This week of Blapril is a week about introducing yourself to the community and letting us know interesting things about you. I more or less have been dodging this bullet because I am not sure if there is anything left that is interesting to tell about me. However on this the 11th anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog, I am going to talk a bit about myself and its origins. This was in no way planned when I laid out the week structure of this event, and quite honestly until this morning I had completely forgotten that it was my anniversary. Sure I have it marked on the Calendar… but my Google Calendar and not the one I use for work purposes. In the past I have had my act together and commissioned artwork from my good friend Ammo to mark this event, but in the time of pandemic I clearly do not have my act together.
Once upon a time in another life, I was a forum troll. I mean that in the best possible version of that term, because I was not disruptive other than complaining when someone got what I considered to be an unfair ban on the blizzard forums. Some of my earliest memories were making epic long form posts on various game forums. That was sorta my shtick, I would squeeze all of my thoughts about something in a big chunk of prose and unceremoniously place it on a forum that could not care less about my thoughts and feelings. The various guilds I was part of also had extremely active forums, and I too would post a running commentary of events there. This more or less stayed the same until the beginning of this blog, but I will get to that.
In March of 2005 blogging was all of the rage among some of my friends, and it was more or less spread out between three sites: Blogger, Xanga and Live Journal. All three of which are shockingly still in business, because I was almost certain that surely something called Xanga would have died by now. Given that I was very much a google early adopter, I started writing a deeply personal blog on Blogger, and sharing it with only a handful of really close friends. This is a blog that I hope never sees the light of day because everything on it is super cringe worthy. Among various things it chronicled my experiences learning how to RV and being thrust into that world when suddenly my wife decided that we needed to buy one. My wife has a habit of making random decisions like that when we are forced to go through traumatic events. We bought our house in part due to the fact that her childhood home burnt down for example.
The RV thing was a reaction of wanting to be closer with family after the suicide of our nephew. This is also why I played a Hunter as a main in World of Warcraft, because this event happened shortly after the launch of the game and knocked me completely out of reality for a good two months, at which point when I returned to the game all of my friends had out-leveled me by a large margin and Hunter was the only class that I was capable of soloing on at a fast enough pace to catch up. Major life events have some weird ramifications, and I think this blog was a way of me dealing with some of the ones we were going through. I only shared it with a small circle of my friends, because the things I wrote about felt too personal to actually share on something like a guild forum. This is probably the first time that I was introduced to the concept of writing as therapy, which admittedly I have later explored many times with this blog.
In 2009 I was the leader of a fairly active guild in World of Warcraft and one of the leaders of a raid called Duranub Raiding Company. I had things that I felt like sharing about the game in general, Warrior tanking, and the act of leading both a guild and a raid. I thought I had some stuff figured out and wanted to share those thoughts with the world, and in the process of having these feelings I stumbled across a specific blog that inspired me to create Tales of the Aggronaut. The Wordy Warrior was a blog written by a warrior tank that was also a guild and raid leader, and I was enthralled by it. The blog was written by Criss Fowler or @Aeridel who eventually went on to work at both Riot and Blizzard and now works for That Game Company, the folks behind Journey, Flower and recently released Sky on mobile platforms.
It was through this blog that I was introduced to the Blog Azeroth community and so many awesome people that I still have in my greater monkeysphere like @Fimlys, @StoppableForce, and @Saresa (who at some point twitter apparently unfollowed for me and I have only recently refollowed). Funny story… Stop has the honor of being the very first person that I followed on Twitter. This community is ultimately what lead me to create a twitter account in the first place. It was a really exciting time to be a blogger, because it seemed like every week we got to greet a brand new crop of blogs that were springing up constantly surrounding this game we all loved. Ultimately it was the sort of community that I sought to help create with my participation in the Newbie Blogger Initiative and eventually the spawning of Blaugust and now Blapril.
However like so many things, eventually disillusionment set in. I got frustrated with World of Warcraft and with that my posting frequency tanked significantly. When I eventually left the game for the first time with the launch of Rift and shortly after the launch of Cataclysm, I found my readership tanked significantly. World of Warcraft and the Blog Azeroth community were really supportive… of World of Warcraft blogs and bloggers, but once you strayed outside of that fold be it on your blog you would ultimately see just how singled threaded segments of that community were. The day I started writing about Rift instead of World of Warcraft I saw about half of my twitter followers vanish over night, which was a really stark wake up call for someone who thought of a lot of these people as friends.
That has always been a challenge for me when it comes to blogging and social media. I come from the early age of the internet, back when we were crawling around in MUDs and on IRC. In fact I met my wife of almost twenty two years on IRC, so these were people to me and not just pixels. I’ve built so many friendships over the years that have transcended the games we played to the random things that are happening in our lives. AggroChat entirely is made up of people that I met through gaming and that we continued to be friends when the controller was set down or the servers went offline. So it came as a shock to me that people are fickle, and in turn lead me to even post less because this thing I thought I was part of wasn’t really as solid as I originally thought.
At that point it was really cold to be on the outside of the Warcraft community looking in, and while I found new friends out here in the blackness of space, it was a different sort of community. If you existed outside of an established game community, you sorta had to be an island nation that occasionally had treaties with other island nations, but effectively were doing your own thing. There was a great freedom that came with that, and once I stopped sulking around 2012… I began the next era of Tales of the Aggronaut where I was going to regularly post and I was going to be far more open about the things that are happening between the gaming sessions. I was always deeply cagey about sharing my life with my readers until daily posting forced me to be brutally honest at times just to come up with something to fill the page.
I still very much feel like an Island Nation at times, but I would like to think that the ties I have with other Island Nations are stronger than they were in those early years. I would also like to think that with things like Blaugust existing and transitioning into a fairly active Discord, that we have more of a social latticework for new bloggers to find easier footing than I did when I first set adrift from the content life-raft that was Warcraft. It is fundamentally a different time for bloggers and blogging in general now than it was during those halcyon days when this was all new and exciting. There are so many other things fighting for our attention and it seems that now Vlogs and Streaming have consumed almost all of the oxygen in the room… to the point where it is exceedingly hard to sign up for any sort of credentials on a blog alone.
I still however prefer to read a long sequence of thoughts placed painstakingly on a page than to listen through fifteen minutes of rambling in video form that never quite reaches a cogent point. Hell I would rather read fifteen pages of rambling than watch most videos, and unfortunately as a reader of Tales of the Aggronaut you are all too familiar with rambling posts. With that I think it might be a good time to actually wrap this thing up. I feel like I have told this tale multiple times, and each time it ends up coming out a little different. On this anniversary of this blog, I once again want to thank you all for being part of this experience. I could and likely would continue doing this without you, because I ended up turning it into therapy… but it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.
This is one of those mornings when I contemplate not writing anything. I am just not feeling it, and as a way of pushing through I tend to post a few photos of whatever I happen to be playing and chat about it for a bit. There are going to be days when you just aren’t feeling it and as far as I am concerned you have two options. The first option is of course to just say you are not going to be posting anything that day and come back the next day renewed. However more often than not I tend to take the second avenue which is to just start writing until a post magically appears before you. Granted with option two you are not always guaranteed that the post is going to be interesting or even worth reading.
So this morning I am going to talk once again about the ridiculous speed of leveling in World of Warcraft right now. For those that are unaware there is currently a +100% buff to experience gained and this seems to stack with all of the other sources of buffs like heirloom gear and the darkmoon “whee” buff. However in my case the only additional buff that I have are the heirloom slots which add up to I think an extra 65% experience gain or something like that. At the beginning of the night last night I was sitting at level 47 in Tanaris, which admittedly is ONLY the second zone I have been in on my Druid. At the end of the night I had wound my way over to Ungoro Crater and closed the evening at 54. The pace of leveling was greatly impacted by the amount of travel time between objectives, and because of that it felt like I was completely flying through the levels.
I’ve more or less been focused on pushing up as many of these Horde characters as I can until either the resolve of purpose or my desire to be playing World of Warcraft fades. At the same time I am still cycling through my 120 characters to see if there is any World Quest upgrades that I can snap up easily. This more or less is my ideal way to play WoW because I am focused on the casual stuff in the game, and don’t get so bogged down in my frustrations. I have a mountain of frustrations with World of Warcraft, because honestly you can’t play anything for almost sixteen years without finding the things you find maddening. The game is exceptionally good at giving you something amazing… but also sorta making one or two aspects of it horrible. I have long joked that Blizzard can’t give you anything that is just universally good for the players.
However saying that… this buff seems to be one of those occasions when it is just good and as a result I am soaking up as much of it as I can while it is still in place. I remember the crazy leveling elevator that was the pre-Legion launch events, and during that time I managed to get every single character Alliance side that I had up to 100. I would love if the buff stayed in place until the launch of Shadowlands, because then I might manage to get all of my Horde characters up to 120… and maybe even a few more Alliance for good measure. I am nowhere near close to unlocking the BFA Allied races for the Alliance and I would rally love to play through the game as a Dark Iron Dwarf of some sort. I just can’t seem to bring myself to grind out the reputation on my single 120 on that side of the house.
… and there you have it. I somehow willed a post into existence. I wanted to take a pass on actually writing something today but I knew that once I started typing I would begin to find a bit of a groove. At the very least I would find enough traction to begin and wrap up a short post. I hope you all have an excellent day and that you are happy and healthy out there in pandemia.
For years in World of Warcraft our character has been referred to in voice dialogs as “The Champion”. I believe this more or less is just an easy way of addressing the character without actually having to care about whatever your character’s actual name is. Actually you are being called by your name in the text messages, but I want to focus on this concept of the Champion for a moment. Essentially this to me is the Warcraft version of the Warrior of Light. We play this character who is constantly put upon by the leaders of our faction or whatever other groups we find ourselves wrapped up in. While the game doesn’t necessarily call this out, we are clearly more pivotal of a character than just being another soldier in the army. Which has lead me down a series of ideas for a World of Warcraft expansion I would like to see.
After a decade of being pushed into making decisions we had no control over, our Champion effectively leaves the service of whatever faction we were part of. In doing so we move to an island with a Tuskarr fishing village and some ancient ruins, with the goal of effectively “retiring”. You would go through some initial set up phase of making yourself a home on the island and maybe doing a few quests to help the locals. After a short period of time Magni would show up telling you about some grave new threat that he needs your help with. You begrudgingly offer to help, but you tell him that you are going to do it your way or not at all.
This begins a sequence of events where you effectively build your own faction, that take up residence on the island. First you would need to go recruit someone who can create a portal network, and I am thinking you would maybe have a series of options based on your past experiences in the game. For example if you were exalted with Suramar you could go on a mission to recruit Chief Telemancer Oculeth to come help you set up the network. My thought being that these missions would work a lot like the recruitment missions in various RPGs like Mass Effect, where in order to convince them you have to go do some other things for them.
After getting the teleportation network set up, you could start drawing upon your past experiences… recruiting folks from your Garrison, your Order Hall, or even individuals that you encountered during the War Campaign. Each bond you created would strengthen your island and open up new options. I am thinking for a system as detailed like this that the Island probably needs to exist an account level, which I realize would piss off the roleplayers… but the level of detail I am visualizing would be a major pain in the ass when it comes to trying to level the island up for alts. Maybe you could have a point based system and that the points themselves are shared at an account level, allowing each character to make their own specific choices.
Ultimately the sequence would involve you negotiating with both the Horde and the Alliance and deciding whether or not to include them in your plans. Essentially you are throwing off the shackles of red versus blue and instead creating your own faction that gets to be created in the way you see fit. The other thing that I would love to see is quest to recruit grandmasters from various tradeskills. In order to start the quest you would need to have mastered that tradeskill on one of your characters, and probably have to craft some difficult to make items to prove your worth. However upon recruiting them they set up shop on your island and start offering that tradeskill to all of your alts. So if you want to craft some armor for a lowbie, you could just walk up to the vendor and access blacksmithing or alchemy or any number of other trades. My idea being that the island as a whole would have a shared crafting inventory that you could just dump your resources into and offer it up to any of your characters.
At this point you will realize that I have not talked at all about the bad guy we would be facing… because in truth that is irrelevant. This would be setting up a new structure for the game going forward and shifting us away from dictating a specific faction narrative to players, and instead allowing them to choose their own path. Sure it would be way more complicated to create content for… but it would also feel immensely better for those of us who throw some serious side eye each time one of our faction leaders makes horrible decisions for us and we have no real say in what is going on narratively. I don’t love the Night Elves… but I would have never willingly taken part in the burning of Teldrassil for example. I also would have told Genn to go fuck himself when he goes on an anti-horde rant as an Alliance player.
I realize I will never see content like this in World of Warcraft, but man it would be awesome if we did. The game needs to evolve past the simplistic us versus them story-line. The game feels best when we are all allied against something stronger than ourselves be that the Scourge, The Legion or the Old Gods. Shifting the story to be about the evolution of what started out as your vacation home, to turning into a fledgling island nation… would be an interesting story to experience. I also have some ideas about the mysterious ruins on the island serving as effectively a Diablo style endless dungeon where the progression of the island unlocks new areas of the dungeon to explore and with it more interesting loot available. The island could even have a shared Guild Hall available that would show up on the islands of everyone in a specific guild and zoning into it would take you to a shared instance for just your guildies. There are so many possibilities, but mostly I just want to walk away from the mistake that was Battle for Azeroth and forcing a specific PVP story down our throats.
Good morning everyone. I need to order a new keyboard because the one I have been typing on randomly seems to repeat characters. So if you ever see a word with one too many of a specific letter I am going to blame it on this phenomena. This week in Blapril is “Get to Know You” week, but I am not really sure what I can tell you that I have not already told you in the other 2312 posts on this blog. I’ve always tried to be open with my readers and share large swaths of my life. There are of course a few edits here and there to hide the identities of the innocent, but the core truth is always there. Anything prior to about 2013 makes me cringe massively when I have attempted to re-read it because I think it was written by a very different version of me.
I will tell you one thing I have been kicking around in my head is whether or not we should do an actual Blaugust this year in addition to Blapril or not. I think there are positives and negatives to it in both ways. That might be a little too much blogging and togetherness in one year, and at least for the folks who are actively participating in Blapril it might feel a little weird to turn around and do it again in another four months. All of that said who knows if we will be getting back to normal by August or not. I will say five weeks into isolation mode, a new sort of normal is starting to settle in and I am not entirely certain if I like it or not.
The only analogy I have for what I am feeling is that I go through something when my wife has a work trip. I go through a day or two of enhanced freedom mode, where I order pizza exactly the way I want to and do other minor random acts of defiance… before I am mostly just wanting her back because I am not sleeping right without another body beside me in the bed. The first few weeks of remote work were really fun… until it set in that this is now the reality rather than the escape from it. There are a lot of days where I would much rather drive into the office and be present there, than work remotely. Like I have said before I have a brand new respect for folks who have been doing this for years. All of that said I am probably way better suited to deal with this than a lot of folks given how generally solitary I tend to be by nature.
On the gaming front I hit 120 with my Hunter and have gotten his item level up to 380ish. The hardest part are the weapons and the trinkets, and I am largely just gearing through soaking up free world quest gear. On the 8th I was sitting in my 70s and on Sunday night I dinged 120. I am not sure how many total hours it took me but it absolutely felt faster than it has any right to be. Legion and Battle For Azeroth were the slowest part, largely because a lot of the quests that you end up doing are more complicated and simply take more time. I am finding that I am really enjoying the Beast Mastery Hunter, and I am contemplating doing further nonsense and trying to farm up missing set pieces from a few Hunter sets.
As far as my next victim goes… I decided to start pushing up my fresh Zandalari Druid. The entire goal here is not necessarily to gear out a single character, but to abuse the fact that leveling is insanely fast right now to build out my stable of horde characters. I spent a decade exclusively playing Alliance characters, so it makes sense that I have one of everything over there above the level of 100. On the Horde side however I have a bunch of “youngins” that my goal is to get several up to the cap before this buff runs out. I spent the better part of last night running around the Barrens doing quests that I have not done in quite some time.
I have to say it is hard to explain how much better the post Cataclysm version of the Barrens is than the World of Warcraft Classic version. This really is driven home by the fact that I spent so much time leveling in it last August during the crush of Classic. The flow of the quests just works so much better and there seems to be much less randomly ping ponging from various corners of the map back to the Crossroads. What is also making this exceptionally fun are the really cool dinosaur druid forms. I am not sure exactly what I am when I am in “cat form” but it looks badass and I am all there for it. I also randomly decided to make my Druid my Alchemist, so I need to spend some time working on that at some point.
I am having a lot of fun leveling random things in World of Warcraft, which is about the level of engagement that I need right now.
