AggroChat

Botany Mastered

May 26, 2015May 10, 2015 by Belghast

A Very Cardgamey Show

It seems when I think we have nothing to talk about… we end up talking for two hours finally having to force ourselves to stop talking to close out the show. Last night was one of those night as I was joined by Tam, Kodra, Thalen and Ashgar. Sometimes a clear theme is presented and last night inadvertedly this happened. As we rambled through the various things we have been playing, it turns out that a lot of us had been playing card games in one form or another. We got this interesting peak into the secret underground gaming scene of Seatle that Kodra has now apparently gotten his ticket into. He recorded this weeks AggroChat on a quick jaunt away from this all day gaming event that was happening in a nearby hotel. The kind of event that isn’t advertised, and that you apparently have to know someone to get into. This is not starting to sound like fight club at all is it?

Other than that I shift things around a bit in the show and I actually go first. Usually by the time we get around to the games I have been playing my co-hosts are bordering on being asleep so I opted to talk about my stuff first. Which was a large course of Echo of Souls, and beating Wolfenstein The Old Blood which is an absolutely enjoyable but exceptionally short version of the original Wolfenstein game redone in New Order style. Machinegames has somehow created this magical mix of the glory days of the 90s era shooter mixed with the narrative power of modern gaming. Ashgar once again is going through his DS collection and playing things that he had not beaten before, this time jaunting down a time travelling avenue. Thalen extolled the joys of Hand of Fate, and Kodra rediscovered Heroes of Might and Magic 3. More than that however we talked a lot about card games and board games in general. Was a fun and chill show to record and hopefully that comes across in the production.

Botany Mastered

Last night while recording the podcast and editing it I spent my time in Final Fantasy XIV working on Botany. For some time I have been working on pushing up the two critical harvesting abilities Mining and Botany before actually starting the Disciple of the Hand push. I figured having the ability to go out into the world and gather things would be beneficial when making the push to level all the other things. The Disciple of the Land classes also gave me a bit of a buffer to psyche myself up for diving headlong into the pit of madness that is crafting. At this point begins the money grind and thankfully I am up to almost 2 million gil to help support this push. I guess the first order of business is to level all of the professions to 15 so that I can get the best cross class abilities to help with the rest of the grind. My original thought was to take everything to 15 in no particular order, and then start walking them up 5 levels at a time. So take everything to 20, everything to 25 etc. This also allows me to convert all of the crafting gear along the way hopefully keeping my vaults from overflowing.

Another thing that I really need to start doing is working on my beast tribe daily quests. One of the things that Ashgar talked about on the podcast was the interesting quest that comes at the end of maxing each of the factions. There is apparently a storyline that somehow joins up all of the rebellious beast tribe factions into a “Justice League” of sorts. I would really love to see this storyline before Heavensward launches, but at this point I have right around a month to accomplish all of this. I am not sure if I have given myself enough time, especially given that I keep dinking around in other games at the same time. I am starting to feel under the gun with wanting to accomplish so many things before I officially say goodbye to “A Realm Reborn”. So far FFXIV 2.0 has been an amazing ride and I am amped about what Heavensward and 3.0 has to offer. I guess tomorrow night the 2.57 patch will be going in, and I am wondering what exactly it will bring as well. I would be extremely happy if they uncapped Poetics gains… but I somehow doubt that will be the case.

Bad At Shadowrun

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time working on Shadowrun Dragonfall and I have decided that I need to just start over. I spent too much of my time on my main character too focused on a specific tree. I was planning on going all melee all of the time and quite frankly that is a poor choice to go with. I spent most of combat running around the room chasing down mobs that would move away from me and attack from ranged. Additionally I am going to have to throw out some of my instincts because I straight wiped my party trying to stay and fight against unwinnable odds. All of that said there are aspects of the game I am really enjoying, but right now I am just pretty horrible at actually doing it. I also need to learn to save far more often because this game will straight kill you at times with a smile. It is going to be an interesting show when we ultimately talk about this game but I am really wanting to make it further than I did with the previous games. I would love to beat this one because in many ways the gameplay reminds me of the Fallout series.

The thing is the game gives you one of every classes so I guess what you end up playing is just for flavor. I will probably go Street Samurai once again because that was always my favorite character to play in the actual Shadowrun campaigns I have been in. I didn’t really care that much for the little dwarf I rolled so I will probably go something more generic like a human this time around. All in all I was a fun several hours I spent yesterday, and as it is raining insanely outside… I plan on going downstairs and hanging out on the sofa all day while watching Netflix. Shadowrun is precisely the perfect kind of game for a day like today. So I will either be doing that or be working on tradeskills in final fantasy. In any case I have a gloriously lazy Sunday ahead of me. These are the types of days that gaming was made for. This massive lung infection has gotten me out of having to travel for Mother’s Day so right now we are planning on having a re-roll there next weekend when the world is not actively trying to kill us. Hopefully you have an awesome day too.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Botany Mastered

AggroChat #56 – Very Cardgamey Show

May 21, 2019May 10, 2015 by AggroChat

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A Follow-The-Money Problem

May 26, 2015May 10, 2015 by Tamrielo

Games journalism. It’s not really about ethics. It’s about money. Shocker, I know.

You can get to the heart of almost any organization’s strengths, weaknesses, issues, and successes by following the money. If you’re looking for motivation of almost any business, follow the money. Specifically, figure out where the money is coming from and where it’s going. If there’s something happening that you don’t like, it’s probably because you are not the part of the group that’s the primary contributor of money to the organization in question.

If you’re looking at a company that’s doing things that you don’t like, things that fundamentally don’t align with your interests, it’s pretty likely that you’re not the target audience (and thus not giving them any money) or you’re not the customer, you’re the product. You can rail against this, but no matter how loud you get, it’s not going to change unless the flow of money changes.

The common saying is that money is the root of all evil, which I honestly find to be something of a cop-out. Everyone needs to pay the bills, keep the lights on, keep food on the table, and keep a roof over their heads. These aren’t easy things to do. If you’re looking at a professional games journalism site, something that posts multiple times a day (every other hour? more?) and that you can rely upon for coverage of a large number of events, you’re looking at someone, usually quite a few someones, who need to make enough money to essentially spend all day posting. Odds are good you don’t pay a dime to any games site– most don’t even give you the option. So, you’re looking at something you consume for free, that takes up someone’s entire workday, who needs to pay the bills somehow. Follow the money.

If you’re not paying, someone is, or no one would be writing. So, who would want to give someone money to write about games? First, advertisers, though too many ads and you, the reader, won’t read the site anymore, so getting all your money from ads isn’t likely. Second, game publishers, who want people to know about their games and know that games sites are a good marketing platform. Both of these groups have money and motivation. This is all pretty obvious, but it’s where the whole “ethics” question gets thrown into the mix.

Is there a conflict of interest when it comes to accepting money directly from the people you are reporting on? Certainly. Pretty much every type of enthusiast press deals with this. Why? Well, what’s the alternative? Gotta keep the lights on somehow, gotta keep food on the table. The relationship pretty much has to run this way because otherwise you don’t have the money to keep the site up. Does this absolve the enthusiast press of the conflict of interest? No, but “real journalism” is going to take a backseat to “paying the bills” any day of the week. Because it’s enthusiast press and not life-and-death reporting, there’s no value in martyring yourself to report on “big issues” because this is entertainment media; “big issues” pretty much don’t exist.

There’s an alternative model that’s been suggested for games reporting sites: Webcartoonists. The vast majority of webcartoonists don’t sustain themselves on their comic alone; it’s a very rare few who can focus exclusively on their work, and they’re almost all solo endeavours. They also post, at most, once a day, usually less often than that. Not counting sponsored posts and reposts, Kotaku posted ten times today (Sunday, May 10). Destructoid posted 11 times. MassivelyOP, a niche site, posted 9 times today. BlizzardWatch, an even more niche site than Massively, posted 7 times. It’s not a coincidence that those numbers are all really close to one another. While a webcomic can update once a day or less to remain relevant, a games site needs to update multiple times a day– in some cases upwards of ten(!) to stay relevant– that’s where the market equilibrium is happening. The model doesn’t seem to work.

I originally planned on making a graph to show this off, comparing today’s pageviews to the number of posts made. Pageviews are relevant because that’s what gets people to see the advertisements and the marketing that funds the site. Your eyes looking at these sites is the traffic that drives revenue (you are the product). However, the divide between games sites is pretty stark. The readership of sites with 10 or more posts versus the readership of sites with less than 10 posts in a given day is STARK. We’re talking orders of magnitude here, it makes for a silly looking graph. I don’t have a complete picture of the data to support this, but I strongly suspect that if a site updated, say, 15 times a day, they wouldn’t see a significant increase past about 10 or so posts. I do have some supporting data, however.

IGN.com updated 32 times this past Sunday. Here’s their Alexa rank:

IGN.com, Alexa ranking

For comparison, here’s Kotaku, with less than a third of their post count:

kotaku.com, Alexa ranking

As a final point, here’s the Escapist, with 4 posts:

escapistmagazine.com, Alexa ranking

These are all pan-media outlets with a focus on gaming. They all have relatively similar curves, with a spike of readers in the last quarter of 2014 and then some levelling off, and all taking a dive in April (as news hits the doldrums). The Escapist is notably even more pan-media than Kotaku, but Kotaku is right in the 500-700 rank, whereas the Escapist is between 4000 and 5000; an order of magnitude. IGN only gains 300 or so rank over Kotaku, a fairly meager gain in absolute terms, particularly for triple the output. I’m not suggesting that post count is the only (or even necessarily the most important) factor in readership, but there’s definitely a correlation, and all of these sites are posting FAR more than once a day or a few times a week.

The difficulty is finding a model that supports the interests of the audience while providing enough income to support the sites themselves. It seems unlikely that readers are going to be willing to pay for access to games news sites– the current games news sites are the old game magazines, which almost wholly died out with the advent of the internet. The audience was more than happy to become the product in return for getting content for free.

Cory Doctorow in his hot air balloon

The other model I’ve seen is the very egalitarian, very grassroots “bloggers can be the new games journalists”, suggesting that the content created by bloggers, in aggregate, can cover the news and be honest and reader-oriented about it because there’s no real money in it for them. It’s the same concept that drives the idea of twitter-as-international news. I’m not sure if it can work; the idea of crowdsourced reporting is still really young and I suspect there will be barriers to entry put in place by both existing games sites (who want exclusive coverage) and game publishers themselves (who want to be able to control what people say about them). It’s definitely a problem with the Youtube scene by most reports– people either allow themselves to be bought or are shut out.

I’m not sure what the future of games reporting is going to look like, but I think the first place to look to see where it’s headed is the flow of money. You can boil a lot of things down to a follow-the-money problem, and if you figure out how that flow is working, you can get a picture of how it’s likely to change and what would need to be different to get what you’re looking for.

I suspect that a site with no advertising, that charged a $10/month subscription fee and managed to get a critical mass of readers would deliver some really top-notch reporting, but I also doubt there are enough people willing to pay for that.

Source: Digital Initiative
A Follow-The-Money Problem

Finding Your Time

May 26, 2015May 9, 2015 by Belghast

Writing Blocks

This morning I am trying to knock a post out quickly before “Rainmageddon” gets here. While I don’t really believe it the neighbor across the street said we are likely to get “ten inches” of rain during the course of the day. That would be absolutely insane. My wife’s theory however is that she just misheard and the news actually said “two inches”. In any case starting at noon today we are likely not going to want to be out in the world. This is awesome because it means I can binge on video games. What is not so awesome is the fact that I need to get a post out quickly rather than my normal lazy Saturday and Sunday posting schedule. So I have a video game soundtrack on to block out the world, and am in beast mode! Sadly my beast mode is more like a sleepy kitten, but in any case… I am making things happen! For those curious I am listening to the State of Decay soundtrack that is available on Google Play.

Normally Storytime Saturday is the day when I tell you some tale about myself, and I try really hard to make it one I have not already told. The problem there is that I have shared so many intimate details of my life with you all, and that I have zero recollection of what I say on any given day. Hell there are days I get to work and I will see entire sections of a post that I don’t remember writing. In the spirit of the Newbie Blogger Initiative this mornings “Storytime” is more than likely going to be a free form rambling mess as I share indiscriminant tips and tricks I have learned over the years. The key to thriving as a blog is to be predictable in your posting schedule, and in order to make this happen it means you need to set aside specific blocks of time to write. How big of a block of time depends entirely on the style of post you make. When I write a post that requires lots of research those are usually done over the course of several days, with me keeping notes in a Google drive document. My “normal” style of posting however takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour of me sitting down at the keyboard and physically writing it out.

Finding Your Time

When I launched this blog in 2009 I spent a lot of my lunch hours writing posts. For the most part this worked great because it was a fixed block of time when I was not really doing anything else. The problem is as work got busier, and I started actually going out for lunch… my noon writing block evaporated. There were more than a few days when I was working on a problem that I could not set down long enough to write a post, and by the time whatever had been fixed… I was usually too drained mentally to produce something worth reading. I wont say this was the reason behind some of my larger lapses but it was certainly a contributing factor. When I started on my “Grand Experiment” I knew I was going to have to figure out something else to do. I had gotten in the habit of going upstairs with my morning coffee and piddling around in a video game for thirty minutes to an hour before actually going into work. This “boot up” time greatly improved my cognitive ability by the time I got to work, so it was actually something that turned out to be pretty beneficial.

When finding your own block of time you have to evaluate your own schedule. Where is a block that you are doing something every single day, or every few days… that you could tweak a bit to turn that into a time to write your blog posts? For me I happily sacrificed my morning game time in an effort to give myself a regular place to write words and things. This however has been a double edged sword. I literally cannot start my day without writing a blog post, and the days when I have to do something differently and stage the post the night before… I feel like something is off the entire day. I have incorporated this writing phase into my morning boot up routine and when it is missing, I am just not fully functional. Additionally the problem of writing while you are not entirely awake means sometimes entire blocks of text don’t really make much sense. Thankfully the frequency of my posting makes up for some of this. When you are posting every single day, your readers cut you a lot more slack for having an “off day”.

Keep a Contract

The other nice fringe benefit of morning writing is that you feel like you have accomplished some thing. No matter how south the rest of the day turns, you will have at least had a tiny victory that morning. For years my wife has done something that I just did not understand until I looked at my own blogging. When we clean the house we usually divide and conquer, meaning I take certain rooms and she takes certain rooms. One of the rooms she always wants to do is the Bathroom and I have never understood why she tackles it first thing. She has always said it made her feel like she had accomplished something, and I guess in a way gets those good vibe endorphins flowing making the rooms that are more painful a little easier to do. I can definitely see this whole process working because I absolutely see these same kind of benefits with my own blog posts. No matter how frustrating the rest of the day is… I at least accomplished writing another post and I continued the chain of daily postings by one more day.

Whatever your block or your schedule I think the absolute most important thing is to treat it like a contract. It becomes extremely easy to give yourself an excuse for not writing one day, that turns into not writing for an entire month. Before I ventured down the path of daily writing there were so many times when I told myself “I just am not feeling it” and let myself off the hook without writing a post. Then as months went by of “not feeling it” it became harder to actually start the process again. In order to keep a schedule you need a certain amount of rigor in your life, and a willingness to sacrifice other things to make sure the ball keeps moving forward. I know this might sound like an odd statement, especially for something that we all consider a hobby. The problem is you can’t really treat it like a hobby and achieve the predictable regularity that your readers will want. In many was blogging is a second job, admittedly one you do out of love… but there still needs to be some constraints on your time. At this point I have blogged every single day for over two years… so I have this pressure built up in NOT missing a single day. I have motivation to keep going, and keep writing… and I think it is this motivation that you have to find for yourself.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Finding Your Time