May 2015 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Back But Don’t Play

May 11, 2015 by Belghast

Supporting Kickstarter

This morning I am going to tackle the second talkback topic for the Newbie Blogger Initiative because it is actually one that has been on the hearts and minds of the AggroChat folks for the last few weeks. For the April AggroChat Game Club game I chose Darkest Dungeon, and since then the topic of playing “unfinished” games has been somewhat of a recent discussion among us in private. The fact that the game was unfinished caused numerous problems, not the least of which was the simple fact that we were never quite sure if this or that functionality was intended… or just unfinished. So I feel like I was not able to give it a really solid testing, because I don’t know what might change between now and when the studio deems the game “finished”. The prompt however for this talkback is pretty straight forward but my answer is going to be a bit more nuanced.

Early Access and Kickstarter – Do you support unfinished games?

So for the first part… yes I wholeheartedly support the backing of unfinished games. I’ve backed more than I can count at this point through either Kickstarter or company specific initiatives. I think Kickstarter is a pretty awesome thing, and it has caused a lot of things that I care about to see the light of day. I’ve backed both software and physical merchandise projects through it, and have been relatively happy with pretty much every project I have ended up chipping in on. Kickstarter does a lot of things, but the biggest one to me is that it allows me to vote with my dollar on what I think is going to be an idea worth making. I rarely back very far into a given product tree, and the end result is me usually getting a cut price copy of the game at launch. While many of these games offer a double platinum early access alpha program… that is not so much what I am interested at least not any more.

Tired of Alphas

Once upon a time I wanted to be playing every single game I could get my hands on. I reveled in the fact that I had alpha and beta tested most of the MMOs out there. For a period of time this was something that was achievable because at any given moment there were a very limited number of Alpha and Beta test programs available. Somewhere along the line I noticed that playing an Alpha seriously adversely effected my chances of staying with a game for very long after release. In essence I would burn myself out playing the Alpha, so that when launch happened the game felt very old and tired to me. The pinnacle of this problem happened for me with Elder Scrolls Online. I seriously cared about the release of this game, and I took my Alpha testing duties seriously. I was told at one point that I was in the top 1% of all bug reporters in the game, and every single time we played I spent most of my time reporting and re-reporting issues I saw.

The problem here is that I had been alpha and beta testing builds of this game for a good year before the game actually launched. So while I only managed to play about three months after the launch of the title, in truth that was around 17 months of me actually playing the game. Huge chunks of the content I had literally seen hundreds of times, and remembered each of the different incarnations. The additional problem is I had trouble letting go of the past. There were some changes made in that game that I considered “for the worse” and myself and many of the other early testers rather vehemently pined for the imagined “good ole days” of early alpha. Memory is always an incomplete state, and what we remembered was this or that feature that stood out in an ocean of an otherwise broken game. The final product was so much better than the one we were requesting they return to, but we got hung up on the minutiae of this or that feature that we missed. Basically I learned that Alpha testing ultimately ruined my enjoyment of the final product… and it only took me twenty some years to wake up to this fact.

Back But Don’t Play

Ultimately I have a very nuanced stance on Kickstarter. I am more than happy to donate money towards a cause that I believe in like the creation of a brand new Wasteland experience on the PC, or any of the other games I have backed that let me wallow in the nostalgia of my youth. Generally speaking I now back just far enough into it to give myself a cut rate copy of the game at launch. Then when I get said copy and any bonus trappings… it seats neatly in my Steam account until I am ready to play it. I might boot it up periodically to check on its progress, but ultimately I am not going to start the game for real until I see that note from the developer talking about how the game has launched. The problem is this also means I am phenomenally bad at tracking the progress of games on Kickstarter. I almost always have a message that needs to be responded to about this or that game but this is what works for me. It lets me feel like I am backing things that I believe in, but also gives me the piece of mind of not actually starting a game play session until the game is “finished”.

As far as other games that are in a permanent state of development like Minecraft… once again my feelings are a bit more nuanced. Paying to play an alpha does not really bother me, if the experience and the enjoyment itself is worth paying to play said alpha. I got into Minecraft for example during its pre-beta days when you could pick up a copy for well under $10. I have gotten easily $1000 worth of enjoyment out of that game. Similarly while I don’t play them nearly as often I have gotten more than enough happiness out of both Trove and Landmark to recuperate any costs I might have put into them. Ultimately backing an unfinished game, and playing said unfinished game is not an entirely bad idea… so long as you go into it with the thought process that you are playing something that isn’t quite done yet. Early Access games are in essence paid betas, and if you can live with that… awesome… if not wait for the release of the game. I personally have found that the games I played heavily in Alpha and Beta get more enjoyable over time, and going back a year after launch I end up really enjoying myself. So that is to say that the games I ruined through Alpha testing… are not in a permanent state of ruined as evidenced by my recent travels into Guild Wars 2, Wildstar, and Star Wars the Old Republic. Ultimately you have to figure out what works for you, and the amount or risk you are willing to take. If I feel like I am going to care about a game, I try my best not to burn out before launch.

Botany Mastered

May 10, 2015 by Belghast

A Very Cardgamey Show

It seems when I think we have nothing to talk about… we end up talking for two hours finally having to force ourselves to stop talking to close out the show. Last night was one of those night as I was joined by Tam, Kodra, Thalen and Ashgar. Sometimes a clear theme is presented and last night inadvertedly this happened. As we rambled through the various things we have been playing, it turns out that a lot of us had been playing card games in one form or another. We got this interesting peak into the secret underground gaming scene of Seatle that Kodra has now apparently gotten his ticket into. He recorded this weeks AggroChat on a quick jaunt away from this all day gaming event that was happening in a nearby hotel. The kind of event that isn’t advertised, and that you apparently have to know someone to get into. This is not starting to sound like fight club at all is it?

Other than that I shift things around a bit in the show and I actually go first. Usually by the time we get around to the games I have been playing my co-hosts are bordering on being asleep so I opted to talk about my stuff first. Which was a large course of Echo of Souls, and beating Wolfenstein The Old Blood which is an absolutely enjoyable but exceptionally short version of the original Wolfenstein game redone in New Order style. Machinegames has somehow created this magical mix of the glory days of the 90s era shooter mixed with the narrative power of modern gaming. Ashgar once again is going through his DS collection and playing things that he had not beaten before, this time jaunting down a time travelling avenue. Thalen extolled the joys of Hand of Fate, and Kodra rediscovered Heroes of Might and Magic 3. More than that however we talked a lot about card games and board games in general. Was a fun and chill show to record and hopefully that comes across in the production.

Botany Mastered

Last night while recording the podcast and editing it I spent my time in Final Fantasy XIV working on Botany. For some time I have been working on pushing up the two critical harvesting abilities Mining and Botany before actually starting the Disciple of the Hand push. I figured having the ability to go out into the world and gather things would be beneficial when making the push to level all the other things. The Disciple of the Land classes also gave me a bit of a buffer to psyche myself up for diving headlong into the pit of madness that is crafting. At this point begins the money grind and thankfully I am up to almost 2 million gil to help support this push. I guess the first order of business is to level all of the professions to 15 so that I can get the best cross class abilities to help with the rest of the grind. My original thought was to take everything to 15 in no particular order, and then start walking them up 5 levels at a time. So take everything to 20, everything to 25 etc. This also allows me to convert all of the crafting gear along the way hopefully keeping my vaults from overflowing.

Another thing that I really need to start doing is working on my beast tribe daily quests. One of the things that Ashgar talked about on the podcast was the interesting quest that comes at the end of maxing each of the factions. There is apparently a storyline that somehow joins up all of the rebellious beast tribe factions into a “Justice League” of sorts. I would really love to see this storyline before Heavensward launches, but at this point I have right around a month to accomplish all of this. I am not sure if I have given myself enough time, especially given that I keep dinking around in other games at the same time. I am starting to feel under the gun with wanting to accomplish so many things before I officially say goodbye to “A Realm Reborn”. So far FFXIV 2.0 has been an amazing ride and I am amped about what Heavensward and 3.0 has to offer. I guess tomorrow night the 2.57 patch will be going in, and I am wondering what exactly it will bring as well. I would be extremely happy if they uncapped Poetics gains… but I somehow doubt that will be the case.

Bad At Shadowrun

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time working on Shadowrun Dragonfall and I have decided that I need to just start over. I spent too much of my time on my main character too focused on a specific tree. I was planning on going all melee all of the time and quite frankly that is a poor choice to go with. I spent most of combat running around the room chasing down mobs that would move away from me and attack from ranged. Additionally I am going to have to throw out some of my instincts because I straight wiped my party trying to stay and fight against unwinnable odds. All of that said there are aspects of the game I am really enjoying, but right now I am just pretty horrible at actually doing it. I also need to learn to save far more often because this game will straight kill you at times with a smile. It is going to be an interesting show when we ultimately talk about this game but I am really wanting to make it further than I did with the previous games. I would love to beat this one because in many ways the gameplay reminds me of the Fallout series.

The thing is the game gives you one of every classes so I guess what you end up playing is just for flavor. I will probably go Street Samurai once again because that was always my favorite character to play in the actual Shadowrun campaigns I have been in. I didn’t really care that much for the little dwarf I rolled so I will probably go something more generic like a human this time around. All in all I was a fun several hours I spent yesterday, and as it is raining insanely outside… I plan on going downstairs and hanging out on the sofa all day while watching Netflix. Shadowrun is precisely the perfect kind of game for a day like today. So I will either be doing that or be working on tradeskills in final fantasy. In any case I have a gloriously lazy Sunday ahead of me. These are the types of days that gaming was made for. This massive lung infection has gotten me out of having to travel for Mother’s Day so right now we are planning on having a re-roll there next weekend when the world is not actively trying to kill us. Hopefully you have an awesome day too.

Finding Your Time

May 9, 2015 by Belghast

Writing Blocks

This morning I am trying to knock a post out quickly before “Rainmageddon” gets here. While I don’t really believe it the neighbor across the street said we are likely to get “ten inches” of rain during the course of the day. That would be absolutely insane. My wife’s theory however is that she just misheard and the news actually said “two inches”. In any case starting at noon today we are likely not going to want to be out in the world. This is awesome because it means I can binge on video games. What is not so awesome is the fact that I need to get a post out quickly rather than my normal lazy Saturday and Sunday posting schedule. So I have a video game soundtrack on to block out the world, and am in beast mode! Sadly my beast mode is more like a sleepy kitten, but in any case… I am making things happen! For those curious I am listening to the State of Decay soundtrack that is available on Google Play.

Normally Storytime Saturday is the day when I tell you some tale about myself, and I try really hard to make it one I have not already told. The problem there is that I have shared so many intimate details of my life with you all, and that I have zero recollection of what I say on any given day. Hell there are days I get to work and I will see entire sections of a post that I don’t remember writing. In the spirit of the Newbie Blogger Initiative this mornings “Storytime” is more than likely going to be a free form rambling mess as I share indiscriminant tips and tricks I have learned over the years. The key to thriving as a blog is to be predictable in your posting schedule, and in order to make this happen it means you need to set aside specific blocks of time to write. How big of a block of time depends entirely on the style of post you make. When I write a post that requires lots of research those are usually done over the course of several days, with me keeping notes in a Google drive document. My “normal” style of posting however takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour of me sitting down at the keyboard and physically writing it out.

Finding Your Time

When I launched this blog in 2009 I spent a lot of my lunch hours writing posts. For the most part this worked great because it was a fixed block of time when I was not really doing anything else. The problem is as work got busier, and I started actually going out for lunch… my noon writing block evaporated. There were more than a few days when I was working on a problem that I could not set down long enough to write a post, and by the time whatever had been fixed… I was usually too drained mentally to produce something worth reading. I wont say this was the reason behind some of my larger lapses but it was certainly a contributing factor. When I started on my “Grand Experiment” I knew I was going to have to figure out something else to do. I had gotten in the habit of going upstairs with my morning coffee and piddling around in a video game for thirty minutes to an hour before actually going into work. This “boot up” time greatly improved my cognitive ability by the time I got to work, so it was actually something that turned out to be pretty beneficial.

When finding your own block of time you have to evaluate your own schedule. Where is a block that you are doing something every single day, or every few days… that you could tweak a bit to turn that into a time to write your blog posts? For me I happily sacrificed my morning game time in an effort to give myself a regular place to write words and things. This however has been a double edged sword. I literally cannot start my day without writing a blog post, and the days when I have to do something differently and stage the post the night before… I feel like something is off the entire day. I have incorporated this writing phase into my morning boot up routine and when it is missing, I am just not fully functional. Additionally the problem of writing while you are not entirely awake means sometimes entire blocks of text don’t really make much sense. Thankfully the frequency of my posting makes up for some of this. When you are posting every single day, your readers cut you a lot more slack for having an “off day”.

Keep a Contract

The other nice fringe benefit of morning writing is that you feel like you have accomplished some thing. No matter how south the rest of the day turns, you will have at least had a tiny victory that morning. For years my wife has done something that I just did not understand until I looked at my own blogging. When we clean the house we usually divide and conquer, meaning I take certain rooms and she takes certain rooms. One of the rooms she always wants to do is the Bathroom and I have never understood why she tackles it first thing. She has always said it made her feel like she had accomplished something, and I guess in a way gets those good vibe endorphins flowing making the rooms that are more painful a little easier to do. I can definitely see this whole process working because I absolutely see these same kind of benefits with my own blog posts. No matter how frustrating the rest of the day is… I at least accomplished writing another post and I continued the chain of daily postings by one more day.

Whatever your block or your schedule I think the absolute most important thing is to treat it like a contract. It becomes extremely easy to give yourself an excuse for not writing one day, that turns into not writing for an entire month. Before I ventured down the path of daily writing there were so many times when I told myself “I just am not feeling it” and let myself off the hook without writing a post. Then as months went by of “not feeling it” it became harder to actually start the process again. In order to keep a schedule you need a certain amount of rigor in your life, and a willingness to sacrifice other things to make sure the ball keeps moving forward. I know this might sound like an odd statement, especially for something that we all consider a hobby. The problem is you can’t really treat it like a hobby and achieve the predictable regularity that your readers will want. In many was blogging is a second job, admittedly one you do out of love… but there still needs to be some constraints on your time. At this point I have blogged every single day for over two years… so I have this pressure built up in NOT missing a single day. I have motivation to keep going, and keep writing… and I think it is this motivation that you have to find for yourself.

Talkback Challenge 1

May 8, 2015 by Belghast

Avoiding a Topic

First off I have to say I am a huge proponent of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, and try my best to do whatever I can to support it. Unfortunately I do a pretty bad job of actually participating in anything that is going on the forums. This year I had told myself that I would try really hard to participate more and do more of the various writing prompts. You know that whole “lead by example” type argument. The problem is the very first topic is something that I find both repulsive and deeply scary at the same time. Izlain seems to love to revel in controversial topics, and has recorded podcasts on various incendiary topics in the past, so I really should not be shocked this ended up as a writing prompt.

The aim of the Talkback Challenge is to engage new bloggers on a topic and provide contrasting views on that specific matter. It is also designed to encourage follow-up discussions and blog posts which further widen the level of interaction. The goal is to generate discussion on newbie blogs, raise their respective profile and share traffic. The NBI has run such activities for several years now and they have proven both informative and engaging. The opening topic for debate this time round is “how did GamerGate affect you”?

The prompt itself is pretty straight forward. How were you effected by GamerGate, but the answer as always is far more nuanced. I just finished writing my Bonanza post over on MMOGames and during the course of it I ran through all of the responses to this question that were available at the time of posting. I was somehow bolstered by the fact that the majority of these posts seemed to have no real effect. The problem is… for those who were effected this is a really touchy subject. The fact that someone actually wants to be talking about this makes me realize that in truth they were largely left unscathed. All of this said, I am going to tackle this topic because I promised myself that I would actually do the writing prompts.

Talkback Challenge 1

GamerGate cycled through the community like nothing I had ever seen before. It was swift and it was obnoxious… and quickly moved into the realm of the really damned creepy. Folks were using the tag without really understanding the consequences. The claim of the movement is that GamerGate is “About Ethics in Journalism” but this claim has never really matched up to the effects seen in the community. So much so that this has become a meme and filed away in the internet as yet another meaningless phrase. What I saw instead was a lot of my friends getting really scared to speak their mind. This hive mind of hatred seemed to be going after anyone who was “different” from what they saw as the cultural norm. This meant that women and the lgbt community seemed to garner the brunt of the assault. I talked to lots of friends who considered just stopping blogging because of the fear and paranoia that was rampant.

The problem is I am by nature not extremely combative. You can make personal attacks against me and it really usually doesn’t phase me. However when you take on my friends, and make them feel less than what they are… then I start to get upset. In the grand scheme of things I didn’t speak out as harshly as I probably should have on the subject. I made a pretty general post about how I wish we would “Be Awesome Human Beings”. Which drew the attention of a Gater that followed me and proceeded to try and argue with me about ethics in journalism in the comments. I didn’t want to get drawn into his discussion and he kept trying to bring me back to his personal brand of right wing philosophy. Ultimately I ended up un-following and blocking the person on twitter. Within a few days of posting this relatively straight forward article, my blog came under fire of a DDoS. At first I thought nothing about it, since hosting companies get denial of service attacks all of the time. The thing is… it seemed to be targeted at ONLY the server cluster my blog was on.

Message Delivered

A short time after that my twitter handle appeared on a list of supposed “Social Justice Warriors” that were to be avoided. Granted half of the people I know ended up on that same list, but while it was a point of pride… it also felt a bit like a veiled threat. It felt very much like a list of people who “thought wrong” and should be targeted. When you combine that with the DDoS I won’t like it freaked me out a bit. I tried my best to exorcise my social networks of any Gamer Gate sympathizers, or at least the ones who were loudly supporting it… and I moved on with my life. I tried my best to support those who were getting attacked, but I didn’t feel like I supported the other extreme either. Ultimately I just wanted us all to get along and stop being assholes to each other. That is the mission I have kept trying to move forward. I am a tiny blue dot in a very read ocean, but I manage to get along with most of my friends, coworkers and neighbors because we respect each other not enough to try and jam our own personal philosophies down each others throats.

The problem is Gamer Gate has left me scarred. When someone new follows me on social media the first thing I do is scan down through their posting history to make sure they are not somehow a GG leaner. I don’t want to make people out to be the bogeyman of the internet, but I also don’t really want that sort of influence screwing up my relatively happy place. I have tried my best to limit the about of negativity in my world. It ultimately makes me a happier person, and GG and the vehemently Anti-GG communities both are something I can do without. That said I am by no means trying to be neutral anymore. I am not a supporter of the GamerGate community by any means, and the whole situation deeply saddens me. I don’t want to be made to feel like shit for anything I do, from anyone. So I am going to keep doing what I am doing, and keep enjoying the things I enjoy and try my damnedest to forget the negative forces still exist. You cannot get me to believe like you do by yelling at me louder, and you cannot convince me of your point with circular logic. Ultimately I hope the internet and gamers in particular mature and learn to make decisions on their own merit and not connected to some larger agenda.