It's All Just A Little Bit Of History Repeating

Well, this is embarrassing... 

Remember when I complained about not being able to remember my login details for Wuthering Waves? I wrote a whole post about it under the (entirely intentionally) click-baity title "Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now." Remember how, in that post, I said "I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works"?

Yes. Well. About that...

It turns out either I didn't try every account after all or else my capacity for thinking is so diminished I probably shouldn't be allowed out on my own. Either way, I now have my account back. 

So that's good.

This morning, for absolutely no good reason other than that I was idly fiddling around on the desktop while I was trying to come up with something to write about today, my attention settled on the Wuthering Waves icon. Since it was there, I thought I might as well update the game, just in case I decided to start over from the beginning again some day or something crazy like that.

I figured there might be a biggish update waiting but it couldn't be very big, surely, given I'd patched up about six weeks ago. I was half right. 

There was an update and it was huge. 56GB. WW (I refuse to call it WuWa. It reminds me too much of Al Pacino going "Hoo-ah!" in Scent of a Woman.) seems to be one of those annoying titles that insists on re-downloading the entire game every time it patches. 

That annoyed me a little but what it mostly did was remind me that even if I could play the game, which I couldn't, I'd be playing it on GeForce Now anyway, not on my own PC, so  I wouldn't need to update it at all. Let some NVidia technician worry about that. Otherwise what am I paying my £6.99 a month for, right? 

I logged into GFN and started WW going and then I noticed a link that said something about registering your character to see more. Well, you always want to see more, don't you? Unless it's body horror...

The link, when I clicked it, opened a dialog that offered me two accounts that were both, apparently, logged in already. I could tell by the names which email addresses they were using and it momentarily made me think one of them might be my original account to which I'd lost access. 

I went through the various stages to log each of them in and of course neither of them was The One. They were the two new accounts I'd made the last time I did this, each with a single, unplayed Level One character and nothing else. 

In the process of logging them in to check, though, I reminded myself which two email addresses they were. And neither of them was the one I'd say was the most obvious choice. The one I'd have been likely to use when starting a new game I wasn't planning to play for long.

Imagine the screen going all misty as we wind back to how I got started in Wuthering Waves in the first place. It was all because of a passing mention by Naithin, who'd tried the game and not thought all that much of it, mostly because of certain issues he had with the quality of the sound recording as I recall. For some reason. that spurred me to take a look at this oddly-named gacha title and the rest is... well, it's forty posts about the game on this blog for a start.

Back then, I wouldn't have been expecting to do much more than take a quick a look, which is why I didn't bother to set up a proper account. I just used Google's very convenient handshake protocol, the one UltrViolet has just implemented to handle comments on his blog. I tend to use it wherever it's offered because it's so easy and saves so much time. This is how billionaires groom us, isn't it? (Adjusts tin-foil hat...)

And I'm sure it's very nearly foolproof - if you just use the one gmail address for everything, like a normal person. As I'm only just beginning to realize, though, it's a lot less reliable if you have a couple of dozen of them. I'm really going to need to make a note of which address I use for which application in future and if I'm going to have to do that, I might as well just make a regular account the old-fashioned way.

All of this is there and thereabouts a repeat of the process I went through back in June. The one I wrote about in excruciating detail back then. So why am I repeating myself, other than for the sheer, visceral joy of listening to myself talk, of course, always a given on this blog. (I throw that in for any New Blaugustians that may still be plowing through this wall of text in the fading hope some point or purpose might eventually emerge. It won't. Or if it does, it won't be for a while.)

Sidebar - New Blaugustians sounds either like the name of a second-tier superhero team, likely made up of characters who never managed to hold down their own title or if they did it only lasted a dozen or so issues. They'd be based in a city like Denver or Omaha, a good way from either coast, which is where all the action in super-hero comics always happens. 

Or it could be an acid-jazz outfit from the '90s...

At this point, if I had any sense, I'd have admitted I was just repeating the same exact steps as last time and I was going to waste another morning on the hopeless task if I didn't accept the loss and move on. It's that saying about not learning from the mistakes of the past, isn't it? You keep on making them. And that other saying about people doing the same things over and over and expecting them to turn out differently...

 

Yeah, well, that's a bunch of crap. And I can prove it. I didn't learn the lesson and I did do the same thing again and it turned out differently!

Okay, maybe I didn't do exactly the same thing. Maybe, when  I said last time I'd tried "every account", what I really meant was "Every account except the most likely one. The one I should have tired first. The frickin' obvious one."

Or, I guess, maybe I did try that one but something else changed since I did it. I'll leave myself an out because who knows what happened? Not me. I won't say I don't care - it would be nice to know for sure - but I will say I'll never find out so there's no point worrying about it.

Whatever it was, I'm back in Wuthering Waves on my old character, Califlora. She's level 40 and almost at the end of the Riniscitta storyline. To be precise, she has the final Act and the Segue left to do before starting the next big chunk of main storyline, the one I've missed, which itself is the chapter before the current one, which has just begun.

I'm about an update and a quarter behind, I think. Not much further than I was the last time I had to catch up. It's doable.

And I've already started. After I spent what felt like half an hour opening a hundred windows to read about dozens of events I didn't understand and clicking on all the rewards that had been patiently awaiting my return, I looked up how to access the content I was trying to play through back in June, the Edgerunners Collab.

That event is over now but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the Night City adventure itself was permanent content. I also seemed to recall you can jump straight into it without having done the MSQ first. 

It is and you can. It took me some googling to find out how, though. I couldn't figure it out in-game. And even when I did figure it out, I didn't do it.

I was about to and then I noticed you can get to Night City more organically by progressing the main story to the point where you reach "the transport dock" in a quest called "What Burns Beneath The Frostlands". I checked how much I'd have to do to get there and it was "only" four quests down the line, in the first Act of "To The Stars Yet To Shine". It's not like I'm in a mad rush. I thought I might as well walk there. 

Of course, first I'll need to remember how to play. To that end, I worked my way through an exploration quest Califlora had up. She must have been doing it when I last played her although I don't remember it. 

By the time I'd finished it, I had a vague idea of how things worked. Who I had in my team. Which buttons to press. That sort of thing. Annoyingly, the combat controls are just very slightly different from Neverness To Everness but it didn't seem to make too much difference. It was surprising how fast it all came back. 

Whether I can juggle two story-heavy gacha games at once is another question. That's a lot of cut-scenes and voice-overs to get through. But I ought to be able to get to Night City, at least. If I buckle down, I might even be there before the next big content drop in NTE, which ought to be in about two to three weeks. 

If nothing else, it'll give me something new to write about for Blaugust. Always provided I don't forget my login details again...  

Dress Sense Or Dress Sensibly?

There's not much I don't like about gacha games. I like the way they look, the way they read, the way they sound and the way they play. I would never have expected it but it turns out the genre fits me to a T.

The monetization that gets some people mad doesn't bother me. In fact, since the Free To Play revolution, which suppose must be well over a decade in the past by now, which did, genuinely and literally, make most games completely free as far as I was concerned, about the only kind of monetization that gives me pause is the good old monthly subscription model. 

If EverQuest Legends had launched as Buy To Play, with no sub needed to go on playing after the first month, you'd most likely be reading a post like Tipa's about that game right now (I'd definitely be playing a Kerran.) instead of looking at some screenshots of Flora in her new 1970s-style trouser-suit. That isn't to say I won't buy EQL eventually but it is the reason I haven't bought it yet and it will almost certainly be the reason I don't play it for more than a month.

There is one thing I don't like about Gacha games, though. I've mentioned it before. It's the way my  characters tend to look the same all the time. It varies from gacha game to gacha game but it may not be a coincidence that the ones that put the least friction in the way of changing your apperarance are the ones that fold soonest.

Neverness To Everness is fairly standard in that you can roll for outfits on the gacha board, buy them for in-game currency and win them as rewards for in-game activities but none of those options is both easy and cheap. I've been playing for three months now and only yesterday did I finally get Flora a change of clothes. And even then it was only by way of the alternate NTE universe that is Warrens Continent.

The 999 Nights update that added an entire medieval fantasy ARPG to the magitech modern world was bizarre in all kinds of ways but not least in how it blew a giant, smoking hole in the gacha dress code. In Warrens Continent, characters have a traditional RPG paper doll with gear slots and whatever you put in most of those slots shows up on the character. Mobs drop wearable gear and there are plenty of different looks. 

You can take a pretty good shot at getting your character to look how you want them to... for a while. Then, of course, you have to start paying attention to stats and the whole thing falls apart, just like in a  traditional MMORPG, which is how things like transmog and appearance tabs end up being added to every MMO that lasts more than a few years.

Luckily, whoever designed the gear for Warrens Continent had an infinitely better fashion sense than the average MMO dev, so most of the pieces look pretty good together. And there are sets that have bonuses that make you want to wear all the pieces and naturally sets fit together quite nicely so it all works out.

I very much appreciated all of that, while I was playing Warrens Continent as if it was the main game. I was a bit miffed when I had to upgrade Flora's excellent starting look, probably the most demure and modest outfit in the entire game, to something that looked like it wouldn't be out of place in a Slayyyter video but stats are stats.

The best thing about that original outfit was that you can wear it in Hethereau. I was looking forward to doing just that for a while but then, almost inevitably, I stayed so long in Warrens Continent and changed my gear so many times I forgot all about it. It didn't help that the outfit, appropriately called "Unassuming Warrior", is only available through the "Button Shop" and I had no clue where that was.

I did look for it. My immediate thought was that it would be the Mysterious Fuzzy trader but that was a dead end. I looked at every trader I could find and pored over the map but I couldn't see any sign of a "Button Shop". And then I just sort of forgot about it. Don't ask me why I didn't google it but I didn't.

And then on Wednesday I mentioned the Button Shop in a post and Mailvaltar dropped into the comments to explain where to find it: in the F4 Event Menu.

It is. And I never noticed. I will say in my defense that a) I very rarely look at the Events Menu and b) the Button Shop Button isn't actually part of the menu itself. It's on its own at the bottom of the page. Even so, there's no excuse for missing it.

The upside of having waited so long is that when I finally found the shop I had plenty of Buttons to spend. Over ten thousand, in fact. More than enough to buy me both the outfit and the dyes to change the color. So I bought them all, which may have been a mistake.

Oh, not the outfit itself. The outfit is excellent. Flora's wearing it now and it makes a very nice change from running around in Lycra bicycle shorts under a netball skirt. It's the dyes I'm not so sure about.

They come in a pack of three - red, green and blue. At least I think those are the colors. It's hard to tell. They're very muted, particularly the green. Or maybe I mean unassuming. None of them is bad in any way, it's more that I'm not convinced any of them is an improvement over the basic silver and black look, which has a timeless kind of elegance about it.

Still, it's nice to have some wardrobe choices at last. If only the outfits weren't character-specific. Then all my characters could be unassuming, which would come as a huge shock to several of them, I'm sure. Not to mention they'd all be able to wear the Archmage outfit I won on the gacha board a couple of days back. That won't see use until and unless I win Iroi, too.

All the poses in the post, except the one below, were taken on the roof of Mint's building, which turned out to be the perfect place for a fashion shoot. I was there because visiting the Button Shop reminded me I hadn't finished everything I wanted to do in Warrens Continent yet. 

It's funny how a couple of weeks ago we (That's just me, Nimgimli and Mailvaltar really, I guess.) were complaining, or at least observing, that it looked as though we'd be doing nothing but the 999 Nights content for weeks and now here I am, having almost forgotten it was there, back running around Hethereau every day as if the update had never happened.

But it did and I'm back with it now. Not only do I want to finish the event itself but now I've seen inside the Button Shop there are a few more things I want to buy there. Not least the money.

Yes, you can buy money with buttons. Fons, specifically. If I can get enough buttons I might even be able to buy enough Fons to cover my losses at the Catzebo. They are substantial.

Also, I just realized this minute, as I typed the word "Catzebo" for the umpteenth time, that it has to be a pun on "Casino"; not, as I've been thinking until now, on "Gazebo". I really did think it was a joke about the cats all standing around in little, wooden huts...

And with that, I think I'd better make my exit. Fast. 

And Off We Go!

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of Blaugust! Or is that too aggressive? How about Blaugust, come she will? No, I think I might have used that one before. After a while it gets hard to remember.

But here we are again. And how many of us are there this time? Let me see if I can find the list. You'll have to excuse me a moment. Usually I'd have sorted all this out in advance but the weather's been so lovely and there's been so much else to do... 

Aha! that took a minute but here we go, courtesy of Wilhelm's trusty Formatted HTML List. If you'd like to add all of these blogs - there are ninety-six at time of writing - to your RSS feed, Owls has an OPML list too.

Both of those invaluable resources will, I'm sure, be kept updated as the month rolls by. Last year we had quite a lot of latecomers so it's worth checking every so often to see who else has thrown themselves onboard. 

I don't plan on updating this post to reflect any further additions (Or subtractions...) and I am not going to add all the new blogs to my blog roll, mostly because it's insanely long already. If any of the newcomers turn out to be particularly to my taste, though, I'll be adding those at some stage.

And that's a good opportunity to mention last year, when we had I think it was 178 people participating by the end. I haven't fact-checked that number but it's stuck in my memory for some reason. It was a lot, anyway. 

I wrote a post at the end of the event naming a round dozen of my favorite new discoveries from the Class of '25. Of those twelve, eight are still active in my feeds. A couple stopped posting and I dropped a couple more over this and that along the way. I think the only one that's returned for another round this year, though, is Axxuy. Quite a high bounce rate, that. (Notes by JC Probably just re-upped since I posted this so that's two!)

I realize now (And only now...) that despite having enjoyed those eight blogs for a whole year, I never added any of them to my blog roll. I might have thought about it right at the start but I wouldn't dignify it by calling it a conscious choice. It was almost certainly laziness. 

Well, I'm going to correct that oversight now. Apologies to everyone who might have had the traffic for the last twelve months, such as it would have been. Talk among yourselves for a bit while I go add them all. It's a fiddly job. You've got time to make a coffee. 

And drink it. 

And wash up.

There! All done. I think a year is altogether too long to decide on which blogs ought to have a permanent place in the sidebar but maybe it does no harm to allow a settling-in period. 

That is what Blaugust is for, though. Or it's one side of the coin. We talk a lot every year about the role the event plays in encouraging people to start a blog or dust off an old one or just find ways to enjoy posting more often but we don't always say as much about what a great opportunity it is to find new blogs to read.

Blogs are like games in one very important way. It takes a lot more time and effort to create and maintain the content than it does to consume it. On average, every post here probably takes me about two or three hours. Sometimes I knock one off in an hour but sometimes it takes all day.

Even the longest posts (Hi, Kaylriene! Hi, Jeromai!) probably only takes me ten or fifteen minutes to read. Most take more like two or three. As a writer, one post a day is enough. As a reader, I can get through a lot of blog posts in a day. Dozens. Easily.

Blaugust is an opportunity to deepen your resource pool as a reader and also to expand your range. Most of the dozen blogs I stuck with after last year I would never have known about without Blaugust. And my reading year would have been poorer without all of them.

That said, I would warn against trying to read everything. Again, veterans and mentors always make a point of warning newer bloggers not to try to do too much, not to over-extend themselves trying to blog every day if they're not feeling it, to pace themselves, allow for breaks and pauses, not to burn so hard and fast they burn out before the month is over.

And the same applies to readers. I found last year's Blaugust exhausting. Not as a writer - as a reader. We had the biggest intake ever and at the start, as happens every time, nearly everyone was posting every day. I said I could get through dozens of posts a day. By that I meant maybe two or three dozen. Not a gross!

Things had calmed down a lot by the middle of the month as people either dropped out or reduced their posting frequency as they realized they weren't going to make 31 posts after all. It always happens. But for me, and from what I read as people summed up after it was all over, for a few others too, by then the damage had been done. I ended up skipping a lot because I'd burned myself out as a reader, trying to read everything in the first week or two.

This year I'll take my own advice and pace myself. I'll check everyone out, eventually, but there's no need to read every single post every day, let alone to comment on them all. All the older posts from any blog that really sings to me will still be there when I come to it. I'll go back and read those with pleasure. And maybe add them to the blog roll later still.

These things you learn, over time. Over a long time, apparently, because I'm only figuring all this out now and I've been doing this a while now. Just don't try to do everything all at once, that's what I'm saying.

And that's enough of a pre-amble. Let's have the list and then I'm done. The sun's out, it's another beautiful day and there are other things to do than write blog posts. 

I won't say better things...

1. Contains Moderate Peril
2. not all those who wander are lost
3. hamatti.org
4. Shadowz Abstract Gaming Blog
5. Troy Press
6. Gaudete Theology
7. Words Under My Name
8. Cubic Creativity
9. Endgame Viable
10. Inventory Full
11. Varun Barad
12. TAGN
13. Through Wolfy's Eyes
14. Gamers Esoteric
15. Byte Vortex
16. Chasing Dings!
17. GamerLady P Blog
18. owlblog
19. Zelibeli
20. Mar Qaroll's The Marrowing!
21. Taylor film crit
22. Aywren's Nook
23. MMO Casual
24. Mailvaltar
25. Quail Creations
26. An Archaeopteryx
27. inconsistent.software
28. Matt's Blog
29. Nerdy Bookahs
30. Dave Henry Blog
31. Indiecator
32. fluidline.neocities.org
33. Lameazoid.com
34. I Can't Think of a Name for this Website
35. Why I Game
36. Gridranger's blog
37. MogBlog
38. 世界のねじを巻くブログ
39. MMO One Night
40. Ubergeek Kelly's World
41. Words of the AgingGamer
42. Geek on a Harley
43. Portrait of a....
44. Ben Ramsey
45. Lucky Instar
46. Knifesedge Blogs
47. Many Welps
48. coffee spills
49. Kay Talks Games
50. Kayriene
51. The Ghastly Mirror
52. Alex's Review Corner
53. Kedara
54. Ryan Patrick Randall
55. Christopherhimes.com
56. The Maker Dad
57. Lyons in Beta
58. WCRobinson
59. keeroks space
60. theTangentSpace
61. BongoTwisty
62. 82MHz
63. Riel's Nest
64. Aster's Asterisms
65. Emma Juettner's Blog
66. What the Fran
67. Taxodium
68. Quinn Daedal - Blog
69. Academic Aesthetic
70. bearblog
71. NomadWarMachine
72. Nerd Girl Thoughts
73. Axxuy's Internet Notebook
74. Pinkway
75. 素生
76. Games and Geekery
77. In An Age
78. ThinkRoot
79. Point, Click, Repeat
80. もうすぐ33歳
81. note (large blog platform)
82. The Friendly Necromancer
83. Select * From Life
84. Fragmentary
85. 伏枥之间
86. ComradeNerdy Blog
87. Brennan.day
88. ChristiRichards.com
89. fyr.io
90. KVibber.com
91. K-Squared Ramblings
92. わくパンの思考のかけら
93. Off the Top,
94. Personal InfoCloud
95. Medium
96. clandestini
97. michcia's notes
98. Tabitha
99. OrbitalMartian
100. コーポ雪原
101. 26g
102. Kai Gulliksen
103. 392ms
104. re: nyman
105. Noisy Deadlines
106. BurgeonLab
107. Beyond the Horizon
108. Notes by JCProbably
109. SweaterPockets

Go Directly To Blaugust. Do Not Collect 200 Gold Pieces

It's Blaugust tomorrow and I have nothing planned. I do have a few, vague ideas floating around but all of them would require annoying little things like research and planning and forethought and I just don't seem to be in the mood for any of that right now. I'm more in the mood for winging it so we'll see how far that gets me. 

I'm not worried about it. If I was, I wouldn't throw several perfectly reasonable topics into a Grab Bag the day before the event, now would I? Just be thankful I haven't held these back to spin up into whole posts of their own just to meet a quota.

Is Your MMO As Famous As RuneScape? 

Who hates Monopoly? No, not monopolies. This is a blog about gaming and popular culture, not politics. I mean Monopoly the incredibly tedious board game I used to play when I was ten but only if no-one would play anything better. 

I haven't played the damn thing in well over half a century but where I work, Monopoly occasionally blows up into some kind of a big deal because Waddingtons  (Showing my age there...) Hasbro keep pumping out special editions. The year they did one for the city where I live, we literally couldn't keep the things in stock.

I very strongly suspect the same will not happen with the latest Monopoly Special Edition: RuneScape.

Yes, hard to believe though it is, RuneScape is getting its own Monopoly board. How many video games can say that?  

Oh, yes, World of Warcraft, for sure. We had that one in. Didn't sell many.

I just looked it up. There are fifteen video game editions of the family fun-wrecking game, according to the Fandom wiki. How many can you name? 

Well, all of them, obviously, since I just put a screenshot of the lot next to this paragraph. But you could have guessed most of them, I bet. 

It doesn't look like it's purely sales-based, although huge sales are clearly a pre-requisite. It very much looks like the key factor is being a big franchise with a presence outside of gaming. More than half of the fifteen also have Hollywood movies or big TV shows based on them. 

All of which makes it doubly impressive RuneScape got in. Is your favorite MMORPG on there? Thought not. Ever wonder just how big a deal RuneScape really is? Here's a clue. It's in the same league as Pokemon, Sonic, Roblox and GTA5.

It's available for Pre-Order on the RuneScape store. The MMO Bomb piece says it's available from October but the store says delivery February 2027. Also, why is it rated 16+ on the box? Regular Monopoly is half that. What is there aboout RuneScape they're not telling us? 

It's Metal, Jim...  

If you didn't know William Shatner once made a very, very bad album of cover versions that included his crazed takes on the sixties staples like Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and Mr. Tambourine Man, you'd better hand your nerd badge in at the desk on your way out. That's Popular Culture 101.

You may even know he's made a few more albums since then. He likes to keep up, even if he's often a decade behind. But did you know he fronts his own metal band? I didn't. Not until I read about it on Stereogum this week.  

Maybe be you did know already. It's not like it's a secret. As the piece points out, Stereogum itself reported back in February that the Shat was prepping a metal album. 

I missed that bombshell, somehow, but I'm doing my due diligence now and telling you about it because I'm sure you won't want to miss the opportunity to hear the 94 year-old cult actor (I nearly put actor in quotes then but that would be a cheap shot. I'm sure he must have acted in something, once.) give his unique interpretations of classics by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

And would you like to see him perform those songs live? I just bet you would. Well now you can! Or you will be able to at next year's Coachella, always assuming he's still up for it then. I mean, he'll be 95...

I know no-one reading this is going to be at Coachella 2027 but these days the whole thing is livestreamed. They wouldn't miss the opportunity to share something like this with the world, would they? We should arrange a listening party...

New Jeans For Old

Gasp as I segue effortlessly from gaming through geek culture to music. It's a veritable masterclass in grab-bagging. It also needs a lot of padding because as must be increasingly obvious I don't have a lot to say about any of this other than sharing the links. 

Seriously, we get all knotted up about people using AI to write blog posts but it's perfectly fine just to precis other people's stuff, throw in a few smart-alec remarks and call that original work, just so long as you don't forget to credit your sources to let everyone know where you stole it from. Is it something to do with the dignity of labor? Does hammering a keyboard add some protective veneer of authenticity or humanity?

Oh dear, he's off on one again. Someone bang him on the back of the head. That usually resets him.

One of the saddest music news stories of the past year or two was the doomed attempt of New Jeans to free themselves from the indentured servitude that is the Idol system. I am no expert in how it all works but you really don't have to be to see how desperately exploitative it all is. That many of the people being exploited have worked hard to get themselves into a position where someone wants to exploit them does nothing to excuse the process.

Not particularly unusually, New Jeans hit a point where they'd had enough but very unusually they tried to do something about it. It was a little like a scene in a horror movie for a while. You could watch them struggling to get free, almost making it to safety, then being seized by a tentacle at the last moment and dragged back under.

And now they've emerged again. Well, four of them have. One was lost, never to be seen again. Eaten by the monster. As yet we haven't had any new music but no doubt it's coming, which poses an awkward moral question over whether to engage with it or not.

New Jeans were my favorite K-Pop band before all this happened, not that it was a competitive field. I guess it's best to hope it all goes well after all they put themselves through but I'm not sure whether I want the New New Jeans to pick up where they left off, making excellent music and uplifting, super-happy videos, or if it wouldn't be easier all round if the new stuff wasn't up to much and they all looked glum singing it. 

Luckily, I don't have any say in it so I'll just take what I get. And probably feel slightly uncomfortable if I enjoy it. But then, I know that feeling... 

At which point I really should move straight into some mildly embarrassing music choice. I'm sure I can find one. Give me a moment...

I Want You (And I Want Him Too) - New Weirdos

Oh, I think that'll do it! In so many ways...

How Early It Was, How Early...

I nearly gave myself a day off from blogging today, what with Blaugust just around the corner and my having spent a couple of hours moving the modem and router to a different part of the house, which was a hot, sticky and annoying job. Also, if I was going to post something, it would have been Neverness To Everness again and I thought perhaps three posts in a row might be a bit much.

I have a few things bookmarked to write about so I figured maybe I'd fling together a Grab Bag. I made myself a coffee, sat down at the PC to get started on that (It's working fine after the router move, thank you for asking.), which was when I saw on MassivelyOP that Stars Reach is going into Early Access in a little over two weeks.

Not just Early Access, either, but as MOP puts it in the headline "paid early access". Ohhh boy... Might as well say something about that, then.

Before I get into any editorializing about the wisdom of the decision, let's talk about the important part: how much is it going to cost and what do you get for your money? I can answer the first part of that question but not the second.

There are three tiers, coming in at $30, $50 and $80. Obviously, all of them will get you the game but what else you get for your increasingly substantial investment is yet to be revealed. I just checked the Steam Store and there are no pre-orders up as yet but there is a "Why Early Access?" spiel that I'm guessing is new? It seems to be the trigger for the MOP post, anyway. That's where their attribution link goes.

Most of it seems to be the usual set of reasons/explanations/promises every developer gives when pitching Early Access but there are some interesting specifics, one being that Playable Worlds only anticipates the game remaining in Early Access for six months. 

Okay, what it actually says is:

 "Our current goal is to remain in Early Access for at least 6 months." 

which isn't exactly the same thing but six months is going to be all anyone hears.

The other line that stood out for me was on the future of pricing after launch: 

"We plan to sunset founders packs and transition to free-to-play at 1.0." 

For some reason, I thought there was going to be a subscription when the game went Live. I remember the thing about only subscribers being able to build homes, for one thing. Now its confirmed as F2P, apparently. Presumably that includes all the game, not just parts of it. If not, it won't really be free to play as such. I guess that would qualify as a Freemium offer but who can keep up with the jargon?

Let's assume Stars Reach really will be completely Free to Play when launch day comes. Not even Buy To Play, although it looks as though Early Access is B2P, what with those pack prices. It's a weird quirk of of the Early Access process, they way developers believe players will pay for an unfinished game that they plan on giving away for free when it's done. And players frequently prove them right, too, which is even weirder. 

If the game is F2P, how is that going to affect the way people play? There's been much discussion over the potential for griefing in Stars Reach (Okay, "much" is pushing it. Wilhelm's mentioned it a few times...) due to the way you can terraform planets with few restrictions or comebacks, other whatever's provided by by local, player-run governments. I'd imagine making the game F2P could stretch the boundaries of player governance to their limits and probably far beyond. The cosy SWG fantasy might not survive the barbarian hordes of F2P. Not to mention the bots.

As for the game itself, it seems it'll be much the same in Early Access as it has been in pre-alpha.  There's a description of available content in the announcement:

"The Early Access version of Stars Reach delivers the core experience, including combat, building, government, crafting, and trade. Players will have the opportunity to create their homestead, defend it against hostile creatures, create and participate in galactic commerce, and travel between planets using spaceports and wormholes. Players will also spend time in space, which features the same core experience as terrestrial gameplay"

Seems about right from what I saw during my intermittent visits, although I found very little of it engaging enough for me to hang around long enough to test the depth of any of those features. I found the appeal of all of them wore off in a matter of hours.

My main problem was that, while the basics of a potential game were certainly in place when I played, I couldn't see much that I recognized as a gameplay loop. There were a few things you could do but no real sense of why you'd want to do them for long. But, hey, that's what testing is for, right? Sorting the basics and honing the gameplay

Early Access, though, is not testing. Oh, I know developers think it is but players don't and they're the ones paying the money so what they think is probably more important. 

Players think Early Access is The Game. You can tell them it's not as much as you want but they won't hear you.

All the caveats and provisos in the world won't stop people seeing whatever's there when they log in and start playing as The Game. They may understand that it's not the Finished Game but it's still The Game and it better be fun and engaging and worth the money.  And if it's any kind of Live Service game, let alone an MMORPG that's meant to be played for years at a stretch, it better be consistently engaging.

People generally don't cut EA releases slack for still being in development. They also tend not to hang around when they run out of things to do and they often don't come back when more gets added. That happens with games that launch officially, too. Retention is always hard. But retaining interest in an unfinished game is harder still.

Early Access is always a gamble but it can pay off if there's a gameplay loop people find attractive. If it feels like a finished game, in other words, even if it's obviously not.

Valheim is a shining example. That game came out with the first half of the game effectively complete. It was a little rough around the edges but all the important parts worked and worked well. What's more, there was a linear progression through four biomes, each of which felt complete in itself. You could start at the beginning and play through to the end of what was there and it felt like you'd played a game. Millions did.

That's a good way to approach Early Access. Give players a shortened version of what the whole game will be. Then the rest, when it arrives, will seem more like an expansion or even a series of expansions. Players leave satisfied and come back to see what's new. (Granted Iron Crown screwed that up by making the second half of the game ten times harder than the first but the principle stands.)

Going into Early Access with substantial systems and features unfinished or entirely missing is asking for failure, especially when you're charging the price of a complete game. And $30, $50 and $80 are full game prices in the AA and indie market. 

So what do you get for the money, anyway? Other than access to the game, which you could already have had if you were interested, back when Kickstarter pledges were on sale.  

We don't yet know and I have some difficulty imagining what extras there might be. A quote on MOP, unattributed but presumably from Raph Koster himself (Hi Raph, if you're reading...) mentions “increasing rewards and cosmetics”, which is about as vague as it possible to be and still say anything at all. 

And "cosmetics"? What's that about? In a  game that hasn't even nailed down full customization in character creation yet? I mean, it's there, sure, but it's extremely basic by the standards of almost any modern MMORPG. What cosmetics could there be?

I realize I'm jumping the gun by posting this. Playable Worlds is assiduous in sending out emails filled with detail about what they're doing or what they plan to do. I imagine I'll be seeing three copies of a PR release in my inbox any day now. (I still get three of everything they send, even after the supposed purge of unused IDs.)

I could have waited for that before I wrote this post but this way I get two bites at the Stars Reach Early Access cherry. Or three. Blaugust is coming and I'll be glad to have a new topic to cover. The actual Early Access launch, when it arrives bang in the middle of Blaugust, is going to be very interesting indeed. 

There should be plenty to post about then, not least how many people EA brings in and how long they hang around. Stars Reach is only available through Steam so there won't be any secrecy over the  numbers. It'll all be there on the Steam Charts where, as I write, no-one at all is playing, presumably because the server is down. I can see the 30-day average, though. It's ten people.

Early Access has to bring in a few more, doesn't it? But how many more? 

Not long to wait before we find out.

Sometimes You Have To Make Your Own Luck

I'd love this to be a post about how I got another S-Class Banner Character on my first try and for almost no effort but sadly my luck didn't run to a third straight win. I thought briefly that it had because on my fifth roll this morning, a big S popped and up came the image above. 

Yes, it's Iroi and yes, for a second there, I thought I'd won her, but I realized almost immediately something else must have happened. When you win any character of whatever class you get a bespoke mini-movie, complete with posing and dialog. This was just a couple of static images.

I was confused enough to stop and fiddle around in the settings and options to see if I could work out what I'd won. It might surprise - or more likely shock - some players, to find out just how little I know about this game, even though I've been playing almost every day for weeks now. 

It surprises me a little, too, although not all that much. I somehow seem to be able to combine a keen sense of curiosity for what lies over the next hill with a bland indifference to how to get there. I'm like a sheep crossed with a cat. 

This is the way it generally goes: I start a new game, run through the opening tutorial then, if I like it, I carry on playing without thinking too much more about it. 

Usually what comes next is a hyper-extended quasi-tutorial that feels like the game's started but which is actually still supposed to be teaching you how to play. The problem with this approach, which I always used to recommend as probably the best way to introduce the various complexities of any game, is that I let it all wash over me and very little sticks. 

I'm sure, at some point, some tool tip or voice-over must have explained what the various buttons do on pretty much every screen but all I've done is click through them as fast as possible because I was already paying and I wanted to get on with the good bits.

It's not until I run into some problem that I stop and try to figure out for myself what all the buttons do or how the systems work. And to be fair to myself, it's not like I needed to know before, is it? Games are very easy and straightforward at the level I'm operating. It makes sense to leave it until I have a reason before digging into the details.

Absent a tutorial or a toll-tip, trial and error usually works. I tried all the buttons and one of them turned out to be a tally of every dice roll I'd made since the game began. It actually keeps the records for a rolling six months but until we get there it's everything. Looking at that, I could see I'd won an outfit.

My first! I was excited.

I needn't have been. Yes, I'd won an outfit. It was a low chance and once again I'd been very lucky to get it. Unfortunately it's an outfit for the character I was trying to win and I didn't win her. So now I have an outfit no-one can wear.

I did check. I wondered if maybe it would work for the whole team but no such luck. It's Iroi or nothing.

I carried on for a while, hoping I'd get lucky twice. I'd pre-set the number of rolls I was willing to use and I had about twenty rolls left before I hit my limit. No dice, so to speak, so I stopped. I'll almost certainly have another go before the Banner changes but for now I was done.

I was still in the mood for some gambling, though, so I thought I'd see what was on the other board, the one that uses the cheap, blue dice. I had loads of those. Last time I looked it was all characters I already had, although you always need multiples to Ascend. This time there seemed to be a couple I didn't remember getting so I thought I'd try a few rolls.

In the end I think I rolled about 25 times. There was the usual sale on where you get eight rolls for the price of ten so I did that a couple of times and then banged out a few singles on top. And I did pretty well. I got the usual couple of dupes but I also got an S-Class I didn't already have - Fadia.

I don't particularly want Fadia. If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure I can remember who she is but every character you acquire opens up some related content like Bonds and background stories so it's always good to get anyone new. 

And maybe I'll need her. After I finished rolling dice I blew a million Fons on scratch cards (I said I was in a gambling mood...) and that made me wonder where I was with my Tycoon levels. Not very far was the answer. I was on Level 19 but all the conditions had been met so I just had to press the button.

For Level 20, though, I was stuck on Exploration again. I had most of the boxes ticked but I still needed five Rabbit Holes (I'd only done one.), three characters at Level 40 (Again I only had one.) and an Anomaly Commission (I  was at 8/9 there). Rabbit Holes were easy. Or they were once I noticed you could adjust the difficulty level. Things didn't go so well before that.

Getting the character levels just meant spending some resources and I had plenty. I can't remember exactly what happened with the Anomaly Commission. I know picked a bad one. I had a look at the options available and I thought I'd try the boxing gloves. I remembered that being easy first time around.

Yes. Well. Maybe it was. The upgraded version, however, is a DPS test and I could not pass it. The gloves take a defensive stance and you have to defeat them in sixty seconds. I couldn't get them under 80%. 

At some point I fought the dog again and got the Arc but how that fits into the picture I can't quite figure out now. Maybe I needed two after all? 

I also did Dragon Gate Substitute, for which, confusingly, you fight some fish, not a dragon at all. They were easy enough, although I made it harder by falling off the roof of the building and having to start over.

The final box I needed to tick after all that was something called  Headless Rider, which is gated by an Anomaly Commission by the name of Ride Assault. I had no clue how or where to find it and it wasn't on the map so I looked it up.

Ride Assault has a complicated trigger sequence, where you have to be driving a car (A bike won't do.) down Foxwindow Avenue sometime between eight in the evening and dawn just to get it to pop. In the highly unlikely event you just happen to meet the conditions, a headless biker appears and if you chase him, he leads you into a tunnel, whereupon he summons a portal to take you to his Anomaly Realm. Then he tries to kill you.

That's not the fight you need for the Tycoon level. It's the fight you need to get that fight. But you have to start somewhere. Having read a couple of guides and fiddled with the clock to get the time of day right, I crashed about on Foxwindow until the biker appeared. I chased him, entered his realm, jumped out of my car to fight him and got slaughtered. It wasn't even remotely close.

I am now going to have to go away, read up on the strats, apply some upgrades and pick a team that has the right elemental qualities to exploit his weaknesses before I take another run at him. This means more research and finding out something about how a few systems work because I barely have a clue on most of them.

Of course, if I had any gaming skills I could probably just brute force it but I don't so it'll require some cheesing finesse. As it stand, not only can I not even begin to read any of the tells that let you know when you need to Counter or Parry. I wouldn't even know what to press if I did. I have never knowingly Countered or Parried anything since I started - nor ever felt like I needed to, either.

And it may be that I still don't. It might be that once I pick the right team and upgrade everyone, button-mashing will be good enough again. I hope so, anyway. I'm certainly not playing this game to git gud, or even for the fights, for that matter. But sometimes you have to make at least a token effort. Either that or give up, an option I always find rather attractive.

That's where I am with Neverness To Everness right now. Slowly learning how the game works so I can avoid playing as much of it as possible. 

Don't anyone try to tell me how to have fun!

Catzebo Carousel

A week ago, I posted something about one of the new, time-limited events in Neverness To Everness, an event that seems to be variously known as "Mews Flash", "Meow Express" or "Cat Dream", depending on the whim of whoever put the whole thing together or whoever happens to have translated the particular bit of text you're reading.

To recap, it's a gambling game where you buy scratch cards from a large, formally-dressed cat standing behind the counter of a booth known as a Midnight Catzebo. You obviously hope you're going to win big but I've been playing every day, or at least every day I remember, and I haven't exactly won big yet, although I also haven't lost big either. 

Most days I just about break even. I tend to stop if I either win or lose more than a couple of hundred thousand. I had a good run this morning with the biggest single win I've had so far, 300k, but I lost that much a couple of days ago so I'm pretty much back where I started.

Having scratched a lot of cards now, I'm certain the cheapest, the 10k ones, are a waste of time. About 90% of them have a single 10k win, so if you buy the full day's allotment of twenty you're going to end up very slightly out of pocket. I've given up bothering with those altogether, except for a little project I'm going to get to in a moment.

The 20k cards are slightly better in that you get quite a few 30k wins, putting you a little ahead, but the overall hit rate is lower, so it works out much the same. I'd barely call the 10k and 20k cards a gamble, they're so consistent in the results they give. It was fun for a while, scratching off all the imaginary foil, but the thrill of that wears off when you realize how predictable it is.

The three types of 50k cards are a lot more entertaining and also where the real money is, if you get lucky. Then again, there's a real chance of blowing more than you can afford before you've noticed if you aren't careful. 

There's no reliable return of your stake money here. Most times you either get nothing or a decent chunk of cash. There are frequently multiple winning slots on a single card. I've had four or five several times, adding up to 200k or so. Conversely, there are a lot of duds, where you don't win anything.

When I first discovered the event, I wondered how many Catzebos there were, scattered across Hethereau. And what the cats operating them were called. I'd seen a couple, so I knew it was a franchise of some kind with multiple outlets and both the cats had odd names (Catvioli and Cat Cake). I was curious (Appropriately enough, what with the cats....) to meet the rest and find out if there was some kind of theme to it all.

This morning I finally got around to doing something about it. I began with the map.

I was still figuring out how that worked. I always seem to take a long time figuring out the basic systems in games these days. I play everything in an ever more casual and laid-back, not to say soporific, fashion or so it sometimes seems. I only started taking a proper look at the map a week or two ago. 

It turns out that, like everything in NTE, it's extremely well-designed. The search function is versatile and powerful and you can set a tracker for anything you see on the map. All the icons are meaningful, too. You can see the Catzebos well enough just from the little cat-heads that weren't there before. 

Still, I didn't fancy poring over the whole thing trying to find them by sight. After a bit of fiddling about, I figured out that all the Midnight Catzebos are listed under the Recommended Locs tab. That was going to save me some time. 

Next, I discovered you can sort all the categories either by district or for the whole city. I got the list up for Hethereau first, to see how many Catzebos there were altogether. It's a nice, round number - ten. Then I selected Miguel District, where Flora happened to be, and started from there. 

Since I seemed to have made a pointless little project for myself, I thought I'd do it properly for a change. I used to do a lot of this sort of thing in MMORPGs back in the day but with the advent of narrative-driven games, quest helpers and never doing any damn thing if it doesn't come with an Achievement or a reward attached, I've fallen out of the habit.

I once spent several days going round all the vendors in Norrath I used regularly with characters of different races and varying charisma stats, making notes on how it affected sales prices. I kept the info in a book on my desk and referred to it when I wanted to sell anything valuable. That's the kind of entertainment I used to make for myself, back when we made our own entertainment. We were simple folk...

Luckily, this project didn't take me days. More like a little under three-quarters of an hour and even that included two trips, one each with Lacrimosa and Sakiri, on the Ferris Wheel that stands (Precariously, in my opinion...) on top of the Floe Cinema. I just happened to bump into them as I was passing. That might get its own post although it probably won't. 

In keeping with tradition, I dug out a notebook and made notes as I ported and trotted around the city. I'd usually take screenshots these days but it occurred to me that even though I was going to take a shot of every booth anyway, it would actually be more efficient to transcribe the details by hand as I saw them, rather than to go back through all the pictures afterwards, looking for the information I needed. 

I would have had to take screenshots of the map, too, if I wanted to give the precise locations. Easier just to write down the names of the streets while I had the map open. It would have been easier still if I'd taken the time to write them down neatly enough so I could read them afterwards but there you go...

Since I was going to be at the booths anyway, I thought I might as well buy a scratch card at each of them and keep a record of my wins and losses, just for the fun of it. I'd already spent my allocated limit for the day, so I chose to buy just one 10k card at each stall, which gave me a chance to test my consistency theory.

Out of ten cards, nine had a winning panel.Every one of them was worth 10k. House takes 10%. Just as I thought.

As I was going round, I found myself thinking about the post I was going to write but also, for some reason, about the ongoing controversy over AI that's raging around Blaugust and something Paeroka said stuck in my mind, about how Blaugust doesn't have any rules about what constitutes a "post", so you could legitimately post a single word every day and it would qualify.

That gave me an idea. What if I didn't use the screenshots of the ten Catzebos right away? What if I saved them and posted one every day in Blaugust when I didn't have time to write a proper post? I don't have a back-up plan for days like that this year and that would be a super-easy way of hitting the target. 

Would that be more creative than prompting an AI for a picture? It's arguable. It might be less creative. I didn't draw those cats myself. Or name them. I very much didn't come up with the idea of putting cats with funny names in booths. All I did was go to where they were and take a picture. Where's the creativity in that?

Take it a stage further. What if I prompted an AI to make a picture of a cat in a booth and then I got my phone and took a picture of my monitor showing the image and posted that? Would that count? How about if I did it on the laptop then carried the laptop around the house and garden and took pictures of the screen with the AI-generated image but with different real-world backdrops? How significant a part of the post is the AI image then? Where even are the lines? It's angels and pinheads all over again!

These are the kinds of things that go through your mind when you take on a repetitive project like this. 

Tempted as I was, I decided not to save my cat pictures for Blaugust, not least because now I've had the idea I can recycle it easily enough if I need to, later. The "photos of AI images" thing is amusing me, too, and the main reason I have a blog is to keep myself amused, so...

Getting back to the ostensible point of this post, I can now tell you the names of all ten cats manning (Or should that be "Catting"?) the booths. They are all male, as far as I can tell, if that's relevant, or they present a male aspect, at least. They all look like 1930s gangsters, if we're going to be frank.

The Ten Cats, in the order I found them, are:

Miguel District 

Cat Ball - Flamingo Avenue

Catvioli - St. Torres Avenue

New Herland

Cat Pastry - In the square with the Wertheimer Tower

Cat Dice - Nutcracker Road

Cat Tart - Camelot Avenue

Cat Sugar -  Yuanmu Hill

Bridge Crossings

Cat Pancake - Bluebeard Road

Unheard Shores

Cat Puff - Just off Coastal Highway Z42

Illusion Town

Cat Cake - Fiscus Avenue

Cat Roll - Coastal Highway Z42 

It does very much look to me as thought these cats must have been named by someone thinking mainly about how hungry they were feeling. With a couple of "Things I Can See On My Desk" thrown in for the sake of variety. 

The outlier is Catvioli. He's the only cat with a single-word name and also the only one whose name isn't an easily recognizable object or foodstuff. I looked it up just in case it had some meaning I wasn't seeing but there doesn't seem to be any. I saw someone on some thread or other suggesting it might be a pun on ravioli but that seems like a stretch.

And of course we'll never know. This is a time-limited event and not a very significant or important one even in the context what might constitute importance in a free-to-play, gacha game. No-one cares what the bloody cats are called or why. 

And yet I've just spent about three hours of my life on it, and that's on top of the three hours I spent on much the same topic a week ago. 

It's nice to have a hobby, isn't it? Keeps us off the streets, anyway. If anyone's under the delusion what kind of pictures we use to illustrate our posts actually matters, maybe they should chew on that for a while.