So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all.  But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway.  Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site.  After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded.  I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought!  This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention.  I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline.  All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it.  Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture.  I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise.  Those questions are:

• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again!  There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how?  That is very nebulous.  I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up.  Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie.  Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing?  I don’t know why.  It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can before to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to run dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons.  It has the classic hallmarks.  The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all.

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds.  One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one.  Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand.  Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended.  But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order.  That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet.  Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that.  It was no big deal in the end.  What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders.  Everything had to be done at the local level.  Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules?  Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem.  First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need?  Too little and then Usenet is your destination.  But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every mont, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet.  Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players.  Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations?  They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad.  I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together.  He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash.  He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes.  We used to call him the garbage nazi.  That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t.  They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything.  I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone.  Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends.  Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online.  I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching.  But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Related:

• Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
• Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach

We’re back for another round of special servers for Lord of the Rings Online.

The Legend Returns

The team at Standing Stone has been very casual about building up excitement for the return of the legendary server idea.  Up until earlier this week it wasn’t something that warranted a spot on their main web site or the launcher.  They have felt content to mention it in YouTube videos that I would bet most of the LOTRO player base doesn’t even know exist.  And not even in a video dedicated to that, but one of the chat and update shows where they talk about a lot of things… and those mentions were not exactly informative feasts.

This feels like something they should be getting players hyped about and they have not done a very thorough job on that front.

Anyway, enough of that.  It is happening.

The original Legendary servers, Anor and Ithil, launched back in late 2018 with an eye towards recreating a bit of the original LOTRO experience, albeit mostly by tinkering with experience gains to set pacing closer to how it was back in 2007 and by gating content into the expansions. The game was still the modern version with added zones and class changes and content updates.  It was explicitly not a “classic” experience save for the pace.

That went pretty well.  Lots of people jumped in, including myself, and played through at least the original content.  As these things go, the further along the unlocks went the fewer the people willing to stick it out.  I didn’t make it out of the far end of Moria.

The second round of Legendary servers, Shadowfax and Treebeard, landed in mid-2021, with the gimmick being one was a fast leveling server and the other a slower pace.

This time around with the Angmar and Mordor servers, they are back with a new plan that involves battling the Nazgul and lesser minions of Sauron, which includes finding twelve lesser rings of power, which gives the whole thing the tag line “The Veil of the Nine.”

A new legendary appears

And that is about it.

There are some special aspects to the servers, aside from the fact that you will need to be a VIP subscriber in order to access them.

They are the first pair of 64-bit servers out of the box.  It will be interesting to hear if this alleviates the ongoing lag issue that has plagued the game for the last couple of years.

The Angmar server is located in the US while the Mordor server is located in the EU, though you can play on either one so long as you are a subscriber.

When the servers end their run the plan is for Angmar players to be transferred off to other servers while Mordor will stay as the EU 64-bit server.

Otherwise no monster play, no level boost, nothing that one would have if one were starting out fresh.  But all the current options, including skirmishes and landscape difficulty.  They even take a paragraph at the end of the announcement to be clear that this is not a “vanilla” or “classic” server experience.

There isn’t even any mention of the experience curve that I saw.  Is it the same as live, cut back for better pacing through the content, or accelerated because everybody is impatient?

I am in favor of this sort of thing, even if it isn’t a “classic” server… in fact, in the case of LOTRO, it is probably better that is isn’t a “classic” server.  Things were pretty rough back in 2007.

And, as I mentioned above, I was all in on the 2018 run through.  There are sections of the 1-50 experience that I can play over and over again… with the Lone Lands being a particular favorite.

Now I am less enthused.  As I have said too many times, the game isn’t really viable for me on my 34″ widescreen monitor.  It is a fine game at 1920×1080, but the UI gets pretty bad beyond that.  And I am not exactly feeling the call of Middle-earth at the moment.

Still, I wish those who are off on a new adventure the best of luck and hope the new servers… and the 64-bit aspect especially… are a great success.  There remains no equal out there when it comes to a digital recreation of Tolkien’s work.

Related:

• LOTRO – Two New VIP Legendary Worlds Have Arrived

The first day of Blaugust has arrived!  Welcome to the 11th annual running of the blogs!

Blaugust – 2024 Edition

I haven’t been very good about the build up to Blaugust this year.  Fortunately the event doesn’t rest in any way on my shoulders, and others, Belghast especially, have been out there spreading the word and getting things ready.

There are currently 75 or so blogs registered to participate in the event, but that doesn’t mean that you are left out.  It is a month long event and you can join at any time.

So how do you get involved?

Here is everything you need to know about Blaugust but were afraid to ask, in easy link form.

• Blaugust initial Announcement – All this info in a longer format
• Blaugust 2024 Eve – Last minute event updates
• Blaugust Sign-Up Page – Get yourself officially on the Blaugust list
• Blaugust Discord Server – Come hang out with fellow Blaugust participants
• Blaugust Mastodon Account – The official social media organ of Blaugust
• The Blaugust Prompt List – Post idea central
• Blaugchievements – Achievements you can claim during Blaugust
• Blaugust Media Kit page – Where to find the Blaugust logo in various sizes
• Blaugust Participants List – A Google sheet of who is in it to win it
• Blaugust OPML File – All the RSS feeds for participating blogs

What is in the event for you?

That is sort of up to you, really.  We do have a community that has been hanging around on Discord for a few years now, a community that persists between each annual event.

If you think it will boost your readership by 10,000%, perfect your SEO, and get you a job in publishing then you might be a bit let down.

If you want to rub elbows with other bloggers, see how they approach things, trade tips and recipes, and find yourself mildly perplexed as how several curmudgeons like myself with days jobs still crank out a thousand words a day… this is the place.  I’ll even let you in on my person secret:  Low standards.  Nearly 7,200 posts in to this it is quite clear I’ll push the “publish” button on just about anything.

If you need structure to help you write, you can find that.  There are prompts above and people will riff off of each other’s post ideas and the various weeks of the event each have their own theme.

• Welcome to Blaugust Week (August 1st – August 3rd) – The idea behind this week is to give a specific time to be actively talking about Blaugust and welcoming new members to the fold. This could also count as promoting Blaugust for the “Spreading the Madness” achievement. The hope is that drumming up some heavy activity of talking about the event might allow us to pick up a few more stragglers.
• Introduce Yourself Week (August 4th – August 10th) – The idea behind this week is to have some structured time around getting to know the other bloggers. I realize that those of us who are veteran bloggers might have already written half a dozen introduction posts by now, but it is a great time to share anything interesting you might have in your arsenal.
• Creator Appreciation Week (August 11th – August 17h) – Developer Appreciation Week or the D.A.W. was an event that took place in the blogging community independent from Blaugust but eventually died out. The more modern idea is to show appreciation for the things and creators that we love. This could be authors, musicians, developers, artists, or even other bloggers, with the focus being on sharing something that we love so that maybe others might appreciate it as well.
• Staying Motivated Week (August 18th – August 24th) – As we get towards the end of the event, the activity can often trail off a bit. The goal of this week is to share some of your own tips surrounding how you keep motivated and stay focused on creating content. If you are new to the event, you might share some of the things that have helped you stay engaged during Blaugust.
• Lessons Learned Week (August 25th – August 31st) – This week is a reminder that the goal of Blaugust is to refresh the content creators out there for the coming year, and not to burn them out in the process. Some folks are going to cross the finish line and immediately go dormant and others will want to process their thoughts about the proceedings. This space is reserved as a bit of a cooldown lap so that you can share your own experiences.

I am kind of bad at Blaugust, more because my ability to write about any particular idea is very much influenced by my mood.  So the prompts tend to be right out unless somebody tackles one in a way that inspires my own riff.  I do try to at least do one post on each of the weekly themes, often during the designated week.

I wrote in my previous post about the 2024 event, there are achievements and awards and shiny badges to be displayed when all is said and done, on the other side of things when we reach September.

We do have quite a few blogs here on day one.  Here are all the participants so far.  Please try to take a bit of time to visit as many as you can.

1. 2TonWaffle Community
2. A Boy and His Computer
3. A Hobbits Journey
4. AI MMORPG News
5. Alexs Review Corner
6. Alligators And Aneurysms
7. Alvans Digital Garden
8. Amerpie
9. And So It Goes…
10. AppAddict
11. Aywrens Nook
12. Beats and Skies
13. Beyond Tannhauser Gate
14. Bio Break
15. Chasing Dings
16. Contains Moderate Peril
17. Cotswold Diary
18. Cubic Creativity
19. Endgame Viable
20. EVE Online Pictures
21. Exposition is Inevitable
22. Flamingo Flix
23. Gaudete Theology
24. Geek on a Harley
25. Heartless Gamer
26. In An Age
27. Indiecator
28. Inconsistent Software
29. Inventory Full
30. Juha-Matti Santala
31. Just Text
32. KayTalksGames
33. Kellys World
34. Kluwes
35. Lameazoid
36. Linkage
37. Living Out Loud
38. Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
39. Martins Notebook
40. Monsterladys Diary
41. Mormoroi
42. Mutant Reviewers
43. Nathan Friend
44. Necoco loves stuff
45. Nerd Girl Thoughts
46. Nerdy Bookahs
47. Notes by JCProbably
48. OwlBlog
49. Peridotlines – A Place Where I Write
50. Ramble With(out) A Cause
51. Riels Nest
52. rscottjones.com
53. rsjon.es
54. Rumors Matrix
55. SamJC
56. Scopique
57. Select Star Studio
58. Shadowz Abstract Gaming
59. Sharon A. Hill: Strange Claims Adjuster
60. TAGN
61. Tales of the Aggronaut
62. Tart Darling
63. The Chip Bag
64. The Dragon Chronicle
65. The Everjournal
66. The Friendly Necromancer
67. The Last Chapter Gaming Blog
68. Time to Loot
69. Uncountable Thoughts
70. Unidentified Signal Source
71. Valentines Days
72. Vicissitudes
73. Wand3r
74. WAWAWA
75. Words Under My Name
76. Yordi

And off we go.  First post in.  Just 30 days left.

Other Blaugust first day posts to look at:

• Inventory Full – Good Grief! It’s Blaugust! Again!
• Chasing Dings! – Welcome to Blaugust, 2024!
• Monster Lady’s Diary – Welcome To Another Blaugust
• Time to Loot – Blaugust 2024 is Here!
• Words Under My Name – Blaugust2024 Day 1 – An Introduction
• The Friendly Necromancer – Welcome to Blaugust 2024! Life is crazy!
• Many Welps – Re-Introductions
• Indiecator – Blaugust 2024 is here!
• Living Out Loud – Blaugust Introduction
• Cubic Creativity – Blaugust 2024: The First Post of Blaugust
• Juha-Matti Santala – Blaugust 2024: Batteries included
• Nerdy Bookahs – Blaugust 2024: Here we come!
• Wa Wa Wa – Introduction, Because of Blaugust
• AI MMORPG News – Unleash Your Inner Blogger: Dive into Blaugust 2024!
• Shadowz Abstract Gaming – Welcome, Hello, Glad you’re here #Blaugust2024
• valentine’s days – welcome to blaugust 2024!
• StarShadow – #blaugust2024 Introduction ~ Day 1
• Aywren’s Nook! – Blaugust 2024: First Post of Blaugust
• The Dragon Chronicle – First Post of Blaugust 2024
• Kelly’s World – Motivation for posting more- Blaugust 2024
• Notes by JCProbably – Birthday Month with a side of Blaugust
• Heartless Gamer – First Post of Blaugust

The Site

I did my complaining about WordPress early this month, so I can move on to something more upbeat for this section.  I got at least a bit of recognition this month from CCP as they included the blog in the Community Beat post published on July 5th. (The title says “July 7” which just says to me an American wrote the title and screwed up the Euro date pattern.  Swift?  I blame all things on CCP Swift now.)

Woo hoo!  I guess I have to set aside my usual “CCP only cares about Twitch streamers and the rare site they let into the community program” gripe for a while.  I mean, it is still true, but I can’t gripe about it for a few weeks now.

Hey, they didn’t just link to this blog, they also took a moment to link out to my other blog, EVE Online Pictures.  So it was a twofer!  That site saw an immediate boost in view!

From zero to 30 in just an hour!

I mean, maybe that wasn’t a huge boost, but when the average is zero, anything is an improvement.  (It looked like one person showed up and used infinite scroll to look at pictures until they got bored and moved on.)

And what prompted them to notice my work?  Was it my ongoing writing about life in New Eden?  Was it my monthly look at destruction from the MER?  Was it my criticism of their economic policy and their plans for null sec?  Was it my years of CSM election coverage?  Was it my posts about the Alliance Tournament?  Was it all the historical posts about wars in null sec?  Was it because I was bitching again about the in-game map?

Nope!  It was due to me repeating the story Asher Elias told at the fireside a while back about Ser Fukalite’s ship spinning medal… a medal which I am pretty sure was handed out by the community team.

So the lesson here is clear enough that I can put it in meme form.

You know what to do

You can close the loop if you just write about what the people who write the community outreach post are up to.  Look for more of that for sure!

One Year Ago

We got the announcement that Blaugust would be returning for its 10th edition.  We had a decent list of signups in advance.

I did a run down of my gaming in the first six months of 2023.

EverQuest and EverQuest II got quiet summer producer’s letters.

Blizzard’s Q2 2023 financials were all about Diablo IV.

In Wrath Classic I was indulging in the Call of the Crusade update.  That is always good for faction rep… and for heirloom gear for alts to come to Northrend.

The group gave heroic Gundrak a try and we didn’t quite have it in us.  That got us doing Wintergrasp for welfare epics… when we were not having desync issues.

I thought about flying in Wrath of the Lich King, probably the last expansion where it wasn’t a controversy.

Blizz was warming up for WoW Classic Hardcore with the proposed rule set.

CCP announced that the EVE Online 20th Anniversary Edition box was ready to order… though the shipping was going to be so expensive they pledged to give is PLEX in compensation.  CCP also gave us the roadmap to the CSM18 election.  I went over the June 2023 destruction from the MER.

In New Eden the drama of the Tranquility Trading Consortium kept on going with Vily changing his mind and declaring it would carry on, just as a PanFam-only business.

Pandemic Horde lost their irreplaceable Pochven Fortizar in Skarkon.

And I reviewed The Fountain War a decade after its end.

The Metaverse was still trying to be a thing, but even after pouring billions into Facebook Horizon Worlds, Zuck’s metaverse vision still lacked legs, both literally and metaphorically.

Twitter, which was still Twitter, was trying to limit the posting rate of non-subscribers.  Many thought for sure that would kill Twitter, yet it lived.  Only Twitter could kill Twitter I opined, and it couldn’t even manage that right.  At that point I had spent a month with Twitter alternatives and Facebook launched Instagram Threads.  I tried to sum up the different pretenders and the communities they were fostering.

And then Elon announced his master plan, to change the name of Twitter to X.  Jesus wept he is so dumb.

I did a brief wrap up of the 2023 Steam Summer Sale.

I was looking at old books on my shelf wondering what to do with them… besides read them again.

And I started off on my Telephony Tales series of posts.  That started with my misspent youth and calling payphones at the mall and yelling past the Popcorn Lady.

Five Years Ago

There was a Steam Summer Sale to write about, with its odd contest.

Daybreak was fiddling around and registering studio names with the USPTO.

Pokemon Go hit its third birthday. StarCraft got cartooned.

And it looked like Blizz was going to give people a mount every six months so long as they subscribed to the six month renewal plan.

CCP, after saying they would change the 1 million skill point starter pack, just kept on selling it so long as there was sufficient demand.  But at least it was limited to one per account.

Out in null sec space, it was all about the Drifters as the month opened up.  They changed up a bit, but the war we had in progress was already ruined.  We tallied up the damage and headed home.  We had chased PanFam out of Tribute and Vale of the Silent.

But the Drifters were just the start of what would be dubbed the Chaos Era.  CCP announced that local would soon be blacked out in null sec.  We got warnings it was coming.  And then it hit and CCP said it would remain in place indefinitely. (Which some people took to mean permanently.)  The idea came from Hilmar, though many people were going on about null sec being risk averse.

The big VNI nerf hit in there as well.  And a tax increase!  Good thing devs don’t need to run for re-election.

Meanwhile, CCP was trying to keep people in the game during the blackout with skill point handouts.  So many skill points.  And they had to clarify what they meant even.  But the online player count suffered all the same.

And I was on CCP about maybe building their own killboard or at least making SKINs for all the things.

Still, I did get some play time in New Eden.  We did a Triglavian roam with DBRB.  I went on a blackout roam. I moved a dreadnought around to a new deployment on my own, then lost it.  It was a suicide dread.

I tried out DOTA Underlords.

I had been fiddling around with tracking my game play time for six months.

And, finally, we were getting ready for Blaugust once again.

Ten Years Ago

There was a site put up by eBay about game return on investment.  Unsurprisingly, it indicated that used games are a deal in that regard, so you should go buy some on eBay.

There was the passing of yet another Steam Summer Sale.

SOE forgot to pay their domain name registration.  Wasn’t that fun!  Meanwhile, Landmark was available for a deep discount after the Steam Summer Sale, leading to speculation about its future.

SuperData Research was listing out the Top Subscription MMOs while not defining what they really meant by the term.

Anarchy Online introduced a PLEX-like currency, GRACE.

The community manager for LOTRO was busy telling raiders and PvMP players that they weren’t getting any new content because they added up to less than 10% of the player population.

I finished up Pokemon Y on the 3DS.

In my attempt at the loremaster achievement in WoW I ran through Desolace, Feralas, and Thousand Needles one week, Felwood and Un’goro Crater the next.  Then it was Winterspring, Swamp of Sorrows, and the Blasted Lands, the Cape of Stranglethorn, and the final bit of the Eastern Kingdoms.  I was on a roll.

in EVE Online we were commuting to Delve, where maybe there was going to be a war, and chasing Brave Newbies around (then getting pipe bombed) when there wasn’t anything going on.  That was back when we owned Delve.  Fights went on sporadically for a while and many a Rupture was sacrificed simply try a fresh doctrine.  So many Ruptures.  Apocs did better.

Meanwhile the Crius expansion hit New Eden, making industry better… it did get better, right?

In EverQuest, on the Fippy Darkpaw Time Locked Progression server, the vote to unlock the Underfoot expansion failed, making it the second expansion ever to get voted down, the first being Gates of Discord nearly two years before.

With that I was wondering what other MMOs might go for the retro nostalgia server thing.  Not WoW, I was sure of that at the time.  Since then though…

I was also on about housing in MMOs, what has really worked for me and what has fallen flat and why.  This included some projection as to what garrisons might end up being in WoW.

Our epic game of Civilization V saw expansionism and direct conflict with the Aztec empire.

Fifteen Years Ago

I won a contest.  Granted, all I got was a T-shirt.  But that was probably more than you got.  And it was due to a video game.

Mythic announced a version of Warhammer Online for the Mac.  Not sure that helped anything at all.

I was, as usual, asking silly questions like why does Tetris gets faster.  Okay, it was an analogy, but it was still silly.

Oh, and then there was the horse.  Remember the $10 horse?  I did a poll about it and everything.  Boy, that seems like small potatoes these days.  I mean, that was a cash shop game selling a horse for $10.  Now WoW and EQ2 will sell you mounts that cost much more.

Gary Gannon announced that GAX Online was going to close in August, bringing to an end that experiment in gamer community building.

I asked what people considered cheating in an MMO.  It included another poll.  I was doing polls that July.

I did a parody of Tipa’s Daily Blog Roll feature.  That is some pretty rich stuff in hindsight.

In EVE Online I got another step closer to mining perfection.  I was also fiddling around with a fit for a Dominix.

In World of Warcraft the instance group hit Violet Hold and Gundrak, but couldn’t get the team together for Halls of Stone, so went back and did some Burning Crusade heroics just for kicks.

Then the instance group took a run at Onyxia.  The old school Onyxia.  She’s since been remade.

My daughter somehow got to Dalaran at level 16… without having the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

And even as we were doing all that, we were starting to mull over what we should do once we were level 80 with no new expansion in sight.  It only took us a year to try another game.  At about that time, my hunter alt hit level 80.

I also dredged up the old Alamo Teechs U 2 Play Druid post from the WoW forums.  Philosophical question:  Would Alamo have posted that if RealID had forced him to use his real name?

And, finally, my daughter was trying to get me to help her make WoW videos to post on YouTube.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Billy Mitchell got the first perfect score in Pac-Man, though his record has since been expunged due to accusations about cheating.

Forty Five Years Ago

The Sony Walkman was introduced and portable music has not been the same since.  A pair of classmates of mine had a father went to Japan on business regularly and who brought them each one of the brand new devices back from one of his trips.  Those were the first two I ever saw.  Blue and gray cases and headphones with bright orange foam padding for the ears.

Most Viewed Posts in July

1. Blackrock Caverns for Four
2. Return from Pokemon Go Fest 2024
3. I Sold a SKIN on the Paragon Hub!
4. Level 45 at Last in Pokemon Go
5. Stars Reach Appears on Steam and all the Default Social Media Outlets
6. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
7. Starting No Man’s Sky – My Ship is on Fire and I am Being Irradiated
8. June 2024 in Review
9. In Which We Bowl Over Blackrock Caverns
10. Averting a Black Ops Disaster
11. Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft
12. Tarisland – I Hate it Already

Search Terms of the Month

starcraft cartooned carbot deviant art
[Why Deviant Art?]

ttc-collective-agreement-2020
[I have some posts about that!]

gamer blogs
[pretty sure I’ve had my card revoked]

neg vs enad
[gen vs dane?]

zmud on windows 11?
[Haven’t gone there yet… maybe?]

Game Time by ManicTime

On the one hand, I did play a few more titles than usual this past month.

• EVE Online – 48.14%
• No Man’s Sky – 24.11%
• WoW Classic – 14.81%
• Valheim – 6.04%
• EverQuest – 4.01%
• Unnamed Beta – 1.50%
• Once Human – 1.31%
• Palia – 0.04%
• World of Warcraft – 0.04%

On the other, nearly 75% of that time was the first two titles, though No Man’s Sky was a surprise dark horse candidate.  But I cover that below.  It could have been a Once Human month.  I played that for an evening… and then was distracted elsewhere.  Meanwhile, I think I logged into WoW and Palia to claim a gift or a Twitch drop or something.  It was quick.

EVE Online

New Eden was at the top of the chart this month, thanks to several factors.  First, there was a new group formed in the Imperium to go out and pick fights in the middle of PanFam space, so that got me undocked.  Then there was the Keepstar bout in Catch.  That might turn into something next month, but in July it was mostly move ops.  I was recorded on 16 different fleets according to the participation dashboard, but at least 6 of those were just getting in to move ships from point A to point B.

A lot of my time in game was probably attributable to me logging in and doing the AIR daily goals for 12 days across seven characters, 5 Omega and 2 Alpha, to test that out.  Well, if the goal was to get entice me to log in more, op success.

EverQuest

Really, I am still subscribed, but all I am doing in the Overseer thing every day… and I have almost gotten all the achievements for that.  So I might be done here sooner rather than later.  My 25th anniversary spirit is waining.

No Man’s Sky

Kind of a surprise entry this month… or any month.  It came out in 2016, I played it for a short bit in 2017, and then haven’t really thought about it much since then, save for noting updates coming out every so often.  Then there was all the Stars Reach talk this past month, with pillars and being on Steam, and I started thinking about procedurally generated exploratory space games… and hey, here we are!  More to come on this too.

Once Human

I came very close to making Once Human a thing, mostly because I had picked it in our Game Critic Fantasy League, so I had a vested interest, and because I left Twitch tuned into Mind1 and he went and played it so I ended up with some Twitch Drops for it.  So I tried it for a bit.  It has its own interesting flavor.  But then all the Stars Reach stuff made me think about No Man’s Sky and I went there instead.

Pokemon Go

• Level: 46 (+1, level, 10% of the way to 47, 0 of 4 tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 838 (+8) caught, 847 (+7) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 16 of 18
• Pokemon I want: Two specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm and Sun
• Current buddy: Annihilape

Valheim

I think I finally hit the wall here in the Ashlands.  But that is fine.  We got some good times out of this third run at the game.  It is my most played title on Steam.  I can feel good about moving on.

WoW Classic

I am feeling kind of the way I did with Burning Crusade Classic, that I have started to prove that my negative feelings for Cataclysm back in the day were not wholly unwarranted.  And we have six more months to go on this.  Our group still has a dungeons to run.  But logging in to level up alts and that sort of thing… not really feeling it for that.

Coming Up

Blaugust.  Next month is Blaugust so you can expect a Blaugust kick off post tomorrow to celebrate the first day of the event, with a run down of participants, probably with a bit of history and some reasons to join in.  Or maybe not.  I don’t know.

Then I have to figure out how to fill out the month… which is one of those things that is always daunting on the first day, and then when I get to the last day I realize I have a half a dozen more unfinished drafts in the drafts folder and didn’t even start on some things I felt I should have.

There might be a war of sorts in EVE Online.  We’ll see if the other side shows up I suppose.

Other than that, nothing is going on in August… wait, I am being told that there might actually be a release or two in August.

Yes, we’re getting the Janthir Wilds expansion for Guild Wars 2, which will bring with it player housing.  A very big deal there.

I think we’re getting a big update in EverQuest 2.

Oh, and Visionary Realms is said to be doing a pre-alpha beta test of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen in anticipation of early access in December… I think I have that right.  But you won’t hear about it here as this event is has been reported to require that participants not share, communicate, or deliberately imply information about their pre-alpha experience or involvement.  Public information on their website, however, is fair game and we’ll get to the plan for early access, oh you can just bet.

And I suppose I would be remiss if I did not mention The War Within for WoW.  Big new expansion.  Kind of a thing here in the game’s 20th year.

So, you’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.

Record scratch, freeze frame, the usual trope…

I guess that situation, but also in the situation of owning this title at all.  Well, I am, even if you’re not.

I went back to check when I bought No Man’s Sky, just to get at least some sense of when I put in the 25 minutes of total play time I had before I downloaded it to try again last month.  I purchased the game in August of 2017 according to my purchase history, when it was on sale.

Honestly, my purchase history is practically fodder for a blog post on its own.  Several, really.  Let me put NMS into some purchase context.

Summer/Fall 2017 purchases

That is some history right there.  Three purchases for my daughter, one of which was returned because I suspect ARK didn’t run on her iMac.  That was before I built her a gaming PC.

RimWorld, which is my third most played title on Steam, with 311 hours, and the name in game pack, which I totally did not get because they rejected all my entries, Doom, Civ VI, and MiniMetro show up before NMS.  Those were all Summer Sale purchases… well, Doom seems too late for that, but figures in the post I have about the sale, so maybe?  The latter three have, in order, 91 minutes, 14.8 hours, and 8.4 hours played.  Not bad, really, in a world of so many purchased and unplayed titles.

On the far side, in the autumn, there is Medieval Engineers, Space Engineers, EVE Valkyrie, Grim Dawn, and Vietnam 65, which have 75 minutes, 78 minutes, 5.1 hours, 3.4 hours, and 18.1 hours played respectively.

Is this really my Steam catalog?  Do I actually play the games I buy?  I am as surprised as anybody by this revelation.

And in the middle of all of that was No Man’s Sky, with 25 minutes of play time.  I guess I had other things to play.  But it wasn’t the best of times for the game, as I previously covered, so I might be excused for giving it a miss.

I even found my save from my original run at the game… Steam cloud save for the win.  I might have to go back and see what happened back on August 24, 2017… though the game says that save needs to be updated.  We’ll see.

But here we are in 2024, the game is about to turn eight, and I am playing it again.  All I knew when I started was that I didn’t like it seven years ago, but a lot has changed.

Now, in starting off down this path, I had a plan.  I was going to go through the game slowly and write a series of fairly granular views of the game as it took me through various aspects of coming up to speed… and then I got into it, found myself a dozen hours in, and now I feel like Iago Montoya.

Really, there is too much

So let me sum up in a bit of an initial speed run to get at least to a baseline from which I can continue.  I plan to do this in chunks still, but somewhat less granular chunks.  Also, I promise this will be the last time I get into the history of the game, that having been over-covered here and in my previous post. (I can also promise I will, at some point, break that promise.  Also, I am from Crete and all Cretans are liars.)

Again, I don’t remember how the game started in 2017… I have searched my brain, but have found nothing to trigger any old memories… so maybe what I am seeing now was there then, though something

But here in 20204… where I will attempt to stay going forward… NMS starts off with the classic shipwreck, amnesia scenarios.  I will occasionally mock these over-used, but I also recognize you do have manifest a player into a game as a fully formed adult with no expectation of knowledge and no desire to over burden them with stuff, and there are only so many smooth ways to do that.

And, even having opted for a well worn trope, NMS does it pretty effectively.

You wake up, everything is broken, your ship is on fire, and you are being irradiated by a hostile atmosphere and are being told you need to do something.  There is a task list for you, an urgent task list if the tone is accepted… though I suspect you have as much time as you need… though I did not test that hypothesis.  I found myself caught up in the fire drill.

First you have to fix your multi-tool.  Then it comes up and tells you that your scanner is down.

The scanner is on the fritz captain

Not just down, but critically damage and there is a task that demands you repair it immediately by using the newly working multi-tool to mine some ferrite dust.  So off I went, first trying to mining laser attachment on the nearest thing.

Dude, this doesn’t say ferrite, now does it?

Then, after looking around a bit, I found something that would actually yield ferrite.

What a strange looking mineral

With that I was able to gather enough ferrite dust to fix the scanner.

Fixing the scanner was critical as my environmental protection was blinking at me about being low on this radioactive planetary surface.  You need the scanner to find things that will yield sodium, that being what the fuels the protective layer of your suit.  So I scanned and went chasing after sodium, then went about trying to harvest some.

Misunderstanding the lesson

The joke in that image is that you just need to pick the plant by holding down the E key.  The mining laser is not needed nor will it actually do anything in this situation.  I was learning.

And I wasn’t just learning about what to mine and what to pluck from the ground.  I was learning about the UI and control scheme.

As noted previously, NMS is a cross-platform title.

Available on a platform near you

This means that its UI is setup to accommodate both PC mouse and keyboard as well as a controller.  This means some compromises, such as a layered menu system that can feel a bit inflexible if you’re used to PC responsiveness.

Still, I will grant that they have done a good job with the compromise, on par with Forza Horizon… which means I still get lost and you have to remember that a tab of options even exist because they don’t just hang it somewhere on a bar on the UI the way one might with a PC.

The most immediate thing I had to get used to was the need to hold down a key on selections, such as the E in the sodium harvesting image, rather than just hitting the key and getting an immediate response.  The comic side effect of this is that when I swap over to something like EVE Online I find myself clicking and holding on options that do not require that level of effort.

Anyway, I found my sodium and then was guided how to recharge my suit so it would stop telling me about my impending demise.

Just get the sodium in the right slot

That sorted, it was back to the burning ship and getting that repaired, which involved me learning about how to craft things from my suit and apply them to my ship.

The ship parts list

That also required me to find a hermetic seal, something that I could not craft.  That sent me off to a marker, a bit of exploration, to some buildings where I might find the missing part.  Moving around on the surface.

Just some buildings

That red diamond with the somewhat inverted tuning fork… or whatever it is… is the universal important quest marker telling you where to go… which, at the moment was sending me into some buildings.

I found my hermetic seal.  I also found that buildings are good.  Inside of a building my environmental protections stop nagging me and even recharge.  Buildings made me happy at that point.  Eventually though, I had to leave the building and head into the radioactive landscape and back to my ship.

The game brought me through a few other tasks, like the deployment and use of a portable refiner, which can convert raw elements I harvest into more usable forms.

Portable refiner

The final thing to fix was analysis visor

Analyze this

This is a critical bit of your kit as it allows you to find key minerals and things you can salvage on the landscape as well as being able to scan and record new things you run into, for which you receive a bounty.  Cash money for finding stuff is good.

That done, the ship refueled, the game then pushes you to get off of the radioactive hell hole it started you on and into space.  Wheee!

My ship lives, I am flying in space

And then it sends you to another planet… see the quest marker… when I found I had given up radioactivity for extreme heat.  I am not sure which hurts market value more.

Here on Yardo the temps are a bit high

Goodbye Jovi, hello Yardo.  The temps are not too bad if you stay inside.  The fact that there are firestorms that pop up now and again is a bit of a drawback.

So I made it out of the initial “let’s get you going” tutorial and onto another planet.  So far, so good.

Though I will say, for a game with the title No Man’s Sky, there are, in fact, a lot of things flying past in the sky.  Like all the time.

More like Crowded Sky

That isn’t bad, though I keep looking over my shoulder when I hear something flying overhead.

Anyway, I am getting stuck into NMS.