Goodbye, Bel.

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I did not expect, this past Thursday, to be on the phone with authorities two thousand miles away trying to convince them to take the need for a wellness check seriously. I did not expect to hear from someone I only occasionally spoke to (but still think warmly of) asking to check in on a close friend. I did not expect peaceful quiet to become worry, then anxiety, then panic, then the hollowness of loss. I did not expect to spend the next day and a half reaching out to as many places and as many people as I could to let them know what happened, hoping that I could reach far enough and to enough people that the news would start spreading itself and everyone who should know did know. I did not expect to lose one of my closest friends of 22 years, a person I have known longer in my life than not, suddenly and unexpectedly. I did not expect to be saying good-bye to Belghast.

I did not expect to post in my blog, this blog, possibly ever again. I’m not really writing this for anyone to read. I don’t even know where it syndicates anymore, if anywhere. I’m not really writing it for myself, if I’m honest. I am not as open or talkative a person as Bel was, it was always something he would chide me about. He, I think, always wished I would write as prolifically as he did, or as regularly, but I am not much for sharing outside of closely controlled spaces. It is one of many ways Bel and I differed, and one we would joke about a lot.

I’m writing this for Bel, because a blog post seems fitting.

I met Bel in 2004, as a persona I had no idea was so far from his default. He was Lodin, a Hunter in WoW, and the only thing about that character that even slightly reflected the real Bel was that Lodin was a Dwarf. He was mostly quiet, he was friends with the raid leader, and he was competent. Other than “skilled, not annoying, not conflicting with my loot drops” for the first few months we knew each other we barely talked. What he did, the thing that really caused me to sit up and take notice, was set up the website and forum for our little group, the Late Night Raiders.

He could have co-lead the raid, if he’d wanted. It was me who wound up co-leading instead. What he did instead was use his IT skills to make sure everything we needed to run the raid was smooth and functional, and community-building to boot. He took innumerable screenshots, I came to realize, recording everything over months and years of raiding together.

When I got it into my head to go after a frankly stupid endeavor– trying to build a Scepter of Ahn’Qiraj ahead of the Gates event in WoW, I found myself desperately trying to scrape together mostly disinterested people to do some difficult and deeply unrewarding challenges in the game, including the frankly horrific process of farming bug shells in Silithus for literal weeks on end. We were not a top-tier raid group, we weren’t even sure if we could manage the requirements, so most of it was me going it alone. I had one regular companion though all of it, and it was Bel. At the time I didn’t really understand why he was content to slay thousands of elite bugs in Silithus or die repeatedly to hydras in quests that we should have had 40 people for and not 5-10, but I never second-guessed the company, and we talked and told stories about Everquest and other MMOs we had played. It turned out we had been just missing one another basically since Ultima Online, each game a near miss where but for one random quirk or another we had simply not been in the same places at the same times.

In 2007, Burning Crusade shattered our raid group. Beyond the mess of going from 40-person to 25-person raids, the wide reset meant that we never really got anything off the ground again; there were too many different interests and too many different playstyles that had worked together in Vanilla but didn’t survive TBC. When the group broke, I inherited things, and at the same time I was about to graduate college. I simply didn’t have the capacity to try to keep everything together and keep it all functioning, and I disappointed a lot of people by openly saying that and leaving. Amid all of that, Bel was the person who reached out and told me it was okay, and that people would find a place. I later found out that he had built that place himself. It was a community vacuum, and Bel always abhorred those. He had seen a need for community infrastructure in LNR and saw it again when LNR fell apart, and stepped into the gap himself. He turned House Stalwart into a home for many who had been in LNR and ultimately resurrected the teams.

When I’d gotten over my WoW burnout, started fresh on a new server, and started collecting people who I wanted to stay in touch with, I had set up an AOL Instant Messenger chatroom, plugging people into it. When, on a whim, I logged into my old WoW main, Bel quickly reached out, and soon after I’d added him to the chatgroup. The group was maybe five or six of us, variously keeping up, rarely playing games together but slowly converging. AIM eventually killed their chatroom functionality, but this was the original Aggrochat. It wasn’t until we moved to another platform — after Bel had started his blog– that we actually called it that, but that AOL chatroom was the seed.

I will always remember that Bel HATED that chatroom. He could think of twenty better ways to facilitate chat and he probably suggested we move to IRC, or MSN, or Gchat, or one of several different homebrew tools, but we would chat while at work and several people couldn’t access those other chat programs, so AIM it was, until years later when this thing called Slack came out and Bel jumped on it with glee, especially as the AIM chatroom had been so deprecated that it barely worked at that point– we couldn’t access any admin controls, and I’m not even sure if we could add new members.

It was about when Bel joined that AIM chatroom that I realized he’d started blogging regularly, and he slowly got the rest of us to at least dip a toe in. For a variety of reasons, we wound up moving with the Cataclysm expansion back over to where Bel was, joining up with House Stalwart. We were on voice chat regularly, often nightly, just talking about whatever while we raided. Bel immediately made me a raid leader, and while it didn’t last, I remember his strong vote of confidence. It was also when we started playing other games together, trying out Guild Wars 2, City of Heroes, SWTOR, and other things. This was the point where Bel really started to come into his element. He brought people together and shepherded people between games and into groups, and would reach out to people on various social media who seemed to be looking for a home. It was a time when we operated very much as a team– Bel would find people and I would help organize and lead them. Not so much in WoW, but as I jumped from game to game and he built communities in each one, we would leapfrog each other and built a kind of odd team.

It’s also where we fought, for the one and only time we ever disagreed so intensely that we stopped talking to each other for a while. I remember that we had had some kind of guild resourcing issue, people wanting help or resources from the guild and not feeling like they were available, or that people in the guild would ignore them. Bel responded in his classic determinedly idealistic way– he updated the guild charter to effectively insist that people provide help when asked. It led to a number of people coming to me with concerns, and ultimately Bel and I clashed over it. It led to a guild split, where he and I led different guilds, and I had to set up the infrastructure we needed, while Bel had to manage and lead people the way I had been. In the course of less than a month, we went from at each other’s throats to trading tips via backchannels as we both ran our own guilds. When the next MMO came around, we wordlessly returned to a single guild.

In 2013, lightning struck with Final Fantasy XIV. We had been puttering around in different games, none of them fully satisfying, and often just sitting around in voice chat talking about nothing in particular, or going on about the games we’d been playing. Bel confided in me that he missed the LNR days of talking games and game design, and wanted to get that kind of feeling back. He had always been around and hanging out when I, an aspiring game dev, would go on and on about whatever I was thinking and riffing off of him and other people. He floated the idea of a podcast, something I didn’t feel comfortable with at the time (working on an MMO myself and being very touchy about losing my job). It was also the point at which we finally kicked that old AIM chatroom to the curb, and started to build Aggrochat properly. Bel and Ash were eager to move to something better, where we could bring in more people, and while we’ve always kept our group small and tight-knit, it’s been my home online for over a decade now.

In all of this, Bel was a constant voice in my life pushing back against my own insecurity and people who would try to cut me down. He would love to say that were were essentially the same person, just from different starting positions, and we would often find places we disagreed and trace back our thought processes until we found what he liked to call the “divergence point”, where he had zigged and I zagged from the same point. We found hundreds of such things, and it was why despite Bel’s searing distaste for both “finger-wigglers” (i.e. wizards) and “sneaky types” (i.e. rogues), which were my two primary class choices, he still would talk about how much he and I saw eye to eye from different mountaintops, in games and in life.

When I actually, finally released a game in 2014, Bel was there from the beta through launch and squeezed out every drop. He played more of that game than I did myself. He smiled through the bugs and told me about all of the stuff he’d seen that he loved, and got me through one of the hardest periods of my life, as “dream job” and “burnout” collided and I left the games industry. He understood, he got it, and he was pulling for me the whole time. He was the first person to clock that I was severely depressed and needed a change, and despite him being one of the most stable, unchanging people I had ever known, he helped me think through what needed to happen and what I needed to do. It is not exaggerating to say that Bel saved my life, helping me step outside myself before the spiral of depression became inescapable, and encouraging me to make moves and changes that strengthened my bonds with other people and helped me build a life outside of my work.

The Aggrochat podcast has been a fixture of my life for 12 years now, and Bel quietly hounded me to join it every single show from the beginning until I finally got past my worries and jumped in. Games have come and gone, and the games we have played separately now far outnumber the games we played together, but through over 500 episodes we have come together to talk about what we’re playing and what we’re thinking about, and every so often, when lightning strikes, we’re all in the same game together and feeling great about our time together.

There is a lot that could be said about the last year. Most of it Bel has said himself. Most of the rest, the parts only I can really say, aren’t super relevant right now, except that when Bel had his colonoscopy and discovered the cancer, one of the first things he did was reach out to me and tell me to get one. It was emblematic of his mindset– help others avoid what I’ve struggled with, let me tank for my friends. I almost didn’t want to tell him that mine had come back clean, not even polyps to remove, but when I did he was genuinely happy in a way that shattered me.

Losing Bel is not something I can encapsulate in a metaphor. It would be easier if I could. What I am put in mind of is him tanking through raids, and how when he went down in a fight he would immediately cheer the rest of the team on in his absence. He built communities intended to outlast him, and spent nearly two full decades being successful at it. When stress would spike for him, he would “turtle up” as he called it, going quiet for a while while he recharged. He understood, at some level, that he would not always be able to be around so he built things that could function without him, could move forward and grow in his absence.

I have had to sit with this thought for the last few days, struggling to articulate it beyond the simplest of forms, but where I’m landing is here: if there is anything I know of Bel, it’s that he would have been furious about all of this, that he left so much unfinished, that there are pieces for other people to pick up, that he hadn’t had the chance to get all of his ducks in a row and do his damndest to ensure that he could fade away without any disruption and, ideally, without anyone noticing. It was never going to happen, but it’s what he would have tried in vain to do. He would have wanted the things he’d had a hand in building to continue in his absence, to keep going without him and to grow beyond him. He would have wanted people to find each other, to come together, and to forget about him.

I will disrespect one of those wishes: I will not forget about Bel, and his passing will not go unmourned, even if I can hear “Ta-am, you don’t gotta DO that” in his voice in my head. The ache I will carry forward with me will remind me of the love I have for a person who was without equal, but it will be carried forward. The best way I can honor his memory is to continue with the things he had a hand in building, and to build more things in the way he would have.

Goodbye, Bel. I will make things in your memory.

Mapping in POE2 Kinda Sucks

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Good Morning, Friends. I apologize for not blogging, but this seventh round of chemotherapy has pretty well debilitated me in both mind and body, and I am honestly barely holding in there. I got them to add an extra week to recover, so I am hoping that will make the final round doable. The main problem is that I am never fully recovering from one round before the next one starts. Anyways since I have been stuck on the couch most of this time, I have been playing a lot of both Path of Exile II due to the new 0.5 league, and more recently a lot of Path of Exile 1 due to the Phrecia event. I think I have landed on some of the reasons why mapping just has never felt as good in POE2 as it does in POE1. So we are going to go on a journey where I rant a lot, but I will try my best not to go too far off the deep end.

Too Much Ground Clutter

The biggest problem I have with POE2 maps is that they have too much bullshit on the ground that clips and blocks your model from moving. For example, the above picture is from POE1 and has plenty of ground clutter, but none of it blocks your model from moving freely. I have no clue why GGG decided to fuck this up by making the smallest of stupid items on the ground clip your model and block your progress. It feels extremely bad to keep getting hung up on terrain and not understanding which tiny object is doing it.

No Agency in Map Choice

In Path of Exile, you have complete control over the maps you run. If there is a specific layout that you enjoy, you can literally run nothing but that map for your entire league. This was even improved further more recently as they added generic maps per tier that you can just run with whatever map layout you choose. In Path of Exile II, you instead have biomes and maps associated with those biomes, and if you want to path through an area, you have no control over what maps you end up running. This feels like a massive step backwards and a universally worse experience. I feel like they were trying to go with a delve-like experience, but delve only works because it is micro bursts of activity.

Maps are Roughly Twice as Big

This is something that I have noticed coming back to POE1… the maps on POE2 are just too damned large. They are roughly twice as big as your average POE1 map, and as a result just take too long to complete. You spend so much of your time searching for those last few rares, or last mechanics, that it kind of ruins the super chill head-down mapping experience. It would be different if that extra space meant extra fun, but so much of it is just filled with generic packs that don’t do anything but block your progress.

Variable Number of Portals

This is one of those things that I personally hate, but no clue if anyone else does. In Path of Exile, you have six portals per map. It feels like about the ideal number of attempts, and honestly makes me willing to try maps at greater difficulty because I know I have a safety net to fall back on if I die. Path of Exile II, however, reduces the number of portals you have based on how juicy you have rolled your map, with each affix removing a portal. So it creates this situation where you are either playing one of the immortal builds of the league, or you are running all of your maps on blue. You can look at POE.Ninja and see that every league tends to end up with the entire player base running a specific immortal build. Right now, 23% of the player base is essentially playing the exact same martial artist build, with 15% playing the same Spiritwalker build. 12% are playing gemling legionaire in a few different spell damage configurations, and 9% are playing Fubgun’s Deadeye build. So roughly 60% of players are playing builds that are either effectively immortal or have so much damage potential that they are. I can’t say this is due to the limited portals, but it certainly is not helping. You can exist on a janky build in POE1… that is not really a thing in POE2.

Failing a Boss Wipes Your Map

Another insult-to-injury aspect of POE2 mapping is that if you do a boss rush strategy and fail to kill the map boss, all content on the map will be wiped. No more rares, no more mechanics, just a bricked map that you are likely going to have to redo. My natural path through these dumb maps is to work around the corner until I find a boss, kill said boss, and then use the guidance that gets turned on to find the rest of the content. God forbid you end up with a tanky boss that gets a lucky slam against you… Oftentimes, because you are getting hung up on bullshit ground clutter, you end up with a bricked map. It just feels awful. Mapping is supposed to be this relatively chill activity, and Path of Exile II has mostly ruined that. It is better than it was, but it still feels awful.

Atlas Passive Tree Still Bad

One of the big changes that came with 0.5.0 is updates to the Atlas Passive tree, and I admit it is a massive improvement over the Passive Twigs that we had previously. The problem I have, though, is that it fails at being an Atlas Passive Tree and mostly only allows you to impact things that don’t really matter. In Path of Exile 1, we have three Atlas Passive Trees, and each of them more or less allows you to force three league mechanics onto every single map that you run. This is phenomenal for your average alch and go player, and allows them to target specific clusters of league mechanics that work well together. The equivalent of this in POE2 is tablets… which end up being ridiculously expensive. So the general investment required to run specific league mechanics goes through the roof. Who cares how many lockboxes or spirits you can force onto your map when you cannot reliably force a league mechanic through the passive skill tree?

All of these are reasons why mapping feels worse in Path of Exile II. Do I think this post will change anything? Not at all. There is a clear design space that they are working on at GGG for POE2, and I think it just isn’t what I wanted. I just hope they continue to support the original game, because really, it is the one that I enjoy. POE2 is generally something I mess around with when I am bored more than anything else. It just isn’t as good of a game as the original.

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Tequatl and Phrecia

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I am still playing a heck of a lot of Guild Wars 2. Last night I spent my evening doing sibling time with Ace, and I feel bad for how not into GW2 they are…. yet I continue to talk about it. I managed to catch Tequatl last night, which always makes me happy. This is, without a doubt, my favorite event in the game. I think it was legitimately one of the first events that I stumbled onto on my own, and I have loved it ever since. I have also had better-than-average luck at getting ascended gear. In fact, I have a few coffers in the bank waiting to be used by someone. At some point, I need to start properly working on legendary armor sets.

I, of course, had to set loose the Pineapple Choya. These are, without a doubt, the best parts of the Castoria housing, and I have to set them free anytime I am in housing collecting my harvest nodes. Basically, right now I am only playing Belgraves, my hunter, for dailies and assorted reset collection. I have my housing, then three guild halls to collect resources from. Additionally, I have a bunch of characters parked at various chests around the world. These are mostly for collecting rare resources that can only be gotten daily. The level of detail in this game and the systems within systems is one of the things that attracts me. However, in talking with Ace, one of the biggest problems is how far behind you feel when you are just starting out.

I’ve been spending most of my time on Belglorian, my spearbender guardian. At this point, I have completed four of the Human zones, four of the Norn zones, and last night I spent the majority of my time doing world completion. I am currently working on the final Norn zone, and at some point will return to the Human lands and pick up the final zone there. This is still the chillest activity in any game, I swear. There is just something relaxing about following the marker to all of the objectives that I have not completed. I think I am over halfway through the zone I am working on.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have now made it far enough to collect the free passive skill that comes from a player having sacrificed their level 100 character to the void. I really think this concept is cool, that one player in each league can sacrifice themselves to give everyone an extra passive. I have been grinding away on my Raven RF Witch, trying to get it to level 90 and knock out one of the achievements. The build works well enough, but is nowhere near as broken as some of the other popular builds in this league. I had to drop one of my minions, which was a bit of a bummer, but I picked up Morior Invictus to greatly increase my survivability. It is unfortunate that this one chest piece is better than pretty much anything else in the game.

All of this said, I am very likely dropping POE2 entirely tomorrow when the Trial of the Ancestors Returns event happens in Path of Exile. The big thing about this event is that we get back Trial of the Ancestors, but with the Phrecia ascendancies. The big thing about it is that we are getting these alternate ascendancies without the bullshit that is the Gauntlet, and without the Idol-based Atlas passives. I played a Poison SRS build on the Servant of Arakali build during the gauntlet and had a lot more fun, but would have had way more fun if I could have just played it in a normal league. As a result, I am resurrecting BelLovesArakaali and seeing how far I can take it without all of the restrictions. The event starts at 5 pm CDT, and I am hoping I can get back from chemo, take a nap, and be ready for the launch.

Have you made a return to Guild Wars 2? Are you still playing Path of Exile II? Are you going to try the upcoming Phrecia event tomorrow? Drop me a line below.

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Mixtape Mondays: Jangly Bits

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Good Morning, Folks! If you have not been around this blog for long, one of the things that you have to know is that mixtapes are really important to me. I have spent large swaths of my life creating carefully curated lists of songs for the purpose of creating an experience greater than the parts. I used to do this for individual friends and paramores while growing up, and now I release my madness out into the greater internet. I am truly uncertain if anyone appreciates this nonsense, but it makes me happy, and I legitimately listen to my own Mixtapes on the regular. So I guess at the end of the day I am doing it for myself as much as I am doing it for you all. If this is your first outing, you can find the other 31 Mixtapes that I have created to date over on the archive.

32 – Jangly Bits

This particular brand of madness dominated my mind one night and would not let me sleep until I had assembled what you see before me. Essentially, it started with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Jars of Clay, and then attempting to craft something that thematically matched that level of melancholy. The only regret that I have with this mix is the fact that there is a whole-assed Cracker album that none of the streaming services have. So I had to choose an alternate song, but in truth, it worked out well because it became the perfect last track. I spent a lot of time listening to this music, especially in late high school, and as a result, I am sharing yet another fragment of my soul with you all. Jars of Clay is a Christian band, which is a thing you are not likely to see often among my mixes, but Flood broke into the mainstream. I once went to a Jars of Clay concert expecting it to be normal, but there were folks in the aisles doing the “celestial benchpress” as a friend calls it, raising their hands to the sky with eyes closed. Side note… I am agnostic. I appreciate the role faith has in people’s lives, but I chose to remain unaligned.

Track List

  • 01 – Flood – Jars of Clay
  • 02 – Promises Broken – Soul Asylum
  • 03 – Come Back Down – Toad the Wet Sprocket
  • 04 – Mr. Jones – Counting Crows
  • 05 – Bittersweet – Big Head Todd and the Monsters
  • 06 – My Sister – The Juliana Hatfield Trio
  • 07 – Allison Road – Gin Blossoms
  • 08 – Selling the Drama – Live
  • 09 – Man On The Moon – R.E.M.
  • 10 – Noah’s Dove – 10,000 Maniacs
  • 11 – Wonderful – Everclear
  • 12 – Somewhere Out There – Our Lady Peace
  • 13 – Best I Ever Had – Vertical Horizon
  • 14 – The Old Apartment – Barenaked Ladies
  • 15 – Sick of Goodbyes – Cracker

Listen to it yourself

Well, folks, that is another mixtape added to the archive. I did not honestly expect to keep doing this thing, as my brain aligns with new mixes, I post them. This one in particular means quite a bit to me, because the music is deeply personal. Trivia… not sure if you have realized, but I specifically never use the same song twice. Often during the process, I add a bunch of tracks and then weed them out, and my brain attempted to reuse three songs while creating this mix. I just hope there is someone out there who appreciates this nonsense.

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