Just Wait it Gets Good

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There will be some potential Guild Wars 2 story spoilers in this post so be warned.

Hey Folks! I have been busy this week with work and finishing up all of the assets so that I could make the Blaugust 2023 announcement yesterday. When it comes to gaming, I have mostly been focused on catching up with my Ranger with the story content in Guild Wars 2 and preparing them for the expansion drop in late August. When last I talked about my replay experience I was wrapping up Lake Doric and diving both literally and figuratively into Draconis Mons. This segment of Living World Season 3 features both my favorite and least favorite aspect of this sequence and I thankfully remembered to unbind my ground targeting before doing so. This area contains the quest where you are flying around and having to bomb things on the ground… which can’t actually be targeted directly. Funnily enough, I encountered the exact same game-breaking bug on the final sequence of this area… which required me to die in order to reset something so that I could finally finish up.

From there I continued onwards into Siren’s Landing… which means back to Orr and dealing with a large number of Risen again. One of the things that has to be stated… having a Skyscale makes all of this content so much easier. I remember that Siren’s Landing was a major pain in the ass to navigate with only a glider. I think this was honestly part of the zone design, making you rely on air currents in order to get to all of the areas of the map. With a Skyscale however, I have an easy button… and the entirety of this zone was pretty quick to progress through.

Finishing Siren’s Landing also meant finishing Living World Season 3… which of course treated me to more amazing cutscenes. Something was lost when Arena Net stopped doing cutscenes in this weird dream sequence thing that they have going on. More recently they have been doing game engine cutscenes and they are fine… and honestly have more room for emotion. However, I will always find the way the visuals in these older cutscenes looked special. They match the amazingly evocative zone loading screen artwork far better. The big reveal from finishing Season 3… is the fact that we are going to the Crystal Desert and Elona… meaning of course it is time for Path of Fire.

I feel like I need to acknowledge something after having played through the content once before (some of it more than once) and now seeing it all laid out in its proper sequence. Living World Season 3 is really when this game gets good. Living World Season 1, especially in its modern incarnation taking lessons learned from years of creating content… is pretty great. The base game story and living world season 2… are not. They are fine but feel like something you suffer through to get to the good parts. Living World Season 3, and Path of Fire… are when the good parts begin. Path of Fire is just so freaking well crafted that I had to stop and marvel at that fact the other night as I begin questing through the Crystal Desert proper.

The sad thing is that once again… we are asking folks to push through a few hundred hours’ worth of content to get to the good part. This seems to be the curse of MMORPGs and we tell our friends “Just wait, it gets really good” and mean it in earnest. I’ve uttered this before talking about getting to the “good” World of Warcraft expansions or showering my friends with just how amazing the story gets in Final Fantasy XIV once you get to Shadowbringers. Unfortunately… I think few players actually get past the awkward cruft that was created while the game was finding itself… to actually push through to greatness. Don’t get me wrong… there are great moments in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Core Tyria, and with the massive zone-wide Meta events in Heart of Thorns… but the story itself doesn’t really get good until Living World Season 2.

This happens so often with MMORPGs that they have to find their footing and determine what the cadence of content releases and style of storytelling is going to look like. In Core, LW1, LW2, and HOT… Guild Wars 2 has this huge problem of either not giving us enough time with a figure in opposition to us to care bout them… or resolving that conflict in some deeply unsatisfying way. Scarlet was a cool baddie, but it feels like we never really got to know her well enough before we ultimately took her down. She felt more like a Villain of the week… and then the game spent precious time in Living World Season 2… trying to make us care about her postmortem. The death of Zhaitan and Mordremoth both felt insignificant in scope based on the great existential threat that they were narratively told to us to be. It isn’t really until Balthazar that we get a baddie with both narrative weight AND mechanical gravitas.

Everything that is to come in this play through of the Ranger is fresh enough in my memory, to know without a doubt that Living World Season 3 is the turning point for Guild Wars 2. Sure the second half of Icebrood Saga, aka the misnamed Living World Season 5, is awful. There are reasons for that… due to the direction, the studio was going at that time. However, no one can deny that they stuck the landing with the zone meta that wrapped up that expansion. End of Dragons felt a little short but was also amazing… introducing us to a whole slew of new characters that I now deeply care about and a central conflict that felt meaty. Living World Season 3 was the point the game got good from a narrative standpoint. Mechanical enjoyment… I didn’t really grok until 2017… and even then I am not sure if it was due to some change in the game or more that I finally understood the type of game Guild Wars 2 was.

Guild Wars 2 is the sort of game where you can absolutely jump around and do content out of order if you choose. So I find myself confronted with the question… should people just jump ahead to Living World Season 3 and be done with it? I don’t really know. I am not sure if LW3 is the point at which the game gets good because it is standing on all of the information that I now know about the game up to this point… or if the experience stands on its own independent of all of that information. Similarly, I am enjoying this replay of the game so much, in part because I know where we are going and how we get there having completed all of this content before one or more times. I will say though… having done all of the content effectively out of order in the past, seeing it laid out in the manner it was meant to be played does improve the entire experience.

So once again… I find myself in the position of being that stereotypical MMORPG player. I still feel like while it is rough around the edges… and downright hamfisted at times… the content from the first parts of the game is important to feeling like you care about the characters and setting. So I found myself again saying to a friend the other day “Just Wait, It Gets Good”. This is the core problem that we can’t seem to rid ourselves of when it comes to an MMORPG. Deleting content and removing it feels awful, but the more content that stacks up over time… the harder it is for anyone to ever feel like they have truly caught up. I’ve never read the Wheel of Time series, even though I know it is supposedly amazing… because I am staring down the barrel of fourteen core books. If we accept Living World seasons as what they truly are… full expansions to the game… a new player is staring down the barrel of the base game and eight expansions worth of content to really feel like they are up to date.

But… Just Wait… It Gets Good.

Blaugust 2023 is Coming

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Good Morning Friends! I have been looking forward to the start of Blaugust for most of this year. This is your yearly reminder that it is almost time for the yearly festival of blogging and other serialized content that I host. I think the most interesting thing about this year is going to be the fact that I am no longer really on Twitter. For a good number of bloggers, Twitter was a staple of our community, and many of us have migrated to Mastodon or other platforms over the last year. This means we have also met a whole slew of new folks during this process and hopefully can widen the reach of this whole event to a group of folks who have either never heard of it or have never participated in it. I am extremely excited to see how all of this shakes out.

What is Blaugust?

Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place in August each year that focused on blogging and other serialized content. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly. For years blogging has been dwindling, and in part, Blaugust was my attempt and reversing that course by compiling a bunch of veteran bloggers in one place and making it super easy to ask questions and get answers. The idea is that this festival of blogging can help reignite dwindling fires for the next year and give folks a sense of kinship as a result. Each year has taken slightly different forms and shifted to include more than just blogs, but the core mission is always the same. In this year of corporate internet staples seeming a little less sturdy, it is all the more important that each of us carve our own homes that we can call our own… that gives us a sense of permanence. No matter what happens on whatever platforms I am on… my blog remains.

Why Blaugust?

In April 2013, I made a decision that would ultimately dominate the fate of this blog for the last decade. I decided that I would force myself to write something and post it every single day. It wasn’t necessarily an easy challenge but for roughly three years I posted something every single day without pause. This forced me to get over some of the self-doubt that had kept me mired for years. I started this blog in 2009, but would often go upwards of six months without a single post. Each time I would lapse… it felt like I had to do something really special when I started blogging again or at least apologize for my absence as though there was some imaginary person out there disappointed in me. Forcing myself to “just hit publish” got me past a lot of those hangups and now I can bang out a post in my sleep… and often do consider I write around 6 am each morning. Blaugust came about originally because I wanted to share this revelation with other bloggers, that forcing yourself to write something every day can be liberating.

So I hatched the idea that if I challenged folks to make 31 posts during the month of August, and called it Blaugust… it might help others get over their own fear by immersing them in a pseudo-competition. The thing is… I learned that this maybe wasn’t the brightest idea in the world. For some folks writing 31 posts is a rather daunting feat and failing to accomplish it was just one more setback in a line of setbacks that were keeping them from blogging. So nowadays the original concept is still there, but mostly I just want folks participating to focus on “blogging more” not necessarily conforming to some mad schedule I devised. After three years of daily blogging… I needed a break and eventually landed on the schedule that I have now of trying to knock out a post every single weekday. Even then there will be times when I give myself a pass because I am just not feeling it… but the key is to get back on the schedule as soon as you can.

The Original Challenge

Blaugust at its heart has always been about celebrating the creation of content on a regular schedule. The original challenge was to post 31 times during the month of August which is 31 days long. This can be posting every day or doubling up on some days to make the schedule a bit easier. However, we also want to award anyone who starts down this path, because deciding to blog in the first place is a victory in itself. As such we give out awards based on the number of posts that you manage to knock out during the month of August. Again the idea is to spark creativity and get folks to create more content, not necessarily grinding them to dust on the millstone of some lofty goal. Here are the guidelines for each of the awards that we give out as part of this original challenge:

  • Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You joined Blaugust for the very first time and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result, we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.
  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the original challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2023.

The Expansion Packs

Last year we introduced something that I call “Blaugchievements”. This essentially encapsulates all of the half-baked ideas I had over the years into a single series of game-like achievements that you can earn. These should all be considered entirely optional and will be considered on the “honor system”. There is no realistic way that I can track these without killing myself during the month of August, so if you tell me you earned one of these… it is good enough for me. Over the years I have introduced themed weeks, prompt lists, and all manner of nonsense, and Blaugchievements are a great way of sort of neatly tying those all together.

Originally I was going for a whole “Xbox Live” achievement toast thing and made them somewhat generic so I never had to redo them again. Then unfortunately this year I got on this whole visual theme kick and decided to redo all of them… which means going forward this is probably going to be another thing that changes each year along with the logo and assorted branding. You can view the full list of this year’s Blaugchievements here, but below is a quick rundown of the short version.

  • Reading the Manual – Read the introductory blog post with the rules of the event.
  • Joining the Cause – Sign-Up for Blaugust.
  • Recruit a Friend – Convince another blogger to participate in Blaugust.
  • Spreading the Madness – Promote Blaugust on your blog or through your social media of choice.
  • Friend of Wumpus – Join the Blaugust Discord.
  • Sharing is Caring – Post your content in the “Share Your Content” Channel.
  • Forum of Friends – Take part in a discussion on the “Post Discussion” Channel.
  • The Pet Tax – Post a picture of an animal friend on the “Stuff and Things” Channel or create a blog post about them.
  • Friend Like Me – Answer a question posted on the Blagust Discord or help out a new blogger.
  • Shared Thoughts – Comment on a blog post from another Blaugust participant.
  • Federation of Bloggers – Sign up for a Fediverse account and follow the official Blaugust account.
  • Getting Inspired – Write a blog post inspired by a post from another Blaugust participant.
  • Pickup Group – Play a game or take part in an activity with one or more Blaugust participants.
  • Hot Topics – Write a blog post based on the Blaugust Prompt List.
  • Welcome Wagon – Write a blog post based on the first week’s theme of Welcoming Folks to Blaugust.
  • Introduce Yourself – Write a blog post based on the second week’s theme of Introducing Yourself.
  • Creative Appreciation – Write a blog post based on the third week’s theme Appreciating the works of some Creative or Company.
  • Staying Motivated – Write a blog post based on the fourth week’s theme of how you have managed to Stay Motivated.
  • Lessons Learned – Write a blog post based on the fifth week’s theme explaining some of the Lessons you have Learned through Blaugust.
  • Going Platinum – Complete All of the Blaugchievements for Blaugust 2023.

The Event Calendar

One of the things we have had during several of the Blaugust events is a calendar of themed weeks. This should be considered completely optional but is there only to serve as a loose scaffolding for anyone struggling to find something to write about. August usually has Five Weeks and as a result, we have five different themes. Again no one should feel under any obligation if they do choose to write about the themes, to actually make an entire week’s worth of posts. Here is this year’s event calendar:

Here is a quick rundown of the idea behind each of the themed weeks:

  • Welcome to Blaugust Week (August 1st – August 5th) – The idea behind this week is to give a specific time to be actively talking about Blaugust and welcoming new members to the fold. This could also count as promoting Blaugust for the “Spreading the Madness” achievement. The hope is that drumming up some heavy activity of talking about the event might allow us to pick up a few more stragglers.
  • Introduce Yourself Week (August 6th – August 12th) – The idea behind this week is to have some structured time around getting to know the other bloggers. I realize that those of us who are veteran bloggers might have already written half a dozen introduction posts by now, but it is a great time to share anything interesting you might have in your arsenal.
  • Creator Appreciation Week (August 13th – August 19th) – Developer Appreciation Week or the D.A.W. was an event that took place in the blogging community independent from Blaugust but eventually died out. The more modern idea is to show appreciation for the things and creators that we love. This could be authors, musicians, developers, artists, or even other bloggers, with the focus being on sharing something that we love so that maybe others might appreciate it as well.
  • Staying Motivated Week (August 20th – August 26th) – As we get towards the end of the event, the activity can often trail off a bit. The goal of this week is to share some of your own tips surrounding how you keep motivated and stay focused on creating content. If you are new to the event, you might share some of the things that have helped you stay engaged during Blaugust.
  • Lessons Learned Week (August 27th – August 31st) – This week is a reminder that the goal of Blaugust is to refresh the content creators out there for the coming year, and not to burn them out in the process. Some folks are going to cross the finish line and immediately go dormant and others will want to process their thoughts about the proceedings. This space is reserved as a bit of a cooldown lap so that you can share your own experiences.

The Prompt List

In 2020 we tried something a little different. Due to folks needing something to focus on other than the constant frustration and stress of lockdown… we ran our normal Blaugust event in April of that year… and called it Blapril. By the time August rolled around, none of us were really ready to do a fully Blaugust event… but I had enough of a request from the community to do something. As a result, I tried this ill-fated idea of a blog posting webring of a sort called “Promptapalooza”. It failed miserably, largely because the concept was not super easy to grasp and my explanation of it… was lacking. What it did give us however is a really nice list of writing prompts. So as a result there is no reason not to keep using these. Again this is considered part of the optional content but serves as a well of ideas for when your creativity might be running low.

The Recap

That my friend is Blaugust and in a few weeks we will be starting the whole proceedings. I thought maybe I was a little late in getting the information out there, but it seems like last year I made this post on the 15th so I’m potentially a bit early. As is my tradition, I am closing the post with a bit of a “too long didn’t read” recap that hopefully serves as a “call to action”.

  • The Sign-Up Form for Blaugust 2023 can be found here. Since logging in with a Google account has been a source of consternation for some, I have removed that functionality. If you still cannot for whatever reason sign-up but want to participate please let me know. Only those that I am tracking will be assigned awards.
  • The invite link to the Blaugust Discord can be found here. Participation in Discord is entirely optional but also a great way to bounce ideas off the existing community.
  • If you feel inclined to do so please use the hashtag #Blaugust2023 for tracking purposes and to make your content easier to find for those watching the proceedings.
    • We also highly suggest that you utilize the Share Your Content” channel in the official Discord.
  • This year we have an official Blaugust social media account over on Gamepad.Club a Fediverse/Mastodon server that I help admin. During the event, I will be watching the above hashtag and boosting all of the posts.
  • Mingle with the participants of Blaugust 2023. Get out and see the blogs, read the posts, and comment frequently! These folks represent a social structure that you can lean on for advice in the coming years. I deeply value the ties I have made with other bloggers and started this process as an attempt to cement those and build new ones.
  • If you are so inclined there is a “Gaming Together” channel on Discord for those impromptu grouping activities. I believe there was even some discussion of doing a one-shot D&D adventure this year.
  • If you find yourself getting stuck at any point feel free to rely on the weekly schedule or the prompt list for inspiration or you can hop on Discord and talk through your issues.
  • You can also check out the new Blaugchievements list for anything that might spark your creativity and check one of those off.
  • Welcome to Blaugust 2023. As always if you have any questions please feel free to ask. My door is always open but I might be slow to respond because I have a bad habit of idling on pretty much all the social platforms at once.
  • If you want an archive of all of the various logos and such from this year or past years of Blaugust, please check out the Blaugust Media Kit page.

Final Thoughts

Without you, Blaugust would just be a dumb word that Bel bashed together one year in his head. I feel like I also need to state that ALL of this is optional. You can sign up for Blaugust just because you want to feel like you are part of a community of bloggers, even if you don’t write a single post next month. The challenge exists in its original and expansion forms to add a bit of fun to the mix, but the real Blaugust is the friends we met along the way. As always if you have any questions about any of this… my comms are always open. Thanks for helping to make this nonsense memorable each and every year. Much love, and please… spread the reach of this event, because I love seeing new faces showing up each year.

Existential Dread

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Good morning friends. Every so often on my blog I have a post that I put zero effort into syndicating. This is going to be one of those posts. So if you are here and reading it… that likely means you are amongst my most loyal and devoted readers. In the before times I was your average mild-mannered aging fat software developer and manager, working out of a maze of cubes just like everyone else. My team has NEVER needed to be in an office to do our work, but we existed in a culture that placed a high premium on “butts in seats”. When the pandemic hit we were the first team to go fully remote, and as such acted as the canaries in the coal mine to vet how well it would work. The thing is… it worked amazingly well and at least in part due to some planning and heavy use of the Teams environment… we sort of set the pace for the other teams as they went remote. Now we scan forward and I’ve been working fully remotely for over three years at this point.

For a while, I tried to do a hybrid schedule of a few days in the office and the Lion’s share remote… but the days in the office were just giant wastes of time. I cannot really tell you when I last was in the office, but when I was it was for a very short in-person meeting before going right back to my home office. Next week however I am going to have to be present and in person for a training course that is only offered once a year. So that means I will be in a room with other humans from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday… and I have to admit I am terrified of this. It is summoning forth so much anxiety that I have begun having “Return to Office” nightmares very obviously sparked by it. This morning I woke up about an hour before the alarm was set to go off and just could not go back to sleep. My mind reeling with all sorts of minutiae that I was trying to figure out how to deal with.

The thing that is terrifying me the most… is knowing that I am going to have essentially all of my work peers in the same training class with me. They are all very extroverted folks and many of them have said more than once how much they miss being in the office, or how much they miss seeing me on the regular. The thing that terrifies me the most above everything else… is contemplating dealing with lunch. I know I will need to run away and hide by myself in order to calm down enough to confront the afternoon session. However once upon a time I was really good at masking my antisocial and introverted tendencies. I pretty regularly went out to lunch with coworkers, because it was the sort of thing that was expected. Working remotely for three years has caused me to jettison behaviors that were stressing me out all along… and I am terrified of what this week is going to do to me mentally.

The thing is… it will probably be fine. I do this thing where I make problems out to be way bigger than they are out of the anxiety of actually doing it. The hardest part about attending anything… is getting out the front door. When I am in the situation I tend to relax into the environment and go with the flow, but I know it is going to be way more stressful than it used to be because I am simply not adapted to it anymore. Truth be told I barely leave the freaking house. On the weekend we make a few trips out for supplies, but during the work week, the furthest I am out of the house is hanging out in the backyard with Greybie. I’m trying to tell my brain to calm down and that everything is going to be fine… but my anxiety is working everything up into a frenzy.

The other thing that is stressing me out is… normally next week would be the week I lock down everything into place for Blaugust but it is VERY unlikely that I will blog at all, given the tumultuous shift in my schedule. So I am trying to scurry around this week and make sure everything is finished because next week… is essentially going to be this void. I will come home from training every night and crash, and will likely be unable to summon cogent thoughts… let alone write something worth reading. Anyways… every so often I make one of these posts where I am brutally honest with my readers. I never syndicate them because it feels weird to let you all into my thought process, let alone publicly broadcast my weaknesses to the world.

My blog is often times therapeutic. There is something about writing things down that allows me to turn them over in my head and process them a bit better. Usually, when I make one of these posts I start to feel better almost immediately, and I am hoping that this time it has that effect as well. I shared a picture of Josie in part because I felt the need to do something to apologize for this giant wall of text. Also, I sort of wish I had her life because she does not give a fuck about anything most of the time. Anyways… I’ve wound down this little written panic attack for now. Tomorrow I will likely write about game things. Today however is devoted to existential dread.

All Over the Map

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Good Morning Friends! I was a bit all over the place when it came to gaming this weekend. I did not make nearly as much progress as I thought I would in Guild Wars 2. Essentially I wrapped up Bitterfrost Frontier and Lake Doric, which now plants me firmly in the middle of Draconis Mons. I have some bad memories of this section of Living World 3. Specifically I remember there was a quest chain where I had to change up my keybindings in order to get through it. By default I have an option turned on that makes my ground target effects center on whatever I happen to be targetting. This is super useful when it comes to not having to fiddle with aiming them. However there was a sequence I can remember when I was flying up in the air and having to target specific things on the ground which required me to turn this all off. So I will have to figure how HOW I do that… by the time I get to that part of the quest.

I am still playing a bit of Honkai Star Rail every day, and still slowly working on trying to get Coffin Guy aka Luocha. It is not necessarily that I even like him as a character, but I want access to a second healer. In my travels of trying to pull for him, I did manage to pick up Pela which is cool. I bonded with her as a character during the whole Museum event. Speaking of events there is a new one starting today that gives you double Calyx rewards. Like as far as events go it is boring… but it is a decent time to stock up on resources. Unfortunately only the first 12 Calyx battles count towards the double rewards, so I guess I know what I will be doing for the next few days at least… stockpiling resources.

One of the cool things about Mastodon in general is that it has a heavy indie dev presence. The other day the very awesome Megan Fox (the game dev one) was doing a thing where she was boosting indie devs that had less than 100 followers. One of these was Craig, who works on a game that recently hit early access on Steam called Trinity Fusion. So I picked it up and have played quite a bit of it over the weekend. Essentially it has a lot in common with Dead Cells and Hades, and there are some really interesting options. I think maybe the difficulty curve might be a bit overtuned especially if you choose the “easy” mode because there isn’t really much of a difference from the normal mode. The art style reminds me a bit of Flashback for reasons I can’t fully explain. There are a lot of interesting weapon options, some of them clearly better than others but that is always going to happen. I will be interested to see how this one evolves over time.

I also spent some time this weekend screwing around with Yuzu the Nintendo Switch emulator. It had been quite awhile since I last touched it, and lord has it improved during that time. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the emulator is capable of latching onto the gyro sense in my Dual Sense PS5 controller. I remember when I was playing through Breath of the Wild on Cemu I had to use some monstrocity where I latched into the gyro in my android phone to complete those puzzles. I mean I could just play all of these games on my switch, but I know with Cemu the ability to remove weapon durability from Breath of the Wild made that game infinitely more enjoyable. I need to dive into the mods for Yuzu and see if I can find something similar for Tears of the Kingdom. I have to say playing on my 3080 equipped PC… is so much prettier and smoother than playing on a native Switch.

Lastly I spent some time this weekend screwing around on the Mage in Last Epoch. I’ve decided to follow a build guide and go all in on lightning damage. So far it is just immensely fun to shock everything to death and watch the lightning damage arc between oncoming monsters. I am not sure how far I will make it with this character. I spent the entire podcast on Saturday playing it and am now around level 21 ish. I’ve chosen my specialization and went Sorc but am still picking up basics from the Mage tree. I am curious to see how this character feels once I get a decent amount of ward preservation on it, because at the moment it feels a wee bit squishy.

Last week was a bit of a slog, in spite of only being three days long. I am hoping this week will be a little less compacted and stressful. I know I essentially have to prepare for being in training all week the week after next. I’ve not done anything in person for that many days in a row for awhile, so that will be its own sort of stress. I hope you all have a pheomenal week, and I hope that maybe I can pick one of the many things I have been doing to actually focus on.