Today is the day that the much anticipated Janthir Wilds expansion lands in Guild Wars 2, with the talk being primarily about the Homesteads, the account-wide player housing feature that is a cornerstone of this update.
Going to the The Janthir Wilds
Over on the Guild Wars 2 site this morning they had an prep announcement to get players ready and frame the plans for the expansion:
Happy release day! When Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds launches in just a few short hours, you’ll begin a bold adventure into a dangerous and untamed wilderness. The denizens of Tyria are determined to recover and build a new future, and cooperation with neighbors is crucial. Your mission: befriend the lowland kodan and uncover the mysteries of a land that was once home to the enigmatic mursaat and their White Mantle followers.
In Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds, you’ll embark on a story that unfolds across four major releases, starting with today’s launch and continuing with quarterly updates through the first half of 2025. Below is a high-level view of what’s going live today and our plans for what’s coming in the following three quarterly releases.
There’s a significant change to our map content plans that we’d like to bring to your attention. We had originally announced that the expansion would feature three open-world maps—two at launch, with a third released in a quarterly update that would then be expanded on in a subsequent quarterly release, like Inner Nayos. Rather than shipping the third map in two parts, we will instead be releasing a standalone map in both the second and third quarterly releases, each similar in size to Lake Doric. This brings the total open-world map count for Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds up from three to four.
As always, game development is full of surprises, so this roadmap comes with a general disclaimer that our release plans may change, despite our best efforts.
It isn’t just a launch today, but a commitment to a content update cadence over the next year.
There is also a launch trailer to go with today’s release.
I am sure the content will be appreciated by the core audience, but as an outsider I am a bit more interested in how the player housing implementation plays out.
I like player housing, but only when it is done well. I know there are some vocal proponents out there that are absolutists on the idea, that any player housing is better than none, but I feel if you aren’t going to do it well, integrate it into the game, and give it some sense of being in the context of the world, then you should spend development time elsewhere.
So I am very much a fan of EverQuest II housing, which was integrated into the game on day one, which has a myriad of style and decor options, and which has a trade skill profession dedicated to making furniture. Well done, 9/10 score, always do stuff with housing a guild halls when I go back and play.
Other attempts have not grabbed me. WoW’s garrisons were impersonal to the point of being hideaways, and were seemingly designed specifically to prove that housing takes people out of the world, which was the WoW team’s argument about housing up until then.
Likewise, LOTRO’s housing is very pretty, but detached from the world, inflexible, and shoved off into distant corners so that they have no sense of being a part of anything. I would have much preferred an instanced doorway in a lively town like Bree than the instanced neighborhoods of abandoned homes across the road from a marsh that was the state of things last I checked in.
So I am keen to hear how this new run at player housing works out.
Meanwhile, ArenaNet has other things planned to go with the launch.
August 20–August 26: Twitch Drops
August 26:Guild Wars 2 Anniversary Week
September 10–September17: Fractal Rush Bonus Event
September 17–September 24: Return to Path of Fire Bonus Event
September 24–October 1: WvW Rush Bonus Event
October 1–October 8: Living World Season 4 Bonus Event
October 15–November 5: Shadow of the Mad King Halloween Festival
It was announced at the Imperium fireside meeting this past Saturday that the coalition had taken 69 systems since the opening of the offensive against Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, and the assorted members and hangers on that make up their coalition. Sniggering about the obvious number aside, we have been busy.
These gains include systems beyond the Catch region, extending out to Tenerifis, Immensea, and Impass. So the sov influence map… you can see the latest one here or the full historical directory here… has changed.
Here is the pre-campaign state of the map.
Area of Operation – July 25, 2024
And here is where things stood on Sunday, August 18th.
Area of Operation – August 18, 2024
Our foes have been pushed back and you can see systems in Immensea lit and ready to be taken from Legion of xXDEATHXx. The enemy is mostly busy trying to reorganize their holdings further back to accommodate refugees and retreats from the front. The alliance they created, Goons Failed to Defend This System, which was put together to goad the Imperium into attacking, has been wiped off the map.
All of which is less a chest thumping declaration of triumph than a cold statement of fact. Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, and their gang has proven unwilling or unable to defend the space taken and has been sending messages out to its members and allies that they will just take all the space back once Goons get bored and go home.
In their narrative this has been a success in that they did, in fact, goad the Imperium into attacking. Their claim is that on their side the whole thing was just a couple of SIGs.
A little more substantial claim on the Imperium side is the structure kill count.
2 – Keepstars
21 – Fortizars
1 – Tatara
2 – Azbels
59 – Astrahuses
2 – Raitarus
22 – Athanors
23 – Metenox Moon Mining Drills
35 – Skyhooks
That list gives lie to the claim that this was just a couple of SIGs on their side. I mean, when I go out on operations with SIGs on the Imperium side we try to live out of an NPC station, or maybe a Raitaru or an Astrahus. We do not drop two Keepstars. Keepstars are a commitment, targets that attract hostiles and which, if you are not out in force, will be attacked.
Dropping a Keepstar means serious business. And two Keepstars on one grid… a potential clash of titans… I mean, unless one side just doesn’t show up.
There goes the neighborhood!
Then there was the great hell camp of Utopia.
After blowing up the two staging Fortizars in the system of Utopia in Curse, we were told that Fraternity, Horde, and their allies had moved all of their capital ships to one of the NPC stations in the system.
We dropped a Fortizar of our own in sight of the undock and setup a hell camp.
The camped station and our Fortizar
A hell camp is when you have your foes in a single location and you bubble them in and put up a guard fleet around the clock to catch them if they try to break out. Hell camps are a thing of legend, especially in Goonswarm, as they demonstrate the sometimes stupid lengths we will go to in order to best a foe. Hell camps can for run for days, weeks, or even months if the goal is clear and the foe well and truly trapped.
The hell camp of the battlefield after the clash at M2-XFE during World War Bee was a classic example. While likely a strategic mistake… to do the hell camp we had to let down the watch on the wall of Helm’s Deep, the protected industrial region we had held against overwhelming odds, and in doing so those three constellations were lost and all of our structures purged… it was tactically a very popular operation and did demoralize our foes for weeks.
The M2-XFE Keepstar grid and the hell camp
You could log in and sit around for an hour or two and suddenly some foe would get impatient or log in the wrong character and a titan or a super carrier or a fax would appear in the bubbles and a hoot would go up on coms and we’d dog pile on the unfortunate for another easy kill.
I got on a few such kills. We were all working from home during the pandemic, so I would just leave myself logged in and coms on a speaker so I could turn from my work laptop and join in if something came up. Good times.
The hell camp in Utopia though… that felt a bit weak to me. Unlike the M2-FXE hell camp, hell camping a station requires the hostiles to log in, see local, and still think they can undock. You aren’t going to get very many accidental kills and the whole thing is prone to station undock games and what not. I’ve been there and done that. I remember us bottling up the Southern Coalition at the station in 319-3D in Delve a dozen years back. As a tactic it has its place.
But this hell camp didn’t feel right to me. It wasn’t clear that the enemy was bottled up or that they cared if they were. They hadn’t bothered to show up for more than a couple of fights and their stated goal was to bore us to death, so why would they care if they couldn’t undock? They were not going to do so anyway.
The hell camp in Utopia
I nearly wrote a post about the hell camp, but my attention was elsewhere. I did go out and get a few screen shots of it and our Ferox Navy Issue fleet hanging out, ready to unleash their aimbot accurate railguns on anybody dumb enough to show up, but I didn’t join the camp.
Certainly Gobbins made hay about us and our hell camp. Apparently he openly and repeatedly pinged out on Discord to all who were listening that the Imperium were fools, that there was nothing there, that the capital ships had been withdrawn previously, and that they were gone, safely back in home space, out of reach of the Imperium and were not coming back.
The Imperium could go pound sand with their hell camp.
The Imperium took screen shots of those pings… we all have enough low level spies in each other’s organization that no general ping goes unread by all… and the coalition diplomats brought them to organizations in the area of operation who had previously declined to cooperate with us because they have assurance from Gobbins that Pandemic Horde would totally be there to help defend their space. This did not bolster confidence in PH and their promises and we now apparently have cooperation from groups who were previously willing to defy us based on the backing they assumed they had.
This was all part of the plan, or so we were told, so the hell camp served a purpose, if not exactly the expected one. And they probably got a few random kills in any case. If you wait long enough anywhere in null sec somebody will eventually blunder in and get caught.
Which brings us to the other part of Saturday’s announcement, which was that the Imperium is expanding its space. We have groups that want more space and we have a vested interest in preparing for however CCP’s plan to reinvigorate null sec with the Equinox expansion… launched back in June and expected to be a thing… maybe by November… turns out.
I previously wrote about how Equinox seemed to be the end of farms and fields, the old goal of being able to make any null sec system useful and able to support players, to the old pattern of some systems having value while others did not. This was surprisingly… to me at least, I am not used to getting the point of things without having them explained with small words… taken up by the Imperium and other null sec entities and became the wide versus tall argument.
Farms and fields was a “tall” view of null sec, where a large group could provide for itself in a constellation or two. The “wide” view of the world has only some systems providing enough value to fully upgrade so a large organization needs to grab more space to ensure it has the resources it needs to support its members.
So the Imperium is expanding as a hedge against that, getting the timers started on things because the sovereignty level take 60 days to get to five and you can’t do all possible upgrades until you get there.
We will likely be taking more than the 69 systems already acquired… and if Pandemic Horde and Fraternity want to take them back like they have said they are going to do, they might have to undock and put some effort into it.
Also, by the time this posts the Fortizar kill count will have gone up by at least one… assuming PH doesn’t come to defend it. But that has been a very safe assumption so far.
A new design post went up last week about Stars Reach seemingly tailored to the question being asked in the comments of past posts; Who is this game for? I know Bhagpuss has put that very response in more than one comment so far.
Stars Reach Continues
However, if you were expecting a simple answer, something like Smed saying H1Z1 was dedicated to Star Wars Galaxies players, you are going to be disappointed. SWG isn’t even mentioned, so as much as Bree at Massively OP has declared Stars Reach to be a remake of exactly that, that is not a specified goal.
Also, this is another philosophical post with a byline from Raph, so it is his sort of soft and/or more nuanced approach to these sorts of question.
But, I’ve been here for the philosophy so far, why not carry on. My own posts in the area so far:
So what are we looking at as far as answers go? Well, there is, in a big headline font, in all caps, the following:
THIS IS A SANDBOX GAME
I tried to reproduce the color, in case that was important, but they’re using a different color palette on their site, so it may not be a 100% match.
I think we knew this, but in case there were any questions, there it is.
Sandbox tends to mean game play that is not based on linear advancement, that there is no “winning” state like hitting the level cap, maxing out all your skills, or defeating the final raid boss and getting that epic gear drop that completes the set. It is the journey and not the destination for Stars Reach, which has declared against anything like end-game raiding.
Which, as always, sounds great, but then I have been playing EVE Online for coming up on 18 years and the biggest problem there isn’t PvP or the cash shop or CCP messing up the economy through self-defeating attempts to make us play they way they want us to play or the difficulty of the UI or the lack of a decent map or the oft repeated, yet never substantiated tales of new players being ganked on their first undock.
No, the absolute, number one, no question about it problem is “So what do I do now?”
This is the problem, the reason you cannot have a pure sandbox game… because it wouldn’t even be a game. It would be Garry’s Mod which, while it can be fun, is hard to classify as a game. And it is an outlier in many way, the key one being its level of success. You are unlikely to be able to duplicate that.
Raph has directly said that there needs to be a game, something to give players some sense of purpose out of the gate. Likewise, EVE Online provides some sense of structure to help new players along, which are missions. Only, then people get stuck in the missions, advance through them, get to the point where they have a nice battleship that can face roll level 4 missions… and they’re done and they leave, never to return, having solo’d themself through a few months of game play and ended up finding the game boring.
New Player Trajectory – 2014 edition
I can attest to that track as I did that myself, along with a few of the other obvious paths forward, like mining, manufacturing, and market tycoon. They all end up feeling pretty empty once you achieve the level of success you were aiming for. And CCP has spent some time trying to address this problem, which the spoke about nearly a decade back, though they ended up fixated on the tutorial for way too long… the main problem crops up AFTER the tutorial people… but have made some progress. But it is still probably the #1 issue the game faces today, 21 years into its being.
in EVE Online the way out of that mission experience is to find a purpose beyond the mechanics of the game. I am invested in the soap opera of null sec empires. This has kept me playing for at least a decade and the roller coaster ride of it has pulled me back from a few points of thinking maybe it was time to move on.
But that, and the New Eden economy, rests on PvP and destruction and Raph is put combat on the optional list for Stars Reach. No PvP save for the esoteric economic competition sense of the term.
So Stars Reach wants to give you some things to do. No, wait, let me phrase that correctly.
SOME THINGS TO DO
Some things like, possibly:
THE ADVENTURER
Run across the geyser fields towards a crashed Old One ship, before the Cornucopia get there.
THE TRANSLATOR
Observe aliens speaking in strange glyphs; match them up, and crack the code of what they are saying.
THE EXPLORER
“Beep! Beep!” Audio signals help you find a soft spot in space to open a new wormhole.
THE FARMER
Plant red wheat under a violet sky; crossbreed strains to get a valuable healing variant.
THE MEDIC
One press of a button conjures a healing bubble around you as you call your party closer.
THE XENOBIOLOGIST
Sneak up on house-sized carnivorous bunnies and draw their blood; gotta sample ‘em all.
THE PILOT
Collect crystals fallen from shattered asteroids and drag them in bags behind your ship.
THE MINER
Tunnel underground – the map is fully destructible. When the gold is gone, it’s GONE.
I am once again put in the mind of No Man’s Sky, which has some of those jobs as part of your experience as the traveler.
The Playable Worlds team has LOTS of ideas… and has gotten a lot of positive response… or so they say. I suspect that much of that positive response, like much of the negative response, has been due to people overlaying their past experience on the vague philosophical underpinnings of the design that has been shared with us so far.
That is certainly the basis on which I have now spewed out half a dozen blog posts on the topic so far. We get presented with something new and immediately assess how it is similar to past experiences and process accordingly. Bree at MOP hears Raph talk about “sandbox” and believes we’re getting a new Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies. I hear about sandboxes or infinite worlds or cloud computing and I apply my own personal and professional experience to interpret what is meant.
The thing is, the post from Playable Worlds… doesn’t answer the question posed in the title in any way. The post is more about what they might do and they tap into some of the Nick Yee work from his Quantic Foundry research, literally borrowing a chart from it, to talk about all the things the possibly COULD do, but which they haven’t decided on yet.
The problem with every software project is that there are always many more things you could do than you actually have time, budget, or resources to implement.
So the actual message of the post is that they are on their way forward to test some of their theories. This past weekend the first group of play testers were allowed in to try some of the initial work.
Who the actual game is for has yet to be determined beyond a theoretical estimate. But they are trying to test their theories. I heard that they had 47 people online at once and found some issue including a client memory leak. However, these tests are very, very early in the process, so there is likely a long road ahead before the average schmoe like me gets a peek at what is going on.
I don’t think it will take until 2047. But I would be surprised if there was a “there” there for any general user before, say, 2027. That is just a little more than two years away.
In our house I am the master of channels. I am the one who unsubscribes from services we’re not watching, re-subscribes to services when there is something for us, and makes sure we don’t get signed up until a show we’re interested in has a full season available.
A mere four years ago we were at a point that felt almost like a renaissance of streaming content… we were all stuck inside and in need of something to do and streaming channels were there to deliver. And then we got a vaccine, decided the pandemic was over, and realized that maybe we didn’t need a subscription to 17 different streaming services.
Netflix
Meanwhile, all the players who got into the streaming service game, having been lulled by the seemingly effortless success of Netflix, found themselves in a bit of a bind as they found this was not a cheap and easy path to riches even as people began trimming back on their subscription count. This led to the need to raise prices, which drove even more people to dump their offering.
Still, the strong will prevail and, after some closures and a series of mergers… there are still probably too damn many channels. More than we can afford to subscribe to continuously, so this is where we are at.
After more of four years of peaks and valleys and industry strife, these are the channels we end up watching.
The Long Haul Keepers
These are the services which we remain subscribed to pretty much always. They have, on some level, a reason or a proven value to keep them around.
Netflix
This is the one service we subscribe to continuously and watch most regularly, and it is largely because they throw more content at us than any two or three other services combined. Sure, a lot of it is garbage, and most of it isn’t for us, but every Friday night they have a selection of content added to their service to choose from.
Add in that they drop a full season at a time so you can binge to your heart’s content and that they have probably one of the best apps by most measures, and you can see why I never bother to put Netflix on the bench.
Finally, their app works. It is fast, responsive, comprehensible, and doesn’t assume I can read the tiny title card from across the room. It also skips the “previously” section if I just watched the previous episode and lets me skip the beginning and end credits successfully.
That said, they just announced that they are cancelling my $12 a month plan and enrolling me in a $7 a month plan with ads. Netflix promises it will just be a couple of ads at the beginning of some programming, but we’ll have to see how it goes. The other alternative is $18 a month for no ads, and then we’re getting into the “you need to prove your value every month” zone of streaming services.
Amazon Prime Video
I think it is just called Prime Video honestly, but I always put “Amazon” in there to remind myself that this is part of our Amazon Prime subscription, which is something we keep even when we’re not watching any of their shows.
So, technically, it is the other service we subscribe to continuously, but if my annual Prime member ship was just for it, I would cancel it in a heartbeat. But I get other benefits from my Prime membership that make it worthwhile, so technically we subscribe to Prime Video.
The problem is that while they occasionally pull off something good… the recent Fallout series is a “prime” example… there otherwise isn’t a lot of new content there, and much of what is new isn’t very good. If you missed some straight-to-video bad science fiction film, Prime is apparently where they all end up.
It is also very much in the business of bait and switch, where they will get a series from another service like Starz or MGM+ and show you a season… or, in one case, the first season MINUS the final episode… the prompt you to subscribe to that service… through them, of course, so they get a cut… which does not make me happy. I have gone off and subscribed due to this at times, though I always go directly to that service, like Starz, and contract with them direction so Prime does not get a cut.
This is, in part, out of spite, but also because the Prime Video app isn’t great. It is not the worst, but it is at best mid-pack. It is slow, it can be hard to see, browsing for shows is not great, and it is really hit and miss about whether it will let you skip the “previously” or opening credits and just hates when you try to skip the end credits to start another show. This is likely, in part, to them just showing a lot of content from other services, which they put the minimal effort into adapting to their app.
Finally, despite paying for access to Prime, if I don’t want to get ads during shows, I have to pay extra. This, as you might expect, irks me and I will not pay their ransom. The only upside to this is that they don’t show ads on all content, though amusingly some content an ad comes up to tell you the video will be ad free thanks to a specific sponsor, for who an ad then plays.
TL:DR – Not great, but comes with a package I never cancel.
Apple TV+
Apple is in an interesting niche in that it is just cheap enough and the content is high enough quality that I don’t rush to cancel our subscription. There isn’t a lot of new content, and they are still wed to the “let’s stretch out people’s subscription time by showing one episode a week because maybe, this time, we’ll have the next Game of Thrones and everybody will need a full week to discuss the show” routine, which I find irksome.
Our house rule is we don’t start watching anything until it is six episodes in.
The app is also not the best. When you have something selected on scree it makes that item about 5% larger than it was when not selected, so I often have to move the selection a couple of times to see what has focus on screen. It is a pain in the ass to just go watch the next episode if you stopped at the start of the credits last time you watched a series. It wants to resume from exactly where you left off unless you fish around in the app to fine the page for the full series that has the episode list.
But the app does at least run pretty well for us. I will give it that.
And, like I said, there isn’t a ton of new content. It is the Anti-Netflix, which just throws a constant stream of new content at you. So we spend a lot more time watching Netflix because we’ll take a chance on an episode or two of something new or watch some potentially bad movie on a Friday night because the commitment feels low and there are many other options if we bail.
KQED Television
I almost forgot about this. I give public television a regular monthly payment which gives me access to their regular lineup of shows and whatever they import from the UK via Masterpiece Theater. We used to have half a dozen public television channels in the SF Bay area that each had their own varied content. They all got scooped up by KQED in San Francisco over the years. We almost never watch this these days, unless I want to go back and re-visit one of the Ken Burns documentaries, but technically we’re continuously subscribed. At least when you stream you are not interrupted by pledge drives every few months.
Xfinity Stream
Also, I should mention this because, due to the fact that Comcast is our only internet provider option and that they make sure that internet bundles are cheaper if you include cable TV, we still have cable TV at our house. But on the rare occasion when we want to watch it, we watch it using the app on our Roku Stick. And, live TV with ads… this is how animals watch TV, right? Just sitting there and being force to watch whatever is “on” at that very moment? How did we survive this?
The Frequent Recurring Subscriptions
These are the services that we are often subscribed to, but which get turned off now and then when we run out of content.
Disney+
I will echo what I have heard many other say, which is if I still had pre-teen children in the house, I would never unsubscribe from Disney+. It is also the one stop shop for all things Star Wars and the MCU and the entire 35 year life of The Simpsons.
But our daughter is now a college graduate and my nostalgia for the Disney catalog and the other properties they own isn’t all that strong. So we’re willing to unsub from this one when we’re done with whatever the latest Star Wars series is. And, because Disney+ is still locked into the “one episode a week” ploy to get people to string out their subscription for an extra month or two, we don’t subscribe until a season is set.
The app itself is pretty good. It does group up content well enough and is responsive and doesn’t crash on our Roku stick.
Hulu
Some very decent original content. Will subscribe when a new season of something is out. They do adhere to the “one episode a week” thing, so I wait until seasons are complete. They do also get Fox and FX stuff, and at one point I watched literally all of the available episodes of Bob’s Burgers while also watching all available episodes of Archer, both of which feature H. Jon Benjamin voicing the lead role, which was quite a trip.
The app is okay, though it isn’t well organized. They like to put the “continue watching” piece of the UI way down the main page and prefer to promote their new stuff, so you really have to bookmark the things you like and go to your personal page to get what you want out of the app.
Starz
One of the relics of the premium cable channel era, somewhere down the list from HBO and Showtime, its once niche with us is the period piece dramas like The White Queen, The Spanish Princess, and The Serpent Queen get us to subscribe for a while. They also feature a lot of movies, but everybody has a lot of movies and they are almost never the ones I am in the mood for at any given moment, so somehow that rarely works out.
Paramount+
We originally came here to watch Yellowstone then found that this is where all of the Star Trek content lives as well as having a cross programming agreement with Showtime, so there is kind of a lot here. However, we can get a bit burnt out on it as well. We’ll watch a few seasons of this or that then stop watching for a while, at which point I will turn off the subscription. But we do return.
AMC+
This is the channel for all things Walking Dead, which my wife is still into because of the soap opera-like drama. As I noted previously, after a season or two of zombies, people really became the main enemy, while zombies would only show up when the plot demanded. Decent channel, not too expensive, and AMC has quite a bit of original content. When something pops up we’ll subscribe for a while.
The At Need Only Channels
These are the services that we only subscribe to for very specific reasons, then cancel ones we’re done.
Max
You would think they would be better at this whole streaming things, having been in on that business since the HBO Go app, their first cut at streaming, launched back in 2010. Then again, the whole thing hasn’t been the same since the end of Game of Thrones.
The old HBO business model was to get people subscribed based on a few prestige series and maybe first access to films that had recently left the theaters, which worked well enough in the age of cable TV and the early days of streaming. Now films don’t see to be the draw they once were, there are a ton of competitors, and they haven’t quite hit another big winner.
I mean, they can get a show like Succession that gets a lot of awards, but I think Netflix puts out a show about once a month that gets as many or more viewers, and a hit on Netflix will get 5-10x the viewers.
And at one time we would stay subscribed to HBO for years at a stretch. Now, however, with the consolidation under the Max brand and the removal of back seasons of some shows, and other shows entirely, and their lack of anything really new and good… we went back last to watch season 4 of True Detective and it was okay, but I cancelled the service once we were done
Peacock
This was an okay service the first few times we have subscribed, and they did a credible job with the Olympics recently. I mean, I cannot blame them directly for NBC cutting away from the opening ceremonies to watch the US team standing around waiting to get on their boat. I know the French are… uniquely French I guess… but they’re still more interesting that Snoop Dogg trying to engage random strangers in conversation or Kelly Clarkson repeating “Oooh, look at that” over and over. And past that, if you wanted to watch very specific competitions, they let you. So maybe the most accessible Olympics when it came to video.
But beyond the Olympics it has been degrading as a service. They are going hard on ad revenue with a cheap subscription. The problem is that I am fully willing to buy the more expensive ad free option, but they now show you the version of the content that has been cut up for ad injection… without the ads. What this means is that every so often the show pauses for nearly a full second while the server apparently has to decided on the fly whether or not an ad gets played or not, then moves on when the result comes back negative.
That doesn’t sound bad, until you learn just how many ads Peacock thinks they should inject into 30 minutes of television. It quickly becomes annoying out of all proportion to the actual duration of the interruption. It isn’t completely unwatchable, but it just pulls me out of the show and makes my brain think, “Oh, here is another place where they would have put an add had I not given then an extra $8 for a month of service.”
Also, “ad free” did not apply to Olympic coverage, and I am still salty about that.
The Odd Outsiders
Services we have tried once and haven’t really felt the need to return to.
Acorn & Britbox
I am lumping these two together because they share the same problem, which is the US view of British television after having been raised on US public television cherry picking the very best and putting it on in front of us via Masterpiece Theater. We think everything produced in the UK is sophisticated and urbane, performed by actors who are veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with performances delivered in that very specific BBC news reader accent, written by over educated graduates of Cambridge and Oxford, which holds a mirror up to life while making historical and literary references that mean we have to keep Wikipedia to hand in order to keep up.
Some of us grew up on a diet of things like I, Claudius and House of Cards and Monty Python and it skewed our perception.
So a pair of channels filled to the brim with British television content seems like heaven.
The problem is that Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abby are not the prototypical British programming, the pinnacle to which the island strives; Benny Hill is. And even that is a huge cut above the average. There are a lot of simply unwatchable, predictable, crap shows on Acorn and Britbox.
Finding that for every Prime Suspect there are a dozen dreadful police procedurals out there, often hampered for US audiences with incomprehensible UK regional accents and slang, is enough to burst the myth of British television superiority. You’re just as bad as us at this TV thing and it is a miracle when you can build a season of television on even three hours of actual content. At least in the US when we crank out mediocre content, we get 8, 10, 16, even 22 episodes out the door.
I’ll go back to letting US public television cherry picking for me, thank you.
So yeah, we’ve been through both of these channels and found that the good stuff we’ve seen already elsewhere and the rest… is usually not the good stuff.
MGM+
We subscribed to this because of a Prime Video bait and switch with the show Monsieur Spade. They had some content worth watching, but not enough to keep us subscribed and, lacking another screw job from Amazon, there isn’t anything there we’re dying to watch. I think all the Bond films are available there… but I also have them all on DVD so I am excused from every having to watch them because there are just right there, I could watch them any time I want.
Tubi
Technically not a subscription service but a free ad supported venue, one of my nieces that works in Hollywood… I have two such nieces… was working as a producer here so we gave it a try. Oh man, ads suck, and injected ads suck at least 3x as much because if they don’t have enough ad buys, they will just show you the same damn ad two or three times back to back.
If the future is ad supported, they need to work on that. It is awful. Anyway, my niece has another job so I do not feel the need to engage with Tubi anymore.
Conclusions
We wished for a bright future of on demand entertainment where we could select and watch anything we wanted. But we wished on the monkey’s paw, and as the finger curled down, we were given a patchwork landscape of competing services, shifting content availability, and difficult UIs.
I think the biggest problem is just know what there is out there to watch. My least favorite thing these days is to sit down on the couch and have my wife ask, “So what should we watch?” This portends me using the remote to scroll through large sections of half a dozen services to find something that looks good.
This, btw, is why Netflix wins so often for us. They at least always have something new, something we’re willing to invest at least a bit of time into. And after about fifteen minutes of my wife vetoing this or that I’m ready to just put anything on so I can stop this futile quest for content.
Using the Roku for streaming helps, as it will search all channels and services for programming and find it. But you have to know what you are looking for. If you are doing the streaming equivalent of channel surfing on a Friday night there are just too many places to look.
I know we don’t want to go back to half a dozen channels where you watched what was on or nothing at all, but there was a simplicity to it and a limited scope where you could glance at the TV listings and just decide to read a book or go play a video game.
So what are you watching these days? Which channel scratches your itch? And is there any decent new science fiction shows out there? Is Orphan Black: Echoes any good? Might have to re-up AMC+ if it is.
I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then.
We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal. I meanJulia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I started blogging (though that was a blog on Salon, so perhaps not representative of the medium), as was that one about the life of being a waiter and a few others.
And while blogging being a more common practice makes it harder to be noticed and called out as special, it didn’t mean the medium was dead. And I wasn’t looking for a career move out of blogging in any case. As documented, I already managed that with a BBS back in the early 90s and by the time I started a blog I had a career and a position that paid better than any equivalent in video games… plus a family and a mortgage that would be difficult to sustain had I any talent in video game development.
So the medium was perhaps dead by the time I started in the sense of being an easy way to be discovered as a stepping stone to something else, though that was not entirely uncommon for some time after I started.
Still, it was a heady time. There were lots of blogs around no matter what topic you were delving into and more showed up every day. I jumped into the MMORPG sub-genre zone, the state of which was immortalized by Michael Zenke as he took the 2007 XKCD online communities graphic and made a little map of our corner of the blogosphere. Look at us.
The community of old
Some of those site persist. Heartless still posts and Raph still keeps his blog going. A few still stand, like Kill Ten Rats and Terra Nova, but get no updates. Others are around, but on different mediums. Lum, perhaps the ur MMO blogger, left behind the many iterations of Broken Toys and now has a substack or something like it… I don’t know, Substack had a nazi problem at one point and I don’t remember where he landed… while Damion Schubert of Zen of Design mostly trolls people on Twitter with bad opinions about Star Wars.
More though are just memories, shadows on the Internet Archive. Long was the reach of VirginWorlds and its podcast at one time, but now the site stands no more.
During that era being an MMO blogger of any quality and sufficient quantity could push you into the belief that you might actual be relevant that to the genre, that your opinions might matter. They didn’t, but community managers, always looking for some way to escape the inbred echo chamber that official forums tend to become, seemed keen to pay bloggers some attention now and then if only to break up the perpetual complaining of their site regulars.
Brent from VirginWorlds got a card
People could afford to be picky. You could take a stand, take a side, champion a cause or a very narrow point of view and get a following. I got kicked out of the EVE Blog Pack for not being sufficiently devoted to the topic. (Also, JFC there is a kind comment from Gevlon on the post at that link. That belongs in a museum!) Dedicated WoW bloggers would not talk to me because I wrote about other games. We argued with each other. SynCaine and I used to have at each other in what became known as the Friday Blog wars. I was nearly part of a holy war because I was insufficiently effusive about Warhammer Online, only to have most everybody dump the title and walk away a couple months later.
It was a happy and chaotic time and, not coincidentally, the peak era for Google Reader, the handy, easy to use, free RSS feed reader that Google killed in 2013 because they wanted everybody to use Google+ instead… and then Google+ was so flawed that they killed that too.
Sure, new venues show up. There were podcasts, and for a while podcasters were all the rage, taking the limelight from all but the most famous bloggers. And then there was Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to contend with, and even Tumblr seemed to be a thing… until Verizon bought that and screwed it up.
XKCD, again on the pulse of the internet, had a comic about that too!
But all of those got along pretty well. I appeared on quite a few podcasts, syndicated my blog feed to Facebook, made some YouTube videos, and even did things on Tumblr. I just got my 11 year badge on my Tumblr account in June.
Then came Twitch, and I kind of want to blame the demise of blogs on that. Certainly if we look at the annual page views for my blog for all the full years from 2007 to 2023, things start to go down hill not too long after Twitch becomes a thing in 2011.
Page view for TAGN by year
I mean look at that line. It feels like the body blow of Twitch and the demise of Google Reader conspired against me, to mix a metaphor.
And I am especially prickly about Twitch because it now dominates the attention of community managers, still keen to escape their self contained forum hell and whatever sub-reddits they are being assailed from. The peak of my ire remains the EVE Vegas 2018 where I gave a presentation about the EVE Online blogging community and the value of the written word in recording the vibrant history of the game… and they put my presentation up against the Stream Fleet broadcast, which meant about six people sat and tolerated my plea… honestly, I should have bought them all a cocktail for enduring me… while literally everybody else, all CCP team members included, went to the Twitch event.
My sole recorded contribution to the discourse is this meme.
Highlight of my Presentation
Okay, there were a few more people than that. But still, as a metaphor for the state of blogging in the eyes of the community team it was unparalleled in its poignancy.
And that is certainly one way to look at things. The written word out maneuvered by a bunch of shallow attention seekers like Asmongold, who probably couldn’t string together three coherent sentences about a day at the zoo without checking to see which animals were trending and should be featured in his latest tirade against the people who dumbed down zoos so that they are no fun anymore.
Or, you know… maybe it is my topic of choice.
I mean, if you look at the arc of my so-called popularity, it might very well describe the ascendancy of MMORPGs and their eventual fall from the top of the food chain.
I mean, WoW hasn’t been on fire since the run up to Cataclysm and has felt the pinch of declining subscribers since Warlords of Draenor, which is when the panic really set in down in Anaheim. Star Wars: The Old Republic was in some ways the last gasp attempt to get an old school subscription model expansions and so on MMORPG off the ground… and it had to go free to play.
If you go look at EVE Offline, the site that tracks the New Eden online user count and has done so for ages now, you will see that the peak of online concurrence was in May of 2013, when 65,303 accounts were logged into the game. That was before free to play, the peak of EVE Online’s paid popularity.
Maybe in my pursuit of the same topic over and over again for 18 years I have ended up in an internet backwater, no longer of interest to any sort of mainstream audience. Maybe it is merely MMO blogging that is dead.
Or maybe it is the written word, or the long form written word that has fallen out of favor… not that I would call what I do “long form” in a world where Stephen King exists. Magazines are dead, newspapers are dead, books are not dead but not as popular, and we like to get our daily doses of news and gossip in the short little squirts of social media.
Maybe it is the words… or the quantity of words? Maybe I would be more popular if I just kept to 140 or 280 or 500 or however many words are the limit of the modern attention span.
Should I eschew words and just do pictures? Take the ultimate path against the trend against reading?
No, that can’t be it. I literally have another blog that is just pictures and it isn’t even a tenth as popular as this, my bloviation platform. Though, then again, it is pictures from an MMO… a pretty, spaceship MMO, but an MMO all the same and those aren’t so popular any more as noted above.
Of course, the real question at the heart of this is not whether or not blogging is dead, but whether or not it matters.
I have said on a number of occasions that I would keep doing what I am doing, cranking out an excess of words on the trivial or obscure twists of fate and business in a niche sub-genre of the PC gaming market even if I had no readers.
I am not sure that is 100% true. Zero readers might be too much quiet. But I’ve kept going at the same pace… hell, an increased pace if words per post are any measure… even as readership has declined. For a brief peak period I could count on as many as 2,500 page views in a day on a regular basis. Now I’m happy if the number breaks 500, and I suspect that I would continue to cater to an audience that added up to just 100 page views a day, even if most of them were comment bots.
The writing isn’t the joy… the writing is work and I often stare at my drafts folder and say, “Nah, not ready to finish that one. That one is for another day… or maybe never.” Then suddenly something will come up and I will be inspired and I will crank out 500 or a thousand words in a quick burst of energy, a flurry of words and typos flooding the screen, and I will press the Publish button and off it will go, another post done.
And there is the pleasure, the having written. The ability to go back and filter through what happened a year ago, five years ago, and so on, the act of going back and reading something you wrote in a different era to see if or how your opinions have changed. Did I soften on this expansion or that release? Am I nostalgic for some title I panned? Maybe?
Sometimes I kind of want to go back and try Warhammer Online. Not enough to play the pirate server version of it, but I think about it sometimes. Was it really that bad? Did I miss something in it? Is the me of 2024 more or less likely to play something like that?
Probably less likely, in all honestly. My patience for the genre has constricted quite a bit.
And occasionally somebody else comes along and finds some old post of mine, some piece of history from the genre and gets a kick out of it or is reminded of some past venture. Just the other day Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium, was writing something up and said that he was happy to have found some written records of old Reavers operations somewhere on the web.
Preserving a small sliver of the player lore of New Eden is just part of the job.
And anyway, how can blogging be dead if all these people showed up for Blaugust? Look at them all! Here, in 2024, in an age where some people can’t string together three sentences on what they did over the weekend without injecting a meme or an emoji, 117 blogs made the list.
I mean, two of them are mine, and one of those is just pictures of internet spaceships, but still, that is quite a turn out for our little corner of the internet.
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