Tales of the Aggronaut

Collaborate Not Compete

November 13, 2014 by Belghast

For Azeroth

Last night while I slept Warlords of Draenor launched in the United States. Once again the launch time was based on Pacific Standard Time meaning that it occurred at 2 in the morning for me. I actually got to see some play last night from Qelric, due to the fact that this time it actually launched ahead of time for our European friends. I think it is pretty awesome that finally it launched for them at the same time it was slotted to launch in other territories, it just meant that they technically got a head start. In part I think this decision was influenced by the fact that with this expansion they have completely removed the concept of world and server firsts. So while folks are hustling around like mad, presently there are nine people online in guild for example… there really isn’t much of a broader point to it.

I think removing the world and server firsts was a good step, but I think it is so ingrained into the Warcraft culture to rush headlong towards the finish line. My hope is that this will at least cause some of the players to slow down and enjoy the journey. That said I realize I will probably level quickly… because I always seem to level quickly. This is more of a necessity this time around since I am actively juggling two different games and trying to be available for grouping in both. Unfortunately I will not really get to experience Draenor until after work, though I have popped in this morning to at least take a screenshot of the trio standing outside the Dark Portal. I must admit that while I played in Alpha… nothing I did actually felt real. This time around I will be actually working on things like Garrisons permanently, so I think a lot of the stickiness of this expansion will have more effect.

Awesome Communities

The other day I made a connection that I had failed to grasp until then, when a friend from twitter pointed something out to me. For weeks I have been talking about just how amazing the community has been playing Final Fantasy XIV. It is the little things, like the fact that the other morning I zoned into North Shroud looking for the B Rank Phecda. It has been common place for me to /shout in zone asking if anyone has seen the spawn. I had a pretty quick response from a player who not only gave me the location, but also hung out at the spawn point to help me kill it… even though she didn’t need the kill. Then a good ten minutes later, another person sent me a tell asking if I still needed it, because they just ran past the big bear. This little Vignette plays out over and over… and I have added so many random strangers to my friends list through casual interaction like this. There is this global sense that we are all in things together that I cherish.

If I had to rattle off the four best server communities I have been part of it would have to be Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, Landroval in Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World (mega server), and Antonia Bayle in Everquest II. In each case there have been so many positive random encounters that make living in those worlds enjoyable. I’ve had completely random strangers run up to me in Bree on Landroval offering me crafted goods to help my leveling process. I’ve had folks offer me a group during the various Everquest II holiday events, that then turn into multiple hour long treks through the world. I’ve had random strangers stop me in the Secret World to tell me that they liked my outfit, and ask where I got various bits of it. These casual interactions remind me of the way servers used to feel back during the early days when the MMOs were a little less “massive”.

Collaborate Not Compete

It was around this time in our conversation that my friend pointed a thread of connection between all of these games that I had never really noticed myself. None of those games have real and meaningful faction rivalries. Sure in The Secret World and Everquest II you have certain alliances, but largely this work out to be personal choices. Being Templar versus being Illuminati is largely just a flavor choice, since from the moment you get out of London or New York you are grouping together and communicating freely. Games like Final Fantasy XIV and Lord of the Rings online don’t even have these artificial divisions. From the moment you start playing any of these games, you are instilled with this spirit that all of the players are ultimately battling something more sinister than they can imagine. So it makes perfect sense to lend another player a helping hand along the way, since you are not competing against each other in any meaningful way.

There might be a certain measure of self sorting going on when it comes to players of these games as well. Since none of the four really have a strong PVP aspect, that flavor of super competitive player is just not interested in playing them. That means you are left with a more collaborative “role-playing server crowd” type player. Ultimately this shared struggle, and spirit of cooperation has always been why I have self sorted myself onto Role-Playing servers, because in general this type of player is more prevalent there. Essentially what I am coming to realize is that the awesome communities that I have held out as paragons against normal online gaming horribleness… all exist for pretty similar reasons. They are all environments that teach the players to get along with each other, rather than compete.

Collaborative Environments

To tie into today’s post, I am thankful that games exist that teach players to work together rather than work against each other. So many games set up an artificial conflict between players, and try desperately to draw them into it. As I said in my “Sandboxes and Sheep” post, these artificial faction boundaries have no meaning to me personally. I have no real emotional ties to the Horde or the Alliance, other than the fact that I mostly chose Alliance because that is where the Dwarves were. However this decision did not immediately make me hate the horde, in fact I have 11 Alliance characters on Argent Dawn… and 11 Horde characters on The Scyers… the realm that is connected to Argent Dawn. Over years of playing on that server I made just as many friendships across the faction barrier as I did within my own pool of players. In fact one of my key problems with World of Warcraft has always been that it made us choose sides in a war that was largely meaningless to us.

All of this is the reason why I am thankful that there are games that have transcended faction. I was hugely impressed when Rift decided to abandon the artificial conflict with their “Faction as Fiction” patch removing the hard lines between Defiant and Guardian. I think as a whole that game has been greatly improved for doing so. More than that however I am thankful for the games that never put up those walls in the first place. Eorzea is this wonderful land where the races don’t always get along, but they are not openly warring either… because the writers have created a threat so great that in its face… squabbles seem petty. After talking this whole situation through, I feel like this sort of environment really does breed a player willing to help others freely. It is for that spirit, that I am thankful for. If you are actively making your community better, you are doing awesome work.

Carried through Garrosh

November 12, 2014 by Belghast

Strange Days

Of all of the things that I had planned to do yesterday, the events that unfolded were completely unforeseen. As it was Veterans day yesterday, I was off and took care of a few things around the house. Namely considering the extreme dip in temperature I wanted to get the heating and air guys out to do our winter check up. We have an air conditioning unit from 1980 the year our house was built, and it continues to limp along valiantly. At one point we had discussed getting a new unit, but the good folks from our heating and air company informed us that we were simply better off to just keep limping along with the one we had. Apparently they do not make units quite like the one we have any longer. So as a result we have paid for a yearly maintenance contract that mostly involves a winter and spring checkup. When things break, and they have in the past we get deep discounted parts and labor while under contract. The cool thing is that there have been a lot of little things that they simply did not charge us for, so I feel like overall it is a good plan.

Wow-64 2014-11-11 09-42-42-476 While waiting on the heating and air guy to show up, I spent a good deal of time running dungeons and raids in Final Fantasy XIV. Since Rae was off as well we managed to get her a Sunken Temple of Qarn run and would have gotten Snowcloak but she had still not done the Ramuh fight, so at last check was still catching up to the main storyline. Since I had been kicking around the notion of playing some World of Warcraft with the launch of Warlords of Draenor, I decided I should probably poke around in game and at the very least do the precursor quest out in the blasted lands. The quest chain itself was rather enjoyable, as you assist Murad in staving back the tide of Iron Horde that have come through the portal. I think Murad is going to be the character we get the closest to during the course of this expansion. Essentially I feel he is going to be this expansions Chen Stormstout as it were, and I am okay with this notion especially after seeing the motivation behind why he acts he way he does.

Carried through Garrosh

While fiddling around in game I bumped into so many people that were shocked to see me online. I joked that they were just seeing a shadow, and that I wasn’t really playing World of Warcraft. Mostly I don’t want people to think I am “back” because the last two times I have showed up in game… it didn’t last for terribly long. I was just there long enough for folks to get accustomed to relying on me for things again, and I really don’t want to disappoint them once more. Damai has done an awesome job of holding things together in the guild. In the time since the launch of Warlords of Draenor he has fallen into the role of General, keeping the raid group moving forward and organizing weekly flex raids to help pull up folks that didn’t quite have the gear to do larger things. He popped into the game while I was roaming about and said “you should really come get your Garrosh weapon tonight.” I of course protested, saying I was unprepared and undergeared… but he waved away all of this notions and said that I just needed to show up.

I figured what the hell did I have to lose. I knew the Siege of Orgrimmar raid at least somewhat form doing the LFR incarnation, and I had no firm plans for that evening. Last night was to be their final time running Garrosh, and one of the final times available to get the heirloom weapons from it. So after not having played WoW for at least six months I found myself getting pulled into the final raid of this current expansion. To make matters even more interesting, apparently we were doing Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar. In Damai’s words “Heroic is the new Normal” and as we got underway it certainly seemed as such… that is until I actually attempted to dps anything. Essentially it was through a combination of skill and gear that they were able to make everything look this easy, and clearly I had neither. In fact I brought Belghast, one of the last characters I had managed to push up to 90 organically and had not really geared much. He was sitting at 496 ilevel before walking into the instance, and through the course of the evening that improved to 540. I quite literally soaked up almost a full set of gear, and now he is in a far better place for the purpose of leveling in the expansion.

Rift Repaired

I’ve talked some about the Rift that existed when I returned to the game last time. I fought hard to try and mend it, but ultimately failed. What I did do apparently however was start to break down the walls between the factions within. It seems that once the two warring captains had moved on to other things… one of them to a mythic raid, and another to move on to his own guild… things seem to have repaired themselves. It seems as though there has been somewhat of a “Pax Stalwartia” as folks have flourished once the drama went away. I would like to think it was the forcing of sides to talk that helped this along, but really I think I was more of a hinderance than a help. I actively tried to keep the pieces of the puzzle together, when I should have surgically cut the damage limb from the guild. I have a problem with never quite wanting to give up on someone, that I keep seeing the best intentioned version of them buried deep under the bullshit.

Maybe if I had never shown back up, we would have reached a state of peace faster, or maybe the guild would have quite literally cleaved in two… I will never actually know. That is the fate that the guild seemed to be heading towards when I returned… two factions, one of which would win the guild, and the other would be exiled. Instead now we have the bulk of the guild cooperating together, and only a few ended up leaving. In any case I was extremely proud last night to see everything going so amazingly smoothly. It was a supremely odd sensation to be carried to victory on the backs of the guild that I founded ten years ago. I can’t take responsibility for last night, other than that long ago I set the wheels in motion and caused these people to meet each other. More or less I have been gone since the beginning of Cataclysm, and in that time they have really done amazing things as a team.

Pax Stalwartia

Maybe last night was what I needed to see. For some time Rylacus had told me that things had improved in the guild, but I didn’t want to believe it. I have talked many times about never being able to go back. If I could teleport to those days in Late Night Raiders, or Duranub Raiding Company… or even No Such Raid… I would have. Last night felt like a mix of all of these rolled together. Folks were jovial and happy, and not a single person got grumpy when we wiped. They enjoyed the presence of one another, and enjoyed what they were doing. There was so much excited talk about what was to come in the expansion, and tentative plans to raid come December 2nd when the raid opens. It did my soul good to see this happening. I feel like they deserve me going into this with an open mind, because maybe home does still exist after you leave it.

All of this said, my heart still belongs to Eorzea, and the amazing community that I have found on Cactuar. I have so many goals that I want to accomplish there, and we have this amazing mass of folks gathered. I am never going to play just one game, it isn’t in my nature. So while I am “playing” Rift, and by that I mean logging in every single day to run my minions on missions… I am not really “playing” the game. Nor am I really playing most of the games I log into periodically. For the time being I think I am going to be playing Final Fantasy XIV and allowing myself to also play some World of Warcraft at the same time. I find it comforting that both House Stalwart and Greysky Armada exist… and both are completely different guilds. I’ve left my mark permanently on both, and I think both are really amazing places to play. What I find the most comforting however is that in both cases I am not responsible for their destiny. That in both cases the guilds are taking care of themselves.

Old Friends

Last night was this strange trip down memory lane as I experienced folks in a way that I have not since the beginning of Cataclysm. So many of my friendships from World or Warcraft were forged in battle, and in a way it took battle once again for me to really remember why we were friends in the first place. I am thankful to have a group of friends that are still out there, keeping on without me. That seem to be willing to accept me for whatever I happen to be at the moment, and welcome me back time and time again with open arms. I am extremely lucky to have lots of pools of these kinds of friends scattered from game to game, that are happy to see me show up, and don’t hold a grudge against me when I ultimately leave. It is comforting to know that the universe is just fine in the absence of your presence.

I realize that might sound like a strange thing, that I am happy to not be needed. You have to realize however that all I ever wanted was for House Stalwart to give them a framework upon which to do awesome things. So much of my time in Vanilla, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King was spent being a catalyst, and enabling things that didn’t happen when I wasn’t around. The guild was absolutely a cult of personality, and when the personality went away… people didn’t interact at all. So to see this guild that functions entirely without me being around, makes me happier than anyone would really know. I am thankful to have all these awesome people step up and take over the mantle of leadership. I have never been happier to be obsolete in my life, and it is my hope that I can continue to be so for a very long time.

Hunting Bookrocks

November 11, 2014 by Belghast

Deep Freeze

Last night was another prime example of the odd weather patterns here in Oklahoma. When I got home from work it had managed to heat up enough to kick on our air conditioning. Then over the course of one of the worst wind storms I can recall, that pretty much wrecked the gate to our backyard… it dropped from a balmy 80 degrees to 33 degrees and still really windy this morning. Being veterans day, and being that I am off work today… I had planned on having the Heating and Air guy out today to do our yearly “winter” inspection. I am guessing that I picked the perfect day because tonight it is supposed to plummet even colder. I realize that all of you northerners are thinking that the temperatures I am describing is nothing… but for someone raised to live in 70 degree to 115 degree climate this is pretty cold.

The problem with the heating and air folks coming out is the fact that my office was a mess. I have a bad habit of just tossing empty boxes in the corner and over the course of a year the pile of boxes had gotten pretty epic. It made me realize just how much stuff we order from Amazon. While we do not have curbside recycling here, we do however have these little bins called “Mr Murf” that I can take the cardboard to. So I have loaded the back of my jeep with the various assorted boxes, condensing them as best I could. In addition I went out into the backyard and unhooked the hose from the house in preparation for a hard freeze. The last step was to gather up all the trash and put the bin out next to the curb, feed the cats, feed myself and sit down to blog. All in all I have had a damned productive day and it is only 7:30 in the morning.

Hunting Bookrocks

I rushed around so much this morning so that, one it would actually get done, and two I could spend the rest of my day leisurely farming for bookrocks in Final Fantasy XIV. Before I finished the night last night I managed to cap my Tomestones of Poetics, and similarly I am close to another piece of armor with my Tomestones of Soldiery. Generally speaking running content on reset day yields some of the best results, so I will more than likely be hitting a mixture of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and Expert Roulette in an attempt to get the precious precious bookrocks. At this point I really want to get my pants drop out of Syrcus Tower so I can stop running it as a dragoon. Ultimately I would rather be running it as a class that has a higher likelihood of getting drops like my Bard. However given my past luck with MMOs, I know the moment I take anything other than the class that can roll “need” on them… they will start dropping every single time.

In The Burning Crusade I raided Karazhan every single Sunday for over a year. During this time tanking it, I managed to get Attumen’s mount, but never managed to get the tanking necklace that eluded me. After a years time I got tired of dragging a character in there that only needed a single item, so I started healing it on my paladin… letting another up and coming tank take my space. The first time I was in there as a Paladin… the tanking neck dropped. That has always been the case for me… I have exceptional luck early on and then there are one or two items that will not drop no matter how many times I attempt to get them. Then there are super rare items that everyone seems to be able to get but just end up taunting me. I am looking at you Headless Horseman mount. When I was farming that regularly, almost every time someone in my instance would get their mount… but I would not. I guess it could be worse… I could be Rylacus or Tamrielo… who simply don’t get drops at all.

Rapidly Backpedaling

I am still completely up in the air as to whether or not I will be playing Warlords of Draenor come Thursday. Had you asked me two weeks ago I would have said an absolute and resounding “Nope”. Then Blizzcon happened… and the extreme heartstring tugging of the Looking for Group documentary. That thing crit me straight to the feels for 9999… yeah I am still thinking in Final Fantasy numbers here. Unfortunately I felt things that I have not felt stirring in me about World of Warcraft since probably I last set foot on Draenor or at the very least last set foot in Northrend. This started an unraveling of my resolve against playing World of Warcraft. Basically there are two important pieces of data. The first being that my subscription does not officially run out for another 19 days. The second being that thanks to them opening preorders what seems like a year before the expansion actually launched… I’ve already pre-purchased the game and used my boost to 90 to push up my Night Elf Mage.

So there you have it… I have both access to my account to play, and the expansion already sitting there waiting on me. The problem is my problems with the expansion are still there. There is an excellent video from Qelric condensing her views about the Death Knight class in the expansion, and while I have never been able to be that concise she sums it up nicely. All that I have been able to say… is that they just felt wrong somehow. Like I never could quantify exactly what that meant. All of that said… if I do end up coming back I will more than likely do so on Belghast my warrior, with a return to protection tanking. I managed to get into Belghast a little bit right before I quit playing before the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and was having a reasonably good time with it. The protection changes seem to be mostly good, and the feel is solid. I would be kinda nice to set foot in Draenor on the character that came into its own during the Burning Crusade expansion. BC was the era where I transitioned from Hunter main to Warrior Tank main, so there is a whole bundle of nostalgia wrapped up in that setting.

The one thing I know for certain… I will never be leading the World of Warcraft House Stalwart again. When I came back last year, I fought hard to try and mend the rift that had built up in the guild in my absence. I tried desperately to get the two factions to talk to one another, but no amount of me acting as a bridge between… managed to actually help. This broke my resolve, and eventually the problem child in the equation left… and things apparently have been rather blissful in his absence. World of Warcraft is not a game I can play seriously any more. I tried to go back to raiding regularly with this last expansion and it just did not fit with the way I want to play the game. So long as I was a damned dirty casual I seemed to be enjoying myself, but the moment people started relying on me for anything… I was back in the position that I fought so hard to escape the first time. If I do play again, it would be as a secondary game the same way that I continue to play Rift. It is time for the Warcraft branch of House Stalwart to have a true leader, not just a figurehead that long ago stopped loving that position.

Given that it is Veterans Day here in the United States, I thought it fitting to show my thankfulness for the service of our men and women in the armed forces. This actually means quite a bit to me, because while I have never served in the Military myself… both of my grandfathers did. We lose sight on just how hardcore World War 2 must have been. The Grandfather on my fathers side was wounded during the D-Day invasion, and had a machine gun emplacement shoot down his back as he was trying to duck into a foxhole. Had he not happened to quite literally fall on a medic, he would have died as the machine gun and sliced through his lung and it was collapsing. They bandaged him up just enough to send him back out into battle, where he eventually participated in the Battle of the Bulge. During that leg of the campaign it was so cold that he lost half of his toes to frostbite.

My Grandfather on my Mother’s side was in the Tunisian front and captured during the Battle of Kasserine Pass, and spent time in a prison camp. Eventually he joined in with others and staged and escape managing to eventually get back to Allied lines. While on the run he was aided by various farming families in the Italian countryside. My wife’s step father on the other hand was a veteran of the Korean Conflict. He was a member of the Chosin Few, a group of service men trapped on a peninsula in the Chosin Reservoir that held off Chinese forces. The thing that I found the most interesting is that all three men were completely stoic about their service. Not a single one of them wanted any recognition for what they had done for our country. In fact none of them really wanted to talk about it at all. It was only later in life that each was willing to give us little tidbits of information regarding what all they had been through. I quite literally cannot imagine what they had to go through to survive, and I am thankful that I will never have to know. So on this Veterans Day I am thankful for all of the men and women who have served our country so that I can have the life of safety and personal freedoms that I lead.

#FFXIV #WoW

Holiday Countdown

November 10, 2014 by Belghast

Gone Viral

Yesterday did not go as planned in any sense of the word. Well to be honest the morning went pretty smoothly and I had a rather relaxing go at piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV while doing laundry. However that all changed mid afternoon as we started battling a virus infection on my wife’s laptop. The night before she had some weirdness going on with several DllHost.exe in memory consuming lots of system resources. She rebooted and it seemed to go away at least temporarily. However yesterday morning the virus scanner picked something up and deleted it… which seemed to only cause things to escalate from there. She started getting errors in Powershell which to the best of my knowledge we never actually installed on her system.

It seems as though a new strain of something called Trojan.Poweliks had gone out into the wild on the 8th and she had the bad luck to hit the wrong site and the wrong time and contract it. For a bit we thought maybe it had been stopped, as the virus scanner found several items and correctly identified them as Poweliks. Strange thing is that this only seemed to piss off the system, as constantly more things were popping up with the same infection. Finally around 10pm we decided to just wipe the system taking the “nuke it from orbit” approach. So that is precisely what I did after watching Walking Dead. At least this solves one problem… as that laptop had a 32bit version of Windows 7 on it… which prevented us from giving her some more ram. Problem solved.

Dragoon Legs

Since the 2.4 patch release I have been on an insatiable quest to finish out the level 100 Dragoon set from Syrcus Tower. Sure I could get better items from the soldiery vendor, but at this point it is a matter of principle. I have gathered up every item but one, the legs that drop from Amon the next to last boss. At this point I can run Syrcus Tower in my sleep, as I have quite literally been in there three to five times a night. I have seen the legs drop exactly three times… each of those times I had the misfortune of being in the same dungeon with another dragoon. Each time I lost, one of them by a single point on the roll. Essentially these legs have become the bane of my existence… but I am not giving up, not by a long shot. I know that the moment I switch classes and start running Syrcus as my bard… the legs will drop on the very first time and go uncontested to another Dragoon.

One of the interesting options you have as part of the Duty Roulette is that you can check the “join party in progress” check box… meaning in theory you could get dumped into a partially cleared instance. I actually managed to luck out twice with this… the second time they were on Zande the final boss in the raid. Now when you join it dumps you at the beginning of the instance and you have to take a teleporter that brings you relatively close to the boss that the group is working on. Apparently they pulled before I could get there so the above picture is me dancing the Manderville as the final meteor plummets towards the party. The funny thing is that I still got to roll on all of the items that dropped even though I got locked out of the encounter. While I didn’t win anything… this was the easiest 15 poetics and 20 soldiery I have ever earned.

Holiday Countdown

xmascountdown

It feels like this has been the year of gaming blogosphere events. The first was the always awesome Newbie Blogger Initiative, then I had my own super successful Blaugust, and Izlain just wrapped up Bragtoberfest, and now the ever amazing MMO Gypsy is wanting to create a virtual advent calendar. It seems there is tradition in her area of the world of the “Advent Window” where each member of a town or village decorates their home to represent a day of the advent season, the days leading up to Christmas Day. In a way we are a virtual village, with our blogs representing our homes and the town being made up of the gaming blogosphere as a whole. The idea that she talks about in her blog is that for each of us to create a post on an assigned day highlighting all of the positive things about the gaming community.

If you have a blog and are interested in participating, you can sign up by either leaving a comment in the post announcing it, or dropping Syl a line on twitter. I have been informed that since I helped with the logo, that I had no choice but to participate. Of course I would have signed up anyways, but I will just let Syl think she has some serious pull to order me around like that. I think it is going to be a really interesting event, and hopefully we can come up with some way of visualizing the days of the month to carry out the window on the world feel. All of the specifics about the topic, title, how you get your day assigned can be found in the original post. We have had so much negativity this year in the broader gaming community, and as such it is up to us the gaming bloggers to show that there are still positive voices in our world.

Gaming Blogosphere

While it was not my original intent, I am ending up making thankfulness posts that ultimately relate to the topic I just posted. Similarly this morning I am extremely thankful to be a member of the Gaming Blogosphere. That term in itself is a fairly ephemeral thing, because it means so many different things to so many different people. Ultimately it was the Blog Azeroth folks that gave me the spark to start Aggronaut.com so many years ago. Like so many Tales of the Aggronaut started as a single focus blog, with my intent being focused on World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking. However this shifted focus to being a general tanking blog, with some raid leadership topics… and then ultimately abandoning being World of Warcraft focused at all. At each step of my journey I have had supportive voices cheering me on from the community, and were it not for them I likely would have fallen completely into obscurity.

For a long time it felt as though we didn’t have a very strong sense of community out here in the “not entirely devoted to World of Warcraft” blog space. However the events I talked about in this post have helped to create a much more cohesive sense of community. This combined with the fact that this year we launched The Gaming and Entertainment Network has given me a deeper sense of belonging to something larger than just myself. I am deeply thankful for the other bloggers that I interact with on a near daily basis, and thankful that they have for some reason accepted me into their good graces. You have been a supportive voice when I desperately needed one, and I am so thankful to have all of you.