The String is Life

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This morning I am admittedly struggling to both stay awake and come up with anything to talk about.  I have one cat sleeping on the right side, and the other wanting me to play with her instead of write.  Personally I would rather join the right cat and return to slumber time.  I had one of those mornings where I woke up thirty minutes or so from the time my alarm was set to go off.  The problem being that it wasn’t one of those “wake up refreshed” moments, but instead a “please god let me roll over and go back to sleep” moments.  The cat on the left side however wants to play with her new toy.  I have talked about Kenzie and her playing fetch with rubber bands in the past…  but the game has changed.  Last week we had what was supposed to be a sizable ice storm, and in preparation for it I picked up a pair of snow/rain boots for my wife that look mostly like actual proper boots instead of the clunky things we grew up with.  They came bound together with a length of the white stretchy elastic cord…  and Kenzie has adopted this as her new purpose for being.  Much like the rubber band she wants us to throw if for her… which actually works so much better than the rubber band did because firstly it is easier to see, and secondly it has more weight to it and is easier to toss across the room.  She also looks absolutely adorable with this big loop of elastic hanging out of her mouth as she bounds back happily to return it to us.  We’ve tried taking pictures of this but she just moves too fast for the focus to hone in on her.

So while typing this post I am periodically having to throw the string down the hall outside of my office.  She returns it and eventually pesters me to the point that I have to throw it again.  All the while Allie looks so blissful sleeping on a blanket I keep folded neatly on my desk to make her a bed.  In truth I have two blankets on my desk and there are many nights where I will have a cat on either one snoozing while I play games.  The positive thing about the bit of elastic is that while she is obsessed with it, she is not actually bothering Allie our older cat.  The funny part about this whole thing is occasionally she doesn’t return to us at all… but instead will put it somewhere nearby but not quite within reach which I can only assume means she is tired of running for the moment.  Last night for example there was a period of time where she decided to lay on the string.  One side effect of this whole thing is that we have to get the string away from her before bedtime, because she will keep walking back and forth on top of us with the string hoping we will toss it for her.  As a result I have started the practice of sticking the string in my pocket before bedtime and then after we have showered and gotten dressed in the morning giving it back to her.  She surely knows what is happening but so far has not made too much of a fuss about it.

Luna on the other hand is a completely different proposition.  I still have to keep her separated from the other two cats, because she still charges after them whenever she sees them.  Breaking up the cats has lead to lots of wounds on our part, and even needing to take my wife to the ER for IV Antibiotics.  I have a set of four nasty bite marks on my lower calf that are only now starting to look normal.  I have another set on my hand that will likely always be visible scars.  Essentially we just need not to introduce them again, and we sorted out pretty early on that we would end up needing to find Luna a new home.  However that does not mean I am not spending a lot of time with her, because it has become a nightly ritual of closing off my office and bringing her in while I play Destiny.  What I don’t get though… is she sleeps on the exact same blankets that the other cats do… and seems not to even notice the fact that they HAVE to smell like the kitties she is constantly chasing after.  On a positive note however we maybe have a new home for Luna, but it is going to be one of those things that takes a little time.  Ultimately we wanted to find some place that she would feel happy and safe and be the only kitty.  Also I really wanted to find her a home where I could still find out details about her and see how she is doing.  When we ultimately have to give her up… it is going to break my heart because we have bonded.  However her living in my wife’s office and hanging out with me in mine for a few hours each evening… is not exactly a sustainable solution and is not fair to either of us.  She needs a place where she can chill out and snooze in whatever sunny patch she happens to favor that day… rather than being cooped up in a office.  Admittedly said office has a big ole sliding glass door and lots of blankets and chairs to sleep on…  but still not the optimal solution.  I am hoping talking about the potential home doesn’t jinx it.

The other big event happening in my life is that I am starting to stress massively about Pax South which happens next week.  I will be travelling on Thursday and then will be there Friday and Saturday, and driving back home on Sunday.  I talked about this on twitter with another user going through the same thing… but sometimes anxiety is like this brick wall that hits you from seemingly out of nowhere.  I know I will have fun, because I always do… and this year is going to be great given that I don’t have to feel like I am representing anyone other than myself.  The first two years I scheduled interviews and was in theory there to cover certain aspects of the con for another website.  The problem being that sort of focused what exactly I was looking for…  primarily trying to find anything MMO related.  Instead with me just representing myself and our podcast… I feel far more open to talk to anyone and everyone, which I know is something I could have done in the past but I guess it just feels different.  The problem there however is I have to now muster the emotional currency to get out and push myself out of my comfort zone, and actually pass out business cards and such.  I have a massive dose of imposter syndrome when it comes to all of this… because when I hear people talking about “content creators” and “influencers”, it never really feels like they are talking about me.  Content Creator has sort of become synonymous with Youtuber or Streamer…  and it always feels like no one is actually that interested in us Bloggers or Podcasters.  I mean sure I stream and upload videos occasionally… but my primary focus will always be this blog and the things that hang loosely off of it.  So instead I am mustering the strength to totally pretend like I am legit and try my best to push through and talk to all the people.

Nighthold and Senpai

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Last night I managed to pull myself out of my recent funk and actually get more than a modicum of excitement about the prospects of raid night once again.  On Tuesday The Nighthold opened and since we are a Wednesday night raid we hoped that any weirdities would be resolved by then and we could simply get in and start working on clearing new and interesting things.  Thankfully that was the case and we moved forward with only the most spartan scribbled notes to go from as we pushed our way through the boss fights.  We are not exactly a super serious raid, but that said it is nice to keep moving and doing things that are at least progression for our purposes.  Before the launch of Nighthold we managed to clear both Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor on Normal, and push all of the way through Heroic Emerald Nightmare and even got it on farm status.  We have a bit of an odd structure in that we raid a single night each week, and then have a second night on Friday that is completely optional.  So up until this week we had been doing Heroic Emerald Nightmare on Wednesdays and attempting to clear Normal Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor all within a pretty compressed Friday night.  For the most part it has worked out pretty well for us, because Friday gives us a night to start bringing folks who are maybe not geared enough for the more serious content.

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As far as the fights that we saw… I have to say they were really fun.  We are very much a raid that learns on its feet, or at least needs multiple attempts to sort out the fight.  However generally speaking once we have a fight sorted as such, we then can pretty much repeat it every single week regardless of the exact raid composition.  Skorpyron was absolutely a case of me trying to sort out how exactly to do the tether mechanic effectively and I think we managed to get it down on our third or fourth attempt…  going pretty much from chain rezzing tanks to clear within the space of a single attempt.  Chronomatic Anomaly was its own special hell, but we sorted out how to deal with the tank swaps and the add phases… and the fact that the boss could be moved if only slightly towards the add when it first spawns making the “dunk” go much more smoothly.  Sidenote… the dunk absolutely reminds me of a handful of fights in Destiny where you have to pick up an orb and then slam it down somewhere else… so  I got a bit nostalgic there.  We then moved on to Trilliax… the fight where we get to eat cake… and play with roombas.  To be truthful as the tank I am not entirely certain what is going on other than the fact that it sounded like madness, because Art and I spent our entire time worrying about tank swaps and trying to kite the boss around the room…  or prepping for the next kite phase.  I know it somehow involved eating cake and not eating cake and not allowing the roombas to have any cake.  Whatever the case after a couple of attempts we had one of those slow wipes to the finish line that ended up with a boss kill.

Throughout the night I had been tweeting out each time we downed a boss because I knew there were a few people who could not make it last night, and also a good chunk of our guild as a whole is on twitter.  Over the years I have sorta adopted people and smuggled them into my guild, and now you have the end result that tends to be an amalgamation of awesome.  We were working on clearing the insane amount of trash on the way to Spellblade Aluriel when I got a Battle.net message from a friend of mine that lives on the other side of the faction fence.  He excitedly told me that I apparently got a congratz message from the official World of Warcraft account, and when I alt tabbed over to check myself…  sure enough there was the above message as well as a handful of favorites to go with it.  Senpai apparently noticed us, and smiled upon our progress.  I won’t lie…  it gave me and still does give me a bit of an afterglow of warm fuzzies.  We continued on and put in a little work on Spellblade Aluriel, and managed to at least push into phase 2 before needing to call it for the night.  Like I said we are a bit of an odd case when it comes to raiding because we raid 8 to 10:30 EST, and try really hard not to push too far over that line.  So in that 2 1/2 hours minus a break in the middle when our first flask wears out we managed to clear 3 bosses and at least reach a point of understanding with the fourth.  As is always the case I am certain we will speed up in week too, because it honestly felt like last night we spent more time talking out strategies than actually fighting things.  All in all though it was a pretty great night of raiding in a really pretty instance with some seemingly fun encounters.

Welfare Epics

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This mornings topic is going to veer off in an odd direction, but stay with me.  Yesterday I saw the above tweet and I have to say the term “Welfare Epics” is one that bothers me.  Not that I mind the above tweet mind you, but the fact that it is apparently still a thing bothers me.  For some background I remember when I first heard the term was during Burning Crusade.  When the Arena system was introduced it also opened up a new gearing path, in that so long as you played a minimum amount of matches each week you got some points based on your current arena rating.  As a result raiders like myself saw this as a quick and easy way to augment our gear, or at least mitigate the bad luck in getting drops.  I remember that by the time we started Gruuls Lair, several of our more pvp centric players already had most of a set of gear… or at least two or three pieces and it prompted the rest of us on the deeply carebear spectrum of the world to quickly form teams and start getting our weekly allotment of points.  Instead of using it to gear my raid main, I instead saw it as a great way to deck out my Paladin for whom I was attempting to go healer mode.  Our team scheduled our arenas like a raid… and met in Nagrand once weekly to play three or four games hoping we could win most of them and wind up with a decent arena rating for that week.  So every other week we would get some piece of gear, or it might take a little longer if we were going after a weapon… but all the same we were constantly inching forward.

To the best of my knowledge the term “Welfare Epics” comes from Blizzard itself, reportedly from a developer…  but the only reference to this I could find is a now long dead WoW Insider post that has been mirrored on Engadget.  There is no source cited but references the same urban legend that I recollect, however given that I have never attended Blizzcon and the stream didn’t exist at that point… I have no evidence other than speculation. (EDIT:  Special thanks to Nyn for providing the evidence that apparently it was none other than Jeff Kaplan who said it I think joking… but nonetheless thrust the term into our vocabulary) The term however has been applied to any system that a certain fragment of the player base does not deem “worthy” of the rewards that are handed out.  When Karazhan and Zulaman were release… they also got called this term as did all of the gear that you could purchase with Justice Points.  In Wrath of the Lich King, the end bosses of the various heroic dungeons had a chance of dropping a much rarer epic quality item… and these were called Welfare Epics.  It simply became a way of one segment of the population diminishing the achievements of another segment of the population.  MMOs in general have always had rampant gate keeping, with various ways to tell other players that they are not tall enough to ride the ride, and this term just became another tool in that arsenal.

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Where it frustrates me the most however is that it generates this sense that MMOs are a zero sum game.  It creates the fallacy that if I am getting ahead, you are falling behind.  The fact that a level 110 can walk into a world quest and get a level 865 item, does not diminish the sense of accomplishment at every piece of gear I got in a heroic raid, or through beating the timer on a mythic plus.  Ultimately at the end of the day what we are actually battling is not other players, but instead the eldest of enemies…  the random number generator.  The problem is that there is a lot of bitterness that pools up when your luck never plays out.  I have friends who still have not seen a decent legendary this expansion, whereas I got my third last night… and for extra salt they dropped at level 940.  I got this legendary from an emissary chest, so I am sure that folks are going to refer to it as a “welfare legendary” but I really don’t care.  I simply see it as a useful item that will make me perform better for my raid when we start doing Nighthold tonight.  Instead of getting salty, I get happy when I see orange text appear in guild chat and congratulate folks with an open heart and friendly smile instead of a bucket of bile.  My friends getting awesome stuff is almost as good as me getting it… and in many cases better.  As is always the case in these games I tend to shoot up in item level pretty quickly, so when I started to see my friends catching up… it meant that I could then do interesting things with them.  them getting gear was helping to fuel my fun, which is largely derived by doing the stuff that requires a well geared party.

Essentially in my experience if you are of the opinion that only the hardest of hardcore should have interesting stuff…  then you are wrong.  That is a recipe for a dying game, and a game that has a massive population surge and purge cycle.  Please note that I absolutely raided Naxxramas in vanilla, which put me in the hardest of hardcores at the time…  and the fact that the content was so grossly inaccessible was a travesty.  During Burning Crusade I was a raid leader that suffered through the rampant poaching of players that occurred as folks checked out and slots needed to be filled.  When Tier 6 required you to do a string of attunements that involved clearing both Tier 4 and Tier 5, finding a replacement for someone who simply needed to stop raiding because real life got a little too real was pure hell.  You had two options…  either grow your own raiders, or steal them from another raid.  The growing option was painful because there are a fixed number of nights in the week, and trying to get folks who are knee deep in Tier 6 interested in running the content they long cleared and abandoned was pure hell.  That didn’t even take into account the real problem that was you needing them to be geared enough to actually do the content.  As a still sometimes leader, I would far rather have a system that allows players to get to reasonable item levels on their own, and stand as viable replacements that can make their way into the raid proper…  rather than having to orchestrate a plan to direct the entire guild to help catch a single player up.

The fact that others are getting nice things does not diminish the fact that you cleared mythic and got a whole slew of shiny baubles to show for it.  If you need a souvenir to prove that you were somewhere and did something “before it was cool”, then you might need to adjust your own motivations.  Sure to some extent or another, we all do content to get the shiny loot… that often lets us then go on and do more content.  However the experience of doing the content really should be the reward.  When I look back on my raiding career I don’t see a string of loot drops… but instead I see a string of events that involved the people that I was raiding with.  I think of moments like our first Sindragosa kill… where Thalen got the killing blow seconds before being frozen himself and we had to run back to see what had dropped.  I think of hanging out in front of the Throne of  Thunder with everyone using their shiny new Sky Golems like some sort of mechanized infantry.  I remember the excitement this season when we managed to finish up Heroic Emerald Nightmare and clear Trials of Valor in the same week…  not because of the achievements themselves but because I love the people I raid with.  If you don’t have warm memories like that, then I question why exactly are you raiding?  Raiding is about the people and the places and the things you did…  not pencil sharpener that you walked away with because you needed to find something to spend your tickets on.  The fact that someone else got something and it took less time than it took for you to get it…  should not tarnish the memories of the things you did along the way to get that same item.

Honor the Green

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Last night I managed to wrap up Greenshade and move on to the next zone Malabal Tor.  The funny thing about “leveling” through content in the post 50 game is that you lose all focus of how far you have actually come.  When I started playing again recently I was sitting about Champion rank 115, but at this very moment after doing the introductory quest line in Malabal Tor I am sitting at 141.  Both numbers seem like utter nonsense in the grand scheme of things, other than the fact that I am constantly getting incrementally more useful.  That said the mobs around me are getting incrementally more crafty at all times as well, but I am uncertain where the theoretical “max level” at least for gear advancement sits.  As of right now the highest level thing I have seen on any of the guild vendors is 160, which doesn’t really tell me if that is the actual max, or just the maximum that is reasonable to craft.  I have done a shockingly minimal amount of research so far during this return to Elder Scrolls Online, because in truth…  I had a path laid out before me already and that is to simply keep questing.  It might be madness but I really would like to finish up Aldmeri Dominion and then quest my way through all of Ebonheart before starting any of the DLC content.  Considering that the DLC lets you start it at literally any moment… I am guessing this is pure madness and not something most players do.

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Back to the whole having no basis on how far I have actually come in progress…  I was absolutely thinking that Malabal Tor was going to be the last zone in the AD content, and apparently I was completely wrong.  After this zone I still have Reaper’s March which is fine by me because I am actually enjoying myself in this content way more than I ever thought I would.  It is not exactly a surprise to anyone who has read my blog for very long… but I am not a huge fan of elves.  My friend Tam has this theory that every player is inherently either a Dwarf of an Elf and the two paths rarely cross.  I am absolutely a Dwarf and I tend to love all of the normal aesthetically wonderful things about Dwarfdom.  That said the Elder Scrolls setting as a whole does some weird things with what is and is not an Elf…  since technically both Dwarves and Orcs are elves in this setting.  Essentially in Elder Scrolls you have the races of “men”, the races of the “mer”, and then the beastmen which probably have a similar name or at least should.  Now in Skyrim… I go out of my way to kill Thalmor on sight… even if it is ultimately going to cause me issues.  In The Elder Scrolls Online I find out that the Thalmor are largely a militant group of “Elven Supremacists” that most people don’t like… and often times actively hate.  This subtle difference makes it significantly easier for me to actually like the elves while playing through the elf dominated content.

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That said… I have also found a certain Kinship with the Khajiit… which was to be expected, but also the Bosmer which I was not entirely prepared for.  I mean I have always liked the concept of the Green Pact and the existence of cannibal elves.  However while actually questing through the Bosmer centric story content, it has been interesting to struggle with the same weird thin line that they do…  of choosing what is common sense and what is honoring “The Green”.  It is a testament to just how damned good the storytelling is in this game to get a notorious elf killer like myself…  to convert to if not love…  but at least a begrudging respect for the folks that don’t belong to the Thalmor.  Of note… if given the chance I would still absolutely run around cheerfully slaughtering Thalmor.  I am extremely happy though that the game has given me ample opportunity to at least embarrass a few of them for showing them to be the unsteady zealots that they really are.  The only thing that I would have liked to have seen the game do… is throw in additional options for acknowledging the fact that you are an outlander while questing through the other two factions content.  The highlight of yesterday however was dealing with Hermaeus Mora, one of my favorite of the Daedra…  but also one of the more deadly.  He presented me with a deal that I could not refuse…  that I really wanted to refuse but felt the ramification of not taking it would be far worse.  While at some point I know turtle mode will finish… I have a feeling that I will still remain engaged to the storytelling of this game for the near future and this is about to be my “off night” game of choice.