Last night was a good night. First off I am finally starting to feel a little more like human, as it seems that whatever crud I have been fighting for the last week is starting to subside. Second I think I found the source of my annoyance in Discord mysteriously turning itself from push to talk to voice activated all the time. Finally I got to run some dungeons with Mor, Grace and a friend of theirs from the Star Wars the Old Republic days. At this point I think there are a couple of dungeons I still have yet to see on normal, and it is my goal to remedy that before sitting foot into heroics. There are still several items that I need… namely a good shield, good main hand weapon, and another reasonable trinket. Those are the slots that are dragging down my magic number down from what it could potentially be.
Speaking of magic numbers however… I have now hit 305 which makes me physical capable of queuing for heroics. However this is not quite something I want to do yet. I want to finish getting those missing slots and see if I can sort out why I feel so damned squishy. It could be that Protection Warriors are just in a shitty place right now and one that will improve later as gear scales. This has been the case in past expansions, but what I am going through at the moment is that I feel completely rage starved. It is like I don’t have enough active rage to be using revenge and keeping up Ignore Pain/Shield Block. This is completely new for me because always in the past I had all the rage in the world to play with. So last night I shifted around my talents after the few dungeons we ran and I am hoping tonight… I maybe see an improvement.
The image may state that this is Lord Stormsong… but in truth it is Squid Pope. Originally we thought he was Fish Pope but he transformed over the course of the instance. Squid Pope and his friends were very annoying, but we managed to make it through the effort and get some loot in the process. So far I am thinking that the dungeons that the Alliance gets natively are maybe a little cooler than the dungeons the Horde gets. The blood troll instance for example… is annoying as shit and I still have not figured out how the ticks work given that sometimes I die horribly to them exploding and other times I am just fine. The end result is me running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to avoid standing near them as they die.
My hope is that tonight in our adventures I manage to find a weapon and a trinket… and preferably a new shield so I can go forth into heroic land with great confidence. It is taking me a little longer than normal to ease into my comfort zone with Battle for Azeroth content, but I am thankful I have a trusted healer to ferry me along in this journey. She is showing great restraint in not just completely blowing past me and leaving me in the dust. I am already feeling super behind the curve given how often people in guild chat are asking for Mythics… and I have not even set foot in a Heroic. They are on a vastly different trajectory to me so far, and that is okay. I will get there eventually, and hopefully at some point I get enough gear to have offspec options.
I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning, apart from just how badass my Orc Warrior Lady looks in the Blackhand set combined with the revamped version of the crazy Black Temple shield and Mechanar sword. As much as I generally did not like the story arc of Warlords of Draenor… it produced a bunch of gear that I absolutely love. The Iron Wrath set still is among my all-time favorite Warrior sets and I really need to put some time into farming the transmog bits that I am missing. One of the things I realized last night is that my attachment to the Sun Eater’s appearance is at least in small part because I farmed Heroic Mechanar for ages to try and get it. It also made me realize how different the economy of gear is now as to when it was back then.
There were items worth farming because when you got them… they would actually serve as a pretty good weapon for a good while into raiding rather than something you toss in the bin immediately. I remember in Burning Crusade when they introduced the long and contorted weapon specializations for Blacksmithing… those items were actually worth working towards because they would serve the player for more than a day or two. Anything I could craft for myself right now gets tossed in the shredder the moment I step foot into a heroic or at the very least a mythic dungeon. Those long tailed goals are largely gone from the game, the things that are worth striving towards.
I think the problem for me is that my core gameplay loop has shifted from seeking specific objectives, to gaining the next disposable item that will increase the magical number that gates all of the tiers of content in the game. I remember there used to be a time when I would create “Hit Lists” of the items that I wanted from specific dungeons, and then set forth to run those dungeons until I completed that set. Back then however the items in each dungeon felt unique to the location… not just super similar draws from the same item pool. The transitory nature of the items however makes each new acquisition feel completely unimportant… the equivalent to the commons in a pack of Magic the Gathering cards that you just skip over hoping that maybe just maybe you got something really cool in the Rare/Mythic slot.
I miss caring about the drops. I am not sure how you go back to that era especially when the modern era is actually way more open to varied styles of play. Right now I am largely gearing through a mix of World Questing and running the occasional dungeon. If I were super serious about things I would be abusing the fact that I have instant dungeon queues as a tank and pug my way to glory. At this point I am sitting at 300 item level and I need 305 to start doing heroics. That said in truth I probably need to have a full compliment of 310 items to make heroics really viable as the person who is soaking all of the damage.
The thing is… I used to feel confident running dungeons with strangers. Somewhere along the way that changed and I no longer feel as bulletproof and steadfast as I once was. I used to feel like I really had a handle on all there was to know about warrior tanking. Now I just sorta feel like a pretender in plate armor, and I think that lack of confidence hinders me so much when it comes to random groups. Last night Grace and I ran a dungeon, and I felt like I was screwing up all of the time… and doing all the wrong things. I am not entirely certain how to get over that, apart from just bashing my face against the random group finder until I become desensitized again.
The funny thing is though… I don’t have reason to feel this way. So far all of the random people we have grouped with on Horde side have been awesome. I generally start the group with a “Hey Folks!” and unlike Alliance side I almost always get a response back which starts an open dialog that often continues during the dungeon. I do however miss the days when I used to have a ton of active social channels on the server, and had to build groups by hand… because then I actually got to know more people. It is all too easy for me to stay in my comfortable bubble of people I am already familiar with rather than branching out and making new connections. I think in part that is why I am enjoying Mastodon so much… is because it is forcing me to meet and entirely new world of people.
One of the things that you probably already know about me by reading my blog… is that Twitter is my social media home. It is where with the release of this blog I carved out a place for myself online and then filled my feed full of other awesome gamers and bloggers. It was for years my happy place, where I came to get new ideas or interact with others about my own. Then something happened along the way that started to darken the environment. More politics started filtering their way into these discussions and with the introduction of the Gators, there was a massive chilling effect on this community I so loved. So it is a world that I still feel very connected to, and is still the primary source of communication I have for a lot of my friends… but the day to day interactions just don’t feel as good as they once did.
Hey, I made a Mastodon account. Come follow me there. So far it’s like early twitter, but gayer, so better in every single way??https://t.co/NMLEUjL7cH
The above tweet was sort of a catalyst for an interesting journey I have been on this weekend. Initially my thought was “why the hell does the metal band have a social network?”. It seems like I have been behind the times and another network sprung up without me knowing about it. Mastodon is essentially the latest not-twitter to show up on the block, but in truth by latest I mean it has been out in the wild since October of 2016 in one form or another. Twitter is the most readily available comparison but in truth it is doing a lot more than that, some of which honestly is a bit of a detriment to easily on-boarding new users.
Mastodon is a distributed and federated social network that is by nature decentralized, and while there is in fact a Flagship site called Mastodon.social, there are a ton of smaller communities that have downloaded the open source software and are running their own instances. The largest of these is the primarily non-English speaking Pawoo.net with around 400,000 users, and the smallest ones somewhere in the sub-100 user range. No one person controls the network as essentially all of the instances out there have control over the code base of their own server… pending they don’t tweak the general network protocol settings.
So you are probably thinking to yourself, what use is a social network if it is a bunch of disconnected islands? This is where the Federated part comes in allowing users on different island states to talk to each other freely as though they were on the same network. That means I can take my @Belghast@Elekk.xyz account and talk freely to @Tamrielo@Tabletop.social or @x1101@social.nasqueron.org. The naming following an email like scheme with @Username and then @Instance following it if they are not also on your local instance.
The user interface has a very “I swear I am using TweetDeck” feel to it, but it is just subtly different enough to trip you up a little bit. However it was extremely easy for me to shift over to using it comfortably because a lot of the things I was used to doing were also here. Instead of a Tweet you have a Toot since Mastodons… and instead of a Retweet folks call it a Boost, which in some ways is a more pleasant way of thinking about it given you are trying to share someone else’s content with the world. Significantly different is the fact that you can change the visibility of a given “toot” so that it shows as public, unlisted, follower-only or is instead a direct message to a specific user or users mentioned.
There is also the Content Warning tag that allows users to hide anything that might be sensitive behind one of the Show More walls that you are seeing in the screenshot above. Each community uses this a little differently, and a lot of people will simply use it as a way of truncating a long post so that it doesn’t clog the feeds of others with a wall of text or something that is image heavy. For example this weekend when I syndicated my podcast, I was able to give a little longer of an intro to it given the 500 character limit instead of 140/280 and hid most of that behind a CW tag for making life easier on the folks reading their timelines. The only thing that seems to be missing is the ability to add a comment along with a boost similar to the quoted retweet functionality that I use so often.
One of the other interesting things about the Federiverse as a lot of people call it… is that you can effectively start on one server and uproot and move to another. For example I started out on Mastodon.cloud because I simply did not understand at first how this network worked. It was a more general interest instance and quite honestly was still very awesome with a very nice admin. However the longer I used it, the more I realized that maybe I wanted to be on an instance that was more drift compatible to my own interests. I had a lot of great interactions with folks from Elekk.xyz and that lead me to investigate it closer… and when I saw the above image I knew that it was probably the right place for me.
One of the things that separates Mastodon from Twitter is that you have the ability to read essentially every public toot that comes across the server. You have a local timeline that shows you everything happening on your own instance, and a federated timeline showing you everything happening on all of the servers your local is connected with. It is probably best to think of this in MMO terms as your Local Timeline is your Guild Chat and your Federated Timeline is Trade or General.
The other thing that it feels like to me is an old dial-up BBS. During Fido.net era when they were loosely connected through a hub and spoke relay network, a user on one BBS to communicate with a user on any other connected BBS. However it sometimes took four or five days for the round trip depending on when you sent the message and when the person on the other end received and replied to it. In the Federiverse each of these instances is like your local BBS where you get to know everyone, with the ability to reach out and make friendships with anyone else in the larger connected community.
I feel like I have spent an awful lot of time talking about the hows and not much about the whys this morning… but unfortunately the WHY I am enjoying myself is going to have to come another day. Essentially the short version is… it feels like a throwback to a simpler time in the internet when we all were much more open to talking freely with each other. Thusfar everyone I have encountered has been charming and helpful in me getting settled into their neighborhood. There are a handful of us from the blogging space that have made a home for ourselves on Elekk.xyz, but there are so many other instances that I highly suggest you start out on JoinMastodon.org and see some of the other instances. I am finding out it is weirdly customary to have multiple accounts on multiple instances. Tam for example has one on TableTop.Social, Elekk.xyz and some Game Dev related one that I don’t know the address for.
Does this mean I am leaving twitter? Probably not, but I do find Mastodon to be a much more engaging network than the current state twitter is in. If you too sorta miss the days when the internet and social engagement was simpler, or have a hankering for an even older time of BBSes and IRC Servers… then maybe it might too feel comfortable. It is more than likely always going to remain a niche thing, but I think in the grand scheme of things that is its strength. We talked about this at length on the podcast, but maybe having a bunch of fragmented islands leads to a better community than having one mega server as it were. I know we have commented as such in various MMO communities, so why would that same theory not apply to the broader social media?
I feel like I need to be apologizing since you are not getting an awful lot out of me this week. I am still recovering from whatever crud I seem to have caught, and my wife appears like she might be coming down with it too. All this time I thought it was just super bad allergies but maybe it really did end up being some sort of a summer cold. Regardless we ended up heading to bed around 9 last night because we were both sitting there fighting sleep. That means I did not spend an awful lot of time playing last night, but I did managed to finish up the main story arc of Zuldazar which was very cool. The only negative is there is a lot of stuff happening that doesn’t cleanly get resolved so I am expecting that once again the raids will act as finishing off bits of story. It gives the players that would not normally run the raids a hook to go do them… but at the same time it is a bit annoying that you are essentially forced to do them to see the end of story lines.
I got called out by Grace that she had not yet dinged 120, but I am going out on a limb and saying that she dinged last night. I mean she said as much, but I also remember he saying as much the night before. Basically at this point I cannot trust my brain because apparently whatever crud I have is effecting my memory as well. I think I also said I was 117 going on 118… which is not true as I dinged 117 last night. It is little wonder that I had trouble following some of the story line throughout Zuldazar a bit. It is my hope that this weekend I can push forward and ding 120 so I can start doing end game shenanigans.
The real hope however is that I start to feel like a normal human being. Yesterday was my first full day back at work since Monday, and it took an awful lot out of me. This weekend also probably means we are going to run a lot of errands as my wife realizes things she needs for the classroom given this is her first day back with kids. It is going to be busy… and I realistically need to be back a normal operating status in order to do all of the things that need to be done. I’ve not done any of the Developer Appreciation Week posts but my hope is to do a few of them over the weekend. This is really not a great time to be sick, so hopefully I get over this nonsense quickly.
