Morning Folks! In the great roulette that is post-Twitter social media, I’ve largely thrown my hat into the ring with Mastodon. I’ve been there long enough at this point that it just feels the most comfortable. I pretty regularly poke my head into Bluesky as well, but it feels very much like I am a visitor rather than a resident. Largely I say this in part to make sure my biases are known. Yesterday Mastodon, the primary branch of the fediverse hit 15 million total users which of course caused a round of congratulatory posts as a result. Thing is… I am not sure that number means what the general public seems to think it means. From my understanding that is 15 Million total accounts signed up on Mastodon servers, not necessarily 15 million unique people.
That led me to joke that likely 10 million of those accounts are accounts that users had migrated away from. The thing is… migration is common in the fediverse and folks pop back and forth between instances for all sorts of reasons. This is a feature of the software and part of why I am so comfortable here. While I actively participate and help administer Gamepad.club, I know that if something were to happen down the line, I could just move my chair to another stall and keep trucking on like nothing happened. I don’t have to worry about some tyrant buying up my social media of choice and then enacting all manner of stupid changes because, in a worst-case scenario, I can just create my own private instance and still keep communicating with everyone as if nothing happened.
Someone might misinterpret my joke as throwing shade at folks who migrate servers regularly. There is this one couple that in the time I have known them… have migrated almost once a week for the last year. The thing is I have no ground to stand on as I have migrated around my own account quite a number of times. However because of the way that migration works… most of those older accounts are still out there and still being counted in the total census of accounts. I thought it might be an interesting thought experiment to walk through my own migration history and talk about each of the hops.
@Belghast@Mastodon.cloud
This was my very first account on the Fediverse and I joined on August 16th of 2018 during what was at that time the first big migration wave. I don’t remember exactly what the hubbub was on Twitter at the time but there were a number of folks packing up their stuff and moving to Mastodon, the most famous of which was Wil Wheaton. That did not go well for him… and he was pretty much harrassed off the platform. I had no clue about anything and signed up on the first instance that seemed to have openings, not understanding that accounts were bound to a particular instance and that I was not actually joining mastodon.social the flagship instance. I was on this server for I think three days in total, but here it is out in the void taking up space as a unique Mastodon user.
@Belghast@Elekk.xyz
On August 17th of 2018 I signed up for Elekk.xyz but since the server was “approval only” I think it took me another day before I completed the migration. It took a couple of days before I realized that different servers specialized in different things. That isn’t necessarily a hard and fast thing, but at the time Elekk was the only server specifically advertising itself as gaming-focused. Noelle the admin was super awesome so it seemed like a no-brainer to migrate especially since I had only actually been on the other server for a few days. A good deal of your relationship with a specific instance is tied to whether or not you are aligned with the admin that runs it. This will come up later, but Noelle seemed drift compatible with my interests so I moved and was pretty happy there. I was considerably more active than the average user and the self-identified “gamers” were a bit more casual than I was used to but it still felt pretty comfy.
@belghast@nineties.cafe
Friends… I bounced around a LOT in that first year. Honestly I bounced way more than I even realized prior to sitting down to write this post. Time is largely meaningless when it comes to memory and I thought the events of Nineties.cafe and later MMORPG.social played out over a few years… but alas that is not the case. On August 25th 2018… I migrated to Nineties.Cafe so initially it appears that I was only actually active on Elekk that first time for a little over a week. Essentially my blogging buddy Liore decided that she was going to throw her hat into the ring for site hosting, and I joined along as a moderator to help out. The server was hopping for awhile but largely died down after a couple of weeks. It was a cool idea but there were only a handful of us that were ever active on it. Sadly the only way you can see this instance now is through the Wayback machine and as a result, this is not counting towards that 15 Million account total.
@Belghast@MMORPG.Social
In December of 2018 a friend of mine Gazimoff, who you will probably note is the current owner of Gamepad.club… decided to create a Mastodon instance targeted at MMORPG players. This was a really fun instance and I moved over once again to help moderate. Once again it was new and exciting… and extremely active for a month or so until the shine wore off and folks ended up going back to Twitter. I was still active here for quite a while and considered it my active home on the Fediverse. More than anything Gaz learned a ton of lessons on how he would not host a server in the future, as MMORPG.social became unsustainable. It folded in June of 2020 but I was “maining” this server pretty much its entire lifespan. It was a good year and a half and I had a lot of nostalgia over that time. Once again the only way you can see this site is through the wayback machine and as such it is not counting toward the 15 Million users.
Back to Elekk
With the death of MMORPG.social I needed another home on the Fediverse and since I didn’t really have any negative feelings towards Elekk I went back there. I honestly would have likely have stayed there were it not for assisting two different friends as they attempted to run their own instances. I migrated back in June of 2020 and was there until April of 2022. For a few years it was a great little home that gave me a window into the larger Fediverse. I never had any issues with the users of the instance, but I was starting to feel a bit stifled by the administration of the server. It had changed hands since I was first there, and while I adore the new admin… they were a bit quick to defederate from instances instead of limiting them. I get that there were some legitimately serious attacks on the server from hostile actors, but also defederating from the flagship instances like Mastodon.social can be frustrating for the individual users that have friends there. I wound up shopping for a new home in large part because I did not love being disconnected from friends I still wanted to talk to.
I hold zero ill will towards the admin or the users because you gotta do what feels best for your community, but I needed to get to someplace a little less cloistered.
@Belghast@Mstdn.social
Stux is an admin that runs a number of instances: mstdn.social, masto.ai, mastodon.coffee, and a bunch of other side projects like a Pixelfed instance. He seemed like an admin with a very steady hand that was not prone to isolate instances from the bulk of the network, so in April of 2022 I migrated there and had a lot of fun. I met a ton of people that I still communicate with on a regular basis thanks to the local feed on this server. It felt like a giant instance but had a bunch of really friendly folks who were very active, and when I joined I think it was prior to it hitting 10k users. However the mass migration in November of 2022 wreaked havoc on this server as it ballooned up to around 120k users… and at that point, it was a constant struggle for Stux to keep server resources online. He reached a point where he literally could not buy any more resources from his server provider and while he had shut off new sign-ups at 100k users… thinking that would help… he forgot to shut off the ability for users to send invite links that circumvented this. Legitimately over the course of a few days, we shot from 100k to 120k, and things ground to a halt. This account still exists in a tombstone state but is still counting towards that 15 million.
@Belghast@Masto.ai
I had legitimately planned on sticking with Mstdn.social for the long haul, but Stux fired up a new Mastodon instance in an attempt to handle the overflow. There were a lot of us who were more active users who decided to help lighten the load and migrate over to Masto.ai, and I did so on November 7th, 2022. It had the same vibe as Mstdn.social and a good number of the folks that I was talking to regularly made the jump as well. It was a great little place and quite honestly I would probably still be happy there had some other events not transpired. Some folks have an axe to grind against Stux due to his fairly public drama with the admin of Mastodon.art… but honestly, he was always a super chill admin as far as I was concerned. This account is still out there and active in a Tombstone state, so it will be counted in that 15 million.
@Belghast@Gamepad.club
So there is a whole situation that went down with another site and its admin… and I think in part it prompted Gazimoff to seriously consider starting an instance again. MMORPG.Social was a lot of work but also in the process of running that site for a year or so… he learned a number of important lessons. Mostly it seemed like he wanted a nice cozy gaming instance that would be a safe place for friends to gather, and as such in January of 2024, we started Gamepad.club. I officially migrated on the 24th of that month and have been there ever since. It has been impressive to see the site grow over that time and always seems to hover around 100 active users and a little over 200 total accounts on the server. It is legitimately my hope that this is my final resting place on the Fediverse, but if something changes down the line I will pack my bags and move again as that is just the nature of how this platform works. I’ve also got an account dedicated to Blaugust on this server, so technically I count as two different users in that 15 million number. Technically I also have an AggroChat account over on Botsin.Space which counts as one of those users as well.
What About Other Server Types?
So while I am throwing a bit of shade at that 15 Million number… thing is there are a lot of people on the network who are not being counted in it. That 15 Million users are just folks who are using Mastodon as a platform and not counting all of the folks on the larger Fediverse made up of a bunch of different server types. The above tree has become popular as a representative of what the Fediverse is versus Mastodon, but there are a number of platforms that are not even represented there. For example, I use Bookwyrm to track my reading so that account would not be counted towards the 15 million. All of this is why it is really hard to pin down how people are actually on the Fediverse in one form or another.
So while I am not entirely certain about this milestone… it is nonetheless impressive. The fediverse is way more active than anyone seems to think. I have no clue what the total active population would look like if you filtered out all of the dupes, but it would still be a large number. I think that is really the aspect of why I like Mastodon and the larger Fediverse so much is the interoperability of everything. I could in theory use my Bookwyrm account as my main account and still have access to talk to everyone on the platform. Similarly, Lemmy is a Reddit clone, and I could use my account on Lemmy.zip for all of my Fediverse needs. The result though is you end up creating a bunch of accounts on a bunch of different platforms… only to use a handful of them. I enjoy the concept of Pixelfed but never really use it because it is separate from my preferred Gamepad.
All that said… I love knowing that no matter what curveballs might be thrown at me… there will always be a place for me to participate. There is never going to be a time when some billionaire buys the network and takes it over to skew to his particular sensibilities. The side effect of that freedom however will always be that there is some friction to getting started. That friction is a bit more than most users will want because it isn’t ever as simple as just going to the app store and downloading something. In fact, doing that… is almost guaranteed to give you the worst possible experience as the official app is awful and the flagship server it connects to… is isolated from large swaths of the network. I realize none of this is going to win me any more converts… but it is still where I feel most comfortable.
If you are looking for a good home though… Gamepad is a great place but many other servers are equally good places. It is also perfectly normal and just accepted that folks are going to migrate for various reasons. I have no clue WHY I went down this rabbit hole, but if you have made it this far in the post I appreciate your tolerance of my nonsense.
The post Migration as a Service appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! If you follow any of the ARPG YouTubers or Streamers you will have probably heard of Dwarven Realms. This game is a very indie very alpha passion project from two brothers, that wanted to do something new for the ARPG genre. Essentially the game is this blend of Vampire Survivors mixed with the controls of what sort of feels like an action combat World of Warcraft. The graphics in general and the model work are nothing to write home about, but the gameplay falls in the “big dumb fun” category. For scale expectations… the game recently hit a peak concurrency of 780 players so this is still very much a niche thing but something that I’ve been playing around a bit with. I had so much fun that I bought copies for all of the AggroChat crew over the weekend when the price was dropped from $5 to $3.74 on a promotion that lasts until the 21st of March.
The setup of the game is pretty straightforward. You have a home camp that over time gains some crafting benches and other resources that you can access. The most important aspect of the home camp is the big green portal, which gives you access to the ruptures which are the core gameplay loop of the game. I’ve been told that the first 34 Ruptures unlock all of the side systems of the game, and then after that point, it is just an endless mechanical loop to see how high you can push up your level and how many ruptures you can clear.
Each Rupture starts out pretty slowly as you are placed on a map with some sparse destructible terrain and some monster spawns themed to that area. However, every few seconds more waves of monsters spawn eventually reaching a point where you are completely surrounded by spawns. Each Rupture has a time limit in the upper left corner showing you how much time you have left, and after killing a fixed amount of monsters you will be notified that you can unlock the boss chamber to finish out the Rupture. I keep wanting to call these Rifts because they remind me quite a bit of the Greater Rifts from Diablo III, so if I slip up and swap terms in the middle of this post hopefully you can reason what I meant. Killing monsters grants essence that you can then use to unlock objectives that spawn into the map and give you resources or gear. Additionally, all of the things you kill will have a chance of spawning loot that goes directly into your inventory.
Once you enter the Bosses Arena the door will lock behind you. This point of no return has led me to spend a good deal of time farming the map before moving on to the boss just to get a good deal more resources. The bosses are pretty straightforward and have some sort of pattern to them. Canuckmeat the Boar for example will charge you and knock you back, with the real danger coming when it knocks you into the lava that surrounds the arena. Others may attack in a fixed pattern that you need to avoid while dealing as much damage as you can. After you unlock your dragon companion that follows you around green circles will spawn throughout the map allowing you to regenerate your life and stamina, so most of the fights become a matter of avoiding the bad circles while standing in the good ones.
There are a lot of different weapons that you can unlock and an entire magic system that I have spent zero time exploring. Staves and Wands allow you to cast spells, Bows allow you to fire off arrow volleys, and all of the martial weapons have some form of bit sweep attack that takes out multiple things at once. I’ve lately been using the two-handed maul quite a bit and I’ve managed to get a unique version of that weapon with a bunch of stats and abilities associated with it. The game pretty much has every mechanic that you would expect from an ARPG, for example I have been trying to focus on LIfe Steal so that I can regen some health while dealing damage and increasing my chance of survival when surrounded.
Using a specific weapon type will begin to unlock various traits. The first few will be active abilities tied to either your Q or R button and then after that they are passive bonuses that increase your effectiveness in combat. This feels a little odd at first because when you swap weapons you will go back down to only having the default attack tied to your Left Mouse Click. However, it does not seem to take very long before you open up the first few abilities and can start taking out large groups of enemies at a time.
There are magic items that you can equip in totem slots that will cause your attacks to spawn specific behaviors. For example, I have an item that causes a rain of meteors that will deal damage to everything around me. I have another item that causes totems to spawn around me that explode whenever I or the enemies walk over them. These magic items honestly deal most of the damage during combat allowing me to sort of kite the enemies around until I have a giant pack and then explode them all at once.
As you level up you get skill points to improve your base stats and talent points to spend on a skill tree. I’ve been working on buffing my survival, damage output, and have decided to pour a bunch of my resources into fire damage to buff my magic items of choice. I figured it was probably beneficial to limit my scope to a single element, but this does mean I am passing up some seemingly powerful items that might cast lightning bolts or something like that instead. For such a simple game… it really does seem to have a lot of interesting nuances. It is nothing like a Last Epoch or Path of Exile, but still allows you some leverage in how you want to build your character.
When you first launch the game you are greeted with this screen that is a note from the developers. It is very important to keep this in mind as you play the game because it is pretty janky at times. However that said I have had a heck of a lot of fun making things explode and I think if you limit your expectations you will as well. I’ve played a lot of $100 games that were nowhere near as much fun as this simple $5 one, so if anything I have said interests you in the least… throw them a few bucks and check it out for yourself.
There is a hardcore mode that might interest those who are into such things. I am largely a “softcore” player, but given how easy it is to get started and how random the items you end up getting are… I could see hardcore being enjoyable. There are leaderboards that track progress, but honestly… I am never likely to mainline this game hard enough to get on them. I am impressed though at how generally fleshed out the game is for this early in development. The initial release date was December of 2022 and it already feels like it is a fairly substantial game. Legitimately I am not sure I can describe it any better than I did at the start of this post. Dwarven Realms is Big Dumb Fun.
The post Dwarven Realms Alpha Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks we’re back! Sorry for the week off but we return with a full docket of topics. We start off with some more discussion of Last Epoch and how everyone is still enjoying the game. Bel dinged 100 for the first time and we talked a bit about buildcraft and approachability. From there Bel talks about Dwarven Realms an ARPG of a sort that has gained traction this week amongst some of the streamers that is just “big dumb fun”. From there Ash goes down a list of Roguelikes that he has been enjoying lately namely Astral Ascent, Spiritfall, and Balatro. Tam revisits his topic surrounding the ambitious process of remaking Final Fantasy VII and his thoughts after having played a good deal of the second part. Finally, Bel uses volatile reversal and brings us back to the topic of Last Epoch and namely the impact it seems to be having on the ARPG genre as a whole.
Friends… sometimes I get something stuck in my head that I cannot seem to forcibly dislodge. I’ve also been sick the last few days so apologies for the lack of any semblance of a post yesterday. Anyways… a while back I wrote a post talking about my attempt at creating something that feels like Righteous Fire in Last Epoch and it was great… up until the point that it was not. The build sort of just fell apart when I entered the level 100 Empowered Monoliths because I was not dealing enough damage and did not have enough survival… so basically could not keep moving forward with it. I attempted to resurrect the build and got it to a point where it felt “aggressively fine” but also not exactly what I was going for in the first place.
I had this entirely different plan and created a Paladin that I was going to do some Healing Hands nonsense with… but before long found myself leveling again with a Firestarter’s Torch and Warpath. Which led me down the path of trying to figure out how Paladin was better suited to the burnination of my dreams. It turns out yes… yes it is. However, I held off on talking about the build until I reached empowered monoliths because I did not want to prematurely share my nonsense before I knew if the wheels were going to stay on the bus this time. Today despite my generally lousy “sickboy” status… I wanted to share what I had been up to. Apologies for the thrashed state of my voice in the above video where I talk about the build and show off some empowered monolith gameplay.
So the idea is not at all dissimilar from the previous build… where I went all in on making Warpath do the fire damage things. I’m trying to do a few new things, namely since I am throwing in Judgment occasionally for more damage which causes me to stop spinning… I’ve taken Giant Splitter which does a bit AOE attack each time I stop channeling. I will likely shift around these points a bit before I land on the final configuration of the build. However, the concept is straight forward… convert all bleed to ignite and convert Warpath to fire damage so that I can scale it and the ignite damage at the same time. Also, this is what makes the build feel thematically like Righteous Fire so it is a hill I am willing to die on.
The big thing that is making the build function a little better… and is the reason why I care about it being Paladin is Holy Aura. This is the unique ability for the Paladin mastery and is just sort of a build-your-own-buff aura system. I’ve found nowhere in the game that properly shows all of the buffs that the aura is granting me so I pasted the above list from the build planner. Largely I am throwing points in fire damage, attack speed, and an ability that will proc a fire explosion whenever I have hit something 6 times in a row. I am not entirely certain if that last bit is worth it because it currently costs me 7 points to get there… and I am wondering if I would not be better off just taking flat damage scaling instead. This also serves as a burn button because when I activate the ability it increases how much of these buffs it is providing.
The thing I dig about the Last Epoch Tools Build Planner is that it collates all of the stats and gives you nice numerical rollups that don’t really exist in the game. Based on the stats in the planner I just linked it shows that I am dealing 832% increased fire damage and have 204% chance to ignite on hit… not factoring in that I have other abilities that Judgement that also have their own baked-in 200% additional chance to ignite on hit with that ability. On top of that for survival purposes, I have 18% melee leech and 7% leech off the additional damage that I am dealing over time with ignite. If I can swap some of my gear around and get more void resistance, I can throw on a shield that will generate a good deal more fire damage over time and ignite chance.
All things considered, I am pretty happy with the state of the build currently. There are a number of levers that I could pull to keep tweaking the damage while leveling the rest of the way to 100. Am I happier with it than I am with my Void Knight? Honestly, I am not sure. However, I am very happy that I did not give up on this concept and was finally able to see it the rest of the way to something viable for empowered monoliths. Would I suggest playing this build? Sure if you like burning things and want to track down either the items I am using or something that gives a similar amount of ignite chance and fire damage scaling. It is a heck of a lot of fun and offers a fairly chill playstyle which is ultimately the aspect of Righteous Fire that I loved so much. Throw on a movie or like I have recently… an audio book… and just grind out some chill monoliths for tasty loot. That really is my happy place.
The post Third Time More Burny appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
