Here Comes The Train: Blaugust 2019

"And so it goes on with the show
And all I hope, hope all your dreams will come true"

Pavlov's Dog

It's that time of year again. Dust off the keyboard, shake the cobwebs off the mouse, bring out that old lever-arch file filled with ideas you never quite finished...

Blaugust is back!

Ok, not quite yet but it's coming. Belghast says so and he should know. He invented it.

If you hang around this corner of the blogosphere you're going to be hearing about Blaugust a lot. Naithin and Izlain are already talking about it and now so am I. Expect a lot more of this.

Just to summarize, Blaugust is a Festival of Blogging. It started out as a challenge to post every day in August and over time it morphed into something much greater and grander than that.

The modern Blaugust incorporates lapsed celebrations like Developer Appreciation Week and the Newbie Blogger Initiative. It offers opportunities to begin or begin again. It asks you to do no more than you feel but to feel you can do what you want.

For active bloggers Blaugust can be a welcome challenge. Can you hit that mark running, each and every day? For those gone dormant, living in slow-time, it offers a structure, a scaffold, something to haul on as you pull yourself upright. For everyone who sends postcards to the void and wonders if there's anyone out there it brings the noise.

With the incorporation into Blaugust of the NBI this is also the very best time to start that blog you've been thinking about for weeks, for months, for years. Pressing Publish for the first time can be scary but Blaugust has your back.

Bel's even come up with a schedule. As regular readers will know I love a schedule the way a feral cat loves a nice, hot bath with lots of shampoo. But not everything has to be about you, does it, Bhagpuss? And Bel's schedule is so pretty!

If that's not enough belt there's also the braces of Mentorship. A whole bunch of folks who've been at this for a while have volunteered to have themselves tagged on Discord so you can tap them up for advice. I'm one but don't let that put you off. Expect a lot of old war stories you've heard before and advice that works for pretty much no-one but me. (First piece of advice for free, don't go hog wild on the metaphors).

For the full skinny read Belghast's post but for quick here are the links:

Sign-Ups
Discord Invite
Media Kit

I'm likely to be home all August for medical reasons so I have no excuse to miss a day. One serious piece of advice I would throw out there, though, is if you make targets for yourself and miss them that is absolutely fine.

Every year a whole slew of people sign up and some of them we barely hear of ever again. That is okay! Blaugust is about experimenting, trying things out, getting the feel of what blogging is like (if it's new to you) or how it could be different (if you're already in).

If it's not working for you, take a break, try it another way, rethink. If it's stressing you out then, really, stop. This isn't an ironman challenge. It's a co-operative, collaborative social event that's 100% for funzies. (Probably don't say funzies if you're 60 years old like I am, just another freebie I'm throwing out there).

Last year Blaugust saw 88 sign-ups, at least according to my count. I recorded them all in a sidebar called "The Crew", whose derivation I revealed in a post I wrote as recently as this June. Should have called it Rocket 88. Missed a trick there.

In my final piece of mentoristic advice for the day, that post was one of my very favorites of the year so far. I worked really hard on it and it came out even better than I hoped. It got no reaction whatsoever. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Once before, I built a second post out of how another had failed and Gevlon turned up in the comments to take me to task about it. He'd misunderstood my reason for writing the post but he still had a point.

Blog posts aren't your babies. You don't have to protect them. They're wild. Let them fly free. The best will go unremarked while the ones you toss out in an idle coffee break will live a life of their own that outstrips anything you could have imagined. That's just how it is. Ya gotta ride it out.

Speaking of Gevlon, currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file, if you're reading this, have you considered that Blaugust might be the time for a comeback? Now, that would break my irony meter. But go on, you know you want to. I can buy another one.

This is running way longer than planned.  Bit of a trope here.  Let's wrap it up.

Hoping to see an even bigger turnout than last year. Let's see if we can crack the ton this time!

It's Back! They're All Back! : Blaugust, NBI, DAW

Just a short post today to thank Belghast for once again stepping up to host the traditional posting bonanza that is Blaugust. Even better, this year he's had the brilliant idea to combine Blaugust with two other staples of the blogging calendar that I think we missed last year - the New Blogger Initiative (aka NBI) and Developer Appreciation Week.

Bel has all the details in his opening post over at Tales of the Aggronaut. There's a sign-up form there so he can estimate numbers and also a link to the Blaugust Discord.

Going off on a tangent, I have to confess Discord weirds me out a little. Nothing to do with what it's used for but more the disturbingly conversational way the app itself goes about updating. I get the feeling it's talking to me as though it thinks of me as someone it knows personally but doesn't much like. I also get the impression Discord thinks I'm not very bright because it tends to jolly me along as though I was a small child.

It's probably my age but I'm not keen on software that personalizes itself. I don't allow Cortana to speak or indeed do anything for me and I don't like to address Google out loud as "Google" as my phone asked me to do yesterday. I'm all for AI that works like AI in movies and books but this kind of pretend personality is all a bit uncanny valley as yet.

I'm going to have to get used to it, I guess. Variety (Variety!?) reports SuperData as claiming Discord poses a major threat to Steam.

“Previously, Steam was invaluable not only because of its storefront but because it facilitated social connections between players,” said SuperData research manager Carter Rogers... Now, Discord is where gamers’ main friends lists live, not Steam.”

Valve has noticed the competition and taken steps to do something about it. The new Steam chat UI looks oddly familiar...

So, Discord it is. I imagine I'll get used to it.

I also volunteered as a Mentor. When Syp ran the first NBI he invited me to take that role, which was exceptionally flattering seeing as how I'd been blogging for less than a year at the time. Of course I did have a decade and a half of apazine experience behind me and apazines are just offline blogs, but I don't think Syp knew that...

Anyway, I'm mentoring for Blaugust, not that I have much of an idea what that entails. Looking back at my previous posts on "How to Blog" I suspect it will mostly mean giving out advice that I don't follow myself. When was the last time I backed this blog up, eh? EH??

The official start of the festivities is July 25th when the Prep Week starts so I'm a getting a bit ahead of myself but the main reason I'm posting this is for the NBI side of the house, to give anyone who might be thinking of dipping a toe in the blogging waters a bit of a head start. Each previous NBI has turned up a number of new (or new to me) blogs that went on to be some of my most enjoyed and most read and I'm hoping 2018's event will bring out a few more, or bring back a few that have lapsed.

The original NBI was focused on MMO blogging but this time around anything goes. I've been thinking for a long time about starting a second blog, somewhere I could link the huge number of odd and seldom-seen music videos/live clips I find when I'm trawling YouTube. Maybe I'll start that up - it could be quite low maintenance.

If you've ever thought of starting a blog now's the time! And even if you haven't, maybe now's the time anyway!

The Scattershot Approach : NBI

Shintar of Going Commando has a post up for NBI 2016 which is filled with really excellent advice and suggestions for the would-be "narrow-focus" blogger. Much of it is equally relevant to those of us whose approach to blogging is somewhat more, shall we say, scattershot.

"Scattershot", as it happens, was the name of the first Op Ed column I ever wrote for a fanzine, way back at the beginning of the 1980s. It seems my attitudes and approach to life haven't changed as much over getting on for four decades of supposed adulthood as I might have fooled myself into thinking.

J3w3l has also written a post for the NBI in which she talks about the importance of having a suitable space from which to blog. My own "nest" isn't  quite as chaotic as the one in the photograph that illustrates her piece but it does reflect my scattershot outlook to organization.

I tend towards design by accretion. My workspace is a concrete palimpsest and my blog posts are sliding block puzzles. This paragraph is being inserted retrospectively to give some much needed structure to what had become a scrambling sprawl.

Onscreen Image Papertiger Sound - Tiny Robot Love

That's a thing about blogging. It's not technical writing (Hi Aywren) nor are you writing a novel (hat-tip to Superior-Realities). You don't have to stress over structure or angst about architectonics. Bang it out, heave it around, gussy it up at the end.

In the end I pretty much only have one rule about what I post on my own blog: does it entertain me when I read it back? If it amuses or interests me then I believe there's a fair chance it will do the same for others.

That's why, reading Shintar's suggestions, one early paragraph really resonated with me:

I continue to be surprised by the amount of gaming blogs I see that hardly ever talk about what their writers have actually been up to in terms of gaming. I suspect that some might be afraid that mere descriptions of their latest online adventures might sound too mundane or even boring, but part of the fun of practising your writing skills is making the mundane sound exciting

I couldn't agree more. As a reader I relish bloggers who write entertainingly and enthusiastically about the games they play. If those are games that I play as well then that's a bonus but I devour every TAGN post on EVE and every installment of Bio Break's retro gaming series with as much enthusiasm as though they were writing about GW2 or EverQuest.

If you write entertainingly people will want to read what you write. It really is that simple. Well, it's that simple provided you can get them to look at what you write in the first place, but that's what the NBI is here for. You don't have to be grammatically perfect or poetically profound. Your authentic voice will forgive a multitude of technical flaws although if you prefer to be deliciously arch, well, that works too.

So far 2016's intake has been small but the blogs that have joined have all been very interesting reads. The latest addition to the Class of 2016 is Mignon of Cookie Cutter Monks. I think that's our first ever tumblr blog but I could be wrong...

And now, in this Live demonstration of  blogging (working without a net here, people) I'm finally getting around to what I intended to post about when I finished my morning cup of tea and opened with that link to Shintar about an hour and a half ago. What I've been playing.

Except, you know what? I think I'm going to stop here and split that off into a post of its own. You can do that sort of thing when you have a blog. You should try it sometime. Yes, you!



 

Roll Call : NBI 2016

The NBI train is starting to roll. Lots of posts popping up, Doone is doing a bang-up job working on a permanent new home for the organization and at last we have our first actual New Bloggers!

Welcome 

Just East of West

The Wild Core Chronicles

Shadowz Gaming Blog

I'm Not Squishy

All added to the blogroll and tagged NBI 2016.

And welcome back

Pleasant Gamer

I thought that last one sounded familiar. In fact I was certain I knew the name. When I went to add it to the roll Blogger wasn't having any of it. I scanned down the list and sure enough, there's Pleasant Gamer already, tagged NBI 2015. 

I'll be adding all this year's intake to the Blogroll as they arrive, just like last year and the year before that. There are currently just under 100 blogs on my blogroll. I don't know if Blogger has a limit. I think I might find out soon though.

I'd just like to add a few words on the subject of Blog Rolls. If you're the kind of blogger who cares about things like page views, a good blog roll is a fantastic asset. 

Blog rolls are incredibly useful for gauging the temperature of the blogosphere and spotting hot topics that are crying out for you to bandwagon enrich with your own eloquent and incisive insights. A blogger in possession of a good blog roll is never in want of an idea for a post. It's not plagiarism - it's community spirit!

It's a metaphor, alright?

Better yet, a good blog roll is a destination in itself. People will use your blog as a stopping-off point in their daily round or flip to it when they're bored at work just so they can carom off onto whichever blog on your list might just have updated. I used to do it all the time before I had my own blog and I still use my own blog roll that way when I don't want to log into Feedly for some reason or other, which happens more often than you'd imagine.

My blog roll has grown to a seriously unwieldy length, although nothing like the insane descender of my Tag Tail. I used to worry a little about that but I'm past it now. Blogger seems immensely resilient as a platform when it comes to untidiness, which is one of the main reasons I like using it. Everything new floats to the top without my having to do much, or indeed anything, to keep it that way.

On the other hand, you could go for a super-clean, minimalist look and have just your very, very favorite blogs on the front page. The ones that you really recommend. Might not make many friends that way but some people have standards to maintain, I understand that, even if I don't have any of my own...

If you go for Wordpress or self-host then you'll have a lot more work to do if you want a blog roll that updates in real time. It certainly can be done - Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob (who posted his own thoughts and advice on blog rolling for the NBI of 2012) has such a blog roll and he's blogged in some detail about the fun he had getting it to work, too. 

You don't have to have a blog roll but I never think a blog looks quite complete without one. In Blogger, at least, they are quick and easy to set up and maintain and they really have no downsides that I'm aware of. Then again, I never think a blog looks complete without pictures and a lot of people would disagree with me on that one...

All About You : NBI, EQ2

I don't mean to jump the train to blogger's ennui but yesterday I did find myself coming up oddly short of a peg on which to hang my usual Sunday post. Nothing to do with a disconnect from the games or writing about them. Nothing to do with lack of desire or interest or enthusiasm. All of those are present and in good order.

It was laziness, that's all. I had several ideas rolling around but all of them would take a few hours to polish up to a post and it was Sunday and I'd been working all week and I mostly wanted to kick back, run around Norrath and Tyria and not have to think too much. 

So I spent Sunday morning in Skyshrine, working through the heroic signature questline there and Sunday afternoon and evening in World vs World. Doing not very much of any interest or importance to anyone, even to me.

I remember when the Withered Lands update arrived and Skyshrine along with it. Mrs Bhagpuss and I worked through the long, complicated solo questline that took us from where the griffin from Thurgadin landed to where the griffin to Skyshrine takes flight. It seemed to take forever. It probably took at least a couple of weeks. It might have been a whole month.

When you come to a new zone that's been added at level cap there is often a step change. Your old gear doesn't really cut it any more because everything past the first starting area has been tuned for the new normal. Progress slows to a crawl.

I like that. I find it encouraging and motivating, even when, as with Withered Lands, the step is a high one.

As well as slowing leveling down by a factor of five, Withered Lands was the update that introduced Advanced Solo zones, modified versions of Heroic (aka full group) Dungeons tuned for at most two players, more normally one player and an NPC Mercenary. When we finally got to Skyshrine we stepped into the contested (aka  open world) dungeon, where our backsides were neatly packaged and handed back to us by the first few mobs, as expected. 

In the olden days that would have been an end of it. I remember, for example, how The Hole roadblocked our progress in the Sentinel's Fate expansion back in 2010.

Advanced Solo changed all that. In modern EQ2 the EQ stands for equality. Equality of opportunity. No-one has to miss out on the art department's hard hours just because they don't have any friends. We all get to stroll through the galleries, together or alone.

So, I'd seen all the sights before, which is why I didn't take any screenshots yesterday. Usually, if I'm thinking of a post I'll take some shots for insurance but I was feeling lazy so I didn't bother. Plus, neither Withered Lands nor Skyshrine is much of a visual feast. The clue is in the name as far as the outdoor part goes and Skyshrine itself is one of those maps where someone thought it would be a good idea to use a filter, in this case a dark, red filter that makes everything look dull and smoky.

That aside, I had enormous fun, working through the questline from the wiki walkthrough, one-shotting whole groups of heroic Awakened with my bow, thanks to the mighty multi-attack and crit bonuses from my overlevelled gear, burning through bosses long before they could pull any of the tricks the wiki warned me about.

I do purely love being overgeared and overlevelled for old content, especially when I was badly undergeared and underprepared for it when it was new. It's one of the greatest strengths of the MMO genre.  

I can't begin to count the number of times knowing I'd become powerful enough to do something that was out of my reach before has brought me back to an MMO for another few weeks or months. Indeed, now that we have had the opportunity to compare, I prefer it as a gameplay model to the kind of always-at-level scaling that's becoming the norm.

So, I pottered through Skyshrine for a few hours and when I'd had enough and my bags were too full I meandered back to GW2, where I did my dailies on three accounts and then spent the rest of the day in WvW. Which was quiet. Very quiet. Didn't take many screenshots there, either.

It was all thoroughly good fun but it didn't give me much in the way of inspiration. All day as I played I had it in the back of my mind that I "ought" to be posting. I very nearly always post on Sundays, usually in the morning. But I didn't want to. I was feeling lazy. 

I toyed with a couple of ideas for slapping up something short but I couldn't come up with anything that seemed like it would work so in the end it got to be evening and I hadn't posted and I knew I wasn't going to and that was fine. I don't have a schedule. I don't want to have a schedule. If I don't feel it I'm not going to do it.

Tomorrow is the start of this year's NBI although posts related to it have been popping up all over the place for the last couple of weeks. This is one of them. Sort of.

There is, to my way of thinking, altogether too much angst around the hobby right now. The hobbies I might say, both playing MMOs and blogging about them. If there's one message I'd like to put across to anyone about to take the plunge it's this:

It's YOUR blog. 

You get to decide when you post, what you post, how often you post, whether you post. I can't speak for the other platforms but in Blogger at least you also have a measure of control of who can comment and even over who reads everything you write. 

Yes, you can have a blog that only people you invite can see - a bit like guild chat I guess. I don't recommend that but it's a thing, if you want it. The important part to remember is

It's YOUR blog.

It doesn't belong to your readers or your commenters or The World. It doesn't belong to whoever owns and operates the platform. You can pick it up and move it somewhere else if you want and if one day you find the game's not fun any more you can take it down and that's an end of it because

It's YOUR blog.

And because it's yours you can skip a day or a week or a month or a year and then, when the mood or the muse takes you, you can spin it back up. You can opine on the burning issues of the day or burble on about your characters or what you're doing to the back yard (Hi, Belghast - I really like those posts, by the way...). 

Just because you got into blogging via the gateway drug of reading MMO blogs doesn't mean you have to write about nothing but MMOs (even though I do). As I think I mentioned

It's YOUR blog.

Write about what you want. Write when you want. Write how you want. And if you don't want to write then don't. 

It's a lot less stressful that way and a lot more fun.

NBI 2016: Incoming!

It's that time of year again! Or to be precise it's past that time of year. The great tradition that is The Newbie Blogger Initiative usually rolls around in May but this year it's kicking off a month late.

It looked for a while as though we'd be skipping a year but in the end Doone stepped up to the plate. Thank you, Doone!

I'm a bit vague on exactly what's planned but I'm sure it'll all come together somehow. The forums are still up and running, there's a Twitter feed and even something called Discord, about which I know nothing. I'd never even heard of it before. I'm guessing it's some kind of voice chat...

If you've ever read a blog and thought "I could do that" or even "I could do better than that" now's the time to prove it. Go on, give it a go! Blogging may be a whole lot of things but one thing it's not is hard to start.

The easiest way is to just grab yourself a free Blogger or WordPress account and follow the instructions. If you get stuck (you won't) just ask!

The NBI Head Office

Blogging has a fairly high turnover/attrition rate. If you read blogs you'll have noticed that. As blog readers we all need a constant stream of new blood and you could be it! Doesn't that sound appealing?

The NBI has a pretty good record for helping people to get started and supporting them through those early days and weeks. It certainly beats spinning a new blog up out of nowhere and hoping someone notices. Every year sees some great new blogs that go on to run and run. And some that don't but that's fine too. It's not for everyone but you won't know until you try, will you?

I'd particularly encourage anyone who already comments on blogs to make the move to a blog of their own. It really is a natural progression. I always click through new names in my comments in the hope that the link will go to a blog I haven't read before. When it does, in most cases I add it to my blogroll and when it doesn't I'm always just a little bit disappointed.

Here's looking forward to a June filled with lots of new clicks and no disappointments! Now 
let the blogging begin!

Catching A Wave: #NBI 2015

When it comes to giving tips to each year's new NBI intake it's often a struggle to think of anything that hasn't already been covered, not least by yourself, last year and the year before that. Of course, since the target audience is supposedly people new to blogging you might feel safe in assuming they haven't read your words of wisdom from previous years and it certainly won't do any harm to dust them off, make a few corrections and additions and offer them up again.

Murf did that with his excellent and entertaining piece on grammar and sentence structure. In linking to Murf, like I just did, I was offering a practical demonstration of one of Aywren's Tips for Connecting to the Blogging Community, namely "if you read a blog post that inspires you to respond with your own post on the same topic, link to that original post or to other posts on a similar topic". That's great advice.

You can even go a stage further and do a whole post made up entirely of links. It's a public service other bloggers will appreciate, both as readers and when you link to them and send them traffic. At any given time there will always be someone performing this welcome and often under-appreciated role. Tipa used to do it, then Spinks. Currently J3w3l has taken it on and is doing sterling service despite Wordpress's best efforts to thwart her.

One thing most regular readers of blogs will come to notice after a while is that trends and topics move through the blogosphere like waves rolling onto a beach. Sometimes the wave begins far out to sea, on some blog you don't follow or in an interview with a dev for some game you never played, other times it surges up unexpectedly right in front of you in your rss feed. Wherever the wave begins, before long all your blogroll boats are bobbing.

It's an easy in to a day's posting to ride that wave and bob along with the rest. If you watch the waves closely, though, you may see the hidden rhythm of the tide as separate waves roll back, under and across one another, gaining or losing strength as they absorb each other or dissipate. Topics, trends and themes throughout the blogosphere tend to demonstrate both synchronicity and synergy, which isn't surprising when you consider we are all reacting to subsets of the same stimuli.

Right now, there's a clearly-defined boost to the effect, caused by the multiple NBI Talkback Challenges and Screenshot Safaris. Often, though, it can seem almost magical. There's little in blogging more satisfying, to me at least, than the sensation that you're making connections between ideas as they hum and spit across the zeitgeist, the feeling you get when the architectonics of a post that will weave them all together begin to coalesce.

On a good day it feels like bottling lightning. The words tumble from the keys almost faster than your fingers can follow. Other times it's plain hard work. Sometimes those ideas that seemed so lucid and  transcendental in the mind struggle against codification. They need to be wrestled down onto the page, where they lie inert; defeated and flat.

And sometimes what comes out seems to have no connection to what went in. You look at what you've written with confusion and surprise. This post is one of those.

I sat down to write about Exploration in MMOs, bringing in the "What Made You A Gamer?" NBI Talkback Challenge and the whole repeatable content furore instigated by the WoW Dev Shoots Self In Foot interview. I was going to weave such a tapestry out of threads suggested by Gaming SF, Kill Ten Rats, Tobold, In An Age, The Rykter Scale and more. I had screenshots ready from GW2 and Dragon Nest Oracle, where I was going to use the patina of lichen on the red roof tiles and the angle of the wooden shutters on the windows to illustrate the ineffable nature of both compulsion and delight.

And then I wrote this.

So here's my NBI Blogger Tip for 2015: when the post you write turns out to be different to the post you thought you were going to write - just go with it. You can always write that other post another day. Although the chances are you won't. The waves are never still.

Prog Rocks : Everquest

The Open Beta for Everquest's third round of Progression Server fun has been up and running for a few days now. As Wilhelm observed, now they've been freed from the shackles of the Sony Megacorp, Daybreak Games seem determined to demonstrate their fleet-footedness and general joi-de-vivre. Everything is careering along at a breakneck pace that would have given the old SOE terminal whiplash. As far as I know there's no official launch date for Ragefire but I would bet on it being sooner rather than later.

As the years roll on, I am becoming increasingly certain that my days of doing volunteer Quality Assurance work in my leisure time are behind me, most especially for projects that I plan to play when they go live. My attempts to grab one of the dropped beta portals for the next round of Heart of Thorns testing in GW2 were desultory at best. Where some people devoted the entirety of their playtime for day after day until they got lucky I managed less then two hours.

Don't listen to Nusback. He's just our Belts guy. I'm your real Guildmaster!

Someone said in map chat that today is the last day the portals will drop and still it literally did not even occur to me to go and have one last try. When a couple of people linked their purple portals in chat at Fire Elemental this morning my immediate reaction was "Congrats! Now you get to test unfinished content on a temporary character!" I may even have said as much in /map.

As we move uncertainly into the era of buy-in betas, Early Access and the rest it seems likely that my interest in beta-testing will be limited to MMOs that are only available in that form, that are likely to remain so for a good while and that don't require me to do much more than give an email address to apply. Other than that I reckon I can manage without, thanks.

There's an NBI Talkback Challenge going on concerning Early Access vs Kickstarter to which I guess this post is some kind of response. Kickstarter doesn't interest me greatly. I don't have much faith that anything very significant will come out of it. I see it either as a way to place a long pre-order for projects that look solid and which offer good perks at an affordable price or as a way to express solidarity, as I did with both Project:Gorgon and Massively OP.

Oh come on! I can get through there! I'm a dwarf fer Brell's sake not an Ogre.

Other than that Kickstarter campaigns are a kind of low-involvement entertainment in and of themselves. Crowfall has been fun to follow, for example, regardless of how the game eventually turns out, as was EverJane before it. In the end any real choice and certainly any meaningful emotional commitment won't arrive until there's something I can actually play, and I don't mean a tech demo.

When it comes to Early Access, I'm a lot more interested. As I commented after the The Mystic Mesmer's post on the subject:

"Early Access is just a very straightforward purchasing decision like any other. The unfinished game is a product/service that you can examine and accept or reject according to whether you think it’s worth the price being asked. The only real problem (particularly for consumers who are not interested in buying unfinished games) is whether a wide acceptance of Early Access will lead to a drop in availability of “Finished Quality” products."

The apparent commercial and to some degree critical success of barely started, let alone finished, games like H1Z1 may set warning flags for those who prefer a polished product but it's still Skyrim and GTA5 that make the big headlines and the big bucks so I feel we're safe from any kind of sea change away from quality finished product for the time being. On the other hand, when Microsoft announces the end of discrete versions of Windows in favor of the kind of on-the-fly patching MMO players have come to know and love then I guess anything could happen.

Did the cracked staff go out of fashion or what?

With all that rattling around in the background, today I finally got around to making a character on the EQ Prog Beta. Since I definitely plan on playing it when it launches, albeit sporadically and to little purpose, I'm sure, it seemed like a good idea to download the client and make sure it worked, which it does.

I have it installed on a 64GB USB stick (it uses about 10GB) so I can in theory play it on my Tablet. I'm already playing EQ2 on the Tablet in my lunch hour now and then so I'm guessing EQ should run okay. So far the only MMO that won't play nicely with the Tablet is GW2, which won't even let me update the client.

I made a dwarf warrior and spent a quarter of an hour getting her out of Kaladim - and that was with the in-game map we shouldn't really have. Another fifteen minutes killing decaying skeletons and goblin whelps just in front of the gates took me to level two, at which point I logged off. It still has the magic but I'm saving my energy and excitement for a permanent character.

I might log in again while the beta lasts. There's some kind of reward for participation, most likely a bag, that will be redeemed when the game goes live. Well, sometime after the game goes live. Daybreak will decide what it is and when we get it. They're very clear on that in the new, plain-speaking style they seem to have adopted and which, I think, is going down quite well with their core audience.

They don't say how many of the tokens we need to acquire, which is very Classic EQ, but at least, unlike the GW2 portals, its a very common drop. I was getting one for about every three kills. While I was playing a serverwide broadcast announced that the progression-required raid target, the White Dragon Lady Vox, had been killed. The victor popped on to general chat to confirm that yes, he'd just soloed her and her loot was rotting if anyone wanted it.

The shape of things to come? Let's hope not. Even if it is, though, it's not going to affect me any. I very much doubt I'll get further than Blackburrow. Still, I fear it could be a long six months in end game for some.

Tales Of Everyday Gaming: NBI, GW2

Jeromai (yes, him again) has been suffering from Blogger's Block. Rather than let ennui and inertia get the better of him he's chosen to offer himself up as an example for any NBI bloggers who may already be feeling the pressure to come up with something, anything, as they sit and stare into space in front of a blank screen.

His prescription for block-breaking is Freewriting and, leading by example, today he has a post up inspired by a dose of his own medicine. He finds himself taking a close look at the choices he makes when he sits down to play GW2, which is something I find myself doing a lot these days. Examining my choices, that is.

Before he launches into a lengthy, discursive, philosophical account of the ways he chooses to spend his gaming time, though, he wonders "Why should you or I care about what I did? What I incremented? What I achieved?" He means it rhetorically but I'm going to answer as if he was expecting a reply.

For me, it's always interesting to read the accounts of what others, personally, find compulsive and absorbing about the games they play. If the writing is strong enough, involving enough, idiosyncratic and attractive enough, then it scarcely even matters what the games are.

Ah, Silverwastes! Long time, no see and you haven't changed at all. Unfortunately.

It certainly doesn't matter whether they're games I've played or am ever likely to play. I follow Wilhelm and Stabs and Nosy Gamer's detailed descriptions and news reports and analyses of EVE Online, not because I have any particular interest in internet spaceships (I really don't) but because they're able to create narratives in word-pictures that open the game out and make it accessible and intriguing even for a disinterested outsider.

Indeed, were I to limit myself to reading blogs only about games I'm currently playing, most days most of my Feedly feed would go unread. The blogroll over there to the right is filled with blogs that, these days, mainly feature games that I've never tried or have long since abandoned. Yet I read them all with pleasure and with interest.

Think pieces (this is one) are all very well but the heartwood of MMORPG blogging is the telling of tales of everyday adventure. Be it The Sims, WoW or Ingress each everyday story opens a window not only onto another imaginary world but into this supposedly real one we all share as well.

Tip your waitress. I'm here all week.

That said, there's a special appeal in reading someone's thoughts on a game you know and love, especially when it's one you're both still playing. And it's rarely more appealing than when someone simply writes about what he or she does in the game itself.

GW2 is a very successful and popular game but it doesn't seem to generate many blogs. There weren't that many even when the game was new. There's a very active community on reddit and, for all I know, on umpteen other social media platforms but for a good while now the only people on my radar who write about GW2 regularly, in long form, are Jeromai and Ravious. I do miss The Egg Baron...

Consequently it feels very valuable when someone gets down to writing about what they actually do in the game, even when the activities on which they focus turn out to be ones that are peripheral for me. Jeromai writes "...every night, I look at the clock and make sure my butt is in the chair by 8.10pm so that I can kill the Triple Trouble Wurm with the oceanic arm of TTS. If I have time, I might join in by 6.30pm for Karka Queen, or try my best to squeeze my way into Tequatl by 7.00pm." Let's compare.

I have never followed the Three-Headed Wurm event to a successful conclusion. I tried a few times, back when it was introduced well over a year ago, when no-one knew what they were doing. That was clearly going nowhere so after the first couple of weeks I forgot all about it and I've barely spared it a thought since. It's a long, long time since I was last even in the zone when it popped.

Famous last words.

Tequatl I like a lot now everyone knows the ropes. If I notice he's due and I'm not doing something more interesting I'll waypoint down and take up my preferred place at one of the boats or on North Hill. It's a fun event, although not as much fun as the original, unevolved  version, which Mrs Bhagpuss and I did as often as we could manage.

Karka Queen is just another stop on the World Boss train, which I jump on and off as it suits me every day.

Right now the big ticket is Maguuma Wastes. Dry Top and Silverwastes, with their numerous achiever-focused grind levers, have remained popular and populated since they arrived with Living Story 2 (remember that?). The recent addition of a time-limited, region-wide, random drop of a Portal that flags your account for the next Heart of Thorns beta event has brought the crowds flooding in.

Jeromai reports that, such is the level of interest, Triple-Trouble is on hiatus. His own time in Silverwastes has proven well-spent. "One event or another finishes, a fort defence of some kind, or a bull escort, and I realize that I have new mail and a purple beta portal in my inventory."

Move right along the lane please. Plenty of room for everyone.

I liked Dry Top when it was new but got very bored with it after a month or so. Silverwastes always seemed like a weaker iteration of the same idea. I was done with that in a matter of days. With the incentive of the beta portal I went back for the first time in a very long while last week and as a result I have now done the Vinewraith event, successfully, twice. I'd never even looked at it prior to that despite its being arguably the most significant new PvE content drop of the last six months.

It was okay. Again it felt like another very weak iteration of an earlier, stronger, better-realized idea, the Marionette event from Living Story 1, which was possibly my favorite GW2 event ever. A couple of  hour-long sessions in Silverwastes turned out to be about half a session too much. I haven't been back.

In our house the big PvE events of the day are Frozen Maw and, especially, Claw of Jormag. Maw is always the best loot for time spent but Jormag is done for fun. We like to hang at the back in Phase 2 and compete to see who can get the most bags off the Champs. Mrs Bhagpuss is the current record-holder with 11.

#nornpriorities

I think I must have done Maw more than a thousand times by now. Most days I do it twice - some days I do it four or five times. Claw of Jormag probably runs somewhere close to four figures. I have done him regularly ever since my first character reached Frostgorge, long before there was any material reward. I just like the event and always have. It's deliciously annoying.

Outside of that I always do at least the minimum three dailies on all three accounts to get the Completion reward. I never miss unless I am physically unable to reach the PC that day. The bulk of the rest of my time is spent in WvW, of which a good deal is taken up standing around in Citadel sorting my banks or out in the keeps and towers, refreshing siege or just hanging around aimlessly on the walls, chatting and watching the map.

The thing I don't do as much as I would like is map exploration. I still don''t have any character (of more than a dozen) with more than 65% map completion. I don't care about the "completion" part but it does show how much of Tyria I still haven't even seen. Must do something about that. Sometime.

The thing is this: GW2 has long since ceased to be a game that I play. It has become a space in which I live. I have few if any goals there any more. I do the achievements, kill the bosses, hoover up the loot, all for no other reason than to store it away. I have tens of thousands of Ascended crafting materials and enough gold to buy a Legendary should I want one, which I do not. I have well in excess of 10,000,000 karma, 7.5m on one account alone. I have over 2000 Laurels and nothing I want to spend them on.

Of course there are many, many things that can't be purchased, things that I don't have; seemingly endless skins and pets and titles and achievements. It's not that there are no goals left to which I could aspire, far from it. It's just that none of my characters want any of them enough to make the effort worthwhile.

And in GW2 it really would be an effort. Nothing outside of the Gem Store comes without hard work. There's a thread on the official forums entitled "Why does GW2 feel like a grindy F2p?" to which the very obvious answer has to be "Because that's exactly what it is". Or, at least, it is if that's what you choose to make of it.

That's why it's never boring to read about other people's experiences in a game you play, even if those very experiences are boring them to tears. Choices matter and context really helps to place your own experience. There's no better context than the quotidian narratives of other players.

So, here's my nugget of NBI advice for what it's worth: never be afraid to tell your stories of everyday gaming for fear that you'll bore your audience. Explain yourself to yourself and let the resonances reverberate as they will.

But if you've read this far you'll understand that already.

If It's May It Must Be...

Yes, it's that time of year again. The trees are in bud, the sun's in hiding, the temperature's dropped ten degrees - it must be Spring!

And with the merry days of May, as surely as village maidens dancing round the maypole (they do do that where you live, don't they?) comes

 The Newbie Blogger Initiative.

The NBI, for anyone who hasn't run into it before, is an annual pep rally for would-be bloggers. It's for anyone who ever thought about putting finger to key and then thought again, for anyone who's tried and faltered, for anyone who's reading this and thinking "Geez, does this guy ever go on...I could do better than that...". It's for anyone who fancies giving this blogging lark a go.

The NBI began very much as an MMO-centric affair and MMOs are just about all I blog about so chances are anyone reading this is already on board that train. If not, never fear! It's already opened out to welcome all stripes of the gaming rainbow and this year Izlain and Doone, the current curators and keepers of the flame, hope to widen the appeal still further.

If you think there's nothing left to say about MMO payment models, the holy trinity or the NGE that hasn't already been said by ten thousand bloggers before you you'd be right  then maybe you'd like to try your pen at some other aspect of the Wider Geekdom. The NBI is a broad church. You could probably even blog about Broadchurch! Maybe not... anyway, can anyone ever truly say they've read enough posts about MMO payment models?

I'm not entirely sure what's planned for this year's festivities. In previous years I'd received an email by now or engaged in some other form of promotional run-up to the big day but this year the NBI has kind of crept up on me. The first mention I saw was in Wilhelm's April review.  He's obviously been paying more attention than me although he does seem to have the advantage of a time machine - the link he posted on April 30th to the Call for Organizers goes to a post that's dated 2nd of May!

If you think organizing is a thing you can do you don't need to be a Timelord or a Chronomancer. You don't even need to wait to be asked. Just go out yourself on the thread I just linked. No, not Jeromai's, although I'm sure he'd pass the message on - this one!

If you're a would-be blogger you can go sign up here.  Go on! You know you want to!

If you just clicked that last link and got put off by having to fill out a form - I know it would have put me off back when I was unmming and ahhing and sitting on the fence over whether to commit myself to public scrutiny - it's okay! Go here instead and just make yourself and your blog known on the Forum. It all comes out the same in the end.

Whatever route you choose, if you have the slightest desire to see your assumed name in links this is the place to start. Don't worry about commitment. Don't think about whether you'll stay the course. If you try it and don't like it that's fine. You can just stop whenever you want. Plenty of bloggers go round the track a few times before they hit their rhythm. There are no rules, no quotas, no targets. Just give it a go. If it grabs you you'll always be glad you did and if it doesn't that's fine too.

Very selfishly I hope this year's NBI is a huge success that brings in lots of new bloggers. I see it as a great big trawl net scooping up new blogs for me to read and enjoy. Oh yes, its all about me! And once you have your own blog it'll be all about you!

I'm going to add all the new NBI blogs to my blogroll for May, which means I might have to cull some of the dormant ones on there before I find out the hard way whether Blogger actually has a limit on that particular widget. If you start an NBI blog and don't see it listed, yell at me in the comments somewhere. There have been one or two blogs over the years whose urls Blogger simply refused to recognize but if yours isn't there it's probably just me being slack.

That's enough waffle from me. Your turn!

Is It That Time Already? : New Blogger Initiative 2014

First of May means heavy rain and the start of another round of NBI fun. This year I'll mostly be cheering from the sidelines (not that I have a record of doing all that much any other year).

For those who don't know or who can't remember as far back as last year (comes to all of us in the end), the NBI is an excellent wheeze originally devised by Syp of Massively and Bio Break fame and currently curated by Doone of T.R Red Skies.

The full background is HERE

The introductory page is HERE

The Schedule of Events (yes, this year there are events!) is HERE

If you've ever thought of starting a blog but haven't gotten around to it/had the nerve/known what to do next this is your time! Each year so far has brought some top-notch new bloggers onto the scene (what is this? 1966?). Some started from scratch, others had been going for a while without drawing in the audience they deserved.

If you've been standing around looking at the water there's never a better time to jump off the dock. If you feel you've been shouting into a bucket, let the NBI turn it into a megaphone. Technical advice, moral support, increased page views! NBI has it all.

Wilhelm, as usual, has the best advice, especially when he says this:

"my only real regret as a blogger is that I did not start sooner".

Me too. Don't make the same mistake.

Guilds. Huh!. What Are They Good For?

One of the innovations of the 2013 NBI has been the Talk Back Challenge Event, which Wilhelm conveniently summarised with links in his own recent contribution to the discussion.

Guilds have been a thorny subject with me almost since I began playing MMOs back in the 20th century. It was a good while before I even realized they existed. When I installed Everquest late in 1999 there was only one computer chez Bhagpuss. Why would anyone need more than that? Most people didn't even have one!

For a year or more, Mrs Bhagpuss and I had been in the habit of taking turns playing rpgs like Baldur's Gate or Might and Magic VI, one of us playing and the other watching and making "helpful" comments. When we ran out of interesting RPG options I decided to dip a toe in the very scary waters of online gaming. There wasn't a whole lot of choice. I settled on Everquest because after much research I came across far too many UO horror stories in which some hapless newbie spent hours standing in one place hacking at a tree only to be murdered in cold blood by another player as he trudged back through the forest weighed down by logs.

Within a few days of watching me play EQ, once she'd gotten over laughing herself silly at my flailing attempts to kill bats outside Freeport, Mrs Bhagpuss decided she wanted to play too. First she shared the account (sorry, Smed) but it was apparent very quickly that that wouldn't cut it. Then for a while we both had accounts but still shared one computer. That was never going to last, either. Finally a second PC was purchased and off we went.

D'you think the Guild Lobby might be letting in the damp a little?

And just what does this little stroll down memory lane have to do with guilds, eh? Hush, I'm coming to that. It's my contention that this fractured introduction to online gaming, sliding in sideways from a shared-but-separate offline experience, strongly informed my original attitude and formed the foundations of an approach to gameplay that has persisted ever since.

From the beginning I always felt I was playing alongside other players rather than with them, yet the difference their presence made was immense. It was immediately apparent that inhabiting your own character in a fantasy world was flat-out more convincing when all around were other characters similarly inhabited by humans. It was the difference between listening to music alone at home and seeing a band play in a hot, sweaty club.

Back in the day I saw a lot of bands play in a lot of hot sweaty clubs but I never found myself buddying up with strangers, swapping phone numbers and going to a whole string of gigs with them. The audience was essential for atmosphere but the music was the focus. That's very much how I felt about players playing around me: great for ambience and atmosphere but essentially background not content.

So for a long time I didn't just not join a guild, I didn't think about joining one. Mrs Bhagpuss, however. did. She may dispute this but I remember her as a serial guild-joiner almost from the start and it was through her that I became dimly, then acutely aware of the intricacies and vicissitudes of guild life.

And, comrades, consider this magnificent Peoples' Caravan, available for guild meetings.
Can your so-called Secret Societies offer you such?

As time wore on and MMOs came and went, many guilds were joined, were left, fell apart. Sometimes I followed Mrs Bhagpuss into guilds, sometimes I accepted guild invites that came up during a particularly enjoyable PUG. By late 2001 we'd even had a bash at forming a guild of our own (actually the offshoot of someone else's guild that we offered to run on another server).

The peak of my guild activity took place through the high summer of Everquest, from 2002 to 2004. That was the time when much of what we did revolved either around the activities of a single guild or a custom chat-channel that operated as a cross-guild clearing house for adventure. Those were the days when I grouped more than I soloed. Sometimes I even raided, although what we called "raiding" then was more akin to battling The Shatterer or Claw of Jormag than the baroque formality of a modern raid.

Guild-centered gameplay continued when we moved to EQ2 but the dour, attritional pre-Hartsman tenor of that game sucked the energy and heart from everyone around. Within a month or two guildmates were dropping like clumps of fur from a mangy spaniel.

EQ2 was hemorrhaging players, some back to Everquest, others on to WoW  and when the inevitable server mergers came I decided for the first time to form a guild of my own. Well that's how I remember it, anyway. Others who were there might have a different version of how it happened but the guild that grew out of those ashes, tendrils of which can be found in just about every MMO I've played seriously since, was named by me and I'm the co-leader of all of them so I get to write the histories.

I'd throw you an invite but we kinda have this rule about height...

The pattern was set. Much like Wilhelm, every time I, or Mrs Bhagpuss, or usually both of us together, move to a new MMO and decide we might be there for a while a new guild gets created, always with the same name. We have a couple of fellow-travelers who join us for a while should they happen to find themselves in the same world and we pick up like-minded individuals as and when we run across them.

It gives us a familiar guild tag, some useful facilities (life without a guild bank can be hard) and a good deal of pleasant conversation. I'm happy enough playing my MMOs alone but without a doubt the whole experience is enhanced by the quiet drone of comfortable chat in the background. What we don't have any more, and what I absolutely do not miss in any way, shape or form is guild drama, guild politics and people whining that they're bored and expecting me to act as entertainments officer.

Of course, we don't do very much. Sporadically we may have fits of group activity, particularly around holiday events. Now and again someone might get a fad for running dungeons for a week or two. A guild hall even got bought and fitted out a while back, somewhere. I think I went in it once.

If you asked me for my thoughts on Guilds, which, come to think of it, is exactly what this challenge does, my immediate response would be that I'm agin 'em. But that's not really true. The real truth is, I don't like guilds that tell people what they should or shouldn't, can or can't , must or mustn't do. Not unless it's me doing the telling.

A guild that allows friends and acquaintances to rub along together in quiet harmony is an asset to anyone's gameplay. A guild where you dread to log in because of what's going to be expected of you or who you're going to have to deal with, or one where you seethe with frustration because things aren't being done the way they should...well, I'd rather solo.

Wouldn't you?