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Farewell Google Plus

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A few days ago we got news that Google Plus had a vulnerability that exposed profile information, even when the users had flagged that as private to the circles based visibility system.  They didn’t report this until Wall Street Journal was about to break the story, so for starters that is kinda bad.  Their response to this whole situation however is interesting an unique in the tech world…  but also very google.  Instead of agreeing to fix the bug… they just decided to sunset the service as a whole.  So within the next ten months or so Google Plus as we know it will cease to exist and join the long graveyard of services that google decided to axe…  the most important of these for me personally being Reader their RSS Feed Reader.

One of the problems with Google is at the end of the day you have to remember they are primarily a search engine and advertising company.  Anything that does not align with those two missions is suspect to disappearing at a moments notice.  Part of me would like to believe that Gmail and Google Docs are safe since they are both products being sold…  but even then I think the only thing that is sacred is Search and the Advertising services that fund seemingly everything.  That means all of these products that people rely on…  Google Voice, Google Fiber in their homes or anything they may have purchased on Google Play are honestly likely suspect to the whims of whatever seemingly random business decisions Google Corporate makes.

As far as Google Plus…  I was an early adopter and had an awful lot of fun on the network.  There are a bunch of people that I never would have known were it not for the service.  It seemed to have a very high adoption rate among MMO gamers, and I used it almost rabidly around the launch of Star Wars the Old Republic with a good deal of our guild coming from connections made through Google Plus.  It was almost a simpler version of the internet, when no one seemed to worry about follow counts or were afraid of interactions…  and instead sort of widely followed anyone who seemed to have anything even vaguely close to similar interests.

What made Google Plus special however was the Circles system, or a way of walling off certain groups of users from seeing content not intended for them.  I had tons of circles for various interests, and it felt safe to be open and free with ideas and opinions… when you are targeting a specific community in mind.  Granted what this meant in practice for myself and other bloggery types is we sort of made Plus a massively multiplayer chat engine.  I regularly posted these massive diatribes about various in game things…  instead of posting them on my blog which in itself was a bit of a problem.  The rapid fire nature of getting interaction and commentary made it super appealing, and I think there were some folks who largely switched to “blogging” through G+ at the time.

It was not a network without controversy, and the biggest one for me personally was the enforcement of Real Names sometime in 2011.  I started dinking around with the internet as a whole in 1993-ish which in some minds makes me an early adopter… and in other minds makes me a babe in the woods.  Regardless… back then there was a golden rule of using the internet…  NEVER SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION WITH ANYONE.  You never knew who was on the other end of the connection talking to you, and as such you really shouldn’t give them any information that they might be able to use to harm you.  As such I have a really hard time actually using personal information online, and this is why you either see me posting as “Bel Temple” or “Belghast Sternblade”, because I grew up in a culture that used handles to relate to each other and real names.

It is not that I am trying to hide my identity or troll anyone, because I have been using the name Belghast as a static gaming moniker for decades… and honestly before that I went by Exeter on IRC.  Those are real identities to me, much like the handles that I know people by are similarly real.  I know Ashgar’s real name, and have met face to face with him on several occasions…  but I still end up calling him Ash because that is his name in my brain.  I mean gaming culture sort of does this, in that we relate to each other by tags and handles that seem just as real as any other attribute that you might associate with someones name.  Regardless I played along for awhile and branded my Google Plus by my actual name…  and it made me deeply uncomfortable the entire time.  “Bel Temple” was my eventual half way point, since I do actually respond to “Bel” in real life just as often as I do “Mark”.

Ultimately it wasn’t a controversy that drove me away from Google Plus, but instead a whole sequence of things that are likely unrelated.  In April of 2013 I rededicated myself to blogging and started posting on Tales of the Aggronaut every single day of the week and managed to carry that forward for a little over three years.  During that time… any energy or thoughts that I might have posted on Google Plus… I instead directed towards the blog which was in constant need of fodder.  It took several months before I realized that I just wasn’t interacting on the network anymore.  Even then… I couldn’t seem to find the oomph to get reconnected.  Folks faded away, things started getting more political… and my interest in social media in general waned.

The truth is…  my appetite for interaction is in twitter sized bites and not grand multi paragraph posts anymore.  I miss the golden age of Google Plus much like I miss the golden age of any thing that I have interacted with and then ultimately out grew.  It bums me out a little bit that it is going away, but at the same time… much like other things I have mourned like Toys R Us or City of Heroes…  I wasn’t actually using it myself.  I think the future of Facebook like interaction will ultimately belong to things like Diaspora that allow you to carve up small but interconnected communities, much like we have with Mastodon and Nineties.cafe.  I find myself feeling less comfortable being part of the hive, and instead wanting to be part of smaller guild sized communities.  I don’t really think I am alone in this.

Whatever the case though…  Google Plus is leaving and with it I do mourn the promise of what it was for awhile and what it could have been.  I noticed this morning that when the news broke on October 8th they apparently did something to break the syndication process, and with it all of my posts went back to being shared only with myself.  However I plan on syndicating this one specifically with Google Plus manually.  While I have a ton of different social media accounts, in truth the only three that actually matter are as follows.

I can be pretty slow to respond at times unless I am actively engaged with a given network at that moment, however those are the three that I actually use by choice.  Everything else I am mostly just using as a syndication platform for Tales of the Aggronaut and is ultimately not likely going to get an interactive response from me.  If we only have contact through Google Plus, and you don’t want that connection to die… then I suggest you follow me from one of those.  Then again if you have made it this far…  you can just quietly watch from the wings as I continue to do my daily blog posts and weekly podcasts.

BFA: The Good and The Ugly

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BFA: The Good and The Ugly

At this point Battle For Azeroth has been out for just shy of a month and in that time I have leveled two characters to 120 and geared them.  I’ve shared little anecdotes as I leveled and did some of the content, but I have yet to really collect my thoughts about the expansion in one place.  This morning I am going to share some of these thoughts because some things are really working extremely well, and other things are not working at all.  This is by no means an objective list because the majority of the content on my blog is just me sharing my opinion with others.  Your list is probably going to look a little different if you were to create one.  However I feel like it is time for my to share my highs and lows.

What Works Well

BFA: The Good and The Ugly

Warfronts

This is not something I thought I would be into at all but I am shockingly loving it.  Now some of that love will probably dissipate as the lure of 340 gear becomes less. I remember enjoying Alterac Valley back in Vanilla because it was about more than just fighting other players.  The Warfronts are essentially all of those elements that I enjoyed divorced from the player versus player interactions I didn’t enjoy. Also did I mention 340 gear?

Mythic+

I am way more into the experience of running Mythic Plus this expansion, in part because my normal circle of folks that I tend to game with… aka the folks loosely connected to AggroChat are also into doing them.  Also it feels like the gear is better this go around than it was the last time… because I got a 355 item from my Mythic 3 weekly chest, so numerically it seems to be scaling in a way that makes them worth it.

Kul’Tiras

Again I was not super sure how I would feel about the split faction islands concept but I really like roaming around on Kul’Tiras.  Once again this gives the feeling of PVP without actually being PVP since not playing on War mode means nobody gives a shit if I accidentally flag myself.  It gives me a whole new playground to roam around in after I have already reached level cap, and I am hoping that they give us more areas as the expansion drags on similar to how they expanded the game with the Broken Shore and Argus.

Dinosaurs and Pirates

I really love the horde content and the feeling of riding Dinosaurs and fighting Old Gods.  Everything about that is on point and makes me extremely happy. Similarly I love the whole Sea Witch and Pirate nonsense happening in Kul’Tiras.  Basically this is Ixalan the expansion and I am loving so much about it. The faction bullshit is still faction bullshit, but at least it is playing out in an interesting way most of the time.

Uldir

While I have not seen much of it, I am digging the whole Mesoamerican Titan thing going on with Uldir.  The two bosses I have seen have been fairly interesting, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the raid.  I think it is kind of shit though that they copped out and didn’t make it a tier set, and instead just made shared armor type sets.  This wasn’t cool in Trial of the Crusader and isn’t really cool now.

War Mode

I love War mode because it single handedly removed the worst players in World of Warcraft from my universe.  They simply do not exist any longer because they are off on their own island full, removed from my field of view.  Bravo for voting them off the island and making a more chill environment for me to run around in. As a result of this… the “enemy” players I encounter are often times helpful… and in turn I am regularly hopping in and helping them out as well.  It is a kinder and gentler Warcraft that I greatly approve of… now just drop the damned faction wall.

What Doesn’t Work

BFA: The Good and The Ugly

Crafting

Crafting still feels awful.  Now I give them credit for splitting up crafting into a per expansion thing, because quite frankly that is the only reason why I am dabbling in crafting at all on my Demon Hunter.  However what feels completely fucking awful is the fact that the gear that is actually worth chasing is gated behind running fifteen mythic dungeons to achieve it. By the time I can craft it, it will no longer be worthwhile at all.  At a bare minimum there should have been a weekly quest to acquire a couple of the hydrocore items. Also there should have been a chance of any item over 340 that gets scrapped producing a Hydrocore. While this is less fucked up than Legion crafting was… it isn’t very far off the stupidity meter.

Weapon Drops

Every player I know is struggling to get decent weapons because they are just hard to come by.  I’ve run a silly number of Heroic Dungeons… several Mythics, killed a raid boss, and a slew of warfronts and have never seen a weapon drop in any of them.  I am having to survive entirely off drops from World Quests that seem to get rationed each week in an extremely limited quantity.  Now having written this…  I did get my first weapon drop of the expansion last night from a Warfront, and I will continue grinding that until I get another…  however that weapon came after a chest, legs, 3 pairs of bracers, a belt, another pair of bracers, another belt, a cloak…  and then finally a weapon.  I still feel like they have tuned this expansion drops for the era when we got freebie Artifact weapons.

War Campaign

What if you took the Garrison and the Order Hall but removed anything about it that made it enjoyable.  Then you would end up with the War Campaign that has a few interesting moments but largely feels forced and phoned in.  The missions you can run are boring and don’t really offer anything interesting apart from the occasional faction boosts.  The upgrades to your boat… are largely meaningless and are locked behind things I largely don’t care to be doing. It serves as a way for me to get to Kul’Tiras and nothing more, and all of the flavor that went into both the Garrison and Order Hall is just not there in any way that I care about.

Azerite Items/Heart of Azeroth

Much like the War Campaign this is a neutered version of the Artifact Weapon.  Everything that felt good or interesting has been diluted and spread out over a bunch of artificial bumps in the road where you get something…  but you don’t have an awful lot of choice about the thing you are getting. You get a 370 chest from Warfronts… well you are stuck with an arrangement of sub optimal talents on that piece of gear because it is not like you are going to luck into something else anytime soon.

There are so many ways this system could have worked better.  Maybe if each time you leveled up your Heart of Azeroth you got to choose which talent to learn, and then when you got a piece of gear you got to assign to the 2 or 3 slots available one of those talents you learned.  Then to go one step further… the assignments should be remembered like Talent picks and assigned to a specific spec so if you change your gear swaps Talent loadouts. As it is now… you feel like you have no real choice and have to largely roll with the items you get…  because once you have left 325 land you won’t have all that many options.

Islands

So at face value these are “fun enough” and involve running amok and killing tons of stuff with a group.  These work more or less like Pandaria scenarios… if they were completely divorced of having a purpose. As it stands I don’t get the point.  They are a cool tech that could have been interesting, but as it stands it is a boring and grindy activity that occasionally if you are really freaking lucky you might get a pet or a mount.  Your reward for running them is a purple currency called Dubloons that more or less doesn’t really have a purpose yet. As it stands the currency is used to buy a bunch of items that can only be used on Islands…  but this does nothing to help define the reason why you should give a fuck. As it stands you are forced to do enough to have done five different island layouts in order to move your also largely meaningless war table progress forward.  I can’t even call it a stick, because it isn’t really hard… but it is completely devoid of any carrot.

Tarnished Hope

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Tarnished Hope

Yesterday was a bit of a trying day for me personally.   I’ve personally been bought into this notion that Mastodon provided a kinder gentler alternative to Twitter, but yesterday largely proved that notion completely wrong.  The Fediverse has been the welcome home of the disenfranchised and marginalized, which is awesome since Twitter has not done a great job of protecting that group in any way.  However some events happened recently and because of them I am glad that I joined up several weeks ago rather than right now at this time.  I was able to see what I thought was the ActivityPub community in its native state, talking about interesting things openly and publicly and willing to friend each other just as easily.  I was able to get settled in quickly with the help of a whole slew of people who offered useful advice as I docked myself into a corner of this big maelstrom of interesting things.

I started out on Mastodon.cloud which was a large overflow instance to the original flagship of Mastodon.social.  However I quickly realized that maybe being on a big disconnected instance was not the best idea in the world.  As such I made the migration to Elekk.xyz which is awesome and started funding the patreon a bit to help out in its maintenance.  However when my good friend Liore decided to fire up her own private instance…  I found myself making the jump yet again to Nineties.Cafe and I am extremely happy I did.  It is sort of this protective bubble where the people I already knew and the friends of those people are hanging out and talking freely about our interests.  It has made it very easy to drown out the events that are happening over in “fedi” aka the federated timeline.

Effectively some weeks back Wil Wheaton joined Mastodon and like any denizen of twitter had some difficulty adjusting to the weird mix of things going on here and all of the little social norms that I talked a bit about the other day.  However with increasing fervor there was a move to push him off of the platform, and while there are folks who have very valid concerns…  most of what I saw regularly in the form of shitposts from Fedi was effectively the consensus of “fuck him for being famous”.  As such it felt like a defense coalesced with the goal of pushing the infection out of the system, and in that I saw a lot of behavior that I had seen on Twitter and other social media platforms that is normally targeted at those same disenfranchised and marginalized people that I talked about at the beginning of the post.

Essentially I was watching the bullied become the bullies, and it saddened me greatly.  I thought I had found a quiet corner of the internet that functioned the way I remember the internet first feeling during those heady early days of the nineties.  I’ve compared Mastodon to early IRC or to the BBS era…  but the last couple of days have felt like anything but that.  I am not saying that the folks who pushed back are evil or wrong, just that the tactics that they were employing were the exact same thing that I have seen employed against them in the past.  The only real comment I have made on the issue was last night.

I guess today yet again proved that we can build a better technology, that has the potential for better community engagement. But we can’t necessarily guarantee that everyone is going to be willing to be better human beings. Human beings still suck, and I welcome the robot overlords that will come after us.

I still have a lot of hope in Mastodon and Pleroma and the rest of the little islands that live in the ActivityPub Fediverse, and I am super glad that I have found my little island full of refugees from the nineties.  I just saw a lot of the same behavior that I have on other social media platforms and it made me a little bummed about the whole experiment.  However I will keep moving on and keep looking for the good things out there happening.  There are needlessly folks who feel safer after yesterdays events, and that is good I guess.  I just wish it wasn’t at the cost of reverting to the same flavors of toxic gate keeping that had been used as a weapon against “the other” before.  Yesterday just made me think a little too much about this quote from Animal Farm:  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Reluctantly Fury

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Reluctantly Fury

This morning is a hard morning, because I am struggling to wake up.  I apparently had a way more active night than I realized, because in my mind I slept all the way through.  However my wife told me a tale this morning that tells otherwise.  Apparently I fell asleep with the television on and at some point during the night she woke up and decided that it should be turned off.  The television remote was on the end table on my side of the bed so she proceeded to wake me up and tell me to turn it off.  Instead of doing this… I apparently proudly proclaimed that “I peed”.  At which point she tried to tell me no.. please turn off the television…  to which I again proudly replied “but I already peed”.

This apparently happened a couple more times before I finally reluctantly turned off the television.  I remember absolutely none of this happening at all.  In my mind I went to bed and slept all the night through without incident, but I am guessing my generally groggy state this morning is due to the fact that I didn’t in fact do that thing.  I have been taking a dose of nyquil before going to bed because I have been fighting this nameless crud, and I am wondering if the sleep inducing nature of that…  lead to my odd behavior.  Regardless it is blogfodder as I call it, and like so many things I probably shouldn’t tell you…  I am telling you anyways.

Reluctantly Fury

Last night I managed to get the Demon Hunter to 114 and finish out the quests in Vol’dun.  At this point I have moved him on to Nazmir which is a zone I never quite finished on the Warrior before getting caught up in the madness of world questing.  As I was winding down on the Demon Hunter I decided to make one more pass on the Warrior to see if there were any quests up that I absolutely had to do.  It was around this point that I decided to try out Fury in proper and get my bars set up.  Now at this point I don’t have a great combo of weapons for Fury as I am have a spear from world questing that came in around 320 and an axe that came from a world boss I believe at 289ish.  It is good enough to get started, but generally speaking I have had hell getting weapons this entire expansion so far.  I was hoping that onehander fury was a thing again and I could just drop some fist weapons crafted by my leatherworker, but that is apparently not a thing.

The shocking truth is…  Fury is amazing.  It feels good and shockingly feels like I have more moment to moment survival than I do as a protection warrior.  Basically this is now my world questing form and will probably run dungeons as such also to help build out the rest of my gear.  This is the expansion where apparently I am maining Fury on the Warrior, however that is not enough of a consolation prize to give up my mission to level the Demon Hunter and tank on it.  It does at least make me feel like maybe I didn’t completely waste the first two weeks of this expansion leveling a character that would be permanently shelved during this expansion.  Maybe just maybe at some point they will apply some tweaks to the way protection feels and I can dust off the sword and shield.

Reluctantly Fury

Another thing that I poked my head into last night was Destiny 2, and for starters the lighting model feels totally different as evidenced by the way this ship looks.  As far as the changes… I am still wrapping my head around what weapons do what.  What I thought was going to happen was that we could put any weapon in any slot.  What actually happened was that weapons are still divided by Kinetic, Energy and Power slots and then to confuse things further…  the weapons are split by what sort of ammunition they use being primary, special or heavy.  Fusion Rifle, Sniper Rifle and Shotgun all now are counted as special weapon types and are divided between the first and second slot.  What I had hoped was that I could run around with Uriel’s Gift in the first slot, Merciless in the second slot, and then a Sword in the third slot.  That is not a thing since Merciless and Uriel’s Gift both occupy the same slot.

None of this works exactly how I remembered them explaining it in the first live stream about Forsaken, however I have also not been following the changes terribly close.  So technically there probably are ways you could have a shotgun in the first two slots, but I am not sure how viable that is actually going to be.  The infusion however works much better to where it is slot based and not weapon type based.  That said we still can’t do what we were able to do in TTK era of feeding trash drops from one class to become infusion fuel to push up another class which is unfortunate.  Supposedly the changes feel really good, but I am on a mission to level the Demon Hunter so I did not give it that much time.  I hope to explore it more over the long weekend break.