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I’m struggling a bit this morning to pull together a blog post.  In theory I think I am fighting a cold or something because the last several days I have just felt lousy.  Last night for example I really wanted to pop into some Destiny 2 and do the weekly tasks that are set in front of me on a brand new day.  However I roamed around the tower a bit before logging out for the evening because I could not seem to focus enough to actually do something as intensive as playing a guardian.  I didn’t really play much last week either, so I have not been helping push the clan level up and for that I feel bad.  I have so many things that I need and want to get accomplished but have just been lacking the drive to actually do them.  The quest for the Last World exotic went in yesterday but after looking what all is involved…  I am really not looking forward to more crucible grinding.  I had to do plenty of that already for the Malfeasance quest line that I have yet to actually finish.

What I ultimately spent my night doing instead was working on the Blue Mage some more.  There are probably more productive ways to go about this process, but what I wound up doing was spent some time in Coerthas before eventually settling into Outer La Noscea grinding the 41-44 Goblin camps.  I managed to get Blue up to 37 so the progress was moving pretty well, but solo grinding largely involved controlling the camp spawns since I was many times the only person out there.  It reminded me a lot of the way that we used to play in Everquest, where you would work your way into an area and then try and hold that position while avoiding getting overrun as too many things spawned in at the same time.  There were a few moments where things got a little dicey if I had two bombs and two goblins on me at the same time, but all in all I reached a comfortable pace and thanks to Sticky Tongue I could yoink mobs over to my perch of relative safety.

The biggest challenge however is that 1000 Needles has started to miss a significant amount lately.  I am guessing its the fact that I have been hitting higher level mobs than my own level, but whatever the case it occasionally makes things a little questionable.  At this point I should probably be able to solo Haukke Manor just fine, but all of the remaining abilities that I can pick up are going to require some significant shenanigans to collect.  For similar reasons to why I didn’t play Destiny 2 last night…  I just did not have it in me to attempt soloing a dungeon.

What I ultimately want to be playing however…  is more Anthem.  So I am guessing that the Demo did it’s trick of embedding that world deep into my psyche.  This weekend we are supposedly getting access again and I am looking forward to it.  I am hoping the various connection issues are resolved and I can spend some time playing with friends and doing missions together.  I am also hoping they maybe give us a bit more of a drip feed of content…  at least more than the one strike mission.  Regardless I am looking forward to suiting up again because it feels like it is going to be a game that latches hold of me pretty tight.  Ashgar introduced us to the FashionLancers reddit, which I am finding super interesting… but also realizing that I didn’t do anywhere near what I could have with the cosmetic system.  Here is hoping we get a newer build this weekend and with it a bunch of the issue have been put on ice.

It has been roughly a month since we embarked on this journey of the MMORPG.Social Mastodon instance and I have been wanting to report back how things have been going.  For the uninitiated Mastodon is as social microblogging platform that runs on a technology called ActivityPub  which provides the functionality of decentralizing your access to a larger network.  What I mean by that is all of the individual Mastodon/Pleroma/PixelFed/GNUSocial and a bunch of other similar ActivityPub based tools “federate” with each other and effectively link up to form what folks commonly refer to as the Fediverse.

What this means in practice is that you address people not only by the @name convention but also @instance following the name.  In doing so you can follow and communicate freely with anyone using any of the ActivityPub based federating instances.  Because of this freedom it becomes more about choosing the local instance that most closely reflects your interests than simply dog-piling on the largest one.  Some numbers for example of the biggest instances…  Pawoo.net which is a mostly non-english speaking instance has as of the time of writing this… 441,376 users.  Mastodon.Social which is lead by the creator of the Mastodon software and largely considered to be the flagship is at 306,065 users.  On the other end of the spectrum you have thousands of single or handful of users instances that cater to very small communities.

Why Change Instances?

I’ve moved around quite a bit on the Fediverse, largely because as I got more engaged with the community I had reasons for popping elsewhere.  Thankfully Mastodon specifically gives you the tools to direct users from one profile to another profile and export/import the users you were following to make picking up your home and moving it a little easier.  Just for reference…  here is a run down of the people I have been on the Fediverse.

• @Belghast@Mastodon.Cloud – a large generic instance that was being used as overflow for Mastodon.Social when I first found out about the existence of the Fediverse.
• @Belghast@Elekk.xyz – I quickly realized that having a good local was more important than being on a big instance and this was an amazing home run by @Noelle who also serves as one of the moderators for Mastodon.Social and in general does an awful lot to help support the Fediverse in general.  Even though I am not actively using Elekk.xyz I fund her Patreon just to help support her efforts.
• @Belghast@Nineties.Cafe – My good friend Liore decided to start her own Mastodon instance, and with that I migrated myself from Elekk.xyz to Nineties.Cafe.  The first month was a glorious time, much like the launch of a new MMORPG but over time folks stopped posting and now there are only a handful of us that seem to check it these days.
• @Belghast@MMORPG.Social – I initially just signed up here to support the very awesome Gazimoff who is running the instance, and in the end wound up migrating completely because it has become a really cool environment.  Lots of MMORPG players hanging out and talking about the games they are playing.

Ultimately I didn’t have to move at all and I could have continued communicating with people from Elekk, Nineties and MMORPG all through my original Mastodon.Cloud account.  However one of the things I love about having a good local instance for a home, is that you get access to the Local feed that shows what everyone is publicly talking about on that server.  Each time I have moved it was because I wanted to be part of that local environment and keep taps on what was happening.  There is of course the Federated timeline which shows you everything being said by anyone that your instance is federated with, but that can be at times like drinking from the firehose.

Admittedly one of the hardest things to get used to for a long time avid Twitter user like myself, is how generally slow the pace is on the Fediverse.  You have to sort of think back to those early days of twitter when you weren’t following a couple of hundred very chatty people to get the same sort of experience.  Over time I have found people from lots of different instances that I follow, and because of it I have knitted together a community of people that I talk to on a regular basis.  However I want to throw out the warning that Mastodon and the Fediverse in general is going to feel like a really quiet place at the beginning before you branch out and find your tribe.

Why MMORPG.Social?

The instance has been going for roughly a month at this point and we have way more users than I ever expected at this point.  Gaz also has been working super hard to give lots of different options for the user base and even got us an official Mascot.  I have no clue if the mascot has a name… but I propose Mortimer.  Normally folks just stand up and instance and call it good, but Gaz has been doing a lot of fiddling under the hood to stand up infrastructure to support growth.  Here are some examples…

• https://mmorpg.social – this takes you to the default TweetDeck inspired interface that personally I find super comfortable since I generally use either that or a mobile client to access Twitter.
• https://lite.mmorpg.social/ – for those who prefer the twitter web client experience, Gaz stood up Halcyon which is a lightweight twitter clone interface.
• https://blog.mmorpg.social – is a WordPress site where he posts information about the instance which is pretty new but also super useful.
• images.mmorpg.social – is not directly reachable but serves as the infrastructure for AWS S3 where he is now hosting all of the images for speed and reliability
• mail.mmorpg.social – is also not directly reachable but is a dedicated mail server that handles that functionality again for speed and reliability since registration requires email notification

On top of that I believe he is experimenting with PixelFed which is an activitypub implementation that gives you a more Instagram like experience, but the challenge there is making it blend in seamlessly with the rest of the network so folks who prefer that Insta experience can still hang out and communicate with those who prefer the Twitterish one.  So much of this is contained in a really excellent “Getting Started” post that he crafted as a way of easing new users into our little corner of the world.

Adjusting Expectations

I think one of the challenges of the Fediverse is that so many people hop on that bandwagon thinking it will immediately replace Twitter as their daily driver network.  I too went into it with those expectations and quite frankly I was placing too much pressure on it to fill some predetermined niche I already had carved out.  As I have moved through the Fediverse and tempered that opinion…  I’ve realized that more or less it is a completely new continent to explore.  Sure you are ultimately leaving a bunch of people behind in that journey, but you are also going to meet a ton of people you might never have met if you didn’t hop on that boat to the new expansion content.

At it’s core MMORPG.Social was created to fulfill three basic goals.

• To build a microblogging home for fans of MMOs and online games
• To eliminate excessive and uninvited advertising
• To bring back features like chronological timelines, and add new ones like editing statuses and custom emoji

I personally think it is excelling at all of them and they have a pretty reasonable code of conduct statement as well.  The awesome thing about the Fediverse is somewhere out there is an instance being run in the manner that you want.  The fediverse in general gives the admins a lot of latitude in dealing with problems…  like the ability to block entire instances that end up being problem children.  This means that the fediverse experience is going to be very different for each user and especially on each local instance.  So far I am greatly enjoying my stay and if you are interested in Mastodon, the Fediverse or MMORPG.Social I am always more than willing to answer questions.  If you are interested in signing up check out the sign up link here.

A few weeks back I got a DM out of the blue from whoever manages the ParsecTeam twitter account.  Essentially they said that since I talk about Parsec all the time that they would like to send me a shirt as a sort of token of appreciation.  So yesterday said shirt came in the mail so I thought I would post a picture of it here.  It is REALLY bright blue, and the photo I took with it laying on the bed doesn’t exactly do it justice.  Basically think how bright Twitch Purple is… but blue.  I have this weird thing with products, in that I really only want to support the things that I truly believe in…  and Parsec is definitely one of those given that I use it pretty much every night.  I do not however have any sort of a formal relationship with the company and I am paying for services the same as anyone else.  I opted into the Warp account thing more than anything as a way of helping fund development which I THINK is around $50 a year but I am not 100% certain of that.

The reason why I keep talking about Parsec is because it has been a game changer for me personally in opening up my options to play games on a system that effectively no longer supports decent gameplay.  I’ve talked about this at length, so really don’t feel the need to dig back in this morning but if you are curious what I am talking about you can find the tales in these two posts:  “In Home Streaming” and “Wireless Ethernet”.  I guess throughout my life I have experienced a lot of things that I loved…  that for whatever reason did not stand the test of time.  As a result this has made me really want to show support for the things that products that make my life better.  Parsec has definitely been one of those products and as such I keep mentioning it any time someone brings up wanting to swap around the way they game, or have a better mobile gaming option.  I still would love to see native clients for the consoles, even if they can’t do bi-directional play and simply offers streaming from PC to console.

The thing I am the most curious about are the cloud options that they offer to rent.  One of these days I am going to try out that Amazon Web Services g3.4xlarge even though I have no real need to do so.  Mostly I am curious at just how viable it is for modern gaming and just how cost effective it would be to purchase one.  If you were going to try and recreate my current gaming rig right now…  even though it has some older parts in it… it would still cost around $2300.  You could effectively game 24/7 for 52 days straight before you spent in cloud charges as you would on that system.  My real question however is just how nice is the performance.  At the moment I am streaming Parsec across my LAN with it configured to always try a local connection first, so I am not really sure how it is going to feel going out to AWS.  One of these weekends when I don’t have another competing project I am going to give it a shot because I am super curious.  I’m also curious what that big box feels like as compared to the much smaller specced $0.51/hour set up.

This morning went down a rabbit hole that I did not intend to go down.  Originally I was going to make fun of my character in Assassin’s Creed Origins for somehow having two different bows, a battle axe, a sword and a shield slung across his back.  Instead I talked more about Parsec, but legitimately I am going to try out the cloud option at some point.  Mostly for folks that want to have a PC gaming experience a few hours a week without affording a PC…  it might be a really cost effective solution.  This is one of those things that I don’t need myself at all, but I would like to know how well it works before I offer it as a possible solution.  I’m in a weird spot gaming wise where I am still playing a single player game, but not really feeling like I have much exciting to say about it.  I’ve also been super exhausted this week, and need to wrap this up so I can get to work.

So readers…  How is your week going?

I am breaking my review of the games coming out in 2019 to talk briefly about a weird experience I am having with a website.  In my travels the other day I stumbled across one of those “Top 100 Gaming Blogs” lists, and I clicked through to see if there were any blogs on it that I recognized.  Generally speaking this is not the case because in my experience these lists tend to include a ton of corporate blogs managed by the game companies themselves.  The sites listed largely fit this bill, but as you got towards the bottom of the list I saw a bunch of smaller sites…  none that I actually recognized but still smaller than MassivelyOp that was also on the list.  Looking around the site it seemed to be a mishmash of two things happening…  firstly it was some sort of a RSS reader tool that seemed to suggest that you could subscribe to a bunch of sites and get their content delivered to your mailbox.

Secondly it seemed to be selling access to the blog information to marketers, since when you register a site you are providing a contact name, the URL and an email associated with the blog.  Claiming to be able to provide relevant bloggers in a given subject area.  There was a form that allows you to submit your blog and on a whim I decided to do just this.  At this point things start getting really weird and shady.  You notice I have not mentioned the site yet or linked to them…  it is largely because of the behavior that followed and my not wanting to give them any eyeballs as a result.  Within minutes of signing up for the website I got the following email in my inbox.

So essentially on top of selling to marketers, they are also double dipping on the back end and running a pay for placement scam.  This email arrived so rapidly that it has to have been scripted, and that they did not actually take any time to review my website.  Additionally it isn’t really a “top 100 gaming blogs” list if you are letting people pay money to get onto it.  As a curiosity I clicked through to see how much it cost for this gold service, and things get even stranger.  For reference its roughly $24 a year, to essentially place your website on one of their lists, which is a thing I was not interested in.  However two hours after clicking on the link to view the pricing… I got this email.

Of note… I am blanking out the guys name because he keeps email from his personal account on the site in question and in general I don’t think it is terribly cool to spread someones actual name around.  I am not trying to Dox the person after all.  Things keep getting weirder from here.  Roughly eight hours pass and I get an email from the site telling me that I need to verify my email address.  My working theory is that since I had not been responding to this guy at all… he is assuming at this point that I must have given him a bogus address.  At this point I am finding this whole process interesting… so I validate the address and upon landing on the site it tells me that my account is in violation and that I have signed up for too many websites.  That in order to keep using the service I will have to upgrade to Gold.

This morning I got the above email which is honestly what prompted me to take time and write about this scam.  Notice how that it has switched from being listed on a top 100 list to being listed on a top 200 list.  Additionally they are pushing a bunch of information about the site trying to sell you on how many eyeballs your $24 a year is going to be buying you.  Back in High School there was something referred to as the “Top Scholars” scam, and there were a few perpetrators out there.  They would request mailing lists for all of the graduating seniors and send out a message targeted at the parents touting that their child had been selected as some sort of an elite scholar and that they had earned the rights to be listed in some book.  They go on at length about how much this book is going to improve their chances of getting into a good college, and that the only catch is that they needed to purchase one of these deluxe edition gold leaf adorned $150 tomes to go ahead with the listing.  Thankfully our gifted and talented coordinator warned all of the parents about this scam and as a result my parents did not fall for it…  but I know others who did.

What we are seeing with Feedspot is a confusion amalgamation of product offerings…  including something that is very much the digital version of that scam.  They seem to be targeting the bloggers themselves and promising fame and more traffic and targeting the marketers promising a verified list of contacts to get them in touch with people who could influence their customers.  For everyone else…  you have a RSS feed site that offers an email digest service.  There is nothing necessarily “wrong” with a capital W about anything they are doing, but it is nonetheless somewhat shady.  The thing is… this isn’t the only site offering a somewhat questionable top 100 list and likely not the only site that is going to offer to place your site on said list for a small fee.  This is more or less a public service announcement that when you see something like this… it is likely going to be a scam.

I’ve still not responded to any emails from the site, because at this point I find it sort of entertaining.  Hell if they actually do read my blog they might make a response here, but I have been pretty careful not to actually include links to any of their content.  Posts like this one are likely why no one will ever take this blog seriously…  however I do have an interesting product review in the works.  I’ve always said that I was willing to review products if they actually were something somewhat related to my interests… and if there were no strings attached…  and someone actually finally nibbled on my conditions.  So we will see how well that works out once the product actually arrives.