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Eleven Years of Aggronaut

April 17, 2020 by Belghast

This week of Blapril is a week about introducing yourself to the community and letting us know interesting things about you. I more or less have been dodging this bullet because I am not sure if there is anything left that is interesting to tell about me. However on this the 11th anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog, I am going to talk a bit about myself and its origins. This was in no way planned when I laid out the week structure of this event, and quite honestly until this morning I had completely forgotten that it was my anniversary. Sure I have it marked on the Calendar… but my Google Calendar and not the one I use for work purposes. In the past I have had my act together and commissioned artwork from my good friend Ammo to mark this event, but in the time of pandemic I clearly do not have my act together.

Once upon a time in another life, I was a forum troll. I mean that in the best possible version of that term, because I was not disruptive other than complaining when someone got what I considered to be an unfair ban on the blizzard forums. Some of my earliest memories were making epic long form posts on various game forums. That was sorta my shtick, I would squeeze all of my thoughts about something in a big chunk of prose and unceremoniously place it on a forum that could not care less about my thoughts and feelings. The various guilds I was part of also had extremely active forums, and I too would post a running commentary of events there. This more or less stayed the same until the beginning of this blog, but I will get to that.

In March of 2005 blogging was all of the rage among some of my friends, and it was more or less spread out between three sites: Blogger, Xanga and Live Journal. All three of which are shockingly still in business, because I was almost certain that surely something called Xanga would have died by now. Given that I was very much a google early adopter, I started writing a deeply personal blog on Blogger, and sharing it with only a handful of really close friends. This is a blog that I hope never sees the light of day because everything on it is super cringe worthy. Among various things it chronicled my experiences learning how to RV and being thrust into that world when suddenly my wife decided that we needed to buy one. My wife has a habit of making random decisions like that when we are forced to go through traumatic events. We bought our house in part due to the fact that her childhood home burnt down for example.

The RV thing was a reaction of wanting to be closer with family after the suicide of our nephew. This is also why I played a Hunter as a main in World of Warcraft, because this event happened shortly after the launch of the game and knocked me completely out of reality for a good two months, at which point when I returned to the game all of my friends had out-leveled me by a large margin and Hunter was the only class that I was capable of soloing on at a fast enough pace to catch up. Major life events have some weird ramifications, and I think this blog was a way of me dealing with some of the ones we were going through. I only shared it with a small circle of my friends, because the things I wrote about felt too personal to actually share on something like a guild forum. This is probably the first time that I was introduced to the concept of writing as therapy, which admittedly I have later explored many times with this blog.

In 2009 I was the leader of a fairly active guild in World of Warcraft and one of the leaders of a raid called Duranub Raiding Company. I had things that I felt like sharing about the game in general, Warrior tanking, and the act of leading both a guild and a raid. I thought I had some stuff figured out and wanted to share those thoughts with the world, and in the process of having these feelings I stumbled across a specific blog that inspired me to create Tales of the Aggronaut. The Wordy Warrior was a blog written by a warrior tank that was also a guild and raid leader, and I was enthralled by it. The blog was written by Criss Fowler or @Aeridel who eventually went on to work at both Riot and Blizzard and now works for That Game Company, the folks behind Journey, Flower and recently released Sky on mobile platforms.

It was through this blog that I was introduced to the Blog Azeroth community and so many awesome people that I still have in my greater monkeysphere like @Fimlys, @StoppableForce, and @Saresa (who at some point twitter apparently unfollowed for me and I have only recently refollowed). Funny story… Stop has the honor of being the very first person that I followed on Twitter. This community is ultimately what lead me to create a twitter account in the first place. It was a really exciting time to be a blogger, because it seemed like every week we got to greet a brand new crop of blogs that were springing up constantly surrounding this game we all loved. Ultimately it was the sort of community that I sought to help create with my participation in the Newbie Blogger Initiative and eventually the spawning of Blaugust and now Blapril.

However like so many things, eventually disillusionment set in. I got frustrated with World of Warcraft and with that my posting frequency tanked significantly. When I eventually left the game for the first time with the launch of Rift and shortly after the launch of Cataclysm, I found my readership tanked significantly. World of Warcraft and the Blog Azeroth community were really supportive… of World of Warcraft blogs and bloggers, but once you strayed outside of that fold be it on your blog you would ultimately see just how singled threaded segments of that community were. The day I started writing about Rift instead of World of Warcraft I saw about half of my twitter followers vanish over night, which was a really stark wake up call for someone who thought of a lot of these people as friends.

That has always been a challenge for me when it comes to blogging and social media. I come from the early age of the internet, back when we were crawling around in MUDs and on IRC. In fact I met my wife of almost twenty two years on IRC, so these were people to me and not just pixels. I’ve built so many friendships over the years that have transcended the games we played to the random things that are happening in our lives. AggroChat entirely is made up of people that I met through gaming and that we continued to be friends when the controller was set down or the servers went offline. So it came as a shock to me that people are fickle, and in turn lead me to even post less because this thing I thought I was part of wasn’t really as solid as I originally thought.

At that point it was really cold to be on the outside of the Warcraft community looking in, and while I found new friends out here in the blackness of space, it was a different sort of community. If you existed outside of an established game community, you sorta had to be an island nation that occasionally had treaties with other island nations, but effectively were doing your own thing. There was a great freedom that came with that, and once I stopped sulking around 2012… I began the next era of Tales of the Aggronaut where I was going to regularly post and I was going to be far more open about the things that are happening between the gaming sessions. I was always deeply cagey about sharing my life with my readers until daily posting forced me to be brutally honest at times just to come up with something to fill the page.

I still very much feel like an Island Nation at times, but I would like to think that the ties I have with other Island Nations are stronger than they were in those early years. I would also like to think that with things like Blaugust existing and transitioning into a fairly active Discord, that we have more of a social latticework for new bloggers to find easier footing than I did when I first set adrift from the content life-raft that was Warcraft. It is fundamentally a different time for bloggers and blogging in general now than it was during those halcyon days when this was all new and exciting. There are so many other things fighting for our attention and it seems that now Vlogs and Streaming have consumed almost all of the oxygen in the room… to the point where it is exceedingly hard to sign up for any sort of credentials on a blog alone.

I still however prefer to read a long sequence of thoughts placed painstakingly on a page than to listen through fifteen minutes of rambling in video form that never quite reaches a cogent point. Hell I would rather read fifteen pages of rambling than watch most videos, and unfortunately as a reader of Tales of the Aggronaut you are all too familiar with rambling posts. With that I think it might be a good time to actually wrap this thing up. I feel like I have told this tale multiple times, and each time it ends up coming out a little different. On this anniversary of this blog, I once again want to thank you all for being part of this experience. I could and likely would continue doing this without you, because I ended up turning it into therapy… but it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.

Riding the Buff

April 16, 2020 by Belghast

This is one of those mornings when I contemplate not writing anything. I am just not feeling it, and as a way of pushing through I tend to post a few photos of whatever I happen to be playing and chat about it for a bit. There are going to be days when you just aren’t feeling it and as far as I am concerned you have two options. The first option is of course to just say you are not going to be posting anything that day and come back the next day renewed. However more often than not I tend to take the second avenue which is to just start writing until a post magically appears before you. Granted with option two you are not always guaranteed that the post is going to be interesting or even worth reading.

So this morning I am going to talk once again about the ridiculous speed of leveling in World of Warcraft right now. For those that are unaware there is currently a +100% buff to experience gained and this seems to stack with all of the other sources of buffs like heirloom gear and the darkmoon “whee” buff. However in my case the only additional buff that I have are the heirloom slots which add up to I think an extra 65% experience gain or something like that. At the beginning of the night last night I was sitting at level 47 in Tanaris, which admittedly is ONLY the second zone I have been in on my Druid. At the end of the night I had wound my way over to Ungoro Crater and closed the evening at 54. The pace of leveling was greatly impacted by the amount of travel time between objectives, and because of that it felt like I was completely flying through the levels.

I’ve more or less been focused on pushing up as many of these Horde characters as I can until either the resolve of purpose or my desire to be playing World of Warcraft fades. At the same time I am still cycling through my 120 characters to see if there is any World Quest upgrades that I can snap up easily. This more or less is my ideal way to play WoW because I am focused on the casual stuff in the game, and don’t get so bogged down in my frustrations. I have a mountain of frustrations with World of Warcraft, because honestly you can’t play anything for almost sixteen years without finding the things you find maddening. The game is exceptionally good at giving you something amazing… but also sorta making one or two aspects of it horrible. I have long joked that Blizzard can’t give you anything that is just universally good for the players.

However saying that… this buff seems to be one of those occasions when it is just good and as a result I am soaking up as much of it as I can while it is still in place. I remember the crazy leveling elevator that was the pre-Legion launch events, and during that time I managed to get every single character Alliance side that I had up to 100. I would love if the buff stayed in place until the launch of Shadowlands, because then I might manage to get all of my Horde characters up to 120… and maybe even a few more Alliance for good measure. I am nowhere near close to unlocking the BFA Allied races for the Alliance and I would rally love to play through the game as a Dark Iron Dwarf of some sort. I just can’t seem to bring myself to grind out the reputation on my single 120 on that side of the house.

… and there you have it. I somehow willed a post into existence. I wanted to take a pass on actually writing something today but I knew that once I started typing I would begin to find a bit of a groove. At the very least I would find enough traction to begin and wrap up a short post. I hope you all have an excellent day and that you are happy and healthy out there in pandemia.

The Cutting Room Floor Post

April 10, 2020 by Belghast

This morning is technically part of my weekend, and as such I contemplated following “holiday rules” and ignoring a post. However since we are in the middle of Blapril that might set a bad precedent for the various participants. Instead this morning you are going to get a random assortment of blurbs that are sorta left on the cutting room floor. These are things that I don’t necessarily want to devote an entire post to, but still have things to say. For example here is a picture that my friend Storm sent me from Astral Chain because apparently in that universe I am a Toilet Fairy. I can’t say it is a profession that I would have chosen for myself, but I am also not going to fight it terribly hard. I should probably play Astral Chain at some point because it is either going to be right down my alley or I will thoroughly reject it… because I am not sure there will be much of a middle ground.

Unlike Microsoft, Sony keeps unveiling their system bit by bit… and up until this point we really didn’t have much to go on as far as stylings for this next generation. However if this controller is any indication for what the final system might look like I am completely on board. This controller reminds me of you took the vibe of Tron Legacy and combined it with the Robotic designs from Portal. It also looks like maybe just maybe they are making a design that is a little bit friendlier to larger hands. There is a problem I have with the Dualshock 4 that my pinky fingers fall asleep when I am gripping the controller because I am sorta having to tuck them back up and under to get all of my fingers on the sides. I’ve written about my favorite large hand controller designs before, but this is definitely a thing for me personally. Thanks to growing up on movies like Bladerunner… this is what I expected the future to look like and I am thankful to Sony for starting to realize that cyberpunk reality. If the new console is inexplicably orb shaped they will even score more points with me.

The Friends and Family Alpha for World of Warcraft Shadowlands started this week, and like I assumed I did not get an invite. There was a time when I was pretty much getting these like clockwork, but I feel like I have said enough bad stuff about the company and the game that I am no longer considered friend nor family. All of that said I am excited it has started because I actually do love World of Warcraft spoiler season. I have a weird stance on spoilers in general, because they actually enhance my enjoyment of the product and hype me up about it. Now I tend to try avoiding some of the story beats, but the various world building products that start leaking out and how the systems are going to work are absolutely candy for me to gobble up. On one hand I have to admit that I would have liked being invited because it would have been fun to test out the various classes. On the other hand I wouldn’t want to burn myself out on a game before it even releases as I have done a few times in the past. I have a lot of hope going into this expansion that it will start to turn the game as a whole around. Having been back the last few weeks I am remembering how fun it is at times, and how much enjoyment I get out of piddling around. The corrupted item system however can die in a freaking fire.

Destiny 2 on Google Stadia Fake Screenshot

Another thing that happened this week that is worth talking about is that Stadia went open to the public. Everyone can sign up for 2 months of free Stadia Pro to get in and kick the tires. The problem I have seen so far is that the tires might fall off. Stadia appears to be actively blocking any third party capture solutions, including even GeForce experience and as such you have to rely on their baked in screenshot functionality accessible by hitting F12. The problem with this is that the above image bears no resemblance to the image that I actually saw on the screen while playing the game. I am guessting that the image is saved on the server side where the fidelity is significantly better. That image is perfectly fine and if the game looked like that while playing I would consider this a rousing success visually at least. What the game-play instead looks like is more akin to what I remember playing Destiny 1 on the PS3 felt like.

The nail in the coffin for me however is how the game performs. I specifically chose Destiny 2 just like I did when I was testing out GeForce Now because it was a game that I have deep experience playing and understand how it is supposed to be performing. I opted not to connect this up to my cross save so that I could experience the New Light intro. In it you pick up the Khvostov auto rifle, a weapon known for its smooth handling and honestly probably the ideal starter weapon. Trying to aim down the sights and take out Fallen felt like my mouse was jumping all over the place constantly. The cursor movement felt exceptionally jerky and random making it near impossible for me to stomach playing through even this first mission. I’ve stopped and restarted it a half dozen times, and for reference I am using the chrome based web client over a wired gigabit connection straight into my router. This machine has full access to my 350 Mbit internet connection, which should be more than cromulent for playing 1080p gaming.

Contrast that to my experience with the same game on GeForce Now and I am questioning how viable Stadia is for pretty much any sort of shooter going forward. I am going to play some of the other game that are less demanding on fine motor skill and see how they work out. However in playing GeForce Now it was not that different than playing over Parsec streaming to my desktop upstairs on the same LAN. The sad thing is… I am pretty close to their ideal customer given that I play games remotely all the freaking time. However the end result just did not feel good… and it could be that the server is just overloaded at this point. However it felt the same at 10 pm at night as it did this morning at 8 am… which should have significantly different bandwidth footprints. Not my jam but I am thankful that I did get to play with it in person.

Well folks it is finally here, and as I write this I am hearing the soundtrack playing in the background. I am weird and have all of my consoles connected to a capture card instead of directly into the television. So that means while I am playing games I am actually doing so through the Elgato HD Capture software window maximized. It works for me because it allows me to capture footage directly while playing and just hit the print screen key in order to take screenshots. Anyways all of that nonsense aside I have Final Fantasy 7 Remake up and ready to go and a day off work to play it. However I have to admit now that I do… I am thinking about playing other things. Seven was not the pinnacle game for me that it was for so many others. I originally played it on the PC, and really the game that blew me out of the water was Final Fantasy 3/6 depending on when it was released. The first Final Fantasy game I played on the Playstation was the 8th, and as a result I probably have more affinity for it than I do this one. That said I do plan on playing it this weekend, just not sure how far I will make it.

With that we bring to a close my random list of topics. I am once again going to spin this around to Blapril for a moment, because quite often you are going to find yourself in this situation where you have a bunch of small bits of content that don’t really fit together. It is perfectly fine to do one of these cutting room floor posts where you clear out a bunch of thoughts that are disconnected. It helps greatly to break things up with images and captions like I have done, or to at least use headings to help the readers shift between them. As time passes and you get more used to creating content on the fly, you can pretty much take any assortment of things and make it work. My readers may however disagree with me and tell me that these sort of posts are crap, but they have always been a crutch that I could fall back on when I didn’t have much else to talk about.

Regularly Playing: April 2020 Edition

April 7, 2020 by Belghast

Okay folks, this is Topic Brainstorming week for Blapril 2020, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to talk about one of the things that I have traditionally done where I update you all on what I have been regularly playing. I use this opportunity as a time to update the sidebar of the blog and talk about my feelings about some of the games that are in heavy rotation. I have been exceptionally bad at keeping this updated over the last few months, but that isn’t really a new thing either because I have gone through serious lapses before. The idea is that you have a dialog with your readers and talk about what has been going on in your gaming life. This topic could be adopted to pretty much any subject, talk about movies you have been watching, music you have been listening to or any number of other hobbies.

Since this is mostly a gaming blog I have simply chosen to call that aspect of my life out, and as such I talk about the games that are new to the list, the games that are still in regular rotation and the games that are departing the list. Last edition of this feature I also included the “ships passing in the night” feature where I talk about games that I have been enjoying but that won’t really have much staying power.

To Those Remaining

Destiny sweet Destiny… I am not sure what is going on between us. You right now are hanging by a thread and are just barely making the list. I am not sure what it is about the seasonal format but it actually disincentives me from playing, because deep down I know I won’t have the staying power to unlock everything and squeeze every last drop of good from the season before it expires. I think mostly I just have a problem with expiring content. If the seasonal content allowed me toe work through it at my own pace like something along the lines of Elder Scrolls Online, I would feel significantly better about playing Destiny on a regular basis because it doesn’t feel quite so much like wasted effort. I hope they re-evaluate the seasonal formula and make the additions to the game stick around a little longer. If they maybe give you three seasons to complete the content before it expires that might go a long way towards making this feel like a better experience.

I had an awful lot of fun at the beginning of the season hanging out with Grace and Byx and have since then sorta faded away. Diablo 3 is never really far from my mind however and I am sure at some point I will finish building a reasonable set and push toward the end goal. I did at least get the 4 chapters of the seasonal journey knocked out, but Set Dungeon Mastery right now is what is holding me up because it is the one step I hate doing each season. I end up delaying it until I finally can’t anymore and now it is holding up two separate seasons journey ranks. I just really don’t like being on a timer when I am gaming.

To The New and Returning

This is effectively my very first Animal Crossing game, and as a result there has been a mountain of knowledge that I needed to climb in very short order in order to figure out what the hell was going on behind the various mechanics. This is a game that is exceptionally bad at explaining itself, and really this should have been their “Monster Hunter World” moment, because given that the Switch is an extremely popular console makes it attractive to a whole new generation of players. This should have been the title that they added a bit more scaffolding to the game in order to hand hold you through the process of engagement. There are so many things that I have had to take to external sources to figure out, and I feel like maybe some hand holding would have been nice at least to have an option to say “Hey I am a First Timer, Explain to me like I am 5 Years Old”. All of that said it is adorable and while I am not playing with the length I was in those first few days I am at least logging in each day to move the bar forward a bit.

This one is making this part of the list because I feel like there is a lot more here to explore. I have not finished the game, and I want to spend time once other things calm down a bit getting back in and roaming around. Essentially this poorly named game is “What if Fallout 1 and 2 were Russian themed and came out recently”. It is a re-imagining of the Fallout genre and plays like you remember those games playing, which is to say it plays much better than they do if you were to buy a copy from GOG and play it today. It can be brutally hard, and I seem to have more issue with ammunition than I remember having back in the day, but it did serve for several fun nights of gaming and I want to return to it.

While I have not been playing this a lot recently, there is still a lot of meat on these bones and I want to return to it. Wolcen has released a bunch of patches and tweaks since I last played and it will be interesting to see if my tanky spin to win build is still functional. Wolcen is the best Diablo game we have gotten in recent memory and does a great job of sorta cherry picking the best features of both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile… in a formula that feels closer to D3. Essentially it is a recipe for what I like in an ARPG, but I realize for the folks that hold Diablo 2 up in high esteem it might not be their jam. I wish this was available on the Switch because as much as I like playing D3 from the bedroom… if this supported cross save and allowed me to progress my character while chilling out horizontally… this would become my new sleepy time jam.

Ships Passing in the Night

Star Wars Galaxies – Legends Server – PC

In the months since January I have been on a bit of a MMORPG Emulator server binge. The first of these was Star Wars Galaxies because my good friend Tam got into the game heavily, as it was one of his nostalgia jams from the past. For him this was a great experience about space combat in the Star Wars universe. Since I do not really like flight simulators, it was less enjoyable, but I did greatly appreciate the first few levels that felt similar to a WoW or an Everquest 2. Unfortunately once you have finished the first ten levels and the game opens up… this helpful scaffolding falls away and the “real” game was far less enjoyable for me. What was there instead was slow progression and the unpredictable difficulty curves that I remember from Everquest. I was happy that Tam was having so much fun, but I was a bit saddened that I really was not.

This lead me down a path towards one of my nostalgic remembrances… and the game I was likely playing while Tam was playing SWG… City of Heroes. I had so much fun with this game and for the full nostalgia trip, I opted to play a Katana/Regeneration Scrapper. The game itself was way different than I remember it being, but not in a bad way. The homecoming server effectively is picking up where the game left off when it was shuttered, meaning it is several years worth of patches past the point at which I actually left off playing. For the most part the game holds up well unlike SWG or Everquest, and I could see myself maybe returning to it at some point in the future when I am not deluged with other games I want to be playing.

Eventually this path of madness lead me back to the progenitor of MMORPG gaming (for me at least), Everquest. I tried a few different server options and eventually landed on EZ Server, which is a super fast progression and super low difficulty Everquest experience that lets me play tourist and revisit areas I loved in the game without having to deal with finding a group. I realize this largely defeats the purpose of Everquest, but I also don’t have the time or patience that I did when I first played this game, and as a result I am down for cheat mode. It was a lot of fun for about a week and then I wandered away like a bored toddler. I might return the next time I get nostalgic about Norrath, given how hard I have found it to ease back into Everquest II.

This is the third game by Spiders that I have played and it suffers from a lot of the same problems. However still like Greedfall and Technomancer there is something about the gameplay that I find compelling. They all sorta play like low rent Bioware titles, but they are doing a thing that Bioware no longer seems to be doing which makes me interested in them nonetheless. Mars: War Logs was the first game in a series that continued with Technomancer, and I could definitely see some merit in playing this game first because it does introduce parts of the Mars setting that never get explored fully in the sequel. That said it is a much more primitive gaming experience, and while I enjoyed it I could see a lot of the awkwardness turning others off. If you want to experience a spiders game and have never done so… probably start with Greedfall and see if it leaves you wanting more before diving in deeper.

This game was in heavy rotation for me for about a week and then once again as is my usual I wandered away like a bored toddler. It is really charming and interesting, and I liked the pace of feeling like I accomplished something each day. What I did not love about it were how many precision jumps that were required to complete some of the puzzles. The basics of the game is that you are visiting an archipelago and each island has a different them, as well as a central puzzle to solve in how to unlock its shrine. There is no real combat, and if you fail something you start over immediately at the beginning of the room that you are in so it allows you to fail fast and rapidly iterate through ideas. The voxel theme is a lot of what makes the game charming, and the engine that is running it is among the more impressive ones available on the switch. The lighting, the animations, the subtle details all add to the feel of it being a living and breathing world.

It only took me four years… but I finally buckled down and finished my play through of Doom 2016 in anticipation of the release of Doom Eternal. It was a fun if nonsensical ride through a world of exploding demon corpses. I had an awful lot of fun pushing through the final bits of the game and would definitely suggest it to anyone who loved the earlier era and arcade shooters. I’ve not really had a chance to dig into Doom Eternal but it also seems to be a similar style of enjoyment. Right now I am buried under a bunch of games and I need to dig out before I really tackle anything else.

During the crisis we currently find ourselves in… I’ve struggled to allow myself to sink into the warm embrace of a video game. I’ve had trouble disconnecting mentally enough to really allow myself to engage fully with another universe. As a result I have been in desperate need of something that I could more or less play while at the same time shutting off my brain and just giving it time to rest. World of Warcraft fits that bill perfectly because all of the patterns of engagement are more or less muscle memory at this point. I’ve been taking advantage of the experience bonus currently going on in game and the speed of leveling is pure nonsense. I took my Horde Paladin from 110-120 in a few days and hit 118 before I had finished the first zone I chose to go through, Zuldazar. Now that I have that character at 120 I am swapping over to pushing up my Warlock, while at the same time dipping my head in periodically to gobble up any upgrades from World Quests. I’ve also leveled my Paladin on Alliance side as well, since it was the closest to the level cap… and am in the process of working my way towards unlocking the allied races.

Summary

When I allow myself to go more than one month without an update it ends up being this mammoth post as I have a bunch of things that I feel like I need to talk about. My hope is that I can get back in the swing of doing these early in each month. I find it helpful to sorta clear the slate each month and talk about what is and is not seeing play time. There are a lot of games that I might play, but ultimately don’t feel like dedicating one of my daily posts to, and this gives me the space to address those.