Flipping Birdsite the Bird

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Good Morning Friends! It is time once again for my semi-annual explainer post about the Fediverse or as some call it Mastodon. In truth, I am not going to do a full explainer because I did one back in April and I am not sure I can do a better job than I did then. If you are like most of us and have littered the fediverse with many past versions of yourself as you tried out many instances, then this post might be of interest about migrating between sites. As I said in the post from April, I originally joined the fediverse during the Wheaton Exodus of 2018, but it seems like every six months or so there is another mass influx of folks discovering/re-discovering the platform. Of note… while I jokingly refer to it as the Wheaton Exodus, I mostly got hip to the notion of “mastodon” due to all of the Loading Ready Run cast moving to various sundry instances. It does make me wonder if anyone is out there tracking the migratory patterns of Twitter users.

So You Decided to Leave Twitter

Yeah, I guess I am going to write about this today, but given that I already linked you better articles that I have already written I am not sure where to go with this one. I think first it is important that you understand that the Fediverse as I refer to it, or Mastodon as the media seems to refer to it… is not a single website controlled by a single entity. There is no one corporation responsible for running everything, but instead a network for smaller “instances” that are “federated” so that they can share messages with each other and facilitate cross-instance communication. What this means in practice is that the Fediverse is not a monolith with a single culture, but instead a bunch of different smaller communities that each have their own cultures. Probably a better analogy would be for you to imagine that users on the World of Warcraft Forum, Something Awful Forum, GameFaqs, and Reddit could somehow seamlessly communicate with each other.

Firstly I feel like I want to get this out of the way. This is not a post attempting to recruit you to the Fediverse. I am happy to welcome you with open arms to this alternate dimension, but it isn’t the sort of thing where you unplug from Twitter and plug into the Fediverse and life continues on like normal. Using these instances is its own thing with its own series of differences that go far deeper than the tweet vs toot thing. Image a server instance as a small computer club that meets in the back room of your library, that deals with all sorts of logistical problems inherent with growing membership and outgrowing its meeting room space. Instances in general are run by a very small group of administrators that are struggling to pay the bills and are happy to have you… but also know that each influx is going to wreak havoc on their data usage.

Finding a Home

I’ve bounced around quite a bit during my time in the fediverse, but this is sort of a thing that happens to most people. They join an instance and it doesn’t end up feeling right for one reason or another. My own journey looks a little bit like this:

  • Mastodon.cloud – My very first instance and I had no clue what any of it meant at that point, or that I wasn’t signing up for one single monolithic site. It was perfectly cromulent.
  • Elekk.xyz – Once I learned different instances and did different things, I obviously tried to gravitate toward the gaming-related one. It was a pretty nice place with a bunch of interesting users that I still follow to this day.
  • Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore wanted to start up an instance so I signed on this nonsense to help administrate it. This meant leaving Elekk behind, but since you can so easily migrate between instances it was no big deal.
  • MMORPG.Social – As Ninteties.Cafe had run through its cycle of excitement, and a friend of mine Gazimoff decided he wanted to try and tackle creating MMORPG-centric social media. I moved houses once again and helped administrate, but the costs eventually became egregious and it was shuttered.
  • Elekk.xyz – So I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went to sleep for a while, going dormant for a year or so. When I woke up and started caring about the fediverse again, the instance was a very changed place. It seems that there was a bit of a “netsplit” to borrow an old term, and Elekk was pretty proactively blocking a bunch of instances making it very hard to communicate with friends spread throughout the fediverse.
  • Mstdn.social – This led me to try and find a more neutral ground instance. One that was not quite so block-happy but also was not doing anything egregious that would lead to it being actively blocked. So I migrated over to this lovely instance run by a nice person who goes by Stux.

I fully expect that most of you are going to go through a sequence of events similar to the ones that I did. At this point, I would maybe shoo people away from rolling on Mastodon.social, because while it is the largest instance and considered the “flagship” it is also largely lawless. Nothing has been done about abusive members for long enough that the community took it upon itself and caused the problems that ultimately led me to leave Elekk. Basically, if you choose to use that one, just know that there is going to be a wide swath of people who won’t be able to see you.

Maybe Support If You Stick Around

Like I said before each instance is usually run by a very small team that is racking up expenses in order to keep the lights on. Knowing this I have always tried to chip something into wherever I am calling home. When I was on Elekk I contributed to their Patreon, and when I moved to Mstdn.social I started contributing to the one Stux has set up. Like it isn’t a large amount of money but I end up chipping in $5 a month as a way of attempting to help the operation. It doesn’t give me any benefits other than knowing that I am at least helping to keep the lights on a little bit. Most of these instances are not profitable and are deeply cutting into the personal finances of those who are running them.

Each time there is a mass migration wave, more folks end up sticking around. Something you should go into this knowing is that the vast majority of “I’m leaving Twitter” folks will be back within the week. However, what has evolved over time is an alternate reality that skews way more liberal and queer and as a result super open and accepting about some things and hypercritical of other things. I feel like if you want to come to the Fediverse, you are going to need to accept it for what it is and not try and turn it into Twitter 2.0. The folks are really lovely but also a heck of a lot quieter. There is less general noise on the network, but also much less interaction.

Riding the Bomb Down

I’ve personally found a place in my life for both Twitter and the Fediverse/Mastodon. I have no plans to do anything drastic like delete my Twitter account. If folks legitimately migrate this time then I will likely spend less and less time there. I feel it is also very important for folks to realize the level of stress these mass migration waves place upon the existing denizens of these instances. Like they are all open and welcoming but have been through this shit so many times before. I know alone this is my fourth or fifth mass migration, and I know they existed prior to the Wheaton Exodus that brought me to these shores. On some level, the “townies” often duck out for a few weeks until the onslaught has died down a bit and then poke their heads out again to see who actually stuck around.

Please note while this post is not an attempt to recruit you, it is also not an attempt to dissuade you. Whether or not you take this adventure is entirely up to you. I am more than happy to field direct questions from anyone considering it. Like I said before I’ve written about this several times in the past and some of my words might fill in gaps in your knowledge. So I will leave you with a list of links.

  • My Home in the Fediverse – @belghast@mstdn.social
  • The Fediverse: A Wildly Incomplete Primer – my post from April attempting to explain how exactly Mastodon and the larger Fediverse work.
  • Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance – a follow-up post where I talk about the process of migrating your follows and redirecting people to your new home instance. This is helpful if you have a string of other attempts to move off Twitter.
  • Adventures in the Fediverse – might be fun to read to see how my tone has shifted over the years since this original post back in August of 2018. I was way more excited about this being the future of all social media, whereas now I am pretty resigned to knowing it will only take hold with a handful of people.

Keep Up Alternate Contacts

I will close this out with the last piece of general advice, one that I have learned the hard way over the years. If you care about someone enough to not want to lose contact with them… trade multiple forms of contact. There are numerous folks that I have lost over the years through various gaming venues, and I occasionally wonder how they are doing. I know email is old school, but it and phone numbers tend to be the lowest common denominator for staying in contact. I’ve had the same email address for almost twenty years, and at this point moving to another would be painful. Discord is another more modern messaging platform that is worth trading information on, but remember it is also a closed platform owned by a single company and could at someday be the thing you are fleeing.

For me, you will always have this blog. I am going on my fourteenth year and I figure much like Slim Pickens I am going to be riding this bomb to the ground. This will always have some cogent way of contacting me available to you.

Dragonflight Launch Schedule

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Good Morning Friends! I tweet-threaded some thoughts yesterday that I thought I would expand into a proper blog post. As we slide into the launch of the Dragonflight World of Warcraft expansion, I have to admit that I have some complicated thoughts about it. I immensely enjoyed my time spent in both Alpha and Beta testing. More specifically I thought the directed testing that took place prior to the start of Beta was extremely valuable because it set a clear focus for every play session. With those constraints, I set my focus on completing a single zone at a time and each week finished the task on at least one character. As a result at this point, I have largely seen all of the leveling content and enjoyed most of it.

Unfortunately without that direction and drive… when the game effectively turned over control to me, I struggled to find traction. Previously I was playing with a clear mission of testing the content and now that I was left to my own devices, I really didn’t have much forward momentum. I think on some level I just don’t find the World of Warcraft style of gameplay nearly as engaging as I once did. Over the last few years, my personal preferences have shifted more towards action combat and away from more strictly hotbar combat. I think this is also why my whole “level everything to 80” burnt me to a crisp in Final Fantasy XIV and why after finishing the main story there I have not really returned other than the stalk housing properties.

I think this is more a tale of shifts in my own tastes and less a tale of expansion quality. What I was able to experience and play through, makes me feel deeply like Dragonflight is going to go down as one of the better World of Warcraft expansions. I don’t think it will rank up there quite as high as say Legion, which now sits at the pinnacle for me, but I do think it is going to be better than a Shadowlands or Battle for Azeroth. The only thing that still concerns me is that the zones don’t feel anywhere near as intricate. Part of what I liked so much about Legion is that it took everything that Warlords of Draenor attempted and expanded upon them. I like zone events, treasures, and minibosses that all reward good stuff. Maybe there has been a micro objective pass that I have not fully experienced in-game, but last week when I was playing the world still felt very spartan.

I think there are a lot of interesting things happening with the expansion. While everything goes really hard on the whole Dragon thing, and you pretty much have to like Dragons to enjoy that deeply… there are enough fringe world-building things going on that make me wonder about the direction the entire game is going. I’ve never particularly cared about the Dragon Flights, and my interest in them cratered with Cataclysm, and how Alexstraza did not remember us from Wyrmrest temple when we were questing for her in Twilight Highlands. I feel like there are a lot of plot threads once thought resolved… are about to become unresolved again. What World of Warcraft has lacked is a clear story that carries forward from expansion to expansion and I hope this might be the beginning of that.

Mechanically I think the new talent trees are excellent. While they did not give me back my previous gladiator stance, left enough on the table for me to build a really fun protection warrior. I enjoyed Blood Deathknight and Protection Paladin as well, so it was going to be one of those expansions where I had trouble deciding upon a main. I probably would have landed back on the Warrior since it has such a special place in my heart. The bigger challenge would have been to determine if I was going to play the OG Belghast which is a Human, or the more modern Belghast which is an Orc. While I like the general community Horde side quite a bit better, I have to say I will probably always have strong Alliance leanings.

This time around there is this interesting staggered launch, where as of this past Tuesday the pre-patch landed featuring the new talent trees and a precursor questline. On the 15th, in a few weeks the new race/class will be playable. Then the 28th the official launch day happens with the gates opening on the Waking Shores. This all makes me realize that I will not be playing Dragonflight at launch, in spite of largely enjoying myself in testing. I know that with a World of Warcraft expansion there will be a certain measure of FOMO associated with it. My entire social timeline will likely erupt in nothing but Warcraft talk for a few weeks, and honestly, I look forward to seeing everyone geeking out on the game. I also know that it is highly unlikely that I will be joining them.

Even if we push past my complicated feelings about Blizzard, I am just not sure this is the game I want to be playing right now. I have a lot more games that I would rather be devoting my time towards, given that it is very unlikely that I would want to be raiding anyways. I have a long list of things that I would like to accomplish in Guild Wars 2, and I would like to give Final Fantasy XIV a chance to enspell once again with the post-Endwalker story. I am just not really connected to the World and story of Warcraft anymore, and while I have guild families that would accept me back… I also don’t really feel that longing to join them right now. I do know enough people who are wrapped up in the game though that I truly hope this is the good expansion that I think it is going to be for them.

In the short term, I am still deeply engaged with my New World reroll. It features that action-style combat that I seem to be favoring right now, and last night I dinged 60 and started working on gearing. I also ran through a dungeon with the guild which was extremely fun, and I am hoping as folks level we can do some of the interesting outdoor content that is focused on a single team. I think on some level I need to reach a place where it is okay for me to wave from the sidelines as the float goes by. There is a version of me that would absolutely be trying to claw my way up onto the float to keep the excitement rolling… but instead, it is probably way more healthy to set my own interests and my own pace.

So for now as we approach the Dragonflight launch, I will be waving at you all from the sidelines.

Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition

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Good Morning Folks. It was this morning that I had the sudden realization that I seem to have let one of my long-term reoccurring segments just completely die. For years I have done this thing where I update my blog sidebar with the games that I am regularly playing, and then create a semi-monthly post talking about where I am with each game and the games that are cycling out of the mix. However, the last one of these that I have done was from March of 2021. Some pretty significant things took place last year that derailed a lot of events in my life, but it would be nice to get back in some sort of regular cadence with these posts as there are often games that I am playing but not really actively talking about.

Generally speaking, one of these posts is broken down into subsections:

  • To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
  • To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
  • To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
  • Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

Unfortunately given the length of time that has passed I am not sure if any of these really make sense for this “catch-up” post. Instead this time I am just going to talk about the games that I am poking a stick at periodically.

Cyberpunk 2077 – PC

While waiting on the New World patch drop, I found myself in a bit of a doldrum where nothing much sounded good. When this hits, I tend to dive into some sort of open-world game like Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, or Witcher 3… and more recently Cyberpunk has been in that “nothing else sounds good” rotation. Generally speaking, I tend to play for a few nights and then nothing much comes of it, but this time around I am precariously close to a second complete playthrough. I am also finding a ton of content that I missed the first time around, and I think I am way more attached to femme Nomad V than I was to my original male Corpo V. Judy is without a doubt the best romance option in the game and it ends up being super sweet.

Diablo III – PC

I got a bit of a late start on Season 27, and because most of the conquests are sorta butts this time around… I have yet to finish things up. Essentially I need 3 Conquests to get Set Dungeon Mastery. I need to do this at some point but other things have just been drawing my attention. It is a bit harder than in past seasons because I am mostly soloing everything and don’t have my partner in crime Ace along with me. I need to buckle down and finish things off, but ultimately what caused me to fade for a bit was the severe performance issues that I was having. Hopefully those have passed now.

Fallout 76 – PC

Another game that I have been poking around for a while now is Fallout 76. I am not playing it super often, but at least once a week I dive down into the world of irradiated West Virginia. Right now the AggroChat folks seem to be going through a bit of a renaissance launched by Thalen’s discovery of the game. I need to figure out a time I can join in, but I am way behind in levels due to a reroll recently. I spent some time fucking around in a custom world and it seemed as though I was gaining levels… but said levels did not carry over to the main game.

New World – PC

If you have been reading my blog lately you will know that I am back in New World and created a brand new character over on Themiscyra to experience the game from level one again. The new player experience is so much better and the leveling and balance are much better than it was at the original launch. I am closing in on level 60 without really trying terribly hard, and my goal is to effectively complete all of the quests in the game. For the moment I am filling all of the various stashes that I have access to with materials and I hope to grind up Armoring and Weaponsmithing to 200 so I will have a good start at the game. At some point, I will need to find the various legendary crafting materials that unlock the 600 item-level weapons and armor, but I have plenty of time.

Path of Exile – PC

I’ve wound down the experience of playing Path of Exile Lake of Kalandra league, and I have to say it was pretty frustrating overall. I feel like I chose a bad league to go all in on. I did manage to knock out a number of the achievements and completely unlocked my altas, so I accomplished the things I had set out the do. I am not sure if I am going to be quite so amped to dive into whatever the 1.20 league ends up being, however. I am just not sure if Chris Wilson’s vision for the game fits the sort of experience I actually want to have. I am still interested to see what mobile Path of Exile ends up being like and the 2.0 experience… but my hopes are being tempered greatly by the frustration we experienced with this past league.

Torchlight Infinite – PC and Android

I have to admit I am not playing a ton of this yet, but slowly easing into it. I would greatly prefer that it supported a controller and whenever that patch lands, I have a feeling that it will become my primary phone game. The touchscreen controls are not amazing, though probably better than most mobile games. The game seems way less greedy with its mtx or at least the things that you can buy with real-world cash don’t seem to matter that much yet. I need to try some of the other classes but so far I am digging the “not-barbarian” character. I am not playing much of the game on PC mostly because if I am sitting at my PC… I have other games I would rather be playing.

Tower of Fantasy – PC

I think I am mostly winding down Tower of Fantasy. While I do enjoy it much more than I did Genshin Impact, I find myself in the old familiar trap of only logging in to collect my freebies and then logging right back out. I am not sure why the experience went flat for me, but I just stopped wanting to play it quite as much. I think maybe around the time I was winding this down is when the Brimstone Sands patch landed on the PTR and re-ignited my love of New World. As one star rises another sets, and as a result, Tower of Fantasy was on the losing end of that equation.

World of Warcraft – Dragonflight Alpha/Beta – PC

I played a ton of this game when I first got into the testing. I really liked the more directed testing phases of giving us a new zone to explore each week. I have to admit I ate that up and completed the quests in each of the new areas. Unfortunately when things opened up more and I was given access to play the entire experience from start to finish… I deflated a bit. I think the biggest frustration is that it seemed every single time I logged in, I had to reset my talent points and the profiles that I saved were getting wiped. There were several times I logged in… stared at the wall of talent points and noped out of choosing them and setting back up my bars again.

As far as Dragonflight itself… the pre-patch has landed and I still do not have a World of Warcraft subscription or own the expansion. While I had a lot of fun playing the test phases, I am not sure if it was enough to really draw me back into the game. I have to be honest… World of Warcraft feels like a really old game at this point. A lot of what I have been focused on of late is more action-oriented games, and Hotbar combat just feels weird. Like I never thought I would get to that point but here we are. I still don’t feel amazing giving Blizzard money either… so I guess time will tell if I get caught up in the expansion launch zeitgeist or not.

NDA Game – PC

Then there are games that are bound by NDA that I can’t talk about other than in the vaguest of terms. One I have access to and is eating up a bit of my time, and another I have created an account but have not received the game client. I am torn on whether or not I like NDAs in general because, on one hand, it keeps the players from getting just completely burnt out and bored with listening to news about the game before launch. On the other hand as a content creator, it sucks having a void that you are afraid to talk about. I get to the point where I am almost afraid to cover even public news of a game for fear that maybe just maybe something that ISN’T public knowledge will slip out.

Themiscyra is Open

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Good Morning Friends! It is another day and another time I am posting my login screen to New World as a way of marking progress. I cannot fully put into words how much experience you gain in this game as compared to the way it was at release. I remember clearly that I essentially had to bounce from town to town grinding out objectives on the town boards in order to push my level bar forward. Now instead I am 53 having finished Monarch’s Bluff, Windsward, Everfall, and Brightwood… with over half the zones in the game still out there and loaded up with quests. My intent is to do them all in order to remove the markers from my map, and also soak up all of that “free” gold. The quests are worth a lot more of it than they were in the beginning as well. I’m currently sitting somewhere near close to 10,000 coins and still have so many more zones that I have yet to even visit.

My very short-term goal is to visit Restless Shore and Mourningdale, so that I can open up banks in those territories as well. At the moment I have been in questing mode, but while journeying across the map I am picking up every rare resource I can get my hands on. For the most part, I am just dumping these in the various storage sheds in the territories I have already opened. At some point, I am going to have a grand craft-a-thon to see how far I can push my skills up to using this stockpile. I posted this screenshot largely to show how full the various banks are. At one point last night I crafted up over 1100 Iron ingots for example to compress some of the space. As far as questing goes I am currently working my way through Cutlass Keys, which is chock full of uncontested materials since no one seems to go down there much.

In other news, Themiscyra is open for business once again if any of you were hoping to join us there. There seems to be a bug happening right now with company invites where they are taking a significant amount of time to resolve. They do eventually go through and I have been getting folks invited as I can. If you are looking for an invite to our nonsense throw Belglaive a friend invite as that is my character on the server. Transfers work as well because yesterday we had a few folks do just that. I really should have timed it better so that I could maybe catch someone transferring off of Valhalla and smuggle some gold over to me on Themiscyra. I sincerely doubt I will be returning to my Valhalla character because I am already pretty damned attached to this one.

We are once again Syndicate because purple is a good color, and I would rather be team science/magic than team religion or military. If you are hoping to join up with the company, you will need to make sure you choose Syndicate as your faction when you go through the series of quests in Everfall. That is one point of frustration with the new flow of quests, which is that it takes forever for you to choose your faction. Previously this happened around level 8 and I could speed clear my way through to the faction choice in about 15 minutes. Now, this takes place after you have cleared the first zone and are well into the second zone. I didn’t get my faction as a result until I was well into my 30s. This is a seemingly long time for folks to be hanging out in limbo waiting for a guild invite. In my opinion, guilds/clans are something that you should be able to do immediately in a game.

As far as progression goes, my proudest achievement of late is that I can now officially start harvesting Orichalcum. I even managed to get my first piece of void ore, and I believe I will need five more in order to eventually craft a full set of voidbent armor. This is one of my long-tailed achievements for this re-roll is to get back to my cool-looking armor set. My lumbering is lagging the most, and I probably need to devote some time to catch it up so I can begin doing my full route of orichalcum and ironwood spawns. I am also lagging a bit on harvesting, but I am not terribly far behind there as Cutlass Keys has been terribly lucrative when it comes to silkweed. Though it would be nice to start stockpiling those red weeds as well as I find them.

Another thing of note is that you should probably pop by the in-game shop soon. There are a couple of canopic jars for your house that you can claim, and a set of Roman Vexillarius armor that you can snag for free. There is also a really slick set of armor called Fallen Spirit that can be farmed through 4 hours of watching a participating twitch channel. You might watch the twitch drops space as well because there is another event that will be happening soonish with the drop of the fresh start servers. Essentially teams of streamers are going to be completing specific objectives, and each one unlocks a unique set of drops for their viewers. I will probably give more detail as it is released but it should be even more unique appearances that are available.

I’ve been frustrated with New World and the decision process of Amazon Game Studios… but I wouldn’t keep playing it if I did not also love it deeply. There is just something about this world that lands for me. It nails so many things which is what makes the glaring issues so maddening. Weaver’s Fen may be one of my favorite MMORPG zones ever, and it really exudes this foreboding nature. New World does dark and scary places so well, and when you get up to Shattered Mountain, it is maybe the closest game representation of something like Mordor I have experienced. The entire world feels dangerous and just roaming around out there sets me completely on edge. I am very happy that the experience curve and questing have been improved to maybe hook more players into sticking around a bit longer.