Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
Tonight we start off with an apology about missing last week due to severe weather. We did the thing where we accidentally talked about things we should have talked about on the show… and roll straight into a discussion about Drizzlewood and Living World Season 5. From there we talk a bit about the World of Warcraft Dragonflight announcement. This dives into a topic about how the failed state of Warcraft has helped so many games that are not Final Fantasy XIV and the odd thriving condition of legacy games. We talk a bit about Flowstone Saga and vampire Survivors. Then we dive into what ends up being a full spoiler discussion of Outriders that starts with some discussion about the expansion coming in June. We attempt to wrap things up with the Stanley Parable, but get into an offshoot at the end of the show about Marvel shows.
Topics Discussed
Guild Wars 2
Drizzlewood is Great
Chapter 5 of Living World 5 is NOT
World of Warcraft Dragonflight
WoW Failing Helped Everyone Out
Talk about various MMORPGs that are thriving right now
Last night was a very good night, and one that I have needed for awhile. It had absolutely nothing to do with what I happened to be playing, which was of course Guild Wars 2, but instead the company I kept. I’ve talked about my friend Grace so many times over the years on this blog and quite honestly they are one of my favorite people on the planet. It used to be that we were pretty regularly on the same bandwidth when it came to games and were partners in crime… whatever that crime happened to be. Lately however we have fallen out of step and the crossover opportunities have been limited. Our fallback was always Diablo 3 and the coming of a brand new season roughly every three months. However we’ve both sworn off Blizzard titles for the moment until the situation there improves… which has been more painful than I can put into words because it has also cost us our regular decompression sessions.
The pandemic has been hard in wildly different ways for different people. Grace and I have managed to stay in contact and pretty much still talk every single day, but our long gaming sessions over voice chat have dwindled to non-existent. Last night however we opted to remedy that and while they spent the evening on a combination of the Switch and Knitting and I had a casual night of World Bosses in Guild Wars 2, we spent almost three hours just talking about whatever the conversation happened to bring up. We talked about parents, jobs, and they graciously listened to me go on at length about Guild Wars 2. I am not necessarily trying to sell Grace on the game but I certainly would love to have them try it, but also know that at least until Living World Season 1 has rolled out completely that is going to be a non-starter. I just have a problem with gushing about something when I am super into it, and Grace has been there for me as I gushed at length about other games that they were not interested in at all.
The sad thing as we were talking is that we realized we had not done one of these big lengthy catch up sessions… since probably last year sometime. That is way the hell too long honestly. Granted we hang out for the length of the AggroChat podcast, but that is a more directed conversation and less free form random word association. The next step however is we have to figure out some game we are both interested in playing at the same time. While I have missed the conversation, I have very much extremely missed the random nonsense that we often got up to when playing games together. Aging and adulthood sucks sometimes, because it often pulls you away from the sorts of interactions you need most. Part of it for me is that I have also not been as available as I once was given that I can only really hang on voice chat when I am upstairs due to the quirks of Parsec blocking microphones. Since I have been working remotely for the last three years… the upstairs is “Work” and when I get off I go downstairs to “Home”. Though last night was fine and I really need to try and sort out how to make a microphone work in spite of Parsec.
In other random news I am really enjoying the Halo series. I’ve said it before but I know next to nothing about Halo and I think it has helped my enjoyment. It does however make me want to go back and try and play the games again. I find it to be a really compelling setting and maybe it will act as a catalyst for me to actually get into the series in general. I know I had not played any of the Witcher games to the end until I watched the Netflix series, and that lead me to go on a deep dive and play everything Witcher related I could get my hands on. I technically own all of the Halo games, and even if I did not they are all available through Gamepass. At some point when I decide to get on a single player kick again, I should try and play through them all.
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Good Morning Friends! Over the last several days I have fielded a large number of questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse at large. There is one aspect that I hinted about in my guide post, but did not really cover in detail and that is how to move instances. I bring this up in part because yesterday I moved instances. It is something that I have done a number of times over the years for various reasons. For fun here is a quick rundown:
Mastodon.cloud – I started here because I had no clue how anything worked and was joining during another wave of mass exodus from Twitter in 2018.
Elekk.xyz – I was not there long and then moved to Elekk because in the directory it reported to be a gaming focused instance. While gaming discussion does happen I was kinda surprised by how not true that statement was.
Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore decided to start up an instance and happily moved over, and ended up helping with the administration and moderation a bit. We had some fun times here.
MMORPG.Social – After awhile Nineties.Cafe died down and my friend Gazimoff wanted to try and create an MMORPG focused social network, and as such I moved houses once again and helped a bit with administration and moderation.
Elekk.xyz – When things got too hard for Gaz to keep it running, I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went into read only mode for awhile, occasionally favoriting and posting daily blog posts but not a ton of direct interaction.
Mstdn.social – Then yesterday I moved once again to a larger instance run by a lovely Dutch fellow that goes by Stux, and is more general purpose.
To most people this is going to seem like madness, but in truth instance migration is built into the fabric of the Fediverse and a rather normal custom. Why did I decide to pick up my box and move it to another home? Well the reality is in the time I had been semi-afk on Elekk, it became a much more locked down environment than I realized and as a result I had been severed from a number of people on Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online, who through no fault of their own decided to pick the big flagship instances that some instance operators are blocking. Elekk is still a lovely place and if you are there currently there is zero reason to ever leave, that is unless you ALSO have friends in places that you could not communicate with.
Most instances that you would be migrating to or from are going to be running Mastodon as the backend software. Pleuroma is also extremely popular, but I have no experience with those instances and as a result I am uncertain how this process works there. However if you see an interface that looks something like this when you go into user preferences, you are on a Mastodon based instance. Under Account > Account Settings there is a functionality that allows you to move from one instance to another. There are two ways to do this, but the first is automated where you plug in the information for the instance you are moving to, and go through a series of dialogs to indicate which bits of data you want transferred. The instance you are leaving will then go dormant and show that you have moved to a new instance (will show this shortly).
If for whatever reason there is a difference in software versions, a misconfiguration… or something purposefully blocking this functionality there is another method. Essentially you can go into the Data Export section of the Mastodon user preferences screen and dump individual CSV files for each of the pieces of data you might want to migrate. Then on your new instance you can go into the Import screen of the same area and pull in the individual CSV files. Something you need to know about this process is you can migrate the people you follow, but you cannot migrate your followers. This moving process happens often enough that when someone gets a notification that you have followed them on a new account, most of the time they click follow out of habit. The Fediverse in general is way less focused on clout and making follower numbers go up. I personally like this manual process because it allows me to edit the CSV which is just a text file, and remove any accounts that I might not want to carry over to the next instance for any reason.
When someone goes to your old profile, they are going to see something like this indicating that the account has gone dormant and moved. Notice how my header image and avatar are greyed out, and in the side there is a note indicating that I have moved to @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. What is nice about this process is that if anyone happens to stumble upon any of your older “toots” out in the ether, there will be a breadcrumb trail that can lead them back to your active account. Among all of those accounts I talked about earlier, the only instances that are still alive are Mastodon.cloud and Elekk.xyz, and as a result I logged into both of them yesterday and set up my redirections.
Hopefully through this little sequence you can see that the process of moving instances is nowhere near as tedious as it might sound at first. As always if you have any questions about the process please feel free to drop me a line below, or if you are yourself dabbling in the Fediverse feel free to reach out to me @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. There are certain customs and traditions in the Fediverse that might see a bit odd at first, but over the last four years I have gotten accustomed to them. I am always willing to help new folks as they start down this journey.
The post Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This is me… officially in Cantha and having legitimately gotten there through the story. This means that I have now finished all of the available story content in Guild Wars 2 prior to the release of the most current expansion, End of Dragons. So far Cantha seems to be a massive leap forward in the way the storytelling takes place, but we are not going to talk about that this morning. Instead we are going to talk about Living World Season 5, or what is otherwise known as the Icebrood Saga. Season 5 featured some of the best content I had experienced to date as well as some of the worst. Largely it was a season that felt like it was developed by two wildly different teams… and given the way layoffs hit ArenaNet in 2019 and 2020… that might be literally what happened.
The entire adventure spans the course of three zones: Grothmar Valley, Bjora Marches, and Drizzlewood Coast. Each of these is extremely well built and features some of the most interesting gameplay to date, especially Drizzlewood which is effectively a PVE only version of a WvW map. The story that unfolds is effectively one of a Charr civil war, as an entire culture of warriors is not quite certain who they should be fighting. It also furthers the character arc of the Norn prophecy and more specifically the evolution of the character Braham Eirsson. He has honestly turned from an insufferable ass of a character that I hated… to someone that I actually enjoy taking along on missions. The content is divided into a prologue and five chapters for a total of six parts. Everything but that last chapter is expertly crafted and deeply enjoyable… however it is in the end that the wheels fall off the cart.
It is in “Episode 5: Champions” that we are introduced to a new type of activity in Guild Wars 2, the Dragon Response Mission. At face value these are actually somewhat enjoyable, and reminds me of something akin to a Destiny 2 strike. You entire an area of an existing map, are given story dialog over coms, and asked to complete a sequence of tasks. They follow a very predictable pattern:
You Zone into the Map and are given 5 minutes to complete three different tasks. You will not have enough time to do all three but this is effectively the “matchmaking time” while it searches for additional players. Doing any effort seems to award you gold participation.
You are given a new task which is usually either escort someone to a place, or kill a bunch of things scattered around the map.
Upon completion of this task a Champion will spawn somewhere around the map. You will need to kill it and the standard “boss” rules apply, in that at some interval it is going to do a thing that makes it invulnerable… which will require you to perform some gimmick to begin dealing damage to them again.
Again this mission construct in itself is pretty enjoyable, and would have been a great addition were it sprinkled in sparingly or just something you could do on the side. However the ENTIRETY of Episode 5 is doing these missions… ten of them. Every couple of missions you are going to get a brief story interlude where you are asked to go talk to Aurene… where some member of your entourage is going to interrupt you and tell you that you need to do more Dragon Response Missions. This is something that I more or less had to grit my teeth and just grind out, and it felt awful.
The finale of Episode 5 is effectively doing a story mode only version of the Dragonstorm event. This is also exceptionally good and I really enjoyed experiencing the full story version. However it in no way makes up for the slog that the player has had to go through in order to get here. It is my understanding that when they were released they were doled out two Dragon Response Missions at a time. MAYBE playing it in that manner would have felt a bit better, but having to do ten of them in a row without coming up for air… just is the worst. As a result I deem the Icebrood Saga both the best expansion content to this point in Guild Wars 2, and also the worst.
I hear there are challenge mode versions of the Dragon Response Missions, but I am not sure if I want to set foot in another one. There are a few where I was so dead set on burning through them that I missed checking whether or not there was a mastery point I should be getting. I need to revisit these and at least pop in long enough to get those. Otherwise I maybe never want to see that content type again until I level another character through the content. I am greatly looking forward to digging into End of Dragons because so far… it has been delightful. I do want to take a quick moment to note that Kalidris Sparrowhawk is maybe one of my new favorite characters and I am hoping at some point… she joins Dragon’s Watch.
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