The circular nature of life can be strange. You are oftentimes presented with opportunities that you never quite expected. The Thirteenth of April was the six year anniversary of AggroChat, and that is extremely germaine to today’s topic. In 2014 I was listening to a podcast created and hosted by one of my good friends called Cat Context. The shift to listening to it was extremely natural because at the time I was playing Rift as part of the Machiavelli’s Cat, so it felt like I was listening to an extension of guild chat. It was effectively three friends, hanging out on voice chat and talking about a bunch of loose topics for roughly an hour.
The chemistry that this group of friends had was staggering, and it planted a seed in my head that I could in theory do the same thing with the large cast of characters that I hung out with on a nightly basis on Teamspeak. Little did I know at the time that making a conversation seem effortless is way harder than it sounds, and I am still in awe of the great interactions that always happened on the Cat Context podcast. Over the years I would get wistful and tweet at Liore or Aro about how much I miss the show. Apparently this stuck in Liores head as earlier this week I got a DM announcing that they had gotten “the band back together” but lacked any place to actually host or advertise it.
So it is with great pleasure that I have the opportunity to announce Cat Context episode 117, or at least we think that is the appropriate number. Three years ago life happened to all of these wonderful hosts and the show sorta dropped. As a result we have a show that talks about at least in part what has happened over the last three years and more importantly what life is like now living in the time of pandemic. I hope you are all as pleased to see a new episode of Cat Context and I would absolutely be willing to set up more permanent hosting for the trio if this thing starts happening more frequently.
Well folks… the madness continues. Last night I dinged 120 on my fifth character in rapid succession. Prior to the launch of Legion, there was a pre-launch demon invasion event that I abused for every drop of experience that I could on the Alliance side. During this I managed to level one of every single class to 100 while doing these events. However on the horde side I have had mostly a bunch of low level characters to go along with what is ultimately my two main characters, the Demon Hunter and the Warrior. The goal has been to take these experience boosts and catch the stable of characters up so that going into Shadowlands I have a bit more choice in what I am going to play. I’ve always found running up alts relaxing, and last night getting the Warlock to 120 gave me my first caster.
So one of my friends pinged me the other night on Steam to ask a question and apparently I completely missed it. I won’t lie folks, you are most likely to get an answer from me on Twitter, because in the modern age I am exceptionally bad at paying attention to the chat services associated with the plethora of social options we all have. However the question was pretty straight forward and essentially boiled down to asking how I was leveling these alts so quickly. It is really straight forward… I am questing, rapidly, and with flight. I talked about this the other day but right now there is a Winds of Wisdom buff that gives you an extra 100% experience, meaning every drop of xp gained is twice what it previously would be. If you also have heirlooms that adds up in total to either +45% or +55% depending on if you have rings or not.
What that feels like in experience however is that extra experience gain appears to be multiplicative because I did not have heirlooms while leveling the Warlock and I absolutely noticed a massive difference. Normally speaking with heirlooms I can do all of Battle for Azeroth in completing a single zone’s worth of content and opening the three war campaign footholds. Without the heirlooms I had to complete one full zone, open the three footholds and then go do almost all of a second zone. It felt like everything was going about half as fast as I would normally go, but there were a few other factors. Namely leveling a caster is not my jam and my time to kill was probably significantly lower. This makes a big difference because the other thing that I do while questing is that I kill everything in my path while getting to the next objective rather than just swooping down on a mount.
I’ve always leveled quickly, the the answer has always been the salted earth approach that I take, since monster xp doesn’t seem like much but adds up over time. All of that said I absolutely boosted a mage because it is the least “bel” class on the planet. I actually enjoy leveling a priest way more than I do a mage, so more than anything this is probably just for sake of seeing all 120s sitting in my roster. I boosted the mage last time on the alliance side, so it appears to be a tradition for me. I will never likely take this character off any “sweet jumps”, and often times they turn into my banker alt. The real question is… after having finished leveling the Warlock, what character do I start with next? Right now I am leaning towards pushing up my Highmountain Monk, because a Tauren monk is hillarious.
Today is the very last day of April, and in theory it would normally be the point at which we draw this month long experiment to a close. However due to the weird nature of the times we find ourselves in I changed things up a little bit this year. I am not exactly sure if that many noticed but the time frame of the event and as such the tabulation started March 29th and concludes with May 9th, encompassing the entire six weeks of Blapril. It always felt weird that I specifically outline six weeks of content creation and then only ever counted 31 days of that period towards the ultimate goal of the event. The problem is, now would be the normal time when I start tabulating the results but this means that I ultimately have one more entire week that I will need to include.
It is probably however time to talk a little bit about the proceedings as a whole. We had 46 bloggers sign up to participate in the event, which seems pretty solid given the very impromptu nature of the fact that we moved this up to April. That was made up of eight mentors, thirty two participants and six newbies. So in essence we brought six blogs into the forefront of this community and hopefully got them a bunch of exposure and what will ultimately turn into regular readers. Here is a quick rundown of the participants.
One of the best things to come out of last year, I think was expanding our reach to Facebook… which more or less was a completely different community of users that we were not reaching. Last year Angie from Backlog Crusader introduced the community to Geek Blogs Unite, and this year we had several participants that joined the proceedings from there. I’ve personally been down on Facebook as a whole for years, but it opened my eyes to the fact that there are other thriving communities out there that I personally wasn’t even paying attention to.
I think another significant success has been how actively the Blaugust discord has remained throughout the years between its inception and this current event. It has sorta become a base of operations for a lot of us as we go throughout our separate lives as bloggers. Blogging in as disparate a community as we have will always be a bit like island nations developing trade negotiations with other island nations, since we don’t have a perfect copy of shared experiences. However having a stable platform to communicate and share ideas most certainly helps the isolation, which I guess is an important realization given that so many of us are in very real isolation mode.
Since the topic of this post is about setting expectations, I just want everyone to be aware that the assigning of rewards is going to come a little later this year than it has in other years. Since I specifically used the verbiage “Posts during the weeks outlined for Blapril 2020” that includes all six weeks and I don’t want to jump the gun and push someone out the door that is still working towards whatever goal they ultimately had. My hope as well was by extending it out a bit, it would feel like less of a sprint after which the participant collapses at the finish line, and stops posting for another year. Fatigue has always been a challenge we have dealt with since the very first running of this event.
Yesterday our dear Bhagpuss, who has always been one of my favorite bloggers to read wrote a bit about the exhaustion. It is well worth the read but there is a bit of it that ultimately addresses some of my concerns in doing this each year.
Every time Belghast runs one of these things he takes great care to emphasize that it’s not a competition, that there are no “win” conditions and that the awards are only there for fun. Even so, every time there seem to be quite a few Blaugustians or Blaprilistas who don’t seem to be finding it anything like as much fun as they thought it would be.
Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
To which I allowed myself a moment of despair and commented about my own fears.
I always feel bad when folks seem to struggle a bit. It is this moment when I start to question if I should ever do another event like this again. I am never certain how it is going to end up. I think blaugust as a community has been good, but I am not sure if blaugust as an event really bears the fruit I ultimately hope it will. Those of us who are regular bloggers will stay regular bloggers, but I am not sure if we are really making any new ones from our mold.
Belghast – via Inventory Full
The thing is… this is always a concern that I have when deciding if we are going to do this again. This is also why the format has shifted throughout the years because I keep trying to figure out a way to get the benefit of having a focused month of blogging without getting some of the negative after effects. Blaugust is the herald of fresh content, but unfortunately it is also the warden of months of not posting as the writers recover from the marathon that they just ran. Those of us who are more or less daily bloggers have been doing this for so long that I am not sure what we would do if we were not posting content. However for everyone who has been a once or twice a month blogger, it is a major stretch to try and create so much content in a single event.
That first year was an eye opener, because so many people that managed to get their thirty one days also effectively dropped off the face of the planet. There are times I allow myself to get mired in the notion that I might have killed as many blogs as I have helped create or promote. I appreciate when folks like Naithin come along to give me a kick in the rear when I get to thinking like this, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that what I said isn’t true. I am constantly concerned about the impact I have made with this event, both the positive and the negative. Bhagpuss had some sage advice to follow my own comment.
I tend to get the sense that the pressure, such as it is, comes from the Award system. It’s similar to what you see in games with achievements – with some people, once they know they exist they feel obligated to get them. You couldn’t really have made it any more clear that the awards are just for fun but their mere existence has people setting targets.
Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
So I guess the question is… should we do away with the awards? I am wondering if they are something that is more or less vestigial at this point? Blaugust started its life as a challenge to other bloggers, to do what I had chosen to do and start blogging on a daily basis at least for one month. It was in fact a contest and we even had rewards for winning, which admittedly was mostly me just handing out some duplicate humble bundle codes that I had stockpiled. In an attempt to combat the fatigue I kept trying to open it up and make less things mandatory in an effort to lower the anxiety and stress. However for whatever reason I have kept the rewards as sort of bragging rights for anyone who wanted them.
So I ask you the participants and my readers… are the rewards making things worse? Is it time to abandon them? What changes could I make to Blaugust/Blapril to lower the stress level and reduce the negative impact of the event? What would you change if you could in the way these proceedings work? I guess the other topic we need to discuss is whether or not we want to do anything in August when Blaugust would normally run, and if so what should we do to mark it? My comment section as always is open and so long as it isn’t random pedantry about typos or spelling errors, I always welcome real criticism.
Random aside before I get into the meat of the topic this morning. Apparently it is my 11th anniversary on Twitter this morning, or probably more likely later this afternoon. Twitter and blogging have forever been inextricably linked. I joined Twitter for better engagement with other bloggers and creators, and wound up staying there because I found a terribly interesting and engaging gaming community. Sure there was a challenge in trying to hold a conversation in what was then 144 characters at a time, but somehow we managed to string together some pretty interesting topics. Now that we have proper threading, longer character counts, and @ing in people not eating up all of the conversation space, it is staggering just how much easier it is to hold a proper discussion.
Which leads me to a segue to the topic at hand, which actually came up yesterday in a Twitter thread but has also been something I have been discussing with the AggroChat folks. Each time I see a new game advertised as a massively multiplayer sandbox survival game, I have to resist rolling my eyes back into my head. This is a design pattern that budding designers seem to think they can make work, but so rarely does. They set out with this ideal of simulating a realistic world with consequences and one that forces interesting decisions to be made for the sake of survival. What ends up happening is either a barren wasteland that no one is playing or a brutal and toxic kill box that eats anyone who did not start on day one or does not have the fortitude to wade through a river of feces to get to a stable place.
There is a very vocal minority of players that will scream at devs about wanting the ability to kill other players and loot their corpses, but what they really mean is that they want to prey on the weak. So a new game is released with a bunch of tantalizing world building elements or intricate crafting systems, which draws in players like myself that have always wanted an interesting modern PVE sandbox experience. Then like blood in the water the gank squad shows up to ruin everyone’s day. My working theory is that this is effectively the same group of players that show up in every new game. Much like FPS players are fickle and will flock to whatever title has the most traction, the gank squad shows up in whatever environment they feel has the most hapless noobs.
It begins a cycle of these player killers making life hell on the PVE populace until they ultimately log out never to return. I still remember the opening weekend for ArcheAge there was a quest that involved having to cross a bay in a rowboat to continue the storyline. Lined up were a bunch of players with massive ships that would do nothing but ram into the poor innocent rowboats and sink them. Eventually I logged out and decided that the game just wasn’t for me, and perpetuated the cycle. The gank squad flocks to these fertile hunting grounds and once their toxic behavior has turned them fallow, they move on to the next new hot game trying to make this design pattern work. The PVE player wanders off feeling frustrated and swearing that they will never go through this process again… only to be lured later by some killer feature in an otherwise frustrating game.
The funny thing is in my experience if you return to those same games six months later, what has grown up from the dead earth is often times a thriving oasis of cooperative players that more or less ignore the player versus player aspect of the game. Some two years after the launch of ArcheAge I returned to the game and found that I could roam freely and enjoy the world for what it was. Sure it was hell trying to find a plot of land since those had long ago been snapped up in the process, but I managed enjoy the leveling process without ever encountering another hostile player in the process. From what I understand from friends currently playing Sea of Thieves the same thing is happening there, and they ran treasure missions without encountering another hostile ship throughout the weekend.
Ultimately my question is… why do companies keep trying to make the PVP and PVE elements work together? If it is actual player combat that folks are craving, then they are far better served by a game that ONLY supports player versus player engagement. However that is not what the gank squad wants. They want unfair fights where they roll in and “pwn noobs” and then laugh about how weak their prey ultimately is. So when I hear complaints on forums about there not being enough players engaging in a system like “war mode” from Battle for Azeroth, what I am actually hearing is that there are not enough lambs to slaughter for the gank squad to get their jollies. The players who actually care about challenging combat are off playing games that are solely focused on player versus player engagement. The folks that want to feel powerful as they dominate the weak… well they roam off to the next new game looking for victims.
To answer my own question, the reason why these games keep trying to make this work is that player versus player engagement is effectively free content. Story driven content is time consuming and thus costly to make. However dropping a bunch of players into a kill box looks enticing because the theory is that the players will ultimately create their own content. Visions of giant continent wide battles dance in the designers head as they envision players creating complex social structures as they duke it out in multi-tiered warfare. This didn’t even work in the games that folks hold up with praise like Dark Age of Camelot, because ultimately one faction became so dominant on a specific server that it forced a defacto alliance between the other two factions if they had any hopes of delaying the slaughter.
Ultimately I welcome continent wide battles… but I want those battle to be waged with intricately crafted NPC factions and not a bunch of random players. Where I get hung up with playing games that have open flagging for player combat is that I could have a lovely evening where I get a bunch of things accomplished that I wanted to. However equally likely is that I will be minding my own business and wander across a band of player killers and wind up logging out of the game rather than trying to recover my body while dealing with the spawn camping. At its core, I don’t like the idea of having my fun impacted by other players. I realize in an PVE game I might have this sort of impact when I queue for a dungeon and people are assholes. However there are plenty of other activities I can do entirely solo that dilute those negative interactions. When engagement with the world alone paints a target on my back, I find it really hard to get hyped about going through those motions.
I would love to see some of these games that really no longer have active player killer populations simply remove that functionality from the game entirely. Taking your otherwise interesting game with PVE sandbox mechanics, and making it “safe” for players who want no part in the other aspects would be essentially igniting a beacon to those of us who had been avoiding it. Hell even having a PVE only server would go a long ways. I mentioned Dark Age of Camelot earlier, and the moment they opened Gaheris which was the co-op server I re-rolled there without a second thought. That server was an awesome thriving environment of folks who wanted to engage in the awesome PVE and raiding content in the game, but wanted nothing to do with the battleground experience. If it worked so well in the game that everyone holds up as the pinnacle of making a PVP game engaging, it can pretty much work in any game.
I still feel like there is effectively a single loud mouthed PVP Gank Squad that roams from game to game, and an ocean of PVE only players that are turned off by them existing. It seems like it would make business sense to create those PVE only servers that players ask for. I admit a lot of my lack of excitement over the Fallout 76 changes are knowing that there is a slim chance of my enjoyment being adversely effected by some other player as I wander the wasteland. I was originally not interested at all in the New World until they took a massive uturn and moved away form the multiplayer kill box concept. I’ve avoided Sea of Thieves similarly because while I am fine with a piracy simulator, I want to be engaged with interesting NPCs and not running away from players. Similarly I have always been interested in the Dark Zone in The Division, but have avoided it like the plague because I don’t want to engage in combat with other players. Each time I bring up these points I realize how not alone in this line of thinking I am, as was the case on Twitter yesterday. Surely there is a market here that is more or less being ignored by the constant striving for a design pattern that doesn’t actually seem to work.
