Pictures Or It Didn't happen

This is going to be a different post to the one I planned and a much shorter one, too. That's not so much of a problem from my point of view because I have something else I'd rather be doing anyway and the post I was planning was going to require a certain amount of research, by which I mean googling some stuff then cutting and pasting some links and screenshots, which if we're honest pretty much sums up most "research" these days and I'm not just talking about mine...

So, that was a snippy introductory paragraph. Possibly because I'm feeling a bit snippy, thanks to Windows 10 or my PC, one or the other, assuming it wasn't the pair of them, getting together to prank me, which I certainly wouldn't rule out. What happened was that I took a bunch of screenshots of various things I was thinking of writing about, all of which would have made up the infrastructure for two somewhat unrelated posts, one of which I may still get around to one day and the other of which I probably won't.

The first post was going to be a list of all the standalone game launchers I use - Daybreak, Amazon, GOG, Epic, NCSoft, Steam and a bunch of others - comparing them and commenting on which I like, what they do right or wrong and so on. I thought that might be interesting but obviously it would take some effort so I wasn't going to do it today when, as I said, I have other things to be getting on with.

I was nudged towards the idea by two things: firstly, the ongoing awfulness of Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online launcher, which is so bad I can't even bring myself to stick with it long enough to get into the game to see if I can move my characters over to the new 64-bit servers. There was that moment when it looked as if the "One Launcher" might fix things, until that turned out to be just as bad if not worse. Did that ever improve? I gave up on it almost immediately so I have no idea.

Secondly, there was Kuro's launcher for Wuthering Waves, which I discovered, when I went to log in this morning, has just been upgraded or updated or replaced or something. I could be be a bit more specific if I had those screenshots because a couple of them were of the announcements explaining it. Unfortunately, wherever they went, if they went anywhere at all, I can't find them. They should always go in the default Windows Picture folder but not today they didn't, none of them. I took about a dozen. 

After I found they weren't there, I took a few more to test what might have happened. For some reason, although a screenshot of the desktop still saves as normal, a shot of the desktop with the Wuthering Waves launcher open doesn't. It does go into the clipboard but it just sits there and then gets overwritten by the next one.

At this point you may be thinking "But Bhagpuss, the Windows clipboard saves the last twenty-five entries. If you only took a dozen shots, why can't you get them all from the history?" and that would be a perfectly good question, to which my answer would be "Because I had the history turned off, that's why!" 

I have it turned on now but horses and stable doors and all that. In my defense, I had no idea there even was such a thing as a clipboard history until today but ignorance is no defense, as any competent brief will tell you.

So, that was one post I could have written today but now I'm not going to, although if I'm going to be realistic, I probably wouldn't have anyway. Too much work. I'll add it to that ideas folder I haven't got. Maybe I should start one.

The post I really quite likely would have written today because I was quite interested, not to say excited about it, arose from an in-game survey I took almost as soon as I logged into Wuthering Waves. Kuro are always doing player surveys, asking how us how we like certain aspects of the game and what other things we'd like to see added or changed and so on. They hand out in-game currency and other rewards for filling them in although I would happily complete them for free because I like filling out questionnaires and always have done.

This one was interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it specifically asked if we'd like housing. 

I always put "Add housing" in the "Any other feedback" section so I was very happy to see an actual line item about it. Whether it'll happen is another matter but at least they're thinking about it. (This time I put "Add non-combat pets" in the suggestions box, in case anyone was wondering.)

That wasn't the thing I was going to post about, although believe me I could make a whole post about one line in a survey if I wanted to. There was something in the survey a lot more suited to a full post: a list of upcoming games Kuro wanted to know if we were looking forward to.

I thought that was taking quite a risk. They often ask which current games we're playing, usually accompanied by a list of a whole bunch of titles I have never played, considered playing or even heard of, but there's an existential difference between naming the games that might have been your competition in the past and putting the names of games that might be your competition in the future into the heads of your customers. Brave move.

Anyway, there were maybe a dozen names on the list, only one of which I'd heard of, that being Neverness To Everness. As it happens, that is a game I'm very much looking forward to, so I ticked that box, but I also immediately wondered: if that one was on the list, might I not also be interested in some  of the others? Told you it was a risky move.

So I took a screenshot, intending to go look them all up after I finished playing to see what they were like and if any of them looked any good. I wanted to do that partly for my own satisfaction but also because it sounded like a great idea for a blog post. Lists and previews are both kinda my thing.

Except of course, when I went to look at that screenshot, it was nowhere to be found. And obviously I can't remember the names of any of the games. Not one. I mean, if I'd known the screenshot wasn't going to save I'd have written them down...

Also the survey isn't anywhere online that I can find. I already tried that.

It is possible, although not very likely, I might be able to get to the survey again from within the game itself. I don't think you can go back to old surveys but I'll have a look next time I'm playing, just in case. I'm not going to do it now, though. I just played through the whole of Act 1 of the Averado Vault storyline and that took me two hours. I'm Wuthering Waved out for the rest of the day.

And that's why there's no interesting post here today, just this. Sorry. 

I did take several screenshots while I was playing, using the in-game camera, though. And those all saved properly, so at least there are some pictures to brighten things up. So there's that.

Be grateful for small mercies, eh?

The Past Is Always With Me

Thanks to spending all my time leafing through my own musical back pages these last couple of weeks, I don't have a huge amount of new music by anyone else to share. Neither do I have a lot of random items of interest bookmarked for bullet point analysis.

I do have a few of each though. Time for a bit of the old mix and match!

Let's open with a tune, why not? 

Bonnet Of Pins - Matt Berninger

I've never paid much attention to The National. No, that's not fair. I've never paid any attention to The National. They were the favorite band of someone I used to work with and if she hadn't mentioned them a few times, I'm not sure I'd ever have noticed they existed. Based on this magisterial performance by the band's lead singer I seriously need to take a look at the back catalog. 

This is magnificent stuff of its kind, which sounds dismissive, now I read it back. Not what I meant at all. What I did mean is, this is the kind of thing too many people take a run at and miss. Hard to describe, the rolling, building, tumbling, white-water force of all those words and sounds, rushing towards the moment where it's jump or be swept away. Get it wrong and you're the Waterboys.  Or worse - much, much worse - the Alarm. Matt doesn't get it wrong.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things #4382

I'll follow that with just a brief mention of the most dispiriting musical story that won't get out of my feeds. Just this morning I was greeted by the deeply depressing news that a Seoul court has granted management company ADOR's injunction, prohibiting the members of K-Pop band New Jeans from "pursuing independent activities" under their new name, NJZ.

K-Pop can be a bit of a culture shock all round, what with band members having to text pictures of their lunch to their managers before they're allowed to eat any of it, but this farrago has really exposed the feral nature of the process. About the best possible spin you could put on it would be to call it indentured labor. If you wanted to be hyperbolic you might start throwing around expressions like slave labor.  

However you define it, it's extremely unsavory and goes straight into the "Things Up With Which We Shall Not Put" barrel. Except, of course, we all do put up with it, like we put up with all the rest of the bad stuff that lies behind our hedonistic pleasures and our idle fancies. There is no love in this world any more, as Pete Shelly told us all the way back in 1979. Not got any better, has it?

Also, I'd forgotten just how long that Buzzcocks track is. Over seven minutes! So much for the myth of all punk songs coming in under three minutes, eh? I mean, I was there and even I get fooled by that one.

Of course, I wouldn't even be mentioning any of this if it wasn't happening to the only K-Pop band I really like, would I? It's all about me as usual

Except it's not at all about me, is it? I'm not helping. I didn't even sign the petition, not that anyone asked me. 

Fight the power, girls! Easy for me to say. Weird how guilt makes you feel complicit, isn't it? And don't I ask a lot of rhetorical questions?

WE'RE ALL MADE OF STARS

 Miami Horror (Feat. Telenova)

Of course, as the disclaimers have it, other views are available. "You can be anything you want" says... erm... Miami Horror. Are you quite sure that's the name you want to go with?

This is one of those ones where watching the video changes the entire impact of the track. In audio only, it's an uplifting anthem that leaves you feeling high on life. The images turn it into something wholly other. Worth watching all the way through - well, not the credits, maybe. Nothing clever happens at the end of those. It's not a Marvel movie.

Obviously I came to this by way of the excellent Telenova, which is why algorithms are our friends. Sometimes, anyway, but we'll get to that later. Time for some gaming news.

Play To Earn Is Real, Y'All!

Look, don't shoot me. I'm only the aggregator. I pick this stuff up, I pass it on. I didn't come here with the intention of harshing everyone's mellow. I have to work with what I've got.

Have a read of this. Too busy? Okay, I'll pull out a few choice snips:

"50% of mobile players have now received a reward with real monetary value from a smartphone game"

"72% of that group say real-world rewards are now "important" when it comes to them selecting a new mobile game to download"

“What we are currently seeing is real-time transformation in how gamers choose what they play based on rewards"

The rewards we're talking about here are things like "cash, Amazon credit, or payouts of other currencies of real-world value" and players are getting them for "reaching particular stages or achieving certain tasks within a game".

It turns out that if you give people credit they can spend in regular shops rather than bizarro world crypto crap you can't spend anywhere, people really will Play To Earn. As the article concludes 

"It’s a total rewrite of how and why users engage with gaming content"

Just what we wanted, eh? And if it's working in mobile, you can guess where it's coming next...

 Locals (Girls like us)[with gabby start]  - underscores

I heap a lot of praise on the YouTube algorithm these days but I have some bones to pick with it, too. Like, how come it never told me about underscores before? She's a big deal, too. I mean, just look at the size of her Wikipedia page!

YT didn't bring me to this one, either. I got to it old school, through a link on a virtual inky. Can't remember which one. NME? Ah, apparently I can remember!  Score one for my short-term!

Anyway, Alice Harper Grey is on my radar now. I have her very highly-rated album Wallsocket cued up, ready to listen to. I imagine posts will get written to that one although first I need to watch it, since she's also done it as a single-continuous-shot video. 

At least I think that's what it is. I mean, I didn't check the whole fifty-five minutes for cuts but it looks like that's what she's done. Look, get off my case, alright?

Would You Trust Netflix With Your MMO?

That article about underscores I just linked claims she's "turning her focus to emotion and comfort" so maybe she'll be in the target market for Spry Fox's upcoming cosy MMO, Spirit Crossing. 

I'm not sure I am. I'm having some issues with cosy games. A couple of years ago, I thought they sounded like they'd be right up my queit, leafy, sleepy suburban avenue but that was before I'd played any. They can be kinda... boring, can't they? Nothing really happens. And then it doesn't happen some more.

This one does sound good, though. According to MMOBomb "The game will offer most of the things players associate with cozy games such as exploration, crafting, and customizable housing", which does sound great. And MassivelyOP reckon the promo video makes it look like “Miyazaki Palia.”, which certainly sounds like it'd be an improvement on regular Palia.

Netflix, though... they don't exactly have the best rep for patience, do they? Or sticking with things for more than five minutes. These days their brand is virtually shorthand for "Second season cancellation".  Can anyone see them keeping a low-key, niche-market, borderline profitable  MMORPG chugging along year after year after year? Because that's the business model.

Then again, maybe Spirit Crossing will be the next Animal Crossing. Look at the name. Can't be a co-incidence. That'd keep it safe from Netflix Cancellation Dept. for at least... well... erm.... Nope, not seeing much of a long-term future for this one. 

And that's it for news stories. Let's wind things up with some tunes. Three, to be precise: one original and two covers. 

Gumshoe (Dracula from Arkansas) 

Youth Lagoon

All the good stuff, there. Distorted vocals, lyrics that sound like they'd be fascinating if you could only hear them, glitching Super-8 home movies, lyrical interludes, interpolated found footage, sampled speech...

If I was, oh, I don't know... thirty-five? Forty? this might be the sort of thing I'd want to be doing. It's not the work of a young person, that's for sure. (If I was a bona fide Young Person I'd more likely be doing something like this.)  

Youth Lagoon aka Trevor Powers, which explains why he took a stage name I guess, is thirty-six. I think this sounds like something someone a tad older might have made but he's been doing much the same thing for a decade and a half so it shows what I know.  

There's not much of his very old stuff on his channel. Maybe he wants to move on. This is eleven years old so he'd have been twenty-five when he made it. Feels like the work of someone older, sonically and visually. 

These things are hard to quantify, though. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were talking about cool the other day; what it is, whether it still has currency. I was suggesting I'd seen a strong recurrence of the kind of cool we grew up with and it felt like something more than nostalgia for a time you never knew. I thought it felt like a trend but here it is a decade ago so maybe it never stopped. They do say fashion passes but style is forever.

 Our House - Cream Flower (Original CSNY)

Case in point re that old anemoia we all love so much. Cream Flower, a two-person band (Remember when we called those "Duos"? How sweet and innocent we were, once...) from Manila, are very hard to find out anything about but looking at the pictures on their Soundcloud page I guess they look about, what, mid-twenties?

If so, Our House, would have first come out around three decades before they were born. The song was a centerpiece of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's seminal 1970 album Déjà Vu, which was itself a cornerstone of the then-burgeoning hippie nostalgia boom. The folk-rock supergroup were looking back fondly to the kind of life they imagined their parents might have led, had several wars and objective reality not got in the way. 

So, we have one bunch of twenty-something in the twenty-first century getting all warm and fuzzy over another bunch of twenty-somethings thirty years ago, who were getting all warm and fuzzy over something that probably never even  happened several decades before that. 

Good though, isn't it? And so are Cream Flower. That Manila indie scene really is something.

Can You Feel My Heart (Incorporating Heart-Shaped Box)  

Fontaines D.C. (Originals Bring Me The Horizon/Nirvana)

Geez. That's a mouthful. And an attribution minefield. Can't help feel they missed a trick not calling it Can You Feel My Heart-Shaped Box? Although maybe that doesn't quite set the right tone...

It does feel like picking low-hanging fruit, featuring the Fontaines on the blog yet again. Right now, they can't seem to put a foot wrong. Sorry. Bad choice of words.

Grian Chatten gets all the focus as the lead singer and he has got a very distinctive voice, it's true, but I can't help noticing how really very good the backing vocals are, particularly from Conor Deegan, known to the fans as Deego. Backing vocals are generally underrated in most bands but these really matter.

This is one of those covers where it might as well be a brand new song to me. I've never heard the BMTH original and although Heart-Shaped Box is super-well-known, I couldn't hum it at gunpoint. The only Nirvana album I own is the Unplugged one. I wasn't a big grunge fan back when it was big although I have a lot of time for some of the bands coming along right now who claim its influence. Same goes for drum'n'bass, techno, rave...

Hmm. Might be a post in that.

Happy 26th Birthday, EverQuest! Now Give Me My Presents!

What does it take to get me to log into a game I haven't even updated in months? Yep. You got it.

Free Stuff!

It's EverQuest's twenty-sixth birthday and guess who gets the presents? 

We Do!

God. My eyes hurt.

Before we get to the gifts, there's quite a nice video. Let's all watch it together.

So, anyway, it's been more than a quarter of a century now. Last year was the Big Silver Anniversary and I imagine we got freebies then, too, although I'd be lying if I said I remembered what they were. 

Hang on, let me check my records. That is supposed to be why I keep this blog thing, isn't it?

Hmm. I didn't post anything about EQ in March last year until this on the 21st. By then the Anniversary celebrations were clearly already well under way. I wonder when they started? The game went live on 16 March 1999 so presumably on the sixteenth?

Anyway, let's not dwell on the past, be it last year or last century. Let's think about the present. Or the presents, more like!

So, what did we get?

Well, if you're a scuzzy freeloader you get 

A 50% xp buff

from now until 1 April. (Actually from whenever it started, which was probably whenever the game last patched or maybe from the sixteenth but, again, let's not worry about what went before.)

That might not sound like a big deal to players of modern MMORPGs but even though it's not the (G)olden days any more, when everything took f o r e v e r and we liked it, xp in old Norrath is still hard to come by and a fifty per cent bonus is a big one. If I wasn't so wrapped up in other things (And the weather hadn't turned so unseasonably gorgeous.), this would be the time to get back to trying to nudge my magician closer to the level cap

A Blade of Jade Ornament

That's a nifty cosmetic that can look like a sword or a staff or a shield. There's one for every character on your account but you do have to log each of them in separately to get it.

Can I be bothered to do that? Maybe. I did log in on every character on all my accounts, plus two of Mrs Bhagpuss's, last year, when I was doing "research" for my "25 For 25" series or whatever I was calling it. 

I never did finish that, did I? Never fear, I will. Probably.

That means I at least know where they all are. I wrote it down. So that will save some time, if I decide to claim all those Ornaments. 

(Ornaments, by the way, are what appearance items are called in EQ. I don't wholly understand how they work but I'm sure I can figure it out. I mean, I already did before, once,  but I've forgotten. I expect it will all come back if I try again.)

That's the extent of the free stuff for free players. Not that amazing but what do you expect for nothing?

All Access Members, naturally, do better. They get the above but they also get:

A Metamorph: Jade Prowler Cub

Whoah! Now hold it right there... We're going to have to stop before we even get started. A Metamorph? What the heck is one of those? I've never even heard that piece of jargon before. I'm going to have to look it up...

Ah! It looks like it might be the EQ equivalent of EverQuest II's Petamorph Wands, the device you use to make your pet look like something else. It also seems as though in EQ, the Metamorph process applies to Familiars. 

Unfortunately, that's another thing I barely knew existed in the older game. I can see I'm going to need to do some more research. Do any of my EQ characters have familiars? 

I right-clicked the Jade Prowler Cub from inventory on a couple of characters to see what would happen. On my necro, the giant jellyfish floating next to him poofed. Maybe that was his familiar. On my banker, it did in fact summon a familiar, or rather I got the message it had and he got the buff. What I didn't get with either of them was an actual Jade Prowler Cub I could see. Maybe it's invisible.

Anyway, you get one of those for every character. It doesn't specifically say you have to log them all on but the cub is only available until 20 April so logic suggests you do.

Let's leave that for now and move on to the next freebie:

A Goblet of Adventure II

Now, I know what that is! It's an XP potion.  Specifically, it appears to be a 25% bonus that lasts for eight hours. The Press Release says it's only available until 20 April and only one per account but unlike the Metamorph and Jade Blade it didn't appear on my cursor when I logged in. Or anywhere else.

On the other hand, I do have two Goblets of Adventure II in Claim. Maybe it's one of those? But items in Claim usually stay there forever...

I don't know. Not likely to use it anyway, so let's move on to:

A Level 100 Character

Aha! Now we're talking! I could do with one of those! It's one per account again and presumably you claim it via the drop-down menu at Character Select/Creation. I actually have two Level 100 characters showing as available there. I'm guessing I had one before? Not sure why I never used it.

For the ludicrously complicated reasons I've gone through many times before, none of the characters I actually play, if and when I ever do play EQ, are on the account I'm currently paying for. It's a long and stupid story and I'm not going over it again.

The point is, I have two characters on my All Access account who already took a Level 85 potion so I suppose I ought to bump the pair of them up to 100. It is tempting to make two new characters and leapfrog past, although since there's almost no conceivable circumstance in which I would actually play any of them, I have to concede it's a bit of a moot point whether it makes any difference one way or the other.

Also, 100 is still well short of the actual cap, which I think is probably 125 these days. Let me check...

Yep. 125. Although Gemini confidently gives it as 100:

 How do they get away with it? Seriously? How? Do people actually read this stuff and believe it?

Anyway, that was yesterday's topic. Back to today's.

Now I have to decide whether

a) To log in all my characters, so they can all have more crap they'll never use.

b) If not, which ones might use any of it, so I can just log them in instead.

c) Who gets the Level 100 boost? An existing character or a new one?

And I have a month to make my mind up. Seems reasonable. Maybe I'll get around to doing a couple more of those character studies for last year's project while I'm in an EverQuest mood. I hadn't even got to some of my  most-played characters. I'd like to get those out there, at least. The whole thing tails off towards the end so I'm not so bothered about finishing it but my Beastlord and my Magician deserve their moment in the sun.

Then again, I really ought to finish the full twenty-five. I never mentioned it at the time but I did have an ulterior motive for doing the whole thing. There are companies out there that will produce a hardback book based on a blog and I've always fancied having one of those for Inventory Full. 

Obviously it's completely out of the question to do the entire blog. You'd need to be a billionaire to pay for it and it would be bigger than the full Encyclopedia Britannica, back when that was a thing. Twenty-five posts about twenty-five characters, though... that would make a very nice, slim volume and for an affordable price.

Something to think about... Meanwhile, Happy 26th Birthday to EverQuest and here's wishing you many more of them

Getting To The Point

And so we come to the part of the story I find the most interesting: turning dreams into reality. Well, daydreams into some kind of facsimile of reality, anyway. The whole question of just exactly how "real" or "authentic" anything created with the assistance of AI can or should be considered is about as contentious as it gets right now, although I strongly suspect that, in a decade or so, most people won't even be able to remember what the fuss was about. 

By then, it'll either be as dead an issue as synthesizers, sampling or Autotune, basics of modern music-making that were all considered utterly fake, spurious and beyond the pale in their day, or it'll be looked back on as some fad that's remembered only in a "Weren't our parents weird?" kind of way, like playing outdoors or VR.

My money's very much on acceptance and normalization. It's just too useful, even in its current, hallucinatory form, but more importantly a whole generation is about to grow up using it and they're not going to have any of the emotional, aesthetic or ethical baggage that makes older people feel so uncomfortable. Since most good art and almost all innovation comes from the young, you can see where that's leading.

"After a time, though, more and more people
began to become uncomfortable with the process"

It's been nearly forty years since I last considered myself "young" so, not surprisingly, my relationship with AI so far has been ambivalent. When it began to push its way into my consciousness I found it sweet, funny and endearing, like a dog doing tricks. As the old saw goes, it's not that it does it well, it's that it does it at all.

Like many in the blogging community, I spent some time playing with the new toys and writing up my experiences. There were posts all over this part of the blogosphere as people experimented with the capabilities of various AI services. Bloggers got AIs to write stories, draw pictures, play music and report on the news. They asked questions and laughed at the silly answers. Bloggers got AIs to describe other bloggers or picture them as characters in a game. It was all innocent fun. For a while.

After a time, though, more and more people began to become uncomfortable with the process, the methodology, the provenance and the ecological impact. At the same time, the AIs started to get better at what they did, so the results weren't as funny any more. Using AI, even in the one area where it was already undeniably useful, providing spot illustrations to break up text, became something most bloggers no longer seemed comfortable doing. 

Things that are useful rarely go away just because they're not to everyone's taste, though. There are more than a few folks around here still using AI-generated images. What's different is that now they generally apologize, even as they're doing it. My own footnotes detailing any use of AI in my posts is partly a sop to that sentiment, although mostly it's just me trying to keep some kind of record for my own purposes.

Other than that one usage, though, I have found AI in general to be less of a boon than I thought it might be. As the Russo Brothers said recently, in relation to their use of AI on their latest movie, The Electric State,  "AI is in its generative state now, where it has, as we call them, hallucinations. You can’t do mission-critical work with something that hallucinates." In other words, it's flaky and unreliable still and always needs a human to check its work.

"The technology continues to improve"

You can see that in Google, sometimes, whenever you use search these days, although I have yet to figure out how or why it happens on some searches but not on others. I thought for a while the phenomenon only occurred if I phrased my query as a question, something that does seem to stir Gemini from its slumbers, but sometimes doing it that way just gives an old-school string of links. Other times, even a simple two-word query will bring up an "AI Overview" at the top of the page.

This is Gemini's attempt to act as the unpaid personal assistant I always wanted it to be. Sadly, it's not very good at it yet. Yesterday, for example, when I was answering a question by an anonymous commenter who wondered if there'd ever been any major MMORPGs that came out of a Kickstarter campaign, I asked Google and the AI Overview told me that yes, there'd been several, chief among them Camelot Unchained and Ashes of Creation. I rest my case.

The technology continues to improve but for most things I'd want to do with it it currently requires far
more oversight and effort than makes it worthwhile. When it comes to using AI for video, for example, as I've said many times, when I can type in a two-line prompt and get a two-hour movie that's worth watching, get back to me. Right now, even the best AI video generator couldn't come up with something usable for a three-minute music video on its own. 

Hah! Three minutes? I don't think there's one that could give you thirty useable seconds.

The same can't be said of the three-minute song itself. AIs can pump out extremely convincing facsimiles of songs in pretty much any style you can think of and they're doing it by the million every day. Maybe the tens of millions. There's even an app for your phone that will make all the tracks you need for an album in less time than it takes you to ride the bus to work.

"this brave, new, artificial world"

When I first found out about those services I was extraordinarily impressed. At the time the generations were very short so a two-minute song was about the limit but that didn't seem like much of a problem. Some of my favorite genres lend themselves to very short songs. 

Just from a few prompts, I was able to "create" songs that, I felt, could easily be slipped into a compilation of tweepop with no-one any the wiser. My experiments back then suggested the AIs were pretty good at the music but their lyrics left a lot to be desired. Like really a lot. Which was when I first had the idea of having them set my own lyrics to music. 

And it worked. Kind of. But it was weird.

Hearing words you've had in your head forever, now being sung to a different melody, is unsettling. It's never going to have a truly happy outcome; either it sounds worse, in which case it's frustrating, or it sounds better, in which case it's upsetting. You want the AIs to do a good job but not do such a good job it makes you feel like you might as well not be there. 

I'll break chronology here to make a point that may or may not be re-assuring, depending on your particular attitude to this brave, new, artificial world. Having spent many hours now, working with the AIs on bringing my own words and music to life, I can categorically say that I feel an existential difference between their interpretation of my work and their own, wholly artificial, creations. Even when they're singing my words.

"I wish I'd thought of doing it that way"

I've listened to many attempts by Suno to make songs from just my lyrics on their own but also to many, many more based on my melodies, arrangements, phrasing and rhythm. Using just the words alone, in not one case did I find Suno's versions superior. Sometimes they were interesting; sometimes I liked them. Not once, though, did I think "I wish I'd thought of doing it that way".

What's more, I can now clearly hear the artificiality in Suno's composition and execution in a way I couldn't before. With different levels of "authenticity" to compare, it's a sliding scale. The more you put in, the more you get out. And vice versa.

That said, everything the AIs produce has a kind of brittleness to it. It's hard to describe but once you hear it you can't miss it. It's very apparent in material produced wholly by the software from just a prompt. If you let the AI handle lyrics, melody, arrangement, instrumentation and all you get something that feels thin, somehow. Incomplete. Inauthentic. It does depend on genre, certain styles lending theselves very much more to automation than others, but it's there in everything. 

Then again, this is precisely the same, subjective, argument countless people have put up against just about everything you can think of, new or old, synthetic or organic. A certain type of person always claims to be able to sense authenticity in some arcane way that, quite conveniently, can never be objectively authenticated. Or, in other words, I might just be missing something that was never there to begin with.

Crucially, though, to my ear, the more organic input the AI has to work with, the less obvious its ghostly hand becomes. Ironiocally, perhaps, I put that down more to human idiosyncracy and incompetence rather than any flaw in the machine.

"I am a poor singer and a worse guitar-player"

I am a poor singer and a worse guitar-player and the recordings I'm feeding into the AI maw are of

terrifyingly bad quality. Add to that my strong preference for never using three chords when two will do, rarely sticking to any kind of coherent song structure and generally employing the kind of rhythm that sounds like the thrumming of a somewhat faulty diesel generator, and it's hardly surprisng the results, even mediated by technology, tend to sound unlike anything any respectable algorithm would want to put its name to. 

It seems quite unlikely anyone would want to program a machine to make songs quite as wonky as these. Although, as I may elaborate upon in another post, they will, if you ask them nicely.

All of which tends to re-inforce my feeling that AI is far more likely to become a useful tool in the hands of creative artists than it is to replace them. Maybe one day people won't be needed at all and certainly some genres are more at risk than others but in the end that ineffable quality, authenticity, so long debated, derided and dismissed, will have its way.

And that's a very long introduction to the next part of this series, in which I might just, finally, get around to talking about specifics instead of generalities. Or maybe not. It turns out I have one hell of a lot to say on all of it. More than I even knew. It's just like when I start playing a new MMORPG and find I want to post about every last system and mechanic, taking them all apart to see how they work.

I think it's called an obsession. It'll pass. Only not just yet.

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

It seemed entirely appropriate to use AI illustrations ina post about AI so I did. No apologies there. I also spent absolutely no time fiddling about, trying to get something clever or apt. I wanted to see just how practical it would be to have the AI do nearly all the work. As it turns out, pretty practical.

Every image was produced at NightCafe using the current default model, Flux Schnell. Flux Schnell is extremely cheap  at just 0.75 credits per image. I have more than 2300 credits in my bank, none of which I paid for.

I didn't change any settings other than the ratio, which is 4:3 landscape, even though it doesn't always look like it. The generation time was Medium. 

For the prompts I simply cut and pasted a sentence or a phrase from the text, all but one of which I have handily included as captions. The image at the top was generated from the phrase "turning dreams into reality". 

Abstract to concrete is no problem for the AIs but I was very surprised to see the result of that last one. It's both bizarrely appropriate to the theme of the post and also very much in the style of image I generally go for if I take the trouble to specify genre and technique. It makes me wonder if Nightcafe feeds the AI information about previous images generated by the specific account. If not it's a hell of a co-incidence. I mean "turning dreams into reality".  could be just about anything...

The End Of The Beginning: The Stars Reach Kickstarter Enters Its Final Week

The Stars Reach Kickstarter has just over a week left to run. The total so far stands at $605k from a $200k ask. That target was smashed in the first hour of the campaign, which, as has been widely discussed, at least among the surprisingly few people in this part of the blogosphere who care enough to have offered an opinion, isn't necessarily the resounding victory it might appear.

Before the campaign began I had a minimum target of a million dollars in mind. Anything less seemed like it would be underselling a game that has been, from the start, promoted as a very major endeavor and a potential big leap forward for the MMORPG genre.

As a comparison, Noiramore Academy, the other Kickstarter game I backed this year, asked for $40k and got $50k. That game is a single-player Point&Click adventure, being made by a team of just four people, not counting the voice actors. 

NA, then, asked for a fifth of the target of one of the most ambitious and technically advanced MMORPGs we've heard about for a long time, ending up with a quarter of what Stars Reach said they wanted. Noiramor also hit its first stretch goal, which was by far the most significant, then ran into the buffers, twenty-five per cent above the ask.

It suggests to me that Ink Rose Inc pitched their campaign perfectly. They asked for what they needed and got more but not so much more it looked as though they'd underestimated the demand. It's also notable that all their stretch goals after the first begin "More..." making it clear they were additions, not essentials. They didn't get close to most of those but they did hit the first at $60k and it was the only one likely to make a material difference to the success of the game: full voice acting.

Given the relative difference in size and scope of the two projects, it also suggests that Playable Worlds are being, at the very least, conservative in their choices. Not taking any risks. At all.

Of course, there's another, fundemental difference between the two projects, other than scale and scope. The developers of Noiramore Academy asked for the money they needed to finish the game; Raph Koster made it very clear the Kickstarter campaign was, first and foremost, a shop window designed to attract further investment from elsewhere.

To that end it must have been crucial the campaign did not fail. A Kickstarter that fails to fund makes an exceptionally poor calling-card to hand to potential investors. It may even be that being able to wave that "Funded In An Hour!" banner will impress the people it needs to impress even if it rings hollow to me. I guess that depends how easily impressed they are. 

It could be interpreted - as several bloggers and commenters around here have chosen to read it - as an indication of lack confidence in the market. Or it could imply they haven't read it as well as they might have done. Neither of those would be helpful in negotiations.

On the other hand, it could equally be seen as a refreshingly pragmatic and realistic view of the prospects for the game and the potential size of its audience. Clearly there's a hardcore willing to jump on board at the earliest opportunity as well as a respectable number of less ardent but still seriously interested customers, ready to buy in after due consideration.

As Wilhelm outlined in some detail, the campaign has followed the expected pattern of MMORPG Kickstarters, a heavily front-loaded "U" curve with a surge at the start followed by a decline into a very low rumble of interest through the middle of the campaign. As we enter the final stages that line should begin to curve back up as the fence-sitters and procrastinators finally realize they have to make a decision and, or so the developers hope, get out their wallets before it's too late.

I wonder, though, just how accurate that campaign model still is in 2025. I read an interesting piece on the topic, written only six months ago, that suggests the likely outcome these days is more like "a reverse J".

"Kickstarters are so front-loaded now that the tail spike is much, much smaller than the final burst of pledges. It used to be that Kickstarter's '48-hour warning' email as the last couple of days of a campaign were reached was a big factor in the funding. Nowadays, it's more a gentle bump at the end than a massive flurry of last-minute backers."

That's from a publisher responsible for more than fifty Kickstarters. There's a lot of data and graphs to support it in the article, although since it's all drawn from their own campaigns, I don't know if it's  reasonable to spin up a universal rule.

Still, it does ring true. It's going to be very interesting to see how the final week - and particularly the final forty-eight hours - adds to the total Stars Reach has already accrued. 

My question is this: if, as the U-curve suggests, there's at least another $200k to come, who, exactly, are all these people, who haven't been able to make up their minds until the very end? And what's been stopping them?

It certainly can't be lack of information. The pre-alpha has been running for months with no NDA and there have been ample opportunities to join in. Since a pledge of $30 or more gets you access right away and you can cancel your pledge at any time before the campaign ends, anyone who really isn't sure could have taken a look for themselves by now and at no financial cost.

It also seems unlikely there are swathes of people out there who might be interested in the campaign, if only they knew about it. Playable Worlds have been promoting the hell out of both the game and the Kickstarter, including asking over and over again for anyone already interested to Tell Your Friends!!

They've also been deluging me with emails. I get one almost every day and have done for what seems like a very long time now. Certainly longer than the campaign has been going. The sheer volume of PR has actually had a negative impact on me, making me less interested in hearing about the game than I might have been, had information been harder to come by. Still, I very definitely couldn't claim not to have been kept in the loop.

So, I'm not quite sure who's left to pledge. Surely everyone with a real interest has stumped up at least that minimal $30 to stake their claim to the various versions of the game that will pass the time until launch? I guess we'll find out next week but from here a seven-figure final total doesn't look nailed on yet.

One thing I can't imagine making much of an impact are those Stretch Goals. It's good that Raph didn't hang out a lot of tempting bait there and even better that the team didn't have a rush of blood and promise a whole lot of stuff that they hadn't already planned and budgeted for. That kind of nonsense has done for plenty of projects in the past. 

On the other hand, it seems very unlikely many people will have said to themselves "I wasn't at all sure about the science-fiction setting but now I can play a space-fairy... Take my money!". It could even be that a few potential backers got the email with the picture at the top of the post and thought "Oh, it's going to be that sort of game, is it? I'm out."

The stretch goals in general have been underwhelming, especially when you know they would all have been in the game anyway. And therefore presumably always will be, regardless of how well the campaign does, even the ones that haven't been announced yet. It does take away any sense of urgency, as does the knowledge that the campaign was effectively over an hour after the doors opened.

All that's left is to pick a pledge and wait for your card to be charged. I did that weeks ago, although I'm increasingly less sure why. The tests have been running non-stop and I have yet to patch the client, far less log in. Clearly I am not as interested in playing the game as I am in speculating about it. Or writing about it, either.

And that brings me back to something I mentioned in passing earlier. For a game of this significance, there does seem to have been a lot less interest among the usual suspects than I would have expected. Other unlaunched MMORPGs have had bloggers churning out posts by the dozen. Not this one.

In this segment of the 'sphere I think just about the only people to have posted regularly about the game itself  - or the test program or the Kickstarter - have been myself and Wilhelm. I remember a few people mentioning they'd either applied for the test at an early stage and didn't get in or that they were thinking about it but as far as I know, none of those bloggers went on to write anything more about Stars Reach. Tipa might have posted something once...

Hardly anyone ever leaves comments on posts I write about it, either. I appreciate that comments on any posts here are about as common as dentures for chickens but even so the sheer lack of any reaction to anything said about the game seems almost passive-aggressive in its consistency. 

Even Wilhelm, whose posts get far more comments than mine ever do, also seem to get less traction for Stars Reach than much he writes about. Across his posts and mine, it's mostly been a conversation in comments between the two of us. No-one else seems very interested at all.

If the game and the campaign aren't even getting the full attention of the MMORPG crowd, it's very certain little impact is being made outside. Have there been any articles or major news reports in the general gaming press? I'm pretty sure that if there had been, Playable Worlds would have wasted no time letting us all know about them. I'd have had an email the next day.

In just over a week all speculation will end and we'll know. That will be a relief. This whole thing seems to have been going on forever. 

Of course, as soon as the Kickstarter ends, it'll be straight on to speculating about the game itself. With luck there's another year or two left in this story. I guess I can't complain. It gives me something to write about and that's without even having to play the damn thing...

 

I Write The Songs. Well, Kinda...

Over the past ten days I've spent about as much time fiddling about with old tapes and new technology as I used to spend playing MMORPGs. Every available moment, basically. 

When Beryl woke me up at a quarter to seven this morning, I was quite grumpy. I didn't go to sleep until after one in the morning last night, thanks to not being able to stop playing with my new toy. 

That's the downside of having a moderately decent laptop. I haven't had enough sleep since I bought it. I was already staying up too late scouring YouTube for new music. And now this.

"This" is my current obsession: playing virtual bands. Last Wednesday, I covered the first part of the project, the one where I went through my old cassette recordings and digitized everything that wasn't too embarassing to listen to, even in private. There were a few that didn't make that cut.

After I'd transmuted the ancient tapes into MP3s, the next stage was to make them as clear and audible as possible. I was expecting that to be a problem but I was very pleasantly surprised by how well many of them had survived forty years in a cardboard box. I'd been under the impression that the magnetic tape commonly used in cheap compact cassettes in the1970s and '80s had a strong tendency to lose its integrity over time, offering up nothing much more than a few hisses and mumbles, when replayed half a century later.

It seems reports of the rate of degeneration may have been somewhat exaggerated. Most of the tapes I played sounded, there or thereabouts, as good as they ever were. Not that that would be saying much. The sound quality was always pretty poor. It still is but only one or two sounded worse than I remember.

Whatever the quality, I gave all of them at least a couple of passes through various filters and fixes in Audacity, just to be sure. At first I played around with sliders and settings trying to get the "best" sound but after a while I realized all I needed to do was amplify them and appply the default "clip fix" listed under Noise Repair. That gave me results more than clear enough for my purposes. I wasn't establishing an archive. I had other ideas.

Put simply, my plan was to hire an AI backing band to play my songs the way they'd always been meant to be played. I wasn't at all sure that was possible but it seemed like it might be. There was only one way to know for sure.

A while back, when AI was all fresh and new and exciting, in a way it really isn't any more, I spent some time playing around with a couple of the best-known AI music generators, Udio and Suno. It was an interesting experiment, as I said at the time, but it can't have been as interesting as all that because I never did much more with either of them.

I had my reasons for not following through even though, back then, I was stunned by the ability of the AIs to replicate musical genres and create whole songs from nothing more than a few prompts. True, the lyrics they came up with left an awful lot to be desired but I had plenty of lyrics of my own.

Using them, though, created as manyproblems as it fixed. It was strange, to say the least, to hear my words set to thematically similar yet significantly different melodies to those I'd always known. It felt like when you're at a funeral and you stand up to sing a familiar hymn, only to realise the organist is playing a different tune to the one you're used to. That has happened to me more than once and it's always disconcerting.

As I noted then, when I listened to AI vocalists singing my lyrics, " I can feel the new pushing out the old. I can already feel the AI singer's phrasing replacing the way I always heard it in my head." What I didn't say was that I didn't much like the sensation. That was the main reason I didn't pursue things any further.

But what if I could make the AI sing my melody instead? And adopt my phrasing? And maybe even follow my chord patterns and rhythm? What if, instead of a rough approximation, I could get a reasonable facsimile: my song but with full instrumentation and a singer who could, in fact, sing?

As I said, only couple of weeks ago I had no idea if that was possible but it seemed like it might be. If it wasn't going to cost me anything more than time to find out, why not give it a go? 

Well, one reason: ownership.

Ownership, intellectual property rights and copyright, where AI is involved, is still in the digital wild west right now. Until the courts get to grips with it, which could take years, if not decades, and even then will almost certainly result in different rules for different regions and polities, it's anyone's guess who owns what. As always, whoever can afford the lawyers is going to make the rules until then.

It is fairly clear already that no-one can claim copyright of content generated wholly by AI and also that using AI  in conjunction with traditional writing and recording doesn't automatically void pre-existing copyrights. Even so, who "owns" that content is far from certain. Ownership and copyright are not synonymous.

Ownership has more to do with contracts than creation. Most of the services you can use for free include clauses in the EULA making it absolutely clear they "own" what you create by using them. What ownership means in this context is that they have the right to use those songs for any purpose they like, forever. On Mars, when we get there, if they feel like it. (Pretty much the plot of Carole and Tuesday, right there.)

As far as the output of a prompt goes, I couldn't care less about any of that. The AIs can have the content they create out of thin air from my vague suggestion that they might like to have a bash at writing "a song about puppies chasing their tails in a poppy field" performed in "indiepop style, cute female vocals, toy xylophone solo." 

Honestly, they're welcome to it. I just got Udio to follow that prompt and the result was abominable. Genuinely unlistenable, which is why I'm not even going to link it. I'll be comparing my recent experiences with Suno and Udio at some point in this series. Suffice it to say there's a very, very clear winner. And it's not Udio.

When it comes to actual words and music I wrote and recorded in my teens and twenties, though, I'm a lot less sanguine about handing any ownership at all over to some anonymous corporation. As in I'm not inclined to let go of any rights I might still have, regardless of whether I'll ever make use of them.

So I did a little mild research and it turns out that Suno only grabs all supposed rights for the songs you make there for free. If you give them money, that all changes:

"If you were subscribed with a Pro or Premier plan when the song was created, you are considered the owner of the song. You also retain the rights to commercial use for the song, even if you end your subscription."

As for copyright, AI affects nothing. If you owned the copyright before uploading that material, modifying it with AI leaves you with the same ownership you had at the start. In fact, you have to tick a box to say you do own all applicable rights before it will even allow you to upload anything.

I'm sure all of that can and will be challenged in the courts in due course but it's good enough for me right now. We're talking about recordings that have gathered dust under my bed since the 1990s. It's not like I was ever going to do anything with them until this opportunity arose. And it's not like I'm going to do anything meanigful with them afterwards, either, if we're going to be realistic about it. 

All of this is purely so I can hear my songs, coming out of actual speakers, sounding something close to the way I've always heard them in my head. If that's even remotely possible it has to be worth trying.

I subscribed to Suno for a month and then immediately cancelled the subscription just so I wouldn't end up accidentally paying again. Everythng's a recurring contract, these days. It seemed exceedingly unlikely I'd need more than a month so why waste money?

Not that it's a lot. The monthly subscription is a very reasonable $10. Or £10 where I live, since apparently Sterling is at parity with the dollar now. News to me. 

For that you don't just get what passes for ownership. You get 2500 credits to spend on making songs. 

Suno charges 5 credits per song and always makes two songs per prompt so that comes to five hundred songs a month, which sounded like way more than I was likely to need. I mean, I only had a couple of dozen songs I was interested in doing anything with. How many tries was it going to take? Surely it wouldn't take me twenty goes per song to get something I was happy with?

Yes. Well. No. But also yes.

It didn't take me anything like that many. In fact, for the most part, I got a very satisfactory version of each song on the first or second attempt. What I hadn't bargained for was how incredibly enjoyable and addictive the whole "making different versions of my own songs" was going to be. 

Like, insanely addictive. Best £10 I ever spent, quite possibly. I've used over two thousand of my credits already. Luckily, I can always buy more.

And that's about it for today. The story will continue in another post, when there may even be actual musical examples. We'll see. 

Clearly this is now a series. As for the project itself, it's still ongoing. I may need a second month of Suno after all. 

Notes on AI used in this post:

The big, seemingly irrelevant picture at the top is one of the images Suno automatically creates for every song. It usually pulls something out of the title or the lyrics but I have no clue why it went for hearts over a city street. I don't believe the lyrics or the title mention either.

Long Story Short(ish)

I'm always saying I'd like to do shorter posts. Turns out all I needed to do was not play any games and it happens naturally.

EverQuest II

Okay, it's not strictly true to say I haven't played any games. I have played a little EverQuest II. 

I logged in yesterday and finished another of Qho's supremely irritating gathering quests. That leaves just one more in the first set. Then it all starts up again, although from what I remember the second questline follows a different format and can be quite entertaining at times. Well, by comparison to the first, that is. But then it would pretty much have to be.

There's a lot going on in Norrath just now. Even though the Chronoportal event still has a few days to run, Brewday has already started. This is one of the busiest times of the year for holiday events. There are so many they start to overlap. 

I might do some more time-traveling with my Necromancer. I ought at least to take her to visit the vendors so she can spend her Ancient Coins. Not much point earnig them if you don't buy anything with them. 

Brewday, which I suppose comes in March to co-incide with St. Patrick's Day, although I can't recall ever seeing that connection made explicit, has never been a favorite of mine but there's a new tradeskill quest this year, so I'll definitely take a look at that.

It is interesting that the two quests I've seen added so far this year have both been crafting ones. I missed Erollisi Day completely, though. I wonder if there was a new tradeskill quest for that as well. Hold on and I'll check... no, there wasn't. 

I'm guessing the reason for the focus on crafting is either that these events were light on tradeskill content (Other than the inevitable new items that get added to the recipe list year on year.) or that Niami Denmother just really likes writing crafting quests. Both, probably.

The Chronoportal one is super-easy and very enjoyable, if you like very easy quests, which I do. All you have to do is go through a bunch of portals (Eight, I think it was. Might have been nine...) and pick up an item somewhere very near the entrance. All of them are in safe locations with no aggressive mobs nearby, so even crafters with a total aversion to combat can do it easily.

Then you just have to combine some of them to make sub-combines and combine those to make the final result, Grobb Liquidized Meat. It's a disgusting drink, enjoyed by trolls in the original EverQuest, which gives the quest its holiday-appropriate theme. You then trade the drink to a troll in exchange for Sir Fluffykins, the kidnapped cat. The troll hasn't been able to eat Sir Fluffykins because he has toothache and can't manage solids. The troll, that is. Not the cat.

Par for the course with tradeskill quests, really. Most of them are very light-hearted and generally very easy. They can be long and fiddly but they're rarely what you'd call challenging other than to your patience. 

Or they haven't been for a long time, anyway. There was that period when crafting "raids" were a thing and those were quite a performance, what with all the timers and the organization and a serious chance you'd fail. But that was a loooong time ago. I wonder if anyone still does those? I know you can easily solo them now because I've done it but does anyone actually get a team together and do them as they were intended? I bet someone does.

Another thing I hadn't particularly considered until I was summarizing the plot of the Chronoportal
quest just now is how very twee a lot of the crafting quests are. I don't think that was so much the case back in Domino's day, although even then many of them were far from serious. 

Raffik's quests, for example, which I tend to think of now as a jolly romp, are quite sad, what with him having been orphaned and shipwrecked and being close to starving to death when you first meet him. 

He's a great character, always cheerful, even though nothing ever seems to go quite right for him. Over the years, he changes from a lost adolescent to a confident, successful adult but even in the latest expansion, where he plays a small but significant role as the captain of the ship that takes you to Western Wastes, his ship gets destroyed, leaving him once again having to start over from scratch.

That, though, is part of an adventure questline and in adventures things do sometimes go badly wrong. In crafting quests they pretty much never do. You get asked to make something, you go get the materials, you put them together, you give the thing you've made to the person who asked for it and there you are. Sometimes you have to repair something but the experience is much the same.

Now that I think about it, EQII is a very twee game all round. The pure adventure side isn't, so much, although it does tend very much towards the Gods, Dragons and Faerie Queens end of the fantasy spectrum, rather than the blood, gore and bits of goblin flying everywhere kind. Everything else, though, crafting, housing, familiars, vanity pets, mounts, holiday events and most especially all the fancy dressing-up, does often have something of the six-year old girl's birthday party about it.

That suits my sensibilities fairly well but I've also been boiled in the EQII water for so long I barely notice how pink I'm getting. I'm wondering now if the high tweeness quotient might be a contributory factor to so many people bouncing off the game when they try it.

By contrast, there's that huge part of the game I never see (And neither do those new players who give up quite quickly.). Heroic/Heroic II dungeons and Raiding, from everything I read, are really serious business, to the point that most of the commentary I've been seeing for years on that end of the game is about how it's 100% Pay-to-Win because of how impossible it is to keep up with the required gearing needed to handle the difficulty if you don't get your wallet out.

For me, that might just as well be a different game entirely. My EQII has no Pay-to-Win features at all. The opposite, really. I find it hard to spend the Daybreak Cash I already have before more comes in.

Like most older MMORPGs, EQII isn't just two games any more. The old Casual/Serious Player split is there still and so is the Leveling/Endgame divide but the game fractures into many more pieces than that these days. It's entirely possible to play full time in any one of a variety of playstyles and hardly come into contact with the others at all.

Lord of the Rings Online

The really odd thing about all these older MMORPGs is how hard it is to get away from them. EverQuest is twenty-six years old this year and tens of thousands of people still play it. Lord of the Rings Online turns eighteen next month and the MMO news sites have been full of stories this week about how Standing Stone Games radically underestimated the demand for the new 64-bit servers. 

More than a million characters have been transferred apparently. Or, rather, have requested transfers. The actual number moved is presumably far smaller since the whole thing has been quite a debacle. I was going to log in this morning and see if I could at least press the Transfer button, just so I'd have a screenshot of me doing it for this post. 

What I'd forgotten was that I took one of my hard drives out last week, when I was trying to fix some issue with Mrs Bhagpuss's PC and I haven't gotten around to putting it back in yet. I don't feel like doing it right now, either, so my characters will have to wait a little longer. Probably a good idea, all things considered.

That does suggest the question "Why even bother transferring if you're not going to play the game?" and there, right there, that's the nub of it. I didn't have any desire to play LotRO again but then everyone started going on about it and Wilhelm revealed his plan to create a new character and take them all the way to Mordor and that started me thinking about how I've never gotten past the end of the original game - or even to the end for that matter - and suddenly the thought of playing again began to seem oddly appealing.

Would that it were so simple

And that's how they get you, every time. All these older games. It's not FOMO so much as familiarity. They sunk their claws in years ago and they hang on. You think you're free of them but they can always come back. Like malaria or relatives.

I had another thought, too, while I was considering whether I really wanted to give the game another chance. If so many people are fleeing the existing servers for the sunlit uplands of 64-bit Middle Earth, doesn't that mean the old 32-bit servers will be under a great deal less strain? Will that reduce or even remove all the lag problems and so on that everyone has long been complaining about?

Maybe the smart move would be to stay put. The FAQ says 

"At this time we do not intend to close our 32-bit game worlds. Eventually, we would like players to experience the game on our 64-bit game worlds, but as long as the populations of our 32-bit game worlds remain healthy we intend to keep these worlds open." 

I'm sure the last thing they'll want to do after this round of self-inflicted chaos is to rush headlong into another potential disaster so I'd guess it'll be later rather than sooner before any forced migration of the stay-at-homes kicks off.

As for low population levels, one of the given reasons why people wanted to move in the first place, I've always had a liking for low-pop servers. If you mostly solo, the fewer people around the better, generally speaking. 

Maybe I'll leave my existing characters where they are and re-roll on one of the shiny, new servers. That might be fun. And that way I could have my choice of quiet or busy, depending on my mood.

Of course, that's exactly what I used to do, back in the old days, when I had characters on multiple servers in several MMORPGs and somehow managed to find time to play most of them. These days I struggle to play even one character in one game with any consistency so all this is probably idle speculation. Fun, though.

Erenshor

And finally, in this short round up of things I might do in games I might play, there was yesterday's announcement that Erenshor is going into Early Access on Steam next month. 

Erenshor, you may remember, is the single-player MMORPG. Or, as the Steam Store description puts it "A fully simulated MMORPG". I played the demo during a Next Fest in 2023 and wrote about it here, when I found it very odd indeed. I concluded by saying "Whether Erenshor turns out to be no more than a novelty or a harbinger of things to come, I guess we won't know for a year or two."

We know now! Or we don't, because what I was really referring to there wasn't whether the game would get anywhere but the potential it suggested for the use of generative AI in MMORPG game design. 

As it happens, though, Erenshor doesn't even use that kind of AI. When it says the NPCs are "AI-driven" it means the old-school AI we've always had, just a more up-to-date, sophisticated version:

"Note that SimPlayers do not use LLM or any other emerging AI model. They are run by a mixture of state machines and decision trees."

If you want to know more about it, Tipa has been part of the testing program for a while and she's posted about the game several times. (I applied but I never heard back. It's too late now!)  She found it both very enjoyable and extremely redolent of the traditional EverQuest experience. If anyone knows how that feels, it's Tipa so you can take her word for it.

Erenshor has been on my wishlist since I played the demo and I will definitely be buying it as soon as hits Early Access. As always, the question is what I'll do about it after I've bought it. I suspect I might actually play it, in which case you'll hear about it here, whether you like it or not!

And that's all for now. Was that even a shorter post? I'm not sure it was. It was shorter to write, though, and that's what I wanted. 

Op success, then, I guess. I obviously should spend less time playing games.