Month: May 2015

The Wayward Blogger

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Tyranny of a Blank Page

nbimmogames-666x271 Early in the week I had this idea of what I was going to write about for Storytime Saturday, and it was something good.  The problem is as Saturday has now happened I cannot for the life of me remember what it was that I wanted to write about.  Jaedia says this is why she keeps notes…  but I ultimately fail at doing that.  I have literally hundreds of “Untitled” Google documents with only a few sentences in them, so note taking is not exactly my strong suit.  Actually the problem isn’t the notes themselves but the organization.  Some people can neatly compartmentalize their lives into subjects and categories and then there are people like me that are shocked and amazed if anything goes as planned… because we are constantly rewriting that plan as we go along.  This is the point where I admit that I really have no prep work for my blog.

This is a curse and a blessing both depending on the day.  As I could not think of anything to write about this morning it was a curse.  The fact that I could start banging away on my keys and make something work as I went along…  is the blessing.  As writers we have to find whatever it is that works for us.  I’ve always tended to be one of those “rough outline” people, that I need a sketch of a roadmap…  but then prefer to fill in the details as I go allowing myself to be flexible and adjust to change as it happens.  The irony of this… is that I am pretty damned adaptable, but I still end up hating change in most forms.  I guess when you choose to life your life is a state of loosely organized chaos, you learn to really respect the parts of your life that you can commit to routine.  Those are the stable base that you build your ever changing life upon, so when one of those things changes you notice it.

The Wayward Blogger

One of the things I took special time to point out yesterday in all of my NBI 2015 announcements… was that we are also looking for what I termed the “Wayward Blogger”.  I guess this hits home for me especially because still deep within my core I am one of you.  I was a Wayward blogger for years, with weeks where I was extremely active, and month long pauses in activity.  If I could do this whole blogging daily thing naturally then I wouldn’t need to challenge myself by calling it the “Grand Experiment” and keeping track of each and every day  that goes by where I didn’t break the streak.  If you look through my blogs history you will find several six or seven month lapses in posting, and today during Storytime Saturday I guess I want to address those.  Not necessarily why the lapses happened but what my mental state was like during each.

The problem with a blog is when it starts to get popular you feel like you are forced to produce content.  The irony of doing the blogging every day thing, is that in many ways it is a gimmick.  When you are producing that much content people are generally forgiving on your off days.  Not every single post I make is meaningful or important, and some of them are going to flat out honestly suck.  I’ve talked about the “permission to suck” before, but it is even more than just this.  When you are blogging infrequently you feel like you have to write gold every single time you set your fingers to your keyboard.  This pressure is overwhelming sometimes and each day that passes gets internalized as another rung higher your subsequent post has to be to make up for the fact that it has been six months.

Permission to be Boring

I have no stats on this, but this is something I have heard from each and every other person that has gone dormant.  That they don’t blog because they feel like they simply don’t have anything to say that is worthy of that “triumphant return” post.  This is the instinct we have to figure out how to subvert if we are going to be happy bloggers.  Like the permission to suck when you are just starting out, you have to give yourself the permission to be boring on occasion.  Writing a “return” post is often like ripping off a band aid.  You need to get it over with quickly so you can get on with the normal business of writing posts.  The thing you have to realize is that for most readers your blog has been shuffled into a RSS Reader along with the rest of the people that they follow.  They will notice when you come back, but no one is actually there waiting every single day for that “epic post” you have built up in your head.

Ultimately if anyone is going to read a blog for any length of time, there is a transition that happens.  You stop caring so much about what is being written and begin to focus on the person behind the screen.  Those people, the ones that have transitioned to caring about you as a human being…  they will always be there when you return to welcome you with open arms.  The other folks who were only there when you were producing that thing they desired on that specific moment…  they will always be fickle and aren’t really worth the heartache and frustration.  You need to ask yourself what exactly do you want to write about and then focus on doing just that.  So many of us started our blogs as one thing, and then realized whatever that “one” thing was no longer sustainable.  We then transitioned into writing about the things that made us happy, and have kept going because of whatever that “thing” was.

I Am Proof

Essentially I offer myself as proof that you too can be a pillar of stability in the community.  I was quite possibly one of the least prolific bloggers, with some pretty massive absences.  The longest one that I can remember was the seven months that passed between the last blog post and me rededicating myself to doing the daily blogging experiment.  Each time I felt like a complete failure for letting the blog posts stop.  Each time I beat myself up for not being able to crank out content when I “wasn’t feeling it”.  Each time I could not get the desire that I should be writing something out of my head, and ultimately this small amount of madness lead me to put fingers to keyboard again and start writing.  Now is when I let you in on a little secret…  that inner doubt, the bit of you that tells you not to post.  That never actually goes away.  Most mornings I have to hold my breath and close my eyes… and press the publish button, because the inner voice inside me is constantly telling me that whatever I am doing simply isn’t good enough.

I was and still am in many ways a Wayward Blogger, I am just learning how to overcome those instincts and force myself to perform.  I don’t know what I am doing most days, and in truth I don’t even have a clue.  I just keep moving forward and adapting to whatever happens, coming up with things on the fly as I push forward.  If I can do this…  quite literally anyone can.  I am possibly the least qualified person to be doing what I am doing on a daily basis, yet I keep finding a way to make it happen.  You are significantly more talented than I am, and will go on and make more magic than I could ever dream of.  You simply have to push yourself to do it.  Prove it to yourself, prove it to the community… that you can be our next shining star.  The support is there, you just need to make it happen by finding what it is that you love talking about, and start writing.  My hope this Newbie Blogger Initiative is not so much that we get this massive crop of new bloggers, but that instead we find a way to rekindle the fires of bloggers that have long gone dormant.  If I can do this so can you.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
The Wayward Blogger

Degenerative Strategy

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I really, really loved The Secret World for a long time. My close group and I blasted through that game together, loving every second as we worked our way up through the areas and got new, better skills. I’m still of the opinion that some of the best atmosphere and best storytelling (covering the entire spectrum of ways to tell a story) can be found in TSW.

I stopped playing in an abject, frothing ragequit. Today I’d like to talk about degenerative strategy.

When playing a game, especially a complex one, you make decisions. Broadly speaking, the decisions you make in the moment– where and when to move, when to attack, what spells to cast and when– those are tactics. The decisions you make in the planning phase– what movement abilities you’re using, what weapons you have equipped, what spells you have prepared– those are strategy. This is something of a simplification, but it’s not terribly inaccurate, either.

When I played TSW, I focused heavily on the Blood Magic healing tree, and was my party’s healer. Through most of the dungeons, I used blood magic to keep the group alive and continued investing in the tree. Thematically, it was a great choice, and one I enjoyed a lot. As we reached more and more difficult content, notably the hard-mode dungeons at the endgame, I found myself brutally struggling to keep up and keep everyone alive. It became stressful, and I started to get burned out.

At the same time, some of my group was starting to feel like their choices (particularly: to play melee) were getting unduly punished in the higher-end content. At one point, Kodra, having saved up some unused skill points, dumped a handful into the Claws healing tree, a different healing tree that I previously hadn’t touched, because it wasn’t really the theme I wanted.

Instantly, he was a better healer than I was. With less than a tenth of the investment I’d put into my strategy and no practice, he’d exceeded the capabilities I’d honed over my character’s entire progression. The choice for me became clear: play a Claws-based healer, or don’t heal. Blood Magic was simply not good enough. I took a third path: quit the game in disgust. I had invested a lot into the theme of the character, putting together a specific look and an entire concept based around being a blood mage. The endgame for TSW wasn’t worth sacrificing that to use a strategy I didn’t enjoy.

I refer to that as an example of a degenerative strategy. A degenerative strategy is a strategy that, for one reason or another, limits the effective choices you can make. You are either playing that strategy, a strategy that can directly counter that strategy, or you are losing. It’s degenerative if other choices exist, but are so far behind in effectiveness that they are no longer competitive options. As players discover the strategy, the viable options for the playerbase as a whole diminish; the strategic playing field degenerates into a small number of “correct” choices and a rather larger number of bad choices.

World of Warcraft’s old talent tree system created degenerative strategies. There was at least one “correct” build for every class, and even when there were multiple build options in a given class, the actual distribution of talent points in that build had an incredibly small amount of variance. If you were playing optimally, and had a build that allowed you to choose which set of talents you wanted, it was because you only needed to spend points in that tier and the actual distribution didn’t matter, generally because none of the talents were any good.

If there is a “right” way to play that excessively limits other options that appear on the surface to be viable, that is a sign of a degenerative strategy. If there is only one correct choice, there shouldn’t be a choice. It’s really important to note that this doesn’t mean that every choice you can make in a game has to be viable, if the game design itself isn’t trying to support that choice. As an example, in FFXIV, you cannot functionally form a group that lacks a tank, a healer, and some DPS in content that is relevant to you (if you far exceed the intended power level of the content, you can largely do whatever you like). This is a design choice, and it’s reinforced at every stage of the game. It’s not a degenerative strategy because the game doesn’t suggest that any other choices are intended or supported.

On the other hand, claw-based healing in TSW was a degenerative strategy, because it was so much better than the other healing trees that (at the time) there was no other viable option. As your understanding and skill at the game increased, and you sought to play as best you possibly could, you would have to move away from options like blood magic in order to play the more powerful, more effective, and thus more optimal claws build. Blood magic still *appeared* to be a supported option, but in practice it wasn’t effective and was, in essence, a “trap” build.

Game balance is a touchy thing, and is honestly not as relevant as people might expect. It’s less important that everything be equally balanced against one another and more important that degenerative strategies don’t exist. Certain games offer options that are very high-risk, high-reward, where a high degree of skill lets you outperform other options, but low-skill players will lag significantly behind less risky options. Perfectly optimal play would suggest that everyone should play the high-risk high-reward options, but in reality this isn’t that necessary, because balance is achieved through the demands of player skill.

When players get upset about game balance, it’s often paired with a claim that “everyone should just play X”, which is an implied suggestion that X is a degenerative strategy. Most of the time, this isn’t the case, but it’s very important that a game designer keep an eye out to see if a particular strategy is degenerative or not. It’s usually important to leave the strategy in place for a certain amount of time to see if it actually *is* degenerative– it takes time for the strategic geography of the game to degenerate, and a strategy with a functional, accessible counter is not degenerative.

In general, a good way to determine if a game is struggling with degenerative strategies is to look at how the game is played at the highest tiers of play– the most competitive, most optimal players– and see if there is a downward spread of those players’ choices to lower tiers of play over time; essentially, is the strategy causing degeneration in the game? If the highest tiers of players are making the same (small number) of choices out of a (much larger) selection, it’s a good indicator of a degenerative strategy.

Frost Mages, waaaaaaaay over to the left.

Fixing this problem is difficult. A direct nerf (reduction in power/effectiveness) of the degenerative strategy isn’t necessarily the way to go. If Claws had been nerfed to the functional level of Blood Magic, it would have been impossibly punishing to heal at the higher tiers of content in TSW. Sometimes, bringing the noncompetitive options up to par with the degenerative strategy evens the playing field and stabilizes the available strategies. Sometimes, introducing a new element to the game that shakes up the geography simply by existing can shake loose degenerative strategies and stabilize things.

One of the places I’ve seen this done very elegantly is in League of Legends. Oftentimes, a new champion will also bring other, older and less-used champions to the fore. The new champion may work very well with the older champions, or the older champions may be a strong counter to the new champion that is otherwise very powerful. The new champion may simply be very good at shutting down the existing dominant strategies, forcing new ones to be formed. It’s not a perfect process by any means, but it’s a very elegant one.

The main thing to remember is that fixing degenerative strategies is EXTREMELY difficult, and is a slow process. Discovering and refining a degenerative strategy takes time, and allowing it to take root and then watching to see if acceptable counter-strategies arise takes even more time. Since the changes required to fix the issue are generally not subtle, it’s important to be sure to collect enough information to correct it properly. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it is very, very hard. Games have rewritten their entire ruleset, sometimes multiple times, just to hammer out degenerative strategies.



Source: Digital Initiative
Degenerative Strategy

Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015

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It’s That Time Again!

nbi-blog-logo Well folks it is once again May the First and as such time for us to begin the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  For those that are unfamiliar with this program, I thought I would take a few minutes this morning and talk about what exactly it is and what you can expect from it over the coming month.  May is essentially the month that bloggers set aside to helping create more bloggers.  In order to do what we do we need a thriving community to live in, and this is our version of a neighborhood block party.  I once referred to NBI as the BlizzCon of the gaming blogosphere, because really this is the event I look forward to each year.  It is exciting seeing all of the new faces filtered into our world, and seeing others rededicate themselves to creating more frequent content.  Others of us just enjoy helping folks out to get their start with whatever projects they are wanting to do.

For New Bloggers

If you have ever thought about creating a blog, a podcast, or a youtube channel this event is solely centered around you.  For years we have heard that “blogging” is dead but the fact that I have over five hundred active blogs in my feedly account would disagree.  Each time I go to read through my gaming blogs it is like drinking from a firehose.  I love this and I love the fact that there is so much creativity packed into this community.  However in order to keep this a vibrant and fresh community we keep needing to infuse it with some new blood and new ideas.  One of the most difficult parts about starting any new venture is getting an audience.  It can be frustrating to feel like you are writing into the void, and in part the Newbie Blogger Initiative is here to give you what you need most…  exposure.

During this month the gaming blogosphere turns its eyes to the Newbie Blogger Initiative and by choosing to start a blog during this month we are essentially hand delivering you readers.  Now of course starting the blog is the easy part, creating regular and creative content is the challenge.  Throughout the month veteran bloggers will be giving you tips and tricks that we have to help ease your transition.  This has always been a very blogging centric event, but we want to embrace all gaming content.  There have been quite the number of new podcasts spawned out of this event and the connections with other bloggers, as well as a few folks dipping their toes into video creation.  Essentially the sky is the limit on what you can do, but you have to start someplace and we are here to help.

For Veteran Bloggers

While all of this love is getting thrown around on the new bloggers, it is  really the Veteran bloggers that make up the backbone of this initiative.  We need you, your ideas and your wisdom.  Blogging is rough, and getting up and doing this on a daily basis means we need some tools to be able to lean on.  Each of you started out as a fledgling blogger at one point or another, and many of you got a massive boost by the Newbie Blogger Initiative in the past.  Now is the time for us to step up and help the next generation to become the awesome bloggers of tomorrow.  Many times these new bloggers just need someone to talk to and bounce their ideas off.  I personally am always open to new blogger queries and during the course of this event I will end up trying to make a personal connection with as many of the new folks as I can.

What we need more than anything however is for you to keep making awesome content.  Let the bloggers know what works for you, what you have figured out doesn’t work, and general ideas about how to make a blog successful.  I’ve talked about a lot of topics in the  past, and there are a few of them I end up dusting off almost every year.  More than anything we need you showing that this is an achievable goal, and that given dedication you can succeed.  Each of us has tricks that we use to keep us going, and at the end of the day someone starting this is going to need a big bag of tricks to lean on.  Channel your gifts in whatever direction you feel best be it with writing prompts, tutorials or lessons learned, but whatever they might be we need you to make this work.  There are already folks signed up on the forums waiting for us to find them, so I suggest you sign up as mentor today.

For Wayward Bloggers

Now especially I want to address a special kind of blogger this year that I might not have in the past.  Have you lost your way blogging, and somehow lost the will to put pen to paper and create new content?  While I am generally thought of as this prolific daily blogger, there are some pretty massive lapses in my blogging history.  I recently celebrated my second anniversary of making posts every single day…  but prior to starting that there was a seven month lag in my blog.  It is easy to “fall off the wagon” for lack of a better term.  Life gets in the way and your font of inspiration dries up…  then the longer you wait to make a post the more pressure you put yourself under about making said post.  We are our own worst enemies, and as the months tick you suddenly realize you are no longer really a blogger.

Newbie Blogger Initiative is also the perfect time of the year for you to get active once again.  Sometimes we start down a path that doesn’t end up as sustainable for our interests, and other times life just simply throws us a curve ball.  In any case I urge you to take this month to get back into blogging.  We are here and waiting to help you with whatever you might need to tweak on your blog to make it sustainable.  We are also waiting with a ready audience to consume your brand new and shiny content.  Each year we lose a number of bloggers to life, and I am hoping to help resurrect some of them and get them making content once more.  The Newbie Blogger Initiative is so much more than just a launch pad for new blogs.  It can be the vitalization of our community every single year, giving us a new perspective to carry us through the next year.  If you want to come back to blogging regularly, we are waiting for you.

#NBI2015



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015

A Wednesday Afternoon Post

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I normally write these entries relatively late at night, as a way of processing my thoughts about each day, then schedule them to post early in the morning the following day.

Today, as a bit of a departure, I wanted to try writing a post in the afternoon, to see how it changed my outlook.

I’m a big fan of breaking from habit and trying different approaches to things, because I feel like it’s very easy to get into a rut and just do the same thing over and over again. I like to think that continually breaking the habits I fall into lets me reform them in ways that work better for me, and keeps me aware of the various mental loops I sometimes get stuck in.

It’s been suggested to me that my anti-habit mindset is indicative of discontent– that I try to change things because I’m not happy with how they are. I don’t necessarily think that’s wrong, and I think that analyzing my own habits as well as how and why they form lets me find out what I’m unhappy about and why.

I read the above book recently, and found the first section of it extremely interesting. It talks about how we form habits and how we can change them.

This blog itself is me attempting to rewire my own habits– I’m notoriously bad about doing anything on a daily basis (see above, about me being anti-habit), and I used the book’s concepts and suggestions to flip around my own habits so that I could start blogging five days a week.

It’s been an interesting ride thus far; I’ve blogged every day for about a month and I’ve found it relatively easy to do. I have missed some days, but I generally find I have something to say each day.

I will say that I don’t think I’ll be writing and posting at this time in the afternoon in future– my thoughts are scattered and I’m a little too distracted by the lovely day outside. Something about it being dark outside focuses me and helps me hone in on a topic, whereas I feel like this post is a little all over the place (certainly my mind is).



Source: Digital Initiative
A Wednesday Afternoon Post