This blog currently runs on Hugo but I’ve taken to poking around with WordPress a bit since while Hugo does its job admirably for me and I don’t really mind the write post, commit to git, push to server workflow I have going on with it there are some things that do annoy me, namely the lack of comments, having to manually enter the time and date of a post and not being able to automatically publish in the future—now that last point, I am aware it would be possible through some sort of webhook but I’m just not interested in setting that up at the moment and it seems like something that would be somewhat janky and unexact.

WordPress of course isn’t perfect either, since it requires something other than pure static hosting and will probably require more optimization from a performance point of view but I think having comments—yes, I know about solutions like Disqus but I don’t want the comments being hosted by a third party in a way that I can’t easily export to other places—as well as some other neat things enabled by the site not being completely static such as pingbacks might be worth the extra hassle of figuring out the hosting. I also think the slightly more visual editing flow might not be all bad though I’m very used to the the Markdown based editing available in Hugo but there are times where having something visual is nice, for example when doing something I don’t do as often like adding an image to the post, it’s nice being able to just add it through a visual interface instead of poking around for the proper syntax or snippet to do that.

It would however also mean being a bit more diligent with my backups or potentially getting some sort of managed hosting solution which I don’t really want to throw the extra money on at the moment, since with my current git based workflow my posts are most of the time on at least three different computers: my desktop, my laptop as well as the git server. This means I’m fairly safe from most hardware failures as well as natural catastrophes since the data is stored in a very distributed fashion, but if I start hosting WordPress which I would probably host myself the posts would as a rule only reside on a single central server—sure, they might be cached by a CDN for a short time but that’s not really a backup solution.

There is also a not insignificant amount of extra “junk” that WordPress adds to the site, in the form of some JavaScript for emojis as well as some CSS to support them and since that’s somthing I don’t really need it annoys me a bit to have it there.

Lastly, there is also the matter of getting my posts ported over to WordPress from Hugo. Importers in the other direction are easy enough to find, since static site generators are all the rage around techier bloggers these days but something that would cleanly import a Hugo blog into WordPress doesn’t seem to exist. It seems the best solution for me since I don’t have that many posts—only around 70—is to import them through the RSS importer and this has worked fairly well after I modified it a bit, there was only a single post I needed to manually fix. However, this isn’t a perfect solution since the internal links in my posts seem to be static which means if I end up changing domains which I’m considering going through those links would lead to a redirect. I’m also in general not a huge fan of internal links being static references instead of relative ones, since that means changes to the domain means a lot of editing of posts which is unecessary. Though thinking about it, I think I could probably fix that with some SQL, even now after the posts have been imported, hmm… Or maybe I’ll just modify the importer again and reimport, might be the easier solution. Or possibly the extra redirect doesn’t matter that much since I want to keep the old domain redirecting anyway in order to not contribute to link rot.

Whatever the case, there is still a decent amount of work that needs to be done if I want to go through with this change—which I think I still do even after all the many negatives and seemingly few positives pointed out here. While I have adapted the theme I use in Hugo for WordPress I still haven’t added some of the extra features I want to make use of like comments so that’s something that needs to happen. I guess there’s nothing else to do now than to get working on that.

This reset we ended up taking a poke at the Restless Cabal on mythic again, since apparently there is some desire to kill the bosses in Crucible of Storms again even though the original plan was to only kill them once each—the changed plan seems to have to do with some nice tank trinkets among other things.

Now going back was really interesting, since while the encounter is somewhat simple on the surface, there were still a ton of details that we had collectively forgotten not having played the boss since our first kill probably a month or so ago. Small things like exact timings of abilities, when to use which cooldowns and who needs some extra attention when the explosions come and they have the stacking debuff, when to dispel the debuffs in order to keep everyone alive while optimising the amount of damage they can do. So there was a lot more detail to the fight than I even considered during progress that kind of just came naturally at the time but needed to be quickly relearned now in “farm”.

It was actually really fun to see how much complexity was actually in the fight that had been forgotten, especially since once we did have the boss down and the few trys before that it had all become so routine as to feel trivial. That actually meant that even though we “wasted” almost three ours of farm on killing just the one boss, I actually still had a decent amount of time that evening even though that ended up being all we did. It was just nice to have some change from Battle of Dazar’alor since while sure, we have been doing a lot more Crucible than Battle lately we have still farmed Battle a lot more.

Still, we are only killing Cabal this reset and extending next reset in order to rekill Uu’nat, probably because they don’t want to risk us not finishing Battle for Dazar’alor—even though we managed that today and we still had plenty of time over in addition to an extra raid day—as well as probably keeping with tradition of shorter raid weeks during farm so they don’t want us to spend all of our raid days in Crucible of Storms. It’ll be interesting to see Uu’nat again next week, it’ll be a shorter time difference from the first kill but it will still be a good three weeks or so in between since the plan seems to be to try to do him on Sunday instead of earlier in the reset.

On a separate note, with 8.2 being a Release Candidate on the PTR I’m curious to see how long it’ll be until the next content release, rumour has it Patch 8.2 will be dropping on the 26th of June and with there being a two week off-season it stands to reason that the raid will become available two weeks after the patch which would give us only three weeks of farm remaining before the raid. It also means that it is rather unlikely that the Hall of Fame will end up being filled on Alliance side, for Crucible that is. I’m curious to see how Blizzard will handle that, simply having less than 100 guilds in there since I’m assuming Cutting Edge is going away with the release of the new raid and so far that has been a prerequisite to earn the tile from participating in a Hall of Fame kill. It also would make little sense to be able to still earn the title with potentially much more gear available from the new raid so interesting to see where that goes.

If the Hall of Fame doesn’t end up being filled, that will both definitely show the poor state Alliance PVE is—outside of the MDI at least, but those are premade characters—as well as the brutal difficulty of this raid with so few guilds managing to get Cutting Edge. It’s strange really, personally the fights don’t seem that difficult anymore but to be fair we had a pretty decent learning curve on them with over 300 wipes on each boss so maybe a lot of guilds just don’t have the time to do that because they might still be progressing in Battle of Dazar’alor? It’s a strange circumstance, but kind of cool to see some more limited content again even though it does unfortunately mean that fewer people can participate. I’m looking forward to seeing the final numbers on all of that, could it even end up being the raid with the fewest Cutting Edge guilds so far?

AP, Artifact Power in Legion and Azerite Power were the new “infinite progression” mechanics introduced by Blizzard in order to keep different types of content rewarding for max level players. Now this worked very well in Legion—for me at least—since it was the first expansion in a long while that I played all the way through. Simply always having something available to strive for was a nice change of pace since it meant there was always a reason to log in—this was especially powerful in combination with mythic+ since this enabled me to do fun and engaging content while still working towards that goal of the next artifact level.

Unfortunately, somewhere halfway through Legion this system changed for the worse and remains in this incarnation—though I would argue even worse—with Battle for Azeroth. The big change that came was a significant reduction in artifact power received through completing mythic+, now because the reward had always been rather low in raids but this meant that the most sensible way to gain artifact power became world quests meaning there was no interesting way of gaining it anymore. This made the whole system feel a lot more grindy since I don’t find world quests particularily enjoyable yet I like raiding and mythic+ a lot and now I was being pushed to participate in content I did not enjoy.

In Battle for Azeroth this same system remained of low reward through interesting content and high reward through trivial content continuing through world quests and with the addition of Island Expeditions. Now on the surface island expeditions sound like a cool idea: explore a new island and collect the azerite there, the problem comes with the implementation. Firstly, it’s a lot less about exploration since you are competing against another team even in the PvE mode where you compete against NPCs that behave slightly more in a “PvP” way but without much of the strategy of real players—you also don’t get to use your PvP talents and some abilities work very differently from actual players—but these end up being more of an annoyance than anything else.

Secondly, the content ends up just being so trivial as to be uninteresting: the opposing faction poses no real threat and neither do the normal mobs and they can’t really, since this is content that is supposed to be doable with any setup including three healers or three damage dealers severely restricting the possibility of Blizzard balancing it into something interesting. Now in the end, this is probably the better outcome since for me personally I don’t see how a more time consuming version of this content could be made interesting with the technology currently available as I’d rather just have it be over with quickly since it just feels like a grind.

Thirdly, the grind also feels much worse on alts in Battle for Azeroth than it did in Legion with the changes to how artifact/azerite knowledge work. This is the catch-up mechanic which makes it possible for alts as well as players joining the game later to achieve comparable levels of power to the players that have been playing throughout. The problem comes with how it was implemented, in Legion the amount of AP you gained from doing activities scaled up as artifact knowledge went up; in Battle for Azeroth the amount needed per level goes down until a floor of 1000 and that is still a rather decent amount of azerite power, something along the lines of three mythic islands or three to four world quests. Meanwhile in Legion, doing one world quest might have given you something like ten levels towards the end which means that alts not only have a more severe version of the problem of having to unlock traits for their new gear since they’ll probably be receving it faster than a main character that has been farming since the start it will also require comparably more effort than it would have in Legion.

Now, the other problem with azerite in Battle for Azeroth is the reason you farm it: the azerite gear. This system just doesn’t feel quite as rewarding as it was in Legion, partially because you keep unlocking the same traits and partially because at some point you just kind of have everything and the only reward is a couple more item levels on your neck—hardly anything to look forward to. The maximum level is even capped within reach and most players who can still be bothered to do the farm content are probably already at that cap—several in my guild are, I’m not because the content just doesn’t interest me.

This is getting changed with the upcoming patch as well as some buffs to the amount of azerite rewarded for some activities but I don’t actually see how it will really help the system since at the start there will only be three new ranks of real interest—the one major relic slot and the two minor ones of which the latter won’t be available—which means that most of the time while gaining a new azerite level you actually don’t get anything for it except for maybe a small boost to stamina—not really a system that motivates you to play. That along with the above mentioned problems of the relevant source of azerite just make the system feel a lot more annoying and a lot less rewarding than it was in Legion which has meant I try to avoid participating in it as much as possible which is somewhat unfortunate since I think I’m probably exactly the target audience of such a system: someone that prefers having something regular to do in order to keep me going.

It is also completely possible that I simply burned out on the system back in Legion when the gains from mythic+ were nerfed and Battle for Azeroth never really had a chance, but even then the whole system has been something I’d rather be avoiding from mostly day one which is not a good sign for such a major feature of the expansion. I’m hoping 8.2 will bring some improvements that actually make me care again but I guess time will tell.

So apparently MMO-Champion is being sold off by Curse and getting bought up by Magic Find.

Now it seems that one of the investors is the original creator of MMO-Champion:

I won’t be involved in the website, but for full disclosure I am an investor in Magic Find, and the team includes people who have worked on MMO-Champion since 2007.

I’m extremely grateful that Fandom helped us preserve the community and I’m sure the team will have more updates soon — Bouboille

which does make it seem that this will be a good change. I personally wasn’t a huge fan of Curse gobbling up so many gaming properties especially since some of their sites like WoWDB are just poorly functioning alternatives of better sites—Wowhead in this case. To be fair, competition is good and I was actually hoping that WoWDB would be good since Wowhead has some nasty history with the ads they serve, some of them being particularily loud or obnoxious—now on the other hand apparently the same can be said for MMO-Champion so maybe gaming sites just can’t afford to be too stringent about the ads they serve. But for me at least, when that competition can’t even manage proper responsive design and more importantly localisation of the different item it becomes kind of useless—I actually wanted to try to use WoWDB as my primary information source once but that attempt was instantly stopped by me having the game client in German and WoWDB only supporting English which was really unfortunate. I would still have probably missed the years of comments on Wowhead at some point but the faster loading speed of WoWDB would have probably kept me using it over Wowhead if it had remained an option.

Still, I hope MMO-Champion remains a relevant resource for World of Warcraft news since while Wowhead does provide similar content and even at times better and faster, the signal to noise ratio of MMO-Champion posts is much better. I have watched both feeds and Wowhead often includes to me irrelevant content like some contest or different announcements about the site; meanwhile the only non-relevant content I get regularily from MMO-Champion is the weekly summary of active world bosses and the weekly event quest—I generally don’t have a need for this content so which boss is up doesn’t really matter to me. Another reason I prefer MMO-Champion is simply the nostalgia I think, it’s the website I’m used to going to when I need to know what’s going up with World of Warcraft since it was pretty much the best alternative back in the day, sure things like WoW Insider existed but from memory they had the same problem as Wowhead has now: too much non-news content. It’s really nice being able to have an actual notification for new articles on MMO-Champion and be reasonably sure that it’s something of interest, like changes on the PTR or announcements of new features or interviews of Blizzard staff.

Now thinking back, I did also enjoy WoW Insider content—especially some of the columns there—and I haven’t looked at the successor Blizzard Watch in a while. Sure the focus is broader these days but I believe it is still possible to filter the content by game which would allow me to just view the World of Warcraft content, that might be something I want to start doing more regularily again. They even have a podcast I remember enjoying for a bit, so I guess there is a decent bit of content for me to catch up on.

In the end, I guess there’s nothing really to be worried about since I haven’t noticed any decrease in quality during the previous acquisitions and maintaining a pure news site is pretty simple as long as you can get the news out there quickly enough.

Sooo. Have had a couple of coop play sessions of Borderlands 2 this weekend and it has been a decently fun time so far. We decided to play the game since the Handsome Collection is currently available for only 6€ until the 17th of June I believe and includes a bunch of DLC and the game had interested us all from before already so it was kind of a good opportunity for it. Now I have been playing Gaige the Mechromancer which is one of the DLC character. She is actually a pretty cool character that as a special ability to summon a robot called Deathtrap that seems to be very efficient at meleeing enemies down and I recently got him the extra ability to fully restore the shields of an ally—this has proved rather useful in helping the party keep alive in sticky situations.

Now the game is a shooter looter or shlooter which means shoot down lots of enemies with a few bosses at times and loot new cool guns and equipment however here the game it feels has a couple of problems. The shooting—so far at least and to be fair we aren’t that far in—isn’t that great since it is so innaccurate though some of the guns feel kind of cool. This is made worse by my biggest peeves with this game: limited ammunition and somewhat bullet-spongy enemies at least in four player coop—the enemies health scales with amount of players I believe. There just isn’t enough ammunition in the game for all four players so you end up having to buy more at the kiosks selling it but simultaneously some weapons are designed around low damage high fire rate making these weapons make zero sense in a coop situation since you won’t have enough ammunition to kill anything with them—you could probably empty all of your ammunition into a single of the normal tougher enemies.

The low ammunition of course is made worse by the bullet-spongy enemies, since it can be very difficult to kill one of the “badasses” alone and when three or four of them spawn at a time your whole time might need to be a bit clever with their ammo in order to actually be able to kill all of them. This got especially bad at a spot in the game where waves of enemies spawned including a couple of the tougher enemies where pretty much all of us were running low on ammunition I think.

Now, different weapon types use different ammunition and you can carry several weapons so it is plausible that the idea is that you should be switching weapons as needed—and the game even encourages this through elemental effects on the weapons which cause them to deal extra damage to different types of enemies—but this also doesn’t really feel it makes sense to the core mechanic of the game which is looting cool weapons which you then aren’t supposed to use if you need to switch away from them. I actually very much like both accurate high damage weapons like snipers as well as more spray-and-pray weapons like miniguns but find myself steering away from the latter since I know I won’t have the ammunition to sustain their usage. I can understand ammunition in something like a survival game where resource management is a core part of the game but here it just feels like it doesn’t really fit that well—at the same time games like Diablo 3 have something similar simply through having to manage health and potions so maybe it is something that is part of the genre since they are both games centered around loot but I just feel having to bother with ammunition and not being able to use the cool weapon you like because you’re out of ammunition detracts more than it adds from this game.

Other than that though, as said Gaige feels pretty awesome to play with her robot buddy, we’re still pretty early in I think so we don’t have that exciting guns yet but I already have a couple that are pretty fun to use and the fights seem to be pretty dangerous or at least we pretty often have knockdowns with the occasional complete deaths sending you back to a save point. Even the shooting, I think the lack of ammunition is coloring my feelings of it a bit, since the guns in themself feel pretty cool but it’s just frustrating not to be able to hit anything except for close range when that’s really dangerous and you are heavily limited by ammunition and not being able to use the weapons I would more like to use because I no longer have ammunition for them—even the bullet-sponginess would be more forgivable in that case since I understand it’s one of the simpler ways to add some difficulty but when you feel you use a limited resource to no effect it just ends in frustration.

Despite all that, I have been enjoying the game and am looking forward to the next play session which I expect will be on Monday since all of us seem to like the game. Now here’s hoping the third installment coming later this year will fix some of these problems, maybe we’ll have a new fun game to play once we’re done with this one.