Yes, Of Course I Know How To Use A Hammer. You Hold It At The Long End, Right?

 

Just a very quick post on New World. Yes, really. Very quick. I promise. I was out most of the day, visiting my mother. When I got back I did my Guild Wars 2 dailies, then a couple of hours in New World. After that I had to eat and now it's getting late. I'd really like to get back in and do just a little more before the day ends, so yes, this is going to be quick.

Did you see the news about those pesky afkers? Their running into walls days are numbered! To be honest, I've seen almost as many people doing it in GW2 recently as I have on Zuvendis, where there's rarely any significant queue, at least in my playtime.

Why would people fake-afk in a game like GW2, where there are no queues at all? You might well ask, although, if you did, it would tell me you don't play World vs World. There haven't been queues to get into any other part of the game in living memory but WvW frequently has them, particularly at the weekends and especially in Eternal Battlegrounds. 

The maps only have a capacity of around a couple of hundred players or so it's believed. If you get three full squads running around, one for each team, and a smattering of roamers, the shutters come down and newcomers have to wait for someone to leave before they can get in. 

Last week there was a WvW event to tie in with the Alliances week-long beta test that ended up lasting all of two hours and whenever there's one of those we get inundated with PvE players, trying to farm pips for their various Legendary weapon requirements. Or something. I don't pay much attention to it so I'm not entirely clear what they think they're doing.

I do know that they all want to be on maps that have the Outnumbered buff because that gives them bonuses on top of the bonuses but most of them have no clue there are any other maps apart from Eternal Battlegrounds, so they all try to get in there anyway. Afkers aren't always the brightest, it would seem.

 

When ANet introduced the pip system there was an absolute explosion of this kind of behavior. You couldn't move in Citadel (the totally safe area) for people afking hour after hour. 

At that time there was no afk timer to speak of. There still isn't in the PvE maps. I can log my elementalist in after breakfast to do her dailies, tab out while she's loading in, get involved in something else, forget I was going to play her and leave her standing on the bearskin rug in Krennek's Lodge for several hours before I remember and when I tab back she'll still be there.

In response to the complaints from people who wanted to go fight people, not just sit at spawn for days on end, counting their pips, ANet eventually instituted a fairly short afk timer in WvW only. That was when people began running head-first into walls. Mostly they don't now because no-one really plays WvW except the hardcore masochists who haven't decamped to other games but on weekends and when there are bonuses you do see the occasional wall-runner.

Usually I log out of games when I go afk for more than a few minutes. It just seems tidy, not to mention polite. I was curious how long the timer was in New World, though, what with all the talk about shortening it or adding checks or whatever it is they're planning, so this evening I left my character standing around in town while I went to have something to eat. 

I still don't know exactly how long it takes before the game kicks you out but I can say it's not as long as it takes me to eat two baked potatos and a bowl of wholemeal pasta. And make a coffee. And read a few pages of On The Road Reluctantly by Dyan Sheldon (A surprisingly depressing read for a travel book by a children's author.)

In the couple of hours I did get to play today I made a whole bunch of random stuff at every crafting station in Monarchs Bluffs. I love the way the recipes pull straight from your storage but only the storage in that town. It's quite brilliant.

Mostly, nothing much of note happened except a lot of numbers went up, which as many people have noted is key to New World's astonishing success. People love making numbers go up. 

 

The one unusual thing was what happened when I smelted a whole load of iron and hit Smelting skill 20. I got an achievement for that, which didn't surprise me. You get achievements for turning round suddenly in New World. Not literally. Don't go trying it. You'll crick your neck.

What did surprise me was that I also got a title. Titles are much rarer. I only have the same four or five as everyone else, the ones you get for playing the game in the first place and for joining a faction. 

Only now I also have one for being extra super handy with a two handed warhammer. Which is nice. Or would be, if I'd ever used one. My character not only has no skill whatsoever in that weapon, she has never even equipped one. I do own a couple but they're in the bank along with all the other weapons I haven't tried yet.

I have no clue what triggered the achievement unless it's somehow incorrectly linked to the smelting one. I'm fairly sure, although not one hundred per cent, that it appeared at the same time. I was doing all kinds of things around then, though, and there was a bit of lag so who can say for sure?

Presumably it's a bug. I ought to bug report it, I suppose. There is a feedback option in game although I couldn't find a specific bug-reporting tool when I wanted to report the annoying notification window that appears when you leave an area with an event going on before the event ends. 

That one stays until you log out. Even dying won't shift it. I did feed that back but I'd be more motivated to send in bug reports if there was an actual reporting tool. I can't imagine whoever reads the feedback is going to do much about it, if indeed any human ever sees it at all.

Not being one to turn down a free title, my novice hatcheteer and semi-trained sword-and-boarder is out there right now, running around claiming to be a "War Hammer Expert". If anyone asks I'll tell them I was a great Squig Herder in my day.

The other big excitement came when I opened one of the many level-based chests that come from questing and out popped my first ever Rare quality piece of gear. The chest was flagged "Level 23" and I'm only level 20 but I thought I might as well see if there was anything good inside. I've had several nice greens out of these things but never a blue, until now.

Curiously, the item was level 19, making me wonder whether the algorithm is one of those points-based ones, meaning the higher quality stole points from the level and forced it down. EverQuest II has a system that works just like that.

Then again, there's plenty about New World gear I don't yet understand. There's a Gear Score that's supposed to allow for easy comparisons but as often as not I find myself preferring the lower gear score piece I'm wearing to the supposed upgrade because of the specifics of the stat bonuses or the perks. 

I'm not really sure what the point of an automated comparison mechanic is when you have a design ethic that's so nuanced and situational. The blue piece I got is much higher level, much better quality and not surprisingly has a much higher Gear Score than the piece I'm wearing in that slot, but it's Light armor and I'm wearing Heavy, so it's a huge downgrade as protection and the bonuses strongly favor a ranged character, whereas I'm playing a melee.

I put it into storage with all the rest. I'd say one of my characters will end up wearing it some day but of course I can only roll one other character. There are only two character slots.

At least I still have plenty of room to hoard stuff. That's another thing New World gets right. For all the good things about the game I think it's a bit rich of me to complain about a few bugs here and there. So I'll shut up now. 

I said I'd make it quick!

Television, Internet

One of the reasons I started playing MMORPGs was because there was nothing to watch on tv. Until the mid 1990s I'd always been a serious consumer of broadcast television and when I say "serious" I don't just mean I watched a lot of it, I mean I took television seriously.

I didn't just watch it. I talked about it, thought about it, wrote about it, collected it. When home video became a thing in the 1980s I began to build up a library of tv shows, filling my shelves with VHS cassettes the same way I filled the house with books, comics, vinyl and CDs.

And television seemed important, then. Watching was a social act. A bonding ritual. Along with music it was the glue that held society together. Or it was until that all fell apart.

By the time I got around to installing EverQuest in November 1999 I'd already lost faith in the God in the Corner. By then, for a couple of years Mrs Bhagpuss and I had been playing more video games than we watched tv. I'd already all but stopped watching altogether when I stepped onto the wooden platforms of Kelethin for the first time. And fell off.

Falling to my death and losing my corpse on my first evening did not deter me. I stuck with EQ and that was that for television for more than a decade. I almost literally did not look at a screen, other than my CRT monitor, for wel over ten years.

I remember vividly how far removed I became from the televisual experience. It wasn't just that I didn't know the shows any more, it was that my brain ceased to be able to interpret the images. On the very rare occasions when I visited someone and saw a tv playing I felt like Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, only instead of being fascinated I was repelled.

With deep irony, I timed my withdrawal to co-incide almost exactly with the explosive growth of of non-broadcast television and the concomittant, meteoric rise in both the quantity and the quality of available content. Television entered a new and radically transformed golden age and I missed it all.

Luckily, along with the new direction came new technology. Television joined books and music in the long afterlife of the culture. You no longer had to be there. You could wander up later. You'd miss the zeitgeist, sure, but we all missed Dickens' moment yet we still read him. Okay, I don't read him but the point stands. I could, if I wanted.

I still don't watch broadcast TV. As best I can tell it remains, for the most part, abominable. Also inconvenient. What brought me back to the wider form was the discovery I could download television to a pocket device and watch it on a tiny screen in my hand. A very, very tiny screen. Less than two inches square.

I don't think I have that MP4 player any more but it gatewayed me back into television. Over the years I've stared at any number of small screens, from my trusty iPod Touch up to an ironically "gigantic" ten inch Windows tablet and back down to my current platform, Amazon's reliable-if-annoying Kindle Fire.

These days I'm in the habit of watching whole runs. Not in the now-traditional box-set binge over a lost weekend but in hearty bites over a few weeks. I watch in the late evening, in bed, for a couple of hours. It began as thirty minutes right before I went to sleep but the habit has grown. Now I often go to bed early just so I can watch more stuff for longer.

At first I ran through some old favorites, sitcoms mostly. I found them on YouTube, where the quality varied wildly. I learned a lot, both about the history of the medium and the way that long-form, episodic narrative works. It's far easier to see the structure when you watch in a week what would have originally taken a year.

I worked my way through television's comedic back pages, all the way from sixties classics like The Dick Van Dyke show to 90s obscurities like Boston Common, trying to give myself an education in what I'd missed but eventually the poor quality of the recordings on YouTube began to wear at my resolve. I'm no graphics nazi but I do like to be able to see peoples' faces. Like everyone else I turned to box sets, which I watched on the seven-inch portable DVD player I bought to take on holiday.

And then I got Amazon Prime. Jeff Bezos kept offering three months for free and I kept resisting but one day I had some stuff to buy and there was postage and I thought, "Why not? I can cancel it later". Only, I didn't cancel it. I started watching stuff. Often, ironically, shows I already owned on DVD but hadn't gotten around to taking the shrink-wrap off yet because it had only been five years, well maybe ten, and who has time to unwrap stuff?

Streaming was just so much more convenient and the HD picture was so much better. Over the last couple of years I've run through most of what appeals to me on Prime. It's a good selection but it's quite surprising how fast you get through it.

I always like to have the next thing lined up when I near the end of a series because coming to a dead stop can be jarring. Right now, though, there's not an awful lot left that's calling out to me, which is how I let myself be talked, once again, into a subscription, this time to one of Amazon's extra channels. 99p a month for three months, that was the deal, and there was one show on there I really wanted to watch - Doom Patrol. I'd pay a lot more than 99p to watch that.

Only, now I have watched it. It was great - even better than I hoped it would be, let alone than I expected. But it's over now until they make some more and with things as they are, who knows when that might be?

I have a complete box set of Veronica Mars waiting so I have my supply lines secured but that means getting the little DVD player out and I don't want to. To avoid having to do that I was even wondering whether to subscribe to a second streaming service. I'd really like to finish watching Umbrella Academy on Netflix. I started last year but I can only watch it on Mrs Bhagpuss's PC (for a very uninteresting reason I won't bother to explain), which makes it too awkward to bother.

As I was dithering over that decision I was also scrolling through the shows Prime was trying to foist on me. The recommendation algorithm there is... not good. And then I noticed something called AFK. It seemed like a very odd choice for title. Out of idle curiosity I clicked on it and read

Well, that sounds... embarassing. Still, I don't know, maybe it might not be completely terrible? It had four stars from customer recommendations, for what that's worth (not much). I read some of the reviews:

"If you've ever played an MMORPG then you can relate to this series. It is low budget, but don't let that run you off. This little gem is very well written and some of the actors are amazingly good."

"This is one of those low budget finds you sometimes discover on Amazon, very short episodes but its a real winner of a show"

"Honestly, at first, it was kinda bad. It's clearly low budget and I just had it on in the background 'cause was a cool concept. Gamers getting stuck in the game. Nothing groundbreaking, but around halfway through the first season the quality improved massively. And by the end of the second season, I was hooked. "

And I have to agree. It is low budget. Some of the actors seem to have more enthusiasm than experience. The script can be a little on the nose. But the characters are very well conceived, much of the acting is convincing, there's a surprising amount of nuance, the narrative arc is sound and a good percentage of the jokes land.

All in all it's a lot better than I expected. It also raises a lot of very interesting questions about the nature of the hobby itself. Nothing we haven't all thought and talked about plenty of times, but framed in a context that casts new light on some old topics. It made me think, which is above and beyond the call for something like this, I'd say.

The AFK project began as a web series, a whole other part of the tv forest I have yet to explore. In truth, I've been keeping well clear of it until now for fear of what I might find. As a lifelong advocate of the DIY ethic in music, comics and writing, I have no idea why I would do that, other than that I can be an idiot sometimes.

Anyway, I consider this a lesson learned. I need to cast my net wider and keep my mind more open. There seem to be a few more of these shows floating around. I'll see if I can't make some space in my extremely busy schedule and give them a try. 

Recommendations welcome.