January 2018 - Page 4 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Types of Players

January 11, 2018 by Belghast

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The photo of Belgrazer has absolutely nothing to do with this post… I just felt like I needed some image to break up what would otherwise be a wall of text post. Yesterday I made a post about the emotional labor it takes to be an organizer in a guild. Then Scop and I went back and forth with a series of comments. Firstly I don’t want it to come off like I was specifically making a post about him, or specifically directing my commentary at him. He got to be the guinea pig because he happened to be the person responding. The thing is… I do get his down in the weeds point of view as a member wanting other members to respond. It has just been in my personal experience that this doesn’t really happen unless someone is out there prodding folks into action. One of the weird offshoots of this conversation happened in the private slack that the AggroChat podcast crew discuss things on. Tamrielo a long time friend and similarly long in the tooth leader and organizer and I started talking about the various personalities we encountered. I made the flippant comment that if I was pressed to do so… I could create a list of pretty much every personality I had encountered through leading guilds and raids… and then walked away from the conversation to enter a meeting filled afternoon. When I got out of said meetings he had done just that. We went back and forth on a few of the points and there were a few cases I felt he had missed, but all in all he was pretty damned spot on. You can now find a revised list over on his blog that I feel is pretty close to whatever I would have cobbled together myself. I don’t want to copy large sections of his post, but I do want to share the general bullet point list of types of folks we encountered.

The Socialite
The Drill Sergeant
Chill AF
Things Explainer
The Ninja
Side Projects
The Collector
The Griefer
The Devotee
What’s Going On Lately
I Got Mine
You Need Yours
My Dude
The Hiker and The Backpack
I’m Here, Now What?
Ready To Go
The Downer
The Positivity Cannon
Silent But Competent
Respect My _____

The thing is… if I were pushed to do so I could probably rattle off names of players I have played with over the last two decades and tell you which of these traits they were focused on. Most people are to some extent a “multi-class” of a bunch of these traits. Similarly every single one of these has a positive version and a not so positive version. “The Griefer” for example… can be beneficial to a group by goading other people into reforming their habits or getting better at dealing with things at hand… or they can just be a merciless asshole that only exists to sow the seeds of drama. Similarly the “Things Explainer” walks a thin line between being overtly helpful when asked for assistance… and being a know-it-all that everyone wants to avoid catching the attention of. The term “emotional labor” is a weird one but very apt and is often times brought up in terms of dealing with the emotional maintenance needed to keep a team going. It is draining knowing that you need to treat each one of these people a specific way to get the results you actually want from them, and know that you are always walking a fine line between getting the positive version and the negative version.

The truth is over the years I have probably been at least part of each of these traits, and at this very moment in my life I have zero clue which one I actually embody anymore. In most games I am very much “What’s Going On Lately” aka the “Content Locust”… the person who swoops in and consumes the new content and then bounces pretty soon after that. I think I have almost always been at least heavily multi-classes into “The Socialite” and “Chill AF” which is an odd blend but I definitely go through phases where I embody one over the other. I am very much not a good “Things Explainer” because there are so many things I can do easily but could not necessarily tell you how to do them. I feel like all of the traits that specifically focused on “competence” are not necessarily for me either because I mostly am just winging it the entire time I play a game. I have “Collector” and “Side Projects” streaks but usually only after I have gobbled up all of the surface level content and am desperately trying to stay rooted in a game because my friends are playing it still. Ultimately what I am trying to get at is that each of us have multiples of these traits blended together into the player profile that we ultimately are. However your leaders… the people who are out there watching for these things probably already have you pegged. I am absolutely certain however that each person I talk to would probably slot me slightly different. Regardless I highly suggest checking out Tams post because it contains a lot of good description of each of these types.

Bad Concierge

January 10, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I failed miserably at making any sort of a post. In truth by the time I had realized I had not logged in and created a blog post it was mid afternoon… and figured I might as well just call it a day off. First off this morning I feel like I probably need to update considering my Monday post. I saw a Doctor Monday afternoon but good or bad the pain had subsided by that point. The pain in whole lasted roughly 3 1/2 to 4 hours and without it being “acute” the only way they really had to diagnose things was some scans. Their advice to me is that if the pain comes back at all… go to the Emergency Room immediately. Based on my description they thought it might have been either a kidney stone or my appendix… since I still have one of those so in both cases something dangerous if I allow it to go unchecked. While I was there however they also told me I had a pretty significant sinus infection and prescribed a round of antibiotics to help clear that up. I had been coughing up a storm the last few weeks and apparently I actually had an infection to back that up. The doctor suggested that I not return to work until Wednesday, to keep down the odds of me infecting someone else… which I guess makes sense given this is a sort of work based free clinic thing that I went to. So for the bulk of yesterday I chilled out while something cooked in the crockpot and piddled around in World of Warcraft while consuming Netflix/Amazon shows.

One of my favorite things about ElvUi is the AFK screen thing. Not sure why it makes me happy to see it pop up and I have a directory littered with screenshots of my character sitting down while dancing on the side. At this point I am level 52 on my newish Tauren Hunter and spending time in the greater Gadgetzan area. In truth last night before logging for the evening I got the precursor quest to take me to Ungoro crater, so I will likely be heading there shortly. Being fully decked out in Heirlooms makes the leveling experience really odd given that things rarely last long enough for my pet to even reach the target, let alone need any form of “tanking”. This means that I am largely running a pet for the flavor of it rather than for the functionality. Traditionally when I need a pet to be a barrier between me and the target I tend to favor bears… however for the moment I am running around with a golden brown Owl I picked up somewhere in Feralas that I named Bubo. The hunter is ridiculously relaxing which has been exactly the sort of thing I have been looking for lately. One of the things I enjoy about hanging out in Facepull on the Horde side is that I can be a fly on the wall mostly, that interacts every so often but also has the room to simply not interact at all if the spirit doesn’t move me to communication.

I ended up going off on a twitter tear yesterday talking about guild leadership and being the person in the background that makes sure things are happening. When I first started leading guilds… I was very young and lacked any sort of responsibility apart from just showing up at work and making sure I was getting my tasks accomplished. In fact when House Stalwart hit its stride about a year into the release of the game… I was in quite possibly the worst job I have ever been in. I had a horrible boss and felt like I had no control over my work environment, and as a result having a smooth running community to come home to and spend my evenings with was almost refreshing. During this time my home life was in a bit of a disarray due to the large number of deaths that were occurring in the family, and Stalwart wound up being my stability that I so desperately needed. As we entered Wrath of the Lich King I changed jobs and wound up in a much better place where I had a support structure and actually started taking on more responsibilities. As such I found myself starting to back away from the same sort of things that I did during Vanilla and Burning Crusade and begin placing myself in more of a distant advisory role. By the time Cataclysm launched I had moved up to being a Team Lead, and was responsible with juggling planning and task assignment, and similarly I found myself completely checking out of the guild leadership role and even going so far as to quit World of Warcraft when Rift released. During that time I have shifted from Team Lead, to assumed supervisor, to actual supervisor… to now interim manager of three groups. While I have kept trying to be the social glue for guilds… by the time I get home I just have no social capital left to make things happen.

The truth is that every guild you have ever been in that felt active… had one or more people behind the scenes making sure that things were going smoothly. I used to have a motto among our officers that I wanted our actions felt but not necessarily seen, and so long as I had the focus it worked smoothly. From Cataclysm on Stalwart has changed hands numerous times and as a result has kept going forward without me. While now it takes a more raiding focus, it is still functional and still doing things. However if you take away the people who are actively moving the ball forward… you end up with 30 people sitting in guild chat and nothing happening. That has been the problem with so many of these guilds that I have formed as new games come out.. I don’t have the drive to be the cruise director anymore… and while I gather up the people I don’t have the strength to actually do things with other people. This was extremely noticed in the recent foray into Destiny 2 where I spent 99.9% of my time soloing, all the while people around me were trying to make things happen. Guilds work when they have a concierge making sure needs are being met and I just cannot fill that position anymore. I have transitioned to being one of the players that just wants to log in and have a good evening escaping whatever stresses piled up during the day. The key difference for me at least is that I do most of this through solo play and am completely happy to piddle along with alts. There are times that I miss big group activities… like I wish we had beat Calus in Destiny 2, or I wish we had made a bigger push into Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. Then I sit back and think about the frustrations of having to remember to log in on time with all of the materials needed for raiding on a specific night of the week… and I question if I could ever go back to that. So yes… I play tons of MMOs as single player games and am mostly okay with that, and yes I realize I am doing it wrong. I do like knowing people are out there in spite of me not being capable of actually interacting some evenings, so I will always seek out potential communities because someday… maybe… I might shift back out of whatever turtle mode I have been in for the last year.

Still Mostly Alive

January 8, 2018 by Belghast

Apologies for the super late post this morning, but it’s been an ordeal to get to this point. I woke up about 3:30 last night with the most excruciating pain I think I have ever experienced. It was this pain that was super hard to place because it seemed to be everywhere. It sort of radiated from just below my bellybutton, around the right side of me and also had this sorta lower back pain thing going on. I spent a good deal of the early morning hours trying to find a way to lay that was less painful than the others without much luck. Finally after getting up and showering the pain started to lesson enough that I could crash and attempt to get some rest. At this moment there are occasional twinges of pain but nothing like it was this morning. I went back and forth about going to the emergency room, because I hate dealing with that nonsense. Instead I took the day off work and have a doctors appointment at 2:10 that will hopefully get me to the bottom of whatever is going on. Anyways as a result you are getting a very late and very non-gaming post. This is in part because really it was a pretty gaming light weekend.

On Saturday I went up to my home town and helped my parents move a bunch of stuff and hang a television on the wall. I think when I first started to notice the abdominal pain I thought maybe I had just pulled something moving in directions my body is not used to moving in. Saturday night I felt completely out of it, like I was a little guy in my brain piloting my body badly sort of out of it. Sunday we had to get up and around and go to a family thing… that turned out to be its own nightmare. There are three people on my wife’s side of the family that I really do not like being around and all three of them were at this party. By the time I got home I was once again out of it and spent the evening watching black mirror. I remember some minor abdominal discomfort when I first went to bed but I guess as the night went on it just kept getting worse until it finally woke me up. Here is hoping that the doctor might have some ideas for what is going on. I’m in this state where I am almost afraid to eat or drink anything because I have no clue what might make it worse… and the last thing I ever want to feel again is that pain.

I mostly wanted to make a post because I didn’t want folks to be concerned about me… even though I guess in theory there was reason to be concerned. I hope the start of your week is going better than the start of mine.

Poorly Dressed Hunter

January 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night on a whim after running my Emmisary quests on Horde side I decided to start playing something else. For a long time I have had a level 20 Forsaken Hunter, but I have this major problem playing anything with the “horde hunch”. While I realize that is eventually going to be optionally not a thing… there is also the major problem I have with the Forsaken in that they cannot wear anything but trashed out armor. If I could be an upright walking normal armor wearing Forsaken… that would probably cause me to re-evaluate a lot of my choices in life. However I can’t and I doubt they will ever taken away the iconic exposed bone thing from them so… until that date that is likely never going to happen I am probably going to bounce the fuck off playing one. I wound up deleting my old hunter and re-rolling as a Tauren, which coincidentally was my very first World of Warcraft character back in beta. I got into closed beta shortly after the Tauren starting zone opened and primarily played a Warrior and a Hunter for most of my testing time. That combined with the fact that Mulgore looks not dissimilar from the corner of Oklahoma I live in… has always sorta made that experience feel homey.

The only problem is… first I forgot that my mail armor was a mishmash of nonsense that I got through the Wintergrasp PVP heirloom vendor… combined with the shaman shoulders because apparently at some point I bought those? As a result I am the most disturbing ahn’qiraj era fury warrior looking character to exist. The problem there is that I forgot that I could not ride a mount until 20… which means I won’t have access to my Yak and a transmog vendor to remedy this until then. For now… I just look like a mess roaming around with an awesome purple birb. There is something extremely relaxing about the leveling process and if I actually want to do that in earnest I am left with two options: Roll Horde or Roll Alliance on server other than Argent Dawn. If you notice in the above image… every single Alliance character I have is over level 100, which means I would ultimately have to grind nothing but Legion content and quite frankly that doesn’t sound that fun or relaxing in the least.

Horde side however I have lots and lots of room for expansion and as a result I am experiencing a bit of a renaissance of “monstrous humanoids”. I am however catching shit now from my Alliance guild as every so often tells show up in my timeline saying things like “we miss you”. While I seem to have switched relgion for the moment I am sure at some point in the near future I will play alliance again. I am neither red nor blue but have always been purple, because purple is a great color and also blends the fact that since day one… I have played a little bit on both sides of the fence. The fact that there still is a fence at all infuriates me, which is why I am not nearly as amped as I probably should be about this upcoming expansion. I have different pools of friends that prefer to play one side or the other and as a result I will always be split between the two. It is my hope that I can get a few more characters up before the expansion hits so I have a pretty even stable of characters on either side of the fence. Similarly I will probably start pushing up some of my Alliance characters as well… but there is only so much Legion grinding that one can take. Side note… I have the best Tauren Hunter Bel-Themed name ever… Belgrazer.