Belghast

GenX • Husband • Petfriend • Daily Blogger • Weekly Podcaster • Eternally Confused • avatar by @Ammosart@gamepad.club He/Him

Ahead of the Curve

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One of the things that I love about being a fairly prolific blogger, is that it also makes me a fairly prolific “screenshotter”. I like using images to break up blocks of text, so it means that I am always looking to capture moments in games. At last count, it also means that I have an archive of somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 GB worth of images recouting my time in various games. This means that with some measure of accuracy I can usually pinpoint exactly when I started playing a game. For example with my most recent return to Final Fantasy XIV, I know without a doubt that it happened on June 26th or 2021 and the above image is the first screenshot that I took. I started playing again on a Saturday which allowed me to get in, buy a jumbo cactpot ticket, and then cash that in after the podcast and I took a screenshot of it because I got a prize slightly greater than the default. It isn’t always a moment of huge significance that causes a screenshot to happen, but I do enjoy the fact that I do this regularly enough that I can use it as a visual journal.

This puts me slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to the recent wave of players trying out the game. It also has me still playing catch up for all of the content I missed since I last played around the release of the 5.3 patch. Something I had never participated in for example was the Bozjan Southern Front which is like this interesting halfway point between a Deep Dungeon and something like Eureka. To get it unlocked however I had to run through the entire Ivalice Alliance raid series that I never actually got around to doing in Stormblood. I’ve not spent a lot of time in there, but what limited time I have has been enjoyable. I mostly bounced from FATE to FATE and then signed up for all of the boss fights that happened while I was in the vicinity. I’ve unlocked the second area of the zone and I think at last count I was rank 6 of 15. Every time I can put on a new rank I pop back into the base and upgrade because I had been warned that often times this opens up new quests which unlock new things.

The bulk of my week was spent working on my machinist job, and I have to say right now at this very moment it is probably my favorite DPS class in the game. This is weird given how much I did not like Machinist when it was originally released in Heavensward. We’ve lost track of how many revisions to the class this has been, but right now they have a really enjoyable mix of a gunner class and Edgard from Final Fantasy VI. One of my friends Erry mentioned that she was not digging the class at all… and then she got Drill and that changed everything. I have to agree with this sentiment, it is really when you get the gadgets and the upgraded “heated” versions of your base attacks that it really starts to come alive. I hit level 80 with the class a few days ago and as is usually my pattern, once I got some basic gear I flipped out and started leveling something new.

There was one job that was completely greyed out for me, and I decided to remedy this. Otherwise, all of my battlecraft jobs are at least level 50 or higher. Dancer was introduced with Shadowbringers and I have to admit it is not traditionally what I would consider my jam. The first thing we had to remedy was getting rid of the default appearance which looked a bit goofy on a Lala. Instead, I went with this whole pirate lord sort of theme and I think it works nicely. Shocking to me is how much I am enjoying the class because it feels like playing a melee… but all of your attacks work at range. This means that like Bard and Machinist it is a class with a high degree of mobility since I don’t have to wait on any abilities to cast. What really pushes it up there though is the group support it provides with a bunch of interesting AOE minor heal abilities. I am learning the ropes but definitely a job that I dig. I think ultimately I am on the path to level everything to 80, but I sincerely doubt that happens before Endwalker.

Grace and I were joking that somehow I was replaced by the version of the player that they were in 2017. I have been throwing myself at all sorts of random group content and am even doing the daily Alliance Roulette for fun and experience. Sometimes it works great and we get a nice easy Syrcus run, and other times it does not… and you get Dun Scaithe that has so many wipes that I eventually had to bail out and go to bed. All the time however I find myself enjoying doing content with random players and how generally awesome everyone has been. Even in the cavalcade of wipes that was that Dun Scaithe run, no one was really hostile at least not the levels of hostility that I would have seen in other games. Like I can take passive aggressiveness because I grew up with plenty of that, it is the downright hostility towards other players that I think has driven me away from random group encounters in other games.

I had built this mental block up against doing things with strangers, and it makes me wonder how many opportunities I had missed out on. For example, I happened to be doing clan hunt logs in the Lochs when I noticed the Ixion this big mega FATE was up. Shortly thereafter folks started flocking to the zone and grouping up to prepare to kill it. They sat there and waited a good solid 10 minutes for folks to filter in from other zones and when there were 20 minutes left on the FATe they pulled. You can see the grouping of players that already had their mount, but were super happy to help out and do the FATE just because it was fun. I was in that camp as well, because I got the mount through another source and was just there to experience the event. It wasn’t particularly difficult but also wasn’t a trivial face stomp either. I walked away with enough Ixion horns to be able to pop over to Rhalgar’s Reach and get the minion version of Ixion to show for my effort.

Thing is… there is a version of me from not too long ago that would never have signed up for an event with a bunch of strangers. I know this is corny, but it feels like this game and its community have summoned forth a version of me that I thought was long dead. I used to be a group organizer and constantly slamming my face against impossible obstacles with strangers. That is more or less how I survived all of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and because of it I had long lists of friends and was in my maximum number of social channels that I used as a reservoir of people to do things with. Then the community changed, or at least I became fearful of it and I stopped grouping with anyone that I did not know personally… or at least were not vetted through one of my friends. Coming back into this atmosphere it has revitalized that part of me that is willing to talk to strangers and even lend a helping hand again. I’ve missed this version of me.

Boycott or Not

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I’ve felt like I needed to talk about this point for a few days now, but honestly was uncertain exactly what I would say about the matter. If you remain blissfully unaware of the situation happening with Blizzard entertainment, I would like to have some of whatever you are smoking because apparently, it works extremely well. The short rundown is the State of California has filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for hostile working conditions, specifically targeting women and in EEO language “protected classes”. Since this point, a cavalcade of horrible stories of Blizzard employees behaving badly has been loosed upon our community. I am in no way trying to diminish these stories but there are way too many of them to ever realistically cover in a blog post. If you have remained oblivious then I highly suggest educating yourself and PC Gamer has a fairly good rundown of the timeline of events.

As part of this discussion, I feel like it is important to at least talk about the employee walkout at the Blizzard campus. The first image in this blog post is a picture of Blizzard staff walking out on July 28th to protest the situation. Corresponding to this action there were calls across social media, many of which coming from Blizzard staff to boycott all of the studio’s games on that day and to create a virtual picket line. This specific call to boycott was targeting a specific time and date and not a larger drive to boycott the games as a whole. The thing is… once this ball started rolling it was difficult to stop and now there are a number of individuals that are maintaining the boycott as a way of showing support. It is all a double-edged sword because, in order to make the “corporate overlords” take notice, the company has to be losing money. However, in order for the company to lose money, you have to take actions that will actively harm the folks that are still working there.

In fact, there are folks in the community trying to say “hold up a minute” and stop the boycott. Alanah Pearce is a trusted voice in the gaming community, and I generally speaking appreciate her opinion on things. Yesterday she released a heartfelt video talking about how a boycott might do more harm than it does good. I’ve seen this echoed in the comments on Twitter of my own friends who work at Blizzard. Now that the initial employee action is over, there seems to be a general fear that the fans won’t be coming back. I mean and honestly, that fear is warranted given that I myself cannot stomach the thought of playing any of the games right now. Diablo 3 Season 24 is happening currently and the start of a new Diablo season is generally my happy place, but I cannot bring myself to touch the game.

If you have reached this spot in the blog post, you might be wondering… “Bel why are we even talking about this right now?” On Tuesday just ahead of the investor earnings call, J. Allen Brack the president of Blizzard Studios left the company to “pursue other opportunities”. Replacing him is a team of “co-leaders” made up of Jen Oneal that came from Vicarious Visions, and Mike Ybarra previously from Microsoft and the Xbox platform. Firstly let me be clear, that I absolutely believe that JAB needed to go to begin the process of change. Secondly, I don’t necessarily see anything specifically wrong with the choices that were made other than they seem to reflect Activision more than they reflect BLizzard as a studio. They are choices that point at corporate control and stability with Jen Oneal being a pretty familiar surrogate for Activision and Mike being looked at as a rainmaker from Microsoft.

I think my ultimate fear with all of this is that these were simply performative actions in order to show the stockholders that Kotick and crew were seizing control just ahead of the earnings call. Additionally, the head of Human Resources left the company, which makes sense given that every single tale that I have heard involved either that department being apathetic or openly hostile towards those coming forward to report incidents. The timing of this all synchronizing with the earnings call, however, makes this all seem like a calculated series of steps in order to smooth out investor sentiments. I wouldn’t exactly classify the stock prices as being in freefall, but there has absolutely been a downward trend since the announcement of the lawsuit and the other information coming to light. There is even a lawsuit coming from the investor community alleging that the company misleads shareholders.

Tuesday, August 3rd was the Activision Blizzard earnings call. If you are so inclined you can check out the webcast recording of this call here or view the slide deck from which the above image is pulled. Some of the core takeaways are that Blizzard as a whole continues the downward slide of MAU’s reported, losing another 1 million players and down roughly $50 Million in revenue compared to the first quarter. Additionally, Diablo Immortal the oft-maligned mobile port of Diablo 3 has been pushed out to a 2022 release and there are still no firm dates for either Overwatch 2 or Diablo IV. Diablo II Resurrected appears to still be on track for a September launch which is largely the big positive.

In 2015, Blizzard stopped reporting subscription numbers in favor of a more ambiguous engagement figure of MAU’s or Monthly Active Users. However in the above image pulled from MassivelyOp, shows that since 2018 Blizzard has lost 32% of its Monthly Active Users. In other terms, it is now sitting at 26 Million MAUs for Q2, which means it is down 12 Million users for the company as a whole in that timeframe. I think what is scarier is the fact that this quarter doesn’t even take into account the current exodus of players from World of Warcraft. That all more or less started during the Month of July. My own World of Warcraft account was canceled and laying dormant, but still on the books until the first part of July for example. When it comes time for the investor call in Q3, it is likely going to be pretty bleak.

So I guess we wind up back at the first question of the post. Should you boycott Blizzard games? Ultimately I don’t have a clue. I don’t know what actions are going to lead to a significant change in that company. I do know that it is a more complicated issue than just seeing some performative actions taken to convince the investors that change is coming. Change actually needs to happen. The other side of the coin that we have not even begun to discuss is the fact that not only are the allegations of sexual assault horrific, but the fact that World of Warcraft has not been in great shape for the last four years. I didn’t quit World of Warcraft because of the allegations, I was already long gone when I bounced hard off the Shadowlands content. While my six-month sub timed out corresponding with the great exodus that is happening, it is not part of it. I simply input didn’t want to play this game anymore.

Going back to the changes that are happening with the company, the Employees that were protesting made a list of pretty straightforward demands. To the best of my knowledge, none of these demands have actually been met or even publicly discussed by those in power at Activision Blizzard. Until these demands are taken seriously I am hesitant to ease up on the pressure. So if you did in fact quit World of Warcraft or any other Blizzard titles over this recent situation, then it isn’t exactly time to take your eye off the ball because no tangible action has actually been taken to improve the situation other than a changing of the guard. If you were boycotting for this specific reason then it is a pretty fraught decision to determine if you should go back to playing like normal or not.

It is very easy to look at any corporate action taken as being “good enough”. The thing is gamers have very short attention spans when it comes to boycotting the things that they love. There are deep structural issues at work in the gaming industry as a whole, and that doesn’t align itself with rapid change but instead, a slow and prodding ship that takes decades to turn. I’ve been guilty of being angry with a company and then forgiving them quickly because it means that I can return to doing the things I want to do guilt-free. Nostalgia is a powerful drug and we all want to return to the places that give us those happy feelings. I would love to be able to return to playing Diablo 3 for example with a clean conscience.

The thing is… I can’t, at least not yet. I can’t tell you what you should do or the actions that you should take. Your situation is different than mine and in the eyes of one of my friends “the money is already spent”. That is a perfectly cromulent way of viewing the situation if it works for you. For me, it does not, because I know that regardless of what I happen to be doing… I am also broadcasting that action to the world. I can’t in good faith keep publicly supporting Blizzard or its games. That is not to say that this will always be the case. It is entirely possible that next week I buckle and return to the fold, but for the time being, I am holding my ground. It is not so much a boycott but instead me doing what feels right. You need to look deep inside yourself and determine what feels right to you.

Okay to Take a Break

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Good morning friends! I am feeling better this morning, or better enough to actually be interactive and mostly functional. Right now we have this weird thing happening in Oklahoma that is a perfect reminder that as a state we just get the weather patterns that are left over from the rest of the country. The air is filled with smoke from fires but said fires are happening in Canada and the Pacific Northwest but the current wind patterns are causing it to hang over the middle of the country. As a fairly severe asthmatic and one that is particularly susceptible to smoke, it has been destroying my lungs. For reference in 2005, there was a house fire down the street and that was enough exposure to send me to the hospital for five days. Yesterday was a day of rest and lots of Benedryl to try and halt the allergic reaction causing my lungs to stop functioning.

The results are that I feel more like a human being, but yesterday was not so much. As a result without really meaning to, I made the tactical decision just not to worry about blogging. I made a comment on Twitter given that the largest chunk of my vocal readers have a presence there where I sheepishly half apologized for not posting.

It felt strange that the key proprietor of Blaugust was taking a day off during the running of the event. I was rapidly presented with a chorus of my friends telling me that it was perfectly okay to take time off from blogging and that maybe it was a good lesson to present to younger bloggers. So here we are this morning with a post I did not intend to write on a subject I did not think to cover. The thing is… my friends are completely correct. Your health and wellbeing are far more important than maintaining a schedule. As a result, Uncle Bel is going to tell you a story.

The Grand Experiment

I am going to be completely honest with you, but right now my legacy in blogging seems to be the fact that I am more prolific than most. I am not necessarily known for the quality of my posts, but instead the quantity of them. Sure there are true daily bloggers that completely clean my clock when it comes to posting count, but people keep returning because I have things to say and keep saying them. This was not always the case and in fact, for the first four years of this blog, I was extremely irregular in my posting patterns. In 2013 I decided I wanted to change this and proposed what I then called The Grand Experiment where I force myself to sit down every morning and write something. The idea was simple enough, that not every blog post needed to be this epic tale and there could be straightforward “day in the life” style posts along the way.

In that first year, I made a total of 257 blog posts, which was over a hundred more than I had made to that point in the first four years of blogging. The more I wrote the easier it became to summon forth something to talk about, and honestly the more the barriers lowered in talking about my real life. I had always tried to keep my readers at arm’s length and never really talk about anything that I was going through. When you are blogging every day it becomes exceptionally hard to do that, and bits and pieces of my real life came through in this new journal format. Thing is, years after the fact I am very glad that I opened up because I can now use my blog as a way of determining when exactly which events happened in my life.

The Double Edged Sword

The challenge with blogging every day is that it becomes extremely difficult to stop blogging. You feel like you are a failure if you miss a day and for three and a half years I managed to crank out something new every single morning. There were a lot of days that I did not want to make a post and probably would have been better off not making one. The thing is I didn’t want to let that ball drop so I keep juggling and eventually reached this place where I felt like I needed to purposefully drop it in order to keep my own sanity. I’ve been so good about marking the passing of specific milestones, that I find it funny this morning I had to search for the exact point when I purposefully broke the streak. The history of daily blogging was looming over me and it felt like pressure pushing down on my shoulders. My ultimate fear was that if I did not break it on my own… I would potentially have a longer break when burnout finally caught up with me.

Instead of daily blogging, I shifted over to a format of blogging every weekday, which gave me a bit of a break on the weekends to recharge my batteries. The truth is I actually landed on a format where I took Saturday off because Sunday ended up being a quick posting of that weeks AggroChat which was more or less a required thing. In general, this was enough of a break to make me feel less pressured to keep things going. Even then however there are days when I just can’t bring myself to post like yesterday, and I need to be better about giving myself room to allow those days to happen. I did start out yesterday feeling like a bit of a failure for not summoning forth a blog post, but my friends came to the rescue and dispelled that myth.

Give Yourself Breathing Room

So while I absolutely think setting a schedule for yourself and sticking with it is a key trait in blogging, you do have to give yourself a bit of wiggle room. I am a daily blogger of a sort, but I give myself the leverage to determine which days I actually make posts. I try and follow a weekdays format, but occasionally there is going to be a day where that just doesn’t work. Yesterday I was sick, other days in the past I have been too busy at work or just didn’t feel like I had anything to add. Those days are okay and natural and it is important to let yourself have a break every now and then. Blogging is about the marathon and not the sprint. Ultimately we want you to be a voice that is around for the long haul and not someone that is going to be super active and then disappear forever. Breaks I think are key to that longevity.

Mixtape Mondays: Aether Consumed Prayers Answered

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Good Morning Friends! It is time for another Mixtape Monday, and I am going to take a moment to sorta slide into this discussion. It is Blaugust and we are supposed to be giving some sage advice or some such as mentors. This friend is what you would call a series and it gives me some structure when it comes to planning around my blog. I know that in theory every Monday, which is one of the harder days to be motivated and post something is taken up by a fixed construct that I can count on. This also gives me the ability to plan ahead, knowing that each Monday I am going to need a Mixtape to write about. As such I tend to have these super productive days when I crank out a half dozen or so tapes and then keep them in the bank for when I need another Monday post.

The double-edged sword of having a series is that you are more or less expected to keep it going. While you have a predictable slot in your blog schedule, it also means that you have to more or less produce on a pattern. I have been super bad at actually keeping series going throughout the course of this blog, and so many of these have been abandoned by the wayside. For example, probably no one actually remembers Easing Into Eorzea, Media Consumption, Steampowered Sunday, or Storytime Saturdays but they were absolutely series that I attempted to make a thing and now looking back had a shocking number of posts under each of them. They are failed series because I didn’t plan ahead enough or work on trying to create a backlog of content to post under each of those categories. Essentially my advice to you is if you plan on doing a series, treat it as something that you are going to create content for ahead of time so that you can meet those weekly drops.

Aether Consumed Prayers Answered

It is shocking to no one who has read this blog for more than a few posts recently that I am back playing an awful lot of Final Fantasy XIV. The game itself is great, but one of the things that have always stood out is the music. I realize there are a number of you that do not listen to in-game soundtracks, and I would say at least for Final Fantasy XIV it is a critical flaw in your logic. This game spends so much effort devoted to making sure that the music is great and synchronizes down to the frame with animates. One of the places this is most clearly evidenced is the Primal fights and something like Titan for Leviathan would not be the same experience without the soundtrack and the changes that are made during the source of the fight. This morning I share with you some of my favorite big fight tracks, while not all are from Primal encounters they represent the vast majority. Unfortunately this means that the YouTube version of this playlist is going to be super spoilery and I will give it a very special warning below.

Track List

  • Fallen Angel – Masayoshi Soken
  • Spiral – Masayoshi Soken
  • Rise – Masayoshi Soken
  • Battle on the Big Bridge – Nobuo Uematsu
  • Amatsu Kaze – Masayoshi Soken
  • Unbreakable (Duality) – Masayoshi Soken
  • Under the Weight – Masayoshi Soken
  • Through the Maelstrom – Masayoshi Soken
  • Metal – Brute Justice Mode – Masayoshi Soken
  • Oblivion – Masayoshi Soken
  • Birds of Prey – Masayoshi Soken
  • Wayward Daughter – Masayoshi Soken
  • Unbending Steel – Masayoshi Soken

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Normally I embed the YouTube Playlist here, but I feel like I need to give some very special warning with this one. Unlike is normally the case, the vast majority of these videos are actually fighting spoilers and show players fighting along to the primal encounter itself. This means watching the videos could spoil not only fight mechanics but significant story beats. Please watch at your own peril and I realize this is frustrating given that up until this point I have tried to give both Spotify and YouTube equal treatment. So I will link to the playlist, but if you have not experienced these fights then I highly suggest minimizing it and letting it play in the background without actually watching the fights themselves.

Well folks that were the Fourteenth mixtape in this series, and as a result, it is clearly aligned to being music from Final Fantasy XIV. I am going, to be honest, this is entirely a happy synergy that I did not plan in the least. I have been playing a lot of the games and loving the music, and this sorta happened spontaneously. Again if you are not listening to the music while you play this game, you really should remedy that. As always if you are so inclined, you can listen to the entire Mixtape Mondays Archive: