Month: August 2019

Abridged History of Bel

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This week was in theory about introducing yourself in some way on your blog. I have not done any of that thus far and since today is the last day that I actually write a blog post for the week… I feel like i should at least try and remedy that. The challenge however is the fact that I already feel like I share a lot of details about myself through normal posting. I’ve always kept a weird barrier in place in that I don’t have the names but I tell you real stories that happen to me as they are happening. This is either a positive or a negative depending on your feel about personal writing.

I grew up in a “podunk” town in Northeastern Oklahoma, that was very obviously a place that had one seen significantly better days. Wikipedia lists 3989 as the official population, but I don’t believe them at all and think that number likely got manipulated to make it seem less pathetic. By the time I was a Senior in High School, my graduating class had dwindled down to around 60. We didn’t have a valedictorian but instead had four salutatorians of which I was one of them. I gave a terribly depressing speech at my graduation where I talked about how once we left this town none of our actions in it would actually matter to the rest of the world. I lost my place in my notes and somehow skipped over the only positive chunk of the speech.

I fundamentally had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. I was ultimately torn between Art and Computer Science, and wound up getting a 2 year certificate in Desktop Video Production before ultimately transferring to a 4 year college and getting a Bachelors in Commercial Art. There was a point where I was enrolled in four colleges but couldn’t decide which path to go down… and ultimately dropped out of all of them and did a mix of Junior college credits for the first two years while driving back and forth from college each day and living at home.

The town was small enough and it was 1994… and reliable internet options were not spectacular. I remember paying $60 a month for my first internet connection, which involved a $20 charge to the phone company to make the town 30 minutes away from us a local number, which allowed me to then connect to the modem banks of the $40 a month unlimited internet provider I was using. It was in my travels as an itinerant college student that I happened to meet my wife. We were both IRC junkies at the time and were introduced by a mutual friend from Belgium, when I happened to be in his channel working on one of his bots as she happened to enter.

Turns out she lived in a similarly “shithole” town, roughly 20 minutes away from mine and that we knew a lot of the same people. We opted to meet over Memorial Day weekend holiday, hang out a bit and see a movie. We saw the remake of Sgt. Bilko… which was not exactly stellar fare and we saw it in a movie theater with all of the panache of a high school speech classroom. However over the course of the next few months I met a lot of people from her college, and opted to transfer there to finish up my degree. We were “just friends” but over the course of the summer “things happened” and we’ve been together at this point for 23 years (married for 21).

My first gaming experiences were with a Sears and Roebuck Pong clone. My uncle borrowed this from my folks and hooked it up to my grandparents zenith console television… leaving it running over night and burning stripes into the screen. This basically made everyone paranoid about any future generations of console and nixed my chances of ever getting to drag my Nintendo along with me to play at other houses. We didn’t get a computer until 1991 when we got a 386 16… with no math co-processor making anything like Doom play horribly on it. I did however play a massive amount of Wolfenstein on it, as well as pretty much every computer at the High School I could get it to run on.

My first MMORPG experience came when a friend of mine asked me to come over and play his second character during a Vox raid. He traditionally dual boxed an Iksar Monk named Chadoe with a Halfling Druid named something that was pronounced “Tim You” but I cannot remember the spelling of to save my life. Basically he gave me a five second primer of run in and cast nuke spells, and showed me which specific abilities to cast. I died… and had to run back in and then had to learn how to put spells back on my bar… and wound up getting the killing blow on Lady Vox largely cementing my connection to MMORPGs from that point forward.

I played Everquest from the Velious Expansion through to Lost Dungeons of Norrath as a Dwarven Cleric. Then when we transitioned to Dark Age of Camelot I didn’t really gain traction in that game until the opening of the Gaheris Co-Op server and starting the original Belghast, a Celt Champion. From there we started playing Horizons which is pictured above, and in that game I met a ton of interesting people through my friend Vernie and the community of crafters centered around building the huge public works projects that opened up new communities. From there we played City of Heroes and it was during that game that we started getting into the Beta of a new game being published by Blizzard.

With World of Warcraft I shifted from guild member to guild leader as I founded House Stalwart with a bunch of friends I had met through all of the MMORPGs I had been in up until that point. I original planned on playing a Paladin, but the suicide of my nephew knocked me out of commission for several weeks meaning that when I did come back i needed something I could solo to catch up with my friends. As a result Lodin the Dwarven Hunter pictured dead center above was my main for most of Vanilla. At some point I decided I wanted to run up a tank, and Belghast was reborn this time as a Human Warrior, and I duo’d it with my friend Amy ( pictured to the right on her Hunter) who wanted to level a priest.

From that point forward I have pretty much been a tank in every game I have played. I fell into the rotation of tanking the “alt” raids for Late Night raiders. I am pretty sure this was taken after I had just finished tanking a Zul’Gurub raid on the weekend. I think I was showing off my new sword that I got along the way. Look at the horrible mishmash of gear I was wearing… but in truth this is what a lot of tanks looked like back then. I still miss drillborer’s disc, which I believe is what the shield I was using was called. In part I am hoping to regain a lot of the joy I had from collecting these pieces of gear with the launch of World of Warcraft Classic.

I will close this point out with a “screenshot” of me. I’ve been mistaken for Brian Posehn, so here is an image I threw together with me on the left and him on the right. I however need to wrap this up because in truth I need to get my arse to work. I am never sure what to tell people during one of those “introduce yourself” moments, but this was a stab. I’ve not done a great job in participating in the themes but I fully expect since the next one is “Developer Appreciation Week” I will probably have some more cogent topics. I hope you have a great Friday and an awesome weekend.

Optimizing out Communication

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The first time I saw the Dwarven Statues in Loch Modan

A few days ago a conversation started on twitter, initially between myself and Heart1lly but expanded outwards from there. What originally started as a discussion about World of Warcraft Classic also similarly expanded out to cover the golden age of MMORPGs in general. Now that I am staring at the calendar and see that I will be playing a “Classic-zed” version of World of Warcraft in thirteen days, I find myself mulling over it some more. I find myself extremely excited by the possibilities it might present. This morning rather than posting pictures from the modern classic client, I have dug through my archives and am digging out a bunch of 4:3 aspect ratio screenshots from my early years in the game.

The day I got my very first mount in World of Warcraft

I’ve written about this before, but largely I think when it comes to video game nostalgia especially surrounding an online game, we are less nostalgic about the game itself and more nostalgic about a certain set of circumstances from a certain moment in time. I think much of the draw of the nostalgic is that we know at some level that we can never again arrive back at that moment and have those same feelings, because the world has changed and we have changed with it. However it feels good from time to time to try and retread the steps we have passed before, and as I age I find myself doing this a bit more often. I regularly reinstall aging game clients just to experience for a moment the glimmer of the joy I once had playing them.

My good friend Vernie dancing on boxes in Stathholme I believe one of the first times I was in there.

Sure we should be out there making new memories, but I feel like the modern crop of MMORPGs actively hampers that ability. The first MMOs worked and created the lasting relationships that they did in part because we had a serious need for other people. What I mean by that is that in order for us to have a fun night, we needed a bunch of other people to be similarly interested in doing the same thing. This meant that without really meaning it… you yourself were open to doing things that were maybe less than optimal for your evening because it would mean that in turn the other player would be willing to assisting you at a later date. I cannot count the number of Paladin and Warlock mounts that I helped people get, knowing that it was a really important achievement for them and that at least on some level I was accruing social capital that could be spent on my own desires.

The original “Warrior Protest” on Argent Dawn… aka the dancing naked gnomes in Ironforge moment

When I say lasting relationships were formed, a good number of the bonds with gamers that I talk to on a semi-daily basis were forged during this era. It was a shared sense of struggle that lead us all to bond over so many nights in Dire Maul or Lower Blackrock Spire… or eventually Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. The majority of the folks that I record AggroChat with on a weekly basis have roots that tie back to the time we spent in World of Warcraft on the Argent Dawn server. These are life long friends that moved past just the game. I’ve helped people prepare their first resume, or proof read a term paper in college, or even in the case of Rae hired for one of my development positions.

A warband waiting for reports back from scouts before moving in the infamous Southshore/Tarren Mill open PVP

There is no denying that MMORPGs have become significantly more convenient for the players, but I think that convenience has been a double edged sword. Last night I found myself queuing for a dungeon in FFXIV without even asking in guild chat if someone wanted to ride along for the fast tank queue. Why did I do this? Because waiting on another player is inconvenient and I now live in a time where I no longer have to get myself messy with human communication. I feel bad that my brain sometimes thinks in that manner, but there are a lot of times we can live in our own little bubble and are presented a series of nameless faceless and often time voiceless individuals in our group that we don’t need to communicate with.

Our first outing as a guild to Scarlet Monastery… we tanked it with hunter pets.

The rough edges have been smoothed to the point where a dungeon run is a series of encounters that are messaged so well as to not need any form of communication. With Shadowbringers, Final Fantasy XIV introduced the Trust system, which allows you to run dungeons with a full party of NPCs. The funny thing about it, is that running with a trust feels no different now than running an Expert Roulette with a full group of human beings. In fact the NPCs talk way more in a party than the humans that are there with me all barreling towards a fixed goal that we all have memorized by this point. I present that again… this has all come through the fact that we no longer need to communicate to play these games.

Hanging with my friend Amy on her rogue Ricci after killing The Beast in UBRS

Now I am not naive enough to think that a return to World of Warcraft Classic is going to magically usher in the golden age of MMORPGs again. However I am looking forward to needing other players, because even for me… who is generally thought of as a community organizer… I occasionally need a reminder that the other people matter. The Dungeon Finder opened the game to a lot of people who lacked the social network to be able to form groups, and because of this you will find a lot of proponents. For me, it was the death of social gaming in World of Warcraft, because rapidly these thriving social channels that we used each night for grouping went silent. Why say into a channel “Tank and Healer looking for dps for dungeon” when you can just push a button and get a group assigned to you.

Doing the Stormwind step of the Onyxia quest on Belghast

The problem with push button grouping is accountability goes out the window. I think a lot of the toxic behavior that we see in gaming as a whole is due to the fact that there are generally no consequences attached to it. During the pre-dungeon-finder society in World of Warcraft, your actions and ultimately your reputation mattered. As a guild and raid leader I was in communication with the leaders of most of the other raids and guilds on our server. We had a situation happen on a raid where someone rolled need on a pair of BoE boots, and then at the end of the raid that player informed us that he was leaving the raid and going elsewhere. Within moments of the raid being over the BoE boots were up on the auction house.

All hunter Upper Blackrock Spire run back when you could get 10 players in there

This was a pretty uncool move, and I mentioned it in passing to the leader of the raid that the player was going to as a warning. Within a few minutes of conversation among various guild and raid leaders I found myself in tells with the player. The unintended consequence of his actions was that he was finding himself kicked from that new raid and barred from all of the other raids that he could have gone to. He was begging me to call of something that I didn’t even ask for in the first place. Raid leaders hate mercenaries, and effectively his behavior was something that none of the other raids wanted any part of either. When you needed other people, and you were limited to the scope of your own server… prior to the existence of server transfers… your reputation as an honorable player was way more important than the gear you happened to be wearing.

The line of players preparing to storm the whelp room in Blackwing Lair

So in truth I figure most of the people that we are dragging into World of Warcraft Classic will bounce within the first few weeks. However there is a part of me that is hoping it will serve to rekindle a server community surrounding the game that brings back some of the things that I remember from my past. I want social channels to matter again, and the dark art of forming a group to be a thing. I want to meet new people and bolster that list of life long friends that I have met through gaming. Right now the only people I really meet are through Social Media or introduced to me by friends of people I already know through gaming. The problem there is that on many levels these are just surface friendships because at no point in our gaming do either of us actually truly need the other player.

One of our first Karazhan raids

The strongest friendships are forged in the fires of shared adversity. In order to have that adversity the game needs a significant amount of friction pushing back against you on a nightly basis, and the modern MMORPG lacks that apart from the most hardcore of activities. Sure were we Savage or Mythic raiders we would have the same tales to tell, but I just don’t have the appetite for raiding that I once did. I want the simple moment to moment game-play to matter and with this I am looking forward to hanging out with people in a re-imagined World of Warcraft. I am trying to go into it with open eyes about the slim chance that it acts as a catalyst to bring about the styles of gameplay that I find myself missing. So while I am not going into this with rose colored lenses I am hopeful nonetheless.

Two Goals Down

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Destiny 2 – PC

The first goal of the night was to finish up my purple armor set for the Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. Over the weekend I had knocked out everything but the EAZ minibosses component, and I largely stopped there because I knew given yesterdays patch the requirement was being lowered to 50. I was sitting at 56 so my hope was that it would be as simple as logging in, equipping all of the gear and meditating in front of the statue.

What I did not expect was that all of the gear would be 750, which was a nice boost in item level. I just need to get some powerful items to bump things up on the weapon front to 750 as well. The funny thing is… I will probably be farming EAZ over the next few weeks to try and get slightly better perks on each of the armor slots. As it stands the Helm is ideal for the way I play, but all of the other items could use some work. I opened the rest of the boxes I had in my inventory and picked up four additional pieces of the purple majestic armor.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

With the first goal knocked out quickly, I moved on to the second goal of the night which was getting the last little bit of a level on the Samurai and hitting 80. I opted for the short queue of a Trials roulette and got quite possibly the easiest option: Cape Westwind. It legitimately takes longer for the new player to watch the cutscene than it does to kill the boss, so we hung out chatting while waiting on the fight to start. Upon dinging 80 I equipped whatever gear I happened to have available and managed to get my item level up to 425.

From there I picked back up with the 74 Physical DPS Role quest, thinking the easiest and fastest way to gear would be completing the quest and getting the 430 gear from the smithy. It took some time though to chew through the remaining 74, 76, 78 and 80 quests so this consumed the majority of my play time last night. However I have now unlocked a second role and have access to physical dps gear. I wound up buying the 450 crafted blade, so I am now sitting at 435 which is enough to be able to dps Eden. Now that I am getting back into the swing of tanking a roulette or two each night, I should be able to bolster that level with tomestone gear.

World of Warcraft – PC

Finally I spent the last hour or so catching up on the War Campaign quest series given that it appears to be the most coherent manner to catch up on story. I think I underestimated just how much story content had gone into the game since I left, because I keep chewing away at it and seem to be not actually making any headway. I started last night queuing for the pieced of the raid finder that involves the Jaina battle seeing as I needed that for the War Campaign. That was a fun fight overall, but I am not sure how I would feel about the middle section where as horde we are forced to fight Rastakhan? I like Rastakhan a lot.

I think for the forseeable future I will be poking my way along these three different paths of catching up on World of Warcraft in getting back into the swing of the game prior to the launch of Classic. Then working on various objectives in Destiny 2 and probably leveling a healer in Final Fantasy XIV. It has been enjoyable to play for an hour or so and then swap to something fresh and new. It has also been nice hanging out and talking to my friends in Facepull once again.

Fourth Time’s a Charm

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Praetorium or Bust Apparently

I talked about Main Story Roulette some time back and it being one of the best ways to casually level a character. Last night I encountered the problem with this system, and weirdly one I had not encountered at any point prior in the process of pushing the Samurai to 80. The challenge is that when you queue for MSQ Roulette you are ultimately hoping to get Praetorium, because it is worth a significantly larger chunk of experience than the other option Castrum Meridianum. I’ve managed to pull Praetorium more times than not, and as a result when Castrum comes up I curse my fate… but largely play along nicely.

Apparently I hit a streak of people who are not willing to waste their daily bonus on Castrum. It took me roughly fifteen minutes to get through the queue each time, and when I got the first group within seconds all but four of us had bailed on Castrum. You can’t really run the place with four players reliably so I bailed as well and re-queued. Another fifteen minutes later I drew Castrum once again… and this time one of the two tanks refused to move until someone dropped from the party. Again once one person left there was a cascade of leaves until I opted to bail rather than run it down over half of the people.

A third time I sat through the queue and a third time I drew Castrum… and once again before I had even loaded in fully we were down a handful of people. The problem there is that no one queues for MSQ Roulette with the party in progress box checked. There is no reason to do this given that you would in theory be missing out on a bunch of experience that comes from the various boss kills. Again I returned to the queue a fourth time and finally this time it was Praetorium and everyone happily powered their way through it.

Unfortunately that does not stop the fact that Square has a problem on their hands, where a Roulette can produce one of two results and one of them is so disliked that folks are willing to take the 10 minute debuff that keeps them from queuing rather than deal with wasting their bonus on it. In theory they should probably buff Castrum to be able to reward the same amount of experience that Praetorium does. However if they do that… it will swing the balance in the other direction given that Castrum takes about half as long to run as Praetorium. There aren’t any great answers to this conundrum, but seeing as I encountered it three times in a row last night… it is a problem.

Belghast the Undead Warrior on Bloodsail Buccaneers NA-PVE RP server

The other thing that I took care of last night was reserving my character names on Bloodsail Buccaneers the PVE RP server that we plan on rolling on. As a result Belghast the Undead Warrior now exists there and is ready to start leveling when the gates open later this month. I also reserved a Belghast on Mankrik as a back up, but I doubt I will be using it. I don’t have a lot to say on this point other than the fact that if you are wanting names, you might want to log in and do this thing yourself. Several of my friends have already missed out on their chosen character names which is frustrating.

It seems as though I have steered a good number of my Horde side guild Facepull towards this server as well. So in theory we should have a decent number of people around at launch. Largely I just want to be able to field guild groups for dungeons and such. I fully expect to be running a bunch of Ragefire and Wailing Caverns. The only negative about playing a Forsaken is that they are so far away from everything. However the pull of having a second fear break is too great not to roll Undead.