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A Statement vs A Discussion

March 23, 2016 by Tamrielo

I’ve been mulling over this post in my head for several days now, and still haven’t formed a clear picture of what I want to say. Rather than continuing to spin on it, we’ll see if putting text to screen makes things more coherent. Here’s hoping.

I love the Division. I hate the Division. It represents a path forward for MMOs that’s been sorely lacking for a decade now. It is chock full of some incredibly high-fidelity, compelling content. It also has content that makes my stomach turn, and it is very clear that it’s doing so intentionally. At times, the game intentionally tries to make me feel uncomfortable, and succeeds.

It manages to be a surprisingly inclusive game, with characters from all walks of life– it’s casually pro-LGBT and has some really great female characters who, from my perspective, feel like powerful women, not just dudes with boobs. One such character is why a friend of mine stopped playing the game. Video games tend not to put women in “lead” roles, either as heroes or villains. In the Division (spoilers to the end of this paragraph), I wound up facing a gang leader who was a black woman, and who, during the fight, hurled a variety of poignant epithets and taunts, one of which commented “oh, so you’re a cop, and you’re going to shoot me because I’m a black woman, is that it?”

It’s a nasty line, and it’s extremely effective. So effective that, like I said, at least one friend of mine up and quit the game right there. It links into my biggest problem with The Division, one that I’ve mentioned on the podcast: it asks questions, but doesn’t give me the ability to answer them. My only solution to a problem is to shoot and kill someone.

The world of the Division is a world of desperate people trying to cling to whatever little they have, and, in the chaos, warlords of various stripes amassing followers and carving out territory. You, as the player, are literally no different– you carve out territory in the name of making it “safe” (for you and yours) and kill anyone who gets in your way. It’s exactly what every other faction in the game is doing, and in-game ambience even spells this out explicitly. There’s a talk radio station that you can listen in on, where a slowly-freaking-out host goes on about your group, the titular Division, and asks if it’s really okay for a bunch of sleeper agents to come in and start using lethal force on whoever looks at them wrong.

As a player, I have no answer to this. My only solution to a problem is to shoot and kill someone.

What I crave in the Division is a dialogue, with the game and with the people in it. I want to be the last bastion of civilization that restores order and peace, not just the successful warlord that managed to kill everyone opposing them. The game makes a number of statements– “desperate times call for desperate measures” and asks if the ends justify the means, but doesn’t give me the ability to think about and answer that question. It uses uncomfortable situations not to open a dialogue, but for shock value. It’s disturbing, and there is no way for me to take a moral high ground or even ideologically defend myself.

At the same time, this is a game that represents what I’ve wanted in MMOs for a while– a richly-detailed world that my friends and I can jump into and have fun playing. An MMO where combat is *fun* and every encounter feels enjoyable and meaningful. A group system that doesn’t adhere to the standard “trinity” roles but has the ability for party members to fill specific niches that they come up with themselves.

I love what the Division represents, I just wish it wasn’t laced with so much stuff that bothers me deeply. As mentioned in the podcast, if I could buy The Secret World set in the Division’s engine and gameplay, I would buy that game yesterday and still be playing it instead of writing this post.

I haven’t been this conflicted about a game in a while. Maybe that’s the dialogue.

Space Goats and Paid Content

March 22, 2016 by Belghast

WoW Chronicles

Last Friday I managed to find a copy of the regularly back ordered… World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1. One of the huge problems World of Warcraft has had to date is that a lot of the lore just feels somewhat tacked on. I feel like much of the story was written during some late night unbridled “wouldn’t it be cool if” sessions, and there was a lot of hand waving going on from about Burning Crusade onward. What the chronicles project is trying to do is to set in stone a true canon about the world, and how all of the interlinking pieces actually fit together. I wholeheartedly support this notion… I just wish someone had the foresight to do it a decade ago, or at least when they decided to start really mixing things up with the first expansion. I am sure there has been a penciled together napkin sketch of what the world was intended to look like, that at least partially exists in the minds still of the people working at Blizzard. The problem is when something is not written down and set into print… it becomes too easy to erase a line here and graft on a new segment of lore there that really conflicts with something that came before.

What I am wondering is how much narrative cleanup are they committed to do to make this canon really a living document? While this project doesn’t exactly burn down what was in place before… it does invalidate a lot of things that happened and in other cases it simply explains things that already exist. For example… the book indicates that the Spirit Healers that we have used for years are essentially a rogue faction of Val’kyr. The book goes into depth about the relationship between the void lords, the titans, the old gods, and classifies things that lacked classification like the wild gods which now include the pantheon of August Celestials. What I really hope to see is some of these lore fixes making their way into the game in either the form of new quests, or old quest revisions. I will say that having some sort of concrete font of lore that they can keep going back to, makes me at least somewhat excited for the future of the game. Lore has always been one of the big problems I had with World of Warcraft, and how confused and messy…. and downright incomplete it always seemed. Hopefully we will start to see the fruits of this project with the coming expansion Legion… which even before this seemed like it was going to be a complete loregasm.

Paid Promotional Content

I am going to take the tail end of this mornings post to complain about something that has been bothering me. Granted I know it will do absolutely zero good since it is quite obvious the forces in question are not even reading my blog. For years I have gotten messages from various companies wanting to place paid content on my blog. There is a practice that is frighteningly common that gets called by a bunch of names… but essentially marketers want to pay established blogs to place pre-written and pre-approved articles which serve as a sort of advertising for a product. Essentially the practice makes me feel dirty inside that they are even targeting my blog… but most end up getting caught in the spam filter. Here lately several have made it through on my About page, and I have taken to responding to them directly. I realize I should just brush these off as the byproduct of having blogged for as long as I have, but it really sticks in my craw.

I get super excited about products, and games… and the other things that interest me in the world. I’m a geek and a lot of geekdom is geeking out about something. That said I want to make sure it is understood that when I get excited about something… it is because I am legitimately excited and that there is not some nefarious force behind the curtain pulling my strings. Sure I would love to make money on my blog, or at least love to reach a point where it is self sustaining… the problem is every option to monetize means I am giving up some of my control. For example if I were to install advertisements… I wouldn’t be able to curate WHICH advertisements I allowed onto the site, I would have to accept anything the ad network wanted to place there. So the notion of “supporting” products that I don’t necessarily believe in, really bothers me. As a result I have shunned pretty much all advertising, and while I freely accept alphas and betas to games… I only end up writing about the ones that really interest me. I have friends in the gaming industry, and it is awesome… but no one is paying me to like their product.

Basically what it all boils down to is that my opinion is not for sale. None of the folks that have been approaching me will actually read these lines, but I still feel like it is important to say it loud and publicly. Tales of the Aggronaut has been a work of love for going on seven years now, and while my opinions shift and change based on new data… they are still very much my opinions and not carefully scripted speaking points. That said I will always be open to reviewing products if someone wants me to do so. That said I will only write about the product when I feel like I have had enough time to see the entire picture, and when I have something interesting to say about it. I also will never guarantee a positive review. I am not really a ranty blogger, but I do talk about the points that disappoint me in games or products and that is likely to happen. If someone finds this in a search later on… hopefully they will actually read it before asking me to do something shifty like accepting payola for content. I am extremely luck in that I have a day job that can support my blogging shenanigans, and that I don’t need to somehow turn this into a profit center. I don’t begrudge those who are trying to monetize their content, but I can’t ever really condone shillery.

Gamer Social Media

March 19, 2016 by Belghast

Love for Anook

So anyone who follows me probably knows of my love of twitter. Over the years it has become the only major social media network that I really interact with on a regular basis. Technically I have Facebook, and G+ and essentially an account on every single social media network because I am always curious about the next big thing…. but rarely do they actually make an impact. What has happened instead is that I seem to have become more and more entrenched in niche social media. Firstly I have to talk about my love of Anook. When this site first launched it confused the hell out of me. In fact I was shooting off my mouth like I often do on twitter, complaining about me not really understanding its purpose…. when the Anook account started messaging me trying to explain it. My attachment to this network is entirely thanks to one man, Lonrem the social and community manager for the site. The site itself does a lot of things… but it also has so far to go before it “grows up” into the site that it could be.

I have a long list of things that I would love to see on it, but I continue to use it as it is in the hope that someday the rest of the world will realize just how special this network really is. It is built on a strange dynamic of forcing actual interaction with the site, rather than allowing folks to just auto post content. This is cool because it means that folks are actually there and posting and commenting… but the negative is for content providers like myself it is frustrating to have to do extra work just to support them. Each week when I publish AggroChat I go out and manually syndicate the content to our AggroChat Nook. The first change I would love to see is for them to integrate with RSS feeds the same way they do with YouTube and auto format a post in a way as to showcase blog content. The other big one for me is that their system only allows you to tag one game per post… and you all know I cannot seem to make single game posts like ever unless it is an impressions piece. In any case…. the community on Anook is amazing because Lonrem works his ass off to keep it that way. Spammers, Bots and Trolls do not last long because the network is curated by hand. I just hope that they get the funding to expand features and integrate with more things.

Slack: Private IRC Thingy

The next social thing that has taken me even further away from traditional social media… is Slack. It is kinda hard to explain just what Slack is, but I tend to think of it as a private social network. On one hand it is almost like having a private IRC server, and on other hands it is like having a private version of google drive or dropbox. I was originally introduced to the tool through the MMOGames.com staff who uses it for coordination of articles and such. I then started using it at work with my own development team, and we have pretty much switched to communicating exclusively through it so that if someone tags into a discussion late they can use the channel backlog to catch up on what is going on. Finally I convinced the AggroChat crew to start using it to discuss and coordinate things during the week, and from there it kinda grew into me being in a huge number of private slack groups each of them with their own dedicated focus. The end result is that I use other media less and tend to use slack as my key focus. It has a bunch of benefits, like the fact that this site is largely used for business purposes around the world, and as such happily passes though most corporate web filters.

What slack does extremely well is text chat, and while they can integrate with a dozen other things and are even starting to move down the voice chat path… they are the king of text allowing you more options than pretty much any other service. For programmers this is amazing because it allows you to post snippets of code and then have it formatted and color coded for the language you posted it as. This is huge when collaborating on development, and we even end up using this from time to time among the AggroChat crew. You can also see in the above image that we have it integrated with twitter so that anytime someone sends a message directed at our AggroChat account it shows up in a specific channel. The feature we have really gotten addicted to is the custom emoticons and I am not sure what I will do without my Vault Boy Thumbs Up icon to use as a reaction. The piece of the equation that most people don’t know is that the team behind Slack… is Tiny Speck the company that built the amazing 2D MMO Glitch. They essentially took the robust chat infrastructure behind that game… and turned it into a business product that honestly makes me feel a little good inside to be using.

Discord: New Voice Contender

Over the years we have shifted back and forth between the three major voice providers for gaming purposes: Teamspeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble. Each of them has their own positives and negatives. They all share a big negative however in that it requires you to either find someone willing to host a server for you, or pony up for server hosting costs. For years during World of Warcraft raiding, I just ate the cost of a voice server because it was something like $45 a quarter. However that still adds up over time, so when we were offered the Alliance of Awesome Teamspeak server I jumped at the chance to jump to no longer having to pay this fee. That server has been awesome and we record AggroChat from it every Saturday night. However deep down inside… I know that someone out there is having to foot the bill for our fun… and it kinda bothers me. Recently a new app called Discord has somewhat taken the gaming world by storm. In so many ways Slack and Discord seem to spawn from the same desire… to have server less communication for their users. Slack went in the direction of replacing IRC, Instant Messenger and Email…. and Discord went down the path of trying to replace Teamspeak, Ventrilo and Mumble. There is a huge bit of overlap between the two technologies but for the most part Slack is my daytime network, and Discord is rapidly becoming my night time network.

What is extremely awesome about this is that each game community seems to be adopting Discord, and I now have large communities in Destiny, ESO, Rift, and The Division that are focused that one game. We recently shifted to using this as a World of Warcraft raid for the Stalwart casual Wednesday night raid and it works wonderfully. The stability of Teamspeak has been a little questionable of late, and we went through a night where everyone sounded like robots. This lead us to fire up a discord, and in a few minutes we were all able to chat happily with little to no lag. There are some caveats here that I feel like I should talk about. The web client is awesome for text based chat, but if you intend to use it long… I highly suggest downloading the client for your desktop or mobile platform. The web client push to talk only works if you have focus on the web page…. meaning as soon as you alt tab into your game you can no longer speak. A side note… if you are not using push to talk… please god use push to talk. I raided for years with folks who didn’t and really… we can hear every sneeze, fart, and kid yelling in the background. I would absolutely jump from Teamspeak to Discord entirely… but as of right now there is no good means of recording a channel. I’ve bumped the feature up on the request list, so hopefully maybe someday someone will see fit to do that. Mostly I hate Skype with a passion and would love for Discord to really take over the podcast recording world.

Other Stuff

The thing is… these are the three services that I have now become extremely comfortable with and have integrated into my life. There are so many others out there like Player.me that I have yet to really see the personal benefit of. Then of course there are all of the services like Steam that we all use… but don’t really use like social networks. Recently I have somewhat been forced to use Band because it is what my Destiny Clan switched to using. It seems to have really great scheduling options, but pretty shitty chat or at least it is shitty if you are not using a mobile client. I try and do everything I can through desktop or web based clients because nothing makes me a sad panda like typing on my phone. I am horrible at responding to non-critical text messages because I really hate the process of typing even with swype on a mobile device. I know my wife uses the Google speech to text functionality a lot, but nothing makes me feel more of an idiot than talking to my phone. So in the end… I put off responding to as much as I can until I am sitting back down at a keyboard again. So I’ve showed you mine… what services do you now use that you cannot give up? I am curious how these niche media sites are reshaping the way we interact with social media in general.

Of Immersion

March 17, 2016 by Belghast

That Word

One of the things that I have come to realize over the last few days is that apparently immersion in a video game is not really that important to me. What I mean by that is that sense of “losing yourself in a game” and for lack of better verbiage start thinking like your character. This is one of those things that role players do amazingly well, and something that I have honestly always struggled with. So what ends up happening when I play a pen and paper game for example… is that I ultimately always play a version of myself. The same is true for MMOs that I create this “super me” where I change my features to match what I guess internally I consider the idealized version of myself. I created the above imagine some time ago to illustrate that point, that essentially I keep creating the same character over and over… and the games that refuse to allow me to create that character… I quickly lose interest in. The reason why this has reared its head once more is the fact that I keep reading Division reviews that say the same thing. There are a host of critics that find it jarring that they are having to fight people in essentially heavily armored hoodies. There are so many that state that it “breaks their immersion” to fight something that takes so many bullets to make it fall over, even though they are not terribly well armored. This is not the first time something like this has come up, and each time it makes me question… am I ever really immersed in a game?

The thing is… I geek out about the lore and world-building that happens behind the scenes of the worlds that I am inhabiting. I use the world inhabit because there are times I feel like I am wandering around through a realistic looking setting. I remember the sheer awe I felt the first time I left Kaladim in Everquest and turned around to see just how massive the entrance really was. I am a screenshot junkie and I am constantly snapping photos of the various vistas in the games I am playing. I get thoroughly impressed when I am wandering a game like The Division that makes me feel like I am actually wandering Manhattan. The thing is… there is never a point for me where I don’t realize I am playing a video game. I’ve yet to really experience that transcendent moment that some folks talk about, where they blend into the story and get swept away as though it were really happening. I mean a game can tug on my emotions, and make me feel all sorts of things… but it is always a game, and I am always me experiencing it not some other character. I got to thinking about the reason why this might be… and I finally landed on a possible answer. When I am playing games… there is never a moment when I am not also doing something else. If I am downstairs, the television is almost always on in the background, or I am carrying on a conversation with my wife at the same time. If I am upstairs I am monitoring slack, discord or instant messenger conversations on my second monitor (or at least making an attempt at doing so) and while playing PS4 I am constantly waking my PC up when the screen goes to sleep so I can do the same. Even back in the day when I would play a Nintendo or Super Nintendo game in my childhood bedroom… I would be listening to music or trying to jot down notes about where I found this or that. I guess I have always been a habitual multi-tasker with one foot always in the next activity, or the one after that… and because my mind is always thinking about other things and other possibilities it is very hard to get all that engaged in the one I am currently doing. So when I play a game… I want a really awesome world with really fun game mechanics… but a lot of the sticking points that seem to bother other people just simply don’t even register until I read it from someone else’s perspective.

Going Dark

A good chunk of last night was spent doing Mythic Dungeons in World of Warcraft. The normal Wednesday night raid group did not meet this week because we were down four or five people. When I got home I popped into Discord and ultimately wound up logging in and tanking a couple of Mythic dungeons, something that for whatever reason I had never actually done. Of note… unless it is late in the evening there is never a time when I am going to turn tanking for a full guild group. Now if we are having to pug people… you are likely going to see me check out completely, but I really do enjoy tanking for friends and friends of friends. After a couple of runs however I had my fill and ultimately logged from WoW for the evening. I popped into The Division and did a cleaners mission that was super stressful and wound up with me rezzing at the check point a number of times. The problem I have been having is that I am starting to feel severely under geared for my level, so after having watched so many dark zone videos where the loot seems to drop like candy, I decided to make my way over there even though I have heard so many times that “solo dark zone” is a bad idea. Within a few minutes of wandering around, I was absolutely slaughtered by a rogue agent… but the thing is it didn’t really bother me that much because I had yet to actually pick up anything decent. Instead I opted to simply hunt right around the nearest Extraction point, where I noticed there were lots of people who seemed completely happy not to shoot me in the back.

I wandered around for a little bit and in that time managed to successfully extract a couple of loads of stuff. A few of the items were blue upgrades… but the bulk was simply just stuff that I could sell and push me closer to my goal of a nice weapon available on the main base weapons vendor. I had quite a bit of fun, and I can absolutely see how exploring this super dangerous area would be amazing with friends. My schedule has been pretty damned wonky over the last few weeks so I am kinda hoping that I can connect with some of my other friends playing this game over the weekend and do some dark zone fun. I realize that I am in an awkward level not being 30 yet, but I still think it could be a lot of fun to wander around out there and see what we can take down. Last night I finally dinged 15, which again makes me so far behind the pack it isn’t even funny level wise. Lately I had been pushing my way around the lower zones trying to finish them, when in truth I probably should just skip ahead to the 15ish areas and do whatever is available out there. I poked my head into Flatiron and immediately started seeing greens that were massive upgrades over what I happened to be wearing, so I am guessing that is precisely what I should be doing. The problem is… I have spent so much time wandering aimlessly that I have out leveled the areas I still have some quests in. I figure I can always go at a later date and mop those up after I have hit the cap.