bloggers

Ten Years of Blaugust

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Good Morning Friends! This is potentially going to be the last reliable blog post from me for a bit. Next week I am going to be dealing with the in-person training that I talked about in a post the other day. As such I expect to not be able to blog in the morning, and when I come home I fully expect to crash very fast and very hard. Last night was a bit of evidence of that happening already. I had a fairly stressful day of work and by the time I wrapped up around 6 pm, I was just dead to the world. I left off in Guild Wars 2 sitting outside the Tomb of Primeval Kings having only made it part of the way through that quest sequence before crashing the other night. While the will was there, I was struggling to stay asleep so I really made no forward momentum yesterday. I’m thankful I at least hit a checkpoint in the quest that I was on so that I can continue at a relatively straightforward place.

I’m exceptionally happy that I managed to get everything ready to go for Blaugust this week instead of having to deal with it in the evenings next week. While the sign-ups have only been open for a few days at the time of writing we have 25 bloggers, four of which are brand new this year. There has also been a significant bump in activity in the Discord which has been cool to watch. There was a bit of a screw-up on Wednesday when I announced everything… somewhere buried within the wall of nonsense was apparently a link to the old sign-up form. Thankfully I could tell by date range who had signed up and copied them over to the participant list that I maintain. I use this list to drive my blogroll which I keep updated as often as I can. I’ve been keeping everything updated on the Media Kit page as it serves as the true permanent resting place of all information assorted with Blaugust in general.

I’ve come to the realization that I think this is the 10th Blaugust. I probably should have made a much bigger deal about that when it came to the design.

What always throws me off is 2017… the year that I didn’t do a Blaugust event. I had allowed the naysayers to convince me that I was doing more harm than good with this event. That entire year was a rough one for me, but by the time 2018 rolled around… I had so many people come out of the woodwork to tell me how much they missed Blaugust and hoped that I would be running one that year. It was really that moment that lit a fire in me to keep me moving forward in spite of how exhausted I might be. So while we missed a year… there was also 2020 when we technically had two Blaugust events… one of which we called Blapril and the other gave us the prompt list.

Every year I seem to try something slightly different, while also keeping all of the things that worked well in the past. Whatever year we added Discord was probably the single best change for the longevity of the event. The first Blaugust was run more or less through the ill-fated Anook platform, and they even went so far as to sponsor an award in 2015 the second year. I still think that platform idea was really cool and is sort of what we are trying to do with Gamepad now… carving out a community. The “new thing” this year is that I set up a Blaugust account on Mastodon, and the idea is that I will use it to boost all of the posts that come across with the #Blaugust2023 hashtag. I tried to do this, but I always sort of hated spamming everyone that had no clue what the fuck Blaugust was from my personal account. This also gives folks an option to follow Blaugust without following me… given that I can sometimes be an acquired taste and I know of at least a handful of people who occasionally participate in the event that have zero love for me personally.

Not directly related to Blaugust, but it has been cool to watch Gamepad grow over the last half a year. I think we went live in November of last year, and during that time we’ve picked up a little over 120 accounts, and currently, at the time of writing this, 106 of them are active…. which is a pretty dang good retention rate. Mastodon and the larger Fediverse are really the social media of choice for me. Sure I am putting my thumb on the scale by choosing to run this out of Gamepad, but ultimately it is my event… so I am going to do the thing that I find most comfortable. A lot of bloggers had already moved to the platform so it doesn’t really seem too far-fetched to make it a home base for the event going forward. I’ve posted about the event on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram… but none of those really feel comfortable to me. I am not sure how many folks we will get from those anyways.

I think my hope in running it out of Mastodon, is that it will introduce us to an entirely new community of folks. We already have several sign-ups from folks who had no connection to our core group before we started talking about it on the fediverse. That is EXTREMELY exciting for me. My hope has always been for this thing to spread to different communities and spider out so that we have LOTS of blogs active and happily posting away throughout the year. In this year of internet bonfires… and the if not death of Twitter… the mutation of it into something I no longer want to be associated with… having a place to call your own is way more important than it ever was before. I had the realization that because of my blog… I am exceptionally easy to find. If I lost touch with someone along the way, they can always find me here. For most folks… the tapestry of connections that we have woven between each other is relatively tenuous. If you put your faith in corporate social media as your digital sense of place… then when you lose one of them you also lose your foundation. While self-hosted bloggers have gone out of fashion… we represent a sense of permanency and stability that is hard to remove.

Anyways… did not mean to ramble off in the direction of techno-religiosity… but there you have it. I feel like we need to take back control of more of our internet presence. Gamepad for example is run by folks that I trust and I believe in… and if something needs to happen to it, the portability of Mastodon allows me to migrate elsewhere. Worse comes to worse I can fire up my own private instance just for me, and continue to truck along with the same social connections. My blog is my digital front step, and anyone can find me here along with any of the other connections that I might be active on. That is a weird peace of mind in this time of digital uncertainty.

Versatility Sucks

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Ko’ragh Down!

Wow-64 2015-01-06 21-36-33-96 With the holidays and the revolving door of people, it feels like this week is the first “real” week of tries we have been able to put on Ko’ragh.  This time we went into it with a lot of proper research and managed to carve out a strategy.  This involved a lot of things, not the least of which was me glyphing Mocking Banner so that it functions as a misdirect and our rogue and hunter standing by to do the same.  Essentially Mocking Banner was available every other add phase it worked out, and it seemed to do miracle work of absolutely gluing the adds to our tank letting us burn them down faster.  The off phases when it was on cooldown went nice and smooth as our rogue and hunter worked together to pick the adds up.  We had a Deathknight available last night, but we wanted to sort out a method that did not rely on her since she is not an “every week” person in our raid and sometimes has scheduling conflicts.

It was amazing how different this set of attempts felt from the very start.  The first handful of tries we had made on him before felt like this chaotic mess.  This time around everything felt smooth and focused and while it took us a couple of attempts to work through the various issues…  we straight wrecked the boss in a method that felt extremely repeatable.  Additionally the entire raid as a whole felt better… even Tectus which is generally the most chaotic mess ever for us felt nice and smooth.  I am really damned proud of the progress we have made as a raid.  We have never been “cutting edge progression” but it feels nice to be doing well within the current tier with us sitting at 6/7 Normal and 2/7 Heroic.  Thursday night the goal is to get in and get us a few heroic kills, and maybe test the waters to see where we are on the DPS check that is Butcher.  Then hopefully we get some good solid attempts on Imperator Mar’gok.

Versatility Sucks

Yesterday twitter was a hotbed of long running conversations for me and various groups of people.  One of these conversations was with my friend Talarian about stat distribution on the items in Draenor.  As a Gladiator I have been focused on two things above all else…  Bonus Armor and Crit because both of these feed the goofy chain reaction that is the gladiator warrior.  In general Gladiators get 1.5 times the Attack Power from Bonus Armor per point of itemization than we do from Strength.  This makes it our number one stat for literally anything… because per point we are getting one and a half times the benefit.  The prime example of this is when you look at the Draenic Strength Potion and the Draenic Armor Potion.  When I pop a strength potion I get 1000 attack power during the course of its buff, when I pop the armor potion which feels counter intuitive… I gain 1500 attack power.  So yesterday I was complaining about getting items with the “wrong stats”.

Talarian chimed in with a well written post where he mathed things out and came up with the conclusion that relative ilevel is far more important than having an item with the “perfect” stat combination.  While I agree with this in theory…  it is nonetheless frustrating when you have to trade in an item with the perfect stat package with a “bigger” item with a rather shitty one.   I feel like Blizzard goes through these phases where they want to make “stats interesting” but I feel like their game design simply does not support this.  Raid encounters are in essence more about “throughput” than making “interesting choices”.  So long as they keep making “DPS Check” encounters, that is literally the only thing we are  going to care about, and we want whatever stat package gives us the most performance.  In these scenarios stats like Versatility lose out, because would you rather have the stat that passively and opaquely “makes things better” or would you rather have that stat that cascades a chain reaction of your abilities making your class “feel” better.

Right now Versatility feels like a failed experiment, because it is this phantom stat that “makes everything better”.   If we look at the definition on the wiki: Versatility is pretty simple: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%. It’s a straightforward, obvious upgrade to your primary role’s performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. The healing increase it provides does work on self-heals, such as Recuperate, for example.  All of this sounds amazing… but the problem is it is also boring.  When I stack crit it directly effects my chances of abilities interacting with each other, since a Crit X gives me a free Y and a Crit Y gives me a free Z…  essentially my class FEELS better to play.  When I stack Versatility the benefits are largely transparent and feel something akin to “Mastery 2.0” but somehow more boring.

Thank You for Blogging

altchatquote While I am in this mode of reacting to conversations from twitter… I have to single one out that happened with the Godmother of Faff herself…  AlternativeChat.  This comment itself is buried in part of a larger conversation about the effect of when we refer to someone on our blogs.  But it underlines a problem all bloggers have.  None of us think what we are doing is as meaningful and important as others seem to.  I am singling out AlternativeChat here because she has been a good friend for some time, and been every so gracious to follow me down a number of whims.  All of this said and all history aside…  when I wanted to have her on my Bel Folks Stuff podcast, I was quite literally afraid that she was going to say no.  I feel like the tiniest of ants compared to her when it comes to my impact on the blogosphere and my reach within our shared community.  Thankfully she graciously accepted and out of it came a really wonderful conversational podcast.

What I find hard to fathom is that I am sure there are people in the community that look at me the same way as I looked at AlternativeChat.  I feel like I do nothing important, I just do my thing but it is the act of me doing my thing that is the important thing.  There was a further discussion yesterday about numbers and statistics and all of that sort of thing.  In truth at the end of the day I would feel just as happy if I had 50 readers as if I had 500 readers.  All that really matters is that there is someone out there listening and reading and caring enough about me to keep doing it on a regular basis.  This is not a business for me, this is an act of love and caring… and all I am looking for is people to share that with.  So if you are out there blogging, I want to thank you deeply for doing whatever it is you do.  At the end of the day you can’t read a person daily without caring about the individual on the other side of the screen.  As far as the readers… I want to thank you all the most because you make doing this crazy thing each morning worthwhile because I know I am not alone.