Month: October 2022
AggroChat #410 – Enter the Pitt
Tonight we have a bit of a weird show, where we start off talking about the nonsense happening over on Twitter with the Muskrat purchase of the company going through. Bel talks a bit about social media alternatives and how the administrators on the Fediverse/Mastodon instances are straining a bit under the load. From there we talk a bit about the community being angry at Magic, and Bel’s adventures in buying the cheapest Wish dot com proxies he could find. We continue to talk about New World and how Themiscyra is now open for business again. There are a number of interesting changes on the PTR and we talk through those. Finally, we land on Fallout 76, the game the other half of the show has been enjoying. The crew playing makes their way into The Pitt expedition and talks a bit about that experience.
Topics Discussed
- Twitter Nonsense
- Muskrat Buys Dumpster Fire
- Fediverse Admins are Tired
- Magic Debacle Continued
- Bel’s Adventures in Cheap Proxies
- Secret Lair Frustrations
- Magic Vegas Frustrations
- New World
- Themiscyra Open for Business
- Gathering still the best
- Weird level-band problems
- Upcoming changes
- Fallout 76
- Entering The Pitt
Flipping Birdsite the Bird
Good Morning Friends! It is time once again for my semi-annual explainer post about the Fediverse or as some call it Mastodon. In truth, I am not going to do a full explainer because I did one back in April and I am not sure I can do a better job than I did then. If you are like most of us and have littered the fediverse with many past versions of yourself as you tried out many instances, then this post might be of interest about migrating between sites. As I said in the post from April, I originally joined the fediverse during the Wheedon Exodus of 2018, but it seems like every six months or so there is another mass influx of folks discovering/re-discovering the platform. Of note… while I jokingly refer to it as the Wheedon Exodus, I mostly got hip to the notion of “mastodon” due to all of the Loading Ready Run cast moving to various sundry instances. It does make me wonder if anyone is out there tracking the migratory patterns of Twitter users.
So You Decided to Leave Twitter
Yeah, I guess I am going to write about this today, but given that I already linked you better articles that I have already written I am not sure where to go with this one. I think first it is important that you understand that the Fediverse as I refer to it, or Mastodon as the media seems to refer to it… is not a single website controlled by a single entity. There is no one corporation responsible for running everything, but instead a network for smaller “instances” that are “federated” so that they can share messages with each other and facilitate cross-instance communication. What this means in practice is that the Fediverse is not a monolith with a single culture, but instead a bunch of different smaller communities that each have their own cultures. Probably a better analogy would be for you to imagine that users on the World of Warcraft Forum, Something Awful Forum, GameFaqs, and Reddit could somehow seamlessly communicate with each other. Firstly I feel like I want to get this out of the way. This is not a post attempting to recruit you to the Fediverse. I am happy to welcome you with open arms to this alternate dimension, but it isn’t the sort of thing where you unplug from Twitter and plug into the Fediverse and life continues on like normal. Using these instances is its own thing with its own series of differences that go far deeper than the tweet vs toot thing. Image a server instance as a small computer club that meets in the back room of your library, that deals with all sorts of logistical problems inherent with growing membership and outgrowing its meeting room space. Instances in general are run by a very small group of administrators that are struggling to pay the bills and are happy to have you… but also know that each influx is going to wreak havoc on their data usage.Finding a Home
I’ve bounced around quite a bit during my time in the fediverse, but this is sort of a thing that happens to most people. They join an instance and it doesn’t end up feeling right for one reason or another. My own journey looks a little bit like this:- Mastodon.cloud – My very first instance and I had no clue what any of it meant at that point, or that I wasn’t signing up for one single monolithic site. It was perfectly cromulent.
- Elekk.xyz – Once I learned different instances and did different things, I obviously tried to gravitate toward the gaming-related one. It was a pretty nice place with a bunch of interesting users that I still follow to this day.
- Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore wanted to start up an instance so I signed on this nonsense to help administrate it. This meant leaving Elekk behind, but since you can so easily migrate between instances it was no big deal.
- MMORPG.Social – As Ninteties.Cafe had run through its cycle of excitement, and a friend of mine Gazimoff decided he wanted to try and tackle creating MMORPG-centric social media. I moved houses once again and helped administrate, but the costs eventually became egregious and it was shuttered.
- Elekk.xyz – So I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went to sleep for a while, going dormant for a year or so. When I woke up and started caring about the fediverse again, the instance was a very changed place. It seems that there was a bit of a “netsplit” to borrow an old term, and Elekk was pretty proactively blocking a bunch of instances making it very hard to communicate with friends spread throughout the fediverse.
- Mstdn.social – This led me to try and find a more neutral ground instance. One that was not quite so block-happy but also was not doing anything egregious that would lead to it being actively blocked. So I migrated over to this lovely instance run by a nice person who goes by Stux.
Maybe Support If You Stick Around
Like I said before each instance is usually run by a very small team that is racking up expenses in order to keep the lights on. Knowing this I have always tried to chip something into wherever I am calling home. When I was on Elekk I contributed to their Patreon, and when I moved to Mstdn.social I started contributing to the one Stux has set up. Like it isn’t a large amount of money but I end up chipping in $5 a month as a way of attempting to help the operation. It doesn’t give me any benefits other than knowing that I am at least helping to keep the lights on a little bit. Most of these instances are not profitable and are deeply cutting into the personal finances of those who are running them. Each time there is a mass migration wave, more folks end up sticking around. Something you should go into this knowing is that the vast majority of “I’m leaving Twitter” folks will be back within the week. However, what has evolved over time is an alternate reality that skews way more liberal and queer and as a result super open and accepting about some things and hypercritical of other things. I feel like if you want to come to the Fediverse, you are going to need to accept it for what it is and not try and turn it into Twitter 2.0. The folks are really lovely but also a heck of a lot quieter. There is less general noise on the network, but also much less interaction.Riding the Bomb Down
I’ve personally found a place in my life for both Twitter and the Fediverse/Mastodon. I have no plans to do anything drastic like delete my Twitter account. If folks legitimately migrate this time then I will likely spend less and less time there. I feel it is also very important for folks to realize the level of stress these mass migration waves place upon the existing denizens of these instances. Like they are all open and welcoming but have been through this shit so many times before. I know alone this is my fourth or fifth mass migration, and I know they existed prior to the Wheedon Exodus that brought me to these shores. On some level, the “townies” often duck out for a few weeks until the onslaught has died down a bit and then poke their heads out again to see who actually stuck around. Please note while this post is not an attempt to recruit you, it is also not an attempt to dissuade you. Whether or not you take this adventure is entirely up to you. I am more than happy to field direct questions from anyone considering it. Like I said before I’ve written about this several times in the past and some of my words might fill in gaps in your knowledge. So I will leave you with a list of links.- My Home in the Fediverse – @belghast@mstdn.social
- The Fediverse: A Wildly Incomplete Primer – my post from April attempting to explain how exactly Mastodon and the larger Fediverse work.
- Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance – a follow-up post where I talk about the process of migrating your follows and redirecting people to your new home instance. This is helpful if you have a string of other attempts to move off Twitter.
- Adventures in the Fediverse – might be fun to read to see how my tone has shifted over the years since this original post back in August of 2018. I was way more excited about this being the future of all social media, whereas now I am pretty resigned to knowing it will only take hold with a handful of people.
Keep Up Alternate Contacts
I will close this out with the last piece of general advice, one that I have learned the hard way over the years. If you care about someone enough to not want to lose contact with them… trade multiple forms of contact. There are numerous folks that I have lost over the years through various gaming venues, and I occasionally wonder how they are doing. I know email is old school, but it and phone numbers tend to be the lowest common denominator for staying in contact. I’ve had the same email address for almost twenty years, and at this point moving to another would be painful. Discord is another more modern messaging platform that is worth trading information on, but remember it is also a closed platform owned by a single company and could at someday be the thing you are fleeing. For me, you will always have this blog. I am going on my fourteenth year and I figure much like Slim Pickens I am going to be riding this bomb to the ground. This will always have some cogent way of contacting me available to you. The post Flipping Birdsite the Bird appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.Dragonflight Launch Schedule
Good Morning Friends! I tweet-threaded some thoughts yesterday that I thought I would expand into a proper blog post. As we slide into the launch of the Dragonflight World of Warcraft expansion, I have to admit that I have some complicated thoughts about it. I immensely enjoyed my time spent in both Alpha and Beta testing. More specifically I thought the directed testing that took place prior to the start of Beta was extremely valuable because it set a clear focus for every play session. With those constraints, I set my focus on completing a single zone at a time and each week finished the task on at least one character. As a result at this point, I have largely seen all of the leveling content and enjoyed most of it.
Unfortunately without that direction and drive… when the game effectively turned over control to me, I struggled to find traction. Previously I was playing with a clear mission of testing the content and now that I was left to my own devices, I really didn’t have much forward momentum. I think on some level I just don’t find the World of Warcraft style of gameplay nearly as engaging as I once did. Over the last few years, my personal preferences have shifted more towards action combat and away from more strictly hotbar combat. I think this is also why my whole “level everything to 80” burnt me to a crisp in Final Fantasy XIV and why after finishing the main story there I have not really returned other than the stalk housing properties.
I think this is more a tale of shifts in my own tastes and less a tale of expansion quality. What I was able to experience and play through, makes me feel deeply like Dragonflight is going to go down as one of the better World of Warcraft expansions. I don’t think it will rank up there quite as high as say Legion, which now sits at the pinnacle for me, but I do think it is going to be better than a Shadowlands or Battle for Azeroth. The only thing that still concerns me is that the zones don’t feel anywhere near as intricate. Part of what I liked so much about Legion is that it took everything that Warlords of Draenor attempted and expanded upon them. I like zone events, treasures, and minibosses that all reward good stuff. Maybe there has been a micro objective pass that I have not fully experienced in-game, but last week when I was playing the world still felt very spartan.
I think there are a lot of interesting things happening with the expansion. While everything goes really hard on the whole Dragon thing, and you pretty much have to like Dragons to enjoy that deeply… there are enough fringe world-building things going on that make me wonder about the direction the entire game is going. I’ve never particularly cared about the Dragon Flights, and my interest in them cratered with Cataclysm, and how Alexstraza did not remember us from Wyrmrest temple when we were questing for her in Twilight Highlands. I feel like there are a lot of plot threads once thought resolved… are about to become unresolved again. What World of Warcraft has lacked is a clear story that carries forward from expansion to expansion and I hope this might be the beginning of that.
Mechanically I think the new talent trees are excellent. While they did not give me back my previous gladiator stance, left enough on the table for me to build a really fun protection warrior. I enjoyed Blood Deathknight and Protection Paladin as well, so it was going to be one of those expansions where I had trouble deciding upon a main. I probably would have landed back on the Warrior since it has such a special place in my heart. The bigger challenge would have been to determine if I was going to play the OG Belghast which is a Human, or the more modern Belghast which is an Orc. While I like the general community Horde side quite a bit better, I have to say I will probably always have strong Alliance leanings.
This time around there is this interesting staggered launch, where as of this past Tuesday the pre-patch landed featuring the new talent trees and a precursor questline. On the 15th, in a few weeks the new race/class will be playable. Then the 28th the official launch day happens with the gates opening on the Waking Shores. This all makes me realize that I will not be playing Dragonflight at launch, in spite of largely enjoying myself in testing. I know that with a World of Warcraft expansion there will be a certain measure of FOMO associated with it. My entire social timeline will likely erupt in nothing but Warcraft talk for a few weeks, and honestly, I look forward to seeing everyone geeking out on the game. I also know that it is highly unlikely that I will be joining them.
Even if we push past my complicated feelings about Blizzard, I am just not sure this is the game I want to be playing right now. I have a lot more games that I would rather be devoting my time towards, given that it is very unlikely that I would want to be raiding anyways. I have a long list of things that I would like to accomplish in Guild Wars 2, and I would like to give Final Fantasy XIV a chance to enspell once again with the post-Endwalker story. I am just not really connected to the World and story of Warcraft anymore, and while I have guild families that would accept me back… I also don’t really feel that longing to join them right now. I do know enough people who are wrapped up in the game though that I truly hope this is the good expansion that I think it is going to be for them.
In the short term, I am still deeply engaged with my New World reroll. It features that action-style combat that I seem to be favoring right now, and last night I dinged 60 and started working on gearing. I also ran through a dungeon with the guild which was extremely fun, and I am hoping as folks level we can do some of the interesting outdoor content that is focused on a single team. I think on some level I need to reach a place where it is okay for me to wave from the sidelines as the float goes by. There is a version of me that would absolutely be trying to claw my way up onto the float to keep the excitement rolling… but instead, it is probably way more healthy to set my own interests and my own pace.
So for now as we approach the Dragonflight launch, I will be waving at you all from the sidelines.
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