Tales of the Aggronaut

Home Decor

July 20, 2013 by Belghast

This morning has pretty much sucked. Fairly late last night we found out that we were expected to be at my wife’s mothers at roughly 9 am this morning. This is completely separate from a long list of errands we needed to run this morning. As a result I am finally getting home and able to blog today… additionally as a result I am extremely grumpy from having my routine demolished so completely. The most frustrating thing is… that we essentially spent 3 hours on the road for nothing at all. The reason why we were going… could have been easily dealt with over the phone. So now I am finally setting down to try and make a post that hopefully does not sound angry at the world.

As the Guild Turns

As stated the other night, after the vote of Rift Stalwarts, we decided to break out into our own guild. Since Thursday night we have gathered up about 15 members with more that I know will be joining that just have not logged in yet. It is really starting to feel like a real guild again. Last night guild chat was relatively active, and while things still feel a bit under construction we have managed to push through to level 2 already. It will be a long ways from having all the nifty perks that we might have had in previous guilds, but we have unlocked more or less the most important ones like mass rez and the ability to plant rally banners.

It is awesome getting everyone together under one roof again. I still am not sure what directions we will take, but it finally feels like home. Silent Strike folk have been extremely awesome about the path we chose, and Saleny the leader offered a warm welcome both as a comment on the blog yesterday, and as an email. I am hoping that we can find ways to do some joint stuff with the Strike folks. Right now there are only two of us with high level characters, but it would be cool to go do a night of hunt rifts or something soon.

Home Decor

As I said yesterday, I pretty much bankrupted myself personally to make sure the guild had a dimension and a vault. Rae is a pretty amazing dimension decorator, and she has done some truly awesome things with her personal Moonshade pools instance. When it came to our Stone Tavern Inn instance… I told her the sky was the limit… do whatever the hell she wanted. She has delivered massively. I spent most of the evening whittling away on the 500 planar mobs and 50 planar rifts guild quest. Over the course of the two hours it took me to almost complete the quest… she had been completely quiet.

When I finally decided I needed to take a break and we were like 5 rifts away from finishing the quest… she just mentioned in passing over guild chat that she had done some work on the guild hall and that I should check it out. So in the course of the hour or so time since i had last heard anything from her… she had completed this entire bar area from scratch. I was completely floored… it looked amazing. So much so that some of you may have seen it last night when I tweeted it. Most of last night the dimension looked pretty much the same.. included this amazing bar and the start of a second story.

When I just logged into the guild hall to see if any more progress had been done I was greeted with a lot of changes. The first picture I posted in this section shows the amazing entrance you are greeted with when you first log in… including a dragonbone entrance with glowing green eyes. The main floor of the inn appears to be mostly done and now there is a candelabra reaching down from the new upper story. Some work has been done up there but it is still pretty Spartan… though I am sure she has plans for that space as well.

Additionally she has done a lot of work to flesh out the market area. Where before there was just the Greenscale balloon, now there are a bunch of tents and assorted goodies set up. I walked around in this area for some time before realizing that there is now a secret path that goes up the waterfall with platforms up there. I can’t wait to see what she has in store for that area. Essentially she has taken what is a large but not expansive zone and made it feel much larger than it actually is. It looks like someone also expanded the item limit for the guildhall by quite a bit, so she still has a ton of items left to play with.

I am still just floored by her talent with dimensions. I am probably going to get in trouble for showing all these pictures when the guild hall is still in progress, but I think it looks awesome. Totally a place we will all be proud to call our own. I believe she is going to enter her own dimension in the contest that is going on. It really looks amazing, and she is applying that same talent to making ours look extremely cool. If you are over on Faeblight definitely check out her houses… on the character Caithris. Additionally swing by our guild hall and check out the progress. I swear she likely did not sleep last night considering just how much work was done from the time I logged at 11 pm until now.

Wrapping Up

I am still in a rather sour mood… so I am going to go kill things in Rift. Will look forward to finally having all our people under one roof, so trying to catch them as they log in to coordinate guild invites. Right now I just want to chill out for a few hours after the frustrating morning. Hopefully all of you out there have had a better day than mine… and additionally that you have a great weekend.

Big Changes

July 19, 2013 by Belghast

This morning was the fourth morning in a row that I slept fine without any middle of the night panic attacks… so I feel like the whole walk before bed thing has been vested at this point. Additionally it gets in a bit of exercise which is always good. The only real negative is that now I have to start watching the clock and about 10-10:30 I need to be detached from whatever I am doing and get ready for the walk. This is shortening total available time to play… but the actually getting sleep thing is not too shabby.

Big Changes

Over the last few weeks I have posted off and on about the dilemma my friends and I had with the guild we were in over on Deepwood. Stalwart has a really strong guild identity and culture, and it has spanned multiple games without really diluting. Over the years since I left WoW, we have tried to reside as part of another guild. But each time we end up as a guild within a guild, and this always leads to a bit of discontent. Essentially after nearly a decade of House Stalwart, we have all come to expect a specific set of guild norms… and when the guild we are in deviates from that… folks feel uncomfortable.

Since leaving WoW I have pretty much harbor with various friends of mine that have guilds. Then as the Stalwarts decide they want to join me in that game… I have tried to broker there way into that guild. The problem is when a critical mass of players arrives there… we stop blending in. As a result whether or not I intend to.. I fall back into the old “Guild Leader Bel” norms that they expect of me. Regardless of if I am actually wearing the tin star or not… I am treated as such by the Stalwarts.

The Outcast Misfits were extremely nice, but for none of the Stalwarts was that guild really home. Part of this spawned from the fact that we were over on Deepwood… a non-rp server without the roleplaying culture we were used to. When you are used to this more “evolved” culture you can only see “labiator” so many times before it breaks you… even worse when it was a member of your guild. So after listening to grumblings for a bit, and the same thoughts going through my head… I decided to send out a question to the Stalwarts.

The Options

Yesterday I created a mailing list and BCC’d everyone that had been a member of House Stalwart that either was actively playing or showed interest in playing Rift. In the email I explained the situation we were in and laid out three different options. Essentially I did not want to force my friends down a path they did not want to go down. Guild Leadership is not a democracy… but I value the opinions of my friends and for a big change like this I wanted their full buy in if it was ever going to succeed. I phrased the different paths as numbered options and asked for them to vote either by reply to the email or getting ahold of me some other way. I used a Google spreadsheet to tabulate the results.

Option 1 – Stay With the Misfits

To be a fair question… we had to include essentially the control… the NO change option. I didn’t really think anyone would want to go down this path, but essentially this option involved ignoring the things that bugged us and staying with the Misfits as is. There were a lot of positives about this honestly. They are an extremely active guild, and have regular raiding opportunities. However the problem is that while they have a PG guild chat policy… they have no such thing for character names… and in their ranks there were more than a few offensive ones.

One of the Stalwarts plays with his son and daughter fairly regularly. Another one is likely to let her daughter play now that the game is free to play. None of them need to see names like “Vulvanatria”… not that they would necessarily understand it. Additionally it sticks in my craw a bit that the guild has a built in have and have-not’s setup. There are raider ranks and non-raider ranks… and while they never really treated the non-raiders as second class citizens it just bugs me that there is a division at all. While they are extremely active… you pretty much have to be level 60 to join in any of the “reindeer games”. The vast majority of the Stalwarts are far younger than that.

Option 2 – Move to Faeblight, Join Silent Strike

Faeblight is the defacto roleplaying server, so simply by hopping over to it we are changing to a lot of the social norms our guild expects. Additionally it is likely the highest population server, and all the cross server channels reside there. During Vanilla and Burning Crusade era World of Warcraft, House Stalwart was closely allied with the guild Silent Strike. It was rare that we were running a raid or a dungeon without a decent mix of Strike folks in it. In the course of my nomadic behavior over on Deepwood… I found out they had a pretty large and active contingency on Faeblight.

Elowynn/Saleny the leader of Silent Strike graciously offered us harbor in their guild, and quite honestly it would be a good home. I have missed hanging out with the Silent Strike folks greatly over the years. The guilds drifted apart when Stalwart became far more serious about raiding, but I have always tried to maintain a connection to Strike. The only problem is that again… we would end up forming a guild within a guild like we always do. Additionally merging as many people as we would be doing so… would put undue stress on their guild culture. This was a good option but definitely had its issues as well.

Option 3 – Move to Faeblight, Form official House Stalwart

Moving to Faeblight gave us a lot of the cultural norms we were lacking over on Deepwood and the ability to actually report those heinous names. Additionally most of the people that I know who are actively playing Rift… are doing so over on Faeblight. So we have a built in community of shirt tail kin to draw from when we need to fill a group. Elowynn was willing to introduce us to the HammerStrike folks and that would at least give us a foot in the door if members of Stalwart ended up wanting to raid eventually. Finally we would actually have a home of our own after all these years of searching for one.

I had been super reluctant to take this step after leaving World of Warcraft. However recently I have come to the realization that it was never guild leadership that bothered me. That is the part I am good at and enjoy, and did for almost a decade without issue. It was the raid leadership part that killed me, caused me to burn out and almost quit the game. I hate the herding cats aspect of raid leadership, and I simply never want to do that again. Guild leadership… that is all the fun stuff, and mostly is just making sure people are feeling heard and help them when they have issues.

The Decision

This all honestly happened far sooner than I had ever intended. I expected to throw out the email and have no real consensus until later this weekend. However after a few hours a major pattern emerged, one that was essentially undeniable. I got a total of 19 votes either through email or through some other means. 18 of the votes were for Option 3… one of them was for Option 2. So with that clear a mandate, last night I went through the motions to prepare for creating a guild charter over Faeblight. Once the Stalwart server channel had enough people, we went ahead and set things up.

As of last night House Stalwart on Faeblight is born again.. and I bankrupted myself buying the Stone Tavern Inn guild hall and our first vault page. By the end of the night we had several people in guild, and hopefully over the weekend we can grab the rest of them. It will be a long road to level the guild up to the point at which we get a lot of the same perks we had previously… but it will be our home finally and not just a timeshare with someone else.

I could not deny the statement I kept hearing over and over from people. “I think everyone will feel more at home in an actual HS guild.” And it is true honestly… I already feel more at home. Communication is cross server and easy.. and I can still keep in touch with the people I joined Outcast Misfits with. But it feels good to actually set down some roots in a game again. The last two years have been good for me… but also very spastic. I feel like I am jumping games on a weekly basis, never really developing the same kind of network I had with House Stalwart.

After my “MMO Must Haves” series of posts… I realized that the only game that actually has all of those things is Rift. So I knew all along I guess which game I should be playing as my primary. Now that House Stalwart exists in that game.. it feels all the more like home. Hopefully over the coming weeks we can get things set up proper. Rae has already started adding things to the guild Dimension.. she donated her awesome Greenscale balloon that can be seen in the picture above. Thalen also donated a number of nifty things, and spent a good chunk of last night whittling down the current kill 500 planar mobs guild quest. I will take awhile to get all the goodies… but it is ours.

Wrapping Up

Well I have an early meeting this morning so I need to get out of the house and on to work. Hopefully you all have a great Friday, and a great weekend as well. So far each day this week there has been a new crisis, and yesterday was no different. My hope is that I can make it through today without anything breaking, or any customer screaming too loud about something.

Goodbye Granite Falls

July 18, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was night three of good sleep after taking a quick walk before bed. Additionally it has broken loose the log jam that was my weight loss plateau. As of this morning I was down another three pounds since starting the walking. The weird thing about the sleep however is that I am pretty much dead to the world. I didn’t dream, I don’t remember sleeping… I just went to bed and woke up with the alarm and everything between is a void. I seem to be getting rest because I am not absolutely dead tired in the morning… it is just an odd experience since I normally dream and remember the dreams.

Don’t Starve

Over the last few nights one of my friends has been playing the hell out of this game, so last night I decided to fire it up and give it a shot as well. It has been compared to turn of the century film version of Minecraft… but quite honestly I didn’t have that feeling at all. Essentially “Minecraft” to me means taking raw materials and building something permanent. So for me Terraria is a Minecraft game… but Cube World for example is not… regardless of how much it looks like it.

It took me awhile to adjust my expectations… what we have here instead of a building game is a survival game. Something I find far less interesting. Essentially you have to gather resources during the day, and survive the night all while not going crazy or starving. You gain sanity by standing near the fire each night, and as you get more insanity you start to see hallucinations everywhere. I’ve heard that eventually the hallucinations will attack you if it gets bad enough.

I can’t say I really enjoyed myself massively… but the gameplay instead fell into the mildly entertaining category. I think at my core I am a base builder… and the lack of the ability to build a permanent basecamp to go adventuring from really harmed my enjoyment of the game. I have seen screenshots that seem to suggest that later you are able to build fortifications to keep your camp safe. Additionally at least at low levels, it seems like you are almost penalized by trying to keep returning to a central base. Since in essence you can plunk down a fire anywhere you happen to be when night comes.

The other big problem I have with the game is a lack of permanence. The goal of the game is to “beat” each world by solving some puzzle that allows you to progress to the next one. So even if I could build some form of a base, I would be abandoning it every time I moved to the next tier in the game. Even in Minecraft when I decided to venture out and build a new base camp… I know that I always have the previous ones to return to if I so choose. Essentially it seems like the game has all the survival hassle of Minecraft, without the elements that make it fun for me… the wholesale world building.

The game is well designed, plays extremely smoothly and has a great retro look and feel that is immediately appealing. If you really like the survival aspect of Minecraft and similar games than this might be just the thing for you. I only managed to survive 3 nights on my first foray because I kept trying to engage in combat apparently too early. So that throws another money wrench in my enjoyment… to be happy in a game I need to be killing something regularly. My friend is having a blast with it, so it might very well be down your alley… however it goes in the “not really for me” bucket.

Goodbye Granite Falls

Between the laptop lunch fun and the beginning of last night I managed to wrap up the last of Stonefield with Baby Bel over Faeblight. The tail end of that zone is much more enjoyable than I remember. I am sure it was equally epic when I ran it originally… but there have been some tweaks that seem to make it flow better. Firstly I remember there being a gap where I was uncertain exactly where to go… so the transition up to the camp near the Phoenix Gate seems to be messaged better. Additionally the “rumble” with Guardian forces at the tail end of the zone… actually occurs in Stonefield now. Previously it sent you across the bridge into Scarwood Reach… where it was extremely easy to get into mobs way too high for your level.

So major Kudos for them for fixing the flow of this tail end content. Additionally the whole opening of the Phoenix gate felt far much more epic to me after having done the Rise of the Phoenix raid instance. I guess I am in less of a rush this time through the game… and as a result find myself enjoying the content much more. I still have problems with a few things… like Meridian and Sanctum still do not seem worthy of being capitol cities… but there is enough good always to make up for the few frustrating spots.

Has the Must Haves

Essentially when I was working on my MMO must haves list… I came to the realization when a friend asked me… that Rift is the only game on the market that has almost every single bullet point I listed. While I am looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online… it also seems like a vastly different kind of game… much like The Secret World is. So as a result… I feel like even after that game launches… Rift will still be my traditional MMO crush. I feel like I will always be playing rift at least some of the time.

There is just so much to like about the game, and so many different options for things to do. Especially now with the gem store… you can expand your character in ways you never could before. Recently for example I picked up Artifacing for Belghast over on Deepwood. This adds to his already existing crafts of Armorsmithing, Weaponcrafting and the three harvests of Butchering, Mining and Foraging. At this point it is just easier to add additionally tradeskills to that one character than to try and level up new harvesting abilities elsewhere. The one thing I really wish however is that we had cross shard mail between our own characters.

Better Mentoring

One of the sore points right now is that mentoring should be a bit easier than it is. I am not talking about lowering your own level… because that seriously could not be any easier. What I am looking for is the ability to invite any 4 friends to a group… click a button… and have it queue us for a random dungeon to meet our level range. Right now we essentially have to mentor manually to the lowest common denominator… sometimes it lets us queue for a dungeon… other times we have to remember where the hell the dungeon entrance is and run in manually.

One of the most powerful things about Rift is that it is functionally possible to group with your friends regardless of shard or level range. Trion really needs to put some effort into ironing these tools out to make it a much simpler proposal. I want to be able to group a bunch of people together and see a list essentially of things we can do… and then queue for something on that list without having to do much fiddling. When we have done this manually there is usually a lot of trial and error until we get everyone in the right zone at the right time at the right level. Streamlining this process would be a massive boon.

Wrapping Up

Well I have pissed away another morning rambling on about nothing much. Now has come the time for me to gather up my now empty coffee cup, run it to the kitchen and get on with the day. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope mine personally is far more uneventful. While I was on vacation, nothing much happened. But every day this week since I have been back… there has been a crisis. Yesterday for example McAfee decided out of the blue to mark an FTP Server Daemon as a “Potentially Unwanted Program” and in the process quarantined it… taking down a number of automated processes with it. I just want a nice calm day where I can actually remove items from my task list, instead of chasing down fires.

On Guild Leadership

July 17, 2013 by Belghast

Yesterday was a double post day… and quite honestly I just don’t have much ammo for this morning. I’ve been relatively busy at work and in the evenings I’ve had an odd schedule. Last night was the second night of going for a 15 minute or so walk before going to bed… and as suggested earlier in the week by Tententacles it seems to have mostly halted the panic attacks. Additionally it seems to unjammed my weight loss and is getting me off this plateau I have been on for several weeks.

Awesome Forum Sigs

Our very own Audrae is working on something spiffy for the Stalwarts. Essentially I’ve seen over the years nice clean guild signatures on various forums and always thought it would be cool to have something like that for the Stalwarts. I mentioned this yesterday in passing, and last night after work she knocked this out post haste. She has grand designs of building a php based signature generator but the first step looks amazing for a static one. This way we can have those really cool drool worthy signatures where ever we end up in the future.

Right now we are starting to develop a critical mass in Rift, but I am really torn as to the direction we should take. Currently we are living under the roof of the Outcast Misfits, and they have been gracious hosts. But the problem is… we still have an internal identity and our folks tend to mingle mostly with other Stalwarts. So in essence we have become a guild within a guild. There are times I really wish we were a guild of our own, so that I could get completely behind the concept of recruiting new people.

Additionally I have been playing a low level alt with long time Stalwart friends over in Silent Strike on Faeblight. I feel like that might be a halfway step between actually forming an official House Stalwart guild again in Rift. The only problem is… the relationship of Stalwart and Silent Strike dates from the pre-raiding era of our guild. Whereas the active members playing Rift are all from the raiding and post-raiding era. I still feel like as a whole it would be a better fit personality wise… but there isn’t the immediate name recognition there as there is for me.

It has been awesome logging into Silent Strike though in the evenings and seeing a bunch of “Hey Bel!” messages spamming across green chat. That was what Stalwart really was more than anything, a wonderful social place where everyone knew your name. Still I don’t want to move at all without talking to the assorted crew of folks… but this is likely going to have to be an email conversation since getting everyone online at the same time has proved to be troublesome. Hopefully I can reach some consensus as to what we want to do… and then move on it. I will admit… the part that has always bothered me about Deepwood is that it is not officially an RP server… not that it really means anything anymore.

On Guild Leadership

There was an interesting thread back and forth yesterday on Twitter about the death of guilds in WoW between myself, Linedan and Zellviren. In that conversation I made the above statement. It is honestly the truth… there was a massive amount of difference between leading a guild.. and trying to lead a raid. Guild Leadership is just a default instinct for me. My goal was always to create an environment that enables people to be awesome and do awesome things together. My philosophy was to try and make the officers and leader as hidden as possible… so that you felt the effects of having them… but they were never making any grand sweeping proclamations.

Additionally I tried to engage the quiet guild members, just to make sure they were getting what they needed. But when Stalwart changed from being a social guild that had a non-guild based raid attached to it… to raiding as a guild… something fundamentally shifted for me. Granted during some of the Wrath years, I was struggling with the mantle of raid leadership… but I had a team of others to hold me up when I was burnt out beyond going. Always in the past… I had the comfortable guild life to retreat to… and could say that there was a separation of church and state between House Stalwart and Duranub Raiding Company.

When Cataclysm robbed us of that buffer, it was the beginning of the end for me. No one really wanted to do the 25 man raids anymore after the expansion released… so as a result we organized into 5 different 10 mans. The problem is… not all 10s were created equal. It quickly devolved into a mix of the haves and have not’s… with the haves lording the kills over those who had not yet. Rather than cross pollination within the groups, so the more experienced helped out the less experienced… galvanized cliques were formed.

It was completely cool that people wanted to play with their friends all the time… but where I ran afoul with the system is that the people I wanted to play with… were not necessarily the team that the rest of my raid group did. I always struggle when a game puts up walls between me playing with ALL my friends. I hate having to choose if I play with this group or that… and the cataclysm lockout system just exacerbated this. Always in the past I could raid with the 25 man, and then break out into a smaller friends and family style 10 man to get the type of interaction I actually craved.

Being a raid leader essentially broke me. Now I am extremely gun-shy about committing to ANY organized activity… and I wish I could find a way past that. I miss all the more casual grouping activities, but each time I join a group with friends… I have this fight or flight instinct kick in telling me to run. I miss the days when I was just a guild leader… was the chaperone and cruise director for a group of friends. That is a role I am good at… a role that makes me happy.

As I look forward to games on the horizon… I am going to try my best to make a return to guild leadership in a proper fashion with Elder Scrolls Online. By the Stalwarts… I am looked at as a leader regardless if I am wearing the hat or not. So in every one of these non-wow games we have joined… where I have tried my best NOT to be the guild leader… I have ended up the leader of a guild within a guild anyways. Normally this works out fine for the most part… but in SWTOR this ended in pretty catastrophic fashion as we ended up splintering off from the guild we were hosted in. I really never want a debacle like that to happen again.

All of this… is why I think long and hard about moving our people into or out of a guild. Stalwart is more than a guild to me… it always has been. These people are my extended family, the family I chose. They have always been there for me when I needed them, and I will continue to try and be there for them. I’ve helped out Stalwarts fill out job applications, with interview questions… and even hired one as a co-worker. Additionally when I was out of work… this same group of people kept digging up job offers from other parts of the country. So all of this is something I feel passionate about protecting.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to take a nothing day… and spin off in a direction that created a big ole post. Still have no clue if it is one actually worth reading or not… but here it is nonetheless. I am sure I have a busy day ahead of me.. and it is pretty late right now so I need to be getting on the road. I hope you all have great days ahead of you, and that you do something awesome during its course. Here is hoping that tomorrow I can say it is night three without a panic attack!