Tales of the Aggronaut

Wrong

August 13, 2013August 13, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks, and welcome to another episode of “Bel tries to think of something to write about in the morning”. Last night was kind of an odd night. We had to run a number of errands so it ended up with me getting home fairly late and missing most of the “nda” event. Afterwards I logged into Rift for a bit, but kept getting disconnected. I think it was jealous for cheating on it with another game. When it finally stabilized I did a bunch of silly things and finally it was time for our evening walk… and I was in bed by 10:30. Theoretically I should be recharged and ready for the day… but I feel all sorts of fuzzy mentally.

Silly Things

One of the things that I spent my massive amount of points on that I got from being a longtime subscriber to rift… was on the tradeskill extension unlocks for my main. As a result he has Mining, Butchering, Foraging, Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing and Artificer. Which to some extent has started me down the road to madness. Since I have pooled the majority of my tradeskills on one character, I have the overwhelming desire to rework all my other characters so that they are pure harvesters. Lately we have lacked a healer when I attempted to pull together dungeons and such with our 50+ crowd, so I thought I would bring my cleric Belgaroth out of retirement since he was already 50.

The problem is… this also began my descent into insanity as I noticed he had the odd combination of Weaponsmithing, Apothecary and Foraging. None of the tradeskills were terribly high, so I decided this was the opportune time to rebuild him as a master harvester. The only bad thing about this is that I spent all of last night roaming around Freemarch collecting ore and skinning wolves. When it came time for our walk last night I had just finished up on Freemarch and was headed into Stonefields. Since I have recently done this whole level all the tradeskills thing on Belghast when I picked up foraging… I am hoping it goes more quickly since I pretty well know the areas I need to be in for each type of material. I don’t really want to get too much further into the Storm Legion content without having his harvest abilities up to snuff.

Wrong

So two things happened yesterday… firstly I stumbled across the video above… and one of my posts got picked up by MMO Melting Pot a site that aggregates posts from the community normally relating to World of Warcraft. I like the site, and they do a decent job of promoting various blogs, but almost every trolling comment I have received has happened when they have featured one of my posts. Normally the trolls don’t really bother me but this one just stuck in my craw.

No, sorry the author of this post is flat out wrong.

So I have no problem with someone disagreeing with my opinion. It happens on a regular basis and people seem to be able to do it well. I have a problem with the fact that this poster said my opinion was wrong. It is impossible for an opinion to be wrong. It is not a fact based statement generally, but the way someone feels or believes, and as a result there is no right or wrong. It is in fact their opinion until they decide to change it. My blog while it has little factual nuggets at times, is pretty much my view on the world as I know it. While you can get grumpy or disagree with what I say, saying that said opinion is wrong just is not an option.

Now to the video above… I linked it into this segment because in some small way it is addressing as the video calls it the “nerd on nerd violence” aspect that is trolling. I disagree vehemently with folks all the time… prime example is the whole “tank” series of posts. All the while I was posting my good friend Rowan was posting the counter point on his blog. We don’t always see eye to eye and we disagree plenty… but at the end of the day I still love him like a brother… and I would never dream of calling his personal opinion “wrong”.

I’ve tried super hard myself to present a mostly positive outlook into our community, which in my case is the collection of gaming blogs out there. While the above video has nothing to do with that, I feel like it has a lot of threads of truth about our own community or ANY geek community in general. Geeks seem to like eating their own, because they do not measure up to some standard they have set in their heads. I have been guilty of this multiple times myself, and I try and take a step back and realize that we are a niche of a niche of a niche… and the quite frankly we need all the awesome people we can get. I have so much respect for the cosplayers out there, whereas I put my ideas on paper and hit a publish button from the comfort of my office… they wrap themselves in those thoughts and parade it for the world to see. I cannot imagine how much self confidence it takes to do that… and I have nothing but the utmost respect for ANYONE who even vaguely attempts to cosplay something.

Gearpunk Dice

My good friend Tesh is making another run at Kickstarter, and this time it seems to have gotten massive traction. The above dice are just a production sample from his blog but gives you a feel for what the gearpunk dice will ultimately look like. This campaign is for metal dice and he is offering essentially three designs… Tinker Dice, Gearpunk Dice and Fudge Dice. Essentially through a combination of the Gearpunk polyhedral dice, and the tinker dice you have what is like the ultimate gear punk dice collection for your gaming needs. I was a big fan when they were plastic, and I am an even bigger fan now that the metal seems to be going over like gangbusters.

[edit] Apparently I was extremely tired this morning… because I completely neglected including the Kickstarter link….

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tishtoshtesh/tinker-dice-steampunk-metal-dice

This one is easy now… the initial project requested $1000 and now they have received enough funding to do that almost ten times over. Essentially the dice are now a guarnteed thing, so make sure you do not miss out on this offering. They have been available through his shapeways site for some time, but this is a much better deal. I am extremely happy to see this campaign doing so well, and it could not be supporting a nicer gamer and blogger.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this thing up. Today is the first day back for my wife, and as a result it has thrown my morning into a complete state of disarray. I am not used to having to get ready with another human being roaming around the house. Additionally now pretty much begins hell for me until roughly mid September as the whole back to school ritual dominates my life. I am essentially bracing for it now, and expecting my time to be whittled away as we need to run this or that errand to prepare. I hope you all have a much better series of days ahead of you, and that the work week has been going well.

Mordheim

August 12, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning people out in internet land. I am slowly waking up and drinking my cup of coffee. Usually caffeine makes everything better, so here is hoping it does the trick once again. I had a pretty chill weekend. Yesterday I hung out on the sofa with my laptop and play assorted games while watching the tail end of Hemlock Grove and continuing with Luther. Both really great shows that I would suggest to anyone that is interested. The more I think about it the more Hemlock Grove reminds me of Once Upon a Time meets Silent Hill. I really don’t have a ton of ammunition to write about this morning, so here goes nothing.

Mordheim

I think we all have those games we have a bundle of “what ifs” about, that never quite lived up to our expectations. One of the biggest for me will likely always be Warhammer Online. I loved the intellectual property the game was based on, and I think they did a really good job of bringing it to life. The game introduced so many interesting mechanics like “physical tanking” and “public quests”. They did several things well and I was happy to see other games adapt their ideas.

Ultimately the problem for me was the lack of a viable PVE experience after level 25. I realize this was an attempt at making a PVP centric game… and that honestly is its failing. People just don’t want that, or at least didn’t want that at the time of the release of Warhammer Online. As a longtime fan of the Warhammer setting, there were various touchpoints they hit for me, and various other ones that I would have liked to have seen. There is one thing especially that I have always daydreamed about that I wish they could have pulled off.

Mordheim was released as a stand alone boxed game from Games Workshop that takes place some 500 years before the setting of Warhammer Fantasy. Ultimately the short version of the storyline is that a comet crash lands depositing this new material known as Wyrdstone. Small warbands that the players control have to enter the city and try and uncover as many pieces of this new mineral as they can. Not only do they have to contend with other warbands of players, but they also have to contend with the Skaven that have taken up root in the city.

I have always thought it would have been amazingly cool if they were able to either implement a public quest area that was Mordheim. It would have been a lot like the Darkness Falls experience in DAoC with the ability for one faction or the other to control key points within the city while still having to fend off waves of NPC skaven that will attack the placements. This would give an interesting three way balance between two factions of players and a third npc faction that wants to kill both of them and take the Wyrdstone for themselves. I can’t say that this would have turned the tide of a losing game, but it definitely would have made for some interesting gameplay.

Eloping

After this weekend I am more convinced that we did the smart thing when we decided to elope and opt out of a traditional wedding. One of our friends has decided that she is finally going to marry the guy she has been with for some time. There have been multiple dates in the past but none of them actually came to fruition. However now they decided to set a date two weeks from now… and are trying to pull everything together for a traditional wedding last minute. The end result is complete and utter insanity.

As a result of all of this… my wife literally spent a good chunk of Friday night, most of Saturday and almost all of Sunday dealing with dress shopping. She came hope with a disturbing looking teal number that appears to have come from Florida circa 2000… as it seems to have a number of “hanging chads” along the skirt. It is ugly as hell… my wife knows it, I know it… but it makes the bride happy so you deal with it. But as we watch this logistical nightmare play out in front of me… we have turned to each other at several points and said “god I am happy we eloped”.

Ultimately I am going to end up as the photographer for the wedding… which should be a decent idea… as it will give me something to busy myself during the whole event. I really really dislike weddings, and all the fluffy white wonderland that they seem to be. I try my best not to be a grump about it, because for whoever is having the wedding it is a massive happy occasion. I would just far rather send a nicer gift and hope they don’t mind the fact I didn’t attend. I do find myself bringing a crappier gift when I attend the wedding… because I feel as though my suffering should count for something.

Chasing a Dream

I stumbled across this video while checking into G+ this morning. I thought it was a really cool feel good story about how a guy chased down his dream of owning a video game store. He mentions an IndieGoGo campaign but unfortunately I have not been able to dig up that link. We have a handful of game stores like this in the Tulsa area and I try to frequent them whenever possible to support the concept of the hometown video game store. I guess I find this whole thing extra neat because many times my wife and I have talked about the pipe dream of us building a store that fed off our own passions.

Ultimately it would end up as a educational curriculum, traditional book, video game and pen and paper shop. The franken-shop would have a bunch of only vaguely related things crammed together in one place. Granted we will never actually likely build said store, but it is a fun daydream. Logistically any kind of retail venue would be a nightmare and I feel as though you are always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in this market. I think it would be cool to have an apartment located over the store like the old type general store clerks used to have. There is just something special about a stored owned by someone that has a passion for whatever they are selling. Hopefully at some point I can dig up the IndieGoGo link and post it.

Wrapping Up

This seems like another really short one, but to be honest I did warn you guys that I did not have a lot of ammunition this morning. Hopefully something will happen throughout the day that I deeply care about. Fortunately or Unfortunately depending upon the perspective, I have another one of those NDA bound things going on tonight, so not sure if I will have much gaming to be able to talk about tomorrow. Hopefully you have a great start of the week, I have a lot going on at work that I need to make headway in.

Folklore Roulette

August 11, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning my loyal readers… or at least I think I have some loyal readers. Over the last week or so I have done a quite a few thematic posts spurred on by the announcement of EQ Next. Today is going to be a bit of a throwback to my “what Bel did” posts. Yesterday was a busy day but also a pretty relaxing one. We got out early and ran a bunch of errands including a haircut for me. I was getting rather shaggy… I was to the point where I could theoretically ponytail it up… just a horrible one.

Lego Maniac

When we finally got home and settled in I engaged in something I had been planning for awhile. When we set up the game loft, the intent was to also make it a place for me to build with my Legos that I have been amassing. So as a result there is a fold out table underneath the loveseat and finally yesterday I gave this concept a trial run, Over the last several months I had accumulated a large number of sets that I had yet to build, and this was only compounded by the awesome haul that my wife found last week. It had become a running joke that I collected Legos but never actually built them… so I intended to rectify that.

My grand scheme is to eventually come up with a storage system so that I can sort out the Lego bits into component types. But I have not settled on the best and most efficient means to do that. However in the meantime I would like to build every set I have at least once as it was intended. The entertainment center upstairs has been rather barren so it will serve as my showcase for built sets. The above picture shows a wide assortment of things I put together yesterday.

In the picture is a Captain America set, a Ninjago one, The Gandalf arrives set from Lord of the Rings, a couple of Star Wars sets including an Ewok Attack one… and two different Harry Potter sets. I barely scratched the surface of the unbuilt sets I have accumulated over the last little bit. Essentially anytime I find a set on sale for a price I am willing to pay I snap it up. Building anything with Legos makes me immensely happy. It is like returning to a simpler time. I can remember building by myself or with my cousins and creating grand machinations, and I guess to some extent I am capturing a small piece of that. Not sure if I will return to builder mode today or not, but I had a blast doing it yesterday.

Folklore Roulette

So as I built away with the Legos I decided to fire up Netflix on my PS3 and watch something. Hemlock Grove has been sitting in my recommendations for some time, so I figured what the heck. I like werewolves, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse was hands down my favorite of the World of Darkness games… so I would at least give it a shot. After watching nine episodes I can say that I really like the show… but I am not really sure why. It kinda has a twin peaks meets world of darkness feel to it. The biggest thing I realized immediately is just how under-billed calling it a “Werewolf” show is. There is a lot going on in thee town of Hemlock Grove.

Essentially you are presented an odd hodgepodge of Slavic folklore traditions mixed with some Reanimator style science-horror. You have psychic vampires, demons, possible alien hybrids, Romani seers, some crazy demonic wolf terrorizing the town… and of course a noble werewolf trying to reluctantly protect all of it. The demon wolf very much feels like a Black Spiral Dancer from White Wolf, at least the description we have been given of what a “Vargwolf” is.

I want to maybe finish out the series today, because seriously there is a lot of crazy shit going on in this little town… and I feel that sooner or later it is all going to come to a catastrophic end. If you have ever been a fan of the World of Darkness series of games, I would highly suggest checking it out. The acting is very good and at some times there are parts that remind me a little bit of American Horror Story season one. It of course has the requisite HBO style gratuitous tits and ass thing going on… so be warned if you have little or sensitive eyes in the room. I am not really sure when this became a requirement for “edgy” television but I wish it would work its way out.

Festival of Unity

One of the coolest things about playing Everquest 2 on Antonia Bayle has always been the massive player run events. Today is kicking one of the largest yearly events called the “Festival of Unity”. It starts this afternoon at 3pm EDT at the Qeynos Claymore in Antonica. You can check out the full information about the festival here on their homepage. Also Stargrace did a nice write-up about the festival over on MMOQuests. I am not sure yet if I will be attending it, but even if I do not I think it is an extremely cool concept. Antonia Bayle has by far the coolest community I have ever experienced on a Role Playing server, and I am always happy to get the word out when an event is going on.

Wrapping Up

Today’s post feels a little bit shorter than normal, but I am out of meaningful things to say. Hopefully you have a great rest of the weekend. My wife has gotten roped into assisting a friend with her wedding planning, so more or less I will be holding down the fort alone today. Going to have to start up laundry and the sort soon. Speaking of fortifications… thankful that so far I seem to have thwarted our escape artist ferret. She is sleeping peacefully in the playpen and has not found a way to climb out since yesterday. Here is hoping that the ramparts hold.

On Leadership

August 10, 2013 by Belghast

We have entered back to school shopping season and last night we ran around hunting for pants. A nasty side effect of our collective weight loss is the fact that my wife currently appears to have no pants that will fit to start the school season. This manifested itself yesterday when she was trying to get ready to meet some of her teacher friends for a presentation. Of course panic ensued, but she managed to figure something out and as a result last night we began the process of trying to rebuild the clothing archives.

On Leadership

Yesterday I was having a long talk with Sevok about his interest in maybe joining us in the House Stalwart Rift contingency. Sev has been a longtime friend of mine, lasting well over a decade at this point and been involved in many of the previous incarnations of House Stalwart. The problem is he really does not want to start up in Rift unless he brings his wife with him. She on the other hand has not been in a Stalwart guild yet, and is extremely gunshy of guilds in general, namely because we both have a shared moment in our history that likely changed both of us in different ways.

Over the course of the last few weeks I have talked quite a bit about how tanking brings out my protective nature, so I thought I might talk a bit today about what exactly lead me to guild leadership in the first place. In many ways it is this exact same protective nature manifested in trying to create a wonderful environment for my friends to play in. Honestly the roots have always been there, but as an introvert I am always loathe to step up unless I feel like some wrong has been committed. I have a strong sense of justice embedded in me and equality that honestly should not have been there based on my upbringing… but that is a tale for another day.

High School

I did not have the traditional “geek” upbringing of exclusion and ridicule at the hands of the popular masses. In fact I could have very easily been another one of the popular kids. I guess in many was from the outside it probably seemed I was one. I essentially had my geekiness grandfathered into the popular culture of my small home town. My parents friends ended up having what would essentially end up as our crop of “popular kids”, and as a result these were my play dates and birthday party goers all the way through elementary school. So as my geek tendencies manifested themselves for the most part they were just accepted as “me being me”.

My mother was a fairly overbearing sort that insisted that I be involved with everything. Essentially she was brought up in a poor household and had aspirational goals to be more than that and as a result ended up using me many times as the vessel of those aspirations. So as a result I was in 4H, an Eagle Scout, Team Captain of the Academic Bowl, FTA, Student Council, National Honor Society, and many more acronyms that I can barely remember. The result was frustrating for me, because I ended up in the local paper on a regular basis and everyone out in the community seemed to know my business. I want to say I was on 26 pages in my high school year book thanks to all the random organizations I was pushed into being a part of. I feel as thought my mother was trying to build herself a Kennedy… which I very much have no aspirations ever to be.

My Tribe

I could have very easily fallen in the kegger madness that was the life of a small town popular kid, but instead I took a very different path. My friends were essentially the geeky misfits of the town. The edgy art students, the math nerds, the show choir kids… all bound together to form a family of sorts. My mother was a home economics teacher, and as a result we used the small back room of her classroom as a private lunch room of sorts. In there would would plan D&D campaigns, play Wolfenstein on the 486 computer, and a lot of Chess and Pente. This room gave us a moment of sanity in a world that none of us really liked much.

The funny thing is… that as acknowledgement got around that these were my friend… these were my tribe of misfits… each of them started to get extended an invisible veil of protection. I was not a small guy, and at 6’4” the hooligans in high school seemed to fear me just by my seemingly powerful stature. Each of my friends reported getting picked on a lot less, or at least no longer in the form of physical confrontation. I had no clue when I started the little community that it would have the fringe benefits it ultimately did. To some extend it only caused me to expand the group and pull in other people. I feel like this is what started my “collecting people” tendencies that would serve me later.

Past Guilds

When I got addicted to Everquest, I went through a couple of extremely unsatisfying guild experiences. The first was an extremely exclusive group that dated back to a bygone era of gaming. They were friendly enough and active enough, but they were also an extremely closed door society. If you did not go through the initiation rituals to join their secret society… you were forever treated as an outsider regardless of how long and how many games you had played with them. I went through the little initiation, but really did not see the world change much after doing so. The problem is… as I got my friends into these games… they were forever destined to be outsiders… or not allowed in at all. After seeing this injustice play out a few times I decided not to follow them into any new games.

While in Everquest I moved servers to play with a group of locals to Tulsa. At first it was an extremely awesome having a group of locals that I could play with an socialize with. However the longer I played and the more closely I got to the inner core of the guild, I started to see the same problem with injustice. Essentially to be a member in good standing… you had to do whatever the guild leader wanted of you… and more often than not this was to do whatever would keep his wife happy. I saw members miss out on rare drops for their epic weapon quest that would instead go to alt number 307 for his wife. If she wanted this rep from this zone… the entire guild was expected to go there and farm forever until she got whatever she was wanting.

House Stalwart

If you were not in the inner circle, your opinion did not matter. When the wife had a falling out with a member, it was expected that the entire guild would shun them or else you would get kicked out on your ass as well. None of this sat well with me, but I was torn. My group of friends were still mostly in this guild, but I felt as though nothing about this situation was fair. Somehow I ended up as the sounding board for all the players who were sick of the leaders shit, and made some extremely deep ties within the “resistance” of sorts. As we moved on past Everquest and into other games I kept contact with the members of this undercurrent and in many cases they all ended up as members of Stalwart guilds eventually.

World of Warcraft was the next big thing on the horizon that I knew everyone would be playing. As a result I wanted to gather up as many friends under one banner as I possibly could. Prior to launch I started a brand new forum unconnected from any guild or game. Through it I organized all my friends from EQ, DAoC, Horizons and City of Heroes towards the goal of forming a new guild for World of Warcraft. Essentially I never wanted to end up in a situation like i was in the previous two guilds… either with abusive leadership or and elitist inner circle. After talking to some friends about it, I decided that the only way I could ever guarantee that, was to be the leader myself and keep it from happening.

So here we are roughly a decade later and there is still an active House Stalwart presence in several games. World of Warcraft damned near broke me for leading anything. As a result I took roughly a two year break from guild leadership, as I wandered around and joined up with lots of other pools of friends. I am extremely thankful to each person that sheltered me and invited me into their own organizations during this time. Sadly however in each new place I visited… there was something missing… and I would go back into my old ways trying to recruit everyone under a shared banner. I was missing my home, was missing my guild, and was ultimately missing the freedom to make an awesome home for everyone involved.

As a leader I have always tried to enable people to do awesome things and be awesome in the process. As a result I have always tried to keep things simple, only adopting the barest of rules that instill a sense of the larger community rather than a list of “thou shall not”. For the most part this has worked over the last decade. We have had a lot of amazing moments as friends and I have built more of an extended family for myself than a guild. These are all people that I talk to regularly outside of the game, when we travel I try and meet up with ones in the area… they are the family I chose for myself. Still to this day… I have an overwhelming desire to bring new people I meet that are also awesome into the fold.

Wrapping Up

I feel as though this post kind of developed a life of its own. I am not really sure what I intended to right. To some extent I was writing so that Sevok’s wife could see that our time spent in the horrible EQ guild had adverse effects on both of us. I just chose to take that bad experience and roll it into building a long standing family of friends and a much larger community. Hopefully this tale will be at least interesting to other people out there. I hope you all have a great weekend. I desperately need a haircut so that is the number one priority on our list. Also hoping to coax my wife into another trip to the place where she found all those Legos.