Tales of the Aggronaut

Launches and Lurching

July 18, 2018 by Belghast

Initially I had planned last night on poking my head in on various characters within Azeroth but like many I was greeted with a lot of this screen when I first got home. It seemed like a combination of a couple of things… first being that there were apparently some rather nasty DDoS attacks going on with the hosting providers… and secondly this was a major patch in WoW. I mean I’ve been going through this cycle since 2004 and this is far from the first time a major patch rendered the game unplayable for one reason or another. Just the simple onslaught of a bunch of players coming back to do like I was planning is enough to take down servers. I have no idea when it was fixed and when the servers came back up… because I did what I have learned I need to do to keep from getting ragey… I moved on to playing something else.

Though that said I heard that the community was particularly toxic to the BlizzardCS account last night. There were apparently people calling for the firing of employees and all of that nonsense… while those of us who have been through far worse launches sit back and eat our popcorn. I think the reality is that Blizzard has spoiled us of late with a string of relatively smooth major patch cycles. So as a result when folks see what I would consider a normal MMO patch rollout… they lose their shit. There have been times when I too was losing my shit… particularly during the relaunch of A Realm Reborn when you had to effectively stay logged in if you hoped to play the game at all. In this scenario however I happily wandered off to play Elder Scrolls Online after a few rounds of attempts.

So I have been working my way through the ESO content as it was originally released and after finishing Orsinium… that lead me down the path of the Thieve’s Guild. Now I had accidentally already done the intro quest to this content because I quite legitimately thought it was just another quest in Windhelm. That is one of the challenges you have coming back this far behind the curve is there are quests everywhere… and a good deal of them are trying to lead you off to start expansions and DLC without ever fully announcing that is their intent. Sure I probably could have looked it up in the quest journal, but for the most part I find myself not using that at all while playing Elder Scrolls Online.

One of the challenges with Thieves Guild is the fact that it is more or less a stealthy expansion, and I Belghast… am not a stealthy person. I am one of those charge into the fight and taunt all the things type person… and the thought of sneaking around in full plate seems hilarious to me. That said I have tried my best to embrace this game play style because the content essentially forces you to do so. Getting detected in a good deal of the missions means that you are going to get swarmed by city guards that you have no way of actually soloing. Now thankfully it employs the Assassins Creed “instant hiding container” sort of thing, which allows you to evade attention at just the right moment. Now unfortunately if you already have guard aggro you are going to have to wait a bit until the “heat meter” dies down before popping out and continuing the mission.

Now it is not like I have never done a thieves guild in the past Elder Scrolls Online games… in fact to my knowledge I have done them all since Oblivion. The problem is in those older games there was always a path of “kill all the things” that got you through the quest as opposed to constantly sneaking your butt around. For the most part however I have managed to do the quests as intended part from a few times when I killed someone instead of just not doing that. While the gameplay is not my favorite thing in the world, I have to give the game credit for completely hooking me with the storyline. This is in fact an Elder Scrolls Thieves Guild story… which quite honestly tend to be some of the better written and more interesting guilds out there.

I am completely hooked on the characters and the story as it is deciphering due to my interactions. It is part pirates, part heist, part Indiana Jones and a whole of fighting back against an oppressive evil empire… all of which make for a really interesting sequence. The way it plays out is interesting as well as there is no one constant thread that you follow but instead a sequence of what seems to be disconnected actions that ultimately weave their way into a main story quest. I get the impression that I am reaching about the halfway point in the story as there was a major revelation last night, that seems like it will begin the end phase where I start narrowing down and working to righting the great wrong done to the guild. I am completely hooked… in spite of needing to creep about unbenefiting a warrior of my stature.

Not Prepared

July 17, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I logged in a bunch of characters in a failed attempt to prepare for the impending apocalypse that is sure to come with today’s patch. What I mean by that is the 7.0 patch nerfed the prices of a bunch of the garrison missions as well as the sales prices of a ton of the associated nonsense that comes with that sort of thing. So last night I logged in and collected any gold missions I had waiting to be collected since I had not logged into WoW in a few weeks… and sold all of the items used to upgrade followers that I had in my inventory. While the servers are still up and running at this very moment the patching process has already started to our clients, and by the time I come home there will be a whole new era of World of Warcraft started. I am still not entirely sure how I feel about this.

I don’t mean this post to sound as hyperbolic as I am sure it will come off as, but Legion was sort of a tipping point for me in many ways. Blizzard showed me how good a design could feel that didn’t focus on the red versus blue nonsense but instead dug down hard into the class story-line and creating situations where all of us… Horde and Alliance worked together to solve issues. While I didn’t stick with it for the long haul, Legion is probably my new favorite expansion for World of Warcraft replacing the previous… Wrath of the Lich King. I had hope that we would see a new shining era of working together to fight the bigger baddies in the world, but instead what we got was a doubling down on the infighting and bullshit, and a path that looks to be setting up both Jaina and Sylvanas on a possible path towards becoming raid bosses.

My dream for World of Warcraft is a time when I can sit down and play with both my Horde and Alliance friends together, and this expansion seems to be putting a final nail in that concept. As a result my interest in this game has never been at a lower point, and were it not for twitter and people talking about the 8.0 patch constantly I probably would not have known it was a thing. While a lot of my friends were in a flurry of activity trying to finish out their mage tower challenges, attempting to beat all of them before they went away… I find myself in a situation where I never did a single one. The last expansion saw me going into it with one of every class Alliance side at maximum level… this expansion sees me going into it with 2 warriors, 2 deathknights, a demon hunter and a paladin.

This expansion also sees me planning on switching my allegiance and “maining” horde this time around. It is going to be a weird ride when in less than a month now the expansion launches. I have deeply mixed feelings about my future with this game. I’ve heard the “its world of warcraft, not world of peacecraft” nonsense so many times it makes me want to punch people through the internet. I used to keep going because I had this nexus of hope deep down inside of me that someday somehow things would change and the faction wall would fall and I could finally unite both groups of friends living on either side of that chasm. That hope has died, and with it a lot of the reasons why I kept playing the game. That said I know I will give Battle for Azeroth a shot and probably even find myself enjoying certain aspects of it. However the hope has mostly been replaced with Dread as I watch this Warbringers series seeming to make good on that concern that we might be losing one more more powerful characters to a Raid someday.

After patching my addons and logging into a bunch of characters… and then the requisite amount of “oh look its bel” and answering a series of messages… I eventually retreated back into my comfy space that is Elder Scrolls Online. I sorta knew that I could only log in so many characters before someone noticed my presence and started trying to interact. I mean this is more of a thing on the Alliance side where I have been gone far longer. On Horde side I am mostly greeted with a “hi bel” since I tend to darken those doors fairly often. House Stalwart was the guild that I built on the day the servers opened in World of Warcraft and for a long time it was my home. However the game has changed and with it the guild has changed as a necessity to keep folks active and happy. I don’t begrudge anything that Elnore, Rylacus or now Kylana did to keep things up and running and the tweaks they made to stay viable.

That said House Stalwart feels like returning to the small town you grew up in, years after leaving it… and while the folks are friendly all you can notice is the things that have changed and the names that are no longer there. That guild and the Alliance side of the house are fundamentally different now, and quite honestly are different from when the Legion expansion rolled out and I went through my last period of heavy activity and raiding. To say active and relevant you have to be a guild in constant motion, whereas the older I get the more I seem to want things to stay the same. As it stands, though I created it… I identify more with Greysky Armada our FFXIV guild than I do with House Stalwart these days. While the Elder Scrolls Online guild bears that name it bears way more connection to Greysky and the AggroChat community than it ever did the original World of Warcraft one.

I think ultimately so much has changed in my life and inside of me since 2004 when the doors opened to Azeroth. What used to feel like family now feels like a foreign country. I can’t really blame the game or the players… it is me that changed because I kept leaving with increasing frequency to go elsewhere. I remember my first “WoW Tourist” jaunt happened about six months after release, before I had even made it to level 60 on a single character. A bunch of my friends went off to play Everquest 2 with the group of folks who didn’t follow us into World of Warcraft but instead chose that path. I remember doing this again for Warhammer Online and quite frankly every major MMO release seemed to pull me away from Warcraft for a period of time… until those periods of time got longer than my actual time playing the game.

While this image is greatly outdated at this point… you can see this constant string of orange squares at the top to represent time spent playing World of Warcraft. The only problem with that is it is a lie, and a lot of those interactions are time spent subscribed and poking my head back in for a night here or there and not large blocks of dedicated time. I left the game during the early days of the Cataclysm expansion prior to the first patch, and in truth I never fully returned to feeling the same way about it as I did back then. Sure I have come back with each expansion and usually become active again just prior to a new patch… but that orange bar is evidence of a lot of time spent moonlighting in World of Warcraft but not actually playing it as my primary game. I have some deeply complicated feelings about my inability to let go of the past and just move on, and a lot of those feelings have come to a head recently as I stare down the barrel of this expansion.

Sorry for what probably ended up being a bummer of a post, but occasionally I cannot predict the post that will come forth from my fingertips on a given morning.

Luck and Mini Bosses

July 16, 2018 by Belghast

At this point we are up to 41 blogs signed up for Blaugust in one form or another, with a significant number of folks hanging out in the Discord just for the sake of fun that we may be able to sway one way or another. I am super happy with this early participation, and in side conversations there are a bunch of folks on the fence trying to determine just how much they can afford to participate themselves this year. In that always be plugging style of conversation… if you are at all interested in starting up a blog now is the time to do it. Pop on by the sign up form and let us know your information and we will do our best to support you through that early blogging experience. This is of course also an open offer as well to folks who are currently blogging and just want to up their frequency of posting… or really want to help mentor the next crew of bloggers.

Since I last posted updates there have been a few new entries and you can see the entire list in an easy to use google sheet that I have been maintaining.

New Mentors

Izlain – Me vs Myself and I

New Participants

Rambling Redshirt – Beyond Tannhauser Gate
Ashgar – Ash’s Adventures
Neschria – Municipal City

The official pre-week starts on July 25th so there is still plenty of time to get a blog up and running before the official August 1st start.

There are times where I have the sort of luck that pisses my friends off. For example I have pulled a couple of those ultra rare chase cards from Battle for Zenndikar and Kaladesh, just buying random single packs here and there. Magic the Gathering just released its return to core sets with M19 and there are a bunch of interesting cards in it… namely a much needed reprint of Crucible of Worlds and brand new version of the classic legends era dragons. Ultimately I would like to have a copy of each for eventual EDH brewing purposes, and as a result I picked up a fat pack on Friday in my post funeral travels. Now a fat pack has 10 packs and seems to be for lack of a better term a partial piece of what would have normally been a full box.

They tend to be feast or famine, either you get the good end of the rare/mythic sheet or you don’t. In this case I managed to pull 4 mythics out of those ten packs. I took the above photo to show off everything that came out of that box, with the last two on the left side being just a couple of cool looking common foils. I found it weird that I got a duplicate rare out of the batch so maybe they are doing the fat packs different than they have done before. I was extremely excited that I managed to pull a Crucible of Worlds and at least two of the three color dragons. Unfortunately I did not pull the big daddy of them all… Nicol Bolas, the Ravager. I still consider this an insanely lucky box, and walked away mighty happy with it.

As far as the rest of the weekend… it was largely spent hanging out and playing some Elder Scrolls Online. I have now officially finished the Orsinium content and wow… I am exceedingly impressed with the quality. If that is at all representative of what I have to expect from the follow up releases, then I am going to be a very happy boy. I’ve since started on the Thieves Guild which is the next content release in order… having largely skipped Imperial City due to its PvEvP nature. I did however spent a chunk of last night running around and collecting Skyshards out in Cyrodil.. I am sure frustrating someone who was there to try and take keeps and mile forts. The only actual PVP I got into was being found by a roaming murderball of Ebonheart Pact players… at which point my screen froze and I crashed out of the game only to come back very dead.

The most fun however was prior to that when I was roaming around in Coldharbor with Ashgar and Tamrielo doing the public dungeon there. It all started simple enough… the three of us on Voice Chat when Ash mentioned mostly to himself that he was going to ignore the Public Dungeon for now until he could come back with a group. I said that I had not done the public dungeon there for the same reason and Tam chimed in that he had largely been avoiding any group content. Before long the three of us were converging upon Ash’s location and doing the public dungeon which had two quests inside of it. Additionally we realized that there were a bunch of optional bosses in various corners of the place and we set forth to take each and every one down earning us a conqueror achievement.

I kinda love that this game does not care at all about where a player is in the progression, and that you can pretty much just group in for whatever happens to be going on. I abused this power to help Void get some crafting materials by porting myself to Windhelm and then letting him piggy back in on that to get the shrine there. I love that this game has decided that horizontal progression is the way to go because it has allowed me to invest resources in a really nice set of gear knowing I won’t be upgrading it anytime soon. I love that I can just do whatever happens to cross my path and still feel like I am moving towards a goal in the form of Champion points… knowing that I am also adding progression to every single character as I go. I am very happy with the current state of Elder Scrolls Online.

NPC Memories

July 13, 2018 by Belghast

Once again I am going to lead off this morning with an update on the folks who have joined in the fun since my last post. I have a sneaking suspicion that these will continue especially considering we have a bunch of folks in the Discord who have yet to actually fill out the sign-up form. I am not officially counting someone until I have an entry in the sign up sheet from them. Another thing that has happened is I was asked to record a quick demo for the for someone to mix into their podcast. I am not sure if anyone else out there cares about such thing but I thought I would link it here. I did find myself falling into radio announcer voice a bit but whatever… I think it does a reasonable job of summarizing the event.

As far as the sign-ups we don’t have as many as we have had in past days. I feel like this is going to probably slow down a bit and then pick back up just prior to the event starting around July 25th.

New Participants

RumorsMatrix – Barely Readable Diary
UnwiseOwl – Leaflocker
Professor Beej – ProfessorBeej is Awesome – RunningShoes.tv

I want to give an extra call out to RumorsMatrix who completely bucked the notion of WordPress vs Blogger and went off and created his own custom blogging software. That is some awesome dedication and I highly suggest you check out [barely readable diary] because it is anything but. I’ve had a few questions recently about the whole Mentor vs Participant thing largely because there were some in the community that were viewing Participant as the “newbie” role and didn’t necessarily feel like they were ready for the “mentor” title either. Functionally this comes down to intent and less about who is new or not.

I’ve used the analogy of Blaugust as a Blogging Summer Camp, and in that concept the Mentors would effectively be the Camp Counselors. As a mentor you should feel comfortable with other bloggers coming up to you and asking for advice or some form of assistance. Participants on the other hand are folks who just want to join their blog into this nonsense and participate in the festival of blogging as a whole. I do however intend to try and track a few metrics that were not in the form, namely folks for whom this is their first Blaugust, and folks who started a brand new blog for the initiative. Ultimately if you just want to join in and have fun then Participant is likely the role for you.

Last night I continued my journey in Elder Scrolls Online Orsinium DLC and knocked out a few more areas before ultimately getting pulled into a crisis at work. You never want to hear the words “catastrophic failure” at 10 pm… but we managed to get everything wrapped up by 11ish. However it greatly cut into the flow of my evening and kept me from completing more than I otherwise would have. The depth of this content continues to impress me as does the scale, and I keep thinking in the back of my head… if all of these DLCs are this cool it might be a really long time before I chew through it. It sounds as though the key differentiation between a DLC and an Expansion is the first is largely centered around a single zone and the later includes multiple areas.

I am extremely thankful that I wound up finishing all three factions worth of content before starting any of the DLCs. There were times I contemplated straying off that path but it is really paying off in spades. During the original quest lines there are certain characters that stand out, and occasionally show back up multiple times during the course of the main story. One of the interesting things is that if you have completed all three factions… you end up getting recognized by characters that you have interacted with in all three campaigns. For example Neramo is part of the original Daggerfall starting area of Stros M’Kai and when I bumped into him in Wrothgar he recalled our previous adventures. Similarly you run into Rigurt the Brash a handful of times during the Ebonheart Pact story… and you can see how he is greeting me here.

Functionally this feels like the difference between starting Mass Effect with the first game and playing your way through all of them, each time importing your save game… and just starting with Mass Effect 3. I am hoping this time commitment continues to pay off as we move forward through other DLC… I did some googling and apparently at the least Neramo shows up a few more times in the future. It is this level of scripting and quest detail that makes the game feel so good as people greet you differently based on your past experiences. Sure it is an illusion and they are simply checking to see if this quest or that quest was completed, but it is a level of detail that is sorely missing in other games. I still remember how painfully jarring it was when I encountered Alexstrasza in the Twilight Highlands after completing several arcs for her during Wrath of the Lich King saving Wyrmrest Temple… and having her not remember my character in the least.

I have a huge backlog of Elder Scrolls Online content to get through and I am still greatly enjoying myself.