Blog Features

The Defense of Leveling

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There is a thread that sprung up on the AggroChat slack that has been largely demonizing the process of leveling in MMORPGs. The consensus seems to be, that games should allow you to immediately drop into content with your friends without any requirement to push through levels and push through gearing. On one level I absolutely get where they are coming from, but on another… I genuinely love the process of leveling. Games struggle to provide content that feels meaningful, but at the same time is generally low-pressure. When you hit the endgame, there is this propensity for expecting that players want the difficulty dial cranked up to eleven. I am fine with difficult content, but I also don’t want things to be “sweaty” all the time. In fact I need large swaths of chill gaming in order to distance out the spikes of frustration.

Yesterday I rolled a brand new Guardian in Guild Wars 2, and I have been having a blast going through the motions of doing a ton of content I have done several times before. However the introduction of leveling and earning new things each time I level… makes the process enjoyable. I am also getting to see story content again with fresh eyes. This is a huge part of why Ace and I rolled alts on Kraken server in Final Fantasy XIV, was to experience those early days of the game all over again. There is something charming about starting over, so much so that there are a few times I have legitimately considered creating an alt account in Guild Wars 2 so that I can see the game with the same eyes I would as a brand-new player. I get that this is not something that most players would want to do… but also I am also a huge proponent of the seasonal model in ARPGs, and after experiencing Pandaria Remix think it might be an interesting thought experiment in MMORPGs as well.

Part of the reason why I end up rolling so many characters during what is effectively a limited event like a Path of Exile league… is that every so often I just get that itch to start over. For example, I have played through Cyberpunk 2077 up to the “Embers” quest chain something around eight or nine times at this point… only actually finishing the game on two of those play-throughs. I could not tell you how many times I have put at least 40-60 hours worth of playtime into a Bethesda game… only to start all over again the next time I get the itch to play one. In Minecraft, I almost never continue in the same world for more than a few weeks at a time because I get this urge to explore and “break” the world and once I have satisfied that urge I can move on with something else. I’ve played through the entirety of Mass Effect start to finish at least four times… with individual segments like my favorite Mass Effect 2 even more times. There is just something comforting and compelling about revisiting some of my favorite games.

So while leveling is a chore to most players… for whatever reason my brain is keyed to crave it. I leveled three characters during the Pandaria Remix event in World of Warcraft and one of those characters is now the character I am starting to play in War Within. Similarly, in Final Fantasy XIV I already have five jobs at level 100 and am continuing to level more as I do daily content. Before Endwalker released I pushed everything that I had on my account to level 80 and while I think I burnt myself out in the process… I also had a hell of a lot of fun experience with all of these different gameplay styles while doing content that was deeply familiar. I have at least a half dozen different Warriors scattered between multiple servers in World of Warcraft, and I enjoyed creating and leveling all of them.

I think the problem that I have with games that don’t have leveling… is that the characters I am playing oftentimes don’t feel like they are mine. Like I don’t really have a concept of “character” in roleplaying terms, but I have a deep investment in character as a sequence of my interactions and gearing decisions. All of my characters are me and in spite of playing on many a roleplaying server for the better sense of community… I don’t really do roleplay. However I remember when I acquired this item or that item, or when I got a new ability that I had been wanting and played with it for the first time. I remember each and every Path of Exile character when I managed to push across the line toward viability and was able to start ripping through content and farming it. Similarly, I have a stable of characters in Guild Wars 2, that I boosted that I feel almost no investment in.

Guild Wars 2 is really free with its character boosts, either in the form of partial boosts that come in the birthday gifts or the level 80 boosts that you end up getting each expansion. After seeing how much more I care about my Guardian while going through the process of leveling him… I feel like I might have robbed myself of a critical experience to enjoy these characters by taking those boosts. I’m legitimately contemplating deleting characters, and rerolling them over time so that I can expand my stable of characters in a more organic fashion. In truth… I am probably still going to use a boost to get a free set of gear, but I am planning on using it around 70-75 after I have already leveled through the content most of the way naturally. This character feels more “mine” than my baby Asuran Guardian that I boosted ever did.

In other news, I wrapped up my Griffon yesterday and now officially have every mount unlocked on my account. This one was a little bittersweet because despite all of this effort and expenditure of gold… I still don’t really like this mount. It feels like a worse version of the Skyscale, which I guess I already understood. Maybe it is better if you are crossing a large distance and starting at a really high vantage point… but getting up off the ground is miserable. One thing that I really wish Guild Wars 2 was better about is organizing all of these “system” unlocks into a category of Achievements. For example, if they had one place where you should see all of the Legendary item quests, all of the Mount quests, and anything that unlocks a specific system it would be far less obtuse to players. As it stands you essentially have to live on the Wiki in order to figure out how to do any of these things… which is a challenge as I am trying to determine what my next “long grind” is going to be.

I also spent some time yesterday crafting a new set of award badges for Blaugust 2024. I apologize to everyone who has participated this year because I have not really been engaged. August was a really rough month for me, and I have felt like I was largely phoning it in because I just did not have enough spoons for anything else. There were times this month that I thought I should have probably ended the event at the decade mark because I just was not feeling it. I think that is more the viewpoint into this specific month and how busy it has been and less about the event as a whole. I might start actually accepting more help in the planning and running of the event in future years though, and I have leaned way the hell more on my mentors than I have at any other time. Huge thanks to Jaedia and Magi who have carried a lot of the burden.

Blaugust and Large Language Models

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Good Morning Folks! My morning has been a bit on the odd side. I had to get up super early, run into the office, do a few things, and then get back home before an 8:30 meeting. As a result, I am getting a bit of a late start to the day. There is a topic that I have been mulling over in my head and I thought I would use today as a time to open a discussion. This year with Blaugust we have had a significantly larger reach than we have in previous years. At the time of writing, we have one-hundred-seven participating blogs and fifty-nine of them are completely new to the Blaugust event. This means our community is growing, but also as it grows some of the collective cultural tenets of the community are changing a bit. Right or wrong this was an event born out of the MMORPG Blogging community, and most of us old-timers have created blogs where we ramble on about our thoughts regarding the games we are playing and the new games on the horizon that we find ourselves pining for.

I appreciate a fresh perspective as folks arrive who have been wholly disconnected from this original community. I think there has been a good deal of shared growth since we opened up the call to pretty much anyone who creates regularly syndicated content in whatever form that takes. However this year I have seen a few entrants that are very clearly using Large Language Models as part of their daily routine. This feels like we are approaching a slippery slope here, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts. I’ve screwed around a lot specifically with Large Language Models that generate images off prompts. I’ve spent most of my time playing around with Stable Diffusion, and that is precisely what I think of it as… “play”.

It is a toy that I can fiddle around with and get some curious results from, but nothing I am doing do I truly consider to be a creative endeavor. I know other folks who have been in this same blogging pod for a while do the same. Sometimes we need an image to break up the text of a post, and can’t find anything that fits our exact requirements so it is pretty easy to turn to a picture generation machine and have it poop out something to fill this void. The thing is… when I do this, I don’t take any sense of pride in “creating” something because I did not. I typed some words into a magic box and it spit out a visualization, and while that visualization might be appealing it is a largely unrepeatable event. What I take pride in are the words surrounding that visualization that I pulled from my head.

So I am finding myself in a weird state looking at the prospect of folks having LLMs spit out the text for their blog posts, even if they are tweaking them later. Blaugust originally was an event centered around writing. That is humans who are sitting down to commit the thoughts that they are thinking to the digital page and then share them with peers. Typing some prompts into a machine and having it generate thoughts for you… feels like a bit of a violation of that original goal. I don’t care what ChatGPT regurgitated from stolen data… I care about what YOU think as the person behind the screen typing the thing that I am reading. I find zero value something that an LLM generates that is formatted to look like a number of posts that it consumed that were written by someone originally.

So I find myself in an awkward position. Blaugust 2024 as the rules of the contest stand, does not have any text forbidding the use of large language models to generate posts. As a result, I find myself having to tolerate some things that seem distasteful to me personally… and given the number of back-channel comments that I have received other Blaugustans also find it distasteful. Going forward for 2025 and beyond there is likely going to be an “Anti-AI” rider that the mentors will have to work through. Again I don’t so much care about the “AI as Clipart” trend of using it as something vaguely pleasant looking to break up large blocks of text. What concerns me is using Large Language Models to generate text posts instead of sharing your own thoughts.

I’m not purposefully trying to be a Luddite, but also believe there is value in human creativity that cannot be replaced by a regurgitation of consumed source material. Maybe I am off base here, and folks don’t mind the concept of LLM content mills… but given the number of sidebars I have had with folks I am guessing that will not be the case. Anyways I am opening this discussion, feel free to drop me your thoughts and feelings below.

Tour of the Aggronaut

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Good Morning Folks! However, by the time I actually finish this blog post, it might be afternoon. Today is the very first day of Blaugust 2024, and this year one of our mentors had a pretty great suggestion. Magi thought it might be pretty great if everyone dedicated one of their early posts to introducing themselves to the rest of the Blaugust Community. As a result, I am going to attempt this feat, but I will be honest… introductions are always a challenge. I never know what details someone might be interested in or what I have already said in the past. For the sake of this exercise however, I am going to pretend that you know absolutely nothing about me or my blog.

So with that in mind… Hi, I’m Belghast and welcome to this nonsense that I crank on a regular basis called Tales of the Aggronaut. I’ve been blogging here since April of 2009 and in total including other blogs I created period to this one… I’ve been doing this since around 2000. I am in fact an “internet old” and pretty much arrived on the internet in 1993 and was here for the very early days of the web. For a period of time in college I worked at an Internet Service Provider as a system administrator and webmaster, then worked for a college as a webmaster and computer lab admin… before making my way into the professional world as a web developer turned traditional programmer. These days I live the life of a manager over Development and Data teams. Since a lot of folks participating in Blaugust this year exist on the Fediverse, I also help to administrate Gamepad.club where the Blaugust account resides.

I have a ton of various sundry geek interests. I’ve been a Magic the Gathering junkie since the launch of Revised, have played a lot of tabletop games throughout the years, am a fairly avid reader specifically of science fiction and fantasy, and nerd out about alternative/indie/punk/industrial/metal music. I love Horror films and Monster movies and spent years working at a sports card and comic book shop and while I am not quite the avid collector and reader of comics that I used to be… I still have decades’ worth of nonsense crammed into my skull. I come and go these days in interest levels surrounding Marvel and Star Wars because quite honestly… the modern quality levels vary wildly. Growing up my dad was a professional portrait photographer on the side and I spent a lot of my childhood in the darkroom, so I still have a knack for going out and doing artsy photography every now and then.

Mostly thought… I play a lot of video games… or more so I play a number of video games a lot. There was a period of time where I could with all confidence say that if there was an MMORPG out there I had probably played it. Over the last decade or so there are a number of specifically eastern MMOs that I have not really spent much time with. However, all of the western ones from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV to Guild Wars 2 and on… I’ve logged multiple hundreds of hours in with many max-level characters. The origins of this blog started with a laser focus on “a world of warcraft warrior tanking blog” and was spun up during the heyday of the Blog Azeroth community. Over the years as my interests have changed this mission statement has also changed to where it is today… that this is just my blog and I make no thematic claims.

What I am probably the most interested in these days are ARPGs or Diablo-likes most specifically Path of Exile and Last Epoch. In the sidebar on the right side is a list labeled “Regularly Playing” and contains the usual suspects that I devote most of my time to. If you mouse over any of the game icons you will see my character information, and if there exists a profile system in that game it will link directly to that. Right now I tend to play MMORPGs very heavily when a new expansion rolls out and ARPGs when a new season starts. Right now I am knee-deep in the Settlers of Kalguur league in Path of Exile, and as a result, you are going to get some deeply in-the-weeds posts from me as I talk about my progress through that league. I am still deeply engaged in Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail and while I have taken a bit of a break have a side project to level alts with a friend on the Kraken server, while we are still doing raids together every week on our Cactuar mains. On the near horizon I am really looking forward to the Janthir Wilds expansion in Guild Wars 2, and at some point when there is a lull I plan on playing through the War Within expansion in World of Warcraft but it is highly unlikely I will be playing at launch.

Watch

Since I called this post “Tour of the Aggronaut” I thought I would also do a bit of a show and tell with this website. Since this website has been active for fifteen years and has over 3500 posts during that time, there is a lot in my backlog. Most of this is accessed through a menu structure at the top of the site. I figured I would take a few sentences to discuss each of the options. So for this first image, it shows off the Watch menu. This largely links to my YouTube page and also has a link to my Twitch page… which rarely if ever gets any use these days. There was a period of time when I streamed to Twitch quite a bit and got affiliate… then just sort of stopped. Youtube however is full of our weekly AggroChat podcast episodes and a number of videos that I have recorded talking about hyper-specific features of video games in my “Bel Bungles” series.

Listen

Next up is the Listen menu that links to AggroChat.com our podcast website. At some point in the future I might be pulling this content into Aggronaut.com because really there is not a lot going on over there and largely serves just to be a clone of Aggronaut. When we first set it up all seven of us hosts were actively blogging on our own platforms, and the goal of AggroChat.com was to coallate all of this together in a single place. Nowadays however I am the only one still actively blogging with any regularity and it is mostly just a carbon copy of the posts here on Aggronaut. Bel Folks Stuff was a really fun interview podcast series that I did with some of my friends. I still really want to get it started back up at some point because they were fun deep dives into a person I am close with. There is also a page of guest appearances I have made on other podcasts and such.

Social

The social menu links to my How to Find Me page with links to various social media and where I play various games with server and character information. There is also a direct link to my primary social media account over on Gamepad.club in the Fediverse as well as links to the Super Dungeon Friends discord and the Blaugust Discord. I really should throw up a link to Spoopy Town which is a discord I run dedicated to horror, cryptids, and good-natured conspiracy theories… though to be perfectly honest it is mostly just Jaedia and I chatting back and forth.

Features

Over the fifteen years of this blog I have decided I was going to start various features… only to abandon them after a while. The Features menu is where a lot of these ideas end up and they are all tied to various categories within WordPress. Probably the one I am most proud of is Mixtape Mondays where every Monday for I think 23 weeks I posted a unique mixtape with some album art that I created for it. I had a lot of fun doing these, and I still listen to most of them… but also it was really hard to keep creative inspiration to keep churning out new ones that also did not sound like anything I had created before. I might revisit it at some point, but it was still a really cool thing that I enjoyed doing.

Game Tools

These are technically a feature of the website but grew into their own thing. Essentially there are a lot of games that I play and in them… there are a lot of third-party tools and websites that I use while playing them. The “Game Tools” section is a place where I keep track of these things, partially for public benefit, but partially because several years might have passed since I last played a specific game and I want to have a good place to jot these things down so I will remember them. There are a few games that I still need to update to the new single-page format specifically FFXIV and Elder Scrolls Online. It is on my todo list, specifically since I am actively playing FFXIV right now and finding lots of useful resources that I did not know about previously.

Core Beliefs

The last area is what I refer to as my “Core Beliefs” and is essentially a page where I state things that I take as true. In this era of negotiable facts, I thought it was important for me to plant my flag in the ground and list out the details that are not negotiable for me. That is not to say that I am not constantly learning and adjusting details in my head and eventually evolving these beliefs, but if you have deep concerns with this page it is unlikely we will ever truly see eye to eye on issues. Essentially this is my page of “this is where I stand on these things” and if you have an issue with my stance on things… then it is cool if you no longer want to read my content. I am very much an acquired taste and it is fine if you never acquire it.

So there you go friends… a bit of a fresh introduction and a tour of the website. It is just about to stop being morning as I am still working on this thing. So I guess my initial comment was truthful as I have continued to get sidetracked and distracted from my task. I hope you all have an amazing Blaugust. I started this nonsense eleven years ago and am still consistently amazed that anyone else out there is down for this thing. I am very afk most of the time in Discord but if you need something specific feel free to page me with an @Belghast and I will try and answer any questions you might have. I am very much the sort of person who creates something… sends it out into the world… and then hopes someone else out there enjoys it. This means I am far more comfortable being behind the scenes than I am getting up close and personal. I will always be an introvert at heart, and most days as I write these blog posts I am pretending that I am just talking to myself. As a result blogging also is rather therapeutic because I am telling myself things I think I need to hear.

Anyways! I am going to hit publish and send another mess of nonsense out into the aether!

Blaugust 2024 Eve

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Good Morning Everyone! It is almost time for Blaugust and in fact at the time of writing it… it is probably already Blaugust for our Oceanic participants. Timezones are weird. Anyways as is often the case before the official start of Blaugust I release various bits of information about the event. Namely this morning I updated the Media Kit page to include the Participant List Google Sheet and then created and uploaded an OPML file for those who use feed readers. This morning I had the fun time of trying to find RSS feeds for everyone. Side note, if yours is not prominently displayed you might want to change that because for as belabored as RSS is… it is still the best methodology for reading lots of blogs in a single application. I should also say that this participant list is not updated in realtime. There are various bits of data that I don’t share publicly from the sign-up sheet so generally speaking I update the sheet that I just shared once a day and dump a new OPML file at that same time.

At the time of writing this, we have 74 blogs signed up and ready to participate in Blaugust 2024. What is even more impressive however is of those 74, 34 are folks who have never participated in Blaugust before. I honestly thought that abandoning Twitter would be the death knell for this event, but in truth, it has caused it to find an entirely new life. Last year we had 103 participants which was by far our highest of the last decade. As always I assume the event is just going to be participants drawn from our list of usual suspects, but we keep reaching new audiences and I think a huge part of that has been planting our flag for the official account on Mastodon, specifically Gamepad.club the server I help manage. Blogging is very much alive and well in the Fediverse, and the community of folks that assemble there tend to be way more geeky and way more apt to spin up their own DIY services to fit their needs. As a result, it has been a perfect match for the spirit of Blaugust and I am extremely happy to see new faces rolling into our community discord.

Here is the list of blogs participating this year as of the time of writing this:

As I said above I am keeping an OPML file updated which should make it easy for you to import the entire batch into your feed reader of choice. I will also be updating my blogroll to include all of these folks.

In other news, I provided a version of this year’s logo without the checkerboard backing on it. This might fit your particular blog style or needs a bit better. I uploaded it yesterday on the discord, but also added it to the media kit page this morning. In this year’s information post, I threw out the idea of the “First Post of Blaugust” being one that introduces yourself to the community. I often have the false belief that everyone already knows me and that no one wants to know more information about me… since I pour so much of myself into the blog. However, in the spirit of the event, I plan on participating in the introductory post tomorrow and hope you will join me in this new tradition. Even though I have written countless introduction paragraphs over the years as I have joined many different communities on the internet, each time they end up being a little different. The benefit of writing it on my blog is that I can actually backlink further details if I have written a post about a specific topic in the past.

I hope this coming month is an amazing time for everyone participating in Blaugust 2024. I rarely go for the highest award and tend to just post on weekdays, save for Sunday when I post our podcast. I hope you take all of this assembled apparatus and make an event out of it that best suits your needs. While the core of the contest has always been “do 31 posts”, over the years it has become way less about that and more about mingling with your peers. Get out there, read a ton of posts, and get active in some conversations. As always I will be here lurking in the background if anyone needs anything. I am far from the most charismatic leader, and often get overwhelmed by large-scale social situations… but I appreciate each and every one of you that are joining in this nonsense.

Happy Blaugust Eve!