Abridged History of Bel

This week was in theory about introducing yourself in some way on your blog. I have not done any of that thus far and since today is the last day that I actually write a blog post for the week… I feel like i should at least try and remedy that. The challenge however is the fact that I already feel like I share a lot of details about myself through normal posting. I’ve always kept a weird barrier in place in that I don’t have the names but I tell you real stories that happen to me as they are happening. This is either a positive or a negative depending on your feel about personal writing.

I grew up in a “podunk” town in Northeastern Oklahoma, that was very obviously a place that had one seen significantly better days. Wikipedia lists 3989 as the official population, but I don’t believe them at all and think that number likely got manipulated to make it seem less pathetic. By the time I was a Senior in High School, my graduating class had dwindled down to around 60. We didn’t have a valedictorian but instead had four salutatorians of which I was one of them. I gave a terribly depressing speech at my graduation where I talked about how once we left this town none of our actions in it would actually matter to the rest of the world. I lost my place in my notes and somehow skipped over the only positive chunk of the speech.

I fundamentally had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. I was ultimately torn between Art and Computer Science, and wound up getting a 2 year certificate in Desktop Video Production before ultimately transferring to a 4 year college and getting a Bachelors in Commercial Art. There was a point where I was enrolled in four colleges but couldn’t decide which path to go down… and ultimately dropped out of all of them and did a mix of Junior college credits for the first two years while driving back and forth from college each day and living at home.

The town was small enough and it was 1994… and reliable internet options were not spectacular. I remember paying $60 a month for my first internet connection, which involved a $20 charge to the phone company to make the town 30 minutes away from us a local number, which allowed me to then connect to the modem banks of the $40 a month unlimited internet provider I was using. It was in my travels as an itinerant college student that I happened to meet my wife. We were both IRC junkies at the time and were introduced by a mutual friend from Belgium, when I happened to be in his channel working on one of his bots as she happened to enter.

Turns out she lived in a similarly “shithole” town, roughly 20 minutes away from mine and that we knew a lot of the same people. We opted to meet over Memorial Day weekend holiday, hang out a bit and see a movie. We saw the remake of Sgt. Bilko… which was not exactly stellar fare and we saw it in a movie theater with all of the panache of a high school speech classroom. However over the course of the next few months I met a lot of people from her college, and opted to transfer there to finish up my degree. We were “just friends” but over the course of the summer “things happened” and we’ve been together at this point for 23 years (married for 21).

My first gaming experiences were with a Sears and Roebuck Pong clone. My uncle borrowed this from my folks and hooked it up to my grandparents zenith console television… leaving it running over night and burning stripes into the screen. This basically made everyone paranoid about any future generations of console and nixed my chances of ever getting to drag my Nintendo along with me to play at other houses. We didn’t get a computer until 1991 when we got a 386 16… with no math co-processor making anything like Doom play horribly on it. I did however play a massive amount of Wolfenstein on it, as well as pretty much every computer at the High School I could get it to run on.

My first MMORPG experience came when a friend of mine asked me to come over and play his second character during a Vox raid. He traditionally dual boxed an Iksar Monk named Chadoe with a Halfling Druid named something that was pronounced “Tim You” but I cannot remember the spelling of to save my life. Basically he gave me a five second primer of run in and cast nuke spells, and showed me which specific abilities to cast. I died… and had to run back in and then had to learn how to put spells back on my bar… and wound up getting the killing blow on Lady Vox largely cementing my connection to MMORPGs from that point forward.

I played Everquest from the Velious Expansion through to Lost Dungeons of Norrath as a Dwarven Cleric. Then when we transitioned to Dark Age of Camelot I didn’t really gain traction in that game until the opening of the Gaheris Co-Op server and starting the original Belghast, a Celt Champion. From there we started playing Horizons which is pictured above, and in that game I met a ton of interesting people through my friend Vernie and the community of crafters centered around building the huge public works projects that opened up new communities. From there we played City of Heroes and it was during that game that we started getting into the Beta of a new game being published by Blizzard.

With World of Warcraft I shifted from guild member to guild leader as I founded House Stalwart with a bunch of friends I had met through all of the MMORPGs I had been in up until that point. I original planned on playing a Paladin, but the suicide of my nephew knocked me out of commission for several weeks meaning that when I did come back i needed something I could solo to catch up with my friends. As a result Lodin the Dwarven Hunter pictured dead center above was my main for most of Vanilla. At some point I decided I wanted to run up a tank, and Belghast was reborn this time as a Human Warrior, and I duo’d it with my friend Amy ( pictured to the right on her Hunter) who wanted to level a priest.

From that point forward I have pretty much been a tank in every game I have played. I fell into the rotation of tanking the “alt” raids for Late Night raiders. I am pretty sure this was taken after I had just finished tanking a Zul’Gurub raid on the weekend. I think I was showing off my new sword that I got along the way. Look at the horrible mishmash of gear I was wearing… but in truth this is what a lot of tanks looked like back then. I still miss drillborer’s disc, which I believe is what the shield I was using was called. In part I am hoping to regain a lot of the joy I had from collecting these pieces of gear with the launch of World of Warcraft Classic.

I will close this point out with a “screenshot” of me. I’ve been mistaken for Brian Posehn, so here is an image I threw together with me on the left and him on the right. I however need to wrap this up because in truth I need to get my arse to work. I am never sure what to tell people during one of those “introduce yourself” moments, but this was a stab. I’ve not done a great job in participating in the themes but I fully expect since the next one is “Developer Appreciation Week” I will probably have some more cogent topics. I hope you have a great Friday and an awesome weekend.

Early Access IS Your Launch

I am going to start off this mornings post by linking a tweet that I read yesterday morning. When I first processed this shortly after posting my blog for the day… I had the immediate reaction of “no it didn’t, that game is old”. Please note I am in no way singling out GameSpace here or picking on them, because much like I did in my own inbox they received a press release talking about how the game was coming out of Early Access. I am not even picking on Fantasy Strike to be truthful, because they are only the latest instance of this to catch my ire. The problem is that in my mind this is a game that launched roughly two years ago.

If game sales are based upon the amount of hype that you can generate for your game, doing Early Access means whatever hype you could have generated was spent on that. For me personally a game launches the moment you start taking money for access to it. I also feel like a game doesn’t get a pass for me while it has an alpha, beta or whatever the next industry catch phrase for “unfinished” is attached to it. Once you start accepting money to let players play your game, you have launched.

I think the core problem here is we have two different offshoots for why games claim to be going into Early Access. The first is as a funding vehicle, and if you are a small studio and need an infusion of cash especially if you are self publishing… then you should feel zero shame about using this. It does not give you the rights to make a big deal about it when you “officially” launch other than maybe a pat on the back and a hearty “good job” for not imploding along the way. I think the ideal scenario was that of Starbound that held back a massive update to release to their fans as a sort of last hurrah for leaving the Early Access system and going into official release mode.

The second route seems to be in a scenario when a game wants the fans to feel like they have shaped the end product. While I have vacillated wildly about on this point… I am arriving at the stance that this is a horrible idea. In truth fans should have very little say in the design of the game and really should only be engaged with the final fit and polish… as was traditionally the role of a closed or open beta process. I will always have opinions on the way things should have been done, but the truth is as a fan and a blogger I have no clue at all what I actually want until I get my hands on it and play it.

There have been many times that a game on paper sounds like everything that I ever wanted. Then I start playing and I realize that it was a horrible idea. Also similar there have been many times I wound up playing a game that I never thought I would like and it ended up eating two or three weekends of my time. My ability to decide what I actually like is flawed… and I think it is similarly flawed for every other gamer out there. We fundamentally do not know what it is that makes an experience that we will enjoy. We are really good at determining what it is we do not like, and tend to focus on eradicating those things rather than actually promoting the things that we enjoy. So in the end you wind up with experienced that have been carefully curated by people screaming at the top of their lungs telling the studio what not to do.

The truth is, if I had my druthers… I would not even know a game existed until three to four months before it launches. I know we have an entire industry built upon the constant stream of hype surrounding the game release cycle, but I am not entirely certain this is a good thing. During the EGM era of games magazines you had a month to month cycle of content to fill… now if you don’t get the eyeballs within the first few hours of an announcement you have lost that revenue. This leads to a very short sighted and hyperbolic approach to trying to be as sticky as humanly possible to cash in on that brief blip when people are hungry for more information.

This has lead to a situation where announcements are timed for all of the major conferences and are comprised of about 90% vaporware and good intentions. The tale of the Anthem development cycle is all too familiar with E3 demos being loosely cobbled together and not representative of the final product at all. Hell this has even become its own kind of content, where you take trailers that were first shown and bash the product based on how much it did not live up to those expectations. We are a snake that is eating itself and I fear that eventually this is all going to end up with an Atari style crash if we are not careful.

Sleepy Ramble

Last night was one of those nights where I did not get much of anything accomplished. Starting around 8 pm I was ready to sleep… even though we managed to hold out until around 9 before actually doing that. Once I hit the pillow I was completely zonked for the night and didn’t wake up until the wee hours in the morning when my brains auto timer seemed to think I had slept enough. I was able to shrug this off however and go right back to sleep… and given the slightest opportunity as I sit here at the keyboard I feel like I could still successfully doze off again.

I feel like I might be starting to fight whatever crud has been going around through the office. Initially I think we all thought it was just allergies… because even folks who do not traditionally have problems elsewhere end up developing allergies here in Oklahoma. The oppressive heat has not helped either with recent days nearing 100 but with a heat index well 15 to 20 degrees higher than the actual temperature. We are finally starting to get a break from this over the last few days, but it is somewhat sad when you consider 85 degrees to be “cool”.

Last night I put some more levels on the Red Mage and even though I am absolutely convinced I am probably playing the class wrong… I am enjoying myself. It is funny how adding a sword to a finger wiggler instantly makes it more enjoyable for me? I remember back in the day one of my favorite party comps in the original Final Fantasy was Red Mage, Monk, Thief and Warrior. I mean it is not a suggested comp by any means but when I was grinding it allowed me to use as little magic as humanly possible. Magic made me go back to town to rest, and my goal was to stay out as long as humanly possible.

I am wondering if this first Final Fantasy game ultimately set my feelings about Magic users from that point out in future outings. My preference from that point forward has always seemingly been to include as few magic users as humanly possible in my parties. The classic comp would insist on a Black Mage and a White Mage, but I often times took a Red Mage just so I could use proper weapons. In Final Fantasy V I am super partial to the Mystic Knight because it is effectively a Warrior with elemental buffs. Side note… I kinda hope that eventually makes its way into Final Fantasy XIV as an eventual job.

As far as dreams went, I did have a super lucid dream where I apparently was visiting the Blizzard games campus in Anaheim and wound up taking some sort of an assessment. I have no clue why I was taking an assessment, because I thought I was visiting as a blogger. I don’t remember a lot of the questions on the assessment, but for whatever reasons various Devs were talking with me while I was sitting there filling it out. I quickly became aware that all they wanted to talk about were the more modern games like Overwatch, and really the only thing I was interested in talking about was Diablo or World of Warcraft.

There was a time when I felt like I more holistically cared about the output of Blizzard Entertainment, and now they really are just the Diablo and WoW company for me personally. I am passingly interested in a lot of the other things that they create, but they aren’t exactly how I want to spend my time. I feel like I got the whole online multiplayer shooter thing more or less out of my system during the 90s, and once MMORPGs existed I was more or less gone. While I dabbled with MOBAs it was also not really my jam.

I feel like during the 90s there are a whole bunch of games that I played more or less because online play was somewhat of a novelty. We were still enthralled by the fact that the internet existed, and if I could play a game with other people over this new fangled invention I was going to try it. Even then… I was way more into making maps and sharing “PUDs” with my friends than I was ever into actually playing Warcraft II. However I do remember some really happy times surrounding that game.

In college, towards the end of my stay there… the campus opened a state of the art 24/7 computer lab. There were many a night when several of us would go there to hang out on IRC, because there was something special about being both in the same room with someone and being online in a shared environment at the same time. Many times however we would wind up installing Warcraft II on eight computers and engaging in a massive 8 way battle. Why? Well because we could of course and because it was new and exciting.

Now online play is more or less expected… and as a result a lot of my hook for playing some of those other games went away. Anyways… today’s post has ended up being a massive ramble. I blame either getting too much sleep or not enough sleep. Here is hoping that I return tomorrow with something resembling a normal and proper post.

Books and Bad Decisions

I’ve been piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, but have largely languished without a real purpose. This weekend I guess I got a sense of purpose and managed to push my Machinist up to level 50 with darkest dungeon. I had been piddling around during the podcast in Palace of the Dead for a few weeks now, but largely just wound up running around the top of the wall in Quarymill while we talked. I refer to this activity as Dalaran-ing because anytime I would need to talk to someone in game I would find myself running laps around whichever incarnation of Dalaran was in World of Warcraft at the time. I find I do the same with Final Fantasy XIV hubs, and I greatly miss the running friendly walls that our old Free Company house used to have.

As it stands I have every class that is currently in the game above the level of 50, which in theory should allow me to massively clean my vaults and get rid of anything lower level that isn’t particularly cool looking or at least dyeable. I did dump a ton of stuff into ye olde glamour commode, and was pretty happy to see that we are getting an increase in storage space with the upcoming Shadowbringers update. At this point I have dumped every Axe and Katana that I care about keeping as those two classes are already at the level cap. I need to start working my way backwards through my weapon archives and saving anything that I particularly want to keep. Inventory management is the bane of my existence in most MMORPGs and FFXIV is no exception sadly.

After tooling around on my Machinist I decided to push Bard up to 60… at which point something started to bother me greatly. At the end of everything I have completed I get a warning telling me I am capped on Tomestones of Poetics. This lead me down a path of trying to research ways I can spend said Poetics… which lead me back to the original expense that I had previously used them for… Books. I never finished doing books for my Bravura Animus. In fact right now I could not tell you where I am exactly in that process, but I am working my way through a speed book that involves a FATE that apparently never spawns.

So there it is folks. I am making poor life choices and apparently drawn back into piddling around with my Zodiac weapon. I solo’d my way through several dungeons last night and at current moment find myself just needing to do Amdapor Keep and get a FATE in Coerthas to spawn that seemingly doesn’t want to. I figure at some point I will have to start farming down the FATEs that have popped since I believe every zone has a limited number up at a given time. This is apparently what I am doing with my life now… in this lead up to Shadowbringers. Sadly I have not even begun to go through madness because I still have to do my melding materia step. The good news however is that I probably won’t be able to complain about not having something to spend my Poetics on shortly.