Take Me To The River

I seem to be starting a lot of posts I don't finish at the moment. Just did it again. I get a few hundred words in before I realise even I'm not interested in hearing what I have to say next. So I stop, send it to draft and start over. One day I'll be desperate enough for something to write about that even these turgid screeds will seem worth resurrecting. Fear that day!

Instead, here's something very weird I thought I'd share. I just spotted it on Steam and had to click through to find out if it was real.

Remember Rift? It was an MMORPG a lot of people had high hopes for, myself among them. I had a great time there for a few months and I still drop in now and then for a bit of a run around.

Long ago I linked my original account with Steam, so I get to see all the updates flagged along the top of the screen every time I log in. By far the most prolific sources of news on my Steam page are Bless Unleashed, New World, Valheim and Rift. New World and Valheim generally offer substantive information about significant changes to their games. Bless Unleashed and Rift... not so much.

Bless Unleashed seems to do a lot of "server maintenance" and "emergency updates", few of which contain new content. It actually works quite well as a form of subliminal advertising because I'm always thinking of re-installing and giving the game another try. I liked most things about it except for the combat.

Rift, under its current Gamigo ownership, does a lot of "events". Nearly all of these are rehashes of things that happened before Gamigo took over. MassivelyOP likes to report them while making ironic comments, most of which seem well deserved for once.

I rarely even think about joining in to try and get some bizarre mount or other, which is usually the reward. It was rainbow-colored unicorns last time, presumably because Gamigo's target market for the game is six year-old girls.

There's often speculation among the few who still care about just what Gamigo think they're doing with the game they bought in Trion's fire sale half a decade ago. I offer this as evidence that whatever it is, it's too weird to second-guess.

I don't know if that link works but it goes to a World Rivers Day quiz. Did you know it was World Rivers Day? I didn't but Gamigo did and they want to celebrate.

Given you can just Google all the answers, I think it's more of a lottery than a quiz. Then again, you're probably not going to need Google's help with the likes of questions like these:

Which of these famous tourist attractions was not created by a river?

• The Grand Canyon
• The Nile Delta
• Niagara Falls
• The Louvre

Or 

Rivers can carry rocks and mud called sediment for many miles. Sediment is often droppen when the river reaches the sea where it forms what feature?

• Alpha
• Beta
• Delta
• Archipelago

If you're interested, there's a whole week left to work on your answers. The top three highest scorers, drawn out of a hat because that'll be everyone, win 3,000 Credits. Not much use unless you play Rift. Also not much use to me since I have about 20,000 left from when they converted to F2P a decade ago. Never found any reason to spend those so I don't really need more.

As for what this tells us about Gamigo's long term plans for the game, maybe they could make that into an essay question. It'd be a lot harder to answer than anything in the quiz, that's for sure.