Tales of the Aggronaut

Mourning The Past

November 19, 2015 by Belghast

Another Time

Lately I have been struggling with fits of nostalgia, mostly surrounding World of Warcraft and in the middle of it I had a revelation. I know the moment I started to distance myself from raiding, and the events that lead up to me ultimately checking out mentally. When the Cataclysm patch went live, Blizzard in their infinite wisdom decided to deeply incentivize guild-centric raiding. This was probably a no brainer for them, because in truth this is more than likely how the vast majority of people raided. If you wanted to raid… you went and found a raid guild… and life moved on normally from that point onwards. Since the early days of Vanilla however… we never really raided like this. There was a clear distinction between “The Raid” and “The Guild” that was significantly harder to maintain after Cataclysm. The reason being that we raided as an entity that was distinct from any of the guilds that came together to make it up… we raided as a coalition of sorts. In Vanilla it was the Late Night Raiders, in Burning Crusade it was mostly No Such Raid… and from late BC through Wrath we formed the Duranub Raiding Company. In each case the “raid” was an organization with a distinct leadership, made up of a bunch of people from different styles of guilds, with the one thing in common… that they wanted to clear content.

There was relatively no pressure to join any of the guilds, though folks did from time to time filter back and forth between them… nor was the fixed and set number of guilds that made up the roster. It allowed us to recruit people to fill slots, without asking them to give up everything they knew about the game from that point… just to raid. It also allowed people who were far more comfortable in five or six player guilds to remain in their small close knit groups, while still having access to a larger raiding life. It also solved some of the problems that you run into with guild based raiding, where individuals have the impression that if they join X guild they will have an automatic guaranteed spot in X raid. We were able to keep a completely separate infrastructure, with its own rules and tenets, and then fall back on our larger social guild for non-raiding interactions. It was a structure that felt so natural to me, and it almost seemed like a personal affront when the Cataclysm changes showed that they would be shifting focus away from this style of raiding, and only crediting kills to the guild with the largest number of members.

Death of Duranub

When Cataclysm launched we tried an experiment that ultimately failed. House Stalwart, the guild I had lead since the day World of Warcraft launched… attempted to consume all of the smaller satellite guilds for the purpose of “keeping the raid together”. So over night we quite literally went from a 600 character guild to an over 900 character guild. With this came so many different cultures and so many different “norms” that it rapidly became a jumbled mess. We also made the decision to focus on 10 player raid groups, and ended up splintering the raid into a bunch of teams. The problem there is that not all teams were created equal, and some of the teams had the deck stacked heavily including more of the seasoned raiders. So when the progress was not equal, it caused strife and competitiveness between the groups, where it had never existed before. Previously we were there Duranub Raiding Company… we were a group that made the easy things look hard… and the hard things look easy. The phrase “Duranub” tied lineage back to a saying that Shiana the leader of my first raid group said about the Late Night Raiders… that we were a “Durable Pack of Nubs”. In fact Duranub was our attempt to pull out the best things we experienced during Late Night Raiders and congeal them into a modern raid group.

In the process all of the officers sacrificed a lot of their time… and for me a lot of my sanity to keep it going. So when that disolved and we splintered into smaller raid teams… it introduced a whole mix of things that I just didn’t care about any more. I have never been a competitive player, and I have never cared about clearing content first. I am all about working together with my friends to make bosses dead, and to get new and interesting pieces of gear. So when I felt like I was in a competition with those same friends, it somehow tarnished the experience. When Rift launched it became all too easy for me to walk away from World of Warcraft, because the thing that had been keeping me in the game for so long… was this concept that I believe in so deeply. That you could gather up a bunch of disparate parts and make them into a raid group… and have fun doing it. The problem with raiding as a guild… is often times there are people that you end up raiding with… that you don’t want to share a guild with. They are great raiders, but lacking in the human being department. The end result causes you to make compromises… and either diluting the atmosphere of your guild… or sacrificing talent for the sake of culture. This is the part that I was never really able to put into words before now.

Extended Family

I have been nostalgic lately, and it seems to be far less about what we did in World of Warcraft, and more about who I was doing it with. When I said the other day that I didn’t wan’t World of Warcraft, I wanted the WoW that existed in 2009 during the Wrath of the Lich King patch cycle… I meant more than just the game. I experienced that game with a certain set of individuals and a certain feeling of togetherness… and that is the game that I want back more than anything. So many of the people I’ve raided with, I keep in touch with today on a regular basis… definitely more that any other group of people that have been in my life. I don’t talk to anyone from High School, and there is only a couple of folks from college that I keep in touch with other than my wife. I have a notoriously bad track record at keeping in contact with folks I have worked with in the past… but when it comes to folks I have raided with… three of the five other people in the AggroChat podcast are folks I have raided with since Vanilla. Rae and Dallian I’ve raided at least on some level with since Burning Crusade. Other than that there is a huge list of people that I have raided with in one fashion or another that I talk to on IM or Slack, which shows how much more important this group is to me than pretty much any other.

When you spend year after year with these people, even though it is only on voice chat… you develop a bond that is forged in shared struggle towards a goal. Having never really been serious about sports, maybe this is the same sort of bond you develop between your team mates, or the same sort of bond that soldiers come out of conflict with. Whatever it is, it is important to me… and what Cataclysm and our decision to abandon 25 player raiding did was to force me to choose between which group of friends to play with. House Stalwart forged on without me, and when I came back during Warlords out of the ashes of numerous groups was forged a really fun raid team. I got to experience the content with people that I had not played with in years.. and for a moment it was magical. The problem being… even then, it just wasn’t quite the same. It is impossible to sort out guild drama and raid drama… when both are mixed into one big amalgam. So as I sit back being nostalgic… I miss the era of non-guild raiding. If I could bring back any one element of the past, it would be that… and even put in systems like formal raid alliances to bolster that style of game play. If there is one thing I have learned throughout the years… it is that raid guilds are just not for me. What I want is to be able to have my friendly social guild… and raid effectively at the same time. While that might sound like wanting it all at the same time… I did have it for years, which is why I miss it so much looking back upon it.

Underwhelmed

November 18, 2015 by Belghast

Mixed Emotions

One of the big problems with last week is that quite literally I had too many things I wanted to play. Not only did Fallout 4 release… and give me a franchise of shanty towns to look after…. we also had the launch of Final Fantasy XIV 3.1 patch. Now I have complained a bit that the lag between 3.0 and 3.1 was entirely too long. Basically from 2.1 onwards they kept a schedule along the lines of a major patch every 3 months and a minor patch every month. Instead this patch took about five months to release… and it was a long enough lag to get me completely out of the habit of logging in on a regular basis. That said I knew whenever 3.1 landed I would be back, albeit a bit rusty from lack of playing. Fallout however took precedence and over the last two nights I have finally consumed I believe all of the new quest content. Now we get to the mixed emotions part… because in one way the content was really damned good. It managed to hit us in the feels a few times and introduce a new to this game character… that we are VERY familiar with from Final Fantasy V thanks to Ashgar and his constant cheerleading for the Four Job Fiesta. The problem I am having is it did nothing really to re-ignite my desire to log in on a nightly basis.

The other big take away I had from the story content is it felt like a trickle compared to what we have seen in the past. I know at the very least the quest to unlock Void Ark was significantly shorter and less involved than the quest to unlock Crystal Tower. Similarly the main story line, lacked a big boss fight like they have in the past… because there was no introduction of a new primal. Also part of what I think is the feeling of it being small… is the fact that we did not get a Hildebrand story to go with it. So while I enjoyed the experience of the new quest content… I felt like it was over far too quickly, and took part of an evening to complete in total. That is including unlocking the new Vanu Vanu beast tribe quests and done two rounds of those. I don’t want to have this “let down” feeling but I can’t help it I guess. Maybe it is just that I had built up 3.1 as being this point of my grand return to this game… and like Tam has said in the past we simply lack the huge backlog of content to slowly work our way through that we had during 2.0. Maybe there has always been a very limited amount of content… and I just never actually caught up completely until this expansion.

The Dungeons

All of this said… I have yet to do the two new dungeons, and have yet to run Void Ark, so maybe my feelings will be different after seeing those. Dungeons have always been the lifeblood of the game for me, but I have simply not been sleeping well the last few nights, so I felt more than a little out of it. Also Tam spent time playing Lords of Verminion last night, and I am hoping he writes up a quick guide because what I saw of it… looked like madness, but a fun sort. Mostly I just need to get back into the habit of logging in on a regular basis. I was in last night at least long enough to run my Vanu Vanu dailies before disappearing back into the Commonwealth, and at a minimum I plan to be doing that each night. I want my flying snake and I want my sundrop dance. I spent some of my stockpiled MGP one one of the new dances there as well… the “Gold” dance, which looks hilarious when my Lalafell does it. I also need to get back in the swing of tanking, because I was a complete slacker when it came to esoterics gear, and I need an awful lot of it. I also need to start running Void Ark to get items to upgrade with.

Is it wrong that I feel a little disappointed though? Maybe it just feels like a let down after the amazing ride that Heavensward was, and maybe the patch content is on par with what they have done in the past. Final Fantasy XIV has always been this happy place, and logging into the free company brings that point home. It is amazing that the guild has managed to keep trucking on and being active in spite of a large chunk of us taking an extended break from the game. I was just so ready to hop back in the saddle and be wowed by the experience… and instead I feel a bit melancholy about it. It just feels like the team might be resting on their laurels a bit, and maybe spent too much time working on Verminion that would have been better suited putting in more content for the patch. It really bothers me that there is only two dungeons in this patch cycle, because the whole Fractal/Neverreap thing got super old… super fast. Having only two dungeons means there is the one you enjoy… and the one you don’t… and it always feels like the only thing you get is the one you don’t enjoy. For us it was non-stop back to back Neverreap, and my fear is that once we start the dungeon cycle one of them is absolutely going to be “That” dungeon for us again. It is funny how much of a difference that extra dungeon seems to make… but man it does. Maybe they will add another dungeon in with 3.15 which is supposedly right around the corner. My hope is that they will also be adding more Hildebrand content… with another boss fight, and potentially a new primal. Mostly I guess it just feels like we got half of a patch, which makes me a little sad after the length five month wait.

Return to Hitbox

November 17, 2015 by Belghast

Streaming Providers

I am a fairly horrible streamer, mostly because I do it so infrequently. Before I jumped to Windows 10 I had Virtual Audio Cables set up and working awesomely to exclude Teamspeak from my stream. Then the upgrade to 10 seemed to bork all of that. As a result I am finding myself less likely to stream random stuff, because quite honestly I don’t want to accidentally catch someone that does not want to be recorded. What ends up happening is that I only actually stream on “special occasions” when I know I have a block of time where i can just leave the mic open. The problem I continue to struggle with is the choice of providers. YouTube gaming had peaked my interests… until I participated in Liore’s stream during Extra Life. Considering I was on voice chat with her, the lag between the stream and what was actually happened seemed painfully bad, and the stream itself would go loopy on us. I would load it up and suddenly it was trying to play what was happening thirty minutes ago instead of what was happening now.

Twitch seems completely ubiquitous but the problem there is that it is equally painful to try and chat with people while using. I get so few people popping into my channel that when a friend does pop by I want to be able to hold a conversation with them. Even when you are running Twitch with the limited delay options… there is still a painful delay when you try and hold a conversation with anyone. I ultimately switched back after some experiments of trying to stream to both Hitbox and Twitch at the same time. When given a choice people always picked Twitch because it was the interface they were familiar with. The truth is however… when someone fires up my stream it is because they are there to hang out with me… not because they really care about what I am streaming. I never get random people popping in my channel because it truth I don’t tend to play the sort of games that people care enough about to go hunting for. For awhile I was using Twitch primarily as a way to export my streams to YouTube, and their interface just works so much better than Hitbox. Now however I record the video separately and then do some minimal editing in Adobe Premiere before uploading, so that functionality no longer matters.

Team Green

I am a Blogger first, Podcaster second… and I dabble poorly in both YouTube and streaming. Those are just not my native mediums and will likely never be, so long as I have a deep aversion to being on camera. So I will never have the sort of followers that would allow me to become a partner and have the better streaming options, nor will it ever really matter… considering I am super adverse to turning on advertisements on even on my YouTube channel. The truth is… I have always liked Hitbox better. The dashboard is significantly nicer, you can have “teams” without being a partner… and the fact that there is little to no delay between the video stream and chat means I can actually have a comfortable conversation with someone watching my stream. I realize that I am essentially exiling myself to the service that no one is really using natively… but really… what is the difference? I have a clear preference towards one or the other, and it is not like I am looking to be some streaming internet celebrity. Streaming for me is a way to share what I am doing with my friends and pretty much nothing more than that, and in a way that is more custom than Forge.gg would offer.

Basically I feel like I am choosing BetaMax over VHS, which is not far from the truth. The experience I have while streaming on Hitbox just feels better than when I use Twitch. In part it is because the Hitbox interface has to be better in every way to get someone to even consider using their service. I realize there are third party tools that I can run that add in a lot of the functionality that the Hitbox dashboard has…. but I don’t want to have to. My favorite stupid feature from Hitbox is the fact that when I get my stream set up and I am happy with it… I can press a single button to have it broadcast my stream to social media. Twitch can do this for you automatically, but the problem I have there is it sometimes takes me a few tries to get things where I am happy with them, which ends up spamming the living hell out of twitter which gets frustrating. I really do want to start trying to stream more… which means I need to sift through the arcane machination that is virtual audio cables once more.. to see what it takes to get it set up and properly working for Windows 10. In the meantime I am probably going to switch my setup over to my Hitbox profile and just accept that I am picking the less popular pony… but its the one I enjoy better.

Misfortune Mordren

November 16, 2015 by Belghast

Boring Post Material

This morning I am struggling a bit to remain conscious. Neither myself nor my wife managed to get much sleep last night, because in our partially finished state… the rain kept dripping off a metal plate just outside our window. Which meant either try and sleep through this loud irregular dripping pattern, or sleep with the television loud enough to hopefully drown out the noise. We did the later which means we never really slept that deeply, kinda like we do when there is a tornado warning and we end up with the weather blaring all night hoping we would wake up if we needed to take shelter. As a result I am struggling a bit when it comes to stringing together thoughts into a sentence. This is absolutely the sort of day that I would just say screw it and not blog… but after several years of this madness I don’t really want to break the chain. That’s the funny thing about doing the daily blogging thing… is after a point you really don’t want to do something to break the pattern of posts. It is like the pattern itself becomes the important thing and not so much what I am writing about.

This weekend also was one where I did a surprisingly small amount of gaming. We recorded the latest episode of AggroChat on Friday night this week, and during that I piddled around in Fallout 4. Then as usual I stayed up way the hell too late wrapping up some minor details on the podcast. Then Saturday we had the very first of our family “Christmas” activities, I say it in quotes because it is technically a dual purpose Thanksgiving and Christmas that we have with my wife’s dad and step mom. They are snow birds and spend the winter in warmer climates… so for the last decade or so we have had this dual holiday day around Thanksgiving. Thing is they keep pushing it up so they can get down South “before it gets cold”, and admittedly they have a really nice place down there so I don’t blame them. It just ends up making for a strange holiday get together… when I am absolutely not even in Thanksgiving mode yet. When I got home from that… I had every intent of taking a nap, but instead the contractors were banging on the wall of the bedroom which would have made sleep impossible.

As a result I pretty much sleep walked through the day until we went to bed that evening relatively early. This is the point at which we realized that the drip was a thing… which woke us up about 4 am Sunday morning. My wife just stayed up, and I attempted to sleep through it… which I am guessing I eventually succeeded because it didn’t wake me up again until around 7:30. Over the last several years we have pretty much ignored we had a back yard. The siding had gotten bad and honestly everything back there was just overwhelming in that it all needed attention. With the bedroom door thing leading out there, my wife has become determined to fix the problems back there and reclaim it as usable space. Since we had a dumpster thanks to the construction folks… she was damned determined to use that to take care of some stuff. We had a few hour break in the rain, so my wife and I were trudging through the muddy back yard picking up things and carrying them to the dumpster. I am surprisingly sore from this, even though all I really did was act as the person moving stuff from the backyard to the dumpster, and she did a lot of the brute force gathering stuff into piles for me to move.

Star Wars Pen and Paper

The highlight of yesterday has to be our Star Wars pen and paper game. The AggroChat crew and a few friends have been doing a fantasy flights Star Wars system game through Roll 20. The way that game integrates with Roll 20 is amazing, and quite literally if you fill out your character sheet correctly all you have to do is push a single button when you want to do an attack. I am assuming there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that Tam is doing to run the game, but for the most part… this is the best possible remote pen and paper experience. Essentially we are a group of force users during the A New Hope era, with one significant monkey wrench thrown in. My character is the one that does not fit… I am not a nice person… I never claimed to be. My character has pretty much spent his entire life working as a Bodyguard/Hired Gun/Enforcer for one Hutt cartel after another. The problem is… I get these “bad feelings” and often times my employers don’t heed my warnings and end up dead. As a result I’ve developed this persona in the underworld of “Misfortune Mordren”, and it has been interesting to see how that is working out.

I built this persona because I thought it would be interesting to play… but apparently I am some sort of underworld bogeyman. We had an instance yesterday where our craft was about to get boarded by some pirates, and the mere mention of my name…. and some really high deception rolls on the part of Kodra… caused them to back off because they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Apparently I am considered to be so “Bad Luck” that even after interdicting our ship… it was not worth their time to try and take us on. Then again there is a whole other side to this tale, because I am racking up quite the body count. While I am playing a character from Edge of the Empire, we decided to make things easier and put me on the Force and Destiny conflict system. I feel like I am not understanding this system… because every time I take conflict I cheer out loud. Much to the horror of my otherwise party of “goody two shoes” that are trying desperately to avoid the Dark Side. We walked into a gang base yesterday, and I opened fire before they had time to even speak. To my defense though… I figure if you are in a gang on Nar Shadda you have made some poor life choices anyways. Also to my defense Kodra did ask me to create a diversion… so yeah I was just doing that.

Essentially I am becoming somewhat of the conflict sponge for my party, and I am perfectly fine in that role. The thing is… I never said I wanted to be a light side character… and additionally I never said I was a “good guy”. My character has spent his entire life living in Hutt territory, and in truth I am turning over a new leaf. As a Hutt enforcer I would have been expected to torture every single one of these people I took down… just for good measure, because that is what Hutts do. I have yet to feed a single one of them to some bizarre creature we are keeping in a pit to entertain the boss. So simply taking them out cleaning… is a bit of a mercy from what I have been used to. It is going to be interesting to see how my character and the rest of the party play out… as they so carefully use their stun settings… and mine has dust on it because it has never been used once. The game usually runs for several hours… and by the time it wraps up I just have enough time to grabs some food and head downstairs for my Sunday evening television time… including Walking Dead, Talking Dead… and now maybe Into the Badlands. I watched the first episode last night and I have to say so far I am digging it heavily.