Category: blog

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Warcraft Classic: Death defining

Today in Warcraft Classic I died. Quite a few times. This was tremendous!

Abandon all hope ye who exit here

My new-to-Warcraft-although-no-longer-that-new friend has started playing Classic too (unfortunately as Alliance), and has been commenting on how he keeps dying. Mainly to murlocs, which made the old hands in our group have PTSD flashbacks.

In a typical “I remember when” fashion I laughed and assumed it was due to his rookie skills, and that I would never die – or only very rarely – during lowly levelling quests.

How wrong I was.

My first death was to the Palemane Gnoll leader Snagglespear. Like a typical boss, he stands in the middle of a campsite surrounded by fast spawning minions. Another player and I grouped up to take him on, having seen several others try solo and fail. Surely a Druid and Warrior would make short work of him even at level 7, we thought, before he instead made short work of us.

A Classic lament

We did get him eventually, with great caution and judicious pulling, but even then it was close. Unlike Live where he’s guaranteed to drop a 6 slot bag, his Classic loot table drops absolutely nothing of use, but succeeding with the challenge of defeating him was reward enough.

Snagglespear however seemed to open the death floodgates for me, and I proceeded to be killed by Prairie Stalkers and Flatland Cougars working together, Wiry Swoop talons, Venture Co. troublemakers, and Windfury Sorceresses (twice!). Mulgore is huge so the death runs were long, but I kind of enjoyed every one of them.

I eventually learned that running around in white and grey gear and no way of healing meant extreme patience was required. Plus a lot of 360 camera panning during a fight to check for patrolling extras. Mulgore’s spread out nature is somewhat deceiving – you think there’s plenty of space so you won’t get hemmed in, but the mobs have long patrol paths so you can suddenly find yourself in a perfect storm of fang and claw.

The triumph of the day was downing Supervisor Fizsprocket and plenty of his Venture Co. cronies. It would have been impossible – or near impossible – to solo, but organic grouping meant we (still cautiously!) cleared his mine and recovered his… clipboard. Almost sounds like FFXIV!

This post also marks the final day of Blaugust. I’m pleased to have posted every day again (like last year), and most of them felt ‘postable’. I do agree with Endgame Viable that deciding not to post is a valuable skill, but Blaugust makes it hard to shelve things – I think the Money on the Table post is probably one that I would have dropped (which makes it ironic I’m now linking to it again), but it was getting late and I didn’t have the energy to start something fresh. And I did like that press box!

Many thanks to all who have read and commented during the month, I’ve really enjoyed reading a lot of new and established bloggers who’ve participated too – though I’ve struggled to keep up with all the reading.

And of course huge thanks to Belghast for pulling this together – a monumental effort each year. It’s great to read how much enjoyment he’s getting from Classic, which appropriately enough mirrors what he’s created with Blaugust: a community.

I think more than anything I am enthralled by World of Warcraft Classic because it represents something that I never really dared dream would happen. Sure I had high hopes about getting the band back together and tromping around in Azeroth. However what I really missed was the return to the sense of broader community that existed during that time. Apparently lots of people also missed this because it has done my jaded heart good to see players helping players constantly.

A nice Blaugusty reward!

#Blaugust31

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Warcraft: Midnights Children

As the Classic fever was building, I enjoyed reading Belghast’s excellent post on communication and admiring the great screenshots from his early Warcraft days.

It made me want to dig out my old screenshots from Burning Crusade, but unfortunately they were locked away in Picasa somewhere. I had assumed that they were lost forever due to Google sunsetting Picasa some time ago, but a small amount of research revealed that you could still get them if you could logon to the Google account associated with your Picasa account. Luckily enough I still had that logon and before long I had recovered all the pictures.

Approaching Moroes: There was so much excitement, mounting these stairs for the first time

Now that I had the images, it seemed like a good time to reconstruct the old guild blog, which was a two year history of my first Warcraft guild and our adventures in Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and, in particular, Karazhan. The blog was also on a Google property – Blogspot. But the broken images made it no longer useful, plus Google’s propensity to shut services down meant it could disappear at any time. It was the same account as Picasa, so I could easily logon and download the post history as an XML file.

I decided the best plan would be to try and migrate the blog to a static Hugo blog and host it on a Galumphing subdomain, which would mean merging the Blogspot text with the Picasa images.

Nightbane: We had a lot of trouble with this guy

Thanks to the internet magic of 2019, there are plenty of tools for doing the Blogspot to Hugo migration. The most promising looked to be this Blogger to Markdown tool written by palaniraja on Github. I installed it on a Mac and it worked flawlessly, miraculously producing a directory full of Hugo formatted markdown files. It even had a very nice feature that merged the blog comments into the single markdown post file, making it much easier to publish as a static archive of the original blog (comments being the bugbear of static site generators).

Next I followed the very simple Hugo Quick Start steps, and was very surprised to find it worked first time. I chose a theme – Solar – that was similar to the original blog, and before long had the site up and running locally and started configuring it in real-time with the Hugo server.

Maiden: Another road block, but joy once we got past her

I did a pass of comment formatting (some of the dates were a bit mangled), and tweaked some of the settings – publishing the full test of each post instead of a summary, and putting it in chronological order so you could read it from start to finish (which is the reverse of a standard blog setup). I also added Wowhead tooltips for good measure, which slows things down marginally on load but with a static site it seems a fair trade-off. Otherwise I left it as it was.

Prince: the end game

The final step was merging the local images back into the blog. That was unfortunately a more manual process, as I had to remove a lot of Picasa HTML cruft, but it didn’t take too long with some judicious Notepad++ mass replacements.

I published the site again, and there it was: Midnights Children, in all it’s non-apostrophed glory. Just seeing it again hit me with a huge nostalgia wave, and reading the posts complete with images of glory and despair was even better. There’s probably only 5 people who are still interested, but for them it’s a reminder of a special time and a special friend.

Epilogue

Coincidentally after doing all this, I read that UltrViolet at Endgame Viable was embarking on a very similar project, albeit more about consolidating multiple online identities and blogs.

I totally agree about the WordPress dilemma – it’s a great platform in a lot of ways, but it’s very slow and kind of stodgy, especially when compared to static sites. It is however very easy to setup, has a strong support ecosystem, and importantly has integrated comments and associated spam protection (assuming you want comments, that is).

I was tempted to move this blog to something simpler, but stumbled trying to find something that elegantly incorporated comments. Disqus seems to be the most common choice, but it seems to have pretty major privacy problems, and all the open source commenting engines seem pretty flakey and hard to configure and maintain.

Like UltrViolet, I’ve stuck with WordPress, self hosting and using Markdown for writing the posts (so it can easily be migrated if need be), and disabling the frustrating new block editor. I even did a test migration of this blog to Hugo using the same tool as above and it worked just as well. Which gives me confidence that I’m not super locked-in should a nice simple option present itself.

I wish Endgame Viable well! It was certainly worth the time for me, though this was more an archival project than a living blog.

#Blaugust28

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Blaugusting Final Fantasy XIV

Blaugust has once again arrived in the gaming corner of the blogosphere, thanks to the great efforts of Belghast.

Like last year, I’m participating, and I thought that maybe I’d try my hand at a brand new game and blog my reactions and experiences – inspired partly by the highly entertaining diary Bhagpuss kept of his Star Wars: The Old Republic escapades. But not quite on the scale of UltrViolet at Endgame Viable who is planning to play no less than 31 games from his Steam backlog – one per day during Blaugust – and video the sessions to boot. Madness, but brilliant!

I’ve chosen Final Fantasy XIV Online (hereafter FFXIV), the hot-mmo-du-jour, as the victim, an icon that’s sat on my desktop untouched since buying it cheaply late 2018.

I’ve never played a Final Fantasy game of any stripe, despite owning many PlayStations – I think I even have a copy of the PS1 version of FFVII squirrelled away somewhere. So I’ll be coming into the game completely fresh, blind to the lore, and with no real idea how to play it.

There’s been plenty of chatter about the game recently, with the Shadowbringers expansion being very well received, and FFXIV apparently challenging WoW (a very cogent analysis from Kaylriene) for the MMO popularity crown. I love that I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the Shadowbringers trailer, other than it all looks epic and everyone is very handsome.

Of course (late) August also bring the release of Warcraft Classic, something I’m surprisingly excited about (along with at least one of my regular Warcraft crew) and will certainly blog about. Maybe it’s not that surprising – having started in Burning Crusade, I’m thrilled to be given the chance to see the original game, janky models and all. As my fellow guildie says, it will be novel to have to really earn things again in Warcraft, instead of having loot drop like rain. Even the idea of name reservations is exciting – we live in strange times!

First things first though: FFXIV here we come.

#Blaugust01

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Post Blaugust post

Blaugust is wrapped up for the year, and it was great fun to participate. I was a bit wary about signing up and committing to writing, but I’m glad I did – it created a good discipline to write each night, and the interaction with other bloggers was very rewarding. It was really good to find so many new blogs to follow, and also to see people didn’t worry about ‘gotta post every day’. I’m pleased I managed the streak – on the couple of days when I struggled for an idea, it was great being able to turn to the Blaugustians and quickly find inspiration. After 31 days of posts, having three days of radio silence was kind of weird, but it happened to coincide with a work /afk trip so it all worked out pretty well. Thanks to everyone who’s visited, and special thanks to Belghast.

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Looking good

One of the questions I had when pondering the rare mob collection project was how to improve the quality of the screenshots – pictures or it didn’t happen, after all.

After a bit of hunting around, I found that there a few console only settings in Warcraft related to the screenshot quality. If you type these commands in the chat window and press enter, they are changed permanently everywhere. (You don’t get any feedback that anything happened, but it does work.)

The first is choosing between JPG (the default) and TGA. TGA is a lossless format, so the image quality is higher and non compressed, but it is a fairly arcane format – you’d want to convert it to something more useful like PNG to use it on WordPress et al. In any case, the command to change it to TGA is:

/console screenshotFormat tga

And to switch back to JPG:

/console screenshotFormat jpg

Sticking with JPG is more convenient, but the default quality is pretty average. The good news is there’s another console setting that bumps up the JPG quality until it’s barely different from the TGA files (confirmed by much internet commentary). Wowheads screenshot submission guidelines state the default JPG level is 3, but we can bump it all the way up to eleven 10:

/console screenshotQuality 10

I tried this and while the difference is noticeable if you look closely, it’s not as huge as you might expect. One byproduct is the filesize grows from about 500KB to 2MB, but with some judicious resizing the filesize gets more reasonable.

So it seems changing the quality setting is not quite enough. Which means learning more about doing some post processing on them. There are some great photography-inspired tips in this excellent article on Blizzard Watch which seems a good place to start.

Aside from the framing tips, the main advice seems to be about adjusting colours and contrast, to get the details to really pop and sparkle. The main problem I see is that the screenshots are too dark, so I played around with an image of our second RFC run to see what could be done. Here’s the default shot:

The heavy contrast is quite nice, but it does tend to hide much of the detail

Using Irfanview (which admittedly is more of a viewer than an editor), I mucked around with adjusting contrast and saturation, but in the end found that the ‘auto adjust colours’ setting did a pretty good job:

Details are much clearer, at the cost of some depth

Finally I used the ‘sharpness’ setting to see what that would do:

Things like belts, tabard edges, and moustaches(!) are picked out, though there is also some jagged edging

Hm. I like that you can see more once it’s adjusted, but it does wash it out a fair bit. I guess using the default settings isn’t a great plan – more to learn and more experimenting to come. Either that or I should just start taking screenshots in daylight…

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Developing appreciation

It’s been nice reading the various Developer Appreciation Week posts on the Blaugust blogs, the surge of positivity is very welcome.

The obvious candidate for me is Blizzard. Warcraft has provided endless hours of entertainment, fun, laughter, obsession, joy, sorrow, and accomplishment, and continues to do so even now. Most recently I’ve discovered the cleverness of level scaling in dungeons, which has meant our lowbie guild can all be completely different levels but still play together – something that must have been very hard to implement into the creaking framework of old WoW code, and yet appears seamless to the player.

Overwatch is also a brilliant game, the perfect antidote to the long termedness of an MMO. Jeff Kaplan in particular is a great front man, communicating extremely well and obviously loving what he’s doing, but the entire team have achieved incredible things. The game is constantly evolving and updating, which is all due to the dedication of the dev team no doubt.

On a slightly different note, I’d also shout out to the team that have put out 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. Our tabletop group have loved the current version, which managed to simplify the rules somewhat and also introduce a bunch of great new mechanics like Inspiration – basically a free re-roll granted by te DM to a player for particularly clever role playing. It’s a simple idea that escalates the enjoyment instantly without bogging things down. They have also managed to make all the classes feel exceptionally heroic, with every class feeling powerful and different, and the official modules have been entertaining for DM and players both.

Finally I’d call out gaming bloggers again. So many great, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, curious writers who are passing on their love of a game, or many games, to all the readers out there. And through that enthusiasm they in turn highlight what a great job so many of the developers are doing. It’s a virtuous circle, and may it ever grow stronger.

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Expansion paralysis

It’s happening again.

Instead of diving into the latest expansion with arms open and eyes wide, I’m doing everything to avoid even logging in to my only 110 character. This happens every time, and I’m at a loss to explain why.

Running dungeons with the Alliance guild is one thing, but everything else I’m doing is pure avoidance. So far I’ve rolled up one of each Alliance race, tried them out, deleted them. Settled on a Dwarf Hunter alt, then decided the name would be better for a Panda, but do I really want to play a Panda? Maybe a Human. But wait, I’m an actual human, why would I play one in a game.

Then I thought I should level a Highmountain Tauren – the character model is beautiful, especially those massive antlers, and it would be fun to unlock their epic looking cosmetic armour. 90 levels before I’d have to face BfA – that should be time enough to get used to the idea!?

Realising this was kind of ridiculous, I caught up on a few blogs, thinking that working my way through the great Blaugust list TAGN put together would focus me on the task ahead. But instead, reading through them made me start to ponder rolling up some characters in some completely different MMOs.

Armagon Live’s enthusiasm for SWtOR (and the great transmog in that post), along with the long term commitment to the game from blogs like Going Commando, make me enthused to don a lightsaber and jump back in again.

Likewise the ongoing chronicles of GW2 from Bhagpuss (who even when wary of the direction the game is taking makes it sound interesting) lures me to GW2, and it’s hard to resist the deep appreciation Blaugust creator Belghast has for ESO. Or Syp’s relentless enthusiasm for LotRO and DDO. Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons, my DnD group are playing The Curse of Strahd (aka Ravenloft revisited), which led me to thinking I should maybe play Neverwinter Online in order to flesh out ideas for the tabletop game.

Meanwhile my Horde Hunter stands patiently waiting but gets no closer to being played. Does anyone else have this problem?

Ah well. If nothing else, my BfA avoidance scheme has made me appreciate the gaming blogosphere all the more. Even though we can’t play every game, the enthusiasm of the blogging community means we can get close. Thanks all!

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Meta Blaugust blogging

With Blaugust fully rolling now, I thought it might be ok to post a meta post about blogging – or more specifically questions about blogging and commenting.

(I guess this could be better asked on the Blaugust Discord, but I don’t really use or get Discord, and anything posted there is only visible to the Discorders. Which is why blogging is so great – it’s public and a permanent record).

One of my biggest confusions with blogging is commenting. Whenever I see a post that stirs the imagination, I think about commenting, but then decide it would be better to make a full post here. The logic is normally that there is too much to write in a comment, and comments tend to be seen by a tiny fraction of blog readers.

On the other hand, comments can be the heart of a blog. It’s how you know people are reading, and reading enough to care to respond. Veteran blogger and Blaugust mentor Bhagpuss is pretty clear on the matter:

I one hundred percent recommend and advise any reader to comment, whether or not they also blog or plan on starting. Comments are the life-blood of blogs. Bloggers love comments and commenting leads to blogging. Do it!

But! He also goes on to say:

I’ll start commenting and within a few sentences it will occur to me that a) the comment is going to run long – most likely very long – and b) it would make a perfectly adequate blog post! At this point, out of blogging solidarity and politeness, I usually change the comment to something along the lines of “Great post! I was going to comment but then I realized I ought to make it into a post over at my blog”.

This is exactly what happens. Though I rarely get as far as starting a reply.

Is the best etiquette to post a reply, but link to your post if you make one? That sometimes seems like it might be a bit rude, hijacking someone else’s post, but it does seem a good compromise? I certainly like seeing a link posted as it leads me to find great new bloggers, or great posts from existing blogs.

It might also be the only way to guarantee the author knows you have posted a response. The state of link-backs seem perilous at best, which is a real shame. There could be terrific post somewhere engaging with one of yours, but you may never see it.

Interested in thoughts on this – feel free to comment or post a response! And then comment. With a link. Argh!

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Fishing for Blaugust

I’ve signed up for Blaugust 2018, which is a wonderful initiative from Belghast at Tales of the Aggronaut to initiate or (re)kickstart gaming blogs. It’s amazing what one enthusiastic blogger can do – so far there’s 80+ blogs signed up, and a great list of mentors from the more established blogs out there. So many thanks to Belghast and crew for all the work on this – and for helping waking this blog up again!

With the Thonry War underway, I needed to get away from Sylvanas’s crazy crusade for a while, and there is no better way to find some peaceful equilibrium than fishing1.

Fishing & Highmountain, like milk & honey

I’ve been tootling around the Legion zones seeking all the rare fish for the Bigger Fish to Fry Achievement. There’s a fun mechanic where you occasionally fish up a special bait that in turn gives you a two minute buff in which you can catch the associated rare fish.

The bait names are all pretty amusing – from Message in a Beer Bottle to Stunned, Angry Shark – and some even create things like a Sleeping Murloc who runs around throwing fish with gay abandon. Each zone has it’s own fish, and it’s a nice way to tour some of the more out of the way places on the (still beautiful) maps.

But I mostly love just quietly throwing in a line and waiting. Those moments when nothing is happening, and you can simply enjoy the serenity and scenery. It’s like real fishing, but with less rigmarole, and far less smelly.

Unless you fish up some Aromatic Murloc Slime I guess.

  1. I have all my Tauren totems out and hooves crossed that they never kill fishing like they did First Aid. ↩
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Influence

A commentator on Syp’s always entertaining blog Bio Break took him gently to task for sometimes dwelling negatively on MMOs that he has abandoned. Syp rightly defends his approach on the grounds that it would be dishonest to say otherwise, though he agrees that letting go is eventually appropriate.

It’s an interesting dilemna, one faced by critics of all forms of entertainment. Critics have such a huge influence on the success or failure of a venture that it must sometimes seem overwhelming – some recipients of bad reviews have even turned to the courts to seek recompense. I remember talking to a record store owner who knew the music reviewer at the Sydney Morning Herald. This reviewer had made a conscious decision to only review music he liked, perhaps as a response to being sampled by The Necks apologising profusely for a bad review he’d given them. That’s obviously an extreme reaction, but on the other hand, why waste time dissing something when there is so much good stuff out there.

Now independent blogs are obviously a different order of influence magnitude to a old school broadsheet newspaper, but the influence is still there.

Despite blogs being a free-for-all, people are impacted by blogger opinions and thoughts, especially when the blogger is as well known and prolific as the bio-breaking one. We can’t help but want our choice of MMO to be ‘right’, and for that decision to be reinforced by the community at large. I remember the great disturbance in the force when BRK stepped down – it actually made WoW feel less fun for a while. I (and many others) still keep an half an eye on his personal blog, just in case he comes back – wishful thinking I fear, but he added so much life to the WoW community, and hence to my enjoyment of the game.

If I read someone praising WoW – as everyone is doing at the moment due to the new LFD tool – I feel justified in my investment in the game. If someone attacks or criticises, I want to turn a blind eye (if it’s justified criticism) or argue back (if it’s unfounded or irrational).

The complusively-readable-despite-the-horror Goblin would call this hopelessly “social” behaviour, but I’m sure even he enjoys his popularity. As Tobold pointed out, “if Gevlon would be honest to himself, he’d realize that writing a not-for-profit blog is an extremely social act”. If even Gevlon can be partly socialised by popularity and influence, what hope do the rest of us have?!