Another Lesson Learned

The topic for the final week of Blapril is "Lessons Learned". I think that's been covered to some extent in previous posts, particularly the one about "Staying Motivated" but let's see...

Opportunity

At the end of Blaugust 2018, when life was very different (aka "normal"), I'd managed to post every day in August, finishing with a grand total of thirty-two posts. I had this to say about the experience:

 "It's been a trip but I can't say I'm sorry it's over. Turns out there's a very good reason I don't normally post on work days. It makes me slightly stressed, it mildly irritates Mrs Bhagpuss and sometimes I just don't have much to say." 

For last year's Blaugust things weren't normal any more. I was off work, at home undergoing chemotherapy, not going out very much at all. Despite feeling quite feeble physically, I had plenty of time on my hands and no shortage of mental energy. I found no trouble posting more than daily, racking up no fewer than forty-two posts in the calendar month. In summing up, something I didn't get around to doing until the week after Blaugust had finished, I said:

"Last Blaugust I was at work and getting a post out every day was tough, particularly mid-week. It doesn't surprise me at all that the limiting factor for me is time, not inspiration or ideas. There were plenty of days when I could have done a second or third post from the half-formed possibilites buzzing around my brain. I only held back because I also wanted to play some games and even with the entire day to yourself there are only so many hours. "

This year for Blapril, normality seems like a half-forgotten dream. Like most of us, I'm under virtual house arrest in lockdown and once again I've been banging out better than a post a day. My total for the month fell right in the middle at thirty-five but April is, of course, a day shorter than August.

The conclusion I draw from this is that, given the opportunity, my natural posting frequency is daily or more. Over the years I've fallen into a pattern of posting mostly on days when I don't work so it's hardly surprising that when I'm not working I post every day.

What has surprised me during Blapril is that, unlike last Blaugust, when I made time for gaming, this year I've felt much more inclined to give games a raincheck and carry on writing.

What I can't tell is whether this is a phase, whether it's related to the unusual circumstances (in both cases there's a background of imminent mortality, which may be sharpening some subconscious desire to "leave a mark"), whether it has something to do with the ongoing drought of new triple-A MMORPGs or whether, given the option, I really would always rather write about games than play them.

I guess I'll find out when I finally retire and have all my time to myself all day, every day.

Organization

I am not a naturally organized person. Never have been. I am good at organizing things that have to be organized but anything that can manage on its own can jolly well look after itself.

My normal practise while blogging is to think no further ahead than the day I'm posting. That had been working perfectly well for me since I started and until now I'd seen no reason to change it. Then, when Blapril started, entirely by accident I somehow found myself with pre-written posts in the bank. For almost the entire month I've been posting in arrears, putting up pieces I wrote two or three days earlier.

And it's not really working for me. For a while it had a slightly liberating effect, allowing me to put up a finished post first thing in the morning and have the rest of the day to myself but since what I did with most of the day was write another post, that didn't have quite the impact you might imagine.

After a while, even that limited freedom began to dissipate as I found myself re-working each supposedly finished post before hitting "Publish". Instead of being a couple of days ahead it felt more as though I was always slightly behind. For the last couple of weeks, even though I've only published one post a day, I've effectively been writing two.

I've also felt a number of times that the posts are becoming stale by the time they appear. In having them pre-written they lose some of their immediacy. It feels increasingly like a restraint rather than a release.

It's been a useful experiment but the lesson I take from it is that I'm better off coming to a blank page every day and just banging something out. I only have part two of the Beatles post lined up and ready to go now. I think I'll let that be the last one I sit on for a while.

Involvement

For last year's Blaugust I signed up as a Mentor and promptly vanished. Well, except for the forty-two posts... I was nominally on Discord but I rarely logged in. I did have an excuse. As I wrote when it was all over

 "I think the main Lesson I learned this year was that I should have skipped being a mentor when I realized I wasn't going to be 100% fit. I was in Discord for the week before the official start but then I had my various health scares and when that settled down it was a couple of weeks before I even remembered Discord was a thing."

When Blapril rolled around I remembered that and signed up as a participant only. Except Bel, being Bel, very kindly left me tagged as a Mentor anyway and I ended up being more active and involved than I expected.

Not that I did much. I'm never going to be someone who organizes gaming events or initiates anything. I've always been far more reactive than proactive. I did manage to remember to log into Discord almost every day, though, and to join in with the conversation, sometimes even in real time.

It's been fun. Maybe particularly so because our ongoing collective weirdness means normal socialization is on hold for many of us. I do get a huge percentage of my regular social contact at work, both with colleagues and with the public, talking at some length to whom is literally something I get paid to do. Discord has offered an enjoyable alternative.

I'll be staying in Discord when Blapril finishes, at least when I remember. I wonder how many people will hang around? Also, does anyone know why the notification bleeps carry on indefinitely after I close the Discord app? It's quite annoying because I tend to close it half an hour before I finally log off at night but it keeps on burbling at me even though I can't see what anyone's saying.

Brevity

And finally, the lesson I never learn. I really wish I could cut to the chase sometimes but apparently that's not part of my skill set. Believe it or not, most of my posts have already been quite heavily edited by the time they appear.

For years I've been saying I want to write shorter posts but I just can't seem to get the hang of it. And Blapril/Blaugust would be the ideal time because, as several people have pointed out, engagement with other people's content actually drops during these events because most of us simply can't find the time to read everything.

We've had several really excellent new entrants to the event this year. The standard of posting has been very high. I'm not going to call anyone out for praise specifically because that can suggest an unintended slight on anyone that doesn't get a mention but I've thoroughly enjoyed reading many of the posts I've seen this year.

I just wish I'd been able to see them all. I've tried but I keep missing stuff. And if I'm doing it I know other people must be too and anyway who would blame anyone if they opened one of my fifteen hundred word essays and thought "Yep...nope" and immediately closed it again? Not me, that's for sure.

So once again I tell myself I must try to stick to the point, trim the fat, not bury the lede. And then I end up writing long.

Oh, well. It keeps me off the streets.

Tankies Are People Too

This week saw Shintar and Yeebo both talking about the tank's lot in modern MMORPGs. They agree it's not a happy one.

Yeebo has given up on the archetype altogether:

"I used to really enjoy playing tanks, and now it's far and away my least favorite class role in most MMOs".  

Shintar, after taking a break from tank duties, is very much back on the warhorse with no fewer than "six max-level tanking alts" but she's not finding it as much fun as it used to be either:

 "...if you want other people to tank for you, you might want to consider not turning every trash pull into an uphill battle for them... Else you may find yourself waiting on the group finder soon, wondering why your requests for a tank in guild chat were met with nothing but silence."

It's been a very long time since I tanked for anyone other then myself or an NPC. Even back in the white heat of my grouping days I preferred to main heal. I did have a max level tank class in EverQuest for a couple of years, though, back when, as Shintar says, a tank was seen as "a group's guide and protector".

In those days, as Yeebo reminds us, "it was expected that the rest of the party would try to work with you towards the goal of aggro management, rather than against you". True, it was an expectation that wasn't always met but back when reputation was more than a stat on your character sheet, magicians who couldn't control their pets and wizards who liked to nuke 'em til they glowed tended to find groups remarkably scarce, despite all those "LFM" messages scrolling through chat.

My Shadowknight, with the trusty two-pronged fork he used for much of his tanking career.

Like Yeebo, I played a Shadowknight. When I first started in EverQuest the only class anyone wanted standing between them and the mob was a Warrior but by the time I was in a position to care, as I ground my way slowly through the fifties to the then-cap of level 60 in the Velious era, hybrid tanks were not just accepted but often preferred.

The EverQuest of the time was still a roleplaying game. Quite a few players spoke in character and had backstories.  More than that, though, it was a game in which every player, like it or not, played a role dictated by the class they chose.

It's become a commonplace to say that EQ was a game in which grouping was not just expected but required. That was always a misconception. From the beginning, EverQuest was designed to accomodate both group and solo play. The trick was knowing which class had been intended to go it alone.

The problem, as Yeebo points out in his reply to my comment on his post, was that although, as numerous later interviews confirmed, the designers had prepared the ground for soloing, they neglected to mention anything about it at the point when it mattered most - character creation. In fact, they seemed quite determined to keep the whole concept of soloing to themselves.

I could get a few posts out of the things they say in here...

I forget what it used to say on the character creation screen but I have the original manual in front of me as I type and the only advice I can find is this: "Norrath is a dangerous and unforgiving land, especially for a solo beginner traveller. The best way to survive and prosper is to join up with a group of players..."

But who read the manual? Plenty of people couldn't wait for that. They looked at the choices, picked something familiar like Warrior or Rogue and off they went. They'd learn better but maybe not before they'd soured on the whole idea.

I'm the kind of person who reads the manual from cover to cover before they even install the game. I also did a ton of research online before I went to the store to buy a copy. I knew I wanted to solo because just going online was scary enough without having to actually speak to anyone, so I did my due diligence. It still took me a couple of weeks and several restarts before I finally happened on a class that could, genuinely and enjoyably, solo.

That class was Druid. I swiftly followed it with Necromancer, which was even better. I learned later that the original EverQuest design brief had those two marked as designated solo classes. Over time I came to learn the hierarchy of soloability, Necromancers at the top, followed by Druids, Magicians, Wizards, Enchanters and Bards in increasing order of skill requirement.

You'd think the big ogre would be the tank, wouldn't you? Nope, the ogre's the healer. The frog's the tank.

In truth, any class could solo to the original level cap of fifty - provided the player had the patience of several saints. Yes, even rogues, a class so broken in the base game that it struggled even in a group setting. I soloed my rogue into the twenties. It was not fun but we weren't all that bothered about frivolous things like entertainment back then. I knew someone who soloed a rogue all the way to the cap so it was possible. I'm not saying it was sane. Also that was after a couple of expansions had turned rogues into something more than feeble fighters armed with pointy sticks.

Anyone who stuck around for more than a few sessions soon learned EverQuest was a game of archetypes as well as classes. The manual is astonishingly blasé about that: "When putting a party together, consider the balance of the players in the group. It's important to have strong fighters and mystical spell casters, but it's also a good idea to add a cleric or other type of healer..."

Gosh! You think?

In fact, even in 1999 there were groups that tried to dispense with the services of both healers and tanks, particularly at low levels. I played in some groups that had neither, even as far as the mid-to-late leveling game. I knew enchanters and bards who claimed their speciality was "everything" as they grabbed the tanking, pulling, buffing, debuffing and crowd control roles for themselves.

I was there as main healer because that was the one role they couldn't claim to offer, although some bards would argue even with that. Grouping with players like those in the mid-40s and low 50s was an experience I still haven't forgotten, much though I've tried.

An excellent paladin tank, two pets, suggesting a necromancer and a magician must be safely esconced somewhere to the rear. Someone I don't recognize lurking round the back of the mob. A rogue, I guess. I'm the cleric, out of shot, taking the picture.

The original holy trinity comprised tank, heals and crowd control. Ideally those roles would be filled by a warrior, a cleric and an enchanter but there were several acceptable options for each slot if you couldn't find exactly the class you preferred.

With a group size of six that left three spots and there were plenty of options: buffs and debuffs, spot healing, off-tanking, pulling... and DPS. That was the role you filled last. You probably only really wanted one specialist and that would be a wizard.

There were only two specialist DPS classes to choose from, the other being the rogue. If you took a rogue it usually meant they were a friend or guildmate of someone in the group. Either that or you were feeling sorry for them. Or there was a door that needed unlocking. Some rogues were very good players and people knew it.

You pretty much had to be a good player if you mained a rogue. Mrs Bhagpuss played a rogue who got groups that way, back when reputation mattered, but even so, mostly she got groups by putting them together. If it's your group they have to take you.

Other than that, dps was everyone's responsibility and no-one's. When Yeebo describes the modern-day tank as "basically a crappy DPS", it's not much different to how it was for everyone, once upon a time.

What a tank sees. Mob in my face, about to give me a slap. Mrs Bhagpuss's rogue behind him. Our enchanter, also creator of the custom channel that provided most of my group play for eighteen months, levitating in werewolf form while making excuses in chat . To my left, I think, is one of our regular tanks playing her ranger, which would explain why I'm tanking. Out of sight, another excellent cleric and someone whose name I remember but whose class I forget. It was a long time ago.

As the content got harder and particularly as the locations became more dangerous - in dungeons, especially - group composition solidified. I did run with some all-DPS groups as late as Lost Dungeons of Norrath but they were mostly seen as avant garde theater more than serious gameplay.

While hardcore raiders and dedicated dungeoneers doubled down on only inviting the right class for the job, more casual players became increasingly restless with the strictures imposed by set roles. Even in a groupcentric game like EverQuest you increasingly saw people soloing - or trying to. Quad- kiting, swarm-kiting, reverse-kiting, charm soloing, root-rotting - the overland was rife with people doing their best to avoid having to tank or heal or socialize.

As a player of many alts and most classes, I could see all angles. I loved main healing for a group. I haven't done it for a decade but even now I see it as the zenith of MMORPG gameplay. I also loved the crowd control role, which on a good day felt like pulling the strings for a particularly violent puppet show.

Good as those roles felt when they worked, I can't deny they were stressful. Playing a cleric required a peculiar combination of patience and alertness. I could keep it up for a good session, two or three hours before I tired, but when it came to crowd control, I could only stumble around the foothills of the skill mountain a great enchanter was expected to climb for half that long, at best.

Tanking lay somewhere inbetween. I found it lot more stressful than healing but I felt I had a better grasp of the essentials, taunting and holding aggro, than I did with the Enchanter's intimidating toolset. I still couldn't tank for as long as I could heal. though. Tanking requires a lot of physical effort, hauling the mobs around, turning them, positioning, jumping to someone to grab aggro then scuttling back into your corner.

Down but not out. Let's see a Warrior try that! As a shadowknight I could tank and solo. So long as I wasn't in a hurry.

And the noise! Tanking is so loud. You're right in the center of the action. All the explosions are going off in your face, the weapons are hitting the armor right by your head, the mob is yelling in your ear...

I found it wearing. Very wearing. I didn't not enjoy it but I usually had to be persuaded to play my SK instead of my cleric. Between the two I never went short of offers to group but I didn't always want to take those offers up. When I wanted some me time I soloed. It might be slow but I relished the peace and quiet.

When World of Warcraft launched in late 2004 it kicked open a door that was already half ajar. By modern standards, as we've seen so plainly with the coming of Classic, vanilla WoW wasn't as solo-friendly as it seemed at the time, but by comparison with its contemporaries it was a revelation and a game changer. More than that, a genre changer.

The holy trinity shapeshifted into the form it's taken ever since - tank, healer, DPS. Instead of being an afterthought anyone could provide, damage became king. In a devil's bargain, as Yeebo and Shintar ably describe, tanks and healers retained all the responsibility while losing all the respect. They turned into the kind of parents every teenager resents, needed but not wanted.

It wasn't until Guild Wars 2 broke the mould again, doing away with the trinity altogether, along with aggro, taunting, healing, crowd control and almost everything anyone thought MMORPG combat couldn't get along without, that it seemed there might yet be a third way. Sadly that turned out to be a step too far for most players. These days even GW2 offers a soft trinity and semi-defined class roles.

The only wizard I ever played in twenty years. She got to level 12. I did not like the DPS role at all.

The ironic thing is that after all of that, in most MMORPGs I've played everyone still does DPS, just like in the old days. The main difference is that now it matters. It's not good enough any more to just keep on poking at the mob until you wear it down. Now you have targets to meet, meters to watch and there's a scorecard.

In my serious grouping days, which ended sometime around 2008 or so, the only post-fight report that mattered was whether you and your group were still standing. Every fight was win/lose, not a time trial.

Damage meters were just making their presence felt in EQ when my career as a main healer ended. I installed and ran a parser to see how I was doing, just for my own interest. Groups were beginning to quote numbers at each other although no-one was taking names and kicking butt because of it.

I got out at the right time, I think. Main healing and tanking were stressful enough without some jumped-up time and motion johnny waving a virtual clipboard in my face, asking if I couldn't throw a few nukes between heals or taunts.

I certainly wouldn't argue that, as Yeebo says, "In modern MMOs playing a DPS is arguably much more fun than it used to be". When the only classes I knew that had dealing damage as their main function were rogues and wizards, I used to think it was by far the most tedious of all the archetypes. I never played either class beyond the lowest levels and they weren't much fun even there.

Still, I'm not sure I agree with Yeebo that what we've gained has been a good trade for what we've lost. I still think there's a better option out there. For a while people seemed to be searching for it. Trion, with the soul system in Rift; FFXIV's jobs; the aforementioned freestylings of Guild Wars 2.

Sadly, such innovation seems to have come to an end with the drying-up of the triple-A well. Big money doesn't go to MMORPG design any more and ageing games and niche new entrants all rely heavily on nostalgia and fan service.

I'm under there somewhere.

Given the choice, I'd prefer a system designed to assign specific functions to classes. Every player should be free to solo, duo, group or raid but to do so they should have to make a choice over which of their characters to play. If you want to solo, pick a solo class. If you want to get groups quickly, play a class that groups always need. If you want to do both, play more than one character.

Yes, it's vital everyone should be able to play with friends without artificial barriers getting in the way but having to play a class that fits in with the classes your friends have chosen is neither artificial nor a barrier. It's synergy.

Having all the classes on one character, as in Rift and FFXIV, is the same thing as having separate classes with defined roles, just tidier. And while it sounds great on paper, in practice most people choose to stick with one or two roles anyway, for good reason. Playing well in a game with combat based around archetypes takes skill and skill takes practice and time. Your character may have all the skills but you probably don't.

That's why I end up back at GW2. It's a true casual's game, incredibly forgiving of incompetence, inability and ignorance. You don't have to be good to play and if you are it doesn't help much. No-one even notices.

Its not stressful at all, at least not until you find yourself in a dungeon or a fractal or, god forbid, a raid. At which point you may well find yourself thinking wistfully of the days when everyone had a well-defined role and stuck to it.

In the end I think I probably prefer where we are to where we've come from. I do sometimes miss the structure and the satisfaction of a game with strong archetypes. I miss main healing. And crowd control. But I don't miss tanking. Not at all.

The Numbers Game

I'll try and keep this short because if blogging about blogging can seem a little self-indulgent then blogging about one's own blogging stats verges on the self-obsessed. In my defense, I can only say that I didn't start it.

There was a bit of a discussion in the Blaugust/Blapril Discord yesterday about viewing figures. SDWeasel followed it up with a list of his top five most-viewed posts. It made me realize I hadn't looked at my own long-term stats in years.

I used to pay very close attention to them. Blogger provided a handy graph on the front page and I would watch the peaks and troughs, enjoying the way the average always trended slowly but steadily upwards as Inventory Full grew and developed what seemed to be a consistent audience.

That lasted for several years. Then everything went haywire. The blog started receiving huge spikes of attention, page hits jumping by an order of magnitude. The line on the graph veered crazily skyward, peaking at many times the previous zenith.

It would have been great if those were genuine readers but of course they weren't. Something had changed. Bots had either found my blog or found a way through Blogger's blocks. I spent a while investigating and I did discover where most of them were coming from but there didn't seem to be much I could do about it.

Old school Blogger. For now you can toggle between this and the new style. Each has its merits. And why do I only have seventeen followers? Up from sixteen, where it stood for many years. Once again, figures elsewhere in Blogger tell me I have a couple of hundred.

The bot invasion had an unexpectedly benign outcome; I stopped paying attention to my stats. They didn't mean much any more so why bother? Instead of caring whether my numbers were trending in the right direction I began to focus on the responses I was getting.

Comments have always been the most important form of feedback. There's plenty of bot action there, too, but fortunately Blogger's spam filter is very effective so few see daylight. The ones that appear represent genuine readers and that confirms there's someone out there reading this stuff, at least.

I stopped watching the big picture but I still look at my dailies with some interest. I have no way of knowing how many of the page hits are real readers but when I have issues with bot traffic it almost always goes to much older posts, as do automated spam comments. No clue why. You'd have to ask a botmaster.

As with Wilhelm's monthly analysis of SuperData's reports, it's not necessarily the intrinsic accuracy of the data that matters so much as what it shows by comparison. If the data is consistent in its shortcomings it still provides useful information on trends.

After I'd read SDWeasel's post I took a look at the lifetime stats for the blog for the first time in what must be at least three years. At first I thought they were hopelessly borked, as I'd expected they would be. At the very top, with way more views than anything else, were two posts that I couldn't imagine ever having mattered much to anybody.

According to Blogger, my most-viewed post in the entire time I've been at this game is the New Year's Eve post from 2017. A decent comment thread shows it did get some traction and someone even left a comment as late as September 2018 but I very much doubt it was seen by just under thirty thousand real, live human beings. More like three hundred.

Second on the all time list, with a mere seventeen and a half thousand views, is my first-ever post on Project:Gorgon from December 2013. At the time it got a couple of hundred hits, which was very good back then and I've linked to it in many of the posts I've done about the game since, which probably accounts for a few more.

With all of that, I would guess the genuine views for that post over six and a half years might come to five hundred or so. Then, on February 1 2018, more than 17,000 curious P:G fans just happened to drop by to see what I'd thought of the game five years earlier. Yeah, right.

As was mentioned in the Discord discussion yesterday, having a post linked in other media can bring a huge spike in interest. Posting about popular games also helps. I thought at first that might have accounted for the third entry on the all-time list but it's another fake. It may be a post about World of Warcraft but it's just those bots again.There's a huge spike in early 2018, a month which seems to have been a bot hot spot, which accounts for almost the entirety of the five thousand views.

The fourth entry, though, that's different. It's a post I wrote about Black Desert when that game was flavor of the month. I also mentioned the word "boat" in the title. Everyone and their dog was trying to build boats in BDO at the time and I got a lot of traffic just from google searches.

The graph for that one shows what the numbers for a post that purports to be a guide to a common problem in a popular game can look like. You can see how BDO players were still wondering how to build a boat for several years and some of them were misguided enough to come to me for advice.

That post also tells you in a nutshell why my page views are never quite what they could be. That post sounds from the title as though it might have some practical advice (it doesn't) and it mentions the name of the game, too. That's a rare combination. I don't often write guides and even when I do I tend not to let anyone know I've done it.

Following some advice I read when I started blogging, I used always to include the name of the game I was writing about after the title. Now I hardly ever do, partly because I stopped caring about artificially boosting page views a long time ago but mostly because I've come to care more and  more about how the blog looks and adding the name of a game to the title is aesthetically displeasing. These days I pride myself on being as obscure as possible in my titles, which exist primarily to feed my increasingly frequent musical collations rather than to give anyone a clue what the post might be about.

At this point the eagle-eyed will have spotted some very strong evidence as to why Blogger stats are not to be taken literally. In the full list above, the boat post has 4.9k views. In the detailed pull-out it has 7.62k. All of the results vary like that. I don't know why.

As well as the internal Blogger stats not agreeing with themselves I get a monthly report from Google Analytics which doesn't agree with either of them. The GA figures are always much, much lower. Often by a full order of magnitude.

I think the analytics are probably quite representative of what you might call the real audience for the blog. In April, for example, it seems to show a fairly consistent pattern of fifty or sixty unique visitors per day, which sounds realistic. Blogger routinely shows many times that, usually a couple of thousand. I really have no way of knowing which is closer to the truth but sanity leads me towards the lower figure.

The fifth post on the all-time list is also an all-time puzzle. It's my first post about Neverwinter Online, published back when the game was new. As the graph shows it was consistently in demand all through a long period when, as far as I know, blog-botting wasn't an issue here.

I never understood why people were interested in that post. I tried to work it out but I came up blank. Maybe it's nothing to do with the game. The title is vaguely suggestive. Perhaps it's that.

That's my top five. I won't go into the rest of the list in detail but I will say that I can account for the numbers on at least half a dozen of the top twenty by their having been linked on reddit or Massively or the official forums of the game in question. That always brings in the crowds.

Looking at this stuff is endlessly fascinating but it doesn't mean much. Self-evidently the figures are horribly compromised. And it's not as if they're even coming from different sources - all of them come directly from Google!

In the end I work by feel more than these supposed facts. Some posts get traction, some don't. How many comments they get, how many other bloggers mention them or link to them or spin posts off the ideas they contain, that tells me far more about how "successful" posts are than anything Google sends me.

And the truth is, the audience that ultimately matters is myself. Am I pleased with what I've made? Does it give me pleasure when I read it back? Am I satisfied that my time making it has been well spent?

Smug, self-satisfied git that I am, I can almost always answer "yes" to all those questions. Anything more is sugar.

Fifteen Again

Paeroka has a helpful post up running through some of the many free gifts and bonuses available in various MMORPGs during this time of trouble. She mentions the free questing in Lord of the Rings Online, now extended to May 31st, something I tried and found I didn't like. I find that particular game suits me better the fewer quests I do.

She also has also a nice picture of the free cape available in the Guild Wars 2 Gem shop. I logged all of my accounts in today to grab that one, including the third account that's largely dormant these days and my free to play account that I haven't used in several months. While I was there, I took the opportunity to credit the F2P account with the Saga of the Icebrood episodes, a totally pointless excercise since a) it would require Path of Fire to play, which I have no intention of buying even with the current 50% off and b) I only ever play Living Story/World/Saga content on my main account anyway.

Still, free stuff is free stuff, a point I believe I have made many times before. There's certainly a lot of it about right now but, for once, the giveaway in GW2 isn't related to the lockdown. It's part of ArenaNet's celebrations for the fifteenth anniversary of the original Guild Wars.

That set me thinking. I can't remember precisely when Mrs Bhagpuss and I decided to play Guild Wars. I know it wasn't at launch. We thought it was a PvP title and although by then we'd both had plenty of PvP experience in Dark Age of Camelot and elsewhere, we weren't really interested in another round of virtual fisticuffs.

By April 2005, though, our love affair with EverQuest II was very much on the rocks. Almost everyone we knew had left and we were finding it a real grind, leveling solo and duo in a game that was still designed almost entirely for groups. Plus EQII ran like a pig with a broken trotter on my PC.

My memory tells me we went from EQII back to EverQuest and I also seem to remember that when we were playing Guild Wars it was late summer or early autumn. That would fit the timeline, being maybe four or five months after Guild Wars launched.

I recall reading a piece on some gaming news site about the way the game had taken an unexpected turn from PvP to PvE, attracting a much greater number of players interested in the latter. That piqued my interest. I remember suggesting it to Mrs Bhagpuss as a game we might try as a direct result of that news item.

She agreed, I bought two copies, we tried it and we both liked it. It wasn't really an MMORPG. It arguably became one but in its initial form it was definitely a lobby-based dungeon crawler for PvE players with a well-developed PvP battleground alongside.

Belghast has a post up about what a mistake it is for developers to mix PvP and PvE in the same game. I don't entirely agree but I do think it's definitely better to keep the two modes separate where possible. Guild Wars and GW2 both do that very well but one thing that people rarely mention about the first game was that, at one time, you literally couldn't play the PvE campaign without first playing a little PvP.

Someone will probably pop in and correct me if I'm remembering this wrong. It was around eight years ago when I last made a new character in Guild Wars so my memory is hazy. As I recall, if you're playing Prophecies, as the campaign in the original base game is now known, when you reach the end of the pre-Searing introduction (itself one of the greatest bait and switch openings in MMORPGs, and there's some heavy competition for that), you have to enter a PvP battleground and complete a match.

If you don't you can't carry on to the campaign itself. It's a fairly harmless trial by fire. I don't think you can fail it in any way. You just have to endure it until it's over and then you never have to think about PvP again. But just that once you have no choice.

I remember being mildly irritated but not because I objected to the intrusion of PvP in principle. No, my problem was that PvP in Guild Wars is so insanely fast I can barely even understand what's happening when I watch a match, let alone do anything meaningful if I'm in one.

The game has a spectator mode which I used to use quite often when I played. Watching a match gave me the impression of two teams of tasmanian devils having a fight in an exploding fireworks factory. I did try playing a few matches but it was utterly hopeless. Given that, over the years, I've played with reasonable facility and moderate success in battlegrounds in DAOC, World of Warcraft, Warhammer, Rift, The Secret World, GW2 and EQII, just to name the ones I remember, I think it's fair to say Guild Wars PvP is on a different skill plane altogether.

Guild Wars is currently in maintenance mode but it still celebrates whatever anniversaries and holidays it had running when it was under active development. I read on Massively:OP that for this notable anniversary the handful of people keeping the lights on and dusting the furniture have made a special effort, adding a new boss and some elite skills.

I did think I might make the effort to see that for myself, which is how I came to be back in old Lion's Arch earlier today, but although I managed to find the NPC who hands out the doohickey that lets you fight the new boss it all looked like considerably too much work. I always forget just how complicated everything in the original Guild Wars has to be, involving all kinds of items and NPCs and fiddling about in menus and inventories.

Instead I contented myself with watching the hourly firework display then finding the Xunlai Gift Giver so I could exchange my Birthday Present Voucher for actual birthday presents (told you it was fiddly). I had this year's and last year's in my bag and I was fortunate enough to get a gold and a purple mini for them.

I took those to my Hall of Monuments and placed them on the podium. I'm not sure how many more I need to place there to get another HoM point for my Hall of Monuments in GW2 and it's rather a moot point these days anyway, but you do these things, don't you? Or I do.

It did surprise me that after I'd done that I still had both minis in my bag. I thought placing them meant you lost the use of them for good. There's even an in-game warning that suggests as much. Maybe they've changed it.

If I can summon up the willpower I might log in all my other characters. I believe they all get individual birthday presents. The minis are tradeable so I could, if I was feeling particularly insane, log in both accounts simultaneously and hand all the good minis from my old account to the one I have linked to GW2.

That might be taking the whole free stuff idea a little too far. I don't mind logging into games I don't play to get things I won't use but I have to draw the line at logging in to games I don't play to get stuff I don't need so I can use it to get stuff I still won't use in different game altogether.

It Was Fun For A While

It's week five of Blapril and I can tell from many of the posts I've been reading that it's been a long month for some. I'm not going to link or quote the many expressions of exhaustion, frustration and general "looking forward to not having to do it any more" I've seen, but there have been quite a few.

Every time Belghast runs one of these things he takes great care to emphasize that it's not a competition, that there are no "win" conditions and that the awards are only there for fun. Even so, every time there seem to be quite a few Blaugustians or Blaprilistas who don't seem to be finding it anything like as much fun as they thought it would be.

It reminds me very much of the Seasons in Guild Wars 2's World vs World. Unlike Blaugust or Blapril, those, of course, were intended to be competitive. ArenaNet ran two Seasons, both of which stand out for me as highlights of my time with the game. Then they stopped, saying there would never be another.

The problem was that although Seasons drove participation in WvW to unprecedented levels of engagement while they ran, when they ended that participation dropped off a cliff. Worse, it never climbed back up even to the status quo ante. People burned out and in doing so some of them lost their enthusiasm for the game mode for good.

This isn't what anyone wants. The fundemental purpose of events like Blaugust and Blapril, as I understand it, is to encourage new people to take up blogging, to motivate current bloggers to continue and for everyone to have some fun. Blapril, specifically, came into existence as a positive distraction from the turmoil of Covid19.

The last thing anyone wants is for people to find blogging turning into a duty, a burden or a chore. We're in week five of six but it shouldn't feel like the light at the end of the tunnel coming into sight. It ought to feel more like we're gazing longingly at the last couple of slices of delicious cake left on our plates. Blapril needs to finish with everyone saying "Wow, that was amazing! When can we do it again?" not "Geez, thank god that's over. I thought it would never end".

So, how do you stay motivated if it's all starting to become a little too much? Sadly, I'm not sure I'm really the person to ask. I have the opposite problem.

It's extremely rare for me to have any kind of difficulty either coming up with ideas for posts or finding the enthusiasm to turn those ideas into something I can publish. Most days there's little I'd rather do than write. Only yesterday I was complaining to Mrs Bhagpuss as we took our daily walk that I had so many topics I wanted to write about I didn't have time to play my games as well. It varies according to what's going on but on average I'd rather blog than game, most days.

Even so, there are occasions when I don't really have anything pressing I feel I have to blog about. When there's nothing much in the news and all I'm doing in game are a few dailies, when other blogs are quiet and no-one's teeing up any juicy topics for me to bounce off, there are still a couple of things that can get my blogging juices flowing again.

One is playing about with style or presentation. Regular readers may have noticed that I don't always write in exactly the same way. Sometimes I post pieces that read as though they were intended for a news site or a magazine; journalistic prose, complete with sub-headings and pull-out quotes. Other times what I write could have been pulled straight from a personal journal, all in-jokes, asides and notes to self.

Just a few days ago I wrote this piece on the Block By Blockwest festival in Minecraft. It has a peculiar format in which every line ends with a carriage return. It's not free verse but it looks as though it might be.

I didn't sit down that morning intending to play with the form. What happened was I read the news item on Pitchfork, got an instant idea for a post about it, opened Blogger and started jotting down my thoughts in note form, with no paragraphs or line spacing at all.

When I started to edit I noticed what I'd written had a staccato ryhthm, all short sentences and phrases. Instead of fixing that up and turning it into properly punctuated paragraphs I started making it choppier still, cutting what I'd written into single lines.

It was fun. I re-wrote all the bits that read like normal prose so they'd fit the new format. I played around with ideas to get things looking how I wanted them on the page. At one point the whole piece was right-justified but although that looked good, it made it too hard to read.

It's not a great post by any means. I wouldn't hold it up as a particularly good example of my own work let alone suggest it has much merit in any other context. That's not the point.

This isn't a post about literary quality. It's a post about how to stay motivated when writing a blog and the point is I had a lot of fun writing that post. It amused me to do it that way and I was happy with the end result. Well, I would be. I'm both easily pleased and my own biggest fan, two personality traits that make it very easy for me to stay motivated.

Also, it's a post on a topic that I'm aware is not one that interests all of the people who read this blog. FFS, he's droning on about his terrible taste in music again. Wake me up when he has something to say about games. From the reader's perspective, posts like that can use any help they can get, which makes them a great opportunity to try some new ideas, have some fun.

If you already know you're mostly writing for yourself, it gives yourself permission to make yourself the audience, but while you're indulging yourself, you can also try to make it eye-catching or amusing. After all, when you write on the latest hot game or chime in with your opinions on a current controversy you can rely on the content to carry the weight but if you're off on a jolly the responsibility's all on you.

Bullet points, lists, unusual layouts, illustrations, video clips, anything to break the text up on the page. All of that adds interest, for you and for your readers. Okay, sometimes some of it will annoy someone and not everything you try will fly but you can't please everyone or get it right every time. Your blog is a safe space to experiment, or it should be.

It's not just the look of the thing, either. Try changing the way it sounds.

I like to write in different voices. Sometimes I'm demotic, sometimes formal. I can be chatty or academic. I can also be horribly self-indulgent but that's what blogs are for, isn't it? And there's nothing like an homage to Damon Runyon or Hunter S. Thompson to freshen things up, once in a while. Probably once in a very great while, unless you have a gift for mimcry.

The thing is, it's your blog. Not your readers, precious though they are. And anyway, if you're not having fun, chances are they won't be either.

I said earlier that there were a couple of things that juiced me up when I was feeling dry. Actually, they're both the same thing: variety. And as well as varying the form and the voice I vary the content.

I didn't used to do that much. It's kind of a recent innovation and I've found it liberating. I started posting on music last summer and it's fair to say that I've found I enjoy it even more than posting about games.

My range here on this blog is beginning to expand further. I've posted a couple of times recently about visual media and I talk increasingly often about ordinary life. In Pandemia everyone's doing a bit more of that. It's a difficult situation. We may as well get what we can out of it.

Posting about music motivates me not only because I get to share my discoveries but also because I get to listen to the music while I'm writing about it. That's something you can't really do with games. I find it very engaging to have songs or bands playing as I'm typing stuff about them. It also gives me an opportunity to watch videos as I choose examples to use in the post. It's a fun way to spend lockdown days.

It also feels creative and what motivates me in this hobby more than anything is the creativity. All of the ideas mentioned in this post are basically the same idea: making something that's fun in the making. Form follows function. If it's fun to do it should be fun to read.

That's the best advice I can give for staying motivated: indulge yourself. Have fun. Play.

Blogging isn't work and it very definitely isn't a duty or a responsibility. It's an indulgence, a pleasure and a privelige. Enjoy it! But never feel guilty if you don't.

If blogging's not working for you, if you're not feeling it, skip it. Come back to it tomorrow or next week or next month or don't come back at all. You aren't letting anyone down, not your readers, not yourself. No-one out there wants to read what you write so badly they want you to feel bad for having to write it.

Give yourself permission to enjoy blogging. If Blapril's wearing you down, rest on your laurels. You don't have to do this. You wanted to do this. Now you've done it. Go you!

And maybe when you feel you don't have to write you'll find you want to. People are funny that way.

Five To Conquer

When I saw the replies begin to roll in on Krikket's post about her Five Favorite Games Series I was certain I wouldn't be joining in. I wasn't sure I'd even played five games series, let alone ones I could call favorites.

As I kept reading the posts, though, names began to bubble up from the swampland of my memory. Then the topic came up on the Blapril Discord and in thinking about it some more I found myself with four, then five, titles I had at least played.

Luckily I don't have Wilhelm's scruples on what counts as a series. I agree that including expansions to MMORPGs might be stretching a point but a check on the accepted definition finds "a number of similar or related events or things, one following another" from Cambridge University Press or "a number of things or events of the same class coming one after another in spatial or temporal succession" from Merriam-Webster.

There's no stipulation as to how large that number must be. For the purposes of this excercise, I'm going to allow it to be as low as two, although I don't genuinely believe that's  what we usually mean when we talk about a "series". If it was, we probably wouldn't talk about "pairs" or "couples" instead, would we?

I have considerably fewer qualms about the question, raised again by Wilhelm, of whether we need to have played all or most of the games in a series for it to count as a "favorite". In all seriousness and entirely without irony, I don't see any reason why we should have played any of the games in a series at all to consider it a favorite. 

I could perfectly reasonably include Pokemon based on the posts I've read and enjoyed about the games or Grand Theft Auto because of its cultural significance. I have favorite bands I've barely listened to and favorite authors I've scarcely read, after all. Why should games be any different?

I'm not going to do that, if only because I think I can come up with five series from which I have played at least two games. The first is blindingly obvious, of course.

EverQuest.

My first MMORPG. Responsible for a fundamental change in the direction of my life and for much of my last two decades. 

There are more EverQuest games in the series than you might immediately remember. I've played only two of them although I own three and wish I'd played four. I played EverQuest itself from November 1999 and EverQuest II from September 2004 (beta). I played both of them this morning.

I own a copy of Lords of EverQuest but I have yet to install, let alone play it. It's an offline RTS set in Norrath that came out in 2003 and I just discovered that it's available as a download from a website called MyAbandonware. I've downloaded it, which gets me one step closer to playing it, I guess.

There were three Pocket EverQuest games released for a forgotten device called the PocketPC. I wrote about them less than a year ago. I still haven't gotten around to trying that free trial.

Then there's the console mmorpg EverQuest Online Adventures. I regret never playing that one and hope I still might, even though it sunsetted long ago. There's an emulator project called Return Home I have bookmarked to that end.

And of course there's Landmark, once known as EQ Landmark. Or EQNext Landmark. Or something. I liked Landmark. I don't miss it, though. It was a time vampire.

Guild Wars

A series of two, so far. Speculation on a third seems to have no basis in fact.

I played Guild Wars for something like a couple of months, close to the time it came out. I wasn't all that interested when I thought it was a hardcore PvP title, which was how it was advertized prior to launch. When reviews started talking about the large amount of PvE content, though, Mrs Bhagpuss and I decided to give it a try.

I stuck with it long enough to reach Ascension on two characters. Took me about six weeks. I have the clearest memory of how frustrating some of the fights were. I remember having to stop one Sunday afternoon and go for a long walk because if I'd carried on playing I probably would either have had a stroke or thrown my PC through the window.

Mrs Bhagpuss carried on for a couple of weeks after I stopped, taking her characters into some fiery hellhole that passed for endgame back then. When she stopped too we forgot all about the game for many years, until the sequel went into open beta. At that point I bought all the expansions, nearly finished Eye of the North, messed around in the others and collected points for my Hall of Monuments in Guild Wars 2.

GW2 has been my main MMORPG, on and off but mostly on, for the last eight years.

 Baldur's Gate

Mrs Bhagpuss and I both played BG1 through to the end, including the expansion or add-on, whatever it was called. We used to watch each other playing, often, but we never played co-op. 

My memories of the game are colored by the voice and image pack I downloaded right at the start. I made a custom bard and gave her the character portrait and voice of Daria from the eponymous animated tv show. I wrote about it here.

Mrs Bhagpuss played Icewind Dale, which kind of counts as part of the series. I tried it but didn't like it. Too hack and slash. I bought Baldur's Gate 2, played it and finished it. Mrs Bhagpuss was deep into MMORPGs by then and didn't have any interest in making time for offline games.

I'm currently playing (actually on a break from playing but I'm close to the end) Divinity:Original Sin 2, whose creators are working on Baldur's Gate 3 as we speak. I will buy that and play it. I hope it's better than D:OS2.

Broken Sword

Mrs Bhagpuss and I played the first Broken Sword together when were still a one computer household. When the sequel arrived we played it the same way even though, by then, we already had a computer each. Back in the early eighties, when I was married to my first wife, the two of us played text adventures that way on the ZX Spectrum. I still think it's the best way to play adventure games. 

I've owned Broken Sword 5 for several years but I still haven't played it. Well, I've played a little on my own but I'm waiting for a suitable opportunity for us to play it together. The fact that it requires a Steam account has put a block on that, simply because it adds a level of irritation too many when it comes to setting it up so we can both play. I wanted to install it on a handheld device and take it on holiday but my Windows tablet died, which put a stop to that.

We still do impressions of Nico's fruity French accent sometimes. We're such a caution.

Might And Magic

This is the longest series on my list, with ten numbered games and a load of spin-offs. We only played two of them, VI, Mandate of Heaven and VII, For Blood and Honor. That was in 1998 and 1999, immediately before we discovered EverQuest and MMORPGs, which explains why we never bothered with the rest of the series. 

We both loved Mandate of Heaven. I wouldn't mind playing it again right now. Mrs Bhagpuss often mentions it, particularly when we're out walking and she thinks some piece of farmland looks like somewhere lizardmen might lurk.

Might and Magic seems to be one of those series where the controls and the gameplay change from game to game. We neither of us enjoyed Blood and Honor as much. 

That's always a problem with series of games. Series of novels or movies frequently all stick quite close to each other in style but games tend to careen around all over the place. I think that's why I don't feel the same kind of drive to follow them. It's often better to find a different game that plays closer to what you remember about an old favorite than it is to keep adjusting for the inevitable disappointment and confusion series insist on bringing.

I also notice this list of favorites ended up being a list of series Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together. I don't think that can be a co-incidence.

Smashed Blocked

I wasn't expecting to mention Block By Blockwest again but since I was hyping it I guess I should also post an update about what happened. In a scenario woefully familiar to anyone who ever tried to play a hot new MMO on launch day, the servers managed to stay up for twenty minutes before bursting into flame.

The organizers attempted to salvage the event by whitelisting everyone logged in at the time then closing the doors to newcomers. More controversially, they continued to accept $15.00 payments for V.I.P. tickets, adding those people to the whitelist. Unfortunately for everyone that wasn't enough to mitigate the exceptional demand and the event had to be cancelled before it had really started. The Twitter feed tells the tale as does this NME report.

The organizers aren't giving up. The event has been re-scheduled for May 16th, by which time they hope to have scaffolded their infrastructure sufficiently to withstand the onslaught.

Given that Minecraft has already hosted successful events during April, featuring artists with major-league followings and international reputations (American Football, Charlie XCX) it's very clear that virtual festivals are a viable proposition but unless you have Epic Games' resources, maybe setting up a bill that looks like an actual festival, featuring headliners with a global reputation plus nearly forty support acts, many with very strong fanbases of their own, all performing on three seperate stages in the game and livestreaming on several socia media platforms simultaneously, does smack a little of hubris.

Easy to be wise after the event, I guess. Let's hope the people behind BXBW can get the show up and running in a few weeks' time.

I'm pleased to report that I did manage to catch the first twenty minutes before everything crashed and burned and what I heard and saw was very enjoyable. I had the website up as I was playing EverQuest II. At 3pm Eastern Standard Time, eight in the evening where I am, I clicked on Stage One to hear the opening act, Cannibal Kids.

They were new to me. They have a light, dance-inflected indie sound that made a fine backdrop to my latest run through the Corral.

There was a live feed on the website showing the stages in game. I watched the little blocky figures running around and dancing. It looked like a lot of fun. I wished I was "there". I watched for a minute or tow, then I flipped back and carried on playing EQII with the music in the background.

I was somewhere between the first and second named when Cannibal Kids' short set ended and someone astonishingly foul-mouthed began to hype up the crowd. It was obviously intended to get people's attention. It certainly got mine. Someone at the controls noticed pretty quickly too and the stream was cut after about twenty seconds of "colorful language" to be replaced by two people doing what I guess was a parody of the kind of announcers you hear on American sports radio.

They introduced the second act on Stage One, Dangerboy, who sounded pretty good from the half a song I heard before the stream cut out again. This time it didn't come back.

I tabbed out and checked the website. I closed it and restarted it. I tried the YouTube channel directly through YouTube. Nothing.

Mrs Bhagpuss popped her head round the door and asked if I wanted cheese on toast. I did. We had that and a cup of tea while we watched two episodes of series 45 of University Challenge on YouTube. It's one of our lockdown rituals. We have quite a lot of them by now.

When I came back about an hour later there was a notice up on the website explaining what had happened. My hour's absence had dumped me from whatever whitelist they were keeping. I couldn't get back onto the livestream so I forgot about it, finished my instance, went to bed and played Animal Crossing Pocket Edition.

This morning I checked the site again to see if there were recorded highlights to watch, which is when I found the whole thing had been abandoned.

All in all it was pretty entertaining and quite memorable. I learned a few things. I discovered some new bands. I'll go through the running order before the rescheduled event so I have a better idea who I want to watch next time.

The event raised $5000 in its truncated form, which according to the website, meets their goal. If they were only expecting to make $5k I'd have to wonder a) why they invited such an impressive line-up of performers and b) if they had any realistic idea of what would happen at all.

Oh well. As someone pointed out on Twitter, nobody risked their lives and everyone still has food and shelter.

We fail, we learn, we rise.