Seven Years of AggroChat

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Morning Friends! Today is the seventh anniversary of AggroChat the semi-weekly podcast that I record with some of my friends. At this point I have no clue what it was exactly that prompted me to start a podcast. I have fuzzy memories of it being inspired by Cat Context that my friend Liore started, and realizing that pretty much every night we used to get into these long winded discussions on the guild voice chat server. There were times I thought it would have been interesting to just hit record on that and edit it into a podcast form.

Episode 1: Finding the Format – 04/13/2014

The first episode at this point is largely unlistenable, but cobbled together the basic structure of the show that would evolve into what it is today over a large number of episodes and host changes. We started the show with Ashgar, Audrae, Belghast and Kodra. Over time I co-opted more folks to join me along with a cast of occasional guests from our larger community. Rae went her own way but we picked up Tam first and then Grace and Thalen around the same time and our most recent addition Ammo has even been with us for almost three years at this point. At some point I am going to chart out the timeline of guests on AggroChat because I think it might be interest.

Seven hosts is a lot of hosts and I worry sometimes that not everyone is getting their word in every week. There are times I kick around switching back to a format where we go around the table and share what we have been up to that week. The problem with that however is it sorta puts people on the spot, especially if they had a busy week and didn’t really get up to much of anything. This also was part of what extended the length of our shows and lead for us to record some that were upwards of three hours long. Essentially as it stands now we record roughly an hour and a half of show and that condenses down around the neighborhood of an hour.

I’ve never really shown our planning system, but here is a carefully chosen snapshot of the Trello that we use to maintain our show notes. One of the columns that we have running that rarely bears fruit is the “Media We Should Talk About” list… because we don’t really want to do a full spoiler discussion unless everyone is ready to have a full spoiler discussion. You might notice there are checklists in a few of those topics and folks have gone in and indicated that they are good to talk about it. We still sorta talk about the media we just do it spoiler free until everyone is ready… which largely means we just put those topics off indefinitely. There is actually another card not shown called “Tabled Indefinitely” with things that we never really got around to talking about and are now no longer viable discussions.

Essentially we have a rolling batch of topics and Trello allows us to easily roll them forward if we don’t get around to it. The only problem with this is that occasionally there are orphaned cards that just keep getting moved forward. The “Freeform vs Guided Gameplay” card for example has been floating in this zone since November of last year and I could not for the life of me remember what the hell actually spurred that thought. When we ACTUALLY dug down to it last week I just sorta winged it and turned it into something that was valid at this point, which happens on occasion.

In November of 2017 our Podcast hosting provider switched the statistics program and since that point the most listened show is “Bribed to Be Content” where we talk about Battle for Azeroth. This is a pretty common thread in that when we do a World of Warcraft show (or a Pokemon show) they get just a silly amount of listens over time. I can still access the legacy statistics and looking at those numbers tell me that nothing has actually surpassed the show recorded that was part of the 10 Years 10 Questions initiative for the 10th Anniversary of World of Warcraft. I also apparently did a blog post around the same time for the same initiative.

An awful lot has changed since we first started recording. Back then we were on voice chat together all the time and that isn’t quite the case for me anymore. Life has conspired to push me out of the general time band that Ash, Kodra, Tam and Thalen all operate in. Ammo, Grace and I all share a general time space but we are also all sorta introverts and only on voice chat these days if there is actually an activity that we are participating in. I worry that this might have changed the show because we just aren’t interacting nearly as often as we once were. It still floors me that we have been doing this for seven years and have recorded just over 340 episodes. Probably what shocks me even more is that we still have a regular group of listeners each week.

To all of you out there that consume our nonsense I salute you!

Twelve Bleaks out of Ten

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Hey Friends! Like all weekends this one went way the heck too fast. I ended up taking off Friday but a good chunk of that was spent taking my dad to the doctor and running errands. As far as activities this weekend they fall into three distinct buckets. Firstly I managed to finish leveling my Bow Nightblade which is the last of the characters that I was planning on leveling while the buff was active. I am contemplating maybe putting a few of the easily levels on the new Sorcerer Tank experiment, but I am absolutely not going to do the grind all the way to level 50. What I really need to spend the next few weeks doing is burning through all of the treasure maps that I have clogging my inventory and bank from doing the Dark Anchor grind.

I need to spend some time evaluating pricing on the guild store so that I can maybe move some of this stuff more quickly. Right now I have my 30 slots filled and I wish there was a way to be able to sell more items without joining additional trade guilds. I guess it makes sense why folks have more trade guilds than pretty much anything else. On the radar is a return to running content on my main because I still would love to be caught up to the point of being able to start the new expansion fresh in June when it lands. I don’t think there is a shot in hell of that happening however, which again is a me thing… because anyone can start the new content day one. I just have this hang up about wanting to complete content in the order it was released.

Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was working on my nonsense playlist. At the time of writing this I am up to 894 songs for a grand total of 59 hours and 47 minutes of play time. Considering that I am using shuffle and spotify doesn’t seem to play through everything once before repeating… it is highly likely I will actually listen to everything on it but it makes a good radio that brings me joy. I am still periodically adding things to it as I think about them, but I am probably going to start creating some focused “mixtape” playlists and sharing them with you as well. I am not sure if this brand of nonsense is down anyone’s alley, but I am enjoying it.

Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was catching up on Outriders. I attempted to play a bit when it launched but have been otherwise occupied, first with the Diablo 3 Season 23 and later with grinding my Nightblade in Elder Scrolls. The first thing that I did was turn off the thing that keeps increasing your world level because this felt a little weird. My power gained from dropped items was just not keeping up with the difficulty increase and it sorta felt like being dropped into Torment 1 in Diablo 3 before being fully geared. I’ve now set the world level to 3 aka what they call “Normal” and am back to enjoying myself.

I am sure at some point I will write a general review of the game, but one of the bigger takeaways is just how bleak it is. Like I have played some bleak games… but this one is on a whole new level. It seems like so often you meet a character that seems interesting, and then in a very Walking Dead fashion… they callously kill them off with a stray bullet or something else that feels meaningless. I think this is absolutely on purpose to illustrate just how bad of shape the world is, but it does grate on you a bit as you continue to play. I hope that as I keep moving forward I will eventually start to see a glimmer of hope, because right now the straights are much dire.

That is all folks. I hope you have a great week. I seem to have jacked up my sleep patterns and am personally hoping that settles out.

AggroChat #341 – Ghost Bear Friends

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Tonight we start off with a brief reprise of last week’s Diablo 3 Season 23 topic.  Because of the changes to followers this is pretty much the easiest season yet to complete in full.  We talk briefly about the Diablo 2 technical alpha going on and how it is mostly just D2 but prettier.  Grace talks about her experiences with Cozy Grove which is effectively Animal Crossing but Ghost Bears.  Tam and Thalen talk about their experiences with Super Adventure Box in Guild Was 2.  Bel talks a bit about Games Preservation and more specifically the release of a demo copy of the long rumored Castlevania Resurrection.  Finally we go down a topic path that has been sitting on our list for awhile and talk about directed gameplay versus guided gameplay.

Topics Discussed

  • Easiest Diablo 3 Season Ever
    • Overpowered Followers
    • Diablo 2 Technical Alpha
  • Cozy Grove
    • Animal Crossing but Ghost Bears
  • Super Adventure Box
    • A Platformer Kodra Doesn’t Love
  • Games Preservation
    • Castlevania Resurrection
    • Nintendo PlayStation
    • Missing Content from different industries
  • Freeform versus Guided Gameplay
    • Bel Wants out of the Car
    • Directed Gameplay in Sandboxes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rediscovering Playlists

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Morning Friends! Now that I have finished the Diablo 3 Season 23 grind, that means I have more or less defaulted back to trying to finish my Nightblade off in Elder Scrolls Online. There are still several more days of the Anniversary Festival and with that the double experience buff that comes from eating cake. I personally find this pretty chill and relaxing to just hop in and join one of the auto groups and grind away until my bags fill. While doing this I have been spending quite a bit of time recently listening to music, which is odd to say that I have not done in a very long time. I have no clue what happened because music used to be such a critical part of my life, but over the years I gravitated more and more towards instrumental music… and then just stopped listening to something in the background all together.

This most recent foray has been thanks to my good friend Bells, which I realize is somewhat confusing given that I go by Bel with one L. She has created a handful of really good playlists that are theme based with the most recent one being centered around the music of Generation X, or at least those of us growing up at a very particular age. Listening to this feels like I transported back to being seventeen again and cruising around in my beat up 1977 Honda Civic Hatchback. If you are interested then I highly suggest this playlist, and I also really enjoy her punk playlist as well.

I admittedly am pretty new to using Spotify, which I know sounds weird given how ubiquitous it has become. I am by no means a stranger to streaming audio, I just went down a different path to arrive here. Originally I was a huge proponent of Pandora, because with the closing of Oink’s Pink Palace I was looking for a new discovery engine more than anything else. I was no longer listening to the radio and with it I needed a new vehicle for discovering new music that I might like. From there I shifted over to Google Music and was there until they started screwing with it and trying to turn it into YouTube Music. After that I had a brief stint with Amazon Music but kept running into gaps in their inventory of songs which lead me to finally subscribe to Spotify.

One of the things that I didn’t love about Google Music was the lack of a way to publicly share a playlist with someone else… and actually allow them to listen to it. This is something that is solved with Spotify and recently I have been working on my own stupidly large playlist. It is far from complete and likely never will be… but if you are so inclined I give you Bel’s Confusing Blend. I highly suggest listening to it on shuffle given that there are large blocks of the same artist right now in a row. It is intended more as a radio station style experience and shuffle mostly does that. I sorta wish I had the ability to pre-shuffle the list and at some point I might actually sort it by hand to make it flow a little better but for now it is what it is.

One of the things that I used to love as a kid is creating mix tapes and I might start doing that again. A mix tape was a specific vehicle where the songs flowed in a specific way as to invoke a particular feeling. I miss doing this and if I can find some of the ones I created in the past for friends, I might port them over, but I have no clue if I saved any of that. I lost most of my musical archives at one point which is ultimately what lead me to embrace streaming. Today is going to be a bit of a busy day, but at least I will have a personal soundtrack to nurture me.