Grand Experiment Archives - Page 3 of 199

Seven Years

April 17, 2016 by Belghast

Interesting Journey

It feels so immensely strange to be sitting down to write this post. As of this morning it marks the seventh year of Tales of the Aggronaut. I am not exactly sure why but seven years seems like a significantly more auspicious number than five or six or even eight. Culturally we place a strange importance on the number seven as either lucky or magical, and I have to admit that I fall for this same trap myself. As a web developer by trade, I started this blog with a purpose and had all of the trappings of a proper website. One of those is of course Google Analytics integration, and I spent some time this morning going over the numbers before sitting down to write this post. In the Seven years I have published 1260 posts, and they have been read a grand total of 235,304 times at the moment of pulling the stats. Over the course of this blogs lifespan I’ve had 110,359 unique readers from 182 countries, and roughly 40% of them are return readers. What I found shocking was that there are a little over 4000 of you out there that have read my blog more than 200 times. As far as my readers go it seems that the bulk from from the United States as one would expect, but the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Australia also make up large chunks and round out the top five countries with France coming in a not too distant sixth. The web developer in me was also curious to find out that the vast majority of my readers are using Google Chrome (go them!) with the next highest batch using Firefox (also good choice)… and then unfortunately a large block are still using Internet Explorer and I was shocked that it actually beat out Safari.

The thing is… these numbers are utterly meaningless because at the end of the day it still very much feels like I am a little kid pretending to make a newspaper or sitting in a cardboard box pretending to tell the news. Every day I get up and make my post, and mentally I feel like I am talking to myself. I have a hard time reconciling that there are people out there reading each and every day without fail. I know there are mentally, because when I am late getting a post up… folks will come out of the woodwork to check on me. However emotionally I cannot quite comprehend that I have people that are that interested in the boring things that I do each and every day. I am not a terribly interesting person, and most of my life is spent going to work, trying to be a good husband, juggling family and friends… and attempting to get in as much game time as humanly possible. The truth is I share a lot of my life with you my readers, and if I didn’t feel like I was talking to myself… I am not sure if I would have the courage to say some of the things I have said. I’ve shared my high points and my low points… and attempted to be honest with my struggles and frustrations. The result has been more support from my friends and readers than I ever thought possible. When am feeling down, you all reach out to me and lift me back up… and in truth you are a huge part of why I keep going each and every morning.

Evolution of the Aggronaut

I still look back on the early days of this blog and wonder what exactly caused me to start it in the first place. I guess in truth I was always a blogger, I just didn’t realize it. I was one of those folks that haunted game forums, and was prone to writing huge wall of text posts about this subject or that. As to what prompted me to make the switch from forum goer to blogger, that one is a bit harder to nail down. I know I was ultimately prompted to start thinking about it by WoW Insider and their focus on a single blog called The Wordy Warrior. Since I was a Warrior trying to lead a raid, I felt a certain kinship with this blogger and that lead me to start my own “warrior blog”. Aggronaut itself has gone through so many changes over the years. It was originally a Warrior Tanking blog, and then shifted to a general warrior blog… to a raid leadership blog… to a general World of Warcraft blog… to a Rift blog… until finally it was rebooted in its current form which is MY blog. For so long I kept trying to make it into something more than just an open discussion I was having with my readers about whatever happened to be on my mind. I was told that in order to be “successful” you had to find a niche and then exploit the shit out of that niche… and that never really did feel amazing. The end result after all of this back and forth is that Tales of the Aggronaut is a blog about me and whatever the hell I happen to be doing. If you are going to read me for long at all, you have to be interested in me as a person because I am not always going to be all that interesting.

The strangest thing to get used to over these years is that once you have made a post it often times develops a life of its own. There have been many times I have written something and then someone came along behind me and got some other meaning from my post that I never intended or even thought about. Sometimes this is good… and other times it just serves as fodder for someone else’s rant blog. The one harsh reality is that the posts that become popular, are never the ones you actually thought were worth reading. Looking back through my analytics… here are the top five posts in the seven years of Aggronaut. At least one of them completely makes me cringe these days.

Of those the only one I am actually proud of in any fashion is my GroupCraft series of posts. The Keyboard Turning one I am actually actively embarrassed by largely because I don’t even recognize the “me” that wrote that post because I guess I have mellowed out significantly since I first started this blog. However I feel like it would be dishonest to remove posts from the annals of time, so I leave them… even the ones that make me cringe. If nothing else this blog charts my evolution as a player and a decent human being. However I admit that a lot of that evolution didn’t really start until I began my mad mission of blogging every single day. In a few weeks it will mark the third anniversary of blogging every single day, and it is funny how I have gone from being one of the least prolific bloggers to being among the most. In the first four years of my blog I made 148 posts… in the last three years I made 1112 posts, so a huge difference.

Faces of Bel

Like I said in the start of this very long and probably self aggrandizing post… seven feels like a special number. For years I have joked that I really only play one character, and then try and recreate that character in every single game that I play. I’ve even posted pictures of my various characters to drill home that point. This got me thinking, and since I am really good friends with the amazing artist @Ammosart I decided I would try and commission her to create a special graphic to commemorate this occasion. The idea was to have an image that showed off several of the “Faces of Bel” and I have to say I was completely blown away when I saw the end result. She went above and beyond anything I could have hoped for, and now I will have to be tempted to have her create something for every anniversary… if I can afford that. I absolutely wanted this on a shirt, so at my suggestion she has throw it up on her t-shirt store. I wanted every last penny of the proceeds to go to her, so instead of me creating a “Tales of the Aggronaut” store this seemed like the better option. For I believe the first 72 hours it is only $14 and then after that they go up to the normal price of $20 and $22 for bigger sizes. Once I finish writing this post I plan on ordering one for myself because I am so floored at just how well this turned out. I am super thankful to have awesome friends like Ammo, that I can pester to do little side projects like this.

I feel like I need to wrap things up, because this post has gone on quite a bit longer than I thought it would. I am very thankful to have all of you out there reading my words, and without you I am not sure I would have the strength to get up every single morning and commit text to page before I have finished my cup of coffee. Through this blog and the awesome community of folks that I have met through the various social media accounts connected to it… I have forged a family that I will take with me for the rest of my life. It doesn’t matter if we have only interacted one time… you’ve left an impression on me and given me the will to keep going. Sure there are mornings where I question myself why the hell I keep doing this, but all of you out there that ping me over twitter or slack or countess other methods… give me that drive to keep moving forward. I realize this post has sounded a little bit like a farewell at times, and I haven’t meant it to. Seven is a magical and special number, but so is Thirteen… so as I top the hill of this goal I set my sights on the next one. Thank you for joining me in this journey, and hopefully we will have a lot more of them before I decide to call it quits. Also side note… please take some time to tell @Ammosart just how damned amazing this image is! I’ve had it for about a month now… and it has been pure hell to keep it under wraps because from the moment I got it I wanted to share it with the world!

So Much Better With People

August 6, 2015 by Belghast

The AMA Experiment

Yesterday my good friend Syl started a thread over on the Blaugust Nook with a very simple purpose. The idea was to generate writing prompts by asking the person above you in the thread a question. It seemed like an awesome idea, so I joined in the fun asking the first question, which then left me open to be asked a question. Wilhelm from The Ancient Gaming Noob chimed in after me and gave me a really excellent question, because it is honestly one I have thought about before but never actually written anything on. Without more rambling… here is the prompt.

For a lot of people, starting off in MMORPGs changed the way they viewed and interacted with video games. I often defer single player games in favor of online games now due to the fact that games with other people are… or at least seem… more interesting, even when I am playing them solo. Did starting off with MMORGPs change your relationship with video games?

Brief History of Belghast

So I feel like in order to answer this question appropriately we have to go a ways back into my history. I grew up in a small town, but more so than that… I grew up a significant distance outside of the city limits. This compounded with the fact that I had no siblings, meant that I really didn’t have anyone to play with. As a result I got extremely adept at entertaining myself, but when we hit middle school… the prime era of sleep overs, I pretty much took every opportunity to stay over at someone else’s house or have someone at mine. It was awesome to be able to play games with friends, but my reality was that I was mostly a single player gamer the majority of my time. As such I tended to favor mostly single player titles like role playing games, and zelda like adventure games. These would let me explore worlds by myself without the need of an additional player to bring the fun.

In college I did my fair share of LAN gaming, but the majority of my time was still spent playing single player titles like Fallout on the PC. My first real “MMO” experience was Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, and I ate that game up. Even though communication was not that big of a deal, I spent so much time exploring the worlds with other players. I even went so far as to get a PC keyboard adapter that I could hook up to my Dreamcast so I could make communication easier. During this time I was still playing a significant amount of single player games on the PC and devouring every single Japanese Roleplaying Game that was released on the PS1, PS2 or the Dreamcast. Then my “jumping into” Everquest happened, as I was asked to play a friends secondary character during a Vox raid… and from that point on I was pretty much hooked. Gradually I just stopped playing anything single player and instead devoted every single moment of gaming time to whatever my current MMO crush happened to be as I moved through EQ, DAoC, Horizon, and City of Heroes.

So Much Better With People

Something else happened during this time, that ultimately disconnected me from single player game experiences. Games became so much more cinematic, and quite honestly this was not a good thing as far as I was concerned. There were so many times I wanted to plunk down in front of a game, boot it up and just start playing. When I played my role playing games, I absolutely expected to have a serious time commitment. I did not however expect to have to wade through cut scene after cut scene just to play a platformer. So I became even more immersed in my big online worlds that let me wander aimlessly and find my own enjoyment. I also found myself favoring games that were extremely similar to the online worlds I was playing in. Games like the Elder Scrolls or the three dimensional Fallout games provided me that big open world I craved but allowed me to explore offline. The problem is there was always something missing. These are games that I have devoted hundreds of hours to playing, but there is always a point where I start thinking to myself… this world would be so much better with people.

Ultimately even if I am in “alone in a crowd” mode, I enjoy seeing people roaming around in the same world I am inhabiting. Maybe this is an artifact of my early desires to have someone to play with, or a side effect of being recruited into Everquest in the middle of a bustling and thriving guild. In any case I always end up missing the people when I am playing other games. So as a result there are lots of single player titles that I want to play through, to experience the story… but they ultimately sit in my steam library unfinished and in some cases not even started… because I would rather be online interacting with people that I care about. Fairly recently I have found that hanging out on Teamspeak while playing single player games helps a bit. It allows me to chat with people and feel like I am part of a larger community, while still indulging in single player worlds and experiences. Similarly streaming a single player game to twitch feels like I am in some way making it a multiplayer experience by sharing it with others. So to answer the original question… yes MMOs have changed the way I play single player games, by simply making me not satisfied with being in a world without other human beings to interact with.

Blizzard Does Not Need WoW

August 5, 2015 by Belghast

The Elephant in the Room

I figure this morning I would cut with any sidebar discussions and get straight into the topic that was on everyones lips yesterday… the Blizzard Q2 Earnings call. If you remember during the Q1 2015 earnings call they announced a drop to 7.1 million subscribers after a peak of 10 million during the Warlords of Draenor launch bump. I think we all knew that the numbers would be down, at least incidentally based on our own experiences from the game. I have to say that I thought WoW token would be more of a game changer, and when they announced that World of Warcraft was down to 5.6 million subscribers I figured that the Token numbers would bolster this amount. However based on further information it appears that this number does include token subscribers as well. In truth this number likely does not fully account for the actual loss. Personally I would consider myself no longer playing World of Warcraft, but my account does not actually die until mid September. There are several folks in similar holding patterns in our guild waiting on their time to tick down as well.

As always MMO Champion has a spiffy graph charting the subscription numbers since the release of the game. To put things into proper perspective, the subscription numbers are exactly what the subscription numbers were in December of 2005 roughly a year after the initial launch of the game. This has lead some folks to point out that when you iron out the outliers like the Warlords of Draenor bump you end up with a standard curve that you might expect for a game of this longevity. There was a lot to be gleaned from the earnings call, but one of the major points I got out of it.. is that while they have already announced that the World of Warcraft expansion would be revealed Thursday at Gamescom, they left it off of the list of products planned for the rest of the year. That tells me that at the very best the expansion will be a Q1 2016 release. That means that there will be at a minimum of a six month lag between content patches, and at worst… honestly who knows what the worse case scenario could be. Hopefully this will not be anywhere near as long as the content drought after 5.4, but I am seriously hoping that they reconsider Hellfire being the final patch of the expansion.

Blizzard Does Not Need WoW

I feel like the takeaway from the earnings call is not that World of Warcraft has fallen by 1.5 million subscribers in a quarter. Anyone who was not expecting this was living in a rose colored world. Quite honestly I half expected it to be a bigger drop just based on my own experiences. The real take away for me however is that in spite of losing this many players Activision Blizzard had one of its strongest quarters yet. During the earnings call there were repeated mentions of “diversification of product offerings”, which tells me that Blizzard no longer considers themselves the “World of Warcraft” company. They see the writing on the way, that their juggernaut is winding down, and they have replaced its revenue by more agile games that are significantly easier to support. The hard truth is that Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are making them lots and lots of money. When Overwatch launches you can damn well bet that it is also going to make them equally large piles of money, further diluting the need for World of Warcraft.

There was a time when Warcraft was the prize bull, but that is simply no longer the case. If you think of it from a pure numbers perspective it makes sense. Hearthstone for example is a digital card game, and the bulk of the assets that are created for it are two dimensional images. Granted they are awesome looking but they do not require the amount of time it takes to create three dimensional textured models and even more so huge three dimensional worlds for players to explore. The type of content that goes into games like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm is just simply cheaper to produce than the amount of time that goes into building an entire world filled with hundreds of quest givers that have to be debugged and cross checked to make sure they are not breaking something else. To make matters worse… this expensive content is something we are extremely good at either avoiding or burning through as quickly as possible. The hunger for new content is never changing, there is never a point where we the players will ever be satiated. Adding a new playfield to Heroes of the Storm changes that game and its meta for months, and requires only a faction of the work that a single zone would take in a traditional MMO.

The Movie Tie In

The timing of all of this seems to coincide with the release of the Warcraft movie, but I question what exactly that means for the franchise. All of the details behind the movie so far seem to point at this being a “Warcraft” movie and not necessarily a “World of Warcraft” movie, meaning that it takes place in a time before the MMO is set. So does this mean that we will be doing more “timey wimey” stuff with the expansion, and we are somehow trapped in the timeline that we created by following Garrosh to Draenor? Are we going to play a role in trying to stop a new invasion of Azeroth by Guldan and the Burning Legion? The bigger question is… if all of this is going to happen are players going to stomach yet another storyline retcon? These are all questions that I really don’t have an answer for. I feel like if Blizzard has a shot in hell at rekindling the love of this game, they have to take us someplace new and unexplored, but do it in a way that feels epic like never before. I still mark Wrath of the Lich King as the best expansion to date, and it built upon the success of Vanilla and the Burning Crusade polishing both to a mirror sheen.

This is simply something that going back in time cannot provide for me. We’ve done the reboot of the world thing before with Cataclysm, and I found the whole process frustrating and annoying that places I once loved… simply no longer existed. I feel the only real option is for us to take the fight to the Legion, and have an expansion where we are the ones laying siege for once. What I want to see is an expansion where the Alliance and Horde finally put aside their difference, and with it the artificial barriers between players fall down. I want to see an expansion that places us squarely in the path of epic battles as we lay siege to the worlds that the Legion has conquered before, slowly working our way back to their base of operation and banishing their evil from the universe. That is the adventure that will bring players back, and anything less than that I think will ultimately feel hollow. We have run out of villains that we care about… and the whole “Dances with Orcs” feel of both Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor has been infuriating for anyone who really doesn’t care a damn about Orcs. Blizzard needs to prove to us that it can still create an opposition that is worth of the lineage of Arthas and Illidan, and I feel the only way they can do that is by having us take on the Burning Legion on their own territory.

Bahamut Is Down

August 4, 2015 by Belghast

Some Personal Stuff

I feel like it has been pretty noticeable that I have been in a bit of a funk for the last few weeks. When this happens I tend to extract myself from the world until the passes, which isn’t necessarily the smartest thing that I can do. However over the years I have done this as my coping mechanism, because I am always afraid I will snap at someone when I get moody. For a bit yesterday I was wondering if my magical happy pills were not longer working, but then my wife asked me something. Was my low as low as it has been in the past… and to be honest no. Normally the world would be crushingly oppressive, and instead I just felt sort of permanently bummed out. So I guess maybe things are working just fine, they are just filling in the valleys so that the lows are quite as low as they would have been otherwise.

Yesterday was one of the more stressful days that I have had in awhile. We had someone patch a server and due to a conflict between the Windows Update Service and MacAfee that we have seen numerous times now… it caused a process deadlock that ended up taking down production services for hours. This was stressful in so many ways, because while there was nothing I did to cause it… there was also nothing I could really do to help it either. It was another department with another manager… and another set of priorities responsible for the fault and the fix. So when I came home… I was at an extremely low point. However my wife and I went out to dinner, and then as the evening went on I started to feel better about the world. It was like peeking out of a fog to see a lovely day behind it. I guess in the grand scheme of things… if all of my low spots are like this from now on… I will count myself lucky because while it sucked, it was manageable.

Bahamut Is Down

One of the struggles in game is that I feel like I am caught between two worlds a bit. It has taken longer than I expected to get the Monday night raid group pieced together and ready to do Heavensward content. As a result we have been focusing on trying to get through the Final Coil of Bahamut, and made some significant progress. Last week we were just shy of forming a group, so going into Turn 13 last night… we were all rusty. However it feels like we got our bearings more quickly than normal and made a few adjustments. Previously I had been tanking Bahamut at the twelve o’clock position which seems the most obvious place to drag him as you are running in… and do the traditional drag the boss while running thing. Instead we swapped things up and I drug up back to the six o’clock position we entered the room at. This allowed Ashgar to pick up the adds significantly easier and also allowed the DPS to burn them down faster.

The real challenge however was like always… we suck at dive bomb phases. However in spite of the fact that you ultimately have to deal with something like five divebomb phases, they seemed to come together more smoothly than we were used to. Essentially you have to find Bahamut, and move out of the way while also moving out of the way of Twintania that comes barreling through immediately after him. I think we only made it through two or three of these phases completely clean, however we did manage to rez the few players that got pushed into a wall. I am constantly impressed at still how difficult of a fight this is. Sure this is expansion old content at this point, but I am damned happy to be able to say I have defeated Bahamut, and I have a title and a minion to show for it. Paragon to a really spiffy White Mage Cane as a result, and part of me wants to try and muster the troops to do this more often so that we can farm the really awesome weapons for folks. I have to say… the most stressed I have ever been in Final Fantasy XIV is trying to find a way to survive Ahk Mourn. On the positive side… Alexander turn 3 has caused me to get really good at timing Holmgang.

Alex Finally

Last night was a significant night because not only did it see us beating Turn 13 of Final Coil of Bahamut… but it also saw us officially starting this expansions raid content as a group. I love the Wednesday night group, and I am enjoying what is happening there… but there is something extra special about getting the Monday night group into Alexander. While Kodra, Grace and I are parts of both teams, there will always be something special about my first Final Fantasy XIV raid group. So it makes me happy that this week everyone was up to 170 and several were considerably beyond that… even though it took a little bit of cheatery to get Ash’s paladin in the zone by wearing some strength jewelry. We only really had time to do turn one of Alexander, but we came really damned close to oneshotting it. Had we not started freaking out because we thought we were coming up against the hard enrage… we absolutely would have downed it in the first try.

On the second attempt everyone felt more confident and we pushed the dps so much harder than before. The awesome thing about coming in on a Monday is that several of us were already capped on Alexander pieces for the week which meant pretty much all of the newish folks walked away with something spiffy. I look forward to coming in next Monday and clearing all four turns of Alexander, and getting everyone their freebie accessories. From there maybe some Bismarck and Ravana? It makes me happy to feel like I am making forward momentum with both teams. The only thing that frustrates me a little bit is that I feel like we should go back and do Turn 8, which is the turn that Monday night skipped to start work on Turn 9. So maybe next week I can talk people into doing that so that we finally can close the book on the Coil of Bahamut. I don’t want to sacrifice getting people through Alexander for it, but I would love to be able to say I have beaten each of the turns. All in all it was a pretty great night, not just for the raid victories but for also clearing away the fog that I have been dwelling in.