Tales of the Aggronaut

Class of 2014

May 2, 2014May 2, 2014 by Belghast

Class of 2013 Revisited

Now that we are officially underway in the Class of 2014, I thought it would be interesting to look back and see just how well the fruits of our efforts with the 2013 have paid off. I have to say based on past experiences I was expecting to see about half of the blogs either no longer resolving or not having been updated in months. However it appears that the class of 2013 was one of the most productive to date. Looking up my blog post from the close of NBI 2013, I counted 23 blogs that finished the event. Out of those fifteen are still updating fairly recently, or have at the very least had a blog post in the last few months. A handful have even been updated semi-weekly for the past year. I think this is pretty cool that the Initiative was able to create some really dedicated bloggers.

Here is a quick rundown of the folks who beat the odds and have kept up with their blogging habit on a regular basis.

All of you out there that are still updating your blogs regularly… take a well deserved bow. There are some massive lapses in posting in the history of this blog, so the drive to keep making content is something I truly respect. Last year seems to be the most successful year to date, and here is hoping that going into 2014 we can top that.

Class of 2014

It is still pretty early in the process but I wanted to get some link loving started already to the folks who signed up right out of the gate. I expect as the month rolls on we will have significantly more participants, but already we have an extremely impressive crop. So if the group we have gathered already are any indication for what we are likely to see in 2014 as a whole… I feel like this is going to be a really great year. One of the big challenges when the Newbie Blogger Initiative was rebooted last year, was to not only get new bloggers into the community, but also to retain them. It seems to be working and I tip my hat to the folks who have been making sure this happens. Without further ado… on with this years list of blogs.

A few of these folks I have already engaged with via Twitter, and I am hoping to be able to do the same for the others as well. If you are not already there, twitter is somewhat a vital too for maintaining the sense of community as a whole. Generally speaking that tends to be how the majority of the gaming blogosphere communicate with each other on a regular basis. My contact information is at the top of the right side bar and I welcome anyone to approach me in any venue I happen to be using. If there is anything I can do to help make your blog more successful, please let me know.

Gaming Lite

The last few days I have been all over the place as far as gaming goes. I recorded a new Trove video the other night as I tried to figure out all of the changes… which are pretty massive. Adventuring now seems to revolve around the creation of portals that take you to various tiered worlds. Additionally there seems to be a system now that prevents you from equipping too high of level of a weapon. I end up screwing myself over by upgrading the one set of weapons I could equip… too high to actually equip them. So now I am back at square one, working on leveling up my Knight and finding weapons to do so with it. The pace of the game seems to be significantly slower, and I am going to have to figure out exactly what all has taken place since I last played. I still really dig trove in that it is a funky and friendly little world full of random adventure.

Another random thing I did the other night was decide to record a walkthrough of our guild hall in Rift. I still love what she did to the place and how awesome it looks. I have been pining for Rift lately, so I will likely start poking around over there again. I wish I could get some elite groups honestly, but the random dungeon finder queue is insane. I might end up working on my tank spec and doing some streams of me tanking for random pugs. I am just not sure if I really want that kind of stress. Surely as long as the queues are… folks will be appreciative of tanks right? At least that is the theory and I hope they don’t rip me to shreds. There are a few other streamers that I might be able to connect with that also seem to want to do elites, so maybe I can get that going. Right now both my Warrior and my Rogue are geared almost entirely through the free patron chests that we get every week.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVLastly I am still playing a ton of Elder Scrolls Online on a nightly basis. I streamed for about an hour last night as I wandered around in Bangkorai trying to finish up objectives that I still have out there. I ended up completing a few major quest steps, and generally faffing about killing lots of imperials. I show off my new armor and my new fast pony. I finally gathered up the 42,700g needed to buy the +25% speed mount, and while it is not necessarily the color I would have chosen… I am happy enough with it. It seems like the campaign against bots is actually working, as the few places I went last night with bosses… the traditional gathering of bots was absent. I feel like Zenimax is trying hard to combat the gold spammers and botters, but it is a constant and ever changing battle. Right now they have shifted almost entirely to using the email system… which is a bit more manageable. I am religiously reporting each and every spam email I get, hoping that over time they can lock down on these accounts. I am super interested in ArcheAge, but right now honestly I am still having a ton of fun playing ESO.

Not as Hard as it Seems

May 1, 2014 by Belghast

So You Want to Blog

This will be my third year participating in the Newbie Blogger initiative, and each year I have lead off with a post along these lines. Without a doubt the hardest part of blogging is some how conquering that little voice in your head that says that you shouldn’t. If you can ever defeat this inertia you can do truly wonderful things. The problem is, this is the step no one can really help you with. If you are like those of us who are already blogging… you have ideas and thoughts that you feel like sharing with the world. Chances are you started out as a poster on your guilds forums and then worked up courage to posting on your game forums. Maybe you are the “social network pundit” that comments on various topics when someone else brings it up.

Essentially at this point you are this bottled up fountain of ideas. I am here to tell you there is a cure for what ails you. There is nothing quite so cleansing of these ideas as trying to write a post. You can go from having thirty million things to say on a variety of topics, to not having a single thing at all to say when presented with the blank page of your own blog. For the past year I’ve engaged in Mortal Kombat with the blank screen every single morning, and for better or worse made my mark on it. When you finally wrangle an idea out of your head and break its will transforming it into written word… it is a miraculous thing.

The hardest battle however is actually hitting that publish button. There are many mornings I simply close my eyes and hit publish and then walk away from the screen for a few hours. In truth this is helped by the fact that I write at 6 am as I am drinking my coffee and have a natural built buffer to keep me from fiddling with it otherwise known as my drive into the office. There are going to be days where you write something you thought was great… and no one seems to care. You are going to have topics that you threw together in five seconds that get way more hits than the rest of your blog combined. But at the end of the day you get to call yourself a blogger, in a completely real fashion. You are a content creator, you put words out into the internet and even if no one knows who you are… eventually those words will reach someone thanks to the sorcery that is Google… and hopefully touch them in some way.

Not as Hard as it Seems

There are a lot of decisions to be made about your blog, but the most important one hopefully is that you have decided to make one in the first place. There are tons of great free options that you can have started and running in a few minutes. I happen to be in the WordPress camp and I choose to host my own version of the software. However there are many people who have great results with Blogger, including my own wife. I personally suggest you create a little proto-blog on each of the services and get a feel for how the tools work. They each offer unique benefits, but also have some unique constraints as well. I’ve personally found WordPress to be more flexible and more easily modified to do exactly what I want, however if Google already controls your life… then Blogger more easily integrates with G+ and Drive. In either case you can literally have a blog up and running and open to the world in less than ten minutes.

There are as many ways to write a blog as there are people. Some folks like to stage the entire post in a word processor and cut and paste bits into the blog software when they are ready to post. For a few particularly tricky posts I have done this with a Google doc that allowed me to “chew on” the topic for awhile before finally entering it into my blog. Other people like to stage their posts ahead of time in the blog software and schedule a specific post time. This allows you to write an entire weeks worth of posts in a Saturday afternoon and have them trickle out throughout the week. I’ve never been a huge fan of this, but it works well for a lot of people, especially those who write for multiple blogs. Ultimate you have to find the option that works best for you. I highly suggest you try lots of different things. If you read my early posts they look nothing and feel nothing like they do currently. This was a slow evolution over time where I found what I liked and didn’t like and started to develop my own blogging style book of sorts. Ultimately you will end up doing the same thing for your blog whatever it might be.

Picking a Format

Now we start getting down to the more difficult decision territory. Your blog is this “thing” and that thing needs to have a hook that will draw people in. What is your “thing”, are you supremely devoted to this one game or even this one niche of this one game… or are you more of a generalist wanting to talk about lots of different things. Tales of the Aggronaut for example started its life with the intent of being a World of Warcraft blog. More so than that… the intent was to be a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog. A niche within a niche within a very specific game. I have to say there is a beauty and a simplicity of writing a blog about one specific thing. When someone asks you what your blog is about you have a very handy answer, that immediately makes sense… at least to anyone who has ever played World of Warcraft.

I quickly realized that I had boxed myself in a corner, because it meant that from that point onwards… I would have to write about World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking. The biggest advice that I can give you after five years of blogging… is to pick a “thing” that is livable. Essentially you want to try your best to quell any excuse you might have NOT to post a blog post. For the first few years of my blog there were some massive lapses in posting, and each one relates to a period where I just was not feeling the theme of my blog. I didn’t want to be a rant blog, and if I didn’t have anything that made me excited about something… I stopped writing about it at all. This was the achilles heel of being about a specific thing. So I went through a series of “format changes”. For awhile I tried to be a blog about raiding, or a blog about World of Warcraft in general.

Finally I had a massive reboot and become an official Rift Fansite for a bit, when I was hot and heavy over that title. Thing is it wasn’t just my site that was changing, but it was me as well. I had played this one game for seven years and I was entering a phase in my gaming where I didn’t really want to be tied down to this one thing any longer. I am so thankful that early on I picked a pretty ambiguous title for the blog. “Tales of the Aggronaut” can be so many things, and regardless of the game I am playing I always seem to have Tanking tendencies… so Aggronaut always makes sense. Had I been thinking properly at the time I would have simply named my blog Belghast.com and been done with it, shedding all illusion about what it would be. Having an open ended name to the blog has allowed me to shift the format around a bit to fit whatever felt right at the time.

Now five years on you have a blog that is vastly different than where we started. I am now habitually and happily poly-amorous when it comes to gaming, and my blog has become a cult of personality of sorts. People are interested in reading what I write more than what I happen to be writing about. I feel grateful and lucky to have reached that point, however in the beginning after watching lots of new bloggers hit the scene… it is probably better to try and be a blog about a “thing”. Those blogs seem to have far better traction because they are easily relatable and more importantly easily integrated to an existing community that is whatever that “thing” happens to be. All that said… when you name your blog, I highly suggest you give yourself an escape clause. Name your blog something that will make sense as this “thing” you want to write about, but also make sense as something else too.

Accessing the Community

I know the irony that is me writing about community after various posts I have made in the past about blogs and community. However if your blog is going to get traction you need a community to support it. This can mean different things, but ultimately you want to find a niche in the “thing” you are writing about, and also a niche in the community of bloggers that share that space. This is the aspect of the Newbie Blogger Initiative that makes it so helpful. By starting a blog right now, you are getting dumped into a shared space with lots of other budding bloggers, and a huge chunk of the blogging community is paying attention to you. For example within the next few days I will be starting up a special blog roll again just for the NBI Class of 2014 giving each new blogger prime placement in my visual blog roll. Similar lists are going to be spread throughout the verse showing you as someone they should be checking out.

One of the hardest things I find about making a successful blog is the self promotion aspect. It is the piece that feels the least genuine and the most needy. By entering the Newbie Blogger Initiative you are getting a bit of a pass on this one… at least for a little while. We the established bloggers are going to be doing your promotions for you. All you need to do is sit down and focus on producing great content. There has been talk over the last few years that blogging is a dying art form. While I don’t necessarily agree with the dying part… I do agree that we are in desperate need of fresh blood in our community. So much of what we do is fed by interaction with others, and we need an ever widening circle of people to talk with. There are moments when I swear I have had the same discussion with the same bloggers multiple times… and the more of us IN that conversation the less that is going to happen. Won’t you please join the madness that is blogging, and leave your mark upon our community?

#NewbieBloggerInitiative #NBI2014 #GettingStarted #JoinUs

Nerd on Nerd Violence

April 30, 2014April 30, 2014 by Belghast

Hipster Glasses

Living in Oklahoma is absolutely insane sometimes. We have been having a string of 80 degree days lately, and it has been fairly glorious. When we went for our walk in the evening it would be in the high 70s and absolutely wonderful outside. Last night the temperature dropped again and this morning it is 48 degrees outside. I don’t like turning the AC and Heater off and on, especially for a short cold snap like this, so instead last night we simply piled the blankets on. I am so thankful for our cats , because Chloe our fattest and fuzziest cat somehow managed to squeeze between us and under the covers keeping us both nice and toasty through the night.

Yesterday I happened to snap the photo on the side on a whim. The previous day I had gotten some new glasses, so I snapped a photo to send to my wife to show her. Well yesterday morning we had some absolutely amazing looking skies. When I went to snap a photo I noticed that the camera was still turned the wrong way, and using the front facing one. At which point I noticed that it looked pretty cool to see my head surrounded by the halo of clouds. This is the first photo I have seen of myself in years that I actually kinda like. I have had a lot of issues with the way I look and in part it has been due to the weight issues I have had. Just like I am starting to get used to my own voice through all the podcasting I have been doing… I am starting to become more comfortable in my own skin.

The willingness to try something new as far as glasses go is probably just a side effect of this. I have literally work the same hair cut, and same glasses for damned near two decades. While they aren’t always the same frames they are as close to the same thing as I can get at the time. I like to keep things simple, and I have always reasoned with myself that this is in part because I am trying to not have to think about things. In part I think it is this lack of comfort in my own skin that had lead me to simply think it didn’t matter what I wore or what I looked like. I kind of dig the new glasses, my friends have been giving me shit about them. When I like something they say it is because I am being “ironic” or if I dislike something they claim it is “too mainstream”. That however will fade, and each of them has begrudgingly said that they like them as well.

Nerd on Nerd Violence

Since getting my fitbit I have done all sorts of little things to hack my life and try and add in more exercise where I could. While I have always parked on the roof, I’ve begun walking up and down the ramps from the 6th floor to the 4th floor where the skywalk is. As a result I have started noticing various vehicles and one of them has stood out. There is a green Honda “something” that has a cute little demon skull and cross bones on it and a “twilight girl” sticker. My feelings about that sticker have evolved over the last few weeks as I have passed it. I think we can universally agree that the Twilight series is pretty horrible. My wife had been given the books by a student, and she read them… then when the first movie came out we struggled through it. We both agreed it was a horrible idea and one we would never repeat again.

Thing is… somewhere along the line this morphed in culture from “twilight is horrible” to “people who like twilight are horrible”. As I have spent the last weeks walking past this car I had a revelation. This person is a geek, and they have proudly emblazoned their vehicle with something they obviously care about. While we might not like it, we have to respect the fact that they stepped up and announced that they loved something… anything. This is no different than my Doctor Who lanyard, or my co-workers collection of my little ponies, those things are just “socially acceptable” geekdom. At one point or another throughout our lives we have been picked on for those same geeky traits, and if you have not… then you’ve lived a truly charmed life. It just feels like picking on someone for liking a horrible novel, is fairly hypocritical.

The other night I friends and I ended up having a fairly epic discussion after I had stopped recording the podcast about the decision to completely jettison everything in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. As we started discussing it, the initial reaction was “how dare they” and it faded more into a “makes sense” as we started to recount the various aspects of the Expanded Universe. For each thing that we loved we managed to pull out five or six fairly horrible and badly written constructs from the comics, novels or video games. Most of it was no less “horrible fan service” than the Twilight novels. As much as I loved Dark Empire for example… you have to admit it is a pretty dumb story arc when it involves the fact that there are millions of clone emperors hidden throughout the galaxy. Not to mention the fact that while Luke spent an entire series of movies fighting the Dark Side, he decides to give in within a couple of comic books.

We are all guilty of loving something completely moronic that has no literary merit. So I say to the “Twilight Girls” out there… rock that shit and ignore the people who will hate you for it. To the rest of us… we need to realize that this person is a geek just like we are, they just happen to like different things. Geekdom is not a thing we own, there are no rules of entry. While I might rage on “Brogamers” and what they have done to my beloved gaming community… they have no less right to be there than I do. For us 30 and 40 something’s, who spent our lives getting excluded from pop culture… it really is not cool that we try and do the same thing to others. I am proud when I see anyone let their geek flag fly… even if it is not something that I particularly care about.

Prophet Loves Jewelry

I was all over the place last night gaming wise. I popped into Trove for a bit and streamed it, and I decided to do the same for Rift and show off our awesome guild hall. When I finally settled on a game and played for a bit it was once again Elder Scrolls Online. Over the course of leveling I seem to have completely ignored the main story. This is in part because you keep having to go back the harborage to keep accepting the next step, and for whatever reason I have simply not taken the time to do this. As a result I spent a good chunk of last night trying to play catch up and do both the level 35 and 40 main storyline quests. My big takeaway… is that at some point during his history The Prophet managed to knock over a jewelry store. He seems to have this endless supply of necklaces and rings.

At this point I am a stones throw away from 44 and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of Bangkorai. Normally I do a pretty bad job of following quest chains through the zones in Elder Scrolls, but this zone… I have done worse than normal. I have objectives scattered all over the place some of them completed, others still dark and unfinished. I am getting cursed quite a lot because I cannot stop myself from charging packs of werewolves and vampires. I’ve had the “Sanies Lupinus” curse more times than I can count, but it seems to just go away on its own rather rapidly if you do nothing about it. I had one guy rather mad at me the other night named “Raper of Souls”, which was convenient since I had already paused to report his name. Yes I am one of those people… I report bad names, and do so on a nightly basis. I am not going out of my way to troll people who are trying to turn into a werewolf or a vampire… I am simply playing the game as I always do. Namely I charge first and ask questions later.

Thankfully we have plenty of werewolves and vampires in guild if someone needs to get bitten. Personally I would far rather choose neither and be a hunter. In fact I have already morphed my silver bolts attack to also effect werewolves. I’ve always had a love of werewolves, so in theory I would totally become one were it not gimped. Right now werewolf seems a bit underwhelming, considering all of its buffs only actually take place when you are in Crinos form. Yes I just called it Crinos form… I played a lot of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, so it will always be known as Crinos to me. Vampire on the other hand has all sorts of passive benefits that are active all the time, but the weakness to fire seems far more problematic than the werewolf weakness to poison. As a result… I am just walking the line between and hunting both equally. Though oddly… I seem to be going out of my way to save both werewolves and vampires in the storyline.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #HipsterGlasses #NerdOnNerdViolence

The Achilles Heel

April 29, 2014 by Belghast

The Struggle

Most mornings my posts flow freely from my fingers as I sit here typing away at my keyboard. This morning however is not one of them. For whatever reason I feel completely drained of anything that makes sense. Over the weekend I spent quite a bit of it at a severe sleep debt, and I think for the most part I am still trying to recover from that. When I am in doubt I turn to my RSS feed, but after thumbing through the pages I have yet to really get the inspiration to write anything either. I am in a really weird place right now. I am still very much loving Elder Scrolls Online, but I also feel like most of what I say about it is just repeating something I said earlier. So instead I think this morning I will talk about the points that frustrate me. I’ve been more or less accused of being a cheerleader for the game, or at the very least our podcast as “full of fanboys”.

The Achilles Heel

For as awesome as the game is there is one massive and glaring hole in the game. It is simply too damned hard to group up with your friends. This problem is multi-faceted, but revolves around a few variables. Firstly content “trivializes” when you are five levels over the level of the actual mobs. This means you get no experience, gold or any other form of loot from killing the monsters. This also means that the experience that you gain from completing the quests is significantly reduced. While I have said that content is still relatively challenging a good deal over level, that also means you are taking risk with zero reward. This becomes a massive problem when a guild member happens to need a low level dungeon. The first time someone completes an Elder Scrolls Dungeon it is pretty much a given that there will be wipes. For the on level players this is really not a huge deal, but for the higher level players that have been drafted… it is pretty significant.

I feel like once I have gotten my 42,700 gold mount this will be less of an issue for me, but right now as it stands I am taking zero risks when it comes to my bank account. I am a stones throw away from the mount, and right now just trying to build up enough of a cap to afford a repair if I need one after buying it. By repair right now that means roughly 2000 gold each time I do it. This is always the problem as players age through content, trying to keep enough money inflow to pay for the money going out. Having mobs completely trivialize and stop being worth any loot is a big problem when I consistently out age the content of a given zone. Bangkorai for example is a zone that seems to cap out mob level wise at 43. I just dinged 43 last night and I have not even completely half of the content in the zone. This means that my need to turn all the black dots white on my map will easily cause me to stop getting loot long before I finish the content.

For a game that already has significant problems with bots hanging out in dungeons and farming bosses over and over, this is a hard problem to solve. My immediate suggestion would be to make the group-able level range something more like ten levels, rather than five. Encounters ten levels under you can still a challenge especially in a dungeon setting. That would also ensure that you gain loot the entire way through a zone, regardless of how much you manage to dawdle around. I realize the whole trivialization thing is not going to be an issue once I enter the veteran levels, however that is setting up the same problem every MMO has ever had. If the “real” game begins at 50, then why even have the pre-50 game. I don’t necessarily believe this, but I am playing devils advocate here. My problem is I happen to love the leveling game in every game I play, and the Elder Scrolls Online is no different.

Mixed Mode Grouping

Another huge problem the game has is that grouping is somewhat piecemeal as you level. You are constantly flowing between quests that allow multiple players to complete them together, and quests that require you to solo them in a private instance. Additionally the system is confused about players getting credit for things. You can simply ride by someone fighting a the last mob in a quest chain and accidentally get a quest completed, but when it comes to anything that requires gathering… each and every party member has to get their own items. This generally lends to frustration as you end up waiting around for respawns to allow the character that is lagging behind to complete that step in the quest chain before progressing to the next item. It feels like this whole system could have been better thought out. Duoing is a very common tactic for couples and friends leveling in a new game, and this game seems to support this extremely well at times, but really badly in a few cases.

Where this gets compounded is when a duo happens upon a solo instanced quest. Inevitably one of the members will breeze through the content, and the other will struggle. I’ve seen more than a few duos derailed by Doshia already in our guild, and I am sure as a whole it is probably even worse. The game has very particular skill check moments, and this ends up locking a single player away behind that quest so that they cannot progress further in a given quest chain until they solo it. What does the other half of the duo do at that point? Do they twiddle their thumbs and wait around for them to complete it… therefore putting more pressure on the member that isn’t quite able to grasp the fight as quickly? Do they wander off and kill random stuff potentially causing them to get ahead in level. These gates are awesome in theory, but hell on people trying to keep at the same level.

The Game Needs Mentoring

This game is in desperate need of mentoring. I realize at this point I have banged this drum so damned many times that the skin on it is close to cracking from the abuse. However I feel like every game is better off with a mentoring system. For those not familiar with the concept, mentoring is a system that allows a high level player to drop their level to that of the player. If you group a level 50 character with a 20 character, this functionally makes them both level 20 characters. Scaling always makes it so that the mentored down character is “better than” their level, but it works better than not having it. Generally speaking a mentored character receives loot as though they were at the level of the group and the difficulty is something similar to level as well. This is a magic bullet, and has worked to make every game that has it better.

This was my key point of frustration with the game when I heard it did not exist. It is never the right answer not to ship with both Bolstering, like you see in Cyrodil and mentoring. I have a maxim that is getting tired at this point… but it is no less true today than it was when I first started posting about it. Anything that gets in the way of you grouping with your friends is bad. These games are social experiences, and as such should have every possible tool to allow friends to group freely together. This game unfortunately has a ton of barriers between players. Firstly there is the issue of level gaps and trivialization of content, that I have talked about here. We also however have the frustration of not being able to group across faction, even for instanced content.

Globalization

Finally there is always the problem of region lockout, and while I can understand the logistical need to have both a North American and a European mega server… my hope is that at some point they will choose to merge them. I should not be penalized for having lots of friends who do not happen to live in the United States. What is happening in practice is that my European friends are simply accepting the fact that they will be having lag and rolling on our megaserver just to be able to participate with their friends. The concept of a region lock needs to die in a fire. In an era when we can communicate instantly across the entire damned planet, thinking of things in a country centric means just doesn’t fly anymore. Please note that this is not specifically an Elder Scrolls Online problem, but a problem with each and every game system out there. I am looking at you Sony and your players locked behind the ProSiebenStat.1 wall as well.

I have spent weeks talking about the things that the Elder Scrolls Online has done really right, so it is only fitting that I spend at least one day talking about the things that it has done “less right”. I am hoping with time they fix some of these problems, especially the inability to group with people in a meaningful way once things have trivialized. The answer that they would give us is that after level 10 we should be going out to Cyrodil… which is fine and good and an option I will probably start taking more often, but that is such a SMALL part of this game, that it just feels like a cop-out. You have created this amazing world, and crafted a really fun dungeon experience. Let me show it to my friends in a meaningful way, because right now I don’t want to run lower level content because it just isn’t fun trying to be the high level in a dungeon. Adding mentoring would solve almost all of the problems I mentioned other than the region lockout. Here is hoping that someday they add it in, before it is too late for the folks who were NOT in the initial leveling rush and will fall by the wayside as they realize they can’t do anything meaningful with their friends.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Mentoring