The One That Got Away

 

Fishing. Ah, fishing...

Every MMORPG has to have it, for reasons that I find hard to imagine. Is it such a universal pastime? I know it used to be ranked the #1 participatory "sport" in the United Kingdom, when I was growing up in the 'seventies, but people had fewer ways to entertain themselves in those deprived and forsaken times.

You know what? Let's fact-check that. Was it ever that popular? Is it still? It always seemed unlikely to me but I didn't have the worldwide web and an AI assistant to help me check back then. 

Here's what Gemini says:

"No, fishing is no longer the most popular participation sport in the UK. While it is still widely practiced with millions of participants, mainstream activities like football and swimming have surpassed it. Football boasts roughly 11 million players, and swimming attracts over 4 million participants, placing them well ahead of angling."

And as for the supposed domination it used to enjoy:

Where the Myth Comes From
Past Status: Angling was widely cited as the number one participant sport in Britain for many decades through the late 20th century.
Industry Claims: Governing bodies like the Angling Trust still refer to it as "one of the nation's largest" or "biggest" participation sports, keeping the legacy title alive in public perception. 

Hmm. A bit hand-wavy, that, although I'm pleased to see Gemini immediately labeling the supposed popularity a "myth". But obviously we're not going to accept anything Gemini tells us on face value. Luckily, it's citing sources. Or rather a source. Easy enough to check. Shouldn't take long. 

Gemini bases its claims on a 2017 report by the British Disabled Angling Association, which in turn refers to an article in the Daily Telegraph newspaper about the most popular participation sports in Britain. The BDAA piece links to the Telegraph article but the Torygraph (© Private Eye.) has long been behind a paywall and I'm not giving them money to find out what they said in some puff piece almost a decade ago.

Let's assume for the moment that someone at the BDAA read the Telegraph article carefully and quoted it accurately. If so, the reported position of angling (Which is what men who get away from the wife and kids on Sundays by sitting next to canals with a rod stuck in the ground beside them as they swig coffee from a thermos and stare vaguely into space, like to call what the rest of us know as "fishing".) in the 2017 Top Twenty UK participation sports was #19.

So where does it place now? That was ten years ago. I didn't ask for a history lesson, Gemini!

In answer to the question

 "What are the most popular participation sports in the UK in 2026?" 

Gemini, annoyingly, doesn't come up with a nice, tabulated list, as I was hoping. Instead it somewhat vaguely asserts that 

"Football remains the undisputed leader in UK sports participation with roughly 11 million players, closely followed by fitness activities, swimming (4.2 million), golf (1.06 million), and tennis (over 640,000). Emerging trends also highlight rapid growth in racket-blends like padel and pickleball, alongside soaring engagement in casual running and basketball among younger demographics."

The evidence for this comes from a 2025 Press Release about a survey conducted by EY, in which four thousand adults were polled. This survey does come with a tabulated chart, which you can see if you click through. It's ugly and I'm not going to wreck my aesthetic by embedding it. It also only goes to 15, which strikes me as an odd place to stop. Either do a Top Ten or a Top Twenty, guys. No-one wants to see a Top Fifteen.

So, who are - or is - EY? Their About us page says 

"At EY, our purpose is building a better working world. The insights and services we provide help to create long-term value for clients, people and society, and to build trust in the capital markets."

Cool. Why they commissioned a survey on sport, I have no idea but it wouldn't have been the first place I'd have looked. Apparently they were Gemini's go-to, though. 

Which is a bit of a shame, because not only was EY's survey not conducted in the year I asked for (It's from 2025.) but it's not even a survey about "participation sports". It's called an "Engagement Index" and unless there's something I haven't been told, the second most popular participation sport, one that people in the UK go out and actually do, is not likely to involve driving a $20m racing car, so why is F1 #2 after football on the list?

Wrong year, wrong topic. So much for accuracy.

Originally, though, I didn't ask for the year. I just asked Google

What are the most popular participation sports in the UK?

That got me an AI summary that looked fairly similar, but this time it was drawing its data from an entirely different source, a website called SnookerZone. They did have a nicely-presented Top Ten - and guess what? It was from 2026! 

The SnookerZone article, which focuses on the popularity of snooker, or rather the lack of it, as you might imagine it would, doesn't cite any specific source for its chart, other than a vague "Based on typical annual participation estimates..." 

I wasn't all that happy with that for an answer either so I left Gemini and drifted down into the search results proper. The top result was a link to something called SPOND, which turns out to be "an app", part of whose mission statement is "Building connections through sports". They're all about getting people to go out and play sport. 

Finally! Someone that should know the answers to the questions I'm asking! And they have a list. It's from 2025 but it looks like the best we're going to get. Again, I won't cut and paste it here but if you have any interest in the subject, it's worth a look. It has lots of facts and figures. And pictures!

What SPOND's list doesn't have is attribution. The article on their website is from February 2025 so we have a date but the only source cited and linked is to the FA for Football. My confidence in the rest of the list isn't improved by a basic editing error that transposes a whole load of detail about "Soccer" to the section on Tennis, the #4 sport on the list.  Tennis itself doesn't get a mention. 

And yes, anyone can make a mistake, but presumably that one's been there for more than a year now. Has no-one spotted it? I feel like some of this might not entirely be Gemini's fault. There's only so much you can do with unreliable data.

On the substantive point, though, once again there's no mention of fishing. Or angling, for that matter. It doesn't even make it into the Honourable Mentions section, which includes Horse Racing. Again, a participation sport? Really?? How many people own a racehorse? I mean, I know you can join a syndicate and just own a leg, but for it to count as a participation sport, wouldn't you have to ride?

So, what has been the point of all this? Other than to poke fun at an AI, which if it isn't already a participation sport, soon will be. You may well ask! It's taken me the best part of an hour and a half and what have I proved? Other than that I really like doing pointless research for its own sake.

Well I've proved, yet again, that Gemini still can't be trusted to answer a simple question with any degree of accuracy. Even when it cites its sources, it's often wrong. The AI summary at the top of Google Search looks very authoritative, sure, but that's an illusion. I regularly follow the links it provides and they are, shall we say charitably, somewhat less than 100% reliable. Sometimes they're inaccurate, sometimes they're irrelevant but sometimes they're actively misleading.

 

Look, unlike many people whose opinions I have seen recently, I am not against the concept of AIs giving me summaries of search results. I think it's a weird choice for a company, much of whose income relies on advertising, to make but that's not my call. 

No, I'd be quite happy if I could type a few words and get the information I need, in a matter of seconds, all handily packaged and ready to cut and paste into a post. If it was good information. If I could trust it not to make me look like a fool, when someone drops into the comments to point out all the errors. I don't need an AI's help for that!

Unfortunately, it's nothing like good information, far too much of the time. Certainly not good enough to use unchecked. If I have to check everything it's going to take me as long as it would to find it for myself. And I can find better sources on my own, too!

If I'm going to use anything an AI tells me here, I know I'm going to have to follow the links and read the damn articles or look at the damn websites or watch the damn YouTube videos for myself. And then, when I find out how unconvincing the sources are, I'm probably going to have to go look for something that actually tells me what I wanted to know, instead of whatever it is that the AI has picked up as matching whatever criteria it's using. 

The New Yorker, Gemini is not! I always think it's going to save me time and it never does. Maybe one day...

Oh, and the other thing I guess I've proved is what I suspected all along: that fishing isn't anywhere near as popular an activity as legend (Or "myth" as Gemini puts it.) would have had me believe when I was young. I've done my share of keeping that myth alive, too. Well, no more!

All of which is a very roundabout way back to the beginning, where I was wondering why so many MMORPG devs (And survival game devs and now, apparently, open-world gacha game devs, too.) feel their job is isn't done until they figure out some way to shoehorn a fishing mini-game in, somehow. Anyhow. Just so it's there. 

Neverness to Everness has fishing because of course it does. Shame we're out of time today or I'd have told you all about the Fishing Frenzy event. If you play, you won't want to miss it. The event, I mean, not my post about it. When I write one. 

I guess that's just going to have to wait until tomorrow! 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

I wouldn't normally bother with uses as trivial as this but since we're being reductionist for Blaugust...

I used the AI summary at the top of a couple of Google Searches as described in excruciating detail in the body of the post. Gemini is the AI in question. Other AIs are available. They may or may not do a better job than Gemini. I wouldn't know. The amusement value in running the same query through several AIs to see which would make the biggest hash of answering wore out a couple of years ago.

I also used SnapEdit to remove all the UI elements from the final picture. You can see the SnapEdit watermark in the lower right corner. That's there because I used the free version, which I recommend. I use it often and normally I wouldn't even think of mentioning it in this footnote (For new readers, footnoting my AI usage in my posts is something I've been doing for several years, mostly because I find it entertaining. If there's no footnote, I didn't use any. Most posts have no footnote.) 

At this point, I might mention that I have never really believed SnapEdit does use AI to remove stuff from images. It says it does but it's been saying so for a long time now and I'm not convinced AI was up to doing that back when I started using SnapEdit. I always assumed they just bunged "AI" in as a fashionable buzzword, like everyone else was doing back then. 

And what, anyway, is AI in that context? Does it really require an LLM to remove some text from a digital image and replace it with approximately the same color field as what would have been underneath? It seems to me that we've had software that would do that for a long time. A lot longer than we've had generative AI. I've never used PhotoShop because I couldn't afford the license but I've always thought that was exactly the sort of thing people had been using it for for decades.

We need to get some better names for this stuff. It doesn't mean anything to slap AI on every last damn algorithm any more than sticking an "i" on the front of technology or adding "punk" to the end of game titles ever has. I'd bet half this stuff is just good old software playing dress-up anyway...

Dress Sense Or Dress Sensibly?

There's not much I don't like about gacha games. I like the way they look, the way they read, the way they sound and the way they play. I would never have expected it but it turns out the genre fits me to a T.

The monetization that gets some people mad doesn't bother me. In fact, since the Free To Play revolution, which suppose must be well over a decade in the past by now, which did, genuinely and literally, make most games completely free as far as I was concerned, about the only kind of monetization that gives me pause is the good old monthly subscription model. 

If EverQuest Legends had launched as Buy To Play, with no sub needed to go on playing after the first month, you'd most likely be reading a post like Tipa's about that game right now (I'd definitely be playing a Kerran.) instead of looking at some screenshots of Flora in her new 1970s-style trouser-suit. That isn't to say I won't buy EQL eventually but it is the reason I haven't bought it yet and it will almost certainly be the reason I don't play it for more than a month.

There is one thing I don't like about Gacha games, though. I've mentioned it before. It's the way my  characters tend to look the same all the time. It varies from gacha game to gacha game but it may not be a coincidence that the ones that put the least friction in the way of changing your apperarance are the ones that fold soonest.

Neverness To Everness is fairly standard in that you can roll for outfits on the gacha board, buy them for in-game currency and win them as rewards for in-game activities but none of those options is both easy and cheap. I've been playing for three months now and only yesterday did I finally get Flora a change of clothes. And even then it was only by way of the alternate NTE universe that is Warrens Continent.

The 999 Nights update that added an entire medieval fantasy ARPG to the magitech modern world was bizarre in all kinds of ways but not least in how it blew a giant, smoking hole in the gacha dress code. In Warrens Continent, characters have a traditional RPG paper doll with gear slots and whatever you put in most of those slots shows up on the character. Mobs drop wearable gear and there are plenty of different looks. 

You can take a pretty good shot at getting your character to look how you want them to... for a while. Then, of course, you have to start paying attention to stats and the whole thing falls apart, just like in a  traditional MMORPG, which is how things like transmog and appearance tabs end up being added to every MMO that lasts more than a few years.

Luckily, whoever designed the gear for Warrens Continent had an infinitely better fashion sense than the average MMO dev, so most of the pieces look pretty good together. And there are sets that have bonuses that make you want to wear all the pieces and naturally sets fit together quite nicely so it all works out.

I very much appreciated all of that, while I was playing Warrens Continent as if it was the main game. I was a bit miffed when I had to upgrade Flora's excellent starting look, probably the most demure and modest outfit in the entire game, to something that looked like it wouldn't be out of place in a Slayyyter video but stats are stats.

The best thing about that original outfit was that you can wear it in Hethereau. I was looking forward to doing just that for a while but then, almost inevitably, I stayed so long in Warrens Continent and changed my gear so many times I forgot all about it. It didn't help that the outfit, appropriately called "Unassuming Warrior", is only available through the "Button Shop" and I had no clue where that was.

I did look for it. My immediate thought was that it would be the Mysterious Fuzzy trader but that was a dead end. I looked at every trader I could find and pored over the map but I couldn't see any sign of a "Button Shop". And then I just sort of forgot about it. Don't ask me why I didn't google it but I didn't.

And then on Wednesday I mentioned the Button Shop in a post and Mailvaltar dropped into the comments to explain where to find it: in the F4 Event Menu.

It is. And I never noticed. I will say in my defense that a) I very rarely look at the Events Menu and b) the Button Shop Button isn't actually part of the menu itself. It's on its own at the bottom of the page. Even so, there's no excuse for missing it.

The upside of having waited so long is that when I finally found the shop I had plenty of Buttons to spend. Over ten thousand, in fact. More than enough to buy me both the outfit and the dyes to change the color. So I bought them all, which may have been a mistake.

Oh, not the outfit itself. The outfit is excellent. Flora's wearing it now and it makes a very nice change from running around in Lycra bicycle shorts under a netball skirt. It's the dyes I'm not so sure about.

They come in a pack of three - red, green and blue. At least I think those are the colors. It's hard to tell. They're very muted, particularly the green. Or maybe I mean unassuming. None of them is bad in any way, it's more that I'm not convinced any of them is an improvement over the basic silver and black look, which has a timeless kind of elegance about it.

Still, it's nice to have some wardrobe choices at last. If only the outfits weren't character-specific. Then all my characters could be unassuming, which would come as a huge shock to several of them, I'm sure. Not to mention they'd all be able to wear the Archmage outfit I won on the gacha board a couple of days back. That won't see use until and unless I win Iroi, too.

All the poses in the post, except the one below, were taken on the roof of Mint's building, which turned out to be the perfect place for a fashion shoot. I was there because visiting the Button Shop reminded me I hadn't finished everything I wanted to do in Warrens Continent yet. 

It's funny how a couple of weeks ago we (That's just me, Nimgimli and Mailvaltar really, I guess.) were complaining, or at least observing, that it looked as though we'd be doing nothing but the 999 Nights content for weeks and now here I am, having almost forgotten it was there, back running around Hethereau every day as if the update had never happened.

But it did and I'm back with it now. Not only do I want to finish the event itself but now I've seen inside the Button Shop there are a few more things I want to buy there. Not least the money.

Yes, you can buy money with buttons. Fons, specifically. If I can get enough buttons I might even be able to buy enough Fons to cover my losses at the Catzebo. They are substantial.

Also, I just realized this minute, as I typed the word "Catzebo" for the umpteenth time, that it has to be a pun on "Casino"; not, as I've been thinking until now, on "Gazebo". I really did think it was a joke about the cats all standing around in little, wooden huts...

And with that, I think I'd better make my exit. Fast. 

Sometimes You Have To Make Your Own Luck

I'd love this to be a post about how I got another S-Class Banner Character on my first try and for almost no effort but sadly my luck didn't run to a third straight win. I thought briefly that it had because on my fifth roll this morning, a big S popped and up came the image above. 

Yes, it's Iroi and yes, for a second there, I thought I'd won her, but I realized almost immediately something else must have happened. When you win any character of whatever class you get a bespoke mini-movie, complete with posing and dialog. This was just a couple of static images.

I was confused enough to stop and fiddle around in the settings and options to see if I could work out what I'd won. It might surprise - or more likely shock - some players, to find out just how little I know about this game, even though I've been playing almost every day for weeks now. 

It surprises me a little, too, although not all that much. I somehow seem to be able to combine a keen sense of curiosity for what lies over the next hill with a bland indifference to how to get there. I'm like a sheep crossed with a cat. 

This is the way it generally goes: I start a new game, run through the opening tutorial then, if I like it, I carry on playing without thinking too much more about it. 

Usually what comes next is a hyper-extended quasi-tutorial that feels like the game's started but which is actually still supposed to be teaching you how to play. The problem with this approach, which I always used to recommend as probably the best way to introduce the various complexities of any game, is that I let it all wash over me and very little sticks. 

I'm sure, at some point, some tool tip or voice-over must have explained what the various buttons do on pretty much every screen but all I've done is click through them as fast as possible because I was already paying and I wanted to get on with the good bits.

It's not until I run into some problem that I stop and try to figure out for myself what all the buttons do or how the systems work. And to be fair to myself, it's not like I needed to know before, is it? Games are very easy and straightforward at the level I'm operating. It makes sense to leave it until I have a reason before digging into the details.

Absent a tutorial or a toll-tip, trial and error usually works. I tried all the buttons and one of them turned out to be a tally of every dice roll I'd made since the game began. It actually keeps the records for a rolling six months but until we get there it's everything. Looking at that, I could see I'd won an outfit.

My first! I was excited.

I needn't have been. Yes, I'd won an outfit. It was a low chance and once again I'd been very lucky to get it. Unfortunately it's an outfit for the character I was trying to win and I didn't win her. So now I have an outfit no-one can wear.

I did check. I wondered if maybe it would work for the whole team but no such luck. It's Iroi or nothing.

I carried on for a while, hoping I'd get lucky twice. I'd pre-set the number of rolls I was willing to use and I had about twenty rolls left before I hit my limit. No dice, so to speak, so I stopped. I'll almost certainly have another go before the Banner changes but for now I was done.

I was still in the mood for some gambling, though, so I thought I'd see what was on the other board, the one that uses the cheap, blue dice. I had loads of those. Last time I looked it was all characters I already had, although you always need multiples to Ascend. This time there seemed to be a couple I didn't remember getting so I thought I'd try a few rolls.

In the end I think I rolled about 25 times. There was the usual sale on where you get eight rolls for the price of ten so I did that a couple of times and then banged out a few singles on top. And I did pretty well. I got the usual couple of dupes but I also got an S-Class I didn't already have - Fadia.

I don't particularly want Fadia. If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure I can remember who she is but every character you acquire opens up some related content like Bonds and background stories so it's always good to get anyone new. 

And maybe I'll need her. After I finished rolling dice I blew a million Fons on scratch cards (I said I was in a gambling mood...) and that made me wonder where I was with my Tycoon levels. Not very far was the answer. I was on Level 19 but all the conditions had been met so I just had to press the button.

For Level 20, though, I was stuck on Exploration again. I had most of the boxes ticked but I still needed five Rabbit Holes (I'd only done one.), three characters at Level 40 (Again I only had one.) and an Anomaly Commission (I  was at 8/9 there). Rabbit Holes were easy. Or they were once I noticed you could adjust the difficulty level. Things didn't go so well before that.

Getting the character levels just meant spending some resources and I had plenty. I can't remember exactly what happened with the Anomaly Commission. I know picked a bad one. I had a look at the options available and I thought I'd try the boxing gloves. I remembered that being easy first time around.

Yes. Well. Maybe it was. The upgraded version, however, is a DPS test and I could not pass it. The gloves take a defensive stance and you have to defeat them in sixty seconds. I couldn't get them under 80%. 

At some point I fought the dog again and got the Arc but how that fits into the picture I can't quite figure out now. Maybe I needed two after all? 

I also did Dragon Gate Substitute, for which, confusingly, you fight some fish, not a dragon at all. They were easy enough, although I made it harder by falling off the roof of the building and having to start over.

The final box I needed to tick after all that was something called  Headless Rider, which is gated by an Anomaly Commission by the name of Ride Assault. I had no clue how or where to find it and it wasn't on the map so I looked it up.

Ride Assault has a complicated trigger sequence, where you have to be driving a car (A bike won't do.) down Foxwindow Avenue sometime between eight in the evening and dawn just to get it to pop. In the highly unlikely event you just happen to meet the conditions, a headless biker appears and if you chase him, he leads you into a tunnel, whereupon he summons a portal to take you to his Anomaly Realm. Then he tries to kill you.

That's not the fight you need for the Tycoon level. It's the fight you need to get that fight. But you have to start somewhere. Having read a couple of guides and fiddled with the clock to get the time of day right, I crashed about on Foxwindow until the biker appeared. I chased him, entered his realm, jumped out of my car to fight him and got slaughtered. It wasn't even remotely close.

I am now going to have to go away, read up on the strats, apply some upgrades and pick a team that has the right elemental qualities to exploit his weaknesses before I take another run at him. This means more research and finding out something about how a few systems work because I barely have a clue on most of them.

Of course, if I had any gaming skills I could probably just brute force it but I don't so it'll require some cheesing finesse. As it stand, not only can I not even begin to read any of the tells that let you know when you need to Counter or Parry. I wouldn't even know what to press if I did. I have never knowingly Countered or Parried anything since I started - nor ever felt like I needed to, either.

And it may be that I still don't. It might be that once I pick the right team and upgrade everyone, button-mashing will be good enough again. I hope so, anyway. I'm certainly not playing this game to git gud, or even for the fights, for that matter. But sometimes you have to make at least a token effort. Either that or give up, an option I always find rather attractive.

That's where I am with Neverness To Everness right now. Slowly learning how the game works so I can avoid playing as much of it as possible. 

Don't anyone try to tell me how to have fun!

Catzebo Carousel

A week ago, I posted something about one of the new, time-limited events in Neverness To Everness, an event that seems to be variously known as "Mews Flash", "Meow Express" or "Cat Dream", depending on the whim of whoever put the whole thing together or whoever happens to have translated the particular bit of text you're reading.

To recap, it's a gambling game where you buy scratch cards from a large, formally-dressed cat standing behind the counter of a booth known as a Midnight Catzebo. You obviously hope you're going to win big but I've been playing every day, or at least every day I remember, and I haven't exactly won big yet, although I also haven't lost big either. 

Most days I just about break even. I tend to stop if I either win or lose more than a couple of hundred thousand. I had a good run this morning with the biggest single win I've had so far, 300k, but I lost that much a couple of days ago so I'm pretty much back where I started.

Having scratched a lot of cards now, I'm certain the cheapest, the 10k ones, are a waste of time. About 90% of them have a single 10k win, so if you buy the full day's allotment of twenty you're going to end up very slightly out of pocket. I've given up bothering with those altogether, except for a little project I'm going to get to in a moment.

The 20k cards are slightly better in that you get quite a few 30k wins, putting you a little ahead, but the overall hit rate is lower, so it works out much the same. I'd barely call the 10k and 20k cards a gamble, they're so consistent in the results they give. It was fun for a while, scratching off all the imaginary foil, but the thrill of that wears off when you realize how predictable it is.

The three types of 50k cards are a lot more entertaining and also where the real money is, if you get lucky. Then again, there's a real chance of blowing more than you can afford before you've noticed if you aren't careful. 

There's no reliable return of your stake money here. Most times you either get nothing or a decent chunk of cash. There are frequently multiple winning slots on a single card. I've had four or five several times, adding up to 200k or so. Conversely, there are a lot of duds, where you don't win anything.

When I first discovered the event, I wondered how many Catzebos there were, scattered across Hethereau. And what the cats operating them were called. I'd seen a couple, so I knew it was a franchise of some kind with multiple outlets and both the cats had odd names (Catvioli and Cat Cake). I was curious (Appropriately enough, what with the cats....) to meet the rest and find out if there was some kind of theme to it all.

This morning I finally got around to doing something about it. I began with the map.

I was still figuring out how that worked. I always seem to take a long time figuring out the basic systems in games these days. I play everything in an ever more casual and laid-back, not to say soporific, fashion or so it sometimes seems. I only started taking a proper look at the map a week or two ago. 

It turns out that, like everything in NTE, it's extremely well-designed. The search function is versatile and powerful and you can set a tracker for anything you see on the map. All the icons are meaningful, too. You can see the Catzebos well enough just from the little cat-heads that weren't there before. 

Still, I didn't fancy poring over the whole thing trying to find them by sight. After a bit of fiddling about, I figured out that all the Midnight Catzebos are listed under the Recommended Locs tab. That was going to save me some time. 

Next, I discovered you can sort all the categories either by district or for the whole city. I got the list up for Hethereau first, to see how many Catzebos there were altogether. It's a nice, round number - ten. Then I selected Miguel District, where Flora happened to be, and started from there. 

Since I seemed to have made a pointless little project for myself, I thought I'd do it properly for a change. I used to do a lot of this sort of thing in MMORPGs back in the day but with the advent of narrative-driven games, quest helpers and never doing any damn thing if it doesn't come with an Achievement or a reward attached, I've fallen out of the habit.

I once spent several days going round all the vendors in Norrath I used regularly with characters of different races and varying charisma stats, making notes on how it affected sales prices. I kept the info in a book on my desk and referred to it when I wanted to sell anything valuable. That's the kind of entertainment I used to make for myself, back when we made our own entertainment. We were simple folk...

Luckily, this project didn't take me days. More like a little under three-quarters of an hour and even that included two trips, one each with Lacrimosa and Sakiri, on the Ferris Wheel that stands (Precariously, in my opinion...) on top of the Floe Cinema. I just happened to bump into them as I was passing. That might get its own post although it probably won't. 

In keeping with tradition, I dug out a notebook and made notes as I ported and trotted around the city. I'd usually take screenshots these days but it occurred to me that even though I was going to take a shot of every booth anyway, it would actually be more efficient to transcribe the details by hand as I saw them, rather than to go back through all the pictures afterwards, looking for the information I needed. 

I would have had to take screenshots of the map, too, if I wanted to give the precise locations. Easier just to write down the names of the streets while I had the map open. It would have been easier still if I'd taken the time to write them down neatly enough so I could read them afterwards but there you go...

Since I was going to be at the booths anyway, I thought I might as well buy a scratch card at each of them and keep a record of my wins and losses, just for the fun of it. I'd already spent my allocated limit for the day, so I chose to buy just one 10k card at each stall, which gave me a chance to test my consistency theory.

Out of ten cards, nine had a winning panel.Every one of them was worth 10k. House takes 10%. Just as I thought.

As I was going round, I found myself thinking about the post I was going to write but also, for some reason, about the ongoing controversy over AI that's raging around Blaugust and something Paeroka said stuck in my mind, about how Blaugust doesn't have any rules about what constitutes a "post", so you could legitimately post a single word every day and it would qualify.

That gave me an idea. What if I didn't use the screenshots of the ten Catzebos right away? What if I saved them and posted one every day in Blaugust when I didn't have time to write a proper post? I don't have a back-up plan for days like that this year and that would be a super-easy way of hitting the target. 

Would that be more creative than prompting an AI for a picture? It's arguable. It might be less creative. I didn't draw those cats myself. Or name them. I very much didn't come up with the idea of putting cats with funny names in booths. All I did was go to where they were and take a picture. Where's the creativity in that?

Take it a stage further. What if I prompted an AI to make a picture of a cat in a booth and then I got my phone and took a picture of my monitor showing the image and posted that? Would that count? How about if I did it on the laptop then carried the laptop around the house and garden and took pictures of the screen with the AI-generated image but with different real-world backdrops? How significant a part of the post is the AI image then? Where even are the lines? It's angels and pinheads all over again!

These are the kinds of things that go through your mind when you take on a repetitive project like this. 

Tempted as I was, I decided not to save my cat pictures for Blaugust, not least because now I've had the idea I can recycle it easily enough if I need to, later. The "photos of AI images" thing is amusing me, too, and the main reason I have a blog is to keep myself amused, so...

Getting back to the ostensible point of this post, I can now tell you the names of all ten cats manning (Or should that be "Catting"?) the booths. They are all male, as far as I can tell, if that's relevant, or they present a male aspect, at least. They all look like 1930s gangsters, if we're going to be frank.

The Ten Cats, in the order I found them, are:

Miguel District 

Cat Ball - Flamingo Avenue

Catvioli - St. Torres Avenue

New Herland

Cat Pastry - In the square with the Wertheimer Tower

Cat Dice - Nutcracker Road

Cat Tart - Camelot Avenue

Cat Sugar -  Yuanmu Hill

Bridge Crossings

Cat Pancake - Bluebeard Road

Unheard Shores

Cat Puff - Just off Coastal Highway Z42

Illusion Town

Cat Cake - Fiscus Avenue

Cat Roll - Coastal Highway Z42 

It does very much look to me as thought these cats must have been named by someone thinking mainly about how hungry they were feeling. With a couple of "Things I Can See On My Desk" thrown in for the sake of variety. 

The outlier is Catvioli. He's the only cat with a single-word name and also the only one whose name isn't an easily recognizable object or foodstuff. I looked it up just in case it had some meaning I wasn't seeing but there doesn't seem to be any. I saw someone on some thread or other suggesting it might be a pun on ravioli but that seems like a stretch.

And of course we'll never know. This is a time-limited event and not a very significant or important one even in the context what might constitute importance in a free-to-play, gacha game. No-one cares what the bloody cats are called or why. 

And yet I've just spent about three hours of my life on it, and that's on top of the three hours I spent on much the same topic a week ago. 

It's nice to have a hobby, isn't it? Keeps us off the streets, anyway. If anyone's under the delusion what kind of pictures we use to illustrate our posts actually matters, maybe they should chew on that for a while.

Read All About It! Cat Scratch Fever Hits Hethereau!

Any fear I may have had that Warren Continent would prove so compelling, I'd forget all about Hethereau itself, has proved unfounded, albeit not through any conscious choice of mine. I was just starting to work my way through the second difficulty level, Challenge, when I was interrupted by external factors (Social visits, work...) and next thing I knew I was back doing the regular dailies. City life just seemed quietly to reassert itself.

In fact, I found myself playing for an hour or so today before I remembered the 999 Nights content was still there. Oh, how soon we forget! I will get back to it soon. I need to kill the Molten Dragon one more time and do a couple of other things to fill my dance card for the update, if nothing else.

Mostly, though, I want to go back just for the fun of it. My general suspicion of repeated content of that sort has been pushed aside thanks to the excellent entertainment on offer in this particular case. And anyway, I'd hardly have a moral leg to stand on, looking down at repeated content, considering what I've been doing instead. Something that makes re-running dungeons look positively benign. 

That's not addicted behavior at all, is it? Not compared to frenziedly buying and scrubbing away at scratch cards, anyway. Which is what I was doing this morning. Not, thankfully, outside the newsagent around the corner from my house, if only for the extremely good reason there is no newsagent around the corner any more and hasn't been for a couple of decades. 

No, I was scratching away, standing on the sidewalk outside a Midnight Catzebo In Hethereau. I can't remember which one it was. There are a bunch of them now. They're new. And they're run by cats. Very big cats.

Maybe I should explain what they are. I'm not sure the name really gives it away. "Midnight Catzebo" is a chain of newsstands dotted around the city of Hethereau. Allegedly you can buy papers and magazines there but I can't say I saw them sell any. 

What they do sell are scratch cards. They have five kinds at prices ranging from 10k to 50k. Specifically, there's a 10k card, a 20k card and three 50k cards. The prizes range from 10k to 2.5m, with the higher-price cards offering the biggest wins.  

There's a limited number of cards of each type available at each stand. I'm not sure what the limit is but I bought one stand out of 10k and 20k cards and it felt like I bought maybe twenty of each? Bit of a blur, if I'm honest.

I'm also not sure if each stand is independent of the others, with its own stock, or whether draining one dry drains them all. I couldn't easily tell by googling it and I'm sure as hell not going to go round spending my own money to test it.

They refill overnight, meaning you can theoretically buy all the cards once a day, every day, for as long as the event lasts. Oh, yes. It's an event. I didn't realize that at first. It was added with the 999 Nights update but I totally missed it because I totally missed everything about the update, except for Warren Continents, which absorbed 100% of my attention for a week or so. 

The name of the event is Mews Flash, which makes me wonder whether someone came up with the pun first and then decided to make the stallholders cats or if it was the other way around. There's a backstory of sorts, although it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Allegedly, the Midnight Catzebos were set up by Grandpa Miles as a way to fund his Midnight Newsstand, possibly the last functioning newsstand in the city. Social media and smartphones have basically done for newspapers in Hethereau. 

As Catvioli explained to Flora this morning,  Grandpa Miles sank all his savings into the project. Where the cats come in is anyone's guess. I met two of them They both had "cat" names, Catvioli and Cat Cake. I feel like I need to visit every stand in the city now, just to find out what the rest are called. 

When I saw Grandpa Miles' name, it reminded me I was halfway through a quest involving him. Before the game went all medieval on us, Flora was trying to find out why he was suffering attacks of delirium. Was he showing the early effects of dementia or was there an anomaly at the root his confusion?

Flora met Grandpa Miles when she happened to be passing his newsstand and noticed a blue exclamation point hanging over his head. That being the universal symbol for "Talk to me and you may learn something to your advantage"  in every game since 2004, she jogged over and introduced herself. 

Thus began a very long, well-written, emotionally satisfying quest concerning an old man, his childhood friend, her grand-daughter and the old man's busy but concerned son. The narrative touched on the changes technology brings, the impermanence of memory and how the past needs to be preserved if it's not to be lost. 

Everyone involved showed exemplary levels of responsibility, self-sacrifice, compromise, and empathy, including the JTF officials, who turned up towards the end, looking suspiciously like Men In Black, as they always do. The whole storyline felt rich in compassion and adult in theme, making it yet another fine example of why I find this and similar games an awful lot more satisfying to play than more traditional fantasy titles these days. (Ironic, considering the Warren Continent digression, I know...)

Having been reminded of its existence by a cat in a suit, I went back and finished the whole thing before I bought any more scratch cards. (At that point I'd only bought a couple, just to try them out.) The quest, which goes by the name of either“Gift for the Little Book Lover” or "Books Are Like Old Friends", depending on whether you've accepted it yet or not, is a lengthy one but it would be one whole hell of a lot longer if you waited for each of the many two-day delays to pass in game-time.

This is a mechanic I just do not get at all. I understand how developers might want to time-gate progress for any number of reasons but why would anyone build a whole bunch of delays into a quest like that and then allow all of them to be freely bypassed by moving the clock forward? 

Even that might make sense if events in the game-world took place according to a fixed calendar, as they do in the "My Time At..." series or any number of Stardew Valley type games. Then there'd at least be some notional cost to skipping a few days. Missing a festival or an event, perhaps.

As far as I can tell, though, there's no such mechanic in Neverness To Everness. Turning the hand forwards on the clock makes the sun go down and the moon come up and that's about it. The only discernable effect I could see when I did it was a change in the light and the removal of the restriction preventing me from carrying on with the quest. 

Oh, and the rain. It was gloriously sunny on the day I set the clock spinning for the final time but when the hands stopped moving we were in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was raining as hard as I've seen it in Hethereau. The streets were awash. There was forked lightning flickering across the sky. Everyone either had their umbrellas up or they were holding books or magazines over their heads and running for cover.

NTE has some of the best weather effects I've seen in a game. Everything changes when it rains, from the quality of the light to the reflections in the wet surfaces to the behavior of the people all around. Except, of course, for all those poor NPCs who have to talk to the player. They just stand there, getting drenched. As did Flora.

We got it all sorted in the end, despite the rain. Between us, we managed to bring Grandpa Miles back to himself without destroying Aria's grandmother's precious diary or nullifying the Old Diary anomaly, which turned out to be entirely benign. It was the Good Ending, for sure. Not that there was any alternative.

All of which didn't entirely jibe with the giant cat's assertion that Grandpa Miles, having brought his past and present into alignment, had then rushed out to invest his life savings in what can at best be described as a venture of dubious morality or, probably more accurately, a flat-out scam.

Although that, I imagine, will depend on how you feel about gambling. I'm neutral about it, myself, but as several reddit threads confirm, some people are less sanguine to see it added to the game. (Again, ironic, considering it's a gacha game...) Then again, I imagine you  might have some doubts about the event if you'd just lost two or three million Fons on it. 

I did not lose that much. In fact, after what felt like about half an hour of non-stop scratching (Could have been more, could have been less. I didn't time it.) I think I was pretty much back where I started (Didn't keep an exact tally of my wins and losses, either, but the numbers look much as I remember them.)  I do know I'd had fun, though. And I got a whole load of gifts to hand out to all the characters I'm trying to ingratiate myself with because you get one of those every time, win or lose.

I really enjoyed the tactility of the whole thing. You get a different scratchcard on screen for each of the five types you can buy and you can scratch off each image with the mouse, It's an extremely convincing replication of the physical version, or what I remember of it, not having scratched an actual card in a decade or two. 

There is a button to remove all the coatings instantly if you don't, as I do, find doing it yourself with the mouse hugely satisfying. That seems daft to me. Why simulate a scratchcard and then invite people not to scratch it? Why would you be in such a rush you'd skip the whole thing? Presumably because you only bought it to win the money. In which case more fool you! Of course, you aren't going to win the money!

The most I won was 160k on a card that had five small wins. About 80% of the cards had a single win that gave the exact amount the card cost. A few had nothing and a few had slightly more or less than the cost of the card. 

That meant it felt pretty safe to keep buying the 10k and 20k cards, which I did until they ran out. They mostly paid for themselves. As soon as I got to the 50k cards, though, it was clear two or three bad cards in a row would put me further behind than I'd be likely to make up, so I stopped.

I found the whole thing an entertaining diversion. I'll probably do it a few more times before the event ends but I certainly won't be trying to grab every card, every day, the way some people supposedly have been doing. 

There's a conspiracy theory on reddit suggesting Hotta have added the event purely to bankrupt people so they'll have to buy more Fons with real money. Seems a bit far-fetched to me but then I would say that, wouldn't I? I've never had a real problem stopping before I lose only very slightly more than I'm happy to lose. 

And it's not as though you get nothing for your money. I have a whole load of gifts to give away. 

Now, who am I going to give them to? 

And They All Lived Happily Ever After... Or Did They?

I was going to skip posting today [Edit: yesterday.] seeing as how I posted yesterday [Edit: the day before yesterday.], when normally I'd have been at work. 

Sidebar: I'm on holiday again. I didn't book any holiday this year but leaving it until you actually have a reason to book it isn't deemed acceptable any more. If you don't book the whole year by the end of April, someone you've never met, who works in another city, books it for you. So that happened and I got given a week off in every month from June to October which, unbeknownst to the person who booked it for me, is when I'm going to retire. All of which means I'm not working another full month, ever. And I only work two days a week now to begin with. Yay me!

Sidebar: Wow! Sidebar after one sentence! That's a record. And now another! They don't teach you this in blogging school.

Getting back to the point, although whether you can get back to somewhere you never went in the first place is an interesting piece of metaphysics, I was going to give myself a day off from posting but then I finished Warrens Continent on Story Difficulty and I thought I probably ought to record that somewhere for posterity. It's 8pm though [Edit: 8.40 am now.] and I can pretty much guarantee Beryl will be in any moment to demand at least an hour's entertainment, so chances are this won't get posted tonight anyway. [Edit: It did not.] I could have left it for the morning but we're here now, so let's press on. [Edit - For a while, at least.]

As Nimgimli said the other day, "if AI wrote these posts it wouldn’t add all that superfluous preliminary junk. That’s how you can know I still write my own posts!" Whether that's a good thing or not, I'll let the reader be the judge. 

Getting back to getting back to the point, finishing the story in a major update in a gacha game isn't all that unusual for me, although doing it less than a week after it landed certainly is. What's more unusual is that I've also completed most of the associated Event Table. There are three parts to it; I've done two of them and I'm 7/9 on the third. I just have to repeat-kill a couple of bosses and get Shinku to 60 to finish but I'm not logged in right now so I can't check.

That puts me at 21/23 on the full Events Reward progress bar, the "Grand Prize" for which is five Fabricated Dice. That strikes me as the kind of  "Grand Prize" you'd give a seven year-old for coming third in the sack race at Sports Day but what can you do? It's not like I paid an entry fee.

And anyway, I didn't do it for the reward. I didn't do it for the glory, either, although it's true the Fuzzies are building a statue in my honor. Well, in Shinku's honor mostly but Flora gets a smaller statue as one of her Trusted Companions. The Dice Lord told us that in the epilog.

No, I did it for the fun. And boy, was it fun! Most fun I've had in a game for ages and by that I mean sheer, knockabout, punch-em-inna-face, rock-em-sock-em fun. The story was up to NTE's expected, excellent standard but it was mostly the non-stop, explosive combat and the showers of loot that kept me coming back. Twice a day most days. Playing longer sessions than I most likely would have otherwise.

GeForce Now can take some credit. Super-smooth 99% of the time. Never lost connection. Maybe 30 seconds of intermittent lag in ten hours play. All with my PC sitting there, quiet and calm as you like despite the weather. The only one overheating was me. 

Sidebar: I do have to give NVidia a demerit for not allowing the use of keyboards to control games on GeForce Now when you play via TV. I'd have been downstairs in the relative cool of the lounge if they'd let me use my keyboard. I didn't find that wouldn't work out until I'd already set the app up on our Google TV and bought a new wireless keyboard and mouse to go with it. The mouse works fine but the keyboard isn't recognized once you get past the GFN front-end. 

I had to google it to find out why. It's NVidia's policy, for some bizarre reason. You can only use a controller to play games on their servers if you're playing on a smart TV. No idea why. And just to make it even more awkward, GFN isn't fussy what controller you use but NTE is. Neverness To Everness only officially recognizes the PS5 Dual Sense Wireless Controller, apparently, which is not what I have.

I don't want to play NTE with a controller anyway so I'm not going to get one. I can just run an HDMI cable from the laptop to the TV and do it that way if I really want to play couch-style. I bet NTE would look amazing on the big screen though...

All of which tells you very little about the actual in-game experience of the Warrens Continent end-game. Or the Story Difficulty end-game, anyway. What happens when you go back to do it on Challenge and Nightmare difficulty I can't say because I haven't done it. Yet. [Edit: I had to go back in to get a screenshot so I can tell you a little but that's coming later...]

That "Yet"speaks volumes. I never repeat content on higher difficulty. I'm not sure I've ever done it, in any game. I've always struggled to understand why anyone would want to do the same thing but harder. Personally, if I was going to do the same content again, I'd want it to be easier. 

But this was so much fun the first time... And who knows if it's going to be the same each time? Maybe something different happens on each difficulty setting. If so, I'd want to see it. 

It's not like I saw everything the first time. I didn't even take a look at all the mini-games and events, much less finish them. I only completed one of the half dozen or so quests I took. I could maybe catch up with all of that on Challenge, if the content is exactly the same. If not, maybe there'll be new quests and events.

One thing I definitely won't be doing is going back to Story Difficulty to catch up on all the things I left undone. I tried that this morning and you can't. Once you kill the Crimson Dragon, watch the cut scenes and get transported back to Hethereau, you're done with Story. If you try to go back, you'll find a big "Completed" over that button and no option other than to start again on "Challenge".

That did irritate me. I bet it will irritate some completionists a lot more. All those unticked boxes! Fortunately, Hotta are on the case, as usual. When I poked my nose into Challenge mode, I found I'd already ticked off quite a few of the goals there. Things like "Gather 100 Resources" or "Activate 2 Set Effects" that I'd done in Story Mode turned out to be on the list and my prep-work counted. 

I hope that works both ways because there's only one thing I missed in Story Mode for a full sweep - lighting a single campfire. I lit 29/30. I don't generally care about loose ends but coming that close and missing would rankle even me. If I'd noticed, I'd have made sure to have found one extra fire but I was having too much fun to check fiddly little details like that.

This has been a fairly spoiler-free report so far, except that thing about Shinku and the statue at the beginning. I'll try to keep it that way but I'll give fair warning now there may be a few minor reveals in the rest of the post.

There's more about Shinku for a start. It turns out she's the key to the whole thing (No surprise there.) She goes through every fight as a passenger until almost the end. She doesn't have a class, she can't equip anything that drops, she levels more slowly than the rest of the team. She'd be a liability if you ever let her do anything although if you have any sense you'll just keep her on the bench the entire time.

And then, very late-on, she gets her moment and suddenly she's the big hero. I'm not sure if you have to use her for the final battle with the Crimson Dragon but you'd be daft not to. 

She did about two-thirds of the damage when I did it. I started off using Iroi and the Lambs but the Crimson dragon was too smart for that so I brought in Shinku and she soon fixed his wagon. The team beat the dragon on their first attempt. I doubt they'd have done it without her.

It would be a bit weird if you weren't using her, though. You'd have to be pretty stubborn not to take the hint. And it would mess up the story. There's a big cut-scene when you get the dragon to about a third of its health and it all revolves around Shinku. If she'd not been in the fight before then, as she hadn't been for me in every other, it wouldn't make a lot of sense. Luckily, as soon as she had her epiphany, I'd given her the lead so the plot flowed perfectly for me.

There's a fair amount of exposition in the cut-scenes but I still wouldn't say I understand Shinku's backstory. I was a bit confused over what was metaphor, what was internalized conflict and what was memory. Maybe that'll be clarified later but if not I don't mind. I prefer a little creative ambiguity in my narratives.

Speaking of which, there's some of that after Flora and her pals return to Hethereau. They all go their separate ways. Bizarrely, the Appraiser gets to stay on, alone, in Mint's apartment, where I'm ashamed to say she took every opportunity to snoop around like some kind of creepy stalker.). Then Shinku sends the Appraiser a message to say she had such a good time playing 999 Nights she's tried to buy a copy of the game for herself but it's sold out.

No big surprise there. It's the most popular game in Hethereau right now. But she's also discovered no-one selling the game has even heard of the Warren Continent scenario. She names a couple of other scenarios she was offered (Which I'm thinking could be content for us, some day.) but the one they all just played? No sign of it anywhere.

Flora, being the smart cookie she is, asks Shinku why she didn't just get Mint to tell her where she got her copy. Shinku, also being a smart cookie, tells Flora she asked her but Mint couldn't remember. 

Now, as we all know, Mint is a bit of a dumcat, but in this case I'm pretty sure it's not just absent-mindedness. The Warren Continent version of the game just somehow appeared in her apartment. She can't recall buying it, even. And Mint herself said, when they emerged back into reality, that the whole thing hadn't even felt like they were in an Anomaly Realm. It had felt like somewhere real.

I suspect if 999 Nights turns out to be a very popular and successful addition to the game, we might find out more about what all of that implies. If, on the other hand, as seems quite likely, the overall reaction is "That was fun but can we please get back to the real game now?", we might never find out what was going on.

And I'll be fine with it, either way. I hope it's all going somewhere but if it's a mystery never to be solved, that's okay too. Pursuing this storyline to far might be a mistake, anyway. For the health of the game, that is.

Dropping an entirely different game into the middle of one that's barely gotten going was an extremely high-risk choice, both commercially and aesthetically. It looks like Hotta are going to get away with it through the sheer quality of the work they've done but maybe it would be best to quit while they're ahead. 

I was skeptical when I heard about it but I'm having a great time. If it was a game in its own right, I'd carry on playing it. Even so, it'll be good to back to the city. There are more fantasy RPGs than stars in the sky and quite a few cyberpunk dystopias but upbeat, cheerful futuristic cities make for a much rarer backdrop. Maybe stick to your lane in future, Hotta?

Or maybe that's just what they are doing. Maybe they plan on making unpredictability NTE's USP. 

I could live with that. 

Chocolate Milk - or - The Dragons Of Warrens Continent

I'm not sure I can think of any precedent for what Hotta's done to Neverness To Everness with the 1.2 update that landed last week. Something similar must have happened somewhere before because there's nothing new on this earth but if it happened in any game I was playing, I can't remember it. And it does seem like something you'd remember.

The closest I can think of would be Super Adventure Box in Guild Wars 2 but that wasn't remotely on the same scale. 999 Nights (Which, I'll remind you, because it never ceases to amuse me, is pronounced "One Thousand Less One Nights.") is a complete, full-featured ARPG, playable from within NTE. 

It's not a holiday event or a mini-game or even a special zone. It's a whole fricken' game! Last time, I estimated it might keep someone busy for about 30 hours but having played through the first two big dungeons, I'm going to have to revise that upwards. There are two more to go so it's going to take me maybe fifteen hours just to do it all on Story mode and there are two further difficulty levels.

That's just the main quest, which is what I've mainly stuck with so far, (There are also side-quests. I went all round the Fuzzy Village, where the not-really-sheep live, and picked up about half a dozen, although so far I've only finished one.) but there are a large number of other attractions, quite a few of which I've done, some several times, mostly because curiosity has led me to go up to a lot of creatures and objects and most of the events are on a proximity fuse.

Some you have to speak to an NPC to start, some start automatically when you get near and some have portals you can go through. The overworld is handled very much like the way Shroud of the Avatar does it, albeit a lot more stylishly. The map is some kind of model village, with the player character taller than the buildings as they wander down the paths from place to place. 

You can't jump or climb and there are lots of invisible walls. It's a representation of a place rather than a place in it's own right and I find it works very well.

There's a good variety - ring events, jumping puzzles, arenas, logic puzzles and more - and they're all as repeatable as you care to make them. I wandered about, doing some at random for a while in an attempt to level up and it was good fun. 

I wanted some more levels because, as I mentioned last time, Flora and her team did not do well on their first run at the Molten Dragon. Defeat was so swift and inevitable, I figured there had to be some trick to it, which did indeed turn out to be the case. Before I even tried to figure out what that trick was, though, I thought I'd give the the tried-and-trusted over-leveling method a go.

Gaining a few levels does help but the effect is limited by the much higher influence of gear on combat effectiveness. The primary way more levels help is that they allow you to equip higher level-limited items but since, at least as far as I can tell, you need to beat the bosses before you gain access to the areas where the next tier of gear drops, it's kind of a Catch 22. 

Luckily, a random comment I just happened to spot on a reddit thread gave me a clue what was needed. Someone tossed an aside into a thread where people were talking about the problems they were having with the first boss, saying there was an "artifact" that would protect one member of your team against dragon fire. 

It was the fiery breath of the dragon, or possibly some kind of massive fiery AE, that had done for my entire team in seconds. I figured if I could find the artifact and give it to Iroi, she could heal herself well enough against the rest of the dragon's damage to solo the damn lizard if she had to. 

That would turn it into one of those long, attritional boss fights I'm all too familiar with from both GW2 and EverQuest II. Not much fun, sure, but if you get it right, you only have to do it the one time and that's bearable. 

I was settling myself into the idea but first I had to find the artifact. I thought maybe the mysterious sheep vendor might sell it but it was more obvious even than that. It turned out the person who'd left the comment on reddit was making it sound more abstruse than it really was.

The so-called "artifact" that nullifies the effect of dragon flame isn't an artifact at all. It's an accessory and it drops off... who knows? Not me. Not google, either, as we'll see. Probably just a low chance off any mob in Chocolate Volcano, I imagine. When I came to look in my bags for it, I found I already had two of them. 

They were still in there because I hadn't even noticed there were accessories or slots to put them in. It tells you something about how I play games because the slots are right there on the paper-doll and yet somehow I hadn't noticed them.

My feeble excuse is I hadn't been looking at the paper dolls when I was gearing my team. I'd been using the scrolling list of slots down the left of the screen to swap out and upgrade gear and you have to scroll that one down past the bottom of the display to see the accessory slots. They're right down the bottom, after the boots. 

I found that out by chance, not long after I'd been reading about the artifact. I just happened to scroll a bit further down than usual by mistake as I was swapping out gear. Once I'd noticed the slots for accessories were there, I clicked on them, which brings up anything in inventory that might fit the slot and it turned out I'd already looted quite a few rings and gewgaws. I'd been lugging them around in my bags for ages without knowing about it.

And guess what? There were two copes of the "artifact" I was after. It's called Hot Spring Egg and it "Grants immunity to monster burn damage." Perfect! 

Here's the really weird thing. Google doesn't seem to know the Hot Spring Egg exists. None of my searches then found it and even now I know what it's called, I'm still coming up blank. Even with the name of the game and the item there are no results. Well, no meaningful results.

If you search, as I did just now, for "Accessory in Neverness To Everness Warrens Continent that negates NPC fire damage.", the AI summary confidently informs you "In Neverness to Everness, the "999 Nights" (Warren Continent) content does not feature a single accessory that universally negates all NPC fire damage." Even if you use the exact wording from the egg and call it "burn damage" it's the same. Doesn't exist, apparently.

Yeah. Well, it does.Shows what you know, Gemini!  I have three of them now after another dropped yesterday. And you're not restricted to using the Egg on just one character, as the reddit comment implied. They're not whatever NTE's equivalent of Lore-Equip in EQII would be. Everyone on the whole team can have one. 

I probably wouldn't have known that if I hadn't found two of them in my bags. I'd have gone with my initial plan to use just Iroi and it would most likely have worked, even if it would have been teeth-grindingly slow.

With two Eggs, I had a better plan. I stuck one on Iroi and one on Flora, figuring the two of them could duo the dragon easily enough if they weren't on fire. The Appraiser has good DPS and Iroi is an amazing healer. Since plot mechanics mean Shinku has barely contributed anything to the team anyway, I've effectively been trioing the fights all along. Things would go slower without Mint's DPS but with Flora involved it would certainly be a lot faster than with Iroi on her own. 

I was almost looking forward to it now. I was about to port back and give it a go right then, when it occurred to me I might as well fight my way back through the whole volcano and get a couple of levels while I was doing it. 

That really says a lot about how much fun I'm having. It's the first time I've ever felt like I got the point of an ARPG. Killing hordes of mobs and picking through heaps of loot for upgrades hasn't really been my thing until now. I guess it can't have been the mechanics that were putting me off when I've tried other games that use them, after all. It must have been something else - the setting or the aesthetic, probably. 

It really helps that all the main armor slots displays, there's a great variety of looks to discover and the avatars are large enough to see what it all looks like, something that's never been the case in any isometric-perspective game I've played. The developers have done a really great job, not just adding a complete ARPG to the game but making me enjoy it, too.

So that's what I did. I enjoyed it. Specifically, I enjoyed the return match with the Molten Dragon and I especially enjoyed kicking the crap out of it. 

By the time I got to the dragon's room, the whole team had dinged 21 except poor old Shinku, forever a level behind. But she wasn't going to be fighting anyway. 

Flora woke the dragon up up and whacked it about with her sword. Iroi tagged in to drop her big heal when it was needed. I think Mint might have made a brief appearance, too, mostly to drop her Ultimate then vanish again. She couldn't hang around for long, not having an Egg of her own.

With its fire and lava attacks proving utterly ineffective, the dragon went down pretty easily. As did the  second dragon, over in the Milk Ice Mountain, which was where I went next. I was expecting to have to find some new item to protect me against freezing damage for that one but no. I never checked what damage the Frostspike Dragon who lives there was doing but whatever it was it didn't have much effect on my team, three of whom had the Hot Spring Egg by then.

Maybe that dragon does burn damage too. Or maybe it was my clever strat that did for him. 

I'm being ironic, at least somewhat. No strat I ever come up with is likely to qualify as clever. I think I'm doing pretty well if I know what my characters' main abilities do. Combining them for some kind of dramatic payoff is generally well beyond my remit. 

That is what your supposed to do, I think. NTE, like all the gacha games I've tried, assumes players love complexity. It's ferociously complex in terms of synergies between characters, gear, effects, abilities and a whole lot of other factors, all of which I'm sure the developers imagine the players will just lap up (And probably spend money trying to min-max.). Luckily for me they also seem quite forgiving of lazy bums who can't be bothered to figure out how it all fits together, which is just as well or I'd not be playing.

Sometimes, though, things happen that are hard to ignore. On the way up the milk mountain, something weird occurred often enough to make me tab out to try and find out what the heck was going on. Three-quarters of my team kept turning into flying lambs mid-fight. After that, I couldn't control them at all until combat ended, when they snapped back into their own forms as if nothing untoward had happened.

Fortunately, google knew what it was. It's what happens when you hold down "E" for a little longer than just a key-press, when Iroi's on the field. E triggers what I think of the "ranged" skill. (The game calls it Redirect.) Everyone has one but I'm not sure they all vary on a short and long press. 

I wouldn't necessarily know without looking it up because I rarely use the long-press at all. I hadn't been doing it intentionally this time, either. It was just a fluke but a very fortunate one. What happens when Iroi does it is that she turns the whole team into her puppets. In that form, they can't be damaged at all but they can still attack. 

Given that Iroi is an amazing healer who can keep going for ages on her own, it means she can tank the mob while her flock of lambs whittle away at it. (The lambs all have special attacks as well but I haven't figured out how to get them to work yet.) Perhaps best of all, if Iroi does die, all the characters who were lambs pop back up as themselves, at full health!

That's what happened in the Frostspike fight but by then the dragon was at about 10%. Flora and Mint finished it off with no trouble. And that was the second mountain done.

Next, it's off to the lake. Amber Syrup Lake, to be exact. And to tell the truth I've already made the trip. But that's a story for another day, if only because so far I've only gotten as far as the first campfire so there's not a lot to tell.