November 2015 - Page 2 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Positivity, Cynicism and Thankfulness

November 26, 2015 by Belghast

On Thankfulness

One of the problems with depression is that your brain lies to you. It tells you that things are going horribly, that no one likes you… and that ultimately you are a failure in everything you do. It is because of these lies that I find it extremely important to give myself a reality check every now and then, and really appreciate how lucky and blessed I really am. The Thanksgiving holiday has become my favorite over the years, and the reasoning behind that… is pretty simple. It cuts through all the pretense, and is just a holiday about sharing a meal and some conversation with your family. Granted my particular view of Thanksgiving may be dictated by the fact that we never host… but for us at least it is showing up someplace with a few dishes of food in hand… and then sitting down to have a lovely meal with folks that you don’t see as often as you might like. There are lots of times I wish we could convince our family to treat Christmas as Thanksgiving 2.0… because for me at least it is the getting together part that is the important bits… not necessarily the often times awkward gift exchange.

Thanksgiving is also a great time to sit down and review the past year. I could look at this year as nothing special, but in reality I was surrounded by my support network of friends and managed to continue releasing daily blog posts and weekly podcasts without missing a beat. That seems like a pretty great thing to be thankful for. More importantly I am thankful for my friends. There are so many of you that I talk to on a daily basis, and you are always there to offer a word of support or sometimes a much needed bringing down to earth. I am also extremely thankful for my amazing wife… who helps to center me… and keep me from going off the deep end sometimes. I’m also thankful for my very excellent work family, because they too make the daily grind thing much easier. I’ve been lucky to be under the same boss now for four or five years of my going on eight years at my current job… and I have to say he makes it enjoyable. I am also thankful to this blog and its readers, because whether or not you realize it… this daily writing routine and the interactions I have with you all about said writing is therapeutic. There is something about reconciling my thoughts and putting it onto paper, that helps organize my cluttered mind, and I thank you all for joining in the journey with me.

On Positivity

I’ve always thought that Thanksgiving made a much better day for reflection and resolutions than New Years. For me at least it has taken on this meaning of looking back at the things you did well, the things you didn’t do quite so well… and the things you would want to change. I am not exactly sure when I set down the path I am currently on, but it has at least been a year now since I started purposefully trying to cut as much negativity as I could from my life. I was tired of feeling bitter and frustrated with the world, and I set down a path of “fake it until you make it”. As goofy as that phrase sounds… it really does work because as time has gone on… I’ve myself become a much more positive person in my interactions with people… and in return my outlook on the world. I am a happier person today than I was a few years ago, and my hope is that I will be a happier person still in the coming year. It isn’t like I have some gauge to measure happiness by, but I know at least that I have less days where I am struggling to drag myself out of bed and confront the day.

I will likely always have the darkness of depression hanging over me, but I am getting better at simply not listening to the little voice in my head that is constantly replaying all of the things that are wrong with me. I doubt I will ever shut that off, but I’ve started to develop better coping mechanisms for blocking it out. I want to be someone that makes the lives of those around me better, not someone who brings others down. So even if that is just a brief message somewhere in the social media sphere, I want to leave a positive effect on those I interact with. I am never going to be a full on Pollyanna, because I am just too jaded for that to ever work… but I do want to be someone who is actively making things better rather than consistently making them worse. While what I do is not really important in the grand scheme of things, it is my hope that at least it is a legacy of good… not one of suffering.

On Cynicism

By all accounts I was an almost painfully happy child, and based on all of the photos I have seen… I am willing to accept that at face value. Something happened along the way however to turn me into a fairly bitter, jaded and cynical person. I am good at what I do, because I plan for failure… because I don’t just accept it as a possibility… I expect it to happen. So being an eternal pessimist has been great for a career in software development… but pretty horrible for my outlook on the world. While I am not a doomsday prepper by any means, my mind just naturally works along the lines of preparing for the worst possible thing to happen in every single interaction. I can tell you the constant battling of my brain is tiresome when you take this instinct and mix it with the depression. My brain can make some pretty insane leaps, as failure to shake someones hand… ends up leading to me being out cold and hungry on the streets. There is a whole irrational segment of my mind that is constantly churning out doomsday scenarios out of average every day occurrences. Maybe I simply took my Eagle Scout training a little to seriously, with the whole “Be Prepared” motto.

Now all of these instincts that I am talking about are pretty deep rooted, but it doesn’t mean I think they are good things. It is my hope over the next year to work towards being less cynical. I write about video games, not industrial accidents. I should have more child like joy about the things I am doing, rather talking about how this or that is a portent of a big coming failure. I am tired of seeing the bad in my hobby, and I am tired of feeling like everything is going to shit… and quickly. I mean the world around us does a pretty good job of eternally bumming me out on a regular basis, I really don’t need my hobby to do it as well. So along with the methodology of faking it until I make it… I am going to try applying that positivity more thoroughly and hopefully root out some of my cynicism towards everything. I want the coming year to be an awesome one, and I want to spend more time enjoying the awesome things around me… rather than worrying about the things that aren’t. I can’t say that I think it will be easy, but I think it will be good in the long run for my own mental health and happiness.

In closing… I hope each of you has your own personal day of reflection upon all the ways you are lucky in your life, and all of the things you would strive to change. I hope you enjoy your time with family and friends, and enjoy the ritual of sharing a good meal. Thanksgiving is this day that has a special meaning for me, and it is my hope that it develops a special meaning for each of you. May you have a very Happy Thanksgiving, and even if you are not celebrating it… may your day be excellent as well.

We’ve Got Cows

November 25, 2015 by Belghast

Another Realm

I have briefly talked about this in the past, but I’ve lived in this strange place when it comes to World of Warcraft. Sure I played lots of Alliance because that was where most of my characters that I cared about existed… but I’ve always been one to bridge the gap. It was thanks to my involvement in the Argent Dawn server forums, and the later unofficial server forums that I created and hosted that I got to know tons of people on that side of the fence. For years I said I would level something on Horde to play with my “other” set of friends, but that never really panned out. During Wrath I ended up pushing a Deathknight to 80, but unfortunately the account it is on… is not the account I play most of the time. When it was announced that Scryers would be merging into Argent Dawn… I went somewhat crazy and created a full account worth of Horde characters because quite honestly… I had no clue how the merger would work. I did not know if all of the sudden there would just be this one amalgam server… and we would have 22 characters on it. The end result however is that both Argent Dawn and Scryers exist as distinct worlds… but everything from guilds to the zones themselves spans across the two realms allowing me to officially guild up with my old school Horde friends.

This has allowed me to do some utter madness… and ultimately have both a Horde and Alliance version of every single character. The big problem came with the fact that I had one of each on the Alliance that I did not want to lose access to. So now after some juggling Argent Dawn has become the server I play Alliance on and Scryers the server I play exclusively Horde. The only challenge is the fact that I had nothing leveled on Scryers, whereas on Argent Dawn as you can see above all but two of my characters are over level 90, and even then the lowest is 53 which is still a significant amount of levels. Prior to this week on Scryers I had managed to get an Orc Deathknight to 60, and a Tauren Paladin and Blood Elf Warrior to around 20. With the announcement of Legion came the pre-order process, which I went ahead and did giving me a boost to level 100. I was extremely torn on this one… do I take the boost and potentially get to do some stuff with my friends now… or do I level it the old fashioned way. Having not seen much of the Horde content, I actually do want to level there eventually.

Moo-Cow-Adin

Essentially I arrived at a thought process that is level the Blood Elf Warrior and Orc Deathknight legitimately… but boost the Tauren Paladin giving me access to do “big kid things” right away. I largely went with the Paladin because I really do enjoy both Protection and Retribution, but more importantly it gives me a character that I can in theory fill three different roles on. While I don’t really like healing as a Paladin, I have done it in the past and in a pinch I could do it again. I am however completely comfortable doing LFR and the likes as a Retribution Paladin allowing me to hopefully gear up both my Retribution set and eventually get a Protection set. The problem is… I knew if I was ever going to play the character for real I had to look cool doing it. This means I had to find something that I could enjoy to transmog into for the time being. My go to set for Paladins is the Tier 6 Lightbringer set, because it is relatively easy to farm. So last night I set off to go do Black Temple, Mount Hyjal, and finally Sunwell.

I am convinced that the game goes out of its way to screw with players trying to farm a full set of gear in a single attempt. It seems like there is always a single piece of gear that refuses to drop… and generally speaking it has been the helm token for me off Archimonde. This is extra insulting because as far as a raid goes… I HATE running Mount Hyjal. This is namely because you are a slave to the timers… and it seems to take significantly longer than most any other raid due to this aspect. Namely it is the Horde section of that raid that drives me insane… because I tend to play Melee focused characters, which makes knocking Gargoyles and Frost Wyrms out of the air a major pain in the ass. All told I was pretty happy with the results, and the only piece I did not manage to get were the legs from the Illidari Council fight… because for some reason it glitched and only gave me two pieces of loot including a single leg token. I have zero problem farming Black Temple to get the legs, and in the meantime I got a drop from Sunwell that will fill in well enough for the time being. At some point I need to get a better weapon, but for the moment I am rocking the big damned glowy orange axe from Black Temple, which makes me happy enough.

Onwards to Tanaan

My guild suggested that I spend some time digging into Tanaan Jungle to get some upgrades from the 640 set they start you out in after being boosted. I also really want to start the Legendary Ring quest, which I just picked up last night. From there I plan on throwing myself at the LFR and seeing if I can get some decent upgrades, and hoping to complete the ring quest along the way. It is really my hope that they upped the drop chances of those items out of Highmaul that are needed for the ring, because otherwise… this is going to be a thoroughly frustrating experience. I remember how long it took to get those on Belghast when we were actively raiding every week. In any case I seem to have sorted out how to actually play a Paladin again, and gearing my Moocow is pretty much my side gig from this point onwards. It is my hope to be able to get geared enough to actually join in some of the reindeer games happening on this side of the server. The only footnote there is that I really need not to raid actively, and I am hoping that won’t be a problem.

For a period of time I was really damned happy playing both Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I enjoyed the mix of the two games because they both scratched a distinct itch. World of Warcraft is this really enjoyable experience when played casually. I enjoy doing older content for transmog bits, or casually leveling alts… but when I was raiding both Warcraft and FFXIV… the differences just started frustrating me. Ultimately I prefer the FFXIV raid game better, because it feels like the boss encounters are simply messaged better. Granted if they just added telegraphs with clearly identified edges of effects like they have in both Wildstar and FFXIV it would go a long way to my enjoyment. Ultimately I think I simply got burnt out by trying to raid two different games at the same time… and ultimately ended up choosing the one that was causing me less frustration. So now… I am hoping to go back to playing both games casually… and in theory maybe starting to raid once again in FFXIV. We have started doing this Saturday thing again, where we do older content and it was a lot of fun this week. My hope this will ease me into doing more content in that game as well, and in the mean time I am planning on diving into LFR on the Paladin in WoW. Granted I won’t be doing any of it tonight… because this is the first of our Thanksgivings, and I also need to stage a proper Thanksgiving post for tomorrow.

Launch Hype Cycle

November 24, 2015 by Belghast

The Perfect Amount

One of the subjects I have thinking about quite a bit this week is the video game hype cycle… namely the time from when a video game is announced to the time you can have it in your grubby little hands. There are a lot of times that a game is announced with great fanfare and then when it actually releases two years later… the excitement has died down to a point where I rarely realize it has launched. This is especially true with games that have an early access system, because quite literally in my mind they have been “out” from the moment they started taking money for the game. I’ve come to a line of thinking that Fallout 4 pretty much represents the perfect amount of hype leading into a game launch. While all manner of information was leaked about this game for a few years… there was no official acknowledgement of the game, nor any media floating around about it until June 2015 at E3. At which point they announced that the game would be available in November of that same year. This gave the game a focused four months to hype it up and get people read for it.

The truth is that most of the hype was fan created. Bethesda themselves continued to release a slow trickle of information and trailers… large parts of which were simply recompiled from the demos given at E3. But this constant trickle served to keep the fires ignited long enough that by the time the game actually launched a few months later… folks were still very much at the peak of excitement, rushing out into the store and buying damned near anything even vaguely related to the game. As an example of this fever pitch I give to you exhibit A… the fact that the extremely limited edition Nuka Cola Quantum cases are going for over $1200 on Ebay. They announced a game with lots of new features, and then delivered it a short period of time later as promised. This sort of brevity is refreshing when it comes to video games, because we are simply used to it dragging on over the course of several years including extended alpha and beta phases which only serve to get the players bored with the title before they even lay their hands on it.

Beta is Not Beta

Another huge problem that plagues the industry is the fact that Beta testing really doesn’t mean what it says it means. What is ultimately spurring on this post is the launch of the World of Warcraft Legion Alpha yesterday to the press, streamers and a few fan sites. While Fallout 4 had this nice clean short cycle, Legion is already setting up to have a considerably longer one. We first got the official announcement of the rumored expansion at Gamescom in August, and post Blizzcon in early November we received our potential launch window of September 2016. Now that we have an alpha circulating, we will now have plenty of hype inducing articles and videos circulating… with ten months to go until the potential launch window. While this is awesome to stoke the fires, the flames will have died down significantly by the time the game actually releases. Right now I myself am riding this nostalgia buzz that has lead me to resubscribe to the game, but there is likely no way that the game can sustain my excitement until next year to keep the love going.

What I meant by the Beta not meaning what it used to, is the fact that we no longer have these cloistered NDA protected testing environments. So in essence Beta becomes this time to allow streamers and the press to hype up the game for Blizzard, rather than the period of deeply focused testing. Sure it is frustrating to be in something that is under NDA, and not be able to talk about it… but games need an incubation period before the world gets to see them. When I was testing Elder Scrolls Online I was quite literally in the closed testing process for a little bit over a year before the launch of that game. I tested the hell out of it, and myself and Ashgar apparently developed a reputation for our prolific bug noting. There were lots of things that I saw that would have freaked the hell out of the press and public if they saw them, but I simply calmly noted it and described as many details as I could and moved on. As the builds changed we saw many of those bugs disappear… and often times other ones arise that we continued to note. For me at least it was not about getting to play the game free or having something to fill my site with articles… but instead about trying extremely hard to make sure the best possible game launched.

A Challenge

So now is the point where I present a challenge to anyone with access to the World of Warcraft Legion alpha client. Test the hell out of that game and submit bug notes for anything that even seems vaguely out of place. I want each of you to be so prolific in your bug notes… that the developers behind the scenes know you by name and immediately start predicting what you might say. The Warlords of Draenor testing process was not taken seriously by the developers or by the players… and most of us just used it as a way of showcasing what was coming out from the game. What we ended up with was an expansion that did not quite feel right on so many levels, all of which were things that could have been addressed during the Alpha testing process. By the time a game makes it into Beta… it is essentially in a polish phase, where the content gets the spelling errors ironed out, and cosmetic blemishes are fixed. Alpha is the time when you can actually effect the way a game will play like at launch, and now that you have access to this client I expect each of you to do your job. After all testing is a job, not a perk… or something that elevates you above other players.

Quite literally if Legion is not the best expansion that World of Warcraft has ever seen… we are in a lot of trouble. You can have a single bad expansion and still turn around… namely I am looking at Dark Age of Camelot and the horrible Trials of Atlantis expansion here. They continued on to do a lot of really interesting things, but they absolutely had a misstep. I feel like Warlords was without a doubt Blizzard’s misstep when it comes to the Warcraft franchise, and Legion is their chance to redeem themselves. The problem being they need you the players to give honest and sometimes brutal feedback on what is working and what is not working. There is a huge difference between the live client and the alpha client… and the alpha forums are this magical place where people actually talk about the serious issues of the game without resorting to hyperbole. I expect each and every one of you that have access to this alpha to put that time to good use, and find every single bug in the game. Sure you only have access to the Demon Hunter starting experience, but I expect you to help make that starting experience the best “newbie zone” in the game. Now what are you doing reading my post… get to making bug notes people!

Nostalgia Continues

November 23, 2015 by Belghast

Eleven Years

At this point eleven years ago I was spending the morning with a friend and coworker desperately trying to raise the money to buy a guild charter on one of the two original roleplaying server… Argent Dawn. I remember we rolled a set of toons that we had no interest in playing, and wound up selling literally everything we got from quests and drops all in the hope of hitting that magic number. From there I mailed all of this to my would be main character and started the guild, running back to Coldridge Valley to get signatures. At which point a bunch of people made Dwarves or Gnomes and we got our charter up for House Stalwart in rapid fashion. WoW was the first game that I had a planned entrance into, because it was that one game that everyone seemed to be able to agree upon. So we pulled folks from Everquest, Horizon, Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes all together into one large organization. We had noble amibitions of having both an Alliance guild on Argent Dawn and a Horde guild on Silverhand. Most folks that have worn the House Stalwart tabard probably don’t even remember that the crusader cross that has become so recognizable… was not even our original design. You can see in the screenshot to the side that the colors were similar… but instead we went with the tree logo.

It was not until the first “reboot” of the guild that we went with the crusader cross, as a bit of a way of signifying that things had changed. Hell there was a period of time when I didn’t even have my mains in the guild. About six months into the game I took a hiatus and went off to play Everquest II, which I talked briefly about during my MWP post a few weeks back. When I came back to the game pretty much the entire guild had disappeared. Later I found out that some of those that remained ended up going and creating their own guild, and rather than shaking the boat I decided to move most of my characters there as well. We had some good times, but it didn’t last and before long I was asking my friend Finni to help me move my characters and pass back the leadership from my bank alt to my main once more. Before we knew in… within twenty four hours we went from being a guild of essentially one… to a guild of like sixty players again. This began the golden age of the guild, and with it we started dipping our toes into regular raiding with what was our sister guild at the time… Silent Strike. Granted we never really did anything much more serious than Zul Gurub and AQ20, but we had a lot of fun doing it when we raided as a guild.

Misplaced Intentions

One of the more interesting things about this game is that I became known as a tank, but even now there are folks like my friend Eralia that still call me Lodin my original Late Night Raiders main. I played a hunter for the better part of Vanilla, but I never intended to do that as my role in the game. It was shortly after the launch of the game that we had a pretty horrific death in the family. So while I was keeping up with my Paladin for a long while… I quickly fell behind and when I came back… the only thing I could seem to level quickly was my hunter. I pretty quickly realized that the class was not really for me once I started raiding. However my good friend Shiana needed a replacement for a less than reliable hunter, so before I knew it I had become a regular cog in the Late Night Raiders machine. Once I was geared… I felt like I simply could not swap to another class. It was during this time that my fellow hunter Ailah decided that she really would rather level a priest… so we rolled Belghast the Warrior and Finni the Priest and started leveling them as a duo to make life easier on both of us. At that point the hardest possible thing to level was a Holy Priest, and the second hardest was a Protection Warrior… and we figured as a duo we could burn through the content quickly.

It was not terribly long before both Belghast and Finni had become our “unofficial” mains, so when Late Night Raiders disintegrated at the end of Vanilla, I took that opportunity as my change to be the class and role I had actually wanted to play. I tore through Burning Crusade with a vengeance and became one of the folks that people relied on to make dungeons happen. When LNR finally called it quits I transitioned over to another raid group that I had been tanking for on the side. NSR or No Such Raid became a second family, and through that raid I met so many of the people that I keep in contact with on a daily basis. We had a really great run with the raid and made it to the start of the Tier 6 raid content before various things happened, and the leader dumped the raid in my lap. I tried to make it work as best I could, but week by week we were hemorrhaging folks. We started with baring being able to pull the group together, then the next week we were down around five people… and the bleeding continued at that pace until three weeks in I just called it. I felt like a failure and honestly was uncertain what my future would bring. I talked to a handful of the highest tier raid guilds on our server… and had essentially made my way through the recruitment process on a couple of them.

Durable Nubs

It was around this time that a good friend of mine from the days of Late Night Raiders pulled me aside to talk about an idea that he and some of his friends had. The theory was simple… pull together a raid group in the style of Late Night Raiders and go off and tackle the content on our own. There were a lot of things about the methodology of NSR that never set right with me. I’ve never felt like yelling orders at a team was really that effective. Basically I had a choice… do I go with my friends and start a brand new raid, having to train people up from Tier 4, or do I go off and join a hardcore raid guild and continue my progress into Tier 6. If you have read this blog much, it would be pretty obvious which choice I made, but I have to admit that choice haunted me. As we wiped to Gruul or later Leotheras the Blind… I kept thinking… what did I give up to make this happen. I spent a good deal of Burning Crusade being grumpy about my decision but in the long run I absolutely made the right one. When Wrath of the Lich King launched we were prized to be a real force for awesome raiding. The atmosphere that evolved was awesome… but we did a few things that I think ultimately hurt the raid. We had this policy of “never let the children see the parents fight”, so while we raided the entire group of officers remained connected to a second voice server. The problem being is that when heavy deliberation was going on… the normal raid chat could be deathly quiet as we sorted out what we needed to do to fix the situation.

To the members this felt like a vacuum of information, and we also failed to take into account the possibility that some of those folks might have some really good ideas that would help solve whatever problem we were having. LNR was the example that we were following, because almost all deliberation there happened in a separate and private server channel. The problem being… we had no clue just how contentious that channel could end up being. I had zero intention of being the voice of the raid… but over time that is precisely what happened. The thing is… as burnt out as I eventually became… I still look back on the moments of us raiding together in a positive light. Namely because so many of the people from the raid groups I have been in… make up the folks that I converse with on a daily basis. Like all things… Duranub came to an end, but this time it was only slain by the Cataclysm release and the shift of focus to guild based raiding. There are several moments that I wish I could go back to, and several raider line-ups that I wish I could pull together again. With Cataclysm we ushered in a plot by some of my friends to create the raiding dream team… the problem being… it wasn’t my dream team. It ended up feeling like a really forced thing, and while the team was called “MellyBelNore” it felt like neither myself, Elnore or Melyloss really had any control over where the team was heading. This frustration… combined with a brand new shiny game on the horizon called Rift, ultimately got me to leave WoW on a semi-permanent basis.

Always in Your System

The problem being… that World of Warcraft is one of those games that I can never seem to fully flush from my system. Over the weekend I spent chunks of it playing around on my Blood Elf Warrior that I rolled ages ago on Scryers… as a way of having both Horde and Alliance characters on Argent Dawn. Once upon a time I was a forum junkie, and with that came pretty frequent postings on the Argent Dawn server forums. Through them I met lots of horde players on my server, and cultivated a pretty great relationship with many of them. I’ve never had a lot of faction loyalty, I just tended to prefer the look and feel of alliance races and cities. I’ve never had that streak for playing “monstrous humanoids” to borrow the dungeons and dragons term. One of my big regrets has always been that I never really got a character high enough to be useful on the horde side. I have an account that I no longer play that managed to catch up during Wrath of the Lich King, and I raided a bit with the Batteries Not Included raid… of which lots of folks are in the guild that I am hanging my hat in currently. For years we had a relationship with Bloodmoon Chosen, and I guess there was a bit of a major dramasplosion there. As a result the folks I was actually friends with ended up leaving and creating their own guild called Facepull, and as a result I moved my characters there over the weekend.

I’ve been having a lot of fun, because there is just something about leveling in World of Warcraft that makes me happy. I’ve not spent much time on the House Stalwart side of the fence, namely because I have no clue yet how long I will actually be around. I always feel like a dick when I have one of these relapses and folks start saying things like “Yay! You’re Back!”. I don’t like letting people down, because for all I know I will be gone in two weeks time when something else catches my fancy. If you were to look at my subscription history since the launch of Rift, you would see each expansion there are two or three of these relapses, and of all of them… only two managed to stick for any length of time. What is ultimately going to hurt this time is the fact that I really don’t have much of a guild to return to. That also feels like my fault, because when I left again this time after us defeating Blackrock… a large chunk of folks followed me into Final Fantasy XIV. In the resulting vacuum, the guild as a whole just vanished. I am looking forward to us ramping back up to doing things as a group in Eorzea, and this past Saturday night before the podcast was a lot of fun. That said… WoW right now is like slipping into a warm sweater…. or fixing a hot cup of soup. It is comfort gaming, and works perfectly for being wrapped in a blanket cocoon on the couch watching stuff on Netflix. It is the mode of gaming that I need right now, and I have stopped fighting the desires for the moment. Only time will tell if this is just another outbreak of nostalgia, or if I really truly want to be playing the game.