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Rogue Tanks

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Yesterday another big update happened to Destiny 2 that added Masterwork level weapons.  These are special versions of the existing legendaries that include a single stat boost and the ability for the weapon to generate orbs of light.  In theory these can come from anything that rewards legendaries already, but after spending down my stock of tokens I did not actually see any.  Granted I have not actually started doing my weekly powerful engram grind activities, so I might wind up with one through that system.  That said I think the more important update is the fact that every vendor sells a full set of their unique set of armor that unlocks as you turn in packages.  Additionally they have one weapon for sale that is available for a combination of legendary shards and faction tokens.  This means that eventually there will be a week where Lord Shaxx sells the Better Devils or Zavala here sells the Curtain Call.  Basically this is another way of mitigating bad luck in the RNG systems, and I for one am super happy to see it.  I love package loot but it can be frustrating when you keep turning them in and never get the item you are actually after.  Additionally this can generate buzz for players to go back into the game when there is a week with a really great item up for sale.

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Unfortunately I did not spend much time in Destiny 2 last night because I started the evening in World of Warcraft.  By the time I finished doing the few World Quests that had interesting rewards my friend Cuppy popped online and we decided to run a bunch of heroics together.  Heroics always felt easier than they probably should be, but at the way the power levels are now…  they are insanely easy.  For the first Heroic we opted to run Eye of Azshara where a rogue ran off from the group and solo’d more content than the rest of us managed to kill.  He killed the first boss before we could even get to it.  In the second dungeon I am pretty sure it look less than five minutes to do a full clear, and by the time we finally landed on Blackrook and Darkheart Thicket…  we got something resembling a reasonable group and still had zero issue pulling multiple packs and burning things down.  It was one insanely fun night and once again…  zero drama.  All of the groups were chill and once I figured out I had to use /I instead of /P we actually had a lot of people responding and being rather friendly. I guess I need to run some content Alliance side to see if this really is a difference between the factions or if everyone has just reached a point where they are no longer asshats?  Additionally as is usually the case with my blog… as soon as I complain about something karma steps in to invalidate my comments.  Last night I not only picked up a Trinket, but also got the rest of the relic slots that I had been missing.  As a result that takes my overall gear level to 874 which isn’t too shabby for dinging halfway through Sunday.

Patreon and Awards

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Just a fair warning…  this morning I am going to jump around between topics like mad because god knows why.

Game Awards

Since Xur no longer comes at a time when it is reasonable for me to post a blurb about him on Fridays, I am left without a clearly defined purpose for what I should be posting.  Last night was as I mentioned yesterday a bit odd because I wound up going with people to see The Disaster Artist.  I swear if that movie is not decorated with at least a few awards during the upcoming awards show season, it will be a complete travesty.  By the time I got home and settled in The Game Awards were already in full swing but I tuned in for the tail end… only to watch Horizon Zero Dawn get completely robbed by everything else and walk away I believe with zero awards.  We’ve talked about this problem a lot on AggroChat that 2017 was a year that just had too many amazing games.  This hurts from an awards prospect but also from a financial prospect given that each player has a finite amount of money to spend on gaming and probably couldn’t do ALL of them in the same year.  I know personally there are a bunch of games that I picked up but have not actually started, in part because I wanted to assist the financial success of the title…  but have lacked the time to devote to them.  Ultimately that is the real tragedy of this year as far as gaming goes…  we had too many awesome things to play and not nearly enough time to play them.

As far as games that were shown off…  Death Stranding still seems completely incomprehensible.  At this point we have seen three trailers and none of them really help to flesh out what the hell is going on…  something to do with naked Norman Reedus, creepy Babies, and the alien black oil from X-Files.  New game that is now on my Radar that I didn’t know about before…  is Witchfire which unfortunately is getting labelled soulsian because everything apparently has to be soulsian now?  It name checks Painkiller in the trailer and that is precisely what it reminded me of.  I can only hope that it also has the same sort of gameplay as Painkiller did, because that game did something unique that shooters just don’t do.  You would have a flurry of activity and mindless mayhem…  and then a moment of calm until you moved up to the next area through a tangible series of gates.  Another thing that people seem to be super excited about is Bayonetta 1, 2 and ultimately 3 coming to the Switch.  I’ve never played a Bayonetta game nor really know anything about them other than the main character being nonsense and not exactly the sort of character that draws me in personally.  Perhaps in the near future I should change this and try out the series especially now that it is available on the PC.

Patreon

Another thing I sort of wanted to talk about is the Patreon change.  Ultimately I get the why of how they ended up going down this avenue, and I am sure someone thought this was a hugely positive change.  From the aspect of supporting a creator it absolutely is because they will wind up getting more of the face value of your donation.  However messaging wise and the feeling right now that everyone is attempting to nickel and dime us with micro-transactions…  there is a lot of push back happening.  Functionally there are two truths about online payments…  firstly that the processing company is going to take a transactional chunk of every fee.  This has nothing to with Patreon and everything to do with them needing to offset the liability of handling financial transactions to a third party company that does literally nothing but this.  Its nothing new to Patreon and just the way online payments work, so that is part one that is becoming transparent now and the cost is being passed on to the supporter instead of being taken out of the creators cut.  The second piece is that every online service needs to charge something for their time in order to support the growth of the platform and the employees that the company needs in order to keep things up and running so to speak.  Once again this was a feel that used to be obfuscated to the donors and just taken out on the back end from the money paid to the creator.  So ultimately more of your money goes to the creators…  but it also means that you are having to pay more money out of your pocket.  I think of this along the same lines as that ever present $2-3 ATM fee that you just sorta grit your teeth and deal with because if you could actually get to a bank during the painfully limited operating window you would instead of harassing a machine in the back corner of a convenience store.

The problem is that we are wired to think of things in certain patterns and it was very clean to say that you wanted to give a dollar a month to support someone.  It felt like you were helping but at the same time felt like such a minuscule amount  of money that you would never end up missing it.  When you start tacking additional cents onto the end of that for some reason it feels like more…  even though once again it is still a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things.  However it gives you just enough pause to think about the transaction instead of handing off your dollar happily in the process.  Now the positive is as far as I understand it… these fees are for the transaction itself…  not for the individual donation.  So if you give a dollar a month to a dozen people…  then you get a single transactional charge on your $12 instead of a bunch of individual fees because Patreon is extracting all of that funding from your account at the same time.  You still end up having to pay a cut to Patreon but giving more than one donation at once tends to blunt the blow…  which is ultimately what their advisement was trying to say.  However it was worded so poorly to make it sound like they were ultimately going to phase out the $1 donations.  I got what they were saying… but I also got that the way they were saying it felt shitty.  As a result I seeing a report of a mass exodus of those $1 supporters that end up slowly adding up to a lot of money for several folks.

I have a mixed relationship with Patreon because I waffle back and forth regarding what I think about it.  There are times where I think it is this great business model and ultimately helps fill the gap between the other monetization vehicles that are available for independent creators out there.  There are times I feel like it is the equivalent of internet panhandling and lump it in with all of the insane gofundme campaigns you end up seeing.  All of the time it really depends on whether or not I value what is being created…  and as a result I try really hard to keep that second reaction in check as a result because I realize my personal preference should not be dictated to everyone.  I’ve even kicked around the notion of starting a Patreon myself, but always stop short of doing so because is it really worth the effort?  I do not realistically believe that I could ever do “this” for a living, because I am too used to the stable salary of a developer and manager.  However there are times I think that it would be amazing for all of this to fund itself…  that the blog and podcast and all of the expenses that go with it could somehow make enough money to be “fiscally neutral”.  The problem is the second you enter into any sort of additional money coming in separate from your traditional W-2 employer process…  you are setting yourself up for a world of Tax time hassle.  Right now I figure I would maybe get three to five dollars a month pledged because folks did so out of some weird sense of obligation and then for that extra $50-60 a year it would cause me more headache than it would be worth.  I used to do a significant amount of 1099 contract development work and at that point I had a whole system of extra bank accounts to handle filtering off what I thought would be my tax liability and keeping it out of the main stream of money so I simply forgot about it being there until Tax time.  That is not a world I am willing to enter back into lightly.  So as a result there is still no “Aggronaut” themed Patreon, nor is there any monetization turned on with YouTube…  because in both cases it crosses a line that is hard to uncross.

MMO Blogging Dead?

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One of the things I have failed miserably at lately is keeping up with my blog feed.  During the heyday of Google Reader I was a voracious consumer of gaming blogs of all stripe, and regularly read through everything in my backlog of posts.  Stuff happened and my attempt to expand my horizons when I was writing a column on the blogosphere saw my feed ballooning to some 700 sites…  a good number of them posting about things that never really interested me on a personal level.  As a result I find myself spending less time reading blog posts and tend to catch up in a flurry of reading on the weekends.  That said I did end up doing a strafing run on Feedly yesterday afternoon and stumbled across a post from Tobold posing the question of whether or not the MMO Blogosphere is still alive.  The short answer is yes, the community is still very much alive.  The long answer however is a lot more complicated.  While there are still a ton of active people that I see when I catch up on my feed, there are also a lot of names and faces that I have not really seen much from in years.  There has been a changing of the guards and I feel like maybe I have done a poor job of catching up with who is leaving the community and who is brand new.  Additionally the “community” aspect is a little on the ropes.  We didn’t have a Newbie Blogger Initiative this year nor did I do anything with Blaugust…  two previously big events that pulled people in.  We barely had a Developer Appreciate Week… and only then because Ravalation was determined to make sure it happened.  I’ve personally failed miserably this year at attempting any sort of outreach into the community because 2017 has been a time when literally all I can seem to manage to do is attempt to keep one foot moving in front of the other.

The other big change I have noticed is we no longer have the big MMORPG game looming on the horizon that we are all interested in playing.  The community as a whole is way more fragmented in their tastes.  In the run up to World of Warcraft expansions, Star Wars the Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, Wildstar or even as far back as Warhammer Online there was a community upsurge of blog sites that sprung up as players attempted to mitigate their hype levels by pouring that excess energy into post form.  That is just a thing that doesn’t really happen these days as the traditional MMORPG outside of South Korean doesn’t appear to be a viable business model that big studios are really releasing these days.  Instead we have the MMO-lite games that have some online interaction capabilities like The Division or Destiny but lack some of the rich imaginative landscape that us bloggers used to feast upon.  Essentially when we started playing MMORPGs it was a novel concept and gave us a sort of interaction that we could not get in any other game.  Now that same concept of being online and playing with a bunch of your friends while working on some long term achievement is no longer really something special… and instead describes almost all of the games on the market right now.  Almost every game has RP elements that allow you to customize or build your character, and almost every game now has an online presence often with some sort of persistent progression system.  MMORPGs no longer really offer something unique that you cannot get in dozens of other places…  that also don’t require the level of community to support them.  The games have changed and with that the amount of effort and time they ask of us… or at the very least the sort of skills that they require.  While I can wax philosophically about the differences between two guns and the way they fire in Destiny 2…  that isn’t exactly something more players even care about.

Lastly I think the players and their habits have changed.  When I started playing Destiny at launch back in 2014, one of my big frustrations was how there were no blogs really dedicated to the game.  Instead that community exists as a combination of Reddit posts and YouTube videos that you then need to somehow knit together to get an overarching picture of what is actually happening.  I wish I could say that this phenomena is unique to Destiny, but it seems more often than not the newer games don’t really have much in the way of a blogosphere presence.  In some ways I think we are aging out of blogs being a relevant experience.  While I have never actually had the “thousands of vistors per day” that Tobold talks about in his post unless some major news site picks up one of my posts…  I’ve had a steady trickle that has stayed pretty stable through the almost nine years I have been blogging.  In honesty my daily readership comes and goes based on what I happen to be posting about.  Each time on get on a Destiny bender, the folks who just do not care about that tend to disappear.  When I pick back up a game they are interested in…  they tend to come back.  Most of our blogs were started during the most fertile period of MMORPG releases to exist… and with that ground turning fallow we are left to turn to other interests.  My blog started as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog…  with a super narrow focus and over the years has shifted over and over again until finally I don’t really have a “format”.  This blog is me and my ramblings and if you aren’t interested in that you aren’t likely going to be here very long.  I’ve seen many other bloggers shifting to the same sort of thing, and while I personally care about their lives and their opinions…  it makes our blogs harder to digest for those who have not been along for the full journey.

Thankfulness

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I have this horrible habit of starting things and then just letting them sorta die.  One of those things was the whole “Month of Thankfulness” that I did back in 2014.  The idea was simple enough and it effectively meant that at the bottom of every post I made a little note about something I was thankful for.  In theory I should have been doing this every year since during the month of November leading up to Thanksgiving.  That however never actually happened and I finally jog my memory about a week into the month and think to myself that if I didn’t actually start on time… then it isn’t really worth doing.  That is not to say that I am not extremely thankful for a bunch of things in my life.  The weird thing about depression is that your brain can contain all of this self loathing at the same time as a whole lot of gratitude towards other people.  However the hell this works I figured that I would make a post on thankfulness on this Thanksgiving Eve here in the USA before I troddle off to work.  In theory I should have taken today off but my work schedule has been crazy.

My Wife

I feel like I can’t really start off a post like this without taking some time to acknowledge how awesome my wife is.  We are an odd pair that on paper doesn’t seem to work that well given that we are both into some very different things.  However her strengths are my weaknesses and as a team we compliment each other in so many ways.  Each of us is stronger as part of the whole than we are individually.  More than that she “gets” me, and even though she doesn’t necessarily get any of the many things that I am super obsessive about…  she understands that they are important to me and as a result supports them.  She isn’t a “gamer”, even though she spends plenty of time playing games on her iPad or phone but gets that all of these related hobbies are at the core of my being.  She has patiently dealt with so many “just a second” moments that turned into thirty to forty minutes and generally taken it in stride.  For the last few years she has sacrificed several of her very limited stock of yearly personal days, just to travel with me to San Antonio for Pax South because she knows it is a big deal to me.  It is impossible to grab words that do justice out of the air how awesome she is and how much I love her.  I am thankful I met her so many years ago and exceedingly thankful for the last twenty one years.

AggroChat

In truth it is less about the AggroChat podcast and more a short hand for a very tight knit inner circle of friends that also happens to involve all of the members of the podcast.  I have this habit of collecting people and over the years much like a hermit crab I have taken a shell encrusted with so many awesome friends along with me on my journey through life.  We often talk about having a surrogate family through our online interactions, but in this case I legitimately mean it.  These people are my family and fate willing will grow old with as we talk on a daily basis about all sorts of important and completely frivolous topics.  Its been weird to watch how this dynamic has shifted and changed as we all aged from being largely a group of people who met during vanilla warcraft progression raiding, and then saw that relationship morph into something else as time moved on.  Others are significantly newer but no less precious, and even though I occasionally go into turtle mode…  and disappear for awhile, I always make a return when it is safe to poke my head out of my shell.  These are my people and I am so happy I found them.

Twitter

Twitter can be a horrible place, and in this year of presidential proclamations occurring in 140 characters…  it seems odd to be thankful for it as a medium.  The thing is…  “my” twitter is a different place and while I see the echos of the larger events going on around me… it is largely the eye of the hurricane filled with a bunch of people who are also taking shelter there.  I originally started my twitter account around the release of this blog back in 2009 and in many ways the original intent was to have a way to communicate with the other bloggers.  We’ve tried so many different platforms to carve out a sense of community, but the only one that continues to stand after shrugging off so many is twitter.  It is that common ground that still contains all of the voices that I want to keep track of on a regular basis.  There are so many people that are so much better at doing this thing than I am, and I love being surrounded by them.  Lately though I go for periods where I just lurk, followed by a bunch of random commentary and I am sure this gets annoying at times.  So additionally I am thankful to all of the people who tolerate my nonsense in this already cluttered medium.  If we are “mutuals” this thanks goes out to you because you make my life richer because of your interactions.

Work

I talk sometimes about how stressful my work is, and it absolutely is there is no discounting that fact.  That said I have some pretty awesome people that I work with on a daily basis and I could not keep doing what I do without them.  While this year saw some significant changes in many directions and saw Rae who previously was on the AggroChat podcast finding another gig…  the folks that remain are pure gold.  We do this performance review process each year, and yesterday I met with each of my direct reports as I completed theirs.  I was struck by just how lucky I am to work with the people that I do.  I’ve always been great at compartmentalizing when it comes to work, and so long as my little silo was doing okay…  I could deal with the rest of the ship being torn to bits.  I have a really great silo to keep my eyes focused on from my upper management all the way to my staff, and especially the various peers that I work with on a daily basis.  There is a sense of dedication to getting things done whatever it takes and I appreciate that, especially when I am going into the first holiday season in a really long time that I have not taken any significant time off for.  Camaraderie through shared struggle is a powerful force and I am thankful for those who fight for me as I fight for them.

My Readers

At this point there are so many things that I should be putting on this list, but I wanted to keep it fairly brief.  I do however want to close out with one more bit of thankfulness.  I am thankful for each and every one of you out there that regularly or just occasionally reads this blog or consumes anything else that I toss out into the world.  For me my blog is as much therapy as it is anything else.  Sitting down each morning and siphoning thoughts from my brain and committing them into text format helps me clear the slate.  If something was bothering me it often makes its way onto the virtual page and as a result I can begin the “getting over it” process.  I often times write like I am not actually talking to anyone other than myself, and as a result I am always sorta shocked when I find out that someone actually read the words that I cast into the void.  Please do not mistake this shock for a lack of gratitude, but instead it is surprise that anything I said was really worth consuming in the first place.  There are so many of you who have been with me in this journey for years, and I don’t always take the time to recognize the other people standing on the deck of this ship beside me.  Thank you so much and lets commence with the exploration of new and interesting worlds!