YouTuber Appreciation

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This week is themed “Developer Appreciation Week” which was something that Scarybooster started some years back, and I decided needed to be continued. The idea was to write a post about some game developer that you really appreciate, but I am going to take this post in a different direction. Over the weekend Dragonray from Azerothian Life made a YouTube Creator appreciation post. So I am going to do something in a very similar vein and spin off an appreciation of content creators post for my very first post of Developer Appreciation Week, since in many cases YouTube content creators enhance our enjoyment of gaming experiences.

Alpha Investments

Alpha Investments vacillates back and forth between an deeply informative source of information and a comedy channel depending on the day. Often times it feels like a guilty pleasure, but I absolutely love putting one of the box opening videos on in the background while I am doing something else. The informative side however shines through with videos like the one I chose to link that is fairly recent talking about a Black Lotus scam on Ebay. While I am more aligned to cracking a bunch of packs and the only real “investing” I am doing is sitting on a bunch of old cards, I find them a deeply enjoyable experience.

Spawn Wave

Spawn Wave really is two shows in one. Each morning you have a news video that is released and ready to watch by the time I am up and around, and I find these extremely informative on what is going on in gaming. You also get a recap video each weekend summarizing the biggest events of the week which is extremely nice. The other side of the channel is where he breaks down hardware often times fixing or modding it… or in the case of the above video comparing the “new” joycons to the original joycons to help determine if the new red box revision system is worth picking up if you have an existing one. It was also one of the Spawn Wave videos that convinced me that I could in fact take apart one of my controllers and mod it with Xbox Pro Controller style magnetic thumb sticks.

Mesa Sean

I linked one of his “Xursday” videos because really this is how I first got engaged in the channel. I follow a bunch of Destiny/Destiny2 YouTubers but I latched onto Mesa for his personality. Many players flaunt just how good they are, and Mesa on the other hand often times shows video clips of times when he screwed up massively. Because of this he feels like the Destiny player that represents everyone, not just the terribly skilled. Even when I have not been playing the game I watch his news videos to keep tabs on when I should return, and it was ultimately one of his Solstice of Heroes videos that got me to come back to the game.

Fact Fiend – With Karl Smallwood

I have no idea at all how I originally stumbled on one of these videos, but it is a criminally underrated channel. The core shtick is that this guy Karl drinks something often times alcoholic while deep diving into facts about a specific subject that he personally finds interesting. There is a lot of back and forth between him, the camera crew, and anyone who happens to be on “set” while filming. There is also a tradition of a lot of purposefully bad green-screen work where he often times purposefully finds shirts that are going to interact with the screen as well. It is part PBS Documentary and part Pub Crawl.

Bon Appétit – Gourmet Makes

Another channel that I have no clue how I started watching, but I love it and I will cut you if you say otherwise. Claire and Brad are so great, and I specifically love the Gourmet Makes series where Claire attempts to make a better version of a industrialized snack. I linked the Ferrero Rocher video specifically because like often times is the case… things go a little off the rails along the way. Also I love Ferrero Rocher so that might be part of it as well. I can’t even remember the first one of these that I watched, and now I have found myself watching other videos they have done along the way. Claire and Brad however are still my favorites, and especially the chemistry when they are interacting.

Modern Vintage Gamer

This is a relatively new channel for me, but I have found myself digging back into the back catalog and watching a bunch of older videos. The concept behind the channel is the creator was deeply involved in the Xbox Homebrew scene and is still involved in porting various emulators to new platforms. The most interesting series for me personally is when he deep dives into how a console DRM was broken and explains exactly how that particular copy protection scheme worked. There are also retro style console reviews, but really it is the DRM videos that get me to click through as I also was involved in some of the scenes during that era.

Emmy Made in Japan

Hello My Beautiful Lovelies! Emmy is adorable full stop. Again I have no clue how I wound up watching my first one of these videos but I am hooked on her style of cooking video. Particularly I find the “Hard Times” series interesting as she explores various depression era recipes or similar that come from times of food insecurity. She has a really wide variety of videos and I really appreciate when she focuses in on a tradition that I have never heard of, like one involving cooking baked potatoes in pine rosin? Am I going to do any of the things? Probably not… but I like finding out new tidbits of information.

Strange Parts

I linked what is probably the quintessential Strange Parts video, or at least the one I know without a doubt tipped me off to this channel. He went about the process of procuring all of the parts to make his very own iPhone in the tech markets of Shenzhen China. Since then I have watched a number of videos as he roams around the markets looking for this or that, and has even managed to explore a bunch of factory complexes. Largely I find them interesting for the sheer scale of industrialization that is modern China and he serves as an excellent window from which to explore it.

Gaijin Hunter

Gaijin Hunter is my favorite of the Monster Hunter YouTuber, because firstly he is super approachable while at the same time being insanely skilled. There are a lot that started covering monster hunter during Monster Hunter World, and that is fine… that is the game that got me into the series. However Gaijin has been capturing footage for the older games and goes into detail about various monsters and strategies to fight them. So while you might start with a YouTube like Arekkz you eventually graduate in wanting to learn from someone like Gaijin.

This Does Not Compute

Another Tech/Oddware Youtuber is This Does Not Compute. Again I have no clue how I first stumbled onto his channel, but I like the thoughtful pace as he dives into various technology related topics. I think maybe it was something on Bitcoin that first caused me to stumble onto the videos, but I have stayed for older technology explorations and various after market retro consoles. He has done a number of videos on backlight mods to mobile handhelds and the like, something that I might want to do at some point. The channel feels very much like listening to NPR, and I mean that in the best of possible ways as someone who listens to pretty much nothing but NPR in my vehicle.

Malukah

She doesn’t post anywhere near as often as she once did, but when I see a new video show up in my subscriptions I always click through and listen. I linked to Beauty of Dawn which was the End Credits song from Elder Scrolls Online and still something that I love listening to. Malu is such a cool person and I love listening to her original takes on game worlds through song.

Swtorista

Each time I come back to Star Wars the Old Republic I wind up on this channel and lean heavily on the videos as a way of catching back up and figuring out what I should be doing to experience the brand new content. I linked one of the videos from “The Academy” series where she compiles a bunch of information into a summary of a specific thing. This one for example is what to do at level 70, and covers a bunch of the “end game” items available in the game. I also greatly appreciate all of the cosmetic videos where she focuses on a subject like “best jedi robes” or something like that.

In Closing

So I am quickly realizing… that I could probably keep doing this all day long…. and really need to wrap things up. Destiny was really the game that got me to start engaging in YouTube, because there really was not a blog presence that was available to find information. Traditionally I had focused on a mixture of blogs and WoWHead style game information sites to mine data. However of late I have noticed a lot of communities never really coalesce around written word, and you wind up having to mine a lot of content from videos. Once indoctrinated into that world however, I have apparently branched out significantly and could easily fill two or three more of these posts.

AggroChat #264 – Needing Other Players

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tamrielo

Tonight we talk briefly about Destiny 2 and the upcoming armor 2.0 and cross save changes.  From there Ash talks about diving into Fire Emblem Warriors and why he thinks it is the best of the Warriors games.  Bel talks a little bit about his new favorite Switch controller the 8Bitdo Pro+. Then Grace and Bel engage the rest of the group in some discussion about World of Warcraft and the Nazjatar and Mechagon areas.  This leads into some talk about Classic and how some accessibility features have lowered the social aspect of the game.

Topics Discussed

  • Destiny 2
    • Armor 2.0
    • Cross Save
  • Fire Emblem Warriors
    • Best Warriors Game
  • 8bitdo Pro+ Controller
  • World of Warcraft
    • Nazjatar
    • Mechagon
    • Classic
    • Needing Other Players
    • Accessibility is Double Edged Sword

Original Blog Post on AggroChat.com

YouTube Release

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Abridged History of Bel

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This week was in theory about introducing yourself in some way on your blog. I have not done any of that thus far and since today is the last day that I actually write a blog post for the week… I feel like i should at least try and remedy that. The challenge however is the fact that I already feel like I share a lot of details about myself through normal posting. I’ve always kept a weird barrier in place in that I don’t have the names but I tell you real stories that happen to me as they are happening. This is either a positive or a negative depending on your feel about personal writing.

I grew up in a “podunk” town in Northeastern Oklahoma, that was very obviously a place that had one seen significantly better days. Wikipedia lists 3989 as the official population, but I don’t believe them at all and think that number likely got manipulated to make it seem less pathetic. By the time I was a Senior in High School, my graduating class had dwindled down to around 60. We didn’t have a valedictorian but instead had four salutatorians of which I was one of them. I gave a terribly depressing speech at my graduation where I talked about how once we left this town none of our actions in it would actually matter to the rest of the world. I lost my place in my notes and somehow skipped over the only positive chunk of the speech.

I fundamentally had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. I was ultimately torn between Art and Computer Science, and wound up getting a 2 year certificate in Desktop Video Production before ultimately transferring to a 4 year college and getting a Bachelors in Commercial Art. There was a point where I was enrolled in four colleges but couldn’t decide which path to go down… and ultimately dropped out of all of them and did a mix of Junior college credits for the first two years while driving back and forth from college each day and living at home.

The town was small enough and it was 1994… and reliable internet options were not spectacular. I remember paying $60 a month for my first internet connection, which involved a $20 charge to the phone company to make the town 30 minutes away from us a local number, which allowed me to then connect to the modem banks of the $40 a month unlimited internet provider I was using. It was in my travels as an itinerant college student that I happened to meet my wife. We were both IRC junkies at the time and were introduced by a mutual friend from Belgium, when I happened to be in his channel working on one of his bots as she happened to enter.

Turns out she lived in a similarly “shithole” town, roughly 20 minutes away from mine and that we knew a lot of the same people. We opted to meet over Memorial Day weekend holiday, hang out a bit and see a movie. We saw the remake of Sgt. Bilko… which was not exactly stellar fare and we saw it in a movie theater with all of the panache of a high school speech classroom. However over the course of the next few months I met a lot of people from her college, and opted to transfer there to finish up my degree. We were “just friends” but over the course of the summer “things happened” and we’ve been together at this point for 23 years (married for 21).

My first gaming experiences were with a Sears and Roebuck Pong clone. My uncle borrowed this from my folks and hooked it up to my grandparents zenith console television… leaving it running over night and burning stripes into the screen. This basically made everyone paranoid about any future generations of console and nixed my chances of ever getting to drag my Nintendo along with me to play at other houses. We didn’t get a computer until 1991 when we got a 386 16… with no math co-processor making anything like Doom play horribly on it. I did however play a massive amount of Wolfenstein on it, as well as pretty much every computer at the High School I could get it to run on.

My first MMORPG experience came when a friend of mine asked me to come over and play his second character during a Vox raid. He traditionally dual boxed an Iksar Monk named Chadoe with a Halfling Druid named something that was pronounced “Tim You” but I cannot remember the spelling of to save my life. Basically he gave me a five second primer of run in and cast nuke spells, and showed me which specific abilities to cast. I died… and had to run back in and then had to learn how to put spells back on my bar… and wound up getting the killing blow on Lady Vox largely cementing my connection to MMORPGs from that point forward.

I played Everquest from the Velious Expansion through to Lost Dungeons of Norrath as a Dwarven Cleric. Then when we transitioned to Dark Age of Camelot I didn’t really gain traction in that game until the opening of the Gaheris Co-Op server and starting the original Belghast, a Celt Champion. From there we started playing Horizons which is pictured above, and in that game I met a ton of interesting people through my friend Vernie and the community of crafters centered around building the huge public works projects that opened up new communities. From there we played City of Heroes and it was during that game that we started getting into the Beta of a new game being published by Blizzard.

With World of Warcraft I shifted from guild member to guild leader as I founded House Stalwart with a bunch of friends I had met through all of the MMORPGs I had been in up until that point. I original planned on playing a Paladin, but the suicide of my nephew knocked me out of commission for several weeks meaning that when I did come back i needed something I could solo to catch up with my friends. As a result Lodin the Dwarven Hunter pictured dead center above was my main for most of Vanilla. At some point I decided I wanted to run up a tank, and Belghast was reborn this time as a Human Warrior, and I duo’d it with my friend Amy ( pictured to the right on her Hunter) who wanted to level a priest.

From that point forward I have pretty much been a tank in every game I have played. I fell into the rotation of tanking the “alt” raids for Late Night raiders. I am pretty sure this was taken after I had just finished tanking a Zul’Gurub raid on the weekend. I think I was showing off my new sword that I got along the way. Look at the horrible mishmash of gear I was wearing… but in truth this is what a lot of tanks looked like back then. I still miss drillborer’s disc, which I believe is what the shield I was using was called. In part I am hoping to regain a lot of the joy I had from collecting these pieces of gear with the launch of World of Warcraft Classic.

I will close this point out with a “screenshot” of me. I’ve been mistaken for Brian Posehn, so here is an image I threw together with me on the left and him on the right. I however need to wrap this up because in truth I need to get my arse to work. I am never sure what to tell people during one of those “introduce yourself” moments, but this was a stab. I’ve not done a great job in participating in the themes but I fully expect since the next one is “Developer Appreciation Week” I will probably have some more cogent topics. I hope you have a great Friday and an awesome weekend.

Optimizing out Communication

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The first time I saw the Dwarven Statues in Loch Modan

A few days ago a conversation started on twitter, initially between myself and Heart1lly but expanded outwards from there. What originally started as a discussion about World of Warcraft Classic also similarly expanded out to cover the golden age of MMORPGs in general. Now that I am staring at the calendar and see that I will be playing a “Classic-zed” version of World of Warcraft in thirteen days, I find myself mulling over it some more. I find myself extremely excited by the possibilities it might present. This morning rather than posting pictures from the modern classic client, I have dug through my archives and am digging out a bunch of 4:3 aspect ratio screenshots from my early years in the game.

The day I got my very first mount in World of Warcraft

I’ve written about this before, but largely I think when it comes to video game nostalgia especially surrounding an online game, we are less nostalgic about the game itself and more nostalgic about a certain set of circumstances from a certain moment in time. I think much of the draw of the nostalgic is that we know at some level that we can never again arrive back at that moment and have those same feelings, because the world has changed and we have changed with it. However it feels good from time to time to try and retread the steps we have passed before, and as I age I find myself doing this a bit more often. I regularly reinstall aging game clients just to experience for a moment the glimmer of the joy I once had playing them.

My good friend Vernie dancing on boxes in Stathholme I believe one of the first times I was in there.

Sure we should be out there making new memories, but I feel like the modern crop of MMORPGs actively hampers that ability. The first MMOs worked and created the lasting relationships that they did in part because we had a serious need for other people. What I mean by that is that in order for us to have a fun night, we needed a bunch of other people to be similarly interested in doing the same thing. This meant that without really meaning it… you yourself were open to doing things that were maybe less than optimal for your evening because it would mean that in turn the other player would be willing to assisting you at a later date. I cannot count the number of Paladin and Warlock mounts that I helped people get, knowing that it was a really important achievement for them and that at least on some level I was accruing social capital that could be spent on my own desires.

The original “Warrior Protest” on Argent Dawn… aka the dancing naked gnomes in Ironforge moment

When I say lasting relationships were formed, a good number of the bonds with gamers that I talk to on a semi-daily basis were forged during this era. It was a shared sense of struggle that lead us all to bond over so many nights in Dire Maul or Lower Blackrock Spire… or eventually Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. The majority of the folks that I record AggroChat with on a weekly basis have roots that tie back to the time we spent in World of Warcraft on the Argent Dawn server. These are life long friends that moved past just the game. I’ve helped people prepare their first resume, or proof read a term paper in college, or even in the case of Rae hired for one of my development positions.

A warband waiting for reports back from scouts before moving in the infamous Southshore/Tarren Mill open PVP

There is no denying that MMORPGs have become significantly more convenient for the players, but I think that convenience has been a double edged sword. Last night I found myself queuing for a dungeon in FFXIV without even asking in guild chat if someone wanted to ride along for the fast tank queue. Why did I do this? Because waiting on another player is inconvenient and I now live in a time where I no longer have to get myself messy with human communication. I feel bad that my brain sometimes thinks in that manner, but there are a lot of times we can live in our own little bubble and are presented a series of nameless faceless and often time voiceless individuals in our group that we don’t need to communicate with.

Our first outing as a guild to Scarlet Monastery… we tanked it with hunter pets.

The rough edges have been smoothed to the point where a dungeon run is a series of encounters that are messaged so well as to not need any form of communication. With Shadowbringers, Final Fantasy XIV introduced the Trust system, which allows you to run dungeons with a full party of NPCs. The funny thing about it, is that running with a trust feels no different now than running an Expert Roulette with a full group of human beings. In fact the NPCs talk way more in a party than the humans that are there with me all barreling towards a fixed goal that we all have memorized by this point. I present that again… this has all come through the fact that we no longer need to communicate to play these games.

Hanging with my friend Amy on her rogue Ricci after killing The Beast in UBRS

Now I am not naive enough to think that a return to World of Warcraft Classic is going to magically usher in the golden age of MMORPGs again. However I am looking forward to needing other players, because even for me… who is generally thought of as a community organizer… I occasionally need a reminder that the other people matter. The Dungeon Finder opened the game to a lot of people who lacked the social network to be able to form groups, and because of this you will find a lot of proponents. For me, it was the death of social gaming in World of Warcraft, because rapidly these thriving social channels that we used each night for grouping went silent. Why say into a channel “Tank and Healer looking for dps for dungeon” when you can just push a button and get a group assigned to you.

Doing the Stormwind step of the Onyxia quest on Belghast

The problem with push button grouping is accountability goes out the window. I think a lot of the toxic behavior that we see in gaming as a whole is due to the fact that there are generally no consequences attached to it. During the pre-dungeon-finder society in World of Warcraft, your actions and ultimately your reputation mattered. As a guild and raid leader I was in communication with the leaders of most of the other raids and guilds on our server. We had a situation happen on a raid where someone rolled need on a pair of BoE boots, and then at the end of the raid that player informed us that he was leaving the raid and going elsewhere. Within moments of the raid being over the BoE boots were up on the auction house.

All hunter Upper Blackrock Spire run back when you could get 10 players in there

This was a pretty uncool move, and I mentioned it in passing to the leader of the raid that the player was going to as a warning. Within a few minutes of conversation among various guild and raid leaders I found myself in tells with the player. The unintended consequence of his actions was that he was finding himself kicked from that new raid and barred from all of the other raids that he could have gone to. He was begging me to call of something that I didn’t even ask for in the first place. Raid leaders hate mercenaries, and effectively his behavior was something that none of the other raids wanted any part of either. When you needed other people, and you were limited to the scope of your own server… prior to the existence of server transfers… your reputation as an honorable player was way more important than the gear you happened to be wearing.

The line of players preparing to storm the whelp room in Blackwing Lair

So in truth I figure most of the people that we are dragging into World of Warcraft Classic will bounce within the first few weeks. However there is a part of me that is hoping it will serve to rekindle a server community surrounding the game that brings back some of the things that I remember from my past. I want social channels to matter again, and the dark art of forming a group to be a thing. I want to meet new people and bolster that list of life long friends that I have met through gaming. Right now the only people I really meet are through Social Media or introduced to me by friends of people I already know through gaming. The problem there is that on many levels these are just surface friendships because at no point in our gaming do either of us actually truly need the other player.

One of our first Karazhan raids

The strongest friendships are forged in the fires of shared adversity. In order to have that adversity the game needs a significant amount of friction pushing back against you on a nightly basis, and the modern MMORPG lacks that apart from the most hardcore of activities. Sure were we Savage or Mythic raiders we would have the same tales to tell, but I just don’t have the appetite for raiding that I once did. I want the simple moment to moment game-play to matter and with this I am looking forward to hanging out with people in a re-imagined World of Warcraft. I am trying to go into it with open eyes about the slim chance that it acts as a catalyst to bring about the styles of gameplay that I find myself missing. So while I am not going into this with rose colored lenses I am hopeful nonetheless.