three basic goals.

  • To build a microblogging home for fans of MMOs and online games
  • To eliminate excessive and uninvited advertising
  • To bring back features like chronological timelines, and add new ones like editing statuses and custom emoji

I personally think it is excelling at all of them and they have a pretty reasonable code of conduct statement as well.  The awesome thing about the Fediverse is somewhere out there is an instance being run in the manner that you want.  The fediverse in general gives the admins a lot of latitude in dealing with problems…  like the ability to block entire instances that end up being problem children.  This means that the fediverse experience is going to be very different for each user and especially on each local instance.  So far I am greatly enjoying my stay and if you are interested in Mastodon, the Fediverse or MMORPG.Social I am always more than willing to answer questions.  If you are interested in signing up check out the sign up link here.

Cloud Gaming

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A few weeks back I got a DM out of the blue from whoever manages the ParsecTeam twitter account.  Essentially they said that since I talk about Parsec all the time that they would like to send me a shirt as a sort of token of appreciation.  So yesterday said shirt came in the mail so I thought I would post a picture of it here.  It is REALLY bright blue, and the photo I took with it laying on the bed doesn’t exactly do it justice.  Basically think how bright Twitch Purple is… but blue.  I have this weird thing with products, in that I really only want to support the things that I truly believe in…  and Parsec is definitely one of those given that I use it pretty much every night.  I do not however have any sort of a formal relationship with the company and I am paying for services the same as anyone else.  I opted into the Warp account thing more than anything as a way of helping fund development which I THINK is around $50 a year but I am not 100% certain of that.

The reason why I keep talking about Parsec is because it has been a game changer for me personally in opening up my options to play games on a system that effectively no longer supports decent gameplay.  I’ve talked about this at length, so really don’t feel the need to dig back in this morning but if you are curious what I am talking about you can find the tales in these two posts:  “In Home Streaming” and “Wireless Ethernet”.  I guess throughout my life I have experienced a lot of things that I loved…  that for whatever reason did not stand the test of time.  As a result this has made me really want to show support for the things that products that make my life better.  Parsec has definitely been one of those products and as such I keep mentioning it any time someone brings up wanting to swap around the way they game, or have a better mobile gaming option.  I still would love to see native clients for the consoles, even if they can’t do bi-directional play and simply offers streaming from PC to console.

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The thing I am the most curious about are the cloud options that they offer to rent.  One of these days I am going to try out that Amazon Web Services g3.4xlarge even though I have no real need to do so.  Mostly I am curious at just how viable it is for modern gaming and just how cost effective it would be to purchase one.  If you were going to try and recreate my current gaming rig right now…  even though it has some older parts in it… it would still cost around $2300.  You could effectively game 24/7 for 52 days straight before you spent in cloud charges as you would on that system.  My real question however is just how nice is the performance.  At the moment I am streaming Parsec across my LAN with it configured to always try a local connection first, so I am not really sure how it is going to feel going out to AWS.  One of these weekends when I don’t have another competing project I am going to give it a shot because I am super curious.  I’m also curious what that big box feels like as compared to the much smaller specced $0.51/hour set up.

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This morning went down a rabbit hole that I did not intend to go down.  Originally I was going to make fun of my character in Assassin’s Creed Origins for somehow having two different bows, a battle axe, a sword and a shield slung across his back.  Instead I talked more about Parsec, but legitimately I am going to try out the cloud option at some point.  Mostly for folks that want to have a PC gaming experience a few hours a week without affording a PC…  it might be a really cost effective solution.  This is one of those things that I don’t need myself at all, but I would like to know how well it works before I offer it as a possible solution.  I’m in a weird spot gaming wise where I am still playing a single player game, but not really feeling like I have much exciting to say about it.  I’ve also been super exhausted this week, and need to wrap this up so I can get to work.

So readers…  How is your week going?

Fun Police

Yesterday during the day I posted a list of Ravnica guilds in order of my likelihood to play them.  For the uninitiated the guilds themselves simply represent the various two color combinations that are available in Magic the Gathering.  So instead of saying you are playing Black and Green…  a lot of players simply say that they are playing Golgari as a not as short as saying GB sort of shorthand.  The truth is I think it goes deeper than that and is instead a sort of tribalism that allows players to indicate that they are in fact “in the know” and part of the community.  Whatever the case… they exist and I have certain proclivities.  Here is my ordered list of guilds in decreasing likelihood that I would play that color combination.

  1. Golgari – aka Green and Black
  2. Gruul – aka Green and Red
  3. Rakdos – aka Red and Black
  4. Orzhov – aka White and Black
  5. Selesnya – aka White and Green
  6. Boros – aka White and Red
  7. Simic – aka Blue and Green
  8. Dimir – aka Blue and Black
  9. Izzit – aka Blue and Red
  10. Azorius  – aka Blue and White

Later that night Kodra chimed in with a comment that I expected him to make at some point.

You notice that pretty much on my list every combination that includes the color blue is sorted to the very bottom as in general it is the color that I am least likely to play at any given time.  Also note that pretty much any combination of Black and Green gets sorted pretty high given that those are my favorite colors to play.  So why then do I hate one specific color of magic.  The truth is I hate what it stands for… which is control magic.  The challenge of the color pie is that in modern magic every color has specific themes that it excels at.  Black for example plays with dead things, and also things that are just as likely to backfire and harm the player as the opponent.  Green wants to go big and go fast and stomp stomp stomp stomp.  Red wants to burn you…  GIVE ME FUEL GIVE ME FIRE GIVE ME THAT WHICH I DESIRE!  White does a bunch of things… but mostly small creatures with tricks, flyers and ways to prevent damage from being dealt.  Blue on the other hand…  while it also has a bunch of flyers… it excels at the magic of denial.

Now I will admit that pretty much every color has some form of denial built into it.  Green is good at blowing up flyers and artifacts, Red can nuke stuff…  black has a lot of straight up death to a creature cards, and white can throw creatures into time out exceptionally well.  Blue however just has a lengthy library of ways to keep you from actually doing anything.  If a control player is doing what they are intending to do… they effectively shut you down from being able to cast anything.  This means that one player is having fun tormenting you… and the other player is frothing at the mouth and wanting to flip the damned table.  Blue players tend to couch this commentary as that they like doing tricky things, but those tricks are played at the expense of someone else’s fun.

Don’t get me wrong I have played control before and fiddled around constantly with my “Mill” deck for years.  For the uninitiated “Mill” is a deck style named after the card Millstone that forces the player to place the top two cards from their library into their graveyard.  One of the alternate win conditions in Magic the Gathering is that when one player cannot draw a card they lose the game.  So in Mill you are playing a constant stream of cards that force the player to discard over and over until they have nothing left.  Right now there is a card called Persistent Petitioners that if you have 4 of them in play…  can force the player to mill twelve cards at a time.  Sure it is weird and entertaining the first time you encounter it…  but if you keep encountering it the fun wears off for everyone but the person playing the deck.  Ultimately the reason why I do not enjoy Blue… is because too often the fun of a control player comes at the expense of everyone else.

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Of note this is also why I generally do not like broken combos like Krark-Clan Ironworks that if encountered you might as well just concede and move on with your life.  There was an unlimited combo in Amonkhet that involved players creating a bajillion cat token creatures.  The first time I encountered it…  I let it play out just to see how nonsense it could get.  Notice the opposing player has an army of token creatures…  and is at 183 life to my 15.  Once again this was entertaining the very first time I encountered it, but not at all from that point forward and if I even got the whiff on the wind of someone playing this combo…  I could concede out and move on to the next match hoping for something more manageable.  The players who love combos like this feel a sense of gratification for breaking the game…  and everyone else just feels like the game is dumb for allowing something like that.

The times I am happiest playing Magic the Gathering is when you have some random back and forth interactions, the type that you see often among brand new players.  I love two people sitting down with a bunch of random jank and hoping to succeed, and I guess that is why in general I prefer draft formats for the randomness.  I’m working on a pauper singleton league at work as I have said before, in part because those constraints do a lot of things to stamp down power combos.  If Arena had a format where they literally gave you a randomized deck that aligned to some basic color themes…  that would probably be my favorite format ever.  I think ultimately I am chasing the joy we felt first playing this game when we absolutely did not know any better and had six of us sitting around a table playing in a grand melee.

Giza and Memphis

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Today we return to my normal nonsense.  Yesterday felt really weird, but not as weird as I guess I expected it to feel?  I am still very much engaged in Assassin’s Creed Origins…  or in the way that I play it…  Egyptian Skyrim?  I’ve made it to Giza and can now die happy…  or actually at this point I have made it past Giza.  Climbing to the top of the pyramids was an interesting challenge as you effectively had to work your way from gap in the capping to the next gap all the way up to the top.  That is one of the bizarre things about this game…  in some ways it feels very much like Breath of the Wild where it seems like you can climb everything in your view…  until you suddenly can’t.  When the game wants to cut off a route it makes something un-climbable which just feels really odd considering the rest of the game you are pulling off crazy moves that would be impossible to actually do in real life.

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One of the mechanics that I both love and hate is the torch, because I am having to use it an awful lot here in Giza as I explore the depths of many tombs.  It feels cool because in theory the torch shows about as much as you would expect from an actual torch.  The negative however is the game knows this… and regularly presents you with rooms that have dimensions that do the torch no favors, and in those situations I find myself working around the edge in a vague attempted to not fall into some pit or something.  So far I have not actually encountered an actual pit, but by god my mind knows that the moment I stop being vigilant…  BAM A PIT.  Additionally I love that the game shows me actually equipping weapons…  but it really shows the nonsense of my inventory as I am equipping two different bows… a sword and shield…  and a giant freaking battle axe.

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Another thing we need to continue talking about is how freaking gorgeous this game is.  I’ve always been enthralled by Egyptian history… and roaming around all of these locations in virtual avatar form is amazing.  Memphis is pretty much how I imagined it…  a swampy mess.  I also love the fact that there is a dedicated croc hunter in a vague attempt to keep the waterways clear enough for the people to safely traverse.  I am not entirely sure why I am on this single player kick, but I am going to roll with it at least until Anthem starts going through its pre-release posturing early next month.  I will say… all of this is really making me want to pick back up Witcher 3, which is even less linear than Assassin’s Creed Origins… and quite literally something I could play for six months and never have seen everything.  The biggest thing about this game…. is I am always happy to return again the next night.

So readers… what are you up to that is interesting?  Playing anything great?