Month: February 2016

Modding Tamriel

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Struggling to Record

Last night was one of the worst ideas I have had in awhile.  I am still extremely sick, and for the most part don’t really have a proper speaking voice.  The problem being, that Saturday night is the night we record AggroChat.  This seemed to be an off week for most people.  Grace was busy, and Ashgar was being worked to death in the “on call” rotation.  The smart and adult thing to do would have been to simply apologize to our listeners and take a week off.  However I am hopelessly chained to this notion of not missing an episode… either in my daily blog posts or weekly podacsts.  I guess there is a part of me that is afraid that if I ever go by without making a post, that all of this will fall apart.   That people will go their own separate ways and whatever thing we have called AggroChat will just cease to exist.  I mean I am deathly afraid that if I miss a day of posting on this blog… that day will turn into six months before I start posting again.  So there was what I should have done…. and then what I did.  The end result is me today not really being able to talk, and afraid that I won’t be magically better by tomorrow morning for work.

The show itself went pretty well, I just felt like I struggled to try and maintain a voice that could actually be heard and understood.  Quite literally I sound like I am going through puberty, where my voice cracks and squeaks at uncontrollable times.  My vocal cords I guess have been ravaged by the congestion and the constant coughing.  To make matters worse yesterday my eyes started watering uncontrollably and are all bloodshot.  Basically I feel horrible, and will probably end up taking a sick day Monday as a result.  The worst part has been trying to get any rest in this state.  I’m taking NyQuil but it doesn’t seem to actually do much.  My night felt like it was perforated by getting up every hour on the hour to readjust myself.  I am hoping after staying up all day today I will be tired enough that I just simply collapse tonight and don’t much care what position happens to be comfortable.  I realize this is just a cold…. but my god is it one of the worst ones I have had.  I swear I have had the honest to god Flu and it has effected me less annoyingly.

Questing Auridon

Modding Tamriel

It wouldn’t be me if I went too terribly long without adding some interface addons into Elder Scrolls Online.  Right now I have Dustman, a mod that auto sells junk items and allows you to auto sell other items that you don’t really want, which is one of those things that I end up trying to find in any game I play.  I also have Lore Books and Skyshards that simply mark the location of any books or shards that you have yet to collect.  I also found a really cool mod called Undiscovered which marks areas that have some sort of a POI that you have yet to visit, which makes completing maps much easier.  The best of the mods however is the Minimap I am using which is ultimately something I complained about not having back in early testing.  I love the compass rose, but it doesn’t really replace the minimap… and I found myself spending too much time with my map open when I lacked the minimap.  Having this makes the overall experience of moving around the world so much more enjoyable for me, because quite frankly….  I have gotten used to always being able to see that top down view.  The only negatives are that most of the really awesome interface mods that I ran during the first days of the game…. seem to be long gone.  I guess I should probably check the non-curse sites just to make sure that they might not be still lurking out there.  I realize that I am essentially “Wow-ifying”  Elder Scrolls by adding these mods in…. but quite frankly I don’t care.  It makes my experience more enjoyable.

Modding Tamriel

The biggest improvement so far is that the Veteran system was replaced by the Champion system, and it finally feels like I am making forward momentum again.  I like that doing a few things here and there ends up earning me a point that I can spend on improving my character.  It also feels like they have put some serious polish in place, because in playing Friday night and most of the day yesterday… I really didn’t encounter any bugs.  All of the deeply scripted events went off without a hitch, and while I had gotten used to having to log in and out to get things to trigger during those first days of the game…. all of that seems to be a thing of the past.  The other really positive thing is that the community seems to be pretty cool.  I’ve gotten a lot of impromptu help, or folks asking if I wanted to join in for this world boss or that anchor.  I’ve not really seen anything that made me cringe, which is a huge plus given that there were plenty of cringe worthy happenings during those first months.  I am not sure how long I will remain playing the game, but I gotta say I am enjoying myself….  which is huge given the funk I have been in lately of not really knowing what to play.

 

 

 

AggroChat #94 – Chicken Horse Grand Prix

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Tonight Kodra, Tam, Thalen and a very sick Bel talk about Pax South, Magic Grand Prix, Warframe, Destiny, Final Fantasy Explorers and a bunch of other stuff!

AggroChat94_720

Tonight was a bit of a struggle to record.  Going to leave this as a disclaimer that Belghast is pretty sick, and somehow managed to come home with the Pax Pox from Pax South.  As a result there are several points during the show where his voice kinda falls apart.  Additionally we are down a handful of people this week, with Grace being busy and Ashgar being worked to death on call this weekend.  In any case Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen talk about a bunch of stuff, namely Pax South,  the Vancouver Magic Grand Prix, and MMOFPS Progression contrasting Destiny and Warframe.

Topics Discussed

  • Pax South 2016
    • Pax Pox
    • Ultimate Chicken Horse
    • Code Names
    • Pushfight
  • Grand Prix Vancouver
    • Magic the Gathering
    • Oath of the Gateswatch
    • My Little Pony Card Game
    • Hearthstone Format Changes
  • MMO FPS Progression
    • Destiny
    • Warframe
    • Defiance
    • Third Person Point of View
  • Final Fantasy Explorers
  • Elder Scrolls Online Revisited

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Tamriel Revisted

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Point Click

Yesterday I kept being reminded by co-workers of just how horrible I sounded, so after I finished with my critical meetings I took off and headed home around 12:30.  After eating a hastily grabbed lunch of convenience store pizza…  I collapsed on the sofa trying to force fluids while finding something comforting to watch.  I guess my version of comforting is a little different than most people, because I wound up watching the entire first season run of Rick and Morty.  Granted I have watched a lot of this show, but it turns out there were a handful of episodes that I missed when they originally aired.  Whatever this thing is that I caught down south, it is very much kicking my ass.  Blogging has been a real struggle because it is very difficult to string thoughts together into enough of a cohesive mass to make into a blog post.  It is my will along that I am committing fingers to keyboard and producing words… because I simply do not want the streak to stop.  I am a couple of months away from my official three year anniversary on the whole daily blogging thing, and the seventh anniversary of my blog.  So until I hit that at the very least, I will keep up doing the daily thing even if I have to struggle to make words happen.

Lately my crutch while sick has been Diablo 3, but I feel like I am running out of things I care to do right now.  I’ve gotten the seasonal rewards, but more than anything I am farming content in the hopes of getting the last few items I need to drop for the build I am working towards.  Clearing regular rifts and doing bounties is the sort of mindless interaction that works well when I am sick, but I am quickly reaching the point where I am questioning why I am bothering?  The other side mission has been to gear my monk, but once I found out from several folks that you only get one set of gear per season…. a lot of my gusto was lost.  I thought I would be able to go kill the bosses I needed to get my first set of gear, on my second character and be up and running and clearing content pretty quickly.  Alas that is very much not the case, and my best option is to ride along with Rae who is regularly clearing TX stuff… but honestly after being able to participate, going back to just having to pray to stay alive…  makes it pretty uninteresting.  Yesterday my big problem was the fact that I had a very needy game install going on in the background, that kept slowing down my teleportation to the point that the battle.net would disconnect me before actually ending up in zone with Rae.

Worst Install

Tamriel Revisted

On a whim yesterday afternoon around 1 pm, I started installing The Elder Scrolls Online.  I guess I had forgotten just how painful the install process was, because it took until roughly 8 pm for it to finally complete.  During the last hour of that time I was pretty much unable to play anything else on my laptop.  The thing is… I have installed much larger games in far less time…. so I have to fault the launcher for just how painfully slow it was going.  I mean I say this as someone who was installing to a laptop that is using a AC Wireless card capable of 650 MB connection on a total internet connection that generally runs around 150 MB down.  I should have been able to completely saturate my pipe and had this game down in short order… but it took quite literally 7 hours to finally get installed.  Now for a good chunk of that time I was still playing Diablo 3 so that could have been slowing things down…  but the total download was tortuously slow.  The last hour or so it was thrashing my hard drive badly enough that I really could not do anything else functional on the machine, so I wound up mostly fiddling around on my phone while watching television.  The problem with ESO was that I honestly can’t remember why we stopped playing, other than the fact that one by one we just stopped until I was one of the last four or so people still active.  For me I guess the Veteran game system was so bloody boring because it felt like I was no longer making reasonable process.  I made it roughly two zones into the Aldmeri campaign, when finally my desire to keep playing petered out.

I guess recently I had been curious about what was going on in game, and they have done a few high profile DLC releases.  So around 8:30 last night I finally was able to log in and poke around.  Firstly I have to say I guess playing this game for roughly two years in testing…  means that I have some serious muscle memory going on.  While I had to reset all of my talent points, I can still for the most part remember exactly how I played it.  All of the little things like dodging, and blocking attacks…  came back without any effort and before long I was up and running and questing again.  I feel like maybe this is the speed of game that I need right now.  What I am struggling the most with in my current state is interacting with other human beings.  I have been pretty much oblivious to twitter and slack since coming back from Pax South, and as a result I am kinda cocooning in my own little world again.  Much like SWTOR…. ESO was a great single player game…  and as a result I found myself really enjoying questing around last night.  That is of course until the nyquil kicked in and I simply couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer.  I figure I will put in some more time today playing and maybe talk a bit about my experiences on AggroChat tonight.  That is of course if I have any voice left.  Right now my voice is pretty damned squeaky so I am thinking we might have to rely on someone else to do the bulk of the talking this evening.

 

 

It’s Okay To Be Good At Things

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So many people I know are loathe to talk about themselves, particularly about things they’re good at. They will hasten to deflect compliments and deny endorsements like they’re warding off demons, lest even accepting praise mark them as a braggart, that most terrible of labels. We’ve accepted this as standard, even praised it as “humility”, without realizing that our underestimation of ourselves limits both us and the people around us.

It’s Okay To Be Good At Things

I’ve seen people oscillate between wanting to be recognized for their achievements and not wanting to call attention to themselves, even when it’s warranted. I’ve seen people overlook other people because they don’t realize what their skills are. I’ve known people for years without realizing what they’re capable of, because we’re so trained to avoid talking about ourselves.

When we see people who do talk about themselves, and we see their success, we’re often resentful. I’ve been there, and silently raged at someone whose self-aggrandizement got them attention and praise while my silent, hard work went ignored.

We can’t know what everyone around us is good at, unless we see them at it or they tell us. By extension, everyone around us can’t know what we’re good at unless we tell them. It’s not just okay, but important that people know what we’re good at, because that helps us all solve problems more efficiently and effectively. Communication is important, quite possibly the most important thing, and part of that communication is allowing others the opportunity to know what we can be relied upon to do.

I poured a ton of work into perfecting a prototype at one point, submitted it to my boss, and proceeded to have it ignored for years. I didn’t want to come off as arrogant or pushy, so I left my initial pitch and left it without further comment. This frustrated me, and festered, and when, years later, I was told that I should demonstrate building something unique and interesting, I was livid– I’d done exactly that and was completely ignored. In not communicating this thing that I had done and done well, I had simultaneously absolved myself of responsibility for recognizing it.

Here’s the thing: no one knew that prototype better than I did. No one knew that it had survived, stable and without problems, through more than a hundred codebase iterations. No one knew that it was implementable from scratch in less than an hour, and was modular enough that every implementation could easily be unique. All of these things were valuable, but in expecting other people to notice the work that I’d done, in being “humble” about my work and not self-promoting, I had pushed the responsibility for recognizing the strengths of my work on people who weren’t in a position to realize them.

A few friends of mine, after reading my post on Impostor Syndrome, suggested that impostor syndrome could be called “humility” elsewhere, and implied that it was a good thing to be, as one person put it, “realistic about your shortcomings”. I don’t disagree that being realistic about one’s own shortcomings is valuable, but recognizing shortcomings without also recognizing one’s strengths is very problematic. It dooms us to laboring unseen and unrecognized, and to resent those around us for not magically realizing how awesome we are. It can be very damaging, as that lack of external recognition (through a simple lack of knowledge) turns inward, making us disbelieve our own skills and making us worse at what we do.

It doesn’t take a lot to find scientific studies that support that we are capable of much more when we believe ourselves capable, and much less when we don’t. When we put ourselves in a downward spiral, where we don’t believe in our own skills, we actually get worse at those skills. When we believe in our skills, we measurably become better at them. It’s why positive feedback is vitally important for any manager, and why specific recognition is crucial. Those things fuel a fire of productivity and capability for us, but we need to start that fire with a spark. That spark is communication– letting people know that there is ample space and material to start a fire.

It’s okay to be good at things. Everyone I know is good at things, and many of them know it, even if they refuse to admit it. Accepting that you’re good at something is a key step in becoming great at them.