December 2014 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

AggroChat Episode 34

December 7, 2014 by Belghast

Bad Name Great Cat

This is going to be a really rough post to get through, so I am sitting here avoiding writing. That said I need to actually get through this, otherwise I will sit here staring at the empty page all day. Yesterday started off fairly normally, I got up, got showered and went out for breakfast like I have for years. The problem is what happened during the middle of the day pretty much broke my heart. Fifteen years ago this past Thanksgiving weekend, the above cat entered our lives as we rescued her from the cold of my parents barn. There is some confusion about her name, because I originally named her Sasha having always liked the name. My wife however had a living terror of a student named Sasha in her class that year… so the name actually stuck. The only people who ever called her that were the veterinarian and my mother. When we got her, she was tiny and into everything like kittens always are… there was a common refrain of “you little shit” as we cleaned up one mess she made after another. Well the name stuck and she was forever called “Little Shit” from that point on.

She never would have guessed her name was a bad thing however because we said it with the utmost love. She was my baby girl, but she spent as much time being my wife’s baby as she did mine. There were so many nights I fell asleep with her purring loudly on our pillows. She had the most amazing purr that you could literally hear like three rooms away. For most of her life she always wanted to be somewhere near us, as evidenced by the two pictures above. In fact I always tried to make sure she had room to lay down either at my feet or on the sofa near me. You don’t realize how much you have changed your life to fit someone else. She had all sorts of quirks, like while we were getting ready in the morning she would hop in the shower first and get a drink of water while the shower was running. Actually that was only one of two ways she was willing to get a drink, the other being from a bright red cup we left on the bathroom floor. There were many times in the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of that cup banging around, letting me know that I needed to get up and fill it up for her.

Some Rough Times

We have had two boy cats that had thyroid issues, so we were well aware of the tell tale signs. A bit over two years ago we started seeing them in her, so we got her into the vet and had been treating her with a topical cream that I had to smear into her ear morning and night. She was an absolute trooper and stayed still as I “greased” her ears as I referred to it. About one in three cats experience some digestive problems associated with thyroid disease, so when she started having issues with inappropriate elimination… we thought it was all tied to the issues as a whole. It became a nightly task for me to come up and pick up the messes left by her during the day. Frustrating as it might have been, she was worth every bit of the effort. Over the last two weeks however it had gotten noticeably worse. She was spending pretty much all of her time sleeping on the couch, and then barely making it off the couch before having to go potty. Yesterday afternoon we took her into the vet to see if maybe we needed to tweak the dose of thyroid medicine again.

Little shit had always been a waddly cat with a huge belly, and we always attributed it to her just being built “stocky” she reminded us of one of those strong country women, that while they might not win a beautify competition had the sheer presence to get job on the farm done. As she lost weight her belly became more distended, which again we attributed to her odd body shape. However upon seeing it the vet was immediately concerned. Upon taking some X-Rays the news was pretty grim. There was a massive growth in her stomach region pushing in on her bowels and likely causing pain to eat and got to the bathroom as well. With her age there was nothing really surgery wise that they would recommend as the likelihood of recovery was pretty slim. We were left with the extremely hard choice of either taking her home and waiting for her to get worse and die, or letting her go. She had always been a very clean girl, with extremely preferences in her potty habits. She hated a dirty litter box, and there were certain kinds of litter that she absolutely refused to use. I could tell the last year was rough on her, because when she was force to used to bathroom in a bad place there was a look of panic on her face. With the extreme increase over the last two weeks it felt like we were not terribly far from her messing herself in her sleep, and that is something she would not have wanted to happen.

So we made the decision that seemed like it was going to be the best for her. She had struggled with many things over the last few years. She was struggling to move around the house, and we had to install pet stairs on the sofa for her to get up and down easily. She had not slept with us for about a month, spending nearly 24 hours a day sleeping in my chair on the sofa, snuggled into blankets that I am sure smelled like me. When we tried carrying her to bed, she would last for a bit but ultimately hop down and return to the sofa. Cats do an amazing job of hiding what ails them… and I think she was trying to keep away from us from showing how much she hurt. I wish I could have fixed her, made it all better… but I couldn’t this time. Truth is she has probably always had this mass in her belly, and we always thought it was just her unique shape. This might have been the first time she ever had an x-ray… and unfortunately it happened far too late. I wish I could go back in time and have caught this earlier, but I am not really sure how we could have known. All I know is that I lost one of my best friends, and one of the sweetest animals we will likely ever have. Yesterday it felt like my world was falling apart, and I am still not sure if the gravity has really hit me. Laying down last night, as I called for the cats to come to bed… I had to stop myself from yelling for Little Shit. We will miss you baby girl.

AggroChat Episode #34

I am so thankful to the awesome people that I record with. During the day yesterday I was not sure if I could go on that night and record a podcast. Then something happened over twitter. Someone mentioned me stating that they had found the podcast that day and was really enjoying it. Turns out they listened from show 33 to 24… so some 14 hours of our podcast in a row. I have to say hearing that greatly improved my day and gave me that push to keep going last night. I just was not sure if I could be my normally jolly self, and carry the show… so Kodra stepped up and did an excellent job as master of ceremonies. Actually he did a phenomenal job matching pretty much everything that I normally do and then adding his own flourish.

There was much discussion of Final Fantasy XIV as usual with Raven talking about completing her second Novus weapon and beginning a second Nexus grind, and several of us talking about our victory over Ultros and solid attempts on Tier 5 in Binding Coil of Bahamut. I talk World of Warcraft raiding, and looking forward to beginning the Highmaul Raid after missing Thursday and my raids first two boss kills. We talk Heroes of the Storm, since this week they finally saw fit to give Rae an invite. That game is exceptionally fun and better suited for a more casual gamer than League of Legends is. Over the course of the week we have played quite a bit of it and talk about our personal hero preferences and playstyles. Kodra runs a much tighter ship than I seem to, because we actually clocked in at just barely over an hour once editing was finished. Extra special thanks to Kodra for steering the ship while I couldn’t quite muster the oomph to do so.

WoW Xmas Wishlist

December 6, 2014 by Belghast

Warlords of Faff

The one thing I have to give this expansion credit for is that they really have embraced the gospel of faff. There are more widgets and thing-a-ma-bobs for me to fiddle with in this expansion than any in any mmo to date. It seems like I can lose entire mornings with all of the little goals that I seem to have. Garrisons are a big portion of this, requiring just enough effort to make it worth doing… but requiring just enough time to eat up large blocks of your time. They are this glorious black hole for people who are like me and are huge fans of short term goals. On the other side of the equation there are folks who absolutely hate them, because they represent an end to the way certain portions of this game worked. For the folks that loved farming resources and then using those resources to play the auction house… unfortunately that time is over. To a lesser extent you can do this with savage blood because on my server that is going for 2000g each. However it takes 50 primal spirits to get a single blood, so the amount of farming to the reward is pretty minimal.

I like the way you gradually level your tradeskills and gathering skills through the use of the Garrison. I was never one who enjoyed grinding either of these things, and being able to know that through doing daily snippets of mining and crafting I can eventually max out makes me a happy person. I realize there will be a point where I run out of things that I want to do… but it is going to be a long time down the road. For example I am already plotting removing either my inn or my lumber mill once I have gained all that I can get from them and I figure there will be other buildings that I do the same with. In other faffy news you notice I am riding an Onyxia mount in the above picture. As part of this mornings faff while waiting on a cat to decide she was done laying on my arms… I took my mage over to onyxia. For some time I have been killing her on every single level 90 character that I thought could reasonably do it each week. Finally the mount dropped this morning and I can stop that extremely time consuming process. However I am sure there will be a new target of my mount farming obsession.

WoW Xmas Wishlist

One of the best parts of playing any Blizzard game is the integration with Battle.net so that you can communicate with your friends regardless of what game they happen to be playing. This was awesome in that even when I was not playing World of Warcraft, I still had access to my friends playing the game through the ease of the battle.net launcher chat. The system is extremely awesome for what it does, and the wow implementation is great as it works fairly well cross server allowing you to group up with your friends even if you don’t happen to be on the same server. The problem is however it is still very limiting in that you have a fixed maximum number of friends. You are allowed to have a maximum number of battle.net based friends be it through the Real ID system or the newer Battle Tag system.

Folks look at me like I am crazy but after being a guild leader for well over a decade you end up with a lot of people that you want to keep up with. Once you factor in places like twitter and other social media… the 100 slots are just too limiting. I hate the process I have to go through regularly of trying to find someone I don’t really talk to that often to delete… in favor of adding someone new to the list. So the first item on my Xmas wishlist is for Blizzard to greatly increase the number of available battle.net slots. I hate to admit it, but I would even be willing to pay some sort of premium subscription to have this number uncapped, or at the very least tripled. Especially once you factor in that I have different groups of friends that play different blizzard games… bumping this number up is going to become crucial.

Cross Server / Cross Game Social Channels

One of the ways we have managed to get around the limited size of friends lists in the past was through the use of social channels. During the heyday of non-guild based raiding, we had several channels that served the purpose of giving us a much larger extended guild chat for both the Late Night Raiders and Duranub Raiding Company. These were great, and I would love to see this concept come back into vogue. The problem is at this point single server channels are just too limiting. Our raid currently pulls in folks from other servers on a somewhat regular basis, and if we had a raid chat channel, we would really need it to work across realms. I realize you can have some limited chat functionality with battle.net but what we need are persistent channels similar to the way Diablo 2 used to have them. That way regardless of server you can keep in touch with your social friends.

To take this to the next step we really need these channels to also exist across all of the current battle.net enabled games. As it stands currently we have House Stalwart folks that are playing all of the available Blizzard games. Last night we had groups in Diablo 3, World of Warcraft and a whole bunch of us in Heroes of the Storm. It would be so much easier to keep a common guild continuity if we could all hang out in the same “guild chat” in the form of a shared cross game battle.net chat channel. Essentially Blizzard has the beginnings of something amazing here, and they keep building these really infectious games in different genres. Coupling them all together in a shared communications infrastructure will only serve to reinforce the “stickyness” of each of the individual games. That way players can feel like they can have the freedom to play ANY game in their line-up without losing any aspect of that rich social structure they have built already.

Final Wish

The final wish I have for blizzard is to let me have European friends, or friends from other regions in general. I find it maddening that I live my life in a connected world that allows me to have friends from all around the world… but I am playing a game that tries to separate off these players into regional buckets. I realize this is likely a tall wish but I know so many people thats lives would be made better by it. Sure I would love to have cross region grouping… but I would settle with just being able to have some basic “hey how are you doing” style communication between the server regions. I realize that you guys kinda screwed yourself early on by recycling server names between the regions. However it seems like your current battle.net connection system takes this into account by referring to the servers by the fully qualified names of “Argent Dawn US” or “Argent Dawn EU”.

Blizzard already does some pretty amazing things, given the age of the game and what has to be an insane server infrastructure. At the end of the day however we just want to be able to play freely with our friends, without having to ask them to completely uproot their established social structure and server transfer… or in the case of other regions start completely from scratch. Warlords of Draenor is an expansion where you have very much learned the lessons of just how important nostalgia is. Players don’t want to abandon their servers and their existing pools of friends, but at the same time keep meeting new people from around the world that they also would like to play with. If you can somehow leverage this social connectedness it is only going to serve to strengthen the player bonds to your game. Here is hoping that you are at least working on some of the things I have talked about, because you have some really good systems at work here, but you are one or two steps away from absolute greatness.

An Evening With Alternative Chat

December 5, 2014 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff Episode 3

This morning sees the release of the third episode of my experimental side podcast, Bel Folks Stuff. For those who have not followed this development, as the title graphic says I have conversations with interesting people about the stuff they are into. So far I’ve had such conversations with Gypsy Syl and Rowan Blaze and his wife Scooters. Both of those were really awesome conversations and I suggest you go back and listen to them at your convenience. This morning however I am releasing an episode that I have been looking forward to with another good friend the Godmother of Faff behind Alternative Chat. As a strict devotee of the Faff lifestyle, or at the very least an aspirant to the lifestyle… I always appreciate her bringing the term to public consciousness. The funny thing is… we really didn’t even talk about this during the podcast. I believe in letting the conversation go where the conversation goes and we filled up an hour of time chatting away about various bits, and probably could have filled up another hour doing the same.

Of note for this episode I also wanted to make sure that the podcast was available on both iTunes and Stitcher radio to help those folks out who prefer to listen to podcasts through those avenues. I admit I was nervous with this episode because Alt herself has such an amazing production quality for her own podcasts. I felt like there was no way I could live up to that standard. That said I feel like this episode is really solid, and that maybe just maybe I am starting to get a hang of what exactly this thing is going to be all about. I don’t really sit down with a fixed number of questions or anything of the sort, but instead just try and keep the conversation flowing as best I can. With Alt the conversation flowed naturally even though later in the cast she admitted to having notes of her own. I still feel like we maybe got more than a few moments of genuine spontaneity there nonetheless. Speaking of spontaneity, I am always trying to evolve as a person and as such would love to hear your comments on how this side project is working.

Rifftrax and Raiding

With the shit storm that happened Tuesday with the Argent Dawn server, we didn’t actually get to start raiding as a group until last night. Unfortunately I had other plans, and had to miss the raid. Some of my co-workers and I have started this tradition of sorts of going to the RiffTrax live shows whenever they happen. Granted they are not truly “live” for us as in performed in theater. Nonetheless each time I go I think to myself “I have never laughed this hard ever” and then the next one trumps it. This go around they were riffing on a show they did during the 5th season of MST3K, a strange version of Santa Claus that involves Santa, Merlin, and some Christmas Devils… you know the standard fare. It turns out that apparently the film originally hailed from Mexico where maybe it made more sense? The final product is this insane dubbed over feature with so many absolutely absurd moments that they had pretty much endless ammunition to make fun of it. If you are really curious you can check out the MST3K version that someone has dumped on youtube, but apparently it was edited down heavily… and they had all new jokes to make at the movies expense.

As far as the raid goes they apparently had a pretty great night of their own right. It seems as thought they managed to two shot Kargath, and then down The Butcher a well. The sounds like they made some good progress on Tectus as well, so they are hoping to easily down that next Tuesday and progress to the next boss. We apparently ran the raid on personal loot and the RNG gods were good to a lot of players. I know Rylacus walked away with three pieces of gear, which means he can officially no longer complain about “never getting drops” for the remainder of this expansion. Admittedly he has always had pretty shitty luck with getting drops he actually needs, but the moment a rare assed mount drops… his dice immediately improve. I can’t really complain because I too have a collection of rare mount drops, but most of those were diligently farmed… and the only one I actually won when it was relevant was the Fiery Warhorse Reins.

Less Communicative

Last night after my post yesterday, I had a friend check in on me to make sure I was doing okay. It made me realize that I am doing a pretty bad job of reaching out to say “hey” to people lately. This friend has been logged into WoW at the same time as me for many nights, but I have been stuck in my own little world quite a bit. Right now I have a batch of things that needs to be wrapped up at work before going on my holiday vacation after the 19th. Then there is the daily blogging, and the two podcasts that I am keeping going… one of which records weekly. After that it seems like I always have some OTHER side project to work on, like my upcoming post for Syl’s Bloggy Xmas. Someone started a conversation the other day with “I know you are busy but” and I thought… am I busy? It seems like I very much am, and as a result when I get busy I tend to encapsulate myself in a little bubble or just shift into “speak if spoken to” mode.

Mostly this morning I wanted to take a moment to say that essentially “its me not you”. I feel like I am failing miserably at keeping in contact with people during this holiday season. I promise I still care, and I promise I am still interested in what’s going on in your worlds… but at this point I feel painfully behind in everything. I’ve always taken the Stanley Spadowski “Drink from the Firehose” approach to information intake. The problem is I seem to be falling further and further behind as my blog reader consistently has hundreds upon hundreds of posts to read. Between that and trying to juggle playing World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and entertain semi-focused raiding in both of them… my attention circuits are maxed out. I promise I am still out here and still caring… I am just not taking it upon myself to engage directly nearly as much as I previously did. All of that said… if you need help with something I will do my best to assist in any way I can. Hopefully after the holiday break things will calm down a bit and I can reach a point of equilibrium.

Honeymoon Over

December 4, 2014 by Belghast

Old Familiar Beast

It feels very much like the honeymoon is now over as far as my return to World of Warcraft. Each time I have come back there has been something that ultimately drove me back away. When I came back before the launch of Pandaria, it was the “failed state” feel of the guild and how the once shared guild ethics seemed to have vanished. When I left last April, it was in part due to the fact that two factions of the guild quite literally hated each other, and it caused this giant rift right down the middle. Last night it felt like a brand new yet very familiar Maelstrom was opening, and I essentially supported it. One of the ideological things I have fought for years was the creation of a “Raider” rank in the guild, that granted special access to the guild banks. I hate the concept of a rank that can in any way be used to say that “this person” is better than “that person”. The problem is as a former raid leader myself I can see that it is entirely logistically needed.

Last night I helped to set one of these ranks up, and immediately after doing it I started to question my sanity. This only served to be reinforced later as a new acquisition to the guild started asking questions about how to get into the raid. This is going to be something that comes up over and over, especially now that there is a very noticeable raid rank. The problem is don’t have any good answers to give them. There is no path to follow to get into raiding, because House Stalwart is not a raid guild. Maybe it is moot at this point but I keep saying that over and over. I never wanted it to become “just another raid guild” because it used to be more than just a group of folks who mutually benefited from one another. It used to be this awesome extended family, and while pockets of that still exist… it feels like that era is just gone.

Honeymoon Over

All of this was compounded by the fact that at the very same time there was an incident that happened over voice chat, about someone potentially being muted that reminded me all too clearly of why I have left in the past. I have always despised the concept of the haves and have nots. I’ve always been someone who cared more about attitude and personality than skill, but by the same token this is what has held me back in my own raiding endeavors. If you want to be successful you do have to erect some barriers saying you have to be this tall to ride this ride. I just can’t bring myself to be the person to do that. I’ve never been able to decide that this group of friends is more important to our success than this group of friends. I just want everyone to get along and treat each other with some basic human dignity, but that always seems to be impossible. So last night underscored for me with a big bold line that if House Stalwart is going to be successful moving forward, I need to make sure I never permanently take back the crown. If I do I will started trying to make the guild a much more egalitarian place again, and tie a boat anchor around what was successful last expansion.

That said things are not as dire as I might make them out to be. The same raiders that need to be super serious to break the raid, are the ones that were grabbing anyone and their brother trying to make sure they got heirloom weapons for leveling. So while the bar has to be set pretty high to make sure things are successful, I have a feeling that once the current tier of raid content gets on farm status… those same barriers will start to break down as we have folks that can carry the others to victory. I just know that the guild was more successful than it has probably ever been during Pandaria as far as raid content clearing, and I need to stay out of the way of whatever mojo is required to return us to that status. I know that is going to involve a lot of things that fundamentally make me uncomfortable as a human being. I do however have faith that the raid core knows what it is doing, but I also feel like our fearless raid leader is stressed beyond boundaries. We have some fundamental problems… like too many melee and tanks… and far too few ranged and healers… but I feel like that will all be sorted as things move forward.

Sit Down, Shut Up, Enjoy the Ride

If I am going to stay in World of Warcraft for this expansion I am going to have to make some fundamental changes in who I am as a player. Right now I feel too much responsibility for the happiness of others in the House Stalwart World of Warcraft guild. It has been my baby for years, and I have nurtured it as such during all of that time… constantly trying to keep an influx of new and awesome people flowing through its doors. The thing is… before the launch of Warlords of Draenor I freely gave up the crown, as I have done multiple times since Cataclysm. I need to realize this means I am no longer in charge, and also by the same token no longer responsible for whatever happens in guild. Last night Rylacus passed the crown to me, but also gave me a speech that he really thinks it is best if I give it right back. Ry doesn’t care a bout the power, he just wants to keep me in game and happy as long as he can, because he knows each time I start taking responsibility for the happenings of all of these people… I burn out and run away screaming into the night. I need to also allow myself to be absolved of the guilt that comes from giving up that crown.

There is a thing I do really well, and that thing is acting as the guild cheerleader and chief recruiter. I am always going to be trying to find awesome and interesting people to draft into my family, because ultimately that is precisely what a guild is to me… a big extended and sometimes contorted family. It is joked that I have a white panel van full of candy, and drive around abducting people into our guilds… and more or less that is precisely what I do. I have always done it for World of Warcraft, and I currently do it for Final Fantasy XIV… for a guild there that I have NEVER been the leader of. I feel like I never much cared about actually directing the people once I got them, my focus has always been on the acquisition of more of them… hoping that the rest would sort itself out in the meantime. The problem is… just because I am friends with two people… doesn’t mean that they will be friends. Basically at this point if I am going to be happy in World of Warcraft, I need to be the friendly voice in guild chat and let other people worry about the minutiae. I hope that House Stalwart can remain mostly the same place it has been since launch, but I expect we are going to go through some rough times until folks realize fully… that this is not a raid guild, and raid membership is not guaranteed.