I logged in this morning and it appears that the merger has been completed. I am now on Heliopolis instead of Themiscyra and our old server is no more. Because we were not the server being merged into, it means that none of the companies that held territory on our server kept it. I fully expect the next few weeks to be a time of strife as far as faction conflicts go as the companies from three servers ultimately settle into a pecking order. Sadly I had made quite a few friends in the group that previously controlled Everfall, which is where my tier 4 home is located. Positive however is it seems that Everfall is just as well taken care of on Heliopolis with all but one of the crafting machines sitting at Tier 5.
The map on Heliopolis is seemingly more competitive whereas on Themiscyra it seemed like the heavy hitters were all Marauder or Covenant after the biggest Syndicate company transferred off the server. In truth, I don’t much care about who holds a territory so long as they are not being slumlords and doing nothing to maintain the crafting machines. Sadly on Themiscyra we had reached a point where Everfall and Windsward were the only two territories that seemed to put any effort and pride into maintaining them. My hope as well is that with more players there will be more activity happening in the various open world farms since that seems to be the side of the game that I really enjoy doing.
Speaking of farms, I went back out to the camp with Pit Lord Daeshi and have now picked up all of the gear drops off that loot table. It seems like folks are regularly farming this camp because it is where the legendary corrupted trophy material drops, which is heavily needed for invasions. In fact, at two different times out there I was with groups from major companies on the previous server trying to far trophies. Of those drops the one I was seeking out the most of course was the tanking sword… or at least I am turning it into a tanking sword. I figured with two different life-stealing traits on it and a base constitution stat, that screamed sustain and tanking. It does not hurt that it also looks really cool.
Other than farming gear, I spent part of my last night on Themiscyra doing another invasion. It was doomed from the start but we fought valiantly. We had even less than we had the night before and I think we made it to wave 5 before a boss type made it into the base… which caused everyone to collapse in to deal with it… which caused the other gates to fall. Essentially this is sort of what seems to happen as a cascade failure any time you need to call an all-hands-on-point type scenario. Invasions are very much a “manage everything all at once” type thing but once the plates stop spinning and fall down… everything goes south really fast.
Now to sort of bury the lede… I have been up to some shenanigans or at least I am supporting an initiative that is. A handful of my friends have been working on a brand new Mastodon instance that is gaming-focused, given that this seemed to be a niche that wasn’t really well served. Elekk.xyz is a fine server but it is deeply sequestered from the rest of the Fediverse, and really didn’t seem to be all that gaming-focused in the first place. It is nowhere near ready for sign-ups yet, but those of us who are going to be helping with the day-to-day stuff on the instance now have our accounts. Expect more updates as I have them as to when this is going to be launching. I think for the time being I am probably going to keep my Masto.ai account at least in the short run until we have worked out all of the kinks and have federation relays spinning. At some point in the not-too-distant future however I expect to migrate my account once again, but hopefully for the very last time. I have a lot of faith in this team and it will be nice to have a place to suggest where I very directly know everyone involved.
I’ve known about the possibility of this happening for a while but did not want to say anything until it was actually “for seriously” happening.
The post Successfully Merged appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I’ve talked about Tripod before, the poorly named three-legged calico that lives in my backyard and has done so for the last three years. Lately, she has been doing something new and it is sort of adorable. I always feed in the mornings, but I don’t always feed in the evenings. There are some times however when she decides that she wants food and is going to tell me about it. This is a shot from our security camera from last night with Tripod highlighted in a green circle. She has started standing up on the garden utility box outside the kitchen window and meowing at the top of her lungs… which we can hear while we are upstairs. So of course, I obliged and went out in the dark and fed her… at which point she greeted me with a cacophony of friendly meows. I’ve questioned the relationship we have given that she is still very feral and still impossible to get near… but clearly it seems I am her human and my role in life is to provide food when she wants it.
The problem with doing a long series that spans three weeks… is that there is a lot of shit that happens in the meantime that I never talked about. On Saturday, November 19th in a fit of frustration I deactivated my Twitter account, shortly after Elon Musk had reactivated the account of Donald Trump. I was immediately reminded by many people… that in 30 days it was highly likely that some doppelganger would set up shop with my handle, and we’ve seen that happen several times before in the past. So Sunday morning I slunk back onto Twitter, reactivated things, and then decided to borrow a tradition from Mastodon. When you migrate your instance it shows a desaturated version of your avatar and your banner and posts a link to where you have moved. So @Belghast and subsequently @Aggrochat now show that I have migrated to the Fediverse.
I have to admit I am still exceptionally happy with the Fediverse and though I have had to move during all of the burst in activity to Masto.ai, I am way more engaged than I was for the last several years of Twitter. It seemed for a while that everyone would be congregating in one form or another on the Fediverse as Twitter has continued to degrade over the last few weeks. I always knew that there would be a group of stragglers that avoided leaving Twitter until it absolutely no longer allowed anyone to log in. However, what I did not expect is for another social network to come in at the 11th hour and distract everyone so completely. Hive Social… not to be confused with Hive the project management software, or Hive the blockchain nonsense company, Hive the grocery store, Hive the furniture company, Hive the smart home automation company, or even Apache Hive.
Hive is mobile-only, which immediately puts it in a lower-tier category for me personally since I don’t really use my phone other than when I am laying in bed trying to fall asleep at night. I am primarily a desktop user, which is also why I generally hate vertical format videos but that is a rant for another day. The service itself seems aggressively “fine”, but what it offers is a near-perfect amalgam of Twitter and Instagram and asks absolutely nothing from the user. You download an app, click some buttons, and you are immediately in a very familiar interface talking to hopefully familiar people. Its downsides however are that the performance in the app is awful… like staggeringly awful. Then there is the problem that you are moving from one walled garden controlled by a central authority to a different walled garden controlled by an “even less prepared to handle this fame” central authority. Then there is the whole issue that a key member of the team is a Milkshake Duck. I poke my head in from time to time to see what my friends who are mostly on that platform are up to, but I am not giving it much attention until at a minimum a web client exists.
What has driven me up a wall though is that while we have left Twitter, the same Twitter-like behavior persists. To quote a friend of mine “You can take the people out of Twitter, but you can’t take the constant self-promotion out of the people, I guess.” What particularly is driving me up a wall is seeing the same posts recycled between Twitter, Mastodon, and Hive. This “awareness” started when I followed an internet comedian of a sort that I had not followed in years on Twitter. They are known for short quippy posts that are mildly humorous and I was fine to have that in my feed on the Fediverse. That was until I saw one scroll past that I thought sounded really freaking familiar. It turns out that they had just been recycling posts from like eight years ago from Twitter.
Then there are the folks who are talking about how both Hive and Mastodon are the one true social network and so much better than Twitter… but posting the same statement to both platforms with only the names of the networks swapped. The above screenshot really bugged me the most though, because you have this faux heartfelt message… that showed up on Sunday on Mastodon… and then showed up almost word for word from the same person on Hive yesterday. The identity has been blanked out because I am not trying to call out one specific person, but a behavioral pattern I am seeing from folks who were micro-influencers on Twitter, trying to pack up that same game in their traveling case and take it on the road to the next network. You are better than this… We are better than this. It is one thing to cross-syndicate a post or share the same image in multiple places, but it is another thing to dive deep into the parasocial bullshit by cross-posting something that seems like a genuine unique sentiment.
I think that is the part of Twitter that always bothered me the most… the insincerity. When I start a post and address it “Hey Friends” I am not trying to pull on your emotional heartstrings, I am genuinely addressing you as my friends. I’ve been on the internet for so many years and the majority of my long-term friends… came from somewhere online. I never know when a random occurrence will become my next friend that I stay in contact with for the next several decades. I’ve always tried to approach each interaction with the possibility that it could be legitimate and genuine… but Twitter had burned me hard on this. So many times I found out that someone I thought was legitimately my friend, was just posturing and posing as one. Going into the Fediverse and Mastodon, I hoped that I could be open again… and for the most part, I am trying really hard to be. However, seeing the constant influencer nonsense taking place there and gaining a foothold… is making me start to doubt that it will stay that way.
Anyways I am home on the fediverse for better or for worse. I hope yall are having an excellent week, and I didn’t mean for this post to take quite the sharp downer turn that it did. Much love and hopefully tomorrow will be a more chill post.
The post Fake Plastic Trees appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! It was a wild weekend between the Muskrat and Twitter and the fact that my Mastodon 4.0 instance that I love… is unsustainably popular. On Friday afternoon Stux the admin of Mstdn.social closed the doors when we crossed the 100,000-user threshold. He had been advised by his host that they could not reasonably scale up that instance any further. Unfortunately he did not also close down the ability for users to send out invites to their friends… and as I have talked about before when it comes to MMORPG servers… it is extremely important to be in the same place as your friends. The end result is that another 11,000 invites went out before finally shutting down that loophole.
So unfortunately things are sluggish as hell and the timeline on the server has been running roughly an hour behind real-time as an army of worker processes churn furiously through messages. Stux also manages Mastodon.Coffee which is his attempt at creating an English language only server, and due to the overloading of Mstdn spawned a brand new server called Masto.Ai. I’ve been sitting here this morning trying to decide if I do the right thing for the community to lessen the load and migrate over… or if I just deal with it until enough people get frustrated to drop the total number of active messages. I had hoped the next time I migrated would be to something I was running for myself. I recently picked up Aggro.Chat for such a potential project but don’t have any of the pieces in place yet. It feels like running your own instance is the Fediverse equivalent of Homeownership.
Apart from social media nonsense, I’ve been spending as much of my time as possible doing super chill things in New World. Saturday morning was a delightful time as I chilled out talking on the Fediverse while running my favorite Iron routes. I am not entirely certain why I go off on tangents but suddenly I decided to catch my Engineering up to Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing. Essentially for leveling purposes, I am opting to only use a single high-tier material at a time. Most patterns have a required item… so for example, if you are making a Starmetal sword, you MUST include Starmetal into that pattern, but the other types of materials are variable and you can even use the lowest tier available. This means since I am leveling up Engineering on Wyrdwood at the moment, I am going to use nothing but the lowest-tier leather, cloth, and metal. That also means that I still need to run those lower-tier routes that I find so relaxing.
At this point, both Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing are over 150, which means I can make high-end Orichalcum items but lack the skill to really reliably hit anything of significant item level. Engineering is rapidly catching up and one more push should take me up to 150. Logging is so tedious, but right now my jam tends to be throwing on a YouTube video and grinding away peacefully. I’m using a few specific banks as swap space for current projects, and everything else… is crammed wherever I have room. At some point, I need to set up a system as I have over on Valhalla where specific banks are for specific items. Maybe I should log in there and scribble down a list of what went where so I can copy the methodology to Themiscyra. I’ve legitimately not logged into Valhalla at all since the re-roll, nor have I really had the desire to do so.
I’ve also been out exploring a lot and with that have come some interesting drops. Firstly it appears that every single named mob still has a chance of dropping pretty much any legendary crafting item. So far I’ve gotten pieces for a bow, blunderbuss, and void gauntlet, and unfortunately none of the items that I really care about deeply. Thankfully for Sword, Greatsword, and Shield I picked up the Item Level 600 patterns from the Halloween event. One thing that I really enjoy is how noticeable it is now when you get a named item drop. They all have a bright outline on the item as shown above and have a glowing effect. Essentially when you see an item like this, they will always drop with the same stats and can in theory be farmed from that specific boss.
There are a bunch of really weird places in the world. We all know there is the giant Azoth tree in Brightwood that is guarded by the Angry Earth folks. There is a grove full of not-quite Azoth trees down in Edengrove, which are also guarded by Angry Earth. However in Mourningdale, there is this weird glowing tree that has been corrupted with a bunch of miners working around it, and I am wondering if it also used to be one of the giant Azoth trees like from Brightwood. It makes me wonder what that area of Mourningdale might have looked like before it was corrupted. Would it have also been something more akin to Edengrove?
Speaking of Edengrove, there are a few places where it is just breathtaking to view the various monuments that dot the valley. I’ve not gotten as into the lore of New World as I have other games, but my working theory is that Edengrove and more particularly the Garden of Genesis is the heart of what remains of the original civilization that claimed Aeternum it’s home. The Angry Earth is all that remains and now guards once-sacred areas against the intruders that have come to the shores over generations. New World has clear indications of areas that were settled by different civilizations, but Edengrove has always seemed like it is much older and features a glimpse at maybe what the entire island looked like once before the attempts at colonization.
I’m continuing to largely play in cycles of either going out into the world and gathering resources or sitting down and grinding through crafting levels. This seems to be a really good pattern for me, but soon now that Ace and Vern have hit level 60… it will be time to go out exploring some of the more dangerous areas. I’ve quested through most of Ebonscale Reach and am working on clearing out Edengrove… which would lead me to start on Reekwater next. The money fountain has dried up a bit, only because the quests themselves take much longer to complete and there are far fewer of them. I still have that strong desire however to make the yellow quest markers disappear from my world map.
I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What are you playing currently? Drop me a line below.
The post Corrupted Azoth Tree appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
This week was one of those shows when I was not entirely certain we had enough material. Yet in spite of that… we once again ran over our intended hour-long recording time. We start off the show with Ash engaging in some Bel-like mechanical nonsense and attempting to repurpose a dedicated dance pad into something more universal. From there we dive into some discussion about what is going on at Twitter this week and how it feels like somewhere between a guild falling apart and the closing of an MMORPG. Kodra talks about Overhaul… which is a roguelike Sudoku. He completely lost Bel when he got to the Sudoku part. From there we dive into a discussion about how weird and frustrating it can be to come back to a game after being gone for a very long time, and how none of them really do a great job of re-onboarding you.
Topics Discussed
Beethoven Virus
Adapting a dedicated dance pad to general purposes
