Category: This Blog

Blog Shenanigans

Shenanigans, I say!

Due to folk creating thousands of fake subscribers  here on this blog, and various password reset shenanigans (if it came from “wordpress@hill-kleerup.org,” it’s not legit), and similar suspicious stuff, I have …

  1. Deleted all but admin-level users. Sorry if you were a legit user and I deleted you and you want to subscribe here, please contact me at dave and then at hill-kleerup.org, and I can manually add you in.
  2. Blocked automatic enrollment at the site.

The fact is, there are plenty of ways to follow or subscribe to this site without registering with it, so I am not too worried. But if they don’t work for you, please use the process noted above.

So … what’s going on lately, gaming-wise, Dave?

Yeah, about that …

So I’ve been gaming a lot more of late, but not as one might expect from how this blog has been / used to be.

I have left the City of Heroes

Don’t cry for me, Paragon City …

The Homecoming revival of CoH is a marvel. It scratched an itch I’d been suffering from since the original game shut down.

And then, one day, the itch had been scratched.

A couple of things happened:

First, the dev team made a bunch of “improvements” to the transport system. In particular, they dropped the ability to teleport directly to bases from anywhere, which put a serious crimp in getting about Paragon. True, they added some extra bits, and that base teleport was always flagged as an “oops, we didn’t mean this to be publicly available,” and they added in some other ways to get around as well as improvements in travel powers …

But I decided I really didn’t want to re-memorize how to get from Point A to Point B.

Again, that’s all on me; the devs are doing what they think is best for the game. Just not my cuppa.

Second, I realized that I was spending a lot of time playing CoH. More than I wanted to be, and at the sacrifice of other things I wanted to be doing. (We’re not talking “City of Heroes almost ruined my marriage” stuff here. I’m talking about other hobbies and pastimes.)

So, I quit. Cold turkey. That was back last fall (I think the Halloween event was going on), and I really haven’t looked back since, except to worry about when my account will be archived and my hero names all backup for sale. And feeling like I should go in and take a final inventory of my created heroes for future storytelling.

We’ll see. Some day.

I’ve been doing a lot more TTRPG

The Tabletop RPG world has conceded that “RPG” points now to a lot more online games than tabletop ones, so “TTRPG” has become the New Label.

Anyway, I’d been doing a certain amount of that before for a while — and when COVID-19 hit, my main gaming group was already on Roll20 and able to continue on without a hiccup.

Since then, not only has that continued, but I’ve spun into an additional group that, after some earlier play, I’ve started GMing, playing honest-to-God D&D 5e. So there’s that, too. Lots of material to share.

So what’s up with this blog?

I’ve been a utter and total slug on this blog. But, then, my “normal” blog has been far more quiet than I’d like, too. I’ve been doing most of my social media on Twitter, and been pretty negligent in getting that content into a form I have ownership of.

I think I’d like to change that, at least with the Blog of Heroes (baby steps). So I’m going to try and make this blog a bit more about all my gaming. I’ve already changed the subtag from “Dave Does the MMORPG” to “Dave Does the Game”. I want to do more talking about all the games I play — mostly on the RPG side of things, but also reports from our weekend Game Days and the tabletop games going on there, and talk about D&D 5e and other systems I’ve been playing.

That’s my intent, anyway.

The other thing I’m doing is shuttering the @BlogOfHeroes Twitter account. I don’t expect I’ll have so much traffic out of here that I need to maintain a separate Twitter account for it. It does mean people following my gaming stuff will perforce read my various ravings over politics, society, and geek culture, but I Contain Multitudes, and keeping them separate is kind of a PitA.

Show me the way to go Home …

For some reason, the Redirection plug-in in WordPress was redirecting anything going to the home page to go to a post earlier in July. No reason why, but I fixed it.

Meanwhile, though we haven’t had a lot of CoH action here in the household (though Finest Jade and Lady’s Keeper were on last night to continue playing their all-Architect careers), we’re watching Issue 21 and Freedom with expectations. Some cool stuff coming out there …

Wherein Dave tries to demonstrate that he is, in fact, not just a Twitter bot

Yeah, Blog of Heroes hasn’t been getting a lot of love lately.  But at least that annoying auto-playing CoH trailer got finally pushed off the front page …

Things have been uber-busy the last month or two.  November was pretty much sucked up with NaNoWriMo — after hitting my 2K words, I had no energy for gaming.  December, thus far, has been mostly holiday prep, but Margie and I did get some CoH in over the weekend — mostly taking some of our newly-arrived Praetorians through their low-20 adventures, evil twins, all of that.

I19 is out, of course, alas right about when I couldn’t talk about it at length (esp. having been in closed beta).  There’s just a whole bunch of nice QoL improvements, from trains that run everywhere (and tell you about where you’re going) to being able to sign out without logging off (though it’s a kludgy implementation, and buggy to boot).

Over on the DCUO front, various beta keys are being given away, etc. and so forth.  Not that I would, theoretically, have any time to be playing with that, either …

Nicer links

I use Bit.ly and Twitter a lot to post content here (as you well know). Kelson has come up with a nice Twitter Tools add-in that will take the Bit.ly links that get passed back in from Twitter for the daily archives and expand them into their original links (with original link titles).

That has the dual advantage of both expanding the link into something more visually meaningful, and of fixing the link to that original site.  One of the philosophical drawbacks of Bit.ly is that if they ever go under (or, heck, even just have an outage), their mapping service between the the various Bit.ly links and what underlies them goes away, too. This solve that.

I’d like a few more options added in, but I’m sure that will come over time.  So far (one day) it seems to be working.

AFKish

Between an out-of-town trip last week, and evenings this week that have been action-packed (sufficient that when I get home I want to just plop down and watch some TV), I’ve not been doing much online gaming. Like, um, at all. That’s likely to continue for a bit.

That said, I continue (as seen) to monitor the boards for Interesting Info, which I will pass on post-haste.

Tweets of Heroes!

Okay, I’m going try the Tweeting thing here on Blog of Heroes.

  • I’ve created a Twitter feed, BlogOfHeroes. Anyone’s welcome to subscribe to it.
  • I’ve added Twitter Tools to this blog. That will (a) ping out any posts I make on the blog onto that Twitter channel, and (b) nightly pull in all other Tweets in that channel and post them here as a blog entry.
  • When I get home tonight, I’ll turn on (limited) Twitter output from my account to that feed.
  • Some day, when CoX gets the feature (don’t imagine they aren’t looking at it), I’ll be able to do that feed, too.

Result — you can follow along the Twitter feed to get info about posts here, CO activity of mine, and any news I choose to post about through that simple mechanism (e.g., a couple of Massively news items from earlier today). Alternately, the last five Twitter entries, even before they get made as a blog post, will show up in the sidebar of the blog (under “Bullpen Bulletins”).

The biggest challenge I see is going to be timing. My nightly Twitter dump schedule I use on my main blog may be shifted to wee-hours-of-the-morning, since I’m occasionally (ahem) gaming up to Midnight. I’ll have to play with the post title in that case.

It’s all an experiment. Let’s see where it goes.

CO: More Social Gaming stuff

So I posted the previous message and realized immediately I’d forgotten about the Twitter connection, which I’ve seen only through a lot of awkward and overzealous tweets that Rey’s account generated while he was playing with this …

This thread is the main discussion of the social tools CO has built in, from the perspective of in-game play.

To start using this system, enter /socialmedia. From this screen you can control the operation of the social media tools. Use the settings button to enroll (or un-enroll) from each service. By default, all available activity types for each service are enabled once enrolled. Uncheck any of the boxes to disable that activity type for that service.

The Status activity type is initiated by the command “/social_status Your status here”. The plan is for this to be integrated into the status box in the chat context menu, but for now the command will work.

The Screenshot activity type is initiated by the commands “/social_screenshot <optional title here>” and “/social_screenshot_ui <optional title here>”.

The Blog activity type is initiated ‘/social_blog “Title” “Body”‘.

The Level Up activity type is initiated on natural level ups (meaning those from normal XP gains, not sidekicking). For Twitter and Facebook it will post items every 5 levels. For Raptr awards will be posted for every level.

The Perk activity type is initiated by completing a rank 3 or 4 perk (those worth more then 25 points).

The Item activity type is initiated by receiving a purple item.

The Supergroup activity type is initiated by creating, joining, or leaving a supergroup (including being kicked). The posted message with include the character and supergroup name.

Presumably this will, in fact, all fall into the UI much more cleanly soon, but … okay, it sounds like (I’m not sitting where I can play with it at the moment) you have (A) activities — blogging, perks, screenshots, items, SGs, leveling, status changes — and (B) services — Twitter, Facebook, and Raptr are mentioned. You can also (further in the thread) tune this to which toons get statused (though you have to control/restrict it for each toon).

I keep thinking there is the potential for some coolness here. There’s also the potential for some serious spewing of unwanted status onto these fora. Hmmm. 

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a separate Twitter channel for gaming stuff. That could then get auto-updates from this Blog and consolidated Tweets from what (very limited) CO Twitter output I would do (I can imagine doing the Levels, and maybe the Perks — mostly as a journaling exercise — though being able to link to Screenshots would be kind of cool!). I will have to ponder that.

 

Some Blog of Heroes updates

I’ve done some tidying up of BoH. 

  • Where applicable, I’ve noted sidebar stuff that is for CoX vs CO. 
  • I’ve updated the linklist to show both CoX and CO resources.
  • I’ve updated the About page to include some disclaimers.
  • I’ve now added a “City of Heroes” category. Previously CoX was the “default” context for posting here, with LotRO and CO getting their own categories. With the number of CO posts going way up, it made sense to add a CoX category. I am not going back and post-cateogorizing all of the past CoX posts — just working form today (more or less) onward.

Anything else folks can think of that would make this a better place to visit?

Off to the Fortress of Solitude

Between Vacation, then Stuff, now more Vacation, I fear I’ve not been posting much here.

Which, since I’m headed off to Vacation some more, isn’t going to change soon.

But I’ve been doing a bit of CoX play, actually got onto a high-level PUG that wasn’t doing AE farming (or even AE), and enjoyed myself immensely, despite that godawful lag.

Need to play more …

Going AFK

We’re off tomorrow to a different city where people cluster around costumed characters all day (Walt Disney World), so barring Positron showing up on my doorstep tonight or something of that nature, this blog will likely be going quiet for a week. 

Be heroic! (Or, if you swing that way, villainous!) We’ll see you when we get back.

Change of Blog, Part 2

Okay, I’ve done the conversion to WordPress, and everything seems to be working pretty decently. There are still a few things I need to tweak — this template has a very odd interactions with simple low-level CSS and HTML formatting commands, for one thing. For another, I want to finish stripping away the “.html” suffixes, but haven’t quite figured out how.

But, at any rate, it’s in place, and I can tweak things as I go.

Any feedback?

Change of Blog

I’m in the process tonight (possibly spilling over to tomorrow) of changing this blog to WordPress from Movable Type. It’s something I’ve done with my other higher-traffic blogs, and it was BoH’s turn to take the plunge.

Thought the front page for this blog (http://www.hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/) will stay the same, the native RSS feed will be changing to https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/wp/feed/. If you subscribe via Feedburner (including the post-by-email option) that will remain the same.

You’ll know when the change takes place when you go to the actual blog page and everything looks waaaaay different.

I’m posting this now so that folks getting the old feed will see it in their reader and not wonder why my blog’s never being updated (aside from my random gaps of updating of late).

Excelsior! 

Blog of Heroes news

I will likely be tackling converting this blog over from Movable Type to WordPress Real Soon Now. My MT installation is frelled, and while I can use an external client to post from (the ever-popular ecto/Linear), I can’t actually do much from inside the MT control panel, including adding our latest 50s to the sidebar, adding arcs we write to the sidebar, etc. Feh.

I don’t plan on doing anything fancy, and I’ll give people warning beforehand. Biggest challenge will be maintaining the rather elaborate web of internal links (which I feel obliged to do); I can make that work, but it will turn a half-day effort into a full day or more.

Well, if it were easy, everyone would do it, right?