All In A Good Cauzzzz...

I don't have time for a proper post today but I'd like to get something out there. So, who fancies a quiz about bees?

Gamigo, apparently. According to them, it's World Bee Day and in honor of the event there's a competition in Rift, for which you have to answer fourteen questions about bees!

Why fourteen? Don't ask me! 

What do bees have to do with Rift? Don't ask me that either!

Also, when I say "in Rift", what I really mean is in Microsoft Forms, which is where the link from the Steam page takes you. 

And when I say "answer", of course I mean "Highlight, right-click and select "Search Google", which is what everyone is going to do, although having done it myself, I have to say it doesn't one hundred per cent work for every question.

And finally, when I say "It's World Bee Day", what I mean is it was World Bee Day on Monday. I didn't notice the event was on until tonight.

If you want to try it for yourself you can find all the details including the link on the Rift Steam Community page, where you can win 3000 credits to spend in the Rift Cash Shop, always assuming you a) have a character in Rift and b) are one of the three lucky winners.

Or you can just do it all for fun right here!

1.How many different species of bees are there?

2.How much honey can a single honey bee make in its lifetime?

3.What do bees collect from flowers?

4.How many pairs of wings does a bee have?

5.What color can bees NOT see?

6.Which common insect eats bees?

7.How many eyes does a bee have?

8.How many honey bees can you find in a hive?

9.Who are the members of the honey bee colony?

10.Which of these foods are pollinated by bees?

11.What is the dance called that honeybees use as communication?

12.How wide is the largest bee’s wingpsan?

13.Which family is the honey bee a part of?

14.What is royal jelly?

The actual quiz is multiple choice but really, where's the skill in that? You're just going to Google the answers like I did, anyway. And you're going to have to because I'm not telling you!

At least now no-one can say Gamigo aren't doing their best to keep Rift buzzing!

You Can't Take It With You

Sorting my Steam games by time played today, I was surprised to find that at 78.8 hours, Nightingale still hasn't broken into the top five, although not as surprised as I was to see what it will have to pass to get there. Sitting just ahead at #5 on the list with 81.2 hours played comes Bless Unleashed. How did that happen?

It's always possible I left BU running while I was long-term AFK of course, something I have been prone to do with games on occasion, but it's probably just that compared to any other genre, MMORPGs take up a phenomanal amount of time to play in even the most casual fashion. The only reason there are any other kinds of games in the first couple of rows of my Steam list is that I hardly play any MMORPGs through Valve's supposedly universal platform.

Most people don't, I would guess. A lot of the biggest, best-known, most successful, long-running names in the genre predate Steam entirely. Their players, active or lapsed, already have standalone installations, accounts and launchers provided either directly from the games themselves or via bespoke portals mandated by the developer.

For a long time, even after Steam took over many PC gamers' hard drives, almost all new MMORPGs came with their own launchers. It's only in very recent years that MMO developers have chosen to offer their games primarily or exclusively on Steam.

It has become something of a routine for older games to add themselves belatedely, usually with a flourish of publicity, and it does sometimes result in a surge of interest, bringing in new players for a while. When you look at the numbers playing through the platform a little later, though, it doesn't always seem as though many of those new players stayed for long.

Even less likely is the prospect of a significant proportion of the installed base for an MMORPG moving to Steam. I could play a lot of my MMORPG rotation there - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars 2 - but I don't. In some cases I'd have to begin again from scratch, an obvious non-starter, but even if the Steam version of the game can let me play my regular characters I'd still have to go through all the rigmarole of linking the accounts. Why would I bother?

Clearly most people don't. Taking the EQ titles as an example, Darkpaw would have been out of business years ago if the real average concurrency of the two games combined came to barely 350. LotRO on its own almost doubles that and GW2 makes it into the low thousands, which might just about be viable for a small indie developer but not for a sub-division of NCSoft with several hundred developers to pay.

Daybreak don't like to tell us exactly how many people play their games but you certainly don't need more than three dozen servers to accomodate three hundred and fifty people or even a couple of thousand, if we use the old 5x peak concurrency figure that used to be the top-end estimate for total participation in online games. The Steam numbers for all MMORPGs that aren't also Steam exclusives like New World and Lost Ark are more than just unrepresentative, they're downright misleading.

The disparity is so extreme it does make me wonder whether it's really worth an older MMORPG tooling itself up for Steam membership at all. Yes, there's that initial burst of interest and the concommitant flurry of new players but once the initial excitement fades you're left with a permanent red flag for anyone looking to answer that perennial gamer's question: "Is this game dead?"

If you looked at Steam for any of the titles I've mentioned, the answer would be "As a Dodo". GW2, sometimes reckoned to be one of the front-runners among Western MMORPGs, doesn't even appear on the list until you've clicked through ten screens of results. Then again, it could be worse. Rift, languishing at #1534 on the chart as I write, is so many clicks down in the hole I lost count. 

Rift, however, is the reason I was looking at my time played in Steam games in the first place. I'd seen the recent announcement about server merges and I thought I'd get ahead of the rush by moving my Faeblight characters before Gamigo put them wherever they were going to put them if I did nothing about it.

Given the lack of attention anyone - developers, publishers or even players - has shown Rift since even before Trion shut up shop more than five years ago, it's perhaps more of a surprise to learn the game still has enough servers to need merging rather than that it's actually happening. Server merges, in any case, are an inevitable phase of the life-cycle of any MMORPG and Rift was designed with an unusual degree of flexibility in that regard. Players have always been able to swap servers almost instantly with no charge. I've moved a few times already.

Consequently, I wasn't expecting much trouble when I logged in last night to move my seven Faeblight characters to either Greybriar or Wolfsbane or possibly some to one and some to the other, since I already have characters on both and I'm not sure how the processes handles overspill when you hit your allowed character-per-server buffer. That potential snag I may have thought of; I had not, however, reckoned with another: the guild bank.

It seems that when Trion created the transfer system, they allowed for the smooth  movement of just about everything except the contents of the Guild Vault. I imagine that was intentional to avoid customer service issues when someone tried to jump ship and take the whole lot with them without telling anyone. Rift has one of those very annoying automated systems for handing Guild leadership to someone else if you don't log in often enough so I can see how it could happen.

Moving the guild itself is easy enough. The Guild Leader has to move first and tick a box to say they're taking the Guild with them. Then, whenever another member of the Guild moves across, they're automatically added back to the roster, albeit for some reason at entry-level, meaning everyone has to be re-promoted. A bit half-assed if you ask me but a minor inconvenience at most.

The contents of the Guild Vaults, however, aren't going anywhere. The Valuts have to be completely emptied or you can't move at all. And therein lies my problem.

As I'm sure will astonish no-one whose noticed the title of the blog they're currently reading, my Guild Vaults in Rift are completely rammed. So, for the most part, are the bags of all my characters, although I did take the trouble a while back to make sure the ones I log in now and again at least had one empty bag to collect the inevitable "Welcome Back" bribes.

I considered the possibility of distributing the Vault contents among all my characters but even then there's not enough space. I thought about making a bank mule just to carry the load but I'd have to buy a another Character Slot. It was while I was looking at how much that might cost when I had a small epiphany: this is fricken' Rift we're talking about!

How often do I play Rift? Am I ever going to play Rift again? Do I really care which server my characters are on in a game I don't play now and don't plan on playing in the future? 

More to the point, even if I could buy a character slot for Rift Store Cash or Credits or whatever they're called, of which I still have a ton from when the game converted to F2P, do I even want to spend the time it would take to get the move done? To make a character, run through that damn tutorial, make some bags, transfer them over, join the Guild, meet whatever criteria you need to be able to withdraw stuff from the Vault, take everything out and stash it in another bank...

No. No I do not want to waste hours of my life doing any of that. I wanted to press a couple of buttons and forget about it, not start some major project that would take up hours of my life just to get me back to where I began - not playing Rift. 

Except as the record shows, I do occasionally play Rift. It's my seventh most-played game on Steam. I've spent more hours playing Rift since it moved to Steam than I've given to Palworld, albeit over a much longer period. And one of the reasons I still play Rift now and again is because it's on Steam. I very much doubt I would bother if I had to find and update a standalone client but because the button is just sitting there, sometimes I give in to whim and log in for old time's sake.

It helps that Rift is one of the games where I can play all my old characters. I can't remember if I had to set that up or if it was done automatically when the game was added to the new platform but it definitely makes it more likely I'll keep coming back, if only very occasionally. I suspect that if older MMORPGs were able to achieve seamless integration with Steam at no effort for the players it might help at least a little with retention. Then again, it's not like I ever spend any money when I'm there so there's probably no value in it for the companies running the games, even if they can get a few old lags to look in once in a while.

Having considered the possibilities, I'm going to do nothing. Not yet. The Gamigo announcement acknowledges some players may just not bother to move their characters ahead of time:

"Further details will be provided for those who may not transfer to Greybriar, Wolfsbane, Deepwood, or Laethys in time, ensuring your transition is as smooth as possible."

I'll wait until I hear what those "further details" are. Last time something like this happened they just flagged the old servers as Inactive and when you logged in you were forced to move somewhere else. For me, that would probably be as good as anything. If I'm not playing my characters anyway, I can not play them just as easily on a closed server as an active one.

Until then, it's back to Nightingale to see if  I can't push past Bless Unleashed and maybe even Divinity: Original Sin 2 at 91.3 and Dawnlands at 103.4. Both of those seem possible. 

New World at 235.8 hours, though? That's not going to happen. And as for Valheim at 384.8? 

That's a record I doubt will ever be broken.

Take Me To The River

I seem to be starting a lot of posts I don't finish at the moment. Just did it again. I get a few hundred words in before I realise even I'm not interested in hearing what I have to say next. So I stop, send it to draft and start over. One day I'll be desperate enough for something to write about that even these turgid screeds will seem worth resurrecting. Fear that day!

Instead, here's something very weird I thought I'd share. I just spotted it on Steam and had to click through to find out if it was real.

Remember Rift? It was an MMORPG a lot of people had high hopes for, myself among them. I had a great time there for a few months and I still drop in now and then for a bit of a run around.

Long ago I linked my original account with Steam, so I get to see all the updates flagged along the top of the screen every time I log in. By far the most prolific sources of news on my Steam page are Bless Unleashed, New World, Valheim and Rift. New World and Valheim generally offer substantive information about significant changes to their games. Bless Unleashed and Rift... not so much.

Bless Unleashed seems to do a lot of "server maintenance" and "emergency updates", few of which contain new content. It actually works quite well as a form of subliminal advertising because I'm always thinking of re-installing and giving the game another try. I liked most things about it except for the combat.

Rift, under its current Gamigo ownership, does a lot of "events". Nearly all of these are rehashes of things that happened before Gamigo took over. MassivelyOP likes to report them while making ironic comments, most of which seem well deserved for once.

I rarely even think about joining in to try and get some bizarre mount or other, which is usually the reward. It was rainbow-colored unicorns last time, presumably because Gamigo's target market for the game is six year-old girls.

There's often speculation among the few who still care about just what Gamigo think they're doing with the game they bought in Trion's fire sale half a decade ago. I offer this as evidence that whatever it is, it's too weird to second-guess.

I don't know if that link works but it goes to a World Rivers Day quiz. Did you know it was World Rivers Day? I didn't but Gamigo did and they want to celebrate.

Given you can just Google all the answers, I think it's more of a lottery than a quiz. Then again, you're probably not going to need Google's help with the likes of questions like these:

Which of these famous tourist attractions was not created by a river?

• The Grand Canyon
• The Nile Delta
• Niagara Falls
• The Louvre

Or 

Rivers can carry rocks and mud called sediment for many miles. Sediment is often droppen when the river reaches the sea where it forms what feature?

• Alpha
• Beta
• Delta
• Archipelago

If you're interested, there's a whole week left to work on your answers. The top three highest scorers, drawn out of a hat because that'll be everyone, win 3,000 Credits. Not much use unless you play Rift. Also not much use to me since I have about 20,000 left from when they converted to F2P a decade ago. Never found any reason to spend those so I don't really need more.

As for what this tells us about Gamigo's long term plans for the game, maybe they could make that into an essay question. It'd be a lot harder to answer than anything in the quiz, that's for sure.

Guild Wars 2 And The Telaran Takeover

I'd be overstating things if I suggested I'd been in two minds whether or not to buy Secrets of the Obscure, the upcoming Guild Wars 2 expansion, when it releases on 22 August. I really haven't been thinking about it at all. 

I played GW2 pretty much without a break for more than a decade, from launch until early this year, when I finally drifted away but I can honestly say I haven't missed the game since I stopped. I get the ocasional email from ArenaNet telling me what's going on but I don't bother opening most of them. I see news items about the game on various websites but I rarely read past the headlines.

I did pay a bit more attention to the news there was going to be an expansion this summer, following the previously-announced change of emphasis on content delivery as it transitioned from free Living Story updates to regular paid DLC. I wasn't expecting anything to come of it quite so soon. I thought I'd have at least until the autumn to build up a sufficient degree of nostalgic fondness to make me consider coming back.

In the event, the new expansion is arriving before I've had the chance to start missing the game and it certainly doesn't help that what's been advertised looks like a relatively small-scale affair largely made up of scraps, for which we'll be asked to pay almost as much as we did for a full-scale expansion. The ridiculous name didn't do much to build any enthusiasm, either.

Today I finally saw something that made me think I might want to think about buying the thing when it comes out after all. Realistically, I was always going to buy it eventually. I just imagined I could probably leave it perfectly well until next year. Or the year after.

What changed my mind? Or, I should say, what may have changed my mind, if I've come to a firm decision, which I haven't, yet, and if my mind had been made up to begin with, which it wasn't?

It was the email to the left and the press release on the GW2 Website to which it links that did it.

I've only reproduced part of the email but it's the relevant part, although the news that Zojja's back with Felicia Day voicing her very definitely did not hurt. 

But I already knew that and it hadn't been enough to rekindle my interest sufficiently to change anything. So what, exactly, did?

It was this: in a move so meta-ironic it makes me wonder what decade we're in, GW2 is turning itself into Rift. 

Literally. Don't believe me? Have it direct from the Marketing Dept.'s mouth, then:

        Rift Hunting

"With the help of the Heart of the Obscure, you’ll find nascent rifts across Tyria. Fully opening a rift will reveal Kryptis invaders who were roaming Tyria while hidden from sight. Defeat enough of them, and a more formidable champion will appear for you to face. Taking down the final Kryptis target will allow you to close the rift and will grant you Kryptis essence: powerful material you can use to craft weapons, armor, legendary armor, and bait to lure out deadlier Kryptis from rifts.

At launch, you’ll be able to find rifts in several explorable zones in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure areas, central Tyria, Cantha, and the Crystal Desert. Rift activity in explorable zones not associated with Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure will cycle on a weekly basis. If you use the Heart of the Obscure in maps without active Kryptis rifts, you’ll get pointed to those that have them. In a future update, you’ll be able to progress to even deadlier hunts designed for larger groups of players.

The enemies coming out of a rift scale with the size of the group fighting it. That means that you can party up with friends for rift hunts, weave them into other open-world activities you’re doing, and even help out if you come across a stranger fighting to close a rift in the wild."

That is the exact premise on which Trion originally marketed their 2011 MMORPG "Rift", which came out a year before Guild Wars 2 and which undoubtedly broke ground for GW2's "mould-breaking" hot-join, open world group and zerg playstyle. They haven't even bothered to change what they're calling the damn things. They're rifts ffs!

Rift was a good game in 2011. I played the hell out of it for six months. I wouldn't mind another run. Of course, Rift is still around but it's a Gamigo ghost-world now. Good luck finding enough people running around there to do rifts the way they were meant to be done.

If ArenaNet fancy turning parts of GW2 into a Rift-revival theme park then I don't mind taking a few rides. I'm minded to buy the expansion now just so I can enjoy the frenzy of the first week or two before it all quietens down.

That said, GW2 is far better set to keep content like this active over the medium and long term than most games. I mean, people still do those bandit fights and they haven't been relevant content for more than half a decade. It's also a step back down the road along which I feel GW2 should never have stopped travelling, so I feel kind of honor-bound to support it.

I guess I'll be going back to Tyria towards the end of the month, then. At least for a while. I'm not sure if it's a welcome return or I'm being reeled back in...

Steam And Glyph, Sitting In A Tree

That Frankenstein's Monster of a mash-up above is what happens when you go to play Rift through Steam these days. It's what happened to me, anyway. You may be luckier.

I often think of dipping back into Rift, when I see the name in my Steam library. Once in a while I take the plunge and when I do I usually potter around for a while, knocking out a level or two on one of my many characters, which is how I come to have more than sixty hours played.

Of course, I've actually played Rift for far, far longer than that. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it pretty much exclusively for six months from launch back in 2011, when we were in the habit of racking up a good thirty hours, even in a slow week. We both had multiple max level characters by the time we finally moved on, back to EverQuest II then The Secret World and finally Guild Wars 2.

In fact, I was still playing Rift as my main mmorpg when I started this blog. The very first post, My Bag, was about inventory management in the game. I was taking the name of the blog very literally back then. 

In that post, I was pontificating about an incoming "quality of life" change that would make managing inventory easier. I was against it. "This is the kind of service I try my hardest to avoid", I said, as I compared it to valet parking  - as though I'd ever been offered valet parking by anyone, anywhere - "I like my bags being a mess... I'll thank you to keep your hands out". 

The whole post is emblematic of how I thought back then. I really set out my stall. A dozen years on, the irony is intense. If there's one single factor that prevents me from returning to characters I used to play, in any number of old mmorpgs, it's the terrifying sight that greets me the moment I open my inventory.

I had exactly that problem today when I finally got into Rift although I had plenty of trouble even before that. The main reason I was trying to log in at all was that I'd seen a couple of news items about the game, one of which told me I could have Premium access for a couple of weeks for nothing and the other that if I didn't link my Steam account with the Glyph launcher Gamigo acquired when they bought Rift from Trion I could forget about playing for good.

I had a notion I'd already linked the two platforms at some time in the not-so-recent past so I just hit Play from my Steam library and waited to see what would happen. And waited. And waited.

After what felt like several minutes of nothing happening at all I lost patience and pressed Stop. A warning of some kind came up but I overrode it, telling the damn game to get on with it and shut down. Nothing happened. Again.

After several more subjective minutes I got really fed up and tried to close Steam, which disappeared but then reappeared instantly when I tried to re-open it, as it very well might, seeing it had only pretended to close in the first place. I tried to close it again by selecting "Close Window" from the icon in the task bar but all I got was a mesage telling me to chill while Steam closed Glyph or opened it or asked it out for coffee. The two of them were doing something together, that's all I know.

Around about then Glyph opened and Steam closed. Or vice versa. Either way I got control of my PC back so I started over. I closed both of them and restarted Steam. This time I let Steam take as long as it wanted, which was a good old while (I timed it- it was three minutes) and finally Glyph reappeared. I pressed "Play" again - on Glyph this time - and Rift finally opened for me.

I have to say this does not immediately strike me as an improvement over either the old system, where I just fired up Steam, Play in Steam and a few seconds later I was in the game, or the older old system, where I just fired up Glyph, pressed Play and a few seconds later I was in the game or the oldest old system, where I just clicked on a desktop shortcut to the executable in the Rift folder and a few seconds later... you get the idea.

I also have to say I can't see the point of having Rift installed in Steam any more, if all Steam does is open Glyph. I might just as well go straight to Glyph and cut out the middle man. And I would, if I knew where it was. Only I can't find it because the Search function in my installation of Windows 10 is broken, but that's another story altogether. 

It's just as well I don't really want to play Rift, I guess. Or rather, having played it for about an hour, I'm good for another few months. By then, maybe Steam and Glyph will have gotten their act together.

I did have fun while I was playing, though, as I think the screenshots confirm. There's a good game there, still, somewhere, if you can just find the bloody thing.

Battlesuit Telara

One curious side effect of using Steam as a portal is the way I occasionally find myself logging in to something I had no intention whatsoever of playing. Take today, for example. I was planning on getting stuck in to My Time At Sandrock but what did I end up playing instead? Rift. 

Of all things, Rift? How did that happen? Good question!

I have Steam set up to open on my Library, which is asking for trouble to begin with. There's every chance my eye will light on something in the list and my brain will light up with recognition as though I'd seen an old friend across the street.

I can usually suppress the urge to run into traffic to greet them but across the top of the screen there's always a ticker showing me "What's New" for any of the games I own and I'm a bit of an easy target for that kind of soft marketing. It feels as though I'm discovering something for myself and that always makes me more receptive.

It helps to pique my interest if the headline or image is something I wouldn't have expected. Seeing the news that New World has an update caled "Arenas", for example, doesn't move my dial much. For one thing I knew about it already but more importantly, even if I didn't, it's obviously a PvP feature and although I don't have much interest in PvP in Aeternum, I know enough to recognize it's an area Amazon are currently keen to support.

A picture of a bunch of angry-looking battlesuits stomping toward the camera over the tagline "Mechs on Parade" in a news item about a fantasy mmorpg like Rift, though? That's something I wouldn't expect.

It certainly got my attention. I clicked on the image and read all about the event. I'm not sure how long it's been running but it ends next Tuesday, May 31. It's also clearly a repeat of a previous event because the blurb reads "Lightning strikes on the horizon. Roaring thunder echoes throughout Telara. It has happened, the powerful Mechs are back and causing the earth to tremble. Their mission? Revenge and Chaos."(My emphasis.)

A little research tells me the event first happened back in 2019 and has been repeated a few times since. I can't recall ever having heard of it. I would have thought I might have done, if only because I do still play Rift now and again, mostly thanks to it being right there in front of me every time I log in to Steam. 

You can see why even mmorpg devs want their games on the platform, even if, like Trion and now Gamigo, they have their own in-house corporate launchpad. Even when you log in through Steam it still takes you to Glyph but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered if I'd had to go look for that old thing on my own. Since I added Rift to Steam, though, I have 60 played hours there.

The event may be a rerun but it's new to me and the sight of mechs tromping about the familiar landscape of Telara seemed like it would be worth a look. I logged in my mid-30s Rogue, the character I'm vaguely levelling on the odd occasion I feel like playing and took her to one of the starting towns, where it appeared I could get some quests relating to the mech invasion.

I had no trouble finding the questgivers in Meridian. They happily gave me the quests but if I was hoping for some context that would make sense of this apparent incursion from another genre altogether, I was set to be disappointed. All I got was a bit of hand-waving about the Storm Legion sending a force of "mechanized soldiers" and a "powerful new weapon" they'd developed by hammering five "mechanical dragons" into one megamechadragon. Should have called it that instead of Volt-1, which sounds more like a sports drink than an existential threat.

Once I had the quests I went looking for Mech Rifts to close or Mech Invasions to crush but I couldn't find any. I tried taking an Instant Adventure just in case it might be focused on the event but it dumped me in one of the new zones with one other person doing something unrelated so I dropped group and logged out.

In the evening, after playing Sandrock for an hour or so and taking the dog for a long walk, I was still thinking about Rift so I tried again. I was hoping to get lucky and find the event up and running. I did. It was. I was also hoping there might even be some other people doing it. There were!

I closed a couple of Mech Rifts on my own. There was one handily right outside Meridian, along with an Outpost, both of which proved little challenge since my Rogue is level 35 and the zone caps out around twenty. The only trouble I had was when my own skill, one with a leap-back I'd forgotten, pranged me off a cliff and I nearly died from the fall.

After that I worked my way across Silverwood to defend the one remaining Wardstone. I knew other people were in the zone because the required rifts were being closed but it wasn't until I got to the stone that I saw the first player. 

I joined the open group and we finished off the final invasion before the next phase started. We moved to that and then to the final act, the gigantic dragon mech, Volt-1. By then there were seven of us, the most people I've seen in one place in Rift for a very long time. 

With the dragon down and the Mech Invasion halted I returned to Meridian to do the hand-in, at which point I realized that none of the rifts I'd closed or mechs I'd killed counted towards the quest because it stipulates they have to give xp. At thirty-five I was way over the xp limit but I'd been enjoying myself too much even to notice.

It didn't matter because the important thing was that I'd seen the event in action. It's the same as every other Rift event: close some rifts, stop some invasions, hold at least one Wardstone, kill some mini-bosses, kill a boss. It's a great format. Why mess with it?

The whole thing also reminded me how much fun Rift was up until about three or four months after launch, when the zones were packed and events like this ran constantly. I've rarely had more fun in any mmorpg than I had on a good Wardstone defence back then. 

I'm half minded to try and find the event running somewhere in a zone the right level but given the imminent end-date I probably won't make the time. It wouldn't really mean much anyway. A lot of the items on the event vendor can be bought for the currency I got back when Rift converted to Free To Play and there's not much chance of making enough of the specific event currency itself to buy any of the rest, if I even wanted to, which I don't.

I'm happy to see the game still limping along, at least, although it's a pale shadow of a pale shadow of its old self. Still, better a shadow than a sunset and even a repeated event is better than no event at all.

The Way We Were

This afternoon I got an old PC working again and on it I found a few folders of screenshots I hadn't seen for a while. Nothing all that far back, but some half-lost memories all the same. Here's a selection.

The house Mrs Bhagpuss was working on in Landmark way back in very early alpha. It was called Little Qalia in homage to Vanguard's superb open-world housing.

And here's the original, Mrs Bhagpuss's Qalian home on a very stormy day. We had properties on close-by plots along the same beach. I'm hoping the Vanguard emulator team gets around to restoring housing one day. I'd love to build my house again. In the same spot.

While we're on the subject of housing, I think this is from a project Mrs Bhagpuss was working on in Rift. There were a lot of shots of it on the drive I was lifting files from. I'm always very loyal to EverQuest II and Vanguard when it comes to housing but I never really investigated Dimensions in Rift. 

On this evidence it seems I really should have paid more attention. Of course, the way mmorpgs work, I imagine these houses are still sitting there, in stasis. I'm not sure what level of dimensional access you get in Rift on a free account these days. Maybe I should log in and find out.

Finally, just for comparison, here's a shot of a room in one of Mrs Bhagpuss's many, many houses in EQII. It's striking how rough the textures seem compared to any of the other shots in this post. I'm not sure if that's what the game's graphics generally looked like back then or whether the quality had been dialled down for practical purposes, which was sometimes necessary when working on large housing projects. Whatever the reason, EQII looks a lot better these days - on my screen, anyway.

Allods is another game I regularly think about revisiting but never follow through. I don't even have it installed on this PC although I noticed it was there on that old one. Allods would feature high on my list of underappreciated mmorpgs. Visually, it's stunning, paricularly for it's age, and the graphics have aged exceptionally well.

These shots are from beta back in 2009 I think. The PC I was tinkering with was an old one of Mrs Bhagpuss's, as must be obvious by now. We both played gibberlings in the beta and had a great time.  There's no race anywhere in the genre like the gibberlings. Or if there is, I've never been lucky enough to find it.

The images I was most excited to see again were the ones from our time on EQII's Test server. We played there for several years, duoing with a variety of characters but most often with these two: Mrs Bhagpuss tanking as a ratonga Bruiser and me providing dps, off-tanking and heals as a Necromancer. Between the two of us and the pet we could just about make a full group. I loved healing as a necro although it required constant vigilance. I've seen necros main-heal groups in both EverQuest and EQII because necros can turn a claw to anything but a duo is about as far as I'd care to push it.

I even found a handful of shots from Final Fantasy XIV. We came close to sticking with that one after the revamp but in the end we gave it up to go back to Guild Wars 2. Good decision, I think.

If we hadn't, we'd never have seen the things we did. I haven't cropped the UI from this so as to leave the chat box where you can watch Yaks Bend's much-missed superstar commander setting up another of his hallmark golem rushes. This looks like a big one but I've seen bigger!

A golem army's not just for offense, of course. This defensive ring is a prime example of why Yaks Bend was the most-hated server in World vs World for many years. No-one remembers any of that now, it seems. Sic transit gloria mundi.

And that's why we take screenshots. And hope not to lose them.

Harvest For The World

Yesterday's post highlighted just how vague and inaccurate memories can be. I've mentioned numerous times over the years how the way memory works - or, rather, doesn't - fascinates me. I've read a fair bit on the topic. The more I learn, the lower my confidence in anything I or anyone else claims to remember.

I treat most memories as little more than fiction these days unless they come scaffolded by contemporary evidence. Often not even then, since accounts recorded within hours of an event have been shown to bear little ressemblance to objective reality, more often than not.

It's one thing to be taken by surprise. You might imagine repetitive processes, carried out thousands of times over hundreds of hours, might leave more of a groove in the mind. I would. Then again, maybe not. The brain tunes out anything it considers meaningless noise, after all. Why would it lay down records of such trivial, unimportant behavior?

These are some of the thoughts that went through my mind this morning, when I read Telwyn's post on gathering. I wondered whether my memories of doing that in the same games I mentioned yesterday would be any more accurate. After all, I really enjoy gathering in almost all MMORPGs. I'd put it very high on any list of things I like about the genre and I spend an inordinate amount of time doing it. I ought to be able to remember something about it, shouldn't I?

We're about to find out. Let's see if anything's made a lasting impression.

WoW Classic -

• Should be on safe ground here. I spent a lot of time gathering in Classic just a few months ago. My memories feel fresh. 
• Gathering comes in the form of several skills. There's a limit, shared with crafting, on how many gathering skills each character can have.
• You can see nodes on the mini-map provided you have a particular level of skill.
• Nodes are relatively rare and often not in safe places. 
• Gathering is competitive. 
• Distribution follows a semi-logical pattern. 
• There are few pulls per node.
• Respawn time is substantial. 
• I believe certain nodes, specifically herbs, have some other nuances but I can't remember what they are. 
• For some whole classes of materials, e.g. cloth, "gathering" takes the form of combat. I spent a great deal of time killing mobs for various types of silk last year. 
• A lot of rare or special materials can be gathered from mobs.
• When I say "gathered from" I mean "looted from their dead and broken bodies".
• For some materials (skins come to mind) mobs are the only source and you also require the relevant gathering skill.

World of Warcraft -

• My gut feeling is that gathering in WoW Retail hasn't changed all that much. When I played during Wrath of the Lich King it was about the same as Classic is now. When I've been on the sub-20 endless free trial I haven't noticed any significant changes. What it's like at endgame levels, though, I have no clue.

EverQuest -

• Hmm. This is a poser. Let me think. Does EQ even have gathering? 
• Whether it does or not it sure has crafting materials. There are so many mats it quickly becomes overwhelming.
• I remember, right back at the beginning, there were a few what we used to call "ground spawns". Iron oxide, russet oxide, some sort of mushrooms...
• The vast majority of crafting materials were dropped by mobs, when you killed them. Our guild used to form up specifically to kill clockworks in Plane of Innovation so our resident Tinker could get mats. Does that really count as "gathering"?
• Given the way my Magician's bags fill up with crafting mats every time she goes on a killing spree, I imagine drops are still the main source of mats.
• She has special, huge bags that only take craft mats. They auto-fill with mats she loots, so there's some element of gathering gear involved. 
• And that's about all I can remember. Not much for twenty years, is it?

EverQuest II - 

• If I don't know this one I may as well put myself into sheltered accomodation right now. I've always gathered extensively in EQII and I've been spending quite literally hours every day gathering in Blood of Luclin zones for the last three or four months. 
• Gathering in EQII expanded under Domino's watch to become a full career path. She added multiple questlines, several of which could justifiably be called "Signature" if not "Epic". 
• Gathering has AAs, gear, buffs, you name it. 
• It even has companion NPCs that gather for you, something you rarely find in Western MMORPGs. 
• Any character can gather from any node regardless of class or level. There were both level and skill restrictions for many years but they were all removed, not that long ago. 
• The remaining restriction is that without the right level of skill you can only get commons. Rares still use the old skill floors.
• With sufficient skill (or maybe it's an AA) you get the ability to track nodes.
• Nodes are competitive but they're so prevalent and widespread it's almost never an issue.
• As in WoW, different types follow an approximately logical distribution so you can usually work out where to look for what, even in an unfamiliar zone. 
• What's actually inside a node can sometimes be less than logical, though, particularly in later zones. 
• There are uncommon and rare pulls from most nodes.
•  BoL introduced Shadow Nodes that can only be gathered using a special buff rewarded by the crafting Signature quest. 
• It's entirely possible to spend whole sessions gathering in EQII and I could write several posts on it with ease.

  
Guild Wars 2 - 

• Another game in which I gather every day, if only because there's a daily for it and it's one of the easiest. 
• Yet again, gathering nodes in GW2 follow a fairly logical distribution, although I would say slightly less consistently so than either WoW or EQII. 
• GW2 was possibly the first major MMORPG to introduce non-competitive gathering as the norm.
• Even if it wasn't, you definitely would think it was if you'd heard ArenaNet crowing about it.
• It may have been why the game suffered from an appalling harvest-bot problem in the first few months. 
• Nodes can be seen on the mini-map. No skill required. (That could be GW2's tag line).
• Anyone can gather anything provided they have the right gathering tool. 
• Gathering from nodes requires a range of node-specific consumables (tools) available from NPCs. A wide range of highly advantageous (and highly visually game-disrupting) non-consumable versions of these can be purchased from the Gem store for eye-watering prices.
• You can acquire gathering nodes of all kinds to place in your "Personal Instance" (aka really crappy housing) either through gameplay or via the Gem store. 
• I have never seen the point of this, given the extreme ease and simplicity of open-map gathering, but people seem to like it and often invite others in to gather from their personal node collection.
• GW2 also follows WoW in having cloth drop from mobs. The reasoning behind this (in either case) escapes me. What makes cloth so different?
•  There are other buffs and items available but I can't remember much about any of them. Crafting in GW2 ceased to be of any real interest to me sometime around 2013 and I haven't paid attention to much that's been added in the last six or seven years. 
• In common with probably 90% of players my main interest in gathering is how much money I can sell the mats for on the Trading Post.

Rift -

• Hmm. Does Rift have gathering? 
• It has crafting. When this blog was new I posted about it, saying "I like the crafting in Rift. It's generally simple, straightforward and satisfying." You'd think I'd remember how I got the mats. 
• Well, I don't.
• I do know cloth is dropped by mobs, same as in WoW and GW2. I remember farming undead in Stillmoor for some kind of silk. I have no recollection at all of any kind of gathering or any kind of nodes, though. 
• Nope... without looking this one up I have to admit defeat. Other than the cloth, no memories at all.

Neverwinter -

• Absolutely no clue. 
• Oh, wait, there was that bit where you get some NPCs to set up some kind of sweatshop. That had something to do with crafting. I think I posted about it earlier this year. I vaguely recall having to get some mats or something so the NPCs could craft but if it involved gathering anything I've completely blanked it from my mind.

Lord of the Rings Online - 

• This one I do remember, even though I haven't gathered or crafted there in years. 
• Nodes appear in the landscape in a way almost identical to WoW. 
• You can see them on the mini-map. 
• Probably need a specific level of skill, though. 
• I remember there was more to it than that but that's all I do remember.

Final Fantasy XIV - 

• I'm fairly sure FFXIV is on a par with EQII in terms of having turned gathering into a full-blown game mode. 
• I think there's gear and progression and all that sort of thing but I couldn't tell you any specifics. 
• I tried it waaaaaay back in the original release and it was so mindbendingly irritating I never even looked at it when the Realm got Reborn.  
• FFXIV has really good fishing but fishing is not gathering. Fishing is a topic all its own.

Vanguard Emulator - 

• Vanguard had the best gathering of any MMORPG I've played, bar none. It didn't count as a full game mode like Adventuring, Crafting and Diplomacy but it wasn't far behind. 
• There was gear and progression, separate tabs in the UI, all the good stuff. 
• Nodes had skill requirements and were both competitive and co-operative.
• You could gather solo but if you grouped everyone could share and the pulls were bigger and better.
• Grouping also allowed lower-skill characters to gather from nodes above their skill ceiling by sharing the skill level of their groupmates.
• There was a quality system inherant in the nodes themselves, making rare pulls more than just rng-luck or a direct function of improved gear. I only have a vague memory of how that worked, though.
•  Most mats could both be gathered both from nodes and also from the corpses of mobs, allowing you to choose between pure gathering or gathering via adventuring. 
• As an adventurer, you couldn't just kill stuff and loot the mats. You still had to have the gathering gear and skills to gather from the corpse.
• You had to think more about what you were doing while gathering in Vanguard than in any other game I've played.
• That's probably why I liked it so much.
• I hope the Emu manages to implement the full version. I'm sure it will.
  

Riders of Icarus - 

• I have literally no idea. Or memory. Maybe there isn't any. Or maybe there is but I never tried it. Or maybe there is and I did and I just can't remember. Or maybe I don't care.

Secret World Legends -

• I don't think either SWL or The Secret World before it has any kind of gathering. 
• Crafting was that weird shape-making mini-game. I think that used mob drops but I wouldn't describe anything about the process as "gathering".
• If there was more than that I remember nothing whatsoever about it.

And there we go. It must be obvious I can remember far, far more about gathering than I could about the mechanics of casting in the same games even though in most if not all I must have spent more time casting. I'm also perpared to bet that much, if not all, of what I've said is reasonably accurate. And I'm remembering more all the time, as I write.

I guess that's not too surprising. Gathering, while it may be repetitive, is a primary activity for the time you're doing it. Casting and moving are both just background things you do in combat.

There's also the distinct possibility that I like gathering as much as, if not more than fighting. Or crafting, for that matter. I can't deny that in plenty of MMORPGs I gather materials for which I have no immediate use just because I find the act of gathering amusing, entertaining, soothing, relaxing or satisfying. Sometimes all of those at once.

I'd be very interested in playing a fully-fledged triple-A MMORPG in which the core gameplay loop revolved around gathering. One in which the crafting was secondary and the combat mostly an optional extra.

Or is that Animal Crossing?

Let's Address Some Topics

The second week of Blapril is Topic Brainstorming Week according to Belghast's handy cut out and keep guide. It's intended for "the mentors among us". I didn't register as a Mentor this year but I'm not going to let that stop me.

I probably should, (let it stop me, I mean) because coming up with topics is hardly my strong suit. Or, I should say, coming up with lists of topics other people could use isn't. I tend either to have one or two ideas floating around that I'm itching to write about or else I just sit down, start typing and see what comes out.

If we take it that any advice being handed out here is only likely to be of use to people who haven't been in the game long, it might be instructive to look back at the very early days of this blog. To a time when I had even less idea what I was doing than I do now, if you can imagine such a thing.

The first two posts fulfill the original intention of the blog in that they're about inventory management. I had this bizarre idea I could sustain a blog writing about nothing else. Lasted about a week.

The next three posts are all about the MMORPG I was mostly playing back in the summer of '11, Rift. Things have really moved on for me since then, as you can see from what I wrote this Tuesday.

So much for my first full month of blogging. I managed an astonishing four posts. And they were short. Well, short by the standards of what was to come. It takes some bloggers a while to get rolling. I'd forgotten I was one of them.

In September 2011 I almost doubled my post count with seven entries. By this point, with hindsight, we can already see a pattern starting to emerge: there will be certain topics to which I'll return, over and over again, regardless of whether anyone but me is interested.

The one I'm already employing most frequently is "games I am playing". Most bloggers go for that one. Some rarely write about anything else. That can work for you or against you. If you're playing a very popular  game or the latest flash in the pan, you'll quickly pick up an audience. If it's a ten year old MMORPG or some obscure import no-one but you has ever heard of you may find you're talking to yourself.

None of that should stop you. As a reader I firmly believe it doesn't matter what game you're writing about. What matters is how entertainingly you write about it. Some of my favorite blogs over the years have focused on games I wasn't playing at the time or have never played, Wilhelm on Pokemon or EVE Online being a prime example.

The huge advantage of writing about the games you're playing is that you'll always have something to write about. Ditto books or comics or movies or music or however you choose to while away your endless, sunlit days.

I would never discourage anyone, if they're stuck for something to write about, from just bashing out a few hundred words on whatever they'd amused themselves with the day before. It's the blogging equivalent of that old staple of harried teachers everywhere, "Write an essay on "What I did at the weekend"".

Looking back to September 2011, we can already see other tropes beginning to appear, tropes that will, in the ensuing years, become all too familiar. Look! There's my first post on repetition, a topic I'll return to over and over with no apparent sense of irony.

In quick order we move on to the quality (or lack thereof) in the writing of quests, the way I play MMORPGs "wrong" (Hi, Naithin!), how great flying is, how everything was better in beta, how low level play beats endgame, how MMORPGs aren't as social as they used to be...

Need I go on? God, I hope not. Seriously, my second month of blogging and it's already a shopping list of personal hobbyhorses, gaming cliches and dead horses, every one of which I have returned to belabor and bully into submission countless times since.

And so have most of the bloggers on my blog roll, or at least all the ones who've stuck at it for a while. And yet here we all are, still reading and posting.

I believe there are two lessons to be taken from this salutory dip into the stagnant waters of the past. Firstly, originality counts for zilch in this game. Don't beat yourself up because you can't think of anything to say that someone hasn't said a hundred times before - just say it anyway! Everyone else does - that's how you came to hear it a hundred times in the first place!

In fact, take that a stage further. Don't worry if you've said it a hundred times before. Repetition is a valid rhetorical device: use it!

Secondly, don't concern yourself that no-one will want to read you if you keep saying the same things over and over. People don't remember most of what they read, far less where they read it. Chances are they won't even notice. And even if they do, all the evidence is that they won't care. They may even come to welcome the familiarity.

The key thing is what I said several paragraphs back. Be entertaining in the way you write and you can write about anything you want.  Within reason, obviously. I have yet to see anyone, no matter how sprightly and joyful their prose style, manage to make Destiny 1 or 2 sound interesting.

Seriously, if we all had to come up with an original topic every time we published a post, most of us would probably struggle to get something out there once a month. I know I would. (Now there's a blogging challenge: post every day for a month on a different topic that you've never written about before. Bonus points if it's a topic none of your readers has ever read about before either).

Yeah, well, that's a challenge I won't be taking up. I like to write about what interests me and perhaps it's not surprising that the same things continue to interest me years after I started writing about them. It's foolish consistency I can't be doing with, not consistency itself.

My advice on coming up with something new to write about when you're feeling blocked, stuck or uninspired is simple: drag out an old favorite and write about that again. If you feel up to it, try and come at it from a different angle, use different examples to illustrate your points or find some new sources to stand your argument up.

If you can't come up with any new wrinkles, though, just double down on what you said last time and the time before. At least that way you'll begin to build up some gravitas and authority on the topic. Maybe. You can hope...

I'm not advocating a tin-foil hat wearing, soapbox on Hyde Corner, the Day of Judgment is Nigh level of commitment to a theme here. We don't want to scare anyone. Just give yourself permission to return to your favorite subjects as often as it amuses you. And if you can make it amusing for your readers, so much the better.

This has been one of those posts I referred to right at the start, by the way; the ones where, to quote myself, "I just sit down, start typing and see what comes out." That's my go to for days when I have no ideas, which is often. It's always a surprise for me to hear what I have to say, even when it's something I've heard plenty of times before.

Isn't blogging wonderful?

Many Worlds Theory

My recent foray into Lord of the Rings Online lasted precisely one session. Standing Stone generously opened up questing to free players during April so, once I'd finally gotten the game patched, I logged in my Guardian. He was snoozing in a lodge in some lakeside fishing village in Forochel when I woke him up and sent him, grumbling all the way, to pick up whatever quests he could find.

He couldn't find many. Probably just as well, as things turned out. The ones he did find seemed kind of slow. And unrewarding. And basically not fun.

According to the wiki's list of zones by level he's a couple of levels too low to be there, which is par for the course for me. Almost all my characters in every MMORPG I have ever played spend most of their careers in zones that are a couple of levels above where most guides say they should be.

This time we spent what felt like a couple of weeks (actually more like half an hour) killing twenty bears. They had funny Middle Earth names but they were obviously bears. All the bears were either level 47 or level 48. My Guardian had to stop and get his breath back after each kill and every time he pulled a 48 we played "whoever gets the last hit wins" to see who would die. (Spoiler - it was the bear).

Eventually the torment ended. He jogged back through the snow to hand in his bear paws (or skins or whatever they were) and the questgiver promptly asked him to go and get twenty more bear skins (or paws or whatever it was he didn't ask for the first time). I began to think Paul Barnett might have had a point.

After an hour or so of that I was beginning to remember exactly why I never liked questing in LotRO to begin with. It wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been making good xp but it was terrible. What with being constrained to hunt specific creatures and having to run back to find the right NPC for the hand in (inevitably, I could never remember exactly where the lazy so-and-so was) we didn't seem to be making significantly faster progress than if we'd just killed everything and turned in body parts at the task board, which a free player can do any time.

If I have another go at it, which I probably will, I'll have to move to a lower level area. The xp will be even more paltry but the time-to-kill should make up for it and maybe it won't feel so teeth-grindingly tedious.

The choice of where to hunt isn't great at that level, though. According to the list, my Guardian's too high for Evendim and The Trollshaws. I might give Evendim a go anyway since it's nearby. I did a lot of tasks there a couple of years ago, though. I'm not sure I can stand looking at it again.

I certainly can't stand looking at Angmar. It's depressing as hell. The Misty Mountains might be interesting. I can't recall ever going there although I suppose I must have. I only ended up in Forochel because I'd tried everywhere else, as I recall.

It's not only Standing Stone who have promotions and specials running during les évènements d'April. Everyone's doing it. I noticed Gamigo were offering double xp in Rift, another MMORPG I used to play and haven't quite realized I don't any more. I thought I might as well take a look.

I was a bit late, as it happens. By the time I got around to logging in there were about five hours to go. Possibly a few more, depending which time zone Gamigo uses. One session, whichever way you look at it.

On the plus side, patching took no time at all. Okay, it did take some time. About ninety seconds. A major improvement on LotRO's most of an afternoon and some of an evening. On the other hand, that's not entirely down to the comparative excellence of Rift's patcher. It's also because absolutely nothing has happened in Rift since I last played, just over a year ago, so it didn't require any patching in the first place.

I do have to wonder if, as people seem to believe, the game has been in limbo ever since Trion turned up its toes, why all my frickin' soul points have been set to zero yet again. I swear this happens every time I come back to this game. I know the vast number of possible builds is one of Rift's major features but that's no reason to make me choose a new one every time I log in.

Actually, if I'm going to be completely honest here, not really my plan but let's go with it, I didn't even notice I had no Soul until I'd been playing for about three-quarters of an hour and even then it was only because I dinged.

I was playing my level eighteen Mage and for once she was in a zone a few levels below her. The mobs were all about level fourteen or fifteen and the kills were coming fast and easy. I was a bit puzzled as to why she had almost no skills on her hot bars but I was a lot more surprised to find she had ample bag space so I wasn't really paying attention.

I just slotted the few skills she did have - it was about four - summoned a skeleton pet and started ticking off the quests she already had running. There were a bunch of them in the fae groves right next to Sanctum, which was handy.

Someone was doing a rift just outside the gates so I joined in with that for about half a minute. That was the only player I saw outside the city gates although chat seemed lively enough. The rift closed and the other player ran off. After a while I found an unopened rift and used a Planar Lure on it. I was quite impressed I remembered how to do it.

I soloed that one until I failed a timer and the rift closed. Then I knocked off some more quests until I dinged nineteen. It all went at a pretty decent pace and I was having fun. If the double xp was carrying on I'd say I'd get her to twenty at least.

Then again, levelling in Rift is hardly slow at the worst of times. Just grab an Instant Adventure, whizz around like a sock in a drier until you're too dizzy to carry on and presto! Two or three levels done.

Rift is fun to potter around in, even now. Graphically it holds up very well, although I'd prefer it wasn't dark for so long next time. I was there for over an hour and never saw daylight. I've had to fiddle with the screenshots just so you can see anything.

I have four level fifties in Rift. I capped them all in the six months Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent there from launch. Plus another in the forties and one in the thirties. And levelling certainly wasn't fast-tracked back then. That's a lot of time invested.

What a shame Storm Legion was so horrible. Soured me on the game for years. I'm over it now, as I'm sure you can tell. No grudges left. Seriously, though, it was nice to look in on Telara again. I could spend a while there but I'd really need to get out of Silverwood next time. I've seen a lot of that place the last few visits.

So, that's LotRO and Rift, patched up and ready to be forgotten for another few months. Or years. Although, maybe not. I "played" five MMORPGs today (Sunday, as I'm writing): EverQuest, EverQuest II, Guild Wars 2, the aforementioned Rift and Secret World Legends, where I logged in to take a screenshot of a post box.

EQII got nearly three hours. GW2 maybe an hour and a half. Rift about an hour, EQ about thirty minutes and SWL about fifteen. At those rates I could add another half a dozen to my dance card. And I can think of half a dozen I'd like to take another run around, too.

I think I did intimate I was keen to get out of the rut of dailies I'd fallen into of late, didn't I? Maybe this is the way to do it, at least until something new and substantial comes along.

What did Jeromai call it? Tapas gaming? Sounds pretty tasty right now.