What a difference a night makes. I’ve been continuing to work on my Orc Warrior was for the foreseeable future it is likely going to be my World of Warcraft main. Sure I will continue to visit Belghast and unpack him from mothballs but I’ve never really given Horde a proper chance. I am also playing way more casually as a Hordie than I traditionally do as Alliance, which seems to help my general enjoyment of the game. I know were I to start playing on Alliance again as a regular thing… I would be back in the raid before I knew it and being way more serious about the game than I really want to. Sure on Horde side there are raid options but they tend to be super casual about that sort of thing, and also tend to cram it all into a single night win or lose. I’ve been focusing more on Fury given that I doubt I will actually be tanking much other than the occasional run with friends. I got pinged by my good friend Cuppy last night as I was starting to wind down for the evening and it turns out she is a healer, and roughly the same gear level so I foresee some dungeon running in our future. As of this morning I am sitting at 866 with the only thing holding me back still a 800 heirloom trinket. I looked at the auction house options for that last night and there is no way I can justify darkmoon trinket prices just to get a very temporary boost in level.
My focus for the night was getting through as much Looking for Raid content as I possibly could given my item level. I started the night cherry picking world quests focusing on only the quests that had the potential for gear level increases. This managed to push me up to the 660 item level breaking point and as a result could start doing the Tomb of Sargeras LFR, thinking in theory that I might get reasonable gear from it. Unfortunately the luck was not on my side and I wound up walking away empty on most fights. I did however pick up a warforged breastplate and a set of gauntlets at least making the night somewhat profitable. I need to ultimately sort out re-roll tokens because I walked in without any. In the past there was some sort of a catch up mechanic allowing you to get more of the older tier of token, and I will have to figure out if that exists here or not. I had never done any of the Tomb of Sargeras so it was at the very least cool to see it. I am certain that the LFR fights don’t actually represent the real fights that well but still interesting and enjoyable. The main thing I have noticed about being horde side is that LFR seems way less toxic than it is over on Alliance. People seem to just keep their heads down and do the content without need for much bullshit, and I can respect that greatly. Maybe I just had a lucky night, but whatever the case I approve.
This weekend was a majority comfort gaming weekend, and as a result I spent a good deal of my time working on the Orc Warrior. Sure I played some Destiny 2 and probably have some things to say about the Curse of Osiris DLC but I will save additional commentary for another day. I did manage to unlock prophecy weapons and grind out two of them in the periods of time when I was not actually playing World of Warcraft. Most of the weekend was spent leveling and I managed to ding 110 Sunday afternoon. From there I spent the rest of my time unlocking all of the stuff required to start doing world quests in Broken Isles and Argus all for the purpose of attempting to gear. After essentially an evening of cherry picking quests and doing the three emmisary caches available to me… I managed to push my level up to 846. I still have a ton of dungeons to run for the purpose of unlocking my class hall, but I do have through Nighthold LFR open to me and I am considering running that tonight for the purpose of trying to fill out some of the slots that are not amazing. Right now I still have one heirloom trinket left and that is severely dragging my average down. The other big problem I am having is that I have horrible relics and that is mostly a case of being unlock in the randomized item quests available in the world. Lastly my Helm is pretty horrible, but I could spend a little gold to bring it up a bit because its from the class hall.
It feels so odd to be doing the legion questing thing all over again on a brand new character, and I am not necessarily looking forward to doing all of Suramar or the Broken Isles storylines. That said if I keep poking around on this character I likely will just for the sake of things to do between the gear based world questing. It is going to be weird having both an Alliance and Horde main that are warriors, but then again there isn’t another class that I like anywhere near as well as them. I need to start doing a daily drive by at the deathwing alternate appearance as well. I am hoping the unlocks I did on my other Warrior will count towards that weapon appearance, but I am somehow doubting if they actually will or not. It would have been awesome if I just got them handed to me when I dinged on a second warrior, because some of these alternate appearances are worse than others. Like there is no way in hell I want to do the Corrupted Ashbringer appearance ever again… and sadly my next highest horde character is my 100 Tauren Paladin. I am thinking I probably won’t play that character until the expansion lands and just try and brush off all of the artifact madness from this expansion. In theory I should be focusing all of the classes I never leveled and working on trying to get them a class mount. Instead I am running up a duplicate class that I already have reasonable geared on the other side of the fence and cursing the fact that the faction wall exists in the first place. All of that said though… I do find the design of Legion and the micro-goals spread across my map a really relaxing way of spending an afternoon.
Just a fair warning… this morning I am going to jump around between topics like mad because god knows why.
Game Awards
Since Xur no longer comes at a time when it is reasonable for me to post a blurb about him on Fridays, I am left without a clearly defined purpose for what I should be posting. Last night was as I mentioned yesterday a bit odd because I wound up going with people to see The Disaster Artist. I swear if that movie is not decorated with at least a few awards during the upcoming awards show season, it will be a complete travesty. By the time I got home and settled in The Game Awards were already in full swing but I tuned in for the tail end… only to watch Horizon Zero Dawn get completely robbed by everything else and walk away I believe with zero awards. We’ve talked about this problem a lot on AggroChat that 2017 was a year that just had too many amazing games. This hurts from an awards prospect but also from a financial prospect given that each player has a finite amount of money to spend on gaming and probably couldn’t do ALL of them in the same year. I know personally there are a bunch of games that I picked up but have not actually started, in part because I wanted to assist the financial success of the title… but have lacked the time to devote to them. Ultimately that is the real tragedy of this year as far as gaming goes… we had too many awesome things to play and not nearly enough time to play them.
As far as games that were shown off… Death Stranding still seems completely incomprehensible. At this point we have seen three trailers and none of them really help to flesh out what the hell is going on… something to do with naked Norman Reedus, creepy Babies, and the alien black oil from X-Files. New game that is now on my Radar that I didn’t know about before… is Witchfire which unfortunately is getting labelled soulsian because everything apparently has to be soulsian now? It name checks Painkiller in the trailer and that is precisely what it reminded me of. I can only hope that it also has the same sort of gameplay as Painkiller did, because that game did something unique that shooters just don’t do. You would have a flurry of activity and mindless mayhem… and then a moment of calm until you moved up to the next area through a tangible series of gates. Another thing that people seem to be super excited about is Bayonetta 1, 2 and ultimately 3 coming to the Switch. I’ve never played a Bayonetta game nor really know anything about them other than the main character being nonsense and not exactly the sort of character that draws me in personally. Perhaps in the near future I should change this and try out the series especially now that it is available on the PC.
Patreon
Another thing I sort of wanted to talk about is the Patreon change. Ultimately I get the why of how they ended up going down this avenue, and I am sure someone thought this was a hugely positive change. From the aspect of supporting a creator it absolutely is because they will wind up getting more of the face value of your donation. However messaging wise and the feeling right now that everyone is attempting to nickel and dime us with micro-transactions… there is a lot of push back happening. Functionally there are two truths about online payments… firstly that the processing company is going to take a transactional chunk of every fee. This has nothing to with Patreon and everything to do with them needing to offset the liability of handling financial transactions to a third party company that does literally nothing but this. Its nothing new to Patreon and just the way online payments work, so that is part one that is becoming transparent now and the cost is being passed on to the supporter instead of being taken out of the creators cut. The second piece is that every online service needs to charge something for their time in order to support the growth of the platform and the employees that the company needs in order to keep things up and running so to speak. Once again this was a feel that used to be obfuscated to the donors and just taken out on the back end from the money paid to the creator. So ultimately more of your money goes to the creators… but it also means that you are having to pay more money out of your pocket. I think of this along the same lines as that ever present $2-3 ATM fee that you just sorta grit your teeth and deal with because if you could actually get to a bank during the painfully limited operating window you would instead of harassing a machine in the back corner of a convenience store.
The problem is that we are wired to think of things in certain patterns and it was very clean to say that you wanted to give a dollar a month to support someone. It felt like you were helping but at the same time felt like such a minuscule amount of money that you would never end up missing it. When you start tacking additional cents onto the end of that for some reason it feels like more… even though once again it is still a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things. However it gives you just enough pause to think about the transaction instead of handing off your dollar happily in the process. Now the positive is as far as I understand it… these fees are for the transaction itself… not for the individual donation. So if you give a dollar a month to a dozen people… then you get a single transactional charge on your $12 instead of a bunch of individual fees because Patreon is extracting all of that funding from your account at the same time. You still end up having to pay a cut to Patreon but giving more than one donation at once tends to blunt the blow… which is ultimately what their advisement was trying to say. However it was worded so poorly to make it sound like they were ultimately going to phase out the $1 donations. I got what they were saying… but I also got that the way they were saying it felt shitty. As a result I seeing a report of a mass exodus of those $1 supporters that end up slowly adding up to a lot of money for several folks.
I have a mixed relationship with Patreon because I waffle back and forth regarding what I think about it. There are times where I think it is this great business model and ultimately helps fill the gap between the other monetization vehicles that are available for independent creators out there. There are times I feel like it is the equivalent of internet panhandling and lump it in with all of the insane gofundme campaigns you end up seeing. All of the time it really depends on whether or not I value what is being created… and as a result I try really hard to keep that second reaction in check as a result because I realize my personal preference should not be dictated to everyone. I’ve even kicked around the notion of starting a Patreon myself, but always stop short of doing so because is it really worth the effort? I do not realistically believe that I could ever do “this” for a living, because I am too used to the stable salary of a developer and manager. However there are times I think that it would be amazing for all of this to fund itself… that the blog and podcast and all of the expenses that go with it could somehow make enough money to be “fiscally neutral”. The problem is the second you enter into any sort of additional money coming in separate from your traditional W-2 employer process… you are setting yourself up for a world of Tax time hassle. Right now I figure I would maybe get three to five dollars a month pledged because folks did so out of some weird sense of obligation and then for that extra $50-60 a year it would cause me more headache than it would be worth. I used to do a significant amount of 1099 contract development work and at that point I had a whole system of extra bank accounts to handle filtering off what I thought would be my tax liability and keeping it out of the main stream of money so I simply forgot about it being there until Tax time. That is not a world I am willing to enter back into lightly. So as a result there is still no “Aggronaut” themed Patreon, nor is there any monetization turned on with YouTube… because in both cases it crosses a line that is hard to uncross.
This mornings post flavored non-post is brought to you by my favorite item in Destiny 2… the Schmoradric Cube. This is one of the items that you get in place of actual loot occasionally in one of Cayde-6’s treasure map chests. These appear to be more interesting than they were… but I am still not entirely certain if they are worth the price tag. Last night I looted the majority of them in a single sitting without doing my previously back to orbit thing to make sure I didn’t hit the empty chest bug. Each one rewarded three to four EDZ tokens and a couple of blues and at least one of the “fake” cash items that you can take back to Cayde and sell. One of the chests rewarded me with a legendary engram and another with an emblem that I did not have. This is nothing like that one week when I got four legendary engrams, an exotic and a faction exclusive weapon… but it does feel like you are at least getting something rather than the big fat nothing I occasionally got before. So if you were one of those folks that decided they simply were no longer worth your time… they at least feel interesting now. The real highlight of the night though was getting back the Wolf emblem above, which was a favorite of mine from Destiny 1.
The other positive from last night is that for the most part I am certain that the power mode setting is what was causing my insane freezing. I talked a bit about this yesterday but for whatever reason during the Fall Creators update to Windows 10, it reset my power settings to power saving mode. The behavior I kept seeing is that every 10 to 15 minutes Destiny 2 would lock along with anything else going on on my system while the audio continued to play. After scouring the forums I finally found a post on Tom’s Hardware when I started looking for issues related to the Fall Creators update but not necessarily Destiny 2. Throughout the night I played some crucible and a lot of planetary stuff and never once encountered a lockout except for occasionally some respawn lag which was something that occasionally happened even during the best of times. So in theory I cam considering this “fixed” as I was able to watch videos on YouTube (or in truth listen to them) while grinding out the Crucible Call to Arms last night. Past that though… I had one of those nights where nothing went right and it was not until 9 pm that I finally got settled into a computer and playing something. Tonight is more or less also going to be a non-gaming night because I am going with some friends to go see the Disaster Artist… the same crew that I watched the RiffTrax version of The Room with. It should be amazing, but it also means I won’t get home until significantly later than normal.
