Adventures in the Federiverse

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One of the things that you probably already know about me by reading my blog… is that Twitter is my social media home.  It is where with the release of this blog I carved out a place for myself online and then filled my feed full of other awesome gamers and bloggers.  It was for years my happy place, where I came to get new ideas or interact with others about my own.  Then something happened along the way that started to darken the environment.  More politics started filtering their way into these discussions and with the introduction of the Gators, there was a massive chilling effect on this community I so loved.  So it is a world that I still feel very connected to, and is still the primary source of communication I have for a lot of my friends…  but the day to day interactions just don’t feel as good as they once did.

The above tweet was sort of a catalyst for an interesting journey I have been on this weekend.  Initially my thought was “why the hell does the metal band have a social network?”.  It seems like I have been behind the times and another network sprung up without me knowing about it.  Mastodon is essentially the latest not-twitter to show up on the block, but in truth by latest I mean it has been out in the wild since October of 2016 in one form or another.  Twitter is the most readily available comparison but in truth it is doing a lot more than that, some of which honestly is a bit of a detriment to easily on-boarding new users.

Mastodon is a distributed and federated social network that is by nature decentralized, and while there is in fact a Flagship site called Mastodon.social, there are a ton of smaller communities that have downloaded the open source software and are running their own instances.  The largest of these is the primarily non-English speaking Pawoo.net with around 400,000 users, and the smallest ones somewhere in the sub-100 user range.  No one person controls the network as essentially all of the instances out there have control over the code base of their own server…  pending they don’t tweak the general network protocol settings.

So you are probably thinking to yourself, what use is a social network if it is a bunch of disconnected islands?  This is where the Federated part comes in allowing users on different island states to talk to each other freely as though they were on the same network.  That means I can take my @Belghast@Elekk.xyz account and talk freely to @Tamrielo@Tabletop.social or @x1101@social.nasqueron.org.  The naming following an email like scheme with @Username and then @Instance following it if they are not also on your local instance.

Adventures in the Federiverse

The user interface has a very “I swear I am using TweetDeck” feel to it, but it is just subtly different enough to trip you up a little bit.  However it was extremely easy for me to shift over to using it comfortably because a lot of the things I was used to doing were also here.  Instead of a Tweet you have a Toot since Mastodons…  and instead of a Retweet folks call it a Boost, which in some ways is a more pleasant way of thinking about it given you are trying to share someone else’s content with the world.  Significantly different is the fact that you can change the visibility of a given “toot” so that it shows as public, unlisted, follower-only or is instead a direct message to a specific user or users mentioned.

There is also the Content Warning tag that allows users to hide anything that might be sensitive behind one of the Show More walls that you are seeing in the screenshot above.  Each community uses this a little differently, and a lot of people will simply use it as a way of truncating a long post so that it doesn’t clog the feeds of others with a wall of text or something that is image heavy.  For example this weekend when I syndicated my podcast, I was able to give a little longer of an intro to it given the 500 character limit instead of 140/280 and hid most of that behind a CW tag for making life easier on the folks reading their timelines.  The only thing that seems to be missing is the ability to add a comment along with a boost similar to the quoted retweet functionality that I use so often.

Adventures in the Federiverse

One of the other interesting things about the Federiverse as a lot of people call it… is that you can effectively start on one server and uproot and move to another.  For example I started out on Mastodon.cloud because I simply did not understand at first how this network worked.  It was a more general interest instance and quite honestly was still very awesome with a very nice admin.  However the longer I used it, the more I realized that maybe I wanted to be on an instance that was more drift compatible to my own interests.  I had a lot of great interactions with folks from Elekk.xyz and that lead me to investigate it closer…  and when I saw the above image I knew that it was probably the right place for me.

One of the things that separates Mastodon from Twitter is that you have the ability to read essentially every public toot that comes across the server.  You have a local timeline that shows you everything happening on your own instance, and a federated timeline showing you everything happening on all of the servers your local is connected with.  It is probably best to think of this in MMO terms as your Local Timeline is your Guild Chat and your Federated Timeline is Trade or General.

The other thing that it feels like to me is an old dial-up BBS.  During Fido.net era when they were loosely connected through a hub and spoke relay network, a user on one BBS to communicate with a user on any other connected BBS.  However it sometimes took four or five days for the round trip depending on when you sent the message and when the person on the other end received and replied to it.  In the Federiverse each of these instances is like your local BBS where you get to know everyone, with the ability to reach out and make friendships with anyone else in the larger connected community.

Adventures in the Federiverse

I feel like I have spent an awful lot of time talking about the hows and not much about the whys this morning…  but unfortunately the WHY I am enjoying myself is going to have to come another day.  Essentially the short version is… it feels like a throwback to a simpler time in the internet when we all were much more open to talking freely with each other.  Thusfar everyone I have encountered has been charming and helpful in me getting settled into their neighborhood.  There are a handful of us from the blogging space that have made a home for ourselves on Elekk.xyz, but there are so many other instances that I highly suggest you start out on JoinMastodon.org and see some of the other instances.  I am finding out it is weirdly customary to have multiple accounts on multiple instances.  Tam for example has one on TableTop.Social, Elekk.xyz and some Game Dev related one that I don’t know the address for.

Does this mean I am leaving twitter?  Probably not, but I do find Mastodon to be a much more engaging network than the current state twitter is in.  If you too sorta miss the days when the internet and social engagement was simpler, or have a hankering for an even older time of BBSes and IRC Servers…  then maybe it might too feel comfortable.  It is more than likely always going to remain a niche thing, but I think in the grand scheme of things that is its strength.  We talked about this at length on the podcast, but maybe having a bunch of fragmented islands leads to a better community than having one mega server as it were.  I know we have commented as such in various MMO communities, so why would that same theory not apply to the broader social media?

Player Housing Wishlist

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A few days ago Alunaria asked me in the comments what my ideal player housing in WoW would look like. I figured it would be more fun to answer with its own blog post, because I’m also curious how you folks would answer this question.

Player Housing Wishlist

There’s a lot of things I love about WildStar’s housing, and would definitely steal those for my perfect player housing.

  1. Full control over item placement. Great player housing must allow for player creativity. For me that means lots of cool housing decor, and the ability to move it, rotate it, and scale it in any way I want. “Hook” systems are frustrating. Let me place all my decor freely.
  2. Multiple ways to acquire decor. WildStar’s decor can be crafted, earned through repeatable activities, dropped from mobs, and gained through quests. Decor should drop in pretty much every type of player content so there are always new items to discover or chase.
  3. Some pre-built set pieces can be nice. WildStar gives you choices for when you didn’t feel like building your own buildings from scratch. Having some modular pieces like pre-built houses is great for people who want housing but don’t want to micro manage every inch of their space.
  4. A reason to go back there. Like WoW’s garrisons, WildStar lets you earn some resources through your house. Unlike garrisons, the amount of resources never completely removed the need for gathering in the world. Also WildStar lets you choose other useful things for your plot, like portals to zones you like, or mini-dungeons you can run for fashion or more housing decor. No matter what, there should be some benefit to having a house.
  5. Social controls and social events. I love that WildStar lets you choose who can enter your house, and what they can do there. For example, you can let your friends  harvest your resources, and you can set it so you split then so you both get a benefit when they visit. I would also steal WildStar’s use of housing during seasonal events. Visiting different housing plots to trick-or-treat at Halloween is something every game should do!
  6. Housing should be accessible. You don’t have to be anywhere near the end game to unlock housing in WildStar, and it doesn’t cost very much to get started. I know WoW loves to add features specifically for new expansions at the level cap, but housing should be something like pet battles, that everyone can hop into right away. Save some fancy decor until higher levels if you have to, but at least let folks get their foot in the door early.

Player Housing WishlistThere’s also some housing ideas I like that aren’t stolen directly from WildStar Player Housing Wishlist

  1. The ability to have both guild housing and player housing. This one is basically taken from FFXIV. Have a guild space that also lets players have a small personal section in it. This way folks who don’t want to mess with housing can still have a cool place to hang out for RP and guild events.
  2. Dynamic neighborhoods. This is my dream feature. I’ve got no idea how to make the tech work, but what I would like is something like FFXIV’s housing districts, but without the crazy prices and housing scarcity that is so annoying in that game. I’d like an instanced zone with 20 – 50 houses set up in a reasonable neighborhood that you can wander around. Unlike FFXIV, all the plots would be the same size, and you’d just pay to upgrade your house or the number of items you can place on your plot. Your neighbors would be semi-permanent, but to keep it feeling lively if someone hasn’t logged in for 60 days someone active or new would get moved into their spot. Maybe you could bypass this for people on your friends list, or in your guild. And if your neighborhood is feeling lonely you could request a new spot near a friend. You would never lose your house from inactivity, and people wouldn’t have to wait for someone to move out to find a plot. You’d just end up with a new neighborhood if you’ve been gone for a while.
  3. Housing districts in lots of different zones. Don’t just give us one size fits all housing. I want to spent hours agonizing over whether I want a fancy apartment in Suramar, a peaceful treehouse in Moonglade, or an underwater grotto in Vashj’ir. There should be lots of different housing districts to fit lots of different player tastes.
  4. A choice to link alt housing. I have lots of characters, but not a lot of time and energy to make an awesome house for each of them. Let me choose if I want to let them share a house. Maybe my main wants to have her own big fancy place with all her raid decor, but everybody else could share one cool house instead of each having a mostly empty space.

Most importantly, I would want assurance from Blizzard that if they add proper player housing they aren’t going to abandon it at the start of the next expansion. Garrisons and Order Halls are neat, but it was sad to leave them behind as soon as the next new thing arrived. If they want players to get invested in housing and be creative, the players have to trust that all their hard work isn’t going to get swept away.

AggroChat #217 – Toots and Trolls

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tamrielo

aggrochat217

This evening we talk about a bunch of stuff but first Ashgar sings for us and makes me lose my shit…  so working as intended. Grace and Bel talk about their experiences in Battle For Azeroth so far and how it turned out not to be as factiony as we expected.  We also sorta convince Tam to give the story a shot even though we know he will bounce off it eventually. Bel talks about his recent journey into Mastodon and how it seems like a throwback to the early days of the internet.  Tam also has joined in this process and talks about how the experience so far has been better for him than Twitter was. Tam also talks about his experiences with the game Detroit and so far how it seems to be less pretentious than the average David Cage fare.  Finally we talk about some comfort gaming and enjoyable mechanical loops like Warframe, Destiny and Dead Cells.

Topics Discussed

  • Battle For Azeroth
    • Convincing Tam to Play
    • Better Story
    • Shockingly Minimal Faction Nonsense
  • Mastodon
    • The New Not-Twitter
    • More like a BBS or Old IRC
    • Strength of Small Communities
    • Totally not another Ello
  • Detroit
    • Interesting story
    • Less Pretentious Cage
  • Comfort Gaming
    • Warframe
    • Enjoyable Mechanical Loops
    • Destiny
    • Dead Cells

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Ding 120!

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I actually hit 120 on Thursday evening. I didn’t use war mode for the xp buff, and I did take my time, read all the quest text, and watched all the cutscenes. There’s so much to do now I’m not even sure where I should start. I was so tired when I dinged that I didn’t do too much with it. Unlocking world quests was simple because even though I still haven’t finished the story quests in all three zones I am at least friendly reputation with their factions. I did a round of WQs so I didn’t miss out on the emissary for the day but then called it a night shortly after.

Ding 120!

I want to live here.

On Friday I worked a bit on the faction war campaign quests. I had already set up my bases in each of the Alliance zones, but now they were sending me back to start making excursions farther inland. I had the awesome surprise of getting to quest with one of my favorite characters, Lillian Voss. I’m not especially enthusiastic about faction nonsense, but it was nice to have the change of scenery and run around together as murdery bffs. The quest line ended without giving me any more breadcrumbs, so I’m not sure what I should be doing next to progress it. I wandered around to a couple places where there were flight points and found a few random bounty quests but not much else. There are plenty more horde flight paths to discover on my map so I know I’m not done. I suspect something else will open up when I increase my rep with the Horde war faction.

I’ve also run a few (normal) island scenarios. Supposedly they are a good source of azerite. I’m not really sure how I feel about them yet. I like the small (3-person) group size like scenarios in MoP. The islands do seem to be strangely freeform. I’ve seen groups stick together and roll through lots of enemies, and I’ve seen groups where everyone seems to wander off in a different direction. No group I’ve been in has ever done any of the quests that pop up, sadly. I’m sure soon an optimal strategy will evolve and everyone will start doing that. Overall they seemed reasonable to do, but I’m left wondering exactly what was the point. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I can do the more difficult versions with higher rewards. Side note: if you care about getting all your war campaign upgrades quickly, make sure to run a few islands sometime before reset. You have to finish five different ones to unlock one of the tiers of upgrades, and there are only 3 available each week.

I am sitting at the level cap but I still have most of the quests in Nazmir left to do. I plan on working on them slowly in between world quests and dungeons. I’m not in a huge hurry to gear up since I don’t have a raid group and will probably just be doing LFR, but I do want to get at least enough of an ilvl where questing isn’t too painful. As a fresh 120 disc priest the world quests aren’t horribly difficult, but it does take a long time for me to kill things.

I also want to start working on my crafting skills a bit now. I’ll need to find a good place for farming cloth, and send my druid through the intro quests so she can start picking herbs. I wish I had leveled with someone who had double gathering so I could have been selling raw materials all along, but my priest has alchemy and tailoring. They will be expensive to level right now, but should pay off nicely once I have a steady stream of bags and potions to put on the auction house.

Right now most of my friends are still leveling, so I’ll be focusing on getting my emissaries done every day and then branching out into whatever I feel like at the moment. It’s a good time to start working on alts for crafting and for seeing the alliance side of the story. I’m also looking forward to running some dungeons and/or islands with my friends this weekend, and hearing everyone’s reactions to the different zone stories.