Professional Cat Herding

I don’t have a pithy image to go with this post, but yesterday we officially went on remote protocols. Like literally everyone out there I am dealing with life in pandemia, where social distancing… that thing the introverts and anxiety ridden among us have been practicing our entire life. I am officially sitting in my work place and yes I am wearing pants. Well that is a slight lie because I opted for shorts instead of my usual jeans, but I am properly dressed. I attempted to maintain as much of my morning routine as possible as I got up, showered, left the house, picked up breakfast and then instead of driving to the office I drove back home. What makes it doubly odd is that both my wife and I are now remote workers for the time being, though currently she is on spring break.

I had the sudden realization yesterday that managing a team of 16 remote employees is going to be an awful lot like leading a raid group. The challenge of leading a raid is that you effectively have a group of unpaid volunteers that you somehow are trying to get working towards the same goal with nothing but text and voice chat in order to wrangle them. When it comes to actual employees at least there are some financial hooks that you have that you can flex, but otherwise I think remote work is going to feel extremely similar. While we swapped Discord and Ventrilo for more professional tools like Microsoft Teams… the theory is very similar.

While sitting down to write this I am already connected in with my team and answering some initial tech support questions as we attempt to make sure everyone can get into their machines as intended. Kenzie is extremely confused because she knows that I should be leaving my office any minute now and continues to pace around as if to remind me that I have to run out the door. Hopefully at some point she will settle in on her box beside me and chill. The thing that concerns me the most is that it is only 7:10 and I already feel pretty isolated. I have a feeling that we are going to have to keep a chat going or something in the background that folks can drop in and out of just to have some human contact, which is bizarre for me to admit considering that I can go hours without saying a word on most days.

I pitched this concept as a grand new adventure to my employees. We come from a very “butts in seats” culture where if you are not in your seat at a specific time then you must not be actually working. One of the biggest complaints that I have heard over the years is that we don’t really have a good remote work option, and as a result this is now our chance to prove that things can in fact get done when we are all in different locations. So my hope is that we can embrace this opportunity and show that productivity comes in a bunch of different packages. This is either going to go amazingly well or backfire horribly, but I believe it is going to be the former rather than the later. Just the fact that I can work from cocoon like darkness of my office is a major upgrade to the harsh brightness of the fluorescent light sea of cubical.

Some parting thoughts however. I did some research going into this situation and one of the things that I found helpful is a pamphlet that community veteran Sanya Weathers created with some of her tips and tricks from a career of working remotely. She is currently selling it on Amazon Kindle for a little under $3 and then planning on donating the proceeds to her local food pantry. I ended up taking this version, converting it to PDF and then sending it out to my employees and putting in a donation through her coffee link for each of them and a few more just in case it spread within the company. I found the advice to be invaluable and the writing style was easily approachable and as such I am hoping it helps my crew in making the adjustment.

The thing is… at this point none of us know how long this is going to go on. It is wrecking the daily routine and as a result we are going to have to find a brand new one. I also fully expect that this blog is going to shift around a bit as a result given that my gaming patterns are being interrupted as well. Yesterday was so draining that I more or less melted into the sofa when I got home and did the whole dozing in and out of sleep thing until we finally decided to go to the bedroom around 9 pm. I maybe knocked out a few quests in Elder Scrolls Online, but my appetite for gaming was minimal just due to the sheer exhaustion of existing in pandemia. We are in the time of community spread and I hope we all make it out okay on the other end. I am going to continue to talk about the things that concern me but I am likely not going to be promoting posts like this one. This one is only for the folks who read me on a daily basis.

State of the Cats – March Edition

I realized this morning that it has been quite a bit since I made a “state of the cats” post. Since I didn’t have a ton of pressing things that I wanted to talk about this morning now seemed as good as any time to do one. Josie continues to get more and more comfortable in our house, and I am pretty sure she is made out of some form of gelatin. Cats notoriously can sleep happily in some pretty contorted spaces but she more than any other seems to be completely happy in pretty much any shape. She likes to sleep between my wife and I and if for some reason one of us moves she is more than happy to stay in whatever random contortion she winds up in. Her current favorite spot is nestled into the pillow back of the old love seat we have in our loft… where she is effectively upside down which isn’t really something you can tell from the above picture.

Kenzie and Josie are getting along swimmingly, and while rare they do occasionally actually snuggle together. Generally speaking it involves laying on my legs while I am sitting on the sofa messing around on my laptop but I have encountered a few other random occurrences where they were nestled together. This is the relationship I was most concerned about because Kenzie has not really taken to liking another cat in our household ever. They however appear to be buddies and are constantly playing together and I’ve even caught Kenzie grooming Josie. We’ve even been teaching Josie how to play catch, and she does a much better job at actually returning the object than Kenzie ever has. Shockingly Kenzie is also seemingly fine with Josie playing with her hair bands.

While I don’t have a readily available picture of Mollie, the things on her front are not going super well. Mollie does not get along well with either Kenzie or Josie, and I am not sure if it is a jealousy thing or something else. Mollie and Kenzie have NEVER gotten along, and since Josie tends to be pretty passive it seems like Mollie is taking that to her advantage and venting her frustrations on Josie. This however leads to a cycle of events which means we hear once or twice a night a squabble that is largely vocal only. Mollie will attack and corner Josie, and to this Kenzie will come to the rescue and go after Mollie until she gets chased off. Weirdly they can all be in the same vicinity when one of us is involved. There have been several occasions when I have all three snuggled in with me on the sectional.

I don’t really know if it is a situation of Mollie is actually trying to play, but not really understanding what play is? She had a weird upbringing of spending the first months of her life in a dog shelter without access to other cats and I keep blaming that on the fact that she doesn’t quite work like other cats seem to. For the time being however I am just going to be thankful that two of the three cats get along swimmingly. Josie is either following me around or following Kenzie around pretty much all of the time. Kenzie seems to be perfectly fine with this and for that I am counting my blessings because I could have wound up with a three way conflict on my hands. I am still working on Mollie and giving her lots of attention any time I can catch her off by herself, thinking that maybe just maybe eventually we will have a real breakthrough there.

GeForce Now and My Anger

I’ve had this post in me for awhile now but each time I sit down to try and write it nothing but an angry screed comes out. So today I am going to try going about this from a different angle. There is an issue that is occurring and each time I try and talk about it, I wind up catching shit about my “opinion”. I’ve fired off random tweets on three occasions and each time I’ve gotten someone telling me that my thoughts were more or less wrong because I was not viewing things from the standpoint of the business and only looking at things from the viewpoint of the consumer. The thing is… while I have lots of friends in the industry and can often times give them credit for their stances on issues… at the end of the day I am a consumer and at the end of the day right or wrong I want the thing that is going to be best for me and others like me.

However we are already veering dangerously towards the anger zone and I am going to take a step back and explain why Remote Gameplay matters to me. I have a weird use case namely because I game from two different locations in my house. The secret of my marital bliss has been to be flexible and being able to hang out somewhere other than sequestered up in my office with my gaming equipment. As a result I have a gaming laptop downstairs in the living room and my fancy gaming desktop upstairs in my office. Gaming laptops however are a frustrating proposition in that they just don’t stay viable for very long in the grand scheme of things. The hardware placed inside of them is lower end to deal with power draw and battery life issues and as a result you wind up needing to replace them roughly every two years to keep playing modern games.

That is not an expense that I enjoy and as a result over the last three years I have been exploring various options that would allow me to be on the sofa on my laptop but actually playing games upstairs off my gaming desktop. Remote Play and Game Streaming is nothing new and it has been available in one form or another since at least 2014. There are various issues around it related to input latency and graphical hiccups but some almost seven years later most of these issues have been ironed out. Steam In Home Streaming works well for anything that runs through the steam client and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Then there is my tool of choice called Parsec that supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Web Browser.

The vast majority of my gaming is done while sitting downstairs on the laptop and remotely playing games off my Desktop upstairs using Parsec running in LAN mode. That said I could just as easily connect into my machine from outside of my four walls and remotely play my games on a mobile device. If I so chose I could also go out and rent a box on Amazon or Paperspace and connect my Parsec client out to the cloud server that I am renting and install my games that way. I personally don’t need to go down this path since I have a good gaming machine that I control access to, but I know folks who are doing this and it is working fine for them. Just like the server room has moved to entirely virtual servers that may or may not exist on premises, this heralded the beginning of that being a game for your gaming machine as well.

Why GeForce Now is important is that it took this concept that has already existed for years… and refined it down to something that someone who is not technically savvy could do. It also took the madness of a multi-tiered cloud provider billing system and burned it down to a simple number… $4.95 a month. If you had an Nvidia graphics card in your gaming desktop and one of the many Nvidia devices like the shield… you have been able to stream your games for years now. However GeForce Now blew away all of the artificial barriers and just allowed you to have that same experience without owning the Gaming Desktop and instead renting one sitting somewhere in an Nvidia server farm… or more likely a nameless server farm that Nvidia is themselves renting space in.

Stadia, XCloud and Playstation Now are gaming platforms designed to alter your game buying preferences and channel your focus in a new direction. XCloud and Playstation Now are both following the Netflix model, where your subscription fee gives you access to several titles in their library of licenced titles. Stadia goes down a different path trying to replace both the method of playing the game and the purchase point for that game as well. You make your game purchases through Stadia and you play them within their walled garden on any device you choose to do so. GeForce Now however is something completely different and is not a gaming platform, but instead a hardware surrogate. You still have to purchase games like normally through Steam or Epic Games Store and instead of installing them on your own machine you connect out to your temporary server in the cloud and install the game there. From there you can play that game and maintain progress in that game on any device that supports GeForce Now.

So my frustrations rise when people keep calling GeForce Now a gaming platform and treating it like an equivalency to the other Game Streaming Platforms. While I agree wholeheartedly that a Developer should be able to dictate what store fronts their games are available from, and choose which locations that they want to offer them. I disagree completely that those same Developers should have a single bit of control over the hardware we gamers choose to play those games on. If I go to Best Buy, I can purchase a brand new laptop, take it home and install the Steam client on it and within a few minutes pending download speeds be playing a game on it. When I connect to a cloud server with GeForce Now I am doing the same thing. They have provided the Steam Client for me, but I still navigate to my game that I own in my Steam Library and choose to install it and then moments later play it.

The license for the game is between the end user, steam and the game developer and Nvidia does not factor into that process at all. Nvidia is providing me the gamer with a hardware surrogate. I am renting computing power in the cloud just like I would if I choose to go with Amazon Web Services, Paperspace or Azure. I could achieve the exact same result by doing these things as well and the developer would likely have no clue at all that I am doing it. The only reason why this has become an issue over the last few weeks is because Nvidia has managed to package this same service up with a neat bow and offer it up at a reasonable price point that is enough to get people to jump on the bandwagon and start trying to play games remotely. The truth is that I have been subscribed for a few weeks now and I am still not playing a lot of games through it… but that does not stop me from wanting to fight for the right of such services to exist.

I stream almost all of my games through my laptop from my desktop and I doubt that paradigm is going to change in my household. It allows me to exist with a cheaper laptop and pour any of my finances into my gaming desktop upstairs instead of trying to maintain two rather expensive form factors. With Parsec and an android enabled Chromebook, I can have the same gaming experience that I have on my desktop anywhere inside my house. That is extremely powerful, and what GeForce Now has promised to do is to extend that same flexibility to gamers who either don’t have the skill, patience or knowledge to go through the process of setting the same thing up for themselves. It is really compelling to think that a blah business laptop and $4.95 a month will allow you to purchase games through existing storefronts and play them with RTX enabled graphics.

So yes I get frustrated when Developers be it small indies like the dude behind The Long Dark or big companies like Activision Blizzard and Bethesda take an anti-consumer action and claw their games off of the GeForce Now service. This is the point where I get told that there are business decisions that we are not privy to and that there are complications. I know when you say “no offence but” you are just about to be an asshole… but while I understand the realities of doing business and why sometimes we can’t have nice things… it doesn’t stop me from thinking all of that noise is a lot of bullshit. GeForce Now is not a new platform to deliver games through, it is a hardware surrogate that allows you to play games through existing content delivery vehicles. If you were fine with allowing your players to have the game on Steam or Epic Game Store then you should be fine with them playing it on GeForce Now. In my opinion Developers shouldn’t get a say about it, just like they don’t get to choose the hardware that we purchase.

I hope I successfully rode the line between angry screed and think piece. I am worked up as I sit down and try and finish this because the thought of someone dictating what I do with the games I have valid licenses to always fires me up. I am generally one of the most pro-developer bloggers out there because I do see the ramifications of some of the decisions that are made echoed on the lives of my friends in the industry. This situation however is just a bridge too far for me, and I am unlikely to ever back down from my stance. I will always view the companies that are clawing their games away from GeForce Now in a bad light because I view them as now being on what will ultimately be the wrong side of history. Hardware surrogacy is a thing that is going to happen one way or another and the time of us not having physical hardware in our homes is rapidly approaching. I will always stand on the side of doing this on a manner that benefits the customers.

Assorted Wolcen Thoughts

As I wrote yesterday, Wolcen finally released and I have to say it has improved significantly even from when I last played it. It has been interesting to see game evolve from something that felt very ramshackle and sandboxy to what we have today. Wolcen feels like the love child of Diablo 3 and Path of Exile, having points that fans of both series would ultimately enjoy. From Diablo 3 it gained gorgeous animations and a fast pace style of combat that isn’t just hitting things with a broken chunk of wood for 10 levels. From Path of Exile it gained the sphere grid, albeit a way more sane and rational version of it. Each pick on the sphere grid feels like it is significant, rather than just having an excessive number of picks that felt so incremental that it was hard to notice any difference.

Something I noticed that I did not on previous play time was how much the Diablo 3 style of encounters seemed to be infused with them game. The path you are taking as part of the quest is littered with mini-dungeons that allow you to venture forth and take down what is likely a mini-boss for some loot opportunities. These are like the shacks and caves that you encounter in D3 and are roughly the same length with a warp at the end that takes you back outside. I also encountered my first version of this games Treasure Goblin, which was effectively a glowing beetle that scurried around dropping gold and trying to get away from me. When I finally did manage to kill it, it dropped about the same amount of loot that you would expect from a Goblin with a similar spread of rarities.

I also noticed the game had a bunch of little mini-games out in the world like kill these monsters that just spawned in order to unlock a treasure chest. I’m not really sure the breadth of these but so far the one or two I encountered felt more like Path of Exile shrines than they did Diablo style cursed chests. Another thing that I don’t think I remember from before is that you can learn all of the abilities that you encounter, not just the ones that you can currently equip. This allowed me to fill my bar early on and get some levels in the starter abilities for other builds not just the ones that matched the equipment setup that I happened to be using. The spell vendor seems to more expensive than I remember it being before, but thankfully the game was pretty generous with dropping ones that were usable by me. I now have a full bar worth of abilities that are usable and one or two alternates to swap to as I see fit.

One thing that I did not get to play with but I noticed was happening was the collection of items for the cosmetic system. Apparently you access this in game by hitting the B key and it brings up the interface shown in the above cosmetic preview video. While roaming around the world I kept noticing that every time I picked up an item I had not encountered before it was telling me that I was collecting its appearance. Then when taking down bosses in the game occasionally they would drop a dye pot, which unlocks that color permanently. So already they are on the right foot because I would rather build up a stable of armor tint options than having to keep around a bunch of expendable items to dye my armor. Additionally I love systems that collect appearances as I play the game without having to put a focus on specifically doing something else to override an items appearance.

I saw reports from friends that they were encountering issues playing last night, and thankfully I personally didn’t have any of these. That said I also didn’t really get settled in to play until around 8 pm last night, so potentially after any initial problems that they might have had. I know that they patched a few times, and this morning I attempted to pop in for a screenshot or two of the cosmetic system and I am getting game service timeout errors. You can check out the official Twitter to see the random problems they encountered throughout the night so it is in fact an MMORPG launch fraught with the same sort of issues that you have with those. You can play in offline mode but apparently there are issues with playing in Offline mode if you don’t have the latest version of the game, so I have just been sticking to online personally.

I did not make it super far last night, because the maps themselves are rather large when it comes to traversing them. Again this is one of those things that I would connect more to Path of Exile than Diablo 3. Still however I didn’t find myself getting frustrated by the slog and looking like a dirty hermit like I do with PoE. All in all I am digging what I am experiencing and I think this might be the game that scratches that “waiting for Diablo 4” itch for me. I’m actually looking forward to getting home tonight and playing some more which is usually a good sign for me and a game. So the question is… did you manage to get in last night? What are your own thoughts? Drop me a line in the comments below.