Space Goats and Paid Content

WoW Chronicles

Space Goats and Paid ContentLast Friday I managed to find a copy of the regularly back ordered…  World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1.  One of the huge problems World of Warcraft has had to date is that a lot of the lore just feels somewhat tacked on.  I feel like much of the story was written during some late night unbridled “wouldn’t it be cool if” sessions, and there was a lot of hand waving going on from about Burning Crusade onward.  What the chronicles project is trying to do is to set in stone a true canon about the world, and how all of the interlinking pieces actually fit together.  I wholeheartedly support this notion… I just wish someone had the foresight to do it a decade ago, or at least when they decided to start really mixing things up with the first expansion.  I am sure there has been a penciled together napkin sketch of what the world was intended to look like, that at least partially exists in the minds still of the people working at Blizzard.  The problem is when something is not written down and set into print… it becomes too easy to erase a line here and graft on a new segment of lore there that really conflicts with something that came before.

What I am wondering is how much narrative cleanup are they committed to do to make this canon really a living document? While this project doesn’t exactly burn down what was in place before… it does invalidate a lot of things that happened and in other cases it simply explains things that already exist.  For example… the book indicates that the Spirit Healers that we have used for years are essentially a rogue faction of Val’kyr.  The book goes into depth about the relationship between the void lords, the titans, the old gods, and classifies things that lacked classification like the wild gods which now include the pantheon of August Celestials.  What I really hope to see is some of these lore fixes making their way into the game in either the form of new quests, or old quest revisions.  I will say that having some sort of concrete font of lore that they can keep going back to, makes me at least somewhat excited for the future of the game.  Lore has always been one of the big problems I had with World of Warcraft, and how confused and messy…. and downright incomplete it always seemed.  Hopefully we will start to see the fruits of this project with the coming expansion Legion… which even before this seemed like it was going to be a complete loregasm.

Paid Promotional Content

I am going to take the tail end of this mornings post to complain about something that has been bothering me.  Granted I know it will do absolutely zero good since it is quite obvious the forces in question are not even reading my blog.  For years I have gotten messages from various companies wanting to place paid content on my blog.  There is a practice that is frighteningly common that gets called by a bunch of names… but essentially marketers want to pay established blogs to place pre-written and pre-approved articles which serve as a sort of advertising for a product.  Essentially the practice makes me feel dirty inside that they are even targeting my blog… but most end up getting caught in the spam filter.  Here lately several have made it through on my About page, and I have taken to responding to them directly.  I realize I should just brush these off as the byproduct of having blogged for as long as I have, but it really sticks in my craw.

I get super excited about products, and games… and the other things that interest me in the world.  I’m a geek and a lot of geekdom is geeking out about something.  That said I want to make sure it is understood that when I get excited about something… it is because I am legitimately excited and that there is not some nefarious force behind the curtain pulling my strings.  Sure I would love to make money on my blog, or at least love to reach a point where it is self sustaining… the problem is every option to monetize means I am giving up some of my control.  For example if I were to install advertisements… I wouldn’t be able to curate WHICH advertisements I allowed onto the site, I would have to accept anything the ad network wanted to place there.  So the notion of “supporting” products that I don’t necessarily believe in, really bothers me.  As a result I have shunned pretty much all advertising, and while I freely accept alphas and betas to games… I only end up writing about the ones that really interest me.  I have friends in the gaming industry, and it is awesome…  but no one is paying me to like their product.

Basically what it all boils down to is that my opinion is not for sale.  None of the folks that have been approaching me will actually read these lines, but I still feel like it is important to say it loud and publicly.  Tales of the Aggronaut has been a work of love for going on seven years now, and while my opinions shift and change based on new data… they are still very much my opinions and not carefully scripted speaking points.  That said I will always be open to reviewing products if someone wants me to do so.  That said I will only write about the product when I feel like I have had enough time to see the entire picture, and when I have something interesting to say about it.  I also will never guarantee a positive review.  I am not really a ranty blogger, but I do talk about the points that disappoint me in games or products and that is likely to happen.  If someone finds this in a search later on…  hopefully they will actually read it before asking me to do something shifty like accepting payola for content.  I am extremely luck in that I have a day job that can support my blogging shenanigans, and that I don’t need to somehow turn this into a profit center.  I don’t begrudge those who are trying to monetize their content, but I can’t ever really condone shillery.

Light and Poms

Losing Light

This marks the second weekend of attempts to get a black spindle, and I am quickly reaching a point where I no longer want it.  The first weekend was a tale of me largely spending the entire day either waiting to get a group or making attempts on it.  For whatever reason Bungie seems to keep choosing Sunday as the day for Spindle runs… which is not exactly prime time for people playing the game.  On top of that… Sunday is normally a day that I have stuff that needs to get done, and instead for two different weekends my world has focused around trying to get a Black Spindle.  I reached a point yesterday where I wanted to reach through the internet and punch whoever it was that designed this mission.  The individual parts aren’t all that bad… but combined together is just maddening.  If you could simply respawn at a checkpoint before the 10 minute timer starts on the Ketch it wouldn’t be so bad.  I would happily grind that until we finally got it… but instead it is the frustration of having to clear to a boss… then do the run across the temple… then unlock the various chambers… then FINALLY go up into the ketch and do the “real” mission.  So you have 10-15 minutes of bullshit before you reach the point at which it is omg serious mode.

We tried several different methods of attempting to down the boss, the main one being that we jump to the middle and burn him down with swords.  Towards the end we started trying to just whittle his ass down while keeping the adds under control, and honestly neither really worked well.  Anytime we ducked outside of the entrance tunnel we would get wrecked, and almost one shot.  I guess that is the biggest frustration is that the room has no place where you can really set up OTHER than the entrance tunnel and clean out the adds.  The geometry of the room means that someone is always getting hung on something and stuck awkwardly out in the open… which means they are essentially dead.  I am not sure what is up with the mission but it felt like we did significantly worse than the last time…  and this time around I am 304 and decked out in raid weapons that deal extra damage to taken.  I know I am the albatross around the neck of the group, but I am not exactly sure what I am doing wrong there.  At this point I am not likely to spend another weekend of attempts on this stupid weapon… when I have two sniper rifles that I enjoy using already.  Sure this is the best sniper in the game, but if it quite literally makes one of my party members slam their controller down against the desk breaking it…  it is not worth the hassle or frustration.

Pom Pom Squad

Light and Poms

The highlight of the weekend however for me was getting a Pom Pom Beanie on Friday evening while playing Division.  Strangely enough this seems to be the chase item for most people because they are actually rather rare.  I have given food and water to every single person that I meet along the street asking for it… and have a huge amount of clothing options… and have gotten exactly one pom pom beanie.  Now these also can apparently appear on the appearance vendor that unlocks with the security tier, but I have yet to see any there.  What is awesome about mine is the fact that it fits so perfectly with the colors that I already choose…  black and green.  Other than that last night I got a string of awesome weapon drops…  and I finally abandoned my beloved LSW for a couple of ACR variants and eventually a P416…  which all seem to feel the same when firing them.  I also found an upgrade for my SRS marksman rifle but unfortunately the upgrade was only a green so it won’t last nearly as long.  That seems to be my combo of weapons of choice… a fairly accurate assault rifle that fires well in single shot/bursts and a marksman rifle for headshots.  This allows me to either spray and play, for random two mob encounters on the street… or get more strategic for larger groups.

Light and Poms

I am consistently amazed at the wide variety of feelings this game can make me feel.  There are moments when I feel stirrings of patriotism and sentimentality like when I come across a memorial like the one above, or improvised banners hanging out of windows that say slogans like “Can’t Keep NY Down”.  Then other times the game gut punches you with feels when it comes to finding a phone message from before the infection, or as society was crumbling.  Like last night I picked up a message from two parents that were coming into town to see their child because they missed them… and it feels all the more tense knowing that they had no clue what they were walking into.  We had a lengthy AggroChat show talking about the morality of this game… and for whatever reason it stirs something completely different in me.  I absolutely feel like the good guy, the one trying hard to bring some sort of order to a fallen city.  Sure the only thing that separates me from the looters is the badge I am wearing… but I am also saving countless random people from executions or muggings as I roam the city streets.  I might be more vigilante than righteous crusader, but I am okay with that.  I think you miss some of the nuance of the game if you are constantly focused on this objective or the next, and aren’t really participating in the events that happen on the street.  I cannot count the number of times I have rolled up on a group of Rikers with their guns drawn on a civilian, and even though it is a nameless faceless NPC…  I saved them from certain death.  Had I been a little slower on the trigger finger they would be dead on the ground, and those are the moments I feel heroic.  Those are the moments when I don’t question what I am doing in this game.

New Mailbox

The Final Project

New Mailbox

This spring break has been pretty crazy… but nonetheless extremely productive.  I mostly wanted a pretty chill weekend, but that didn’t exactly happen.  Firstly for some reason I got it in my head that I wanted to change out the mailbox yesterday.  I should have really taken a picture of it before we started, because it was leaning forward and to one side… and had been that way for the better part of the fifteen or so years we have lived in the house.  The door was almost always leaning open because of the tilt, which really didn’t do much to keep our mail dry and safe.  Not to mention it was a post… with a notch inexplicably cut into the side… and the box itself was hanging loosely from a bracket.  On a whim the other day I started looking at options and finally settled on the step 2 fake rock model you see above.  The big thing that I liked about it is the fact that if you go on vacation you can remove the bottom of the mailbox and all of the mail drops down into a larger locked chamber below.  The mailbox is fairly square with the world… my picture taking in the bright sunshine…  not so much.  I relied heavily upon the expertise of my dad, but he was mostly there in an advisory role… which meant I  got to do the bulk of the work.  I am super thankful for him coming over though,  if for no reason other than the fact that he had a really nifty auger tool for essentially “drilling” the post hole into the ground.  That alone saved so much time and effort that I could just corkscrew down and pull out plugs of earth…  or in my case super wet and dense clay that was kinda hell to chew through.

The postive there however is that since it was really dense clay, we could simply pack it back in tight around the post rather than pouring in some quickcrete to stabilize it and set it up.  It took about two and a half hours from start to finish to remove the remnants of the old post, dig a new hole beside it, set the post and install the “easy to install” mailbox.  The last step honestly felt like it took the longest because the manufacturing tolerances were not quite like one would hope.  A lot of the steps involved us banging pieces of plastic together trying to get them together.  After a bunch of frustration… and what would have been a lot of cursing had my parents not been around.  We got the mailbox up just in time for its first delivery, which happened sometime before we had the black top on it.  When we finished with the mailbox I decided we should probably go finish the rest of the errands before I collapsed, which just involved a trip to Sams Club and a trip to Aldi.  As we were coming back from Aldi we got word that our neighbors father had fallen off a ladder and broken his pelvis.  So instead of settling in for the evening to relax, we went up to the hospital to visit and since our neighbor was stuck out of town… we tried to fill in as best we could.  This process took long enough that I was roughly an hour late for recording aggrochat… and even though we had a slew of technical difficulties we just went with it…  because ANY show is better than no show, or at least that was my stance last night.

Relaxation Day Hopefully

New Mailbox

So needless to say… yesterday was pretty damned hectic.  It feels good however to have accomplished as much as we did over a pretty short period of time.  My hope is to mostly just chill out today, and I am wearing all the flannel I can muster because it is pretty chilly in the house.  I really do not want to have to turn on the heat, because I know come next week we will be back in reasonable temperatures.  It is once again Black Spindle day in Destiny, but I am thinking that ship has sailed.  Two weeks ago Squirrel and I struggled to try and get someone to help with that all day long, finally only getting some assistance about 6 pm…  with my end time needing to be 8 pm.  My goal is not to sit around waiting all day to see if that happens and instead go off and enjoy myself in other games.  Not that Destiny is not enjoyable… I just hate waiting around for something.  Right now I have a 1000 Yard Stare that I really like, and the raid Sniper Rifle and between them… I am okay.  I am not planning on doing any content white nail enough to matter that the Black Spindle will make the difference.  I am enjoying casual raiding in Destiny, and I think that will be pretty much where I leave it.

As far as The Division… I am level 18 I believe or otherwise super close to it and still feeling like I need to play catch up.  I am enjoying myself especially now that I once again got a fresh infusion of weapons.  Man do new weapons make a huge amount of difference in this game because struggling… to taking things down in style.  One of the activities that I have been playing catch up on is the phone recordings… and I have to say some of them are just heart breaking.  Some are also showing me a side of characters that I completely without any reservation hated.  There is a phone call from the leader of the cleaners to his granddaughter, talking about how he had to do something for the city… and that she might hear some bad things about him… but not to believe them.  It kinda puts an entirely new spin on what I thought was a mad man, and felt completely happy about putting a bullet in his skull.  The game has a lot of grey area… and so far it has been enough to cause a good chunk of the AggroChat folks to bounce from the game.  For me… I am very much still enjoying myself, but I need to group up more so that I can see what that end of the game feels like.  Right now I kinda like wandering the streets like a nomad and righting wrongs.  Even though I am having to build that hero narrative for myself…  because what I am seeing out in the world is pretty bleak.

 

AggroChat #99 – Faction Walls and Robots

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen suffer some technical difficulties and sound like robots.

aggrochat99

This week we suffered some setbacks.  Firstly we were late getting started by about an hour, and then once we started…  we kinda mostly sounded like robots.  We muscled through for this week but hopefully by next week we will have acquired a new infrastructure for recording the show that sounds better.  The worst part is however…. the conversation this week was really interesting.  We dug int the whole Faction Wall question currently happening in Wildstar and how we generally as a group feel like games are better without them.  We also delved into everyones continued addiction to Stardew Valley.  Ended up being a fairly short show as far as AggroChat episodes goes, but a pretty content dense one.