A Propos Of Nothing In Particular...

Li'l bit busy this week so rather than fall behind on my non-existent, non-essential posting schedule, here's one of those bits 'n' pieces posts filled with stuff that won't quite stretch to a whole post all its own. I actually look forward to these when I read them elsewhere so I don't know why I (And others.) keep apologizing for them...

Tarisland Closed Beta #2. 

My invite just arrived so I'll be doing that. And there's no NDA, so I'll be posting about it too, I imagine. It comes at a very handy time because I have next week off work and the weather ain't great so chances are I'll be staying in. 

According to the chatty email invite, the test, which begins tomorrow, is set to last "for at least two weeks". I'm glad about that because the single week of CB#1 definitely wasn't long enough and since there's a completely new client and all previous progress was wiped, I'm going to have to start over from the beginning (Or begin again from the start, have it as you will...)

I'm downloading the new client right now. It's quite small for an MMORPG, which I assume means we only get part of the whole thing. I doubt the final version will come in under 20GB, although it would be nice if it did. 

You can't patch up the old one, either. You have to unistall and reinstall so it's just as well they have a big pipe. It's done now and I only set it off just before I began the post.

There are two new classes in the upcoming test, one of which I like the sound of, the other not so much. I might well try the Phantom Necromancer, which Chris Neal at MassivelyOP made sound very appealing: describing it as "a caster that specializes in ranged damage and healing. Both of which appear to be managed with a lantern full of spooky ghosts and moths." 

I really want to kill people with moths. Or heal them. I'm easy either way, just so long as it's moths.

The actual teaser video makes it look less appealingly weird but still worth a go.

I'm a lot less interested in the other new class, the Shadow Swordsman, clearly some variation on the usual rogue/thief/assassin paradigm. Any class that relies heavily on positioning and stealth attacks is too fiddly for my taste. I'm not crazy keen on needing to debuff to get good damage, either. I'd rather just thump people or set them on fire. I'm hella subtle like that.

As well as the classes, new stuff includes "fresh story-driven quests, a new raid - Battle of Ancash, innovative battlefields, Inscribed Stone skill, and an enhanced Crafting skill system". Of that, I imagine I'll see some of the questing and crafting and that'll be it. 

They're already begining to think about getting some money out of the game, even in beta. There's a clever introduction to both the cash shop and the inevitable Battle Pass, common to all games that use the popular no-subscription-needed-but give-us-money-every-month-anyway approach: "In this test, it is our first time to introduce commercial contents into the game, allowing players to make optional in-game purchase based on personal needs." 

Put simply, you can buy stuff in the beta and have your costs refunded after launch in the form of in-game currencies at an advantageous rate. If you spring for a beta Battle Pass, you get the same Battle Pass again, at no additional cost, when the game goes Live.

I will not be bothering with any of that but then I never do. I'm just going to play the game with whatever they give me for free and have fun that way. I certainly did last time. Looking forward to it!

FOMO - Bonus Edition

A few days ago I posted quite enthusiastically about the opportunities offered by EverQuest II's huge Extra Life success. I made some optimistic statements about how much use I was going to make of the massive bonuses to XP and I had plans - which I kept to myself - to do even more.

In the event, I managed to get my Inquisitor/Carpenter to the level cap in both Adventuring and Crafting but it took me waaaaaay longer than I expected. Not because of any deficiency in the additional XP, which was truly huge, but because of the inordinate amount of pre-requisite gearing and general preparation required before I could do pretty much anything.

When I finally go to do the quest hand-ins, I got insane xp for them. It took just two hand-ins to go from 120 to 125 in Carpentry. Getting to the point where I could do the hand-ins, however, felt like it took forever. Still, it's done now. She'll be at the cap for all of a month then I'll have to do it again.

I naively thought I'd have a better experience with Honeychurch, my Fury, who was 91 at the time, or with Mitsu, a level 119 Jeweller. I did not. First, I tried taking the Fury to a level-appropriate zone and questing normally. 

Once again, the xp was fine when I got it but quests take ages. Kill xp was good but even in the 90s you need a lot of it to get anywhere. It has to be quests and quests are fidlle-faddle when all you want to do is ding.

In comparison to regular play the bonuses made a huge difference but it meant I was getting a level in half an hour and I was hoping to get one in five minutes. I tried mentoring down and going to a dungeon but again, while it was fast, it didn't feel fast enough. In the end I made a couple of levels and called it a day.

On the evidence of the Carpenter's post-120 experience, I thought it would be a good idea to finish off Mitsu's Jewelcraft by doing the same questline again. It was fresh in my mind so I thought I'd be able to rip through it in no time. I just needed to get her to 120 because you can't get the introductory quest until then.

What I hadn't reckoned with was getting out of 119. I tried segments of quests from three different expansions and ran into a problem each time. The older ones gave good xp but not crazy good, while the later ones, which might have been amazing at the hand-in, all had multiple steps with no xp at all before you got to the payoff. 

If I'd had the patience to pursue it, I'd have reaped the rewards but I didn't and I didn't. Instead, I looked at what I was doing and decided Mitsu really didn't need to be a max level crafter while her Adventure level was still somewhere in the sixties. The only reason she's a Jeweller in the first place is to make her own Combat Arts and she's good on that for another forty levels.

I also tried doing a couple of at-cap instances with my Berserker to get some benefit from the bonus drops but the problem there was that those drops are already out of date even before the new expansion arrives. I was hoping for a good Mercenary but I wasn't willing to chain-run instances for the chance the rng gods might smile on me so I stopped.

The bonus week ends tomorrow. I don't feel I've done myself justice but at least I made an effort. I'm quite glad it'll be over soon, though. I don't like feeling I ought to be playing a game just because there are bonuses too good to miss.

In Another Life

Tipa, who always has great ideas, had another yesterday. She got CHATGPT4 to look through her Blog Roll and instruct DALL-E to create a clickbait image to use as a thumbnail. The results were superb. 

Mine, which you can see at the head of this post, looks disturbingly close to how I might look, were I forty years younger and a different gender. My initial thought was to steal the image and use it to replace my extremely outdated Blogger avatar, a gnome I used to play back at the dawn of time.

After a moment's thought, however, I decided it might be fun to make my own avatar using the same process. Unfortunately, as I found after some conversations, first with CHATGPT3.5 (The best available free model.) and then with Bard, neither of them have the ability to do what I want.

GPT3.5 can't visit a website and parse the data there solely from being given the URL. Bard says it can but when I gave it the URL of one of my posts it wasn't able to do it because reasons. I cut and pasted the bulk of the post - as much of it as the input field would allow - and had Bard write me an author profile based on that but all it really did was precis the specifics in the post. 

Even that would have been enough for my purposes but when I asked Bard to use the profile to create a prompt I could give to an art AI to make me an avatar for the blog it just mumbled an apology: "That’s not something I’m able to do yet."

Both from what Tipa has already shown and from several YouTube videos I've watched recently suggest, I'm pretty sure GPT4 could do all of what I'm asking. GPT4, however, is not free. 

I'm interested enough to consider paying. I think I'd probably make enough use of it to justify a subscription on the order of what I pay for Amazon Prime or Netflix or even an MMORPG. OpenAI, however, is currently asking $20 a month for the upgraded version and that's about twice what I'm willing to spend at the moment.

In the end, what I did was take the file name of Tipa's picture, which handily turns out to be a long, detailed description, possibly the actual prompt she used, and fed that back to some AIs I do have access to for free via NightCafe. I changed a few things around and tried a couple of the more expensive "Pro" models, using some my handful of trial tokens. 

All the results are here in the post. I like them all. I might use one of these (Do feel free to express a preference in the comments!) or I might keep experimenting. I'd love to see what the AIs would do with some of my Secret World screenshots as a visual key. 

I know one thing for sure, though. The era of the gnome is over.