Tales of the Aggronaut

Shovels and Shoveltusks

November 27, 2017 by Belghast

I declared Thursday and Friday to be part of the weekend last week and decided to take myself four days off from the blog and one week off from the podcast. I feel super chill going into what is likely going to be an exceedingly stressful week so I think it was probably a good call. Apart of having to help my folks move some furniture yesterday, I mostly had a pretty chill thanksgiving. Both Friday and Saturday my wife and I attempted to avoid the world, and the only shopping we really did was online apart from a mad dash out to Target around 9 pm on Friday. At that point the store was largely sane and wasn’t that much different than a normal trip on any other night. Throughout all of this I have found myself forsaking my normal checking of Pokemon Go in favor of the relatively newly released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. First off I have to admit I have never played an animal crossing game before so I didn’t have much of a cultural frame of reference going into this. The experience instead reminds me a lot of a mix between the former web based casual MMO Glitch and some flavors of Stardew Valley. Whatever you end up calling it the game is extremely charming and at this point I am level 16 and have a bunch of the animals at my campsite… enough that the last three or four gave me a messaging saying there was no room. Unfortunately I have no clue how you actually determine which ones are at your camp and which ones are not… but for the moment I am rolling with it.

I’ve also seemingly hit whatever the friend cap is because when I try and add anyone it says that combined between my friends list and the few outstanding requests I have run out of room. I have no clue what this cap actually is… I estimated 200 the other day but I am guessing in truth it is closer to 100. The game is maybe bad at messaging some things but I am largely limping along without doing much in the way of research. There is a quarry mini-game that requires you to get help from five of your friends, and I wish they messaged when my friends were needing help a little better. For example if you look at the middle section of the above screenshot you will see a shovel icon out to the side of Kelsey’s name. I wish there was a way to sort these to the top of the list because they are really the ones I am most interested in given I like helping other players, because you appear to get some sort of cut of their profits. After that you attempt to guess which rocks have the most profitable stones… gold nuggets seem to be the best. I still very much feel like I don’t fully grasp a lot of things… like how the hell to make large quantities of Bells that Animal Crossing currency. Right now I have a 30,000 bells loan with the auto place and have never really gotten close to paying it off. Thankfully they don’t seem to be sending anyone to break my kneecaps because of it though, and they still allowed me to customize my RV regardless of having the loan out. I feel like maybe they don’t have the best business model. Regardless if you have not been playing this you should probably check it out because it definitely seems to be addictive as hell given the wide variety of friends that seem to be playing it on a regular basis.

I made a bunch of progress in Destiny 2 but I am likely going to wait until tomorrow to talk about that. Instead I wanted to talk a bit about the other game I played over the break… World of Warcraft. I am still working on my tiny Orc Warrior that is getting less and less tiny as each week goes by. At this point I have completed the Cataclysm content and am on the airship just about to start the invasion of Pandaria. This is something I have never actually done on the horde side given my last several characters I leveled were abusing the shit out of the pre-legion launch invasions. I’ve also not spent much time playing through Warlords of Draenor as a Horde character, so that should be interesting as well. Similarly I have never seen Legion as the Horde… all things I am interested in experiencing first hand. The biggest shock for me is just how fast Cataclysm managed to go given that I started in on Vashj’ir Saturday night and dinged level 85 well before finishing the final section of it Sunday evening. I realize that zone is in theory about the same size as two other zones combined… but I did not expect to be getting quite that much experience from it. Granted I am fully geared out in level 100 heirlooms (minus the rings because I don’t have the patience for that nonsense), but did not partake of any of the experience boosting options. The mission of the day however is to try and figure out how to get a Pandaria flying book… because I do not want to return to land based leveling if I can help it.

Thankfulness

November 22, 2017 by Belghast

I have this horrible habit of starting things and then just letting them sorta die. One of those things was the whole “Month of Thankfulness” that I did back in 2014. The idea was simple enough and it effectively meant that at the bottom of every post I made a little note about something I was thankful for. In theory I should have been doing this every year since during the month of November leading up to Thanksgiving. That however never actually happened and I finally jog my memory about a week into the month and think to myself that if I didn’t actually start on time… then it isn’t really worth doing. That is not to say that I am not extremely thankful for a bunch of things in my life. The weird thing about depression is that your brain can contain all of this self loathing at the same time as a whole lot of gratitude towards other people. However the hell this works I figured that I would make a post on thankfulness on this Thanksgiving Eve here in the USA before I troddle off to work. In theory I should have taken today off but my work schedule has been crazy.

My Wife

I feel like I can’t really start off a post like this without taking some time to acknowledge how awesome my wife is. We are an odd pair that on paper doesn’t seem to work that well given that we are both into some very different things. However her strengths are my weaknesses and as a team we compliment each other in so many ways. Each of us is stronger as part of the whole than we are individually. More than that she “gets” me, and even though she doesn’t necessarily get any of the many things that I am super obsessive about… she understands that they are important to me and as a result supports them. She isn’t a “gamer”, even though she spends plenty of time playing games on her iPad or phone but gets that all of these related hobbies are at the core of my being. She has patiently dealt with so many “just a second” moments that turned into thirty to forty minutes and generally taken it in stride. For the last few years she has sacrificed several of her very limited stock of yearly personal days, just to travel with me to San Antonio for Pax South because she knows it is a big deal to me. It is impossible to grab words that do justice out of the air how awesome she is and how much I love her. I am thankful I met her so many years ago and exceedingly thankful for the last twenty one years.

AggroChat

In truth it is less about the AggroChat podcast and more a short hand for a very tight knit inner circle of friends that also happens to involve all of the members of the podcast. I have this habit of collecting people and over the years much like a hermit crab I have taken a shell encrusted with so many awesome friends along with me on my journey through life. We often talk about having a surrogate family through our online interactions, but in this case I legitimately mean it. These people are my family and fate willing will grow old with as we talk on a daily basis about all sorts of important and completely frivolous topics. Its been weird to watch how this dynamic has shifted and changed as we all aged from being largely a group of people who met during vanilla warcraft progression raiding, and then saw that relationship morph into something else as time moved on. Others are significantly newer but no less precious, and even though I occasionally go into turtle mode… and disappear for awhile, I always make a return when it is safe to poke my head out of my shell. These are my people and I am so happy I found them.

Twitter

Twitter can be a horrible place, and in this year of presidential proclamations occurring in 140 characters… it seems odd to be thankful for it as a medium. The thing is… “my” twitter is a different place and while I see the echos of the larger events going on around me… it is largely the eye of the hurricane filled with a bunch of people who are also taking shelter there. I originally started my twitter account around the release of this blog back in 2009 and in many ways the original intent was to have a way to communicate with the other bloggers. We’ve tried so many different platforms to carve out a sense of community, but the only one that continues to stand after shrugging off so many is twitter. It is that common ground that still contains all of the voices that I want to keep track of on a regular basis. There are so many people that are so much better at doing this thing than I am, and I love being surrounded by them. Lately though I go for periods where I just lurk, followed by a bunch of random commentary and I am sure this gets annoying at times. So additionally I am thankful to all of the people who tolerate my nonsense in this already cluttered medium. If we are “mutuals” this thanks goes out to you because you make my life richer because of your interactions.

Work

I talk sometimes about how stressful my work is, and it absolutely is there is no discounting that fact. That said I have some pretty awesome people that I work with on a daily basis and I could not keep doing what I do without them. While this year saw some significant changes in many directions and saw Rae who previously was on the AggroChat podcast finding another gig… the folks that remain are pure gold. We do this performance review process each year, and yesterday I met with each of my direct reports as I completed theirs. I was struck by just how lucky I am to work with the people that I do. I’ve always been great at compartmentalizing when it comes to work, and so long as my little silo was doing okay… I could deal with the rest of the ship being torn to bits. I have a really great silo to keep my eyes focused on from my upper management all the way to my staff, and especially the various peers that I work with on a daily basis. There is a sense of dedication to getting things done whatever it takes and I appreciate that, especially when I am going into the first holiday season in a really long time that I have not taken any significant time off for. Camaraderie through shared struggle is a powerful force and I am thankful for those who fight for me as I fight for them.

My Readers

At this point there are so many things that I should be putting on this list, but I wanted to keep it fairly brief. I do however want to close out with one more bit of thankfulness. I am thankful for each and every one of you out there that regularly or just occasionally reads this blog or consumes anything else that I toss out into the world. For me my blog is as much therapy as it is anything else. Sitting down each morning and siphoning thoughts from my brain and committing them into text format helps me clear the slate. If something was bothering me it often makes its way onto the virtual page and as a result I can begin the “getting over it” process. I often times write like I am not actually talking to anyone other than myself, and as a result I am always sorta shocked when I find out that someone actually read the words that I cast into the void. Please do not mistake this shock for a lack of gratitude, but instead it is surprise that anything I said was really worth consuming in the first place. There are so many of you who have been with me in this journey for years, and I don’t always take the time to recognize the other people standing on the deck of this ship beside me. Thank you so much and lets commence with the exploration of new and interesting worlds!

Punitive Shades and Iron Banner

November 21, 2017 by Belghast

The 13th anniversary event is going on right now in World of Warcraft and I have been largely disconnected from me. For whatever reason I am focused on leveling my Orc Warrior above pretty much all else. This is often the case when I return to WoW after being gone for a bit, I have to ease my way back into playing my bigger characters. This year each character gets a package that contains 200 timewalking tokens and the quest vendor also sells a bunch of items. One is the Corgi from past events and another are these crazy sunglasses that my Orc Warrior is modelling above. These seemed like a fun item until last night I happened to catch wind of something through twitter.

Correct, the Bronze-Tinted Sunglasses are only transmoggable during each year's WoW Anniversary event. https://t.co/wNQhhXuIEa

— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) November 20, 2017

Why would you create an item that is only transmoggable during the yearly anniversary event? I mean I guess in theory they did give every character 200 tokens so they can fall back on the reasoning that we aren’t out any of our time to get the apparently disposable item. The transmog system in general has never quite set right with me because it seems overly complicated rather than simply just letting you swap any graphic with any other graphic. However the fact that there are timed transmogs only makes me more grumpy with it. I just hate the whole concept of time limited items in general because I realize these are supposed to make me want to collect them all before the time runs out. Instead what they do is make me just not want to even try and save myself the general disappointment by not participating. In the case of the shades, I put them on the Warrior for fun but I am not deeply connected with them. However it does seem oddly punitive to the players who have designed entire transmog outfits around them. This is just part of the Blizzard school of design where we can’t have anything that is universally good. Every nice thing seems to be required to have a negative that comes with it, and that ethos will always be an axe I have to grind with this game.

My means of taking screenshots in Destiny 2 seems to have crapped out this morning. It’s probably nothing a reboot won’t fix but I don’t exactly have time to do that when I am trying to churn out a blog post on the off chance that there might be queued updates to run. Instead you are going to get the Iron Banner screenshot from the PS4 that I took when the event was last available. Tonight I will begin the process of trying to get a set of gear on my Titan once more, because I really love the Iron Banner gear this time around. I have the full set on my PS4 Titan and I love it so much for many reasons… not the least of which is it has a decent stat package. Additionally I am all about trying to get back a few of the weapons that I really enjoyed using… namely the Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle. There are daily milestones and my goal is to attempt to complete them on each of my characters. I am still frustrated that the Iron Banner is not a means of gaining power level the way it used to be in Destiny 1, but it is still a good source of cool gear and I am just going to focus on that aspect.

Memory is Fleeting

November 20, 2017 by Belghast

With all of the recent talk about the World of Warcraft classic server, I have found myself contemplating a lot of things about the game. We recorded a podcast episode where we basically spent the entire time trying to determine just how vanilla classic would end up being. The other side effect of all of this is that I seem to be playing my horde warrior over on scryers quite a bit more than usual. Now if you were to ask me to rank the current expansions to the game that ranking would look a little something like this…

Wrath of the Lich King
The Burning Crusade
Legion
Vanilla
Mists of Pandaria
Warlords of Draenor
Cataclysm

Notice that number one and number two are the second and third expansion, and that weirdly enough I rank Legion above Vanilla. What you are seeing is that my memory of these expansions and the nostalgia that colors them does not adequately represent the experience of actually playing through them. I’ve recently leveled through the Burning Crusade content in a fashion given that you end up dinging your way out of it long before you actually finish much of it. I did do Hellfire Peninsula in its entirety, the majority of Terrokar and a good chunk of Nagrand. I left the Cataclysm tainted Vanilla lands at 58 and similarly left the Outland at 68 and as a result have spent the last four levels completing pieces of Borean Tundra. The reality I am straddled with is that the zone design of the first two expansions is simply not good. I mean at the time it was released it was world better than anything Vanilla had given us and as a result felt like a breath of fresh air, however when you stack it up against modern zone design from say Legion… it is objectively not as well designed.

What I mean by this is that the quests don’t flow cleanly from hub to hub and instead it forces you to do a lot of travel time back and forth between a hub and its related spokes. All the while I was leveling through Outland and so far in Northrend it feels like I am spending a lot of time needlessly travelling between two destinations and this might have been the initial intent. However after seeing modern quest design it feels like I somehow failed and allowed my quests to get out of sync. If you fight your way through a micro dungeon with quest A you often find that upon turning in you now have another quest requiring you to go back there. It is maddening to have to wade through an army of minions to kill a boss that you were already next to and sometimes even killed while completing the first quest. The other that adds to this feeling of tedium is the mob density and having no real way to get in and out of these destinations without a heavy body count. Thankfully on my warrior racking up a heavy body count is fun, but on other more fiddly classes this causes the leveling experience to grind to a halt. The truth is it will probably have taken me twice as long to level through Outland and Northrend as it will have to push through the next three expansions.

As games mature their design ethic shifts significantly and we forget what it was actually like to play these games at the time. When it comes to Classic World of Warcraft for Project 99 in Everquest… what we are chasing is a feeling not an actual honest moment in history. I think when players say that they want to play Vanilla again… they want to return to a time when not everything was mapped out quite so clearly and they had a sense of accomplishment and discovery each time they looted a kobold (and the game subsequently froze). This is why World of Warcraft Classic is going to be the challenge it will be. That experience means different thing to different players, and none of the calculations that a game company can make actually take the social component into play. When I think of Vanilla or Burning Crusade or even Wrath, those memories involve very specific sets of individuals that no longer play the game and I might not even have contact with. For Vanilla it was the Late Night Raiders, and Burning Crusade it was No Such Raid and when Wrath launched we were excited to be the Duranub Raiding Company. Three non-guild based raids dominate those feelings and memories and the simple fact that I went through three separate raid groups tells you that there is no way to actually ever join those broken pieces back together again. All of this said I will have characters on the Classic server, and I will see how this experience actually shakes out in the end. I just feel like it is going to be exceedingly difficult to please even a fraction of the player base because we all want something different.