Month: June 2020

Venturing Forth into Pandemia

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Every so often I end up writing a real world post, and this is that morning. As a result I tend not to syndicate these terribly widely because it isn’t exactly the sort of thing for mass consumption. These are just me talking with you my long term readers about what happens to be going on in my life. To prime the pump here is a delightful picture of Kenzie and Josie… and it makes me realize that Josie certainly has grown significantly. Also it makes me realize how bad the giant hole that the cats have tore in the stairwell landing looks. The hole started its life as a worn spot in the carpet because they put down really cheap carpet when they flipped this house and we have not gotten our shit together to the point to decide what the hell to do about it. The cats however helped make that hole basically an exposed spot of bare plywood.
This is “four” a new addition to our outdoor cats that visit us from time to time. Four is pretty young and seems to largely be unbothered by our presence. While taking this photo my wife was a few yards away sitting on the patio off our bedroom. Four is completely chill and flopped on the concrete under the table and while he bolts for a moment when there is movement… seems to reset back to the default operation he was previously doing rather quickly. I love the existence of our outdoor cat family, but I have noticed that their presence has meant a lack of the usual bunnies and birds. I just want them to be friendly enough to visit us while we are out there.
Here is the point at which we pivot drastically from adorable cats… to Covid 19. March 20th was my last day in the office during what my friends and I have started to refer to as “The Before Times”. So I was fully remote for 13 weeks, but now have been feeling a certain amount of pressure to at least start showing up a few days a week in the office. It is not so much that I was given an ultimatum, but effectively if I did not start returning before the 30th of June, I would need to come up and clean out my office. I am not exactly sure WHY we need to clean out offices because after two days in the office it still feels like an absolute skeletal crew up there. I had a spare mask I was not using and decided that Giant Cthulhu Pop needed to do his part… or at least could hold it for me.
When I say that there is no one there… this image illustrates that point. This is on the floor of the parking garage with the tunnel that connects to our building In the before times… this would be wall to wall cars and I would not be able to find a spot to park. Even at 7 am in the morning when I normally roll into the parking garage, I would have had to have parked one floor away in either direction to find a space. The building itself is on mask protocols and social distancing, with things like elevators limited to only four people at a time. The thing is… I never rode in an elevator with more than just one other person. On a normal morning rush… there were lots of times I was in an elevator with ten people crammed in.
Ultimately I had planned on shifting to a few days a week in the office and the rest of the days remote as my normal schedule. The problem is… I kept waiting for things to get better but they just haven’t. The above image represents the general curve of infections that we have experienced in the county I live in. The blue diamonds represent phase 1, 2 and 3 of reopening the state and the green stars represent memorial day weekend, the beginning of the protests, and the trump rally. As of yesterday we had a single day high of 259 new cases identified in the county and of course… this was the week that I decided to poke my head out of my hidey hole and go back to work. I am more than a little terrified that I might have been exposed to something have have brought it home to my wife who has also been remote this entire time.
I didn’t exactly feel unsafe while in my office, because everyone there was equally mandated to be wearing masks anytime there was a chance of interaction. However that also means that most of us were unmasked at our desks sharing the same recirculating air. In some ways I am glad I left the house because I had developed a tangible fear of doing so. During the entirety of the thirteen week period, I had only been in two buildings with more than a few people at a time. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to schedule hands free grocery pick up, and only needed to go to I think three stores… all three of which had a minimal number of people in them. However the longer I went without venturing forth… the more insurmountable that task seemed to be. I now absolutely understand how someone finds themselves afraid to go out into the world.
I did do something silly while I was in the office, and took a photo of my sheet of cheapo Dollar Tree stickers. This is kinda dumb but one of the things I would do, when someone did something really cool is that I would slap a sticker on the opening of their cube. I kinda miss being able to do that, so I sorta want to try and turn these into icons that I can use in teams. It is silly but weirdly people really seemed to like getting “good job” thumbs up stickers, so I guess that is something that you never quite grow out of. I did have to alter my pattern of giving them out, because at first I was just sticking them on the top of the cube wall… until I realized that most of my employees couldn’t see up there.
The problem now is I am trying to decide what I should do. Do I continue going back into the office next week on Tuesday and Wednesday… or do I resign myself to just going up and cleaning out my office over the long holiday weekend? The reason why I am so concerned is illustrated in the above chart, which shows the raw data points that have not been smoothed into a curve. Our previous high was 143 on June 20th… and then 4 days later it spiked up to 259 on the 24th. The periodic dips that you see make up for the fact that there just isn’t much testing that occurs over the weekend. I live in a part of the country where masks are just not worn… the few stores I have been in my wife and I represented the sole mask wearers and got a lot of nasty looks as a result. This is why I generally feel like it isn’t very safe to leave my house, let alone return to anything resembling a normal daily cadence. Something has to change or things are just going to get out of control. I am not sure if that thing means a rolling back of the opening or something like mandating that masks be worn in public. Whatever the case something needs to change now because we are already past the point of making a significant difference any time soon. I fully expect that this is our lives for the next few years, and I wish I had the magical thinking that some of my coworkers do about the recovery bouncing back within a few months. Also… I would really prefer not to die, which is what escalates my fear given my multiple warning signs suggesting that if I did catch it… I would probably have a really bad time. I realize this is a bit of a downer post, but sometimes my blog is therapy and I needed to get some of these thoughts out of my head this morning. I did give you cats before I careened off the cliff though. The post Venturing Forth into Pandemia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Of Nickels and Dimes

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Yesterday I made a random comment, and it seemed to gather a bunch of traction with my twitter feed, as I spent the rest of the evening reading comments in general agreement. The beginning of this thought process like so many that I have, actually started the other day. I was talking with a friend of mine and they displayed disdain with having to pay to purchase a game. It seemed to be causing them a certain amount of friction, and it didn’t read as “I can’t afford to purchase this” but more a case of “I don’t feel like I should have to purchase this”. This has made me contemplate the nature of where we are currently in gaming and the prevalence of the “Free-To-Play” business model.
The idea of this model is that they get you in the door with a simple game download and install, and then get you later when you are needing to purchase things to be able to maintain a certain “quality of life” within the game. For example playing Elder Scrolls Online without the optional “ESO Plus” subscription is miserable, because that crafting bag that magically takes away your inventory woes is a massive bonus. Similarly I feel like if I am going to play Star Wars the Old Republic, I am going to be paying for a subscription because the “free player” limitations just feel overtly cruel.
At least in the case of those two games there is a monthly amount of money that I can pay easily to take these woes away. When I get frustrated is with the more South Korean MMO model of having a bunch of purchases that effectively add up to a month subscription, without giving you the convenience of actually paying a monthly subscription. Essentially each month you are going too want a Premium pass and the Mission Pass Gold in order to get the full experience. Combined this is roughly $15 and lasts 30 days, but for quality of life purchases you are also going to want the Material Storage pass… which is 300 star gems. These in theory come from playing the game naturally, but if you for some reason you have to purchase them out right which is a horrible idea… it is $15 for 360 star gems.
There is a large part of me that longs for the era of MMORPGs when you purchased the box, purchased the occasional expansion every few years… and then had a simple subscription amount that you could budget for. The problem there is that this limits the amount of money that a game can drain from your pocket book, and even the bastion of the subscription model has found a way to add additional purchases to try and entice you to spend more. World of Warcraft has 15 mounts, 15 pets, 2 toys, a slew of deluxe bundles, and a large number of services that you can only obtain through hard currency. I am not faulting them for finding additional ways to claw money into the coffers, but it can be a bit exhausting especially if you add in the gold token economy.
Guild Wars 2 has been lauded as this buy the box once purchase without need for subscriptions, but even this game feels like I need to spend a certain amount of money to play it in a manner that feels reasonable. Firstly for each character I would want a set of unlimited harvesting tools, because it is annoying as hell to constantly keep running back to a vendor to purchase new pick axes. Each one of these tools and there are three is roughly $12.50 because unless you can catch them on fire sale they are 1000 gems each. I also feel like a Copper Fed Salvage machine is a significant quality of life improvement at $10, and you need shared account storage to keep it in so all of your characters can use it and that is $8.75 per slot or $35 for 5 slots for a bit of a price break. Black Lion keys are a trap but the game does in fact love to throw you chests that you cannot lock without spending money.
I miss what was essentially the Warcraft Battle Chest era of gaming, where you bought the base game and then every so often an expansion came out that tacked on to the original game and gave you new content. Hell I miss the era when “DLC” meant that I got a bunch of new content for a game rather than what is effectively a bunch of cosmetic gear. I get that cosmetics are the true end game, because this is something that I have said all too many times… but it would be nice to get content drops as well. I never minded paying my own way, and I guess the other day I was balking in part while talking to that friend how we have arrived at a point where some folks don’t expect to need to. During the DLC expansion era of games, I remember having friends that complained about not getting the entire game with their original purchase. So there will always be some controversy that is brewing and micro-transactions are just the newest version of the same discussion that has been happening for decades I guess.
I think one of the big challenges is that we have this artificial price ceiling for games at $60 each, and I am not exactly sure when that was set. I remember when Phantasy Star 4 released it was selling for roughly $90, and above is an example of some of the pricing from the late Super Nintendo era. Take the example of Street Fighter Alpha 2, that game was released in 1996 so that $69.99 in adjusted for inflation would be $114.37. While I realize that games are cheaper to distribute digitally than they were to actually put chips into a cartridge, no matter how you slice it there is still a significant amount of money missing from that $60 price tag.
As much as it might frustrate me, it is this long tailed monetary wrangling that keeps the lights on, the staff paid and the servers running. There are few things more disheartening when a game that you love dies. Talk to all of my friends who pinned their hopes and dreams on Wildstar about how bad it feels that the game is gone, and that there is no viable emulator option to keep playing it. So yeah it frustrates the shit out of me, and I throw some serious shade anytime I see that a game I am interested in is launching as the “fee to pay” model, as Jim Sterling calls it. The alternative of a game closing down however feels really bad. I feel like we had it better when we were just paying a flat subscription fee rather than being constantly needled for another small purchase.
That however is coming from a position of privilege. I can reasonably afford to pay whatever it takes to be able to play a game. There are a lot of folks out there who simply can’t because once you subtract groceries and rent, there just isn’t much if anything left over for an entertainment budget. I firmly believe that those folks have the right to participate in the same type of “games as therapy” that I ultimately do on a nightly basis. So if the cost of that happening is me being needled, than I guess that is the cost that I have to pay. I don’t love it, but I can be okay with it… I just wish more games gave me that “bullshit tax” that was an amount I could pay to ablate all of my frustrations. So my fearless readers… what say you? What are your thoughts on this matter, because many of you responded last night on twitter. Now that I have laid bare the situation we find ourselves in, spill your soul in the comments below. The post Of Nickels and Dimes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Goodbye Mixer

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I guess the big news this morning is that Mixer is officially over and that Microsoft has sold the service and all of the accounts to Facebook Gaming. Mixer represented and alternative to Twitch.tv for those who sought it, and seemed to have fairly reasonable terms of service. I personally liked it because of the ability to have a conversation with someone sitting in chat in near real time as there was a very minuscule delay between my stream and what they saw. Because of this it is also why I tended to prefer to watch show streams on Mixer when possible, but alas as July 22nd the streaming service will be shuttered with everything transferring over to Facebook.
The real tragedy is that it seems like the partners were not told anything, and just woke up yesterday morning to the news like the rest of us. The big name acts that they specifically brought onto the platform were consulted, but it seems as though everyone else was in the dark. Facebook Gaming does not have a good reputation with gamers, and I would dare to say that a lot of folks try and avoid any interaction with facebook if possible. I saw comments from a few friends yesterday that had been streaming on Mixer as their primary platform stating that they would rather just not stream at all than to follow over to Facebook. I personally went through the process of decoupling all of my accounts from Mixer yesterday, but did not go so far as the delete my account in its entirety.
It seems like Gothycakes is one of the few named talent acquisitions that Mixer did that is planning on letting it ride and going onto Facebook gaming. The challenge is that most of the folks that left Twitch to go to Mixer in the first place experienced a massive decline in their viewership, Ninja included. It is really hard to get people to switch platforms, let alone to move over to one that a lot of folks associate with their parents more than their own interests. The Electronic Sports League or ESL signed an exclusive deal for streaming match content on Facebook, and according to reports experienced an 85% loss in viewership. That does not bode terribly well for folks asking their fans to follow them in this buyout to an already struggling platform.
What I think is more concerning however is this closes the door on what was the only real viable alternative to Twitch. Yes of course there is YouTube Gaming, but that service has had its own fraught history and in May of 2019 completely shut down the apps associated with the gaming service burying the content once again in mainstream YouTube. As a viewer watching content on YouTube live is not exactly a great experience and feels extremely minimal when it comes to fan interaction. Live Streaming gets mixed in with the accursed YouTube premiere program making it extremely hard to tell which of the people you follow are actually live and which are simply feeding you recorded content through an awkward delivery mechanism.
Once upon a time I used to stream on Hitbox, but that has apparently become Smashcast. Hitbox already had some shady moments as a service, and Smashcast seems to have doubled down on this ethic. There are of course other smaller platforms that one could stream to. If you already have an established community on Discord for example, you might simply be better just streaming through its options. What is ultimately going to happen however, is that the vast majority of streamers that were on Mixer are likely going to try and get their fans to transition back to team purple. Twitch is the massive juggernaut in streaming, and it is going too be progressively harder to compete with them. Which unfortunately means that content creators have also lost most of the leverage they might have had when it comes to negotiating with them. I’ve been kicking around the notion of streaming again, and I had honestly contemplated Mixer because the community there has always seemed to be a big more positive than that of Twitch. However as a Twitch affiliate, there was already a strong reason just to stay with that platform since I already had inroads, not to mention that I never got organic viewership through any platform other than big purple. I feel bad for the folks who had their livelihood mixed up with Microsoft and the Mixer platform. I don’t think Facebook is going to be a favorable environment for games streaming at any point in the near future, but I guess I could be wrong. This is a significant move in an attempt to buy them some market share, and it will at the very least probably add a non-zero amount of value to the platform. If someone has been out there waiting in the wings looking to launch a streaming platform… I guess now would be the ideal timing to do so and provide these folks who are effectively being de-platformed an alternative. I doubt that is going too happen however, and since YouTube doesn’t really seem to care much about its game streamers the lions share will come back to Twitch. What are your thoughts about this news? Do you intend to follow streamers over to Facebook gaming? Drop me a line in the comments below. The post Goodbye Mixer appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition

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I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal. It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 – PC
Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.

To the New and Returning

Guild Wars 2 – PC
So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.
Torchlight III – PC
I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.
World of Warcraft – Retail – PC
World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.

To Those Departing

Animal Crossing: New Horizon – Switch
Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.
Atom RPG – PC
You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.
Wolcen – PC
I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.

Summary

During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing. The post Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.