Belghast

The Patreon Thing

May 26, 2015March 29, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 50 – Game Club 2 – Trine 2

Last night we recorded our 50th episode of AggroChat and I have to say that is a bit staggering now that I think about it. We’ve almost recorded a full year of AggroChat, and we only “missed” a single week. In fact now that I think about it two weeks from now will actually be our one year anniversary show. It is insane how an entire year of recording gets away from you like that. Things are going to be a bit strange over the next few weeks as Kodra has accepted a new job and is moving out to Seattle to join Tam and some of our other friends there. Everyone is joking that they are trying to recruit everyone to Seattle, but honestly the cost of living difference would be horrible coming from Tulsa. Besides according to the New York Times we are apparently this up and coming hipster hub. It is shocking the number of smaller game conventions that are happening in this area.

In any case this week we talked about Trine 2, an exceptionally beautiful game about a Gluttonous Warrior, a Grumpy Wizard and a Larcenous Rogue. Honestly this is one of the shortest shows we have recorded in a long while because there just wasn’t a whole lot to talk about in regards to Trine. We came down on multiple sides of the game with some of us enjoying it, others not feeling much of anything about it, and still others disliking it immensely. From that aspect I feel like the first round robin title was a success. From the aspect of giving us a lot of material to talk about, maybe not quite so much. We also announced our third game club title, which would be one of my picks: Darkest Dungeon. Since that is a game about dungeons… and mental illness I have a feeling like it is going to create a lot of stories as a result.

The Paetron Thing

Yesterday I wrote a strange piece, and among many things that folks got out of it, at least one person thought I was talking at least in some part about the current Patreon trend. I honestly didn’t mean it to come across like that, but it is proof that we can all read the same post but take vastly different messages from it. Patreon and I have this odd relationship, where I think it is both really awesome… and worrisome at the same time. The awesome part is it gives people who are creating a lot of really awesome content a way to actually do that as a living, providing them a semi-regular source of income from the creation of “stuff”. The troublesome aspect is that I seem to see people who are NOT creating much content, throwing up Patreons left and right because it seems to be the latest way to get something for nothing. Internet celebrity is apparently now a thing worth funding? In the case of full disclosure I back a couple of different Patreons because the people involved are creating a regular stream of content that I value, so I don’t want it to sound like I am against the concept.

Where I end up wrestling with myself is that there are times I think “man it would be nice to have my costs offset”. Within a few seconds a little voice inside me pipes up and says that if I did advertising or a patreon or any other way of offsetting my expenses that it would somehow “cheapen” the process. I’ve always considered my blog a labor of love, and this whole getting up every morning to write something new is something I do… because I enjoy it, not because I am trying to profit from it. All of that said there are some very real and concrete expenses to keep it all up, and if I did not have a good paying job I would have to stop doing pretty much everything that I do. I added up some details this morning and for hosting and domain registration alone I am paying the equivalent of a little more than $60 a month once you factor in everything. Then you tack onto that another $150 a month for really fast internet, and various game subscriptions and you quickly get into some real money. So while part of me thinks that I should be creating a Patreon as a sort of Tip Jar, there is another part of me that says “don’t”.

Limited Funding

Patreon is an amazing thing for those who are creating the content and actually needing the money to keep the process going. The problem is… I don’t need the money in the strictest sense. My fear is that as people start popping these accounts up for the fun of it, that they will dilute the money away from the people that actually need it. The blogging and the podcasting and the occasional streaming… are all part of my larger hobby of “gaming” and I just view all of these costs as being part of that bigger habit. If I were to lose my job or something drastic like that, I would actually have a real need for it. I feel like setting up a Patreon now would be akin to “crying wolf”, and asking for the goodwill of my readers and listeners before I in the strictest since needed to. Maybe I am odd in my point of view, in that I view this relationship between reader and writer as some sort of a social contract. I provide for you, and you give me a reason to keep making content. But like all relationships I feel like there is always the problem that one side might end up taking advantage of the other.

Setting up a Patreon page, because it is seems to be the popular thing to do… feels like taking advantage of that relationship. Because honestly I know there will be people out there who do donate because they want me to feel loved and appreciated. I have an exceptionally warm group of readers and listeners. I appreciate every single one of you out there, and that is a big part of the reason why I have turned down every single person wanting to place advertisements on my blog. I don’t want to cheapen that relationship, and I don’t want to tarnish our friendship. That is not to say that at some point the expenses of my sites will grow to a point where I simply cannot weather the entire burden myself. But that time is not now. Until it reaches that point then I will continue avoiding trying to “monetize” what I do for my own personal enjoyment. I will continue also suggesting people show support for the Patreons that DO need the funding, and are providing a wealth of content as a result.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
The Patreon Thing

Crowd Sourced Opinion

May 26, 2015March 28, 2015 by Belghast

Cruel Nation

This mornings post is going to be a little bit out of the ordinary, in part because I don’t really have a story to tell, and I also woke up thinking about this one. This post is a call back to my earlier post this week called “hip to be mean” where I talk about how frustrating it is that the default reaction at times seems to be to bash ideas rather than to bolster them. With this post I got a number of really good comments but one stuck out in my mind. Roger from Moderate Peril wrote “Plus I truly believe that we have entered an age where the old ideologies are waning and people are just more unpleasant and self centered.”. I admit I struggled with this statement for a bit when I first read it.

I wanted to disagree with him, because I don’t want to live in a world that is growing more cruel. However the more I think about it, the more I think he is probably right. The social media age has not been exceptionally good on our empathy. I feel like it has overloaded us in such a way that our only reaction is to worry about our own well being. When you are confronted with so much “faux crisis”, it becomes sometimes hard to detect when there is something serious that you need to react to. So when you see something… you never really know if someone is just being hyperbolic or if they really do need assistance. I tend to favor on the side of reaching out and treating things seriously… only to feel dumb a few minutes later when said person claims to “only be joking”.

Crowd Sourced Opinion

The other big problem I see is that we seem to indulge in a lot of crowd sourcing of our decisions. Social media allows us to ask questions and receive answers in lightning speed. The problem is unlike the real world you are often taking council from strangers on your personal matters. So if you ask if you should dye your hair green, more than likely the answer will sound a little something like“hell yes! do it! do it! do it now!” The problem is… these individuals likely know nothing of your real world situations. You might work in an environment where dying your hair an “unnatural color” could be a fire-able offense. I have quite literally seen that wording written into a number of contracts. So in being urged off the ledge to make drastic changes they could be pushing you into some real life trouble.

This crowd sourcing of our thought processes leads us to this dangerous territory where the loudest and most confident opinion wins. This “group think” leads people to drift along in someone else’s tide, because at least on some level it is simply easier than having to decide all these things for yourself. In some ways this isn’t a bad thing… for example I have this pied piper effect of getting people to join my guilds. I have the best intentions for every member and only want them to have a happy and safe place to spend their leisure time in games. However if my motivations were impure I feel like I could probably bend this same behavior to my whims. Not everyone has the purest of intentions, and sometimes people are just trying to use others to make a quick buck.

The Hive Mind

When I see a “movement” spring up on the internet, my first instinct is to react. Moments later however there is a second instinct, that I jokingly call the “snopes instinct”, where I start to question the motivations behind it. I’ve spent a lot of time googling various things I have read that seemed a little too perfectly aligned to be real. Sometimes it works out that the facts in fact do align, but other times you quickly uncover the true nature of the scam. We live in this time where the once fantastical is right at the tips of our fingers, but I feel like somewhere we have lost our natural instinct to be skeptical in regards to the things we experience. While I would never advocate tinfoil-hattery… I do try my best to “question everything”. Not everything is a conspiracy, but some things may in fact be someone trying to enthrall you in a mission that you did not actually sign up for.

I’ve been told that people trust me because I am stable. That I am the same person today, that I was yesterday and will be tomorrow. The strange thing about that is that I am constantly changing my opinions and outlook. Each time I take in new data I evaluate it against the data I held true before. If the new data reveals something new, or is in some way “more true” than the old… then I jettison the old attitude and replace it with a new, but not after serious evaluation. Because of all of this… it is not that I think we are getting more cruel. I just feel like we are doing a poor job of making sure the decisions we are making, are in fact our own. The hive mind can be a beautiful thing when you need to get something accomplished quickly… but it does a very poor job of adequately expressing your personality, hopes, dreams and aspirations. What it does do however is an amazing job of preying on our fears. All of this said, I firmly believe we have within us a radar for sorting out the conflicting data, and coming to a decision on our own independent of what the deafening crowd is screaming.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Crowd Sourced Opinion

Disappointment in Draenor

May 26, 2015March 27, 2015 by Belghast

Death of Dungeons

So yesterday I originally set out to write a post about World of Warcraft, and I am guessing this morning I will actually make good on that threat. Last night we raided Blackrock Foundry, and overall it was an enjoyable time. I managed to actually pick up a second piece of “tier” gear giving me the two piece set bonus. Unfortunately each of the pieces I swapped out was significantly higher level than the 670 normal gear level. For gladiator however I have a feeling that the two piece set is going to make the difference since it means the occasional free shield charge proc. I am still finding joy in playing with my friends while raiding, the problem is right now I am not finding much joy in anything else is World of Warcraft. As I said yesterday and a few other times… were I not actively raiding in this game I would probably be unsubscribed once more. There are a lot of reasons why Warlords of Draenor simply is not working out the same way as Pandaria did, and I thought I would take this mornings post to write about some of my frustrations.

Firstly the big one seems to be that Warlords destroyed the dungeon running culture. In my guild no one runs dungeons, at all. Largely because there is no real point to running them. What I mean by this is that through clearing Nagrand and mixing in a few crafted items you can get any alt ready to run LFR without having set foot in a single heroic. I’ve proven this on both my Deathknight and my Hunter, and if I bothered leveling another character to 100 chances are that is the path I would be taking as well. The gear gained through heroics just is not enough of a carrot to deal with the frustrations of running the dungeons. I ran the hell out of heroics on Belghast until the first wing of Highmaul LFR opened, and then never again other than the complete some of the Inn quests. I love running dungeons, but there has to be some reason to be running them… some reward waiting at the end of the frustration. The sad truth is that heroics are far harder than Highmaul LFR, so the risk versus reward equation is out of whack. Without the need to cap some token currency each week, we no longer have the incentive to keep running them with the guild.

Garrisons and Ashran

Garrisons have been this mixed bag, that in some ways I really like because it gives me my own private Stormwind that I can do my banking and trade skills in peace. Unfortunately that is also a double edged sword since no one is actually venturing out into the hub cities. We log into our Garrison, and live there until time for us to venture out into the world for raiding. The most social activity is when we invite other guild members into our Garrisons for the purpose of doing an invasion. This feature could have been something to bring players together rather than keep them apart. I feel like there is this missed opportunity where they should have connected the hub city to our Garrison, in that our garrison was like a “quarter” of the hub. This would mean that sure players would spend a lot of time in their Garrison but there would also be the incentive to pop out to the larger city for the resources they are lacking at home.

I also feel there was a massive missed opportunity for guilds in that there should have been another “quarter” that was a “guild garrison”. This would allow guilds to have some common goal to pull towards, bringing them closer and allowing this guild garrison to have better resources that could be shared by the entire guild. Instead we have our Ashran hub located in a PVP zone, that at least at the start you could not even queue for instances from. It is quite literally a town we all go to on Tuesday to collect our weekly raid tokens… and then never set foot in again. Compared to Shattrath, Dalaran, The Shrine, or even the revamped Orgrimmar and Stormwind… Ashran hub cities are abject failures. They don’t bring players together, and only serve as a jumping off point for pvpers waiting on the next match. The previous hubs have felt like these grand cities that had a personality of their own, and begged you to come explore them. Ashran just looks like a lazy camp hastily thrown together on the edge of a battlefield.

Disappointment in Draenor

There is a lot that Warlords does right, and I really did enjoy questing my way through the new content. The problem is there is a lot more that it seems to do wrong. Once upon a time World of Warcraft was this game that had something for many different play styles. While not all of them were as well supported as others, there were still many supported methods of play. The problem that I keep coming back to with Warlords of Draenor is that it feels like Blizzard thinks there are only two types of players now. The first are the raiders, and they are giving them plenty of loving this expansion with a mix of awesome flexible raiding modes and the super hardcore Mythic raiding. Blackrock Foundry is one of the best instances they have designed in a really long time, and Highmaul was this fun romp as well. The other type of player Blizzard seems to recognize… are the folks who wished they had the time and devotion to raid. For these players they have given them the current “tourist mode” LFR content, allowing them to collect shiny baubles, see the storyline and feel like they accomplished something once a week.

There are more than those players however trying to play the game. There once was a very rich and diverse crafting and harvesting ecosystem, and both were routes to both financial success and enjoyment. The problem is that Garrisons have essentially decimated this play style by replacing it with a daily login “facebook game”, where you flip a few switches every day and get candy as a result. Harvesting is now utterly meaningless because you can level and army of alts and receive far more resources in 15 minutes of logging in multiple characters than you can in three hours of serious farming. On top of this, since the majority of serious tradeskill items are linked to garrison resources it devalues their creation. Also placing a three item cap on the number of crafted items you can have, takes away the value of trying to craft a full set of anything. After the first few weeks I stopped doing my crafting cooldowns, because it didn’t really feel like there was any point to all of it. I was not building towards any larger goals, because I accomplished almost all of them within the first month. Now my time in World of Warcraft is largely spent around me logging Belghast in each morning, and each night to flip the switches and keep the Garrison humming… all for the promise of my next loot crate and potentially some upgrades to support my raiding habit. Which cause me to question why I am even logging in at all.

#WoW #Warlords #Draenor

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Disappointment in Draenor

Hip to be Mean

May 26, 2015March 26, 2015 by Belghast

Jackals and Idiots

This morning I had this post in my head that I was going to write, talking about my present funk with World of Warcraft, and how I would not be still subscribed were it not raiding. I was going to talk about the ramifications of this expansion and how it is weighing heavily on my guild and the activities of its players. While it feels like I had written this same post numerous times in the past, I thought like maybe I had new things to say about it. I said I “was” going to write it because at some point yesterday I started reading a post linked to me by a friend. While it took me several tries over the course of the day to actually finish it… I am glad that I did. In the post a blogger/journalist/whatever you want to call it interviews someone who makes games. We don’t know what role they play, or what company they worked for… but as the interview unfolds none of that really matters since they are largely talking in generalizations.

As a blogger, and podcaster, and now writer for a professional games site… I could find a lot of offense in what the person had to say. He calls folks like me Jackals, and the folks playing the games idiots… but I can’t hold any real venom for the person because were I in their shoes I probably would feel exactly the same. I am not really sure how it happened but over the years I have met and become friends with a lot of people that work in the industry. I have listened to horror stories of working in the trenches, and tried to be a positive ear to turn to when they knew layoffs were looming over their heads. I’ve heard just how personally some reviews effect them, and how helpless they felt as they had to make this or that decision for the sake of getting a product out the door. While I don’t think that I would feel the “press” were Jackals per se, I would definitely have an opinion that many of them are opportunistic and prone to their own flavor of “band wagoning” as a game is taking on water and sinking. After years of having your livelihood depend upon the good nature of strangers, I am sure I would have a pretty poor opinion of the enthusiast press in all flavors.

Hip to be Mean

I feel like one of the root problems is that somewhere along the line it became hip to be mean. If we are operating in the gaming space it is a fact of life that we are nerds and geeks or at least former nerds and geeks. You don’t spend your time writing about a very intricate and detailed thing without being at least at one time in your life… extremely devoted to it. I feel like each of us are in some way vying for some undefined “street cred” in the things we say, and there are absolutely times where I have to stop myself from falling into that trap. There is a quiet game of one-ups-manship that happens when you get a bunch of gamers together in a room. It starts as simple as nostalgia… when someone starts reminiscing about the games of the past… and someone else has to throw down that they started in an earlier era… and the instinct is to escalate from there. So if you started in Nintendo, I feel obligated to point out that I started with the Atari… and then someone else will feel obligated to point out that they played pong. This literally happened casually in the course of five minutes the other night in our WoW raid, without any of us really realized it. No one meant anything mean by it, but there is this constant and subtle battle for relevance when you get gamers together.

When you take this natural instinct and magnify it, I think you end up with rant bloggers and you tubers that seem to like nothing at all in the world. It is like being mean and ranting about a subject is a “cruise control for cool”, and frankly I am tired of it. I used to be a pretty negative person, and in fact it is deeply rooted in my core to be pretty pessimistic. I expect the worst out of most situations and am pleasantly surprised when things do not go horribly wrong. About three years ago I made a conscientious effort to change this, to focus on the joy we should all be feeling while playing games rather than the mountain of negativity that is so damned prevalent. Even if you are bitter and jaded, at some point in your past you had to have felt the spark of sheer magic the first time you played a game. I remember being absolutely transfixed by these shapes dancing across the television screen, and being in awe when I realized that my hand on this crude object could control what they did. There is magic in the process, and as someone who has tried to make a game I still have a sense of wonder when I realize just how much work went into the creation of even the worst title.

People Make Games

We have this modern tendency to think of the people that make the things we use as nameless faceless corporations. So we think of Electronic Arts for example as this evil company that is trying to fleece us for our money and give his horrible games in return. When in truth Electronic Arts is an assemblage of hundreds of really hard working and well meaning people who just want to make something awesome. They grew up on the same dreams we all did, wanting to make video games for a living… and unlike most of us they held onto those dreams and chased them rather than accepting something else for their fate. The people that make video games are my equivalent of a professional athlete, they are the people that fought hard enough to achieve the goal of creating that thing they love so much… for a living. So having known developers in all forms over the years, and listening to them talk about what they are trying to do… and the games that they are trying to make. I have a hard time viewing these companies as the evil empires they are made out to be. No one sets out wanting to make a horrible product, and no one deserves to feel like they are hated by the people that are supposed to be their fans.

So knowing that there are people and families depending upon the games I play, gives me a slightly different perspective on what would otherwise be a failure. I find it harder to rage about this game being horrible, and everyone who created it being horrible by association. The irony of this post was that I had originally planned on writing about my frustrations with a game, a post that could very much feed into this same cycle of hatred. The difference is I try my best never go indulge in the rant, or at least not fully indulge. I’ve been told that my angry posts are nicer than some peoples regular posts, and while I have a hard time believing that… I have heard it enough times to assume it is largely true. In part I have to think that the empathy I have for the people who are making the experiences that I still very much do find joy in… is the difference. So if I talk about Blizzard being dumb for not doing something… I know that behind the scenes there are countless heroes struggling every single day to try and create the best possible game they can given the struggle of working with what is now a fifteen year old code base. We started playing these games because they made us happy, that they gave us a bit of joy… and let us indulge sometimes in a bit of escapism. I try my best to focus on that, and the tingly feeling I still get when I play something really good. Maybe it is simply that I am now staring down the barrel of 40, and that I don’t want my legacy to be that of a raving asshole. In any case I am going to still struggle to remain a positive voice in an otherwise sea of negativity… and I am hoping over time more people will join me in my lifeboat.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Hip to be Mean