Blog Features

Short, Dark, and Screamy

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Good Morning Folks! This is me doing a Saturday post, which is not exactly something that I do often. However this month we have Blaugust running and I thought that just maybe for once I would try and hit 31 posts in my own damned event. In truth, the only day that I don’t normally post is Saturday given that I make weekly normal blog posts, and on Sundays, I advertise the podcast episode. So that really means I am only trying to squeeze a few more blog posts in total to hit 31 so I might as well actually make that happen. I figured that I would start off the first of these and talk a bit about what has garnered the majority of my attention for the past two days… Baldur’s Gate 3. This is a game that I have technically owned since 2020, but have avoided doing much with because I did not want to spoil the experience. I get that probably does not make a whole lot of sense, but I am a huge fan of Larian Studios and I viewed my purchase of Early Access as a way of helping fund the development. It turns out that faith was rewarded as all of the early access holders got access to the digital deluxe version free.

The original Baldur’s Gate was a heck of a lot of fun, but I will be honest it wasn’t really until Icewind Dale was released that I began ravenously devouring these games. So when Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn I was well enough indoctrinated into the series to be hyped and ready to go on launch day. Playing Baldur’s Gate III, over the last few nights has felt like my memories of Baldur’s Gate II. What I mean by that is that I have been transported back in time to an era when I could just meld with the game and become hopelessly engrossed in it. I’ve experienced “time loss” like I have not in years where I sit down thinking I am only playing for a few minutes, and I look up and three hours have passed. I mean this in the best way possible, and while it took me a bit to get used to the slower pace of a real-time-action game… now that I am engaged I am fully engaged.

I’m not going to dive too deeply into the story, that will probably come for a much later blog post. For character options, I decided to keep it simple and went with a Barbarian. I opted to go for an entertainer background which gave me performance and acrobatics, both of which have already come in handy. For the race I decided to follow my heart and go with a Dwarf and given the Ithilid roots of this game, I opted to go with Duergar. So far I am pretty happy with all of my choices save for maybe the voice I went with. To be truthful, none of the voice actors really felt like a Duergar should feel. Thankfully most of the time I am a silent protagonist, but there is a bit of a mental disconnect whenever I say anything.

For the most part, I like all of the characters. If you told me this was a Bioware game I would have believed you, because I already care about my little party of misfits. Like we really are a “bad ideas” party, but I am enjoying adjusting to the nonsense and I am glad I am able to be zero shocked when someone reveals more awful things that they are dealing with. It does feel a bit weird that in a party of “chosen ones” I seem to keep being set up as the “most chosen” of them all. The only character I am sus about is Lae’zel but mostly because she is a bit aggro all the time. I run around with her mostly because apart from me she is the strongest hitter.

I like Gale an awful lot, but he has this weird uncanny resemblance to a young Mel Gibson. I have to see it every time I play the game so now you do too. All things told though while I don’t normally like “finger wigglers” as I call them… he is pretty cool for a magic user. Like he has his own “bad ideas” traits about him, but he reminds me a bit of my love of Dorian from Dragon Age Inquisition. Shadowheart is probably my favorite, but truthfully… were Shadowheart introduced differently I probably would have hated the character. I have this thing against the “does not trust you” characters… so I could see Shadowheart reading as a “Corso Riggs” if I was not already inherently wired to want to help her because I saved her from a pod.

All told I am about ten hours into the game and still have yet to replace the weapon I got from the tutorial. Admittedly there are a lot of people who probably did not get that weapon, and I only did so because I happened to read a bit specifically stating that I should. Right now my party comp is Shadowheart, Lae’zel, and Gale and I am not sure if I completely missed getting Wyll. I’ve done some research as to where to find him, but I never seemed to bump into him in that area of the game. I do wonder if I screwed that up and am completely unable to get him now. I need to backtrack a bit and roam around the area just to make sure I did not miss something.

Anyways greatly enjoy the game, and will very likely be mainlining this at least until the launch of the Path of Exile Ancestor’s League on the 18th. I hope yall are having a most excellent weekend. It is raining this morning, which we desperately need because it hit 107 the other day… which is just not fun.

Inconvenience as a Feature

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Good Morning Friends! We are going to go on a bit of a journey. I’m very much in Path of Exile mode with the new league starting some 16 days from now. I have been playing around with various build ideas and trying out new things. This also means I am consuming a lot of content which in turn causes the YouTube algorithm to dredge up even more of it for me to watch. Trade is an extremely important part of Path of Exile, whether or not you want to admit it. If you are playing without access to the trade market, you are absolutely playing on the hardest difficulty settings. Solo-Self-Found is absolutely a game mode, but it is also one that expects you to know quite a bit about the even more obtuse crafting system in order to fix your resistances and craft your own gear. I feel strongly enough about this that I took the time to cobble together a rather detailed dissection of a trade encounter in an attempt to demystify the process.

Then I stumbled onto this video from All-Trades Jack who has been going on his own journey through this game much like I have over the last few years. He has an excellent video talking about the merits of following a guide which I highly recommend watching. Essentially he reached the point that I did two leagues ago, where I finally was willing to engage with the Trade system. He honestly talks about many of the very sane and reasonable objections that I also had. Trade in Path of Exile is needlessly cumbersome and it requires a human element to the trades that I have not dealt with since Everquest and setting up a trader in the Nexus. It should be as simple as putting items in a publicly flagged trade stash tab and then allowing players to purchase those items through an in-game auction house. However two leagues into wrapping my head around the trade economy… it works the way it works for a reason.

One of the core problems with an Auction House system is that it often allows for arbitrage, or essentially buying cheap goods and then selling for a profit margin. This is ultimately how the real-world stock market works, so it makes sense that players will figure out ways to carry over this same logic into a video game. In World of Warcraft, this has led to an arms race over the years of Auction House tools and changes to the way that the Auction House worked, in order to try and throttle the equivalent of “fast trading”. Essentially in an Arbitrage system, there is essentially an invisible broker sitting in the middle of a trade always making sure that prices trend upwards. This is an oversimplification because I don’t tend to engage in “economic pvp” as some call it. I know it works and I have a mount in Classic WoW entirely thanks to the fact that my friend Stargrace is extremely skilled at playing a market and looking for opportunities.

This is not me passing judgment on the system, but just saying that it isn’t really my jam. World of Warcraft specifically has systems in place to help limit the impact of runaway arbitrage. When you use an item, it often binds to your character meaning that you cannot then turn around and sell it after using it. When the game launched bags were not bound to the character, and as a result the bag cartel became one of the most rampant marketplaces. I remember getting very threatening messages when I crafted my first Mooncloth Bag and dared to price it cheaper than all of the other bags on the market. From Burning Crusade and beyond, all bags were set to bind to the character on equipment. BOE as a system is likely largely a result of the trade economy that WoW Devs were all too familiar with in Everquest where all of the gear was tradeable effectively forever. Nothing was ever truly removing gear from the economy because I could use the same Lamentation for 50 levels, and then trade it off to the next person when I got an upgrade.

Path of Exile is similar to the original days of Everquest in that almost everything in the game is freely tradeable between your characters or any other player in the game. This allows for some really interesting decisions where I can take maps with modifiers that I cannot personally run, but sell them to players who have builds capable of running them. I can also take every piece of gear that I find and sell it to any other player, or even when I decide I am done with a character use those items to fund my next character. It is an economy begging to be set ablaze by arbitrage, and there are in fact discords devoted to buying items in bulk for the purpose of flipping them. However, this is not something that the game itself supports, and by default, trade seems to be purposefully cumbersome and requires several human touchpoints in order to stop rampant flipping.

It might be Stockholm syndrome, but I have reached a place of acceptance that All-Trades Jack has yet to arrive at. I accept that the cumbersome nature of trade, and the inconvenience of needing to stop what I am doing in order to sell an item… is a fair tradeoff for having the ability to find reasonably priced items for the vast majority of the league life span. We are currently at the end of a league and the trade market is a bit tight, but my reasonably priced items are going like hotcakes as a result. I will say that the inconvenience factor has changed what I am willing to sell. I am no longer going to personally list 1 Chaos items because frankly, it isn’t worth my time to stop doing whatever I happen to be doing to pop into my hideout to complete that trade. In Sanctum my bulk bin was 1 Chaos, in Crucible my cheapest sell price was 5 Chaos… and going into the next league I fully expect the lowest price I am willing to sell at will be 10 Chaos.

While my personal price point has trickled up, it is not that I am charging more for individual items… it is just that I am only selling better quality items. There are enough dedicated traders out there who are more than happy to take on smaller trades to make sure those 1 Chaos uniques are in plentiful supply. I’ve basically figured out a way that I can live with the system. Would I like it all to be automated and require zero human interaction? Absolutely. However, I am not sure if I would like the ramifications of that system. I get the impression that Grinding Gear Games does not want their trade economy to devolve into a flippers paradise. I feel like they would like to reward players for going out and doing content and then selling the items that they find in the wild. Much of why I never really engaged with the Auction House market in World of Warcraft, is that it felt like it was stacked against the folks going out and doing the content.

Anyways I’ve made my peace with the system. I’ve tried to release content both in written and video form in an attempt to demystify it. There will still be folks who want nothing to do with the system, and at least among my circle of friends I am always willing to interact with trade for them when they are looking for something specific. Last league, I had a bag slot that had currency belonging to Thalen for example, and when he wanted something he would just send me the trade site link and I would snatch it up for him. I’ve reached the point where I am comfortable enough navigating the system that I don’t mind doing it for others. I’ve yet to touch the bulk trading options like TFT, but at some point, I could see myself dipping my toes into that market for no reason other than to get rid of some of my vault clutter. That said I keep buying new tabs in the guild bank so I can start sharing excess things like maps, because after a point I am generating them faster than I can run them.

Anyways! I doubt All-Trades Jack will ever read this… but I figured I would at least share my thoughts on the matter.

Blaugust is Thriving

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Good Morning Folks! Today is the very first day of Blaugust 2023. I had some concerns going into this year, to be honest, because so much of this event spread through the use of Twitter as a platform. This year represents the first Blaugust when I am actively avoiding that platform, so I was a bit concerned if things would coalesce in the same manner as they have in past years. That said I was also excited to see what a Mastodon/Fediverse Blaugust would end up looking like. I know when I stopped syndicating to Twitter, I didn’t really see much drop in readership and in fact, I saw way more engagement from the Fediverse community as a whole. Just to add more things into the mix, this is the tenth year of Blaugust so I wanted this year to feel vibrant and alive.

At the time of writing this post, we have over eighty participant blogs. Knowing that there will be folks that sign up during the process, I think this year might be our most active yet. What has been super interesting is how many of the usual suspects have returned, while also the Fediverse has served as a hotbed for drawing new folks into the fold. I have been so proud of how this event has spread into new corners of the internet. It doesn’t necessarily shock me, because while I am following a bunch of folks that I knew on Twitter as they have moved to the Fediverse, I have also branched out and met a ton of awesome people that for some reason our paths never really crossed before now. So I think the thing I am most proud of is how many first-time Blaugustans we have:

    At the time of writing this post, we have THIRTY-FIVE folks who have never participated with their blog in a Blaugust event before. That feels massive. I am legitimately uncertain if we have ever had that many first-timers before apart from of course the very first year. Many of these folks are not necessarily first-time bloggers mind you, but again for whatever reason our paths never crossed before the break up of Twitter. I thought decoupling ourselves from Twitter might have harmed the event, but everyone spreading out to different platforms of choice… seems to have actually spread the concept considerably.

    The last decade of Blaugust has been littered with many “why didn’t I do that sooner” moments. This year’s version of this is the fact that never in the past have I ever created a dedicated account for Blaugust. The timing is purely selfish because I am now helping to Admin Gamepad.club, it was very easy for me to just set up an account there. The theory being I could use it to boost all of the posts that use the hashtag, and then keep my own account as something a bit less spammy. I should have done this years ago on Twitter because it is really nice to have a single account that is focused on the event rather than having things get lost in the mix of my random posts. While not everyone uses Mastodon or the Fediverse in general, it does give me a relatively nice way to keep an easily consumable thread that is entirely focused on Blaugust content.

    It has had the unintended consequence of prompting a number of folks to either set up brand new accounts on Gamepad or migrate there. Which admittedly is cool and only serves to make our local feed a bit richer, but is more a side benefit rather than the goal. For the folks that call BlueSky their home, I have also created a Blaugust Posts feed that is published through Skyfeed and should allow you to keep tabs on any posts that are made over there. Since accounts are at a premium on that network, I figured it was probably a bit wasteful to set up what is effectively a Blaugust bot over there. The folks who are still syndicating to Twitter can always be found at the #Blaugust2023 hashtag as well. Threads is unfortunately a bit wonky and does not appear to have functional hashtags so I have no clue how any of the stuff on that platform functions, though I am sure folks will be syndicating there as well.

    The Blaugust Discord has also seen a flurry of activity as new folks sign up and join in the conversation. This was still one of the best decisions made in the past, to branch out and start a Discord to support the event. What it has done more than anything is kept the spirit of the event alive all year round. While I often struggle to keep up with Discord, I view it as an invaluable part of this process because it allows for some side discussions to take place that maybe don’t quite elevate to the level of actually writing a proper blog post. It also serves as a platform to ask questions and address concerns. Legitimately when I started this madness a decade ago, I never thought it would turn into this thriving community. I want to thank everyone who has ever participated in this event in the past because you have become part of this great tapestry.

    Lastly… August 1st is a pretty special date for me independent of Blaugust. Twenty-Five years ago today I married my spouse, who has hosted her own version of Blaugust for many years in the Math Blogosphere. It floors me that we’ve been together Twenty-Seven years and married Twenty-Five of those. As a result of the anniversary, I may not be paying super attention to Blaugust happenings today, but thankfully I have built this machine that sort of runs itself. Huge thanks to all of the Mentors who have always been more than happy enough to step in when I am not paying attention. Thanks to everyone for keeping this event alive, and I wish you all a happy and productive Blaugust!

    Coffin Dude Get

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    Good Morning Friends! Whelp I took a bit of a gamble and it paid off. I was running out of time to get Luocha with the new banner arriving soon. To be honest… I don’t really love this character but after playing with him… he is freaking broken as far as healers go and I needed a second healer. So I spent $30 in additional pulls and managed to luck out and get him. I had hit pity off free pulls at the beginning of his banner only to get a different 5-Star champion, so I was hoping that would not happen again. Now I can rest on my laurels and gather up pull currency because Blade is next up, and I don’t need him at all. My hope is to be able to gather up a stockpile and take a run at Kafka when her banner opens.

    I’m really looking forward to the next patch dropping because it looks like we might be finishing up the Luofu story arc with another big boss fight. I am not super enthralled with “Space China”, and am very happy to be leaving it behind. What I am probably looking forward to the most… is a new boss theme because both the Herta Station and Jarillo-VI boss fights are absolute bangers. It will be interesting to see what themes they choose to go with for this boss theme. I’m also looking forward to some of the events that are going to be happening. The museum event essentially proved to me that this team can do some really interesting stuff with mini-events. If my information is correct, this should drop tomorrow, which may or may not actually be “tonight” my time.

    In Blaugust news, the other day I did this dumb image showing off the ten different logos we’ve had over the years. So far the whole Vaporwave/Arcade/Yearbook thing I have going on this year seems to generally be better received than my Stranger-Things-inspired look last year. Truth be told… I don’t really consult anyone when I start crafting the yearly nonsense. Maybe I should, but honestly… this has always sorta been my thing and I am shocked as fuck that anyone follows along. One thing that is a bit different this year from previous years is that I have taken over the generation of the OPML file to make importing into an RSS reader a bit easier. My long-term goal is to automate this, but for the time being I am doing some dumb stuff with Google Sheets and =CONCATENATE().

    We still have fourteen days until the official beginning of Blaugust, and each day more sign-ups are flowing in. I sorta regret the way the event is falling with me being in training all day every day this week. Normally speaking I would be a bit more active on social media to keep the interest levels high. However I just can’t really do that, and after not “peopling” for the last three years… by the time I get out of training, I am just drained. I didn’t even do anything resembling coherent gameplay last night as I bounced from one game to another. I am pumped however that regardless of my lack of support this week we are already sitting at 38 sign-ups as of the time of this posting. Given that we always have a number of “buzzer beaters”, and even some folks who decide to start after it is already in progress… I have a feeling this is going to be a rather “lorge” year.

    There is still plenty of time to sign-up and add your blog, and no shade at “buzzer beaters”… because I habitually am one. I’ve seen a lot of new traction on Discord which is really nice as well. I feel bad that I am not active this week, but I hope to make up for it next week when my life begins to shift back to normal. I’m really looking forward to this Blaugust because even if no one else signed up… we already have an interesting mix of new people interested in our yearly nonsense. Still not sure how many of these morning posts I will be able to knock out this week, but I am going to try and get as many of them as I can before exhaustion claims me. It does not help that Gracie was an asshole and started screaming at the top of her lungs at around 10 pm… and finally got locked out of the bedroom around 1 am.

    I hope yall are having a most excellent week though! Unfortunately, since I have to pass three certification exams by the end of the week… it isn’t like I can do my trick of just disassociating until I am on the other side of the frustrating thing that I don’t want to deal with. I need to soak up knowledge so I can regurgitate it back on an exam.