I Guess That's What Everything Is Now.

I certainly wasn't planning on making any political statements today - or any other day for that matter - but sometimes it's harder to avoid than you might think. Like when you're browsing your media feeds after lunch and this comes up. 

I was pondering a response when Roger at Contains Moderate Peril beat me to it. Thanks, Roger! Saves me having to formulate any kind of reasoned, rational response, something I'm not sure I'd have been capable of, at least not just yet. 

Games Industry chimed in after that with an assurance that gaming wouldn't be affected, which I'm sure was the first thing on everyone's minds but kudos for staying in your lane, GI. Rest assured, the kids will still be able to play Minecraft and Roblox, apparently, although there needs to be some clarification on what the exemption actually means. Supposedly it excludes games but  not "gaming platforms" and media, so expect to have to supply Google and WordPress some ID any day now, if you want to carry on reading your favorite UK-based gaming blogs. 

Seriously, on that last point, I don't see why blogs wouldn't qualify as a form of social media, unless the legislation is only interested in some form of direct messaging, not conversations carried out in public. I guess we'll have to wait for the exact wording, although now I come to think about it, the ban includes YouTube, which I've never even remotely thought of as social media anyway. 

Who knows? If blogs really aren't included, maybe we'll see a revival of interest. For a couple of weeks, until they get added to the proscribed list, that is.

I can't make much sense of it yet. Livestreams are banned. But does that only mean livestreams like on Twitch, which have text panels where everyone talks at once in real time? Or is it also livestreams like sporting events or music festivals on Amazon Prime or Netflix or the fricken' BBC, where no-one talks at all and we all just watch like it's television? Who knows what the hell they're talking about. I guess we'll have to wait for the paperwork.

This has to be an overstep, doesn't it? I mean, I'm pissed off by it and I am very much not one of the annoying crew that keeps bleating on about the daed internets. I'm not even all that especially bothered by the current fad for supplying "identification" to all and sundry, although I was pretty pissed off by the time I'd had to send selfies of me holding up my passport five times in one week (Almost true story. Only slightly exaggerated.)

Every medium has its Wild West era but it never lasts. Enjoy it while you can is my advice but don't expect it to stay that way. We had some fun. Now it's over. Teacher came back into the room.

That said, this blanket ban seems like a response on the level of John Major's infamous Dangerous Dogs Act. I was tempted to go a lot further back, compare it to King Cnut holding back the waves, but as we all know, I'm sure, he was trying to demonstrate how he couldn't do anything so ridiculous, not to prove he could. He was trying to make the point that just because he was King didn't mean he could do anything anyone wanted him to do. Our currently elected overlords seem not to have taken that lesson to heart.

I guess, since I'm nearly seventy now (I need to keep saying that out loud in a vain attempt to get used to the idea. I do still have a couple of years to go...), I ought to be able to stand back and ignore this nonsense. It's not going to affect me, after all. Except I'm sure it will. Not sure how, yet, but I'll bet it won't be anything good.

Perhaps the most interesting thing will be to see how the target demographic responds. Are they going to welcome it? Accept it? Ignore it? If it works, will teenagers genuinely feel they've been given their childhood back? And if they have, will they want it?

I didn't think "childhood" was anything most adolescents particularly valued but maybe that's changed. It's been a long time since I was a child or a teenager, although you might not think it to read this blog. When you were in your teens, did you think of yourself as a child? Did you want everyone else to see you that way? I didn't. At least I don't think I did. As I said, it was a long time ago.

And come to think of it, wasn't the current government talking about lowering the voting age to 16? Is anyone sensing a degree of inconsistency? 

Oh, well. No point going on about it. It hasn't happened yet. It might never happen. If it does happen it might not work. Anyone from Australia reading this? How's it working out for you over there, so far?

I was going to leave you with a final word from Astryuuna on one of my favorite YouTube channels. She's  a lot closer to the target age bracket and although I think she'd probably just escape it, she's having some problems of her own with people trying to tell her how to use the social media and technology she grew up with.

Astryuuna's widely praised for flying the flag for how the internet used to be before it got ruined by a devil's handshake of censorship and commercialism. She's also very NSFW, so be warned. She makes a lot of good points in her latest video, though. She usually does. You don't have to be sane, rational, balanced or reasonable to be right. Or, as the proposed legislation suggests, very, very wrong.   

And then I thought, no, why take the risk? She does go in hard in the latest rant. I don't want to get into trouble by association. Which is indicative of how a moral panic gets to you, isn't it? Go look her up yourself if you're interested. It'll be worth your time. 

Instead, I'll go out with a nice, safe option. Here's a Voice Of Today saying something vaguely relevant. 

Chloe Slater, aged 23, already waxing nostalgic about the good old days of her Southern Youth, although from the video it looks more like she grew up in the '80s. It's not quite jumpers for goalposts but it's not far off. The camcorder's a particularly nice touch.

Cracking song though. I wonder how all the new Chloes out there will get to see videos like that, when YouTube's banned?

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Just the two images, both generated through NightCafe as usual, although I'm typing this listening to some songs I made last week on Suno. Does that count?

I made the second image first, using the prompt "King Canute on his throne on the beach with the tide coming in. He's  surrounded by sycophantic nobles. Canute is checking his mobile phone to see what people are saying on social media about his attempt to hold back the waves. In the style of a stained glass window in a medieval cathedral." You'll note I spelled Canute the way it was spelled when I was growing up, not the way it's usually spelled now. I don't know why I thought an AI wouldn't recognize it otherwise.

For that image I just used whatever model was in the chamber, which happened to be Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. I was pretty happy with it, too, but when I needed a second image I thought I'd run the same prompt through one of my Pro freebies, in this case GPT Image 2 Low. Blimey, Charlie! It's a lot better, isn't it? So I used that one for the header and relegated poor old Flux to the body. Maybe there is some point to paying a sub after all.

What's Going On

Steam has several primary functions. It's a store-front, where you can buy games. It's a platform, from which you can access and launch them. It also acts as a kind of social network for players and it provides a virtual fairground for games companies and developers, with its endless parade of special interest events, such as next month's NextFest or next week's Open World Survival Crafting Fest.

All of which is very helpful and useful and so on but there's another aspect of Steam's service I'm only now beginning to appreciate. It's a great place to get gaming news.

You'd think there'd be enough of those around already but I've always found it unecessarily hard to find the kind of news I wanted, presented in the way I wanted to receive it. Many, maybe most, gaming sites seem to be more interested in being entertaining than informative.

I used to complain quite frequently that what I wanted from MMO news sites like MassivelyOP was a lot less editorial and opinion and a lot more straight news reporting. I fully appreciate that just recycling PR handouts doesn't bring the eyeballs and pay the bills like snark, sarcasm and clickbait headlines but it's a plain fact that the posts I read all the way through at MOP are the ones that stick most closely to the information handed them by games developers. 

I realize it's hypocritical of me to complain about other people doing exactly what I do here all the time, namely using publicity material as a springboard for a string of self-indulgent dad jokes. My justification is that this is a personal blog, not a professional website. My one and only brief is to keep myself amused. If in doing so I happen to amuse anyone else, that's gravy.

I hate gravy, by the way. Who wants wet food? How did that ever get to be the benchmark?

See? That's the sort of self-indulgence I'm talking about. And so is this. Do you really want that sort of nonsense in your news reporting? I don't, which is why I'm constantly on the verge of removing MOP from my news feeds. 

And yet somehow it never happens. The problem is, no-one else covers the industry segment that interests me as fully and accurately as they do. MassivelyOP doesn't catch every development in the genre but it nets more than anyone else I've found and frequently tells me things I didn't know about games I play or introduces me to games I hadn't heard of. I have other MMO news sites in my Feedly, notably MMOBomb, whose coverage tends to be a lot straighter than MOP, if still prone to the occasional, unsolicited opinion, but it's rare for any of them to scoop Bree and her team.

Still, what I would really like is a true news aggregator for the genre. Something that just collates and distributes the press releases sent out by gaming companies and links them, unedited and unfiltered, under simple, declarative headings. That would allow me to skim them, read the ones that interest me and then do my own research to see how accurate or otherwise I feel the information promulgated by the marketing departments might be. I do love to do my own research.

It's taken me a long time to realize it but in a way that's what I already have with Steam. 

I tend to use Steam mainly from the Library page. Along the top is a band called What's New. For a long time I ignored it completely. It was only when I started to notice that information about a game I thought was all but dead was appearing almost daily that I started to pay attention. 

Few people reading this probably remember Bless Unleashed. Even fewer care what happened to it. I imagine most people who recognize the name assume it either closed down or went into maintenance mode long ago.

That's about what I thought, too. I did have a vague recollection of some half-assed conversion to NFTs or blockchain, back when those were the scam-du-jour, but so many fading, failing games tried jumping that bandwagon, none of the details really stuck with me. 

I still don't really have any clue how Bless Unleashed is doing. I uninstalled it a while back to free up some hard drive space so I can't log in to check for myself. I can tell you that according to the Steam charts it has a 30-day average of just under 500 players, which isn't a lot, although it's better than many MMOs on Steam. Lord of the Rings Online, for example, only has about a hundred more Steam players than that. MMOs often have multiple points of access, so Steam charts don't tell the whole story.

As for Bless Unleashed drifting dead in the water, belly-up in the oil slick of maintenance mode, thanks to Steam's What's New strip rolling along the top of my screen, I can confidently say it's not. As I write, news of updates for Bless Unleashed takes up much of the row. The game patched twice on May 17 and again on May 22. It also required an Emergency Update on the 20th and on the 22nd. An activity called "Ordo Chess" was added, along with half a dozen quality-of-life adjustments and the inevitable cash shop offers.

It's nothing major in itself but having played many similar MMORPGs, where even minimal updates like these dried up completely with no word at all from the developers for months on end, it definitely shows the game remains a going concern for the publisher and that there's still someone being paid to work on it.

Steam's What's New is how I heard about the bizarre bee competition in Rift. Like Valofe, who publish Bless Unleashed these days, Gamigo pump out a stream of "updates" I only know about from the news squibs. Granted, almost all of them are re-runs of events Trion originated but even that shows a kind of active engagement missing from games in true maintenance mode.

As a promotional tactic, it works. Better than you'd imagine. I still have Rift installed and I do occasionally log in as a result of reading something in that strip across the top of my screen. I did the quiz and I don't even want the prize. If I'd read about it in a quip-filled paragraph on a gaming website, I doubt I'd have bothered. 

I find  information presented this way, unmediated and without commentary, more engaging and involving than most of what I read after it's been filtered through the observations and interpretations of a third party and there's good reason for that. It's how I was brought up by print journalism.

Back in the day, when I got all my music news from the inkies, there was a very clear division between news and opinion. The first few pages were filled with news, which was presented entirely without comment, just the bald facts. Once past that, opinions ruled. Interviews, editorial, reviews, columns - it was a free-for-all filled with irony, ridicule, posturing, pretension and pontification and I loved it. 

Even now, most of the music websites I follow operate under roughly the same rule: news up front, no commentary; opinion in the back and give 'em hell! I'd love it if I could get my gaming news the same way but so far I've yet to find a site that covers the games that interest me in the way I'd like, which is why I'm so pleased to have identified a possible alternative.

The limiting factor for Steam's What's New, of course, is that it only feeds me information about games I have registered with the platform. And it seems as though only a subset of developers choose to send that information to the channel. 

I hear a lot about Bless Unleashed and Rift. I read plenty on AdventureQuest 3D (Did you know they're about to remove level scaling from the game almost completely? That's worth a post of its own.). Palworld, Nightingale, New World and Palia all keep me up to date with everything they're doing. I even hear from Legend of Edda occasionally, although that one sends me emails more often than it posts updates.

Other games on my roster remain silent, which might lead me to think they'd died, if it wasn't for another benefit of having them on Steam: the Community Hub. The hub is not, in my opinion, as good as the What's New feed for the simple reason I have to go looking for it. I have to think of the game, wonder what's going on with it, find it in my Library and click through to the Community page before I can see any news there might be.

I just did that with two MMORPGs I play - or at least used to play - through Steam. Both of them used to post regular updates in the news feed but neither of them has appeared there for a while. Having made the effort to catch up with them both, I can now tell you Dawnlands hasn't issued any kind of update or news since just before Christmas but Dragon Nest has been putting out a solid four notifications per month all year, none of which I have seen.

Why those have stopped appearing in my feed I have no clue but I wish they hadn't. I don't care that i'm not playing the game any more. I don't even care that I maybe can't play it, thanks to the endless fuck-ups with regionalization Dragon Nest has always been subject to. I would still like to read about what's going on there even if I can't join in.

I was a tardy and reluctant adopter when it came to Steam and since I caved and began using it I've treated it grudgingly and with bad grace. No more. I'm beginning to see more advantages than drawbacks in using the platform and I plan on making more of the opportunities it offers in future.

If I can't get what I want from the gaming press, perhaps I can get it from Valve. Or from Microsoft, if rumors are to be believed.

I didn't read that on Steam, though, and I doubt I ever will, at least until it's a done deal. 

I guess I won't be removing those gaming sites from my Feedly after all.

I Got Nothing

For the first day in about as long as I can remember I don't have anything I want to write about! There's nothing in the gaming news that strikes me as worth commenting on, I haven't read any posts I care to bounce off and I'm not doing anything much of interest even to myself.

I imagine some will be intrigued by Riot's slate of new titles but never having played League of Legends the news isn't really pushing any of my buttons. If they were planning on an MMORPG set in LoLworld I'd be a lot more interested but that's supposedly right off the table.

Anyway, I find it increasingly hard to work up any kind of real excitement about games that won't be available to play for several years. These days I wonder if I'll even be around when it happens. And if I am, will I still care?

Something that is happening right now is the launch of ArcheAge Unchained. I did play and enjoy ArcheAge back when it was new but the degree of enthusiasm for the Buy to Play relaunch strikes me as a little odd. I always thought it seemed like a fairly middle-of-the-road, ordinary kind of MMORPG, although I appreciate it has some potentially interesting PvP systems.

Were I in the market for a new MMORPG I would probably avoid AAU and go for Astellia, although most of the commentary so far has been the very definition of lukewarm and I notice the trickle of posts on the game has already dried up. As it goes, however, I am very much not in that particular market. I have literally more than enough games to play already.

Mostly I'm backing the old favorites. I'm doing my dailies in Guild Wars 2, often staying to spend an hour or two in World vs World. When I logged in this morning I saw the annual spookfest, rebranded for 2019 as "Shadows of the Mad King" had returned.

Please form an orderly queue. ArcheAge Unlimited is currently over-subscribed but we are expecting a new server any time now...

I read the extensive patch notes before logging in but even though it looks as though there's plenty of new stuff, when I examined the detail in game I found very little of any interest. There are two new collections but they give rewards I don't want. The coffin shield is nice but I have no-one who uses a shield and the sword is just awful.

The so-called "collections" are, of course, nothing of the kind. ArenaNet use the term "collections" as a euphemism for what every other MMORPG would call "quests" and these are particularly irritating quests at that. They require completion of content in two game modes I don't play - Dungeons (which I thought ANet themselves had abandoned) and Fractals. Even if the rewards were worth having I'd balk at those.

The event drags on for weeks so I'll probably end up doing a few bits and pieces but it feels very stale. EverQuest II, meanwhile, has its own, far superior, Halloween celebrations going on and layered on top we also have the latest iteration of Gear Up, Level Up!, a sequence of pre-expansion preparation boosts that now happen every year.

This event runs in phases. There may well be a time when I feel I need to jump in but this isn't it. The rewards are triple Ethereal Coins with additional Double Currency for Members (I thought we always got that but I may be confused). The rewards stack, so Members will get six times the regular drops of Ethereal Coins.

That's a major incentive for people who get the coins in normal gameplay, namely most people for whom EQII is the primary MMORPG. I am not one of those people so it's all a bit notional for me.

There is also another strong incentive in Phase One: "Limited Time item drops can be obtained from Chaos Descending missions crates and will grant you a bonus based off of their type, such as Research Reduction".

Don't push, please. It's strictly first come, first served.

Research reduction is also a big deal in EQII and the supposed need to buy potions from the cash shop to accelerate the speed of research is often quoted as proof the game has become "Pay to Win". If I was one of the people who believed that I might be logging in to take advantage but I'm not so I'll pass.

Other than GW2 and EQII, I'm mostly still playing World of Warcraft Classic. I haven't disinvested and my sub still has a few days to run. Whether I'll pay for another month after I go back to work next week remains to be seen. I'm still enjoying myself but it is incredibly time-consuming. I suspect it could move from being a pleasure to an obligation as available time grows short.

As for posting about Classic, even though I don't have the kind of strong feelings about it that many others do, it does feel as though there's a general agreement not to mention the game at all for the time being.

I kind of wish I'd never commented on the whole sorry farrago in the first place, although to have avoided doing so entirely would have been a statement in itself, I guess. I have other political concerns that task me far more strongly at the moment so it seems a bit strange to be discussing Blizzard's faux pas in the Far East rather than addressing what I see as far more immediate and worrying issues much closer to home.

For what it's worth, I do feel that, if we continue along this road of ceasing to engage with companies that do things of which we disapprove, it won't be too long before our entertainment options consist of
pickling, whittling and staring into space.

Maybe that would be a good thing. I already enjoy two of the three and I'm sure pickling has its moments.

Carry The News, Dude!: EverQuest, The Secret World et al.

Inventory Full has no pretensions towards becoming any kind of MMORPG news source but now and again I do read things in my blog feed that I feel I ought to share. I read a couple of items this morning that fit the bill.

One of them will be very widely reported on all the MMORPG news aggregators, I'm sure. The other might not get sufficient attention to draw it to the notice of the niche audience who'd appreciate it.

The first is the news that Chinese gaming giant Tencent has acquired 29% of Funcom, developers of The Secret World, Anarchy Online and Age of Conan among many other titles.

Here's the report from Gamesindustry.biz. As they point out, this still only gives Tencent a minority interest, but it does make them the Norwegian company's largest shareholder.

Funcom's CEO gives the usual, upbeat, positive take, saying all the right things about the new investors having "a reputation for being a responsible long-term investor" and "insight, experience, and knowledge... of great value" but it looks as though the actual transfer of shares happened outwith any involvement by Funcom itself.

I hope this isn't going to affect the motorcycle parts supply chain...

Given Funcom's increasingly apparent lack of interest in the kind of MMORPGs they used to be known for, and indeed for the ones they're still curating, I'm not sure how much this matters. It's intriguing, all the same, especially following Pearl Abyss's acquisition of CCP. and that Chinese mining company's involvement with Jagex. The West is moving East, it seems, at least as far as European MMO deveelopment is concerned.

The other story will, I think, be of considerable interest to a few people who comment here now and then. It was only earlier this year that Wilhelm, blogholder of The Ancient Gaming Noob and longtime Norrath-watcher, drew my attention to a new website and videocast dedicated to the EverQuest franchise.

It's called The EverQuest Show and it's over there to the right, in my ever-growing blog roll. Over just a few months it's established itself as an authoritative voice in the EQ community.

Even Ulthorks watch The EverQuest Show

Most of the coverage revolves around the older of the two EverQuest titles, meaning The EverQuest Show isn't quite the replacement for EQ2Wire I might have hoped for, but it's doing a pretty good job of keeping the news flowing for both titles. It also specializes in covering the wider EverQuest community, bringing some amusing and surprising stories to light.

All this activity seems to have been recognized and acknowledged by Daybreak. The EQ Show team has just come back from a visit to San Diego, during which they "were granted a longform sit-down interview with Holly Longdale, executive producer for EverQuest and EverQuest II" as well as "panel interviews with developers from both EverQuest and EverQuest II about a wide range of topics".

From this they came away with "literally HOURS of video interviews and footage". Once they process and edit all of that it will be available in "several future episodes of The EverQuest Show". I'm particularly keen to hear the Holly Longdale interview, in which she's said to be "very candid about the approach to the future of the games, and the possibility of new ventures."

I wonder if she lets anything slip about the not-so-secret restructuring plans? Can't wait to find out!